Blood sprayed across the pavement.
The shadows, however, did not waver. They crept closer. “Again,” said the shadow. “Again. Do it right this time or it will infect your whole arm.”
Wade nodded, his eyes streaming, his face contorted. “Okay,” he said, whimpering.
He looked down, saw the blood pooling around his hand.
The knife came down again, this time at the wrist, his hand coming off cleanly.
Wade howled into the night, the pain too much even for his drunken numb. “OH MY GOD! OHMYGODOHMYGOD!”
“He can’t help you now,” said the shadow with a hint of delighted irony. “There’s only one way to dull that pain.”
“What?” screamed Wade, clutching his severed arm with his left hand.
“Over here,” said another spirit. “Put this around your neck.”
Wade nodded, lumbering to his feet. He took a wide, uneven step, losing his balance, slamming into a wall. He could see a lamppost, shadows circling it, crows sitting atop it—a rope, heavy and thick, swinging slowly back and forth from it, a noose at the end.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he muttered, slogging against the drink, reaching toward the rope. “Daddy’s gonna make it better. Daddy’s gonna make the pain go away. I’m sorry.”
“There, there. It’s almost done. Just put this on. Just put this on.”
Wade slung the rope around his neck and tightened the noose. “I’m sorry,” he whimpered again. “I’m sorry.”
“Pull,” said the shadow. And the shadows pulled.
CHAPTER 33
FOUR MEN SINGING IN A TRUCK
And then the singing stopped, for they didn’t own the song to this part of the line. For a moment, they sat in silence.
“It just ain’t right,” said Jirra, sitting in the passenger seat, nervously picking at a hangnail. “I have a right to know.” He was young, handsome, the youthful brown skin of his cheek peppered with a light sprinkling of stubble.
Kami frowned through his thick, curly black beard, shaking his head without taking his eyes off the road. He had a potbelly trying to peek out from under a stained shirt, but the arms of a man who worked for a living, hands that knew the outdoors better than the in gripping the wheel. “You drew the straw, you knew the risks.”
“But I should know. I didn’t know I wasn’t gonna know.”
“Well, now you know that you don’t get to know. And all is right with the world.”
“But it ain’t right.” Jirra paused for a moment, thinking about how best to say it. “I’m scared.”
The night was nothing but darkness, the desert entirely swallowed up in it, the moon hiding behind a bank of thick clouds. It was a palpable dark, the kind you could see the shape of a flashlight’s beam in, the kind that was more like a fog than an absence.
The truck was battered, old, culled together with parts from a dozen abandoned wrecks, both fenders mismatched, its body scraped of paint long ago. But its engine sang like a growling mastiff as it ambled down the dirt road at a steady clip, headlights cutting the black, two passengers in the cab, two in its bed. It had, over the years, hauled lumber, rocks, wedding parties, and beer. But tonight’s cargo was perhaps the most important of its long, labored life.
“Don’t be scared,” said Kami. “Whatever happens, it’ll be okay.”
“Just don’t panic, eh? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No. You should definitely panic. That’s the point, mate. You just don’t gotta be scared.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t have to.”
“Do Daku and Mulga know?” asked Jirra. “Because I could just ask them.”
“Nah, bru. I’m the only one who knows.”
“How’s it fair that you get to know?”
“Cause I’m the fella that’s gotta do it, eh?”
The truck veered quickly off the dirt road onto the blacktop highway, neon reflectors stinging in the dark, lit up hundreds of feet out. They could make out the building in the distance, the lights of the parking lot so bright it looked like an airfield or a military base. Isolated, alone in the desert, drenched in halogen.
It wasn’t long now.
Jirra shifted in his seat, growing ever the more anxious as they approached, still plucking at his hangnail. “Are you sure this is the only way?” he asked.
“Nah, it’s just the best way. Quick, easy, in and out.”
“I got rooted on this one, eh?”
“You wanted to come along. Wanted to go on the big job.”
“Yeah. I reckon I did.”
“We’re almost there. It’ll all be over soon.”
The truck rumbled around another corner, headed dead on toward the light. The signs were visible now, though still too far away to be read. Any minute now they would be deep in it, but for the moment there was nothing but nervous silence and a truck engine.
The truck rolled into the parking lot and rattled to a stop just past the front door. Kami turned off the lights but left the engine running. He looked over at Jirra with a hint of remorse, his hand slipping down between the seat and the door. “Now remember,” he said. “Whatever you do, just keep screaming.”
The knife he pulled out was long, sharp, glinting in the glare of the parking lot’s lamps. He flicked his wrist, cutting a wide gash across Jirra’s forearm. Jirra screamed with all the air in his lungs, the sound deafening in the cramped rusty cab. “Fuck, man!”
Kami reached out the open window and slapped the door twice before passing Jirra a greasy white rag to staunch the bleeding. Daku and Mulga hopped soundlessly out of the back of the truck, disappearing around the building. Jirra, on the other hand, still hollered.
“Good, mate. Good,” said Kami. “Just like that.”
The inside of the building was well lit, all white, but quiet. Waiting room, empty chairs facing a television. Scattered clipboards. A nurse sat behind the admissions window, staring at the rerun of some old American show they only bothered to air in the middle of the night. She looked up, scared half to death at the sound of Jirra’s bellowing, bolting straight from her chair.
Jirra pressed the rag, now soaked through and dripping, hard against his arm. He wailed as if his hand at any moment might fall off onto the ground, gone for good. He was pissed, glaring whenever he had the chance at Kami, who in turn avoided eye contact altogether. The nurse rushed out, trying both to assess the situation and calm Jirra enough to keep from waking everyone else in the hospital.
“Sir,” she said. “Sir! I’m going to need you to keep it down. Stay calm, you’re okay now. Sir? SIR?” She looked at Kami, trying to speak over the bawling. “What happened?”
“We were having a few drinks at a pub and this bloke was looking to have a blue. And Willy here, well he didn’t reckon he wanted a thing to do with him. And then out came a knife as big as your arm.”
“Willy?” she asked Jirra, trying to remove the rag from the wound. “Willy, I’m going to need you to stop screaming.”
“It hurts!” yelled Jirra. “It hurts!”
“I know, but you’re going to have to calm down. DOCTOR!” she yelled back into the hall. “Doctor, I need you!”
“It’s gonna fall off! It’s gonna fall off!”
“It’s not gonna fall off,” said the nurse. “Let me look at it.” She gently pulled away the rag, his arm slick with red. He howled. The nurse looked back at Kami. “Is he on anything?”
“Nah,” said Kami. “Just grog.”
“Because if he’s on something and we don’t know, it might have an adverse reaction with the painkillers.”
“We just had a couple o’ coldies at the pub. Nothin’ else.”
“He thinks his hand is going to fall off.”
“He’s young. He’s stupid like that.”
“DOCTOR?”
Kami looked over the nurse’s shoulder, holding his breath. Behind her, Daku and Mulga quietly wheeled out a gurney, covered in a li
ght blue bedsheet. He quickly gave Jirra a dire look and Jirra screamed even louder.
The nurse was rattled, her buttoned-up exterior shedding, giving way to full-on confusion. She turned sharply, looking for the doctor, just missing Daku and Mulga as they slipped out the automated sliding glass doors. Ordinarily she would have heard it, looked up reflexively, but she couldn’t hear a damned thing over the ruckus. She ran to her station, grabbing a piece of sterile gauze, returning to place it over the gash.
“Stay here,” she said. “I’m going to get the doctor.” Then she vanished to the back, wondering where the hell the attending physician was at this hour.
Kami and Jirra didn’t waste a second. They were out the door and in the truck before the nurse was halfway down the hall. Daku and Mulga were already in back, the body of a little girl wrapped in a pile of blankets between them. With the engine already running, Kami shifted gears and floored it, taking off out of the parking lot, racing back into the thick black.
Jirra held the gauze to his arm, saying nothing but giving Kami the dirtiest look he could muster.
“Does it hurt?” asked Kami, his eyes glued to the small patch of lit road ahead of him.
“Nah,” said Jirra. “But it sure as shit looks like it does, eh?”
“He was right about you, you know.”
“He was?”
“Yeah. Said you’d pull through just fine. That you’d do it up right. This would all go down right as rain as long as I didn’t spoil the surprise.”
Jirra nodded. “He knew I’d draw the straw.”
“What doesn’t that old codger know? You might turn out all right after all.”
Mulga slid the cab’s rear window open, leaning in. “She was hooked up to an awful lot of machines. You reckon she’ll be okay back here?”
Kami nodded. “Mandu says she’s just out walkin’. She’ll be fine as long as we get her back to town.”
“You sure?” asked Mulga. “There really were a lot of ’em.”
“If he’s sure, I’m sure.”
“What then?” asked Jirra.
“Only Mandu knows for sure. And he’ll tell you as soon as he sees fit to tell you.”
Mulga slid the window closed, settling back in for the long ride back to town. He looked down at the little girl sleeping peacefully next to him, wondering what she might be dreaming about, where she might be walking.
Then the men all sat quiet, waiting to round the coming pass when they could sing their way along the line back home.
CHAPTER 34
SONGLINES
AN EXCERPT BY DR. THADDEUS RAY, PH.D., FROM HIS BOOK DREAMSPEAKING, DREAMWALKING, AND DREAMTIME: THE WORLD ON THE OTHER SIDE OF DOWN UNDER
Ownership of a song in a songline is a complicated and alien thing to the uninitiated. When the heir to a songline is born, his birthright is to inherit one. He will learn, through drilling and memorization, the names of his ancestors, the history of his tribe and the surrounding area, and a portion of the song to a songline. Others will come and ask to borrow his song; he, in turn, will generously loan it out. It cannot be bought, traded, or sold, and the heir can never be rid of it. He can only sing it and let it be sung by others.
The origin of a songline finds its roots in survival. The bulk of Australia is a hostile wilderness many liken to a wasteland, with weather patterns that vary wildly from year to year. In order to survive, the Aborigines had to become nomadic. In turn, these nomadic practices inspired a number of philosophies about ownership that simply don’t translate easily to the West. To these nomads, property was fluid. The land provided, and since people needed to carry everything they owned from one place to another from time to time, the idea arose that property was something of a burden. Thus one didn’t want to hold on to one thing for too long, lest it weigh one down. This began as a necessity, but continued as a philosophy. If one possessed an object for too long, it could weigh down one’s very life, and thus one should never be too attached to anything, being willing to trade it away at any moment.
At the same time, a tribe might find itself in a place overabundant with one type of provision, but short of another. For example one might find oneself in the woods filled with fowl and game, but short on fruit and ocher. The solution was of course to trade. But since all of the tribes were nomadic, knowing where resources were located or abundant was tricky. So trade routes emerged. The Aborigines imagined them as lines, and they learned them and passed information about them along in the form of song.
These songs described the route to a location, as well as contained the history of those locations. Through these songlines tribes would pass information, news, goods, even trinkets in a way to be connected with other peoples around the continent. But what began as a song describing the rock formation one was looking for to find a billabong became a story about a group of men who fought and died there. Later would come a verse about the couple who fell in love there and the hero who would be born of that love. Later still the song would tell the tale of mythic creatures said to haunt it. Over the course of generations a simple method of learning how to get from one place to another became the medium that contained the history of an entire continent.
Soon the songs became so long, so involved, so intricate that no one man could ever learn all of them. Few could memorize every bit of a single line. From this evolved the practice of passing down portions of the song. It is both an honor and a burden, a gift with strings attached. And every so often, a tribe will gather to sing the whole of its line, requiring all of the owners of a piece of the song to perform, in order, their portion.
It is in these recitations that we begin to see the more powerful, religious applications of the songlines. Aborigines believe that if you sing a songline out of order, you can undo the line itself, singing the elements out of existence. While the exact repercussions vary from tribe to tribe, the end result is always cataclysmic, ranging from the restructuring of reality, the redrawing of maps, to the complete annihilation of creation itself. While there appears to be no real basis for this, the belief in these events is dangerous enough. In a land as rich with dreamstuff as Australia, a large gathering of powerful believers singing ancient magicks, all believing something has gone wrong at once, could be the explanation of any number of their history’s natural disasters.
This, of course, covers the more mundane aspects of the history. Enter the Clever Men, also known as the Men of High Degree. These medicine men learn the more esoteric meaning to the songs. In short, the magic of them. Through song, these Clever Men can reweave their own surroundings, ward off supernatural creatures, and even travel more quickly via a songline.
It is believed by many that singing a songline while traveling will actually conjure up the location more quickly. And while this is clearly untrue, it is based primarily upon the Clever Men’s ability to “hop” from location to location. In truth, Clever Men memorize not only the physical locations and histories, but their hidden, supernatural ones as well. They learn about the spaces between the spaces and memorize their properties within the elements of the song.
There are a number of different theories and explanations as to the nature of the universe, none of which seems to be wholly accurate. I prefer to look at reality as having begun as a balled-up sheet of paper. Over time, it has slowly unfolded, leaving creases and crinkles where portions of it are actually a bit closer than they appear to be when viewed from overhead. People with the ability to perceive beyond the veil can sense these crinkles and creases, and use them to slip from one part of the universe to another without having to cross all of the physical space. This allows someone to travel faster than normal and, when viewed by an outsider, appears as if the person is “hopping.”
Clever Men make extensive use of this, traveling between places much faster than the ordinary person, or evading pursuers by simply disappearing and reappearing hundreds of feet away. To the casual observer this appears to happen as if the Clever Man sings it into being. In tr
uth, he is singing to guide himself to the right spot to pass through.
One of the most important secrets to the magical nature of the songs is that the power is not in the words. Like all true magick, the secret is in the belief and execution. Here, in the case of songlines, the magick is from the music. The belief in the tune is the crux of it. While the many tribes of Australia share a common mythology and belief system, they do not share the same language. Even though songlines belong to people of a specific dreaming (an extended form of tribe tied into the belief of a people’s origin), those people do not necessarily all speak the same language. They do, however, sing the same song. Thus it is not the words that matter, simply the land they describe and the tune by which they do it.
Their belief in the power of their song affects the song itself, weaving in subtle alterations to the way the tune exists and ultimately the way it can fundamentally shape the reality around it. In other words, as long as someone knows the tune, the landmarks and the stories that go along with them, they can sing a song without knowing the specific words and still utilize the knowledge and power of that songline.
CHAPTER 35
THE SWAMPS JUST SOUTH OF ARNHEM
Where are we headed?” asked the pretty little girl in the purple pajamas.
“Not much farther. Few more hours. A billabong near my home. Great power. Very holy. Delicious fish. You’ll like it.”
It was afternoon. They had run all night and seen nary a crow. Now that the sun was up, they ran still. There was no time to stop, to rest. But there was time for a lesson as they hoofed it due north.
Colby stopped, looking around at the tree above him, then, confident he was safe, closed his eyes. He put his hand on one of the thin gray trunks, his hand disappearing into it. Though the tree was many times smaller than Colby, he squeezed himself in, emerging from another tree fifty feet ahead.
Mandu nodded, jogging with a proud smile. “Good. Good! You’ve got it.” Colby waved as he stepped completely out. “Now feel out again. See if you can find one with a sister tree farther out.”
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