Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 120 (May 2020) by John Joseph Adams

Author:John Joseph Adams [John Joseph Adams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2020-04-30T21:47:53+00:00

©2020 by Millie Ho.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Millie Ho’s work appears in Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and others. She was a finalist for the 2019 Rhysling Awards and lives in Montreal. Find her at www.millieho.net and on Twitter @Millie_Ho.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight

We Are Where the Nightmares Go

C. Robert Cargill | 6392 words

Everyone knows the story of the little girl who fell down the rabbit hole and of the children who walked through the wardrobe and of the little girl who was scooped up by the tornado and of the little boy who found the book that never ended and of the little girl who said the right words on the other side of the mirror and of the little girl who unlocked the bricked-up door in the cellar and of the little boy who had such wonderful dreams night after night. But those are the children who came back. No one talks about the other children, the children who walk through basement doors and rabbit holes never to return, or the ones who are never quite the same again once they do. The things that happen to those children are not so magical, not so delightful. Their adventures are not the things of pageant retellings and matinees. Rather, they are the things we try not to think of, the things instead we dream about when we would rather be dreaming of something else.

This is the story of just such a child, a child who awoke to find herself stiff as a board, unable to so much as move a muscle, so stiff in fact that she was able to wriggle her soul free and loose it out into the night. And as that child stepped from her body and onto the floor, she saw the faintest hint of light leaking out from beneath her bed, a light that spilled across the hardwood like errant moonbeams, beckoning her to peer into the dark, past the curtain of cascading bedspread and the clutter of discarded toys. There, as she knelt, she spied a door in the wall beneath the bed frame: a door that had not been there before—just large enough for a small child to squeeze through—a door no adult could fit through, which was fine, as no adult in their right mind would ever believe in such a thing. But this little girl did believe in such things and this little girl was just small enough to fit through it and this little girl could find no reason not to investigate where the light leaking out from the space between the door and the floor was coming from.

The light beyond the door was blinding against the midnight black, but warm, inviting. And as she squeezed her way through the tiny portal, every inch of her body scraping against the wood on its way past, she felt as if she were getting safer, inch by inch. Though the room behind

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