Future Lovecraft (14 page)

A COOL, PRIVATE PLACE

By Jen White

Jen White
is an Australian author of speculative fiction. She lived for some years in the tropical north of Australia, but has since moved to the gentler climes of country Victoria (Australia, that is, not Canada). Her work has been published in various magazines and anthologies. Most recently, her stories have appeared in the anthologies,
The Tangled Bank: Love
,
Wonder and Evolution
,
Bewere the Night
, and
Dead Red Heart
. She also has a story in the e-book anthology, 
Extinct Doesn’t Mean Forever
.

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.