The Dark Issue 53: The Dark, #53

By Idza Luhumyo, Lynda E. Rucker, Ana María Shua and Carly Holmes

Each month The Dark brings you the best in dark fantasy and horror! Selected by award-winning editors Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Michael Kelly, and Sean Wallace and published by Prime Books, this issue includes two all-new stories and two reprints:

"On Full Moon Nights" by Idza Luhumyo
"Every Exquisite Thing" by Lynda E. Rucker (reprint)
"Authentic Zombies of the Caribbean" by Ana María Shua, translated by Andrea G. Labinger
"The Demon L" by Carly Holmes (reprint)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Sep 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393937883

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 53 • October 2019

On Full Moon Nights by Idza Luhumyo

Every Exquisite Thing by Lynda E. Rucker

Authentic Zombies of the Caribbean by Ana María Shua (translated by Andrea G. Labinger)

The Demon L by Carly Holmes

Cover Art: Nothing by Miranda Adria

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Michael Kelly, and Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2019 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

On Full Moon Nights

by Idza Luhumyo

Three in the morning. A quarter heavy with sleep, heaving its groggy way into the sunrise. Little Tatu lying on her bed, eyes open, heart racing. Then she hears it—the hum soft and low, like a slight breeze in the air. And then there she is, the dead girl, alive.

She only comes to her when the moon is full and the tide high enough to throw her out of the water. Tatu can always tell when she is close: a shudder in the air, a hum in the wind, furious waves beating against the rocks by the sea. She will become restless Tatu, her feet on pepper. Ta-Ta-Ta, goes her brain. Scatter-scatter, quick to anger. And to be angered. And then after the dead girl is gone, the sea quietens, and the moon wanes, and Tatu’s calm returns.

She opens the window slow. My, that moon. There it is staring at her through the open window, and there are the stars winking at her from the past, and there is the sea blowing in the monsoon that blows Kasicha into the room and into Tatu and then off into the night they fly. Now, they are two, and together, and free.

First, as a rule, her mother’s house. They swoop across the velvet of the sky and go three houses down the road. They find an open window. The babies are always the first to hear them come in. They fuss in their sleep, reach out for their mothers, scream out the fear. Then the bleating of the stupid goats, the moaning of the stray cats. Today, it is M’ake Kasicha and B’ake Kasicha and the newborn between them. Kasicha can’t do much when her mother is surrounded like this: nestled close to the one who loves her more than anything; and the one she loves more than anything. So she glares at her, throws an eye at her father, and ignores the baby. Then she turns to Tatu and gives her that heartbreak of a smile. It is their cue to go.

Some have an ear into the second world. They hear the two girls traipsing across mtaa wa saba’s sky. Wawe Tatu on her knees beside her bed, fury in her prayers, cursing the evil of the spirits. Zuhura in her bed in that house at the edge of the quarter, turning and moaning and turning and moaning. Bi Kizee somewhere close to that heaving mass of water, her eyes an iridescent green, chanting the evil away.

Some awake from the spell of nightmares. They place hands on chests to temper racing hearts; they find the lesos and kikois; they put on sandals. Something says to them: go. So they go to the edge of the quarter and then down the cliff. The sea beckons. They find the shimmering water to be a clouded secret: dark and daunting and deathly. Quiet, too. Then something says, touch the water. They do. Then there, by the water, they see a woman. Is she easing in or out of the water? No, they can’t quite tell, so they move closer to the sea, to see. Hair on top of the head like a crown. Sparkle skin. And is that a chant? The woman slowly rotates on the surface of the water, sending dance ripples far, far back—there where sky and sea confer. Then she turns and looks straight at them. Wallahi tena, those are not eyes. And now the fear is back, wherever it had gone to. The men and the women in their lesos and kikois run across the beach like possessed fools. They run up the cliff. Behind them, voices in hot pursuit, something like the excited chatter of little girls. The scared men and the scared women pant across the sleeping quarter, reach their houses, and collapse into their beds, shaking. They wake no one. There is nothing about this night that they trust. And outside, as the black of the night begins to dilute into a clear morning, two girls perch on the sole baobab tree in mtaa wa saba and clutch at their ribs, dying, dying with laughter.

The little dead girl wants to fit all of mtaa wa saba into three hours of night. It has been about a year since she went but still, the quarter is a spell she can’t shake off. She has become the haunted haunter. And now fodder for them—every window open, every door unbolted. The two girls fly into rooms all over mtaa wa saba, wreaking havoc. The targets will