The Dark Issue 30 by Octavia Cade

Author:Octavia Cade [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2017-10-29T00:04:40+00:00

Neil Williamson lives in Glasgow, Scotland. His books include The Moon King and The Memoirist, and his work has been nominated for World Fantasy, British Fantasy and British SF Association awards. “Silk Bones” first appeared in his short story collection, Secret Language. Find out more at www.neilwilliamson.org.uk.

The Sound of His Voice Like the Colour of Salt

by L Chan

The ghost boy was the colour of bone, of gossamer spider web, of salt trails of dried tears. He still had his shape, his outline. No one had said his name in thirty years, even though he’d scarred the house with it, carved onto a tree in the garden, scratched into the paint under the outdoor kitchen. Scars unseen, name unspoken. The house had stood for close to a century, waking to kiss the sea breeze decades before, still standing when the red dirt roads had hardened to dark tarmac and the state had stolen the sea from it.

The house called the dead unto itself, and so the boy persisted, him and the others, outnumbering the living. Walls skinned with the colour of the ocean meeting the sky, a driveway of parched and cracked stone, girded with the garishness of bougainvillea and the shyness of orchids. The newest owners had furnished the house with a television screen the same size as a car door, computers in every room, tiny bulbs the size of candles with the glare of lighthouses; ripped out the old worm-eaten flooring in favour of inky Burmese teak. Now, you can do that, strip a house down to the bone, flay the walls from it and pull tiles like teeth. But the marrow of the house remained, so the living never stayed and the dead never left.

On the thirtieth anniversary of his death, a new ghost came to the house.

The ghost boy first consulted with the lady of the house, as was custom. Bibik Neo was a colourful woman in life, and so she was in death. According to her wishes (and such was her power that no one countermanded them), she was interred in the peony pink of a finest nyonya kebaya, slick across waist and hips, flowers twining round the waist, climbing to the collar and back down long sleeves.

“Bibik,” said the ghost boy, head bowed.

The dowager approved his salutation with the slightest of nods, inviting him closer with a crooked finger weighed with a heavy band of jade. Her throne room was the kitchen, the heart of a home, and that was where the lady of the house spent her afterlife. She watched over the servant girls cooking in the black and white and sepia days, she watched over the domestic help in the high definition days.

“Rendang cannot come out of a bag, you see, boy? No pounding of the rempah, no slow heat of charcoal,” she sighed. The ghost boy, who had never cooked in his life, save the time his brain baked in his skull from the fever, said nothing, only looking at Bibik Neo for permission to continue.

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