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

by Paul Haines

  “I do have one helpful suggestion to make right now,” Karl said.

  “And what would that be?”

  “I do think we should hobble the horses and make sure our gear is tied down tonight.”

  “Why?” said Richard. “It’s totally still here. Not a breath of air anywhere.”

  “That’s what I mean,” said Karl. “It’s thunderstorm weather. I’ve seen it before.”

  “Now who’s jumping at shadows?” Richard said. “If there’s a storm here, it will be because the witch has summoned it. And you’ve already told me that can’t happen.” He shrugged. “I don’t see any need to make extra work for ourselves. We’ll be leaving at first light.”

  “You’re the leader.” Karl turned away. He was quietly packing his scientific equipment into its cases and covering it in a sheltered spot beside his own carefully tethered horse when he chanced to glance across the glade at the captive.

  She was alert now, and sniffing the air suspiciously.

  * * *

  Before long a greasy blue-grey smoke haze hung low in the still air, filling the glade with the smell of cooking meat. The men wolfed down singed steaks while the rest of the kangaroo sizzled on its rack over the fire. The light was fading fast, and the fat-splashed firelight cast flickering red shadows that glowed like stained glass between the pillars of the tall trees.

  Karl made a point of sharing his meal with the captive. “There you are, grandmother,” he said, holding a strip of charred meat to her mouth.

  The woman nodded warily, then greedily gobbled her portion.

  Karl resumed his seat by the fire. “She’s as hungry as we are,” he said.

  “Waste of good food,” Richard muttered.

  “She might help us in return,” Karl replied. “She certainly won’t show us native supplies if she realises she won’t get anything herself.”

  “Maybe,” the explorer said. “Maybe not: who knows what a witch thinks?”

  “Do you have witches in Norway, Karl?” Harry asked.

  “I thought it was trolls,” said Thomas. “Where did you say you came from?”

  “I grew up in Bergen,” Karl replied, “and of course we have such stories to frighten the children. But as I told Richard, I outgrew such fancies.”

  “Then I’ll tell you a true story that should scare you,” Thomas replied. “I was up country last year, and the squatters were all talking about it.” He settled himself more comfortably. “You know that human flesh is a great delicacy for the blacks.” The other men nodded sagely. “They call it talgoro. They eat the torso and the limbs, but never the head or the entrails. The most prized morsel is the fat about the kidneys—they think that by eating it they acquire the strength of the victim. It’s because they believe that the kidneys are the centre of life.”

  “How interesting,” said Karl. “For the ancient Greeks, it was the liver.”

  Thomas ignored the interruption. “What happened,” he said, “was that a white policeman was attacked by the blacks. They beat him with clubs until he was knocked senseless, and they thought he was dead. Then they slit his skin and took out his kidneys, and ran away.” He paused for effect. “But the poor fellow wasn’t dead,” he went on, his voice low. “His men found him, and he woke up long enough to tell them what had happened. He died properly a few hours later.”

  “What happened next?” Harry asked.

  “Nothing,” Thomas replied darkly. “They never caught the murdering blacks.”

  “I heard that they like the taste of Chinese best,” John said. “They say that up on the Palmer gold fields they’ve been killed and eaten in big numbers.”

  Karl was skeptical. “Has anyone actually seen the natives committing these acts of cannibalism?” he asked.

  “I for one never want to,” Thomas replied. “Do you think your witch is a cannibal, boss?”

  “She could be,” the explorer replied, considering. “I wouldn’t be surprised.” He shrugged. “But there’s nothing to worry about now. She’s securely tied. She won’t be eating anyone tonight.”

  The men laughed uneasily.

  “Whites can be cannibals too,” Karl said. “We’ve all heard about those Port Arthur escapees eating their friends.”

  “That’s different,” Richard put in. “That was a matter of survival. We’d all do it if we had to.”

  Karl shuddered. “I know I couldn’t,” he said.

  “No,” Richard agreed. “You’d starve defending your principles.” He grinned suddenly. “We’d probably eat you.”

  Thomas grinned back. “Too stringy, boss,” he said. “We’d choose someone with more meat on the bones.”

  “You’re right,” said Harry. “John here is much heavier.”

  “It’s all muscle,” John replied, laughing along with the others. “I’d be too tough.”

  “All right, all right,” said the explorer. “That’s enough. You’re shocking our scientist.” He yawned. “I’m too tired to think about anything right now. Tomorrow’s another day. We’ll worry about what to do with the cannibal witch then.” He began settling himself by the fire. “Goodnight, lads. Goodnight, Karl. Get some rest.”

  “Goodnight.” Karl hesitated, wanting to say more. But he resisted the impulse and moved quietly to where his gear was stowed. He laid his blanket carefully in the little hollow, making a shallow nest for himself. He stretched out, watching as the others found comfortable places. Before long, the camp was all quiet, all still. Clouds were building, and Karl lay a long time wakeful in the starless darkness before he too finally drifted into sleep.

  * * *

  The storm, when it came, came without warning. Lightning arced across the sullen sky and the smell of scorched ozone barely preceded the huge crack of thunder that startled the men awake. Then the sky was alive with lightning flashes and the thunder rumbled like an earthquake.

  The explorer and his men woke to chaos. The horses were screaming, bucking to break their light tethers. Two had already bolted. The captive was screeching too, struggling to free herself from the strangling halter that held her in harm’s way. The men ran in all directions, desperate to secure the remaining mounts, snatching up their rifles where they could, scrambling to grab their scattered gear.

  “One, two . . .” Under his breath Karl began counting seconds between the flashes of forked lightning and the thunder peals. He didn’t get to three. The storm front was upon them. And the wind was rising fast. The noise began as a low moaning in the tree tops. The moaning became a howling, and the howling a shriek. Tall trees whipped and bent, straining in the windstorm. Branches came crashing down. A wattle split, tore, whirled away into the darkness. The men were pelted with stinging leaves and bark and heavier gum nuts that bruised where they struck. Karl grabbed for his horse, but was driven back by the gale. He crouched in the lee of a boulder, sheltering as best he could.

  Then the rain came. A few fat drops at first, then a wind-driven downpour that tore apart the forest canopy. The rain became hail, chunks of ice that bombarded the landscape, round ice balls that collected in drifts around trees and filled the cracks and crevices of the campsite. Karl watched, hunched behind his rock against the punishing onslaught. The pulsing lightning lit a madly shifting scene of flying debris and bouncing white hailstones, with a lurid red fire-glow at its heart. He could no longer tell if the screams that echoed in his ears were human, animal or elemental.

  I don’t belong here, he thought.

  And suddenly he was aware that there were flitting black shadows amongst the shifting shapes of the trees, shadows that moved with purpose despite the wild storm. The tribe had come.

  The naturalist stayed as still as he could, peering at the confusion of the campsite. But then the fire was smothered, the glow went out, and he had only flashes of vision when the lightning flared. He glimpsed spears, and the tall warriors who carried them. Weaponless and terrified, he shut his eyes and turned his face away.

  The storm raged on,
but no blow fell upon him. He lost track of the hours, wretchedly holding on for his life against the elements, until finally the rain eased a little. The thick darkness began to shade to predawn grey, and just as Karl risked movement to ease the stiffness from his limbs, the manic laughter of kookaburras pealed across the soggy sky. The dawn chorus had begun. The carolling of native magpies joining their raucous cousins to greet the day served only to remind the naturalist that he was a stranger in a frighteningly strange land.

  The light grew, and Karl looked about him, badly shaken. He called, and called again, but no-one answered. He was alone. To calm his rising panic, he forced himself to take stock of his position. He was soaked to the skin, bruised and tired, but whole. His equipment was intact—though he noticed wryly that his blanket had been anchored in its hollow only by the weight of melting hail stones it contained.

  The rest of the camp had not fared so well. The explorer’s gear was strewn about, badly damaged, the tools scattered and ruined.

  Everything edible was gone, even the kangaroo meat they had left over the cooking fire. The tribe had been thorough. As Karl had expected, the captive was gone. Her rescuers had left a neatly cut halter rope dropped at the base of her tree. The naturalist stooped to retrieve a length of leather rein, realising as he did so that this too had been deftly severed. His tethered horse was missing. All of the horses had been driven off, under cover of the thunderstorm. He had to assume that they were gone for good.

  The enormity of his situation was becoming horribly clear. He would, of course, wait for his companions. He hoped they lived yet, and would somehow make their way back to the campsite. He knew there was no sense in his getting himself lost searching the dense forest for them: better he should re-build the fire so that the smoke might guide them. He would not, could not think of them lying dead with their throats cut, or worse. Last night’s lurid tales of native cannibalism rose unbidden in his mind. This must not be. He had refused to believe such things at the time, he would not countenance them now. No more than he would countenance the old beliefs in witchcraft—these were tales from his European childhood, not fit for a grown man of science, a logical man. Grimly, he pushed the clamouring thoughts aside and began to sift through the wreckage of the camp, setting aside anything that might be useful, salvaging anything that might be mended.

  The sun was rising now, but the dark fears only grew stronger with the daylight. Hope faded to despair. The explorer would not be coming back. There would be no help, no search party, no reprieve. Without food or tools or the bush skills of his companions, the naturalist was all too aware that the chances of his retracing their path on foot, of making it back alive to the tiny Port Albert settlement were vanishingly small.

  Overwhelmed, he sat by the dead ashes of the cooking fire, staring at the useless bits of cut leather that lay about him. Sunlight touched his face, and somewhere above him a native thrush trilled its liquid song into the cool morning air. The forest stirred around him, indifferent to his plight.

  The scientific man put his head in his hands, and wept.

  Hive

  Stephen M Irwin

  The sky was blue as a vein the day I killed my father. It wouldn’t stay that way; that strange, ice-fire blue eventually gave way to eerie grey, then to the red of sick blood. Everything tilted that day; the world shifted and lurched on its invisible spine, revealing things in new dimensions, ugly as those cubist paintings you see in art books. Ugly, but beautiful. Secret. I’ve looked for that secret beauty every day since. I found glimpses of it in the craquelure on the ceiling of my room at Joondalup, the boys’ home, in the wrinkles of worried faces in hospital waiting rooms, in the marbled beef from cattle I boned. Even yesterday, as I strained in the rain hitching my boat to the car, I caught hints of it in the twisting swirls of grey water flooding down the driveway. But I’ve never really found it. Not the complete beauty—whole, tiny and perfect enough to turn on your palm—that I saw that day.

  I’d woken late that morning. I was ten years old, and rarely slept past dawn. But by the sunlight blaring in under the torn pull-down blind, it was after eight o’clock when I opened my eyes. There was no school on, so no watching Mum rush about looking for her keys; she’d gone to Cumby to see Aunt Trish, her sister. It was just me and Dad at Canterbury.

  Canterbury was a saucer of hard, red land lipped by black rock hills. A river ambled through it, barely wide enough to be called a creek and never more than sluggish with the heat of summer or the dry dread cold of winter. As often as not, the riverbed was dry, just a seemingly endless path of brown skullcaps running north-south. I never saw fish in the water at Canterbury; maybe they were wise enough to stay away. At weekends, when I wasn’t needed for rounding, drenching or shooting sheep, I would fossick among the stones on the riverbank for diamonds. I’d read at school about diamonds, and how ordinary they appear uncut, and found a stone I was convinced was a gem that would change our lives forever. Dad took a hammer to it, to show me it was worthless quartz. Our lot was not to find diamonds.

  Three or four years ago I learned that half of Canterbury had been acquired by the government and flooded to make a reservoir. The river had been dammed and that saucer of land filled with water. In all likelihood, our white house with the rust-red roof was demolished. But in my dreams, the house is still there, deep under brown water. And I am inside, swimming through the rooms of my childhood, down the hall through the shimmering gloom, accompanied by schools of grey catfish as I strain, lungs burning, into the kitchen, past the old fridge, to the back door. Which is always locked.

  But that morning—when I was ten and the drowning dreams had not yet started—I found the back door wide open when I scuffed into the kitchen. I was sore, and confused. Either something good had happened, but bad things were due today, or vice versa. All I was certain of was that I had overslept, there was no school, and Dad had left the back door swung wide. I looked outside, squinting against the glare. Across a hundred yards of red dirt was the shed. Movement. Dad was fixing something on one of the tractors. A glint, like a blue diamond, and a puff of orange flame—he was brazing.

  “Dad!”

  The flame swung low. Like insect eyes, the green-black goggles turned toward me.

  “You want tea?”

  The round goggles fixed on me for a long moment. Dark and inscrutable. Then, a hint of a white smile below, and Dad shook his head.

  I nodded, and turned to make my breakfast. In the fridge, the raft of yellow cream floating on the milk was almost gone—Dad liked to eat it with a spoon when Mum wasn’t watching. I carefully poured a glass, unable to dislodge the dark stone in my belly that said something was wrong. But what? I opened the pantry and reached to get out the honey flakes—then stiffened as if electrified. On the front of the box, benevolent cartoon bees buzzed around the bowl. I’d remembered.

  For weeks—months, really—I’d pestered my parents to let me build a beehive. My fixation on bees had begun in the school library. Researching for a class project on the conquests of Alexander, I found a photograph of an ancient Persian amulet; this shiny, glinting insect of gold and mother of pearl and polished anthracite lodged in my mind, as firmly stuck as a real bee’s barb. Starting my own hive, I could have dozens—thousands!—of living, delicate, golden bees, rich (in my own mind) as any Achaemenid prince. I saw myself donning the keeper’s hat, cool as Steve McQueen in his silver suit about to battle The Towering Inferno, smoker in hand, ready to plunge into the dark, moist, sweetly dangerous vault of my own hive.

  Mum and Dad were set against it. Mum because she felt there was insufficient pollen for bees to survive on in Canterbury, and Dad because he didn’t need to waste his time driving me three hours to hospital covered in bee stings. My protests, my research, my charts showing bee range and numbers of flowering trees, my tables highlighting limited likelihood of allergy were in vain. My hive was vetoed.

  But I’d ordered a Queen, anyway.

  Lunchtimes in the s
chool library gave me the time to investigate beekeeping suppliers in the classifieds of city newspapers. I couldn’t afford a smoker or frames for a hive, but I knew I could make them, and I did. I had started making my hive from a warped and peeling dog kennel that I’d found hidden in long whip grass near the station’s original mud-brick house, about a mile from ours. I’d begun constructing frames for the hive from the scraps of windows and doorjambs that hung awry in that cadaverous place. My experimental smoker was hidden skilfully in the work shed, along with a paper bag full of wattle twigs, the closest thing I could find to pine needles. What I couldn’t fabricate was the essence of a hive—the Queen. She, some workers, drones and foundation wax would cost me $18, delivered. I timed things well, saving pocket money for weeks with a view to having her arrive in her dark, perforated box during the school holidays. Which started today.

  In order to keep my purchase secret, I needed to be the first to our letterbox, two miles from the house, when the postie drove up in his dusty van some time after lunch. The original station house was halfway to the post box, hunched in the lee of a rocky rise; so, to while away the morning, I’d go there to finish the comb frames for the hive. Congratulating myself on my cleverness, I packed a lunch, made a mix of cordial, and packed them in an old cardboard school port that had almost outworn its usefulness. I left the back stoop to go to the shed. Stepping on to the red dirt and into the sun seemed to drop fifty pounds onto my shoulders; the light was blinding, and the heat was heavy and solid enough to chew. I hurried to the shade of the shed.

  My father was at back of a tractor, one hand leaning on the frame that held the greasy PTO shaft he was repairing. His other held the oxy wand, and the flame hissed idly into space, a titian snake with nothing to bite. He was forty-one, then, and I could see the grey at his temples. He wasn’t moving, and the goggles stopped me seeing where he was looking.