The Dark Issue 107: The Dark, #107

By James Bennett, Carina Bissett, Steve Rasnic Tem and Michael Kelly

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:

 

"Vivisepulture" by James Bennett
"Water Like Broken Glass" by Carina Bissett (reprint)
"Imago" by Steve Rasnic Tem
"Dead But Dreaming Still" by Michael Kelly (reprint)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Mar 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224538843

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 107 • April 2024

Vivisepulture by James Bennett

Water Like Broken Glass by Carina Bissett

Imago by Steve Rasnic Tem

Dead But Dreaming Still by Michael Kelly

Cover Art: man stands on boat visiting fantasy village by Tithi Luadthong

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2024 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

Vivisepulture

by James Bennett

Vivisepulture (noun): the practice of burying someone alive.

The ghosts are loud tonight. Eric hears them howling around the house in the wind, but mostly inside his own head. If you asked him, Eric would say he doesn’t believe in ghosts. Like a million other folks, he’s far from special in that. He believes in emptiness though. Ask him and he’d tell you that a ghost is just a memory, a vacant lot filled with the debris of dead feelings. Paul said so once, after reading some book or other. And Eric has thought that way ever since Paul passed three years ago, leaving him to wash up alone on the shores of his late forties, clutching the crushed tin can of his heart and wondering, wondering how the hell he’s supposed to start over. Now that the flat stomach of his thirties has become a bowling ball under his shirt. Now his hair is streaked with grey. Now he doesn’t have the ready, fuck-it-all smile that made Paul fall for him all those years ago, that cold sweet year up north. None of which saved Paul John Rodriguez (1979–2024) from the car crash. A coal truck had skewed on ice, flipped and crushed the roof of his Ford. Crushed them both, even though Eric was miles away choosing tiles for the bathroom refit and didn’t know it until the police showed up at his door an hour later.

‘Your husband is dead,’ they said. Just like that. Didn’t even ask if he wanted to sit down first. A faint air of disdain had hung over the porch. They’d have preferred a wife. Normality. It showed in the officers’ faces. Somehow, Paul’s death was less to them. And Eric was less than that. You can forgive Eric for not having a particularly spiritual outlook. Eric knows what it means to be alone.

But tonight the ghosts are loud, he’s weary of TV dinners and his own sorry company, and so he decides to go out. The trouble is it isn’t the house that’s haunted. Maybe a couple of Cuba Libres will silence the noise. He isn’t expecting much. Enough to wash down the taste of processed mac ‘n cheese and Xanax, and send him into sleep where (he thinks) the dead can’t touch him. That’s on his mind when he steps off the subway and, collar up like a cartoon crook, slips into the downtown gay district. To a bar he’s never been before. A bar without memories.

A bar with a name he won’t later recall. Music rumbles, a dirge through the floor. The place reeks of Le Male and cigarettes. There’s a toilet that he reckons stinks worse. Probably a dark room that stinks worse than that. Whenever a guy walks by his booth, Eric sucks in his gut, not that anyone is looking. Most folks are looking at their phones. Eric is invisible. How ironic is that? Haunted and a ghost. He’s forty going on fifty and on the scrap heap along with the rest. The gay living dead. He tells himself it’s a place that Paul would hate and that makes it better somehow. He’ll order another drink, then head on home, he thinks.

He’s thinking it when the guy slides into the booth and sits opposite him.

Drowning your sorrows?

The guy makes a joke about the necessity of hooch in a place like this. He’s trying to take the edge off it, but Eric is too in shock to laugh. Noah was hammering nails into wood the last time anyone approached him like this. Even guys in the office only approached him with documents and sales figures and tedious chat about their weekends. Mundane, hetero lives.

He manages to cough out a reply. It isn’t a good one.

Or myself.

The guy nods. It’s disarming enough for Eric to take a look at him. The guy doesn’t get up to walk away. Not yet. A second later there’s the fear that this might lead somewhere. Lord, they might even fuck and how the hell is he supposed to remember how to do that? A second after that, he realises that the guy is a corpse.

I hear drowning isn’t as bad as they say. Try being smashed in the face with a claw hammer.

He has Eric’s full attention. Eric is sitting bolt upright against faux red leather and choking on his rum. He can see that the guy is his type, sure. Or at least he used to be. His fringe was probably blond once. His denim jacket sings ‘top’, but it’s had its time in the sun. He’s what? Thirty, thirty five? Hard to tell. Pallor mortis is quite the makeover, he thinks like a dick. Bloated lips smile at him, a shade of blue that Eric knows isn’t . . . Uh. That word again. Normal. There’s the noticeable stink of him too, an earthy sweetness that’s far from sweet. When the guy takes a sip of his drink, Eric can see the straw through a hole in his cheek, the hint of tendons and a black tongue. Rot is eating him away. And,