J. Ballard - The Drought

They made their way along the fence, darting from the cover of one ruined house to another. The humps of car roofs and the blackened stumps of old watchtowers broke through the surface. The noise of the dogs rose from the far side of the building. A stairway led to the shopping level on the second floor. Ransom and Philip moved carefully up the steps to the open balcony. Drifts of dust, mingled with old cans and pieces of broken furniture, had been blown against the metal balustrade overlooking the piazza. Holding their spears, they crawled across to the railing. For a moment Philip hesitated, as if frightened by whom he might see below, but Ransom pulled his arm.

In the center of the piazza, some fifty. yards to their left, five or six dogs were attacking a group of plastic mannequins taken from one of the stores and set out on the pavement. The lean white forms leapt and snarled, tearing at the faces of the mannequins and stripping off the rags of clothing draped across their shoulders and waists. One after the other, the mannequins were knocked over, their arms and legs torn off by the snapping mouths.

A whiplike crack came from beyond the far end of the building, and the pack turned and raced off, two of them dragging a headless mannequin across the dust. Rounding the corner of the building, they disappeared among the ruined streets, the sharp cracks of the whip driving them on.

Ransom pointed to a detached head rocking in the gutter, seeing in the savaged faces the waxy images behind the store window in the riverside town. "A warning to travelers, Philip? Or just practice for the dogs?"

They returned to Catherine and Mrs. Quilter, and rested for a few minutes in the shade inside the hull of a wrecked barge. In a breaker's yard across the river was the skeleton of a large fishing trawler, its long hull topped by the high sternbridge that Jonas had paced like some desert Ahab, hunting for his white sea. Ransom glanced at Philip Jordan, and saw that he was staring up at the bridge, his eyes searching the empty portholes.

Mrs. Quilter sat up weakly. "Can you see my old Quilty?" she asked. During the past few days, as they neared Mount Royal, each of them had been generous with their water rations to Mrs. Quilter, as if this in some way would appease the daunting specter of her son. Now, however, with only two canteens left and the city apparently deserted, Ransom noticed that she received barely her own ration.

"He'll be here, doctor," she said, aware of this change of heart. "He'll be somewhere, I can feel it."

Ransom wiped the dust from his beard. The thinning hair was now as white as Miranda Lomax's had ever been. He watched the distant plumes of smoke rising along the course of the river. "Perhaps he is, Mrs. Quilter."

They left the trawler and set off toward the motorbridge, which they reached half an hour later. Outside the entrance to the yacht basin the remains of Mrs. Quilter's barge lay in the sunlight, a few burnt beams dimly out-lining its shape. She pottered over them, stirring the charred timbers with a stick, and then let herself be lifted back into the carts.

As they ploughed through the fine dust below the fishermen's quays, Ransom noticed that from here out to the white dunes of the lake the surface was composed almost entirely of the ground skeletons of thousands of small fish. Spurs of tiny bones and vertebrae shone in the dust at his feet. This coating of bone meal formed the brilliant reflector that illuminated the lake and the surrounding desert.

As they passed below the intact span of the motorbridge, Ransom let go of the shaft. "Philip, the houseboat!" Recognizing the rectangular outline buried in the sand, he ran through the drifts toward it.

He knelt down in the flowing sand, and brushed it away from the windows, then peered through the scored glass as Philip Jordan clambered up beside him.

Some years earlier the cabin had been ransacked. Books were scattered about, the desk drawers pulled out onto the floor; but at a glance Ransom could see that all his mementos, which he had gathered together before leaving Larchmont, were still within the cabin. A window on the port side was broken, and the sand poured across the desk, half-submerging the framed reproduction, Tanguy's image of drained strands. Ransom's paperweight, the fragment of Jurassic limestone, lay just beyond reach of the sand.

"Doctor, what about the water?" Philip Jordan knelt beside him, clearing the sand away from the window. "You had some water in a secret tank."

"Under the galley. Get in round the other side." As Philip stepped over the roof and began to drive the sand away, Ransom peered down again through the window. The care he had given to furnishing the houseboat, the mementos with which he had stocked it like some psychic ark, made him feel that it had been prepared in the future and stranded here ten years earlier in anticipation of his present needs.

"Over here, doctor!" Philip called. Ransom left the window and crossed the dust-covered roof. Catherine Austen was climbing the bank, gazing up at the ruins of her villa.

"Have you found it, Philip?"

Philip pointed down through the window; the floor of the galley had been ripped back to the walls, revealing the rungs of a stairwell into the pontoon.

"Someone else found it first, doctor." Philip stood up. He rubbed his throat, leaving a white streak across his neck. He turned and looked back down the river to the fishing trawler in the breaker's yard.

Ransom left him and began to climb the slope to the embankment of the bridge. The sand shifted, pouring away around his knees. With his feet he touched a bladed metal object, the outboard motor he had abandoned by the houseboat. For some reason, he now wanted to get away from the others. During the journey from the coast they had relied on one another, but with their arrival at Mount Royal, at the very point from which they,, had set out ten years earlier, he felt that all his obligations to them had been discharged. Ar he climbed the embankment he looked down at them, isolated from each other in the unvarying light, held together only by the sand pouring between their feet.

He climbed over the balustrade and limped slowly along the pavement toward the center of the span. The surface was covered with the strips of metal and old tires that he remembered. He rested on the rail, looking out across the dunecovered ruins around the empty towers of the distant city. To the northeast, the white surface of the drained lake rolled onwards to the horizon.

He sat down by a gap in the balustrade, surrounded by the empty cans and litter, like an exhausted mendicant, Below him Philip Jordan made his way down the riverbed, a spear in one hand and one of the two canteens over his shoulder. Catherine Austen was moving diagonally away from him up the bank, searching for something among the splinters of driftwood. Only Mrs. Quilter still sat on the cart below her tattered awning.

For ten minutes Ransom leaned against the balustrade on the deserted bridge, watching the figures below move away. Like an old crab, Mrs. Quilter crawled slowly up the far bank.

Vaguely hoping for a glimpse of his own house, his eye was distracted by a gleam of light. Cradled among the dunes near the site of Lomax's mansion was a small pond of blue water, its smooth surface ruffled into vivid patterns. Watching it, Ransom decided that the pond was a mirage of remarkable intensity. At least a hundred feet in diameter, the water was ringed by a narrow beach of smooth sand shaped like the banks of a miniature reservoir. The dunes and ruined walls surrounded it on all sides.

As he waited for the mirage to fade, a small white bird crossed the ruins and swooped down over the water. Furling its wings, it landed on the surface, gliding along a wake of breaking light.