The Dark Issue 84: The Dark, #84

By Frances Ogamba, Becca De La Rosa, Nelson Stanley and H. Pueyo

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:

 

"Master of Ceremonies" by Frances Ogamba

"Mal de Caribou" by Becca De La Rosa

"Mulo" by Nelson Stanley

"The Many Murders of the Self" by H. Pueyo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Apr 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201282660

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 84 • May 2022

Master of Ceremonies by Frances Ogamba

Mal de Caribou by Becca De La Rosa

Mulo by Nelson Stanley

The Many Murders of the Self by H. Pueyo

Cover Art: The Wizard Standing Among His Wolves by Tithi Luadthong

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2022 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

Master of Ceremonies

by Frances Ogamba

Obiajulu suns his microphone for the funeral at Amesi. The instrument has grown weightier as if his words form invisible skin layers around it. Its original black colour now fluctuates, pocked in places to reveal a dermis of steel. He likes the windscreen best. It rubs his lips at ceremonies. The grating caress flips Obiajulu’s soul in between worlds and the heavy lull of old wisdom washes over him.

His family has emceed for decades. For centuries, Obiajulu claims when acquainting himself with guests. He remembers being his father’s assistant, clutching his suitcase at a corner while the older man pranced on stage, aweing his audience. Obiajulu watched his father from sunrise until the day faded, until the shine of light bulbs rendered him as thin as a child’s impoverished drawing, as if talking shorn a part of him away. Obiajulu knows their origin of hosting events in slightly altered versions: his grandfather’s version and his father’s version. But Obiajulu’s favorite was the account coined by the townspeople.

Once upon a time, a man famed for this prattling soliloquy fished in the River Niger and supplied his catch to travelers plying the bridge linking Onitsha to Ahaba. One day, something swallowed the tail of his line. His muscles swelled with excitement as he struggled to pull his catch to the surface. The water danced fiercely around the line. This was going to be the catch of the season, he imagined. His mind heaved with suggestions on how he would spend the proceeds from selling such a powerful catch. He could already taste the slap of imperial gin in his mouth—a treat which he had not been able to afford. He kept on pulling. As if nature was militating against his wishes, showing up an hour later was a fish no longer than the length of his foot. The hungry sight of the fish filled the man’s chest with distasteful wonder and disappointment. As he cut up the fish later, he struck an object. In the story, the fish disappeared the moment the man scooped the microphone from its belly, and he heard a whispery voice giving orders and making him promises.

The man in the story was Obi, Obiajulu’s great grandfather. Obi passed the microphone to Obieme who passed it to Obika; and after thousands of events and years of speaking, it landed into Obiajulu’s palm. The mic was to be used at weddings and child naming and birthdays, anything that celebrated the living.

Whoever owned the mic saw beneath things. Obiajulu’s father, Obika, always burst with digestible joy as he moved through their town. He saw fetuses burgeoning and love stories blooming. The townspeople came to quiz him about their children, if there was love yet sprouting in their lives. Obiajulu once saw a woman dragging her daughter into their compound. My daughter has been vomiting. She is only 15. Look at her womb and tell me. When Obiajulu’s father hosted one funeral event, which paid them enough to rebuild the cracked walls of their hut, a different energy curled around him. He began to box the air and duck from unseen punches. Obiajulu’s most vivid memory was of his father huddling in a corner, mud splattered up his arms. His breathing was ragged as if he had been tunneling with wildlings.

Obika’s anger kindled against everything. He resented clients asking for too many services under a low budget. He resented Obiajulu for asking questions about their history. His rage grew pebbles in his gall bladder and stirred blights of bitterness in his spleen. One night while asleep, his soul snuck out of him.

The microphone belongs to Obiajulu now. It feels as though he received it himself from the river. He can almost hear the voice calling out to him as his feet pads on pebbles lying on the shore. He revels in the joy he has brought the people with his words. They come to him with eyes misted over, thanking him for muffling life’s distress and siphoning vigour into them. Obiajulu recalls his events as faint episodes of him saying, Testing the microphone, one, two! Testing the microphone, one, two! Wild applause reaches him, like dry twigs breaking nearby. He sits folded up at a corner of his mind with no memory of any word he says. Only the dry compartments in his throat and the passage of time serve as signs that he has spoken for many hours.

And why do we put it under the sun? Obiajulu asked his father once. He’d become a mass server at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church and was embarrassed to learn that microphones were charged with electricity.

It is an instruction my father passed to me. His own father passed it to him.

I put the mission’s mic in the sun, he said, a part of him blaming his father for not explaining everything in clearer words.

How can you put theirs in the sun?

But we put ours.

Ours is different!

Obiajulu survived the years of being called ‘microphone sunny’ by other children, or ‘mic sunner’ and other