LampLight: Volume 6 Issue 3

By Jacob Haddon

Chet Williamson is the featured writer! He brings a haunting story, *"And So Will I Remember You..."* We talk with him about audio productions, acting, and, of course, books.

Fiona Maeve Geist talks about Gertrude Barrows Bennett & Daphne Du Maurier

Fiction from:

* Errick Nunnally
* Melanie Rees
* Lisa May Lu
* Samantha Mills

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apokrupha LLC
• Release date: Apr 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370897131

Book preview

Apokrupha

All Rights Reserved

LampLight

A Quarterly Magazine of Dark Fiction

Volume 6

Issue 3

March 2018

Published by Apokrupha

Jacob Haddon, Editor

Catherine Grant, Assistant Editor

Paula Snyder, Masthead Design

All stories copyright respective author, 2018

ISSN: 2169-2122

lamplightmagazine.com

apokrupha.com

Table of Contents

Featured Writer - Chet Williamson

And So Will I Remember You…

Interview with Jeff Heimbuch

Fiction

Penny Incompatible - Errick Nunnally

Socks Soaked with Time - Melanie Rees

Gone Wailing - Lisa May Lu

The Gestational Cycle of Flies in a Cupboard - Samantha Mills

Article

Gertrude Barrows Bennett & Daphne Du Maurier - Fiona Maeve Geist

LampLight Classics

The Shadows on the Wall - Mary Wilkens

Writer Bios

Subscriptions and Submissions

* * *

And So Will I Remember You…

Chet Williamson

I don’t recall when I bought the book. It must have been on my shelf for years before I read it and found the inscriptions.

How I ever came to have a copy of The Peep of Day; or, a Series of the Earliest Religious Instruction the Infant Mind is Capable of Receiving, I’ll never know. I had to have picked it up from Kerry Baker, the book dealer, since it had his code in it: $1— with xx below it, showing that he’d paid nothing for it, probably having gotten it in a box lot at an auction. I suppose I bought it on a whim, due to its cheapness and age.

It sat unnoticed in the lawyer’s bookcases in my bedroom for twenty years, until the evening I lay in bed reading Todd Pruzan’s piece in The New Yorker about Mrs. Favel Lee Mortimer, the author. Perhaps I should say authoress, since that stuffy, tight-laced woman would no doubt have referred thus to herself. She was among the most Victorian of British Victorian writers, was the redoubtable Mrs. Mortimer, slinging moralistic platitudes and nationalistic chauvinism about like some precursor to the Evangelical one-minders who’ve cast a similar blight on the current cultural landscape.

The simultaneously amusing and nasty thing about Mrs. Mortimer was that she wrote for children. Her withered literary soul found fertile ground among her parental collaborators who foisted upon their hapless offspring such titles as The Countries of Europe Described, Reading without Tears, and the aforementioned The Peep of Day. When I read her various descriptions of those unfortunate enough to live outside of England – …it would almost make you sick to go to church in Iceland is one of her kinder judgments – I knew I had found a true monster of popular literature, and was assured of it when I unearthed my own copy of The Peep of Day.

I have a memory for books, if for nothing else, and although Mrs. Mortimer’s name meant nothing to me, the book’s title did. I set down the magazine on the nightstand, muttered a brief explanation to my wife Linda, and starting rummaging through the bookcase on the other side of the bedroom. After several minutes I came up with the sad little volume. Its cover was worn, the cheap pseudo-cloth covering the heavy paper boards was chipped, and the dark threads and white binding cloth of the spine lay exposed like muscle and nerves under skin.

I climbed back into bed and found that the edition was published by The American Tract Society, always a promising sign, and gave no author’s name. Anna B. Huber’s book 1860 was written on the front flyleaf in an ink that time had browned. I turned to the text, hoping for outrage, and was not disappointed.

The first chapter, entitled The Body, describes the same in simple and non-technical terms:

God has covered your bones with flesh. Your flesh is soft and warm…I hope that your body will not get hurt…

If it were to fall into a fire, it would be burned up. If hot water were to fall upon it, it would be scalded. If it were to fall into deep water, and not be taken out very soon, it would be drowned. If a great knife were run though your body, the blood would come out. If a great box were to fall on your head, your head would be crushed. If you were to fall out the window, your neck would be broken. If you were to not eat any food for a few days, your little body would be very sick, your breath would stop, and you would grow cold, and you would soon be dead.

You see that you have a very weak little body.

Thank you for all your many kindnesses, Mrs. Mortimer. Her eventual point was that the child should pray to God to keep its little body safe from harm. I suppose it’s merely a more explicit version of the old bedtime prayer, If I should die before I wake, but I wondered about the effect such a list of horrors would have on an impressionable child of five or six, Mrs. Mortimer’s target audience, as revealed in her preface.

I couldn’t help but share Mrs. Mortimer’s deathless prose with Linda, though she’s never been as fond as I of such literary cruelty. Being an elementary school principal makes her even more sensitive toward the feelings of children, and she was properly horrified and disgusted to the point where she gave a theatrical shudder, closed her own book, and turned off the light on her side, a cue that I should do the same, and one to which I responded as desired.

Nothing alarms me at night. When I close my eyes in the darkness I’m able to close them on the concerns of the day, even my current inability to create a solid outline for a new novel, which drove me mad whenever my eyes were open. Nor am I affected by any filmic or literary horror I might have ingested before bedtime. In short, I sleep well and heavily, and am awakened only by the twin orbs of the morning sun and my bladder when full. That bladder alarm usually wakes me around four in the morning, as it did on this particular night, so I got up quietly, traversed the darkened bedroom with the assurance of one who knows every toe-stubbing bedpost and nightstand by heart, and made my way to the bathroom.

When I stepped into the hall on my return, however, I felt suddenly ill at ease, as though if I turned and looked through the doorway into the living room, I might see a dark shape sitting in one of the chairs. It was surprising. Usually I’m as at home in the dark as a cat.

So I confronted my fear, and turned and looked directly into the room, lit only by the pale glow the street lights cast through the thick curtains. There was nothing there, of course, but I thought that I heard just the wisp of a sigh, high and feminine. I took a few steps to the doorway, reached in and turned on the light.

The room was empty. The sigh had probably been my own sinusitis-induced nose-whistle. I snorted at my own imagination, and went back to bed. Sleep, however, didn’t come as readily as it usually did.

The next day I was too busy to think about Mrs. Mortimer and her less than salubrious effect on children. My writer’s block, spongy at first, had thickened to the consistency of cement, and I struggled unsuccessfully through another eight-hour day, trying to extricate myself from a muddle of forced motivations and blatant coincidences. When I’d finished, I had another paragraph of my outline done, and knew that I would delete most of it the next day. My anxiety deepened daily, despite Linda’s assurances that I would work my way out of my problems. Hives frequently appeared, and the small x-shaped birthmark on my shoulder itched madly, as it always did when I grew upset.

That evening, lying next to Linda, I tried to distract myself by once again paging through The Peep of Day. Nothing equaled the awfulness of the first chapter, though that on The Wicked Angels came close, with the deathless verses:

Satan is glad

When I am bad,

And hopes that I

With him shall lie

In fire and chains,

And dreadful pains.

All liars dwell

With him in hell,

And many more

Who cursed and swore,

And all who did

What God forbid.

I wondered if the Anna B. Huber who owned the book had been as enthralled by her bedtime tales as I’d been by mine, and in curiosity I turned to the endpapers to see her name again, then flipped to the back. There was a note handwritten in pencil. Though faded, it read:

The owner to this book is A. B. Huber. My Father gave it to me for a Present. This is a nice reading book for us if we only try and do as it says in this book and read it through and through. 1862

I was unexpectedly moved by this touch of humanity in such a harshly written volume, and could nearly see the events of a century and a half before, the father giving the book with pride and affection to his daughter, and, two years later, Anna trying out her new penmanship skills on the endpapers. I looked through the other pages at the rear and front of the book, and found on a fore-title page a main course to which the other inscription had been a mere appetizer:

This evening I write my name here and that is Anna B. Huber. In the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty three and here youns can see my name when I am dead and gone.

The rose is red the vines are green

The days are Past which I have seen

Remember me by the dawn of day

Remember me when far away

Remember me and so will I

Remember you till I die.

—Anna B. Huber’s Book 1863

God, I thought with a smile, how these simple words define a life long past. A little girl wants to be remembered after death, so she puts her name in a book, perhaps the only object of permanence she owns, creating her own time capsule to be opened years later by a middle-aged man who hears her voice and does as she wishes – he remembers her, long after she is dust.

Remarkable, I thought at first, that she should be so fixated on death. But when I considered what mortality rates were like in 1863, not even taking the Civil War into account, I thought it likely that Anna B. Huber had experienced