The Orange Dust Storm

I don’t mean to sound melodramatic. But if you’re reading this, then good luck. I didn’t get out alive. Which means either someone found my notebook and brought it back. Or you’re standing there looking at my shoes and my puddle of clothes.

The most important thing I can tell you is this. If you’re standing there looking at what’s left of me, don’t read the rest of this. Close the book and get out now. This instant. Go back the way you came and hope you’ve covered up your scent enough. It came here in the orange dust storm. And it’s never left. Please understand this, you must leave now. You stay, you die. It’s that simple. Go! Run! Leave now!

I remember a Wonnarua Elder telling me about it, back when I was a kid. But like all kids, I never believed Aunty’s tall tales. I wish I’d listened. There’s fig trees above us, water nearby, perfect hunting ground for the Yarama-yhawho. Small fella. Red. About the size of a kid. Suckers on its palms.

Don’t let that description fool you though. No matter how you try. No matter what steps you take. It’ll find you. It’ll sneak up on you. Before you realise it’s there it’ll swallow you. Whole. I’m not joking. Then after a while it’ll spit you back out. Just so it can swallow you whole again. It’ll keep doing it. Over and over again. Taking little by little. Until there’s nothing left of you.

I figure I have one, maybe two more times before I’m gone forever. So I’m going to tell you my story. How I came to be in this spot. Hopefully it can bring a little peace to the loved ones up above. Just so they know how I ended. So they stop worrying. Stop looking.

-

Australia is a funny place. A place that can always surprise you. Many years ago I started exploring some of the old convict tunnels under Newcastle. Most people don’t know that the hill is hollow. An ant’s nest of tunnels following the coal seams.

When I was a small boy, you used to be able to get into them through a secret door. False door. Behind a certain patch of wooden panelling in the basement of the Cathedral on the hill. But after the Cathedral tried to slide underground during the earthquake, they shored it up by pouring thousands of tonnes of concrete underneath it.

That didn’t stop us though. A group of us, urban explorers we called ourselves. We kept looking, hunting for clues. Looking through old books and old maps in the library. Some tunnels could be accessed relatively easily. They never went that far. Always blocked off. But others were less obvious. A hatch in someone’s garden shed. A junction in the storm water drain. Those went the furthest.

We spent so much time carefully exploring. Measuring and mapping precisely. Sometimes so deep underground you could hear the engines of the coal ships reverberating all around you. Every fork was investigated. Every lost and forgotten chamber explored. If my room hasn’t been rolled over, you can find copies of most of our maps there. Bottom drawer of the desk.

In this underground maze we found all sorts of things. We found a public swimming pool buried under some shops. Forgotten, paved over, built over. We found basements of buildings that long ceased to exist. We found parts of houses, the bottom floor of a carpark that had no way out of it. From time to time we’d find tunnels and rooms filled with skeletons. Rats and mice mostly. But not always.

It was during one of these underground excursions that we found something truly interesting. Frightening. A chamber. No, a church. It had an altar. It had pews. Looking around it there was stained glass windows. A old pipe organ, it’s long fat pipes reaching up to the ceiling. There was even the hymn list displayed on the wall.

The creepy part? Shoes. Lots of shoes. Clothes as well. Arranged in front of each of the pews. There was a pair of shoes by the organ, clothes strewn over the pedalboard. There were very finely decorated priests robes by the altar. But no bodies.

Everywhere we looked there was orange dust. Thick and heavy. Not brown with a tinge of orange. Really orange. It covered everything. It pooled in the golden goblet that was sitting on the altar. It filled the candles, obscuring their wicks. It overflowed from the shoes that were everywhere.

George and I exchanged worried, frightened looks. Neither of us wanted to show it. But we were both scared. A church, underground, hidden. As far as we could tell we were somewhere near Nesca Park. Probably 50 or 100 metres below it. But neither of us had ever heard of it. Or anything like it.

Part of the intrigue of exploring the tunnels was about finding those places we’d heard of. Finding those places that had become an urban myth. Whispered in school yards. Laughed about in pubs. We’d found most of them, but we’d never heard of this place.

It just didn’t make sense. A church, this far underground. It wasn’t like the pool that was literally a few metres below the surface. This was deep in the labyrinth of the mines. The passageway we walked through to get there was a bare dirt floor, held up by rotting wooden beams. Every passageway leading away from it was the same.

Yet, inside it was like every church I’d ever been in. Thick sandstone walls with deeply inset stained glass windows. An altar that was definitely manufactured, same as the pews. None of them were lashed together. Then there was the organ. I peered at it, marvelling at the mother of pearl and ebony keys.

We continued to explore the church. Shining our torches around, the beams cutting through the dust in the air. Orange dust. It tinted the cold white light of our torches. It coloured our faces when George and I talked together. It covered our hands, our fingertips.

“Say, wasn’t there like a dust storm a few years back? Turned everything orange?” asked George.

“Yeah, I remember it. Couldn’t see one side of the street from the other. Just a really thick orange fog.”

“That was dust blown in from the desert, wasn’t it?”

“That’s what they said. Funnelled down the valley. Newcastle hit pretty bad. In Sydney it stayed mostly in the harbour, over the water. But it has to be 15 years or so ago, doesn’t it?” I asked.

“2009? 2010? Something like that”

We continued exploring through the church. I stopped in the aisle, in the centre of the church. My torch blaring at the crucifix on the wall. I stared hard at it, taking a moment to realise that it was upside down. That freaked me out. When I looked closer I noticed that it had been hung that way. Not turned upside down. It was deliberate.

I was still looking at the crucifix when George called me over. He’d find a diary in the vestry. An ancient book, the leather cover rotting away. It was filled with spidery writing, old cursive. Names, places, dates. Some events that happened. Some things that needed to be attended to.

Then we checked the dates. My mouth dropped open. The last entry was for the 23rd of September, 2009. The day the orange dust storm enveloped Newcastle. The writing in all the other entries was calm, calculating. Like whoever wrote them took their time to make sure they were perfectly legible.

The 23rd though, that was different. Same handwriting, but definitely written quickly. Hurriedly. A long, long entry. Talking about the end of days. How the world was ending. How their God – be it God or the Devil, that much wasn’t clear – was destroying the Earth. The word “Revelations” was written thoughout.

“They thought the world was ending. That the dust storm was the beginning of the end” said George.

“Understandable. It was pretty incredible. The whole world looked like it was on fire, but it wasn’t.”

“Yeah, I was pretty lucky. The boss called off my shift for the day.”

“Trust you to take it like that. Anything else they talk about?” I asked.

“Just that it was the end of days, the world was ending. Says here that the priest called a special mass, to welcome in the rapture.”

“Strange, if they thought they were going to heaven, then why go so far underground?”

“Maybe they thought they were going the other way,” said George.

“True, the crucifix is upside down in there.”

“We’d better get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

“Doesn’t it what? I mean, all those clothes, those shoes? And no bodies? Not even a skeleton?”

“Exactly. Why does that diary look so old? Nothing makes sense. People don’t just vanish. Even after 15 odd years, there’s still going to be some remains,” I said.

“Beats me. Maybe they did get raptured after all.”

“Or maybe there’s something else down here. George, I think it’s time we left.”

“Your best idea yet.”

Without another word we gathered up our things and got ready to leave. Neither of us had brought much. Just the latest map we were working on, a few torches, snacks in the backpack, that sort of thing. I was walking down the aisle, into the Narthex when I heard a strange, gulping sound.

I froze. The light from George’s torch went wobbly, then fell on the floor. I heard a satisfied sigh, then soft, wet squelching noises. I pulled up my bravery pants and turned around. George was gone. Not a sign of him. Only the torch on the floor, rolling between the pews. He couldn’t have been more than a few feet behind me.

I’m not ashamed to say I panicked. George was a good friend of mine. And in that moment he vanished. Completely. Logic and common sense says I should’ve run for the door. I should’ve run out into the tunnels and not stopped running until I found the surface. But I didn’t.

Instead, I went inside to look for him. I walked back down the aisle, my fingers running over the altar as I made my way into the back of the church. Clearly George wasn’t in this room. He had to be out the back. Genuinely I thought he was playing some silly game. But he wasn’t.

I searched high and low. Opened every cupboard door. Looked in every wardrobe. Checked every hiding spot. Each time hoping to find him. Each time fearing the worst. There was no sign of him. Not a sound, not a thread, not a set of footprints in the orange dust. Nothing. He’d just vanished.

The longer I searched the more panicked I became. It got harder to contain the fear inside. The dread. I’ve never been more afraid in my life and I hadn’t seen anything. The searches became frantic. Soon I was checking under chairs and pews, behind the altar, behind the lectern. Everywhere. But there was no sign of George.

I don’t know how long I searched. 15 minutes maybe? Possibly 20? Eventually I decided that George had to be mucking around on me. He couldn’t simply disappear like that. He must be outside, in the tunnels somewhere. Ready to be laughing hysterically while he gave me a jump scare. So I left.

Or at least tried to. When we came into the church every door was open and unlocked. They all led to different tunnels, different paths in the underground labyrinth. But when I went to open the front door and leave the way we came, the door was locked. Solid. Like it had been barred from the outside.

I tried every door in the place. Locked. None of them budged. I tried opening the stained glass windows. The ones that would budge only moved an inch. They opened to solid rock, only a few inches from the walls of the church. No escape that way.

So I sat down. I found a pew with no shoes, no clothes on it and rummaged through my backpack. It’d been an age since I ate or drank anything, I was parched. I took a mouthful of water from my bottle, savouring it, letting it moisten my dry mouth. Then swallowed. It was so refreshing.

I’m glad I did swallow it, because a minute later George walked through the door to the vestry. My eyes were wide. He was walking very unsteadily, his legs very shaky. His eyes were glassy and unfocused. But the weirdest thing about him was his colour. There was no doubt about it, George had turned an orangey-red colour.

“What the hell happened to you?” I asked. George slowly lifted his head, his eyes still not focusing on me properly.

“Dunno. Weirdest thing. It was like, it was like something swallowed me,” he said.

“What the hell?”

“I know! It’s weird. But that’s what it was like. One moment walking, the next I was in something’s guts.”

“How did you get out then?” I asked, not believing my ears.

“It threw up. I think. One moment I was walking, the next I was eaten. A little while later I get vomited onto the floor. I don’t think I like this place, mate. Can we get out of here?” asked George.

“I wish we could. Doors locked tight.”

“Then we break it down.”

No matter what we tried, nothing worked. We tried levering it with the candle holders. We tried throwing ourselves at it. But the door didn’t budge as much as an inch. Didn’t even rattle. I decided to try looking for another way out. Perhaps a door near the organ. I didn’t get far.

One moment I was walking. The next, I was swallowed. I couldn’t see anything. But I could hear George calling out. Screaming. The more he shouted, the more terrified he became. You could hear it in his voice. But I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs to shout. I was being squeezed, all I could manage was the faintest wheeze.

Sometime later I was unceremoniously deposited on the floor. My face hit the stone hard, causing a gash to my eyebrow. I turned over onto my back. Looking up at the ceiling I saw something. A small man. Kind of. Red. Long spindly fingers with what looked like suckers on them. Grinning. A wide mouth completely devoid of teeth. Then it was gone.

I didn’t know what to make of it. It seemed like some horror out of one of Aunty’s stories. George and I huddled together, collectively freaking out. We went through every horrific being we’d ever heard of. Then it dawned on me.

“George! It’s a Yarama-yhawho” I said.

“A Yarama what?”

“A Yarama-yhawho. Like a vampire.”

“So that would make us food, right?”

“It does. We’re under Nesca Park, aren’t we?”

“Somewhere around there” said George.

“And like every bloody park in this town there’s fig trees.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Yarama-yhawho’s live under fig trees. Usually near water. And unless I’m mistaken, we’re literally just across the road from the beach,” I said.

“So what do we do now?”

“I have no idea. Aunty never told me that. Or I don’t remember.”

“We have to get out of here. Man, we are so boned. You’re like an orangey-red colour. Like really. Like you’ve been dyed,” said George.

“Same for you. And somehow you’re shorter. George, we go. Gotta break down that door.”

In the end it was futile. No matter how many times we hurled ourselves at the door it didn’t budge. We kept trying, kept trying to find another door, another way out. But there was nothing. There was no point screaming, we were so far underground nobody would ever hear us. If by some miracle they did, they’d have no way of finding us in the maze of tunnels. Phones didn’t work. We had no way of getting help. So we kept trying.

Every hour or so one of us would vanish. Only a soft sucking sound, whisper quiet. Then George or I ended up being swallowed. Slowly draining us. Each time we came back, our clothes were a little looser, our skin a little more orange-red. Each time we were a little weaker, a little more tired. It became hard to stay awake.

Then George vanished completely. I haven’t seen him in ages. I don’t know how long, I lost my phone somewhere and I just don’t have the strength to look for it. All I can do is sit here, in front of the altar. Sit and wait.

I know the end is coming. Soon. Soon the Yarama-yhawho will be hungry enough to finish me off. There’s nothing I can do about it. Maybe in the beginning, before I was swallowed the first time. But not now. Now I’m struggling to lift my head. Soon I’m going to be nothing but a pair of abandoned shoes and a puddle of clothes. I know that.

This is why I’m writing this down. The rest of this notebook has the latest maps we made. Use it to get out of here. I’m serious. There’s nothing you can do. There’s no way to win. So just leave before the Yarama-yhawho makes a meal out of you too.

I’m so tired. Soul-crushingly tired. I’m done. I’m just going to sit and wait. I’ll leave this on the altar, near the goblet. If anyone finds this place they’ll find this. Just please, I hope for your sake, you heeded my warning. I hope you’re reading this from the comfort of your own home. And not standing over my shoes and a pile of my clothes.

Because if you are, you’re next.