The Horror Day Anthology, page 5
Jordon spat the rest of the blood out and skated back toward the centre of the rink. A nameless Czech player – number twenty-three – gave a half-hearted effort to trip him on the way. Jordon side-stepped his stick and pushed on, taking up position on the left wing to form the line. He lowered his head so the blood wouldn’t be too apparent to the other players.
The rules in this fucked up competition are as screwed up as the venue, he thought. All regulations have well and truly been thrown out the door.
The umpire blew his whistle and dropped the puck down onto the blue line, quickly moving out of the way before the face-off of clashing sticks could castrate him. Almost immediately, an attacking Czech player gained a foothold on it and motioned it through the centerline. No Australian knew what the hell was happening, and before Jordon could even think to move his skates, the opposition had already passed it once and maneuvered the puck beyond the crease and into the mesh. Their goalie, Pete Lester, slid on a peg trying to catch it and the net was knocked askew for the second time in the match.
‘Come on, boy’s! Let’s pick it up! We can’t let them get away from us again!’
This came from Bert Hanuman, an auspicious old fool who lived in a myopic bubble of foolhardy optimism. Jordon thought it might be possible the old codger was going the way of Alzheimer’s already.
We probably all are. I mean... look at us?
Indeed. The old timer’s league, although talented for their age, resembled nothing so much as floating husks on the ice. Average age here was about sixty: old fools whose dreams of playing professional ice-hockey had gone the way of the dinosaurs. There was, however, a robustness and energy about the disciplined Czech players that took ten years off their physical appearance. Jordon looked over toward their bench, and saw on their interchange the one player he had come to see today.
You’ve been in my dreams, buddy, and today one old man is going to make sure that you never have any dreams again.
The players lined up in formation again, and the whole process was repeated; this time Jordon managed to get a little stick on puck and he forechecked to the other end before being crunched against the shatterglass in a spray of ice. He quickly took off his right glove to massage the numbness there and for a moment caught the look of astonishment from the opposition as a player noticed his three missing digits.
Smiling, Jordon re-gloved his mangled hand and skated over to the Australian net. The puck was in the hands of his team but being passed around like it was a hot coal. Gliding to a stop, he looked down at their goalie Pete Lester. He looked forbidding in his Jason Voorhees ice-hokey mask.
‘Do you see him?’ he asked.
‘I see him. Number forty-two, isn’t it? He hasn’t aged one goddamn bit, has he?’
‘And he doesn’t seem to recognize me.’
‘Figures. They’re like fucking robots, aren’t they?’
Jordon didn’t answer him but looked at the scoreboard instead. It read twelve to one in favor of the fucking robots. The Australians had managed to lose the puck yet again while the opposition negotiated the traffic back toward their goal.
‘Better skedaddle,’ Peter informed him. ‘And be careful.’
He took off and manned-up, making small figure-eights around his quarry. He did pretty well; his divergent opponent never had a turn before the Czech’s eventually scored another goal. This time Pete Lester had nothing to do with it – these foreigners were just too damn talented.
A penalty was suddenly called by the umpire, but most of the players were lingering around their captains, discussing in heated tones an attempted tripping just before the goal. Jordon ignored them and skated past the bench... skated right past it to the waiting throng of sweaty, gurnseyed Czech players blowing white plumes of body heat and swigging massive bottles of water.
He entered their field of vision, but they barely registered his presence.
Number forty-two never even glanced his way; he just stared out at the action with his European designer stubble and vacant eyes... exactly the demeanor he’d had when running over Jordon’s fingers more than five years ago on his shitty native homeland.
Am I really going through with this?
The melee in the centre was breaking up, sweat-logged players returning to their respective zones. The blood on Jordon’s lips was drying into a hardened crust, and the reality was there was never anybody in the penalty box to pay for his grievances.
2
For Jordon, it was over very quickly.
For most of his team-mates, it would never be over.
The buzzer had just sounded for the end of the second twenty-minute period and the players to regroup at their individual benches. Forty-two, as expected, had to skate a short distance past the centerline – this was due to the fact that he also served as an assistant to the Czech coach and had to motivate the players as they returned.
He’d no sooner taken at least three and a half skate-strokes before Jordon slammed his graphite stick into the small vacant niche of his steel skate-blades. For a brief, almost surreal moment, he was carried with foreword momentum that matched the velocity of the man who’d released him of his fingers five years ago... then gravity took centre stage and he was jerked backwards and involuntarily spat out his mouth-guard.
Next, an explosion of blood downpoured on the ice as his face came down and Jordon heard a loud satisfying crunch as the nose unfettered from gristle and bone. Teeth – shiny like porcelain but mottled with gore – blew like shards out from under him and scattered to the four winds. Jordon’s stick was still wedged through his skate, the black tape ripping away to expose the fresh graphite. Unbelievably, they were still up in the air; his knees had bent backwards and were flopping uncontrollably.
It was no surprise when the players at first didn’t respond; ice-hockey was one hell of a violent sport, and it probably looked like nothing more than a bit of rough-and-tumble.
Jordan quelled that notion in a hurry.
Using his stick as a harness, he carried himself forward. He was eerily reminded of first learning to skate as a child; hugging the banisters and inching himself along a bit at a time. Then, upon reaching the Czech’s grappling form he kicked his left leg to the ice and stamped sharp skates through the flesh and muscle that attached the man’s ankle to his foot.
‘Yeeeooooowwwww!’
The foreign bastard had finally found his voice, and Jordon saw his team-mates were finally getting a heads-up on all the action. As forty-two made squelching noises with his encumbered voice-box (his severed skate and foot was jetting blood and spinning in a small circle), Bert Hanuman dropped his stick and gave an audible gasp. Then he started smiling, not getting the joke. Not getting it wasn’t a joke.
With all his remaining strength, Jordon pried open the guy’s legs even further and shoved his blood-clad skate into the cleft between the Czech’s legs. The fabric of his padded pants tore easily with the blood acting as a lubricant to make the tear. This time he squealed - a sound Jordon didn’t think was possible coming from a man with a pulverized face.
A few muted shouts now, this time with more urgency. As the gelatinous sack of his testicles came free, the umpire blew his whistle and even people from the crowd had turned their attention to them. No matter. He still had a few moments to see this through. All the planning over the months leading up to this match wasn’t going in vain.
And so, after detangling his skate from the mess of his crotch, Jordon side-stepped the body then knelt down and flipped it over so that it was facing him. The face was worse than he could’ve imagined, thick rivulets of exposed muscle flapping obscenely, but the eyes were strangely clear. Jordon took off his glove and showed his gangly, protruding stub of a hand, hoping for a bit of recognition.
And there was.
It was too bad ice-hokey was such a violent sport. Jordon was an old man now, and if he didn’t have his fingers, what the hell did he have?
In such an arena as this, a little vigilante action was the only penalty that taught a player justice.
Matthew Tait was born in Adelaide, Australia in 1977. Like many authors, he has held far too many jobs for any man to admit to. These include selling electronics, working in kitchens, and co-managing a video store (one of the few vocations he actually enjoyed) – to name just a few. And although it seems a pre-requisite for any writer, he’s not ashamed to admit he’s played in a few rock bands as well.
Currently, he is one of the Associate Editors of HorrorScope and divides his time reading the horror and fantasy genre, playing with his Siamese cat Oscar and writing stories. The current Magnum Opus is the books of Reunion, of which Meridian, Olearia, and The Hope of Kinfold make over a thousand page trilogy.
Matt’s Web Presence can be found at: http://www.matthewtait.com
“Dirty Washing”
Marty Young
The fly-screen door opened on its rusty hinges and its drawn out squeal was loud in the quiet morning. Almost immediately, it slammed shut again, bouncing once, as it was prone to do. Then a loud thud came from the laundry, as if something heavy had been dropped.
Samuel looked up from the text book and waited for his mother to come through into the kitchen. He needed a break from his study - there was only so much maths you could take in at any one time before your brain started to hurt. He looked at the clock on the wall in front of him as he yawned, and was surprised to see that he had been studying for nearly an hour already, and it wasn’t yet ten o’clock. It was definitely time for a break.
When she did not enter, and no further noises were forthcoming from the laundry, Sammy looked out of the dining room window into the backyard. He couldn’t see his mum or the washing basket by the clothesline anymore, and it looked as though all of the sheets had been hung out, too.
Maybe dad had come home from work, he thought, and his mum had dropped the empty basket inside before going out to meet him. His dad had been acting a little strange lately, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if he had come home early.
Only the basket – if that was what the noise had been - hadn’t sounded empty.
Outside, the sheets flapped and billowed in the wind, tugging at their pegs.
Suddenly, there was a sliding, scraping sound from the laundry. Samuel spun around, but as he did, the noise stopped.
“Mum?”
It had sounded like something heavy being dragged or pushed along the linoleum floor.
As he went to stand to go see what was going on, the sound scraped through the kitchen and into dining room again.
Like someone with a broken ankle dragging their foot, the bone grinding against the ground.
The sound made his scalp tingle. “Dad?” He called, hesitantly. He waited, but now only the steady ticking of the clock disturbed the house.
Suddenly, the fridge started humming, and he flinched.
A dog barked from somewhere nearby – old Mr. Thompson’s, Sammy knew, from three house down, the little terrier that yapped every time he walked past. One day he was going to throw a rock at that mutt, and he hoped he got it square between the eyes when he did.
The noise came again, and this time he knew for certain what it was; it was the washing basket, being pushed along the floor. It came into view now, a tantalizing slither visible from the doorway between the kitchen and laundry.
Sammy licked his lips. “What are you guys doing?”
There was no answer.
However bad his maths was, he wanted to return to those calculations and let his parents play their game without him. Neither of them had been very happy lately, so whatever game they were playing wasn’t bound to be much fun.
But he couldn’t take his eyes from the basket, which, even now, slid further into view with another loud scrape.
He felt his face flush.
The world reeled, spun, yet somehow the basket, the blue washing basket that had held the sheets earlier this morning, stayed in focus, the basket and its contents that were leaking onto the floor.
There was so much glistening blood.
The sliding sound came once more as the basket was pushed into view completely, and Sammy gaped.
One of his mother’s arms hung over the side, with scarlet pearl droplets beading on the fingertips. A knee rose like a mountain from the centre, and through the sides of the basket, Samuel could see his mother’s face, glaring at him, her eyes wide and stunned.
‘Why didn’t you help?’ That accusing look demanded. ‘Why didn’t you save me?’
But he hadn’t heard a thing – nothing! Not a scream or cry, nor a howl of fright. Not even the swing of the axe that had done all of the damage.
‘You should’ve stopped him, Samuel!’ His mother’s dead eyes condemned through the basket.
The blood flowed slowly across the floor, seeking him out and snaking towards him. He watched it come, mesmerised yet knowing it would never reach him; already it was slowing as it congealed.
Then his father limped into view, the shining wet axe held in one hand, his right eye still twitching like it had started doing last week and hadn’t stopped since. He stared at Samuel, and for a moment, he did not seem to recognise him. Then, slowly, his eyes focused.
“Sam, Sammy,” He said, a terrible look distorting his face. “I’ve taken care of the dirty washing.”
He swung his other arm and Samuel suddenly noticed the head his father had been holding by its hair. He saw the goatee and instantly knew who it was; his mum’s new friend, the man who always smiled at her when his dad wasn’t watching.
The head landed in the basket, on top of his mother, but there was no longer any smile.
“I’ve taken care of it all,” His dad said in a terrible flat voice.
Marty Young is the founder and current president of the Australian Horror Writers Association (http://www.australianhorror.com), and is co-editor of Macabre - The New Era in Australian Horror, a new anthology seeking to capture the best of the past, present and future of Australian Horror.
Martin Livings (ed), The Horror Day Anthology
