Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (31 page)

~ * ~

Life, however, is never so simple—then
and
now. First, the clerk’s body putrefies in the soil and emits a powerful stench. No amount of perfume will hide it. It fades only with time, and leaves behind an unexpected boon: patches of explosive growth, where the plants in the glasshouses have taken sustenance from the old man’s decaying flesh. The flowers are beautiful and large, and the butterflies seem to favour them over the others, so Polain is pleased enough. But their association with his crime is not so easy to expunge, and he is ill at ease around the flowers.

Then the police call to ask him questions about the dead man. The clerk’s absence was noted after all, by a grand-daughter whose birthday he had never before missed. Polain feigns innocence. Yes, the last time he had seen the clerk was just before the queen’s departure. He had worked all his staff hard in the days leading up to the presentation. Perhaps the clerk had worked
too
hard and had a heart-attack on the way home. Is it so unlikely that the body of an unidentified old man might go unnoticed by the medical system?

His evasion doesn’t entirely satisfy the police, but they leave him alone; they have after all no firm evidence to suspect him, and no motive. Still, Polain’s conscience is troubled, and will not let him rest. That night he dreams that the queen has rejected his gift and returns it to him with a disgusted expression on her face. He looks down into the crystal jar and sees a spider swimming in a puddle of blood, trying to escape.

He wakes screaming and goes down to the glasshouses, seeking solace. A new generation of butterflies is being born, slipping from their pupae and inflating like balloons. He watches in awe: their colourings are striking, their patterns unique. All of them have the same corkscrew, orange-yellow antennae of the butterfly the dead clerk identified. It seems almost like a tribute to the clerk, as though somehow his essence has been leeched into the soil from his body, fed the plants upon which the caterpillars ate, and reached a strange expression in the resulting insects.

Polain shivers, unnerved by the thought, and tells himself not to be a fool. He has never been superstitious. Why start now? It is just a coincidence.

He watches them for hours, hypnotised by their seemingly aimless motion. They are very beautiful creatures, with their angular markings of silver on blue that hint at familiarity but never reveal themselves. Every glimpse of every wing trembles on the brink of recognition, but never allows itself to be known.

A bell rings late in the afternoon, and he stirs himself to answer the door. The police are back with more inquiries. They want to inspect the grounds, and even though they do not have a warrant, Polain lets them. To deny them access would only make them suspicious, and the chances of them uncovering anything are slim. The stench of decay is long gone. Without digging, they will find nothing but flowers and butterflies.

Only as he shows the policemen the glasshouses does he realise what the patterns on the new breed remind him of. Before he was too close to them. From a distance he can see that each marking is a letter, drawn in the minuscule, reflective scales of the butterfly’s wing. As they fly by, they spell gibberish through the air, meaningless jumbles of consonants and vowels that distract him from what a policeman is asking him.

The policeman repeats his question, and Polain snaps himself out of his reverie to answer. What does he care that none of his neighbours saw the elderly clerk leave that fateful evening? He had more important things to worry about—and besides, they were all jealous of his success, or spies for his competitors. He would expect them to incriminate him whenever possible. And why would
he
lie? He has a reputation, and a very successful business to maintain.

Even as he says this, though, a swarm of butterflies lands in a line on a branch behind the policemen and spells out the words: “NEMDO. CONFESS.”

Polain stammers to a halt. “Nemdo” was the name of the dead clerk. Noticing his fixed stare over their shoulders, the policemen turn to see, but their motion startles the butterflies. They fly away to another branch, where this time they just spell “CONFESS”, once again out of sight of the policemen.

Polain suppresses an angry snarl. He knows what the butterflies are trying to do. They want him to own up for the crime. But he won’t. He has no reason to. It is over, finished. The clerk was old, anyway, and near the end of his life. What had he to live for? The policemen are only tying up loose ends, and can’t seriously be concerned for a lost geriatric.

Still, “CONFESS” say the butterflies, waving their wings at him and twitching their antennae.

He picks up a rock from the dirt floor and throws it at them. The rock scatters them, and sails through the glass behind them with a loud smash.

If the policemen are unnerved by that, there’s worse to come. As a cloud of butterflies sail out through the hole, the policemen press Polain for an explanation of his bizarre behaviour. It’s nothing, he stammers. Nothing but reasonable distress at being interrogated in such an unseemly fashion. Who are they to insinuate that he is lying, that he knows something about this absent octogenarian? It’s none of his business, or theirs, and they should leave immediately.

But even as he speaks, the cloud of butterflies that escaped through the hole have not flown away to freedom. Instead, they settle on the roof of the glasshouse and proceed to spell out a single word in shadows against the sunlight.

“CONFESS!” they cry.

Polain staggers backward, shielding his eyes from the sight. Alarmed, the policemen back away as the deranged butterfly breeder trips over a protruding stem and falls into a patch of enormous flowers. Butterflies go everywhere in a panic, filling the air with dark blue and silver flashes.

Polain sees them all around him, in clumps and flocks, tormenting him. “NEMDO” exclaims one group; “CONFESS” yet another. His guilt presses in upon him, suffocating him. Keening, he clutches at the soil for a stick to arm himself with and swings at his tormentors. Swarms of butterflies part before him, sending fragmentary “EMD”s and “ONF”s and other syllables in all directions. But they always regroup, no matter how he batters them. Broken wings fall out of the air and soft bodies squash against stiff branches. His hair becomes entangled with broken antennae and legs. His eyes sting with butterfly blood until he can no longer see— and the fight goes out of him like air from a punctured ball.

And so the police find him, clutching the trunk of tree, bespattered with the crushed carcasses of his former wards, his mind broken and his life in tatters.

~ * ~

And so his story comes to an end, more or less. The world has moved on by the time the disgraced butterfly merchant sees trial before a judge. His sentence is not recorded, although it is told that his beloved city forgot him and his butterflies in short order, finding new heroes to glorify and new villains to condemn, new fads to fancy.

But for some, the story of Polain never ends. It echoes through time even now, in our very different world, as a warning against greed and obsession. And it leaves us with a lesser story buried in its midst, that of the unintended victim: not Polain, who loses everything in pursuit of one final triumph, or Nemdo, whose life holds only his beloved butterfly antenna and whose reward for diligence is nothing but a violent death—but Nemdo’s granddaughter, the girl whose birthday the elderly clerk missed. Thrust into the spotlight of grief by another man’s greed, caught up in tale of deception and self-destruction, she cares little for butterflies.

All she wants is her grandfather back.

<>

~ * ~

INTRODUCTION TO:

.......RELUCTANT MISTY & THE HOUSE ON BURDEN STREET

It’s amazing what a difference three letters make.

Everyone’s heard of a haunted house. It’s one of the great staples of fiction. But what about a house that is itself the ghost
—
the haunting house of this yarn? How could that go
?
That’s in a nutshell where this story started.

The road from idea to finished story can be a long one. For this idea I needed a house and a protagonist. Burden Street isn’t a real location, but it’s based on a real one: Buxton Street just didn’t have quite the right ring to it (misreading it as “buxom” might give readers a
very
different expectation) so again a few letters had to change. The haunting house is modelled on a real house on another street in North Adelaide, but—and here’s the spooky thing
—
I
don’t know where it is any more. I’ve tried to find it, but either it’s not there or I’m looking in completely the wrong spot. (My money’s on the latter.)

The protagonist’s nickname arose out of my chance mishearing of the phrase “reluctant mystic” on JJJ while driving to work (back when I had a day job). The malapropism wriggled around in my head, as good ideas sometimes do, until it stuck to something else and started the rolling-snowball effect that story-tellers love to be swept up by.

This tale is one of only a few I’ve written in which Adelaide prominently features but somehow manages to escape unscathed. From the location of the house to Beth’s lonely search in the bowels of the State Library, it’s thoroughly steeped in my love for the place, even at its spookiest.

Around the time of writing, Adelaide’s second newspaper
The News
folded, leaving a long legacy of photographs and words from the early days of the city. This story also pays a quiet tribute to that paper and to the hours I spent poring through its archives, for no other reason than to see what might be in there. That’s exactly my kind of research: the kind that has no destination in mind, and could therefore take you anywhere at all.

~ * ~

RELUCTANT MISTY & THE HOUSE ON BURDEN STREET

Almost without realising it, her hand reached out to flip the latch on the gate.

Wait.
The hand stopped mid-way, but didn’t retreat.
This is crazy.

She glanced guiltily along the deserted street. At its far end, the ceaseless traffic of North Adelaide rumbled by—each car glimpsed for an instant, strobe-like, then gone. She doubted anybody could see her. A row of parked cars was her only company, apart from the house.

The house. She had passed it on her way from the Piccadilly Cinema, where she had spent the evening with a girlfriend. Something about the house—the way it seemed to hide from the street, absorbing the light—had caught her eye and held it entranced, spell-bound. Between then and now she had obviously stopped her car, got out and crossed the road to have a closer look, but she couldn’t quite remember doing it.

Moonlight glinted off wrought-iron railings, reflected from blank windows on vine-wreathed upper floors and shone through the leaves of an Old Country garden. Shadows dusted freshly-painted awnings, making the house seem somehow taller, darker, more real than any she had seen before. The gloom of its wide, snub-nosed verandah beckoned her forward, into its impenetrable depths.

A brass plate by the gate proudly identified the house as
Number 72
,
Burden St
—which was strange, because the sign at the end of the road said Sydney St, and had for as long as she could remember.

Her knowledge of history and architecture was slight, but she knew the house was at least a century old.

And quite probably haunted
, she added, shivering with a heady blend of terror and excitement.

Her hand headed for the latch again. This time she didn’t try to fight it. The gate opened with barely a squeak, and she slipped through, silent and breathless.

Oh God. This is breaking and entering.
She shut the gate behind her without taking her eyes off the verandah. Her whole body was shaking.
I can’t believe I’m doing this!

Acutely conscious of her exposure in the garden, she almost ran to the verandah, passing an old, stone sun-dial half-strangled by a climbing vine, and a slatted wooden bench before finally reaching the shelter of the steps.

She stood in the timber and iron womb of the verandah for a long moment, arms wrapped tightly around herself. Her reflection in an unshuttered window was pale: blonde hair in a startled nimbus around her narrow face; eyes wide and frightened. Her cool, casual work-suit looked out of place amongst the limestone and white mortar. She felt like an anachronism and looked like a ghost.

The beating of her heart in her chest, however, was loud and immediate—an anchor to reality more concrete than any message from her senses. It told her quite clearly that she wasn’t dreaming, and that, on a deep, subconscious level, she was afraid.

Of what? It’s just an old house.

The door was solid oak, with a brass knocker and a flap for mail. Shut. To the right of it was an earthenware pot as high as her thighs from which bloomed a large native frangipani. When she reached out a tentative hand to touch the grey, lifeless leaves, they shuddered into dust and fell around her feet.

She wiped the hand on her pants—the same hand that had opened the gate—and reached for the polished brass knob.

This isn’t a good idea,
the deep part of her warned, but she nudged the uncertainty to one side. She could feel the emptiness of the house in the air itself, as though nothing had moved inside for years. Certainly nothing living.