by Jack Dann
David finally spoke up. ‘And you all just happened to choose the night Talia deigned to see me, after a whole year. After she’d left me when she was pregnant with our sons. Without even having the courtesy to tell me she was pregnant. Great timing, both of you.’
‘My babies,’ I said again. ‘Not your babies, or our babies, you horrid man. You don’t even like babies, remember? Just for once, this isn’t about you.’
‘I think it is, actually,’ he said, with a smug almost-smile. ‘Whose babies could they be, if they’re not mine? I’m sure they’ve got my eyes. They’re exceptionally handsome little creatures, for babies.’
Everything was always about him. ‘I’ve told you already, they’re mine. They’re only eight weeks old. Do the maths, David.’
His long, single eyebrow tilted. ‘So you got pregnant in Europe, a few weeks after you left me. You said there wasn’t anyone else. Would you care to explain just how this happened? Artificial insemination? Immaculate conception?’
David had quite graciously helped me pack up and leave him, after seven years of squabbling interrupted only by more serious fights. I’d diagnosed mildly dented pride, rather than heartbreak.
‘It’s absolutely none of your business,’ I said. ‘I think it’s time you went home, now. I’ve got to put the twins to bed.’ I wanted to mention the bill for mending the smashed window, but he’d have stayed all night arguing that it was merely a by-product of his heroism, and that I ought to welcome him back to my bed in heartfelt gratitude.
‘And I bet you’ve called them Romulus and Remus,’ he said, with a sly smile. ‘Male twins of uncertain parentage, right? Possibly semi-divine, and suckled by a wolf.’
He knew me far too well.
I prevaricated. ‘Why would you think that?’
‘Well, what else would you call them? Tom and Jerry? Not my inventive Talia.’
Now, more than ever, I knew that I had to change their names to something plainer and more child-friendly before they got to kindergarten, or they would be social pariahs.
After much nagging, David loped off into the night alone, leaving me and Annafrid with the twins. I handed Romulus to Annafrid, and we walked upstairs together and tucked the two boys into their big cot.
When David was out of earshot — which took quite a long time, with a wily old wolf like him — Annafrid asked, ‘They are his, aren’t they?’
‘Yeah. You can smell it?’
She nodded. Troll senses are even better than wolf senses. Their natural environment is harsher.
I said, ‘They’re five months old, really, not eight weeks, but he wouldn’t know the difference. I only found out I was pregnant when I was working in the institute with your relatives. He’ll work it out eventually. He’s not stupid, and they really have got his eyes.’ I hoped, quietly, that they wouldn’t get his dark unibrow.
She looked baffled. ‘But why don’t you want to tell him now?’ she said. ‘Human males bond strongly with their young, don’t they?’
‘Yeah, mostly, but David would be a terrible father. He’d probably run away to Europe, if I told him they were really his. On the other hand, he’ll make a fantastic Uncle David for little boys: all care and no responsibility. Hunting lessons in the backyard — chasing grasshoppers and beetles — they’ll all have a ball.’
While I was trying hard to be casual, Annafrid was looking at her feet sheepishly.
‘What’s up?’ I said.
She looked up at me through her long, feathery eyelashes. ‘Hey, would you mind if, I mean can I, um, is it all right if I sleep on your sofa tonight? Talia? I missed my lift back to the hills, coming here.’
I almost asked her to share my bed. My tongue itched to lick those rippling deltoids. But it had been a stressful evening, and I needed a few hours’ sleep before the 4 am feed, and the 7 am alarm clock.
‘Sure.’ I led her to the linen cupboard for sheets and blankets. She stood very close to me; her fascinating inhuman smell surrounded me. I breathed deeply, and smiled.
But there was no hurry. Annafrid and I could have a few good years together before she started to change into an adult troll. I could smell it in her endocrine mix. And there was something that none of the researchers had wanted to tell the trolls until we were absolutely sure: the medication we’d been testing didn’t just take away the desire for human flesh. It actually seemed to delay the metamorphosis. Annafrid would have a choice; she didn’t have to turn into an aphasic pile of rocks. With luck, she could stay gloriously nubile for as long as she wanted.
As she kissed me goodnight, sweetly and gently, I passed my right hand lightly over her shoulder. Her deltoids felt as good as they looked.
A few minutes later, in bed — alone — I set my mind to work towards a happy future for us all. What could I rename the twins? Castor and Pollux, no; that would be even worse. Tom and Jerry, no. Ben and Jerry, no. Bing and Bob, no …
AFTERWORD
Some years back, Russell Blackford and I ate at a noisy Melbourne restaurant near a large group of young women who seemed to be having a wonderful time. I said, ‘Girls’ night out,’ and our sardonic dining companion replied, ‘Trolls’ night out.’ It became a family catchphrase, and eventually turned into this story.
— Jenny Blackford
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THE REST IS SILENCE
AARON STERNS
AARON STERNS’s first published story, ‘The Third Rail’, appeared in Dreaming Down-Under and was shortlisted for the 1998 Aurealis Award for Best Horror Short Story. Subsequent stories ‘At Night My Television Bleeds’ (Orb #3/4) and ‘Watchmen’ (Gathering the Bones) both received honourable mentions in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror annual collections. Recently he served as script-editor for the film Rogue and appeared in Greg McLean’s earlier Wolf Creek as a nasty truck driver. A former editor of The Journal of the Australian Horror Writers, Sterns has also presented academic papers on American Psycho and Crash at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (as part of PhD work on postmodern horror), written nonfiction articles for Bloodsongs: The Australian Horror Magazine, amongst other publications, and was the Australian correspondent for Hellnotes: The Insider’s Guide to the Horror Field. Sterns is currently working on a number of screenplays and a novel. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Be warned, the brilliant, incandescent story that follows is… harrowing.
He drove from Melbourne almost on autopilot, winding through the familiar country roads between Gordon and Mt Egerton and arriving at the old house before even realising he’d been heading there.
The tiny shack still stood halfway up the slope of the mountain. Abandoned long ago, its yellowing weatherboards looked sickly against the surrounding grass, the few windows broken and gaping. He left his car by the road and slowly walked towards his old home, staring up at the unfinished wooden veranda looming above. His stepfather Graeme had once thrown his mother over the railing, punching her hard enough in the mouth to send her tumbling into the dirt, and he had crept out later to find her folded-up in the darkness, the side of her head caked with mud and blood that he tried futilely wiping away with his pajama top as he helped her inside.
The back door hung only by one hinge, and as he hefted it aside a warm rotting smell hit him. Inside he could see mildew up the plasterboard walls, great darkened rents in the floorboards, spreading stains across the roof. He remembered sitting in here at the cramped eating-table watching television with his brother Stephen as Graeme and his mother argued about something over dinner, remembered the big man leaning forward and casually swatting her across the face, breaking her jaw. Remembered blood speckling his plate.
Through the doorway he saw into the bedrooms, once bisected with a curtain but now open and empty. So many nights he and Stephen had burrowed beneath their blankets on their side of the room trying to escape the sounds from the kitchen of his stepfather’s drunken ranting and clomping feet, the fearful, hitched-breath justifications
of his mother, the heart-stopping gunshot-smash of a bottle thrown against the wall, the otherworldly smack of flesh on flesh. So many nights they listened to the alien sounds of sex from behind the curtain, his mother not able to meet their eyes the next morning but at least avoiding getting hit.
He remembered pleading with her again and again to leave. But Graeme threatened to kill them if she did.
Toward the end, when he had grown bigger, he started standing up to his stepfather and had his nose broken twice, but it tore through his mother’s inertia and forced her to take them away. Since then he had dreamed again and again of revenge, of hunting down his stepfather and … doing what? Killing him? Beating him up? He never really knew, and when the bastard died of cancer it was as if some part of him also died.
He stared around at the crumbling monument to his past, and then stepped forward and opened the jerry-can from the service station in Gordon and started emptying it of petrol. He soaked the walls, the floors, the gaping windowframes, until the wood was stained blood-dark. Then he walked outside on stiff legs and lit the bottom of the door.
The heat scorched out at him and he stumbled back as the door whumped into life. The growing licks of flame blazed in the dying late-afternoon light and soon the weatherboards alongside the entry took hold and the wall of fire arched up towards the roof with a sudden roar.
But as he stood watching the house burn he felt empty inside. It didn’t give him release, didn’t change what happened, didn’t exorcise anything.
When he saw an old guy in a flannelette shirt running over from the next property he headed back to his car. Sat inside clenching the steering wheel with white knuckles, still feeling the heat on his face, the emptiness inside, then realised the guy was taking his numberplate and drove away.
Panicking at being seen he turned onto Sharrock’s Road and quickly wound around the mountain and down again, disappearing into the back roads, nearly losing it on the gravel. The setting sun burned in his rear-view and he glanced up and saw tears in his eyes.
It had all been for nothing. He couldn’t escape the past. Couldn’t get rid of the deadness inside.
And now the police would be after him.
What the hell had he done?
He looked back to the dirt track as he came over a dip to see a bizarre flash of white in front of him, something in the middle of the road: a figure, a boy walking along the trail. He yelled and braked and the car fishtailed, sliding instead towards the boy, the tyres howling on the uneven ground, and he slammed the wheel hard to one side even as the boy finally turned with a little o-mouth of surprise, and then a scraping crump sounded from somewhere, everywhere, as the grille folded around the sudden body. A scream of metal and spinning air and strange whorls of gravity like a blender a washing machine a dryer and trees spanned past the window with a disembodied frightened roar sounding through the crumpling cabin strangely like his own voice; and then an otherworldly slowing, a graceful transition to epiphany in which he could see the web of cracks in the windshield hanging timelessly, sculpture coupled with dried insect guts and scratches from rocks, the dashboard a comforting black nothingness wrapping around him, soothing in its manufactured plastic, primacy over the elements, over the earth; and for an age he transcended it all frozen in that eternal moment — and then the steering wheel sank into his chest as if he was molten and flowing and yielding. Blackness like a sly wink of a loved one, of his mother, his brother perhaps, his runaway father, the boy on the road, capturing eyelid washing away all pain and fear.
He woke suddenly in a haze of agony, chest resting on the remains of the steering column. Pain lanced through his arm but all he could think was he’d killed a child.
Oh God, he’d killed a child.
The car was on its side down the embankment and he looked out through the shattered gape of the windshield at the ridgeline. No movement on the road. Tried to unhook the fused seatbelt clasp and nearly screamed.
His hand was flayed open, the bones broken and spiking out as if claws, threaded muscles hanging in ropes against his forearm. He swallowed vomit and clutched the useless hand to his chest. Tried the clasp with the other hand.
And groaned with despair. He would have to wait for help, for someone to find them. He couldn’t help the child now.
He closed his eyes, realising how stupid he had been.
No one knew he was here. He didn’t speak to his mother any more. After she lost her hard-fought house in Ballarat she became unstable, forever railing against the injustices she suffered, all the shit she went through with no help from anyone, not the government, her parents, his father, no one, as if he and his brother hadn’t been there for any of it. He wasn’t able to take any more of her victim-complex or her vitriol. He stopped seeing his brother too after Stephen became increasingly angry and violent, externalising all his hatred at the world and his past. They had come to blows over some stupid thing last Christmas and that was the last time he saw his family. He had pulled away from everyone: mother, brother, friends; sabotaged every job he ever had; fought against anyone and anything he could. Ever since he left this shithole of a town his life had been in entropy and just when he finally tried to do something to abate it, to regain control again, to purge himself of the past, something even worse had happened.
From the distance came a soft mewling. His eyes snapped open. It sounded again, small and shattered: like an injured cat.
K-kid? he cried hoarsely, coughing with the effort of speaking. The boy must be alive. Injured, perhaps badly, but alive and in need of help.
He could still do some good. I’m coming, he called, tearing with awkward fingers at the clasp until it finally popped and he fell against the door. He sucked in air for a moment, massaging his bruised and constricted chest, then cradled his arm and scrambled through the windshield out onto the dirt away from the wreckage. The Centura was almost unrecognisable — its roof caved in, bonnet dented and steaming — and smelt of leaking petrol. In the last of the light through the trees he could see angry scars arching down from the road, and, using rocks as leverage, he scrabbled back up to the angry churn of the crash site, despite the wrenched feeling in his hip. Caught movement ahead down the long stretch of red dirt: a flash of white on the road. The boy was dragging himself along on his stomach like a wounded dog seeking somewhere to die, heading towards a mass of gumtrees up the side of the mountain.
Wait … I’m coming, he croaked, his voice like dead leaves. He started to follow but his hip had seized, right leg stiffening up, and he could only lurch slowly in pursuit. No, stop! he called to the boy. You need help … We need to wait here.
He looked to the crash site. But the road was empty, no signs of rescue, no signs of chasing police. When he looked back, the child had dragged himself off the road.
Pain-sweat dotted his forehead as he jerked his wooden leg behind him, clutched his arm to his chest. But he pushed through the agony. He couldn’t let the kid down. Then he saw where the boy was heading and stopped.
A house stood off the side of the road amongst the tangle of trees. A big two-storey brick veneer, new, a flat imposing facade pocked with large elegant windows, well-kept driveway, even a garden. A house he had only ever dreamed of. A room for everyone. Space.
The kid was trying to get home.
He gave a strangled gasp and tried not to think of the scene to unfold: the family’s dying child turning up on the doorstep, his killer staggering just behind seeking help. He almost turned and ran. But the lights were off. There mightn’t be anyone home. The kid may still need him to call an ambulance, and he clumsily staggered on, following the speckled trail of blood.
In the distance, the front door opened with a creak. As he watched, the kid tried to rise on unsteady feet and walk through. But the boy’s legs buckled, splintering unnaturally. A high lilting screech of pain scared some birds.
No! Wait! he snouted feebly, but the tiny figure disappeared across the threshold pulling broken legs, the distan
t cry of relief heart-wrenching, and it took him an eternity to catch up.
The boy’s blood glistened faintly on the polished floorboards beyond the entrance and he knew he had to get to the injured child as soon as possible. But the light from outside didn’t travel far and he had to stumble along the wall for a light switch. Hello? He searched a small table for a phone and knocked over a vase. Hey, is there anyone else here? We need help. Kid? Where are you?
The house was silent and he was forced to follow the faint specks down the darkened hall past empty rooms. He was near the end of the corridor peering up a staircase to the second level when he heard the child’s soft mewling coming from the last room. He focused on the massive doors and forced himself on.
The arched doorway led into a big sitting room at the back of the house. The boy huddled in the furthest corner in faint light arcing around the heavy curtains, a puddle of blood dotting the carpet next to him.
It’s okay, he said to the boy as he came into the room. I’m going to help you.
He searched for a light switch but couldn’t find one, instead having to edge into the gloom. Banged his leg into a coffee table a few steps in. The boy shuddered at the collision and tried to burrow even deeper into the corner, crying out horribly as the bones of his shattered legs grated together.
Don’t move, he warned the boy desperately. I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to make sure you’re okay. Look, I’ll stay where I am. He stopped in the middle of the room and put his hands up to reassure the child but the kid wouldn’t look at him, kept trying to edge away despite the grinding pain.
He hesitated, unsure whether to continue into the room or backtrack for help. Looked to the doorway as if that would answer.
