1
The dog must have been howling for a good twenty minutes before Hal climbed up on the back fence to look for it. He’d been standing on the fence, peering into the paddocks towards the hills, for about eleven minutes and forty seconds now. He knew, because yesterday he’d timed himself with Dad’s old watch and that was how long it took for his legs to start trembling. Another minute and they would start to seriously ache.
He squinted into the paddocks searching for the dog. Couldn’t see it anywhere. But some huge bird—an eagle maybe?—swooped down across his vision, three or four crows noisily pursuing it until it shook them off, vanishing into the fierce blue sky.
Shouts came from over Mrs Next Door’s fence. ‘Wretched birds! Get! Go away!’
Hal wished she’d shut up. He didn’t mind old Mrs Armstrong, but he was listening for the dog to start up again. From far over the paddocks the howling and yelping had become gradually weaker, until you could barely hear it. Then it stopped. Like it was worn out and miserable. Or bored out of its mind, like Hal was with this yard, their new blue house, the whole ruddy town their mother hated so much.
The screen door squeaked open as if she’d read his mind.
‘Boys? Come in and get dressed. You haven’t got long.’
‘Soon, Mum.’
She sighed as if it was too hot to stand there arguing with them and went back in, closing the main door after the screen door. As if the heat would stay outside like an obedient pet.
Hal stood on the fence and listened again, but the dog was silent. Mrs Armstrong stopped cursing the magpies and went inside. Soon even the cicadas quit their racket and deathly quiet descended on the yard and the paddocks beyond. Next thing Evan shoved himself up on the fence beside Hal.
‘C’mon Hal, you said…’
‘I know. But we haven’t got long.’
‘Yeah we have? Heapsa time.’
Hal glanced back at the house. They had an hour, give or take. Nothing else to do. ‘Come on then.’
‘What, now?’
‘Haven’t got forever.’
True. They were to be washed, dressed, combed and ready to climb in the car at twelve. Noon. On the dot. Hell to pay if they made Dad lose so much as a minute of his big day out with the work people and the boss he had to suck up to at the picnic. You’d think it was the Queen’s coronation, not just the Prime Foods Christmas party. Any case, Hal might meet some kids from the new school. There’d be Santa, and some kind of present. Piss-weak, probably, but Hal had no intention of missing out.
‘Should we tell them?’ Evan squinted back at the house, its pale blueness glaring under the washed-out sky.
‘You’re kidding.’
They braced themselves and jumped.
After half a mile of bashing through brown paspalum and dead thistles Hal halted, red-faced and puffing, as Evan lagged behind, his cries lost in the cicadas’ din. Slipping between the barbed-wire strands of another rusty fence, he found himself in open fields that rolled on towards the purple hills. They were not so purple as you got closer to them, more a hazy brownish-green and nowhere near as hilly as they looked from home. Up close they seemed like ripples on a khaki pond. Dotted around them were sparse clumps of dying ghost gums, strangled by vines. Closer, fifty yards before him, a line of scrubby willows made a breach in the landscape that divided it in two.
‘Crack in the World,’ he said aloud. The name sprang from nowhere onto his lips. He waved back at his yelling brother and strode onwards.
The Crack in the World turned out to be unimpressive—a muddy gash through an eroded gully in the middle of a chunk of spindly bush—twenty or thirty acres of it, he guessed, being slowly squeezed between the crab-claws of the growing town. Moorabool, Population 3,560, the sign on the highway said. Though he had no idea where most of them were hiding. On a Saturday afternoon you might see ten people on Main Street. The pubs would be jam-packed, of course, but out here on the fringes right now the only movement was a tiny car beetling along a row of little houses melting in the heat haze. That and the flies.
Hal peered down the yellow-brown slope through the gaps between the willows, and saw the muddy creek at the bottom. No more than three yards across at its widest, but a decent jump would get you across in most places. ‘Crack in the World,’ he murmured, loving how it meandered between crumbling clay walls a hundred yards either direction, the ends of it crimped off like a spent tube of toothpaste.
Evan barged up, red and sweaty, puffing his head off. ‘Dad said…stay away…from the…creek!’
‘It isn’t a creek. It’s the Crack in the World.’
Not that Evan cared. ‘Said you’d…wait, Hal…you…ran away!’
‘Sorry,’ he lied, to shut him up. Because for the first time since they’d arrived, he was excited about something. Not about Moorabool, it was still just a hick town with nothing in it. But this place—this was the first part of it that was actually not boring as batshit.
He stared past the Crack in the World, on and on into the mysterious vistas beyond.
‘Whaddya waiting for, a gilt-edged invitation?’ He hopped onto a rock in the middle of the creek, then leapt onto the gravelled bank.
‘Hang on! Dad said…Hal!’
Evan was still tiptoeing across, thongs bogged in the mud, by the time Hal had scrambled up the bank on the far side. He was standing atop a small rise staring at something when Evan staggered up beside him and gasped softly. A strange yellowish vehicle-cum-dwelling: they couldn’t take their eyes off it.
The depleted shell of a truck cabin at one end merged into a decrepit caravan at the other. It was like some bizarre caterpillar with extremities so different they might have belonged to separate species. The truck’s bonnet lay on the ground, engine parts in shades of rust flung around it like a mad mechanic’s toys. Where once were wheels, tree stumps now propped the apparition up. Skew-whiff sheds and lean-tos lay scattered around it, rotting in the grass.
The caravan was covered in peeling tan and yellow paint and above the door a faded sign declared Highway Palace. It was a ruined palace, though, with oval windows cracked or broken, glinting like jagged teeth, shreds of lace curtains behind them. There was nothing palatial or grand about it now, and probably never had been. But behind the curtains, mystery seemed to lurk in every dusty corner.
‘Wooow…eee,’ Evan whispered.
‘We have to go inside,’ Hal gaped, half-afraid it might vanish if he looked away for a second. Evan launched himself, galloping down the ridge towards a rusted 44-gallon drum, stood on its end in the hard clay. ‘Let’s roll it down the hill.’
He went to grab it, and let out a shriek. ‘Hal! It’s dead!’
‘What?’ Hal traipsed over.
‘It’s a—Hal, it’s a dead dog. Look at it!’
Pulling him aside, Hal peered into the drum. It was a dead dog all right. A male, from the testicles sticking out between its lean brown haunches. The hind legs were all twisted up as if some huge fist had smashed him headfirst into the drum then crammed him down like a bundle of rags. Hal leaned in, caught a whiff of something, pulled back and leaned in again, gingerly sniffing. He had smelled dead animals before but not up close. Not in heat like this.