After Z-Hour

by Elizabeth Knox

On a hot August day I hitched a ride back up the line with a group of sappers. They were driving a limber loaded with duckboards plastered with the hard scabs of last winter’s mud. We overtook one Tommy troop singing an ‘adjusted’ hymn, and were passed by messengers on bicycles, military police on horses, and a number of ambulances.

  I recognised the Lieutenant at a distance, walking alone, head down, away from our line. He looked as he did when relaxed and off duty: reserved, set aside in his own rare air. As we passed I said, ‘Lieutenant?’

  He looked up, his face not vague with thought, but empty and fatigued.

  I waved to him and he stood still on the road staring after the limber as it rattled on. He stayed standing against the vista of shattered trees, a long avenue of ruined columns, and with distance turned into another phantom among spectral men, horses, vehicles—all moving through the dust.

  A yellowish-skinned man in a blue dressing gown, head a white dome of bandages, slumped in a wicker chair, who said, ‘That isn’t Mark Thornton’s voice.’

  I husked, ‘The wound,’ and had to pick up his hand—bones and tendons rolling in weak, shrunken muscles under loose dry skin—touching it to the scar on my throat so he could feel what he couldn’t see.

  Jill

  After Kelfie ran off we settled down to wait for Wrathall’s return. Ellen and I sat by ourselves at the foot of the stairs, and she coaxed out of me the cause of my distress. I tried, inarticulately, to explain about Dan and Nicky. I told her how I was on my way to my sister Mary, the only person I could expect to help me, whose help, since we’d leaned on each other on and off for over twenty years, I didn’t have to deserve, yet whose help I knew I wouldn’t get, because Mary was happy and in control of her life, and because she believed it was within anyone’s capabilities to be content, or at least resigned. After all, she and Roger were content, pleased with themselves—sometimes I thought almost defensively so, as though they resented being reminded of other kinds of lives, as though they considered that any other lifestyle was an implicit criticism of their own.

  I told Ellen, ‘Mary thinks I’m being inconsistent, because I can’t make up my mind whether to stay with Dan or leave him.’

  ‘Obviously you don’t know yet.’

  ‘I might never be sure. She thinks my inability to make a decision, to know what I want, is one of my “inconsist-encies”—as though we’re supposed to have personalities like egg custard, smooth all the way through.’

  Ellen sniffed contemptuously, then took one of my hands between her warm palms and shifted closer to me.

  After a moment I said, ‘I don’t think it’s possible to be happy.’

  ‘Weren’t you happy before your daughter died?’

  ‘No, not really—now I’m sorry I wasn’t. I don’t understand why I wasn’t.’

  ‘These days perhaps we’d have to know a lot less than we do to be happy.’

  ‘Sometimes I get superstitious and imagine that, just because I’m never content, things get worse, just so that I’ll be able to see how lucky I was when I thought they were bad. I imagined something along those lines when my car got stuck in the slip.’

  ‘Sounds like you think the universe is spiteful—which it isn’t.’

  She let go of my hand to rap her knuckles on the wooden floor.

  We both laughed.

  ‘Hello?’ Hannah called from the middle of the staircase, where she was perched with Basil.

  ‘Can we come down?’ Basil asked.

  ‘If you like.’

  He scrambled noisily downstairs and deposited himself beside us. Hannah followed him more sedately. ‘Perhaps we ought to look for Kelfie,’ she suggested.

  ‘He’ll be sulking somewhere in the dark, don’t worry about him,’ Ellen said, ‘He’s probably eavesdropping right now.’

  ‘Well it’s my fault he left, and I don’t want anything to happen—’ Basil trailed off unhappily as if something had just occurred to him.

  ‘He can look after himself.’

  Hannah turned on the torch for a moment and I realised how closely huddled we were. ‘Look. We must feel besieged,’ I said.

  ‘We’re all sitting inside the light as if it’s created invisible walls,’ said Ellen.

  ‘It reminds me of a game we used to play at school,’ said Hannah. ‘We’d make pretend houses by picking daisies and laying them in lines on the grass, to show where the walls were, and religiously observe the rules about not walking or looking through our neighbour’s walls. But that didn’t stop the bigger boys playing ball from charging through our living rooms all the same.’

  ‘You know what it reminds me of? The circle of light?’

  They looked at me expectantly.

  ‘When I was a kid I took piano lessons—between five and six in the afternoon. In winter Dad would come to fetch me and we’d walk home over a paddock. It probably took about five minutes, but it seemed to go on forever. The paddock was completely flat and had trees at either end that hid the houselights. Walking, all we could see was a small torchlit space, cropped turf and sheep turds—nothing else. It was like our light created our whole world, our only world—’

  ‘That’s like my idea of Hell,’ Basil said. ‘The field never comes to an end. Or you’re on a train which goes into a tunnel and, after a while, you look up from your paper and think, “This has been going on a bit long.” But it keeps on going forever—with just your own face staring at you out of the glass for company.’

  ‘Basil!’ Ellen and Hannah scolded together.

  Behind us came the sound of a latch clicking, firelight shone into the hall, and over us loomed the shadow of the shape in the open doorway. We sat gaping.

  ‘I tried it, and it opened,’ Wrathall said.

  Ellen and Hannah glanced at one another. We stood up and he stepped back into the room.

  The fire was low, coals draped in filmy flame.

  Hannah faced Wrathall and squared her shoulders. ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lock the door.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’ His face tilted down towards hers, unbraced and mild.

  ‘I don’t know. I was asking you. What the hell are you up to?’

  ‘The door jammed and opened of its own accord.’ His hair was wet, Basil’s parka slick with rain. He had put the crowbar down in the middle of the floor. I watched Ellen walk past him and pick it up. She rested it in the crook of her arms, like an Apache warrior cradling a rifle, facing Wrathall’s turned back. Hannah, although aware of this, never moved her eyes from his.

  Basil, who had gone obliviously and single-mindedly towards the fire, had discovered something among the blankets and strewn contents of the pack. He bent and put his hand down into a shadow. It growled.

  ‘He’s here!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Yes. He’s here.’ Wrathall turned away from Hannah, slowly and deliberately. Noting Ellen standing behind him with the crowbar, his face registered amused surprise. He went over to Kelfie and knelt down.

  Basil opened the firebox and took out another couple of logs. Their bark caught quickly and the room brightened.

  Kelfie’s hair was damp, rumpled, dull, and there was clay under his fingernails. Wrathall tapped him on the face. Kelfie muttered something, but didn’t wake. Wrathall unzipped Kelfie’s jacket and pushed the collar back, then withdrew his hand to his own mouth, biting his thumb. He flashed a look at me—an alarmed, guilty look. I saw that Kelfie’s throat was bruised. The sight of it gave me such a shock of fear that I felt my insteps become cold with sweat.

  Wrathall hauled Kelfie into a sitting position and shook him. And, just as he had earlier, when Basil banged him against the wall, Kelfie stiffened and seized the arms shaking him. ‘Get out!’ he commanded.

  Wrathall didn’t release him, and Kelfie, realising who was holding him, said, ‘Oh. I meant to just thaw then go out and come in the other way—’ Then he saw me and closed his mouth.

  Hannah descended on u
s. ‘How did you get in here?’

  ‘Through the floor.’

  ‘I’m serious. I’m sick of all this sneakiness—’ she pointed at Wrathall ‘—like him opening the door, just like that!’ Snapping her fingers.

  ‘Out through the floor, in through the window,’ Kelfie said, watching her out of wide eyes.

  Throughout this, Wrathall continued to grip Kelfie’s arms, staring at him, as if recording every change in his face and voice. Kelfie finally looked back at him. ‘You can let go of me now.’

  Wrathall smiled. ‘Can I?’ he said, and let go. He stood up to face Hannah again. ‘Stop giving me trouble. I’m not lying to you, I didn’t interfere with the door. There is something—unusual—going on here. But I’m not interested in it.’

  ‘Not interested?’ Kelfie echoed, incredulous.

  ‘Don’t threaten me,’ Hannah said to Wrathall.

  ‘I’m not threatening you. I’m not even angry.’

  Kelfie jumped up next to Wrathall. ‘No, he’s not angry. Leave him alone.’

  ‘Or what? You two are up to something.’

  ‘We aren’t up to anything. Together,’ Kelfie amended quietly.

  ‘They’re up to something independently.’ Basil nodded.

  ‘Why were you gone so long?’ Hannah was intent on interrogating Wrathall.

  ‘I dropped the keys on the way down. It took me ages to find them—’

  ‘Hours?’

  ‘Yes. To find the keys and check for people at the slip. There were none.’

  ‘Hours?’

  ‘Yes, hours. Do you think I liked being out there in the rain?’

  ‘You were supposed to wait till we’d checked the rest of the house.’

  ‘Was I? I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’

  I watched them all, feeling somewhat detached. Then at some point I decided—gliding out of turbulent cloud into calm, clear air—that since I was stuck with these people I should stop resisting them. I said, with great clarity and as if pronouncing law, ‘We should stop keeping secrets.’

  Only Kelfie seemed to hear this. ‘Which of my secrets should I tell? Or should I tell someone else’s?’

  Wrathall’s attention swerved also; he glared at Kelfie.

  ‘Why don’t we all sit down?’ I tried the firm voice I used when Nicky was afraid and upset.

  ‘Yes, Hannah.’ Ellen touched Hannah’s back, then putting down the crowbar she seated herself on the ottoman. Kelfie returned to his nest in the blankets. Basil smiled at me and sat on the firebox. I sat next to Ellen. Which left Hannah bristling at Wrathall, who was looking over his shoulder at Kelfie.

  I consulted my watch: ‘Four forty-five.’

  This information caused an oddly ordinary shift in atmosphere. Ellen got up again, saying, ‘I’d better take out my lenses.’ She began rummaging in her coat. ‘My eyelids feel as though they’re lined with sand.’ Kneeling with a small case before her, she stretched her eye at the corner, blinked, and the first contact lens made a small flashing fall into her palm. She repeated the process with the other eye, licked both lenses and put them away. Peering around the room, her eyes wide, she looked vague and vulnerable. Hannah met her short-sighted gaze and seemed to rethink. She sat down. Wrathall stepped back, leaned against the mantelpiece and said, ‘I didn’t interfere with the door, I had no reason to.’

  ‘Neither did—’ Kelfie began, but Hannah cut him short: ‘We know you didn’t, you were with us when it jammed.’

  Kelfie turned away, his shoulders quivering. He was laughing.

  ‘I believe Wrathall,’ Basil told Hannah. ‘Something unusual is going on.’

  Despite myself I sighed.

  Basil put his elbows on his knees and leant forward looking at the linked fingers of his hands. ‘Jill knows what I’m thinking, and since she thinks we shouldn’t keep secrets I’m going to tell you all a story in a moment, when I compose myself.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Ghosts, I guess.’

  ‘I know a story about ghosts, a true one,’ Kelfie said.

  ‘I suppose it happened to a friend of yours?’ Hannah asked, sounding relatively tolerant. She seemed able to be suspicious and hostile to only one person at a time. At the moment it was Wrathall.

  ‘It happened to a friend of a friend of my father.’ He sat on his heels and straightened his back, as tense and poised as a crouching cat. ‘But ghosts exist. Everything happens at once, so we are all ghosts.’

  ‘Peter Straub said that’s the terrible truth at the heart of every ghost story, we are all ghosts.’

  Basil looked bleak. ‘Do you mean that you think you are dead already?’ he asked Kelfie, who became very still. It was the stillness of a slack tide, a turning tide. After a moment he said casually, ‘No. I don’t exist, I was left holding the lazy-switch in an empty house. I have to recreate myself every day.’

  ‘So you don’t suppose you’re dead because you’re going to die?’

  ‘Of course I’ll die sooner or later, but that’s irrelevant. I’m not particularly interested in death, Basil—I don’t think it means much unless all of us die, and that possibility rather defeats the imagination, doesn’t it? I don’t mean we are ghosts because we’re doomed to die, I mean that we are always what we will be—what we are. Everything happens at once.’ He paused and gave us all a slow, bright smile. ‘Yet although everything happens at once, I can’t change what is happening. For instance, although I wish Princep wouldn’t shoot the Archduke at Sarajevo, I can’t stop him, because the world upon which my mind and imagination works is the world in which Ferdinand is killed.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘Never mind. I’m warming up to tell this story. If it sounds stupid you’ll feel better about telling yours.’

  ‘I wonder.’

  Kelfie took off his wet jacket and pushed it closer to the hearth, then lay back on the sleeping bag and blankets with his hands behind his head.

  ‘I was in Mazatlan in Mexico a couple of years ago, visiting my father. His wife had an old friend who was a roving journalist—a bit washed up—a good writer, but with too many scruples and a tendency to get involved in what she was writing about. Her name was Maxine Baird. She sold most of her work to this trendy-lefty alternative lifestyle magazine called, originally, The People’s Voice.

  ‘Maxine had been drifting around Central America for about five years, and about a year before I met her she had been living in this small Marxist-Leninist republic. There she’d made friends with an Australian photographer, Francis Taylor. From the way she talked about him I gathered she liked him a lot. Francis was, according to her, good-looking, biddable and promiscuous—really popular in the big community of Gringo dropouts who hung out in the capital.

  ‘He worked for Geo and had been sent to photograph the mating “dance” of these rare little yellow birds who live in the jungle of the mountains. For two weeks of every year these birds can be seen perching on branches hitting each other around the head with leafy twigs held in their beaks. What they are doing is coating twigs for their nests with scent from glands in their cheeks—all part of pair-bonding. The local Indians say they are duelling.

  ‘Anyway, Francis travelled around the jungle in search of these WimWims—that’s their name—laden down with photographic gear and escorted by a short, bandy-legged, half-Indian guide. For some reason this guide kept trying to get Frank to try all the native hallucinogenic plants. Frank became cautious only after something the guide shared with him for lunch reacted with a local liquor and he ended up crawling back to the Plaza Hotel seeing everything in a pretty, monochromatic blue.

  ‘Francis kept trying to convince his guide that he wasn’t very interested in experimenting with drugs, and his guide kept insisting that he must, because Francis was a sorcerer.’

  ‘Someone’s been reading too much Castaneda.’

  ‘Can I finish this story?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Maxine and Frank used to have
these late night talks in their rooms at the hotel. She told him about her marriage, how she met her husband when she was studying literature and he was studying law, when she was wearing white lipstick, minis and knee-length boots and he had long hair and headbands. He gave her a political education—now he was a partner in a prestigious Los Angeles law firm, and she was having trouble with her passport every time she went back to America.

  ‘Frank told Maxine that he supposed he was a sorcerer. Though it was true he sometimes abused his persuasive power (like when he told an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, drinking in the hotel’s bar, that he’d read an inside scoop on how the Russian Embassy in the capital was using some sort of gas to make everyone in the Presidential Palace—the government that is—behave just a little crazy); though it was true he told stories (“defensive storytelling” he called it, because the official was being officious and he preferred to be treated in a more personal way by everyone) he was also a sorcerer. He had always been able to see pieces of his own future, like a road illuminated, here and there, along its length, but with pitfalls of darkness between each light.

  ‘He volunteered this information straight, then started to make jokes about how he was his own ancestor. His grandmother had a portrait of his great-great-great-grandfather, and the face in the age-darkened oil painting was his own: Francis Taylor, bom 1960, died 1834.

  ‘Which brings me to the ghost part of the ghost story. The reason why Francis’s lie about the “Russian experiment” was so nasty was because quite a few people in the government were crazy. Six months before Francis had arrived in the country, the Minister of Indian Affairs, a loyal member of the Frente Democratico y Revolucionario, had gone berserk. Time magazine said, more or less, it was because they were all unscrupulous, bloody-minded people, unfit to look after the interests of the people of this once democratic nation. The older members of government said it was the stress of working seventeen hours a day, seven days a week to rebuild a country over the graveyard the previous regime had made of the place. While some of the younger government members, friends of the guy who went berserk, said it was possession, hauntings and generally evil forces at work.