Future Lovecraft

A COOL, PRIVATE PLACE By Jen White

WHEN WE SIGNED the papers on our property, they gave us a map of all the known time wells in our district, and a pamphlet on how to live safely in their vicinity. Our friends thought us crazy to buy in one of the abandoned towns, but what else could we do? With Tamsin unable to work full-time any longer, and my own poor showing at employment, we could never afford the city, or even the fringes of the city, so it was one of the abandoned towns for us. Besides, here we’d be safe from the rising oceans for a good, long time.

We chose Hills Point for the sheer beauty of it, a mountain town ringed by other mountains. It was hard to get to and, because of that, solitary and still, a cool, private place of reflection and contemplation. It consisted of a main street, and a few other, smaller streets running off it, and that was it. Population 30, a few abandoned shops and falling-down shacks. And a pub, of course, a huge, white palace of a pub. The only shop still running was the general store, owned by Ruby Langdon, 15 years resident and as wide as she was tall.

Our own place had once been the local boarding house, a weatherboard maze of rotting carpets, cast iron beds and washstands. It was the first thing of any significance we had ever owned. At night, we would climb up to the top floor and gaze out at the wildness, listen to the scuffling and snuffling of the animals, drink our wine, and imagine how it used to be. A mining town, a working town, a coarse, noisy, stinking town full of energy and self-importance, the very life of it ripping great holes in the quiet of the bush. And now all but dead, life seeping away. Hills Point, and other such towns, had grown so still and silent after such clashings and clangings that the very air had begun pooling, settling in great, suppurating clumps, past and present overlapping unhealthily, creating time wells. Hills Point was full of them.

The nearest well, fenced off for safety, was down the end of Welcome Lane, a short street of ancient shops that had been boarded up decades ago; it was a smallish well on the right side of the road, right in the middle of the footpath, the air around it puckered and torn, as if it were grieving the loss of all those smart, busy ladies dressed in their fineries, marching up and down with their packages. The deepest well lay down near the creek, hidden amongst some giant ferns. Tamsin and I decided that this must have been where sweethearts went to find privacy and, when the town died, this powerful space had yearned so much for blood and warmth and movement that a time well was born. Sometimes, when I walked down that way (which I did often, for I liked solitude and quiet), I would glimpse things in this well—old things, ancient creatures, staring out at me—and I would wonder how far back this well went, for we had no history, no conception, of animals with six legs or four heads or a hundred writhing tentacles.

How could you not explore the time wells? our friends asked us. Touch them, push at their skin, pass through? And we would have, but for the deep sense of unease that came upon us whenever we ventured near them, a sensation akin to that of standing at the edge of a bottomless abyss, of falling into the terrifying unknown. We could go so close and then no further. We were glad, on the whole, to give these wells a wide berth, even averting our eyes whenever we neared one. I found the shallow ones hardest to bear, the ones that held your own grey day from a few months ago, where all you could think was: What’s the point? Or the ones that showed you bright, blithe ignorance before bad news. There were a lot of those. But all the wells were bad. We are creatures who look forward. To look back goes against all our instincts.

I was up on a ladder one evening, painting the lounge room wall a pale green, when I felt it. I nearly fell with the strength of it and I had to hold on tight for a minute or so.

Tamsin came running in. “Can you sense it, Jamie?” she called out. “Something’s shifted.”

We headed towards the front door and peered into the darkness, as if we’d see a change, but everything was still and quiet, as always. And yet, we were sure we had not imagined it. Something had happened; something was altered. But we managed to settle down. We had our dinner and forgot about it for a bit.

It was when I was on my morning trek to Ruby’s, to grab some milk and get a sense of the day, that I first noticed the Welcome Lane well had healed. The shimmer and shift of it that I normally glimpsed out of the corner of my eye was gone. Cautiously, I moved closer to the site. Only concrete path and grass tufts and a forlorn wire fence. It made me uneasy. Were we living in some kind of boiling time soup, where wells bubbled and popped continuously? I had hoped for a bit more stability.

Ruby wasn’t about when I arrived at the shop, but this wasn’t unusual. She could be out the back having a breather, or taking a quick walk. She knew she could trust us to keep her up to date with what we took. I collected my supplies and was about to write out an IOU at the counter when I saw Ruby’s stockinged legs on the linoleum. It was such an incongruous sight that, at first, I didn’t understand what I was seeing. I moved around to the other side of the counter and there was the rest of Ruby, sprawled across the floor, a rich, red liquid pooled under her head. I bent down, took her wrist. No pulse. She looked like she had been there for some hours. The doorbell behind me rang. It was Malcolm, another long-term resident, ex cattle man.

“It’s Ruby,” I croaked. “She’s had a fall.”

Malcolm joined me, squatting down beside Ruby. “That’s no fall,” he stated. “That’s a bashing. See how the head’s all caved in? She’s been murdered.”

I called the police. Malcolm said he’d stay with Ruby till they arrived, which could be hours, as they were based a couple of hundred kilometres away. Then I hurried back to the house, feeling distinctly uneasy, what with the time well and now Ruby. Who on earth had done it?

I headed for the kitchen, following the bitter aroma of just boiled coffee. We loved our kitchen. It was huge, industrial-sized, built to accommodate vast vats of scone mix, mountains of mutton. We had nearly blown ourselves up with the stove when we first moved in, but we’d got the hang of it now. I relished the smoky flavour of our morning toast, the thick, oily coffee that stayed with me all day. I found Tamsin standing at the table, vigorously stirring a bowl of pikelet mix. She gave me one of her looks.

“What?” I said.

She shook her head, flicking the wooden spoon up so mix went all over the table.

“Milla reckons her shed’s been broken into. Her gun and ammunition’s been stolen.”

“Jesus,” I said, pulling up a chair and falling into it. I told her about Ruby.

“But it wasn’t a shooting. Malcolm said her head was bashed in.”

“Gotta be connected, though,” Tamsin said.

But who?

We knew there were some odd ones living around the place, people searching for absolute solitude, people who could not live within society for any number of reasons. Tamsin and I had always prided ourselves on our tolerance. Milla herself was a Satanist. Another resident, Jeff, had worked most his life in the abattoirs and carried his own, personal aura of tension around with him at all times. A little difference, after all, was no big deal. But how far do you go, how much do you tolerate, before it becomes dangerous?

Like any small community faced with a crisis, we gravitated to the pub. By about mid-afternoon, a dozen of us had arrived.

It felt calming at first, comforting to be with others, drinking and yarning in bar, a reminder that most of the world was ordinary and predictable and safe, and that talking about it usually helped. Although, after a while, it didn’t seem like such a good idea at all. Fear and alcohol are a terrible combination.

“We need to search every house,” Jeff stated firmly, his voice louder and louder. “That’s all there is to it. That way, we’ll know for sure who’s done it.”

“Now, let’s not get carried away, said Malcolm. “Could be someone who passed through.”

“Can’t be,” Jeff argued. “We haven’t heard a car in days.”

That was true enough, I had to admit.

“So, it’s gotta be one of us. We’ve got to search the houses.”

Jeff had started banging on the tabletop. He stood, leaning forward. I could see that things could very easily get out of hand.

“Hey, hey,” I said. “We’re not the enemies. We’re all worried. But it’s not for us to decide. It’s in the hands of the police. They’re at Ruby’s shop right now, working out what to do. We’ll hear soon enough. All we need to do is look after ourselves in the meantime. Lock up tight.”

Tamsin and I left for home soon after.

Life changed for a while. We lived behind locked doors. I didn’t take my usual walk down Sweetheart’s Way. And I kept a cricket bat beside the bed of a night. Not much use against a gun, I know, but somehow, the thought of having a gun in the house scared me even more.

“Is it worth it?” Tamsin asked. “All this uneasiness, this fear, just to own some property? It was supposed to be a beginning, but it doesn’t feel like that, anymore.”

I knew what she meant. I didn’t pick up a paintbrush for days, not able to see a future here, not sure where we were heading.

But we did settle. You can get used to anything, I found, even finding a dear old neighbour dead on the linoleum. You can’t live on high alert forever. It’s just not physically possible.

And it was a fine place, really. This part of the world felt ancient, prehistoric. Giant ferns, skittering marsupials, the air clear and fresh, the quiet addictive. Despite the time wells, I felt centred here. Much more than I ever had in the city. At least once a day, we’d go walking in that clear air. I’d had a lot of struggle and complication in my life, but this place was helping to give me some space between me and all that. We’d had a glitch but now, we were on our way again. It was senseless to lock ourselves away when we were surrounded by all of this.

It became our habit to take a morning walk together, a different route every time. We found trees that must have been a thousand years old, creeks full of jumping trout, old miners’ huts made of hessian and lime, still containing a bed and shelves and a bench full of dusty tins of food. And we found the skins. We smelled them before we saw them. Round a bend and there they were, a dozen or so rabbit skins hanging from the branches of a eucalypt, sinister flags twisting slowly with the breeze.

“What is it?” Tamsin whispered.

It felt threatening. It was clearly mental. Hell, it was both. Whoever had done this had some agenda I couldn’t even begin to grasp. That made it dangerous. “C’mon,” I said, “Let’s go.” Whatever it was, there was something wrong about it, a wrong feeling, a wrong sense. Just wrong.

Later, at the pub, Tamsin asked Malcolm about it.

“Sounds like someone’s camping around here, using old-time skills, things my grandad taught me. Only, why hang them up like that? They’d be flyblown within hours, ruined. No, when you think about it, it doesn’t make sense.”

We thought it might be witchcraft, but Milla said no, didn’t seem like anything she was familiar with. It set our teeth on edge, all of us, and we grew wary and afraid again. Tamsin and I began to talk about moving. We had no place to go, people like us didn’t have much choice, but it seemed clear we couldn’t stay here. There were too many things we didn’t understand about this place, too much dissonance going on for me, creating an almost unbearable tension. I could see it was the same for Tamsin. She wore a constant frown and a faraway expression, and held her body rigid as if she were becoming uncomfortable in her own skin. When we made love, she held on to me so tight it hurt, as if she were trying to stop from sinking, drowning. We kept close to home after that, only venturing out to get our supplies. We might as well have been living in some apartment in the middle of one of the cities, for all the countryside we saw. And we checked on each other constantly. If I hadn’t seen Tamsin for half an hour or so, I’d go wandering, searching all the rooms, make sure I’d placed her, that she was safe enough for the next little while.

Whenever I was at the shop, I made sure Tamsin locked herself in. But you can only make a place so safe, can’t you? I’d forgotten the milk that morning, so I’d had to go out for the second time if we wanted our morning coffee. I’d found croissants and had bought a dozen. They were frozen, of course, but exotic enough for a town like Hills Point. I couldn’t wait to show Tamsin. Only, it wasn’t just Tamsin in the kitchen. She had company. An odd-looking man, bearded and black-hatted, wearing dirty, white oilskins and a dark waistcoat, and from the stink and colour of him, he hadn’t washed in months.

It was him, I knew, as soon as I saw him. He was the shift. This man had come through the time well and it had closed up behind him. Is that what it took to close a time well? Human sacrifice?

I tried to place him in time. Somewhere in the mid 1800s, I thought.

“Get you there,” he spat when he saw me.

I froze. Too many shocks piling one on top of the other.

“Get you there!” he yelled, “or you won’t be able to. I’ll do the same to you as I done to the shopwoman.”

So, he had killed Ruby.

“And that stupid girl who tried to bewitch me.”

Milla? Brave Milla.

“Oh, no!” Tamsin gasped.

“What do you want?” I asked him.

“Tell me,” he said. “Where be this?”

“Hills Point,” I told him. “You’re in a small town called ‘Hills Point’.” I could feel myself consciously slowing my speech, enunciating more clearly.

“Where be this?” he said again. “What country have I come to?”

I saw the tremor in his hands, the size of his pupils. If this man had come through the well, the passing through had changed him, you could tell. The symmetry of his face, his body, was slightly off, his colour wrong, his hair, up close, far thicker than normal hair.

And he blurred. I thought it was my eyes, at first, but no, holy hell, it was him. That’s right. When he moved he blurred. He got all pixelated and smeared-looking, almost as if he were lagging behind himself, as if, all around him, space, time were unstable. God, it was weird. Creepy weird. Scary weird. I wondered if it hurt, blurring like that. I was terrified he’d touch me and suck me into his pixelated lag space, almost more afraid of that than of being shot. But, most of all, I was afraid he’d hurt Tamsin. We had to be careful. This was a desperate man, a scared man, and probably an insane one. He had killed Ruby and Milla. Who knew what he was capable of?

“It’s Australia,” Tamsin whispered.

“Then why your foreignness?” he shouted. “I don’t believe you. You are not Englishmen.”

“We’re Australian,” I said. “Not English, Australian. And you, what are you?”

“British, of course, brought out here for something that weren’t my fault. And now, stuck here and hating the damned place. But towns like these. Why do we not know of these places?”

Tamsin slid down to the floor.

“Up!” he shouted.

“She’s afraid. Let her be.”

“If she don’t get up, she won’t never,” he threatened. I could see by his eyes he meant it. He was a man with nothing much to lose.

I helped Tamsin to her feet and held her there.

“Then, if this be Australia,” he continued, “this is where I stay. Not in that godforsaken, backbreaking wilderness I came from.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “You will probably have to stay. The, ah, road you came through has closed up.”

“But am I dead?” he muttered to himself. “Is this Hell?”

God only knows what private torment he was living in now.

“No, you’re not dead,” I said, trying to keep my voice as steady as I could. “But you probably shouldn’t stay in Hills Point. We are only a town of 30. You need to go somewhere bigger.”

I had no other plan but to get him away from us as far as possible. I had to get him away from Tamsin.

“Eh, bigger, you say. And where would that be on this lonely continent?”

“A town of thousands,”’ I said. “There are lots of towns like that. Somewhere you can be lost in the crowd. Somewhere no one can find you.”

“What you say makes good sense,” he said slowly. “So, I’ll need me a horse and a map and some supplies.”

And then I realised what I had just done. We had no horses, only cars. And this man couldn’t drive. He would need to be driven. He would need someone to drive him. He would need me to drive him.

“We don’t have horses,” I began.

“What do you take me for?” he yelled. “If you have no horses, how do you get around? Tell me!”

So, I began to explain cars and how things were different here.

“We are very advanced. Our carriages don’t need horses. But they are hard to drive. I will have to take you.”

He insisted on tying Tamsin up and locking her in the pantry before we left. I knew she was a resourceful woman. I hoped she’d be able to find some way to get out, for God knows when I’d be back. Or if. At least he hadn’t insisted she come with us.

Our car was just an old Falcon, but he seemed impressed enough with it. Afraid, even. He took a turn around the car several times, touching various parts of it. I opened the bonnet and showed him the engine. I tried to give a cursory explanation of how it worked, but I saw his eyes glaze over.

“You will need to sit in the back,” I told him. “And wear a belt.”

“Why must I?” he enquired belligerently.

“It is to keep you safe. These carriages go much faster than a horse.”

I settled him in and put his belt on, being very careful not to actually touch him. Up close, his stench was overpowering. What was it? Sweat, of course, months, years of drying, stale sweat. And a godawful diet of rabbit. And something chemical, too, that I couldn’t readily identify. But it was definitely the worst thing I’d ever smelled in my life.

“Your name,” I asked. “what is it?”

“What’s it to you?” he snarled.

“This will be a long trip,” I said. “We might as well get to know each other.”

He nodded. “William Stanley,” he said. “And you?”

“Jamie Straughan.”’

If he knew me as a real person, I reasoned, he might be less likely to bash my head in.

“Get me to the next town safely, Jamie Straughan,” said William Stanley, “and I will let you go free.”

I had to wonder whether that was true.

I started the engine and headed off down the main road. It’s now or never, I thought. Just before the intersection, I veered left, doing a hairpin turn and taking the dirt road as fast as I could down towards Sweetheart’s Walk, dodging trees and flying over rises, the old girl feeling every bump. I only hoped William Stanley would not realise what I was up to in time to shoot a great hole in the back of my head. I took us straight for the deep well, only jumping from the car at the final moment. I had made sure not to put my own belt on. I rolled over the long grass, winded and dazed. I watched as the car crossed into the well and, once in, push through what appeared to be dense grasslands, on and on. I continued to watch as the air heaved and buckled and the well popped, and man and car vanished. What would William Stanley find, I wondered, in that place, that time?

It took me an hour to get back home. I’d done something to my knee and could hardly put weight on it, and I could feel blood gushing from the back of my head.

“Oh, God,” Tamsin said when she saw me. “I felt it. I thought you’d been taken. Oh, God.”

“I lost the car, Tamsin,” I told her. “Sorry.”

“You silly thing,” she laughed, hugging me, crying. “I never liked that car, anyway.”

I looked his name up later. He had come through wrong, all right, but he had been wrong to begin with. He had been convicted of murder and sent to Australia for life. But he had been suspected of many murders. These days, we would call him a serial killer.

Tamsin and I still think about leaving. But others are joining us here, people like us, couples, families, those with few options. Soon, the town will be a real town. It will have more shops and, eventually, a school and its own police station. But time still overlaps. Once, I heard the clop-clop of a large horse behind me. I turned to see nothing. And some nights, I swear there’s a carriage driving right past our bedroom window. And I’m sure I saw something hovering one night, all still and silvery, right above our roof, only to veer off sharply, disappearing in an instant into the dark sky. Who knows what will come next? In this damaged part of the world, we walk lightly.