"I Need Help"
Which is the title of a new short story, not the state of my mental health.
Exciting news! A bit of a niche short story I wrote a couple of years ago has found a home in the latest issue of Aurealis!
I Need Help is a historical horror story in which two very frightened people encounter each other on the worst night of their respective lives. It has a good dose of Australian gothic atmosphere, a bit of heart, and smattering of gore.
Unfortunately it’s not currently available to read for free, but you can buy the digital issue here for 3.99 American dollars, and I’ll pop a little extract below to help you decide whether or not you’d like to read on.
I’m very proud of this one. As someone who’s mostly written in YA and commercial spaces, it’s been a really key piece in finding my voice (and confidence!) for adult genre work.
I NEED HELP (EXCERPT)
Historical Horror
Content Warnings: Cancer, Blood, Gun Violence
Lorna’s eyes adjust to soft moonlight while ears that hear less than they used to strain to identify whatever it was that woke her. She sorts through the familiar sounds of her world: the choking sputter of her brother in the bedroom next door, the groaning of their decrepit farmhouse, the scratching of gum trees and banksia trying to swallow it whole. None of them ideal, but none of them unusual. None of them worth waking for—
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat.
Ah.
Lorna shrinks beneath her patchwork quilt, as though the worn fabric she and her mother pieced together a lifetime ago can protect her from whoever is knocking on her door in the middle of the night. She knows instinctively that they must be a stranger. Her closest neighbours are miles away: too far to come except in an emergency, too aware of her and Elijah’s situation to ever rely on them in such a case. And a stranger out here, this many hours past sunset, can only mean danger. The bush is filling up with escaped convicts and would-be outlaws, or so the papers screeched at her on her last journey into town. A notion she had scoffed at and then forgotten about, until this moment.
For long, breathless seconds, Lorna waits, and is rewarded with the scrape of the trees, the soft shudder of the wind, the wet coughing of her brother.
But no knocking.
She releases a long, unsteady breath and closes her eyes. It must have been the remnant of a dream, the judder of a branch against the house. She’s let too many things go unattended in the past few months, pushed too many fears to the back of her mind. They must have—
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat.
Lorna’s knuckles tighten around the binding of the quilt. It’s no branch. No dream. Her thumbs rub over loosened stitches as she fervently wishes for whoever is outside to go away, or that there was someone else, at least, to face them.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat.
Lorna moves the quilt aside and shudders as the cool air assaults her knees. She eases to her feet and dresses methodically despite the panic burning at her belly: slippers first, then her dressing gown, her spectacles.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat.
‘Lorna?’ her brother calls, his soft voice quavering from the effort.
‘I’m up,’ she rasps back, taking up her lamp and slipping a match into her pocket. Her knees creak in harmony with the floorboards as she steps out of her bedroom and into the hallway. It’s darker here, with no windows to let in the moonlight, but she knows this house as well as she knows her own body.
Her brother calls out again, but his words are lost to a thick chain of coughing.
‘Don’t try to move,’ Lorna warns as she steps inside his bedroom. The air is heavy with the salt-sweet miasma of phlegm, warm from the embers of the dying fire and the furnace raging beneath Elijah’s skin. He lays sunken on the bed, his body convulsing and chest rattling.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat.
His rifle leans against his chest of drawers, the bullets stored neatly in a box that sits among his socks. Lorna loads six of them into the magazine with shaking fingers and slides the pump, locking them into place. She’s loaded his rifle before, but never at this time of night, never to aim at a person. She wonders if she can.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat.
‘Lor—,’ he wheezes.
‘I’ll handle it,’ she promises, even though she knows the words are of no comfort to either of them. Until mere months ago, Elijah would have been the one to rise in the night, to protect what remains of their family, their farm, their world. Now everything is left to Lorna, and God help her, she isn’t ready for it. Her life was never supposed to look like this. She was never supposed to be alone.
Lorna juggles the lamp and the rifle and steps back into the corridor.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat—
Slap!
Lorna flinches as a palm joins the frenetic rap of the knocker, the two sounds running side by side in a relentless cacophony. Whoever is outside is getting impatient. The thought makes her fingers fumble as she hangs the lamp on a hook beside the door, and it takes several attempts to strike the match. She holds her breath as she waits for the wick to catch.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat—
Slap-slap-slap-slap-slap-slap—
‘If you’re here to rob the place, you should know that I’m armed,’ Lorna growls in the deepest register she can summon. She steps back from the door and raises her rifle. ‘There’s nothing in this house worth risking your life over.’
The knocking stops.
The slapping, too. But strain as she might, Lorna doesn’t hear the sound of feet retreating over the gravel. She sets her finger on the trigger, whispering a prayer for the person on the other side of the door to leave, dear God, leave.
‘I need help,’ a tremulous voice calls.
Hopefully that’s enough to hook you! You can read the rest in issue #183 of Aurealis 😘