by AHWA
That night, Ayumu’s head pounded. A black spot obscured the centre of each eye. The marks were elongating, branching across his vision.
“Am I going blind?”
Obaasan didn’t answer, lest the boy hear the lie in her voice.
She had tried every home remedy, even brewing for Ayumu the potion that had healed her own sight. The doctor would arrive with the morning birdsong, but Obaasan held grave fears for her grandson. The condition boded poorly. Obaasan gave Ayumu bark to chew, hoping to at least relieve the pain. “Shhh,” she soothed. “Sleep my Ayumu.”
* * *
Sleep evaded Ayumu, but he feigned rest long enough to convince Obaasan to retire to bed.
The branches thickened and merged across Ayumu’s vision until all was blackness. His eyeballs pulsed, as if two beating hearts were lodged in his sockets. He writhed, biting his bedding.
A spasm dropped Ayumu out of bed. He twisted on the reed matting, holding his face. Whatever had entered his eyes was growing, pushing its way out. He touched his left eye tentatively. The feeling was gone, his finger failing to elicit a protective blink. The globe was smooth and hard with shallow ruts, like polished wood.
Ayumu lashed his head sideways. Breeze touched his cheek and Ayumu sensed he was facing the outside door, which Obaasan had cracked open in the hope the cool draught would caress away the pain. The ache dimmed.
Ayumu straightened his head, hissing as the throbbing returned. Only when he was once again facing the sound of crickets in the garden, did the pain lessen.
Seeking relief, Ayumu slid the papered barrier open quietly and stepped outside. The pain reduced slightly, though only so long as he faced the one direction.
Ayumu started walking, the easing of pain his guiding compass. He stumbled through the rice field and into the whispering forest beyond. Agony split his mind whenever the forest path deviated and, desperate to maintain direction, Ayumu abandoned the track, crashing through the trees. The ground rose, becoming treacherous with rocks. At one point, a stag barked and Ayumu heard branches break as deer clattered away. His eyes pulsed expectantly.
Eventually the ground levelled and Ayumu detected the sweet perfume of white lilies. Even far away, the smell soothed his pain. Chasing relief, Ayumu proceeded blindly, feeling bones crack beneath his tread. Where the captivating odour was most intense, Ayumu collapsed to his knees, the pain gone. Unseen, white blooms surrounded him.
The perfume made him drowsy and, disquieted, Ayumu crawled for home. Pain dropped him outside the ring of white.
Weeping softly, Ayumu returned to the scented flowers. Numbed, he drifted into dream.
Under the moonlight, roots entwined around warm flesh and the lilies drank. The white blooms turned crimson.
At length, a pair of heavy bulbs fell to earth. The resulting flowers were white as snow. Their scent was heavenly.
Bright Lights, Big Desert
Black Roads, Dark Highways #3
Andrew J McKiernan
Australia is most often seen as a dry and desolate place. A fragile coastal ring of verdant flora surrounding one enormous desert. Our Dead Heart. Mad Max territory. And sure, Australia is the oldest, flattest, driest and least fertile continent on Earth. But surprisingly, only 18% of it is technically classified as desert. That’s by the scientific definition of receiving less than 250 millimetres per year of precipitation.
Hop in a car and drive inland 200km from anywhere and you’ll find what is, to all appearances, desert. Flat. Dry. Hot. Littered with the sun dried carcasses of cattle and camels. Listless and starving kangaroos standing wild-eyed with thirst, their skin stretched tight against their bones. Dead trees like ancient skeletons. Even if you don’t want to call this desert, add its barren geography known as ‘semi-arid’ into your equation and you’ve covered just over 70% of Australia’s land mass.
That’s a lot of empty, near-unliveable land, and for 45,000 years human beings have been traversing it. At first, by foot. Later with the aid of camels and horses. Today, you can skip it altogether and catch a plane. But there are also the roads and train lines that cross these dry lands like Nazca Lines. These are, and always have been, lonely places. Alone at the wheel or camped for the night. The only human being for hundreds of kilometres. The land stretched all about and the sky like a giant special-effect overhead.
It’s only natural that the un-natural would use these places, these moments of vulnerability and insignificance, to reveal itself. Isn’t it?
Just outside of the small far-western Queensland township of Boulia, travellers have been having strange encounters with mysterious desert lights for at least a century. Some call them ‘ghost lights’, but more commonly they are known as Min Min Lights.
The legend of the Min Min Lights appears to originate, as many legends do, in a pub. The story goes that, back in the 1880s, there stood the Min Min Hotel, an establishment notorious for the criminals and wayward shearers who frequented it. So nefarious were the crimes committed there that a righteous mob burnt it to the ground. Since that time, strange glowing balls have been seen floating in the vicinity and following travellers on their journeys, sometimes for many miles.
Hundreds of sightings have been recorded, but their frequency certainly grows from the mid-point of the 20th Century onwards. A period that just happens to coincide with the increasing rate of motor vehicle usage in rural Australian areas.
That’s the main theory for the occurrence of these lights, which occur not just in Australian deserts but all over the world. It is the atmospherically refracted light from distant headlights. A phenomena known as Fata Morgana. A mirage. An optical illusion caused by thermal inversions and the curvature of the planet. Cars travelling far over the horizon (perhaps hundreds of kilometres away) cast their headlights into the air and the light bends back down into the scared eyes of some outback tourist.
All well and good. And a proven scientific phenomena.
How, then, can ‘car headlights’ explain the reports of Min Min sightings as far back as the 1880s? Or that the aboriginal tribes of the area knew of the ‘koorari’ lights long before the first Holden ute did a doughnut in a back paddock. Lights that they say are the ghosts of the dead wandering the land.
Could these desert mysteries really be restless souls glowing with ectoplasmic light? Or is a natural mirage the more sensible explanation?
Both theories seem to fly out the window when confronted with other desert light encounters around the country.
South Australia’s Nullarbor Plain is a hotspot for desert light activity. Meaning ‘No Trees’, the Nullarbor stretches 1,100kms between South Australia and Western Australia and is the world’s largest single piece of limestone (200,000 square kilometres). It was also the home to the top secret Woomera Test Facility, and the site of British nuclear weapons testing near Maralinga in the 1950s.
No wonder then that desert light sightings on the Nullarbor are attributed not to ghosts, but to UFOs.
The most famous case, that of the Knowles family in 1988, contains many features typical to Nullarbor encounters. At about 4am on January 20th, Faye Knowles and her three sons were travelling along the Eyre Highway when a bright light was seen heading towards them. It stopped 20 metres ahead and emitted a blinding light before disappearing. Some miles later the light reappeared, circling before settling directly above their vehicle. The Knowles family says the UFO then ‘picked up’ their vehicle and they travelled above the ground for a short time.
When the family finally arrived at a Mundrabilla roadhouse, they were visibly shaken and emotionally distressed. Their car was covered in a fine black dust and had four indentations on the roof … as if something had picked the car up.
So, Australian desert lights. Are they ghosts? Extra-terrestrials? Or atmospheric illusions?
A Mr. Allan Camm, describing his desert light e
ncounter to journalist James Oram, had one very different, somehow even creepier explanation: “… I drove straight into it. It exploded all around me and then I found its secret. The light was made up of millions of glow-worms!”
Andrew J McKiernan is a writer and illustrator from the Central Coast of New South Wales. Despite having no formal qualifications, he considers himself an expert on everything. Nothing he says can ever be believed.
www.andrewmckiernan.com
@AndrewMcKiernan
Lee Battersby
Interviewed by Marty Young
Here in the Midnight Offices, we recently had the pleasure to chat with the multi-award winning writer Lee Battersby, and our goblins were excited little beasts about this. Lee is one of those rare breeds; an extremely talented writer and a great guy always willing to give you a hand. His first novel, The Corpse-Rat King, was published in September 2012 by Angry Robot and has been getting great reviews—and rightly so. The sequel Marching Dead will be released in 2013.
Lee is also the author of over 70 short stories, and has repeatedly won the Australian Shadows, Aurealis, and the Australian SF ‘Ditmar’ awards. He has been published in Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, Year’s Best Australian SF & F, and Writers of the Future. His first collection of short stories was released in 2006, called Through Soft Air (Prime Books).
Beyond writing, Lee has taught at Clarion South, developed and delivered a six-week ‘Writing the SF Short Story’” course for the Australian Writers Marketplace, and acted as a mentor in the AHWA Mentor Program. He lives in Western Australia with his wife and kids, and sometimes wishes the world was made of Lego.
* * *
Marty Young: Your first novel was released in October, and is getting great reviews (rightly so; it’s a cracker read). Can you tell us a little about The Corpse-Rat King?
Lee Battersby: The Corpse-Rat King is the story of a craven, lying, thieving coward who gets lumbered with a quest to find the dead of his world a King to lead them upwards to Heaven, and responds by running like a jet-propelled weasel as far as possible in the opposite direction. If I’ve done my job properly it’s rude, and gritty, and entirely too cynical for its own good. But fun.
MY: You call The Corpse-Rat King an ‘anti-phantasy’ fantasy novel. Can you explain that? Is it in line with your thinking that art should never be comfort food?
LB: I get all bolshie and loud-mouthed when I start to discuss art. I just don’t believe that art should reinforce the status quo, whether that is social, cultural or artistic. I started out to write a novel that stuck two fingers up at the standard fantasy tropes, because if I had to read another load of soft-focus Celtic-wannabe TV movie of the week slow-pan-across-heather-with-wavy-fronds-of-mist crap I was going to drown in my own vomit. I’m not going to be the herald of my own success: as long as the book is readable and fun and people don’t actively shred it for mulch then that’s fine by me. But any artwork should be an expression of the artist’s philosophy, and that was my mindset going in to the creation of this novel. I probably owe the world a story about noble fluffy bunnies who wave flags and have hygiene standards way out of synch with current knowledge now …
MY: The sequel, Marching Dead, is due out in 2013. What’s it been like writing to a deadline as opposed to the freedom you had with the first novel? Do you find it keeps you on track more, or does a deadline weigh heavily?
LB: It’s been rather weird, actually. I’ve never been under contract before, so I’ve never had to work to a deadline, and I’ve never been in the position of having to revisit a storyline, so almost every story I’ve told before has been perfectly self-contained. The only exception to that would be my Father Muerte stories, and the reason there are only four of them is that I only found four stories worth telling in that way. Now I’m in the position where not only do I have to add to a perfectly rounded story but I have to make it fresh, move it in new ways, give a set of returning characters a whole new set of goals and denouements, AND I have to do it in a significantly compressed writing timeline. It’s a new experience, to say the least.
MY: You’ve written in many different formats throughout your career; short stories, novels, poetry, stand-up comedy, jokes, advertising copy, educational, theatre, film, scripts, legislation … Is there one format above all else that you keep returning to? And if so, why?
LB: I don’t seem to go away from any of them, really, although I think legislation is well and truly in my past. I’ve been writing one thing or another for more than twenty years now, and whilst it feels like blasphemy to say it, I’ve never seen myself as an SF writer: I’m a writer, is all. I love writing speculative fiction, and I don’t really see a time when I won’t write it, but I want to write crime, and poetry, and TV comedy, and film scripts and whatever the hell I turn my mind to without feeling like I’m turning my back on anybody or betraying my readership. It’d be nice to think that a reader might pick up a Battersby romance novel (Hell, why not?) and think ‘He writes weird shit, I’ll give it a go’ rather than ‘He writes fantasy, not romance. Who does he think he is?’
Which undoubtedly makes me a raging ego-monster, but I just like writing. I don’t think about what it is, just that I want to write it.
MY: Your stories are often imbued with a deliciously dark humour. Does your past career as a stand-up comic influence your writing?
LB: Brevity is the soul of wit, thank you very much Polonius. Stand up teaches you to get in, make your point, and get the hell out again before the audience start throwing things. Long, rambling shaggy dog stories with screeds of irrelevant local colour and descriptions of scenery get pretty short shrift, so writing for stand-up was a real education in narrative economy. I carried that across to my short story and poetry work, where I tried to build as much narrative flavour into the fewest words possible. To a certain extent I’m having to work against my own instincts in writing novels: I find myself railing against providing anything but the most immediate details because I just want to get to the story NOW damn it! But I’m aware that the larger scope of a novel demands greater time spent in exploring the settings. So I’m at war with my own instincts in many ways.
As far as content, it undoubtedly influences my voice: stand-up is all about social commentary, pointing out the absurdity of those behaviours we take as normal. There’s a fair bit of that in CRK, I think—I don’t quite break the fourth wall and address the reader directly, but a lot of the narrative text makes a direct point about the things our hero is experiencing. It’s certainly not objective, off the rack show-don’t-tell style narrative. You get a lot more authorial voice than you might be expecting, and I think that’s a direct result of that stand-up experience. That, and the nob gags.
MY: The Corpse-Rat King was actually the second novel you completed, is that correct? Any plans to publish the first one?
LB: I’ve got one earlier attempt in my files at the moment, an alternative history that probably lacked the voice I’ve discovered in writing CRK. It’s a much more literary fantasy—fewer nob gags and much more being serious and philosophical, and absolutely nobody says fuck. The central narrative is strong, and it has some nicely-rounded characters, so it’s likely that I’ll go back and rework it sometime in the future and see if I can’t bring it up to the right level.
MY: You’re well known for your short stories, which have picked up numerous awards here in Australia. But I remember a year or so ago you put out a post saying the last of your completed short stories had been published and you wouldn’t be writing any more. Now you’re a novelist, are you going to only focus on writing novel length stories or will we see you back in the short fiction world again?
LB: I love short stories, and if I could make a living writing them I might not have made the transition to novels. But I aspire to a full-time writing career, and novels are the best way for me to establish one. I certainly don’t see me wr
iting many shorts over the next few years, (although, having said that, I’ve got one in mind that I’m hoping to write for Midnight Echo Issue 9). Truthfully, though, I felt I’d written my best works over the last couple of years and they almost invariably disappeared with a dull ‘whoomph’. I felt ready to move on and try something different for a while. If and when I do write shorts again it’ll be in between novels—a literary sorbet to clean my palate before the next big course, if you like—so I doubt I’ll ever be as prolific as I have been. But I do love them, so I doubt I’ll ever get to the point where I stop writing them completely, in the same way I’ve never stopped writing poems, or drawing cartoons, or any of the other things I love to do. It’s just that, as it stands now, they’ll not be my priority.
MY: How different did you find writing a novel to a short story?
LB: It’s different in every way. I’ve been with these characters for almost two years now: I’ve only had a couple of girlfriends last longer than that! Short stories are an addictive fix: you create a strange little moment, get it down on paper, pat yourself on the back for being such a clever little fellow, then shove it in an envelope and get on with creating the next shiny gewgaw. I love the constant drip-drip-drip of imagination-uppers, that never-ending series of spikes that come from constantly turning up some new factoid or fancy turn of phrase. And magazine publication is like ego-crack! Five, six, ten times a year, out comes a magazine with your story in it? Rub that shit on your gums, man! It’s a constant high, this ongoing buzz of recognition.
So you can imagine how thrilling it is to cut that off so you can spend two years in a room with the same characters, the same setting, the same narrative framework and voice, knowing that it’s going to be months and months and months before anyone sees the stuff you’re writing and gives you that little shiny needle filled with egoboo. At times it’s like being in a twelve step programme for writers: “In every day, in every way, I’m getting better and … Fuck it! I wanna story saaaalllleee …” But this is what it’s like at the start of any new career—and for me, being a novelist really is a new career, entirely divorced from what has come before—a struggle for recognition, the constant fear that you’re working on something that will never see the light of day, watching all the other kids play outside while you’re stuck at your desk. I’m coming to appreciate new skills and writing muscles I’ve never exercised before, and my imagination is restructuring itself: all those shiny little beads of knowledge that once merited a story all to themselves I’m now connecting up, placing them into larger frameworks, larger narratives. And that is exciting.
