📖 The Ghost of Emily - Chapter 5

In which Jake and the children discover the vestiges of civilisation.

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Jake was already packing the travel bags when Gus and Maisie woke up. The first hint of morning light was seeping through the gaps between the planks of wood that lined the outside of the ancient livestock barn.

This place had been their home for seven months, the longest they had stayed anywhere in years. The valley offered a funnel through which they could keep a close eye on who came in and out. They had found the old barn perched stoically against one of the valley walls, and it looked down on the centre of the little stream’s once mighty bed.

The children joined their father, their expressions betraying their trepidation.

“Morning, kids. It’s time to go now. We’ve got to find somewhere else to stay. Pack your things, please.”

“But why, Papa?” Maisie cried.

“Because she… it will be back, and it’s not safe anymore.”

“Okay, Papa,” said Gus calmly, placing his hand on Maisie’s shoulder and gently guiding her towards her belongings. Though sad to leave, Gus was as stoic as the barn itself.

Warmth and shelter aside, the barn had given them a prime vantage point to hear and see if anyone was coming. They had never encountered another human here, only the odd wandering pig, deer or goat. A few wallabies wandered through now and then, but kangaroos were rare. The greatest resources the valley offered were the endless flow of crystal clear drinking water, and the plethora of berries, wild tomatoes, citrus fruits and mushrooms that grew in the damp, dim forest below their fortress.

Maisie stepped over to the rickety shelf on the barn wall, and picked up a parcel of semidried mushrooms, which were wrapped in a cloth coated with beeswax, taking one out to eat for her breakfast. She offered one to Gus, and then slid the parcel into her travel pack.

Jake had taught Gus and Maisie how to recognise the mushrooms they could eat, from those that would give them a bellyache, the ones that would make them see terrible nightmares while awake, or worse yet, the ones that would kill them. He did the same with the berries and other fruits. Whenever they came across one he showed them how to determine for themselves whether it was food or poison, and how best to collect it, and store it for later eating. It was essential to Jake’s way of life to survive independently. His mother had taught him this skill since his birth and he had wanted to make sure his children had it too.

Jake looked at Maisie. Her face was sullen and her movements reluctant as she pushed her clothing and food items into her bag. Her face reminded him of his mother, Alexandra. For the briefest moment, Jake felt a pang of longing to be a child again. In his mother’s care, out here in the woods like his children were, he had felt at ease yielding to her confidence. Now, as the leader and caretaker of this tiny tribe, he felt the heavy burden of responsibility in a world rife with predation.

He missed his mother.

Jake believed that his mother’s accidental death was the result of her having not grown up in the wilderness. Her early life in the city, in the comfort of a technologically and politically stable society here in the lucky country, as she had called it, had tainted her instincts and made her fallible.

Jake’s mother was just a teenager when the razing of Sydney happened. She was living in the nearest adjacent city centre to the west, Parramatta. She told Jake a lot of stories from her childhood as he grew up, things that chilled his bones, things that confused him. Sometimes he wished she wouldn’t tell him. Talk of wars, machines, rebellions, and of his father who died helping her escape the city to steal him away from the watching eyes of robots. He had never seen the machines she spoke of, and these stories gave him night terrors.

He preferred it when she told him about philosophy, the questions we each ask ourselves and the ways we find the answers.

“Look around you, Jakey,” Alexandra would say by the fire. “Whether you know it or not, every day in everything you do your mind is working to answer these questions: Where am I? How do I know where I am? What should I do?

“These are the core questions of philosophy, and it’s these questions that make us human and guide our actions. Philosophy means the love of wisdom, Jakey. And you should love wisdom. Love me, love our friends, but always love the truth more.”

These words, although enigmatic, had given five-year-old Jake great comfort. His natural empirical mind had never been twisted by living in a world of contradictory rhetoric and inverted ethics, like his mother had experienced.

In the wild, his senses were his most trusted allies, and his mind the fundamental tool of survival. He always knew where he was, and by extension, who he was. He knew where his person began and ended, and that the space he occupied belonged to him by right.

He knew that the properties of the objects and phenomena that he sensed each day were consistent, and whenever they seemed inconsistent, it was merely a failure in thinking, that he was always able to quickly remedy with more rational thought.

He always knew what to do; stay alive.

Without a sprawling city full of people around him, with only a handful of humans in his daily contact, Jake spent many hours of every day alone. Even as a small child, his mother would leave him to work while she hunted. He would prepare the fire, or make a new trap, or clean out the firearms.

Without anyone to tell him lies or to show him double-standards, he did not know what these things were, and as a result, even into his adulthood and parenthood, these things did not come naturally to him. What did come naturally to him was his confidence in his senses and in his mind. This was a particularly beneficial skill in his endless search for food.

When he found berries or mushrooms he had never seen before, he would carefully examine them, and use his mind to make a decision about them. He would break them open and examine their contents. He would call to mind the images he had saved of berries he knew were safe. He would compare. He would taste them, just a tiny lick. Were they bitter? Were they sweet? He would draw his findings in his notebook, sometimes smearing the juice of a berry as a record. This was his science.

Alexandra had learned these concepts from books, and taught them to Jake from birth. For Jake, these questions were his everyday experience of choosing life, or choosing death. More than teaching her son how to simply recall a safe or toxic food, Alexandra taught Jake how to think. His survival proceeded from this one skill.

His mother would tell him stories at night before bed, stories of great men with great minds who had lived in the world. She spoke of a man called Socrates who was put to death by other men for daring to think. She spoke of a man called Aristotle who challenged his own teacher and questioned the nature of our existence. She spoke of a young woman called Alisa Rosenbaum who escaped the tyranny of irrational dictators, and who wrote great stories and gave great talks about the power and glory of the ego; the conscious, thinking self.

And she talked with great love, about a man who had lived in her lifetime, a man who dedicated his life to spreading truth and reason through countless books, lectures, speeches and videos he created on a thing called the Internet.

His mother told him the Internet was a place where minds could meet, though bodies were far apart. The idea scared Jake a little. He had never seen a computer, or a television, or any working electricity on a large scale. There were vague memories of technological magic from his early childhood, a strange wizard in the woods who could summon a red demon to his defence, but Jake assumed these memories were dreamed.

His mother had done her best to tell him everything about the old world. She knew that her child might have to return to it one day. There were no books available to them in the woods, in the nomadic life she had chosen over subservience to the machines that were taking control of everything in the city.

She did her best to teach Jake to read with any written words she could find or make, but without the tools, and with the constant need for hunting and foraging, it was not as important a lesson as survival. He grew up with a vague impression of the meaning of letters and number symbols, but the skill was uncultivated and undisciplined.

So at night, she would tell him stories, speak in terms of philosophy, speak of her own life, and that of her hero Jeremy Delacroix, whom she had found one day on the Internet while studying, when a short, passionate moving picture of him captured her attention.

She had told Jake that Delacroix had opened her eyes to truths she had never considered, truths that Jake may take for granted one day, because others aren’t raised knowing them. These abstractions were difficult for a child to accept, but the retelling of ideas from Socrates, Aristotle, Rosenbaum, Delacroix, and his mother’s own life had been enough to shape Jake into an articulate, deeply thoughtful, and resilient survivor. And one who, despite untold suffering, loved his life.

Jake helped Gus to fold the patchwork hide blankets and push them into the travel packs as Maisie packed the last of the travel food into her bag. In the span of less than fifteen minutes, the three of them were ready with warm travel clothes on, their backs laden with goods. Nimrod carried his share, with a harness made of old belts and pieces of animal pelt strapped across his back. His load was light, so that he would be ready to guard and defend them on their road ahead, but he carried the essential medicine kit, as well as spare ammunition and his own travel snacks; strands of deer and pig jerky.

They marched quietly down to the stream, Jake at the front with his Lee-Enfield that Gus had used to slay the boomer, Maisie in the middle, Gus at the rear with his own miniature Crickett rifle. Nimrod ran a few yards ahead of Jake, hyper-vigilant in his sniffing around for snakes or other foes. As they reached the water, Maisie and Gus instinctively began filling their tin bottles that hung from their travel bags with glistening, clear water. None of them knew when they would next find a potable water source, so stocking up now was essential.

A few kilometres up the creek, they came to a large boulder. Jake stood next to it, and then walked in ten abnormally long strides, straight to the west. He crouched and started digging through the pebbles and soil with his hands until he uncovered a long steel rod. He extracted the rusted length of heavy metal, and stepped back to the boulder. Without hesitation or thought, he shoved the end of the rod under the boulder, then levered it with his whole bodyweight until it rolled back onto its flat side.

He beckoned for Maisie’s help and she knelt with him to dig through the pebbles and silt that sat in the place of the boulder’s former home. Gus kept watch as they dug, and soon they revealed the small plank of wood that had been hidden beneath the rubble.

Jake carefully lifted the plank out, and exposed a deep and narrow opening in the ground. It was a piece of old piping buried vertically in the earth. He reached into the hole, confident that no harm would befall him as his entire right arm dropped down into the pipe. One by one he extracted its contents: a large rifle, an unstrung hunting bow, and an enclosed quiver that rattled with the sound of a full stock of arrows. Lastly, he pulled up a long leather bandolier that was packed full of unspent rifle cartridges; one hundred or more in a full circle around the length of brown hide.

“I haven’t seen bullets like that before, Papa.” Gus gestured at the bandolier. “Will they fit in my Crickett?”

“These bullets go with this rifle.” Jake gently tapped the rifle he had just extracted. “Your Crickett is a twenty-two calibre. Much smaller – that’s why we can only really use it for rabbits and such.”

“Will they go in the Lee-Enfield?”

“No, these are even bigger. Big bullets, for very big targets.”

Gus nodded.

Jake took off his travel bag, slung the munitions sash over his head and rested it on his opposite shoulder. He replaced his bag, hung the rifle on his arm and handed the quiver and bow to Gus.

Maisie looked at Jake longingly. Her expression said: What about me?

Jake knelt down to her. “Not yet, sweetheart. I only taught Gus how to shoot when he was six. Next year, I promise. For now, you’ve got us to make sure you’re safe.”

She threw her arms around him in a firm embrace, seemingly unperturbed by the presence of an extensive arsenal on his body. “Okay, Papa.” She kissed him on the cheek, making him smile, then she hopped back down, and they were on their way to look for a new place to stay; one where - with any luck - the ghost of Emily would not follow.

Three days had passed and the weary travellers were desperate for a rest; a real rest. They had stopped each night when the sky had faded into the dull, silvery twilight. On the first night they had slept in the open air, in the middle of a wide flat field, surrounded by a ring of small fires to keep dingos, snakes, and feral dogs away. The night was cold, but with the halo of crackling heat and the heavy furs that had been folded and carried in Jake’s travel pack, the children felt secure. Jake took watch until the moon had sunk below the tips of the trees at the edge of the field, then he rested, trusting Nimrod to warn them if any predators impervious to fire were to approach - predators such as ghosts.

On the second night, they had found a small half-rotted shanty in the woods that provided shelter for the children as they slept, a necessity with the low rumble of thunder threatening a storm all afternoon.

Jake sat by the fire which he had built under the shanty awning, his back to its rickety door, while Nimrod nuzzled his snout into Jake’s lap and purred in sleep upon his beloved master.

Nimrod possessed the unique skill of being able to wake in an instant at the sound or smell of an animate creature on the breeze. And yet, in just as short a time, he could return to sleep and repeat this pattern throughout the night and still be fit for twelve hours of walking the next day.

Jake had puzzled about his four-footed companion that second evening. How could this creature be capable of love and devotion like his children were? And how could such a large beast, who required similar portions of food to the children, who could traipse with a weighty load on his back through forest and field, survive on so little deep sleep?

Jake’s mother had taught him a lot about the mind. That humans were capable of conceptual thought, a faculty that animals did not possess. And that through this faculty we were able to perform the essential act of cognition. Though never objectively proven, Alexandra had read and considered enough rational arguments to accept that this cognition was the source of human consciousness, and that animals lacked it. So Jake tried to imagine the experience of living in the body and perceptual thoughts of a beast like Nimrod. It was a futile exercise, he realised, as the very act of imagining was an act of conceptual thought, and already elevated him beyond the ability to comprehend his companion’s purely perceptual experience.

To think only in the present, Jake thought. There would be a peace in that. One could be deeply happy, in spite of anything going on around him. Like Nimrod. Without concept of a better world, or of an easier life, or even of other places or situations than the present moment. But could that even be called happiness? What is happiness if not an experience of betterment? If one hasn’t felt despair, or loss, or fear, or pain, how can one know what happiness really is? Is happiness a default, mindless state of being? Is that what Nimrod exists in?

The second night had only been eventful in Jake’s mind. The children slept soundly, and with a light rain falling on the rusted roof of the shanty, Jake eventually fell asleep himself.

It was the late afternoon of the third day when Jake, Gus, Maisie and Nimrod climbed down from a high and rocky ridge they had been scrambling up for an hour. As they descended towards the forest’s edge, they could see unusual objects through the thicket, reflecting the light of the setting sun behind them.

The flare of white light ahead of them caused Maisie to cling to her father in a state of unease. Placing his hand on her back, he squeezed her reassuringly, and saying nothing, he led onward.

As they pushed their way through a thick grove of knotted, succulent green foliage, they came upon a small clearing with a neat wooden fence marking its rectangular perimeter. Filling the yard was a tangle of overgrown grass and some odd saplings, likely planted unwittingly by passing birds.

The object reflecting light back towards them was a large silver building, its outer walls comprised of a rippling corrugation of crisp, shining silver. Jake was not alarmed; he had seen such things before. But Maisie looked disturbed.

Jake squatted down low and looked her in the face. “Maisie, darling, don’t worry. This is a shed. It was built by men, like us. This is how people used to live, in places like this, called towns. It’s the same as our barn, but newer, made of stronger stuff.”

“Sh-shed...” she repeated, cautiously, as if the word itself presented some danger to her and needed to be uttered with great care.

“Why build something so big?” Gus asked. “It would’ve taken ages. Why bother, if you just have to leave it?”

Jake considered the question for a moment, then, hesitantly, decided it was time to tell his children whole truths. “People used to stay put, Gussy. They didn’t wander around like we do. It used to be safe to live somewhere for your whole life if you wanted to.”

Both Maisie and Gus stared at their father, incredulously.

“Come on," he gestured, with a confident smile as he stood tall again and led the way around the side of the shed.

They emerged from the yard that was attached to the metallic structure, and the children stood in silent wonder at the wooden house before them. It had a neat verandah of stained cedar wood, and a myriad of vines growing over its walls, hand rails and into its gutters and over its roof. On one side of its wooden steps were green passionfruit, not yet ripe, but abundant. On the other side grew a vine of wild jasmine, which was starting to bloom with a few tiny flowers. Maisie stopped to smell them and she smiled at Jake. “It’s beautiful!”

Jake noticed the smell too, and it filled him with a sense of relief. It was the confirming piece of evidence that winter was almost over, and spring was beginning, at least in this lowland area.

“Can we live here, Papa? This place is so beautiful!” she begged, tears filling her weary eyes.

Jake smiled at her, pitifully. “I don’t know, Maisie. We need to look around some more.” The building seemed abandoned to Jake. Most of its windows were boarded so it was not easy to see inside. Jake thought distance would be prudent at this time, so they skirted around the edge of the yard, beyond the tin shed and down the fence-line towards what Jake knew to be the front of the house.

In the front yard sat an old rusted car, with grass grown chest-high around, through and over it. Beyond the front yard lay a wide, flat black surface. Gus keenly observed it for a moment. “This is a trail, isn’t it, Papa?”

“It’s called a road.”

“So, a man-trail?”

“That’s right.” Jake looked at it for a moment, sharing in the wonder that his boy was obviously experiencing, seeing these strange things of the old world. The black surface now emitted steam as the last powerful rays of sunshine beamed upon it in a final scream of defiance against the inevitability of night.

A few small tufts of grass and leafy weed poked through cracks and holes in the road, but it lay mostly as Jake assumed it had been built. As the travellers stepped forward to the edge of the road and looked down it, they saw a more incredible sight than either of the children had ever seen in their savage existence.

Placed neatly along the edges of the road, as far as their unbelieving eyes could see, was house after house after house. Some as beautiful as the one behind them, some standing tall as rock-solid boxes of smooth stone, others rotting and collapsing in upon themselves. Each house faced onto the road.

“What is this place, Papa?” asked Maisie.

“You remember I told you about towns?”

“You said thousands of people would live together in… comm… commune…”

Gus chimed in, “Communities.”

“Right! Communities, and they’d share their food, and trade and spend time together having fun and laughing! Is this one of those places?”

“It used to be.”

“Wow…” whispered Gus.

“Can we live in a commun… community please, Papa?”

“There are none left, Maisie. Just a few people like us, living in the woods, trying to find food. This place is just rotting into the earth.”

Maisie began to silently cry again, as they continued their march up the road. Jake looked onward, his mind and heart calm. He had seen these things before, and even, for a time, lived in such a place. But his years had taught him the futility of the hope his children were feeling right now, so he looked at the town coldly, pragmatically, thinking only of the resources that they could gather here as quickly as possible, before leaving.

They stopped in the middle of the street, and Jake turned to Gus, pointing to the small rifle on his shoulder. “Load up, Gussy, if there are any people around, they’re probably here in town.”

Gus nodded in understanding, then unshouldered his rifle and competently checked the magazine to see it was full. He replaced it, and chambered a round with a snapping back of the heavy bolt. He raised the rifle and, pointing it away from his sister, took his usual position in the rear. His head began a side-to-side sweep of the surroundings, as his father had taught him, while they walked up the middle of the steaming black road.

Jake too had unshouldered his rifle, and was stepping with confidence towards a clock tower that seemed to be growing from a tiny seedling to a mighty tree before their eyes as they marched on.

They reached the tower and stood in silence looking up at it, observing the manufactured quality of its hard-edged obelisk shape, once painted white as an unmissable beacon for this township, now buried in a sea of six-foot grass and overcome by a cancer of grey moss. Its glass faces remained intact.

Behind the circular pane was a ring of symbols and marks, and two long needles pointing in almost opposite directions. Jake knew that these were the symbols of numbers, but he had forgotten how to identify them and did not know how to interpret the position of the needles. He knew the function of the clock, but not how to translate the interface.

Beneath the round pane was a rectangular one, with a row of three rotating cylinders. The first cylinder was stuck halfway between the numbers 23 and 24. The second displayed the letters APR. The third was fixed on the number 2042. Jake knew this was a calendar date, but he could not interpret the symbols. He had not seen them since childhood, or ever been taught to memorise them.

“What does it say, Papa?” asked Gus.

“It’s a clock and calendar. It’s supposed to tell us what time of the day it is, and what day of the year it is. But it’s stuck. I don’t know how long ago it stopped working. It’s not moving - see?”

They all looked at it silently for a few moments, waiting for something to change. Nothing changed.

“Why would you need a thing like that to tell the time?” asked Maisie.

“Yeah,” Gus agreed, “why not just look up?”

Jake agreed that it was peculiar to need such a device to tell the time, when one could simply look at the sky, the position of the sun and moon and the stars at night, and know all one would need to. They lived by the necessity of the moment, and their relationship with time was only precipitated by a need to manage their movements in accordance with the rhythms of nature.

“You’re right, kids, and I don’t know. Maybe when you don’t live in the woods, you think about time differently.”

Gus looked at the calendar symbols with curiosity. “What date was my birthday, Papa?”

“I don’t know the name of it, Gus. I never learned these things. I’ve always just called it your birthday.”

“Then how do you know when it is my birthday?”

“I keep track of the days as they come and go, and I count them up. I’ll show you later on. It’s probably time you learned. I find it helps with a lot of things to keep track of time.”

Gus nodded eagerly.

“How long until my birthday, Papa?” asked Maisie, hopeful that it would be soon so she could cash in the promise of learning to shoot a rifle like her big brother.

“Two hundred and thirteen days," Jake said with confidence, as if a calendar with its own symbology were etched into the back of his eyelids.

Maisie couldn’t quite conceptualise the number of days he had uttered, other than to qualify it as too many.

The last rays of afternoon sun vanished from the nearby rooftops and the tip of the monolith before them, and they were suddenly enveloped with a chilled air and blue dimness that urged them to find respite somewhere.

Jake turned towards a small house that was across the road from the overgrown park in which the clock tower stood. He tilted his head in a beckoning gesture and stepped across the road and onto its front steps, the children following. Gus dutifully surveyed the surroundings at rifle point, as his father examined the door.

Jake twisted the corroded brass handle and found it was unlocked. The door swung open with a creak. He turned to Gus and pointed down at the ground in an understood signal meaning wait here. The children obeyed and Jake entered the house for a long minute. They heard his feet creak over the wooden floors, then stomp up the stairs, trace a few lines through the rooms of the second storey, then turn back and descend again. He poked his head out of the front door. “This place is good! We’ll stay here tonight. Maybe tomorrow too if it stays quiet. Come in!”

Maisie and Gus ran through the door with the same energy that children from a time long since passed would have felt bundling out of the same door to cross the road and play on the swing set that stood behind the clock tower. The swings were now brown with rust, buried in long grass, and, like the clock, frozen in time.