The Dark Issue 42 by David Tallerman

Author:David Tallerman [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2018-11-02T11:07:30+00:00

H. Pueyo (@hachepueyo on Twitter) is an Argentine-Brazilian writer of comics and speculative fiction. Her work has appeared before in print and online venues like Capricious, Broken Metropolis, and Mad Scientist Journal, among others. She currently lives in Brazil with her boyfriend and their interminable piles of work to do.

A Pinhole of Light

by Julie C. Day

Waiting

Like this life, the afterlife is unfair. A woman dies at twenty-nine and leaves her infant daughter behind. Eight years later she is still trapped on the other side. When I’m in my happiest frame of mind, I imagine Veronica searching for my darkroom each time I turn on the blood-red light. In my darkest moments, I know I’m failing her. She still hasn’t arrived.

I’m an experienced photographer. I should be able to do better.

Forget ghost stories and the spiritual emanations reported at places like Gettysburg and Edinburgh Castle. Forget death’s cricket song: the sound that slips across no matter what we living humans do. True paths between this world and the next appeared less than two hundred years ago when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce developed the first photograph. Niépce exposed a specially treated sheet of pewter for eight hours. The image was hard to make out, but it was a photograph all the same: a view of Niépce’s estate from a second-story window. Niépce’s photograph was the first physical pathway between the living and the dead. It wasn’t the last. After Niépce came Louis Daguerre with his daguerreotypes and Henry Fox Talbot and his paper-based process. Miraculous—all of it. With each developed print another physical doorway appeared.

Long before Veronica’s death and everything that followed, I understood the power of film. The one secret that all photographers know: only physical images offer an actual path to our living world. It is the chemicals—the darkness—the photographer’s intention—that cuts through death’s wall. No photographer is ever really alone. When we’re working, our darkrooms are like crowded railway stations: the dead passing through with each developed frame.

At night in my darkroom, I soak my limbs in developer, fixer, rinse, and then stare—hopeful—as the ghosts rise from the pictures I’ve imprinted on my arms: a long-haired child with stick-thin limbs, a scowling old woman with a limp, a village, a traveling horde, a forgotten family, the father carrying their smallest child. No matter what I try, it is always dead strangers who follow my guideposts back to the land of the living. My wife Veronica’s face is never among them. And so, each night after our daughter, Jenny, goes to bed, I turn on the blood-red light, submerge my arms, and try again.

Our Aksnes Family

After my parents died, I was raised by my Grandmother Henrietta, Henrietta Aksnes and her orphan grandson, Geir, I overheard a neighbor say, as though we were misplaced characters from a Dicken’s novel, David Copperfield or Oliver Twist.

Black-and-white images of Aksnes ancestors lined the hallways and parlor walls of Grandmother’s home, a time-worn brownstone near the center of town. Those pictures, with their egg-white-treated albumen paper

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