‘My name’s Barker.’
‘Is it, now?’
‘Barker Moon.’
‘And that’s not a stage name?’
‘No, it’s real.’
‘Your real name. Well, I have a stage name, but my real name is Frederick. Frederick Austerlitz.’
Frederick’s hand was thin and wiry also, but the grip was firm, more solid than Barker’s given that he had held back for fear of too tight a squeeze.
‘I’m sorry to unload all of this on you, but it’s come to be rather overwhelming. I’m babbling a bit with the disorientation, I think.’
‘Well that’s alright. I think we all do that from time to time. You really don’t know who I am, do you?’
‘I’m sorry. Are you famous? Are you on the stage? Or in the movies? I don’t go to the movies. My nephew is a projectionist. He tells me the stories, but I prefer to read. Perhaps I’d know your stage name?’
‘Perhaps,’ Frederick smiled. ‘Well, I never. Perhaps if you imagined me in a top hat?’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to embarrass you, but I really don’t …’
‘Well. How refreshing. So, Barker, what brings you to the end of the world?’
‘The end of the world?’
Frederick smiled and handed Barker a newspaper from the end of the bar. Barker’s mind was still coming into focus, but the headline and accompanying article was to do with a Hollywood actress who was in town, making a movie about the end of the world. She had claimed, the headline stated, that Melbourne was an ‘ideal place to film the end of the world’.
So that was where he was. The End of the World.
‘She didn’t mean it of course,’ Frederick smiled. ‘I believe there is some doubt as to whether or not she actually said it. But I don’t suppose that matters. It is a terribly good quote, even if it is quite unjustified.’
Very well spoken for an American.
‘The beer here is very good for a start.’
‘I’m taking a while to get used to it.’
‘Good-looking fellow like you, I think you’re going to get along fine. The key to getting along in a city is letting the city get to know you. If you sit around here for a while, you never know who you might meet, or where it might lead you.’
‘Actually, I was hoping you might have some idea as to what I’m doing here.’
‘Me?’ Frederick smiled. ‘I’m just here to get away from things for a while.’
‘Oh.’
‘You’re expecting to meet someone, is that it? Pen friend perhaps? A lady pen friend?’
‘No,’ Barker smiled simply. ‘Nothing like that.’
Frederick nodded and contemplated his beer.
‘Yes, a good beer they do here. My father came from a long line of brewers. So I should know.’
Frederick finished his beer and stepped as gracefully from his bar stool as anyone could.
‘Well, I must be going. You take care of yourself and watch out for those visions. You never know where they might lead you either.’
Frederick smiled, charming as he looked Barker up and down.
‘Why are you here, Frederick?’ Barker asked.
‘Oh,’ Frederick beamed, ‘I make visions. At least, I help.’ He turned and walked cheerfully from the bar. ‘When I can.’
And Frederick was gone.
Barker assessed the paper again and read the article. It was the third of June already. It had been the end of March when he’d set off. He’d heard of Ava Gardner, he thought. But as the closest he came to movies were his nephew’s relayed silver screen experiences, he really had no idea of context. She was a movie star, however, and it was to be expected that their names would achieve some sort of accreditation in the mind.
‘One of a kind, that one,’ the bartender said to Barker.
He didn’t know if the bartender meant Ava Gardner or Frederick, but the elfin chap had been gone a while and Barker suspected he meant the actress.
Barker returned to his room and assessed his packages again.
To call them packages was not exactly accurate. There was one true package, a spell book he assumed from the feel of it. A short examination, early along the voyage, had revealed within the leather satchel an item that had been wrapped within purple velvet cloth. He had not opened the satchel past that initial cursory inspection and it resided within his travel trunk under his shirts and trousers. He had received the distinct sensation that the parcels were not to be tampered with. The sorcerer who had summoned him and sent him off on his mission for the Supernatural Council had not specified as such. It just went without saying. Take them with you, keep them safe, do not touch.
Any sorcerer would feel it.
Alongside his brand new travel trunk, an older one. Much older, he perceived. Not just from the look, but from occult vibrations it gave off. And much heavier than his own. It weighed a ton.
Finally, the most unusual. A plant. A wine barrel, sawn in half, about twenty inches across, within it soil and shrub. He did not know what sort of shrub it was, but it was about three feet high and its thick diamond leaves, dark emerald green, extended probably three inches over the side of the wine barrel pot. His only additional instruction had been to water it once a week. Just one fluid ounce.
Each of his trunks was at the foot of the double bed, an extravagance that the Council had seen fit to provide, for which he was grateful. The potted shrub sat in the corner by the window with the view of the city.
London it was not, but the end of the world …? The weather was gloomy, but that was all he’d heard about Melbourne before departing. It rained all the time. No, come to think of it he’d heard something else. That Greeks liked to emigrate here.
Funny, Barker smiled to himself, the things one picks up without knowing.
The visions came increasingly to him in the days that followed. And Barker would follow each with a short trip to the bar and a cold beer. After a week, he grew accustomed to both.
He supposed that the Council would send someone to get him in due course, and that the dreams and visions were a side effect of the power emanating from the book.
In the visions he saw men returning from the Great War, and things he supposed were in the future. He discovered that he was in a state of Australia called Victoria, and supposed that after all his reading back in London he already knew this. He saw the Olympic Games in Melbourne, which had occurred only a few years before in 1956, and saw another similar event in the future. Such wonders he beheld, and colour and technology. He saw the first settlers in 1835, one hundred years before his own birth, led by a man called Batman, and was briefly, though vividly, exposed to some of their struggles in settling a village on the river which at some point was named Yarra.
After another week he ventured out more often, risked leaving the hotel and inner city entirely, relying on a strong protective spell he’d cast over his room to prevent theft in his absence.
He wandered suburbs with names like Carlton and Collingwood, and would occasionally stop for a cold beer. The suburbs weren’t so different, but everything seemed newer, fresher. There was something about the fact that nothing had been here for much more than a century, if that, which made him feel cheerful. It made him miss London, but made that city seem simultaneously over-laden with history. The people were here for a new start, for the beginning of something. At least, they were on a historical scale.
In one suburban pub he saw a working man bring a glass of beer out to his wife, who was knitting in the front passenger seat of a huge white car called an FJ Holden. They did not allow women in the front bars, and some larger hotels had a separate lounge for ladies.
After a while the winter gloom brought about mild bouts of depression, only a few hours each, as indeed the dark weather had at home. He supposed it was something to do with loneliness. During these times, in which he would return to his room and read, it seemed the more time he spent in his room, the more frequently the visions would descend.
>
The concierge looked at him less and less, but, when he did, with a higher degree of suspicion.
He thought the shrub in the wine barrel was growing, but could not be sure. He thought occasionally of opening the ancient trunk, but always thought better of it. He never considered opening the leather satchel.
As another week passed, it always seemed to be raining. Drizzle, if not heavy showers.
Barker’s bouts of depression lengthened and then started to get the better of him. He started to wonder if anyone would ever come for him. The visions became ever more distinct and yet more banal. They flooded his mind sometimes two or three per hour, sometimes lasting up to a minute each.
He made the acquaintance of several regulars at the bar, including the two regular barmen and a barmaid who worked at night, but never spoke meaningfully with them, and never again openly discussed his mission or his visions the way he had with Frederick. When a vision came while he was at the bar, he would drop his head into his arms and remain that way until the sounds and images passed. One of the young ladies he’d met, who was staying there with her mother while they were on tour, had assumed he was drinking away some great romantic sorrow. She took quite a shine to Barker, he saw, until one of the barmen had whispered something to her about visions. Then she kept her distance.
After that he ceased frequenting the bar, lest they start to believe he was more odd than they already did.
The worst of the visions came with the fourth week.
Everyone knew, had seen the pictures. But the visions presented themselves as though one were really there. It was horrifying. The mushroom cloud and blast of heat. And the noise. The flash, then the explosion. Horrendous.
Anyone would have been terrified at the sight. But to a sorcerer, with a sorcerer’s perception of nature, the horror was ten, perhaps one hundred fold. A sorcerer manipulated nature. Or, rather, found a way to bend the course of nature to his will. But manipulation of nature to this level … it was like rape.
‘Why am I seeing the mushroom clouds, over and over?’ he asked the book, as his fifth week in Melbourne began. His food was being delivered now. A knock on the door, a tray wheeled in, the busboy gone.
The food was very good, but he found no pleasure in it.
He stopped drinking the beer one night upon realising he’d become accidentally pole-axed, after cracking his head against the view of the gloomy city at the end of the world.
He barely recalled the ocean liner and the ocean.
The constant vision of mushroom clouds made him dwell upon the downbeat. The time three years ago when he thought he would lose the bookshop. When Fiona had not accepted his proposal. When the demon on Carnaby Street looked at him as though it had won, and for a second he’d believed the look. When he thought he was going to die at knifepoint on the liner and …
That other time.
The second attack.
A woman, the second time. A middle-aged woman with jet hair and thin lips. A mother and daughter had passed him by, once round the deck before bed, Americans, and they had been cold. They had been wearing long winter coats, huddled together and strolling against the wind, double clip-clop on the wood, and the coats were flapping back in the breeze and the woman had come out of the coat, or from behind the mother and daughter, or something, some camouflage spell with which he’d been unfamiliar and she had a dagger at his heart and she had said to him: ‘Give me your key before you die’ as she came at him black and evil with a cruel and chilling wind.
The protective spell he had cast over his cabin which, theoretically, no sorcerer but himself could penetrate, would have a better chance at being dispelled if they had his key. He used the key every time he went back to his cabin, or departed the cabin, and thus it possessed an iconographic power another would need to attempt to break the spell. After all, he bent the spell, with his will, every time he used the key. It was an enemy’s best chance, and if the key were given willingly, all the better.
He had been so stunned at the attack, which had come a month after the first one, that he had simply not been able to counter it. He had simply fallen backward in shock. But in a flash of sight as he fell, he saw something descend upon the black woman before she reached him. It was like a boulder, dropped from an upper deck. By the time he had scrambled to his feet, she had been crushed. There was blood everywhere. Her body had been reduced to a pulpy mass within the black garments. In fact, the garments in which the goo resided was his only sure indication that the mess had indeed once been his assailant. He had not known what to do, except return to his cabin.
It had been late.
No one had seen.
And nothing was mentioned.
A day later, when he braved resurfacing, this time in daylight, he walked the deck with the other passengers, squinting in the sunlight. He gathered the courage to return to the fore of the ship, where the attack had occurred. There were signs of blood in the cracks between the heavy wooden boards of the deck, but the awfulness had been cleaned up. He supposed someone had found it, and that a roster had been checked. That a stowaway had been assumed to have been crushed to a pulp late at night for no apparent reason. It was a mystery, the less said about it the better, until they docked in Melbourne. He supposed correctly, because in his panic he had read the minds of the crew and found the general consensus toward the incident.
He had not read the minds of anyone on board since he’d first assessed the passengers to see if anyone knew him, or about him, a mild and general telepathic scan. He’d done the same when he’d first arrived at the hotel, two months later. Scans of this nature were forbidden by the Supernatural Council, unless they expressly involved the safety of innocents through occult circumstances. His panic scan, that morning on the liner, had revealed to him his naivety; his two would-be assassins had not registered with him at all when he had made his initial assessment. Therefore, there might be others aboard.
So after that, he’d remained in his cabin for the most part of the final month of the voyage. He cast a general weave about the liner whenever he was out to make people forget he was there, to make himself insignificant.
And now here he was again, hiding in his room. Only now he was not hiding from an external assailant. This time his attacker was, via his mushroom cloud visions, in the room with him.
The book.
Time flew around and through him. The history of the city at the end of the world.
Tall ships and convicts and settlers and soldiers. Churches and hotels, God and ale …
Football.
The creation of the great tramways system.
Buildings and libraries and town halls and hospitals and cemeteries and schools and stock exchanges and houses and houses and houses of parliament and proclamations and elections … it seemed organic, the way the city grew and lived and breathed and produced and destroyed and harvested and expanded and expanded and …
All day, every night, punctuated by mushroom clouds.
He saw a mighty gambling house …
With the mushroom clouds he heard names of places farther away on the continent, like Maralinga and Emu Field and Christmas Island …
Maralinga took him back, further than he thought possible, to the native people, thousands and thousands of years … ceremony and seasons and hunting and laughter and weird tribal music and dancing and scarring—
He had to get out.
He had to get out of bed.
He had to get away from the book.
He looked at the sheets of the double bed. How long had he been lying there, sailing through history? The maid had changed them not half a day ago, but they were soaked. The look on her face … some brand of mild fear. The blankets were now strewn across the end of the bed and the nearby floor, the sheets wet with perspiration. He was cold, and feverish. The gloom remained outside, clouds over the city. Drizzle.
Showers.
He needed a shower. He had never had a shower until he came to the end of
the world. Only baths. But showers were more instant. Everything would be more instant soon. He had seen it. The athletes were faster at the games in the future, the cars were sleeker, the buildings … dear God the buildings … so high. Televisions … he hadn’t had much to do with them. They were omnipresent. He couldn’t comprehend. He didn’t go to the movies, but there were movies and television everywhere, in the home and sliding images, shifting illusions, and changing pictures and all shapes and sizes and sounds, sounds … typewriters that were thin and sleek and portable telephones the size of a cigarette packet.
He recalled as he removed his damp pyjamas that there had been no sound, no sound as it was today, no ambient noise, before the Industrial Age. Just quiet. But the noise had grown. Louder. To the incomprehensible level of the sub atomic.
The water hit him, hot. It burned.
He saw skin burning.
He shut off the shower with, as quickly as he wished he could, the vision.
But that had been good, Barker thought. Reviving.
He could order a plate of chips at the hotel bar. Eat them and have a drink. He had not had a cold beer for weeks, it seemed.
Barker dressed, taking his clothes from the trunk. In a short moment of panic he forgot that he had transferred the leather satchel into the wardrobe in the corner of the room several days ago, a fruitless attempt at distancing himself.
He wondered what day it was. What month.
As it turned out, it was American Independence Day.
He had been in Melbourne, in the hotel, for a month.
Barker knew this because there was always copy of the paper on the bar.
He ordered the plate of chips and accepted the beer and gulped twice. The bartender assessed him sympathetically.
‘Been a while,’ he stated, open-endedly.
‘Yes,’ Barker said. ‘How do I … do I look well?’
‘You look tired, mate. You a writer or something? Spending all ya time alone up there?’
‘How do you …?’
‘We take a stab at guessing every now and then. Y’know, mate. Passes the time. Elsie says there’s no typewriter up there, but we reckon ya keep it in ya trunk, put it away before any of the staff come in for a gander. Watcha reckon?’
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