In Sunshine Bright and Darkness Deep: An Anthology of Australian Horror

by Kathryn Hore

  IN SUNSHINE BRIGHT

  and

  DARKNESS DEEP

  An Anthology of Australian Horror

  In Sunshine Bright and Darkness Deep

  Published by the Australian Horror Writers’ Association

  Edited by Cameron Trost, Ben Knight, and the AHWA committee

  Cover art and design by Greg Chapman

  Copyright © AHWA, 2015

  www.australianhorror.com

  The River Slurry © Rue Karney

  Triage © Jason Nahrung

  Upon the Dead Oceans © Marty Young

  Beast © Natalie Satakovski

  The Grinning Tide © Stuart Olver

  Our Last Meal © J. Ashley Smith

  Veronica’s Dogs © Cameron Trost

  Bullets © Joanne Anderton

  Saviour © Mark McAuliffe

  The Hunt © Mark Smith-Briggs

  The Monster in the Woods © Kathryn Hore

  Road Trip © Anthony Ferguson

  Bloodlust © Steve Cameron

  Elffingern © Dan Rabarts

  Triage by Jason Nahrung was first printed in EnVision

  Fantastic Visions Media, 2005

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  To the scribes of the Australian Horror Writers’ Association. May the sunshine bright and darkness deep of our vast and mysterious land always inspire you.

  The Australian Horror Writers’ Association (AHWA) is a non-profit organisation that was founded unofficially in 2003 as a way of providing a unified voice and a sense of community for Australian writers of dark fiction, while helping the development and evolution of this genre within Australia. This anthology, the first of its kind to be published by the AHWA, is a showcase of work contributed by several of our active members. For more information about us, our members, or to join, visit the website at:

  www.australianhorror.com

  The River Slurry Rue Karney

  Triage Jason Nahrung

  Upon the Dead Oceans Marty Young

  Beast Natalie Satakovski

  The Grinning Tide Stuart Olver

  Our Last Meal J. Ashley Smith

  Veronica’s Dogs Cameron Trost

  Bullets Joanne Anderton

  Saviour Mark McAuliffe

  The Hunt Mark Smith-Briggs

  The Monster in the Woods Kathryn Hore

  Road Trip Anthony Ferguson

  Bloodlust Steve Cameron

  Elffingern Dan Rabarts

  Introduction

  In Sunshine Bright and Darkness Deep is an anthology like no other. The tales herein will take you on a weird and terrifying journey. You will set out on a road trip and find yourself trapped in the arid Australian outback where a little girl and her grandfather struggle to survive. There are isolated farmhouses threatened by bushfires and bullets, and rainforests teeming with bloodthirsty bugs. The cities are full of trouble too. The murky waters of the Brisbane River hide spiteful spirits and the suburbs are infested with insane inhabitants masquerading as ordinary human beings. Then, you will leave Australia, departing from Melbourne, to hunt down vampiric gangsters in Southeast Asia, before sailing future seas and visiting realms beyond this world altogether.

  This inaugural showcase anthology features the work of just a handful of the many talented and darkly imaginative authors who make up the Australian Horror Writers’ Association. If you are unfamiliar with Australian horror, let this book be just the first step on a long voyage of discovery.

  On behalf of our members, we thank you for your support and trust you will enjoy these tales of horror.

  When you are ready, lock the doors, bolt the windows, and turn the page.

  - AHWA Committee, January 2015

  THE RIVER SLURRY

  Rue Karney

  ‘How did you sustain your injury, Mr Waldram?’ Dr Gadot sat at her desk, her pen poised above a sheet of paper.

  ‘I wanted to finish off a few things around the house before the baby arrived. I was putting wood through a plane. Next thing I know, I’m in hospital minus four fingers.’

  ‘You were distracted? Lost concentration?’

  ‘Not really,’ Kurt Waldram replied, tapping his foot on the carpeted floor. ‘Rushing things, probably. You know how it is, too much to do and never enough time.’

  ‘Is your work stressful?’

  ‘It can be. I’m a writer and researcher on the show, Lore, Legends and Lies, so a lot of working to tight deadlines.’ He smiled. ‘Are you a fan?’

  ‘Of what? Tight deadlines?’

  ‘No.’ Kurt’s foot tapped faster. ‘Of the TV show.’

  ‘I don’t watch commercial television.’ Dr Gadot scribbled as she spoke. ‘You’re finding the prosthetic fingers suitable for your work?’

  ‘I can type.’ Kurt gave a half laugh. ‘But mostly I use voice recognition software.’

  ‘And why is that?’ She held the pen above the sheet of paper again, and shifted forward in her chair. Her hazel eyes fixed on the four artificial digits on Kurt’s left hand.

  ‘Voice recognition is easier, I suppose.’ He shrugged. ‘The prosthetics feel…weird.’

  Dr Gadot moved around to Kurt’s side of the desk. She picked up his left hand and massaged the muscles and tendons below his knuckles. As she pressed and kneaded, the itch started.

  ‘You find them hard to control?’ She pressed her index finger hard against each of his metacarpophalangeal joints.

  ‘No, they work okay.’

  He gritted his teeth as the doctor prodded and pressed up his flesh and bone stump to the start of his plastic prosthetic. The itch started to burn.

  ‘Pain?’

  An invisible hot knife sliced across the space Kurt’s missing fingers used to inhabit. The edge of his lips twisted in a grimace.

  ‘If it’s hurting too much, just tell me.’ Her fingers probed up and down his prosthetics.

  Kurt knew he should not feel any sensation in his absent fingers. It was impossible, he told himself, to feel a maddening itch or stab of hot pain in an empty, finger-sized space, but as Dr Gadot pressed and squeezed, pain drummed through his inexistent flesh and bone.

  His stomach squirmed. His head spun. Sweat trickled from his hairline, down his temples.

  Dr Gadot let his hand go and handed him a box of tissues.

  ‘Sorry.’ He pressed a tissue against his mouth and slumped in his chair.

  ‘It’s a common reaction.’ She sat back behind her desk and scribbled more notes onto her writing pad.

  ‘Reaction to what?’

  ‘Phantom pain.’ She put down her pen. ‘However, phantom is somewhat of a misnomer. Your pain exists, Mr Waldram. There is no doubt about that.’

  ‘So I’m stuck with it.’

  ‘Not at all. You’re an excellent candidate for mirror box therapy. Every individual responds differently, of course, but with regular sessions using the mirror box, I expect you will be pain free in less than two months.’

  A bolt of pain shot through each of Kurt’s missing fingers. ‘When can we start?’

  #

  Silvie jabbed at the whiteboard with the tip of her fake fingernail. ‘Kurt, th
e River Slurry. Progress report?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s going well.’

  Silvie opened her palms, signalling and?

  ‘I’m chasing up some leads from 1973—’

  ‘Eyewitnesses from the 2011 floods?’

  He jiggled his knee under the desk. ‘Still working on that.’

  Silvie’s narrow nostrils flared. Around the room, the rest of the Lore, Legends and Lies team focused their eyes anywhere but on Silvie or Kurt.

  ‘Find people.’ She punctuated each word with a point of her finger. ‘Make them talk to you.’

  Kurt suspected Silvie knew there wasn’t enough material behind the River Slurry story to make a solid piece. She’d made it clear she wanted him gone, and up until this assignment, every time she’d tried to prove him incompetent, he’d managed to triumph. But the River Slurry had him stumped.

  He stared out the window at the dirty brown Brisbane River. A blue-trimmed ferry cut diagonally across the water, leaving a muddy wake fringed with yellow scum. A single figure leaned over the edge of the ferry’s safety rail and threw something into the water. The object bobbed and glittered on the river’s oily surface for a moment. The wake snatched at it, dragged it into its scum and sucked it under, into the brown deep.

  I’ll give her a River Slurry story, Kurt’s plastic prosthetics tapped on his tablet, that’ll grip her by her scrawny neck and shake her until she throws up.

  #

  ‘How have your pain levels been this week?’ Dr Gadot gestured for Kurt to sit down on the two-seater sofa in the corner of her office.

  ‘A little better.’

  ‘Are you sleeping well?’

  ‘Okay, I suppose.’ Kurt gave a wry grin. ‘Between the pain and the baby, sleep loses out.’

  ‘And work?’

  ‘Fine.’ His foot tapped a triple beat against the carpet. ‘Work’s okay.’

  ‘Well then. Let’s begin.’ Dr Gadot reached under the table and pulled out the square mirror, unfolded the pieces of cardboard beneath it and sat it on the table between them.

  Kurt put his good hand next to the mirror and lay his injured hand flat inside the triangular box. ‘Same as last time?’

  ‘Yes.’ Dr Gadot nodded. ‘Just like piano scales. Focus on the image in the mirror and let your injured hand relax.’ She glanced at his feet. ‘Relax your whole body.’

  Kurt breathed out. He stared into the mirror and pressed his fingertips against it one by one until they all touched its surface. He repeated the movement, gritting his teeth against the needles of pain shooting through the not-there fingers attached to his hand inside the box.

  ‘Eyes on the mirror, Kurt. Keep your movements even. Work through the pain.’

  Kurt spidered his fingertips against the mirror over and over again, performing the movement to a bass riff inside his head until Dr Gadot’s voice became a distant whisper. His world shrunk to his hand and the mirror and the bass riff until he was no longer in a doctor’s office but inside a space in the mirror. Here, another version of himself existed, a version with all fingers and zero pain. His fingers slid against one another, fingertip to fingertip, nail to nail.

  ‘Good work today, Kurt.’ Dr Gadot’s voice snapped him out of his inner world.

  Kurt flexed his finger stubs. ‘The pain is a lot better.’

  ‘You’ve made excellent progress.’ She gestured toward the mirror box. ‘Increase your practice at home to two sessions of one hour per day. I will see you in a fortnight.’

  #

  The shadow in the mirror didn’t appear until Kurt’s third week of therapy. He had been diligent, working his fingers with the mirror box an hour before work and an hour after dinner. Naomi never complained.

  ‘Spend as much time as you need,’ Naomi reassured him, putting a grizzling Lucas on her shoulder and patting his back to encourage a burp. ‘You’re no help when you’re in pain. With any luck, this treatment will have you a hundred per cent before he starts teething.’

  Kurt practised in the study, with the mirror box on his desk, closing the door to avoid distractions. He worked methodically through the program Dr Gadot had set, his fingers playing the mirrored surface like piano scales.

  When he first saw the shadow, he thought it was a smudge. He grabbed a tissue and rubbed it against the mirror. When that didn’t shift the mark, he shone the desk lamp onto its surface. The shadow disappeared. He continued his exercises and forgot about it until the end of the hour when he got up and turned off the lights.

  A flicker caught his eye. He squinted into the gloom, then switched the light on again and checked the box’s mirrored surface. There was nothing.

  He shut the study door behind him, and went into the nursery to check on Lucas. The baby’s small red lips were parted in a pout, and breath whistled in and out of his tiny nose.

  Nine weeks old. So small.

  Kurt brushed his fingertips across the top of the thatch of fine dark hair that covered his son’s scalp. His fingers rested for a moment on the fontanelle; the soft membrane pulsed beneath his touch.

  So fragile.

  He pressed his lips gently against his sleeping son’s cheek and listened to his soft, whistling snore.

  ‘Sleep tight, my little man.’

  A wave of anxiety washed around Kurt’s stomach. He turned, checked left and right. He opened the cupboard doors and peered inside. He pulled the curtain back, then let it fall. He stood and listened, but the only sound was his son’s breathing. As he left the room, he checked once more, corner to corner. He didn’t see anything in the shadows.

  #

  Kurt pressed his palms against the pain that thumped behind his temples. Another eight hours of combing through archived videos, photographs, text and audio had brought him no closer to the elusive River Slurry. He’d found a couple of newspaper stories about a female mud monster dating back to the 1893 floods, a dozen or so letters to the editor and a couple more stories from the 1973 floods that mentioned the same mysterious female figure lurking in shadows, leaving slicks of mud-like slime on scrubbed and polished floors. He’d traced the first use of the River Slurry name to a tabloid headline from 1973, and tracked down the journalist whose byline appeared with the article.

  ‘A bit of gory entertainment to mesmerise the masses, mate. Nothing more.’ The old guy sipped at his beer as they looked out across the brown expanse of murky river. ‘The River Slurry is about as real as my left eye.’ He pulled out his glass orb and popped it on the table. It rolled across the plastic, and rested against a bottle cap.

  ‘What about the slicks of mud left on clean floors?’ Kurt kept his gaze fixed on the river. ‘And the missing babies?’

  ‘Mud is mud.’ The old journo sighed. ‘But those little babies. Turned out it was some poor girl who’d had her own baby taken away from her. Sent her mad, she kept looking for it, going into people’s homes and taking babies from their cots. Took the cops a couple of months to sort that mess out. Last I heard, they locked her up in Wolston Park Asylum.’ He sipped his beer and shook his head. ‘Poor girl. She’s probably dead now.’

  Kurt tapped his foot against the verandah floorboards. ‘I had an old auntie in that place.’

  ‘In Wolston Park?’ The journo grimaced. ‘Poor thing. You’re ever looking for a horror story, just spend a night there. There’s laws against what used to pass as treatments in that hell-hole.’

  The three reported stories from 2011 had been proven fakes. One of them an excellent fake, which is why the urban legend still hung around, giving Sylvie a legitimate reason for making it into a giant pain in Kurt’s arse. He was determined to beat her at her petty game; to find that something that would have believers shuddering and set sceptics scrambling. He gritted his teeth against the thumping behind his temples and ran the excellent fake video again, searching for that tiny detail that could help him conjure irrefutable evidence from vague conjecture. He studied it frame by frame, his eyes dry and stinging, until the throbbing in his head
shifted to the spaces where his fingers used to be.

  The pain stabbed like a hot dagger. He stopped the video and took his mirror box from the bottom drawer of his desk. He set it up and laid his injured hand inside the box, and began the familiar piano scale exercise, spidering his whole fingers up and down the mirror in time to the bass riff inside his head. His world shrank down to a pinpoint. The pulses of pain faded and the riff shifted to a soothing lullaby.

  ‘Hush, little Lukie, don’t say a word,’ he sang along to the tune inside his head, ‘daddy’s going to buy you a mockingbird.’

  Lucas loved the lullaby, he settled each time Kurt sang it to him.

  ‘And if that mockingbird don’t sing, daddy’s going to buy you a diamond ring.’

  As Kurt exercised his fingers, the familiar female-shaped shadow formed on the mirror’s surface. Over the past few sessions, the shadow had become a comfort to him, because as the shadow deepened, his pain vanished.

  ‘And if that diamond ring turns brass, daddy’s going to buy you a looking glass.’

  A flicker of movement from the screen caught his eye. He pressed play and switched between watching the video frames flick past, second by second, and watching the shadow in the mirror.

  Kurt hit pause. In the video frame, a muddy female shape stained the blue sky background. The flesh on his forearms prickled as he glanced back and forth, mirror to frame, frame to mirror, and identical facial features morphed and sharpened from mirror surface to screen.

  ‘Looking glass…looking glass…’ A female voice trilled inside Kurt’s head.

  Kurt jumped up. His chair clattered against the white tiled floor. He sucked in a breath, then forced it out slow and steady through his mouth. He leaned forward, hands on the edge of his desk, and checked the mirror.