By David Horn

The first time it spoke, it used my voice.

I was alone on the flats — copper sky bleeding into dusk, engine ticking as it cooled, air still as stone — when the radio cracked.

“Lyle.”

It stretched like wire straining under a weight. I answered before I thought the better of it.

I found the tracks three hours later. Hindfeet. Toes spread forward. No forepaws. Long stride. Upright gait. It was about the size of a wallaby, but not quite. There were gaps between steps, as if the ground skipped under it. The trail ended mid-step, as if it stepped away from the world.

I took photos, logged them, and drove back.

At the station, I scrubbed through the camera feeds. Wind. Shimmer. Nothing else. Except one. Triggered at 03:17, the frame showed scrub and dust. The audio carried something else.

Voices.

Mine.

An elder’s voice in Yankunytjatjara.

Another in sharp German, with words that snapped like twigs.

I sent the fur to the lab. They couldn’t place it. No match in their records. Proteins twisted out of order. DNA unfit for any branch of the tree. I didn’t call back.

Two nights passed before it returned.

I found it on the edge of the salt pan. Tall. Hunched. Its coat shimmered between velvet and ash. Its face shifted — first canine, then vaguely human. Then something else entirely. Nostrils along the neck. A blink where the mouth should’ve sat.

It spoke.

My wife’s voice. Steady. Unbroken.

“Lyle. Please.”

She had died ten years earlier. The voice held her shape.

I froze. It stood still. Its outline flickered. Then it turned and stepped into the white.

No sound. No tracks.

I found one feather in its place. Long. Translucent. Edges fine as dust. I didn’t touch it.

At dawn, I called Mirri.

She lived outside Mutitjulu and remembered the old things. I told her what I saw. She didn’t blink.

“Yabberjack,” she said. Her voice clipped the word clean. “Walker-between.”

“What does it want?”

She shook her head. “Some things don’t want. They hold.”

“Will it come again?”

“It never left.”

The land was warped. Compass readings drifted east. Radios dropped to silence. Water pulled metallic on the tongue. Wind rolled backward through the range.

I returned to the pan.

The creature stood in the same spot. Taller, somehow. Or I had shrunk.

“Lyle,” it said.

Then: “Listen.”

Its chest cracked. Noise spilled out — layered voices, brittle and deep. A chant. A cry. A breath caught in fire. Words from tongues gone to ash. Sounds shaped by pressure, heat, and grief.

I couldn’t move. The air pressed against me. I heard a child I never held. A name I had buried. A scream that belonged to me, though I didn’t remember giving it.

These voices weren’t echoes. They had survived something.

The Yabberjack didn’t mimic. It carried.

It crossed into our world, trailing everything that couldn’t follow. Forests. Tongues. Generations.

I saw its weight. A vessel with no home. It didn’t seek shelter. It came for witness.

I raised the recorder. Named it aloud.

The Yabberjack dipped its head once.

Then it walked into the salt.

No feather. No tracks. Only one last sound:

My voice, shaped into a language last spoken forty thousand years ago.

I stopped trying to name it. Some things don’t need files or shelves. They need to be remembered.

I kept the tape.

Sometimes, when the sky pulses like a wound, I play it.

And sometimes, it answers.

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