LampLight: Volume 7 Issue 4

By Jacob Haddon

Fiction from: Ariane Both, Richard Agemo, Charlotte Huggins, Samantha Rich, Heather Valentine. Fiona Maeve Geist discusses Noir as Social Critique, with Margaret Millar and Dorothy B Hughes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apokrupha LLC
• Release date: Jul 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463198346

Book preview

Apokrupha

All Rights Reserved

LampLight

A Quarterly Magazine of Dark Fiction

Volume 7

Issue 4

June 2019

Published by Apokrupha

Jacob Haddon, Editor

Catherine Grant, Assistant Editor

Paula Snyder, Masthead Design

All stories copyright respective author, 2019

ISSN: 2169-2122

lamplightmagazine.com

apokrupha.com

Table of Contents

Fiction

By The Bones of Broken Birds - Charlotte Huggins

Let The Water In - Ariane Both

Sorrow’s Wind - Richard Agemo

Apex Predator - Samantha Rich

Countess de Mar - Heather Valentine

Article

Margaret Millar and Dorothy B Hughes: Noir as Social Critique - Fiona Maeve Geist

LampLight Classics

The Man In The Inverness Cape - Baroness Orczy

Writer Bios

Subscriptions and Submissions

* * *

By the Bones of Broken Birds

Charlotte Huggins

It all started with George.

There were other factors, but when I cast my mind back, it always comes back to George.

For context: George is a dead pigeon.

We found him at the edge of the playground, amid the brambles lining the spiked fences, with a mauled chest and broken wings.

We all crowded around him, boys and girls in school uniforms, jostling each other to get a better look at the first dead thing we’d ever seen.

None of us could bear to move closer. Even Rosie, who was allowed to watch scary movies late at night, couldn’t dare herself to.

‘Dare you to touch it.’

‘Double dare you’

‘Triple dare you!’

The stalemate seemed endless, until Mimi picked up a stick. Smiling, she drove it into the bird, drawing out a messy clump of feathers and meat. She swung it at the other children. The girls fled, shrieking, and the boys stumbled, their laughter and legs shaky.

‘His name’s George,’ Mimi declared, eyes shining and sceptre raised above her head.

* * *

We had assemblies about head lice nearly every week. Our school was in a constant state of infestation. 300 kids in ketchup red jumpers and mustard yellow polo-shirts, clawing at our scalps, skulls itching with pestilence.

It didn’t matter how many times our exasperated parents scrubbed and scraped every last one of them out, they were back within the fortnight.

Every time the teachers talked to us about it, every head in the room would turn to look at Mimi.

Nobody could understand why Mimi’s parents wouldn’t get rid of them, or why they ignored the teachers’ desperate letters home. We all talked about it, even our parents and the teachers. Everyone knew.

The only person who didn’t was Mimi.

In her head, she was always faultless.

* * *

Lunch break at primary school is the single most intense period of time in the human experience. Empires rise and empires fall; friendships are forged and broken; great romances and tragedies alike, all within a forty-five minute span on a damp field behind a school gate.

It’s in that way that the cult of George came to be. With Mimi speaking for him, George ascended beyond just a humble pigeon killed by some neighbourhood cat. George became a sign and an omen, a fallen angel with an exposed heart. George was the obelisk in Space Odyssey 2001. The forbidden apple, already bitten. George was death itself.

As Mimi stood over George, her ragged coat became a shaman’s cape. Her stink was no longer that of an unwashed child, but the dark aura of a mad prophetess. As she spoke to our congregation, Rosie slunk between them, hissing ominous portents into their ears.

I lingered by Mimi’s side, an indistinct blob of a girl. Unremarkable, but at least included.

‘He will curse us!’ Mimi cried out, ‘George will curse us, unless we worship him!’

So the chanting began. A semi-circle of children, all in unison, chanting two words over and over at a dead bird in a bush.

Hail George Hail George Hail George

The dinner nannies probably didn’t know whether to find it funny or creepy.

* * *

Gran often told me not to play with Mimi. She didn’t mean it in a nasty way—she was just tired of the nits. We’re not monkeys, she’d say, fingering through my scalp, we shouldn’t have to sit around picking bugs from our fur.

I’d nod and pretend to agree, but I knew I was lying. Gran didn’t get it. It wasn’t as easy as turning the other cheek when Mimi came over to play. There were politics to it. A subtle hand was required to grease the wheels of playground diplomacy. It was a skill I lacked the courage to cultivate.

And there was one sad fact no parent could face about their child: I was not popular. Mimi was higher up the playground hierarchy than me.

Mimi’s hair crawled with insects, and her clothes were grubby and pungent, but she was fearless. Her stories were captivating, her adventures legendary. She spoke back to teachers. She knew rude words and deployed them beautifully. She commanded the boys, picked the games, and was the first to come up with some mad new idea.

Mimi was a warrior queen.

I was a piglet in a gingham dress, stuttering too-long words through too-big teeth. Three paperbacks in my bag, with dragons on the covers. A Star Wars poster above my bed. A weird, budding crush on Nana Visitor I didn’t have words for. Top of the class, bottom of the pecking order.

Not playing with Mimi wasn’t an option. She was a foothold on a vertical slope, the only one within my paltry reach, and without her I’d fall.

* * *

Everyone in school was talking about George.

It was a phenomenon that lingered, long after lunchbreak. That afternoon, class drawings and stories and poems all became about George. We whispered to one another, Hail George, and wreathed our classroom notes in biro bones and feathers.

We didn’t tell a single grown-up about it. It felt delightfully taboo, even though none of us could name what rule we were breaking.

The next day, we went straight to the fence. George was still there. We whooped in delight, praised our new god, and chanted louder. Mimi had her stick, and Rosie had her scary stories, and the cult was thriving.

The day after that, George was gone.

Mimi scoured the playground for some sign of George. There was nothing, not a drop of blood or a single feather. Our idol had been snatched from the altar overnight, and the other kids, ever fickle, drifted from the faith.

‘Keep looking,’ Mimi said, ‘He’s here. Keep looking.’

‘I’m bored,’ Rosie said, ‘Let’s play Nightmare on Elm Street instead.’

This was mutiny, and Rosie knew it. Mimi turned, her coat whirling around her. I bowed my head.

I didn’t like it when Mimi got angry. It was different to when other kids did. When Mimi was angry, I could almost see the adult she would become, and I wasn’t sure if I liked her.

‘If you want to do that,’ Mimi said, voice soft as a pillow pressed over your face, ‘Go ahead.’

Rosie glowered and grabbed my wrist, her expression fierce. I jerked my head up.

Rosie didn’t like me. We both knew it, even without saying it. I was a barnacle clinging to the fin of Rosie and Mimi’s friendship. An unnecessary addition that, in Rosie’s eyes, was better off exorcised.

If Rosie was deciding to take me, it wasn’t out of any desire to play with me—it was only so that Mimi couldn’t.

Yet I’d never been chosen before.

So when Rosie dragged me away, I didn’t resist.

* * *

Children make friends easily. They sit together in class, or their parents know each other, and that is enough. Friendships have been forged with less.

Yet for some children, this isn’t enough. The children in their class ignore them. Their parents are the kind of people other adults avoid making eye-contact with. They are larger or stranger or uglier, and the magic that is so simple to their peers slips through their fingers like silk.

Those kids make friends in different ways.

Mimi made friends by telling stories.

I made friends by listening and agreeing.

According to Mimi, she grew up in California. This impressed us. America was where things happened. Where superheroes lived and aliens invaded and people fought zombies and gained magic powers and fell in love. Such an exotic origin would have probably been enough to secure her position in the playground, but Mimi always had to go further.

Once upon a time, she said, all the way in the mysterious world of California, Mimi’s family had lived in a big mansion out in the sunshine, with servants and a pool and three cars. Then, something happened. Her Dad got in trouble with the local gangs, or her Mum was in a gang and had to run from the law. It tended to change. Whatever the cause, they lost their riches and fled to dowdy northern England, where Mimi’s grandparents awaited them.

There were countless other stories: a sister locked in the attic, an uncle who worked for Nintendo, a cousin who produced for Westlife. She could recite them at a moment’s notice,