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

by Kaaron Warren

  Best to leave before either of them get a mind to make trouble.

  * * *

  It’s the early hours of the morning, the darkness hot, still and heavy. Moonlight dances off the surface of the river, the reflected light as pale and fluid as the creature that moves amidst it. It sways to the gentle rhythm of beating moth wings and the far off call of a tawny frogmouth.

  The girl however, stares intently at the riverbed. Searching.

  The creature senses her intent: to help a friend in need.

  It can taste the man’s weariness imprinted on the earth he’s turned, frustration and desperation potent in his fallen sweat. Although it cannot fathom whatever strange motives keep the man digging, the creature recognises these emotions and is drawn to their resonance.

  It follows the song of gold beneath the river’s silt down to where it’s loudest, where the metal is closest to the surface. The girl follows, her gratitude and anticipation brushing against the creature’s perception.

  As the girl crouches down and begins to search through the river grit, the spirit detects other humans approaching. Two men stagger through the night, the scent of alcohol seeping from their pores and rising on their breath.

  “Told you we wouldn’t need much coin,” says the older. “Mrs. Higgins serves only the finest!”

  “Don’t know about finest,” the other replies, laughing. “But it was certainly some of the strongest.”

  Subtly, the spirit nudges at their minds, attempting to cloud their sight and direct their notice away from the child by the river’s edge.

  It is too late.

  “Well, would you take a look at that,” says the older man. He points to the place where the girl crouches, still searching amongst the silt.

  “Ain’t right,” he mutters. “Someone oughta do something.”

  The younger man snorts quietly and nods in agreement.

  A cruel smile breaks out across the elder’s face. “Reckon it’s about time someone taught the little chink witch a lesson.” He stalks towards the small figure.

  Though it cannot understand the man’s words, the creature senses his malice. The long simmering resentment it detects within him flows unchecked under the influence of alcohol and the cover of darkness. Yet there is little it can do. The girl is far too intent on her task to notice as the spirit grasps at her mind, trying to direct her notice to the man creeping up behind her, urging her to run.

  She leans over, reaching further into the water.

  The man shoves her hard from behind.

  The girl plunges forward with a small cry. There is a loud splash, and a sickening crack as her head hits a partially submerged rock. She twitches once, then goes still, a dark stain seeping into the water around her.

  The younger man stares at the body in mute horror. The elder looks frantically around for witnesses. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  The creature looses a mournful cry, an undulating keen that reverberates throughout the surrounding bush land, as if taken up by every tree, hill and stone. Despite the mildness of the night, goosebumps rise on the men’s skin.

  “Quick, let’s get out of here!” says the younger.

  “Wait, not yet,” says the older. “We need to move her away from our claim.”

  The younger man complies, hands shaking, and together they heave the girl’s body from the water and set it down slightly upstream. A chill wind picks up, stinging their skin and whipping angrily at their clothing. Then they run.

  * * *

  Tom knows that something is wrong before he even reaches camp. A distinct feeling of unrest radiates throughout the atmosphere. The familiar working noises of the goldfields have been replaced by the discordant notes of raised voices. He crests the rise and surveys the scene below, quickly spotting the gathered crowd.

  His innards twist like black snakes in his stomach. Abandoning his wheelbarrow of supplies he hurries down the hill towards camp.

  There, in a circle of spectators, stands his brother Jack. And there, just a few feet away, is Li’s father, struggling in the grip of two brawny miners. His wife and son are held nearby, the younger man similarly restrained and sporting a fresh black eye. Tears trace winding patterns down their dust-coated cheeks.

  Li is nowhere to be seen.

  The man’s voice cracks as he screams words in his own tongue.

  “Xuè’àn! XiōngshŎu!”

  “God damn it! For the last time, I had nothing to do with it,” yells Jack. “Don’t know how you got it into your bloody yellow head that I did!”

  “That’s right,” comes a voice from the crowd. “Not this bloke’s fault you folk can’t look after your own.”

  A murmur of agreement runs through those assembled.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” Tom demands, trying vainly to push his way through the crowd.

  A man grabs his arm and mutters to him. “Chinaman’s little girl was found dead in the river this morning and now the crazy heathen’s got it in his head your brother had something to do with it. Bloody insanity. She obviously slipped on the rocks. Can’t see in the dark with them slanty eyes.”

  Tom’s legs grow weak beneath him. He looks through the mass of bodies to his brother and feels a wave of bile rise in his stomach.

  That moment, Li’s father breaks free and lunges towards Jack. “Murderer!” he screams.

  Jack shoves the smaller man back into the waiting arms of the two big miners. One lands a punch straight into the bereaved father’s midsection before the other shoves him, winded, to the ground. The man lies still, face down in the mud.

  Sensing the spectacle has come to an end, the miners begin to disperse.

  Tom breaks through the crowd just as Li’s father finally struggles to his hands and knees. His face is plastered with dirt and blood. All the fight seems to have bled right out of him, replaced by grief and despair.

  “I’m sorry,” says Tom weakly. “I’m so sorry.”

  The man turns away.

  She’s gone, Tom thinks. She’s really gone.

  * * *

  The next morning Tom wakes early, takes the remaining gold from his pouch and goes in search of the Li’s family. Yet, when he reaches their camp, they are gone.

  He wonders if they took Li’s body with them. He hopes so. Her final resting place shouldn’t be somewhere she had suffered and been unwelcome. Tears begin to leak from his eyes as he wanders towards the river where they spent so many days together. For a moment, he thinks he detects a familiar presence, a tell tale shimmer near the riverbed, but when he blinks the space is empty once more. Almost.

  He leans down to find the wooden wombat he carved for Li, half buried by gravel. When he looks more closely he detects a dark stain on one of the rocks in the shallows. A wave of nausea threatens to overcome him. He staggers to his feet and makes his way back to camp.

  * * *

  “I’ll have nothing more to do with you,” says Tom, shoving clothes and other possessions violently into a pack. “You’ll be damned in God’s eyes and mine!”

  “Come on, Tom. You don’t really think I had something to do with that China girl do you?” says Jack. “Told you I don’t know a bloody thing about it!”

  “Damn you, Jack!” cries Tom. “You think after all this time I can’t tell your lies? And now you damn well want to work her father’s claim?”

  “There’s gold there, I know it.”

  “Is that all you think about?” says Tom. “All the gold in the world won’t make you any less of a murdering bastard.”

  “Prove it. If you have proof go to the troopers, see if they’ll hear you.”

  Tom stands silent, fists clenched and teeth gritted.

  “Didn’t think so. Even you’re not that stupid. Who’ll miss one less chink?”

  Rage surges through Tom, hot and urgent. His fist connects loudly with flesh and his brother stumbles back, hand clasped to his face.

  “Fine,” spits Jack through a bloodied nose. “We don’t
need you anyway. But I won’t see you come begging when we’re living like kings and you’re dirt poor on your beloved farm.”

  Tom ignores him, turning instead to his youngest brother.

  “Will?”

  Will looks down at his feet, unable to meet his elder brother’s eye.

  Tom casts his brothers one last disgusted look, then grabs his swag, ducks out the tent flap and storms off, not once looking back.

  * * *

  The spirit rushes through the forest, the wind hissing angrily through the eucalypts as it passes. It is not alone. Leaves rustle and twigs snap beneath the hooves of a dozen horses. Subtly nudging at their riders’ intentions, it leads the group on a winding path through the scrub.

  On the road up ahead, a coach rounds the corner. Pulled by four horses, It’s accompanied by a trio of armed guards, one to each side and the last trailing behind.

  The spirit shifts forward, placing itself in the coach’s path.

  It begins to sing.

  With a slow deep thrumming like the sound of plants growing and rock eroding, it calls water from deep below the earth. The road grows rapidly muddy, catching at the coach horses’ hooves, slowing their progress. A wheel comes loose on an axle.

  “Shit,” says the driver, reining in his horses.

  A curtain is pulled back in the passenger compartment, revealing the faces of two men at the window.

  “What’s wrong?” says one.

  “Wheel’s come loose,” says the driver. “Won’t take too long to sort.”

  “This isn’t good enough,” says the passenger. “Got a cheque here worth more than your living and I better bloody well be in town spending it by tonight or—”

  “Wait, Jack. You hear that?” says his companion.

  The sound of movement amongst the scrub grows gradually louder, a cacophony of breaking sticks and snapping foliage. All other noise seems to cease, the silence like an indrawn breath.

  “We’re about to be murdered by savages!” cries the younger passenger.

  “Shut up! You’ll guide them to us.”

  On cue, a group of armed riders burst from the undergrowth. Rapidly they surround the coach.

  “Hands in the air!” cries the leader, his voice accented with a slight Irish brogue. “This ’ere’s a holdup.”

  Outnumbered, the guards lower their firearms.

  * * *

  Tom returns to the abandoned homestead. He pulls the planks off the door and wanders the musty, dust-shrouded rooms. They smell of dirt, mice and home.

  He makes his way to the back veranda and looks out over dry, empty paddocks. It will take a lot of work to get the place up and running again. But now more than ever, Tom is no stranger to hard work and heartbreak.

  Victoria, 1860

  The man in the tunnel digs furiously. He digs through the day and late into the night when all the other miners are gone. His back is bent, his hands are raw, his nails bloodied, his face lined and old beyond its years. He eats little and rarely sleeps, skin stretched tight over sinew and bones. All the while his eyes shine bright and wild, and he mutters to himself—“We’ll find it again. Just one more shovel. One more and we’ll find it. You’ll see.” The same words on endless repeat. His obsession is all-consuming, almost unnatural, as though exacerbated by some external force. He digs alone. Even his younger brother will have naught to do with him now. Yet from the dancing shadows of the torchlight, the spirit watches. As it often has.

  Finally, it begins to sing. It calls to rock and to soil, coaxing them to wake and move from their slumber. It calls to the wooden sleepers that support the tunnel, coaxes them to splinter. Slowly but surely, it sings the earth down upon him.

  * * *

  A hot, parched wind sweeps over the fields to rattle against the old weatherboard farmhouse, causing shutters to bang and walls to groan. A chorus of cicada song farewells the setting sun and an electric tingle runs through the atmosphere; a hopeful herald of rain to come.

  Tom exhales wearily, taking the carved wombat from its place atop the fireplace and sinking into his weathered armchair, bones aching and muscles throbbing from another long day tending the fields.

  It’s been seven years since he left the goldfields and returned to scrape a living upon the dusty earth. It is hard, backbreaking work. His hands are calloused from the plough and his face weathered from the sun. Dust and grime seems to have ingrained themselves in his every pore. Yet he cannot bring himself to regret his choice. Not now. Not ever.

  He turns the wooden toy over and over in his hands.

  He’s heard the rumours of unrest on the goldfields, of violence between the Chinese and European miners. Yet while the newspapers decry the invading yellow menace, all Tom can picture is Li, who died so young, and the look on her father’s face as he rose from the mud.

  He recalls the gloating letter from Jack, received soon after Tom arrived home, announcing that his brothers had stuck a large lode on Li’s father’s old claim and were rich.

  The chorus of insects slowly fades to silence, and Tom detects a familiar shifting presence by the half open window.

  “Is it done?” he whispers, his breath catching.

  A sense of alien satisfaction brushes against his consciousness. For a moment Tom is sure he detects a faint scent of disturbed earth and blood. Then the presence slowly dissipates, leaving him alone in the night once again. He feels cold. Numb. His hands shake.

  Outside, the storm breaks, the first patterings of rain resounding against the corrugated iron roof.

  Metempsychosis

  Jason Franks

  Layne had spent the entire morning hunched over the pinned-out vellum leaves and all he had to show for it was a crick in his neck.

  He’d filled two pages of his notebook with beautiful cursive, but that was entirely because he enjoyed exercising his fountain pen. He had produced little more than a continuous ink line. There was no greater meaning in it than there was in the old manuscript.

  Layne put the pen down and let out a long breath. “This isn’t prose.” The insight surprised him as he said it.

  “What?” Trimby looked up from his workstation, across the lab and near to the window.

  “It’s not prose.”

  “Of course it’s prose,” said Trimby, pushing at the cuffs of his tweed jacket as if ready to engage in fisticuffs. Layne wanted to laugh almost as much as he wanted to punch him. “The wallet clearly states that it’s a diary.”

  The document, sealed in a leather enclosure, had been found in a Tipperary bog not far from the famous Faddan More site. The leather had been dated to 400CE, which made the wallet a major archaeological find in its own right. An inscription in the Ogham alphabet identified its contents as the journal of a druid named Edraghodag. The journal inside the wallet was 500 years older yet. Trimby and his colleagues could not identify the script the druid had employed and assumed it to be some kind of cipher. That was why they had engaged the dubious services of Layne Hutchings.

  “I doubt whoever inscribed the wallet could read these pages any better than we can,” he said.

  “Why would such a person lie?”

  “Dunno,” said Layne. “Not my area.”

  “Your area is the translation of gibberish,” said Trimby. “Perhaps you should stick to it.”

  “The druids had no written language,” countered Layne. “How can it be prose?”

  “Yes, well,” said Trimby, bristling. “Perhaps that’s less true than we first believed. The Gaulish tribes could and did write in Greek and Latin—”

  “But this is neither. If Eddie the Druid could write, maybe he—”

  “Edraghodag.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Layne. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. What does ‘Edrag-odac’ mean, anyway?”

  “It’s pronounced Edraghodag.”

  “I don’t care how you say it. What does it mean?”

  “It is a bit unusual,” conceded Trimby.

  “It�
�s a bunch of nonsense syllables,” said Layne. “It doesn’t even sound like Gaelic.”

  “Are you now an expert on Celtic languages?”

  “No, but I am an expert on gibberish.”

  Layne knew he was on shaky ground. He wasn’t an historian or a linguist; he wasn’t even a proper cryptologist. Layne was a puzzle-solver: sub-literate in ten different languages, talented at maths and logic, but strictly amateur league in any single discipline. Layne’s abilities lay in the narrow intersection of all those areas: intuiting solutions to unusual symbolic problems.

  Trimby’s group had come to him out of desperation. They’d flown him up to Dublin and put him up in a four-star hotel, hoping that he could shed some light on this mystery among mysteries: a 2100 year old document written in an unknown alphabet, authored by an obscure figure belonging to a secretive sect of a culture that had long been extinct.

  “Mr Hutchings, your job is to help us decode the document, not to argue with known fact.”

  “I . . . but . . . ” Layne sighed. “Ah, whatever.” He had a feeling that his contract was not going to be renewed.

  Trimby turned back to his screen. Layne sighed again and returned his attention to the manuscript. He moved the magnifying lamp over the leaves again and stared down at the rows of angular characters. Some of the figures looked as if they might be pictograms; others were joined in a cursive. The orientation of the letters changed from page to page, sometimes from paragraph to paragraph: here they went left-right, top-bottom; there it was bottom-top, right-left. The author’s hand was confident throughout. Layne supposed that Edraghodag had been ambidextrous.