The Dark Issue 90 Page 2

  He eased his way outside, afraid to switch on his headlamp and make himself a target. Expecting at any moment a skeletal hand would grab him. The best and most mundane scenario he could imagine was twisting his ankle on a rock in the dark.

  Only the faint path told him he was moving toward the water, not blundering farther into the woods. He kept a hand out in front of it, sweeping it against air that felt static-crackling and alive.

  At the end of the path, he crouched, giving in to the irresistible urge to make himself smaller, harder to see. The stars were mercilessly bright, and he didn’t want them looking at him. Nor did he want the attention of the figure silhouetted at the edge of the water. Too bulky to be starved Lane Harper. It had to be Walker, which made no sense either.

  Carter was fairly certain, but not positive, that the figure faced away from him, gazing out over the water. He was fairly certain, not positive, that the figure also sang, haunting-soft, and incongruously beautiful. A voice that did not belong to the bulk of the body. The figure paused in their melody, tilting their head as if expecting a response. Carter did not wait to see if one arrived.

  Carter’s head ached as if with a hangover. Sunlight beat against the tent’s fabric; the heater blazed. It was barely above freezing outside, but he felt feverish, burning up.

  The sound of a motor, chugging. The boat at its grim work. He forced himself up, out, his stomach too tight and sour for food. He went to check the trail cams.

  He spent the daylight hours going from one to the next, reviewing the footage from last night. There was no evidence of Walker leaving the tent and going to stand at the lakeshore. There were no skips in the footage, no missing time or footage erased. Only hours of the empty trail leading from the tent and down toward the water. Hours of trees tossing against the dark, though the night had been painfully still when Carter had crept down the trail. No sound of chewing. Or breathing. Nothing at all.

  If Carter himself had left the tent, the cameras would have caught that as well. But they hadn’t, recording all there was to see—wind and trees, stars and dark.

  Seventy-three days alone in the wilderness. That’s how long Lane Harper had lasted. Carter had barely made it four. He didn’t have to worry about food, shelter, knew he wouldn’t freeze or starve.

  A storm had blown in fast on the heels of the sun, swallowing the light again with a mix of sleet and snow, whipping the lake’s surface to a frenzy and bringing dredging operations to a halt. Nothing to do but hunker in the tent and wait. He’d watched Lane Harper do the same thing, voyeuristically consuming his struggle, feeding off his time fighting to stay alive.

  Time went strange in the wilderness. That’s what Lane Harper had said. It moved through him; he became too sharply aware of it, existing inside one long unwinding skein of it that went on and on and on.

  Carter dozed. He jolted upright with the screen in his hand, bleary eyes coming into focus. Something pale, so pale it almost burned white, moved toward the camera. A human figure, but subtly wrong in a way he couldn’t understand. The camera refused to focus, refused to give him more than the impression of a bony frame, a mouth full of teeth that reminded him of nothing so much as a shark when it lunged suddenly toward the camera.

  He dropped the screen, scrambling and kicking backward in his nest of blankets.

  “All right?” Walker lifted the cup of his earphones, sounding more annoyed than concerned.

  Faint, tinny music leaked into the tent. Cut through with the sound of wind, the sound of trees cracking in the cold.

  Carter shook his head, jaw clenched. He reached for the dropped screen and Walker lowered his earphones again.

  Eyes like slick, black glass, a mouthful of teeth when the creature stutter-jumped toward the camera. Even braced for it this time, Carter’s pulse slammed. Not shark’s teeth, but icicles, jammed into abused and swollen gums. He played the clip a third time. A date stamp burned steady in the lower right-hand corner of the frame. November 1st. Seventy-five days after Lane Harper had been dropped off in the Chillcoate Mountains. Three days after Lane had disappeared.

  It was impossible. There was no footage beyond the eight hours immediately following Lane stepping through the tent door. The med team had called for their check-in shortly after sunrise, and the boat had been dispatched immediately after they’d failed to receive a response.

  There couldn’t be any footage from November 1st, and yet the date stamp was there, incontrovertible. Could he have the timeline wrong? No, Carter remembered a specific, grim joke about Halloween approaching, how the world grew thin as the season turned.

  Lane’s gaunt face, staring down the barrel of the camera, had whispered ghost stories in a rasping voice. Carter kept losing the thread, lulled by Harper’s voice. He couldn’t remember the details, whether it was one long ghost story, or a series of shorter ones. Something had come down out of the mountains, something that had been hungry for a very long time.

  You’ll hear the stars chewing their way out of the dark. If you look up, you’ll see the great bowl of sky above the lake standing empty. They’re all down here already, between the trees, trying to eat their fill.

  Something about fingers like twisted branches, gilded in ice, touching a man’s chest and slitting him open. Hollowing him out and climbing inside his skin to get warm.

  If he scoured the footage again, would he find Lane Harper wrapped in his sleeping bag like a shroud, eyes half closed, lips compulsively moving and bleeding out ghost stories? Had that ever happened, or had Carter imagined it? He could just as easily imagine he’d woken in the night, looking across the darkened tent, and seen Lane Harper, pale and starved, sitting cross-legged on Walker’s bed. Mouth opening and closing. Telling stories or maybe just chewing and chewing and chewing in the dark.

  Carter slept like the dead, didn’t wake until sunlight pried open his eyelids with bright, sharp fingernails. The tent door flapped, letting in the cold while the heater groaned and struggled to keep up. The storm had gone, leaving the air smelling fresh.

  Walker was gone too.

  Not just gone and leaving his sleeping bag neatly folded atop the metal frame with its stretched canvas that provided elevation off the cold ground. Gone and taking all traces of his existence with him—sleeping bag, gear, everything. The tent had shrunk too, not wide enough to accommodate two people, only one.

  Carter managed to catch up with the dredging team, hailing them before the engine drowned him out.

  “Walker? The guide?” Even though the boat only idled low, Carter shouted, rising panic driving his voice higher.

  The recovery team exchanged glances, shrugged, shook their heads. They had a job to do. He’d arrived in the plane alone, as far as they were concerned. No one else with him.

  For all Carter knew, they were right. He couldn’t trust his memory. Seventy-three days, Lane Harper had survived in the wilderness, and he was unravelling in less than a week. He slunk back into the tent, which closed in around him. He’d left the dredging crew with the unnecessary instruction to call immediately if they found anything.

  They wouldn’t.

  Carter lapsed in and out of something between dreams and wishes as he listened to the ice crack in the branches and the wind pace around outside. It was old and infinitely patient; it belonged and he did not.

  Lane Harper, draped like pale seaweed from a hook, rose ragdoll limp from the water as the boat winched him up from the bottom of the lake. Lane crept into his tent, sitting opposite him in the space that had never been occupied by Walker the guide. Carter tried to babble an apology, his tongue frozen, thick and numb with sleep paralysis. Lane Harper unzipped him stem to stern and crawled inside his skin to get warm.

  It was time.

  The sun hadn’t risen yet, so Carter fumbled through the camera set-up in the dark. These things required a witness; that was the way the cycle went. Tell a ghost story. Pass it on. Intrigue the next person to delve into the mystery, compel them to see for themse
lves what happened, why the person before them disappeared. And from that, another haunting is born.

  He’d borrowed one of the trail cams, propped it up and pinned back the tent door to the night beyond. The sound quality wouldn’t be great, but hopefully it would be enough to catch the rush and mutter of the wind. The sound of too many voices talking all at once, overlapping nonsense so he couldn’t pick out any single thread. Footsteps, light, but with just enough weight to crack the thin crust of ice atop the snow. Coming closer, ever closer.

  Carter stared down the barrel of the camera, held its gaze for long enough for anyone watching to grow uncomfortable. Then he stepped into the dark.

  Sure-footed, he followed the trail down to the water’s edge. He hadn’t bothered with the headlamp. Stone crunched underfoot. Carter stopped with his toes just at the water’s edge. He breathed out, not the shocked breath of his first night standing here looking up at the terrible, blazing stars, but an exhalation of relief.

  He looked at the water, reflecting the dark. It looked peaceful. Inviting. Slowly, slowly, he tipped his head back to the bowl of the sky sealed against the jagged teeth of the mountain.

  All the stars were gone. They were already down among the trees. Hungry and waiting.

  A.C. Wise is the author of the novels Hooked and Wendy, Darling, and the recent short story collection, The Ghost Sequences. Her work has won the Sunburst Award, and been a finalist for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Stoker, Locus, British Fantasy, Aurora, and Shirley Jackson Awards. She also contributes a regular review column to Apex Magazine.

  How the Cat Woman Became the Giant Lady, Circa 1995

  by Seán Padraic Birnie

  On Kimberley Road the boys of the neighbourhood used to play football in the street. Located in a mostly sedate warren of redbrick terraces built on the Sussex downs not far from the parish boundary of Brighton and Preston, Kimberley was just about quiet enough and along its lower stretch just about flat enough for such games, but when a vehicle came by the shout would go up—car!—and the match would disperse, lads scattering to the pavements, the ball coming to rest where the tarmac cambered to gutter, before immediately reforming in the vehicle’s wake. Sometimes an adult would emerge from one of the houses to move us on, and the game would shift a little way up the street, until some other interchangeably miserable old sod sprung up to push us along again: and so on it would ago.

  Kimberley branched off the steep ascent of Ladysmith Road, and looped north-eastwards to rejoin Ladysmith towards the top of the hill. We might have spent an eternity playing that game of football, part of a larger game played against the residents moving us ever on toward the top, before scrambling back down Ladysmith to resume play at the bottom of Kimberley, an infinite loop of kick-ball and move-along-please, shouts of car and goal and on-me-head.

  And sometimes the ball would shoot off the road to land in the front gardens of those houses. A new game would commence: whoever had kicked it astray would have to fetch it, while the rest of us hunkered down behind low front walls or the bumpers of cars, to watch from that safe distance as the lone boy ventured into peril. Sometimes someone would yell out—a snide move, alerting the whole street to the presence of the intruder, who would break out into a panicked run as the rest of us scattered laughing.

  We knew who of our neighbours were friendly and who were not. The Green Man was the worst; impossibly old and gnarled, that grim figure would appear behind his net curtains to watch us as we played. If you looked at him, we said, and he looked at you, and your eyes met, you would turn to stone. No one doubted it. One time a lad named Gary had to fetch the ball from the Green House, and ended up in a tussle with the Green Man’s adult son. The rumour was that the adult son was a nonce, which was the worst thing in the world a person could be. In a school assembly we had been warned about strangers; it wasn’t so long ago that two girls had been murdered up in Wild Park, the Babes in the Wood. Later I would realise that the killer’s son had been in our class at school, perhaps in that assembly. A toddler in Liverpool had been tortured to death by two ten-year-olds not so long before; Gary’s mum, I remembered, blamed the film Child’s Play.

  Further up the road lived the giant lady. Her name was Deborah. You would not, most of the time, have thought of Deborah as a giant; I think only we children ever understood what she was, because if you saw her walking around Kimberley or Coombe or Ladysmith Road, as we sometimes would, she would appear of more or less normal height, albeit quite tall for a woman. Very tall people develop a habit of adjusting themselves to fit the world, and Deborah was an expert in that manoeuvre. She lived alone at number 63, a few dozen houses up from ours—I have looked it up since on Google Earth, zoomed in from the green-blue dot of the planet to the aerial view of the red slate roofs of those buildings, and that, I have concluded, was the number on her door. She must have moved to the area a few years after my parents bought their own house on Kimberley, back when couples without substantial backing from their parents and on lowish-to-middle incomes could still buy houses in our town, because I remember my mother mentioning her, which was how I learnt her name, although why some fragment of gossip about that particular neighbour would stick in my eight or nine year-old head is beyond me. She was not, at that point, the giant lady—that moniker came later. At the time she was just the cat woman.

  One day in some endless August of my eighth or ninth year I struck the ball with uncharacteristic gracelessness, on the outside of what my dad had liked to call my cultured left foot, and it cannoned high and leftwards to disappear behind the front wall and pampas grass of Deborah’s garden. The game’s noise died in an instant, and I felt my shoulders slump as if my body had registered the disappointment before my mind had recognised it. Gary swore the loudest.

  “Danny has to get it,” he said. In our group it was Gary who set the tone and made the rules: we all instinctively looked to him for direction when direction was required. Already the others were retreating to cover. The abrupt silence filled my ears like so much feedback from an amp. All focus had narrowed onto me: the windows of all the other houses were eyes through which the adults of the neighbourhood gazed down at me, assessing me: all of them, I was certain—each and every one. I was trapped by that assessment. I was stuck.

  The front gardens of those houses on Kimberley are small, the back gardens narrow but longer; if you go on Google you can see for yourself. But on that August afternoon in 1994 the front yard of number 63 began to stretch and twist and elongate in some nightmare version of Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. The street, my friends, the memory of the game, receded behind me, and in that vast garden of pampas grass and rhododendron, the paving stones dotted with the cat statues that had furnished their owner with her first nickname, a cold gloom settled on my shoulders. In that chill I felt my ears burning as if someone was talking about me; and knew, in my bones, that everyone was talking about me. I saw the football innocuously settled next to an empty clay plant pot beneath the sill of the house’s front window, near the wall adjoining number 61, across that unbridgeable gap. From the path inside the front gate it seemed impossibly distant. Every step I took toward it, I knew, would push it further away. Still, I had to move. As I crept forward I dared not look up from my target out of the certainty that if I gazed into the window of the house a face of blank and arresting horror would stare back at me. If I looked at that face, and it looked at me, and our eyes met, I would turn to stone.

  After an eternity I reached the wall and with slippery-fingers picked our tattered football up. I remember how damp its rubber felt, how its seams were studded with grit, and how heavy it seemed, as if the force of gravity in that garden was multiplied, and the ball, possessed of a strange wilfulness, wanted to evade my clasp. I closed my eyes and the air escaped me; I hadn’t known I’d been holding my breath. From the street I heard the muttering of my friends, as if someone had just dialed them back up a notch. I wanted to run back in their direction but immediately foun
d that such movement was beyond me. Each step I took back towards the gate required quite deliberate force, as if I had had to learn to walk again, as I later would. Here, memory inserts its own false artefacts; or else in that telescoping moment I felt some premonition of what fate had in store for me. Each step toward the gate, I knew, would push it back as it had pushed the ball, and I would never close that distance. I have had dreams since in which I am yet to close that distance—the gate always remains some awful stretch away.

  It was as I reached the path that I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, the open front door.

  “Hello, Daniel,” said the cat woman, and it was then that I finally broke into a run. Her head, I saw, in the fragment of a second in which I had looked in her direction, appeared to lightly touch the ceiling of her hallway.

  I couldn’t have told you how she knew my name. I still can’t.

  In 1995, a month before my twelfth birthday, I was hit by a car at the bottom of Coombe Road, between the Video Magic and the Dillons newsagent. Coombe Road was steep and busy—at its top it passed the top end of Ladysmith, and was accessed from Kimberley by a flight of slippery steps that cut between house numbers 45 and 47; our school lay opposite the mouth of the steps, and at its bottom, beyond the old factory buildings in which were manufactured a continent’s supply of false teeth and the abandoned diamond works, Coombe joined the busier junction of Lewes Road. In my memory the car thundered out of nowhere, but it’s likely I had simply been away with the fairies, as more than one of my teachers had on occasion said of me. I broke both my legs, my left foot, fractured my right wrist and my right elbow, and was knocked out cold, this last fact doubtless a blessing. The driver did not stop and was not caught.

  People kept talking about how lucky I was. It drove me up the wall: I didn’t feel lucky. After leaving the children’s hospital up on Dyke Road, a place that on some nights in deep despair I thought I would never escape, I found myself locked in at home. School was off the cards. My friends came round to sign their names in coloured pens. They all thought I was lucky, because I did not have to go to school; and perhaps for the first few weeks I rather enjoyed that fact. But being stuck at home all the time quickly became tedious, and before long the tedium began to madden me.