After Z-Hour

by Elizabeth Knox

  Emma unceremoniously threw the towel over my head and began scrubbing at my hair. I fended her off, took the towel myself and headed for my room.

  I didn’t lay a fire. Instead I sat down in mother’s wing-chair, hauled off my boots and peeled off my wet socks. Then just rested, hugging my knees to my chest, trembling, filled with confusion and unease. My day had suddenly tilted and tipped me off. I understood nothing. Some time later Emma knocked and came in. ‘Mark, you’ll catch your death!’ she scolded. She came closer, and when I didn’t speak or look at her she decided that scolding was pointless. ‘Edie!’ she called, ‘come here!’

  Gordon and Edith both answered her call and they all got me undressed, into bed, and then lit a fire. Emma was tucking the blankets in, flipping the mattress angrily. I freed one arm and took her wrist—simultaneously feeling the chill dryness of the sheets, the ache in my hips and knees, my head hot and ripening and that I was falling fast and far, bound to the rim of a great wheel, turning on its downwards swing.

  ‘I’m not ill,’ I told her, ‘I saw a ghost.’

  Basil

  With the fire out and the damp finally finding its way into the house, the room was like the space inside a mouth, breath held, warm and wet.

  I could hear Hannah walking on the floor above as I went from room to room, finding them empty, then back to the room where the rumpled wet leather jacket lay by the hearth. Kelfie was nowhere to be seen, and the house frightened me more than ever. It was the world on the far side of the mirror; the one you can see looking past your own reflected face, where the titles on the spines of books are unreadable ciphers, and faces in familiar photographs, paintings, posters, are distorted and sinister.

  I was striking the failing torch against my palm, trying to shake strength into the light, when I heard his voice saying my name, tranquil, and close at hand. I shone the torch around the room. It was empty. I went back towards the door in the hall, then heard the voice again, behind me, saying, ‘Basil?’ placidly. I concluded he must be in the outer room—the one with the forced window, and hurried through, only to hear, as I reached its doorway, his voice directly beside me, speaking out of the air.

  ‘Where are you?’ I called, spinning in circles, the flashlight swooping around walls, ceiling, floor.

  On my third revolution, there he was, standing beside the extinguished fire, his hair and clothes shedding water.

  ‘Here I am,’ he announced serenely.

  I dropped the flashlight.

  He picked it up and passed it to me, despite my distrust and withdrawal, trespassing into my space. He held out the torch, saying, not impatiently but with amused challenge, ‘Take it.’

  I took it and we stood, face to face, watching each other. He smiled, fierce and cheerful, full of fearless ease, impropriety and joy.

  At that moment the house shuddered. I wondered whether it was the wind (though it had died down considerably) or an earth tremor. It was unnerving, but Kelfie seemed not to have felt it. He held my gaze.

  After a minute I asked, ‘I suppose you know what you just did?’

  He laughed disarmingly. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Here.’

  I went to the door and shouted for Hannah.

  Kelfie was laughing softly and excitedly behind me—his frail, pretty, unforgettable laugh. (And I thought of an experiment I did in grade-school science, ‘floating’ a paperclip on the surface of a beaker full of water, the teacher saying, ‘This shows us the force of the water’s surface tension.’ The twisted wire, not buoyant, suspended by nothing, precarious and improbable.)

  When Hannah came in, Kelfie’s energy had already begun to dissipate. He looked tired.

  She touched my arm as she went by, whether to congratulate or reassure me I couldn’t tell. She reclaimed Kelfie. ‘There you are. Good.’ Putting an arm around his shoulders she marched him towards the open window. I picked up his jacket and followed them, out into the misty dull-coloured morning—the sun up, but behind cloud.

  Hannah was conducting Kelfie down the sloped lawn to the bricked tunnel. I saw him dig in his heels and say, ‘No, wait for Basil.’ I caught up and draped the jacket around him, holding the corners of its collar so that he was detained. He was really more interested in turning back to the house than in waiting for me. He was entranced. I shook him by the collar and he looked up at me. By daylight his eyes weren’t black or brown, as I had supposed. As I watched the light drew a ring of colour in one eye—dark blue.

  ‘I want to know,’ he said, his voice languid and slurred, as though he were drugged.

  Hannah and I turned him again and impelled him downhill.

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘No way. You’ve got mild exposure, I’d say, and we’re going to take care of you,’ Hannah said.

  ‘Don’t patronise me.’

  ‘That’s matronise.’

  ‘Look, Kelfie, you came back, you called my name.’

  ‘It was a mistake. You came into the house—’

  We had slowed down to feel our way down the steps of the tunnel, our breathing and voices magnified and flat.

  ‘I heard you in the house and all my thoughts turned,’ Kelfie said, his voice still husky, but urgent, ‘like a school of fish turning before a faint pressure wave, a presence in the water,’ his mind jumping from low to high gear.

  ‘Come on kid, honey, you’re sick,’ Hannah coaxed.

  We led him out on to the field. Halfway across it he said, ‘You had better go back through the jawbone gateway, or else you’ll stay in this world.’

  ‘It’s the same world, stupid,’ Hannah said, ‘I’d know it anywhere.’ To me she said, ‘How can someone have exposure and a fever at the same time? It’s plain greedy if you ask me.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something. Listen,’ Kelfie said, with expanding excitement.

  ‘God, it’s like being cornered by a talkative drunk trying to tell you his life story.’

  ‘When I was a kid—’

  ‘You still are.’

  ‘—I found a narrow, crescent-shaped gully, in the middle of some low hills, cut by a stream which emerged from the ground, ran for a little way in the open air, then went underground again. I used to spend a lot of time there. I made mud idols and put them in the branches of trees. I made shrines. When the land was sold for a subdivision some guys in bulldozers scraped the top off a hill and pushed all the earth into the gully, filling it up. They never climbed down to look at the tarata, hawthorn, mahoe, and the shallow brown stream. I always wanted to go back there—and it took me a long time to realise I could. Not only am I walking among the trees now, through sunspots on the stream, also I’m buried, still immersed and still unearthing myself.’

  Hannah looked anxiously at me and said, ‘I guess some of us were in a bad way before the storm.’

  ‘Not me,’ I protested, thinking she was asking whether my behaviour over the past hours had been due to previously accumulated stress. ‘Only that last night was a bit of a blast from the past. This guy reminds me of someone I once knew—who was good at alternating charm and alienation.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ Kelfie muttered.

  ‘Frenetic little bastard,’ I said, under my breath.

  ‘I’m not, you know. I had a father—a pet, performing father, one of a kind—’

  I nodded at Hannah. ‘I see what you mean.’

  ‘He died, he was thrown by his horse. No, actually he tried to shoot me, but killed himself instead. Except that isn’t true either.’

  We reached the road, half-carrying Kelfie, both winded by the effort of hauling him down the hill. I held him up against the side of the camper while Hannah banged on the door. Then she opened it and stuck her head inside. ‘Hey! Where are they?’

  ‘Wrathall’s not in the car, either.’

  ‘They must have gone to the slip.’ Hannah hustled Kelfie into the camper, and despite her curiosity started to remove his wet clothe
s and scrub his hair with a towel.

  He passively permitted himself to be half undressed and swaddled in a rug.

  ‘OK, lie down, troublemaker. Boy I’d hate to be a parent of yours.’

  ‘I don’t have any,’ he said sleepily. ‘I’m an orphan, an exile and an amnesiac.’

  ‘Ah huh.’

  He looked past Hannah at me, his eyes half-closed and failing to focus properly. ‘I learned that when you were sitting in the hallway upstairs, whimpering. I had these buds of strength and certainty uncurling in me, like ferns. I told you it would be all right. I meant that it would all be all right always. But then this voice said—like—Cry! What shall I cry? All flesh is grass and the goodliness thereof is as of the flower of the field. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, which is OK—but the voice also said we are in exile forever and we are all already dead.’

  ‘I wonder if he knows he’s raving.’ Hannah was staring at him with the still absorption of speculation.

  He closed his eyes.

  ‘I don’t think he’s feverish, more like hysterical.’

  ‘I want to find the others. Do you think it’s all right to leave him?’

  ‘I’ll stay, at least till I’m satisfied he’s not going to—’

  ‘—cark it.’ Hannah jerked the blanket up under Kelfie’s chin, then headed for the door. ‘Probably the MOW have put in an appearance.’ She waved and left.

  I leaned over Kelfie. ‘Are you asleep?’

  His eyes opened a little, slitted and dark. ‘You came to find me,’ he said.

  ‘We did.’

  He smiled. His face was softened by tiredness, and radiantly pale. And, because he looked dreamy and defenceless, I told him, ‘You remind me of someone I knew, someone who died.’

  ‘I’m not really anyone who died,’ he replied, nonsensically.

  I went on, caught up in some kind of confession or exorcism. ‘I never thought I’d meet anyone even a bit like him. I thought he was original. Yet, at the same time I had a morbid fear that he would, sort of, turn up again, because in a way I was responsible for his death.’

  He watched me. I had his attention now.

  ‘Do you know anything about Tarot cards?’ I asked, then blushed.

  ‘I have a Waite pack. I read them. I mean, it’s something my flat does.’

  I gave a silly laugh, then asked the question I had been unable to remember in my dream. ‘What card would you say might represent you?’

  The awareness in his expression sharpened, although his face didn’t move. ‘Right now? Well, I guess I’m the Four of Swords: Repose, rest after battle, sanctuary, convalescence. Isn’t that a disorienting question to ask someone you think is hysterical?’

  ‘You’re not hysterical now. And you haven’t really answered my question.’

  ‘You know the answer.’

  Again I felt an irrational start of superstitious fear. ‘The Five of Cups? The Five of Swords?’

  He freed one hand from the rug and traced a horizontal figure eight above his head. ‘I’m the male Querant, of course. I’m the Magician.’

  Jill

  I was walking along an interminable straight street which I knew was in Auckland, looking for an address in the two-thousands. Unfortunately the house numbers counted up one side of the street and down the other, and since I couldn’t recall whether the address was an odd or even number I couldn’t even be sure I was heading in the right direction.

  I was carrying a suitcase which I was supposed to deliver at the address. I had been told it contained some undeveloped films shot by Frances Taylor in the late eighteenth century. Even, I was told, thirty-six shots in Kodachrome 64 of the storming of the Bastille.

  Eventually, very tired, I sat down on the white cement path and opened the case—a fraction at first, fearing to damage the film, then wider—to find not a collection of small black plastic canisters, but a single book, largish, with a worn, stained, red cloth cover.

  Knocking and voices interrupted my dream. I woke lying at a tilt on a bunk in the sloped camper. Ellen and Wrathall were at the open door.

  ‘—waiting for a bulldozer to clear the slip, but if we want to cross over they’ll help us to get in touch with anyone who might be missing us. I thought Jill might like to—’

  ‘I’m up,’ I interrupted them.

  ‘Jill, Wrathall says there are road workers and cops at the small slip. You must send a message to your sister—I guess it’ll be a while before the road is clear.’

  ‘Have they found your car, Simon?’

  ‘The first thing they asked when I went along there was what I knew about it. They’re short of manpower because there’s a bridge out further north.’

  ‘Has the storm been declared a disaster?’ I asked, sounding impressed and excited despite myself.

  ‘Yes. Wrathall, is this seasonal or what?’ Ellen was trying to match up the two lines of Velcro on her parka and getting them hopelessly crooked in her haste.

  ‘No, this is unusual. There are slips on the Hill every winter, but nothing like this—the Civil Defence are out, apparently.’

  ‘Oh, a bona fide disaster!’ Ellen sounded as though she thought the status of the storm had vindicated her whole experience of being trapped on a closed road, as though all our difficulties had been sanctioned by the ‘State of Emergency’. ‘I got snowed in with a school party in 1976, in the Lake District, but that was boring, except when we had to slaughter a sheep.’

  Wrathall turned away from the door. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Hannah will guess where we are, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, no problem.’

  The collection of vehicles, flashing amber and red lights across a gulf of misty air, was at once alarming and comforting. Road workers wearing yellow PVC rain gear were producing picks and shovels from the back of a truck, preparing to clear one lane so that our vehicles could escape. There was only a strip of roadside clear at the edge of the downhill bank—the frayed, muddy hem of the slip was marked by the tyres of a bike: where Kelfie had crossed. He had driven onto the stretch of closed road after the slip and landslide.

  As we approached, a dark-haired woman in a hard hat put down her radio and waved to us. All the workers stopped what they were doing and waited for us to cross. And, for a moment, where there had been the cough of static, and voices answering voices on radios, there was only the sound of foliage dripping, stones rattling in a small stream, and a bird calling out in alarm in the bush above.

  Then the hillside above creaked hugely and, with a loud tearing sound, a large mass of trees and earth began to slide towards us, at first intact, like a ship on a slipway, then cracking, crumbling and churning downwards like a collapsing wave.

  We ran back along the quaking road, pursued by a sodden, thumping rumble.

  I was probably well clear before I was able to stop running, and when I did I saw I had outrun both Ellen and Wrathall. Wrathall was already walking cautiously back towards the edge of the landslide, while Ellen was standing with her arms wrapped around her head, watching him.

  On the far side of the subsidence there was confusion. There seemed to be fewer vehicles than before, and their relative positions had altered. A black-and-white patrol car was pointed nose-down over the edge of the slip, and the officers to whom it belonged were shouting at a group of road workers who, with no thought for their own safety, were clambering across the raw clay beneath the suspended car.

  Ellen joined me, her face white. ‘Someone got swept away, I think.’

  Wrathall disappeared over our side of the slip. We listened to the shouting and the sound of settling earth.

  ‘Do you think we should help?’ Ellen asked.

  ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘This hill doesn’t like us.’

  ‘It wants me to stay on the other side of it.’ (Giving warnings—like the rainbow in the film Kagemusha. On the Canaan side of the hill, where it seemed I was being told I belonged, was the farm, my husband’s house.)<
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  I began walking back towards the slip, deciding to cross over before anything else occurred to prevent me. No longer tired, afraid or angry—just fed up.

  Ellen sighed fearfully and followed me.

  The three road workers and Wrathall reappeared climbing the far side of the slip, helping along a very muddy, shaken man.

  Ellen and I left the road and picked our way carefully down to the wet trough of the landslide. I glanced up at the long raw tear above us and remembered a similar view from the window of a Railways bus on my first trip down the West Coast, peering up the mountainside from the crook of the road, at a broad path of boulders, a mile-long torrent of stones, snagged by the occasional old beech tree, starved of rain, grey and tattered.

  The slip gave me the same sensation. We were caught between the thighs of a sleeping giant. Or we were air, about to be turned under the earth falling in the wake of a great, invisible plough. Our mountains were poised to break over our farms and cities, washing them all away in a slow green-white swell.

  Kelfie

  Some of the road workers had come up the hill in a battered dark green bus, appropriated from the Railways depot at Motueka. It took us back downhill, the six of us, and the engineer who had been swept away in the second landslide.

  Basil laid me down on the bus’s back seat, wrapped in a cocoon of blankets. He sat beside me, wedging me in, and cupped his warm hand against my cheek and jaw.

  Throughout our orderly and anti-climactic rescue I refused to come to. I knew what was happening, but was interested in none of it. I stayed submerged, listening.

  Nothing the ghost had said could help me. His story contained no arcane knowledge, no secret remedy or salving spell. He thought his shadow was the man-sized mouth of a bottomless pit. He thought he had been cheated, coming to the world and expecting it to reflect his love, his longing for a place and purpose. He showed me his catalogue of terrors, and to me they seemed purely personal, and measurable because complete.

  Ours is the nightmare none can own, of time closing in our collective faces. It’s the script that has the tough guy say, ‘You’re history’. All history. Not subject, finally, to any science of the past. We have our lives, and may have our gestures of defiance, but what are we to do?