The Dark Issue 57 by Rob Costello

Author:Rob Costello [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2020-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

Dare Segun Falowo is a writer of occasionally macabre speculative fiction (inspired by old Nollywood and various traditional cosmologies). He has been published in F&SF, The Dark, Brittle Paper, and more. He haunts Ibadan and tweets @dragonsinlagos.

Live Through This

by Nadia Bulkin

A month after Danielle Haas was buried, the cemetery caretaker Mr. Wolf was found dead on the grounds with a rake in his hand and an awful look on his face like he’d just seen the Devil, or so the rumor went at school. Everybody was so convinced that he’d met the ghost of Lady Horn—the wife of the town’s founder, an insane woman buried in Plot 9—that nobody noticed that Danielle’s body was missing until it turned up a week later in the Roths’ living room, cold and clean and stiff-as-a-board, though not light-as-a-feather. The Roths surrendered her to the morgue, which then held onto the body during a slow and meandering sheriff’s investigation into possible grave tampering, and thirty days later the coroner Dr. Arnold was found dead in her office, looking just as wretched as Mr. Wolf, and Danielle was gone again.

By the time Danielle showed up on the floor of the Neumanns’ lemon-fresh kitchen, people had figured out what was going on. There was a four-hour town meeting for the grown-ups in the high school auditorium, and the older kids watched the younger ones over pizza and candy, by turns scared and excited because they were finally getting a taste of true adults-only Emergency. Tegan Sauer had just read The Giver and was sure they were on the verge of undergoing a terrible communal transformation from which she and her brother Emory would have to rescue everyone.

“So what are we going to do?” Emory asked when their mother came home from the meeting, looking exhausted and sniffly in her oversized all-weather jacket.

“We’re going to share the burden,” their mother said, filling a glass of water so she could take her usual clatter of pills. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

“What do you mean, share the burden?”

“We’re all going to chip in and take in Danielle for a month.”

Upset worked its way into Emory’s face. “It’s not our fault that she killed herself, that was Jon Richter and Matty Böhm. Everybody knows that.” Those two were always in and out of school, taking days off to talk to their lawyers, trying to settle with Danielle’s family out-of-court. Their neighbor who sometimes drove their mother to work after heavy snowstorms said that the case against the two boys was so weak that they never would have been able to convict them in criminal court, and if Danielle hadn’t killed herself there would have been no civil suit either. It’s really sad, but they shouldn’t have to pay just because she was unbalanced, he said. There’s a lot of pressure on young girls to be popular these days, he added, looking at Tegan meaningfully, as if to tell her not to follow in those footsteps, to stay good and sweet.

“Because we’re not that kind of town,” said their mother.

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