SUMMER CHILLER CONTESTANT

Unlike my neighbors, I’ve always been rather fond of insects.

In June, they begin to reveal themselves. By the end of the month, the entire street is lit up on warm evenings by citronella candles and electrified zappers, attempting, mostly in vain, to stem the tide of long-legged, winged invaders.

Mosquitoes tend to leave me alone, and bees steer clear of my head and arms as I sit on my patio with my books or journals. I hear them, their onionskin wings beating in the stillness of the air, the buzz of their bodies as they touch down upon blooming flowers.

This year, I noticed a change in my garden. On an early summer evening, I lugged my pen and journal out to the patio table. As I sat down in the stiff, metal chair, something immediately tugged at me. A feeling of wrongness, subtle enough to defy naming, surrounded me. It took a moment to realize what was tugging at me wasn’t a sense of something out of place but rather a sense of emptiness.

The air was still, without sound. There were no insects.

I spent the evening jotting my thoughts down and ignoring the lack of movement. In the distance, I could hear a neighbor’s zapper popping off every half hour or so, though nothing like the rapid-fire staccato I’d become accustomed to. The azaleas that lined my back wall were motionless, so strangely opposite to the rush of life that was normally housed within.

I didn’t see so much as a single fat-bodied bumblebee. It was unnerving.
When the light grew too dim to write, I dropped my pen into my pocket and tucked my journal under my arm. I slipped my sandals on and, pretending to water my potted plants, I made a circuit of my garden.

I felt silly, childish. I doubted anybody else in the neighborhood was concerned with whether or not the insects had gone, and the eagle-eyed old widow across the street was surely peeking out her window as she did every night. I didn’t want to have to answer her questions at the mailbox in the morning. I didn’t want the neighborhood assuming I was crazy.

The first creature I found was a spider. It was large and covered in tiny hairs, resting on its back in the mulch between plants. Its long, delicate legs were splayed out in several directions. I poked it with a slender twig, but it did not move. Spiders can sometimes play dead, but this didn’t feel like one of those occasions.

I backed away and scanned my yard, searching for any signs of life. Still nothing.

Luna moths have always congregated in amongst the trees that border my property line. On warm evenings I often wander close to them, spreading out my reading blanket and enjoying a few hours of a novel while watching them out of the corners of my eyes. Wings of crème de menthe, antennae like a kindly grandfather’s mustache, these may be the most gorgeous moths on earth.

On this night, however, I could see none of them clinging to the trees or flitting from branch to branch. As I grew closer, I spied something at the bottom of a birch that tore the breath from my lungs. I couldn’t even muster a single gasp.

Wings. Hundreds of them, piled atop one another, torn from their bodies. Antennae scattered several feet in every direction, wingless bodies heaped together in a crumbling pile, dry as husks, falling apart.

I took a step back, tears forcing themselves out of my eyes, hot and wet and streaking across my cheeks. This was absolutely wrong. Something was destroying my garden, killing my visitors. I wiped at my face with the back of my hand. What had done this?

There was one last place I had to check, though I didn’t want to confirm what I already suspected.

I crept to the azaleas, watering can in hand, and brushed aside a few branches. Beneath the vividly purple blossoms, resting on the moist earth, was a pile of bees. My bees. The creatures that had traveled from flower to flower, graceful despite their soft, round bellies, were collected in a dry pile of sunken black and yellow abdomens.

I was suddenly struck with the feeling of not being alone, of being watched by something I could not see. I whipped my head around and squinted into the gathering darkness, desperate to find the source of my awful unease.

I heard, or rather felt, a soft humming coming from my rose bushes. It felt like a whisper tinged with the odd thrumming of insect sound. With all of the creatures gone, I felt a twinge of suspicion. Nothing felt normal now.

Beneath the roses, in between the individual bushes’ stalks, was the strangest creature I’d ever seen. It looked much like a spider, though though there were only six legs, and dark, leathery wings curled up on its back. The wings themselves were longer than the body, and its belly bulged out from underneath them, round and gluttonous, quivering. It was the size of a kitten, much larger than any insect I had ever seen before.

It had only two eyes, and they were closed behind what appeared to be eyelids. It rolled and its mouth sagged open, revealing two rows of tiny needled teeth. I could see mint-green dust in the corners, and I gasped softly.

One eye opened and fixed itself on me. It was strangely human, with pupil and iris, and tracked me as I began to creep backwards. As I moved it pushed itself up on its legs, the humming growing louder. It stretched, tossed its head as if popping its neck, and yawned. I could see now that there were not two rows of needles, but four.

The other eye opened, and the wings began to unfold.

I dropped my watering can and ran, sprinting in the darkness around the corner of my house and to the back door, the one that led onto the patio, the only one I left unlocked. I could hear the humming behind me, and it sounded close, though just how close I couldn’t tell. I threw the door open long enough to hurl myself inside and slammed it closed. As I drove the lock and dead bolt into place I could hear the humming on the porch, on the other side of the door’s glass pane.

I curled up on the couch, staring at the door, waiting for the sound to subside. After a few hours I lost consciousness, dreaming of insects I would more than likely never see again. I woke with tears drying along the curve of my nose, my eyes swollen and unwilling to open. Something had destroyed my garden, and nothing would be the same in my yard again.

When I found the nerve to come out again in the morning, the creature was gone. Without my moths and bumble bees, without my spiders and other winged cohabitants, I feared it would move on to bigger things.

©2009 Jessica Brown

Jessica Brown is a thirty-year-old fan of horror and dark fantasy whose work has been featured in Shadow Feast, The Nocturnal Lyric, Bloodfetish, Horrotica and The Harrow. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and can be found online at http://jessicarbrown.blogspot.com

I had the opportunity to interview author Wrath James White about his upcoming novels, what makes real horror, and why it is that we respond to things that go bump in the dark.

LT: Tell us about your latest book.

WJW: I have two novels coming out this year. The Resurrectionist is coming out in hardback from Cargo Cult Books and as a mass-market paperback from Leisure books. It’s about a serial killer who can bring his victims back from the dead with no memory of their deaths. The story centers around Sarah Lincoln, a woman who lives across the street from the killer and who begins to have nightmares every night about she and her husband being murdered in their sleep. When she begins to find clues around her house, bloody sheets in the laundry, blood stains on the mattress, clean spots on the carpet, she begins trying to piece the mystery together in time to save herself from being murdered… again.

I also have a novel coming out from Necro books called Yaccub’s Curse. This is the story of Malik Black, a teenage enforcer for the local drug kingpin in his little North Philadelphia neighborhood. When Malik is ordered to murder a crack-whore and her newborn baby he has a revelation that leads him to believe that his employer is really Satan and that the crack-baby that he has been ordered to kill is the second-coming of Christ. Malik then finds himself in the middle of a battle between good and evil, salvation and redemption, the violence of the streets and the power of the occult.

LT: Some of the reviews I have read of your previous works describe your writing as “extreme horror”. Do you feel this description is correct?

WJW: My writing is certainly not tame. I would never be accused of writing Quiet PG-13 horror. I go all out on my descriptions. I don’t hold anything back. A lot of writers believe in leaving things up to the reader’s imagination but I don’t believe in that. I believe that the reader buys a writer’s book to see what’s in the author’s mind. They want to be entertained by the writer’s imagination. Not their own. They want to see things as he sees it. So I give them that. I describe all the violence as I see it. If there’s sex in it then I describe that with all the detail that I describe a sunset or a rose garden. Not all of my novels have sex in them but when they do it’s graphic just as the violence and gore is graphic.

LT: You have previously written with Maurice Broaddus (Orgy of Souls) and Monica J. O’Rourke (Poisoning Eros). Do you have any future projects planned with other authors? Why or why not?

WJW: Brian Keene and I have been talking about writing a novel together for a few years and I’ve got one hell of a story in mind for us to collaborate on. It’s just a matter now of finding the time. We’re both very busy. Maurice and I also have a post-apocalyptic novel in the planning stages. Hopefully, I’ll get to both novels next year.

LT: What kinds of ideas inspire your stories?

WJW: Arguments. Debates. Anytime I find myself struggling to explain an idea to someone it has a good chance of becoming a story. My stories are often just long hypothetical situations to illustrate some concept or idea I want to communicate.

LT: Is there anything that you’d like to change about earlier novels, or things that you’d like to try in a different way now?

WJW: Honestly? No. Each novel that I have written was a moment in my life, a state of mind that can’t be duplicated. Every one of those novels would be different if I wrote them now because I’m different now, as a writer and as a person. Better is some ways and worse in others. After I deal with a subject matter in a certain way I move on. I may revisit that subject matter but never in the same way.

LT: What authors do you admire?

WJW: I admire anyone who has found a way to make a living in this business. If you have managed to do this full-time and support yourself and your family than you have my respect and I mean that. This is a hard business. I can’t imagine what I would be writing if I had to support myself this way. I have a certain freedom because this isn’t my fulltime gig. I don’t rely on my novels to feed my kids. If I take some wild artistic gamble and it flops my kids still eat. It takes a lot of guts to stay true to your art when failure means the bills don’t get paid. The guys who can remain innovative under that kind of pressure are my idols.

LT: Do you think your stories would lead well to screenplays?

WJW: Absolutely. My writing is so visual that it would be easy to add live imagery to them. The level of emotion that I put into my work would probably be a blast for an actor to portray.

LT: What fears— real or imagined, belonging to you or others—would you like to explore in your writing, which you haven’t tapped into yet?

WJW: I think I’ve hit most of them or I’m at least in the process of doing so. I have a lot of work on the drawing table that addresses some of the things I haven’t explored yet or have not explored in detail or from all available angles. There’s the end of the world, body horrors like disease and mutation, vampires, all types of fanaticism like religion, greed, and patriotism, fear of “the other” as in racism, sexism, nationalism, homophobia, fear of nature, fear of technology. All of these have the potential to and have historically lead to great evil and that’s fodder for a good horror story. There’s so much evil out there in the world I don’t think I’ll ever run out of material.

LT: In your opinion, what is the major ingredient that makes a story frightening?

WJW: If you can imagine it happening to you. If it’s personal. If readers can’t relate to it then they won’t be scared by it. The more you can ground a story in reality, in the mundane, before you introduce the horror element, the greater the potential for fear. That’s why most horror takes place in the dark because we all spend a good portion of our lives in the dark. You can watch “Alien” and when you take away the spaceships and the distant planets you have a big scary thing jumping out at you from the dark. So the next time you get up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water or a midnight snack you’ll be in the same environment that Sigourney Weaver was in when she was attacked by the Alien. Not on a spaceship. In the dark. Now if you add to that and put it in even more common surrounding like a parking garage, a bedroom, or a basement or attic in your own home, you’ll get them every time. Add in other common fears and moments of discomfort, being stopped by the police or some other authority figure, being alone with a stranger, the death of a loved one, undergoing surgery, making a mistake or a bad decision that hurts someone, having sex, giving birth etc. and you have the perfect theater for your horror story.

LT: Can you give us a release date/ publication information for the latest books?

WJW: Yaccub’s Curse is due to be released in September. The hardback of The Resurrectionist is due in October 2009 and the mass-market paperback in December 2009.

©2009 Lori Titus