The Gate Theory Read online

  From “White Bed”, her first published story, which appeared in a feminist horror anthology in 1993, Kaaron Warren has produced powerful, disturbing fiction.

  With four novels and six short story collections in print, and close to two hundred short fiction sales, Warren’s award-winning fiction tackles the themes of obsession, murder, grief, despair, revenge, manipulation, death and sex.

  Kaaron has won many awards such as the Shirley Jackson, Aurealis, Ditmar, Australian Shadows and ACT Writers and Publishers Awards for her novels and short fiction, including Slights, The Grinding House, Through Splintered Walls and the novella “Sky”. She’s lived in Melbourne, Sydney and Fiji and now in Canberra with her family.

  IFWG Titles by Kaaron Warren

  The Grief Hole (illustrations by Keely Van Order) 2016

  The Gate Theory (short story collection) 2017

  Praise for Kaaron’s work

  ’The Gate Theory’ is a perfect example of Kaaron Warren’s accomplishment in converting different themes and subjects into dense and powerful fiction. Her stories have the tendency to insidiously crawl under the reader’s skin, slithering unnoticed until they find a place from where one is unable to shake them loose after reading.”

  ~ Dark Wolf’s Fantasy Reviews

  “Kaaron Warren is without doubt one of the world's leading writers of dark fiction, and The Gate Theory showcases her talent perfectly… Her prose is powerful, her sense of place is evocative and her imagination knows no bounds. This is the kind of book that you will remember long after you finish reading the last story.”

  ~ M R Cosby, Stranger Designs

  “Each of these stories stretches the boundaries of both storytelling and character. Warren’s is a unique voice in horror. She has an ability to take us to places so utterly disturbing yet simultaneously so mundane and believable, that you start to look at people you meet with a sidelong glance. I call it The Warren Perception. It’s unavoidable. Read her work and you will start to look at people as she does. This is not necessarily a good thing, but it’s fascinating.”

  ~ Alan Baxter, Thirteen O’Clock

  “Gaze Dogs, like the other stories in this fine collection, captures the elusive quality of a dream: the strong, darkly surreal images, but also the resonant feeling. So often—in stories, as in dreams—the feeling dies away and only the image remains, a husk that has lost reference to its once-valuable contents. The power of Warren’s stories is to hold onto both simultaneously, giving us the image–feeling complex in all its potency, and nightmares all the more frightening for being only half glimpsed.”

  ~ J. Ashley Smith, Spook Tapes

  “All of the stories are beautifully written and subtle in the real horror they depict. Kaaron Warren’s style is dynamic and thought-provoking—it is the epitome of quiet horror. If you like your horror with an understated quality, then THE GATE THEORY is for you.”

  ~ Colleen Wanglund, The Horror Fiction Review

  “The only warning I'm going to issue is if you read The Gate Theory you are going to be hooked on Ms Warren's writing style and want to read everything she has ever written…”

  ~ Scaryminds

  The Gate Theory

  Kaaron Warren

  This is a work of fiction. The events and characters portrayed herein are imaginary and are not intended to refer to specific places, events or living persons. The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author do not necessarily represent the opinions of the publisher.

  The Gate Theory

  Kaaron Warren

  Copyright Kaaron Warren 2017

  ISBN-13: 978-1-925496-24-6

  Version 1.0

  Collection first Published in 2015

  Published by IFWG Publishing at Smashwords

  This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  IFWG Publishing

  ifwgpublishing.com

  Table of Contents

  Purity

  That Girl

  Dead Sea Fruit

  The History Thief

  The Gaze Dogs of Nine Waterfall

  The Gate Theory

  Purity

  Therese was clean on the inside, but her mud-slapped, filthy, stinking home—with its stacks of newspapers going back as far as she was born, spoons bent and burnt, food grown hard and crusty—kept her skin dirty. The floor all shit and mud and dropped rags.

  Her mother was blind to it all, only seeing the bottle, and if Therese was living a cliché, she didn’t notice. Her mother ate nothing but potato chips. She liked the ones with chicken flavour, so that’s what she stank of. Not of chicken but of that yellow, chemical, thirsty smell of artificial chicken.

  She knew her mother loved her. Hadn’t she dumped Therese but changed her mind? Baby Therese was found abandoned at the hospital, covered with dirt, a thick, sludgy layer of it. They’d never seen a young baby so filthy. A nurse scraped it off, put it into a blood vial. Therese still has this vial of dirt. The nurse wrote, ‘Dirt from Baby Therese’. The handwriting was neat, the ‘i’ dotted with a flower.

  Her mother came to get her a week later when the love affair failed. The nurse gave her the vial of dirt, saying, “You need to keep your baby clean.” Therese’s mother puts on a voice when she tells this story, a low, scratchy voice, making the woman sound evil. Therese wondered how many children that nurse had and what her house looked like.

  This was the last boyfriend her mother ever had. It was food she loved from then on. Food she’d eat without touching, tipping it into her mouth straight from the packet.

  Therese never found out what happened to her mother to make her want to be fat and why she was always filthy.

  “I don’t want you to know,” her mother would say, though not knowing was worse, especially as Therese got older and realised some of the crap that could happen.

  She was loved, though. She knew she was loved, and she was never hurt, always fed. Her mother was fine but dirty.

  She did her homework at school because if she did it at home, greasy fingerprints would appear, a dark smear, a drop of something viscous. Her desk was neat, clean, her handwriting perfect, her work pristine.

  She wasn’t good at schoolwork but she persisted. Wanted to be the first in her family to finish high school and she would do it, next year. She wasn’t smart with the school stuff. She worked hard at it but the letters mixed themselves up in her head and the teachers dismissed her because of how she looked. She didn’t blame them for this; there were too many children. Too many problems. They’d dealt with her older brother and knew what a hopeless case he was, and they didn’t even know how he lived now. Down there in the basement, pale from the lack of sun, and he blinked when he came up to the kitchen, blinked and snuffled at the garbage until she wanted to push him back down the stairs.

  There were layers of shit down there. He didn’t care. He was strong and when he was clean he was good-looking. He could be funny when he wanted to; the funniest person Therese knew. She copied his style, when she made people laugh. Took his wink, his timing, took the way he flapped his hands, held his head when he was telling a joke.

  The joke was him, though. That was the stuff which made people laugh. Laughing at where she came from before they did gave her the power of it.

  She knew she would escape. Get where it’s clean.

  “There’s nowhere cleaner,” her mother told her. “The world is a filthy place.” She said this as she ate her chips. Sometimes she ate them sitting on the toilet.

  ~~~

  Therese worked
at the supermarket after school and on the week-ends, saving her money.

  Most people were clean there but one young customer, he came in every week, she could smell the soap on him from three registers away. He was lovely. He started to come through her register every time and they talked. Up close the soap smell was good and his fingernails were white with cleanliness. He was a laugher. After every sentence, funny or not. Sometimes he brought his grandfather, a nice, white-haired old man, bent at the shoulders, clean, neat. Therese wondered what it would be like to have a neat old man like that in your life.

  One Thursday afternoon, they came through her register with grapes, cherries, lychees and apricots. The old man was dressed neatly in beige pants and a collared T-shirt, the uniform of the old man everywhere. He wore a white baseball cap with a logo of the local bowling club.

  “That’s a lot of fruit,” she said.

  “Purification,” the old man said. “Nothing like fruit for purification. Skin keeps it clean inside, and you know if it’s rotting because it’ll be soft and bruised. You can tell if it’s no good to eat. And even so, when it does rot, it leaves behind pure seed.”

  He and the boy laughed. Therese smiled and laughed, too, although there was nothing funny. The old man laughed harder, threw his head back, roared with it until his eyes watered. The boy gently placed his hand on the man’s shoulder, calming him. The old man bent to pick up the next bag of fruit from the trolley and she saw that at the back of his cap, at the buckle, there was a red, creeping stain. It looked like blood but it could have been rust. It looked like he was leaking fluid from a small hole in his skull. She saw it everywhere, all over the shop; seeping wounds, pus, fat rotten flesh pushing at skin to get out. The boy slipped a packet of gum into his pocket; the old man stole a chocolate bar.

  He stood and caught her staring. Smiled. “These things happen slowly,” he said. “Impurities begin to leak out. Better out than in, I say.” He and the boy laughed again, so loudly people turned to look, but she didn’t care. She wanted to laugh with them, laugh like that.

  Therese’s mother laughed a lot. Mid-sentence, she’d chuckle. If the milk was sour, she’d laugh. If kids threw eggs at the house, she’d laugh. When Therese was fourteen, her first period came, messy and painful. Her mother laughed. “It happens to all of us,” she said, and directed Therese to scrabble in this cupboard and that, looking for sanitary napkins. She found a sticky, dusty packet behind some rusty tins of peas and she had to use them until she got to a shop.

  “I stopped long ago, darling, when they took my insides out. You know what you did to my insides, don’t you? Tore them up like a tiny Jack the Ripper.” Her mother laughed at this.

  There are times when the whole family fell into fits of hysterical laughter. Sugar-high laughter. This was when her aunties came over with cakes and lollies, lemonade, “Gotta feed you up”, no intention of teaching good eating habits because as long as their sister was fat and dirty, they were better. Other times, the neighbourhood mothers took pity on her and invited her over for meals. They’d trick out ways to get her clean, they’d give her their kids’ clothes and she loved the smell of them, the soap she could smell in there, the starch from the iron.

  The old man and his grandson paid for their fruit.

  “You should join us, Therese,” the old man said. “Come and share the fruit with us.” He trembled and she wondered if he was nervous.

  His grandson nodded. “There’ll be lots of people there tonight. We have a lot of friends.”

  Therese looked around, not sure if they were talking to her.

  The old man wrote down the address on the back of his receipt. “You’ll have a laugh, Therese. Life is always better with laughter.”

  ~~~

  She stopped at a clothing shop on the way home, wanting brand-new things which hadn’t been touched by her mother, by her house. She chose badly, though, and regretted it once she’d showered and dressed. A pink, fluffy skirt and a tight shiny red singlet top. Brand-new, unwashed, as clean as she could want. But it all itched and the skirt was too short.

  She caught two buses to a large house in the suburbs. Three storeys, it seemed to extend out the back a long way. There were lights all around it and the lawns were lush and neat.

  The grandson was waiting on the front door step. His name was Daniel. “We’re always adding to it,” he said. “I think the original house was a tin shack.”

  “Bit like my mother,” she said, getting in early with the jokes. “She’s been expanding since she was fifteen.”

  He laughed, really laughed, and she was glad he got her humour.

  Inside, the place was surprisingly coherent. The entrance had three or four doors off it and a large staircase rising upstairs. Four people chattered against the walls, one nibbling a crumbly pastry, making Therese feel suddenly hungry.

  “Through here. We’re just in time to hear him speak.”

  “Who?” They hadn’t warned her about any speaker. Therese pushed open the heavy door and stepped inside. It was the size of a small hall and full of people. It was cold; goosebumps formed and she felt her hair prickle.

  She bent to scrabble a jumper from her backpack but a hand on her shoulder stopped her.

  Daniel said. “Cold is purifying.”

  The gaps around them filled and she couldn’t move. Standing room only.

  On a tall stool at the front of the room sat the grandfather. He looked different; bigger, broader. Silvery grey hair, face barely lined, clear blue eyes.

  “I am Calum,” he said. He smiled, broad white teeth slightly sharp. “I am the Jester. I sit before you a humble man.” There was laughter. A chuckle or two. Therese was surprised but waited for more before reacting. She shivered; it was freezing in the room. Around her, others shivered, too. Even the mass of bodies didn’t help, though she thought it would eventually.

  He spoke on. Nonsense in a deep voice. About football and fame and pressure and what he had for lunch. Music played beneath his voice and that explained why people swayed, butt cheek to butt cheek.

  They laughed. It began quietly, but when he started talking about his pyjamas, they were hysterical. They wept, they sweated, clear fluids leaking.

  Therese felt embarrassed for them. A woman three rows down wet her pants and no one seemed to notice. They laughed as if they’d forgotten how and were copying what they’d seen on television. Wide mouths, noise pouring out with no mirth in it.

  Someone heehawed like a donkey.

  She watched them. The dirtiness of their sweat. It came out clean, but dust, there was always dust, clung to them, muddying their skin. She squeezed her eyes tight.

  “Don’t worry,” Daniel whispered. “They’ll wash and be clean for the afternoon meal.”

  At the thought of food, her stomach growled.

  “Lunch?”

  “We don’t have the standard three meals. We have breakfast at dawn and then one meal between when you would normally have lunch and dinner. He says it’s better to go to sleep with digested food in your stomach.”

  “That makes sense, it really does,” Therese said. She hated the late-night, thrown-together meals at home. Leftovers of a week ago tossed with cheese, covered with melted butter and crushed potato chips and baked, all bad news and toilet stink.

  She felt a hand poke in her ribs and turned, holding her side.

  A middle-aged man glared at her. His face was runnelled with tear tracks; was he the donkey laugher?

  “How dare you not laugh? Who do you think you are?”

  “You’re not laughing right now,” she said.

  He poked her again with his long, hairy forefinger, opened his mouth and brayed.

  The woman next to her pinched her. “If you don’t laugh, you don’t belong.”

  Daniel poked her too, but sexy, sexy. He moved up the front, tugging her hand to take her with him and soon he was rolling in the aisle, hysterical.

  Calum spoke, his voice loud over the laughter, but no
one cared what he said. Therese listened as he talked about his childhood.

  “Shivering is another hysteria,” he said. “One year, when I was at high school, there was a heat wave. We stood in the courtyard, lined up, listening to speeches. We were not being respectful, we did not listen, we would fail and we would all have to work in petrol stations for life, be fat, pimply, greasy adults. We were too hot to listen.

  “It was so hot the children were panting, and one girl fainted, then another. I looked at this and I felt something sharp, I smelled orange peel, but I didn’t faint. I began to shiver uncontrollably.

  “A friend touched me and he began to shiver as well, calling to his girlfriend, ‘Cold! It’s cold!’ and there was no sense to it but soon every child was fainted or shivering and the principal lost his job over it and ended up tutoring maths to bored children. He no longer had parents sucking up to him, wanting favours. He had people crossing the street to avoid him.

  “I did my final-year assignment on the hysteria. I took the girl who’d first fainted out a few times, seeing if there was something in both of us which made it happen. She looked close to fainting most of the time. I wondered if it was a scent, something to set people off. Was that it?

  “I tried to make her faint, just by talking to her. But it made her so nervous that she giggled and couldn’t stop. She couldn’t even eat her chocolate mousse, kept spluttering it out. The waiter started laughing, and others. I watched it move like a wave.

  “I spent years trying to find the source. The cause of it. But there is none. Not even love of God.”

  Therese walked close to him, until she stood at his feet, staring at him. Listening.

  “Are you ready to laugh?” he said.

  She nodded.

  He opened his mouth so wide she could see down his throat, and he began to laugh. He took her face in his hands, made her look him in the eyes, and he laughed until she started and she knew this was it; she would not be able to stop.