The Dark Issue 61: The Dark

By Jack Westlake, Michael Wehunt, Alison Littlewood and Kristi DeMeester

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 Maxo Polyester Swirl Bowling Ball, 14lbs" by Jack Westlake
"Root-Light" by Michael Wehunt (reprint)
"The Zoetrope" by Alison Littlewood
"For Every Sin, an Absolution" by Kristi DeMeester (reprint)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: May 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393236146

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 61 • June 2020

The Maxo Polyester Swirl Bowling Ball, 14lbs by Jack Westlake

Root-Light by Michael Wehunt

The Zoetrope by Alison Littlewood

For Every Sin, an Absolution by Kristi DeMeester

Cover Art: Young Woman Standing Among Evil Hands by grandfailure

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 Maxo Polyester Swirl Bowling Ball, 14lbs

by Jack Westlake

There’s this bowling ball.

Its proper name is the Maxo Polyester Swirl Bowling Ball, 14lbs. That’s what you would search for online, if you wanted one. Only, you won’t find it online. And you won’t find it in a bowling supplies shop—not that they really exist anymore—or a sports and leisure store, or anywhere. Maxo isn’t a brand. There’s no record of them, no one’s ever heard of them.

The Maxo Polyester Swirl Bowling Ball, 14lbs is made of polyester—it’s there in the name. A polyester ball is what you’d recommend to a beginner, or to someone who takes their bowling seriously but who just wants a cheap ball for practice—some of the bowling club guys call those bashers. So the Maxo’s not what you might call a reactive bowling ball. On paper it’s ordinary, basic even.

Only, it isn’t ordinary.

Not that you’d know that, at first glance. The Maxo looks pretty regular. It’s perfectly round, a little scuffed like the balls at the alley often are, and it’s this purple-black colour. The purple’s barely there, though. You have to kind of stare in order to see it. If this colour was on a paint swatch in a DIY store, it’d be called something like abyss or universe. Swirl suggests a pattern or something, but there isn’t one, it’s the same all over. There’s the usual three holes for your fingers and your thumb. Its name—Maxo Polyester Swirl Bowling Ball—is inscribed just a few inches down from the holes. You might consider this the ‘front’ of the ball. Or maybe you wouldn’t. The writing is in this thin gold outline, and you have to concentrate to read it. Below the name is the weight—14 lbs, which is on the heavier side for a lot of people.

It looks ordinary. Boring even. None of the patterns or marbling the kids tend to go for at the alley.

But the Maxo Polyester Swirl Bowling Ball, 14lbs isn’t ordinary.

It’s fucking abnormal.

And there’s this bowling alley. It’s on a commercial estate just outside a little town in England—you don’t need to know where, exactly—sandwiched between a Nandos and a Cineworld. We’ll call the bowling alley Strike Alley, but that’s not its real name. It’s best you don’t know.

Strike Alley, that’s where the Maxo Polyester Swirl Bowling Ball, 14lbs is.

You could say, that’s where it lives.

Strike Alley goes through peaks and troughs, in terms of footfall. There’ll be a quiet weekend with maybe one kid’s birthday party booked for the Saturday afternoon, the part-time staff leaning on the counters, chatting, playing on their phones, being paid for doing essentially nothing. Days and nights like that, the management worry about the future. Then, on a random Thursday evening, it’ll seem like half the town’s teenagers have descended upon the place—on those nights, the Slurpy machine usually breaks down after a few hours and so the little café gets hit hard for Coca Cola. On busy nights like that, the whole place smells of the café’s hotdogs and burgers, mixed with sweat and deodorant. If you’re near the bowling counter, there’s also the smell of the spray that goes in the bowling shoes the customers have to wear. And everywhere, the air’s full of words, of pop music coming out of the speakers dotted around the place, and the constant dull thunk, roll . . . crash of the bowling alley proper.

It’s on those kinds of nights that the Maxo Polyester Swirl Bowling Ball, 14lbs usually shows up. Maybe because there’s more choice. Or maybe it really is just random. Who knows?

There’s this whole mechanism that gets the bowling balls from the far end of the lane back to the customers. There’s a lot to it, but it’s basically called the Ball Return. A lot of customers probably don’t even think about it—the only part of that whole process which is apparent to them is the part that spits the balls up on to the rack at the head of the lane, ready to be used again. This is the bit where you see people bending over, inspecting the balls, using splayed fingers to move them this way and that. Sometimes they test the holes for a good fit. Like they know what it is they’re even doing.

Sometimes, what the machine spits out is the Maxo Polyester Swirl Bowling Ball, 14lbs. Maybe that means the machine, or Strike Alley itself, is what this story is really about. But probably not.

So picture the Maxo sitting there in the rack. Maybe it gets bumped by the next ball to come up. Maybe it, in turn, knocks against another ball. And all the while, on this busy Thursday evening, people are testing out these bowling balls. Trying the holes for size. Deliberating over which one they’re going to hurl down the lane and get a strike with.

Imagine if those holes in the bowling balls, imagine if they had little teeth. Like a cigar cutter. Waiting for you to put your fingers in.

Don’t worry. The Maxo Polyester Swirl Bowling Ball doesn’t have teeth.

So someone chooses