Contents

Editorial — Journey into Dimension6

Going Home Sideways — S. G. Larner

Author Loci

Red in Tooth and Claw — David McDonald

Author Loci

The Pass — Jessica May Lin

Author Loci

Why Dimension6?

Next Issue

Copyright

Editorial — Journey into Dimension6

Keith Stevenson

It’s cold in the multiverse at present. Perhaps it’s that mini-ice age the climate deniers have been wishing into existence. But we think that’s unlikely even in Dimension6.

This issue features all-new fiction from the multiverse by S.G. Larner, from deadly alien planets by David McDonald and from the strange in-between places by Jessica May Lin our first non-Australian author (although in Dimension6 ALL places are Australia and all citizens are welcome...)

The NSW Writers’ Centre is holding a speculative fiction festival on Saturday 18 July in Rozelle, Sydney and we’ll be talking about speculative fiction and handing out FREE copies of our collections and anthologies to lucky attendees. Come and say hello if you’re there.

Going Home Sideways — S. G. Larner

Jason answered the phone and his past reached out to slap him down. Rebecca’s voice was subdued as she said, ‘Your mum called me. I. . . know about it.’

His mother, destroyer of dreams.

‘I was three,’ he said. ‘It was an accident.’

‘She told me. . . that you laughed.’

Jason clenched the phone in his fist, wanting to hurl it at the wall and watch it splinter. ‘I was three,’ he repeated.

‘I just need some time to, you know, get my head around it. I’m sorry.’

He pressed the handset into his ear, willing her to stay on the line but feeling only the emptiness of the disconnection. She was gone. It had happened too many times, they never got past it.

‘How did the bitch find me again?’ Jason stared at his washed-out reflection in the sliding glass door. The fluoro light flickered. He slammed the phone down and crossed to the fridge. Bottles rattled as he pulled a Corona from the door. ‘Here’s to lonely,’ he said and popped the cap.

After the fourth beer his pain was gone.

At quarter to ten he locked the house and wobbled on his bike to the administration building for his shift. The gutter almost claimed him at the last turn but he managed to stay on the bike and chain it to the railing in front of the steps. Lights from the giant Christmas tree that stood in the forecourt winked at him, and glittering tinsel adorned the façade. He fumbled for his smartphone as he walked up the stairs; it slipped out of his clumsy fingers and landed heavily, facedown, on the concrete.

Everything was strangely quiet as he stared at the phone. He was almost scared to pick it up.

Well, what else can go wrong? He sighed and bent down.

‘Ah fuck it.’ A large single crack split the screen neatly from top to bottom. He tested it and it seemed to work, so he stuffed it back in a pocket and tried to calm the buzzing in his head.

The squeal of his boots against the polished concrete echoed in the empty building. A dim safety-light illuminated the stairwell near the information desk, and when he reached the top he walked down the hallway to the door marked SECURITY and unlocked it.

Amal had headphones on, his feet up against the desk and his nose buried in a book. Someone had hung mistletoe over the chair as a joke. The monitors that covered the wall showed a patchwork of scenes: empty street corners, the front doors of the banks, the Golden Fleece Hotel, the sculpture at the entrance to Elizabeth Park. Amal glanced up, saw Jason’s reflection and spun around, dropping the book on the desk and wrenching the headphones off.

‘Christ, you gave me a heart attack.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Wow, that shift went fast.’

‘You’re supposed to actually look at the monitors, not read.’

‘Scone is not exactly a high-crime area.’

‘That’s beside the point. Any incidents I should know about?’

‘Nah. The usual. Drunks and hookers. If you ask me this is all a pointless waste of time.’ Amal waved at the wall of screens.

‘Well if the higher-ups ever agree with you, we’re out of a job, so don’t go shooting your mouth off.’

Amal laughed, snorting. Jason curled his upper lip.

‘Don’t have too much fun,’ Amal said, and yawned as he left.

‘I never do.’ Jason turned and surveyed the screens.

‘Rebecca, don’t hang up. Look, I’d like to see you. Talk about it in person. My mum. . . she hates me.’

The connection was full of static. ‘Who is this?’ Rebecca’s voice sounded tinny.

He frowned. ‘It’s me, Jason.’

‘Sorry, I think you have the wrong number.’ She disconnected and the phone went silent.

‘What the hell?’ He stared at the cracked screen. What sort of game was she playing? His shoulder twinged as he wrenched the curtain across the window, blocking out the morning sun so he could sleep.

In his dreams he was followed by his little sister. Her hair was dark and plaited, and her face bloated and bruised. Silently she followed him through crumbling underground parking lots, up winding mountain roads, and sitting on empty buses. When the alarm screeched he woke with a pounding heart and a metallic taste in his mouth.

Damn her.

Night shift passed in a blur of boredom and schadenfreude, of classic Funniest Home Videos slapstick. Tonight’s security footage winner was Drunk Man Falls Out Of Car. The man got up, wobbling, and shut the car door on his tie before dropping his keys. Jason’s laughter filled the empty room as the man flapped like a fish on the line until a passerby picked up his keys and unlocked the car for him.

What an idiot.

After his shift ended he left the administration building and walked across the road and down to Kerv Espresso Bar for breakfast. Alexis, the woman who took the morning shift, had asked him to cover a few more hours so it was later than usual, 7.30 am. He felt unusually exposed in the morning light.

Rebecca sat at a table against the window. The anger that simmered beneath the surface rose up, but he smothered it in bubble-wrap, numbing himself from the destructive feelings. He stalked over the wooden floorboards.

She glanced up, saw his face and her eyes widened. The red-painted mouth opened but he got in first.

‘If you didn’t want to talk to me, you just should have said. Don’t pretend you don’t know who I am.’

Her brown eyes clouded over as she frowned. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jason.’

‘Bullshit,’ he said in a low voice and leaned in close to her face. She inched away from him. ‘I called you. You said I had the wrong number.’

Rebecca raised an eyebrow. ‘I haven’t spoken to you since. . . your mother called me.’

He stared at a stain beside her coffee mug. His brain fixated on it while the wheels turned in his mind. ‘Show me your phone.’

She frowned and shifted away from him. ‘Why?’

‘I want to check your call log.’

Rebecca stared at him. ‘No, I’m not giving you my phone.’

His jaw clenched, shoulders tensed. She flicked her hair over her shoulder and pulled the phone out of her bag. ‘Look, I’ll show you, but I’m not giving you my phone.’ She swiped through to the call log. ‘When?’

‘Yesterday.’

She held the phone up so he could see the screen. No record of a call received from his number.

‘You could have deleted it,’ he said.

‘Why the hell would I do that?’ Her nose wrinkled and she met his gaze straight on.

Bubble wrap popped inside him. Jason’s vision dimmed. He left before his rage got the better of him.

In the darkness of his bedroom Jason scrolled through his contacts, looking for Rebecca’s number to delete it. His mother’s number flashed past in the list. He should have deleted it years ago. His thumbs pressed buttons and swiped the screen and she was consigned to the ether. He pulled off his shoes, climbed into bed and fell asleep.

When he woke, a vague sense of unease lingered from his dreams. He rolled over and picked up his phone. He thumbed through his contacts and re-added his mother’s number.

His mother’s voice reverberated down the connection, a tiny thread surrounded by vastness. ‘Jason, is that you?’

He breathed shallowly. ‘Yes.’

‘Oh, dear. Are you coming for Christmas? We miss you terribly.’

Jason disconnected. The corners of the room loomed as his mind squeezed with panic. His mother hated him. The world didn’t make sense if his mother missed him.

He crossed the floor and hesitated in front of the fridge. The fluoro light flickered and a moth batted itself against the plastic cover, a dancing shadow of futility. His aloneness crushed him.

He called his mother’s number again.

‘The line dropped out,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘Sorry.’

‘Never mind, dear. I was just telling Melissa that you called. You’ll come down and visit?’

‘Mum. . . Melissa. . . ’ Maybe the old bat was senile?

‘She’s looking forward to seeing you.’ Her voice grew querulous. ‘You don’t visit enough.’

Jason’s head spun. ‘No. I’m sorry.’

‘Christmas dinner. If you drive down, you could be here by four? I’ll be doing turkey and ham.’

‘I don’t know.’ He squinted up at the bedraggled moth. ‘I’ll think about it.’

‘Say you will, dear. It’s been too long.’

The humming in his mind grew louder. ‘Ok. I have to go, now.’

‘See you then, dear.’

He hung up, and shook his head to clear his mind.

Beer. In the fridge.

He drank until every bottle was empty.

The monitors stared blankly at him. He leaned back and put his booted feet up on the desk. His foot nudged something: Amal’s book. He kicked it further back.

Movement in the top right hand screen caught his attention. Elizabeth Park was normally quiet at this time of night, but the two figures locked in passionate embrace in front of the horse sculpture clearly had other things on their minds. Jason grinned and scooted his chair closer. He rubbed at himself through his trousers.

And then he saw the woman’s face and lunged for the phone.

‘Scone Police, Officer Fredericks speaking.’

‘Hey, Matty? There’s an assault in progress down in Elizabeth Park. You’d better hurry.’

He disconnected the line and watched. Minutes ticked by, then he breathed a sigh of relief as uniformed police officers invaded the screen and hauled the man off the shaking woman.

Matty stood beside Jason, watching a replay of the attack, his face set to Police Officer Impassive. ‘Send the file over, and you can come give a statement tomorrow at midday.’

‘Yeah, sure, okay.’

Matty shifted his body weight. ‘I can smell the beer from here, Jase. You need to stop drinking on the job.’

Jason bristled. ‘I had a few at home before work. I’m not drunk.’

Matty turned and gazed at Jason. ‘I heard you and Rebecca broke up.’

‘No. Who told you that?’

‘It’s not important. Just, you know, man, it doesn’t look good.’ He paused at the door, glanced at the mistletoe hanging above Jason’s head. ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’

Jason blinked. Dammit, why not? ‘Going to my mum’s.’

Matty’s eyebrows arched. ‘Oh? Good to hear.’ He turned and tramped down the hall to the stairs. Jason watched as his large, blue-uniformed back descended, and brooded.

On Christmas day the steering wheel burned his hands and the bitumen melted. The car desperately needed a service, but he rarely used it and he didn’t want to part with the money.

His mum’s house looked a little smaller and shabbier than when he’d fled all those years ago. The rose garden trailed thorns across the path, a trial by blood for the unwary doorknocker. The grass was burnt to a crisp, his mother choosing to save her beloved flowers instead of the lawn that only his father had cared about.

The sun seared his neck as he climbed from the car. His footsteps crunched in the gravel of the driveway, and he opened the back door to retrieve the wilted flowers and softened chocolates. As he straightened, the screen door squeaked and banged.

He looked up at the verandah. She was small and hunched, bent with age and bitterness, twisted like a tree root and just as tough. Her eyes narrowed at the sight of him, and her wrinkled mouth opened in a snarl.

He thought it had been too good to be true.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she said, her words whipping him with their astringency.

‘You invited me. I called?’

She hobbled forward, clutching a black walking stick. ‘The heat has baked your fucked-up brain, Jason. Get out. I don’t want you here.’

He winced at the jarring effect of the swearing, at odds with her little old woman appearance. ‘It’s Christmas, mum.’ He held up the bouquet of scented lilies.

‘I don’t celebrate Christmas with murderers. Now go, before I call the cops.’ She glared at him, her withered hands tight white claws, shaking with fury. Cicadas shrilled, filling his ears with a high-pitched monotone.

‘You’re a sick bitch, you know that?’ He threw the flowers in the dirt and dropped the chocolates onto the back seat before slamming the door. She yelled incoherently and started down the stairs, wobbling and waving her stick. He jumped into the car and reversed out of the driveway, leaving her screeching at him as she trampled the abandoned flowers.

Amal had left his book on the desk again. Jason picked it up. The Disunited States of America by Harry Turtledove. The blurb on the back was typical science fiction nonsense, something about time travel. . . no, travelling sideways in time, into a world where history had turned out differently.

His curiosity piqued, he flicked a glance at the screens to make sure all was well, then started reading.

After some time he leaned back to stare at the ceiling. What if? he wondered. What if. . .

The idea niggled at him. The strange phone calls, followed by behaviour that seemed to suggest the phone call had never happened. The missing received call on Rebecca’s phone.

‘Ridiculous,’ he muttered. He picked up his smartphone and inspected it. The call log showed a call made to Rebecca, and a call to his mother’s phone. Not just imagining it, then.

‘So why did it work when I called the police?’ he mused. He glanced at the work phone, an old-fashioned landline wired into the telecommunications cables, and back to his smartphone, connected to the cables only by signal and towers. Some kind of electromagnetic connection he trusted would work, but maybe the signal wasn’t connecting where it should anymore? He ran his fingers down the crack in the screen. Two sides, two halves, two timelines.

He looked up Matty’s phone number on his phone and called it. ‘Hey mate, you want to meet up for a beer on New Year’s Day?’

The scratchy voice on the other end said, ‘Nah, mate, off to visit the missus’s family.’

He hung up, then called the same number on the landline phone. Matty picked up.

‘What’s up,’ he said.

‘Did I just call you?’

There was a brief silence, then a slow, ‘No, you didn’t. Are you drunk?’

‘Are you free tomorrow? I need to talk to someone.’

‘I’m on duty until eleven. I can meet up after that,’ Matty said.

Jason placed the handset on the receiver and turned to the computer screen. He opened up a new tab and started researching, imagining possibilities he’d never dreamed could exist.

‘Have you heard about the multiverse?’

Matty glanced at him from over a beer. ‘Nah, can’t say I have.’

‘It’s a theory that our universe isn’t the only one, that there are other universes and possibilities existing simultaneously to ours. Like you could be in another universe right now drinking beer with a hot chick instead of me.’

Matty laughed. ‘How do I get there?’

‘That’s it. That’s just it. You can’t. I Googled it. There are a bunch of different theories to explain how it could work, but the only one that suggests that these universes can collide says they might actually slam into each other, and that’s what caused the Big Bang. But that would mean we would be obliterated.’

‘Sounds messy.’

‘Yeah. But. . . Matty, I think I called one.’

In the street a car backfired. A woman shrieked before giggling in relief. Jason sweated, even in the air-conditioned cafe. ‘I’m not crazy,’ he said into the gap left by Matty’s silence.

The police officer, the only ‘friend’ Jason had and that was pushing it, tipped his head back and studied the ceiling. ‘Why do you think that?’

Jason tapped on the table. ‘Because I’ve been calling people, and they say one thing, but when I see them they say they never spoke to me. And my mum. . . she hates me, Matty, and I called her and she told me she missed me and invited me for Christmas. Then when I drove there, she abused me and chased me off. How do you explain that?’

‘I’m sure she doesn’t hate you.’

‘She does. She blames me for what happened to my sister.’

‘You never told me the full story,’ Matty said, watching him. Jason stared into the amber liquid in his glass. He didn’t really remember that day, except for his mother screaming and him sitting alone in the backyard while people swarmed in and out of the house. Over the years his mind had constructed a film-reel of imaginings.

His sister getting in the washing machine, thinking it would be a good place to hide.

Him shutting the door and pressing the buttons.

Him laughing because it looked funny to a three-year-old.

‘There was an accident,’ he said. ‘I did something that was bad, but I was three. I didn’t know it was bad. And my sister died. And my mother blamed me for it.’

‘Harsh.’ Matty drained his beer. ‘So, ah, Jason? This multiverse thing? I’d forget it, if I were you. Phones screw up all the time. Texts that disappear, or arrive days after they were sent, calls that are answered but you can’t hear anything. . . don’t dwell on this shit, it will send you mad.’

Jason picked up his phone and turned it over and over again. On impulse, he dialled Matty’s mobile. He could hear the ring tone through his phone, but Matty’s phone on the table was silent. When the voicemail message kicked in he held the phone to his friend’s ear. Matty frowned and checked his phone. Nothing.

‘Phones screw up all the time,’ he repeated, his voice less certain.

‘Yeah, maybe you’re right,’ Jason said, and ordered another beer.

Can’t cross over. Impossible. Like a fly stuck to fly-paper.

Jason called his mother.

‘Oh, we were so disappointed you didn’t come, dear. Did something come up? Work keeps you dreadfully busy.’

The hollow space inside him expanded. ‘I’m sorry, mum. I tried, I really did. Didn’t you get my message?’ A thin sliver of resentment settled in his gut, that this other Jason was such a prick he ignored the mother who actually cared about him. The mother he wanted.

‘No, I didn’t, dear. It’s okay. I hope we see you soon, though.’

‘Me too. I’ll try to get some time off work.’

When he disconnected a vague idea germinated. If he managed to connect to this other universe via phone, was there some way he could cross through by keeping a line open to that place? What if he kept the line open and drove there? It would take him almost three hours to get to his mother’s house.

While he ate lunch he charged his phone to full, then got back in the car and called his mother. ‘Hi, it’s me. This is a strange request, but don’t hang up. I’m coming to see you, but I need you to leave the phone connected.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she replied, sounding flustered. ‘What if someone calls? Or I need to call someone?’

‘Mum, it’s important. I’ll explain when I get there. You don’t have to stay on the line, just don’t hang up. Okay?’

‘Well, okay.’ He heard the doubt in her voice.

‘Thanks. Tell Melissa too. Put the handset down somewhere but do not hang up.’

He placed the phone on the seat beside him and started the car, then pulled out of the driveway and headed for the house he’d never called home.

Several times the bars on the phone dropped down to the point he thought it would drop out, but each time he checked the connection was still active. As he pulled into his mother’s driveway the afternoon sun blazed down and his nerves were tightly wound.

As he got out the screen door banged. ‘You made it!’ a frail voice exclaimed.

He looked up and she was smiling at him. Smiling. It must have worked.

‘Can I hang up now?’ she asked, a worried frown creasing her face. ‘June might call me and she’ll be dreadfully worried if she can’t get hold of me.’

‘You can hang up,’ he said, anxiety knotting in his chest. He leaned across and picked up the phone on the passenger seat. He closed his eyes and pressed ‘end call’.

His mother returned and said, ‘Well, come in. Melissa is out the back painting.’

The tension leaked out of his body. He opened his eyes and sighed before getting out of the car.

His sister sat beneath the mango tree he’d sheltered under as a child on the day of her death, all those years ago. Her long dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her brow, smeared with blue paint, creased as she concentrated on her brush strokes. At the sound of his steps she looked up and grinned.

‘Wow, someone’s been working out! I thought you’d pike again,’ she said, then got up and hugged him. ‘You kill her, you know. I’m glad you could make it. Family is more important than work.’

He winced at her choice of words. ‘I’m a slack shit, I know. I’m sorry.’ Jason searched her face for traces of an old injury. Had they played hide and seek, here? Why was she living with their mother, at this age? Was she sick?

She looked perfectly healthy.

‘I want to finish this before the sun goes down,’ she said. ‘Mum made some scones.’

Jason stepped back from his sister and went inside.

While they slept he crept into the sunroom and searched through the cabinet his mother used to store paperwork. Melissa’s name on medical records, talking about her multiple sclerosis, outlining her current condition and how she might expect to deteriorate in time.

There was also a letter, signed by him. He wanted nothing to do with the medical expenses. His sister’s illness wasn’t his responsibility. It was dated two years ago.

On top of the cabinet an address book sat by the phone. He flicked through to find his name.

Port Macquarie. A two hour drive. He glanced at the clock. Eleven. He could get there and back before sunrise.

A vague thought formed in his mind. The Jason that was in this world was a loose end. He swallowed. Could he kill himself, if it came to that?

He clenched his jaw and dialled his mother’s number again, then grabbed the old phone after the first ring, heart pounding as he waited until he was sure no one had woken. ‘Hello,’ he said into his smartphone and his voice echoed back at him through the crackling line of the old phone. Good.

It wasn’t worth losing this place, losing his chance of redemption. He left the phone off the hook and ran to his car.

His doppelganger lived in a big house with a double garage on the outskirts of Port Macquarie. Jason parked the car down the road and sat staring at the dark building. He got out of the car and walked down the footpath, then ducked in through the open gate. The back door proved easy to jimmy, and he made his way slowly through the laundry using the light on his phone to see.

When he crossed over, did his doppelganger cease to exist? Would he walk into an empty room?

At the top of the stairs he listened for sounds. Faint snores drifted from a room to his left. He tasted sourness on his tongue. He’d seen no evidence of family, no photos of a wife or children.

He pushed the door open and stared at himself sleeping in bed. This-Jason was clean-shaven and slightly fatter. He lay on his back, his mouth slack. The room smelled of starch.

Jason picked up a pillow and hesitated. Maybe he could talk to him, convince him to stay away.

Just fucking do it.

With a burst of adrenaline he pushed the pillow down over the doppelganger’s face. This-Jason jerked and thrashed beneath it, but he had known a softer upbringing, and Jason had never wanted anything more than the life his doppelganger took for granted. A sudden thought struck him.

He could take the doppelganger back to his universe.

This-Jason stopped struggling, and Jason lifted the pillow. He checked for a pulse: strong and steady. His shoulders relaxed. Shifting his doppelganger’s bulk was difficult, but he managed to haul him downstairs and dump him at the laundry door. He dashed down the quiet street, pulse thudding in his ears, started the car and reversed it into the yard before manhandling the body into the boot.

After he drove out of Port Macquarie he disconnected the call he’d made to his mother’s and headed for Scone. It was a long drive and the sky was paling to grey by the time he reversed into the garage. Loud thumps and yells came from the boot. Jason picked up a wrench and unlocked it.

The doppelganger sat up and lunged for him, white-faced, the scissor jack handle clutched in his hand. Jason swore and tried to jam the boot back down, but the other Jason braced against it.

‘Calm the fuck down,’ Jason said, panting. ‘Get out and I’ll drive off and leave you alone!’ The doppelganger bucked and heaved. Jason stepped back and let the other man fall out of the boot, then grabbed the jack handle and pulled it away. Confronted with the wrench and the jack handle the slightly overweight doppelganger paused. Then he noticed Jason’s face, and his jaw sagged.

Jason threw the house keys at him. ‘This is your home now.’

‘How. . .?’

Jason slammed the boot shut and backed toward the car door, breathing rapidly. He cast a quick glance to the street; none of the neighbours had reacted to the commotion.

‘You didn’t deserve them,’ he said, and slid in behind the wheel. The doppelganger shouted something, but Jason locked the door and started the car. The other-Jason hammered on the window, his face contorted. Jason put the car into gear and drove away, not looking in the rear-view mirror as he abandoned the doppelganger to his old life.

Just outside Scone he called his mother’s number. It was engaged. The sun peeped over the horizon.

‘Shit.’ He’d left the phone off the hook. ‘Shit!’ He pressed ‘end’ and pulled over, left the engine idling as he tried to figure out what to do. He called again: still engaged. Tears pricked his eyes, and he punched the car door. ‘Idiot!’

He’d just have to keep trying.

With a deep breath he accelerated away from the road’s shoulder. As the kilometres flew by he tried calling again, and again. The sun rose higher, hot and bright in a cloudless sky. Each time the phone beeped a busy signal back at him. By the time he passed the sign that said ‘Welcome to Gloucester’ his hands shook and his phone battery showed ten percent. The heat baked the road to a shimmering haze, as though the car was driving him to hell.

Jason had never been religious, but he made the call with a silent plea to any deity that might heed him. He held his breath, and this time the phone rang.

And rang.

And rang.

He spotted his mother’s house down the road just as Melissa picked up.

‘Hello?’

The sky darkened on cue, clouds erasing the blue and sucking the heat away in an instant. It had been raining. The windows fogged as the cooler air met hot glass.

‘Melissa,’ he said, his voice rough, ‘don’t hang up. I’m coming home.’

He pulled into the driveway, splashing mud, and glanced up at the house. Wind shook the trees, and light rain spattered the windscreen. Melissa opened the screen door, her eyebrows raised.

‘Where on earth have you been?’

Jason got out, trembling. He looked at the smartphone, clenched tight in his hand, the screen split in two. With a savage movement he flung it to the wet gravel and brought the heel of his boot down hard upon it. It shattered.

‘Jason!’

He looked at his sister, and through tears he smiled. ‘It doesn’t matter where I’ve been,’ he said. ‘It only matters that I’m home.’

Author Loci

S.G.Larner

I have a phone phobia. Like other people I know (we’re always so relieved when we find each other!), I really don’t like making phone calls, or receiving them. One day I got a call on my mobile, and the sound quality was terrible. I went to Facebook and remarked that we just *think* we’re talking to the person we know on the other end, but who’s to say we really are? It was a throwaway comment but I was commanded to write that story, and so I did.

‘Going Home Sideways’ was born from the idea that maybe we could make phone calls across the multiverse. Maybe the person who picks up the phone isn’t actually in the same universe as us (originally the story was going to be much darker, maybe with demons or something personifying humans, but thankfully I didn’t run with that idea). When I was creating my protagonist, I wanted someone with an awful past. I remembered reading about a young child, a boy who shut his sister in the washing machine while they played hide and seek, and turned it on. I was horrified by the news story because my children were similar ages at the time and ever since I’ve been quite paranoid about turning my washing machine off at the wall (it’s a front loader).

My character, Jason, strikes me as a very flawed human being, someone with rather questionable ethics, because his mother rejected him after a tragic mistake he made as a child. He could never make amends for what he did in his life, but he so desperately wants to. And when he’s given that chance he seizes it with both hands, even though it means dooming the other version of his self to the life he hated. So while he’s an unsympathetic character, I have empathy for him, because everyone should have the chance for redemption (I’m not saying Jason’s way is necessarily the best way to go about it, though!).

I don’t tend to write a lot of science fiction, as I’m always worried about getting the science wrong. I did read Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible (the section pertaining to the multiverse) to try to understand the theories of quantum physics a little better for this story. There is a point, though, where you just have to make a leap and hope that the story you’ve written carries the ‘science’ and vice versa.

Speaking of making a leap, a fantastic project I’ve been involved in is the Lane of Unusual Traders. My story ‘Caesura’ was one of the flash fiction stories chosen for this world-building project. It’s a strange and wondrous place, the Lane, and a project to follow, and I hope to have more to do with it in the future.

If you would like a taste of speculative poetry, Apex recently published ‘He Dreams of Salt and Sea’, a poem I wrote inspired by a scene from Margo Lanagan’s Sea Hearts.

Twelfth Planet Press has announced the Table of Contents for their Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction 2014 and my story ‘Kneaded’ has been included. ‘Kneaded’ was originally published in Phantazein, which has garnered great reviews and awards nominations.

I haven’t been able to write much this year, as I’m studying a Masters of Information Science full time. I have written a science fiction story about Google, inspired by the Information Retrieval subject I did last semester, and I’m meant to be editing my weird/fantastical novella ‘The Forgotten Children of Zurat’, which I do hope to submit by the end of the year. If you’d like to keep up with my latest news (including the occasional rant or ramble) I blog at Forego Reality and I very sporadically tweet as @StaceySarasvati.

And because this has been a wall of text with no pretty pictures, here is a whimsical mashup for your viewing pleasure. I’m hoping to make more of these, using public domain historical photos and my own artwork, so you may see more in future! This one is shared under a creative commons licence.

S.G. Larner is a denizen of Brisbane, Australia, where she complains about the heat, wrangles three children, and explores the dark underbelly of the world in her writing. Her work has appeared in Apex, Aurealis, SQ Mag and Phantazein, among others, and been selected for Year’s Best anthologies. She’s currently studying a Masters of Information Science. She has no respect for authority and uses her art to express her malcontent. You can find her at http://foregoreality.wordpress.com and on twitter @StaceySarasvati.

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Red in Tooth and Claw — David McDonald

Garret rounded the largest moon of Hope only to gaze upon what he had dreamed of his entire life. No matter how many times he blinked, or rubbed his eyes, it was still there, filling his port screens with a subdued purple and blue glow. His instruments told him it was roughly.93 the mass of Earth, with commensurate gravity, but that was not what caught his eye — it was the almost breathable atmosphere. After three decades in the Survey Corps he had finally gotten lucky and now had the chance to fulfil the deepest desire of every Corps member — to plant the blue and gold flag on a planet where one day settlers could follow.

Sure, the ozone levels were strangely high, and would have meant the use of filters even had the air not contained an alarming amount of organic particulates. There were oceans, glittering under wispy cloud cover, and mottled areas that might be mountains. Garret frowned, trying to make sense of the swathes of black carved into the purple. They looked like the destruction forest fires might leave behind, but they were too regular. Garrett frowned; surely they couldn’t be the mark of intelligent life? Then he found the answer, or the answer found him.

There was a blinding flash of light that sent black shadows flickering across the walls of the cabin, and then a noise like nothing he had heard before, so loud that he staggered away from the console with hands clasped to his ears trying to block it out. His stagger turned into a fall as the ship lurched, sparks and smoke pouring from the console. By the time Garret regained his feet the instrument banks were flickering into darkness, the only illumination coming from the planet beneath him.

The ship was completely dead.

He stumbled to the port window just in time to catch another flash of light as a vast thread of electricity arced between the moon and the planet’s surface, writhing like a living thing. For a moment he simply stood and marvelled at its terrible beauty, realising he was seeing a true marvel of nature, forgetting in the moment that it had killed his ship. His gaze followed the lightning towards Hope, picking out kilometre wide swathes of flame as the surface grew closer.

It took a moment for the import of the sight to register, and then Garret’s jaw dropped. The ship was falling towards the surface, its dying brain no longer compensating for the pull of gravity. He rushed over to the controls, but everything electronic was melted to useless slag. He turned and made his way to one of the lockers, and hurriedly began to pull on one of the environmental protection suits. As soon as it was on, he ran back to the centre of the cabin and opened the hatch set into the floor. The cavity beneath tilted down on an angle, allowing him to slide in on his belly. The hatch shut behind him, leaving him in complete darkness. There was a brief moment of panic as he wondered whether the more hardened emergency circuits had been fried here as well, and then a soft red glow appeared in front of his eyes.

‘Emergency evacuation protocol activated. Please confirm by saying yes or no?’

The voice was smooth, soft and genderless, designed to calm the listener. It didn’t seem to be working, Garret was far from calm.

‘Yes!’

‘Please confirm.’

‘Yes! Yes!’ Garret screamed.

He felt the walls of the cavity clamp around him, hugging him as tight as his own skin.

‘Evacuation in five. Four. Three. Two. One.’

There was a slight jolt and then a feeling of weightlessness. The complete lack of sensory data caused a moment of disorientation, and then the evacuation pod patched into his neural net, creating a screen that gave the impression of hovering directly before him. Diagrams and grids outlined the planet and its moon, and a small dot that represented the ship. And there, an even smaller dot heading towards the planet. Figures flickered showing speed and angle of descent, and at a mental command an external view came to life. Garret felt sick watching the planet hurtle towards him, the pod shuddering as he entered the atmosphere. Flames licked around the edges of the screen, the illusion so complete that Garret could feel the heat. It was at that point that he fainted.

When Garret awoke, it was to complete darkness. There was a moment of panic as he wondered whether he had been blinded, and then sheepish realisation that he was simply buried headfirst in a pile of ash. He stood, shaking off the ash that still clung to his body, the force shield that acted as his helmet’s face plate automatically cleaning itself even as it filtered the air he breathed. From his training, Garret knew that the suit would also keep him at an ideal temperature and that the smartmesh fibres would excrete any wastes that his body produced. Of course, it wouldn’t stop him from dying of thirst or starvation unless he did something about it.

Garret looked around, trying to locate the remains of his escape pod. He could see smoke rising from a pile of debris a few hundred metres away, and as he approached he realised how lucky he had been. The pod was now no more than a pile of twisted metal, whatever supplies he had hoped to salvage consumed by the flames. Despite the gravity of the situation, Garret was completely calm for the first time since the lightning strike. His training had prepared him for this moment and he knew exactly what to do. If he could find a source of water the suit’s filtration capabilities could render it safe to drink, and even now his neural implants would be analysing the organic matter in the air and whatever else he might come across, instructing the suit’s medipak on how to alter his body to handle the local biosystem.

Garret had landed in the middle of one of the stretches of destruction left by a lightning strike, but even as he watched the ash was shifting and stirring as something pushed its way to the surface. The first delicate bud appeared, shades of purple and blue glimmering in the afternoon sunlight, and soon saplings stood swaying in the gentle breeze. Watching them grow was comforting, almost hypnotic, and Garret didn’t notice the vine wrapping around his calf until it squeezed tight, painful even through the reinforced material of his suit. He was glad no one was around to hear his unmanly shriek as he fell, trying to yank himself free. The vine was surprisingly strong, and it took a few blasts of the laser at his wrist to leave it smoking on the ground.

By now a score of vines were snaking towards him, and more saplings were springing up all around. Pausing only to snatch up a hunk of metal from the wreckage, Garret sprinted away from the aggressive vegetation. Fresh buds were appearing in all directions, but ahead he could see a copse of established trees, spread much further apart and separated by patches of short grass that showed no signs of movement. He ran towards the trees, staggering slightly when a vine managed to wrap around his foot but pulling free. His suit helped, the thousands of tiny bands of electro-contractive filaments at each of his joints enhancing his strength and speed. Despite these enhancements he was still panting when he reached the shelter of the trees, and he stopped a moment to catch his breath.

Garret could almost have been on Earth, if Earth trees were various shades of purple and blue. The trees had completely smooth trunks and wide spreading branches with thick foliage. He stared up into one of the bigger trees, noticing strange growths suspended from the bottom of the thickest branches. They looked somewhat like chrysalides, joined to the branch by a thick stem. They were about the size of a large man, and their surface was unpleasantly flesh-like, glistening and veined, and throbbing slightly. Translucent skin allowed the sunlight to shine through, and revealed a shadowy mass suspended inside. Looking at them for too long made Garret feel slightly sick, like staring at an open wound.

His neural implants had finished scanning the trees and the results were what he had expected. Like every other habitable planet humanity had discovered the life here seemed built on the same basic template, a state of affairs that had delighted proponents of intelligent design and panspermia alike. The trees were carbon based and built on a foundation of the same amino acids as Garret, which was good news as it would not take too many changes to his body to render them edible. And, with this much of what passed for Hope’s plant life around him, Garret knew that there must be plenty of water available somewhere, and if he could find it he could survive here indefinitely. It might be months or years, but he had to believe that another survey team would follow his beacon at some point. And when they did, he would be waiting.

A stirring of the ground at his feet told Garret it was time to get moving. Up ahead he could see a vast uprising of bare rock, and he decided that would be as good a place as any to get away from the aggressive vegetation, with the added benefit of giving him a view above the tree line. From there he might be able to see a river or lake, and he might be able to find some shelter. At the very least, a sense of purpose might take his mind of his circumstances. Grabbing the piece of metal he had salvaged from the wreck of his pod, Garret set off for the distant landmark.

Garret sat with his back against the rocky wall, his arms wrapped around himself and feeling miserable. It wasn’t that he needed a fire, the suit kept him warm and would continue to function far beyond a human’s life span, recharging itself on solar energy during the day and repairing itself as required. But it was so dark, and he felt so alone, that a fire would have been a comfort. It hadn’t helped that during the course of his walk to the hills he had stumbled across the wreckage of two other spacecraft. One had been unfamiliar, even his databanks unable to identify it, but the other had the unmistakable polyhedron design of an Antaren scout ship. A jagged gash had run the entire length of the vessel, and a hexapodal skeleton had hung half and half out.

Garret had tried to salvage something from the wreck, but the inside had been gutted by fire. He assumed that the blaze had been started by the energy weapon that had left deep scars in the walls, and was now only a melted ruin clutched in the skeleton’s hand. Garret didn’t want to think about what the Antaren had been shooting at; he only hoped it had perished in the blaze as well. The laser on his suit’s wrist was not really designed for combat; his extensive arsenal had no doubt broken up with his ship when it hit the atmosphere.

Now, as he huddled in the cave he had found halfway up one of the cliff faces, Garret tried not let his imagination fill the darkness around him with wild beasts or vicious killers. He was safe enough where he was, he had barricaded the narrow pass that led to his refuge with enough rocks to keep out an army and he doubted anything could reach the cave’s entrance without waking him. But this fear was not one that could simply be reasoned away. Sleep was a long time coming, and when it did it was full of dark dreams.

The next morning, Garret felt as if he hadn’t slept at all, but he knew that he needed to continue to explore his new home. He had seen a few signs that pointed to water, and that seemed as good a place to start as any. But first, Garret wanted to make sure that he wasn’t going to be defenceless in case he found more than fresh water and trees. The hunk of metal he had taken from the wreckage was almost a metre and a half long and it didn’t take too much work with his suit laser to trim and shape it into a serviceable weapon. He had carved the last thirty centimetres into a blade and, while it wasn’t razor sharp, it looked capable of dealing significant damage.

It had come in handy when he had decided to collect some branches to build a fire against the coming night. The weapon had functioned more than adequately as an axe and he had managed to gather several armfuls of branches as long and twice as thick as his arm. Still, despite the ease of chopping them free, it had been a disconcerting experience. With every stroke of the axe, not only had the tree he was hacking the wood from shivered, but it had emitted a low moaning sound that was echoed by nearby trees in an eerie chorus. Garret could have collected much more, but he reached the limit of what his mind could bear long before the limits of muscle and sinew. More would have to wait until the need was a little more desperate.

Leaving the wood in his cave, he set out. By the time he reached the stream the sun was high overhead, and Garret was grateful for a chance to have a drink. Now that the analysis of the atmosphere was complete he knew it would be safe to deactivate the mask long enough to eat or drink without any permanent lung damage from the ozone rich air. Garret felt fortunate. He could have crashed on a planet where he would have needed to stay sealed tight at all times. Perhaps his sojourn here would not be so bad after all.

Caught up in the simple pleasure of slaking his thirst, a low growl was his first warning that he was no longer alone. Slowly, Garret turned from the stream and faced the creatures that had emerged from the trees. There were three of them, and his neural implants identified them immediately as Antaren rockwolves, laying out their strengths and weaknesses and a disturbingly short list of potential vulnerabilities. The makeshift weapon in his hands didn’t seem quite as formidable as it had back in the cave.

Garret wondered where the wolf part of their name had come from, unless it was their habit of hunting in packs or their broad dog-like muzzles. With their segmented bodies and six long legs, extending to joints well above their bodies, they reminded him more of ants. The middle one was larger than the others, and a brighter shade of white. It took a step towards him, its muzzle splitting into a snarl filled with a forest of jagged, razor sharp teeth. The other two creatures started to move to either side, attempting to flank him. As formidable as they looked, though, the aliens were simply beasts and Garret possessed an insurmountable advantage.

The state of the art implants that Garret had been fitted with when he joined the Survey Corps may have been out of range of, and disconnected from, the hypernet that linked the civilised planets, but he didn’t really care about the fifteen thousand channels of infotainment he could no longer view. He could never find anything worth watching, anyway. The important thing was that the tactical sub-routines still ran in offline mode, just like the survey database, and Garret was more than happy to let them do their job. He willed himself to relax and let them take over.

The laser on his wrist flashed, raking a beam of coherent light across the multifaceted eyes of the creature on his left, sending it to the ground in a jittery mess of flailing limbs. Garret hadn’t stopped to look; he was already charging to the left, bringing his weapon down in a whistling arc. The edge of the blade turned out to be more than sufficient, the force behind his swing carving through alien gristle and bone and sending a still snarling head flying. Garret spun to face the largest of the rockwolves, only to find it already upon him. It was fast, and he barely had time to bring his weapon up as it leapt, managing to impale it on the point and hold it away from himself. For a moment it pressed down on him, snarling and snapping its teeth mere centimetres from his face. With a last convulsive heave it stiffened and collapsed, its full weight pinning him down as the light faded from its eyes.

He lay there, feeling the adrenalin drain away, before levering the dead weight of meat off himself. Slowly, aching from the impact, he walked over to where the alien he had blinded lay whimpering and put it out of its misery with one swift stroke. Methodically, and with little pleasure, he carved out several thick steaks, taking as much meat as he could carry against the possibility of being able to smoke it, or somehow preserve it. With a last look back at the sight of the battle, Garret draped the meat over his shoulders and started walking back to his cave. He barely noticed the discarded sacs of skin laying at the base of one of the larger trees, not even giving them a second thought.

Garret had assumed the rockwolves had been on board the Antaren vessel, somehow surviving the crash. That explanation didn’t account for the other predators he had encountered in the days since, and Garret had started to feel a deep sense of foreboding every time he left his cave for more water or fuel for his fire. He could believe that one or two ships carrying live animals might have crashed on Hope over the years, but so far he had counted five separate species, as dissimilar to each other as they were out of place.

And every one had been a deadly predator, the sort of creatures Corps veterans would tell stories about to scare the greener recruits. In the last week, Garret had almost been dragged into the water by a Vegan swamp octopus and just avoided being ensnared by the trailing webs of a giant Barnardian tree spider. He knew that without the protection of his suit and the enhancements he had received in the Corps biolabs he would have been dead a dozen times over. The only explanation that he could come up with was that a freighter bearing combatants to one of the fighting pits that were fashionable on the frontier worlds had crashed, freeing its cargo. Even to the increasingly paranoid Garret, that seemed a little farfetched but it was unimportant. He knew it was only a matter of time before his luck ran out.

Even his cave was no longer the refuge it had been. While nothing could attack him from the ground, he had awoken one night to a scrabbling noise at the cave mouth. He had grabbed a burning brand from the fire and rushed to the entrance, only to come face to upside down face with a viciously beaked creature. Its eyes glowed red in the reflected torchlight, while leathery wings flapped in agitation as it hung down across the cave mouth. It had been easily despatched, a single blow of his axe cleaving through its thin skull and sending it crashing to the ground metres below, but Garret had found it hard to sleep since, wondering what else might come visiting in the dark. It had been this fear that had sent him exploring further and further, hoping to find a wreck to turn into a more secure refuge.

On the fifth day after his nocturnal visitor, Garret decided to head away from his usual source of water. As he moved deeper into the forest the trees grew larger, and the strange chrysalides more common. Most were high in the branches, but at the foot of the biggest tree he had seen so far was an enormous chrysalis, almost the size of the Antaren ship. It was leaning back against the trunk, attached to the tree by a mass of thick tubes that pulsed with organic purpose. As Garret watched, the distended skin began to split, revealing the dark mass inside. With a gush of disgusting fluids the chrysalis opened fully and a massive figure stepped uncertainly into the light.

A dull, mottled green, it was built in threes. The thick body stood on three massive trunks giving it immense stability, and about half way up the body were three long tentacles that trailed all the way to the ground. Each of them ended in a spiky ball of bone the size of a small barrel, heavy enough to shake the ground beneath Garret’s feet when the beast brought one crashing down. A dull eye blinked above the base of each of the appendages, and beak-like mouths snapped below.

The closest eye fixed on Garret and the beast roared, chilling him to the bone. It moved faster than a creature that size and shape should have been allowed to, and Garret barely avoided being trampled. He was forced to dive desperately as a hunk of bone hurtled through the air but he was not quite quick enough. One of the spikes caught his shoulder, merely brushing him but still having enough power to send him hurtling into one of the trees.

Yet again the tactical subroutines saved him. He ran for his axe, throwing himself forward in a desperate roll that took him just under one of the tentacles, the wind of its passage ruffling his hair. He slapped his hand down, sobbing with relief as cold metal filled his grip. Whirling, he slashed at the base of one of the legs, opening a deep gash that squirted a thick, green ichor. Not pausing to strike again, he bolted through the trees, trying to outdistance the roaring behemoth behind him. For a hundred metres he expected to feel another terrible blow, but soon the beast’s bulk began to tell against it. Garret picked paths that took him through narrow gaps between the trees, hoping to slow the creature’s progress and soon its roars began to fade into the distance.

Shaking, Garret began the journey back to his cave, wanting nothing more than to curl up and let the suit tend to his injuries. In his relief he gave little thought to the trail of blood he had left behind or the way the leaves quivered as they absorbed every last trace.

Aside from a nasty gash and impressive bruising, Garret had emerged relatively unscathed, and the suit had patched him up almost as quickly as it had repaired itself. As he recovered, his thoughts kept returning to the mystery of how a native of the Gilesian system had ended up cocooned in a chrysalis on Hope, grown from the trees like a deadly crop of fruit. The mystery nagged at him, and he ran through a dozen theories in his mind, searching the databanks and cross referencing accounts of defensive mimicry and morphological DNA. But, he was grasping at straws — his education had not extended to advanced xenobiology.

Garret was jerked out of his thoughts by a disturbingly human scream that echoed from the cliffs. Garret froze, wondering if he had imagined it. The scream came again, sounding for all the world like a human female, and a young one at that. A desperate hope filled him, mixed with trepidation, perhaps rescuers had arrived after all and had been caught unawares by some terrible predator. He grabbed his axe and began the climb down the cliff, trying to find the right mix of caution and urgency. It would not do anyone any good if he was too late to help, but nor would it serve anyone if he fell victim to an ambush. Another scream cut through the air, and he followed it around a large outcropping of rocks. Nothing could have prepared him for the sight that greeted him, and he stopped dead in his tracks, trying to process what he was seeing.

Crouched at the foot of a boulder was a young woman. It was plain to even as poor a judge of age as Garret that she couldn’t have been older than her early twenties, but it was not that which had shocked him. She was completely naked, her only covering the dark, tangled mass of hair that hung below her shoulders and streaks of what looked like clotted blood. She must have heard his approach, and looking up she reached out an imploring hand. Snapping out of his paralysis he hurried over.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asked her. ‘Are there any others with you?’

She didn’t answer, only continued to hold out her hand. Beneath the blood that smeared her face she seemed vaguely familiar, though he knew that was hardly likely. Frowning he reached down and pulled her to her feet. Before he could say a word she wrapped her arms around him and held him tight.

‘There, there,’ he said, patting her clumsily. ‘It will be okay. We will get out of this mess, I promise.’

He felt her twitch in his grasp, and for a moment he thought she had punched him just below his ribs. His knees suddenly felt weak and he staggered backwards, clutching at his side, unable to understand why there was a length of sharpened bone sprouting from his flesh. Blinking away tears, he watched more figures emerge from behind the rocks, some clutching other pieces of bone and others holding thick lengths of wood. As they swarmed towards him, his last coherent thought was to wonder why they all had his face.

Simmons turned away from the controls with a smug smile of satisfaction.

‘There you are, Captain. We are now in geosynchronous orbit.’

‘Well done, Simmons,’ Captain Hussain said. She didn’t particularly like Simmons, but he was a damn fine pilot and she would put up with more than a little smugness if it meant she could be confident her ship was in safe hands. ‘Now, Doctor Swann, tell me something about this planet.’

Swann pointed at the screens that were filled with the purplish globe.

‘Well, Captain, we may be the first people to see it. There are some records of a Survey Corps ship in this sector around sixty years ago but it was reported missing and it may not have gotten this far. One thing to be mindful of, as I reported earlier we want to keep on this side, away from the moon. My readings suggest that there is a great deal of electromagnetic activity that might be dangerous,’ he said. ‘The planet itself seems worth exploring though, the atmosphere is close to Earth normal as is the gravity. Lots of possibility for colonisation.’

‘Any native life forms we need to worry about?’ the captain asked.

Swann frowned. ‘Well, Captain, that’s the odd thing. Our instruments are showing that it is a life form, singular, that we need to find out more about.’

‘What do you mean?’ Hussain asked.

‘See all that purple?’ The captain nodded, and Swann went on. ‘That is all one connected biomass, the surface of the planet is almost completely covered in a single life form.’

‘So what’s that brown, then?’ Hussain pointed at a continent sized blotch in the middle of the purple, its ragged edges giving it an unhealthy look.

‘I’m not sure, Captain. As far as I can tell that’s where the biomass has died off. I can’t get a decent reading because of the sheer mass we are talking about — it’s causing interference — but there is something in that area that is slowly driving the biomass back.’

‘An infection of some sort?’ the Captain asked. She was worried at the thought; even in this day and age an unknown disease could threaten her crew, and that she would not allow.

‘Perhaps, Captain. Or something like a cancer. Let me switch to drone cameras.’

The screens in front of them flicked to a grid of images, all of them giving a bird’s eye view of the landscape, purple biomass flashing past as the UAVs screamed along close to the surface.

The captain leaned forward, and swore softly.

‘Seems you were closer than you imagined,’ she said. ‘Some people might say that is the only cancer a planet can get.’

Swann touched a control and the image the captain had pointed to expanded to fill the screen. They watched silently as a million identical faces looked up to watch the drone pass overhead, tracking it with empty eyes.

Author Loci

David McDonald

There’s a lot to be said for growing up on a property just outside a very small country town. For a playground I had acres of paddocks, bushland and scrub. Our house perched up on top of a hill that ran down into a rocky valley with its own stream, and my parents pretty much let me roam where I pleased. It may not surprise you to hear that I had a very vivid imagination, and I populated the countryside with scenes from my books. One day I might be slaying orcs with a wooden sword my Dad had made me, another I would try and make it to the valley without leaving the cover of trees, crawling through culverts under the road for fear of being captured by Tripods and ‘capped’.

But, there was one big downside. The closest thing we had to a library was a single room of books tacked on to the town hall. While to me that room was an Aladdin’s cave of wonders, there was not a huge selection to choose from, and the speculative fiction choices were even more limited. But, being a voracious reader, I would read anything I could get my hands on. At home, my parents had a few bookshelves, lots of Reader’s Digest condensed books and a big stack of Westerns and Alistair MacLean books. These were those dark days before the internet and Amazon!

A lot of what I read had similar themes. It was usually one man (very occasionally one woman), who was alone in a hostile environment, generally surrounded by enemies who wanted him dead, with only his wits and — more importantly — his will between him and death. They were usually the rugged, self-reliant loner type. Even the fantasy and sci fi that I was exposed to followed similar themes, simply substituting spec-fic tropes for Western or adventure ones. Whether it was Conan alone in the Pictish wilderness surrounded by natives, or a space explorer stranded on a hostile planet being chased by bug-eyed monsters, or a world weary and heart sick pilot infiltrating an oil rig taken over by international criminals, they followed similar conventions.

Looking back, a lot of what I read was perhaps a bit simplistic, some was downright bad — though there was a lot of good stuff in there — writers like André Norton and Robert Howard and Alistair MacLean are still familiar friends. But the most important thing with all those stories is that they were fun. They moved along at a cracking pace, they had plenty of action and you wanted to see how the writer was going to get the hero out of increasingly fraught and dangerous situations — without destroying your suspension of disbelief. Sometimes they managed, sometimes they didn’t, but it was always entertaining.

Later, when I had access to a wider range of reading, my tastes developed and changed, but I still retained a fondness for these first loves of mine. And, there is no doubt that traces still turn up in my own writing. Two examples that stand out are the characters of Vanja in ‘Cold Comfort’ (Cold Comfort and Other Tales from Clan Destine Press), and Jenn in my novelisation of the Canadian movie, Backcountry (Backcountry from HarperCollins Canada). While Vanja finds herself alone against a frozen post-apocalyptic landscape, and Jenn finds herself lost in the Canadian wilderness, they both have something in common — that they have to rely on their own strength and wits and will to survive in a world where everything seems turned against them. Oh, and they both have to deal with killer bears . . .

When I sat down to write ‘Red in Tooth and Claw’ I deliberately tried to emulate the style of some of the sci fi adventures I read as a young teen, and I wanted to try and recapture some of that sense of wonder I felt as I imagined exploring strange planets and encountering alien creatures. I will leave you to judge how well I have succeeded, but I had a great time trying.

This story also serves to reinforce the lesson that you shouldn’t let rejection discourage you as a writer — after all, it is more common than acceptance. The first market I subbed this to put it on their shortlist but ended up rejecting it, the second asked to hold it but in the end also passed. I was tempted both times to trunk it, but instead (with the help of a great crit from my AHWA mentor, Jason Fischer) I gave it a polish and sent it off into the wild once more.

To say I was delighted when Keith emailed me to say he had accepted it would be an understatement. Coeur de lion was one of the first two markets I subbed to when I initially started sending out stories. When I look at the writers who have appeared in Keith’s books (and in Dimension6 itself), it is a roll call of some of Australia’s finest, and it is a huge honour to see my name associated with them—and with the publisher who bought us anthologies like X6 and Anywhere But Earth. From the time I started looking at Australia’s publishers and making a list of the ones I would target, publication has been a long and not always smooth journey, but it is wonderful to have made it here. Of course, it is hopefully another stop on the way rather than the end of the road!

There is no doubt that spec-fic has matured since those Boy’s Own type adventures, and I like to think that my writing has changed and grown as I have been exposed to a wider range of books, too. But, sometimes you just want to take your protagonist, give him no more than a ray-gun and dump him on a planet that wants to kill him just to see what happens. I had a lot of fun writing this story, and it brought back some great memories — and I hope it brings you the same pleasure as it did me.

David McDonald is a mild-mannered reporter and editor by day, and a wild-eyed writer by night. Based in Melbourne, Australia, he is the editor of a fortnightly magazine for an international welfare organisation, and divides his spare time between helping run a local cricket club and writing.

In 2013 he won the Ditmar Award for Best New Talent, and in 2014 won the William J. Atheling Jr. Award for Criticism or Review and was shortlisted for the WSFA Small Press Award. His short fiction has appeared in anthologies from publishers such as Moonstone Books, Satalyte Publishing, Crazy 8 Press and Fablecroft Publishing. In 2015, his first movie novelisation, Backcountry, was released by HarperCollins.

David is a member of the Horror Writers Association, The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, and the Melbourne based writers group, SuperNOVA.

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The Pass — Jessica May Lin

There used to be a train that ran around the world. It has not come for many years, but its tracks still lie in the copse, dividing the strawberry fields in half.

Most of us boarded the last train and departed with it to whatever future lay ahead, but there are some of us left.

Children, whom I have taken it upon myself to protect. They never age.

We are waiting for the next train.

There are monsters. They travel along the tracks, appear from time to time out of the air and hunt us. Some of us think they are things of the past, trapped in an endless time-space continuum, bound by the untold history of the tracks.

The children play in the strawberry fields, and I kill the monsters. It has been like that for many years.

I am old now.

With every red sunset that dips lower under the horizon, the edge of my sword grows duller, my back stiffer with age.

We are waiting for the next train, but it never comes. I begin to think it may never come.

Until the day I find her body.

A breeze runs through the field, bending the strawberries in ripples. The children suck juice from their fingers while playing hide-and-seek in the runners.

‘Grandfather, Grandfather!’ they shout, but I throw my arm out to hold them back.

The tracks are not safe. We do not know their secret, although our lives and our hopes depend on them.

She is lying across the left rail, her head resting on her arm. I know she is not from the village because she is older than the children here. She wears a red ribbon in her hair, the same colour as the stains on her white t-shirt.

I lift her gently in my arms. The bones in her body do not hold right when I cradle her head on my arm. A throng of black marks runs across her torso, breaking through the skin of her chest. Wounds that can only be made by a swift, hard impact.

I raise my head, squint past the sunset to as far as the strawberry fields will go.

Sometime in the night, a train passed by.

Caught in the dappled shadows of the copse, the Girl shivers.

She struggles to fit between the lichen-covered trees, her jeans catching on uncut bramble. She can feel them — the faces and warmth of children’s bodies she cannot see, pressing up against her through a wall of space and time. They are in another world, divided from her by layers of an invisible wall.

She tries to touch their faces, but her hands fall through their warmth.

Around her, the strawberry fields shiver.

When the Girl left this place, many years ago, she never thought she would ever come back. It’s the type of place that is meant to be left behind. It is a haven, but one whose walls cannot keep you safe forever.

She is looking for something she lost long ago, when she was a child. But she does not know where or how she will find it.

The village is gone. Her bare feet leave footprints in the rust as she crosses from one track to the next. Something sweet and melancholy hangs in the air, a familiar awareness left over from better times, when the world was a better place.

A wisp of black flickers in the corner of her eye.

The Girl tenses. An odd chill runs across the surface of her skin, but she can’t bring herself to move.

The creature bursts out of the air — skeletal face and bloated body, skin gray and blistery. The upper half of its jaw is a black, curved beak, the bottom lined with snapping teeth.

She had forgotten what the monsters were like.

The monster bounds down the tracks, and the girl reaches down for the first thing she can get her hands on: gravel and a handful of pebbles.

The monster springs and she hurls the pebbles, which the monster dodges easily. Its claws latch into her shirt, and they fall in a pile on the tracks. The Girl pushes her hands against the monster’s neck, trying to hold it at bay as it snaps its teeth in her face.

When the monster’s jaws gape wide open, she sees down its throat to the horrific pulp of things that give it life: a crumpled beach ball and old yellow sneakers, paper cranes folded from coloured construction paper. Behind its roar, she hears the muffled sound of children’s laughter and the clap of hands together in a game of Down by the Banks.

It is a monster she once shared with someone else.

Its teeth slip past her fighting hands into her shoulder, and she is reminded that no matter how hard she fights, she can never be free from it. She screams. Its slobber is hot against her neck as it drags her into the air and throws her against a tree. She crumples on her side, a sharp pain in her hip.

Before she can get up, the monster charges her a second time, its claws hooking deep into her collarbone.

A hole appears through the centre of its chest.

Droplets of blood spray on the Girl’s face, and she cries out. But the monster falls away, twitching with its front legs splayed.

It roars in agony, and for a second she can hear the voices it has swallowed — clearer than ever. The refrain of a girl and a boy laughing together, playing in the leaves under a maple tree.

The Girl rolls over. For a long time, she hugs her knees into her chest and breathes, sometimes squeezing her eyes shut against the throbbing pain in her shoulder. It pains her to remember.

Slowly, she finds the courage to push the monster over on its back.

It lays unmoving, bleeding with a wound struck through from another world.

I leave the girl’s body lying across the tracks where I found her. Something about her is not ready to die — the way her eyes are closed as if she is shutting something out, the way her lips almost press together like a sigh. Her expression is one of consequential sadness, as if her purpose in the world is unfinished.

I think I can feel her. She is trapped between the reality of this world and another, watching us. Her body does not decay, the wounds still fresh under her white t-shirt.

At night, I guard her from the monsters.

She seems to draw them. The tracks are teaming with rows of glowing red eyes, patched fur, and long, spidery legs covered in fine hairs that scuttle in the copse.

I am extra attentive to the tracks that night.

Every night for near a hundred years, I have stood by these tracks, watching. I have never seen a train. And yet the marks of a train are obvious on the girl’s body.

The soft murmurs of children sleeping in the strawberries carry on the midnight breeze. The fields are quiet, but if I stay still enough, I can hear the ghost purr of cicadas in the soil. They are imprints on my memory from the past, when I used to run through these fields hand-in-hand with a girl. We were both young.

I try sometimes, but I cannot see her face.

Another monster bursts out of the air, this one all tentacles and a teeth-lined hole for a mouth. I drag my sword through the air and hack its head off with a single swing. One tentacle manages to wrap around my sword arm, but I pry it off.

My skins burns where the tentacle touched it. I remember the many-armed beast that I knew lived under my bed, although I’d never seen it — somewhere in the wasted abyss of my childhood, half-defeated and half-lost but still struggling to consume me.

The monster’s carcass dissolves slowly into ash, and a dull, pounding pain begins deep in the left side of my chest. It has nothing to do with the monster, but I am equally afraid.

I am dying.

The tip of my sword trails on the ground, and I have to lean on it. This is not the first time I have experienced such a pain, but I can hardly stand it. I clench my jaw and focus on the still forms of the children dozing in the strawberries.

They need me.

I am too tired to lift the sword to its sheath. Drops of blood run down the blade and trickle back into the earth.

There is not much time to rest. More monsters flash out of the darkness, webbed talons and scales reaching out of the night.

I dodge their teeth and thrust the sword through their bellies, blocking out the nightmares they bring. My body may be failing me, but I have slain thousands of monsters in my lifetime. Not a single one has ever touched the children. They will not as long as my heart is still beating.

I wait for the train, but it does not come.

At dawn, I sit down on the rail by the girl’s body, exhausted. The monsters have laid back on their assault, although I do not know how much time we have. Feeble shafts of light leak behind the horizon, warming the children’s skin and creating pink circles on their cheeks. Their chests rise and fall amidst the morning dew on the strawberries.

An odd peace is at work in the fields. At times like this, with the low sun heralding the safe passing of another night and my blood still racing with the steam of battle, I am almost in love with the fallen paradise we live in. I wish that it would go on forever — the children laughing in the strawberries, a lonely pair of train tracks that have lost their meaning, the fearless protector watching over them.

I shrug my jacket from my shoulders and drape it over the girl’s thin, broken body. A light breeze cools the sweat on my forehead, and I lay my sword against the earth.

The village used to have a name. Perdita Ridge.

It has been decaying for so many years that I can hardly remember where the farmhouse stood. But I remember there was a farmhouse.

A sweet, gentle huff of breath touches the back of my neck, and I turn around.

It is Tommy-Who-Thought-the-Stars-Were-Alive.

He isn’t like Tommy-Who-Climbed-the-Maple-Tree-With-Juliet, who is proud and breathless, or Tommy-Who-Tasted-His-First-Strawberry-Tart, who is always looking under the fields for something he has never experienced before.

Tommy-Who-Thought-the-Stars-Were-Alive is quiet and prefers to watch the other children instead of playing, his blue eyes wide and curious. He believes the stars are guardian angels that have been sent to watch over the strawberry fields, and they will never let anything go wrong for the children or their Grandfather. He has always been different from the other children, because he can sense hope. Even when Tommy-Who-Stole-the-Stuffed-Dinosaur took the biggest strawberry in the field from him, Tommy-Who-Thought-the-Stars-Were-Alive did not cry.

I do not know what he measures hope by, but he knows it is there.

‘Grandfather,’ he asks me. ‘What lies beyond the strawberry fields?’

‘Nothing. There is nothing beyond the strawberry fields.’

His forehead creases, and I know that he remembers the day he and I stood together, alone at the end of the platform, and watched the last train depart. ‘Where did all the older sisters and brothers go?’

‘A better place, where they will grow up and forget about this place.’

‘Will we go there?’

‘Yes. Someday.’

‘Do you want to go there?’

A pause. ‘Yes.’

‘When will the train come?’

‘It is coming.’

One by one, the children all boarded the train, until the boy was the last one standing on the wooden platform, holding his sword loosely at his side. The train was a rusted, arthritic thing that sagged under the burden it carried, its paint peeling away in uneven patches.

Slowly, the boy lifted the sword and stared at it, as if he didn’t know what it was for anymore.

The girl with the red ribbon in her hair ran along the train corridor, fighting the crowds of children who were laughing and clutching each others’ hands, talking about the lives they were about to begin once they had left the strawberry fields. There was an odd spark in the air that seemed to glisten with a new life, devoid of the simplistic innocence that had dictated their childhoods.

‘Thomas!’ the girl cried, elbowing the others out of her way. She leaned out of an open door, her hands braced on the frame. ‘Thomas, come on! The train’s going to leave soon.’

The boy dropped his sword arm back to his side.

He looked up at the girl, and the train’s engines roared to life around them with a sound like thunder.

‘Juliet?’

He felt a rush of warmth in his middle when he saw her face. The sight of her conjured up sweet things. First kisses, things he’d never felt before, promises he said he’d keep forever.

‘Thomas, what are you waiting for?’

But Thomas was afraid.

The world was bigger than he was, and he didn’t know what was waiting out there, beyond the strawberry fields. A sword was enough to fight the monsters of his boyhood, but it wasn’t enough to protect him from whatever lay out there.

He thought about his cold, new future, somewhere far away that he could not imagine. He didn’t want to leave his childhood behind — the sweet taste of his first strawberry tart, nights spent walking hand-in-hand with Juliet, the electrifying anticipation of a train that wasn’t supposed to come.

As excited as the others were now about the vast unknown that lay before them, he knew that in the future, ultimately, there would only be pain.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I can’t go.’

‘Thomas, we have to get on the train.’

He shook his head. ‘I can’t. Not yet. I’ll come on the next train.’

‘There will be no next train!’

The train had started to move, slowly, rolling away from the platform. The girl turned her head, a stray curl of her hair fluttering with the ribbon in the wind.

‘Yes there will be. There will always be a next train, as long as I want it to come.’

She reached out for him. ‘But you don’t want the train to come, and so it will not. Thomas, don’t leave me. I can’t think about you in the strawberry fields all alone.’

‘I won’t be alone,’ he told her. ‘I have my memories.’

And the train rushed along to its full speed, carrying the children away, erasing the strawberry fields to a blur — tearing them apart.

The girl with the red ribbon in her hair ran down the corridor to the last window in the last car and pressed her face and her hands against it, watching the boy fade.

His wide blue eyes were the last thing she saw, staring through her. Strangely lost and sad at the end of the platform.

She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, he had left her.

The other children were exploring the train with a babble of excited voices.

‘Where are we going?’

‘The Future, where we will grow up.’

‘Why did we have to leave?’

‘We can’t stay children forever.’

The further they got from the place they left, the faster the train went.

All around her, the girl with the red ribbon in her hair watched her friends age, growing taller and holding their chins higher. They laughed less and watched more, their breasts fuller and their waists narrower.

They had let go.

‘Tommy!’ she cried out.

The Girl follows the tracks as far as they will take her. Dried blood cakes her skin. She knows some of the scars will never go away. The fresh ones still bleed.

Finally, the Girl reaches the train station, although it is not a station anymore. The walls are eaten by salt lichens, the painted sign faded to grains of colour.

Although the station has moved, the letters remain the same.

Perdita Ridge.

Where everything began and ended.

When she walks through a gap in the wall, the wood is damp beneath her feet. The strawberries have grown through the station and taken it over, although a number of the plants are overripe and weighed down by their decaying fruit.

Past the station where the platform should’ve been, the fields open onto an abandoned ferry dock, a few last curls of wild strawberry pushing through the loosened planks.

She does not remember the water.

The Girl’s fingers trail against wooden walls, which are splintered and peeling. As each wave crashes against the crumpled dock, water floods the station and washes over her feet. A clammy, salty taste hangs in the air.

The train tracks run into an ocean, broken rails and rusted bolts crumbling to pieces together with the decayed pier. Water glistens for miles, as far as she can see. Ceaseless ocean and slabs of the broken dock floating on the surface.

Something beyond her control has drowned the landmark of her childhood. Destroyed it. Perhaps it is the fact that she has come back, after leaving it behind.

In the heart of the station, where the grand foyer used to be, a large tree grows out of the middle, its leaves the shape of stars. Gnarled roots have cracked the floor, strangling the walls.

The Eternity Tree.

The Girl met the tree once, when it grew in the yard by her house. She often lay under it on summer evenings as a child, playing in its leaves and sunning herself in its shade.

At the centre of its twisted boughs — once her favourite roost as a child — a monster waits. This one is bigger than the others, covered in snakelike eyes and coarse hairs. The armoured sting of a scorpion curves around its body, gleaming with a thin membrane of mucus.

The tree has changed.

When the monster comes for her, it opens all its yellow eyes, and she sees what it sees.

A boy and a girl, torn apart, falling through an abyss as their promises shatter between them — both reaching for the other. But their hands fall through each other’s. They are lost.

It is a nightmare; one she shared with someone else that had slowly become real.

The Girl picks up a broken slab of rail from the ground and draws herself straight, her fists tight around her simple weapon.

The girl with the red ribbon in her hair didn’t move from the seat by the window, watching a blur of cities fall away beside the train, with her chin in her hand. Nights and days flashed by her. Cities. Skies. Years.

Her sisters were playing ball in the corridor, bouncing the red sphere back and forth at a hollow, incessant rhythm.

The train had been moving for some time now, although she could not tell for how long. There was a clock hanging on the opposite wall, lonely and faded against pink-striped wallpaper. The hour hand spun around the centre in a smooth compass, each turn faster and faster.

‘Juliet, come look at the sheep!’ one of the children called from the booth across the train.

But she didn’t want to.

‘The sheep! Juliet.’

The girl closed her eyes.

After some time, the children stopped asking her to play. Her sisters got tired of bouncing the red ball and let it go. It rolled through the half-open door and thumped against the wall.

She watched it, and she watched the clock spinning against pink-striped wallpaper.

When she walked in the corridor, she saw that the others weren’t children anymore. She stood behind them and saw their faces reflected against a backdrop of moving woodland — angled cheekbones and disinterested content in their expressions. Behind them, a heron flew through the trees, white against a blue sky. And she saw her own face, small and lost behind the transparent crowds.

She hadn’t grown up yet.

Slowly, she retreated back into the corridor and retied the ribbon in her hair. As she realised what she had to do, she felt more alive than she’d felt for a long time, but at the same time, broken.

She walked to the end of the train and threw open the door at the back.

The train raced through a sprawl of abandoned gas stations. A desert.

No-one had ever gone back.

Life was a one-way journey, and it didn’t stop for anyone. She couldn’t run forever, but she already knew that.

And she jumped, falling through time and space and the riddled pockets of existence between them. Around her, the world crashed in the waves of a nameless ocean, splintering into the fragments of the future she’d thrown away and the past she’d left behind, all of which plunged underwater.

In the copse, I sense the monster crawling out of an abyss, somewhere close. It drags itself across the tracks with a silent menace, slow and gluttonous in its movements.

It is bigger than the rest, and more ugly. The million eyes covering its body glow like sparks of fire as it slithers towards the girl’s body, a scorpion’s greasy sting curved over its back.

The monster hisses and looks into my gaze with all its eyes. Inside its yellow stare, I see the nightmare I once shared with someone else — screams and the small delicate fingers of a girl I knew when we were young, being pulled out of my hands.

My grip tightens around the sword.

The children gather in a fearful circle amid the strawberries, watching. Normally they would run, but this time, they sense that something is deeply wrong.

At their head is Tommy-Who-Thought-the-Stars-Were-Alive, who follows my every move. I cannot bear to feel the weight of his hope. For I know it is hope that will someday drive him mad, pushing him closer and closer to the edge of his innocence.

My hand is steady around the sword, although I wish the children would not watch. I do not want them to see my progressing weakness. Not when I have been their only strength for so long.

The monster lowers its tail and lashes its sting at me.

I dodge under and hack with my sword, striking for the unarmoured flesh of its body. The monster uses its sting to parry my attack, and we circle each other on the tracks. The pain rises in my chest again, so excruciating that I forget it’s not the only feeling I know.

I stumble, and the monster’s tail catches me in the stomach. The sting misses my neck by a narrow inch.

The children run up to me when the monster flings me into the field, but I shout at them to stay back. I am ashamed that they must see me so weak. This is not the future I want them to imagine for themselves.

The monster advances on me slowly, bringing with it the nightmares. They are the worst nightmares, ones I thought I’d forgotten.

A small hand presses a strawberry into mine.

‘Grandfather, it’ll give you strength,’ Tommy-Who-Thought-the-Stars-Were-Alive tells me, his face too serious for his seven years of age. ‘Remember, the stars are guarding you.’

I push him back towards the others. ‘It’s not safe, child,’ I tell him.

But I swallow the strawberry. If there’s one thing he and I both cannot lose, it is hope, although it is harder for me to remember the feeling now. My chest aches as if it will burst, but I haul my sword around me to face the monster.

If it is the last thing I can do for this village, this monster — this nightmare — will die.

The scorpion creature whips its tail around, and I run under the sting. The layered armour plates prevent the monster from reaching underneath its own body with the sting.

It can only watch with its million eyes as I break its only defence.

With both hands, I drive the sword deep into the monster’s heart — so deep the blade goes through to the other side, and my hand buries deep inside the monster’s chest.

The Girl stands in the midst of overripe strawberries and ocean foam. She will not go to the monster.

Instead, she raises the stake she has made for herself, and waits for the monster to come to her. It drags its belly through the rotting fruit.

She tries not to feel afraid, although she relives the terror of the childhood nightmares she thought she’d left behind.

The monster whips its tail toward her. Its sting is almost the size of her body. She scrambles out of the way, and the sting smashes into the wall. Her own screams echo through the field.

Images spin through her mind.

Falling.

Fighting.

Boy.

Girl.

Apart.

The monster yanks its tail out of the wall and strikes a second time at the Girl.

She may not be the most able fighter, but her body is small. This time when the monster’s tail comes around, she jumps onto it, just below the sting. She can feel her opponent’s eyes boring into her and thinks it might drive her crazy.

The monster thrashes its tail against the walls in an attempt to throw the Girl off, as she stabs the stake into the end of the sting. It won’t pierce through the armoured shell.

The back of her head slams against a root, and she slides off the monster’s tail, her vision slipping out of focus. She dodges its next attack, and its tail smashes into the Eternity Tree, where it catches in the trunk. The monster jerks, but its sting remains embedded.

The Eternity Tree is poisoned, black tendrils spreading up its trunk and consuming its gnarled back.

The Girl picks up the stake and drives it into the monster’s heart, as far as it will go. The iron bar sinks through flesh and ribs, snakelike eyes and the darkness that has haunted her since the moment she jumped from the train.

She buries her hand in the monster’s heart, but her fingers brush against the solid warmth of another human hand.

The world falls away, and with it the illusions of time and reality.

Through the twisted destiny that divides them, the Grandfather and the Girl press their hands together through the heart of their worst nightmare.

The Grandfather looks into the girl’s eyes, and he remembers what he had forgotten long ago.

For an instance, they are young again. Two children who had fallen together out of paradise, but could not run from time.

A shadow passes over the Boy’s face, when he realises how wrinkled and rough his hands feel against the youth of the Girl’s skin. They have changed too much. She had stayed young in a world where everyone else had aged, while the Boy had grown old in the world of their youth, wasted and alone, surrounded by the bittersweet ache of his memories.

But they could not be together. Not in the same way. The Girl had already left her childhood and could never go back — not to the same place she had left. She could search for it, but it would never be the way she remembered it. You could only leave that place once.

The world has put too much time between them.

The Boy cannot hold onto the Girl for much longer.

The Girl has a million things to say, but she finds that she cannot speak. The Boy tries to call her name, but all he can think of is the promise he couldn’t keep.

They cannot be in the same world anymore.

A tear slips from the Girl’s eyes and falls into the soil.

It creates a ripple that spreads in transparent rings and engulfs the universe, carrying the consequences of the time they tried to cheat. Around them, the world falls back together, fragments of history spinning through loss and what could have been.

They couldn’t run forever.

At the centre of the train station, the Eternity Tree withers and dies, its boughs bending and twisting until it is no more than a scattering of ashes.

The broken tracks, strewn through the waves, mend in a gust of flying metal and wood.

For all these years, the Boy had been waiting for the next train, but he secretly did not want it to come, and so it didn’t. When he finally understands the life he has thrown away, it summons all the time he had been hiding from.

The last train bounds out of the ocean and hits the Girl.

The Girl with the red ribbon in her hair curled on her side beneath the tree with the star-shaped leaves, nested in an autumn blanket. The grass in the yard was soft against her cheek.

A fresh yellow leaf drifted from the lowest bough, and she held out her open palm to catch it.

‘Do you think we’ll ever get lost one day?’ she asked.

The Boy was sitting with his back against the tree, his legs stretched before him. The shoelaces of his Converse were untied, trailing in the damp earth. The sword was strapped to his back. He’d begun wearing it ever since his fourteenth birthday.

‘What do you mean?’

She rolled over onto her stomach. ‘I don’t know. If something happens to the village. Like a war.’

The Boy’s eyes were quiet and certain, and she liked that. They made her feel safe. ‘I’d go and fight.’

The Girl blew the leaf out of her hand and watched it flutter in the breeze. ‘Would you come back though?’

He reached down and tucked her hair behind her left ear. ‘Yes. We’ll get married, and be happy forever. We’ll run through the strawberry fields together every day, and fall asleep in them every night.’

The Girl closed her eyes and allowed herself for a minute to imagine what such a life would be like.

‘Do you think we’ll ever have to leave the village?’ she asked. ‘And grow up?’

‘No,’ the Boy answered.

‘But if we did, you’ll stay with me? No matter the cost?’

He smiled. ‘Yes.’

She pressed both her hands over his, and held him close.

‘Do you promise?’

‘For Eternity.’

He stretched out on his side, and she relaxed against the softness of his embrace, the tree’s sturdy trunk pressing against her back. Past his ear, under the fence, she could see the faint imprint of train tracks passing through the strawberry fields.

She let her breath go. Because in that moment, for the first time in her life, she was convinced she would be happy forever.

A train has come.

It arrives in a blur. Railway tires and rusted metal. The scent of an ocean, carried back from a long and tiring journey.

The children gather around it, laughing and dancing around each other with their hands linked together.

Their wait is over.

‘Grandfather! Grandfather!’ they cry, tugging at my sleeve. ‘Come on the train with us.’

They are what once was and what once could be, reduced to a bittersweet ache.

I only smile as I watch them pile into the train cars, their eager faces peering out the window at me. It is time to send them away. They have stayed young because they still think they have a future, and their dreams are not shattered yet.

Perhaps they do have a future.

I cannot protect them forever. I wonder how many of them will lose their blissful innocence and waste away, although I hope the answer is none of them. But I also know that once upon a time, I thought I was invincible too.

As the train leaves, I watch the children’s faces disappear toward the horizon. The last one to go is Tommy-Who-Thought-the-Stars-Were-Alive, whose expression is a mixture of fear and hope for the future he has yet to discover. He does not look toward me anymore. His hope lies someplace else now, where the rest of the world has gone and I will never see. I cannot keep the children, because I have failed them too.

With them goes the last purpose I had, the last thing in my life that gave me joy.

I carry the girl’s body in my arms and walk away from the direction the train is going. I am taking us far away, to a place where we can rest without the burden of the past, although I do not know if such a place exists in the world.

At night, I still fight the monsters.

The tracks are my guide, leading me through strange lands I could have never imagined existed. I am growing weaker, but it does not matter to me any longer.

I am surrounded by a strange peace.

The sun shines through the dappled leaves in the copse, creating patterns in the wild grass. The strawberries tremble in the breeze, and I walk alone.

Author Loci

Jessica May Lin

Train tracks have always had an extraordinary significance in my life. I grew up playing along a pair of train tracks where my friends and I would pretend we were wild animals or warrior goddesses, and stage wars. My mother always warned me about the train coming. However, for the many years we played along the tracks, the train never came. My grandmother said the train always came in the night, when we couldn’t see, so we’d always look for signs that it had come.

You find the most extraordinary things along train tracks — tiny animal skulls, broken glass, fruit rinds. Along the tracks by home, I stumbled across deer with long, beautiful antlers, power stations, drug dealers, and the most beautiful stretch of graffiti I’d ever seen. My best friend and I used to add our own graffiti with lipstick and markers, and check every time to see when the rain had washed it off.

When I was seventeen, I spent a summer in Singapore, where I walked alone along a pair of soon-to-be-demolished train tracks for two days, or thirty kilometres. Hidden from the glistening all-glass high-rises of the city, these train tracks were the green-carpeted heart of Singapore, littered with signs of a rich history modernisation had tried so hard to erase. I found Hindu temples, jungle farms with caged peacocks, rundown way-stations with posters still on their walls and blankets on the bunks, graffiti (which is illegal and highly punishable in Singapore), and long stretches of silence and sun. To this day, that journey holds a special place in my heart; I can’t concretely explain what about it makes it so raw and powerful — it was almost as if walking under the palm fronds, with my backpack bouncing on my shoulders, I could feel the ghosts of Singapore’s past, invisible marks left by the hundreds of trains that had passed through that corridor. The very next day, the government closed the tracks off for demolition. (Certain stretches of the tracks were spared after protests. You can read about them here: http://www.thegreencorridor.org/)

Then, shortly after I returned to my home of Silicon Valley, California, teenagers started committing suicide on train tracks. Friends of friends, my parents’ friends’ kids — I read about death after death in the newspaper. There was a suicide at my own high school (although not on train tracks). I fought my own battle with anorexia and depression. I avoided the train tracks for many months after that, partially afraid of what they’d come to represent, partially afraid of the weight of everything that was changing.

Railroads came to represent the world of my childhood — the magic, the adventure, the disenchantment, and the sorrow. And of course, that isn’t a world you can stay in forever. These days when I visit the tracks with my friends, on the few days out of the year I return home, we no longer play pretend. We walk in silence, and argue about whether the graffiti has changed, or if it’s only our imagination. Somehow, there’s a magic of being a child hopping between rusted, broken rails that changes when you’re older.

All these elements combined, but especially that last loss, formed the inspiration behind ‘The Pass’. Stylistically, ‘The Pass’ was also inspired by the films of Hayao Miyazaki and, conceptually, a little bit by The Catcher in the Rye.

Jessica May Lin’s fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming in Nature, Daily Science Fiction, Chiral Mad 3, and Flytrap. She lives in Beijing, China, where she writes for two newspapers and works as a pole-dancer in a nightclub.

Her website is jessicamaylin.com.

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Why Dimension6?

PD Ouspensy, the Russian esotericist, first formulated a way to think about the multiverse in six dimensions: three spatial dimensions and three space-time dimensions.

Picture a solid object, a cube with length, depth and height, tipping over the edge of a table.

Imagine that instant frozen in time — the fourth dimension.

Imagine that frozen instant occurring in an infinite number of parallel universes — the fifth dimension.

Now picture time unfreezing and the cube falling in all those universes with subtle and gross differences depending on the local conditions — the sixth dimension.

The six dimensions encapsulate the sum of all possible occurrences in the multiverse.

That’s where Dimension6 lives.

Next Issue

The next issue of Dimension6 will be available free for download on 2 October 2015, with all-new fiction from Steve Cameron, Louise Katz and one other author currently coalescing from the multiverse.

You can download Dimension6 by visiting the Dimension6 webpage.

We’d like to thank our affiliates for helping spread the Dimension6 word.

AntiSF

Canberra SF Guild

Cheryl Morgan

Sharon Johnstone

Tracie McBride

Mark Webb

Jonathan Strahan

Pulp Fiction Books

Bookonaut

Undead Backbrain

Robert Hood

Cat Sparks

Jack Dann

If you’d like to join our affiliate program, email me at keith@coeurdelion.com.au

You can also sign up for our MailChimp List to get instant notification of the next issue.

Copyright

First published in Australia in 2015 by coeur de lion publishing

www.coeurdelion.com.au

please direct all enquiries to the publisher at keith@coeurdelion.com.au

Compilation copyright © Keith Stevenson 2015

Copyright in each story and article remains with the individual authors © 2015

The right of the individual authors to be identified as the authors of their respective stories and articles has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

Dimension6 is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. This means anyone can copy, distribute and transmit Dimension6 as long as they attribute the work back to us, do not charge for it, and do not alter, transform or build on it. More information on the licence is here — http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/