Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology

by Vince A Liaguno, Rena Mason, Catherine Ho, James Fouhey, Tim Chiou

Synopsis

An anthology of original horror stories edited by Bram Stoker Award winners Vince A. Liaguno and Rena Mason that showcases authors from historically excluded backgrounds telling terrifying tales of what it means to be, or merely to seem, “other”.

Offering new stories from some of the biggest names in horror as well as some of the hottest up-and-coming talents, Other Terrors will provide the ultimate listening experience for horror fans who want to examine fear of “the other”. 

Be they of a different culture, a different background, a different sexual orientation or gender identity, a different belief system, or a different skin color, some people simply aren’t part of the community’s majority - and are perceived as scary. Humans are almost instinctively inclined to fear what’s different, and there are a multitude of individuals who have spent far too long on the outside looking in. And the thing about the outside is...it’s much larger than you think.

In Other Terrors, horror writers from a multitude of underrepresented backgrounds have created stories of everyday people, places, and things where something shifts, striking a deeper, much more primal chord of fear. Are our eyes playing tricks on us, or is there something truly sinister lurking under the surface of what we thought we knew? And who among us is really the other after all?

Contributors include: Tananarive Due, Jennifer McMahon, S. A. Cosby, Stephen Graham Jones, Alma Katsu, Michael Thomas Ford, Ann Dávila Cardinal, Christina Sng, Denise Dumars, Usman T. Malik, Annie Neugebauer, Gabino Iglesias, Hailey Piper, Nathan Carson, Shanna Heath, Tracy Cross, Linda D. Addison, Maxwell I. Gold, Larissa Glasser, Eugen Bacon, Holly Lyn Walrath, Jonathan Lees, M. E. Bronstein, and Michael Hanson.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.  

 

Read more

Release date: July 19, 2022

Publisher: William Morrow

Sample

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.

But today there’s no messing around in other people’s apartments. We go straight down to the basement, pausing on the stairs to kiss because we can’t wait a second longer. Her body presses into mine, and I have to hold the railing so I don’t lose my balance.

Jaz tastes like cherry lip-gloss and salt water. She smells like the cheap perfume she shoplifts from the drugstore. Hurrying now, Jaz leads me the rest of the way down the steep wooden steps. The basement smells like damp cement, old books, grease, and heating oil. The furnace sits at the front end of the building, pipes snaking up to bring hot water to all the apartments. We pass by the storage units: cages of two by four frames with stapled on chicken wire, flimsy doors with padlocks. They’re stuffed full of bicycles, mildewed boxes, furniture that didn’t fit in the tiny apartments upstairs. We head to the one at the end—the extra unit with no padlock. It’s where everything that has no place to go gets shoved: bags of salt for the sidewalks in winter, grass seed, driveway sealant, a dented toolbox with a bent screwdriver and a rusty hammer. There are things left behind by old tenants and never gotten rid of: an old chest of drawers, a worn green velvet couch, a bicycle missing the front wheel, boxes of artifacts from people long gone.

“Hello, Jit,” Jaz says as she pulls me down on top of her on the old stained couch. We’re safe here, tucked away behind the rusted file cabinets, moldering cardboard boxes, a ratty old box spring.

She tugs at my sweater, my favorite—chunky and black and coming unraveled at the edges.

“Hello, Id,” I say, brushing my lips over her neck until she shudders. I start unbuttoning her heavy wool blazer: St. Christopher’s Catholic school, where her mother sends her to keep her away from public school sinners like me. I undo the last button with my teeth, ripping it off, the smooth white circle like a worry stone I hold under my tongue.

“The id, Freud’s id,” Jaz explains for the hundredth time, her breathing coming fast, “is all about instinctual desire.” She puts her tongue in my ear and a little moan escapes my lips.

Soon the clothes are gone and we’re tangled together, bodies sticky with sweat and lip-gloss and cheap drugstore perfume. It’s impossible to tell whose limbs are whose.

Instinctual desire, I’m thinking, and then, all thoughts are gone.

There is only Jaz. Her fingers. Her mouth. Her breath coming faster and faster.

 

After, she lights a joint. I don’t know where she gets pot, but she’s always got it.

She’s naked, lounging on her back on the couch, smoking, watching me. I’m straddling her, on my knees, my weight keeping her pinned to the couch. She looks so beautiful, so perfect, her dyed red hair splayed against the worn green velvet couch.

She runs the fingers of her left hand up my belly, to my breasts, brushing the nipples.

Soon it’ll be time to get our clothes back on, go back out into the too-bright afternoon. But I want to stay here, just like this, with her pinned below me forever.

“This isn’t what I am,” she says, because she always has to say it at least once, just to let me know, to keep me in check. “I’m not like this, really. I mean, I like boys. Don’t you like boys?”

“Sure,” I say, but the lie is thick in my throat. I grab the joint from her, take a deep a hit, let it seep into my lungs. I climb off her, slip my underwear and jeans back on.

“What do you think happened to that boy?” she asks. “The missing one?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he ran away. But the fact that they found his backpack and his bike under the bridge like that, it doesn’t look good, right?”

She turns, stretches like a lazy cat, takes another hit from the joint, watching the smoke drift up.

“I can’t believe you bit my button off,” she says, annoyance giving her voice a sharp edge. “Where’d it go?”

She’s feeling around the couch for it, pulling back the filthy cushions. “Fuck,” she mumbles. “I really need to find it.”

I see it on the stained cement floor, glinting in the dim light like a tiny moon. I pick it up without her noticing and wrap my fingers tightly around it, tuck it deep in the pocket of my jeans, a talisman. My own little secret. A little piece of her I can carry with me everywhere I go.

“Why are you getting dressed?” she asks, her voice soft again.

I shrug.

“Come here,” she orders, a low purr as she reaches out her hand to pull me back down. I’m on top of her again, my mouth on hers, her fingers running up my spine, making my whole body feel electric, dangerous.

We’re all hands and teeth and tongue and she’s sliding my jeans back off and saying my name, panting it, saying, Hurry, please, please, please, hurry.

And then, everything freezes. Time stops. Her body goes rigid beneath me. The temperature in the basement, already cold, seems to drop.

She shoves me off her with a strength I didn’t know she had, covers her bare chest with her hands. I land on the floor, jeans tangled around my legs, hip smashing against the concrete.

“What the fuck?” I say, rubbing my hip.

She’s gone pale, her eyes fixed on some point beyond me.

I turn and follow her gaze.

There, back in the shadows, over near the boiler, a pale face watches. He’s angled in a way that he can see us around the barricade of junk. He steps forward, his face framed in the dim light coming in through the tiny rectangular window.

Mr. G.

He doesn’t say a word. He just stares, clenches his jaw, then turns and walks away. We hear his footsteps on the stairs, boots heavy.

When I turn back to Jaz, she’s pulling her shirt on.

“Jaz,” I say, putting my hand on her shoulder.

She pushes me away.

I say, “Maybe he won’t—”

“Just go,” she orders.

 

Jaz’s mom, Mrs. Fletcher, is a squat woman draped in too many layers: a housedress, an apron, a heavy wool cardigan.

“You,” she says as she opens the door, eyes beady. “What do you want?”

The giant crucifix hangs on the wall behind her: a bloody Jesus with a crown of thorns looking at me, his eyes desperate, pleading.

“I . . . I’m looking for Jasmine. Is she here?”

It’s against the rules. Me coming here, to her apartment like this, but she’s left me no choice. I haven’t seen her or talked to her since I left the basement yesterday afternoon. She isn’t answering my calls or texts. I waited for her to get off the bus down at the end of the driveway to the apartments, but the St. Christopher’s bus went right by. She wasn’t on it.

I fiddle with the smooth white uniform button in my pocket, a charm I hope might have the power to call her back to me.

“She’s not here,” Mrs. Fletcher says.

I swallow, my mouth dry. Jesus watches, waiting. “Do you know where she is?”

“If not with you, then with some other whore,” she says.

I take a step back.

“The devil wears many disguises,” she tells me, moving closer, her face inches from mine. She smells like sour milk and whiskey. She touches my face, pinching my cheek and pulling at my skin like it’s a mask she’s trying to remove. My eyes tear up and I jerk away, then turn and run back down the stairs.

“Stay away from my daughter!” she calls after me.

 

I hurry away from Building B, cheek stinging, and feel my phone vibrate. Pulling it out, I see a text from Jaz: Meet me in the canal.

I practically run across the parking lot. At the north side of the apartments is the big ditch where the old canal once ran, but it’s been dry for over a hundred years now. I clamber down the embankment of brown grass to the bottom. Jaz and I meet here sometimes to smoke pot. Because it’s so low, when you’re down here, you’re out of sight from the apartments—only someone standing at the edge can look down and see you. On the other side of the old canal are the train tracks. The freight trains go by twice a day. Jaz and I sometimes walk the canal all the way into the town, looking for the bodies and bones of dead animals hit by the trains. There’s a surprising amount, really: rabbits, cats, even a dog once—the poor thing was missing his head.

Mr. G has a big burn pile going at the bottom of the ditch—he’s dumped all the leaves he’s raked on it, added a pile of old shipping pallets, a chair with a broken back, a couple of stumps. The old Canal Street Apartments sign is on the pile too, the maroon and gold paint worn away by years of sun and rain. They’ve replaced it with a carved granite sign that reminds me of a tombstone.

Jaz is there, sitting on the ground beside the burn pile, her legs pulled up to her chest, red hair sticking out from under her black knit hat.

I sit down next to her. “Hello, Id,” I say.

She makes a funny little sound, not quite a whimper, but says nothing.

And then, because I know she’ll find out soon enough, I tell her. “I was just at your place. I talked to your mom.”

“You went to my apartment?” She turns to me, snarls, “What the fuck were you thinking?”

“I—I needed to see you. You weren’t answering my texts or calls.”

“So you go and talk to my mother?”

“I thought maybe you were there.”

“You don’t go to my house. I don’t come to yours. We agreed.”

“I know, but it’s not like you left me a choice.” I stare at her. “We need to talk. About yesterday. About what we’re going to do.”

“Going to do? What’s there to do?” Her face is twisted, furious. “He saw us. He’s probably told everyone—my mom, your grandmother, every resident here. He probably went around like the town crier: I caught the dyke and the Catholic schoolgirl doing it.”

My muscles tighten. A lead ball drops down into my stomach.

“Fuck,” she says. She leans down, picks up a twig from the ground, and snaps it in two.

“Jaz?”

“What?”

Do I say it? Do I not say it?

What if this is it—the last time we ever talk? I’m sure Jaz is one breath away from saying we need to stay away from each other from now on, that she’s done.

“I love you,” I tell her, thinking maybe these three words will be enough. Enough to save us somehow.

She laughs bitterly. “Well, that’s just the fucking icing on the cake.”

“And I think you love me, too.”

She stops laughing. Her breathing is loud and strange. “I can’t do this,” she whispers. “You and me—him seeing us, it—”

“I know,” I say, taking her hand. “But you’re wrong. Youcan do this. We can do this.”

She jerks her hand away from mine.

I look at the burn pile. At the ruined and broken things Mr. G is going to make disappear, turn to ashes and smoke.

My eye catches on something: a flash of red like a flag under the leaves. I stand up, stepping forward, brushing aside the leaves, and pull out a red flannel shirt. It’s wadded up and covered with brown paint.

No. Not paint, I realize.

Blood.

Dried blood.

I’m holding the shirt up to Jaz, and then we hear a voice from up above. “You two get away from there!” Mr. G shouts down, a big metal shovel in his hands.

I freeze, the shirt in my hands flapping in the wind like a strange flag.

“I said go!” he yells as he starts coming down the embankment, moving toward us fast, the shovel raised like a weapon.

I drop the shirt, follow Jaz, who’s already taking off along the canal, away from Mr. G.

“Id-jit girls!” he calls.

We run and don’t look back. We keep going for nearly a mile until we’re out of breath and nearly all the way to the center of town.

“What was that?” she asks when we stop at last, bent over, panting. “The thing you found?”

“A shirt. A kid’s shirt, I think. And it had blood on it.” I look down at my hands, wipe them frantically on my jeans even though there’s nothing on them.

“Are you sure it wasn’t like a painting rag or something?”

“Come on,” I say, pulling her forward. We climb up the embankment out of the canal, make our way to Arch Road, and turn right. Soon we’re by the rec center. Kids are playing basketball on the court outside—lunging and jabbing each other with elbows, sneakers skidding on the asphalt.

I walk up the granite steps to the building and stand in front of the bulletin board.

“What are you doing?” Jaz asks over my shoulder.

I study the flyers: youth basketball league schedule, ski swap this Saturday, youth hunting safety courses. There it is: HAVE YOU SEEN EMMET? A photo of the boy: short dark hair, a gap between his two front teeth, a smattering of freckles on his nose and cheeks. Eleven years old. Last seen leaving Strafford Middle School on October 3. He was wearing blue jeans, black Converse sneakers, and a red plaid flannel shirt. Anyone with any information is asked to call the Strafford Police Department. The family is offering a reward for any information.

“It’s his shirt,” I say.

“What?”

“Emmet was wearing a red plaid flannel shirt,” I tell her, pointing at the flyer. ...