Dorman Bloody Parchment

Remains of an Old World
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 661-000012644-6
Verlag: Ba en Ast Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 118 Seiten

A boy pursues a machine across a desert; a Grabouw butcher discovers a secret ingredient to make the best sausage in town; and a seamstress seeks fabric of an unconventional nature to stitch together the garment of her dreams.
The South African Horrorfest Bloody Parchment anthology, edited by Nerine Dorman, returns with a dozen chilling stories featuring finalists from the 2016 short story competition: Brett Rex Bruton, Janine Milne, Stephen Embleton, William Burger, Shaun van Rensburg, Livingston Edwards, Lester Walbrugh, Jessica Liebenberg, Erhu Amreyan, Toby Bennett, Mignotte Mekuria, and Blaize M Kaye.
Bloody Parchment: Remains of an Old World offers you a selection of fantastical and sometimes downright unsettling tales that will drag you to dark places, in settings real or imagined.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dorman, Nerine

Leseproben

The Out of Place
By Brett Rex Bruton   Now   I SIT against the wall in the shade of a mulberry tree and watch the red glove lying in the intersection of Drew and Milner streets. It’s just past midday and the sun is hanging hot in a cloudless sky. Ripples of heat rise off the tarmac, causing the small spot of colour to waver. I crawl forward on my hands and knees and touch the warm street warily with my fingertips, then place my ear against the concrete curb. Beneath the sounds of distant traffic lies a hungry silence. I shade my eyes and check the position of the sun, then move back to the welcome pool of shade. A Clive Cussler novel, worn, torn and stained, sits on top of my equally weathered kitbag. I scoop it up as I settle back into a crook of the garden wall. There’s a diving bi-plane on the cover—German, I believe—and its turrets are a conflagration of orange and red muzzle flares. I’m barely fifteen pages in and the protagonist has already been laid twice. Two cars speed by without slowing. A third stops as the traffic light switches. I watch it until the bulb flashes green then return to my book. The swarthy hero is on the beach with a woman. His chances are looking good. * * * * Hours pass and the sun edges lower in the sky. I hold my open hand up to the yellow-white orb and count off knuckles towards the horizon. It’s almost two PM. The traffic is already beginning to pick up. Sedans, for the most part, with a helping of soccer-mom SUVs. Good cars for a good neighbourhood. A steadily mounting parade of tyres threatens the small shape of fabric. Yet, though dozens come within a literal hair’s breadth of the child’s glove, not a woollen finger is stirred. There’s a picture on the back, of sorts, woven into the material. From a distance, or a glance, it looks familiar—that Ben10 show, maybe, or Bratz. It looks like Saturday morning K-TV and Cartoon Network. It reminds me of the lunch boxes and pencil cases my students would bring to class. But it’s more than that. It’s the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on a scratchy VHS tape. It’s the Thundercats watched on an old TV from the floor of my parents’ lounge. It’s Pumpkin Patch and Liewe Heksie and everything I thought was fun and enticing when I was little. I imagine that, if Elroy Jetson hovered across it a thousand years for now, he’d get a kick out of it too. The traffic is growing congested. With every change of the light, the queue of respectable-looking women in Audis and BMWs grows longer. In the near distance, a bell rings. In a few minutes, Kevin and Barry will be by the corner window in the teachers’ lounge pouring a whiskey each. Sharron will be chain smoking on the balcony before she has to make the thirty-minute drive to her valley flat (her father left her a 1969 Lincoln Continental, imported, and she refuses to smoke in the thing). Vince is likely sorting through mail from my old pigeonhole before heading straight home to the wife and kid. At the far end of the small field, someone is probably starting up the mower and backing it out of the utility shed. Or maybe not. That may have changed. After a few minutes, the tide of traffic begins to reverse as cars and vans begin retreating up Drew and back onto Milner. The queues come to a virtual standstill as moms and dads attempt to squeeze through the red lights from either end. The gravelly static of rumbling car engines becomes punctuated with hoots and honks. I’ve been counting up since I first heard the bell, and now I slide my dog-eared credit to twentieth century literature into my bag and step into the intersection. The slow traffic makes winding my way to the centre easy. From there, I begin a slow, repetitive trudge up and down the lines of cars. Sometimes a window rolls down and a hand extends, holding change, and I take it because it’s expected. I recognise many of the faces. Mrs Band has a daughter in Grade 10. She is having an animated conversation with her cellphone as I walk past, but it’s clear from the dark screen that no call is connected. Karl Horn’s eldest son was in my form class during his matric year, while his youngest is currently in Grade 8. Karl looks straight ahead as I pass. My count reaches six minutes. The kids should start arriving soon.   Then   “You get different kinds of jail,” said Henry as he offered me a top-up. We were perched on his mower, watching the under-16 B-team warm-up for that morning’s rugby. I held my mug towards him and he upended into it a steaming stream of coffee from his thermos. The morning air was dry, but the occasional icy breeze cut clean through the jacket I was wearing. I tried to remember how we’d done it as kids, arriving at the school fields each Saturday morning just as the sun was breaking, the grass in the deeper shadows still grey with the night’s frost, and us in gym shorts, sports socks and a team jersey. I shook my head as the B-team began running lengths behind the dead-ball line and took a deep swallow of coffee. If adult-onset diabetes had a flavour, it probably tasted something like Henry Barnes’s coffee, but the mug warmed my hands, the coffee my throat, and the brandy my belly. Ryan Botha—Grade 10, second set history—turned and waved from the field. I waved back. “Where I was wasn’t so bad,” Henry continued, “I mean, it was bad, but people weren’t getting stabbed a lot or...you know, in the showers or anywhere. There were no real tsotsis there, just guys who had made too many mistakes. The Americans and 26s, they went to big jails, not small ones like ours. Maybe it’s different now, maybe now they just let guys like me go to make room for the murderers and real vuil okes¸ but then it was different.” Henry topped up his own mug while a whistle brought both teams onto the field. “But you can’t tell people that. You can’t say, ‘I went to a good jail,’ because then they’ll laugh and not hire you.” Henry grinned a full set of teeth and breathed a cloud of vapour into the cold air. I offered him a cigarette and we smoked while the home side conceded the first five points of the game. “So, for a while, I didn’t have a job and I didn’t have a home and I spent my time with others who were similar. And, ag, they weren’t so bad.” I knew this, of course. Everyone did. But ever since I’d begun spending my lunches at the bottom of the fields rather than in the teachers’ lounge, if Henry wanted to talk, I could listen. Henry stubbed out his cigarette and dropped it into the mower’s foot-well, then crossed his arms and rubbed his sides. “Jislaaik, it’s cold.” * * * * We were walking back to my car later that evening, Henry’s flask long empty and a bar receipt in my pocket, when Henry brought us to a halt. The moon was gone and the only thing casting any light was a couple of old, municipal street lamps. Thankfully, the wind had taken a breather, and the row of naked oaks that lined the block was silent, but the cold was already in my bones. I hugged myself, blinking hard to clear my vision. Henry pointed at something by his feet. “See that?” he said, his words slurring from one to the next. “That’s what I’m talking about. Flipping bergies are crazy, man. Heeltemal mal.” I tried lighting a cigarette, but fumbled the pack of bar matches as I brought them from my pocket and they bounced onto the tarmac. Henry was in the road now, standing over something dark. Trying not to overbalance, I felt the course gravel with my fingertips—strangely warm for such a chilling night—found the small box and lit my smoke, then almost choked myself to death because something was crawling around between Henry’s legs. Hacking and spluttering, I waved at him, but Henry ignored me as he stepped from foot to foot and the dark mass writhed beneath him. Tiny, fibrous tentacles wiggled across the surface of the cat-sized, pulsing mound that pressed up from the street. A thick blob of shadow, organic and paw-like, rose from the tarmac and slapped down towards Henry’s boot, missing him by millimetres as he moved around. The tentacles wavered like the eye-stalks of a snail as the paw rose again. I kicked up from the road, grabbed Henry, and swung him out of its reach. As we both tumbled to the ground, I heard a hiss. “The fuck are you doing?” yelled Henry as he stood and rubbed his backside. I opened my mouth for a witty comeback, but the words died on my tongue as I turned to face the monster squirming behind us. Instead, I said, “It’s a hat.” A winter hat, inside out, the faux fur of its inner lining ruffling quietly. Occasionally, one of its earmuffs would lift slightly then flop harmlessly back to the street. The bare branches above us rustled and clicked. The wind was back. “Yes, it’s a hat,” said Henry as he scrounged for his lost cigarette, “and a bloody good one. You see that? That’s real leather. Not that fake, Chinese kak.” I stared at the hat, squinting through a little double vision, and tried to fight the feeling that it was staring back. “It’s a good hat, and it’s been here for days. Maybe weeks, even. Been walking past it for ages. And the bergies know...