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    The Dark Issue 44: The Dark, #44
    The Dark Issue 44: The Dark, #44
    The Dark Issue 44: The Dark, #44
    Ebook61 pages1 hour

    The Dark Issue 44: The Dark, #44

    By Sara Saab, Ian Muneshwar, Angela Fu and Aimee Ogden

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    About this ebook

    Each month The Dark brings you the best in dark fantasy and horror! Selected by award-winning editors Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace and published by Prime Books, this issue includes two all-new stories and two reprints:

    "Burrowing Machines" by Sara Saab
    "Impostor/Impostor" by Ian Muneshwar (reprint)
    "Tansy" by Angela Fu
    "A Cruelty That Cut Both Ways" by Aimee Ogden (reprint)

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrime Books
    Release dateDec 27, 2018
    ISBN9781386127703
    The Dark Issue 44: The Dark, #44

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      Book preview

      The Dark Issue 44 - Sara Saab

      THE DARK

      Issue 44 • January 2019

      Burrowing Machines by Sara Saab

      Impostor/Impostor by Ian Muneshwar

      Tansy by Angela Fu

      A Cruelty That Cut Both Ways by Aimee Ogden

      Cover Art: Mysterious Man Sitting on a Chair Playing the Cello in the Sea Against the Night Sky with the Red Moon by grandfailure

      ISSN 2332-4392.

      Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace.

      Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

      Copyright © 2019 by Prime Books.

      www.thedarkmagazine.com

      Burrowing Machines

      by Sara Saab

      There was a strange agitation to London that summer from the very beginning, a hormonal moodiness, a belly heat, if cities could be said to go through such things. We had enough sunshine to roll around in, but twilight snapped to dark between one sentence and the next, like someone’d tossed a quilt over the giant lamp of the sun. They’d found all those new fossils while digging up the duck pond at Hampstead Heath and they shut the footpath the whole way round. People like me who were barely getting themselves out the door for a jog in the park in the late afternoon haze gave up on exercise entirely.

      By May I was sleeping from the end of my night shift all the way through to my final cut-the-bullshit alarm at 8pm. I’d crawl out of bed feeling like death warmed up. I’d put on my orange hi-viz and cargoes, and a stripe of lipstick, God knows who for, and walk down to Camden Town Station with my hard hat’s suspensions pushing against the blood-beat of a headache at my temples.

      The drilling work in the tunnel, at least, started miraculously on schedule. I lost myself for underground hours that summer planning the reroute of London’s Victorian water mains around the burrowing machines’ trajectory, the construction of temporary wall struts and the boring of holes for soil samples. I spent most of my waking hours fifteen meters below ground in a dark punctuated by machine headlights, flashlight beams, and shadows, and on the rare occasions I met Adarsh at the Old Man’s Arms for a fish supper and a dry cider before work, he’d give me that look that told me he thought I was in urgent need of rescue from my life.

      "No one but you would be this into burrowing, Jo," he said when I met him in early June.

      We haven’t had a new tunnel for the Northern Line in three decades, I reminded him around a tartar-sauced chunk of battered cod.

      "How filthy is that dirt you’re shoveling anyway? All London’s millennia of shite, and bones, and bubonic plague, and more shite."

      It doesn’t bother me. If you saw these giant tunneling machines do what they do, I think you’d appreciate it.

      Adarsh sipped his craft ale, eyebrows high enough on his forehead that they almost skimmed his turban.

      And you hear the river through some of the walls, I added.

      The Thames?

      No, you numpty. The River Fleet.

      The underground stream. Adarsh poked a stuffed olive with a toothpick. Made me think of Fran, who’d hated all foods that didn’t belong in sandwich bread.

      Proper river. High and low tides. Currents. Everything. At high tide it vibrates in the stone.

      The River Fleet—London’s geologic minotaur, winding North to South, fallen out of favor, diminished and trapped underground in its labyrinth of sewers back in the eighteenth century. The tourist-friendly experience was the faint hush of it through a tiny sewer grate on Ray Street in Clerkenwell. Being separated from the Fleet by just an underground tunnel wall in the small hours of morning was an entirely different thing.

      But that was just trivia. None of it would matter until later.

      In late June, we started to slip behind on the tunnel expansion project.

      When I looked at Annabel’s Gantt charts, it all seemed minor—engineers taking unexplained sick days, a pervasive anxiety that stretched ten-minute breaks to twenty. Like that same out-of-sortsness that had been weighing on me was spreading.

      The first really observably weird thing happened on a Saturday night, two hours after the last Northern Line train. We were doing a tunnel walkthrough when one of our junior engineers, Philip, noticed a hole punched in the wall of the existing southbound Tube tunnel.

      Grey moon rocks of concrete and a pile of dust dampened in the maintenance crawlspace beside the train tracks. We stuck our flashlights through the hole, wide as a crockpot, to the void on the other side. Our beams spotlighted the adjoining space. Glaze and slime on old brickwork. Water babbled along well below the level of the hole.

      I didn’t know the Fleet flowed right alongside here, Philip said, and ran a hand round the hole’s ragged edge. That’s maybe half a meter of concrete.

      "Are there burrowing machines on the other side? In the

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