Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (54 page)

He swigged from the bottle again and went inside.

The shack was furnished in old seventies pine, stained yellow by age and nicotine: two chairs, a sofa and a rickety table. Amateurish paintings in cheap frames cluttered the walls. The carpet was a mottled burgundy, frayed at the edges and sorely in need of replacement. Sagging bookcases full of cheap paperbacks, mostly science fiction, lined one wall. The opposite wall was one long window, hidden behind curtains. He tugged them open. The view was black, but he knew that it would be spectacular by daylight. The comet winked balefully at him, and he shut the curtains again.

Lighting the stove, he filled the kettle with rainwater and set it to boil. While he waited, he unpacked the tins of food. Apart from some chipped, mismatched crockery, the cupboards contained nothing but dust and fluff. The bench-tops were spotted with dead flies. He made a half-hearted attempt to clean away the evidence of emptiness, but gave up before he had finished. There was no point.

The kettle screeched plaintively, like a baby, and he made the coffee. Stirring the various powders into a muddy solution, he breathed the cleansing steam into his nostrils. The combination of dust and hydrogen sulphide was giving his sinuses hell, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. With the coffee mug in one hand, he explored the rest of the house.

The bathroom was a small cubicle next to the kitchen, containing a primitive shower, with an instant gas heater powered by roof-mounted solar panels, and a tiny handbasin; the chemical toilet was a small plastic box in one corner, lid shut. Mould seeped down the walls like the shadows of stalactites. A tiny mirror hung on one wall, blotched white with soap. Exactly as he remembered it.

The single bedroom was bare apart from a coffin-like cupboard containing nothing but coat hangers, and a stripped double bed. The mattress was stained brown and in the final stages of internal collapse. Again, the same as it had been. He recalled the time, five years earlier, when he and Jacqui had ...

No. He went back into the main room and found the half-empty bottle of scotch. He preferred cold blankness to the grief and pain that waited to claim him. He could feel it building, growing like a bubble deep in his throat. When it burst, as it surely would, he didn’t think he would be able to survive. The shock was fading, so he had to feed the anaesthesia some other way. It was either that, or leave.

And he couldn’t leave. No matter what perverse internal logic had led him here, he had to go with it. With nowhere else to go, and no way to get there, there was only the shack and the past left to keep him company.

In activity there was relief. He opened two tins and cooked himself a simple casserole of meat and vegetables. He fussed with the burner, with the plates, took his time eating and washing the few dishes. The bottle emptied fast, and he opened another. The night deepened. He could feel the comet crossing the heavens above him; invisible through the ceiling, but still there. A primitive clock to measure the thickening of the night.

It became cold at last—a deep, desert cold. A pot-bellied stove crouched in one corner of the main room, but he hadn’t thought to bring wood. Lighting the kerosene heater, he chain-smoked, watched the purple flame flickering and finished the second bottle.

When the sun eventually rose, it was pallid and less intense than it had been the previous day. The snow had tightened its grip on the valley overnight and reflected the myriad shades of dawn back at the cloudless sky.

Inside his mind, more memory than dream, another sun rose.

He was driving the Toyota back from Port Germein, where he had stayed the weekend with a cousin. He almost hadn’t gone at all, but Jacqui had talked him into it.

“Just go, dammit. You need the break.”

“But I’ve got work to do.”

“Work? It’s
Christmas
, Stew.” She put her hands on her hips, resembling more than ever a cross brown bear. “No buts. You missed it last time and complained for a month. I don’t want to listen to your whining again.”

“I don’t remember any whining.”

“It was pathetic.” A grin surfaced through the mock anger. “God knows I can’t see the attraction in some cosmic ball of fluff, but I understand what it means to you. You’ve been up in the clouds for days now, thinking about it, so just get the hell out of here and take a look, okay?” She took his chin in one hand and kissed him on the lips: the quick peck that said she meant business. “Okay?”

She had been talking about the comet, of course—Ronson’s Comet, which had reached perigee the previous autumn. In the city, the spectral visitor had been pale and foreshortened, a dusty smudge almost invisible through the wash of streetlights. Hamish, his cousin, had waxed lyrical about its beauty from the country, but Stewart had been too busy tying up a publishing deal to spare the time to travel to Port Germein, where Hamish lived.

And Jacqui had been right: he had regretted missing it. If perigee had come a single week later, he might have been able to arrange something, but it hadn’t. When the comet had vanished behind the sun, he had cursed himself anyway for not taking the opportunity that Hamish had presented. He tried to resign himself to the fact that he had missed it, but with only partial success.

Then, after perihelion, the comet’s orbit shifted—as a result of violent gas discharges from its unimaginable surface. The second perigee, scheduled for the middle of December, was even closer than the first. Earth, and Stewart Danby, had been given a second chance.

“Okay, okay.” He capitulated gracelessly, feigning reluctance. Jacqui didn’t want to come, he knew that, but he didn’t want to seem too eager to go without her, either. Although he would miss her, her lack of enthusiasm would only dampen the experience.

He left the following Friday afternoon and arrived at Port Germein in time for a spectacular sunset. The small fishing town was lively with weekend tourists who, like him, had fled the perpetual blindness of the city’s light for the transparent skies of the country. The night was hot and clear, perfect for idle star-gazing. The local council had arranged a blackout, to aid the amateur observers.

Sharing a six-pack on Hamish’s back veranda, he watched the comet rise, knowing it would be a sight he would never forget.

Away from the city, its tail stretched across half the sky, nebulous but clear. Through binoculars, it looked like faintly-glowing smoke, backlit by stars. He thought he detected colours in its feathery wake, but couldn’t be certain.

“I doubt it,” said Hamish, who had read a lot in the last few weeks and become assertively confident with his new knowledge. “Takes a spectrometer to pick out the elements. The naked eye just sees white.”

There followed a discussion of the comet’s origins, little of which was new to Stewart. It had drifted into the solar system from deep space, not from the Oort cloud. Unlike Hailey’s Comet, it was a new addition to the family of planets and only a temporary one. After perigee, it would swing out of the system, never to return.

“Show you something interesting,” said Hamish, producing a magazine. Holding a lit cigarette lighter, he illuminated one glossy page. On it was printed a simple picture of the comet’s altered orbit. “What does this look like?”

“A fish,” said Stewart, and Hamish nodded. The sun was the fish’s eye, the Earth a tiny dot in its tail.

“An
Ichthys,
more to the point.” Hamish grinned wryly and extinguished the lighter. “Glad I’m not a Christian.”

It took Stewart a moment to remember the word, and to realise what his cousin was suggesting. Comets were traditionally signs of doom and destruction; coming so close to the end of the millennium, their prophetic powers were augmented. That Ronson’s Comet was further coupled with a common symbol of the Christian saviour augured the Apocalypse, Judgement Day.

“Maybe you should become one,” he joked. “A Christian, I mean. Before it’s too late.”

Hamish snorted in the darkness. “Crap.”

“No, really, doesn’t it seem a little strange? It did change course, after all.” The question begged to be asked. “Maybe we didn’t get the message first time around.”

“Coincidence, Stew. That’s all.”

Stewart smiled in the star-spattered darkness. Hamish was right, of course, but he wondered how many New Age evangelists would profit from the comet’s timely appearance. “Five to one says you’re wrong.”

“You’re on, sucker.”

The weekend passed quickly. Perigee had been the previous Wednesday, but the comet showed no immediate signs of decreasing in magnitude. Tiny sparks seemed to twinkle in its tail, glinting, insubstantial and short-lived. Boulders of dislodged ice, suggested Hamish, although he admitted that he had neither seen the phenomenon before nor read of it. Stewart wasn’t convinced, but kept his opinion to himself; to have witnessed the phenomenon alone was enough. He didn’t need a knowledge of pyrotechnics to enjoy fireworks.

Reluctant to leave, he delayed his departure as long as possible. The comet was hypnotic, beguiling, a drop of dye in the clear water of mundane, modern life. Eventually, he drove out of Port Germein at four o’clock the Monday morning, knowing he would later regret the lack of sleep, but glad that he had made the effort to be there, to stay those extra few hours.

It was at this point that the dream began.

Half way to Adelaide, with the comet low ahead of him and the sun rising on his left, he stopped to rest by the side of the highway. A fatigue hangover had begun somewhere behind his eyeballs, and he relished the chance to close his eyes.

A sudden strong gust of wind made him squint at the lightening sky. Clouds were rolling in from the south-east with astonishing speed. Pure white but as large as thunderheads, they bulked over the horizon, growing larger as he watched. The wind picked up sharply, and he headed back to the Toyota for shelter. There was electricity in the air, a powerful aura of impending disaster.

He started the car and pulled back onto the highway, leaving the lights on. The shadow of the clouds covered him, bringing a semblance of night back with it. The wind became more insistent, tugging the Toyota to one side.

His radio, tuned to a country station, crackled in mid-chorus and died. The shadow deepened; behind him, the last segment of pale blue sky vanished.

He stared in absolute astonishment as, maybe for the first time ever in that part of Australia, it began to snow.

He awoke gasping for breath, momentarily disoriented. Then he remembered where he was, and what he was doing there. He was at Barnard’s shack in the Flinders Ranges, and he had come there to ... what? Forget? Hide?

Die?

Staggering out of the chair, wincing at the light that stabbed through the gaps between the curtains, he found the scuba gear, put on the rubber facemask and twisted a knob. High-pressure air hissed into his open mouth. He lay back on the floor of the shack and sucked in the sweet coolness.

The muzziness in his head gradually faded. He switched off the valve and removed the mask. The air in the shack was thick and pungent; more than ever the stench of rotten eggs filled his nostrils. Taking it slowly, breathing heavily through his open mouth, he rummaged in a box for the gaffer tape.

Then, slowly and carefully, he sealed every gap in the shack’s stone walls: window-frames, air-vents, cracks under doors. Everything.

When he had finished, he collapsed with his face pressed against a dirty windowpane, his chest rising and falling in spasms. Outside, the atmosphere seemed unnaturally dense and yellowish. Although the sky was still cloudless, the snow-cover was thicker than it had been the night before. It now piled in drifts against the walls of the shack, and he was reminded of the red weed in H.G. Wells’
The War of the Worlds.
The snow had turned the valley into an alien landscape: moon-like, with gentle curves and featureless bulges in place of more earthly scenery.

The bubble in his throat was growing, making it even more difficult to breathe. With clumsy fingers he turned on the scuba gear again and flooded the room with fresh air.

Three days had passed since that early morning when he had first gaped incredulously at the white powder batting in flurries at the Toyota. The forecast the previous night had said nothing about storms, let alone snow. It was a warm summer night; he couldn’t imagine where such a mass of super-cold air had come from, or how the snow survived the fall to the ground without melting into rain. The only places in Australia where conditions allowed the freezing of water in any form, as far as he knew, were the Snowy Mountains and the south of Tasmania, both during winter. Not South Australia, the driest state in the world, in the middle of summer ....

Ahead, the road had vanished under a thin carpet of white, and he slowed slightly. There seemed to be no slippage, however; his wheels gripped the road surface as well as ever, which seemed strange. Surely melting snow was more treacherous than water? And the stuff wasn’t even sticking to the windscreen, contrary to expectations.

The last stop before entering the northern edge of the city was Port Wakefield. He pulled into a service station, partly to refuel, mostly to assess the situation, but the attendant knew as little as he did. Snow was falling, impossible snow, and the radio frequencies were still swamped by interference. There was no chance of an updated weather report until the storm cleared.

It seemed safe to assume that the freak weather had hit the city, and he wondered whether Jacqui could shed some light on it. She had spent some years in Europe before moving to Australia, so her knowledge of snowstorms was bound to be greater than his. He didn’t even know if it was safe to drive, or whether tire chains were required. Traffic around Christmas was heavy, and he didn’t want to be caught in a pile-up.