“We’re done. We’re finished,” he said. His face was wet with tears, and the backs of his hands, from wiping.
“You’ll live forever.”
“But no new ones. No growing family. It ends here.” He wept.
Some people are never satisfied.
They all slipped out like boiled broad beans slip from their skins.
~~~
Jake arrived, with a cop in tow.
“We thought there might be trouble. There often is. But figured you’d call if you were really in trouble. Jeez, it’s a ghost town. Where are they?”
“They all left. All squeezed in the back of a ute,” I said. “Left everything behind. But it’s crap, all of it, anyway. They reckoned they had a place to go.”
“They never showed up at Durrum.”
“They’re sorting themselves. Give them a couple of weeks,” I told him. “They don’t want to come into town. They’re going to find a place deep out there. Where none of us can touch them.”
“I didn’t take you for a kind one,” he said. I think he was genuinely surprised. “What about the kid?”
“He recovered,” I said, although Jake had seen all that I had seen.
The ghosts were all hidden around the place; in the rocks, the trees, flattened in the red dirt. The men didn’t look at all; as far as they were concerned it was over. They didn’t care about evidence, or bodies, or anything.
I wondered if my sister would stay behind, but no. Already she was playing with herself, ready for a night of fun with the two men.
I was tired of it all, though, and keen to get out of there.
~~~
Jake watched me pack my few things. I kept waiting for him to tell me not to go; the longer I waited with the silence, the angrier I got.
He’d try to sleep with ordinary women, try to wipe the memory of me away, but he never would. I knew that but he didn’t know it yet.
He got someone else to drive me to Katherine. I left him a note; he’d read it and realise what he’d lost.
Thing was, it was good for all. I did the thing I was sent out to do, and I did it peacefully. Quietly.
And all those people who wanted nothing to do with the real world?
They got their wish, too.
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Table of Contents
Purity
That Girl
Dead Sea Fruit
The History Thief
The Gaze Dogs of Nine Waterfall
The Gate Theory
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The Gate Theory Page 11