Through Splintered Walls

By Kaaron Warren

From Bram Stoker Award nominee Kaaron Warren, comes Book 6 in the Twelve Planets collection series including the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award winning novella "Sky".

Country road, city street, mountain, creek.

These are stories inspired by the beauty, the danger, the cruelty, emptiness, loneliness and perfection of the Australian landscape.

‘Every Warren story is a trip with no map.’ – Gemma Files

‘Her fiction shifts across genres smoothly and intelligently, never settling for the easy path... she doesn’t flinch.’ – Andrew Hook

‘As with most of the best horror writing ... the power of Warren’s strongest stories comes from the mirror they hold up to our everyday practices and prejudices.’ – Ian McHugh

Table of Contents
- Introduction by Gemma Files
- Mountain
- Creek
- Road
- Sky

AWARDS
"Sky" - winner Horror Short Story, Aurealis Award

Shortlisted Collection, Aurealis Award

Through Splintered Walls of Art - Finalist, The City of Kwinana Corporate Community Award

ABOUT THE TWELVE PLANETS SERIES
Twelfth Planet Press is an independent publishing house challenging the status quo with books that interrogate, commentate, inspire.

The Twelve Planets are twelve boutique collections by some of Australia’s finest short story writers. Varied across genre and style, each collection offers four short stories and a unique glimpse into worlds fashioned by some of our favourite storytellers. Each author has taken the brief of 4 stories and up to 40 000 words in their own direction. Some are quartet suites of linked stories. Others are tasters of the range and style of the writer. Each release is a standalone and brings something unexpected.

The Twelve Planets
Book 1: Nightsiders by Sue Isle
Book 2: Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts
Book 3: Thief of Lives by Lucy Sussex
Book 4: Bad Power by Deborah Biancotti
Book 5: Showtime by Narrelle M Harris
Book 6: Through Splintered Walls by Kaaron Warren
Book 7: Cracklescape by Margo Lanagan
Book 8: Asymmetry by Thoraiya Dyer
Book 9: Caution: Contains Small Parts by Kirstyn McDermott
Book 10: Secret Lives of Books by Rosaleen Love
Book 11: The Female Factory by Angela Slatter and Lisa Hannet
Book 12: Cherry Crow Children by Deborah Kalin

• Language: English
• Publisher: Twelfth Planet Press
• Release date: Jan 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9780987216236

Kaaron Warren

Shirley Jackson Award winner Kaaron Warren has published five novels and seven short story collections. She’s sold two hundred short stories to publications big and small around the world and has appeared in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best anthologies. Her novel The Grief Hole won three major Australian genre awards. She has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Fiji, and Canberra; her most recent works are “The Deathplace Set” in Vandal, and Bitters, a novella. Warren won the inaugural Mayday Hills Ghost Story Competition.  

Book preview

Through Splintered Walls

by Kaaron Warren

First published in Australia in May 2012

by Twelfth Planet Press

www.twelfthplanetpress.com

All stories are copyright © 2012 Kaaron Warren

Design and layout by Amanda Rainey

eBook layout by Charles A. Tan

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: Warren, Kaaron.

Title: Through splintered walls [electronic resource]: a twelve planets collection / by Kaaron Warren; edited by Alisa Krasnostein.

ISBN: 9780987216236 (eBook)

Subjects: Short stories, Australian.

Other Authors/Contributors: Krasnostein, Alisa.

Dewey Number: A823.4

Table of Contents

Introduction

Mountain

Creek

Road

Sky

About the Author

Also From Twelfth Planet Press

Introduction

Kaaron Warren has the true gift of spell-casting, the sort of deceptively direct, declamatory literary style which says: I simply have to speak a thing, and no matter how odd it may seem in the telling, it is instantly rendered so—solid, actual, honest, real. Fiction, but not. Sometimes her stories are about an urban legend created by a ward-full of anorexics, or the difficulty of tracking down an entirely new breed of dog; often they are about hunger and dread, sexuality and corruption, grief and power, the unreasonableness of hope.

Every Warren story is a trip with no map. She admits to not planning things out, to simply having an idea and going with it, finding out where it leads along the way. Thus, in ‘Creek’, the protagonist finds herself haunted by a tinnitus-spreading horde of drowned ghosts, the Quaking Women, who rise from the titular bodies of water demanding the return of their long-dead loved ones—and possibly, this all springs from a single turn of phrase. In ‘Sky’, meanwhile, the plot and protagonist of the story shift radically from section to section, with one mystery deepening into another, increasingly existential: Where did that finger in the cat food can come from? Is strength always measured in violence? Does pain travel a circular track, moving from giver to recipient, and back again?

In ‘Road’, a couple whose son died on the same cliff-haunted stretch of highway, deliberately reel in the ghosts of other vehicular victims, knitting themselves a hollow new ‘family’. And in ‘Mountain’, a holiday spot the narrator thinks should be named ‘Temptation’ provides its visitors recipes for public sex, suicide and covert murder—but instead of dragging her down, it provides the (literal) push which takes her back up again, rewriting her family’s future, with only a small sacrifice required.

In many ways, Warren’s particular brand of between-the-lines witchcraft reminds me of that practised by genre cornerstones like Shirley Jackson—but unlike Jackson, isn’t here to seduce you into sharing her point of view, so much, as to quickly and effectively render it all but impossible for you to refuse to. Similarly, there’s an epic scope to her always-dangerous visions which recalls the literal, temporal and philosophical landscapes she sets her stories in: Australia, Fiji, the far future, the ancient past, the surprising lack of distance between allowable and inappropriate behaviours.

If you are bent on opening this book, therefore, remember: Keep your eyes open, accept all of what it has to offer without qualm, and beware—the only thing I can promise you is that you will be taken where you may not want to go. For Kaaron Warren, while many things, is very much not your mum; she owes you nothing except the words on the page, this open door into four very different someplaces else through which she will escort you, then take her leave, without a single glance back. And it will be entirely contingent on you to get yourself back out.

Gemma Files

Mountain

When writing a recipe, you have to be linear. This, then that, then this. You can’t jump ahead of yourself; you have to follow the logical progression from ingredient, to action, to end result. Meanwhile you keep things on the boil and prepare for the next step.

I sometimes feel Temptation Tor wrote my recipe template, everything leading to this moment; an episode of my cooking show, in the place where the idea for Motorbike Munchies was born. I didn’t warn the producers they might see a ghost; I’d long since learned to keep quiet about her. About them.

‘Bush Food at the top,’ the producers said, so at dawn we transported stove and ingredients and camera and crew around the hairpin bends of the mountain. I rode my bike up, loving the freshness of the air, the tightness of the road. They’d have me lean on it, as they did every week.

It’s one of those quirky things reporters love to start their stories with. ‘TV Chef on two wheels’, that kind of thing. They’ll also describe my clothing, and my hair. They don’t do that to men. With men it’s all about how they sit, how they lean forward to make a point.

I always drive myself. Analyse that how you will. It’s simple, really. The chain of years I was driven by my father, then boyfriends, then by my husband, to places I didn’t want to go. Or driven quickly past places where I wanted to stop.

My father was an A to B man. Often, I was tempted to shout at him, or wet my pants, or pinch my elder sister till she screamed, anything to make him stop. I never did it, though. My sister had tested those waters once and been left on the side of the road for half an hour. When we picked her up again she was shaking; what did you see? I kept asking her, but she would never answer. Even then, I knew the mountain must be haunted.

As I moved into my teens, we heard horror stories of the mountain; was it haunted by all those who committed suicide from its scenic outlook? We went to test our courage, to make out, to drink, to throw bottles over the side. The time I finally saw the ghosts I’d heard about most of my life, I sat in the back with a handsome boy called Pat, his fingers working their way up my thigh. He kept up a steady patter of flirtatious nonsense while my boyfriend, Dave, drove. In the passenger seat was Sue, Pat’s girlfriend, who suffered from carsickness and saw some power in the front seat. That was why I was letting Pat play with me in the back. If they could fool around, why couldn’t we?

We ate the chocolate chip cookies I’d baked and drank warm beer.

It was very dark, no streetlights, just the ineffectual flash of reflectors and the broad drag of our headlights. I kept catching glimpses of things moving outside, tall, white, but they were probably gum trees.

Then someone ran out in front of the car, arms waving. Hair flapping.

‘Fuck,’ said Dave, braking sharply. He was a good driver, observant and quite careful. I would have married him for that, if he’d asked.

He stopped just short of the woman. She was naked.

‘Fuck,’ Dave said. Softly this time. She ran into the car, mouth open, screaming. Ran into the bonnet. We all instinctively recoiled. She seemed to grow bigger, whiter … then she disappeared. She didn’t run away or fall into a hole, though that’s what people told us must have happened. She just … vanished.

‘Where’s she gone?’ Sue asked. I caught movement, coming from the same trees the woman-thing had emerged from.

‘Someone else’s coming,’ I said. Pat leaned forward and tapped Dave on the shoulder.

‘Let’s head off, mate,’ he said calmly, and for that I would have married HIM if he’d asked. He didn’t marry Sue, either; none of us saw much of each other after that night.

Dave took off. I watched out the back window. A hairless, naked man stood in the middle of the road. Smiling. He shook his head, waved his index finger at us, tut tut. Pat lifted my hand to his lips and kissed my palm. Dave caught him and we screamed at each other all the way home. The break up didn’t hurt at all.

Progression. One step leads to the next. If I hadn’t broken up with Dave, I wouldn’t have gone out to the pub with friends, and Milo wouldn’t have been there as a friend of a friend, and we’d never have met.

I’d never have married him.

As a young mother, I thought I could make our holidays better than my childhood ones had been. We holidayed and weekended down the coast often. It was a more pleasant break for me than for the children; they always said going for walks with their father was worse than school.

It was a feat of endurance. Milo would insist on all bags packed and ready the night before, with no additions apart from toiletries. One time, my daughter Judy, just six, wore her favourite pyjamas (orange with dogs and bones) to bed, thinking she could take them with her.

‘The bags are packed,’ my husband said. He never shouted. He spoke with a clenched teeth smile. Judy cried for an hour, Milo getting angrier and angrier.

‘Shut her up,’ he said at last. It was a beautiful dawn, the sun rising to our left as we reached the mountain. I imagined that desperate, naked girl, running in front of us. I wondered what Milo would do, if he’d act, or if he’d drive on, as so many did.

Milo considered the day wasted if we hadn’t made a dent by daylight. It meant toast while dressing the kids, no cuppa. Children too sleepy to eat, so cold toast saved for later. I always baked muffins and cereal bars, but this time, we were all so stressed I left them behind on the kitchen bench. It was on this long, hungry trip I first came up with the idea of a motorbike food service, travelling the roads, offering breakfast, lunch and dinner, simple and wholesome. 

I addressed my idea to my children, mostly to pass the long road time and to distract Judy from thinking about her pyjamas.

‘What would you think about a mobile food motorbike, cruising around the roads, full of yummy food to buy?’

‘Cool!’ said Judy. ‘I’m hungry now.’

‘You could have chips and chocolate,’ said Donny. ‘You could call it Mum’s Mobile Meals.’

‘And you could make your meatballs and those yummy little tarts and that roll-up thing,’ said Judy. I laughed.

‘And you can help, painting the bike so people will notice it,’ I said.

Milo had been clearing his throat, waiting for the right comment to come as he negotiated the sharp mountain curves.

‘And who’ll drive? You can barely face driving a car, let alone a motorbike.’ He glanced at me, then patted my hand. ‘I don’t want to share your cooking with anyone.’ As we reached the top of the mountain and began the descent, he held his hand to my chin, caressing it, but effectively keeping my jaw closed.

Somehow, I married a bully. I don’t know how it happened. Some evenings, as I crumbed cutlets because he wouldn’t eat anything fancier, as I mixed a pudding same as I always did, as I steamed the broccoli for the ten minutes he insisted on, I wondered; what if he didn’t come home from work? How long would I wait before reporting him missing? And I thought about my tears, and the great mystery, and about the meals I would create.

Traffic slowed to a crawl; an accident blocking the road that could take hours to clear. When we finally approached the site, we saw an overturned truck, its load emptied.

‘It’s dog food,’ said my son. He was nine; he loved to be first with information. People were scrabbling over the road, scooping up armfuls and driving away.

‘Grab a couple of cans,’ said my husband.

‘We can’t steal dog food,’ I said. ‘We haven’t even got a dog.’

‘It’s all over the road!’ said Milo, as if that was an excuse. ‘Go on,’ he said to Donny.

Donny came back with an armful. ‘Shove over,’ he said to his sister. He and Milo laughed as we drove away. My son showed signs of joining the chain of bullying behaviour, while my daughter retreated further and further into herself.

I didn’t see any ghosts.

That trip sparked the beginning of my true desire to cook for a living, though of course I could do nothing for many years, apart from buy every new cookbook that launched. I sometimes think of that as I prepare for another recording of my TV show. Especially when we have a celebrity in to cook, someone Milo used to sneer at me for admiring.

‘You think these people are better than us?’ he’d say. Than him, he meant. He was certain there were plenty of people better than me. Donny took on his tone of voice sometimes, if he didn’t like what I’d cooked for dinner, or I cut my hair. He’d been such a sweet little boy, gentle, generous to his sister, making us laugh. On our long holidays, he would keep us all responsive, making his sister sing (she still has a beautiful voice) until Milo told them to shut up.

I read later that the truck driver’s entire load was stolen that night. By people like us, citizens. Each taking just a few, feeling justified because they weren’t stealing the lot. I thought then that the