by Breach
Issue #07
Science Fiction, Horror and Dark Fantasy from Australia and New Zealand.
ISSN 2209-2196
Copyright © 2018 by each individual author as noted.
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Edited by Peter Kirk
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Contents
Tee Linden — Waiting for the other shoe to
Lee Murray — COG1
Claire Fitzpatrick — Scarab
Ronnie Smart — Traumatic Reflections
Alfie Simpson — Sub-Urban
Hari Navarro — The Naked Astronaut
Waiting for the other shoe to
Tee Linden
Tee Linden is a member of the NSW Writer’s Centre. Her articles appear twice monthly at The Sydney Feminists. Her short stories Bounds and The Witch are included in anthologies from Margaret River Press and Stringybark Publishing, both in 2018. Her work has been published in AntipodeanSF, Meow Meow Pow Pow and Pink Cover Zine and is upcoming in various literary magazines. Find more at teelinden.com
Sheila died three months ago. I know this. I was there. I also know she’s coming for me. And there’s nothing I can do about it. She wears the shadows. She wears them like they’re fabric. She wears them like she’s death.
I sit on the empty floorboards by the battery-powered work light, stinking and red eyed, with three-day-old beard sprouting from my cheeks.
I know she’ll come tonight. She comes every night. Looking for a way in, looking to take what’s hers. Looking to pay me back. And she’ll get through my meagre defences eventually, if not tonight, or the next, then another. If it’s another, why not tonight.
Tonight is as good as any other.
***
The god forsaken horse flies.
During the day, they crawl on my calloused knuckles. They skulk across my face, spread tiny fly feet over my lips and stroke my closed eyelids. Then they set their saw blade mouthparts against me and they scissor the skin open for my guilty blood. Taking it in tiny sips. For her.
There is no release. No respite.
With a thousand minute stings, they wake me during the day — the only time I can sleep. They won’t leave me alone. Their buzzing is deafening. They’re loud as a jet engine readying for take-off. Their buzzing feels like it damn near shakes the house.
Only the female horse fly needs blood.
My Dad told me that, beer in his hand as he slumped in a fold out chair before the fire at our campsite, his pocked face glowing orange from the flames.
Only the females bite.
Of course, he said. Of course it’s the females that cause the trouble. Isn’t that right? Drunk and stinking of stale cigarettes. Stinking of wallowing anger from his commonplace fights with my mother – when she was still around. Of course it’s the females.
And they are all hers, no doubt, they are all female. The flies crawl into my sleeping mouth and buzz up against my palate as I cough, spluttering, my hands shaking in the sheets that used to be on my bed.
And during the darkest hours of the morning, when Sheila is closest, they start to scream. They sound like women. A hundred tiny women, clinging to the ceiling and the walls and the covers, all screaming the exact same way. It curdles my stomach. The guilt washes up on me like waves on a rocky shore.
They sound like her. They sound like she did, three months ago.
At night, I keep the light on. It’s so bright I can’t look at it. An old work light set on the scratched floorboards pushes the clawing shadows from the empty room. But not the horse flies. They come skittering, even through the taped-up the windows. They crawl around the corners of the room all night, watching me as I watch them. They scream through their saw blades.
Last night, Sheila came along with her spies. She got too close. Every night she gets closer. And she won’t be stopped. But I still act like I can stop her. Like I want to. I still tape the windows. I still throw all the furniture into the yard so there are no shadows for her to bleed from. Like any of my actions might stop her.
They won’t. I can’t stop her.
I know this.
***
At first, Sheila just flickered around the gum trees bordering the property. Mostly by the gate — the only exit. The first few times I saw her, I thought I was dreaming. She was a pale vapour. A grey-filled, guilty fever dream. A regurgitation of my subconscious. The fog was thick and evening heavy and my eyes just got worse with age, so I convinced myself I was seeing things. It just made the most sense.
Maybe I was conjuring her. Maybe my guilt was a religious act. Maybe it was some ancient invocation. I was sick with what I’d done. Maybe my Dad’s old house in the deep bush had become some kind of temple and soaking in my self-reproach for weeks had been the prayer on the altar that brought her back to this world.
Maybe.
Because she, the shape of her, persisted, even when weeks passed and she became more solid and I was sure I wasn’t dreaming anymore. I watched as she took form and then watched as she retained it, with my bad eyes dry from unblinking. I watched in awe. I watched her pulse into the world again, like she was relearning how to remain, how to keep her pallid molecules together.
Night after night, I watched her rebirth with my heart throbbing on my tongue and disbelief like steel nails through my feet. I should have left then. When the first screaming horsefly crawled from the darkness. I was foolish; I didn’t believe she was really there. I refused to feel afraid. Not of flies. Not of her. Not of shadows. Not of memories.
She didn’t stay barely perceptible at the edge of the property, pale as a ghost gum. She drew closer. Closer every night. Sneaking through the thick, moonlight shadows of the gum trees. Then creeping by the outdoor chairs she’d bought my Dad when they were both alive. Then twisting, inhuman twisting, between the slats of the patio.
I watched her become from inside the house, my nose pressed into the dusty curtains, hiding like a red-handed child from an angry mother, hiding from the complicit night shuddering her from its womb. I woke one night to find her standing in the shadowy corner of the bedroom. Watching me with the black accusing stare of a dead woman. Pale and perfect, darkness and flies flooding from her open mouth. A stone statue chiselled into the side of a plasterboard church, glaring down with the malevolent glory of some bush god lost to time.
Heart bleeding in my throat, I slapped the light on, breath hissing like a flat.
Illuminated, her judgement disappeared and I was left alone, sweat running a cold, shameful – (guilty) – river down my spine in the absence of buzzing noise.
She was so real.
From that night, I slept with the light on, but soon even that wasn’t enough. She came. In the wardrobe, peering out from the fly-covered slats, shiny black mouth open too wide, releasing darkness and making noises like half-shed paperbark scraping in the wind. She didn’t need to scream. The flies were screaming for her.
And so was I.
The next morning, I took the doors off the wardrobe and burned them, leaving the cupboard innards exposed to the burning sanity of the work light I’d dragged up here last Christmas. As if the lack of doors would stop her, when even death couldn’t.
It didn’t. She came in the shadows on the bedside table next; her body jagged and bleached like dead coral, crawling out from the wall. I threw the table into the creek down the back of the property, screaming my imagined madness into the gum trees be
neath the blistering noonday sun. I cut up the bed after I found her fingers curling around the corner of the bare mattress like greying, bloated vines. Her nails were so long. Long and grey, like chips of dried bark.
I can still see her.
Reaching out inexorably for my feet.
***
Flies crawl over the ceiling as I sit on the floor of the empty house.
The work light is already on as the sunlight fades through the tape and slats on the windows. There is a lonely, hunchback shadow on the wall where the couch used to be. The one shadow I can’t rid myself of: my own.
The gum tree leaves are rustling, whispering about the oncoming rain. Birds are calling amongst the cicadas. They’re calling to her, I know it, the traitors are calling to tell her about the last shadow. They stack the deck against me. Maybe she can even feel the shadow I cast, maybe she’ll use it. I can do nothing more and I know it. I know it but my mind refuses to accept the idea. It refuses even now, at the end. I’m still looking for a way out.
The flies are gathering. I glance up at them, then back to my shadow on the scuffed wall. The flies buzz. Every now and then, the sound scrapes into short, jagged screams.
She won’t let me leave. That’s why she skulks jagged-limbed by the gate. Guarding it. Guarding me. She’s trapped me, like a rat in a cage, and I can’t do anything about it. And I don’t know if I want to, anymore. She killed the power days ago. I’ve got nothing but the battery-operated work light.
I wonder if I tell her I’m sorry, if that will change anything. It was a mistake, what I did. I didn’t mean it. It’s my temper. I’ve always had such a temper, just like my Dad. She knew that when she married me.
She still didn’t deserve it.
I can taste the tears on my lips as I sit, can feel the urge to urinate like a hot flood dammed in my pelvis.
It won’t change anything. She owes me death. It’s a debt she must pay.
But I have to try. I have to try when she comes. Just like I tried taping up the windows, even though I knew it wouldn’t keep her out.
The flies are seething now. They writhe along the ceiling, crawling over themselves. They scream a woman’s scream. They scream like Sheila did. They always do.
The apprehension is a solemn drumbeat in my chest. I close my sweat-stung eyes and I cry my apologies through rubbery lips. I hear how weak I am, how pitiful I sound. Just as I hear the incessant, uncaring buzzing screams of the maddening flies. I feel them on me. Landing as soon as I stopped watching. They are waiting for her to finish with me. They’re waiting for the meat. For the guilty blood.
I scream my apologies through a kindling throat, loud enough that I almost can’t hear the scraping of half shed paperbark. Nothing changes. I knew it wouldn’t.
When I open my eyes, there are two shadows on the wall.
Only one is mine.
Back to Contents
COG1
Lee Murray
Lee Murray is a ten-time winner of New Zealand’s Sir Julius Vogel Award for science fiction, fantasy and horror, including Best Novel 2016 for Into the Mist, and 2017 for Hounds of the Underworld (with Dan Rabarts). She has co-edited nine anthologies, one of which, Baby Teeth, won her an Australian Shadows Award in 2014. She lives with her family in the sunny Bay of Plenty. Visit her at leemurray.info
On Wednesday the third of April 1889, my inventor announced that I, Cognition1 Automaton, would accompany him to the World Fair in Paris.
Do you estimate Cog1 to be your best mechanical design? said his Mark2 automaton assistant. For the World Fair?
I felt like saying that the event was, in fact, L’Exposition Universelle, but I didn’t dare while my inventor remained in the lab.
I narrowed my angle of incidence and said nothing.
Later though, when my inventor stepped out, I swivelled my torso away from Mark2, showed it my thrusters and sent a shot of steam in its direction. Everyone dreams of the World Fair.
Wipe up that puddle, Mark2 said.
I calculated the days to the start of the World Fair. There were exactly 36 days, or 864 hours, 51,840 minutes, or 3,110,400 seconds. Even with my advanced capacity for computation, the numbers were large. There was a high probability I’d be obsolete before my inventor and I reached the Champ de Mars.
Two weeks before the World Fair, I resolved to remind my inventor about the trip in case it had been erased from his memory bank. But as it turned out, I did no such thing because at 15:33 precisely, a crack in a seal on my drive shaft set off a series of events which ultimately resulted in my spraying tractor fluid all over the lab. It wasn’t the first time I’d sprung a leak, either. Seals from Paltry and Co. had proved unreliable when nearing their replacement date. It was an accident, but the inventor’s precious laboratory notes were badly smudged. The last time a PaltryTM seal had ruptured had been precisely 9 days, 6 hours and 57 seconds ago. On that occasion, my inventor advised me that if I neglected to see to my self-maintenance, he’d have no choice but to pull my pistons, and suspend my employment. The inventor had created plenty of other automatons who would benefit from the advances he’d been working on, he said. I remember this discourse accurately because I made a recording:
<
I concede his statement got my steam up, but at least there was no need to remind my inventor about the Fair as it was evident the event was predominant in his thoughts. I replaced the faulty seal with another and kept out of the inventor’s way.
Anyhow the Earth made 36 rotations about its axis with respect to the sun, and one morning I powered up to find it was the first day of the Fair. It was too marvellous. I was to travel on ahead on a cheaper cargo passage, preceding my inventor’s arrival by two days.
Mark2 and I will meet you at the docks to ensure your safe stowage later today, my inventor said.
Before I departed the lab for the exhibition, Mark2 presented me with a plaque that said Cognition1 ‒ A Hydraulic Universal-Purpose Machine with Domestic Utility Attachment by Barty Hornby Esquire. Mark 2 said no automaton designed and developed by our prestigious inventor should attend the World Fair without a suitable plaque.
I got into the wooden crate, the shiny Domestic Utility Attachment in four separate parts beside me. My inventor handed me the set-up instructions. Mark2 closed the crate and hammered it shut.
On way to the docks the cart must have hit a cobblestone. The crate bounced, suspended in mid-air for 2 nano-seconds, before it landed on the cart again, splinters flying. You can guess what happened. My PaltryTM seal ruptured. There was a system overload. I fell on the Domestic Utility Attachment damaging one of its parts. I was forced to open my pressure relief valve. By the time the crate was opened at the docks, the set-up instructions were steamed to pulp.
We have time before the ship sails, said the inventor.
Help me rewrite the set-up instructions, said Mark2.
But I dropped the quill when I saw my inventor get out his tools to repair the Domestic Utility Attachment.
Let me illuminate the mechanics with my headlamp, I said.
Let me hold that still for you, Mr Hornby, sir, I said.
I helped a lot I can tell you. I helped him until he roared at me for helping him and told me to help Mark2 recreate the set-up notes instead.
My inventor missed supper. He worked into the evening and completed the repairs before the ship sailed.
The Fair was an unprecedented success. My seals held firm and the Domestic Utility Attachment operated without a hitch. Our inventor was lauded by his peers.
Back in the lab, I went on and on to Mark2 about my visit to the Fair. Did you know the Mark4 is the last of its kind? I told Mark2. This is its final year in production.
You were instructed to power down te
n minutes ago, said Mark2.
My inventor was out of earshot so I swivelled my torso and turned my thrusters on the automaton. I got away with it that time. But it was only 23 hours, 12 minutes and 12 seconds later that my creator caught me shooting steam at Mark2.
Calamity.
The inventor yanked out my pistons, and disabled my thrusters.
Back to Contents
Scarab
Claire Fitzpatrick
Claire is an author of speculative fiction and non-fiction. She won The Rocky Wood Award for Non-Fiction and Criticism for The Body Horror Book, which she co-wrote and edited. She writes non-fiction articles for Aurealis and has been called 'Australia's Body Horror Specialist' and 'Australia's Queen Of Body Horror.' She lives in Brisbane. Visit her at www.clairefitzpatrick.net.
June looked up at the mirrored ceiling and ran her fingers through her hair, tugging at the knots that refused to come out. She had installed the mirrors with the help of Tom, and while she had initially loved them, there was a coldness in the room, a strangeness in the room, that had not been there before.
She uncrossed her legs and laid on her back, resting her head on her hands. Her mother had disapproved of the mirrors, but at twenty-seven June didn’t care much what her mother thought. The woman rarely visited her. Let her be spooked. She chewed on her bottom lip and uncrossed her ankles, then crossed them again. She winced at the pain in her bones, so brittle and fragile she feared they would break at any moment. Her friends called her an insect in jest, yet that was what June was. A long-limbed insect with a mass of knotted blonde hair.