The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (57 page)

The rescuer next to him clapped a hand on his shoulder.

“Was there any time you wanted to give up?”

He thought of the long gray man and the feelings of despair he’d left behind. They wouldn’t believe him if he talked about that, think he was mad.

“Nah. I just thought of my wife’s pot roast and that got me through.”

“What is it you’ve got? Why did you survive and not Barry?”

“I can’t answer that.”

The psychologist stepped in. “There are many reasons why people survive. For Stuart, he had thoughts of his family to sustain him. Barry didn’t have that and studies have shown it makes a difference. Also, Stuart was less dramatic in his actions. Maybe he thought ahead a bit more, and maybe Barry thought he could get out of it.”

“You’re saying it’s Barry’s fault he was trapped? His own fault he died?”

“No. Not at all. But the fact is that Stuart thought it through and trusted the rescuers.”

“Do you think yourself lucky, Stuart?”

“Couldn’t be luckier,” Stuart said. “Luckiest man left alive.”

“I’m sure your rescuers will be happy to hear that. Do you feel any sense of obligation to them? Do you owe them anything?”

“Yeah, look they’re all spread out around the place, but they can come to my place for a feed any time they like. And you know what I really owe them? I owe them a good life.”

He and the rescuer shook hands, and the cheering of the audience went on for two minutes.

“What do you say to the idea that some people don’t survive because they may have died helping others?”

“Yeah, well, if I coulda helped Barry survive I would have.”

“What about his food? Is it true you ate his food?”

“Yeah, I ate his food. He couldn’t get to it and it was only going off. That’s not what killed him.”

The psychologist said, “It is true that often it is the survivors don’t help others. Especially in times of famine. Survivors are the ones who will take food from a child’s mouth.”

Stuart felt stunned. He wasn’t sure how the conversation had turned against him and what a hero he was, but it seemed it had.

“All I did was survive,” he said. “No one had to die for me to survive. I did it because I love my family, I love my life, and I wanted to get here on TV for the free beer I’ve heard about.”

With that, he had the audience back.

Afterwards, there was plenty of beer drunk. The crew took him out to the local pub and he was there long after they left. People had watched the interview and they all wanted to talk to him about it.

“If only we could bottle what you’ve got, there’d be no little kiddies dying of cancer,” people said to him more often than he wanted to hear.

“If only we could bottle it, you’d be a rich man.”

“If only we could bottle it, we’d save the world.”

They thought he had some magic power, that it wasn’t a willingness to drink your own piss and a great desire to have proper sex with your wife again, it was something else. Something they couldn’t have.

He took a drink well but even he was feeling a bit woozy by around midnight. By 3:00 a.m., the pub was almost empty. He could no longer remember who he’d spoken to, so when a sad-faced man said hello, he nodded and went back to his beer.

“Hello, Stuart,” the man said again. His voice was soft. It had an amused tone, as if he knew more than other people, found something amusing. Stuart no longer wondered how people knew his name. Plenty of them did. He rather liked the celebrity. He’d always enjoyed making connections with people all over.

Stuart looked at him this time. “Do I know you?” he asked.

His teeth were bright, white and even. Clearly false. His hair, pale blond, sat flat on his head. He smelt strongly of aftershave, the kind Stuart used to smell wafting out of the cars while he waited for the bus. His mouth drooped.
Sad man,
Stuart thought.

“How are you holding up?”

“I’m okay. Bit tired.”

The man moved so that he looked directly into Stuart’s eyes. Stuart froze. This is how the apparition in the cave had looked at him. With this intensity. He was used to people staring at him greedily but this was different. The sad face, the long arms. Long, long fingers.

It was the apparition from the mine.

The man’s hand went out and grabbed Stuart by the wrist with a powerful grip.

“Hold still, Stuart. This won’t take long.”

Stuart shivered, feeling as cold as he had underground. Chilled to the bone and dreaming of snow.

“Leggo, mate, wouldya?” he said. He tried to pull back but he felt deep lethargy, as if he’d been injected with golden syrup and his limbs couldn’t move.

The man raised his other arm and brought it up to pinch the bridge of Stuart’s nose. Stuart was paralyzed. He wanted one of the other drinkers to intervene, to hit the man, knock him away, but no one did. It was so quiet Stuart felt as if he was back in the mine and the idea of it made him choke.

No. It wasn’t that. He had a nose bleed, blood pouring backwards down his throat because the man held his sinuses so tight.

He let go and Stuart slumped forward, spitting blood. He felt movement return.

Turned his head away from the man.

The man bent and helped him up. “Nose bleed, nose bleed, make a bit of room, I’ll take him and clean him up. Nose bleed, he’ll be fine.”

Stuart tried to pull his arm away. His mouth was full of blood.

“Come on, Stuart, it’ll be all right.”

He led Stuart into the men’s toilets. Propped him against the wall.

Stuart heard a skittering sound, like cockroaches across the kitchen bench at midnight. He thought he caught a whiff of them, that slightly plasticy smell. A smell of sour cherries.

“It won’t hurt,” the man said.

Stuart felt the creatures and, by straining his eyes, could watch them walking up his arm. The scream in his head deafened him.

Up his forearm, his biceps, over his shoulders and onto his neck, where he could feel them latching on.

“It’s not your blood they’re taking,” the man said. His voice was soft and almost too broad to listen to. “It’s something else. You won’t miss it. It’ll be like it was never there. You won’t know.”

He clicked his tongue and Stuart thought the sucking stopped. He felt light-headed and nauseous. The man plucked a beetle off Stuart’s shoulder and ate it. Crunched it like it was a nut and took the next. Two more and he was smacking his lips. Stuart couldn’t move. He felt so cold he felt like he’d been buried in snow. Or was back in the cave. But it was light in here. Very bright.

“Look at me.” The man’s cheeks were pink, his eyes bright. He looked younger. Happy.

“Thank you, Stuart. Have a good life.”

He tapped Stuart on the head and Stuart slept.

He awoke on the filthy toilet floor. Someone had dropped a wad of shitty toilet paper and he could smell that.

He felt little compunction to rise, to lift himself. It was like this was the only moment and there was nothing beyond.

Another man came in and helped him up. “Home time for you, mate? Wait here while I take a piss and I’ll get you to a taxi.”

“Do I know you?” Stuart said. Things seemed blurred and he couldn’t remember much.

“Nah, but you’ll always help someone in trouble, right? Specially a survivor like you.”

I am a survivor,
Stuart thought as the stranger helped him to a taxi.
That’s what I did.

But he felt as if he could never do it again.

He woke up on his lounge room floor, his shirt stiff with dried blood.

“Big night was it?” Cheryl said, poking him with her toe.

Sarah, stood over him, ready for school, her shoes all shined, her white socks folded neatly.

He shivered, feeling cold. “The long man pinched my nose.” His face felt swollen and he knew he must look awful.

“Get off the floor,” Sarah said. “You’re shivering.”

“I will soon.” He felt a deep sense of pure lethargy.

Cheryl helped him up onto the couch and brought him a cup of tea. “You’re too old to drink like that anymore.”

“Wasn’t the drink. Well, I did give it a bit of a hiding, but it was this guy. This long gray guy who gave me a bloody nose and then did something to me. I’m tired. I’m so tired. And cold.”

She brought him a fluffy pink blanket and covered his knees with it. “The TV producers sent over a copy of your interview. Sarah and I have already watched it twice! Want to have a look? You come across really well.”

She didn’t wait for his answer but played the DVD anyway.

He watched the interview over and over that day, wondering at the person talking. “Jeez, I’m a smart-arse, aren’t I?” he said, smiling at his Cheryl. She kissed his forehead.

“You always were.” The lightness of her tone warmed him slightly. She had suffered postnatal depression and he was terrified every day it would come on again. He saw it behind her eyes sometimes, in the droop of her mouth. A wash of sadness. Those were the times he tried harder lift her up. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw a bug climbing the wall and he curled up, pulling his blanket up over his eyes. “We need to get the rent-a-kill guys in here. Get rid of the cockroaches,” he said.

She nodded. “Ants, too. All over the kitchen, rotten little things.” She sat beside him, laying her head on his shoulder. “I still can’t believe you’re back,” she said. His little bird, his sparrow, but a tower of strength at the same time.

Usually sitting beside her he felt something. Irritation, often, when she went on about small domestic details, none of which interested him. Boredom, talking about her family. Affection, when they sat together watching TV. Love, when they laughed together at a joke he’d made, when her eyes crinkled up and little tears formed. He loved those little tears.

She held his hand. He let it lie loose.

“Are you okay?” she said.

“I just can’t really feel anything. It’s all gone numb.”

She stared at him. “We have to tell the doctor. Something’s wrong. You shouldn’t feel like that.”

“I don’t feel anything, love. That’s the thing. Nothing at all. Just cold. Like I’ve got an ice block inside my stomach.” He didn’t tell her he meant emotionally as well, that looking at her left him cold.

To cover it up, he kissed her. Usually they’d do this stuff at night, with the door closed, but he kissed her with passion and moved his hands around her body, touching all his favorite bits.

The weeks passed. He ate meals he had no real desire to eat, had conversations and many, many interviews. Sponsorships brought money in. Newspaper reports listed everything he’d eaten underground and those people approached him. It was Vegemite, Tip Top bread, Milo chocolate bars, apples (the local fruit shop took on that one), and the local butcher had a go, too. The watch company put him on TV, talking about how he’d never need another watch, that one was so good. So at least he didn’t have to work. People kept asking him if he was going back underground and he’d bluff at them, give them the real man answer, the hero stuff, but he wasn’t going back.

He spent a lot of time reading the paper. He started cutting out stories of other survivors, especially the ones who talked about the cold, about the deep bone chill they felt after a few days.

“Dad, let me hook you up with an online forum. You can meet other survivors. Talk to them. Most of them are probably feeling what you’re feeling,” Sarah said. He sat at the computer for a while but it only made sense when she talked him through it and he didn’t want her to know it all.

She asked him about the long man. “The one you said pinched your nose. We should try to track him down and make sure he doesn’t do it again. People can’t go round pinching my dad’s nose like that.”

“Willy nilly,” he said. It was an old joke. “I don’t know if we’ll find him. I don’t think he’s at the pub much, or if he’s got a job. I saw him when I was buried, you know. He sent his ghost in to find me.”

Others had talked about seeing visions. Buried in the snow, or caught in a car for two days on a country road. They said, more than one of them, that a long man had visited them. “It’s not just me,” he told Sarah. “No one knows why he doesn’t help. He just looks.”

“Did he pinch their noses? This is the stuff we can find online, Dad.”

“Yeah, maybe. Maybe. What about stuff about cockroaches? How to get rid of them? I saw a huge one in the bathroom. They say they’ll survive nuclear war. That’s what they reckon.” He shivered. “I hate them.”

He felt like a fraud. Life exhausted him, all the people wanting what he had. And Cheryl and Sarah got nothing but harassment.
Lucky your dad’s alive, your husband,
people said to them.
Imagine what life would have been like without him, how sad, how hard.
Making them think about it. All those people wanting to talk to him, but they paid him at least and it kept them in beer and roast beef. Always the same questions.

“What is it you think you were kept alive for?” they asked, putting the onus on him to make something of his life. As if he’d been given a second chance and he’d be a fool to waste it.

“Dunno what I was kept alive for, but mostly I’m enjoying every extra minute with my daughter and my wife,” was his stock answer.

But he no longer really cared.

They asked him, “Are you scared of anything? Seems like you’re not.” It was a stupid question, he thought. Who wasn’t scared?

“Cockroaches. I really hate cockroaches.” The interviewer sighed in agreement.

Another question they always asked him was, “Put in the same situation, would or could you do it again?”

“Well, I won’t mate, will I? Just not going to happen.”

They always ended with, “If only you could bottle it.” His standard joke was to hold out his wrists.

“Ya wanna take a liter or two? Go for it! I can spare it!”

It was all an act and he was good at it.

He was waiting in the queue to buy fish and chips (“Aren’t you that guy? That miner guy?”) when he smelt sour cherries. It took him straight back to the cave and the smell of the long man. He felt cold through his layers of clothing and did not want to turn around. He felt someone behind him, close, but people did that. They seemed to think if they got physically close to him they could absorb some of him, that they could be like him.