The Dark Issue 37: The Dark, #37

By A.C. Wise, Angela Rega, Orrin Grey and Priya Sharma

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:

"In the End, It Always Turns Out the Same" by A.C. Wise
"Beehive Heart" by Angela Rega (reprint)
"The Hurrah (aka Corpse Scene)" by Orrin Grey
"The Crow Palace" by Priya Sharma (reprint)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: May 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386908708

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 37 • June 2018

In the End, It Always Turns Out the Same by A.C. Wise

Beehive Heart by Angela Rega

The Hurrah (aka Corpse Scene) by Orrin Grey

The Crow Palace by Priya Sharma

Cover Art: Boy with a Torch Facing Smoke Monsters by grandfailure

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2018 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

In the End, It Always Turns Out the Same

by A.C. Wise

Five children have gone missing since the school year began. The youngest, only six; the oldest, no more than ten. They all went to school together, but all in different grades. The only thing they have in common is that they all rode the school bus together every day.

Richard McGinty reported the first child missing. And the second. And the third. He’s the bus driver, it makes sense he would notice, but even so, the police chief can’t help but wonder. There’s just something about him, the police chief has always thought so. Sunnydale is a nice town, a safe one, but there are some people, like Richard McGinty, who just don’t seem to belong. It isn’t anything the police chief can put his finger on, but he’s learned over the years that if someone looks suspicious it’s most likely because they are. So the police chief writes McGinty’s name at the top of his suspect list, then he does what he always does. He gives the Super Teen Detective Squad a call.

Helen is the pretty one. Everyone says so. Her hair is long and red and flips over her shoulders just so. She isn’t quite rich, but she isn’t poor either. She always has money for new clothes when she wants them, but she tends to wear the same ones day after day. Pretty is something she is, not something she does.

She’s been a Teen Detective as long as she can remember. Along with Greg, Tricia, and Rooster, she’s solved more mysteries than she can remember. They blend together in her mind—the Old Mill, the Haunted Cemetery, the creature in the pond, or the river, or the swamp. There’s always a ghost, or a demon, or a monster, one that always turns out to be someone in disguise. Helen has never met a real monster. She’s almost eighteen, but she still hopes she will grow up to be a monster someday.

In her time as a Teen Detective, Helen has learned that most people only think they know what monsters look like. They walk past real monsters every day and never see them at all, which is why the monsters she meets go around in disguise. It’s the only way anyone will ever recognize them, and they are all so desperate to be seen.

Helen thinks a lot about disguises. She thinks about putting on a hundred pounds, or losing fifty, and paying someone to beat her up so badly it will utterly transform her face. She’ll get a crummy apartment, one with a roach problem, and a door that doesn’t properly lock. It will be the kind of place a girl like her would never live. She’ll spend her days walking right up to people who know her, or think they do, and laughing behind her hands when they don’t recognize her. And it will be absolutely glorious.

This future, alternate, unrecognizable version of her will get a dog. A big one who slobbers. One who growls at everyone who isn’t her. The dog will know her and love her unconditionally; it won’t have any idea she’s supposed to be the pretty one. It will know her by her smell, and the fact that she feeds it, and it won’t care a thing about her face, her shape, or the color of her hair.

By unofficial consensus, Greg is the Super Teen Detective Squad’s leader. Helen thinks she might have slept with him once, because they are both pretty and that’s the way it’s supposed to go. Though it’s also possible that they got drunk together once and he told her that he’s gay.

Lately she’s been having recurring dreams about murdering Greg. In fact, she’s dreamt about murdering every single member of the Teen Detective Squad. More than once, she’s woken with blood on her hands. She has no idea where the blood comes from. The only thing she knows for certain is that it isn’t hers. Sometimes she wonders if she’s spent so much time thinking about becoming a monster that she’s turned into one after all.

He didn’t start driving the school bus until after he retired. Maybe that’s why all the kids on the bus call him old. "Better behave, or Old Man McGinty will get you. I heard Old Man McGinty’s face is just a rubber mask. I dare you to pull it off and see what he looks like for real. I heard he crashed a bus on purpose once. I heard he locks bad kids inside the bus and hurts them."

There are so many rumors, none of them true. He doesn’t even really mind; it’s just the way kids are. It comes with the job, it comes with being old, with being a little too quiet, a little lonely, a little odd.

The kids are right about one thing at least. He does look like someone in his disguise, his face and clothing all wrong. The clothes are hand-me-downs from his father. Never throw a good piece of cloth away, his mother always said. They don’t fit him right. They smell of mothballs and smoke, though he’s never touched a cigarette in his life. His father died when he was eight years old, but his mother kept the clothes in a trunk in the attic, waiting for him to grow.

He doesn’t remember the growing part. As far as he knows, he’s always been old. What he does remember is the day his mother pulled his father’s old clothes out of the chest and presented them to him. He remembers climbing into them, all shades of umber and brown, sienna and burnt orange. It was like wearing his father’s ghost. He looked in the mirror and saw a man with hound dog eyes, with shadows in the seams of his skin, and hair fading to the color of a mouse’s fur. He was only eighteen at the time.

Tricia is the smart one, but no one ever tells her so. They simply take it for granted. She is the reliable one, dependable, boring. She is so predictable that even she catches words coming out of