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

by Kaaron Warren

  “He ruled my mum and me, did what he liked to us. My mum should have protected me, but she was trapped too. He would beat her if she tried to intervene. Beat me if I threatened to tell. We lived in terror. When I was fourteen I told mum we had to go, we had to run away. She said we had no money, where would we go?”

  “There are shelters,” I start to say and Jake nods again.

  “Of course, but that wasn’t the point. You know what she said to me, after years of beatings and sexual assaults?”

  I sigh and shake my head. “She told you she loved him.”

  “Yep. So I ran away. I have no idea what they’re doing now. He could have killed her for all I know. I haven’t spoken a word to her since I left. I was on the street at first, then in shelters and care. A foster home took me in when I was sixteen and I was a bastard, doing all the things my mum did and worse, acting like her boyfriends, thinking I was different.”

  “You’re nothing like that,” I say. “You’re amazing.”

  He smiles, but it’s not enough to chase away the melancholy this time. “My foster mother is a lady called Glenda Armstrong and she fixed me up. Wouldn’t take my shit, made me finish school. I was lucky. She gave me direction, I got a job, turned myself around. Twenty five now, finally feeling like I’ve got it somewhere near together. And then I met you. For the first time I feel something real, instead of just angry fucking because I thought that’s all I deserved.” His tears have stopped and there’s anger in his eyes.

  “You should be so proud of where you’ve come, given where you started,” I tell him.

  “But I’m scared and you mean a lot to me and that’s why it’s so hard for me to be intimate, emotional. It’s always been an act before, an act of defiance more than anything else, a show of power. But with you, I have no guard and it’s terrifying.”

  I stand, move around to hug him and kiss his hair. “I’m honoured,” I whisper. “I’ll never hurt you.”

  “I know.”

  The shadows of all the people who have died with me mask my vision, make Jake a distant blur. “So many wonderful people die every day, struck down by disease or age,” I say. “And yet fuckers like that Vic get to live.”

  Jake nods against my chest. “There’s no justice in the world. We have to hang on to our luck when we find it, because that’s all there is.”

  * * *

  After nearly a week of no deaths we get two in a day. The darkness wells inside me, that delicious blackness I can’t help but gather. Sometimes I think it’s going to overwhelm me, but there’s always room for more. The journey home is muffled by the circling presence of their passing.

  Jake comes around not long after I get home, bag of shopping in hand. “I’m going to make us a great dinner tonight. Special recipe! Something Glenda taught me.”

  “Great! I’m glad we’re having a good dinner. I have to go away for a couple of days.”

  “That’s sudden.” His brow is creased in concern and it breaks my heart a little.

  “There’s a two-day course Claire Moyer was supposed to go on, but she’s come down with something. Someone needs to go, it’s about a new drug administration practice, and they asked if I’d step in. I head off early in the morning to Newcastle. I’ll be away overnight, back by dinnertime the next day. Sorry.”

  He smiles. “Don’t apologise. Work is work. Let’s enjoy tonight then, eh? Maybe you can lend me your key when you leave and I can get my own cut? Then I can have something ready for when you get back on Thursday?”

  I raise my eyebrows, give him a crooked smile. “Your own key?”

  “If you think . . . ”

  I sweep him into a hug. “Of course I think. I’d love that.”

  * * *

  It took a lot of searching to find this place, but hours of free time in a palliative care hospice can be put to good use with a search engine and access to hospital records. Hints from Jake about where he grew up and a keen eye. Plus friends in social services to join the dots. The idea, the realisation, hit me like lightning when Jake told me his story.

  There’s a broken down car on the front lawn, leaking oil across the dirt like black blood. The house is peeling, the paint reminds me of the skin of a dying woman’s lips. I knock on the door, heart hammering against my ribs.

  A large figure shimmers through the frosted glass panel and the door swings open. A man stands there in shorts and a stained shirt. He’s a tall bastard, muscular, but a beer gut mars anything close to a good physique. He has muddled tattoos on his arms and legs, grey and black stubble across his face like a TV tuned to static. His eyes are dark and mean. “Well, hello, darlin’.”

  “Victor Cresswell?” I ask.

  His eyes narrow. “What?” He glances to my hands, probably checking for a summons.

  “Vic Cresswell,” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  I hold out my hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  His lip curls in a sneer and he takes my hand, squeezing too hard to assert his dominance as he puffs his chest out. “Nice to meet you too, sweetheart. What the fuck is this?”

  And I let my darkness out. It rushes through my palm, desperate to escape, and races into him. I feel it gust up his arm, into his chest to nestle in his lungs. It wraps shadowy arms around his liver and coats his gallbladder in an inky embrace. It snakes through his intestines, finds his prostate and slips down into his balls.

  A shudder ripples through him as I break our grip and smile, turn away.

  “What the fuck was that all about?” he yells as I make my way back to the waiting taxi, a tremor in his voice.

  As I tell the taxi to head back to the station he stands in the doorway, one hand rubbing absently at his throat. There’s a patina of fear across his face. How much does he suspect? I give him a month at most before the decay begins to set in. Before the tumours start to blossom through his organs. Black, flowering death.

  I’m empty inside, somehow hollow but with whiteness swelling into the places where I’ve collected all that dark over the years. Perhaps I shouldn’t have let it all go, should make it last. It’s disconcerting, I’m a little lost without the shadows of the lonely dead inside me. I’ll have to start collecting again. No matter, at least three at work have less than a week left.

  I knew I gathered it for a reason. A shame it took me this long to realise what my purpose is. I have a mission now, giving this unfair blackness to bastards truly deserving of it.

  I’m going to be busy.

  * * *

  Jake is watching television and looks up in surprise as I enter the house. I’m glad he decided to stay at my place, not his. When the moment’s right I’m going to ask him to move in.

  “I thought you weren’t back until tomorrow,” he says, smiling. It’s genuine happiness on his face and that warms me.

  “We got through the training in one day and finished up in time for me to get the last train back. So here I am.” I had taken into account that Vic might be harder to find, maybe not home. It had all been much easier than I anticipated.

  “Well, that’s a lovely surprise,” Jake says, gathering me into a hug.

  I breathe deeply of the clean smell of his skin. “Yeah,” I say. “Maybe there is some justice in this world, after all.”

  The Walking-stick Forest

  Anna Tambour

  It started like this. When the blackthorn trees were bare, Athol Farquar would pollard them—sawing them down to their gubbins, pruning them almost to the ground, just low enough so that, once the raw winter passed, a great number of new branches would shoot up quick, in a vertical panic of desperation while the sap ran strong. Come spring, there Athol would be in the thicket that was the forest, tying up (with soft woollen twist) the short young fresh-fleshed pinkies to the rods, and from that moment on they could push up all they liked, but every movement was caught and bent to measure.

  Every day Athol would come, his woollen bonds stuffed in a pocket of a vest he’d made from his ancie
nt khaki jacket; a girdle of wires loosely wrapped around his waist, and ready in his left fist, an ingenious set of grips he’d forged to shape the discipliners themselves, be they wire, iron, or his sculptured cages of beaten tin. Often he was bare-chested, his hands and arms hardened from years of smithing, so the thorns that could kill with a scratch were nothing to fear. Or maybe they were, but he didn’t pay them any more heed than he did the feisty rapier-sharp branch tips everywhere that he hadn’t pruned, which could have flicked his cheeks or eyes open. It was almost as if he enchanted the blackthorn. Thorns were his caressers. Branches bent to his will. And he loved bringing up his creations so much that many a moonlit night he spent bending, moulding, tending, admiring and listening, hearing and smelling the night breath of the forest.

  The fact is, the pure air suited him. The sloes that the unpruned branches grew, purple and sour as a preacher’s face, suited him too; so every autumn, after the first frost, he’d fill a few sheepskins with the firm fresh plums and eat his fill before their skins lost their face-powder bloom. He macerated the rest of his pickings patiently till his sloe gin was devilishly smooth. He’d start his day with a drop of it in his mug of tarry tea, drunk surrounded by his forest.

  The young trunks couldn’t help but grow, yet every day their own wills were subjugated more, till they were no longer something you’d think should have thorns and leaves but something leaping, roaring, splashing, slithering, dancing, moaning. Nothing so mundane as a tree, let alone a many-trunked bush. When a blackthorn walking-stick-to-be grew to this stage in life, he cut it. Farquar did almost no finishing after that. Even his seasoning and colouring was done without what he considered cosmetic abhorrences—painting, staining, shellacking, gluing pieces on. The only additions he ever made were: to the tip, he fitted a metal cap, robust but finely made as any goldsmith’s ring; and occasionally—to finish snakes, women, that sort of thing—he would inset eyes he made of the whisky-coloured cairngorm stone that only he knew underlaid the walking-stick forest.

  Yet for all his ability to propagate treasures more unique than a Fabergé egg (which any master goldsmith can duplicate) he wasn’t vain about his gift, but moved, and ever more secretive. On some nights, bent over the blackthorn, his chest hurt like that of a lover’s, as he felt something from the forest that he could never explain. Trust? On a fateful day in the hell of 1915, he’d seen a chair made of contorted tree limbs; and in the ruins of a church found a pearl shaped like a sheep, and a shard of an ivory saint, its halo still proud. From them grew his plans to make walking sticks that looked alive, if he survived. He had prodigious skill and ingenuity, but had set out with modest aims, little imagining how the forest that he loved and protected bristled with life in ways he could never fathom. Take two of his masterpieces: a man petting a dog, and two playful lovers. Natural development? Bah! There was something preternatural going on. The blackthorn that grew at his guidance into such impossibilities trembled at his touch like a filly eager to be bridled.

  Athol Farquar called no man master, and certainly didn’t bow to any god. He made his quietly famous sticks to order—never setting his discipliners on a shoot he didn’t know the future master of, and the shape this little innocent would grow up to be. He demanded to be paid first, and what he charged was so outrageous, he was heavily sought after. But he would only accept a client and an order if they met his unpredictable criteria. He made his considerable fortune on a few men and women who had everything, so they couldn’t get enough of his sticks.

  These were collectors such as Mr. L———, who’d made his boodle in khaki dyes. His baronic front hall bristled with walking sticks, whangees, pikestaffs, shoot sticks that folded out into stools; tippling and sword canes; and though his taste ran to music hall, an opera cane whose head glittered with diamonds.

  He was particularly proud of two vicious knot-ended clubs, “A shillelagh and knopkierie,” he was fond of explaining. “See this shillelagh with its head, like an Irishman’s, filled with lead? The effect of this, like its simple African cousin here: Indistinguishable! Tap a man’s head and you can scoop his brains out with a spoon.”

  His ballroom looked like a museum—rows of glass cases filled with walking sticks made of precious metals, woods, and jewels. One find, he’d moved to his safe because he was not sure of it anymore after some nasty tittering by other collectors. The seller, a drinking buddy on that cruise ship to New York in 1920, had sworn: “It’s fair dinkum or strike me dead. Bavarian unicorn horn.”

  All of Farquar’s customers had huge collections. Each begged to see him as soon as they found out about him, as if he had a cure for the incurable. He dealt with their fevers calmly but firmly, just as he did the most willful shoot or thickest trunk in his blackthorn thicket. When collectors yearned for Farquar, they wanted something as different as when the engorged gourmet wants, at long last, simply a drink of water.

  Athol Farquar’s sticks were prized, like the holy grail, for their purity. Made only of the blackthorn, a wood as humble as the Saviour’s cup and crown. And no matter how elaborate the design, a Farquar walking stick was never whittled. If it looked as if its head were a ram’s horn, or a running dog, or a woman, that was purely a delusion caused by the natural development of the blackthorn when taken into hand by their maker.

  There were some sticks Farquar made that he didn’t sell. These were working sticks—crooks he gave to the shepherds in the hills surrounding his little forest. For McAlister, he made a double-handed crook so that the old man could lean on it. Athol Farquar bent the length of this stick to complement the bow-shape of McAlister’s bandy legs, the result being that if you saw him at work peering out along the slopes, you’d think, Now, what a fine specimen of a man. They grow them well in these wild parts. Grayson liked to snag a sheep from the belly so as not to break a leg, so his stick had one great scoop atop, wide as an unshorn ram. Young Stephenson would want something sharp and fancy to twirl in the village on a Saturday night. Athol Farquar didn’t ask any of the shepherds first. He just thought he knew and made the sticks without consulting. Then he gave them out—and to each shepherd, something happened once the first touch of hand to wood was made. Somehow it became a part of him, as necessary as his legs.

  These weren’t sentimental gifts. The shepherds and Farquar had a relationship that each wanted to maintain. Sheep in the blackthorn would be a danger to themselves, even without his disciplining rods and wires making the forest into a nest of traps. And sheep eating the tender shoots of blackthorn would cut each walking stick in the bud. So he maintained a fence against the sheep, a combination of hedge and sharp banks, so that they’d stay on the grassy slopes and not venture into the forest. The triangle of the forest formed a V, the broad part at the top rising up to the rounded mound where McAlister tramped in every weather. The two sides of the V were valleys. Stephenson roamed the slope on the other side of the valley to the right, and over that hill. Grayson’s land was on the left, his rise levelling out to become the closest thing to a plain in these contoured hills. The nearest village wasn’t much to talk about. A day’s drive by ass-cart, a brisk morning’s tramp for Farquar. There was also a scatter of haughty houses within view of the slopes, not that the shepherds nor Farquar had anything to do with the foreigners who tended to rent them, Londoners and such, the villagers said. Neither the shepherds nor Farquar nor anyone in the village had one of those motorized contraptions, though it was already 1924. Young Stephenson wanted one with all his heart but the only way he’d get out of being a shepherd was if he wanted to ‘herd’ wild cattle. Some Laird out Auchencruive way who thought to turn rubbish into gold was offering mad amounts of money to skilled shepherds to civilise them, for the cattle were not only stupidly ferocious but used their horns like bayonets. He fancied his looks, but no matter how hard he scrubbed himself, he smelled of sheep, and therefore, failure—whereas a man with engine muck under his fingernails wafted the City, adventure, romance, escape.

  “The daev
il is ut made that,” McAlister would say, laying on the brogue whenever he saw a vehicle, though there were precious few that made their way up to these parts, the roads being what they were, and the reasons, fewer. It wasn’t the contraptions he objected to. They’d not bothered him in the War. More, the people who swanned around in the beasts. And everyone here agreed.

  Not one of the people who craved Farquar’s canes put a thought to where he lived, nor imagined his precious forest any more than a one of them had ever put a thought to, say, some tree that provided ebony, or the men who cut it. All correspondence was through the postmaster at Blair Atholl, a man who might as well have been a priest when it came to confidences. Farquar was so strict about meeting his clients in various remote inns and waysides he designated, that one tin-can magnate broke a leg leaping from a train and a moving-picture actress came down with quite useless hysteria.

  Farquar’s wealth grew as great and discreetly as his fame. He had, however, the habit of thrift. So in every hole he made by pulling up a lump of cairngorm stone from his hidden warren of mines under the blackthorn roots, he stuck a dumpling of soil filled with the old-fashioned dosh he demanded: pre-1917 gold sovereigns.

  No one local thought of him as anything more than a poverty-stricken craftsman, actually someone even poorer—because he had not even one rough Highland sheep—than the crofters who spent their winters weaving hoary lichen-dyed tweeds that were prized by Lairds, Lords, and those who with war fortunes, were paving their way to obtaining a Title. The crofter-weavers never knew what power they had, if only they’d learned worth, but the middlemen-buyers who made the rounds of cottages were fierce as wolves, and always bought with their lips curled.

  So there Athol Farquar was—as there and unnoticeable as his thicket—and as uninteresting, anyone would have told you. What did he look like? A necessary face. His body? It wasn’t ailing. Otherwise, what decent person looked at a body?