The Dark Issue 68: The Dark, #68

By Carrie Laben, Frances Ogamba, Clara Madrigano and Osahon Ize-Iyamu

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

 

"The Van Etten House" by Carrie Laben
"Love for Ashes" by Frances Ogamba
"There, in the Woods" by Clara Madrigano
"Each Night an Adaptation" by Osahon Ize-Iyamu

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Dec 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393027232

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 68 • January 2021

The Van Etten House by Carrie Laben

Love for Ashes by Frances Ogamba

There, in the Woods by Clara Madrigano

Each Night an Adaptation by Osahon Ize-Iyamu

Cover Art: The Drawing of the Three by Vincent Chong

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2021 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

The Van Etten House

by Carrie Laben

Kelly and I met at Ithaca College. Then we both dropped out and rolled down the hill, living in a limbo where we weren’t quite townies but our friends who had stayed students were a bit suspicious of our strange schedules and sudden access to cash. This was back in the late 90s when you could do that, go inbetween, fuck around, and still live. We rented a place and stayed in town after what would have been our class graduated and left. I got to be the pulp paperback and ephemera expert for one of the used bookstores downtown; Kelly scoured the thrift stores and estate sales of the Finger Lakes region for dolls, stuffed animals, and toys to sell on eBay. I phoned her when someone brought in a load of old Oz books and there was a Raggedy Andy at the bottom of the box. She called me when someone had slipped a Tijuana bible in with little Bobby’s Archie comics.

The way I remember it, I got the call about the Van Etten house first, from a guy I knew who hauled crates of vinyl from record fair to record fair all over the state. His name was Clint, and though it’s probably unrelated, I never saw him again after that weekend. I heard later that he tried to open a record store in Rochester, then when it failed he moved out west.

From the outside, the house was just what I expected. Two stories, the blackened ghost of a collapsed porch, front door high and useless so we went around back and through the garage.

There was a bad smell of smoke and blood even from the outside. It made me wary. Clint hadn’t said anything about the guy died in there. It was damn hard to get that smell out of paper or the fabric of soft toys.

When we got into the house proper, then I was surprised. I’d heard of hoarders, but this was before you could see them on TV. I’d never walked into anything even close to this. Clint and Tom the book guy were already at work, like ants at the base of a pyramid, shifting grains here and there in the living dunes of crap. It made me dizzy and for a moment I couldn’t see the ceiling, the walls, where it all ended.

I forced myself to concentrate on the details—the split seams of cardboard boxes, still-bright dust jackets and album covers peeping out. Tom gave me a thumbs-up and hoisted the A.A. Blue Book, first edition, then pulled aside his dust mask and said You two are going to want to take a look upstairs. Clint, flipping through a crate of vinyl, didn’t even break concentration to greet us. It was going to be a rich and fruitful day.

Kelly and I sidled on through the stacks of cardboard boxes that reached, I could now see, to the ceiling. I mean really to the ceiling, the topmost boxes were crammed in, slightly squashed in a way that seemed impossible to achieve from the top of a ladder. From what Tom told me later, he and Clint ended up having to chop up the boxes and pull things out Jenga-like until they could let an entire column collapse without getting squished. There were a lot of twisted spines, a lot of snapped vinyl towards the bottom. Tom won’t shut up to this day about the signed Helter Skelter he found far down in the mess, beyond repair.

The walls I glimpsed as we worked our way along the goat paths towards the stairs didn’t give me great faith in their structural soundness. I went up anyway.

It was an old-fashioned house, with none of that master suite business going on, three bedrooms and a bathroom spaced evenly along a central hallway. The first bedroom was already almost clear. Tom told me later that the new owner had come in early that morning, hauled out heaps of clothes and the mattress with the sheets still on and set them on fire at the edge of the backyard. Tom, who can be very nice when it won’t cost him anything, cautioned the guy that even ugly vintage clothes can be worth money. The guy told him they were too gross to sell.

The second bedroom, though, made Kelly gasp despite the stale air. Jesus, she said on the exhale. He must have loved his kids.

Along the left-hand wall was a solid rank of cardboard doll boxes, colors sun-faded, cellophane windows thick and gray with filth. On the opposite side, stacks and stacks of magazines; the ones that had slipped to the floor were glossy-covered but black-and-white. Youth for Christ, Fellowship of Christian Athletes Magazine, that kind of thing. I rolled my eyes but I also counted stacks and mentally made bundles for eBay.

Kelly, quicker