The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2010 (volume 1)

by Paul Haines

  Sally felt the substantial weight in her hand and grinned. She hit a key on the brass behemoth behind her. The antique cash register chimed and the drawer slid out, filled with glistening beads and burnished blobs. A shimmering nugget slipped from Sally’s palm into the till.

  That’s a lot of gratitude, thought Sally—the Triple Chocolate Cherry Swirl guy and his wife must have been in a very bad place.

  “That’s quite a stash we’ve collected, my girl,” said Susan, who had snuck up from behind on her otherworldly feet. “Now remember, dear, we’re a family business.”

  “Mum, how many times do I have to tell you that I’m not going to double-cross you and Dad this time,” scolded Sally.

  “Sorry dear. It’s just that old habits die hard.” Susan eyed the shiny hoard and sighed. “It’s not right though, I shouldn’t still be slaving away over my cauldrons after death. If only I’d known that good deeds are . . .”

  “Superannuation for the soul?” teased Sally, rolling her eyes at the predictability of her mother’s ghostly moaning. “It is often mentioned, Mum.”

  “You know very well what I mean. That charity has an actual exchange rate in the hereafter was a surprise to even your Dad, and he knows every financial finagle in the book, and then some,” said Susan in a finicky tone. “Believe me, there are a lot of angry, cash-strapped post-corporeals living in heavenly housing estates and subsisting on angelic largesse.”

  “I’m sure there are,” said Sally.

  “Still, we’ll be set up for eternity once you arrive with this lot. Which reminds me . . .” Susan glanced at a contraption strapped to her wrist. “Must fly—visiting times are almost over and I have to establish an alibi.”

  “Give my love to Dad,” said Sally.

  “Four hundred and three years of Purgatory still to go,” said Susan with a martyr’s air. “Poor Barry. The living conditions are deplorable. It’s driving him mad, I can tell you.”

  “Four hundred and three years reduced from a thousand thanks to his afterlife defence lawyer, whom I’m still paying off, I might add,” snipped Sally. Sometimes her parents forgot to be grateful for the way things had turned out.

  “Well, it’s a silly system. It’s not as if Barry killed anyone,” said Susan huffily.

  “Stealing is a sin, Mum. Not even Dad can scheme his way around that fact.”

  “Don’t speak about your father as if he were a common criminal,” scolded Susan.

  “Sorry, Mum,” said Sally, not wanting to get into another of their interminable debates about the technicalities of insider trading and creative accountancy.

  “Everything you have, you owe to that very tidy fortune your father salted away for you,” said Susan, starting to fade.

  “Yes, Mum.”

  “I’ll be back in two days. Remember to glaze the fruit flans with my Hitherto Potion. And mind the Serendipity Sponges don’t burn.”

  “Yes, Mum.”

  Susan grinned. “This is like the old days. We’re a good team, aren’t we, my girl.”

  “Yes, Mum, we are,” said Sally to the empty air.

  She glanced out at all the people rushing past The Gingerbread House. A woman with a child in tow suddenly braked, her attention snared by something sweet in the window.

  The woman looked up. Sally made eye-contact and smiled the way her parents had taught her to when she was a fair-faced, golden-haired girl spruiking the wonders of Susan the Sideshow Witch. The woman frowned and hurried off, yanking the child after her.

  “Too late, lady,” whispered Sally. “You can run, but you’ll be back.”

  Sally closed the cash drawer, patted the register’s comforting bulk, then headed for the ovens to check on her mother’s sponges.

  A Pearling Tale

  Maxine McArthur

  Jiro Aoyanagi placed his cup of sake in front of Ebisu-sama, the god of the sea. Jiro bowed his head and emptied his mind of the noises around him—the lap-lap of wavelets, chatter of men over in the layup channels, and squeals of seagulls. And, harder to ignore, the shrill, harsh whine of round-eye female voices from Cossack’s main street.

  Ebisu-sama, we are going to sea. Please accept this good wine and watch over your faithful servants. We will keep your lore, so please protect us from vengeful spirits, angry ghosts, and monstrous creatures. Bring us safely to port again so we may offer you our thanks.

  . . . and there it was. The familiar nudge of acceptance in his mind had a resigned quality. Perhaps Ebisu-sama was tired at the end of the season, too. He stood up stiffly, patting the amulet that hung around his neck on a thong. The paper charm was safe within its tiny oilskin bag.

  Two Malays carrying boxes from one of the layup vessels glanced at the lump of beribboned rock that was Ebisu-san’s shrine and looked away scornfully. Not their god. Not a god of this place at all. But what other god did Jiro have to appeal to?

  He walked along the beach to the jetty where Plover waited. The air draped on his bare shoulders as warm and heavy as a living animal. Hot fine mud squelched between his toes, and the stink of the exposed mangroves coated everything.

  Flynn, the master and tender, frowned at him from the deck of Plover. His crass round-eye voice mangled the elegant syllables of Aoyanagi into, “Ooyangee. Yer late.”

  “Sorry mistah. I make pray to god. For safe dive.”

  Flynn’s bloodshot blue eyes roved over Jiro’s face. He pushed a battered fedora to the back of his grey-cropped head, rolled the inevitable cigar to the side of his mouth, and spat a fragment of tobacco over the side.

  “Waste of time boyo,” he said. “Different gods in this country.”

  “Sea not in this country,” Jiro pointed out. “Sea all country.”

  “You’re an argumentative bastard, aren’t you? This sea,” Flynn flung his arm at the harbour entrance, “belongs to this country.”

  “Sea god all country.”

  “Ah, shut up and mark this.” Flynn thrust the indenture papers at Jiro, who made his mark at the bottom of the last page. There wasn’t any room for more marks, because they shouldn’t be going out this late in the season. Couldn’t Flynn taste the metal in the air? There was a deceitful breeze, too, that might die away or worse, rouse into a giant storm.

  Jiro climbed onto the lugger and tied his oilskin bag to his sleeping mat near the bow. They were in Ebisu-sama’s hands now.

  A cockroach, one of the big black ones, scuttled across his foot leaving sharp indents in the skin. He hissed in disgust, and rubbed the foot against his other calf.

  “Doncha love ’em!” One of the crew, Yoshi from Wakayama, grinned at him from beside the mast foot. It was Yoshi’s first season in Cossack, and he still exuded enthusiasm, especially when detailing exactly what he was going to do with his share of the pearl shell takings.

  Jiro rolled his eyes and helped the others get ready to cast anchor.

  The senior diver, Kamei from Ehime, sat unmoving next to the miniscule cabin he shared with Flynn, abaft the mizzen. His hooded eyes dared anyone to complain that he wasn’t helping. Deep divers were always cranky, Jiro reminded himself, from the rheumatics. Jiro, now, had promised his mother not to dive deeper than ten fathoms, although he’d gone close to fifteen.

  The cook, a cheerful Koepanger they all called “Cook”, hummed as he sorted through his pans and ladles, swatting at cockroaches as he went. The other two crew were Malay brothers, who did their jobs and kept a little bubble of privacy around themselves. Jiro had hardly said a word to both of them all season.

  He couldn’t help looking across at the luggers moored in the channels. Plover was the only boat going out today. Flynn didn’t own the boat—he was dummying for the real owner. Flynn shared a percentage of the take with the real owner, who could thereby run more luggers than he was actually licensed for.

  Jiro sighed. If only he could have been signed on by Muratsu. Muratsu didn’t send his boats out into danger to possibly scrape a few measly small shells from the cleaned-out beds
on the reef. Muratsu spoke the same language as his divers. Muratsu knew about Ebisu-sama, and the white-eyed ghosts of drowned men, and the child-faced bird that brings rain, and the sad worms that wind into a man’s brain through his ears and make him cry himself to death.

  But Muratsu didn’t yet have the new diving dress that protected the divers and let them gather more shells. The more shells, the more profit for all.

  “Get that main up,” yelled Flynn. “Here she comes.”

  The long-awaited wind dried Jiro’s sweaty shoulders, whispered through the ropes, and fluffed the sail with little impatient tugs. It lifted the bilge-mud smell from Jiro’s nose and teased the hair from his neck. The sea, the sea, it called.

  Plover’s slanted bow turned north to the mouth of the bay. Sunlight glinted off iron roofs on the hillside. Red rock, green mangroves, blue sky. A land quite alien, next to the familiar sea.

  Down on the shore some children ran, waving at the lugger.

  “One more trip.” Flynn slapped Jiro’s shoulders and grinned. “Then we’ll add up the doings.”

  Jiro couldn’t help grinning back at the vulgar Irishman. “Lot of doings.”

  “Oh yes, boyo, there will be that.”

  * * *

  The water had turned from the clear turquoise and aquamarine of winter to the thicker green of the wind season; even though the winds weren’t here yet, the waves knew. Here, on the outside of the long north reef, the lugger swooped and rose on a long swell.

  It was near the end of their second day out. Jiro sat on deck and sipped hot, sweet tea. His frozen limbs were thawing at last. Here above the waves his flannel pajamas and rough woollen trousers were more than warm enough, but down below the cold seeped into joints and bones.

  Yoshi was helping Cook with dinner. Both of them wore red-and-black patterned sarongs and they chattered about food, each using their own language, but communicating somehow.

  The Malays manned the pump, taking turns to drag the heavy wheel around. In this shallow water it wasn’t too tough a job, and each of them managed ten or so turns before changing places. Their long-muscled brown skin ran with sweat and they chanted as they turned. His eyes met the dark, narrow gaze of the resting man, who looked away immediately. When Jiro was below, his life rested in the hands of the pump crew, and he couldn’t even say their names properly.

  His life was literally in the hands of the tender, too. Flynn sat at the tiller, the manilla rope lifeline taut between his knobby fingers, piggy eyes never still, shapeless hat jammed on head and half-chewed cigar on the side of his mouth. The tender watched the line to see that it did not foul with the anchor chain, gauged the drift of the lugger, kept a check on the pump crew, moved the tiller in response to tugs from the diver, and never took his hands from the line. They’d all heard the story of the inexperienced tender who had put the line under his arm to use his hands for something else. The line had whipped away to its full length of fifty fathoms in seconds, the hose had snapped, and they never found the diver.

  Deep-diver Kamei had been down for an hour, now. He was working the edge of the reef where Jiro had started after breakfast. Jiro glanced over his shoulder to the western horizon. The low sun was hidden in a wide band of flat cloud, but in half an hour or so they’d bring Kamei up, eat dinner, open the shells, wash down the deck, and finish the day. There weren’t many shells to open. Jiro had taken four all day, Kamei six. A miserable haul, hardly worth putting to sea for. Maybe Flynn would turn back and they could finish the season at last.

  A short gust of wind rattled the blocks next to Jiro’s head. Cook cursed.

  Flynn stood up, cigar dropping from his mouth. He tugged twice on the line—the “come up” signal, but Jiro could see no response run up the rope.

  “Keep pumpin’”, Flynn growled at the pump crew, who were staring at him. He began to pull in the line, stopping every few minutes to signal.

  Jiro squeezed beside him at the rail. “What wrong?” he asked.

  Flynn, red and puffing, shook his head. “Dunno. Line’s not fouled. No bubbles. S’like he’s not awake.”

  A cold fingernail of fear dragged down Jiro’s spine. He helped Flynn pull, and pull, and then Kamei broke surface with a splosh, the suit ballooning, like flotsam.

  Jiro pulled while Flynn steered the diver to the lugger’s side. He and Yoshi stood on the ladder and while Yoshi held the dress, Flynn unlocked the helmet and, grunting with the effort, lifted it off.

  Kamei’s eyes were closed. His face was a deep puce colour, and he was dead.

  Flynn crossed himself, then climbed back on deck. “Get on with it, then! Bring him up. Out of the dress. Wrap him up. It happens, y’know.” He spun on the pump crew. “You can stop pumping now, daft bastards.”

  Embarrassingly, Jiro felt only relief. They would have to go home now and report the death.

  Then, as he stared at the body on the wet deck, he realised. “He left bag.” The string bag that divers put shells into.

  “You’ll have to bloody go down and get it, won’t you?” Flynn rummaged in his pockets.

  “Don’t know where.”

  “We haven’t moved more’n twenty feet. Just go back the way we came. We’ll drag you.”

  “Getting dark. Not see bag.”

  Flynn found a cigar. The smell of it stung Jiro’s nose as the tender stuck his face close. “You’ll go down and look for the bloody bag, all right? He might’ve got four or five shells for all we know. We owe the bastard that.”

  Jiro didn’t owe Kamei anything, not that round-eyes understood debt, anyway. Flynn just didn’t want to lose money.

  “Then we go home?” Jiro said.

  Flynn’s shoulders sank. “Then we bloody go home. I’m not sitting in the sun for a week with that.” He jerked his cigar at the body.

  Jiro felt, rather than saw, the rest of the crew relax. He pulled the boots off Kamei’s socked feet and put them on.

  It happened.

  Divers died.

  Kamei was a deep-diver with rheumatics, he could have gone any day. Probably better to die at sea than to get paralysis and ending up in a chair with a tube on your dick for the rest of your short life, like some of them. Or coughing up the balls of blood until you choked, like some of them.

  The water felt colder now. Icy currents brushed against him as he drifted, about six feet above the bottom, one hand on the anchor line as Plover moved slowly back along the afternoon’s course. The amulet lay reassuringly hot against his skin. His heart beat in rhythm with the thunk-thunk of the distant pump.

  The evening sea was a green, murky world of indistinct shapes that suddenly resolved as he grew closer. Clouds of small reef fish flickered past him with startling swiftness. Ridges and branches of the reef jutted onto the sea bed, coral flowers and grasses and blossoms that had long ago lost their charm. He kept a wary eye for hollows where gropers might lurk.

  Had Kamei kept hold of the bag until he died? When had he died? Flynn might not have noticed for a short while, but soon the lack of bubbles and the heaviness in the line had been obvious. So unless Kamei had dropped the bag early in his walk—which was ridiculous, why should he?—it should be close by. He tugged three times on the line, then twice more, the signal to stop. The drag of the line slowed.

  A gleam in the thick weed caught his eye. He tugged three times, then three more, to go down. As soon as his feet touched the uncertain coral surface he tugged once more, to signal he was there. Sure enough, an oyster sat in the middle of the weed, although it had snapped shut as soon as the eddy from his movement reached it. Where there was one, there might be others, and Kamei might have been looking here when he died. Jiro kneeled and wrenched the shell off its perch, then put it in his own bag. Might as well accept Ebisu-san’s bounty when it was offered.

  He had just put his hand to the valve at the back of the helmet to float himself over the next coral ridge, when he saw broken timbers, sticking out of the coral like accusing black fingers. It was
a shattered spar with a scrap of sail clinging to one splinter—a wrecked lugger, and very old by the look of it.

  His feet moved towards it of their own accord. He couldn’t see any letters on the smashed hull, and the rest of it was covered with weeds and barnacles. The pale shapes underneath it could be coral. Or bones.

  His foot caught in something and he flailed away, careful to keep his head up so he didn’t overturn. Could be an octopus, squid, weed . . .

  It was Kamei’s string bag, the ends waving at him as it floated, disturbed by his panic. So the deep-diver had come here, seen the wreck.

  The cold currents grew stronger. The pale shapes—were they moving?

  As quickly as he could, down here, Jiro grabbed Kamei’s bag and tugged twice on the line. He shook it, closing the valve on his helmet to gain greater buoyancy. As Flynn pulled him to the surface he felt heavier than usual, as though something was trying to pull him back down.

  “Did you get it?” yelled Flynn as they hauled him in.

  He waved tiredly.

  “Dunno why he didn’t signal to come up as soon as he saw it.” Flynn poked his hand disconsolately through the broken strings at the bottom of Kamei’s bag. “Looks like he tore it on coral. Bloody stuff could slice through anything.”

  Kamei must have noticed when he tried to put a shell in the bag. Or maybe he hadn’t found any shells until he stumbled on the wreck. Then he’d forgotten the shells.

  “Must be one of the early boats,” said Flynn. Jiro had told them about the wreck.

  They were sittting around the cut-off drum that served as their fireplace. “They didn’t go further than the reef. No dress, in those days. Couldn’t go down any further.”

  The wind had picked up; the deck rose and fell steadily beneath them. Flynn had to raise his voice over the creaking spars and swish of their passage.

  Jiro didn’t want to think about the wreck. Or about Kamei, his body neatly canvas-packaged in the hold with the cockroaches.

  He should have offered Ebisu-sama more wine.