by Lee Murray
‘Listen to me. For God’s sake, just listen.’ Rosie’s mother’s hands claw at her eyes. ‘It’s your sight that distracts you from the real world.’
Tearing pain overwhelms Rosie. Her eyes burst. Her world turns to shadows. Wynter stands amongst them, clearer than ever, his small body flinching. But her bed, the floral couch in the corner, and everything else is gone.
Horrified, Rosie pushes him. ‘Wynter! Can’t you see the shadows? Run!’
Somewhere in the distance, Mother says, ‘Wynter’s not here. He’s not anywhere.’ She grabs Rosie’s hair and pulls, breath hot on Rosie’s face. ‘Look at me!’
‘I am, I am!’ Rosie screams. A lie. She can’t see her mother’s face, only the ink of her words, like a silver pen against the darkness.
Rosie covers her ears and eyes so tight, warm eyelid-red leaks into her brain. Even the pain of losing her sight cannot stop her wondering what will happen to the pretty girl in the tower, waiting for her prince.
An actual prince forms from the shadows. A finger to his lips, he tiptoes to where the window is banging against the wall. He reaches, arms outstretched.
Rosie calls a warning to her mother. Too late. The shadow-prince reaches out. All it takes is one little push. A scream. And it is done.
For a long time everything is still, except the ocean below and the wind rattling at her window. Rosie tries to cry, but she has no tears. So she sits and picks at the scabs forming where her eyes should be.
Police arrive, sirens first. They don’t listen. They don’t hear the prince calling for his princess. Will he come back and save her again?
‘Are you all right?’ the police demand over and over in their hard, clipped voices. ‘We’re calling an ambulance.’
‘Can you hear the shadows?’ Rosie asks. ‘I think they’ve taken my brother. Or he’s run away like I said to. He’ll come back one day. Or maybe Mother will bring him back for me.’
‘We’ll do the best we can,’ someone says from the darkness.
Mother’s ghost glowers at her. Admonishing Rosie with gouts of salty tears. Her disapproval follows Rosie from foster home to foster home, but the waterworks really flow when Rosie finds a family that encourages her obsession. They’re awed as Rosie’s hands trace their way along the silky ink, picking out words. The more she reads, the more she realises her mother is right. Books are dangerous. Horrors lie within their pages. Their call stronger than ever. She reads under the covers, not needing light as she runs her fingers along the text. When there are no more books, Rosie runs her fingers along the walls of her room, reading the horrors there.
Rosie tries to keep the shadows at bay. She yells at them to leave her alone. Tells them she doesn’t want rescuing, that she doesn’t need princes or demons. She doesn’t want to attract the attention of the evil characters lurking in the walls.
The other children in the foster home laugh at her when she tries to warn them of the danger.
‘See!’ she points at the shadows lurking in the walls all around. ‘There’s death everywhere. I’ve been thrown out of my tower. We’re in the wastelands, and we have to be careful.’
She tries to shut the books. But she can’t shut out the walls. She needs them to find her way in this wilderness of shadow. She needs them, or she starts to pick at her empty eye-sockets. She turns to the Bible, but the words are not the sweet stories her mother had told when she was little. The shadows laugh back as she reads the grisly tales. But she cannot leave the Bible alone. She’s the only one who can break its seals and prevent the demons from tearing the world apart.
Revelations says so.
It says a lot of things. Fortunately Rosie knows cold steel is the one thing that can save her.
After the screaming is over, Rosie’s mother has a whole family of corpses to keep her company. Only it does not seem to make her happy. She sits on the ghost of her old flowery couch, cradling Wynter and scowling at the world until someone knocks on the door.
Rosie puts the catch on. ‘Don’t come in, it’s not safe. There’s still a demon here. The one with seven heads and ten horns. The feet of a bear, the mouth of a lion, and the general appearance of a leopard.’ She lowers her voice. ‘It’s very, very dangerous.’
The knocking goes away.
The door splinters. There are so many police, they can barely move in Rosie’s small room. They pick their way around. The starch in their clothes whispers secrets the owners will never hear. I have a sore leg. I have a headache. The wind outside is too cold for me. I think I’m going to throw up.
‘…a grown man twice her size…’
‘The smell.’
‘…she just – tore him apart.’
‘And the kids.’
Rosie shakes her head. ‘No. It wasn’t like that. I—’
They don’t listen. Words like, sick, evil, and psychotic, are thrown around, punctuating the policewoman’s recitation of her rights, like fists against a punching bag. She absorbs each blow. Her fingers trace across the bloody wallpaper, until her arms are yanked behind her back. Plastic bands tighten against her skin.
The word murderer almost bowls her over. It’s new and, somehow, much heavier than the others, especially with her mother’s voice, killing is a sin, echoing around her head.
‘Listen,’ Rosie says. ‘The beast tore its way through. It just came.’
The silence is absolute. Not even the shadows move.
‘So I stabbed it. I had to.’ Rosie’s voice is high, pleading against hope that they might understand. She can’t see their faces. Although she suspects they’re as terrified as she is of the blood. Of the bodies.
To Rosie, her foster family are more visible now than they were in life. More real. She can see the digger on the boy’s jersey. The girl, lips bright with lipstick.
Rosie’s mother frowns. ‘You did it again,’ she says. ‘Weren’t we enough?’
‘It wasn’t me!’ Rosie protests, although she knows her mother will not listen. Neither will the police.
Struggling, the plastic bites at her wrists as Mother turns to Rosie’s foster sister. Her gnarled finger burrows into the girl’s sternum. ‘Harlot, put some clothes on!’
Rosie can’t protect the ghost from her mother’s accusation, but the father tries. ‘My daughter can wear what she likes!’
‘Stop it. Stop fighting,’ Rosie warns him.
‘Those too tight?’ A lady’s voice, coming from the darkness. There’s something about her. Something nice, even though the demon whispers that her shell is just as hard and blue as the other police. Maybe it’s just the spirits of her two babies yet to be born, floating within the blue shell.
‘The demon. It’s standing right there. Can’t you see the hole in the wall? Feel the indentations? I never realised demons bleed, but they do. Screaming and screaming before they go up like torches.’
‘You know we’re here to take you away, don’t you? Somewhere you can be safe.’
The lady sounds so very sincere. And underneath it all, so very horrified.
‘Wasn’t I talking?’ Rosie asks. ‘Hardly matters. No one ever listens to what I say.’ Still, the woman did say she was taking her somewhere safe. ‘Safe?’ Rosie echoes, momentarily hopeful.
‘Very safe,’ the woman says, her words sounding like a smile.
Rosie twists her arms. ‘I don’t feel safe with these cuffs on. Not with the beast so close.’
The policewoman’s breath changes. Quickens. She’s scared. Has been the whole time. Blanketed in fear.
Rosie tries to explain. ‘They come to kill. You do understand, don’t you? They won’t stop. Not until you’re all dead.’
‘Harry, this one’s on something,’ she yells. ‘Take blood and urine samples. You ID’d the bodies yet?’ The whisper of fabric tells Rosie she’s wrapping her arms around herself, not as unconcerned
as she’s trying to sound.
‘Nope. The burns are severe. One’s barbequed to a char,’ he replies. ‘We’ll be lucky if there’s enough dental on it. Frankly I’m amazed the whole house didn’t go up.’
‘They do that. They just burn,’ Rosie says. She’s not really talking to them anymore. It’s clear they’ve only ever seen one world.
The demon laughs. ‘The walls for these obscuro are so thick nothing could ever burst through from the other side. Not much can get through their tough hides from this side either, ’cept a bullet. And me.’
‘A bullet would kill you, too,’ she mutters to the creature. ‘It’s gotta be steel, well, good silver or good steel. And not one speck of rust. Just one, and that puppy flames back to life, instead of burning to a cinder, which always has to be the plan.’ She’d read that somewhere. Books were dangerous, they brought danger. And salvation. ‘You know, lady,’ Rosie says, desperate to scratch the scabs of her eyes, ‘free my hands and I might be able to protect you. And your kids.’ Rosie can see them, clear as the dead family begging her to save them.
The policewoman snaps. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
Nutto, she’s thinking. I don’t have any kids. The thought is so clear in Rosie’s mind, the police officer might as well have said it.
‘You’re blind,’ Rosie whispers. ‘I see them clearly now. A boy and a girl. They’re crying. Fading. If you’re not careful they’ll never be born.’
‘Shut up.’ The woman’s voice is tight.
‘But you have to listen. The shadow came through the walls. Through the gaps in the world,’ Rosie insists. ‘Nowhere is safe. Not for me. Please. Please. Let me go.’
The demon laughs. ‘It’s been fun playing this game with you.’ And Rosie closes her eyes and prays.
‘Let’s get her out of here.’ The policewoman prods her out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the house. ‘In the car,’ she says as soon as they’re outside. She opens the car door and pushes Rosie’s head down.
Rosie fights back, but the door closes, shoving her the rest of the way in. Almost.
Through the mesh windows, Rosie sees the woman’s first child die, feline teeth wrapped around a body with chubby fists flailing. Rosie screams and pushes at the door that never quite closed, trying to stop this. The other child is torn apart as Rosie falls from the car. ‘They’re dead. I’m sorry, they’re just gone…’ Rosie cries, but there’s no reply.
Footsteps rush toward her, and with sightless eyes she sees the body rise from the ground, hands pushing guts back into its abdomen. It’s the policewoman. She’s not only kind, but very pretty, with long dark lashes smeared black against the tears.
‘You killed her!’ a policeman yells.
Rosie shakes her head. But it feels like nothing more than a lie. Maybe if she hadn’t allowed the family to die, if she hadn’t read about the beasts in Revelations, then this woman would still be alive. But how can you hide when the only world you can see is the world of the dead?
All the other officers will die too. Rosie can’t help it. Unless, and here’s the thing: unless it was her that let the demons in. Unless the demons really are all her fault, because she can’t leave the stories alone, she can’t stop looking for answers, and she can’t stop picking away at a story, even when there isn’t one. Perhaps if she’d realised books were dangerous…
Funny that, even when they’re wrong, mothers are always right.
The demon’s lion mouth grins as it swipes the heads from the remaining blue shells, noisily sucking out the marrow as if it were ice-cream.
When it and its fellow monsters are completely finished, they look up, tongues lolling between their teeth like happy puppy dogs. They lick the spatters of blood from Rosie’s face. As their rough tongues hit the empty spaces where her eyes should be, Rosie remembers her mother screaming. ‘Listen to me. For God’s sake, just listen. It’s your sight that distracts you from the real world.’
The monsters snarl, their teeth ripping the plastic manacles from Rosie’s hands so that she’s free. Free to run with monsters. Her heart soars. She realises it’s what she’s wanted all along.
‘Wynter,’ Rosie calls to her brother. ‘Come with us.’
He shakes his head, reaching out his arms for their mother.
‘Wynter!’
‘You killed me,’ Wynter says.
Rosie is overwhelmed, but can find no tears. ‘No, no. That wasn’t me. Come, we can be together again. Better than before.’
The police step in, more solid than ever now that they’re dead. They take her back to her old house, and push her inside an iron cage dangling from her tower. If she picks at the scabs in her eyes, and listens carefully, she can see the beach far below.
Her mother’s corpse, washed in salty tears, neck broken from the fall, sits very still on the old flowery couch and reads her Bible stories. The sweet ones she used to read when Rosie was a child. It makes Rosie want to scream. She prefers the Old Testament.
And so she grows her hair. Maybe one day it will be long enough for her demon prince to climb up and rescue her.
In Sacrifice We Hope
Keira McKenzie
VicParkers were mostly a stolid lot, bastions against the bandits and ferals who roamed the hinterlands between the City and the Hills, but they didn’t venture into the Burswood ruins. Of course they didn’t believe anything, but still, tales of Burswood had extra – disquietingly plural – dimensions, like all that rot about dimensions intersecting when the Earth tilted on its axis during The End – as if! Such talk was common in the early years, but now only lingered in areas like the Burswood Ruins. Surrounded by the toxic sludge the river had become, it was a poisonous place, dangerous and deadly.
The talk certainly didn’t deter two boys who lived in VicPark, near enough to be familiar with the stories as well as the site itself. The allure of the forbidden, plus the (remote) possibility of material gain, added up to be irresistible. It called to them. The boys took their chance. It was winter, no hellish heat or chance of a storm. Perfect.
So, they told their respective parents that morning that they were joining a class for peer group study after school, and promised to be home before dark. After school, they crossed the ancient Causeway (biochar-fuelled traffic was very thin), slipped through the fences surrounding the complex, and expertly divined which solar-secure system was actually secure. Slipping through one of the many defunct others as the sounds of the village faded into the background, they soon stood on the boundary of the forbidden.
The ruin loomed against the late afternoon sky, a hulking silhouette against emptiness, luring them on with its reputation. While stripped of fixtures, fittings, furnishings and anything of value, it had never been stripped of the knowledge that it had been a great gambling den. It had in turn become the source of the most powerful of all urban legends: buried treasure. So who would be the first of this generation to find those tunnels backstage in the Dome that led directly to the upper? There, the ancient machines were still full of gold coins because no one had found them.
Yet.
The boys were off, running over the waste ground to the ruins proper, avoiding the old gambling halls’ ground-level entrances. Those gaping doorways of the mostly roofless structures held populations of rumours that hunted, rustled and killed the foolhardy in various painful ways, so not even the most hardened treasure hunter went in that way. No one wanted to see the bones of the fallen. The boys skirted the restaurants where dead trees punctuated broken floors, their skeletal remains distorted into monstrous shapes by ivy fattened and weirdly verdant from tainted groundwater or the poisoned river. The ground was damp enough for toads. The boys followed barely discernible paths to where the Dome hunkered in the shadows beneath the ruins of the immense hotel.
This was the other entrance to the gambling dens (though why they were called dens w
hen they were on the upper floors was something no one had ever explained to the boys), a secret entrance that was known even if rarely used.
The boys clambered over lumps of masonry, shattered stairs and unrecognisable stuff subverted into ecosystems for snakes, spiders and scorpions which blocked the massive doorway. They negotiated more rubble choking one of the gaping entrances with little more than scraped knees or knocked elbows, till there they were, looking over the edge of the vast empty, echoey spaces of the auditorium.
Too easy!
The yawning roof sucked at the day, darkening and reducing it. Inside it was dry, as dry as bones, dusty and twilit. Wind thrummed around the gaping roof space in testament to bygone times of mass entertainment, when thousands of out-of-control fans crammed in for the concerts, the gigs, the bands. These boys were big on cultural history.
They descended the steps between tiers of bare benches rising tall into darkness like some ancient pyramid they’d read about in pre-history, squinting against the dust they raised, momentarily pausing at the scrabble of hurried movement whispering beneath the echoes. They sprinted the last few steps across the blank area before the stage, then leapt the side stairs leading to the stage itself. Once there, slipping a little on the dust coating the stage floor, they moved front and centre, standing in almost respectful silence, facing out over the shattered auditorium. They’d seen the pale printed screen-shots taped onto covers of rare textbooks, and for a few minutes, they jammed their air guitars better than any old-time cultural icon.
Laughing, they turned their backs on their roaring audience and walked through the dust to the rear of the stage, their performances ringing in their imaginations but fading into irrelevance as they found their way through a maze of sliding partitions to the backstage area of rooms, corridors and hopefully some interesting mementos of the complex’s past life. But once in, they paused.
They hadn’t reckoned on the utter darkness of the internal rooms and corridors. Then bravado set in again.
‘Carter,’ whispered Colin. ‘It’s like Carter in the pyramids.’