[Dark Magazine 07] • The Dark Issue 7 by Magazine The Dark

Author:Magazine, The Dark [Magazine, The Dark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Dark Fantasy, Fantasy, Horror, magazine
Publisher: TDM Press
Published: 2015-02-16T20:09:21+00:00

Patricia Russo’s stories has been published at Fantasy and Chizine, and in many other zines and anthologies, including Corpse Blossoms, The Best of Not One of Us, and The Best of Talebones.

Welcome to Argentia

by Sandra McDonald

On land that was once peat and marsh, the Americans leave behind three asphalt highways into the sky.

They leave behind snazzy call signs, late-night radio banter, and flight paths to Europe over the icy North Atlantic. They leave behind their wharfs and dry docks, hangars and fuel tanks. They leave behind the gymnasium, mess halls, bowling alley, and barbershop, as well as the theater where Frank Sinatra and Phil Silvers once performed for the troops. They leave behind the night clubs where sailors danced with fisherman’s daughters from nearby Placentia and the hospital where nurses tended to frightened young German prisoners of war.

They leave behind the cozy homes of family housing, where children of the Cold War raced circles around the flagpoles and whispered about abandoned graves in the forest.

They leave behind concrete bunkers in the hillsides that had once hoarded ammunition, canned rations, and hospital supplies. They leave behind the building where hydrophones listened all through the night for Mikhail Gorbachev’s diminishing submarine fleet. They leave behind the buried cinders of the officer’s barracks that burned down and killed the sleeping men inside. They leave behind microscopic ashes deep in the harbor mud, remnants of the cigars Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill smoked on a ship’s deck as they forged grim pacts of war.

Also left behind are seaplane ramps #1 and #2. The service shop for ZP-14, the blimp squadron. The immense black anchor at the front gate and the sign that says, “Welcome to Argentia.” VHF transmitters that still send and receive, but only in a realm unheard by the living.

The Americans leave behind ghosts that Argentia herself, wounded and in pain, refuses to give up. Villagers, sailors, pilots and prisoners haunt her shores and forests, ponds and bogs. The most visible is Anna Cleary, who sometimes appears under a full moon with her stillborn babe clutched tight. No matter how hard she tries, she cannot mother the dead. The angriest spirit is Petty Officer Mark Barron, who drowned deep in the icy currents and rattles tiny bits of rock and metal whenever the living draw near.

Neither Petty Officer Barron nor Argentia were by nature vengeful, but their fury comes honestly.

Please understand that you are part of a story that began long ago, and your fate is already out of your hands.

Imagine a bitter February evening along a coastline where the incoming tide crashes into ancient cliffs. Thick with black oil and broken wreckage, the ocean churns with the abating chaos of a storm that is slowly moving to the east. The water smashes and sucks at the hundred and twenty sailors huddled together on a rock shelf in the cliffside, trying to drag them back to the watery doom their shipmates have already succumbed to.

Freezing and injured, their bare skin and sodden clothes scoured by salt, wind and ice, the weak survivors of the U.

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