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A Greater Dark

written by Ian Bell

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Gray sheets of rain as the door bangs in, Willard and his men materializing in that opaque haze and shaking the wet from their long coats. They assess the room with eyes accustomed to staring. Move across the floor and toward a table in the back, away from the windows black with night.

I give Ben a look and he draws three drafts in chipped porcelain steins, struggles to lift them to the counter.

“Ma’am,” Willard says when I carry the drinks over. He won’t tell me his name until later, but I don’t need him to. I take a closer look, face a weathered crag though easily forty years my junior. Almost stop him when he lights a cigarette, but the air is poison, choked with dust. A little smoke won’t hurt anyone. Yet my eyes slide back to Ben with his fingers working a shock of unruly hair, lungs still pink, ten years old if a day.

Willard’s gaze has followed mine, lingers on the boy as I turn and fetch up the tray again. Lingers a moment too long.

I step to the window and stare into the blank nothing, rain streaking the glass, reflection of the motel cafe and its occupants. The Addisons in the corner, three weeks waiting for the visa to come through. Several families up from Boston area congealed around tables too small, set to depart come morning. Willard and his compatriots, silent and morose over their beers. Benyamin behind the bar with his elbows on the wood and his chin in his hands.

A flash of lightning illuminates Casco Bay and the Portland Launch Site across the water. Redwood-thick cables like monoliths stretching 30 thousand kilometers to the elevator terminus. Bright and crisp in the sudden flare like daylight and then afterimages fading to pink, to nothing.

Willard’s eyes on Benyamin again. On me. He knows something he shouldn’t. He knows who the boy is. (Continue Reading…)

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Interstate Mohinis

by M. L. Krishnan

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In the way of Death runs the Vaitarani river. We are flayed open to its woe. We are always aware of its currents in gurgling lungfuls of unease.

Time spun in recursive loops since I died in a scream of metal and flame and asphalt on the Parthibanur State Highway. There was no cremation. What could they consign to the flame? A scorched knob of my torso? My jawbone, still glued with tissue? A lone filling snugly hidden within a lone tooth?

Sometimes, I dreamed about flowing water. About where I would be—not here, anywhere but here—if my body had survived the accident. Mushed, but still recognizable. With its vestigial humanness that demanded respect, especially in death. My ashes would have been tossed into an ocean or a river in a coursing procession of night-blooming jasmine garlands, women who keened and thumped their chests, and drunken louts who gyrated around my urn until they foamed at the mouth. Until they collapsed in exhaustion or pleasure.

When I first began feeding, I wondered if I was a vet?la or a pi??ca. But I felt no urge to sway from bael trees or dart into a hedge of thathapoo with its ray-toothed flowers. Besides, I did not have an appetite for birds or small rodents. I only hungered for certain kinds of men.

Maybe I was a mohini. (Continue Reading…)

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Devil is Fine

By Michael Bettendorf

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I ain’t a good man, but that don’t mean I like doing bad things. Not everyone is afforded the choice. Not truly, anyhow, but I’ve accepted that one day I’ll be judged for what I’ve done. What I do. My lot in life didn’t leave me with a good family or much in ways of inheritance, but I was gifted with a decent mind and an eye for opportunity.

It’s how I’ve found myself huddled on the ground near some boy named Mitchell who’s convinced he’s a man just because he don’t live at home no more. But the boy’s so embarrassed by his lack of whiskers, he covers his face with a bandana all the time, like he’s playing bandit. Well if anyone is going to be suspected a bandit, I suppose it’s better Mitchell than me.

“It’s colder out here than I thought,” Mitchell says, poking the fire.

“The plains tend to trick you. Hardly any cover out in these parts. Makes any breeze feel ten times colder.”

Mitchell rubs his arms, hugging himself.

“It true you took that stagecoach yourself?” the boy asks. “That how you get that beautiful horse of yours?”

“Don’t know what you mean.”

“No need to be coy,” he says. “I heard you took a guarded stagecoach and everything in it all by yourself. Not a single breath of air left in anyone’s lungs. That true, mister Grant?”

“Just Grant,” I say. “And I ain’t interested in tall tales.” (Continue Reading…)

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Keeping Up with the Conan Doyles

by Jess Whitecroft

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From the Journals of the Society for Psychical Research. Interview with Angela Patterson, housekeeper of Latham Hall, present at the last séance of Neville Worth. 14th August 1956.

You want me to talk about the last séance? All right, but I must start at the beginning. I think it was around ’25 that her Ladyship began manifesting ectoplasm. It was definitely after the fairies incident. You remember the fairies, don’t you? Although of course you don’t – I doubt you were even born, or just a babe in arms. But you’ve heard about it, of course – Cottingley Glen?

Oh, we did laugh. Becky, she was a young thing like you. They kept her downstairs for years because Lord Latham objected to her Midlands accent – sort of a singsong about it. She was from Nuneaton. Don’t know if she ever went back there, but she disappeared after the… the incident. Anyway, I get ahead of myself – she had a brother who knew his way around a darkroom, you see. Took one look at the picture of the fairies and laughed fit to burst. “I don’t know what those fairies are,” she said. “But they’re not moving. Look. If they’re flying their wings should be going flap flap flap like a butterfly, right? But they’re not. Look at the waterfall behind the girl, Mrs P. See how it’s blurred? That’s shutter speed, that is. It’s faster than it was in the old days when you used to have to stand still as a statue for minutes to have your picture taken, but even then if you’ve got something moving fast – like a waterfall or the wings of a little flying creature – it still shows up on the photograph as a blur.”

When she pointed it out like that it was obvious, and it turns out the girls who took the pictures were quite the artists. Sir Arthur said they were too young and too common to pull off such tricks – “children of the artisan class,” he said. Shows how much he knew. I heard one of them even worked in a photographic lab, making composite pictures. Always dangerous to underestimate people, especially young women. (Continue Reading…)