The Gate That Rattled

"The part of any new place that tells you the most is the part it finds necessary to defend."

We crested the first rise and there was another rise behind it, and a third behind that, and between each rise a flat stretch of red ground where the dust moved across our feet in thin skeins like water in a creekbed too shallow to wade. Mum had started complaining before we had gone a hundred metres. The heat. The dust. Her slippers. The fact that nobody had given her a proper answer about where we were going. The fact that nobody had given her a proper answer about anything, really, which was not a specific complaint so much as a shape of grievance she was going to lean into until somebody addressed it.

Paul's arm had come off my shoulders at the top of the first rise. He was walking half a step ahead of us now, his pace slightly too brisk for people in pyjamas and slippers, and every hundred metres or so he would glance back to check whether we were still with him and then turn forward again without saying anything. Dad walked beside Mum with his dressing gown re-tied for what must have been the fourth time since we had arrived. The hem of it kept catching on something — not on anything I could see, just on the idea of the fabric being there at all in a landscape that had no fabric in it anywhere.

I found myself walking near the back. The dust had worked its way between my bare toes in the first five minutes, and I had stopped noticing. My hair was beginning to stick to my neck. The sun — it was too bright, brighter than Adelaide was supposed to be in August, and the light of it had a quality I did not have a word for, something whiter than it should have been, as if something had been added to the sunlight that was not in our version.

Mum, at about the fourth hill: "And my feet. Jerome, do you have any idea how these slippers are going to hold up on —"

"They'll be fine, Mum."

"They're not made for this."

"I know."

"I'm going to have blisters by this time tomorrow, you mark my words."

"You'll probably have blisters by lunchtime."

I regretted it as soon as I had said it, because it was the sort of thing I said to her at home — when we were both in the kitchen and she was grumbling about something that had gone wrong and I was trying to nudge her sideways into a joke — and it landed here the wrong way, because we were not at home, and the grumbling was not about something that had gone wrong but about something that was still going wrong, and the nudge-sideways was not what she needed.

She did not answer. Her mouth set. She kept walking.

Paul glanced back over his shoulder.

"This is how it is everywhere." His voice was flat. Not unkind. Just the voice of a man who had delivered the sentence too many times and did not have a fresh version of it. "The ground doesn't change much. You get used to it."

I wanted to ask him how long it had taken him to get used to it, and I did not, because I was not sure I wanted to know the answer. A week was not long enough to get used to anything. If Paul had got used to this in a week then Paul was working very hard at getting used to it, and the working-hard was probably the part of the week he did not want to talk about.

We crested another rise.

"Oh," Mum said.

It was the first single-syllable thing she had said since we had started walking, and it meant what her single-syllable things always meant — that the view had come in on her faster than she had been ready for, and that her defences had not had time to assemble.

I looked.

At the bottom of the slope, maybe four hundred metres away, was a scattering of structures. Caravans — three of them, that I could count, and what might have been a fourth. Motorhomes. Military-green tents, the large heavy kind with canvas sides, set up in a rough half-circle. A low smudge of smoke rising from what I assumed was a fire. Some vehicles parked in a cluster off to one side, and a couple of things I could not identify from this distance that might have been water tanks or shelters or neither. And around the whole thing, taut between steel posts that had been driven into the red ground, a chainlink fence. Tall. The kind of fence you build around a substation or a quarry. Industrial.

Beyond the fence, on the far side of the settlement, the ground fell away towards what I thought might be a watercourse — a pale band running in a long curve across the red — and beyond that more rises, all the way to a horizon that was just red ground and too-blue sky.

The settlement sat in this landscape like a thing that had washed up in it. Not built. Landed. Dropped into position and weighted down with rocks while the people in it waited to see whether it was going to stay.

Mum stopped walking.

"Paul," she said.

Paul had stopped too, a few paces ahead of us. He did not turn around straight away. When he did, his face had gone still in the way that meant a rehearsed line was coming.

"Welcome home." He said it flat. No performance in it. He knew what the settlement looked like from here. He had decided, long before we crested this rise, that he was not going to pretend otherwise.

Nobody answered him.

We walked the last stretch down the slope in silence, Mum half a pace behind Dad now, her hand on his elbow in the way she did when she was walking on uneven ground and had decided she needed the support without asking for it. Dad did not say anything. His face had closed over. He was looking at the settlement the way a man looks at a workshop job that has come in with more wrong with it than the quote had allowed for, and I watched him working out, in the slow methodical way he worked everything out, whether any of what he was seeing was compatible with the thing he had walked through the Portal to find.

The fence resolved into more detail as we got closer. Chainlink, yes, but reinforced — the top strung with what looked like heavier-gauge wire, with wooden posts spaced between the steel ones, the wooden ones lashed with rope and with scraps of metal hammered into them that I could not immediately interpret. The fence had not been built all at once. It had been built, and then added to. Some sections looked newer than others. Some sections had been patched.

Mum said, "Why the large fence?"

Paul answered without looking back at her. "For protection."

His voice was clipped. The answer had the flatness of something decided in advance — a sentence he had ready, and would not be drawn past.

Mum did not push. But I saw it reach her. The line of her shoulders went up half an inch and stayed there.

We came around a small outcrop of ground and the gate came into view.

It was a single panel of the same chainlink, hinged on one of the steel posts, with a loop of heavy chain holding it closed. Nothing elaborate. What was elaborate was what was above it. Mounted on a crosspiece of timber that had been lashed to the top of the steel post, at about head height for a man standing in the gateway, was the head of an animal.

Not a sheep. Not a dog. Nothing I had a name for.

It was about the size of a staffy's head, but the proportions were wrong — the muzzle longer, the brow heavier, the whole shape built for killing in a way that made my stomach go quiet. Black fur, coarse and matted, still covering the skull almost completely. Where the neck had been severed the fur was stained darker, and the skin at the cut had dried in folds, and there were patches of dried blood along the underside of the jaw that had run and set. The eyes were still in the sockets. Gone cloudy, half-sunk into the skull, but still there. The mouth hung open in a permanent snarl, the lower jaw fixed in position by something I could not see from where I was standing. The canine teeth came down past the line of the lower jaw and curved slightly inward.

The smell reached me a second later. Not strong. Old enough to have passed the worst of it. But there, underneath the dust — the specific sweet-wrong smell of a thing that had started to go and then been left to finish going in the open air.

It was mounted facing outwards. Whoever had put it there had put it there for two reasons, and the second reason — the one my body knew before my head had worked it out — was that whatever this thing had been, there were more of them out there, and the smell of one of their own was the thing that kept the rest away.

"What is that?" I said.

My voice came out smaller than I had meant it to. Something in the throat had gone tight.

Mum, behind me, made a sound I did not want to identify. A small half-gasp, half-inhaled, and then she was pressing her face into Dad's shoulder and saying, her voice muffled, "Noah, that's so disturbing. I can't look. Is it really necessary?" And Dad had his arm around her, and his other hand had come up to her hair in the small reassuring movement he did when he did not know what else to do, and I could see from the way his own eyes were fixed on the severed head that he had exactly no reassurance to offer her on the question of whether it was really necessary.

Paul said, "We were attacked a few nights ago."

He said it without turning. He said it to the gate, not to us. He said it the way you say a thing you have been putting off saying for the last half-hour of a walk.

"It is a reminder that we need to remain vigilant to the dangers that surround us."

Attacked.

The word sat on the red dust between us. The four of us did not say anything for what felt like a long second. A breeze had come up — thin, dry, not cool — and the lower jaw of the skull moved slightly against the wire that was holding it, a small almost-click that was probably just the wire settling but sounded, for one stupid second, like a thing trying to close its mouth.

Paul moved to the gate, and unlooped the chain. The gate swung on its hinge. Paul said, "Come on."

Mum had not moved from Dad's shoulder. Dad was the one who walked her through. His arm stayed around her. She did not look up at the head as she passed under it, and I realised, as I passed under it myself, that I was the only one of us who had looked at it properly, and I was also the only one of us who had not found a body to press my face into.

The gate rattled as Paul pulled it closed behind us. Chain against post, the loop dropping back into place. It was a specific sound. I had heard it a thousand times at the Wildlife Haven. It was not a sound I had ever heard and felt in my chest before.

Inside, the first thing I noticed was that the settlement was smaller than it had looked from the hill. From up there it had resolved into a cluster with shape and size. From inside, closer in, it was maybe a dozen structures sitting on a patch of flattened ground maybe thirty metres across. The caravans were in a line along the southern edge. The tents — four of them, now that I could count them properly — were pitched in a rough arc at the northern edge, with their canvas flaps tied back against whatever sun they had been out in earlier this morning. A fire pit that was down to embers.

And in the middle of all this, coming across the open ground in our direction, three men.

They had the look of workmen who were now making their way to whatever the day had in store for them. One of them — the one in front — was carrying a length of timber over one shoulder. The one behind him had a tool belt slung low on his hips. The third, slightly behind the other two, was on crutches. He was the youngest of the three by a decade — early twenties, maybe — and the crutches were the kind you got from a hospital, aluminium with padded rests.

His left leg, below the knee, was wrapped in a thick layer of bandaging. The bandaging had been wrapped over trousers, so I could not see the shape of what was underneath it, but there was a brown-red stain coming through in a patch about the size of my palm, on the outside of the calf. Fresh enough to still be damp.

My stomach turned over, slow.

The man in front saw us and stopped.

"We're off to get this shed finished," he said to Paul, his voice matter-of-fact, the tone of a man reporting.

"Hopefully get the second one finished, too," the man on crutches added, and his voice was bright in a way I did not know how to interpret — not cheerful, but determined, as if determination was what he had agreed to bring to this conversation and cheerfulness was what determination had settled for.

"That sounds great." Paul's voice had gone formal. He gestured at us. "Adrian, Nial, Kain — this is my family. Mum, Dad, my younger brother Jerome."

The three of them nodded, briefly. None of them introduced themselves back. None of them offered a hand. Adrian — the one with the timber — gave Mum's pyjamas a glance that he then pulled away from, too fast, the way you pull your eyes away from a thing you have decided you are not going to look at. Nial said something under his breath to Kain that might have been "Jesus faces" and might not have been. Kain did not smile, but his mouth did the thing people's mouths do when they are not smiling but something has arrived at them that they would smile at if they were a different kind of person.

They moved on. Adrian and Nial ahead, Kain a few paces behind on his crutches, the three of them heading out through the gate Paul had just closed, back into the red dust.

I watched them go.

Kain's leg. The severed head on the gate. Paul's attacked.

Three pieces of information. All of them pointing the same way. A few nights ago, something had come out of the red ground, and the people here had met it with what they had, and one of them had ended up with a bleeding leg and a pair of aluminium crutches, and the people here had then killed the thing and put its head on the gate.

The settlement had a gate because it needed a gate.

Paul was already turning to face us. His hand came up, half-gesture, half-apology, and he started talking — the voice of a man who had been asked to give a tour and had no script for it.

"Caravans." He pointed along the southern edge. "We're mostly sleeping in those. Four of them in use, more on the way. Tents over there — three are ours, one is storage. That slab is — well, that's where we eat, mostly. The fire's kept going at night. There's a gas ring around the back of the second caravan if you need to boil something. The river's down there —" he pointed past the northern end of the camp, at the pale band I had seen from the hill "— about a hundred metres that way, down the slope. We get our water from there. It's drinkable. A few hills over there's a lagoon, which is —"

I felt my face change before I had worked out why.

A lagoon. I had spent several years of weekends at the Haven, learning to handle wildlife by freshwater. The word lagoon in this place, with this sun and these hills and this absence of everything else, arrived in me like a small pocket of Earth I had not expected to find. Somewhere in this landscape there was freshwater. Something green, probably. Birds, maybe. A reason to —

Paul saw my face change. His own face flickered for a half-second. He moved on.

"— which you'll see when we've got time. It's not a priority today." His hand dropped. He was looking at the fire pit now, not at us. "And there, you have it."

There was a long pause.

Dad said, slowly, "Is this it?"

Paul did not flinch. "Yep. Welcome to Bixbus."

The name landed on the ground between us, small, single-syllable, utterly unremarkable. Bixbus. Not New Jerusalem. Not a city. Not a settlement with spires or temple architecture or even, visibly, a purpose beyond being the place where the tents were pitched. A word that sounded like it had been made up by somebody who needed a word in a hurry and had reached for whatever was on hand.

Mum cleared her throat.

"So, this isn't the New Jerusalem?"

Her voice was small. The question came out more honest than I had ever heard Mum be about anything in her life. It was not a challenge. It was not accusation. It was the voice of a woman asking whether a thing she had built a morning's worth of faith around was, in fact, the thing she had thought it was.

Paul went still.

He did not answer.

Into the pause — and it came from somewhere off to my left, and I had not realised she had followed us in from the gate — Karen's voice.

"What the fuck's a New Jerusalem?"

Flat. Unbroken. The tone of a woman who had been listening and had been unable to keep the observation in her mouth.

I did not turn to look at her. I was watching Paul.

Paul's face had drained of whatever colour it had started the conversation with. His eyes flicked to Mum — just long enough to catch her face, which I could not see from where I was standing but which must have done something to him, because he flinched — and then away. His hand came up again, that same half-gesture, and his voice came out higher than it had been a second ago.

"Karen." He was nearly smiling. It was not a good smile. "Do you happen to know where we might be able to find some temporary clothing for my parents?"

Karen came into my field of view. She had her arms folded. She was standing the way she had stood at the Portal — the fencepost posture, the hat tilted slightly forward — and she looked at Paul for a second longer than the question needed her to, the look of a woman being asked to absorb an awkward redirection and deciding whether to allow it.

She allowed it.

"Follow me." She turned and walked without waiting to see whether Mum and Dad were coming. Over her shoulder, without turning her head: "I've got some bits that might fit."

Paul's hand went to Mum's elbow. "Go on. Change into something practical. I'll wait here with Jerome."

Mum hesitated. Her eyes went from Paul to Karen's retreating back to me. And then she did the thing she did when she had been given more information than she knew what to do with in too short a period of time — she smoothed the front of her pyjama top with both hands, in a gesture that did nothing except give her hands something to be doing, and she said, too brightly, "Yes. Alright."

Dad followed her.

They walked off after Karen, Dad's dressing gown flapping once, Mum's slippers kicking up small puffs of dust, and I watched the three of them cross the open ground towards the line of caravans at the southern edge of the settlement.

Karen opened the door of the third caravan — the one in the middle of the row — and held it open. Mum climbed the two metal steps. Dad followed her in. The door closed behind them.

Paul, quietly, next to me: "Well."

It was Paul's whole review of the situation, compressed into a single syllable, and for the second time that morning a member of my family had used the same word to do the same job, and it came to me — though I did not want it to — that if Mum and Paul were now reaching for the same vocabulary, we were probably further gone than I had worked out.