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    LampLight: Volume 5 Issue 1
    LampLight: Volume 5 Issue 1
    LampLight: Volume 5 Issue 1
    Ebook167 pages2 hours

    LampLight: Volume 5 Issue 1

    By Jacob Haddon

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Featuring Are You Sure What Side You’re On? by Sunny Moraine. We talk to them about the Root Code books, short fiction and the writing process.

    Kevin Lucia’s Horror 101, The Weird. What is Weird? How does it fit into horror or literature?

    Fiction from:

    Walter Dinjos
    Amandeep Jutla
    Ryan Lazarus
    Nghi Vo
    Konstantinos Kellis

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherApokrupha LLC
    Release dateOct 19, 2016
    ISBN9781370234554
    LampLight: Volume 5 Issue 1

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      Book preview

      LampLight - Jacob Haddon

      Apokrupha

      All Rights Reserved

      LampLight

      A Quarterly Magazine of Dark Fiction

      Volume 5

      Issue 1

      September 2016

      Published by Apokrupha

      Jacob Haddon, Editor

      Katie Winter, Assistant Editor

      Paula Snyder, Masthead Design

      All stories copyright respective author, 2016

      ISSN: 2169-2122

      lamplightmagazine.com

      apokrupha.com

      Table of Contents

      Featured Writer - Sunny Moraine

      Are You Sure What Side You’re On

      Interview with Jeff Heimbuch

      Fiction

      Sing Me A Song - Walter Dinjos

      Ascension - Amandeep Jutla

      An Expected Guest - Ryan Lazarus

      Lysis - Nghi Vo

      Junkyard Cemetery Konstantinos Kellis

      Horror 101 with Kevin Lucia

      The Weird

      LampLight Classics

      The People of the Pit - A. Merritt

      Writer Bios

      Subscriptions and Submissions

      * * *

      Are You Sure What Side You’re On

      Sunny Moraine

      You can bathe in a smell.

      That’s not a metaphor. By bathe I mean something literal: to the extent that we all have an agreed-upon definition for the word, one can actually bathe in a scent. Synonyms. Wash, soak. Submerge. Swim.

      Drown.

      It’s a question of density. Smell is made up of particles; how densely are these particles gathered together in one given space? What are the structure and the dimensions of the space? This leads us to another key factor, which is perception. Detection. Put a man and a dog in that same space, and their experiences of it will be vastly different. Not by kind, but by degrees. Water is not thicker or wetter depending on your ability to detect wetness. You’re in it, either way. Not so with smell.

      I’m not a dog. I’m not a man, either.

      But I bathe.

      The dimensions of this space are undetectable. Sound, flashing light, constantly moving figures. Thumping bass—is that music? Is the foundation of music rhythm? It guides those bodies, sometimes graceful and sometimes not. Strobes and lasers; this doesn’t seem entirely safe, and I don’t recall being asked to sign a release form. I can’t see anything with any degree of clarity. The nature of my immediate universe is uncertainty. The quantum particulate dance magnified and dragged into the macro, and I’m dragged into it, and I know nothing.

      But I am soaked in this smell.

      Metal. Sweet copper and iron. Sharp, like a tiny claw trailing up in the insides of your sinuses and dancing across your soft palate. The faintest whiff of fresh decay as the oxygen begins to leave it.

      Salt. Of sweat, of tears, a drained ocean. The rain that beats down clouds of desert dust. The sun glittering off flakes of mica at the bottom of a stream bed. Thin sheen of a knife. A fingertip run along the edge of the blade, and a cut that never goes deep enough to bleed. It contains within it the tantalizing possibility of itself.

      This is what I’m bathing in. Swimming. Drowning. There are other smells, sure—sweat and stale beer and dirty leather, all respectable themselves in terms of their density—but they’re inconsequential and easy to ignore. I’m not just here because I like shitty dance clubs. I’m not here because I’m some kind of fucking cliche. My evolution has made me goal-oriented. I’m here for a purpose.

      It’s about feeding.

      I found my way to the entrance—black unmarked door in an East Village alleyway—and now I find my way toward the back, where the water gets deeper and I have to work harder to stay afloat. Every inhalation makes my head spin and my knees wobble, and the music and voices of people screaming to be heard don’t help. Everything is disorienting, and what’s drawing me, my guiding star, is part of what’s overwhelming me.

      It’s been weeks. Weeks since a decent meal. Longest stretch I’ve held out so far, and I’m so fucking hungry, and every agonizing step I take into that sickeningly intoxicating scent makes me more confident that I’ve hit the timing right on the nose. Every part of me is primed.

      Just can’t blow it all in one go.

      Slick skin, damp clothes, strands of wet hair trail over my throat and bare shoulders. Now and then a hand, on my back. Ass. Tit. Don’t flinch. It’s not unexpected, and anyway I don’t care. There’s a place ahead of me, tucked out of the way through that seething crush of people, where the lights don’t strobe and the volume drops. Where stainless steel flashes in the glow of the directional standing lamps.

      Small crowd, watching. Watching unspeaking, making a strange eye of silence in the storm of noise. I press close, peering over shoulders, and see a woman reclining on something like a dentist’s examination chair.

      The woman’s kohl-smeared eyes are closed, her blond buzz cut a rich gold in the half shadow above her face. Clothes black, tight, tank top and jeans, both hugging her curves with profound affection. A big man wearing a thick black beard is leaning over her, latex-gloved hands so steady as he pinches the dark brown skin of her upper arm between his forefinger and thumb and drives a needle through it with a single expert thrust.

      The woman arches, sucks in a breath that sinks into a moan as she sags back into the chair. All around me the people release a sigh as if in sympathy. I’m close enough to have a decent look at the thing; the needle is small and long and very sharp, and there’s barely any blood at all. Same when he drives in another right above it. Her moan is louder, her head falling to the side, and her features are both contorted and oddly smooth.

      Ecstasy.

      Christ, she’s gorgeous. This is gorgeous. This is so gorgeous I can hardly remain standing. As always, part of me is wondering if this was a mistake, if I’m tempting myself too much. But the wrenching in my core is exactly what I came for.

      Another needle, this time above and crossways over the two parallel. A second one and it’s a two by two grid. The man presses down on it and she jerks and gasps and twitches, and I’ve been cold all through for as long as I can remember anymore but all at once my nerves are on fire and my stomach and lungs and cells are screaming with how much I want her, shrieking over the level of the music and the voices, and I clench my hands into fists so tight I feel my file-pointed fingernails pierce the meat of my palms.

      I have never seen this woman before. She’s new. I’m here because I knew the man would be here, and this is a semi-regular activity for him and always draws a crowd of the curious and the admiring. If you asked him, he would probably say it’s not really about sex, but whether he believes it or not, he couldn’t be more wrong, because something like this is about nothing but sex. The grip and the thrust, the penetration, the pain that becomes more than pain, the loosening and the surrender, and the endorphin afterglow.

      He pushes at the needles, flicks lightly at the ends, and he’s destroying her. Patch of flesh on her upper arm half the size of my hand, and it does this to her. This is mild for him. Once I saw him pierce a wide, complex design across a pretty boy’s pretty back.

      Yet somehow this. This.

      That smell, pulsing in my head and spreading through my veins like injected poison. Now mingling with the endorphins and a healthy dose of adrenaline. I’m near the wall and I have to lean on one hand, shaking.

      Then, quickly and smoothly, he pulls the needles free. She cries out, her voice sweet and musical, and as I force myself to watch, small beads of blood well from the holes and begin to trickle down her arm. There won’t be much; he’s too good at this for there to be much, and he’s already pressing gauze to the wounds, but I got what I came for and I’m crushed under the weight of the scent, the glisten and the color, like liquid gems, and I slump against the wall and squeeze my eyes shut and bite back my groans, running my tongue over the fine points of my teeth.

      It’s torture. I feel every second individually, and every second is fucking torture, a ruthless internal beating of wantwantWANT. It stretches out into waves of agony, and I ride their crests.

      It’s so good.

      I’m perverted. Sick. I don’t give a shit. It’s not as if I’m not already a highly problematic individual.

      After a little while—I have no idea how long—it fades, and I open my eyes into the light, drumming red traded for drumming blue and white. The crowd is still in the process of dispersing. The woman is still there, sitting up sideways on the chair and lifting the gauze away to examine her arm.

      I’m making no attempt whatsoever to hide my staring. I’m making no attempt whatsoever to hide anything. But I’m also not thinking about the actual consequences of that, until she lifts her gaze and strikes mine, holds it, pierces me through.

      And though I don’t get it until much later, I already know I’m fucked.

      I turn away and swim into the dark.

      * * *

      It wasn’t always like this. Believe me, I didn’t start out this way.

      Should go without saying, right? Sure. No one starts out this way, or that’s how the story goes, and some of the stories are close to accurate. Things like me are not born; we’re made, conceived in a subtle orgy of blood and death.

      That part is true. Sort of. The blood and death part, anyway. The orgy part, too. And the subtlety.

      Because no one can see it, the rising tide of red-black inside you. It’s a private transformation, and as it happens you’re fixed with the absolute certainty that this is only the way you’ve always been. You are in the midst of a becoming more fundamental and more essential than puberty could ever be. You’re sinking into yourself at the same time as you emerge, slicing open your chrysalis and crawling out to dry your iridescent wings in the sun.

      You are delicate and beautiful, but only you know it, and only you understand. Outside your skin, you look like all the rest of them. You pass. You blend. None of them know what you are.

      You reveal yourself to a chosen few. They don’t realize how much you’ve favored them, how wholly they’ve been blessed.

      They’re too busy pleading for their lives to notice.

      * * *

      This is a community of consensual torture. Or at least, the community makes a periodic home here. There are resources. There’s support. There’s a network of friends and acquaintances and colleagues. And through it

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