by Carol Hone

tied 2nd place

The screen door was being stubborn and sticking open, again. I turned in the entrance and jabbed it with the toe of my shoe, unwilling to put down the bags of groceries to free my hands. When the tremor struck, I was balancing on one foot and swearing. The floor shook, the door-frame swayed. A juddering rumbling engulfed me. Outside, the trees and the two-storey brick-and-timber house across the way shimmered as if turning into one of those desert mirages.

I dropped everything, planted my door-jabbing foot on the floor, threw out my arms like a bad tightrope walker and swore again. Groceries landed with a rustling thump of plastic and cans on the kitchen tiles. Our terrier, Jumbo, shot in through the door, yelping, whacking my leg on the way past. Behind me, my husband, Greg, let out an even higher-pitched yelp. The world quietened and stilled.

Earthquake? Except we don’t get earthquakes here.

The screen door creaked and swung in, shutting neatly with a click? like it was teasing me. Bastard thing.

Greg hissed. “Need a plaster. Damn. What was that?”

The groceries could wait. He stood over the open dishwasher, clutching one hand in the other. Blood welled between his fingers. Where was Hailey?

“Thing bit me.” He chuckled. “I know…don’t put the sharp knives in point up. How was I to know the house was going to move?”

“Plasters, plasters,” I muttered. “Where’s Hailey? Do you know?” The shock seemed to have rearranged my thoughts. “Wait! I bought some!” I knelt and rummaged through the bags. Ugh. Broken eggs leaked yellow yolk around cans of dog food and beetroot. I found the packet, tore it open, dropped the plaster wrappers and let them flutter down? thinking all the time how I’d never do that normally. “Here! Where’s Hailey? Where’s—”

The distinctive sound of Hailey’s small footsteps galloping down the hallway answered me. Our daughter rocketed into the kitchen, wrapped her arms round Greg’s leg and grinned up at me. “Hello, mummy.”

I heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank God for that.”

He held up the cut hand. “It’s not that bad, really.” The blood had spread into the delicate creases on his palm, sketching out the lines of his life like new-inked crimson calligraphy.

I frowned. “No. Guess not.” We didn’t get earthquakes. This was like it snowing in the Sahara. I stuck the plaster over the cut then looked into his eyes. “What in all the names of—”

Greg shushed me and pointed down at Hailey’s brown-tussled curls.

“Oh.” Swearing was a bad habit of mine. “Anyway, what happened just then?”

“You’re shaking, love.” He pulled me close, kissed my forehead then bent to pick up Hailey. She snuggled into his shoulder. At eight years she was easily small enough for Greg to pick up and carry one-armed.

The sight of the two of them together never failed to give me that melting feeling. Greg was tall, dark and not-so-handsome but the loveliest man I’d ever met.

“Dad? What was it?”

“That, munchkin…” Greg said, “was the earth moving itself around to get comfortable. It was nothing. Let’s go into the lounge room and watch some TV. Karen?” He started walking then jerked his head a little to get me to follow.

My heart was still thudding like a rock band’s drumbeat. I went to the screen door to check the neighbourhood. Nothing. No smoke, no sirens. The sweet smell of the roses along our footpath drifted in. Across the road, Connor, the Hanson’s teenage son, pulled into their drive in his banged-up utility. He did his usual Houdini routine and climbed out the ute’s window. In the gap to the right of their house, I glimpsed the patchwork rooftops of the suburb on the opposite hillside. A flock of crows flitted across the blue-blue sky and the fretwork of thin cloud. Normal.

In the lounge Greg and Hailey were nestled on the couch watching a cartoon on the new plasma screen. Jumbo was up there too, his chin on the armrest. Ears back, tail thumping the leather, he watched me to see if I’d order him off. I leaned against the wall, crossed my arms and breathed slowly, gathering the calm aura they seemed to radiate. Hell. Tremors were common in some parts of the world. Breathe…slow.

The wall lurched. The floor, the lounge, the plasma TV, all dropped away with a bang and a grumble of cascading chunks of house and rubble. I fell and gripped the carpet with claw-like fingers, hanging on as the carpet bucked and rolled under me like some maddened beast. “Greg! Hailey!” They were gone. I gaped, lying flat, moulding my body to the carpet. I screamed and screamed but couldn’t hear my voice, saw only dust and my bloodied fingers.

The thunderous noise kept on, growling, cracking the bones of the house, swallowing. The annihilation of everything around me. Dust spewed in a thick roiling haze. My nose clogged and I coughed and spat dust and a spray of fine blood.

The shaking stopped. The air slowly cleared.

Before me, a few feet away across a slope of carpet, was a chasm. Beams, fractured wall and roof tiles lay across the hole. I coughed again then stood. My legs shook so much I stumbled and almost fell.

“Greg! Hailey!” I screamed their names, listened then screamed again, repeating their names over and over until the words came out in ragged whispers. I lay down and dragged myself forward on my belly. Hot stinking air breathed from the hole. Brick fragments scraped at my T-shirt and jeans. Something, some muffled noise, reached my ears from below.

“Hailey?” Terror had magnified the size?the chasm was only a three-foot-wide crevice. I peered down past a higgledy-piggledy structure of criss-crossed wires, timber beams and pieces of plaster, as well as strangely preserved items: our bedside lamp, a dusty but folded towel, the side of the lounge and a teacup. Farther down was blackness. “Greg?”

“Need a torch,” I muttered. Calm. Must stay calm. Can’t help them if I panic. I sniffled then scraped away tears with my arm, only to have to gulp back more tears.

As if to balance the bad, I found behind me the remains of a kitchen cupboard buried under rubble and inside it, a torch. The rugged dolphin torch flicked on. I inched closer again and shone it down into the hole. Past the pieces of my house, the hole continued. I closed my eyes a moment, shaken by the depth of it and by the teaspoon of hope it conjured inside me. Could they have survived?

“Hailey?” Being small, perhaps she stood a greater chance. She would fit into a smaller space than Greg. An awful thought in its way, but I couldn’t stop myself hoping and running through every possibility. That sound again. An echo? Or someone replying?

The house cracked and crunched as it settled. Gravity wasn’t going away. Would the whole structure collapse completely given time or another tremor? I’d been listening for someone coming to help me but nothing and no one seemed to be outside. Past the kitchen cupboard had been a gleam of sunlight and a segment of sky. But the whole suburb, hell, the whole city, might be as bad as our house.

“Mrs Taylor! Is that you?” A male voice. My heart pounded twice and steadied. I turned and saw Connor half-crouching in the gap behind where I’d found the kitchen cupboard. His face, clothes and hair were shrouded in grey dust. “Thank god. Thank god. Holy?” He lowered his head a moment and closed his eyes as he said it. “I am so glad— Thought I heard you yellin’.”

“Connor.” I shook my head. Tears rolled down my face. “Is your house—”

“Yes.” He nodded slowly. “Same as this. It’s awful.”

“Can you get help? Call for it? Have you a phone?”

“Mine and ma’s. They’re talking to each other but nowhere else. Police, fire, ambulance— Nothin’s—” He stopped, swallowed. “Look, I heard my mother calling from inside the house. I’m going to try getting her out. Thought I’d better tell you first. Get you out?least that way if I, well, if I die in there, someone will know.” He looked at me. “Come this way, Mrs Taylor. Seems to be safe.”

“No. I’m searching too.”

I could make it out of here, crawl out through that gap, but not yet. I was going to try to reach them. Until then, I hadn’t known I had the guts to even contemplate it. Of course, I hadn’t done it yet. I put my finger to my mouth and gnawed off a sharp piece of fingernail.

After a moment Connor replied. “I’ll be back to help if I can.”

I nodded, my neck bobbing for too long like some damaged doll. “Wait! Connor! A phone?can you throw me one? So we can talk?” He pulled one from a pocket and tossed it then wriggled around and carefully returned to the outside world.

“Luck, Connor,” I whispered. I dusted off the mobile. The charge was good and the signal at five bars. I punched in the number for the cops. Nothing. Not even a ring. “Damn.”

I shifted rubble and found a length of cord then tied the torch to my belt in case I dropped it. Being stuck down there, even a few yards down, without light… I shuddered.

There, on the edge of the black hole, vertigo gripped me in its malevolent hand. I swayed. My head seemed disconnected, as if filled with air, awareness inflating and shrinking and my legs clumsy logs. If I tripped…

Heights always did that to me.

Concentrate! Think of details! Nothing else. Nothing else. They need me.

Like a gigantic tongue, a strip of torn carpet dangled into the hole. Using that as support, and testing each place where I rested my feet, I climbed down. Three feet down, four…below eye level. I stopped, shifted the torch in my hand. Some hand-sized rubble slid and poured over the lip. The pieces rattled as they bounced off things farther down until it grew quiet again.

Lower down the torchlight reflected off a miasma of dust, the floating particles sparkling like miniscule diamante. I played the beam across the cloud. This couldn’t go on forever, could it? Was this some freak underground cavern revealed by the quake?

The sides of the crevice changed as it went deeper. First the concrete foundations then freshly sheared red and cream rock before it changed again. My feet rested on black rock with a smooth water-worn look to it.

Pale blue light swelled into being on the left side of the dust miasma.

“What is that?” I whispered. “Greg! Hailey!” Voices! I could hear voices! “Greg!” No one seemed to reply to me though the murmuring continued.

I eyed the rocks below me, planning a route, places I could put my feet. Thank heavens I had gym shoes on. The dust might be the worst of it.

But as I descended?slowly, painfully, like some sort of geriatric mountain climber?the dust sank away and, by the time I reached where the top of the cloud had been, it had vanished altogether. In the torchlight the rocks showed a strange gleam, as something below flickered with that blue light. A tuft of brown caught my eye. I eyed it a while, afraid it might be a hank of scalp-torn hair. The gap here was crescent-shaped and barely wide enough for my body…a foot and a half wide by four foot long…if it narrowed farther.

How could Greg and Hailey have gotten past this point? As I manoeuvred myself so I could reach that brown tuft, my thoughts rampaged through my head. Unless the quake had pushed the land back together after they fell past? What natural phenomenon produced a blue light? A fungi? Glow worms?

If I braced my feet just there, if I crouched, stretched my arm down. Couldn’t see it. Had to use feel. My fingers brushed something soft. Got it. Heavier than I thought it would be and larger. I pulled. It dragged and caught against the rock in a few places.

My heart skipped beats then pounded so hard my head swelled in time.

Curious, yet terrified of what I might see, I held the brown thing before my eyes and directed the torch at it from below. The light sifted through a rugged brown landscape, gleamed on polished amber eyes?a teddy bear. I remembered. Half-sobbing, I clutched it to my face and inhaled?imagining I smelt Hailey. It had been on the lounge next to her. Hope flared. It didn’t matter how. Didn’t matter at all. If they were here, they were here. Frantically, I wriggled about until I could see past the narrow point. Then, back straining as my head swung below the rest of my body, I lowered my face and looked.

Below me the crevice widened and to the left side it continued down in broad ledges that were almost steps. At the bottom was the source of the blue light. I stared, unable to decipher what I saw and heard.

My mind focused. Fine details: bevelled edges, black plastic. The little creatures of inexplicable fear scattered gibbering through my mind?the things that woke you in the dead and silent hours of the night. That made you sweat on your pillow and sit up bolt upright with your heartbeat thudding loud enough to make your chest move.

Why the fear struck I did not know. Perhaps it was the cramping closeness of the rock all around me, the alien glow of the light or the muttering voices…

The rock shrank in on me. I knew, just knew, that in seconds I’d be swallowed up too?the rocks would crash down on me, filling up the spaces, pouring into my ears, my nose… My muscles seized tight and I could taste the dry rock as if it were being shovelled deep into my mouth. Gasping, I thrust myself upright, feet finding places, scrambling upward, knocking elbows, scraping skin, sucking air in and out so fast it choked me. I kept on scrabbling?out the hole, through the destroyed kitchen. Outside. Night time. Stars wheeled around me and I fell to my knees on the grass gasping.

I needed to find someone real. Evidence I wasn’t inside a nightmare or spaced out on drugs in some hospital. Words would do that. Connor.

I staggered across the road and past his utility. There I stopped and looked about me. All along the street the houses were gone. Flattened. A fire poured into the sky from three places and not a single house had been spared.

“Connor!” I ran around the perimeter of the pile of crumpled brick and timber that had been a human dwelling, a family home, and found no way in.

I smelled the smoke before I saw it. From their back yard, the entire city was laid out below me. Hands on knees, chest heaving, I beheld the new face of my city?fire and smoke, and devastation from horizon to horizon.

“My god. My god.” I dragged my hand down across my streaming eyes, my face, and left my finger in my mouth, both for comfort and to stop myself from whimpering while I stared.

There was no help for me there.

“Right.” My own voice would be the centre of my universe. I stamped my foot on the real ground. Bit my lip and felt pain and tasted blood. I was real. This was real. No matter how awful. What I’d seen down in the crevice had to be something real too. I drew a shuddering breath. Had to be. Some sort of residual glow.

“I have to go back and check. Can’t leave anything to chance.” I wiped my dribbling nose, my eyes. “If they’re alive…and they might be…I can’t let myself be scared by dreamed-up fears. Right.”

I marched back to my house, through my bomb-wreck kitchen and climbed down the crevice. No fuss. I was getting this done. Got to the narrow part, climbed past and down to the lowest ledge, though that sense of almost-panic hovered at the back of my mind. This time I would not be too quick to judge.

I lifted my head, turned and looked, and knew exactly what the glowing thing was: a phone. I chuckled. Not exactly a normal thing to do, but nothing was normal right then.

I turned slowly, torch radiating light, revealing. This space was bigger than I’d thought. A few pieces of debris had made it this far. In a far corner the light gleamed off something light in colour. I frowned. Then my eyes widened. Held the light steady. Had it moved?

“Hailey?” I barely heard the word I spoke. Then louder, “Hailey?” A hand? Could it be a hand?

“Mummy!”

“Hailey! I’m here!” Couldn’t afford to fall down some unseen crevice. Torn between lighting my way and keeping the torch on Hailey’s hand, I picked my way across. The phone in my pocket rang. I tapped the button automatically.

“Mrs Taylor? Are you okay? Mrs Taylor! Don’t go down the hole. Don’t!” Connor sobbed.

What? I clamped it to my ear. Still counting the steps. Three yards maybe and I’d be there.

“Mummy! Please! Help me!” Her hand twitched.

The fear in her voice… I hopped and jumped across a meandering crack. Flailed about. Banged my knee on rock.

“I’ve got you darling. I’m here!”

“Mrs Taylor!”

The torch went out. The earth rumbled and moved, shifting its geological core. I braced myself with hands and knees to the floor of the cavern, riding the earthquake. The crescendo abated until there was only residual grinding and crackling. All was black. My heartbeat thumping at my temples, I frantically groped around until I found her hand. Warm, the pulse at her wrist beating strongly. She was caught somehow beneath the crack I’d jumped over.

“I’m here, darling.”

With my other hand I felt about me, still clutching the phone, finding smooth solid rock to the left, to the right, and I extended my hand out in front. More rock. Trembling, I reached up. Rock. I bowed my head and rested my forehead on the back of my hand. The voice from the phone persisted. I put it to my ear. Tried to compose myself before I spoke.

“Connor,” I said, my voice cracking. “I’m trapped down here. Please get help.”

The phone was silent a moment. “I can’t.” I heard him swallow. “Look at the phone.”

It bleeped as the photos and the texts came in. Ten, fifteen, thirty. I went through them all, one by one. Snapshots of faces, weary and dirty, and behind each of them the corrugated shadows of rock. The messages:

HLP ME.

PLZ GET HELP.

SOS.

And innumerable versions of the same.

After the messages blurred under tears, I gave up and curled into a ball, though still I held Hailey’s hand, her small fingers entwined in mine. I murmured the comforting sounds a mother makes to her child when all is lost except the ability to let them know that you love them and they are not alone.

I huddled there in a foetal position, hiding my head against my knees. Rocks all around us. The earth had dragged us into its black and awful womb.

Copyright © 2010 by Carol Hone
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