The Dark Issue 80 by The Dark Magazine

Author:The Dark Magazine [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2021-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Seán Padraic Birnie is a writer and photographer from Brighton, England. His debut collection of short stories, I Would Haunt You If I Could, was published by Undertow Publications in 2021. His work has appeared in venues such as Black Static, Litro, BFS Horizons, and Shadows & Tall Trees. More of his work can be seen at seanbirnie.com.

The Lending Library of Final Lines

by Octavia Cade

It wasn’t a library, not really. And not a lending either—only called that by courtesy, because what was hung up on strings like shark fins was printed: crumpled pages of smeared ink, worn through in places and torn but they weren’t being sold as books because there was only a page of each anyway. The rest of the books, the bits not hung up for dried and dreaming, had gone for kindling or to the outhouse. They were no use for anything else.

That’s what Clytie was told when she was set to work at the stall, a job she got ostensibly because of obedience but was more like to be because of illiteracy, and an almost-tangible aura of incuriousity. The last girl was seen off because she used up all the pages, couldn’t stop bitching about frittering and brainlessness. “Too clever for her own good, for all it did her.” Without the sense to shut her gob and scraping a living at dock-end now, for the inability to understand a market.

For all her predecessor had complained about the waste of the written word, none of the books that came to stall were in any condition for sharing. Most of them were from the sea or the dead. The first washed up in a solid lump, all the pages soaked together, and Clytie had to sop up the damp with rags, peel the last page carefully off—“Make sure it’s got words on it, those little marks even if they’re all runny, even if it’s only a couple of lines. No blank pages”—and hang it up for drying. The rest of the sodden mass dried in bricks before the fire, was sold off for burning either in blocks or in gratings to adulterate the plants in pipes.

“That smoke don’t smell like anything,” said Clytie, on days so cold the snow settled like scum on the ocean and she was allowed to burn a brick for warmth.

“This look like a scent shop to you?”

Clytie sniffed and turned away, wiped her nose before wrapping her scarf well-around. Cold killed scent, she supposed, which was alright because all else she’d smell were crab-guts anyway, and only that if she wasn’t stuffed with head cold. But even in summer with the rankness rising around, the bricks whiffed only of salt, and that a thin scent once the paper had dried out.

The dead-books were better, those cleared out of houses when someone died with the rags they weren’t buried in and the people left behind wanted the coin they’d bring. Most of those books were from outhouses, or gone mouldy on shelves, but the man who owned Clytie’s stall only took those if the last page was there still.

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