The Far Side

"The ground stays put. That was the one thing I never thought to doubt."

The falling stopped because the ground came up and caught me — and something else first, something I only pieced together after. On the way down I'd come off a body. It had given under me and grunted, the air punched out of it, and gone out from under me, and then the sand took the pair of us in a cloud of dust.

I came to rest on my hands and knees with the cloud settling around me, and my hands were flat in warm dry dirt, and a heartbeat ago they'd been reaching for a wall in a cold stone hallway. That was the first thing my head couldn't take. I've had my hands in ground my whole working life — Tasmanian ground, dark and heavy and full of clay, the sort that cakes on a spade and stains your boots for a week. This was none of that. Red, and dry, and fine, running off between my fingers like flour, the red guts of the mainland, the sort of dirt I'd only ever seen in a photograph. It was ground. It just wasn't any ground I had ever once stood on.

And the air was warm. That went into me nearly as hard as the dirt. Warm and dry, with a smell in it I couldn't put a name to — and not four seconds back I'd been standing in a house cold enough to see my own breath, on a grey July morning. Warm air. On my face. Where the cold had been.

Is this a dream? Did I hit my head? I wanted it to be one of those so badly I could have wept. But you don't get grit under your fingernails in a dream, or ribs that ache where a man's shoulder went into them, or the taste of dust on your tongue. It was letting me feel every last part of it, and that was the worst of it — it was real, and it wasn't going to have the decency to stop.

I got up onto my knees, and then my feet, and made myself look at where I was. Red sand, and more of it, lifting and falling away in long low dunes to a hard bright line where it met a clear blue sky — a sky with a sun in it, high and ordinary, where there should have been rain coming in off the Derwent. And it wasn't another world I was looking at. That was the thing that made it worse. It looked like somewhere on my own earth, somewhere hot and dry a long way north of anywhere I'd been. It just wasn't anywhere I could possibly be.

And nothing of where I'd just been was in it. The cottage? That stone-and-cedar place I'd stood admiring not a minute before — gone, like it had never stood at all. The trees? The whole wet green run of forest, the tunnel of road I'd driven up — gone. My ute? Gone with the rest, and something cold went through the middle of me at that. Everything that had been round me a minute ago had been rubbed off the world like chalk off a board, and this set down in its place.

Not quite everything. Off to one side of me, dumped in the sand near the foot of that wall, there was a heap of the most ordinary gear you ever saw — sleeping bags still in their sacks, a rolled tarp, a camp stove, a couple of those folding chairs the servos sell off the front counter. Camping stuff. Bunnings-and-Anaconda camping stuff, sitting there in the red sand like it had come off the back of a truck, and the wrongness of that — homely, weekend, ordinary stuff, here — was near enough worse than the rest, because it meant people. It meant somebody had been here long enough to need a bed.

And the wall. It stood up out of the sand a good few metres and ran a fair way to either side — that same great sweep of shifting colour Luke had shoved me into, blues and greens and gold turning over inside it, the same sick depth to it that no flat thing has any right to hold. I knew it on sight, the way you know a face. The one thing in all that sand I'd seen before, and the last thing on earth I wanted to see.

And the man I'd come down on.

He was a few feet off in the dust where the fall had thrown him, and he was in a bad way before ever I got to him — up on one elbow, trying to get a leg under himself and going white and still when it took the weight. One leg only. The other he held out straight and wouldn't put an ounce on, and there was a dark wet patch soaking through the cloth of it at the calf. Work clothes on him, jeans and a tee and boots, every bit of him dusted the same red as me. A tradie. I'd have picked him for one across a car park. And here he was down in the sand of nowhere, hurt, because I'd come out of the sky on top of him.

I should have gone to him. Some other day, some other place, I'd have been down beside him before I'd thought about it. But my body had turned to the wall instead — to the colour, to the one thing here that led anywhere but here, because if I'd come through it then I could go back through it, and Jenny was on the other side of it, and Sammy, and the whole of my life. I took a step towards it.

"You can't go back."

His voice, from the ground behind me — young, and level, and certain, far too certain for a bloke lying hurt in the dirt. It went through me like cold water and I turned back to him.

"What do you mean? Where am I?" It came out of me high and thin and cracking on the end of it, half a question and half a plea.

He had himself propped up now, and he looked at me a moment before he answered — and there was something in the look, sympathy, or near it, with something grimmer folded under it. He was younger than his voice, a face that still got asked for ID at the bottle shop. But the eyes didn't match the rest of him. There were years in them that hadn't come off any calendar. And under the level way he spoke I could see what it cost him to keep it level — the sweat on him that wasn't all heat, the leg he wouldn't move, the careful shallow way he breathed around whatever was wrong with it.

"Didn't you hear the voice when you came through?" There was an edge on it, near enough to sarcasm, and it landed strange coming off a man in his state.

The voice. That voice — the one that had come up through the bones of me in the falling, that had put my name into me like it had always owned it. Welcome to Clivilius, Nial Triffett.

"I think so," I said, barely above a whisper — because saying it out loud was owning that it had happened, that I wasn't lying concussed on the Owens' floor dreaming the lot of it, that I was here, wherever here was.

He got himself up then, and it was a hard thing to watch. He came up off the good leg, got the bad one under him and locked the knee and made it hold through whatever it cost him, his jaw set against it. Upright, swaying a little, he spread his arms wide, and there was a bit of grand mockery in it, a bloke playing showman. "Well, there you go," he said. "Welcome to Clivilius."

The name went into me and stuck. Clivilius. The same word the voice had used, out of this hurt kid's mouth now, easy as a place you'd catch a bus to. It sounded like nothing I'd ever heard and, somehow, like a thing I already half-knew — a word sitting just the wrong side of something you can't quite bring to mind.

My knees went to water under me. The panic came up in waves, one on the back of the last, and the sand seemed to tilt though I knew it was solid. This can't be real. Who is this bloke? The thoughts went round and round, clutching at anything. It's a knock on the head. Luke's hit me harder than I thought. That was it — that had to be it — I was on the floor of that hallway with my brain rattled and none of this was happening. I held onto it. I held onto it hard. But it wouldn't hold, because all of it was too much itself — the weight of the sand, the sun on the back of my neck, the pain plain on the kid's face. None of it had the give a dream has. It all pushed back.

I turned to the wall again. I don't think I decided to — I just found myself going at it, a hand out for the surface, and a hand's breadth off it I hit something. Not a wall; there was nothing to see. But my hand would go no further. Something pushed back, steady and patient and total, and the harder I leaned the harder it held, easing my arm off it like it had all day. I got both hands to it. I shoved. I put my shoulder and my weight and every ounce of wanting behind getting back through that thing to my wife and my boy — and it moved me off it the way you'd move a child out of a doorway.

"I told you," the kid said, and there was no cruelty in it, only that same flat certainty that made me want to swing at him all the same. "You can't go back."

Can't go back. Not shouldn't. Not don't. Can't. Flat and final, no give in it anywhere.

Something let go in me, and the bottom went out of it — a weight coming down through my chest, a hollow opening under my ribs, that lurch you get when your boot finds one less step than there was.

"No!" It came out of me hard and loud, whipping me round to face him, and I'd have looked to anyone watching like a man squaring up for a fight. But there was no fight in it. It only had the shape of one. Underneath it was the other thing entirely — a man going down, grabbing at the last word he had left. "There must be some mistake."

And then Jenny. She came into me all at once and took the legs clean out from under me, worse than any of the rest of it. Jenny at home with the shower not long cold, waiting on me back inside a couple of hours. Jenny who'd let me go without one question, because in eleven years I'd never once given her reason to ask one. I'd stood in our own bathroom that very morning and lied to her, and she'd let me, and this was where the lie had led.

And Sammy. God, Sammy. My boy in his too-short pyjamas, throwing a wave back over his shoulder, chasing that daft dog for the back door, not a doubt in his little body that Daddy would be home. Because Daddy was always home. Because that was the one thing in his whole world he'd never once had to wonder about.

I thought about what it would do to them when I didn't come home. Not that night — that night she'd only think I'd been held up, a job run long, a phone left in the ute. But the next day. And the one after. When the not-coming-home stopped being an evening and turned into a thing with no end on it. My phone dead in a ute that wasn't even on the same earth as her. The business with no one to hold it up. And what would any of them ever find? I'd driven up a dirt road to meet a man, and then, as far as the whole world was concerned, I'd simply stopped. No car. No trail. Nothing. A bloke who drove into the hills one Saturday and was never seen again.

When I came back to myself the kid was watching me with something gone soft around the edges, close to kindness. He forced his mouth into a smile — you could see it for the effort it was, a thing built out of muscle and no feeling — and put his hand out. Just put it out, the way you would meeting anyone, anywhere, the most ordinary thing in the world and mad as a hatter for it.

"I'm Kain," he said.

I looked at the hand like I'd forgotten what one was for. A working hand — hard-used, calluses banked across the palm, dirt worked into the nails, an old white scar riding over the knuckles. A hand like mine. Real, in a way nothing else here was letting itself be.

I took it. More my body doing it than me, the manners carrying on after the rest of me had stopped — and then, once I had it, I couldn't make myself let it go. I gripped too hard and hung on too long, holding onto the one warm solid real thing in the whole place the way a man in a river holds onto a branch. He let me. Didn't say a word about it. Just let me hang on until I could make myself stop.

"So, where's Luke?" I said, when I'd got my hand back, and I grabbed the name like a thrown rope. Luke had pushed me. Luke had brought me to this. Which meant Luke knew the way of it — Luke could explain it, Luke could undo it. It was thin, and I knew it was thin, but it was the only handhold going and I took it with both hands.

"I'm sure he'll be here very soon," the kid said, easy, like it was the most natural thing in the world — like Luke turning up out here was just part of some order of things he had the shape of and I didn't.

Before I could get hold of that, before I could get out any of the dozen things crowding up my throat, the wall behind me changed. I felt it before I understood it — a shift in the hum, a charge coming up in the air — and his hand shot out and closed round my arm, hard, all the ease gone out of him at once.

"It's best if we don't stand too close," he said, and pulled — hauling me back off the wall with more strength than a man on one leg had any right to, his eyes fixed past me on the colour.

I let him move me. I'd nothing left to argue with, and no way of telling what was safe here from what wasn't. We went back together, the two of us stumbling in the sand, his hand still locked round my arm.

The wall set up a hard electric crackle, the hum climbing into something you could properly hear now — like a line come down in a storm, like the big grey boxes at a substation you can feel on your skin from the far side of the fence. The colours went brighter, wilder, slamming into one another, throwing off sparks that spat off the face of it and died in the sand.

"Shit," I breathed.

Because something was coming through. Out of the middle of all that colour, out of the flat face of the thing that had just thrown my own hands back at me, something was pushing its way through into the light. Big. Something that had no business coming through a wall.

My ute.

My green Ranger, Triffett Fencing Solutions down the side of it plain as day, nosing out through that surface like a boat coming out of fog — not fast, nothing about it fast, every inch of it marked with more of the sparking and that hard buzz, but coming, steady, not to be stopped. The bullbar first, then the bonnet, the windscreen throwing the sun back at me in white flashes. Then the cab. Then the tray. The whole of it sliding out through a flat wall of light as if the wall were a suggestion and my ute had simply decided not to take it.

Where the fuck am I? It came up out of the middle of me clear and cold, the clearest thing I'd thought since I landed — watching my own ordinary ute finish hauling itself out of one impossible place and into another.

There was no getting my arms round it. But one thing came through the noise of it clear enough: my ute hadn't wandered through on its own. Somebody had sent it — somebody on the far side of that wall had thought to put it through after me. Which meant somebody was still back there. Still working the thing. Still deciding what came through and what didn't.

The ute came the rest of the way out and settled, all four tyres into the red sand, and the engine was still running — that steady familiar note it kept on a cold morning, obscene out here, the most ordinary sound in the world in the least ordinary place I'd ever stood. Through the windscreen I could see in: my travel mug in the holder, half a coffee gone cold in it. Papers shoved across the passenger seat. The little Saint Christopher medal Jenny pressed on me years back, swinging on its chain off the mirror.

All of it exactly as I'd left it. All of it mine.

Except that it wasn't. Because there was someone in it. A shape behind the wheel, hands up on my steering wheel, hard to make out through the dust on the glass and the glare of that sun. Somebody had driven my ute through that wall. Somebody was in it. Somebody was here, in this place, with me.

Somebody else now sat in the one seat in all the world that was mine, hands on the wheel of the one thing here I knew — in this place called Clivilius, where, the hurt kid beside me had just sworn, there was no going back.