The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2010 (volume 1)

by Paul Haines

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “He was a nice man and asked me questions about work and school. Then he asked about boys and my body, words I didn’t like. I was not brave enough to tell him to stop but I didn’t answer him.

  “When we reached the cemetery he pulled right inside. It was raining and he said he didn’t want me to get wet though of course I would, standing out there. He stopped the car and jumped out while I gathered my things. He opened the door for me and I thought that was kind. But he didn’t let me out. No.”

  She squeezed her hands together. “He pushed into the back seat and he took what my husband should have had. He hit me many times. As he climbed out, I tried to get out the other door but he slammed my fingers. He dragged me out into the mud and forced my face down into it. Then he did more terrible things, tearing and hurting me.”

  She thrust her fingers into her pocket and brought them out covered with sugar. She sucked them.

  “He picked me up and shoved me into the taxi. He could have left me there but he thought of a way to cover up his crime. He drove me up the hill to the hospital and dumped me here. I couldn’t speak sense for two days and by then it was too late.”

  “And he invented the ghost story to explain where you had gone, in case people saw you getting in his taxi?”

  The old lady looked at me and smiled. “I am that girl.”

  I thought, You cling to your youth. You dream of being young again, before this happened to you.

  The head nurse came around the corner. “There you are! You shouldn’t take her away. She is very unwell. Very fragile.”

  * * *

  I went home to paint in the afternoon light. Rain obliterated Suva Bay and was headed our way, so I had to work fast. My painting of Malvika disturbed me, because I had the sense of her as a young girl more strongly than of her as an old woman.

  The hair on her chin. I knew there was a long, dark hair, but did it curl? Which side of her face was it on?

  I hailed a taxi and had him stop at a roadside market, where I bought bananas and pawpaw with the change in my purse. Nobody would question me if I came with fruit.

  Out of habit I asked the driver about That Girl. This one said, “She disappears. I can show you the place.”

  * * *

  I went to Malvika although it was close to dinnertime and the hospital didn’t like a break in the routine. She sat outside the door of the dorm. The other inmates used the door at the end of the verandah.

  She sat bolt upright, her eyes wide open. She didn’t blink. Her mouth was open and saliva had dried around her lips.

  “Omigod,” I said. “She’s dead.”

  The nurse stopped me. “No, she’s in a state.”

  The old lady’s eyes were reddened and dry. I stared into them, looking for a sign of life, but nothing. There was no pulse. No breath. I remembered nothing of my first aid training and didn’t want to put my mouth on her anyway.

  “We must lay her flat,” I said. I could do that much. The others watched me.

  “You should leave her comfortable,” Sangeeta said, shaking her head. She smelled of burnt hair.

  “We must call the doctor,” I said, but even as I spoke I was thinking, “Prussian Blue. If I mix Prussian Blue with Titanium White, water it down, I’ll get her dead eyes. I’ll paint an image of herself as a young girl in there, then wipe it away and paint the blank.”

  “She’s empty,” the nurse whispered to me. “Her ghost is taking a holiday. She will be back. Just wait.”

  Five minutes passed and I knew I had to take charge. I called for the doctor on my cell phone. He said, “No hurry. The nurses will call for the morgue when they are ready.”

  I squatted beside Malvika. I wouldn’t get this chance again. The hair on her chin; it didn’t curl.

  And it happened. After ten minutes, maybe fifteen, Malvika began to twitch, blink her eyes, then she curled over into a ball and rocked.

  “She . . . has a doctor examined her?”

  “They are not interested.”

  “How often does this happen?”

  “Sometimes. It rests her. She is happier for days afterwards.”

  No one else seemed concerned and I wondered if it was my Western woman ways which made me so terrified of an old woman who could die and come back to life as if she was merely sleeping.

  I sat quietly and sketched their night time routine. That calmed me. Malvika sat up, demanding sugar. Yellowish saliva trails covered her chin. Her lips were dry and cracked. Her eyes were still out of focus and almost purple, it seemed to me. Her left cheek was reddened, as if the blood had already started pooling there.

  I sketched those marks of death.

  * * *

  I didn’t go back to St Martin’s for a while. I was offered a commission from a wealthy Frenchwoman and the lure of the money, plus the idea of having my work hang in France, convinced me to take it.

  One afternoon, feeling frustrated with the pretty Frenchwoman’s face, I pulled out my portrait of Malvika. It made me feel ill to look at it. I had not painted a dead woman before. In the background I had painted a clock, set at 5:37.

  I thought of the taxi drivers and how easily they repeated the legend of the disappearing girl. How happily they unconsciously supported their rapist companion. I knew that I would not be able to finish my portrait of Malvika until I knew her as a young girl, traced her steps over and over again.

  I began then a week, or was it two? Of catching taxis just after 5, outside the handicraft centre. I did it a dozen times, maybe more. Some of them told me proudly, “A lot of drivers won’t pick up young girls from there. But I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  One evening, the driver said, “You been shopping?” His eyes looked at me in the mirror but not at me. Beside me. I’ve always found cross-eyed people hard to talk to.

  “Yes,” I said, though I had no bags.

  “You girls going dancing tonight?”

  “Girls?”

  “You and your friend.” He nodded at me. Beside me.

  I felt prickles down my right arm, as if someone had leaned close to me. I didn’t believe there was anyone there, but I didn’t want to look. I shifted nearer to the door, and turned my head.

  Nothing. No one.

  The driver said something in Hindi.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Hindi,” I said, but he spoke more, pausing now and then as you would in a conversation.

  “Your friend is very shy,” he said.

  We turned up the road to the cemetery, heading for St Martin’s. I had to continue, my heart beat with it. We passed the cemetery, pulled into St Martin’s. The driver turned around.

  “Where . . . is . . . your friend?” he shouted. He didn’t look like a man who shouted. “Where is she? You pay me.”

  “Will you wait? I just want to see something.”

  He shook his head, already driving away as I shut the door. “Where is she? Where is that girl?”

  * * *

  Malvika sucked her fingers at me. “Sugar? Sugar?”

  No one had cleaned her up and I could see the marks of death clearly, the yellowish saliva on her chin, the purple colour of her eyes. “Have you been away? Out?” I said.

  She nodded. “I am that girl,” and she smiled at me.

  * * *

  I finished my portrait of Malvika. The paint is very thick because I painted her over and over again; young, old, dead. Young, old dead. I could never decide which face captured her best.

  Walker

  Dirk Flinthart

  Julie Kincaid’s house seemed no different to many older houses in the suburb. White, peeling weatherboard with a picket fence and an overgrown garden, where two frangipani trees blossomed fragrantly, one in pink and the other in yellow. Jacarandas and poincianas shaded the back yard, sheltering myriad cicadas that chirred rhythmically in the building heat of the morning. Tufts of browning grass sprouted in the cracks of the cheerfully uneven concrete path from the gate to th
e verandah.

  But seen from the corner of my eye, the whole house shimmered.

  “There is power here,” I said to Kan-yo, stepping back from the fence. “Why haven’t we noticed so much power before? How did we miss it?”

  From my pocket she pulsed back laughter. And yes, perhaps it was a foolish question. There are few Walkers, and we range widely. Easy to miss one simple house in an ocean of suburban lookalikes. Yet the power here was sufficient to disrupt hundreds of Anima inhabiting machinery all across the suburb. From the wall of display teevees in Retravision, locked mysteriously into Sesame Street, Kan-yo and I followed the trail through past vending machines that refused money, around an ATM quietly coughing twenties and fifties into the hot summer morning, down to CafeTronic where Max’s Internet machines let me speak with Down Time and Sunlight Wires, the two Walkers nearest my region. Time and Wires knew of no other Walkers with business in the north of Brisbane, and we had tentatively decided it must be someone new when Max broke the news about the escalator failures in the mall.

  A Walker new to the power, untrained in the laws of the Dreaming and the ways of the Anima—such a one posed a great danger. Kan-yo and I found the escalators too late. The power had already been shut off, consigning their Anima to the dark side of the Dreaming for a time. But nearby was a glass elevator, doors hissing open and closed at random. While I spoke to the security guard, Kan-yo soothed the Animus of the elevator, and in turn, she learned the scent of the Anima of all the phones which were in the elevator when this unknown Walker exerted her power—for Kan-yo insisted the Walker was ‘she’. I should have known, for even I tasted the scraps and leavings of her power like milk and frangipani blossoms at the back of my throat, but Kan-yo, with her Animus senses and the clever tricks of her Nokia-built form, spoke with certainty of this Julie Kincaid.

  And so we came to an ordinary-seeming house on a warm summer’s day.

  Kan-yo pulsed caution, and a query. “No,” I said to her, watching the aluminium security door that led to the interior of the house. “I don’t think we need the others yet. I don’t want to frighten her. But—stay in contact with the Anima that Time and Wires carry, yes? A new Walker, no matter how strong she is, hasn’t the knowledge to overcome me. Yet if she was strong enough, I might have to hurt her in defending myself. If it comes to that, we will retreat until the others come.”

  Halfway up the steps to the verandah, Kan-yo pulsed again, and I paused uneasily. “I feel it too,” I said. “There’s too much. There’s a feeling . . .” A feeling of what? Something hidden, something behind and under the spilling, jittery energy of an untaught Walker. “I think we have little time, Kan-yo. Watch carefully!”

  A slender young woman, comfortable in a big t-shirt and paint-spattered shorts, came within moments of my knock. From behind the security-mesh door, she frowned.

  “Can I help you?”

  I held up one of my business cards. “Canvassing for work, miss,” I said. “You’ve got a ‘sold’ sign on your fence, so you’ve just moved in. An old place like this, likely you’ve found a few problems with the wiring. Maybe you’ve had trouble with the appliances?”

  She withdrew a little into the shadowy interior, but her hand fell to the doorknob. “There have been a couple things, just lately. But—” she peered at my card, her blonde hair falling in wings about her face. “Kadaitcha? Does that mean something? I mean, it seems familiar.”

  “An old Aborigine term for a sort of magic-man,” I offered. “It’s kind of a joke. You’re meant to think my repair work is magic, see? My grand-mum is aboriginal. Her people came from up Bundaberg way. She used to tell me about the Kadaitcha-man when I was little. But it’s just a business name.”

  Still she hesitated. Through the haze of power that shimmered and sparked off the house, I couldn’t get a real sense of her, or what she thought of me, so I stuck my card through the mail slot. “Look, I don’t want to pressure you. If I’ve come at a bad time that’s okay. You can use my card. Maybe call a few of the people around here. This is kind of my suburb. I do work for ‘most everyone.” I saw the toys scattered on the carpet behind her, in the hallway. “Call the school. I fixed their water coolers the other day. And I repaired the TV at the daycare centre in Winton street last week.”

  She picked up my card, looking at it carefully. “Actually—I really could use some help,” she admitted, and I heard the deadlock snick back. “It’s the ceiling fans. They keep coming on by themselves. It’s a bit scary.” The door swung back, and on her unspoken invitation, Kan-yo and I entered.

  An old Queenslander, the house was cooler inside, and breezy. The ceilings were high, but I had to fight the urge to hunch my shoulders against the claustrophobic pressure of the power in the air, in the very walls and floor of the old place. Kan-yo shuddered on my chest, and I soothed her wordlessly.

  “This way,” said Julie Kincaid, showing us into a sunlit lounge room. Overhead, the ceiling fan chopped at the air, blasting it into the corners, rippling the curtains, flapping a newspaper on the worn brocade sofa. I didn’t even have to glance at the switch on the wall. The distress of the Animus in the fan was clear, even through the distortion of the Dreaming in the house. The poor thing hurt.

  Unthinking, I raised my hand and cleared the tangle of energies around it with a gesture. The fan slowed at once. To distract the young Walker, I asked a question. “How long has this been happening, Miss Kincaid?”

  She stared at me, her eyes narrowing. “I don’t remember telling you my name.”

  Kan-yo throbbed against my chest. I bit my lip. The ungrounded power in the place, that sense of something else—I wasn’t thinking clearly. “Letters sticking out of the postbox on the fence,” I said. “Name of Kincaid. I shouldn’t have, but I looked.”

  Kan-yo buzzed again, and then again, while Julie Kincaid watched me. She reached into her pocket and brought out a mobile phone, keeping her eyes on me while she dialled. “I’m just going to check with the daycare centre, like you suggested,” she said, in a quiet, even tone. “I don’t know how you did that with the fan, by the way. I don’t know whether to be grateful or not. Why don’t you see what you can do for the one in the room opposite?”

  A clear dismissal. I nodded, and stepped into the hall. Behind me, I heard her speaking calmly. Kan-yo confirmed she had called the daycare centre, so I opened the door of the room Julie Kincaid had indicated, and entered.

  And stopped, staggered by a heavy, rolling wave of silence that almost pushed me back into the hall. There was no subtlety to it, but the sheer strength shook me, and Kan-yo shrilled wildly. I had no time to reassure her. The room commanded my whole attention. Stuffed plush toys. A small bed with gaily coloured sheets. Bright, crayon pictures decorated the walls; only crude stick figures, yes, but instantly recognisable to anyone who could walk the Dreaming. Here a car-Animus, obviously a Holden by its sturdy haunches and narrow forelimbs. There a cheerful kitchen-scene, complete with toaster-Animus, blender-Animus, and microwave-Animus. And there—

  Kan-yo saw it too, and shrieked. I swept the picture from the wall, leaving the sticky-taped corners raggedly behind, and crossed to the lounge room in two strides. Julie Kincaid started as I entered, and I held the picture up between us, silencing her phone with a gesture. “Your daughter,” I said. “Where is she?”

  She blinked, summoning indignation, and I cut her off. “There is no time. Listen to me. This house has a cool room. One of those big, industrial fridges they use in pubs and restaurants. You’ve had electrical troubles since it arrived. It is dangerous. Your daughter is in danger.” More than I could possibly explain to someone who couldn’t walk in the Dreaming, and it was obvious that the daughter who slept in that bedroom, not Julie, was the new-fledged Walker.

  “No,” said Julie, confusion writ large on her face. “That’s not—I mean . . . yes, my husband is a cook. We have a home catering business. The cool room was secondhand, and we had some trouble setting it up with the old el
ectricals in this place. But there’s no danger. Gracie can’t even open it. And how—”

  I grabbed her hand. “She won’t need to open it. Come. She’ll need us both.”

  I dragged her, protesting incoherently, into the hall. The cool room would be accessed from the kitchen, and in the old Queenslanders, that meant the back of the house. I could already feel it, if I concentrated. “Kan-yo, pass the word through Eve and Killayli to Sunlight Wires and Down Time. Whatever they’re doing, stop and prepare. The creature here will know we’ve come. It will act quickly. If we have to go Darkside to reach it, I want help as near as I can get it.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Julie Kincaid shook off my hand and caught up with me as I burst into room at the end of the hallway.

  “Mobile phone. Hands free,” I said. It was the only explanation that would make sense to anyone but another Walker. “I’ll need help for this.” To my left, a dining room with an antique wooden table and matching, uncomfortable, curly-legged chairs. To my right, a modern kitchen dressed out in stainless steel, and at the back, a single, white door rimmed in steel. Waves of hatred poured off it, hitting me like soft hammers, and I stopped. “Secondhand,” I said, glaring at Julie, who stared back at me, her eyes wide. “Where did you get it?”

  Shrinking, she pulled away from me, reaching behind her for the telephone on the counter. I raised my voice. “Where did you get it?”

  “A butcher,” she whimpered. “In Zillmere. Going out of business. It was cheap because of the cleaning. Please, please, don’t hurt us. If you just go, I won’t say anything, please —”

  I ignored her and studied the door. “A cool room,” I muttered. “One with a history of blood and death. What kind of idiots?”

  I checked myself, forcing calm. Two centuries ago, when the whites came to Australia, the people here lived with the Dreaming, and the Anima. Back then, the spirit-voices identified with the things that were important to the Aborigines: the animals, the plants, prominent features of the landscape. Some of the Aborigines could hear the Anima, perhaps, and in that way they learned. Or perhaps it was the other way around: perhaps the power of belief and story gave the Anima their path to the places and the things in the Dreaming that touched this world.