The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05 Read online

  “All right. All right, fuck!”

  A long, tense moment before Mara nods and finally releases her grip. “Just get me out of here. Please.”

  “Where to?” Faith asks bitterly. Fresh handprint of blood on her arm and she wipes it on her shirt, navy blue fabric none the worse for such a stain. “Home to warm milk and jim-jams?”

  “No, not home.” Mara closes her eyes, sinks back against the cheap vinyl upholstery. “Get us onto the highway and drive south. There’s a motel about twenty minutes from here.”

  Faith is done arguing. So when she spots the bright-lit storefront of a twenty-four hour pharmacy - Because Your Health Shouldn’t Have To Wait! - after only a few kilometres, she doesn’t even ask. Just flicks on the indicator and pulls into the near-deserted carpark. “Don’t even start,” she tells the rear-view mirror, Mara’s instantly suspicious gaze catching her own within the glass. “Unless you reckon you can put yourself back together with whatever this cruddy motel of yours has in its minibar, then I’m picking up some stuff here. That okay with you?”

  Not really a question, and Mara doesn’t answer it, doesn’t say another word until Faith returns to the car. Two small plastic bags rustling with bandages and Dettol and surgical tape and anything else she thought might come in handy. Paracetamol too for the headache that looms at her temples and she presses a couple of these into her palm straight away. Dry swallows and turns to flash the box at the woman in the back seat, “Don’t suppose you want some ...”

  Mara’s laughter splinters to a wet and ragged cough. “Rainbows End.”

  “What?”

  “The motel, it’s called Rainbows End. Keep driving, you’ll see it.”

  ~ * ~

  She almost didn’t. Almost sped right past the place, with its tall pine trees half hiding the vacancy sign out front, and now that she’s standing in the cramped reception area, she wishes she’d done just that. The night manager pushes a form across the counter and Faith hesitates for a second, pen in hand. She doesn’t know Mara’s last name and is reluctant to use her own because ... well, just because, and so: Courtney Love, the first words that pop into her head and now nothing else will, but the man doesn’t even blink when she slides the form back.

  Made-up name, made-up address, the tariff paid with cash. Two nights in advance because otherwise they’ll have to be out by ten this morning and it’s already almost four, and Faith feels sick.

  Sick and scared and royally pissed off.

  Their twin-share room right at the end of the complex, no neighbours if the absence of cars is any indication, so thank fuck for small mercies. Faith parks at the front and gets out to open the car door for Mara, chauffeur duties never grimmer than this as her passenger extends an arm for support, stares up at her with eyes deeply shadowed but still burning bright. Tiger eyes, savage and regal, and how it must sting for Mara to have to lean against Faith like this.

  Beneath the pine-sharp patina of disinfectant, the room smells of strangers and stale cigarettes. Faith helps Mara over to one of the beds, dumps the pharmacy bags beside her and then goes back to sling the Shhh! Guest Sleeping! sign onto the doorknob. Flimsy chain latch on the inside and she pulls that across, too.

  “I want some water,” Mara says.

  “Let’s have a look at you first.”

  Mara shakes her head, clutches her toga-sheet with both hands. “I can look after myself.” Weighty blue-green cotton like you’d find in an operating theatre, far too much of it soaked magenta by now, and Faith has well and truly had enough of this shit.

  “Fuck you, then.”

  Four long strides to the door of the room, fishing the car keys from her pocket with one hand while the other reaches for the security chain, because this isn’t her problem and never was and -

  “Wait,” Mara whispers. “Please.” Little-girl-lost voice Faith has never heard before, little girl lost forever, and somehow that’s more frightening than all the blood. A voice to stop her dead, and she turns to see Mara rising carefully to her feet. “Look then,” Mara says. “Look if it matters so much to you.” And she lets the sheet fall.

  Bride of Fucking Frankenstein the first thing that comes to mind, but it’s so much worse than that.

  Black-bristled sutures winding their jagged way from clavicles to pelvis, vaguely Y-shaped like an autopsy incision and crowded by an ugly patchwork of cuts that could only in these circumstances be thought lesser wounds. Ribs and belly and the almost non-existent swell of her breasts all bearing the mark of knife or scalpel, some stitches torn apart and bleeding fresh, crimson rivulets to join the dark and clotted mess that cakes her body from the waist down.

  “Christ.”

  The word little more than appalled, astonished breath, but Mara just grins. “Nothing to do with him,” she says, as a thin trickle of blood slides down her calf and around her ankle, pools on grotty grey carpet that has seen better days - though surely not worse ones.

  For an entire precarious minute, Faith just stares, car keys digging sharply into her palm. She can still leave, can still turn her back on this whole fucked-up mess and just walk away, drive away and try very hard to pretend that she never even heard the phone ring tonight, because this is not her problem. This is Mara’s nightmare but if Faith doesn’t leave right now, if she doesn’t open the motel door right this second, then it will become her nightmare as well and god only knows when - or if - either of them will wake up.

  Mara wobbles a little, unsteady on her feet, then half-sinks, half-falls back onto the bed. “Can I have that water now?”

  And even as Faith closes her eyes, even before she takes her first resigned step towards the ensuite, a shored-up space within her cracks and splits and breaks wide open, and something far too familiar worms its way out, uncurls its long and greedy limbs, and laughs.

  ~ * ~

  The scant, thin hour before dawn and Mara seems to have fallen asleep at last. Her shallow breathing has deepened, become more regular, and there’s not the slightest response when Faith calls her name. No movement, no murmur, not even the semi-conscious flutter of an eyelid, but Faith thinks she’ll wait little while longer just to be sure.

  Wet, bloody-pink wads of cotton wool litter the floor, and a stained towel huddles at the end of the bed where Faith left it once Mara finally pushed her away. Enough, enough for now, after Faith finished washing the dried and crusted blood from her chest, her stomach, her ribs. Pale fists bunched in the sheet around her hips, clenching tighter when Faith tried to pull that down as well, tried to see the damage lurking below but there’s nothing, Mara said. Just blood from everything else, and clean or dirty, what she really needed was rest.

  The smell of antiseptic fills the room and Faith worries what Mara might look like beneath her sutured skin.

  Or even just beneath the sheet.

  Finally, careful to make not the smallest telltale sound, Faith slips from her bed and pads over to Mara’s. She takes hold of the stained and crumpled fabric and peels it slowly back, wincing at the whispersoft crackle of dried blood as she draws it all the way to Mara’s parted knees, morbid magician flourish to reveal -

  Just what, it takes Faith a second or two to fathom.

  Nothing left of what should be found between a woman’s legs. Only several deep cuts cleaving flesh right down to the glisten of bone, vicious wounds like someone put a fucking axe to work, and filled with so much dried and crusted blood that Faith tastes bile rising fresh to her throat. So much blood that maybe it seems worse than it is - nothing band-aids are gonna fix, sure, but still maybe not as horrendous as she thinks either - and she forces herself to lean forward, to look closer.

  Too close: not enough time to withdraw as Mara suddenly twists sideways and draws up her legs. Kicks out and catches Faith full in the chest with enough force to send her spinning across the room, winded and gasping like she’s been kicked by a frightened horse. Tacky carpet beneath her hands as she lands and scuttles backwards on her arse, more than
a little frightened herself now with Mara getting up from the bed and stalking naked towards her. Amazon tall and stitched together like a broken doll, a piece of her too large - too chunky - to be simply skin flapping open between her legs, slapping against her thigh with each determined step.

  Faith barely makes it to the toilet before she throws up.

  “Hey.” Hands on her back, her shoulders, reaching around to pull the hair from her face. “You shouldn’t have seen that, you should have trusted me. You should have listened when I said I was fine.”

  “You’re not fine.” Turning to find Mara with a motel towel wrapped close around her waist, greyish-white and already spotted scarlet. “Can you even see yourself, can you see what he’s ... done to you? What he’s ...” The image of torn, bloodied flesh still stark behind her eyes, blinding, and Faith stuffs a fist into her mouth. Mara, she whispers, and oh christ, and then Mara again.

  They’re all the words she can summon.

  Mara sighs and sinks heavily to the floor, knees pressed tight together. “You don’t understand, Faith. You don’t even know the half of it.”

  ~ * ~

  The story is, last night was a game of Doctors & Nurses. More precisely, Doctors & Doctors - Mara’s specialist friend with some friends of his own along for the ride, medical degrees decidedly optional. A room in a house done up as an operating theatre, and Mara the star attraction.

  A patient who would remain fully conscious while you sliced and prodded and poked around inside her. A patient who would speak on command, who would weep or gasp or not speak at all if that’s what you preferred. Eyes wide and bright and completely aware, even as you curved a hand around her heart to feel its rhythms against your awestruck palm.

  Even as you stitched her closed again, your fingers sweating, trembling, inside their surgical gloves.

  The story is, even this was not enough. Sex never in the contract but one of them had pulled down her bikini briefs anyway, the others circling close like leering wolves with the scent of blood thick in their nostrils. Until they forced apart her legs and saw what wasn’t there.

  As for what was, well. Nothing any of them could ever have seen before.

  Simply, nothing.

  Mara thinks they used a cleaver. They’d brought all sorts of tools, all kinds of implements to play with. A cleaver, or some other heavy-bladed knife.

  But the story is: Mara gave far better than she ever might have gotten and by the end, not all of the blood spilled had been hers.

  Not even most of it.

  ~ * ~

  Faith doesn’t want to know exactly what that means. What any of it means. Is only too grateful to be sent in search of the small, combination-locked suitcase Mara has left in care of the management for precisely such an occasion.

  “Should have told us you was with her, love.” A different man from the previous night, tall and hollow-cheeked, leaning towards Faith with both forearms flat on the counter. “She stays as long she needs, tell her. No charge.”

  Then, with genuine concern, “She okay, you reckon?”

  And Faith, who knows nothing about anything anymore and is trying very hard to feel just the same, merely nods. “I think so. She says so.”

  Back in the room, Mara thanks her for the suitcase and disappears with it into the ensuite. There is the sound of the door locking and, after a few minutes, the rhythmic patter of the shower. Faith flops onto the bed - her bed, not the other one -and throws an elbow over her eyes to block out the morning sun now squeezing slantways through the not-so-vertical blinds.

  Thoughts of Sydney crowd forward and, for the first time in a long time, she doesn’t push them automatically away. Livia and Ben and all the others she left behind, one thousand kilometres worth of behind, because who knew how wide that particular vortex yawned. We’re, like, exploring Antarctica here, someone had mused late one night. Russ, or maybe Corin, she can’t recall. Wedged in her memory instead, the wired exultation in Liv’s reply: Baby no, there’s dirt and rocks and shit under there. This is the fucking Arctic circle: nothing but ice all the way down.

  Livia, raccoon eyes now perpetually smudged with day-old eyeliner, her dyed black hair overgrown with greasy blonde.

  Livia, finding veins in her ankles so she can still go sleeveless in summer.

  Livia, scratching herself to ruin in the search for subcutaneous life.

  Faith had fled. No dramatic watershed moment, no death or overdose or even accidental injury to propel her into the harsh light of day, just waking up one winter morning with frozen toes and the even colder realization that if she dragged herself off to Livia’s that night she might never, ever find her way back home.

  Four weeks at her mum’s instead. Best mother in the whole damn world to keep her under lock and key like that, self-imposed house arrest in suburbia while she cleaned up, thawed out, thankful that she hadn’t really even begun to plumb the sort of depths that Livia and the rest had so eagerly dived to. Surfacing from that level might have - almost certainly would have - been impossible. Would have been impossible regardless if she hadn’t then picked up and moved to Melbourne with barely a pause for breath or the burning of all her address books. Faith had proved herself stronger than she’d thought, but no way would she ever be strong enough to close a door in Livia’s face if that girl decided to come knocking.

  Only now there’s Mara, and Faith wonders if she doesn’t have some sort of subconscious freak-compass guiding her every movement.

  The ensuite door swings open, spilling forth steam, fluorescent light and someone Faith almost doesn’t recognize. Mara has cut her hair, close-cropped schoolboy style slicked back from her forehead with gel or maybe just water from the shower. Dressed in black jeans and a baggy black t-shirt, she even seems to move differently. Loose-hipped, almost a swagger, with pale arms swinging by her sides as though buffeted by a careless breeze.

  “Still here?” The surprise in her voice, no matter how mild, is just too much. This is impossible, Mara is impossible. Pain or no pain, no one gets cut open like that and walks around so effortlessly the very next day; no one gets butchered the way this woman has been and walks around at all, never mind in fucking jeans. Faith realizes that if she wasn’t so furious, so well and truly fed up, then she’d most likely be terrified out of her wits right now.

  “What are you, Mara?” Anger definitely the preferred option, and she lets it all the way loose. “What the fuck are you?” Launching herself from the bed, reaching for Mara with no clear intention beyond doing some sort of violence of her own, but it hardly matters. Mara catches her wrists in hands too strong to be human, crosses them over and then pushes her away. Hard.

  Faith lands on the corner of the mattress and topples straight to the floor, terror now sliding into prominence as she rubs her wrists together, so sore the bones themselves seem bruised.

  Mara regards her in silence for a few seconds, then nods, as though arriving at some kind of decision. She sits down on the bed opposite, legs apart and elbows resting on her knees. “I’m not sure what I am,” she says quietly, staring at a point between her bare, blue-veined feet. “You have so many stories, it becomes difficult - confusing - to hold onto the truth.”

  Faith swallows, not daring to move.

  “I did not fall.” Mara glances up, her tear-glazed eyes still sharply focused. “But neither did I choose a side. And more than that, I can’t remember.”

  She winces, hand moving swiftly to her waist where it rubs in smooth, slow circles just below her ribs. “Not all of them doctors, then.” And to Faith’s wordless, uncomprehending shake of the head, “The liver, I think. Re-arranging itself to the proper position.”

  “But you ... it looked like that hurt. Did that hurt?”

  Mara shrugs.

  “You told me you didn’t ... that you couldn’t ...” Not finishing, not wanting to finish. Not wanting to say the words to make it real, so Mara says them for her.

  “I feel pain, Faith. I feel everythi
ng that’s ever been done to me, while it lasts.” Half a smile, half a grimace curving her thin, pale lips. “But think, would you really feel a mosquito bite if your leg had just been severed? Or would you want to feel it even more? Would you long for that bite, that almost insignificant sting, because the other pain - the loss, the absence - was just too unbearable?”

  Faith gets to her knees, gets oh so slowly to her feet. “Mara ...”

  “No.” Even with half a room between them, the raised hand snaps her frozen to the spot. “It’s too late for Mara now. Whatever she had, you can have. Or not. I won’t be returning to that place.”

  Run. Run. Run. Each beat of her heart imploring escape, but Faith can’t seem to move. Finds her mouth opening instead, asking if there is something she can do, because if there is anything at all that might help -