Catherine Jinks TheRoad (87 page)

Outside, the trees had receded as they left the creek behind. Instead of being pinched between creek and ridge, the track was now ploughing its way through thick scrub: acacia, mulga, dead finish. Most of the bushes were quite closely spaced, and higher than the car, so that they formed a kind of hedge on each side of it. Verlie stared at the tightly packed spiny branches without really seeing them. Her thoughts, when not cloudy with fatigue, were with the Fergusons, back at Pine Creek. She didn’t like leaving the children. She felt guilty about it. If it hadn’t been for her, they would have been in the car, with Ross. They would have been safe from that thing – that swarm. Instead, they were now exposed on dry soil, huddled together with their picnic rugs and cooking pots and muesli bars, easy prey for whatever strange phenomenon might overtake them . . .

She reached for her handkerchief (a wisp of embroidered muslin) and dabbed at her eyes.

‘What is it?’ asked Ross.

‘Nothing.’

‘Have you taken your pills?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not far now.’

The scrub crowded in on them, becoming thicker and thicker until they were forced to wind up the windows. It scraped the paintwork, clawed at the wing mirrors, rapped sharply against the windscreen. Verlie began to wonder how long it had been since the last vehicle had passed this way. Surely the brush shouldn’t have been so intrusive, if the track was well travelled?

‘Bloody hell,’ said Ross.

‘What is this?’ asked Ambrose. ‘Have we taken a wrong turn?’

‘We couldn’t have.’ Ross was sweating. ‘There wasn’t any other road.’

‘Check the map,’ John suggested, gruffly. The map was draped across Verlie’s knees, but she found herself unable to concentrate on its hair-thin lines and minute printing. She had to pass it over her shoulder.

‘You look,’ she said faintly. ‘I can’t...’

Thump!
Something hit the roof, and Georgie squeaked. Ross declared firmly that a thick branch must have snapped, and bounced off the nearest unyielding surface. Ahead, the space between the tyre tracks was sprouting large clumps of acacia, which made dreadful rasping noises against the underside of the car as it passed over them. Greyish foliage encroached on both sides, all of it heavily armoured with spiny leaves and jagged twigs. The
scritch-scratch-scritch
of thorns on metal was as irritating as the screech of fingernails on a blackboard. Verlie tried to shut it out by filling her mind with pleasant images: the climbing rose in her beautiful Sydney garden; the face of her granddaughter Lily; home-made butterfly cakes on Wedgewood Queen’s ware.

‘This isn’t the bloody road,’ John suddenly snapped. ‘It’s disappearin!’

‘Well you’ve got the map,’ Ross snarled in return. ‘You tell me where we are.’

‘How should
I
know?’

‘We should have brought along someone familiar with the area,’ Ambrose opined, in slightly accusatory tones. They were now pushing through a screen of branches, which slapped against the bonnet and dragged along the side of the car. The track was hugely overgrown. The scrub was as dense as brushwood fencing.

‘Perhaps we should turn around,’ said Verlie.

‘We couldn’t if we tried,’ her husband responded, and Georgie remarked, in a voice teetering on the edge of hysterical laughter: ‘We’re really not supposed to get out of here, are we?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Ross spoke so sharply that his wife glanced at him, knowing he was afraid. ‘It’s just a thicket! Look, it’s thinning already.’

‘There’s nothing marked on the map,’ John complained.

‘I told you, it’s all right,’ said Ross, and Verlie saw what he meant. The scrub was pulling back, like a curtain. Up ahead it stopped abruptly where the earth fell away a little, as if cut by a knife. There was a shallow depression, quite wide, and then more claypans, scattered between low and manageable clumps of saltbush. The car began to build up speed as it broke free of the clutching foliage. ‘We’re getting somewhere – that’s the important thing,’ Ross continued. ‘There are changes in the terrain. I’d be worried if there
weren’t
any –’

‘Aaah!’

Verlie’s scream was involuntary – she couldn’t help it, though she knew that Ross would be annoyed. The car had dropped, smoothly and suddenly, as if Ross had driven straight off a cliff. There was a bump (not a bad one) and then a strange sensation which Verlie couldn’t quite place. Ross, who had control of the vehicle, identified the problem almost instantly.

‘Oh,
Christ
!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s a bloody
bog
!’

Verlie stared at him. ‘What?’

‘It can’t be.’ Ambrose began to wind down his window. Verlie did the same, and realised that Ross was correct. They had driven straight down into a muddy creek bed, which smelled appalling.

‘Oh! Oh dear!’ Verlie gasped, frantically winding her window up again – and just in time too. Because at that instant Ross revved the engine, and red mud splattered against the glass beside Verlie’s shoulder.

‘Oh!’ she cried.

‘Shh!’ Ross scowled at her. ‘Calm down, will you?’

As the wheels spun impotently, casting up sprays of mud, Verlie scanned the immediate area. She wondered: Is this Pine Creek? It didn’t look like Pine Creek – not like the Pine Creek they had crossed back near the ridge. It was narrower, with very few eucalypts clinging to its bank. It was also less clearly defined, with only intermittent growth and shallow slopes lining its edges. And most noticeably, it wasn’t dry.

On the contrary, though it wasn’t running, the creek was very damp indeed, its bed covered in an oozing mess of thick, red-and-yellow muck. Verlie couldn’t believe it. All around, the earth was as dry as chalk, but here there was moisture to spare. Why? Why here, and not back where they had originally crossed Pine Creek? Because back there the creek bed had been sandy, and here it was clay?

‘We’ve got to get out,’ said Ambrose. ‘We’re sinking.’

‘Hang on.’ Ross floored the accelerator again.

‘Stop it, ya moron!’ John shouted. ‘You’re makin it worse!’

The fact that Ross didn’t take exception to his passenger’s abuse, but instead dropped his forehead onto the steering wheel, made Verlie catch her breath in dismay. Before she could say anything, however, her husband had straightened and pushed open his door. A foul miasma immediately filled the car’s interior.

Georgie moaned.

‘Get outta the car,’ John said roughly, his own door now standing ajar, and gingerly placed one foot on the mud. When he shifted his weight, the foot sank quickly.

He pulled it out of the slop with a curse.

‘The longer we sit here, the worse it’s going to get,’ Ross declared. His choice of words was commanding – reassuring – but his voice was slightly tremulous. ‘Come on,’ he ordered. ‘Everybody shake a leg.’

‘I told you,’ Georgie whimpered. ‘I told you we’re not supposed to get out of here!’

‘Oh, shut
up
!’ her boyfriend hissed.

Gingerly, Verlie climbed out of her seat, and nearly fell as her feet slipped from under her. She managed to grab the door handle and right herself, horrified to discover the force of the bog’s suction. It was quite an effort to move each foot; the mud was like glue. What’s more, it was deep. She couldn’t brace herself on any kind of hard surface, although the morass grew denser as it went deeper, allowing her something of a foothold before it slowly began to yield.

She floundered about, coughing pitifully. The smell was obnoxious.

‘Back to the bank!’ Ross panted. ‘Go on!’

‘You got a shovel?’ John demanded. ‘A jack?’

Then Georgie screamed.

She had been staggering northwards, arms flailing, dragging each naked, slime-caked foot out of the quagmire with considerable effort. Suddenly she fell, hauled herself upright, and struggled to move more quickly, without much success. She kept falling as the top half of her body outstripped the bottom half.

‘Something touched me!’
she shrieked.
‘Something touched my foot!’

‘Georgie.’ Ambrose stumbled to her side; he grabbed her arm. ‘You’re up to your knees in mud –’

‘It slithered!’

‘It was probably a stick, or something. There must be all kinds of crap in there –’

‘Let GO!’

She was sobbing now, and her pale, silky dress was smeared with greeny-yellow sludge the colour of pus. Even in the midst of her own dread and disgust, Verlie felt sorry for the girl. After all, she was very young. No wonder she was losing control.

‘It’s past the hubcaps already,’ said Ross, who was sweating and red-faced. ‘We need wood – maybe some sheets of iron –’

‘Won’t work,’ John growled. ‘Not if the springs are in it. Unless the differential’s clear, ya won’t get any traction.
SHIT!
’

Verlie, who was heading for the creek bank, didn’t see what had caused John’s yelp. By the time she turned, he was blundering backwards, his arms raised, an expression of terror suffusing his face.

‘What?’ asked Ross. ‘What is it?’

But John’s mouth flapped. He was speechless.

‘There’s something in there!’
Georgie yelled. She had reached dry land, and collapsed onto it. Ambrose, bringing up the rear, stumped along with his legs wide apart, grunting as he yanked each mud-covered moccasin out of the ooze. His beautiful trousers were ruined, Verlie saw.

‘There can’t be anything in this,’ he objected. ‘Nothing
alive
.’

‘An eel?’ Ambrose suggested.

‘In this?’ said Ross. ‘Come on. Let’s get some timber.’

But John was staggering out of the mud, breathing heavily.

‘
Quick
, John!’ There was an undertone of panic in Ross’s plea. ‘For God’s sake, it’s
sinking
!’

‘I’ll get branches!’ Verlie offered. She began to walk again, straining against the greedy mud and calling to Ambrose, who was now at Georgie’s side. ‘Get some timber!’ she instructed, gesticulating. ‘Branches! Anything to put under the wheels!’ And then she saw it.

The mud heaved slightly between herself and the bank. It rolled like a wave, twice, as if something had moved sluggishly beneath it.

Verlie stopped.

‘Wait!’ Ross cried. ‘There’s a plastic sheet in the back! John, help me!’

John didn’t reply. He had reached dry land and was catching his breath, his hands propped on his knees.

‘John!’
Ross cried.

Verlie heard something to her right – a slurping sound. Another ripple in the surface of the mud caught her eye.

‘Ross . . .’ she croaked.

‘We’ll have to walk back,’ Ambrose declared. Safe now on the creek bank, he sat with his arm around Georgie, his sunglasses pushed up into his hair. ‘We’ll never get the car out of that stuff – it looks like it’s three foot deep.’

Verlie took a step forward, and her shoe came off. Her toes hit warm sludge. Stooping to retrieve the poor, filthy pump (Diana Ferrari, it was a shame), Verlie lost her balance, so that her fingers plunged into the ghastly, pus-like stuff in which her shoe was caught. When her driving fingertips met with some resistance, she braced herself against it in order to thrust herself upright again.

But whatever she was leaning on suddenly slipped away. It wriggled from beneath her hand like a lizard’s tail.

‘Ross!’
Deprived of support, she fell forward, and found herself half submerged, with the slush up to her breastbone.
‘ROSS!’

‘Verlie!’

She was vaguely aware of Ambrose springing to his feet – perhaps moving towards her with a view to helping her up. But she only caught a glimpse of him, because she wanted her husband, she was looking to her husband for assistance, reaching for him as he made his way clumsily in her direction. He left a choppy wake – faint hollows in the viscid surface – and dragged streaks of red-tinted slime through patches of white and brown and yellow. At first, Verlie thought that
he
had caused the disturbance, churning up lumps in his eagerness to reach her. But the lumps didn’t slide back into the fluid depressions that he had scored through the mud. The further behind he left them, the larger they grew. He was almost within arm’s length of Verlie when one of the lumps took a definite form, rearing up to a kind of point before subsiding again. Unlike a breaching whale, however, it made no splash.

Verlie gaped.

It was Georgie who found the breath to scream.

‘
There! Oh my GOD!’

A flurry of movement. Even Ross saw this, because he turned just in time. The disturbance reminded Verlie of trout feeding on a fish farm: there was the same surge of thrashing, tightly packed bodies; the same sudden frenzy that was over so soon; the same sort of writhing, indistinct shape, which at a fish farm was invariably formed by a massed school rising up, engulfing the scattered food pellets, and sinking again, leaving only a slight disturbance on top of the water.

‘Get out,’ Ambrose panted. ‘Ross! Verlie! Get out!’

‘What–?’

‘There!’

Another glutinous shape – huge, amorphous – thrust itself into view, labouring against the elastic pull of the mud. It was as

big as a dog; no, as big as a dolphin.