by Peter Twohig
When I got back to the Remington room I studied the back yard from the window and in my mind went over the events that had taken place when I had last visited the house. Then, as always, I started thinking about Tom. What would he have thought of all this?
‘So you know this house well,’ said Mrs Sanderson, behind me. To my embarrassment, she had come into the room while I had been thinking, and could have killed me easily if she had been the murderer. As it was, I jumped about a foot, and nearly died of fright.
‘Sorry, dear — miles away, were you?’
‘Sorry, Mrs Sanderson. I was just thinking about my brother.’
The truth slipped out before I even had a chance to recognise it. Now what could I say?
‘Is he unwell?’
None of the women in my family had said a word about Tom since the accident, so I figured Mrs Sanderson wouldn’t want to talk about it either. It was strange lying to her, though, as I felt that I could have told her the truth — damn it, there was that word again.
‘Not exactly. He’s just not around any more.’
The Cartographer is an adept conversationalist.
‘I see. What’s his name?’
‘Tom.’
‘Tom Sterling.’
‘Yeah.’
‘How old is he?’
‘We were twins,’ I said, answering a question I’d been asked a thousand times, and praying she’d shut up.
Mrs Sanderson had one of those looks on her face, as if she’s just heard that someone had died.
‘I see,’ was all she said.
But nobody saw.
‘Did I hear you say you’re a twin?’ asked Mr Sanderson, who’d also slipped into the Remington room. ‘What’s your other half up to?’
Mrs Sanderson chirped up before I could think of a good reply.
‘He’s away somewhere, isn’t he, Jack? Now let’s have a few more of those cream biscuits before they go off.’
I could tell somehow that Mrs Sanderson was trying to save me, but it was no use. They were locals, so they were bound to hear the story sooner or later, and better my version than that of some old biddy who thought I was a nut case.
‘Tom was my twin brother. He died a year ago down the park, in an accident. No one could tell us apart. He was a bit of a kidder. He liked to have fun. He liked to do dangerous things.’
It was a fair summary of the life I knew. I’d heard grown-ups talk about blokes who’d died suddenly, which was the usual way for blokes to die in Richmond. They wanted them to be alive again, but be slightly different, so they wouldn’t die of the same thing. But I wanted Tom to come back just the same. And this time I would make sure he was safe. I just hadn’t figured out how.
‘So you’re that Tom’s brother,’ said Mr Sanderson, as if he was trying to smile with a headache.
I sighed. I knew that I was supposed to cry at this point, but I couldn’t cry about it in front of other people, even though I knew everyone thought I was a loony of some kind and didn’t care. I cried when Tom and me were alone. And I always cried when I woke up from a fit, no matter who was there. It was as if my body let go while my mind’s guard was down, which if you ask me is a pretty dirty trick. Besides, it was the worst feeling in the world, and the person I wanted most couldn’t help.
I became aware that my head was hanging down as if my neck was made of warm plasticine, and slowly lifted it. Granddad says you should never let the punters catch you looking at your shoes. Mrs Sanderson gave me one of those hugs that felt like I’d fallen into a teddy-bear machine, and off we went to crack open another tin of biscuits.
Once we had propped on the front porch and got stuck into the bikkies, Mrs Sanderson did what I knew she would eventually do anyway, and I let her, she being easy to like.
‘Now, Jack, we don’t want to pry, but if you’d ever like to tell us about Tom, we’d love to hear about him, wouldn’t we, dear?’
‘We certainly would. You know, it might even cheer you up a little to tell us about him. For instance, I know everybody thinks identical twins are the same in every way, but did you two have different likes and dislikes? Is it all right for me to ask? Of course, if you don’t want to talk, that’s all right, too.’
His voice was smooth and calming, like Granddad’s, and I knew he had put it on especially to get me to relax and talk, but he was actually the first person to ever ask me that question, because until Tom died we were always together, so people could see for themselves what we were like, and afterwards, no one wanted to mention his name, as if it was a dirty word.
‘No, it’s all right. We weren’t the same at all, though because no one could tell us apart we could pretend we were the other twin, and we did that all the time. Sometimes we’d even swap names for the day. But we didn’t always like the same things. Tom liked Abbott and Costello a lot more than I did, and I liked Laurel and Hardy more. Tom liked dogs, even big ones, and I hate ’em’ — I glanced at Biscuit and he raised his head quickly and gave me a hard look — ‘well, most of ’em anyway.’
I took a slurp of lemonade.
‘But in the past year I’ve learnt to do a lot of Tom things, so I don’t feel so alone. I only do them when I’m alone, though. If I do them when Mum’s around, she gets upset. She doesn’t like to be reminded, especially by me.’
‘Oh? Why not by you, love?’ asks Mrs Sanderson.
‘Because I was there. Because I didn’t … couldn’t —’
‘You did your best.’
I looked at them. They were both leaning forward, gazing at me with soft eyes. They were right, but it felt like they were wrong.
11 Zombieland
How I got out of the Sandersons’ place without spilling my guts about everything that had ever happened to me since I was born I will never know. They didn’t exactly shine a bright light in my face and give me the third degree; in fact they asked me very few questions and they had bought the story that my name was Jack, which made me feel as if I’d been too clever, as I immediately wished I’d told them my real name. However, they had a way of putting you at ease, of getting you smiling and talking — I don’t want to think about it.
One thing I do want to say, though. The whole time I was in the house, I had the feeling they knew what I was doing, and even what I was thinking, like a couple of mind readers. I would go back — hell, they had invited me, hadn’t they? I only know there was more to them than meets the eye, and I intended to find out what that more was.
Apart from making the words of that old song ‘Honey Hush’ go round in my head for days, that trip to the Sanderson place gave me a treasure of intelligence, and that was what counted. I decided not to draw what I had seen from the window of the mysterious room until I could find a good hiding place for the map. I couldn’t hide it under the loose floorboard in my room with the rest of my treasure because it had already grown too large for that. My idea was that if I could find some place where no one would dare to go, it would be safe.
There were only two possible places: a grave, or the kennel of a vicious watchdog. I had such a dog myself, and he did have a kennel, though it was only a tea-chest full of hessian bags with a couple of hessian bags hanging from the front to keep out bad weather. But it lacked the feel that a hiding place needed, not to mention the smell. But mostly it lacked dirt and rock, which all really mysterious hiding places have. So for my next trip I went to the old cemetery, where they haven’t stowed anyone for about a hundred years.
Now cemeteries are generally terrific places to play: they have no adults who are alive, and no dogs, as dogs are afraid of ghosts. However, there was one big problem: zombies. Cemeteries are chock-a-block with them. They can creep up on you and bite you, and turn you into a zombie, which makes you go home and eat your mother’s guts, then go into the city and turn over cars until the police finally drive a stake through your heart and stop you. So you had to be careful, very careful. Not many people knew this, but there was only one way to protect yourself
from being turned into a zombie: you had to carry a big stick, so that you could destroy its brain. I had my stick, and I said out loud as I walked into the cemetery with Biscuit: ‘God help the first zombie I see tonight,’ just to let them know what they were up against.
I had been in the cemetery lots of times, as it was alongside the tea-tree paddock, but always it had been daytime. Now it was evening, and soon would be night. It was one of those late-spring evenings when there is a warm breeze and everything smells like it just fits, even the poor old houses, and the yeast factory down around the corner, and the place where I once saw Mr Cook piddle when he was so drunk he had to lean against the wall with his forehead and use both hands to hold his dick, and I had to hold his bottle of beer until he was finished — I only agreed because I thought I might get a zac for helping him out, but he told me to give him back his bottle and get to buggery. But I didn’t mind, because he forgot to put his old feller away. With a bit of luck, I thought, he’ll get home and his mother-in-law will be visiting.
The breeze made everything okay. And then there was the light. It was a special kind called twilight, and it only appeared at twilight time, like in the song. It was the light that woke up the ghosts, zombies, werewolves and vampires, though as far as I know no one had ever seen a vampire near our street. Matthew Foster had one living in his street, a vampire who had once been a kid who had been hit by a train; so we all knew it was possible. The main thing was to make sure that you got out of the cemetery before dark, or it was bye-bye, Benny, as Larry would say. At this time of the year, we were getting long twilights, so I reckoned I’d have plenty of time to explore the cemetery and get home before zero hour.
The cemetery was empty, but not empty of grass. There was long, dry grass everywhere, and you could tell that no one came here any more, as there were no tracks through the grass, none except mine, I noted, as I turned around to find Biscuit. The grass was so tall it hid the gravestones from me, which was good, as it meant that it was hiding me from the gravestones. But I wasn’t interested in the gravestones; I had bigger fish to fry. I was after the tombs, which were above ground — little stone rooms where coffins were kept. These tombs were as old as time itself, and that meant they were falling to bits. If I found one I could get into, I would have a hiding place for the map. After looking around for ages, and just as it was beginning to get a bit dark for exploring but not dark enough yet for zombies, I came across an old gate through which there was a rough stone path — not really a road — and even more grass and bushes than what was behind me. The path led to a part of the cemetery that no one had ever seen. It stopped at a little building with magic marks all over it and the word BETHSTONE on the front.
The lock on the door was broken, so I gave it a push and walked in. Inside, I found two little rooms, one with a fireplace and an old wooden chair and table, and one with a prison bunk and a sink full of dirt. There was a cupboard with a few kitchen things, and a few old tins. The tins were empty, but they were treasure, so I put them in my bag. The prison bunk had a thin mattress on top and that was covered in dirt too, which made me look up. The roof had a large hole in it with the branch of a tree sticking through. There was a calendar on the wall, but it was almost impossible to see it properly, though I could make out that it was covered in magic signs.
There was now no doubt that I had stumbled on the home of a wizard who kidnapped kids and locked them in the prison cell until they were dead, then buried them beneath the building. Back in the main room, which was about the same size as our laundry, I made a careful search for clues, and found on a shelf a pencil, which went into my bag. Then I crawled out through a hole in the floor, happy with my discovery and half convinced that I had found a possible hideout for the map.
Outside, I discovered that Biscuit had had enough and made tracks. That made sense: he was probably the smartest dog in the world, and I would have expected no less. Actually that’s true: I would have expected no less and a hell of a lot more as well. I trotted around the area surrounding the wizard’s home and found that there were a large number of graves and quite a few tombs in the place. I was sure no one ever came here. A few of the tombs had little gates on the front and they all had the same magic writing on them, and a star in the centre. I was sure now I had struck gold, but I had pushed my luck and I had to get out of there.
It was almost dark, and I was running for the gate, but everything looked different. I ran past the tombs with the iron gates a few times before I realised that I had been going around in circles. I had to steady my nerves and slow down to see what the hell was going on. This was bad: no watchdog, no stick, which I had left behind the little house, and no idea where I was going. I saw what seemed to be a path through the grass to my right, and guessing that I had come in this way, I took it at a brisk pace. Suddenly there was a sickening bang, and that was that.
When I woke up I was lying on my back in the dark and my head was killing me. I tried to move but my head had other ideas. Best to lie still and wait until I felt better, I thought, then I’ll be off. I could tell that I was no longer in the grass: I was lying on something cold and hard, and I was sliding slowly backwards and downwards. I was sliding, in pitch darkness, into the Cave of the Zombies.
I stuck out my hands to stop the slide, but there was nothing to grab. All I could hear was the soft sound of my clothes sliding down the slab. When the sliding suddenly got quite fast, I screamed — don’t ask me why; it was all I had left — and pushed my arms out, but I felt nothing. Then I was upside down, then I was airborne, then, an instant later, I was on my side, and tumbling down another slope, this time with the wind knocked out of me. I came to a halt filled with pain and unable to breathe. The first thing I did when I could breathe was moan — to see if I was still alive. The sound made me clutch my head in agony and to cease all movement for five minutes. Whatever I did next, it was going to have to be slow.
And what I did next was what the Phantom would have done: I gathered my wits about me and formulated a plan. I tried to get to my feet, but my head hurt too much for that, so instead I began to crawl like a dog downhill, because that was the best choice. I crawled for what seemed miles, and then, when I was exhausted, I stopped and lay down and tried to open my bag because I remembered that I had some jelly beans with me, just enough to save me from starving to death. I lay in the zombie den on my back and chewed the jelly beans. When I finally got a black one, I knew that somehow I was going to be okay.
I put the rest of the jelly beans back into the bag and, feeling better, continued downhill on my hands and knees, wishing that zombies would get softer caves. Soon I came across my first sign of life, a cigarette butt, then another, then lots of them. What did zombies smoke? Turf? Black & White (Mum’s brand)? Du Maurier (Granddad’s brand)? Craven A (‘They never vary’)? Could zombies smoke? We had a song about Craven A and I sang it to myself softly, as I reckoned that I was now out of zombie territory.
Jingle Bells, Batman smells, Robin’s run away.
Father Christmas burnt his whiskers smoking Craven A …
I immediately felt even better and stuck my right hand out to see if I was near anything. I felt a concrete wall, then a little recess, which I used to lean on. I thought I might be able to stand up, so I tried it while hanging on to the recess. There was another recess, then another, so I was able to drag myself upright. Just as I was beginning to straighten myself up, my head touched something in the dark, and I put my hand up to feel it. It was warm and smooth. It was a shoe, and someone was wearing it. My legs gave way with fright, and I sank soundlessly to the bottom of the drain. Oh Jesus Christ, I was back!
There was no sound from the bloke, and there was no lamp; there was only the sound of my breathing, which I could do nothing about. It was with a curious mixture of leaden heaviness and panic that I began to hurry down the drain, taking advantage of the downhill slope and the fact that I had a wall to follow, but worried that I had never explored this part of it. Sti
ll, it was a well-known fact in the mapping business that all drains lead to other drains, and eventually to steps and ladders to the surface. And besides, I told myself, look on the bright side: you’re getting away, and breaking the world stumbling record into the bargain. My bag, I realised with horror, was making more noise than a Salvos collection tin. I had not heard it before because of the ring of panic in my ears. Nothing to do now but run.
The bloke was coming down the drain and yelling: ‘I’ll get you, you bastard!’ I knew I was making more noise than a tramload of footy fans, and the pitch darkness didn’t seem to be worrying him at all. With a thrill of horror I realised that the bloke had probably spent so much time down here that he could see in the dark.
I picked up the pace, making no attempt to stop the rattling, and found myself turning to the wall and running into it at the same time, as if I couldn’t make my body work properly — I must have banged my face on that wall a million times. He was gaining on me, and breathing like a horse, and I was just beginning to think I was going to faint from exhaustion and the throbbing in my head when the tunnel floor pointed downwards quite suddenly and my feet hardly touched it as I ran. I was beyond caring. I ran flat out until I was running in cold, fresh air. Then suddenly I was in water. And a few seconds later, the bloke landed in the water only a few yards from me.
I had seen the river many times in daylight, and I knew exactly what it looked like, but in those moments I had no pictures in my head at all. All I had was the certain knowledge that I was going to drown. I was under the water and sinking and my mouth seemed to be full of poison. I was in the worst place a kid could be, because it was a well-known fact that even if you could swim, if you fell into the river you might never be seen again; and I could only dog-paddle. You’d think that having just had my panic for the day I’d have a clear head, but you’d be wrong.
