Shards (5 page)

A heavy thud struck the roof.
Followed by another. And another ...

* * *

Practical Joke

Scrubbing hard, stretching
muscles til they ached, Julie fought a losing battle with the
toilet bowl. Decked out in leggings and Jim's old blue shirt, she
had engaged in the monthly cleaning ritual with gusto. It was the
bathroom's turn presently, a pristine space turned hovel by Wade
and his friend Joel, who slept over the night before. Scouring the
bowl, she struggled with the smell. Sewer, rubber, and chlorine
incarnate.

#

"Mum's gonna be scared," Wade
told Joel, breaking into a grin.

The cardboard face they'd
drawn, all black Texta horns and fangs, looked sinister as they
taped it to the broom handle.

"I don't know Wade, do you
reckon it'll reach?" Joel glanced dubiously at the pole.

The front of the house was at
street level, but beneath the bathroom window at the rear, the
house was high, chocked up on brick foundations. The darkness
beneath the house held Wade in thrall. He'd ventured under the
house a few times before, borne on fool's courage, but his
expeditions were always brief. Spiders and nameless things crawled
in that darkness.

"It'll reach," he assured, his
smile faltering.

#

A scraping sound drew Julie's
attention. The sound came from behind her. From below.

A creeping tentacle,
phosphorescent green, slithered up from the small circular drain in
the centre of the floor.

It protruded a few inches and
groped around the grate---a slimy tongue tasting at the fringes of
rust.

With sick fascination, she
observed the tentacle writhe and probe. The sight gnawed at the pit
of her stomach.

In slow, deliberate motions,
she retrieved a bold red can of flyspray from the cupboard. Within
seconds, the hiss of insecticide filled the room.

The tentacle thrashed and
retreated into the drain.

Gathering her nerve, she sidled
forward on hands and knees until her face hovered above the grate,
at a respectful distance. Beyond the little silvered bars, she
found only empty darkness.

#

"Go for it," urged Joel, as
Wade hefted the pole-and-mask toward the window.

A rumble, and the rattle of
pipes, reverberated from somewhere beneath the house.

The boys looked at each other
in bewilderment.

#

Something banged on the window.
Julie whirled around. With her pulse racing, she looked closer.

A face, black, angular and
misshapen, filled the window.

She yelped in surprise and
stepped away on reflex. Her foot brushed something cold and
wet.

#

Hearing mum's yelp, the boys
exploded into giggles. An instant later, a crash echoed from the
bathroom, followed by an ominous exhale sound, a hydraulic
hiss.

"Mum!" Wade raced up the back
stairs and into the house. Joel followed.

Reaching the bathroom, they
found Julie standing stiffly in the centre of the room.

"Sorry about the joke, Mum. Are
you okay?" Wade said.

"It was a good joke," she
answered, atonally. "I have another." She motioned toward the
drain, and stared at them with vacant eyes. "Come in boys, and
close the door."

* * *

Interlude, With Lavender

The world spun. Grey lines of
swirling chaos formed at the edge of vision as he opened his eyes.
Like the jarring stop of an amusement ride, the room came into
sudden, sharp focus.

Greyness---stainless steel and
concrete---pervaded the room. A metal table rose in front of him,
shrouded with a white cloth. The cloth concealed lumpiness in a
vague, albeit hefty, human shape.

"Hey there," a man's voice
called.

He turned at the sound of the
voice. A humanoid silhouette, swirling with mist, black and
ethereal, extended an arm-like appendage toward him.

He recoiled.

"Oh," the voice said, coming
from the mist. "I forgot."

"What are you?" He tried to
hold the quiver from his voice.

"The name's Blake. What's
yours?"

"Daniel. Daniel Caruthers."

"Pleased to meet you."

"You too," he answered without
thinking.

Daniel kept a wary distance
while he studied the shape named Blake.

After moments, Blake broke the
silence, "Umm, Dan, you might want to move."

"Why? What are you going to
do?"

"Nothin' mate. It's just that
..." Blake pointed toward Daniel's legs.

He dreaded looking down but
couldn't resist the urge. What passed for his hips disappeared
through a white sheet identical to the one on the other table---yet
he didn't feel a thing. His arms, legs, and body were as vague and
ethereal as Blake's. He flinched and the world spun again, a crazy
whirligig of greyness, to find himself in the centre of the room
under the light of an overhanging lamp.

"How'd you do that?" Blake
asked.

"What?"

"You blinked out for a
sec."

Daniel fixated on the swirls
that replaced his absent flesh. "What's happened to me?"

Blake glided forward across the
concrete. "Well, the last thing I remember was eating dinner.
Something was caught in my throat, and then ... and then I was
here. You?"

"I ... was in the car. There
was a light, just a flash really. I don't remember anything else."
He studied the slab with which he'd just been merged. Small drying
patches of brown saturated through its covering cloth. The shape
beneath looked human, vaguely so, but he couldn't tell.

He grabbed for the cloth with a
shadowy hand, only to pass through it, groping at nothingness.

"It's no good, mate. I tried
that already," Blake said. "It's a safe bet that's us under those
sheets though."

Despite a yearning to throw up
or to shout to the heavens, Daniel felt nothing---except an itch.
Like the feeling an amputee experiences after losing a limb, he
struggled against a palpable loss. The absence of the physical
ached, but only in his thoughts. That was all he had left.

From beyond the door, Daniel
heard muffled voices approaching. "Someone's coming," he whispered,
feeling strangely exposed.

"What do you want me to do,
mate? Hide under the table?"

A face, dark with stubble and
suntan, appeared in the glass window inset into the door. A second
later, the door swung open, admitting the man and another trailing
behind. Both men wore the aqua-coloured garb of hospital staff.

"I thought you said you heard
voices," the stubbled man said.

His blonde-haired companion
nodded. "Yeah, I swear I did."

"We're right here!" Daniel
stepped in front of them and waved his arms.

They didn't react.

"Sorry, maybe it came from room
four," said the blonde man. "You know the weird stuff that's gone
down in there,"

"Yeah," the other replied,
walking up to the table housing Daniel's body. "When did this one
come in? There's no tag."

"Less than an hour ago," the
blonde said, "paperwork's still upstairs."

"Hey, I'm right here!" Daniel
moved to the other side of the slab and floated inches in front of
the darker man's face.

"Save your breath, Dan. They
won't hear us." Blake coasted around the room. "We're dead."

The man pulled back the sheet.
Daniel's sheet. "Hey!" Daniel protested.

His face, his flesh and blood
face, was crumpled. He wore a look of surprise, nearly lost amid
the carnage inflicted by the metal and glass of the car
accident.

The sense of finality
overwhelmed him.

The room swirled again as he
reeled from the table. Only the details of his ruined and very dead
face remained constant as the world wavered.

"Sorry you had to see that,
mate." Blake hovered close by.

"Oh God. I have a wife and
kids. What's gonna happen to Sarah now I'm ..." Daniel trailed off
into silence.

"Jeez," said the stubble-faced
examiner. "That can't have been fun."

The blonde man nodded but said
nothing.

At his shoulders, Daniel and
Blake looked on as the examiner covered Daniel's corpse.

Suddenly sniffing, the blonde
man raised his nose and looked around the room.

"What is it?" the other
examiner asked.

"I can smell something.
Something sweet."

"Yeah sure. You only get
disinfectants and death down here," the darker man said. "I can't
smell anything, except maybe porky over there." He pointed to
Blake's remains.

"Hey! Screw you, dirtbag," said
Blake.

"Come on, it's always cold in
here. I hate this room," the blonde man said.

The other examiner nodded, then
turned for the door.

The lights flicked off,
followed by the door closing with a thud, which echoed through the
room and into the corridor beyond. As the sound of footsteps
retreated, a gentle draft wafted through the room, carrying the
fragrances of lavender and roses.

"You smell that?" said Blake, a
disembodied voice in the darkness.

"Flowers, a whole bouquet of
them. Like the ones I brought home to Sarah last Valentines Day.
She loved roses. Lavender too. The florist put a sprig in the
bouquet for me."

"More like Eucalyptus to me. My
ex used to burn it in those little oil burner things around the
house. I loved that smell." Blake paused. "When things were bad
between us, that smell was sometimes the only reason I'd come
home."

"I'll miss Sarah---and the kids.
It's going to break my heart to not see them grow up."

"I'll miss the Colonel's
Three-Piece Feed, but what are you gonna do?" Blake laughed.
"That's why I'm here in the first place."

"What do we do now, do you
reckon?" asked Daniel.

"We wait for the light, I
guess. Isn't that how it works?"

Together they waited in the
darkness as a breeze swirled through the room. An interlude between
death and something else, bearing lavender, eucalyptus, and aromas
of lives left behind.

* * *

Cruel Summer: Sand

The hole was impressive,
yawning---big enough to accommodate Dad. Rueben was pleased.

"Tuck your legs in, Daddy," he
shovelled sand like an artisan, bathed in the midday sun.

In this corner of the beach,
only wind-blown sand offered company. Reuben had chosen his spot
carefully.

He was a little curious when
Dad's eyes widened in surprise, his head then slumping sideways
into the loose sand.

Waiting for Dad's ruse to end,
Reuben piled and shaped more sand, creating a landmark around Dad's
slumped head.

Finally losing patience, Reuben
stomped off for an ice-cream, leaving Dad to sleep for awhile.
Marching away, he didn't notice Dad sink steadily beneath the
sand.

* * *

Dread Seasons Quartet: Rainbow-Speckled
Field

The butterflies flittered
between the flowers, caught in the euphoria of their sweet
springtime feast. A million flowers bloomed in the meadow, a
riotous explosion of colour.

The local kids frolicked among
the long stems, enraptured by the living rainbow tapestry. A
chest-high carpet of velvety grass was woven across the meadow,
providing an intense green underlay. Wind rippled across the grass,
eddying in complex currents.

Something rustled the
undergrowth, just a few short metres from Mindy's feet.

"Jacqui! Something's over
here!"

Nearby, Jacqui picked at a
cluster of marigolds, inspecting them with the clinical eye of a
scientist.

"Don't be such a wimp," she
said, still fixated on the flowers. "It's probably just a rabbit.
Or a rat."

"A rat!" Mindy shrank away.

A grey, floppy-eared hare
emerged from the grass, bounded past her legs, and disappeared
again.

"It was a hare!" Her heart
pounded.

Engrossed in the flowers,
Jacqui didn't bother replying.

Fevered shouting drew Mindy's
attention to the boys. From the gentle knoll, she watched Mark and
Josh chasing butterflies through the meadow. Becca trailed them,
her head barely visible above the grass line.

"I caught one!" Josh
shouted.

Carefully cupping his hands, he
waited for Mark and Becca to inspect his prize.

Mindy tore her gaze from Josh
and the others to watch the grass. The undergrowth around her
buzzed with movement.

Flashes of brown and grey
streaked past; dozens of rabbits swarmed around her. Clumps of
colour quivered in their wake.

The last rabbit paused by her
feet and looked up at her with solemn brown eyes.

"Get out of here," it
whispered, in perfect English, before bouncing into the undergrowth
after its kin.

She blinked, stifled a giggle,
blinked again, and then shuddered against the chill prickling her
skin.

A cold, heavy sensation sank
through her stomach.

"Becca?" Josh called, stealing
her attention.

Josh and Mark stood in the
centre of the meadow, casting their eyes around for Becca.

She was gone.

"Bec!" Tension edged Josh's
voice.

"Jacqui? You seen Becca?" Mindy
kept a nervous eye on the foliage.

No answer came.

She turned to find no trace of
Jacqui. Her cluster of marigolds fluttered in the breeze.

"Josh? Where's Jacqui?" she
squeaked, verging on panic.

A tiger-striped butterfly
drifted where Josh stood only moments before.

Everyone had vanished.

Waist-high grass, strewn with
endless daffodils, tulips, and other garish flowers, encircled her.
The colours danced and swayed, flirting with the morning sun.

Movement at her feet startled
her.

The grey hare she spotted
earlier approached with caution through the undergrowth.

Like the rabbit, it pinioned
her with soulful eyes. "Don't move," it warned, in a British
accent.