LampLight Vol 1 Issue 4

By Jacob Haddon

Issue IV of LampLight is here. Our Featured Artist is Elizabeth Massie. Her story, which is loosely connected to her upcoming novel, Hell Gate, takes us to Coney Island in the turn of the 19th century. J.F. Gonzalez talks about the importance of The Horror Show, edited by David Silvia. Kevin Lucia brings is the stunning conclusion to his serial novella, And I Watered it with Tears.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apokrupha LLC
• Release date: Jun 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301840649

Book preview

Lamplight

A Quarterly Magazine of Dark Fiction

volume 1

issue 4

June 2013

Smashwords Edition, published by Apokrupha LLC

Jacob Haddon, Editor

Katie Winter, Assistant Editor

Paula Snyder, Cover and Masthead Design

All stories, copyright respective author, 2013

ISSN: 2169-2122

lamplightmagazine.com

apokrupha.com

Table of Contents

Featured Artist, Elizabeth Massie

Flip Flap

Interview with Jeff Heimbuch

Fiction

The Photograph - Mjke Wood

The Statue - Delbert R. Gardner

Little Ones - Michele Mixell

Somewhere Like You've Been - Sarah Rhett

The Stele - Armel Dagorn

By The Book - E. Catherine Tobler

Serial Novella

And I Watered It With Tears, Part IV - Kevin Lucia

Featured Article

Shadows in the Attic - J.F. Gonzalez

On The Horror Show

LampLight Classics

Over an Absinthe Bottle - W.C. Morrow

Writer's Bios

Submissions & Comments

Flip Flap

By Elizabeth Massie

Coney Island, September 1898

I believe in magic. Who don't? Have you looked around yourself, up and down the Bowery and the lanes, where men with pigeons make them disappear and reappear inside red silk scarves and women in Turkish gowns look into crystal balls and see your future filled with pretty children and lots of money? Didn't you hear how in July Teddy Roosevelt cast himself a spell on them Spanish on San Juan Hill and they just dropped down dead? You ever seen one of them Vitascope shows, where the ghost of a beautiful lady dances on a white screen and some train runs from one side of the room to the other without so much as smoke or noise? Magic is everywhere, though some don't believe that. It's common as loose milk and mutton. 'Cause what is magic, but the power that makes something happen that you want real bad to happen?

* * *

Open your eyes.

I didn't open my eyes.

I said open your goddamn eyes!

There was a sharp pinch on my shoulder. I opened one a tiny bit, the one closest to Victor so he would think I was enjoying myself, but all I could see was a blur of whites and blues and a tangle of faces and flowered hats below me. I hated heights. They made my stomach flip like a cake on a griddle.

Ain't this great? Victor asked cheerfully, knowing full well to me it wasn't. I nodded, a lie, one eye closed, and one eye open to a slit. My fingers clutched the rope reins as tight as they could. Beneath me, the great weight shifted back and forth. Any moment I knew I'd slide off and get trampled to death by those huge, flat feet.

The smell of the elephant was ripe and strong. The saddle we sat on was made of rough leather, stitched around with blue lacing. It was made for ordinary people, and so it didn't fit me or Victor right. The rope reins were just for show; we didn't have no control. A boy in a turban and bloomers lead the creature through Sea Lion Park.

I asked ain't this great, Mattie? Victor's voice had lost a bit of its cheer. He didn't like me nodding or shaking my head to answer him. It had to be with words.

I like it, Victor. I managed. I was already swooning, my head filling with thick cotton and my throat crawling with ticks. Victor knew how I was feeling. I heard his satisfied grunting next to me. Victor always liked what I didn't like. He liked that I didn't like those things he liked, because they made me feel faint and weak. When I got faint he'd scoop me up and hurry me off to our dime-a-day room behind Stauch's and have his way with me real hard.

The elephant continued along another minute. I clutched the reins and my feet strained to reach the stirrups. I tasted blood in my mouth where I'd bit my tongue. We wobbled around by the lagoon where Captain Boyton was doing tricks with noisy sea lions for a cheering crowd. The sun was hot on the saddle and on my arms, and the stale lagoon stunk like an East River fishing boat. I heard the snapping of the American flags in the August wind, brand new, crisp flags Boyton had hoisted along the perimeter of his park once he seen Tilyou had done the same over at Steeplechase.

Then the elephant stopped short. He snorted and shook off a nest of flies that had trailed him on our little ride. Victor pinched my shoulder again and both my eyes opened.

What you waitin' for? Get off, he said.

The boy in the turban watched me slide off the saddle and onto the stone stepping block. He didn't help me off the block, as short as I was. Like most people, he didn't seem to care to touch a midget. And a midget with bandaged hands clearly had him nervous. The boy turned away, pulled a little flag from his waistband, and waved it in the air to draw in more customers. Come! See! Ride Tiny the Elephant! he shouted above the din of sea lions in the lagoon, the brass band outside the dance hall, the rattling of the Flip Flap car going up its lift hill, and the rumble-swoosh of the boats hurtling down the Shoot the Chutes into the manmade lagoon at the bottom of the ramp. Ride just like the kings of the jungle or the queens of the Far East! Only a nickel!

Victor slid off Tiny on other side, came around to me, and stood wiping his forehead and rubbing his nose. He was nearly as tall as the elephant's back, a good six-feet-eight or more. He was dressed in his everyday clothes - white shirt, blue vest, gray trousers and a bowler that had seen better times. We were taking the afternoon off, as he liked to put it. Usually, he dressed like Abraham Lincoln and made me dress like a miniature Southern belle in white cotton mittens with blue embroidered flowers that covered my hands until it was time for the big unveiling which costs customers an extra five pennies. We performed on the Bowery six days a week, ten to twelve hours a day, up and down the lane to catch as many customers as we could. Victor called our act Honest Abe and the Wee Woman of Lies.

I stood, wobbling, on the stepping block. My arms were wet beneath my shirtwaist. My forehead was damp beneath the band of my broad, flat brown hat. My skirt, which I had tried to keep un-rumpled as Victor had shoved me up onto the elephant's back, was creased and plastered in pachyderm hairs. One of my stockings was torn. I needed to sit down to catch my breath. But Victor just whipped me up off the block and carried me out of Sea Lion Park like a bundle of laundry, and took me to our flat behind Stauch's for the rest of the afternoon's entertainment.

He didn't want me to catch my breath. This was how he liked me, when he liked me.

* * *

I liked Edward the Great. He was a midget, too, smaller than me by about two inches. He wasn't born with fused fingers the way I was. His hands were perfect and strong. He had a real job with a real regular wage as part of the Troupe Minuscule in Steeplechase Park, which sat across Surf Avenue from Sea Lion Park. Troupe Minuscule was made up of midgets and dwarves who did tumbling, magic, and impromptu tricks on those who came to see their performance. Their little theater was at the far end of the park, close to the beach and in the shadows beneath the southern turn of the Steeplechase Ride. Edward grumbled as to why Tilyou built the theater there because every four minutes the wooden horses would come flying down the tracks and around the bend, clattering overhead like an angry giant's dentures. The walls of the little theater would rumble and shake, and it was almost impossible to hear what the troupe was singing or saying. But the audiences didn't seem to mind the interference. Who wants to hear midgets anyway? People want to see them, not listen to their little voices. The theater was decorated real pretty, with painted bench seats, a little raised stage, and electric lights strung along the ceiling. Colorful plaster flowers were all over the walls, making it like a fairyland except for that blasted rattling from above. I never seen it myself, but Edward had told me all about it. Edward did magic in the act. He made coins come out of ladies' ears and made hoops float in the air.

Edward and the troupe worked from ten in the morning until the park closed at midnight. But he got time off for lunch. Every day at two he would leave Steeplechase, buy himself a paper cone of clams on Surf Avenue, then come to find me and Victor along the Bowery. He would stand in the shadows near the door to a gambling hall or postcard shop, eating his clams and watching us perform our morality play to whoever was willing to part with a nickel.

Our customers were an odd and silly crowd, some factory girls, some college boys, some middle-aged farm couples with wide eyes and tight purses, others immigrants as green as snakes who couldn't understand a word we said. Victor told me that once Coney used to be the playground of the very wealthy, that the very spots on which the vaudeville theaters and the hootchy-kootchy tents and the postcard booths now stood once held elegant hotels, ballrooms, fancy restaurants, and bathhouses. But as the politicians and crooks got their sticky, fat fingers into them money pies, the whores and morphine traders and cockfighters got a whiff and signed on for their own little piece of them pies. Some of them fancy hotels burned down or got tore down to make room for an array of the pavilions and amusements that the bosses now controlled. The very rich folks ran out to Manhattan Beach, but every once in a while you'd see a couple of them tippy-toeing around, hoping to have half the fun the poor folks were having. Captain Boyton built himself Sea Lion Park in '95, and put a fence around it to keep out the riffraff and pickpockets. Then Tilyou got the same idea and in '97 built himself Steeplechase Park the same way, filled with amusements and food and shows and wrapped up in a big old fence. They advertised that this was good entertainment for good, wholesome people, and it worked. It drew in church-going couples and families with children who now felt safe coming to Coney for a day.

Most families were cautious of the Bowery and the lanes, though. They stayed clear except to cross through to the beach. Sometimes children would stop to look at Victor and me in our costumes, and say, Mama, I want to see them dance! Horrified Mamas would tug on their children's hands and drag them down to the ocean.

Victor and me didn't