‘Noooooo,’ wail the woozy onlookers as they circle around the pilot.
Yukio kicks at them hard, thrashes his legs around wildly, driven by primal fear and primal rage and he barges through the group and back out the cavern’s entrance, back into the black corridor, the lantern providing just enough light.
‘Ease the pain!’ Marielle hollers after him. ‘Ease the pain!’
And Yukio runs because he now knows what this place is. So far from the Plain of High Heaven. This is the nether world. This is Yomi-no-kuni. This is the World of Darkness. This is the land of the dead.
MOON TRUTH
She stands alone at the edge of the world. The gravedigger girl and a high night wind behind her back pushing her floppy brown hair, curled like her mother’s, forward across her face. I will never be afraid, she tells herself. But she is. That is the truth of it. Night skies tell no lies. She is alone. That is the truth of it. She is sick in the stomach because she dragged her only friends into a hell that she made. Only her. That is the truth of it. I feel no pain, she tells herself. But she does. Night skies tell no lies. Night skies tell her the cold hard truth that she’s on her own.
The gravedigger girl in the sky-blue dress with the shovel and the duffel bag, standing on a sandstone plateau overlooking a valley of natural stone formations so bizarre and intricate she wonders if they were made by the ancients. Made by the women with the quarter-lemon heads she saw back in the gallery chamber.
Three distant forks of electric-blue lightning strike the moonlit horizon and the stone valley becomes a city. A city of giants. Men and women of stone bending and bowing and reaching for each other in the night wind. Molly tilts her head to the night sky. Star blanket with a full moon pillow.
‘“City of stone ’tween heaven and earth,”’ Molly says to the night sky.
And the night sky responds. ‘“The place beyond your place of birth.”’
Molly plants her boots into a loose scree slope of sandstone rubble and begins to slide down the edge of the plateau.
‘Where are you going, Molly?’ the night sky asks.
‘I’m going to find Longcoat Bob,’ she replies.
‘But you heard the woman in the cave,’ the night sky says. ‘Longcoat Bob is dead.’
‘Do you believe her?’ Molly asks the night sky.
‘No.’
‘Night skies tell no lies,’ Molly says. ‘But why would that old woman lie to me?’
‘Because she wanted you to stay there with them.’
‘Why would they want me to stay?’
‘Because you’re a good one, Molly,’ the night sky says. ‘Because you’re special.’
‘I’m not special,’ Molly says. ‘I bring bad things to every single person I care about. That’s why my grandfather locked himself away for all those years in that house. He didn’t want the bad things to spread. He knew he had to be alone.’
Molly comes to an expanse of white rocks, a scattering of angular chalky boulders maybe one hundred yards wide and one hundred yards long. She talks to the night sky as she frog-hops between the rocks, her legs moving faster than her eyes sometimes, instinctively bouncing between the flattest landing surfaces she can see in a night turned to deep blue and silver by the moon.
‘You should turn back,’ the night sky says. ‘You should go home.’
‘Home?’ Molly echoes. ‘I’ve got no home to go to. Darwin doesn’t even exist anymore. I’m not even sure if Australia does. Why are you telling me to go home?’
‘Night skies tell no lies,’ the night sky says. ‘You have come too far and you know it. You were so brave to make it this far, but you need to turn back now. You will die out here, Molly. That’s the truth.’
‘But Longcoat Bob is out here,’ Molly says. ‘I need to find him.’
‘What if you find Longcoat Bob and you don’t like what he has to tell you?’ the night sky asks.
Molly hops to her left, hops to her right, zig-zagging over the rocks. At one point she props Bert the shovel in the dirt floor and pole-vaults between two high slabs of stone.
‘What could he possibly tell me that could be worse than anything I’ve already been through?’
‘He’ll tell you the truth, like me,’ the night sky says.
As she leaps from the last of the white rocks, she comes to two towering, human-shaped formations, maybe eighty feet tall. Each of these segmented rock structures has a pillar for legs, a fat slab of sandstone for a torso and a balanced ball of rock for a head. They seem to be looking down on her and they stand like sentinels tasked for eternity with assessing all those who would pass between them into the city of stone at their backs. And she feels that they watch her as she passes between them and enters that city, a place carved by wind and time and turned into something as big as all the street blocks that make up Molly’s Darwin town.
Millions of years of erosion have fashioned freestanding sandstone blocks with shoulders and wonky heads that seem to be falling off their necks, and fat men pillars that seem to be leaning over in hysterics, and tall graceful women pillars that seem to be gathering in gossip circles, and some conjoined pillars that look like twins or triplets. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of them across the entire city, as crowded together
