The Dark Issue 90: The Dark, #90

By A.C. Wise, Seán Padraic Birnie, Lavie Tidhar and Angela Liu

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

 

"Wind Come Down the Mountain" by A.C. Wise
"How the Cat Woman Became the Giant Lady, Circa 1995" by Seán Padraic Birnie
"Sirenia" by Lavie Tidhar
"Olympus is a Body" by Angela Liu

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Oct 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215164471

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 90 • November 2022

Wind Come Down the Mountain by A.C. Wise

How the Cat Woman Became the Giant Lady, Circa 1995 by Seán Padraic Birnie

Sirena by Lavie Tidhar

Olympus is a Body by Angela Liu

Cover Art: Mermaid by Mona Finden

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Clara Madrigano and Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2022 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

Wind Come Down the Mountain

by A.C. Wise

Wind come down the mountain/you won’t see me ’gain

Stars come down the mountain/you won’t see me ’gain

—Traditional folk song Bear Creek/Chillcoate Mountain Region ca. 1932, unattributed

It didn’t matter how many times Carter watched the footage—it didn’t change; it didn’t yield any further clues.

None of which mattered. He couldn’t stop.

In grainy black and white, he watched the camera struggled to focus, trying to choose between the wind-tossed trees beyond the open tent flap, the fabric itself, and the interior of the tent. Visible in the frame—a sleeping bag, a low fire crackling, smoke spiraling up through the hole in the tent’s roof, cookpot, gear-pack, and a small hand axe. Coming into the frame after fifteen seconds although there seemed to be no space left which he could have come from—Lane Harper speaking in a low, indistinct mumble.

It had taken Carter until this third or fourth viewing to make out the words, and he still wasn’t certain of them.

The sky gets inside you. It’s so big, there’s so much of it, it fills up everything. The wind and trees get into your head. They make you hear things, see things, think things. All of it hollows you out until there’s nothing left and then you aren’t there anymore. You’re gone.

In eerie night-vision silver, that close to the lens, his eyes looked inhuman. Harper wasn’t talking to the camera anymore, Carter understood that. He was talking to himself, or no one at all. The camera struggled to focus again, losing Harper’s edges as he stepped closer to the tent’s doorway. Gaunt cheeks under a rough beard—the body of a man slowly starving himself to death for the camera. And Carter had put him there.

As if to underline the point, Harper lifted his shirt, showing the ladder of his ribs, the concave of his stomach. When he turned his back to the camera, the knobs of his spine pressed painfully outward against his skin. He held the pose a moment, dropped his shirt back over the scaffolding of his body, then ducked outside.

Carter stopped the playback. There was an additional eight hours of footage, the camera filming the open tent doorway, the fire burning to cold ash. Trees, just barely visible in the dark, tossing restlessly until the sun came up, washing the scene with color. He’d watched the whole thing countless times before, all the way through until the camera shut itself off, a mercy for the low-battery icon flashing in the upper corner of the screen.

The only sound in those remaining eight hours that Carter could clearly define was the crackling of the tarp covering the tent fabric and the low hustle of the wind. He’d convinced himself on the seventh—or maybe it was the eighteenth—viewing that there were low words muttered just on the edge of hearing. Someone standing outside the tent, or farther off in the woods.

He’d made his production assistant and two of the sound guys listen, but no one had heard anything.

On the eighth—or the nineteenth—viewing, when he backed the recording up to listen again, the words vanished, unraveled into the snap of fabric in the hands of the wind.

Lane Harper never returned.

After seventy-three days of solo-filming his wilderness journey for a show Carter had tentatively titled Lone Wolf when he first pitched it to the studio, Lane had simply vanished.

Carter had scoured the footage from the cameras recovered by the rescue crew sent after Harper failed to check in via sat-phone to confirm his weekly physical, a required precaution starting after week three. Network executives weren’t in the business of paying for footage of actual deaths. That was for snuff peddlers. They wanted the illusion of death, its specter, so audiences could sit comfortably on their couches, never having known a moment of true hunger, and watch an individual walk right up to the edge of their mortality, but ultimately walk away again, whole.

Lane had been equipped with bear spray, a sat-phone. An emergency team was on stand-by at the basecamp five miles away. Releases had been signed; agreements had been made. It was up to Lane how long he wanted to stay. He was a trained survivalist, competing against no one but himself—filming himself out in the woods below Chillcoate Mountain for as long as he was willing to remain there alone.

There’d been an alarming number of willing applicants. Carter had hand-picked Harper because he seemed practical, stubborn, but also like a man