The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05

by Bill Congreve (ed) (v1. 0) (epub)

  “None of us care what you eat, mate. It’s the fact you’re eating. Dead people out there. Ghosts in here. Most of us couldn’t manage it,” the Builder’s Labourer said.

  The Census-Taker ate his roti.

  “My parents were quieter in their achievements. And, before too long passed, they gave birth to me. Well, my mother did. She said that around the birthing bed clustered all the women who had died in childbirth. They didn’t want to see her die. Shift this way, now that, they told her. They knew the best way to get a baby out. I was fine, they knew. Strong and healthy, ready to claw my way out. ‘Slow him down,’ they told my mother. ‘Not too fast.’

  “I was one of 40 babies born in England that day. I can give you the statistics on the others. All of the Plague Babies expect great things of their own children. Hard work, no illness, no foolish thoughts. My parents expected great things of me. They taught me to respect difference and risk. They expected me to be perfect, a great creator. I am neither of those things. I believe in a complete count, and that my numbers matter, but I don’t believe I am the one they think I am. They even opened me up to see if I would be a priest.” Here, he lifted his shirt to show his belly; a jagged scar, angry and red, across the front. “Priests have a small, hard stone in their stomach, to remind them to think of God at all times. I’ve known men to swallow a stone in order to be chosen as a priest.

  “My mother became a faith healer. She sucks up the poison in a person’s soul. She always smells awful. Oh, the stink of her after a day at work. She comes home, dusty, dirty, wanting to squeeze me tight to help her forget about death and disease. But I can’t stand the sour-sweet smell of her.

  “I tell you all of this so you will understand how very accepting I was when I entered the village of Beddington and found everyone dead.

  “There are some who say that people like me, children of Plague Babies, attract death. Or can sense death in large numbers.”

  The Builder’s Labourer said, “You people, people like you, you got everything.”

  “If I have everything it is because my parents gave everything. Don’t you understand that?” He took a lozenge from a small bag and sucked on it.

  “From the start, my mother was determined to teach me to see ghosts. She said that ghosts took advantage of the ignorant, that they stole thoughts away and memories, too. It’s happening to my father. Most days he knows where his hat is, but others he’ll spend an hour searching and there it is on his head all along.”

  “That happens to all people as they get old,” the older gentleman said.

  “Not my mother. She snarls at those ghosts if they come reaching for her. She thought she had failed in her lessons because for a long time I couldn’t see what sat right in front of my face. I could hear them, though, small voices telling me if someone was lying or not. It was only once I started work I could see them. If people left out information, the ghosts would laugh. They like liars. They like people who leave information out of their census answers which would help the country. That makes me very unhappy.”

  Here he stared at the Builder’s Labourer, who had, perhaps embellished his tale just a little.

  “I have been working as a Census-Taker since I left school fifteen years ago. In that time I have spoken to people of many walks of life. I have seen fresh-born babies and noted their birth defects. I have watched people say goodbye to their loved ones as the priest calls last rites. These things bring ghosts, chattering creatures that fill me with their own important nonsense. My awareness grew stronger, to my mother’s delight. The ghosts began to appear as a shimmering apparition then, as I learned to focus, as formed humans, albeit unstable ones. They sit with us now, in this carriage.”

  The young, slow girl squealed in horror and leapt to her feet. “Where? Where do they sit?”

  “There, there and there. They are raggedy creatures and bloody. Victims, I would say, of the terrible accident which has caused our delay. And you,” he said to the mother, “You have a radiant boy by your side, watching over you. We only see radiant boys who have been killed by their mothers.”

  “You act as though this was ordinary.”

  “It is to me. I’m not telling the story very well if you don’t understand that. Seeing and hearing these things was ordinary in my household. You know that some evolution seems damaging to the creature, but it takes that creature forward. Hyenas give birth through a pseudo penis. Peacocks’ tails, nightingales’ songs, cardinals’ plumage; all this attracts the mate, but the predator as well. I think ghosts are evolving like that. They are damaging themselves, but evolving. Most ghosts will stay at home, except for the men who like the travel, looking for a host body. They move further from home, seeking purchase, but they weaken as they do so you can tell them by their foot fall. Heavy, slow steps. They might be body-less, but they have all the weight of the world on their shoulders.”

  They heard this noise soon after and there was panic in the cabin. “He wants to take my body,” the young girl screamed. So she had understood that much. But it was an old woman walking to the lavatory.

  “I had been asked to take the census on the road from Canterbury to Brighton, taking in Ashford, Rye, Hastings ...” This time he did notice the bored shuffling. “Some of the villages I stopped at had no numbers recorded there for 30 years. Partly this was due to the isolation of the countryside in this direction; it was three days journey to get there from the nearest major road and I needed to take all my own supplies. There were no shops along the way. Not even a roadside stall. There was barely a roadside. Lack of travel meant the cowslips and grass had grown, the rocks and pebbles washed over by the rain were not cleared, the pot holes were not filled. More than once I felt despair. I pulled a small cart behind my bicycle with few comforts in it, and I peddled hard to get to my destination. I believe the future of Great Britain belongs in the counting, and that the first civilized nation to account for its people will be the one to hold sway over the rest.

  “After close to four days travel and thousands of questions, a great downpour forced me to shelter for close to eight hours inside a derelict cow shed. I would guess the abandonment occurred during the heat wave of 2078, because there were old newspapers lining the windows dated around this time. People tried to keep the heat out in such ways but these cows died like so many of them at the time. There was bone here; nothing but. Well, nothing until evening fell and with the storm still raging outside, I settled in for the night.

  “As I warmed some beans over a Bunsen flame and sorted through my forms to ensure none were damp, I heard a whispering in the corner.

  “One of the things we learn before we go on the road is how to defend ourselves, but from a sitting position this was not easy. Still, I shifted carefully, as if I were preparing for sleep, in order to catch a glimpse of who I was up against.

  “The glow told me it was nothing alive. Ghosts can affect you at a spiritual and emotional level, if you let your guard down, but not at a physical level, so I stood up cautiously.

  “These children were very, very clear. I assumed they had died in the shed along with the cattle, because the closer the place of death, the clearer the apparition. Your boy,” the Census-Taker said to the mother, “is very blurry, so I would say he died a long way from here.”

  The mother began to cry quietly. Her daughter didn’t seem to fathom what was happening, and no one chose to tell her about her dead brother.

  “The radiant children crouched in the corner over a small pile of coins, playing some simple game. They were not yet aware of my presence. Like all children, they were too thoroughly absorbed in themselves to be observant, but I didn’t want them to discover me as I slept, so I walked over to them.

  “Radiant children rarely speak. I think it is because they do not want to talk about their mothers. There is great shame and sorrow in such a death; I think by not speaking they avoid the subject.

  ‘“I am the Census-Taker,’ I said. ‘I would like to record your d
etails for the files.’

  “So we did just that. Using sign language, and fingers, and pointing, we filled out a form for their barn as place of residence. I was cold, but they were not. Ghosts don’t feel the cold. When I asked them if this was their place of birth, they flapped their hands about, shook their heads until I produced a map of the region.

  “They pointed to a small village some ten kilometres from our position. On the map it was dominated by an Anglican Church. My map was quite a new one, but I knew it had not been updated in all these regions for many years. The church could well be long gone and the road impassable.

  “My final question on the Census for the dead is cause of death. I understand the many causes of death. One I hear often is the loss of sanity. The inability to feed oneself. The loss of desire to survive. The lack of intention to work.

  “No one admits to suicide in the family. It is considered the worst sin after infanticide. I know the suicides, though. They have a reddish glow, and they smell of wet dog. They wander, causing havoc. Sucking the will to live from others.

  “The children didn’t want to answer this question, but as we communicated, their stomachs glowed blue and I checked ‘poisoning’.

  “I knew that a visit to their village could well lead to my loss of employment. My supervisor frowns on sidetracks, prefers us to stick to the job at hand. He doesn’t understand just how many sidetracks there are. He moves from his neat, clean home in Canterbury to his neat, large office in Canterbury, wearing a sheltering hat and barely noticing the world passing him by. He knows how many steps take him from place to place and he knows, according to the figures, how many people should pass him by. But he doesn’t care to look any of them in the face.

  “It seemed important to me to count this village. I would not be back this way again; my route was a circuitous one, moving up past Croydon on my return to Canterbury. Yet here was a whole brood of children, killed by their mothers far from home. I needed to know their number.

  “So in the morning I orientated myself and, trying to avoid the thickest puddles of mud, I set off on my detour.

  “As I approached the village, just on lunchtime, I heard a low hum. I rode into the village mud-spattered and hair awry. I must have looked quite a sight.

  “I called out as I walked, wary to be a stranger in a place which hadn’t seen such a thing in a long time. I heard women’s voices, no men’s. This is not uncommon. Whole villages, sometimes, all the men gone. Those women are old, though, old widows. These voices sounded younger.

  “The voices of young mothers.

  “I found them clustered around the communal cooking pot. I called again and didn’t realize until I was close that they glowed. Every one of the six women glowed.”

  He stopped and closed his eyes. “Go on,” the mother said. “Tell us about the ghosts.”

  “I admit to being a little shocked to find them all dead. The radiant children hadn’t warned me about this. Perhaps they didn’t realize. It was not surprising to find the women around the cooking pot, though. Ghosts like to be in the place they were happiest, most cohesive. I wished my mother was with me, to help me speak to them, take their count. But she had taught me well.

  “I took out my forms and began to ask my questions. They told me their children had turned into fire-breathing monsters who burned all they touched. They said they had lured the children to the barn, telling them a puppet show was there, and that they had given them poison in sweet, cold drinks.

  “It was all they could do, in order to put out the fire, they said.

  “I don’t think it was the only place this happened. I think villages lost sense like that all over the country. The children are often the first to go.”

  “So what did you do? What will you do?” the older gentleman asked.

  “I will enter my census forms. I will account for each and every village left. I will note ages and I will note cause of death. I will add ‘abandoned’ for the domicile question.

  “Did none survive?”

  “None in this village. I can’t speak for the other places. The church no longer existed. It burned down, with all the remaining villagers in it. Caused by the children, the mothers said.

  “I noted cause of death as insanity brought on by the heat, the weather.”

  The Census-Taker took a sip of water without offering any around.

  “So that is my tale,” he said.

  “English people don’t treat each other that way. It must have been the Indians. Or the Pakis. It was the Chinese. The Bangladeshis. They’re like that.”

  “When it comes to survival, we are no different to anyone else.

  There was silence in the carriage. Outside, the land was green and pleasant as it ever had been. The young girl took his hand.

  “Anyone going to the Olympics? I would if it wasn’t in Birmingham. That place is a fucken hole,” the Builder’s Labourer said, and they spoke of sport, and competition, and tried not to think about villages of dead children around the countryside.

  * * * *

  Kaaron Warren’s short story collection The Grinding House, CSFG Publishing (published as The Glass Woman by Prime Books in the US) won the ACT Writers’ and Publishers’ Fiction Award and was nominated for three Ditmar Awards, winning two.

  Kaaron has three novels with Angry Robot Books. The critically acclaimed Slights was nominated for a number of awards and won the Australian Shadows Award.

  Her short story collection from Ticonderoga Press, Dead Sea Fruit, was published in 2010.

  Kaaron lives in Canberra, Australia, with her husband and two children. Her website is kaaronwarren.wordpress.com.

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  Getting Rid of Mother

  ROBERT HOOD

  When the old lady shuffled into their bedroom on Saturday morning, Gary was awake but still struggling out from under the debris of a dream. The dream had been full of axes, blood and bits of bodies. He was vaguely aware that the lady was carrying a tray with breakfast on it and this was good because it filled him with contentment rather than fear. He loved it when his mother brought him breakfast in bed. As he moved, he touched Sharon. The touch triggered his memory and the first thing he thought was: My mother’s been dead for five years.

  He sat up. The old lady, who was dressed in an old-fashioned floral-print dress and black shoes that were very dirty, smiled at him. “Sorry I woke you, Clive dear,” she said. “I thought you’d be up already.”

  Gary and Sharon had moved into the old house in semi-rural Collington only a month before, having bought it from its previous owner on an impulse. Their first months together, living in a small inner-city terrace, had not been good. Gary had a delicate constitution and needed someone to watch out for him. Sharon did her best, but she wasn’t very good at looking after herself, let alone him, and their life tended to be chaotic. They forgot to pay bills, wouldn’t clean up, never managed to undertake even necessary maintenance jobs, frequently ran out of clean laundry, and ate from local takeaways more often than not. Neither felt particularly good about this - it seemed like an admission that life was slipping through their fingers. But they explained it away easily enough and as tensions mounted, they blamed their sense of helplessness on city life. “Too much noise, too much confusion. How can anyone expect to cope in this shambles?” they’d said, and moved to the country.

  But things hadn’t improved. Every morning Gary got up to dress for work, noted with a growing unease the derelict condition of the house, remembered the eerie noises under the floor that had kept him awake for hours, stretched and said: “I feel so much better living out here.” Sharon would smile and nod wanly.

  “I’ve laid out your work clothes, dear, nicely pressed,” the old lady was saying, “I hope your new bride won’t mind?”

  Gary was about to reply that Sharon and he weren’t married; but Sharon woke up suddenly, looked at the old lady, shrieked and grabbed hold of Gary. “W
ho’s that?” she yelled.

  The old lady grinned indulgently, taking Sharon’s slim, white hand in her gnarled fingers. “Did I scare you, love?” She patted Sharon’s arm. “It’s just your mother-in-law. But of course you know that, don’t you?”

  Sharon looked at Gary, bewildered. Gary shrugged.

  “Now the two of you love birds stay in bed for a while ... don’t worry, you’ll get to work on time, Clive, there’s no doubt about that.”

  Gary’s eyes darted furtively between Sharon and the old lady. “Um ... it’s Saturday,” he said. “No work today.”

  The old lady laughed, holding her hand to her mouth. “Saturday? Oh silly me. Of course it is. Never mind. All the more reason for you to lie around in bed.” She winked. “Newly-weds need plenty of time to get to know each other.”