‘So, it’s like ecstasy?’ asked Georgia.

    Lara glanced from the road long enough to devilishly smile at her friend. The two had taken drugs before but none of the more exotic, harder substances, into which category the four pills in Georgia’s hands indisputably fell.

    Lara resumed her focus on driving (much to Georgia’s relief). ‘Yes, like ecstasy,’ she reaffirmed.

    She overtook a tourist coach, the car nearly going up on two wheels, before adding, teasingly, ‘But better.’

    Georgia shook her head with a rueful smile. Just like Lara to get them into this. The two had been friends since high school. Then, as now, everyone thought they were sisters. Superficially, the mistake was understandable; both had jet, slightly wavy hair and dark brown, almost black, eyes. But whereas Lara was fuller in flesh and feature, Georgia liked to think she was narrow in hip and attractively angular in face. Similarly, despite first impressions, their differences in personality were also pronounced: Lara being the more spontaneous, but not to mention foolhardy; Georgia the more considered, yet sometimes verging on staid, of the two. They had been through nearly everything together, from puberty to matriculation through to their first, steady boyfriends. And here they were, about to share a joint experience of another kind: hard drugs.

    Lara was tailgating a truck making a fair pace down the highway they’d got on. Georgia knew it wasn’t about aggression on Lara’s part but a belief that riding in the truck’s jet-stream would save gas.

    Yes, they were alike there, too, in their frugality, only Georgia would have left a wider margin. She scrutinised the four white innocuous-looking pills in the sealable plastic bag she played with on her lap.

    Like ecstasy but better …?

    ‘How better?’ she asked aloud, deciding to pocket the pills as a police car tore past.

    Lara smirked to herself – she had Georgia hooked. ‘Well,’ she explained airily, ‘when you take ecstasy, even with friends, you’re on your own trip.’

    ‘And with this?’ asked Georgia, trying to lean with the sharp turn Lara was taking as she merged with traffic on the off-ramp.

    ‘With this, you all have exactly the same experience.’

    ‘And what exactly is that experience?’ Georgia asked, gripping the door handle.

    ‘Well…’ began Lara teasingly but without going on, not because she was concentrating on anything particular to do with her driving, but because she was enjoying dragging out the mystery.

    Georgia knew the game her friend was playing but was forgiving.

    ‘Well, yes?’ she asked, providing the appropriate spur.

    ‘You all hallucinate…’

    ‘Yes!’

    ‘You all hallucinate that you’re fucking.’

    Georgia’s mouth wouldn’t close for a second. ‘Each other?’ she asked at last as Lara drove up a bus lane before pushing her way back in the car lane twenty vehicles ahead.

    ‘Of course.’

    Lara narrowly missed the car in front as she swerved round it and applied her accelerator. It had been stopping for an orange light. 

    ‘And are you?’ asked Georgia as Lara looked in the rear-view mirror to make sure the police camera hadn’t gone off.

    Satisfied she’d gotten away with running a red light, Lara took a reading of Georgia’s face. Judging from what she read there, she figured it was time to cut back on scaring, and start reassuring.

     ‘No, no, I told you, Georgia, you’re tripping. You’re just tripping the same thing, that’s all.’

    Georgia looked out the window. Staring at Lara wasn’t helping her growing sense of unease. She and Lara had been through a lot of troublesome initiations, albeit always apparently less troubling for Lara. Their first year in college campus, Lara had been keen on trialling pot. Georgia, following her lead, tried it too but gave up almost straightaway due to the edginess it made her feel. She’d coped better with the ecstasy and speed Lara sampled next, but that was as adventurous as Georgia wanted to get.

    ‘Lara, I don’t know about this,’ she heard herself saying before she knew it.

    Lara was mildly annoyed. It was her natural effervescence which had meant a run-on effect on Georgia’s life, enamelling it in greater vibrancy. Hers! But then a counter-argument entered her head, one often voiced by her own mother. Georgia had a calming influence on Lara’s life, diverting her from more harmful whims. Lara pushed the dissenting voice back down.

    ‘What do you mean you don’t know?’ she asked. ‘You don’t want to know!’

    Georgia thought of her boyfriend, Hugo. Reliable, wide-shouldered, even-more-considerate-than-she, Hugo.

    ‘Has Hugo agreed?’

    Lara grinned wickedly. ‘Only if you do.’

    Huffing, Georgia slipped off her Gladiator sandals and put her lilac painted toes up on the dashboard. Typical of Hugo to delegate any arduous decision-making to her, she thought. Then another factor occurred to Georgia and, quite uncommon to her character, a pulse of anger ran through her.

    She turned on Lara. ‘That’s why you want me and Hugo to take this drug? You’ve always had a thing for Hugo.’

    Lara pursed her voluptuous lips – everything was voluptuous and sensuous in Lara, before eyeballing the more ascetic-looking Georgia.

    ‘Maybe, Georgia, I’ve always had a “thing” for you.’

    Georgia was stunned. She imagined Lara capable of many shifts and caprices in desire, but a segue to lesbianism?

    Lara enjoyed the puzzlement on Georgia’s face and laughed.

    ‘This is getting too weird,’ said Georgia, half-laughing herself. ‘I’ve never had a “thing” for your man, you know.’

    ‘Craig’s not too bad in the sack – as you’ll find out.’

    With that, Lara whooped harder. Georgia quickly tried picturing the suggested scenarios: herself with Lara, herself with Craig. Herself with a couple and her own boyfriend. Into what new exciting/scary territories were her and Lara’s friendship/relationships entering? 

    Lara pulled up at the site of their destination, a car park adjoining a suburban sport’s field. She got out her side and opened the door for Georgia because the inside door handle was broken on the front passenger’s side.

    Georgia edged her foot out onto the bitumen, then unsteadily rose to her feet. Lara waited impatiently for Georgia to move out of the way so she could shut the door. She slammed it instead; she was getting annoyed to see the doubt creeping back in her friend’s face.

    They started walking, Georgia in her sandals, Lara in her folded tan boots.

    ‘Georgia, what can go wrong? It’s the ultimate safe-sex drug – fucking with your minds. Look, I won’t tell our friends you took it with us, if that’s what you’re worried about. They’d be envious anyway. Okay?’

    Georgia ceased her sleep-walk. After all, Lara’s adventures had always broadened Georgia’s horizons before.

    ‘Okay, okay, okay.’

    Lara screamed in joy, hugging her friend. The sport’s oval was empty, but it had recently been the site of a cricket match. The cricketers, their girlfriends, parents and families were gathered round the locker rooms enjoying a sausage sizzle cooked on one of the coin-metered barbies.  

    Georgia and Lara entered the throng of baked people and sweat, deodorant and charred meat, fly-spray and spittle. They passed two ladies in floral-patterned frocks, one pink, one blue, with half-open straw-hats, the doily-shadows decorating their faces. Georgia almost collided with the pink-frocked one as the woman lunged for her fold-out chair, a piled-up, paper plate of food in her chubby fingers.

    The pink-frocked lady suddenly gasped. Georgia paused, while Lara kept going.

    The pink-frocked lady’s companion turned from pouring lukewarm champagne into a plastic fluted glass. ‘Prue, what’s the matter?’

    Prue steadied the overfilled plate resting on her pillow-like knees and fanned her face with a half-scrunched-up serviette.

    ‘I…’ she gasped. ‘I just felt a ghost pass through me.’

    Georgia gasped in turn. The correlation of facts, her passing the woman at just that moment, and the woman’s strange comment, quite unnerved Georgia in a way that she could give no account to.

    Before she could give the matter further consideration, she was distracted by Lara calling out to their respective boyfriends, whom she’d found in the crowd.

    ‘Craig! Hugo!’

    Georgia pushed her way to join them. Lara took her hand and dragged them through the remaining throng to the veranda of the locker rooms. Craig was an appropriately captivating partner for Lara, with large, athletic shoulders, dark eyebrows, cropped curly black hair and a thin moustache. He was dressed in a yellow hoodie and black striped blue tracksuit pants. The two kissed.

    Hugo, Georgia’s boyfriend, was only slightly taller than average height but he was naturally wide of shoulders, long and loose of limbs, with a big nose, ears, eyes, and lips. This contrived to a pleasant effect, apart from a tendency to slouching and a lower lip a little on the puffy side, giving him, and accentuating, a certain poutiness in manner. He was in jeans, a flannel top, and he wore a baseball cap sideways. He and Georgia briefly held hands.

    With open palm held out, Lara indicated to Georgia to hand across their treasure. Georgia looked round at the throng and nodded insistently at the audience. Hugo pushed open the door of the locker room, ushering them inside. When Georgia passed through, he put a hand on her shoulder.

    ‘You okay with this, babe?’ he asked.

    Georgia looked over her shoulder at him.

    ‘If you are,’ she answered, immediately aware that both had thus effectively abrogated responsibility for what they were about to imbibe.

    Craig locked the door. 

    The interior of the lockers was furnished with only that necessary for the various sporting codes that played there, but the ‘time-out’ room was slightly more accommodating, with facilities for making tea and coffee. There was even a mantle over the gas fireplace. It held aloft a rather incongruous, large brown and white striated conch.

    Georgia relinquished the prize of the pills.

    ‘Look,’ said Lara breathlessly.

    All four examined the pills for a long moment. They were round, white, with a paw-print indentation on one side.

    ‘That’s it,’ continued Lara, enjoying having the wrapt attention of her friends and lover, ‘Sleeping Dog.’

    At once, Hugo drew back from the pills packet dangling in Lara’s hand.

    ‘Sleeping Dog?’ he questioned, alarmed.

    Lara snatched the package away, stuffing it into the front pocket of her ultra low-rise skinny tight jeans.

    ‘What’s the matter?’

    Hugo was concerned, and his concern in turn troubled Georgia.

    ‘Lara,’ said Hugo moderately, although there was an undertone of annoyance beneath his evenness, ‘you didn’t tell me that was what it was called.’

    Lara huffed, slumping herself down in a brown scraggly couch that had soaked up one too many spilt beers like an oversized sponge.

    ‘So,’ she shrugged, ‘you’ve heard that story too.’

    It was the turn of Lara’s paramour, Craig, to show his first signs of disquietude with the prospect.

    ‘What story?’ he asked, before licking his fingers and running them along his thin moustache, as if that was how it was held there.

    Lara sighed, rubbed her hands down her blue jeans, shifted forward in the couch to the only point it provided some stability, its wood edge and, with a sigh, explained.

    ‘Some urban legend. Apparently some bar owner took it, went mad, killed some people, then disappeared into the outback. That wasn’t Sleeping Dog.’

    ‘Then what was it?’ asked Georgia, annoyed she was always in the role of providing the follow up question to Lara’s routine.

    ‘LSD.’

    ‘Great,’ huffed Hugo, his pouty bottom lip trembling.

    Georgia reached for his hand and squeezed it. She knew the trouble Hugo had had on LSD.

    Lara retrieved the packet of pills from her front trouser pocket, no mean feat given their tightness and the fact she was sitting down, and threw them on the large, blue eski that doubled as a coffee table. Georgia extricated herself from Hugo’s side and sat with Lara, aware and a little guilty she was putting a damper on Lara’s plans. Hugo, abandoned, fell down heavily in the couch opposite, regretting his speed in response to the inadequacy of its support. Craig sat next to him, immediately spreading his arms across the backrest.

    Lara laughed. Tension often had that effect on her. Sometimes the result was to only exacerbate that tension, since she was seen to be making light of it, but in this case, as in the majority, the result was conducive of ease. Georgia joined in her mirth.

    ‘Why not?’ asked Georgia simply.

    With Lara, Georgia usually ended up having a good time.

    Hugo leant forward, concerned. Despite his pretended apathy, he had handed the decision to take the pills to Georgia because he hoped she’d say no and he could save face. Now that she was saying yes, he saw his chances of face-saving refusal diminishing. Then his real objection to the idea emerged.

    ‘Babe, a mass orgy? Doesn’t that mean I also get it on with him?’ and Hugo nodded to Craig who was at that point eying up Georgia in hungry anticipation.

    Craig’s expression altered instantly.

    ‘Ew, I hadn’t thought of that.’

    Craig pulled the overblown cushion from behind his back and shoved it down between himself and Hugo. Hugo frowned at the childishness. Lara merely folded her arms.

    ‘Craig, if we can get it on, then you two can,’ said Lara and then, uncrossing her arms, reached round for Georgia and brought her lips to her own.

    Before Georgia was able to make a conscious decision of whether to accept the encroaching advance, she was tentatively and then greedily pashing Lara in return. Surprised at her own sexuality, she was both turned on by the intimacy with Lara, and her peripheral awareness of the escalation in libido this was causing not only in Hugo, but Craig as well.

    Just as Georgia was ready to immerse herself unthinkingly in love-making as she had few times before, Lara gently pushed her away and turned challengingly to Hugo and Craig.

    The two knew straightaway the imputation. It was only begun at last by Craig, who convinced himself he could not pass up a dare, and so he planted a stagy kiss on Hugo’s lips. Hugo, equally, felt himself compelled to meet the challenge and not recoil and so, in this way, both were surprised at the longevity of the embrace; even more surprised when, in a mutual moment, each took the jest a step further with tongues. At last separating for breath, it was in complete earnest that first Craig pulled Hugo’s shirt off, and then Hugo, Craig’s. 

    Turning to the girls, surprised at their forgotten presence, but unembarrassed and also freshly aroused, they watched in glee as the two also removed each other’s shirts and began unbuttoning bras in an un-fumbling way the men could only envy. Craig took Hugo’s hand, and the two rose to step over the eski towards the girls when Hugo slipped in his eagerness and knocked it over.

    The noise, for an empty, plastic container, was disconcertingly loud and reverberant. The four momentarily froze. Lara moved first, reaching to grab a hand each of Graig’s and Hugo’s, to draw them back into the moment, when Hugo pulled his away, breaking the cord.

    ‘Listen,’ he whispered over the remaining echo of the thud.

    ‘It was just the eski,’ pleaded Lara, exasperated, keen for the ‘spell’ not to be broken, sensing the moment was like that when you’ve just woken up and know if there are no further breaks you can go instantly back to sleep.

    ‘No, listen,’ insisted Georgia.

    All four listened, Lara the least willingly. Apart from their breathing, there was a silence common to only the deepest underground caves or the empty reaches of space.

    ‘Where’s everyone outside gone?’ asked Hugo, wincing at the deafening noise of even his own whispered voice. ‘It’s silent … deathly.’

    Craig was the first to move. Quickly, he unlocked the door but then stalled in throwing it open. Turning around to the others, all four noticed with embarrassment their semi-naked states. Craig and Hugo wordlessly put on their shirts, embarrassingly half-putting on the wrong ones first, while Lara and Georgia, equally silently, reclothed themselves.

    Seeing that everyone was appropriately covered, Craig again turned to the door, unlocked it a second time and contrary to his first impulse of throwing it open, cautiously pushed it ajar. The silence, seeping in, was even more terrible than that which resounded inside. But what was more horrifying than the absence of sound, was the fact that outside it was pitch black.

    Craig voiced the obvious. ‘Hey … hey, it was the middle of the day when we all walked in here?’ 

    ‘It was,’ agreed Hugo.

    Craig’s voice began to shake. ‘What’s happening? We couldn’t have been inside more than five minutes.’

    Georgia looked down at nothing in particular; something had occurred to her.

    ‘Did we ever actually take the pills?’ she asked.

    They quickly shuffled back through the door and examined the top of the eski. The package was gone; nor was it on the floor or in or under the couch. None of them could actually remember imbibing the pills.

    Craig turned to Lara, grabbing her roughly above the elbow.

    ‘Where’d you get them from? You said you could rely on your dealer.’

    Hugo interceded, gently pulling Craig away. Lara, arms now folded, walked to a corner of the room, back turned.

    ‘Look, guys,’ said Hugo. ‘We’re tripping. We’re obviously tripping. We’ve just got to stay calm.’

    ‘Stay calm?’ said Craig, his voice rising in both volume and pitch. ‘Stay calm? Somehow it’s the middle of the night. Five minutes ago it was twelve – noon. Where’s the time gone?’

    Georgia found that controlling her own panic was made harder by the obvious anxiety in Craig’s voice. She decided they must at least be able to reason the situation out.

    ‘Lara,’ she asked, ‘how long does this trip last?’

    Lara turned round, visible panic now pricking her features as well.

    ‘I… I don’t know. I didn’t ask.’

    Craig swore several obscenities, kicking the eski at their termination. Lara sobbed with the thunderous sound.

    ‘Just stay calm, everyone,’ said Georgia in a wobbly voice. ‘We’ll ring someone – a friend. Find out what time it is.’

    They immediately each reached for their mobiles to assess the time. None had reception. Hugo convinced Lara and Craig to stay put; he would venture outside to see what he could gauge and then come back for them. Georgia would not let him to go by himself, even though Hugo didn’t want Craig and Lara left by themselves. Eventually, he agreed she should accompany him.

    The oval was strangely bare; none of the mess one would imagine left from a barbecue. The four lighting towers ringing the oval were on. With the moths flying in their beams, it was like they were four shower nozzles sending down a white spray. Beyond the oval, there appeared to be nothingness; merely a misty black.

    They held hands and were about to step off the concrete footing when they heard from inside Lara screaming.

    Georgia and Hugo turned apprehensive faces to each other. Rushing inside, Lara explained between shrieks that Craig had gone to the toilet. Deciding she didn’t like being alone, she followed him a moment later. But she hadn’t been able to find him, anywhere.

    And yet, most disturbingly, the three could hear his successive shrieks, each one decreasing in volume. Hugo, in his ongoing chivalry, insisted Georgia remain in the room to comfort Lara while he investigate. Georgia, her mind flooded with the bizarre memory of horror films where the characters are separated one by one and, one by one, are killed off, insisted all three go together.

    They narrowed down the source of Craig’s screaming to the kitchen. Searching cupboards high and low, he was not found; but the screams seemed to be coming from higher than low. Scrambling onto a bench, Georgia knocked over a few pans that crashed and echoed on the floor, the sound beating their eardrums. There was an oval of water gathering on the ceiling, pooling to a point and pinging on the metal bench below. Craig’s screams coincided with each drop.

    Hugo was still trying to maintain the sanity of the situation and his own. ‘He must be in the ceiling.’

    The water gathered to its last fall, and with it dropped Craig’s last cry. For a brief moment, as the bulb of liquid formed, Lara saw Craig’s face encapsulated inside it, his face largest at the round bit, foreshortened and tapering away to the tail.

    With Hugo helping her down, she tried to explain what she had seen. Lara was near apoplectic with grief and fear. All she could mumble was that they should leave and find help. Neither Hugo nor Georgia were keen to enlighten her to the strange emptiness outside, but neither was their reason up to staying another moment indoors. Quite animalistic, the three fled, crashing out the front door and onto the concrete veranda. It was still, empty night.

    They made their way along the grass to where the car park should be. Lara paused to be sick, Georgia holding her hair back in a tableau of better times, while Hugo stumbled forward, trying to peer into the impenetrable dimness.

    In another moment, when Georgia looked up from the wet and sticky back of the head of her friend, Hugo was gone.

    She screamed his name.

    Dimly clawing her way from her insensate state, Lara, too, began calling Hugo’s name, then Craig’s, and finally managed to issue only inarticulate despair. The same instinct that had seen them flee the locker rooms, seized them both at once and took them back inside.

    Lara found the couch, and curled up the way certain insects do when being prodded. Georgia stepped this way and that, but only several paces at a time. She then stopped her moving, and her breathing a pulse later.

    Somehow, somewhere in the room, she could hear Hugo’s voice. It soon became loud enough that Lara, too, awoke to its pleading. The two wordlessly began searching. However, as with Craig’s pleas, which did not seem to emanate from a body, but a surface, Hugo’s cries also seemed lacking in physical placement and locality. At last Georgia stopped, amazed, before the conch sitting above the gas fire. She reluctantly reached out for it, Lara watching with equal terror. Georgia held its mouth up to her ear. There was the rushing sound of waves and sea breeze and, on the recorded beach, Hugo, or at least his voice.

    ‘Babe, babe, can you hear me?’

    The absurdity of talking into a shell as though it were a receiver was the only factor that delayed Georgia’s response. The absurdity of the situation, she overcame in an instant, and it merely seemed an added dreadfulness.

    ‘Hugo, Hugo, where are you?’

    ‘I don’t know, but why didn’t you come? I kept calling!’

    ‘Did you?’ asked Georgia, exasperated.

    ‘Yes, when we hit the sand. There’s a beach – never mind how in the middle of suburban Melbourne, but a beach, and I’m standing on it. What’s more, it’s broad daylight.’

    Georgia held the shell away from her face momentarily as she reluctantly edged open the front door. Outside, it was still inky black.

    ‘Hugo…’ she sobbed, ‘Hugo, where are you? It isn’t … it  isn’t daylight here.’

    Silence from the shell except for crashing waves and whirling winds.

    When Hugo next spoke, it was in a tone of unmasked fear – gone was his pretence of control.

    ‘I don’t know, babe, I don’t know where I am. Don’t stop talking to me, okay?’

    ‘I won’t, I won’t,’ cried Georgia, the tears streaming down her face.

    The tears also started out in Lara’s eyes. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she added to the wailing song.

    ‘Wait!’

    Hugo’s utterance had been harsh. Georgia pressed the shell closer to her ear, its crenulated mouth making imprints in her flesh. Georgia pressed her face closer too, and for a brief instant each remembered happier times listening in to each other’s amorous phone calls to suitors.

    What issued next, was as confused as it was evocative.

    ‘Oh God… out of the water… monstrous… Impossible, impossible – ple-e-ease!’

    And nothing more, no matter how many times the girls screamed into the shell. It was unclear which one let go first, or whether both leg go simultaneously, but the conch was now on the floor, smashed into a thousand egg-shell pieces.

    Lara fled screaming through the front door.

    Georgia found a moment in her incoherent terror to wonder whether it was safer to stay or follow. Craig had been claimed inside, Hugo out. The threat seemed omnipresent. The further fear of being left alone, compelled her to follow. Stepping out onto the concrete footing, she heard Lara’s screams. By this point, Georgia was unsurprised, though no less distressed, to locate the sound coming from her feet. She looked down at the concrete. There was a puddle of water. Bending down, Georgia did not see her own reflection but Lara’s staring up at her. Georgia quickly, but without heart, looked up briefly to make sure Lara wasn’t somehow, in antagonism to gravity, suspended over her shoulder but when she stared down again, she knew the equally impossible: Lara was in the puddle, desperately trying to cup its edges as it spilt over the side of the concrete lip. Georgia futilely tried to help, but a faster problem presented: the water was seeping into the concrete, fading from a dark to a lighter stain to eventually the colour of the concrete. With this transition, also faded Lara and her screams.

    Georgia ran. She felt herself slow and stagger on sand (how, when there was no sand – they were miles from the beach?) and turned the other way, her feet finding grass once more. A staggering blow took out her shins, sending arcing pain up her body. She screwed up her face as if to squeeze out the pain, but to no relief. When at last she could open them, she groped about for the offending barricade. She found a fence made of circular logs, stained green with an agent used for pesticide and preservation in weather. Georgia felt the first sense of hope since the adventure. She recognised the low-fence as the make and style of the one surrounding the carpark. This time, hopping over it, she found her feet on bitumen, then, hands forward, collided with a car.

    It was Hugo’s, unmistakably, with roof rack and bent front fender.

    She didn’t have her set of keys. Hugo’s might be in his sport’s bag, which she’d seen just inside the front door. The locker room glowed ominously like a ship in an otherwise dark sea. Georgia stole herself for the mission. She would walk as straight as she could, and memorise the direction in which to head back.

    The puddle was completely dry. The shell still in pieces. She found Hugo’s keys, gave a sob, and left. She walked in a crouch, arms out forward and low. To her surprise, she heard a woman gasp. Georgia swivelled round. She could neither see nor, with arms forward, feel anyone. She quickly turned around again, lest with further revolutions she lose her path.

    She hit the fence, but with less force, and found the car almost immediately. With key ready, she was in and had the headlights on.

What she saw was this.

    Lit up by the headlights, almost with the force of daylight, the barbecue Lara and Georgia had made their way through in what could not have been more than half an hour before. Sitting amid the throng was the pink-frocked lady who had gasped then, as now.  

    Her companion turned from pouring lukewarm champagne into a plastic fluted glass and inquired of the health of her friend.

    ‘Prue, what’s the matter?’

    Prue quickly steadied the paper plate on her limb-like legs and waved her face with a half-scrunched-up serviette.

    ‘I… I…’ she gasped. ‘I just felt a ghost pass through me.

    Georgia, her throat constricting on these words, as if she had uttered them herself, turned the key the rest of the way, the engine starting up. She pushed the gearstick in reverse and pressed her foot down on the accelerator. It was only then, with the resultant splash, that she realised the car was waterlogged. Something huge, monstrous, slimy, impossible to physiology and equally repugnant to basic geometry and the physics of the natural universe, was rising up to consume her.

    The only thing she knew by then was the futility of sound.

 

Six Months Earlier.

Dane didn’t know who his father was; his mother changed her mind so many times on the subject, he believed she didn’t know either. Or was lying. It didn’t matter. He was taken for being part- Samoan, Aboriginal, West Indian and African. He was even occasionally assumed to have Arab blood. All this meant was that wherever he went, he received the ‘nod from another brother’, the nod one black person gives another in meeting or passing when in predominately white cultures.

    He did well in school, well enough to get into a Bachelor of Arts degree course, becoming quite the favourite with his philosophy lecturers, and even majoring in the subject. The faculty wanted him to do honours, to take up an academic career, but he didn’t see any future in it. At least not the kind that interested him. After the abstractions of thinkers like Wittgenstein, Dane wanted to settle to studying the philosophies of day-to-day existence.

    The philosophy of exercise was also becoming increasingly important to him. He’d done gymnastics at school and gym training during university. The boredom of weights training made it a challenge mentally as well as physically, but it helped instil a discipline he’d carried over into his studies and hoped to carry over into his career, whatever that would be. There were many reasons people buffed up. Some to do with how they looked, others with how they felt. Some to wield power, others to dissuade anyone from trying to wield power over them again. For Dane, it was unabashed vanity.

    Given his commitment to the cause, it was not surprising that one of the regulars at the gym asked if he wanted to do security work. (There were also the suggestions he do porn, but he ignored these. That latter option appealed to his vanity but not to his sense of style.) 

    He started off working in security for other people, then ran a security firm of his own, specialising in nightclubs, before eventually deciding he could run a nightclub better than most of the galahs he’d worked for.

    Zombie was the result. 

    Dane stood at the double doors in his sleeveless shirt. He had to show off his coiled muscles and tatts, right? Liz was next to him, seated at the table collecting the cover charge from the punters strolling in. Outside, in neon, hanging under the awning, was a sign advertising that it was ‘Acid Night’. So it was the usual trippers. As well as paying their covers and proving they were over eighteen with legit I.D. and fingerprints, they were also signing waivers. Even though acid had been legalised, in fact taken over by government Health and Safety, and hence made with the proper ingredients, not laced with weed killer, ground-glass and the like, it could still be potentially dangerous, hence insurance was at a premium.

    Liz was super-efficient, not letting anyone dodge past. She’d started off as a customer, but she spent so much time in the bar that somehow she ended up helping out in busy times and then, before either knew it, she was on the payroll and working full time.

    ‘Dizzy’ walked in, giving Dane the ‘nod from a brother with another mother’ that Dane found so amusing. Dizzy’s pedigree was unmistakable: Jamaican and, as evidenced by the accent, Jamaican via England landing in Australia sometime in his teens when the Aussie drawl could still take effect.

    Liz took Dizzy’s money and signature. When he passed through into the bar proper, she turned her oval face, captive in a rococo frame of red curls, up to Dane’s.

    ‘That Dizzy wants you bad,’ she purred, her upturned button nose set squarely in the middle of her nearly round face.

    Dane didn’t take his eyes off the queue.

    ‘Liz, I haven’t fucked guys since college,’ he said simply.

    Liz was quick with a return.

    ‘I haven’t fucked girls since high-school. I still let the keen ones go down on me.’

    ‘I’m married,’ replied Dane.

    ‘Your wife was one of them,’ quipped Liz.

    Dane shrugged, unconcerned. At that moment, his wife, Sue, entered, skipping the queue. She was blonde, straight hair cut off in an even fringe above her eyes. When Dane met her, she wore black collars, black boots, black eyeliner; her hair was dyed black. Everything, black. Now she wore autumn colours, let the natural blonde grow out, and liked all music unplugged. 

    They briefly hugged and kissed before Sue hurried out the back to the office.

    Dane nodded to Scud, his Norwegian, impossibly tall bouncer, to shut the doors; they were at capacity. The usual groans and complaints were shut out with their closing. Liz got up from her seat at the cash register.

    ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘my pay for being front-of-house?’

    Dane was about to reward her; why beg?

    ‘Your tab,’ said Dane, withdrawing a tab from the box.

    Liz extended her tongue, none too seductively. Every second punter tried the same routine, proffering the tongue for the tab instead of an open palm – Liz was staff; she should be bored by such coquetry. He took her hand and closed her fingers round it. 

    Liz opened her hand a second later, noting the single tab.

    ‘Can you make it two?’ she asked as winsomely as she could.

    Dane saw the second trick coming. He humoured her by asking, ‘For you and who else?’

    ‘Why,’ said Liz, affecting innocence, ‘for me and my favourite barman.’

    ‘Bar manager,’ corrected Dane.

    ‘Ooh, who’s being boastful?’

    He was. But he deserved to be a little prideful. Getting Zombie up and running had nearly killed him, figuratively speaking.

    ‘Liz, you know I don’t take drugs,’ he told her.

    Liz’s retort was quick and accurate. ‘Anymore.’

    Dane winced. His private drug history was a subject he never brought up, nor wanted broached, by anyone else. And that rule was inclusive of long-term friends like Liz. But it was just like her to take liberties. Whenever Liz and Dane enjoyed a meal out together, Liz would pour Dane more water, if she thought he needed more, fill up his plate with half her food, if his portion wasn’t ample. To begin with, she would ask if she could supplement his dietary intake in this way; after a short while, she did it wordlessly, almost unconsciously, as if Dane were her child for an afternoon’s outing, for whom it brought her great pride to take fleeting custodial care of. In anyone else, Dane would have found such coddling insufferable; in Liz, he forgave the indulgence, her charm and genuine feeling of warmth for him outweighing any implied condescension in the behaviour. 

    When Dane entered the bar proper, with its ring of half enclosed booths encircling a dance floor, most people had already taken their tabs. He began reading out the government health warning he’d learnt by heart, and everyone groaned.

    ‘Okay, I know you’ve heard it before, but I’m required to say it by law. I could be shut down if I don’t. So tune in or not, here it is: This is a government health warning, drugs can seriously harm your…’ and Dane regurgitated the rest of the spiel.

    With the legalities out of the way, Dane got the night into action, making sure the standby nurse was available, the D.J. was on show, and the V.J. providing the appropriate visuals. He then sat at a stool at the bar, watching a hundred people go temporarily nuts under supervision.

    Not only did Dane own and manage Zombie, he’d built it. It was a combination of all the ideas he’d seen work in the bars and nightclubs he’d done security for plus a few notions of his own. A bar was a complicated space to get right. And a ‘night’ like this Acid Night was not simply a matter of changing the sign on the neon outside; it was about creating ‘installation art’. It was its own mini-movie production, with set dressing, costume design, choreography and that all-important soundtrack; all melded to facilitate and stimulate the tripper’s mind.

    To that end, Dane would approach installation artists at the universities seeing if they wanted to set something up for a bit of cash. It kept his eye in on what was happening in the arts. Also, he’d solicit fashion students; see who wanted to get their clothes worn. And then he’d ask dance students if they wanted to display their moves. The edgy, Avante Garde ones seem to gel best with the punters, but a few classical ballet movers didn’t go astray either.

    Dane had to admit he liked this part best about a nightclub. Not serving the drinks so much, and definitely not standing outside in the cold deciding who could come in, but creating an atmosphere. (Although deciding who could or couldn’t come in was an integral part of fabricating that atmosphere – bouncers and door bitches were casting agents for the show indoors.)

    He shook himself back to the present and went over to Liz, asking their takings on the door. The amount seemed measly. He then did a cross-reference in his head with a quick headcount. Oddly, it added up.

    He looked over to his wife, who’d just entered the bar to fix herself a drink. He knew the sort of venue she’d prefer.

    He went to the fish tank he had set up against one wall, under the sky-light, and dropped in flakes for his beloved goldfish, who were already waiting at the surface.

    Perhaps they should go back to beer and live music.

    The next day, Dane visited his brother, Frank. Frank had a Toorak house. It was all slabs of white concrete with blue/green glass balconies and partitions thrown in. The odd rust-coloured plant with bladed leaves dotted about, surrounded by blue/grey pebbles. Austere and what you’d seen before. Dane didn’t like it. As something of a self-appointed connoisseur of spaces, it said ‘money’ to him in the blandest, most generic of ways. He almost always preferred an extravagant kitsch to such lifeless posturing. He liked people to have a style, for their personality to be in their clothes and living space, their individuality expressed outwardly, whether that made it – and him – shallow or not. It was an aesthetic standard some of his friends found exhilarating, some exhausting, and not a few pompous. True to his arrogance, he didn’t care.

    He parked his Deerta and got out, walking between the marble plinth things outside the path. The front door, with its handle like a fridge, and wedge of frosted vertical glass running off-centre, was open.  

    He shut it properly behind him.

    Inside, was the outside, just with furniture. 

    Anastasia was standing at the bench, licking a stick of ice cream. The 3D was going. Her long, blonde hair was pulled tightly into a bun. Her eyebrows looked painted on and probably were – they were higher than what was natural. He’d never seen her out of makeup or underdressed. Must have been pretty tiring for her. She was very busty. His wife had caught him looking at her breasts once. When Anastasia was out of the room, Sue had said, ‘They look just like real rock melons.’

    He nodded at her curtly. ‘Anastasia – how are you?’

    She stopped licking the ice cream. ‘Hot.’

    Dane chose not to comment. Anastasia leant back against the kitchen bench, which was the one piece of marble, stupidly expensive, smiling. 

    Dane looked around. ‘My brother?’ he asked.

    Anastasia licked her pouty lips. ‘Not so hot.’

    He gave her a quick glance. ‘I’ll find him,’ he said shortly.

    Anastasia licked the stick and leant forward onto the bench, stretching her back and lifting her chin up, displaying her cleavage to full advantage. Dane wanted to laugh but merely turned heel.

    Frank was upstairs in his loft. He was playing with a remote controlled car, repairing the rear foil. Frank was white. Through and through, which made a mockery of that line about a brother from another mother. Same mother, different fathers. While Dane’s face was contained and in proportion, classical in its lines, Frank’s, like his loose body, was spread across his face with a hard slap. They’d found each other through adoption-link. They just hadn’t found their respective fathers. The line of Frank’s hair sat too close to his eyebrows, like a beanie that had been pulled down too far. Not much older than Dane, he looked older. That other cliché: black don’t crack.

    Frank looked up when Dane tapped lightly on the open door.

    ‘Dane, mate, how was last night? That batch of LSD – it’s the shit.’

    Frank, heading into his forties, would still try on youth lingo.

    Dane picked up the car remote, that was sitting on the bench, and sat down in the now cleared space. ‘Numbers down,’ he said.  

    Frank motioned unconcern. ‘Yeah, sure, winter.’

    Dane turned on the car, whose wheels spun in Frank’s hand. Frank quickly put it on the floor, and Dane did a few donuts with it.

    ‘Frank, they started going down in summer. Government making drugs legal has kind of killed drug-taking.’

    Frank stopped the car with his foot and switch off the battery. ‘Nonsense.’

    Dane put down the remote and stood. He tried to get the next bit out – he hated being personal. ‘The truth is, Sue wants us to go back to live music and beer. From now on, I’m only running one drug night a week.’

    Frank took this in. Typical of Dane not to be bringing an idea, but stating one. ‘Okay, it’s down. Yeah, it’s down. But this isn’t good for government, either.’

    After decades and countless billions, probably trillions, trying to eradicate drugs, governments across the globe had finally wised up. Not only legalising drugs, but being involved in their manufacture, had made a lot of money for them. And, in parallel, it had also saved money in policing and hospitalisation. Surprisingly to many people, but not to the cynical or those in the know, corruption and graft had also decreased. People got drug cards which limited how often they could take them. Of course there was cheating and corruption in this department – there always is to some degree – but it meant a great reduction in serious health effects.

    ‘Why isn’t this good for government?’ asked Dane.

    Frank snorted like the answer was obvious. ‘Drugs are a great revenue raiser. Better than parking fines and speeding tickets.’

    ‘Ah…’

    It amazed Dane how governments could go from being in deficit on drug matters to in the black, and then hooked on that surplus when it startled to dwindle, suffering withdrawals.

    ‘Hey, but good news,’ laughed Frank, noting Dane’s thoughtful and serious face. ‘Government is privatising drug manufacture and distribution.’

    Dane frowned. ‘That doesn’t sound wise.’

    He knew the con of privatisation. Jobs were cut domestically, the remainder outsourced to poorer countries with lower wages in an increasing race to the bottom. The larger players left would then collude to fix prices, forcing out the small fry. They would then go from talking about loyalty to the customer and employers to loyalty to the shareholder. The shareholder was the only person that mattered anymore.

    ‘Our new contractor has already come up with a new drug,’ said Frank. ‘Sleeping Dog. I’m now working for them.’

    Dane laughed. ‘You’re a civil servant no longer?’

    ‘Anastasia and I are up-scaling house next month. I can give you and your clientele an exclusive run on Sleeping dog before we sell it to the other drug houses.’

    Dane winced. He was no goody two-shoes – that was certain. He didn’t obey all rules, but he obeyed the official drug ones. Because they’d been so controversial, they’d been thought out unusually intelligently.

    ‘Doesn’t that go against the trade practices act?’

    It was Frank’s turn to laugh. ‘What trade practices act? This is private business.’

    Unamused, Dane excused himself to the bathroom. Why did governments privatise profitable industries but nationalise losses, with the average taxpayer the loser every time? Washing his hands, he noticed the bags under his eyes in the bathroom mirror. His gaze dropped to the vanity. There were white lines on the black marble. 

    ‘Is this a licensed venue?’ he asked when he rejoined Frank. 

    Frank took a second to work out what Dane was referring to, but then laughed. ‘C.E.O. package deal. Leftover speed. Only problem is droopy dick – Anastasia’s not happy.’

    Dane threw up his hands. ‘Too much information!’

    Dane walked downstairs, leaving Frank with his toys. Anastasia hadn’t moved from her spot. From this angle, he could see what she was watching: an exercise video on 3D. He hadn’t taken much notice of the 3D before; it was always going. He thought about that spectacle she’d made with the stick. Pretty odd to eat ice cream and exercise. She watched him admiringly. Dane was suspicious of people who were outwardly very sexual. How sexual were they? Often they turned out to be the starfish in bed.

    ‘I married the wrong brother,’ she purred.

    Dane stared at her. Anastasia shrugged. 

    Getting into the car, he could kick himself. The truth was, the attraction was mutual. It occurred to him for the first time that Anastasia would have known that. This annoyed him more. He wanted to fuck her. He wanted to fuck his own brother’s wife. And she, him.

    Why couldn’t they?

    He started the car and took off.

    Sue.

    What happened? They were best friends. Equals. Soul mates. They loved and respected each other. But somehow, the sex had dried up. The longer they went without doing it, the bigger the issue it became. Did their equality account for a lack of frisson? Had a respect for each other’s minds made them too respectful of each other’s needs, to the point where they could neither sate the other nor demand their own?

    Anastasia had always had a thing for Dane. But it bothered Dane now more than ever. Because he felt wanted around her, desired for just his body. Objectified. It felt fucking fantastic. Above all, horny as fuck.

    How could he and Sue get that animalism back without sacrificing their friendship, their deep respect for each other?

    Evening; the city was a dingy blind pulled over a blinding light. A million tiny stabs let through windows of light. There was a queue outside the bar stretching round the corner, hobbling in the needling rain. Dane was smiling as he calculated the covers and all the bills he could pay.

    ‘Packed,’ said Liz.

    ‘Close the doors,’ said Dane.

    ‘We can squeeze more in,’ said Liz.

    They probably could. But if there was a fire, could they get them all out? And if a licensing officer came in, Dane would be fined. There was a fine for everything these days. They’d fine you for farting next.

    Dane addressed the crowd. ‘Tonight, folks, for the first time ever, Sleeping Dog.’

    ‘It’s new?’ asked Dizzy.

    ‘That’s why I said “first time ever”.’

    Dizzy looked away. Dane felt bad for making Dizzy feel like a dill. He got on to the government health warning. He’d shout him a drink later.

    An hour passed, and Dane walked back in the bar, having been working in the office on accounts.

    ‘How we looking?’ he asked.

    Liz turned to him. ‘It could be opium night for all the movement they’re making.’

    She turned back to the punters lolling on the couches, pulling at her bottom lip. She let go and it sprang back to words.

    ‘Hey, Dane, doesn’t it appear like they’re trying to wake up?’

    Dane walked among them. He stopped at a girl who looked like her neck might be getting a crook in it and readjusted her pillow. Not only did she look like she was trying to wake up, she didn’t look happy either. She was making that moaning sound like people do when they’re trying to wake from a nightmare. Soon the whole room was moaning. It was disturbing in a way that was painfully reminiscent to Dane. Trying to snap out of a bad trip – he’d been there. Were these guys on a bad trip from Sleeping Dog? He directed the stand-bye nurse to make sure they came down nice and easy, aided by the appropriate parachute drugs.

    He could see Sue talking to that Fred bloke who kept coming in. Were they standing a little too close? There was a time he and Sue couldn’t keep their hands off each other. That time of excitement. Was it over, because they each knew each other too well to any longer expect the best?

    He wasn’t going to bother tonight, but god, he was horny. It was like he was a teenager all over again. Why this amorous charge in the air? It was winter, for Christ’s sake, not hot, sticky summer.

    He stopped off at Geralto’s the next morning, saying hello to Costa first. Being into hospitality, he knew everyone else in hospitality, and they him. At least on this strip.

    ‘Heya, what’s this I hear about a new drug?’

    Dane shrugged innocently. Costa, his big, wide face sweating, delivered Dane a friendly clip.

    ‘Usual?’

    Dane nodded. He also ordered a couple of scorpions to munch on. He’d tried steak once – the one time he could afford it.

    He joined his friends ‘outside’ under the smog-tarp. 

    The cappuccino had a velvety texture, perfect temperature. Costa was an ace barista. Dane looked up at his friends. They were all smiling at him. It was a bit weird. He couldn’t delay the question they knew he wanted to ask.

    ‘Okay, what was it like?’

    They looked at each other, embarrassed, and laughed. 

    ‘You were watching us, weren’t you?’ asked Dizzy.

    Dane nodded impatiently.

    ‘What were we doing all night?’ asked Sharnie.

    Dane looked around at their barely contained smiles. ‘Just lying there.’ He didn’t mention the bit about their pained faces, the whimpering.

    Dizzy broke into the first full-fledge grin. ‘Because in our trip we were fucking.’

    The others joined him in leering.

    ‘En masse,’ said Dizzy.

    They now laughed.

    Dane watched them. No longer coy, no longer ashamed, he was the one left out, left out of their joyous tryst. Dane couldn’t help but look at Sharnie’s exposed shoulders. His eyes ran down her sleek form. He was practically fucking her in his thoughts – was that an infidelity? His best friends had had group sex without even touching. What was Sleeping Dog but a way of facilitating what people did all the time, mentally fucking each other?

    Dane excused himself. He had swimming.

    Dane knew the figure he cut. He swam three kilometres a day, six days a week, sometimes seven. At 1 am, the liquor licence would close, but Dane knew the right cop to pay. And he would switch the window to opaque at the front, close off the front room, and move the punters to the back. They could exit that way too. Most nights he got out about two or three, but on Fridays and Saturdays, he could end up there till the sun came up. Whatever happened, he had one rule: he closed when people stopped buying drinks. He’d sleep in till one the next day, then jump up and go swimming. He had his routine down to two hours. He’d come back and eat a breakfast of watermelon, a tub of yoghurt, and bran. At four, he’d buy extra alcohol or whatever else needed restocking. At six, he’d open. It wasn’t much of a life. Mondays and Tuesdays he’d have off. It was his weekend. But one of those days would be spent doing the usual chores, paying bills, washing clothes, repairs etc, and the other day – well, most of his friends were at work. Friends dropped into the bar, some were even regulars, but it wasn’t the same as meeting up in neutral territory: Zombie was his place. He could never quite relax there – it was his living.

    He exited the pool change rooms, trying to gauge which lane had swimmers going at his pace.

    Dane didn’t get the swimmers who’d swim one lap to his every five and try to beat him on that lap. What did they prove to themselves? He didn’t get the guys soaping their genitals in the showers for half an hour afterwards either. ‘They sure must be unclean,’ he once said to the most persistent. Occasionally he’d see a hot girl sliding through the water. He wished Sue swam. It would mean they’d get to see each other outside of work. Plus, she looked great in a swimsuit. 

    He slipped in the fast lane and began with freestyle.

    Anastasia. If he didn’t stop thinking about her, he wouldn’t be able to hop out of the pool. It was like he was sixteen again.

    He was aware Pearl had fallen in behind him.

    He met his friend, Pearl, at the pool. A different pool to the one he went to now. But a pool they both lived near at the time. They admired each other’s physique, were curious about each other’s routine. The walking exercises up and down the lanes, sideways, backwards, twisting from side to side. The feet stationary exercises, with the arms moving. In short, their ‘drill’. They got talking eventually and agreed to swap notes. Soon, they were doing exactly the same routine, a mixture of the two, the best from each. They’d swim one behind the other, Dane leading for twenty laps, Pearl for the next twenty. It had other advantages besides swapping a slipstream. It meant the hobby swimmers, the ones who’d swim then recuperate at one end, before taking off right in front of you and fucking up your rhythm, were less keen to jump into a lane with not one, but now two, big guys who were obviously a team. No doubt they were viewed as overly self-obsessed wankers by the other regulars, but what did Dane care?

    They started having beers afterwards at the pub, and a smoke. Something else Sue didn’t get. ‘If you didn’t smoke and drink, you’d probably only have to do half the laps to be the same size.’ She was eminently sensible. Turned out Pearl was a youth worker for a religious institution. At first, the two would try to out-argue each other. Each week they’d swap books – Pearl’s on proving God’s existence, Dane’s on disproving, then thrash the points. One day after a particularly gruelling exercise when they’d just upped the laps, Dane said to Pearl in the showers, ‘Hey, let’s just agree to disagree.’ It worked because that time at the pub they started to learn about each other beyond religious or atheistic standpoints. They had other interests, ones that didn’t conflict.

    Pearl explained his name, surprised that Dane had never asked. It was what he got teased with at school. But he liked having a girl’s name for some reason, and so ended up adopting it.

    Dane almost laughed the first time he saw Pearl’s house. Dane chose every item of furniture in his place with meticulous care. Their positioning was also of prime importance. They had to add up to a seamless scheme, an idea. Mostly it was old stuff or, if it wasn’t old to begin with, he’d thrash it with a bike chain to get the right dents. Pearl obviously just bought what he needed and at the cheapest price. All colours and styles, tacky and nasty. He didn’t dress himself with much care either. The guy had a good body, but he hid it in floppy blue/white long-sleeved flannelette shirts and daggy, olive corduroy trousers. And his hair: long, curly, and unkempt. It was this hair that Dane put down to his slight advantage over Pearl in the pool. It dragged like a net clogged with seaweed. Dane wondered if Pearl’s self-uglification had something to do with erasing vanity in the face of his god.

    Pearl had never taken drugs, never shoplifted, never done the usual things guys and girls do to get kicks when young and, some of them, even when they can no longer claim youth. So he got his kicks through other, legal, permissible-by-God ways. Caving, trail-biking, parachuting. He’d beaten Dane in that last pursuit. Dane believed if something went wrong on all the other pursuits there was still a chance he could get himself out of it. But if the parachute didn’t open…? ‘There’s a second,’ Pearl would say.

    Pearl had other interesting traits, endurance tests he’d set himself beyond the pool. Like the summer he decided to dress lightly for the rest of the year, meaning he ended up with only a shirt in winter. He believed he could acclimatise himself, that it would toughen him up. He did it too. Dane privately just thought Pearl needed a root.

    The guy was that cliché, a forty-year-old virgin, because he could only have sex in wedlock. And he hadn’t yet found his perfect partner. Dane couldn’t convey to Pearl that no one does.

    This was probably what interested Dane the most about Pearl, this manic safeguarding of his chastity.

    When they finished swimming, Dane couldn’t help but offer, like Satan, the drug over a few beers.

    ‘Sleeping Dog. You get to fuck someone out of wedlock.’

    ‘Dude, you know I can’t take drugs,’ said Pearl. 

    Because Pearl worked with kids all day, he used words like ‘dude.’ Dane could only imagine how they must have laughed at him. At least Pearl, unlike Frank, had an excuse to try to be contemporary.

    ‘Are you tempted at least?’ asked Dane. ‘Pearl, prove to me you’re human.’

    Pearl laughed. ‘You want to sleep with Anastasia. I don’t.’

    Dane looked at his watch: 5 o’clock. He’d have to open the bar in an hour, to catch some of the zombified after-work crowd. People thought he’d called his bar ‘Zombie’ because he liked dystopian fiction. If his clientele had known his real reason was that the name was a perfect fit for them, they might have been indignant enough to stay away a couple of weeks. 

    ‘Next time,’ said Dane, placing his soapy beer on the bar, and getting up to leave.

    He noticed Pearl was staring at him. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

    ‘Dude, remember why you stopped taking drugs.’

    Dane got in his car, annoyed. Was he so transparent? First, Pearl guessing he wanted to fuck Anastasia, and second, suspecting he was curious himself about trying Sleeping Dog. He prided himself on not being too easy to read, and he’d practically acted as a teleprompter. Driving along Punt Road, he agreed. Drugs still scared him. They scared him ever since that trip that had gone so terribly wrong ten years before. He and Frank had recovered. But their mutual friend, Spike, was in a mental institution because of it.

    He couldn’t park out the back of the bar because the rubbish guys had carelessly dumped the bin back in the middle of the drive. It was a tight place to begin with. He swore – he’d already told them off about it.

    Parking out on Separation Street, he walked round the front. To his surprise, he saw the neon sign had been changed to ‘Beer and Live Band.’ The anger he’d suppressed over the bin, reignited. Skud and Liz were turning away irate punters. He pushed his way past Skud and into the bar.

    Inside, there was a small crowd wobbling to a three-piece acoustic band, Sue sitting up front, eyes half-closed, smiling.  Liz followed him in.

    ‘Sue, we’ve only got this drug exclusively for two weeks. You seen how many people Liz is turning away?’

    ‘We’ve made enough money for this month.’

    ‘I want enough money for the whole year. Liz, get that fucking sign down. And put up Sleeping Dog.’

    Sue bristled; he’d humiliated her in front of her friends, their overweening mutual respect out the window. But what sort of damn fool was she? She motioned to the band to keep playing. Dane walked to the lighting desk and pulled the plug on the amp.

    Two hours later, Liz was looking over the crowd lolling in their respective booths. They’d swapped the sign and still managed to fill up.

    ‘I’m not seeing things,’ she said. ‘They look like they’re trying to wake up.’

    Sue, who’d disappeared out the back after the altercation, emerged with an overnight bag.

    ‘Liz, shut up,’ Dane whispered. 

    Sue walked past.

    ‘Where are you going?’ asked Dane.

    Sue merely stared at him as she continued on to the front door.

    ‘Her mum’s,’ answered Liz. 

    ‘Fuck off then.’

    Sue stopped, stiffened, and turned around. ‘Dane, there was a time when you would’ve punched a guy for speaking that way to me.’

    He watched Scud open the door and let her out. Now she’d made him feel small in front of his friends. True, he’d never spoken to her like that before. Oddly, for the first time in ages, he really wanted her. Wanted to run after her and beg to make her feel good.

    But he didn’t act on it.

    He thought about Sleeping Dog and what his friends had told him over coffee that morning. Seemed like on Sleeping Dog all you did was act. No thinking, no wavering, no endless fucking discussions about the other’s feelings. It was pure unadulterated sex.

    Dane turned to look at the comatose crowd. Their trip would last two hours, which they’d worked out from the night before. Dane repeatedly asked the stand-bye nurse to check on them. Everyone was okay, despite their expressions and whimpering.

    ‘Liz, take over.’

    Dane grabbed a Sleeping Dog pill, looked at it a moment, then swallowed it with a whiskey and dry.

    Liz smiled at him. ‘What will my pay go up not to tell?’

    Dane turned to her. ‘You tell, and you won’t have a wage.’

    Liz threw up her hands. ‘Hey, you know me.’

    ‘Yeah,’ said Dane meaningfully, ‘I know you.’

    Walking past the toilets on his way to his room, he thought briefly about putting his fingers down his throat and throwing up. There was a very good reason he’d stopped taking drugs before. What was he doing? But he was so – so damn horny.

    He lay down on his bed after setting his alarm for an hour and a half. He wanted to be up before the punters were up. Surely he could shake the drug’s effects early?

    He woke without remembering that he’d gone to sleep. He shook his head. Nothing. Annoyed it had brought him no relief, he walked into the bar. What he saw made him stop in his tracks. The punters were no longer lying comatose in their booths; they were awake, naked, and in a seething mass of sexual excess, forming a many-limbed single creature of intense self-gratification. Even the punters, who he hadn’t found attractive, looked hot. Dane had been worried on that score. Maybe everyone looked the way they imagined themselves when on Sleeping Dog.

    It had worked for him after all. He was about to step forward to join them when he noticed Liz and the others at the bar. They looked bored. It became obvious they could not see what he was seeing, that to them it was still a room of sleeping, whimpering punters.

    He turned back to the orgiastic crowd of shimmering limbs and sweat. He looked down to find himself naked, too, and, in his own estimation, even hotter than usual. He eagerly stepped forward.

    But hesitated. Damn it, he could kick himself! Never quite being able to get into a trip. Then he felt a hot mouth on his cock. Looking down, it was Dizzy, who’d disengaged himself from the crowd. Dane leant back. Dizzy then rose to his height and kissed him.

    Next, he was joined in a broiling mass of parts. Not whole bodies, certainly not souls, but a pornographic coupling of limbs and organs. 

    He opened his eyes to find himself fucking Dizzy. Dizzy was bent forward, his head over the fish bowl. Now and then, he’d drop his head in it, to issue tiny, wordless bubbles. Holding his breath must have been increasing the pleasure for him. Dane gripped Dizzy’s waist tighter and thrust harder. Dizzy lifted his head from the tank.

    On Sleeping Dog, sexuality didn’t seem to matter; only sex did. He closed his eyes and went with it.

    He reached forward and caressed the back of Dizzy’s neck, then his hair. Then he saw a flash of something within the tank, as if the water were now fathoms deep, and a vile, impossible-to-conceive creature wallowed there. In his intense fear, his hand gripped Dizzy’s hair, unintentionally holding him in the water. The kraken rose up to take him.

    Dane sat up in bed. His alarm was going. He was wet with cold sweat.

    He raced into the bar. The punters were in their booths, still asleep, groaning. Liz and the other staff were crouched over someone lying prostrate on the floor. Dane felt ill with worry. He quickly pushed aside the panicking stand-bye nurse, and knelt beside Dizzy, who was prostrate on his back in a puddle of water. Dane instinctively turned him on his side. Dizzy coughed up water and even a wriggling goldfish which Liz eventually returned to the tank after everyone had stared at it for a long while.

    When Dane stood, he couldn’t avoid Liz and the others’ question in their eyes: how the hell did you know Dizzy had swallowed the tank water?

    When the rest of the punters revived, they drank their coffees and left.

    Spending the night alone, Dane felt that same sense his sanity had been threatened that he’d had the last time he took drugs.

    It was ten years before. Dane had recently found his brother Frank through adoption-link. Surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, they’d also found they got along well, deciding to share a flat together in Moonee Ponds, near Puckle Street. Frank had a rich friend from over the railway, in one of the old Victorian-era large houses, called Spike. Spike’s parents had eventually moved out when he wouldn’t, leaving him with a stipend and a crumbling house to do whatever he liked in.

    Spike was Dane and Frank’s age, but he seemed older. Not just because he was a committed druggy, but in his world-worn guise, his lined face and dirty, scraggly hair. He wasn’t a drug aficionado in the sense that he desired to escape reality; rather, he wished to ascend the humdrum, to climb his way to heightened states of being. With no job or the financial need to acquire one, Spike had researched his passion intimately and exhaustively: how the Aztecs employed drugs to ‘astral travel’, the Hopi to commune with extra-terrestrials, the Sthrani to swap bodies with animals during mating season. The extent of his investigations was encyclopaedic.

    Dane was pretty sure Frank was as sceptical as himself about these larger pretensions; they were both along for the ride.

    But for Spike, hallucinogenic plants, roots, chemicals, or food could bridge the gap between the natural world and the waking one, some even initiating out-of-body experiences, which could then lead to astral travel. He’d worked his way through every psychoactive substance he could get his hands on, Dane and Frank joining him in his quest. Datura, DMT, hashish, LSD, magic mushrooms, marijuana, mescaline, opium, peyote, psilocybin … The list went on.

    The three didn’t go anywhere to imbibe these substances but stayed in the dark house, rigging up their own light shows, playing favourite dialogue-sparse films, programming hours of appropriate music. Unknown to Dane at the time, it would prove great training for Zombie, and the reason his bar was the best. 

    Together, Dane, Spike and Frank half-perfected a kind of lucid dreaming.

    But there was a downside Spike kept warning them about, but which Dane and Frank only gave lip-service to, such was the fun they were having. Psychedelic drugs could help one step into a dream, sure, a dream they could control. But the power of the drug, or mixture of drugs, could end up controlling the person trying to control the dream. Spike persistently warned that the drug user must maintain rigid control of his consciousness, or else risk being swallowed by the hallucination and be spat out crazy.

    They’d tried for a hypnogogic experience, that is, a dream state without the paralysis associated with sleep. A dream state they could control.

    Then, one day, with Dane and Frank at Spike’s, a parcel arrived from Spike’s parents that he opened with particular glee. (His absent parents were always sending back parcels from their travels.)

    It contained a Peruvian wood statue, which Spike somehow knew to dust. From this dust, he made a concoction for them to imbibe, the most powerful, he warned, yet.

    Dane didn’t even baulk at this – how casual he’d been, unconcerned. The truth was, no matter how much he took or the strength of the particular substance, there was a part, an invulnerable part, which remained untouched by the effects and knew undoubtingly that the resulting hallucinations weren’t real. In some ways, this annoyed him. He never quite got into it the way Frank and, especially, Spike did. His visions were always more prosaic, less fantastical. It flattered his ego that he was always in control but disappointed his hankering for the more heightened experience his brother and friend were enjoying.

    They imbibed the drug, once Spike had boiled it down to a dark paste. It was extremely bitter to the tongue. Almost immediately, they began tripping. Dane enjoyed his hallucinations – the strongest he’d had – then the moment turned. Not only was he now unable to assure himself none of this was real; it was more real than reality.

    Afterwards, he and Frank were deeply shaken, but Spike was mad.

    It took Dane three months before his mind was working properly again. Frank, a week, but Dane disagreed with that figure. Neither broached what they’d seen. And neither visited Spike in the insane ward where he was now confined.

    Frank had put their fright down to amount (excessive) and concentration (100% proof), but Dane feared a more profoundly disturbing reason. He had been so disturbed by that trip, and what it did to Spike, that he hadn’t touch drugs again.

    Until, that is, the other night with Sleeping Dog.

    He told Pearl the real reason he’d stopped taking drugs, the only person he’d ever confided this to. They were at Pearl’s house after one of their swims, when Dane had finally caught up with Pearl again after that fateful drug session.

    ‘With drugs, I’ve always felt distanced from their effects. Sure, I’ve noticed those effects, and enjoyed them, but they were always disassociated from me. It was never real.’

    ‘But…?’ prompted Pearl.

    ‘Well, on that night, when I hallucinated, the things I saw… no longer could I dismiss them as my mind’s wanderings. They were… real.’

    Pearl stared at him. ‘Okay, dude, so that part in your brain that tells you it isn’t real has been switched off. Time to stop taking them.’

    ‘No,’ said Dane.

    ‘No, you won’t stop!?’

    ‘No, I’m certainly stopping; have stopped. But that wasn’t the problem. If I merely felt that part of my brain was not functioning, I believe I could still accommodate. The problem was this. The things I was seeing weren’t the intoxicated dreams of my imagination.’

    ‘What were they then?’

    ‘Real.’

    Pearl twitched, then got up. He poured him and Dane a shot of Tokay, each in mismatched glasses, then sat down again.

    ‘What were these real things you saw?’

    ‘I could read your quotation marks round “real”.’

    ‘They weren’t there.’

    Dane raised an eyebrow.

    Pearl protested. ‘Really, dude. Honest.’

    ‘Pearl, I know the things I saw I didn’t imagine.’

    ‘How can you know that?’

    ‘Because they were things I couldn’t possibly imagine.’

    He’d managed, after months, to dismiss those impossible visions as just that, visions after all. But now, he’d seen them again, on Sleeping Dog.

    Again, he sought out Pearl.

    The first thing Pearl said was, ‘Dude, I knew you’d take it.’

    Dane sighed. Yep, he was a billboard.

    ‘So, what did these critters from another dimension look like?’ persisted Pearl.

    ‘Well, that’s just it; I could only partially see them. But they were hideous, impossible to geometry. I saw a… our words and concepts don’t suffice… but let’s say it was a room. A room that didn’t adhere to our physics. Or to sanity. Well, say we weren’t humans, we were centipede-creatures from Alpha Centauri, and we saw an object from earth – a chair, say, or a bike. From those objects, we could fathom some shape of the creature which used them. Well… ’ And Dane’s face visibly paled. ‘…I got an idea of the shape of these creatures from the furnishings – again an inadequate word – from the objects in that space.’

    ‘And…?’

    ‘Diabolical.’

    Pearl stared at Dane for some moments. ‘Dude, coming from you, that sounds oddly like religious talk.’

    ‘A red man with horns, no. This creature stretched through time, into your history, accounted for fears, fed dread, was impossible to perceive but ominously everywhere.’

    Pearl looked around, walked up and down. Finally, Dane asked him for his thoughts.

    ‘Man, anyone else told me this, I’d laugh. But you – you’re such a sceptic! I’ve known you for years, dude, I know what a total cynic you are. So this shakes me.’

    ‘Why?’ asked Dane, keenly.

    ‘Dude, I don’t know. I guess, I guess, and this is what I don’t like about it, because… because I can see that you believe it with the same conviction that I believe.’

    ‘One of us has to be wrong,’ said Dane.

    ‘Then let’s hope it’s you.’

The God and world, that Pearl’s religion conjured, didn’t seem to Dane that wonderful either. But at least that god had an investment in Earth. Dane felt himself agreeing.

    ‘You’d better get moving, dude.’

    Dane looked at his watch. 4 o’clock. Two hours before he had to open.

    Dane went to the market. These days, people were growing fruit and vegetables on their rooves. Some of it looked all right. He kicked himself for not having his Geiger counter on him. He chanced a few purchases and then went to the liquor store to buy the alcohol he needed to restock.

    He got a kebab from the café next door and wondered if he shouldn’t have paid the extra for them to irradiate it. Not much food tasted good after irradiation. But deaths from food poisoning had gone up that week.

    After a bite, he chucked it in the bin.

    He looked up to see the sky darkening. The reports that morning were that a typhoon was coming, followed by monsoonal floods. Great, only six weeks back, they were weltering in a heatwave. What the fuck had humans done to the world? No wonder the government was keen to push the doping of the populace.

    He received a text from Sharnie as he got in his car. She and the others were at Costa’s. He looked at the time on his mobile. He figured he could squeeze in a drink with them before opening. Besides, he had a question he wanted answering.

    ‘How was it?’ asked Dane as disinterestedly as possible. Truth was, underneath, he was nervous as hell. The last he’d seen this bunch was when he’d rolled Dizzy over to drain the tank water out of him.

    Sharnie laughed. ‘Shit, it was awesome.’

    ‘So, you all remember the same details?’

    They nodded.

    He swallowed dryly. ‘During the trip, were… were you trying to wake up?’

    ‘Why the fuck would we? It was heaven.’

    Then why that pained look on their faces during it? Had there been that pained look on his when he took it?

    Dane got to the point. ‘Well, was I there?’

    Sharnie laughed. ‘You don’t take drugs, but you should. See you tonight for Sleeping Dog. The ultimate safe sex drug – fucking with your minds.’

    ‘I’ll pass,’ said Dizzy.

    Dane felt his stomach drop. Did Dizzy remember Dane in the trip? Dane had held Dizzy’s head under water, distracted by that dimensional fissure he’d seen through the tank glass, that rent onto other worlds. Was there such a thing as rape on Sleeping Dog?

    Dizzy ignored the protest of his friends and walked off, staring momentarily into Dane’s eyes.

    Sharnie waited till he was out of earshot and then addressed the circle. ‘He was involved in the sex. And so-o-o good at it, but then…’

    Miriam joined in, ‘…he seemed to ‘pop out’ of the room.’

    The four laughed at the double entendre and could not be made to focus on the topic, no matter how hard Dane pressed. They had the giggles worse than if they were on dope. Their utter idiocy ignited Dane’s revulsion for the insouciant side of drug-taking, and he excused himself also. He noted that not one of them noticed his leaving.

    Dane dropped by his brother’s place. Anastasia was out; Frank, in his loft.

    ‘Frank, there’s something wrong with that drug.’

    Frank smiled in a disturbingly manic way, like a clown from an amusement park with a fixed open mouth. It was odd that image should have come to mind to Dane, especially given what Frank said next.

    ‘Me and Anastasia went to Luna Park last night, Dane. Most romantic night we’ve had in ages.’

    ‘That’s great, Frank, I’m happy for you. But how well has that drug been tested?’

    Frank put down his putting iron he was practicing with and beamed at Dane. ‘Let me show you something.’

    Dane worked out Frank was leading them to his and Anastasia’s bedroom. Dane suddenly didn’t want to know, but like in a dream, his feet compelled him there. 

    There was a large, pink teddy bear on the bed. Dane was aware that the sight of a large, pink teddy on a neatly folded satin red bedspread was not a sight that should have fixed him with such existential foreboding.

    But it did.

    He tried to shake himself of the feeling.

    ‘I won that for Anastasia in the shooting gallery,’ simpered Frank.

    Dane drew his eyes from it to Frank. ‘Frank, I’m trying to tell you that it’s too early for Sleeping Dog to go on the market. It needs more testing, it needs more – ’

    Anastasia was at the door, dressed only in a sheer, see-through nightgown, her nipples pinging through the fabric.

    ‘There’s nothing wrong with that drug,’ she purred.

    Dane gawped. ‘How would you know?’ was all he could manage to say.

    Frank and Anastasia looked at each other and foolishly smiled. Anastasia pinned Dane with her glare. ‘Best fucking root we’ve had in ages. That’s why.’

    Dane drew his covetous eyes from her. ‘But it wasn’t real, Frank. It was in your head.’

    Frank smiled sheepishly. ‘We went to Luna Park afterwards. I’m still a great shot. Won that teddy for Ana. That’s real, isn’t it?’

    The three regarded the teddy.

    Anastasia left. Dane found himself following her downstairs to the kitchen, trying desperately to knock out the image he was left with of Frank crawling onto the bed and cradling the bear.

    Anastasia regarded him as she reached into the freezer for ice cream. Déjà vu washed over Dane, even though it was merely a case of repetition.

    ‘How do you know something’s wrong with Sleeping Dog?’ she asked.

    Dane could not answer. He was still trying to shake off the profound sense of unreality. 

    ‘You were fun with you took Es,’ she sighed. ‘Where’s the love gone?’

    She put a hand on his. Dane looked down.

    ‘Anastasia, remember this: you’re family only so long as you’re married to my brother.’

    He tried to pull his hand away but could only watch as she ran hers up his. He looked to the stairs, worried Frank would be at the top of them, but Anastasia only smiled as if Frank knew, too, what was about to happen. 

    She fixed drinks, ice teas, giving Dane one, and then Dane remembered that he had seen Anastasia when he arrived, that she’d fixed a drink for the three of them and then they’d… they’d… A jolt unplanted him.

    He could see himself outside, lying on the deckchair, asleep, but looking like he was trying to wake up. In the deck chairs beside him, Frank and Anastasia.

    He turned with infinite slowness back to Anastasia at the kitchen marble top, whipping cream. A noise made him turn to the first flight landing, where Frank was now standing, teddy in hand. Frank ripped a hole in it, pulled out several handfuls of foam, before entering it, thrusting, crying. Dane turned, shocked, sad, revolted, as Anastasia undid her top, revealing one breast with a pert and beautiful nipple, and put cream on it. Dane felt himself half-fainting towards it. Her hands bringing his head onto it, he suckled, nibbled. She then pulled his head between her legs with an aggressiveness he wished she could impart to Sue. Doing a different kind of lapping, he felt himself slipping out of the moment.

    But not quite. Still this inability to completely lose himself! Was his brother still watching from the first floor landing? Had they both agreed to spike him like this? Whatever the case, Sleeping Dog couldn’t override his averse reaction to anything incestuous.

    He craned his neck with infinite fear towards himself, his physical self, outside on the deckchair. His slipped disk sanity worked overtime not to give out.

    Then he screamed. 

    For there it was, a creature like a spilt ink blot that had been blown every which way across the paper, till it was an insane scribble, was crouched over his physical self, trying to enter his body and brain, as his mind was engaged elsewhere, in sex, in the overcharged, heated, moment of orgasmic arrest.

    Separating himself from Anastasia, he lunged towards his corporal self and the creature bent over him.

    Dane woke up, back in his body. Hands splayed up, there was nothing in front of him, at least nothing he could see in this everyday dimension. He looked at Frank and Anastasia asleep in the deckchairs beside him, angered at them spiking him, their dirty trick, but fearful of the horrid look on their faces.

    Because while under the influence of Sleeping Dog, hovering over their bodies, he’d also seen creatures trying to enter them.

    Quickly filling a bucket of icy water from the pool, he splashed it on their contorted faces and hurried out as they woke up. As he stumbled outside, he saw a dog sitting statue-like on the raised garden bed.

    The look the dog gave him frightened him to his core. He hoped it was still the effects of Sleeping Dog wearing off. Getting in his Deerta and pulling away, he tried to place the breed. Short coat, ebony; stiff tail, forked at the end; ears, also held erect, long and triangular; snout, narrow; eyes, a piercing, glowing red. He couldn’t. Like a greyhound but not a greyhound, was all he could manage.

    Dane got to the bar late. Sharnie had already dished out Sleeping Dog to the punters, which meant she probably also pocketed a few herself. He walked among their lolling bodies. More than ever they appeared to be struggling to wake. If he’d been on time, he hadn’t planned to run it that night; didn’t want to run it ever again.

    He sat at the bar. Liz leaned over him, her red curls falling on his shoulders.

    ‘And yet they all say they had a great time the next day. Fucking each other senseless.’

    Sue emerged from the back and walked straight up to Dane. ‘How many people did you fuck when you took it?’

    Dane turned to Liz. Liz looked away guiltily. ‘Blabber mouth,’ he spat. 

    Sue reached out a hand and swivelled Dane back round to face her. ‘Do you remember your drug days and who got you through? You almost went schizophrenic. You’d fuck our friends!’

    Sue stormed out the back once more.

    Yes, it had been Sue who nursed him back to sanity after that trip that left Spike mad. It had been Sue who’d stayed by him ever since. Helped him get up Zombie. Even though a nightclub was anathema to her. She was a morning person, who missed seeing the sun rising. He would often tell her she could go to bed at ten, that he’d handle the bar. But she’d stay up next to him, even as she was nodding off, or gripping her feet in pain. Between work and chores, they didn’t have much time for each other. She stayed up late just to be with him. He needed to remember things like that at bad times.

    He watched the punters for a good hour-and-a-half. Sue didn’t come back in. He got up and went out the back to make it up to her.

    Sue was lying on the bed, seemingly asleep. But then, to Dane’s horror, he saw an all-too-familiar expression pass over her face.

    Oh no. She was trying to wake.

    Fucking Liz! She must have given Sue one of those infernal pills!

    He knelt on the bed, shaking her. She woke, and something crept in her eye, which made him throw her back in horror.

    ‘Where’s Sue?’ he blubbered.

    She leapt at him, and the two fell down beside the bed. When he looked down at her face, he was relieved.

    ‘Sue…? Sue, you’re back. Where did you go?’

    Holding her in his arms like this, he felt a tenderness he hadn’t felt for her in a long time.

    ‘A dream, a horrible dream,’ she murmured, ‘and before that…’

    ‘So, who did you have sex with?’ he asked before he knew it.

    Sue pulled away from him and answered tartly, ‘I was alone. I masturbated; it was the most love I’ve felt in years.’

    She left the room, Dane appropriately chastised, after grabbing her overnight bag. If he hadn’t said that, if he hadn’t responded in that predictable, outmoded way, they would have had sex. More than just sex, they would have made love for the first time in ages.

    Perhaps he had imagined this dark side to drugs? These diabolical beings? What’s to say his hallucination wasn’t that he was certain he wasn’t hallucinating? Since he’d been hallucinating at the time, that made a joke of that.

    But that shadow that passed over Sue’s eyes…

    Well, there was such a side effect as residual flashbacks, sometimes lasting weeks.

    Was Sleeping Dog so bad? Perhaps the problem was with him, his never being able to completely lose himself? Sleeping Dog had reinvigorated Frank and Anastasia’s love life. His experience on it, and Sue’s just now, had almost reinvigorated theirs, if not for his foolishness. He thought about yesterday with Frank. Perhaps Frank, realising Anastasia’s ‘thing’ for Dane, had suggested she spike their drinks. What did it matter, Frank must have reasoned, if his wife and brother mentally fucked if that’s what they both wanted? And yet that… he pushed the teddy bear image out of his head.

    When Dane returned to the bar, Liz told him what he already guessed: Sue had gone to stay at her sister’s.

    Next night, with it being a Monday and the bar closed, Dane joined Frank at Luna Park. The two had ignored the Ghost Train, the Mad Mouse, and other rides, and headed straight for the shooting gallery with its ducks and drakes. The doubts Dane had managed to put away in the night, had resurfaced toward dawn, and occupied him all day.

    ‘It can’t have been,’ said Frank breezily.

    ‘It was,’ said Dane, scoring a bull’s eye. ‘It was the same creature.’

    Frank shifted uncomfortably, missing his shot. He was usually a better marksman than Dane. 

    ‘Look, I’m not sure that I even saw it, now,’ he said irritably.

    The carnival music blaring through the speakers was getting to both of them.

    ‘Frank, the same monster I saw when I freaked out on drugs with you and Spike ten years ago is the same monster I saw when …’ Dane wanted to avoid last night ‘…when I took it at work and when I woke Sue – it was in her eyes.’ 

    ‘Hey, Dane, I’m not so sure I saw these creatures you and Spike were convinced you saw. I think I let your conviction sway me.’

    Dane glimpsed a dog moving among the crowd and wondered how it had got into an amusement park.

    ‘Dane, you’re getting overworked.’

    ‘Did you hear me?’

    Frank merely nodded.

    ‘Frank, Spike is mad.’

    Frank looked off into the night, at the multi-coloured flashing lights all around them. ‘He’s not so mad.’

    Dane was surprised. ‘You still visit him?’

    It was Dane’s greatest shame that he’d never visited Spike in the psychiatric ward. But he feared going because Spike’s insanity would be a proof of what he believed he saw that night.

    Frank smiled at the expression on Dane’s face. ‘Dane, Spike knows everything there is to know about drugs. Where do you think I got the ingredients for Sleeping Dog?’

    This stopped Dane in his tracks. ‘Spike invented it?’

    That weird dog was still watching them. It was very familiar… Was it the one he’d seen at Frank’s house?

    He turned to his brother. ‘Frank, you better tell me they’re holding off on that drug.’

    Frank regarded him impatiently. ‘Yes, until they’ve done more testing… on animals.’

    Dane looked round sharply. The dog was gone.

    He forewent swimming the next day, and stood outside the psychiatric hospital, his limbs trembling. Forcing himself inside, he was greeted by the head doctor, a woman with disturbing green hair and a long neck. He wasn’t sure how the head doctor got away with looking like one of her patients.

    Perhaps appropriate staff was rare.

    She took him to a room like those interrogation ones in police stations; windowed on one side. Spike was sitting in darkness, mouth twisted, hair frayed and coming down over his eyes. The room was well lit, but somehow Spike wore darkness round him, as a cloak.

    The doctor whispered in Dane’s ear, ‘Be careful, he’s mad.’

    He faced her, disconcerted. ‘I’d hope so, to be here.’

    She snorted merrily, before nodding to the guard to unlock the door and let him in. Dane sat down at the table. Without any prompting, Spike began to speak in a voice croaking to life after long disuse. 

    ‘Kisthagua has visited you in numberless dreams. Sothtogo awaits his creations.’

    It was nonsense, but it chilled Dane all the same because it was just the sort of nonsense he feared was true. God, he and Spike were the same age. But whereas Dane looked more like thirty than forty, Spike looked double that again.

    ‘Spike, I’m sorry I haven’t visited earlier.’ Christ, he was way overdue. ‘But… I…’

    The dispassionate way Spike was looking at him, Dane wanted to get straight to the point.

    ‘Are there… creatures… aliens?’

    Spike watched Dane an uncomfortable while, the shadows under his brows, the faint, inverted light of his eyes, the drawn, sinister mouth, all contriving to an unnerving effect.

    ‘They are dead, but being immortal, cannot die. Their dreams awake in ours. Great Kisthagua wants to rise. Yet, to soar again, he and his blasphemous minions must awake in us.’

    Dane shivered. Madness to anyone else, but aspects of it added up with what he’d experienced.

    ‘Spike, what are they? Aliens from another dimension?’

    Disturbingly, Spike closed his eyes in orgiastic prayer. ‘Yes, you could call them that.’

    Dane pinched himself to get sense back. ‘Okay,’ he managed sceptically, ‘I’ve never believed the visitation fantasy. If there are aliens, why haven’t they made contact?’

    Spike tittered. Dane looked at the head doctor through the glass. She, too, was looking fearful. Spike droned on.

    ‘Did the Spanish Conquistadors try to make contact with the piranha? Creatures from other worlds have visited Earth, but they have found no sign of intelligent life. When great Kisthagua wakes, the best you can hope for, Dane, is that you are not reserved for a farm or experiment animal, but chosen as a pet. And a pet with a relatively benevolent, unperverted owner.’

    Spike giggled. His giggle became a monstrously offensive thing, as if directed at Dane’s very soul. Dane rose and slammed the table. The security guard moved from the window to the door, but the head doctor grabbed his arm, wanting to hear more. 

    ‘Frank says you invented Sleeping Dog. How?’

    ‘I didn’t invent it, Dane. Can’t you guess, though, what I did do?’

    Dane recalled a story Spike had told him and Frank about the South American Indians. The Indians would lime their darts and arrows with a poison called curare, which would stun an animal, so that they could then kill and eat it. Curare was made from young bark scrapings, other cleaned plant fragments, and sometimes snake venom or venomous ants. The mixture was boiled in water for two days before being strained and evaporated. What was left was a blood-dark, viscid paste, bitter to the taste.

    The remarkable thing about the poison was that it would affect the prey, but not the hunter who then ate it. But most remarkable of all, given that the Amazon rainforest is home to more animal and plant species than anywhere else, is that the Indians should have chanced upon such precise ingredients with so beneficial a result.

    According to Spike, the Indians themselves had given an explanation for the fortuity: when in drug-induced states, terrible beings had shown them where to gather the ingredients and exactly how to combine them. 

    Dane beheld Spike’s shadowed eyes. ‘You found Sleeping Dog,’ he ventured.

    ‘Very good,’ said Spike, smiling. ‘Sothtogo told me where the ingredients could be found here on Earth, leftover from their brief tenancy of our planet. I communicated this to my parents, who immediately travelled to Syria where they followed the relayed directions and unearthed a canopic jar with the viscera of a demi-god and powder vital to Sleeping Dog’s formulation.’

    ‘And that has fuelled Sleeping Dog’s manufacture ever since?’

    Spike nodded. This gave Dane hope. If the key ingredient of Sleeping Dog was finite, all the better. Then his mind wandered back to that other connotation of Spike’s divulgences.

    ‘Your parents are in on this?’

    ‘They, like me, are human votives of the Argoomarn tribe of Callea.’

    God, this was crazy! To Dane’s horror, Spike burst into an incantation.

    ‘Oh great and terrible Kisthagua, trapped in sleep, awake in us. Awake in your unrepentant and perverse disciples!’

    Dane looked at the notebook under Spike’s hand. ‘What’s in that book?’

    ‘The thoughts they have conveyed to me that I can put in words. The ingredients to Sleeping Dog, among other things.’

    ‘Who else has instructions on how to mix the ingredients?’

    ‘Only Frank.’

    The interview over, Dane was looking through the glass with the head doctor. Spike was writing in his notebook.

    ‘What else is in that book?’ he asked. ‘Has anyone read it?’

    She let her head roll on her neck. ‘Three psychiatrists. They all went mad. Two of them have since killed themselves.’

    Dane put a proposition to her. She immediately yielded to it.

    It took Dane, the head doctor, the guard and three more staff to get the book off Spike. He’d screamed, not in distress, but diabolical ecstasy.

    Before driving off, Dane rang Frank, but the call went straight to Message Bank.

    ‘Frank, there’s something really dangerous about this drug. I don’t want you to just hold off on it. I want you to destroy it altogether. Frank, you’ve got to destroy the – ‘

    A beep sounded, Frank’s Message Bank full. Dane realised he was quite close to Frank’s work – he’d drop in instead.

    ‘Can I see Frank Moorlock? He’s my brother.’

    The secretary looked up at him. ‘He’s not in.’

    ‘Anyone else associated with Sleeping Dog?’

    ‘Sleeping Dog?’ She tapped the name into her computer. ‘There is no drug due to be released under that name.’

    This seemed hopeful. Frank must have taken it off the register himself. 

    When Dane left, unbeknownst to him, he was followed.

    That night, Dane changed the neon sign to read, ‘Beer and Live Band.’ He’d somehow managed to get Sue’s favourite acoustic set back in, despite how he’d treated them.

    He flushed the remaining cache of Sleeping Dog pills down the toilet, then returned to the bar.

    He wished Sue would walk in, but she must still be staying with her sister. He half-thought of texting her that her favourite band was playing. But it would have been disingenuous, presenting his not selling Sleeping Dog as a gesture to her.

    Sharnie was incensed when she showed up, along with all the punters desperate for Sleeping Dog. As Dane suspected, Sharnie was already hooked.

    The next day, Dane again stood up Pearl, instead going to the laboratory where the drug was manufactured and tested. He wanted to make sure Frank was eradicating every last trace of its existence.

    The chief scientist, an extraordinarily strange-looking creature with what was inarguably a hunchback, regarded him with his small eyes. He had the most startling silver-grey hair Dane had seen.

    The laboratory was fluoro-lit, with many and varied machinery. Along one wall were caged dogs, yapping or howling incessantly. Dane’s heart sank for them.

    The chief scientist seemed glad of company; he had not heard from Frank either.

    Dane got straight to the point of whether they had a finite supply of Sleeping Dog’s key ingredient. The chief scientist agreed they had, saying they’d kept a sample to try to recreate synthetically, but they weren’t having much success. 

    Dane asked him if he knew how the drug worked.

    ‘All drugs alter the pathways in the brain,’ he said. ‘Sleeping Dog doesn’t just seem to alter them but creates new ones altogether. The strange thing is that the sex part of the brain is highly stimulated, but so too is the rest, nearly ninety percent. We normally only use about ten. The longer and higher the dose, the more the rest of the brain lights up with activity.’

    Despite the dogs’ audible distress drilling in his mind, a few more pieces fell together for Dane. While Sleeping Dog was finger-popping the brain centres to do with sexual pleasure, keeping us well-nigh distracted in a lugubrious trance, these terrible creatures from another dimension were trying to enter us.

    He figured fitting themselves to our dimension was one difficulty. The other, no one had taken Sleeping Dog long enough for the brain to be rewired for a perfect fit.

    Dane suspected the reason he seemed most susceptible was that his excessive drug-taking had already halfway reconfigured his mind for alien habitation. Frank must have been a close second. On the subject of Frank, why the hell wasn’t he returning Dane’s calls?

    ‘That seems the hard part for these aliens,’ he theorised aloud. ‘Not entering us, so much, but the waking within us. I woke my wife while she was under the influence of Sleeping Dog. What I saw briefly in her eyes – it wasn’t her.’

    The chief scientist nodded like he’d seen the same thing. He droned on in answer, but Dane found himself staring at the frantic dogs, trying to move and stretch in their cages.

    ‘I saw a dog the other day following Frank,’ Dane said, half to himself. ‘I suspect Frank’s still taking the drug, becoming more and more susceptible.’ He turned to the scientist suddenly. ‘Have you woken any of the dogs while on the drug?’

    ‘Yes, one. I have a curious video of it, in fact. It afterwards tried using its paws to lift its food bowl. It seemed frustrated with them because it couldn’t manipulate them.’

    ‘Which dog?’ asked Dane, alarmed, turning back to the cages. 

    ‘That one.’

    The scientist pointed to an empty cage.

    Oh no, thought Dane.

    Dane insisted on seeing the video, although he knew what the dog looked like. It was the same one he’d seen at Frank’s and then at the amusement park. He knew why it was tailing them, too; it wanted to wake Frank while he was under Sleeping Dog’s influence, wake the beast trying to wake within him.

    He asked the scientist if he could see the remaining sample of the key ingredient. The scientist removed it from a safe and looked relieved when Dane then poured it down a sink.

    ‘One last question.’

    The chief scientist waited.

    ‘What breed is that missing dog?’

    The scientist smiled manically. ‘A cryptid.’

    Dane cocked his head.

    ‘A cryptid is an animal whose existence has been suggested down the ages but never scientifically documented. I have only found one canine species that looks like it: the totemic animal of the Egyptian god Set.’

    Sue went back to the bar, deciding to give her and Dane’s relationship one more go. He wasn’t there; probably swimming. She found a leather-bound notebook hidden under the desk in the office and sat down to read it, at first curiously, then with growing apprehension. She turned to a page that had a picture on it. Jarringly, she realised the picture was of her, seen from above, engaged in her present activity, reading the notebook in the office. It was a wholly disconcerting out-of-body experience, yet one she struggled to draw her eyes from. She, at last, managed to shut the book, only to see two books shut, one half the size of the other. She was now watching herself watching herself, in an infinite corollary of regression.

    In horror, she tried to draw away further, to no avail. She was screaming as she was watching herself watching herself watching herself watching her –  

    She felt someone take her in their arms as she swooned to the floor. Dane had thrown the book from the table, breaking its terrible grip. Sue was sick with giddiness. Dane held her, and she, him.

    ‘Which… which gods are those…?’ she asked, utterly appalled and terrified.

    He gritted his teeth. ‘The real ones.’

    Sue felt her sanity lurch towards her throat, as if it had been seated in her stomach. Throw up, and she would be mad.

    ‘It’s okay, Sue, it’s okay, baby, I’m here for you.’

    He held her in his arms and kissed her forehead and wouldn’t let go.

    The next morning, Dane woke Sue early to join him on the roof and watch the sunrise together.

    ‘But we have to work tonight,’ she said.

    He held his fingers to her mouth. ‘I’m closing the bar for a week. We deserve a holiday.’

    They sat for an hour, hugging. He told her to go back to bed; he’d serve them breakfast there. She made her way down the roof hatch while Dane stayed a moment longer to watch the last of the red sky fade to blue.

    He felt infinite relief.

    The last of the key ingredient of Sleeping Dog, he’d destroyed. The instructions for making it, in Spike’s notebook, he’d thrown in a barrel in the back alley and set alight. And he’d found an unlikely ally in Anastasia, who’d eagerly agreed to destroy Frank’s notebooks too.

    Everything would be okay. He made his way down the roof access hatch himself; he had one more surprise for Sue.

    He entered their bedroom wearing a bowler hat, a necktie, black trousers and shoes. He was topless apart from braces. He adopted the best accent he could.

    ‘Hello ’ello.’

    ‘Dane?’ she asked confused, waking slowly. She must have fallen back to sleep.

    ‘Dane?’ he echoed, affecting confusion. ‘You’ve got the wrong name, Miss. I’m Luke.’

    He did a little whirl, ripping off the front of his stripper-trousers, revealing sleek, silk boxers underneath.

    ‘Hope I scrub up all right, Miss. Well, since you paid for the full service, I’m yours to do whatever you like with.’

    Sue seemed to start crying. Dane felt a flash of anger. God, anything he tried – it didn’t work. He became embarrassed he’d bothered with this charade. But then he saw that she was crying tears of mirth.

    ‘Look in your wallet,’ she managed to get out.

    ‘Eh, miss?’ he said, still trying to maintain the role-play.

    When she insisted, he looked through his cards as instructed before finding one with a picture of Sue in stilettos and fishnet stockings, brandishing a paddle. It read, ‘Call Sandy, to fulfil your secret, darkest desires.’

    Dane smiled, too. They’d had the same idea! He started to speak in his own normal voice when she snapped, ‘Shut up!’

    Dane closed his mouth.

    ‘I’m sorry, Luke,’ she purred, ‘it’s just that since you’re here at my bidding and at my expense, I want to make full utilisation of your services. No more small talk.’

She looked him up and down before placing her finger on her lip meditatively.

    ‘Well now, tiger, you said I could do anything with you I please?’

    Dane felt his heart and groin swelling. ‘That’s right, miss, anything.’

Two Days Earlier.

Katrina Global hated these fucking assignments. To make matters worse, this one involved a friend: Sharnie Meyers. Katrina and Sharnie went back years, although they hadn’t seen each other in years either. Sharnie had got a job at Zombie, where she seemed to be enjoying a youthful night-time renaissance. Katrina was still to take up the long-standing offer of going along one night. She couldn’t do nightclubs anymore; she couldn’t stay awake past ten.

    They hadn’t caught up, that is, until Sharnie knocked on Katrina’s door just the night before, looking like she’d been doused with wet sick.

    Sharnie explained she’d got herself addicted to some newfangled drug called ‘Sleeping Dog’ and wanted Katrina to put her journalistic skills to use in scoring for her. Apparently, it had been recalled.

    Naturally, Katrina had told her friend where to go for having the nerve.

    When she’d mentioned the incident to her boss, Sly, that morning, he of the pointed curly beard, triangular hair, large mouth and oval shiny bald spot at the front of his head, his response had typically accorded with the kind of trash their news service (Wazzup?) put out.

    ‘My God, are you mad, Katrina?’ he asked in his Vaudevillian way, clearing space on her desk to park his bony arse. ‘If there’s a new drug being trialled on the market, we want the scoop on it. Call up this friend, and follow any leads she may have. At once!’

    Katrina shook her head. To think she once shared a kind of sexual frisson with this man – never consummated, thank god. She supposed the thought of the reality of it accounted for the hesitancy on her part. She’d heard from the cafeteria ladies that Sly utilised parallel mirrors in his lovemaking, and Katrina just wasn’t keen on seeing her wobbling arse duplicated to infinity.  

    She excused herself to the bathroom while Sly went through her pen jar, reclaiming the ones of his she’d borrowed.

    She messed up her hair in the mirror and evaluated herself. Not a beauty, sure. Face a little too puffy, auburn hair she couldn’t seem to make look alive without a good deal of voodoo. Mouth a tad too tiny. She did have eyes though, great big doe-eyed luminous jewels they were, framed by genuine, long lashes.

    Career-wise, she was somewhat more satisfied. She’d become something of a celebrity with her weekly video blog, where she debunked whatever was the latest crack-pot conspiracy doing the rounds.

    After applying necessary colour to her puffy, white cheeks, she exited and made her way back to her desk, where Sly was still rummaging through her stuff. Donning her Princess-style caped charcoal jacket, and throwing her black baguette bag with silver diamantes over her shoulder, she psyched herself up to the indignity of procuring drugs.

    ‘Can I score you any coke while I’m at it?’ she tossed at Sly as she made her way to the lift. 

    She rang a disconcertedly happy Sharnie to say she was on the case. Sharnie’s only suggested lead was some building where it was rumoured the drug was manufactured.

    ‘So, what does this drug do for you, Sharnie?’ she asked unsympathetically.

When Sharnie explained, Katrina’s mouth dropped.

    The building looked harmless enough. Grey, though, with no windows above ground floor. Katrina crossed out ‘harmless’ in her mind, replacing it with ‘ominous’. Already, she was composing copy. She was sitting in her clapped-out car, parked opposite.

    She pulled her folded boots over her polka dot tights, scraped the hair out of her eyes, tried to look serious, got out of the car, pulled down her rather short printed dress, and strode across the quiet road to what she assumed was the front entrance. Locked. The glass was so shaded, it was impossible to see in, even by pressing her eyes right up to it.

    Eventually, the sliding door opened, and she quickly slipped in as a muscled black man in a tight-fitting tanktop, and with tatts up his arms, left. Yum, she thought. Wouldn’t say no to taking Sleeping Dog with him.

    When the glass door slid shut behind her, she paused, surprised at the concentration of that thought. She never before realised she had that fantasy, a coupling with a complete stranger. She was evidently curious despite herself about this new drug. No doubt it didn’t exist at all, but if it did …

    She approached the counter where the receptionist looked at her doubtfully. Katrina couldn’t be bothered being subtle.

    ‘Hey, this is gonna sound stupid, but do you have a drug called Sleeping Dog?’

    The secretary shook her head. ‘No. But funny thing is, he just asked the same thing.’

    Katrina hurried out to see the hunky man take off in his Deerta. She wasted no time getting in her bomb of a car; she had her stranger to follow.

    Two nights later, Sly called her while she was on her cramped little balcony, drinking cheap red wine and making eyes at the topless married man across from her as he hung up nappies and other domestic paraphernalia to dry in the artificial wind tunnel between their two blocks. The shirtless thing was working for her; the nappies thing, not so much. Say… about zilch.

    ‘Good work, Katrina,’ said Sly. ‘We tracked down that car rego you gave us.’

    Katrina listened carefully as Sly explained that the car’s owner was Sharnie’s boss, the manager of Zombie. Okay, she was definitely going along to Zombie now, even if it meant she had to take a nana nap first.

    ‘Well,’ said Sly matter-of-factly. ‘Seems he killed everyone in that building, excluding the receptionist, everyone in a laboratory two hours before, and everyone in a private mental clinic the day before that.’

    Katrina hung up as she watched the married man wink at her before disappearing through his makeshift clothesline, a decidedly unsexy bra passing over his head and swinging in the wind.

    Hmm, could she still fancy that bar owner knowing he was a mass murdering psychopath?

    Next day, at her work desk, Sly dropped a memory stick in her now empty pen jar.

    ‘Katrina, you’ve got a new assignment.’

    Katrina took off her reading glasses, and regarded Sly in his chequered white shirt and braces; the clichéd news chief and not much of a turn-on.

    ‘My last one turns out to be a mass-murdering psychopath, and the mad drug-addict who gave me the story still won’t leave me alone.’ 

    Sly shrugged. ‘Goes with the territory.’

    ‘So, where is it? The Bahamas, five-star hotel?’

    ‘The desert, two-star motel.’

    Katrina picked her bag off the floor and put her glasses in it; it was only an hour off lunch; she might as well beat the cafeteria midday rush. 

    ‘Great,’ she said, putting on her coat and lassoing her handbag over her shoulder. ‘Why are most fruitcakes rural? So, what is it?’

    ‘A coal miner reckons his company has stumbled upon the ruins of an ancient, technologically advanced civilisation.’

    ‘So?’

    Sly looked genuinely astounded. ‘Katrina, that would be mind-blowing.’

    Katrina pushed her chair in. ‘And the proof?’

    ‘He’s managed to sneak a canopic jar belonging to this impossibly old empire out of the coal mine.’

    Katrina put her hands on her hips. ‘I’m waiting to be impressed.’

    Sly leant forward. ‘Katrina, it was found in a coal seam.’

    ‘And? What am I missing?’

    Sly shook his head. ‘Coal was formed two million years ago!’

    Katrina yawned. ‘Right, before humans were even around? Debunked already.’

    She headed for the lifts, asking if any of the other staff wanted her to bring back coffee.

    Sly called after her. ‘Maybe it wasn’t a human civilisation.’

    Katrina swivelled round after pressing ‘ground’ on the lift buttons. ‘You buy this crap?’

    Sly shrugged. ‘I just want you informed of the facts.’

    The lift doors opened. Katrina half stepped in so they wouldn’t close. ‘They’re not facts; they’re fantasies. Of lonely, unimportant people.’

    Sly lost his good-humour and stared at her wearily.

    ‘Okay, where’s the brief?’ she capitulated.

    Sly dug the memory stick out of the pen jar, then walked halfway over to her and chucked it.

    ‘Good catch. It’s all in there. Along with the electronic plane ticket. I’ve called your taxi. It should be downstairs. It will take you via your flat so you can pack.’

    Katrina frowned. ‘You want me to go right this minute?’

    Sly nodded; he had his smile back.

    Stale chicken and avocado sandwiches! She wrapped them in the plastic sheaf they came in and threw them on the tray in front of her. Ah well, it was only a four hour flight to Perth. At least she was relatively comfortable. The tall guy next to her was doubled-up like a pelican’s neck. There were advantages to being short. Short-ish, she liked to say.

    When the flight attendant removed the sandwiches, she got out her laptop, placed it on the tray, and studiously loaded Sly’s brief. Not so studiously, she only bothered to read the first page. Flicking through the rest of the document, it seemed merely to consist of a cut-and-paste job of all sorts of historical and mineralogical crap Sly had no doubt simply downloaded from the net as an approximation of research.

    She brought up another screen on her laptop and started writing her article instead. She gave it the heading: ‘Another Bore Debunked.’

    Before she knew it, she’d fallen asleep.

    She always liked Perth Airport. Spacious and clean. Unfortunately, it wasn’t her final destination. She had to wait two hours for a connecting flight on a much smaller plane this time – a sixteen-seater, which took her north a further two hours, into mining territory.

    The airport this time was an airport in name only. Anyone would be forgiven for thinking it was a glorified bus shelter.

    Fortunately, her Wi-Fi worked. She claimed one of the few seats in the waiting area, turned her tablet off plane-safe mode, and emailed her article to Sly.

    She then discovered that the baggage collection area was merely a trolley that one of the ground staff had packed and left out on the tarmac. 

    A man was standing beside it, holding a card with her name on it. He was wearing rather short, blue shorts and black boots. On his top, a colourless, short-sleeved shirt; on his head, an Akubra hat. The clichéd outback Australian.

    A fellow passenger, a frumpy woman with dreadlocked hair, was reading the name on the card. ‘Katrina Global,’ she articulated slowly before pointing to Katrina. The other passengers collecting their luggage started doing the same.

    Katrina sometimes underestimated just how many people viewed her weekly blog.

    The frumpy woman pushed her face up to Katrina’s. ‘UFOs do exist!’ she shouted in a rage.

    Katrina limbo-ed past the frump, and ripped the sign off the guy so no one else would realise who she was and hassle her. Why was her lift the only one here who didn’t know her?

    Walking to the car-park, with him dragging her bag, she appraised him more closely. He had a sandy, two-day stubble. Kind of handsome, if a bit un-manicured for Katrina’s tastes.

    ‘Carter Ryan,’ he said. ‘Reporter for The Dagga.’

    She could only assume ‘The Dagga’ was a colloquialism for the local area.

    They got in his open-top, beat-up 4WD. ‘How big’s that?’

    He took off at once, as opposed to ‘in increments’. She tried to hold her hard-fought hair-job in place.

    ‘Thirty thousand square kilometres,’ he yelled over the wind. ‘I’ve followed your articles.’

    That could mean one of two responses was coming.

    ‘Another fan,’ she quipped, hoping it was the first.

    ‘You’re a puppet.’

    Damn. The second.

    ‘Governments do lie to us,’ he shouted, ‘there are conspiracies, and UFOs exist.’

    Katrina put on her Ray Bans and looked at the, to her, non-descript scrubland passing by. This Carter Ryan was handsome, sure, but another fruit-loop. ‘I see,’ she said at last, trying to feign interest. ‘The objective reporter.’

    Taking a side-glance at him, she couldn’t tell if he’d got the sarcasm. Maybe he just hadn’t heard.

    ‘So, where’s this miner with the statue?’ she yelled. ‘You taking me straight to him?’

    ‘No, your motel.’

    This brought her up. ‘I’m hoping to leave today. That way I might at least make Adelaide and spend the night in a bed.’

    Carter looked at her, confused. ‘Won’t you need to research the article?’

    Katrina now had the upper hand. ‘I already wrote it.’

    His eyebrows arched.

    ‘On the plane. I already emailed it to my boss when we touched down, but he emailed me back to say at least get a picture.’

    She held up her slim-line phone with super-duper camera.

    ‘Carter’s lips curled up in a snarl. ‘What about research? Journalistic integrity?’

    Katrina sighed. ‘You don’t research mad ravings to find sense in them.’

    Carter grimaced. ‘Were you ever a real reporter?’

    She chose not to comment.

    ‘Well, what does this article you’ve already written say?’

    Katrina scoped the dull, straight road ahead, a pyramid balancing an impossibly blue, clear sky.

    She cleared her throat. ‘Lonely miner pretends to have found an artefact belonging to a civilisation pre-dating man because no one takes notice of him at work, and his wife cheats on him. I turned up to meet him at our “secret rendezvous point”. The miner explained that the ‘proof’ of his fantastic story, the canopic jar, mysteriously disappeared overnight. He can say nothing more on the topic because he fears certain mysterious forces in the government. The end. Katrina Global reporting.’

    Katrina took off her Ray Bans, batted her large lids and delectable lashes, and let roll moo eyes on Carter. She knew how to work her best asset. The poor man could do nothing but pay greater heed to his driving.

    The ‘secret rendezvous’ was the carpark at the back of a roadhouse. If they’d at least met inside, Katrina could have gotten herself a coffee.

    The miner was shaped like a seal, all belly, tapering off to either end. Had a ridiculous name, too: Dud Babcock.

    He had next to no chin and a strange screwed-up paranoiac intensity to his eyes. He jerked his calloused thumb rudely in her direction before loudly whispering to Carter, ‘This her?’

    Carter nodded.

    Katrina leant against the 4WD’s bull-bar. ‘Oh boy,’ she mumbled.

    The miner addressed her for the first time. ‘Anyone follow you?’

    Katrina rolled her eyes. ‘No.’

    Carter indicated to Dud Babcock to tell his story.

    ‘You won’t believe what happened, but last night, the canopic jar – ’

    ‘– was stolen,’ Katrina butted in.

    He nodded dumbly, wondering how she could possibly know.

    She held up her camera phone and took a snap of him, before walking to the front passenger seat of the 4WD, and getting in. Blushing red from every capillary, Carter got in the driver’s side, unable to look at the miner. Or Katrina. 

    ‘Airport?’ he mumbled out of the corner of his mouth.

    ‘Airport.’

They drove in silence, Katrina taking peeks at Carter now and then under her Ray Bans. She eventually let out a long laugh. He managed, after first going red (with anger or embarrassment, she couldn’t say), to find a smile.

    ‘Dud Babcok,’ she tittered. ‘The name alone should have been a giveaway to you.’

    He lost the hard-won smile, and turned the wheel left, decelerating quickly and jerkily.

    ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, alarmed.

‘Petrol.’

    She felt slightly silly as they drove under the great big free-standing veranda on its two stick-thin iron stilts.

    She got out to stretch as he filled the tank. A cop car and ambulance pulled in. She watched Carter watching their occupants out of the corner of his eye. He seemed to recognise one of the them, the ambo driver. ‘Hey, Rog, what’s happening?’

    Rog, a man with a bushranger’s beard – Katrina didn’t know they still existed in this century, let alone the last – lit up with a smile and sauntered over. ‘Hey, Carter. Last night, a miner got flattened in the coal mine. Only just managed to get his body out an hour ago.’

    Carter nodded respectfully at the ambulance. ‘He’s in there?’

    ‘What’s left of him,’ laughed Rog.

    Katrina winced. No doubt a mortician’s levity helps with coping with an ambos’ job. 

    ‘What was his name?’ asked Carter, having finished putting in the petrol. Katrina wished Carter would just pay, instead of extending the conversation. Or did he expect her to cough up?

    The other ambo, quite young, returned from paying.

    ‘Yes, the miner’s name?’ insisted Carter, doubly interested now, given the silence from Rog.

    Rog chewed his lip, but then the young ambo blurted with laughter, ‘Dud Babcok!’

    Katrina slapped her thigh. ‘That’s impossible! We just spoke to him not five minutes – ouch.’

    Carter had kicked her with his heavy leather boot. 

    ‘You what, ma’am?’ asked Rog, the bushranger beard now appearing rather less avuncular to her. (Yet still decidedly anachronistic.)

    ‘Gotta get goin’, Rog,’ said Carter with affected lightness. He threw his thumb in Katrina’s direction. ‘She’s due at the airport.’

    As they drove away, Katrina turned in her seat. The cops were watching them go as they got on their radios. She turned to Carter, unnerved.  

    ‘You still think government conspiracy theories are bullshit?’ he asked.

    She turned her hands over on her skirt, palms up, then palms down. Her nervous twitch.

    ‘Airport?’ asked Carter more civilly. 

    Katrina chewed the side of her mouth. ‘No, my hotel.’

    There were two cop cars, parked right outside their motel room. Katrina let go of the blind. She sat on her single bed, Carter on his.

    ‘They’re not watching us. No, they’re just… they’re just…’

    ‘ … parked opposite your hotel room, watching you,’ he finished for her.

    ‘Us,’ Katrina ventured, suddenly not wanting to feel alone in all this. Her phone rang. It was Sly. She put it on speaker.

    ‘Katrina, where are you?’

    Katrina looked up from her phone, which she’d thrown on the bed, and found Carter’s eyes.

    ‘Still in WA,’ she said.

    ‘But I’ve printed your article – it went out today.’

    For a moment, Katrina had a mental blank. She broke her stare with Carter and looked down at her phone. ‘My article?’

    ‘Yes, the one you emailed me the moment you touched down.’

    Carter angrily shook his head at her.

    ‘Oh no.’

    There was silence on the other end, then, ‘What do you mean, “Oh no”?’

    ‘Sly, I don’t believe that miner was onto aliens, but there is something fishy going on.’

    Another silence. ‘Katrina, you’ve just done another brilliant demolition job. No one will believe that miner. No one.’

    She let those words sink in. Had that been the reason she was sent on the job? God, how quickly she’d started thinking like a conspiracy crank.

    ‘I know,’ she mumbled. ‘Apparently, he’s dead.’

    Sly seemed to be talking to someone else. The line cleared, and he addressed Katrina again.

    ‘I want you here tomorrow, Katrina. You… you don’t want to be in a similar accident. We need you debunking these stories in the media to stave off… mass panic. Your close encounter with that bar manager who was using his own drugs – well, it was your emotive article that’s seen a great new bill passed through.’

    She waited for the punch-line.

    ‘Once more, drug-taking is illegal.’ Sly rang off. 

    Katrina and Carter gazed at each other from their two beds.

    ‘Take your story to another news service,’ he suggested. 

    Katrina stood, paced the room, pirouetted, held her hair up close to her head, threw the bathroom door open, walked in, then walked straight back out, slamming the door. She stared at Carter. Yeah, he was hot, if somewhat rather persistently rugged. Would there be a subtle way of making him take a shower? She decided muskiness was an inextricable part of the fantasy, and she should bloody well get into it.

    She inhaled deeply, before pushing her bed against his.

    ‘What are you doing?’ he asked, only just getting his hairy, brown legs raised in time. 

    She looked at him innocently. ‘Oh, so you didn’t feel like having sex?’

    During their post-coital cups of tea, a second miner had rung Carter, a friend of the first. This time, Katrina didn’t make jokes about secret rendezvous. The meeting place decided on was a little frequented desert patch, ignored by the tourists for being ‘featureless’, and not more than an hour’s drive from their motel. They were to meet him at dawn.

    Carter popped into the bathroom. Katrina heard the shower running. Now he washes! The phone rang: Sly.

    Katrina told Sly about the second miner.

    ‘Who is he, Katrina? You must tell me. It’s important you tell me his name.’

    Katrina regretted mentioning him. She pretended bad reception, hung up, and turned off her mobile.

    Carter emerged, towel round his waist, doing a ridiculous dance. She didn’t know whether to tell him about Sly. Soon, she was laughing too much at his woefully unrehearsed strip-tease to remember.

    Katrina was glad when they got in the 4WD the next morning that Carter didn’t try to take her hand. It had been what it had been. Rather enjoyable and surprisingly tender, but a one-off. It was still a good hour off dawn.

    They weren’t ten minutes out of town when three black Toyota SUVs came careening from behind a stand of sheoaks. Katrina screamed as Carter braked hard to avoid the one that had swung in front. The second cut off their retreat while the third pulled alongside. All four vehicles came to a stop. From the SUV parallel to their 4WD, two men in camouflage combat gear, and carrying Steyr AUG assault rifles, jumped out.

    Katrina was hyperventilating as the soldiers shouted at her. She eventually made out a calm, quiet voice in her ear: Carter’s.

    ‘Copy me. Put your hands up and slowly get out of the vehicle.’

    Not quite an hour later, and they were at the rendezvous point, as planned. Except now with uninvited company. One of the soldiers had driven Carter’s 4WD, while Carter and Katrina were prisoners in one of the SUVs.

    The soldiers had neither answer their questions nor asked any during the trip.

    When let out, they were ordered to sit under a tree behind a rise, where a camouflage sheet was then strung between the boles of two trees. Two soldiers were left to guard them. Katrina noted a figure sitting at the base of one of the trees, his hands bound with plastic handcuffs.

    ‘Hey… Dane?’ she said. ‘From Zombie?’

    Dane nodded.

    ‘You mass murderer!’

    One of the soldiers told her to keep her voice low. Carter looked puzzled. She explained to him who Dane was.

    ‘Except that isn’t the real story,’ said Dane with emotion. ‘I was going around, making sure all links to Sleeping Dog were destroyed, sure. I admit that. But it turns out these guys were following me, being even more thorough.’

    ‘Overkill?’ whispered Katrina.

    ‘You could say that.’

    Katrina’s brow wrinkled with a thought. ‘Then how did you end up here?’

    Dane leant back against the tree.

    Just when he thought the danger from Sleeping Dog was over, two things occurred. Firstly, a neighbour told him the notebook he’d thrown in a barrel out the back of Zombie and set alight, had been rescued from the flames by a dog.

    Secondly, a frantic Anastasia had called not long afterwards, saying a singed dog had woken Frank while he was on Sleeping Dog (Dane cursed – trust his brother to keep his own stash). Anastasia screamed that Frank was Frank no more, and he and the dog had driven off with a charred book in their possession.

    When Dane hung up from Anastasia, he then told Sue everything. She would have thought it madness if she hadn’t read Spike’s notebook. Instead, she let Dane know the notebook mentioned a second canopic jar that also held the extra-terrestrial prime ingredient to Sleeping Dog. From what she could make out, its modern-day location would be WA.

    Dane had only just got away as police surrounded his house. He watched in tears as Sue was captured and taken away for questioning. Driving west, he’d heard the news reports, of the murders that were pinned on him.

    He was always a day behind Frank and the dog, as he followed them first to Adelaide, then across the Nullarbor Plain. Anyone Dane spoke to who’d come in contact with Frank and the dog were thoroughly disturbed as a consequence, although none could quite articulate why.

    He next tailed them up north and finally to a mine. Apparently, Frank was making inquiries there, sniffing around. Was that where the second canopic jar could be found? Before Dane could investigate further, he ran into the Australian Special Forces Ops, who were also casing the mine, and they’d chased him down and taken him into custody.

    The most important thing, he finished saying, more important than their own welfare, was that that canopic jar, if found, was destroyed. At the least, certainly never opened.

    Katrina and Carter took this in.

    Carter suddenly looked worried on another score. ‘If government is killing off everyone with any knowledge of this stuff, then that means we three are…’

    Katrina moaned with fear. ‘Am I being meted out some sort of celestial punishment for a life of arrant scepticism?’

    Dane regarded her like he had no patience for levity. ‘If Great Kisthagua and his minions awake in this world,’ he intoned, ‘there’ll be no future for anyone on this earth. Anyone. And I still have a wife I cherish to think about.’  

    They were told to hush by their guards while the other soldiers finished setting their ambush. All was quiet, as the sky lightened with approaching dawn.

    All around them, heard but not seen, birds were clearing their throats, like musicians in an orchestra warming up. A tweet here, a twitter there, a sustained note, a more extended chortle.

    Dane looked at the sun lipping the horizon and wondered if this would be the last time he saw it rise. He had at least made up with Sue.

    Katrina and Carter noticed a strange glow on the ground, a kind of sickly colour they had never before encountered in the known light spectrum.

    They looked up and gawped. Above, floated four objects whose exact natures, even dimensions, appeared to admit of multiple interpretations at once, stymieing and derailing lucid thought. Katrina and Carter’s difficulty in perception was not merely mental, but also auditory and olfactory. Even touch was involved, as they recoiled wondering just what those profane things would feel like. Animal, mineral, vegetable? Or a heinous conglomerate of all three? Whatever the true nature of those impossible objects, there was little doubt they were in essence ghastly in their physiognomy.

    Katrina and Carter looked down first at their guards, then at Dane. While they, too, appeared sickly from the scrambling of their senses, the element of surprise was not evident in their faces.

    ‘Oh them?’ asked Dane. ‘They’re “the help”.’

    ‘What the hell?’ mouthed Katrina.

    A solider waved a warning barrel at them.

    Dane leant in and whispered. ‘They’re the “less bad” aliens who don’t want Kisthagua to wake from the dimensional prison they put him in. Governments have apparently been working with these friendly ones for decades.’

    Carter tapped the side of his head. ‘And the bad ones might escape their prison through us, through those of us who mess with reality through drugs.’

    Dane smiled, his sense of humour reclaimed. ‘Yep. Seems Regan’s War On Drugs wasn’t so mad after all.’

    Carter stared dumbfounded, many of his theories and suspicions tumbling together to make a kind of patchwork.

    An officer came and told Katrina and Carter to get up and wait by their 4WD, which had been parked in the centre of the clay-pan.

    Above, the four spaceships/creatures folded themselves into invisibility.

    A lone car appeared on the far slope of the basin, silhouetted against the burnished sky. A stocky guy got out, a jar held in his hands.

    He looked around before noticing Katrina and Carter beside the 4WD, fidgeting.

    The miner kicked up dust as he jogged down the sandy embankment towards them and…

    …was hit. A pickup had burst from the cover of a dirt-coloured tarp, colliding with the miner square on and sending him, shattered, into a ditch. Dane recognised the vehicle at once.

    ‘Frank…’

    Frank braked and got out, his face a distortion of madness, the dog popping out a moment later, its eyes a leaking, light-filled, red. Dane bit his hand to stop himself from screaming. The soldiers fired, Katrina and Carter ducking round behind the 4WD. The dog fell mid-air, Frank on top of the jar. Dane got up and ran.

    The swollen vegetable things above pulsed, sending white light scuttling like legs of a spider across the plane, atomising the dog and frying Frank’s lower torso. Dane threw himself against the side of the 4WD, yelling at Katrina and Carter to run as Frank undid the canopic jar before no less than seven lightning strikes reduced him to dust. Soldiers were shouting around them.

    Nearly mad with fright, Katrina took Carter’s hand, and the two stumbled from the firing and chaos and into a shallow ditch. Katrina raised her head to see Dane fall metres from them, his body exploded from a hail of bullets. Carter took Katrina’s hand, and the two got fifty metres when voices in their heads told them to stop. White, brilliant light enveloped them.

One Day Later.

Katrina woke in her motel bed. She looked at the time on her phone: 11:13 am. Hell, quite the sleep-in. She had a terrible headache. Probably she’d been on the piss. God, she meant to stay away from alcohol. Who’d she been drinking with again? Or was it alone…? Tragic.

    There was loud knocking. She staggered to the door and opened it, hoping she was dressed. Sunlight caved in. Looking down, hospital grade pyjamas, by the looks of it. Thank god.

    The man was staring at her. ‘Carter,’ he introduced himself. ‘Carter Ryan.’

    Was she meant to know that name?

    ‘Yes?’ she asked impatiently, squinting painfully in the glare. Where the fuck were her Ray Bans?

    ‘I’m your Dagga contact,’ he said. ‘I’m here to take you to interview the miner.’

    Driving to the site, both looked at each other several times. Katrina was about to ask if they’d met before but they couldn’t have. Surely. She suddenly pictured him naked, and it was with a detail she didn’t think herself capable of imagining. God, did she mentally undress complete strangers now?

    Carter, or Ryan, or whichever was his first name out of those two, got out and talked to the foreman at the mine site. The two men had a short conversation before Carter rejoined her. He looked perplexed.

    ‘I don’t get it.’

    ‘What?’

    ‘Dud Babcock.’

    ‘Yes?’

    ‘He died…’

    She stared at him. ‘Well?’

    ‘He died a week ago.’

    As Carter drove her to the airport, Katrina trawled through her memories but no matter how hard, there was a big blank. A week! How could she have lost a week? Carter seemed equally troubled. What could have been on his mind? Who was he again? Had they met before? It was like a part of her brain had been fenced off.

    Awkwardly, she and Carter spontaneously hugged at the departure gate. She felt like maybe they had a connection, that she should chance staying and try to get to know him. God knows she’d exhausted all the potentials she could find in Melbourne. In the transit lounge, she rang Sly.

    ‘Katrina! How was the holiday?’

    Katrina shook her head. So, that’s what she’d been doing?

    ‘Great,’ she slurred, her headache lingering.

    Must have been one hell of a vacation if she couldn’t remember any of it.

    Fuck, she was going to stay off the drugs from now on.

    A week later, Katrina was commuting to work on the train (her car had died), reading the rival news reports on her phone. She saw a horticultural article she’d normally ignore, but for some reason, it piqued her interest. It was about a new species of plant in WA.

    That gated paddock in her mind came slightly ajar, and she saw a silhouetted man, who didn’t appear to possess his lower half, holding up a strange jar. With a quick, complicated twist of his fingers, the lid came off and out flowed particles which caught and flared orange in the morning sun.

    The man then appeared to fry before her eyes.

    ‘Dust,’ someone laughed quite near her, as it blew from the jar and dispersed on the wind. ‘That’s all it contained.’

    ‘Not all,’ yelled another man, a dark, muscley guy.

    ‘No,’ agreed Katrina.

    The memory dimmed, and she read more of the article.

    ‘Seeds,’ thought Katrina as the gate started to swing shut.

    She jumped up in a great panic. ‘The dust was seeds, the dust was seeds!’ she yelled at the top of her lungs.

    The gate in her mind locked.

    All the other passengers were staring at her. She no longer had any idea what that phrase meant either.

Six Months Later.

‘So, it’s like ecstasy?’ asked Georgia.

    Lara glanced from the road long enough to devilishly smile at her friend. The two had taken drugs before but none of the more exotic, harder substances, into which category the four pills in Georgia’s hands indisputably fell.

    Lara turned back to the road (much to Georgia’s relief). ‘Yes, like ecstasy,’ she reaffirmed.

    Lara overtook a tourist coach, nearly going up on two wheels, before adding, teasingly, ‘But better.’

    After more banter, Lara eventually divulged the name of the drug they were about to imbibe.

    Georgia had heard of it. Six months back, a black, hitherto unknown, flower had grown up overnight across much of the state of WA, a flower whose petals only opened at night. While the government moved swiftly to eradicate it, claiming it was a menace, swifter, enterprising souls had already picked several samples, which were then disseminated and propagated across the globe. It wasn’t long before the drug-curious began experimenting with its hallucinogenic qualities. Because governments had universally gone all puritanical once more, reinstating drugs’ status as illegal, manufacturing and refining of it was undertaken in sheds (it didn’t need the usual glasshouse) where its potency had been heightened to a dizzying agree. 

    Yes, Georgia had certainly heard of it.