The Dark Issue 41 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: 2018-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

Chaz Brenchley has been making a living as a writer since the age of eighteen. He is the author of over five hundred short stories, nine thrillers and several fantasy series, under the names of Daniel Fox and Ben Macallan as well as his own. Chaz spent his childhood in Oxford, his adulthood in Newcastle, and now lives in California with his wife Karen, two squabbling cats, a turtle and a famous teddy bear.

Psychopomps of Central London

by Julia August

Excerpted from A Psychogeographer’s Guide to the British Isles, Vol. 1: London, by permission, &c.

In the Church of St. Anselm & St. Cæcilia on Kingsway, near Holborn Station, there is a statue of St Peter with a golden foot. Place a pin in your maps: many statues have toes or noses or bronze balls brightened by the application of passing pilgrims. Marin Drzic sits in Dubrovnik, shining beakily; in Split, St. Gregory’s toes glow against your skin; the Scots apply to Hume, who lights up the Edinburgh Royal Mile; an older St. Peter in St. Peter’s, Rome, similarly enthroned, is losing his foot to time and friction. What picks our Peter out? He’s wooden. The paint is rubbing off his bare left foot and key.

When did they realise he’d been coöpted by a global narrative and needed a prosthetic to truly belong? Whenever it was, whenever St. Anselm & St. Cæcilia’s Peter acquired his golden foot, you shouldn’t touch it. Reach into the fist-sized hole in the statue’s seat instead and set your palm against the wood. You may feel a heartbeat. Wait until the wood yields like flesh beneath your fingers and a slate-blue shadow falls across the nave.

This is where we begin your journey to the underworld.

I realise you have questions. (I say this to everyone who finds me waiting for them in the church doorway.) The church is quiet, though, and the day is short: ask me later. From St. Anselm & St. Cæcilia, we thread the needle between Kingsway and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, squeezing down the insalubrious passage behind the avocado-laden fruit stand and The Ship Tavern. Take a careful note of the clock on the park gate. What time does it say the park will close? Five to four, when the sun goes down? That’s how long our walk together lasts. You’ll have to keep track, I’m afraid. I measure footfalls, not minutes, and boroughs instead of hours.

Have you drunk from the fountain at the gate before? No? Don’t. There are too many psychopomps ahead of us for you to take shortcuts. As with any journey, where you end up depends on who you met along the way.

But come with me. The street is patched with trees and scaffolding, pavilions on one side, park on the other, strictly fenced off with iron bars. Our second psychopomp, correctly counted, awaits us in the basement of Sir John Soane’s house, which you will find at Number 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Render up your bag to the coatroom, yes, and your buzzing phone and dripping umbrella, and make your way through the gift shop.

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