The Dark Issue 17 by The Dark Magazine

Author:The Dark Magazine [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2016-09-20T16:24:47+00:00

Elaine Cuyegkeng was born in Manila, Philippines, where there are many, many creaky old houses with ghosts inside them. She loves eusocial creatures both real and imaginary, 80s pop stars and caffeinated drinks with too much sugar. She now lives in Melbourne with her partner and a rose named Blue. Her work has appeared in Rocket Kapre, an online publication for Filipino SF.

The Gift

by Robert Shearman

1

Whenever Susan Pitt went to the circus a clown died, and she wasn’t entirely sure that it was a coincidence. She mostly thought it was. It had seemed a coincidence when she’d been a little girl, rather less so in her late teens and early twenties. And now she’d turned forty, and the world seemed flatter and greyer and just so very real, and she was firmly of the opinion it was a coincidence after all. Much of the time, anyway. If she stopped to think about it.

Coincidence did seem the most likely explanation. And that’s because: (a) The manner of the clown deaths had nothing in common with each other (save for the fact the clowns did, indeed, die). (b) She never had any personal interaction with the clowns, she did nothing to distract them or alarm them. She just sat in the middle of the crowd, none of the clowns showed any inclination to pick her out from it. Except that last clown, maybe, and that was arguable. (c) Three clowns over a ten year period sounds a lot, but isn’t really enough to establish any pattern, a scientist would want her to kill a fourth clown at least before agreeing there was any precedent.

She hadn’t killed a fourth clown. She hadn’t visited a circus in years.

It wasn’t something that haunted her. She’d been with Greg for twelve years now—six married, six not—and she’d never even brought the matter up. Not even as an anecdote—it wasn’t a subject she avoided, circuses and clowns weren’t things they had natural cause to discuss. He was an estate agent, she worked part time in a bank. She hadn’t even mentioned it on one of those first few dates, when they had both been so awkwardly casting around to find things to say. And that was a shame, because it might have made the date more interesting, and Susan seem more interesting too—and yet not a shame, really, because Greg had married her anyway, so what did it matter? Susan just hadn’t realised that clown death was an arresting topic for conversation. Susan wasn’t really a very gifted conversationalist.

In fact, when it boiled down to it, Susan wasn’t very gifted at anything. She had passed her exams at school, but none with distinction. She could drive a car, but liked to keep off the motorways. They were glad of her attendance at work, but never much noticed when she took a day off. And Greg would come home each and every night and she’d have prepared him a perfectly adequate meal and then they’d have a perfectly adequate evening together, watching TV and holding hands and then going up to bed.

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