The Dark Issue 57: The Dark, #57

By Rob Costello, Michael Wehunt, Dare Segun Falowo and Nadia Bulkin

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:

"Emergent" by Rob Costello
"Holoow" by Michael Wehunt (reprint)
"Ngozi Ugegbe Nwa" by Dare Segun Falowo
"Live Through This" by Nadia Bulkin (reprint)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Jan 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393704201

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 57 • February 2020

Emergent by Rob Costello

Holoow by Michael Wehunt

Ngozi Ugegbe Nwa by Dare Segun Falowo

Live Through This by Nadia Bulkin

Cover Art: Cycle of the Werewolf by Vincent Chong

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2020 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

Emergent

by Rob Costello

Do me a favor, Papa, and don’t let them market this as a fucking ghost story, okay?

I may be dead, but I’m no ghost.

And before you get all defensive here, remember that it was you who first taught me my contempt for ghosts when you proclaimed that ghost stories were no more than bloodless fairy tales "that both license and rebuke our dread of death."

I read that quote in the interview you gave to The New Yorker.

In the most charitable sense, ghosts can be useful stand-ins for remorse. Through the guise of irrational terror, they serve to exculpate the guilt of the bereaved by assigning a measure of harmless punishment for the unforgivable sin of remaining alive.

You said that, too.

Only, I’d add that in the least charitable sense, ghosts, like wolves and witches, demons, hobgoblins and all the rest of it serve as the sole emotional refuge of callous, self-obsessed, pretentious has-beens whose names once appeared on the dust jackets of their arty horror novels in a typeface larger than the titles.

Oops . . . I’m sorry, Papa. Did that hit too close to home?

But let’s get real, shall we? Can you think of anything more ridiculous than for me to be a ghost? Imagine your dead son haunting the dreary moors of your consciousness like one of your post-modern banshees from Highland House, mooning over my lost love and moaning about all your great and petty cruelties that brought me to my lowly state.

Boo!

Hoo.

Still, given your colossal narcissism, it will no doubt come as a surprise to learn that I have not spent the past eighteen months stewing in the ectoplasm over you. You’re not worth the trouble of revenge, and I’m not the least bit interested in saving your soul, nor, God help me, attempting to make you regret what you did to me. Sure, I hope you hurt, and I hope you go on hurting for the rest of your miserable life. But I doubt very much that you do, or will, and believe me, that’s not what’s keeping me up nights. I have better things to do with my eternity than to try to ignite something like a flame of guilt in that cold, black lump you call a heart. Besides, we both know that off the page you’re way too pragmatic a guy to be bothered with inconveniences like remorse or redemption. In the real world people fuck up all the time. They hurt and get hurt, don’t learn anything profound about themselves, a lot of unresolved shit happens to them, and then they die.

I’m pretty sure as far as you’re concerned that’s all that happened to me.

I died. End of story.

Only, that’s not quite the end of it, is it? Because although I may not care about you or your wretched soul, I do still care about Jamie. Jamie is the one whose remorse is real. Jamie is the one who deserves to know what really happened in that forest the night I died, so that he might find some measure of closure and move on with the rest of his life.

I owe him the truth.

So, that’s the only reason I’ve bothered to come slumming in the back-alleys of your inspiration like this. I’m here to use you, Papa. Nothing more. I’m going to take advantage of your shameless lust for a good story to get you to put down on paper the truth of what happened to me the night I died, since the nebulousness of my current condition prevents me from striking the keys on this laptop myself. Instead, I’ll whisper my pitiful story into your ear, and all you have to do is translate me back into the language of the living.

For Jamie’s sake. For mine.

It’s the very least you can do.

Besides, think of what the critics will say! The master’s triumphant return. They’ll call you a macabre genius for re-contextualizing the tragic suicide of your only son to inaugurate your long overdo comeback.

Just remember, I’m no ghost…

So, shall we venture back to that night?

I’m sure you’ll recall how the evening began for you, Papa, brooding behind your desk as you had all summer long, a glass of Glenfidditch in one hand, the other hand propping up your chin, your fingers drumming out DEEP THOUGHTS across your pursed lips as you struck a writerly pose for that spectral Vanity Fair photographer who never seemed to stop shooting inside your mind.

The silence of your keyboard was deafening.

At first, you didn’t notice us watching you from behind the bushes beneath your study window. Of course, Jamie had wanted to formally meet you, right from the beginning. Just like all the others did. But experience had taught me too well to avoid that at all costs, and so I’d managed to put him off for most of the summer, until that evening, when I’d finally broken down and agreed that we could spy on you for a few minutes while you worked. Or, should I say, while you pantomimed being a serious writer—aka, a drunk—suffering from the affliction of writer’s block—aka, a chronic and persistent lack of talent.

Anyway, I ought to have known better. I did know better. Letting you in—even simply the notion of you—had been the ruination of every friendship or relationship I’d ever had. If it wasn’t the terrible things you inevitably did and said, it was the corrosive suspicion I could never fully shake that I was only ever a means for others to enter into your orbit. Some smaller body the star-seekers could slingshot around into the gravitational pull of your greater and more glorious, if ultimately fading celestial wonder.

But I told myself that with Jamie it didn’t really matter, because it didn’t seem possible that even you could hasten the end of our time together. There was so little of it left anyway. Summer flings never endure past Labor Day, and I’d already made my peace with that. In less than a week, you and I would return to the city, and that would be that for Jamie and me.

So, I figured no real harm could come of it. You were already too drunk to be truly dangerous anyway. At worst, if you caught us spying, you’d make a fool of yourself, say something predictably withering about your pansy of a son, and then, with any luck, you’d pass out in a stew of your own vomit. Jamie might leave disillusioned and disappointed, but before that could begin to matter between him