The Dark Issue 58: The Dark, #58

By Orrin Grey, Natalia Theodoridou, Gabriela Santiago and David Tallerman

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

"The All-Night Horror Show" by Orrin Grey
"The Summer Is Ended and We Are Not Saved" by Natalia Theodoridou (reprint)
"Escaping Dr. Markoff" by Gabriela Santiago
"Casualty of Peace" by David Tallerman (reprint)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Feb 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393296119

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 58 • March 2020

The All-Night Horror Show by Orrin Grey

The Summer Is Ended and We Are Not Saved by Natalia Theodoridou

Escaping Dr. Markoff by Gabriela Santiago

Casualty of Peace by David Tallerman

Cover Art: Death Bush by chainat

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2020 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

The All-Night Horror Show

by Orrin Grey

Markos Koszjan sits alone on Halloween night and watches himself on the heavy wood-sided TV. On the screen, he is a darkened monolith, his black suit an empty doorway that sucks up all the light, tapering from his broad shoulders to his waist, naturally narrow and cinched tighter by an unseen girdle.

At the ends of those black sleeves are his hands, the same hands that now rest on the arms of his chair, their knuckles buzzing with arthritic pain. On the screen, though, they are alive in a way that they haven’t been for years. Pale spiders crawling out of black stovepipes, skittering at the soft-focus necks of pretty young starlets who scream and swoon in backalleys and boudoirs and basement labs.

When his face is shown, it is often obscured by makeup, but only partly. There to accentuate rather than hide his own features—the prominence of his forehead and jaw, the depth of his bright but sunken eyes, the way his bones seem to lie too close and wrong-shaped beneath his skin.

Sometimes he plays mad scientists or sinister mesmerists, and then he is allowed to give speeches, his delivery addled by an accent he could have shed but was encouraged to keep. Not merely keep, but play up. People were afraid of foreigners back then. He guesses they still are.

Around him in the living room are framed posters and publicity stills, sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall where he has never yet gotten around to hanging them. They almost say his name, but not quite.

Zander Markos as the Monster, as the Creeper, as the Maniac, as the Brute Strangler. Zander Markos, the name foisted on him by the studio. So close to his own, and yet so far away.

Outside, someone is setting off fireworks at the wrong time of year. He can hear the staccato cracks through the thin walls, see the flowers in the sky if he just turns his head to look out the high-set window.

The view beyond should be of black sky speckled with familiar diamond stars, but the city pollutes the air with toxins and with light, and the night sky is a faded copy of itself, like the pictures he watches on the old TV.

Faded by time and by neglect. Gone the crisp, dark shadows that he remembers from the movie palaces. All of it gone now, lost to time, to memory, to cobwebs and creeping things that will soon be forgotten in their turn.

In the van three doors down, in a haze of smoke fenced in by rolled up windows, Darius and Mason sit smoking and talking. Or rather, Mason is talking, as he is always talking, especially when he’s also been smoking.

"Did you know that the stars are millions of light-years away? he is saying, for the third time tonight. He pauses to take another hit. A light-year isn’t time, like it sounds, it’s distance. But it’s also time, man, the time it takes for light to travel in a year."

That this last sentence doesn’t make sense seems lost on him, and Darius doesn’t push it. So what? he asks instead, though he has already heard so what; he already knows.

So the light we see from the stars, and here Mason gestures with the burning pointer of the joint, through the windshield and the haze in the air toward the stars that are barely visible, even when they