The Turning

8

8

“I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you why I’m leaving. I’ll tell the reason why I’m leaving, and I’ll tell you some other things too. But I’ll warn ya now, you can’t say I’m crazy. Not to my face anyway, all right?”

Brett felt a little reluctant now to say anything. The kid seemed unperturbed, uninterested and entirely indifferent. He sighed, took a generous swig from the bottle and thought what difference will it make? You’ve been wanting to tell someone for months, may as well do it now and get it off your chest.

Kyle was beginning to worry deeply now about the lateness of the hour. His mum and dad would be concerned and maybe they'd even be out in his dad's ute looking for him right at that moment. He pictured his father behind the wheel of his ute, head craned forward, teeth gritted, an expression on his face similar to Busters earlier. But what could he do? He knew old people liked to talk, especially to the younger generations, and to sit and listen would be like a thank you to Brett for his hospitality and for not calling the cops. Another half hour and it would be seven and he supposed that he'd be home by quarter past, twenty past perhaps. He tried to tell himself that it wasn't that bad, that daylight savings meant the sun wouldn't set until around 7:30 anyway.

“All right,” Kyle said, folding his hands. “Tell me.”

Brett sipped beer to wet the whistle and then rubbed his cheek. It made a faint rasping sound like sandpaper.

“About three months ago I was taking some garbage out to the tip. I had two recycling and a garbage wheelie bin on the back. I tied them up and threw a few pieces on with ‘em and then headed. Now, I was in a bit of a hurry ‘cause, you know young Mattie locks it up ‘bout six-thirty. I knew I was pushing it a bit, leaving here at the last minute.

“It was bright like the way it gets leading up to full moon. The sorta night ya wanna be down the river for. The light brings fish to the surface, you know that? Anyway, I didn't need me high beams, only had ‘em on ‘cause it’s the law and I didn’t want old Morris pulling me over.”

He lit a cigarette and blew a plume of smoke from his nostrils like a Chinese dragon. His eyes gazed on the kitchen window thoughtfully, having decided not to look at the boy in case he saw the shadow of skepticism creep into his face.

“Got out there, said G’day to Matt. He had the chain through the loop in the gate and was just pulling her shut when I turned up. He’s a good bloke young Mattie, let me go through to unload me crap in a flash.

“I emptied me bins and was just starting to toss some of the old scrap pieces I had put on the back when I happened to look out to the east and seen something queer. So I called Mattie over to come have a squiz and maybe tell me I was hallucinating.”

“What was it?” Kyle said. 
“A black dot.”

“A dot?”

"Yeah, a dot. Like the moon durin' an eclipse. It was just like someone had drawn a dot on a whiteboard. Stuck out like a sore thumb. So I got Mattie over to have a look and he comes along, staggerin' a bit, I suppose he must have already had a few, you know.

“Well, it wasn’t a plane, I knew that ‘cause it wasn’t movin’. From where we were it didn’t look that big but up there it would have been wider than the footy oval here, three times the size probably, but the thing that got me was that it wasn’t moving at first, and then it started to slowly glide across the sky.

“Anyway, Mattie came up next to me and I pointed up an’ I said, ‘What the f**k do you reckon that is?’ And you know what? He wasn’t a bit surprised. He just goes, ‘Yeah, been seeing them for ages, mate, just ‘bout every night. Buggered if I know what it is. Could be a black hole.’

“Well, I shook me head and told him if it was a black hole we wouldn’t be standing there then, we would have got sucked into Looneyville. ‘Besides,’ I say, ‘It was moving just then, I watched it.’

“I didn’t know what to make of it and I don’t think he did either. I asked him what he meant, that he had been seeing them for months and he said that just about every night when he goes out to take a s***h in his backyard, he’d look up and see it there, hovering, just hanging around over town. He said he’d seen it move too and one night when he was was havin’ a smoke he saw it zip across the sky. Imagine that. I couldn’t. I’d seen s**t in the war that made my skin crawl, like a soldier screaming with half his head blown off and brains leaking out his eyes. But this was different because it was like… like impossible, you know, like this was on our own turf and it made me friggin anxious. I started thinking about invasions and the war and terrorists and I actually started feeling panicky. I didn’t like it one fuckin’ bit. We watched it move along towards the south, doing a great big circle and then I said to him, ‘Matt, that f*****g thing is coming towards us.’ And he nods and says, ‘Yeah I know bro,’ and I said, ‘Don’t that make you… nervous,’ and he goes, ‘Nah, what’s it gonna do? s**t on us,’ and I said, ’I wouldn’t wanna be shat on by a UFO,” and then he looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘So that’s what we’re lookin’ at then is it Brett?”

Brett’s voice had been rising and now he began to cough, a roaring choked rasp riddled with phlegm. Kyle wondered momentarily whether the old man might actually keel over in that moment. He seemed to have a difficult time catching his breath but just as he was about to ask Brett if he was all right, the old man grabbed the beer bottle and tipped it up. He drank a gulp and the coughing stopped, but the rasping his lungs made didn’t.

“Are they UFOs?" Kyle said. Brett sighed, shrugged.

“I can’t say for sure. I s’pose they’d have to be unless they’re somethin’ the military dreamed up and that they was testin’ out here for some reason. I don’t worry about the government being up to bad s**t, they don’t have the willpower to do what the yanks do, phone tapping and weapons of mass destruction and all that s**t. You probably don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that but, you’re in your Wilton bubble and that’s all that matters,” he said. He coughed a few more times, took another swig.

“It’s nothing manmade, whatever it is. Even if it wasn’t UFO’s or whatever it’s still not man-made. I’m fair sure of that.”

He leaned in a little. “Yeah, you’re in your bubble and so is everyone else. I don’t keep up with the community gossip but you probably hear it from your mum and dad. Tell me something son, you notice anything a little bit funny going on ‘round here lately?”

Kyle shook his head. For the last week, he'd been looking at pictures of forte's on the internet and studying how to build them. Aside from school and performing maintenance on his bike, this had been the extent of his interests. Otherwise, it was just boring old Wilton as always. People went to work, went to school, went to the pub, stayed home and watched Deal or No Deal or Better Homes and Gardens on a Friday night and complained about the heat and the flies. On the surface, this microcosm could have been passed as dead or inactive. But if the old man was right about what he said, then something had taken an interest.

“No,” said Kyle.

"Well, I'd just keep my eyes peeled if I were you. I suppose this really is the bit where I start to sound paranoid and de-loony-al, but it is what it is.

“’Bout three weeks ago I was sittin’ out on the back step, havin’ a fag like I do as it cools down of an evenin' but I’d be fibbin’ if I didn’t say I was doin’ it a bit more often after what me an’ Mattie seen out the tip.

“It was dark like now and I was lookin' at the sky, hoping that I’d see it again, wonderin’ if I might be able to get a photo on my camera. Then along that back lane behind the house comes this group of about ten people walkin’ along, not saying a word or makin’ a sound ‘cept for the gravel under their feet, all going at the same pace. They had no torches or any of that, and they looked like they were all heading out towards the town common. And I thought to myself, that’s queer. Ten people together in a group doesn’t happen outside the friggin’ pub, but the fact that they weren’t making any noise at all… was… a bit eerie I suppose. So I sat there with my beer and I thought, I might go see what this’s all about. It wasn’t ‘till I got to the back of me fence that I realised something that blew my mind. Me dog wasn’t barking. Now, can you imagine that? I wouldn’t be able to if I hadn’t seen it. I thought, s**t maybe he’s sick or, you know, maybe dead. Happens, dog gets bit by a brown snake and he just rolls over quietly. So I checked his kennel and he was there, eyes open and happy as Larry. Came wanderin’ out when I bent down.”

“That is weird,” Kyle said. “Your dog barks at everything.”

“I know,’ said Brett. “I bloody know he does, wakes me up in the middle of the frigging night and I sleep like a platoon of dead men!”

The old man shook his head, scratching his chin in thought.

"So I thought, well I'll follow them in my scooter. I'll wait till they wander up a bit and then I'll just sort of follow them in the motorised wheelchair I got you know, see what's goin' on. I felt like a nosy bastard but when you get to my age you don't really care much what people think.

“Well, I strapped myself in and headed out the gate after locking up Buster. I got on the lane and I could just see them down the end, could hear that gravel crunching under their feet.

“I went all the way out past the pool and the school and by then I knew for sure they were goin’ out to the common. Just near your house too isn’t it?”

Kyle nodded. He often forgot that it wasn’t actually a part of his backyard.

“I followed them out there but I stopped on the side of the road, sort of near where the bush starts. Because whatever they were doin’ I didn’t wanna disturb ‘em. But it wasn’t just that. As I was goin I started getting a bit paranoid, I didn’t know of what but that’s what was happenin’. So I thought I’d just keep my head down sort of thing, try and leave before they do so they wouldn’t see me heading off up the road on my scooter. Only thing I was worried about was the humming of the motor but they hadn’t picked up on it when I arrived.

“Well, I watched them walk out towards the middle of the vacant patch and form this circle. I stopped just outside and watched from behind a heap of bushes. At first, I thought they were some sort of cult or a witches coven, thought they were gonna start chanting. But they just stood there and in the whole area there wasn’t a single sound, I mean nothing, not a bird, not a cricket, not a cicada or a fly or mosquito, nuthin, not even a tap dripping in a bucket near a house or a breath a wind. I watched for about a minute, two minutes before I started to get restless, thinking that they were just a buncha fuckin weirdos, you wouldn’t know what types are around these days. This is why I don’t wanna go to Byron, you know. I thought, bugger this, this is a waste of time and I started to turn and I glanced at the sky and stopped. I went dead cold, son, you wouldn’t believe it. Because that whole sky was lit up like the moon was just inches from the ground. A light behind was shining right down through the clouds and onto the ground. And they were looking up at it and smiling, eyes closed, and…”

Kyle frowned. “How did it…”

“It just came on,” Brett said as though stating a fact. “Like a switch, bang!” He clicked his fingers to emphasise.

“Right,” Kyle muttered.

The old man lit another cigarette.

"Well, after seein' that I thought I'm outta here. So I started to leave. I drove up onto the grassy bit on the side of the road, you know like to muffle the tires. I kept looking over my shoulder and the lights had gone out but them people were still standing around in the dark. And then I saw their heads turn, watching me, and the scary thing about it was they all did it at once like they had read my mind or something. And I just put the scooter into higher gear and concentrated on getting the hell away. I went up Tiffard Street and past the school, thinking that I might need to go past the pub and get Pricey to do me up a belt of scotch just to settle me down. Then I started to hear gravel crunching behind me and I looked back and I saw 'em, followin'."

“W-what were they doing?” Kyle muttered, thinking about the walk home he would have to take with this story rattling around in his head.

“They were all staring at me, like they knew I had been out there watching them, eyes just starin’ straight at me like a bunch of zombies out of an old movie, saying nothing. Mrs Dover from the post office, Baz Davis who owns the shop, Merrill Simpson who works for the council, Mr Richards.”

“He’s my teacher,” Kyle said.

“Yeah,” Brett said, nodding. “It was him. But it didn’t… it was like it was him but it wasn’t. Like something had gotten in his head an’ had switched off the lights. It was the same for the rest of ‘em too. Like something had gotten in their heads and was playing with ‘em. I don’t even know if they were awake. Maybe they were sleepwalkin’.”

Carefully Kyle muttered, “Were my parents-“.

“No,” the old man said, shaking his head. “Nah, they weren’t. But there were plenty. All town people. People I’ve known for years. Except it wasn’t them. Like I said, it was like somethin’ had gotten into their heads and had turned out the lights so that anyone talkin’ to them wouldn’t see it in there, you know what I mean? And they just followed me, staring but saying nothin’. I could hear them following me up the back lane.

“And I… and I tried talkin' to ‘em a few times, tried saying hello but they said nothing back. So I just tried to forget they were there and it was like my house just couldn't come quick enough. I thought, bugger the pub I'm going home and not coming out. As soon as my back fence turned up I started thinking that they were gonna follow me into my yard, into my house. That they were gonna try and do something to me. That's how I felt. Threatened. But as soon as I turned into that vacant patch next to my place and headed to the gate I watched them just kept walking past. I drove the scooter through and Buster barked before he realised it was me but never bothered goin' off at them. I went right up to my back fence to watch them… and they were looking back at me. They were smiling at me and then I started hearing…."

He stopped, shook his head. “Never mind.”

“No, tell,” Kyle demanded. “Please, tell me.”

“You’ll really think I’ve gone off the deep end,” he said, his voice lowered, eyes bulging wide. “And maybe it was my imagination, I dunno I had had a couple of grogs so it could have been-“

“Please!” Kyle moaned.

“I heard they’re voices,” he said finally. “There, that’s what happened. I heard Mr Davis talking like it was right in my ear. But their lips didn’t move. I think he said, ‘Don’t worry about us, Mr Stevens, don’t worry. You’ll find out.’ And I got away from there. I went to the gate to shut it and lock it and lock it bloody good and I planned on locking the rest of my house too, every window, and every door. And as I went I heard them all, voices on the wind- ‘You’ll find out, you’ll find out Brett Stevens, don’t worry you’ll find out’. Like a promise and I didn’t wanna stick around to find out what they meant.”

They sat there, the quiet hanging over their heads, Kyle peering down at his hands and Stevens with his eyes set on the bottle. Then he glanced at the clock on the wall.

“Suppose I should be taking you home soon. If that’s all right. It’s up to you but I thought you might want to stay off the roads on foot.” Kyle saw that it was seven-thirty. He stood, jamming both hands into his pockets, eying the window, his mind now filled with the thoughts of people walking the deserted roads and tarred streets like a mob of ghouls. What did they call them in that TV show about zombies? Walkers? Was that what they were? Was that what they had become?

No, his mind scolded. They’re not because its bullshit. The old man’s talking rubbish.

“I hope you’re feeling all right now, not faint or anything.”

“Yeah, I am,” Kyle said. “Thanks for the food. I wish there was something I could give you for it. That and… and not doing me in.”

“I wouldn’t do you in, not after telling you about what I just did. You’d probably do me in.”
“What about my bike?” Kyle murmured. The old man shrugged.

“Leave it out there, no one’ll take it. You can come pick it up in the morning. When it's daylight again.”

He wanted to convince himself that the only walkers out there were the shambling, stumbling variety, the Friday night regulars at the Wilton Hotel. The people had not… changed as the old man seemed to be suggesting. They were just people, the same as they’d ever been.

And yet he found it impossible to meet the old man’s gaze and think that he could be crazy because, on the contrary, he was wired and frightened. There was no lie in his eyes, only a sincerity that came through in his voice.

“I think a lift sounds like a good idea,” Kyle said.