Spoken Into Silence

"Mum always said curiosity killed the cat. She never mentioned what it does to courier drivers who touch things they shouldn't."

Pulling myself upright, a wave of confusion swept over me as I gazed into the shimmering, swirling shades of the gate.

It was like looking into a kaleidoscope of reality, each movement causing the colours to dance and shift in ways that defied logic. Red bled into violet. Blue sparked against gold. The colours weren't flat—they had depth, dimension, as if I were staring not at a surface but into an infinite tunnel that somehow occupied no space at all.

The air around the gate felt different. Thicker. Charged with something that made my skin prickle and my teeth ache.

Tentatively, almost as if drawn by an unseen force, I found myself walking towards it.

My legs moved without my conscious permission. One step. Then another. The gravel crunched beneath my work boots, and the sound seemed muffled, distant, as if the gate were swallowing not just light but sound as well.

"Luke," I called out tentatively, my voice barely more than a whisper. "Are you there?"

My heart pounded in my chest, a mix of fear and intrigue propelling me forward.

No answer came. Just the soft hum of the colours—a sound I felt more than heard, vibrating in my chest cavity like the bass note of some cosmic organ.

Standing mere feet away from the mesmerising wall of colour, I hesitated for a moment.

The surface rippled. Not like water, but like something alive. Something aware.

Then, with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension, I extended my hand towards it.

Bright streaks of red and blue intertwined, colliding and sparking off shades of magenta that seemed to reach out into the air, enveloping the tips of my fingers.

The sensation was indescribable.

Not hot. Not cold. Something else entirely. A tingling that went deeper than skin, deeper than muscle, as if the colours were touching something fundamental inside me. Something that had never been touched before.

Just then, a calm, ethereal voice, unfamiliar yet strangely soothing, reached my ears.

"Clive sees you, Joel Gibbons."

The words hung in the air, sending a chill down my spine.

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. From the gate. From inside my own skull. From the spaces between atoms. It was neither male nor female, neither young nor old. It simply was—as constant and undeniable as gravity.

Startled, I jerked my hand back, my eyes scanning the area for the source of the voice.

Who was Clive? How did he know my name?

The surreal quality of the moment was overwhelming, blurring the lines between reality and something altogether different. My name. This thing—this voice, this presence—knew my name. Not Joel from the courier company. My actual name. As if it had been watching. Waiting.

I stood there, my hand still tingling from the contact with the colours, trying to make sense of the voice, the gate, and the bizarre turn my day had taken.

My mind raced with questions, each more perplexing than the last.

The reality I had always known seemed to be unravelling before my eyes, and I felt as though I was standing on the precipice of something entirely unknown.

I should have run.

Every instinct, every survival mechanism honed by nineteen years of cautious existence, screamed at me to turn around, get in the truck, and drive away. To forget the tents, forget Luke, forget the swirling impossibility before me.

But I didn't run.

I couldn't.

My startled shriek was muffled as my left arm was wrenched painfully behind my back, the sudden force causing my knees to buckle.

The pain was immediate and absolute. My shoulder socket screamed in protest, the tendons stretching to their limit. I felt the bones grinding against each other, felt the muscle fibres tearing at the edges.

Someone had grabbed me from behind.

No warning. No sound of approach. Just the sudden, violent seizure of my body.

Before I could gather my bearings, I was slammed against the cold metal of the truck, my back pressed hard against it.

The impact drove the air from my lungs. My skull bounced off the metal with a dull clang that reverberated through my jaw and made my vision swim. Stars burst across my eyes—white and sharp and cruel.

Both of my arms were pinned, rendering me helpless.

I tried to struggle. Tried to twist away. But the hands holding me were like iron clamps, fingers digging into my flesh hard enough to bruise bone. The grip was professional. Practised. The kind of hold that spoke of experience in violence.

I raised my eyes to meet those of my attacker—a man with a heavily bearded face, his expression grim and determined.

The man was massive.

His bald head gleamed in the winter light, adorned with scars that crisscrossed his scalp like a map of past battles. His beard was thick and dark, shot through with grey, framing a mouth set in a hard line. But it was his eyes that made my blood freeze.

Steel-blue. Cold as a Tasmanian winter. Empty of mercy.

Suddenly, a third arm snaked around from behind me, a cold, sharp blade pressing threateningly against my throat.

There were two of them.

The realisation hit me like a physical blow. I hadn't heard either of them approach. They'd materialised from nowhere, and now I was trapped between them like prey between predators.

The blade was cold. So cold it burned.

I could feel its edge against my skin, feel the slight pressure where it dimpled the flesh of my throat. One wrong movement—one flinch, one swallow—and I knew it would slice through.

The sensation was terrifyingly real, and I felt a warm trickle of urine escape down my leg, a physical manifestation of my fear.

The shame of it barely registered. I was going to die. I was going to die in this driveway, in this quiet Berriedale street, and nobody would know what had happened to me.

Mum. Oh God, Mum.

"You the Guardian?" the burly man demanded, his voice rough and menacing.

I was paralysed with fear, unable to find my voice.

Guardian? What guardian? The word meant nothing to me. I was a courier. A delivery driver. I sorted parcels in a tin-roofed depot and drove a truck that needed new brake pads.

The blade at my throat pressed in harder, a silent but deadly warning.

I felt the skin break. Just a little. Just enough for a thin line of warmth to trickle down my neck. My own blood. Hot against my cold skin.

"Speak to me, boy!" he barked at me.

"No!" I finally managed to choke out, my voice barely above a whisper.

The word came out strangled, pathetic. The voice of a frightened child, not a nineteen-year-old man. But I couldn't help it. Terror had stripped away everything except the most basic responses.

"Where are they?" he pressed, his gaze piercing.

His steel-blue eyes bored into mine, searching for something. Searching for a lie, maybe. Or for recognition. I had neither to offer him.

"I... I don't know," I stammered, my mind racing in panic. "I... I don't know what it is."

I was telling the truth, but the fear of not being believed was overwhelming.

The man's face was inches from mine. I could smell him—sweat and leather and something else, something strange and otherworldly, like ozone after a lightning strike.

He scrutinised me for a moment, and I saw calculation in those cold eyes. Assessment. Decision.

Then he took a step back.

"Take care of him," he ordered the person holding the knife.

With that, he turned and walked toward the gate, disappearing into the bright, colourful sparks of the swirling mass.

The colours swallowed him whole. One moment he was there—solid, terrifying, real—and the next he was simply gone, absorbed into the kaleidoscope as if he'd never existed.

Take care of him.

The words echoed in my skull.

I knew what they meant. I knew with a certainty that went beyond logic, beyond hope, beyond denial.

Rough hands gripped me under my armpits, pulling me into the back of the truck.

The man behind me was strong—wiry rather than bulky, but with a grip like a vice. He dragged me as if I weighed nothing, my heels scraping uselessly against the driveway, then the metal lip of the truck bed.

The interior of the truck was dim. Familiar. I'd loaded this same truck this morning, had checked the straps on these same boxes. The smell of cardboard and packing tape—my ordinary life, my mundane existence—surrounded me now as I was hauled toward my death.

"Stand up!" the gruff voice behind me demanded.

The accent was strange. English, maybe, but wrong somehow. Older. Like something from a period drama, or from a world where time moved differently.

"Please, no," I pleaded, my voice trembling as I was yanked to my feet.

The words were useless. I knew they were useless even as I spoke them. But what else did I have? My arms were still pinned. My legs were shaking too badly to run. The knife was still at my throat, still pressing that thin line of fire into my skin.

The situation was spiralling out of control, and I had no idea how to escape it.

The fear was all-consuming, and I braced myself for what might come next, unsure of how I ended up in this nightmarish scenario.

Time seemed to stretch. Each heartbeat lasted an eternity.

I thought about my mother. Her auburn hair. Her tired smile after a long shift. The way she'd looked at me last night, when the truth about my father had spilled out between us.

I thought about Jamie Greyson. The father I'd never known. The man I'd come here hoping to find.

I thought about how ironic it was—how cruel—that I'd spent nineteen years believing a lie, had finally discovered the truth, and would now die before I could ever confront it.

The blade shifted at my throat.

As the man's hands gripped me, fear coursed through every fibre of my being.

I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. Hot. Steady. The breath of a man who had done this before. Who would do it again.

There was a sharp, almost electric jolt of pain as he made his move.

It didn't feel like I'd imagined.

In films, in books, the moment of violence is always dramatic—a slow-motion sweep, a theatrical spray of crimson. But this was different. This was real.

The blade moved fast. Faster than thought. One moment it was pressing against my throat, and the next it was through.

I didn't feel it cut.

I felt what came after.

A spray of red, vivid and shocking, flashed before my eyes, splattering against the side of the truck like some grotesque painting.

The blood was everywhere.

On the cardboard boxes with their cheerful images. On the metal walls of the truck. On my hands, which I hadn't even realised I'd raised.

My mind struggled to process what was happening, to make sense of the sudden, violent turn my day had taken.

That's my blood, I thought, with a strange, detached clarity. That's my blood on the floor.

I clutched at my severed throat, my body heaving, gasping for breath, as it gargled and coughed on spewing blood.

The sound was obscene. Wet. Bubbling. The sound of a drain trying to empty, of a fountain trying to flow through a blocked pipe. The sound of a body that was already dead but hadn't yet realised it.

Blood pumped through my fingers in hot, rhythmic gushes. Each heartbeat pushed more of my life out through the wound. I could feel my pulse in the ragged edges of my own flesh—could feel the torn vessels and severed tendons and the windpipe that now gaped open to the cold Tasmanian air.

I felt my knees give way beneath me, the strength in my legs vanishing as I dropped to the cold ground.

The impact barely registered. I was beyond pain now. Beyond sensation. The world was narrowing, contracting, becoming a tunnel with darkness at the edges.

In that moment of overwhelming pain and shock, my thoughts turned unexpectedly to my mother.

Her image appeared in my mind, a tearful but loving smile on her face.

Not the mother I'd seen yesterday, raw with guilt and secrets. Not the mother who'd lied to me for nineteen years. But the mother who'd stayed up all night when I had fevers. Who'd worked double shifts so I could have new shoes. Who'd loved me so fiercely that she'd constructed an entire fiction to protect me from pain.

"I love you, my son," she seemed to whisper to me, her voice a comforting yet heartbreaking echo in the chaos of my thoughts.

Mum.

I'm sorry.

I should have told you—

My vision began to blur, the edges of my consciousness fraying.

The blood had stopped spurting now. It flowed instead, sluggish and dark. My heart was slowing. My body was shutting down, system by system, like a house going dark room by room.

I could feel my eyes rolling back, a darkness creeping in, enveloping everything.

The world around me, the truck, the man, the swirling gate—it all started to fade away into nothingness.

I tried to hold on. Tried to keep my mother's face in my mind. But even that was slipping away, dissolving into the encroaching black like morning mist burning off in sunlight.

The cold of the truck bed seeped into my back.

The smell of my own blood filled my nostrils—copper and salt and something else, something final.

And then, in an instant, all light, all sense of being, vanished.

I was left in a void, a place of eerie calm and profound silence.

It was as if I had stepped out of one reality and into another, or perhaps into the space between realities. A space where time, pain, and fear no longer held any meaning.

The darkness was complete.

Not the darkness of night, or of closed eyes, or of an unlit room. This was something else. This was the darkness of absence—of everything that had ever been, ceasing to be.

I was nowhere.

I was nothing.