The Grief Hole, page 1
Shirley Jackson award-winner Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had fiction in print every year since. She was recently given the Peter McNamara Lifetime Achievement Award and was Guest of Honour at World Fantasy 2018, Stokercon 2019 and Geysercon 2019. She has also been Guest of Honour at Conflux in Canberra and Genrecon in Brisbane.
She has published five multi-award winning novels (Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, The Grief Hole and Tide of Stone) and seven short story collections, including the multi-award winning Through Splintered Walls. Her most recent short story collection is A Primer to Kaaron Warren from Dark Moon Books. Her most recent novella, Into Bones Like Oil (Meerkat Press), was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award and the Bram Stoker Award, winning the Aurealis Award. Her stories have appeared in both Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’s Year’s Best anthologies.
Kaaron was a Fellow at the Museum for Australian Democracy, where she researched prime ministers, artists and serial killers. In 2018 she was Established Artist in Residence at Katharine Susannah Prichard House in Western Australia. She’s taught workshops in haunted asylums, old morgues and second hand clothing shops and she’s mentored several writers through a number of programs.
Her most recent books include the re-release of her acclaimed novel, Slights, (IFWG Australia) Tool Tales, a chapbook in collaboration with Ellen Datlow (also IFWG), and Capturing Ghosts, a writing advice chapbook from Brain Jar Press.
Kaaron Warren titles
published by IFWG Publishing
The Grief Hole (2016)
The Gate Theory (2017 - short fiction collection)
Slights (2021)
Tool Tales (2021 - with Ellen Datlow; chapbook of microfiction/photos)
Mistification (2021)
Walking the Tree (2022)
Morace’s Story (2022 - chapbook/juvenile fiction)
Tide of Stone (2023)
The Grief Hole
by
Kaaron Warren
This is a work of fiction. The events and characters portrayed herein are imaginary and are not intended to refer to specific places, events or living persons. The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the publisher.
The Grief Hole
All Rights Reserved
ISBN-13: 978-1-925496-06-2
Copyright ©2016 Kaaron Warren
Internal and cover illustrations and layout by Keely Van Order
V1.0
This ebook may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
IFWG Publishing International
Gold Coast
www.ifwgpublishing.com
For my sister and her godson.
For every intervention there was aftermath. A blank space in her memory, a slowing of movement. Theresa knew this, but some monsters had to be dealt with.
Many times she didn’t intervene, if the ghosts were quiet or their message unclear. She never acted unless she was sure.
It was the rise of the ghosts that pushed her.
When the ghosts flew so thick she could barely breathe, she had to act.
The First Intervention
Client A sat in the kitchen of the rented apartment Theresa had found for her. Her oldest child cooked the dinner; it smelt so good Theresa hoped they’d invite her to stay, although she’d say no, to maintain the boundaries. One child was at the table doing homework; the other two, watching cartoons.
“My husband used to manage all the finances. The rent, all that,” the woman told her. “I looked after the people, he looked after the things. We always did it that way.”
Theresa said, “I lost my man, too. That’s an emptiness that can’t be filled. We can only try.”
“We were saving for a home,” the woman said. Most of that went to medical and funeral expenses. “He was going to do all the cabinet making. It would have been beautiful. He wasn’t a clumsy man. How could they say it was his fault?”
The woman spoke quietly. Her children had not seen their father’s body; that was an image none of them needed.
The phone rang. “Mum, it’s the man from the real estate.”
Client A sighed, and Theresa thought she caught a glimmer of something shifting near the fridge.
“He wants to do another inspection.”
“Do you want me to be here?” Theresa asked.
“No. I need to be independent. I can do it.”
As Client A talked, Theresa could see the ghosts coming for her. Crawling hand over hand, broken legs trailing behind them, the more she talked the closer they got. And around the 15 year old were what appeared to be teenage girls, pregnant, blood pouring down their thighs.
Curiosity sparked by the ghosts, Theresa waited in her car until the real estate agent arrived. Faces from every window watched as he walked up the path. Searching for information on her handheld, she found nothing but praise for his work and his dedication, but as he walked, ghosts scooted around. They knew an ally, hurry up, pushing him forward, get it done.
Theresa followed him for three days as he visited clients. She asked discreet questions, took the occasional photo. When even a forty-eight year old bikie’s widow was surrounded by beaten ghosts after he visited her, she knew this man was a destroyer; perhaps one who preyed on widows.
“Can I help you, love?” she heard. A gentle, masculine voice.
A man dressed in leathers, long beard, tattoos. He held a cigarette between two yellowed fingers and, incongruously, balloons tied to the handles of his motorbike.
“Oh,” she said.
“It’s just that you’re staring in at my mate’s wife. And my mate’s dead, so we’re watching out for her. And she’s not keen on being stared in at.”
Theresa thought, Am I going to do this? The real estate agent left the house, wiping his mouth. The woman’s ghosts leaped up and down, broken legs buckling, trampolining their excitement and she knew she had to intervene.
“It’s that man. I’ve been following him. I’ve seen some terrible things.”
The real estate agent fought back; he was strong and wiry. But he was never going to win. Theresa was there to watch; if they expected her to call a halt they were surprised.
She didn’t regret the intervention, but she physically reacted to it, coming out in boils. She considered it worth the aftermath because of the solace it brought her, and because when next she visited Client A, there were no ghosts to be seen.
Even after five years working at the refuge, barely a morning dawned when Theresa didn’t wake thinking of who she would help that day. When asked why she did it, why she made such sacrifices for others, she said, “I just want to help,” but truthfully, helping others helped her to forget, distracted her from her empty life. It made her feel good.
She listened well, mostly because she didn’t want to talk about herself. She had an extra skill; she could see the ghosts of beaten women around those clients who would die that way.
Some surprised her. A bossy woman in an office, a famous athlete, a respected dancer; they all had ghosts.
It wasn’t only the women. Men, too, had ghosts. Some of them beaten, many of them ill, many of them murdered. Join us, join us, she sometimes heard. And the children; she saw the ghosts of molested children but what could she do? She couldn’t adopt them all, keep them all safe. Her crazy aunt Prudence sent her greeting cards periodically, with instructions on them like “Let Fate Be,” as if she had any control over it. These cards went straight into the recycling bin.
Theresa did what she could for her clients, and sometimes the ghosts would vanish. More often, though, they’d be replaced by others. The ones beaten with a baseball bat would replace the ones drowned in the bathtub. Or the ones kicked to death would replace the ones gutted. It was exhausting, depressing and emotionally draining. So many times she wanted to say, “Go. You don’t need to be a victim. Leave. Find a new life.”
But she knew that couldn’t work, that it was a letter to the editor opinion, and she’d help no one by expressing it. All she could do was watch the ghosts, help house the clients and sometimes, if it was called for, intervene.
So many times she didn’t intervene and most often she knew this was right. Other times, she made small choices, small changes, and hoped these were enough.
Then her inaction led to the death of a client.
The Second Intervention
The second intervention was a woman. Client B was reluctant to accept help, as many were, but had been ordered to do so. She said, “You’re never so alive as when someone is beating the crap out of you and you’re not sure if you’re going to survive it.” She didn’t mind the pain, or the humiliation.
She had no ghosts, was the interesting thing, and Theresa was annoyed to have to find her a place she knew would be abandoned in weeks. So many others needed it.
She went to the woman’s new home to help her settle in. There were men’s shoes in the hallway; two packs of cigarettes on the table; a man’s coat thrown on the floor. “It’s his stuff, that’s all. He’s not living here or anything,” Client B said.
> She wasn’t settled at all. Nothing unpacked, nothing clean. She drank a bottle of wine, pouring it, glug glug, into a large water glass. She slurred her words and smiled at Theresa as if she were a friend.
The kitchen was full of takeaway containers, half-eaten chicken nuggets sitting in cardboard buckets.
“That’s the kids,” she said. “They are fucken pigs, they are. You can’t teach them a fucken thing.”
“Kids?” There had been no children listed. Theresa felt her heart slow. Client B stood, staring at her.
“Fuck,” she said. She hadn’t told them about the kids. This was a new, one-bedroom apartment.
“How many children?”
“Two.”
“Are they his?”
Client B shrugged. She stank of smoke, of sweat, of booze.
Theresa heard it then; a thin wailing noise. She’d thought it was the water taps.
“They never stop whinging,” Client B whispered.
The ghosts appeared then, tiny children squatting in the hallway, their arms wrapped around their knees, their heads lolling sideways.
Client B took up her handbag. “I’ll only be a minute. Can you mind them? I have to get something from the shops.”
Theresa reached out her hand and grabbed the woman by the neck. Gave her a quick jab under the jaw to knock her out.
Then she checked on the children.
Both were strapped into strollers, although one was at least seven. They looked the weight of children half their age or less. There were deflated party balloons and ghost children littered around the wheels of the strollers like dried twigs.
Theresa unstrapped them and helped them lie on their mother’s bed. She found stale bread and peanut butter and made them piles of toast, and then she shut the door and went back to Client B who was blinking, holding her jaw.
Theresa knew where to land the blows; the voice box. She called the police after laying the evidence on the ex-husband; she didn’t want the children in his hands, either.
The children were placed in foster homes and while Theresa couldn’t track them, she knew they were in a better place.
It couldn’t be worse than where they’d been.
The aftermath was three days of vomiting, a blinding headache that lasted a week, and a failure to remember her mother’s birthday.
The Third Intervention
Theresa intervened for the third time after three years on the job. She’d been working with this client for six months; had placed her away from her violent husband and facilitated her visits to the hospice where her mother lay dying.
They stood together in the corridor, Theresa wanting to leave. Client C dragged her into the room. “I can’t stand to be alone with her. Please.”
The attending nurse bent to stroke the dying woman’s brow; her ghosts clustered by him, pressing up against him, three old women, crowded round the bed, heads bent, praying. Client C approached the bed and they hissed at her like witches.
Naked they were, naked as they were born; Theresa knew this was what they thought. Spines out, skin flabby, but they prayed for the mother until her spirit lifted out and they drew it along with them.
“It’ll be all right,” Theresa told Client C, who wept hysterically. “She’s gone to a better place.” Theresa had learnt the words to say from her counsellor. She knew some people found them comforting.
The attending nurse dispensed tissues. “She is lucky,” he said. “She’s in paradise, now. No more suffering. You can take solace in that.”
Client C nodded and Theresa tried not to be offended that she’d accepted comfort from the nurse and not from her.
He had no ghosts around him, not even at a distance. He took Theresa’s hand over the bed. His palm was cool to the touch.
“She’s not my mother,” Theresa said.
He winked at her. “All mothers belong to all children,” he said. He put his hand on Client C’s shoulder. “You tell me if you need anything. You ask for me: Jason.”
He left the room and Theresa followed him, curious.
As he walked along the corridor, ghosts roared. Emboldened, excited. She thought, He did it, he killed her.
He poked his head into the room of a young girl. Recovering from a life-threatening disease if the number of stuffed toys and ‘get well soon’ balloons in the room were anything to go by, and the sulky ghosts, pale, skinny, scarred, who clustered in the corner as if deciding where to go next.
As the nurse, Jason, walked in, the ghosts grew. They glowed, Theresa thought, filled with new energy, and they ushered him forward; Come in, come in sir.
He winked at the girl in the bed. “I’ll check ya later,” he said, hands in his pockets as if it all meant nothing. The ghosts sucked in close, happy, ready, they knew him.
She followed the nurse to a bar, she drank with him, she went home with him. She’d researched him, asked around; he was an unlucky one, people said. Wonderful carer, but unlucky. So many patients lost.
She didn’t have sex with him; she hadn’t had sex with a man since Ben’s death. Instead, she doctored his drink and watched as he tried and failed to fight sleep. She washed her hands in the bathroom, ignoring the pale, drained ghosts perched on the edge of the bath. She found enough in his home to know what sort of man he was. Boxes with a photo of a dead person in a hospital gown and an item; an earring, some fingernail clippings, a bedsock. Items he could steal without anyone noticing. It was evidence she understood, but not that the police could act upon.
Theresa sent the nurse some extra material in the mail, and she made sure he was at home before she called the police. She knew they’d find enough to lock him up. Magazines, DVDs. Evidence of an unhealthy obsession with children and death. He spent a week in remand before being released on bail. Three days later he committed suicide in his bathroom; his father was a priest, his mother a nurse in a Catholic hospital and it seemed he couldn’t face the shame.
He would make no more ghosts happy.
She suffered memory loss, or more precisely, memory replacement. She remembered things that had not happened, she was sure of it. Her head ached for a week—a thin, high pain behind the eyes—and she didn’t speak to her mother or her sister because they would know there was something wrong and she didn’t want to field questions. She didn’t want to hear ‘since Ben died’, words she heard too often from both of them.
The Fourth Intervention
Theresa intervened for the fourth time when she worked to find a home for a father and his two teenagers. He was a huge man, silver-haired, charismatic. Theresa had been as convinced by him as everybody else. His charm and his apparent kindness blinded people.
“We had to sell the house to pay for her defence,” he said. “And the car. And cancel birthdays and Christmas.” He blinked tears. “And we still failed. All that and we couldn’t keep her out of jail.”
Manslaughter; driving home drunk his wife had killed a father of five and badly injured his fifteen year old son.
“I told her not to drink,” Client D said. “I begged her.”
Theresa found them a clean, sizable house, near the shops and schools. She dropped by with her usual basket of settling-in treats; biscuits, cheese, chocolate.
The young girl who opened the door was pale. Still grieving, Theresa thought, but then she saw two ghosts, sitting on the bottom step, wrists slit, blood pooling at their feet.
“Is your dad home?”
The girl lifted her shoulders, not quite a shrug. “Dunno.”
There were voices from the lounge room. “He said it was okay to have friends over.”
Her brother appeared; he bore a stark resemblance to his father. His ghosts, green, their arms pocked with needlemarks, joined the others on the stairs.
“You’re the one who got us the house,” he said.
Theresa nodded.
“Thanks. Drink?” He held up a beer can and she nodded, then shook her head.
