The Dark Issue 39: The Dark, #39

By L Chan, A.C. Wise, Steve Rasnic Tem and Stephen Graham Jones

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 Last Epic Pub Crawl of The Brothers Pennyfeather" by L. Chan
"The Stories We Tell About Ghosts" by A.C. Wise (reprint)
"For All His Eyes Can See" by Steve Rasnic Tem
"The God of Low Things" by Stephen Graham Jones (reprint)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Jul 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386974154

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 39 • August 2018

The Last Epic Pub Crawl of The Brothers Pennyfeather by L Chan

The Stories We Tell About Ghosts by A.C. Wise

For All His Eyes Can See by Steve Rasnic Tem

The God of Low Things by Stephen Graham Jones

Cover Art: halloween concept of zombie crowd walking at night 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

The Last Epic Pub Crawl of The Brothers Pennyfeather

by L Chan

My brother is waiting for me in the cold; didn’t bother him then, doesn’t bother him now, even with the wind snatching billowing steam from right under my nose. Me? I get the cold, and the cold gets me. The fingertips that I don’t feel against my gloves, even when clenched into fists and pressed into trouser pockets; that familiar ache in the knee I popped in my twenties, singing to me, Storm’s comin’, storm’s a’comin’ . We haven’t had a good night out, haven’t had a good anything since the fiasco at Holborn Station. What a mess that was.

Bill, he’s got that shit-eating grin on his face. It’s Cheshire cat wide, salesman earnest and razorblade sharp. On a lark, we both bought the loudest, ugliest Hawaiian shirts for a previous pub crawl. Tropical bingo: coconut trees, pineapples, sunsets, surfboards and beaches. The kind of shirt that ruddy faced teenagers in their souped up import cars can’t help but slow down to heckle.

We don’t hug, William Pennyfeather and I, there’s a gap there, a chasm of time, space; wrongs, real and imagined; and the scar tissue, puffed and red, plastering over old wounds. Been a while, Bobby-boy. Like he wasn’t two years younger. And it’s still there, under those last few detritus years, a bedrock of blood and brotherhood. Hey back at you, I say.

You didn’t wear the shirt. Anyway, this crawl’s gonna be special. Just three pubs and a fourth if we do things right.

Getting soft, Bill?

Not at all and at least I still fit into this shirt. There’s a method to the madness, it has to be these three pubs. They’re all haunted. The crawl is going to be—

Don’t say it, Bill. Wasn’t cool when we could barely manage the sum total of a full beard and moustache between us, isn’t cool when we’re both the wrong side of thirty, freezing our arses off in a parking lot on a Friday night while the world sleazes on by in tinted headlights, fishnet stockings and the doppler sound of the latest pop hit ringtones.

—epic.

The Hound and the Stag, The Unmaking Boy

The first pub’s an antique, blue plaque on the side wall. For all that, there’s a subtle flavour of desperation; workman’s sweat and the dregs of paychecks wafting from the countertop, the smell marinating old wood in a sous vide a century in the making. Hoary men with dirty fingernails throng the counter, but it’s the pre-teen boy nursing an outsized pint glass that we sit with.

Bugger off, you two, and leave an old ghost in peace, says the boy, turning his hollowed out gaze on us. The apertures on his head bleed inwards to nothingness, the fathomless depths in the pits of his eyes and gaping maw radiating a network of questing cracks, as though his pale face was of the finest porcelain, unmade and glued together once more.

We’re off the clock, as you can see, says my brother. The Work can wait. The Work, that’s what Mum called it, a reverent pause always turning the simple word into something more; between calling and curse, like all good endeavours. The eyeless, lipless thing in front of us snorted, and raised his glass of spider webs and dust.

You’re not dressed for your death, I tell the boy after Bill has left to get us the first drinks of the evening.

No, says the boy, wiping a smear of grey across his pallor with the sleeve of his football jersey, Liverpool F.C., Number 7. Suárez had only been signed in 2010. Nothing to watch here but cricket and footie. I like to stay up to date. He pauses to whistle at a trio of women, striding in a clatter of heels and stretched nylon; more girls than women, and certainly underaged. One of them, more sensitive than most, rubbed the gooseflesh from her forearm. You stay the same for two hundred years, and you’d wish you were dead, he finishes.

White foam crests the side of a sweating pint glass, spilling down the side in a lazy wave. Oops, says Bill, running a finger up glass and into his mouth. Bubbles gasp into the warm pub air, starting to smell of the press of the crowd, now that dinner is over. A little like cheap perfume, a little like cheap aftershave, a little like cheap everything. The beer is pure gold and it drowns out the scent of the place, and that alone is worth its price.

The unmaking boy scratches a perfect white cheek, like scraping knives over fine china. Something catches on his fingernail and he peels off a sliver of his face with the sound of an egg hatching, placing the tiny triangle on the table, all sharp angles. We all have our hell waiting; some of us go to meet it, some of us carry it with us. He says this to me, popping the flake back into his mouth, staring me down; unmaking and remaking himself, fighting the march of entropy.

You lads here just to take up my space, or are we going to fight or what? asks the boy with no eyes, draining the dregs of his glass and pushing it off the table. There is no smash, nothing hits the floor. Fighting was sometimes part of the Work, a pastime that consumed Bill and I for at least the decade after Mum left the family business to us. Not a business at all, really. You’d need to make money off a business. Bill and I finish our drinks.

That’s the Work, said the Mistress Pennyfeather.

Helping ghosts? asked Bill, still with his hair in the curls of his youth, voice an octave higher than that of the man he would be.

We should kill them, that’s what the word means right? Exorcism? To drive out? I said, chasing down Bill’s question.

Oh, you two, said the Mistress Pennyfeather, looking down at us with her wide eyes, with flecks of gold across the pupils that you could just see when the light caught them. What would it take, to cling to this plane, to the material when everything that was material about you is lost? A violence

Reviews for The Dark Issue 39

[Lena Ariza · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A.C. Wise has a good story. Two are ok but STJ’s story was filled with animal abuse and I DNF’d. Dragged down the whole issue for me.