Jarrah’s grip tightened around his hand. ‘I’m staying with you until we work out what’s going on.’
They edged down the steps together until they came to the outline of a door. Han’s phone made out the outline of an exit sign. ‘Here we go.’ He shouldered the door and pressed against it. He could tell it was open, but it was held back somehow. He pressed again, harder, and heard the sound of something tearing, a strangely delicate and multifaceted noise. The door eventually gave way, diffuse light flooding in. Han stepped forward and suddenly something stuck to him, thousands of strands of a material at once familiar and horrifying. The silky thick material found its way into his mouth and eyes as he flailed around chaotically like every human who has ever walked through a spiderweb. Han had walked into his fair share in his time, but nothing like this. His mind raced instantly to fangs and hairy legs scuttling towards him: the primal insane arachnid fear of any sane person. But somehow no legs crawled across him, no poison was injected into his veins. Instead, he felt Jarrah’s hands tearing the webs off him.
When he was free of the worst of it, Han got a chance to take in the view. They were one level down: more bookshelves in long columns behind glass, a boardroom away to their left. Tiny alcoves for study were cut away from the wall. At first Han thought that he still had webs stuck around his eyes, but then he realised the webs were just everywhere. The walls were covered in them, fractal shapes that played out and along the open air as his eyes followed their lines. What he’d thought was mist was in fact long strands of webs strung across the balconies. It seemed the same all the way down to the ground. As his eyes adjusted, he saw other shapes, darker shapes that moved. Thousands of spiders, each twitching and revolving with every trembling wind that shook the strands of their webs.
‘Fuck,’ Han and Jarrah said, almost simultaneously.
Han made for the exit, but Jarrah grabbed his wrist and pointed back down the hall. An orange light, bobbing like a lifebuoy through the spider’s mist, was growing slowly closer. Han stepped in front of Jarrah and backed her towards the wall, flicking his eyes back to check for spiders. There was the sound of dripping water again. Footsteps now, the sticky sound of wet shoes.
The figure emerged and Han almost laughed at the ridiculousness of it. A woman—or it seemed to be a woman—in bright yellow dungarees and black gumboots, with a small child in a blue coat riding on her shoulders. The woman had a slim black torch in one hand, and a large Macquarie Thesaurus in the other. Water dripped from the lower half of her body. ‘Are you okay?’ she called to them.
‘I guess so,’ Han called back. ‘What the hell’s going on?’
The woman came closer, and Han could see she was young, only mid-twenties at best, wearing aviator goggles, the sort they wore in WWII. Her face with speckled with mud and something else that Han hoped wasn’t blood. Even more strange was the little girl, whose coat was a couple of sizes too big, pockets distended. Her face didn’t betray an ounce of fear, rather an avid interest in everything going on around her. The woman leaned over and the girl hopped off her shoulders. ‘Something’s happened,’ said the woman.
‘No shit,’ said Jarrah. ‘You know what tipped me off? The fucking spiders everywhere.’
The woman nodded. ‘I’m Sammi,’ she said. ‘I’m the head librarian. I know this is a little strange, but it’s new to me as well.’
‘You’re the head librarian?’ Jarrah assessed her outfit with a critical eye. ‘Aren’t head librarians supposed to have buns and wear colourful scarves, that sort of thing?’
‘Maybe,’ said Sammi. Her tone was unhurried, but she suddenly swooped down to her left, twisting her body and bringing down the thesaurus with a whomp against the floor. Something sticky came off when she lifted it up. She wiped the book against her leg, a few spider legs left behind in a brown smear. ‘But I’ve recently had a rapid ascendency up the corporate ladder.’
‘What’s . . . what’s happening?’ said Han, who felt like he’d asked the same questions twenty times.
Sammi removed her goggles. ‘We’re not quite sure,’ she said. ‘We think it’s tied into the sandstorms somehow. And the rain. The river just came up. Downstairs is completely under. Lucky I was in the museum when the alarm went up. Artifacts of Arctic Explorers and Heroes of Aviation. Go together pretty well I reckon.’ She gestured to her outfit like a gameshow host.
‘I’m Emily,’ said the little girl to Han. ‘What’s your name?’
‘I’m Han. This is Jarrah.’
‘Hananjarra,’ said Charlie. ‘Hananjarrahananjarra.’
Han was too confused to try and work out where the little girl fitted into all this. ‘We were studying upstairs,’ he said. ‘We didn’t even notice.’
‘Upstairs? Where upstairs?’
‘The room with all the . . . messy books, whatever it is.’
‘Level Five?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Well you really can’t go up there to study.’
‘Tell me about it. The world can go to shit and we don’t even realise.’
‘We had staff evacuate people, but it came up so fast. The alarm doesn’t even register up there, I don’t think. It’s pretty much storage. Are there any more of you?’
‘Two more,’ said Han.
‘Alright,’ said Sammi. ‘We’ll head up. We can get onto the roof from there and wait for help.’
‘Wait,’ said Jarrah. ‘We can’t get out?’
‘Not downstairs we can’t. It’s all underwater. The army’s coming in when they can. We’re going to have to get helicoptered off the roof.’
‘Wait,’ said Han. ‘I’m confused. I saw out the window. There were cars going around, buses on the bridge.’
‘They’ve told people to get out of the city if they can,’ said Sammi. ‘They say they can’t predict where or why the water’s rising. If you saw anyone, it’s people getting out.’
‘But why did I see a bus going into the city, then?’
Sammi shook her head. ‘I haven’t got a clue.’
‘I’m a clue!’ shouted Emily.
‘What’s that?’ said Sammi.
‘I’m a clue! My mum told me. And the lady from the radio! I get to stay in the library all morning and get as many milkshakes as I like!’
‘The radio?’ Jarrah’s features drew inward.
‘Look!’ Emily reached into her pockets and pulled out from one a slim paperback with the State Library logo emblazoned across it and the other a bag of coffee beans. ‘The book means the library and the coffee means the coffee shop!’
‘Brightman and The Ferret,’ said Han.
‘What now?’ said Sammi.
‘Brightman and The Ferret!’ sang Emily, expertly aping the awful opening sting to the radio show.
‘You’re the missing kid,’ said Han. ‘T-Dough will be so happy.’
‘T-Dough?’ Jarrah laughed. ‘What an excellent name. And he won’t get the prize if we call into the station first.’
‘Fifty grand could come in handy.’ Han saw a proper place to live, maybe a business card with his name on it. Book Trolley Operator.
‘The competition might have an environmental disaster escape clause, though,’ said Jarrah.
‘Either way. As long as we beat T-Dough.’
‘Absolutely.’
***
The rain had cleared, but the sky was still veined with contrails. They came out near the overhang of an exhaust fan, a collection of carpet samples they’d found in a storage cupboard laid out flat to signal any potential rescuers. Despite his confidence about his phone, T-Dough hadn’t managed to get any signal. Sammi filled them all in on what she knew, which was scarce. Sand dunes were moving out west, floodwaters rising with no rhyme or reason all over the city and maybe the state. Something had happened to set it in motion. The ground around them was littered with bats and birds and other creatures, sent off-course by some malfunction to their internal guidance systems or whatever it was that kept them
from careening straight into the ground.
T-Dough continued to fiddle with his phone, unaware that the key to his precious genre-busting radio promotion was only a few feet away from him, playing a complex version of hopscotch with Key, her blue coat flapping out in the breeze. Sammi stood at the edge of the roof, her eyes on the horizon to the south, waiting for the helicopter she was sure was coming from the airforce base at Amberley to save them. Han and Jarrah sat on the opposite edge, side by side, watching the city.
‘I sat next to you a bunch of times in the lecture,’ Jarrah said. ‘I’m not sure you noticed.’
‘I guess I didn’t. I’m very devoted to my study, as you know. The whole world can end and I won’t even notice.’
Jarrah grinned. ‘Anyway, if you want to sit beside me any time and be devoted to your study, that’d be fine.’
‘I’ll see what I can manage.’
The sun broke through a scar in the cloud and lit up the river below them, and the sleek corpse of the overturned boat. The water reached up nearly to the city bypass now, turning as it did with its strange cyclical roll. Instead of its usual lazy drifting current, it came towards the library, in waves, the tips turning to a golden froth as they crested and crashed against the side of the building. An ocean of sorts.
The wind through the ship’s hull made a strange music as it travelled across the water and under the bridge. It came to rest at the tips of submerged street lights, a crooked fence to end its song.
Aftermath - Nick Earls
‘It claimed the douche bags first,’ Brian says in his most ominous voiceover voice as we’re parking the van.
Two bright jet skis are in the rubble next to us, crushed like painted eggs.
Steve leans forward and gives Brian’s shoulder a squeeze. ‘Not all the douche bags, Bri. You made it through.’
‘Nice one, guys. Let’s get the douche-baggery out of the way now as much as we can, okay?’ I am, as always, the dull voice of reason, the droning Jiminy Cricket who keeps Brian Brightman and Steve ‘Ferret’ Fletcher on the right side of the broadcasting guidelines, most of the time.
All the time wouldn’t be right–4BB wouldn’t thank me for keeping its bad boys entirely on the straight and narrow. Bad boy. It’s Brian whose mouth keeps us in the paper and gets up the nose of the bloggers.
Today’s different though. How many days have I pointlessly said that to them? But today actually is different. Since the flood came through, everything’s different. It’s our first OB, and we’re doing it from flood ground zero, the State Library. It’s a time for Brian to mine his deeply buried seam of sensitivity. He’s assured me he has one and, to prove it, he’s brought a genuine seventies jaffle iron, several loaves of white bread, a bag of tomatoes and an esky full of sliced ham and bags of grated cheese.
‘Yeah, but seriously,’ Brian says, as if he’s dropped his douche-bag remark in a rare moment when right’s on his side. ‘What kind of dickhead would have gone out in that on a jet ski?’
We all saw the footage, as floating restaurants crumpled against bridges and lost pontoons bunched like dropped dominoes in the mangroves. People had been out on their jet skis on the fierce water, and two of them made it here, to Grey Street, but no further.
There’s a checkpoint ahead. I’ve got a letter I’m supposed to show if anyone asks me, and this is the first time I’ve needed it.
‘You’re right,’ the officer says, peering into the van to take a look at Brian, who manages to keep his mouth shut. He steps back and takes a look at the rest of the van before bending down to the window again. ‘You’ve got your own power? They’re on generators up ahead, and I don’t know that we can . . . ‘
He lets it hang there. He knows we can’t take power from the rescue effort.
‘All we need’s somewhere to park,’ I tell him. ‘We’ve been told just outside the library.’
‘Righto.’ He waves us on.
Brian flicks at the window controls and the swampy air gusts in.
‘Smells like turd,’ he says. ‘Did you just let one go, Ferret?’
‘As often as possible.’ Steve sticks his head forward between us. ‘You know I’m a big fan of short transit times.’
It’s the last thing he needs to tell us. Steve’s transit times are regularly discussed on air. He calls it a ‘bowel cancer prevention initiative’. We’re not the team for this. When the OB idea came up, it fell our way because our ratings are sliding. I pushed for it to go to afternoons, who had half a chance of handling it decently. But, no.
‘Like a good novel,’ Brian said when I picked him up this morning, with his boxloads of jaffle fixings. ‘Show don’t tell. Those poxy afternooners’d be all hugs and shit when, really, say it with jaffles, I reckon. ’
As we drive along Grey Street, it’s hard to be certain where the road ends and the pavement begins. There’s a silt of mud and sand over everything and the trees and power lines are down. I’m driving mostly from memory. At the library, we’re directed to a place near where the bus stop used to be, and where four orange witches’ hats have been placed to invent some order in the shambles.
‘I’ll get you a librarian,’ the volunteer says, and then pulls out his two-way. He fiddles with the buttons, as though he hasn’t used it much. ‘Darren to base, Darren to base. I’ve got Double B here for you.’ There’s a crackling sound that I can’t quite make out and when it finishes he looks at me and says, ‘No worries. They’ll have someone out here in a minute.’ He’s about to leave us when a new thought occurs to him and he turns back. ‘Watch out for spiders. There’s been a lot of them coming through. They reckon they’ve come in on the trees from upstream.’
‘Spiders? What is this?’ Brian says. ‘The Apocalypse? Watch out for four horsemen?’
He gets out of the van and stands with his hands on the hips, surveying the wreckage while Gary, the technician, and I set up the trestle table.
A woman in her mid-twenties walks towards us across the mud. Her hair’s in a pony tail and she’s wearing hiking boots and a hi-vis vest undone at the front. She’s got a clipboard under one arm.
‘Sammi Bernhoff,’ she says, as she reaches out to shake my hand. ‘Mona’s not around right now, so I’m your librarian.’
‘Bullshit,’ Brian says, as if it’s a greeting. ‘If all librarians looked like you I’d’ve read a lot more books when I was a kid. Or at least perved over them. Where’s your bun?’
She laughs nervously and puts her hand on her hair. ‘I’m leaving the bun to Mona, but don’t tell anyone I said that. I guess it might have been more practical when I was evacuating.’
‘Don’t worry, love, your hair’s not that long,’ Steve says, stepping forward to shake her hand. It occurs to me that he might have made a joke about diarrhoea, and his wry smile pretty much confirms it.
I lurch in and say, ‘Great, Sammi,’ before he removes all doubt. ‘You’ll be on first with Brian and Steve, who you can feel free to call Ferret. We’ll talk about how things are in there, what’s happened to the collection, what the prospects are for getting back on deck in the near future . . . ’
‘Sure, sure,’ she says. She checks her clipboard to match her notes with what I’m saying. She has a pen tied to it with string and she does some underlining.
‘Meanwhile,’ Brian says, ‘can I interest you in a jaffle? All this mucking out must make you pretty hungry. I’ve gone classic. Ham, cheese and tomato. Would’ve knocked up a batch of savoury mince, but we didn’t get much notice. It’s a slow-cooker, that one.’ Sammi looks perplexed, as if the jaffle’s a metaphor, and one she won’t like when she decodes it, but Brian picks up his jaffle iron and flaps its blackened old jaws and says, in another of his character voices, ‘Sammi, you know you want me.’
‘Well of course she wants you,’ Steve says. ‘But what’s a jaffle iron doing talking like Darth Vader?’
‘Fuck it, mate,’ Brian says. ‘It was improv. In improv, every accent’s either Darth Vader o
r an Indian.’
‘Purple towel,’ Steve says, in an overdone version of a Peter Sellers Indian accent. ‘If you want to get into Indian, that’s all you’ve got to say. Purple towel.’
I tell Sammi she doesn’t have to have the jaffle, but Brian’s pretty insistent and already piling on the cheese before I can stop him. Gary confirms that everything’s set up and we’re ready to go after the news. Steve takes his seat and talks to the station, then checks levels on all the mics. Brian plates up Sammi’s jaffle.
She looks at it as if she’s not sure if it’s a prop or the real thing. ‘Oh, do I . . . ’
‘It goes in the mouth, love,’ Brian tells her. He smirks as he works through half-a-dozen follow-up lines, but he keeps them to himself.
Gary calls out, ‘Thirty seconds,’ and Brian finds his seat behind the table, puts on his headphones and pulls some notes out of his pocket.
‘About this far,’ he says to Sammi and she pulls her mic closer. He nods and pushes a button, and the show’s underway. ‘Well, they let us off the leash today and sent us somewhere even less tidy than the studio. Brightman and the Ferret here at Brisbane’s South Bank, at the State Library to be precise, where recovery efforts are underway. We’re here bringing you news, music and the latest in classic jaffles, and our first customer is librarian Sammi Bernhoff. Sammi, can we take it that, in this time of crisis, the library’s temporarily shelved its draconian bag policy for a start?’
Sammi laughs nervously. ‘I, uh . . . ’
Steve steps in and asks her about progress with the clean-up. She checks her clipboard and talks about how many people they have working on site, and the red-bellied black snake found curled up on the State Librarian’s desk.
Brian gazes off into the distance at the broken trees and the army of fresh volunteers making their way down off the William Jolly Bridge.
As soon as there’s a pause he leans into his microphone and says, ‘Yes, quite a day here, Sammi. Some awesome work from everyone trying to get this place back on track.’ He looks down at his notes. ‘But now for the question everyone wants me to put to you – you know they do – what’s your favourite librarian pick-up line? Something guaranteed to hit any librarian right in her Dewey Decimal System?’
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