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

by Paul Haines

  The guard called. “Another audition sir!”

  “Of course.” The fat man grabbed the chair and pulled it towards us, leaving the servant on the wall to scramble for footing on the rough bricks, “Because we are clearly suffering a dearth of entertainers.” I was so tired it was only when he reached us and sat down with a heavy sigh that I recognised him. Bonteme, the duke’s Master of Revels. He pulled a small hourglass from his pocket and placed it by his feet. “You have until this runs out.”

  Performing for children in the market, I had never suffered nerves. But this was the Revels Master; besides which, I had only stolen scratches of sleep over the past few days. My hands, suddenly greasy with sweat, slipped as I tried to open the case. I could hear Bonteme’s hands drumming on the chair. I pulled the creature from the case and balanced it on its wooden feet.

  “It’s a puppet.”

  “Marionette,” I muttered under my breath as I untangled the strings. I tapped my foot and hummed.

  It had seemed loud enough under the low roof of my lodgings. But here in the expanse of the Duke’s hall, it was drowned under the banging of hammers, the screech of tables dragged across the floor, the surly curses of soldiers turned labourers.

  I twisted my right wrist. Strings pulled at the creature’s arms and legs and it began its ragged dance. As rehearsed, the pretence that the creature was mere marionette would continue for another verse, but already there was more sand in the bottom of the hourglass than the top. I’d have to improvise. I reached for the scissors I’d hidden in a secret pocket at the back of my jacket.

  They were gone.

  My smile was desperate and thin as I dug frantically at my jacket with my left hand. At the same time my right hand worked the device, trying to ensure the creature’s dance did not falter. Without the scissors I wouldn’t be able to flamboyantly cut the strings and usher in the real act— the creature revealed, dancing by itself. Without the scissors, I was no more than a puppeteer. So intent was I on these tasks, I failed to notice that I had stopped humming. Then I saw the hourglass.

  Bonteme exhaled and rubbed his hand over the balding spot at the back of his head. Without a word he turned and walked away. The guard had returned to the door; as I stood, numb, a pair of servants carrying a bench between them crashed past, crushing the hourglass underfoot. I was left alone in the centre of the hall. The creature twisted on its ropes.

  I had failed.

  * * *

  I stumbled through the streets. Rage blinded me—at the ignorance of Bonteme; at the guards who sneered as I ran from the hall. At myself. After everything I had done—as I pushed through the crowds already assembling, images kept surfacing in my mind: Niam’s collarbone, slick with sweat; the pale limbs of the witch-tree, moving in the moonlight; holding down the witch-tree branch while I cut into its to living flesh. All of it wasted effort. The scissors were still resting on my workbench, unless they’d fallen free somewhere in the streets.

  I still grasped the manipulator in my right hand and the creature jostled behind me, dangling from its strings, arms raised as if in benediction.

  I pushed people out of the way, as if I were still in the forest and they were nothing more than branches in my path. A child appeared from between the stalls and I cuffed him away; only when he cried out did I notice it was Gaben. He fell onto a table loaded with oranges. When he wiped the back of his hand across his face I saw blood. I did not stop to help him to his feet.

  I reached my lodgings, slammed the door behind me and threw the creature on the workbench. Rabian hung from his hook, mocking me with the smile I’d painted on him myself. I tore him from his place and flung him across the room where he clattered against the low roof. I stalked over to the marionette and broke him across my knee.

  I did not stop until I had destroyed it all: the marionettes; the foolish costumes they wore; the sets and props; the paints and varnishes that comprised their empty expressions. I screamed as I did so—a guttural rage, as if I were giving voice to the creature’s screams that had haunted me since I brought Niam’s axe down. The creature turned its head as I thrashed about the room, watching as I spat and tore and wept. Finally, when there was nothing more to break I collapsed on my pallet, strings cut, into a dreamless sleep.

  * * *

  I slept through the revels and woke late in the afternoon the next day, every part of my body screaming protest at my recent exertions. There was the smell of smoke in the breeze. I flung the shutters wide. A rope of black rose from the eastern gate. I heard unsheathed steel and the screaming of horses.

  Upon my workbench, where the creature had lain the night before, lay nothing but tangled strings.

  My saw was gone.

  The creature was a fast learner. It had watched while I destroyed my art. And in the same way I had taught it to dance, now I had taught it something else.

  I could imagine what it had done—bringing my saw to the witch-tree in the same way I had taken my axe. I rushed down the stairs, flung open the door and ran downhill, through the square, towards the eastern gate. I could see them now—an army of creatures, roughly-hewn: they ran in packs across the battlements. I saw a soldier caught with no way of escape. They attacked him in a swarm. I heard the sound of wood beating upon bone. When the creatures dispersed there was nothing but a red smear on the brick.

  Then I saw, behind the gate, a bone-white limb stretch far above the wall. Its end was twisted into an imitation of a fist and it grasped Niam’s axe, held backwards. The limb slammed down on the wall—soldiers and masonry tumbled to the street below. The height of the limb could mean only one thing—the witch-tree was walking.

  I turned and ran back up the hill and when I reached my lodgings I bolted the door knowing full well the futility of the action.

  * * *

  It is louder now, the sound of battle. The streets are full of carts: the rich have fortunes piled up and drawn by horses; the poor drag what they can, or simply run, leaving everything. All are equally doomed. The eastern gate is still ablaze and the other exits are choked with traffic.

  I found the scissors lying on the floor. I had nudged them, no doubt, in my haste to leave for the audition. I have them now, gripped tightly in my left hand. They are good scissors. In the hours ahead I will have need of something strong and sharp.

  They are coming.

  She Said

  Kirstyn McDermott

  Finally, the sound of weeping stopped and Mallory hobbled out of the bedroom on legs that seemed to grow both thinner and whiter with each new day. She clutched an empty baby food jar in one hand and stared at me through the shards of her uneven, grease-black fringe.

  “You’ll need this,” she said. “For the clouds.” And she coughed, harsh and hacking, skinny ribs hitching high with each hard-drawn breath, and spat something dark and clotted into the jar. She held it out to me with trembling, blood-scabbed fingers and I took it, trying not to look too closely at the contents.

  “Mix it with indigo,” she said, as she wiped a smear from her chin.

  “Mal?”

  “For the clouds.”

  “Mal, come sit with me a bit.” My invitation was less than half-hearted and I hoped the relief didn’t show on my face when she shook her head.

  “I’m going back to bed, Josh. I’m tired.” She paused at the bedroom door, scratched her thigh through the ratty black slip she’d been wearing for longer than I cared to think about. “Do some fucking good with that, yeah?”

  The bedroom door closed almost soundlessly behind her. I retrieved a tube of Indigo Blue from the mess scattered over the floor, squeezed about half of it into the jar Mallory had given me. I started to stir, slowly, carefully, blending colour and consistency to something new, something no one had ever quite seen before and as I did, the skin on the nape of my neck crawled. I could already see the paint moving over the canvas, wet and violent and alive, could feel it sliding beneath my brush with a purpose all its own.

  I tur
ned to the half-finished cityscape that loomed from the easel by the window: my abandoned, nameless city with its buildings left to rust and rot and ruin, left to cower and hope beneath the threat of an oncoming storm which must surely mean its end. Massive thunderheads little more than charcoal sketches because I’d been uncertain how to render them.

  Until now.

  As I lifted my brush to the canvas, as I felt the paint flow thick and eager from the bristles, I could see the end, how it needed to be finished. I could see the promise that glimmered beneath the threat, the mercy inherent in destruction. My hand steadied, and worked.

  Hours later, I pushed my face into Mallory’s neck while we fucked. Her sickly, sweat-stale smell filled my nostrils, seeped down the back of my throat; even then it was better than looking at her. Better than having to meet that weepy, red-rimmed gaze and pretend. But she knew. Turned away as soon as we were done, her fragile fetal curl on the edge of the mattress familiar as breathing now, and I knew better than to try and touch her again. Even if I’d wanted to.

  Instead: “I think the painting’s done, Mal. I think you’ll like it.”

  She whispered something into her pillow.

  I swallowed. “You’ll see it in the morning, anyway.”

  Minutes dragged by unanswered, the dry scrape of sandpaper on skin, and just as I was beginning to hope she’d drifted off to sleep, Mallory sighed and rolled back over to face me.

  “I know about her, Josh,” she said.

  * * *

  Fiona. Fee. My dirty little secret, not so much it seemed.

  I’d bumped into her on the street, literally, crashed into her as I’d come out of the art supplies place on Greville, head down, suspiciously counting the change the emo kid behind the counter had dumped into my hand. I didn’t see the girl til I’d almost knocked her over, knocked the breath from her lungs with a small, startled oh!, knocked the cardboard carton she’d been carrying from her hands.

  Then suddenly, magically, the air was full of feathers.

  Thick and white and swirling all around us as though someone had exploded an angel, or a pillow factory, and oh! the girl said again, softer this time, and grinned. I was grinning too, trying to apologise as I brushed the feathers from my shirt. A handful had come to rest in her hair and, without thinking, I reached out to pluck them from her ash blonde curls.

  “Sorry,” I said again. “I didn’t see you.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she told me. “This was so much better than whatever he had planned for them.”

  She’d been dropping off the box for an artist friend who was working on some kind of an installation to do with animal liberation, or sleep deprivation, she couldn’t remember which. Shrugging, the girl shook a few more feathers from the hem of her brightly-coloured skirt. I was fixated on her arms, so smooth and tanned, jangling with a dozen or more gaudy plastic bracelets.

  “Are you an artist too?” I asked.

  “Me?” A coy, sideways tilt of her head. “More an artist’s assistant. Admiration and inspiration, that sort of thing.”

  “And plumage procurement.”

  “Yes, sometimes that as well.” She held out a hand. “Fiona.”

  “Josh.” Her skin was warm, her grip purposeful. She looked about ten years younger than me, maybe in her early twenties, twenty-five tops.

  “Well, Josh, my fine new friend, I think you owe me a coffee.” She slipped around to my side, hooked her arm through mine and flashed me another brilliant, straight-toothed smile. “At the very least.”

  I could have said no. I should have said no, should have gone straight back home with my tubes of paint and the new Size 4 sable brush I couldn’t really afford. Back home where Mallory would have been waiting with her nails gnawed down to the bloody quick and her eyes full of thunder and hurt.

  Instead, I followed Fiona to her favourite café and then, later, back to her flat in St Kilda. We sat on her sixth floor balcony with a bottle of wine, looking out over the bay and arguing, good-naturedly, about whether or not we could discern a curve in the horizon from that height.

  “So, you’re a painter,” she said at some stage. “Any good?”

  “Sometimes yes, sometimes definitely not.”

  “We might have to see about that.”

  Evening had crept up on us; I could barely make out her features in the growing darkness. But I leaned forward anyway, and kissed her. Slowly at first and then, with her lips moving against mine, more urgently. I caught her hair in my fists, tangled those soft, pale curls around my fingers.

  Finally, she pulled away. “It’s not going to happen tonight, Josh.”

  But her smile was wolfish, and more than a little regretful, as she pulled me to my feet and sent me off, alone, into the dusk.

  * * *

  Sunk deep into the sagging centre cushion of our couch, Mallory pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders. A scab on her left knee was flaking and she scratched at it, absently.

  “I don’t know, Josh. There’s something . . . missing?”

  She was right, she was always right. The painting was done, done as I felt I could make it, but it wasn’t finished. The abandoned city, the brooding storm-laden sky; it wasn’t enough, it didn’t sing, or even mutter. More and more, I felt trapped by the canvas, caught within the very oppression I’d been attempting to create.

  And I couldn’t help but think of the other canvas I’d been working on over the past few weeks, the one Mallory didn’t know about, could never know about. The painting that currently resided high up in a certain sixth floor St Kilda flat. My huge, half-finished portrait of a girl with ash gold curls and a grin coaxed straight from a fairy tale.

  “I’m done, Mal.” I rubbed at my forehead. “It’s done.”

  “No, you’re not, and no, it’s not either.”

  I shook my head, refused to meet her eye. The buildings I’d painted reminded me of her somehow. Those empty, abandoned facades agape with broken windows like the teeth she’d lost just the other day. A sharp-pointed incisor and its less interesting neighbour, offered on a shaky, flattened palm for my inspection. They just fell out, Josh. They fell right out of my mouth. A childish wonderment in her voice, but also, unmistakably, fear.

  “You’ll find it,” Mallory said from the couch, and sniffed.

  “Find what?”

  “The way through. You always do, in the end.”

  “Mal—” I turned, and whatever I was about to tell her slid away as I saw the runnel of blood edging sluggishly from her left nostril. Revulsion kicked at my guts. Revulsion, and something else besides. “Mal, your nose.”

  She frowned and sniffed again, extended the tip of her tongue above her lip to catch a smear of scarlet. “Oh.” Her hands disappeared beneath the blanket for a few seconds before resurfacing with one of her empty little jars, and she leaned forward, one hand pushing her hair out of her face, the other holding the jar carefully beneath her nose. Blood seeped down the clear glass sides as I watched, pooling toxic-thick at the bottom.

  And I could see the buildings in my painting bleeding like that. Just like that. Weeping bitter streams of rust and corrosion from every crack and windowless crevice. Not simply waiting for the storm, but falling before it, flowing apart at the edges. Forsaken, even by each other. Forsaken. The word tasted swollen and hollow and cold as I whispered it beneath my breath.

  It tasted of surrender. It tasted right.

  “Josh?” Mallory was sitting up again, the jar resting on her thigh. It held an alarming amount of blood. “Yes?” she whispered.

  “I think so,” I replied. “Yes.”

  Her lips parted in a faltering, gap-toothed smile and as she lifted the jar up to me, its contents glinting dark and crimson in the failing afternoon light, I leaned over and kissed her, my fingers closing over hers and over the jar, and I tasted the blood still smeared beneath her nose.

  And, just for now, that tasted right as well.

  * * *

  �
��Let me see.” Fiona rose from the wicker chair and retrieved her robe from the floor. It was bright blue and patterned with huge orange flowers, one of which sat over her left breast like a mutant, six-fingered hand as she tied the belt loosely around her waist. I could make out the dark circle of her nipple through the flimsy, semi-sheer fabric.

  “Who said the man couldn’t paint?” Fiona nudged me with her elbow. “It’s beautiful, Josh. Seriously, it’s amazing, and I’m not just saying that cause it’s me. The way you’ve made it so it almost glows, that’s . . . wow.”

  “It’s not quite finished yet, I don’t think.”

  “Really? It looks finished.”

  The truth was, I didn’t want it to be finished. I didn’t want to give up these mornings in Fiona’s lounge room, watching the sun as it spilled through window glass and over her naked curves, watching the rise and fall of her chest deepen whenever she slipped into a doze. But the portrait was too finely balanced now, and I knew if I added so much as a single brushstroke, it could fail.

  Fiona was right, it was finished.

  “Hey, Josh?” She looked at me sideways, and smiled. “You didn’t actually need me to sit for you today, did you?”

  I reached out and squeezed the back of her neck. “Not technically, no.” My hand moved around to her throat; her pulse beat hard beneath my fingers. “But a little extra inspiration never hurts.”

  She returned my kisses at first, her tongue giving playful chase to mine. Only when my hands moved down to her hips, sliding through the folds of her robe to grasp at her soft, sunwarm flesh, did she push me away. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” she whispered, her hand trembling on my chest. “But you know if anything were to happen, it would just get too messy. And I try to avoid mess.”

  “You don’t think something has already happened?”

  “Josh, you have . . . complications.”