August 6, 2018 AD
Luke Smith Confides in Aaron Smyth at Wallcrest Road
Late in the evening, Luke Smith knocked at Aaron Smyth's door at 27 Wallcrest Road, unshaven and smelling of smoke. At the kitchen table he began to tell Aaron about a door in his study wall and a settlement on the other side of it. Aaron did not believe him, but questioned him as he would any displaced community, and by the time Luke left he had filled two pages with figures.
Luke Smith knocked at 27 Wallcrest Road a little before ten at night. When Aaron Smyth opened the door, Luke smelled strongly of smoke and wet ash and had not shaved in several days. There was a fine reddish dust caught in the seams of his boots that Aaron noticed and could not account for.
Aaron sat him at the kitchen table, reheated the remains of a stew and put the kettle on. Luke ate everything in front of him without speaking, and only when the bowl was empty did he begin to talk.
He told it haltingly and out of order. He spoke of a door that had opened in the wall of his study, of a desert on the other side of it, and of a settlement there of several dozen people sleeping in cars, small camping tents and several motorhomes, carrying their water up from a river. He told Aaron that there had been an accident there the day before, that people had been badly hurt, and that he had not slept since. He did not say how most of the people had come to be there, and Aaron did not ask.
Aaron did not believe him. He decided, some twenty minutes in, that Luke was either ill or caught up in something criminal that he was dressing up as fantasy, and that either way the useful thing was to keep him talking. He began to ask the questions he had asked of displaced communities through a decade of bushfire seasons: how many people, how many children, how much water each day and how far it had to be carried, where the latrines were, what they were eating, and where the injured were lying. Luke answered most of them precisely, down to the number of litres, and that precision unsettled Aaron more than anything else he said.
Luke left a little after one in the morning. He asked Aaron for nothing and said only that he would come back. When the door had closed, Aaron sat on at the kitchen table with the two pages of a notepad he had filled while Luke talked: head counts, water volumes, tent capacities and a rough calculation of how long the settlement could last at its present rate of growth. He looked at them for a long while and then put them in a drawer.
