Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest #11

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  Apex Publications, LLC

  www.apexdigest.com

  Copyright ©2007 by Apex Authors

  First published in 2007, 2007

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  What Say You

  Editorial by Jason B Sizemore

  Congratulations to Justin Stewart, our resident artist and content designer, for his Chesley Award nomination. Although he didn't win, nobody will deny that being recognized by the top SF/Fantasy art awards in the country isn't damn cool.

  Justin has been with us since the genesis of Apex Digest. He did the covers for our first four issues, all free of charge. He continues to do amazing work for Apex, be it creating advertising art, banners, flyers, book covers, etc. Without Mr. Stewart, there would probably be no Apex Digest.

  Congratulations, Justin, on your nomination. Next year, please win.

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  Jason Sizemore: Editor in Chief

  Gill Ainsworth: Senior Editor

  Deb Taber: Editor/Art Director

  Alethea Kontis: Contributing Editor

  Mari Adkins: Submissions Editor

  Jodi Lee: Submissions Editor

  Justin Stewart: Content Designer

  E.D. Trimm: Copy Editor

  Cover art by Nigel Sade

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  Subscription Rates: $20 for one year (four issues), or $6 for a single issue. International is $34 for a subscription and $11.00 for a single issue. Subscriptions and single issues may be obtained from Jason Sizemore c/o Apex Digest.

  Apex Science Fiction & Horror Digest is a publication of Apex Publications, LLC and is distributed four times a year from Lexington, Kentucky.

  Copyright © 2007 all rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reprinted in whole or in part without written permission.

  ISSN: 1553-7269

  Apex Science Fiction & Horror Digest PO Box 24323, Lexington, KY 40524

  Email: Jason@apexdigest.com Website: www.apexdigest.com

  Table of Contents:

  Blackboard Sky—Gary A. Braunbeck

  Interview with Gary A. Braunbeck

  Spinnetje—Stefani Nellen

  Ray Gun—Daniel G. Keohane

  Uncanny—Samuel Tinianow

  Curses of Nature—Alethea Kontis

  The Moldy Dead—Sara King

  Interview with Bryan Smith

  Cain Xp11 (Part 3): Sorry About the Blood—Geoffrey Girard

  What to Expect When Expectorating—Jennifer Pelland

  Gary A. Braunbeck writes mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mainstream literature. He is the author of 19 books; his fiction has been translated into Japanese, French, Italian, Russian and German. Nearly 200 of his short stories have appeared in various publications. He was born in Newark, Ohio, the city that serves as the model for the fictitious Cedar Hill in many of his stories. The Cedar Hill stories are collected in Graveyard People and Home Before Dark. His fiction has received several awards, including the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction in 2003 for “Duty” and in 2005 for “We Now Pause for Station Identification,"; his collection Destinations Unknown won the Fiction Collection Stoker in 2006. His novella “Kiss of the Mudman” received the International Horror Guild Award for Long Fiction in 2005. For more information about Gary and his work, please visit: www.garybraunbeck.com.

  BLACKBOARD SKY

  By Gary A. Braunbeck

  "Children of the future age.

  Reading this indignant page,

  Know that in a former time,

  Love, sweet love, was thought a crime..."

  —John Milton, A Little Girl Lost

  #

  When I was six years old I fell down the stairs of our house and cracked my spine. Had it been one centimeter deeper I would have been paralyzed for life, but as luck would have it the injury required only one surgery followed by months of bed-rest, during which I could only move my arms or have my head propped up on pillows when it was time to eat. I read hundreds of books during those months, learned how to play poker from my mother, and drew so many pictures my father threatened to wallpaper every room in the house with them if I didn't stop. To save both paper and his nerves, he devised a contraption with hooks and pulleys that enabled me to raise or lower a small blackboard above my bed, allowing me to lie on my back (I was supposed to remain flat as often as possible) and draw pictures with the dozens of pieces of different-colored chalk he purchased at an art supply store. I thought of it as my blackboard sky. Some of the chalk was of the glow-in-the-dark variety, and every night before I fell asleep I would draw a picture of a guardian angel so that if I woke up in the middle of the night, frightened, I had only to look above to see my glowing angel with its luminous wings, and I'd know that I was all right, I was protected, someone was watching over me.

  If it weren't for that, if I'd not had my blackboard sky on which to depict glowing guardian angels and the dreams of all I planned on doing once I could walk again (flying to the moon in a rocket ship was right at the top of the list), I think my head would have started ticking like a bomb on a subway train, and I would have gone stark, staring crazy by the time I was seven. I still have that blackboard, and every so often I take it out of the closet and spend a half-hour or so drawing on it, just to remind myself that at least I had an outlet as a child when one was so desperately needed.

  Or, rather, I used to. I used to do a lot of things, look forward to things, plan for things, hope for things. And then came the story of the Boy in the Box Tower.

  #

  The first part was jammed between pages 93 and 94 of a used paperback edition of Anton Chekhov's The Party and Other Stories on a stained piece of notebook paper that looked as if someone had spilled coffee on it and then, in anger, crumpled it into a wad and thrown it away, only to have someone else later find it, smooth it out, and write on it. The handwriting (printing, actually) was that of a child—perhaps 7 or 8 years old—and if the spelling, punctuation, and grammar were any indication, not a particularly bright child; but I stopped thinking about those things by the time I reached the end of the first paragraph:

  The boy In the boxTower

  befour he was calld the boy in the Boxtower his name was vincent. he was not like everyone else. he was difrent. he had a special gift for distruction. vincent could distroy anything just buy looking at it when he was upset. he hated it but didn't no what he could do too stop it. it was resess and all the forth-graders went outside too play. vincent walked too a corner of the playground and sat alone. he didn't hav friends. everyone thought he was a freek. vincent wasn't intoo math or science or reeding or righting or history. he was intoo horror and ghosts and creetsures and aleyans frum space in books and movees. he yousd to watch horror movees with his dad befour his dad got all sad and killed himself. that was why vincent was always depressed. he never reelly talked two people or got along with anywon. he was always alone, even when he was home with his mom who was always drunk and on the fone with her sister asking four monee to help with the bills. a kid was walking to vincent, a big kid.

  "hay, freek!” the kid shouted at vincent. then he hit vincent in the face hard. vincent fell back but then got up. vincents nose was bleeding and his left eye began to twitch.

  "y
ou would not bee like this if yore dad wasn't mean and hit you all the time,” said vincent to the big kid.

  "well at leest my dad is alive and not some psycho who killed himself!"

  vincent grabbed a big rock and beat the kid in the face with it. the kids face all bloody. vincent stood with tears in his eyes. the twitch in his eye went faster. he felt very hot inside. all the heat like fire heded to his eyes. vincent stared at the kid with the bleeding face. with his eyes he made the bleeding kid go on fire all over. the big kid started screeming reel loud. vincent cryd harder and took off running until he reechd the big tower of cardbored boxes. it took him 7 hours to climb to the top of the tower where there was a room for him to hide. noone new where he went, but they started looking four him. but vincent was not alone in the box tower. the device was there with him. the device always found him. the device was his only friend.

  "That is seriously fucked-up,” came a woman's voice from behind me.

  I started, nearly knocking over the stack of books I'd been inventorying, and turned to see that Claire, who worked one of the cash registers, was standing there reading over my shoulder.

  "Jesus, Claire! Have you been taking some kind of ninja training on your days off? I never heard you."

  "You were so engrossed in that, I just knew it was something odd."

  I tilted my head and grinned. “You were hoping it was another twenty, weren't you?"

  "Can you blame me?"

  I'd once found a twenty dollar bill inside a well-read copy of Love Story. Claire and I—along with the other volunteers who'd been working that night—had used it to order a pizza.

  The place we work is called, simply, BARGAINS. It's a second-hand store, not unlike those run by Goodwill and the Salvation Army, where people who can't afford to shop at regular department stores come to buy clothes, furniture, household appliances, televisions, VCRs, DVD players, assorted other electronics ... and, of course, books. I volunteer on Friday nights and Saturdays, and am in charge of the electronics and books sections. (I'd taken the day off work on this particular Friday because of a too-long doctor's appointment, and had decided to come into the story early.) I make it a point to always go through every box of donated books that comes in and remove anything left inside. Over the years I have found concert tickets, bank receipts, phone numbers, addresses, photographs of people whose names I'd never know, money, candy bar wrappers ... people will use the damnedest things as bookmarks, and then forget to remove them before tossing the books into the large metal BOOK DONATIONS bin outside the store. I'd once suggested that we request people leave their names when donating books in case something of value was found inside, but the store has no computer to create such a database, and even if it did, cataloguing who donated each book would soon become a full-time endeavor; so, instead, I go through each book before placing it on the shelves.

  "There's more on the back,” said Claire.

  I turned over the page and there, in the same childish handwriting, was this:

  * * * *

  * * * *

  ....

  the device was sending him a message, so vincent listened very carefully. he almost never understood what the device was telling him but it was nice to have someone talking to him and not yelling at him or ignoring him.

  "The wavelength in the waveguide is: lg = 2p/b, which is always greater than the free-space wavelength of l0 =2p/k—except for the 00-th mode, where lg = l0 applies as frequency decreases, the guide wavelength increases until it becomes infinite, at a cutoff frequency of:

  * * * *

  * * * *

  "—where ‘c’ is the speed of sound. Below the cutoff the propagation constant b becomes imaginary, and the mode decays rapidly instead of propagating without loss. So the 00-th mode has a cutoff frequency of zero."

  vincent smiled at the device. “thank you, C'haill-ol-i,” he said.

  "What the hell?” I said.

  Claire put her hand on my shoulder and leaned closer. “Got any idea what that is, Mr. Wizard?"

  "Some math equations that are way beyond me—and please stop calling me ‘Mr. Wizard.’ I teach 6th-grade science, not quantum physics."

  "So maybe it's just something the kid made up?"

  "Probably.” I found it hard to concentrate with the touch of her hand sending waves of heat down into my chest. “Probably,” I said once again, folding the page and moving to place it in the stack of other items I'd found left in today's books, but Claire was faster and yanked it from my hand.

  "C'mon, Patrick! You're actually expecting me to believe that this doesn't interest you in the least? Look at it! All of a sudden, when ‘the device’ starts talking to Vincent, his grammar and spelling are fine—okay, his capitalization still needs work, but otherwise...” She waved the page in front of my face. “Tell me this isn't the most attention-grabbing thing you've encountered all day. C'haill-ol-i? What kind of word or name is that?"

  I just smiled and shook my head, amazed as always that this lovely, vibrant, so alive woman showed any interest in me at all. I knew she thought of me as a friend, and I kept hoping things would turn into something more, but I was too afraid to make the first move. Besides being ten years younger than me, Claire was far too vibrant to weigh herself down with a man who had to use a set of canes to walk around—an after-effect from my childhood injury. Although the crack in my spine did eventually heal, it left quite a bit of nerve and muscle damage behind that decades of twice-monthly physical therapy has done little to improve. I can walk short distances without the canes—say, from my living room to my bedroom or to the kitchen—but for anything farther, I need the canes. When I'd talked briefly to Claire about how frustrating it sometimes became, she'd laughed, cupped my face in her hands, and said, “Yeah, but you get the best parking spaces.” How could a guy not fall for a woman with a sense of humor like that?

  I found myself suddenly full of courage and decided to ask her out for a bite to eat after the store closed, but when I turned fully around to face her, she was staring past me, her face drained of color.

  "Claire? What's wrong?"

  Saying nothing, she pointed toward a row of television sets a few yards away; all were tuned to the same local channel where the noontime news was just starting with a breaking story.

  A solemn-faced reporter stood at the edge of a school playground that was swarming with police, EMTs, several teachers and parents, and a lot of crying, frightened children. The volume on all of the televisions was set at low so it was difficult to hear everything the reporter was saying, but the words “two young boys,” “fight,” and “fire” came through loud and clear.

  Claire touched my face and made a beeline for the nearest set, turning up the volume, though by that time there was no need; I think we both knew what had happened.

  Two young boys from a local 4th-grade class had gotten into a fight during recess and the boy who'd started the altercation had somehow been set on fire. The boy he'd hit had run away during the confusion and still hadn't been found. The names of the boys were not being released yet.

  I was still trembling when Claire came back to the sorting area.

  "When were these new boxes of books brought in?” she asked me in a thin, quavering voice.

  "This morning, right after I got here.” I picked up the copy of the Chekhov paperback. “This was in one of the bottom boxes."

  "So it would have to have been dropped in there either last night or some time this morning before the store opened, right? I mean, there were other boxes on top of it, right? So that book and this piece of paper had been there for a while, right?"

  I looked up at her. The color had still not returned to her face. “Right,” I whispered.

  She unfolded the sheet of paper, staring at it as if it were something diseased. “Please don't say this is a coincidence."

  "I wouldn't insult your intelligence like that."

  She stared at the page and tried to smile. “Good. I probably would have hi
t you. Oh, God, Patrick—” She took hold of my hand. “—what're we going to do?"

  "We could go to the police and show this to them, but my guess is that someone would think we were trying to ... I don't know ... pull something on everyone. That we'd made this ourselves somehow and were just using it as a way to draw attention to ourselves."

  She gave a slow nod of her head. “They'd think we were either a couple of scumbags or a couple of crazies. Or both."

  I squeezed her hand. “I didn't want to be quite so blunt about it, but yes."

  She stared at the page for a few more seconds, then released a breath that seemed to take everything out of her. “Jesus Christ—look at it now.” She threw the page down on the table.

  In the last two minutes, the story had been continued:

  * * * *

  * * * *

  * * * *

  —said the device to vincent as he lay down his head to rest.

  "yes,” whispered vincent. “they're coming for me. but they won't find me right away. And when they do come, they'll have to come over the bridge."

  * * * *

  * * * *

  —said the device again.

  "I will,” replied vincent. “i'll make sure to do it right."

  "Patrick, I swear to you, I swear to you, I didn't do that."

  "I know,” I said, this time struggling to my feet and taking hold of both her hands. “I was looking at you the whole time. I know you didn't add that."

  "Then ... how?"

  "I don't know."

  We both looked at the page on the table, and then Claire said: “Patrick, when the store closes later, I want to come home with you. I don't want to be alone tonight."

  "I think I'm even more scared than you are."

  She tried to smile but couldn't. “That's why I like you so much. You don't have a false-macho bone in your body. That's a good thing, in case you were wondering."

  "You can sleep in my room and I'll take the sofa."