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

by Paul Haines

  I didn’t have many thoughts after that.

  * * *

  The Crocodile Woman said, “You must trust me.”

  * * *

  The van hit a hundred and ten as it tore down Sunnyholt Road and then swerved off and punched into the Snake Handler’s front yard. The noise of it crashing through his garden, of the letterbox ripped off and sent crashing through the window had him out front in shorts and singlet, looking just as pissed as I was. The only difference was that he didn’t keep that look. It drained out of his face like fat poured down a drain and was replaced with a look of such terror that he didn’t even move as I stalked up and slammed the stock end of a shotgun into his temple. Once, then twice, and he went down. With a loud crack, I loaded the shotgun and pressed its cold black opening into his belly.

  There’d be something special about it this time.

  “He’s going to beat you,” Bob spat from my side. “Then I’m going to beat you. Then he’s going to do it again. Should he get tired, I swear to fucking God, I’ll find some other people to beat you until your intestines have split open. And when those people get tired, we’re going to start cutting things off you, you understand?”

  “Please—please,” the Snake Handler whispered. “I have no—absolutely no idea what has happened.”

  “Turner.”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s dead.”

  His eyes flew open. “I swear—”

  I jammed the barrel into his stomach, and he jerked his eyes, wide like saucers, to me. Bob said, “I don’t think he’s believing you.”

  “I swear—I swear right now that I had nothing to do with it!”

  “We saw you last night!”

  “In a bar, yeah!”

  “Where’d you go after?”

  “Home. I didn’t want anything to do with you guys—fucking hell, you beat the shit out of me! Why would I hurt that old woman?”

  I could kill him easily. My finger was on the smooth trigger and I could smell that hint of gun oil in the air that was an aphrodisiac to the moment. All it would take was one movement and I wanted it . . . but I wanted it to be him, wanted him to say I did it so that there’d be nothing but the flavour of justice in me when I did it.

  I lifted the shotgun. Bring him, I signed, unloading it.

  Bob grabbed the Snake Handler roughly and tossed him into the back of the van. The little guy didn’t say a word after that. He hardly ever shut up, and would talk a mile a minute, but he was as silent as me now. It took me a moment to realise that it was the silence of waiting, an awful, heavy silence that sat between the three of us. He sat down across from the Snake Handler and I shut the doors to the back of the van with an empty ring. I stood on the lawn and gazed at the dark, daylight shadowed houses of the Snake Handler’s neighbours. Each one looked like a child hiding under a blanket.

  I tossed the shotgun into the van and drove silently to Turner’s. My plan was simple: I was going to toss that sack of shit in front of Barney, and if the mongrel went for him, then the three of us would spend the day cutting pieces of the fuck off.

  Ten minutes after leaving the Snake Handler’s place, I was standing over Turner’s body, the Snake Handler lying on the ground, and Barney ignoring him totally. His warm little body never left Turner’s cold one.

  The Snake Handler began sobbing in relief and there was nothing but a nasty emptiness in my stomach.

  “Shit,” Bob said.

  Yeah. Shit.

  It was then that she knocked on the door. She was knocking for politeness, nothing more, since it was wide open. Bob and I turned and we found a tiny, plump and old Chinese woman wearing a black dress and black veil of mourning, waiting for us to invite her in.

  * * *

  The Crocodile Woman said, “Don’t think in rational ways, Tom Tom. Let reality go. It has no place here, not now.”

  * * *

  She had been the Crocodile Woman for long as I’d been alive. The name had been given to her after she’d been arrested and charged for keeping the flesh of crocodiles in her freezer. This had been in the sixties, and she had had heads, legs, bodies, tails, and hearts neatly packed and kept from the crocodiles that she had been breeding in her backyard. The name had been given to her in the papers, and the locals had begun using it unofficially and then officially, though it had been years, she told me, since she had sold the meat and organs of a croc.

  There isn’t much power in that meat these days, she had explained.

  She was Turner’s oldest friend, though I didn’t know how far back it went. I had once heard that they had been lovers, but that wasn’t any of my business, so I never asked. The one thing that did connect them, however, was their out-of-the-house business of mystic promises. But where Turner told pretty futures and offered potions and aids to solve things quickly, the Crocodile Woman laid curses, promised to punish the individual who had hurt you, and would give you drugs to explore the inner subconscious and intangible world. At least that is what she had told me when I had arrived at her house with a van full of cacti for her to butcher. She had given me some that some day, and it had been the foulest shit I had ever tasted. It made me puke and did fuck all, but still, there was something bout her, a craziness that didn’t lurk in Turner, who I always suspected didn’t much believe much in the potions and fortunes she told . . . but with the Crocodile Woman, you knew that she believed and that belief had left its mark.

  Her hands were pale and light on my face. She whispered my name and I could see tears down her cheeks and in her eyes and I knew, at least for today, that I believed in her world of curses and pain.

  * * *

  The Crocodile Woman said, “Drink the heart of the albino python.”

  * * *

  When she sat, Barney curled round her feet silently. Her tiny, unornamented hand dropped down to his soft ears and began to stroke them. While she did that, she told me what she needed. Must have been fate that the Snake Handler was lying right there with us.

  “Yeah,” he said quietly, pushing himself up. His eyes were red and swollen and coupled with his other injuries, he looked as if he had been tortured for days. “Yeah, I got one of them. It—”

  Bob kicked his legs out from under him and he smacked into the floor.

  “You can have it,” he said weakly, pushing himself up again.

  Bob and I took him back to his place. The front yard was still a mess, the screen door was wide open, and the venetian blinds behind the broken window rattling like the breath of a dying giant. Without a word, the Snake Handler went into his garage and emerged with the new snake in his grasp. It was huge and pale, two hundred years of dead flesh rolled into one long thick piece of muscle that had become a creature with no interest in any of us. Its colouring placed it above us, gave it a regality that none of us could hope to capture, and for a moment, we stood quietly and in awe around it.

  The Snake Handler handed it to Bob, and he took it to the van, leaving me and the Handler alone. He wanted me to go, to fuck off and never come back, which was fair enough. But I had a small amount of sympathy for what we had put him through, and knew that the snake was worth a huge amount to him. After a moment, I dug into my pockets and gave him what I had. It didn’t amount to more than thirty, and he stared at orange and blue notes in his bruised hands, clearly confused.

  I’ll give you the rest later, I signed.

  He looked up at me with no idea what I’d said. Fair enough. It was the nature of our relationship. I left him outside his garage, standing guard for the living creatures that he sold to people as pets and meat.

  Once we had left, Bob, who was holding the python in his lap, said, “You going to go through with this?”

  I nodded.

  “You don’t believe in this.”

  I shrugged. Unlike me, Bob did believe, but he believed in everything. He paid respect to priests of every walk, even men and women like Turner and the Crocodile Woman. I had asked him about it a couple o
f times, but the closest he had come to explaining it to me was telling me that he would most likely be dead at forty. In a short life, he reasoned, it was best to pay respect to everything spiritual upfront.

  My response to his question had been that I believed what was in front of me.

  Right then, with no answer, no way for me to make sense of what had happened, and the only things in front of me being my dead mother, a huge need to hurt someone, and the biggest fucking albino python you would ever hope to see . . . well, I was willing to believe in anything that would bring the three together real quick.

  When we returned, the Crocodile Woman had covered Turner in a black shroud and cleaned up some of the mess. There was an odd flavour tainting the air of crushed flowers, and it took me a moment to realise that it was Turner. Barney was lying at her feet, as he had done through all of his life, and would never do again. He looked as if he knew that.

  The Crocodile Woman took the python out of Bob’s hands as if it weighed nothing, and began whispering and stroking it. Its long white form dropped down to the floor in a line that looked like an obscene umbilical. The longer she held it, the more still and quiet it became, until it had gone so still that it was as if there was no life in the creature at all.

  Then she ripped its heart out.

  * * *

  The Crocodile Woman said, “Feel it beat inside you, Tom Tom. Taste the blood. Follow the life as it fades and let it lead you.”

  * * *

  Nothing is right. Everything is wrong. I’m heavy. The world is heavy and grey. I feel trapped. Caught. Stuck. Beating. A blockage. An infection in the womb being forced up through the throat to emerge in the World. To be reborn. But it isn’t right. It feels wrong for every push, every beat, every moment that I can feel her around me.

  I blink.

  The world is still grey, but I can make the shape out of a park. An empty slippery dip. A broken jungle gym. Light is blooming in the grey, a dull sun pushing through the grey clouds. I can smell water. I can sense someone next to me. On the right. On the left. Two men. I know they’re men. The light ahead grows stronger and I realise that it is trapped, held by long slender men and women who are so thin that they remind me of a commercial that I saw, once.

  Nothing is right, but it isn’t me that’s the cause as I first thought. The distorted world has a flavour. Chemicals. I can’t identify them, but they’re there, little parasites that steal the colour from the world, and leave everything bad. Real bad. Sick. So sick. Next to me the two guys are filled with anger and it blooms like a burning white sun—

  There’s a loud screech. It rips through my ears. Jangles my nerves. Jangles her nerves.

  “What the fuck was that?”

  Dominic on the right. Dominic’s voice. I know you now Dominic.

  “Some sort of fucking rooster,” replies Brad. Brad on the left. Brad who is bald and thin where Dominic is larger and hairy. “Why is there a fucking rooster around here? I don’t want a fucking rooster. Fucking rooster is not making me happy.”

  “Pissing me off, mate.”

  “Who has a fucking rooster? Fucking rooster. Ain’t no fucking farm here.”

  She—is it me?—wants to speak about roosters. She wants to say that it’s kind of odd to be hearing one now. She thought they only crowed at dawn and it’s not dawn, is it? Is it?

  Dominic: “We should fucking kill it.”

  Brad: “Yeah. Shut the fucking thing up.”

  Dominic: “Yeah.”

  The two guys stand, and she feels empty on the grass without them. She stands. The wispy grey world passes me and the familiar shape of a driveway appears, followed by the wooden gate and that big bastard Dominic kicking it open in a blur. The Hills Hoist looks like the giant skeleton of an umbrella. She shivers with a hint of something that she doesn’t quite know but which I know is a hint of things to come. After that there are cages filled with wildlife, with screeching noises and a beat, a beating from somewhere . . . then she notices that Dominic and Brad are ripping shit up, going fucking berserk, laughing and screaming while all the animals make hundreds of noises and fly into the sky and run along the ground around them.

  Dominic is beating the shed up. Kicking it. Brad hurls the rooster at it. She stands there and then hears a crash, the shattering of glass and she smiles and runs to the door to see what it looks like inside—

  “What the fuck is this?”

  It’s not Dominic’s voice. Not Brad’s. She turns and there’s an old black lady standing in her doorway, a thin third leg punched solidly into the ground. At her feet is a growling, pissed off three legged dog and the sight makes her giggle. It’s funny. Fucking funny.

  When she looks back, the doorway is empty.

  “Fucking cops!” Dominic screams and Brad is running up the stairs. He leaves her on the grass, fighting back her laughter.

  Then something heavy slides across her foot and the laughter dies. She looks down and there is a long black line stretching across her foot. A heavy black marker of a line that says do not cross this and hisses and she reacts automatically and kicks it. It flies off and she runs into the house screaming.

  Is she screaming?

  No.

  She rounds the corner, the screams everywhere, her body beating erratically. Brad is holding a coffee table and he’s bringing it down repeatedly onto a mushy black figure, while in the corner, Dominic is on his back, frantically holding the three legged dog off as it tries to rip out his throat. It’s barking and snapping and it’s a violent angry fuck of a thing and without pause she runs up and kicks it off him. There’s a bang and a yelp and they aren’t connected except that they end in a long stretch of silence.

  * * *

  The Crocodile Woman said, “There is one response, Tom Tom. Blood must be paid with blood, and death with death.”

  * * *

  There should have been a point, a meaning. That was my first thought when I opened my eyes, the beat of white python’s heart still lingering in my chest, a faint pitter-patter down my throat. There should have been a point. There should have been a reason.

  But there wasn’t. It was just all fucked up. Turner was killed by the three fucks on a bad trip. They lived in a red brick house across from Blacktown Hospital. I awoke knowing that, knowing a lot about those three, and I did not question it. The Crocodile Woman said something about the Gods telling me, but who knows. Bob and I checked out the house and it was them all right. You could tell by their quietness and over the shoulder glances when they entered the house that they had done something wrong. Guilt doesn’t mean a thing to me, however.

  The Crocodile Woman was taking care of Turner’s remains, and I promised her that I would bring what was left of those three. I told her it wouldn’t be pretty, and she told me that ugliness is at times beautiful. Sounded right to me. Bob and I picked up Barney and drove the van into the street at two in the morning. We are sitting there quietly now. Quietly as I think about everything that has happened. Everything that has passed without one bit of fucking reason. Maybe Bob and the mutt are thinking the same thing. Maybe they’re just thinking about what’s going to happen when we open that door.

  Maybe they’re not thinking of anything at all.

  Anne-Droid Of Green Gables

  Lezli Robyn

  The Station Master whistled to himself while the steam engine puffed into the small Bright River station, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet as he checked his brass pocket watch to verify the arrival time for his logbook. He had been told to expect an important delivery today, and so he was personally going to oversee the unloading of the cargo carriage. There wasn’t much excitement to be had on Prince Edward’s Island, so he was very curious as to what the package contained; he’d been told to unpack the box with care upon arrival.

  The train chugged slowly to a stop, and the Station Master scanned the carriages to see if all was in order before pressing an ornate but bulky button on his lapel pocket. It whirred percep
tively and then emitted a piercing whistle to alert the passengers that the train was safe to disembark.

  He tilted his hat in greeting to the first young lady to step onto the platform, but she didn’t have eyes for him. She was gazing about her with a soft smile on her face, smoothing out her skirts.

  He made his way to the back of the train, signaling for Oswald to keep watch on the platform while he began to search for the precious cargo, wondering why the owner hadn’t arrived yet. On the way he detoured to pull a brass lever on the side of a machine fixed to the platform near the last carriage door. The device wheezed to life, numerous brass and wooden cogs beginning to whirl around, steam pumping out of several exhaust valves as the leather conveyer belt sluggishly sprung into action. He then walked into the carriage and lit the gas lamp hanging just inside the doorway, automatically picking up and placing all the small packages and bags onto the conveyer belt so they would be transferred to the station office for sorting.

  He paused when he came across a large trunk in the dark recesses of the carriage, the layer of dust that shrouded it a testament to its long journey on more trains than this one. He grabbed the lantern and held it over the trunk, wiping the corner clean to expose the sender’s stamp.

  “LUMIERE’S REFURBISHED MACHINES-TO-GO”

  Satisfied, the Station Master pulled out his Universal Postal Service key and inserted the etched brass device into the leather buckle locks that were holding the lid of the trunk down. He heard a perceptible whir as the key activated in each lock, and they sprung open. He paused, his hand hovering just above the lid, wondering what he would find in the trunk. It was not often that city machines, even refurbished ones, made their way to the tiny coastal towns.