Tremble (24 page)

He hoisted her legs over his shoulders and thrust into her hard. There was so much of her he was engulfed, her tightness and wetness catching at him as if her very cunt was sucking him into the core of her. This was it. His floating critical eye was closed, his body was jerked into
now
, the present tense, for the first time in his life. With an almighty rush, the emotional fused with the sexual. His quickening triggered her own and as he began to orgasm she followed a few seconds behind, and they both came yelling, sending hissing cats flying to all four corners of the house.

“Jesus, Saturday, that was fucking marvelous.”

Lying nestled in the crook of her arm he had never felt more relaxed in his life, as if after holding his breath for forty-three years he’d finally exhaled. One huge erect nipple dominated his horizon; snuggling down into the soft flesh he felt like a child. Saturday, for once, was silent, staring up at a damp patch on the ceiling—a leak she’d failed to fix a summer ago. Secretly she was frightened, attuned as she was to the tremors that still ran like an underground earthquake through the very stratification of her body. She didn’t want to fall in love. Not with him—a man whose politics were as abhorrent to her as Hitler’s. Besides, she was convinced she was merely a curio, an interesting diversion for Gavin. Why would a man like him want a woman like her, she couldn’t help thinking as she looked at the toned abdomen, the chiseled profile curled into the crook of her shoulder.

Her vagina involuntarily contracted, the shape of him still echoing
deep within her. She could have him again now, and if there was one thing Saturday hated, it was needing a man. There had been a time in her life where she deliberately did not come, having realized that when she orgasmed she let men in emotionally, and immediately there was a kind of fatality to the way the relationship—comradeship was how she liked to think of it, being an active socialist—played itself out from then on, invariably ending with the man leaving her. She’d be buggered if she was gonna let some man hurt her again now, especially someone she had always regarded as the bane of the Queensland environmental movement. This wasn’t just sleeping with the enemy, it was sleeping with the devil.

I think I must love her, Gavin thought, his eyes half-shut, dozing against the soft warm breast, her armpit hair tickling his nose. I’ll dump Amanda and move in Saturday, he concluded, wondering how her naked bulk would fit with the pristine trimmings of the apartment. She’d look great in a gray silk dress, low-cut, with those enormous breasts jutting out, he imagined. His mind rambled on until he had the paleobotanist squeezed into black vinyl as a familiar fetish reemerged.

Distressed by this new train of thought, Gavin opened his eyes. A large daddy longlegs was tentatively making its way across the wooden floorboards. He stared at the tiny body swaying precariously on its spindly legs, as if amazed at its own gravity-defying design.

Gavin hated spiders, their hairy legs, the way their silk spilled so effortlessly out of their rears like slippery excrement. But as he watched the insect daintily tiptoeing across the floor he realized that at this moment he loved this particular arachnid. In a sudden epiphany he saw the spider as it viewed itself: a fearless hunter perched high over its terrain; the lion-king of a microscopic world that existed as a constant invisible below human eyes. It was then Gavin realized that he knew exactly how to solve the riddle.

His meditation was rudely interrupted by a large tabby who pounced on the defenseless creature and carried it off in its mouth, eight threadlike legs whirling madly, fringing the cat’s jaw like a demented beard.

“Saturday, I need to blow up an image. Can you do that here?”

Excited, Gavin strolled naked around the kitchen, his penis lolling
against his thighs. Saturday, wrapped in a purple tablecloth and smoking a beedie, speculated whether his behavior might be the onset of a bipolar disorder, then less reverently wondered if Gavin’d be up for another bonk. She finally decided that the best action would be to humor him. She stubbed the beedie out. “I have a scanner that can do the job, assuming it’s a photographic image.”

“Perfect.”

Gavin found his jacket and pulled a pile of photos from the pocket. He laid them out carefully on the scarred wooden table and waited while Saturday looked.

“Jesus! It’s a corpse! Where did you get these, Gav?” A new tone of fear ran through her voice. To reassure her, Gavin put his arm around her waist. She pulled away.

“Don’t worry, I didn’t kill him. Nature did—or whatever it is that’s after me.”

“What do you mean, Nature? Where’s the photo from? Some morgue?”

“I found him, on one of my sites, but that’s irrelevant. I want you to look at the face. Recognize it?”

She peered closer. The features looked barely human under the thick velvety covering of moss and gray lichen. Dispassionately she wondered how the lichen could have sprouted so quickly on a decaying body; under normal circumstances it would take decades to get such thick growth.

“It’s your Green Man, Sat, that German critter in the garden.”

“Personally I can’t see the resemblance,” Saturday murmured, although she noticed that if you tilted the photo at a certain angle there were some similarities. He was obsessed she concluded; perhaps it was cumulative guilt, some kind of subconscious remorse. But she couldn’t imagine Gavin regretting anything.

“But what about that strange vegetation sprouting over his face, what do you think that represents?”

“Some kind of unusual decay. It would have needed very bizarre weather to produce that.”

“Blow it up.”

“What?”

“Magnify a section…. I have an idea about something.”

The photo filled the whole of the computer screen. Saturday highlighted a portion and pulled it away as a separate window.

“How far can you magnify before you lose detail?”

“About 400 percent. It’s not quite state of the art but it’s close.”

Her fingers raced across the keyboard as she spoke, magnifying the image again and again, until all that was visible was the moss itself, magnified four hundred times. It looked like a forest.

The few hairs left on his body rose with the chill of recognition. “That’s it,” he whispered.

“There must be something wrong—moss doesn’t normally look like that close up. It doesn’t have—”

“Branches? Trunks? Leaves?” Gavin’s voice grew shrill with hysteria. “Can’t you see that it isn’t moss—it’s a forest,
the
forest…that horrible parallel world I’ve been trapped in.”

“Will you calm down?”

“Saturday! Don’t you see? He’s been murdered, and it was he who warned me at the beginning….”

Saturday peered closer. The magnification did look like a forest, but not any forest that she knew of.

“Okay, say we do work from the premise that it is a forest—I don’t recognize the vegetation. It’s neither prehistoric nor contemporary, although it probably looks vaguely more contemporary.”

Gavin sat down heavily, his head in his hands.

“Say it is a warning. Say it’s not from the past but the future….” he murmured.

“Now you’re really losing the plot.”

“Can you add in environmental factors—like weather, pollution?”

“Of course.”

“Pull up a contemporary rain forest—one that would be appropriate for now, in this area.”

Thinking he’d gone crazy she followed his instructions, reverting to the computer modeling she used as a base program. A recognizable rain forest filled the screen, a canopy of Queensland vegetation with a thick undergrowth of ferns. She glanced across to check that the telephone was within reach, comforting herself with the thought that she could always ring the police if necessary. Gavin was beginning to look more and more maniacal.

“1.6ppm of carbon dioxide, that’s the eight-hour average for the Brisbane CBD. Times that by fifty.”

She punched in the equation: the forest sprouted more leaves, the
trunks extended spinelike into the sky, which had darkened to a dirty gray.

“Take the greenhouse factors and treble them….”

The horizon darkened again and the evolution process sped up, tendrils winding like blind snakes up tree trunks, the undergrowth thickening to an impossible density.

Gavin froze. “Stop it there.”

The image on the screen stopped moving. Gavin held up the printout of the magnification of the tramp’s face. It was a perfect match.

“No.” Saturday swung around in her seat, her whole body quivering. “No, it’s not possible, Gavin. It’s just coincidence, an optical illusion. It just isn’t scientific—even you must know that.”

“But, Saturday, you’ve seen what’s been happening…. I would have thought you of all people—”

“—would have what? I’m a scientist not a mystic.”

She picked up the photo of the old man. “How do I know that you didn’t kill this guy, then have some strange mental breakdown where you concocted this whole scenario to justify the murder?”

Gavin looked at her in horror as her hand crept toward the phone.

“You
have
to believe me. There’s no one else, no other witness….”

“Witness? I’m not a witness. I’ve seen nothing to convince me of the reality of your haunting, except some reportage and now a photo of a corpse.” She lifted the phone. “You’ve got ten minutes to get out of the area, then I’m phoning the cops.”

He stared at her, barely comprehending her words. He couldn’t believe that she would do this to him after making love, that she hadn’t felt the overwhelming connection as he had.

“But we made love…. I thought you understood….”

“Just go. Go now!”

Gavin picked up his polyester suit and bolted for the door.

He waded through the thick undergrowth, driven by a dulled sense of purpose. He stank of piss and some unmentionable human filth, but had become so accustomed to it he could no longer smell himself. He’d been living in the vacant lot for as long as he could recall. His mind was a blank beyond the moment he had found himself lying on the rubbish
heap, familiar faces now reduced to ghostly circles as his memory evaporated into fog.

In the distance he heard the sound of a vehicle pulling up, the thud of a car door. He wasn’t frightened. Other human beings were shadows that passed beyond the wall that separated his world from theirs. He lived in a forest, the forest of the future.

His toe hit something sharp; he bent down to find that he had cut himself on the edge of a rusty tin. A piece of newspaper lay nearby. The headline across the top of the article read:
PROPERTY TYCOON DISAPPEARS. FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED. WIFE GETS ESTATE BY DEFAULT
. He tore the paper in half and wrapped it around his bleeding toe. The crash of footsteps interrupted him. Someone had broken into his world.