LampLight: Volume 8 Issue 1

By Jacob Haddon

Fiction from Meghan Cruickshank, Katherine Givens, Crystal Sarakas, Yume Kitasei, Daniel Delgado. Fiona Maeve Geist talks about Unica Zurn: Dark Fantasist and Shrouded Muse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apokrupha LLC
• Release date: Nov 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463994405

Book preview

Apokrupha

All Rights Reserved

LampLight

A Quarterly Magazine of Dark Fiction

Volume 8

Issue 1

November 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

I am Going to Go Deeper - Meghan Cruickshank

And Embers Were All That Remained - Katherine Givens

The Well - Crystal Sarakas

The Mechanical Mind - Yume Kitasei

Deep Water - Daniel Delgado

Article

Unica Zurn: Dark Fantasist and Shrouded Muse - Fiona Maeve Geist

LampLight Classics

The Queen Of The Bees - Erckmann-Chatrian

Writer Bios

Subscriptions and Submissions

* * *

I Am Going To Go Deeper

Meghan Cruickshank

An apocryphal story about Fermat’s Last Theorem: at the annunciation of the solution there were five to nine people on Earth who could comprehend it in its entirety. One must imagine the heady intimacy of membership in such a group. Perhaps it forged them a kind of brotherhood, like the most pampered of war veterans.

I also know things that five to nine human beings have ever known. Like any mathematical truth, the things I know are specialized, arcanely obtained, and wet with the failures of people who died in the attempt. The attempts and deaths, in my case, are more causally linked. And I know other things too that I alone know of our whole race. Though so do you.

* * *

Here is a thing only I know, which I tell you so we can press our hands together from either side of solipsism. Pay attention: in principle, you will be a different person once you hear it, at an unimaginable quantum depth. Once in my canola-garlanded prairie home when my parents and siblings went out to a farmer’s market, I put my face in the filled kitchen sink for almost two minutes.

I knew by then, like many people who are for something in particular, what I was for. I will pretend at anonymity, but it would not be hard to find me from the things I am about to tell you if you cared enough to look. At any rate, you could not bring me back from where I am.

* * *

When Fermat’s Last Theorem was solved there was still law concerning the human body. For instance, they debated if edited athletes should compete. But soon there were too many of us. The dogmatists of the body revised again and again their judgement of what was sacrosanct, desperately holding smaller and smaller country. Finally they circumscribed nothing at all. We outgrew interest in what the human body could do; we turned our attention to what the human body could be made to do.

Myself, I had it done when I was twenty-two. This was after years of unedited diving when I was told I had an aptitude for it, and I needed that, as do girls who have no other aptitudes. Me, from my landlocked jobless province, where we moaned about our depleted oil. As though we hadn’t been warned for centuries by our detested Cassandras on their manicured campuses!

If I had been older and wiser I might not have done it. But it was correct. Not only do I mean that it was correct for me but I mean my new body was, if you like, in the universe’s atlas, correct, and true. They say, you know, that a common thread among religions is the demand for unfakeable, irrevocable sacrifice, like giving up one-seventh of your week, tithing your income, or cutting off your foreskin. I would’ve scoffed once.

* * *

Divers in my circles were morbid. We loved to share stories. Diving deaths are not like surface deaths; the tissues are warped and swollen or burst and bloodied, the white parts become red and the red parts become blue, the skin becomes a flopping shell, the air poisons you, all that is natural becomes monstrous within you, et cetera.

A friend of mine had a dive buddy in Greece whose dive contacts glitched and his eyes imploded. And there was water in his lungs so they figure he was still conscious enough after to wet drown.

A friend of mine’s dive buddy got nitrogen drunk and went the wrong way down a cave tunnel so narrow she got wedged. And he had to leave her there. They extracted her body later. I guess these weird little shrimp were eating her.

A friend of mine had a cousin in training whose BCD didn’t measure her weight correctly, and the instructor just swam off without her for a while. When they found her she was on the floor of the ocean with her lungs full of sand.

A friend of mine held her husband’s body for eight hours on the ascent. She said the whole time she was convinced any second he’d wake up.

Who knows if these stories are true? And see how they are created by the clumsy, suicidal cyborg one must make of oneself to dive without editing to the depths that we few masochists seek out. Helium and nitrogen and oxygen and stranger brews, the ugly clinging wetsuit, the mask!—like the huge eye of an insect covered with repulsive tiny hairs. Of course it would be stupid to say that free diving is safer, but at least the deaths are more elegant.

* * *

This friend of mine had her wife as a safety diver and one time on an ascent the friend blacked out or something and when she woke up on the deck of the boat her wife was just gone.

That is a story I tell, but I am the friend of mine.

Do I seem cold to you? I’m only telling you what happened. Anyways, I miss X------ of course, but I’m not that sad. It won’t be long.

* * *

A funny thing about small elite groups is how easily you accumulate records. I was the first female no-limits free diver to reach 1800 feet, although sex differences in this kind of thing are outdated now so I don’t make a big thing of it. X------ is the first Greek diver to reach 1000 feet. She never wanted to go as deep as I did.

When X------ was a child her parents put her in pi recitation competitions. She told me that she thought she’d forgotten all the digits past 500, but when she went deep enough, as she recited, they came floating back to her, like they’d waited in some substrate and were squeezed back up into her consciousness. Then when she reached the surface again, reciting in reverse, they were left behind in the depths.

X------ and I met at the pool, where she was practicing for an intramural synchronized swimming competition at the university. I watched her from poolside as I warmed up. She held herself upside down in the water; the feminine-masculine swells of her muscular legs traced precise compass arcs through the air; her feet were pointed so tightly they had the shapes of twin bows.

Perhaps you’re thinking, these two had a bizarre accumulation of interests, didn’t they. Ah, yes, but do you think it’s so strange that there should be one person on the earth, or two, given statistical likelihood, who love numbers and breath-holding? Really, what’s strange is that we found each other, that we were permitted to intersect. You can imagine human lives on the sled-lines, perhaps, everyone rocketing toward a silty future, glimpsing