Dust & Distance

"Some places do not echo because they are empty. They echo because something in them is already listening."

The world went out and came back, and I was standing somewhere else entirely.

There was no tunnel and there was no rushing and there was not one single item of the machinery that a century of films had taught me to expect—no corridor of light, no stretching, no sensation of travel of any kind whatsoever. One heartbeat I was standing in a cubicle in a McDonald's in Elizabeth underneath a fluorescent tube with a flicker in it, and the next heartbeat I was not, and nothing appeared to have connected the two.

And Saint Phillis took me the way it had taken me every other time, which was with silence.

I stood there for a moment and did nothing at all but breathe it in, because after an afternoon in the northern suburbs of Adelaide in January the air on that plain went into me cool and thin and mineral and it was like putting my whole face into a bucket of water. The heat came off me in a single movement. The sweat on my back went cold and the hair came up on my forearms under my shirtsleeves, and I stood there on the red dust with my eyes shut and let it go on happening to me for a good deal longer than I had any business letting it.

The doorway behind me was already going out. The colour went inward on itself and folded down into nothing, and what was left standing on the plain was the screen—that great translucent pane with the land visible through it and slightly wrong, the way a thing goes wrong when it is seen through the air above hot tarmac, catching no light anywhere on its surface and throwing no shadow at all onto the ground beneath it.

And there was nobody there.

I want to be accurate about how I established that, because I established it badly. I did not look once and accept it. I went round that entire horizon three separate times, slowly, hunting for a reason to believe otherwise, and I found none, and I went round it a fourth time anyway.

The rock formations stood about at their long intervals in ones and twos, worn round and smooth and headless. Away to the west the ground ran out and stopped and the cliffs went down to the sea in their bands of ochre and rust and cream, doing on another world precisely what they have always done at home. And the dust ran away flat and red in every other direction to a horizon that managed somehow to be both nearer and a very great deal further off than it had any right to be.

Nothing moved anywhere in the whole of it except a little grit going along the ground in front of my shoes.

And the silence was not an absence. That was the thing I could never get anybody to understand afterwards, on the rare occasions I tried. It had weight in it. It pressed on my ears the way altitude presses on them, and it got in between one thought and the next and settled down there, and it took the sound of my own breathing and absorbed the whole of it before the breath had properly finished—so that I caught myself swallowing on purpose, deliberately, simply in order to make a noise. Simply to establish that noise was still something that world was prepared to permit.

I turned round slowly, half expecting to find them standing behind me. Mason. A little girl. A dog with its ears up.

And there was nothing there at all except the land, going away in every direction and not caring.

Then the screen flared behind me, and I turned round in time to watch my brother come out of it, and he came out of it badly—stumbling, catching himself, swearing under his breath—and for about a quarter of a second the whole of him seemed to hesitate at the threshold, as though the world were going carefully through his paperwork before it would let him stand up straight.

"Bloody hell," he said. He was blinking hard, and he put a hand up to his temple and pressed at it. "Still not used to that."

He straightened himself, and brushed at his jeans out of pure animal reflex, and then he stopped doing anything whatever and looked at it.

And I watched him look at it, because I was hunting for something.

I was hunting for what I know perfectly well was on my own face the first time I stood in that place. The stagger. The open mouth. The sheer undignified stupidity of somebody who has just been handed a thing that does not exist and has nowhere to put it down.

And there was none of it in him anywhere. He went round that horizon with his eyes and he was not amazed by a single part of it. He was reading the place. He had come back to somewhere that something had gone wrong, and he was working out, in that flat professional silence of his, whether it had moved since he was last there.

"It looks…" He stopped, and hunted for a word, and settled on one that did not fit. "Emptier than I remember."

And I did not answer him, because there was nothing I could have said that would have been true, and because I have learned over thirty-three years that the fastest way to stop my brother telling me something is to say something first.

So we started walking instead, and our shoes went into that dust and came back out of it, and the sound of them was obscene—two grown men crunching along across a silence that had been managing extremely well without either of us for a very long time. The ground sloped away between two long low ridges and then opened out into a shallow basin near the edge of the cliff, out of the wind and out of the sightline of the screen.

It was a good place to make a camp. Somebody had.

The shelter was a low wall of stacked stones no higher than my waist, thrown up in a curve to take the edge off the wind, and even at fifty metres I could see how it had been built. It had been built by a man who had never built one before and had worked the whole thing out from first principles as he went along, and had run out of stones before he had run out of curve.

And there was a tarp. A blue plastic tarp, the eleven-dollar kind out of a hardware chain that ends up living in the back of a ute for four years, with one corner still pinned under a rock and the whole of the rest of it torn loose and twisted round on itself.

And that blue was the most violent thing I had ever seen.

On a plain of red dust and cream sandstone under an ordinary sun, that one shade of hardware-store blue did not belong to the same universe as anything else within a hundred kilometres of it—and I could not leave it alone. I kept catching my own eye going back to it while Josh was talking, and having to haul it off again, the way the tongue keeps going back to a broken tooth.

Josh stopped walking, and he did it so completely that I had gone three paces past him before I understood that he had. And when I turned round, everything in his shoulders had gone tight and had stayed tight.

"This was it," he said. And it came out at barely a whisper. "This is where I left them."

I went forward with my eyes on the ground, which is where they should have been for the last hour.

And the dust had got into everything. It lay over the stones of that little wall and it lay in every fold of the tarp and it lay across the whole floor of that basin, undisturbed and smooth and entirely unbroken—so that there was not one single fresh print anywhere in the place, and nothing else at all except the long patient work of a wind that had been going over it, unopposed, for a considerable time.

"Are you sure?"

I did not need to ask him. His face had answered the question about four seconds before I got round to putting it.

He nodded slowly. "They were here. Last night."

So I got down on my knees beside a ring of stones that had been a fire, and I put my fingers into the middle of the ash, and I held them there for a great deal longer than the test required.

I held them there because I very badly wanted to be wrong.

It was cold. It was not warm and it was not faintly warm and there was nothing left in it whatsoever, and I had known that from about four feet away, and I knelt in the dust with my fingers in the ash of a dead fire for another ten seconds anyway.

"They didn't wait," I said.

And Josh did not answer me. He turned on the spot with his eyes going round the horizon, and that hard clean light laid every line in his face out deeper than I have ever seen them.

"There was nowhere to go." It came out of him stretched thin, like wire pulled past what it will take. "We agreed. They were going to stay put. That was the whole of the arrangement, Nathan, that was the entire thing we said to each other—"

"Well, they didn't," I said.

And I did not say it to hurt him, and I do not believe that it did. I said it because it was a fact, and a fact is the only thing I have ever had to offer anybody in a difficult room.

"Look."

Because while he had been standing there talking about the arrangement, I had found them.

There was a faint line of disturbance in the dust just beyond the wall. Prints—broken, half-gone, softened away at every edge by the wind, but prints, and going somewhere.

Josh was beside me before I had finished pointing at them, and I heard his breath go in.

We went along the line of them together, stepping wide, keeping our own feet well outside the trail so as not to take away any more of the thing than the wind had already taken off it.

And they were not the prints of people running away from something.

That was the first fact I got out of that ground, and I got it off the ground the way I would have got it off a page. They were not deep. They were not far apart. There was no drive anywhere in them at all. They wandered—a little to one side and then a little to the other—and in two separate places along that trail they doubled back on themselves and stood about. Two sets. One large and one very small, facing one another, going nowhere at all.

Somebody stopping to have a conversation with a child about which way they ought to go.

The trail went out of that basin and away, curving off gently towards the cliffs and the great flat nothing beyond them.

And about fifty metres on, it stopped.

It did not peter out and it did not thin. There was a print, quite clear, with a heel in it—and then there was nothing at all, and the dust in front of it lay as smooth and as untroubled as a swept floor.

Because the wind on that plain was never strong. It was simply patient, and it was constant, and it had come along behind three frightened people, grain by grain and hour by hour, and had taken away every single thing they had left behind them.

Josh stood at the end of that trail with his hands opening and closing at his sides, staring at the empty ground in front of him as though looking at it hard enough for long enough might argue the prints back into it.

"I told them I'd be back," he said. "I told them not to go anywhere."

"You couldn't have known."

And I heard how little that weighed even as it was leaving me. Couldn't have known what, exactly? That they would go? That something would come and make them go? I had said the words because there was a silence and I have never been able to leave one alone, and they were worth nothing, and both of us knew it.

His jaw shut.

"I should've."

So we stood there for a long time at the end of a line of footprints that had run out, and the silence came down over the two of us, and this time there was something in it.

Because something was wrong with that place.

I have had a great deal of time since to sort out what I actually felt standing out there from what I have quietly added to it afterwards, and I do not entirely trust myself on it.

But the air had changed. It had gone attentive. It had acquired the specific quality that a room acquires when somebody has been standing in it and has only just walked out, and I knew that room, and I had never once been wrong about it before.

It was not danger. Not there, and not yet.

But it was not right either, and I turned round and went along those rocks with my eyes—every shadow, every fold in the stone, every place on that whole plain where a thing could stand and not be seen—and there was nothing anywhere, and nothing moved in that entire landscape except a corner of blue tarp lifting and dropping back down again behind us.

"Josh," I said. And I said it very quietly. "Do you feel that?"

And his head came round fast.

"Feel what?"

And I watched him ask me the question, and I watched him already know the answer.

It took me a considerable time to get him to come back with me towards the screen, because he did not want to leave that basin. He kept turning round to look at it as we walked, as though the three of them might come strolling back into it behind us if only he kept his eye on the place.

And I did not tell him where we were going, and I did not tell him why.

Because I was walking my brother out to a crevice under a rock overhang two hundred metres from the screen, where I had knelt down in the dust that afternoon and pushed a stolen backpack in under the stone with my own two hands.

And I had not told him. I had sat opposite him in a plastic booth and let him confess to the worst thing he has ever done in his life, and I had listened to every word of it, and I had said nothing whatever about mine.

The walk back took a great deal longer than it should have done. The distance was the same distance and my legs were the same legs and the ground had not altered, and it took longer, and I have never been able to account for it.

And then the formation came up ahead of us—the leaning stone, the deep triangular shadow underneath it, sitting exactly where I had left it—and from thirty metres out I could see that the shadow was the wrong shape, and my stomach went over before my head had caught up with what my eyes had already worked out.

I went the last of that distance far too fast, and got down on my knees in front of the recess, and put my hand into it.

My fingers went all the way in, right back to the curve of the stone where I had wedged the thing myself, and they came out again with nothing on them but dust. And I put my hand back in and went round the other way, further under, because I did not believe my own arm.

The bag was gone.

I had pushed it right back under there. I had put it flush against the rock and then stood off at several paces and gone round it from three angles, and I had satisfied myself that it could not be seen from any point on that plain, and the wind on Saint Phillis could not have moved it in a hundred years.

And I had been rather pleased with myself about it.

Somebody had come and taken it out.

And somebody had put something in its place.

A notebook. Sitting square in the middle of the recess, exactly where the bag had been. Not dropped there and not fallen there. Set down—placed, deliberately, into the space that the bag had come out of, the way a receipt gets left on a counter by somebody who wants it found.

My hand was moving before I had decided anything at all about whether it should.

The cover was soft and battered under my fingers and the corners had gone up, and I knew it the instant I had hold of it. Matte black. Worn slack at the spine. Four dollars in a university bookshop, bought by somebody who had never once looked at it properly.

Hers.

And I opened it, and the hand on the page was not hers.

It was cramped, and angular, and it went into the paper hard enough to score straight through it—and I have seen that handwriting on a birthday card and on the side of a cardboard box, and my heart went over sideways in my chest.

"Josh," I said, and it came out of me strangled.

He was already moving. "What is it?"

"It's Mason. He's written in it."

And I watched the colour go straight out of my brother's face.

He came down beside me, close enough that I could hear him breathing, and I opened the thing flat across my knee, and we read it together.

The writing went across the page at an angle. It was jagged and hurried and pressed so hard in places that the nib had gone through and left small ragged holes in the paper, and there were dark smudges in the corners of two of the pages, and I did not look at those for very long.

Something's out here. Watching.

It started after sunset—complete darkness. No stars, no moon. Just black.

Then the lights came. Flickering—far off at first, then closer. Diesel went wild. Wouldn't stop barking. Ella's terrified. I'm not far off myself.

We didn't see anything, but we heard it. Footsteps maybe. Breathing? It's hard to say.

And I read that last word twice, and then I lifted my head off the page and listened to that plain for a long moment.

There was nothing at all out there. There was a little wind coming along the ground and going round the foot of the stone, and beyond that there was not one sound anywhere in that entire world.

I don't know if we're being followed or if this place is playing tricks on us. We waited until daylight, but things aren't right here.

Diesel's been pacing since morning—ears up, low growling. He's not himself.

And I thought, reading that: the dog knows. Whatever is out there, that dog has known about it since the night before, and he has been standing in front of a frightened man and a frightened child telling them so, over and over, at the top of his lungs—and not one of the three of them can understand a single word of it.

I think the lights are coming back. We saw reflections—just barely—near the cliffs.

Same place we thought we heard movement last night.

And my eyes came up off that page and went straight to the cliffs, and there they stood in their bands of ochre and rust and cream under a perfectly ordinary blue sky, warm and banded and entirely innocent—and I looked at them for a very long time and could not make myself look away.

It's not safe. Not here.

We've taken the pack and gone inland. I left this in case you came back. We'll leave markers if we can.

And beside me my brother made a sound in his throat.

And I did not look at him. I could not look at him, because he was sitting there thinking about a promise he had made to a little girl, and I was sitting there thinking about something else altogether.

We've taken the pack.

My pack. My pack. The one I had lifted out from under a woman's seat while she was two hundred metres up an aisle with her hands shaking, and carried through a hole in the world, and hidden under a rock so that nobody in creation would ever find it.

And a man with a little girl and a dog had found it inside a day. He had found it, and he had opened it, and he had taken it—and he was now walking into the interior of an entirely uncharted world with it on his back, going away from the only place on that plain where anybody was ever going to come looking for him.

I had put that bag there. I had knelt in that dust and pushed it in under that stone with my own hands, that same afternoon, and then I had stood up and brushed the red off my knees and looked out across the plain and seen absolutely nothing.

And they had been sitting in a basin behind a ridge less than half a kilometre from where I was standing, with a tarp, and a fire, and a child who was frightened of the dark.

And I never once thought to look.

I had been out on that plain with them. I had been within shouting distance of the three people my brother could not sleep for, and I had gone out there for exactly one purpose, and the purpose was to hide something.

Don't follow unless you know where you're going.

If we're wrong and something finds us…

Well. Better one of us knows where we disappeared.

M.

And I read that last line three times, and then a fourth, and then I sat back on my heels in the dust and understood it.

Not where we are. Not how to find us. Not come and get us.

Where we disappeared.

He had written that down, and then he had put the notebook into a crevice where somebody would be certain to find it, and he had known exactly what he was doing when he did it. Because he had not written down where to find them.

He had written down where to start looking for what was left.

I read the whole of it out loud, quietly, and my own voice came out thin and human and hopelessly inadequate in all that enormous space, and Josh did not say anything at all for a long time afterwards.

And when he finally did, it came out of him rough.

"I don't like this."

"No," I said. "Nor do I."

And that was the single most useless sentence I have ever produced, and I said it anyway, because the true one was sitting in the middle of my chest with its arms folded and I could not get it out past my own teeth.

He got up onto his feet and went round those rocks with his eyes—every shadow, every fold in the stone, every place on that plain where a thing could stand and not be seen—and his jaw was working the whole time, and he was standing in the middle of an empty world looking for something, and he did not know what it was, and neither did I, and both of us went on looking anyway.

Nothing moved out there.

And it felt, very distinctly and very unpleasantly, as though something had.

I shut the notebook and put it away inside my jacket, and I stood up and looked out at the horizon, and the dust went away from the two of us in the flat afternoon light all the way to the edge of the world and did not tell me one single thing.

Josh let a long breath out through his teeth.

"What the hell is watching them?"

And I did not answer him.

Because I had no idea. And because there was a great deal that I was not saying to my brother by then, and it had begun to accumulate behind me, and I could feel the whole of it standing out on that plain at my shoulder like something with a shadow of its own.

Whatever was out there had found them first.

And there was nothing whatsoever—not in that notebook, not on that plain, not anywhere in the entire silent architecture of that world—to suggest that it had stopped looking.