The Dark Issue 45 by The Dark Magazine

Author:The Dark Magazine [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2019-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

Susanna scored the page with satisfaction. So the client was the Conjuror Supreme, a maker of disconcerting devices and money. Mostly money. What could he want with a thousand true names? The price of his next conjuration, of course. Now that would be something worth seeing.

She considered hunting for more information, but a plump hand swept her cup away with a happy cry of, “Miss Morley! And how’s Miss Smith, if I might ask? Mr. Humphreys wondered if you might be advertising for a new lady companion, because his cousin’s looking for a new position now her employer’s little boy is off to school, but I said I was sure Miss Smith would be back before you know it. Is she improving at all?”

“The waters at Leamington Priors are doing her a power of good, Mrs. Humphreys,” Susanna said evenly. “Now I must go. Good day.”

The rain held off until the penultimate day of the month, by which time Susanna dreamed, when she slept, in the hushed green language of grass, which whispered like the wind ruffling through white seeded stems and left only a fading impression of sun and sap and water. Her fingers stuck together. Sometimes she forgot she had feet, rather than roots, and tripped over when she went to get up.

She scrawled the final name. It bled black ink across the page and told Susanna it wasn’t complicated, being grass. There wasn’t any hidden inner life. There weren’t any mystic vegetable secrets. You rooted yourself and raised up your blades and drank what the sky sent your way. Sometimes you were set upon by a butterfly. Susanna thought she wouldn’t mind spending a bit of time as a grass stem if she had the chance.

But she was a human, not a plant, and moreover a human with her rent to pay, so she unearthed her sober, feather-free bonnet and went around the corner to the lawyers’ lair. The façade was fresher than Susanna had expected, fronted with white Norfolk brick that had not yet had the chance to collect soot, and the busy flood of legal traffic buffeted Susanna towards the door, where a doorkeeper directed her up a clipped staircase. “Miss Morley?” said a clerk doubtfully. “Why don’t you take a seat? I’ll see if Miss Stock can see you soon.”

It was a very comfortable chair, but it seemed peculiar to Susanna, given how urgently the commission had been represented to her, that she was left to enjoy it for almost an hour. She cleaned her nails, then straightened her skirts, then catalogued her surroundings in terms of doors, chairs and passers by until it was impossible not to look at the cage set flush against the wall just where any visitor to the office would be obliged to admire it. A cloud of butterflies beat blue wings against the frosted filaments and clustered around the sigil hanging, humming, in the middle of the cage. Susanna couldn’t tell how far back into the wall the butterfly cage went.

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