The Abandoned Backpack

"Sometimes the most ordinary objects carry the weight of extraordinary decisions. And sometimes they are left behind on purpose."

The rest of that flight went past me at the speed of a bad meeting.

Every second of it came out longer than the one before it, and the hum of the engines—which had been furniture until very recently, and which I do not believe I had ever once actually heard—was now pressing itself against the inside of my skull with a merciless sort of insistence, getting into my back teeth, going away in the bones of my face like a warning coming up out of the machinery that was holding us in the air.

And I could not stop looking at the seat beside me.

Its emptiness had stopped being an absence, and that is the nearest I have ever got to describing it. It had become a violation. An interruption in the otherwise perfectly coherent arrangement of that cabin, a gap in a row of teeth that the tongue keeps going back to. There was no scent left in it and there was no warmth in the cushion, and there was nothing at all in it anywhere, and in the middle of the nothing there was an implication that would not be reasoned away no matter what I did to it.

The wine was still going round in me somewhere, reduced but not finished with, and its ghost made all of it worse rather than better. It thickened the unreality of the thing. It gave me the steady persistent sense that I had slipped sideways through a seam in the world that nobody else in that cabin could see—and it was a dreamlike state, but it was not the soft kind with the pillows in it. This was a dream with an edge on it, held very steadily just above the throat of my understanding.

I kept checking the lavatory door, as though looking at it hard enough and often enough might argue her back out through it. The door stayed shut. The occupancy light stayed off. Silent, and indifferent, and entirely unbothered by anything I was doing.

She was not coming back. I knew that. It landed in my chest with the resigned finality of news that has been expected for a long time and prepared for not at all.

I shifted in the seat—restlessness rather than discomfort—and stretched my legs out as far as the tyranny of economy class permits.

And that was when I saw it.

The backpack.

It had not been there before. Or rather it had been there the entire time and I had not seen it, which is not the same thing at all and is considerably worse. But there it was now, tucked in neatly and unceremoniously beneath the seat in front of her empty chair. Matte black. Weathered. Ordinary in every conceivable respect.

Except that it was not. Not now. Not here. Not after what I had just failed to watch happen.

The sight of it went into me under the ribs. I stared at the thing with my eyes wide and not blinking, as though it might at any moment sprout legs and go scuttling off up the aisle—and it should not have been there, and that is the whole of it. If she had gone the way I had gone, through a hole in the world and a quiet sideways step out of existence, then why in God's name was her bag still sitting on the floor of an aeroplane?

You do not step out of a world and abandon your belongings. Not unless you have to.

Unless you were interrupted. Or threatened. Or hunted.

My brain went after rationality the way a drowning man goes after a plank. Perhaps she simply forgot it. And the thought was laughable before I had finished having it. Nobody forgets a backpack on an aeroplane. Not a bag they have been sitting with for two hours. People keep their bags where they can feel them, and I had spent an entire flight out of Hobart turning round in my seat to stare at the closed door of a locker.

Unless, of course, it was not hers any more.

I leaned forward slowly and narrowed my eyes at it, and from that angle I could see a scuffed patch stitched into the upper corner of it. It was not a brand I recognised. It was a stylised silver triangle with its three points all wrong—asymmetrical, and deliberately so—and it sat somewhere on the line between an alchemical symbol and a corporate design error, and I looked at it for a long time and could not decide which of the two it was.

I did not reach for it.

Not yet.

I sat there instead, entirely motionless, regarding a canvas bag with the reverence and the suspicion that any sensible person reserves for a device whose wiring he cannot follow. It was inert. It was an object. Canvas, and zips, and nylon straps, and whatever was inside it.

And it felt like a black box pulled out of the wreckage of a disaster that I had not, until that afternoon, understood myself to be part of.

What was in it? Clothing? A passport? A half-eaten sandwich in foil?

Or something else altogether. Something active.

The Portal Key sat against my thigh through the fabric of my pocket, dense and heavy and doing absolutely nothing, and I could not shake the idea that it was somehow aware of that bag—that the two of them, the one against my leg and the one on the floor, were conducting a conversation to which I had not been invited.

I looked round the cabin again.

Nobody watching. Nobody moving. No indication anywhere that the fabric of ordinary consensus reality had noticed the tear opening quietly in row twenty-nine.

The rational part of me—the part that still wanted very much to believe in airports and boarding passes and announcements about turbulence—was murmuring away that a bag is a bag, and that this one very probably contained a jumper and a notebook and a toothbrush and nothing else on God's earth.

And the other part of me, the part that had stood in a service corridor in Melbourne and watched a painted wall stop existing, knew perfectly well that it meant something.

It had to. She had left it there for a reason.

Or she had not left it there at all.

I pushed back into my seat and took hold of the armrests, and my pulse went in my ears like something being beaten in another room, and the bag sat on the floor being patient at me.

And I could not stop asking myself the question.

What if it is a trap?

What if it is bait? What if there is another Portal Key in it?

Or something a great deal more powerful. Something a great deal more dangerous.

The device had been against my leg since a man with a cut on his jaw put an envelope into my hands in a laneway and walked away from me, and it had got heavier every single hour since, and not one gram of that weight was physical. It had begun to feel like a witness. As though the thing knew exactly what I was contemplating and had elected to say nothing and watch me do it.

And there was the bag. That entirely unremarkable, perfectly ordinary black canvas bag.

Could it be part of the same thing? Part of whatever it was that Seth had been unable to explain to me with his hands shaking? Part of whatever it was that had made a woman in a denim jacket look at an object lying in my lap and know it on sight and go white?

It seemed likely. The longer I sat there, it seemed very nearly inevitable.

I looked up the aisle. No attendants anywhere—tucked away in their galleys at either end, presumably, preparing for the final sweep. Standard procedure. Predictable. And entirely, laughably irrelevant to the thing sitting in front of me.

Every sensible instinct I possess was telling me to leave that bag exactly where it was. Do not touch it. Do not go near it. Do not cross this line, because there is no uncrossing it afterwards.

And I could not do it.

The longer I looked at the thing the more the need to know ate through everything else. And it was not curiosity by then; it had stopped being curiosity somewhere over the border. It was a compulsion with its roots a long way underneath logic, fed on cheap wine and on four days without sleep and on the hot humiliating sting of having been told to shut up by a stranger who had turned out to be entirely correct.

She had looked at me. She had known. She had disappeared out of a sealed box six miles above the ground.

And she had left that behind.

It could not be coincidence. She had wanted me to find it—she must have—and some buried piece of instinct assured me of it with all the serene confidence of a thing that has never once been required to produce evidence.

And so, in the end, I moved.

I leaned forward with what I hoped resembled the casual boredom of a passenger reaching for his own luggage, and I put my hand in under the seat in front of hers, and my fingertips came up against coarse canvas.

It was cold. That was the first thing. It was noticeably and unpleasantly cold, and it was rough under the fingers in a way that suggested it had seen a very great deal more of the world than airport terminals—the sort of surface that remembers grit.

I slid it out and put it on my lap.

And the weight of it startled me badly enough that I very nearly said something out loud.

It was not simply full. It was dense. It was weighted with something specific and deliberate, and it did not have the loose scattered heft of a travel bag, and I have carried enough travel bags in my life to know the difference in my forearm before I know it anywhere else. This had the compact, purposeful heaviness of a bag packed by somebody who knew precisely what they were going to need.

I adjusted my grip on the straps. My palms were tingling with a combination of wine and adrenaline that I would not recommend to anybody.

To a passer-by, I imagine, it looked as though I were checking my own bag before landing. Innocuous. Ordinary. Forgettable.

And every cell in my body was ringing with the knowledge that I had just done a thing that could not be undone.

The ordinary noise of that cabin—the murmur of a conversation two rows up, the turn of a magazine page, somebody's muted cough—swelled alarmingly in my ears, as though the entire aircraft had drawn one collective breath and was holding it. I felt exposed. I felt seen. I felt, quite distinctly, that something somewhere had just taken notice of me.

I looked round the cabin again. Nobody watching. Nobody moving.

And I could feel it anyway. The same crawling tension I had felt in that corridor at Melbourne with my thumb on the indent—that quiet vibration underneath the surface of things, the sense of the air changing its mind about something.

My hand hovered over the zipper.

And I did not open it.

Not there. I could not do it there.

My fingers were shaking where they rested, a few centimetres from whatever it was, and her voice came up through the middle of everything with a clarity that made me flinch.

Do you really want to get us both killed?

And the flame of it went out, just like that, and left the cold sitting there behind it.

Not here. Not now. Not surrounded by two hundred people with the taste of cheap white wine still on the back of my tongue and a head full of questions I had not yet begun to know how to ask.

So I made a decision. I set the bag down on the floor between my feet—not hidden and not displayed, simply there, exactly as though it had always been mine—and I shifted in my seat so that my legs bracketed it naturally. Nobody looking twice would have thought a thing about it. A commuter's bag. Unremarkable. Forgettable.

And I put my shoe against the canvas.

Solid. Weighted. Sitting there with an air of quiet intent that I did not care for in the slightest.

I would wait. I would get to Adelaide. I would find my brother, if my brother could be found at all, and then, somewhere private and somewhere safe, I would open it.

Not here. Not in public. Not while the sound of her absence was still going in my head like a bell I could not un-ring.

That resolution lasted about ten minutes, which I think may be the shortest time I have ever kept a promise to myself in the whole of my adult life.

Because the bag got heavier. That is what nobody tells you about a decision to wait—the waiting does not hold still while you do it. The weight of the thing between my feet accumulated with every minute that went past, as though the questions inside it were putting on mass, layer upon layer of meaning and secrecy and silent intent, until it had stopped being a piece of forgotten luggage altogether and had turned into something mythic. A relic. A message. A trap. Very possibly all three at once.

The engines droned away against the edges of my concentration like a clock counting down towards an event I could not name and could feel coming. My hands had steadied at last as the wine went out of me, and they were tingling now with something else entirely, something sharp and clean and cold.

And I stood up.

I looped the strap over one shoulder with what I hoped was the ease of routine. There was nothing routine about any of it. Every movement I made had been rehearsed inside my head before I made it, and every step was measured to look like nothing whatever.

Just another passenger going to the lavatory.

All around me that cabin went on being a bubble of oblivious calm. Quiet conversation under the white noise. Screens flickering away with cartoons and blockbusters. A toddler somewhere behind me shrieking with delight at the sight of a cloud. And the sheer comfortable mundanity of the whole thing only made the electric unreality going on underneath my skin considerably worse.

Nobody looked up. Nobody cared. Nobody in that entire aircraft noticed me step into the aisle and start walking towards the back of it with a vanished woman's bag on my shoulder.

At the door I stopped, and turned round—not for effect, but to check. Both attendants were occupied. One of them was down on one knee retrieving a dropped cup from under a seat.

Nobody was watching.

I went in and pulled the door shut behind me, and it closed with a muted clack that went off in my ears like a shot, and the lock engaged with a small sharp click, and above my head on the other side of it the sign came on and glowed red.

OCCUPIED.

And this time I did not hesitate.

I set the backpack down carefully on the closed lid of the toilet, and something inside it shifted—dense, and deliberate—and settled. Then I took hold of the edges of the basin and leaned on them, and let out a breath I had not known that I was holding.

The air in there was close and acrid, industrial cleaner laid over the top of decades of accumulated human anxiety. Sterile. Unforgiving. Entirely appropriate.

And then I put my hand in my pocket and drew out my own Portal Key.

It was not humming. It was not warm. There was no glow to it and there never had been, and my hand made its usual small formal complaint about the weight of an object that size, and I stood in a box two feet by four and looked at a thing that gave my eye nothing whatever to take hold of.

And then I thought about the aeroplane.

I did think about it, and I would like that noted, because everything that followed makes me look like a man who did not.

This aircraft was moving. It was moving at something in the order of five hundred knots and it had been moving the entire time I had been sitting in it, and every wall inside it had been somewhere else a second ago and would be somewhere else again a second afterwards. And a doorway is a thing that goes into a wall and stays there. I had put two of them into buildings that morning and I could not take either of them out again.

What does a permanent door do in a wall that will not sit still?

And on the other side of it—what came out? A patch of red ground on Saint Phillis? Or five hundred knots of empty air at fifty below, and a hole in the side of an aircraft with two hundred people sitting in it, and my own body going out through that hole before a single one of them had finished turning their head?

I did not know. There was nobody on this earth I could ask.

And a woman in a denim jacket had stood exactly where I was standing, not very long before, and had done it anyway—and the aeroplane had not come apart, and the cabin had not depressurised, and a man three rows up had gone on asking for another beer.

That was the entire body of my evidence. A sample size of one. Uncontrolled, unrepeated, and drawn from a person whose name I did not know.

I would have failed anybody who brought me that.

I aimed it at the narrow stretch of wall opposite the basin, and I pressed.

The light went out of it and struck the laminate, and the wall of an aircraft lavatory stopped being a wall.

It did not burn and it did not shatter. The surface of it simply gave up—unmaking itself, going soft, losing its edges the way wax loses its edges—and what came up through it was colour. All of it at once. Gold running into green, a blue with no name for it going over the top of a red that hurt to look at, silver tearing through the middle of everything as though somebody were painting with light and motion rather than with pigment and a brush. Sparks ran along the edges and threw flashes across that cramped little box.

And it stood in the wall from the floor upward, with its base sitting on the lavatory floor exactly as a door sits in a doorframe, and the whole room bent itself towards it.

I did not stop to look at it. That was the one thing I had learned in a corridor.

I took the backpack in one hand, and I stepped forward.

The threshold let me through without any argument at all. No friction. No sound. No change in temperature. Just a moment of dislocation, the sensation of blinking and finding yourself elsewhere—and one moment I was in synthetic fabric and chemical air, and the next I was standing in silence.

The silence hit first. It always does. Total, and immersive, and very nearly suffocating in its completeness. No engines. No recycled air. No two hundred people breathing at once behind a curtain.

Nothing at all.

Then the pressure came off my ears with a small pop, and I took a breath and it did not fill me, and the air was thinner and cooler and had that dry mineral emptiness about it that I had begun, God help me, to recognise.

Saint Phillis.

I had not asked for it. I have never had to ask for it. Wherever I put my thumb on that thing, on whatever wall, in whatever city, it opens onto here—and I had gone through the wall of an aeroplane at cruising altitude and had come out standing on red dust with both shoes on the ground and my heart going like something industrial.

The aircraft had not come apart. Nobody had gone out through a hole in the fuselage.

It had worked. And I still had no idea why, and I have never found anybody who could tell me.

The plain ran away from me in every direction, flat and red and vast, precisely as I had left it—the low rise away to the east with the fold in it about halfway up, the rock formations standing about at long intervals in ones and twos, worn round and smooth and headless. The dust lay over all of it as fine as flour in a bowl. The sun was up there where a sun ought to be, in a sky that was perfectly and unremarkably blue, and it laid my own shadow out across the ground beside me, and that remained the single worst thing about the place and I did not expect it ever to stop being the single worst thing about the place.

Away to the west the ground ran out flat and stopped, and the cliffs went down to the sea—red sandstone, laid down in bands of ochre and rust and cream, the same stone that half of Hobart is built out of, doing on another world exactly what it has always done at home.

And behind me, standing on the plain with its base in the dust, was the screen.

The colours had gone out of it the moment I came through, which I had not expected and did not understand and did not have time to think about, and what was left was that great translucent pane—three metres across and more, standing perfectly still, with the plain visible through it and slightly wrong, the way a thing goes wrong when it is seen through the air above hot tarmac. It caught no light. It cast no shadow. The wind came along the ground and struck the foot of it and went round.

And I stood there in the wind of another world with a vanished woman's backpack hanging off one hand, and then I did the first genuinely competent thing I had managed in four days.

I did not stand about gaping at anything. I did not walk towards the cliff. I picked the bag up properly and went looking for somewhere to put it.

Because I could not take it back through. That was the whole of the reasoning and it had taken me about four seconds to reach it. If she had gone, and if somebody had been hunting her, then a bag full of her belongings was the single most dangerous object I could conceivably walk through an Australian airport carrying—and it had no business existing on Earth any longer.

And there was exactly one place in the universe where nobody would ever think to look for it.

Every footstep I took left a perfect print behind me in the dust, and every one of them began to soften at the edges before I had finished making the next—the wind coming in off the water and going over them and quietly taking them back. I watched it happening as I walked, and I let it happen, and I was glad of it. There are not many worlds that will do a man the courtesy of forgetting he was in them.

I found what I wanted at the base of one of the rock formations, perhaps two hundred metres out from the screen: a place where the stone leaned out over itself and threw a deep triangular shadow across the ground beneath it, and underneath the overhang there was a shallow recess, dry, and out of the wind.

I knelt down in front of it and brushed the top layer of powder away with the side of my hand, and underneath it the ground was firm and finely fractured and had not been disturbed by anything at all in a very long time.

I put the bag into the deepest part of it, and pushed it back until it sat flush against the curve of the stone, and the shadow took the shape of it and made the whole thing into nothing.

Then I stood back several paces and looked at it with an eye I had not known I possessed.

You could not see it. Not from where I was standing, and not from anywhere else on that plain, and there was nobody anywhere on that plain and there never had been.

"There," I said.

And the sound of my own voice startled me a great deal more than it had any right to. It hung in the air for about half a second and then it was simply gone—absorbed, taken, swallowed whole, with no echo and no reverberation and nothing whatever coming back. It was like speaking into velvet. That place had taken my words and had given me nothing at all in return, and it did it every time, and I never got used to it.

I stood in the quiet for a moment.

Then I went back, and knelt down again, and put my hand on the bag.

Because of course I was going to open it. I had never for one second been going to do anything else, and every part of the sensible little speech I had made to myself on that aeroplane—about privacy, and safety, and Adelaide—had been a piece of theatre performed for an audience of one, and the audience had not been convinced either.

It was so ordinary. Black canvas gone grey along the seams. Scuffed metal zips that had been pulled a thousand times by somebody who was thinking about something else while they pulled them. And the sheer banality of the thing made it worse rather than better, because it had belonged to her—to the woman who had known what was in my hand the moment she saw it, and who had told me to stop talking, and who was now somewhere I could not follow.

I slid the main zipper open, and the teeth parted with a soft rasp that went off in that silence like a branch breaking.

I stopped. I waited. Nothing moved. The light did not change. The air stayed exactly where it was.

The first thing I took out was a water bottle. Plastic, scratched, half full. A common brand; there is one in the fridge of every service station in the country. And it sat in my hand under a sun on another world with the condensation catching the light on the inside of it, and it felt very nearly sacred, and I put it down in the dust with a great deal more care than it deserved.

Then a small zippered pouch. Black canvas, matching. I opened that the same way.

Toiletries. A travel toothbrush worn flat at the bristles. A tube of toothpaste squeezed from the middle, which I noticed, and had an opinion about, and then despised myself for having an opinion about. A packet of tissues folded over with a neatness that was almost ritual.

They were ordinary. They were reassuring in the way that ordinary things are always reassuring. This woman had brushed her teeth. She had carried tissues. She had bought a bottle of water somewhere and drunk half of it and put the cap back on.

And every one of those objects was now lying in the red dust of a world with nothing alive on it anywhere, and the fact of them being there made the strangeness of that place worse by an order of magnitude.

She had been here. She had crossed over, exactly as I had.

And she had left it all behind.

Whether by choice or by necessity I could not say then and cannot say now. But I knew, kneeling in that dust with a stranger's toothbrush in my hand, that the bag was not an accident.

And then my fingertips found something rigid at the bottom of the main compartment. Something rectangular, buried underneath everything else.

My pulse went straight up.

I got it out and held it up in the light.

A notebook.

Plain. Unbranded. Matte black, worn soft at the corners, dog-eared from being handled by somebody who was not gentle with it. The spine had gone slack. The edges of a good many pages were curled and faintly stained with something—water, or sweat, or both. The sort of thing a person buys for four dollars in a university bookshop without troubling to look at it.

And it had gone through a hole in the world in the bottom of a backpack.

I opened it, and the crackle of the spine was obscene in all that silence.

Most of it was blank. That was the first thing, and it was somehow a great deal worse than if it had been full. Page after page of nothing—and under any other circumstances an empty notebook is simply an empty notebook, and here it was a question.

What had she written? And why so little?

The pages that had been used were covered in a hand that had gone entirely to pieces. Cramped, hasty, wildly inconsistent in size, the letters shrinking and then suddenly swelling, the way handwriting goes when the person producing it is under a great deal of pressure and is not stopping to look at what they have made. Whole lines had been scratched out with a violence that had gone through the paper. Phrases had been written and struck out and rewritten and struck out again, and the ink got darker and heavier and more forceful as it went. There were arrows connecting things. There were boxes drawn round things, and then drawn round again, and again—and the whole of it spiralled outward in a pattern that I did not want to look at for very long.

And one thing caught me almost immediately.

"M— — key active"

The rest of it had dissolved. Smeared ink, half a letter, and then nothing at all. The truncated word could have been anything—master, or modified, or a name, or a place—and I sat back on my heels in the dust of another world and stared at it and tried to make it mean something and could not.

A sentence abandoned halfway along. A thought that had simply stopped.

And further on, a series of numbers. Coordinates, or something formatted the way coordinates are formatted, written fast and then circled—and circled again, and again, with a pressure that had very nearly torn through the page.

I know the format. Anybody who has sat through enough workshops with a mapping team knows the format. And with nothing whatever to hang them on—no date, no place name, no annotation of any kind—they told me precisely nothing. Locations of interest. Other portals. Somewhere to run to. Somewhere that had already been found.

I shut the notebook.

And then I sat there in the dust and did the only thing I have ever been any real use at, which was to look at what was not in that bag.

No maps. No identification. No wallet, no cards, no passport, no boarding pass, no telephone, no charger, no keys. Not a receipt. Not a chemist's docket. Not one single object anywhere in the whole of it that could be traced back to a living person.

She had packed that bag knowing that somebody would go through it.

And that was not caution. Caution is a thing a frightened person does badly and inconsistently and forgets about halfway through. This was a procedure. This was a woman who had done it before, and had thought about it in advance, and had made rules for herself, and was following them.

And that notebook was not a set of observations.

It was a set of warnings.

Do you really want to get us both killed?

I put it back. I put all of it back—the notebook, the pouch, the water bottle, each thing exactly where I had found it and in the order I had found it, which is a habit I have never been able to break and which for once in my life was worth something. I zipped it shut. I brushed the dust off the top of the canvas with the flat of my hand, and most of it went, and some of it stayed down in the weave, and I could not get that out, and I left it there.

And I put the bag back into the crevice, and pushed it in under the overhang, and stepped away from it.

It went into the shadow almost completely. A black shape lying against a darker shape. Even the light on that plain seemed reluctant to go in after it.

And then the other thing came back, and it came back hard, and it came back all at once.

The time.

I did not know how long I had been standing on that plain. I did not know how long I had been in that lavatory. I did not know whether those two figures were the same figure or whether they had anything whatever to do with one another, and I had no means at all of finding out—and somewhere on the other side of a hole in the air an aeroplane was going to begin letting down into Adelaide, and there was going to be a queue outside that door by then, and people talk about a man who goes into a lavatory and does not come out of it.

I looked once more at the crevice. At the bag lying in it. At the cliffs going down to a sea I could not hear.

And I walked back to the screen, and it woke as I came up to it, and I braced myself for it and the bracing did no good at all.

The plain behind the pane went out, and the images came, and they came fast—riffling, the way cards go past when somebody runs a thumb down the edge of a deck.

Meeting Room 4B, with the chair still wedged under the door handle. Gone. The corridor, with the mop standing in the bucket. Gone. The amber room, with the dust in it hanging motionless in a shaft of light, and I did not look at that one and I made myself not look at that one. Gone.

And a fourth.

A lavatory. Grey walls, and a steel basin, and the fixed grin of a plastic waste bin, lit with that particular buzzing fluorescence that exists nowhere else in creation except in the back of an aeroplane. The door shut. The lock across. Everything in it perfectly and unnaturally still.

There had been three of them. Now there were four. And I had put the fourth one there myself with my own thumb, not very long before, and it was going to sit on that screen for as long as the screen existed.

They went round and round and my head began to split behind the left eye, and I stopped chasing them with my eyes and stood still with my hands down and did the thing that had worked the first time.

I meant one.

And it slowed. Not much, and not well, and it hurt a great deal more than it had before—but the riffle came down to a shuffle, and then to something I could very nearly follow, and I hauled at it with my hand up over my eye and my teeth shut.

And I caught the lavatory, and I got hold of it, and I held it.

And the screen burst.

The whole pane went at once, colour tearing outward from the middle of it, and a still photograph of a small grey box six miles above the earth was swallowed whole—and the doorway stood open on that plain with its base in the red dust, roaring at me without making one single sound.

I took a last breath of that air, dry and clean and mineral with nothing living in it anywhere.

And I stepped through.

The hum of the aircraft came back with a violence that made me put a hand out for the wall. My ears popped. And I was standing in a plastic box that smelled of blue chemical, with a mirror in front of me and a dry basin underneath it—and behind me the colours went inward on themselves and were gone, and the wall was a wall again, and there was nothing in that room to say that anything had occurred in it.

I leaned on the basin and let my own weight come back down into my legs.

My breath fogged the mirror and then drew off it and gave me back a face I did not entirely recognise. Grey. Drawn. Pulled tight round the eyes and slack everywhere else.

It was not that I looked older, although I did.

It was that I looked heavier—as though the things I now knew had begun to settle into the flesh underneath my eyes and into the lines going down beside my mouth, and had made themselves comfortable there, and had no intention whatever of leaving.

I straightened my shirt. I put a hand through my hair. It did not matter in the slightest what I looked like; it mattered only that I looked ordinary, and that not one person in that cabin would look at me and begin to wonder.

Then I put my hand on the lock and turned it, and the little sign on the other side went from red to green.

And I stepped out into a queue.

There were four of them. Four people standing in the aisle in a line, every one of whom had plainly arrived at the far end of whatever patience they had brought on board with them, and every one of whom looked at me.

The man at the front was balding and in a charcoal suit, and he had the settled radiating authority of a man accustomed to being deferred to in a room, and his tie was loosened in a manner that was meant to signal ease and signalled nothing of the kind. He raised his eyebrows at me. Slowly. With enormous theatrical patience.

Behind him a girl of about sixteen stared at me over her folded arms with a pair of headphones round her neck and one trainer going tap, tap, tap against the carpet in a small private rhythm of pure grievance—and her expression was not hostile so much as it was accusatory, as though I had wasted her afternoon deliberately and had rather enjoyed doing it.

"Sorry," I said, and put my head down, and got past them.

Their attention had gone off me before I had finished saying it. I was an obstruction. I was a man who had taken too long. And I could feel the last of their eyes coming off my back like static all the way up that aisle.

How long had I been gone?

There is no honest answer to that and I have never been able to construct one. What does twenty minutes mean when it has been spent on two worlds at the same time? Time on Saint Phillis is soft; it goes where it likes and it tells you nothing. And here, in a pressurised tube full of people going home for the weekend, it is a hard instrument and it does not forgive.

Every sound in that cabin was too loud. The conversation, and the clink of a cup going into a bag, and somebody's cough, and the small artificial ding of a call button two rows up—all of it going across my nerves like grit in a bearing. I had been standing in a silence with mass in it, and I had come back into this, and some part of me had not made the return journey.

I got to my row and sat down, and I looked to my right, and I already knew.

The seat was empty. It was as empty and as unremarkable as it had been before she ever sat down in it—if indeed she ever had. No indentation in the cushion. No warmth in it. Nothing anywhere to say that a woman had been sitting there watching me over the top of a paperback and telling me, entirely correctly, to stop talking.

She was gone.

And not in the ordinary sense. Not the way people go—into a crowd, or into a taxi, or quietly out of a life.

She had vanished. Completely. Without trace.

I did try, once, to tell myself that she had simply moved to another seat. That she had spoken quietly to an attendant and been reseated further up the aircraft. And I did not believe a word of it, and I knew that I did not believe it while I was still assembling it, and I have never been able to lie to myself for very long.

She had gone the way I had just gone. Through a door that nobody else on that aeroplane could see.

I put my head back against the rest and closed my eyes, and behind them I saw a rock formation on a red plain, and a shadow lying underneath an overhang, and a black canvas bag pushed into it with a notebook at the bottom that somebody had written in as though the writing were being taken out of them under duress.

That bag existed. I had held it. I had opened it. I had put my hands on every single object in it.

And there was no trace of it anywhere on that aircraft, and there never would be.

I opened my eyes and went along the rows one at a time with what I hoped resembled the vacant scanning of a bored passenger. No dark ponytail. No denim. No sidelong glance from a stranger who knew something.

The floor under the seat in front of hers was bare.

And nobody had said one word. Not one of the crew had commented. Not one passenger had leaned across and asked what had become of the young woman who had boarded at Melbourne and had not got off anywhere. So far as I could establish, not a single person on that aeroplane had registered that she had ever been aboard it at all.

I was the only person alive who knew that anything had happened.

Which is not remotely the same as knowing what happened, and I have never managed to get the two of them to meet.

The attendants went past me again. The engines went on making their noise. And the world carried on with its steady immaculate performance of an ordinary afternoon.

And in my trouser pocket the Portal Key sat against my leg, cold and far too heavy for its size, and it was the only object anywhere on that aircraft that was telling me the truth.

I looked at the empty seat beside me one more time.

She's gone.

It had stopped being a speculation. It had hardened into a fact while I was not looking, which is what facts do.

But where had she gone? And why? And who from?

The questions came up faster than I could get hold of any one of them, each one splitting into two more as I reached for it, and I sat in an aisle seat over the wing with my head going round like something at a fairground and no means at all of getting off it.

And underneath all of it, ticking away quietly, was the knowledge of a black canvas bag lying under a rock in a silent, sunlit world that has never appeared on any map that anybody has ever drawn.

It would wait for me there. Or it would wait for somebody else.

And there was nothing left for me to do about a single part of it except sit still in a pressurised metal tube going west across a continent—suspended between Melbourne and Adelaide, and between not knowing and knowing, and between the man I had been at the start of the week and whatever it was that I had now begun to turn into.