Fear and Folly

by Maurits Zwankhuizen

  The door was silent, its throat dark.

  Tom continued unperturbed.

  “It’s not something we enjoy, but you are guilty of certain crimes and there are laws to be upheld. And we hope to uphold them without the need to use force.”

  There was another scraping sound, footfalls, then a lady of about forty years stepped forward. She stopped upon the threshold without a word, one hand over the other, completely still. A portrait but for her heaving breasts. Tears bled from her dusky eyes, staining her bronze cheeks with an unnatural iridescence.

  Sam chewed his lip.

  “Thank you, Mrs Campbell,” said Tom. “It pains me but we have also come to arrest you. You know why.” She nodded faintly. “We shall give you some time now to summon your children and collect a few belongings. We’ll be waiting here for you.”

  Mrs Campbell’s gaze fixed on Tom’s expressionless face, eyes burning like tongues of fire, furnaces within the greater furnace of shimmering summer.

  Her husband was a bushranger of some notoriety in the area. A pseudo-chivalrous ruffian who had moved from rustling sheep to robbing the purses of coach-travellers; from a thorn in the side of authority to a bullet in the side of a local policeman. He hadn’t been sighted in the six months since. His band of brigands had been either killed or captured but Campbell himself had vanished like water into desert sands, last seen escaping slumped across the back of his stallion after a police ambush. As good as dead, they said.

  Still, Sam and Tom were only too aware that his eyes might be on them now, but they stood firm, confident that they were alone, confident that he couldn’t have survived three bullets to the body, that the only bullets to avoid were the bursts being fired into their backs by the bright yellow revolver in the sky.

  They waited in the midday heat, cursing this devilishly dry country.

  It seemed like hours before Mrs Campbell suddenly swept out from the sun-lined doorway with several bags of leftover life and flanked by three owl-eyed children, all tawny timidity.

  She took one last look behind her and threw a dagger of hate from her burning eyes at Sam and Tom.

  “You men took my husband. Now you’re taking my home.” Her eyes narrowed to blades of steel. “But don’t you dare try to take my children from me. For by God I’ll tear your hearts out with my bare hands!”

  Unlike Sam, Tom was able to meet her glare.

  “We shall do no such thing,” he stated. “You have our word.”

  Mrs Campbell nodded ever so slightly but drew her children closer.

  “It’s time,” she said proudly, and stepped down the veranda stairs with her brood in tow.

  As she did so, a chill wind rose up, running icy fingers through tinder-dry leaves, which crackled electrically. A soft rumbling powdered the sky. Sam and Tom turned as one. From behind the homestead, there appeared a man atop a horse, his face shaded by a bushman’s hat, eyes unseen. His shirt was tan with dirt, except for three large rust-coloured stains like roses pinned to his chest.

  Mrs Campbell gasped.

  Sam and Tom threw off the spell of shock and ran to their own steeds. They swung into the saddle and flicked spur to flank but the horseman already had fifty yards of ground on them. They followed in his wake, hot air branding them for their haste. Mrs Campbell and her children stood forgotten, her wild cry for her husband eaten by the wind.

  The bushranger led them through steep-banked gullies and across dry dams, always just far enough ahead to make their pistols ineffective and aimless with the speed of their pursuit. He and his horse had an affinity with the landscape, flowing between trees with the ease of water, trees which then stabbed long sharp fingers at his chasers.

  This was Campbell’s land and even the woods knew it.

  Sam and Tom lost him among a forest of ghost gums, each gnarl a marbled horse’s rump, each bough a stooped rider in flight. He moved like a cloud among clouds, a phantom flitting in and out of vision.

  Eventually the woods unravelled into grassland. With eyes freed, they spotted the bushranger ahead of them, his horse’s hooves shearing fleeces of dust from the earth. Tom’s steed was foaming at the mouth but he spurred it on. Sam sat a length behind, sweat streaks like warpaint on his dust-darkened cheeks.

  Grassland rose up into scrub. Tea-trees bent towards them as they flew by. Then suddenly the scrub parted and there stood the sun and Campbell before it, with the ground falling away sharply just beyond him. He sat high in the saddle, one hand on the reins, the other hanging loosely by his side. With the light behind him, he and his horse shared one silhouette like a mythical centaur.

  Tom reined his horse in. The bushranger was trapped. He was standing at the edge of an escarpment. The distant cry of a cockatoo rose up from below. Tom turned briefly to Sam and saw that his young ally was scared and exhausted but resolute.

  “You have nowhere to go now, Campbell,” said Tom, “except straight down to the valley floor.” He eased his gun out of its holster. “Dismount and drop to your knees.”

  Sharp sunlight danced along the silhouette as if horse and rider were afire. Blinded, Tom raised one hand to his face but kept the other pointed dead ahead with its sixth steel finger. The shape before him seemed to put hand to hat in mock respect. The next moment the shadow was gone, man and beast hurtling to the depths of the forest hundreds of feet below.

  After a warped moment of disbelief, Sam and Tom dismounted and edged forward. A mantle of eucalypts hid the earth at the foot of the escarpment. Campbell’s body and his horse were nowhere to be seen, the only movement some trembling leaves disturbed by their passing.

  The sun set in a eulogy of reds and purples, draping a shroud over the valley and shepherding the two horsemen’s thoughts to the homestead, to Mrs Campbell.

  “Taking away a lady’s liberty is bad enough”, Sam mumbled, eyes embers in the twilight, “a lady with three innocent children, but now we have to tell her her husband’s been taken to.”

  Tom shook his head. “We’re not responsible. He had a choice.”

  The evening was wrapping cold arms around them.

  “Come on, Sam. Let’s get it over with.”

  The homestead lay somewhere in a cavernous gut of moonless earth and sky. A million stars rode the heavens, a thousand noises strummed the air. Sam lit a cigarette. Comfort, light and movement coiled around his hand and his voice only faltered once as he spoke to Tom.

  “Do you think she’s preparing to ambush us? That Campbell probably has a hoard of firearms stored away some place.”

  “I doubt it.” Tom was unnerved, too, but the darkness hid his restless eyes. “For all she knows, her husband has more likely escaped than … you know.”

  They circled the homestead slowly without finding hide nor hair of the Campbell matriarch and her brood. Dismounting, they led their steeds to a trough of water by the stables.

  “All the horses are gone,” said Tom. “She’s got clean away with her children. They must have had some pre-arranged plan. She wouldn’t just leave without her husband.”

  “Well, wherever she is, Mrs Campbell will be waiting an awful long time for her husband to return.”

  Tom lit a lantern and followed the tracks of feet and hooves in the dust. It led him to a disturbed patch of grass between the homestead and the stables.

  “Look here,” he said, motioning to a solitary headstone. “They’ve even got a cemetery of sorts.”

  Sam joined him. The light fell on a single slab. Clean, new. The name Peter Campbell and the previous year was all that was chiselled, roughly, into the granite. Perhaps a stillborn son.

  Then they noticed the freshly-picked wildflowers, the hand-written note with the ink still wet, covered in childish convolutions. Sam’s hand dragged it into the light.

  “What does it say?” asked Tom.

  Sam had turned pale. His hands shook as he held the ink-stained paper, his voice trembling.

  “Read it for yourself.”

  Tom took the pag
e, lantern angled high. Although much of the ink had run and although it was written in a young child’s uncertain scrawl, the message was still discernible.

  It read:

  Thank you, father. Now you can rest in peace.

  THE BRIDGE

  The lady wandered towards the bridge.

  She was the only lady on the street, which meant she was the only person on the street. Children did not walk around at this stage without their mothers or nannies. Men there were none. Most were far away. Across the sea. Or below it. Those who remained were either underground or within thick walls or elsewhere beyond the sight of women. Occasionally one or two would drive by in motor cars, looking dead ahead, looking dead.

  The lady walked on, dragging her dress behind her with effort, dragging her thoughts further behind. Somewhere in the previous four years they had tangled up in solace and skeined into a ball of lost times and empty feelings. They rolled behind her now without momentum, heavy and disheartening, connected to her by the ring on her finger.

  The bridge was a good two miles from her home, two miles to her fate. It was the most she had walked in four years and the ball of thoughts dragging behind her made it an ordeal.

  For all those years she had held a note in her mind. Each time different sentences, different typewriting ink, but the same stark message as the note which had finally been delivered to her that morning. She had waited for it for four years but felt her mind crushed and scrunched the letter up immediately. Her recurring nightmare had become a reality.

  The walk to the bridge did not feel real. Her mind was autonomous of her body now. She had already died and only needed to correlate her mind’s distress and demise with a like collapse in her body. The bridge would provide that collapse. The bridge would rush her back into one piece, rush her forth to her husband.

  The street widened as it approached the water. Her eyes did not accommodate the increased perspective. They remained fixed on a point beyond conception, two round antennae for the large skein being dragged further behind.

  The lady reached the bridge and placed both hands upon the railing in the middle. She looked down into the water. She did not look up. Below is where death had taken her husband. It was below that she would go, too.

  There was a sudden shrill noise and, in the time it took her to tense her fingers on the railing, to clench her muscles in the first microsecond of force, to even half-think of pushing herself up onto the metal separating her from her perceived destiny, in that shortest time which returns the blinking eye to an identical vision where not even the wind and current have moved a single drop of river water, in that shortest of short times, she was no more. The bridge was no more. The city around her was no more. Only her skeined thoughts survived in their insulated ball. From above where she had been standing a moment earlier, they floated and rose with those of a hundred thousand others, floated heavenward and hung there in repose, a great mushroom cloud of memories.

  EGON

  The cottages of Cromley village lay huddled around the church of St. Thomas, which squatted on its buttresses like an ugly ogre, stained-glass eyes leering at the villagers as they hastened towards it through the pouring rain.

  Beyond, there lay only the treacherous waste of Cromley Moss, an expansive marsh shrouded by the pall of rain. Acre upon acre of mire, a maze of muck peppered with tussocks of grass beaten flat and grey by the downpour.

  Through this vastness stretched the only road which serviced Cromley, a raised dirt path now churned into mud and almost indistinguishable from the rest of the marsh.

  All of the villagers had made the trek to the church. While labour and play had drowned in the incessant rain, nothing could deter Cromley’s God-fearing residents from attending the Sunday service. The Reverend Bertram watched them enter, watched them discard tarpaulins and umbrellas, exchange greetings and assume their places. He leered at each face, hoping to catch a glimpse of nervousness in one, perhaps two.

  Having taken his seat, Nathaniel, a young village labourer, drew his hand through his lank brown hair and, with his face obscured, seized the opportunity to breathe in deeply. He knew that Argus watched him from the pulpit.

  The Reverend Bertram moved back from the wooden railing so that the entire congregation was fixed in his sight, so that no person could hide in his peripheral vision. All eyes were turned upon him.

  He opened the Bible but then replaced it on the lectern. He seemed hesitant but it was merely an act to draw his audience’s attention, to heighten their expectation and fray their nerves.

  “I dare say the end of the world is nigh,” he proclaimed suddenly in a booming voice. “For five days it has rained without halt. Five days. The rain has been heavy and unceasing. Folk have been unable to work. Crops have been devastated, soil washed away. Our stock of dry firewood is almost exhausted.” He shook his head. “Why are we suffering like this? What have we done to deserve this? Are we not as unblemished in mind and soul as last week? Perhaps not. I say to you that someone has had occasion to sin. Someone amongst you. And it must have been a heinous sin indeed to warrant such retribution.”

  He let the words settle, leaning forward with a glance that seemed to eye everyone simultaneously.

  Nathaniel stared defiantly, though he felt his muscles stretch taut, felt the fiery gaze burning a stigma of guilt into his brow.

  “This deluge which has come down upon us,” the Reverend said, “is the result of your impiety.” He smiled an unhappy smile. “But I see that you are all indignant at my allegation. That such a thing could happen here! Thus I have taken into consideration one important factor: those wretched souls whose aimless, Godless wanderings have led them to our beloved Cromley. The degenerates from the cities.”

  Egon, thought Nathaniel.

  “But surely,” the Reverend continued, “had they indeed sinned among us, the repercussions of their sins would have passed with them. And surely, had any of you had occasion to sin, you would have confessed to me your moment of weakness. Yet I have heard no peccavis. Which can it be? Have you been so demoralised by the vices of the Devil’s own that you have ceased to care? That you sit here among us without shame? I say to the sinner, if you do not confess and repent, begone, or the Lord will take you! Begone! Begone! BEGONE!”

  Nathaniel’s heart throbbed with a rapidity born of guilt as he heard the name over and over:

  “Egon! Egon! EGON!”

  He felt like he was sinking into the pew under the brutal weight of the word. The psalter slipped from his sweaty grasp but he caught it between his knees with reflexes that had already saved his life once that week.

  The Reverend Bertram, having felt the force of his own tirade, was momentarily blind to those around him. Then, with composure regained, he once more leant over the railing from which he had almost flung himself during his impassioned speech.

  “What was it?” he asked. “Theft? Adultery? Murder?”

  He spoke now in a state of subdued ecstasy, the words uttered in sibilant whispers.

  “Whichever it may transpire to have been, I have just cause for declaring the end of the world nigh – if the Devil has gained a foothold even in our isolated and pious community!”

  The older folk frowned and nodded their heads in assent, positioned in the pews like so many mirrors reflecting the image from the pulpit.

  Nathaniel thought how simple it would be to destroy the Reverend and then no more of his reflections would be projected onto the gullible villagers. But he withheld a venomous glance and frowned as best he could.

  “We can only hope,” said the Reverend, “that the Lord will see fit to rid us of the sinner in our midst. To dissolve him in the fires of Hell.”

  He then commenced his sermon, a slightly distracted voice being the only sign of vestigial anger.

  Nathaniel, however, was now blind to his immediate surrounds. Instead, his mind’s eye was wandering on Cromley Moss, darting here and there but seeing only the same interminable slough of despo
nd.

  The villagers trooped from the church to the noise of unfurling umbrellas. Nathaniel stood aside and was the last to depart, snatching a furtive glance at the pulpit where the Reverend Bertram stood still, like a mannequin, a marionette.

  Outside the heavy double doors, the stuffiness of the church evaporated and Nathaniel let the raindrops run unchecked down his forehead, washing away the sweat of guilt.

  The misty curtain remained draped around Cromley, the dirt road dissolving into its grey darkness. At least the miasmic stench peculiar to Cromley Moss had also been purged of its potency by the rain. Nathaniel smiled in realisation. No stench could permeate the refreshing cascade from the heavens. No stench whatsoever.

  Perceiving movement at the church doors, he clumsily went about the business of unfolding his black cloak. Turning briefly as he left, he saw an expressionless face hover for a moment before the doors swung to.

  Nathaniel wrapped his cloak about him and began, with hesitant and faltering steps, to walk away from the village. He glanced a final time at the dark cottages and the squat grey structure around which they clustered. Everyone was already inside, no doubt gathering about the hearth and warming their chilled bones.

  Assured that he was alone, Nathaniel followed the dirt road for some four hundred yards, until the mist had initiated a rearguard action and Cromley was no more than a hazy silhouette. He passed over the slight embankment which separated road from marsh and stepped confidently from tussock to tussock. He halted at a spot where a jumble of timber planks were strewn across the surface of the mire. Some lay on the surface, others projected obliquely from the swamp like the bows of foundering ships.

  He kicked one protruding plank deeper into the marsh, where it had bobbed up seemingly of its own volition. Subsidence was common on Cromley Moss, causing some objects to vanish and others to rise suddenly.

  As he kicked the plank, he momentarily lost his balance, his right leg sliding knee-deep into the brownness. Swiftly pulling it free, he felt something curl about his ankle but it was only a thick clump of knotted tendrils, ashen-grey and dead.