Relics, Wrecks and Ruins

by Aiki Flinthart

  Relics, Wrecks & Ruins

  2020 Anthology of short Sci-fi, Fantasy, and Horror works

  By some of the world’s best authors

  Reviews

  “The deep messages of this anthology make the very bones hum. Taloned onto the page by resistance and vision, these stories invite us to witness how sacrifice crafts wisdom, and how wisdom opens doors for the next generation.”

  L.E. Daniels, author of Serpent’s Wake: A Tale for the Bitten

  “Rich, varied, and bittersweet, this anthology is a fitting and triumphant salute to Aiki Flinthart’s dauntless spirit and irrepressible moxie.”

  Geneve Flynn, co-editor of Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women

  Edited by Aiki Flinthart

  Assistant editors: Gene Flynn, Lauren Daniels.

  Cover artwork by Daniele Serra

  Cover design by Pamela Jeffs

  Internal art by Caitlyn McPherson

  Published 2021 by CAT Press

  Copyright © 2021 Aiki Flinthart

  All stories are original to this collection or acknowledged as reprints

  Cosmic Spring, by Ken Liu - First English publication by Lightspeed, March 15, 2018

  American Changeling by Mary Robinette Kowal - First English publication in Daily SF in September 2010

  River of Stars by David Farland—First English publication September 2017.

  The Wind and the Rain by Robert Silverberg—First English publication in “Saving Worlds” 1973, Doubleday Books.

  Morgan of the Fay by Kate Forsyth—First English publication in “The Road to Camelot”, Random House Australia, 2002

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations) without the prior permission in writing of the copyright holder concerned, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Distributed by Smashwords

  A Cataloguing-in-Publications entry for this title is available from the National Library of Australia.

  Print copies available from major online retailers.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-6489917-3-1 (Trade Paperback)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-6489917-2-4 (e-book)

  CAT Press

  PO Box 3388, Darra

  QLD 4076, Australia

  Acknowledgements:

  Heartfelt thanks goes to my wonderful, supportive, fun-loving husband and my loyal, huggable, strong son. Huge appreciation to Gene Flynn, Lauren Daniels, and Pamela Jeffs who helped and supported me every step of the way in this madness. Thanks to Daniele Serra who kindly donated the beautiful cover illustration.

  Also to all the authors in the Springfield Writers Group, for their enthusiasm & support; and to my many wonderful family and friends who are helping me through this difficult time.

  Big thanks to Jonathan Strahan, without whose help I would not have been able to pull this crazy project into shape.

  And to Ellen Datlow for her kindness and direction. And Dirk for his encouragement.

  This anthology is likely to be my last project before I head off to Valhalla. So I’m hoping it will bring to your attention, dear reader, several new authors as well as let you relax with several old friends.

  When you finish, if you enjoyed it, please leave a review on Goodreads or your ebook retailer so others can find it as well.

  Never be afraid to try to achieve your goals. You’ll only regret it if you don’t try.

  Relics, Wrecks, & Ruins

  Anthology of speculative fiction short works

  NOTE: This collection contains both US and some

  Australian/British colloquialisms and spelling variations.

  DON’T PANIC

  Contents

  Washing the Plaid…..by Juliet Marillier

  The Names of the Drowned are These…..by Angela Slatter

  The God Complex…..by Jan-Andrew (JA) Henderson

  A Malediction on the Village…..by Garth Nix

  In Opposition to the Foe…..by Pamela Jeffs

  The Echo of Love…..by Marianne de Pierres

  16 Minutes…..by Jasper Fforde

  American Changeling…..by Mary Robinette Kowal

  Pattern on Stone…..by James (SA) Corey

  The Wreck of the Tartarus…..by Lee Murray

  Six-String Demon…..by Sebastien de Castell

  The Shard…..by Ian Irvine

  The Wind and the Rain…..by Robert Silverberg

  Thaw…..by Mark Lawrence

  Morgan of the Fay…..by Kate Forsyth

  Geisha Boy…..by Kylie Chan

  Cosmic Spring…..by Ken Liu

  Dreams of Hercules…..by Cat Sparks

  River of Stars…..by David Farland

  The Mirror in the Mirror…..by Jack Dann

  Heartbreak Hotel…..by Dirk Flinthart

  Relict: (noun) A Widow; A Thing Remaining from the Past…..by Alison Goodman

  The Movers of the Stones…..by Neil Gaiman

  Old Souls…..by Aiki Flinthart

  About the Authors

  Other titles by the Editor

  Washing the Plaid

  By Juliet Marillier

  The Bridge House is a wreck. It’s been empty for years, and it’s old and crumbly and falling apart. When I walk past on the way to the school bus, I can see peeling paint and cracks in the walls. The wooden porch sags and the front door is faded to a weird shade of gravestone gray. The garden’s a mini-jungle of rioting weeds, half-dead in the end-of-winter cold.

  So, everyone’s surprised when the house finally goes up for sale, then super-surprised when it sells almost immediately. The biggest shock is when Mrs. Mac moves in. That’s what people call the old lady. It’s short for Mac-something.

  “Why on earth would an old girl like her buy such a huge place?” my mother asks one night at dinner. “It’ll cost a fortune to fix.”

  Mum’s an accountant so everything is about budgets and money. I ignore her and flip the page of my book.

  She frowns. “And Mrs. Mac must be eighty at least. Living on her own with all those dogs—that’s crazy. What if she trips over one of them and breaks her leg? Or forgets she left a pot on the stove and sets the place on fire? Mr. Briggs next door won’t be happy if they make a nuisance of themselves. He’s always hated dogs.” She points at my plate. “Rachel, close that book and finish your dinner. No reading at the table, remember?”

  “If there was a fire, wouldn’t the dogs bark?” I don’t really want to be part of the conversation. I’m only here because Mum expects us all to sit at the table for meals. But someone should stand up for Mrs. Mac. “And we’d smell the smoke.” We live directly opposite the Bridge House.

  “Would’ve been a smart buy for a developer.” Dad’s off on his own train of thought as usual. “That’s prime riverfront land. Demolish the old house, build a luxury two-story place, maybe a private jetty. You’d make a healthy profit. That’s if you could get around the heritage guidelines. The owner should have got us to handle the sale.” Us meaning the business he and my uncle run: Premium Property. He pauses to shove a forkful of spaghetti in his mouth, chews,
and swallows. “Still, she’s an old woman,” he says. “I suppose it’ll be up for sale again before long.”

  I imagine a gleaming modern house sitting there on the riverbank like some alien craft that’s landed among the big old gum trees, knocking quite a few of them over. A private jetty would mean we couldn’t walk along the riverbank anymore. It would block the path for other things too—wallabies, lizards, water birds, all the creatures that live in that patch of bushland. It might send them up onto the road where they’d get squished by passing traffic.

  A house like that would never belong.

  I finish my spaghetti in silence. Mum and Dad have changed the subject to some cocktail thing they’re attending on Saturday, and they’re working up to an argument. That happens a lot these days. James and I exchange a glance and take ourselves off to the kitchen. We wash and dry the dishes. In the dining room, Mum has gone quiet while Dad gives one of his lectures.

  James goes up to his room, in theory to do his homework. I retreat to mine and shut the door so James can’t sneak in. He loves snooping and solving pretend crimes.

  I’ve got homework, too. More than James, since he’s still at Ashburn Primary and I’m in my second year at high school. But all the talk about Mrs. Mac has given me an idea for the next part of my story and I need to write it down before it slips out of my mind. Ideas do that sometimes; like when you have a fantastic dream and then you wake up and for a moment it’s still there, bright and clear, but just fades away. That’s so cruel.

  I write and write. I don’t stop until I hear Mum coming up the stairs. My neck hurts and my fingers are all cramped and it’s dark outside. I’ve written six hundred words without even thinking, as if something was sitting on my shoulder or, even creepier, in my head, controlling the whole thing. I like it when that happens; that’s when I do my best work.

  But I can’t check it over now because Mum’s knocking on the door. She barges in without an invitation.

  I hide my story behind a French translation assignment on the screen. I’ve never let anyone read my work. My real work, I mean. I’ve written stuff for English at school and earned high grades for it. Teachers have suggested I might do creative writing at university. But Dad wants me to work for the business, and Mum thinks I should try to get into law.

  Before Mum can say, Finished your homework? something outside catches her attention. She walks to the window and stares down into the street. There’s a light out there, not the whitish streetlight but more of a gold glow, moving about.

  “What’s that?” she asks.

  Mum’s gazing in the general direction of Mrs. Mac’s place. I look over her shoulder, remembering the comment about pots on the stove. My eyesight is better than hers. The warm light comes from a torch. Holding the torch is the small, shadowy figure of Mrs. Mac with a shawl around her shoulders, a woolly hat on her white hair, and trainers on her feet. Beside her pads the biggest of her dogs. Its head is nearly up to her shoulder. After she moved in, I looked up dog breeds, and that one’s a Scottish deerhound. You don’t see many of those being walked around Ashburn.

  “Mrs. Mac,” I say. “Just walking the dog, I guess.” Maybe two dogs; I think I spotted a tiny one tucked into her shawl, like a baby in a sling. Perhaps that one can’t walk very well.

  Mrs. Mac goes in her gate with the deerhound alongside. The gold light bobs about for a bit, then cuts out as she enters the house.

  “I don’t know,” mutters Mum. “Out walking in the dark, all on her own…” Her tone changes. “Finished your homework? It’s getting late.”

  “Not much more to do. Half an hour, tops.”

  Mum looks at her watch and rolls her eyes. “Don’t forget to iron your school shirt for tomorrow.”

  “I’ll do it in the morning.”

  “Rachel.” She uses the warning voice. I hate that. It’s like a threat: Do it or else (insert horrible thing that might happen). I’ve tried to explain how important my writing is, but she just doesn’t get it.

  “I’ll do it when I’ve finished the homework.”

  She takes the hint and leaves. I do some math problems and the French translation, all of which takes more than half an hour. Since she hasn’t come back up to hassle me about having a shower and going to bed, I write some more of my story, adding a witch who looks like an eccentric old woman with dogs and turns out to be immensely powerful.

  “Mess with me at your own peril,” I mutter as I save and close the document. I put my school stuff in my bag for the morning, then go over to the window.

  Mrs. Mac is out there again. Not on the footpath, but in her front garden, shining the torch up into the trees. Looking for owls? Hunting for a lost cat? I’m about to close the curtains when she looks straight up at me. She kindly doesn’t shine the torch into my eyes. She gives me a little wave. I wave back. Then she’s gone. I don’t feel embarrassed to be caught watching her. I’m weirdly happy that she saw me and was nice about it.

  #

  When I get home from school the next day, there’s mail sticking out of our box, so I take it inside, call out “Hi!” to Mum so she’ll know I’m there, then check the letters to see if there’s anything for me, unlikely as that is. They are all bills or junk mail, except for one. It’s a longish envelope with interesting stamps on it. They’re all pictures of monsters: a dragon, a weird horse with too many legs, a thing that might be a phoenix. It’s from the UK, and it’s addressed to Mrs. M. MacEachern at number 29, which is the Bridge House.

  I wonder what the M is for—Mary? Millicent? Myrtle?

  Mrs. Mac might be waiting to hear from a son or daughter, a grandchild, a dear old friend she hasn’t seen for years. I should take it over to her. I should knock on the door and give it to her. That’s more friendly than stuffing it in her letter box. And I might get a peek inside the house.

  I’m not going to say, Hi, Mrs. Mac. That would be rude. But I have no idea how to pronounce MacEachern. I get out my phone and search for a pronunciation guide. YouTube gives two ways of saying it, mac-EECH-ern, and mac-EK-ern. Since the first one’s the name of an American high school, I go for the second one. I practice a couple of times. I tell myself not to be nervous; she did wave to me last night.

  The gate creaks as I open it, and from inside the house there’s muffled barking. I picture myself in hospital, swathed in bandages from head to toe. I hear my mother and Mr Briggs saying, I knew those dogs would cause trouble. I’m calling the council right now.

  I hesitate then swallow and lift my chin. All right, I’ll do it. I won’t be bookish, shy Rachel who barely talks to anyone at school. I’ll be a brave and bold adventurer with head held high.

  I reach the door, which has a fresh coat of paint in glossy dark blue—when did that happen?—and knock three times. There’s a frenzied yipping and a scuttling sound, then claws scratching on the other side of the door.

  Footsteps.

  “Sybil, no!” says Mrs. Mac, and the scrabbling stops. The door opens and there she is, with the tiny dog in her arms and the huge one beside her, and a couple more bouncing up the hallway behind her. “Wait,” she says over her shoulder, and they do. “Oh, you’re the young woman from across the road.” She gives me a close look, sizing me up. “Hello.”

  “Hi, Mrs. McEachern.” My voice shakes. Why am I so pathetic? I hate myself sometimes. “I’m Rachel. This letter’s for you—it was in our mailbox.”

  She’s holding the dog and doesn’t have a hand free to take the envelope.

  “Lovely,” she says, backing into the house. “Will you bring it in? And close the door behind you—Sybil is liable to bolt at the slightest opportunity.”

  I do as she asks. I may be breaking the family rules about stranger danger, but I can hardly do otherwise, since Sybil is thrashing around as if she’s seen a demon. Mrs. Mac sets her on the floor. The little dog hurtles off down the hallway.

  “I thought that small one couldn’t walk,” I say.

  “Ah. Come through and I�
��ll explain. Cup of tea?”

  “I can’t stay long.” I follow her toward the back of the house and try not to gape. The place may be old and neglected, but it’s still amazing. I don’t know where to look first. The ceiling’s a riot of plaster flowers and animals and things that might be cherubs or strange fairies. The carpet runner has a long dragon on it that would once have been brilliant red on a deep blue background. It’s faded badly, but I can still see all sorts of delicate details: people in tiny boats, a bug-eyed monster guarding a tall palace, and a field of flowers with crows flying over it, and…

  “That carpet has a hundred stories in it,” says Mrs. Mac, looking back at me with a crooked smile. “Every person who looks at it finds new ones.”

  I’m speechless, because the carpet has put several new stories in my head, where they’re jostling to be first in writing order. With test week coming up at school, that’s not a good thing. But it feels great, like a door opening on a wider world.

  I follow Mrs. Mac through to a big kitchen, where there’s a long table with five chairs, none of them matching; and an old-style stove, the kind that uses wood or coal. Lots of things hang from the ceiling: herbs and garlic and stuff, but also a string of little silver bells and three pottery owls in different sizes.

  At the back of the room, overlooking the river, a row of windows lets in the light. Some have stained glass; some are plain so you can see the water and the trees and probably kookaburras and magpies and spiders. On the outside there are spiderwebs in every corner.

  “Live and let live,” murmurs Mrs. Mac, apparently reading my mind as she puts a kettle on the stove and gets out cups and saucers. “They keep the flies out. Please, sit. Now, would you like ordinary black tea, or Earl Grey, or a herbal brew? I make my own mixtures; you might enjoy this one. Lemongrass, peppermint, marigold, a touch of this and that.” She opens a squat earthenware jar and offers it for me to sniff. “What do you think?”