The Dark Issue 103: The Dark, #103

By James Bennett, Ai Jiang, Jorja Osha and Kristina Ten

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 two all-new stories and two reprints:

 

"A Strange & Terrible Wonder" by James Bennett
"The Sisters" by Ai Jiang (reprint)
"The Fish's Wife" by Jorja Osha
"The Dreadful and Specific Monster of Starosibirsk" by Kristina Ten (reprint)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Nov 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223277583

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 103 • December 2023

A Strange & Terrible Wonder by James Bennett

The Sisters by Ai Jiang

The Fish’s Wife by Jorja Osha

The Dreadful and Specific Monster of Starosibirsk by Kristina Ten

Cover Art: Monster Head Hiding in a Open Cardboard Box by Tithi Luadthong

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2023 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

A Strange & Terrible Wonder

by James Bennett

Suffolk , 1557

O Domine! Such was the cry in Abacuck’s heart up on the roof of St Mary’s. Save us.

The steeple above was all the answer he needed, a dark, judgemental finger. Treacherous his path was, slippery as the tiles under his boots, the removal of which the rector had charged him with that very morn, keen to curb the blow of the coming storm as much as earthly powers would allow. ‘For they hath sown the wind, and they shalt reap the whirlwind. Hosea eight seven’, quothed Goodryke in Latin (the queen had hitherto banned all the Bibles in their own tongue), and clapped his trembling young clerk on the back as if he thought his words a comfort. Then the rector, portly and grey, had shuffled off with the grimmest of smiles, keen to fettle the nave and dust off the gospels for his urgent sermon when the clock struck noon. Such a squall was rare, and prodigious—too much so to pass up the opportunity to strike the fear of God into the three hundred odd souls who dwelt in Bongay, the old market town huddled on the edge of the broads. Thankfully, he failed to mark the way that Ab cringed, the colour that rose in his cheeks, and to be out from under the chance of it, even up a poles-long rickety ladder struck the lad as a mercy.

I know it by heart, father, he might’ve said, and he pictured his sweet Lament once more by the mill, the memory of her blank gaze making him wince, the living proof of his transgression. Thou need not tell me.

To add to his woes, Ab descried in the roiling black clouds the likeness of a cowled figure, dwarfing the church in its gusty approach. Curtains of rain veiled the willows that prayed along the meander of the river, lending the impression of a moth-eaten robe. Lightning scythed in the thunderhead, illuminating the guise of a hollow skull, giant in its proportions. Death hi’self came marching over the fens that surrounded the town and for his sins, Abacuck ‘Die-Well’ Temple reckoned he came at his invitation.

Zounds! It were her love I wanted. Instead I court damnation.

It would not do to look down and the storm presented no cheer. The doings of the town below, however, gave him faint hope. The small ruined castle had lowered her flags, the new hotchpotch one symbolising the union of England and France, all crowned lions and stripes and fleur-de-lis, Bloody Mary having wed Philip the Prudent. Men were nailing shutters in the whisking arrows of thatch while goodwives shooed geese and goats into barns, most of the townsfolk already garbed in their Sunday best. Daundelyon, the tavern keeper, had unhooked the sign of the Queen’s Head lest it go sailing into the air and land in the reeking basket of the midden. The whittawer had taken in his skins, the frames outside his tannery left stripped and skeletal. Out in her garden on Crooked Lane, the decidedly uncrooked and buxom form of Grissel Cobbe was bringing in as much veg as possible, and the odd handful of flowers—monkshood and belladonna, Ab reckoned—all plucked and stuffed into her apron. That way lay further cause for shame, for it was Grissel who’d given him the book in the first place and extracted a saucy price to boot, more wood on the fire under him. With a blush he looked elsewhere. Folk in hemp and hose looked fit to drain the town square well, buckets passing from hand to hand, sloshing back and forth. The old mend-bones, Mother Scrogg, went hobbledygee for her washing, her petticoats flapping on the line like a stricken ship at sea.

Up in his precarious eyrie, it pleased Ab to think that all should endure the tempest and remain none the wiser to the witchery he’d performed, the matter of the book and the binding. His business with Lament Wyddowsoun would stay locked behind his lips and his imminent descent into Hell pass unmarked by Goodryke, his guardian. The shame of it alone, the thought that the man who’d taken him in one winter morn from the rectory steps and raised him as his own should learn of it . . . why, it was almost enough to make him fling himself headfirst into the graveyard.

But he’d undo his error yet, by God! Unlike Rose Allin and those other poor souls down in Colchester, Mary wouldn’t see him burn for heresy, no martyr he. This was his respair, the hope in his foolish and blasphemous heart, that the storm would sweep on south and leave him and his spell a secret, its