The Dark Issue 48 by The Dark Magazine

Author:The Dark Magazine
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: fantasy, horror, magazine, dark fantasy
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2019-04-28T23:00:35+00:00

Georgina Bruce is a writer and teacher living in Edinburgh. Her short stories have been widely published in magazines and anthologies, and have been longlisted for the Bridport and Mslexia short story prizes. In 2017, her story “White Rabbit” won the British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. This House of Wounds is her debut collection from Undertow Books.

The Wiley

by Sara Saab

The house I unknowingly shared with The Wiley during the time of the darxne.ss was perfect, airy and modern. The curtains and windows were remote-controlled, the bathtub was clawfooted and the master bedroom was warm. On a day of gale-force winds flattening muddy litter against my shins, I walked the perimeter of my new neighborhood park to a shop I’d noticed, Well Sprung. I carried rental keys in an envelope; the year was 2003 and I remember the date was April 1st because the mattress salesman tried out an ill-considered joke, some halfhearted quip about bedbugs.

I picked out the widest bedframe in the catalogue, a California King in walnut. All that empty bedspace seemed an inhospitable tundra I’d have to teach myself skills to survive. But the opposite was more terrifying: to lie in a single-person bed, arrayed like a corpse.

Darkness was, for several weeks yet, still unremarkable, mundane like the weather, as controllable as indoor temperature. The loneliness, though, was very bad. My response was to sleep star-splayed in the most lavish bed money could buy, piping a nightcap of Vivaldi and Bach through the room’s expensive sound system. The first thing I learned about The Wiley, in retrospect, was that it didn’t like to sleep alone either.

My perfect place with its two minute walk to the train, that rose-bright dining room I kept decorated with weekly deliveries of wildflowers—to The Wiley, was it a beacon in an abyss? Did The Wiley know the abyss as a thing distinct from its own mind? And what does it mean that I—with my cocktail parties and keynote speeches of today—shared part of my life with a creature made of loneliness?

I know the beginnings of the darxne.ss better than anyone else on the planet, save for Dexter or Jon. I was having dinner with a journalist that night. We were on a date. It was the first time I’d put any effort into human company since my move.

In my life before that moment, before that bed, before that perfect house, I’d almost never been alone. At anyBuddi, work edged into late nights into early hours, when, with the help of pizza and beer, we’d spin it as fun. Dexter and Jon and I, we led from the front. What else could we do? Our raggedy bunch of software engineers hired out of prestigious programs, padding around in mismatched socks, coke-bottle glasses, zippers of piercings down ears or eyebrows—we’d gestured at a mirage of stock options shimmering in the California sun; we’d sold them our dream. We were the first to unroll sleeping bags in the conference room so we could spend a few extra hours eking out a bug fix.

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