“What can you do?” The woman that was Mara snaps. “You and your kind who know nothing but selfishness and cruelty.” Rising from the bed, one hand lifting her shirt as if to illustrate the point. Jagged central incision that actually does look markedly better, even after these few brief hours - until two long fingers dig their way beneath the stitches and tug, pulling out half a dozen with a sickening wet pop. Gaping, bleeding wound in her belly big enough for a hand to slip into, and it does, emerging again scarlet and dripping and offered to Faith like a promise. “Tell me, what can any of you do?”
Faith feels the motel room door against her shoulder blades, even though she can’t recall backing into it.
And the woman, the creature that was Mara stalks towards her, taller than ever with bitter-black eyes darker than the despair of stolen souls. “Cruel. Selfish. Arrogant beyond sufferance.” But that hand, those blood-soaked fingers, are unexpectedly gentle as they caress Faith’s cheek, slide down to cup her chin.
“Yet you are loved,” the creature that was Mara whispers. “You are all loved.”
Faith can only hope the taste of salt on her lips comes from her own tears.
“Leave.” The hand loosens, those terrible eyes close. “Leave now.”
And for once, Faith does not need to be told a second time.
~ * ~
The door to Mara’s townhouse stands slightly ajar, slightly crooked. Half off its hinges, Faith sees when she approaches, and inside the place the damage is worse. Furniture broken, upholstery torn. Smashed crockery and glassware turning the kitchen into a glittering minefield, and the bedroom reeking from the dozens of bottles of perfume that have been spilled onto the stripped and blood-stained mattress. In the wreck of a home still devoid of intimate possessions and personal touches, the saddest thing is the painting of the floating red rose. The canvas now cut to pieces, palm-sized scraps scattered over the loungeroom floor, and the wooden frame upon which it had been stretched cowering in a corner like some skeletal, broken-backed beast.
By her foot, a bit of canvas lies face down, arest Mar scrawled on its back in a small but confident hand, and Faith gets down on her knees to find the rest of the inscription. Oversized, paint-stiff jigsaw with too many blank pieces, but finally she has all the ones she needs.
For My Timeless Love, My Dearest Marguerette, who waits for no man. Arthur. New Orleans, July 1928.
And Marguerette may not be Mara. And Mara may have lied about the artwork being done for her by a friend. And Arthur, whoever he was, may have painted this canvas for a woman who did decide to wait for him after all, a woman with whom he grew old and lined, a woman who was mortal and human and who did not look up at the stars at night and remember what it was like to walk above them.
But Faith doesn’t think so.
Especially when she turns the pieces of canvas over to see they show the curved, blood-draggled feather. Long and thin and silverwhite, the feather of eagle or albatross, or some other creature equally glorious and skybound and doomed.
Arthur, whoever he was, he had known.
Faiths curls up on the carpet, knees drawn close to her chest, and wonders when she’ll stop crying. Don’t you ever forget how strong you are, sweetheart, her mum had said. You got yourself through this, you can get yourself through anything.
But right now, all she wants is to feel Livia’s arms around her, Livia murmuring meaningless shit into her ear. All she wants is not to feel the weight of a new day, the weight of new knowledge too frightening to consider except from the most oblique of angles. Never mind how she gets there.
Never mind if she never, ever finds her way out again.
You are loved, it had said, blood running down its slender wrist.
Right now, the scraps of canvas clutched in her desperate, desolate fists, Faith thinks love never burned colder than this.
* * * *
Kirstyn McDermott was born on Halloween, an auspicious date which perhaps accounts for her lifelong attraction to all things dark, mysterious and bumpy-in-the-night. She has been published in various magazines and anthologies, including Shadowed Realms, Southerly, GUD, Redsine, Southern Blood and Island. Her short fiction has won Aurealis, Ditmar and Chronos Awards and her debut novel, Madigan Mine, was published by Picador in 2010. Kirstyn lives in Melbourne with her husband and fellow author, Jason Nahrung. Her website is http://www.kirstynmcdermott.com.
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* * * *
* * *
for want of a jesusman
jason fischer
Lanyard Everett knew a sheila once, who didn’t want a crooked man but liked the idea of being kept by one. When he talked of being prentice to a jesusman, she tried to stab him and he had to hurt her some. He left her there in a bubble of blood and teeth, and followed a man named Bauer into a new life.
“There’ll be hatred for you and yours,” Bauer tried to warn him, but Lanyard laughed. He’d never known anything else, didn’t have anyone anyway. The old jesusman had smelled him out, pulled him from his crooked ways. First thing he made him do was burn a bible.
“This is just to let you know that the old rules are gone. The jesus doesn’t have a book for Now, and you’d be mad to want to write it.”
They sat there in silence, the old man poking the burning paper with a stick. Lanyard couldn’t remember ever having read it, and the tiny print made his eyes swim in their sockets. He was glad to see the pages curl and blacken.
“No books anymore. You ever need guidance, you make his mark,” Bauer said. “But don’t let anyone see you making it. Certain folks will kill you over it.”
Lanyard killed Bauer himself, in what some would call a crisis of faith. He killed the next jesusman that came for him, and then they left him alone. One year with Bauer and he learnt enough to hate their kind, just like everyone else did.
~ * ~
“If he carries that mark, then he serves the jesus,” said one of Gareth’s new men. Lanyard pretended he didn’t understand the river patois, which sometimes served him well. Comments like that were meant to end in blood.
“Lanyard?” Gareth laughed. He was the bossman, and it was never ‘Gary’ unless you wanted drama and hurt. “No, he’s not. My oath, he’s as far from one of those fools as a man can get.”
He ignored them, worked on rolling another cigarette and trying not to drop his tobacco each time the barge pitched. The gun often got comments, but he’d be a fool to be rid of it. It was Bauer’s shotgun, the wooden stock carved with jesus marks and pictures, the barrel etched with words no-one knew how to read. It brought a lot of trouble, but a gun was a gun. They were rare enough in the Now.
“Get them ropes ready, we’re here,” Gareth said, cutting the motor. The men threw the ropes to the dock and some taursi fellas tied them alongside the crude pier. Taursi were taller than a man, bristling with sharp spines on their head and back. Lanyard knew the river folk called them spiny or worse. A better word he might have used was echidna but he’d only heard it in dreams so he kept that word tight.
They unloaded the gear. They were running grog to the taursi, as there was more profit in it than medicine or food. Nevermind the misery they were causing and the fact that a patrol would shoot them on sight for breaking town-law. There was trade and profit to be had and damn the indigenes.
“Where’s your bossman?” Gareth asked one of the deckhands. He spoke loud, as if the taursi were deaf or simple. A taursi could hear a bird’s shadow and tell you its name but men were men and they laughed and told jokes.
The deckhand gestured, his coat of quills expanding. This taursi was getting huffy. Lanyard was always wary around them, they ate sand and had workings inside them hot enough to make sharp glass. Gareth’s men followed, all but the man with a working gat who was made to watch the barge.
“You see anyone on that river, they get the bullet,” he told the man, a trusty and not one of the new recruits who’d as likely nick the gun and the boat. “None meant to be here b
ut us.”
Humping and lugging the rattling crates of moonshine, they followed the taursi back to their settlement. It was a rude place, all shantys and humpies and campfires. This mob had some of the yellow-furred native dogs, half-starved and whining. For all their bravado on the boat, none of the grog-runners said a word, or met any of the sullen looks cast at them by the locals. Though these were half-civilized addicts, a taursi could launch battle-glass through a man’s heart at twenty steps.
At last they were at the trade-stone. The bossman of this settlement was an old buck named Pauryah, his spines turning white and his eyes near eaten by cataracts. Near as Lanyard could guess he intended to drink himself to death and take his mob with him.
“We brung it,” Gareth said, placing an unlabelled flagon on the stone. “What you got for us today?”
“Nothing for you,” Pauryah spat. “You would destroy our people, I give you nothing.”
Gareth smiled, put another bottle on the trade-stone, then another. Pauryah relented, reached into the pouch that was part of his skin. He unwrapped something wrapped in a thick leaf, gave a heavy sigh that made his quills rustle and click together.
“Very old,” he said, placing the delicate glass sculpture on the stone. It was a master work even by taursi standards, a beautiful abstract catching the sun how it was meant to. It would hold the sun long after dusk, twinkling in the dark like a little star.
“A good start,” Gareth said. “What else for the trade?”
“No else!” Pauryah said. “This is our history. Worth more than you or any man.”
Gareth said nothing. When he made as to take the booze from the trade-stone, Pauryah put up his hands. More glass was brought out and they both kissed the stone, striking a deal.
Lanyard was ready, knew that this was the time things could sour. The taursi had no love for the grog-runners, and sometimes their crushed spirits flared into violence. It would happen quickly, they would fill the air with glass and death before the men could raise their guns.
Gareth was getting greedy and stupid. The taursi may sell their treasures today for his poison, but they would regret their loss, doubly so through a hangover. The next visit to this settlement would end in tears.
Lanyard Everett did nothing to stop this, never did. Even if he were a great and noble man, that type went hungry these days. Gareth’s coin brought his guns and his silence.
Lanyard had not meant to fall into this line of work, but Gareth was right. He was as far from a jesusman as you could get.
~ * ~
Lanyard had a little rat’s nest of a room, it was in a Before-Time building and it cost him nothing. Few people were mad enough to squat in one, and when the twisted structure sprang out of the ground, all melted and crooked looking, Lanyard leapt at the chance to move out of Gareth’s place. He did not wish to have all his eggs in that particular basket.
Near as he knew there were three or four others living in the building. What furniture was left in it was twisted and wrong, but this place was big enough that the squatters hardly saw each other.
There were other places like this. He’d seen skyscrapers jutting sideways from cliffs, cities underwater, half-melted houses out in the middle of nowhere. It was just rubbish from the Before-Times and these dead places did nothing but confuse and upset folks living in the Now.
There was still water in the pipes, though Lanyard wasn’t that foolish. A lad could bring you a cask of boiled river water for a crown, but Lanyard always boiled it again. He’d worked on the delta long enough to know how filthy the water got.
“I got a job for you, Mister Everett,” Gareth said. He wasn’t scared by his new Before-Time place, seemed to respect Lanyard more for having moved out.
“A grog run?” he asked, and the portly criminal shook his head. He took in the cramped little room, the walls at odd angles. Lanyard had made a bed of sorts, a jumble of rags and boards. He’d tacked mosquito netting over the doorway; the window was fused and didn’t open. The glass was all warped, and looked like a sheet of toffee.
“You get any ghosts in here?” he asked Lanyard. “My friend tells me these places are a home for ghosts.”
“No ghosts. Just Before-Time dreams,” Lanyard said. “The job?”
“Ah. We need to go overland and inland and maybe further. Man wants us to kill another man. You in?”
Lanyard nodded.
~ * ~
“That’s far enough,” Lanyard told the boy.
He held the shotgun to the lad’s head. The boy looked from the gun, the wooden stock completely covered in mad etchings, to the whip-thin man glaring at him from under a battered slouch hat.
The boy dropped the sharp little rabbit knife, never taking his eyes from his, tender little mouth a black O of fear. He looked like he was about to cry.
“That your pa?” Lanyard asked the boy, who nodded yes. The body was folded up in the dirt, a great hole in his belly and a kinder one between his eyes. “I had to kill your pa, but I won’t harm you if you don’t do nothing stupid.”
The boy must have been all of ten years. He didn’t have a friend in the world now but he had the balls to stand up to his daddy’s killer.
Lanyard felt an ache then, deep in his bones. He’d been feeling it for months now, on and off, but never this strong. His teeth felt sore, and his skin itched like crazy. Someone was watching him, had seen him murder another man out here, deep in the bush and as far from town-law as you could get.
“Damn you Bauer,” he said. He knew the signs now for what they meant, wish he’d never met the old man. A man just didn’t need to know some things. He could feel the witch, somewhere close. And the witch would feel him, and know him for a witch-sniffing jesusman.
The boy looked a little less scared now, thinking Lanyard was the worst of his problems. Lanyard picked up the boy’s knife and threw it as far as he could. He broke the shotgun, primed another round into the breech.
The boy was staring at his gun, covered in the forbidden jesus marks. It told the story of a man what let himself get pinned to a tree, led everyone to a land of flies and dust. Not to paradise, not to heaven. Here. The boy’s pa might have told him stories of the jesus late at night, to give him delicious shivers around the campfire.
At last, the distant sound of the skiff. Gareth must have had trouble getting the ancient motor started. “Five minutes after you hear shots”, he’d told his bossman. Damn noisy thing would have scared the dead man to ground, who must have known that someone would be gunning for him. He’d stalked the mark on foot before shooting him dead.
Lanyard started to get the shakes then. A very bad sign. He started, seeing a white shape through the trees, and knocked the boy to the ground with his free hand. Almost let off a round of buckshot before cursing himself. It was a termite mound, half-hidden by trees and spinifex, bleached by the sun.
He was right to be scared. He could feel a great dark presence, something lurking unseen in the scrub. If he was right, it would sniff him out and come for him. They hated his kind, and with good reason.
He could see the familiar shape of the skiff through the trees, felt the beginnings of hope. Gareth pulled up in the rusty old wind-cart, the machine coughing and belching blue smoke. The sails were limp, the air sticky and still, and if the motor gave out they’d be walking.
He raised an eyebrow at Lanyard and nodded meaningfully at the boy, as if to say why don’t you kill him? but Lanyard ignored him. If he was right, and there was something out here, it could feed on the boy, and they’d have time to run.
Lanyard had the presence of mind to hack off the dead man’s pinky finger with his bowie knife. Proof for payment. He climbed into the passenger seat of the skiff, the tube frame rocking under his weight.
“Don’t leave me here,” the boy yelled out over the spluttering engine, but Lanyard shook his head and told Gareth to go. With a roar of the dying motor and a cloud of dust and stones, they left the lad in the middle of nowhere.
It was a long minute before the ache in his bones left him, and even then he watched their backtrail till sunset. He’d never been a real jesusman, but try telling that to a hungry witch.
~ * ~
“I guess it doesn’t matter about the boy,” Gareth said. “Should have killed him out of kindness. Mark my words, an orphan is just a bum in training.” Lanyard said nothing, just stared into the depths of his beer. His soul was already filthy with shame, but this was a new low.
They were drinking in a shanty that straddled a crossroads. The whole place was on stilts, more for the gimmick than for avoiding the overland heat. Still, it helped a little.
There were taursi at the next table, nasty drunk and quills flared. Gareth hated the natives, hated their weakness and exploited it. Lanyard did not like what Gareth did but he’d advanced him some coin and never cheated him that he knew of.
The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05 Page 5
