Nightmare Magazine Issue 30 by Nightmare Magazine

Author:Nightmare Magazine [Nightmare Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Dark Fantasy, Short Stories
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2015-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Caspian Gray currently lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he shares a home with two humans and a small dachshund. He’s a used car salesman who has previously worked as a funeral director’s apprentice, a pet nutritionist, and an English teacher to a group of Korean engineers living in Japan. His work has appeared in magazines such as ChiZine, Interzone, and Odyssey.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

The Burned House

Lynda E. Rucker

One you’re at the yard . . .

The burned house stood at the back of a scrubby lot. If a house could be said to glower, then glower it did: rising from the ashes which were all that was left of its south face, sitting back on its haunches, its wooden front porch inexplicably wrapped in chicken wire (to keep out trespassers? to keep something in?), its second floor rearing up and threatening to topple.

The For Sale sign had been there forever — whoever had first put it there was probably dead by now — and punctuated the scene like a particularly unfunny joke. Nobody was ever going to buy the burned house.

Agnes Swithin, jogging through the chilly dusk, her breath steaming, slowed and then stopped before it. Her kneecap had begun to throb again. She clutched at the splintery fence with hands that looked older than she felt, the skin translucent over knots of prominent blue veins, and willed the pain to move up through her body and out her fingers. The doctor said running made it worse, but Agnes couldn’t bear being sedentary. Why don’t you try swimming or walking, the doctor had said helpfully, a fresh-faced young woman Agnes might have taught just a few years earlier, who clearly (Agnes imagined) thought that she, Agnes, ought to be engaged in a more geriatric form of exercise. Afternoons in the pool at the Y surrounded by soft fleshy women wearing bathing suits modestly trimmed with skirts. Yoga for the ancient and decrepit. Agnes had never actually been to the senior yoga class, the pool, or even the Y itself, but she felt she could picture it all the same.

She caught her breath, then, not from exertion, nor from the pain in her knee.

A girl in a white dress had emerged from round the south side of the house. The girl was thin — too thin, transparently thin, head and hands and feet like bough-breaking burdens on the ends of twig-like neck and arms and legs. The legs were bare, the dress stark white against tanned skin. Or it might have been a nightgown. She could have been twelve, fifteen, older; her frailty lent her an ageless quality. Agnes, who resolutely did not believe in ghosts, imagined for a bad moment or two that she was looking at precisely that.

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