Other Terrors, page 1
Dedication
For all those who have ever been made to feel “other” out there.
We see you and celebrate your otherness.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Other Fears by Christina Sng
Idiot Girls by Jennifer McMahon
Waste Not by Alma Katsu
Night Shopper by Michael H. Hanson
Scrape by Denise Dumars
Mud Flappers by Usman T. Malik
Churn the Unturning Tide by Annie Neugebauer
There’s Always Something in the Woods by Gabino Iglesias
The Turning by Hailey Piper
Help, I’m a Cop by Nathan Carson
Miss Infection USA by Shanna Heath
All Not Ready by Tracy Cross
Illusions of the De-Evolved by Linda D. Addison
Black Screams, Yellow Stars by Maxwell I. Gold
Kalkriese by Larissa Glasser
The Devil Don’t Come with Horns by Eugen Bacon
Invasive Species by Ann Dávila Cardinal
The Asylum by Holly Lyn Walrath
Tiddlywinks by Stephen Graham Jones
Where the Lovelight Gleams by Michael Thomas Ford
It Comes in Waves by Jonathan Lees
The Voices of Nightingales by M. E. Bronstein
What Blood Hath Wrought by S. A. Cosby
Incident at Bear Creek Lodge by Tananarive Due
Acknowledgments
About the Editors
About the Contributors
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
From the other, all terrors flow.
Since the advent of horror as a genre, fear of the unknown—and fear of what we think we know—has largely driven the narrative. Likewise, there is little more frighteningly unknown to us than that generalized monster commonly referred to as the other. You know the one—the monster with green skin and a flat head, the alien from a distant planet, the beast that drinks blood instead of red wine, the necromancer that conjures spirits in a foreign tongue. The one that doesn’t fit neatly into the small boxes in which our rigid frames of reference so comfortably exist is the one we’ve been conditioned to fear the most.
As the film and genre expert Andrew Scahill, PhD, assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado–Denver, explains horror, “It’s how we work out the difference between us and them. What we know about identity formation now is that we don’t really form our identity through similarity; we define ourselves by what we are not. We’re constantly forming our identity by the Other, by the monster, by I know who I am because I’m not that.”*
Similarly, societal bigotries coexist in this realm of otherness. Despite the fact that all humans share the same basic anatomy and bleed the same, we tend to focus on our differences. Many of us have been conditioned from a young age to fear those different from us. Differences are scary and should trigger a fear response, right? Fear the other—the one who doesn’t look like us, the one who speaks another language, the one from a foreign land, the one with unfamiliar customs and values, the one who is differently abled, the one who loves or worships differently. If they’re different, they must somehow be wrong, flawed in some serious and potentially threatening way.
Society’s collective disposition to suspect that something that is different must also be dangerous has been long explored in horror—in both literature and film, from the classics to the contemporary. From Bram Stoker’s Dracula and its exploration of xenophobia in the idea of a fiendish eastern European foreigner invading polite London society to ravage its women to the queer subtext of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge and its allegory for gay panic and the suppression of sexual orientation that falls outside heteronormative boundaries, horror has long been a conduit for the coded expressions of this subconscious fear of that which is nonconforming to the mainstream. Concepts like race and gender and sexual orientation and political ideology have long been fodder for the machinations of the horror genre.
Throughout history, society has always seen itself—its condition and circumstances, its fears and collective anxieties—reflected back in its art. It should come as no surprise then—and a logical progression—that we’re starting to see a tectonic shift in the concept of otherness in horror. The viewpoint is adjusting, fine-tuning to reflect a modernism in cultural evolution. As women and people of color and the LGBTQ community and those differently abled are rising up, stepping forward to demand their place at the table, the stories are recasting the other from villain to victim—modern sympathy for the traditional devil, if you will. The concept of otherness in horror is breathing, expanding its literary lungs to show the other as the oppressed, the one that must summon the courage to rise up and defeat the inhuman monsters of convention. It’s no longer just us versus them; it’s often them versus us in a sea change infusion of cultural context. These shades and variations of otherness challenge readers to expand their minds, to consider that the call is indeed coming from inside the house.
This recurring theme of otherness that often comes up in both critical analysis of the horror genre and discussions about the prejudices and biases people have against minority groups that manifest in myriad phobias was the catalyst, the launching pad, for Other Terrors. For this anthology, we set out looking for short fiction that explored the idea of fearing the other, the other as a source of terror, in both traditional and progressive ways. We cast our net far and wide, hoping to attract a diverse roster of literary talent whose backgrounds and experiences might best be suited to interpret this theme. In some of the tales curated for this collection, the other takes literal monster form. In others, the tables are turned, the concept of otherness subverted. In still other stories, the authors crafted modern retellings of traditional narratives where otherness is a defense mechanism weaponized against oppression.
Otherness has evolved and continues to evolve—and it’s even more terrifying in the diversity of forms it takes.
Vince A. Liaguno and Rena Mason, editors
Other Fears
by Christina Sng
I.
There are worms in his eyes
And maggots in his skin
But they are not what I fear.
I fear his malignant presence,
His hands drawing near.
I fear the touch of his fingers
Encasing my upper arm
As I instinctively flinch
And shake them off.
His gnarled hands,
Made up of rinds
From desiccated rats
Encircle my neck
In a tight suffocating grip,
Lifting me into the air
Legs kicking frantically
A reanimated rag doll
Awakened to a dark fate.
His eyes, cold and emotionless,
Almost clinical when strangling
The woman he says he loves,
Not something he hates,
Not something he fears.
This isn’t love.
II.
For over two decades,
He’s chipped away parts of me:
First, the parts that were strong.
Then, the parts that were brave.
Afterward, he took away my voice
Chiseling away the parts
That made me who I was,
A person worthy of life and of love.
He left the fearful child behind,
The child he terrorized,
The child he controlled.
Until one day, I woke up
From this nightmare and
Searched for the pieces I lost,
But they are forever gone.
Only the poems remain.
The poems that remind me
Of what I have endured.
III.
His mask frightens me the most.
How often it slipped,
Yet I never saw his true face.
Or I did, but could not
Acknowledge it, just like
Everyone around us.
Most cannot imagine
Such evil exists, numbed by
The absence of overt war.
And his lies,
How easily they spill
From his mouth
Like breath and vapor,
Like smoke and mirrors,
Unraveled by a single thread.
He hates me
Because I am human,
Because I have emotions.
Because I can feel love,
And most of all, because
I see his true face now.
It is him who is other—
The aberration among us.
The shell devoid of fractals.
The cave without crystals.
I no longer fear him:
The hyena in the barn,
The hollow puppet
Strewn onto the ground,
The child who cannot feel love.
It is me I should fear.
How I did not realize the truth
Despite the signs I clearly saw:
Glimpses of the monster
Behind an innocent smile,
His touch that makes me cringe
And cower—my panicking heart
Smashing through my rib cage,
My gut tightening into a knot.
His blood has seeped into my hands,
His darkness etched into my eyes,
His shadow follows me now.
IV.
I learn to overcome my fear,
Use my thumbs to press hard
And gouge out his bloody eyes.
He reels backwards—
And raises his hands to hit me
But I duck under his swing and run.
A new fear:
That he will find and kill me.
There is nowhere to hide.
I grow wings so I can fly.
I grow armor to protect my body
From knife wounds and stray bullets.
I abate my fear and face him,
Despite my innards dissolving
At the thought of his presence.
Unless death shows mercy
And takes him first.
There is always that hope
But not one I can count on.
I slam his bloodied head
Onto the ground
And press hard
On his eyes
Till his head caves inward.
Idiot Girls
by Jennifer McMahon
“Idiot girls,” Mr. G calls as Jaz and I run by, only he says it in a funny, shortened way, the accent he tries so hard to hide coming through like a ghost: “Idjit,” he says, the word its own spark.
We’ve taken to the name, let it leave its mark, baptize us in some new way. We’ve started calling each other Id and Jit. The idjit girls.
Mr. G is standing in front of Building A raking leaves. His wife, Mrs. G, sits inside, looking out the window of their first-floor front apartment, A-1.
There’s a collection of wind chimes hung up on brackets around the windows of their apartment—over a dozen of them made of metal, wood, plastic, shells, and driftwood. They tinkle, rattle, and ring in a great cacophony all day and night. Mrs. G says they help keep the evil spirits away.
We’ve talked about where Mr. and Mrs. G might be from. I think their accent sounds vaguely Creole and picture some swampy state with gators and Spanish moss draping from the trees. Jaz says they’re from farther away than that—another country, somewhere in eastern Europe maybe—a place no one’s heard of.
Their last name is long and multisyllabic—when people try to pronounce it, their tongues get tangled. When Mr. G says his name, it sounds almost musical, but with a low rasp like he’s about to cough up phlegm. Everyone at the apartments has given up trying to pronounce it—they just call him Mr. G.
He wears the same outfit every day when he’s out painting steps, glazing windows, raking leaves, shoveling snow: stained blue coveralls and scuffed leather boots. Mr. G is the maintenance man and groundskeeper for the Canal Street Apartments. His shoulders are slumped like he’s always tired. His dark hair is slicked back and oiled, streaked with gray. The backs of his hands are thick with a pelt of black hair like the man is part bear. One time, in the summer, he had his coveralls unzipped and there, under his stained and threadbare white undershirt, I caught a glimpse of a dark shape beneath the curly black chest hairs: a faded tattoo done in heavy black lines, a geometric design that came up to his clavicle. A letter or sigil maybe. I told Jaz about it and she laughed, said it was probably the mark of the beast.
Now, as we run by, Mrs. G calls us over: “Girls! Girls!” She’s waving her hands, beckoning, pleading for us to come. Jaz doesn’t slow, plans to run right past, but I grab her arm and stop her, drag her back to the window where Mrs. G waits. Above us, a wind chime of large metal tubes bangs together like someone hitting a cage, wanting out. Jaz takes a step back, like she’s worried the whole thing’s going to come crashing down.
Mr. G calls out something to his wife, a reprimand maybe, and she shakes her head at him, responds with another phrase, thick and guttural.
Strange smells waft through the open window: smoky and earthy with a touch of spice, but pungent enough to make my eyes start to water as we move closer.
“Do you know him?” Mrs. G asks from the window, speaking slowly, annunciating carefully. Her English is much better than Mr. G’s. She has a scarf tied over her hair: bright yellow dotted with tiny flowers like flecks of blood. “The boy who is missing? He go to school with you?”
I shake my head. “He goes to the middle school. We’re high-schoolers,” I say.
She blinks at me, eyes huge and owl-like.
The boy, Emmet Clark, is a seventh-grader. He’s been missing for two days. Was last seen leaving school on his bicycle. They found his bike and school backpack under the bridge over the river two blocks away from the school. But no sign of Emmet. It’s all anyone’s been talking about. There’re flyers stapled to every telephone pole in town. have you seen emmet? A hundred two-dimensional Emmets watching the whole town with dull brown eyes, a goofy smile revealing slightly crooked teeth.
In some places, they’re stapled over the old flyers, the ones from last spring: have you seen jackson? Another middle school kid who went missing back in April. Never found.
There have been search parties. Neighborhood watches. Curfews put in place. Last night, there was a community meeting where parents demanded to know if there’s a serial killer in our midst.
“You girls be careful,” Mrs. G warns, leaning out the window. I can smell the onions and garlic on her breath.
Jaz pulls me away. “Yeah, yeah,” Jaz says.
Mrs. G shakes her finger at us. “I’ve got my eye on you,” she says. I’m not sure if her words are meant as reassurance or a warning.
“That’s comforting,” Jaz shouts back at her. “Real fucking comforting, Mrs. G!”
“Watch your mouth, filthy girl,” Mrs. G says, then mutters something, a little prayer for us maybe, or a curse. “What will your mother say, Jasmine,” Mrs. G calls after us, “when she hears how you’ve been talking to me?”
But it’s a bluff and we know it: She won’t go to Jasmine’s mom. Everyone’s afraid of Jasmine’s mom: the thick incense smoke, the giant gory crucifix that’s the first thing you see when you open her door, the way she asks every visitor to kneel down and pray with her.
“Infidels,” Jaz’s mom hisses when Mr. and Mrs. G walk by. “Filthy people.”
Jaz holds my hand tightly in hers as she leads me right through the pile of leaves Mr. G’s been raking. We kick our feet and the leaves scatter everywhere. We’re our own autumn wind, our own hurricane.
Mr. G shakes his rake at us. “Idjit girls!” he roars, and we laugh, swoop like crazy birds across the parking lot, leaves in our hair and clinging to my chunky wool sweater.
“Id-jit,” we repeat, our own song, the pitch rising as we screech. “Id-jit, id-jit!”
We run right to the door of Building B, where Jaz lives. Instead of going up the stairs to her apartment, we go all the way to the back of the hall, open the heavy metal door that leads to the basement.
We could go anywhere, really. Jaz has a pass key—something she stole from Mr. G’s key ring months ago. She’d made a copy of it, then left the original in the driveway next to his car where he found it, assumed it had been there all along, just slipped off his ring. Now she uses the pass key to get into whatever apartment she likes. Sometimes she takes me with her and we walk through other people’s lives; we see who leaves dirty dishes piled in their sink, whose recycling bins are full of booze bottles, whose apartments smell like cat pee and old people. Jaz takes a little something from each apartment: a tiny figurine, a single earring, a fork—something that won’t be missed, that people will think they’ve just misplaced.
