by Trent Dalton
‘My dad told me never to walk up Candlelight Creek,’ Molly replies.
‘Why?’
‘He said it’s very dangerous.’
‘What makes it so dangerous? What’s up there?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Whaddya mean you don’t know?’
‘Dad never told me.’
‘Why not?’
‘I was never supposed to go up there so why would he tell me what’s up there?’
Molly stands and grips Bert the shovel tight as she slides down a steep mossy embankment connected to the side of the bridge which leads to a path running adjacent to Candlelight Creek.
‘Maybe we should respect your father’s wishes,’ Greta says, standing nervously at the top of the embankment.
‘Silver road’s the only way to your gold,’ Molly says. ‘And wherever that gold is, I reckon Longcoat Bob won’t be too far from it.’
Greta stares deep into the tunnel of foliage, her bones tingling.
‘You got any candles?’ she asks.
*
The deep country creaks and moans. Soon the gravedigger girl and the actress are so far up Candlelight Creek they can no longer see where the creek begins or ends. The water is clear, but there’s so little light under the archway foliage that the creek looks black and glassy. The thick monsoon vine forest lining the creek narrows and encloses to a kind of natural and suffocating tube of wild growth, only ten feet wide in some parts. Their feet stepping and sliding over moss-covered bank boulders lining the water. The relentless ear scratch of cicadas. The smell of mud and earth and mangrove.
Greta’s foot slips on the slimy buttress root of a blush satinash tree and her increasingly damaged saddle shoes land in the shallow left edge of the creek. Gripping the handle end of Bert the shovel, which Molly extends to her, she pulls herself back out.
‘Why d’you want to find this Longcoat Bob so bad, anyway?’ Greta asks.
Molly pauses to think on this. ‘I’m gonna ask him to lift the curse,’ she says.
Greta takes a moment to get her breath. ‘You know, Molly, there’s such a thing as rotten luck and it’s a fact of life that it lands on some people more regularly than others.’ Another deep breath.
Molly nods. ‘I know.’
‘Do you think we should talk about what happened to your dad back there?’
Molly turns, looks back up the creek. ‘Nah, I don’t think we need to talk about that.’
She moves on. Thick jungle now. A closed canopy of palms and ferns and wild weed. Strangler figs germinating in the forks of trees, their aerial roots wrapping round their life-giving hosts and slowly killing them. Vines and climbers merging and turning into suffocating monsters in the dark that seem to whisper to each other. Molly can hear them, talking about the gravedigger girl and all she has seen in her short life and why she’s come so deep into Candlelight Creek, and about her troubled father, the good man and the bad man all at once, wedged into the fork of a tree, his leg blown off and resting by a thunderbox. Poor little gravedigger girl.
‘Ya reckon Uncle Aubrey is still alive?’ Molly asks.
Greta pushing along the creek edge, her hands pulling a spiky fern frond away from her face. ‘I fear it’s gonna take more than a world war to finish off your uncle.’
‘Stop,’ Molly says.
‘What?’
Molly frozen stiff. ‘Stop moving,’ she whispers. She stares up along the creek. ‘See up there. Eyes in the water.’
Greta leans forward to peer further up the creek. She mistakes it for a log at first. Then two milky white eyes blink in the glassy water.
‘Shit,’ Greta says.
The eyes disappear beneath the water and then the eyes reappear, breaking the water closer to Molly and Greta on the creek edge.
‘Crocodile,’ Molly whispers. She can see the creature’s body clearly now. Almost twelve feet in length, half of that being its tail. Green-brown scales that shimmer in the water, colours blending like the insides of gemstones; a skin as ancient and earth-born as the old rocks she finds deep beneath Hollow Wood Cemetery. A long snout and a thick jaw and rows of bloodstained, conical teeth – teeth for biting into lizards and bats and rats and wallabies and gravedigger girls who step too far out of Darwin. Then a second pair of milky white eyes emerges behind the lead crocodile and then a third pair of eyes emerges beside the second one.
‘You see them?’ Greta asks nervously. ‘We need to go back, Molly.’
‘Wait,’ Molly says. ‘They’re freshies. Freshwater crocs aren’t like saltwater crocs. They don’t attack like salties. Freshies are more …’ – she searches for the right word – ‘graceful.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Greta replies. ‘Graceful? For fuck’s sake, let’s go.’
‘Sam says he talks to these fellers,’ Molly says.
The lead crocodile inflates its body. A warning sign: go back where you came from.
‘This is Longcoat Bob doing this,’ Molly says. ‘He sent these fellers to scare us. He doesn’t want us comin’ any further.’
‘Mol’, I’m afraid you’re talkin’ bullshit now, kid,’ Greta says. ‘Let’s go back.’
‘I’m not talkin’ bullshit,’ Molly says. ‘Didn’t you wonder why all them water buffalo were charging at us like that? Bob sent them for us, too.’
‘They were scared of something and they were running from it,’ Greta says. ‘That’s the natural response, you see, Molly, when you’re scared of something, like, oh, I don’t know, say, seeing three adult crocodiles halfway up black-arse Candlelight fucking Creek! Let’s go now, Molly.’
‘I’m not going back,’ Molly says. ‘That’s what Longcoat Bob wants. He wants us to scramble at the first sniff of trouble. Nup. Not me. Sorry, Bob.’
The crocodiles swim closer, their slender bodies snaking stealthily through the water. Molly grips Bert the shovel. Then she talks to the crocodiles. ‘My name’s Molly Hook and this is Greta Maze,’ she says. The three crocodiles pause in the water, all eyes on the humans. ‘Greta’s a gifted actress who’s gonna make it to Hollywood one day. I’m just a girl from Darwin and I’ve come up here lookin’ for Longcoat Bob.’ Molly waits for a response from the crocodiles but they say nothing. ‘The Japs bombed Darwin all to hell.’ She breathes deep, thinks of something else to say. ‘They blew my dad to bits. I found him in a tree. That bomb must have lifted him right up off the ground.’
Greta moves closer to Molly now. She rests a hand on the girl’s shoulder.
‘My dad was all right. He had his problems but he still loved me. He did.’ And Molly wants to cry in front of these crocodiles. And maybe this is what people mean when they talk about crocodile tears: what you shed when you talk to crocodiles about your dead dad. Cry, Molly, cry. They’ll let you pass if you cry for them. Cry, Molly, cry. But she can’t. And she tilts her head up to find the sky but there’s no sky to be seen this far up Candlelight Creek.
‘So I’m gonna go ask Longcoat Bob if he could stop all the bad things that keep happenin’ to me,’ Molly says. ‘And if you fellers could just sit right there and let us pass we’ll walk on up this creek and we’ll thank you for your grace.’
Molly waits for a response. The crocodiles lie still and Molly nods her head confidently. She fixes the strap on her duffel bag, pulls it tight over her shoulder. She grips Bert the shovel in both hands like a spear and she walks on along the creek edge.
‘Follow me, now,’ Molly whispers to Greta under her breath. Greta watches Molly walk innocently, almost casually, past the crocodiles and she follows hurriedly in her footsteps. Her eyes can’t help but turn to the trio of toothy creatures, who remain deathly still as their eyes – three sets of cold and ghostly and milky eyes with dark coin-slot pupils – follow every last movement of the actress’s clumsy course across the slippery ancient rocks that line their creek home.
Greta moves so fast that she eventually overtakes Molly. ‘Faster,’ Greta says. ‘Faster.’
&nbs
p; *
Forty more minutes of walking and the creek bends away to the right and Greta can see a patch of grey light at the end of the tunnel. ‘C’mon,’ she says. ‘We’re almost out.’
She hurries along the creek bank, her movements more assured now. Greta in a summer satin dress, emerald-coloured, which shimmers when it finally finds the light of a clearing that extends from the end of the suffocating tunnel to a vast freshwater floodplain covered in pink and red lotus lily flowers that stand tall out of submerged rootstocks connected to smooth, green, rounded leaves so wide and flat they look to Molly like circular steps she could walk on to make her way across the deepest wetland pools.
‘Look at this place!’ Greta screams. The actress starts to run and she breathes the wetland air deep into her lungs and she raises her arms to the sun. To her left is a billabong of vivid water lilies like something from her wildest twilight dreams, perfect suns of gold rising from the centre of each purple flower. To her right is a field of white snowflake lilies, their showy flowers like ostrich feathers made of the desiccated coconut flakes in which she rolls her freshly iced lamingtons on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
‘What is this place?’ Greta hollers back to Molly.
And Molly screams back to the actress in delight, ‘It’s Australia.’
They walk on for a few miles, their shoes sloshing through thick green grass that grows from water that in places reaches up to Molly’s kneecaps. It is at least cooling. Greta cups three handfuls and splashes them across her face. At a small build-up of water in a circle of spear grass, Molly kneels down with her grandfather’s prospector’s pan and washes away the hard cemetery earth that masks the mysterious etchings on its battered underside.
Greta stands at Molly’s shoulder, drinking from the water bag. Molly studies the pan. It’s smaller than she remembers it being. She runs her fingers over the etched words her grandfather wrote to himself and maybe, just maybe, to his daughter and his daughter’s daughter.
T he longer I stand, the shorter I grow
And the water runs to the silver road
Molly’s dirt-caked forefinger traces the carefully drawn line that meanders down the circular base, taking occasional lefts and rights, to a second set of words.
West where the yellow fork man leads
East in the dark when the wood bleeds
The line is like a road and the sets of words are like rest stops along that road.
‘This pan was a gift to me when I was seven years old,’ Molly says. ‘My mum called it a sky gift. She said there are gifts that are always falling from the sky. This was one of the gifts that fell from the sky just for me, Greta. I looked up at the sky and when I looked down again my mum had disappeared into the bush and I never saw her again. Then I turned around and this pan was lying at my feet. I reckon she wanted me to have it, but I don’t know why she wanted me to have it.’
‘Maybe she wanted you to go find that gold for yourself,’ Greta says. ‘Maybe this pan is your inheritance. She wanted to give you something before …’ Greta doesn’t finish that sentence.
‘Before what?’ Molly asks.
‘Before she had to go away.’
Molly scratches at the pan, soaks it in the water again, scrubs it with her fingers.
‘I think she wanted me to find Longcoat Bob,’ Molly says.
She soaks the pan again, and a third set of words reveals itself in the afternoon light.
City of stone ’tween heaven and earth
The place beyond your place of birth
Greta kneels down beside Molly for a closer look.
‘“The place beyond your place of birth”,’ Greta considers. She dwells on this for a moment. ‘Where was your grandfather born?’
‘He was born in Halls Creek, across the border in Western Australia,’ Molly says.
‘Where were you born?’ Greta asks.
‘I think I was born in Darwin Hospital like my mum,’ Molly says.
‘You got any idea what he’s on about?’
‘Not yet,’ Molly replies. ‘We haven’t gone deep enough yet to find out.’
She soaks the pan again, scrubs at the bottom of the base and holds the pan up to the light once more. Her forefinger runs along more newly revealed words and the mystery of them sends a shiver down her twelve-year-old spine.
Own all you carry, carry all you own
Step inside your heart of stone
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Greta asks.
‘That’s what Longcoat Bob said he was going to do with his curse,’ Molly says. ‘He said he would turn our true hearts to stone.’ Molly thinks of the blood-red rock she’s carrying inside her duffel bag.
‘But how do you step inside a heart of stone?’ Greta asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Molly says. ‘Maybe we’ll only know when we know. We have to follow the path. One step at a time.’
She traces the map line with her fingernail. ‘When we find the silver road we follow this line going down here. And we look for things. I reckon my grandfather saw things like I see things sometimes. Maybe I’ll be able to see what he saw when I see those same things.’
Greta raises her eyebrows, takes another swig of water. ‘So what do you see now, Molly?’
Molly’s eyes follow the thin stretch of what’s left of Candlelight Creek, which snakes through the wetlands towards what appear to be, a mile or maybe two in the distance, two towering red sandstone plateaus split by a deep and miraculous canyon.
‘The water runs to the silver road,’ Molly says. ‘We follow the water to that range. The silver road is in there somewhere.’
Then she turns her head to the sun. ‘But we’d best get there before dark.’ And she keeps staring in the direction of that sun because she can see a flash of silver in the sky beneath it. She puts a palm to the top of her forehead and looks harder at the silver flash.
‘A plane,’ Molly says.
Greta turns her head to where Molly is looking. The silver plane moves closer. They can hear its engine now, the relentless buzz of its front propeller. Molly can tell how light and agile the plane is by the way it bobs and shudders in air pockets, but otherwise it maintains a steady course that she comes to realise is leading it straight towards them. Greta stands, confused, eyes up to the sky as the plane flies over her head. Then she sees the red circles. The red rising-sun circles of paint on the underside edges of the plane’s sparkling metal wings. A Japanese fighter plane. All this way from Japan via Pearl Harbor and the Darwin central business district. All that blue sky and the hornet buzz of the metal fighter cutting through it.
‘It’s a Jap,’ Greta says. ‘But what’s he doing all the way out here?’ The fighter zooms high over Greta’s head and banks hard left and circles back around to where it came from and Molly and Greta turn in a circle in the sloshy floodplain grass without taking their eyes off the plane.
‘What’s he doing?’ Molly asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Greta says.
The fighter comes lower this time. It halves its speed and it circles Greta and Molly.
‘Should we run for it?’ Molly asks.
Greta scans the floodplain. No trees for shelter. There’s an ochre-coloured termite mound taller than her, but it must be at least a hundred yards from where she stands in the open wetland. ‘We’d be dead already if he wanted to kill us,’ she says.
She turns in another circle, following the fighter plane as it orbits the blonde actress in the shimmering emerald dress and the gravedigger girl in the sky-blue dress that she hopes to dance in one day with handsome Sam Greenway the buffalo hunter. The plane circles the girls once more and this time it comes in so close and low that Greta can see directly into the plane’s cockpit. The pilot is staring back at her. He leans hard left on his control stick, but his eyes don’t care for direction, they appear to care only for the actress whose saddle shoes are waterlogged in the wetland slush.
Greta can see the man clearly now. A hard jawline be
neath thick brown aviator goggles. A brown leather flight helmet, fur-lined, with its side flaps covering his ears. Then the engine seems to cut out and the plane appears to be gliding around her and there is no sound, only a metal flight machine floating on the breeze and the machinery of her heart beating fast beneath her chest. The pilot won’t stop staring at Greta and now, to Molly’s befuddlement, he raises his goggles to his forehead, and his Japanese face looks stunned-mullet puzzled by the actress. The silent plane looks to Molly like a bird, a grey brolga in the low sky with its big black wings outstretched, hovering effortlessly on an invisible wind.
Then the engine rattles back to life and the plane turns and roars back to where it came from, back towards the sun, before circling around once more, but higher now. It soars above Greta and Molly and their eyes turn up to watch it flying towards the two tall red sandstone plateaus.
And Greta and Molly watch the plane fly on its inexplicable course towards red rock and their feet begin to move involuntarily because they are drawn to the image of that silver arrow moving in the sky. But then they stop in their tracks when they see the white mushroom cloud of a parachute with a pilot attached to it falling from the fighter’s cockpit. The aircraft flies on as the parachute spirals down towards the floodplain. Beyond the parachuting pilot, the plane nose-dives in a great arc towards the plateaus and it must be moving at two hundred miles an hour or more when it meets a craggy outcrop of red rock and explodes into a brief ball of flame. Molly looks back to the pilot falling from the sky and her feet want to move faster now. These feet have their own instincts and she follows them.
‘Wait, Molly!’ Greta calls.
‘C’mon, Greta!’ Molly says, sprinting across the floodplain. ‘He wants to meet us.’
‘He’s a Jap, Molly,’ Greta says. ‘He’s our enemy, Molly! Stop!’
‘He’s not our enemy,’ Molly shouts behind her. ‘He’s our gift.’
*
Yukio Miki’s family shortsword tucked into his belt. His brown leather flight boots making circles in the air as the parachute plummets in a spiral to the ground. He can’t see anything on the ground that will help him plan a safe landing. Just long grass. Wetlands. Deep green and black pools of water. Purple flowers. Red flowers. His brown leather boots spin and the world spins with them.