Dark Matter (43 page)

The world had ceased to become plastic
beneath his will, take its impression. It now seemed intent on ejecting him
altogether.

The man watched, for a moment forgetting
his sister and pursuit. The ocean’s lip touched the cloud, which lowered like a
curtain. Vapour and liquid moiled together until it was impossible to tell
where ocean ended and atmosphere began. The island was enclosed in a rapidly
constricting pocket of space. The wind, now confined, began to howl parallel to
the beach in a vortex driven by preternatural force.

The man tore his gaze away and hunted again
for his sister. Her footprints had broken away from the shore and angled toward
a hump of sand, a dune standing now at the centre of the island. He glimpsed
her crouched at its peak. He struggled up the dry sand, going to all fours,
gulping air, as the water rose hungrily behind him and lapped at his heels.

He planted each foot in dry sand, only to
draw it forth again from an agitated slurry of sand, water and froth. He felt
wetness caress his face, and upon raising it, saw the heavens had sunk to within
yards. Only a small orb clear of chaos remained, centred on the dune’s peak,
where his sister still squatted, and licking out from the looming wall came
spiralling liquescent arms.

It was all suddenly very familiar.

The Eye had found
him
.

He mounted the last yard. The girl rose and
turned to face him. She smiled once―it smote his heart―before diving into the
water.

He cried out―
Tell me. What is my name!
―clutching
after her but she was gone.

The orb closed in. He had to crouch, and,
there before him, saw a message scrawled in the sand. Water chattered up the
last feet of sand and raced to obliterate it. He dropped to his knees, and
arched his arms to protect it, realising he had only seconds.

He saw his mistake immediately. The message
did not start with a H, but an I. He had read it the wrong way. It said: I
forgive you.

Water poured over his forearms. It clasped
his head, embraced his body.

I forgive you.

Not a name. Perhaps better than a name.

The water entered his nose and mouth, from
above and below. The light was extinguished and he was thrown into darkness.

Light bloomed softly into complete darkness,
and with it came the realisation he was suffocating. That knowledge was not
distant or academic―with animal cunning he sensed it, and with animal ferocity
he fought it.

His lungs hurt, too much for him to bear.
Much easier to give it away. Sink back into the numbing darkness.

But the animal would not be quieted.

He resolved to fight. He had known pain―he
could recall no single memory―but he had known it and tamed it. He summoned his
strength, like a king calling his subjects by an oath of fealty.

In response, he found himself. His will
invested in body and limb, and with that reunion came the crisp image of his
peril. He felt himself bound, head to foot, encased and unable to move. Worse,
lodged in his throat was a heavy mass, as though his tongue was distended and
swollen in place.

His senses sharpened and like a keen wind
drove off the ghosts of dreams that had converged on him, hovering over the
knot of confusion and pain he was.

He was in the process of dying. He would
die. Be dead.

A soundless shriek rang through his head.

He focussed every ounce of strength on his
left arm, which lay parallel to his trunk, fixed to his flank. He drew on it
with his bicep, levering with his elbow, as blood throbbed in his temples and
in the engine room of his chest.

The light began to fail. He felt himself
slipping downward, a nameless cluster of sound and pain.

His left arm tore free.

Pin-pricks of light began to sparkle in the
darkness, little constellations being born beneath his eyelids in honour of his
passing.

His left hand scrabbled over his face,
banging dully against his ear before finding his mouth―or rather, where his
mouth should have been; his fingers found only toughened and puckered flesh. He
dug fingernails under it, seeking purchase, conscious of his strength ebbing as
the oxygen in his blood fell.

More stars blazed, and the throbbing of his
heart rose to drown out thought with its requiem beat.

His hand, still poised above his mouth,
slowed and became still.

He ceased to strive.

Even the pain gave off, and left him alone,
content to watch and listen, to not hurt.

What moronic logic had led him to struggle?

Something brushed the raw flesh of his
hand, something that in its foreignness felt like ice.

It was another hand. It covered his own,
its fingers twining with his, and pried.

He rallied, contemplated fighting that
hand―oblivion was so inviting―then strove together with it to tear open a
passage for breath.

Another hand gripped the side of his face,
and then something hard, like the cap of a knee, dug into his side, and pressed
down on him bearing its owner’s weight. He felt panic in the force of it.

Singular pain lanced his face as a clot of
flesh was pulled from his throat, making him gag. In the pain’s wake came a new
sensation, the feel of air over raw lips and teeth suddenly chalky. His
diaphragm convulsed, compressing air in his suddenly too-small oesophagus. The
inrush of air, its payload of oxygen, was the closing of the master circuit
breaker. His whole body sprang into life. The rails of his internal tracks were
electrified, and a long dormant population sprang forth and thronged the
streets. In the clamour, all he wanted was to cry.

He felt himself lifted, pulled into a
sitting position. Tightness like a ripe scab resisted every movement. The hands
that had helped free his mouth would not be still. They came and went, touching
and testing, over his head, chest and belly.

The panic that had immersed him ebbed until
it was a residue on clear thought. His heart slowed, and the hands, as if
sensing this, became less frantic.

With his free hand he explored the skin of
his face. He could only feel its pressure through the thickened, dry skin, as
though it were anaesthetised. He climbed his fingers up and into the cleft
beneath his brow, searching for his eyes. They too were skinned over. He began
to pry at the dead skin. The other hand sought to help, but he pushed it away,
gestured for it to stop.

His lids cracked open on what seemed to be
the centre of the sun, and at last he could cry. Great tears merged, pooling
between the new and the old skin, before spilling in streamers over the
senseless skin below.

Into the shimmering brightness already
dimming came a face. He knew her name immediately: Dee. She was crying too, and
at his acknowledgement, her eyes disappeared in a smile. Her lips moved with
speech, but he heard it only as a dull buzz.

He flexed his right bicep and ripped the
arm free, ignoring the pain that made his flank spasm. He dug in his ear.

“Help me hear,” he said, unsure if she
heard him. He could not hear himself.

She seemed to understand, for she brushed
his hand aside and loosened the skin stopping up his ear.

A small rupture―and a world of sound poured
in: breathing, its faint echo from the walls of the half-lit room, and Dee’s
sniffing up of tears.

“I can hear,” he said.

“Oh, Monk,” she whispered, and leaned
forward to embrace him.

“Please,” he said, and pushed her away,
square-on to him. “My name. What is my name?”

“Monk—” she said, then seemed to see
something in his gaze, intent and fraught. “Rasputin. Your name is Rasputin.”

“Rasputin,” he said, his tongue feeling its
way over the contours of the word. “Yes.”

He let her hug him then.

It felt like they were clasped a long time,
but he could not say how long. His mind would not mark off the seconds.

Dee broke the contact. She left the room
and returned with a damp flannel. Rasputin sat curled and taut, bound by ropes
of his own cast-off flesh, able to see, hear, and flex his arms, but cosseted
still within the birth canal. Beneath the bed clothes snarled around his waist
and legs, he was naked. But as Dee began to fuss over him, to soak the skin
above his still-blind eye and slake it away, his shame dissipated. Her
ministrations had motherhood in them. He was surprised by their beauty.

When at last he was free, wrapped in a
towel and attempting to take some water with salt, his mind came up to speed
enough to recognise where he was. The room’s high ceiling, and the brass door
handle glossed with a heavy patina, brought back to him the farm, and the
field.

He turned to Dee, who was seated beside him
on the sagging bed, and said: “Where’s Jordy?”

In response, she burst into tears.

PAR INUST

Rasputin fingered the head of his
walking cane. It rested against his leg, jutting into the cavity beneath the
car’s dash. When he and Dee had left the farm, the sun had gilded the cane’s
glossy paint, sending a thread of fire down its length. The twilight now
suffusing the car’s interior wasn’t able to call forth the fire.

His leg was not right. Still not right. He
felt that initial realisation again keenly. Though plunged deep into the valley
of the shadow of death, he was still not whole.

He had swivelled on the bed, waited as
muscles took up the strain as he loaned his weight to the leg, only to feel it
give, and twist dumbly like a dancer bereft of wit. It had been the image of
the day he had first left his hospital bed, made worse by the weight of foreknowledge
he had not had that day.

Hell. Caterpillars got
wings
. Was it
that greedy to want the full use of both legs?

He caught his slip into self-pity. He had
been fighting it since they had flown the farm, but it would not sit, like a
ball-bearing repeatedly set on an incline. He gritted his teeth and hurled it
away.

“Why didn’t he take the car?” he said.

Dee replied through pre-occupation he knew
did not stem from concentrating on the road. “He thought I might need it, so he
walked to the highway and caught a bus.” Her eyes were dry. He guessed their
wells were dry too.

He chewed his lip. It had been like this
since they left―a question, an answer, then quiet.

He had stopped trying to comfort her, to
persuade her that everything was fine, that Reim was fine, that Jordy was fine.
He didn’t believe it, and he couldn’t keep that out of his voice.

In the distance a knot of eucalypts were
silhouetted by an orange sky, stark against vast cauliflower cloud heads
forming above the scarp. The clouds made the hills look like volcanoes in
eruption, but although they appeared thick and tangible, he knew they held no
rain. The only sound was the engine’s dull drone, and the occasional skitter of
loose grit flicked into a wheel well.

Dee turned the car’s lights on, revealing
the occasional moth or bug that came wheeling out of the blue to collide with
windscreen or grill.

And from all of this raw data Rasputin’s
mind made nothing. It remained just that: raw sense parsed only for animal
necessity. There were no messages nested within visions.

He drew a deliberate breath, and began
again to put the pieces together.

“When did you last hear from Jordy?”

“Four days ago.”

“What did he say?”

“He couldn’t raise Reim. He was going to
have one last try at unpicking the phone.”

“What does that mean?”

“He thought he could find who was bugging
you.”

He was silent a moment as he collated the
facts.

“Why didn’t you just call an ambulance?”

“Reim said they would kill you.”

He chewed on that. “He was probably right.”

“And you say Reim called―when?”

“Two weeks ago. The morning after you...”

“Then nothing?”

“No. He said he was coming, but he never
showed.”

“Maybe he got lost?”

“For two weeks? I texted him the address.”

“What did you do?”

“After Jordy left? What do you think,
Rasputin? I made one mad rush into Northam for food, and then sat with you,
torn.”

“You called Reim?”

“Every day. It was like Jordy said: his
answering machine said he was sick. His email bounced with an ‘Out of Office’.”

“Did you try Jordy’s parents?”

“I asked them if they could see if he’d
left yet, that his phone must be dead and there were a few items I needed him
to bring. They went past, but the house was dark. That was three days ago.”