The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2014 (Volume 5)

by Kaaron Warren

  I am obliging.

  It slows its movement and begins to oil me. I lay exposed as it pushes warmed liquid into my hollows and cranks with insistent fingertips.

  “Holly,” it says, as it maintains me. “You can’t go. You are here for me, here to stay.”

  There is someone below us, rattling against bricks and coughing up the water and the bread that it leaves when the pumping is steady. The pumping has to be steady for me to breathe. I am connected by clouded tubes to something below me, far down where I can’t see. My circulatory system is squeezed by anonymous hands and this thing that might be blood flows up through the dangling tubes. My cheeks bloom, sometimes, and other times my whole cavity heaves.

  The pumper grants me breath, minute by minute. I thank the pumper, silently, every time the sun rises to shine in through my window.

  “Geraldine.” It names me anew as it finishes its greasing and begins to thrust once more. It drags its fingers through the wool and grips hard with each push. “My sweet, my heart,” it calls me, quietly, then louder. “Geraldine!”

  I wonder who she is; who they all are. Former lovers? Enemies? Sisters? I try to give them all faces, when I am named for them but I do not and will never know them. All I know is that I am them, for a time, until it changes the name and my identity hastens to the next.

  “Jessica, I have always known that it would be you. I have waited for you forever and ever. Jessica, lovely one, Jessica!” It scrapes its cheek against my cheek and I can smell its muggy breath.

  I am allowed to rock along with it, when I am being used. Sometimes I make the smallest of unnecessary movements when I think that it is too caught up to notice. It feels like a minuscule act of rebellion. I dare not even tremble when I am in my room, alone. It tells me that if I move when it isn’t around, it will come to me in the smallest hours and set me on fire—just burn me up into a crisp. It could be lying. But I don’t know anything.

  I am just a box.

  I could tell you a story. I could tell you about the way that it whispered me to this place, telling me how beautiful I was, oh, how perfect; all the while gouging its fingernails into the parts of me that once had feeling. I could spin you a tale of my life before it, before this room. I could tell you of the time I ran after a dragonfly and skidded through mud until I was wet up to my knees in a creek. I could recount for you the months it took me to learn how to play my favourite song, could show you the guitar-string callouses that emerged. I could count for you the number of rooms that I slept in, from the time I was small until the day that I was installed in this place.

  I could tell you how it watched me, found me, took me up from the world that didn’t see me for what I was, or what I could become. I could tell you of how I was sung to this room by a poisoned voice, each note another snare to catch me and bind me tight. I could tell you of how I gently resisted, until I didn’t.

  But the stories would be a lie. I have always been here. I am a box.

  I am a wife.

  It screams when the pumping dies out and I fade, and its thick boots go smash smash smash on the stairs—and then on body and bones. I know that this means no more food for the pumper, stuck far down below me. No sustenance until the lesson has sunk in. And I lay back, deflated, the sheepskin sagging at the corners.

  I wonder if this is the time when it won’t come back. Maybe today, the pumper will defeat it and we can both leave, together. But no, soon enough it is up and up the stairs and leaning into my corners.

  “Jennifer. My sweet Jenny,” it whispers at me and my lack of ear. “Jenny, darling, you’re here.”

  I imagine one up above me, hovering in this place in order to keep me safe. I wish to smile when I think of that one, the watcher. Perhaps the watcher is real and has been, always. I can see a crack in the roof through which the watcher could observe me. I have looked and looked. Listened. I’d only need a scratch to know that the room above is occupied; just one faint drag of a nail.

  Perhaps the watcher has a window, too. I hope that the watcher can see things, everything, all of the world that I do not know and will never visit. I would give anything—even my sheepskin—for the watcher to come down and whisper to me of the sights and the sounds and the taste of the world, even if it was nothing more than stories of dust and mold. Anything.

  I would also like a kiss. Just one.

  “Brenda. Glenda. Kate!” it says, hips rolling. It picks up speed, quivering around the throat. Its skin is red and wet. I wonder if this time it will shake me to pieces. If so, I am sure that I will be repaired back into usefulness.

  It wriggles like something freshly caught.

  “Charlene! Oh, my love, my little one!” It is louder and faster. Drips patter onto my rubber skin. One hand grips my shoulders. The other is lower, moving. I am fortunate not to bruise. I notice, idly, that today the room is fresh with morning sunshine. I wonder if it will go out and live a real life today, after it is finished with its wife.

  I do not know what it does when it goes, but it often comes to me smelling of flowers and methanol. Once, it visited me in the smallest hours of the night, near to the dawn. It reeked of cheap perfume and I knew then that it had tried to be somebody else’s. It chastened itself, repeated again and again that this was its life now, that I was its world and that it would never leave me, not for anything.

  It made promises to me, the kind that you should treasure. And then it started and kept going until noon.

  All the while, I stayed perfectly still.

  Now it shivers and shakes. It must have built me to be pretty, but I don’t know what that means.

  I realize that my hair has fallen off. The hank must be huddling on the floor like a lonely spider. It notices, shouting that I have ruined everything, and swings a hard slap. I rock to one side and I know I shouldn’t, but I tilt up my hip as I roll and I know I should have warned it with my lipless mouth, but—

  The point of the spring is sharp and dips into its upper thigh with ease, cutting into its thickest blood-tube. This metallic slip is utterly silent, but it begins to scream immediately. There are no words, but there is terror. It lays about with its arms, as red comes in spurting throbs. My rubber is drenched with warmth.

  It knows that I shifted and it wants to kill me. It screeches with the voice of death and brings both clenched fists down upon my face. My teeth clatter down the back of my throat. The pump of my false-breath sucks them into the dark of my belly. It hits me again, but this time the blow is weaker and I know that I will outlast it.

  “Caroline,” it sobs, “I only wanted—I wish that you were . . . ”

  It dies next to me in the bed, the way a faithful lover ought to.

  I lay broken for a time. I am not sure what to do or how to be. My false-breath continues to ease in and out of me, slippery and moist. I count the strands of cobwebs that are high in the corners of my room and when I am finished, I start anew. This continues, perhaps for hours, until I hear whimpering from the pumper. My breath continued, even through all of the noise, because nobody has told the one below to stop. The pumper does not know that we are both alone now, together.

  I hear another cry, a hungry sound. I know that, somehow, I must go.

  Firstly, I must sit. My wired arms are extended above my head but as the cries grow louder, I swing them up so that they clatter down on either side of my sheepskin. My wires thrum as I hoist up my torso. I ease myself forward, dizzy with the tilt of the world. My sheepskin falls off and I can see the worn wool sticking up in bloody peaks.

  My displaced teeth rattle in my belly as I stand on sprung legs. The tubes that carry my breath and blood to me pop off the suckers that sit along the ridge of my wooden spine. There is a leak. I lurch toward the door and cogs spill from me like dropped coins.

  I realize that I will never hear its voice again.

  I do not mourn. It didn’t build me to mourn, or to grieve. I was built to be silent and useful.

  I move from my room and ca
refully turn at the top of the stairs. I know that I must go down and down and down.

  So much of me has fallen off that I am nearly nothing when I reach the middle of the stairs, but every step has shown me a new thing. I go slowly, relying on stiff knees that were never meant to take weight. My painted eyes would widen if they could, even at the zigzagging strips of crackling wallpaper.

  I halt at the window, a full storey lower than my own. I see a yard thick with weeds and broken glass. The sight is glorious. There are machines laying at odd angles, gutted. I wonder if I carry any of their parts within me. I am rapt, until I see the others. They are scattered about the enclosed yard with a carelessness that speaks of their failures.

  Broken wives. Lost wives. My predecessors. I wonder if I hold any of their screws and nails and am all at once sure that I do. I think that I might match at least two of them for paint. My glossy eyes show me ruins and hulks. I trace their frames and feel something that could be horror and something that may be love.

  The only thing that could move me is another cry from the pumper.

  “Please,” comes the call. “Please.” I go. I go to save the only one left.

  I shuffle down in to the dark and I lose more of myself with every step. I remind myself that they are only fragments and parts. Surely I have a few to spare.

  I hear clanging and sobbing, but when I reach the door the pumper goes quiet, perhaps expecting punishment. My fingers scrape at the latch until the door opens. I stand in the frame, illuminated by the light of a new day. I must look a fright, for the pumper shrieks at the sight of me. With great effort, I hold up my hands.

  Peace, I am here for you, here to take you away from all of this, I think, though I cannot shape the word with my empty mouth. I wonder if the watcher would say the same to me, if I were the one being rescued.

  The pumper runs to me and I grind into a hunch.

  I am enveloped by pale arms. They squeeze me tight and I creak.

  “You came,” says the pumper, breathlessly. “I wished and hoped for you to come. I knew that you would. I knew it.”

  My bloody shoulder is dampened with tears. I lean forward, pressing my rubber skin to the stark bones of the one who gave me breath. We turn and my knees pop, but I can see freedom and know that I only need to walk a few steps and then we will be outside. I begin to shake and I do not know if I will ever be able to stop.

  The pumper wraps a hand around mine, whispers a secret to me and kisses me. Just once. That is enough.

  The Badger Bride

  Angela Slatter

  The tip of the quill scratches its way across the parchment, a sound that sets my teeth on edge.

  One might think I’d be used to it by now.

  The black marks it leaves in its wake make no sense to me—indeed the entire book makes no sense—then again, I am a mere copyist and mine’s not to question why. Although I do.

  Frequently.

  Much to my father’s despair.

  When he brought me this commission, I turned the tome over and over—a difficult enough task, for the thing is heavy, aged and fragile, the ebon cover tacky to the touch, the pages brittle—and a smell rose from the skin of the thing that was quite unpleasant. The name of the author and the title of the book were quite obscured, a thick stygian gum had been smeared across them and it was hard to perceive whether this application was intentional or the result of mere carelessness. The inner leaves confirmed any suspicions of intent—no extant title page waited therein, merely the remnants of a folio torn from the binding, tiny sad folds of paper with ragged edges remained.

  So, an anonymous book.

  “Who is the client?” I asked my father, Adelbert (former Abbot of the monastery of St Simeon-in-the-Grove), who rolled his eyes and bid me Just do the job.

  “But, Father, it is very old, very frail, the ink is faded—indeed fading as I watch if my eyes don’t deceive me.” I manoeuvred the article in question so he could better see. “Is it the last of its kind? Who is the owner? What does he expect?”

  “He expects, like your father, that you do not ask questions, little prying thing. That you take this volume and copy it as quickly as you might!” He took a deep breath and roared, “Else I’ll put you out in the cold, Gytha!”

  I made a ‘harumph’, and left his study. He will not put me out; he will do no such thing. I am the only child in Fox Hollow House who earns her keep, after all. Aelfrith spends her days draped across the couch, sighing for a husband, and Edda spends hers exercising and grooming the six horses in the stables. I alone understood and adopted the scholarly arts Father had tried to teach us; and I alone I adopted the trade he learned in the monastery (and at which, he freely admits, was terrible). People come from all around, from as far away as Lodellan, to have me copy their books, their precious, unique, failing books; to have me adorn and amend them, to add vines and flowers and strange animals in the margins; to change the existing illustrations they cannot bear (modestly clothe a naked Eve, paint out grandmother’s warts on her nose, give uncle a chin that does not slope so straight from lower lip to collar bones). Copy, edit, amend, ameliorate, augment and occasionally, if the pay is right, forge.

  I will make your book what you want it to be, either more or less itself.

  So many since I was very small—so small that Father had to lift me up onto the stool piled with two firm fat cushions that I might be able to sit at the tilted desk and reach the inks and shafts, the paints and tints, the papers and parchments that required my attention.

  My fingers are stained from the mixing of hues of slate and blue, flashes of umber and gold, red and green; the same fingers are scarred, fletched with nicks from sharpening my very fine goose feather quills. When I work, I wear white cotton gloves, each pair washed in the hottest of hot water after use. I have spectacles, thick half-moons of polished glass to magnify the things I must discern and craft; these perch on the end of my nose only when I am mid-copy. Aelfrith says I look like someone’s granny, for all my smooth skin and dark hair.

  “No one,” she taunts, “would ever believe you young.”

  Edda merely grunts at that and adds that I need to get out more—that both Aelfrith and I need to take in the healthful air and exercise that she regards as her very own sustenance. We three have different mothers, so we are more like to be dissimilar than if we shared a maternal imprint. Fathers have so much less influence.

  The scratching of the nib, which has almost hypnotised me, has a rival: the tap-tap-tapping of a bare frozen branch from the wild cherry tree by the side of the house.

  My scriptorium (with a tiny bed cupboard in one corner) is located on the second floor, in the room with the most windows so I might steal in all the light I can. The cherry tree is naked and frosted; it looks dead, as if it will never bloom again. The cold coming from the glass panes may just convince me this is true—this place cannot be too warm, so I may have only the smallest of fires, banked low in the grate. I prefer to not work in winter (hence my interrogation of Father as to the need for urgency and the status of the client—I’d prefer someone I could send away with a flea in the ear until, at my convenience, she or he returned when bid).

  I have spent the day copying this wretched thing, stopping but once to read a couplet aloud, hoping that speech might add some meaning, but it remained nonsense. Looking up I blink hard until my eyes stop watering at the change in focus, and watch the thin branch as the wind pushes it this way and that; any moment now, any moment, it will snap. But no, the thing is hardier than I would have thought. It endures.

  I stand, stretch, arching my back until I hear the four distinct cracks that say my spine is aligned once more. I take stiff steps over to the window (where a cushioned seat awaits, draped with shawls) and survey the garden, white as a fine linen sheet, its purity broken only by the shadowy things there’s not quite enough fall to cover: the chopping block, the wood pile, the swing we use only in summer and only when we are feeling particularly frivolous.
And a dark mobile thing, the size of a small dog or a large cat, which is inching its way forward, terribly slowly, shaking the snow off its gentleman’s coat quite determinedly.

  Brock.

  All stiffness is gone from my limbs and I fly from the room, down the staircase with its carved banister and hideous newel post (the head of a green man, but not as cheerful as it should be), making a great commotion that brings my family from various directions. I don’t even worry about a cloak, but fling open the door and charge out into the white.

  For precious moments I’m lost, blinded, then I catch sight once more of the determined lope—almost a waddle, with his limbs so chilled—of the black fur and the hoary streak down his back. I stumble through the cold powder and catch up the poor creature. He is heavy; he smells strongly, oh so strongly; he looks at me with bleary-eyed distrust.

  “There, there,” I croon, stroking one hand over his head and face as I trudge towards the front door, where Father and my sisters wait. “You’re safe here, little brock, little badger.”

  And the poxy little whoreson bites me.

  Not viciously—it was merely a warning nip—and only on the one finger but still he breaks the skin and it wells red and stings. Then he snuggles against me, smugly content.

  * * *

  Edda washes and salves my would. While she applies a bandage to the two sharp punctures, I glare at the animal, curled snug in a blanket-lined basket by the kitchen fire.

  His eyes are closed, his breathing is even and he is making a deep throaty noise somewhere between a grunt and a purr. One lid lifts, a brown orb stares at me, then slowly lowers again. In a bowl in front of his basket (both of which items once belonged to Father’s long-dead hunting hound) are slices of preserved apple and cherries, tepid milk, porridge and honey. His left hind foot is bandaged; a deep cut slashed its fat pad. The cold had stopped the bleeding, but once inside, the flow started again. He let us bathe the limb with warm water and apply a rosemary salve to it before Edda swaddled him like a baby. He didn’t bite her.