I smiled at the thought, reaching down into the moss. It was deeper than I could have imagined. I thought of quicksand and all of those old scratchy black and white Johnny Weismuller Tarzan movies I had watched in my childhood. I couldn’t remember a thing about them, beyond the sight of a fat man in a loincloth swinging through the trees.
And then I kept on sinking. I was elbow deep and up to my knees in the cool forest moss. A part of me panicked, kicking and screaming. No one could hear me. I felt the comfort of quilts, eiderdown and cotton batting packed around my mouth and ears and eyes. All of my panicked shouts were swallowed up by the muting walls of the calm blank tombstones.
The last thing I thought of was my ex-wife’s smile, and I grinned wistfully as I sank, remembering how I’d once fallen in love with that smile, and I was surprised that I couldn’t even remember the colour of her eyes. I sank deeper into the dark moss, and then there was nothing, like being swallowed by the sound of a seashell pressed tightly against your ear.
I looked up one last time. The stones grinned high above me, and I felt a newborn stone push upwards past me to mark my vanishing. I tasted dirt and nothing and the ground about me made a sour rumbling sound like a fat man growling happily over a plate of beans.
Everything went silent and I finally…
Steve Vernon is a storyteller. Oh sure, he hides it a little behind his writing. He tries to pretend that he’s ACTUALLY hoping to sell a few books and make a billion dollars in royalties–but really he is nothing more than a low-down, shameless, bend-your-ear-until-it-bleeds storyteller. He is that old fart sitting by the woodstove waiting to tell you how rough things were back when he-was-a-kid. He is that funny-smelling dude over there at the campfire talking of how he abducted Bigfoot in a UFO in order to perform a satanic ritual at a disbarred Illuminati hidden bunker. Steve Vernon is the man who came up with zombified buffalo in his seizure-inducing novella “Long Horn, Big Shaggy.” He is the man who elevated the scarecrow novel trope from mere there-is-something-weird-in-that-field-boredom-inducing-pap to dangerously-mind-blowing-he-wrote-WHAT? status in his full length scarecrow novel Tatterdemon. Steve Vernon tied the twin Canadian pastimes of hockey and vampirism together in one unholy-boy-scout-tangle-of-a-knot in that truly disturbing novella “Sudden Death Overtime.” In short, Steve Vernon is NOT to be trusted. Lock up your daughters. Bury your whiskey. Hide your Chihuahuas. Steve Vernon is coming.
“If Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch had a three-way sex romp in a hot tub, and then a team of scientists came in and filtered out the water and mixed the leftover DNA into a test tube, the resulting genetic experiment would most likely grow up into Steve Vernon.” –Bookgasm
“I knew that Steve Vernon was a good writer when I found myself cheering for a decapitated head.”–Adrienne Jones
-The Emu in the Sky
by Mark Farrugia
Jack Baker stood at the kitchen window, waiting. Home was at the edge of town, close to the old graveyard on Cemetery Hill, and Jack reckoned the window would provide the perfect view to see the rocket rise.
Perhaps this would be the first launch from the Melville Downs Rocket Range, but then again maybe not. Jack waited with a mixture of impatience and excitement but was prepared for disappointment yet again. The first launch had been cancelled on account of a dust storm; the second, just because a big red jumped the security fence. Jack had heard that the roo was only grazing in the restricted zone, minding its own business, but that had been enough.
Today, lift-off was scheduled for 9 a.m. Jack turned from the window to the wall, glanced at the clock’s slow, jerky second hand.
Any moment now.
Behind Jack, his Gran, Ada, steadied a pot on the stove. The aroma of freshly ground gum-leaf wafted through the kitchen. In defiance of the desert heat, the old lady insisted on wearing a knitted hat which clung to her scalp; straw-like hair draped her sun blotched skin. Her wrinkled hand moved chunks of meat with a large wooden spoon.
Jack turned back to the window and stared at the wrought iron fence that marked the boundary between Gran’s property and the old graveyard. Beyond, a mess of broken headstones and untended grass crowned the hill.
Jack was haunted by thoughts of death. He’d always reckoned that was because his parents were dead, and because the house he shared with his grandmother was so close to the graveyard. Though the old lady never confirmed it, he guessed his parents were buried up on the hill somewhere.
Where else could they be buried?
Kids didn’t go up there. Jack wasn’t sure why the graveyard remained locked, but he’d heard rumours. All the kids had. Rumours that a murderer was buried there. A killer who had hunted children for their pure and supple bones. For as long as Jack remembered, Gran had forbidden him to step into the graveyard.
The house shook, windows rattled, and a sonic boom sent shockwaves through the atmosphere. A rocket flew above the hill like a spear. Flame and smoke forced it higher.
“Gran, look!”
“That’s nice, dear.”
In the lounge room, glass shattered.
Jack watched until the rocket shrank, first to a needle in the shimmering blue sky, then to a speck of dust, then nothing.
He stepped from the window and walked out of the kitchen to the lounge. On the floor, facedown lay the framed photo of his father. Jack picked it up, and a shard of broken glass narrowly missed his finger as it fell from the frame.
The picture was untouched: Nick Baker wore a hat and army-greens rendered grey in the black and white print. His skin was light grey, not much different from the washed-out sky in the background. Jack looked at his own skin–the colour of weak black tea, of shadows–and touched the part of the picture where the glass had been, imagining his father’s lightness leaking into his darkness.
“Gran, how come there are no pictures of Mum?”
Jack knew little of his mother. Gran had told him her name was Kala and she’d died the night he was born. That was all Gran said she knew. But sometimes in the dead of night, Jack thought he heard his mother’s voice whispering his name.
The floor creaked underfoot as Gran stepped forward and peered into the lounge. “Your mother didn’t like having her photograph taken, dear. I’ve told you that before.”
Jack understood some of his mother’s people–the old ones mostly–feared cameras could trap their souls in the thin membrane of film. His father’s framed photograph still in his hands, Jack turned to face Gran. She smiled an end-of-conversation-smile. He smiled back.
* * *
The Melville Downs township lingered halfway between Dubbo and Darwin. Its fortunes had been as fickle as the spinifex that scratched the desert sand. But then the Americans came and built the town a rocket range–outback Australia’s contribution to the Cold War. Now the townspeople talked of prosperity and change.
The Melville Downs General Store was a squat building with a large front window. Light filtered through the dust-caked glass and splashed the tins of Lucky Hit tobacco and Oxo cubes stacked high on shelves behind the counter.
Shirley Porter stood in front of a large metal till. She wore a floral dress, a wide-brimmed hat and a crooked smile. “Morning,” she said to Ada Baker.
“Shirley.” Ada gave her a handwritten list. In the mid-morning heat, the woollen hat on Ada’s head was damp with sweat.
“How’s that grandson of yours?”
“Jack’s fine.”
Shirley tsked, licking her pencil. “Will that rocket affect things?” she said, writing the cost of the flour, Lanchoo tea, matches, and sugar on a length of butcher’s paper. She circled the total and used the paper to wrap up the butter she had just weighed.
Ada shook her head as she handed over the coins.
“Ta.” Shirley tossed the money in her till without counting it. “What’s dead is dead,” she said, denting the butter package as she laid it, perhaps a little too forcefully, into Ada’s basket.
“Only if
it remains buried, Shirl.”
* * *
Melville Downs Primary School operated four days a week. On Friday mornings the school was usually empty and silent. But even when the sound of children’s laughter littered the playground, school was a lonely place for Jack. It was more than Gran’s watchful eye and the colour of Jack’s skin that kept the other children away.
Seven years before, on his first day at Melville Downs Primary, he was called a “rusty” by one of the older boys. Jack hadn’t been aware he was considered different back then and at first he’d thought it was playful banter. But the other children laughed and the older boy continued with “Rusty Jack the half-black.” Jack picked up a rock, walked over to the larger boy and smashed it against his skull. Since then Jack’s classmates only ever gave him sideways glances, like magpies did just before taking flight when children got close.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
Jack was in the playground swinging from an old tyre tied to the branch of a boab, but he dug his heels into the dirt at the sound of the voice. It was Ritchie Dyer, the new kid. Ritchie’s family had moved to Melville Downs from Adelaide. His old man was some sort of big shot at the rocket range. Jack hunched his shoulders and hung his head, looking past his feet to the dirt of the playground.
“A few kids are sneaking into the rocket base tonight,” Ritchie said. “Wanna come?”
Jack looked straight at Ritchie. “Me?”
“I’ll have my dad’s keys, it’ll be fun. We’ll get a look at some rockets, probably even touch one.”
“Yeah?”
“You in?”
“Why you inviting me?”
“Bobby said to tell everyone. The more the merrier.”
“Bobby said tell everyone?”
“Yeah. We’ll come past your street at nine. If you want to come, be there.”
* * *
Ada spent that evening in the kitchen, grinding not-so-exotic delicacies–the flesh of a camel’s hump, the fluffy tail of a brown rabbit and the snout of a fox–into a pulp. Each ingredient she had carefully selected to offset the aboriginal connection to the land. Adding a portion of sheep’s blood to the grainy powder, she threw it all into her good soup pot and lit the stove. The old woman watched it boil to a thick paste, then she added one poisonous drop she had carefully squeezed from the gland of a giant toad. The feral mixture bubbled above the flame. She stirred.
While the potion cooled, Ada stared out the kitchen window. The new moon was still a week away and she’d told herself she’d place her concoction around the graveyard by then–her failsafe to keep the dead buried. For a moment she allowed herself to relax.
As was her evening routine, she listened to music on the radio as she maintained her vigil over the cemetery. Occasionally, she looked up at the stars and the dark patch of night that silhouetted the Milky Way. Within that darkness, some of the aboriginals used to say they saw a great emu–its form stretched across the night in a trail of stars and cosmic dust. Others though, claimed that when they stared into the dark cloud they saw the head and shoulders of a man. A tribal lawman, grey bearded and bushy-haired. An old Dreamtime shaman, who they said claimed the sky and kept watch on the hill below.
Bunkum!
When she looked up at the sky, Ada saw none of that. Fearing revenge in the wake of a murder, the local aboriginals had fled town more than a decade before. Ada was determined to make sure that the past remained buried.
Even if the things the aboriginals claimed were true–that everything is kept in balance by the relationship between the stars in the sky and the soil beneath their feet–she didn’t think a rocket or whatever it is they put up there would disrupt the constellations too much. Best be safe, though.
* * *
Behind the old woman, Jack tiptoed towards the lounge room and the front door beyond. The radio murmured just loudly enough to conceal his footsteps on the floorboards. He pulled the door open slowly to stop it creaking, and snuck out into the night.
Halfway down the street, beams of light moved in the direction of the rocket range. They’d left without him. Jack ran after the other boys until flashlights spotlighted him like a hunted roo.
“Hey Ritchie.”
“Baker?” Bobby Porter was a pasty-faced kid, and he turned his light towards Ritchie. “Why’d you invite him?”
“What’s the big deal?”
“He’s off-limits, everyone knows that!”
“Off-limits?” Ritchie said.
“My mum says I can’t play with him.”
Pete and Mick, boys Jack recognised from school, nodded to indicate their mothers told them the same. The children turned away from Jack real quick, like they were too scared to look directly into his eyes.
“What? You can’t play with him because his mother was black?”
“Not just black,” Bobby said.
“Yeah? Well, he’s here now. Scared your mummy will find out her little Bobby played with the dark kid?” Ritchie said.
Jack shuffled uneasily.
“I’m not scared, but he isn’t coming.” Bobby pressed a finger against Ritchie’s chest.
Ritchie pulled a set of keys from his pocket, dangled them so the other boys could see. “Well if he doesn’t go, I don’t go.”
Silence cloaked the boys as Ritchie and Bobby locked eyes. “C’mon then, he can come. Let’s go.” Bobby relented, pushed past Ritchie and ran down the dark street. The other boys followed.
* * *
It was a little over a mile to the other side of Cemetery Hill, and from there they planned to take a back track through the scrub behind the rocket range. Ritchie said that once they got inside the compound, he’d take them to where the rockets were stored and they’d search for the doors his father’s keys could unlock.
Running alongside the other boys, Jack was finally part of a pack. While they ran, he imagined that their glowing flashlights were the eyes of dingoes prowling the desert landscape. The strength of the earth moved through him, the red dirt rose through his feet and flowed in his veins. His heart beat with the mesmerising rhythm of a drum. Each snap of twig or crunch of leaf was louder than the last, closer and more intimate. Within the isolation of his mind, Jack was being reborn. But when he looked around, he saw the truth. It was a bunch of white kids beside him, he with skin of dirt and mud.
An hour of roaming the darkness spread the distance between the boys, but eventually they all made their way onto a dirt track. Jack remained at the front alongside Ritchie and Bobby.
“How far we got to go?” Ritchie said.
“I don’t know. In the dark it all looks different.” Bobby surveyed, slicing the night with his flashlight, creating shadows.
“I think we should turn back,” Ritchie said.
“Who’s scared now, new boy?” Bobby said. He yelled down the path. “C’mon you guys, hurry up!”
“I think we’re lost,” Ritchie said. “We should’ve taken the first track.”
“Yeah, I think he’s right,” Pete huffed. “We need to turn back.”
Jack kept his distance. He stared up at the stars and thought about the rocket.
His head followed the path he imagined it had taken. When the path swung around, it wasn’t a rocket he was following anymore but a boomerang, spinning through the darkness. As it moved across the heavens, it etched lines between the stars to splay the body of an emu across the night sky. A starless patch of night formed the ancient bird’s head.
“What’s up with him?” Mike motioned towards Jack.
“He’s weird,” Bobby said. “All his kind are.”
“I think we’re lost,” Ritchie repeated.
“We’re not lost. It’s just a little farther.”
Jack’s gaze paused at a dark patch of sky. He stared at the emu. Mixed within it were misty specks of grey, like stubble on an old man’s face. Clouds extended back like long wisps of hair. As mist and cloud were blown by wind, a man’s face formed where the emu’s
had been. Jack had seen the face up there before, but only in fleeting glimpses from his bedroom window. Never like this though, outside and exposed to the night. Jack felt something old and wise gazing down. The face in the stars was part of that, the emu too, but there was something more. Something spiritual keeping watch. Keeping him safe. Keeping things in place. He could feel it.
The clouds moved across the sky, and Jack stepped from the darkness into the glow of Ritchie’s flashlight and pointed. “It’s that way.”
“Yeah, he’d know. Probably out here every night rootin’ dingoes,” Bobby snickered.
Ritchie aimed his light along the road and created a tunnel through the darkness. Jack led the way. The other boys followed.
* * *
From her seat by the window, Ada stared up at the sky. The Milky Way was concealed behind a blanket of clouds. She wondered if that rocket thing could play havoc with the constellations.
Light flickered.
Ada’s gaze was drawn to the hill and the graveyard beyond. Her heart pounded. She leapt up and ran to the stove. Hands fumbling, the old lady poured the thick liquid from the pot into a glass jar. She screwed the lid tight. Jar in hand, she ran to check her grandson before heading out the front door. His room was empty, sheets scrunched to one side of the bed.
“Jack!”
Ada checked the outhouse. “Jack!” she called into the darkness, but he wasn’t there. “Dear God,” she mumbled under her breath. She slammed the back door, went to her bedroom and knelt before an old wooden trunk. She threw its lid open, and dug deep until her fingers brushed cold metal.
* * *
Jack led the children to the back of the cemetery, where they ran their flashlights along the side of the hill and traced the outline of tombstones. In the distance, floodlights lit the rocket range, giving the landscape a sinister glow.
Bobby ran his fingers along the iron posts that fenced the graveyard. “Heard the stories about this place yet, new boy?” He sneered at Ritchie.
Ritchie shook his head.
Horror Library, Volume 5 Page 29