J. Ballard - The Drought

Ransom clambered to his feet and hurried forward across the bridge. Giving up any attempt to find the others, he climbed the rail at the lower end and slid down the embankment. Pausing to rest every fifty yards, he ran on along the waterfront streets, stepping on the roofs of the cars buried under the sand.

"Doctor!" As he sidestepped over a low wall, Ransom almost jumped onto the diminutive form of Mrs. Quilter, crouching below him in a crevice. She gazed up at him with timid eyes. Somehow she had managed to dismount from the cart and make her way up the bank. "Doctor," she sighed plaintively, "I can't move myself."

When Ransom began to run on she fished the other canteen from beneath her silks. "I'll share it with you, doctor."

"Come on, then." Ransom took her arm and helped her to her feet. They set off slowly together. Once she tripped over a partly buried cable and sat down panting in the dust Ransom chafed at the delay. Finally he knelt down and hoisted her onto his back, her small, dry hands clasped around his neck.

Surprisingly, she was as light as a child. Along the open stretches, he was able to run for a few paces. Now and then he put her down and climbed one of the walls to take his bearings. Sitting in a sandfilled swimming pool by a lean-to of burnt timber, the embers of an old fire around her, she watched Ransom like an amiable witch.

As they took their final leave of the river, Mrs. Quilter pinched his ear.

"Doctor, look back for a minute!"

Half a mile away, below the motorbridge, clouds of smoke rose from the houseboat, the flames burning brightly in the shadows below the bridge. A few seconds later the cart began to burn, as if touched by some invisible torch.

"Never mind!" Tightening his grip on her legs, Ransom stumbled away across the rubble, like a lunatic Sinbad bearing the old woman of the desert sea. He turned in and out of the sloping streets, the dust rising behind them. Ahead he saw the ring of higher dunes that surrounded the lake of water. With a last effort he ran up the nearest slope.

When he reached the crest he stopped and let Mrs. Quilter slide from his shoulders. He walked slowly down to the silent disc of blue water. Stirred by the wind, a few wavelets lapped at the beach, a strip of dark sand that merged into the rubble. The lake was a small reservoir, the banks of sand built along a convenient perimeter of ruined walls. To Ransom, however, it seemed to have dropped from the sky, a distillation of all the lost rain of a decade.

Ten feet from the water's edge he broke into a run, and stumbled across the loose bricks to the firmer sand. The white bird sat in the center, watching him circumspectly. As the water leapt around his feet, the foam was as brilliant as its plumage. Kneeling in the shallow water, he bathed his head and face, then soaked his shirt, letting the cool crystal-like liquid run down his arms. The powdery blue water stretched to the opposite shore, the dunes hiding all sight of the wilderness.

With a short cry, the bird flew off across the surface. Ransom gazed around the bank. Then, over his shoulder, he became aware of a huge figure standing on the sand behind him.

Well over six feet tall, and with its broad shoulders covered by a loose cloak of cheetah skins, an immense feathered cap on its head, the figure towered above him like a grotesque primitive idol bedecked with the unrelated possessions of an entire tribe. Girdled around its waist by a gold cord was a flowing caftan that had once been a blue paisley dressing gown, cut back to reveal a stout leather belt hitching up a pair of trousers. These had apparently been cut from odd lengths of turkish carpeting, and terminated their uneven progress in a set of hefty sea boots. Clamped to them by metal braces were two stout wooden stilts nailed down to a pair of sandshoes. Together they raised their owner two feet further above the ground.

Ransom knelt in the water, watching the figure's scowling face. The expression was one of almost preposterous ferocity. The long russet hair fell to the shoulders, enclosing the face like a curtained exhibit in a fairground freak show. Above the notched cheekbones, the feathered cap sprouted laterally into two black wings, like a Norseman's helmet, and between them a long wavering appendage pointed down at Ransom.

"Quilter-!" he began, recognizing the stuffed body of the black swan. "Quilter, I'm-"

Before he had climbed to his feet the figure was suddenly galvanized into life, and with a shout launched itself through the air at Ransom. Knocked sideways into the water, Ransom felt the heavy knees in the small of his back, strong hands forcing his shoulders into the water. A fist pounded on the back of his head like a drum. Gasping for air, Ransom had a last glimpse through the flailing furs of Mrs. Quilter hobbling down the bank, her beaked face wearing a stunned smile as she croaked: "It's my Quilty boy… come here, lad, it's your old mother come to save you…"

Half an hour later Ransom had partly recovered, stretched out on the beach by the cool water. As he lay half-stunned in the sunlight he was aware of Mrs. Quilter jabbering away on one of the dunes a few yards from him, the silent figure of her son, like an immense cuckoo, squatting beneath his furs in the sand. The old woman, beside herself with delight at having at last found her son, was now inflicting on him a nonstop resume of everything that had happened to her during the previous decade. To Ransom's good luck, she included a glowing account of the magnificent expedition by automobile to the coast, which Ransom had arranged for her. At the mention of his name, Quilter strode down the dune to inspect Ransom, turning him over with a stilted boot. His broad dented face, with its wandering eyes set above the hollowed cheeks, had changed little during the intervening years, although he seemed twice his former height and gazed about with a more self-composed air. As he listened to his mother he cocked one eye at her thoughtfully, almost as if calculating the culinary possibilities of this small bundle of elderly gristle.

Ransom climbed unsteadily to his feet and walked slowly up the dune to them. Quilter seemed barely to notice him, almost as if Ransom had emerged half-drowned from this pool every morning of the past ten years. His huge eyes were mottled like marbled sandstone. The ambiguous watery smile had vanished, and his wide mouth was firm and thinlipped.

"Doctor-?" Mrs. Quilter broke off her monologue, surprised to see Ransom but delighted that he had been able to join them. "I was just telling him about you, doctor. Quilty, the doctor's a rare one with cars."

Ransom murmured noncommittally, weakly brushing the damp sand from his half-dried clothes.

In a gruff voice, Quilter said: "Don't fish into any cars here, there are people buried in them." With a gleam of his old humor he added: "Hole down to the door, slide them in, up with the window, and that's their lot-eh?"

"Sounds a good idea," Ransom agreed cautiously. He decided not to tell him about Philip Jordan or Catherine. As yet Quilter had given them no indication of where or how he lived.

For five minutes Quilter sat silently on the crest of the dune, occasionally patting his furs as his mother chattered away, touching him tentatively with her little hands. At one point he reached up to the swan's neck, dangling in front of his right eye, and pulled off the headdress. Beneath it his scalp was bald, and the thick red hair that fell to his shoulders sprang from the margins of a huge tonsure.

Then, without a word, he jumped to his feet. With a brief gesture to them he strode off on his stilts across the sand, the cheetah furs and dressing gown lifting behind him like tattered wings.

Barely keeping up with Quilter, they followed him as he strode in and out of the dunes, his stilted sandshoes carrying him across the banks of rubble. Now and then, as Ransom helped Mrs. Quilter over a ruined wall, he saw the river bank and the white bonehills of the lake, but the pattern of the eroded streets was only the faintest residue of Larchmont. Nothing moved among the ruins. In the hollows they passed the remains of small fires and the picked skeletons of birds and desert voles left years beforehand.