Burnt Snow

by Van Badham

  ‘I’m not a witch.’ I said. ‘The solidarity’s nice, but I’m not sure I want to be one. I know one or two tricks, but—’

  ‘That’s enough for the Finders to stick a poker in your eye,’ she said. ‘Maybe your immediate family are too distracted by this business with Louhi to know the danger you’re in, but me and Izek … Well, now you must understand that we’re like your family too.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked. We were past the junction with Frankston now, and climbing the hill on the other side of it, towards the crest with no houses. This was the wretched hill my mother described. As we approached, my skin registered a thrum of bad energy.

  ‘We thought you might want to get a new view of Yarrindi and night’s the best time. You’ll see why,’ she said. ‘Up here.’ I followed her as the road ascended the hill and emptied into a tourist car park. There were no cars here, but there was a large glossy map mounted to a billboard, as well as a couple of signposted paths. Ashley walked towards one that veered to the right. ‘It’s a good life, being a witch,’ she said as we climbed the steep path. ‘With your proclivities, you’d do well to study hard.’

  ‘Izek showed me you were …’ I began, ‘forced to retire.’

  Izek lifted from Ashley’s shoulder and flapped into the air. He lunged into the space in front of us and soon was scaling the breeze, flying away from us and out of sight, towards the top of the cresting hill.

  ‘I’m surprised he told you – he doesn’t like to talk about it. It was a long time ago, and I didn’t quite lose everything with the bind,’ she said, waving her mutilated hand for emphasis. ‘My range just became very short. I can do things to myself still, and for maybe a metre around me.’

  ‘Like with the crows the other day?’ I thought out loud.

  She nodded. ‘And that business with the Ki-Pi, which I’m sure you worked out. Truth-telling device.’

  ‘Lot of them around,’ I said. For my own sense of security, I pretended to myself that Ashley was exaggerating the threat and I said nothing. ‘Why didn’t they kill you?’

  Ashley stopped. ‘I believe the plan was to strip me of my defences so I’d be more pliable under torture. Once they obtained my knowledge, then they would have killed me. And I’m sure after torture they would have made death appealing. Finders don’t muck around. Sanctimonious pricks.’

  ‘But what happened?’

  ‘Izek and his brother slaughtered them.’ She said this with no emotion, starting to walk again. ‘They are brujo – that family of shape-shifting magicians. His brother’s preferred form is a coyote. One of the great pleasures of my life was watching his brother tear the skin off a Finder’s face. They’re the moments I cherish.’

  My breath was heavy – the uphill walk was making me pant. I realised that we were walking towards the top of the cliffs that rose over the southern beaches of the town. ‘What are you going to teach me up here that you can’t teach me down there?’ I asked Ashley.

  She only smiled and directed me up a small flight of grey cement steps. At the base of the stairs was a sign that read Lookout. The thrum of bad energy grew thicker as I gripped each of its metal banisters and hauled myself towards a space carved out of the rock. Here was a pebblecrete barrier and a mounted, coin-operated set of tourist binoculars. There were also two benches facing the view. Izek, in human form, was sitting on one of these.

  ‘Nice walk?’ he asked.

  I noticed that he had a jar in his hands and was stirring something in it with a wooden brush.

  Ashley wandered over to him, and I saw her stroke his shoulder, kiss his head and say something into his ear. I almost asked them how long they’d been together, but I thought the answer might frighten me, so I walked to the binoculars instead. Without a dollar coin to operate them, I used my non-coin-operated eyes to look over the parapet.

  Beneath the lookout were brown rocks that plunged straight down at least a hundred metres into a road running along the foot of the cliffs. Beyond the road, along the shoreline, clung a row of houses. This, I realised, was Beachie Land, and I had instant contempt for the whole area because I knew that Belinda Maitland lived there. As the road travelled to the south, I saw that the houses fell away from it in places and scrubland led down to sandy beaches. Further to the south, I saw more houses clustered around the road, more beaches and, what the tourist binoculars were there to magnify, rows of magnificent brown cliffs that jutted proudly into the water. Their shadows were impressive at nighttime; during the day, they must have been spectacular.

  ‘The view’s even better up here,’ I heard Ashley say. Izek and she had jumped over the parapet on my left hand side, and Izek, I saw, was climbing towards a higher, unfenced part of the cliff. There was a sign on the parapet where they had crossed that read: Absolutely no climbing. Ashley extended her hand out to me as I walked towards them. ‘Do you need my help getting over?’ she said.

  ‘Are you sure it’s safe?’ I asked, staring at the sign but putting my hands on the pebblecrete parapet and vaulting over it.

  I landed, my feet breaking twigs on the rough ground.

  Ashley took my hand. Although the lookout was lit by a dull orange bulb, the area around it was dark – I stumbled as Ashley kept hold of my hand. I followed her towards the highest point of the cliff top. More than once I felt twigs scratch my legs through my jeans.

  ‘Is there a safety rail here?’ I asked, when we found Izek, standing at a cliff edge.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ Ashley said. In a single movement, she pushed both cuffs of my jumper up to my elbows and gripped my wrists. Izek moved next to me and I felt something cold and wet on my arms.

  ‘Hey—’ I started, and tried to pull free, but I was held tight in Ashley’s grip. Izek was smearing something from the jar onto my bare skin, and what had first seemed cold was now starting to burn. It smelled vile, like rotten meat. ‘What’re you doing?’ I barked. ‘What is that stuff?’

  ‘Boiled children,’ said Ashley in a calm voice. Izek lurched forward and started smearing his brush against my forehead. The burn intensified, as if my skin itself was fighting the ointment, a blackness oozing from the gel. I struggled in Ashley’s grasp. The smell was so strong in my nostrils now, I thought I was going to pass out. Where the gel had touched my forehead felt as though it was peeling open.

  ‘Let go of me!’ I cried, gritting my teeth, willing the ointment away from my blood with everything I had. ‘This hurts! It’s nasty!’

  I thought I heard one of them chuckle.

  ‘Remember what we told you: fear makes you weak,’ Izek said.

  ‘This is not what I agreed to!’ I said, still trying to pull away. The ointment was sliding all over me now and it made me feel sick. I would have flayed my skin clean off to get its clammy poison away from my body. ‘Tell me what this shit is!’ I demanded.

  Ashley’s hands snapped away from me.

  ‘It’s flying ointment,’ Izek said.

  And then Ashley pushed me over the cliff.

  39

  A backward tumble. A rush of brown and black. The sound of limbs slicing through air. My stomach shrivelled with a nausea that I thought would kill me even before my inevitable smash into the road. I couldn’t see anything but spinning darkness. My skin was burning from the ointment, and as my head suddenly pointed to the ground, my pendant whacked me in the teeth. I had maybe four seconds until my head rammed into the solid, unbreakable blackness that would pulp my skull and brains on impact. My limbs flailed, and I couldn’t grab my pendant away from my face.

  Three seconds and my throat was full of air, driving my neck into my stomach.

  Two seconds and my bent wrists were going to snap in midair from the force of the fall.

  One second … the road, the blank end, was all I could see—

  One second …

  One second and I stopped fighting the ointment. I willed its black, corrupting viscosity into my flesh. Anything to stop my face breaking like a dropped egg on
that road, my teeth smashing into its crushed remains. In a millisecond, the ointment’s toxins bloomed through my skin; topical burning gave way to deadening cold and suddenly – snap! – a ceiling of tarmac bobbed at the top of my vision, my dizzy head swayed and my tortured stomach stretched like a bungee cord.

  The sky had stopped falling and I hung upside down, suspended in the air less than a metre from the road. My feet fell backwards over my head and I lost balance. As I tumbled to the ground, shock hit my guts like a punch and I vomited everywhere.

  My elbows and knees were bashed as I fell over my own body and my hip made a hard, bruising impact with the ground. My head sank into one of my arms as acidic waste bubbled out of my mouth. My eyes closed.

  40

  When they opened again, it took more seconds than I had actually fallen for me to realise I lay limply but safely at the bottom of the cliffs, on the cool surface of the road. I was aware that at least one of my elbows was in a wet puddle of my own vomit and that my right hip was bleeding. I felt sick, spent and heavy – but I was alive.

  I lifted a hand to wipe some of the vomit from my mouth and dragged it across my slack lips. Despite myself, I gave a little chuckle, the reverberating dizziness from the fall starting to feel like delirious joy.

  I planted my hand in front of me and pushed myself up. There was an ache in the muscles of my arm, and a sharp pain stung into my hip, but, sitting up, a wave of strange coldness flooded through my body and I no longer felt heavy, but light. This, I guessed, was the ointment circulating its secret properties. Looking down, I saw blue residue on my arms.

  Another ache, from a knee, let me know that I was not yet in a fit state to balance or stand, so I sat where I was in the middle of the road, dusting dirt from my legs and stomach, checking for the seepage of blood through my clothes. I was investigating what looked like a tomato-shaped stain on my knee when I heard a noise.

  It was unmistakably a truck, and not far away.

  I didn’t panic. I calmly used my hands to move one knee to an upright, bent position and pushed myself up – but my knee collapsed under my weight and I fell to the ground, breaking the skin on the palm of a hand.

  One of my feet was asleep.

  The truck was getting closer.

  Sweat started to bead above my eyebrows. I tried rolling myself onto my side, as if to trick the sleeping foot into taking weight from a different angle. It didn’t work – the lunge just rolled me onto my stomach and now my hip was screaming pain.

  The rumble of the truck grew louder and I could see its lights curling around the corner of the road. I desperately tried to press up on both hands, but I couldn’t lever myself onto my knees. I stared in horror at the pale yellow lights that rumbled towards me.

  I inhaled cold air. I had not survived a fall from a cliff to get run over. The truck rattled closer and I squashed my hands into tight fists and willed the ointment deeper into my body with a song that tasted blue in my mouth. My arms spread across the ground, my fists rose up above my head and, with a forceful exhalation of breath, I unpeeled my body from the road and rose weightless into the air.

  I saw through my dangling feet that the faint shadow of my floating body was a grey flicker on the truck’s roof as its driver completed the turn and drove safely past.

  41

  I hovered above that patch of road for a while. While panicked, my Will had known how to raise me from the ground; but, out of danger, I was at a loss as to know how to move. I stretched out my wounded limbs and sifted some breeze between my fingers. I hoped that the residents of the street were sleeping heavily while I got my bearings.

  Levitating, I discovered, was a little like swimming. My limbs felt free and there was no sense of falling or gravitational pull. Unlike swimming, however, the air around me lacked the density of water and therefore its propulsion properties. Kicking my legs like a swimmer’s did not move me an inch and I soon hung there not in peace but limb-locked frustration. Given that they’d pushed me off a cliff with no warning, I didn’t trust Ashley or Izek to come to my aid. Their strategy with the cliffside plummet was either to train my survival instincts to work magic – or kill me. Either way, I had to come up with my own solutions.

  I hummed a concentration spell and retraced the process by which I’d been able to float into the air in the first place. I thought of what had caught me from my fall and, remembering, felt the cold glow through my blood of the ingested ointment. The notes I sang tingled at the edge of my mind as I became aware that the presence of nasty goo in my body actually formed an internal, liquid skeleton. I focused my Will towards the ointment as if in that skeleton were some kind of cyborg kite frame; pushing the frame forward from within carried the rest of me along with it, and it was only a few more exertions before I got the hang of combining Will, strength, positioning and muscle movement to start flying.

  Flying. With each clumsy lunge, my confidence started to build. The movement became smoother with practice and soon I was circling the roofs of houses. Then I was moving at increasing speed up and down through the street. I tried a loop-the-loop, then, with a huge gulp of breath, I willed all my energy into a massively powerful lunge into the sky.

  I couldn’t estimate how high I climbed, but I was far higher than the cliffs and I kept going until the air was freezing and the sights of Yarrindi too far away to see.

  I floated down gently. I couldn’t see Izek or Ashley, even though I looked for them. Exploring the air in front of the cliffs, I noticed pockets of blackness in the rock, which I guessed to be caves, far above the road. I examined the township hugging the water, the soft orange lights that lit the streets, subtly illuminating Yarrindi’s meagre lighthouse and the beaches. Up high again, I flew over my school, the beachside park and the rotunda, the ice-creamery. I’d half-decided to propel myself as far as Noah’s Resort, and maybe visit the Cabana Bar, when a faint perfume that hung on the wind caught my interest.

  Even hundreds of metres above the town, even flying for the first time, even with a broken body, of all the individual lights that were burning in Yarrindi this evening, only one radiant little bulb had the power to draw me from the sky and back towards the earth.

  Brody Meine.

  42

  Following my nose, I giddily decided to swoop down and see what he was doing. Brody’s scent, when I found it amongst the thousands of people who slept in the town below, was thin and emerald green, like a thread of spun silk. Thoughtless with desire, I was soon floating over a 1970s-style public housing block with square balconies and blond bricks.

  As I lowered myself to the roof of this building, the implications of what I was doing gradually began to dawn. Even I knew that while it was one thing to find a pretext to walk past a boy’s house, it was entirely another to use magic ointment to drift weightless in front of his open window. The first instance could be considered a little desperate, the second downright horror-movie whack-weird.

  Feet barely scraping the roof of the apartment now, I tried to summon an invisibility spell but discovered, as my toes clipped the edge of guttering, that I didn’t have one. A small whirlwind of gum leaves wheeled around my ankles in a swirling puff of breeze and I realised I knew how to turn myself into mist.

  With only a chant on my lips, and my body still preoccupied with the black ointment pumping through it, it took immense concentration for me to focus my Will into the new spell. My unassisted spellcraft had already been drained of strength when I lifted myself from the road. Now I was literally ‘light-headed’: every individual atom of my body stretched its electric orbit until all pieces of me were floating cells of spread water. The cloud I turned myself into was several metres wide and soft and fine as a kiss.

  He was standing on a balcony as I descended. He was shirtless, wearing a pair of loose grey pyjama pants, and his hand was on his neck.

  43

  On Friday I’d told him not to touch me but I would have stayed mist forever if he’d allowed me to touch him n
ow.

  Brody was staring into space; the hand at his neck dropped to the rail of his metal balcony grille and I saw that the other hand clasped a mug of tea. He sipped, regarding the unexpected mist that hovered in front of him with mild curiosity. Barefoot, pre-bed Brody wasn’t strictly looking at me, but the cells of my heart beat through their watery form anyway. I drifted towards him almost unconsciously, and was winding myself around his body like a blanket when my sight lit on the white space of his room.

  Brody’s balcony jutted out from a pair of glass sliding doors, and he stood framed by the open doorway. Some part of me cooled the air around one of his marble shoulders as the rest sought to comfort him for whatever unspeakable problems had led him to live in a room like this.

  It was obviously a cheap flat, but Brody’s room was almost unnatural in its cleanliness. A frosted ceiling light illuminated a white box of a room, only large enough for a single metal bed, which itself was rammed into the corner next to the sliding doors. A grey standing lamp provided what I guessed was reading light over the bed’s flat, bounce-a-coin-on-them white sheets. Opposite was a desk, where a nondescript laptop was neatly closed alongside a stack of crease-free textbooks. A single black pen was in a black pen-holder. At the other end of the room was a built-in-wardrobe, shut, its mirrored panel unmarked. The beige carpet had a rough pile, but it was spotless. The desk chair was black. That there were two guitars – one acoustic, one the sapphire electric – in guitar stands next to the desk didn’t make the room look any less like the world’s most unappealing furniture showroom display.