The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2013

by Angela Slatter

  Blackwood enjoyed the comments of the anonymous critic enormously throughout the first five stories, until he came across a rather odd note beside a lurid description of a Black Mass. “Not how this is done at all!” the critic had written, and underlined. For an instant Blackwood had thought the writer was talking of the Mass itself, but then he realised that he (Blackwood had decided it was a he) must be criticising the scene as a whole, which was badly conceived and absolutely without suspense. A few lines further down the page were written the words, “Stupid BITCH” in reference to the insipid heroine of the story. The comments became progressively ill-tempered after that, and Blackwood found them less entertaining. The only positive criticism he found were a few words in the margin of a story describing the summoning of an ancient, evil spirit; “There’s something to this after all.”

  Blackwood couldn’t agree, for this story was perhaps the worst of the lot. Still, he read to the end, as he had never left a book unfinished in his life. He had hoped the critic would have written a more extensive review of the book on the flyleaf, but there was nothing. Blackwood was about to lay the book aside when he noticed that the last page had, in fact, been ripped out. Considering the unseen writer’s heavy hand, Blackwood found a pencil, and began to lightly shade the flyleaf, in case the writing from the missing page had imprinted itself there. After a moment he was rewarded with the ghost of a p outlined in lead. Childishly pleased, he continued shading with the pencil, and next revealed the letters a, x, z and a. It was gibberish. As he continued down the page, all he disclosed was five long lines of letters, making nonsense words. Blackwood squinted and stared at the letters, thinking that they might be anagrams, or a code. Tired, he was about to give up when he had the queerest feeling that someone was reading over his shoulder.

  This was always a sensation he had particularly disliked, and it was for this reason he never read on a bus or a train. And yet, though Blackwood knew that his back was to the wall, he felt compelled to turn around and look. Upon the whiteness of the wall he saw the same rows of letters that he had been staring at for the last few minutes. At first, he thought this was simply an optical illusion. He was even satisfied with himself that he knew the scientific term; persistence of vision. But then all at once the letters began to move, like a mad optician’s chart. The vowels and consonants re-arranged themselves on the blank page of the wall, so that they very quickly resembled nothing less than a face, with two o’s for eyes, a line of i’s for hair, an a for a nose, and a w for an angry mouth. Blackwood, thinking that he was overtired, went to blink away the letters, when the two o’s blinked at him.

  Blackwood shut his eyes. He had often thought that characters in ghost stories behaved as if they had never read a ghost story, and he wasn’t going to make that same mistake. If, when he opened his eyes, the thing on the wall was still there, he would calmly but hurriedly leave the house and find a place where there were lights and noise and people. Slowly, he counted to ten, and opened his eyes. The words were gone. Blackwood laughed, and got up to put the book away on the shelf near his bed. It was only then that he screamed. All his dozens of books were leering at him, their titles unreadable, the letters transformed from familiar vowels and consonants into an alphabet of hell. Hundreds of strange red symbols that were somehow alive gnashed and tore and devoured and copulated with each other. Some signs resembled twisted serpents and others unnatural orifices, whilst others still appeared to be crucified men and deformed children. At this first glance, Blackwood almost vomited. He felt as if he were looking at a bucket of maggots, or to be more precise, reading it, for the horrific symbols, though he couldn’t understand them, still conveyed a sense of evil.

  Dajuq’shroxnv’bljpo’todinaly’dewh

  Blackwood instinctively looked down, away from the books, and found that he was standing upon a newspaper, and that the headlines were crawling up his leg. He cried out and stumbled backward, kicking at the paper with his bare feet. The walls of the bedroom gibbered at him, but between the transformed books he could see the blessed white of the bathroom. Blackwood ran inside and locked the door behind him. Kneeling down and breathing heavily, he allowed his eyes to rest on the white tiles. Then he stood, and, turning around, caught sight of the shampoo bottle on the edge of the bath. Its list of ingredients writhed and suppurated until Blackwood, whimpering, threw a towel over it. Blackwood was grateful he was a tidy man; his toothpaste and deodorant were shut up in the drawer. He didn’t want to imagine what their simple logos had been transformed into.

  When he had caught his breath, he began to wonder what he should do. He couldn’t get to the front door of the house for there were too many books in the way, and he knew that he couldn’t face what the words had become. The bathroom window was too small to climb out of, but it faced onto the main road, and he reasoned that he could cry out for help. When he raised his head to the open window, he staggered back, sobbing. He had forgotten the advertising billboards across the street which now displayed sneering, hellish letters that were five or six feet high. At the sight of them Blackwood could no longer control himself, and he was violently sick in the toilet. He lay face down on the floor of the bathroom, exhausted, staring at the white tiles as if they might disinfect his sight. Finally, as an experiment, he began to draw the letter A on the mirror with soap, but he stopped at the end of the first leg, and smashed the mirror with his hand. The pain from the gash in his palm allowed him the clarity to gather his thoughts.

  At first he tried to convince himself that he had had a stroke, and that this metamorphosis of words was some form of aphasia. But he knew, somehow, that while several of the letters he had seen resembled tumours and blood clots, they were not caused by them. Similarly he was certain that he was not insane, though of course he would think this even if he were. The transformation had begun when he had read the letters from the book, and turned around to see the thing made of words looking at him. The only explanation, then, was that the letters in the book were somehow cursed, and had possessed the alphabet. Blackwood spent the rest of the long night desperately considering what he could do. If the book had cursed him, he had no idea how to lift it, especially as he couldn’t look at any other books to do research. All he knew about curses was that they could sometimes be passed on, and it was this thought he clung to as he spent a sleepless night lying in the empty bath. Fortunately the “H” and “C” on the taps had worn away long ago.

  At dawn he shut his eyes tightly and opened the bathroom door. As he crossed his bedroom he tripped and fell against the bookshelves. He expected to hear the pages shriek at him, but the books simply thudded to the floor. It seemed the words would not harm him if he did not look at them. Blackwood knew that he had to find the book that had started it all, Ten Terrifying Tales. He was certain that it had fallen on the bed and he groped blindly for it. At last he found it under a pillow, and he forced himself to open one eye to make sure of it. A glance was enough—the woman on the cover was now screaming at the book’s title, which writhed and leered at her. Blackwood almost screamed too. He ripped the flyleaf away and closed his eyes again. With bloodied shins he found his way into the living room, to his desk, and clumsily searched the drawers until he found a pair of old sunglasses. He put them on and slitted his eyes so that he could just make dimly out objects nearby and nothing else. Still he wouldn’t risk looking directly at a book. Blackwood dressed quickly, and staring at the ground, went outside.

  He hesitantly made his way to his neighbour’s house, though at one point he was almost run over by a car when he stumbled onto the road avoiding a rabid cigarette packet. Blackwood rang the doorbell and waited, holding the torn page of the book to his chest. It was the first time he had felt glad that the man was in. There he was, with his habitual vacant expression, but mercifully wearing a long-sleeved shirt so that Blackwood didn’t have to look at his tattoos of football teams and seemingly misspelled names that Blackwood assumed were his offspring

  “What?” t
he man asked abruptly.

  Noticing Blackwood’s sunglasses, he laughed. The logo on the man’s shirt winked at Blackwood, who said in a quavering voice, “I was wondering if you might help me. As you can see, I’ve lost my reading glasses, and have to wear these old things. My friend wrote me a message telling me where I should meet him today, and I can’t make it out. Would you mind?”

  The man scowled and snatched the page from Blackwood. He held it close to his face and looked it over briefly before muttering, “Can’t read it.”

  “Please,” Blackwood begged, “Could you look closer?”

  The man stared at the paper a moment longer, his lips moving, and then he started. “I’ve told you before you silly cow, not to sneak up on me!” he roared. Glancing over his shoulder at the untidy hallway, Blackwood saw no one. The man spun around, dropped the page. Then he shouted something and sprang into the house, slamming the door behind him. Blackwood stooped and retrieved the flyleaf. Carefully, he returned to his own front door, stopping once to force himself to look up at one of the billboards across the road. The words were still capering and cursing and glaring at him, and Blackwood began to despair. Then he saw the e. It was very faint; the merest ghost of an e behind an obscenity that squirmed and tongued in front of it, but it was there. If the curse couldn’t be passed on, Blackwood reasoned, then it appeared that it could at least be weakened. Squinting, he went into his house and fell into an exhausted sleep in the bathtub. An hour later he was woken by an ambulance siren, and eyes still shut he went to the window and eavesdropped on the commotion outside. They were saying his neighbour had gone mad, and had almost bled to death after cutting the tattoos from his arms.

  Xi’ucumb’hiwpeqlo’upqojajdfah

  The next day, Blackwood made two hundred copies of the flyleaf. It took him almost all day, for he had to shuffle to the library with his eyes half-closed, avoiding as best he could the nauseating litter, demented license plates and menacing things that infested the shoes and T-shirts and hats of passers-by. When he arrived, it took all his courage to go inside, knowing what awaited him there. Thankfully the photocopier was in an alcove near the entrance, hidden from the pulsating shelves of books. When he had gathered the papers together, he went out in the street and tried to hand them out. But few people would take anything from a bedraggled, trembling old man, wearing sunglasses in the rain. Those that did accept a paper only glanced at the first line before throwing it away, although one or two must have read the whole thing, judging by the distant screams Blackwood could hear, and the fact that he could now clearly make out the e and the s in the disgusting inferno of the Newsagent’s sign. He walked the streets all day, but at dusk he still carried at least a hundred leaflets, and no more letters had become visible.

  As Blackwood lay miserably in his bath that night, the only thing that prevented him cutting his wrists was that he could not bear to face the logo on his razor. He thought bitterly how all of this had come about through reading stories, and it was then that he had an idea. Perhaps people would only read the five lines of the incantation from start to finish if it was hidden in something else, like a short story. That was it! As soon as it was light, Blackwood would begin to write a story, or rather he would hire someone and dictate it, as he couldn’t use a pen, or a computer. It may as well be a ghost story, he had read enough of them to write one, though it might appear somewhat old fashioned. Perhaps that was all to the good, for then the reader wouldn’t suspect anything until near the end, when they had read the last of the cursed letters, and taken part of the curse upon themselves, and felt the eyes of the o’s over their shoulders.

  Uowhe’hiehih’dahzoz’bega

  Now, look behind you.

  After Hours

  Thoraiya Dyer

  The thoughts you have before you fall asleep are unsaved files on a computer before a storm.

  The blackout comes. The screen goes dark. You can’t ever get back what’s lost.

  What am I thinking, right before a Change? I can’t be sure. Maybe there’s evidence of what I tried to do—sunscreen applied too late or the blinds half drawn. It hasn’t happened since I joined the Air Force. Military life’s very ordered. You don’t forget what day it is.

  I can see why Toby liked it. Even though it got him killed.

  * * *

  One hundred scrubs of the brush.

  That’s how many you’re supposed to do. Nothing can make human skin sterile for long; the bacteria come oozing out of their hidey holes and recolonise your hands before you’ve even picked up a scalpel blade. But it’s important to do your best.

  I watch my boss, Bradley. He squirts a bit of chlorhexidine on his hands, squelches it around for a second or two and then rinses. He turns off the tap with his elbow. Without ever touching the scrub brush, he’s snapping on a pair of latex gloves, grinning at me over his grey beard.

  “Come on, Jess,” he says. “We’ve got six dogs to do this morning.”

  I don’t say anything. I’m a freshly minted graduate, one month into the job, while Bradley’s been practicing for thirty-seven years.

  Everybody loves him. He can spey a bitch in eight minutes flat. None of the dogs ever get infections. It’s all about speed, according to him. Less time under anaesthetic. Less time with the abdominal cavity open. Less time searching around in there, doing unintended trauma.

  Speed might do the trick for a rural mixed practice, but I want to be a specialist surgeon one day. I am methodical. Maybe that makes me slow.

  By the time I get gowned up, Bradley’s already got his spey hook around one horn of the dog’s uterus.

  “Here you go,” he says. “Follow it down and bring the ovary out.”

  There’s two things holding an ovary to the inside of a dog’s abdomen. One of them is a ligament. You want to tear through the ligament with your fingers. The other one is an artery. You don’t want to tear that one. If you tear it, you’re in trouble.

  Big trouble.

  And when you’re new to surgery, they feel the same. Like digging your gloved hand into a warm basin of spaghetti and grabbing two identical strands of it. You don’t yet have the instinct for how much pressure to apply, or which direction to angle. Your heart’s in your throat, wondering if you’ve pulled too hard. Is the patient’s blood pressure normal? Are her membranes a little bit pale?

  The ovary feels like ravioli in my hand. I pull. I stretch. It abruptly comes away. I bring it up towards the tiny incision that Bradley has made; an incision I feel is too small to properly examine the abdomen for an upwelling of blood.

  Of course, Bradley doesn’t have to do any examining, because there’s never an upwelling of blood when he desexes a dog. He could do it blindfolded.

  “Great, great,” he says. “Here’s the clamps.”

  He shepherds me through two more, then leaves me to do the other three dogs by myself while he goes off into the countryside to scrape some tumours off the eyes of half a dozen Hereford cattle.

  The last dog is an enormous, overweight golden retriever. I search desperately through fat for the ovaries. Every time I think I’ve found them, my hand comes up holding globs of fat. It takes forever for me to clamp and tie them.

  When I’m finally finished closing the abdomen, I look up to discover a stranger in the doorway: a short, heavily muscled man in army camouflage.

  “Where’s Brad?” the man asks.

  “Out on a call,” I say.

  The man runs a roughened palm over his salt-and-pepper buzz cut.

  “I’ll wait in his office,” he grimaces. “Black tea with two sugars.”

  He clomps off towards the office. I suppose he’s mistaken me for a nurse, but then, I’m wearing a surgical gown. Maybe he’s a mate of Bradley’s, but this is a staff only area, and I sure as hell didn’t go to university for five years so I could serve up black tea with two sugars.

  I take a deep breath, count to ten, take off my mask and gloves and sit down at the computer to write up the
surgeries.

  * * *

  The dog was new, they said. When they’re new, they make mistakes.

  They needed more dogs than they had. Their metal detectors were suddenly useless. The new IEDs had no metal or electronic parts. Instead of hacksaw blades coming together to complete the circuit, detonating the shell, graphite blades were used with ammonium nitrate. The Australian commanders had a choice between uncertified contractors and dogs who hadn’t finished their training, and the troops were getting shirty with all the waiting around.