The Dark Issue 25 by Hadeer Elsbai

Author:Hadeer Elsbai [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2017-06-19T13:45:14+00:00

Karolina Fedyk is a Polish bilingual writer of speculative poetry and fiction and their work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Star*Line, and Polish genre fiction venues. They divide their time between writing and work in academia, and the latter had been an inspiration for this story.

Hans

by Ray Cluley

Hans usually enjoyed road trips, especially late at night in the snow. He liked the quiet hush of the engine, the shush of the tyres on the wet streets. Father played the radio low, little more than a murmur. Something local with lots of talking. A comforting sound. Hans could doze in the back of the car just as comfortably as in his bed at home. Better, thanks to the gentle rumble of the engine and the careful way Father drove. It was cold outside, nearly Christmas, so the heater was on as well, adding to the background hum, filling the car with a snug warmth so that Hans barely needed the blanket draped over him. He tried to watch the scenery as it passed, the dark lines of pines beside the autobahn, but the warmth of the car and its steady motion made his eyelids heavy. He didn’t mind. He liked the dreamy quality it gave everything as they drove.

It had taken Hans a while to get used to all the travelling. Father was a sales representative, an area manager, and it meant he was always on the move. That used to be okay because Hans would stay with Mother, but now Hans had to come too. Sometimes he couldn’t because of school, and that made things awkward for Father, but often he went along anyway. He liked to imagine he was learning the job, that he would take over from Father one day, travelling the country in his own car. Maybe even beyond the country; this was Europe, and you could drive almost anywhere. Father was all the way from England. It would be good to go there.

Hans usually enjoyed road trips. Usually. But during this one his comfortable doze couldn’t hold him for very long and he kept waking from it abruptly. Father was singing the same song whenever he woke, something in English. It was called ‘Driving Home For Christmas’.

“Are we nearly there?” Hans asked. He’d asked a few times because asking about where they were going got him no answer at all.

“Nearly.”

At some point they had come off the autobahn and the lines of government-planted trees had become the outskirts of actual forest. The dark shape of it passed in upright smudges of ghostly shadow, black at the trunks but white in the branches where snow had gathered. At the side of the road the snow was a dirty slush, blackened and foul, but in the boughs of the trees it was still bright and fresh, sparkling occasionally in the beams of headlights. Hans could easily imagine the light catching the eyes of wolves in there, making them glow like embers in a dying fire. Once, all of this area had been wild and wolves had passed through the countryside and its woodland.

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