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    The Dark Issue 22: The Dark, #22
    The Dark Issue 22: The Dark, #22
    The Dark Issue 22: The Dark, #22
    Ebook88 pages1 hour

    The Dark Issue 22: The Dark, #22

    By Carlie St. George, Helen Marshall, George Salis and Livia Llewellyn

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    About this ebook

    Each month The Dark brings you the best in dark fantasy and horror! Edited by award winning editors Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace and brought to you by Prime Books, this issue includes two all-new stories and two reprints:

    “If We Survive the Night” by Carlie St. George
    “Caro in Carno” by Helen Marshall (reprint)
    “The Thinker” by George Salis
    “The Mysteries” by Livia Llewellyn (reprint)

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrime Books
    Release dateFeb 23, 2017
    ISBN9781386504658
    The Dark Issue 22: The Dark, #22

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      Book preview

      The Dark Issue 22 - Carlie St. George

      THE DARK

      Issue 22 • March 2017

      If We Survive the Night by Carlie St. George

      Caro in Carno by Helen Marshall

      The Thinker by George Salis

      The Mysteries by Livia Llewellyn

      Cover Art: Ghost Cowboy by breakermaximus

      ISSN 2332-4392.

      Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace.

      Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

      Copyright © 2017 by Prime Books.

      www.thedarkmagazine.com

      If We Survive the Night

      by Carlie St. George

      It’s autumn, and all the dead girls are kneeling in the yard. The sun is orange, low in the sky. It is Afternoon Contrition.

      Heather doesn’t know what year it is. She died in 1987: fucked out on a camp cot, sticky and unprepared. Not that anyone can prepare for a masked man and a screwdriver through the ear, but at least Mike didn’t have his tits out. At least he got the chance to run.

      Of course, Mike didn’t make it, either. Harper confirmed it, but Heather already knew: she’s been around long enough to know what kind of people survive the night. But Mike isn’t at the house. None of the boys are. It’s only the dead girls and the angel, walking between them, judging.

      The angel is made from marble, and inexplicable, white feathers trail in his wake. He stands above her, perfect, glorious. Heather. Will you repent?

      Heather spits in his face. Or, she thinks about it. A year ago, she would have done—had done—without regret.

      Repent, Heather. If you are pure of heart, you will be forgiven.

      Heather will never be forgiven. Rarely anyone is, no matter how sorry they are, how broken, how pure they try to be. The only girls who leave this house are not girls at all but puppets, limp, folded flaps of cloth that only expand into the shape the angel makes them.

      Heather’s afraid to be forgiven.

      The new girl arrives at dinner. Megan barely glances up—another dead white girl, not exactly news, and she hates the introductory stories: I had sex, and I died. I did drugs, and I died. I’m black, and I died.

      There are twelve girls at the house—thirteen now—and eleven of them are white. Pretty standard, Harper had said when she’d arrived, pale and shaking and bleeding from the back. "As victims, white people outnumber PoC, like, 10-1. Course, that’s just cause the final girl is always white, so all her white parents, teachers, and buddies die too, along with her one black friend, or the Asian stoner who brought the music."

      Megan had been the one black friend. Funny, to think that’s all she boiled down to.

      They called yours the Waco Cheerleader Massacre, Harper had continued, though Megan hadn’t asked. Only three victims were cheerleaders, though, and that’s including you.

      Jen?

      Sure, she made it. Final girl. Brave little toaster.

      That’s good, at least. Mostly that’s good.

      Looks like the Welcome Wagon’s arrived, Heather says sourly, stabbing her lasagna. Megan glances up and sees Cindy greeting the new girl. She’d welcomed Megan, too, once upon a time, answered all her questions, showed her the bathrooms, the meal room, the open graves. And when Midnight Penance had come, Cindy ran without looking back.

      Megan doesn’t blame her. It’s the instinct. It still takes over, even after all this time.

      Glass breaks, and Megan’s breath catches—but it’s only Harper, staring at the new girl. Milk and broken shards all around her feet.

      The new girl steps forward. Harper?

      But. Harper pushes up her glasses, like that might make someone else appear. You should have survived. I did the research. Why didn’t you survive?

      The new girl has red hair, and a hole in the back of her head. Impaled, probably.

      I did survive, the new girl says, crying. "I survived, and I died anyway."

      Harper makes Abby a cup of tea. It’s a soothing liquid, the universal sign for calm the hell down, and Abby thinks it’d be a lot more successful if the girl who made it hadn’t taken a fire axe to the back exactly one year ago.

      It had been Abby’s ex-boyfriend who’d killed Harper. He’d killed eleven people, actually, but not Abby—Abby had shot Ethan three times in the chest and then once in the head, just to make sure. They had to give Abby a lot of tea that night. But she came through it, she survived, she went to therapy six times a week and moved away to college so she could start fresh—

      —Only to find someone wearing Ethan’s reptilian mask in her dorm. She opened her mouth to scream. He shoved a piece of rebar through it.

      Abby sits on a sofa, sips her tea, and waits for it to make sense.

      The tan girl with the Farrah hair—Cindy, Abby thinks, or Cathy—is sitting near her feet, peering up, uncomfortably close. Her eyes are fine china blue and blink inconsistently, like a broken doll. Did you start doing drugs? Or have sex?

      I told you, Harper says impatiently. Sex doesn’t matter anymore. The first documented non-virgin to survive a killing spree was back in 1981, and final girls have regularly survived losing their virginity since 1996.

      1995, a cheerleader says. There are three different cheerleaders here. This one is tall and black and wearing a red crop top uniform. Abby notices a frayed yellow cord around the girl’s wrist. There’s blood spattered all over it.

      Really? Harper asks, surprised. I thought—

      You must have done something wrong, Cindy/Cathy says. You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t.

      I didn’t do anything, Abby snaps, even though she’s not always sure that’s true. She knows what people said, after Ethan. She knows how they looked at her. "Anyway, I don’t even know where here is."

      She turns to Harper, the only familiar face. They’d never been friends, but they’d held hands under the bleachers, shaking as Ethan killed the Homecoming Queen. You said, you said this was Purgatory, but I—

      A girl laughs. She has blonde crimped hair and heavy eyeliner and a bloody ear she keeps tugging on. This is Hell, the girl says. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.

      It’s Purgatory, Cindy/Cathy hisses. If we repent, if we’re forgiven—

      The lights flicker, and suddenly several girls are on their feet. What is it? Abby asks. What’s happening?

      Cindy/Cathy smiles with her wet, broken doll eyes.

      Penance, she says.

      Heather is the first to die that night. A girl falls, running through the woods, and Heather stops to help her. She takes a knife to the spine for it.

      Harper waits until another girl screams in the distance, then climbs down the tree and steps around Heather’s body. Staying in the tree indefinitely never works; she’s tried it before. She’s tried everything before. Nothing works.

      She goes back to the house and finds Abby in the kitchen, clinging to the telephone. Her eyes are showing too

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