by Penni Russon
It was also not complete: as though it were made more of insufficient memory than of elements or atoms, it blurred at the edges. But it felt real, the sand under her feet. She could smell the fishy, seaweed smell, could hear the ocean, but the acoustics were all wrong. It was more like an echo of the ocean resounding in a small chamber, like entering a shell.
The sound of it filled her, a kind of drifting, sonorous dream. It was hypnotic, she couldn’t think through it. She struggled. She was looking for something. What was it? Trout, Trout, dead on the ocean floor? No. No. She’d already done this. Pulled him from the sea, breathed into him. He’d left her. He didn’t want her.
She walked below the tideline and stared at the water that flowed around her feet.
‘Sister.’
She whirled around, seeking the source of the voice.
‘Jasper?’ Undine said, like a half-remembered dream. She turned again. There was no one.
‘Sister! Worlds pour out. Worlds pour in.’
The voice sounded so … shredded. So partial and brittle. ‘Jasper?’ she said again. And then, hesitantly, ‘Phoenix?’
The air whipped around her. ‘Sister.’
And then in front of her eyes, from particles in the air, from the grey sand, from ashes, from dust, from nothing, a figure began to form. It was barely anyone. It was parts of someone, tattered leftover parts, as though they’d been knitted together by shadows and cobwebs.
‘Who are you?’ Undine asked.
‘I am we. Are you. Am she.’
And out of the eddying sand she stepped. She was hardly she. The girl was mostly gone. But as she came together, always swirling, never still, there was just enough remaining to recognise: it was Undine that Undine was looking at. It was her own dark, terrible self.
CHAPTER THIRTY
She seemed temporary, as if she might disintegrate any second. Her face kept drifting apart and reforming. It made Undine feel ill to watch it.
‘I am,’ she said again, experimentally, as if she wasn’t quite sure. She looked at Undine curiously and tilted her head – there was a slight delay as parts of her caught up with other parts of her. ‘Jas-per?’ she said. ‘You say: Jas-per?’
‘Is he here?’ Undine demanded. ‘Where is he? You can’t keep him.’
She swirled again, questioningly. ‘Keep him?’ The half-girl seemed to consider this.
‘He can’t live here,’ Undine said, glancing around at the grey world with its scant substance, its barely thereness. ‘No one can. He’ll die.’
‘Live here?’ The girl swirled darkly. ‘Live? Die? No one can.’
‘He needs Lou. He needs us.’
‘He needs us?’ The dark thing repeated.
‘No! Not us,’ Undine said, alarmed. ‘Not you.’
But the girl seemed to smile, or a smile seemed to form on the shifting surface of her face. ‘Not you,’ she agreed.
And then she exploded. She became sand, dust and wind, stinging Undine’s eyes. She swept herself out across the cresting, choppy waves of the Bay – or the Bay’s other self, its bad twin, its copy. Undine looked into the sky. Here, in this grey, dead place, a storm was brewing, a darkness spreading across the sky. And the halfling thing, her cobweb twin, was gone.
Undine threw herself down on the sand. The grey sea smelled of death, of bones. She put her hands over his eyes. ‘You need to stop this,’ she told herself firmly. ‘You need to see.’
And now, pressing firmly on her eyelids, she found that in the darkness she could see. She could see everything. Atoms, the minutiae of dust. She could see whole worlds, galaxies, space spiralling outwards. She could see universes forming, primordial and molten. She could see them dying, their black hearts spreading outwards. They rumbled and collided, they stretched apart. And like a ribbon, like a river, gleaming and golden, like the silvery mesh of a fisherman’s net, she could see the magic, the way it intersected everything, crisscrossing worlds, oceans, her own heart.
She could also see her own path, where she had been and where she should go. It glistened, it pulsed, it was umbilical, it carried out and flowed in at the same time. It undermined integrity, so that where she’d been there were rifts. She could see the greyness of this world pouring out into the other worlds she’d touched just as those worlds were pouring in to this one.
But at least now she knew how to find him, her boy, her Jasper, to find him and bring him safely home. She lowered her hands. She made a hole in the air, tearing space apart – it was easier here, the world just fell away at her touch – she stepped through it. Ashes, dust.
Every step that took her closer to Jasper was a step further away. But she stepped anyway, because she knew if anyone could help her, anyone in all the wide worlds, it was the golden boy himself, round and sweet and soft. It was Jasper.
Undine knew how to enter a world but she didn’t know how to enter her house. She stood outside on the concrete steps, staring at the front door. But she couldn’t just walk in, or even ring the doorbell. This wasn’t her world.
So she slipped, down the side of the house and hefted herself up on the back fence. The wood cut into her hands and briefly she was shocked back into her own body, into the girl, by the sensation of wood digging into her palms.
Jasper was playing at the bottom of the garden only a few metres away, though he didn’t look up. The air was crisp and clean, the garden green as if lately the rain had come and given it a good dousing. Undine, her counterpart in this world, was reading on the veranda. Only the stretching garden beds and lawn separated them. She looked at the house and wondered if Stephen was home, then pushed the thought out of her mind.
She didn’t want to attract the other Undine’s attention, so she hissed, ‘Jasper. Jasper.’
Jasper looked up from his game. Undine felt a sudden, intense homesickness for Punnel the guinea pig and Mrs Worthington.
Jasper glanced at his reading sister and frowned. He looked to the fence to where Undine had called from. He got up and wandered idly and inconspicuously over, as if he were used to such games.
‘Can you come through?’ she asked, softly so only he would hear. She pointed to the palings at the end of the garden which she knew were loose enough for him to slide through.
‘Okay!’ Jasper said.
Undine slithered back down to the ground and met him there.
Jasper hugged her. ‘I missed you. You’re here,’ Jasper said. ‘You’re here and she’s here.’
‘Is she … all right?’ Undine asked.
Jasper kicked the dirt. ‘She’s sadder,’ he said. He looked up. ‘Like you were. At her eyes.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Undine said, but it was a plain kind of sorry. She didn’t have the time or the energy to feel responsible for the Undine who lived here.
‘And she still doesn’t play with me.’
Undine looked down at him. ‘Want me to bash her up?’
Jasper giggled.
Undine wished momentarily that she could bundle him up, that she could stay here and be this Undine. But she thought about her own Jasper: alone, hidden, frightened. She wanted him, he needed her. To gather him up, to hold him close, to carry him back to Lou.
So to this Jasper she said, ‘My Jasper … do you remember him?’
Golden Jasper nodded. ‘He was like this.’ And he made the face, hollow and thin.
‘He doesn’t want to be,’ Undine said. ‘He wants to be like you. But now he’s missing. He’s run away, and it’s scary where he is because there’s a big fire and he might burn.’
‘I don’t want him to burn.’
‘No.’
‘I don’t want him to be scared.’
Undine knelt down. ‘Do you remember when we built a nest? Where else would you go, if you wanted to build another nest?’ She remembered something. ‘Your place? Your special place? You said you’d seen the other Jasper there. Where is it?’
‘In the trees. Past Madeleine’s house. Up there.’ He pointed up the
steps. ‘My mouth doesn’t know where it is, but my feet remember.’
‘Take me there?’ Undine asked taking his hand in hers.
Jasper glanced towards the house uncertainly. ‘She’ll worry.’
Undine squeezed his hand. ‘Then we’ll be quick,’ she promised.
They stood together in the circle of trees. ‘This is it?’ Undine asked. ‘You’re sure?’
Jasper nodded. ‘In there. That’s where I would make a nest.’ He showed Undine a big hollow tree. He peered inside. ‘Only I didn’t make it yet.’ He looked at Undine and said, ‘Last night it rained on my roof and Mum said it came from nowhere and Dad said it was a blessing and Undine said she watched it fall and it was warm and gentle from the sky.’
‘Thank you.’ Undine knelt down to him. ‘And now you need to go. You need to run all the way. Only be careful on the road. But run. Run to Maddy’s because she’s closer and get her mum to ring … to ring your sister.’
But Jasper didn’t want to go. ‘I want to stay with you,’ he said. ‘I want you to stay here. With us.’
Undine smiled. She kissed Jasper tenderly on his cheek first and then his forehead. ‘This isn’t my place. I don’t belong here.’ She hugged him. ‘Now be a big boy. Run.’
Jasper ran.
Undine stood in the bush surrounded by the sweet rain-refreshed gums. She wanted to go straight to him. She tunnelled through space. She could see it, there. Her eyes shifting slightly out of focus, she could look beyond this world and into the next one. She stepped. She was close now, so close.
But all roads led to the grey world. All roads led to the Bay.
It was like a vacuum. No matter how close she got, she was repelled and brought here. Though she was getting closer to Jasper, she was further away than ever. She couldn’t stop herself coming here. She wanted to be somewhere else, but she was here. It was as if there was a current, a riptide, hidden and deadly. Clouds gathered. There was a storm rolling in, the sky dark and dangerous.
‘Look,’ she told herself. ‘Look.’
And there it was, through space: the ring of trees fringed with dry fern and combustible bracken, dry wood, long grass. She stepped through space. She was close. She was close. She was almost there.
But she wasn’t first. Dark as smoke, she was, and as impermanent, the other Undine leaned over him, poring over his sleeping face. He looked so … so tiny. As if Undine could slip him into the palm of her hand for safekeeping.
‘Jasper.’ But he slept on.
She stepped towards … herself, her other self. ‘Leave him.’
‘Jas-per?’
‘You can’t have him. He’s mine. He belongs here.’
‘Here he will …’ She paused as if trying to remember the word. ‘Die.’ The dark Undine gestured around them. The heat was forceful, the fire was close. Embers rained down from the sky.
‘No. Not die. I won’t let him—’
‘Your work this? Fire?’
‘No! Well, yes. But … I didn’t know … I didn’t mean to …’
The dark Undine swirled contemptuously. ‘Listen to you. Stammering heart. Didn’t know. Didn’t mean.’
‘Please,’ said Undine. ‘He’s just a boy.’
‘Boy. Meat. Girl,’ the dark Undine said, looking at Undine curiously. ‘Meat. Bones.’ She leaned in, peering at Undine, her hair levitating around her face like a cloud of flies. ‘Teeth. Gums. Spongy. Splintery. So fragile. Like an egg. Little skull.’
‘Takes one to know one,’ Undine said, edging around closer to Jasper.
The dark Undine rose magestically, made herself taller. ‘Magic. Rich. Dark. Strange. Stop breathing. Stop pulsing, fluttering. Dark heart. Extinguish. But still. Be.’
‘You’re not … you’re not a girl anymore?’ Undine said, horrified. ‘You’re … dead?’
‘Listen don’t you? Extinguished. But still. I am. Ashes. Dust.’ She demonstrated, flying apart, scattering herself before she coalesced once more. ‘Broken world. Broken girl. Dead world. Black heart. Everyone. Gone.’
Undine was horrified. Bile rose in her throat. She looked at where Jasper was lying unconscious in the heart of the tree, his face peaceful. ‘He’s living. He’s a living boy. You can’t keep him. It would be murder.’
‘Keep him?’ the other Undine said.
‘You can’t,’ Undine said. ‘You can’t.’
‘Keep him?’ The dark Undine hovered, drifting apart and then back together again, as if she was considering this. And then she seemed to shrug. ‘You want him. In and out. Back and forth. This world, that world. They all fall down. You say: Jas-per? I say: Dust, dust.’
‘If you don’t want Jasper then what do you want?’ Undine asked. ‘What made you?’
Catching Undine unaware, the dark girl flew apart again, making herself dust. But instead of re-forming, this time she rained down on Undine. She poured herself in through Undine’s eyes, into her throat, her ears, blinding her, deafening her, spreading out along the branches of her brain, crowding her with thoughts, with voices, so thick and fast, so filled with pain and torment, that Undine felt herself tearing within. She seemed to live a lifetime, several lifetimes, in that moment, other people’s voices crowded her head. And interspersed with worrying about vacuum cleaner bags and maths tests and world hunger and toast and bicycles and scraped skin, she felt a mutual, collective rising terror overcome her.
‘It’s too much. I can’t … Stop it. Get out. Get out!’
But then there was a kind of peacefulness, a bright whiteness. She smelt newly mowed lawn and a fresh afternoon sky, and something else, warm and human … a laundry smell, like Jasper’s pyjamas brought in from the line on a warm summer evening just before bed. And then the thoughts cleared to be one thought, one voice. And she saw:
Like the stretched wings of great white birds, feathers fluttering in a wild squall, the bedsheets trapped the wind and tried to take flight. Mim fought them, pinning the sheets to her body with one arm as she struggled to unpeg them with her other hand.
The wind had come with no warning. Only moments earlier it had been what Mim called a good drying day, with a gentle breeze strumming the summer air, the warm sun baking the sheets so they almost smelled like the hard crust of good bread. Mim might have said it had come from nowhere – that was usually where wind came from, swelling out of the air from nothing – but this wind seemed as though it had come from somewhere, that it was travelling through her garden with a destination in mind, bringing with it the debris of its travels: a branch with twigs like a grasping hand; the torn palings of a gap-toothed wooden fence; the best part of a garden chair.
The sheets flapped, flickered and covered Mim’s eyes. For a moment all she could see was white. Then the one she was holding was torn from her arms. The wind simply took it, tossed it up into the air and threw it away over fences, until it was out of sight. Mim stood staring at the tunnel of vacant air through which the sheet had travelled, astonished by the unexpected departure and by the wind’s brazen theft. And then the wind suddenly died. Mim could see its path, fences bowing down the sloping hill of Mim’s suburb, gardens flattened as if gargantuan feet had trampled through them. But the air was completely, stiflingly still.
Then, in the south of the sky, Mim saw something that was almost nothing, a speck of blackness – a bird, a cloud, a hole in the sky? But the speck grew as she watched it and the dark stain seemed to be inside her too, for she felt sick as it spread like blood flowering around a wound. As the darkness approached relentlessly, Mim watched the sky fill with it until the light of the day disappeared. The dark pressed downwards, filling Mim’s ears and nose, soft and cloying as damp earth. Mim breathed it in and choked, vomiting darkness. She breathed again and it filled her lungs like wet soot, clamming her up. She dropped to her knees, heaving, trying to expel the dark air. Still the darkness kept coming. The world was black and Mim and the sheets and everything else like an extinguished candle was gone.
Undine push
ed the blackness out of her, she screamed it out, filling the air around her with dust. She staggered back and clamped her hand over her mouth and nose. She coughed violently as the other Undine re-formed in front of her. ‘That place – that dead world … it’s because of you? Because of me?’ Undine asked desperately.
‘I’m magic. I’m dust.’
‘You destroyed everything? You! The magic. At the Bay, when you thought Trout was dead … when Prospero first had you swim in the sea, that power …’
‘Dust. Dust.’ The girl swirled, then added sadly, as if vaguely remembering, ‘Trout. Dead.’
‘You darkened the sky … why didn’t you stop? You were supposed to stop! I stopped. There was a light. Didn’t you see the light? You were a girl.’ Undine’s voice was filled with horror, with pain. She could still taste the vile, bitter darkness in her throat. She panicked, wondering if the dark girl had left a trace of herself behind, if elements of her coursed through Undine even now, colonising her cells, laying claim to her bone marrow, her brain matter, changing her, twisting her into something dark and dreadful. ‘My god. You were me. How could you …? I would never …’
‘Stammering heart,’ the girl scoffed. She drifted apart again, and then drew herself into shape, her face millimetres from Undine’s, and sharp, mirror-clear, though the rest of her was still cobwebs, dust. ‘We want the same. What you want I want: chaos, pour it in, worlds bleeding together. To walk the worlds and drag my wake.’
‘I don’t want this. I don’t want darkness. I want … I just want …’
‘What you want. Everything. Together. For you. You want to …’ The dark girl hesitated as if searching for the precise word. She swirled. ‘To rearrange. Worlds. Pour them in. Bring them together. Bring it all back. Fathers. Mothers. Brothers. Pour them in.’
