Crow Shine

by Alan Baxter

  Sammy/Sonny shrugged. “You wanna wait inside?”

  “When did he go out?”

  “No idea, I only just got up.”

  Dread ran icy through Michelle’s veins. “You didn’t see him leave today?”

  The young man started to shake his head, expression doleful, as Michelle pushed past him and pounded up the stairs. She had been to the house before, knew it well. She ran to Paul’s door and put a palm against it to push it open. She wailed at the chill of the wood, as if it were frozen solid. The handle was colder as she twisted it and flung the door wide.

  Paul lay on his bed, shrunken, reduced, skin ashen, his hair frosty white. His chest rose and fell rapidly as he stared wide-eyed at the thing leaning over him. A thing hard to behold, harder still to comprehend. It was as Jenkins had described, so many dark colours at once, both thickly bulked and sinewy thin, man-shaped, bear-shaped, unshaped. The room was drenched in despair and doom, a palpable hatred drifted through the air like fog. All Clara’s pain.

  “Get away from him!” Michelle screamed, rushing in. She drove herself between the bed and thing leaning over it, pushed it away with hands instantly numb from an unfathomable cold.

  The creature stepped unsteadily back, rose to a towering height, hissing in an echoing, distant voice that came from within it and somewhere else far, far away.

  Michelle shook like she was palsied, her stomach turned to water. Her mind ran like treacle, but one over-riding thought drove her on. That was her baby on the bed, Clara’s baby. Dear Clara, how could she possibly have raised this evil thing?

  Its chill snaked out towards her and she felt the malice it breathed. It was made of pain and isolation. She had to stand against it, protect her son.

  “You were born of spite and hate and hurt. I don’t carry those things!” The words hurt her to say, made her feel a betrayal to Clara, but there was truth in them, kernels of fierce light against the consuming black. Poor Clara, carrying such darkness alone for so long. She gestured back to Paul, still frozen behind her. “He doesn’t hold those things. He knows love and care and kindness. And so do I. And so did Clara, if only she had allowed herself to see. She gave you power. Poor Clara gave you form, kept you digging for so long. But I don’t! He doesn’t! And Clara is gone.”

  The thing seemed to waver slightly, shrink. Refusing to acknowledge the terror churning in her gut, Michelle walked towards it, one hand raised, finger pointing in sheer defiance. “How easily did you kill before? And how weak are you now? How you struggle to take his life. Because Clara is gone. I don’t hate the people who ostracise me, I pity them! I don’t fear the people who fear me, I try to make them understand!” The creature reduced further, its deep hiss faded. “I will never give in to the darkness because everywhere I look I find light. I know love, for Paul and for myself. And despite everything, I know only love for Clara. I am not afraid of you! You have had enough! You have done enough. Begone!”

  The thing flickered and wavered, shrank away. It became gossamer, insubstantial, and drew back towards the shadows in the corner of the room. It merged with them and disappeared from sight. But it was still there, somewhere, deep and reduced, but not gone. Michelle stared into the gloom, knowing it would never really be gone, not entirely. She pulled open the heavy curtains, let the afternoon sun slam away every darkened corner. Despair leaked from the room. Mostly. Somewhere, some place adjacent to the plane she inhabited, it still lurked.

  She turned to Paul, drawn and blinking against the light. His breath was ragged, his eyes wild. “Oh, my baby, are you okay?”

  “Mum. I’ve had the most horrible dream . . . ” He looked at his hands, thin and shaking. “I’ve lost so much weight.”

  She gathered him into a hug, almost crushing the breath from him. “It’s okay, baby boy. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

  *

  Michelle and Paul stood by Clara’s grave, holding hands. Paul’s weight was slowly returning, his appetite as voracious as ever. But his hair would always be snow white. Michelle absently rubbed her forearm where fresh ink itched as it healed.

  “I still don’t really understand,” he said, eyes scanning the words on the stone.

  Clara Jones, forever protected now against the dark.

  “Neither do I,” Michelle said. “None of it should be possible. It’s hard to believe it was real.”

  Paul ran a hand back over his ivory hair. “But it was.”

  “Yes, it was. Poor Clara tried to save us from it. We should have stood against it together, but she couldn’t know that. We know now.”

  “There are terrible things in the world, Mum.”

  “Yes, darling. There are. There really are.”

  Afterword

  The question is often asked, “Why do you write such horrible stuff?” And it’s weird, because I don’t think I do. I certainly write dark stuff because, in a nutshell, I think it’s more honest. But it’s not horrible. It’s necessary.

  We don’t live in a world with happy endings. Everyone dies, everything breaks, all things ends. Entropy is the only certainty. Now that’s not to say I’m a nihilist. I love life, I think the world and nature and at least a few people are wonderful and beautiful and awe-inspiring. But there’s already a lot of people writing about that. I explore things darker, because things darker hold my interest more. If I come to a fork in the road and one way is a well-lighted street and the other a dark alley, I’ll take the alley. I apply the same principles to my fiction. If there’s a literary rabbit hole leading underground, I won’t turn back when the light fails. I’ll follow it all the way down, however dark it gets, and I’ll see it through to the end, because I want the honesty of its totality.

  Though for me it’s many-layered. Not unrelenting blackness, but facets of light and shade. There are moments of horror, there are bad people making nasty choices and good people making bad decisions, but there’s a fight for good too, and a hope for the light. There’s optimism and realism, though perhaps not in equal measure.

  G.K. Chesterton said, “Fairy tales are more than true - not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” This is something I think is absolutely true and incredibly necessary in our stories. But you know what? It’s not entirely true. Because sometimes the dragons win. Sometimes they’re not beaten. And survivors need to live with that truth. That’s the purpose of dark fiction. To help us live with that truth, to prepare us in some way for the shit that will go down.

  Bad things happens to good people for no reason at all every single day. We can interrogate that with our fiction, and we can look for our own optimism in someone else’s tragedy. There’s a dichotomy on which to meditate. I write dark fantasy and horror wherein sometimes the dragon prevails, but not always. I write it because there are monsters everywhere, and we must face them, win or lose. Sometimes losing is not the worst thing and sometimes the victories are pyrrhic.

  Short stories are perfect for this stuff. They are a unique art form that I’ve loved ever since Roald Dahl blew my mind when I was a child. I’d adored Danny The Champion of the World and Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, so when I saw a book on my parents’ shelves by Roald Dahl, I naturally snatched it up. I was probably eleven or twelve at the time. That book was Kiss, Kiss. In it I read short stories like “The Landlady” and “Royal Jelly”, and a dark and twisted and wonderful world opened up before me. (If you haven’t read Dahl’s adult short fiction, remedy that forthwith.)

  Since then I’ve loved the visceral, powerful nature of the short story, its lens focussed tightly on humanity and life. And, of course, it’s the dark stuff that I love best of all, that most honest delving into the rabbit hole and not flinching. Using fantasy and the supernatural allows us to create and explore the deepest rabbit holes of all.

  I know many people enjoy a little note from the author after each story, discussing that story’s genesis and what it means. I decided against that in favour of this afterword
because I want the stories to stand on their own. After all, if you read a story and it resonates in some way and you think it’s about this one thing, then I come along at the end and tell you it’s about something else, I’ve destroyed the magic. It might sound pretentious to describe my own work as magic, but all stories are magic. I hope mine are at least a little bit enchanted. And these stories aren’t just mine any more. They’re yours, dear reader, and whatever they mean to you, whatever you take from them, you’re absolutely right.

  All my stories come from one place or another of personal experience, but they are greatly leavened with imagination and what if, and live at different levels of emotion. Some are almost frivolous, though none are pure whimsy, while others were made by tapping directly into a deep well of pain and personal trauma. I’ve always struggled at a gut level with injustice, unfairness, bigotry and ignorance, lack of agency. I’ve seen way more terminal illness and premature death than I’d like. All these things and more I’ve explored in my stories. I’ve also tried to simply tell a good yarn. To spin a tale that will entertain you, discomfort you, confound you, engage or perturb you. Whatever the result, if there’s any emotional resonance in here for you, then I’m happy. I hope you’ve enjoyed this book, and I genuinely can’t thank you enough for reading.

  Alan Baxter

  New South Wales, 2016

  Story Acknowledgements

  “Crow Shine” Original to this collection.

  “The Beat Of A Pale Wing” A Killer Among Demons anthology (ed. Craig Bezant, Dark Prints Press, June 2013)

  “Tiny Lives” Daily Science Fiction (ed. Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden, December 2012)

  “Roll The Bones” Crowded Magazine issue #2 (August 2013)

  “Old Promise, New Blood” Bloodlines anthology (ed. Amanda Pillar, Ticonderoga Publications, Oct 2015)

  “All the Wealth in the World” Lakeside Circus, issue 1 (ed. Carrie Cuinn, January 2014)

  “In The Name Of The Father” The One That Got Away anthology (ed. Craig Bezant, Dark Prints Press, February 2012)

  “Fear Is The Sin” From Stage Door Shadows anthology (ed. Jodi Cleghorn, eMergent Publishing, October 2012)

  “The Chart of the Vagrant Mariner” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (ed. Gordon Van Gelder, Jan-Feb 2015.)

  “The Darkest Shade Of Grey” Red Penny Papers (ed. Katie Taylor, February 2012)

  “A Strong Urge To Fly” Original to this collection.

  “Reaching For Ruins” Review of Australian Fiction (ed. Matthew Lamb, Vol. 16, Issue 3, November 2015)

  “Shadows of the Lonely Dead” Suspended in Dusk anthology (ed. Simon Dewar, Books of the Dead Press, September 2014)

  “Punishment Of The Sun” Dead Red Heart anthology (ed. Russell B. Farr, Ticonderoga Publications, April 2011)

  “The Fathomed Wreck To See” Midnight Echo Magazine, issue 9 (ed. Geoff Brown, May 2013)

  “Not The Worst Of Sins” Beneath Ceaseless Skies #133 (ed. Scott H. Andrews, October 31st, 2013)

  “The Old Magic” Original to this collection.

  “Mephisto” Daily Science Fiction (ed. Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden, June 2014)

  “The Darkness in Clara” SQ Mag, issue 14 (ed. Sophie Yorkston, May 2014)

  About the author

  Alan Baxter is a British-Australian author who writes dark fantasy, horror and sci-fi, rides a motorcycle and loves his dog. He also teaches Kung Fu. He lives among dairy paddocks on the beautiful south coast of NSW, Australia, with his wife, son, dog and cat. He is the author of the dark urban fantasy trilogy, Bound, Obsidian and Abduction (The Alex Caine Series) published by HarperVoyager Australia, and the dark urban fantasy duology, RealmShift and MageSign (The Balance 1 and 2) from Gryphonwood Press. He’s the award-winning author of over seventy short stories and novellas. So far. Read extracts from his novels, a novella and short stories at his website www.warriorscribe.com or find him on Twitter @AlanBaxter and Facebook, and feel free to tell him what you think. About anything.

  Also by Alan Baxter

  The Balance Duology

  RealmShift

  MageSign

  The Alex Caine Series

  Bound

  Obsidian

  Abduction

  Ghost of the Black

  Dark Rite (with David Wood)

  Primordial (with David Wood) forthcoming

  thank you

  The publisher would sincerely like to thank:

  Elizabeth Grzyb, Alan Baxter, Joanne Anderton, Laird Barron, Angela Slatter, Kaaron Warren, Nathan Ballingrud, Amanda Pillar, Dirk Flinthart, Stephanie Gunn, Kathleen Jennings, Pete Kempshall, Martin Livings, Anthony Panegyres, Cat Sparks, Lisa L. Hannett, Donna Maree Hanson, Robert Hood, Pete Kempshall, Penelope Love, Nicole Murphy, Karen Brooks, Jeremy G. Byrne, Felicity Dowker, Kim Wilkins, Marianne de Pierres, Jonathan Strahan, Peter McNamara, Ellen Datlow, Grant Stone, Sean Williams, Simon Brown, Garth Nix, David Cake, Simon Oxwell, Grant Watson, Sue Manning, Steven Utley, Lewis Shiner, Bill Congreve, Jack Dann, Janeen Webb, Lucy Sussex, Stephen Dedman, the Mt Lawley Mafia, the Nedlands Yakuza, Angela Challis, Shane Jiraiya Cummings, Kate Williams, Kathryn Linge, Andrew Williams, Al Chan, Alisa and Tehani, Mel & Phil, Hayley Lane, Georgina Walpole, Rushelle Lister, everyone we’ve missed . . .

  . . . and you.

  in memory of

  Eve Johnson

  Sara Douglass

  Steven Utley

  Brian Clarke