by Lois Murphy
‘Murderer,’ the mist is crooning. ‘Come out, come out.’
‘You murdered me, Alice,’ sings Xandrea. ‘My death is yours.’
Alice gives a twitch and rolls to face the apparition pressed against the window. ‘I didn’t,’ she chokes. ‘I didn’t.’ Her finger snakes out and points crookedly across the room, as if exhausted. It points at me. ‘It was him.’
‘He killed all of us,’ adds Wesley Forrest, kneeling down beside Xandrea and peering into the cellar. Around him the mist swirls and murmurs. ‘He’d never take risks, he only ever looked after himself.’
‘Ask Li,’ hisses Monica Lambert, one of the first to disappear when the mist began.
‘Ask Li,’ echoes Xandrea, and it becomes a chant, rising and receding like an incoming tide.
And then there is Li, kneeling, raising her eyes to the window and nodding silently.
‘But Alice,’ Xandrea breaks in, calling over the top of the voices, ‘you’re as bad as him. You’re dripping with my blood.’
And Alice, rolling back into a tight little ball, begins to wail.
Rob is pale, even in the lack of light. ‘Can’t you make it stop?’ he hisses at me.
I ignore him.
‘Fuck!’ He pushes himself up off the floor, standing to face the sea of ghouls peering down at us. ‘Can’t you just fuck off?’ he shouts. ‘You can’t get in, just fucking leave us alone.’ He sounds like a whining child.
The faces at the window distort. ‘Leave us alone!’ they howl, their laughter even worse than their screams.
Rob’s defiance shrivels. ‘You can’t hurt us,’ he tries lamely. This produces another round of laughter, and a new chant begins. ‘Can. Can. Can. Can. Can.’
‘For God’s sake!’ Rob suddenly kneels, clasping his hands before his chest and closing his eyes. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven …’
The mist seething around the windows explodes. ‘Hallowed be thy name!’ it shrieks, ‘Thy Kingdom come; thy will be done.’ Its laughter howls around the words.
Rob’s hands lower. He seems hunched, aged beyond time. ‘What are you?’ he whispers, as if to himself.
The mist explodes into howling again. ‘We. Are. You.’
‘You. You. You. You. You.’
‘Al-ice! Al-an! You need to come out here, you need to be part of this.’ At the window Xandrea’s face is starting to melt. ‘This is solstice, it’s your last chance. Your last chance to atone. To understand, Alan, everything. Come out. Or you’ll have me forever.’
On the floor, still curled into a ball, Alice begins to rock. Rob crawls over and wraps his arms around her. After a moment, Alan shuffles over and presses himself into their huddle. Like kittens, left out in a storm. I stay to the side of the room, in the darkness. Above me the mist whispers. Coward.
If it had waved a bottle of whiskey at me, I would have opened the door.
They talk about your life flashing before you when you die, in which case I seem to be pretty safe. My review of everything I’ve ever done wrong takes an eternity.
On the floor nearby, Alice is curled with her back to me, wishing me into non-existence. I can recall Julie and Gina in the same posture, curled up in the same protective ball; Gina in the days before I realised she was seriously ill and required careful handling. I used to stay away from home as much as possible, to avoid behaviour I viewed as petulant and shamefully self-indulgent. When she sobbed I read the paper, when she yelled I left the room – or the house. I was repulsed by her slothfulness, the glasses of sickly cask wine that were always at her elbow, and by her bewildering and destructive lies. I’d think: lazy, selfish, manipulative. I’d even called her a nutter, but to my shame it never occurred to me that she was actually genuinely unwell.
The Gina I met and married was shy, creative, plump and happy. When I think of her then, I think of colour, paint and books, bottles of red wine and bowls of cashew nuts, and weekend suburban barbecues, where people gathered together and ate and laughed. And sure, they drank too much and talked and argued about mundanities like the football and recipes, but that was the point. It was escapism, a chance to relax and just float on the surface for a while.
It was good. But no one ever came along to the parties and Sunday drinks and said what they really felt. We argued over football and no one ever stood up and said: I never imagined that saying ‘till death do us part’ meant watching someone get fatter and duller and more selfish by the year, or: When my baby cries constantly through the night I just want to kill it, I’m so tired, or: When I drive to work in the morning the pressure of responsibility is like a worm, chewing at the walls of my stomach, maker it harder and harder to stand upright.
Instead, we rolled sausages around and charred steaks, and talked about TV shows as if they were real and bloody boat people as if they weren’t. And when the cheap veneer of our social framework started to buckle and warp we were horrified, shocked. In our parents’ day happiness was an aside, something that was accepted without drama or acknowledgement – like being asked about the wallpaper pattern in a room you use every day and realising that you don’t even know the colour.
When the framework started crumbling, we could only stare at the wreckage in bewilderment. When wives started to divorce drunken, bloated and unfaithful husbands, and men were caught with their fingers in the till, or in the other, divorced wives, and children were found to be selfish turds and not the reincarnation of goodness itself, then the cracks that opened were too vast, too confronting. We watched the disintegration, and we understood it, and once our social safety net had been slashed with the recognition of the inevitable, we went into freefall ourselves.
My inappropriate choice of career became more apparent every day as I was thrown into situations of conflict, but I hated my father so much that I refused to give him any grounds to scorn me. So I remained in a world that scared and repulsed me, a world full of hate and deceit and deliberately inflicted pain, and I coped by barricading myself in. It was as if a wall had been constructed two feet in front of me that kept me removed, kept me from registering. At first my wall kept me sheltered from the turbulence of my work, and then increasingly from everything else as well. As Gina, in her escalating unhappiness and confusion, flailed and hammered at my detachment, I reinforced it with increasing amounts of scotch and beer before I even contemplated going home.
Even after all this time, I haven’t forgiven Gina for turning our daughter against me, but in one sense Julie is quite right. Gina needed help and all I gave her was indifference. Yet my hiding place was so closed in and devoid of light that I came to consider myself the victimised one, unfairly imprisoned, and my calculated callousness towards her felt entirely justified. It’s no wonder Julie blames me for her mother’s collapse.
It has been quieter for a while now. Feet skip regularly past the windows, snatches of schoolyard rhymes float through the night. Every now and then the rhymes break into the chanting poetry first used to seduce Alice, but now it’s harsh and mocking, like the worm-ridden inside of a beautiful crisp red apple. Alice moans and Alan wraps his arms around his head, burying his face.
The night is slowly drifting towards morning. If we can survive another couple of hours, we will be safe. Thinking this relaxes me a little, and a sudden movement at the window startles me. It is Gavin, peering fixedly across at me.
‘Pete!’ he calls. ‘Aloha!’ I look away, try not to register the dirt that clings to him, the wriggling. He breaks into his completely unselfconscious, delighted laugh, the one that made him a favourite wherever he went.
‘Milly and I were so happy Pete, you know that. You knew that and yet here I am, and there you are. It should never have been me, Pete. You’re the miserable fuck should have been mashed into that tree.’
I know this isn’t my friend Gavin, it’s just some horrible apparition of the mist, but I can’t help thinking that this, like Julie with her arrows of blame, is right on target. There is movement in the mist around Gavi
n, and a clutch of figures break from it and squat to peer through the cellar windows, seeking me out. Women.
At first not all the faces are familiar, but I begin to recognise them: the young girl beside Li is my pregnant teenage suicide, the anxious woman beside Gina is Marylou Shanks, who’d rung me scared to death during one of the first nights of the mist and hasn’t been heard from since. Julie is there, and Milly, Liz and Alex, and a few old callgirls who used to work the fringes of my eastern beat. Xandrea. They all peer down at me, not saying a word, but they don’t have to. Everything is there, draped and flowing from what isn’t being said, hanging in the silence between us.
From the last of the night outside comes a rhythmical drum, which I suddenly identify as the sound of marching, hundreds of marching feet, heading towards us. There is a shuffle of movement and Alex lifts her head to look beyond my gaze. ‘Goodbye, Pete,’ she says, and raises her hands to press against the window. The other women follow suit, and then they disintegrate, one by one crumbling into nothingness as the marching feet appear as a swarm of children, who press up against the windows until the panes are a sea of tiny faces.
‘Come out to play,’ they call, whining, petulant, and then their faces start to elongate, melting into moonlit rivers of blood. A gurgling red tide flows against the windowpanes, pooling along the bottom ledges. There is a gasp, the smallest of sighs, and on the other side of this red curtain appears the first tiny crack of dawn.
And I can’t help it, it’s instinctual; like an involuntary tic the first word that comes to mind at the glimpse of light is: Over.
PART
SEVEN
Dawn. The beginning of a new day; the end of a night. How do you tell which is which when the distinction between the end and the beginning is blurred, is essentially the same thing?
Without a Snap! how do you tell who’s won, and who, when the echoes of the cheers have faded, has lost everything in their hand?
The key to the cellar lock is only the second one I try; the ease of getting out is like a further ricochet of silent accusation. Another brick in the wall that’s solidifying around me.
We emerge into a peaceful dawn, a morning softened by a light but consistent drizzle. The street smells damp and clean after the stale confinement of the cellar, with its unavoidable human stenches. The freshness of the air seems infinite; it’s so free from pollution it is as though it’s completely empty, like an unblemished slate. A new beginning.
Or the beginning of the end?
On the Land Cruiser’s dashboard my phone shows eight missed calls. Alex. The same message, over and over, increasingly panicked: ‘Pete? Please don’t be there, please don’t. Ring me, please, please call me.’
And then suddenly, at the end of the stream of Alex’s desperation, there is Milly, quiet and calm. ‘I got your note; I don’t need to tell you that I’m worried. Can you give me a call when you can, let me know you’re okay? There is a pause. ‘Pete? Soon? If …’
Then the phone is overcome by static, and anything after Milly’s If is obliterated.
When I try to ring home there is nothing, just silence, a void like the emptiness of a street washed clean by the persistence of morning rain.
My house is closest to town and to Li’s. There is no milk and the few remaining teabags are stale, but there are lemons on the tree out the back, so we make do. The musty cold of the closed house is tomb-like. I leave the doors wide, throw open the windows along the front. The fresh morning air seeps over the threshold.
Rob manoeuvres Alice from the car into the house, his gentle pressure overpowering her obvious reluctance. She is grey and expressionless, and she flinches when I reach to touch her, try to put my hand on her arm. She refuses to look at me, staring off to the side. The taste in my mouth is the residue of old smoke.
The towels I find are remnants, threadbare, but we need showers, need to wash off the clinging odour from the night before. I dig out old sheets and show a wan and silent Alan to the spare room, while Rob makes up my room for Alice. By the time he joins me at the table, the tea has overbrewed and tastes both bitter and musty. I roll him a cigarette without asking and he takes it without comment. We both know what’s ahead.
We continue our silence throughout the drive to Li’s.
When we get to Li’s gate, I find I have to stop for a moment. The long driveway seems like a portal, as if it’s a crossing to a new dimension. It’s probably lack of sleep, and shock from the drawn-out foulness of the previous night, but turning in to the driveway seems somehow momentous; it looms like an open mouth. I have to flex my shoulders in an effort to release the tension collected in my shoulderblades. It doesn’t work.
Li’s garden has become overgrown in the short time since we left town, already wilting under an air of desertion. The pang I feel at the sight of the neglect is physical; Li would turn in her grave, I start to think, but the thought makes me shudder. It’s a turn of phrase we tend to avoid.
Rob’s hands are tight fists in his lap; my delaying isn’t helping. He gives me a quick glance. His hair has transformed from rumpled curls to unkempt tendrils, lank and unattractive. He’s unshaven and there’s an edge to him beyond sheer exhaustion. He’s aged, considerably and irreversibly. I think of Alice, the change in her overnight, her grey skin and surface emptiness. Her lifelessness.
Our eyes meet only briefly before we both look away. I put the car into gear.
The house stands empty and passive. The front door is wide open. There is no sign of any disturbance. I park further along by the shed and open the car door without killing the engine. Rob pauses for a long breath, then follows me out of the car.
Instinctively I pause, awaiting the arrival of a dog. The morning is completely silent: there are no birds or cicadas, not a breath of breeze. It’s like entering a movie set, lifeless, empty, as if filming has just concluded or is waiting to begin. The stillness is challenging; it’s not a comforting silence. The winter sunshine is weak but also strangely charged. Rob zips up his jacket, but his selfconscious movements suggest that it’s more for distraction, something to do, than for warmth. A similar urge has me reaching to my pocket, but I change my mind. I’ll need a smoke soon enough.
Our footsteps on the porch seem unnaturally loud. At the front door we both hesitate, neither one of us wants courtesy to be interpreted as cowardice. We’re avoiding each other’s eyes now.
Rob follows me into the house.
In the lounge room the disarray from our hurried departure is the only sign of disruption. The packs lie open against the wall, spilling their contents. Hands of cards are fanned upon the table. Xandrea’s cigarettes and lighter are there too, and the ashtray holds a number of butts. Some spilled ash is streaked across the table top where it fell short. I go over to the lantern, which is out. When I shake it, it is empty.
Rob scans the room restlessly, continuing to avoid my eyes. I head to the back of the house. In the laundry the air is chill. The window they broke to get in is exposed, the cardboard they’d jammed over the broken pane lies on the floor beneath it. It’s impossible to tell whether it has simply blown off.
There’s no indication that anything happened here at all. It’s a thought that chills my blood.
When I get back to the lounge room Rob is zipping shut the last of the packs. ‘I’ll bring the car round, if you like,’ he says, but instead he stands staring at a large tie-dyed carryall, lying on its side with a black shawl hanging out of it. He looks at me for the first time. ‘I have to ask,’ he says.
‘I have no idea,’ I tell him.
He expels his breath in a long sigh through his teeth. ‘It’d be good to know.’
‘Would it?’
He shrugs, lets the pack he’s holding drop to the floor. I can’t offer him anything.
At the car we load the packs and sleeping bags in silence. We leave the coloured carryall on the floor where it is.
It’s almost noon before they’re ready to leave. Rob lets Alan
and Alice sleep, not waking them till eleven. Alice emerges looking greyer and more withdrawn than before. She won’t look at me at all, pushes her lunch of tinned salmon and beetroot around with her fork. When she does raise a small amount to her mouth, she winces and lowers it to her plate again.
Alan’s remoteness is so profound it’s starting to seem catatonic. He eats methodically, pale and cryptic behind his glasses.
I’m sitting outside in the cold having a smoke, when Rob comes out and slumps onto the step beside me. I grind my cigarette butt under my heel.
He clears his throat. ‘The police,’ he says. ‘We’ve agreed to say that we couldn’t find the key to the cellar in the dark, that we couldn’t let her in.’
I stay motionless, sagged on the porch steps. I don’t think I could move even if I wanted to.
There is a small noise from the direction of the front door. The tiniest flash of movement tells me that Alice has turned back over the threshold and closed the door behind her.
The silence once they’ve gone is familiar, but it also feels unnatural, overwhelming, because now it is internal as well as surrounding me. The station wagon’s engine has faded into the day, everyone has gone, and Gina is lost. There is only me, and I am crushed, a husk as devoid of life as the deserted trees around me.
I slump backwards and lie spread-eagled on the porch, staring at the sky with my arms outstretched and my legs sprawled down the steps. Like a crucified scarecrow.
A locum constable had answered Rob’s call to Woodford. Obviously only vaguely familiar with the history of Nebulah, he’d been unimpressed at Rob’s wild story, remaining noncommittal about Xandrea’s alleged disappearance. Eventually he told Rob they’d need to come in to the station to make a statement.
I told Rob to drive slowly and carefully. By the time they get to town Denham should be back on duty. They were unnerved when I said I wouldn’t be going with them.
I’m guessing there’ll be hell to pay.
The lightest of breezes has sprung up, a cool, gentle caress. I’m so exhausted that I barely notice it as I crash into sleep.