LampLight: Volume 6 Issue 4

By Catherine Grant

Gemma Files is our featured writer. We talk with her about 'monster pride' and what she's working on next. Fiona Maeve Geist returns with an article on Hope Mirrlees and Margaret St Clair.

Fiction from:

* Becca De La Rosa
* Irene García Cabello
* Pierce Skinner
* DC Mallery

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apokrupha LLC
• Release date: Jun 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463447079

Book preview

Apokrupha

All Rights Reserved

LampLight

A Quarterly Magazine of Dark Fiction

Volume 6

Issue 4

June 2018

Published by Apokrupha

Catherine Grant, Editor

Jacob Haddon, Editor-in-Exile

Paula Snyder, Masthead Design

All stories copyright respective author, 2018

ISSN: 2169-2122

lamplightmagazine.com

apokrupha.com

Table of Contents

Featured Writer - Gemma Files

Thin Cold Hands

Interview with Barry Lee Dejasu

Fiction

Eulogy - Becca De La Rosa

Ellie - DC Mallery

It All Starts with the Flood - Irene García Cabello

Disciples - Pierce Skinner

Article

Hope (Helen) Mirrlees and Margaret St Clair: Underappreciated Innovators - Fiona Maeve Geist

LampLight Classics

The Goblin Market - Christina Rossetti

Writer Bios

Subscriptions and Submissions

* * *

Thin Cold Hands

Gemma Files

Though it’s a long time since I’ve lived in a house, I still have memories about what that used to be like which work on me constantly, mainly subconsciously. When I dream, I open a door into a composite domicile cobbled together from bits and pieces of all the houses my parents passed through during my childhood, dragging me behind them. And while I suppose it’s strange how I never seem to dream about where I live right now—this apparently safe little condominium apartment with its security guards, its concierge, its maintenance crew, its entire fee-fed infrastructure—that’s just how it is, how it’s always been. How it always will be, probably.

Instead, night after night. I shut my eyes and drift off only to discover I’m back in the dark, the dust, that symphony of too-familiar noises: scratch of claws through wood shavings as my long-dead rat skitters around in his cage, exercise wheel whirring against the bars; weird clang and hoarse, throaty hum of the furnace starting up, down deep in the basement’s bowels. Hot air exhaling through the vents, rank as some sleeping monster’s breath.

It feels like being swallowed, always, still alive. Swallowed, but never digested.

* * *

Living in a house is defined, to some degree, by the process of accidentally finding places in your home you can’t remember ever having seen before. In my case, this was often aided by the fact I was still young enough I didn’t mind getting dirty, nor was my ew, gross! reflex fully formed, making the treasures I found while exploring a mixture of the genuinely interesting and the mere disgusting. There’s a story my Dad used to like to tell, for example—before he left us—about how he once went looking for me down in the basement of a particular place (13 Hocken Avenue? 33?) only to eventually discover me crouching behind a huge piece of plywood leant against the back wall, covered in dirt, absently sucking on a dead mouse’s tail.

Sometimes, when I concentrate hard enough, I can even almost remember what doing that felt like, if not dissect what weird turn of toddler logic led me to make that particular decision: conjure how soft the mouse was in the middle but how stiff at either end, the feel of its dusty fur under my stroking fingers, the taste of its tail in its mouth, that sharply angled little corpse-curl pricking my tongue. Familiarly unfamiliar, a mere memory-sketch filtered through someone else’s version of it, someone else’s story. Because the past really is another country, and all children lunatics, in their very different ways.

I can testify to that last part for certain, especially now I have a child myself.

* * *

I don’t remember giving birth, just waking up afterwards, dazed from drugs. The feeling when they folded my slack arms around her, pressing her face to my breast. Her mouth gone round against my warm skin, seeking ring of lips so soft yet oddly cold, latching on tight; an instinctive sense of predation, of something being stolen. And then, as she started to suck, that sharp, prickling pain.

I gasped, whimpered; tears came to my eyes. It was a moment before I could find my words.

"Hurts, I told the nurse, when I was able. Babies aren’t s’posed t’have…teeth, right?"

The nurse stroked my slick hair, comfortingly. Most don’t, no, but some do; no worries, it’s perfectly natural. She’s a very forward-thinking young lady, your daughter.

Nothing for it, after that—I didn’t have the strength to do anything but lie there and let her drain me, never letting go. They had to pull her off me at last, blind crumpled face avid and a red ring vivid around those still-pursed lips, of blood and milk admixed.

Greedy girl! the nurse called her, affectionately. Well, you’ll both have to work it out, I guess, eventually. Once you take her home.

I nodded, or thought I did. Before slipping back into sleep, my wounds salved, this vampire thing I’d birthed still clutched to my chest.

But almost six years later, I still can’t say that’s ever really happened.

* * *

I don’t remember how old I was when I first figured out that if I slid aside a basket-woven screen on one side of the front deck, I could crawl underneath the house. Indeed, I don’t even really remember which house it was, though it must have been one from the part of my childhood after Dad left, since the property in question had both a porch and a garden, as well as a back yard. In the crawlspace it was dim and cool, soil soft beneath me and stone joists on every side like squat little pillars, holding up the walls, the floorboards, the house itself. I had no idea of danger, only that elation which comes with exploring, scuffling around on my hands and knees like a badger in shorts. I enjoyed knowing what I thought nobody else knew, seeing what I thought no one else could have seen.

And it was down there, at last, that I found the grave.

I don’t know what attracted me to that spot, exactly: a slight hump under my hand, faint but unmistakable, like reading braille. I looked down, squinting, but could more feel that see it. Mapped out its dimensions with that one-handed reach my piano teacher always told me she envied, middle finger stretching elastically, thumb rotating in its socket so the nail pointed to my elbow. It was my full reach long and three slightly spread fingers wide—pointer, middle, ring. It narrowed at the top and bottom, like a seed-pod, so eventually I simply dug my thumbs into the middle and peeled it open. Milkweed fluff spilled out, dirty white silk, along with a flood of bones I picked out one by one, reassembling them there in the part-light. Once painstakingly pieced back together, the bones reminded me of any classic fossil, crushed like an insect between two rock-beds…but not quite. Two arms, check; two legs, check. One skull, snoutless, eyes forward-facing, nude grin full of delicate needle-teeth. The remains of a spine, yet nothing that looked like a tail. A rib-cage, mostly intact, though with its second and third rib down on (my) left-hand side wrenched and cracked out of shape by that rusty four-inch iron nail stuck in between them—I removed it so they’d lie flat, slipping it into my pocket. Wishbone slope of a pelvis, half-cracked, a socket-hole on either side for a pair of delicate, too-sharp hip-bones. An unstrung spray of what could only be finger-joints scattered at either end of its out-flung radiae and ulnae, tiny as caraway seeds.

And oh, but they were cold to the touch, all of them—so damn cold. Cold enough they crisped and pulled at my skin like freezer-burn.

Light as a bird’s yet impossible to break, with two more things spread out like huge, dried oak-leaves left at the very bottom, frayed but intact. And though I couldn’t possibly have known what they were back then, whenever I think about them now, they look just a bit...just a little bit…like wings.

Tinkerbell, I remember thinking. Someone murdered Tinkerbell.

But even as I stroked those bones a light began to kindle at the heart of them, icy-colourless, traced thin as a thread along where the vertebrae should have been strung. And I thought I heard a thin ringing like a half-full glass’s rim being toyed with begin, almost at the same time, somewhere off in the distance...or no, maybe not; far closer, maybe, though muffled by my own skull’s echo-chambers. A sick, dim bell tolling out from deep inside, fluttering like some insect mired in wax and cartilage alike. The very idea, in turn, coming with an image attached, so sharp I could almost see it: a flash-bulb going off behind the curve of one ear to show the culprit caught inside, fluttering between hammer and drum, silhouetted to its delicate little black leg-hairs.

None of which I much liked, so I recoiled instead, knocking my head on the boards above—scrabbled back, feeling blind behind me for the screen, afraid to avert my eyes; missed it not once but twice before I found it again at last, wrenched it breathlessly aside and spilled back out into sunlight, my hair full of dirty cobwebs. Before Mom heard me scrambling around in the grass and threw the back door open, yelling: "You better not be under that goddamn deck again, Emme, goddamnit!"

That night, in the bath, I watched dirt sluice off me down the drain, turning the clear water gray; waited for my mother to come tell me to get dressed, brush my teeth, turn that light off too, because we weren’t made of money—and thinking, as I did (glimpsing it briefly between the lines of my own mind, pretty much, in the very fuzziest, least explicit of ways) how everything I did, everything I was allowed to do, was only ever at someone else’s sufferance. Since that was always the scrambled background signal lurking behind all my childhood memories, same as everyone else’s—the part I, like them, only grew to understand later on, when I was finally old enough to put a name to what I’d never been able to recognize before. That constant feeling of helplessness, of misunderstanding, that everything was decided for me, that I had no control...

Because I just didn’t, ever, from birth almost to the moment I moved out. Because some would say I never had more than the illusion of control, even after that.

Thus all the small rebellions, small sins, small betrayals which make up every coming-of-age narrative: cruelties practiced on me versus cruelties I didn’t yet know better than to practice on whatever other, weaker things I could get a hold of—kids, animals, objects. The first blunt, sticky stirrings of sexuality paired with an equally itchy feeling of being not yet fully formed, both equally impossible to do much about. And knowing, on some level—not accepting, just knowing—that all those unslakable aches are only ever half the problem.

I found the iron nail in my pocket when I threw my jeans aside and fell asleep holding it, clutching it between two fingers. Hours after, meanwhile, I jerked straight up in bed with no earthly idea