King Tides Curse Page 3

  ‘You know how you love to paint?’ Gale asked, crossing his legs slightly. ‘Well, since I’ll be eighteen, I got tickets to paints and pinot.’

  Ashley looked at him blankly.

  ‘Its a painting class and you get wine with it.’ Gale rushed out. Had this been a bad idea, was it too much? Maybe he should play it off as a joke?

  ‘Gale Knott, are you trying to impress me?’ Ash asked, and Gale blushed.

  ‘You shouldn’t have,’ Ash said.

  ‘Oh ok...’ Gale said. His hand with the tickets dropped back towards his pocket. Ash’s hand grabbed his.

  ‘No you shouldn’t have because I bought us tickets to see Sirens Rock, that indie band my friend Piper is in. They’re only in Sydney for one night.’ Ash said.

  Gale looked at her in surprise. ‘I thought you’d be going with Jeremy?’

  Ash shrugged, ‘He’s out of town, besides he can be such a bore sometimes.’

  She was right, Jeremy had the personality of a moist towelette. Bastard had a six-pack though. Gale would get himself a six-pack before university. He’d pump his lungs up with a puffer and earn it.

  ‘What if we did both. Painting can be our pre-drinks?’ Gale asked.

  ‘Just like you, overachieving, even at relaxing.’ Ash rolled her eyes.

  Gale’s phone rang, and with a grimace, he let go of Ash’s hand and answered it.

  ‘Gale its Tim from St Johns, we need someone to cover a shift tonight, it’d really help us out if you could come.’

  Ash flicked him on the forehead. ‘Come on Gale…just this once, stop resume building. You’ve gotten into med school, take a night off to value yourself, you’ve earned it. Taking one night off from resume building won’t derail your future.

  If you spend all your time working, you’ll burn out. ’ She put a hand on his shoulder.

  Gale looked from the phone in one hand, to the tickets in the other.

  He was a real sucker for a pretty face.

  Gale painted the view of Sydney Harbour from a small studio in the Rocks. Paints and Pinot was harder than he thought. He hadn’t had trouble convincing the instructor his ID was one day from being valid. They hadn’t even bothered with that. No, it just seemed that he couldn’t paint what he wanted.

  He’d visualised his goal. He’d imagined his glorious painting. The colours just wouldn’t match his vision. Why did he always pick dates that turned out badly? At least this wasn’t like the time he took Erin out to Churrasco’s.

  It turns out that vegans can’t eat a lot at Brazillian bbq.

  Somehow though, he felt incredibly relaxed. Perhaps it was the wine. Perhaps it was the bliss of a night off or the dodgy incense that burned in the corner. Perhaps it was not having to act nice with Jeremy, Ash’s boyfriend. It was nice to take a night off, and he could deal with his Centrelink issues in the morning.

  ‘Hey Gale, see that girl’ Ash said, pointing to a girl refilling her paint tray. Cute, with a distant expression, lost in her artwork. Half Asian descent with short bob hair and a dreamy expression.

  ‘Go practice flirting.’

  ‘I’m not good at it Ash.’

  ‘Come on practice makes perfect, constant and never-ending improvement. That's what it said in that Tony Robbins book you lent me.’

  ‘You read it?’ Gale asked, surprised.

  ‘Yeah so now you owe me, go practice flirting.’ Ash winked.

  Gale shrugged his shoulders. She had quoted Tony Robbins at him.

  Gale trundled over to say hello. Perhaps it was best to just be honest. She had done a brilliant job of painting the harbour. Her use of colour was exquisite, highlighting the glow of the skyline on the harbour

  There a simple plan wouldn’t backfire. Tell her you like her use of colours.

  ‘I like colours’ Gale blurted out.

  The girl looked up at him, ‘okay.'

  Gale flushed bright red. ‘I mean that is…to say… I like what you did…with colours.’

  ‘Right…Well I should get back…to…you know…my colours.’

  Gale darted away, hoping Ash had not overheard that. Her double thumbs up and wink indicated she had. He slunk back to his chair. He resumed painting in a bit of a funk. His mind wandered, and his brushstrokes became mechanical. He stared out into the harbour.

  ‘Well that is unconventional.’ The instructor said and leaned over Gale’s canvas. In the corner, he had a drawn a hulking black shape passing under the harbour bridge wreathed in mist. The shape was huge, almost the size of the harbour bridge. He didn’t remember painting it at all. He glanced back out to the harbour view, the peaceful harbour view with no dark shapes.

  ‘Its, uh, a metaphor.’ Gale said, ‘You know..about…the environment.’

  The instructor rolled her eyes. ‘Everyone’s a bleeding poet. No one respects the traditional way of doing things.’

  Ash winked at him. She held up his coat. ‘Come on we’ll be late for the concert.’

  ‘That was amazing!’ Gale said.

  The fresh night air greeted them, a shock after the sweaty, dive bar they’d left behind. The music though and Ash’s friend Piper had been entrancing. Best music he’d heard in a long time. Though that may also have been the beer Ash had bought him. It’d been a while since he’d had a drink. The night was young and full of possibility.

  Ash turned back to him over her shoulder and grabbed his hand. ‘Lets cut through the Uni. I have a wicked idea.’

  Gale got pulled along for the ride, heart pounding.

  Bondi University was built on one massive hill. The centre of campus a towering library and laboratory which had four grand walkways. The walkways stretched down the slope bound by grand greek-style columns. Buildings crammed themselves in either side, space being a premium in Sydney real estate.

  The east-facing walkway finished right down at the cliffs to the beach. Ash climbed a small fence which Gale hesitantly followed her over. They sat on the cliff ledge overlooking the beach, their legs dangling in the air. Ash pulled out their high school textbooks which they had both slaved over the last year. Ash had also worked hard this year, her collection of highlighters and study apps matched even his. Ash pulled out a lighter, winked and set fire to them. The textbook burned up in her hands, lighting the darkness, she let the flame creep closer and closer to her hand. As the flame curled up to her fingertip, she finally dropped it off the cliff. The flaming textbook plummeted into the night before crashing into the ocean.

  Gale pulled out a stack of medical school applications, ten separate folders tailored to the local preferences. He set fire to them and dropped them off the cliff. His eyes followed a burning resume into the water. The darkness swallowed up the fire.

  Ash pulled out a single cupcake in a tupperware container. It had gotten a bit squashed, but the number eighteen written in icing was still legible. Ashley put a burning book to a candle and held out the squashed misshapen cupcake to him.

  It was perfect.

  ‘Happy birthday Gale,’ Ashley smiled at him as Gale realised just how close they were sitting. He could smell the scent of coconut from Ash’s hair. She gave him a wink.

  ‘I hope you like..you know…the colours.’

  Gale internally screamed. Also, he needed to pee. Why did he break the seal? Why did he have the extra drink?

  ‘Do you like…you know…what I did with them.’ Ash said, cracking up and bursting into laughter.

  She wiped away tears.

  ‘So I have some good news of my own.’

  Ash pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket and gave it to him to read. He glanced at the letterhead. It was from Oxford University. Gale’s warm contented glow faded, like the wee in your wetsuit being washed away when you just to go out in the surf.

  ‘You’re going to university in England?’ Gale said.

  ‘Yeah, they offered me a scholarship to study marine biology.’

  ‘I…I’m happy for you. It's a great opportunity.’ Gale
said, and Ash gave him a half-smile in response.

  ‘What about your medical appointments?’

  ‘They’ve got doctors in England.’

  ‘What about Jeremy?’

  ‘We’ve taken a break since he left town. There’s no reason for me to stay here, is there?‘ Ash shot him a look and cocked her head. Gale felt his heart pounding, his chest tightening.

  ‘I….’

  In the distance, the bell tower began to toll midnight.

  A horrible grating sound, like tortured metal, overpowered the ringing of the bells. A figure emerged on the shadows of the walkway. A knight in rusted metal armour, over eight feet with broad shoulders. They marched down the main uni walk from the tower. With every step grating metal shrieked. The knight’s armour was corroded, orange-brown and a riven blade, nearly as tall as Gale scraped along the ground beside it, raising sparks into the night.

  The lights on uni walk shrivelled up and twisted, flickered and faded. Corrosion spread outward from the knight like a wound gone septic. The buildings either side of the walkway began to erode, their foundations being eaten away.

  The buildings around the knight started to sway on their eroding foundations, and it raised a rusted sword straight at them. The tang of salt came thick on the breeze.

  ‘No, not him,’ whispered Ash.

  Then reality broke.

  The water below cracked like shattered glass. The crashing waves fractalised as they passed through a break in the air. A reptilian claw reached through the crack in reality. Long hooked talons heaved on the crack. Dark black and blue creatures emerged from the cracks, four-legged beasts with a sail-backed ridge and elongated jaws. They had a long, laterally compressed head that led to a bulging snout. Their eyes were cold, reptilian, and a hinged jaw was filled with fine teeth like scalpels.

  Gale jumped back from the edge, had someone spiked his drink? They plunged their claws into the cliffside and locked eyes on Gale. The beasts bellowed, saliva sprayed from their mouths, and they surged up the cliff towards them.

  Gale felt a strange, visceral need to hunt them crash into raw fear. He grabbed Ash’s hand and ran from the cliff, back towards the fence. Gale leapt onto the fence and climbed. His breath began to come more ragged, his chest tightening.

  ‘Not now,’ said Gale, and he reached for his puffer. He tried to raise it to his mouth, and it slipped from his grasp, bouncing off into the darkness.

  He dropped down off the fence. One of the beasts cleared the cliff edge. It roared and charged straight at them, busting through the fence, shredding the metal wire. The beast pounced on Ashley and tackled her away from him. A second beast charged at Gale and Gale’s foot slipped. Gale tumbled to the ground feeling the air bursting from his chest. Gasping for breath, he looked up just as the beast placed two claws either side of him. A cold, reptilian eye stared at him, and he sensed an ancient deep instinct, unreadable, unknowable.

  Fathomless.

  Then it opened its jaw and bit down at his head. His chest working like a bellows, he thrust his hands out to try to grab the beast's neck.

  Something broke inside him.

  Like a dam wall had burst, something surged up through his chest and water erupted from his hands like a spear. It blasted through the jaw of the beast. The beast jerked back, its jaw broken.

  Gale scrambled to his feet. The beast standing over Ashley jerked its head towards him. It came at him, and this time Gale felt only exhaustion and couldn’t even move. He was done.

  A war hammer struck the beast’s head to the side. A man in his late forties wearing a designer suit swung the hammer again down into the creatures back. Silver struck through the man’s black hair, and his eyes were a deep purple.

  The man followed up by sliding past the beast jamming a huge spike of metal, like a nail, into its knee joint. The nail slid in, and the creature lurched, fixed in place in midair. The spike connected to nothing. Small amounts of white callous spiralled around the beasts knees, spreading out from the nail.

  The stranger tumbled around the beast, swinging the war hammer, which had a head the size of a watermelon, like it weighed nothing. The stranger rammed spikes into the creatures joints, its tail, and finally its jaw. It seemed locked in place in the air.

  ‘What the hell?’ Gale rasped out.

  Two more beasts came over the cliff face, and Gale felt his lungs constrict again. A shriek of fury came from the uni walk, the rusted knight raising his blade high. The knight hurtled down the uni walk towards them. The purple-eyed stranger with the war hammer frowned. The stranger looked from Gale to the knight and the two new beasts.

  ‘Take this,’ the stranger said and threw Gale an old black pager with a belt clip. Gale caught it two-handed on his chest. It was heavy, far heavier than it looked.

  ‘Can’t hide you here anymore Gale, need to surround you with your own kind. No time for the orientation, still, always better to learn on the job, right?’

  ‘What?’ asked Gale.

  ‘Go to the university, become a fracturesmith, stop the Worldflood…maybe work on your resume a bit, it wouldn’t kill you.’ The strangers purple eyes were wide with maddening enthusiasm.

  ‘Who are you? Why are you doing this?’ Gale asked. Then he remembered Ashley, he swung his head around back and forth, trying to find her.

  The purple-eyed stranger’s smile faded a bit. He rolled something in his hands. A set of bone-white coral hammered flat on a chain, like a set of dog tags. ‘Because your dad asked me to. Now crack on. There is a fracture, and I need to fix it.’

  The stranger drew back his war hammer like a major league batter.

  ‘Wait,’ Gale said, holding up his hands, ‘There’s a girl here who might be hurt and how do you know my parents.’

  A soft song came from the ocean, turning Gale’s head.

 

  His chest exploded with pain, and the war hammer knocked him through reality.

  Gale - Ionhome

  The Penumbra is found around world-fractures. It distorts the memory and perception of those without strong Script. How many disappearances or strange happenings through history might have been covered up by the Penumbra? I call to mind the disappearance of an entire Roman legion or the story of the Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt who ‘did the bolt’ and disappeared while swimming at the beach one day.

  Spur’s primer for fracturesmiths 2nd edition.

  ‘Go to the University, become a fracturesmith, stop the Worldflood…maybe work on your resume a bit, it wouldn’t kill you.’

  Gale flew through a fractal space of blurring images, up became down and his stomach threatened to hurl. His hands reached out trying to find solid ground and only found blue smoke. A bright light flashed.

  Gale dropped into a pile of trash on a rough dirt street.

  He breathed in, and his ribs protested, a few bruised, maybe a few cracked. He started poking his ribs and didn’t see any flail segments. Should heal up slowly, as long as they were all in the right spot. He breathed in, cursed and sat up.

  He pushed himself out of the pile and brushed off a banana skin. The ‘fracture’ in reality rapidly faded away, jagged rents in the air covered with a chalky white callous. He leaned in close to examine it.

  A nail banged outwards from the other side. Gale’s head jerked back. Where the nail had been placed, the fracture healed quicker the callous thicker. Three more nails hammered in from the other side, the last coated in blood.

  The fracture sealed. A ghostly outline left in his vision, an afterimage. Then it was gone.

  The visions he had seen scattered within his mind, hard to recall. What the hell had happened? What were those things? Who was that knight and that stranger with the war hammer. What did they have to do with his family? Why did his head hurt so much? His memories felt foggy, scattered.

  ‘Right, what would
Tony Robbins say?’ Gale muttered to himself. ‘See the opportunity, how can I achieve my goal. This won’t stop me on my path.’ He straightened his shoulders and set his mind on success.

  Then he chundered all over the street.

  ‘What the fuck is going on,’ he said, wiping vomit off the corner of his mouth. He touched the copy of Awaken the Giant within he kept in his pocket (next to a small copy of Dare to Lead) and staggered out of the trash.

  He pulled his phone from his pocket. No reception. Damn.

  Nearby terracotta walled houses lined narrow streets with arabesque designs. They were jammed in with newer built houses on stilts, raised off the ground a few metres with broad open walls and windows.

  Two suns beat down overhead, both suggesting early morning, in a red sky. They already had the sort of heat that made thongs acceptable anywhere, a real North-Queensland sort of scorcher. There was no sign of more of those creatures. There was no sign of the rusted knight or the man who’d saved him. There was no sign of Ashley.

  What had happened to Ashley?

  What had happened to him?

  That man had known his father. Gale hadn’t known his dad or mum, so who the hell was that man? Could he find him again? Ok, don’t freak out, Gale thought to himself. What would a leader do in this situation? Where is the opportunity in this crisis?

  Flashing blue lights and a polyphonic, tinny ringtone came from the trash pile. Gale picked up the pager he’d been thrown, brushing off a smooshed bread roll. It buzzed with numbers.

  ‘Fracture at Ionhome, Reefside, standard rates, accept,.’

  Gale poked the ‘n’ button with his finger. A frowny faced emoji appeared on screen and the pager stopped buzzing. Gale pocketed it, and it weighed heavy in his jacket. His hand brushed his copy of Tony Robbins ‘Awaken the Giant within’.

  ‘Visualise your goals, Gale. Decide to be excellent. What do you want here? How can you make the most of this situation.’