Five seconds. Eight seconds. Yukio gasping for air. Up this close to Kane, Yukio Miki wonders for a moment in this brief hell if he has found himself before an oni, one of the supernatural demons his grandfather Saburo told him about as a boy, those giant disfigured monsters who passed across the demon gate from the world of darkness. They had a third eye mashed into their foreheads and they had extra fingers and toes and strength enough to walk with blades pierced through their stomachs.
Ten seconds. Twelve seconds. Yukio out of breath, feeling like he’s swallowing his own Adam’s apple. The hand and the nub of a monster. I’m coming Nara, he tells her. I don’t know how it came to end like this, dear Nara, but I am coming.
Then a large red rock shaped like a heart smashes into Kane’s right temple. Then it smashes again and again and Greta Maze howls with fury as the blood-red rock that Molly took from inside the bone pillow of her mother’s chest meets the bones of George Kane’s face. Still the monster squeezes the pilot’s throat and still the actress smashes the rock against the side of Kane’s face.
‘Animals!’ she screams, and she is rage and blood and fear and she is past and she is present and when she screams that word again – ‘Animals!’ – she is including herself in the gallery of monsters in her mind.
The falling steel stamps of the crushing plant. Thump, thump, thump. The rock hitting the side of the giant’s head, his blood splattering onto the face of the Japanese pilot, until, at last, George Kane slumps still and dead on top of Yukio Miki. Greta pushes hard at Kane’s side and Molly is there now to help her, and the actress and the gravedigger girl heave the miner off Yukio and onto his back with the hilt of the blade still lodged in his belly.
Greta stands over the Japanese swordsman. Her hands and body are covered in blood. Yukio sucks air back into his lungs as he watches the actress go and wipe her hands on the pants of the dead miner and then he watches her walk back to him and stand over him once more, breathing, breathing, breathing and studying his face, staring into his eyes, examining the splatters of blood across his skin. And then she extends her right arm. She offers the pilot her hand, her shaking right hand. And he raises his right hand up to hers and the two hands meet in the middle of the silent space between them.
Greta Maze pulls Yukio Miki to his feet.
DELIRIUM TREMENS
The questing shadow man. He does not stop to vomit. He spews three mouthfuls of blood and bile as he walks, and the vile stomach slurry showers the spear grass of the floodplain far beyond Candlelight Creek. The sun is high and hot but his body is cold and shaking. He drinks from floodplain waterholes but what his body needs more than water is gin, vodka, whisky. Turpentine. His hands shaking, his knees shaking, but he walks on because the hate inside him is the only thing he has to keep him warm and moving. Only animal now. Only hate.
Head aching. Clammy skin. The bite wound in his shoulder blade still weeping and full of vivid yellow pus. Dizzy. He passes purple and pink flowers and he turns back to these knee-high flowers on occasion because he could swear the flowers have eyes for petals and these eyes are following him, but every time he turns back to catch them staring they look away. Weak muscles moving so slow but a heart beating so fast. He walks through a small city of meridional termite mounds and he believes for a moment he is walking back into Hollow Wood.
In one straight row of termite mounds he sees the names of Tom Berry’s kin because all he sees is hate. He sees their names on their gravestones and he sees their reasons for being buried in the ground. The most profound and rotten season of bad luck to ever befall a single family in all of Darwin history. Some four members of Tom Berry’s kin, all of whom perished within three months of the night the black sorcerer named Longcoat Bob pointed his finger at Tom Berry from the doorway of the Darwin town hall.
Aubrey looks deep into the face of a large termite mound. He sees a name in bold letters written across a gravestone. ‘Theodore Berry, 1866–1916’. Tom Berry received the news in a telegram only five days after Longcoat Bob made his announcement in the town hall. His brother, Theo, the eldest of the three Berry brothers, had been working alone as he often did during the slower seasons on his wheat farm in Clermont, central Queensland. When production was halted by a blockage in his grain silo, he tied a safety rope to his waist, as he had done numerous times, and lowered himself into the silo to unclog it. When the safety rope snapped, Theo found himself immersed to his shoulders at the centre of a cone-shaped depression of wheat grains. When he tried to dig himself out, the mounded grains began to slowly slide down the cone-shaped slopes and engulf him. He called to his wife, Marg, who could not hear his desperate pleas for help because she was weeding the front garden of the couple’s farm cottage, some sixty yards from the grain silo. Remaining perfectly still, Theo Berry managed to slow the gradual slide of the suffocating grains, which was pressing down hard on his chest and eventually his throat, long enough for Marg to realise her husband wasn’t coming to the house for his usual afternoon tea. Theo heard Marg’s calls beyond the silo walls just as his mouth and nostrils were filling with seed.
‘Theo!’ Marg called. ‘Theo!’
Theo used his last gasp of
