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    The Dark Issue 38: The Dark, #38
    The Dark Issue 38: The Dark, #38
    The Dark Issue 38: The Dark, #38
    Ebook65 pages1 hour

    The Dark Issue 38: The Dark, #38

    By Carrie Laben, Nadia Bulkin, Dare Segun Falowo and Ray Cluley

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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:

    "Sea Glass" by Carrie Laben
    "Empire Down" by Nadia Bulkin (reprint)
    "Vain Knife" by Dare Segun Falowo
    "The Swans" by Ray Cluley (reprint)

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrime Books
    Release dateJul 1, 2018
    ISBN9781386766681
    The Dark Issue 38: The Dark, #38

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      Book preview

      The Dark Issue 38 - Carrie Laben

      THE DARK

      Issue 38 • July 2018

      Sea Glass by Carrie Laben

      Empire Down by Nadia Bulkin

      Vain Knife by Dare Segun Falowo

      The Swans by Ray Cluley

      Cover Art: Playing with Fire by Gloom82 (Anton Semenov)

      ISSN 2332-4392.

      Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace.

      Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

      Copyright © 2018 by Prime Books.

      www.thedarkmagazine.com

      Sea Glass

      by Carrie Laben

      A windchime played through a crackling speaker. Frozen leaves kicked by tiny feet. Vida’s quarry—her fucking quarry, as if it was going to run away—had a sound distinctive enough, persistent enough, that she knew it was there even in the imperfect shifting darkness outside the circle of her flashlight.

      She was almost sure this wasn’t illegal. The park rules prohibited defacing real or personal property, taking flowers or plants, and littering. What she planned was the opposite of all that. But every chip of sea glass she scooped from the water’s edge was going to stop singing, and that seemed a little selfish.

      They really needed the money, though, and people on Etsy were paying ten, twenty bucks for bulk lots of sea glass. More if you sorted it by color and size. And it was free for the taking. Surely, she thought again, there was no law against taking litter off the beach. But she’d come at night anyway, bringing Louisa and Murph the yellow lab along with her for safety.

      She’d also brought a long-handled net, the kind you used to clean the pool if you lived in a suburb with a pool in the backyard and not in Astoria with your grad school friend and her grandma and her grandma’s dog. But the net wasn’t long enough to reach down to the river’s edge from the walkway that paralleled Shore Boulevard. They’d had to climb over the fence and down the seawall, Murph scuffling and sliding on the steep concrete, Vida and Lou bracing the toes of their sneakers and then jumping. It was darker down here, though a little light still glittered off the river. The singing was constant and they crunched where they stepped.

      Vida took a couple of steps, a couple of scoops, a couple of moments to pour the glass into a plastic shopping bag where it tinkled together one last time and went silent. She repeated that a couple of times. Then she stepped in something that squished instead of crunched.

      Murph darted towards the sudden smell and then away, which was all Vida needed to tell her that something was wrong. That dog had never darted away from raw hamburger in his life. And that was what she’d stepped in, now that she turned her flashlight on it. Pre-formed patties from a shitty grocery store, the kind textured with little divots just to show they hadn’t been made by human hands. There were more of them at the edge of the light. About a dozen all told, laid out in a series of concentric arcs that they’d just reached the edge of.

      Ugh. Lou had been a vegetarian from before they’d met, but there was more than that in the noise she made. And Vida agreed with her. There was something very wrong here, although the meat was pink and fresh and no bugs crawled on it. She shuddered and stuck her shoe in the water on impulse, as though the East River was going to make anything cleaner, and got a wet sock and another squish for her trouble. She turned her light to see what she’d stepped in now, and discovered that the patties went out under the water too, making the arcs into complete circles. The larger scope made it worse somehow.

      What the fuck! Vida began to back away. She was sorry she’d made a noise as soon as it left her lips, and Lou said nothing at all, just backed away with her until they both felt safe taking their eyes off the meat and running.

      They hadn’t really had a plan about getting out when they climbed down here, just a tacit agreement that it must be possible. Murph was running ahead of them down the shoreline and he soon reached a spot where there wasn’t enough space to stand between wall and water. The wall was a little less steep there, maybe.

      There was no way the dog was going to scrabble back up so they boosted him first, not an easy task. He was overfed and he didn’t like that his feet were suddenly off the ground, even in a good cause, so he squirmed. Louisa got kicked in the face and squeaked, but didn’t drop him.

      Vida turned her head to avoid a similar fate and caught a movement from the corner of her eye. Fluttering, close enough to see in this dark. A bird, plump as a pigeon but not pigeon-shaped in the beak or the wings. Speckled and showing a hint of dull red in the dark, so that she wondered if it had gotten into hamburger blood that had dried. It

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