The Dark Issue 59 by Octavia Cade

Author:Octavia Cade [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2020-03-29T23:28:29+00:00

Peter Gutierrez’s dark fiction has been published off and on for about twenty-five years. A longtime writer for Rue Morgue, Peter has had his work appear in various anthologies and online journals, and he has had both a short story (“A Different Kind of Sunshine”) and a poem (“Anteroom”) in the long list of Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year. He lives and works in New Jersey, which never ceases to be a source of inspiration.

The Longest Night

by Emily B. Cataneo

The longest night of the year crept towards them from the Arctic, whose southern border lay just across the sea from the village of Fiskurfjörður, where Birta had lived all her life. At this time of year, gold light snuck up from behind the northern mountains at noon, lighting the ice-frozen road, then disappeared, pallid and bitter, only two hours later. The view out Birta’s kitchen window—salt-scrummed boats beached for the long winter, wind whipping at the fjord—lay always either in twilight or in that midnight dark when Fiskurfjörður seemed as far away as it was possible to be from the sun while still remaining on the earth.

Today, Birta’s Advent calendar revealed a piece of weak chocolate and the date December 14, 1966. The solstice was approaching, fast, and the signs showed that this year, the ghost was approaching too.

That afternoon, after Birta finished straightening the cans and boxes on the shelves at the store, she walked to her friend Magret’s house through the twilight, as she had three or four times a week all through her twenties and into her thirties. After Birta hung up her coat and threw her fur-lined boots on the rubber mat by the door, she padded into Magret’s kitchen, where Magret poured them black coffee into chipped mugs.

“One week left.” Magret cradled her mug. “Well, they said down at the community center that Ólafur will donate part of what we need for the ritual, and, you know, the men from the fishing cooperative have been out looking for a reindeer every afternoon when it’s not snowing. So we should be able to stave it off, so long as we can come up with a sheep skull. That’s what I hope, anyway.” She stared at Birta as though waiting for her to agree.

Birta tested the scalding coffee on her lower lip and studied the red-and-green needlepoint troll banner that Margret had hung on her kitchen wall. The corner of the banner fluttered in the breath from the heater. Birta had a similar troll banner hanging in her own house, ready for the holiday. Like all the girls, she and Magret had made these banners in school, when they were on the cusp of teenagehood.

She and Magret had always led, and still led, very similar lives, like everyone in Fiskurfjörður: they had gone to the same elementary and secondary school, learned acrobatic and survival backstroke in their mandatory swim lessons at the town pool, giggled at the boys in the sauna. They had moved out

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