The Dark Issue 93: The Dark

By James Bennett, Angela Slatter, Phoenix Alexander and H. Pueyo

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 two all-new stories and two reprints:

 

"Of Gentle Wolves" by James Bennett
"The Names of the Drowned are These" by Angela Slatter (reprint)
"Silk-Wrapped Love Story" by Phoenix Alexander
"The Memory Eater" by H. Pueyo (reprint)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Jan 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215875469

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 93 • February 2023

Of Gentle Wolves by James Bennett

The Names of the Drowned are These by Angela Slatter

Silk-Wrapped Love Story by Phoenix Alexander

The Memory Eater by H. Pueyo

Cover Art: mysterious person under a red jacket holds an ax in front of the door by Tithi Luadthong

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Clara Madrigano and Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2023 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

Of Gentle Wolves

by James Bennett

All wolves are not of the same sort.

—Charles Perrault

Friends, beware gentle wolves. Never stray from the path. If you’d listened to your mother, little girl, you wouldn’t have been eaten. I wouldn’t be hunting him now in the forest.

Josef, stay, my father said, old and fearful by the fire. Let the woods and the wild look to themselves.

The hearth echoes in my ears, cold under my hat, as I tramp up the crisp white hill. A robin watches, shaking its head against it. On the air, the scent and shadow of the beast. My axe rests over my shoulder. I only ran back to the village to claim it, a broad, golden man barrelling through drifts and sliding down hollows, and then I was gone again. Big Josef. Kind Josef. A brave Christian soul, all hereabouts would say, built for chopping and lugging wood. But a girl must be answered for.

Then take the stones, my father counselled, waving his cane at the cupboard. The axe is only the half of it. A gentle wolf is a-roaming. Of all wolves, the gentle are the worst!

I took the stones, all six of them. Wolf stones. Magic stones. Stones of binding and death. They weighed down my pack like snow on the branches, like my beard by the ice, but never so heavy as my heart. The poor girl was dead and there was no saving her. Well, only her immortal soul. Felling trees in the deep wood I heard it, the bright ring of her scream. Birds taking flight, outraged. Through the briar I thundered, winter and firewood forgotten. Breathless, steaming, I found my way to the cottage. Well my father might caution me; he has not seen the things I’ve seen.

The door stood wide, the embers aglow. By its light I saw the ravaged bed, the old woman lying there, her bonnet askew. Flakes danced over everything as if to hide the sight. Crows shrilled, interrupted at their feast. Eyeball in beak one flapped to the rafters, favouring the darkness there. The girl lay spread-eagled on the floor, her basket strewn beside her. Apples, cheese and oatcakes dotted the spill of her guts like a crate at some terrible harvest. The wolf hadn’t cared for such comfits and taken the girl for his own. Half her face was gone, but I knew her for a villager. Blood and flesh painted the walls, none so red nor tattered as her cape and hood discarded by the fire.

Did he make you undress? I’d heard of such things. All the better to devour you . . . 

A lump rose in my throat at that, and one in my breeches to match, the thought of her hellish seduction, and the wolf, the beast who’d made it. I’d heard about him too.

A howl through the trees put me to flight, dashed my own blood out of me.

Beware gentle wolves. Never travel at night under a full moon. Childhood warnings sang in my skull, every snapped twig a bark, every gust a breath on the nape of my neck, rank with the scent of meat. What choice did I have, a poor woodcutter? The village looked to me for protection. Aye, I’d heard this tale before, the wolf come ravaging, the danger. As I climbed the white hills, it seemed that it had been told a thousand times, spun like a web across time, and I tangled in the thread. Doomed to repeat my doom, you might say. The hunter and the hunted. The predator and prey. Who was who?

I climbed and I peered under the pines, my axe as keen as my eyes. I climbed until lights twinkled in the valley below, the dusk settling not long past midday. The smoke curling from chimneys, the holy thrust of the church, an ocean, a world away. No icicle could match the one up my spine at the faint canticle afar, the distant howl of the wolf. A challenge. An invitation. Had the