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

by Paul Haines

  Even here, at the edge of this, where the gravel throat of the dump vanished down another curve, other people’s junk was heaped to either side of the road. The hard, rounded corners of kitchen appliances jutted from the morass of tattered garbage bags, broken toys, old wood, and mattresses that had already been burnt once or twice.

  Amy and I drove on. The edge of this place wouldn’t do. For them to be truly gone, I’d have to go to the heart the quarry. If anything had the power to let us leave them behind, it was a place like this. A place where so many had left with less than they’d brought.

  The road twisted, again and again, as we drove, always in downward in tight spirals. When the road stopped at the bottom, so did we. This time I did turn on the headlights. The sun overhead was rimmed in cloud cover, and it’s light was too pale to help.

  I popped the trunk and got out. There were only three bags, half full of yarn and wool and patterns for dresses Becky would never wear. A dozen or so knitting needles poked out from one of the bags like finger bones.

  I lifted all three bags at once. My life with Becky weighed nothing. I found a hole, not far from the car, in a clearing where even the old clothes and moldy cardboard dared not stray. My hole.

  I dropped those bags down my hole, and went back to the car. I felt lighter.

  As I turned the key, the air-conditioner sputtered and the moisture on my cheeks went cold. I wiped the tears away before Amy could see them and surprised myself with the taste of blood. I wiped again, this time with the back of my hand. One of Becky’s knitting needles must have gotten me. The jagged hole in the webbing between my thumb and forefinger oozed blood, and started to ache. I ignored it and gave Amy a weak grin. She just looked at me, and I butchered what should have been a three-point turn into a six or seven-point one and turned around.

  We drove away. The dump faded in the rearview, and we went home for trip number two.

  Janice had been a hoarder, and when we’d broken up, she left everything behind. Everything. It had taken me days to gather it all, and it took me an hour to load it into the car. Bags kept breaking, bursting at the seems and spilling old envelopes, beads, paints, clay, and everything else an out of work artist can gather in a year and a half. All of it rolled about in the driveway like flotsam.

  The phone rang during my last trip to the car, but my hands were full. It stopped, then started again. I closed the door behind me. Whoever it was would have to wait.

  At last, she was rebagged. The trunk was full, as was the backseat, more full than was safe, but I opted to block the rearview’s line of sight instead of asking Amy to hold a few of the bags on her lap. She’d already lived through enough of this. She was smiling now, at least. Maybe she felt lighter too.

  This time, the dump smelled like a wet dog. I grimaced and the wind shifted to bring us another scent. The acid smell burnt batteries now stuck in the back of my throat. We circled to the center, in the last of the afternoon, that thick smell following us all the way down.

  Janice took just as many trips to unload as she had to pack away. I was sweating by the time I was halfway through. It all went down the hole, my hole, and it didn’t seem to matter how much I put down there, there was always room for more.

  My hand throbbed, and a bright slash of the thick purple paint Janice had used to sign her work dribbled across my hand and into the needle puncture. I got into the car and turned around a bit better this time, getting used to driving amidst the refuse of other people’s lives. We made it into a five-point turn, this time, and drove home.

  I had to turn the headlights on again before we got there. The last trip was going to have to be in the dark after all.

  I went inside for Lindsey’s stuff while Amy waited in the car.

  These bags, piled up in the corner of the den, held Lindsey’s belongings. But her things were my things; things that Lindsey had once loved and I had grown to love as well. Things that I had bought her and she had bought me and we had used together. When I’d gone around the house gathering her up, I ‘d put myself in those bags, as much as I’d put Lindsey in them.

  I filled the trunk, put a few bags in the back seat, and went back into the house one last time.

  I stood in the front room, the one Lindsey had always called the parlor and I had never had a need to name, to look for things I’d missed. And there, draped over a pair of nails, above the doorway that led to the kitchen, was the braid of dried mistletoe she and I had hung so long ago. A place to kiss, she’d said. Lindsey had loved Christmas. Christmas to Amy was simply a convenient time for her to give me an itemised list, ranked in order of her expectation.

  I brought a chair from the kitchen and stood on the seat. The mistletoe crumbled when I touched it, and the phone rang, all at once. I thought about letting it ring, but didn’t. Answering it would give me a reason to pu off this last trip, if only for a minute or two.

  I climbed down from the chair and picked up the receiver. For a moment I heard nothing, then the cries of gulls cut through the hiss of a bad connection.

  “Who is this other woman?”

  I wanted to drop the phone, or throw it, but my muscles had gone rigid and pressed the received to my face so hard it hurt my ear.

  “Who is this other woman, Rick?”

  “Janice?”

  “Do you love her?” A rustle, as she put her hand over her end and spoke to someone else. Then she was back. “Do you? It’s ok if you do.”

  “Her name is Amy. She says she can feel you, feel all of you. She said you wouldn’t leave her alone until the things you left behind had been gotten rid of. She says you make us heavy.”

  “What are you talking about?” Even now, she had a way of making me listen, but I guess all exes do. Even ones that slit their wrists. “She says her name is Becky. She says you’ll visit us soon. We’ll be here until you come for us.”

  I heard the line go dead and my muscles awoke. I slammed the phone down.

  I could see them, if I tried hard enough, Becky and Janice down in that hole, my hole, introducing themselves and then waiting patiently on that pile of garbage bags. Waiting for me.

  I fled the house. Amy wasn’t smiling anymore.

  “Sorry, hon,” I said, and stepped on the gas too hard. Amy nodded. The bags in the back seat nodded too, as did the “No Smoking” sign hanging from the rearview as a joke. Everyone I knew smoked like chimneys. Everyone but Amy.

  I knew the drive by heart, now, and it didn’t matter that it was dark. The wide lanes of the highway bled into the gravel road that led to the dump. The headlights picked up purple blossoms growing out of other people’s things. The little blossoms nodded at me like Amy had. There were eyes out there amongst the ruin as well, the eyes of things that pawed and sorted.

  I shivered and drove on.

  We wound deeper, back to my hole. I parked the car at an angle, so the headlights were aimed in that direction, patted Amy on the knee, flashed her a smile, and got out.

  This trip, all I could smell was the end. The rust and seagull droppings were everywhere, and my mouth was full of the stink of things that had burst in the sun and cracked in the cold.

  When we reached the center, I stopped the car and unloaded it. I took each bag, one at a time, and set it at the edge of the hole, then went back for another. When the car was empty I pushed the bags in with my foot, one by one, before I could change my mind.

  Then I looked back at the car. The headlights were at full bore, now, and I couldn’t see past their glare to Amy, but I knew she’d be smiling.

  I got on my hands and knees and peered into the hole, down into the darkness there. My hand had started bleeding again, and it hurt like hell.

  Janice had found the glow-in-the-dark paint in one of the bags. She’d painted them all, lines and squiggles and bright yellow masks that covered their faces but left the eyes and mouths black. The three of them stared up at me like baby birds in a nest, their limbs tangled, mouths working up at me, making black “O�
�s that widened and narrowed.

  I shifted, and felt my hand come down on something soft. A scarf. Whether it had fallen out of ones of the bags on that first trip, forever ago, or Becky had knit it for me in that hole, while she waited for me to return, I didn’t know. It didn’t matter.

  I wrapped the scarf around my throbbing hand and felt the pain go away. I pulled more up, wrapped the slack around my neck, and let the three of them pull me down into that place of theirs. That place of ours.

  My hole.

  Perhaps the next person who comes down here will know what to do when they find Amy. When they put her in her own hole, maybe we’ll all find our own peace.

  Mirror

  Jenny Blackford

  She screamed each time, she knows

  she screamed, but no one came.

  Perhaps it was a dream,

  the mirror and those eyes, not hers,

  so many times. Perhaps

  it was a dream.

  Years on, grown up, she’s still

  afraid. What if those eyes—

  imaginary eyes, not real—

  can find her here, look through

  the mirror on the wall

  in this new place?

  When she must close her eyes,

  must pull, let’s say, a dress

  or jumper overhead,

  she checks the mirror once

  again. What’s in it now?

  The room, herself.

  So far, so good. But whose

  eyes look from it at night

  when hers are closed?

  High Tide At Hot Water Beach

  Paul Haines

  We arrive early, but traffic already crawls, stalled and stalling along the road that snakes the coast to Hot Water Beach. Sam winds down his window, and the smell of the ocean tangy with salt and foam breezes into the car. Above us, television helicopters circle like gulls searching for scraps on the beach.

  “We’ll make it on time,” I say.

  “I know.” His eyes are closed. My brother appears relaxed, at peace. His chest rises and falls with deep breathing exercises. The grey in his hair has almost won the battle with the blond, and the stubble on his chin has gone from brown and red to a stark white in less than two years.

  I turn off the air-conditioning and lower all the windows. The sea breeze sweeps us back to childhood.

  It’s been more than thirty years. There were no carparks then, just a wide berth at the end of an unsealed road where people parked their cars and then continued on foot carrying baskets and towels, while ahead of them children scampered across the shallow stream and then raced the hundred or so metres down to Hot Water Beach.

  An official sees the ‘participating’ sticker on our windscreen and guides us into the reserved carpark for beachgoers. It’s almost full. Behind us, the three general admission carparks fill slowly and continuously with sightseers. I close the windows, then kill the engine.

  “Ready?”

  He smiles, and though his blue eyes are still bright, they are sunk deep within dark hollows. “Always ready, Toby,” he says, though he sits in the car as I get out and remove our bags—one for the beach gear, the other for the laptop. I put my pass around my neck and hand Sam’s in to him through the open door.

  “It’s warm,” I say.

  He holds out an arm. I grasp it—his wrists are so thin—and pull him lightly to his feet. He squints in the light of day. “Jesus, it’s changed.”

  We walk through milling crowds towards the makeshift registration office nestled between several cafes, a small pub called “The Hot Water Bar”, and the dairy. People sip at coffees, lick at ice-creams; video cameras are in hands, photos are snapped. We queue ten minutes until another official hands us our allotment number.

  “Cutting it close, gentlemen,” she says. “Low tide was just over an hour ago. You don’t have much time to get ready.”

  She directs us to the tarmacked ramp that bridges the stream and leads down to the beach. Space has been cleared, and temporary stands have been erected along the pathway. Already sightseers jostle for the best vantage point, the stands almost full.

  Others have taken position up on the slopes of the banks overlooking the sand, picnic rugs spread, cameras in hand, cold beers in the other.

  We pass security and head down the ramp. Several other participants walk ahead, one an obese man waddling uncomfortably alone, another a middle-aged woman in a wheelchair, being pushed presumably by her husband.

  Tina said she wouldn’t be coming, that there was no way in hell she would watch this. She had refused to allow Izzy as well. I knew this bothered Sam, though he said nothing.

  “She’ll come,” he says, as if he knows what I’m thinking. “Both of them will come. They’ll want to kiss me when this is over.”

  “They’ll come, sure.”

  The tarmac is hot. I can feel it cooking the soles of my jandals.

  “When did they put in a bridge?” I ask, shifting the bags to my other shoulder. “Or, for that matter, a path?”

  Sam laughed. “Remember that first time we came here, Toby? I was about eight, you must have been going on six. I think that was the first time I ever saw a woman’s breasts.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Remember Uncle Andy hanging shit on Mum and Aunty Jane and Aunty Elizabeth for not getting their tops off?”

  I nod, though I don’t remember that. All I remember is Uncle Andy’s big hairy penis flapping in the waves as we tried to splash it and our Aunties yelling at him as they sunbathed. “Geez, he had a big dick, didn’t he?”

  We both laugh. “And a different girlfriend every Christmas.”

  “I remember the sunburn, too. Our bums peeled for days.”

  There are perhaps fifty people on the beach. Half will be support people like me. Many of the rest have almost finished digging shallow troughs in the wet sand, not far from where the surf crashes to shore. Several already lie in their holes, as the sand is piled back over them. I place the bags at our allotment, open the beach bag, and remove a small spade. Sam undresses, and swaps his clothes for the spade. He kneels, naked, and begins to dig in the sand. If he is to have any chance at all, he must dig his own hole, or that’s what everyone believes. His body is emaciated, the sinew and muscle stretched taut across his limbs. His elbows and knees jut uncomfortably, all knobbly bone and callouses. Scars stretch from his pubis to his sternum, bisected across the abdomen just above the navel. A cross carved in skin. It has healed badly, a ridge of purple tissue riding proud through the hair on his belly.

  “Water’s warm,” he says, digging deeper into sand wet with hot springs.

  His ribs run like corrugated iron up his torso towards shoulder blades protruding like chicken wings from his back. He’s lost a quarter of his original body weight. Every muscle flexes in sharp relief beneath the skin as he digs his hole, all fat long since burned off his body.

  I remove the laptop from its bag. It blinks from hibernation mode, the screen difficult to see in the sunlight. I receive the signal broadcasting from the nearby cafes and arrange the windows on the screen. Newsfeeds stream in, betting agencies list odds—I can’t help but look, and Sam is listed at 15:1, roughly middle of the pack—and I initiate the communication channels Sam and I will use for the duration of the tide. I mute the volume on the noise coming in from the newsfeeds, then take Sam’s earpiece from the bag. It resembles a hearing aid, with a spur of moulded plastic that holds a miniature camera. I’ll be able to see what Sam sees as the surf rolls in. I point the earpiece at Sam, and his skinny body shows up on the screen. I blow into the earpiece and adjust the volume levels on the laptop.

  “You ready for this?”

  Sam looks up, sweat on his face. “When I’ve finished the hole.”

  On my screen, one of the newsfeeds shows a reporter interviewing the obese man. I turn and see them standing thirty metres up the beach from us. A cameraman stands nearby filming. The man resumes his digging, and
the reporter and cameraman head towards us, stopping to interview the woman sprawled in the sand at the base of her wheelchair. Her support person crouches next to her. Even from here, I can see him glare angrily at them. The reporter kneels and thrusts his microphone towards her. Back on the screen, she smiles politely. Her face is sheen with sweat. She clearly mouths the words “fuck off” to the reporter. I consider turning up the volume on the feed as the reporter says something else, and then the support person is between them, forcing them back with his chest. As they tussle, she jabs her spade back into the sand. It’s obvious to me she hasn’t the strength to finish the job in time. I wonder if she’ll let her support take over the hole.

  Statistically, that would be a bad move, but if she’s not inside before the tide rises, she’ll have even less chance. If you’re not in the hole, you’ll lose your soul, or so they say.

  “Reporters coming our way,” I tell Sam. “You want me to intervene?”

  “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “You know how they are.”

  “I don’t care. About them or what anyone thinks.” He pauses and rests the spade on his knees. He looks at me; his eyes are clear and untroubled. “This is my last chance.”

  We watch as they approach.

  “Hi, Steve Moki, iNet. We’re interviewing the contestants. Do you mind if we ask you a few questions, please sir?”

  “It’s not a competition,” Sam says.

  “Sorry, I meant participants,” Steve says. “Your name, sir?”

  “Sam Sawyer.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, Sam.” Steve scans the screen on his phone, no doubt looking up Sam’s online profile. “You have metastatic cancer in your lymph node system, Sam. Sorry to hear that. What do you think your chances are?”

  “For beating the cancer? Or for beating the tide?” Sam laughs. “How many people on this beach, Steve?”