The Dead of Night

by John Marsden

  "Everyone's strong in different ways. I didn't think Kevin was strong until he drove off with Corrie to the Hospital. You were so tough when we blew up the bridge."

  "I'm not strong with people though."

  "Do you still hate me for what I wrote about you and Homer?"

  "No! Of course not! It was just a shock when I read it, that's all. Your trouble is you're too honest, and that was the shock. You wrote down the things that most people think but never say. Or else, people write them in their diaries and never show anyone."

  "But you and Homer still haven't got it back together."

  "No, but I don't know if that was because of what you wrote. He's so difficult. Some days he's so loving and beautiful and other days he treats me like I don't exist. It's very frustrating."

  Seemed like I had a lot of significant conversations that day. Maybe it was the fact that we were on the move that got everyone talking suddenly. The last one was with Chris and that was even tougher than the one with Homer. I went down to the creek deliberately to find him, because I felt guilty about neglecting him lately. The more morose he became the more I avoided him. Everyone did. And I suppose that just made him worse. So Saint Ellie decided to fix things, and away she went, determined to do something good for once.

  I found him sitting on a rock looking at his left foot, which was bare. For a moment I couldn't see what he was looking at but then I saw this nasty black bulge on his skin, like a long ugly blood-blister. I looked at it, shuddered, looked again, and realised it was a leech. Chris was sitting there calmly, watching it grow fat on his blood.

  "Er, yuk," I said. "What are you doing that for?"

  He shrugged. "Passes the time." He didn't even look up.

  "No, seriously, why?"

  This time he didn't answer at all. For the whole time we were talking the leech stayed there, getting bigger and blacker. It made it hard to have a conversation. I couldn't take my eyes off it. But I tried.

  "Can you make sure you check for eggs behind that flat rock? Blossom's been laying there occasionally."

  Blossom was a rather depressed looking red hen who wasn't popular with the other chooks.

  "Sure."

  "So how are you going to spend the time while we're away?"

  "I dunno. I'll find things."

  "Chris, are you OK? Like, you seem so cut off these days. Do you hate us all or something? Is anything getting you down?"

  "No, no. I'm fine."

  "But we used to talk, we used to have these great conversations. How come we don't do that any more?"

  "I dunno. Nothing to talk about."

  "So much is happening. We're in the middle of the biggest thing that we'll ever see in our whole lives. So much is happening."

  He shrugged again, not lifting his eyes from the foul slug on his leg.

  "I'd love to see some more of your writing, your poetry."

  He gazed at the leech for a long time, but without answering. Finally he said, "Yeah, I liked what you said about the other ones." Then, as if he were talking to himself, he added, "Maybe I should. Maybe yes, maybe no."

  He turned and stretched out past me to get something from his jacket, which was lying on a rock. Mechanically I picked it up and handed it to him. As I did so I smelt again the stale sweet smell of alcohol on his breath. So he still did have a secret collection of grog somewhere. He pulled out a box of matches. He seemed to be ignoring me. I felt flat and dispirited. I'd been in a better mood after talking to Fi but that was lost again. I could hear Robyn veiling for me; our expedition was ready to move out.

  "Well, see you," I said to Chris, "in a couple of hours or a couple of days."

  He didn't even answer. I slouched off up the hill, grabbed my pack and headed for the point where the creek slid under the thick growth of bush, the route to the Hermit's cabin and beyond. Fi and Homer and Lee were already there; only Robyn had waited for me. I took off my boots and socks. We'd agreed on a compromise—to' wear boots and keep our socks dry—so I put the boots back on and followed the others into the cold water. Was this trip a good idea? I couldn't decide but I didn't care all that much. It was something to do, and if we were careful we couldn't come to much harm. Except for frostbite, I thought, as I felt the water trickle in around my toes. And leeches. I kept glancing down nervously to make sure they weren't making sneak attacks on me.

  We passed the little old cabin and kept going. We were in new territory now. It didn't take long to get quite uncomfortable. Bent over, slipping on rocks, getting pain up my legs from my freezing feet, I grunted and grumbled my way along. I kept trying to move the pack on my back into new positions, feeling more like a tortoise with every passing minute.

  "This is a tough way to earn a living," I said to Robyn's bum. She laughed. I think that's what she did, anyway.

  Turning her head a little she said back to me, "Hey El, do yabbies bite?"

  "Yeah, count your toes every time we stop. They're hungry little critters."

  "And dragonflies?"

  "Them too."

  "Bunyips?"

  "They're the worst of the lot."

  We had to duck even lower then as undergrowth pulled at our hair. It was the end of conversation for a while.

  We went on like that for a long time. Once I got into a routine it wasn't so bad. There's those first few minutes when you're sweating and in pain, then it becomes a kind of rhythm and you go with the flow. It's happening inside you and outside you, but the first intensity wears off," luckily. So I plodded along, following Robyn who was following Lee who was following Fi who was following Homer. Sometimes the creek widened and rippled over gravel, which was nice and easy; sometimes I slipped on smooth rocks or felt the pressure of sharp ones; sometimes we had to clamber around deep pools. In one place the creek flowed straight and dark for about eighty metres, with a sandy bottom, and we were able to walk along it with our heads up as though we were on a highway.

  I'd always thought of Hell as being a basin, a bowl, but I had no real evidence of that. From Tailor's Stitch the far side of Hell looked to be a ridge of rock and trees, a lot lower than Tailor's. It certainly gave the impression of forming one side of a basin, with Mt Turner the only really high point. But beyond that was the Holloway Valley/and the creek had to reach there somehow.

  We slogged away for two hours, losing height most of the time. I was wondering if I'd be able to stand straight again or if I'd be locked into this position forever, a hunchbacked monster from the bush. Suddenly I realised that Robyn's bum had swung around and was going away from me; in fact it was rising, leaving the creek. I glanced up from under my pack. Robyn was clambering out of the water to join the others, who were sprawled along the bank pulling off their boots, groaning as they tried to rub their legs back into life. We were in a clear length of bush for the first time since leaving our campsite. There were only a few metres of flat, but it was enough. There was even some warm sunlight to lie in; the thick canopy of trees was broken and we could see a clear pale blue sky.

  "Mmm, this is nice," Robyn said.

  "Thank God it was here," I said. "I couldn't have gone much further. That was one mother of a paddle. Whose idea was this anyway?"

  "Yours," came the four voices, on cue.

  I pulled off my saturated boots and looked around as I rubbed my feet and legs. The creek flowed on without us but it changed its tune a little further down. I could hear a wilder, louder, lonelier sound. And through the trees was more sunlight, a light blue background instead of a thick green and brown one. Walking like a hospital patient on her first day out of bed I hobbled along to the end of the clearing, followed by Homer. We went a few metres into the belt of trees, and stood, looking. There was the Holloway Valley.

  To a lot of people I suppose it wouldn't have been beautiful. It had been a dry summer and although the river flats were a soft green, the paddocks beyond Risdon had burnt off into the ochre sameness that seemed part of my life, part of me. The lush green of our springs and
early summers never lasted long. I was more used to that dry monotonous yellow; so used to it that at some stage it had soaked into me, till I wasn't sure if there were boundaries between me and the landscape any more. I remember Mr Kassar at school saying that he'd come home after living a year in England and his heart had ached with love when he saw the sunburnt plains again. I knew what he meant; boy did I know what he meant.

  Even the yellow wasn't all yellow of course. There were dark green dots of trees and lines of windbreaks, the flashing of galvanised-iron roofs like little square pools of water, the tanks and sheds and stockyards and dams, the endless boring fences. It was my country, even more than the bush and the mountains, and definitely more than the cities and towns. I felt at home in those hot, rustling paddocks.

  But between us and the valley were a line of cliffs and a lot of bush. We'd skirted around Mt Turner without even realising it, and it was now quite a way over to my left. Homer and I were standing at the brink of one of the lowest cliffs, where the creek trickled over the edge in a long thin stream, falling to rocks fifty metres below and then gurgling away into undergrowth again. The bush down there looked as thick as the stuff we had come through in Hell.

  "Lucky Kevin isn't here," Homer said, gazing down at it.

  "Eh? How do you work that out?"

  "Didn't you know? He's terrified of heights."

  "God! Is there anything that guy isn't afraid of? And he always acted so tough."

  "Mmm. Guess he came through in the end, but."

  "Guess he did."

  We went back to the others and told them what we'd seen. We left our packs and went for a walk along the cliffs, looking for a way down.

  "Short of bungy jumping..." Lee said, after ten minutes.

  "We've got to be able to get back up again," said Robyn, alwavs practical.

  The cliffs were fast becoming impassable in this direction, crowded by trees, breaking away in a few-places, and with some dangerously slippery sheets of rock. We gave up and tried the other way, passing the creek again and striking out across some more bare patches of shale. We found only one possibility: a tree which had fallen head-first down the cliff and died there. Its bare white skeleton now leaned against the wall of rock; branches like bones stuck out on all sides, a kind of natural stepladder.

  "Golly," said Fi in her grandmotherly voice as we stood there and gazed down at it.

  "No way," said Lee.

  "I don't see why not," Robyn said.

  "I don't have medical insurance," Lee said.

  "We should have brought some rope," Homer said.

  "We should have brought an escalator."

  "I think it's possible," I said. "If someone does it without their pack first, and if that works we can think about getting the packs down."

  They all looked at me as I said that, and they kept looking at me after I'd finished. I started to feel uncomfortable. "Whose idea was it we come on this trip?" Homer asked again. They kept looking at me. I sighed, and began to take my pack off. Was it my imagination, or did they press closely around me as they escorted me to the edge of the cliff? Seemed like I had the proverbial two chances of getting out of this: Buckley's and none. I got down on all fours and began sliding backwards over the edge.

  "Hang onto my hands," Homer said.

  "There's no point. If we can only get down here by holding onto people, then what does the last person do?"

  The top of the tree was about three metres below, but I thought I could reach it. The edge of the cliff was rounded, not sheer, and my biggest problems were the loose gravel and the need to connect my feet with the top of the tree. With a few instructions from Robyn, I lined myself up, then hung at full stretch for a few seconds. I needed to take a leap of faith. A slide of faith, anyway. I took a breath, swallowed, and let go. The slide only took a second but there was that horrible long thought that I might miss the tree and slide forever. I pressed myself into the gravel harder and scrabbled at the rockface with my fingers. Then my feet hit the broken trunk and almost immediately my legs were wrapping round it. I let myself slip a little further and hugged the old white wood with my arms as well, closing my eyes and resting my face against it.

  "Are you OK?" Robyn called.

  "Sure." I opened my eyes. "I'm just not thinking about getting back up again."

  I looked down, searching for a place to rest my feet. The spikes of wood were arranged neatly below me, all the way to the bottom. It seemed pretty straightforward. I put my left foot down to the first spike and rested my weight on it, straightening a little in relief. The branch immediately snapped. I hugged the tree again, as advice started pouring down on top of my head. "Keep your feet close to the trunk." "Don't put all your weight on one branch." "Test the branches first." They were sensible enough suggestions, but I could have figured them out for myself. I could feel the sweat starting to make my shirt sticky and my forehead hot; I gritted my teeth and searched for the next branch.

  By keeping my feet so close to the trunk that the soles of my boots were twisted against it, I made progress. Boots weren't ideal for this kind of work, but they were all I had. It took me five minutes, it felt like fifteen, but at last I was standing, wild with relief, at the base of the trunk, my back to the bush.

  "Come on," I yeiled.

  "What about the packs?"

  "Put the fragile things in your pockets, and chuck the packs down."

  And that's what they did. We didn't have many fragile items, torches, radio, a pair of binoculars. Then I had to dodge the falling packs. I'm sure they weren't aiming them at me. I'm quite sure they weren't. And I resisted the temptation to set fire to the trunk as they gingerly worked their way down it, one by one.

  "We'll have to pick up a bit of rope somewhere," Homer said, when we were all standing, a bit breathless, at the bottom. "From Risdon maybe. It'll help us get back up."

  There was no path through the bush, and the trees were packed tightly. It was going to be a grunt. We went over a ridge, found a bit of a gap along a line of rock, and followed that until it ran out. After that we just had to struggle on. It took us about an hour to travel a kilometre. "I'd rather be back in the creek," I said to Fi.

  And that's when we heard the voices.

  Eight

  Our first view of Harvey's Heroes was from a ridge of rock overlooking the camp. We'd snuck up on them so carefully that we could hear their voices clearly. It was such a relief that they were speaking in English. We lay there wide-eved, watching them and gazing at each other in amazement. A month earlier we would have gone in yelling and screaming and waving our arms, but now we were so cautious we would have looked a gift horse in the mouth, nose, ears and throat before we'd accept it. And then we'd ask for references.

  Still, there was no doubt that these people were fair dinkum. Some of them were in military uniform, there were rifles leaning against a large gum tree in the centre of the clearing, and the tents were camouflaged by fresh-cut branches. I could see at least twenty tents and in the few minutes that we watched we saw twenty different people, all adults, mostly men. They moved quietly around the camp. They had a relaxed air that I found attractive. My only worry was that their sentry system was so poor that we were able to spy on them without being caught.

  "Well," said Homer, "are we going in?"

  Lee started to rise but I pulled him back.

  "Wait," I said. "What are we going to tell them?"

  "What about?"

  "Well..." I hesitated. I wasn't sure what I meant, what impulse had caused me to ask that question. Finally I said the only thing I could think of. "Are we going to tell them about Hell?"

  "I don't know. Why not?"

  "I don't know. I just don't want to, for some reason. I want to keep it as our secret place."

  Homer paused. "I guess it wouldn't hurt to keep quiet about it. Till we find out more about these people, anyway."

  I had to be content with that. Homer stood, and we followed him. We walked forward about
ten metres before anyone noticed us. A man in jungle greens, carrying a shovel, came out of a tent, saw us, gaped in disbelief, then straightened up and gave a bird call. It was meant to be an imitation of a kookaburra but it wasn't very good. Nevertheless, it worked. Within seconds we were surrounded by men and women who came from every part of the camp. There were thirty or forty of them. Some of the women, to my astonishment, wore make-up. The unnerving thing though was that they were so subdued. A few of them patted us on the back, but most said nothing at all. They crowded us quite closely, close enough for us to smell their sweat and hair and breath. They didn't seem unfriendly, just wary, watchful. They seemed to be waiting for something.

  I spoke up. "Hello. We sure are glad to see you. We've been on our own a long time."

  A short tubby man came pushing through the crowd. He was about thirty-five, black-haired, puffy-faced, with his head held at a rather strange angle, slightly to one side, and leaning back a little. He had a large, sharp nose that gave his face a strong look. He was dressed in a dingy yellowish-green military uniform with tunic and tie but no hat. His tie was khaki, as was his shirt. The others shuffled back, making room for him. The man gazed at us for a moment, then focused on Homer.

  "Hello youngsters," he said. "Welcome to Harvey's Heroes. I'm Major Harvey."

  "Thanks," Homer said awkwardly. "It's fantastic to find you. We had no idea anyone would be here."

  "Well, come with me, and we'll have a chat."

  We still had our packs on our backs as we followed him through the camp. It was a clearing that wasn't a clearing, as there were so many gum trees that at times it was difficult to squeeze between them. Tents were placed in all kinds of odd corners. But compared to the thick bush around us it was a clearing.