The Dark Issue 71: The Dark, #71

By Carlie St. George, H. Pueyo, Octavia Cade and Ai Jiang

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:

 

"Forward, Victoria" by Carlie St. George
"A Study in Ugliness" by H. Pueyo
"Worm Blood" by Octavia Cade
"Hello" by Ai Jiang

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Mar 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393252511

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 71 • April 2021

Forward, Victoria by Carlie St. George

A Study in Ugliness by H. Pueyo

Worm Blood by Octavia Cade

Hello by Ai Jiang

Cover Art: Santa Muerte by breakermaximus

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2021 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

Forward, Victoria

by Carlie St. George

Time means less when you’re dead, and you’ve been dead a long while. Someone always brings you back, though. This go-around, it’s two little girls with a Ouija board, playing at your grave. Victoria Waite, Victoria Waite, kill my parents so I can stay up late! The rhyme has changed again, it seems. It doesn’t matter. Evolution is part of being a monster; the legend shifts, and you shift to fulfill it. They invoked your name. They’re at a Significant Place. They wished for a death.

You wake.

You didn’t wear the prom dress, that first time you resurrected.

It’s part of your signature, red dress, no shoes, but it only happened . . . the second resurrection? The third? It doesn’t matter, really. The legend shifted, so.

But that first time . . . you wore what your parents had buried you in: an ugly burlap sack of a nightgown, stained with your blood and sweat, piss and tears. The Redemption Gown, they called it. They never washed it, ever.

They hadn’t meant to kill you. Arguably, they’d been trying to save you; they’d been trying your whole life, in secret, in the dark. Things went too far. Head cracked against a wall. Not breathing, for a moment. Confusion, panic. Disposal.

But you were still alive, a little, when they threw your body in the old well.

You don’t remember the exact moment you died. You don’t quite remember being dead. But you do remember waking up that first time: the tiny metal thunk of a penny hitting your cheek. A boy’s voice—Todd’s Clarke’s voice—echoing through the well.

Victoria Waite, Victoria Waite.

Todd. Strawberry hair, big goofy smile. Earnest questions and silly little rhymes. His rented black tux had been a bit too big. You’d put your hands under his shirt. He’d laughed into your mouth.

Victoria Waite, Victoria Waite. Where did you go? Come back, it’s late.

One thing you don’t have is a signature weapon.

Of course, anything can be a weapon. You decapitated a vice principal once with an office door. You electrocuted a mayor with gin and a string of Christmas lights. You don’t exactly make puns—you never speak at all—but you’ve been known to indulge in the occasional irony kill. Your high school gym teacher, for instance. Shoving that golf club down his throat. Really, it made it further than even you would’ve imagined.

Still. You were all bird bones, back when you were alive, easily dislocated, easily crushed. Being dead is different: still skinny, forever sixteen and gawky, but there’s strength in your arms and legs now, even though they’re all bent and broken from the fall. It’s a very particular type of strength, the kind you only get from climbing out of your grave.

You don’t have a signature weapon because you don’t want a signature weapon. Weapons break, get stuck. Weapons are less effective the more you use them. You’ve always preferred a signature method: making flesh origami with your own hands. Snapping bones, contorting bodies. Creating new, agonized shapes.

This is how you killed Molly’s mom.

As a kid, Molly Guzman was an asshole. She shoved younger kids around. She stole their lunch money. She started that stupid chant. Wait, Victoria Waite! Which was inevitable, really, considering your surname—but still. You hated her guts. You hated her stupid pretty face. You hated her streak of pink hair and the bruises she didn’t bother to hide and how she was too cool to know the answer, even though she obviously did know all the answers. You hated everything about Molly until you were fourteen, and she pushed you into the bathroom wall, and you kissed her, suddenly you just had to kiss her, and she kissed you back, she kissed you back a lot, and you were staring at each other, breathing hard, all what the fuck, what the fuck.

This can’t happen again, Molly said, and you agreed because if your parents ever found out—

No. They couldn’t. They wouldn’t. (They didn’t.)

You kept your word; Molly did, too. The closet was almost the only thing you had in common, anyway. She was a poster child for juvenile delinquency; you were a B-student, trying desperately to become invisible. You never did become friends, exactly, but you . . . looked at each other often. Opposite ends of the hall, across the cafeteria. Nodded, occasionally, when no one else was looking. It was acknowledgement, validation. A silent confirmation: I see you. You see me. We’re both still here.

You turned fifteen. You lost another battle with the guidance