After Z-Hour

by Elizabeth Knox

  Pursued by these vague, fatalistic feelings I dozed off, imagining myself warmed in one of those sticky, opaque spider’s nests to be found on the branches of gorse bushes—curled up, clotted in spider-silk.

  I dreamed I was standing before the scene of a postcard my friend Neil had sent me from Dawson: the beginning of the Dempster Highway, a slow-curving, bulldozer-raised path of asphalt and gravel, defying erosion by scoria and snow, heading north thousands of kilometres across the tundra into the Arctic Circle, like Alaska’s Haul Road, servicing the pipeline. Tourists occasionally ventured along it in summer to photograph signs like ‘LAST PETROL STOP FOR 800 KILOMETRES’ and ‘CARIBOU CROSSING’, discovering what the wilderness was all about by recording what the Yukon Road Authority had to say about it.

  As I stood looking at this immense, empty, useless landscape, behind me came the click and hiss of a soft-drink bottle being opened. I turned and there, by a service station drink dispenser, was Kelfie, saluting me with the bottle topped by a curl of grainy vapour.

  I was pleased to see him. There was something I had meant to ask him, although I couldn’t remember what it was. I knew I had to detain him till I remembered.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m going up the road.’

  ‘Soon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Behind the service station was a flat, wet, green country—very like Taranaki. Several Friesian cows turned their dark eyes and wet-whiskered muzzles towards us, their breath steaming—rich and warm, not like the vapour at the neck of the Coke bottle. I looked back at the snow-scoured landscape. ‘But there’s nothing out there.’

  ‘That’s what they’d have us think. And it seems reasonable—I mean, look at it—’

  Highway, patchy tundra, mountains—a window into a cold, white other world where explorers might sleep in hammocks hung on rock faces, like babies in delivery by storks. ‘There’s nothing out there,’ I repeated.

  ‘But back there,’ he pointed behind him, ‘are one hundred and fifty-three thousand missing. The cemetery is still open, waiting for their bones to be disgorged. Out there,’ he pointed ahead, ‘the ground is too hard to bury bones. They couldn’t grow pasture over the battlefield like Mum putting on sticking-plaster: “There, all better, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”’

  ‘That isn’t a battlefield—it’s Taranaki farmland.’

  ‘There were battles in Taranaki. The bones were hidden. That cemetery is still open too.’

  I heard the sound of a door opening and cold air engulfed us. I woke up.

  Wrathall had climbed into the seat beside me. He slammed the door and sat staring out the windscreen at the early morning gloom. In the light from the window his face and throat were veiled by the shadows of raindrops, like a drapery of grey lace.

  I was surprised at his audacity, turning up when we had quite obviously left the house to escape him. Feeling sleep-dopey and unsure about confronting him I settled for a cross between confrontation and mockery of confrontation. ‘Shoo, shoo—’ I said, waving a hand at him.

  ‘It isn’t your car you’re asserting territorial rights over. It’s Jill’s and Jill likes me and is concerned about my wellbeing.’

  ‘She may have been, but after your performance with the crowbar, I doubt it.’

  His hands rubbed the arch of the steering wheel. ‘Yes, I suppose she’s disappointed.’

  ‘Quite.’

  He looked at me. ‘I’m not going to go away.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘And what about Ellen’s “performance with the crowbar”?’

  ‘That was different.’

  The car smelled of wet wool and oilskin—like the inside of a city bus after five on an evening in late autumn.

  ‘Less than a week ago I was strolling along the beach at Totaranui with my feet in the warm surf,’ I said, probably in the same tone as someone might quote the end of Paradise Lost, about Adam and Eve, ‘with wandering steps and slow’ taking ‘their solitary way’ to the exit of Eden.

  Wrathall smiled at this mournful remark and I eyed him suspiciously, wondering if, and why, he was now trying to put me at ease. ‘Where’s Kelfie?’ I asked.

  ‘I tied him in a knot and put him in the fireplace.’

  ‘Seriously.’

  ‘Where indeed.’

  ‘Is he still up at the house?’

  ‘He was when I left. He threw me out.’

  ‘How achieved of him.’

  ‘Very achieved. It was a private spell.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s a witch.’

  ‘You’re warped.’

  He laughed. His hands caressed the curve of the wheel again. ‘Think about it—the symptoms: nightmares, sleepiness, hallucinations, sleepwalking, jammed doors, inexplicable paranoia and jumpiness—’

  ‘Oh right. And I suppose he made you attack Ellen?’

  ‘No, that was me, I lost my temper. I used to think I didn’t have one.’ He became very still. ‘I keep imagining that nothing I do will matter, since nothing feels real and immediate anymore. Like a sad fantasy, everything is remote and irrevocable—’ He trailed off, eyes unfocused—an expression similar, but not identical, to one I had seen several times on Kelfie’s face.

  ‘Wrathall?’

  He blinked at me, then said, ‘But the other stuff—that wasn’t me.’ He was like an old person dropping off to sleep mid-sentence, dozing for a moment, then waking up and resuming what they were saying. He turned sideways in the seat to face me, and the look of sullen impassivity, his usual expression, left his face. He gave a slow, bright smile. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said with gentle resolution. He savoured this a moment, then went on, ‘Do you remember Kelfie saying I locked the door so I could go off and bury the body?’

  I nodded. ‘Though he said “iggry off”. “Iggry” is a funny old word.’

  ‘It is. And that is what I did. I didn’t lock the door—but I did go off to bury a body.’

  I made a sound between a croak and a gasp, meaning I didn’t want to be told anymore.

  ‘I wasn’t crossing the Hill, I was looking for a place to bury Vic—I must say this, Basil, so don’t glaze over. I’m going to tell the police too.’

  He took several deep breaths. ‘Vic was my lover. That was his idea, which might sound stupid, but you know how it is when someone feels strongly about you. You’re flattered and get caught up in their feelings. Only, he was always so unhappy, wanting someone to rescue him from everything.

  ‘He made me feel tired and weak and anxious—so I tried to break it off, but he got into emotional blackmail, suicide attempts, and doing bizarre things like calmly standing at my mirror cutting off all his hair, or filling up the sink with water and then putting his camera in it—he was a professional photographer—’

  He was shaking now and struggling to control a stammer. Then, quite suddenly, he overcame his emotion and continued in a calm, almost conversational tone: ‘You know, I always believed myself to be different—sane, and trustworthy. I’ve had a good life, I get on with people; I expected to be able to cope with Vic, but he made me feel like a failure. And crazy. He was always telling our acquaintances how happy he was, and they were all applauding me for being so good for him. But it wasn’t true.’

  He paused a long moment and the rain came into the pause murmuring like a prayer.

  ‘He turned me into this role. This fake, reactive, miserable person. The day before yesterday he rang up and said he had to talk to me right away—and I said I was in a meeting. But he turned up with bandaged wrists—such a cliché!

  ‘I don’t remember that we argued. I must have made him some coffee because there were a couple of empty cups sitting on the sideboard when I came to, sort of, and there was my cat with all the fur along her spine standing up in a ridge, sniffing his body—

  ‘I’m not saying I’m insane, but I must have gone—gone off. Anyway, it happened again when I tried to choke Kelfie—because he
said I did, but I didn’t really believe him till I saw the bruises on his throat—’

  ‘What?’ I demanded, my voice high and tight. I had had enough. And at that moment I made the only clear decision I was capable of making: I wasn’t just going to go back to Saskatchewan to touch home-plate with my folks—I was going home.

  ‘Kelfie followed me. He offered to help me bury Vic’s body. I tried to hurt him. But he wasn’t afraid of me. For a while he just—took over—being rational and commanding. But he lost his nerve when he saw the body. I sent him away. I was going to do a Mr Asia and cut off Vic’s head and hands to bury them separately. It was a stupid idea, and horrible, but I had decided I didn’t want to get caught. I was sorry he was dead and horrified that I’d killed him, but I didn’t want it to ruin my life. Can you imagine that? How could I have thought I hadn’t already ruined my life?

  ‘In the end I didn’t do it, because when I took the bandages off his wrists—supposing that would make it easier—there were no slashes, only the old scars, and I was so disgusted with the whole thing—with his manipulations, with my craziness, and Kelfie’s monstrosity—that I just left Vic lying in the bush.’

  He fell silent and watched me, waiting for a reaction, a verdict.

  I began to laugh nervously.

  ‘I wanted to tell him … Don’t get hysterical, Basil.’

  I continued to laugh. Everything was shaking and shimmering.

  ‘I wanted to tell Kelfie why I did it. In a way I imagined, superstitiously, that he’d be able to tell me what happened when I was blanked out in my living room—as if he was standing there watching. Can’t you just see him doing that? Being there? I didn’t want to confess to anyone. I just wanted to make him tell me the privileged information I thought he must have. I mean, why else did he say I’d gone off to bury the body, then turn up to help me?

  ‘But you know what he told me? My confession was the “wrong punchline for this joke”.’ Wrathall glared broodingly out the window. Then after a moment said, ‘If you don’t stop laughing I’ll hit you.’

  This made me worse. It was like an earth tremor. I couldn’t reach the source of the laugh to stop it.

  ‘Look, have some respect—it’s my life that’s ruined.’ Then, as an afterthought. ‘And Vic’s.’ He waited another moment then said, ‘Basil, I’m only practising on you for when I tell the police. Telling you isn’t the same as telling Kelfie.’ I continued to giggle, and the muscles in his face stiffened. Edgy, but still in control, he said, ‘You know what I think? I think that house is haunted.’

  I stopped laughing and stared at him.

  ‘Ellen tried to brain me with the crowbar, and I don’t think that’s at all the sort of thing she’s inclined to do.’

  He paused, and in the pause the door beside me opened and Hannah squatted down on the road so her face was level with mine. She disregarded Wrathall and said to me, ‘I’m going to fetch that idiot kid, do you want to come with me?’ Then, without waiting for a reply, she picked up my flashlight from the dashboard and shoved it into my chest. ‘You’ll need this, it’ll still be dark inside the house.’ She stood up, thrust her hands into her coat pockets and waited. I exchanged looks with Wrathall then got out of the car and followed her. Behind us he turned on the headlights.

  ‘Bastard,’ Hannah muttered.

  It was true that the headlights seemed less light to see by than suggestion of the hidden assassin about to use an automobile as a deadly weapon.

  ‘He can’t just pretend he isn’t there, oh no.’ She strode ahead of me up the track. I caught her up halfway across the field, taking long steps over the grass which was now lying in large white curls, flattened by the rain.

  ‘Hannah—’

  ‘I know. We all discussed it and we’ve decided that the house is haunted,’ she said, abruptly. ‘As for the kid, he is, if not “possessed”, at least “occupied”. Or so Jill reckons.’ She caught my elbow. ‘Basil, are you incapable of walking in a straight line?’ She hauled me along beside her. ‘Jill’s hang-up about the haunting was the idea that her first “ghost” could be completely irrelevant—because her daughter died a year ago—’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Fair enough, eh? And I didn’t really believe in ghosts, but when it comes down to it it’s only science says they don’t exist—and science has also given us so-called multicultural IQ tests, and left brain/right brain theories.’

  Mark

  I sat for an hour on the Hill’s highest peak, recovering from the climb. My perch was one of the smooth marble outcrops which break through the Hill’s flesh like bones. I gazed down at grey jumbled stones with turf lapping up around them, as if stretched and clinging where the stone tore through into air. My eyes followed the wet seam of a stream, which levelled out into a swampy valley of flax. I watched Gordon work the new dog, half-a-mile down, its black, tan and white body streaking towards the sheep, then stopping to crouch low in the tussock (belated, the whistle floated up to me). The dog crept forward slowly, ears twitching and eyes intent ahead. While Maire, Gordon’s roan mare, grazed and furtively practised her old trick of lowering one leg down the abrupt shelf in the sloped ground she was standing beside so that her haunch would drop and her rider would be spilled off her back. But Gordon was used to this ploy and kicked her away from the edge of the shelf. The dog was silent.

  I looked at the far side of the hill that hid the homestead, the pines my father and Euan planted when they were still living on Finnin flat in a pug clay hut. And I saw what cannot be seen from anywhere else on the Hill: the summit plateau of smaller hills, then the steep tumult of slopes, ridges, valleys and the dry thread of road looping downwards to the Upper Takaka Valley, Canaan; and the sea, which, seen between the hills, seemed to climb again towards its horizon, the only straight line in sight.

  At the end of the hour a membrane of high grey cloud had covered most of the sky—its blueness filtered through lavender. The air was thin and difficult. I felt at peace and, in the high sparse atmosphere, increased inside my skin.

  This was the world I had wanted to explain to Alan, showing him, telling him. This was what I had longed to run back to, out of the war zone, invisibly past the Redcaps, their revolvers and their law. This I wanted to share with him, when it was all over, and we stood together on the crest of Flint Peak. This I carried around inside me like folded wings. Except he died. Except I failed to carry and keep it.

  The lavender sky thickened to blue-grey and began to settle. My hands cupping my crooked knees were the colour of old ivory; gold not of sun, but sickness. Yet, as I contemplated the scene, all that beauty, tidal and inevitable, came back into me again, until I felt I was taking it in with more than my own eyes. The space and height they had never known and were now looking at with me: Alan, Doug, Les, Bill; John Price—even John Palmer, alive and in hospital in Wellington, with his prickling scalp the tic under one eye—even the Lieutenant who might still catch the wind between his thin fingers and listen to Gordon’s changing, liquid whistle.

  They were with me. They would taste all my meals and be warmed by all my suns, and all my work would be their work also.

  I stood to accommodate something unfolding within me, full of calm, rebellious joy. I wasn’t ill, I was a fountain.

  I would go back down to the house, take out my abandoned journal and write not, ‘And when my eye flees from the present to the past it discovers the same thing; fragments and limbs and dreadful chances, but no men,’ but, ‘Speak no further, convalescent, but go out to where the world awaits you like a garden.’

  Under the still, heavy sky the stones gave off the scent warm fabric has, one sensed at the back of the palate. It began to rain; large drops splashed onto the warm rock and the air filled with the odour of steam and ozone. I set off back down towards the track beside the wet crease where flax grew, the riding track that followed the little valley, then veered around the pine-covered hill, ending at the fence of Emma’s flower garden.
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br />   Gordon on Maire, the dog following at a respectful distance, were disappearing around the home hill. From behind another ridge a hawk beat upwards through the rain, set its wings at a slant to the hillside and slid away down the air. The summit was empty.

  By the time I reached the riding track I was wet through. It was pouring, the wind gusting this way and that, and the flax clapping. The bare earth of the track shivered white, and the hills were hidden in the folds of a phantom curtain. As I forged on, engulfed in a great sibilance of falling water, I began to feel a persistent sensation: I was not the last person on the summit hurrying to shelter. If I stopped and waited, someone would appear out of the rain on the path behind me.

  I broke into a run, for as far as I was able, jogging then walking along the flooded path. There was no wind on the home side of the hill. I was very cold. Water dribbled down my cheeks and met beneath my jaw like a freezing chin strap. There seemed to be a heavy band around my head, as if I was wearing my helmet.

  Then the white palings of the fence were beside me. The gate was open, the kitchen door open also, and Emma was standing before it on the porch. She ran out to me, head down, arms hugging a thick cardigan close around her.

  She ushered me inside. ‘I only just missed you, where have you been?’ She didn’t wait for an answer, but ran out the hall door, calling back to me, ‘Come through to the fire—I’ll get a towel.’

  I stood, dripping and shivering, in the quiet kitchen. Then, behind me, the cool silver light changed and a voice said, ‘Mark—’ I turned and saw, standing in the doorway against the rain, a body outlined by the streaming icy glow—a stranger in whose face eyes glimmered, quick, like water—saying my name once more in a strange, terrible, mesmeric voice. I turned my head involuntarily as Emma came in with the towel, and when I looked again an instant later the doorway was empty.