Weird Tales

AMBIENT MORGUE MUSIC
by Richard Howard

copyright © 2009 / May not be reproduced without permission

(from Weird Tales #354, Fall 2009)

* * *

The best thing about being a reviewer is that you often receive music in the old fashioned way, via a CD through your letterbox. Anyone jaded with this century’s downloading obsession and its associated esoterica of bit rates, compressions and conversions will no doubt be turning snot-coloured with envy at this point. [Oh, the quaint and glamorous life you lead… Ed.] Yes, I actually receive music through the post with handwritten covers, illustrations, bribes, pleas, death threats… and on top of that, the music is good.

Yes, it seems that only now in the 2030s is the true character of this millennium’s sound finally being heard. It’s early days yet but, for my money, the best stuff is being made right here, in Dublin. I know that looking at most mags these days you wouldn’t know it, but most of this music is being made far away from the hubris of the mainstream music business, by the disenfranchised, who can barely afford to eat, never mind pay a publicity agent. My favourite music of the last six months has, for the most part, arrived unexpectedly in my hallway like a burglar, a begging letter, a Halloween firework.

Ambient Morgue Music is one I look forward to in particular. There have been four volumes so far, arriving monthly, each accompanied with a black-and-white photograph of a corpse and a handful of soil. The track names, listed on the back, speak of bloody revolution, disease and, for reasons that will become clear later on, zoo animals. The music itself is an eerie type of lo-fi ambient; at times it’s hard to make out the music from the microphone hiss, but I presume that that’s part of the aesthetic, the sound of the room putting you right where they want you. It’s beautifully hypnotic, filled with dread and, as I found out this week, truly revolutionary.

The only contact information provided is a mobile phone number and it changes with every dispatch. Since the first Ambient Morgue’s arrival I’ve been trying desperately to contact the artist or artists, but each time the phone has either been disconnected or I get the generic answering machine drone. Last week I finally made a connection.

“Hello.” —A thick Dublin accent.

“Hello, you sent me some CDs. I really think they’re great; would I be able to meet you and have a chat? I’d like to do a piece on them.”

“Yeah de CD, ye like it yeah?”

“I think it’s some of the best music being made at the moment.”

“Okay, which one are you? Whereabouts are ye?”

“I’m living on North Circular Road.”

“Ah sure, yer only five minutes up the road. Sure come up now if ye like. Ye know where the Phoenix is. Just gis a shout when yer at the monument.”

My brain froze for a second. “Um… yeah, okay. I’ll give you a ring when I get there.”

Why had I never been to the Phoenix Park before? I’ve lived on North Circular Road for almost ten years, but I had never turned right upon leaving my house, always left towards Phibsboro. Sometimes if I was walking into the city I’d cross the road and follow the picturesque houses of Oxmantown road, before turning left and strolling through Stoneybatter, towards the River Liffey. Why had I never chosen to take my walk in one of the largest city parks in the world? Come to think of it, why does nobody I know ever talk about it, let alone go there? My head swam with these, and many other questions, as I threw on my winter coat. Leaving the house I turned right, feeling slightly askew.

It was twilight as I made my way up the road. I looked around for something to keep me grounded in what I had come to believe was reality; I fixed on the trees, trying to ignore the colossal monument coming into view. Surely I’d have noticed something of that size at the end of the road I lived on.

I entered the park and followed the winding path to the monument. I took out my phone, but there was no need. He found me. An ordinary-looking young man, smartly dressed but slightly disheveled.

“Story bud?” The easy, familiar colloquialism took the edge off the uneasy, illusory feeling that had grown inside me since leaving my house.

“Hello, pleased to meet you.” I offered my hand and we shook solidly.

He introduced himself as Dessy and then walked away, gesturing that I should follow him.

Reader, in my youth I enjoyed reading the fiction of the fantastical. Future dystopian nightmares, journeys to the stars and magickal conspiracies, I devoured them all. Bearing this in mind, I would have thought that what I’m about to explain would have been that much easier to comprehend. But, for all the reading in my youth of the classics of imaginative fiction, I was still left with nothing to compare with what unfolded over the next hour or so, beginning with the sight that startled me as we stood on top of that hill. On the area around the monument in the Phoenix Park I saw what I can only describe as a shantytown.

My stomach turned in giddy dread. I was so taken aback that Dessy had to let me stand for a while to take it in, my brain processing and reprocessing, programming and reprogramming. It was mind-blowing enough to be standing in a colossal green area in the middle of the city that had been completely erased from my consciousness like an early morning dream, but this threatened to smother my wits altogether. Rows and rows of dilapidated huts as far as I could see were broken here and there by mud tracks. Campfires burned. I could see people, too, going about their business as if following a daily routine. The atmosphere was one that my mind had never experienced, but that my body recalled, something primal and buried. How could this place, situated right in Dublin City, remain unremarked on by society?

I hadn’t much time to entertain such a question, as Dessy beckoned me to follow him and we started down the hill towards the town. I trailed behind him, my head a swarm of ideas. As we got closer I realized that the scene I’d been viewing from the hill was less rustic than I’d first assumed. Everyone appeared reasonably well-groomed and fed; the men, women and children all wore modern clothing; and the children played with toys, handheld games and bikes that placed them firmly in the center of the twenty-first century. The huts themselves, on the other hand, were made from the kind of materials I would imagine have been employed for such purposes for over a hundred years: corrugated iron, tin, loose wood, plastic sheeting, cardboard and old furniture all converged to create the bric-a-brac village we stepped through. I saw a deer being roasted over an upturned shopping trolley and then remembered reading about the deer of Phoenix Park when I was young—a realization both nostalgic and grisly given the circumstances.

Seeing the flames licking around that beast’s carcass served me well in one way, though, as I began to come to my senses somewhat and my journalistic instincts began to kick in. How did these people get here? Why had nobody ever heard of them? Where was the music made? As we walked further these turned into questions about self-preservation. What did they intend to do with me? Was the music just a ruse to kidnap a member of the press?

We stopped at another campfire. Thankfully this one didn’t contain any recently deceased wildlife, just a handful of men and women warming themselves against the intense cold. Dessy took me to the far side of the fire and introduced me to a man called Sean, who signaled for me to sit down on a cushion by the fire. Dessy disappeared.

“Now, what would you like to know?” said Sean, scratching his ample beard and staring right into my eyes.

“Um,” I stuttered, taking a second to switch fully back into journalist mode, apparent cosmonaut that I’d become. “Well, how did you get here?”

The light from a fire has a way of changing one’s appearance at every moment but, at a guess, I’d say Sean was in his mid-forties. I studied his jovial, friendly face as he mulled over the question.

“The government,” he said finally.

“That’s it? The government?”

“The Olympics,” he said, and I fidgeted on my cushion, seriously considering walking away. He must have noticed the germ of my impatience, and he began shaking his head apologetically.

“I’m sorry,”’ he said. “After all, we are the ones who have always known. You are the ones who have never known.”

I settled back down as he continued.

“You do remember the Olympics, don’t you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Twenty years ago that bloody thing came to our city. Thousands of people forcibly removed from their homes to make way for the Olympic village, the new stadium, twelve-story car parks.” He spat into the fire at the memory. “We were promised houses out in the suburbs — well, they call them suburbs — might as well be outer space.”

“So you sought refuge here?”

“Some of us sought refuge, others were chased here. We fought pitched battles with the police all the way up North Circular Road. Caused quite a stir at the time. At one point it looked like St. Peter’s Church was going to go up in flames. Don’t know how I would have explained that one to him at the Pearly Gates. Hopefully the pigs found a way to erase it from that document, too. Haha.” His laugh turned into a cough and he spat again. The fire sizzled. “Of course some of us were already here, but the numbers were small so nobody really took any notice. Forced removal had been going on since the late nineteen hundreds and those that didn’t want to go usually came here. That caused a bit of resentment at first, because since the newcomers, everybody’s trapped here.”

“Trapped?”

“Yes. From what we can gather, it’s some kind of gravity field. If we try to leave it just propels us back. There are only three people in the whole camp that it doesn’t affect. Dessy is one of them. The rest of us can’t even pass the monument.”

“But how?”

“It was the Olympic Games. Every major technological country in the world had an interest in the games running smoothly. The amount of technology Ireland would have had at its disposal would have been unprecedented.”

“But what about everyone else… outside…”

He just shrugged his shoulders and said, “But sure, isn’t it the music you came here for? Come on.”

We walked until the huts began to thin out, and I got a twitch of recall as in the distance I saw a naggingly familiar sign: DUBLIN ZOO.

“I haven’t been here in…” I let the sentence trail off, giving in to what now appeared to be a full-scale hallucination. Deciding to jump onto surer ground, I began questioning him about the music as we pushed through the gates.

“So how did you make the music?”

“Gas.”

I shook off his obvious flippancy and persisted with my questioning, “How do you record it?”

“My only inheritance was a suitcase full of microphones. My Dad used to record bands years and years ago. He was always buying microphones. He loved sound, god bless him and not much else… I just use them and an old computer…”

I had followed him into what used to be the reptile house.

“Don’t worry,” he said, switching on a light, “most of the animals are long dead. At the height of the battle we released a lot of them and charged the cops. The rhinos and hippos caused the most mayhem, not to mention the big cats. They were all gunned down in the end, of course. I feel terrible about that, but we made the choice. We did what we thought we had to do. Anyway, do you like it? My home studio.”

I looked around the former reptile house with the same awe that visited me atop that hill. Memories started to awaken, doors unlocked in my brain that someone evidently wanted closed forever. At that point I remembered this place, reader, even if you do not. I remembered the crocodile, the iguana and the snakes but they were gone. Each case had been turned into a recording booth, with microphones hanging from the ceiling; the largest case contained a mixing desk and a computer. Even stranger, though, was when I came in for a closer look at the booths and saw the dead body lying on a slab in each one. Sean saw the look on my face and laughed a maniac’s laugh.

“My instruments,” he said.

I couldn’t comprehend what I was feeling, hearing, seeing. Silence seemed the only option that wouldn’t further submerge my flailing sanity. My companion simply smiled and continued.

“Some of us did consider moving in here when we arrived. But then we thought that it would be better used as a kind of mausoleum. Less chance of disease spreading if we keep the dead over here. Then I had the idea of putting my studio in here, and the two ideas kind of eventually meshed together.”

My continued silence told him I still didn’t understand.

“Dead bodies fart. Anybody who works in a morgue will tell you that. All those pipes and organs and valves finally getting to relax after all those years tensed up.” He stuck out his tongue and blew a chilling raspberry, letting it echo for a second, before continuing. “The music you’re hearing is basically my recordings of gas being released from corpses. I manipulate the sounds somewhat of course . . . mostly layering them on top of each other. The last CD we sent you was a new experiment I was working on where I’m actually playing the body. I’ve developed a kind of stopper so I can restrict the flow of air from the body, while applying pressure to certain points. It’s early days yet… I don’t think I’ve even begun to scratch the surface of the potential here… I don’t think I’m far off a rudimentary scale, though.”

I still couldn’t talk.

“Oh, before I forget—” He produced a CD from his coat and put it in my hand. I was in so much shock that I nearly dropped it. He actually had to close my hand around it.

“The giraffe died last week… marvelous, elongated movements… this is just a rough demo of the stuff I’ve done with it… let me know what you think.”

Evidently I was too stunned to ask any more questions, so we both made for the exit in silence. We cut through the shantytown and, at the bottom of the hill where it all began, he bade me farewell.

“Don’t forget why we do this,” he said. “Be sure and let everyone know about us.”

I managed to force out a ‘yes,’ and scaled the hill, feeling the force of an electric current through my hair as I passed the monument. Only when I was back on North Circular Road did I begin to feel anything like myself again. I was stunned, jaded, but also excited; my hands clutched the CD so hard it hurt, gripping to the only evidence of the strange things I’d seen that night.

I ran the short distance back to my house and slammed the door behind me. Taking the CD from its cover I placed it in the stereo and sat back in my favourite chair. As the beautiful dread of what will probably become Ambient Morgue Volume Five swelled and drifted through the room, I took out the photograph. It was the first one Sean had appeared in himself. He looks like some strange kind of wizard as he works away at the giraffe, like he’s trying to give it back its life — reanimate it. In a way I suppose he is. It looks primitive and futuristic all at once. Slowly the magnitude of this thing started to hit me. I thought of how inspiring and revolutionary the music I was hearing was. The fact that I now knew the circumstances and conditions under which it was recorded made it all the more fantastic. After the music finished I pressed PLAY again and put it on repeat. I sat at the computer and began typing this article. What started out as a simple opinion piece about underground music gradually turned into the pocket odyssey you’ve just read. At this point I couldn’t care less if my sanity is in question; just please, track down this morbidly angry music for yourself. It’s simply some of the best sound you will hear this decade, lovingly crafted by someone that the world chose to forget, whose time to appear from the shadows seems to have arrived.

* * *

Richard Howard is a speculative fiction writer from Dublin, Ireland. To date he has had stories published in Electric Velocipede, M-Brane and Loki’s Journal. In 2008 he won the Weird Tales Spam Fiction contest for his story “Let Yourself Look Spiny.” He currently resides in Dublin 7 where he writes, studies English, and meditates on the exact moment the humdrum becomes the fantastic.

Wow. We didn’t expect this. But there it is: Weird Tales was awarded its historic first-ever Hugo Award on Sunday night as thousands cheered at the 2009 World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal.

Fiction editor Ann VanderMeer and editorial & creative director Stephen H. Segal (pictured above with WT web consultant Matthew Kressel) were there to accept the award for best semiprozine, the category that honors small-press magazines with part-time staffs. Other Hugo winners that evening included Neil Gaiman (best novel, The Graveyard Book), Elizabeth Bear (best novelette, “Shoggoths in Bloom”), and Joss Whedon (best short-form dramatic presentation, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog).

From all of us at Weird Tales, we offer our deepest thanks to all those who’ve supported and participated in our work to re-energize the magazine as a leading storytelling venue. From the brilliant writers and artists who’ve crafted these pages with us, to the readers who told all their friends how much they love the magazine these days—this is YOUR award, and we’re honored to have been there to say so.

Ann talks at length about the Hugo experience with her husband Jeff VanderMeer at Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog, where you’ll also find a link to a ton of great pictures by the io9 news crew.

The new Weird Tales #352 features an exclusive interview with bestselling fantasy author Neil Gaiman. This fall saw the release of Gaiman’s new novel The Graveyard Book, and January 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of his comic-book masterpiece The Sandman — so WeirdTales.net will spend the next two weeks (starting Monday) revisiting The Sandman in “Recurring Dream,” a daily retrospective column by correspondent Eric San Juan.

But first, we asked Seattle-area WT contributor Lisa Mantchev to tell us what it was like when Neil visited her neck of the woods — specifically, the University of Washington — on The Graveyard Book tour this past October.

* * *

He’s signing. Books in stacks of eight await his signature, rendered in red-brown ink that flows from a fountain pen. Everyone here in the backstage green room keeps a close eye on Neil Gaiman and a closer eye on his right hand, which sports a splint on the middle finger: a souvenir from a recent trip to China. (The first rule of author signings is that you don’t ask the author how he ― or his hand ― is holding up. The second rule? See rule one.)

In passing, Gaiman wonders aloud why there is a clip-art leaf on the title page, when a bat or a tombstone would have been more thematically appropriate to a tome entitled The Graveyard Book. Everyone within hearing offers their suggestions (“Perhaps it’s meant to be the ivy near the Egyptian Walk?”) but there’s no denying that other things might look more like actual ivy, and Gaiman only shakes his head and moves on to the next title page in the next book.

A lot has changed since his first signing at the University of Washington Book Store years ago, where twenty people were in attendance. Tonight’s venue holds nine hundred, and by the time the reading starts at seven, the only seating available is in the balcony. Attendance didn’t jump fiftyfold overnight, though; there’s never been a lightning bolt or thunderclap in Gaiman’s career. Instead, a gradual storm has built one raindrop at a time: a cult following for Sandman whose membership jumped with the publication of American Gods and again with the release of the Stardust movie. No doubt the same will happen again when the Coraline movie opens in 2009. Hand-selling by supportive booksellers has been as vital as word-of-mouth by readers who each came to the Road of Gaiman by a different gateway work, as evidenced by the shifting piles of personal items now moving across the table: old review copies of Good Omens, co-written with the estimable Terry Pratchett; a Mirrormask DVD; a pamphlet of Snow, Glass, Apples; a hardcover copy of the Fragile Things collection.

In the chapel where the reading will take place, the audience is just as diverse: a beauty in full goth attire complete with crinoline and top hat; a young married couple with a toddler; people of various ages and means who arrive singly and in small groups. It’s Seattle, so they waited in the rain, in some cases for more than an hour, until the doors opened. It’s their chance to see the man many consider the rock star of the speculative fiction genre, the uncrowned king. Yes, he’s an award-winning, bestselling, internationally-acclaimed author, but he’s still “Neil for short”: amicable, approachable, and still very much one of us.

Before long, the moment has come: The sconces and chandeliers dim, the applause begins, and a single spot pours white light over Gaiman as he enters Stage Left. A ripple of laughter passes through the room when Gaiman informs the audience they will be seeing special advance footage of Coraline after the intermission, and he would appreciate it if no one would videotape it and put it on YouTube, because he knows he can trust them. Upturned faces smile and nod. With a smile that says, Good. I’m glad we understand one another, Gaiman launches into Chapter Four of The Graveyard Book: The Witch’s Headstone.

It’s a long chapter ― the longest in the book, in fact, and the original source material for the novel. Originally published, almost simultaneously, in the anthology Wizards and Gaiman’s collection M is for Magic, it is the seed that bore the darkly charming flower of The Graveyard Book. Gaiman swiftly renders Nobody Owens (Bod, for short) and his companions:

Abanazer Bolger had thick spectacles and a permanent expression of mild distaste, as if he had just realized that the milk in his tea had been on the turn, and he could not get the sour taste out of his mouth.

This is exactly the sort of thing Gaiman’s audience has come to expect and to love: words that sketch a vivid mental image, colored with his charming inflections. He’s a brilliant reader of his own work, pausing for dramatic effect in exactly the right place, pacing sentences just so, and always properly anticipating the laughter of those gathered in the pews.

“I wanted to hear his voice,” fan Elizabeth Coleman says afterward. “It’s such an expressive, melodious thing, and brings magic to everything he says, profound or mundane. In the Q&A, he turned even the most simple question . . . into a tale, but he was never long-winded.”

It’s all a perfectly balanced tightrope act: an author whose stories for children resonate with adults, whose comic book stories win World Fantasy awards, whose novels become movies filled with both CGI special effects and puppetry. And perhaps that tightrope act is simply one turn at the Mouse Circus, where everything is odd and enchanting and darkly mystical. ―Or, if not a tightrope, then the blade of a very special knife, the sort carried by Jack in opening scene of The Graveyard Book:

The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.
The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.

Gaiman walks the edge of that dark knife, weaving tales that cut his readers, that linger and transform their hearts and minds long after the author has departed a rain-drenched city.

Lisa Mantchev is the author of the fantasy novel Eyes Like Stars (forthcoming in summer 2009 from Feiwel & Friends). Her story “Six Scents” appears in Weird Tales: The 21st Century, Vol. 1.

WHISPERS OF THE OLD HAG
by Eric San Juan

copyright © 2008 / May not be reproduced without permission

* * *

The thing was made of light and shadow; skeletal, pale, with ribs like talons and deep eager eyes. I did not know the time. Didn’t care to know, really. Midnight; 4 a.m.; whatever. How could I care when it stood there, just outside my bedroom door, framed in moonlight and a clinging mist; a malevolent thing, angry and waiting? The time didn’t matter. All that mattered was that I was being watched.

I longed to scream, but the sound would not come. A hoarse croak. A gasp of breath. Nothing more. I was silent; immobile; paralyzed.

It’s impossible to recall how old I was when it first happened. Twelve. Maybe fourteen. The experience was terrifying, a mix of dread and horror and of being utterly overcome by something alien. The experience was no dream. It was real and true. And it would happen again.

Once, an unseen presence woke me in the night and sat on my chest. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it perched upon me. As it sat there pressing the air from my lungs, the walls filled with whispers. Most of them were incomprehensible, but at times snatches of words tormented me: accusations, laughter, distant discussion tantalizingly close to being understood. I strained to call to them, to tell them I was trapped, to beg to be released from this unseen prison, but again my voice was frozen.

On another occasion, I could see the presence. A curtain was spread across my doorway, pulled slightly open, and as I awoke from a soft afternoon sleep I saw it, a black shadow pacing back and forth just outside the room. “Who’s there?” I called, but no sound came. Again my voice was frozen. Again I could not move. Again the whispers came. Just beyond the curtain they chattered, always on the very edge of understanding.

The visits continued sporadically over the years. A woman I knew, a self-styled fortuneteller, the sort who thinks she knows the secrets of the universe, told me something was happening. That I was breaking through some wall. Some barrier. That maybe, just maybe, it was dangerous.

She wasn’t far off the mark. As it turned out, I was treading in territory that had tormented man for all recorded history. I was swimming in the blackest waters of night; grasping at nightmares made real. Yet it was not the journey into otherworldly hells she suggested.

I was suffering from sleep paralysis: a bizarre fluke of consciousness that occurs while on the borderlands of sleep, thrusting the victim into a place between dreaming and waking. A very scary place.

When one enters REM sleep, something called “REM atonia” kicks in, a state during which the body’s muscles do not move. You are, in essence, paralyzed. This is perfectly normal. It happens to every sleeper. In the case of sleep paralysis, however, the mind awakens, becomes aware and conscious ― mostly ― even while the body still sleeps. And then come the hallucinations.

The feeling of a presence, almost always malevolent, is common. The feeling of being watched, sometimes of a crushing pressure, is also typical. There is always dread. Always fear. Sometimes unbridled panic. And sometimes voices, barely understandable but tantalizingly recognizable. I’ve heard people chatting in the next room or just outside my window, familiar voices and alien voices, the voices of loved ones and the voices of strangers. Yet none of them were real.

“Not real” ― but for all the terror they brought me, they might as well have been. The foothills between waking and sleep are a harsh place, a landscape of half-seen truths and elusive lies. Tarry too long, dwell upon the seeming realism of the frightening episodes too obsessively ― believe too much of what you see ― and you could find yourself swallowed up by your own mind. This was the danger from which I ran.

I’d left fears of demons behind with childhood. Poltergeists, hauntings, ghosts; sure, the images could provide a chill, but the same could be said for anyone with a vivid imagination. This doesn’t mean we really believe in such things. We don’t. As a society, we’ve moved beyond taking such fears seriously. But hang on ― because humanity has a new terror of the night. A new presence that comes in the evening and whisks away the unsuspecting. Demons of the modern age. They come from space, drifting out of the sky bathed in cold lights, bringing their emotionless and distant violations with them.

The gray alien ― the now-familiar visage of the silent, petite, triangle-faced, giant-eyed extraterrestrial ― that’s today’s demonic visitor. Frighteningly inhuman; rendering people helpless; changing the way some live their lives. Alien abduction is a terror many do believe in. Could sleep paralysis explain these experiences? All the calling cards are there. Waking in the night, unable to move. The feeling of a presence in the room. Losing control of your body. Even a sense that time isn’t quite flowing right. Like pieces of some twisted puzzle, it all fits. So if these experiences are simply the result of sleep paralysis, are people investing themselves in the belief that they have been taken by aliens when the real explanation is something much less sinister?

It wouldn’t be the first time sleep paralysis has done exactly that. The belief that this experience is something more than a biological quirk in the body’s sleep mechanism has been around as long as man has feared the night. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare makes mention of “the Old Hag.” The Old Hag is a demon of the night right out of foggy old myths, describing an entity ― whether a witch, demon, or spirit does not matter ― that sits on its victim, rendering them unable to move and making it difficult to breath. Sound familiar?

The myth of the Incubus, a demon which lies upon sleeping women in order to violate them, may have sprung from the same source. Peer at the mosaic of language and things begin to fall into place. The Old English word for the Incubus was maire, which means “one who oppresses or crushes.” In German, it is mare. And from these we get “night mare,” or simply nightmare. What it all means is: “A perfectly normal sleep thing that scares the screaming holy fuck out of us.”

I recalled this one recent evening when, after having drifted off to sleep, I awoke, unable to move. Outside my bedroom window were voices. My father, I think, and my wife. Others, too. I could not understand them. And then something malevolent came into the room. And stood at the foot of the bed. And watched.

This experience was nothing new, not for me and not for mankind. From restless spirits to space-faring entities, from the Incubus to the gray alien, from Romeo and Juliet to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, we can cast our fears in a new guise. We can give it a new name and a new face. Yet ultimately, the haunts of our evening remain the same: a hiccup of sleep and a lack of understanding. Once I understood that, it was an easy enough demon to exorcize. I needed neither holy water nor holy man. No scientists; no laser beams; no necklace of garlic. Just some understanding . . . and the terror was no more. Sometimes, that’s all the exorcism you need.

Eric San Juan is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks With the Master of Suspense, forthcoming in April 2009 from Scarecrow Press. “Whispers of the Old Hag” appeared in print in Weird Tales #350.

This November, the Chicago drama troupe Wildclaw Theatre — which received rave reviews last year for its staging of the horror classic “The Great God Pan” — will premiere a brand new adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House.” Our very own Lovecraft columnist Kenneth Hite will be on hand representing Weird Tales at the show’s opening night on Sunday, Nov. 16. It’s an auspicious occasion: the 75th anniversary of the story’s original 1933 publication in Weird Tales, the 85th anniversary year of the magazine itself, and a triumphant return to the Chicago arts & letters scene for Weird Tales, which was based in the Windy City all throughout its heyday of the 1920s and ’30s.

For fifteen years, the Chicago office of Weird Tales was the cutting edge of far-out strangeness in the American consciousness, as it produced such classic icons of the genre-to-be as Robert E. Howard’s bloody barbarian-king Conan and H.P. Lovecraft’s tentacled cosmic monstrosity Cthulhu. And the Midwestern location was not incidental to the Weird Tales story; not only did visionary editor Farnsworth Wright come to WT straight from his gig as music critic for the Chicago Herald & Examiner, but it’s worth noting that all of 20th-century horror literature might have evolved differently if Weird Tales had originally been based in the New York publishing mecca, instead of in Chicago. When the magazine’s first editor was dismissed in 1924, Lovecraft himself was publisher Jacob Clark Henneberger’s first choice for a replacement. But Lovecraft could just barely stand leaving his beloved Providence, R.I., to live for a time in nearby New York; uprooting himself to Chicago was utterly out of the question. And so Weird Tales went on to be shaped by Wright’s eclectic vision of the strange and horrific, while Lovecraft spent the rest of his days undistracted by editorial duties, penning mind-blowing stories now considered American classics. Both men’s work influenced horror for generations to come.

Wright wasn’t the only Chicagoan responsible for the magazine’s profound stamp upon the genre subcultures that rose in its wake. Fashion illustrator Margaret Brundage had been one of Walt Disney’s classmates at both McKinley High School and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts; in 1933, she became Weird Tales’s chief cover artist. The 65 lush pastel illustrations she created over a thirteen-year period, featuring eye-catching scenes of whip-wielding witches, maidens in bondage, and black-clad gothic succubi, would provide a template not only for other pulp magazines, but for the goth-fetish fashion styles that remain popular today.

What’s more, one of Brundage’s latter-day collectors, Chicago author and genre-fiction scholar Robert Weinberg, has been the leading authority in maintaining and promoting the Weird Tales legacy for the past three decades now. His book The Weird Tales Story remains the definitive history of the magazine’s literary greatness.

So, Chicago-area Weird Tales fans, we encourage you to take part in the horror history your city helped build: head to the Athenaeum Theatre and see Wildclaw’s production of “The Dreams in the Witch House” — either on opening night this Sunday, or during the show’s five-week run. It promises to be a night to remember.

The 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

Not only is 2008 the 85th anniversary of Weird Tales, it’s the 20th anniversary of CHUCK SHEPHERD’s syndicated newspaper column, “News of the Weird.” What started in the Washington City Paper as just another alt-newsweekly snarkfest turned into the world’s premier tabulator of real people doing bizarre things. A million bloggers have emulated Shepherd’s format, but he was there first, chronicling the depths of surreality to which actual reality can sink.

The 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!

That brain you see hanging out in a ThinkGeek ad owes its existence to FRIDA KAHLO (1907-1954), whose stark self-portraits eliminated the boundaries of the body and put the four-chambered hearts, fetuses, and internal organs where we can see them. Frida’s work is weird at its most personal. She wore her inner pain on the outside, beautifully rendered and impossible to ignore. Her paintings will make you flinch, but just try to look away. Go on, we dare you.