Vanished

by James Delargy

  ‘The well dried up so they capped it and built a rotunda over the top. Dropped another out near some place called Orange Lake and transported the water back to town. I’ll try there first. Then I’ll try uncapping the well in town. The water should be fine for washing clothes at least.’

  Naiyana didn’t respond, willing sleep upon herself.

  ‘Then in 1921 there was a fatal fire at Rattlesnake. Twenty people were killed. Mining halted for three years, so people drifted away to the nickel mines at Leonora and Gwalia. That was it until increasing gold prices in the late seventies made gold mining economically viable again. But not here. So Kallayee faded into a silent existence.’

  He paused. The history lesson was over but he wasn’t finished.

  ‘Do you think that the noises are ghosts?’

  She swivelled around to look at him, his face itself ghostly in the pale light.

  ‘Let’s not mention that in front of Dylan.’

  Lorcan nodded. ‘Good idea.’

  But as if he had somehow sensed that he was being talked about there was a sharp cry from the other bedroom. Naiyana stared at her husband. Neither of them said anything for a moment.

  ‘Your turn,’ said Lorcan.

  ‘You’re closer to the door.’

  ‘By about a metre.’

  She paused to see if chivalry would surmount discomfort. It had in the past. Young love.

  ‘I’m tired,’ she said.

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘You dragged us out here.’

  It was the same blunt club she would continue to swing until it became ineffective. As much as Dylan needed time to settle in, so did she. Lorcan believed it was all worth it but she remained unconvinced. Maybe even less so than when they had left late last night to drive all the way out here.

  From the other room Dylan began to cry. For Mummy. For Daddy. For anyone.

  She glanced at Lorcan in case gallantry won out but his nose was back in the tablet. Reading up on more history. Or better yet, how to install a bloody window.

  Wrapping the blanket around her shoulders, she entered the other bedroom, goosebumps on her flesh, her senses heightened.

  Dylan was tossing and turning as she perched on the edge of the bed, pulling him close, trying to comfort him.

  After half an hour his twisting stopped and she went to leave. If she could get a couple of hours before the sun came up that might get her through tomorrow. Life was to be taken a day at a time at the moment, future plans thrown out of non-existent windows.

  As she tried to sneak out of the room Dylan woke again. The deep brown eyes that he had inherited from her spoke of a disquiet, even fear.

  ‘It’s rumbling again,’ he said, quietly as if afraid to awaken a monster.

  ‘What is, honey?’

  Dylan didn’t answer. But in the silence she heard something too. A rumble like something was stirring in the belly of the earth itself. Hungry to eat. Closing her eyes she tried to identify the source but almost as soon as she did it seemed to disappear, leaving her wondering if she had imagined it entirely.

  11 Emmaline

  The rest of the house was clean. Of blood or excessive bodily fluid at least. Nothing that random daily existence couldn’t account for.

  After that it was a case of inspecting the rest of the town for evidence that something untoward had taken place. At present, the case remained a misper. Times three.

  The team had increased by one. Anand, another constable from Leonora, had been dragged in from two days’ leave to help, wearing a sour expression as befitted the rapid change of plans. They spread out like ants, using the Maguire house as the nest.

  From what she had read, Kallayee was a goldrush town that had given up a modest few veins. Like a heroin addict’s arm they had been stabbed relentlessly, gold transported out and opiate transported in, something greatly appreciated with nothing else to do in the evening but reminisce about lost opportunities.

  Gwalia, a town beside Leonora, had the only real claim to fame. It had once been visited by an American president. Back then Herbert Hoover had simply been a young geologist, sent there to develop his company’s latest find into a working concern. He had eventually become manager of the new mine and shipped in a load of Italian labourers who were hired cheap and laid off just as cheaply. As the Italian immigrants filtered south looking for work, they had eventually crept into Kallayee and for a time the official language became an Italian–Australian mix that was incomprehensible outside the town. It explained the long-dead store with the name ‘The Italian Press’ in fading writing above the door.

  She stuck with Rispoli as she scoured the town. Her opinion of it remained the same: no place for a young family to live. The tin shacks that hadn’t fallen over were close to doing so, the wood dwellings frayed and split, all uninhabitable. The few brick constructions had been gutted a long time ago. Around every corner, she expected to fine a lone, wizened stockman resting on a barrel, his feet up watching all the action unfold in his long undisturbed town, waiting to tell his tale to someone. But rarely in this business was everything laid out in one neat polished script. Everything had a dog-ear somewhere, a wrinkle that needed to be smoothed out.

  Emmaline had a question to ask. And not about the case.

  ‘Rispoli. Sounds Italian.’

  The young constable turned to her. ‘I can see how you made rank.’

  The accompanying smile lifted his cheekbones and involved his whole face. Even his ears seemed to rise. A handsome face, pleasing to her eye. Set free from Barker’s rigid deportment, he was emerging from his shell.

  ‘Related to anyone who used to live here?’

  ‘My mum did one of those ancestry trees once.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We came from Leichhardt in New South Wales. And before that Abruzzo in Southern Italy. My great-grandfather moved the family out here to Kalgoorlie. Never made it up to Kallayee. Not officially anyway.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It means that he might have worked the mines. But not according to any government records. Near impossible to tax his kind of iterant working back then.’

  He nodded his head towards her. ‘I guess your family weren’t originally Aussie.’

  Emmaline stopped in her tracks and turned to him, sharply at the waist, flicking her head. Her recently shorn locks prevented the whip she desired.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  The young officer stopped. His lips moved, no words came out. A dash of colour came to his tanned cheeks.

  ‘I didn’t mean… I… It was…’

  He was backtracking rapidly. His eyes flicked this way and that. Trying to get out of the snare he had triggered.

  Emmaline tried to hold her glare but failed. A smile eased across her face, basking in the endorphin rush, essential to keep her going through this strung-out day.

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘I wasn’t saying…’

  Emmaline put him out of his misery. ‘My dad’s from Cape Town and my mum’s from London. They moved out here when I was two. She got offered a good job and Dad was happy to try somewhere warmer. Simple as that. No drama. No running away. Just a better job and a better life. Like your great-grandparents.’

  ‘No,’ chortled Rispoli, shaking his head. ‘They were running away.’

  ‘From?’

  ‘A story for later.’

  They shared a smile. Emmaline wondered if this could go somewhere, a primal urge taking over. Something that society suggested she should be ashamed of. But she wasn’t. There was nothing wrong with fishing; hunting, catching and letting go.

  As they entered yet another shed, the sun poking holes through the tin, allowing dust motes to dance in the brilliant bursts of energy, she asked him what he knew about the town.

  ‘Dead goldmining town. A few good shoots but mostly famous for the mine collapse in 1921. Killed around twenty people. Then another two in the riot against the mining company after. The gove
rnment even cordoned off a few houses, in case they sank into the collapsed mine.’

  To Emmaline it sounded a lot like what had happened in the family home. Had there been a collapse? Did that explain the roof and wall? Scaring them into leaving in a hurry? But why not collect their valuables? Why not get in contact?

  ‘There is, of course, also the legend that the town is cursed,’ said Rispoli.

  ‘Is that your official opinion?’ she asked as they left the shack.

  He smiled. ‘Soon it might be our only line of enquiry.’

  She smiled back but hoped it didn’t come to that. As a rule she steered away from superstition. Her mother was a superstitious woman, the house decorated with feathers and trinkets, abiding customs that her father obeyed in public and had always encouraged Emmaline to disobey in private.

  Indeed, the town itself seemed to exist in some kind of limbo, between what it had once been and vanishing back into dust. Her mother might even have relished the almost spiritual silence. It wasn’t on any map and there were no road signs directing traffic to it. The government had done everything it could to prevent anyone living here. But it was an easy edict to defy. Emmaline looked at the scrub beyond the town, sand dunes and gibber plains, a hard, closely packed surface of pebbles, populated by a few weary eucalyptus trees, mulga shrubs and deep-rooted spinifex grass all adapted to low rainfall and high temperatures. There was nothing but barren land, no government or police keeping watch. And nature abhorred a vacuum.

  * * *

  The first discovery was made by Anand, his energetic cries dragging the four of them behind a house with a roofless coal shed. There they found a quad bike with its tyres slashed. Petrol in the tank. In poor condition, the seat worn, the throttle grip and gear bar rubbed smooth from excessive use and sparkling in the sun, clean unlike the sandy, oily engine.

  As Barker issued a request for a check on its origin, a second, more significant discovery was made close by. A patch of reddened earth. Likely blood. In larger quantities than was found in the house. It reminded her of the aftermath of a western. A duel at high noon.

  It meant three things.

  That Forensics needed to be called. To test if the blood samples matched.

  That something had happened here. Something bad.

  And that, for a town that had been dead for forty years, a lot of blood had been recently spilled.

  12 Lorcan

  Dylan didn’t sleep the next night either, again complaining about rumbling. He had wanted to persuade Dylan that it was his imagination but even he felt it. Naiyana too. A rumble that seemed to come and go without rhyme or reason. He had even gone to check the generator a couple of times to make sure it wasn’t automatically switching on at night. Even though it lacked capacity to do so. Nee pushed him to find a reason for the unnerving phenomenon. There was only one explanation he could think of. A water source or aquifer beneath the town. Untapped for decades.

  The sleep Dylan failed to get at night was recovered during the day when the rumbles seemed to disappear, which was comforting for the child but less so for him and Nee, slaving all day to try and get the house in order.

  With continued dry weather he abandoned mending the roof to drive out to the uncapped well near Orange Lake. This would give him a good idea of the state of the water table. Plus, if he could draw water there it would save having to dig through a century of dirt and uncap the original well.

  Orange Lake was about five kilometres south of town, a faded wooden signpost signalling the way. Standing all on its own was a small tin shack. There was no lake. Just dry, scorched land stretching into the distance. Dragging open the door, light filtered through the rusted tin. Inside, a stone wall surrounded the well but it had cracked and partly collapsed down the hole it protected. Above it, the metal bucket attached to the pulley was cracked too, virtually useless for collecting liquid, but Lorcan dropped it anyway.

  He fed the rope slowly through his hands waiting for a distant, welcome splash. He wasn’t confident. The whole shack smelled bone dry, no hint of moisture in the air.

  After twenty torturous seconds there was a sound. The solid, dry clang of metal hitting rock. Raising the bucket slightly, he lowered it again, faster this time to allow for the bucket to bounce off the offending rock in case it was merely an obstruction. Still no splash. Just the clang of metal on rock. A third time confirmed the insult. The well was dry. Which meant they were currently stuck in the desert without water.

  NAIYANA

  With Lorcan gone and Dylan fast asleep, she continued to tidy and organize, sweeping each room twice using the small hand-held vacuum that they had packed to get into the corners, having to stop regularly to empty the container. It was frustrating in two ways. In having to vacuum, something she had never enjoyed and which she usually farmed out to Dylan for pocket-money, or Lorcan on the promise of sex, and in the feeling that she was fighting a losing battle.

  She was pleased with one thing. The mirror that her mother had passed down to her and which had been passed down from her own mother had survived the journey, wrapped in five layers of bubble wrap and tucked between her knees in the cab. She had never lived anywhere without it hung up. Her family watching over her. A giant eye to keep them safe. The nail on the kitchen wall held firm. Immediately the room felt brighter, more like home. More subconscious than physical. But Naiyana didn’t care. Any sliver of joy was something to cling to at the moment.

  13 Lorcan

  He pulled the horizontal shutters back and let the well breathe. Not that it had been exactly starved of oxygen given the multiple holes in the wood. Sand and dust had practically filled the old well. The cap would be somewhere underneath. How far underneath he didn’t know.

  The winch that would have perched on top like a metal sawhorse was long gone, so he reached down and stabbed a spade into the sand. It was loose, not compacted like he had feared. At the top at least. He started to dig, the sand collapsing in and around each spadeful. He continued his Sisyphean battle, his feet settling into the sand, swamping his trainers.

  Footsteps approached from behind him. In the shimmering haze, his wife and son approached.

  ‘If it isn’t the Irish Mario,’ she laughed.

  Lorcan looked down. He smiled too. From her perspective it would look like he was stuck halfway down a pipe trying to exit the level. If only disappearing was that easy.

  ‘Any water?’ she asked, glancing down the well.

  ‘I hope so. Orange Lake was a bust.’

  ‘How far down do you have to go?’

  He checked his progress. He had only removed a few inches of material.

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

  The look on her face suggested that she wasn’t keen on her survival relying on guesswork.

  ‘I’m taking the ute to town,’ she said. ‘See what they have, food-wise.’

  The nearest town, Hurton, was ten kilometres as the crow flew. But a crow didn’t have to deal with the treacherous dips, gullies, rises and scrubland of the outback. By road it was a thirty-kilometre round trip. And given the state of the tarmac, speed limits were unlikely to be broken.

  Lorcan nodded. ‘You taking Dylan?’

  ‘Wasn’t planning to. He can help you.’

  ‘I’ll let him wander around.’

  She gave him a hard look. ‘Don’t let him wander too much.’

  On cue, he watched his son poke his head into a half-collapsed shack across the road.

  ‘Dylan, stay out of there!’ he shouted, his voice carrying across the empty street.

  The boy turned, guilt smeared across his face, shuffling closer to them but gazing back at the shack. The childish temptation to explore was hard to resist. And it never truly left. Lorcan could attest to that. Moving out here was a chance for them all to explore. And renew.

  * * *

  Naiyana took the ute and left in a cloud of dust. He watched it fade into the cloud like a magic trick. He turned to instruct Dylan to
help him with the well but his son was lying in the shade at the front of the shack swooping his Matchbox cars through the sand, flicking them off a ramp. Lorcan left him to it and returned to the well.

  After thirty minutes, his sweaty shirt abandoned, he adjudged his progress. He was now four feet down, his hands choked further up the handle as the space became tighter, bucket after bucket of sand and dirt dumped over the side.

  Another hour and he was seven feet down and unable to see over the rim. It should have provided him some solace from the heat but noon had brought the sun nearly directly overhead, peering in at him. Looking up, the entrance seemed to narrow, the walls tightening as if closing in. A flick of panic sent his heart rate sky-rocketing. Suddenly it occurred to him that he was standing in a hole, on top of a cap that was over a hundred years old, in the desert with only his six-year-old son around to help. This wasn’t smart. ‘About as smart as trying to lose weight by chopping off your arm’, a phrase he had used many times to caution investors in his previous job. It was time to get out.

  He clambered out of the well into the sun. He felt like a mole, squinting in the bright light. Dylan was standing by the well looking agitated. As if he had sensed his father’s panic.

  ‘Given up on stunt racing?’ asked Lorcan, with a smile, riding the curious wave of joy at making it out alive. As if he had escaped death somehow.

  ‘I seen someone,’ said Dylan, his gaze fixed down the street in the direction of their house.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Lorcan.

  At this Dylan grabbed his hand and pulled. Urgent. Insistent. Lorcan let him lead, his son’s short legs churning the sand.

  ‘Dylan, this isn’t one of your special friends, is it?’ Lorcan recalled Bennie and Ixsell, the pair of characters that his son had invented previously. Apparently a lot of only children did the same. For company. They had disappeared a year ago and Lorcan had to admit he was glad when they had left. He didn’t need his kid to be a fantasist. Not out here.