Nightmare Magazine 46: July 2016

NIGHTMARE is an online horror and dark fantasy magazine. In NIGHTMARE's pages, you will find all kinds of horror fiction, from zombie stories and haunted house tales, to visceral psychological horror.
This month, we have original fiction from Gavin Pate ("Red House") and writing team Rachel Swirsky and An Owomoyela ("Whose Drowned Face Sleeps"), along with reprints by Nick Mamatas ("Der Kommissar's in Town") and Seanan McGuire ("Anthony's Vampire").
We also have Tananarive Due writing the latest installment of our column on horror, "The H Word," plus author spotlights with our authors, and a panel discussion about demon possession with Stoker Award-winner Paul Tremblay, Horrorstör author Grady Hendrix, and editor Jordan Hamessley London.
"This is the story you remember. The girl lost in the woods. How they find her after eight days, the mud smeared on her arms and legs, clumped in her hair and under her nails. Through the rain she sees the policeman running, lifting her up in his thick brown jacket, driving her back down the jagged lumber road towards the highway in his truck. She won’t answer his questions, won’t untangle her thin ten-year-old limbs. She runs her tongue along her broken tooth and the cop hits the sirens to run the stoplights, the world flying by in a haze of streets and rain. At the police station they write her name on a form, put her in a room with a large uniformed woman, her tight bun pulling her face into a mask. The girl begins to cry and they give her crayons to keep her calm. With a red crayon the girl draws a box and with a black crayon she draws stick figures inside it. She cocks her head, lets her knotted brown hair fall across her face. She draws a roof atop the box and what might be a crowbird atop the roof, and she fills it with crisscrosses and smaller boxes, until the stick figures seem to reach out and hold the thing by its guts. The woman asks the girl what she’s drawing and a white light in the ceiling buzzes and the buzz is like a machine grinding the world into a hole. The girl colors a black stovepipe out the roof and a slanted porch off the front and a backdrop of lines like rain or pines to fill the remaining space. The crayon breaks and the girl looks up at the woman’s face to see what she might see."