Sugar Town

by Robert Nicholls

  The snake’s head is above Isak’s line of vision. Now it falls, retreats, becomes like an arm cocked for throwing. “What we delivered to Les, remember? You and me? All those years ago? It’s always the same thing, old man. Always the same thing. I’m sure this is the place! Funny how things come around again, don’t you think?”

  Les? Les Crampton? Why has that evil-bastard name come creeping out of the past! Isak’s mind flicks up a memory of rage – beyond-words, gut-clenching, animal-howling, need-to-chase-and-batter kind of rage.

  “Yeah,” he thinks. “Funny. Ha ha.” And another image of the pulped face pleading up at him. “Not sorry, though. He needed puttin’ down!”

  “Poor old Les-s-s!” the snake hisses at him. “Remember his las-s-st words? ‘We only meant to s-scare her!’ That’s what he said! Spat them out, like loose teeth, didn’t he? ‘We thought she’d keep running!’ That was it, wasn’t it? ‘Why did she s-s-stop?’ Remember, Isak?”

  Isak is puzzled. “‘We’? Never noticed that before! Who’s ‘We’?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know!” the snake laughs. “Who’s ‘We’? For that matter, who’s ‘she’?”

  Isak frowns. “Piss off, Lyle. You jus’ tryin’ to confuse me.”

  “Never act in anger, old man. That’s the lesson. Because you finish up getting it wrong, don’t you. You finish up not being finished!”

  There’s another movement, a sound, somewhere beyond Isak’s head. He can’t move to see what it is, but the Lyle-snake reacts abruptly, uncoiling in a reverse motion, backing away, its tongue flickering wildly. Within seconds, it’s gone.

  In its place, the edge of a shadow creeps, sunrise-slow, across his line of vision, displacing the great cat of the sun from his neck and back. Isak directs his feeble gratitude toward it. It doesn’t occur to him to question the strangely ovoid shape of the shadow. Nor does he think further on his vulnerability, lying so inertly on the red earth. He decides to sleep.

  Before that can happen, though, the thing that has blessed him with its shadow leans over him . . . and touches him. It feels at first like a cold spark has been ignited at the base of his spine. Then, like a bullet from his own rifle, something rips a furrow all the way up into his head. It seems that every muscle in his body, most particularly his heart, is summoned into spasm and a burst of light slaps his consciousness, like a cricket ball, straight up into the air. Quite suddenly he’s looking down on himself, on his contorted body, just in time to see it collapse slowly into stillness. He also sees, bending over his body, the smooth, metallic, sausage shaped bubble that he stalked that very morning. No longer the uniform copper colour he first saw, it has become a veritable pallet of colours, shifting amongst one another, like oil on water. And emanating from it, he fancies he can hear a distressed little bonging sound that makes him feel very sad.

  “There now,” Isak thinks toward it. “That was a long time ago, matey! None of it was your fault! Not a bit. If I got it wrong, why then . . . it wun’t the first thing I done wrong. ‘S jus’ too bad! An’ all too late!”

  * * *

  By torchlight, beneath a starless sky, Amalthea wheeled the barrow into the dewy dark knee-deep grass of the headland. Asael stumbled beside; the keeper of the torch, tripping in potholes that he couldn’t quite seem to focus on. And behind them, as wary as bandicoots, came Rosemary and me. I had threatened him a last time – told him I’d leave him there.

  “If that paddock’s haunted, Asael, whatever it is is going to love getting its dried up old hands on a squidgy little runt like you!”

  “Don’t be scared, Ruthie,” he’d said, as though ‘Fear’ wasn’t his middle name. “I’m not scared!” I’d snarled. “And don’t call me Ruthie! Call me . . . Prudence.”

  “Okay. But we can’t go yet, Prudence. We have to help Amal . . . !”

  It was hopeless. Short of wedging his underpants up his bum-crack and dragging him, I couldn’t get him to leave Amalthea. And I couldn’t leave him.

  “All right, all right! Fine! We’ll go look! It’s nothing, but we’ll go look! Then we go home! All right?”

  Rosemary and I bumped along together behind the other two. I at least drew some courage from having her there, with her animal senses. My own little snake detector. In the distance, the cycle of rise and fall continued despite my determination to ignore it. I tried a last desperate diversion.

  “It’s just going to be somebody playing silly-buggers, you know that, don’t you? Harvest Festival weekend people, getting stupid!”

  No answer.

  “I’m just saying! They’re not going to be happy! If we show up in the middle of . . . whatever they’re doing, they’re not going to be happy!”

  I’d really given up by that point but Amalthea suddenly stopped in her tracks, bringing our little parade to a sudden halt. She looked to right and left and to the rear.

  “You know, you could be right, Ruth!”

  We muddled briefly in the middle of the track and my hopes began to rise.

  “Course I’m right!”

  “But take another look around!” I did. We all did. “What do you see?”

  Apart from the plume of torchlight and the pulsating glow ahead, the night was absolute.

  ‘It’s dark, Amalthea! I can’t see anything!’

  “That’s right! Not a thing!” There was no defensiveness in her voice, only wonder. Great, I thought! If she’s immune to sarcasm, what chance does anyone have?

  “And how amazing is that?” she continued. As though every night of the year wasn’t completely rife with darkness! “How amazing to find ourselves – just the four of us – out at the edge of the humdrum; maybe where worlds are colliding! You know, there was a time when people wouldn’t go out at night at all! For fear of other worlds!”

  “Yeah, well I’m with them! Coping with the usual world is hard enough!”

  “Ahh,” she sighed; yet another person disappointed. “Of course! You’re right! You’re right to remind me. Tell you what! We’ve spied a light in the darkness. And there’s a path! But we don’t know what’s out there, do we? Going down mysterious paths without knowing? What are we, white rabbits?”

  Okay, she wasn’t entirely insensitive to sarcasm. Nor, it seemed, to wild fantasy.

  “You know,” she went on, her face shining in Asael’s torch light, “I once knew a girl who . . . turned me into a white rabbit! Just for a time. Dropped me onto a strange path! Life has never been the same again! It never can be the same! Once you choose!”

  Asael was fairly dancing with excitement by this time, pinning her ever more closely with the light. “A white rabbit? Whaddya mean? What path? Why not? Choose what?”

  I was really beginning to dislike my brother. What had happened to that sweet kid you could count on shushing with a look and a nudge?

  “I’ll tell you later, Asa. First, though, Ruth’s made a good point. So what do you want, Ruth? Stay with the familiar? Be safe and sensible? Or shall we follow and find out what’s there?”

  I’m smart enough to know when I’m being played and I definitely felt it then. I also heard the echo of the note she’d left on the Gourd: ‘We follow. Now we follow.’ And I wondered, like Asael, only with a good deal more cynicsm, what ‘path’ she was following. What path had led her to Sugar Town? A girl who believed in Voids. A girl with goats.

  In spite of all that, I didn’t want to be the piker. I wanted to go back, but I wanted it to be because I was right; not because I was afraid.

  “The White Rabbit knew where it was going!” I said. “It was Alice who got lost. We’re Alice, not the rabbit!”

  She smiled enigmatically in the beam of Asael’s torch. “Right again! But they both wound up in Wonderland, didn’t they? Each in their own way? So? Keeping in mind, of course, that even going back is just a different way of going forward – what’s it to be?” She wagged her head, testing a balance of ideas. “Mad Hatters or home to bed?”

  The probl
em with talking in metaphors is that sudden switches in perceptions can leave you looking at yourself in ways you never intended. I’d already seen myself, that day, doing outrageous things: putting the Agnes letter on The Grand Gourd; challenging Mayor Hoggitt; even pulling Johnathon Cranna from the Moth to ensure that he lived long enough to tell me what I needed to know. They were all the acts of a person I wasn’t particularly used to being. A person in a place that seemed increasingly out of whack. But, I told myself: you at least know how it’s out of whack! Unlike, for instance, Asael whose own personal Wonderland is a mystery even to him!

  In short, I was stuck – a situation that Rosemary ended by walking back into the beam of the torch. She went straight to Amalthea and Amalthea squatted beside her. They shared an eye-to-eye moment before Amalthea nodded and tapped Rosemary gently between her horns.

  “Yes,” she said, pushing herself to her feet. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Not one bit!”

  The comment, I was sure, was intended as a tantalising bait in the midst of the little pond that was us and I refused to approach it. Asa’, however, was onto it in a flash.

  “Surprised about what? What did she say?”

  Amalthea’s face turned through the beam of Asa’s torch, back into the darkness, toward the distant light. She fell still, letting the decision take hold.

  “A Thing! That’s what you said! Fallen from the sky! And Garlic’s dead!” She put a hand absently on Asael’s shoulder. “You know, you should listen to your sister, Asael. Go back. Go home.” And she pushed him gently to me.

  In the ghoulishly shadowed backwash of torchlight, Asa’s face became a picture of confusion. And it struck me again how vulnerable he was. How he barnacled himself onto people he trusted. He never challenged me on my name choices; he never stood up for himself when I bullied him. He saw and believed things in his own special way. He took medication. If only, I thought, there was a medication for naivety or gullibility! But there wasn’t. There was only me.

  I snatched the torch from his hand, knowing clearly what I needed to do. I moved quickly ahead and turned to face him, centring the small circle of light on his chest, as though the pressure of the light might hold him back.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Asael,” I hissed, my voice rattling out of control, “and it’s wrong! Listen to me! Garlic is dead, back there at the house! He’s not out here in the cane. There are no worlds colliding and there are no things from space. There are drunken boys out here, playing silly–buggers! It’s the police who are wanted, not us! And just you ask yourself: would Bridie want us doing this? No she wouldn’t! So we’ll do as Amalthea says,okay? And go home! Now!”

  “Oh!” Amalthea whispered. I flicked the light to her and saw that she was looking over my shoulder. “It stopped!”

  * * *

  Up until then, even at a distance, the light had formed a precise shape and had had a clear boundary, as though contained inside an inverted bowl. Even at the dim end of its cycle, it had been more a case of the light thinning than shrinking. But now something – perhaps the sound of my raised voice – had caused it to change. The boundary between dark and light had taken on a vaguely molten look and begun to collapse, falling into and through itself in slow motion, shrinking down in a vaguely oily fashion. As though somewhere, low down, a skirt had been lifted and the glow was oozing out. It was quite beautiful, in a special effects, golden-syrup kind of way. And it wasn’t the end.

  “What’s that sound?” I turned the torchlight back on Asael. His face was all circles and astonishment.

  I listened. We all listened.

  “No, Honey!” I said. “There’s no sound.” Honey! You know I’m close to breaking when I start calling him names like that!

  “In your feet!” he said, gawping at the ground. “In your ankles! Thunder!”

  Sound, coming up through the ground? Rosemary nodded faintly. Amalthea put a hand to the ground to search for vibration and I put a hand to the back of my neck to press the hairs back into place.

  If Amalthea had shown some skerrick of either doubt or fear, we might just have gotten out of there! But she didn’t. She rose, touched my arm – a passing gesture – and reclaimed her torch.

  “Why don’t you wait here?” she said, almost without inflection. “I’ll just be a minute. Promise.” And before I knew it, she, Rosemary and Asael had all nudged past me, leaving me alone on the path in the dark. Sometimes, it seems, as in Alice’s Wonderland, paths just insist on being under your feet.

  * * *

  I caught up with them quickly, targeting the tensely rigid outline of Asa’s back.

  “Did you take your medication this morning?” I hissed, in a half-hearted effort to remind him of his vulnerability.

  And he answered, “It’s okay, Prudence! Don’t be afraid!” The second time he’d said that to me!

  “I told you, I’m not afraid, Asael! Not for me, at any rate!”

  He didn’t answer. At least he didn’t answer ME. What he did say, half under his breath, in a little sing-song breath was, “Marco-o-o!”

  I had a “Huh?” half way out of my throat before I noticed the movement of his head, turning like a radar beacon, and recognised the game.

  “Marco-o-o!” Like someone blindfolded, whispering into in the darkness and listening for the response: Polo-o-o! Trying to grasp the invisible presences that lurked just out of reach.

  If all that seems weird, (and how could it not?) it instantly got weirder. On some inexplicable impulse, maybe hoping that darkness would shield us from whatever lay ahead, Amalthea flicked off the torch. And a soft, organic radiance, green and golden, took its place, lighting the pathway at ground level! Like a sleepy, glowing river of smoke, it flowed out of the cane and into the headland.

  Amalthea halted, immersed up to her knees in the pale drift of it. Rosemary also stopped, submerged up to her chest, the words on her banner – LET IT GATHER IN YOU – washing faintly in and out of view. I reached into the glowing mist to brush at my calves which prickled as though tiny, invisible moths were fluttering against them.

  Believe me, I’ve spent many an hour since, thinking of that light. Perhaps it was some kind of river fog (though the river was dry!) Or fireflies. Or radioactivity or phosphorescence. Amalthea reckoned it was a spirit light. But then Amalthea’s a frustrated mystic. Asael was sure it was a welcome from The Thing. But then Asael takes medication. Isak, when we told him of it, agreed with Asael. But then Isak’s prone to delirium tremens – they’re as whacko as each other! I don’t suppose it makes any difference in the end. It’s just that you like to know the ‘whys’ of things.

  I could sense awe creeping into my mind and I pushed it away, grasping instead at a more comforting tendril of anger. Someone – I didn’t know who or why – was playing us for fools! And I wasn’t having any of that!

  “Right!” I barked, looking at Amalthea who was stroking at the mist as though it was a vast, green cat. Looking, I must say, more than a little bit fiendish and crazy. “Right! That’s a step too far! Thing – Void – whatever! Let’s get this sorted out, once an’ for all!”

  She smiled and began to walk. And we all followed, Asael studying the ground as though it was strewn with glass.

  * * *

  It turned out to be only a few dozen metres until we were brought up flat against a dense, tangled barrier of sugar cane. Without a skerrick of hesitation, Amalthea oozed her way in between the stalks and disappeared. Rosemary and Asael threaded themselves in behind her and also disappeared. I thought of the eminently sensible things Bridie would say when, inevitably, Asael blabbed this story.

  (‘What about the snakes, the rats, the bandicoots, the spiders? Ruthie, did you never think?’)

  I looked back down the headland where, in a myriad of tiny sparkles, the syrupy mist was dissolving away into nothingness. ‘Don’t be afraid, Ruthie!’ That’s what Asael had said to me. My nerdy, hypochondriac, paranoiac, shrimp of a misfit brother h
ad said that to me! I stepped forward and fit myself into the narrow path, following the sound of his breathing.

  Wrist-thick stalks of cane, twice my height, squeezing, rubbing, barring – snaring, entrapping. Buzzing, squirming things entangled in my hair! Things with hooked legs, hard shells and mandibles sliding inside my shirt. Ten metres, fifteen metres – seemed like a hundred. And then, slowly, the light again. A clearing. A long, narrow hallway, walled in by cane.

  The ground was a tangle of broken, flattened stalks. Off to the right, the crop had been laid flat far into the shadows. To the left, it remained standing, tall and untouched. The view directly ahead was blocked by Amalthea and Asael but it was clear from the glow that surrounded them that the source of the light was there. I stretched to see past.

  What I saw was a waist-high pile of dirt that shouldn’t have been there. And a man, half sitting, half leaning against it. Further back was what appeared to be an enormous, burnished lantern, once again emitting the gentle orange glow that had drawn us there. The man, of course, was my chief concern. His face was too shadowed to recognise but the angles in his knees and back told me that he wasn’t young. He was looking to the sky in a thoughtful, distant manner, as though the sudden appearance of three people and a goat was of no consequence to him. And scattered about the area I could see various articles of clothing, a neatly tied swag and a high powered rifle. The man was stark naked.

  And strange as it may seem, I was relieved. It was, it seemed, as I’d predicted: merely someone playing silly-buggers.

  “Who is it?” I whispered, pressing into the space to stand between Asael and Amalthea.

  Amalthea reached slowly out and placed a finger against my lips. The man, making no sound, no movement, no acknowledgment, continued his distant contemplation. We waited. And waited. And waited.

  Until finally Rosemary released a huff of impatience and Amalthea propped a hand on her hip.

  “Hello? Are you all right?”

  At that, the man’s gaze floated down to our level and he set himself into a kind of broken motion. First his arms jittered about, without any apparent purpose. Then one took it on itself to point at each of us in turn. Until it came to me. Then it stopped. A gluey recognition sort of gargle scraped around in the old bloke’s throat and the pointing finger turned into an open palm, being held out to me. Something, I could see, was there, glistening faintly.