In Sunshine Bright and Darkness Deep: An Anthology of Australian Horror

by Kathryn Hore

  Nosplentyn tensed.

  The nurse leaned over the man in the bed and caressed his sallow cheek.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered, ‘but it’s the best I can offer. You will live on, for ever, in me.’ She touched her breast, so pert under her crisp white uniform.

  Her fangs slid out as she tilted the man’s head to one side. His carotid bobbed weakly and he mumbled in his sleep.

  ‘How can you stand the taste of his blood?’ Nosplentyn asked.

  Startled, she sprang back. The patient’s head lolled. His eyes flickered but couldn’t resist the combined pull of morphine and exhaustion.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ the nurse asked, crouching behind the bed, her gaze flicking between Nosplentyn and the door.

  ‘I’ve been sent to have a word. A final word.’

  She straightened.

  ‘I see.’ She looked down at the patient as Nosplentyn stepped forward into the room’s subdued light, allowing his shadows to fall away.

  He really would have preferred to have been wearing his robe. Somehow, it would have felt more official than army boots, cargo pants, and hoodie.

  ‘He’s dying, you know,’ the nurse said, and caressed the man’s forehead as Nosplentyn stopped at the foot of the bed. Her hand shook.

  Nosplentyn nodded. ‘They all are.’

  ‘He’s a good father, a gifted musician.’ She fondled a silver ankh on a chain around her throat. ‘Why should that be lost through no fault of his own?’

  ‘That’s life,’ Nosplentyn snarled, gesturing with a clawed hand, fangs extending. The memory hit him with a sudden rush that made him gasp: the ambush, the flames, the pain, and the stranger leaning over him, refusing to let him pass through to the peace that waited so near he could almost reach out and touch it…

  The nurse ran.

  Nosplentyn cursed his momentary distraction and gave chase.

  Damn, this place is getting to me, all right.

  He caught her in the hallway, pushed her against a wall so hard a print fell. Glass shattered across the polished floor.

  His claw drew blood from her throat as he pinned her. The wall flexed, suddenly elastic as the spirit world reacted to her fear, his frustration. Nosplentyn paused, fighting to seal the rift. It did not help that the nurse, aware of his hesitation, if not the cause, was trying to mentally manipulate his psyche as well.

  ‘His youngest daughter just turned two,’ the nurse said, voice pleading, eyes wide and shining with tears. ‘She’ll barely remember him at all.’

  Nosplentyn’s grip loosened, the talon retracting from her flesh as the walls, the ceiling, the floor, ghosted back.

  ‘That’s her blessing,’ he stammered, the spirits’ howling making him stumble. ‘Mortals are made that way. Time heals. Memory fades.’ But not fast enough.

  The nurse struck with razored nails.

  The world snapped back into painful solidity as Nosplentyn sprawled on the floor, chest burning from the cut.

  Her sneakers barely made a sound as she fled.

  Damn it! He couldn’t afford to lose her. Couldn’t give the Council a reason to doubt him, to move against his family.

  Nosplentyn crouched, using the pain to shore up his psychic barriers. Then he ran, following her into the ‘staff only’ area.

  She was heading for the nearest exit. Too young or too panicked, maybe both, to simply go out a window. Falling back on human instinct and running for the stairs. Nosplentyn drew closer.

  A lift door opened and an orderly appeared, pushing a trolley of linen.

  The nurse dived inside the lift and Nosplentyn saw relief on her face as the doors slid shut, cutting him off. Going down. If she had the smarts, she’d stop it before ground level. Then she’d have her pick of escape routes.

  Cursing, he mind-fucked the orderly, then steeled himself. This was the only way he could be certain of cutting off her escape.

  He phased into the spirit world.

  It was every bit as bad as he’d expected. Dark clouds of misery throbbed with bright red anguish. Scarlet bolts of agony jagged through the suffocating desolation. Spirits howled like jet engines as they flitted down midnight corridors, dodging the pale glow of plants and people projecting into the inside-out plane from the mortal side. Some still wore the shadows of their mortal faces, eyes wide with bewilderment or narrowed with anxiety. Others were little more than a screaming maw of pain and fury. They clawed at Nosplentyn’s aura, confounded by his undead energy, unable to find purchase as he kept his mind resolute, his shield intact.

  Nosplentyn concentrated on tracking the nurse’s ghostly signature as he descended through the floors, gradually catching up. Faster! The spirits were leaching his strength. He mustn’t get caught here. He couldn’t let them in!

  He dived through the spirit world’s membrane, feeling it snap closed behind him as he re-appeared in the lift.

  ‘How the hell did you get in here?’ the nurse asked. She cowered against the wall, hands up before her. Fingernails glinted sharply.

  ‘A gift.’ He hit the emergency stop.

  ‘Please… I could just leave town,’ she pleaded.

  ‘Too late for that. You’ve been noticed,’ he said. ‘You should’ve stuck to the platelets and plasma, left the living alone.’

  ‘Processed product’s not the same,’ she said. ‘It stills the hunger, but doesn’t hold the memories, the emotions… I need those dreams! Don’t you miss them?’

  ‘Not especially.’ His hardened nails sliced into his palm with the strength of his lie.

  They circled in the confined space. He could smell her fear, as though the trembling lip and shaking legs weren’t enough.

  ‘I wasn’t going to turn him, I swear. I know it wouldn’t have cured the disease, just preserved it. Maybe made the effects even worse.’

  Nosplentyn flexed his flame-scarred hand as the fingers grew into claws. He was quite aware of the limitations of the change.

  ‘So you were just going to absorb his life force,’ he said, stalking toward her. ‘How kind. But what makes you think it’s yours to take?’

  ‘He would have lived on, in me,’ she said, clutching her necklace.

  ‘That’s his family’s job, not yours.’

  ‘We have a gift, you and I. Why should we be the only ones who don’t have to face this?’ She gestured at the lift walls, but he knew what she meant.

  ‘But we do,’ Nosplentyn said. ‘Everyone does. Some just sooner than others.’

  He pounced, claws slashing, as she leaped to meet him…

  #

  Nosplentyn sat in the dented, bloody lift, numbly watching as the body burned to ash.

  When he’d struck the killing blow, the rogue’s life force had flashed from her body like a firework, shimmering like a miniature Milky Way with the essence of those she had devoured. She would’ve said ‘saved’, he supposed. Her spirit blasted through the poisonous cloud that was the hospital like a rocket and quickly passed from Nosplentyn’s astral sight. He had no idea where it was headed. That was a mystery he would happily wait to solve. He had things to do. Overturn the Council. Reclaim his family. Find a reason to endure when so many others could not.

  On his way out, he stopped at room eight in 4C. The young man still dreamed; part hoping, part dreading the arrival of his latest bone marrow biopsy. Nosplentyn touched Mr Smith’s forehead and willed him past the level of dreams. He didn’t need to see the test results to know the truth. But he let Mr Smith know just one thing and hoped it would lessen his grief when the results arrived. Tomorrow night, Nosplentyn would find the man’s family, and when the children slept, he would anchor in their minds a single memory of their father so it would never fade. It was the only comfort he could offer; the most any mortal could hope for.

  UPON THE DEAD OCEANS

  Marty Young

  As The USS Hodson cut through the dead ocean, I stared at the captain, stunned into silence by what he’d just told me. The words had been
like an anchor to force me into the chair before him.

  The weathered old man was seated at his cluttered and computer-less desk. He had stared down at the mess while speaking, almost as if the failure of which he spoke was his own doing and he couldn’t bear to meet my eyes — nothing could have been further from the truth. He kept his head down now as the last echoes of his words reverberated around the small room.

  Out through the tinted portholes, the ocean dipped and rose; an angry sky with swollen clouds threatening more acid rain, then deep dead waters, followed by sky again. I could feel my insides rolling with the motion, sinking with the troughs and riding the crests. The oceans were anoxic, filled with hydrogen sulphide. Even thinking about them made me feel sick.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said. It was all I had.

  Captain Leahner looked up, his grey eyes rimmed with red and underlined in black. ‘I used to pray to him once,’ he said as he reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of dirty scotch. He unscrewed the cap and swigged from the neck, then offered it to me. ‘But Jesus gave up on us a long time ago. This is the only God left that’s worth praying to.’

  A long time ago, too many nights now to count, scotch had been my drink of choice. I’d had ten bottles sitting on my cabinet at home at last count; Laphroaig, Ardbeg, Penderyn, Chivas Regal, Glenfiddich — names now that meant nothing — or gave only the faintest of savoury memories.

  This liquid made me cough. I wiped my lips and returned the bottle to the captain. ‘New Zealand dome is at capacity so whoever goes will have to try and come back,’ I said. ‘You know that, right?’

  ‘How many people were lost on your way to The Hodson?’

  ‘Enough. Too many.’

  ‘More than half, right?’

  It was my turn to look down. I could still see their eyes as they drew and then released their last breaths, the way they just, faded, went dull, then out. The memory will never go faint though, even after all I’ve seen. There’s no limit to the horror one can endure and recall with clarity.

  ‘Don’t carry their deaths; it’ll wear you down if you do. Grind you into the dust. But get used to the feeling. You know there are no other options. That message has to get through.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said again, looking down at my calloused hands, hands that had held so much death and now seemed destined to hold even more, because I knew he was right, damn him.

  #

  After the meeting, I walked back to my cabin through steel hallways, but the sounds of the ship were different, more weary, exhausted. The creaking, the groaning. The echoes. The grim looks I saw on the faces of the crew.

  I fell onto my bunk. I didn’t bother turning any lights on.

  The Hodson was a prototype submarine-destroyer hybrid that ran on multiple power sources, capable of surface cruising as well as submerging. Its multitude of large windows had made underwater travel especially scenic before things had died. Now those windows were kept opaque so the mortuary oceans didn’t crush those aboard under their oppressive weight. During surface travel, the windows were automatically turned from opaque to tint to allow a view outside while blocking the ultraviolet radiation that had killed so many, but most of us chose to keep them blackened — apart from Captain Leahner, who used the view to remind him of where we were.

  I always made sure mine were blackened. I’d seen enough of that outside world.

  Our survival had been sheer luck; there was no other way to describe it. When Portland Dome had gone, it had gone fast, far more quickly than any of us had believed possible. We’d thought we could patch things up enough to get us through to The Hodson’s next visit, but we’d been wrong. And with no way of getting long distance messages out anymore and nowhere else to go, we had headed to the dock in the impossible hope the ship would magically be there, outside of its biannual port call.

  And it had been, looking for its own miracle — but how many miracles were left in the world? Perhaps they were all extinct, too, along with hope.

  The tears took me by surprise, but the pillow quickly swallowed up the sounds of my sobbing.

  The wind picked up during the night and became a wild turbulent mistress to the ocean, casting its surfaces into disarray. Ghostly voices wailed about the ship, distraught at not finding a way inside to chill the blood of the men and women cowering within. Those sounds left us with visions of the dead surging alongside the vessel — God knows there was enough death to make such a ruckus.

  The USS Hodson had been made to withstand much of what the seas could throw at it but it was an elderly statesman now, with arthritic limbs and cataracts in her eyes. Her joints creaked and groaned with every movement, her decks shuddered.

  Sometime deep in the night, I heard the engines shut down; their hum had been a constant, a steady calming influence, a reminder of past technologies. Even under the surging ocean and wailing wind, the thrum had been there — but now that vacancy churned my stomach as much as the storm outside.

  #

  The next day, I met the captain at oh-eight hundred in his office as arranged. I was tired. My eyes felt gritty. The little sleep I’d managed had been filled with the tormenting dead. Faces I knew had come to glare at me through the portholes as I’d sat on my bunk, staring back.

  The boat still drifted with the currents but the wild motions of last night were gone. The swell remained a good several metres so the vessel rolled from side to side, with all of its aches and pains.

  Captain Leahner’s weathered face was set taut this morning too, and his eyes were troubled. He swayed on well-built sea legs. ‘The engines failed again last night,’ he said, and for the first time since I’d known him, I heard the exhaustion in his words. It was a frightening thing.

  ‘They’re still down, aren’t they?’

  ‘They’ve been down for the past five hours. My engineers are working on them. They’re confident they can get them started again, but with the wind we had—’

  ‘Are we lost?’ I blurted, panicked by the idea of drifting endlessly in the dead oceans, being chased by howling ghosts.

  ‘No, but we’re off course. Quite some way too.’ I saw his barrel chest rise as he drew in a deep breath. ‘Come on, let’s do what needs doing.’

  ‘Captain—’

  Leahner fixed his worn out eyes on mine. ‘You choose them or I will, and then any deaths will be on you. You don’t want to live with those ghosts following you, believe me.’

  ‘But they’ll never make it! We’ll never make it! It’s a suicide mission. It’s hopeless.’

  ‘There’s always hope.’

  ‘How can there be?’

  The captain’s eyes flared again. ‘Because it’s up to you to create it, and hold onto it, no matter what.’

  I wanted to ask him how anyone could do that in a world like this, but he ushered me from his cabin out into the swaying, creaking hallway and toward the long metallic room that was the Mess. I felt as sick now as I had last night during the worst of the storm. The only hope I had was his, and I hoped it was strong enough for the both of us.

  The thirty-four men and women I had spent Armageddon with were waiting for us; the captain had sent out word yesterday for them to meet us here. There were a lot of pale faces amongst that familiar rabble.

  ‘Come close,’ he called as he entered the room. My companions looked at us and in every pair of eyes I could see worry, more worry than usual. Those eyes had coloured in darkly since our trek across the mostly dead lands but there was more darkness within them now and that was some feat; I’d been certain they’d reached their limits of fear and terror a long time ago.

  Some of the captain’s crew had stationed themselves just within the two doorways, and even from this distance I could see the tension holding them rigid as they watched us.

  ‘The Hodson is dying,’ Captain Leahner said in his commanding voice. It was enough to still the restlessness filling the mess.

  ‘It’s falling apart and we don’t have the equipment to f
ix it anymore. We’ve replaced almost every inch of this ship over the years but we’ve reached the end of what’s possible. We’ve searched docks and cities, warehouses and wharfs across the world. We’ve done everything we could.’

  There were murmurs but not much more from the ghosts of men and women before him.

  ‘We’re heading for Cape Town Dome but will first dock at New Zealand Dome so they know what’s happening. We can’t leave them without word. But make no mistake; this will be our last journey. Once at our final dock, everyone aboard will disembark and head for Cape Town Dome, and there we will remain, probably for ever. There will be no further connection between the three remaining domes of human civilization.’

  It was obvious his words weren’t new to the crew as those impressive men stood tall and proud by the doorways, but my unwilling companions were faring differently; I could see the horrified expressions spreading as the impact of what his words meant struck home.

  ‘But how can it be failing?’ Andrew Evans asked in a frightened voice. His gaunt cheeks were splotchy red; they always got that way when the man was flustered. ‘It’s made of titanium, isn’t it?’

  ‘There’s more to the ship than just the hull. Between the water, atmosphere, and the rain, it’s a surprise we’ve managed to keep afloat as long as we have.’

  ‘Will we make it to Cape Town Dome if the ship’s that bad?’ Someone else asked — Toby McDonald, late forties, grey hair, with prominent cheek bones. He’d once been a prominent mathematician and author of five Nature papers, too — not that it mattered anymore.

  ‘Truth is we don’t know. But—’

  ‘Then why try? Why not just dock at New Zealand Dome and stay there? You’ll save a lot of death that way.’

  The captain said nothing for a second, and again, I caught a glimpse of the despair within him; it was a shadow in his eye, gone before I could focus on it. It was the slow breath he drew, released before his chest could swell appreciably.