The Dark Issue 35 by Erin Roberts

Author:Erin Roberts [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2018-03-28T15:30:19+00:00

Nin Harris is an author, poet, and tenured postcolonial Gothic scholar who exists in a perpetual state of unheimlich. Nin writes Gothic fiction, cyberpunk, nerdcore post-apocalyptic fiction, planetary romances and various other forms of hyphenated weird fiction. Nin’s publishing credits include Clarkesworld, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, The Dark, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Lightspeed.

The Darkest Part

by Stephen Graham Jones

PART ONE

All we wanted to do was kill a clown.

And not just once, either.

I mean, one clown, sure, one would be enough, one would be plenty. But he was going to die all night.

Dick’s ex was a nurse over at Idalou, and during their two years together, Dick had learned enough doctoring that he figured that he could bring a clown back from flatline a time or two at least. With electricity. With adrenalin stabbed into its heart.

It was going to be perfect.

What Garret had to provide wasn’t medical know-how, but his dad’s old barn out near the Lubbock county line. The one that should have caved in on itself two winters ago.

It would shelter us for one more night, though.

And, out by the county line, there was nothing but livestock to hear a clown scream.

We’d gone out there a few days before, killed the headlights of our trucks and closed the doors to turn the dome lights off as well, and the darkness had been almost grainy, it was so thick. Like we could have stuck our tongues out, let it collect, swallowed it down.

“Perfect,” Dick had said.

Garret had nodded, leaned over to spit just past the toe of his boot, and said, “Hell yeah, son.”

My job was the bait.

Of the three of us, I was the only with a son the right age.

Three weekends ago it had been my weekend with Josh. But, because we were watching the calendar, I’d faked a job for Misty Banta’s father. His spread was half of Crosby County; a good ten percent of my calls are to get his pumps going again, so his cotton will have something to drink.

From our six years together, Tina knew that a call from Deacon Banta wasn’t just a call for that particular pump job, but for all the pump jobs waiting for the rest of the year. When Deacon says jump, you don’t even hesitate.

She bought it, I’m saying.

And she was okay with me taking Josh to the carnival. Talking to her on the phone, there’d even been a pause, like she was thinking maybe she’d go with, that we could be that family again, walking down the midway or whatever it’s called, Josh between us, trying to figure out where to start on this wispy spin of cotton candy.

But she hadn’t said anything, and I hadn’t either.

All the years the carnival’d been coming through Crosbyton, we’d never gone, not even once, not even when Josh came home from kindergarten with a clutch of free tickets.

Tina’s only rule about it was that, if we rode anything fast, I be sure to be in the car with Josh.

It was because every once and again, the Hammer would throw its riders up into the sky and not catch them.

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