| |
There was an urban legend
About a wandering man
He roamed the many countries
Adrift, without a plan
Where he came from, no one knew
His origin obscure
But his presence caused a stir
The fear of him was pure
They tried to go and find him
The infamous enigma
To see him in the flesh
The one they call the Drifter
They were basically a bunch of amateurs with some rented equipment, way out of their depth, and they knew it. Navigating their way across Southern Vietnam in the rumbling 4x4, cameras and emergency gear bundled all around them, they couldn’t help feeling like a bunch of frauds.
There were three of them: Josh, Denis, and Lance. Josh was the unofficial leader, the one who’d put this insane plan together, the one who was crazy enough to have actually come up with the idea in the first place. They were making a low-budget documentary, travelling around South East Asia gathering footage, and, even after two months into the project, none of them could believe that they were actually doing it.
Laying down the money for the plane tickets, cameras, shipping fees, hotels, hired vehicles, and all of the other unexpected costs associated with the project had been brave—or stupid—enough, but the actual subject of the documentary itself was arguably even braver. Possible names upon release included: The Search for the Drifter, The Hunt for the Drifter, and The Man that Time Forgot.
If you were to mention the name Drifter to most members of the general public you’d most likely get a blank expression; either that, or people would perhaps think that you were talking about some kind of chocolate bar. Mention it in a pub and someone might think that you were referring to a new sports car. But if you were to mention the name whilst in the company of certain niche circles, however, people who were inclined to spend vast amounts of their time scouring the internet in a darkened bedroom binging on strange videos, it would trigger a look of knowing recognition as an icy chill ran up their spine.
The legend of the Drifter went back for generations. Hearsay and old wives tales of a wandering, timeless man had been in circulation around the globe for decades and beyond, but with the advent of cameras in the 19th century, followed by the ubiquitous rise of smart phones in the 21st, there was now a sizeable amount of photographic and digital evidence to back up these ancient tales. Nobody really knew anything about the Drifter, but that certainly didn’t stop people from speculating. Some people claimed that he was the ghost of an escapee from a lunatic asylum, others claimed that he was a government spy. Certain researchers and investigators swore that he was the result of a botched laboratory experiment, whereas some believed that he was a robot or a cyborg. And, if one cared to comb through special forums for long enough, they would find posts claiming that the Drifter was actually Elvis or D.B. Cooper.
The first photograph of the Drifter surfaced all the way back in 1892. To describe the picture as being grainy would be an understatement. Shot out on the Yorkshire Moors in the north of England by a dog walker, the black and white image showed a spindly figure strolling along in the middle distance, surrounded by grassy slopes. The thing that led many people to believe that this hazy figure was the Drifter was the distinct shape of a wide hat upon his head. Most of the tales and legends surrounding the Drifter included descriptions of a wide black hat, something like a fedora or a warped cowboy hat, along with the rest of his black attire.
Other photos popped up here and there during the first half of the 20th century, but the turning point for most people was a video clip that emerged in 1984. Shot on a family camcorder in a rural hillside area in Tenerife, the recording showed a tall, gaunt figure traipsing across a sandy, cactus-infested field adjacent to a disused industrial estate. Despite only being about twenty seconds long, the clip clearly displayed a figure which strongly resembled the standard description of the Drifter, reigniting the ancient legend for a new generation of curious, impressionable minds.
And since the famous Tenerife clip there had been others uploaded onto the internet, originating from all four corners of the globe. Teenagers exploring a deserted airbase in Russia uploaded a brief clip in 2007 of a darkly dressed man loitering near a metal hangar, backpackers in Japan uploaded a video of a “wandering beast” walking through a forest in 2010, some shaky footage from Turkey in 2013 showed a hatted man walking along a rocky shoreline, and in 2018 a clip surfaced in Cambodia showing a disturbing figure shuffling through the remains of an old temple on the periphery of Phnom Penh.
For some, the most disturbing aspect of all of these photos and video clips was the way that the Drifter moved and carried himself. A common thread among all of the separate sightings was the lethargic, drained movements of his gangly limbs, like some kind of slo-mo button had been pressed. A certain graininess or haziness seemed to be present on every picture and video of the Drifter, but it couldn’t always be explained by crude camera equipment or bad weather. Eye witnesses sometimes described a difficulty focusing on the man, like an invisible film covered his ragged clothing and lofty physique.
The team’s last port of call had been Phnom Penh, where they’d managed to gather some half-decent footage of the temple where the Drifter had been spotted, plus a few brief interview clips of local tuk-tuk drivers explaining how they’d seen a “strange foreigner” walking along the shore of the Mekong River for a few weeks before he suddenly vanished, never to be seen again.
The newest sighting of all, however, had occurred just three months ago, and it’d been in a semi-rural area in Vietnam, hence the reason Josh and his team were now driving through the outskirts of Sài Gòn in the sweaty, afternoon heat.
* * *
The Vietnamese roads had been chaotic and hectic since they’d left the car rental lot, packed with mopeds, motorbikes and speeding buses that stopped for no one. Families of three or four rushed past on all sides, all on one bike, along with delivery drivers carrying stacks of unsecured boxes behind them on the seat.
They were travelling along a road called Đường Mễ Cốc, a long pot-hole-ridden stretch that ran parallel to the Kênh Tàu Hủ River in District 8. The latest sighting had been witnessed and filmed by a local man to the area known as Chú Đức, and after some correspondence online with his English-speaking daughter, the man and his family had agreed to show them the original footage as well as answer any questions they had.
‘This is it,’ said Josh, sat in the passenger seat looking down at the map app on his phone. ‘Take this turning here.’
Denis, who was sat behind the steering wheel covered in sweat and dust, nervously steered the vehicle across the never ending tide of mopeds and motorbikes, taking a small slip road that ran beside a concrete bridge. Lance, the youngest of the three of them, was in the back of the vehicle, trying unsuccessfully to insert a new battery into one of the cameras.
After a couple of sharp turns they found themselves driving down a narrow alleyway with rows of colourful houses on either side, and low-hanging electrical wires dangling from wooden posts that threatened to snag the roof of the car. For a moment they all thought that they’d taken a wrong turn, but up ahead a small cluster of locals came into view, waving them over to a sliding metal gate on the right-hand-side.
‘Hello,’ said a young woman, as they climbed out of the car.
She was about mid-twenties, long black hair flowing down either side of her smooth face, with a floral dress covering her slim body. Her English was broken, but intelligible.
‘Hello,’ said Josh. ‘Nice to meet you. You must be Ngân.’
‘Yes, yes,’ she smiled. ‘And this is my father, Đức.’
Đức was a friendly-looking man of roughly middle-age. A large grin seemed to be constantly present on his weathered features, and a semi-casual collared shirt hung from his thin shoulders.
‘Please come inside,’ said Ngân, waving a hand towards a blue house with a corrugated roof which formed part of a mini neighbourhood.
They all went inside the house, watched closely by an assortment of neighbours who sat on their doorsteps or lay in hammocks. Once inside the main living room they sat themselves down on the tiled floor, and was brought a tray of fresh spring rolls and iced tea from a woman who Josh guessed was Đức’s wife.
‘Cảm ơn,’ said Josh, to the woman, reeling off one of the survival phrases he’d memorised during the plane journey over.
‘My father, he fish by the river,’ said Ngân, sitting opposite them all. ‘He saw strange man by the old hospital, and he film.’
Most of the details were already known to Josh, and he’d even seen a small section of the video already, but he nodded and listened politely as the girl spoke.
‘The man, he walk around one of the old buildings, but my father filmed him for a while.’
‘How did you know who he was?’
‘I show video to one of my friends, and she tell me that he’s the ghost. After that, I put video online.’
‘But how did your father know? Why did he film him in the first place?’
‘The ghost is famous here,’ said Ngân, running a hand through her glossy black hair. ‘After people see it in Cambodia, it famous here.’
Ghost, thought Josh. He’d been wondering how the Drifter would be perceived in Vietnam, and now he knew. ‘Can we see the video?’ he said, at last.
‘Yes, you can see,’ said Ngân, turning her amiable gaze towards her father, who then rose to his feet and retrieved his mobile phone from the armrest of a lacquered, wooden sofa.
The grin on her father’s face widened and morphed into a smile of genuine excitement as his fingers swiped at the device’s screen, eagerly searching for the infamous video that’d gone viral on certain websites. The phone was then passed over to Josh, and his two companions leaned closer to him, itching to see the full footage in its entirety.
The first thing they saw on the small screen was a shaky view of the Kênh Tàu Hủ River. After a few seconds the shakiness levelled out, and a crumbling building came into view over on the opposite bank. For a while, nothing happened and nobody was to be seen. An excited mumbling could be heard from behind the camera, presumably from Đức, but the dusty landscape was empty apart from a couple of stray dogs hobbling about. But then, like a wiry apparition entering the frame from another dimension, the unmistakable outline of the Drifter came into view. His slow, fuzzy form undulated across the dirt and gravel like a dark snake standing upright, the blacked-out windows of the old hospital serving as a macabre backdrop to his unsettling gait.
‘That’s him all right,’ Josh muttered, squinting down at the section of unseen footage with keen, borderline obsessive, focus.
In line with the several other videos of the Drifter, the black-clad figure appeared to be completely oblivious or indifferent to the fact that he was being filmed, heading towards some unknown destination off screen with his long steps. He eventually disappeared around the back of one of the dilapidated hospital buildings, his mirage-like outline merging into the simmering heat waves of the sun-beaten vista.
Josh handed the phone back to Đức and thanked him. Then, he turned to the young woman. ‘We’d like to interview your father on film as part of our documentary. Would you be able to act as an interpreter? Your voice will go over the top of his when it’s broadcast.’
‘Yes, I help you,’ she said, her deep brown eyes lighting up with curiosity. ‘That’s fine.’
Looking over at both of his comrades, Josh said, ‘Let’s do this.’
If the neighbours within the small congregation of houses had been secretly curious about Josh and his team when they first arrived, they were now not even bothering to hide it. A wall of onlookers huddled around the open doorway of the house as Josh interviewed Đức in front of a chunky, tripod-mounted video camera, the lighting made dramatic with the help of a couple of strategically-placed lamps and mirrors. The interview lasted for around ten minutes, and they all knew that the intense scene would add a considerable amount of value to the documentary once it was released. Đức was very open to all of the questions that were put forward to him about his encounter with the Drifter, and his daughter Ngân translated his answers very well.
Once it was all over, Josh had just one more question for the man.
‘Can you take us there?’ he asked, in his friendliest tone.
Ngân leaned over to her father and whispered a few words into his ear. When he nodded in response, the whole team felt butterflies in their stomachs—the most important stage of the documentary was about to be put into motion.
* * *
They were back in the 4x4, rumbling along the riverside highway, this time accompanied by Đức and Ngân. Denis was driving, following translated directions from Ngân as she leant over the back of his seat. There was a tense, nervous atmosphere in the car as they made their way through the quiet town, as though they were driving into the arms of a beast that lurked just out of sight.
It didn’t take too long to find the old hospital, around twenty minutes or so passing tiny food outlets and empty coffee shops, but when they arrived they were far from relieved. Worried, disappointed looks were present on all of their faces as they parked the car and took in the sight before them, their hopes emptying away. It wasn’t the unsettling eeriness of the old medical facility that drained their spirits, nor was it the unbearable heat that showed no sign of easing off—it was the ten-foot-high barbed wire fence that menacingly loomed before them.
‘What the hell is this?’ grumbled Josh, squinting up at the long steel fence with despair seeping into him.
Ngân came up beside him, sensing his confusion and worry. ‘Maybe it’s police fence,’ she said. And, after an awkward silence, she added, ‘I don’t know when they did it.’
Things had been going relatively well so far. They had some pretty good footage and interviews to use, all filmed on location, but the success of the project ultimately rested on Josh getting some close up shots of the hospital. Even if he didn’t manage to get an exclusive clip of the Drifter himself the show could still do well, but at the very least he had to get into the derelict hospital and film some of the interior. This latest video clip of the Drifter in Vietnam was rapidly becoming the most famous one of all, and exploring the building for the documentary was of paramount importance. This realisation, along with the searing afternoon heat, was grating away at Josh.
‘Well that’s just great, isn’t it?’ he fumed, finally giving in to his irritation. ‘How are we supposed to get in there now?’
Denis and Lance were short of ideas, the vast array of anti-trespassing signs and tall steel posts stunning them into silence. They were both avoiding Josh’s gaze, but after a few moments Denis cleared his throat and came up with a suggestion:
‘We’ll have to just get some shots of the exterior, and then maybe add some commentary over the top of it.’
‘Shots of the exterior?’ sighed Josh. ‘You think I’ve come all the way out here just to get some shots of the exterior? You can’t even see the bloody exterior, anyway! It’s fifty metres away and obscured by that poxy fence!’
‘Well, I’m sorry Josh! What am I supposed to say? I was just—’
‘Okay, okay. I’m sorry,’ said Josh, taking a few deep breaths. ‘I’m just getting stressed right now.’ He wiped some sweat from his brow, then turned towards Ngân and her father who were standing by the car. ‘Ngân, what’ll happen if we go in there?’
‘You mean, go through the fence?’
‘Yes.’
Sweeping a strand of charcoal-black hair from her forehead, she looked over towards the metal barrier with unease. ‘I don’t think it’s good idea. The police, they arrest you.’
Josh paced around for a while, kicking the stones and gravel as he pondered the predicament. He wasn’t prepared for this, and yet he should’ve been. He should’ve seen something like this coming; it was just the kind of unexpected hurdle that arose whilst embarking on a crazy adventure of this kind. There was really only one option available to him if he wanted to make the documentary a success. Denis and Lance must’ve known this, too, because they were still avoiding his gaze, fiddling with some tripods and lenses in an effort to make themselves invisible.
‘There’s only one thing for it,’ said Josh, coming to a halt before his two cameramen. ‘We need to get ourselves in there, get the golden footage we need, and then leave.’
‘What about the police?’ said Lance. ‘You heard the girl.’
‘If the police come, we’ll just act dumb.’
‘Act dumb?’ snapped Denis, throwing his tripod down on the ground. ‘You’re talking about trespassing onto Vietnamese property! They’ll—’
‘Calm down, Denis! It’s an old hospital, for crying out loud! You make it sound like we’re about to rob a bank or something. The council probably put this fence up for health and safety reasons; to stop kids from running around in there, that’s all.’
‘I’m not doing it, Josh. And even if the police don’t come, what about the person, or thing, we might find in there? Have you thought about that?’
‘Have I thought about that?’ screamed Josh. ‘Of course I’ve thought about that! That’s why we’re here! That’s the sole reason we’ve been travelling across South East Asia for the last two months! Or did you not know that?’
‘Fuck you, Josh!’ shouted Denis. ‘There’s only so much I can take.’
‘Suit yourself,’ said Josh, shaking his sweaty head. ‘Lance? What about you? Are you with me?’
Lance, the youngest of the three of them, looked down towards his feet. ‘I’m sorry, Josh. I’m committed to this project, but I’m not willing to get arrested in a foreign country. I’m just not.’ The words fell from the young man’s mouth in a weak spill, like the utterance of a schoolboy shamefully turning down a dare.
‘I see,’ spat Josh, derisively. ‘Well, I suppose I’ll have to go in there by myself. You two can wait out here and look pretty.’ Walking over to the boot of the car to grab a camera bag, he added, ‘Make sure you don’t break a nail or anything.’
‘Come on, Josh!’ cried Denis. ‘You’re being unreasonable! You’re obsessed over this thing!’
Denis never got a reply. Josh ignored his outburst and stormed off towards the fence with a camera bag slung over his shoulder, leaving all of them to watch on in disbelief. Nobody tried to stop him as he angrily tore up a corner of one of the fence posts, yanking it back and forth until a sizeable gap had been created. Nor did anyone try to stop him as he painfully dragged himself through the gap on his hands and knees, ripping his shirt and trousers in the process.
Moments later, once he was on the other side of the fence, he followed the exact path that the Drifter wandered along on the video, disappearing around the back of the same crumbling structure, its cracked brickwork rising up from the dirt like a rotten, decaying tooth.
* * *
Obsessed? Yeah, too right I’m obsessed, thought Josh, as he walked gingerly around the deserted medical facility. He’d been obsessed about this thing before it’d even begun, obsessed after first hearing about the legend of the Drifter as a child in his primary school playground. Solving the mystery had turned into his main purpose in life, his ultimate ambition, and he certainly wasn’t going to let a barbed-wire fence stop him from doing it.
It was getting later into the afternoon now, but the relentless tropical sun was still smothering the land like a humid blanket, scorching the cracked concrete edges of the various buildings. The atmosphere was eerie, mysterious, borderline miasmic, and Josh’s senses were on overdrive as he nervously looked around. But apart from a few rats scurrying around, and a steady trickle of cockroaches crawling over the empty beer cans and plastic bottles lining the curbs, there was no sign of life.
Things changed when he turned a corner, however, creeping silently around the edge of a crumbling plastic security hut. There was a sudden shift in the air, a feeling that he was no longer alone, and the dry landscape heaved with tension. The main hospital building towered over him like an overgrown tombstone, and the setting sun shone through its empty window frames creating bizarre, surreal shadows over the stony floor. These shadows stretched out before Josh like long grey monoliths, the windows giving them a grid-like effect.
It was on one of these shadows that Josh saw the first sign of movement. A shape passed across one of the square window frames on the ground, a silhouette crossing from one edge to the next, and the sight of it took his breath away. By counting the windows cast across the shadow, Josh calculated that whoever was in the hospital was up on the fourth floor.
Did I just see the Drifter?
An overwhelming wave of panic and fear took hold of Josh as he contemplated this question, as well as an impulse to leave. But leaving was absolutely out of the question, and he knew it. Not only was he in serious debt due to the expenses of the expedition, not only had he committed a ridiculous amount of time and effort travelling and preparing, but now he’d also pissed his two cameramen off in a big way. Redemption was the only way out of this mess, and an award-winning documentary was the thing he needed to pull it off. A prize-winning cult hit would pay off the debts, make all of the stress and hassle worthwhile, and win back the respect of his fellow crew members. Was he scared? Yes. He was terrified, even. But so what? This was it. This was his moment, this was his dream, and he was doing it.
Moving stealthily like a cat, he prepared to enter the hospital.
* * *
The interior of the hospital was like a setting for a demented dream. Old fashioned relics and artifacts of a time gone by sat in every crevice of every room and hallway, all covered in dead flies and dust. Metal trolleys with torn tablet boxes in their compartments sat beside stairwells, bed frames with mouldy mattresses occupied empty wards, and small storage cupboards here and there were filled with broken mops and half-disintegrated rubber gloves.
Josh recorded all of this through the lens of his camera, working his way up the many floors with the device held up against his chest. Terror and trepidation rattled his bones and ignited his nerves, but he refused to give in to it. He was going to confront whoever, or whatever, lurked upstairs above him, no matter what the outcome may be.
It was on the third floor that he began to hear noises.
Light footsteps and shuffling started to echo down the concrete stairwell, a peculiar sound that permeated straight through to Josh’s core. A voice seemed to accompany the sound, but the exact words were too distant and low to make out. This unsettling murmuring and shuffling continued as he climbed the filthy, littered staircase, and he followed it carefully.
His earlier calculation had been right: the sound was emanating from the fourth floor of the building. It eventually led him to the open doorway of a dormitory, where he lingered for a moment whilst peering in. The long room was filled with intense rays of orange light as the sunset penetrated through the remaining glass panels and empty frames, highlighting the spirals of dust and dirt that hung over the empty beds like miniature sandstorms. At the far end of this rectangular room, behind what might’ve been an old doctor’s desk, a hatted silhouette pranced up and down like a shadow puppet.
Josh edged further into the room, his presence seemingly undetected or ignored, holding the camera at chest height. After a lifetime of searching and studying he was now actually in the same room as the Drifter, and he had no idea what to say or think. The Drifter, on the other hand, showed no sign of discomfort. His incessant pacing and shuffling did not falter for one second with Josh now in the close vicinity, he simply continued to twist and gyrate in his elastic way, letting a new string of words flow from the neat crease of his mouth:
Has it really come to this
Despite the planet’s size?
No nook or cave to sit and rest
To hide from prying eyes?
The voice. The voice. It was like a needle that pricked the centre of Josh’s heart, the tainted echo of a damaged instrument. The camera had slipped from Josh’s hands upon hearing it, but he hardly even noticed. For several minutes he could do nothing but stare across at the partially-obscured features hidden under the rim of the big hat, trying to decipher the meaning of the rhyme he’d just heard.
‘Wha...What? What do you mean?’ he eventually said.
Without breaking his graceful stride, the Drifter sang again:
This globe of many wondrous things
I’ve sat and watched it grow
It started off so desolate
But now it’s quite a show
Taking another few steps into the room, passing along the rows of rusty bed frames either side of him, Josh formulated his next response.
‘Who are you?’
A splendid thing you ask of me
For sometimes I forget
It’s been so long since I’ve been home
I sometimes have to guess
The combination of the loose pacing, the rhyming dialogue, and the piercing voice was making Josh’s head spin. It was like being in the presence of a tormented circus animal that’d been locked away in a cramped cage for too long, or a trapped insect buzzing away under an upturned glass. It took a large amount of discipline and self-control for Josh to hold himself together and think clearly amongst this onslaught of insanity, but he persevered. It’s been so long since I’ve been home? he thought. What could that mean? Calling out again to the moving figure up in front of him, Josh said:
‘Where do you come from?’
And then, another tainted melody rang out across the room:
My city is a distant speck
So far away from here
They banished me with no remorse
And did not shed a tear
The rays of sunlight cascading into the room made it hard to focus on the Drifter, but there was something else too. His nimble, arachnid limbs were clouded by a mirage-like haze, making the edges of his form flickered and blurred. Even his words seemed to lack solidity, undulating through the air before seeping into the listener’s skin.
‘So how long have you been here?’ asked Josh, straining his eyes through the dusty haze.
The Drifter’s rhythmic pacing altered at this question, and he began to gravitate towards the old wooden desk. Then, in one fluid motion, he scooped up a small item from its surface and tossed it over to Josh.
There was a dirty, nasty war
It really was no fun
The soldiers sleeping in the dirt
They call it World War One
An antique whisky flask sat in Josh’s outstretched palm, and he looked down at it in bemusement. Its metallic surface was scuffed and dented, worn with age, but before he could comment on it another item was thrown over to him.
I once bore witness to a time
Caligula was king
The fights, the battles, and the deaths
A sight it did so bring
Now he was gazing down at a small Roman coin that he’d caught, the inscriptions barely visible. The implications of it were crazy, but things were about to get even crazier.
You want to go back further still?
For that, I can oblige
A token from an ancient past
All witnessed with these eyes
With a graceful twist of the torso, the Drifter hurled another small object over in Josh’s direction, which he barely managed to catch. This one was a reptilian tooth, large and sharp at its tip.
This beast I fought with my bare hands
In the Mesozoic
I roamed the plains with ancient forms
Mighty and heroic
‘Is this a dinosaur tooth?’ asked Josh, his face now solemn and deadly serious.
There was no reply to this, though. The Drifter was off again on his maniacal pacing, his dizzy wandering of the room, his...drifting. Josh was close to him now, only a few metres away, but he still couldn’t make out any crystal clear details. It was like trying to focus on something through a rain-spattered window, or trying to read a page of a book just seconds after waking from a long, deep sleep. This continuous confusion and failure to understand what was going on made Josh snap. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘How are you even here? How are you still alive?’
Like a gangly spider stumbling about in its web, the Drifter paced and sang his reply:
I broke the law, on my own land
And paid a hefty price
They dropped me down on this wet rock
Then rolled the dice of life
‘Dropped you down on this wet rock?’ Josh cried. ‘You’re from another planet?’
They wanted me to suffer hard
Throughout millennia
To live among the vicious forms
From their panspermia
This last word hovered around Josh’s head, circling his brain. He’d heard it somewhere before, probably on the internet. Panspermia? he thought. Isn’t that the theory that life on Earth came from another planet? He was pretty sure that it was, but he wasn’t certain. Fortunately, the Drifter had more to say:
Before they brought me to this place
In a shiny vessel
They strapped me down on to a bed
Injecting me with metal
Inside my body sits a sphere
No bigger than a dime
Its function is a simple one
To bend, and distort time!
Josh carefully placed the tooth and the rest of the items down on a bed beside him, and tried very hard to get his head around what he was hearing. If all of this was to be believed, he was in the presence of someone who’d lived through millions, if not billions, of years, witnessing the evolution of Planet Earth first hand. A time dilation device sat inside his slim body somewhere, keeping him young as he traipsed across the eternal landscapes. And as for the panspermia comment: was he trying to tell Josh that his race planted the seed of life on Earth 4.6 billion years ago?
‘Tell me more,’ cried Josh, determined to solve this torturous riddle. ‘Tell me what you’ve experienced.’
The Drifter’s haunting face stared out across the room from behind a thick sunbeam infused with dust, his pointy features lost in the glowing swirl. Then came a melody, a string of sounds that caused the hairs on Josh’s neck and arms to turn end-wise.
For hundreds of eternities
I’ve walked the Earth alone
I’ve scavenged things and pillaged things
And carved out many homes
The languages and dialects
I’ve seen and spoke them all
My eyes have seen ten million suns
They rise and then they fall
The population of this place
Is on a rapid rise
But I will always walk alone
And no one hears my cries
For perhaps the first time ever, Josh was seeing the Drifter not as a monster but as a victim. It was clear now that time had rendered him insane, the decades, centuries, and millennia melting his brain into a tortured mush. Always an outsider, he wandered along the periphery of the societies and cultures that he saw come and go, trapped in his own bubble of existence. Regressed into his own head, he lived out his lonely days within the walls of his cranium, his thoughts and musings heard only by him, the outside world nothing but a transient, ever-changing backdrop that had no place for him.
Maybe his rhyming talk was simply a way for him to occupy his mind, Josh thought, a distraction from the terrifying predicament that he found himself in. In the same way that an incarcerated man may develop eccentric, psychotic habits and rituals to pass the long hours in solitary confinement, the Drifter may have developed his own bizarre habits to pass the long millennia that he was trapped inside.
But what about this talk of panspermia? Josh had to know more.
‘What did you mean by panspermia? Did life on Earth come from another part of the universe?’
This life that’s all around you now
The life on planet Earth
It’s all a big experiment
Concocted and researched
My race came here with cells and genes
To see if they would grow
But they could not just stick around
To sit and watch the show
The evolution takes so long
For things to take a hold
So I was left here on my own
To watch the thing unfold
‘But what was your crime?’ asked Josh. ‘Why did your people leave you here like this?’
The crime that I was guilty of
That got me many years
Was my affront to their big plan
Of planting life down here
So there it was. The mystery that’d sat in the background of Josh’s life, as well as countless others, was now solved. The Drifter was a convict of his planet, sentenced to become an observer of an extraordinary biological project. The punishment for his crime of being opposed to the terraforming of Earth was to be left here alone to watch the evolutionary show unfold. But was his punishment eternal? Or would his race one day return to collect him and take him back to his distant city, wherever that was? Josh had neither the energy nor the willpower to find that one out. The atmosphere in the old hospital wing had become suffocating, the Drifter’s strong presence adding a sickly weight to the air. His agony and torment radiated outwards from his restless body, his loneliness and isolation surrounding him like a magnetic field.
It was time to leave. Without saying another word, Josh began to tip-toe back through the rows of empty beds, retreating to the doorway. The Drifter made no attempt to follow him. In fact, he didn’t even notice him leaving. Josh was merely another shape in the transient landscape, another meaningless object that came and went, another blurred movement in his peripheral vision.
There was one last shock for Josh before he left the room. Just a few feet away from the door, he lost his footing and almost dropped to the ground. He’d forgotten all about his camera, and he nearly stepped right on it. Once he’d steadied himself he picked it up and cradled it in his arms like a comfort blanket, then got himself out to the stairwell as quickly as he could.
To his emotionally-distressed eyes, the building appeared to warp and distort around him as he hurled himself down the chipped stairs, the architecture bending and breathing like the arteries of a concrete heart. He could still hear the Drifter’s shuffling and murmuring as he reached the ground floor exit, the faint rhymes orbiting the edges of his consciousness like the echoes or residue of an hallucinatory dream.
* * *
It took a while for Josh to navigate his way back out of the disused site. Stumbling around in a stupor, his bearings were all over the place. After stuffing the camera into his bag he searched for the hole in the fence that he’d made earlier, but it was easier said than done. And, once he’d gotten himself through the fence and away from the buildings, he was faced with a fresh problem—everyone was gone.
The area was deserted. As he stood there in a daze, head turning left and right for signs of life, all he could see was an empty patch of gravel where the 4x4 was previously parked. Denis and Lance were nowhere to be seen, neither were Ngân and Đức. Paranoid thoughts instantly began to surface in his mind: had the police turned up? Had there been some kind of accident? Were they all so pissed off at my decision to enter the hospital they simply left me to my own devices?
Things didn’t improve when he took his phone out of his pocket to make a call, either. There was no signal, no data, nothing. He’d purchased a new SIM card upon his arrival into the country; had it run out of credit already?
Effectively stranded in a small corner of Sài Gòn, all he could really think of doing was to walk back the way he’d come, following the roads that Denis had driven down on the way out there. If he could get himself out to the main road again, he could try to hail a cab and get back to Đức’s house. With any luck, they might all be there waiting for him.
The sky had grown very dark, the palm trees and empty shops lining the river discernible only as faint outlines, but he made it back out to the main road easily enough. There was a strange disorientation gripping him now, however, and everything around him seemed altered and unfamiliar. Houses passed by that he didn’t remember seeing on the way out, and even some of the bikes and cars on the road were peculiar-looking and sounded too quiet.
One of these slick, silent cars pulled over for him when he stuck out his hand, though, and it came as quite a relief. The offside door slid open on its own, and the driver—a middle-aged cabbie—waved him in. Flopping down in the passenger seat, a dazzling array of miniature screens and luminous buttons screamed out at him from the dashboard, and the driver had to call out to him twice to get his attention.
‘Err, sorry,’ Josh mumbled, fumbling around in confusion. ‘Can you take me to...’
It soon became apparent that communication was going to be quite hard, so he just pointed a finger in the direction he remembered the house being in, and attempted to direct the driver en route. And, surprisingly enough, it worked. About twenty minutes later the small alley that the house was on came into view, and things were looking promising.
But then it went strange again.
The driver didn’t seem to like Josh’s money, despite it all being in Vietnamese dong. The colourful bank notes first made the cabbie smile and chuckle to himself, but then, when Josh persisted and made it clear that this was how he was seriously intending to pay for the ride, the man’s smile transmogrified into an angry scowl. Tapping his finger impatiently against a card reader on the elaborate dashboard, he demanded some kind of digital currency. There was a flurry of shouted obscenities from the driver, and Josh was eventually pushed out of the car. A few seconds later, the cabbie sped off down the small road in a huff.
It wasn’t an ideal turnout by any means, but at least he was back at the house now. Walking over to the sliding metal gate, he peered in at the cluster of houses, then entered the small estate. To his horror and dismay, he noticed that even Đức’s house looked different than it did earlier, the paintwork and corrugated roof constituting a different design. How could this be?
He tapped on the front door a couple of times and waited. A few seconds later a young man answered who looked completely unfamiliar, as well as hostile.
‘Bây giờ, mày muốn cái gì?’ he said.
Peering over the man’s shoulder into the house, the entire layout of the living room looked different, the furniture of a completely different design.
What the hell’s going on? I don’t like this!
Josh had no idea what the man said, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t good. He’d never seen him before, and even the neighbours in the surrounding houses looked unfamiliar too. Sensing trouble on the horizon, he made a swift exit from the small estate and walked back out towards the main road.
A concrete bridge sat next to the main road and he stopped by it, taking a few minutes to gather himself and decide what he was going to do. He was alone in a foreign country, he had no vehicle, his money appeared to be useless, and, on top of that, he appeared to be losing his mind. Was this really happening? Was he dreaming? The encounter with the Drifter in the derelict hospital already seemed like a sketchy dream rather than reality, so he couldn’t rule it out.
Remembering that the camera was in his bag, he took it out to see what’d been recorded. The device came alive easily enough, despite having been dropped, and within seconds the rectangular screen lit up to reveal its usual symbols and functions.
He pressed play.
Shaky images of the crumbling stairwell began to play out, confirming that the experience had been real, and then things were reinforced even further when the Drifter’s dark silhouette came into view. The entire sequence of events played out as they should have, the scene crashing and shaking as the camera was dropped to the floor, but there was a huge anomaly that caused Josh’s eyes to widen as he watched the screen—the date and time.
Was he seeing this correctly? Or had he damaged the camera when he dropped it? Something was wrong, because the displayed date and time read: 20:42pm 7.2.82. Pulling his phone out again, he checked the time on there.
His heart did a cartwheel inside his chest, then a somersault for good measure.
The same thing was showing on his mobile phone: 20:42pm 7.2.82. There were two possible explanations that Josh could see. Either both of his devices were faulty, displaying the same incorrect date and time for some unknown technical reason, or sixty-odd years had passed by while he was in the hospital. The former was more likely, of course, and more desirable, but bearing in mind the altered state of his surroundings, coupled with his awkward experiences with the cab driver and the man at the house, the latter was looking much more like the truth.
Had the Drifter’s time bubble distorted his own time line? Had he strayed too close to the spherical device mentioned in one of his rhymes? He couldn’t believe it, he didn’t want to believe it, but yet...he had to.
So what was he to do now? Hitch a ride to the airport? Try and catch a flight home? After a quick calculation in his head he worked out that both of his parents were probably long dead by now, along with most other distant relatives. And as for Denis and Lance? Even if they were still alive they’d both be octogenarians, old and frail and tucked away in some cosy nursing home somewhere. Maybe they’d remember him, maybe they wouldn’t.
Dark thoughts. Dark thoughts, indeed. A strong impulse to move suddenly washed over him, a desire to just walk into the night in an effort to distract himself from the terrible predicament he found himself in. He was now a lost soul wandering along the periphery of society, a forgotten face from another era.
The legend of the Drifter had been Josh’s main obsession for as long as he could remember, and solving the mystery had become his main purpose in life. Now, not only had he solved the mystery, he’d also become a Drifter himself, an outsider destined to roam, traipse, and drift through a lonely existence.
