The Dark Issue 55: The Dark, #55

By Carlie St. George, Leone Ross, Tobi Ogundiran and Eliza Chan

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

"You Were Once Wild Here" by Carlie St. George
"Velvet Man" by Leone Ross (reprint)
"The Muse of Palm House" by Tobi Ogundiran
"Joss Papers for Porcelain Ghosts" by Eliza Chan (reprint)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Nov 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393537809

Book preview

You Were Once Wild Here

by Carlie St. George

Laura is a dead girl’s name. That’s your first thought when she introduces herself, all smiles, telling you about cheerleader tryouts like you aren’t dressed from head to toe in get-the-fuck-away-from-me. Pretty blondes like her are always ending up dead somewhere, in lakes or forests, murdered by someone who insists they did it out of love. No point getting attached to a walking dead girl like that. No point getting attached, period: a few months and your parents will catch a new case, and you’ll be on the road again. It’s better this way: in any relationship, you prefer to do the leaving.

But of course, you do get attached. And of course, Laura ends up in that lake.

Your father finds the body. It’s what he does best: dead flesh sings to him, beckons him forward to the dark and lonely places where corpses wait to be unearthed. It’s four a.m. when he finds her, but you don’t realize it, not then: you’re at home, asleep, dreaming of Laura and the moon.

She’s sitting beside you in a canoe, half naked. There’s nothing sexual about it: your crushes are all fictional characters, heroines in lipstick and menswear, and anyway, you’ve never had a sex dream before. It would be strange to start with Laura, who’s beautiful but miserable, who only laughs to change the subject and smiles at anyone she’s scared of. She stopped smiling at you three weeks ago, when you told her that you’re ace.

The moon is impossibly large. It takes up half the sky.

I’m a werewolf, Laura says. Did you know?

You didn’t, and it worries you: keeping tabs on people is your best subject at school, the only strategy that makes sense in the dog-eat-dog world of public education, where mean girls taunt queer kids into suicide and every gym teacher is a monster, often literally. Missing that your one and only friend is a lycanthrope? That’s a red F, especially for you: the whole reason you’re in this sad, California backwater is so your mom can stop the werewolf killing off the student body.

But then, you and Laura have always been so careful to speak around your secrets. We move around a lot, but never why you move around. My brother died, but not what killed him, not what your mother sacrificed to avenge him. Not what lives inside her now. Something has always lived inside Laura, too, something reckless and dangerous, hidden under pastels and repression. Maybe you got too dependent. Maybe you just didn’t want to know.

Laura’s bleeding: a straight line from neck to pelvis. Even her hair is dripping blood, droplets that dye the lake dark red. She doesn’t seem to notice. Her eyes are still on the moon.

I had to do it. You’ll understand by the end.

Spoken like the guilty. You really shouldn’t warn her: the murders have been grisly but methodical, a monster who means to kill. If it’s Laura, she deserves everything that’s coming. But.

We could run away together. We could leave it all behind.

Don’t tell me any secrets, you say. I know things I shouldn’t in dreams.

But Laura doesn’t listen. The witch is on the squad. The proof is in the pocket. The confession is under the pew.

Laura—

Laura finally turns. Her skin isn’t the same white as yours; it’s ethereal, beaded with lake water. You’ll find me, won’t you? Promise you’ll find me, Emily.

But by the time you wake, it’s dawn, and your dad already knows exactly where to find Laura.

You tell your parents about the dream, most of it. They hear the words proof and pocket and take off, leaving you with black coffee and powdered donuts for breakfast, and only asking if you knew Laura as an afterthought. They’ve always been happy that you’re a loner. It’s safer, they say, if you don’t make friends. It’s not that they’re bad parents; they’re just not great ones. They love you so much they can’t help but fail.

You love them too, of course. It’s why you’ve stopped begging to go along on stakeouts; it’s why you’ve never snuck out to a party. It’s why you’ll never tell them anything you’re actually thinking. And when Laura—intense and glittering and mysteriously, surreptitiously drunk at ten in the morning—grabbed your hand in the back of church and asked you to run away with her, it’s why you said let’s wait till spring instead of yes, God yes, we could be free.

She’d laughed, said you’ll miss the sermon, as if coming to church had been your idea in the first place. Laura had very complicated rules about when and where you two could meet; she may have been your only friend, but you certainly weren’t hers. You were Laura’s goth little secret, kept hidden far from view. It didn’t bother you: standing up for your true friends was a sucker’s game when those friends would split town by Christmas. Laura was a survivor. You respected that.

But Laura didn’t survive, and you can’t just sit here, drinking coffee and waiting for your parents to return home with another dead monster to bury. Your dreams happen for a reason. They happen