The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2013

by Angela Slatter

  Zahra looked briefly to the sky before bowing her head. Adir stared at his brother. “Then kill me too.”

  Sayid turned and spat in the dust. “She is my wife. I have this right.”

  Adir’s arms cramped behind his back, his shoulders ached. He tasted blood and grit and Zahra.

  “Friends,” he said, raising his voice. “Can’t you feel the darkness in the air? The Gloam wants blood poppies, not opium poppies. They’re turning us into savages.” A foot landed in his ribs. He grunted in pain. Where was his father?

  “Enough of this,” Sayid said. “Kill her.”

  “Wait! Without a trial, you have no right to call on the village to execute her.”

  Sayid paused. “You would like me to kill her with my own hands? You think I can’t?” He turned and slapped Zahra across the cheek. She grunted, then glowered at Sayid.

  Adir gasped as the air thickened and the menacing presence filled the village.

  Sayid hit her again. And again.

  “You are a coward, brother.”

  “I have no brother,” Sayid replied as he pulled a long dagger from his belt. Zahra moaned and shook her head.

  “Sayid! Our father—”

  “Father is . . . indisposed.” He held Zahra’s jaw in his hand and forced her to look at him, then ripped the sheet from her body. “I bet the spawn in your belly is his, isn’t it?”

  Adir stopped breathing. Stall, Zahra! Beg, grovel, convince him!

  The look in her hate-filled eyes turned his blood glacial. Her laugh withered his hopes. She said, “Oh yes. Never yours.”

  Sayid drove the point of the dagger into her belly. She screamed.

  Breath returned in a rush. Pain squeezed Adir’s heart tight and he shut his eyes. Forgive me, Zahra.

  “How would you like to fuck her now?” his brother yelled. Adir clenched his teeth and ground them together. He wanted to grasp his brother’s throat and slowly crush it.

  Zahra’s scream cut off with a gurgle.

  Silence. A hush like the moments before a newborn takes its first cry. Tears forced their way from beneath Adir’s closed eyelids. If he didn’t look, she could still be alive.

  Something in the stillness made him look. It was too quiet. Zahra—streaked with blood from a gaping wound at her neck—hung unmoving from the post and at her feet were a mass of red poppies. As Adir watched, a drop of blood fell from Zahra’s breast. The ground stirred as the blood seeped in. A tiny green shoot surged forth, spindly and rapid. In seconds the plant reached full growth and the bright buds bloomed. Adir’s eyes widened. He glanced around. Faces were slack-jawed, eyes filled with awe. Little Fadwa wailed and fell to her knees.

  “A miracle,” he heard. Cries of fear and sadness followed. He narrowed his eyes and tilted his head to look up at his brother. A flicker of unease crossed Sayid’s face and he cast around, looking for someone.

  “A whore,” Sayid began, uncertain. “She was a whore! God wanted me to kill her. It is so!” He looked for support. Villagers shied from him. The hands that pressed Adir into the dirt eased and let go. He stood, letting the sheet fall. Naked, he confronted his brother.

  “You are a pig.”

  Sayid recoiled. “How dare you—”

  “I loved her. She loved me. I wanted to marry her, but you stole her from me. There is no shame in love. None.”

  His brother stumbled back, raising his hands. Adir glanced around at the villagers. Some were slinking from the square. At the edge of the square he saw a hooded, grey-robed figure. Sayid saw it too and a sudden smile bloomed on his face.

  “Stop!” Adir urged. “This is not the end.” Behind him Zahra was a macabre scarecrow in her growing field of red poppies. “This can never happen again. Love is not punishable by death.” He pointed to the grey-robed figure. “The Gloam are using us.” The figure stood unmoving as the frightened villagers watched.

  “The poppies must be fed,” someone called.

  “The poppies have been fed! You have grown a crop of blood poppies, my friend. What darkness do they bring? Before, we fed the opium poppies with sheep. We must return to that practice. We have become little more than savage monsters.”

  Sayid’s lip curled. “Whores make fine fertiliser, better to not waste the sheep.”

  The faces before him changed. Eyes looked past him, grew wide, fearful. Someone shrieked.

  He turned. The crimson poppies were writhing, growing bigger, sending out tendrils formed of smoke and blood. More people screamed. The first tendril reached Sayid. Uncomprehending, he swatted at it. It curled around his wrist.

  And then it curled around his neck and strangled him.

  Chaos. Men and women ran back and forth, trying to escape the square, but the tendrils were everywhere—lethal snakes of death, hunting indiscriminately. “Mercy!” cried one woman as the tendril closed around her neck.

  A wall of grief separated Adir from their terror and shrieks. Grief . . . and satisfaction.

  Revenge.

  One of the tendrils found a small boy, lifted him and threw him into a wall. Shock punched Adir in the gut. No. Not the children.

  A vicious tug on his arm sent him sprawling. Junah stood over him, her face hard. “This is what they want,” she said, pointing. He looked and saw the Gloamling walking undisturbed through the chaos, waving the tendrils away with a word. The face was shadowed but a thin smile could be seen. “You must stop it.”

  “Is it Zahra?”

  She shook her head. “It was there before Zahra, but it is stronger now. She is part of it.”

  He got to his feet. The blood poppies grew tall as men, their colour dark as Muscat grapes. Tendrils thrashed. With a silent prayer Adir lunged forward and sunk his hand into the earth beneath Zahra’s still form.

  A vast pressure squeezed him; an ancient brooding presence woken to a frenzy by blood and hate. At the edges he felt Zahra’s rage and terror. If he closed his eyes he could see them: the huge shadowy being, the women stretching in a mournful line behind his murdered lover. Adir breathed deep.

  “Forgive us,” he said to the ancient one. “This blood should never have been spilled, should never have woken you. Forgive us,” he said to the women. “We are weak and cruel, but this slaughter is giving the enemy what it wants.” He raised his arm with effort and pointed at the Gloamling, still untouched. “If they have their way, more women will die.”

  In the eye of the storm, Adir held his breath. The ancient one regarded him.

  His mind was filled with a vision of what must be done. He nodded. The tendrils withdrew.

  The ghostly women were unsatisfied. Adir sensed their anger and smelled burnt ozone. Women who have defied God’s laws. He inhaled sharply.

  “The Gloamling draws its power from your strength. You can take it away,” he said, hoping it was true. The smell intensified, blistering his nostrils, before a zephyr blew the scent away. A sense of profound peace settled upon him.

  The grey-robed figure stood beside him. The poppies had shrunk back to normal size and moved only with the breeze that ruffled their petals. Zahra’s hair fluttered like a pennant. He reached his hand out and stroked a silky lock.

  “You owe us your existence,” the Gloamling said, its voice hissing and clicking simultaneously.

  “Thank you,” Adir said stupidly. He rubbed his face and discovered his cheek was wet.

  The Gloamling turned and studied him. “Tell me what you did,” it said.

  Adir tensed his shoulders. He resisted the Gloamling’s mind easily and relaxed. “It was their power. Never yours.”

  The Gloamling leaned down and touched a scaly claw to a red petal. It hissed in pain and pulled its claw back. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. Some dark force, a being of immense power.” Adir stared at Zahra through hazy eyes. He only half-listened to the Gloamling.

  “That’s impossible. We banished your Gods.”

  “There is but one God,” Adir recited absently.

&nbs
p; The Gloamling snarled and stalked away. Adir watched the grey-clad form retreat. He became aware of his surroundings.

  The square was filled with sobbing people. Scattered around him was the wreckage of his village. Faces were swollen and black, tongues protruding rudely. As Adir turned, survivors scattered, but a small whimper made him pause. He stepped over corpses, careful of his bare feet. Trapped under the swollen body of Hassan he found little Fadwa. She wept silent tears, eyes shut tight against the horror. He knelt and touched her arm.

  “Fadwa.”

  The girl covered her face with her hands and shook.

  “Fadwa. Please. Look at me.”

  She slid her fingers from her face and stared at him with tormented eyes. He leaned forward, kissed her lightly on the cheek and whispered in her ear.

  Mute, she nodded. He stood and picked his way back through the bodies littering the ground. Back to Zahra.

  “Goodbye, my love,” he said. As the rising sun broke through the dawn cloud cover, light turned the blood poppies from dark Muscat to bright crimson.

  Under the combined gaze of the few survivors he bent down and picked a flower. He turned from his lover, back straight, and walked naked from the village. A sharp wail sounded behind him like a knife at his back. It was joined by another keening cry. And another. The remnants of the village mourned.

  Adir walked into the field of white opium poppies. He placed the red poppy in the hollow that held so many memories and touched his fingers to his lips.

  Junah approached, holding a blazing torch in each hand. Fadwa hovered behind. Adir took the proffered torch and stood side by side with Junah. She placed her free hand on his arm, then held the flames to a row of perfumed blossoms. They shrivelled and fire took hold.

  Adir avoided her gaze as she turned to him. He watched the spread of the fire. With a nod she left him there, gathering Fadwa up as she went.

  “Adir!”

  He saw his father hurrying toward him, a grief-stricken Wadi trailing.

  “Stay back,” he warned. “This is the only way.” He saluted Wadi. “For Zahra.”

  “Zahra would want you to live,” his father cried in anguish. He started forward, but Wadi held him back. Adir turned his back on them.

  Adir touched the flames to the poppies, swinging the torch slowly back and forth. He walked through the field, a harbinger of doom and hope. As the sun rose he found himself in the centre, surrounded by blistering heat. Fire burned him clean.

  The Ninety-Two

  Claire McKenna

  When the devil died (aged forty-five, heart attack from overtraining, keeled over on the Nugget’s Crossing five kilometres into a ten kilometre run), he was wearing his number ninety-two guernsey, and even then nobody wanted to touch it, or him, because if there was ever a man averse to kindness or tenderness it was Beaufort Kinsey. So they stood in the middle of the road instead, eighteen dumbfounded men watching him die, and not one lifting a finger to help.

  Only a passing motorist had the good sense to call an ambulance five minutes and thirty seconds later, but by the time the paramedics arrived Beaufort had passed on to the great beyond.

  “Christ, it was quick,” said one witness. “Died right there on the spot. Dead before he hit the ground.”

  A subsequent autopsy was confirmation enough of a cardiac arrest. A minor blood vessel in Beaufort’s grotesquely scarred heart had pinched off like a highway after a five car pile-up, and the cascading trauma climaxed with a split artery and Beaufort hitting the concrete at the midpoint of haranguing a seventeen-year old kid about the correlations between sexual orientation and not being able to keep up with the much fitter pack.

  What the report didn’t quite mention was that a good ten minutes might have existed between the incident and the sweet hereafter. Nor was it floated that with CPR Beaufort might have been saved, nor did anyone want to mention the croaked, “Help me, you fucks,” that constituted Beaufort’s last words.

  Two hundred people turned out for his funeral.

  The event was woefully under-catered. Kylie Kinsey, Beaufort’s long suffering wife, had calculated for the thirty members of the North Trafalgar Victorian Football Association and maybe the one or two drinking mates he had not totally isolated from years of using the Royal Arms Hotel as his preferred provider of maggoting volumes of spirits. In a last (and her first) moment of rebellion she catered the event herself with five loaves of stale supermarket bread and the cheapest sausages she could find, pre-cooked and left overnight in the too-warm fridge Beaufort hadn’t replaced last month because it wasn’t fucking broken you fucking bitch.

  Like they said, the devil.

  Kylie sat stonily through a service MC’d by the budget celebrant from several towns over, a man who had never known Beaufort Kinsey and gushed about how wonderful and respected and loved Beau was, and you could have heard a pin drop as everyone looked at their feet or the gaudy crying Jesus statues in the corner of the church. Kylie shed a couple of tears, but only out of relief that Beau was gone, and only from her left eye, because the healed orbital fracture in her right—the size of Beau’s fist—had destroyed her tear ducts.

  Seated next to Kylie was Beau’s employer and North Trafalgar’s main sponsor, Finnegan Torch. Sixty-year-old Torch was the owner of Torch’s Meats, the regional meat and butcher specialists. Beau had been Torch’s head abattoir manager, and Finnegan had loved him like his own delinquent and terrifying son.

  Kylie Kinsey might have been stoic, but Torch wept like his heart had been broken.

  When Coach O’Laughlin came to the lectern, he continued the fictional theme with a story of a man dedicated to his club, a father-figure who took his time in mentoring the younger ones, whose commitment had him becoming the oldest still-active player in the state.

  Coach O’Laughlin didn’t mention how Beau was meaner than a drunk on Good Friday, that his mentoring extended only to taking the over-18’s on sex tours. Anyone who didn’t go was immediately branded a flaming fucking poofter and not fucking playing in a Trafalgar North team. Heterosexuality according to Beau was measured in how many naked men could fit into a bedroom and service one unconscious local girl. He was that person both sad and too common; who found himself equally aroused by another man’s shame as a stranger’s breasts but would never admit it even privately lest the possibility of poofterism raise its judgemental and perhaps even purplish swollen head.

  “He stayed with his team to the end. A legacy lasts longer than a memory, and his legacy will stay with us always.”

  (More than one mourner put his hand in his pocket and surreptitiously scratched his nuts, because on the last tour everyone contracted something red and weally and anitibiotic-resistantly itchy that also threatened to stay with them always.)

  Beau had two daughters, eight and ten. Easy enough to feel sorry for them at the loss of their father, but they had the look of survivors who have just been airlifted out of a war-zone. Kylie’s younger brother Scott flew down from Sydney and in a fit of defiance wore his pinkest and most flamboyant shirt.

  “I would have brought my goddamn maracas if I thought I could piss that fucker off any more,” Scott was heard to grumble to his partner later that evening. “By the way, don’t eat the sausages.”

  Two weeks later, when everyone had recovered from the gastro epidemic that had run rampant through North Trafalgar’s male demographic, Coach O’Laughlin convened a meeting with the rest of the football club.

  “Well boys, we have to elect another club President, and we have to vote on shelving the guernsey.”

  North Trafalgar’s clubhouse was longer than it was wide, and one long wall was completely covered in mounted Australian Rules football guernseys, each one bearing a photo of the man who had worn it last. The earliest jumpers were long sleeved and woollen, from the original style of the game where a player waited in Melbourne’s wintry conditions for the ball to be kicked his way. Back then the men were small and nuggetty, hard working men from th
e inner city whose factories overlooked re-appropriated cricket grounds turned into mud-pits. As the game modernised, so too did the players. Poached from athletics clubs and other sporting codes, the players grew in stature, and a new style of no-sleeved parachute silk jersey replaced the wool-knit in the fast-paced marathon that the game had become.

  None of the numbers were in use. There is a grand tradition in Aussie Rules, that a player who has lived an exemplary life, who is a hero and a mate and brave and true, all the qualities that are held in the highest regard, will have his number retired on his death. No other player will wear his guernsey, and it will join the wall of heroes and champions, a football Valhalla.

  Being a little town, a lot of men had filled those criteria. They were men who had fought bushfires, rescued families from swollen rivers, had gone overseas to fight wars they knew nothing about and had still carried on a tradition. They were giants, and they were numerous, and there wasn’t a player alive now who had worn a North Trafalgar number below eighty.

  Beau had thought himself that sort of man. Two years ago, when he’d beat with extreme prejudice the cancer that lost him a testicle, he had begun to rearrange the Hero Wall so that the central space above the Premier’s Cup was vacant. That space was going to be reserved for a single guernsey, a number ninety-two, and for the hero photo Beaufort Kinsey would be immortalised in the prime of his life, taking the spectacular mark that had shattered another man’s collarbone.

  “As you know,” Coach O’Laughlin said, “We have to vote unanimously to have a guernsey retired. All those in favour . . . ”

  Beau’s influence was so absolute that even after his death most of the hands went up in stiff, shuddering columns.

  All except one.

  “C’mon Darren,” whispered one of the younger players to the malcontent who sat, legs spread and arms folded, refusing to vote. “Just put your hand up.”

  “No,” he said. Now that Beau was dead, Darren Speaker was now the oldest player. As Beau’s best mate since they were teens, everyone thought he’d have been Beau’s biggest cheerleader.