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

by Kathryn Hore

  ‘Won’t be nothing but lightning,’ said the girl, ‘lightning and a whole lot of clouds crashing about, and maybe they’ll throw down some ice, but what’s the good of that? ‘Cos you can’t stand out in the hail and catch it on your tongue, can you?’

  Gary glanced quickly at the girl. She had a petulant look on her face, but it only made her seem younger and more vulnerable. He thought back to the pub where he’d stopped for lunch. The men huddled over their beers, and the way the beer tap sputtered, and the cloudy lager it produced.

  ‘You guys must be really struggling out here,’ he said. The girl merely looked away out the window.

  Some ten minutes passed before the girl called suddenly, ‘Left here.’ There was a fork in the road, and Gary branched left and they immediately ran off the bitumen. The dirt track carried them toward a small rise, and bare granite scalloped away on either side until they stuttered over a cattle grid, the last of the trees fell away, the ridge was crested, and the unclothed land spread out before them. Yellow grass tufted the brown soil all the way to the single wooden farmhouse, then disappeared beyond it, replaced by hundreds of termite mounds. They glittered as if constructed of equal parts salt and mud, and pierced the cracked bare earth in all directions.

  Gary eased the car down the steep last few metres of the track. The tyres gripped the dirt hard, as if clawing the ground in an effort to retreat, and the engine surged, its whine like that of a dog being dragged on a leash. Finally, Gary brought the Camry to a stop outside the house, and cut the ignition. The sudden silence was like a stifled scream. No bird calls greeted him as he opened his door, no breeze hummed against the drooping gutters of the house, no trees crackled in the afternoon heat haze. Gary pointed at the rundown farmhouse and the termite mounds.

  ‘What happened here?’ he said. ‘Don’t you have any irrigation?’

  The girl startled Gary by grabbing his hand and pulling him along. ‘Hurry! Pop’s over here.’

  She led him onto a creaking stoop, then through an open doorway into a corridor that ran the length of the house, which was only a few metres. Then they were out into the sunshine at the back and Gary’s eyes struggled to adjust to the harsh whiteness of the light, which saturated the scene as if he was looking at a washed out photograph: a verandah shaded by a trellis of tattered passionfruit vine, a few lumpy couches piled high with clothes, a warped coffee table with a broken ashtray, several buckets, a pickaxe, a hacksaw, piles of old books, brown and brittle plants in pots, a box of broken toys. In one corner hung a large wooden box, two of its opposing sides open to the air but covered by fine plastic mesh. Inside the box were hung strips of something dark and leathery. Gary had to stare at them for several seconds before he realised they were strips of drying jerky.

  ‘Over here, mister.’

  The girl again took his hand, and led him toward the couch on the left. At first, he could not distinguish anything apart from a jumble of clothes and a discarded mop head, but then the items shifted, seemingly by themselves, and Gary noticed something thin, wrinkled and brown lying half hidden under a shirt. In fact, it had its origin inside the shirt, and emerged through a sleeve. The mop head lifted, revealing an ancient wrinkled face, and Gary realised he’d found the girl’s grandfather.

  ‘Pop… Pop…’ said the girl as she gave the old man’s shoulder a good shake, ‘Get up!’

  The man simply stared up at her, his eyes blinking, once, twice. The girl leaned over him, tucked her arms under his armpits, and pulled him upright. He came up easily, as if he weighed almost nothing. His shirt hung loosely, the neck open almost to his navel, exposing leathery skin stretched over ribcage.

  ‘I’ll bring you drink, pop,’ said the girl, speaking slowly and miming the action of raising a glass to her lips, as though speaking to a child. She dashed inside, leaving Gary to stare at the old man, who gazed wide-eyed back at him, his lips quivering and his fingers trembling. Gary heard a phut phut sound from inside the house, and a harsh juddering of pipes. The girl emerged, carrying a glass filled with grey liquid. Sediment had already begun to collect at the bottom.

  ‘You can’t give him that,’ said Gary, sure that he could actually see little wriggling things in the liquid.

  ‘This is all that comes out the taps,’ said the girl defensively. ‘Why don’t you try if you think you can do better?’

  ‘Actually, I can do better,’ said Gary. ‘I’ve got an almost full water container in the back of the car. I’ll go get it.’

  He left the girl standing there and fetched the water. As he stumbled back out on to the back porch, hugging the heavy container to his chest, he was startled to see the girl tilting her grandfather’s head back and attempting to force liquid from the glass down his throat.

  ‘Hey, don’t do that!’ he shouted, and he dropped the water container onto the coffee table and moved to grab the glass from the girl’s hand. She shrank back, her teeth bared like a cornered beast.

  ‘You’ll make him sick,’ said Gary. ‘Look, I’ve got clean water now.’ He held out his hand, and the girl reluctantly handed the glass to him.

  ‘Have you got some dishwashing liquid?’ The girl shook her head. ‘Some soap?’ The girl shrugged.

  Gary grunted impatiently, and unscrewed the cap of the plastic container. He tipped water into the glass, swirled it around, and emptied it onto the dusty concrete, before repeating the whole process. Finally, he filled the glass almost to the brim, crouched down next to the girl’s grandfather, and raised the glass gently to his salt-rimmed lips. The man slurped hesitantly, then with increasing vigour, so that the water ran down over his chin and spattered on the clothes covering his lap. He looked at Gary, his eyes springing wide open, and suddenly his two scrawny arms shot up and grabbed Gary firmly around the waist. The glass slipped to the ground and shattered. Gary tried to prise the old man’s arms loose, but they seemed to have spasmed tight around him. The man brought his face up to within centimetres of Gary’s. His mouth opened wide to reveal rotting teeth and a stench like sour milk lay hot and heavy on his breath.

  ‘Wah… waaahh…’ He appeared to be trying to talk, but Gary could not make out a single word. He gripped the old man’s shoulders and used all his strength to shove him away; the man’s eyes grew wide with fear, and a high-pitched babble tumbled from his lips as he suddenly toppled back violently, clothes slipping from his lap. Gary stared in horror as two raw stumps appeared where the man’s legs should have been; something hit the side of his left knee, eliciting an immediate spike of pain, and a sound like a branch snapping.

  Screaming in agony, Gary fell back in time to see the girl wrestle the point of the pickaxe from his shattered knee. Red-cheeked and grunting, she strained to raise the tool again, before swinging it clumsily and ineffectually at Gary’s head. The head of the pickaxe hit the ground, and the girl leaned on the handle, breathing heavily. When she lifted her face, Gary saw that she had begun to cry.

  ‘I’m sorry, mister… I’m sorry…’

  ‘My knee’s broken!’ gasped Gary. ‘I have to get to a hospital.’ He gripped his leg as it began to throb and clamped a hand against the blood trickling from the wound, ratcheting the pain in his knee so high that he almost passed out. He steadied his head with sticky hands and then used his right to fish around in his shorts pocket for his mobile. As he pulled it out, the girl took a step toward him and raised the pickaxe again.

  ‘Give it to me!’ she said, her face twisting with sudden anger. ‘Give it to me or I’ll bash your brains in!’

  Gary threw the phone at her. She snapped her head back, but it hit her anyway, on the left cheekbone. She lost her grip on the pickaxe and it clattered to the ground. Gary tried to propel himself forward, but a jagged edge of pain along his left leg left him gasping and floundering in a heap on the floor some three feet from her. She recovered quickly, hoisting the pickaxe again, and bringing it down on Gary’s phone, which shattered immediately. Gary levered himself up with his arms, but this t
ime the girl closed in quickly, with two hands firmly clamped on the handle of the pickaxe. She pounded its head into his chin.

  The world inverted; the trellis trailing its dead vines wavered hazy and indistinct, in a sky that seemed to be darkening like coffee grounds swirling through scalding water. He felt only a heaviness that pain could not penetrate, and the girl’s hands under his shoulders, dragging him, stopping, dragging him again…

  Then, for a while, nothing mattered, though he saw shapes flit like shadows across his vision, with a sound in his ears like sand scuffing grass on windblown dunes. His lips tasted wetness, and he struggled to swallow, dimly aware that someone was tipping water down his throat. He couldn’t breathe, briny water flooding his lungs, vomiting back up again, streaming from his mouth, and his wife was there, her face streaming, sobbing, choking with rage.

  You were supposed to be watching her!

  And he was helpless; what useless words…

  But this is normally such a calm beach.

  He tried to move his arms, but they were shackled somehow behind his back. And as the memory of where he was returned, so did awareness of the throbbing pain in his left knee.

  He was seated on an old armchair a few metres from the couch on which the girl’s grandfather sat upright once more. The girl leaned over Gary, bringing a glass full of dirty water toward his mouth, and he knew that the water was sickening him. For though the sun still sent the full force of its rays against his skin, its face was black, and the sky surrounding it glowed silver. Thunderheads menaced the horizon, piling up, churning closer, snagging out lightning like flicking snakes’ tongues. Rain squalled a section of the barren termite-scape in the middle distance, shrouding it with grey mist.

  The girl squealed in delight.

  ‘You brought the water!’ she said, forcing his mouth open with a violent shove of the glass against his lips. Gary choked and spat, looked at the approaching rain, and realised the girl was not talking about the water he’d fetched from the car. She turned and faced the edge of the verandah, her face glowing and ravenous, as the storm closed in with frightening ferocity, finally quenching the dead sun, and with its arsenal of fat rain drops began to tear apart the plain of termite mounds. The clay cratered and crumbled as the water gouged out little plumes of dust, and the soil coalesced, slid in little rivulets like creeping amoebas. The bones, the hidden bones, showing through the claggy mess, emerging white and gleaming like fossils in the sluice; the rattling bones, skulls and shoulder blades and ribs and pelvis, snapping together like some child’s construction kit; the legs, freed and moving, stepping forward, dragging each skeleton with mud hanging off like bits of flesh.

  Skeletons of kangaroos and wallabies with elongated tibias and drawn-out tails, dingoes with broad, flat skulls and mighty teeth, lumbering cattle and sheep with large, curved mandibles, rodents and lizards and snakes, and scattered in amongst them all, the erect bones of humans.

  The rain washed away the termite mounds, one by one, and one by one, the fleshless corpses staggered toward the verandah.

  The girl’s grandfather began to shake, nameless words tumbling from his lips like some frenzied preacher. The girl stood on the edge of the verandah, arms spread to the rain, her tongue darting out to spoon up the droplets that spattered her face. She lifted her head, exultant at each lightning strike. The disinterred bones passed by her, ignored her; clattering and skittering they rushed in like the tide toward the old man. They churned against him, skeleton upon skeleton, bone piled high upon bone until he was covered, and consumed, and his whimpering ceased. Then the great cresting wave broke, and the bones surged back off the concrete and onto the sodden plain, gradually disentangling to form up again as distinct skeletons, which moved apart to take up positions at irregular intervals in the mud. Then, as one, they turned so that their grinning skulls looked directly at Gary.

  Of the old man, there was not a trace.

  The girl scampered around in the rain, placing buckets to catch the water, which she then tipped into an old cement washtub. She finally turned back onto the verandah, her face shiny and her dress sodden. She walked up to Gary and gazed down at him.

  ‘I would have been next, you see,’ she said.

  The rain continued all that night, and Gary dozed fitfully in his semi-seated position. The lightning jagged him awake often, imprinting the image of hundreds of staring eye sockets on his mind. He became convinced the skeletons were edging closer to him as the night wore on. And as the eastern horizon merged black upon grey about an hour before dawn, he was sure he could see Lucy walking whole amongst the bones. But when she came closer, he could see her face was half ruined, and she called out to him in a voice that rattled and frothed.

  Why did you bring the water, daddy?

  Gary fell into a deep faint, and when he awoke, the orange sun was sculpturing shadows from the termite mounds, dry and whole once again. He wavered on the edge of consciousness as the sun carried the day to its apex. The barren plain with its clay sentinels baked and shimmered, and the sky was such a brittle blue that it seemed it might shatter at any instant. A terrible hunger and thirst grew in him, but all the girl brought him was brackish water and salty jerky. Even these he began to crave before long, convinced that the poisoned waters of the aquifer that the deluge had brought to the surface were flowing into his body, and crystallizing in his cells.

  And all the while, the ravenous, dying land gazed upon him, licking its lips, waiting for a storm to sharpen its teeth.

  And for the bones to surge forward once more.

  OUR LAST MEAL

  J. Ashley Smith

  It used to be our favourite lookout. Our hangover lookout, Sallie had called it.

  We always got trashed the night we arrived, and the next day, would roll out of the cabin before dawn, woken by the kookas outside the bedroom and the painful clarity crystallising behind our eyes. We’d slog our way through the rainforest, sweating poison, Sallie forever in the lead, boasting how she’d walked this track since she was a toddler and couldn’t I keep up. At the top, we’d stretch out on the coarse rock and share the same, unchanging picnic: crackers, cheese, and cucumber sliced with a knock-off Swiss Army penknife, all rinsed back with the warm dregs of last night’s bottle of white. And there we would lose ourselves, gazing out across the canopy below and the hazy blue exhalations that rose above it, into the deeper blue of the sky.

  It could never be the same without her; I knew that. But something had drawn me back here to spread out that same simple lunch and stare blankly at those same treetops. I’d invested in a bona fide Swiss Army knife since then, and was washing down the food with water instead of wine — I had only ever got drunk because Sallie had. But whatever it was I had hoped to recapture remained hidden, or had never been there to begin with.

  There had been a storm in the night and the rainforest that morning steamed, lush with the smells of life giving birth to itself without cease. The foliage all about me resonated with the calls of whip birds and whistlers, the rustlings of scrub turkeys, and of other creatures too innumerable to distinguish or identify; and of creatures too small or silent to acknowledge.

  My feet were swollen from the walk, and aching. Trickling streams of ants converged on the crumbs of crackers and the flakes of cheese. I unlaced my boots and tugged them off, surprised to find my left sock was dark and soaking. As I peeled it off, my hand came away smeared with a watery redness. I rolled up my trouser cuff to uncover the wound and found instead a leech, bloated and quivering.

  It was as round as my thumb and twice as long, shiny black with streaks of orange. Even as I watched, it seemed, with each of its hideous pulsations, to be getting larger.

  I’m ashamed to admit it now, but I was so overcome with revulsion that I panicked. In an instant, I was on my feet, kicking at the air. I wanted it off me, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. I flicked at it spastically, trying to brush it away, but the leech held on, its engorged body flapping a
gainst my calf like a bloody balloon.

  It would have drawn some odd looks, had there been anyone around to see it: a bearded young man hopping barefoot on the rocks, arms flailing against an outstretched leg, while his twisted mouth strangled noises of disgust. I can laugh about it now, but at the time I had no sense of how daft I must have looked. Only the hysterical thought voicing itself over and over: It is drinking me!

  In the end, the leech just let go. Engorged and rippling, it writhed among the remains of my ritual lunch.

  Something welled up in me then, something I could not contain. I picked up my boot by the toe and slammed the heel down on the leech.

  That first blow had no effect, so I struck again. And again, and again, and again. I felt the reverberation in my arm each time the sole struck rock. I was grunting. Jaw clenched. Teeth grinding.

  When I finally stopped, I was panting, almost in tears. There was nothing left of the leech but a twist of black, like a burnt elastic band, and a burst of red the size of my palm, pooling in the striations of the rock.

  My blood.

  #

  All the way back to the cabin, I was consumed with disgust.

  The walk seemed longer than usual, and more perilous. I recoiled from every frond that brushed my calves, jumped at each drop of water that fell from the canopy above. The rainforest teemed with life-forms of every sort, both real and imagined. Every path was criss-crossed with the giant webs of orb spiders. Every leaf was crawling with the black bodies of sucking, biting parasites. I swept and lashed at every sensation — on my arms, my neck, my shins. Every exposed patch of skin seemed to be alive with creeping crawling things.

  Before I finally passed through the gates of the national park, I had removed three more leeches from my boots. It was an enormous relief to feel the concrete beneath me again: man-made, impervious, reassuringly lifeless.