The Dark Issue 71 by Carlie St. George

Author:Carlie St. George [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2021-03-30T17:29:51+00:00

H. Pueyo (@hachepueyo on Twitter) is an Argentine-Brazilian writer of comics and speculative fiction. Her work has appeared before in F&SF, Clarkesworld, and Fireside, among others.

Worm Blood

by Octavia Cade

Gunnora kept her arms covered. Bare, they looked too much like farmland—or what farmland had come to look like. Burnt, pockmarked patches in corn, the dark smudges black as the circles under her eyes. The worms might burn themselves out for air, but the fields needed beating for all that, to keep the flames from spreading.

Better sleepless nights than harvest failing, but it was unsustainable. Gunnora hadn’t slept for three days, not properly, and her neighbours did no better. An entire community half-conscious in the fields, trying not to fall asleep lest fire burst out around them and the smoke send them into suffocation.

“I’d rather burn than send word we can’t make the harvest,” said Aldrich, who farmed on the other side of the valley.

Gunnora grunted her agreement. Burning seemed like the easy way out in comparison.

“We shouldn’t even be out here,” he continued. “Not at night. If there’s no-one to bring the worms . . . ”

“Something’s bringing them,” Gunnora snapped. It was a new argument that had fallen into the patterns of old, repeated so often in the days since the worms came that she knew every beat and cadence of it. “Shouldn’t” no longer had any meaning. All sorts happened that shouldn’t, and no sense in pretending they didn’t.

Hell of it was that Aldrich was right. Human blood brought the worms, far as anyone knew, but it wasn’t an experiment people were willing to make twice. Gunnora had cut the throats of rabbits herself, of a number of small creatures, held them over earth with farmhands close pressed round her, their hands clutched onto buckets and damp sacking and scythes. None of those small struggling bodies had produced anything but red earth and stifled squealing. Gunnora had kept watch herself for a full day and night afterwards, not even turning away to piss, her grey hair scraped back from her head so it didn’t blow across her face and block the view, but there’d been nothing. In the end she’d given up. It was human blood brought the worms, and only human.

Which meant that if all Gunnora’s neighbours were tucked up into their own farmhouses at night, their blood soaked up by bedclothes or dish towels on the off-chance any were spilled, the fields should have been safe. Except they weren’t, and it had taken every single body to quell the blaze that worms had made of Elenor’s orchard when they’d slept on that supposition, and Elenor’s man dead two days later from the burns he got trying to put it out.

“Never thought I’d be glad to see him gone,” Elenor had said afterwards, not with six children to look after and her land all in ruins. But her orchards had been first to see the worms, them and the vineyard Matthias had given his labour to of a morning, and folk had begun to look at him unkindly.

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