howling into the void

"there is a madness that runs in my family," i tell him, our legs kicking hard underwater to keep us afloat, skin pressed together.

My eyes are locked to the trail as I jog, leaping over fallen trees, sticks, and long bulrushes that slice through the skin on my legs unless I’m careful. As I round the bend, I take a moment to look up at the hill — a mob of kangaroos all eerily watching me in the dusk haze, a particularly large male staring me down without blinking as I keep moving. Blackberry bushes grow wild up the slope until a grove of ancient pine trees marks the top.

My body chills slightly, even as I rub sweat off my brow and out of my eyes.

I get back to my parent’s place, take my runners off, mud splattered all over them and up my legs, mixing with blood and the occasional grass seed lodged in my hairs. I ask dad if anyone lives up on top of the hill. Like the Bermuda Triangle and the perennial fear that any seed swallowed was going to sprout inside me, the hill over the paddock — colloquially called Sanatorium Hill — played an outsized role in my brain as a space of terror and concern.

Once a place to hold patients with tuberculosis, it later became an institution where wayward women could be kept. It was well known around the region that husbands having affairs, or those married to ‘difficult women’ and looking for a solution, could have them put away — mad, sick, unwanted — on the hill. By the late 50s, it was passé to lock up your wife when pursuing another woman, and it fell into disrepair.

As a kid I knew it as a sprawling, if dilapidated farmhouse. Even before “it” happened, the hill left us feeling unsettled. The name, its dark past, but more tellingly it was the mist that clung stubbornly to it all winter, and in summer, bushfires threatening us were always behind the hill, leaving it standing there amidst a glow of distant fires and framed by threatening smoke. Then, when I was 11, the owner shot himself. Neighbours kilometres away reported hearing the shot. Whispers travelled up and down the valleys: financial mismanagement, recent divorce, but moreso that no one should be living in that place, that walls and spaces have memories, and the ghosts of the past clung to the hill like the thick winter fogs.

At a sleepover one night we sit over a ouija board. I always feign casual nonchalance, but they always give me chills. I imagine demons summoned breaking through, invading my mind, the minds of my friends. Consumed by madness. One of us suggests breaking into the house on Sanatorium Hill. I am brave. I am a teenager. I want to impress my neighbour who I know at that point I am destined to marry. It is agreed — we will break in. We grab what torches we can find and slog out across the paddocks — through muddy streams, thickets of tough wattle — and scramble up the granite to reach the top of the hill.

A grove of pine trees surrounds the house — smaller than we imagined, but in that typical institution style: blocky, high ceilings, few windows. We walk around the house once. Everything is boarded up, but we find a window that is open, no wood blocking it, and one-by-one we make our way inside. All of us shitting ourselves, waiting for someone else to go first into the dark. Cheap furniture coated in a layer of dust, no one has moved anything. Shitty lino, moth-eaten carpet. Rooms jerry-rigged from institution to home — either too big or too small. All dark and eerie.

A friend suggests we try and find any blood left from the shooting. Nobody says anything to that.

I am fucking terrified. We all are. My future wife whispers to me that we shouldn’t be here. That she feels something is really off about this place. I feel it too — the weight of everyone who has suffered here, remembered by the walls, the earth, the ring of trees fencing the house off from the rest of the world.

We hear something move in one of the rooms — a shadow picked up by a torch — and someone screams. We are all already on edge and everyone freaks out, diving out the window and running, sprinting, falling over each other until we are off the property and down the hill.

I never went back again. A few years after our break-in, some more people bought the property and moved in. At uni, dad tells me that the son died in a car accident, and the stress of grief led to the disintegration of the marriage. It’s a small town, everyone talks. Gossip travels at the speed of sound, projected down the valley, into town, and like light, refracts, shooting off into all directions.

I am living in the US when mum texts me — the man on Sanatorium Hill shot himself yesterday. History repeats. I call her and she tells me it is cursed. That madness and despair drip off the walls of that place.

I take off my shirt and my mud-stained pants as dad makes his way into the kitchen.

“Does anyone live up on the hill these days?” I ask.

He tells me some people bought it a few years ago but have never lived there. The rumour is they are from the city, bought it to retire to, but have done nothing with it. The whole property is overrun with rabbits and kangaroos and blackberries.

“Should just bulldoze it all down I reckon,” dad says. “The trees, the building: everything. The whole place is cursed.”

—-

“You’re so much like your cousin Steve,” Mum would tell me every other month. He was her favourite cousin — because of the age of her brothers and sisters (her being the 7th of 7) he was only a few years younger than her.

I only remember meeting Steve once.

My siblings and I got home from school and mum beckoned us into the house.

“Your cousin is here,” she said. “Don’t worry and be calm, but he is not well at the moment.” As if on cue, a scream pierced through the house that just kept going. A noise that transcended words and was just sound. Too much sound. The wrongness of it wasn’t the pitch or the volume, it was the duration. It just kept going, long past the point where a person should have needed to breathe.

Mum panicked and ran outside. We ran out following her. At first we couldn’t find him — the scream coming from a tree over toward the boundary with Sanatorium Hill. We looked everywhere until my sister pointed up in the tree. There!

He was thin. Almost gaunt. Long hair. Screaming and pointing in the distance. Mum walked under the tree and started talking to him gently, asking if he wouldn’t come down. He stopped screaming but didn’t come down. I stood out there with my brother and sister, watching mum try to coax a grown man down from a tree.

She sent us inside and stayed out there with him. Dad drove home, parked out front and took over the vigil. Mum came inside and started cooking. She asked me to help cut the potatoes, as though a crazy person hadn’t just arrived at our place and taken refuge in a tree like a loud, existential koala.

As dusk fell, Steve came down and dad walked him over to the shed, where there was a room for guests.

At the dinner table mum burst into tears. Dad got up and walked over to her, holding her as she sobbed into his stomach. My brother just stared at his plate. My sister started silently crying, while playing with her food. I looked up at dad and he gave me a look that I didn’t understand: but I knew it well enough not to make a scene and to keep eating as though everything was normal. Nothing was normal. She told us that Steve was sick and he usually took his medicine, but that recently he had decided he didn’t need it anymore. That sometimes he heard voices that weren’t there and saw things that others couldn’t. He was a sensitive kid, but too many drugs had tipped him over the edge.

None of us said anything. Outside, across the dark paddock, a light was on in the shed.

That night I lay in bed waiting to see if I could hear voices; if I could see what he saw that made him scream like that. Nothing. I was relieved, but shaken that mum thought I too had this inside me.

The next morning I heard mum on the phone. She was talking quietly, not wanting to be heard. I stood behind the door listening as she talked — her sister I guessed — saying that Steve was there, he was okay, but off his meds. That he could stay as long as he needed. I heard the click of the phone hanging up and walked into the kitchen.

He joined us for breakfast before we went to school. I watched him constantly over my cornflakes. How he tossed his hair; how his eyes were rimmed with red and sunk into his face; how at times he just twitched and would start scratching at himself, almost absentmindedly. My sister asked him what he saw in the tree yesterday and mum shooshed her. He didn’t answer, but looked at her for a long time, curious, as if he were seeing her for the first time.

I debriefed with my brother and sister as we walked to the bus. What had made him crazy? We theorised that he was on the run — that he had committed a terrible crime and was hiding out at ours. That mum and dad were at risk and maybe we needed to tell someone.

Over time, Steve became part of our life. We took delight in telling our friends at school that our mad cousin was with us. People wanted to come meet him, as though he were an exotic animal in a zoo. I smiled and said maybe, but underneath I was wracked constantly by the uneasy feeling that mum thought Steve and I were similar.

I found myself staring at him over dinner, watching his movements. Trying to find something of myself in him. I broke down one night and went to mum. Asked her why she thought I was, in fact, a mad person who lived in his car and howled at the moon.

She sighed and told me he was different before. That he had been in a band, an artist, “sensitive”, not made for this world. But that drugs and trauma had robbed him of himself.

Until one day, I don’t know how long after he arrived, he was gone. We came home and his car wasn’t parked underneath the power pole anymore. I was relieved, and then ashamed of being relieved. Mum never brought up how much I was like him again. She didn’t need to.

——

It’s a month before my final school exams. Although it’s only October, it’s already hot. The driest year in more than a century, the creeks are dry, a drought is crushing regional towns and I couldn’t give a fuck because I’m obsessed with someone and she likes me back. Actually, I’m obsessed with two people, but the other person is a secret. I know he likes me and he is here with me tonight.

Instead of studying for exams we’re at the pub in town with friends: drinking and planning what we’re going to do after school finishes. We had some mushrooms in the park earlier and everything feels like I’m living in a dream: sort of mellow but everything is enhanced. The swirling pattern on the carpet, the sensation of the leather couches, the warm spring air.

“Mango mango,” I say.

“Mango madness,” he repeats.

We talk about how we’re going to do it — drive up in my car with a bunch of us, go mango picking before backpacking through south-east Asia to India. Visions of mountains, dance parties, shenanigans and a life unshackled by the constraints of a small town. Everyone else goes home but we linger. I tell them all I’ll drive him home: no one blinks an eye at that. I should not be driving anyone home in this state.

We walk for a while, until he suggests we go up the hill at the top of the town. Like a creepy castle in a gothic novel, it looms over us. The asylum at the top of the hill, the old gaol at the bottom. We’re panting by the time we arrive at the gates, fallen off, the grounds entirely overrun — towering elm and oak trees, many half fallen down. We push through the undergrowth and get to the walls. Solid stone, white flaking paint and small windows, most of them smashed by bored kids.

We smile at each other and he grips my hand. I kiss him lightly before jumping through and landing on the dusty floor. My mind already imagining us in one of the rooms alone, I feel desire buzz through my body. He grabs the torch and turns it on: graffiti all over the wall opposite us, a corridor leading into the darkness, dusty carpet rotting beneath us and the smell of damp and mould everywhere. I squeeze his hand again and we walk down the corridor trying to find a room. We push a door open and look in: entirely empty, just torn carpet and more graffiti again on the walls.

The deeper we go, the more I feel my desire dwindling and a chill coming over my body. We go down some stairs and end up in a basement corridor — framed by door after door, every one of them locked. No graffiti down here. No smashed windows. Just doors, dust, and the kind of heavy silence that suffocates us and feels as though it hasn’t been broken in decades. We try kicking a door down: nothing. It won’t move and I at this point I don’t really want it to.

“What the fuck do you think happened here?” I say.

“It’s so creepy,” he replies.

We turn back and jog up the stairs before tumbling into one of the smaller rooms off the main corridor. It’s dusty and empty. I kiss him and he kisses back, tentatively at first, before I feel him push up against me. I feel his erection against my stomach and close my eyes.

Suddenly, it feels as though I’m struck by lightning. I go ice cold and the back of my eyelids is assaulted with an array of fragmented images: people restrained, screaming, crying. I pull back, freaking out, and start breathing heavily. He grabs my hand and asks what’s happening.

“I think I’m having a panic attack,” I gasp out.

I am so lightheaded I slump down against the wall and wait for my heart to get back to normal. I tell him we need to leave, NOW. He grabs my hand and pulls me along the corridor until we find the window again. He pushes me out first and scrambles after. I stumble and he falls on top of me.

“What happened to you?”

I tell him what I saw. I’m high, I’m drunk, and whatever happened here doesn’t feel like history to me right now.

“Can we leave, please?”

He grabs my hand and we sprint down the hill, running as fast as we can, screaming, the wind blowing against my face, his hand warm in mine until we get to the lake. I need to purge myself clean. I scramble out of my clothes. He follows. We run to the jetty and dive in, laughing. I swim to him and just hold him.

“There is a madness that runs in my family,” I tell him, our legs kicking hard underwater to keep us afloat, our skin pressed together.

—-

A wave of music washes over me. I feel every vibration as it penetrates my skin, my fingers, my ears. For a moment I feel myself entirely dissolve into the warm, sweaty air of the small grubby band room. I try and keep track of what I have taken, how long I’ve been up.

It doesn’t matter really, I’m here now, in this room, with him. He looks over at me, as though he can read my thoughts — can he, I think? How easy it would be if people could see inside my brain and cut out the need for words. He puts his hand inside his jeans and hands me a sugar cube.

On your tongue, he mouths at me. I put it on my tongue and feel the sweetness dissolve. I look across at our friends and see he has them doing the same. Later in the night we spill out into the city, my body feels like a doll I am dragging along, playing with, and the streetlights, traffic lights and city noise is sort of trailing and vibrating. A bouncer takes one look at us and refuses to let us in to a club.

“Let’s go to the river to watch the city,” a friend says and we make our way to the river bank.

It’s so fucking beautiful. These towers of light, the people partying and going about their lives. I feel such a profound sense of joy to be human and part of this world — a tiny ant in a giant nest all working together and the sum greater than all of its parts. We walk along the river and come to the casino.

“Fuck it: why not,” someone says with the promise of music and drinks inside.

We cascade into the lobby and I’m assaulted by a wall of bright light. It’s too much. It’s too much, I tell everyone. It’s okay, someone says as we keep going deeper in. In the casino the carpet moves under my feet, while the overhead lights cause my eyes to slide back and forth trying to find some respite. Everywhere there is noise: pokies dinging, beeping, paying out, taking money. At tables people are shouting, everyone seems tense and agitated.

I look down at the carpet and am caught. I can’t pull my eyes away as it shifts and moves beneath me, like amoeba under a microscope. I hear a friend, distant at first, but getting closer as he shouts at me.

“Clem, CLEM: what are you doing?”

I pull my head up and the people have morphed into animals. This place is a cage, we are trapped and they’re snorting and pawing at the machines, chained to the tables they’re at. All I see is Samsara and desolation and the deep knowledge we’re all in this together, but this is a trap. I’m not even Buddhist — why the fuck am I thinking about Samsara. This is the opposite feeling I had lying on the bank looking at the city.

I feel myself sweating. I’m losing control. We’re all trapped. We’re all trapped. I let out a howl. I don’t know if it is only internal or if I am howling in the middle of the casino but my friend grabs my arm and takes me to the toilet. He helps me splash water on my face.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he tells me over and over. I try to tell him it’s not: that we are animals and we’re trapped here. That we are all consumed by a madness and a constant driving hunger and the only respite is death.

I stay in the bathroom staring at the mirror and he goes to find the others. After an eternity — what is time? — he comes back and we step out together, through the bright lobby with the sterile tiles and into the warm summer evening. I feel everything: the air on my face and skin, I smell the river, the sea, and I see other people still awake walking along the footpath. The partiers, the people up early for work, the people finishing work. All of us in the same place but worlds apart.

The madness leaves me. We walk to the parklands and lie on the grass, staring at the sky as it slowly lightens.

“Did I scream inside the casino?” I ask.

“Nope,” someone says. “But you sort of froze and your eyes went really crazy.”

No one says anything for a while. The sky is doing that thing where you can’t tell if it’s getting lighter or if your eyes are just adjusting.