Where has all the sound gone?

The road to the North Head Quarantine Station is rimmed on either side by trees. Rugged and coastal – low, crouching. Hardy patchwork, greens and yellows, tiny white flowers. Occasional bone-grey branches, jutting out like witches fingers. There are dry weeds sticking from wrinkled sand, and ant-holes. Birds flicker. A wing, a leg, singing – invisible. It feels like a far longer walk than it is. For a moment you find yourself trapped in it and all that’s around you are the trees and the dust on the road and the wide sky. The wind is humming. Rustling leafsong swirls from the canopy, the walls. The ocean faintly crashes, somewhere far away. The rest of the planet has sunk into the distance and you suppose that if you had a machete, cut through those trees, you’d find yourself at the edge of a cliff falling into nothingness.

This country is built of layered strata. Stories on stories. Cultures dropped on cultures. In places like this, liminal, where the world is thin, the deeper layers seep in, wispy, through cracks in the earth. Dull reflections.

Where has all the sound gone?

Legends are classically fertile things, leaping forth from the merest blurry photograph or mistranslated phrase – monsters in Hawkesbury river, Min Min lights stealing people off the Outback, huge black cats in the Blue Mountains. In places like Sydney, they’re born by the dozen. There are ghosts all over the place. Seeping like water down the gutters, breaking out of weetbix boxes and being sucked into the air conditioning. A blood-splattered lady in white screaming on the Macquarie Fields train station. The Street With No Name at Annandale, which dogs are afraid of. Wakehurst Parkway, where an apparition will appear in your back seat and drive you off the road. Even Central Station has its own ghosts. Voices resounding in the dust and concrete where platforms 26 and 27 plowed through a graveyard. The sound of children playing, deep underground, in the buried darkness.

And then there’s Q Station. It’s argued by some to be one of the most haunted places in Sydney. It’s got everything. It’s got a buffet. Hands and figures captured in photographs. The inexplicable movement of objects. Sudden nausea. Localised temperature drops, even on hot nights. The sensation of being clasped by cold hands. Disembodied voices asking: ‘who are you?’ ‘why are you here?’ Nurses, a top-hatted mortician, a Chinese fisherman, wandering. A deeply morbid and highly depressing abundance of dead children – up to twenty of them, crowding each other out.

And older spirits, too. Buried deep, wistful scraps. Rising up between rocks older, far, far older than the First Fleet.

If death breeds folklore, it goes without saying, then, that a Quarantine Station would be crawling in the stuff.

The transfer from Manly to Q Station is uncanny. It’s a sunny day, the kind with an icy blue sky and clouds in tiny fat clumps. The sunlight is hot but the wind is cool. It’s enlivening. It’s the sort of day tourists crawl all over. The ferry’s drenched in them. Jutting out the rust-smattered pipes, breaking out of cracks in the lumpy green paint. Children, too, either shrieking or preparing to shriek. An island is sliding by, ringlets of blue-green waves sweeping, washing white against its grey sides.

‘An island! An island! An island! An island!’

So on. I have never felt more intensely aware of the presence of an island in my entire life.

And off the ferry, too. Slogging in a seeping mass of people, wiping salt spray from my face. Shuffling and chattering – somebody asking someone else about the numbness in their legs. Even past the gate, a slow bumpy trickle. And into the sunlight – spreading out, finally. But still, people, people! Noise, sound! Life and sentience reverberating from the tiles, shaking in the hardy sunlight.

Such is Sydney. Vibrancy. Life upon life, folded atop like geographic strata. A whole lot of death layered in between.

 

So comes the uppermost stratum of the history of Q Station. It’s the August of 1828 and the Bussorah Merchant has docked at North Head. It’s a ship with snow white sails towering into blue skies on masts ingrained with salt and seawater. The smell of fish rising from its soaking planks, snippets of wind playing in the rigging. It’s long as a shore. It’s sailed for more than eight months across wild seas, hauling convicts and the hardy folk to keep them in check. It’s huge, and invincible.

It’s spilling over with smallpox.

It’s the first of many ships quarantined here. Official documentation suggests 1300 people arrived – archeological research suggests 1600. Gravestones piled on gravestones, some torn out, some buried by drunken labourers who were paid in rum. 572 people died here, so it’s said. Nobody’s really sure. Here’s a metaphor for you: even to this day, researchers refuse to dig up bodies on the site. The diseases, so they say, still live in them. Poisoning the soil, burgeoning in bones like moss. The plague. Scarlet fever. Smallpox. Typhoid fever. Stains. Dig them up, and who knows what will come rising back out?

Strata extends further down. It’s uncertain, the significance of North Head to the Indigenous Australians. They’ve been there for a while, of course. Saw the coastline form, over centuries. Sculpt and erode and shift. It’s a burial ground, some have supposed. A religious site, with ceremonial significance, other suggest. A special gathering place. Shelters and middens and rock engravings and art sites, hidden in the scraggly coastal trees. This is where the First Fleet met the Aboriginal people. The place is now named after the meeting, in fact, when Captain Philip decided the behaviour of the natives was particularly ‘manly.’ This did not prevent him and his mates from kidnapping a few of them, of course. But you know how it is.

So goes the history of Q Station. Or the shallowest, thinnest layers of it, barely beneath the sand and gravel. The grass in Sydney is grown on human bonemeal.  

Where has all the sound gone?

It’s been stripped away in that manner uncanny to abandoned places. It’s like that, even here – even this tourist centre, a single bus off the ferry terminal, the shrieking children and bumping elbows and flowing cars and grease-smells of fish and chips. Like some thick sheet is over the place. The air feels close. Blades of grass are quivering. The trees to the right widen a bit. Taller, twistier ones, gnarled and less close together. You can see the ocean below, can hear the distant waves crashing. The stretching blue, lapping, little white lines forming, unforming. And the rest of Manly, a crescent along the horizon. Fluffy green with blocks of bright white and red and blue, buildings looking like they’d been spilled from above. Lego blocks littering a grassy knoll. You can see the vague shadows of streets – look hard enough, you can see the cars. The glint of light off their hides.

It’s a nice place to die, really.

It goes down a green slope to where a swathe of tall trees, all twisted trunks through shrubbery and little white flowers, cuts a long wall between the outlying staff cottages, and the station itself. There’s a map set up on a pedestal by the side of the road, bleached so that it’s nothing but scratches and black spots and names on a white background. Q Station goes in levels, like decorations on a cake. This place, where the staff once were, is the top level. Below that, the first class, second class, and third class precincts. And then, below that – the hospital and isolation precincts. The word ‘Former’ lunges. ‘Former’ Third Class Precinct. ‘Former’ Hospital Precinct. The finality of it is brutish. Mortality, pounded with a maul. An epitaph in one word.

‘Former’ cottages run opposite to the treeline. Small and square, roofs running up in low slopes. Bright red bricks with bright white plaster. Plastic signs with their building numbers, the names of their dead owners. They’re cleaned up, as would be expected on a tourist site. The fencing is bright white, the wood walls yellow and lumpy, like custard. There’s a low stink of familiarity in this place – that with only a few more components, this could be any other street. The sides of roads could be lined with cars with glinting windows, and the noises of lawns being mowed, somebody vacuuming, somebody’s too-loud radio swirling in the air. But the windows are dark. The brick chimneys are cold, empty. The wind is singing and a single tiny tour bus slides along the road. There’s a driver, an old man, an old women. Silent.

 

A long staircase in the First Class Precinct goes down to the dock. Framed in grey branches, silver sides licked by the sun, leaves glowing gold. The water, dark, mouldy, lapping. Turning deep green by the shore, caressing blocky stones, chalk-white, flat tops gleaming. Patchwork shrubbery flowing over it as a veil.

The dock is entanglement. Suspended in a glistering webwork, time and place zig-zagging in a floating, manic mess. Old bricks, old corrugated roofs for containing old things. The cliff face, scratched with ancient graffiti. It’s easy to believe those ships still come here. That you’d look far away and see the great white sails, the salty wood. Except, look far away, and you’ll just see more of Manly, lego bricks on a stretching crescent. The great building by the pier is now a museum, with a small cafe. Little plastic brochures detailing ghost tours and local restaurants and events. Another one is a restaurant. Another has the bathroom – too-bright lights and white walls and screaming hand dryers. The shore is cut off with a wire fence. The waves breathe, lazily toy with a yacht. At night, it all catches fire. The sea chokes, coughs, hacks. The tips of waves glisten with starlight and the fiery wobbling refractions of far-off Manly – Manly, gold squares in stacks, in hefty silhouettes, cutting out the sky. The stink of fish, a row of lights rumbling off the pier.

Crouched in the shadows, opposite to the lapping shore and the darkened buildings encrusting its sides is the shower block. It’s horrible in there. The two worst things in the dark are hallways and small hidden nooks. The shower block represents an exercise in maximum efficiency that contains them both, under a yawning blackened roof with crisscrossing rafters. Blue moonlight sliding on grey edges, and splotches of blackness thick and heavy like pools of dust or water. The crooked doors, swinging, angular, the concrete floor stretching fathomless in darkness. An emptiness is here. Deep, heavy. A coldness.

Doctor Reed, unaware of his death in a ferry accident, is here. He’s lead to one of the site’s most curious legal threats, when he scared a pair of kids out of the block, to the fury of their parents. He presumably spends most of his unlife in a state of angered confusion as to why his place of employment is invaded nightly by unfamiliar people in tacky shirts leaping at shadows.

And there’s Trouble.

He lives in the rafters. In the milky light, hanging upside down, shadowed. Long locks of trailing black hair. His arms are longer than his legs and he crawls above the stalls. Silent as cinder blocks. Like a daddy long legs. He’ll reach down, stroke your hair. Feel the curve of your head. And move on. He’s an old spirit – an indigenous one, supposedly. Some tour guides suppose he’s a yowie. One wonders what his actual name is. What he climbed on, before the rafters were installed. What his role was – I assume it went somewhat deeper than ‘hair stroker of tourists’. All that died to create Doctor Reed was the doctor himself. What died to create Trouble? How old? How much is really left behind?

The isolation precinct is above the hospital precinct. It’s up a set of blocky stairs, smattered with pebbles, dust, weeds. A grainy, sun-bleached quality. Made for convicts – just a bit too tall, just a bit too wide. Small buildings with corrugated roofs crowned with scraggly branches rising into the deep blue. Wicker chairs and overhangs and wooden walkways between them. Nested in a little corner in the trees, facing a wall of ragged shrubbery and then – the ocean. Calling out. Manly laid across the skyline like a curtain. Little white flowers, little yellow flowers – hanging lilies. Huge stones in long piles looking like fallen gravestones, striating rubbly colours, hardy green lichens. And the great bare limbs, bone-white and curving above the verdancy like huge broken fingers. Curling and twisting and collapsing wavelike, skeletal, cephalopodan. The boughs make loops. Draw strange runic patterns in the air, in their rotund curves. Don’t look into the branches. Spirits live in them, and they’ll take your soul.

This place was thought to be an Indigenous meeting place, for the secret business of men. Tatters of it hang around, invisible to all but Indigenous visitors. A woman who paused, and stared between the trees. The splotchy darkness and the blue shadows in the boughs. A chanting, thumping between the foliage. Ringing. And a pressure in the skull – an unwelcomeness. She is a woman, and this is a place for men. So on. Tatters, is all. The tour guide I talked to admitted that these were not stories, really, for him to tell – at least in any greater detail. They’re not mine, either. Tatters, is all – and not our tatters.

The path from the isolation precinct leads to the third class precinct. It’s all construction work, there. Safety signs, fences with green fabric. Scaffolding and dust. There’s a cabin, on the very edge. The tour guides hate it. Some refuse to enter it. Samuel the Gravedigger is one of the many spirits inhabiting it. Nobody’s really sure who he is. A doctor, some suppose, or an officer, or a boatman, or the subject of some older grave deep beneath. Layers, layers, layers. Stories refracting against stories. Not one theory actually involves any gravediggers. Where his name came from is a mystery. I don’t think Sam cares very much, really.

Suppose the milky moonlight scrawling patterns in the dust on the table. Suppose the window frame outlined in silvery gleam, and the blue-grey shadows from the chairs and cabinets and handles and other cramped things in that tiny room. EMF detectors clicking to themselves, blinking – bright eyes. The ceiling’s corners thick and heavy with shadows, and dark mould spreading. The floorboards creaking and thumping, bending and bowing with a vigour unlikely even for a whole tour group. Sam, running laps. I imagine him chuckling to himself, tongue lolling out the side of his mouth. I imagine him leaping, flat and pale and silver light cutting through his nothingness like blades. In another room, in a corner, is a cupboard. Shadows hang over it like stains – an inky solidity, like your hand could brush it away, or get caught in it like web. It’s shut tight. If you ask nicely, and Sam figures your reaction will be funny enough – it will swing open. A rising creaking. Like a sloughing dream, slipping open – slowly, slowly, so you don’t notice it until you’re gazing widely at shadows so deep it’s like looking into a hole. And the floorboards go mad beneath, rattling and creaking. Singing.

 

Q Station gives the sensation of a place hollowed out. Wide and unlit, and old echoes ringing off cold heartless walls. There are tendrils that reach out in the cracks in the dry dirt, between the dusty floorboards or breaks in the foliage. The burnt smoke of old stories drifting off to be forgotten. Most have been, already. All that can be gathered from beneath this piled strata are tatters. Tatters shared, tatters collected. Dull reflections, endlessly distant from the kernels of truth at their centres. That’s really all this is, in the end. To collect the tatters and present them as they are.

 

Back to University Writing

It has been two years now since the God of Empty Places bestowed divine epiphany upon Collin Frisbee and implored upon him to dig it out of his backyard. The pit gazes out with a solid hefty blackness like a dark eye boring a hole in the sky. It goes so deep your head swims and your eyes turn away, and you feel mythological and electrical all over. And you start seeing weird things in the shadows, scuttling gargoyles or worm-dragons down there, Jersey Devils and Bigfoots in the trees. The morning sunlight can only scrape the shadows on the top and the darkness beneath is blessed and immortal. Every day Collin Frisbee returns to it with his shovel, hoists it, dextrous, like it’s a limb. It has been baptised in that inky blackness, consecrated by the God of Empty Places. It shimmers like new, and seems to shine brighter every day. Dirt slings from it like molten butter.

It was a tough task, when he first started. He had awoken one morning with the sun burning on his face through the curtains and his arm numb from having been slept on, with the shocking realisation that he was the prophet of the God of Empty Places. Divine epiphany burnt through his skull with welding heat. A prophet? Him? Collin Frisbee? Who the hell even was Collin Frisbee?
Collin Frisbee was this: in his house, damp and drab, with moths in the sheets, in all its heavy-aired emptiness. In this stillness, purchased long ago by a man who was now dead, in the shadows of the garage, in a box by rust and rat droppings, a shovel. Glimmering. Ready for its purpose. So he took it, and he dug.

Now his hands are calcified as hard as the shovel itself, but in those early days he was still a man of flesh, and he dug and dug as the sun went down, rays scattering in the dry leaves of the tree in the yard, down, touching the top of the jaggedy fence with graffiti over the side. Down, until it turned all the suburbs into black silhouettes against a horizon pink and orange and grey, colours wildly dancing in all the crevices and bumps on the bruised clouds so it was like every form of light was cavorting up there. It was that time of day where there were no shadows and all the hard edges of the sunlight were gone so you saw everything as its true self, soft in the dullness, and the streetlamps and car lights are bright as stars and the meat-world of Collin Frisbee felt that much closer to the faded spirit-places the God of Empty Places lived. And he dug and dug right until the sky went black. And his hands hurt, right in their fibres, right in the bones.
And the next day he dug. And dug. And the sun went down and the sky flashed all its colours and the earth went black and cool, and his hands hurt. God, did they hurt.

He is descending the pit, now. It closes around him, with the cool wet air and the dirt walls rising around with roots and pebbles jutting from the sides. His shovel is slung on his back behind his bag and everything in it. All those blessed artefacts, singing in rattling voices.

There had been mechanical difficulties when he had first begun the project. After only a week or so of digging, the hole had become too deep for him to pull himself out of. Too tall to fling the dirt from. A ladder and bucket were promptly procured, but those didn’t last the week after that. He buys pitons, now, drives them into the dirt at regular intervals. They were hard to get used to but now he scuttles over them with iron-tough hands and stone-tough feet like he’s sauntering down a slope. He has installed a pully system, too. Ingenious and simple – a matter of pulling on the rope, tugging the bucket all the way atop (covering your head as occasional smatterings of dirt are loosed and tumble onto you), and then one final tug as the bucket releases the dirt onto the surface, and falls back down. It took Collin Frisbee a while to figure out that one. The God of Empty Places is as inspiring and encouraging as a god ought to be but it has no knowledge at all of engineering matters, not even the most basic. It is an old and obscure god and it lives in the dark places beneath the cracks in the sidewalks and in the cold dry under graveyards and deserts with shadows untouched for ineffable aeons. Its primary worshippers are worms, centipedes, and the occasional grieving rat looking to religion for answers. Its experience in these matters is limited.

But figure it out he did. The hole yawned deeply, and deeper and deeper it yawned. The trips down there lengthened. People came to his door every once and then like they always did – official-looking types in stiff suits wanting him to sign this or that. Or awkward-smiling faces with flyers asking for donations for children here, or children there. The mailbox filled. He had no time for them, not any more.

‘I have no time for this,’ Collin Frisbee would say, shaking his head. Dirt flew off him, dripped off his shovel. ‘Not any more.’

‘No time for what?’ They might ask.

‘The God of Empty Places needs me,’ Collin Frisbee would reply. ‘I was bestowed with divine epiphany.’

Their reply would usually come a bit slower after that. ‘Oh, well, um…’ is usually the most any of them could get out before he would march off to the yard, shovel slung over his shoulder like Excalibur. He holds nothing against them, as prophets and holy-men ought not to.

Some things needed attention. He had a burst pipe, once. It leaked for hours and hours and turned the kitchen into a small swamp when he had finally come back, aching, sweating. There had been a frog that had gotten into it somehow and it looked at him from the kitchen counter and croaked. He fixed it, of course, but he is unsure if he would even bother, now. Now he spends more time in this pit than he does at home. All he really needs is a place to sleep for four hours or so every day. Maybe he can get a tent. Maybe all he really needs is a sleeping bag and an umbrella.

He began finding truly strange things in the pit in the second year. The light from above was impossibly distant. Mostly the air was cool and damp but sometimes it felt warmer and warmer, and so did the dirt, and sometimes you felt a gust of humid wind and a sound like something breathing, and the roots quivered like veins. Still, Collin Frisbee dug. He didn’t know what he would meet, but he knew that his shovel was consecrated and his hands were as hard as stone, and that nothing could hurt him.

He passed a place where the dirt glowed with a swampy green light. Loose debris wobbled and the air thrummed with sentience, and every stone he hit with his shovel sparked suddenly with a bright white flash. It stunk of gas and light.

And he passed a place where long lost dead had become trapped and buried in the darkness and the soil, and they gazed morosely, jealously, at him as he dug past, pleading with their eyes for things he didn’t have, grazing him with plaintive hands soft and weak as ash.

And, at one point, his shovel struck something rough and dry. When he swept the pebbles and mess off it he saw it was a chalky cracked white. It was bone, he knew. It was a femur. It stretched hugely along, up, he supposed, to some massive pelvis, down, he supposed, to some colossal foot. He redirected his hole around it.

He would uncover a travelling worm, here, or a trundling centipede, there. They would bow to him in that distant and hasty way of theirs, and would tunnel away and vanish. It was lonely and tiring, but he thought on his divine epiphany, and this drove him.

Deeper, so deep that time was slow and sludgy and you couldn’t tell whether you were awake or unconscious and for how long or not, Collin Frisbee felt the Candle-Eaters. Aware, prophet, the God of Empty Places had told him. Be aware, prophet. He felt it in the walls, felt the rumbling movements like they were from his own organs. There was an undeniable noise: a repetitive sturdy shuffling. He felt it building for what might have been hours, until the dirt split suddenly aside, crumbled apart like liquid, spurting. A hand. Gnarled and thin, bone ridden over with narrow white flesh. It tore violently at the walls around it, spidery, frenetic. There was a slavering, agonised panting, of something long, long starving. He swallowed, and drove his shovel into the hand. A wet crrsch, and a hissing sound, and thick dark smoke wallowing from it.

Collin Frisbee knew in that exact moment what they were and why they were here. They were the Candle-Eaters who lived in houses made of the roots of dying trees and who had skin like wax and tongues and blood made from smoke. They loathed Collin Frisbee, and he couldn’t help but loathe them right back. They loathed him all over, for his lifestyle and clothing, for his hair, for his diet and his joblessness, for his state of education, for the way he talked, and his distance from his living relatives. They hated him because he had no candles, because nobody seemed to have candles anymore. They hated him because they hated his mission and because they hated his god, and all gods. They did not believe in anger management and, as a cultural whole, despised therapists.

Another hand jutted through and he stabbed that, and another one, which he stabbed, and another one. Scrabbling hands, hissing, grabbing, flicking dirt, scratching. He stabbed and stabbed at them for what might have been days, or weeks, or minutes, or a single second, he couldn’t tell. It smelled like dirty smoke and wax and his eyes and shoulders stung, and he only stood down when the God of Empty Places finally told him, with a humid breath from deep below, that it was over. He fell to the ground, leaning on his shoulder. He rested, checked the rope and the bucket, and his shovel, and his injuries. He had cuts and scratches, and a bruise or two, but nothing more. And his shovel was clean and smooth as moonlight.

The Candle-Eaters never attacked again, but at times he knew their scouts were nearby, scrabbling, sniffing him with long waxen noses. He would yell at them and jab into the walls where he heard them, and they would scrabble in a panic and vanish. They appeared less and less of late. They were afraid of Collin Frisbee, and of his consecrated shovel, and his stone arms. But never enough to go away entirely. Even now, as he digs, where the depth of the earth rises around him cathedral-like, where the shadows are ancient and virgin and distant even from their tree root cities, he hears them.

The dirt pile in Collin Frisbee’s backyard, meanwhile, swelled. Fed on deep, wet, healthy dirt, it grew monstrous and fat. It grumbled happily to itself and spread outwards, over the grass, towards his house. It was nearly as high as his roof, then, he recalled, the last night he had checked. He can feel it swelling, can hear its sighs, licking its tongue. It is probably bigger than his house, now. It is probably eating it. Sometimes he thinks of what is happening up there, what he has left behind and what he has wrought. If one day should he stop, look at the faint fizzling sunlight, take up that long climb to the surface, what would he find? The whole world a great dirt pile, mountain-high, reaching its filthy, wet mass, squirming with worms and buried houses and bones up to scrape the moon? Or – would anything have changed? Had it been always like that, and he was only thinking of it now? Perhaps there isn’t an Earth at all. That the hole scales endlessly up and there is nothing at the top but a light bulb. His mind drifts occasionally to these thoughts, even at this depth, his cheeks stroked by the holy shadows, the breathing roots. Sometimes he feels a gulp of illness at it. His mortal self returns and his stone limbs quiver into meat and he is unable to even dig – but sit there, in silence, thinking about that dirt pile, and how big it is, how faraway it all is.

He sees the sunset rarely, now. All the miraculous lights, pirouetting red and yellow and orange in clouds like Greek temples. The long shadows and the twisted black trees and the headlights down the cracked roads that shine like trapped flame. The only light he can see now is the faint thread from the top of the pit, and the wandering swampy green will-o-wisps. He thinks these things, even now, when he is so close. When the dirt beneath him trembles with foreboding. And the dreary air feels electric.

The God of Empty Places does not have a Bible, because its worshippers mostly don’t have eyes. If it did have one, this is what its first and most important prayer would be:

¹ I don’t really know anything about anything.

² This is fine by me.

Collin Frisbee’s divine epiphany has remarkably similar wording.

 

Back to University Writing

Blasphemy, blasphemy, thought the gardener, and that really was the oddest part.

Though the gardener was a filthy disbeliever – a rotten agnostic-or-atheist (alternating with dependence on factors as the quality of his day, his health, the weather, et al), dirty to his bones, faithless (frequently, anyhow) in topics involving anything more spiritual than a hot cross bun – despite all this, he found it blasphemous. A rumbling in his gut. A dark vague weight on the back of his brain. The sinking heaviness of his face into a frown.

But blasphemy, blasphemy, so on: the gardener sunk into it. Felt it absorb him up to his ankles, hips, chin. So he stepped, silent, frowning, broiling internally, warm ash hugging his boots, gentle and snug as a lover.

The planet had ‘military relevance’. Hills of ash, death-grey, rolling over and down, flat in great far-off plains. Ash twisting in gales, rattling off the gardener’s helmet. A corpse-land, beaming with white light, but grey everywhere, grey-skied, grey-earthed. Grey corpsed, and the gardener, grey-suited, looking like some ambulatory smudge, a man watched through mist. A grey no-one with a gleaming visor.

And another one: legs splayed, scorched on the back, deserting. No judgement from the gardener. That was none of his business. He placed his nozzle under the boy’s face and spun him over: terror and smattered ash. But that was none of his business, and the gardener spun the crank and aimed at the boy, and with a noise like an electric zipper being pulled up sent jittering tendrils of light over him, fizzling away at him. They worked away, jaggedy and vivid, turning him blacker and blacker until there was nothing left but another mound of ash, sinking into the hill, steaming into the sky. Blasphemous, felt the gardener, in spite of all he kept saying to himself.

For instance: they were hardly innocent, were they? Glimmering like stars in those low ashen fields – weaponry. All those centuries developing, inventing, philosophising, and it all led to this: magic wands that made guts and life come flying out instead of nicer things like doves or rabbits. All the evidence was there: homicide. Murder in all of them, murder gleaming in even the most wide, terrified eyes. So the gardener explained to himself.

And, for instance: they were already dead, weren’t they? They certainly weren’t asking for his manager, let alone weeping over their fate, which, frankly, was probably bound for them anyway, gardener or not. Cremation was in. Next to all such newfangled hologramming, mechano-taxidermy, clone museuming, and sun-launches, it was cremation that was the most fashionable. Cremation was retro, like mounted deer heads and fireplaces. It was the best treatment you could really get in that state of being and the gardener would have even appreciated a ‘cheers, mate’ now and then. So the gardener explained to himself.

The new kids understood it. Esoteric figures who all looked similar, spoke similar, had Anglo-Saxon names never longer than seven letters. The new kids were as invincible as djinni because they never seemed to think about anything at all.

‘Nasty stuff, isn’t it?’ Asked the gardener some weeks ago. He and a new kid (John or Brian or Adam) met on a hill, ended up walking alongside each other. They talked like robots, traded word for equivalent word. So they came upon a field where the bodies were piled like the ashes. They were clean as the day they had all been born but for their throats. Chemicals in the air tasted like lightning.

‘Ahum?’ The new kid replied.

‘I said, “It’s nasty stuff, isn’t it?”.’ The gardener checked over his apparatus and said once more: ‘Isn’t it?’

‘Um, yeah, sure?’

And that was the end of the discussion. It was noiseless but the zipping of the vanishing corpses and the rattling ash on their visors. That was when the gardener realised that the new kids were invincible, safe as Adams and Eves (before that nasty tree business). They were unlike people like the gardener, who were mortal, disgustingly so, oozing flesh and snapping bones, squelching, leaking and bruising. The gardener envied them. In fact, the gardener despised them, with a howling, white fury he had never felt before. They were wretched, vapid, hateful creatures, brainless, and the gardener wished he could be even a tenth like them.

He wondered bitterly upon these things until the apparatus broke. Thank God, thought the gardener. There was no greater blessing upon the gardener than the apparatus. It might have been fashioned by Hephaestus. It was a dirty mass of metal and tubes. On one end there was the nozzle and on the other was the handle, and on the other was the crank. The Holy Trinity.

The apparatus had jammed right as he had come to a small squad and they lay like gentle sleeping babies under the white sky as the gardener tugged at the machine. It was a perfect world in those few moments as he worked at the device and everything might have been right forever had he never fixed it: those dead bodies would have been nothing more than sleeping children and the gardener would have been plugging away at the machine in mindless peace, and all would have been well forever. But the gardener wasn’t half as smart as those new kids and soon the thing was tittering back to life, sweeping over them.

One of the bodies moved.

The gardener paused, of course.

The body shuddered. The visor was cloudy and cracked on the edges and the gardener couldn’t see anything of the soldier’s face except his wide eyes, blinding as searchlights. They blinked.

So the gardener shot the soldier dead. The noise resounded like a bell and the air smelled like thick ozone. He looked like a burnt out candle, a clean hole in his face, tendrils of coiling smoke. So the gardener turned all of it to ash. These things happened.

Blasphemy, blasphemy, thought the gardener, dragging himself across the ash hills, towing the apparatus, heavy. He felt binded. There were ropes on him, connecting all around, back to that boy he killed, and to that gun in its holster, and to every particle of ash he walked on. All of it together, tied, pulling at him. The gardener understood, then, that he was dead, too. Dead the instant he had killed that soldier – probably long dead before that, too. Back when he first thought of blasphemy. Back when he was born, he had been dead. That really was the oddest part.

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