The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2013

by Angela Slatter

  “You need a future!” There was a look of resolute satisfaction on her face.

  I sobbed and reached out to my mother.

  “Not me, now, hold him. He is your husband. Father will apprentice him.”

  “I want to be apprenticed!”

  My mother continued, speaking to the spirit-man. “I name you Venerio. You will live here and marry my daughter,” she said, “You will take on an apprenticeship, spirit of reflection, and become the greatest glassmaker that Murano has ever known and care for my daughter!”

  Venerio was beautiful. His eyes were grey green and had movement in them, like water. His skin was pale, like moonlight. His hair was long for a man, long brown tresses that were tangled with seaweed. Mother used her bodice dagger to cut his tresses short like my father’s. I picked them up, held them close to my nose and inhaled their perfume of salt and the open sea.

  Even though I had sworn never to use my mother’s magic, my father clapped his hands in delight at what I had done and my reasoning.

  “You are a genius, daughter!” He said to me. “For what better mirror maker could there be, than one who is reflection himself?”

  On our wedding night, I shivered in excitement. What would it be like to be loved? To have a man to caress and hold me? I lay on my bed, my hair undone, my arms outstretched out on either side of me.

  He came into the room and lay next to me, gazing into my face. I puckered my lips to kiss him and he puckered his lips back. I sat up on my knees on the bed, and he moved to do the same. Facing each other; I could see my reflection in his eyes, I lifted my hand slowly up to caress his chest; he did the same and touched mine. He reflected back the love and desire I felt.

  That night, as we lay in each other’s arms under a blanket of filtered moonlight, contentment welled in my heart. I would not be a glassmaker but at least I would be married to one. At least, regardless of my looks, I would have a companion, to whisper secrets to and sing songs about the Mediterranean with. Even if he had been my own creation.

  My father understood Venerio’s true worth—near the furnaces. Made up of water, he could withstand more heat and toxic salts than any of the other apprentices. I watched him work at the ovens. While the others coughed at the nitrates and the soda ash, his watery substance washed it away. He was a spirit of reflection. Made of water. Transparent and cold.

  Meaningless until someone gazed into him.

  There was a staccato knock at the front door. From the whistles that rose to my bedroom window from the Glassmaker’s Canal below, I knew it was my cousin Isabella.

  I descended the stairs to our foyer, lifting my skirts so they would stay dry. I should have put my small passarelle down, so that she would not wet her feet when entering our antechamber, but my disdain for my mortal cousin stopped me. Even the recent fire in her father’s workshop that had reduced her family to poverty was not enough for my heart to warm towards her. Her presence was enough for my mermaid scales to start appearing on my legs, making them itch.

  She stepped inside and, without waiting for my invitation, proceeded up the stairs to higher, dryer ground in the living room, perching herself on our divan.

  “What brings you here?” I sat in the armchair opposite and shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

  “Why haven’t I met him?”

  I smiled sweetly; there was no point taking time to answer. She was obviously here for the news of my hasty marriage to an apprentice glassmaker.

  “Married so quickly! Any scandal I should know about?”

  My tail whipped at the wet hem of my gown. I smoothed my dress down to conceal it.

  “No scandal.” I scratched at my legs and tried to change the subject. “Surely, you must be getting excited about your own wedding now.”

  Like a twittering canary, she divulged the details of her nuptials. It was to be a loveless marriage but one that would provide wealth to her family.

  I rose from the chair and took the keys from the table to take her to the furnaces.

  Isabella followed me behind, up the narrow staircase and down the main corridor.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, Quasibella,” Isabella said, a smile forming at the corners of her mouth, “but you’re very lucky to have found a husband.”

  “All daughters, part mermaid like me, or full blooded mortal like yourself, need good marriages for their livelihood,” I answered and continued walking ahead, my limp more profound now that my tail had grown. All daughters, it seemed, in her opinion except me.

  “Tell me everything! How did you meet?” She hurried behind me down the narrow stone corridor.

  “The guild has been sworn to secrecy, Isabella,” I answered, “and that includes information about new apprentices.”

  We walked on; the silence cutting between us, the floors were dry on the first storey of our home, its labyrinthine passageway leading us to the furnaces.

  It would take only ten minutes to arrive at the glass-making furnaces by foot but I was already tired. It wasn’t the silly banter of my cousin that made me so; my recent use of sea magic had aged me. My shin bones ached, longing to return to full flesh and scale, and I was short of breath. Still, I had been content for the first time since I married Venerio. We had all been happy for these past few weeks and I had not even argued with my father about being apprenticed to glass. For once, I felt equal to all the daughters of Venice, even to the feather­brained mortal cousin of mine that flapped about in her prettiness behind me.

  “Quasibella! You aren’t listening to me!” The shard sharp voice of my cousin shattered my reverie, bringing me back to the present. “I was telling you my future husband will hold a ball to honour my beauty!”

  “We must make you a special wedding gift then, at the workshop,” I said and continued walking. Her looks were her only talent.

  “We?” She laughed. “Quasibella, you can’t make anything!”

  “I mean ‘they’.”

  I smiled sweetly and continued on, beckoning for her to follow.

  We arrived at the door that led to the workshop. The heat emanating from the furnace enveloped us. Isabella wiped the sweat from her upper lip with her sleeve.

  “Would you like to return to the house?” I asked, “It is even hotter once we go inside.”

  “I want to meet Venerio. Not a peep about it and then a letter to say you’re married! Before me!”

  She pushed in front of me and walked in towards the ovens. Venerio was sweeping the embers from the floor, his shirt unbuttoned, and his face red from the heat.

  “Venerio?” Isabella cooed. “We haven’t had the pleasure of each other’s acquaintance?”

  Venerio didn’t look up. Being a spirit of reflection, he didn’t respond to words or commands. He was taught glass by being shown and copying my father’s actions. He kept his head down, sweeping the stray bits of silica on the ground.

  “Is he a simple fellow?” She asked me. “He doesn’t answer me!”

  “He’s preoccupied with his work.” I answered, my tail wanting to lash at her ankles.

  Venerio was a simple kind of young man of limited speech and sometimes, I feared, empty of mind. Still, he was a good companion to me. Isabella tried asking some more questions but still he didn’t look up. She laughed with her sharp shard voice and said that God made them and he paired them in two just like in the story of Noah’s ark. Her eyes darted from him to me, indicating we were ‘them’. I wanted to box her ears. Instead, I smiled. Let her say what she wanted. Soon, I would be of equal standing when Venerio invented glass to show a woman’s true beauty and father would see my worth.

  But when Isabella tugged Venerio’s sleeve for attention and he finally did see her, he fell to his knees and kissed her dainty feet.

  “Oh? Perhaps he’s just deaf?” She giggled and put her hand out for him to kiss.

  I held my skirt down as the last bit of tail whipped around my ankles. He was the spirit of reflection, as fickle as any man, and admired vanity when
it gazed into him.

  “You would have chosen me, of course, if you had seen me first. Am I not the fairest of all Murano women?” She said.

  “You are the fairest, my lady,” he said and gazed at her like a love struck pup.

  I ran out of the workshop, my skirts flying behind me.

  “Cover your tail!” my father screamed. I ran down the corridors, all the way back to my room and bolted the door. Breathless, I looked out the window. Sunset was approaching and the swallows circled the turrets in a mad frenzy. I realised that worse than no man at all, is to have one you love, and for him not to love you back. When did I start to believe the illusion that he loved me? I threw myself onto our marital bed, punching my pillow in frustration and cried myself to sleep.

  I woke several times in the night, my head aching from crying and Venerio’s pillow empty of his soft curls and face. Where was he? The window was open, allowing a wet wind into the room. I got up and bolted it shut.

  Just before sunrise, mother knocked on my bedroom door, and without waiting for me to answer, escorted a bloodied and bruised Venerio into the room.

  “I told you not to play with sea magic!” she scolded and pushed him towards me. “He escaped from your bedroom window last night, swam the many metres of lagoons until he reached Isabella’s home. He climbed up into her room and your uncle found him there, gave him a hiding, then tossed him back into the water. Isabella was crying, said he would damage her marriage prospects. They cannot have her marriage prospects ruined since the fire at their workshop; it’s their last hope of salvation.”

  I pulled the blanket up over my head and gritted my teeth to suppress a scream. Yes, they were poor, Isabella needed a good marriage, but she also hungered for love, she sought it and Venerio reflected it back.

  Mother slammed the door leaving Venerio and I together.

  “How could you do this?” I screamed and pummelled his chest with my fists. He didn’t try to stop me but sat still, staring back at me. I stopped and looked at him. He wasn’t angry. He didn’t have a response. How could he when his very essence was shallow and without substance, meaningless unless there was someone to behold it? I had never gazed upon him with vanity but Isabella had, and it made him feel meaningful.

  I had been fooled by my own illusion of love.

  Finally, I begged my father to talk some sense into Venerio or else let me throw him back to the water from which he came.

  “He is a good glassmaker,” Giacomo said.

  “He is a terrible husband,” I said.

  “He is a typical husband.”

  “I made him!”

  “And you made yourself a wife! Infidelity is not uncommon. To be a good wife you must behave with dignity!”

  My tail now stuck out from my skirt, thrashing at my ankles. I lifted it up under my skirt and walked across the cold floors and did what I do when I needed to think. I poured the cold Murano water into my tub for a bath and immersed myself.

  Father was on an errand to pick up soda ash from a Persian ship at the main port. I had a few hours without his stern eyes upon me.

  I walked the long corridors to the furnace and found Venerio near the ovens sketching a portrait of Isabella. When he saw me, he picked up his shovel and moved toward the lit furnace, as if he had been working all along. He’s not that simple, after all, I thought. I squinted and drew from the anger in my tail to make Isabella’s reflection appear in the fire. Her face jumped about in the flames, beckoning Venerio to help her. And the man made of water jumped in to extinguish them.

  I’d watched the apprentices and Venerio long enough to know what to do. My hands shook as I crushed the crystal frit but I was determined. I’d made him from magic and I’d return him to water.

  Solid water.

  A mirror.

  Better a widow than a woman scorned, Quasibella.

  I was immune to his screams, his pleas for release as the steam hissed from his pores, his skin and bones liquefied. I threw the letter I had written under the guise of my underwater family into the fire, too, and used my last bit of magic to curse Isabella. I twined the two strands of Isabella’s hair I had collected on her visit around a thorn-stemmed rose and threw them into the fire that made Venerio glass.

  Two days later, I lay in my bath, ill from the pain and exhaustion only sea magic and spell-binding can bring. The muscles in my twisted leg had weakened and my tail had grown so long, it now dragged behind me, angry or not. I could not put any weight upon my feet. They itched and burned as the scales came through between my toes. Cold water was my only comfort.

  Father came with another letter. This time, not written by me. It was from his brother.

  Isabella’s betrothal had been called off due to the scandal of Venerio’s nocturnal visit. To avoid further shame, Isabella was to be shipped off to marry a widower with a baby daughter in Lombardy. The baby was known to be of a unique beauty and therefore considered a perfect match for Isabella to become her step-mother.

  “So Venerio has fled to avoid my brother’s wrath!” my father said, as though he had solved the puzzle of Venerio’s disappearance. I let him believe it.

  “Apprentice me to mirror making! Look at what I’ve made! It’s in the armoire! Open it!”

  My father cautiously opened the wardrobe’s creaking door. Inside was a large, oval-shaped looking-glass mirror. He gazed into it and I stifled a giggle as my father jumped back as it spoke.

  “What a fine beard, you have, Giacomo!” the mirror said.

  “You’ve made a speaking mirror?” My father was incredulous. He let out a gasp of surprise and then began to dance a jig. “We will write to the Underwater Senate and get our reward! The fortunes such an invention will bring!”

  “Apprentice me to glass,” I pleaded. Father finally agreed.

  We sold him for a fine price—a talking magic mirror that spouted empty platitudes to vain women. The widower bought it as a wedding gift for his new wife, Isabella, my cousin. I promised my father I would make extraordinary glass like the letter had asked.

  Now I am a glass-maker. I make glass of cobalt blue and vermillion red, and mirrors that speak of a woman’s beauty. As I hold the mirror that can reflect the true beauty of a woman, the beauty of her heart—I ponder my decisions and keep it covered.

  After what I have done to Isabella and Venerio, I fear looking into this mirror. I keep it covered, afraid of what it might reveal.

  Sticks and Stones

  Ryan O’Neill

  “False words are not only evil in themselves,

  but they infect the soul with evil.”

  — Plato

  Paxza’ravrnam’bablla’tok

  Early one morning in the summer of 2011, James Blackwood, Professor of Philology at the University of Newcastle, set aside the examination papers he was marking, and went out for a walk. It was a cloudless Sunday, and he strolled up the hill to the cathedral, waiting there for ten minutes until the hour. Although he was an atheist, he enjoyed the sound of church bells, and as he wandered away from the cathedral, he followed their pleasant echoes.

  In a small side street, Blackwood stopped in front of a shop he had never noticed before. The walls were cracked and red paint was peeling from them like sunburnt skin. Even the graffiti on the side of the shop seemed ancient, resembling the symbols of a dead language. By the doorway, on a bench, an old man sat in the shade. Above him, printed on the filthy window, were the words A BADDON. Without the full stop, Blackwood was reminded of a sign on a cage in a zoo. The old man spat on the pavement from time to time, regarding the few cars and pedestrians that went by with barely concealed outrage, as if the world were his and his rights were being trampled on. Blackwood peered at a large cardboard sign taped to the door that read “Seller of Clothes, Food, Sundries” and was about to pass on when he saw that the last word on the list, very small, was “Books.”

  As he stopped A Baddon rose to his feet and went inside, and after a moment, Blackwood followed him in
to the darkness of the shop. Though it was a bright day, it seemed that the sunlight was hesitant to come in, as if it were afraid that the old man might charge it admission. The cracked windows were curtained with dirt, and across one of them, running diagonally, was a disgusting finger-written blasphemy that Blackwood, godless as he was, felt obliged to wipe off with his handkerchief.

  On the wall to his left stood shelves of paperback books, mostly Westerns, and piles of old magazines that had the same discarded look as newspapers left on trains. Opposite these, hanging from nails, were racks of clothes, and teapots, pots and pans. Everything in the shop had a neat, handwritten price tag, and most of the prices had been revised up or down several times in red ink. The old man, Baddon, waited behind a dirty glass counter, watching him. “Good afternoon,” Blackwood said.

  “I was about to shut for lunch” the old man replied. He had a harsh Scottish accent that conspired to make even the most innocent word sound like a curse. “Just looking,” Blackwood smiled. “Won’t be a moment. Blackwood went to the bookshelves and cocked his head to read the titles. None of the books appealed to him, and he was about to leave when he caught sight of a broken-backed blue spine, which proclaimed in thick red letters: Ten Terrifying Tales by J.B Reid. Blackwood pulled the book from the shelf. It was a first edition printed in New York in 1938, and the yellow, brittle pages were almost falling apart. The cover showed an amateurish drawing of a woman shrieking in terror at a ghostly figure. She had evidently annoyed the old man for he had gagged her with the price tag of three dollars. It had been a long time since Blackwood had read a ghost story. He was glad to pay the old man and leave the shop before he found a price tag on himself as well.

  Dwix’bitud’slekdi’berbod’qadiv

  Blackwood lived alone in a large L-shaped house on the corner of a busy street near the beach. He had been content there for many years, until a new neighbour had moved in, a rude, ignorant young man with tattoos on his neck and forearms. Often this neighbour played loud music until early morning, and Blackwood barely slept. But that night, after dinner, there was silence, and so Blackwood settled in bed and began to read the book he had bought at Baddon’s. The first story had the promising title, “The Horror in the Darkness.” Above the word “Horror,” someone had written in red pen, “cliché.” Blackwood tutted and flicked ahead to find that every page was similarly annotated. Blackwood disliked handwriting on books, considering it a kind of desecration. But after reading the first paragraph of the story, he found that he couldn’t disagree with the judgement of the annotator, who had also circled it and scrawled, “Sheer hokum!” The story was so appallingly written that Blackwood only continued reading because of the amusing marginalia. Blackwood was proud of his knack at being able to guess the sex of his students, and even whether they were left or right-handed, from a sample of their writing. But the writing in the book puzzled him. Sometimes it sloped forwards, sometimes steeply backwards. It was usually very neat, but at the most juvenile sections of the book it would become messy and almost illegible, as if the writer had become agitated. Only the dark red ink and the heavy pressure of the pen remained constant.