by Trent Dalton
He finds a third opening and he rests his arm against the rock wall as he calls again. ‘Greta Maze!’ Only his echo is returned.
He breathes quick and deep. His mouth is bone dry. Only darkness in his vision. Then, far along the corridor, he sees someone, a woman, walking across the tunnel from left to right, from one side passage to another, holding a lantern up with her right arm. She moves quickly.
‘Hello,’ Yukio calls.
But the figure does not stop.
Yukio barrels down the dark corridor blindly, his right hand feeling the rock wall for the entryway the lantern carrier scurried into. With his left hand, he pats the handle of his family sword and the touch of it brings a comfort that does nothing to slow his heartbeat. His boots kick up dirt as he walks and the corridor is cold and the air is thick.
‘Hello,’ he calls.
His right hand finally finds a wide space. ‘Greta Maze,’ Yukio calls. ‘Molly Hook,’ he calls into the passageway.
His feet move faster as he turns into the black void and he keeps his hands on the walls to feel his way along the corridor. ‘Hellllooooo!’ he hollers, the sound echoing through the tunnels. He moves faster still because his heart beats faster still and he cuts his hand on a sharp rock edge sticking out of the wall and then he releases his hand from the guiding right wall and breaks into a jog.
‘Greta!’ he screams. ‘Molly!’
And he builds to a blind run and then his face slams hard into a junction wall and he has to stop and put his hands to his nose because it feels like it’s about to run with blood. He breathes hard, looks up once again, looks left, looks right, but finds only darkness. Then he looks left again and sees the woman with the lantern once more, turning right into another passage, and he runs after her. ‘Wait!’ he says. ‘Wait.’
And he charges down the passage and his arm reaches out for the guidance of the rock wall and his palm finds air and he turns right quickly into a new passage and he sees the lantern woman moving slowly now into a doorway from which light spills into the darkened corridor. Yukio pads quickly to the glowing light and turns into the opening. ‘Greta Maze!’ he barks as he enters another spacious cavern that looks almost identical to the one he just woke up in, except there is only one large wooden bed with no mattress here – no tables, no chairs, no stretchers, no piano. And the bed is in the centre of the space and all the people of this troubling underworld, all the sleepers, all the half-dead, have formed a circle around it. ‘Ssshhhhh!’ says Marielle, turning from the circle to admonish the Japanese pilot. ‘They are dreaming.’
Yukio can make no sense of the scene and the confusion makes him ache and the incongruity of it all makes his head throb even more than it throbbed when he woke from his dreaming. He must catch his breath and as he does he sees that Greta Maze is lying on the large bed, lying on her side in a deep sleep and the baby who fell from the sky is sleeping there, too, nestled in the warmth of her chest. Yukio can see now that all the men and women of the cave hold wax candles aflame and they are watching Greta sleep and they are whispering in Chinese and at the head of the bed stands the piano player with the hair as white as Sakai snow in winter, scribbling his observations in a notebook with a pencil as long as his thumb.
Yukio’s fast-beating heart turns to fire, and a rage inside him compels him to break through the circle of cave dwellers and crawl onto the hard bed. ‘Greta Maze!’ he screams. ‘Wake up.’ He screams again in broken English. ‘Wake now. Wake now.’
Two old Chinese men with thin bones and long beards reach for Yukio. ‘Noooooo!’ one old man wails. ‘She is dreaming. Noooooo.’ And then more of the cave dwellers reach for Yukio, tugging at his arms and shoulders and speaking in Chinese, loud and panicked.
‘Wake up, Greta!’ Yukio hollers, his hands shaking her now. He pushes her hard and she flops over onto her back, eyes still closed.
‘She will not wake,’ Lars says, matter-of-factly. ‘She does not want to wake.’
‘Why did you wake, Yukio?’ Marielle asks. ‘You were dreaming so beautifully.’
Yukio shakes Greta again. More cave dwellers crowd around him, hands reaching for him. The pilot turns and all he can do is roar because he doesn’t have the words to speak to them. He pulls his shortsword from his belt and he charges at Lars, whose bulging blue eyes are so crazed and wild they can only stare in wonder at the stranger who now raises a blade to his face and drives him hard against the cavern wall.
‘Back!’ Yukio snarls as he tears the notebook from the old scientist’s hands and throws it across the room. Yukio grits his teeth – the wild dog of his fury, the tiger of it – presses the blade tip hard against Lars’s throat and lets loose a barrage of hate-filled words in his native tongue that spray against the old man’s face, words about how Yukio came to this forest to escape the killing of men but every bone in his rabid body right now is willing him to resume it. He roars and raises his elbows high and drives the blade hard and straight towards Lars’s eyes, adjusting his thrust late so that the sword slices the top of the botanist’s right ear and stabs through the handle loop of a gas lantern that hangs from a nail against the rock wall.
Yukio lifts the lantern up with the sword blade and transfers it to his left hand before sliding his sword back into his belt. He bites on the metal lantern loop, moves to the bed, drags Greta to its edge and heaves her onto his right shoulder, adrenaline supplying the extra strength he needs to lift her dead weight. Then he reaches for a handful of the sheet that’s wrapped around the baby who fell from the sky, and the baby rises with the sheet like he’s sleeping in a pillow case.
‘Noooooo,’ wail the woozy onlookers as they circle around the pilot.
Yukio kicks at them hard, thrashes his legs around wildly, driven by primal fear and primal rage and he barges through the group and back out the cavern’s entrance, back into the black corridor, the lantern providing just enough light.
‘Ease the pain!’ Marielle hollers after him. ‘Ease the pain!’
And Yukio runs because he now knows what this place is. So far from the Plain of High Heaven. This is the nether world. This is Yomi-no-kuni. This is the World of Darkness. This is the land of the dead.
She stands alone at the edge of the world. The gravedigger girl and a high night wind behind her back pushing her floppy brown hair, curled like her mother’s, forward across her face. I will never be afraid, she tells herself. But she is. That is the truth of it. Night skies tell no lies. She is alone. That is the truth of it. She is sick in the stomach because she dragged her only friends into a hell that she made. Only her. That is the truth of it. I feel no pain, she tells herself. But she does. Night skies tell no lies. Night skies tell her the cold hard truth that she’s on her own.
The gravedigger girl in the sky-blue dress with the shovel and the duffel bag, standing on a sandstone plateau overlooking a valley of natural stone formations so bizarre and intricate she wonders if they were made by the ancients. Made by the women with the quarter-lemon heads she saw back in the gallery chamber.
Three distant forks of electric-blue lightning strike the moonlit horizon and the stone valley becomes a city. A city of giants. Men and women of stone bending and bowing and reaching for each other in the night wind. Molly tilts her head to the night sky. Star blanket with a full moon pillow.
‘“City of stone ’tween heaven and earth,”’ Molly says to the night sky.
And the night sky responds. ‘“The place beyond your place of birth.”’
Molly plants her boots into a loose scree slope of sandstone rubble and begins to slide down the edge of the plateau.
‘Where are you going, Molly?’ the night sky asks.
‘I’m going to find Longcoat Bob,’ she replies.
‘But you heard the woman in the cave,’ the night sky says. ‘Longcoat Bob is dead.’
‘Do you believe her?’ Molly asks the night sky.
‘No.’
‘Night skies tell no lies,’ Molly says. ‘But wh
y would that old woman lie to me?’
‘Because she wanted you to stay there with them.’
‘Why would they want me to stay?’
‘Because you’re a good one, Molly,’ the night sky says. ‘Because you’re special.’
‘I’m not special,’ Molly says. ‘I bring bad things to every single person I care about. That’s why my grandfather locked himself away for all those years in that house. He didn’t want the bad things to spread. He knew he had to be alone.’
Molly comes to an expanse of white rocks, a scattering of angular chalky boulders maybe one hundred yards wide and one hundred yards long. She talks to the night sky as she frog-hops between the rocks, her legs moving faster than her eyes sometimes, instinctively bouncing between the flattest landing surfaces she can see in a night turned to deep blue and silver by the moon.
‘You should turn back,’ the night sky says. ‘You should go home.’
‘Home?’ Molly echoes. ‘I’ve got no home to go to. Darwin doesn’t even exist anymore. I’m not even sure if Australia does. Why are you telling me to go home?’
‘Night skies tell no lies,’ the night sky says. ‘You have come too far and you know it. You were so brave to make it this far, but you need to turn back now. You will die out here, Molly. That’s the truth.’
‘But Longcoat Bob is out here,’ Molly says. ‘I need to find him.’
‘What if you find Longcoat Bob and you don’t like what he has to tell you?’ the night sky asks.
Molly hops to her left, hops to her right, zig-zagging over the rocks. At one point she props Bert the shovel in the dirt floor and pole-vaults between two high slabs of stone.
‘What could he possibly tell me that could be worse than anything I’ve already been through?’
‘He’ll tell you the truth, like me,’ the night sky says.
As she leaps from the last of the white rocks, she comes to two towering, human-shaped formations, maybe eighty feet tall. Each of these segmented rock structures has a pillar for legs, a fat slab of sandstone for a torso and a balanced ball of rock for a head. They seem to be looking down on her and they stand like sentinels tasked for eternity with assessing all those who would pass between them into the city of stone at their backs. And she feels that they watch her as she passes between them and enters that city, a place carved by wind and time and turned into something as big as all the street blocks that make up Molly’s Darwin town.
Millions of years of erosion have fashioned freestanding sandstone blocks with shoulders and wonky heads that seem to be falling off their necks, and fat men pillars that seem to be leaning over in hysterics, and tall graceful women pillars that seem to be gathering in gossip circles, and some conjoined pillars that look like twins or triplets. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of them across the entire city, as crowded together as the punters in Gordon’s Don Hotel public bar on Melbourne Cup race day. Molly was always the short girl moving between all those legs, trying to find her father at the bar because she was hungry and wanted to go home and eat something, but all those tall, high-panted legs became like walls in a maze and she would always find herself lost inside them. ‘Dad!’ she’d scream. ‘Dad.’ But he never heard her amid the din.
And that’s what this place is. Less a city than a maze. A maze of stone legs separated by alleys of dirt and short clumps of dry spear grass.
‘Which way will you go, Molly?’ the night sky asks.
‘I don’t know,’ she says.
‘Go back home, Molly,’ the night sky says.
‘I’m not going back when I’ve come this far,’ she says. ‘I’ll die out here if I have to.’
‘I’m sure you will,’ the night sky says. ‘You’ll get yourself lost in here and nobody will ever find you. You’ll waste away at the foot of one of these pillars and the birds will peck out your eyes while you’re still breathing.’
‘Stop it,’ Molly says. ‘You’re scaring me.’
‘Night skies tell no lies, kid.’
Molly makes her choice. Molly makes her move. She walks into a narrow alley between two rows of pillars, some with two heads, one with a head like a dingo, one with a head shaped like an axe blade. She tells herself to follow the lightning. Move forward. If she’s moving forward, she is moving towards the lightning and the lightning was striking on the other side of the stone city. If she moves forward she won’t get lost in the maze of stone legs.
‘No one is going to come for you, Molly,’ the night sky says.
‘Why are you saying that to me?’
‘Greta has turned, Molly,’ the night sky says. ‘Yukio has turned. Your mother is dead. Your mother left you here alone, and you will be alone always.’
‘Stop it.’
‘Your mother abandoned you.’
‘Stop it.’
‘She left you for dead like a lame fawn, Molly. That’s what happens to people with hearts of stone.’
‘Stop it.’
‘She wasn’t running away from them, Molly. She was running away from you.’
‘Stop it.’
And Molly darts between pillars, skirts the legs of the stone giants, moving forward in diagonals. Diagonally right, diagonally left, speeding through the maze of legs. Always towards the lightning that flashes ahead in the distance. But then she comes to a wall of eight, nine, ten sandstone pillars that are joined together at the hips. She must go hard left or hard right and she chooses hard right and she comes to a rock shaped like a tortoise and she pats it because she feels that if she pats it she will remember it if she passes it again. ‘Tortoise rock,’ she says.
She takes a hard left into another alley and then it splits three ways – left, straight ahead and right – and Molly takes the forward path because she needs to follow the lightning and then she can only turn hard left and then hard right into an alley that runs straight for so long that she can break into a jog and she needs to jog because she is frightened and because in the moonlight the stone figures look like creatures bending down to curse her without words.
She comes to another stone wall and she must turn hard left and she spots a pillar that’s been severed down its middle, as if by a samurai sword and she calls this pillar ‘Yukio’ and she pats it to remember it, and even if she passes it again and is lost she feels that Yukio will save her the way he saved her from the tin miners so far back now in the deep country.
‘He’s not coming for you, Molly,’ the night sky says.
Molly’s heart beating faster. Her mouth dry. She runs down another alley. Forward. Left. Forward. Right. Forward again. Surely she is getting closer to the city’s edge?
She runs and she runs and she runs and she comes to another wall of pillars joined at the hip and she turns hard right and passes a rock she has seen before. ‘Tortoise rock,’ she gasps. And she panics and she runs faster because she feels the pillars are closing in on her now.
As she did before, she takes a hard left into the alley that splits three ways – left, straight ahead, right – but this time she takes the left alley which leads past a row of S-shaped pillars like snakes rising to strike. Like the whipsnakes Bert would slice up at home. Like the brown snakes that would cool themselves on the concrete floor of the laundry back home. Home, she tells herself. I want to go home.
‘I want to go home,’ Molly tells the night sky.
‘Then go home,’ the night sky says.
And Molly turns back and runs right along an alley and she takes a hard left and then a hard right and comes to another set of snake-shaped pillars, four of them this time, and she runs left and right and zigs past a pillar with a small round head the size of a coconut resting on a torso the size of a large ice chest. Then she zags right alongside a pillar with a horse head and then a pillar that curves like a crescent moon.
‘You are lost, Molly,’ the night sky says.
‘Stop it,’ Molly says.
And she runs and she runs and she runs. Left and right and right and left again and she comes to
a wall and she turns and comes to a wall and turns and comes to a wall and then she stops to breathe. She rests her head against the sandstone.
She’s in a box of stone legs with only one way out. And there is no lightning to be seen. No lightning to be followed.
‘You are lost, Molly,’ the night sky says. ‘Nobody is coming for you. Nobody wants to help you because you are cursed.’
‘Stop it.’
This stone city has darkened. This sprawling city has shrunk. This place has turned into a cave. This is the dark place. The sad place.
‘I know why she left you, Molly.’
‘Shut up.’
‘She left you because she could not love you.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘I know why you want to find Longcoat Bob.’
‘Shut up!’
‘Shut up!’
And Molly closes her eyes and she’s standing inside her bedroom again and she’s opening her bedroom door and she’s walking down the hallway.
‘He will not tell you what you want to hear, Molly.’
‘I said “Shut up!”’
And now she’s standing in the doorway to her mother’s bedroom and the moonlight shines across her mother’s face and Violet Hook is staring at her daughter, Molly, and Violet Hook is weeping.
‘You want to find Longcoat Bob because you want him to tell you lies,’ the night sky says. ‘You want him to say it’s not true.’
‘Stop it.’
‘You want him to say it’s not true what he did to her.’
‘Stop it!’
And the shadow wolf is moaning in the dark and the shadow wolf is clawing at her mother. And a voice from behind whispers her name. ‘Molly.’ It’s the voice of Horace Hook, standing in the light of the kitchen.
