The Underhistory

People come to visit my home and I love to show them around. Of course it’s not the original house where it happened. That was destroyed when my entire family died. But I don’t think their ghosts know the difference. Pera was twelve the day the pilot intentionally crashed his plane into her family’s grand home, killing them, their friends and the Australian prime minister. She was the girl who survived the tragedy, a sympathetic oddity, growing stranger by the day. Over the decades she rebuilt the huge and rambling building on the original site, each room telling a piece of the story of her life and that of the many people who died, both before and after the disaster. Her sister, murdered a hundred miles away. The soldier, broken by the war. Death follows Pera, and she welcomes it in as an old friend. On the day she runs the last haunted house tour of the season, an unexpected group of men arrive. One she recognises, but the others are strangers. But she knows their type all too well. Dangerous men, who will keep an old woman alive only so long as she is useful. But as she begins to show them the house and reveal its secrets, the dangerous men will learn that she is far from helpless. After all, death seems to follow her wherever she goes...Sinister and lyrical, The Underhistory is a haunting tale of loss, self-preservation and the darkness beneath.

Kaaron Warren is the author of the novels Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification and The Grief Hole and the short story collections Through Splintered Walls, The Grinding House, and Dead Sea Fruit. Her short stories have won Australian Shadows Awards, Ditmar Awards and Aurealis Awards. She lives in Canberra, Australia.