The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2013

by Angela Slatter

  You don’t Change for a while, you forget the clean, cutting enhancement of your senses. The joy of being alive. But the price tag is too high. I feel the thrill but then I remember that boy who followed me out of the club. All he wanted was my phone number. He was too shy to ask for it in front of my friends. The dancing had been frantic; I’d sweated most of my SPF 30+ away and forgotten to reapply it.

  That boy was the same age as Toby when he died. When they both died. Maybe he had a sister, too, who loved him. Maybe she’s hollow inside, like me.

  The moon sets and I’m naked in the dark.

  It’s cold.

  * * *

  Nadia arrives first thing in the morning.

  Sweeping past the staff only sign, she goes unerringly to the cage where Ripper is sleeping.

  I follow her, bleary-eyed.

  “What have you done to him?” Nadia asks.

  “Surgical rotation and permanent gastropexy,” I say.

  At least, I hope that’s what I’ve done. It was my first one and I’m not sure I’ve stuck the stomach on well enough. But I did my best.

  Ripper wakes and whines and thumps his tail at the sight of his handler.

  “Good,” Nadia says. “That’s good.”

  I’m startled by the praise. For a moment I wonder if she’s talking to Ripper and not me.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” she says.

  “Tom was good with him. He should be able to go back to the base after he’s finished that bag of fluids. I’ll get the invoice printed out and give you a copy of the treatment record for Sergeant Scott.”

  “Sergeant Scott isn’t well. I took him to hospital earlier this morning. I’ll be looking after things until he gets out.”

  “Oh,” I say uncomfortably. “I hope he’s better soon.”

  “He won’t be. You know a new grad missed his tumour the first time around?”

  “Bradley told me,” I say. “I suppose everybody makes mistakes.”

  * * *

  It was a mistake. An accident.

  When I came home from school, the big brick house was empty. Our parents were doctors. We didn’t see much of them. Toby was six years older than me. He looked out for me. Cooked a mean mushroom omelette.

  Wednesday nights were footy practice, though. He wasn’t home. I got my bike out and went riding in the cul-de-sac with the other kids from the street. We rode on all the front lawns except for Mr Heery’s, because he put a rope around it and put mean letters in our letterboxes if we went under it.

  When we got bored we started daring each other to go under the rope. I went the furthest. All the way to Mr Heery’s front door. It crashed open and he stared down at me, peeled-grape eyes in a pickled face with crazy white hair everywhere.

  “Nadia Lucas,” he said. “As loved and wanted as bird shit on a barbecue.”

  I ran away from him instinctively, springing over that rope like a gazelle while the others laughed and melted away to their houses.

  My house was still dark. The street lights came on. I could smell onions cooking in the house next door. The full moon came up and I didn’t go inside. I sat on the doorstep, holding the handlebars of my bike, getting angrier and angrier. I was loved and wanted. It was just that my parents were busy and important and Toby had footy practice.

  I got so worked up that I decided to put bird shit on Mr Heery’s barbecue. I scraped some off the top of our front fence with a steel kebab skewer, climbed under Mr Heery’s rope, advanced up his manicured lawn and sneaked down the side of his house.

  The tall side gate had a bolt that only opened from the inside, but my hand was small enough to fit through the wire.

  When I opened it, a huge white dog knocked me down. It went for my throat. I stuck the skewer into its open mouth.

  Mr Heery was brain damaged. His family waited two years before they pulled the plug and he died.

  I should have died, too. Toby stayed in hospital with me for a week.

  “You’re strong,” he said to me. “You’ll make it.”

  And I did. In a manner of speaking.

  * * *

  It seems like déjà vu.

  The shrill phone at 2 AM. The RAAF base on the other end. I think: It must be Ripper. He’s got another GDV. I did something wrong and now, a month later, the adhesion has failed.

  “Which dog?” I ask huskily, pulling on my clothes with the phone jammed between shoulder and ear.

  “Oh, it’s not one of the working dogs,” Nadia Lucas says. “It’s my dog. Mike. He’s got a lump I’d like you to look at.”

  “What sort of lump? Is it painful?”

  “It’s not painful.”

  “Maybe you could bring Mike in first thing tomorrow.”

  Nadia’s voice turns cold.

  “No. He needs to be seen right now.”

  I hesitate. I recall what Bradley said about bending over backwards for the Air Force, even if this isn’t a military working dog.

  “I’ll see you soon,” I say.

  I shuffle down the stairs and unlock the clinic, flicking on a few lights and eliciting a few plaintive whuffs and miaows from hospitalised snail-bait-guzzling puppies and overnight boarding cats. I check their drip lines and litter trays and pet them as I pass. One of the computers has to be booted up to give me access to the file.

  Mike doesn’t have one. Nadia’s never brought him to us before.

  I line a few things up in the consulting room. Clippers, for shaving the lump. Cotton balls soaked in alcohol, for swabbing it. A needle and syringe for aspirating some cells and microscope slides on which to spray them. A cigarette lighter to fix the cells onto the slides. Stains for giving them colour. Maybe I’ll see bacteria. Maybe fat. Maybe cancerous white cells, the blood of a hematoma or the clear fluid of a cyst. I figure any dog of Nadia’s will sit quietly while I take all the samples I need.

  He explodes through the front door, heavy head fringed with brown and grey fur, yellow eyes gleaming. Nadia follows with the leash wrapped around her forearm, red-faced and thin-lipped.

  I open my mouth to speak, but Mike launches himself at me. The leash snaps taut. His back arches. He lands on his side and immediately starts to roll, front paws scrabbling at his muzzle.

  “He’s going to get that off,” I observe.

  “Sit!” Nadia shouts, hauling on the leash. Mike’s the size of an Alaskan malamute, but the stick-thin limbs, straight tail and long muzzle are all wrong. If I didn’t know it was impossible, I’d swear he was a timber wolf.

  “One moment,” I say. I go to the surgery, where a thick, goose-feather quilt has been spread lovingly over the heating pads on the table, ready for a new patient.

  When I get back to reception, Mike is still rolling and clawing at his face.

  I throw the quilt over him and lie on the thrashing shape. Nadia gets the idea and joins me on the floor. I ease the edge of the quilt back so that his nose is poking out.

  “Where’s the lump?” I ask.

  “On his tail,” Nadia replies.

  We switch places.

  The lump is hard and immobile. That’s not good.

  “Can we carry him into the consulting room?”

  “You’ll have to sedate him.”

  “I don’t know if a sedative will touch the sides, frankly.”

  “Then knock him out.”

  “I need his weight and his vital signs.”

  He is forty-three kilos with a heart like a horse. I give him an intravenous anaesthetic and between us we shift him to the consulting room table.

  Nadia’s phone rings.

  “I have to take this outside,” she says, taking her sunglasses out of her pocket, leaving me alone with the anaesthetised dog.

  I shave the lump on his tail. I swab it and let it dry. When I insert the needle, the lump feels crunchy inside, like bone or calcium deposits.

  The dog’s head whips around. Its teeth graze my hand as I jerk back. The snap of his jaw still resounds in the roo
m as the shaggy muzzle lowers itself back to the table, succumbing to the drug, eyes closing.

  I stare at the shallow laceration across the back of my knuckles. I scrub the injury with iodine, thinking of Hurricane and Bradley’s twenty-eight stitches. I’ve gotten off lightly and should have been more careful.

  Still, I don’t like to muzzle a dog while he’s under. Gingerly, I replace the pulse oximeter probe on his tongue, waiting for it to read his heart rate and oxygen saturation levels before turning to the microscope slides.

  * * *

  I hang up the phone.

  The night air has a tang. The temptress moon hangs in cloud-pillows. I go to the car to check the weather forecast. We’ve still got an hour. I slap more sunscreen onto the places where Mike’s fur has rubbed it thin.

  What could have been my biggest mistake ever has turned out just as I planned. Even if it was a bit tough to catch him and bring him in before the Council caught wind of him. I’ll explain to him later what’s happened and why.

  There’s no time for that now. I march back towards the clinic.

  No mistakes tonight.

  * * *

  “So chop it off, then,” Nadia says.

  I blink at her over the microscope.

  “But I need the cancer to be staged by the pathology lab. I need to take a biopsy first. X-rays of the long bones. What if it’s spread to the tail from somewhere else?”

  “I can’t afford all that,” she snaps. “Just cut his tail off, will you? He’s sleeping now, isn’t he? I don’t want to get charged for two anaesthetics.”

  “It’s not like carving a roast,” I reply hotly. “I can’t do it here in the consulting room. I’ll need a nurse to monitor the anaesthetic, if I’m going to surgery, and everything costs twice as much after hours as it would in the morning.”

  “I’m a trained vet nurse. I’ll monitor the anaesthetic.”

  “You?”

  “Yeah. I quit my job at the animal emergency centre and joined the Air Force when my brother was killed in action. So. I’ll set up the rebreather with isoflurane and check the system for leaks, okay? Get going! I’m due back at the base in an hour. You’ve got thirty minutes to finish the surgery.”

  “You’re joking,” I say, but she isn’t.

  It takes five minutes for me to fill Mike up with antibiotics, get him intubated and get him properly positioned in ventral recumbency on the table. It takes another five minutes for me to get his tail clipped and prepped. Five more for me to scrub in.

  “He’s taking twenty breaths a minute,” Nadia says, emptying a scalpel blade into my sterile instrument pack. “Heart rate’s good. No blink. No swallow. Chop, chop!”

  I make a double V incision in the skin distal to the transection site. The lump is attached to the bone, to caudal vertebrae IV. I’m going to remove number III as well, leaving number II and the levator ani muscle attachment intact, so there’ll be no incontinence or herniation.

  It takes me ten minutes to carefully dissect through the soft tissues. There are two big arteries to ligate and six smaller ones.

  I use dissolvable suture material to tie off the median and lateral caudal arteries and veins. It’s more difficult to isolate the smaller blood vessels.

  “Bing,” Nadia says. “Time’s up, Ben Carson. You’re not separating Siamese twins, here. Cut, damn it. Cut, cut, cut.”

  “I can’t just cut,” I shout at her.

  She brandishes the cautery wand.

  “Cut! Before I do it for you!”

  I slash through the joint. The tail comes away. Without touching anything else, Nadia sears the six bleeding blood vessels until the bleeding stops. I’m aghast at the charred, dead areas she’s created.

  “Is that how you did it at the emergency centre?”

  Nadia’s already opening packets of suture material over my pack.

  “Close it up already. And I don’t mean plastic surgery. Just make sure it’s going to heal cleanly.”

  I glare at her, but Bradley did say it was all about speed. I pick up the needle and forceps.

  * * *

  He changes back just as I’m tucking him into bed.

  When I get home, I bury what’s left of the tail in the back garden.

  A week later, I’m handing my Amex over the front counter of the vet surgery when Bradley catches sight of me. He comes over to ask me about Sergeant Scott.

  “How’s Mike doing?”

  “Pretty good,” I say. “They did a scan and the cancer’s gone.”

  “Gone? You mean shrinking.”

  “No, I mean gone. Tailbone too. Like they all just magically dissolved.”

  Most folks with tailbone problems don’t have the luxury of turning into dogs. Even if they did, most folks don’t know that the fused caudal vertebrae stuck on the end of a human sacrum has a direct anatomical equivalent in the dog which is much easier to access.

  There are no werewolf vets that I know of.

  * * *

  Something is happening to me.

  Peppe sits, calm and relaxed, on the table while I clean his teeth. Not just with the forceps but the scaler and polisher. Through the whining of the dental machine and the dampness of its cooling water spray, I extend to him my reassurance and, as pack leader, my insistence on compliance. He extends to me his trust.

  When his teeth are clean, I scrub up for surgery. Without bothering about the scrub brush, I squeeze some chlorhex onto my hands and squelch it around for a bit.

  It’s all about speed, really. And I don’t think I will go into surgical specialisation. I can do more good here, in a community like this one.

  Besides, Bradley and Nadia are really good teachers.

  The Boy by the Gate

  Dmetri Kakmi

  It was a rainy night, and the four of us—Ross Orr, Geoff Hitchens, Rebecca Nagy, and myself—had gathered round the fireplace at Rebecca’s home to stay warm and keep each other company during the longest and coldest night of the year. As happens at this sort of gathering, what with one thing and another, people began to tell ghost stories. Real ghost stories. Things that happened to them or to a close friend.

  As Ross related a particularly gruesome tale about a driver who encounters a grey woman on a lonely country road, Rebecca shuddered and, excusing herself, went to the kitchen to fetch more of her excellent chocolate cookies. As a tribute to her culinary skills, they were devoured in no time, and the plate had to be replenished, together with cups of hot Belgian cocoa.

  Next in line was Geoff with an unsettling story from his childhood. Between the ages of ten and eleven, he awoke every night to find a blond boy standing at the foot of the bed. Nothing ever happened. The scene merely repeated itself, night after night, until Geoff was used to the visitant and did not bat an eyelid when the phantom made his nocturnal appearance. In adulthood Geoff discovered that a child of the same description died in that room more than thirty years earlier.

  Being the close-minded sort, I had nothing in the way of phantasmal visitations to offer, which meant I could pass the ball with relief to our hostess. Rebecca remained quiet for a minute or two. Then she raised her dark head and said:

  “This didn’t happen to me. It happened to a friend long ago, when she and I were in our last year of high school. If I hesitate it’s because I’m not sure I have a right to tell the story to a group of strangers who didn’t know her and can’t possibly appreciate the seriousness of what happened to her at a young age . . . ”

  She trailed off, and her face clouded. Our murmured protests and encouragements were met with an inflexible silence. Rebecca’s expression was eloquent. It said the story she was thinking of relating to this comic gathering was no mere light entertainment. It had obviously left a deep and lasting impression on her psyche.

  “Come on, Rebecca, out with it,” Ross, always the gregarious one, said. “It’ll do you good to get it off your chest.”

  She smiled sadly. “I doubt that.”

  The fire c
rackled in the grate, and rain lashed the windows as we waited for her to reach a decision.

  I studied Ross and Geoff as they sat in armchairs on the other side of the coffee table and saw that the high spirits had left them. Rebecca’s disturbed mood pervaded the atmosphere and affected the entire company. It was as though the spectre of a dreadful past hovered over us like a stormy cloud. After some minutes, Rebecca stood from her seat beside me, threw a log in the fire, and said,

  “If I’m going to do this, I’ll do it properly. You see, I found out about it from a letter my friend Alice Kendall addressed to me before she . . . before . . . well, before it all happened. I don’t think I could do the story justice if I told it in my own words. It’s best if I read the letter to you, if that’s all right . . . ? She was a talented writer; wanted to become a novelist.” She cast questioning eyes round the room, and the three of us gratified her with a nod. “Excuse me a minute while I get it.”

  She was gone for about ten minutes, during which time Ross, Geoff and I contemplated our own thoughts.

  The wind howled outside. The jacaranda tree hissed as it thrashed and tossed against the windowpane, the bare branches flung about like the arms of a demented skeleton. A part of me wished to be safely in the guest room upstairs, instead of playing silly buggers with adults who ought to know better. As I said, I am a cynic and very sceptical about supernatural occurrences. It was all I could do to stop myself from laughing or sneering at the circle of glum faces.

  I was about to announce that I was going to bed when Rebecca returned with an envelope.

  “Sorry, I had trouble finding it,” she said, reclaiming her seat beside me. She opened the envelope and removed several sheets of thin, crackling, and somewhat yellowed paper. These were carefully unfolded and placed in her lap.

  “Before I read Alice Kendall’s words,” Rebecca said, “I should tell you that all this happened at Port Fairy in the winter of 1986. It’s a little town on the west coast of Victoria. Alice had gone there with her father, Barnaby Kendall. He was an academic, speaking at a literary conference. He had taken his only daughter along for a relaxing week at the seaside town. Alice’s mother had passed away a year earlier.” Rebecca raised her eyes and looked at each of us. Content with our undivided attention, she added: “And so to the letter. I’ll leave out any parts that don’t directly relate to the story.”