We made our way to the lower balcony, to the exact spot where Mum had died—or as close to it as was possible now, as the balcony had been redesigned as well as rebuilt. And still I felt nothing out of the ordinary. I stared down at the rocks where her broken body had been smashed to pieces. The memories roused by the sight were horrific, but no special unease stirred in me; no hairs rose on the back of my neck; I felt no proximity of an other.
A panic began to grow in me. Had I imagined the whole thing? Was Dad right all along? Even worse, was my idiot therapist right too?
Then I looked up, to the great overhanging roof of the cave, to where the boulder had worked itself loose, and there were tears in my eyes now, of frustration and terror and doubt.
And that’s when it came.
Not a sense of a presence, but of … of an active absence of a presence. It was not that there had never been anything there; instead there was a spiritual cavity where something had been, just as there was a physical hole in the cave ceiling, where the boulder—the two boulders, in fact—had fallen.
And I understood then. I was looking at a grave. Not of my mother, or at least not only of my mother, but of the thing that had killed her. It too was dead now. It had been extinguished by the completion of the house, by the occupation of the family that called it home. The entity that had been so angry and vengeful over the intrusion of humanity into this previously untouched place, had, after its last display of fury, bowed to the inevitable, and died.
I felt that loss keenly. The cave was infinitely a lesser place without it, merely an overhang of rock, meaningless. And in that moment everything changed in me. My hatred evaporated, replaced by pity. The best way I can describe it is to imagine that my mother had been killed, say, by some wild animal that was itself endangered and dying. A Bengal tiger, perhaps, or a polar bear, a creature forced by dwindling habitat and hunger into an area it did not belong, where by ill luck it encountered and killed a human, only to be later found dead itself of starvation. I would not hate such a creature, I would only pity its wretched final hours, and lament the fate of its species.
That’s what I felt, overwhelmingly, in the instant that I stared up to the rock ceiling. Whatever had lived here had been dying when it attacked my mother, lashing out in its fear and desperation, and now it was dead. And it was my father’s house that had killed it.
I looked at the man beside me with a suddenly renewed loathing. He was a killer! On behalf of his super-rich clients, he was a destroyer of something that he had no right to destroy. If it had been just this one cave, that would have been bad enough. But this was what he did everywhere. He worked almost exclusively with remote and unspoiled locations; he was famous for his ‘submerged’ style of design, which in particular dug into and transformed locations of natural wildness and beauty, made them habitable for man.
I did not know then for certain that presences existed in many places, but I already suspected it. And what my father had done to this cave, he was doing all over Australia, all over the globe.
It is no surprise, then, that things only got worse between us, after that.
▲
I went away from the cliff house with a whole new perception of the world around me.
In fact, I soon realised that there are two worlds. One consists of the regions that mankind has inhabited densely for years—cities and towns—and those places, no matter how beautiful (think of Sydney Harbour, say) are desolate and empty of anything other. Whatever presences inhabited them before humanity’s advent are now long dead.
The other world is to be found away from the towns and cities, but not necessarily far away, and it is not necessarily what people call wilderness. I began skipping school, and catching busses and trains out of Sydney, to go roaming in the countryside, searching for places that might possess presences (as I started to call them) the same as the cave. And I found them. In scrub gullies, along overgrown creek beds, in quiet forgotten places that humans—although they lived close enough—rarely bothered to venture.
Things were there; I could sense them as clearly as if they were beacons.
Later I would travel more widely, to distant native forests and to remote alpine meadows, and would find still more presences—but remember, it was never anything to do with the forests or the meadows themselves. Presences are products purely of landscape, they inhabit formations of stone and earth and water, not trees or plants.
And those formations have to be singular, out of the ordinary, as I’ve already explained. Not every hill or gully or lake possesses an inner awareness, no matter how remote. But a hill that is sharper than those around it, a gully more steep and narrow than most, a lake unusually deep and dark; these places have something, a self-knowing, a presence.
It is this consciousness, so alien to our own, that mankind senses when confronted with dramatic scenery in some lonely place. And alone or in small numbers, passing by, our own consciousness is no threat to the presence in the landscape. But when we come in greater numbers, and settle permanently, and build over the landscape, then our mass consciousness is lethal to the presence that preceded us. Poisoned, suffocated by us, it withers and dies.
But not willingly, not in silence, and not without protest—though in truth, the invading humans will rarely be aware of that protest. They may get a bad feeling about a place, they may fall victim to unlucky accidents there, they may experience a fleeting regret that, in the name of progress, a hill must be levelled, or a river tamed, or a lake drained dry. But only a few have the ability to detect the presences directly, or even to communicate with them.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
At eighteen I was done with school and free to go wherever I wanted. And I went. I spent the next two years drifting all over Australia, seeking out remote and unvisited landmarks to see what, if anything, I might discover there, feel there.
It was a gypsy life, involving a lot of camping, and also a lot of hanging around bookshops and libraries, reading up on alternative philosophies and religions. Inevitably, I fell in with certain crowds of fellow nomads. Sometimes it was hippies (I’ve known my fair share of communes), sometimes it was conservationists, or bushwalkers, or birdwatchers, or four-wheel-drive enthusiasts, sometimes it was gun-toting ferals protecting their scrub marijuana patches, and once it was even a mob of wiccans dancing naked around a desert bonfire …
But I was none of those things myself, and though I picked up bits and pieces from each of those groups, none of them could sense what I sensed, or could teach me anything about it.
So I had to teach myself. In time I learned what sort of landmarks might possess consciousness and what types wouldn’t. I learned the type of mental state I needed to be in, to best sense the presences. I learned of their individual nature, of their ancientness in some places, and of their fleeting immediacy in others. I became expert in an Australia that no one other than myself seemed to know.
But I spoke very little about my developing ability. As far as my friends were concerned, all this time I was simply partaking in the same generic ‘nature is good’ vibe that they espoused themselves, be it via meditation, or bushwalking, or the cultivation of pot, or Gaia worship.
The fact that I would go off into the bush for hours or days in search of unusual land formations was just considered to be my particular nature kink. I even developed a modest fame as the girl who had a knack for locating previously unknown ‘power sites’ in the bush. For once I found a place with presences—a rocky outcrop, a dark gully, a hidden waterhole—then when others came there, even if they were blind compared to me, they could still feel something.
And it was because of this modest reputation that, not long after my twenty-first birthday, the second great change in my life arrived.
At the time I was at a crossroads, living in a commune in the scrub outside of Bairnsdale in eastern Victoria. I had accepted the truth of presences, but was beginning to wonder what practical use that was to me. I had no c
areer, no home of my own, and no particular purpose in life. Worst of all, I had no money. I worked the occasional odd job here and there, but for urgent funds, to keep my car going, or to travel, or often just for basic supplies, I resorted to my rich and famous father, who always coughed up.
Not that either of us was happy about it. He, of course, disapproved of my whole wastrel existence, and hated having to enable it. And just as strongly, I disapproved of him: his whole career was based on destroying the very things that I had come to find the most precious, which made it indefensible that I took the money he earned from it. Hell, I even attended protest rallies against some of his projects, although I was careful to not reveal my true last name, or my parentage, to my fellow protestors.
So I was searching for a way out of the impasse, when one day I received an unusual request.
It came from a family who had just moved onto a bush property in the hills north of Bairnsdale, not far past the little town of Bruthen, and on the east side of the Tambo River. This was pretty wild country, much of it state forest, and with no road access at all when the Tambo flooded, but the block these people had bought was a beautiful one, seventy acres or so on a hillside overlooking a creek, and with long views down a forested valley.
They had expected to be very happy there, but instead, something was wrong. Something they thought maybe I could help with.
Intrigued, I drove up to see them. And sure enough the place was lovely. Indeed, it was striking, for halfway up the hill a large stone shelf jutted out from the slope, perfectly level. This natural platform was about fifty yards broad and deep, and was fronted by a cliff a good twenty metres high: a very unusual formation for that part of the country. And not surprisingly it was on this ready-made base that the family had started to build their house.
There were five of them in all, the two parents and three children under the age of ten. They had moved in about a month before, having built a track up to the platform, and then dragged a caravan up there to serve as a camp while they built their home proper. But though the spot was as gorgeous as they had hoped, with no other house or sign of civilisation in sight, they had found their time there to be disturbing rather than restful.
Something wasn’t right, they told me. They felt unwelcome. And it wasn’t merely because they were roughing it; they were used to that, they had been living in places like this since they had been married. But unlike any other of their bush camps, here, on the broad, empty stone platform, there was an air, they insisted, of sustained hostility.
In the daytime it was bad enough, but at night it had become downright frightening. Noises came out of the darkness, groans and shrieks that most definitely were not made by any animal, and the children were plagued by nightmares and fits of sleepwalking. The oldest boy had disappeared entirely one night, and was not found until the next morning, wandering bewildered and naked down by the creek.
They had begun to wonder if there was something unusual about the stone platform. Having heard, through mutual friends, that I was good at discerning ‘power’ in such spots, they hoped I might be able to tell them something more concrete. Could it be, they asked, an Aboriginal thing? There were some markings on the lower cliff that might have been faded paintings and worn carvings. Could the platform be a sacred site of some sort?
Of course, as soon as I saw the place I knew it would host a presence. As for a sacred site—well, to this day, I don’t know. The markings on the cliff might have meant something, they might not; they were too faded to say if they were man-made.
But in truth the whole issue of presences and their relation to Aboriginal mythology is something I’m still pondering. I’ve visited many supposedly sacred sites over the years, and while some are bare of anything other (perhaps because they’ve become tourist attractions, or have been built over) those that remain un-trampled do indeed have an attendant presence, often a very strong one.
Given that, it seems to me that surely there must be a link. Surely, all those millennia ago, there were Aboriginal shaman who shared my ability to sense presences in the landscape, and perceiving those presences to be gods or spirits or demons, then declared the sites sacred, and off limits.
It’s an interesting thing, actually: the fact that Indigenous peoples never chose to live in an area that they declared sacred. Such zones might be visited at certain times and as part of certain rituals, but human contact was kept very limited. The traditional explanation of this is that they did so out of awe and respect. But I wonder. What if those earlier peoples in fact recognised, as I came to, that presences, for all their apparent power, are able to be killed by human habitation? What if they kept away from their sacred sites to ensure that the presences there endured—to save their own gods, indeed, whereas we Westerners seemed so determined to destroy ours?
It’s an intriguing thought.
But in any case, to get back to my story: I agreed to spend a night there on the stone platform, and to report anything I might learn.
The family I dispatched off to Bruthen for the night, as in those early days I assumed that I needed isolation for the experience to work, though I have since realised this is not so. As the sun set behind the western hills and the long evening deepened towards dark, I got a fire going, more for company than for warmth. It wasn’t at all cold, but it felt lonely the moment the family was gone.
And it got lonelier as it got darker. The scenery that had seemed so lovely in the afternoon—the hillside, the valley, the creek—now took on a sinister air. The nakedness of the stone platform, the angle of the slope above and the sheerness of the cliff below, the way the trees were positioned in groups, as if it huddled and conspiring, all of it seemed increasingly askew in the fading light. The fire burned brighter, but the darkness grew ever larger all around it, and I began to sense a malign intent in the air, a feeling of being watched by unfriendly eyes, inhuman eyes, not eyes at all, but a watching, waiting alertness.
It was the presence of the platform, no mistake, and it was angry. Indeed, not since the death of my mother had I felt a presence that was so hostile, and so wishing of harm. No wonder the family had been having a terrible time. It was all I could do to sit there myself as the evening inched towards midnight, so potent was the sense of threat.
But at the same time, I understood why this was happening. The presence that had attacked my mother had been in its final extremity, lashing out before it was itself extinguished—and the same was true here. The presence in this platform had existed since the stone itself was moulded into shape, but now humans had arrived, permanently, five of them, their consciousness suffocating the platform’s own. And so, amid my dread, I also felt regret.
And somewhere in the depth of the night, the presence became aware of that regret.
Now, for all my experience with presences, it remains difficult for me to describe exactly in what form they sense we humans and our minds. I suspect that usually we appear to them as a grating intrusion, not thinking beings at all, but merely a kind of static that crowds out their own awareness, faint maybe at first, but as more and more of us arrive, building to a din in which the presences drown.
But for the first time, there on the platform, I became aware of a presence gradually becoming aware of me. Me uniquely, not merely an annoyance, but a creature with consciousness. And what made the connection, I’m sure, was that the presence could sense my sadness at its incipient extinction: an emotion, perhaps, it had sensed in no human before.
In turn, I could sense something beyond its anger and pain, and that was gratification—gratification precisely that its anger and pain had been recognised. I do not pretend to fully grasp the thoughts of a presence, if indeed they think at all, in a way we would accept. But I could feel that my simple acknowledgement of its existence and of its impending death was dissolving away its anger, even though the fact of its death remained unchanged.
Indeed, it did not fear death. After all, an end comes to all presences sooner or later, as
the landscape shifts and changes over the ages. But what presences do fear and resent, I suspect, is death coming unnaturally, caused by beings too brutal to even recognise the thing they are killing. That’s why presences lash out against intruding humans, their animosity a malaise in our hearts: not merely in self-defence, but in outrage at the insult of not even being acknowledged in the first place.
It was at this point that I took off my clothes. There was nothing sensual in this, I had long learned by then a truth shared by many belief systems, from the hippy communes through to the wiccans, that baring one’s body to nature is mirrored by a more fundamental baring of the psyche. And indeed, it had helped me before, being naked, to attune myself to landscapes around me. But now I did it more to express to the presence within the stone platform my goodwill towards it, to expose my own vulnerability as a naked creature of flesh and blood.
Unclothed, I sat by the fire and opened my arms to the night, pouring out my sympathy and empathy to the thing that surrounded me in the darkness, cold and ancient and inhuman as it was. I even tried to share with the presence the memory of my own mother’s loss.
And the night heard me. From the shadows and the stone I received in response a clear sense that the presence recognised what I was doing, and that it acknowledged my mother’s death. There was no sympathy: it saw her death as the fair price to be paid for the destruction that had been wrought by the humans in the cave. But it accepted that the price had been paid, and that the matter was done.
I understood then that my regret, appreciated though it was by the presence in the stone platform, would not be enough to assuage its anger. There must be a higher price paid if the presence was to accept its approaching end. A price of pain, of suffering. And then it came to me, the real word for what I was considering. Not a price, but a sacrifice.
I didn’t hesitate. There was pocketknife nearby in my camping gear—I picked it up and, carefully but deliberately, I made a cut across my wrist. Then I turned my arm and dripped my lifeblood onto the ground, onto the native stone of the platform.
The Rich Man’s House Page 40
