The Dark Issue 65: The Dark, #65

By Rob Costello, Shari Paul, Steve Rasnic Tem and Gabriela Santiago

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 three all-new stories and one reprint:

 

"A Few Words From the New Tenant of ____ House" by Rob Costello
"Stretch" by Shari Paul
"Reflections in Black" by Steve Rasnic Tem (reprint)
"The Wendigo at the End of the Blue Line" by Gabriela Santiago

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Sep 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393063728

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 65 • October 2020

A Few Words From the New Tenant of ____ House by Rob Costello

Stretch by Shari Paul

Reflections in Black by Steve Rasnic Tem

The Wendigo at the End of the Blue Line by Gabriela Santiago

Cover Art: Woman with Lantern 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

A Few Words From the New Tenant of ____ House

by Rob Costello

To Whom It May Concern:

I’m writing to inform you that I have recently moved into ____ House. I apologize for being circumspect about the name. I should probably just spit it out to make all of this easier, but what with copyright laws being as they are, it feels safer if I leave that to you to assume. I don’t want to be sued for infringement! Besides, I’m fairly certain you are familiar enough with this particular house to discern its identity pretty easily on your own. It’s rather famous, after all. If you haven’t read the book, you’ve surely seen one of the films or the recent television series. Hint: it’s that forsaken house on a hill made iconic by the phantom hand in the night, the bloody writing on the walls, the thing that walks alone there.

Except now, that thing has me for company.

Not that I ever dreamed I’d make ____ House my home. All I wanted when I opened the book was a change of scenery, you understand? A few hours refuge from the purgatory of this interminable quarantine and Mother’s vicious sniping, especially if I could spend that time at a place with the spine-chilling reputation ____ House has. You see, I’ve always had an appetite for the macabre. Even when I was small, I was the sort of boy who pulled wings off of butterflies and incinerated ants on the sidewalk with a magnifying glass. I’ve spent my whole life rooting for the ghosts, ghouls, and monsters in my favorite novels.

For example, when I was eleven, I stole a paperback copy of The Shining from our local Goodwill and spent an entire weekend in delicious terror wishing I had my very own roque mallet, so that I could join Jack Torrance rampaging through the halls of the Overlook Hotel.

At thirteen, I sold my soul to the boy next door in exchange for an actual kiss, open-mouthed and with tongue, though when I pressed my luck and copped a feel between his legs, he slugged me in the gut so hard I saw stars. Then he tore to shreds the little slip of paper I’d given him with my name written out in my own blood.

That’s what really broke my heart.

Then, on my seventeenth birthday, I got arrested for reciting Poe by candlelight in the middle of the Salem Hill Cemetery. I’d dressed all in black, of course, and painted my fingernails especially for the occasion in a shade of blood-red called Tell-Tale Heart. The cops didn’t know what to make of me. They asked if I was there to smoke weed or kick over headstones, sacrifice kittens or to blow some old creeper I’d hooked up with on Grindr. How could I explain to them that I simply felt more at ease reading to the dead than skulking in the shadows of the Homecoming dance like some impotent Carrie White?

The dead do not laugh at me.

They listen.

Go ahead: call me a freak if you like. Everyone else does, including Mother, but I enjoy that word very much. Freak: One who is markedly unusual or abnormal. That’s from the Webster’s definition, although when Mother screeches FREAK! at the top of her lungs as she clutches her rosary, I get a flame-in-the-belly satisfaction knowing I’m the one in our little nuclear meltdown of a family who’s considered markedly unusual and abnormal.

When she claims to pray for my soul’s salvation, I don’t even believe her.

Dear old Mother, with her pink fleece slippers and acid wash jeans. Her Hang In There calendars marked up with monthly novenas. Her jugs of Ernest & Julio Zinfandel stowed beneath the elastic-waist skirts in her closet where Jesus can’t see. And the endless chain of her Merit Menthols, which, when I was smaller, somehow managed to find themselves occasionally snuffed out on my arms and back.

Ah, memories.

Every now and then I wonder if she misses me, now that I’m living here full-time at ____ House. I doubt it. We’re so little alike, after all. Me, with my books and dark thoughts, and her, with her parish suppers and 24-hour Fox News. Two atonal chords striking against each other in shrill cacophony, especially since the lockdowns began. Her life must seem so much more harmonious now without me trapped in it with her. Choirs of imaginary angels no doubt sing her to sleep each night.

I’d much prefer silence.

I have no friends who’ll miss me here at ____ House, and while the WiFi is non-existent, it’s not as if I pine for human connection anyway. I am not that kind of person. The enforced isolation of these past few months was never really a problem for me. Books are all the company I’ve ever desired. Besides, the Internet is just a mosh pit of