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

by Kathryn Hore

  The creature holds James, one hand wrapped around his neck, one inside his chest, the cold pouring into his heart.

  ‘You,’ it hisses into his ear, ‘are mine.’

  James gags.

  ‘Mine,’ it breathes again. ‘I am Elffingern, and you are my eleventh, as each before you has been my eleventh, and as each after you will be. They speak of me in frightened whispers, the widows and the children and the fearful, but with time, they forget, and stop believing. This is when I hunt, when the legend of Elffingern grows silent in the long dark memories of trees and in the songs of the little ones as they ring around their rosies, their pockets full of posies. I am he of the eleven fingers, and you will remember me, in the short falling of the hours and days you have left, and your nightmares will spill into the world, and there I will be. As long as I have...’

  The monster pauses, as if realising that it has forgotten something. Realising it has grown vain and careless. It has made a mistake.

  Its eyes dart sidewise, to where James’ finger lies in the muck. It releases him and grabs for the severed digit.

  James sucks in a breath and somehow, perhaps by the rush of human desperation, perhaps by the eternal light that burns for heroes in the dark depths of a fairy tale, finds the strength to strike. He snares the string of bones on Elffingern’s chest and yanks. Something breaks, some part of the ghoul, or of the world.

  Elffingern screams, and the trenches devolve into white. Through the collapsing swirl of light and ice and pain, James grinds out a single agonised word:

  ‘Mine.’

  Zwölf (12)

  James put down the last sheet and folded his arms.

  Mary had watched as James read the ten stories Eric had already written, just as she had watched as William had gone away to war, and as the world had gradually fallen to pieces around her. She was fading, a bystander, a ghost abandoned by the past. Her throat was tight as she looked at her son, withering under her brother-in-law’s heartless gaze; the man she had hoped might one day warm her bed and brighten her mornings, like her William once had.

  But she also wanted him to step in, to take charge, to make the hard choices. If she intervened at this critical point in their fledgling relationship, the opportunity would be lost. She would for ever be an interfering mother, a haven for Eric to flee to. The world had a way of sweeping such havens away. Eric must learn respect, must know his place, and accept that the world is harsh and unforgiving. This was James’ chance to be that man. James, who had always lived in his brother’s shadow. James, who had never been able to talk to the young ladies. He had always been slight and somewhat abashed, caught up in books until he got caught up in war and became a man before he was done with being a boy.

  Now here they were, the widowed and the wounded, bound up in the fractured pieces left behind. Behind her, the two rifles which had served the brothers were mounted over the threshold in a crude salute, their barrels crossing. She missed William more than ever at that moment, but William wasn’t coming home. So many were never coming home. James; dear, sweet, shy James, was her best chance at happiness. She had to give him room to adjust, to find his own way through the minefield of fatherhood that they never offered pre-combat training for.

  So lost was she in her thoughts that she was startled as the pair of them, man and boy, rose from their respective seats and headed for the door, for the settling gloom of night. She took a hesitant step after them. ‘Where are you going?’

  James turned, waving a penny in one gloved hand. ‘I understand there is another story ready to go to press. I intend to purchase the first copy.’

  Mary stood speechless, transfixed by the unexpected grin on Eric’s face. She watched as they trooped off into the gloaming toward the print shop, like she had so often watched William trudge off into the pre-dawn shadows. She stood still, her mind racing, lifted by Eric’s smile but equally haunted by the look she had seen in James’ eyes. The same look she had seen in the sanatorium. The hunter, stalking.

  No, she told herself. He’s taking an interest. James has always been fond of stories, of books. He’s merely taking up Eric’s enthusiasm, finding a common ground. She allowed herself a nervous smile as the two figures, one tall and stooped, the other small and vulnerable, disappeared into the gloom, framed by the arc of trigger guards and rifle bolts. Mary tried not to let the sick feeling in her belly overcome her; tried not to dwell on that haunted, hungry gleam in James’ eye.

  She pushed the door closed, familiar with the clank that the two rifles made against each other as it shut. Whether James had hung them there in some pique of dark pride or as a constant reminder of the past, she didn’t know. She would rather not see them, ever again. She would rather forget.

  In the warm glow of the stove and the gaslight, Mary tried to take comfort in the hope that given time her house would become again a place of warmth and laughter. A place for her son to grow, and thrive, and create, like his father had. Like William would’ve wanted.

  She looked at the papers now scattered on the occasional table beside William’s — James’ — armchair. Stories, inspired by nightmares. Her poor boy! What awful things were invading his sleep? Things he couldn’t tell his mother, but couldn’t bear to keep inside. She picked up the pile, sorted through to find what appeared to be the first in the sequence. Eric was as meticulous with dating his work as William always had been. She sat beneath a gaslight, and started to read.

  Dreizehn (13)

  The whiteout is clearing. James stands ankle-deep in snow. On all sides, as the blizzard lifts, he can see tall black trunks, misshapen boughs clawing the white sky. A trail of red drips leads into the dark places between the trees. James knows what he will find if he follows that trail, like breadcrumbs through the forest, and it won’t be a gingerbread house. It will be a cave, or a hovel, or the cold innards of a tree grown too deep, too ancient to offer anything like sanctuary. It will be a lair, where Elffingern huddles, little more than dry skin stretched over bones too thin, too frail to give chase, too weak to fight. It will be cowering, the bloody trophy clutched to its ribs, its last remaining source of the vitality it needs to stay alive, to be needed, to not be forgotten. The last vestige of belief anyone might have of a lost spectre of folklore turned cold as ashes under the driven snow.

  James looks at his own hands. One, shredded by shrapnel and butchered by fey steel, the other clutching tight to a grisly string of yellowing phalanges, each one a fragment of some poor soul, their strength the life-force that sustains the monster which has fed on them for centuries untold.

  James does not want to follow that trail. Too many children have gone down just such a dark path and never returned. Yet he can feel the draw of it. He can feel the cold in his chest, and he knows that as long as Elffingern possesses his severed finger, the wraith will sup at it — at his soul — to keep itself alive. That the ice will continue to creep into his limbs until he will no longer know what warmth feels like, and he grows cold, pale and stiff, like William had.

  But it will not be enough. Elffingern is too old, too burdened with the weights of so many souls for the taste of just one to revive it. It will cower and sap James’ life, until they both perish in the blinding chill.

  All this James can feel in the clatter of dry bone between his fingers. He can feel it in the lure of warm blood that tempts him across the snow, into the dark between the trees. Perhaps he can dare it. Perhaps he can best the wounded beast and win back his prized finger, the link to his essence, and not live out his days in fear.

  But James does not follow the trail of blood — his blood — into the darkness. The thing he faces is ancient and has survived here, in the dark and the cold, by guile and cunning and ruthlessness for so long that even time has forgotten it exists. With difficulty, he loops together the broken strands and drapes them over his neck.

  ‘A trade!’ he shouts to the wind, and the trees, and the terror that eats at his bones. ‘Mine for yours. I will bring yo
u another soul, and in return, you will release mine. Do this, and I will give all of these back.’ He shakes the bones around his neck with his good hand, feeling the cold burrowing into his skin. Already the bones are sinking into him, under his skin, searching for warmth. ‘Do we have a deal?’

  The wind howls, and the blizzard collapses upon him.

  Vierzehn (14)

  Mary’s hands shook as she set the tenth sheet down.

  Stories, just stories.

  Her boy’s narratives, weaving a disjointed tale fit only for nightmare, couldn’t be true. They couldn’t possibly reflect anything real, much less what James had seen in the war. They were stories, nothing more. To believe otherwise was too harrowing to contemplate.

  Nonetheless, she found herself rising, walking to the door, pushing aside the curtain and looking across the long, dark space that separated the sanctuary of her home from the ink-stained cavern where the press machinery slumbered. The press, with its spinning wheels and grinding teeth and slamming plates, shadowed by the watching pines. And was that a figure, a shambling shade among the shadows, stumbling toward the press door?

  Mary was through the door and crossing the empty lot before she had time to consider the danger. She clasped one of the rifles in her hands, though whether it was loaded or if she even knew how to use it were moot points. With any luck, the mere sight of a gun would be enough to frighten any intruder away.

  Eric wasn’t some trading piece in a deal between the demon and the damned. Eric would not be sacrificed to resurrect a dead ghost, in this young land where there should have been so many dreams, so few nightmares.

  Mary heard the terrified cry before she pushed through the door. In the dim pools of illumination cast by two gas lamps, the scene resolved itself in awful, gruesome clarity.

  James, leaning over the manual press, one gloved hand wrapped around the plate lever, one gripping Eric’s wrist as the boy struggled to get his fingers out from under the machine. Between James and Mary, there moved a hunched figure, bone-thin, limping forward one agonised step at a time, its hands outstretched. On one of these hands, a bloody stump where an eleventh digit ought to have been. In the other, a bleeding finger, pale as snow.

  Mary didn’t know how she found the courage to move, except that her son — her only son, all that was left of her William — was in danger. She rushed forward, swinging the rifle, slamming the intruder sideways into the bulking mass of the press. The ring of metal on metal was drowned out by the roar of discharging gunpowder.

  Mary would never learn why James had hung a loaded gun over her door. She would never be able to ask him.

  The bullet ricocheted off the machinery and slammed into James’ ribs, punching through his chest. Shards of red ice scattered and shattered across the dark floor, along with dozens of tiny broken bones.

  ‘Nein,’ croaked the demon as it sank to the floor, withering, hands still grasping for Eric. ‘Meine...’

  ‘Not yours. Mine.’

  Mary brought the rifle butt down with a wet crack, like frozen branches snapping under the weight of too much snow, in a land far away, where fairy tales grew dark claws and hunted in the wake of other men’s wars.

  The brittle red chunks that had been James’ frozen heart began to melt across the concrete, while the finger bones of untold dead mean broke apart and crumbled into dust.

  Stepping over Elffingern’s still form, Mary pulled Eric close to her, holding him tight, like she would never let war or nightmare take him away from her again. Eric pulled himself closer to his mother, shivering, and ever so gently, rubbed his fingers against hers.

  But she doubted she could keep the nightmares away, not for long. Men had ways of making their own horrors, and of bringing them up out of the darkness and into the light. Sometimes, all you needed was the frozen remains of a heart, stripped of everything it had ever loved and laid out to die in the snow. They said that this war, the Great War, could never be repeated, that it would decide, once and for all, the shape of the world. Mary prayed that was true, for if there was to be another, they would surely take her son from her, and she was sure that was a nightmare she could never wake from.

  ‘No more stories,’ she whispered to Eric, and he nodded, and wrapped his cold fingers tight around hers.

  Author Biographies

  Rue Karney is a horror writer and amateur neuroscientist with a love of the bizarre and gruesome. She has worked as an artists’ model, barmaid, and frozen food packer, but (apart from writing horror) her most interesting job has been cleaning toilets in a pub in the middle of the desert. When not creating malicious characters and evil scenarios, Rue enjoys learning French and reading about psychopaths. Her work has also appeared in the Hic Dragones anthology, Hauntings.

  Jason Nahrung grew up on a Queensland cattle property and now lives in Ballarat with his wife, the author, Kirstyn McDermott. He works as an editor and journalist to support his travel addiction. His fiction is invariably darkly themed, perhaps reflecting his passion for classic B-grade horror films and ‘80s goth rock. His most recent long fiction title is the gothic tale, Salvage (Twelfth Planet Press), and the outback vampire duology, Blood and Dust and The Big Smoke (Clan Destine Press). ‘Triage’, written specifically for an anthology of the EnVision writers’ workshop, marks an early outing for a character from The Big Smoke who has, like that novel, gone through a few changes of his own. Jason lurks online at www.jasonnahrung.com

  Marty Young is a Bram Stoker nominated and Australian Shadows Award winning editor, fiction and non-fiction writer, and sometimes ghost hunter. He was the founding president of the Australian Horror Writers Association from 2005-2010, and one of the creative minds behind the internationally acclaimed Midnight Echo magazine, for which he also served as executive editor until mid-2013. His website is www.martyyoung.com

  Natalie Satakovski is a former English teacher who has turned to copywriting to support her fiction habit. Her work has appeared in AntipodeanSF and Infernal Ink Magazine. She loves reading all things creepy, from southern gothic to the new weird. Tweet things for her to retweet @Satalie

  Stuart Olver lives in Brisbane with his wife and two sons. He is the author of the award-winning coffee table book, The Scenic Rim, and would spend all his time exploring and photographing mountains if he could. In 2014, he won the AHWA Flash Fiction competition with his story, ‘What Came Through’.

  J. Ashley Smith is a British-Australian writer of dark fiction and other materials, some of which can be found at www.jashleysmith.com. He is the 2015 winner of the AHWA Short Story competition for his tale, ‘On the Line’. He lives in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales (where there are many leeches), tormenting himself with nightmares while his wife and two sons sleep.

  Cameron Trost is a writer of strange, mysterious, and creepy tales about people just like you. His short stories have been published in dozens of magazines and anthologies, including Midnight Echo, Morpheus Tales, and Crowded Quarantine’s Of Devils and Deviants. His collection, Hoffman’s Creeper and Other Disturbing Tales, is available from Black Beacon Books. He is the vice-president and Queensland community leader of the Australian Horror Writers’ Association, and a member of the Queensland Writers’ Centre. Rainforests, thunderstorms, whisky, and chess are a few of his favourite things. Visit him at www.trostlibrary.blogspot.com

  Joanne Anderton writes speculative fiction with anime and manga influences. She sprinkles a little science fiction to spice up her fantasy, and thinks a touch of horror adds flavour to everything. Her novels, Debris, Suited, and Guardian, have been published by Angry Robot Books and Fablecroft Publishing. Her short story collection, The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories won the Aurealis Award for best collection, and the Australian Shadows Award for best collected work. Visit her online at www.joanneanderton.com

  Mark McAuliffe lives in Brisbane. Since the 1990s, he has had stories and poetry appear in several small press publications, including Skinned alive, E.O.D. and Daarke Worlde. More re
cently, he has been published in the ezines, Eclecticism, and AntipodeanSF, as well as the anthologies, An Eclectic Slice of Life (Dark Prints Press), and Til Death Do Us Part (Burnt Offerings Books).

  Mark Smith-Briggs is the president of the Australian Horror Writers’ Association. His short fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies in Australia, the US, and Canada, while his non-fiction and review work in the genre has won a Chronos Award and been nominated for two Ditmars. He lives in Melbourne where he works as an editor with Leader Newspapers. Find him at www.freewebs.com/marksmithbriggs

  Kathryn Hore is a Melbourne writer, photographer and occasional librarian. She writes speculative fiction and business non-fiction, with fiction appearing in a variety of anthologies and magazines, including the AHWA’s own Midnight Echo, and a novel in the works. She takes photos of weddings and spiders, though not usually at the same time, and has a website she occasionally remembers to update: www.letmedigress.com

  Anthony Ferguson has published short stories, flash fiction pieces, and non-fiction articles in Suspect Thoughts, Camp Horror, Lost Souls, Ripples, Horrorscope, MicroHorror, Midnight Echo, and the anthology, RomComZom. He wrote the non-fiction book, The Sex Doll: A History (McFarland 2010), and edited the short story collection, Devil Dolls and Duplicates in Australian Horror (Equilibrium 2011). He was awarded second prize in the AHWA/Melbourne Zombie Convention 2013 Short Story Competition, and received an honourable mention in the AHWA 2014 Flash Fiction Competition. He blogs at www.apferguson.com