Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

I walked back, got into the car and reversed, then cautiously turned left and nosed the vehicle slowly into the wilderness. The hills were about three to five metres high and obscured the view on both sides and in front; the way curved slightly right, then left again, and the fronds of vegetation brushed against the car in places. Sulphurous smells confirmed that this was a volcanic area, or at least an area of geological weakness. I peered out intently at the track, watching for danger signs or patches of treacherous mud. The way led towards the steam. Ahead on the left I could see a pool half-overhung with dead ferns, steam drifting from the water across the track. The windscreen hazed over and the humidity increased. I stopped. This was too risky. I had only come this far because there was no room to turn around, no way to go back. Reversing would be awkward.

I opened the door and carefully got out. There were bubbling, demonic noises from the pool on the left, and similar and other sounds nearby from behind the hills. I trod along the track into the steam, but it seemed to thicken and become more clammy and hot, and I couldn’t see any further. The tangle of plants rising up on both sides seethed with vapours, a dead dark green and brown; the sun had vanished, and the atmosphere and odd sounds closed in on me. I stopped. The noises were secretive, unnatural. A pressurised hissing broke through undertones of heavy exhaling and mixed with the bubbling water to sound like a series of sighs trying to force their way up from beneath the surface and being drowned, falling back, trying again, the bubblings expelling furious energy out of suffocation.

I suddenly felt the onset of terror, a bad, hard fear coming at me from all this, the place, the noises, and something else watching me, consciously, very close.

There was a rustling in the ferns on the small hill to my left. I hadn’t got my shotgun. I turned to run back to the car, not wanting to see whatever was behind the mist.

But the haze cleared for an instant and I couldn’t move a muscle. For a fraction of a second I might even have been unconscious with shock. Then stupefied.

It was a human figure. A man.

Pointing a gun at me.

‘Stay there. Don’t move.’ Keeping the gun trained on me, he sidled down and stood about five metres away on the track. ‘You alone?’

I nodded. I couldn’t speak. The steam moved between us; his hands were raised with the rifle and his face obscured. He seemed to be wearing army gear, khaki trousers tucked into his boots, an anorak stippled with dark camouflage green, and a black woollen hat. He kept the gun levelled at me.

‘Put that bloody thing down,’ I managed to say. I hadn’t spoken to anyone for so long, my voice sounded unconnected to me. He stayed as he was.

‘Where you from?’ he said.

‘Auckland.’

‘Just you?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many people up there?’

‘None. Nobody.’ The realisation that I wasn’t alone was beginning to penetrate my mind, pushing aside the fear and danger. My voice caught in my throat. ‘I haven’t seen anyone since last Friday,’ I said. He seemed to hesitate and began to lower the gun. ‘Look. For God’s sake—’

There was a breeze from the south, and the air cleared as the steam was blown aside. He suddenly came into focus and I could see his face. He was a Maori. We stared at each other, and he relaxed even more, the tension going from his arms and shoulders. He held the rifle down.

‘Nobody?’ he said. I shook my head. The intentness of his eyes and face drained away and he looked as worn out as I must have looked and felt. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ he asked; ‘Where the bloody hell is everyone?’

Something crumbled inside me, as it must have inside him, with the revelation that we had each been alone and could tell each other nothing. I shook my head again.

‘I don’t know.’

Perhaps the disappointment was greater for him than for me, since I might have seemed to him more likely to know an answer. In that moment we appeared to have said everything we would ever say to each other; we had exhausted what was important. We faced each other blankly. He was uncertain what to do, and the gun made me nervous. Cautiously holding out my right hand, I said, ‘I’m John Hobson.’

There was a long pause, as though we were both frozen in an event which had slowed down outside normal space and time. Then he advanced towards me, the rifle held down in his left hand, his face still almost drained of expression, his right hand reaching up to clasp mine. The formality of shaking hands in the middle of so much strangeness reminded me of pictures of British explorers meeting after months of forcing their way through remote jungle alone. I didn’t know what else to do. We managed to smile at each other.

‘Apirana Maketu,’ he said.

What was even stranger was the fleeting idea which seemed to link us at the same moment, immediately after the reassurance of physical contact had confirmed for us both that we were real, living, flesh and blood human beings and not illusions or apparitions; and that was the faintest hint of recognition as our eyes stared closer. ‘Recognition’ would have been too decisive a word. It was rather more like a vague questioning look which people exchange when they mistakenly think they know each other and then realise they don’t, or can’t possibly, and yet in the act of dismissing the idea they’re really putting it to one side for further exploration. There was reassurance, and caution; for this and for all sorts of reasons, we weren’t sure about each other.

‘You’ve not seen anybody?’ I asked. He shook his head.

‘Went down to Napier, Hastings. Nothing. And up to Wairoa, Gisborne, all up the coast. That’s where I’m from. Tolaga Bay. Nobody there, back home, it’s just…’ The words had come out in a rush and he stopped and swallowed. Then, ‘D’you reckon…you reckon they’re all…?’

He was obviously thinking of his family. ‘I don’t think they’re dead,’ I replied, sensing that I ought to sound decisive and assert something, however little I might know. He very much wanted an assurance to hang onto. ‘Dead things didn’t disappear.’

He gazed at me, thoughtful, far off, his eyes still fixed on my face.

‘No.’ He nodded. ‘’S true.’

I’d avoided saying ‘corpses’. He knew that much, then; he must have found corpses. He nodded again, and came out of his thoughts with a tighter smile, lifting his right hand and clasping my left arm in a friendly gesture.

‘Gee, it’s good to talk to somebody,’ he said; ‘I was…I begun to think I was…you know? Porangi . Crazy. I mean, I couldn’t figure out why it was me, just me—’

It was my turn to nod agreement, but I couldn’t bring myself to return his gesture. I wasn’t in the habit of grasping people in matey embraces and it would have looked awkward and phoney if I’d even tried. Yet without knowing what to do, how to respond, I did feel the same thankfulness and rush of emotion.

‘And I thought it was just me,’ I said, and we grinned at each other. The puzzle seemed to have changed shape elusively, to have shrunk and expanded in different areas. Yet I felt it could be cornered now, and defeated.

‘Why us, then?’ he asked; ‘we must be special, eh?’

‘We must have something in common,’ I said, absurdly. He stood back and looked at me, in mock confusion. His face was lightened by very white teeth and the going of the frown, but he was quite dark-skinned and his eyes were very black and quick, scanning me up and down.

‘You don’t look like Ngati Porou to me,’ he said.

As if on cue we both burst out laughing like madmen, reeling around the ridiculous landscape, eyes watering, lungs heaving. The release was more than just the collapse of fear, tension, isolation, and everything else, it was a burst of noise for its own sake, for being alive, for getting our own back, for defiance and mockery at whatever had messed the universe into such clueless stupidity. Five minutes earlier, alone, it would have been a sure mark of mental disintegration.