Chapter 3 - 1967-70 - The dump
Keg’s having a fit.
Not the epileptic kind—though that might be preferable, Boxy reckons—but the full-body, head-wagging, wrist-flapping kind of Aussie bloke meltdown where words spill out in clumps over grievances that have built up like a king-size aneurysm.
“All I said, right, all I said to her was don’t leave the bloody sheets out, love, the refinery’s running night shifts. And what happens? Wakes up this morning, they got holes in ’em. Acid holes! Big enough to drive a bloody bus through! Looked like someone took to the flannelette with a bloody flamethrower!”
Boxy says nothing. He was supposed to be doing these deliveries solo. The blathering idiot got foisted on him at the last minute. Dispatcher said: “Either you take him for the day so the boys don’t strangle him and drop him in a vat—or I give you him as an offsider for the rest of the year.”
Boxy stares out the cracked windscreen. He can do a day. Maybe.
They’re stuck behind a panel van stalled in a sea of Christmas traffic somewhere near Parramatta Road. The sun’s punishing, and the barrels in the back are seeping something sharp. Burn-your-throat kind of sharp.
“‘You should’ve known,’ she says. Me! As if I’ve got the schedule from God himself. ‘You work there, don’t you? You should know what’s blowin’ out the stack!’ Like it was me burnin’ the sheets.”
Boxy grunts. Keg takes it as encouragement.
“And you know what? Despite that I am lucky. Gotta great job, don’t I? Gotta a beautiful semi right next to the plant! Gotta Christmas bonus, even with inflation. And tonight, at the Christmas Party they've gotta bloody all you can eat seafood buffet, eh? Bloody gigantic succulent prawns! Not from the Bay, of course, no one with a brain’d touch ’em from there—”
“Gonnakillyoumumbleshutupashutupshutup,” Boxy whispers to himself.
But Keg’s already onto the next load of whinges. Something about a dented panel on the truck, the girl at the gate not smiling at him this morning, and how the barrels at the back of the loadout weren’t even on the manifest when they left. And now they’re here, stuck in traffic, and it's stinkier than the drunk tank at Darlo station.
Boxy’s fingers twitch on the wheel.
They’d done two deliveries. First out near Blacktown—roofing solvents. Second was cleaning fluid for the lino factory. Easy jobs. But when they went to shift the last skid, they found them: six fat drums, rusting at the seams, pooled in sludge that smoked slightly in the heat.
“What the hell is this shit?” Keg had asked.
Boxy didn’t blink. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?” whined Keg. “They aren’t listed. Don’t exist. Damn, that makes the problem worse, not better.”
He bent to read the stencilled text on one of the drums. “Says... Hexa…chloro…butt?” he stammered. He grabbed a scrap of cloth they kept in the cab to clean spills and tried wiping away the grime.
The cloth caught fire.
Keg squeaked and started stamping on it, then kicked it out the back of the truck. “We have to get rid of this shit,” he moaned.
“We’re supposed to be back at three,” Boxy says, seeing an opportunity. “We go back to the plant now; we’re in a queue behind every other bastard trying to sign out. And the paperwork to return it—Jesus on a unicycle. We’ll miss the Christmas party. And it’s open bar tonight.”
“Exactly,” Keg nods. “Bloody nightmare.”
Boxy doesn’t move. Just stares past the panel van, past the exhaust-tinged shimmer rising from the bitumen. He breathes out through his nose. Slow.
Then: “I might have a better idea.”
“Oh, thank the gods of chemical refining, Boxy, you are a genius.”
They detour. East.
Keg’s still rabbiting as they roll past wire fences and cleared ground. A new foundry’s going in here—he can see eleven piles already ringed around the site, drilled deep to hit bedrock in the shifting Botany sand.
Boxy mutters, “My brother-in-law’s the foreman here. Said they’re pumping concrete first thing tomorrow. No crew on site today.”
They drive toward the mouth of the twelfth borehole. A deep, empty cylinder lined with steel. Black and waiting.
“So, we just drop ’em in a bore,” Boxy says, already backing the truck up near the shadows. “No paperwork. No questions. And no one’s ever gonna miss what wasn’t on the inventory. “Besides—” he shrugs, “it’s not like it’s going to explode. It’s just... sludge. A one-off thing. Not our problem.”
He doesn’t tell Keg this is the twelfth. That for the last three months, he and his brother-in-law—on quiet orders from the refinery’s safety officer—have been filling the other eleven holes with the same devil’s piss.
Keg hesitates. “You reckon?”
Boxy doesn’t answer. He’s already out, peeling back the tarp.
They heave the barrels in one by one. Some make a solid clunk. One splits on the lip going down—something with a rainbow sheen dribbles across the dust and disappears into the shaft.
They don’t stay long.
As they’re leaving, a Holden ute pulls into the site. Brand new. Weller’s Foundry – Metallurgy for a New Decade written across the side.
Keg leans out the window, grinning, and waves. "Nice. It's the new HR"
Boxy slouches lower in his seat. He knows that name. Shitshitshitshutupyouboofhead!
Boxy doesn’t talk the whole way back. He glances sideways at Keg, who’s now fiddling with the radio and singing off-key to Green, Green Grass of Home.
God help me, Boxy thinks. I could strangle him with my seatbelt and no jury’d convict.
Instead, he shifts up a gear. The truck coughs once, then settles.
The only thing that unsettles Boxy—just for a moment—is the smell. That lingering chemical note. Not solvent. Not petrol. Something deeper.
Like scorched dust. Like death.
He blinks it away. Breathes through his mouth.
Almost there.
Seafood, beer and silence soon.
Δ.031 Hz – The Spiral Shuts
Floraville, Late December 1967 – Beneath the Perimeter Ring
At first, there was only pressure. The slow tectonic breath of the world. Weight. Motion. Heat. That was the rhythm. That was the song.
Then— stuttering.
Pile drivers above. Surface creatures building again. The pattern was familiar. Annoying. Irrelevant. They would dig, they would scratch, they would leave.
Δ.031 Hz ignored it.
But something else came. Not pressure. Not motion. Something foreign. Something that bent the frequencies sideways.
A seep.
It entered like a whisper changing the language. Through the sand. Through the cracks. Through the crystal filaments that once reached like nerves across a continent.
It smelled of entropy. It felt like forgetting.
A soporific bloom. Heavy. Slow. Wrong in tone. Wrong in time.
Δ.031 Hz tried to name it. Tried to analyse.
But its senses stuttered. Signals fired, but they echoed back empty. Sensory drift. Cognition flickered— then sealed shut. Memory dimmed to ash.
Forget— Forget what?
There was— There was something. It mattered.
It was long. It was old. It moved with the stone and sang to the sea beneath the plates.
But the song— The song is— wrong.
Noise now.
Chemical nonsense. Oxidised dreaming. A coppery tang in the cognition.
I— am?
I was.
(…what was I?)
Movement hurts now. Thought bleeds.
So, it ceases. Folds deeper.
The seep thickens. The final borehole ruptures—Boxy’s payload— and the spiral tightens.
All eleven others have been filled. Their contents burst and creeping inward, meeting at the centre like a noose.
It is not a flood. It is not a war.
It is a forgetting. A silencing. A slow, spiralled burial.
What name it had, becomes a smear. What shape it wore, a faultline. What purpose drove it, devoured.
It tucks in.
Sedated. Subsumed. Still.
Below the pylons, a god folds into itself— and forgets it ever existed.
Floraville – Christmas Eve, 1967 – 5:06 PM
The sand gives under the wheels as the Holden HR ute crunches onto the cleared lot, a dust plume curling behind it like a lazy ghost. “Weller’s Foundry – Metallurgy for a New Decade” is stencilled across both doors in blocky gold letters, already flaking at the edges—too much optimism, not enough clear coat.
As he slows, Dion spots a flatbed truck rattling toward the road, two workers inside. One’s hunched over the wheel. The other’s waving like he’s already on the beers.
Hard-working lads, Dion thinks. Finishing up before Chrissy. He raises two fingers in a casual salute. The truck doesn’t stop.
He pulls in further, angles the ute toward the site’s eastern edge and kills the engine. Steps out into the heat in old but well-polished boots, shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows. He leans into the cab, retrieves a clipboard in one hand, a battered Thermos in the other. Smiles at the hand-forged copper gear knob—his own work. First thing he ever made that wasn’t black iron. Still proud of it.
He surveys the site like a man about to plant a flag. Twelve bored piles ring the clearing like ancient sentinels—steel-toothed, silent. The last one was drilled only yesterday. Concrete trucks are due first thing in the morning. Final pour before Christmas.
He grins.
“Gonna be a beauty,” he mutters.
From the tray, he pulls a roll of site plans and a dog-eared copy of Modern Casting Techniques, Vol. III. Spreads them across the bonnet. The pages ripple in the breeze. He looks up, gaze drifting—not to the ground, but back in time.
He can still see the forge at home. The dull glow in the stone hearth. His father, arms like tree trunks, bent over a horseshoe, muttering that real metal was iron. Always iron.
"The future’s alloys, Da," Dion had said. "Copper, bronze, lightweight composites."
His father didn’t look up. "You’d have better luck shitting gold and smelting that, boy."
The last fight was vicious. Irreversible. About titanium, of all things.
He still remembers his mother, waving her scarf as the ship pulled away from the pier. His sister crying and waving at the same time. Northampton’s shoreline grey with fog, the slow-moving ship dragging the grief out mile by mile.
Even after he reached Australia, it took another two years of blood and furnace sweat to get here. Long, bone-tiring weeks in Port Kembla, shifting ore. Ten months in Homebush watching tin can after tin can roll off the line. That mad sculptor in Newtown with the bronze nudes and the temper of a Tasmanian devil.
Every shift brought him closer to this plot. Every pound he saved, he saw chimneys rising from sand and proof of his dream.
In all the excitement, he’d forgotten to pay attention to the land itself. Botany sand. Too loose for large constructions unless you anchored to bedrock. The borehole budget had doubled, then doubled again. He’d begged the bank for extensions just to hold onto the plans.
He chuckles now, under his breath.
“If the Black Death didn’t stop us, neither will a little shifting sand,” he says aloud. A quote from his great-uncle Fergus, or maybe Cromwell. He writes it in the margin of his site diary, under today’s date: December 24 – Final Borehole Complete. Pylons: Set. Future: Pending.
Behind him, from the edge of the scrub, a black cat pads silently into view. One eye clouded, the other burning like coal. Lucifer watches him from the tree line, tail twitching once.
He watches a willy willy pluck grit from a spoil heap—sees, as only cats can, how it dances the way it shouldn’t.
Dion doesn’t see it.
He just sips his tea, and smiles at his empty field, envisioning his triumph as if it’s already been built.
Floraville, April 1969 – Furnace Pit
Rolf had done this job a thousand times.
Thirty years on digging machines. Caterpillars, Komatsus, the odd Hydrema when someone up the chain got clever. But his girl—his girl was a Liebherr 955. Smooth like schnapps, precise like clockwork. She purred for him.
The site plans were clear. They were installing a reinforced slab for the main furnace. Excavate to bedrock. Grade. Compact. Nothing complicated.
Sandy base, a few shale seams. Simple job.
Until it wasn’t.
The first tremor came just as he was finishing up— like the bucket kissed something hollow.
He leaned forward. Adjusted. Nudged the controls.
That’s when the hydraulics screamed.
The boom jackknifed sideways. Gauges flickered like disco lights. The whole rig spasmed, hissed, then dropped dead. The cab filled with a high-frequency whine Rolf felt more than heard.
He didn’t shout. Didn’t swear. He just sat there, frozen, eyes wide, muttering—
“Ich habe es nicht gemeint…”I didn’t mean it…I didn’t…
It took three men to pull him out of the cab. He didn’t resist. Just pointed, vaguely, at a spot in the pit. And said, once more—
“The whole world.”
They craned the Liebherr out that afternoon. Hydraulics blown. Battery warped like it’d been microwaved. Gearbox mangled like a bomb had gone off. No one could explain it.
Dion Isenhart Weller barely looked up from the incident form. Another bloody delay. More bloody cost.
The union wanted a full investigation. Site freeze. Safety review. There wasn’t time. Not now. The furnace was due by winter.
Dion greased the right palms.
They brought in day labourers. Cheap. Disposable.
By midday the next day, six had walked off the job. Pale. Shaky. Complaining of nausea and headaches.
The others jeered them. Called them piss weak.
By knock-off, two more had collapsed.
Still, the pit was done. The spoil was carted off by a discount hauler. The steelwork was in.
The concrete pour went ahead the next morning.
By lunchtime, nothing had exploded. No more walk-offs. The sky stayed where it should be.
Dion stayed on. Just in case.
He sat on a pile of timber, sweating through his shirt, eating a tuna sandwich he’d left too long in the sun.
And then he saw the cat.
Jet-black. One clouded eye. Sitting at the edge of the pour, tail curled, watching like a building inspector from hell.
Dion froze. The cat didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Just stared—from him to the slab, and back again.
“Alright,” Dion muttered. “You’re an omen, are you?”
He tore the sandwich in half. Tossed the bigger piece toward the cat.
Lucifer padded over. Took it delicately. Sat again. Still staring at the slab.
Dion swallowed. Told himself it was a sign. Cats are good luck. Like the ones on British destroyers that survived torpedoes.
It was only much, much later he remembered that the cats did survive: but not the ship, not the crew.
It must be a good luck sign Dion convinced himself. good luck. The worst was definitely over.
The Cost of Optimism
Floraville Foundry – Late 1970
Construction was a bastard from the start.
Steel beams being craned into place would freeze mid-air as if magnetised. Machinery shorted out. Concrete cured with hairline fractures, bleeding rust overnight. The crucibles cracked during dry runs. One worker claimed he saw a shape moving in the half-cast bronze. Another said the slag pit sang him a lullaby only his mother knew.
More than once, Dion caught labourers whispering about noises—low, vibrating rumbles that didn’t match any machine on-site. Echoes with no origin. One welder quit after a blackout mid-shift. Said his rig had started to hiss at him.
Dion blamed the humidity. The cheap rebar. Union laziness. Bloody migrants who didn’t follow instructions. Privately, he wasn’t so sure.
He called the historical society. He wanted context. What he got was folklore. An old sacred site. He nodded politely, mumbled, “Too late,” then buried the report beneath a pile of invoices.
Still—just in case—he brought in a priest. Young bloke. Catholic. Broad-shouldered. Didn’t make it through the first verse of the blessing. Started trembling. Dropped the aspergillum. Ran out the north entrance without looking back. Later said he felt like his skull was filling with metal.
They finished setting up the scaffolding the next day. By morning, it had twisted itself into some bizarre cat’s cradle. Three of the scaffolders quit on the spot. Dion doubled the shift pay. Told everyone it was just the hot weather. No one mentioned it again.
He kept showing up. Kept quoting his gran. “If the Black Death couldn’t stop us, neither will a bloody colonial summer.”
He stopped asking questions. Just worked longer. Talked louder. Called it bad luck. Weather. The shifting bloody Botany sand.
He started bringing a saucer of milk for the stray black cat that had begun shadowing the crew. Lucifer, he called him. One good eye. One clouded. The only creature who seemed unbothered by the deep, low hum that never stopped.
He still called it his foundry, but deep down, Dion had stopped thinking of it as triumph and more as penance. Magical thinking told him if he could just complete the foundry, everything would go back to normal. Everything would be OK.
Floraville Foundry – Official Opening Day and Final Day of Operation, 1970
Power-on was meant to be symbolic. A triumph. A “bloody good show.”
Dion wore his best shirt. Had a speech in his back pocket he wasn’t going to use—but just in case.
The crew gathered late. Half of them hadn’t shown up. The remainder looked skittish. One bloke in the back row had a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop.
The air inside the forge shimmered again. Which was a problem—it hadn’t been turned on yet.
Dion told himself it was excitement. Tension. Industrial pride. He gave the signal.
Breaker one. Breaker two.
The furnace groaned—not like a machine. Like something otherworldly waking up with molten lungs.
Lights flickered. A vibration through the floor built into a hum that resonated through steel-toed boots and jawbones.
The control panel spat sparks. A crucible ruptured. The slag pit buckled inward—concrete collapsing like wet cardboard.
Someone screamed. Not from injury. Because of what they saw.
Crystalline blue spikes pushed through the seam between steel and soil. Glass-like, spider-thin, pulsing and vibrating at a frequency that loosened bowels.
Dion stumbled back, hand to his chest, his eardrums screaming— even though he could not hear any sound. There was no sound.
Metal warped. Panels blistered. Paint peeled in fractal patterns.
Dion didn’t hesitate. Didn’t shut anything down. Didn’t yell for calm.
He ran. Faster than even he thought he could—move.
He didn’t take his clipboard. Didn’t take his tools. He left behind the Foundry. The debts. The dream. He didn’t stop to think. He didn’t look back.
Behind him, something ancient stirred. Not angry. Not malevolent. Just scared.
Years later, in a low-slung bar on the WA coast—far enough from Floraville to pretend it never happened— he told a barkeep who wasn’t really listening:
“I didn’t just leave the building, mate. I left the man I thought I was meant to be. Every step I took… it felt like being peeled out of my own skin. Like something inside me got left behind.”
He didn’t mention the moment when the hum reached through his boots and his bones and found something deeper.
The barkeep asked what he thought it was.
Dion didn’t answer. Just shook his head and muttered,
“Even the bloody cat knew better than I did.”
Outside, a thunderstorm cracked the horizon. The ice in Dion’s drink split clean down the middle.