by Lois Murphy
The silence was broken by Daryl Burcott. ‘What kind of sick joke is this?’
‘Shush!’ hissed Maeve Summers.
‘Come on, will you? What the fuck? Look at us cowering here. Someone’s pissing in his pants at us right now.’
The mood shifted and the tension relaxed a fraction, as people moved from fear to confusion.
‘You reckon?’
‘Shit, there’ll be a camera somewhere – a projector, with some arsehole laughing his ring out at what a pack of gullible shits we are. And he’s fucking right!’ Daryl started to laugh.
‘Shhh!’ I said. ‘Listen.’
From outside came muted shrieks of laughter, as if blown from a distance on the wind. But another noise could be heard growing within it, a ghostly throb, like a chant. Slowly it became clearer: ‘Little little little little little little little little little little little …’
It made your blood run cold.
‘It’s just a …’ started Daryl.
‘Shut up!’
The chant suddenly changed, evolving without pause into another two, equally disturbing syllables. ‘Come out come out come out come out come out come out …’ There was a guttural shriek, and the voices around the building intensified. It was like being trapped in a demented thunderstorm.
‘Well, speaking for myself –’ Earl cleared his throat ‘– I’m staying put.’
‘There’s no way I’m going out there again,’ said Jonesy, shuddering.
‘What if it gets in?’
‘Oh God!’
‘My vote is that door stays locked,’ I said.
‘What if we’re here all night?’
‘Then we’ll be here in the morning, which is all I care about just now.’
‘It might go away?’
The forms began to flit from window to window. Earl stared after them. ‘Daryl might be right. This might be some kind of elaborate joke.’
‘Don’t open the door!’ We turned as one to Jonesy, this large, blustering man not given to flights of fancy, shuddering like a child who’s just been plunged underwater for the first time. ‘Jesus, I was out there, it’s not a hoax. It’s freezing cold, you could feel it coming towards you. This fucking horrible chill. It’s like nothing, it’s like death.’
‘That’s got my vote,’ said Wally. ‘If it’s a hoax I’m happy to laugh it off in the morning.’
Outside, suddenly, there was the sound of an engine. A car – someone was coming. People began to push towards the windows again, as close to them as they dared. The hazy figures seething on the other side seemed to freeze; then, as if a vacuum had suddenly been aimed at them, they wrenched away in a single mass.
Tentatively, we moved closer to the windows. Outside it was perfectly still.
‘What is it?’ asked Earl.
Daryl shrugged, squinting along the street. ‘Nothing. I reckon it’s gone. Like someone got a scare from the car coming and turned whatever it was off.’ He turned away from the windows with a sneer.
The thud at the window behind him was like a bomb. There was no warning or approach, just the sudden impact, the swift view of the spread-eagled body of a man in a bloodstained yellow shirt, sliding quickly out of sight, leaving nothing but thin, opaque trails of blood on the window’s clear pane.
Dave Jones started to retch.
I slept eventually, clutches of rest rather than a proper sleep, stretched on the floor near the pool table, after several generous serves from Earl’s top shelf. Earl had offered us the few rooms the pub had available, but no one seemed inclined to leave the company of the group, and one by one we subsided on the hard chairs or the beer-scented carpet of the front bar.
Naturally enough, the small Woodford police station wasn’t manned overnight, and the triple-0 operator who answered Earl’s emergency call was less than impressed by his claim that fourteen local punters were under siege by a cloud of smoke that seemed to have people in it – trapped in the town’s pub, no less. He showed a glimmer of interest when Earl told him that a man’s body had been slammed against the building, but this quickly dimmed when Earl admitted he’d only glimpsed the alleged corpse, and had no idea who it was.
The operator grew increasingly placatory, assuring Earl of the frequency of such calls, and how easy it was to mistake a large bird flying unexpectedly into a window as something more substantial. Especially if you’ve been drinking, was clearly implied. It was likely that the bird was simply stunned and had since flown away. The details of the call would be recorded and passed on to the nearest jurisdiction in the morning, to be followed up when resources were available. But for the present, he suggested, perhaps it might be best if Earl stopped serving and everyone got themselves off home to bed.
The missing man’s car was found parked around the corner from the pub, undisturbed. It contained his luggage and the remains of a McDonald’s Happy Meal. There was no body and no blood, and no evidence at all of foul play; the thin strokes of blood on the pub’s ornate windows appeared to have dissipated overnight. According to papers found in the glove box, the missing man was one Martin de Witt from the Gold Coast. A tourist. His status was established as Whereabouts Unknown, and unless his family reported him missing, there was no official concern. As it transpired that his only family was a son working in Kalgoorlie, who hadn’t been in contact with his father for years, and an estranged brother in the Netherlands, it seemed unlikely that his disappearance would ever be taken further.
But Martin de Witt wasn’t missing, anyway – he was back the following night, a gasping, bloodstained apparition in the heart of the swirling fog.
Unofficially, things progressed at a rapid rate. I spent the next few nights holed up at home, peacefully enough, but with a thin smear of smoke over the landscape, like a delicate gauze. My doors remained locked.
Daryl Burcott had soon followed up on his threat to reveal the ‘hoax’ by confronting the tricksters, and disappeared. The mates who’d goaded him on – but had stayed inside – were shamefaced and pale. They hadn’t been able to see anything, but there’d been a fair amount of noise.
Daryl reappeared the next night.
Within days, people had changed their routines. Like an unspoken curfew, twilight became lock-and-key hour. A couple more people ‘vanished’, again with no signs of disturbance, so they became a phenomenon rather than a crime. As people started to lock themselves in, pets and livestock began to disappear. It was only a few days before people noticed that the birds were gone. It didn’t take long for the town to begin emptying.
People who had no ties, or those with somewhere else to go, started to clear out. It wasn’t just the oppressive nights, the fear of the mist’s appearance, it was the confusion, the unknown threat that shrouded the town completely, day and night.
There was a resurgence in church attendance, and the strengthened congregation swung into action, organising a religious protest in the form of a midnight mass. The minister, who resided in Woodford, came in specially to perform the service. He arrived before twilight, and was escorted to the local hall that served as the community church, where the congregation had gathered long before the ceremony was due to take place. The mass was performed with great dignity and formality, undisturbed. But at its conclusion, people noticed that the hall’s windows were slowly being shrouded, isolating the worshippers from heaven’s celestial reach.
There was an extended pause. The priest gulped, and then began shakily to pray. The defiantly unlocked doors were quickly bolted and secured.
The exodus began in earnest shortly after that.
I didn’t experience the mist again myself until a couple of weeks after the first night. I stayed at home with my doors locked, and things remained relatively peaceful, albeit disturbing. I still dropped in to the pub, but earlier now, and generally the punters were all gone and the doors closed by nightfall. Earl was ageing noticeably; he openly admitted that if it kept up, he’d be out of business very shortly. Takeaway liquor sal
es were certainly strong, but he hadn’t become a publican to run a bottle shop, he sniffed.
My next encounter with the mist was at a crisis meeting called by Wesley Forrest and three other hobby farmers, who’d all lost their stock in recent nights. Wes had been a stalwart of the town for decades, its unofficial mayor and one of Earl and Wally’s history society cronies. Most people referred to him (behind his back – Wes wasn’t renowned for his sense of humour) as Alderman. Although he was now retired and had subdivided and sold off the bulk of his land, he’d held on to the best of his heritage breeding stock, and had established a lucrative arm in animal husbandry. His stud was purebred and worth a lot of money. And now it was gone.
Wes wasn’t a man with a patient disposition. Arrogant at the best of times, he now offered us beers on his back porch with barely concealed fury. Gilda, his wife, had packed herself off to her sister’s in Adelaide a week ago, after losing her beloved Siamese and her entire aviary. Wes meant business. A whiskey bottle stood a little to the right of his beer can. The day was only just starting to wane.
‘What I want to know,’ he was saying, ‘is why the authorities are refusing to react. I’ve lost over eighty-thousand dollars’ worth of almost pure bloodlines, almost irreplaceable breeding stock, which anywhere else would be considered a serious crime worthy of investigation. And all I’m getting is “no evidence” shrugs. Who gives a shit if there are no tyre tracks or footprints – it’s their bloody job to investigate.’
‘What’s your insurance say?’ croaked Fisher O’Toole through a mouthful of peanuts.
‘Pending investigation. Pending the frigging police getting off their arses and doing their job. Doing something useful instead of cross-examining me and my family, speculating about my financial situation. Lazy bloody pricks.’ He gulped at his beer, then reached over for the whiskey bottle.
‘So what’s your theory?’ I asked him.
‘My theory is that some shady arseholes snuck out here three nights ago with a stock truck and nicked four prime Hereford bulls and three of the best bloody breeding boars I’ve ever studded.’
‘And you didn’t hear a thing?’
He blanched, the briefest flinch. ‘There was a bit of bellowing. I thought it was possums, or dogs.’
‘You didn’t investigate?’
‘If I’d thought for a moment that some arsehole was making off with my livelihood, I would have been out of bed pretty bloody quickly, with a shotgun, I can assure you.’
‘But you didn’t hear a truck? Motorbikes? Dogs? Any sound of mustering?’
‘Look, McIntosh, I’ve had enough bloody innuendo from your useless mates to last me a lifetime.’
‘I’m just making a point. What would you think of a stockman whose entire herd disappeared from his pens, right under his nose, without him hearing a thing and with no signs of intrusion? You’ll be lucky if your insurance coughs up a cent.’
Wes flashed and was about to tear into me, when Matt Johnson swore under his breath and pointedly cleared his throat. ‘Sorry to interrupt, gents, but Wes, I think your bulls are back.’
Wes jerked around to face the fields. We followed the direction of his gaze, Matt’s face strangely grey. The dusk had deepened while we’d been arguing, and in the settling dark a thick sea of fog was flowing over the fields towards us. Elongated figures seemed to cyclone around its edges, and at its dense core other forms pulsed and throbbed indistinctly. As the mist continued to deepen, the forms became more solid and recognisable. Standing out within the writhing centre were four enormous beasts, which would once have been hulking bulls, prizes of their species. Now their frames sagged, and they grunted forlornly, their huge carcasses stripped back to bones, with a few shreds of torn flesh hanging like rags. One raised his huge skull and bellowed, the ring audibly clattering in the bone shells of his nostrils.
Wes swore. The mist flowed on towards us, the skeletons of his cattle plodding in its midst.
‘I’m out of here,’ I said, and pushed back my chair. In unison, the others followed. To the side of the cloud, a large man in a bloodstained yellow shirt waved dislocated arms around like a grotesque, broken marionette.
‘Wes,’ Matt called from the doorway. ‘Come on.’
‘Matt’s right, mate,’ added Russell Simms. ‘There’s nothing you can do.’ But Wes, a man who’d always fought – and usually won – his battles, stalked away from us, descending the back steps to the lawn and heading resolutely towards his fields.
‘Wes!’ called Fisher. ‘For God’s sake, man – come away!’
We’d all started yelling by then, but not one of us moved to go after him. We stood, shouting and imploring, until he reached the very edge of the mist, and began to yell into it, demanding an explanation for the desecration of his cattle.
At first the mist only swirled, while the grisly remains of the bulls slowly, mournfully moved to surround him, as if asking to be taken home. They brayed solemnly at first, and then their tails began to flick. Eyeless and unseeing, they nevertheless moved to arrange themselves so that they all faced Wes, enclosing him in their centre. He was surrounded. Beside me Fisher swore and began a furiously whispered prayer. One of the bulls gave a furious bellow, and they all began to stamp and paw at the ground, raising small puffs of dust to swirl among the mist. A low chant could be heard, arising from the smoky cloud and building like an audible wall around the scene.
‘Wes!’ Larry yelled, ‘for shit’s sake, run!’, but at the same moment the largest of the bulls lowered its massive skull and charged, lifting the big man and tossing him into the centre of the cloud. The others stampeded, with sickening thuds that were soon drowned out by the shrieks of laughter coming from within the mist. Frozen on the back porch, we could just make out the writhing figure beneath the stamping hoofs, being pulverised into his own field.
As the mist eddied around the scene, three smaller loping skeletons with blunt snouts and long curved tusks broke from its borders and galloped towards the house.
There was no pride, no decorum. Paddy Lynch was sick before we’d even finished bolting the door.
We hit the freak-show circuit shortly after that. We waited and fought for an official response to our situation, the disappearances, but were treated with tongue-in-cheek condescension or outright hostility. Nebulah did not match any existing bureaucratic criteria for evacuation or relocation, and no government department was willing to introduce any that officially recognised unexplained haunting as a finding on disputed fatalities or a basis for social assistance. Politicians from all parties recognised a political minefield that could sink a credible career in a few words, and steered well clear. They all adopted an aggressive, face-saving ambiguity towards the ‘question’ of strange happenings in our small country town – or downright open cynicism, suggesting we were bludgers after compensation from the hard-working taxpayer. We became leper-like, all eyes averted from us. Best to be ignored and avoided. Files were closed, or misplaced.
Tourists and looters proliferated as the townspeople left, and a police patrol was begrudgingly established – at the road into town. Then suddenly, one day, we discovered that all the road signs had been tampered with: all reference to Nebulah had been quietly removed. By the Eastern Highway stood a denuded pole, testament to a town that had ceased to exist. On the state highway signs there were patches of clumsily matched green swipes where our town’s name used to be. We were 215 kilometres down the road and a whole other world away.
There’s a disturbance from the direction of the skateboarders. The older one has misjudged a jump and rolled badly. He tosses his board with an expression of childlike fury. It lies impotent, blameless, on the ground. It’s signalled the end of the session and the others gather to leave, boards under their arms.
Two of the smaller boys remain behind. Without the intimidation of the other boys’ presence, they launch into attempts at the older one’s tricks. The smaller of the two, a wiry, dark-skinned boy, released from his self
consciousness, throws his legs high, finally executing the flip he was so desperate to achieve. When he lands upright and stands, his face is bright with the redemption of triumph, lit with youthful joy.
How quickly we lose joy. I’m struck by a memory of Julie, at one of the primary school sports days I so rarely attended, suddenly realising at the end of the egg-and-spoon race that she’d won. Her concentration had been so focused on not dropping her egg that she’d blinkered out the other competitors. The effect of her realisation was instant and transformative, and on receiving a blue ribbon her face lit with unfettered happiness and pride. It was the same face Gina had lifted to me when I was finally allowed into the maternity ward to find her nursing our newborn daughter, a face that immediately crumpled into tears, overwhelmed by the intensity of her joy.
Had I ever been overwhelmed like that? Difficult to recall a single instance. The birth of Julie, yes, but that was fleeting, tinged with anxiety, a sense of responsibility I found almost crushing. Instead of abating, this sense grew over the years, as Julie grew from fragility to vulnerability, and then, almost worse, to independence. My role in her existence lessened, but the anxiety of responsibility deepened, accompanied by an increasing sense of powerlessness.
I experience that same draining sense of powerlessness when Alice’s phone swerves straight to message bank yet again.
At home I find a note: Milly is at the supermarket.
Gina watches me anxiously as I load the gun into the car. I have to think for a long time before I open the passenger door for her. Before I lock the house I try Alice one last time. I’m just disconnecting from her message service when the landline starts to ring. I don’t know what it is that stops me just as I am about to pick it up. I hover, waiting for the answering machine.