Alan Foster - Exceptions to Reality

She replied ingenuously. “I don’t exactly know. I was only seven when Mother brought us to the rain forest.” Her smile was as radiant and unspoiled as the rest of her, he mused. “We’ve been here ever since.”

“Hasn’t it been lonely for you without any other children to grow up with?”

“Oh no. There was always Mother and the animals. I’ve had every kind of pet you can imagine. Pythons, until they got too big, and cockatoos and possums and sugar gliders. I’ve always had playmates.”

“But you’d still like to visit a city?”

She nodded thoughtfully. “I think so. I wouldn’t want to live in one, though. I don’t think I could, after living in the forest.”

“What about—not having any clothes?”

She shrugged. “I’ve seen other people. I don’t understand clothes. You dry off much faster without them, and it hardly ever gets cold here.”

“What about people who come looking for you? Aren’t you afraid they might see you like this?”

“Well, you’re looking at me right now, and I’m not afraid.” Here was a directness of logic he rarely encountered and could not argue with. “Besides, if we don’t want to be seen by other people, we’re not.”

“You can’t move around all the time, Leea. You can’t continue to dodge the rest of the world your whole life. People will find you, eventually.”

“Not if we don’t want them to.” There was a certainty to her claim that puzzled and intrigued him. “We just walk off into the Dreamtime.”

He frowned. “I’ve heard of that. It’s the name for the Aborigine spirit world, isn’t it?”

She nodded enthusiastically. “Something like that. There are lots of Native people around here. Mostly in the Dreamtime. They’ve gone there to get away from this world. Modern Aussie people did bad things to them, so they left. Those who knew how. Sometimes Mother and I talk to them, and they teach us things. Like how to live in the forest. They taught us how to find the Dreamtime. There’s a lot of it in the Daintree.”

He shook his head impatiently. “Leea, the Dreamtime is myth. It’s the collected stories of a people. They’re very beautiful stories, but they’re just stories.”

Her smile and her eyes were full of secrets, like pearls at the bottom of a dark, dark pool. “The deeper you go into the Daintree, the closer you get to the Dreamtime, Michael. This is one of the oldest forests that has been on the Earth, one of the very first, and the Dreamtime is the first place. They’re very near to each other, the Daintree and the Dreamtime. You just have to know how to look.”

Girl, I’ve spent my whole life trying to learn how to look. Her mother has fed her this, he realized suddenly. To keep her here, away from civilization, away from other people. But why?

“When we don’t want to be seen or found, we just find a piece of the Dreamtime and go into it,” she was saying. “The people who are looking for us walk right past. They don’t see us. They don’t know how to find the Dreamtime, so they don’t see it, either.”

“What’s it like?” He wondered what a psychologist would make of her delusions.

She lapsed into dreamy, exquisite reminiscence. “A lot of it is forest, like this, but before the loggers and highway people came. There are no cities, no airplane tracks in the sky. No white people. Only the Aborigines, and Mother and I. It’s like it was when the Earth was before people.”

There was movement outside. Annabelle entered, clutching a handful of leaves and stems that were oozing sap. “This won’t take long.” She didn’t even glance in her daughter’s direction.

She’s crazier than Schneemann, Covey thought, isolating herself and her daughter out here like this. Warily he eyed the vegetation she had brought back.

The poultice she fashioned lessened the fire in his wounds. He was less eager to sip the tea she brewed, but did not know how to refuse. It put him to sleep almost immediately.

When he awoke, stiff and cramped but otherwise feeling better, they had both gone.

Staggering out of the shelter, he stumbled unexpectedly into full, searing sunshine. He felt himself blinded by a thousand emerald mirrors. Thick gray mist clung to treetops where unseen lorikeets fussed. The air had the clarity of a sudden vision.

“Annabelle!” He turned a slow circle as he shouted. “Leea!” Within his limited range of vision, nothing moved. There was no reply.

“Leea!”

He thought he heard a voice. Most probably it was some kind of animal, but he pursued it anyway. It was all there was.

The voices grew louder, contentious. Among them was one deeper than any he had heard in days. Eyes widening, he increased his pace, suddenly heedless of the possibility of encountering stinging trees, or worse.

He came up short, breathing hard, on the steep bank of a deep gully. Leea was there, her hands cupped over her mouth, eyes wide and staring. He could hear her muffled screams clearly.

Boris Schneemann, his agonized face framed by his wild black mane, knelt by the drop-off. His thick, callused hands clutched the edge and he was sobbing and screaming in a berserk, unintelligible mix of German, French, and English.

Not far below him the twisted, naked form of Annabelle hung crucified in a tangled mat of wait-a-while. Where the unrelenting vines had torn her flesh, blood flowed freely in thin, viscous streamlets. Her head was bent back so far that Covey could not see her face. It rested at an angle unnatural to her shoulders.

One large vine was wrapped tightly around her neck.

The anguish that welled up unexpectedly in his throat far exceeded anything he felt in his arm or feet. Anger glazed his eyes as he rushed forward.

Leea turned to him, her ethereally beautiful unblemished face wide-eyed with shock. Schneemann rose slowly. Then he threw back his head and shook his clenched fists at whatever gods hid behind the mist-shrouded sky, screaming in guttural, uncontrollable, wretched German.

“You rotten, rotten bastard.” Covey eyed the other man carefully as he approached. “What the fuck happened?”

Schneemann suddenly became aware of his presence. “It was an accident. She would not listen. I only wanted to talk and she would not listen. She ran from me. Toward the Dreamtime, she said. Where she would be safe. Crazy, crazy! Gott in himmel . She ran and she fell.” He looked down. “There.” He inhaled massively then turned and, before she could retreat, grabbed Leea’s wrist.

“You. Leea. You are all that is left. You come back with me now.”

The girl stared at him, half mad with terror and despair. “N-no. I don’t want to go with you. I don’t want to.”

“You must. Now.”

“No!” She dug her heels into the mud, sliding forward as he dragged her, beating at him with her free hand. He took no notice of the feeble resistance.

The air went out of him when Covey tackled him around both legs.

They went down in a damp, muddy heap. Covey struck out blindly, furiously, slamming fist after fist into the German’s face. With a roar like a wounded rhino, Schneemann threw him off.

Rolling over, Covey saw the guide grinning insanely back at him. The big man was back on his feet, tense as a panther, a knife clutched in his right fist. In Covey’s eyes the short, thick blade loomed as large as a ceremonial sword. Reaching up, he felt blood streaming from his nose.

“So little writer wants to fight, eh?” Covey scrambled to his feet, only to find himself caught between the drop-off and his opponent. “You verdampt swine, you niggly little son-of-a-bitch. Ten years I spend looking for these two. Ten years of my life hacking and sweating at this stinking jungle, and you, city man, you find them. And then she don’t listen to me.” His face contorted and he began to sob anew.