Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

Christ! There was something ahead , on the road, running into the car lights! I jerked the wheel hard across, braked, swerved, nearly lost control. There was a wild screeching. The car tipped right, skidding, and I flinched, expecting it to roll. It didn’t. The wheels lifted, then fell back. The car stopped, sideways across the camber, headlights whitening trees. What in the name of God had I just seen?

It had appeared out of nowhere, loping diagonally along the road from right to left, glaring hideously in the lights, an unrecognisable thing. I sat paralysed, then wrenched my eyes to the left to look back, but outside the patch of car light there was only the black of the road and forest below dull sky. First move was to grab the shotgun. Then panic. The engine shuddered and died. Sudden, heavy silence packed the car, pressed in. I writhed around, left hand frantic for the ignition, found it, turned the key, the engine dead, stalled—come on, again, again, for God’s sake—it started. I rammed down the accelerator. Not in gear. First, first, where the hell was it— there . The gears crunch-connected, my foot came off the clutch and with a muscular spasm hauling the wheel round I was off. Wildly. The car lurched all over the road. My arms had no strength, I couldn’t steer. The terror had done something to my spine and the nerves of my shoulders; my right foot went numb thrust down on the speed pedal. Space rushed past. The black came quick at the patch of light. Faster.

I had glimpsed, briefly, a bone-white beast the size of a big dog or a calf, hairless, wet and pallid like an abortion. Its head was deformed, a mutant of dog and goat, yet fat and imbecile, wide mouth snarling to the roots of its teeth, and glistening with spit; the car lights had glared back from red points of eyes rimmed pink. I had never seen such a monstrosity, not even amongst Perrin’s worst experimental aberrations, and they were all mercifully dead. The double shock here was that this nightmare was alive, the only other living thing—

The car ran round bends squealing and roaring. How did I miss hitting the thing? It had gone straight at my left headlight but there’d been no sound or impact. I kept staring in the rear-view mirror half expecting the abomination to be coming after me; no, nothing but dark. That sounded biblical: abomination , it surfaced like some diseased vision from Revelations. The way the creature moved ! The slow lope totally alien to the run of a dog or calf, a kind of upright slithering…

Overwhelming fear had been dreadful enough inside the motel. Now it struck at me here, in half-dark on a remote road cut through hills and forest in the back of nowhere. I struggled to stop the panic. Calm down. It’s gone. You’re safe in the car. You have the gun. You’re safe. It wasn’t real. You were asleep for a second, it was a hallucination. Don’t think about it. Just a stray dog, or something, distorted in the light. Control it.

I drove on to Rotorua, the whole place standing dark, powerless, empty. The stench was the same as ever, like shit in hell. Clouds of white steam lurched in the distance and spurts of vapour were dissolving in midair over the road. There seemed to be movements everywhere. When I turned to look, they vanished.

I went fast down the main street, saw a hotel block on the left, turned off, drew up next to the main doors, switched off, and got out with the shotgun ready.

The only sound was a background hissing and rumbling, becoming more violent nearby in the bushes beyond the car park. Boiling water spattered up in a roar for a moment and then subsided. The bushes were coated with sulphurous powder. Some were dead. They stood out very pale against the edge of the darkness, trees from another planet, fuming suddenly. The air was thick, evil with heat.

I grabbed what I needed from the car and locked it. The hotel doors were open. I entered and latched them behind me. Shining a torch around I got a room key from reception and found the stairs. I went up six floors, let myself into the room, then locked and barricaded the door.

I stayed awake. My mind raced.

I know what I saw back there. If it was real then there were now things living on earth which should be dead, which defied every law of nature I ever knew. And there must be a reason for that. Something I could not live with, in any sense. It demanded my death.

And if what I saw had slid into my retina from inside my mind, then God help me.

I put the muzzle of the shotgun in my mouth and reached down to the trigger. My fingers touched the trigger guard. The gun barrel was hard steel. It tasted of metal and machine oil, a sour, hard taste. And I could do nothing. I took the gun away and laid it down.

When I was small there was a story about a boy in a forest walking along a path as night draws on. The trees make strange shapes. Shadows move and rustle. He is afraid to look back. He walks faster and the path strays until he is lost. The forest has a power to transform itself and to sense fear, and a power to change people. They never return. If they try to turn and go back they meet a terror.

It was so dark in this room. The night was starless, it seemed to go on forever. A long time in the past I would keep my eyes closed if I woke from a bad sleep and would think of words to plead for help, for the night to stop; but I never spoke them. When scared, I always thought, Oh God, or said to myself words like ‘God help me’, but they were just words and meant less than nothing. I had never been able to believe in God. Teachers had ransacked the Bible to cram morals into our minds like metal fillings drilled into teeth. There was small forgiveness in those stories. Animals were slaughtered, vengeance extracted, cities desolated, eyes and tongues rooted out, spikes hammered into wrists; the pain demanded belief to make sense. The more pain, the madder the belief. I remembered a man holding a Bible, his face tense, and the way the vein on his forehead writhed as if there was a worm beneath his skin straining to get out. God is not mocked. God is just. Close your eyes, pray, and you will be heard. I had not believed it.

At some time a rainstorm rattled across the space outside, running against the glass of the high windows. It went on quick to the west. I closed the curtains.

The beam of light from the torch revealed the things in the room one by one: chair, bed, gun, lamp, mirror, picture, chair. I moved to look at my image in the mirror and there was a pale skull there, shadowed black, the bone only millimetres beneath the stretch of skin. I propped the torch on a chair. My fingers went towards the glass and touched the tips of the fingers of the image. I put my hands up to my face. The reflection obeyed. It looked sad. And frightened. The eyes were hard to see, the shadows deep over lids and sockets. There was a frown.

I remembered being here with Joanne years ago. She would now be dead. Like everyone else. That was what the remnants of the crashed plane had meant. The passengers and crew could never return. Where would they return to ? The plane had crashed because everyone had vanished. The crash had not killed them. They could not reappear dead in the wreckage; they had never been part of that event. It had been caused only by their absence. They could not reappear alive unless time ran backwards and the plane somehow reassembled itself and flew back together again as it had been at 6.11 am five miles high. Both options were equally impossible. Time has no way to run back. Events are sealed.

Everyone has gone forever. Face it.

The image in the mirror moved its mouth. It was forming the beginning of syllables, fractions of words. The words had never made their way so far before; even now they carried scarcely any weight of meaning. They were worn down. The restraint normally held by the brain over the larynx and tongue and lips loosened now that acknowledgement had been made that there was absolutely no one to hear. The words were about love; a declaration, an admission, that once there had been somebody who had been loved. It was not extraordinary. For most, a fact as conventional as the word. But to the reflected figure now mouthing syllables of affection to shadows in a concrete cell on an empty planet to someone seeming dead so many times over, it had all been unbelievably strange and unexpected. How could expressions of love have been used? What emotions did they refer to? There had been no standard of comparison for those feelings. A life had functioned without them. How could they be known?