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

by Kaaron Warren

  For a split second, the thought gave her pause—the idea that this voice came from an orphaned soul, one of those not chosen—but then she shook her head, chastised herself for being such a downer, on this, their happiest day. Even so, she switched off the radio in the car on the way home, switched off her phone, while Nick rushed out to the hardware store to spend their last dollars on paint for the baby’s room. It was only for a while, just a very little while, that even the most dulcet of electronic tones struck a sad note deep inside her.

  * * *

  Kate would never admit she didn’t enjoy being pregnant.

  It wasn’t just the morning sickness, although that was bad enough, or the gradually expanding number of unattractive elasticised pants in her wardrobe. It wasn’t just the incontinence. It wasn’t just the hyper-alert sense of smell that meant she could tell if Nick farted at the other end of the house, or that its stench set off the vomiting. It wasn’t just the grinding in her hips every time she walked, or the sense that her centre of gravity had shifted forever. It wasn’t just the walking determinedly into one room then forgetting what she came for. It wasn’t just that maternity leave meant no grown-up conversations until Nick came home at the end of the day. It wasn’t just Nick patting her arse and whistling the Baby Elephant Walk as she lumbered down the hall. It wasn’t just her feet growing a size and a half.

  It was the voices.

  The chorus of tiny voices that kept her awake at night, all the voices of the lost children’s souls, all the voices she’d heard during the day from the devices she’d interacted with. All the voices that had once belonged to someone, somewhere else.

  * * *

  The gel was cold on her distended belly and the tube made a loud, rude noise as the obstetrician squeezed hard to get the last drops out. Kate winced, imagining him holding a newborn. His hands were stubby, short fingers gripping the probe he pressed below her navel, the hands of a manual labourer, someone who planted cabbages. She decided she didn’t like him very much—so little in fact that she hadn’t even retained his name, even though he’d told her three times. She couldn’t be bothered to ask again. They were in the same medical complex as Dr Goodman’s office, which presented a misleading façade when behind it snaked a great alimentary canal of specialist suites.

  “Three heartbeats detected,” said the console attached to the ultrasound machine. The tone of someone who’d have grown up to be an accountant, Kate thought before she registered what it had said or that Nick had involuntarily clutched her hand too hard, his panic transmitted through their palms.

  Triplets.

  Trip. Lets.

  Kate closed her eyes, trying to block out the screen, the obstetrician’s round face. At this stage, they couldn’t even afford twins. Their house had been on the market for three weeks, and they’d been desperately looking for a smaller place, with the smallest price tag they could find. Even with Kate’s maternity pay, it would be years before they could call their living situation ‘comfortable’ again. And by then, despite the miracles Dr Goodman peddled, Kate would be far too old to have any more children. The Conways would—could—only, ever, have one.

  One is enough, Kate told herself, over and over.

  One will have to be enough.

  Three little hearts pulsed on the screen, like black mouths gaping then swallowing the lie. Swallowing and swallowing, like they surely would every last cent.

  The obstetrician looked at Nick first. Kate noticed.

  “As you know,” he said, “there’s a grace period . . . before life-proper starts . . . You can choose which one to keep and at this stage it doesn’t count as a termination, so you don’t incur any criminal charges. This early, we call it a surrender.”

  “It’s just . . . We can’t have . . . We can’t afford . . . ” Words spilled from Kate’s mouth, but they flowed toward Nick, not the medic. “Can we wait to decide? Once and for all, that is. Before . . . I mean, will we even know if they’re boys or girls before—”

  “Sex as yet undetermined,” interrupted the console. “Embryonic sacs, stable. Funiculus umbilicalis, secure. Vital signs, strong. Probability of full-term gestation, ninety-seven point eight percent.”

  “As you know,” the obstetrician said sternly, after the devastating stats had been repeated for each of the triplets, “termination is not a real option.”

  “I suppose it’s best not to get too attached,” Nick said, talking over the doctor, not quite meeting Kate’s gaze. “If we know what they are . . . If we wait that long . . . ”

  We’ve waited this long . . .

  “ . . . it’ll be that much harder. Better not to find out, I guess.”

  By the time he’d finished, Nick was whispering.

  “Most couples choose randomly,” agreed the doctor. “They try not to overthink it.”

  Taking a handful of tissues from a box beside the bed, Kate wiped the ultrasound gel from her swelling bump, then pulled down her shirt. She grabbed a few more sheets to dry her eyes.

  What if they chose the wrong one? What if the one she “saved” was sick? Or horrible? What if the other two were geniuses? What if they would’ve cured cancer, or colonised Mars, if only she’d picked them? What if the survivor hated her? What if Nick ended up hating her? She was certain she would end up hating him, now, just a little.

  Even a little was too much.

  She was pulled from her thoughts by the opening of the door, that sliding hiss that no amount of engineering could quite silence.

  “What will happen to them?” Kate asked Dr Goodman, as he stepped between her and Nick, between flickering screen and bed. She suspected his proximity was less coincidence and more planned management for moments such as this. “The . . . surrendered?”

  The good doctor had been in the business long enough to know she didn’t mean physically. Like all would-be mothers before her, she didn’t want details about procedure, implements, how, or when. She didn’t want to visualise the evacuation. The wrinkled, nestling features. The blood and mucous. The tiny still limbs.

  No, he knew she was concerned with more important, ephemeral matters.

  “The souls will be extracted and stored . . . Our facility is sponsored by Sony; their orphanages are nurturing, fair trade environments . . . But if there is a brand of which you are particularly fond, we can certainly recommend Sanyo, LG, Acer . . . ”

  He sat beside her, balancing one plump buttock on the edge of the examination table, and took her hand. ‘Some parents like to set the voices of their surrenders for their own personal use. Kambrook does a whole range of ‘Junior’ alarm clocks that come highly recommended. And Macintosh is working wonders with wearable tech nowadays . . . Many couples find it most heartening, I’m told, being able to hear specific voices with a simple tap on their wrists. An Apple consultant is available on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays—if you like, we can arrange an appointment at the front desk. There would be another fee, of course . . . ”

  I can’t do this, Kate wanted to say, but poverty wired her jaw shut. A few months ago, she’d read an exposé on soul orphanages in TIME magazine; the factory-like conditions in distribution centres, staff earning less than minimum wage with no breaks, often sleeping underneath their work stations. The overcrowding in dormitories, young spirits crammed into bits and bytes like so many oversized sows into medieval stalls. The gender realignments in computer labs, the impossible number of boys becoming girls and girls becoming boys simply to suit the manufacturer’s product, the colour of its plastic, its design.

  But not all the facilities were like that; even the article had admitted as much. Some were clean—whatever that meant—and others free-range. There was a picture, small but detailed, that Kate had stared at for ages: a series of clear glass domes, each bigger than a football stadium, in which the surrendered could roam until they’d matured, or until they were needed. Out in a field in arable country, this orphanage was a few Ks away from the workshops, so the souls could play in pe
ace. The gravel roads leading between bubbles and concrete buildings were lined with roses and daffodils. There were pinwheels and windmills under the vaults, stirring gentle breezes through which the surrendered could soar.

  Closing her eyes, Kate imagined two of her own little souls, flitting like moulted feathers through the air. Surely they’d be happy there? Surely they’d be better off?

  “I’m sorry to rush you,” Dr Goodman said, tapping his watch until the little boy inside it stopped chattering, Follow-up with the Belvederes at four, “but we knew the risks—they were clearly outlined in the agreements and the original product disclosure statement. We absolutely need you to nominate a date so we can ensure it comes under the surrender clause and doesn’t incur termination penalties.”

  Heat bloomed in Kate’s sinuses, and leaked from beneath her shut lids. She shook her head. But they won’t know us, she thought. We should keep them all. They’ll be strangers in the orphanage, they’ll be left out. They’ll never know us, if we let them go. They’ll never know each other. They’ll never know me.

  In the end, Nick chose a date from the designated fortnight range Dr Goodman presented. Kate couldn’t look at him as they drove home.

  * * *

  Audra wasn’t a fussy baby. She wasn’t noisy. She slept for hours at a stretch. She ate whenever she could and plumped up nicely, but didn’t often grizzle for the breast. If she had a crying spell, she got over it soon enough. Most of the time. Usually. All morning, she’d lie in her crib and stare up at the Baby Einstein mobile Nick’s mother bought, a pink blob with a bright orange starfish, blue turtle and sailor-hat-wearing octopus whirling over her head. She was so sedate, so dull, Kate sometimes forgot she was there.

  In some ways, Kate thought the little fleshy girl was to blame. If only she’d made noise regularly, gurgled, giggled, blew spit bubbles in that cute way babies have. If only Audra would proudly own the voice she had been given, the voice she’d been privileged to get. If only she could appreciate what she’d won and the two others lost.

  Sitting up in bed, the quilt covered with brown cardboard parcels, some open, some still labelled and taped shut, Kate kept thinking about what Dr Goodman had said, how some parents programmed their surrenders into their own personal devices. Kate and Nick couldn’t afford that—they’d arranged no hospital meetings with Apple or Microsoft or any techno-upstarts, and they’d had to hand the medical tablet back to Dr Goodman’s nurse once they’d brought Audra home almost three months ago. Soon after, they’d both sold their laptops, one to Kate’s nephew and the other to Nick’s niece, naming a price well below what they’d paid for them. They’d pawned Nick’s gaming consoles, the TiVo, the flat-screen TV—any gadget that was mostly intact, buttons and touchscreens passably good, any frivolous comfort that might fetch a few bucks, quick, because they needed the money, any money, to pay for the baby formula and nappies that Audra was going through at a rate of knots. Nick worked double shifts, he worked evenings and weekends, he worked public holidays, but all they had left was one rattly old desktop, two out-of-date mobiles . . . and Kate’s boxes of digital secrets.

  The iPods. The Fitbits. The Google hearing aids. The Dell KeyNails™, porcelain and acrylic, for typing, making calls, or even playing piano on any hard surface. The new and improved Away Mate, only $79.95, doorbell and butler in one small plastic case! The Digideskpal. The Roomba. The Fujitsu sun visor. The IBM wireless headphones in gold, silver and platinum, that even Kate couldn’t distinguish from regular pairs of hoop earrings. All second-hand, none top of the line anymore, but every last one more than sufficient to store the voices Kate downloaded from the soul orphanage, courtesy of VoiceWorks™ technology. She bought these—and so many other—devices on eBay, mostly, spending her days tracking down the cheapest ones she could get, saving the bigger portion to spend on downloads.

  It didn’t matter how cheap these things were, the bargains she’d find; before long, they tore through precious funds, devoured her maternity pay, depleted Nick’s salary.

  And Kate didn’t care.

  As soon as her husband was out the door, she purchased and she listened. She listened to all the voices, tracking inflections and tones, cadences and quirks. Sometimes she became convinced she’d found one or both of her surrenders; she would play their files over and over, taking comfort for a few days or weeks, but eventually, inevitably, dissatisfaction set in, a sense she’d been mistaken, misled, cheated. And the search would start again.

  ‘Good morning,’ Kate cooed at the new GPS unit clipped on her collar, plotting the route from bedroom to kitchen, telling her to turn left with the prettiest little accent she’d ever heard. The child sounds just like her Nan, Kate thought with a smile, quickly walking past Audra’s room. Behind the closed door, the baby was exercising her lungs, wailing at a red-faced pitch. Without pause, Kate marched down the hall. ‘Turn right in one point five metres,’ said the charming little girl nestled next to her ear. Kate was tempted to play with her, to dart back into the linen closet, take a surprise detour through the laundry room, just to see how the surrender would respond; if she’d show traits of her mother’s quick wit, or Nick’s silly sense of humour. But she resisted; she was in a hurry. There was a Motorola stopwatch hidden in the pantry that she just knew—she was almost positive this time—had to be the GPS’s brother. Her possible son. She wanted to introduce the kids properly, and to hear their greetings. She wanted to be there if—when—the siblings finally recognised each other. There would be some sign, she thought, some hint of awareness. There must be. A change in register. A blinking Bluetooth connection. An identical chirp. Something, however fleeting, that showed they were family. That they were all family. Not Motorolas, not Sharps. Conways, the lot of them. And that, somehow, they knew they were wanted. That they belonged.

  “You’ll love it here, won’t you,” Kate said, leaning close to the gadget’s speaker, anticipating its reply. “Tell me you will.”

  Tilting her head, Kate strained to hear the placid voice as it began to speak.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered after a second, stopping short just inside the kitchen. She scowled as, down the hall, Audra’s crying went from sad to shrill. “I missed most of that. Can you please repeat? Louder, if you can. Full volume.”

  Covering her left ear, Kate pressed the GPS into her right. Hunched and leaning against the fridge, shoulders bunched up to help block Audra’s racket, she listened, anxiously, for her daughter to offer reassurances. For her to give Kate straightforward directions. To tell her to proceed.

  Dolls for Another Day

  Rick Kennett

  Mr and Mrs Merewether were alone in the dining room of Ilbridge House in the English parish of Coxham. The evening meal was over and only wine and glasses were left on the table. They were sat close together, he in blue satin, she in brocade, arranging their plans for later that night.

  “So it falls to me to do the deed,” said Mrs Merewether in an earnest whisper, her eyes glinting in the light of the single taper burning in its silver candlestick on the sideboard.

  “It is your place to give him his medicine,” said her husband in a similar low tone. Then, his voice taking on a harder edge, he added, “You do not scruple because he is your father?”

  “And the grandfather of my children, which should have made him think better of his intentions. Instead he makes it the crux of his claim on them.” Her dark ringlets bobbed as she shook her head. “No, James. I do not scruple. We brought this on ourselves, it is true. Now we must end it while we still can.”

  “Elizabeth . . . do you regret ever marrying me?”

  “A young architect with no prospects above a talent in miniatures?”

  “There is no need to wound me with the truth.”

  “The truth often wounds, one way or the other. That is why lying was invented. James, the truth is that if it were not for my father’s . . . workings, who can say where we would both now be. We could never have afforded all this.” Sh
e plucked at her rich clothing, then with a sweep of her hand indicated the cut crystal glasses, the vintage wine on the solid oak dining table, the silverware on the sideboard, and by extension the white stone mansion they possessed. “We sold ourselves, James. Not that I countenance it, especially now with the price being asked of us.”

  “Demanded of us,” he corrected her.

  “The children—” She broke off and turned suddenly to the window in an attitude of listening, as did her husband. For a moment they held their breaths; but there was nothing to hear. “I thought I heard the approach of that infernal man.”

  Mr Merewether flinched at the word his wife had chosen to describe their impending visitor: it had been a little too apt.

  ”James,” she went on, looking out at the night, “do you not feel there are eyes out there, looking in at us?”

  He glanced through the windows, at the darkness beyond. “There is nobody there. As to our visitor, men who smell of dust and rat-gnawed book bindings are never punctual. We have yet time to make ready.” All the same he went to the window, opened it and put his head out with his hand to his ear. Nothing was heard but the wind in the trees of the surrounding park and the distant cries of owls and other night birds.

  He shut the window again and went out of the room, closing the door quietly behind him. Alone now, Mrs Merewether swept up the burning taper in its silver candlestick and held it aloft as if afraid of the shadows, afraid of the dark, afraid of what events the night would bring. It was clear by her strained expression that she was striving to keep down a fear threatening to master her. The consequences of her actions this night, she knew, were awful to contemplate. But the consequences of doing nothing were unthinkable.

  Mr Merewether returned then and gave his wife a vial of some dark liquid, pushing it into her moist hand, folding her fingers over it.