by Lee Murray
If Ellie survives, they will tell her that her family went into the forest.
*
You go into the forest. You must always go into the forest. The kelp above you cuts out the sun and you walk by torchlight.
You feel, as you take steps too light for your heavy boots, that there is a piece of the story missing; that you should be dropping breadcrumbs or marking each fifth trunk with a knife or trailing a length of string behind you. But such things are for people who expect to find their way out.
More life has survived than you expected. Damn possums, you think. How typical that they would outlast us. They seem to be laughing at you from high above.
You keep walking. You turn off your torch to see how the darkness feels, and it seems less claustrophobic than the light. Now you could be anywhere; out on the plains, atop a mountain, standing on the deck of the ship that brought you here all those decades ago.
There are no stars. The air is too still. You switch the torch back on.
You are somewhere that is neither land nor sea, and years of stories lap at invisible shores.
You hear wolves howling in the distance. You hear the voices of children. You hear the axe of a woodcutter: chop, chop, chop on the slippery trunks.
Many have brought stories with them. It can’t just be yours that have slipped out.
Chop, chop, chop.
In the distance there’s a voice. It’s not a peasant child, and it’s not a witch. It’s calling your name.
Closer, and you recognise Wiremu’s voice, bellowing into the seaweed.
‘Mike, please come back. They’ve found a herbicide that targets the kelp. They’re testing it up North and then they’ll deploy it here. We’re saved.’
You stay quiet, and still. You try not to breathe, hope he won’t find you.
You know that he will have brought some breadcrumbs, or a ball of string, or marked every fifth trunk with a knife.
About the Editors
With five pointy Sir Julius Vogel Awards on her bookshelf, and an Australian Shadows trophy in shared custody with co-editor Dan Rabarts, Lee Murray’s most recent work is the military monster thriller Into the Mist (Cohesion Press).
The author of several novels, shorts stories and novellas, Lee is proud to be the editor of five fine anthologies of speculative fiction. Her work-in-progress is a middle grade adventure, Dawn of the Zombie Apocalypse. Find her online at leemurray.info.
Dan Rabarts is a multi-award-winning short fiction author and editor, podcast narrator, and sailor of sailing things. He was the recipient of New Zealand’s Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best New Talent in 2014, and the co-editor of Baby Teeth: Bite-sized Tales of Terror, with Lee Murray, which won the SJV for Best Collected Work and the Australian Shadows Award for Best Edited Work that same year. Dan and Lee continue to collaborate on projects, including a crime-horror novel set in a dystopic near-future Auckland. His SFFH short stories have appeared in venues such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and Aurealis, on the Hugo award-winning podcast StarShipSofa and others, and in the anthologies Regeneration, In Sunshine Bright and Darkness Deep, and The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk, to name a few. He is one head of the writing band Cerberus, which includes fellow kiwi author Grant Stone and a certain hairy mango, Matthew Sanborn Smith. Find out more at dan.rabarts.com.
Contributors
Joanne Anderton is an award-winning author of speculative fiction stories for adults, young adults, and anyone who likes their worlds a little different. She sprinkles a pinch of science fiction to spice up her fantasy, and thinks horror adds flavour to just about everything. Her science fiction/fantasy novels have been published by Angry Robot Books and Fablecroft Publishing. Her short story collection, The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories, was published by Fablecroft Publishing. It won the Aurealis Award for best collection, and the Australian Shadows Award for best collected work. You can find her online at joanneanderton.com.
Richard Barnes lives, works and occasionally writes in the coolest little capital in the world: Wellington, New Zealand. His short stories have been published in A Foreign Country and Tales from the Bell Club amongst others.
For a fresh take on Royal Weddings, with added monsters, sword fights and car chases, check out The Royal Wedding from Hell e-novella at smashwords.com.
And why not check out his reviews of the 11th Doctor’s era on reviewthewho.wordpress.com. And one of these days, seriously, Richard WILL write a whole novel. And he blogs at richardbarneswriter.blogspot.co.nz.
Carlington Black lives in an apartment on the Wellington foreshore with his cat Poe, and his late parent’s hound, Jimmy.
AC Buchanan lives just north of Wellington. They’re the author of Liquid City and Bree’s Dinosaur and their short fiction has most recently been published in the Accessing the Future anthology from FutureFire.net and the Crossed Genres Publications anthology Fierce Family. Because there’s no such thing as too many projects, they also co-chair LexiCon 2017: The 38th New Zealand National Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention and edit the recently launched speculative fiction magazine Capricious. You can find them on twitter at @andicbuchanan or at acbuchanan.org.
Octavia Cade has had stories published in Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine and The Dark, amongst other places. Her short fiction has been BSFA- and Sir Julius Vogel-shortlisted. She’d previously sworn never to do a zombie story in her life, but a month pet-sitting for her sister destroyed that notion when she found herself a) burying a dead chicken under the front lawn, and b) skittering back out to that lawn in a thunderstorm at midnight, to roll a heavy planter on top of the grave just in case. (She’d been watching a horror film and is entirely too suggestible).
Shell Child is a writer and a sound designer for films and VR games. Some films she’s worked on include Steven Spielberg’s Tintin and Neil Blomkamp’s Elysium.
Shell lives in Wellington where she’s working on her latest writing project, a young adult sci-fi novel series. Shell’s had a few short stories published in New Zealand speculative fiction anthologies. Storytelling is her passion. She believes the world is what you make it, and so spends most of her time creating worlds. The rest of her time is consumed by movies, wine and cheese. Check out her blog at shellchild.me.
Debbie Cowens is a writer and teacher, living on the Kapiti Coast with her husband and son. She has contributed to a number of anthologies, including the award-winning Baby Teeth: Bite-sized Tales of Terror, for which her short story ‘Caterpillars’ won the AHWA Best Short Story Shadow Award in 2014. She co-authored Mansfield with Monsters, and her first novel Murder & Matchmaking was published by Paper Road Press in 2015.
Jodi Cleghorn (@jodicleghorn) is an author, editor, small press owner and occasional poet with a penchant for the dark vein of humanity. Her stories have been published locally and abroad, including the Aurealis-shortlisted Elyora/River of Bones and the flash collection No Need to Reply.
Tom Dullemond stumbled out of university with a double degree in Medieval/Renaissance studies and Software Engineering. One of these degrees got him a job and he has been writing and working in IT ever since. Tom writes primarily short fiction across all genres, including literary fiction and the occasional poem. He co-authored The Machine Who Was Also a Boy, the first in a series of philosophical fantasy adventures for middle-grade students, and has short fiction published in a handful of anthologies and magazines including Suspended in Dusk, Danse Macabre and Betwixt Magazine. He is the co-creator of Literarium, an online writing management portal.
AJ Fitzwater is a meat-suit-wearing dragon who lives between the cracks of Christchurch, New Zealand. A graduate of Clarion 2014, they were awarded the Sir Julius Vogel Award 2015 for Best New Talent. Their work has appeared in such venues of repute as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Crossed Genres Magazine, Lethe Press’ Heiresses of Ru
ss 2014, Twelfth Planet Press’ Letters to Tiptree, Random Static’s Regeneration: New Zealand Speculative Fiction 2 and many others. Their ideal dinner party guests would include James Tiptree Jr, Joanna Russ, Anne McCaffrey, and Freddie Mercury.
Jan Goldie writes books and short stories. Her latest creation is a children’s fantasy adventure about a boy called Brave and a girl named True. The book features a magical world, strange creatures and months of travel without a bath. Jan loves coffee, champagne and raspberries, so she wouldn’t last long on that journey. You can find out more about Jan and Brave’s Journey by visiting her website at jangoldie.com.
JC Hart is a mother and writer who resides in Taranaki, cushioned between the mountain and the sea. She is the author of several works of both long and short fiction, including several short stories in award-winning anthologies, of which one, ‘The Dead Way’, was a finalist for the Australian Shadow Awards 2014. Alongside her writing, JC is also a freelance editor, and the co-chair of LexiCon 2017: The 38th NZ National Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention.
Perth-based writer Martin Livings has had over 80 short stories published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. His first novel, Carnies, first published by Hachette Livre in 2006, was nominated for both the Aurealis and Ditmar awards, and has since been republished by Cohesion Press. Find him online at martinlivings.com.
Phillip Mann was born in Yorkshire. After working in Drama in the USA, he and his wife moved to New Zealand in 1970 where, apart from working in the theatre, he founded the first New Zealand Drama Studies Department at Victoria University.
He began writing Science Fiction while working at the New China News Agency in Beijing. To date he has published 10 science fiction novels (all with Victor Gollancz) and his most recent work, The Disestablishment of Paradise, was a finalist for the Arthur C Clarke Award in London in 2014. This year, he was made an Honorary Literary Fellow by the New Zealand Society of Authors.
Further information on his writing can be found on his web page at phillipmann.co.nz.
Paul Mannering is an award-winning writer living in Wellington, New Zealand with his wife and two cats. His writing crosses the range of speculative fiction genres from horror, to sci-fi and philosophical comedy. Paul is the author of the Tankbread series; Apocalypse Recon: Outbreak, published by Permuted Press; and the first two volumes of the Drakeforth Trilogy, with Paper Road Press. He holds a long-standing grudge against asparagus and believes that we should all make an effort to be courteous to cheese. He appears on Twitter as @paul_mannering.
Keira McKenzie resides in the desert lands far to the west across the Tasman ditch. In the city by the sea, she spends her time torn between drawing/painting and writing. She has sold illustrations, artwork, short stories and essays. She doesn’t know which comes first: the painting or the words. She has a PhD somehow, despite the cat, the would-be triffids of the courtyard, and the (mostly) invisible dragons of kitchen gardens and rain drops.
Shortlisted in the Sir Julius Vogel Awards, Eileen Mueller has won SpecFicNZ’s Going Global and NZSA’s NorthWrite Collaboration awards. Co-editor of The Best of Twisty Christmas Tales, an anthology including stories by Joy Cowley and David Hill, Eileen was also sub-editor of Lost in the Museum, the 2015 Sir Julius Vogel Best Collected Work. A New Zealander of the Year Local Hero, publicist, and marketing consultant, in 2014 & 2015 she managed Wellington’s Storylines children’s literary festival. In her spare time, Eileen sings in a barbershop chorus, runs community planting projects and juggles children – usually without dropping them!
Since 2011, Perth short story writer and PhD candidate at UWA Anthony Panegyres has had numerous stories published in anthologies and also Australia’s premier literary journals (Meanjin and twice in Overland). He has also been an Aurealis Award Finalist for Best Fantasy Short Story (republished in The Best Australian Fantasy & Horror, 2011). His most recent stories have been published in the anthologies The Best Australian Stories 2014 (edited by Amanda Lohrey) and Bloodlines (edited by Amanda Pillar).
AJ Ponder has a head full of monsters, and recklessly spills them out onto the written page. Beware dragons, dreadbeasts, taniwha, and small children – all are equally as dangerous, and all are capable of treading on your heart, or tearing it, still beating, from your chest.
Specialising in dark fantasy and horror, Angela Slatter has won a World Fantasy Award, five Aurealis Awards, and a British Fantasy Award. She is the author of, among other things, six story collections (including Sourdough and Other Stories and The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings), has a PhD, and was an inaugural Queensland Writers Fellow. Jo Fletcher Books will publish her debut novel, Vigil, in 2016, with its sequels, Corpselight and Restoration, coming in 2017 and 2018 respectively.
Her website is located at angelaslatter.com and she can be found on Twitter @AngelaSlatter.
David Stevens lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife and children. He has worked in criminal law for 25 years, including a year spent in The Hague recently, working with an international tribunal. His fiction has appeared in Crossed Genres, Aurealis, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Pseudopod, Cafe Irreal, the anthology Love Hurts, and elsewhere. He blogs irregularly at davidstevens.info.
David Versace lives with his family in Canberra. He occupies his time between meetings of the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild with minor acts of public service. His work appears in the CSFG anthology Next and in the forthcoming The Lane of Unusual Traders from Tiny Owl Workshop. Find him online at davidversace.com or on Twitter @_Lexifab.
Emma Weakley is a freelance illustrator and sometimes writer currently living on the Kapiti Coast. Her first book, Jack and the Beanstalk, was published in 2010. She has won the Sir Julius Vogel award in 2008 and 2014 for best professional artwork. Emma uses a mixture of traditional drawing and digital painting.
Summer Wigmore has written many books and published one, so far: The Wind City, published by Steam Press. This is their first foray into sending out short stories, and shows the excellent rewards of foraying. Lately, Summer has also taken up a bewildering variety of crafts, from candle-making to drying their own ingredients for tea. A living experiment in gentle pretension.
EG Wilson cut her authorial teeth writing Sherlock fanfiction at uni when she should really have been studying. She fell into writing science fiction after being inspired by Star Wars and That Whedon Show That Was Cancelled After One Season, and has since won NaNoWriMo four years in a row. She lives in South Canterbury, New Zealand; she loves mountains, hates broad beans, and never wears matching socks.
Imprint
Paper Road Press
paperroadpress.co.nz
Copyright © 2016
First published in paperback and ebook in 2016
ISBN 9780473345365 (Mobi) 9780473354169 (Epub)
All stories in this collection are © 2016 their respective authors
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publisher. The authors have asserted their moral rights.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand
Cover art by and © Emma Weakley
Ebook formatting by Marie Hodgkinson
Proofread by Spell Bound