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"I'm a digital effects artist working in the feature film industry and am also experienced in flash animation and cartooning. I'm currently writing and illustrating a book featuring the exploits of my cartoon character 'Poppo' which will hopefully come to fruition if I can drag myself away from working on movies long enough to compile everything. Creative writing is a pastime I indulge in for fun from time to time but I've never had anything published before now."

- Grand Prize Winner, Brett Dix

"Coromandel"

by Brett Dix

I'd like to relate a personal experience which occurred sometime in the late 1990s on the Coromandel Peninsula , on the North Island of New Zealand. For those of you who have never traveled to the peninsula, it consists of some very beautiful, albeit rugged landscape which is navigated on very narrow and often poorly maintained shingle roads. The Kennedy Bay road is one such road and it was over this road that I was driving at 2am one Saturday morning on my way from Auckland where I lived, to my parents home on the east coast where I would be taking a break from work and looking after their place for a week while they were in Australia at a conference.

Ordinarily I wouldn't choose to travel at this time of the morning, but work commitments had kept me in Auckland until midnight and I didn't want to face the Saturday morning traffic coming out of the city. So, there I was in pitch blackness, easing my 4WD along the steep and winding road up and over the hills which sit between the small township of Coromandel and the beautiful sandy beaches of the eastern side of the peninsula.

Of course the fact that it was the middle of winter and the rain had stripped away most of the gravel didn't help. Most of the time I found myself driving on nothing more than slippery wet clay and I was thankful for being able to utilize the low ratio gearbox of my truck to control my speed downhill.

I was relieved to finally reach the base of the hills, as beyond that it was pretty much just flat ground all the way to the coast. The particular model of gearbox on my truck required me to reverse for a few metres after I changed out of low ratio - it was explained to me once, but I'm not really into cars that much and never really understood why. Nonetheless, I started to reverse slowly, waiting for the sound of the click as something(?) switched over in the gearbox which would allow me to drive on in high ratio 4WD without burning anything out or blowing anything up.

Suddenly out of nowhere, a small boy appeared in the glow of the reverse lamps, Ashen faced, in torn and dirty clothing, eyes wide and terrified. I slammed on my brakes and jumped from the cab, afraid that I might have hit him. As I ran to the back of the truck he appeared from behind the vehicle and before I had a chance to open my mouth he said hoarsely and out of breath "there's been an accident - daddy's hurt". From the look of him he was obviously in shock, though not seriously injured. A cut somewhere above his hairline had been bleeding but was now clotted. The dried blood was splattered down the right hand side of his face and only added to the frightening image before me. He was dressed lightly in t-shirt and jeans, which were soaked up to his knees and had muddy sneakers on his feet. I tried to take his hand to get him into the truck as I knew that in the cold night air and having suffered such a trauma he was a prime candidate for hypothermia and shock, but he wouldn't let me touch him. Instead, he started to retreat the way I assume he came, across the road and down into the riverbed with the rushing stream which came from high up in the hills I had just traversed.

I hesitated, not knowing what to do. There was absolutely no cellphone coverage at the base of these hills so calling for help was out of the question. The kid had already gone and for me not to follow would mean that he would probably have to spent the rest of the night injured in the bush. Gradually the fog of indecision cleared and I moved the truck off the road, grabbed a torch, a blanket and my pathetic excuse for a first-aid kit and hurried in the direction the little kid had taken. I stumbled down the low riverbank and immediately found myself ankle deep in ice cold water. Swinging the torchbeam upstream and down, I finally caught sight of a little shape about 20 to 30 metres upstream, waving to me to follow. If it hadn't been for his light coloured t-shirt I would have missed him completely. I clambered upstream as quickly as I could and very soon was drenched almost to the knee by the river water which was flowing quite strongly due to the recent rains. Every so often the little boy ahead would stop for a break and wait for me to come closer before setting off again, never allowing me to get near enough to touch him, as if he were afraid that if I reached him I would force him back to the truck and take him straight to the hospital without his father. To be honest at that stage, exhausted and cold as I was, I probably would have.

Eventually the boy stopped again and pointed up to the right, toward a very steep bank and then quickly scrambled up the muddy hillside into the trees. By the time I reached the spot where he had disappeared he was completely out of sight but I charged headlong up the slope anyway, grabbing at roots and rocks as best I could with my hands full. I eventually managed to fight my way up far enough to see the twisted wreckage of a car, tangled in the trees above me and for a moment I was afraid that it would suddenly break free from its tentative mooring and come crashing down on top of me. I gingerly moved sideways, trying not to slip all the way back down to the riverbed from where I had come and slowly mad e my way up to the side of the car, expecting the worst.

To this day, I cannot really describe my feelings upon shining my torch into the interior of the car. I guess they lay somewhere between relief, disappointment and confusion. The car was completely empty. Fearing that the driver had been thrown clear, and that I now needed to find both him and his son, I spent several long, agonising minutes searching the surrounding bush, calling out and waiting with my heart beating in my ears for an answer without coming across any evidence of either. Eventually I returned to the car and being almost completely exhausted I sat down to rest by it. It was then that I realised that something about the car was not right. For one thing, It was extremely rusty. No vehicle with that much rust in it should have been on the road. The Coromandel locals aren't exactly known for their adherence to land transport regulations, but there was something else. There was no smell.

No smell of burning rubber, no oil, no leaking petrol.

I shone my torch from one length of the car to the other, examining the twisted metal and iron, finally focusing on the tyres. The rubber was beginning to perish and they were covered with moss.

It took a few seconds for the realisation to dawn on me that I was looking at the wrong car. This was obviously an old wreck, but really, how many Goddamn wrecked cars could there be just above the point where the kid disappeared into the bush? I had searched within a full 10-20 metre radius of this spot and seen nothing. I screamed out one more time but heard nothing more than the river below me and the occasional screech of a possum somewhere else in the gully.

I don't know how much longer I spent there searching the wreckage, the area around it, my mood swinging from desperation to anger and back again over and over again. Eventually I gave up and slogged back downstream to my truck, too tired to even think about looking for an explanation for what had just happened. If it weren't for the truly frightening state of the boy I had seen I would have thought it was some sort of prank and was actually relieved to see that my truck was still there, that he hadn't just been a decoy to get me out and away from the vehicle so that it could be stolen.

By this time it was about 3.30am and I knew that I wouldn't be sleeping any time soon. It was another 30 minutes to my parents house and about the same for me to turn around and head back to town to wake up the community constable. I decided on the latter. Negotiating my way back up over the hill I had just come down an hour and a half earlier, I caught sight of a small wooden cross, nailed to the wooden support of the relatively new metal barrier erected on the left-hand verge of the road to replace the one which had been shattered by at least one vehicle which had taken the downhill slope too quickly and careened over the edge.

To cut a long story short, the Constable was not happy to be woken early at 4am . He became somewhat more courteous when I told him that a car had driven over the edge of the road on the Kennedy Bay Road , but his courtesy turned to bewilderment when I told him exactly where it was. "No, the only wreckage I had seen was was at least six months old and yes, the barrier above was still intact, and yes officer I am very sorry for waking you up and wasting your time." The tension in this confrontation, coupled with my exhaustion mad e me decide not to mention the little boy in the torn and muddy clothing and to this day I am glad I didn't.

A week later, when my parents returned I mad e a point of casually mentioning the little wooden cross on the barrier at that steep and dangerous corner of the road and they, equally casually told me the story of the man who, almost a year ago was driving his eight year old son back from Auckland and never mad e it. 3 days after they were supposed to arrive, a neighbour called the police to report them missing and the search began. They didn't find the wreckage until two days after that, the driver dead at the wheel. The little boy was found later that day, at the bottom of the gorge about 300 metres downstream. His only injury was a cut to his scalp, but the coroner found that he had most likely passed out from shock and died of exposure as he was only lightly dressed in a t-shirt and jeans.

Coromandel now has a new community constable who doesn't know me. I'm glad, because I've never told this to anyone. No one would believe me.