Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Dark Issue 59: The Dark, #59
    The Dark Issue 59: The Dark, #59
    The Dark Issue 59: The Dark, #59
    Ebook79 pages1 hour

    The Dark Issue 59: The Dark, #59

    By Octavia Cade, Gemma Files, Peter Gutierrez and Emily B. Cataneo

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Each month The Dark brings you the best in dark fantasy and horror! Selected by award-winning editors Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace and published by Prime Books, this issue includes two all-new stories and two reprints:

     

    "Otto Hahn Speaks to the Dead" by Octavia Cade
    "Thin Cold Hands" by Gemma Files (reprint)
    "Some Sketches of County Life" by Peter Gutierrez
    "The Longest Night" by Emily B. Cataneo (reprint)

     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrime Books
    Release dateMar 31, 2020
    ISBN9781393198147
    The Dark Issue 59: The Dark, #59

    Related to The Dark Issue 59

    Titles in the series (100)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Horror Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Left To Lose

      Jul 10, 2022

      Around the time she gives up her name, it starts to feel like this entire revolution isn’t worth it anymore. The world is probably lucky that Kelian—she still remembers Kelian, in spite of everything—is there to pick up the pieces, the way he always

      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Let’s Play Dead

      Mar 3, 2020

      There was a man, let’s call him Henry VIII. There was his wife, let’s call her Anne B. Let’s give them a castle and make it nice. Let’s give her many boy babies but make them dead. Let’s give him a fussy way of being. Let’s make her smart and sneaky,

      17 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Hilarious Outrage

      Oct 4, 2020

      “At a certain age, I began to think less about sex and more about tableware.” So Airini Beautrais opens her sharp and confronting, though often funny, short-story collection with a strait-laced science educator rebuffing her husband’s clumsy if well-

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Excerpt

      Dec 12, 2019

      He was an angry man, and he was an ugly man, and he was tall, and he was pacing. Not much space for it in the new home, just a few rooms lined up in a row, underneath a series of slow-moving ceiling fans, an array of antique clocks ticking on one wal

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Cast Out

      Jul 10, 2021

      Verity pushed back the quilts, rolled off her straw mattress onto the floor, felt for the poker, and stirred the ashes. The embers glowed. She wouldn’t have to go fire-borrowing again. Her chilled hands were clumsy. One glowing bit of wood rolled fro

      21 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Lech

      Feb 8, 2022

      Lech
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Venom In The Cloud Forest

      Mar 10, 2022

      Sweat crept down Acoti’s left temple and tickled his eyebrow as he stabbed his knife into the tree bark. He withdrew the blade and used it to smear the thick, sanguine resin against the wound in his neck. His skin burned as he rubbed it in with his f

      15 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Five Poems

      Jul 1, 2019

      You agreed to meet him in one of those cafés you imagined yourself writing in if you could afford to live in that city. He was also a writer, but older, and you wanted to know how to get published. Slip a picture of yourself in with your poems, he ad

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2020

      Pallets of bottled water on the back porchwere one evidence of apocalypseor the demise of the way of thingsor lazily written computer code backin the 80s, when I was a boyand the nightly news was just about all the doomwe had stomachs for, whenwere t

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Ira & the Whale

      Jun 14, 2022

      It is dark in the whale and hot. The air is difficult to breathe. Ira is coated in gunk, sweating in his black Speedo. The whale’s heartbeat booms and echoes like a giant drum. It’s intimidating. It sounds tribal, ritualistic, as Ira wades through th

      15 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Glove

      Mar 4, 2024

      The Glove
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The King’s passion

      Aug 11, 2021

      The King’s passion
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Best Of The Best

      Oct 29, 2022

      Best Of The Best
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The King’s passion

      Aug 11, 2021

      The King’s passion
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Discarded Wraith Of Apartheid

      Apr 13, 2024

      It’s been years since I read a book that strained the Likability Principle as viscerally as Karen Jennings’ new book, Crooked Seeds. Her previous novel, An Island, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, but I fear the more I tell you about Crooked Seed

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      In The Middle Of Even This: Poetry

      Jan 1, 2020

      To be brought from the bright schoolyard into the house:to stand by her bed like an animal stunned in the pen:against the grid of the quilt, her hand seemsstitched to the cuff of its sleeve—although he wantsmost urgently the hand to stroke his head,a

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Murder Most Fowl

      Mar 12, 2023

      Murder Most Fowl
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Going Gothic How To Tell The Goth-iest Story Ever

      Oct 1, 2021

      WHAT DO DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, AND YOUR SISTER’S LACE-UP COMBAT BOOTS ALL HAVE IN COMMON? If your answer was “they’re super cool,” you’d be right! But if your answer was “they’re all part of the gothic’tradition,” you’d be even righter. Being gothic

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Remains

      Sep 1, 2017

      THIS IS what you think your mother’s remains will look like. The ash will be black, like all that soot in the fireplace. It will be heavy, like wet sand. There will not be too much of it. It will fit in a small urn with intricate designs on the borde

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Chop-chop

      Feb 6, 2020

      Chop-chop
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Lost Prayer

      Feb 2, 2023

      A Lost Prayer
      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Nick Laird

      Dec 15, 2017

      I was trying to write like an adult.I had children.I was at the end of something. As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,I saw that the sirocco had depositeda scrim of dust on the sill overnight,and it was the dark red of powdered blood

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Cain’s Feast

      Sep 15, 2022

      Cain’s Feast
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Books

      Jul 8, 2024

      Books
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      First Date

      Jul 9, 2020

      First Date
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Symmetry Of Ruby Margot

      Feb 6, 2020

      The Symmetry Of Ruby Margot
      10 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Dark Issue 59

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Dark Issue 59 - Octavia Cade

      THE DARK

      Issue 59 • April 2020

      Otto Hahn Speaks to the Dead by Octavia Cade

      Thin Cold Hands by Gemma Files

      Some Sketches of Country Life by Peter Gutierrez

      The Longest Night by Emily B. Cataneo

      Cover Art: Carrie (Second Cover) by Tomislav Tikulin

      ISSN 2332-4392.

      Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace.

      Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

      Copyright © 2020 by Prime Books.

      www.thedarkmagazine.com

      Otto Hahn Speaks to the Dead

      by Octavia Cade

      A garden is a beautiful place to die. It was the only beautiful thing about Clara’s death, which otherwise was a bullet and a broken chest, blood spilling over everything, the red scent of iron.

      Had he been there, he might have vomited. Only might, because the revulsion he felt for death had lessened a little in the immediacy of the war, and he’d done so much to increase that death that it didn’t do to be squeamish just because the dead in front of him now was a woman. One connected with him, and her death was a repudiation not directed at him—Otto wasn’t the one married to her—but he had some responsibility nonetheless. He’d helped in the work she’d felt such revulsion for; she had seen the choice he’d made and refused her coexistence.

      Of course I did, she says after they took her body away. She’d been covered after it happened, the suicide kept from sight, but not all of the blood she’d shed had soaked into dress and dressings. The rest had soaked into earth, was scatter-droplets on petals, and in the moonlight no-one could see it anyway, or was even out searching. Some things were too terrible to look at and her husband was inside, avoiding mirrors. The ghost of her stayed in the garden, with the closed-up blossoms, so she wouldn’t have to look at him. No decent person would be part of this.

      Chemical warfare, and Clara a chemist herself. There are some things I will not stoop to, she says, and it disgusted her that Otto had. That her husband had—that he’d covered his hands with burning, with suffocated blood, and brought them home to her afterwards, as if she were expected to touch them, to kiss them and be grateful for their presence.

      She couldn’t bear to be touched by him ever again. Hence the bullets, the garden death, and the house still in a mess from the party Haber had held to celebrate chlorine gas in trenches, and how he’d done it first.

      Better than the alternative, Otto argues. It’s not exactly heroic, coming up with ways to slaughter at scale, but he’d rather cause others to choke and suffocate than do so himself. There’s nothing wrong with self-preservation, he says, because war is a terrible thing, yes, but sometimes scruples do nothing but extend it. Best to get it over with as quickly as possible, and with as little damage as possible. The rest he doesn’t look at too closely.

      You should have the decency to look at what you’ve done, says Clara. She slips her arms out of her dress, lets the fabric fall to her waist. He doesn’t want to look. It feels disrespectful, somehow, with her bare breasts slick with her own blood, and that gaping ruin between them. Look, she says. Look at what I think of you.

      He’ll go to his own grave swearing that he never got hard at the sight of her.

      She’s there every time he goes to sleep. A nightmare come to life. You traffic in nightmares, don’t you? Clara asks him. Well then. This is what you invited in.

      She’s a monster.

      No, she isn’t.

      That’s one accusation Otto will never have the right to make again. Monstrosity comes in many forms but Clara isn’t it, and he thinks as long as he can hold to that then there’s something in him human still, something the gas hasn’t changed.

      He has a gas mask of his own now. It was only a matter of time. There is argument out of Britain: We cannot win this war unless we kill or incapacitate more of our enemies than they do of us, and if this can only be done by copying the enemy in his choice of weapons, we must not refuse to do so.

      It is an escalation that was entirely foreseen.

      His face in the mirror is masked and wheezing. Clara stands behind him, the front of her blood red and dripping, but her face is innocent of canvas and charcoal. It suits you, she says. But it won’t make a difference.

      She comes to him at night. He wakes to her kneeling on his chest, the breath being pressed out of him. Blood runs from her shattered chest, drips into his mouth, pools in the back of his throat. It’s copper and iron and choking, the warm sweet scent of it. When she smiles down at him her teeth are rimmed with red, like they were in the garden when she coughed up the last of her own life.

      Poor baby, she says. Did you have a bad dream?

      Her hair smells of flowers. That’s always what sets him to weeping. If it were grave dirt, trench dirt, the scent surrounding him as he lay in his bed, he thinks he’d be able to treat her as revenant. To push her off him, to let horror take the place of bitterness and grief. That would be protection, of a sort, because the gas mask never is. He wears it to bed, when she’s come too often for sleeping and sanity, but it smothers him regardless. It’s too warm, too close, and he comes to gasping consciousness, slick with sweat, that same taste of salt.

      Flowers are better. At least with flowers he can tell himself that what’s waking him is external, the product of a grief he’d never admit to having, because what would that make of his life? His involvement is not peripheral. The responsibility for chemical warfare falls on him as much as anyone. Edith tells him not to worry, tells him he is doing his duty, and thank God his wife is not as dramatic as Haber’s was, he does not think he could bear it. Flinches now when she goes into the garden. Pastes a smile on his face for her, makes of his features a smooth clean warmth, because she’s never woken to ghosts in the bed and he doesn’t want her to

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1