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    LampLight: Volume 2 Issue 2
    LampLight: Volume 2 Issue 2
    LampLight: Volume 2 Issue 2
    Ebook152 pages2 hours

    LampLight: Volume 2 Issue 2

    By Jacob Haddon

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    About this ebook

    Our featured artist is Kealan Patrick Burke. He brings a brand new story called "Memory Lane." Jonathan Crowley continues his adventures, with Part Two of James A Moore's serial novella, The Devoted. J.F. Gonzalez brings us part 3 of his From the Stone Age to the Early Victorian Era, in 3000 Words, talking about Late Victorian ghost stories through the early pulps. We have fiction from Lauren Forry, Dave Thomas, Arinn Dembo and Bracken MacLeod.

    Featured Artist Kealan Patrick Burke

    Bram Stoker Award winning writer Kealan Patrick Burke brings a new story to LampLight. He talks with us about his early writing, acting, and his experience writing a web based novel.

    Serial Novella James A Moore

    The Devoted, Part Two: The Rabble. Crowley and his companion make their way to a small town and see what they can stir up.

    Shadows in the Attic J.F. Gonzalez

    From the Stone Age to the Early Victorian Era, in 3000 Words, Part Three. In this installment, J.F. Gonzalez takes you through the Victorian era into Edwardian, talking about ghosts and the first pulp magazines.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherApokrupha LLC
    Release dateDec 9, 2013
    ISBN9781311650184
    LampLight: Volume 2 Issue 2

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      Book preview

      LampLight - Jacob Haddon

      LampLight

      A Quarterly Magazine of Dark Fiction

      Volume 2

      Issue 2

      December 2013

      Smashwords Edition

      Published by Apokrupha

      Jacob Haddon, Editor

      Katie Winter, Assistant Editor

      Paula Snyder, Cover and Masthead Design

      All stories copyright respective author, 2013

      ISSN: 2169-2122

      lamplightmagazine.com

      apokrupha.com

      Table of Contents

      Featured Artist - Kealan Patrick Burke

      Memory Lane

      Interview with Jeff Heimbuch

      Fiction

      Oh Holy Night - Lauren Forry

      The Hole - Dave Thomas

      The Uncertainty Principle - Arinn Dembo

      Reminisce - Bracken MacLeod

      Serial Novella - James A Moore

      The Devoted - Part 2: The Rabble

      Shadows From the Attic - J. F. Gonzalez

      From the Stone Age to the Early Victorian Era in 3,000 Words Part Three, or,

      Late Victorian and Edwardian ghostly fiction and early pulp horror

      LampLight Classics

      The Middle Bedroom - H. de Vere Stacpoole

      Writer Bios

      Subscriptions Submissions and Comments

      Memory Lane

      Kealan Patrick Burke

      Honey, you up? his wife called up the stairs.

      Sure am! Glenn Bradley rose from the bed and stretched, wincing as his spine cracked, muscles twanged, and his bones resettled in their joints. He was thirty-nine years old, and today, he felt every one of them. Youth, it seemed, like the promotion at the bank and the financial stability it would have afforded, had been unceremoniously stolen away from him. He had the beginnings of a headache and was eager to quell it with a double dose of coffee. Plus, the aroma of bacon from downstairs was making his empty stomach growl.

      He dressed quickly, and gave himself only a cursory glance in the bathroom mirror, for fear of the disappointment he might see in the glass.

      The sun blinded him as he passed the mullioned window that overlooked the upstairs landing, but he welcomed the kiss of warmth. August was ending, the leaves were slowly starting to turn, and the air smelled of earth and smoke. It was his favorite time of the year.

      Downstairs was, as usual, a portrait of familial chaos. At the kitchen table the girls were arguing over which one of them got to use the iPad today and had taken to pelting each other with Cheerios to punctuate their protests. Wendy, dressed in her pink silk robe, her auburn hair in disarray—a look he’d always found, to her bafflement, unbearably erotic—stood at the stove frying eggs.

      Morning, he said, snatching a piece of toast from a plate on the counter beside her.

      She looked at him and her smile quickly turned to a look of puzzlement.

      Whah? he asked around a mouthful of toast.

      Why are you dressed for work?

      He looked down at himself. Charcoal suit, crimson tie, white shirt, pristinely polished shoes. Always have your shoes so shiny you can see the sky in them, his father had once said, and it was a lesson that had stuck. So had his mother’s instruction about walking with his shoulders back and head held high no matter how gloomy things got. The latter seemed particularly helpful these days. Never let them know you have nothing, she’d said, and she had known intimately what nothing felt like, much more than he probably ever would.

      No more enlightened after his self-inspection, What do you mean? he asked his wife. When he looked back at her, her smile had returned, her eyes glittering with amusement. As much as I appreciate your attempts to make us more money, you might find it tough on a Sunday.

      For a moment he thought she was putting him on, until he looked at the Kincaid Caller newspaper and saw that it was twice the usual girth, the swelling typical of its Sunday edition. Once the confusion passed, he felt much like he had as a child on those beautiful but rare occasions when he’d dressed for school only to be told, with similar amusement, that it was the weekend. He felt tension he hadn’t realized he’d been carrying drain from his shoulders.

      Oops.

      She studied him for a moment. Are you all right?

      Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?

      It was a silly question. There were plenty of reasons why he wouldn’t be okay, foremost among them the omnipresent threat of depression in the wake of the loss of the promotion that would have ensured their financial security. But this didn’t need to be restated or debated. Not again. The last time he’d mentioned it, he’d been unable to keep the bitterness from his voice, and had even gone so far as to share with his wife the suspicion that he’d been passed over because the only other candidate, Marcia Clay, was an attractive young woman. Though she was happily married and dressed conservatively, Glenn doubted that mattered much to their lecherous boss, Mr. Gorman. Promoting Marcia would relocate her to a desk much closer to Gorman’s, allowing him a view of the woman unobstructed by computers. It felt petty and ridiculous to think such sexist thoughts, but one had to know Fred Gorman to consider how easy one could form such a conclusion: the hooded gazes and slight smiles, the slow, deliberate appraisals with the tip of his tongue poking out from between his ancient crooked lips, the touches that lingered just a beat too long…the guy was creepy, regardless of his motivations.

      It doesn’t matter, had been his wife’s response. "If you’re right, it hardly changes anything, now does it? What does matter is how we’re going to pay for back-to-school stuff for Candace and Gretchen if things don’t change soon."

      She was right of course, so he let it go, banishing his suspicions to the darker provinces within him, and began to redouble his efforts at finding part-time work on the side. So far, he’d come up empty and it was no small blow to his ego to be told at the local bars, grocery stores, and gas stations that there was no place for him. He knew they saw him as a white collar guy despite his best efforts to show them he was no better or worse than anyone else, and it was hard not to see the satisfaction on some of their faces as they sent him away. The economy was in the toilet, Kincaid was a small town, and in many ways felt the impact more profoundly than the big cities. He’d been lucky enough to land the job at the bank in the first place. Finding something else wasn’t going to be easy.

      Wendy broke from her scrutiny to attend to breakfast. Sometimes I worry, that’s all. We’ll be okay though, you know that, right? We’ll manage.

      Rather than address the false conviction in her voice, he merely smiled, lightly kissed her cheek, then cried out Free day off! and hurried over to the table to hug the girls. Despite being born a year apart, they could have been twins: long blonde hair with darker roots starting to show beneath, porcelain complexions and aquamarine eyes. Only closer inspection revealed the differences: Candace, being the older of the two, was a half-inch taller than her sister; the underside of Gretchen’s chin was host to a binary set of tiny moles, and her ears were shaped differently.

      The girls squealed in delight as he tickled them. Gretchen poked a Cheerio into his ear and he made a show of trying to remove it, which got all of them, even Wendy, laughing until their stomachs hurt. Now, he announced, once the laughter had abated, Daddy needs coffee.

      Wendy gave him an exaggerated sad face. If Daddy doesn’t want it black, Daddy’s going to have to make a run to the store.

      This was a task he might have begged off had he not noticed the bowls of dry cereal in front of the girls. He could go without coffee, or drink it black, bitter as that might be, but it wasn’t right to let the girls chow on dry cereal, and besides, the store was hardly an epic trek. He raised his hands in surrender. Okay, okay.

      Good boy, Wendy said, and started to hand him a plate laden with eggs and bacon. When he reached for it, she withdrew it, and like a magician working backward, yanked open the oven and slid the plate inside. I’ll keep it warm for you, she said, and gave him a lascivious wink.

      Make shure yah do, he responded.

      That supposed to be Sean Connery?

      Supposed to be.

      Wendy winced. Yikes.

      With the children giggling at his back, he shook his head and headed for the door. Nobody appreciates my talent around here, he said, all exaggerated sulk.

      You can eat first if you like, Wendy said, as he freed his jacket from the newel post in the hall. We can wait until Daddy fills his belly, can’t we girls?

      They cooed their approval.

      He waved a hand in the air. Nah. The only thing better than coffee first thing in the morning is a solid dose of Jack Potter’s good old-fashioned, all-American racism.

      Wendy laughed. As he stepped out into the glorious late August day, he heard, as he closed the door behind him, Candace asking her mother what racism was. It seemed to him a bit of an accidental triumph to have escaped addressing that particular question.

      * * *

      Situated on a cul-de-sac, the house was one of a twenty-nine unit development, a two-story imitation Colonial purchased at the end of a string of work bonuses he’d earned for facilitating several lucrative, high-interest loans for the bank (in light of the economic downturn, Gorman had taken to calling such loans credit-busting time-bombs, with no degree of sympathy whatsoever for those who would be most impacted; it was, after all, good for business) and ahead of the promotion he was sure to acquire over the summer. Now that he’d been passed over, he felt the physical weight of that house on his shoulders. Whereas once it had seemed a fair and accurate testament to his hard work, now it appeared grossly overindulgent and foolish. Looking in the rearview at the pristine whitewashed façade and faux marble columns, he understood at least some of the enmity his search for blue-collar work had revealed. The house looked like the domicile of a man with kingly aspirations, a billboard advertising a measure of success the hard-working, simple living people of the town both envied and resented. Arguably they worked as hard, if not harder than he, and yet their labors had not yielded commensurate reward, assuming they were the type who might have flaunted such things, which clearly they were not. As such, living in a big house and working for an institution which could only thrive in this catastrophic economy by luring their customers into ever deeper financial calamity, did not a son of Kincaid make. His outward appearance of success was to them, then, a slap in the face.

      Grand Row, the name of the housing development, did little to dissuade the notion of haughtiness either. As his Toyota cleared the black-lettering-on-burnished silver sign announcing the development, the manicured lawns gave way to the narrow rain-washed, leaf-flecked streets of Kincaid proper. It was a charming place, one he wished admired and respected him as much as he did the town. But like so many things, he knew such respect needed to be earned. All the town had to do was be itself, and from the winding roads to the archaic buildings and general sepia-toned and bucolic aspect of the place and its people, this was an attitude at which it excelled, whereas he clearly had work to do.

      Halfway to Potter’s store, his headache returned in earnest, a dull monotonous tapping against his right temple. One hand on the wheel, he massaged it gently and made a note to pick up some aspirin. Lately Wendy had complained of similar headaches, which she put down to not enough sleep. If this was indeed the cause, then it made perfect sense that

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