The Shooter at the Heartrock Waterhole

Bill Congreve

ONE

The rifle kicked, and one of the creatures—the beautiful one—was dead. But the wyrde, as Dad would have called it, began long before then.

Two days ago, I shot and killed two sparrows, and a rabbit I’d called “Attitude.” Right after, I buried them out in the deep sand away from the water.

At dawn yesterday, I smelled them as I woke. The sun filtered through the needles of a lone desert oak straight into my eyes. I rolled onto my stomach, lifted my head, and there they lay, just outside the tent flyscreen.

The corpses had been dug from their half-meter-deep holes and had been laid out on the orange sand and the leaf litter as neatly as you like, half a meter from where my head lay on the pillow.

I hadn’t heard a thing.

It was an unusual waterhole. A gently sloping dome of granite the color of rusting iron, maybe fifty hectares in area, that the maps called “Heartrock,” rose above the desert where I had camped. Millions of years of sparse rainfall—or a glacier in the last ice age—had carved the rock so that the water on that side of the dome all ran off in one spot. At that point there was a lip in the granite about five meters above the floor of the desert and, below that, a pristine rock pool surrounded by a bed of sand the color of red ochre.

From high above, the dome would look like a heart, with the high ground up near the point, aiming north, and the waterhole nestled in the heart of the “v” in the south.

From the edge of the water a dry sandy creek bed four or five meters across ran a half kilometer out into the desert, where it ended in a salt lake maybe a hundred meters wide. A once in a decade flood would see the creek run for a couple of hours, the lake fill, and the whole place seemingly dry out two or three days later. And if some idiot were to walk out on the salt lake in the couple of months after the rain, they would crack through the crust of salt and drown in mud.

Stunted bloodwoods surrounded the water. The single desert oak grew amongst the spinifex fifty meters out along the creek bed.

I didn’t even know what desert it was a part of, just that it was too far north and west to be called a part of the Nullarbor Plain. It smelled and sounded like the end of the world: empty, with an aftertaste of dust, eucalyptus, the soughing of leaves, and then silence.

The animals smelled like dead, wet fur, but with a gamey scent. I stared at them for a couple of seconds and then scrambled out of bed and into a pair of shorts and running shoes. My Dad’s Anschutz was where I had left it, in the tent at the foot of the bed, but the target rifle wasn’t what I needed now. The Remington was in the Toyota: a pump-action shotgun, instead of a single-shot twenty-two rifle. I grabbed the machete, pulled down the zipper on the insect screen, and bolted outside, running for the Toyota.

When I had the Remington in my hands, I shouted: “Hello!”

No answer.

I knew that, of course. Not another human being for two hundred kilometers in any direction. That was part of the job description.

But the birds’ feathers had been brushed flat and the blood had been washed from the exit wound in the rabbit’s skull.

Stunted eucalyptus and acacia scrub surrounded Heartrock’s margins, living on what little water ran off the rock. Not enough bush to hide anybody—I know because I checked. Standing on the peak, the binoculars showed me nothing but a mob of kangaroos resting in the lee of some trees a couple of kilometers away. I knew about them, they came down to the water every night. Kangaroos don’t dig dead animals out of half meter deep holes and wash the bodies.

“Hello!” I shouted again.

After those first moments of surprise, I hadn’t felt threatened. But that was easy, I had a shotgun in one hand. Yet, somebody—somebody who enjoyed playing games—had dug up those animals … I wasn’t alone.

Back at camp, I leaned the Remington against a tree and fired up my small gas stove. I put enough coffee in the plunger for two. Perhaps the smell of coffee brewing might draw whoever was out there into the open. Some old Aboriginal, I expected. Or a prospecting crew playing silly buggers. My mate James was going to study geology when he got to university; this would be his idea of a joke.

But if a prospecting crew had been responsible, where were they? A half hour later I spotted bare footprints leading down into the water.

The first ten days I didn’t shoot a thing. Since then each bird I’d shot, I’d buried in a separate grave. I would cut a couple of twigs, strip them of their bark, and tie them into a small cross. I called the corpse of the first sparrow, “An Insensitive Dependence on Bureaucratic Conditions” in a tribute to two favorite authors, wrote the name in biro on the wood, and put the cross at the head of the bird’s grave. The second bird was another sparrow. It was ‘Trixie,” after Dad’s old Falcon utility. I chopped the legs off both of those and tied them to a tree branch to dry out, and for the ants to get to. I felt queasy at that, but my new boss in Eucla wanted trophies until he knew he could trust me.

A tiny flock of starlings interrupted breakfast one day in my third week. There were six in all. That was slaughter. I waited with the Remington loaded with buckshot till they were close, and then let fly. Five loads of buckshot in seven seconds, spinning from side to side like a maniac. Afterwards, I was a little disturbed at how much I had enjoyed it. When I buried those birds, I took special care.

I named the first rabbit I saw “Attitude,” but missed the killing shot. It got away with a graze in its neck, but didn’t go far. “Palm Tree,” “Coconuts” and “10 Enderley Avenue” were buried alongside the birds. Now the plot of graves a hundred meters out in the desert measured six by three. Well, five by three if I counted the bodies next to my tent.

I also had books, but I couldn’t spend all day reading.

“Coffee’s on!” I shouted.

Nobody came, of course.

I took the job a month ago, right after Dad’s funeral.

The Western Australia Agriculture Department employed hunters in the desert to shoot birds—the non-native starlings, sparrows, doves and shit they’ve got on the east coast which hadn’t yet made it across the desert. Starlings are the big one. They were desperate enough to find people willing to live in total isolation fifteen hundred kilometers from Perth that they weren’t worried I had just turned eighteen, only that I had my shooter’s license.

In the desert the waterholes are hundreds of kilometers apart. A bird flies in, desperate for water. It goes anywhere else, it dies of thirst. It settles in for a couple of days, recovers a little, maybe moves on, maybe sticks around and dies of boredom. Think of the wider picture: a slow migration of non-native animals into what is still, even with all the wheat, sheep, cattle, grapes, bees and shit, a fairly pristine environment. Add a hunter with a few loads of buckshot and you’ve got instant environmentalism. Either that or instant protection of commercial agricultural interests, I wasn’t sure which.

Killing things to save others. Ironic, huh?

James and I had broken into the local kindergarten at midnight on James’s sixteenth birthday to drink a couple of beers and watch The Exorciston the school VCR. James loved doing things like that. He spent the whole next day laughing.

Two years later, to the very day, it had been a bus with a load of kids from that same kindergarten that had killed Dad on a pedestrian crossing. More irony. Now here I was in the desert.

That was when I heard the flutter of wings. Weak, tiny wings, not like the small hawks which chased the insects at night, more like a thirsty sparrow.

About twenty meters up the rock slope from where I was camped, a clump of spinifex grew from a crack in the rock overlooking the waterhole. I found my keys, put the Remington behind the seat, and locked the Toyota for the first time in weeks. Then I grabbed the Anschutz from the tent and headed up the slope.

In the last few weeks I had spent hours every day lying beside that spinifex, just out of reach of the needles.

Why the Anschutz? Every weekend when I was a kid Dad would take that thing out to the Blacktown Pistol Club range in western Sydney for club shoots. While he was alive, he never let me use it, just bought me a little Winchester. When he died, I sold the Winchester and kept the Anschutz.

The target rifle wasn’t designed for hunting: ring sights instead of telescopic, small bore, single shot with no magazine, floating barrel, the wrong ammunition, and as heavy as all shit—I had to use a sling wrapped around my arm just to hold the thing steady and give myself a chance—but I had only missed the once. And “Attitude” the rabbit had only bounced around out there in the desert a day or two before coming back to the water and his second bullet.

I began using the Anschutz because it was Dad’s, and because the soft-nosed lead bullets it demanded made a mess of any small animal. I kept using it because of how I felt—hitting a two centimeter target with it at fifty meters in these conditions was more an art form than a matter of brute strength.

Sparrows, but twoof them. I should have brought the Remington after all, and gone closer. Too late now.

I squirmed around until I was comfortable, put an extra couple of cartridges on the rock where I could reach them in a hurry, and waited.

The birds pecked at the sand, and hopped down to the water. Aim a little high, the ring sights blotting out all but the small form of the first bird. Breathe out gently and watch the sights drift down across the target, hold the breath, take up the first pressure in the trigger, hold steady…. Of course I’d be sacked if the Department ever found out about the Anschutz.

… squeeze the trigger…. A brown smear across the sights. Slight recoil. A body dropped to the sand and the sparrows flew away.

I felt sick.

She was a kind of dusky black, but not aboriginal. Her features were like nothing I’ve ever seen, even in the tourist markets in Fremantle: eyes slanting up, nictitating membranes, ears that were more like nubs surrounding a depressed pattern in her skull than human ears, webbed fingers and toes. She could have been fifteen, a little younger than me.

She was naked. She was dead.

Yin and yang, Dad had always said. Light and dark. A little bit of the light had just left the waterhole.

I had my father, Rudolf Cartwright, cremated. I took the official urn of ashes that contained a bit of Dad, a bit of coffin, and bits of a few other dead people and their coffins as well given how busy the crematorium was, to Bluff Knoll in the Stirling Ranges. The mountain was the first place Dad and I had stopped at for more than a few hours on our trip from Sydney after Mum went back to her family in Ireland.

October twenty-second at eleven fifteen p.m., four years ago, her plane took off. And despite all the promises, she never came back.

That was a confused time. Neither Dad nor I had wanted to stay in Sydney. He left his job and took me out of school. Both of us wanted a fresh start. We sold everything we couldn’t fit in the car. Only when we drove away did we decide where it was we wanted to go.

Dad and I had fought tooth and nail for four days crossing the Nullarbor; by the time we had reached the Stirling Ranges northeast of Albany a day after leaving Norseman, we couldn’t stand the sight of each other. He had climbed the steep, winding track below the cliffs and around and up to the back of the mountain while I sat at the base in a sulk. Then I had become afraid that he really was sick of me, and would just keep on walking, down the far side of the mountain and away … or worse.

I ran up the mountain. On top we hugged and cried.

Burials and graves are for the living, not the dead. Bluff Knoll was where my memories of my father, and my impressions of place and time, were inseparable. Symbols. After I left Perth on my way out to the Agriculture Department’s office in Eucla, I had stopped at the ranges. I climbed Bluff Knoll in the dark, and buried the urn near the crest about two am, a three hundred meter cliff on one side, a view across a hundred kilometers to the ocean on the other. It was windy and raining.

I don’t know why I thought of her as “her.” She had no breasts, no nipples and no genitals. Set in her navel was a dull chunk of black rock that wouldn’t lift out. She could have been a boy but for the shape of her face and her rounded hips. The question only entered my mind as I carried her back to the Toyota and the first aid kit. I looked down at her in my arms and saw her full lips and her long, wet hair framing her face, and had no doubt. Perhaps it was her hair more than anything else—wild and long, straight and thick, the color of wild henna.

The bullet hole was in the side of her chest, below her left armpit, above her heart. There was no exit hole. At first, her blood had run freely; now it had slowed to a dribble. By the time I reached the campsite, it had stopped altogether.

I bandaged the wound, the scissors clinking against the stone in her navel. It was magnetized. I thumped on her breastbone in an imitation of the CPR I’d seen, and gave her mouth-to-mouth.

Nothing. So I did it all again, her body unfeeling under my hands.

I don’t know how long it took me to stop. I fell back against the wheel of the Toyota and stared at her.

I stopped staring when I began shivering. It was night, the full moon at least a third of the way across the sky. Twelve hours since I’d shot her. I’d probably fallen asleep, but my head didn’t feel like it. A bit like having a hangover without having the beers to get me there. I’d dreamt of water, but my eyes felt full of sand.

I wandered around the campsite in a daze, then staggered across to the waterhole to wash my face.

With the moonlight and the clear desert sky, I didn’t need a torch. I’d walked this route a hundred times in the last weeks and knew every shrub, every twig, every boulder hidden under the desert floor. Heartrock loomed above. The trees rustled in a light breeze.

Then I tripped and fell on my face. I turned. Nothing. But it had felt like a branch coming alive under my foot … a snake? The sand lay bare under the moonlight, the nearest cover meters away. Perhaps a death adder sleeping inthe sand? No, not in the cold at night.

I crawled forward to the water’s edge, dipped my hands. Gasped. The water was freezing. Nothing in the desert in summer should feel that cold. I lifted my hands from the water, ice crackling from my fingers—not just my perceptions then, it wasfreezing.

Good. I splashed my face, opening my eyes to the water, needing to wash them out, needing to force myself awake. I gasped again, the cold driving under my eyelids.

I shook my head and wiped the ice and water from my face. For seconds I saw nothing through the moisture but the blur of bright moonlight to my right, then the blur shifted, and spun into a spiral of stars, twisting before my eyes, covering the whole of my vision, shifting until it was centered in front of me, dropping … I fell face first into the freezing water and bounced in shock to my feet, for seconds unable to force my chest to go through the motions of breathing.

Shaking with the cold, I stepped back. The moon was high on my right, back where it should be. Still water glinted with reflected moonlight; the dome of Heartrock loomed above.

A wavelet rippled across the surface.

Something was in the water—over against the rock-face, in the dark.

Some sort of native rat? A rabbit going for a swim? It’d freeze its arse off. I laughed nervously and stepped back again.

The next wave splashed across the sand and wet my feet. I turned and ran three or four paces, then looked back. The waterhole was only twenty meters across. There was no wind, how could it throw a wave a meter up onto the shore?

But the girl belonged here. That much I didknow. She had deliberately taken a bullet to save the sparrow. She had dug up the dead animals and laid them outside my tent. She had obviously thought of herself as the protector of this place. I went back to camp and picked her up. Half way back to the waterhole, my biceps stinging into agony, I switched her from my arms into a fireman’s carry.

Yin and yang. Light and dark.

With the girl’s body pressing against my shoulders, forcing my head forwards, I didn’t see the waterhole until I was only a couple of paces away, but then I swayed to a standstill and stared in terror.

The water glowed from below, a glow that I had once seen on a movie, as an orbiting spaceship moved from the shadow cast by a planet towards the emergent glow of an accelerated sunrise. Can you imagine it? That glow of promise before the spaceship moves into the light? Now turn that wondrous glow into a photo-negative of absolute dark. Not so much the absence of light, though definitely that, but a covenant that wherever this darkness came, light would never return.

Above that darkness, myriad glints of light reflected like stars. And above the glinting light was the ice—ice on the sand, ice on the rock, ice weighing down the branches of trees and flattening the shrubs and the spinifex. Then I realized the glinting on the surface of the water was ice, too—a sterile reflection of the moon.

A tide of dead life lay at the water’s edge—small fish, frogs, weed, reeds, freshwater shrimp, insects, a couple of crayfish—the life of the waterhole scoured out and left to die.

All this in just a couple of minutes.

I put the girl down, picked up a weakly struggling fish, and tossed it in the water amongst the ice. Seconds later, waves pushed the frozen corpse back to shore.

The waterhole had become as sterile as the back side of the Moon; as ancient as the surface of this land before life began. Yet it held within it the threat of more sterility: I would be made as sterile and lifeless as the ageless atoms from which my body was formed if I ventured any nearer.

The sense of wonder remained, but the wonder had become a dreadful, bleak thing. This was the wonder of a raging fire, of acid burns, of the knowledge of theend—life destroyed and denied.

In a daze I picked up the girl. I had killed her, and she deserved better than a burial in this place.

TWO

Three days it took to reach the highway.

I left before dawn that same night. Broke camp, packed the tent, swag, and other stuff in the tray of the Toyota, and then stopped and thought twice about what I wanted to do.

Just behind the cabin, the Toyota ute had a massive chest of half centimeter thick galvanized steel the width of the entire tray. For the firearms and ammunition, the chest had two heavy brass padlocks, both with different keys.

It was only when I discovered that her body fit neatly into this gun locker that I finally decided to leave. I put a pillow under her head, stood watching the dusky glow of her skin and her hair in the fading moonlight for a few seconds, covered her with a blanket, and locked her down.

The clock on the dash said 4:17 a.m.as I began bashing my way south through the scrub and across the gibber plain, the rocks squeezing up from under the tires and knocking against the chassis. Five hundred and thirty kilometers, the first third of it over open terrain, the rest over the kind of dirt track that carries a vehicle once a month.

By day, I drove. By night, I dreamed of water. Serene rippling pools under trees in the moonlight. Great ocean swells. Streams and torrents of water. All empty of life.

When I finally drove over the edge of the escarpment and down towards the Eyre Highway, I hadn’t seen another human being—a living one at any rate—for weeks.

I stopped at the first roadhouse I came to—a combination petrol station, pub, and restaurant, with a couple of motel rooms, a parking area for caravans and trucks, a tent area, and a small zoo out back for the kids and the tourists. Four weeks ago I had stopped here and put up a tent amongst the cages. The pump attendant was a burly, irascible, middle-aged man who remembered me.

“Going home already?”

“They send me all the way out to this spot in the middle of nowhere, and some bugger’s already there.”

“Typical bureaucrats.”

A little girl in a faded pink cotton dress and sandshoes with no socks carried a spade and dragged a dead wombat by the left rear leg past the petrol pumps. She looked at me curiously, like she was glad a stranger was present to witness this, and then turned to the pump attendant. “You can’t wait until tonight, Daddy, he’s starting to smell.”

‘Daddy’—the owner, obviously—looked embarrassed.

“Ah, the family pets … We’ve had a bit of bad luck recently,” he said to me.

The girl dragged the wombat across the highway to a string of crosses planted in the verge on the far side.

The owner waved in the direction of the pet cemetery, “I want our customers to know we’re doing the right thing. Lots of people used to stay here because of them.”

“What’s killing them?”

He shrugged. “Since the wife’s gone, they’ve just … died. Grief, I guess. They miss her.”

“They got names?” I looked at the girl dragging a couple of branches to cover the wombat. “Might make it easier for the girl.”

“Ya reckon?”

“Yeah I do.”

“I reckon I’ll do it my way. Less arguments.”

A trail of blood followed the dead wombat across the roadhouse forecourt. Looked to me like it might have been a bullet in the head killed it.

I paid cash and got out of there.

The Eyre Highway is one of only two paved roads into Western Australia for the entire two and a half thousand kilometers of border. It is a place where a half dozen roadhouses have their own time zone—one which differs to those on either side, not by one hour or a half hour, but by three-quarters of an hour, and which the owner of one of those roadhouses, being a patriotic West Australian citizen, refuses to use, preferring Western Standard Time instead. The center of population is the village of Eucla, of maybe fifty souls, most of them government and some of them with the same job of killing birds I have. When I finish at Heartrock, I’ll be stationed there.

If I was to scrabble in the dirt at any of the rest areas on the highway, I would find the fossilized sea-shells of an ancient seabed. Fossicking for meteorites is prohibited, because they canbe found, can be picked up off burning sand—providing a history of both the land and the solar system. In summer the daytime temperature can reach 55°C, or 130° in the old scale Dad always used. The economy consists of selling fuel, beer, hamburgers, and a place to sleep to truckies, and to travelers who, for whatever private reason, would not catch a plane.

The land was empty, but driving through it I always expected to find something wonderful just around the next corner.

Heat shimmered off the highway ahead. The road followed the base of an escarpment—the shore of the ancient sea. I didn’t know what brand the trees were. That was a word James used once in biology class: “brand.” The teacher told him we were talking about a form of life, a species. “Not when some accountant sells ‘em to you in a supermarket, you’re not,” James had replied. Whichever “brand” they were, the trees were stunted, dark green, all but identical, and scarce. It made me wonder what “brand” was the corpse I had in the gun locker. It was a horrible thought, but I still laughed.

A truck rose out of the heat-haze ahead. The shimmering flowed down the road towards the Toyota and surrounded it, floating up from the bitumen until it seemed I was looking through a sheen of water. Braking gently to keep control, I concentrated on staying on the road, on the white lines passing the edge of the Toyota’s bonnet. Silhouettes of fish swam in the corners of my eyes. One swam at my face, and I flinched. A shadow passed overhead and I looked up at the massive roiling underside of a breaker rolling in against the shore.

The blast of a truck horn dragged my attention back to the road.

Waves? Abovethe road? The haze disappeared, as did all thoughts of “brand name” corpses. That kind of thinking worked in cities, not out here.

I felt haunted.

The tension I suddenly felt made concentrating easy after that. What was I doing touring the back roads of Australia with a corpse hidden in the vehicle? I had no answers. The police patrolled this road, pulling vehicles over at random to search for drugs. What if they stopped me?

Whatever this quest was that I had found myself on, I wanted it done.

That night I dreamed of water again. I was back at the roadhouse, standing in the middle of the highway, trucks roaring past in the night air. It rained, and the clean, healing water ran off the road, soaking deep into the verge amongst the graves.

Early morning twilight woke me. The ground was soggy, the tent wet. It hadrained. Letting it all dry out a little before I packed, I put water on to boil for coffee and walked out of the scrub onto the highway. The trucks that had roared past all night had gone. The bloodied corpse of a kangaroo, crows picking at its flesh, explained a thump I had heard just before falling asleep the night before.

The glow of light where the highway met the horizon signaled dawn. The sunrise glinted off wet asphalt, four lustrous trails converging on the disc of the sun on the horizon—light reflecting from the sheen of water in the shallow furrows pressed into the road by trucks. Endless traffic, but a moment of beauty. I stared for a moment then went back to the gas stove and boiling water.

I needed to look at her.

Sipping hot coffee, I unlocked the tool chest. This was the morning of the fourth day in desert heat, and she hadn’t started to smell yet. God knows what I would do when that happened. Pack her in ice? Drive the desert in a ute weeping condensation? But she should smell! She was dead. No heartbeat. And it was my fault because I had shot her. I tried to imagine explaining her to the police, and couldn’t. But was she even human? I wondered. Maybe that would get me off in a court, can you murder a non-human? But it didn’t save me from knowing Ihad killed. I lifted the lid, and she was lying there in water a foot deep, her hair floating in a ring about her face like a dark sunrise.

I dropped the coffee and fell off into the mud.

“You okay there, lad?”

NowI spotted the caravan back in the trees. Other travelers had come into the rest area overnight.

“Shit.”

I managed to slam the lid. After that, I had no choice but to accept an invitation to breakfast, all the time thinking of what else I had seen there in the gun locker, other than a quarter ton of water that had appeared from nowhere: a fine patchwork of golden dark scales the size of pinheads covering the skin around her wound, and the black stone in her navel now shiny and smooth, like polished hematite.

I didn’t try to figure it out. The wyrde was following me, and it wouldn’t leave until this was resolved.

But now I was certain that I was haunted, and what it was that haunted me—a halo of hair drifting in sparkling water.

Before leaving, I pulled out a map. The Stirling Ranges were not quite a thousand kilometers away, give or take fifty kilometers depending on which route west I took from Norseman.

The Stirling Ranges? I realized then where I had been heading since I had loaded the girl’s body into the gun locker back at Heartrock. Bluff Knoll. I wanted to bury her beside my father. It had become that important.

And urgent—a thousand kilometers—I could do that in a day. Then I wanted to leave and never go back.

I made it onto the road a few minutes before eight a.m., estimated time of arrival: dusk. The day blurred into a drone of heavy 4X4 tires and a litany of places and names that I would never forget: Caiguna, and the hundred and forty kilometer straight; Norseman, where the tallest hills are mine tailings and slag; the ghost town of Dundas where I ate the cold chicken burger; the dirt road to Lake King, with the most desolate, and most desecrated, roadside rest area I had seen; Lake King itself, and Lake Grace, both of them salt, but with townships made possible by damming the runoff from outcrops of granite similar to Heartrock, dams made by circling the rock with a wall of bricks four or five courses high, which slopes slightly downhill as it follows the contour around the rock, trapping the water and guiding it into a hollow on one side; the Pallinup River, the first watercourse I had crossed that actually had water in it, in three thousand kilometers of driving—a genuine goddamned river that the map told me ran all the way to the Southern Ocean.

I missed rivers. Western Australia just doesn’t do running water like other places.

And that made me think of the waterhole at Heartrock—a rare and wonderful place that wouldn’t exist at all but for an accident of topography in the bedrock millions of years earlier. But the very scarcity of water also made the waterhole a trap.

How long had the girl been there?

By ten p.m., I was sitting on top of Bluff Knoll, Dad’s urn cradled on my lap. Once I had reached the peak, it had been the work of minutes to find Dad’s grave and dig the urn out. I would never be able to fit both the girl and the urn among the rocks in just that spot, and I wanted to see the urn again, and feel it in my hands.

The stars were bright, and a stiff wind blew in from the ocean. A glow in the east signaled moonrise. The lights of Albany and Mount Barker shone to the southwest. Civilization. Six hundred meters below was the carpark, and the Toyota with its precious cargo. The gun locker was still full of water. The girl was still dead, the wound in her side a little more overgrown with the same scaly skin I had seen that morning. The big change was that the stone in her navel now glowed green.

Up here, I might be able to squeeze an urn between the boulders and cover it with a scrabbling of dirt and mud, but a body? And if I did find a spot, I would have to lug her all the way up, six hundred meters vertical like one giant flight of stairs. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

The pause gave me time to think. She wasn’t human, I knew that now, but her hair and her face haunted my every waking thought. I even wondered if she was truly dead. Probably not.

Something was expected of me, and I didn’t know what it was. Had I done the right thing taking her away from Heartrock? I didn’t know that either. But what was done was done, and I had to live with it.

I turned and aimed the torch up into the dark, at Alpha Centauri, and watched the beam disappear.

But Bluff Knoll wasn’t the place for her, and that made me sad.

I dreamed of water.

Bright moonlight rippled into my eyes. The moon was close, the disc huge, white, and smooth.

A lake stretched for kilometers to my left. Just across the way, bare, jagged mountains reared from the water into the night. A meteor blazed across the sky, dimmed out, and thunder rolled across the water and echoed off the cliffs.

There were no trees, no grass, no bushes, no animals or insects. If life existed here yet, it was in the water or in the sky. Beside me, my father’s urn rested on the coarse sand.

The place was sterile, and reminded me of Heartrock after the waterhole had gone mad. But now I didn’t feel threatened; instead, I felt old.

A hand thrust above the surface of the water. It looked human except it was covered in fine scales. A plain gold ring circled the forefinger. The hand held a naked baby above the water.

I was still and silent, unable to move, but I felt my presence there was sanctioned, as a witness.

The hand threw the baby up onto the shore, where it floated gently to rest beside the urn. The hand disappeared and a woman cried; my heart wrenched at the sorrow contained in that sound. A wake as of something swimming under the water drew away from the shore. The baby grew into a child and stood up on the sand. I recognized the features of the girl I had shot.

The girl picked up the urn and then waved goodbye to the lake. She disappeared, whisked away like a reflection between mirrors, towards the sheen of moonlight on a distant, much smaller, body of water.

When I woke, I picked up Dad’s urn and climbed down off the mountain. The sun was just lifting above the horizon. Soon the first tourists would arrive.

I opened the gun locker and stood staring at her. Her wound had almost fully closed over, and dusky skin was growing over the scales. The stone at her navel blazed green in the sunlight.

I lifted her head clear. Water dripped from her hair. I kissed her gently on the lips, once, and lowered her back under the surface.

We were going back to Heartrock.

THREE

The void stood ahead in the night sky.

It was like the black glow I had seen in the water at Heartrock, but now it stood above the landscape like a signal fire, the promise of darkness and emptiness, the removal of life. It wasn’t a blackness, I could see the stars through it and, during the afternoon driving across the gibber guided by the GPS system, I could sense it behind the sunlight—had been able to sense it ever since turning off the Eyre Highway. The feeling overshadowed my impatience as the Toyota bounced laboriously across the stony plain. I had become attuned to the wyrde.

When, as I got closer, the GPS went haywire—telling me I was in Rabaul, of all places—the void stood like a beacon above the horizon, both guiding me onwards yet warning me away.

In the gun locker, the girl’s wound was healed, waiting for her to come back to life. The water had drained away as unknowably as it had come. Expecting nothing, but feeling an indefinable sense of what might be possible, I had nestled Dad’s urn beside her head. Surely it couldn’t work, he was dust. But she had healed, and I continued to hope, and the urn hadbeen in my dream.

Whatever was happening would soon be over.

The attack began with the clunk of a stone. At first I thought it had been thrown up into the chassis by the wheels. But then the rattling clunk came again, from behind, against the side of the tray, and instinctively I swung the wheel away from the sound. The next one I saw in the headlights, silhouetted against the lee side of one of the great sand dunes that ran north-south through the desert, parallel to my route. A rock stirred from the gibber, hovered a moment, then came at the Toyota, accelerating, bouncing off the grill. I turned towards the dune and drove a little way up, where the sand was still firm, then drove along the side of it, away from the rocks on the desert floor. The Toyota leaned like a drunkard and the wheel twisted in my hands. Steering in sand is like steering a boat—the wheels acting like rudders pointed where I needed go. Keep the speed a steady forty kph, and no sudden moves. An easy target.

The stones came crashing in from the downhill side, aimed at the gun locker, a hail of stone out of the corner of my eye. But the locker was galvanized steel—the safest place she could be. The din was incredible. I drove hunched forward over the steering wheel. The window beside me shattered, showering me with glass, and I felt the passage of stones behind my head.

Then the gibber stopped, the ground at the base of the dune covered in sand.

I slanted the Toyota down off the dune and drove on as fast as I dared, eager to cover as much distance as possible before the next assault.

Here I was, delivering a dead girl into the heart of a psychic storm that would strip my bones of…. I remembered once, sitting on the beach at Cottesloe watching the girls jogging past in their shorts and the sun setting behind the ships threading their way through the islands, James had asked if I believed in God. “No,” I said. Then he asked if I believed in anything else, freedom, capitalism, terrorism, and I replied: “Just more dogma.”

“You’ve gotta believe in something,” he replied.

“Why?”

Then the sand began moving up around his legs. He looked at me and said, “Please help me. You’ve got to believe!”

I shook my head. The sand moved around his waist, then his chest, as if he were sinking into the beach.

“Please believe!”

“No!” I shouted. The sand covered his head, his fingers scrabbling at the surface as if he were trying to pull himself over the edge of a cliff.

“Please!” He disappeared in the sand. The surface bulged, and then was still.

Please believe? James would never say that. I slapped my face, and night returned.

The memory had beenthe next assault. What would be next?

I wanted to turn around and drive back to Perth, leave the girl lying on the sand and leave the waterhole to whatever it was becoming in her absence. Yin and yang.

A vision of long, henna-coloured hair and a smiling face—a smile I hadn’t even seen—drifted before my eyes. The vision was followed by the memory of my father hugging me on top of Bluff Knoll. I couldn’t betray those images. I wasn’t alone in this.

The void became clearly defined against the stars. It was nearer now, much nearer after the dream. The headlights showed tire tracks I had made eight days ago.

Heartrock loomed ahead. I had been thinking of this for days, trying to decide what to do, trying to plan, but not knowing what I would face.

Once again the headlights showed stones stirring on the desert floor. I twisted the wheel away from the tracks I had been following, and aimed the Toyota at the rock slope. The first rush saw me thirty meters up off the sand, but then I geared back into low and concentrated on the slope. A boulder trembled ahead, and I swerved, letting it thunder past.

If I was at the peak, the goddamned waterhole couldn’t get at me with rocks, or boulders.

It took five minutes to force the Toyota up the final two hundred meters. I stopped the ute and got out. For a moment I was fooled by the stillness of the night.

Then I looked up. The stars had gone out.

I pulled out the Remington and aimed at the sky.

The shotgun blasted into the darkness, the muzzle flashes unnaturally dim, the crack of the shots muffled, like shooting with a blanket wrapped around the barrel.

Shoot the sky? I laughed as I dropped the gun. Might as well piss into the wind.

But I did it again, this time with the Anschutz. The bullet left a track like a meteor. I reloaded, fired again. Just fireworks. The only difference one of affect, of my emotions. Should Ibelieve? In what?

I jumped back into the Toyota, switching on the headlights and letting it roll down the slope towards the waterhole. The quickest and easiest way to get the girl back into the water was to run the ute off the rock into the water. But could I walk out of here? Five and a half hundred kilometers of desert on foot? The desert would trap me, too. I needed the ute.

The headlights dimmed. I braked, slipped the Toyota back into gear. The headlights dimmed further. Then I couldn’t see at all. I couldn’t risk the vehicle.

Working by the feel of the steering wheel in my hands, I turned the Toyota so that it pointed across the slope and parked it. Then I climbed out, and worked around to the tray. I could see nothing. The vehicle rocked as if buffeted in a high wind. I fumbled the keys into the padlocks, threw back the lid of the gun locker, and the nothing became tinged with green, centered on the jewel in her navel.

I felt inside the locker, found her and pulled her over my shoulder. A fireman’s carry again, leaving one hand free. Dad’s urn was next. Again I felt that unreasonable, that impossible hope.

The Toyota rocked again. I found the edge of the tray, sat, felt down with my feet until they touched rock. I stood there for a moment, feeling her hair against my arm. The void had a faint green tinge, the jewel in her navel blazing against my shoulders. I felt no heat. I couldn’t even see the urn inches in front of my face when I held it up, just the void like green silt in water.

I slid one foot in front of the other, feeling ahead for the surface. If I followed the steepest slope, I would find the waterhole. How far?

A rhythmic pounding came from behind me, and I scrabbled sideways. There was a rush of air, and the crashing of something massive through the soles of my boots. Another boulder.

It hadn’t given up.

I had no time to be careful. I stepped out, and then jogged down the slope, feeling with my feet for clues, madly waving the urn for balance, desperately searching my memory. What had Heartrock looked like? The girl’s weight slammed at my shoulders. My legs burned with the effort of staying on my feet.

Air blasted past my face. The temperature crashed. Ice formed inside my mouth. Was I still going down? I closed my eyes and stood still a moment to be certain. I didn’t fall, so my balance was good. Down was thatway.

The last of the air rushed past, and then I couldn’t breathe at all. My lungs pumped in and out, but sucked at nothing. The void had become vacuum.

How far?

Another five paces and I stumbled and crashed to my knees. Pushed to my feet. Another ten paces. Soon I would fall and not get up.

Then my right foot fell, scraped rock, and fell again. My left knee smashed into the edge of the rock and I tumbled forwards. A burst of white lit the green, and that was all.

I woke face down on the sand, and shivered.

Lifting my head, I saw blue sky, the she-oak out in the desert, my little row of animal graves, the dry creek bed, my old campsite … The void had gone. I rolled over and stood. The Toyota was in the most bizarre place … If I’d driven any further down the slope it would have taken a nose dive over a ten meter cliff. How I had found my way around that, I don’t know.

But I hadn’t been alone.

The water was at my feet. I saw tadpoles duck behind some reeds. Less life than there had been before, but life, and already established.

Dad’s urn had gone.

“Hey!” I shouted. No answer.

“Hey, what’s your name?” I called.

Still no answer.

I waded into the water up to my knees. It was cold, but refreshingly so. “Where’s my father?”

I saw a ghostly image of the girl against the wall of Heartrock, behind it a fading impression of other people: my father, an old woman, a boy, a pregnant teenage girl. How many people had been cremated that day? Only one mattered.

“I want him back!” I cried, and splashed further into the pool. I swam to the rock wall and tried to climb onto the slick surface, but fell back.

He is my price for what you did.

She was standing on the shore behind me. It was the first time I had seen her alive and whole, her hair falling past her shoulders, the stone once again a dead black thing in her navel. She was at once young, lithe and beautiful, but also old—geologically old. She didn’t just live in this land, she was a part of it. I swam back across the waterhole, climbed out, and fell to my knees, unable to approach her, to touch her. How could I love something so old?

“I can’t leave him here alone.”

Look at them, she waved at the other ghosts. None of them are alone.

I stayed at the waterhole all that day, sitting on the sand, taking potshots with the Anschutz, watching the bullets flash into the water and minutes later wash up beside me on the sand. The game soured quickly, and I threw the rifle into the water in disgust.

Dad was gone.

That night, I dreamed of shooting her again, loading her back into the gun locker in the Toyota, and driving off, stealing the light away with me, leaving a decaying, ever blackening void in the desert. I would find some secluded stretch of river in north Queensland and let the water there bring her back to life. I would live bathed in light, and the void would never touch me until the day I died.

I woke in a panicked sweat long before dawn.

In the morning, I drove away. This time I headed north, further across the desert and away from everything and everybody I had known.

Bill Congreveis an author, critic, editor and independent press publisher who lives in Sydney, Australia. He reviews science fiction and horror for Aurealismagazine, Australia’s largest circulation genre magazine, and has acted as a judge for the Aurealis Awards on five occasions. His stories have appeared in Aurealis, Crosstown Traffic, Intimate Armageddons, Tenébrès, Event Horizon, Terror Australis, Bonescribesand Passing Strange. He runs MirrorDanse Books (www.tabula-rasa.info/MirrorDanse/), an independent publisher of science fiction and dark fantasy. A collection of vampire stories, Epiphanies of Blood, was published in 1998. His anthology of Australian horror fiction called Southern Bloodwas published late 2003. Forthcoming projects include another collection and a novel.

Author’s Note

I’ve driven across the Nullarbor about a dozen times, in one direction or the other. The Australian landscape is ancient, yet European settlement began only a couple of hundred years ago. Traditional European faery stories don’t sit well in an Australian environment, yet there is magic here. For me, that magic lies in the sense of wonder I find in traveling the landscape, from the scarecrow in the passenger shelter of an outback tram line that hasn’t been used for fifty years, to the “dead boot” tree on the side of the Lasseter Highway near Uluru. In this story I not only wanted to find that magic so that others might also feel it, but to relate the magic to something as old as the landscape itself.

The West Australia Department of Agriculture maintains teams of rangers at Esperance and Eucla to eradicate feral wildlife, and the few waterholes in desert regions are a key part of their strategy. However they don’t send solitary rangers of the protagonist’s age into the desert alone for extended periods. That’s my artistic license. Thanks to those who helped with the story. All errors are mine.