All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  Yukio lifts the lantern up with the sword blade and transfers it to his left hand before sliding his sword back into his belt. He bites on the metal lantern loop, moves to the bed, drags Greta to its edge and heaves her onto his right shoulder, adrenaline supplying the extra strength he needs to lift her dead weight. Then he reaches for a handful of the sheet that’s wrapped around the baby who fell from the sky, and the baby rises with the sheet like he’s sleeping in a pillow case.

  ‘Noooooo,’ wail the woozy onlookers as they circle around the pilot.

  Yukio kicks at them hard, thrashes his legs around wildly, driven by primal fear and primal rage and he barges through the group and back out the cavern’s entrance, back into the black corridor, the lantern providing just enough light.

  ‘Ease the pain!’ Marielle hollers after him. ‘Ease the pain!’

  And Yukio runs because he now knows what this place is. So far from the Plain of High Heaven. This is the nether world. This is Yomi-no-kuni. This is the World of Darkness. This is the land of the dead.

  MOON TRUTH

  She stands alone at the edge of the world. The gravedigger girl and a high night wind behind her back pushing her floppy brown hair, curled like her mother’s, forward across her face. I will never be afraid, she tells herself. But she is. That is the truth of it. Night skies tell no lies. She is alone. That is the truth of it. She is sick in the stomach because she dragged her only friends into a hell that she made. Only her. That is the truth of it. I feel no pain, she tells herself. But she does. Night skies tell no lies. Night skies tell her the cold hard truth that she’s on her own.

  The gravedigger girl in the sky-blue dress with the shovel and the duffel bag, standing on a sandstone plateau overlooking a valley of natural stone formations so bizarre and intricate she wonders if they were made by the ancients. Made by the women with the quarter-lemon heads she saw back in the gallery chamber.

  Three distant forks of electric-blue lightning strike the moonlit horizon and the stone valley becomes a city. A city of giants. Men and women of stone bending and bowing and reaching for each other in the night wind. Molly tilts her head to the night sky. Star blanket with a full moon pillow.

  ‘“City of stone ’tween heaven and earth,”’ Molly says to the night sky.

  And the night sky responds. ‘“The place beyond your place of birth.”’

  Molly plants her boots into a loose scree slope of sandstone rubble and begins to slide down the edge of the plateau.

  ‘Where are you going, Molly?’ the night sky asks.

  ‘I’m going to find Longcoat Bob,’ she replies.

  ‘But you heard the woman in the cave,’ the night sky says. ‘Longcoat Bob is dead.’

  ‘Do you believe her?’ Molly asks the night sky.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Night skies tell no lies,’ Molly says. ‘But why would that old woman lie to me?’

  ‘Because she wanted you to stay there with them.’

  ‘Why would they want me to stay?’

  ‘Because you’re a good one, Molly,’ the night sky says. ‘Because you’re special.’

  ‘I’m not special,’ Molly says. ‘I bring bad things to every single person I care about. That’s why my grandfather locked himself away for all those years in that house. He didn’t want the bad things to spread. He knew he had to be alone.’

  Molly comes to an expanse of white rocks, a scattering of angular chalky boulders maybe one hundred yards wide and one hundred yards long. She talks to the night sky as she frog-hops between the rocks, her legs moving faster than her eyes sometimes, instinctively bouncing between the flattest landing surfaces she can see in a night turned to deep blue and silver by the moon.

  ‘You should turn back,’ the night sky says. ‘You should go home.’

  ‘Home?’ Molly echoes. ‘I’ve got no home to go to. Darwin doesn’t even exist anymore. I’m not even sure if Australia does. Why are you telling me to go home?’

  ‘Night skies tell no lies,’ the night sky says. ‘You have come too far and you know it. You were so brave to make it this far, but you need to turn back now. You will die out here, Molly. That’s the truth.’

  ‘But Longcoat Bob is out here,’ Molly says. ‘I need to find him.’

  ‘What if you find Longcoat Bob and you don’t like what he has to tell you?’ the night sky asks.

  Molly hops to her left, hops to her right, zig-zagging over the rocks. At one point she props Bert the shovel in the dirt floor and pole-vaults between two high slabs of stone.

  ‘What could he possibly tell me that could be worse than anything I’ve already been through?’

  ‘He’ll tell you the truth, like me,’ the night sky says.

  As she leaps from the last of the white rocks, she comes to two towering, human-shaped formations, maybe eighty feet tall. Each of these segmented rock structures has a pillar for legs, a fat slab of sandstone for a torso and a balanced ball of rock for a head. They seem to be looking down on her and they stand like sentinels tasked for eternity with assessing all those who would pass between them into the city of stone at their backs. And she feels that they watch her as she passes between them and enters that city, a place carved by wind and time and turned into something as big as all the street blocks that make up Molly’s Darwin town.

  Millions of years of erosion have fashioned freestanding sandstone blocks with shoulders and wonky heads that seem to be falling off their necks, and fat men pillars that seem to be leaning over in hysterics, and tall graceful women pillars that seem to be gathering in gossip circles, and some conjoined pillars that look like twins or triplets. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of them across the entire city, as crowded together as the punters in Gordon’s Don Hotel public bar on Melbourne Cup race day. Molly was always the short girl moving between all those legs, trying to find her father at the bar because she was hungry and wanted to go home and eat something, but all those tall, high-panted legs became like walls in a maze and she would always find herself lost inside them. ‘Dad!’ she’d scream. ‘Dad.’ But he never heard her amid the din.

  And that’s what this place is. Less a city than a maze. A maze of stone legs separated by alleys of dirt and short clumps of dry spear grass.

  ‘Which way will you go, Molly?’ the night sky asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says.

  ‘Go back home, Molly,’ the night sky says.

  ‘I’m not going back when I’ve come this far,’ she says. ‘I’ll die out here if I have to.’

  ‘I’m sure you will,’ the night sky says. ‘You’ll get yourself lost in here and nobody will ever find you. You’ll waste away at the foot of one of these pillars and the birds will peck out your eyes while you’re still breathing.’

  ‘Stop it,’ Molly says. ‘You’re scaring me.’

  ‘Night skies tell no lies, kid.’

  Molly makes her choice. Molly makes her move. She walks into a narrow alley between two rows of pillars, some with two heads, one with a head like a dingo, one with a head shaped like an axe blade. She tells herself to follow the lightning. Move forward. If she’s moving forward, she is moving towards the lightning and the lightning was striking on the other side of the stone city. If she moves forward she won’t get lost in the maze of stone legs.

  ‘No one is going to come for you, Molly,’ the night sky says.

  ‘Why are you saying that to me?’

  ‘Greta has turned, Molly,’ the night sky says. ‘Yukio has turned. Your mother is dead. Your mother left you here alone, and you will be alone always.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Your mother abandoned you.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘She left you for dead like a lame fawn, Molly. That’s what happens to people with hearts of stone.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘She wasn’t running away from them, Molly. She was running away from you.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  And Molly darts between pillars, skirts the legs
of the stone giants, moving forward in diagonals. Diagonally right, diagonally left, speeding through the maze of legs. Always towards the lightning that flashes ahead in the distance. But then she comes to a wall of eight, nine, ten sandstone pillars that are joined together at the hips. She must go hard left or hard right and she chooses hard right and she comes to a rock shaped like a tortoise and she pats it because she feels that if she pats it she will remember it if she passes it again. ‘Tortoise rock,’ she says.

  She takes a hard left into another alley and then it splits three ways – left, straight ahead and right – and Molly takes the forward path because she needs to follow the lightning and then she can only turn hard left and then hard right into an alley that runs straight for so long that she can break into a jog and she needs to jog because she is frightened and because in the moonlight the stone figures look like creatures bending down to curse her without words.

  She comes to another stone wall and she must turn hard left and she spots a pillar that’s been severed down its middle, as if by a samurai sword and she calls this pillar ‘Yukio’ and she pats it to remember it, and even if she passes it again and is lost she feels that Yukio will save her the way he saved her from the tin miners so far back now in the deep country.

  ‘He’s not coming for you, Molly,’ the night sky says.

  Molly’s heart beating faster. Her mouth dry. She runs down another alley. Forward. Left. Forward. Right. Forward again. Surely she is getting closer to the city’s edge?

  She runs and she runs and she runs and she comes to another wall of pillars joined at the hip and she turns hard right and passes a rock she has seen before. ‘Tortoise rock,’ she gasps. And she panics and she runs faster because she feels the pillars are closing in on her now.

  As she did before, she takes a hard left into the alley that splits three ways – left, straight ahead, right – but this time she takes the left alley which leads past a row of S-shaped pillars like snakes rising to strike. Like the whipsnakes Bert would slice up at home. Like the brown snakes that would cool themselves on the concrete floor of the laundry back home. Home, she tells herself. I want to go home.

  ‘I want to go home,’ Molly tells the night sky.

  ‘Then go home,’ the night sky says.

  And Molly turns back and runs right along an alley and she takes a hard left and then a hard right and comes to another set of snake-shaped pillars, four of them this time, and she runs left and right and zigs past a pillar with a small round head the size of a coconut resting on a torso the size of a large ice chest. Then she zags right alongside a pillar with a horse head and then a pillar that curves like a crescent moon.

  ‘You are lost, Molly,’ the night sky says.

  ‘Stop it,’ Molly says.

  And she runs and she runs and she runs. Left and right and right and left again and she comes to a wall and she turns and comes to a wall and turns and comes to a wall and then she stops to breathe. She rests her head against the sandstone.

  She’s in a box of stone legs with only one way out. And there is no lightning to be seen. No lightning to be followed.

  ‘You are lost, Molly,’ the night sky says. ‘Nobody is coming for you. Nobody wants to help you because you are cursed.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  This stone city has darkened. This sprawling city has shrunk. This place has turned into a cave. This is the dark place. The sad place.

  ‘I know why she left you, Molly.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘She left you because she could not love you.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘I know why you want to find Longcoat Bob.’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Shut up!’

  And Molly closes her eyes and she’s standing inside her bedroom again and she’s opening her bedroom door and she’s walking down the hallway.

  ‘He will not tell you what you want to hear, Molly.’

  ‘I said “Shut up!”’

  And now she’s standing in the doorway to her mother’s bedroom and the moonlight shines across her mother’s face and Violet Hook is staring at her daughter, Molly, and Violet Hook is weeping.

  ‘You want to find Longcoat Bob because you want him to tell you lies,’ the night sky says. ‘You want him to say it’s not true.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘You want him to say it’s not true what he did to her.’

  ‘Stop it!’

  And the shadow wolf is moaning in the dark and the shadow wolf is clawing at her mother. And a voice from behind whispers her name. ‘Molly.’ It’s the voice of Horace Hook, standing in the light of the kitchen.

  ‘You want him to say he’s not the wolf.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  And Molly Hook turns back to the bedroom to find the face of her mother in the moonlight, but it’s not her face she finds. It’s the moonlit face of the shadow wolf. It’s the night sky face of Aubrey Hook.

  ‘You want him to say he’s not your father.’

  ‘STOP IIIIIIT!’ Molly screams to the night sky and she grips Bert in her hands and she swings hard at the sandstone wall and Bert’s blade hits it with such force that brief firework sparks pop from its edge and Molly plants her boots in the dust and swings again and the blade smacks against the stone but the stone does not crack in two so she swings again and again and again and the stone is her past and her present and her sky and her mother and her father and the stone is Yukio Miki and Greta Maze and the stone is Aubrey Hook.

  ‘Stop it!’ she screams. ‘Stop it!’ Crack. And Bert’s blade snaps clean away from his long wooden handle.

  The gravedigger girl beneath the night sky holding the headless body of her only friend. She looks to the ground and finds the shovel blade in the moonlight. ‘Bert,’ she whispers. And she falls to the dirt and spear grass floor and she holds Bert’s blade in her lap as she rests against the rock wall and she wants to cry but she can’t because she’s cursed.

  ‘Your pocket, Molly,’ the night sky whispers.

  And Molly reaches into the pocket of her sky-blue dress and grips a small piece of fruit. She turns the fruit in her palm. Orange and round and hard-skinned. A death she carries in her hand. A death that grows on trees in the deep country.

  TRUE LOVE IS BURIED TREASURE

  Yukio Miki holds the winged brown seed capsule of a stinkwood tree. It is long and curved and shaped like an aeroplane propeller blade. He raises it high and drops it and watches it twirl as it falls, spinning fast like the propeller blades on the Zero fighter he watched crash into a sandstone escarpment and burn. That seems so long ago now that he feels it was a different man who parachuted from that death fighter compared to the one who rests now on a sandstone rock beside Greta Maze and the baby who fell from the sky. The new man who is worried for them both. The new man who woke from a long sleep.

  Morning sun warms his head and he turns to it and he finds it rising beyond a thin gravel path that leads out of the forest into stone country that spills away to the distant plateau over which he saw electric-blue lightning flash in the dark early hours of the morning. A thin freshwater stream flows by the stinkwood tree carrying fallen seed capsules that now resemble canoes rowing gently into the forest. Yukio wears his white undershirt because he has made a kind of crib out of his flight jacket for the baby to sleep in. He knows the boy, like Greta Maze, has slept too long and he wonders what strange potion those white-haired people in the miner’s cave might have given the infant and the actress to make them both sleep through the brute body-heaving forest trudging that brought them out of that strange monsoon vine land.

  He has rested Greta’s head upon a pillow of rolled-up paperbark he stripped from nearby trees. Her back lies flat on a patch of soft, shaded grass beneath the stinkwood tree, whose shiny silver-brown trunk rises at least fifteen metres from the ground. The wind blows and the tree’s leaves shake and more propeller-blade seed capsules twirl to earth. For the third time in the past thirty minutes Yuki
o places his forefinger beneath the baby’s nostrils and for the third time he is relieved to feel the boy’s soft outbreath.

  Yukio studies Greta’s face. The curve of her cheekbones. Her closed lips and their gentle contours. Her chest rising and falling in the emerald dress. He looks away from her at the very moment when his heart tells him he wants to look at her forever. Zutto. Boundless, measureless, endless.

  He shakes his head. We must keep moving, he tells himself. We must find help for the baby. But you are the enemy, he reminds himself. They will kill you. Because you killed them.

  He kneels now over Greta and claps his hands, hard and loud. Once, twice, three times. ‘Wake,’ he screams. ‘Wake . . . Greta Maze!’ He pushes her left shoulder and her body moves but she does not wake. He puts his fingers on her neck to find her pulse and it throbs every second for five seconds. He’s tired, so he lies down beside the sleeping actress.

  His eyes find a full sky of blue and he begins to talk in Japanese. He speaks of his dream. He speaks of Nara and the weeks and the months during which he watched her disintegrate. He speaks of how he saw no beauty in the world when she left. No colour anymore in the trees and the leaves and the flowers of Sakai. No story anymore in its rivers and creeks. No joy anymore in its people. He recalls how the violent and bloody world war followed her sickness and he felt it was right that the world should burn for letting her go, so he climbed into a fighter plane and his hands that had once gripped wondrous knife blades in his family’s workshop now gripped gun controls and he aimed those bullets and bombs at other men and he cursed them all for being human, for knowing love but not knowing what it feels like to lose it.

  He remembers what the gravedigger girl said in the gallery chamber staring at the Lightning Man: that we are treasure buried under sky. He couldn’t follow all her English words, but he could sense the timbre of her heart, the strange beat of her soul. Love is a hidden treasure, too, he thinks. You meet the one the universe forged in the fire just for you and they bury their love deep inside you but sometimes you don’t even know it’s inside you until it’s ripped out of you, until it’s dug up out of you like pure gold dug out of earth. The hole remains. The hole is never filled and your blood and your soul and your joy and your life leak out of that hole, until you are empty. Until you are a ghost.