Nightmare Magazine, Issue 88 (January 2020) by John Joseph Adams

Author:John Joseph Adams [John Joseph Adams]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2019-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

©2017 by Stephen Graham Jones. Originally published in The Demons of King Solomon, edited by Aaron J. French. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of sixteen novels and six story collections. Most recent are Mapping the Interior, from Tor.com and the comic book My Hero, from Hex Publishers. Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.

Elo Havel

Brian Evenson | 3135 words

I.

It is good of you to write, and I thank you for it: I am glad at last to hear from another of my kind—and, above all, to have another of my kind acknowledge me. I have indeed, since my return, heard many voices, seen many faces, but the individuals to whom they belong neither hear nor see me in return. I shake them, shout in their ears, but they do not respond. It is as if, for them, I do not exist.

But why then, I wonder, would I exist for you? What is different about you? To put it bluntly, what is wrong with you? By which I suppose I am also asking: what is wrong with me?

• • • •

You ask me what happened. You ask if I can recount to you what passed in the forest—why, though four of us went in, only one came out. First, I must ask how you found me. True, after leaving the forest I returned to my old residence, and have been here since my return. But considering that everyone around me acts as if I do not exist, how did you know I did? Did you deduce somehow that one of us had returned and simply posted letters to all of us in turn? Was I the first of the four you contacted? The last?

What do I need to tell you of the forest before I begin? Since you are not from our city, I do not know what you already know.

We have enjoyed a long friendship, for lack of a better word, with the forest. We foraged there, but did so with care. There were, true, portions of forest that over the years we destroyed, razing whole hectares of ground to make way for our roads, our houses, our farms. We also inadvertently, carelessly, burned down many hectares more. But these were exceptions rather than the rule: nobody should be judged by the exception. Consider them just the momentarily slights of a thoughtless friend. No, for the most part we honored the forest, preserved it.

And what did the forest offer us in return? It provided berries and mushrooms for food, animal skins for clothing, wood to build our shelters and to warm us. It healed us, nurtured us, kept us alive.

Or at least it did so in the past. More recently, no.

But that, no doubt, is why you have written to me.

• • • •

For many years, we had a practice. We would care for our elderly until they were moribund, and then they were taken into hospice. They would wait there a day, a week, perhaps more, and then a delegation would arrive.

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