The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2014 (Volume 5)

by Kaaron Warren

  Jasmine nodded, a curt starting signal. Jack saw the movement from the corner of his eye; he was focused on what the nurse was doing. He held back a moan of need as flesh was pierced—a shunt sparkled like some exotic piece of body jewellery in the woman’s chest. She barely reacted: a slight shudder of the feet, a subtle increase in her anxiety curling into the room. Fresh blood tainted the air as the nurse threw a stained cotton ball into a bin under the trolley.

  “The glasses are on a heated tray to maximise taste,” Jasmine told them.

  The nurse took a goblet and tapped the shunt. He heard the liquid hit the glass, smelt the gush. His parched mouth flowed with saliva that contained both a mild anaesthetic and a highly efficient anticoagulant. Neither would be needed tonight.

  The nurse shut the tap and—quickly, efficiently—took the glass to Jasmine, who held it as though it was the holy grail, waved it under her nose to enjoy the bouquet, then sipped, rolling it around in her mouth. It was quite a performance. The stench of desire filled the room. The gent, seated next to Jack, growled.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Jasmine said, her eyes slit in reverie, “the experience is superb. There is no fear to be tasted here. Perhaps the faintest pinch of melancholy, but nothing more. It flavours the experience; it does not pollute it.”

  She told the nurse to proceed and five goblets were half-filled, then delivered to each of them. Jack’s hands trembled as he lifted his glass, so warm in his palms, pink bubbles still dotting its ruby surface. The five of them were dogs, straining at the leash; he was past embarrassment.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Angela,” Jasmine announced. “Bon appétit and bon voyage.”

  He drank.

  * * *

  In the heat of the day, smelling of horse and sweat and chemicals, they muster the cattle into the yards and dip them for ticks and buffalo fly. The flies are a nuisance but the ticks are vile, buds of stolen blood spotting the herd’s necks and guts and legs; rubbery, the ticks burst like bloody berries if squeezed, but the heads, buried in flesh, can infect, and en masse they can make a beast do poorly.

  Afterwards, he tries living off cattle by moonlight, but unlike the tick, he finds no nourishment there. Only the two-legged herd can give him what he needs. He feels himself drifting away, like trying to live on air and water. He needs more, and out here with the roos and the gum trees and the beady-eyed crows, there is no more to be had.

  He’s never met anyone who can so much as stand the thought of ticks.

  * * *

  Angie wears a silver mermaid on a chain. It catches the sunlight as it dangles below her tanned chest, seeming to swim of its own accord as she dives under the waves. The pendant was a present from her daughter—Richard said Nerida had picked it out herself. She never takes it off.

  II

  Jasmine rang the bell, jarring them all back to awareness. Angela looked pale, her breath shallow. The bruiser opened the door. He was tall and wide and thick and looked at each of them as though he had metal detectors in his eyes, though he’d swept them all when they’d arrived. It had been a perfunctory act: you didn’t spend as much money and surrender a quart of blood simply to cause trouble. Besides, any ill intentions would be transparent at the first taste.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, let us adjourn to the drawing room,” Jasmine said, motioning them out. “It is time to bid.”

  They reluctantly pulled themselves from their chairs—Elise actually swooned. She looked radiant, lips ripe and red, eyes bloodshot, flesh rosy with blood and remembered sunshine. The thought of tasting her made him hard.

  Jack took a long time to walk past the woman on the table, feeling her life already slipping from his veins. The cool of seawater, the salt crusting on his skin, the delicious heat. . .

  He trailed after the others. The guard shut the door and took his station, leaving only the nurse in the chamber. Mundane worldly odours—eucalyptus, brine, petrochemicals—encroached from the outdoors. The cloying miasma of the human condition crowded Jack like ghosts: sweat and food, detergents, piss. Blood.

  Jasmine left them “to savour and anticipate” and they spread around the drawing room, jealous even of sharing space. The nervous bonhomie of their brief pre-aperitif meeting had been left in the tap room.

  “This is my third blood walk,” Mrs Winterbourne announced, her voice slicing through the stillness. “I got to keep the last one.” A hand touched her breast, her lips; her lashes flickered as though a movie was unreeling on the backs of her lids.

  “Geez, Mother, rub it in, why don’t you?”

  Mrs Winterbourne flashed a sharp-toothed smile at her sparrow-faced daughter. Elise appeared old enough to be Mrs Winterbourne’s younger sister. Jack couldn’t be certain just how long ago Elise had been preserved—her blood hadn’t revealed that fact to him when they’d been swapping claret in her Brisbane loft, and it wasn’t polite to ask—but it’d been well before his time. No amount of hip threads or jargon could hide the age in their eyes. The tedium wore them all down eventually. Tonight proved just how far they were prepared to go to hold it at bay, and he was hardly in a position to judge: he was here, wasn’t he? But he’d had no idea . . .

  Mrs Winterbourne caressed Elise’s cheek with the back of her hand. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. You might be more fortunate this time.”

  Elise stared, furious, out the window, where there was nothing to see: the dark of hillside against the dark of sky, a glow suggesting the city of Cairns nestled out of sight between mountains and mudflats. The house was so still, so quiet, they could have been the only people left on the planet.

  Except that, no-one in this room had been a person in a very long time.

  Jack was the youngest here, of that he was certain. The country had been in the grip of the Depression when he’d opened the farmhouse door to the wrong swaggie. Jack had been lucky, according to some he’d met since. There were a lot more rules these days about who got preserved and who didn’t. A lot more regulation. Australia wasn’t as carefree as it used to be.

  Neither was he.

  * * *

  The watercourses are as cracked and dry as pine bark. The sky is gritty with dust. Dawn and sunset bleed over the parched country. Spirits wither, hearts shrink, the hot westerly picks up dreams and lives and blows them all to hell along with the topsoil. The molasses runs out and only the mustiest hay remains in the shed. The cattle are little more than hides stretched over skeletons. Sometimes a dying cow’s skull is particularly thick and it has to be shot twice. When the pyres have burnt cold, Jack and his father dig a hole and bury the bones. The bank sends letters.

  When the drought breaks, only a couple of years after his father’s death, and the paddocks are thick with green grass, they are too understocked to take advantage and the bank won’t extend their debt to buy more. They are—his day foreman tells him when they meet at the cracked Formica table in the kitchen one night—royally fucked, and Jack thinks the foreman is almost relieved not to have to deal with the daylight-shy boss any longer.

  Why is it, he wonders, that regret sticks like a burr, but joy floats away like a dandelion seed?

  * * *

  His name is Richard, never Dick—NEVER Dick—and he’s absolutely everything to Angie; him and Nerida. Absolutely everything.

  Richard. Such dark eyes and dark hair, tanned skin so warm, as though it contains all the sun it’s felt. The black curls so thick around his cock, the little tuft between his pecs. Curling her fingers through his hair. Holding his back, feeling the muscles moving, the solid weight of his thighs between hers.

  Campfire heat keeping the night chill at bay. Stars sparkle overhead. Wine in his mouth, salt on his skin, sand on their bodies. She clings and she clings and she never wants it to end.

  The dawn, when it inevitably comes, red fingers shimmering to gold and silver on the water, is the most beautiful she has ever seen. There will never be another one like it.

  III

  The dandy s
tood by a bookcase, leafing through one of the volumes. How long had it taken to perfect that stance? One leather-booted foot out just so, the hips and shoulders angled to make that frock coat fall just—God, everything was so. . . so so. He drew in a breath, making a nasally whine, and slammed the book shut. “I am still burning.” He held out one hand, looking at the pink tinting his flesh. “How does Jasmine do it? It’s like nothing else I’ve felt.”

  Elise turned from the window, suddenly animated. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s like—you know how when you feed, you get little bits and pieces of their lives, mouthful by mouthful; death stuff, mostly, or sex stuff? It’s like that, isn’t it? Like, 3D cinema compared to black-and-white telly. It’s as if Jasmine can distil their feelings—physical as well as emotional: the whole works—and squeeze it out like. . . like juice from an orange. It’s even better than you said, Mother.”

  “And if you win the auction, you get to keep it,” Mrs Winterbourne said. “Their lives always fade with time, but not when you take the last drop: the life drop.”

  The nob adjusted his almost not-there glasses as he stared at Elise. “Quite remarkable.”

  “Quite remarkable,” Mrs Winterbourne said, and scanned Jack again, her lip curling. Apparently she didn’t approve of his jeans, his scuffed leather jacket. Or maybe the still-healing bite marks he’d left on Elise during the tryst that had revealed this little blood klatch.

  It had taken every cent and every favour he had to be here. He’d had to pay a blood bond to Jasmine, a specimen squeezed into a bottle from a cut on the wrist. He didn’t care if she sifted it—he had no secrets.

  Elise sauntered around the room, her hips swinging to set the part in her skirt swaying, revealing black stocking and white thigh. She settled, dove-like, on the thickly stuffed arm of the antique armchair in which he sat. Though her arm was draped around his shoulders, he saw the glance she shot at the nob. Jack turned away—he’d known there was nothing for him there, but still, he’d hoped for longer. For more.

  Foolish him. Eternal life was the absence of hope; only cunning remained. Jack realised that now. Hope was for the humans like Angie, strapped down and bleeding out so the monsters like him could steal a taste of what they’d lost. Her trust had been misplaced. She was a trophy and he was vying with these four to be the repository. He tasted bile.

  “It’s all about the blood,” Elise said, stretching to show off her marked throat, and he remembered her moaning as he worked his way down to suck on the femoral, her blood squirting into his mouth like milk from a cow’s teat. “It contains everything we need. I mean, we call it blood memory, but that’s not really doing it justice, is it? Memory—you can’t trust memory. What happened, and what we remember happening, they’re two different things.”

  “The blood knows,” Mrs Winterbourne said, and there was a sharpness to her tone, like scissors snapping shut. “You can’t fool the blood.”

  Elise turned, all attention on her, hunger a palpable sensation in the room. She looked deeply into Jack’s eyes and asked, “Have you ever killed someone, Jack?”

  Under those combined gazes, he confessed, “Yes.”

  “Well, I bet taking the life drop is like that, only better.”

  “Much better,” Mrs Winterbourne said, regarding him with eyes snake-hungry and unblinking.

  * * *

  A literal roll in the hay with Deborah Burt. Spiky stuff, and dusty, and the sun frying on the tin roof and making laser lines across the bales and in the dusty air, their skin and lips tasting of dirt and straw and sweat, and he shoots before he barely has it in her, and she says it’ll be better next time, but the swaggie’s at the door and the next time he sees Debbie Burt, well, it sure is better, but it isn’t sex. It all happens so fast, he spills more than he drinks, and although she remains, her life, so short, is barely there. She remembers their tumble in the hay, though, and seeing it from both sides is intriguing at first but ultimately unsatisfying: he doesn’t look good naked and he didn’t do much for her at all and she was covered in scratches from the hay for days with a rash across her arse and shoulder blades and she was kind of grateful it had ended quickly because she’d have hated to have had a kid with him.

  * * *

  Sun spears through water the colour of dust. Coral glimmers, striated with sunlight. Angie’s skin pimples, but the chill of the water fades as she splashes towards a massive outcrop of brain-patterned coral, its mushroom top a quilt of pinks and blues and greens; fingers stick up amid plates and bowls and swaying fronds. Darting fish sparkle. One big one, yellow and blue, takes a leisurely cruise around the edge. Two little red-and-white ones hunker down in the centre of one formation, charging at any fish that comes close.

  Her snorkel breath whooshes in and out past her ear. Her heart thumps. Legs kick, hands flapping leisurely from time to time for extra stabilisation as she floats with the current, eyeing the world below. She floats, sun warm on her back as she rises and falls with the waves.

  IV

  Jasmine rejoined them. She placed a small casket, like a ballot box, on the table, and next to it, five pens, five slips of paper, five envelopes.

  The Winterbournes were the last to take their bid forms and huddled together by the fireplace. The dandy took a stance by the window, looking like some kind of Romantic poet contemplating the love that was just out of sight. The nob sat in a chair, tapping his pen against his pursed lips as though the blank paper in his hand were a spreadsheet of profit and loss.

  Jack scribbled his bid, sealed the envelope and placed it in the box. The others all stared at him. Jasmine gave the faintest of nods.

  “Is there somewhere I can stretch my legs?” he asked. “While I wait?”

  “Of course.” She smiled ingratiatingly as she indicated the door. “It’s not unusual to want some solitude after the blood walk. I find the east garden is an ideal place for digestion. Someone will fetch you when it’s time.”

  * * *

  One day at noon, when all he can see is darkness till the end of time, he walks naked into the house paddock and embraces the sunshine. He’s well alight by the time he changes his mind. It takes his father the whole afternoon to contain the grassfire he’s caused. It takes him weeks to recover. The pain isn’t as bad as he expected, but the smell never leaves the house.

  * * *

  Angie pulls her cardigan tighter around her shoulders against the cold wind as they arrive back at the dock, sunset spreading like a wound across the clouds, all blood and bruises reflecting on the gunmetal sea. Sadness sweeps over her as she soaks up the view; she’s faintly annoyed when Richard hugs her, blocking her sight of it: those last precious drops of colour fading fast as the sun sinks behind the mountains and blinking aircraft fly in and out from the airport and the parrots race in squawking flocks down the esplanade and cars drive blithely by and joggers huff past in iPod isolation and there’s the smell of barbecue and the sound of laughter from a picnic table crowded with people in shorts and t-shirts and don’t they feel the cold?

  V

  Jack reached the corridor to the sacrifice room and slowed his nonchalant pace. The guard watched him, his crossed arms unfurling to hang at his sides. Jack faltered. ‘Um, east garden?’

  A massive paw pointed back the way Jack had come.

  The guard’s headset crackled; he kept an eye on Jack as he answered. Jack turned away and then—and then, Jack felt it, heard it—the guard walked away down the corridor, his back to Jack, as though Jack was already gone. Jack turned and, oh so quiet on the tips of his sneakers, ran to the door and slipped inside.

  The nurse looked up, eyes wide.

  They locked gazes.

  He asked her, “Please.”

  “You can’t escape,” the nurse said, battling his compulsion.

  “What?”

  “Jasmine knows. She has your blood. She knows you’re here.”

  “Please,” he said, and she succumbed, and left the room in a daze. “Five minute
s till visiting time is over.” She held up her hand, fingers spread wide. Her nails were so white. Shiny like moonlight. “Five minutes.”

  Angie had been covered with a blanket. Her eyelids jumped with dreams. There was gloss on her lips; someone wanted a beautiful corpse. Attention to detail—part of the reason Jasmine could charge so much. And all the knowledge she gleaned from her guests’ blood: priceless.

  Jack stroked Angie’s face, her hair, her throat. There would be one more feeding and then . . . nothing. Her life fading from their veins, except for that one lucky blood walker who could offer the most. How often could they do it, he wondered, before all those stolen lives melted their brains? How much memory and experience, joy and pain, could a single person carry with them before it was all too much? For some, one was enough. More than enough.

  Had Jasmine opened the bids yet? His hastily scrawled FUCK YOU wouldn’t curry any favour.

  For Winterbourne, that shrew, a collector, enough was never enough. Junkies all, heading for that eventual overdose.

  She wouldn’t have this one. Angie would not be banished to the dark of Mrs Winterbourne’s soul, nor that of her inconstant daughter. None of them would have her.

  He ignored the shunt, used his fangs to open her throat, and drank from the carotid. Angie sighed as her life flowed into him, a crimson sea white-capped with memories. Brimming, storm-tossed, he wrenched himself from her ebbing vein and fell like flotsam on the floor. Blood collected in the vial under the table and overflowed, at first a stream, then drips, puddling at his feet.

  * * *

  He offers to preserve both his parents. They both say no.

  * * *