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    The Dark Issue 41: The Dark, #41
    The Dark Issue 41: The Dark, #41
    The Dark Issue 41: The Dark, #41
    Ebook73 pages1 hour

    The Dark Issue 41: The Dark, #41

    By Nelson Stanley, Chaz Brenchley, Julia August and Michael Harris Cohen

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    About this ebook

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

    "Dukkering" by Nelson Stanley
    "The Fold in the Heart" by Chaz Brenchley (reprint)
    "Psychopomps of Central London" by Julia August
    "Erasing Tony" by Michael Harris Cohen (reprint)

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrime Books
    Release dateSep 28, 2018
    ISBN9781386541745
    The Dark Issue 41: The Dark, #41

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      Book preview

      The Dark Issue 41 - Nelson Stanley

      THE DARK

      Issue 41 • October 2018

      Dukkering by Nelson Stanley

      The Fold in the Heart by Chaz Brenchley

      Psychopomps of Central London by Julia August

      Erasing Tony by Michael Harris Cohen

      Cover Art: Hi Mr. Jack! 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

      Dukkering

      by Nelson Stanley

      My mother could do it from the Rorschach of tea-leaves, or from the metropolitan map of your palm, or from knots tied on a piece of string. She’d do it from the tiny flecks of colour on the edges of your iris, clamping you between her work-roughened hands and craning her head back, narrowing her eyes to peer long-sightedly into your soul. She’d do it from cards, if they were to hand, if she judged you the sort to be impressed by such props: ordinary playing cards. She favoured a yellowing pack she’d inherited from her grandmother that must’ve been printed some time in the early nineteenth century—greasy to the touch, fraying at the edges, kept wrapped when not in use in a dusty scrap of moth-eaten black silk—but I know for a fact she could do it from anything made of pasteboard and divided into suits, for I saw her do it once from a deck of pneumatic cards with an advert for P&O Ferries painted on the back, a souvenir from some distant relation’s visit abroad in 1912.

      She did other things so we wouldn’t go hungry, too: hawking door-to-door, whether she was selling heather or lace or the pegs she carved the old way, from hazel, a notch hacked in the end, a small ribbon of tin cut from an old can pulled tight around the top. She told the Gadjé we made the lace ourselves, but actually acquired it by the yard from a little place in East Ham. She was too clumsy to make the wooden chrysanthemums her sisters made, or the paper flowers fashioned from toilet paper, privet and silver paint that her cousins churned out by the dozen: her pegs fell apart so rapidly that she could never return to the same place twice and the lace she shorted people on, two-feet six for a yard.

      She was too proud to do like our Kennick relatives did, and clean floors and wash doorsteps, and besides, the Gadjé would never trust her inside their houses, afraid she’d chore the silver off the table or the babies out their cribs. What she could do, though, was dukker better than anyone, twisting the threads of your hopes and fears into a life-line that she’d anchor somewhere so solid in the future that you felt you could drag yourself towards it, hand-over-hand, dangling above the awful yawning chasm of the possible.

      It was all lies, though. You’ve got to keep that in mind. Artifice and lies.

      Summer we’d work the market gardens down south, then September hop picking down Kent, all of us in the fields, gathering the papery cones, fingers stained yellow from lupulin, snot the colour of goldenrod on our handkerchiefs when we sneezed. Winter we’d gel on up to Walworth, the men going out to scrounge work on the docks, the women out hawking.

      It was in the winter—when the skies melted into the smoke from the campfires and the fallen leaves turned greasy along the edges of the roads—when the worried-seeming, well-to-do women would turn up, wives of the sort of men who’d not have my mother call at their doorsteps. They’d hitch up their New Look crinolines out of the mud, pull their shawls tighter around their shoulders and pick their way as daintily or haughtily as they could through the outskirts of the camp, seeking out the vardo with the yellow sign painted on it; they’d try not to notice the gangs of little chavvis and chavvos singing nasty rhymes in Romani chib. They’d hold themselves stiffly upright, unflinching even as the dogs reared up barking and snarling, snapping their chains taut.

      Once inside the vardo, they’d sit very carefully on the edges of our chairs, their backs very straight, as if contact with the antimacassars would leave a mortal stain. They drank the tea my mother made for them watchfully, trying to hide their surprise at the age and fineness of the porcelain. I’d squeeze into the dusty gap between the chest of drawers and the vardo wall and peek out at them, through the dim light falling through the clerestories; they fell into two general types. Most evoked a mild bitterness: silly, frazzled women, bored by the ease their station in life imparted, looking to add a bit of colour to the drear confines of their social lives. A few evoked something like pity in me, for I believed they visited my mother to seek relief from a kind of long slow sadness that marked them as surely as if they struggled under a weight.

      Most of the stuff they wanted to know about was quotidian: who’d get Mabel’s good China, whether Henry would recover from his cough, if our Johnny might finally get over his stammer and find love, where Auntie Violet’s keepsake had gone. Gossip, rumour, nothing that clawed the fabric of their lives.

      One of them was different. She came through the needling rain and biting cold of a November night, and outside the trailer, all across the atchava, the dogs began to howl like a fox had got in to the camp. The grais got to whinnying and snorting, and my mother sat up straight in her chair and pulled her shawl tightly around her shoulders. She turned the wick down on the lamp and put her knitting aside, glanced across to where I pretended to sleep in my bunk, at the

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