The Dark Issue 23: The Dark, #23

By Erica Mosley, Bruce McAllister, Kristi DeMeester and Lisa L. Hannett

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

“The Name, Blurry and Incomplete in His Mind” by Erica Mosley
“The Witch Moth” by Bruce McAllister (reprint)
“The Language of Endings” by Kristi DeMeester
“In Syllables of Elder Seas” by Lisa L. Hannett (reprint)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Mar 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386168393

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 23 • April 2017

The Name, Blurry and Incomplete in His Mind by Erica Mosley

The Witch Moth by Bruce McAllister

The Language of Endings by Kristi DeMeester

In Syllables of Elder Seas by Lisa L. Hannett

Cover Art: A Sinner Like Me by Aleksandra Grahovac

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2017 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

The Name, Blurry and Incomplete in His Mind

by Erica Mosley

When Jentri was ten her father, having run out of things to say, told her about the name he’d once found written in pencil on the wall above the basement sink, and about how he’d often wondered if it was still there.

Maybe you should look, she said, and he did, and she followed him. The limestone wall above the stainless steel sink was cracked and stained like an old map, but they saw no name written on it.

I must have seen it somewhere else. He ran his fingers over the limestone and Jentri took the opportunity, while he was distracted, to study her father closely. They had never stood together in the basement before; in fact they rarely ventured beyond the living room during his visits. An incandescent bulb swung from a chain and in its sweep of light Jentri noticed, for the first time, a freckle on her father’s neck.

Maybe I was thinking it was behind the furnace, he said, and they looked there, but found nothing; only a green beetle hanging in a dusty web.

Upstairs? he said.

Jentri bounded up, hearing her father’s footsteps behind her. Don’t step on that floorboard, it’s dangerous, she said, and That light doesn’t work, sorry, pointing like a guide, though she knew it wasn’t necessary; he’d lived here, too. Once.

They found it on the third floor, in a bathroom no one ever used. The bathtub had no fixtures; the toilet, no lid. But there was a name: Susie, written in childish pencil above the rust-stained porcelain sink.

Who’s Susie? Jentri said.

I don’t know.

But that’s the name you saw, right?

Her father paused, thinking. Jentri waited patiently, but he never did answer the question, not that day or any other one. But on their way down the stairs Jentri just happened to see—now that she was looking for it—Susie’s name scratched into the metal bracket that held the banister to the wall.

Thereafter Jentri and her father spent almost the entirety of his weekly ninety-minute visits traveling the house looking for Susie’s marks. They were everywhere—on the back of a closet door, on the underside of a kitchen drawer—and Jentri wondered how she’d spent her whole life here without noticing them.

They called this game finding a Susie.

It was a welcome change. Jentri and her father did not know how to talk to each other, because they rarely practiced. He’d left when she was young, before she knew any words. Even after she learned, she did not have much to say to him.

Normally, during his visits, he asked Jentri questions about which method of long division they were teaching her at school or which flavor of pudding was her favorite, and she would have to explain that she was learning fractions this year because they were done with long division, and that she didn’t like pudding. After each answer came a long and uncomfortable pause while he thought up a new question.

He rarely spoke about himself. Jentri knew he had a dog but she did not know its name. She did not know what her father did for a living, not exactly, though he wore nice shoes and she knew he traveled often: to Jefferson City, to Cape Girardeau, to Poplar Bluff.

Ten or so minutes into every visit the questions ran out and they required an activity, something to focus on besides each other. Before the Susie game, there had been other games: simple flip-card memory games, checkers, or Shoots and Ladders when Jentri was young, graduating to more strategic games like chess, Risk, and five-card stud as she aged. Jentri and her father concentrated on the cards, the plastic pieces, eyes down.

But hunting for Susies was different. Jentri and her father became different people.

Look, Jentri. He stood next to a stained glass window on the third floor landing. The window was missing a pane and Jentri’s mother had taped cardboard over the space, awaiting a how-to book on hold at the library because she could not afford to hire a glazier.

Jentri ran to him, and pressing her finger next to his against the wood of the window frame she felt the depressions of carved letters. She looked closer. It had been painted over several times but the name was still readable: Susie.

I bet she was just a little girl when she did this, just like you, her father said.

Jentri pressed her fingernail into the letters, trying to chip away the paint.

What are you doing? Don’t do that.

Jentri froze. Her father had never corrected her before. He’d never had a reason.

She traced the letters instead with the soft of her finger pads. Head down, red-faced, she thought of the other places they’d found Susies: etched into a brick by the side gate; in