by Anna Romer
A motor rumbled to life, pulling me back to the present. The coach doors hissed shut and the huge vehicle left the kerb and heaved out onto the road. Scanning the windows, I saw only a blur of unfamiliar faces.
Then, as the coach navigated the corner, I glimpsed her at the rear window, she and Jade together, their faces pushed near the glass. Both of them looking at me, trying to get my attention, waving furiously.
A moment later, the coach rumbled off around the corner, leaving behind nothing but a puff of thin black exhaust.
The house was empty without her. The rooms were full of echoes, the shadows restless. I caught myself hovering at the window, watching the dark trees along the service road. Or going into her room, folding and refolding the clothes she’d left scattered in her rush to pack for camp. Or trying to calculate what she was doing, right now, this red hot minute.
Whatever it was, I knew it didn’t involve worrying about me.
I went out to my studio at the back of the house and browsed through some recent photos, then decided that moping around was getting me nowhere.
So instead, I went in search of Glenda.
I climbed the hill, picking my way along the path that wound up through the pomegranates and monsterio, up to the clearing where the hollow beechwood tree grew. Moonlight washed the old beech in silver, illuminating its bark, making the branches glow white against the black velvet sky. Around it, the bush was an inky scrim of shadows.
Despite the moon’s far-reaching radiance and my focused cone of torchlight, it took me an hour to find what I’d come looking for. Beneath the overhanging boughs of a collapsed tea-tree, I found the remains of an old haversack. It was sodden and disintegrated, empty of anything except a couple of worms and a wolf spider.
For a while I fossicked in the bushes, training my torch under ferns and grassy clumps, wandering uphill then backtracking to lower ground, all the while keeping the gnarly old beech central to my search. After twenty minutes, my flashlight beam struck a soft glimmer of colour.
The hairbrush was plastic, its translucent pink body cracked and whitened by age. Most of its bristles had fallen away – a few remained, though, and I trained my light up close and searched for a strand of ash-blonde hair. Of course there were none, so I stowed the brush in the grocery bag I’d brought and continued looking. Soon I’d collected scraps of clothing, various articles of makeup, toiletries, a wallet, and the remains of a book riddled with slaters.
On my way back, I paused at the tree. Its white bark seemed to breathe in the darkness. The burnt-out trunk looked sinister. Shadows scattered in the probing cone of my flashlight beam, then re-formed into the outline of a man’s skinny frame, assembling and fleshing out until I could see him with full clarity: Hobe Miller balanced there on a trembling bough, reaching into the fork between two branches, his arm sunk to the elbow as he groped around for what was no longer hidden there. Letters or a diary, it didn’t matter which. What bothered me most was that he’d known exactly where to look.
I hugged my grocery bag and stared into the darkness.
The gully was thirty minutes from here. On the northern boundary of the property, back in the direction of town. Well known for being dangerous – rockslides, earth collapses, cave-ins.
And murder.
Fear ran light fingers across my skin. Fear . . . and the overwhelming urge to see this gully, to wander among its shadows and lofty trees and sprays of sunlight, to absorb its particular atmosphere for myself. Not with the intention of finding anything, but to get a sense of the place where Glenda – and her grandmother forty years before her – had lived out the final moments of their young lives.
18
The following morning I set out early.
By the time I reached the top of the first hill I was puffing, my skin flushed with sweat, my hair damp beneath Bronwyn’s old sunhat. The battered Minolta I kept for field trips and photographic note-taking was slung over my shoulder along with my satchel and waterflask, bumping me as I walked.
Pausing to look back the way I’d come, I could just make out the homestead’s roof gleaming through the ironbarks, and the deeper green of its garden surrounds. It was a glorious day, the sky faded denim, the air tangy with the scent of leaf litter and wildflowers. Lorikeets flashed green and crimson as they swooped from tree to tree, their squeaky chatter disrupting the stillness. As I passed beneath a giant ghost gum, a flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos lifted and flew into the sky, shrieking like devils.
It felt good to be surrounded by nothing but thickets of tea-tree and black-trunked wattles and lofty red gums. There was no one else for miles, I could have been the lone survivor of an apocalypse, the last soul on earth adrift in the golden morning. I had to keep reminding myself that Tony and Glenda had walked this way countless times as kids, a shortcut from William Road to their grandfather’s house; this lonely track had probably once rung with their calls and shouts and laughter.
Glenda had also come this way the night she died, upset after discovering the letters in her father’s shed, impatient to see Ross. Only Ross hadn’t showed, and Glenda had rushed from her hiding place to meet – not Ross, as she’d been expecting – but someone else.
I shivered and picked up my pace.
Ten minutes later, the trail veered downhill. Once or twice it vanished into an erosion gully, and I was forced to crab-walk down the steep embankments on my hands and bottom until I reconnected at the other side. I passed several cone-shaped anthills erupting from the earth like red boils. Further down, the landscape grew lush and wild. I was certain I could hear the faraway tinkling of bells. I stopped to listen, then decided it must be the sound of flowing water. Taking out the aerial shot given to me by Tony’s lawyer, I studied it, identifying what landmarks I could, and surmised I was close to the gully.
Following the watery babble, I pushed through a dense understorey of ferns and wonga vines. The treetops now formed a canopy, their dense mosaic of leaves cutting the sunlight to ribbons. The shadows underfoot were black, and rank with new smells: decaying vegetation and wet wood. Here and there wild orchids and bluebells thrust their jewel-coloured heads above the grey-green foliage, tiny embers of exquisite purple, pink, crimson, indigo.
Then, more chiming bells. I gazed up into the trees, but there was no sign of any birds. As I wandered deeper, the calls became more frequent. Soon I was surrounded by a melodic chiming. Bellbirds, I realised. Their fluty chirps and trills seemed to echo from all directions, as if the sky itself was singing.
Walking on, I came to a small clearing. At its very centre stood a lofty boulder. The boulder was taller than me and shaped like a shark’s fin. Its grey elephant-hide surface was decorated with frills of lichen and moss. One flat face was turned to the sun, the other thrown into gloom, and the shadow it cast on the leaf-littered ground was damp and tombstone-like.
As I went nearer, I had the bewildering sensation that I’d been here before, a long time ago. Impossible. And yet I could see it as though in memory. The clearing had been darker then, more overgrown, the trees so thick they formed an unbroken canopy overhead. It had been night-time, and the wind had sobbed as it threaded through the leaves. No, stop, it cried, Please stop –
I shook my head to clear it.
Streamers of light fluttered through the leaf canopy, chasing the deep gloom from between the rigid, black-trunked ironbarks. Sunbeams picked along the spines of lacy ferns, turning them brilliant lime-green beneath the ghostly white trunks of imposing river gums. A cathedral, I thought. A sacred place which must have been of great significance to the land’s indigenous custodians.
Standing in this enchanted, timeless clearing, I felt cradled by the soft light, swaddled in the cool green glow, embraced by the giddy chiming-song of the bellbirds. I was a shadow among a million other shadows, existing in perfect alignment, tapping into the greater flow.
So why did being here make me uneasy?
Crossing the clearing, I went to the edge of the
gully and peered over. The embankment walls were steep, eroded by cave-ins. Trees grew at right angles up the sidings, their new shoots seeking the light. Boulders thrust from the soil like half-buried skulls. Here and there were fallen trees, their roots jutting skywards, their trunks making gangways over the gaping nothingness.
One wrong step . . .
Walking back to the fin-shaped stone, I sat in its cool shadow and took out my flask. The water was sweet and delicious on my parched throat, but it sat heavily in my belly. The air was humid, the heat made me languid. Leaning back, I shut my eyes and breathed out the tension. Felt myself slip into the past.
It was dark, so dark.
No longer morning. Something was wrong. My limbs were skewed beneath me. My skin burned, but my bones were made of ice. If I cracked open my lids I could just make out, through a haze of red, the tracery of moonlight in the treetops. Bats chirped and insects droned, the wind murmured in the branches. From below me in the gully came the pounding of the creek, a liquid heartbeat that drew the other sounds into itself and slowed them down until nothing remained but the sound of someone sobbing –
I snapped to my senses. My pulse raced as I got to my feet. These recurring half-dreams were becoming more intense, feeling more real. I knew the dreams were related to Aylish – I could feel her presence rubbing against my mind like a hungry cat, pressing me to take notice – and yet I was unable to pinpoint any order or meaning. Just that the tone of the visions was fearful, maybe cautionary, as though Aylish was – from whatever realm she now inhabited – trying to warn me.
Stowing my flask back in my bag, I moved away from the stone. The darkness of a moment before was gone; the clearing had returned to daylight. The eerie throbbing of the creek had subsided – yet still, all was not right.
The gully was almost otherworldly in its beauty . . . and yet I couldn’t wait to be away from it. Two young women had died here, forty years apart; one brutally bashed, the other with similar injuries attributed to a fatal fall. That the two women were related to one another by family ties – grandmother and granddaughter – hadn’t escaped me. Was it an unfortunate coincidence, or had more sinister forces been at work?
The bellbirds had fallen silent. The clearing seemed to be holding its breath. Even the sunlight dappling the leaves appeared frozen. I was no longer a part of the whole. Rather, I was aware of my isolation. Shut in by trees, miles from home. No one knew I was here. No one. Worry started to twist and churn in me. What if something happened to me here? What if I died? Bronwyn would be alone, an orphan; abandoned the way my own mother had abandoned me.
I’d been wrong to come here. The gully offered no answers, no revelations about the past, just shadows and dampness and mystery, and the mesmerising babble of a creek, trickling from its underground source, lapping into shallows that had once run red with blood.
Retracing my steps, I hurried back the way I’d come, leaving the clearing and reconnecting with the meandering dirt trail that led uphill and back to Thornwood . . . or so I thought. A few minutes passed before I realised my mistake. The gully had sunk from view behind me, hidden by an awning of tall eucalypt crowns draped in parasitic vines. Through a gap in the trees further down, I glimpsed the rounded peak of the fin-shaped stone. The lichen freckling its smooth surface glowed green and black and lavender-grey in the blotchy sunlight. It was a breathtaking sight, but I couldn’t recall seeing it on my way in.
Which meant that I’d entered the clearing via a different track.
I looked down the slope in dismay. There was no way I was going to retrace my steps, go back through the gully clearing. I flashed on the creepy feeling I’d experienced near the stone, the dark dreamlike glimpses that had so unnerved me.
Better to keep going, I decided. Sooner or later I’d stumble upon the right trail; for now, all that mattered was putting distance between myself and the haunted shadows of the gully.
I continued uphill.
The stillness grew until it was dizzying – at one point I imagined I heard the muffled barking of a dog – but otherwise there was just the soft crack of leaf debris beneath my trail boots, the raspy tempo of my breath, and the eerie ever-present chiming of the bellbirds.
Twenty minutes later I stood at the edge of another, larger clearing surrounded by groves of lanky ironbark trees. Sunlight cascaded across the open expanse, turning the carpet of native grasses to silver.
At the far side of the clearing, sheltered beneath a stand of red gums, sat a little shack. It looked very old, its weathered walls and shingled roof all cut from the black ironbark that grew nearby. Along the front of the rickety verandah grew pink hippeastrums, gnarled lavender bushes, even a rambling rose bush with huge crimson blooms – a forgotten cottage garden in the midst of wild and lonely bushland. I guessed it was the hut Corey had told me about, the one built by the original settlers in the 1870s.
Despite its age and remoteness, the hut looked to be in sound condition. The narrow verandah appeared to teeter, but the palings were intact and the steps leading up to it looked sound. There was even a battered old cane chair propped at one end. The roof shingles were age-blackened, though some looked lighter in colour, more roughly hewn – as though they’d been recently replaced.
Approaching, I saw the door was ajar.
Standing at the foot of the steps, I was able to look up through the door and into the hut’s interior. It was cool and dark and inviting, crammed with furniture and belongings.
As if someone was living there.
‘Hello . . . ?’ I called. My voice echoed in the stillness, and I felt silly. Of course no one lived here. The place was too remote, too isolated. There was no road, no electricity, no running water, nothing that even resembled a telephone line. Why would anyone bother? Besides, I reminded myself, it was on Thornwood land. If anyone was living here, I’d have known about it . . . wouldn’t I?
The door creaked as I pushed it open. ‘Anyone home?’
I half-expected to see Corey’s ghostly woman standing at the window, but there was no one there. The place was small and shabbily furnished, darker than a tomb. A single bed jutted from the opposite wall, its ragged army blanket moth-eaten but clean, its stained pillow plumped just so. At the bedside was an upended wood crate, topped with a thick candle in a jar and a new-looking box of matches. I went to the bedside, pinched the candlewick. Brittle, freshly burnt.
The other furniture was dilapidated and old, but tidily arrayed. A deep shelf was stacked with ammunition tins – each one labelled in small white block lettering: powdered milk, matches, pencils, tea, flour, candles, rope. A camp table and chair were crowded under a small glassless window. Next to the table was an ancient meat safe with mesh sidings. I peered inside. Enamel dishes and cups, a jar of jam that looked older than I was, and a lump of mouldy bread.
Crossing to the window, I peered through and saw a corrugated iron water tank tucked against the house. Nearby sat a forty-four-gallon drum with an iron grate fitted over the top as a makeshift cooker. Next to it, another drum full of kindling. Someone’s idea of a bush kitchen, I supposed.
A noise behind me.
I turned, but it was just a leaf scraping through the door. The breeze that carried it in smelled of sunlight and wildflowers – a fresh contrast to the musty, unwashed atmosphere of the hut.
As my pulse recalibrated, I took stock. The matches, the tins of provisions, the neatly made bed; the repairs to the roof and water tank, the fusty odour that was – the more I breathed it – clearly not the smell of nesting possums.
The hut was inhabited.
I tried to remember if Tony’s lawyer had said anything about the settlers’ hut being tenanted, but felt certain she hadn’t. Which meant I had a squatter. I had no way of knowing how long they’d been here, but it looked like a long time. I turned to leave, my mind already mapping out the procedure for having them served with an eviction notice. First step, notify the cops. Then write to local council to apply for an unlawf
ul tenant eviction form. When I’d lived my nomadic life with Aunt Morag, we’d had our fair share of eviction notices served us; it felt weird to have the shoe on the other foot for a change. But there was no other option; Bronwyn and I were living less than a mile away . . . it was too creepy to have an unknown element in our backyard.
I was halfway to the door when I saw, in a shadowy corner, the antique tallboy. Its carved detailing was chipped and flaking away, one of its fretwork panels hung loose. I turned the key, rattled open the door.
On the top shelf was what appeared to be a crude shrine. A collection of tiny porcelain doll heads was arranged in a semicircle; they were old, their prim Victorian faces chipped and discoloured as if they’d been dug from the ground. In the centre of the circle was a carved wooden box, and on the box sat a tarnished picture frame displaying a black and white photograph.
I picked up the frame and tilted it into the light. It was an informal portrait of a young woman leaning against a tree. Sunlight cascaded around her, and she was smiling, the joy clear in her lovely features. The photo was dim and patchy with silver marks where the developer had succumbed to age – but the uncommon beauty of its subject was clear. Her windswept hair was long and thick, her face a perfect oval, her eyes dark almonds. A 1940s-style dress hugged her willowy figure.
I wondered who she was, and why her image had been trapped here, in this gloomy cupboard in the middle of nowhere. I wanted to rescue her. To slip her picture in my satchel and take her back out into the sun. The hut was on my land, I reasoned. The squatter had no right to be here without my consent. Which surely meant the dwelling and all its contents rightly belonged to me.
I ran a possessive finger along the side of the picture frame. What was it about these old portraits, why was I so drawn to them? Not all of them, I amended. Just this one. And the one of Samuel at home . . .