The Decision to Return

"Crossing between worlds was never the difficult part. The difficult part was finding out what I had dragged through behind me."

I stood there for a long time with the notebook still open in my hands, and the last line of it went round and round in my head like something that had been shouted across a canyon.

Better one of us knows where we disappeared.

Mason had written those words believing that they might be the final thing he ever communicated to another human being, and he had made them sound like a warning, and they were not a warning. They were a farewell with a warning laid over the top of it, so that a little girl looking over his shoulder would not know what she was reading.

The page curled slightly in the dry air of that place, one corner lifting and dropping again in the wind, and I ran my thumb across the back of it and could feel every single place where the pen had gone in too hard.

Josh did not say anything at first. He stood a metre or so away with his arms folded across his chest and went round the horizon with his eyes, wearing an expression of tight, controlled disappointment—which was not what he was feeling, and never had been.

I knew that stance. I had been watching it my entire life. He stood exactly like that in the kitchen when our mother told us that Dad was going, and he stood like that on the front step of the house on the day the police force wrote back to him, and he stood like that in a pub car park after his first serious girlfriend finished with him and then would not talk to anybody about any of it for six weeks. My brother turned fear into disappointment before he would let it into the room with him, because disappointment could be stood about in with the arms folded, and fear could not.

I turned round and went back towards the abandoned shelter and put the notebook down under a flat stone, with just enough weight on it to hold it if the wind got up—and not one gram more than that, because I did not want the thing to look hidden. I wanted it to look left.

And then I stepped back three paces and squinted at it, and then went in again and shifted the stone a couple of inches, because the first arrangement looked like something being concealed and the second one looked like something being offered. And there was a difference. I had spent my entire working life on the difference between those two things, and I had never once expected to need it on a plain of red dust with my brother watching me.

"They left it for us," I said, and straightened up.

Josh nodded, and his jaw was tight.

"Yeah." And his eyes stayed on it. "I just keep wondering… where the hell did Mason even get it from? He didn't take anything with him when we crossed over. I remember that."

And I stood in the dust with my back half turned to my brother, and the whole of the afternoon arrived on top of me at once.

Because he was right. Of course he was right. Mason had walked into that world out of a shed in Broken Hill with nothing in his hands and nothing in his pockets, and a notebook did not simply occur on a plain where nothing had ever lived.

And he had not even been looking at me while he said it. He was still looking down at the stone. He had asked it out of the side of his mouth, the way a thing gets asked when the mind asking it is somewhere else entirely and expects nothing back—and in doing that he had walked straight up to the one door on that entire world that I had bolted, and put his hand on the handle, and rattled it, without the faintest idea that he was doing any of it.

And I could have let it go.

I could have said God knows, and shrugged, and put my hands in my pockets, and he would have taken it—because his head was full of a little girl and a promise he had broken, and he was not looking for a liar.

And I stood there on that plain and worked out how to do it. It took me about two seconds. I had the sentence assembled and the shrug ready and the correct quantity of puzzled interest arranged across my face before I had consciously decided anything at all.

And it had cost me no effort whatever. I noticed that while I was doing it. I noticed how fast it had come, and how neatly, and how little of me had needed to be involved in the making of it.

And then I did not use it.

And I would very much like to say that it was because I found some decency at the bottom of myself somewhere. I did not. It was because there was no version of the coming week in which he did not find out—and because I had spent eleven years sitting in rooms watching people hold things back from me, and watching precisely what it cost them when the thing finally came out on somebody else's terms rather than on their own.

So I told him because it was the least damaging option on the table.

It was not a confession. It was a risk assessment, and I ran it in my head in the two seconds before I opened my mouth, and I have not been able to look at it squarely since.

I cleared my throat.

"I need to tell you something about the notebook."

And Josh's whole face changed. The distraction went out of it and something a great deal older came in, and his eyes narrowed by about a millimetre—and he did not say one word. He simply stood there and waited, which he had been doing to me since I was six years old, and which had always been considerably more effective than shouting, and which he knew perfectly well.

"I know where it came from," I said. "It was in a backpack."

And the silence that came after that was not a comfortable one, and I did not enjoy standing inside it.

"There was a woman. On the flight from Melbourne to Adelaide. She was sitting next to me."

His brow came down.

"The one who vanished?"

And I stopped, and I blinked at him, because I had not said one word about her to another living soul.

"How did you—?"

"You mentioned something weird at Macca's." He shrugged, and there was nothing casual anywhere in it. "Didn't say much. But I clocked the way you looked. Like you were carrying a grenade in your back pocket."

And I gave a dry laugh, and there was not a great deal in it.

"That's not far off."

And he waited again. He simply stood there with his arms folded on a plain in another world and let the silence do the whole of the work for him—and I filled it, because I always did, and because I had never once in thirty-three years managed to sit inside a silence and let it stand on its own.

"She was watching me," I said, and once it started coming it came a good deal faster than I could put it into any sort of order. "Not curiosity. Not the sort of idle looking that goes on in an aeroplane cabin because there is nothing else to look at. She saw the Portal Key. And she told me to hide it."

His eyebrows went up.

"She knew what it was?"

"I don't know. But she reacted like she did." And I could see her doing it while I was saying it—the stillness of her, the way her hand had gone flat down on the cover of that book. "She warned me. And then she went to the lavatory. And she never came out."

And something arrived behind my brother's eyes that I did not care for in the slightest. It was not surprise. It was a very great deal worse than surprise. It was the look of somebody watching a piece of a puzzle drop neatly into a hole that he had been rather hoping was not there.

"I checked," I said. "I got up and I went down the back and I opened the door. It was empty."

He ran a hand over his face.

"And you took her bag."

It was not a question, and he did not put it as one. He simply set it down between us—flat, and face up—and then he stood there and waited to see what I was going to do about it.

"She left it under her seat," I said. "I waited. She didn't come back. The whole cabin started getting up to disembark, and I was sitting there with a vanished woman's bag against my shin, and—" and I heard the word coming a full second before I said it, and I said it anyway, because it was the true one—"I panicked."

"You panicked," said Josh, "and smuggled a stranger's backpack into another dimension."

And there it was. That precise tone. He had been using it on me since we were children and he kept it exclusively for the occasions on which he believed I had done something not merely wrong but spectacularly stupid, and it contained exasperation and disbelief in roughly equal measure, with a thin unwilling seam of concern running right through the middle of the whole thing.

"I didn't want to open it in public," I snapped, and I was defending myself before I had made any decision to defend myself. "And I wasn't going to leave it lying on the floor of an aeroplane if she was connected to any of this. Which she was, Josh. Which she demonstrably was, because her notebook is sitting under that rock over there with Mason's handwriting all over it."

And he put both hands up, palms out.

"Alright. Just… processing."

And he was not processing anything. He was standing on the dust of another world and choosing, with a certain amount of visible effort, not to say the next thing that had occurred to him—and I had watched my brother do that perhaps six times in my life, and every one of those occasions had ended up costing somebody something.

I let a breath out.

"I didn't tell you because I didn't know what to say. And then every hour that went past made it harder to say than the hour before it had been." I looked at the flat stone with the notebook underneath it. "I have watched that mechanism work on other people for eleven years, Josh. I have written it up. I have stood in front of executives and explained to them precisely why the thing was not disclosed at the time, and precisely what it cost everybody to find out about it later. And I stood in an airport terminal and let it do exactly the same thing to me, and I knew what it was while it was happening to me."

And I looked back at him.

"And now Mason has written in her book."

And Josh finished the sentence for me, quietly, and a good deal lower than he had been speaking.

"You think she followed you here."

"Or somebody else did." And I turned my head and looked at the cliffs, because I had not been able to stop looking at the cliffs since I read the word reflections. "Either way. I don't think that bag was full of toiletries and novels."

And Josh stood there and stared at the notebook under that rock as though he might get something further out of it by looking hard enough at the stone.

And neither of us said anything for a while.

Then he shifted his weight, and glanced at the horizon again, and the restlessness had got right into him by then and it was not going to be put back.

"I still think we should go after them."

And I nodded slowly, because I had been thinking about very little else since we found the trail, and because I had already been all the way down that road in my own head and did not care for what was sitting at the end of it.

"I do too. But not like this. We're not prepared."

And I hated saying it. It felt like putting down something that I had no right to put down, and it went against every instinct I had—and it was also entirely and unarguably correct, and being correct had never once in my life made me feel better about anything. Two men standing in the dust of an unmapped world in the clothes they had put on to go to an airport. No water. No light. No food. And not the faintest idea what had frightened a grown man badly enough to make him pick up a child and walk away from the only object on that plain that could ever have got him home.

Josh's jaw worked. He did not want to agree with me and he was not going to be able to avoid it, and I stood there and watched the whole of that argument go across my brother's face and come out the other side of it.

He sighed.

"We need gear," he said. "Shelter. Food. Water. And something to see with, because it gets black out here—and I mean black, Nathan. There's no moon. There's nothing in the sky at all."

"Weapons," I said.

And the word came out of my mouth and stood there in the air between the two of us. I had never in my life said that word about myself. I had never so much as held an air rifle, and my only opinion on the subject had been a mild and untested distaste held at a comfortable distance.

And I did not take it back.

He looked at me sideways, with one eyebrow up.

"You planning to shoot ghosts?"

"I'm planning not to get cornered by something I don't understand."

And it came out a good deal harder than I had meant it to, and with a very great deal more fear in it than I had intended to let out—and he heard every bit of that, and he did not comment on it, and I was grateful to him for that.

He rolled his jaw.

"Fair."

We stood there a while longer, and the sky above us had begun to go soft at the edges, which was the first indication I had ever had that this place did anything at all with its light. And the temperature came down while we were standing there. It did not come down gradually. It fell out of the air all at once and without any warning whatever, exactly the way it had fallen out of the air on every night I had ever spent north of Port Augusta, and the cold got in under my shirt and settled itself against my back where the sweat had been.

And the silence deepened as the light went. It got heavier, and it got closer, and it pressed on my ears, and I did not care for that either.

Josh turned and started back towards the screen, and I went after him with the dust coming up round my shoes in small rust-coloured clouds, and I did the only useful thing that occurred to me, which was to learn the ground.

The shape of the shelter. The curve of the ridge above it. The slope down from the screen and the way it fell away to the left of the third formation. I counted paces without meaning to and then went on counting them on purpose, and I picked out the things I was going to want later—a stone worn round and headless with a fault line running down one side of it like an old scar; three flat rocks stacked one on another by nothing whatever but wind and time; a crevice going away across the plain like a split in dried mud.

Because there was no map. There was no map and there was never going to be one, and there was not one single object on that entire world with a name attached to it except the two of us and the things we had carried in. Anything I did not put into my own head was going to be gone—and I had never in my life had to think about a place like that.

"Do you think they're still nearby?" I said, after a while.

Josh shrugged, and his shoulders were stiff with it.

"If they are, they're not leaving tracks any more. The wind's had the lot."

"And if they've gone right out of this area?"

And he did not answer me. And he did not need to, because the two of us were standing in the middle of an unmeasured continent and neither of us had the first idea how far it went in any direction. Mason and Ella could have been three ridges away, sitting behind a fold in the ground, close enough to have heard us if either of us had thought to shout. Or they could have been ten days' walk into a country with nothing living in it. And there was not one single thing anywhere on that plain that could have told us which.

"Next time," Josh said at last, "we bring flags. Markers. Something we can follow back."

"Trail paint," I said.

"Stacked stones."

"Breadcrumbs."

And he laughed at that, and there was nothing in it at all.

"Diesel would've eaten them."

And the name sat there in the air between us for a great deal longer than either of us wanted it to, and neither of us went anywhere near it.

Because Diesel is not a pet. Diesel sleeps on Mason's bed. Diesel is the reason that Ella walks to school on her own and Mason does not worry about it.

"He's with them," I said. "That's something."

"Yeah," said Josh, and he said it very quietly. "He'll look after them."

And neither of us said anything else after that, and it seemed like the right way to do it.

By the time the screen came back into view I felt as though we had been out there for the better part of a day, and I looked at my watch, and we had been on that plain for fifty minutes.

We stopped short of it. It stood on the dust with its base in the ground, translucent, and still, and catching nothing at all—and it ought to have been a relief to see the thing, and it was not.

Because going through it meant leaving them. Even for an hour. Even to come back with water and a light and something in my hand, it still meant turning round and walking away from three people who were out there somewhere with the dark coming down on top of them—and I stood in front of it and did not want to put my hand anywhere near it.

Josh turned round to me.

"We leave anything else behind?"

And I went through my pockets. I had done that at the door of every building I had ever walked out of in my life, and I did it now on the surface of another planet, patting myself down for a wallet and a set of keys that could not possibly have been anywhere else—and I did not see one single thing funny about it at the time.

The notebook stayed where it was, under the flat stone, in case Mason came back to that shelter and needed to know that somebody had been there.

And the Portal Key was in my palm. Cold, and a great deal heavier than it had any right to be, and giving back nothing whatever to the last of that light.

"I think we're good."

Josh nodded once, sharply.

"Right. So. Back to Earth. Grab gear. Come straight back."

And I hesitated.

"What?" he said, straight away, because he had been reading my hesitations since before I could read anything at all.

"I don't think it's going to be that simple."

His brow came down. "Why not?"

And I looked back over my shoulder at those rocks, and the shadows had got long and deep between them by then, and every single one of them looked like a place where something might be standing perfectly still.

"Because if she came here too," I said, "she isn't going to stop looking."

And my brother's face went dark.

"You really think she's here?"

"I think she wants that bag." And I heard my own voice going into the register it went into when I was delivering a finding that nobody in the room was going to enjoy—flat, and level, and entirely uninflected, which was the only way I had ever found to say a thing like that without somebody's hand going up before I had finished. "I think she has been looking for it since Adelaide Airport. And I think it is now gone from the place I put it, and it is going inland on the back of a man who has not the faintest idea what he is carrying, with a child walking along beside him."

And Josh stood very still for a moment, and I watched him run the whole of it through.

"Then we'd better be ready."

And the two of us stepped forward together.

The screen woke as we came up to it. The plain behind the pane went out and the colour came tearing up through it, that great silent bloom of everything at once—and I had seen it a good many times by then, and it had not once failed to do something to the inside of my chest.

I gestured at it.

"After you."

And he gave me half a smirk, and for one second he was twelve years old and standing at the top of a rope swing.

"Typical. I do the hard yards, you watch."

And he stepped forward, and went into it, and was gone—and the surface shivered and settled behind him the way water settles.

And I went after him.

And I hit it like a wall.

It did not hurt. In the fraction of a second I had, I braced myself to be thrown backwards, and I was not thrown backwards. There was no impact in it. There was no pain in it. There was nothing whatsoever to see, and nothing that touched me anywhere. There was simply an absolute and total refusal—one instant I was stepping forward, and the next instant I was not going anywhere at all, with my breath stopped halfway in and my skin crawling as though there were static coming up through the inside of my own bones.

I came back a step, with my heart going hard, and I stood in front of a doorway that was standing wide open in front of me and I could not get into it.

"What the—"

And then I understood. And when it came, it came all at once and completely, and every single part of it fitted.

Ella had run at a wall of air.

Mason had put his shoulder into it and shoved with everything he had.

And it had not hurt them either. It had not knocked them down, and it had not thrown them back, and it had not so much as marked the child. It had simply, quietly, absolutely declined them—and I had sat in a plastic booth in a McDonald's in Elizabeth and listened to my own brother describe that to me across a tray of chips, and I had nodded at him, and I had not understood one single word of it until it happened to me.

Josh had opened that link. It was his. That screen was answering him and it was not answering me, and it did not matter in the slightest that we were both Guardians, and it did not matter in the slightest that the destination was a place I had every right in the world to go to.

That thing had never been a door standing open in a wall. It was a door being held open, from the other side, by somebody—and the somebody was not me. It would take one of us at a time, and it would take us in the order we asked, and it had not the smallest interest in what either of us happened to think was urgent.

So I stood there on the dust with my heart coming back down, and I watched the colours go.

They slowed first. Then they thinned out. And then the whole of it folded inward on itself with a final flicker, the way a held breath goes out, and the pane went smooth and blank and translucent, and stood there on that plain catching nothing at all and telling me nothing at all.

He had arrived. Wherever he had gone, he had got there, and his link had shut behind him.

And only then did I step up to it.

And I did not press anything, and I did not say anything, and the device stayed exactly where it was in my closed fist at my side. I simply stood in front of that pane and thought about a lounge room in Broken Hill with the curtains half drawn across the window and the amber light coming in through them.

A room I had stood on this plain and looked straight at and failed to recognise. A room I had turned into a monster with my own two hands, at a basin, in an airport, with the water running red.

A room with my own brother standing in the middle of it, waiting for me to catch up.

And I meant it.

And the screen flared before I had properly finished the thought, and the colour came up out of it and welcomed me in, and the light of the thing went out across the dust round my shoes in shapes that I could not read and did not much like the look of.

Behind me, Saint Phillis had gone very nearly dark.

And whatever it was out there among those cliffs, it had a very great deal more of the night left to it than I did.

And I stepped through, and the silence folded shut behind me.