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

by Paul Haines

  Eliana screamed, a look of fear in her eyes.

  Anton placed both hands against the mould that was coursing up his neck, but the thing flowed beneath his fingers. It was strong, like an animal beneath his hands. He clawed at it, desperate now, but the mould simply coursed up his cheek, the tip of it probing at his nose. Eliana screamed again as the mould found Anton’s nostril and plunged into it like water down a plughole. Anton blinked rapidly as the thing forced its way into him, like a worm, up, up behind his eyes. It reminded him of jumping into the sea and having water rush up his nose and down the back of his throat. There was a terrible taste in his mouth, as if he had eaten rotten refuse from a stagnant pond. He was weeping now, and the room swam and blurred in front of him. He found himself on his knees as the pain pushed up around and behind his eyes, his temples. Looking down at the floor he vomited. Looking back up he saw Eliana transfixed before him.

  “What was that?” Her voice trembled.

  “Truth mould,” said Anton. “It makes you speak the truth.”

  She looked at him. “Can you get it out?”

  “I don’t know. Your husband—he knows.”

  “He gave it to you?”

  “Yes, to use on . . .” He struggled not to speak, though he was filled with the desire to tell her everything, not the surface thoughts, the ones he kept for an easy dismissal or a glib answer, but the deep truth that he knew lurked within, sometimes unrecognised, but no less true for that. He stopped the word “you” from coming from his mouth and managed to replace it with others. “We were discovered. He thinks there is a Technis agent that you have passed secrets to. He sent me to fix things. To kill the agent.”

  She cocked her head and looked at him strangely for a moment. His heart leapt: was her shrewd intelligence sifting one thing from the other?

  Anton continued to speak. “I was going to break things off. I was going to save us. Of course, you would have had to suffer your husband’s recriminations. But we would have lived.”

  She pursed her lips and tensed as if she was in pain. She refused to look at him. “We’ll live now. We’ll simply tell him that my lover did not turn up. We’ll have to pretend not to have met. Anyway, it’s not as if you cared for me. Neither of us has lost anything.”

  Anton could hardly bear to see Eliana standing there, her face barely composed, threatening at any moment to lose its structure and break into a sobbing mess. He searched for words to explain. “You don’t understand. I never thought you would feel this way. I didn’t think I would feel this way. I thought ours would be just a brief liaison.”

  She looked at him, her cherubic face smooth, with the traces of tears reflecting the light from the lamp in little trails. “You love me?”

  Anton started to form the words, “Of course”, but before he could, the door rattled for a second and was silent.

  Eliana tensed. “Oh no.”

  A second later it burst open. Jean-Paul stood in the doorway with a bolt thrower in one hand. Behind him Director Lefebvre, his face stern and troubled. Finally, wearing a terrified look was Eliana’s maid—she had betrayed them, or Lefebvre had forced the information from her.

  “Where is he?” asked Lefebvre. “Where is the Technis spy?”

  “He didn’t come,” said Eliana. “My lover has fled the city.” At the very same moment, before he could stop himself, Anton found himself speaking the truth. “I am that man.” He cursed inwardly. He realised that he had to concentrate to stop himself from speaking, or to modify the words that came from his mouth.

  Frowning, Lefebvre looked from Anton to Eliana and back again.

  “Be quiet!” said Eliana to Anton desperately.

  “You!” Lefebvre’s face twitched.

  Anton realised that Lefebvre would not forgive him. He would die here, or in his fury and loss of dignity Lefebvre would take him back to the Arbor Palace and into the dungeons. There terrible things would be done to him, truth mould or not. Other organisms would be fed into him. He would end up in exquisite agony, as alien flora grew and moved within him. It didn’t matter, but he found himself speaking again, “You have to understand, I didn’t aim to —” With great effort, he cut the words off and controlled himself. As long as he didn’t speak, he could think his thoughts. The problem came when he opened his mouth.

  With Jean-Paul looking on coldly, the bolt-thrower pointed at Anton, Lefebvre pulled a seat from the corner of the room and sat heavily into it. He looked up, ashen faced. His severity had given way to a kind of defeat, and suddenly his attitude seemed uncertain. “You were always so loyal.”

  Anton thought rapidly. He judged the distance between himself and Jean-Paul. He was still one of Caeli-Amur’s philosopher-assassins. He still had his stilettos sheathed around his waist. He could leap at Jean-Paul, take the bolt, but kill him. And then, half-dead he could turn on Lefebvre and Eliana could escape.

  The terrible taste of betrayal filled Anton’s mouth: the truth of it all seemed to rise from his stomach like bile. Lefebvre looked up at Anton, who counted the moments. He widened his stance, the better to leap.

  Silence hovered in the air like a mist. Jean-Paul smiled a little smile.

  Elaina spoke with a new certainty. “Wait! Husband: I’ll come back to you, willingly. I’ll come back to you and devote myself to you, but only if you let Anton go. If you kill him, then I’ll never really be with you. You can force me, but I’ll always escape somewhere else in my mind.”

  “No,” said Anton.

  Eliana ran to Anton and threw her arms around him. “Let me go,” she said.

  “We should have run away.” He shook his head in disbelief. How did things reach this point? He could barely trace the events in his mind, so fickle and fast they seemed to have come.

  She whispered in his ear. “In our next lives we’ll live in that little fishing village south of Caeli-Amur, won’t we? Won’t we?”

  But Anton could not speak; he knew the words would not be “Yes.” He could not say them. That wasn’t the truth.

  Eliana tried to step back, but Anton held her close. “Stay with me.”

  “No,” she said.

  “We can fight. We can—” He tried to say “run” but the word would not come. He knew it to be false.

  She shoved him and broke free from his grasp. “No.”

  Eliana walked back to the Director, who stood to greet her. There she threw her arms around him. “I will love you, husband. Love is an act, not just a feeling. I will come to feel the feeling. I will bring myself to it, through my actions.”

  “Take her home.” Lefebvre gently pushed Eliana towards Jean-Paul. The adjutant led her through the door, and Eliana did not look back, at the room or Anton.

  “Liar,” said Anton beneath his breath at her. “You’re a liar.”

  Lefebvre and Anton stared at each other. The Director spoke quietly. “I trusted you for years, and now this. The truth is a hard thing to accept is it not? To look things in the face, as they really are.”

  Anton closed his eyes. He too spoke quietly. “You know she will always love me.”

  “That is where you are wrong. It seems she possesses greater willpower than either of us believed. I have no doubt that she will come to love me. Do you?” Lefebvre looked at Anton severely.

  “No.” Anton looked down at the floor as if there he might find something with which to make sense of events.

  Lefebvre walked to the door. “I could have you killed, but I prefer to leave you alone—to face the truth.”

  * * *

  In the darkness of the night Anton made his way into the House Technis complex—that massive sprawling structure, constantly growing like some brick and mortar cancer. He passed through the warren-like corridors. Overhead pneumatiques carried messages on criss-crossing wires. Anton made his way into the office of Officiate Ijem, who seemed to spend much of his time laughing—one of the qualities that made Anton like him.

  “Ah, Anton, it is good to see you,” said
Ijem happily. “I trust you’ve been well.”

  “I have a Truth-Mould within me,” said Anton. “And everything has come apart.”

  Ijem looked at Anton with a curious half-smile. “Ah, one of House Arbor’s experiments . . . how fascinating.”

  Anton rubbed his face with his hands. “There’s no pleasure left for me in this world.”

  Ijem broke into a grin. “Don’t worry, the House will look after you. You’ve served us well for a long time now. Not just anyone is able to steal papers from Director Lefebvre’s very study in the midst of a ball! What a story that makes! Don’t worry, our physicians will heal your arm, our thaumaturgists will get the Truth-Mould out of you and we’ll get you back on your feet. Obviously you’ll have to hide here for a while, but there’s always hope. Tomorrow’s another day, eh?”

  “I don’t want the Truth-Mould out of me. I don’t want to live this life of deceit anymore.” The image of Eliana with her arms around Lefebvre came to Anton’s mind.

  Ijem looked at him questioningly, and then matter-of-factly said, “Well tomorrow’s another day. Who knows what pleasures it might bring.”

  With one hand, Anton spun his labyrinth ring around his index finger and closed his eyes.

  The Memory Of Water

  Andrew J McKiernan

  “The ocean, it remembers us,” David said, the heel of his foot dredging shallow trenches in the sand.

  Mara did not reply or even acknowledge that she’d heard her brother speak. Instead, she continued looking off towards the clouds that followed the coast up from the south. Purple and swollen, they straddled the line between land and sea, crawling on watery tendrils ever northward. But the storm they carried was still a ways off yet—somewhere over the city, she imagined—and they had at least an hour before it disturbed the calm of the beach.

  She’d have to leave then, before the rain hit. Return to the shelter of the small beach-house their father had left to the family many years before. A house her mother had both hated and loved for the memories it evoked. But it would be out of the rain; away from the water.

  “Do you remember that time when we were kids?” her brother was saying. “We came up here for the summer. I think I was about ten, so you would’ve been eight. Do you remember?”

  She turned to face him for a moment, the line of his profile matching the cut of the headland in the background—a long sloped forehead weathering away to cavernous eye sockets, a rocky-edged nose flaking from over-exposure to the elements, a short ledge of lips occasionally licked slick with salty wetness. The similarity was disconcerting. She forced a smile and turned back towards the open sea, the pounding waves and distant horizon.

  “We must’ve come up here a thousand times when we were kids, David,” she said, knowing perfectly well which time he was talking about. “We were up here every weekend one summer and you expect me to remember just one time?”

  “Yeah, I expect you to remember. You pretty much ruined the whole holiday. Mum got so upset she took us back to Sydney. I beat on you all week for it, so I doubt you’d forget.” His smile was both furtive and apologetic, as good an admission of guilt and remorse as she would ever get from David.

  Further down the beach a family were excavating towels, an umbrella, a volleyball, buckets and spades from the sand in preparation to leave. There were a lot more empty spaces on the beach now. Not many people remained in the water either and Mara wondered what time it could be. Almost certainly after four, but could it be as late as six? She hated daylight savings.

  “Yeah, I remember,” Mara said. “I got dumped by a wave and spazzed out something chronic.” Mara knew it wasn’t quite that simple and she pretended not to notice her hands were starting to shake. “You and mum thought I was drowning.”

  “Drowning! We thought you were being eaten by a damn shark! You were rolling all ‘round in the water, screaming like a stuck pig. We thought it was another fucking shark, Mara.”

  David stopped to look out at the water.

  He’s trying to find the spot where it had happened, Mara thought. She crossed her arms, hiding her hands in her armpits to stop the shaking. Maybe, she tried to tell herself, it’s just getting cold.

  “And then, when we’d dragged you out, you started spluttering and screaming about Dad,” David said, his voice softer and sadder than Mara had ever heard it. “Mum went white when she heard you. Started slapping you and shouting at you to shut up. Eventually you did. I didn’t think either of you would ever stop . . .”

  And then, quieter, he added, “I don’t think Mum ever did stop, not really.”

  “David,” Mara’s voice trembled, “what has this got to do with anything? Why are you bringing this up now? Do you think its my fault that Mum died? That somehow I caused her to become an alcoholic? That cirrhosis of the liver is my responsibility?”

  Tears welled up in Mara’s eyes and the shaking grew from her hands to her arms and up into her chest.

  David reached out to her across the sand, his hand brushing her shoulder, bringing out goosebumps on her skin. She could see in his eyes that she’d misread him completely.

  “No, no,” he said. “It’s not like that at all. That’s not what I meant, Sis. Last two days, since the funeral, I’ve been thinking. Thinking a lot. About something Mum said to me a couple of weeks ago.”

  He looked across at his sister, awaiting a sign it was all right to continue. When she closed her eyes and nodded her head he took that as his cue.

  “She wasn’t quite there, Mara. You know how she was most times. But she was trying to be there, really trying. I could see her in there, fighting to be understood. She said she was afraid. Afraid she wouldn’t be remembered. Afraid everything she’d ever seen, or touched, or heard, every joy she’d experienced would be erased. That eventually even our memory of her would fade away to nothing. Just like her memories of Dad. I couldn’t argue with her, Mara. I couldn’t tell her it wasn’t true.”

  There were tears in David’s eyes now too. Tears that overflowed and ran in salty rivulets down his cheeks.

  “But after she was gone I thought, it’s not true! You remembered Dad, but you weren’t even born when he died. You said things that day on the beach you couldn’t possibly have known. Things only Mum knew, and she hadn’t told anybody.”

  “I don’t remember him, David,” Mara protested. “I never even knew him. How could I when he was already gone?”

  “I know, I know. You’re right. You didn’t remember him. The ocean remembered him, Mara. It remembers us all.”

  She stared at him for a moment, scared of what he might mean. David mistook the fear in her eyes for bewilderment and forged a simpler explanation of his words. His tone was as a teacher to a small child.

  “Our bodies are mainly water, Mara. Salt water. We came from the sea; we return to the sea. Every minute part of you is a whole, a small fragment that explains the rest—like a hologram—just as every molecule of water in the ocean is identical to every other. Know one and you know them all. And, because we are part of that too—that cycle of life that is ruled by water—we are linked. We are linked, us and the oceans, and they remember us all.”

  Mara shook her head, denying his words. What he was saying was preposterous. Superstitious claptrap. A disjointed mental fantasy constructed from a childhood memory, layered over with fables of mother Gaia and the scam of homoeopathic science. The memory of water. The persistence of states. The ocean as some intelligent mother from whom we had all crawled—finned and gilled, gasping for air—and to whom we still owed reverence. It was pure rubbish!

  These were the thoughts Mara was preparing herself with when David asked:

  “Is that why you never go in the water any more, Mara? Does it speak to you of its memories?”

  Mara didn’t answer; she couldn’t.

  Eventually David left, returning to the beach-house, his absence an accusation in the sand beside her.

  * * *

  The storm did not ar
rive, at least for quite a while. The clouds still hovered just off to the south, caught up in some clash of pressure systems and prevailing winds that kept them churning upon themselves. Churning like Mara’s thoughts. She wondered if the storm would rain itself empty before it broke free and started north again?

  She sat quietly on the beach, watching the water rise and fall, advance and recede, to its own hypnotic rhythm. She felt the warmth of the sand beneath her; the smell of salt and seaweed mixing upon the breeze. The setting sun warmed her back and waves, inching ever closer on the incoming tide, whispered conspiracies across the sand in front.

  Once, during those long summer holidays, this beach and its ocean had been her playground. A wonderland of strange creatures sheltering in rock pools. Of bright shells and the promise of buried treasure hidden just around the next rocky headland. Days of too little sunscreen on the ears and too much sand in her bathers. Of dodging blue-bottles and poking piles of seaweed with driftwood in search of baby crabs.

  Sometimes she and David would body-surf the waves or, when the tides grew too rough, snorkel the calmer channels. And after, when she was tired out from her play, she would lie in the wet sand where land met sea feeling foamy waves wash over her body to cool the heat of the sun.

  But Mara had not been swimming in the ocean since she was eight. Not since she had seen her father there.

  She’d tried, once or twice, never getting much farther than the partial immersion of a toe or two.

  It was a fear of sharks she told her friends when they had asked, splashing and shouting from the waves, during one seaside excursion. There are no sharks here, they shouted at her, that’s ridiculous. Tiny schoolgirl hands sliced water in mock imitation of menacing fins and cruel laughter followed Mara along the beach, back to the school bus, alone.