The Dark Issue 59: The Dark, #59

By Octavia Cade, Gemma Files, Peter Gutierrez and Emily B. Cataneo

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:

 

"Otto Hahn Speaks to the Dead" by Octavia Cade
"Thin Cold Hands" by Gemma Files (reprint)
"Some Sketches of County Life" by Peter Gutierrez
"The Longest Night" by Emily B. Cataneo (reprint)

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Mar 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393198147

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 59 • April 2020

Otto Hahn Speaks to the Dead by Octavia Cade

Thin Cold Hands by Gemma Files

Some Sketches of Country Life by Peter Gutierrez

The Longest Night by Emily B. Cataneo

Cover Art: Carrie (Second Cover) by Tomislav Tikulin

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2020 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

Otto Hahn Speaks to the Dead

by Octavia Cade

A garden is a beautiful place to die. It was the only beautiful thing about Clara’s death, which otherwise was a bullet and a broken chest, blood spilling over everything, the red scent of iron.

Had he been there, he might have vomited. Only might, because the revulsion he felt for death had lessened a little in the immediacy of the war, and he’d done so much to increase that death that it didn’t do to be squeamish just because the dead in front of him now was a woman. One connected with him, and her death was a repudiation not directed at him—Otto wasn’t the one married to her—but he had some responsibility nonetheless. He’d helped in the work she’d felt such revulsion for; she had seen the choice he’d made and refused her coexistence.

Of course I did, she says after they took her body away. She’d been covered after it happened, the suicide kept from sight, but not all of the blood she’d shed had soaked into dress and dressings. The rest had soaked into earth, was scatter-droplets on petals, and in the moonlight no-one could see it anyway, or was even out searching. Some things were too terrible to look at and her husband was inside, avoiding mirrors. The ghost of her stayed in the garden, with the closed-up blossoms, so she wouldn’t have to look at him. No decent person would be part of this.

Chemical warfare, and Clara a chemist herself. There are some things I will not stoop to, she says, and it disgusted her that Otto had. That her husband had—that he’d covered his hands with burning, with suffocated blood, and brought them home to her afterwards, as if she were expected to touch them, to kiss them and be grateful for their presence.

She couldn’t bear to be touched by him ever again. Hence the bullets, the garden death, and the house still in a mess from the party Haber had held to celebrate chlorine gas in trenches, and how he’d done it first.

Better than the alternative, Otto argues. It’s not exactly heroic, coming up with ways to slaughter at scale, but he’d rather cause others to choke and suffocate than do so himself. There’s nothing wrong with self-preservation, he says, because war is a terrible thing, yes, but sometimes scruples do nothing but extend it. Best to get it over with as quickly as possible, and with as little damage as possible. The rest he doesn’t look at too closely.

You should have the decency to look at what you’ve done, says Clara. She slips her arms out of her dress, lets the fabric fall to her waist. He doesn’t want to look. It feels disrespectful, somehow, with her bare breasts slick with her own blood, and that gaping ruin between them. Look, she says. Look at what I think of you.

He’ll go to his own grave swearing that he never got hard at the sight of her.

She’s there every time he goes to sleep. A nightmare come to life. You traffic in nightmares, don’t you? Clara asks him. Well then. This is what you invited in.

She’s a monster.

No, she isn’t.

That’s one accusation Otto will never have the right to make again. Monstrosity comes in many forms but Clara isn’t it, and he thinks as long as he can hold to that then there’s something in him human still, something the gas hasn’t changed.

He has a gas mask of his own now. It was only a matter of time. There is argument out of Britain: We cannot win this war unless we kill or incapacitate more of our enemies than they do of us, and if this can only be done by copying the enemy in his choice of weapons, we must not refuse to do so.

It is an escalation that was entirely foreseen.

His face in the mirror is masked and wheezing. Clara stands behind him, the front of her blood red and dripping, but her face is innocent of canvas and charcoal. It suits you, she says. But it won’t make a difference.

She comes to him at night. He wakes to her kneeling on his chest, the breath being pressed out of him. Blood runs from her shattered chest, drips into his mouth, pools in the back of his throat. It’s copper and iron and choking, the warm sweet scent of it. When she smiles down at him her teeth are rimmed with red, like they were in the garden when she coughed up the last of her own life.

Poor baby, she says. Did you have a bad dream?

Her hair smells of flowers. That’s always what sets him to weeping. If it were grave dirt, trench dirt, the scent surrounding him as he lay in his bed, he thinks he’d be able to treat her as revenant. To push her off him, to let horror take the place of bitterness and grief. That would be protection, of a sort, because the gas mask never is. He wears it to bed, when she’s come too often for sleeping and sanity, but it smothers him regardless. It’s too warm, too close, and he comes to gasping consciousness, slick with sweat, that same taste of salt.

Flowers are better. At least with flowers he can tell himself that what’s waking him is external, the product of a grief he’d never admit to having, because what would that make of his life? His involvement is not peripheral. The responsibility for chemical warfare falls on him as much as anyone. Edith tells him not to worry, tells him he is doing his duty, and thank God his wife is not as dramatic as Haber’s was, he does not think he could bear it. Flinches now when she goes into the garden. Pastes a smile on his face for her, makes of his features a smooth clean warmth, because she’s never woken to ghosts in the bed and he doesn’t want her to