Kzine Issue 1

by Graeme Hurry et al.

  ‘Hey! What up! I was just chopping some wood, what the fuck brings you both here? Getcha beer?’

  ‘Bill said you’d know if the hunting was good lately.’

  ‘That so, Bill? Whattaya huntin’?’ Dave asked this over his shoulder as he grabbed another beer from just inside the door and came back, wiping foam from his lips.

  ‘Elk. Any luck with that?’

  ‘Why?’ His face sobered into a cold mask.

  Bill slowly brought the .45 out from behind his thigh. Dave’s eyes went wide as they flicked towards it and he took a step back.

  ‘What the fuck are you on about.’

  ‘Why did you kill Monty Argliss?’ Charlie asked him.

  ‘You’re fucking crazy.’

  Bill cocked the hammer and pointed the gun at Dave’s eyes. His left hand went to his pocket and pulled out the tail-end of the arrow they pulled from the elk.

  ‘Remember this, Dave? The arrow you winged that elk with. Twin a’ the one you shot Monty with, ‘cept this one had the fletchings still. Your fletchings, Dave, you’re the only one in town with them on store-bought shafts.

  ‘What happened?’

  Dave’s cheeks sunk, and his eyes darted around the scene in front of him. The barrel of the gun, lands and grooves and all. Bill and Charlie, expressionless. The hawk-feather fletches rolling slowly between the fingers of the man with the gun.

  ‘I’m lining up a shot at this bull elk. Huge antlers, the bag of a lifetime. I have the shot all set up, and I’m just waiting there for it to raise its head up so I can take the neck, when I hear him stomping through the woods, raising holy hell.

  ‘The elk’s spooked, so it gets up and starts to go away. I had to take the shot, I had to.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Arrow misses the neck, lands in a chunk of shoulder. I notch another one, but the damned thing is out of sight. Then that asshole’s thirty yards behind me shouting out, halloo, halloo, like it’s a walk in the park.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘He says something, I yell at him for spooking the elk. He says something else, I don’t know, and I start to get really angry. I’m yelling at him, then I realize that I have the bow in my hands, and…’

  Dave shrugged and dropped his hands.

  ‘I just let go and that was it, arrow hit him, he fell back. I panicked, I tried to pull it out, cover him up, but then I heard that dog barking. He must have had it with him. I sprinted out of there and beat it to the shore by twenty yards, jumped into the boat, and left.’

  Charlie stared at him silently.

  ‘You’re gonna come back with us, now. Tell the police what happened. Turn yourself in.’

  He stared at the two of them incredulously.

  ‘Oh? You’re kidding.’

  ‘What?’

  The expression of disbelief on Dave’s face started to turn to a cruel smirk.

  ‘None of what you heard is evidence. It’s hearsay, you can’t do anything to me with it. Half the hunters in the state use that kind of arrow, to fuck with your fletchings, nobody will know that arrow from Adam’s, and if there was any other physical evidence, I’d have already been arrested. There’s no way in hell I’m going to jail for this, and you know it.’

  He was glaring at the two of them now, defiant. Bill looked at Charlie out of the corner of his eye.

  ‘What? You’re going to kill me for it? Gun me down? You wouldn’t murder me. You don’t have the balls, and you don’t have the reason.’

  He stopped and silence hung between the three men.

  Dave snapped the tension with a roll of his shoulders as he started walking back to the yard behind his house. He called back over his shoulder.

  ‘Now I’m gonna go out back and enjoy the quiet nap I was having before you got here, and you both are gonna get the fuck out of here.’

  Bill froze for a second then jerked the gun down and holstered it. The two walked back to the truck and stopped at the doors, staring over the hood. Kellerman was right. Not much they could do.

  ‘We ought to just leave. Get in the truck and drive away.’

  ‘Yup,’ Charlie answered.

  Charlie got in the passenger seat and belted himself in beside Benni. Bill stood with the door half open, his face twitching. Monty Argliss had been a bit of a fool, a bit of a recluse and a loner, and a drunk when he had the money, but he still deserved better than this. Wasn’t much of a world that wouldn’t take notice of a man who killed over a god-damned overgrown deer, no matter whom he killed.

  ‘Go on, get.’ Bill reached in and swatted Benni out of the middle of the bench seat. One hand on the collar was all that he needed to urge the dog out of the cab as he sat down behind the wheel. Benni’s nose twitched.

  ‘Bill…’ Charlie began.

  The stocky Karelian sniffed at the air again. Bill pulled the door shut and flipped the key to Accessories. Benni started to turn his head from side to side, scanning the house and yard in front of him with a quiet purposefulness.

  ‘Bill…’ Charlie repeated.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Bill said as he turned the radio up high, the Stones rattling their eardrums from up in Vancouver as the dog broke into a loping run towards the corner of the house, ‘we’ll be off in a minute.’

  BLUE

  by Julie Travis

  When pain goes beyond endurance, it takes on colour, a hue that lights up the whole world. It is not enough to say that pain is white; it is an electric whiteness that’s almost blinding. It covers everything like a veil and if you could only reach out you feel that you could touch it, that it would have substance.

  If physical pain is white, what then, would be the colour of despair, of waking from a nightmare to find the nightmare is real?

  (i) All the shades of melancholy

  Anna Maybe knew the colour of despair - her world had been blue for as long as she could remember, perhaps for her whole life. When things were on a more even keel life became azure, a light, more peaceful shade of gloom, but mostly it was dark and filmy and during the very bad times it was blue-black, murky like a river polluted with sinister things, building until the banks are breached and the angry tide floods and drowns everything in its path.

  The world was not made for Anna Maybe, and Anna Maybe was not made for the world. She had a lifelong sense of not belonging, of having been placed here accidentally; a damaged egg fertilised by a damaged sperm, or a conception from an unwanted sexual encounter. To humour herself, she would imagine she was a visitor, an observer from another world, to which she would return one day. Perhaps some people are simply not meant to be born.

  On this day, she had surfaced from a dream that would not let her out of its grip. She had dreamt of walking into a village corner shop. She went up to the counter where a woman waited, a catalogue open in front of her. The woman turned the catalogue around and placed it in front of Anna, turning the pages for her. It was full of photographs and banal descriptions of suicides. As Anna was making her choice, she felt movement under her feet. Looking down, she saw blood and flesh seeping through the cracks in the linoleum floor.

  The dream, like many, was a lesson, knowledge imparted by a divine source, and now she was burdened, understanding what it was to be dead. It stayed with her, colouring first the morning and then the afternoon, darkening the day. Outside a dog was barking, the chimes of an ice-cream van rang out, sparrows bickered in the trees – all the sounds of the life she rarely participated in. And then suddenly they were gone. No, she decided, they had not gone; they had slowed and then ground to a halt, like a cassette tape stretching and winding out into the machine. She looked around the room. The clock by her bed was stuck at seventeen minutes past two, the second hand twitching as it tried to get past the twenty second mark. Her watch was the same - the LCD flicking between forty one and forty two seconds. She looked out of the window and saw a bird, its wings blurred, halted in mid-flight. There were others, stopped as they tried to land on branches caugh
t swaying in a frozen breeze. She ran her hand down the window, feeling the temperature of the glass then stamped her feet, reassured by the sound of her boots on wood. It proved that she could move and think and feel. It was the rest of the world, not her, that had stopped.

  If she had been in a healthier state of mind, Anna might have laughed, blessed whatever had done this and hoped that it stayed that way forever. Who wouldn’t want eternal life? But she was sick and depressed. And now, unable to trust her senses, she wondered if she was completely insane.

  She sat down and thought, for how long she couldn’t tell. Habit made her refer constantly to her watch, which of course was useless. She wondered if this was really happening and what had caused it – could her pain be enough to stop the world from turning? She tried to calm the panic that threatened to engulf her. Eventually she went back to her window and looked outside.

  It took some time to understand what was going on. At first glance it looked like twilight, as if time had moved on after all, but then her eyes were able to separate the two images, to see day and night in parallel. The world outside was continuing whilst simultaneously being at a standstill. It was dark; street and house lights were on, and there was a silhouetted figure moving past one of the windows. But the scene Anna had looked out on at two seventeen that afternoon was still there, like a photographic double exposure, one image laid over another. The world had split in two.

  She dared herself to explore it. Would she switch between times, between night and day, or would she leave the daytime completely and slip back into ‘real’ time? Anxiety slowed her down but did not stop her. After all, did she have anything to lose by leaving the house?

  She stepped outside and into the daylight, into the world that had halted. Its sun was still shining, a dog was caught on its back having a dust bath, drivers were in their cars. One wiped a stationary drop of sweat from his face, another re-tuned her radio while waiting at traffic lights which might stay at red forever. But the night world was alive beneath them. The three quarter moon was up, clouds brushing across it like fingertips on a human face. Cars were free to move. A dog skipped past, the one Anna had seen in the act of rolling around. But both worlds were separate and she was not part of this one; she walked in the sunshine, she cast a strong shadow, she could feel the warmth of the day on her face. The dog on its evening walk didn’t sniff at her or even look in her direction. She was a ghost. When she stepped in the path of its owner he walked through her and she felt nothing. Nothing from the night that she touched had any essence. Though the daytime world was stopped, it was at least solid, tangible.

  She went to the nearest car, opened the door and got in. It was a minicab. A woman sat in the back with a child who was dressed for a party. The driver was in the process of changing gear, his foot still holding down the clutch and his hand resting lightly on the gear stick. She touched his arm. It still felt like skin but there was no indication that he was alive; he was in mid-breath, mid-heart beat. But he would be in the night world, too, perhaps still driving, and moving, breathing, feeling. Not like this awful thing that was neither dead nor alive.

  She was asleep; she had to be.

  If that was the case, then she would wake up, take control. Pinching herself would be ineffectual, too little for this dream. So Anna brought her fist down over and over again on the dashboard.

  Later - much later, after she’d cried and screamed herself hoarse because she’d not woken up, because she wasn’t asleep and this wasn’t a dream after all - she surveyed what she’d done. Much as it hurt, she could still clench her fist, so nothing was broken, but it was puffy and she had split one of her knuckles. She took the rear view mirror with her other hand and adjusted it so she could see behind the car. Night world vehicles passed by and through her, and then, a short distance away, a figure stood from a crouching position, squinted in the sunshine, and walked slowly toward her. She was not alone.

  ii) The man with sleight of hand

  As the man approached, Anna dared not move or even blink in case he disappeared. He moved easily, unhurriedly, not breaking his step when he put his hands in the pockets of his suit, pulled out several lumps of coal and began to juggle them. As the coals hit the top of their arc they ignited. The man caught them, ignoring the flames that licked around his fingers and continued to throw them until he reached the driver’s door of the car. Then he collected the coals and put them back in his pockets. He stood for a moment, silent, motionless, as if contemplating something, then turned and opened the door.

  They looked one another full in the face. The man was perhaps fifty years old, with piercing blue eyes that looked deep into Anna’s and beyond. There was no expression on his face; no surprise, no pleasure at seeing her, the only other moving person in the world. He turned his attention to the driver. Under his gaze the man began to sag. He began to fold and flatten. The stranger was sucking the air out of him. He collapsed gently in on himself. Anna closed her eyes when the man’s face deflated, leaving his teeth sticking grotesquely towards her. When she opened them, the shell of the driver was being dumped on the road by the man, who took the driver’s place. He grasped the steering wheel for a moment, getting the feel of it, then let his hands rest in his lap.

  ‘How appropriate,’ he said, so quietly Anna barely heard him. He looked at her again. ‘It’s apparent, Anna Maybe, that you don’t know me. Let me introduce myself. I am Mr Pandemonium. I am your driver.’

  For a moment Anna thought the man was going to get out of the car and walk away. His manner was as if the necessity of his speech was slightly insulting, that she should already know him. The man’s juggling tricks, his whole demeanour, was that of a magician. Not the glossy, flamboyant illusionists of television but something earthier, more real. And the man’s name, his terrible influence on the cab driver, indicated something much more dangerous. He evidently knew something, perhaps everything, about her. Could all this be his doing? Could it be that her illness, her depression and now her bizarre situation was his fault, the work of black magic, a malicious spell? Anna was not sure she believed in magic, but after the amazing things he had just done, she could discount nothing. Anger and optimism rose within her in equal measure.

  ‘I don’t know who or what you are, but you can take your fucking hex off me right now. It’s gone way beyond a joke.’

  Mr Pandemonium smoothed an imaginary crease from his trousers. ‘I don’t do jokes, my dear; I’m not a conjurer, a children’s entertainer. I don’t do party tricks - you’re not so lucky. Let us walk awhile. There’s someone else you must meet.’

  He got out of the car and continued his walk. Anna didn’t hesitate to follow - the man evidently had answers of some kind for her. And he was, as yet, the only other living thing in this world. As she caught up with him, he addressed her again.

  ‘To explain more fully who I am would be pointless to you. Your paranoia will not let you believe what I say. You will understand only through example.’

  He stepped into the night world. The effect was astonishing; one minute he was standing next to Anna in the sunshine, then he seemed to slide away from her, he was there but not there. He was still standing next to her but he was in the other world. It was like being next to a projectionist’s screen, watching Mr Pandemonium in a film running a few inches away.

  ‘You’d forgotten this place - Life - exists, haven’t you?’ His voice was muffled, his tone observant rather than critical. ‘Now, let me show you who I am.’ He took a few steps away, towards a couple out walking together. As the man brushed past Mr Pandemonium he stopped dead, a grimace replacing his smile. He grabbed his partner by the throat and drew her to him.

  ‘You’re working against me, aren’t you? You don’t love me, you’re tricking me. As soon as I feel safe with you, you’ll leave me.’

  The man let her go, turned to a nearby lamp post and began smashing his face against it. The woman’s screams brought people running. Two men tried to restrain him, but he
continued, machine-like, his features almost indistinguishable. Anna looked away from the horror. Mr Pandemonium left them and stepped back beside her, the night world more distant again. ‘Do you understand yet? Or do you need to see more?’ His tone was, again, uncritical, but this time Anna thought she heard a hint of smugness. As if it was a competition - and he was winning.

  As she struggled for an answer, he raised a finger to his lips and cocked his head, listening.

  ‘I think… Yes. She’s here. Sadie’s here,’ he whispered.

  Anna listened. There was something, a confusing mish-mash of noises. Mr Pandemonium had spoken of another person, but it sounded like a whole group of people. There was laughter and excited chatter, interspersed with darker sounds - sobbing, wailing, screaming rage.

  Anna saw her then. A woman was moving gracefully between groups of children who were blurred in the act of play. Anna looked her up and down. She wore army boots and a multicoloured sari decorated with golden thread, but it was her head that caught Anna’s attention. It was bald and misshapen, far too large for her body. The woman stopped and allowed Anna to walk around her, standing in silence when Anna gasped in wonder at the sight of a hundred tiny faces moulded into the woman’s head, all identical but with a myriad of expressions. One laughed wildly while another yelled in anger. One looked at her bashfully, another was gripped by grief. Every possible human emotion was captured there. Through gaps in the woman’s sari were a criss-cross of cuts, some old scars, others new wounds. Every time Anna heard a cry of anguish, the newer cuts re-opened and oozed blood. To see so much pain was appalling.

  ‘I am insane,’ she murmured. ‘Nothing here is true, it cannot be.’

  Anna backed away from the strange couple, turned and ran. They did not give chase. She was fifty, a hundred yards away, yet when Mr Pandemonium spoke, his words breathed right into her ear.

  ‘What did you think, Anna? That we were here to help you, to save you? To show you the way? We’re here to see you burn.’