by Barry Klemm
“Don’t worry about the women,” he shouted to the considerable band of helpers that he accumulated behind him. “Stop the men.”
No one moved. They all knew that such demonic possession was contagious and to touch the victim was to expose yourself to the risk that the demons would transfer through the contacting flesh. That the women were seemingly unaffected did not deny this logic—they were assumed to be under attack by their own demons, which they certainly seemed to be.
Padre Miguel tackled the first man to come by, and was immediately repulsed. It was like throwing yourself against a rock, and the man brushed him aside with a sweep of his arm. The sisters rushed to aid Padre Miguel, bravely overriding their fear that he too might now be possessed. By the time he fought off their attentions and got himself to his feet, the procession had already passed by and was leaving the courtyard.
“Where are they going?” he wondered aloud.
“To Hell,” an old man on the verandah replied, and put his pipe back between his gums.
Padre Miguel and several of the sisters rushed after them. They were going along the path that went nowhere really except to meander along the cliff tops to the next village. It didn’t make sense, but then, perhaps it wasn’t supposed to.
They passed several exhausted and overcome women weeping at the edge of the track but the Padre ordered the sisters to ignore them.
“Get the men,” he was shouting. He remembered shouting it once before.
It jumped into his mind, just for an instant, that all of these men were those plucked unconscious from their boats three months ago. They had lain, unhurt but unconscious, for eight days while doctors and officials came from the other islands and the mainland to determine what Padre Miguel already knew—that there was no reason why they slept so deeply. Demonic possession was immediately suspected.
Then on the eighth day, they all revived as if nothing had happened and returned to their villages and their fishing. He remembered that there had been a garbled telephone call from some lady doctor in some other country who spoke no Spanish but finally got the message across that this might happen, that she had seen something similar, that they would probably be all right. So it was. But now this.
It was as if the sea was calling them, its voice on the wind, screaming above that of the women who carried on frantically, trying to restrain their maddened men. Padre Miguel shook off his thoughts as he caught up with the end of the crazy procession. The sounds ahead had intensified and the screaming was on the wind as if the sea itself was remembering its agonising death. He pressed ahead, and the path through the jungle opened to the sky and sea beyond.
Here the cliffs dropped five hundred feet straight onto the rocks and the surf below and the men were disappearing there, dropping from view one by one. The Padre almost went over himself as he reached the edge of the crag and saw the scene below him. The men walked on, straight over the edge and fell silently, shrugging off the women or else taking them over with them. A dozen shattered bodies already surged amongst the rocks down there, and two more fell while he watched, and then three, their stiff unyielding forms in contrast to the flapping gyrating things that were women who refused to let go of her man until it was too late.
“Madness! Madness!” the Padre shrieked, and rushed forward but the first man he tried to stop almost took the father with him. The sisters grabbed him only just in time—he remembered scrambling wildly as stones and branches came away in his hands as his feet swinging helplessly in space and three more men fell by him, and the more, and more.
By the time the sisters dragged the Padre to safety, all of the men were gone. Those women who had survived were huddled and wailing, screaming to God to take revenge on the sea. The Padre, the horror sweeping nausea and bile through his body, looked down the precipice and saw the bodies crashing together amid the rocks and the waves intermittently spraying pink surf. Padre Miguel had again forgotten to pray, instead he wept, and even shook his fist at the heavens.
“Take me. Why didn’t you take me instead?” he roared.
The sisters subdued him, one even threatened him with a syringe but he shook his head. And then they pointed and he looked that way. Further around, on the cliffs of the next headland, men were walking off the edge and falling unheedingly into the sea.
*
Just short of Dimboola, Brian Carrick pulled the rig off the road and rolled to a stop. It was all wrong but he could not understand how. There was a wayside stop here, deep in a forest of eucalypts and nothing much around otherwise. The starlines, or whatever it was that guided him, had fucked up and brought him here by mistake—of that he was certain.
Maybe he was tired. He had been on the road three hours now after a troubled morning in the yard—it was four in the afternoon, the sort of time when men dozed. But it wasn’t that. He got out of the truck and walked around, boots crunching on the gravel. The day was hot—it was just five days before Christmas—but here in the shade of the gums it was cool and refreshing. No, he wasn’t tired. He was in the wrong fucking place.
At first he wasn’t surprised that the direction had changed, even if initially it seemed the same. The restlessness had come upon him as the morning progressed and he moved about the yard, checking the loads against the manifests, making jokes, ignoring his senses as long as he could.
He was bored, of course. Larry had been pleased to offer him the job of dispatcher and Judy was delighted to get him out of her hair, but he was a driver, not an office jockey. Judy talked a lot about psychiatrists these days, and padded cells, and the relief from that situation was a blessing in itself. But the work bored him—like Clancy of the Overflow, he didn’t suit the office.
More and more, since his recent strange experience—or non-experience—up Kyabram way, he had related himself to bushmen, Lawson figures, classic Australians, which he defined as Europeans skewed by the same effects that the Australian landscape had worked to create aboriginal culture. He was proud to be one of them. His suburban life drifted further from him constantly.
The aborigines, they said, travelled the land along the songlines, invisible emotional navigation routes that took them from one waterhole or hunting ground to the next. The Dreamtime was overlayed with a map of the sacred sites and the rhythms of the bush pointed the way. By this means, Brian felt he was being guided even if, at a more rational level, he was rather more convinced that it had something to do with the stars. What ever it was, they had presently brought him to the wrong place.
He wished it was night and he could see the stars—perhaps they would provide some clue or confirmation. He had spent much time studying star maps and reading astronomy books. He had thought about celestial navigation, but it wasn’t as simple as that, if such a complex thing could be called simple. The stars did not point the way—like the songlines, they simply nudged and bumped him in the right direction.
By lunchtime, he knew he was going. He was tempted to ring Judy and tell her he was off again, but he supposed she would figure it out soon enough. She would protest no more or less for knowing in advance.
“Larry bent over backwards to get you that job,” she would say. “You can’t just walk away from it.”
He wouldn’t be walking away. To get out, he was going to have to steal a truck. Which simply meant that as a final gesture, he would be despatching himself.
The lunch break meant he had the yard to himself. He fuelled up a Kenwood that he knew was in good order but wouldn’t be needed for the next few days, signed it out to himself in the most formal manner, turned on the answering machine and drove away, careful to padlock the gate behind him. At least all that would make it plain to Judy, if not Larry, that the nutcase was gone walkabout again.
Once more he took the freeway toward the city, and the first inkling came when he did not turn off at Punt Road but continued straight on, around King’s Way and Curzon Street and out onto the Tullamarine Freeway. Was he going to the airport? he wondered. No—he went strai
ght on at the Calder Highway and soon after found himself tempted by the Melton exit. Really? He drove on, knowing there were other options ahead.
There wasn’t any reason why he should have expected to return to the same place, that empty paddock near Kyabram—after all there wasn’t anything there. As he continued toward Bendigo on the Calder Highway, his irritation grew and at Digger’s Rest, he did turn off without the slightest doubt in his mind. He crossed on the side roads to the Western Highway and contentment returned to him immediately. Okay, Ballarat, Horsham, Adelaide, Wherever—here I come.
He wondered if maybe he had gone the wrong way on the previous expedition. Perhaps there was nothing at Kyabram because he had failed to read the invisible maps properly. After all, it was his first try. But he knew that wasn’t the case. That had been the right place then, this time he was going somewhere different. His sense of adventure grew.
And then, suddenly, beyond Stawell, it was all wrong again. His agitation grew intensely and when he pulled off the road near Dimboola, it was because he had no choice. He sat on the lower rung of the bullbar, rolling a cigarette and allowing his sensations to flow. Okay, he was heading west, but he needed to go north. He did not need a map because he knew these roads. In Dim was the turn-off to Warracknabeal—north-east really—but then on through Donald and Charlton which was fully due east. He stood, drawing on the cigarette, contemplated the position of the sun, facing himself around until he was sure. Yep, and that would point him right back at bloody Kyabram again.
His destination had been the same place all along—he just couldn’t understand how this long detour had happened? Perhaps he didn’t read these signs as well as he thought. Maybe it would be better, in a couple of hours, when the stars came out...
*
Where the fuck am I now? No-wheresville, that’s for sure. Sitting out here in the middle of nothing, squat on the suitcase, showing plenty of leg to any passing motorist only there ain’t no motorists, and nothing else much either.
Andromeda Starlight, a figure of tragedy, abandoned at the side of the road. The sun blazed down unmercifully but she at least had a big floppy hat on her head, or else she would have been dead. Ten million flies hung about her, but she had sprayed herself with Kelvin Kline Exotica that kept them at bay or at least confused. The more intrepid ones she maced.
Her Ray-Bans were hardly a match for the glare but they spared her eyes the sprays with which she defended herself and there was fucking nothing to see anyway. Mulga out of sight before and behind her. The road, potholed and straight, disappeared without deviation to left and right. There were some low hills to the right, but no trees at all. What in the name of all that was sacred was she doing here?
She didn’t tell Tierney she was going. She had a gig on Great Keppel Island and she wouldn’t be there. He’d be furious but that was just bad luck. She’d stolen a fistful of money out of his wallet while he slept by the pool and so the bridges were burned. Except there weren’t any bridges, just the ferry right there, all steamed up and ready to go and she just hopped on and was gone.
In Rockhampton, she went shopping, stuffing her purchases into the suitcase and then got out on the road and thumbed it. She’d dropped a tab or two at each stage and hardly knew that she was picked up by a salesman in an air-conditioned Ford.
“Where are you headed to?” he asked.
“Not to, from,” she replied.
Far inland anyway, to wherever she was now. When she had passed out from the Bundaberg Rum the salesman offered her continually, he stopped the car and tried to rape her. But she wasn’t quite as far out of it as either of them thought and maced him and he drove off and left her. On the whole, when she considered her present situation, rape wasn’t such a bad option.
Far out between the low ridgelines, she saw a cloud of dust begin to rise. Three vehicles had already passed her by—a road train that didn’t seem to see her, a family of tourists that stared and hurried on, and a bunch of young bucks, probably miners, who called her ‘coon’ and ‘boong’ and offered money. Silly buggers thought she was an aborigine—somehow she managed to know that no amount of money would have been worth it. When one jumped out of the car, she maced him too and they raced off, shouting abuse. There was a certain macabre way in which she was enjoying this. It wasn’t actually that she was developing some weird sort of morality at this late stage of life—it was mostly because they weren’t going the way she wanted to go.
Not that she actually knew where she wanted to go. When they left Rocky, this seemed the right way. Now it didn’t. Left was back to Rocky, which was certainly wrong, but right seemed the wrong way too. It was as if the desert had disoriented her.
Amid the growing dust cloud down the road to the right, a speck materialised and took shape and slowly became another road train. Another driver popping pills and seeing nothing, she supposed. She sighed, lighting a cigarette, and watched the approach. The big truck with its three high trailers thundered toward her and she contemplated getting off the road. Nar, let the bastard run over me.
The driver blasted on his clarion as if in warning but then came the squeal of the airbrakes and the massive rig began to slow down. The driver had white hair and beard, all close cropped, and looked far too old to be driving such a monster.
“Anything I can do fer yer, luv?” he called over his elbow that seemed permanently to protrude out the window.
“A beer would be nice, Honey,” she smiled.
He rummaged and came up with a can and threw it to her. She caught it deftly—it was remarkably cold. Plainly he had an Esky full of ice in there beside him. She opened it, took a gulp, and rewarded him with her best smile.
“Thanks, Lover. What do I owe you?”
“Nuthin. Where you going?”
She indicated a point directly behind her, at right-angles to the road.
“I wanna go that way.”
The driver looked that way, as if to assure himself that the nothing that was out there was out there. It was.
“Can’t go that way, luv. You either gotta go where I’m goin’ or back where I come from.”
“Where in tarnation am I anyway?”
“Ooo, ‘bout halfway between Bogantungan and Withersfield.”
“Sorry I asked, Sugar. What’s that way?”
“Bugger all.”
“Well maybe so, that’s the way I gotta go.”
The driver thought about it.
“South, hey? Well, yer better come with me to the next town. About a hundred kay. There’s a turn-off south there, takes yer down through Springsure and Taroom to Brisbane.”
She was thinking about it, but she stood and was gathering her things while she did so.
“Brisbane ain’t south,” she was sure.
“It’s where people usually mean when they say south.”
“Ain’t south enough.”
“You wanna really go south, you can turn off at Springsure and the highway runs down through Charleville and Cunnamulla and into New South, through Bourke and then on to everything south.”
“Bourke, you say, my man. Ain’t that where the Black Stump is?’
“Sure is.”
“Somewhere thataway then, I guess.”
*
Police were called to a disturbance inside the Riverdale shopping mall and found a small crowd gathered about a man in a motorised wheelchair. The man was barely conscious, soaked in sweat, breathless and certainly unable to make an account of himself.
An ambulance had already been called and the police would have moved on, had not Senior Constable Belinda Grey decided to check the man’s identity. She quickly determined that he was a lawyer named Joseph Solomon.
“I’ve heard of him,” she murmured. “Gets all the fat cats off corruption charges.”
She also found a card referring to Fairhaven Hospital and mentioned it when she put the call through to dispatch.
“That’s interesting,” the dispatcher said thoughtfully. �
��We had a report of an escaped inmate from Fairhaven a couple of hours ago. Hang on, Belinda, I’ll check.”
Moments later, the dispatcher informed Senior Grey that Fairhaven were coming to collect him.
“Apparently he has a history of unauthorised departures,” the dispatcher added. “But the only risk is to his own health.”
By then, the ambulance had arrived and the crew were examining the patient. There were no dangerous signs, but Belinda Grey remained dissatisfied.
“Fairhaven is over ten kilometres away,” she frowned. “How the hell did he get here?”
*
A tourist with a video camera had been on hand to film the scene when the Human Lemmings of Gran Canaria made their final plunge. The video was just a few shots of indistinct figures falling down the cliff face while others waited their turn at the top, followed by many views of a number of bodies floating in the sea, and it was all out of focus and rather shaky, but it was enough to propel it to headline status by the world’s television news producers.
As the shadow line that divided night from day travelled about the circumference of the earth, so those amateur pictures flashed around the world—a tantalising glimpse before the evening news credits, a more detailed showing later in the bulletin depending of the state of local politics and catastrophes.
At twilight in Melbourne, Judy Carrick remarked that the Canary Islanders were plainly as silly as her husband, who had gone walkabout again and stolen a truck to do it. But she was only joking, trying to humour herself out of her shattered nerves.