The Dust Forgets

James Brown had been watching from the scrub since before the girls left the camp.

He had followed them at a distance his experience calibrated precisely — close enough to track their torchlight and the sound of their voices, far enough to remain invisible in the dark. The campfire had been an interruption he had not anticipated. The two young men, the stories, the cigarettes and laughter — all of this had consumed time he would have preferred to use differently. But patience had never been a problem for him. Patience was the one thing he possessed in greater supply than any other quality, and he had spent the interval in a position of his choosing, still, breathing slowly, waiting for what the night would eventually produce.

The separation was what he needed. Not specifically Mandy Glasson's need for a bathroom, but the category of event it represented: the girl, alone, without witnesses, in a location sufficiently remote that sound would not carry to anyone capable of responding. When Mandy entered the toilet block and the door closed behind her, the conditions converged.

Violet stood alone in the dark, her torch cutting thin arcs through the scrub, her body radiating the particular tension of someone whose instincts were screaming warnings that her conscious mind could not translate into action. He had seen this before. The body knew it was being watched. The eyes could not find the watcher. The result was a state of heightened alert that would sustain itself for a few minutes and then, if no threat materialised, begin to fade. The fade was the window. He waited for it.

Her shoulders dropped a fraction. The torch steadied. Her breathing, which had been shallow and rapid, slowed into something closer to normal. The window opened.

He snapped a twig deliberately, thirty metres to her left. The sound cracked through the silence and her torch swung toward it instantly, the beam sweeping the scrub where the sound had originated, finding nothing, because there was nothing there. He was already approaching from the opposite side, moving across ground he had selected hours earlier for its softness underfoot, his dark clothing absorbing the moonlight that her pale jacket reflected.

A thud sounded from inside the toilet block — the building's own contribution, timber contracting in the cooling night, the kind of sound old structures produced without human assistance. Violet's attention jerked toward the building. Her back turned toward the scrub.

He covered the final distance in the interval between her recognition of the sound and her body's attempt to turn.

The gloved hand sealed her mouth before the scream could form. The arm around her torso pinned her arms to her sides with a pressure he had learned through years of practice — enough to immobilise, not enough to cause the unconsciousness he did not yet want. He lifted her clear of the ground. Her weight was slight and familiar, not this specific girl but the category she belonged to. He had held this weight before. Her body did what bodies always did: writhed, kicked, bit at the leather, produced muffled sounds that the glove absorbed. None of it mattered. The outcome had been decided before the contact began.

He carried her toward the toilet block and activated the Portal as he walked.

The colours erupted across the building's corroded surface in the seconds between initiation and arrival — greens and purples and blues pulsing with the rhythm that accompanied every opening, bleeding outward from the doorway until the entire façade seemed to breathe with impossible light. They had not been there moments ago. The night had been dark, the building ordinary. Now it blazed with the signature that Violet had seen in her bedroom, that Jasmine had named the rainbow man, that Ethan had witnessed near the Silver Queen.

Violet saw them. Even through the terror, even through the hand crushing her lips and the arm compressing her ribs and the grinding of her legs against the earth, the colours reached her. She recognised them. The part of her mind that was still processing information despite everything her body was enduring made the connection that twelve days of investigation had been assembling: these colours had been present at every stage of the mystery, and they were now present here, erupting around a threshold toward which she was being carried against her will.

The building's interior was not the building's interior. The space beyond the doorway bore no resemblance to the narrow cubicles and cracked tiles that the structure's dimensions should have contained. It expanded into something vast and folded, the air stretching and contracting in configurations that defied everything Violet understood about how enclosed spaces behaved. The crossing was brief. She felt her body being carried through, felt something at the boundary that her mind could only interpret as dissolution, and then consciousness severed itself with the mercy of a system shutting down before it could witness what came next.

Her last perception was the sky. Visible for a fraction of a second through the door before it swung shut, the constellations she had traced since childhood glittered above the Outback with the cold patience of things that had been burning for billions of years and that regarded the disappearance of one girl from the surface of the earth as an event beneath their notice.

The door closed. The colours collapsed to a point and vanished. The Portal sealed, and the toilet block returned to what it had always appeared to be: a derelict amenity in an abandoned campground, its corroded walls holding nothing but cracked tiles and darkness.

The Outback settled back into itself. The wind moved through the gum trees. The stars continued their rotation. Somewhere at the margin of Penrose Park, the campfire still glowed, and the faint sound of voices carried on the breeze — Gordon's laughter, the murmur of conversation, the ordinary sounds of people who did not yet know that anything had changed. Michelle and Rebecca sat within that circle. Their awareness that Violet and Mandy had been gone too long was still forming, still taking shape as mild concern rather than alarm, still several minutes away from the transition into fear that would, within the hour, reshape the rest of their lives.

Mandy pushed the toilet block door open. The hinges shrieked the same corroded protest they had produced when she entered, and she stepped into the moonlight expecting to find Violet where she had left her.

The ground outside the door was empty.

Violet's torch lay at the threshold. Its beam, which had been steady in Violet's hand, now flickered with the diminishing certainty of a battery approaching exhaustion. The light shrank into itself, casting a shrinking circle across cracked earth that bore no evidence of what had occurred upon it. No drag marks. No scuffed ground. No signs of struggle. The Outback's conditions — wind, dust, the slow patient work of erosion — had already begun restoring the surface to the state it had occupied before anyone walked across it that night.

One mark remained. A single footprint pressed into the dust at the toilet block's threshold, small and clear, the tread pattern of a trainer captured in the earth with the fidelity of a mould. The dust held the shape with a precision that the wind would soften within hours, that the following day's heat would bake into something less distinct, and that subsequent weather would gradually erase until the ground remembered nothing at all.

The torch flickered once more and went dark.

Mandy stood in the moonlight, alone, looking at the empty ground where her best friend had been.