The Dark Magazine

by Prime Books

  “My father is watching us right now,” he tells me sullenly. “He’ll go get the others if there’s any trouble. The deal’s broken now, isn’t it? We don’t want no more of it. You shouldn’t be here.”

  But I ignore all this. The agreement isn’t necessary any longer. I’ve found a way to manage on my own. I have looked to my studies just as Nan said.

  “Don’t you want to know what your mother had to tell you?”

  He looks at me uncertainly. I know this is cruel, that I’m teasing him a little, but he was cruel to me once as well. I can’t help it.

  “Very well then.”

  “Wait!” he calls as I begin to cross the street. “Please! Wait, miss! What did she—” he’s almost shuddering now “—did she say something to me? Did she give you a message?”

  I turn to look at him once more. He’s standing at the edge of the porch, straining forward. I can see that he’s breathing very heavily and his eyes are wet and shining like glass.

  “She said she loves you very much. She says she longs to hold you in her arms once more. Will you come to her?”

  I do not tell him the truth. I know what she whispers. She whispers, “ Morieris ”—and so it is, but not yet, not yet.

  “I don’t know what you mean, miss.” I watch his Adam’s apple bob up and down.

  “You know well enough, Tom.” His lips are very red. It is lonely without Nan, oh, not so lonely as you would think—I have my studies after all!—but still lonely enough.

  “Come if you like, Tom,” I say, smiling my very best smile. From here I can almost taste the salt of his tears. How magnificent you are, I want to tell him! You carry within yourself the stuff of eternal life—and yet you shed it so easily! “The way goes down and down and down but it isn’t so difficult. And we shall be ever so happy to have you join us for a while.”

  Originally published in The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, edited by Paula Guran.

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  About the Author

  Helen Marshall is a critically acclaimed author, editor, and Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University. Her first collection of fiction, Hair Side, Flesh Side , which won the Sydney J Bounds Award in 2013, emerged from her work as a book historian. Rather than taking the long view of history, her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After , negotiated very personal issues of legacy and tradition, creating myth-infused worlds where “love is as liable to cut as to cradle, childhood is a supernatural minefield, and death is ‘the slow undoing of beautiful things’ ” ( Quill&Quire , starred review). It won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award in 2015. Her first novel, Everything that is Born , will be released by Random House Canada in 2018.

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  The Thinker

  George Salis | 6045 words

  He waited for the knock on the door. Not the front, but the padlocked one upstairs, which led into the guest bedroom. Even with rags stuffed into the air vents and tape pressed over the cracks of the door, a stench percolated throughout the house. The stench of a gradual resurrection. Before they stored their father in there, because of the decay, Lars’ sister, Tabby, would wash and change their father’s clothes, comb his hair, and scrub his body, as she had done with her dolls many years ago. By the end, he had been so subservient to his sickness that he took the posture of a king: slouched in a threadbare La-Z-Boy with putrefied foot extended and opposite leg bent, starkly exposing the patella, one hand equally extended, and the other pressed against a pudding face, a spine as solid as his gelatinous body, but also charged with the tension of an ill omen. Having lived a life of accumulated sin, as all men and pretending saints do, the sword of Damocles hung by a single horse hair above his skull, which was, aside from a civic crown of ashen bristle, naked in the most fragile way. Occasionally, Lars and Tabby swore they saw it, the sword, albeit ethereal, sometimes taking the shape of a syringe, other times a ray of holy light. Regardless, they knew the seed of revival had been planted in his heart through their prayers. They had constantly checked for the most distant of pulses in the neck or wrist, for the subtlest of exhales from the mouth or nostrils, falling to their knees and praying with more fervor, not only with their minds and souls but also with every inch of the mortal flesh that they were consigned to occupy for the time being. They had faith that it would happen.

  On the second day of October in 1517, after a generous amount of rain, farmer Mathew Wall lay stiff with rigor mortis, in a coffin (made by the one-eyed carpenter that the villagers in Hertfordshire called Cyclopes, even though he always thought of himself as Hephaestus, but, as fate would have it, he never did become a blacksmith) which the solemn pallbearers carried in a procession toward the church of St. Mary the Virgin. As they marched, one of them slipped on a dewy pile of leaves, causing the coffin to fall and land upside-down on the cobbled path. Amid the toll of the funeral bell and wails of mourners, including Wall’s green-eyed fiancée who always maintained a faux emanation of royalty, the pallbearers rushed to flip the box upright. When they did, they heard a polite succession of two raps on the lid from within, as if the person inside was hesitant about disturbing the lives of those whose privacy was the whole of the world, of the living, so they opened the coffin and Mathew Wall, resurrected, went on to marry his fiancée, providing her with as much as he could on the meager funds of a modest farmer until he died of a heart attack twenty-four years later.

  Lars and his sister had tried to catch it early after they noticed a foot ulcer brought on by their father’s diabetes, bright red and moist, located Achilles-like on his heel. When they asked if they should take him to a hospital, he refused. “God will cure me,” said their father in his soporific voice. “God through you.” Tabby leaned in closer to him, holding his vein-puckered hand. She blinked at the caress of his pickled breath when he said, “My children. Show me that I didn’t make you for nothing.” From then on they diligently cared for him, while he, prostrate in his La-Z-Boy, paid full attention to the infomercials and The 700 Club on television. With each day the ulcer became more recalcitrant to their prayers. It expanded, deepened, rotted, until it was as though, in mid-charge, their father had been struck by a tiny, pestilent meteor, covered in the blood of the Hydra. The edges of the crater went through a strange process of ripening, between sickly colors of green and yellow and blue, until culminating into a crusty black, lubricated by inhuman liquids and exuding a sour, viscid stink. “Don’t worry,” he told them. “This is simply a test. We are, all of us, being tested.” Tabby repressed her tears while he continued, “You’re my children, and you’ll do what is right.”

  In the kitchen, while a pot roast cooked in the oven, Lars whispered to Tabby, “This might be the work of Satan.”

  She absentmindedly looked through the dirty glow of the oven’s window. The hunk of amorphous meat reminded her of the foot. “What do we do?”

  He placed a nail-gnawed finger on her temple. The angles of her features were inclined toward the tip of her nose, like a nimbus. “Pray, have faith. We’re only pawns.”

  She couldn’t meet his eyes, those crenulations of Giotto blue singed with chemical drops of brown, so she looked down at the white and olive tiles. “It’s too soon.”

  Lars kneeled a bit to look up into her water-tensed eyes and she closed them. “Not if it’s part of His plan. If he goes, we should be thankful. If he’s healed, or later returns to us, then—”

  “We should be thankful.” She opened her eyes and the tears seemed to vanish.

  Lars’ finger slid down the side of her face and rested in the gluteal cleft of her chin. “Yes.”

  She envied his assurance. He spoke, she thought, as if he had all the answers by the paradoxical means of repudiating them, leaving what was left of their family as motes of dust in the sunbeam of God’s guidance. Yet she also acknowledged a hierarchy in the family, their father the neck below the Father’s head, Jesus and the Spirit as busied hands, Lars the torso, and she the feet. Variou
s other parts, like their mother, had been dismembered to prevent impurity to the whole. She told herself often, without the feet the totem of her admittedly iconoclastic image would collapse. Her existence, her perseverance, was a necessity.

  Their father used a substantial portion of his daily strength to call, “Is dinner about ready?”

  Over the course of their father’s illness and beyond, Lars and Tabby ate and slept little while in service to Him.

  On the fourteenth day of December in 1650, after being accused of infanticide, when in fact the illegitimate conception (by means of her master’s licentious grandson) had yielded an unfortunate yet guiltless stillborn, the domestic servant Anne Greene was sentenced to hang by the neck until death. After the sentence was carried out, including Greene’s request that her cohorts pull and beat upon her dangling body so as to ensure said death, she was sent as a cadaver for medical dissection at Oxford University. Upon the first incision, equidistant of two bloated breasts, she groaned, forcing the startled doctors to do everything they could to help the revival process, which involved, among other procedures, a tobacco smoke enema in order to warm the bowels. Thus, Anne Greene, resurrected, had her innocence proven by the divine powers of God, while also attaining a morsel of fame with the publication by academics of several pamphlets, such as the aptly titled Newes from the Dead, or a True and Exact Narration of the Miraculous Deliverance of Anne Greene (Oxford, 1651), and went on to consensually produce and rear a brood of three healthy children with a semi-respectable man until she died of unreported causes fifteen years later.

  Despite the perpetual prayers, further complications arose when a stroke occurred and their father’s facial expressions became lugubrious and involuntary, like an invisible finger stirring wet sand. “It’s tingling,” he repeated several times. All Tabby could do was caress the side of his face and murmur to him like the melting and derelict being he was. They wondered if this might be a kind of saintly death, the symptoms of celestial passage, from adult to infant, from human to puddle, from this world to the next, and if they should release him under God’s will, until their father gurgled, “Help.” It was the urgency and less the slurred construction of the syllable that made them shiver off such nebulous thoughts and continue channeling His will through clasped hands and closed eyes, through the power of the private mind in silent speech. This was one of the few situations in which Lars and Tabby wanted Him to truly intervene for a sacred purpose. Throughout their lives they petulantly prayed for the cliché and unwarranted: more toys, better school grades, knowledge of social secrets, prestigious careers, copious amounts of wealth, even the punishment of their mother, whom they all branded as an adulterous deserter. They had prayed mainly for things of the material, fleeting vanities that cannot and should not be taken into the afterlife. Rightly, they were ashamed of such paltry wishes. Naturally, they did not manifest. Lars was a manager at McDonald’s and his girlfriend routinely left him for other men, only to retreat into his arms weeks later, and he was too hurt to accept her actions as real, convincing himself that she went on vacations up north with her family, as she was currently doing. Tabby, having had only one serious boyfriend during her senior year of high school, spent most of her time at Pine Towers, a retirement community, putting up with the rarely-wise babbling of the nearly expired, and when they finally did pass away, they were replaced by replicas that were just as loquacious, if not more so. They both worked only a couple of dollars above minimum wage. God’s will is as mysterious as it is virtuous.

  After their father had fallen asleep to the southern drawl of Pat Robertson, Tabby turned off the television and they began to pray over the wounded area. Their father’s mouth was agape, drool dried at the corners, one side of his upper lip permanently tensed, baring a yellow cuspid. They had become more or less habituated to the foot’s musk, it was familiar, like the natural smells of one’s body that only strangers can identify.

  “Is it working . . . ?” she spoke with closed eyes.

  “What?” said Lars.

  She opened an eye, the other still closed. “This.”

  Lars had ceased praying and was scrutinizing her. “If anything, we’re the problem.”

  It was the closest he came to admitting that she was the problem. He had meant to say it just then, yet his tongue wouldn’t curl that way. He loved his sister but her mere presence became a bother to him, not out of any pet peeve or idiosyncrasy, on the contrary, it was how she emanated an implicit questioning he found almost universal among outsiders, those who didn’t share or defend the faith. He could see the question marks running through her veins as sickle cells, the ellipses floating across and within the vitreous fluid of her eyes. Cataclysms and catastrophes did not shake faith, his father had once told him, it was the little things one needed to be cautious of, persistent drops of water upon the forehead, paper cuts on the skin between the fingers, such was the true cause of razed empires.

  He looked at their father, the flesh of his eyelids as dark as soot. He turned and fixed his eyes on the muted green of Tabby’s.

  “Or maybe you are,” he added.

  His nerve had gotten the better of him, and as he said it he knew he was wrong. She had been on the receiving end of faith healing during childhood, a living testament to His power. Over the course of weeks, she writhed with a fever that diminished the light of her consciousness for hours at a time, turned it into a strobe. As she had told Lars herself, all she remembered was the hum, the literal vibration of his and their parents’ prayers, and how it created a cocoon of cooling and warming. She had opened her eyes to light upon light and saw God, who simultaneously spoke in the voice of her brother, mother, and father, “To feel pain is to feel the sacrifice of the Lamb upon the cross. To feel love is to realize the veracity of what I have told you.” The face of God, lambent and ultra-dimensional, leaned forward and kissed her brow, morphed her sweat into blood, and she awoke with radiant eyes, healed. Their father still possessed the kerchief stained with her blood-sweat in a velvet-lined box on his dresser, and, ever since, he had taken to pressing it against his nose and inhaling each night before bed, claiming it smelled of blessed rose oil. After the onset of his sickness, Tabby had put the kerchief in his hand, closing his fingers around it, but she continued to find it dropped on the floor later in the day. With a crack in her heart she had put the dirty rag back in its box.

  “Me?” Her jaw descended and she placed her tongue into the corner of her cheek. She let her clasped hands break apart and fall. “When have I ever stopped caring for him, praying for him? You think my job will want to take me back after missing so many days?”

  “Is that what your care about? Your job?”

  “No . . . if you’re so pure then why don’t you heal him yourself?”

  She stood up and flicked on the lights, for the house had dimmed with the sunset so gradually as to be unperceived.

  “What are you looking at?” asked Lars.

  She recognized how still their father was. The way one of the octogenarian residents at her work went. Eternally still, yet seemingly alive. Resting, but not. Seeing the gray blanket cover his corpulent stomach, his foot, so decomposed by now as to be another kind of limb devoid of any discernible function, an un-foot, and his face, like that of a baby’s in mid-laugh, or mid-fright, made her cry. Lars touched underneath their father’s spongy wrist. No, he didn’t fall asleep, but simply died. The expectation of further instructions or clarifying wisdom was squelched. Tabby began to snatch at her hair and wail without reserve, because her father wasn’t around to be disappointed.

  On the twenty-ninth day of June in 1914, the hypnotic-eyed mystic and ill-reputed sinner Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, otherwise known as the Mad Monk, was sloppily disemboweled through repetitious stabs to the gut from an ex-concubine named Khionia Guseva as she hollered, “The antichrist is slain!” But slain he was not, for, resurrected, he went on to become the personal faith healer and rumored advisor of the Russian czar and
his wife after healing their son Alexis of his hemophilia, but a peasant’s unusual proximity to royalty, along with his questionable reputation concerning a carnal cult, inter alia, resulted in a curious banquet summons. And so, on the twenty-ninth day of December in 1916, Rasputin unknowingly dined with a group of conspirators at Prince Felix Yusupov’s palace, where he ingested cakes and wine laced with cyanide, merely becoming inebriated. The conspirators, which included the czar’s first cousin, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, settled for repeatedly shooting Rasputin in the back. Having still little effect, they clubbed him until he ceased breathing and then restrained him with chains, wrapped him in a thick blanket, and tossed him, whose name means ‘where two rivers meet,’ into the icy flow of the Nevà, whereupon three days later Rasputin was spotted, pulled ashore, and pronounced drowned, but not before breaking his restraints underwater and splaying his arms like Christ. In a final act of divine performance, the imperial Russian family was assassinated in its entirety amid the revolution, as the Mad Monk predicted fifteen months earlier.

  They had placed him in the middle of the guest bedroom, not comfortably in the bed so as to encourage rest, but in one of the stiff wooden chairs from the dining room table. Their father’s shoulders drooped, arms parallel with the stiles of the chair, legs somewhat bowed, head bent backward, fully exposing the reptilian vertebrae of his Adam’s apple. Afterward, Lars and Tabby heard bumps and creaks in the dark, which they had always ascribed to ghosts and demons until now. They prayed in bed every night and knew they were hearing the acute and magnified sound of atoms vibrating, of antibodies mobilizing, of cells lighting up. With this static of life, this electricity, their faith was strengthening.

  Their family stood out in the neighborhood because of the green Astro van they kept in the driveway. Their father had adorned it in bold-lettered verses, such as Proverbs 3:5-7, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths. Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and depart from evil.” In order to project God’s symbol of redemption, of His love and justice, their father carved crosses into the headlights. After their mother left six years ago, their father had taken the newly-bedizened vehicle across the state on an impromptu mission of proselytizing. Lars and Tabby, old enough to have been able to contribute to such a noble cause, were frantic that he left them without even mentioning the journey, other than a last-minute note on the kitchen counter. Three weeks later he had returned and with remorse in his voice he said, “I couldn’t take you, my children, because this will be a pilgrimage you must eventually take on your own, when you’re older. You’ll know the time by His light. You’ll be both sundial and shadow.” Other than this mystifying remark, he never expounded on those three weeks, and Lars and Tabby imagined he must have received many ridiculing harangues from the heathens, because he kept mostly to himself afterward, only expressing his beliefs to his children like hand-me-down items, nostalgic and sentimental, with little worth to those outside the bloodline. The van, though, remained in its ostentatious condition, and so he left the burden of conversion to the eyesight of drivers, passengers, and pedestrians, whom either paid no attention or gave sun-glared glances. But when weeks went by without their father driving it, the neighbors began to inquire. Before that, in order to feel closer to her father and to Him, Tabby started driving the vehicle to work. On a humid evening, when she was transferring groceries from the bed of the van into the kitchen, their neighbor, Barney, a Vietnam veteran with a prosthetic leg, waved from his porch as he usually did, but then began hobbling toward her.