The Stone Gate

by Mark Mann

  I look in the mirror. I know what to expect. Just like in Mrs Peterson’s bathroom, I have no reflection. I hand the mirror to Jack. He stares into it with wide eyes. This is the first time he’s seen it. There were no mirrors with the Dunjini, no reflections.

  “See?” Sara says. “Or rather, you don’t see, do you? Because you’re not there. You’ve got no reflections.”

  She hands the mirror to Noah, who angles it so he can see us in it. Or should be able to see us. He stares at the mirror, turning it this way and that, unable to believe what he’s seeing. Or not seeing.

  “What are you? Vampires?” he demands.

  I’m so surprised I burst out laughing.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s just ... I’ve never been mistaken for a vampire before. But if we tell you the truth you won’t believe us.”

  “But don’t worry,” Jack adds hastily. “We’re not dangerous or anything. We’re just ordinary kids.”

  “Yeah, right. Ordinary kids with no reflections,” Sara says. “I saw it at Mrs Peterson’s, in the bathroom. You thought I’d missed it, didn’t you? And another thing. You didn’t show up on the guard’s security camera either. You’re lucky he didn’t notice it.”

  Noah is sitting upright now, alert, on the edge of his seat. I notice he’s also produced a knife from somewhere. He holds it down by his side.

  “Leo told me you didn’t show up on your photographs either,” he adds. “When I went to collect them. He thought the film must have been damaged. Except he says all the other pictures on that roll of film were fine. It was just you two who were missing.” It’s the first time I’ve seen him flustered.

  “So what’s the story?” he asks.

  I take a deep breath. “You want the truth? Okay then. We are from Baytown. But a different version of Baytown. A parallel universe or something. We don’t know exactly. Billy called it a different Dreaming.”

  Noah and Sara look at me as if I’m mad.

  “Believe me, it makes no sense to us either,” I say.

  Jack gives it a try. “It seems we accidentally found a portal between different realities. The Stone Gate. Up on the High Plateau. In our world, Baytown doesn’t flood and nobody attacks you for being a refo and everyone has food. Well, almost everyone. But the portal only opens on the full moon so we have to wait until then to go back.”

  “But we didn’t even know about the mirrors, or the cameras, until today,” I say. “The Dunjini didn’t have mirrors. But I guess it makes sense, in a way. Billy says when you visit another reality your life force or spirit remains in your own world. Maybe we’re sort of like ghosts.”

  I stop. I realise we must sound insane. I see Noah and Sara exchange a look that says “we’ve got a couple of nutters here”.

  “So you’re telling us you’re not vampires but you are ghosts,” Sara says eventually.

  “Not real ghosts, I mean ...” I hesitate. We’re not doing a very good job of this. Mind you, it’s not an easy thing to explain.

  “Who’s Billy?” Sara asks.

  “The first time we went through the portal we came out in another version of Baytown, like a version with only Aboriginal people. Billy is their binjin man. That’s what they call the portal. Binjin. Billy knows all about the portal. And he’s been to our world and speaks English. He explained it to us.”

  “Lucky for us too,” Jack says. “Without Billy we’d have been lost there. Billy showed us how to get back through the portal. Except ...”

  “Except something went wrong and we came out in your Baytown instead,” I say.

  There’s a long silence.

  Finally Sara says: “And you expect us to believe that?”

  “I know it sounds crazy,” I say. “It is crazy. We wouldn’t believe it ourselves if it wasn’t happening to us.

  “I’d say you’re a couple of lunatics,” Sara says slowly, “if it wasn’t for the mirrors and the camera and the photographs. And you don’t seem like crazies. And you know your way around Baytown, yet you don’t know what’s going on in Baytown.”

  “They could have memorised a map,” Noah points out.

  “But there’s still the mirrors,” Sara repeats.

  “Come to the portal with us at the next full moon and you’ll see we’re telling the truth,” I say.

  Sara runs a hand through her dreadlocked hair. “I don’t know ... it’s crazy, but at least you sound like you believe it.”

  Suddenly Noah jumps up. “Hold on a second,” he says. He sounds excited. “If you’re telling the truth, we can go back to your world with you. It could be our ticket out of here.”

  “I’m afraid not,” I say. “Billy says you can’t live for more than two or three months away from your own reality. Like I said, your life force stays in your own world. When you visit another world it’s like ...” I search for a way to describe it. “It’s like you’re running on batteries but when they run out you can’t recharge them.”

  “Oh,” Noah says softly. He sounds disappointed. I feel bad for him. It would be great to give Sara and Noah a way out of this Baytown, to take them home with us. But also, I think, it’s good because if he’s disappointed then he can’t have totally dismissed our story. And I’ve got a feeling we’re going to need Sara and Noah’s help to get back to the Stone Gate.

  “That’s why we’ve got to get back through the portal,” Jack adds. “This will be our second moon away from our world. We don’t know how long we can last. Especially Kaya. Billy said it hits women more quickly.”

  “But how do you know this portal will take you back to your reality? You just said it brought you here instead last time,” Sara says.

  That question has been worrying us too.

  “We have to hope, I guess. What choice do we have? Billy says your life force pulls you back to your own world. I don’t know why it didn’t last time.”

  ***

  Next morning we find Noah and Sara in the garden, cooking porridge over a small firepit. The porridge is watery and there’s no milk or sugar or sultanas to sweeten it, but at least it fills us up. Noah rakes grey ash over the embers of the fire and smoke drifts around us. “Keeps the mosquitoes away,” he says. He pauses. “Sara and I have discussed it. You can stay. Until the full moon. We’ll help you get back to your portal thingy.”

  Relief floods through me. “So you do believe us?”

  “I’m not sure I’d put it that strongly,” Noah says.

  Sara laughs. “Let’s just say that if by some miracle you do vanish into thin air ... well, we don’t want to miss seeing that, do we?” she says. She takes the kettle off the fire and pours dandelion tea into our mugs. “But remember, you’ve still got to earn your keep.”

  ***

  Sara and Noah are as good as their word. About making us work, that is. I go with Sara to clean homes at the Fortress, and we work in the garden, and Jack helps Noah find firewood. We work in other people’s gardens too. Because we don’t show up in photographs Leo can’t make our Resident’s Permits so we have to move carefully, keeping an eye out for cops. Luckily George, the guard up at the Fortress, doesn’t ever seem to look at his screen. I guess he knows Sara. Now he recognises me too, he just waves us in. Sara always has a little present for him, a piece of fruit or some smoked meat. In the Fortress, we get paid in cash. Outside the Fortress most people trade us stuff in return for our work, like clothes or jam or potatoes.

  Noah disappears for hours. He never tells us where he’s been.

  We eat thin potato soup and porridge and dandelion tea and stale bread, and thin slices of smoked possum and rabbit, and any food Sara and I can steal.

  Do Noah and Sara believe our story? I’m sure they think we’re mad. On the other hand they keep asking us about our world, and Billy’s. Or maybe our stories just help pass the time. I mean, without electricity they’ve got no television or internet to watch.

  The important thing is, they’re letting us stay.

  It�
��s hot. It must be forty degrees today. Noah wants to know if our world is getting hotter too. I say it is, but it doesn’t seem as bad as here. Noah says the Arctic ice is gone and Greenland is melting fast. He says when all of Greenland melts it will raise the sea seven metres. The sea is already up more than a metre. Eventually all of Baytown—all of the Coast—will be under water.

  “That’s why the government introduced the Coastal Retreat Plan,” Sara says.

  “But it’s not only sea levels,” Noah explains. “Global warming has changed the weather too. There are more heatwaves, droughts, storms. Droughts and heatwaves cause the harvests to fail, which means people starve, which leads to riots and wars, which creates refugees. Millions of them. And rising seas also means millions more refugees as people abandon coastal towns and cities. And refugees create even more riots and war, because there’s nowhere for them to go that has spare food and jobs and houses for them.”

  “Which explains the welcome you got,” Sara adds.

  “Anyway,” Noah says, getting to his feet. “You get the idea. When there was time to do something about global warming, nobody took it seriously. Maybe people thought it just meant a few hot days in summer, or wearing T-shirts in winter. What they didn’t understand was that a few degrees hotter and everything falls apart. You see it in Baytown but it’s happening everywhere. Civilisation is crumbling. Now everyone realises it but it’s too late.”

  ***

  It’s another hot day. It’s like a heatwave, except Sara says it’s always like this now. Sara and I go up to clean at Mrs Peterson’s. While we’re there, I have a dizzy spell. Everything becomes fuzzy. I lose my sense of balance and feel the energy drain from my body. I stumble over to a chair and sit down. It takes about twenty minutes for my head to clear.

  When we get home I tell Jack. “I think it’s started. Like Billy said.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “Comes and goes. Most of the time I feel normal. Then suddenly it hits me and I’ve hardly got enough energy to stand up. How about you?”

  Jack shrugs. “No, I’m fine. Nothing a big plate of chips and a shower wouldn’t fix. Otherwise I feel normal.”

  “Billy did say it affects girls more. What if I can’t make it to the end of the month?”

  “You’ve got to,” Jack says. “Or I’m stuffed. You know I’d be no good at surviving on my own.”

  “Yeah, how selfish of me, to think about dying and leaving you all alone.”

  But I guess if I am going to fade away and die there’s nothing I can do about it, so why think about it? Like Wolf Meares says, just focus on the things you can control.

  ***

  I’m feeling better this morning but Sara thinks I should take it easy. She suggests we go to the beach. She says the salt air will do me good. I don’t know what makes her think that.

  Bay Beach is a half-hour walk down Trafalgar Street. Near the beach the puddles in the street are larger and the houses look abandoned. Sara says east Baytown, near the beach, floods every high tide now. It’s uninhabitable. Even now, at low tide, the beach is no more than a narrow strip of sand.

  As soon as we reach the beach I see the boats. Hundreds of them, lining the horizon.

  “Are they fishing boats?” I ask.

  Sara shakes her head. “Not likely. There’s no fish left to catch anyway. They’re refugee boats.”

  “But there are so many. Are there people on them?”

  “Bodies rather than people, I’d imagine. Not that I want to imagine. But they can’t get ashore. The navy stops them. It’s the same all along the Coast. The refugees die of thirst or starvation or disease. It must be horrific. I saw a report about it once. Sometimes a few refugees slip past the navy patrols and make it to shore on a raft or clinging to driftwood or whatever. But ... well, you know the welcome refos get. It’s terrible, but if we let the refugees in we’ll end up like Europe.”

  “What happened in Europe?” I ask.

  “Millions of refugees. From Africa, the Middle East, Asia. But Europe already had droughts and food shortages. It couldn’t cope. There was no food or jobs or houses for the newcomers. Europe fell into chaos.”

  Sara says the boats we’re looking at are from Asia, where rising sea levels are forcing people to leave the coast. Maybe Bangladesh or Vietnam. Or China. She says there are two billion refugees around the world, a quarter of all the people on Earth. And there’s nowhere for them to go.

  “How can you have fun with those boats there?” I say. “Knowing what’s happening to those poor people.”

  Still, we go for a swim. The ocean feels good: at least it cools me down. I float on my back and look up at the blue sky and pretend I’m back in my own Baytown, having a swim after school on a hot summer’s day.

  Afterwards we walk along the beach. We pass a fenced-off area that Sara says is reserved for people from the Fortress, and an unfinished sea wall jutting halfway across the mouth of the river, which Sara says was meant to stop Baytown flooding.

  “Officially, it’s still being built,” she says. “But that’s a joke. They haven’t done any work on it for five years.”

  The moon is about half gone. So we’ve been here, in Noah and Sara’s world, for a week.

  ***

  This morning I have a dizzy turn as I get up from my mattress-bed. I sit down until it passes.

  “We’d better take you to meet the boss,” Noah says over breakfast. “Blaster. He’s been asking about you. He’s heard we’ve got guests.”

  “Blaster runs Bad Boyz,” Sara explains. “Bad Boyz Security. He protects people’s businesses or homes.”

  “Protects them from who?” Jack asks.

  “Anyone. Thieves, other gangs, bent cops ... himself.”

  “You mean it’s a protection racket,” Jack says.

  “Sort of. Basically, Blaster runs Baytown. If you pay him off, nobody will dare attack you. If you don’t then you’re fair game as far as he’s concerned. What Blaster wants, he takes.”

  “Why did you call him boss?” I ask.

  Noah hesitates. “Sara cleans his place. Cooks sometimes. I do deliveries. Cash and drugs. Blaster runs the drug business in Baytown too. And I get information for him. Talk to people, find out what’s going on around town. Blaster never leaves his house. He’s got agoraphobia or something. But he likes to keep himself informed.”

  “And he pays you?”

  Noah shakes his head. “He ... protects us. As long as we’re with Blaster, everyone leaves us alone. That’s why we can live in this house, on our own, without joining a gang. Anyway, let’s go.”

  Blaster’s place is only a few blocks away. It’s a large two-storey brick house protected by a high steel fence topped with barbed wire.

  Noah presses the bell at the gate and looks into the security camera. A buzzer rings and the gate clicks open. We cross the yard and the front door of the house buzzes open automatically. Inside, we enter a narrow hallway. It’s ankle-deep in water and planks have been laid on top of piles of bricks to make a raised walkway. The doors to the rooms are shut. Everything smells damp. I guess the ground floor floods just like Sarah and Noah’s house.

  We climb the stairs to another narrow hallway with two doors on each side. Noah turns into the first room on the left. Inside it’s cool. Air-conditioning! Three men sit at a table playing cards. Behind them, a giant of a man sits on a red leather sofa, watching the news on a huge TV screen. His head is shaved smooth. Tattoos cover his powerful arms and his thick neck.

  “Hi Blaster,” Sara says. “These are our cousins Jack and Kaya. They’ve moved up from Sydney. We’re teaching them the ropes.”

  Without taking his gaze off the television the man points at the other sofa.

  “Sit down,” he says. He jabs the remote to change channel. On the screen, a reporter is standing on a beach. Waves crash behind him.

  “Scientists say sea rises will soon reach the two-metre mark ...” the reporter is saying.

  Hea
dlines scroll across the bottom of the screen: Drought in east Africa enters fourth year: four million dead from starvation, disease ... riots in Pakistan as rice harvest fails again ... tiger declared officially extinct ... forest fires devastate Europe ... football: US 2 Brazil 1 ... gossip: K.Lo marriage sham ...

  “Dunno why you watch this stuff Blaster,” one of the men says. “It’s depressing. Why don’t you put on the footy instead?”

  “We gotta get off the Coast soon, Blaster,” one of the other men says. “Go Inland.”

  Blaster changes channel. Another reporter is standing in a bare brown field.

  “... without rain soon, farmers predict more crop failures ...”

  Blaster jabs the remote again and the television goes dead.

  “See? It ain’t no paradise Inland neither. Even if it rains, they ain’t got no soil left. It’s all dried up and blown away. Dust and sunshine, that’s all they got. They’ll starve before we drown.”

  Blaster turns to examine Jack and me.

  “Noah and Sara’s cousins, are you? If you’re as smart as Noah and Sara then I’m sure I can find work for you. It’s hard to find people with brains around here.” He winks at me. If a wink can feel threatening, this one does. “Brains and beauty. Must run in the family. Maybe you can help Sara out round the place. Cleaning, like, and other ... duties.”

  Blaster laughs. I don’t know what other duties he means, but I don’t like the way he says it. Or the way he looks at me. Suddenly his mood changes. “Now get out of here,” he snaps. “I’m a busy man. Ain’t got time for chit-chat. Come back tomorrow.” He turns the television back on. And with that it seems we’re dismissed.

  Once we’re out of Blaster’s house, I ask Sara what Blaster meant by other duties.

  “You’ll find out,” is all Sara says.

  “Just remember, anything Blaster asks you to do, you do it,” Noah advises. “Anything.”

  Jack’s been quiet, like he is when he’s thinking about something.

  “Did you notice the date on the television?” he says. “September 30.”

  “And ...?”

  “Well, when we first went through the portal it was September 21. Nine days ago. And we’ve been in this Baytown for nine days.”

  “Yeah, so?” I must be missing something.