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

by Paul Haines

  One of the Malays pointed to the sky above the bow and commented to his brother. The stars that had been clear to the south began to fade. Soon they were sailing into a moist, white cloud. Fog, in these waters? Ridiculous. The swell grew stronger and Jiro’s hands and feet grew numb with cold.

  Even Flynn was silent.

  “Put away now,” said the cook uneasily. He clattered his ladles and pans into their box.

  The fog swirled around the masts, over the deck. Voices called in it, on the edge of hearing. The men clumped together.

  “Perahu!” cried one of the Malays, pointing.

  A black lugger loomed through the mist and ran silently beside them, sails furled. No crew moved on the deck.

  Ghost ship. Funa-yurei.

  Ebisu-sama, protect us. Jiro grasped his amulet through his shirt.

  “Holy Mother.” Flynn muttered a prayer.

  Yoshi grabbed Jiro’s arm. “You know the sea lore. What do we do?”

  Jiro’s arms and legs shivered, he couldn’t stop them. “Depends what they want.”

  The calling began. Voices he’d forgotten years ago, his dead father, that girl on the beach in Haruyama, his dead brother, grandmother, uncle . . . We miss you, Jiro. Come back to us. Join us. Give him to us.

  Give who? he thought. His mind was stuck in cold mud, the freezing currents of mist pulling his body away like the currents under the sea, his lungs pushed inward, blood balls rising through his throat . . .

  “They want him.” One of the Malays shook his sleeve. The man’s lips were drawn back from his broken teeth in a rictus of terror, sweat pouring off him as though he was still at the pumps.

  Jiro could barely hear the words, the wind and the voices and the creaking filled his ears.

  “Who?”

  “Dead man.”

  The voices roared in assent. Yes! Give him to us. He is ours now. Give him to us. He sails with us. Yes. Yes yes yessss

  “Let’s throw him overboard.” Yoshi’s teeth chattered as he grabbed Jiro’s sleeve from the other side. “Then they’ll leave us alone.”

  “Yes,” said the Malays.

  “Yes,” said Cook.

  YES said the voices.

  “Hang on, now.” Flynn drew himself upright with a groan, pulling his hat down tight. “I don’t chuck anyone overboard. What’ll we say to the constable—some ghosts wanted him? We’ll get fined.”

  GIVE HIM TO US screamed the voices. The wind rocked the lugger from all sides, it pitched and yawed, water sluicing over the deck. Everyone grabbed a handhold.

  “Flynn only one man. We give him.” The Malay who spoke before began to stagger towards the hold.

  “You bastards,” Flynn yelled.

  “Wait!” Jiro put up a shaking hand. “Must not give dead what they want. They kill us then.”

  “You got some other way to stop this?” said Flynn, his hands over his ears. “We’ll go mad otherwise.”

  “Give other thing,” said Jiro.

  GIVE HIM TO US screamed the voices.

  They will try to sink your boat, the sea lore said. So give them a ladle with a hole in it. Fine, but Cook’s ladles didn’t have holes. Nor did any of the buckets. A bucket with a hole, what use is broken stuff? smart-aleck Flynn would say.

  Broken stuff . . .

  He crawled to where the diving gear was stowed, rummaged in the box with paralysis-numb hands, then crawled to the rail of the lugger.

  The ghost ship followed whichever way he looked. Give him to us.

  “Here!” he yelled. “Take this. It belonged to him. He wanted to leave it with you but I took it away by mistake. It’s yours.”

  He flung Kamei’s shell bag as far as he could, onto the black deck. It hit with a wet slap, they all said afterwards they heard it land. The voices swirled upwards in a final shrill wail.

  The wind howled over them and the gaff gave with a crash, narrowly missing Yoshi.

  Then silence.

  The wind settled back into its course. The mist cleared. The southern stars beckoned them home.

  A flint clicked and cigar smoke stung Jiro’s eyes.

  “Bloody mess, this is,” said Flynn. “What are you lot standing around for? Start cleaning up.”

  Jiro put a hand to his chest. The amulet felt cold and lifeless, spent. He would have to get a new one made. He wouldn’t set sail without it.

  Flynn grinned and clapped him on the shoulders.

  “Sea god all country, eh boyo.”

  White Crocodile Jazz

  Ben Peek

  Sometimes there isn’t any meaning behind anything.

  Take the day it started. A late afternoon, a Tuesday, and I was kicking the shit out of a Snake Handler. The Snake Handler, as I called him. There wasn’t anything fancy about the beating. The sky was empty, the wind cool, but not cold and it was the first good day in weeks. I hadn’t planned on spending my afternoon here giving out violence, but here I was. I hit that Snake Handler in the stomach with all my strength til he was bent over and fighting for breath and then I grabbed his head and held it as I smashed my knee into his face. Broke the cunt’s nose with that one. Heard bone crack, left dark red stains on my jeans and across the half crescent moon of mower-burnt grass. When I let him go, he slumped down to his knees and spat blood from his mouth. I grabbed the pony tail on the back of his balding head, tilted his head back with a yank and saw a drunk vampire smear of blood around his mouth and busted nose. He stared at me with a glassy expression, so I kicked him in the stomach with the thick tip of my right boot, and dropped him to the grass.

  “You want us to continue this?”

  That was Bob, my mate, my voice for moments like this.

  Bob’s real name was Danh Lo, though I don’t remember anyone ever using it. He’d been calling himself Bob since his folks had fled Vietnam in a nasty little boat and arrived with him, still a baby, broke and homeless on the shore. Like a large portion of Asian parents wanting their kids to fit in, they gave Bob an English name to help him through school, which was a bit useless given that he was a midget, but the name stuck. Close to thirty now, he was still no taller than a ten year old, bald as an old man, ugly as the mix would suggest, and with coarse black hair over his back and shoulders that stuck out of the necks on the t-shirts he wore. The shirt he wore on that day was red.

  “Well,” Bob repeated, memory kicking back in after the pause. “You want fucking more?”

  “No, no,” the Snake Handler cried and pushed himself into a sitting position. He was a skinny, vein shrunken, longhaired husk of white Australian, and his voice was mashed behind the mess of his nose which left him about as desirable as dead dog. “Okay. Stop. Just stop. Please. It’s—it’s—they’re in the fucking garage! Just no more!”

  I considered kicking him again. I wanted it.

  “Want me to check?” Bob asked, holding the garage keys.

  I nodded, gave in and kicked the Snake Handler again. I got a pleasure out of hearing him whimper. He had been lying about the seven red belly black snakes that he had been trying to get more money out of me for. Said he didn’t have them, needed more time to get them, but they were in the garage as he said in blood stained teeth. According to Bob, they were stashed at the back in a wooden cage, past the glass cage display world of snakes and spiders and fuck knows what that he had set up for customers of his choose-your-own-poisonous-Australian-animal world he had going. Once I heard that, I pulled out the six yellow fifties that had been our agreed price and let them flutter down like dead butterflies.

  “They were more,” the Snake Handler muttered in flat, dull words as they touched down on him. “They were harder to get, man. I had to go out of the State.”

  Being mute, I’m not much for the arguments and negotiating, so I just shrugged and kicked him in the balls hard to remind him of that. I didn’t give him any thought after that, didn’t think one thing more about him til it went shithouse.

  * * *

  Later, the Crocodile Wom
an said to me, “You cannot escape your responsibility, Tom Tom. Blood must be paid for with blood, and death with death.”

  * * *

  The Snake Handler had nailed a thin, grey mesh of chicken wire over the open end of the crate. Fucking idiot. All it would take was one of the slippery black snakes in the bottom to unwind itself from the twisted knot of muscle that was all seven, push its thick body against the wire and pop out the nails, and then all seven would be out across the floor. It wasn’t a reassuring thought as I made the fifteen minute drive back to Turner’s place.

  Turner’s house was on Chicago Avenue. Ask her and she’ll tell you that its position is geometrically dead centre in the middle of Blacktown, but the only people who ask are those who buy from her mystic world and are put out by the fact that the house is a rundown little brick and fibro place with overgrown grass and wild trees that have formed a natural wall around it. It’s so overgrown that the letterbox has been lost to everyone but Turner and the ancient white Postie on his bright red motorcycle. Everyone else who wants to find the place uses the green painted 13 on the gutter, which I paid twenty bucks so that the council would put it there for ambulances to find easily in an emergency.

  Bob and I pulled into the driveway just after five thirty. We lifted the crate out of the van, kicking tools and wire out of the way to drag it out of the oil and metal smelling back. Once we’d gotten it out, we headed around through the wooden side gate, where Turner’s three legged, sandstone coloured mongrel, Barney, was sitting, waiting for us. Bob quieted him with a shout, and we continued past, the mongrel following behind us, not at all bothered by the shout.

  The backyard was neater than the front. Turner kept it clean for the mutt and the other livestock she kept in cages against the back fence. These cages were made from wood and wire and had been there for as long as I could remember. Most of the time they held chickens and roosters and ducks and rabbits, with the occasional appearance of a cat or possum. There was a tin shed in the far corner, which is where Turner kept her spiders and snakes and other poisonous things she didn’t want terrorising the neighbourhood kids.

  Turner was sitting on the back verandah, her old and fat brown body resting comfortably on a tattered couch, her legs propped up on a blue milk crate, a trashy horror novel in her hands, and a glass of iced water on a different crate next to her. She had been on water for twenty-five years, she said, ever since she had awoken and found me dumped on her doorstep.

  “You’re late, my boys,” she called out. “I was having a bit of a worry.”

  “No need,” Bob replied as we placed the crate down near the tin shed. Inside, the black, tangled mess twitched and slithered and a baleful eye revealed itself to me.

  “Tom Tom?” Turner asked, approaching the verandah railing. She moved slowly, leaning heavily on her cane.

  He wanted more money, I signed. Took a while to settle it.

  She frowned. “You break anything of his?”

  Just his nose.

  “You should have broke more. He’s a nasty piece.”

  I’m fine.

  Turner grinned her white teeth. “Of course you are, love, but what about those frail old girls like me?”

  Who would hurt you?

  “People,” she replied. Leaving the edge of the verandah, she began to make her way down the stairs. Barney waited patiently at the bottom of the steps for her, like he always did, and then stayed at her side as she crossed the lawn, two three legged animals who understood each other like no one else. “You can always count on people to be cruel, Tom Tom. These are good snakes.”

  Looking down into the black mess and the blinking, hate filled eyes that stared up in a series of hisses, I couldn’t imagine them being worth shit. Turner assured me there was something special in the heart of a snake, though. Suppose there must have been, since she sold each of them for four hundred to men and women who ordinarily didn’t purchase the still beating hearts of animals to swallow.

  When I had been younger, I thought all of Turner’s business was bullshit, and that she only kept me round as a part of it. Come look at the mute boy and three legged dog while you purchase snake hearts and chicken blood and have your fortune read to you. It was a good sell, but it pissed me off some while I was going through High School. In hindsight, there wasn’t anything special about the anger, just your regular teenage shit, but it took a year long stay in Parramatta jail for me to realise that. I couldn’t watch Turner appear every week to visit without having a form of re-education about my position in her life.

  Still thought the mystic stuff was bullshit, though.

  “Bob,” she said, leaning over the cage and pushing her thin grey hair back, “Would you fetch me my hammer so we can put these boys into a nice new hole?”

  * * *

  The Crocodile Woman said, “Think about everything in your life, Tom Tom, and how it relates to this place.”

  * * *

  The snakes twisted and wrapped around Turner’s heavy old hands without a hint of anger when she dipped her grasp into the crate. She told us that they were hard and warm, an old friend in strips of scaled flesh. Whispering gently to them, she entered the tin shed and placed them into a large glass fish tank. When the last one had been dropped in, the seven lay on the bottom of the glass like the remains of a diseased animal slowly relearning to breathe.

  With that done, Turner sent us away. Her first clients for the evening would be showing up in bright, tiny cars and their straight, unisex suits, and there was no place for a mute and a midget in the house during that time. Didn’t worry either of us. It was hard to keep a straight face listening to Turner talk about love and money and how a bottle of chicken shit would help realign the internal compass. Instead, we drove down to Blacktown RSL, where we filled ourselves with a buffet dinner for ten bucks, then went to the bar to sit and drink and smoke.

  I drank beer, but Bob mixed it with vodka shots and beer chasers. Maybe I should have too, cause by about nine in the evening, after a steady couple of hours drinking and playing the pokies, I had a lazy, unshakable funk on me. When I closed my eyes, I saw the black lengths of snake wind their muscle around Turner’s sagging skin, and then flick their red tongues over the deep lines of age on her as if they were Barney and she was holding his favourite toy. When she placed each into the glass cage, the snakes landed softly, without a hint of bone or substance in their being; without a hint of worry that soon they’d be plucked out and cut open; just touching the bottom like each of them had been made to be there.

  Never had a thing about snakes before. I had been handling them since I could remember, but with this new batch, the inky inky blackness of their skin—

  “Hey,” Bob hissed, nudging me under our table. “You see that?”

  The RSL was brightly lit, but mostly empty, which left the scratched tables and bar and jukebox to occupy the bored gaze when it ran out of people. When I looked behind me, there wasn’t more than a handful of people spread out among the tables and pokies, including the girl behind the bar, so it was easy to guess who Bob is referring too.

  The Snake Handler.

  He stood in the doorway and looked straight at the two of us, but I couldn’t guess the expression on his face. It was busted up pretty good: one eye black, cuts on his lips, and a thick strip of white over his nose. When our gaze met, he didn’t twitch or flinch, which was impressive in a certain kind of way, but downright asking for it in another fucking way.

  Before I could finish the thought, he turned and walked out of the bar. I pushed my drink back and stood.

  “Tom Tom,” Bob said loudly, emphasizing my name as he always did when he was in the middle stage of being a very drunk midget. “Sit down and finish your drink. I’m not up for that shit. It’ll just ruin the warm happiness I’ve got.”

  I gave him the okay sign and sank back into the chair. What the fuck. It was probably too much effort anyhow.

  * * *

  The Crocodile Woman said, “You
are part of this world, but you are part, also, of the borderline between worlds. The mundane and the unreal. You sit in the centre of the final frontier. You lack only a guide to take you across.”

  * * *

  I dreamt of black trails. They lead me beneath thin wire fences that cut my hands and left shiny wet, red stains as I stepped out into empty blocks of land. I looked down at my feet and saw that they were now that of a chicken; that giant bird prints marked the dirt as I made my way across the ground that slowly turned into glass. My feet clicked with every step. Then my beak began tapping on the glass and that was when I finally cracked my eyes open and found myself staring up into the face of a white chicken standing on the windshield of the van, tapping away. Dirty sunlight had flooded the world behind it.

  I felt nasty. The night was a rough edged network of bad shadows and I had no recollection of driving the van home. Bob was asleep in the dirty back, but he couldn’t drive manual, which meant I drove . . . and wasn’t that chicken one of Turner’s?

  Opening the door, I snatched the chicken by the feet, then made my way round to the back, thinking that something had spooked the birds and they had broken out of the cages, again.

  I was right, but not in the way I wanted to be.

  The backyard was a wreck: cages were smashed open, wire ripped out and tossed across the yard; the tin shed was a beaten shell and the door was open and, lying in that opening, was a long, single red belly black snake sunning itself. It stared at me with one of its narrow eyes, and I might have spent more than a moment contemplating it, if the rest of the general destruction of the yard hadn’t crept into my head and I finally noticed that the back door was wide open.

  Turner.

  Inside, it was dark. None of the blinds were opened and I followed the shadowed outline of the threadbare carpet down the hall, around a corner and then into the living room, until I found her. She lay so very still, but even in the weak light, I could see the bruises and welts and blood. Next to her lay Barney, a quiet and mournful thing looking up at me with his big brown eyes and whining. He was covered in blood, some of it his, but most of it Turner’s, and it had dried into hard black stains that were the violent markings of Turner’s final moments.