by TJ Park
Doug suddenly swung round toward the ute. He strode over to it angrily, cursing himself for wasting time. He pulled open the door, then hesitated, hanging off the door handle, looking back at the ruins of the Clarkson home. He told himself the familiar was gone for good, but uncertainty remained. How long would it be before he could relax and not wonder if it was still after him? How many nights would it be before he could find a sleep that would remain deep and uninterrupted? He hated thinking of it in terms of weeks or months. The idea that it may be years, or perhaps never, was unavoidable.
Such things were harder to believe in the bright light of day. There was only a smattering of cloud and the temperature was mild. It promised to be a good one.
Doug approached the destroyed house, just to confirm it was only a ruin, not the sanctuary or prison it once was … a place that would still mean a lot to the Clarksons, but not him. At first appearance, it seemed earthmovers had crudely shunted the house to the right, folding most of the walls to the left. The roof draped over it like a messy bed sheet. Most of the stumps were knocked out, but not all. A few were merely pulled out of line, creating a low lean-to under one part of the collapsed house.
Stepping carefully over a section of felled veranda, he set a hand to the entrance of the lean-to and bent down, peering in. Small gaps of daylight shone through from the other side. They revealed a large slumped shape deep within, outlined by a faint nimbus. A sick fear started rising up in Doug, while at the same time he realised the hollow under the house was less like a lean-to and more like an animal’s den.
His eyes adjusted. The interior was cool, musky, and empty of anything to fear. The dark slumped shape was a thick roll of heavy matting, some leftover insulation that had been stored there. Unless the familiar had managed to burrow up inside the dark nooks and crannies of the house it was truly gone. It had only one night to take them down and it had failed.
Then the gloom under the house pressed forward.
It raced toward Doug like the leading edge of a tidal surge. He leapt back in a few skipping steps to avoid it. The tide lapped at the terminating line between shadow and direct sun and was gone.
Doug shook his head, laughing weakly, pressing his fingers to his eyes. They were tired, that’s all, dragging bright afterimages over a dark canvas, producing phantom motion.
Time to go.
There was still the uncertainty of whether he could make it to the rendezvous point, and if anyone would still be there when he did. He shook his head. There was no need to make up more fears as he went along.
He turned to go, and there was Janet standing in front of him wielding a hatchet.
He began to drop, twisting at the hip to try and avoid the blow, all of it before he realised there was actually no weapon, only the terrible expression on Janet’s face that made him think of a falling axe.
“I frightened you,” she said, matter of fact. There was no apology. No pleasure, either. “Where is he?”
After a puzzled moment, he understood. “In the shearing shed. Let someone else take care of it.”
She nodded without surprise. “You got your opals?”
He felt mealy-mouthed saying it, yet it would be poorer not to reply.
“I’ll let someone know you’re here.”
“I think you should be more worried about yourself.”
The morning was heating up fast, but Doug noticed her oversized jacket, her hands stuffed deep in the bulky pockets.
“If you’re going to start something, Janet, get on with it,” Doug said hotly.
She considered him with faint contempt. “You’re confused, Doug. I’m not the killer here, but there is something you can do if you like.”
She slipped a hand out of one of the coat pockets, holding out a plastic ice-cream lid folded over in the middle. “There’ll be a mail truck coming past at noon. There’s a hook over the slot on the mailbox. I want you to hang this message on it, leave it there for the courier to find. I’d prefer that you let me know now whether you’ll do it or not. I imagine it could ruin your head-start.”
He reached for it clumsily. “I’ll do it.”
She was careful not to touch hands when she passed it over, and he was both angry and disappointed. He kept the plastic lid folded up. He had no desire to see how she worded the calamity that had befallen them.
He stayed facing her. There was something left unfinished between them, even if it was just for her to spit curses at him. She looked behind him, suddenly distracted. The blood fled from her face and she tottered back a step. Doug could almost believe she was about to turn tail and run.
“Dear god,” she said.
He spun round, looking at the same place she did, at the ground behind his feet. He sidestepped to remove his shadow from the large black snake winding through it, travelling swiftly to strike at his heels. At least, that was how his startled eyes perceived it. Except after he jumped out of the way, there was nothing there other than bare dirt.
He turned back to Janet. She continued to stand her ground, but in an odd stilted pose, half turned round, as if she couldn’t bear to face him.
“Go!” she shouted off to his side. “Take what belongs to you and go!”
He was not so stupid or insensitive to think he was in any way welcome, but he never thought she’d dismiss him in such a way. She wouldn’t even look him in the eye.
“What are you waiting for?” she shouted.
Doug went.
***
The feeling that someone had a rifle trained on his back never left him as he drove. The skin between his shoulder blades twitched involuntarily where he imagined the gun was aimed. He thought the sense of being tracked would reach its peak at the first closed gate, the most dangerous period being when he got out to open it, but the sensation persisted long after he lost sight of the station. After settling into the routine of the journey he became aware that it wasn’t trained only on his back. Beneath the low throb of cuts and bruises, he felt it everywhere – an itch.
He could ignore it at first because it was so low-grade, more like a slight tingling. But the longer he drove, the more it impinged on him. He hated the feeling. It made him think of ants crawling all over him. Something they would do if he was dead. It felt worse where his body made contact with the seat, as if the ants were trying to squirm out from between seat and body.
Dodging the ute around sharp-toothed gullies and potholes the size of dried-up ponds was not enough to distract him from the constant prickling. Not even the fear of last-minute capture diminished it.
Inexplicably, his thoughts were full of the suicidal roo and the bow-backed dogs, and how they were … doubled up … in tandem.
He was well over a hundred kilometres away from the Clarkson property before he remembered the promise he had made to hang Janet’s note from the mailbox.
Damn! Distracted by an itch!
He knew the promises that a man made in his heart were the most sincere and also the easiest to break, but he swore to himself that after reaching his rendezvous, he would get out a radio message to send help to the Clarksons, no matter the risk to him.
And that’s exactly what he would have done too, if something else hadn’t come along to distract him, something that could not compare to an itch.
***
And still, it was the little things that irritated him.
No matter that both windows were wound down and the wind roared in, the cab’s interior felt closed. He checked the rear-view mirror several times before realising he had adjusted it not to show the road behind the ute, but the space directly over his shoulder. He corrected the mirror, only to change it back again in an inattentive moment.
It was the itch that kept him distracted. Always vaguely maddening, never quite working up into something that had to be scratched. It clung to him like rainwater hanging from the underside of eaves, poised and trembling to drop, never quite falling.
Maybe he was getting sick. His body was so run-d
own he would be no match for a simple cold. That could explain why he felt crowded. The crawling sensation was him getting the chills prior to the onset of some bug.
The prospect of being unwell actually made him feel happier. He grasped at it as the answer to why he felt beleaguered.
He just wished he’d stop throwing glances at the empty seat beside him and at the ute’s tray in back. Nothing different about them every time he looked. But he couldn’t help himself, he had to look again, just –
He jumped, jolting the horn with his hand.
Idiot. Settle down. You nearly ran yourself off the road.
He thought he had caught a sly movement on the seat beside him, but it was only his shadow – jumping at bloody shadows again! – shifting out a little when the ute took a slight bend in the road. When the ute eased straight again, the shadow settled. There, put right. It began drawing out again as the ute turned slightly away from the sun.
Except it hadn’t. He was driving on a straight section. The shadow shouldn’t have gone one way or another. He took his eyes off the road and gazed down at his shadow for longer than was wise. His foot relaxed off the pedal, the ute beginning to slow. His shadow on the seat beside him swelled and fell back again like the slumped shape of something turning in its sleep.
Please, let it be another shadow overlaying his, making it behave so strangely.
He searched for the other possible cause, not realising how wild his eyes had become as they roamed round to find the culprit. But the shadow on the seat was his alone. He thought it might be possible the shadow’s odd movements had come from going over a rough road. But, as his foot eased further and further away from the accelerator, he found that excuse more and more unconvincing.
His shadow shifted again of its own accord, a gelatinous shiver travelling to where it connected to him.
Doug fought a sudden impulse to leap from the moving ute. He maintained control just in time, his hand clutching the door handle. The shadow kept shifting, like something twisting inside a dark sheet. It stirred to the point of coming awake.
His foot gone from the pedal, the ute slowed right down. Without warning, it jerked forward and stalled.
Doug nearly shrieked. The sudden jolt brought back the memory of his own spastic leap to avoid what he thought was a large black snake in the Clarkson yard.
Now he recognised that he had not avoided it at all.
Take what belongs to you and go.
Janet had not dropped her gaze to avoid his own. She had been attentive to what lay at his feet, inside his shadow.
For the first time that day, Doug thought about Mick.
In the early hours of the morning, he hadn’t asked any of the Clarksons what might have happened to the old man. He was too fearful of the bitter satisfaction he would hear in their answers. He could guess. Only Mick would be cocky enough to attempt taking the whirlybird. And Doug believed he could have succeeded too, if not for the familiar’s snare.
At least the whirlybird had made a fine funeral pyre. Mick was buried deep within it, as blackened and hollowed out as everything else in there, unable to be seen properly. Doug would hate to think of him half-stuck in and out, dragged along the ground like a rag doll, something for the birds to pick at.
Looking like he died in some stupid accident.
Doug didn’t like to think too much on why Mick was there to begin with. He could pretend that Mick meant to pick him up, or was risking his life to try and lure the familiar away. But, really, the facts were obvious. Mick had meant to run out with his “fair share” of the stones. Except there was one kink in that theory – the knapsack of opals Doug had found by chance, propped up in the open beside the whirlybird’s landing pad. At first he considered the irony that Mick had forgotten about it in his rush to get away, or that something (the familiar) had stopped him from retrieving it, but then he thought, no way … Mick would never have left the opals behind, absent-mindedness or monster be damned. They were all that had kept him going the last few days. Mick had left them behind deliberately.
Mick was smart. He knew there was no getting away. He knew he was doomed.
Doug sat without moving for a long time in the stalled ute. During that aching interval he watched his shadow move twice more of its own volition. He wanted to be certain of what he was seeing. Without giving much thought to anything, he stepped out of the ute and walked around on the road. He took an idle look at the landscape around him, then another look down at his restless shadow to make sure it was still there before he climbed back into the ute.
He watched as his shadow slid out across the seat and settled back, looking like it was trying to get comfortable before they continued on their trek. Together.
***
The remainder of his journey was the delirium of nightmare. In a place beyond numb, behaving more like passenger than driver, merely carried along on a hot, bright, irrational day, Doug was able to act out the craziest of behaviours.
Once, while driving, he lifted out of his seat to try to evade his shadow, making his arms take the strain of his weight. Finally, he fell back and his shadow slid over and rejoined him. Stupid thing to do, wasn’t it? It was still attached to his hands and feet.
One time, he tried to spread the road map over his shadow to cover it up. In that moment he had an idea of what it was like to be a nutter, indulging in careful, methodical thought processes that only made sense to the insane. Naturally, his shadow overlaid the map, covering most of the country he was travelling through, implying that no matter how far he went, he would never be out from under it.
Another time, he slammed on the brakes without knowing he was going to do it, and leapt from the vehicle before it came to a full stop, racing away in electric leaps and bounds. In an open patch of ground he stopped and looked down at his shadow, willing it to move. When it did, he tried to vault over it, running about in huge, ungainly leaps, trying to leave the ground for as long as possible in the vain hope the wind would snatch up his shadow and blow it away.
That didn’t work either.
He tried to beat it back to the ute, but of course it ended up in a draw.
After that, he did nothing more except drive the ute.
Morning climbed into noon, placing the cabin’s interior in the shade and blocking out most of his own shadow. That was better. Up till then, it was beginning to cosy up to him too much.
His bizarre actions might have ceased, then, but not the mad run of his thoughts. For a while he played with the idea of being brilliantly lit up from all directions to burn away his shadow. Perhaps it could be done inside a circle of mirrors set up to reflect the sun. He wondered how long he could endure standing in the centre of a bonfire.
The shadow did not deserve all this attention. It was not black as night, not even close. Before the shade of the ute’s cab had overtaken it, it only made the cracked vinyl seat it covered a darker brown.
But it was the constant shifting of it that got to him, the motions of something restless, impatient to be let out.
***
Once he reached the coast he began to make better time. The ute cruised the smoother roads, and he started to recognise certain landmarks. It was unfair that he could not be happier about it.
He came to the signpost that meant he was less than half an hour away from his destination. For no good reason, he stopped the ute. The skin on his face felt dead. He had never believed he’d be allowed to get this far.
If he needed any confirmation that he hadn’t gone off course, it was the knocked-over sign in front of him, still not put right after several weeks. It pointed the way to Mornington Island as being deep in the earth.
Another idea came to Doug of how he could be rid of his burden.
Buried, he thought. Can’t have a shadow if you’re buried deep.
He started the ute moving again, going toward the Gulf.
***
Tea-trees gave way to mangroves, and the ute rumbled down a rarely used track,
struggling to keep a straight line as it spewed out spumes of sand-rich soil behind it. When Doug finally stopped, it seemed as if he had picked a place at random. Above him, on a branch, hung a rag of bright blue tarpaulin, looking like it had blown up there by accident. That was how it was supposed to look.
He went to exit from the ute … hesitated. The sun was on top of the vehicle, the cab’s interior fully in shadow.
He leapt out as fast as he could, nearly falling over when he landed. Walking away, he did not look down at his feet to see how he had fared. It was not a knowledge he was prepared to deal with yet.
He looked around for the remote prospect of nosey tourists, or someone lying in wait. Apart from a pair of cranky plovers, it appeared he was alone.
He could only hope.
He walked a short sandy gap through the trees that swiftly came to a dead end, blocked off by an impenetrable barrier of vegetation. He plunged his hands into it and shifted aside the man-made lattice of leafy branches. It hid a path behind. He entered.
It was dark inside the trees, the path as tight as a closed throat. He was some way along it when he remembered the crate. He had forgotten about it! After the sheer hell he’d gone through for it. But he was not going back to fetch it yet, not until he was sure of something else first.
The sunlight penetrated the canopy above in dappled bursts, hurting his eyes, fogging the shade. The shrill noise of marsh insects came from nowhere and everywhere, rocketing up to near-deafening levels. His feet dodged roots that pointed up from the sandy soil like charred fingers. The temperature had dropped dramatically under the leafy cover. Normally he would have welcomed such a respite from the heat, but he fought to suppress the shivers.
Regardless, he was a little glad of the shade. It kept him from eyeing a certain shadow that would otherwise be dogging his feet. But soon, not being able to see it made him feel uneasy. Instead of being tethered to him, his shadow could be lurking anywhere in the deep shade, its size made limitless. He feared it becoming so dark under the mangroves that his companion could find it feasible to come out early.