Pasha Malla - People Park

Griggs, said the Mayor, tell me right now: who’s attacking you?

Oh, it could be anyone, said Griggs, almost sadly. There are just so many people, he sighed, so many people it could be.

WHAT DO THEY EXPECT? said Starx. That we’ll get out and check every site?

Maybe we should have told them we don’t even know what — Olpert checked their notes from Residents’ Control — Gip Bode looks like.

And what? Also tell the HG’s we didn’t even watch the show? Terrific idea, Bailie. Crazy Magurk’d cut our fuggin eyelids off.

Ha, said Olpert — though this time Starx didn’t seem to be joking.

They drove at a crawl through fog-soaked Lakeview Campground. Around every bend the Citywagon’s highbeams appeared as twin dabs of yellow paint on a blank canvas, illuminating nothing, while the wipers scrubbed lethargically back and forth, smearing the scant snowfall into wet streaks across the windscreen.

Starx steered them into a Scenic Vista at the edge of the poplars. Though the vista was of fog. Above the treetops this bled into a grey cloudcover in parts tinged bluish. Around the Citywagon the fog churned, coiling and uncoiling, a thicket of pale snakes or the fingers, thought Olpert, of many many searching hands.

Know what I think?

Okay? said Olpert.

I think this guy, Raven — know what he’s doing? He’s hanging out somewhere right now, maybe in his hotel room, having a laugh at all of us.

You think?

Starx tapped the walkie-talkie: just a dull drone, not even static. Weird, he said.

So do we go to the Grand Saloon?

No, it’s not our job to look for him. They’ll have dozens of guys doing that. We’re supposed to find the kid, right, but how can we? I’m not a fuggin detective. Are you?

Starx put a hand over Olpert’s mouth. That was rhetorical, you scrotal pleat.

He let go. A taste of soup lingered.

Tell you what. Let’s get a cider.

Starx! We haven’t had lunch yet!

Fine, you get lunch, I’ll get a cider. Though if you don’t drink then you have to drive.

Oh, said Olpert uneasily.

The Golden Barrel it is, said Starx, firing up the ignition. On the dash dials spun into place, the Citywagon’s headlights splashed onto the fog. Starx pointed at the dashboard clock. See? It’s nine o’clock, Bailie. Perfect time for a drink.

Starx, wait, said Olpert, pointing through the windshield. Look.

Something was happening in the headlights, mist swirled into phantasmal forms.

Pictures? said Starx.

They’re moving, said Olpert.

What is it? said Starx. Can you tell?

A series of indistinguishable images played holographically out of the highbeams, skipping one to the next — a slideshow of strange shadows marbled with light, just figurative enough to suggest people maybe, or animals. The pace quickened, then the figures began to sputter into motion, invoking those halted jerky images from the advent of cinema. But quickly they sharpened, the animation smoothed, and a scene took shape. .

Is that? said Starx.

I think so, whispered Olpert.

And —

It can’t be!

But —

Oh god, said Starx. Oh no, oh god.

Olpert’s face had gone the colour of the fog.

No, said Starx. Bailie, no.

The two men watched, rapt. The film’s refracted light danced over the Citywagon’s hood. Neither spoke, neither blinked, neither budged a muscle. The film blazed into a final searing swath of white, and in an instant everything was gone. The highbeams left a yellow stain on the wall of fog.

What was that? said Olpert. What did we just watch? Starx?

Starx shook his head as if to dislodge something from it, slung an arm around the passengerside headrest, put the gearshift into reverse, and floored the gas. Olpert lurched forward, the seatbelt sliced into his neck, gravel shrapnelled up the sides of the Citywagon, and they went screeching out onto Lakeside Drive.

At the roundabout a Helper lowered his traffic batons and leaned in the window.

Nothing on my radio, he said. Your guys’s dead too?

Starx nodded so slightly that Olpert felt the need to pipe up: Yes, ours too.

Where you headed?

Special mission, said Olpert.

Special mission, repeated Starx, and fixed the Helper with a blazing, wild look. Going to let us through, brother? B-Squad’s got places to be!

The Helper removed himself from the car, called, Good lookin out, and waved them through the barricade, around the traffic jam up the Throughline, and out of People Park.

IN THIS MOVIE or is it a dream the bridge has been empty, that sort of huge and booming emptiness that could never have been anything but empty, who else could be out here and where would they come from. But there it is bobbing at the horizon, a fleck, what might be just a spot in Calum’s vision or a reflection or a trick of light. From this distance it could be anything small, a mote or mite or flea, maybe not a person at all, this little blip of matter exactly at the point where the bridge narrows and vanishes. Amid all that emptiness here is this thing , whatever it might be, a blot or a mistake, a puncture or a speck, now visible and now not, flickering. It seems less present than projected or imagined. It is a dot, a period, the end.

Calum keeps walking and holds up his hand to gauge perspective: the shape has curled into a comma half the length of his thumbnail. Some indefinite amount of time later it has fractured into a top and bottom, a semicolon, twice as big. Calum seems to be closing the distance at a rate incommensurate with the speed he’s walking. He squints but doesn’t pause. The shape bobs on the horizon. It is moving. It is growing. It is, he realizes, approaching.

He squints again. This thing seems to be human, or at least human-shaped, and coming at him very, very quickly, now the length of a knuckle. And though the shape of this thing is human there is something inhuman about it, about the way it moves and its spectral presence and the shimmer of air between it and Calum, a dream’s air that thickens into tendrils that slip and tighten around his neck.

Also as this person approaches, the bridge behind it, in fact everything behind it, even the sky, seems to be disappearing. It isn’t going dark. What was there a second before vanishes. And for a sky that was already an absence to cease to be even that — it becomes nothing, there’s just nothing there. As this person moves the horizon recedes, closing in, a hand curling around a camera’s lens, shrinking the image, choking what can be seen until, eventually, it will be just Calum and this person, alone, and everything else a void.

Calum backs away from the yellow line. His first step is deliberate, but then he staggers, legs twisting, and everything goes slow and soupy, this can’t be a movie, it has to be a dream. The encroaching figure nears, the emptiness swells behind it — and Calum stops walking. He steps off the yellow line. He backs up against the bridge’s railing. There is nowhere to go. He looks down into the mist and what is maybe a river’s shadow beneath and above at what remains of the colourless sky, swiftly vanishing.

And the figure comes closer still, swallowing everything in its wake.

AT BLACKACRES STATION train 2306 sat on the southbound tracks, doors open. The platform was empty, the movators motionless. Debbie boarded the lead car. Two passengers sat down at the far end: a kid, maybe eight years old, and his fatigued-looking mother with a handbag in her lap.