Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

There was one thing he hadn’t lied about, and that was her blood, how much he’d loved and honoured it, that wasn’t a lie. But it wasn’t enough to save them either. And she wouldn’t listen now. She turned her face away. He could only see one ear, some damp hair. When he leaned over her, tried to bring her face back, she tucked her lips inside her mouth and wouldn’t speak.

It wouldn’t have been enough, though. It really wouldn’t. She belonged in this stage set, among these lies. She belonged here, where things weren’t real. It was a warp in time, a secret crease in space. This precipice, this sheet. She was here, but he wasn’t. Not really. It wasn’t really him.

After he dropped her outside her house that evening he never saw her again. He woke up every day and went to work at the ice-cream parlour, but he began to hate the taste, the sight, the very thought of it. It was his life, all that frozen mess. His fury when the doorbell jangled and a family of tourists in shorts and visors came babbling in. His fury while they scanned the world of forty-five flavours.

‘Fudgana?’ They’d be blinking, their heads tilted at him, all at different angles. ‘What’s Fudgana?’

‘It’s our special,’ he’d hiss. ‘Four scoops of vanilla with hot fudge, banana wheels and whipped cream. It’s two-fifty.’

They often had Fudgana and they were often, he hoped, violently sick in the car about half an hour later.

His fury, his revulsion.

One day he took the afternoon off without telling anyone. He drove out past the graveyard where he’d stood alone in the wind and hurt. He drove out of town and just kept going. There was nothing west of Adam’s Creek, nothing for miles. A low range of hills lifted in the north, yellow, rumpled, threadbare, as if someone had been carrying a lionskin and had grown tired of it and had thrown it down. Otherwise the land was flat and hot, studded with dull stones. Shreds of rubber twisted and coiled at the edge of the highway. Just tyres that had burst. When he first set foot in Adam’s Creek he used to think they were snakes or lizards, some kind of reptile anyway. It was that kind of country, somehow, safe things looked dangerous, specially in the corner of your eye. Or maybe the landscape was his mirror, and he was just seeing himself. In any case, he was still deceived sometimes, even after six years.

He drove further than he meant to. The road was so straight, it was hard to stop. Stopping would’ve been like looking away from a hypnotist’s swinging silver watch. His long spine ached, and his eyes felt hot and flat against the windshield, like eggs broken on to a rock. The dense grey sky seemed denser than before, so grey in places that it seemed almost green. Then he saw the sign. A wooden sign stuck at the beginning of a red dirt track. LAKE QUIRINDI, it said. 24 MILES.

He took the turning without knowing why. Thinking, maybe, that it would break the monotony, the tedious spell of the highway. He had to drive now, where before he had merely steered. There were pot-holes to avoid, riverbeds to cross. It seemed to give him a purpose which, up until he saw the sign, he hadn’t had. Though he couldn’t have said what that purpose might be.

Soon there was nothing except the laboured surging of the engine and his head jolting on his spindly neck and a swarm of red dust in the rear window. He seemed to have been driving for ever. He’d be reaching the lake soon, and then what? A sudden vision of Celia, and the blood rushed to that part of him. He took one hand off the wheel and tried to push it down. He couldn’t leave it there for long. He was driving fast and the road kept surprising him. Those riverbeds could snap an axle as crisply as the way that Zervos snapped his fingers when he danced. One of those deep troughs of dust could suck his wheels down, and there’d be nobody passing on this road, not for days, maybe, maybe not even then, and he hadn’t thought to bring water along or tell anybody where he’d gone, it had all happened too fast, there hadn’t been a moment. He sat up straighter and locked both hands on the wheel. He could die out here, and he wasn’t ready. It wasn’t his time.

The loud engine, the road slippery with dust. And then he came over a rise and saw the lake below. He stabbed the brake, stabbed too hard, and his back wheels slurred in the dirt.

There was no water.

Now he remembered someone telling him about this place. The lake itself had dried up thousands of years ago. It was some kind of ancient burial site. Relics had been unearthed. Pots, charms, bones. There were sand dunes here, he remembered. They’d been given names by the local people — the Grand Canyon, the Great Wall of China — on account of the strangeness of their formations. He could just make out the sand dunes now, a blond strip on the far side of the lake, a good ten miles away.

He let the car forwards, down the hill, and on to the white road that led across the lake bed. Halfway across he imagined the water there again, he saw the lake fill up, some ghost of the ocean haunting him, and shuddered at the thought of drowning in such loneliness, in such heat. There were no animals here. Only a twitching at the edges of his vision. Snakes, he thought. And then he thought: Tyres. Just tyres.

He stopped the car where the road lost itself in sand and got out. He stood still and listened. Heard one bird. It sounded like a tap dripping. Give it time and it would fill the lake all by itself, just with its song.

The air was thick. So thick that the oxygen seemed buried in it, hard to extract. Breathing like mining. He looked up at the sky. Clouds on the boil, the whole sky simmering. White cracks showed in the grey, white cracks fanning out like the bones in the wings of birds. He looked down again and the sand seemed pink in this storm light. He began to walk, his eyes still on the ground. He passed scattered jawbones, pale twists of wood. He stopped and picked one up, and was surprised by how light it was. Everything had been sucked out of it. All the wood’s blood gone.

He was climbing now. The sand under his feet had been crusty at first, ribbed, but now it was turning smooth, soft, unmarked. He’d left the castles and the monuments behind, he was climbing a dune that was featureless, untouched. Another footprint would’ve been a shock, a threat. The wind had risen. His ear to a seashell. There was only that now, the hollow roar and scrape of the wind and the scuffing of his feet in the sand. He lifted his eyes and saw that he was almost at the top. He was about to move on when something tapped him on the shoulder. Someone. He jumped, spun round. Nobody there. And yet he could have sworn that someone had tapped him on the shoulder.

And then raindrops began to fall in the sand all around him. Fat drops of rain placed in the sand, almost one by one, like counters on a board game. But there was no board. Or was there?

And then, just as suddenly as they’d started, they stopped. It was the shortest rainstorm he’d ever seen. He could count the drops. There were thirty-six of them.

And then he knew what it was that had tapped him on the shoulder. It was the first drop of rain.

And he knew what it meant too. He’d been singled out. He’d been anointed. He was special. Places like this, they knew.

He moved past the collection of dark holes in the sand and, with half a dozen steps, he’d reached the top of the rise. He half expected ocean, the white towers of Moon Beach, but there was only land, land that looked infinite, land without end, and he stood still and stared, as if by staring he could make something happen, the first drop of rain already drying on his shoulder.

The phone woke Nathan out of a deep sleep. He reached out, and picked up the receiver. ‘Yes?’