The Dark Issue 36: The Dark, #36

By Michael Wehunt, Angela Slatter, Hamilton Perez and E. Catherine Tobler

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 Pine Arch Collection" by Michael Wehunt
"The Heart is a Mirror for Sinners" by Angela Slatter (reprint)
"Our Mortal Undressing" by Hamilton Perez
"The Sea Half-Held by Night" by E. Catherine Tobler (reprint)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Apr 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386358091

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 36 • May 2018

The Pine Arch Collection by Michael Wehunt

The Sea Half-Held By Night by E. Catherine Tobler

Our Mortal Undressing by Hamilton Perez

The Heart is a Mirror for Sinners by Angela Slatter

Cover Art: The Yellow Wallpaper by Abigail Larson

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2018 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

The Pine Arch Collection

by Michael Wehunt

From: x_

To: Aly Duarte

December 18 2017 3:36 am

Subject: The Pine Arch Collection

—Play the attached video and you can see, almost from the start, that something isn’t right. But you don’t know what. A sort of—familiarity. The trees are gasping in the fog. All you can make out for two and a half minutes are their thin trunks sliding through the white breath of a fallen cloud. There is no lamp on the camera. No night vision.

—At 2:17 a voice whispers, deep and thick. Increase the volume, reverse to 2:17: She is sleeping. You are welcome to think it whispers something else. But there is a—familiarity. What could almost be light approaches ahead, through the thinning screen of the trees. The camera is expelled from their mouth onto a bare patch of lawn. There is the moon. Pause the video at 2:38 and see the back of your house, at a distance of perhaps 80 feet. Something huddles against the wall, a heavy black lump with arms reaching up toward a window. Your low bedroom window a closed eye. You beneath its lid, warm.

—Resume play. The arms of the heavy black lump reach closer to your windowsill. The arms stretch up with a dreadful slowness. Zoom in but the resolution decays and you can’t tell if the arms have fingers, or hands. The camera holds for 43 seconds, then moves backward, back into the mouth of the trees. The pines gather. The cloud folds around the shot again and the wall of your house recedes. The heavy black lump and its arms reaching.

—Do the arms reach the window? But the video ends at 3:59.

—We have chosen you.

—Pine Arch Research is a group of filmmakers based—locally. As the title of the attached .avi file tells you, this is The Pine Arch Collection. When you complete your segment, send it to [e-mail]. Tap your own personal terror, real as blood. Breathe it into the camera with authenticity. Recommended length is 3-7 minutes. Finished product will be uploaded to YouTube (on a channel that does not exist at the time of this writing). Complete running time unknown. Cult status guaranteed.

—Welcome.

From: Aly Duarte

To: Bobby Power

December 18 2017 10:03 am

Subject: Shoot this weekend

Hey B. Texted you but wanted to elaborate. So something weird happened and I don’t know if I can do the shoot Saturday. I might have a new project, but . . . . . . . . . I don’t know. Got an email overnight from an encrypted (I’m assuming) address. Like a chain letter but for a cheap found footage horror movie? That’s what it seems like anyway. They sent the video clip with a sort of narration pasted in. Strange and pretty grim. I guess I got the most recent clip (and most recent director, if I’m right that it’s being passed along like that old typewriter story game), so it’s hard to say. But THEY FILMED MY HOUSE. I’m a little spooked at the moment. No, I haven’t responded to the email.

But IF I do a segment for their project and I need staging help, extra eyes, whatever, would you be down with rescheduling our shoot and joining forces on this too? I think Hamlet on Tape can wait another week. Pretty sure you’d be into this project, if it’s not too guerilla style.

Anyway, talk later?

-A

From: Bobby Power

To: Aly Duarte

December 18 2017 11:39 am

Subject: RE: Shoot this weekend

Mysterious dudes in the woods filming your bedroom window at night? Um, that’s a red flag, don’t you think? You know how those movies always end.

I’m cool pushing Hamlet back, but you gotta sell me on this. Doubt thou the stars are fire and all that.

How about you come to my place after work and we’ll talk about it. I’m not sure I’m super comfortable with you going back home.

Bobby

From: Aly Duarte

To: Bobby Power

December 18 2017 12:08 pm

Subject: RE: Shoot this weekend

Sure, it’s red flaggy, but it’s just . . . the boldness of reaching out to me this way, not to mention the fact that they must have seen some of my work. I like it. I love the outré element this has and there’s just something about the way it’s filmed that’s got my head filling with ideas, angles. I sketched something for it. Picture the woods, a pile of tree limbs shaped like a mound, with an opening at the bottom. [shivers]

I’ll let you know about coming over tonight. But for now, are you in? I only need a couple of nights. Sorry to bail on you AND ask for help basically in the same breath. I’ll be fine on my own with something simple if need be, but . . . see aforementioned spookiness.

Also, there was this really tall Chinese guy in your surrealist film class back in school. He came out with us once. Blanking on his name, but that was, what, 6 years ago? He told me he was in this blog group that would go camp out at filming locations of