The Dark Issue 70: The Dark, #70

By J.S. Breukelaar, Clara Madrigano, David Tallerman and Jelena Dunato

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:

 

"Where We Will Go On Together" by J.S. Breukelaar
"Little Doors" by Clara Madrigano
"A Cold Yesterday in Late July" by David Tallerman
"Immortelle" by Jelena Dunato

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Feb 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393219521

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 70 • March 2021

Where We Will Go On Together by J.S. Breukelaar

Little Doors by Clara Madrigano

A Cold Yesterday in Late July by David Tallerman

Immortelle by Jelena Dunato

Cover Art: Queen of the Woods by chainat

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2021 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

Where We Will Go On Together

by J.S. Breukelaar

It was the smell that woke her, an unfamiliar floral scent that made Eddie grab the first thing which came to hand—a sourly rank pelt—and bury her face in it, feeling it grow damp with drool and the flow of her tears. The light from the clocktower outside washed in over the mattress where she lay.

But now, someone else was in the room.

Is that you, Mum? Eddie said, her voice muffled behind the pelt.

But the face that loomed out of the dark was not her mother’s. Unlike Mum with her lumpy jawline and narrow forehead, and more like the house itself with its steep roof and gracefully dilapidated balconies, this face had good bones. Beneath dark hair haloed by the big clock from the brick works, black eyes narrowed down at Eddie, and full lips drew back in a grimace.

Mum! she cried, hugging the pelt to her chest.

But the woman was gone, leaving that lingering scent of flowers left unwatered in a vase. Eddie could not get up and follow her—not at first. She felt glued to the mattress. What if her mum came while she was gone? They had an agreement that if Eddie ever got lost, she was to get to the biggest clock she could find and to wait there. Her mother always said that best chance of being found when you’re lost, is to stay where you are.

I will find you, Mum had said. I promise.

Eddie had been waiting a long time.

She blinked into the cold morning light, the scrap of matted grey fur tossed aside while she had, finally, slept. The still white eye of the clock from the old brick works peered into the windows of this room high at the back of what had once been a boarding house—before that of course, some rich family’s city manse, but that was too long ago to even count. Eddie’s room was little more than a passageway on the third floor and right at the back, a narrow space that had maybe once been for storage. It was separated from an upstairs bathroom by one of many partitions hastily added to accommodate more lodgers. When she first arrived in the house she had chosen the narrow forgotten space because it was as close to the clock as she could get, and high enough so that she would see her mother coming. Louvred windows looked over the garbage-strewn yard and a crumbling brick shed. Under the windows was a pot on a one-burner stove. A rampant grape vine had broken through in places, splinters of glass on the hand-shaped leaves.

Eddie called out, but because she’d had nothing to eat and had been ill, the words came out slippery and at the wrong speed. She wiped a rosy leakage from her eyes. She wouldn’t cry. Reg didn’t like it. Reg was Mum’s boyfriend. He used to say that Eddie wasn’t all there, and that was the risk you took with foster kids. You never knew where they’d been.

The arrival of the stranger, this not-mum, had stirred the place into a guarded wakefulness. Eddie listened to the unfamiliar movements coming from below. She sniffed the intrusive smell, bitter and flowery. She kneaded the slate-gray pelt as if it could tell her what it meant.

Mum-m-m-m. . . . Eddie had been with her birth mother for two years until they took her away. Her adopted mum was the only real parent she’d known. The word squirmed inside her and twisted her bodily away from the light, as if to prove that it still held her in its power, could do with her what it would. And did, in the end, drag her off the mattress, setting her feet to the icy floor, and with one arm held up in front of her, compel her unsteadily toward the source of the intrusion. She emerged in a draughty room with a missing ceiling, the rafters given over to pigeons and dust motes. A bookshelf stood along one wall. A teaspoon on the floor and a torn red shirt stuffed into a hole in a partition. A litter tray and scattered cat bowls. Silted windows overlooking the driveway were shaded by the dusty leaves of the grapevine, the whole space washed in a dull underwater light.

The color of drowning.

An unfamiliar voice drifted up through gaps in the floorboards. Buzz-hiss. Other sounds wound around Eddie’s head, syllables that clung to meaning by the thinnest of strands—kettle, cup, plate—and a humming inside her of something stirred reluctantly to life. The new sounds and smells reminded her of a time before the house, when she had been on the road with Philly and the other runaways and how no one used their real names, not even Eddie who was just Girl, and sometimes, Philly’s Girl. Applying pink gloss to his lips and hers, Philly would drag her out onto the noon-day streets of wherever they were in a never-ending series of wherever-they-weres to conjure breakfast, an egg sandwich to share, an Americano for