The Dark Issue 107 by James Bennett

Author:James Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2024-03-25T15:00:09+00:00

Steve Rasnic Tem is a past winner of the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards. He has published over five hundred short stories in his forty-plus year career. Some of his best are collected in Thanatrauma and Figures Unseen from Valancourt Books, and in The Night Doctor & Other Tales from Macabre Ink.

Dead But Dreaming Still

by Michael Kelly

Will you talk to me? Please?

In the still of each obsidian night, in her restless half-sleep, her torment, she doesn’t know what is dream and what is memory. Even her waking hours are cloudy and blurry, often distorted, like she’s viewing the world through a rain-streaked, ash-strewn window.

She stirs. Sits. Rubs her eyes. Blinks. Early morning. Quiet. No wind. No birdsong. It’s been a while since she’s even seen a bird, or another living creature.

She’s alone. She hasn’t always been alone. She’s almost certain of that. But she is alone now. Once, she thinks, there were others. A family, even. A child. Small and happy as only children can be. A few years, she thinks, that’s all we get. A few years of unfettered freedom and happiness before life begins its inexorable toll.

But the child in her splintered memories is happy. Smiling. Laughing. And their laughter is a summer laughter, bright and gentle and musical and soothing. Nourishing. And all too brief.

These dream memories are fragmentary and fleeting, like the grainy static transmissions that winked on then off again on her comm-plate when it was out of comms range. Now, she knows, everything is out of comms range. The towers are toppled. The lines are cut. Invisible wavelengths and frequencies aborted. The comms, like a lot of things, are long dead. Still, every morning she pulls the comm-plate out and presses her fingertip to the blank black screen. Sometimes she even speaks to it. Holds it up to her face and stares at her fuzzy reflection in the dull screen. Always the same one-sided conversation, as if recited from dream memory: “There you are,” she says. “Look at you. What will you do today? Will you talk to me? Please?” She’s no-one else to speak to, after all.

Hunger twists in her gut like a living thing, coursing like a river or a disease. She imagines it as both of those things; flowing, spreading, changing. Mutable. A river never retreats. Nor does disease. What’s coursing through her body, she wonders? What’s in her head?

She rises slowly from her bed of thin thread-bare blankets, crawls to the tent entrance, unzips it and peers out. Even through her mask she smells ash and a peculiar tangy acidity. The world gone sour.

Blinks again. Hazy. Still as death. The air cool with sorrow. The copse of birch trees are limned in silver-grey light. The ground is dew-spackled. Mist-shrouded. A still and static world daubed in thick grey splotches like a renaissance oil painting. A world that somehow, like her, beyond all expectations, still exists.

She zips the tent flap closed and moves to her depleted backpack, opens it and pulls out a small dented tin.

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