Calvaria Fell, page 20
—
She recovered; she always did. Much later, when she was better, she would find fish and crabs dead and rotted in the water cages and on the hooks, and that made her cry, for the waste of their lives.
—
She gorged on her strawberries and snow peas, experienced moments of pure joy for the freshness of them.
—
The beach was awash. She moved slowly, not fully recovered, but relishing every step. She found an ancient newspaper, still rolled in plastic. It was swollen, and so old it fell apart like sludge when she unrolled it. Tears came and she realized she was desperate for news of other people. Desperate to know if they were still out there.
—
She walked. She collected everything, keeping some things in her bag, placing others on the dune line. The salt air was tinged with something else, as if even here it was becoming toxic. The sky was purple, tinged with green. Beautiful, really.
Ahead the fist/whale/horse. She stood looking at it, inordinately proud of how real it looked, how beautiful . . .
Someone had added to it.
Had she been delirious, done that in a stupor? But there were things added she’d never use. Man-made items. Strips of metal, beer can plastic holders, ring pulls.
Furious, she went to pull this rubbish off, but then paused. She looked up the beach, in the other direction. The city lay that way, so far distant she wouldn’t see it with binoculars or a telescope, but still she fancied she could see a dark cloud hanging over it.
She walked a hundred steps or so then turned back to see what this new artist had done.
It was good. They had added the movement she’d been seeking, and gathered more around, giving an illusion of community around the horse, of a herd unseen but following.
Faye cried. It was beautiful. And it proved her artwork had been seen. That she existed. But then panic took her. If there was someone else, where were they? Did they think it was their horse now?
Faye ran, her legs heavy, her feet lagging in the sand. But, hating herself for being indecisive, she turned back. The other artist hadn’t destroyed her work, they’d added to it.
She added her own new pieces. Her eyes watered and she thought she better get indoors. One last touch and she stopped for the day.
She’d come back tomorrow to see if there was anything new.
—
And one day, perhaps, before the world ended, they would meet, and see each other, and talk as they worked together.
Doll Face
Cat Sparks
The kids want to pat the donkey and the donkey doesn’t mind. The mums, on the other hand, despise the clanking old contraption, biodiesel dribbling down its legs like clotted blood.
WHATCHA BRUNG US, COME ON, WHATCHA BRUNG!
Aloha Joe raises his arms, pats the air to shush their clamoring.
The little ones like plastic dolls with lurid bubble heads. They reckon that’s how people look beyond the Great Divide, all goo-goo eyes and pouting painted lips.
Used to be that way, some of ’em, Joe says, a sort of, kind of truth.
The mums and dads want medicines, but he can’t help with that. Instead, he crates in memories, charging through his bulbous, crusty nose and they’d pay without a squeak, only these folks don’t have coin or much besides, abandoning such things when they crossed on over.
The Great Divide sounds like a mountain range, but is, in fact, the crumbling ruins of the Dispensary with a portal-gateway fixed.
The Great Divide is no longer great, nor fit for purpose—humankind or other. Aloha Joe keeps telling, but no one’s listening.
Folks once driven through by clavers fearful of their plasticated limbs have come to like it, nestled into cracks and folds, night skies blazon with kinetic borealis, shimmer fields warning of danger spots, elders cussing everyone over what they should and shouldn’t eat. Some crawling things look plump and tasty, but if it weren’t on the Ark, then it’s not safe. Everyone remembers that Granger girl, how they couldn’t even bury her remains on account of what she ate still growing fleshy fronds.
What Joe wants most is to scream into their placid, settled faces how they can’t stay here and how they oughta run. Look at the sky, fer fuck’s sake—damn thing’s literally cracked. Never mind all the other stuff, how he once went full on face-to-face with a Saint and lived to tell, that Saint staring right back through him—once they’ve clocked you, there’s no breaking free—and yet, he’s standing here, still full of breath. Upturned mountains, gouged out lakes, skyscrapers smashed back into bricks. Unfolding geologies, geometries expanding and unraveling. How the physics from encyclopedias no longer ticks over, how the sprouting coral’s least of all their worries. Every forage run, he swears will be the last, every scavenged slab of rubble a dance with death and other kinds of crazy.
Mums and dads don’t want to hear about that.
“Oh my god, is that Crofter Country Harvest?”
“Simpson of England—my grandma had a whole top shelf . . .”
Two women exuberant over a Nallyware kitchen canister; green with white lid, Rice in raised white letters.
Vintage Lusterware, Pyrex, Diana, Elektra, Ruby Bohemia, Mingay, Villeroy and Boch, all names like heroes from antiquity instead of fucking cups and saucers, jugs and plates, and how exactly are you all not noticing those sickly scudding clouds, all weft and buckle and the way the horizon bends if you stare too long and hard?
One woman shoves another on her way to a pile of greasy Tupperware.
Aloha Joe breathes deep and sucks his teeth, dislodges a scrap of jerky with his tongue. Tells them all he’s looking for his daughter. No one ever challenges him on that. But they chip in.
“Your girl will be older—would you even know her face?”
“She’ll be dust and bones if she’s anything,” he answers. “Was almost in that state when I brung her through. Couldn’t have walked herself a single step.”
“Something took her?” Big-eyed stares.
He nods carefully. “Something.”
A man clasping a Pyrex bowl nods back, understanding.
“Wasn’t a Saint, if that’s what you’re thinking. Weren’t many moving around in open air back then. No time for anything that grand to manifest. I only left the girl alone a moment.”
Poor Lily, his Lily, a girl so lost, there’ll be nothing left to find. Only thing he’s truly sure of these days.
—
“Hey Doll Face!”
Wind snatches at his words.
Worse than coral or Tupperware skirmishes stands the old girl’s wall, an abomination roughly sized and shaped like an ancient Greyhound bus. A slab of particulate upthrust dead sea life, drifted and crushed beneath layer weights across millennia, eroded by wind and rain and sun: sediment cemented sentimental.
Sinead’s banging away at it with chisel and hammer, carving nooks and niches from siliceous infill veinlets. Tap tap tap till she’s scraped space enough to stuff a doll inside each hollow.
Hard to guess what’s on her mind, tap tap tap below a tepid, sticky sky. That face of hers gives nothing much away, a fact she trades on when she’s flush with bouts of My Way or the Highway, another of those old-time phrases echoing through cavernous mental spaces. High life, high and mighty, high rollers, high falutin. What the fuck did falutin ever mean?
Sinead means business. All her ducks stuck in a row, or in this case, dolls. Only ducks this side of the Divide being flat ceramic, all chipped wings and cracks, once were three flying up the mess hall wall.
Sinead’s dolls give Aloha Joe the willies, even more than goo-goo eyes and bubble heads. Broken queens and aching princesses granted bespoke chiseled crannies in a gallery growing faster than scurvy weed, but not as fast as corals thrusting spikes and fronds through former human claves. Nothing fucks things faster than that stuff.
Old, old dolls, putty-fleshed and startled; pouting, painted, pocked and frocked. Balding, battered and abandoned, chubby-cheeked and cupid-bowed. Grime smudged, cockeyed, each one sporting worn out, haunted eyes.
Aloha Joe digs them out of abandoned malls and other secret spaces. Sometimes Sinead gives them a rinse and wipe, other times she takes them as they come, crusted with dirt and blood and gods know what—no use hiding from the truth now is there?
Joe brings dolls but has long stopped asking questions. Doesn’t want to know the answers only gods can speak to. He wants the settlement to listen—folks in 53 used to hang on every word. Once was value seeing places others left behind. Before space started folding in on itself.
“Hey Doll Face. Catch!”
“Doll Face! Long time since anyone’s called me that.” Sinead half smiles at distant triggers. Straightens as he approaches the driftwood platform she knocked up for tools and nick-nacks. Wipes her damp brow with a wrist, full attention on his hessian sack. He takes his time, drawing out the moment, tugging hard then letting the fabric fall. Holds the content high for her to see.
Hands on her hips. “The fuck is that?”
“What it looks like.” He throws.
The chisel falls as she clasps the missile in both hands. “Cute. But what am I s’posed to do with a human skull?”
“Sinead, we need to talk about the Great Divide and how it’s stopped dividing there from here.”
She sniffs, tosses the skull back, wipes another sweaty trickle, bends to scrabble for the fallen chisel. “So, what’s new? Always known coral could push through any time it wanted. Portal-gateway wasn’t built to—”
He steps closer, slams his fist on wood. “For starters, that portal-gateway’s completely gone.”
She pauses. “Like I said, it was just a symbolic—”
“Nothing symbolic about a fuckton of newly spewed up coral. Reckon even you gotta see that my way.”
He coughs a clot of dust out of his lungs and points. “That skull came from our side, not the other.”
She flinches, such a small thing, but he sees it.
“Got your attention now, do I?”
Sinead says nothing.
Joe joins her in silence, letting the moment flow. Decades on the road have taught him not to let frustrations show to these roughshod plasticated innocents squatting on lands supposedly terra nullus, scratching subsistence from indifferent soil, trading with occasional passing randos. He brings them more than he’s getting in return, but that arrangement suits. Least he can do—and the most. Aloha Joe doesn’t get a lot of offers. Forage doesn’t frighten when you know you’ve passed your own expiry date. He’s been a dead man walking since Lily vanished.
Waiting for the tap tap tap again before he speaks, voice raised for effect. “New world’s catching up with us. Time to try our luck in greener pastures. I’ve been searching—”
Sinead faces him, chisel gripped hard. “. . . she’s not your daughter, Joe, and you oughta stop pretending . . .”
He stiffens, feels his face flush crimson. “You weren’t here when—”
“No I weren’t. And I’m sure you tried your best. You always do. What happened to that kid was way past your control. Time to settle down and face the fact.”
He stares past her at the curdling sky. “Trouble’s brewing, Doll Face. Something’s gonna happen. Something big.”
A big broad smile cracks her plasticated face. “Ya think?”
—
If you’re hearing this, doesn’t mean I made it out alive. Just means the doorway works both ways, is all.
Aloha Joe’s been talking to the dead for half his life. They don’t talk back—Get real, I’m not crazy. The dead make better listeners than the living. Sometimes listening’s all he really needs.
So much hearthside banter about sacred spaces, bullshit soaking deep into his marrow. No one stepping through that portal-gateway uses that S word. Sacred suggests the hand of god and the coral don’t have either: gods or hands, but this is their place all right. He can smell it.
The girl can too, weightless as a desiccated bird, blanket tucked around her like a shroud. What little form she holds shifts slightly in his arms. More movement than she’s achieved across the past two years, so her mother told him.
If I make it back, Clave 53, they’re gonna want to know.
We. If we make it back.
This place is enough to scare you straight. Too many rectangles. Stuff that looks like nature, but it isn’t.
Monster breaks is what their structures feel like. Closest thing. Remembering the biggest wave he ever saw. Facing down the early season killer Atlantic swells of Nazarè, eighth wonder of the soon-forgotten world. Trapped in the death zone, heavy water slamming down like concrete. Eighty Ks an hour, feeling nothing but elation and respect.
Keep walking.
Sky’s a sickly pastel, no place to stop and rest. No shelter. Not much of anything, air humming with electric fizz. He expected something, definitely more than this.
Places the girl under a tree, or what kind of looks like. Might be something other, but he’s not blowing time on details. Harmless, dry and sheltering, unlike everything else on this undulating plain.
At the fringes, coral extrudes in ways impossible to describe. Not structures. Sculptures maybe, punched and twisting upward, refracting light with spiral slashes of a substance smashed some way between concrete, lava, chrome and diamond.
Could be AI art for all he knows.
Lays her down for just a while. No time at all in the grander scheme, needed a piss was all. Landscape gently misted, disappointing after all the ballyhoo and build up. Clavers back in 53 so certain they were walking to their deaths, fresh hells and fury waiting through that Dispensary portal-gateway.
Moonlight shivers on the silent sea . . .
More than anything, he wants to take her surfing. Ocean’s the only place I feel alive. All the young who’ve never seen beyond half a rain tank’s water in one place. His dreams are crystal pools of azure, champagne-laced salt spume, water horses striking, lapping tides, sandcastles, seagulls coasting updrafts. Every night when he shuts his eyes, yet not a word of it worth sharing. Might as well bang on about the surface of the moon. She’d make no sense of it, the girl and all the rest of them who fell between the cracks of now and yesterday.
One day.
But by time he walks back from emptying his bladder, the girl is gone. No visible tracks, spoor, signs of struggle. Tree’s still there and it looks the same, an unmoved assemblage of brittle sticks and bark. Panic wells, but he crushes it back down.
All his fault. She was dead already, but he brought her here. Deader than the seven seas. Him too, probably. Give it time.
Suspicious skies shimmy and pulse to private rhythms.
Wind could have carried her away. Wind or wolves.
He’s being watched. Always being watched.
Presses palms to his own plasticated skin but nothing’s changed. No mystery runes or sigils manifesting by way of phantasmagorical revelation.
Figures he’s got a water bottle’s worth of time. Whatever took the girl will take him next.
Broods as gossamer fog thickens, descending gradually over the portal-gateway. The far side’s crumbling Dispensary manifests as a wound on this, already starting to scab over.
If he’s going back, oughta do it now.
Oughta done a lot of things: shoulda, woulda, coulda.
Ruminating options as he blows his last remaining spliff, scored off that swamp witch hawking pumpkins next to Dreamers Gate, false promises laced with PCP and magic mint.
He’s puffing blue when the thing appears like a Medjugorje sky virgin blazon with abundant fruits of grace.
Mouth hanging open, he gets it now, everything he needs to know: Saints don’t march, they shimmer-shiver, surfing through heat haze, light refracting, bouncing all which ways. Nearer than appearing, yet further than you’d reckon, churning air choked with fractured static.
Not his first rodeo—or apparition.
Years spent trading bullshit around Gunning and Collector campfires, plenty accounts of Saints moving through and buggering up the sky, man. Those things change sky to soup. What’s happening now’s the light-on version and he wouldn’t call it soup, more like coagulant.
Bullshit encrusts until you don’t know how to listen, all campfire stories taken with a pinch, ’specially when it comes to whats and whyfores. Knock knock: What do you get when you kick-spawn intelligences smarter than their creators? Not much use for whyfores after that.
Near as Aloha Joe can figure, A Saint steps in when the Other takes an interest in the Meat. Coral doesn’t register humanity as sentient, just pushes through like we’re aggregates in gley.
Some years back, tripping down Psilocybin Sunset Strip with a salvia divinorum chaser, he witnessed something unaccountable: windstorm blowing in out of the north—luminous clouds flush with erratic lightning. Burnished bronze entities center front, multifaced and winged, with human hands. Wings melding where they touched, bright fire moving back and forth amongst them. And lightning. Always lightning, intersecting wheels of fearsome crystalline, sparkling like topaz and lapis lazuli, jasper, carnelian and emerald, moving when the windstorm creatures moved. A soundtrack roar of rushing waters, like the violence of an army blended with the radiance of rainbow.
That was not a Saint. He knows that now. That bronze-faced thing was something else entirely.
—
The sky might be cracking but his donkey doesn’t care, standing in the open, oblivious to wind doing its worst. Lost its head back out Goulburn way and hasn’t minded much of anything since. Aloha Joe gave it the same name as his dog, but time blew on and nowadays he’s forgotten both.
Sinead’s been tap tap tapping a new niche. She brushes the last stone crumbs aside, inserts a doll into its forever home, a blue-eyed thing with tiny teeth, no arms or legs.
