The Fogging by Luke Horton

Author:Luke Horton [Horton, Luke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000, FIC025000
ISBN: 9781925849592
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2020-07-01T16:00:00+00:00

9

It was one of those nights when everything felt more vivid. There was no chance of sleep because everything, including him, was monstrously, throbbingly alive. Maybe it was that the moon was full. The room was mostly dark, but he could tell the moon was full because, through the shutters, it cast six bright bands of pale-blue light against the bed and the walls.

He turned onto his other side, faced the air conditioner. The unit was loud, but he could still hear things above it: crickets, frogs, the shrieking of other creatures, birds of some kind, monkeys maybe. Something big scampering across the roof of a nearby bungalow.

He got up. Tiptoed to the door and found the iron ring-pull. The porch was in darkness, but beyond that everything was bathed in the same bright, but kind of washed-out blue. Short, bare trees and tropical flowers were motionless and finely detailed against the grey sand. He wanted to lie down on that neatly raked sand, so soft and cool-looking, but he dared not do this — who knew what was crawling around there at night — so he stepped out barefoot onto the path and looked up at the sky. Looked for the moon, but now it was hidden. The upper reaches of the tallest trees above him moved a little in some higher breeze, and he looked around for the monkeys, but there was no sign of them.

He followed the path towards the beach. The restaurant was dark and still, the boardwalk was dark and still, all the signs and all the people packed up for the night. The beach was cooler, the merest breeze, but it was not inviting. He worried about rubbish, about stepping on a needle that had yet to be raked under the sand.

He turned back and went the other way, all the way back through the grounds to the entrance of the hotel and the curving white-pebble driveway. There, outside a row of low-lying buildings set off from the entrance to the hotel by a knee-high rope fence — they had peeked into these buildings one day when a door was left open to see a mess of mattresses, sheets, and towels in plastic — a woman was getting onto the back of a motorcycle. He recognised her from the hotel. She had served him breakfast at least once, brought drinks over to the pool. She was in jeans and a T-shirt now. Her traditional clothes — her uniform — were hanging in the room with the mattresses maybe. If she saw him, there was no acknowledgement. She got on the back of the motorbike, folded her arms in front of her, and rested gently against the man’s back, and they drove off.

He went back to the room. Pushed open the little cupboard-sized doors that led to their secret room with the daybeds. He picked one, lay down, and looked out at the wall of green that shielded the room from other guests. He thought

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