Chapter 1

The Earth Moves

No.

I’m sorry. I won’t be going into sordid details. There won’t be any car chases, either. No guns or bombs. No shootouts. No torture or harrowing feats of physical punishment or endurance. No dismemberment or gore. No teenage lesbian sex scenes. And no genitalia exploding in slow motion. Nothing more violent than bruised toes.

Remember—you were warned.

We had sex. That’s all you need to know.

Call me old-fashioned, a prude, whatever, but I’ve never had much time for descriptions of the mechanics (hydraulics?) of sex. They remind me too much of instruction manuals for DIY model planes. Tabs, slots, insertions, rotations… Titillating, stimulating, perhaps, but how relevant? So someone’s good in bed, or pedestrian, easily amused, inventive, submissive, athletic, fond of strawberries, or yodels a medley of national anthems during climaxes? Would you buy a used utopia from them? Would it make any difference?

Anyway, Yvette and I did it. In our bedroom. A thunderstorm raging, animal instincts ageing.

A relevant detail: Yvette was on top. Compensating for my alleged tiredness (and doing an admirable job of it). Not that I hadn’t been interested when she’d made her desires clear to me, I was just worried another chest pain would flare and let the cat out of the bag. For once, my thoughts were dominated by my heart, not my groin. And a long forgotten memory of a trashy tabloid headline reporting an ex-politician’s death as occurring ‘on the job’.

“Has it been a fortnight already?” I had said to Yvette, trying to replace the tabloid with my most reliable anti-arousal image: a protracted film clip seen years before of a gaunt prime minister and prim wife—his tie fluttering, her hair blowing—waving, endlessly waving dutifully at a jet taking an eternity to lift off (inside: the Queen, undoubtedly wearing the same grim bored expression, longing too to get away).

A mouth-corner smile from Yvette, clearly not amused.

Spring fever? I mused. After all our years together?!

An especially loud roll of thunder erupted, and rain finally fell, pounding on the roof and windows, soon drowning out all other sound. The storm, building for hours, now unleashed itself in a fury.

An omen? I wondered—but I could never have guessed to what extent.

The house blacked out. Common enough in storms. Annoying, but it made the lightning even more dazzling.

Yvette drew closer—but not from fear of the storm. With familiar assured means, she soon made it impossible for me to resurrect the image of those poor duty-bound people, waving, waving. Instead, they saluted, and against my better judgement and claims of tiredness I gave up.

What followed was marred only by intermittent anxiety about my abilities to disguise the agony of a chest pain as a surge of ecstasy.

I’d never before experienced pains like those of the preceding few weeks. Always sudden, brief, and occurring unpredictably only after sudden activity, my doctor couldn’t decide whether they were muscular or a sign of heart trouble.

There was enough circumstantial evidence for either option. Desk-bound, with no more regular exercise than paperweight-lifting, why not cramps on the rare occasions I did do anything vaguely strenuous, like running for a train? But then, why always in the chest? Were clogged arteries warning me of an impending heart attack? My father had the first of his seven attacks when he was 48—for me, less than a decade away.

Heart or muscle? I’d been fretting about the results of the tests ever since taking them but I only had a day to wait before I’d know (so I thought). I hadn’t told Yvette—no point worrying her about what might be nothing. Especially when I was doing enough worrying for both of us. Even during…

When the inevitable overtook me, my arms were outstretched, grasping the steel frame of the bed’s headboard. Yvette and I were not touching except in the obvious way, she riding frantically towards her own inevitability, the rain thrashing the windows with white noise, thunder bellowing, lightning flaring…

You know… the usual…

… then, in my last gasps, Yvette in the midst of hers: lightning bright enough to have been Hiroshima. Blinded for several seconds, thunderstruck even more than usual for that stage of proceedings, I was nevertheless aware of Yvette suddenly ceasing her motions.

It was as if she was not there at all—I felt no weight pressing against me, no tactile sensations of any kind, not even of the headboard I was gripping; and beneath me, a similar absence of feeling. Had my sense of touch been obliterated, confused by precedings?

Unable to see, feel or hear anything but the rain’s roar, wind and thunder, the thought came to me that perhaps we’d been strenuous enough to bounce from the bed.

Then, gradually, a feeling—something beneath me: not carpet, and certainly not soft sheets—something rough, uneven, scratchy.

We couldn’t have bounced out the window?!

Vision returned, snail-pace…

Yvette was nowhere in sight.

More to the point, I was no longer in bed, or even in my bedroom or house. I was alone, lying on my back on soft buoyant wet grass, my arms stretched behind my head but gripping nothing. And it was no longer the early hours of the night but day-time.

I sat up—abruptly, to say the least. A jittery scan of the surroundings…

I wasn’t even on the lawn of my house. I was on tall native grass in a place I didn’t recognise: thick bushland full of towering trees and dense shrubs, devoid of people, houses, any sign of civilisation.

“Ooooookay,” I said, eyes darting from side to side. “The earth moved, but…”

It was warm, despite skies full of storm clouds rapidly receding. All around me: signs of recent rainfall, though none was then falling. Occasional lightning.

To say I was mystified is about as much an understatement as suggesting a basketballer would be inconvenienced by having a leg amputated. Had I lurched into a dream? It didn’t feel like one—it felt eerie but real.

I stood up in something of a panic, only to immediately feel worse. My head swam, and my entire body felt uncommonly tired, out of proportion to recent (relatively) leisurely activities.

I sank back down to my knees—absently noticing that I was not simply still naked but proudly so, anatomically speaking (though not for long).

I massaged my temples, perplexed, thinking: I must be dreaming. After setting a new record for falling asleep after sex. I’m going to pay for this in the morning.

Then I noticed the grass beneath me was marred by a narrow line that curved back on itself, its shape that of my own, arms outstretched. The grass within and around the line was tall and healthy—but along it, burnt almost to the ground.

It reminded me of a chalked outline in a murder case.

I started to panic.

Wild desperate paranoid explanations sprang to mind. Was I a victim of a high school or university initiation prank? Or were the perpetrators myopic buck’s night celebrants who’d mistaken me for the groom? Had I been kidnapped and drugged, my tiredness an after effect? By aliens who’d wiped my memory? Perhaps I was simply hallucinating. Maybe someone had spiked the water supply, and not just me but the whole city was in a state of delirium. I’m just a bank manager, after all. Why single me out?

I even wondered if Yvette was behind it all, if one of her many interest groups was more sinister than appearances suggested and had persuaded or brainwashed her to play some grim joke on me for their own deluded reasons. Could she somehow have spiked our sex!?

Or had she suffered a similar fate?

Perhaps the worst idea: had a heart attack left me deliriously immersed in the phantasms of my own mind? Had I been blinded by a lightning flash as I thought, or was this a side effect of a massive coronary? Like a tunnel of light in near-death experiences. Hallucination by oxygen deprivation.

What the hell was going on?

Staying put was not going to answer that question, so I gradually quelled my panic by dwelling on the realisation that wherever I was, I could not be far from civilisation, and sooner or later I would find it—then I’d discover the true explanation for my baffling transportation. Or wake up. Whichever came first.

Summoning my energy, I again stood up, this time more cautiously. I scrutinised my surroundings, scanned a full circle, sought for a direction.

Distinctive white-barked trees were oddly familiar. One was like a gum outside our bedroom window, only taller, and with thicker limbs. Another was positioned relative to the first just like another at home, with a neat scar, too smooth to have occurred naturally but in the same spot as where I’d sawed off a dead branch on the tree at home. I was sure of it. But this tree too was taller than I remembered ours, and the scar was much older. And it had other branches missing.

Had I been dumped here deliberately, so the contradictory familiarity of these trees would heighten my confusion? Or was it just the sort of thing I could have expected from a hallucination? Or from exhaustion? Or maybe to me, all trees simply looked alike.

Endless thoughts, when the need was for action. Nothing hinted at an obvious direction, so I chose the one least likely to drain my depleted energies. Downhill.

“It could have been worse,” I reassured myself. I was naked, but not cold. And the grass was thick and luxuriant enough for my soft feet not to greatly miss their habitual protection of shoes.

After a featureless, seemingly endless, gently sloping hundred yards or less, the bush suddenly ended at a narrow bitumen road, devoid of traffic, curving across the sloping ground. I could not see far in either direction, but it was not familiar.

Exhausted, dazed, and disoriented, I took to the road. Again, downhill.

The next hour or so is a bit blurred. The road curved back and forth, with no streets crossing it, and I kept walking, slowly, fighting weariness. Several times when moving uphill, chest pains struck. Mercifully, they passed quickly, but they did nothing to help my state of mind. About the only other thing I remember is my hands cramping from being held so long in the same position—over my crotch.

At no stage did I see a car or other vehicle, nor people, not even a farmhouse or power line. Just thick bush on either side of the road. And a profusion of wildlife: mobs of grazing kangaroos; occasional wallabies and echidnas; a dozen or more varieties of snake and lizard; uncountable species of birds, from tiny blue wrens to wedge-tailed eagles; even koalas and one small herd of emus. And surprisingly close to the road but too big to be anything else, several wombat burrows.

“I must be a long way from home,” I decided. I’d seen many of these creatures near our house at one time or another, but they were rare sights, and never in such numbers. I couldn’t think where so much wildlife might be found. Even the more distant national parks I’d visited hadn’t seemed so abundant. Or, for that matter, some zoos.

I found it threatening, and my apprehension and sense of dislocation increased—especially when I almost stepped on one large black snake as it suddenly darted onto the road, before slithering back as soon as it saw me. I hate snakes.

The terrain did not alter until the road crossed a creek with steep banks, clear flowing waters, and frog choruses. Thirsty, as well as tired, I stopped to drink and catch my breath. It hadn’t rained since I’d started my trek, but the light was dimming as another thunderstorm built, deep rumbling thunder and dazzling lightning bolts gradually drawing near.

I stretched out on the grass adjacent to the creek, and found myself gazing at a nearby hilltop, again vaguely familiar. It had an odd shape, something like an ancient Mayan truncated pyramid. Its very flat broad top was covered in thick tall gum trees. Without the trees, I’d have sworn it was a hilltop a few kilometres from home—also not far from a creek, though one more often dry than not, and dirty and impoverished despite Yvette’s and others’ efforts to re-vegetate its banks.

A sharp splash in the creek prompted me to turn in time to see a platypus gliding gracefully near the far bank. “Definitely not the same creek,” I said. Just another coincidence, like the trees I first saw. Or some side effect of the drugs I’d been slipped.

I resumed my walk, worried that if I rested too long, I might fall asleep. But I’d barely covered any distance when my tiredness grew extreme and I indeed found it hard to stay awake. The mounting thunderstorm began to spill its rain, in a handful of large drops. “Not a favourable development,” I muttered, before lurching at the shock of the first cold drop hitting my bare back. The ordeal mounted—but my attention was diverted.

From where I stood, the road now stretched straight in front of me for some distance, and through the increasingly heavy rain, the dim light, and the blinding lightning, I could see, perhaps a kilometre away, a vehicle of some sort, approaching. It was too distant for me to detect any details other than that it was a car of some description, with an unusual deep violet colour. And I knew I could not expect to be seen from so far away. Yet I could not resist waving my arms and jumping in the air, trying to catch the driver’s attention, in the process gradually growing used to the shock of the rain’s coldness on my skin.

Just when I thought it was definitely close enough for its driver to see me, I suddenly remembered I was naked. Still uncomfortable about this, and also abruptly aware the car might have people inside responsible for my situation and perhaps ready to make it worse, I darted off to the side of the road and crouched behind a thick bush. I peered between the bush’s branches, but my view was hampered by the dense vegetation, the dim light, the pouring rain now draining constantly through my hair into my eyes, and the glare of occasional lightning bursts.

Without a sound, the car stopped almost directly in front of me, mere metres away, its middle portion dimly visible between a narrow gap in the bushes, the rest hidden. Try as I might, I could not see inside the tinted windows.

The driver’s door opened and a tall figure left the car, its build too burly to be anything but that of a male. His back to me the whole time, he hurriedly put on a voluminous raincoat, and placed its bulky obscuring hood over his head. He extracted something small and rectangular from a coat pocket and tried to shelter it from the rain by bending over it. He watched it studiously, pointing it first away from me, then gradually swinging it round to point directly at me—even though the bush I was hiding behind must have obscured me completely from his sight. He moved forward, out of my view briefly as he went round the car bonnet, then approached, a small waterfall tumbling over his hood. When he stopped barely a metre from me, I could still not see his face, but I knew he was looking straight at me.

“There you are at last,” he said in an unusually deep voice, with a slight but quirky accent. “Are you all right?”

If his words implied that he knew me, indeed that he was expecting to find me, then I did not recognise his voice. I didn’t reply. Instead, I remained motionless and wary, trying to study him through the bushes.

“What happened to your clothes?” he said, pocketing his rectangular instrument.

Still silent, I moved the bush’s branches in a mostly futile attempt to better hide myself.

“Well?” he said. “Are you coming with me?”

I hesitated. I was not just uncomfortable about being naked, but unsure whether to trust him.

“You prefer to just stay here in the rain, do you?” he said. “Come on. I think I have some sort of explanation.”

I was too tempted by this—and surprised—to resist. Abruptly, I stood upright, but was overcome by a wave of giddiness. More exhausted than ever, I gripped my head, staggered a step around the bush towards the stranger, then stopped aghast.

A particularly intense lightning flash behind me lit up the stranger’s face, allowing me to see it for the first time.

It was the face of a scaly horned demon.

Fresh horror clambered feverishly onto the back of my exhaustion and disorientation, and they tumbled together in a heap. I managed to turn to flee, but probably didn’t take even one step. Instead, as a massive burst of thunder erupted, I felt the now familiar pain in my chest strike without warning, and much more intensely than usual.

With a vague sense of falling, darkness overwhelmed me.