LampLight: Volume 5 Issue 4

Apokrupha

All Rights Reserved

LampLight

A Quarterly Magazine of Dark Fiction

Volume 5

Issue 4

June 2017

Published by Apokrupha

Jacob Haddon, Editor

Catherine Grant, Assistant Editor

Paula Snyder, Masthead Design

All stories copyright respective author, 2017

ISSN: 2169-2122

lamplightmagazine.com

apokrupha.com

Table of Contents

Featured Writer - Kristi DeMeester

Abide With Me

Interview with Jeff Heimbuch

Fiction

The Air Gap - Hilary B. Bisenieks

In The Morning - Sandra T.

Dixie Square - Terence Hannum

A Delayed Exit - Brian Keene

Horror 101 with Kevin Lucia

Quiet Horror

LampLight Classics

The Signal Man - Charles Dickens

Writer Bios

Subscriptions and Submissions

* * *

Abide with Me

Kristi DeMeester

Tessa rented the cabin sight unseen. Private Getaway! Let your problems fade in the majesty of the North Georgia Mountains! She’d been thumbing through the paper Wesley had left on the kitchen counter, the cup of coffee she’d poured gone cold, when she saw the ad and called. The voice that picked up was nondescript. Neither male nor female but calm and even and measured. So different from Tessa’s own nervous squeaking.

She had not told Wesley. Claimed she had a conference. A last minute invitation that could be really great for her career. Something that would put her in front of some very important people. She expected the lie to ache in the deepest parts of her, but it didn’t, and her husband nodded and smoothed his peppered hair away from his face.

Sure, he said. When she loaded the ancient Toyota with her suitcase—too light even for this short trip—Wesley was already at work. She’d lingered in the driveway, her fingertips resting lightly on the steering wheel as she stared at the bricked monster they’d bought when they still pretended to love each other. Maybe they both thought this joint venture—the fresh paint and new drywall—would be something they could drown in together. Now, the house only looked shabby, the red brick faded to a dull rust, and the grass grown long and spotted with dandelions. Two containers filled with dying chrysanthemums flanked the front door. Tessa couldn’t bring herself to throw them out.

Hissing out her breath through her teeth, she started the car and did not look back. She was afraid if she did, she’d end up staying after all, and she needed this weekend. Needed it as a test to prove she still knew how to be alone after all these years of filling that empty space with Wesley’s quiet.

If she could, then…Then maybe the thing she’d been thinking of for the past few months wouldn’t feel so huge. Wouldn’t feel like something too large for her to hold. Maybe she wouldn’t feel like her guts were slowly leaking out of her.

The voice on the telephone had given her directions. Talked her through the turns slowly. When the gravel dumps out to dirt, you’re almost there. You’ll go around a turn. Big pine tree on the left, but it’s rotted out. You can’t miss it. Pass that and the house is right around that bend.

An hour into the drive, she couldn’t control her hands. Turned the radio on, then off. Pressed all of the buttons to turn on the air conditioning, the heat, to zip the windows down and then up.

Stop it, she whispered, but still her fingers danced over every surface, and she hated herself for every twitching movement.

The voice on the telephone had told her to leave the check in the mailbox, and Tessa had thought it strange. It had been a long time since she’d booked any place on her own—Wesley normally occupied that role—but she figured not taking payment up front was a good way to get ripped off.

I’ll be sure to do that, she said.

And one other thing, the voice said, but then the line crackled, hard and loud, and Tessa’s hand slipped, the phone bouncing against the carpet. By the time she pressed the receiver back to her ear, the dial tone was a loud, accusatory beeping, and she put the phone back in its cradle.

She had tried to call back, but no one ever picked up, and there was no answering machine. If whatever the voice wanted to tell her was important, Tessa figured she’d get a call back, but the days came and went without any word.

Outside of Dahlonega she stopped for gas and a bottle of water. Along the highway, signs promised gold mining experiences for the littleuns, the peeling pictures featuring a smiling, bucktoothed rendering of a tyke holding a nugget of gold. Every miner takes home a treasure!

If she and Wesley had ever had children, she would have taken them to places like these. Let her raven-haired boy and girl dip their pans into the pre-loaded silt and then oohed and ahhed over tiny gemstones and flakes of pyrite. That was the kind of mother she would have been. Doting. Overprotective.

Now, she drank her water in small sips, let her throat and her belly cool as she thought about turning around, pointing the car back toward Atlanta and spending the rest of her life wandering through that big house like a ghost. Navigating past Wesley and pretending her marriage wasn’t irretrievably broken.

Get on then, she muttered and dropped back into the seat.

The further the road carried her, the more her anxiety dropped away, that heavy skin shedding as the miles ticked on. By the time she found the turn off, she felt lithe and young, and the pines overhead grew thick and dark, but there were no ominous signs in them. No strange omens in the crows that dipped low overhead, and she slowed the car to a creep and zapped down the window.

Already, the air held a different tang. Something massive and wet and ancient. She breathed deep and wished she had more water.

575 became the Georgia Mountain Parkway and soon enough she saw the sign for Thomaston Road. It veered of the highway in a hairpin curve that could kill a man if he took it too quickly. Dotted among the trees were bunches of Goldenrod and Queen Anne’s Lace and Black-Eyed Susans. All of the magical flowers she’d learned as a girl, their colors like jewels and sunshine and bridal veils in her memory. She smiled and turned off, her car lurching over a series of potholes, and then the highway was swallowed up behind her. Even though Tessa hadn’t seen a car for miles, for the first time, she felt truly alone.

A deep culvert ran on either side of the road, which had already dropped to a single lane. If she wanted, she could thrust her hand out the window and snatch at the sagging leaves. Everything here seemed on the precipice of death. The landscape painted in drab browns. There was no brilliance. No glitter or fanfare past the loveliness that marked the entrance.

Above, the sun had begun its autumnal death—quick and on her before she noticed. She’d always hated these long months between fall and spring, hated the long night and eternal darkness. Too often, she’d felt herself on the edge of some violence. Like some terrible dream come to life she’d wake with her heart rabbit quick in her chest and her hands slick with the sensation of blood.

She had that same feeling now, and she swiped her palms against her jeans and shook herself. The road bent again, the lane growing even narrower as it passed the promised dead pine tree, and she squinted, tried to be sure she wasn’t inadvertently driving herself directly into the ditch.

If she hadn’t already been moving so slowly, she would have missed the second turn off. The dirt path was overgrown, weeds and dead grass choked what had once been tire treads, and she brought the car to a complete stop.

This couldn’t be it. The voice on the phone had told her the road would be dirt, that it would be hard to see and she might not want to make the trek back there in the dark, but the road looked abandoned. She couldn’t imagine that anyone had driven through here in months.

She looked again at the directions she’d scrawled on the back of an envelope. Unmarked road. Dirt and small. Veers off to the right.

Fuck it, she said, and this small vulgarity made her skin tingle. She giggled, but the sound unsettled her, and she bit down on her tongue and turned the car onto the road. If there was no house at the end of all of this, at least she’d had an adventure. She could always drive back into Dahlonega and get a hotel for the weekend. It wouldn’t be the same, wouldn’t promise the same isolation she wanted, but it’d be better than nothing.

Her car lurched over fallen branches, the pine needles crunching under her tires. Twilight had fallen and painted the woods with shadowed devils. Delicate forms took shape, dissipated, and then came together again as she stared into the gathered gloom. A chill ran over her skin as she imagined all of the toothsome, wicked things lying wait in the woods. Shivering, she bounced over the road and hoped she’d reach the house before the sun fully set.

As soon as she’d had the thought, the house appeared, the dirt road seemingly