Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

He lay on the bed, his stomach a pink balloon. When he shut his eyes, she locked herself in the bathroom and relieved herself.

“Out you come,” he said. She could tell by his playful tone he was naked.

Then his tiger’s penis was at work, and his fingers were about her throat, he was squeezing, squeezing. She reached for a weapon and grasped his belt, lifting it high and beating his back with a thick thwap. He enjoyed its caress.

She became aware of a figure standing over him. It was the hunter. He raised his club and hit Karl on the side of the head, knocking him off her, away from her.

“Thank you, my dear,” the hunter said. She gathered her clothes as he crouched over the body, nestling the penis in his hand. As she left the room, she heard the thud and click so familiar to her; a brother’s knife; a father’s; a lover’s knife.

She closed the door quietly behind her so as not to disturb the hunter at his work.

She didn’t use the lift; she wanted to feel the strength of her muscles. As she descended the stairs, she rubbed at her make-up so it ran in streaks over her face, brushed out her curls with spread fingers. The hunter could not be expected to spare her again.

Next time, she would be ready.

Lucy Sussex was born in the South Island of New Zealand and now lives in Australia, where she works as a researcher and writer. Her fiction has won Ditmar and Aurealis awards, and she has been nominated for environmental awards and the International Horror Guild award. Her short stories have been collected in My Lady Tongue , A Tour Guide in Utopia , and Absolute Uncertainty . She has also written several books for younger readers and an adult novel, The Scarlet Rider . She is completing a non-fiction book, Cherchez les Femmes , about early women crime authors and detectives.

Sussex says: “I’d never done a Christmas story before, and what better to use as source matter than a visit to the European original of the festival—Germany during Weihnachten, where the Christmas tree began. Pretty much every detail in the story has its origin in real life, like the East European heavy metal band at the airport, the cat by the Rathaus in Arnstadt. I was based in Bremen, and have photographs of the memorial statue, also tourist kitsch. Yet, while I was there I didn’t have a chance to read the original Grimm story, ‘Musicians of Bremen’, although I had a vague memory of it. That kept niggling at me, like sand-grit inside a shellfish. I trust my niggles, they generally persist for a good reason. Back in the Southern hemisphere, in the middle of a hot summer I did read the story, and got a surprise. Here was a complex, multi-layered story, subtly-nasty, about such matters as animal rights and aging. It’s easy to riff on Grimm by playing up the gore, or the sentimentality. Harder is to be matter-of-fact, realistic, as the original is.”

For anything I know it was all due to jetlag, that curious fugue state in which the body has leapt over space and time as if in seven-league boots, with the protesting spirit, or soul, striving to catch up. Or due to the jetlag medication. Or else that I was betwixt and between stages of my life, or thought I was, and my subconscious was trying to tell me different. Whatever the cause, I walked between waking dreams, intermittent hallucinations, in which what was real and what wasn’t mingled and merged madly. In the end it didn’t seem to matter—I just went with the flow.

It all began in the Sydney International Departures check-in, where the teenage girl ahead of me exclaimed:

“Ohmigod! Tell me I’m hallucinating!”

Gladly, sweetie, I thought. I hadn’t slept the previous night and was decidedly on edge, my body on automatic pilot, my mind darting every which way. Terminals always are artificial, in their air-conditioned saccharine blandness, and today this one seemed particularly unreal. That what seemed might actually be a genuine unreality was a notion I could welcome.

I followed the direction of her pointing, black-varnished finger, to see four figures and a trolley piled high with flight cases. And a part of me that I had resolved to leave behind pawed the ground and said: Aha! A band.

The trouble with music promotion, if you’ve done it too long, or long enough that it stops being fun, or fannish, is that you automatically categorize market niches. The girl was an obvious Goth. The band was a little more difficult: tatts, black clothes, long hair can indicate anything from stadium rockers to Norwegian Black Metal, who are more trouble than they’re worth, as they have an annoying habit of burning down churches. Probably Speed Metal, I decided, as the girl started hyperventilating. Cult-level, if they’re at the economy counter. I could guess at the festival they’d just attended and even take a punt at the promoter. My old life pawed at the ground again, raring to start a professional chat, about festival logistics, equipment, transport. Not the least of the fun would have been giving the Goth fangirl the vapours. To her, I was over forty, and thus nigh death—but I could still best her in the catty cunning stakes.

Instead I suppressed the urge, and stood meekly in queue. Was I not en route to a new life, leaving all frivolous, pop-culture things behind? The band passed through check-in, then security without incident. If the Goth fangirl got autographs I didn’t see, for I was deep in Duty-free. What can you get a serious-minded man, apart from seriously good drink? Then I stretched my legs for the last time until Changi, a long walk around the corridors with my headphones and German-language CD. The Goth fangirl I spotted in the lounge for Vanuatu, which would surely ruin her graveyard pallor. My flight had been called, I was handing my boarding pass to the Stew, when a bloc of black joined the queue—the band again, clutching tacky outback souvenirs. Not as evil as you like to pretend, I thought. Like most metallists—who upon acquaintance tended to be polite and obliging, the reverse of the Christian rockers.

I have flown so much it has become routine, but even the tedium failed to deaden my jangling nerves. I watched a movie, The Jane Austen Book Club , and decided I didn’t believe a word of it, apart from Jimmy Smits playing against type as a nice family man. I ate automatically, listened to my tapes again, dipped into my E-book, which was programmed with everything about Germany, from the Rough Guide to the Brothers Grimm. The Stews handed out cocoa, started dimming the lights. Outside it was dark, as if we were passing through an interminable tunnel. It was 2 a.m. my time, and there would be light, and an airport, in a few hours. I took a pill, and, just to make sure, chased it with the last of my dinner red wine.

And awoke, with sleeping passengers all around me and my nerves jangling again. My feet, in their airline socks, felt cramped, so I wandered down the aisles. As I neared the back row, the middle aisle, I had a sense of being watched, and traced it to a hulking dark shape, almost entirely muffled by an airline blanket worn like a hoodie. Eyes showed beneath it, large and lustrous. Beside my watcher were several other forms, similarly shrouded in blanket and curled up in the narrow seats like a pet in a basket. I caught only a glimpse of dyed Mohawk protruding. The band, I thought.

It was easy enough to catch my travel dress on a protruding, blanket-clad limb—elbow or knee I don’t know, as he overflowed his seat in several directions. As I crouched down to extricate it, the “Sorry”, “No I’m sorry” morphed into a whispered conversation. The accidental proximity of air travel can make for unlikely fellow travelers having even more unlikely conversations. But, as I crouched beside him, whispering into the space beneath his hood, and he whispered back in an accent I couldn’t trace, it all seemed natural and easy—in retrospect too easy.