All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

  Greta screams, a primal howl. Deep terror in it. But rage in it, too. Fight. She thrashes along the ground and an arm slips free and she punches at her captors. The man in the hunting jacket kicks her hard in the stomach and the blow winds her and she sucks deep for breaths that don’t fill her lungs.

  ‘Lemme go,’ she says, but the words barely come out.

  George Kane stands over her now as she lies flat on the ground, his face – his disfigured and crusted face – close to hers. His right hand is big enough to grip both of her cheeks and squish her lips together.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ he sneers. ‘Don’t you see, pretty girl? We cannot let you go, pretty one. You will run back to what’s left of your home and you will tell the survivors of that airborne apocalypse that you have found a paradise deep in the scrub and they will come for us and they will bring all their fear and prejudice with them and they will turn our new sanctuary into the same hell they just watched burn to dust.’

  Then the thumping. Greta turns her head and sees the three rusted steel-block stamps piled on top of each other thumping into flattened earth. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Kane grips Greta by the neck and pulls her. Closer, closer, closer to the thumping stamps of the crushing plant, which feels alive to Greta, a living thing of metal and oil, monstrous and hungry, with rotating arms and jaws and a need to crush her skull like a block of mineral-rich quartzite.

  Kane shouts at the red-haired boy. ‘Rope!’

  *

  Molly drowning. Molly with nothing left. The bald man’s right arm forcing her head into the still creek water. She is Ophelia now in the grip of the brook. She will not have her Christian burial. Maybe she doesn’t deserve one, anyway. She thinks of her father in the fork of the tree in Hollow Wood Cemetery. She should have buried him properly. She counted at least six holes the Japs had dug deep enough with their sky bombs. She could have pulled Horace from that tree and placed him in one of those holes and sent him back to the earth that made him.

  But she had to walk away. She had to find Longcoat Bob before it was too late. She had to find the sorcerer before her heart turned to stone like her father’s did so close to the end. A stone heart like his brother’s, like her uncle’s. Uncle Aubrey. The bald man’s face, she remembers. It was disfigured. But beneath the bald man’s swellings and lesions was a face that reminded her of her uncle’s face. Could that be possible? A dark magic, perhaps. The work of Longcoat Bob? She left her uncle to squirm and rot in the Darwin sun back there in Hollow Wood Cemetery. But maybe Longcoat Bob resurrected Aubrey Hook’s soul, or the earth did, and placed it in the body of the deranged bald man whose arm seems so filled with strength and hate as he holds her down, down, down inside her water death.

  Sam said the earth would rebel. Sam said the earth would not want her here. But who said Molly Hook was not allowed to rebel too? Dig, Molly, dig. Dig for your courage. Dig for your rage.

  And the gravedigger girl thrashes her head in the water and pushes her head back against the hand that holds her down. Her legs kick and kick and thrash against the rocks on the surface and then, as if the earth is responding to her will, relenting to it, the hand holding her hair and her head falls away, the pressure eases. And the clear water surrounding her turns red.

  Her head is still underwater when she sees the body of the bald man fall in and down into his own water death, the eyes open on his disfigured face, looking back at Molly. Such surprise on that face, such confusion. Then Molly’s underwater eyes find the source of his puzzlement: a hole in his stomach, leaking blood into the water in the languid way the smoke from Bogart’s cigarette can fill an office. Blood folding in the water like cirrus clouds in a blue sky.

  Molly lifts her head out of the water and sucks air into her lungs and turns to find the Japanese pilot standing above her, his sword fixed in his right hand, its short blade red with the blood of the man who now floats face down in the creek.

  ‘Yukio,’ Molly whispers. She breathes again, hard and fast, her backside flat on the rocky creek bank. Soaking wet.

  ‘Yukio Miki,’ she says, pointing at the pilot, between further sharp inhalations. ‘The good one.’ Gathering her breath, but needing to acknowledge this. ‘I knew it, Yukio, I knew it.’

  The wonder of all this. She points at him again. ‘The good one who fell from the sky.’

  *

  Thump. The steel block stamps meet the ground and the brief shockwaves of that meeting reverberate beneath Greta’s flat back. Thump.

  ‘Who told you about us?’ Kane barks.

  ‘Nobody!’ Greta says. Her arms are outstretched and her hands are bound by rope that tears at the skin on her wrists. Circles of blood around her ankles where her feet have been roped together too tight.

  ‘Who else knows you’re here?’ Kane blasts.

  ‘Nobody does,’ Greta says. ‘Please. Please. Nobody knows we’re here. We came looking for someone.’

  Thump. Thump. Thump. Steel blocks smashing against the earth.

  ‘Who are you looking for?’

  ‘The girl,’ Greta says – there are tears in her eyes now – ‘the girl believes she’s had some sort of curse put on her. She wants to find the blackfeller who can take the curse away before her heart turns to stone.’

  She shakes her head. It sounds foolish saying it out loud. She breathes hard. ‘That’s the truth,’ she says. ‘You let us walk out of here and we won’t tell a soul about this place. I swear that to you.’

  Greta pants. Panicked. Primal. Kane studies the actress’s eyes.

  ‘Throw me that bag,’ Kane says to the red-haired boy, who immediately slings Molly’s duffel bag to his boss. Kane kneels, dumps the bag’s contents at his feet. He inspects a couple of food tins. Flips through the Shakespeare. Scans the gold pan briefly and tosses it aside. Then he holds the blood-red rock up to Greta’s eyes.

  ‘What’s she carrying a rock for?’ Kane asks.

  Greta shakes her head, confused. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I’ve never seen that rock before.’

  Kane drops the rock and finds Molly’s paring knife. ‘The girl is not cursed,’ he says. ‘How could she be cursed when she has just lucked upon the new world.’

  The steel stamps thump into the ground. Kane leans over Greta’s face. His body so large. The smell of toil. Yellow pus inside the open lesions on his neck. He runs the point of the knife along the bruising on her eye.

  ‘Someone tried to disfigure you,’ he says. ‘Who did this to you?’

  Greta is silent.

  ‘Answer me,’ Kane says.

  ‘Just someone I knew back in Darwin,’ she says, quietly.

  ‘Someone you loved?’ Kane asks, softly.

  Greta nods. Kane turns to the red-haired boy. ‘Go to the house, Shane.’

  The boy stomps like a petulant child. ‘But you said I’d have my time.’

  ‘Your time will be with the girl,’ Kane says. ‘But all in good time, Shane.’

  Shane runs off along a path that fringes the mine entrance and disappears into the scrub.

  Greta reels in horror, bringing her knees to her chest. ‘Get away from me, you fucking animal,’ she screams. She pushes herself across the ground with the heels of her tied feet.

  ‘Sssshhh,’ Kane says. ‘Please understand that if you move again I will be forced to keep your head extremely still beneath those steel blocks. Please tell me you understand?’

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  ‘It’s a new world, Greta,’ Kane says. ‘There are no rules in this new world of ours. There are no laws.’

  Greta shaking. She nods. She weeps.

  Kane’s thumb wipes away a tear. ‘He tried to make you ugly,’ he whispers. He runs his thumb now across her face. ‘He failed.’ He smiles. ‘Who would do this to something so beautiful?’

  Greta shivers.

  ‘I will never do this to you,’ Kane says. ‘We will treasure you. We will always know what you are.’

  Greta shivers, moves
her head away from Kane’s fingers.

  ‘What am I?’

  ‘You are the beginning,’ Kane says. And his eyes move down her body to the hemline of her emerald dress and the skin of her thighs beneath it.

  ‘You are Eve,’ he says.

  *

  The man in the red shirt with the black stockman’s cap runs along the path to the creek to help his friend, Hoss, bring back the strange girl who could handle herself with a shovel. His name is Kenneth Spencer and he’s thirty-six years old. He has always believed in the things George Kane told him, but he believes them more than ever now. George told his men the old world was done for. He told them about the Kraut with the funny moustache who was putting an end to England. He told them about the Italians and the Japanese who would help destroy the old world. He promised his men there would be women for the new world when the old world ended, and Kenny Spencer knew every one of those words to be true the second he saw the gravedigger girl and the actress wander into their bustling tin-mine utopia.

  Kenny Spencer bounds through a thick wall of palms and ferns and finds himself at the flat rock by the mine’s well-frequented creek, where he sees the girl who steeled his beliefs. She’s sitting by the creek edge on her backside. He runs to her but then he stops. The girl hugs her knees to her chest looking into the water at something that has made her frightened. It’s a man floating face down. A tall bald man. It’s his friend, Hoss.

  The girl turns to Kenny Spencer. ‘Please don’t hurt me,’ she says.

  And Kenny Spencer realises there is more to this girl than George led him to believe, and if there’s more to the girl then there might be less to George, and that makes him uneasy about the new world. And this is the last thought he has, staring into the eyes of the girl by the creek, before a cold blade slices across his Adam’s apple.

  Molly watches the man in the red work shirt and braces collapse onto the rock floor, blood streaming from his neck like a burst water bag, leaving only the figure of Yukio Miki, of the day sky, standing, with his pilot boots two feet apart, braced for any further attack from beyond the forest walls.

  Molly nods her approval, then she stands and hurriedly dusts the dirt and rock debris from her hands. ‘Greta,’ she says, rushing past the man with the bloody sword.

  She leads the way back to the tin mine through the avenue of blue cycads the colour of the moon. The loud thumping of the rock-crushing stamps rumbles beneath their feet and Molly treads lightly as she approaches the mine entrance.

  She turns back to Yukio and puts a finger to her mouth. ‘Sssshhh.’

  *

  The metal arms and jaws and legs of the crushing plant. Cranks turning, shafts spinning. The steel block stamps, still thumping into the earth. The loudness of it all. The machinery of it. The man in the hunting jacket standing at a distance from the drop of the crusher stamps. He watches his boss, George Kane, who has his back turned to him, leaning over the actress, cutting the last threads of rope that bind her ankles. The colour and shape of the actress’s legs have excited the man in the hunting jacket and he thinks about running his hands over those legs and spreading those legs apart and he thinks about pounding the actress’s insides with the force of the crushing stamps that pound so loudly behind her and this thought is the last he has before a cold, sharp sword blade runs silently across his throat. The man in the hunting jacket falls to the ground, but Kane does not hear his friend’s death unfolding over the sound of the turning and thumping machinery.

  Yukio Miki now silently approaches George Kane’s turned back. The heavyset miner cuts the last link in Greta’s ankle ropes and gently shifts her legs apart. Yukio raises his sword, two hands on the hilt held high, the blade pointing downwards like a fighter plane set to fly into the target of the stranger’s large back. He says a word in Japanese: ‘Yamero.’ But he’s not heard in the sound of the machinery. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  He says it louder: ‘Yamero!’ And Kane turns and his face turns white when he sees the vision of a Japanese soldier with the sun behind his back, body glowing, light shimmering off the blade of a raised sword.

  Yukio’s eyes fix on the stranger’s blood-red eye and then fix on the paring knife he holds in his right hand, and the pilot hacks instantly at Kane’s right wrist, but the hallowed Miki blade severs limbs in a single swing only in the family stories that Miki men have passed down through generations. Yukio hacks again at the wrist and Kane is left stunned by the sight of his right hand hanging loosely by a thin bridge of flesh.

  Eventually he gathers his thoughts and, in turn, finds his rage and he charges at the Japanese sword carrier, who changes the thrust of his elbows and instantly braces himself to drive the blade deep into the giant one-eyed man’s round belly. But the rage-filled miner keeps moving forward along the blade until the hilt guard is pressing against his skin and the blade tip has pushed through to his spine.

  Kane’s big left hand reaches for and grips Yukio’s throat, and the bloody nub of his severed right wrist pushes deep into the underside flesh of the pilot’s jaw. Kane drives with his legs and Yukio, two hands still grasping the sword hilt, is lifted up and carried for several yards before Kane drives the pilot’s back hard into the ground as he falls forward on top of him. Then the giant with the sword through his gut presses all of his weight on Yukio and invests every last ounce of his strength into choking the Japanese pilot to death.

  Five seconds. Eight seconds. Yukio gasping for air. Up this close to Kane, Yukio Miki wonders for a moment in this brief hell if he has found himself before an oni, one of the supernatural demons his grandfather Saburo told him about as a boy, those giant disfigured monsters who passed across the demon gate from the world of darkness. They had a third eye mashed into their foreheads and they had extra fingers and toes and strength enough to walk with blades pierced through their stomachs.

  Ten seconds. Twelve seconds. Yukio out of breath, feeling like he’s swallowing his own Adam’s apple. The hand and the nub of a monster. I’m coming Nara, he tells her. I don’t know how it came to end like this, dear Nara, but I am coming.

  Then a large red rock shaped like a heart smashes into Kane’s right temple. Then it smashes again and again and Greta Maze howls with fury as the blood-red rock that Molly took from inside the bone pillow of her mother’s chest meets the bones of George Kane’s face. Still the monster squeezes the pilot’s throat and still the actress smashes the rock against the side of Kane’s face.

  ‘Animals!’ she screams, and she is rage and blood and fear and she is past and she is present and when she screams that word again – ‘Animals!’ – she is including herself in the gallery of monsters in her mind.

  The falling steel stamps of the crushing plant. Thump, thump, thump. The rock hitting the side of the giant’s head, his blood splattering onto the face of the Japanese pilot, until, at last, George Kane slumps still and dead on top of Yukio Miki. Greta pushes hard at Kane’s side and Molly is there now to help her, and the actress and the gravedigger girl heave the miner off Yukio and onto his back with the hilt of the blade still lodged in his belly.

  Greta stands over the Japanese swordsman. Her hands and body are covered in blood. Yukio sucks air back into his lungs as he watches the actress go and wipe her hands on the pants of the dead miner and then he watches her walk back to him and stand over him once more, breathing, breathing, breathing and studying his face, staring into his eyes, examining the splatters of blood across his skin. And then she extends her right arm. She offers the pilot her hand, her shaking right hand. And he raises his right hand up to hers and the two hands meet in the middle of the silent space between them.

  Greta Maze pulls Yukio Miki to his feet.

  The questing shadow man. He does not stop to vomit. He spews three mouthfuls of blood and bile as he walks, and the vile stomach slurry showers the spear grass of the floodplain far beyond Candlelight Creek. The sun is high and hot but his body is cold and shaking. He drinks from floodplain waterholes but what his
body needs more than water is gin, vodka, whisky. Turpentine. His hands shaking, his knees shaking, but he walks on because the hate inside him is the only thing he has to keep him warm and moving. Only animal now. Only hate.

  Head aching. Clammy skin. The bite wound in his shoulder blade still weeping and full of vivid yellow pus. Dizzy. He passes purple and pink flowers and he turns back to these kneehigh flowers on occasion because he could swear the flowers have eyes for petals and these eyes are following him, but every time he turns back to catch them staring they look away. Weak muscles moving so slow but a heart beating so fast. He walks through a small city of meridional termite mounds and he believes for a moment he is walking back into Hollow Wood.

  In one straight row of termite mounds he sees the names of Tom Berry’s kin because all he sees is hate. He sees their names on their gravestones and he sees their reasons for being buried in the ground. The most profound and rotten season of bad luck to ever befall a single family in all of Darwin history. Some four members of Tom Berry’s kin, all of whom perished within three months of the night the black sorcerer named Longcoat Bob pointed his finger at Tom Berry from the doorway of the Darwin town hall.

  Aubrey looks deep into the face of a large termite mound. He sees a name in bold letters written across a gravestone. ‘Theodore Berry, 1866–1916’. Tom Berry received the news in a telegram only five days after Longcoat Bob made his announcement in the town hall. His brother, Theo, the eldest of the three Berry brothers, had been working alone as he often did during the slower seasons on his wheat farm in Clermont, central Queensland. When production was halted by a blockage in his grain silo, he tied a safety rope to his waist, as he had done numerous times, and lowered himself into the silo to unclog it. When the safety rope snapped, Theo found himself immersed to his shoulders at the centre of a cone-shaped depression of wheat grains. When he tried to dig himself out, the mounded grains began to slowly slide down the cone-shaped slopes and engulf him. He called to his wife, Marg, who could not hear his desperate pleas for help because she was weeding the front garden of the couple’s farm cottage, some sixty yards from the grain silo. Remaining perfectly still, Theo Berry managed to slow the gradual slide of the suffocating grains, which was pressing down hard on his chest and eventually his throat, long enough for Marg to realise her husband wasn’t coming to the house for his usual afternoon tea. Theo heard Marg’s calls beyond the silo walls just as his mouth and nostrils were filling with seed.