Mistification (Angry Robot) Read online

  KAARON WARREN

  Mistification

  Praise for Kaaron Warren

  "In a time of too many trend-followers and sound-alikes, Kaaron Warren is a welcome new and unique voice with her own stories to tell. I look forward to what she does next."

  Pat Cadigan

  "A puzzling world full of subtle mystery and fascinating people. Kaaron Warren isn't afraid to challenge readers to think, so if you prefer your fiction cerebral and highly original this book would be a great choice."

  Warpcore SF

  "Hers is a voice that demands to be heard, and I don't doubt that this marvelous fable represents only the root of her talents."

  The Speculative Scotsman

  "Slights is a rusted blade of a book, cutting away at the reader's comfortable expectations until only bitter bones are left; a delightful middle class suburban fright."

  Jay Lake

  "Kaaron Warren is a fresh, amazingly talented voice out of Australia. You must read her work."

  Ellen Datlow

  "Warren possesses a knack for expressing her narrator's voice, allowing even the most outlandish thoughts and ideas to be presented earnestly and believably. Slights displays a true knack for style and a highly imaginative vision which I look forward to seeing explored more fully in subsequent work. The horror genre is lucky to have [a new writer] of such quality and ambition."

  Strange Horizons

  Also by KAARON WARREN

  Slights

  Walking the Tree

  Story Collections

  The Grinding House

  The Glass Woman

  Dead Sea Fruit

  "Of magic '…which, in almost every age except the present,

  has maintained its dominion over the mind

  of man.'"

  Edward Gibbon, Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire

  "Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble,

  scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr Gibbon?"

  William Henry, Duke of Gloucester (1743-1805), upon receiving Vol.II of Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire

  Warning

  Please do not accept as truth any data following. Much comes from opinions of those long dead or discredited. Much comes from invention and twisting. Much comes from seedy books bought in dusty bookshops for $1.00 per kilogram.

  A single pail of water can produce enough fog to cover 231 km2 to a depth of 2405 metres.

  Marvo the Magician does not need the pail.

  Marvo could remember, first, the smell of hand lotion. To him it meant birth, strange birth, and the sound of people running. It was his grandmother's soft hand covering his mouth to silence his screams.

  He appeared in an enormous house, amongst ant-like numbers of residents. He had no recollection of his birth; no record. He did not have a mother to tell him, "I spent twelve hours having you, twelve hours of agony. But when I held you in my arms it was all worth it."

  He did not have a father to say, "You little rotter, you kept me up all night for weeks on end. You would not stop crying. But your mother was more beautiful than I've ever seen her, giving birth to you."

  He did not have friends to compare growing up with; he could not remember growing up. His second memory was of the guns; guns and screams. It was his first image of the house; filled with running, screaming people. A house like a hotel, with a huge, dark lobby, floors covered with dark green linoleum. Two staircases, one up the west wall, one up the east. People running up and down the stairs, carrying things, baskets, bundles, children.

  He was still; he did not run. He waited and watched with his grandmother's hand over his mouth. He watched men dressed in green like the lino, carrying guns and shooting the people.

  Marvo was afraid of these men. He watched as they lined people up and shot them, watched the bodies fall onto the green floor (where the blood did not show, and there was no sun to shine on the puddles and make them glisten, where their belongings and their children fell).

  Marvo was snatched up by his grandmother. She was very small, only slightly taller than him, and he was eight, or nine perhaps. She had black hair but it was a wig; Marvo knew because it fell off as she dragged him through a small door she had produced by pressing a panel in the wall of the kitchen.

  They walked thin corridors and passed through niches. The walls were so thin he could hear the shouts and screams and shots. He could hear people being dragged from cupboards, from under beds, where they must have imagined they were safe. He followed his grandmother, poor old thing using the last of her strength to make him safe. They came to a rope ladder dangling down and she climbed it. He could see up her dress to her underwear.

  At the top of the ladder there was a landing and a trap door. His grandmother used her hands to tell him to keep back (they had not spoken or made a sound since the men in green burst in) and she lifted up the door. He helped her pull the ladder up and then they let it drop down through the trapdoor. She climbed down first, then he did, and he found himself in the room which was to be his home for the next four years. It was a long climb down.

  The machine guns spat (the walls here, too, were thin. He could hear the men's words, listen to them). As each person was found, the machine guns spat. His grandmother stood in the middle of the room, listening, waiting. She counted on her fingers, counted as her friends (if that's what they were – Marvo didn't know) or her family were found and killed. He realised he must have known her for at least a while before the guns, because he heeded her, trusted her.

  Half the roof consisted of the platform with the trap door they climbed through and the other half was skylight. Somebody planned well; the room was bright and warm. Marvo grew to love the sun through the roof, love the uncontrollable warmth of it.

  There was a single bed. His grandmother slept there alone; he did not like the idea of sharing with her. He slept on the floor for four years and never got used to sleeping in a bed. In the future, with lovers, he rarely stayed over, or let them stay with him. He was embarrassed to be found on the floor each morning, sleeping soundly, the sleep he could never find in a bed.

  There was a TV, which made him happy, though he didn't know what to watch, he couldn't remember watching before. His grandmother shook her finger at him. She turned the sound right down, then removed the knob.

  The house remained full of men for the four years of their incarceration. Marvo grew very restless in the room with only his grandmother for company. They talked in whispers. She told him stories, taught him lessons through stories because there were no books. She told him the story of a cruel spell, of a woman who dared to stand up for her cause and not forget her lessons.

  "You must never forget your lessons," she said. And he didn't, because what else was there to do but remember?

  The Spell of Age

  This witchy woman learnt when she was very young, that, while friends come and go, your family always remains. She was still young when she found that her mother was under attack.

  Her dearest friend said, "Your mother is an old witch now. Her magic is no longer relevant. You must stop her from practising."

  All of her learning had come from her mother, and the young woman did not believe her mother's magic was useless. She saw in a sudden moment of clarity that her friend was deeply jealous of that learning, and that she sought to cause a rift, to halve the magic.

  The young woman said, "I can't stop my mother from practising magic. I still learn from her as I learn from you. A triangle is solid and powerful, when its lines meet. There are three in our triangle of learning."

  But the friend disappeared, and the young woman began to get old very quickly. She realised the extent of her friend's jealousy. The hatred.

 
It was a spell of age her friend placed on her. The young woman's bones ached, riddled with rheumatism, and she went to her mother, the witch. Her mother could not change the spell. She could only provide another. Weeping, she said, "Take a potato and allow it to go black and hard in your pocket. This will cure your rheumatism. This may also keep you from bad luck, tough with a spell so heavy on your shoulders."

  It was painful to be offered merely a lifting of symptoms, not her young life back, but it was something. The young woman carried that potato, fingering it with her pain-filled fingers until that pain faded.

  "I wish we could find a place to be safe," her mother said.

  The young woman felt the finality of the words. She left the village and did not return.

  #

  "She would not be seen in the world outside again," Marvo's grandmother said.

  "Outside where?" asked Marvo. He knew only one outside; outside this room.

  "Where the wind blows and the trees rustle. Where scent abounds and the texture beneath your feet is rough."

  His grandmother clasped his arm with her strong fingers. So much power in those hands. "One day you will see outside, but don't wish it too soon. It will come."

  The first few months passed. He slept a lot, and listened. He awakened from a cocoon, emerging to an unfamiliar world. He got to know the room very well and grew up quickly. It was vital, in order to stop his grandmother from leaving the room each night, risking her heart up and down the ladder to steal the food they needed to stay alive. He took over the job when he was nine; she had to let him, she was not fast enough any more to do what was needed. She was close to discovery each time.

  So Marvo began the trips, and slowly the room filled with things. He brought food, but he also brought found objects, things lost by the men, things left on the table at night, things dropped behind the couch. The room (so bare when they arrived; the bed and the TV, and a chair and a small table) began to fill with things: socks, condoms (used and unused – Marvo had no idea what they were and his grandmother didn't tell him. It was many years before he realised what the substance was and he laughed to remember he had kept them as special objects), stubs of pencils, half-empty pens, writing pads with three or four sheets of paper left, newspapers, slippers, underwear, bullets; a thousand little things people didn't miss and didn't care for. His room resembled a junkyard, though each item was noted and neatly placed in position. Marvo knew how many of everything there was. He was good with numbers.

  Once he stole books. One of the men had been clearing out a child's room. In a rubbish pile by the door were six thin books, books of numbers and how to figure them. Marvo took them back with him and waited till his grandmother was asleep. He was not sure what she thought of books, whether she wanted to be the only one to tell him things. She had taught him to read using the TV instruction book. He never had trouble with equipment in his adult life.

  He flicked through the books. Each had a different coloured cover; purple, mauve, aqua, dark blue, red and green. He read them so he knew every word, every figure. He flicked through them for hours, trying to pick the one he knew the least. He flicked through them, wishing hard for something new, something exciting, he flicked through them and one changed colour. It was brown. Tan brown. It was a new book inside too. He didn't tell his grandmother. He put the books away and didn't look at them for a while. He thought he must have missed the brown one, thought there must have been seven from the start.

  The tan book obsessed him, though. His mind's voice repeated the title, How to Be a Magnificent Magician, loud and soft, again and again, until he took the book to a corner and began to read.

  What you need, it said:

  • A piece of black cloth

  • A selection of small balls

  • A magic wand

  • A stuffed toy until a real animal would be safe

  • Some coins

  • Some cards

  • A length of rope

  • A collection of large handkerchiefs

  • Patience

  • And plenty of time.

  Marvo collected all the things first. He improvised on his pieces.

  The black cloth he found screwed up in a ball beside a toilet. His grandmother said it belonged to a nun, and Marvo imagined that:

  She came knocking on one of the doors of the large mansion, softly shaking her collection box. "For the orphans in the other wing." The other wing was a long way away, over the other side of the world.

  "Come in," said the head man, the one who had watched from the top of the stairs, the one who did not shoot anyone himself but watched all the shooting. "Please, come in."

  "We're collecting door to door," said the nun. "The orphans are in great need."

  "Ah, but my money is here in an inside room. Surely you can bear my company for a few moments."

  The nun entered the head man's room. He click-locked the door behind her.

  "What do you look like beneath that black sweep?" he asked. "What body do you have?"

  She was a young nun, unused to the ways of men. "The orphans, sir, they need the help of those in our fortunate positions."

  The man laughed. "I have no love for the unfortunate. I feel no need to support their failure. However, if you were to agree to lie with me, an arrangement could be made."

  The nun tried to leave the room, but the man grabbed the thick material of her black dress and, using his strength, tore it through the centre. The nun wept and whimpered, prayed and pleaded.

  Marvo could not imagine next. The television usually faded, and returned with:

  The nun, naked and bleeding, holding her dress to her chest. The man gestured to the toilet and she went in there to clean herself.

  The man, however, came behind her and caressed her skull with the brass nude statue. The nun collapsed, and her body was hidden in one of the rooms. The dress was forgotten, kicked behind the toilet and left to gather stench and dust.

  This became Marvo's magic black cloth, and, eventually, his black cloak. The blood of the nun was never removed. You cannot see blood on dark cloth.

  Marvo knew about the head man, listening to him mutter, alone regardless of who was in the room, drunk, incoherent:

  "I was supposed to be the magician. That was what my dream meant. I was walking along a cliff top and a cat was leading me. It led me to a castle which reached into the clouds."

  Marvo never had this dream, and he didn't place any faith in dreams. He didn't believe in them.

  "I was waiting," the head man muttered, "for the magic to be bestowed upon me. Then I heard of the birth of that one, that strange birth, and it looked like he'd be it, he'd be the one. So I had him killed."

  One of the men in the room laughed. "Killed them all," the man said. Marvo did not tell his grandmother of their glee in the slaughter. He told her how the men lived in the house like kings.

  She said, "That man thinks you are dead, and he's waiting for his own magic to come." This made his grandmother laugh soundlessly.

  "What's funny, Grandma? When will his magic come?" Marvo thought of his magician book and wondered if the head man would like to read it.

  "He will not come into magic. Even if he had killed you, your magic would not be his."

  "Anyone can learn it, though. I'll show you."

  Marvo jumped up to grab his magician's book. He opened it at the page which showed you how to make a ball disappear.

  "It's only practise, the book says. Maybe if that man practised he'd be happier and not so mean to people."

  "This is a different sort of magic, Marvo. You'll discover it when you're bigger. Stronger," she said. "But you have to wait until you're old enough. You're too young and brittle at the moment for real magic." She hugged him to her, squeezed him, to show him how much stronger she was than he. "I'll keep you a while longer," she said.

  It was difficult for Marvo to find the small balls listed in the book. He wanted a lot of them. Eventually he realised the fruit th
ey ate contained round stones. The cherries, apricots, plums, and the avocado, all taken from the rubbish, discarded as old, but very fresh (was there someone helping them in the big house? His grandmother would not answer this question). Thus Marvo collected the second requirement.

  The wand proved very hard. He could find no short, smooth stick. He sought each time he was out, looked for anything which may prove appropriate.

  Then there was a terrible time amongst the men of the house, a raging screaming smashing which kept Marvo close to his grandmother, hungry but unwilling to go out for food, for three days. At the end of it, one man was left blind. Marvo listened with fascination as he progressed. Marvo remembered how the woman in his grandmother's story had paid so much for her belief in her mother, had paid with her youth, and wondered what cause this man had paid for. Marvo closed his eyes to imagine life without sight and felt a certain power. The blind man stumbled about the rooms of the house, tap tapping with a smooth white cane. Marvo watched through a ventilation shaft. He felt safe watching the blind man. The blind man could not see him.