The Dark Issue 10: The Dark, #10

By Jack Fisher and Sean Wallace

The Dark is a quarterly magazine co-edited by Jack Fisher and Sean Wallace, with the tenth issue featuring all-original short fiction by Michael Wehunt, Lisa L. Hannett, Patricia Russo, Kirstyn McDermott, and Megan Arkenberg.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TDM Press
• Release date: Feb 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9781519955838

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 10 November 2015

The Devil Under the Maison Blue by Michael Wehunt

The Canary by Lisa L. Hannett

Self, Contained by Kirstyn McDermott

What Hands Like Ours Can Do by Megan Arkenberg

Cover Art: Young girl with halloween make-up by NKMandic

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Jack Fisher & Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

Copyright © 2015 by TDM Press.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

The Devil Under the Maison Blue

by Michael Wehunt

Gillian notices that no one ever closed Mr. Elling’s attic window. A week has passed since the brief swirl of ambulance lights near dawn. Already his house seems decades older.

She’s staring across at it when she hears his voice say, Lord, child, you about run as far as you can get. He has a rich and rumbly cadence. There’s a crackle in it, too, faint as a needle at the end of one of his records. Somehow she is not startled, though he might as well be perched right here beside her, on the high sharp peak of her house. That’s how close his words are; she feels them in the shingles under her hands, and in the cups of her ears.

She sees him (for a second she’s sure of it) in his old chair, rocking slowly toward and away from her, in and out of the pool of a hanging bulb. Even from a distance he looks ancient, his skin like dried dates. The silver of his hair glints and fades. She can’t see his eyes, but she pictures them, heavy-lidded, stained the yellow of a smoker’s teeth.

He was the only person she could talk to in her six months here, though most days she’d just listen. Stories about his life in the big jazz towns; who played what with whom before when. He could talk the sun down, tapping the valves of his battle-tarnished trumpet idly in his lap. Betty, he called the old horn, with something in his voice that said she was his one true love. His lungs couldn’t handle her anymore, but sometimes, just to get a smile, he’d lift her up and blow his cheeks out into great globes. Then cough a while after.

For the first time she wonders if maybe he knew that listening would do her more good. Her father had pulled her out of school after the day in the maple trees, and the weeks had grown into one long, opaque strand. Now Mr. Elling’s words carry clear through the space between their houses like the few stray starlings (they’re late flying south) calling to one another above. Faraway cars on the highway sound like the ocean. She can pretend the starlings are gulls and she is somewhere else, a place that, if only for a little while, doesn’t have her father in it.

She calls across asking Mr. Elling if he is a ghost. He breathes a deep sigh. You just hush, he says. No need for you to be yelling. It don’t much matter what I am. I ain’t haunting nobody, that’s for sure. Just lingering. I got a story I kept letting myself not tell you. Before, it was a story about my daddy and me. Now it’s maybe got room for you and yours, and that’s a terrible thing to come to.

A minute unravels. She listens to the birds. Look at that sky, Gillian, he says. She has to grip the shingles, so wide and heavy is the shock of hearing that. To Mr. Elling they’re just words. He says them kindly, like another sigh, but she remembers (she’s always thinking of)