The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2013

by Angela Slatter

  “Tell me about her.”

  He crunches the stein back into the ice and settles the acid pen back into his working hand. Bends forward over the vase, begins his next stroke.

  “What do you want to know?”

  I think about what to ask, how to ask it.

  “What did you call her?”

  “Her name, what else? Trüde. You used to call her Nana Trüde yourself.”

  “What else did you call her?”

  “God, I don’t know! Darling, sweet one, Trüdelinde. Occasionally harridan or shrew.” He pauses, squints at me. “Odd questions. You okay? Too cold up there to sleep?” He nods up towards my attic.

  “Too hot, actually.” I wait until he starts a new stroke of the acid pen, a perfect curved line over an elemental buttock, and say: “What about Saulė?”

  The pen goes through both sides of the vase and into his left palm, taking a jagged shard with it and plunging a water wraith’s outstretched hand into his own. Crimson spatters up the frosted whiteness of her limb. My grandfather howls, a sound of anguish as much as pain, and lurches forward. The remains of the vase clatter onto the marble benchtop, shattering and scattering into slivers and dust. I am rigid with fear and guilt. If I’d intended anything it was only to spoil the design, not to destroy, not to injure.

  “Don’t just sit there!” My grandfather is up and staggering to the big tin sink in the corner. “I need gauze and bandages, some sulfadiazine if we’ve got any.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry? I’m the one who cut my damn hand open.”

  “What I said—”

  “What about what you said? God’s sake, stop squawking and get me some bloody ointment.”

  I open the cupboard next to the sink, rummage for the first aid box.

  “You should have been wearing gloves.”

  “I never wear gloves when I’m etching, you know that.”

  “You make me wear gloves.”

  “Yes, well. Do what I say, not what I do.” Ice-cold water runs over the rip in his palm and sputters down the drain threaded with ribbons of crimson. His face is set against the pain as the acid from the glass and the pen burns the edges of the wound. “Gloves get in the way. Putting anything between you and the glass clouds what you’re doing, stops you feeling your way through to the image, to the truth of what you’re making.” He glances at me, and for the first time his face looks truly old—accepting of its age, and bowed by it.

  “We’re the only ones left, you know,” he says then. He tries to grin. “And I’m running low on material. All my deals are reaching their end date. Soon it’ll just be you.”

  I take his wounded hand in both of mine and gently place the ointment-soaked gauze over the ravaged palm, then bind it with a crepe bandage.

  “You’ve hurt your left hand, Illar, not lost your right arm. You’ve still got plenty of art left in you.”

  He shows me a grateful smile, but there’s something hard now behind his eyes, an edge I’ve never seen before: a deliberation, a calculation. Something fundamentally cold. And I wonder then, thinking about the question that I asked, whether the wound in his hand is my fault at all.

  Still, I insist that he goes to the Hambapol Clinic for proper first aid, a thorough investigation of the injury, a professional dressing. He, in turn, insists that I mustn’t go with him, that an old wooden door and high windows aren’t enough security for the showroom, that I must stay and look after the place. After the taxi drives away, Illar cradling his hand in a towel in the back seat, I walk back through the showroom and catch a glimpse in the blind glass of the side-chapel’s archway, and a hint at the edges of the mirror’s lacuna of something blue and sharp and cold.

  * * *

  “Mikus!”

  But he’s not there. I’ve fallen asleep fully dressed on the bed, and woken with his name in my mouth but no voice in my head. The clock says it’s four in the morning. I’m thirsty and too warm, and make my way downstairs to the small kitchen behind the foundry.

  I find myself instead before the chapel’s archway and the locked steel door to the basement beyond. It’s shut, as it always is, solid against the old stonework. I didn’t get a drink, I realise, and turn to walk back through the darkened showroom, and there is the mirror on the far side, blind as ever, and in it the cellar’s steel door at the back of the chapel is open.

  Some part of my mind assumes this is a dream, and that therefore the contrary image doesn’t have to make sense. But other parts, the parts that are thirsty and too warm and that saw the clock, make me look back again into the chapel. At the resolutely closed basement door.

  “Oh, for Saulė’s sake,” I breathe, and stop and wonder why I said that. That is my grandfather’s oath, not mine.

  Ask him about Saulė.

  I did ask him, and he ripped a hole in his hand and went to hospital. So what was the point of that?

  Look again.

  Her voice in the back of my head, and I turn sharply and am trapped again by the mirror. In the blind, unseeing glass, the door to my grandfather’s private sanctuary stands open.

  Remember, the mirror cannot see. So it cannot lie about what it sees.

  “Mikus.” I want the other dream. I want to wake up in the other dream with him beside me, with his impossible skin on mine. “Mikus, please.”

  No, not Mikus Auseklis. Not brother-lover, not this time. He found you, and led you to me. Now find me, and I will lead you to him.

  The mirror cannot see, and so cannot lie about what it sees.

  So what I see is a lie?

  I step into the chapel. There is a memorial to one side, a stone sarcophagus mounted by the ruined effigy of some long-dead Teutonic knight; its feet are missing and half the face is gone, the noble features crumbling into pitted marble. I look closely at the door. Heavy steel, no handle, a smooth flush fit into the church’s stone-brick walls. Impassable, to my eyes.

  A lie.

  I close my eyes and reach my hand forward to touch the door. My fingers touch nothing. To look now would, I know, be a mistake. I walk forward again, four, five, six steps, well beyond the door’s barrier. I turn and open my eyes. The door is closed, sealed, solid. Or looks solid, at least. I think about testing it, and decide not to, decide to hope that it simply works the same way going back out. It’s only a dream, after all. If it doesn’t work, I can always wake up.

  There are a dozen steps in front of me, old and worn and slippery with condensation. I tread carefully down them and find myself in a long chamber, a wide corridor in the earth lit by angled spotlights that leave irregular stretches of it in blackness. As I move through and down I feel the temperature drop. My breath skeins into mist in front of my face, and there is a faint odour of sulphur and old earth.

  Lining the tunnel walls are the same iron-rodded shelves as in the showroom. Initially they hold more of the eccentric, glorious misshapes from the upstairs studio—Illar’s signature melted forms and dissolute wholes, though more extreme in their deliberate imperfections. But further down the chamber there are other objects. Tall fronds of green glass set out in clusters along one wall: the first group all perfectly vertical, like the rods of glass in the foundry but with flared bases where they seem to be growing straight from the shelf; the next group beginning to bend, the merest undulation at their tips; the next group more pronounced, almost as if they are swaying in a non-existent breeze. And on down the wall into darkness, and then I look again and they are changed. The first group is now supplicant, bending almost to the flat surface from which they sprout; the group farthest away is upright, stiff as bamboo. And they change again, and I know, I think, that it is a trick of the light.

  Looking hard away from the falsely swaying grass, I move down the line of transparent shelves. My gaze settles on another display, three curved semi-pyramidal pieces that look more like polished stone than glass—a lustrous golden brown like tiger’s eye, with yellow fibres running through it. Each ‘sto
ne’ is pitted in several places, adding a seeming element of decay to their beauty. On another shelf sits a clear glass paperweight globe with a partial opening in the top and striations in the glass that make me think uncomfortably of teeth. I stop beside a set of shelves replete with blood-red bowls interconnected with dendritic venous straws of blue-black glass. I look closer. There is a slight, slow pulsation, a peristaltic drift of current along the glass veins between each scarlet bowl.

  All the days my grandfather spent down here—the bad days, the off days—brooding and grumbling and, so I always thought, pouring his little miseries into his art. But this isn’t the artistry of the showroom, these aren’t the modern relics of wonder that the tourists come to buy. I look back along the corridor. The thickly swaying filaments of green, like infected polyps or gangrenous muscle strands; the tiger’s eye rocks like massive gallstones on a slab. This is an art of strange compulsion, of sacrilege and sacrifice, of offal and taint. These are vessels and organs rendered in infernal dust, viscera in glass.

  I feel a hard binding in my own muscles, a tension that sets off an uncontrollable tremor in my upper legs and arms. I force breath into my lungs and movement into my feet, and walk on down the darkened corridor.

  The tunnel opens out into a large circular chamber of rough-hewn stone, maybe half as big again as the showroom in the nave upstairs, lit by strings of arc lamps hanging from crampons hammered into the rock. Midway around on one side is an archway that leads to a narrow room—a small foundry, with three furnaces and all the necessary equipment carefully placed to make the most of the minimal space. The glory and the annealer are closed and cold, the crucible barely glowing. There are several large holes drilled into the roof of both the foundry and the main chamber, and I can feel a cool passage of air when I stand beneath them. As in the vestry foundry, there is a small bookshelf to one side, though this one is of ornately carved wood rather than workaday aluminium. But there are no technical manuals on these shelves; instead there are volumes of Northern mythology, scholarly texts on witchcraft and religion, and a battered cloth-bound pocket book with the title stamped in gold-leaf: On The Malleability Of The Soul.

  In the main chamber, there are six display cases of iron and thick glass set into alcoves that have been chiselled at regular intervals around the walls. Each case holds an assortment of small objects—plates, bowls, goblets, glass flowers. These objects are neither the fanciful meanderings of Illar’s commercial output, nor the grimly beguiling chimaera from the tunnel, but are instead curiously flat in their effect, almost void of artistry altogether, like mismatched minor parts of a greater whole.

  To the sides of each case are smaller stands holding altogether stranger objects, along with wall-hangings and individually mounted sculptures. There is a picture of a long beach, with the sand fused into glass. There is a carved wooden pole on which sits a glass helmet, smoothly rounded, a rococo design etched into the facade and a darker opacity where the eye-holes should be. Another painting, smaller, back-lit stained glass that looks sand-blasted, of a ghost-pale child looking up to Heaven. Another, a monotone face behind frosted glass, but part of the glass is torn away like skin to show black-and-white flesh beneath. I see silicate viscera displayed as if on a mortuary table, blown-glass filaments fine as hair, miniature quartz figurines caught in poses of agony and joy.

  Beside what I at first take to be one more display case, though this one is taller and covered in a heavy black cloth, there hangs an entire glass body, flawlessly transparent, upside-down and held fast in an inverted pose of blessing. Its eyes are sightless, hollow sockets in an angelic face, yet it holds my gaze and tells me that I am here now beyond all measure of safety.

  I reach for the cloth covering the case and pull.

  * * *

  I don’t know how long I’ve been standing there when Illar’s voice breaks through the wall of my skull and my consciousness spills back out into the world.

  “Nietzsche knew what he was talking about, you know. You should look away now.”

  With more effort than I would ever have imagined necessary for such a task, an effort that costs me pain in my shoulders and behind my eyes, I peel my gaze away from the blind glass and look at my grandfather. His left hand is thickly bandaged, his arm raised halfway up his chest in a sling.

  “How? How did you . . . ?” I move away to the side of the chamber and turn my back more fully to the mirror. The density of its pull, of its desire for my sight, recedes. “You said the one in the showroom was the only one.”

  “It was, for a long time. In a way, it still is, the only one of its kind, at least.” He walks towards the glass but keeps his eyes on me. “This one is of an entirely different kind. It doesn’t just not see you, it sees not-you. It’s a spectacle of nothingness.” He walks briefly into the foundry, brings out a folding metal chair, opens it next to me. “Sit down. You look exhausted.”

  I look at him for a long time. His face looks ragged in the arc lights’ glare; his shoulders are slumped, and I can see by the way he holds himself that his back is hurting. I gesture at the chair.

  “Maybe you need it more than I do.”

  He grins, but it’s tired and fleeting. He nods, and sits down.

  “What did you see, when you looked into it?”

  I stare at him, and say nothing.

  “No. Well, can’t blame you, I suppose.” With his good hand he reaches into his coat pocket and brings out a half-bottle of Polish vodka that’s already nearly empty. “They gave me some painkillers, rather strong ones, so I probably shouldn’t have drunk all that. You want the rest? No? All right then, they can have it,” and he swings his arm and launches the bottle at the mirror. It misses, bounces off the wall without breaking, and finishes neck down against the corner of a display case, the dregs of alcohol dripping out and soaking into the dirt packed between the stones in the floor.

  “These tunnels were here long before the church, you know. There are older places to worship than churches, older gods to pander to than God.”

  “Was Saulė a god?”

  “Goddess. And is, not was. Gods don’t die, you should know that. Goddesses even less so.”

  “Who is she?”

  Illar sighs and stands—it seems to take him an age to stand—and he walks slowly around the display cases. Stops at one and gestures to the shelf beside it.

  “You see this?” There is a book, the pages filigreed black glass. Illar gestures with his good hand and the pages turn with a sound like falling diamonds. “You think I’m ragana, think I’m a witch?” He laughs, a guttural bark of old bitterness. “I’m nothing. I’m an ungodly taxidermist, that’s all I am now.”

  “Illar, please. I don’t understand any of this.” There is an acrid and bitten-down fear in my mouth, and a wild pulse racing through my head and heart, but I force myself to speak slowly and softly.

  “Of course you don’t. I made sure of that, didn’t I? I had to, that was part of the deal. One of the deals. I don’t know, I lose track. So many bargains, so many slices off my soul. It’s amazing what a man will put himself through just to keep his line running.” He picks up the bottle, stands it on top of a display case, leans hard against the wall next to it. “Saulė is the sun.” He points at the inverted, transparent body next to the mirror. “She is your mother, your sister. My wife. Next to her,” he indicates the glass helmet, “is Auseklis, god of the stars, her brother, her lover.” My heart beats faster and I’m surprised Illar doesn’t hear it. If he sees the shock in my face he doesn’t register it.

  Mikus Auseklis, brother-lover. He found you, and led you to me.

  I feel my sense of reality beginning to unravel, and I tell myself to focus on what my grandfather is saying.

  He is indicating each of the display cases in turn as he speaks a litany of names. The black glass book is Laima, goddess of fate; the quartz figurines of agonised joy are Pērkons, god of thunder. There are Kapu māte, the graveyard mother, and Smilšu māte, the
mother of sands.

  “These are your family, your kin and kind.” He looks around the room, a bitter grimace on his lined face. “Fickle, murderous, in-bred bunch of egotists, every one of them.”

  “They’re nothing to do with me,” I say, and though I know as I say it that it’s not true, still it seems as good a defence as any against the madness my grandfather is pressing on me. “Whatever this is it’s yours, and I’ll have no part of it.”

  “But you already have, child. I know it, I can see it, I’ve worked with these bodies of glittering dust for so long now I can see every little taint when they merge. They are a part of you as you are of them, they are your glass kin and you are glass with them.” His eyes are wild now, and his voice is rising through hoarse belligerence to a half-strangled shout. “All of this is for you, don’t you see that? You’re the last one, the last of our kind and set in glass. All the things I’ve done for mercy, gratitude, forgiveness—all of it for love, for you.” He coughs, retches, and staggers forward—not towards me but towards the mirror. He reaches out a hand to steady himself, and looks up and into the blind glass.

  The steadying hand falls to his side. His breathing slows. The ragged lines of his face smooth into an expression of cold bliss.

  My grandfather stands between me and the mirror, but the one brief, searing glimpse that I catch is enough. The mirror cannot see, and so cannot lie about what it sees. This glass, I know, is truly blind.

  I pick up the metal chair, step quickly around my grandfather’s frozen thrall, and in one wide sweeping arc I hurl the chair at the mirror’s shimmering, minutely faceted surface.

  Illar Kroos screams as the blind glass crazes and shatters and slides in great shards and planes to the floor. But even as he cries out and brings his one good hand up to his head, his gaze is still fixed on the mosaic remnants of the glass; only now his eyes are filled with disgust and hate and fear, and the pull of the thing drags him to his knees and tethers his good hand to a spike of broken glass and wrenches his terrified face closer into the wreckage, and I run.