Afterlight

by Rebecca Lim

  Claudia’s blue eyes narrowed dangerously. ‘If I find out one of you has been taking the piss, especially you…’ She pulled a fistful of my jumper close for a moment. ‘I’ll have you.’

  Then she stormed out of the toilet, not bothering to wait for her backup, who filed out in wordless confusion a second later. Which left Linda and me standing there—hot tears misting up the backs of Linda’s lenses, snot running down over her mouth and chin.

  I helped clean Linda up as much as I could, as much as I could bear to touch her. Even helped her dry her pink socks and skirt under the automatic dryer before I remembered I was seriously busting and locked myself in a cubicle. Linda had been so ashamed, or so grateful, that she hadn’t been able to string a complete sentence together and had beaten it as soon as the coast was clear. When I was finally alone, I exhaled, wondering what was around the corner, because something was coming like a freight train, it had to be.

  I knew who’d written that message.

  ‘You there?’ I said wearily, pants around my ankles, studying the ceiling as though Eve might be hiding up there, like the outline of the Virgin Mary. ‘You there?’

  I was at my desk that night, my back to the room, thinking about that strange look Jordan had given me, when I began to smell flowers.

  I didn’t turn immediately, crossing my arms to stop myself from shaking. ‘This has got to stop,’ I insisted in a low voice. ‘School’s hard enough without adding something like you to the mix. Haven’t I done enough?’

  But I could feel her just standing there behind me, waiting. Patient and inexorable as time.

  Turning away from my open laptop, finally, I got the same electric jolt I felt the other times I’d seen her. She looked so much like Mum it brought the sting of tears to my eyes.

  Impassive, unmoving, Eve showed me a rundown house called Hatherlea.

  That was it. Just an image of a sprawling Victorian weatherboard—with a prominent nameplate—that probably used to be a pretty, sunny yellow but was now just an all-over diseased grey. I saw an overgrown garden of long grass and sky-high feral roses, rusting ironwork on the verandah, no one moving in or around the house. There was junk mail frozen like a sodden waterfall coming out of a letterbox set into a low, red brick fence that had half toppled over into the garden behind it.

  ‘Thanks for nothing, Eve,’ I said fiercely after she flashed the image at me a couple more times for good measure. Same thing, same camera angles. ‘This is the last one, okay? After this, you leave me alone. You rest in peace and never come back.’

  By way of an answer, she just winked out like a light. Over to you, Storkie, she pretty much said.

  5

  How Eve found these people I was supposed to help was beyond me. Basket cases, most of them. People I wouldn’t even notice if she didn’t tell me they were there. There was definitely a pattern. The people Eve wanted me to find were all pretty badly, um, the nicest way to put it was…dented.

  Hatherlea. It was like the name of a house you’d find in one of those set texts for English. I never knew what those books were about and I never enjoyed them, and that pretty much summed up my search for that house and everything that came afterwards.

  I couldn’t sleep after Eve had shown me Hatherlea. Searching the internet at 4.21 in the morning for it didn’t improve my mood. Try Googling the word and see what comes up. A dentist, a guesthouse, an art gallery. A playwright, a porn star, a logistics manager. Hatter Lee, Heather Lee—every combination except the one I actually wanted. Pages and pages of bum steers. It was hopeless.

  By the time Gran was up and strapped firmly into her Dr Rey’s shapewear, I still had no clue where Eve wanted me to go or what I was supposed to do when I got there.

  ‘You okay, love?’ Gran asked over a heavily loaded ham, cheese and tomato toastie. She still couldn’t believe how she’d turned on the mid-morning news yesterday and seen grainy replay footage of me—shot on someone’s phone—saving some old codger’s life. He hadn’t been grateful. He’d called me all sorts of terrible names that were edited out of the news stories as the paramedics worked on his face. Hey, he’d had to land on something.

  The police had arrested the driver a couple of suburbs away. He’d probably had similar work done to his profile because, apparently, he’d resisted arrest in a big way. Pre-existing rap sheet longer than my arm. Eve had me mixing with interesting company.

  ‘My girl, the hero. Still don’t know what you were doing out there, but I’m glad you were. You did good, love.’ Gran gave me a quick, embarrassed squeeze and looked hard into my face, telling me I was looking peaky and could have the day off school if I needed it.

  Perfect. It was like Eve had set it all up.

  ‘If I wanted to find a house called Hatherlea,’ I asked Gran casually as she tipped leftovers out of the recyclables into a bucket and put some elbow grease into wiping down the scarred main bar, ‘how would I go about doing it?’

  ‘Now why’d you want to do that?’ Gran said, raising her eyebrows. Good question. Hadn’t thought it through before I opened my big mouth.

  I back-pedalled furiously. No one had twigged to the Crime Stoppers call I’d made with that kid’s mum yet, or connected it with me saving the old bastard on Sunday, but I didn’t want even Gran to know about Eve. It was all too hard to go into without sounding insane and she already watched me, like a hawk, when she thought I wasn’t looking.

  ‘History assignment,’ I babbled. ‘Important landmarks of early Melbourne. Since I’ve got the day off—cheers—I want to try and find it, maybe take some shots for my project, but I can’t remember the street name. Just the name of the house, silly me. It’s old. Very, very old.’ I held my breath, feeling dishonest.

  Gran’s face cleared. ‘Well, love,’ she said reaching under the countertop and feeling around. She pushed an old street directory across at me and sailed off to the kitchen to try and impose her will over Cook about the day’s menu. I knew she would lose, but hope sprang eternal with Gran.

  There was only one Hatherlea Street in the book. It had to be a good place to start since the name was so unusual. And a pretty expensive one to reach, too, once I figured out I’d have to hop a tram, a train and a bus to get to what might not even be the right place. But I had all day now. And there were worse things to do, I supposed, than trek all over town doing one final good deed for a genuine, paid-up member of the Undead. Who got to put that on their CV?

  I got off the bus someplace that had to be the farthest I’d ever travelled from home before on my own. Usually, I lived my whole life within walking distance of The Star. It was a real eye opener.

  Hatherlea Street was the absolute heart of darkness, the outer, outer north-eastern ’burbs, practically a different universe. It ran off a street that ran off the poor excuse for a main road I was standing on. I stopped into a milk bar for a fried dimmie to fortify my nerves, then I started properly looking.

  In the end, it was pretty easy to find. Almost like Eve had pre-planned the entire operation, which, in a sense, she had. Hatherlea—more an old homestead than a house—was on a massive block at least the size of three ordinary gardens knocked together. Turned out the street was named after the house, not the other way around, and if that house wasn�
��t already haunted up the wazoo before I set foot in it, I’d be laughing.

  In real life, in the harsh autumnal light, the house looked even worse than Eve had made out, if that was possible. Half the trees in the frontyard were actually dead and parts of the guttering hung down like a rusting sort of exotic creeper, a decorative feature that dovetailed nicely with the missing wooden floorboards in the return verandah. The roof was missing a few slate tiles and the cement walkways were badly buckled and overgrown with weeds. There were bedsheets hanging in most of the windows in place of curtains. Good housekeeping did not figure highly in the life of whoever owned this joint.

  No one could possibly be living here, I told myself, the last bit of the dimmie sticking in my throat.

  Trying to get a better handle on the problem, I walked up and down the street a couple of times. I swore a curtain twitched here and there but no one bailed me up to ask me what I was doing. Save for Hatherlea itself, it was a pretty ordinary street. Nineteen-seventies brown brick places mostly. Neat, neat gardens. Lace netting in the windows. Lots of roller guards. Probably all built on Hatherlea’s old grounds.

  It was almost 1pm. I’d been procrastinating for at least half an hour. The pointing finger of God had not appeared to tell me what to do. So I went in, finally, even though the house had trouble written all over it. I jumped the rusty front gate and walked up the buckling footpath to the front door.

  Of course there would be no doorbell. Just a heavy lion’s head doorknocker that had half rusted shut. I tapped that a couple of times, waited a polite interval, then started bashing the crap out of it. Still nothing. I was not going to get into Hatherlea by the official entrance, that much was obvious.

  I rounded the side of the house, skirting fallen tree branches, abandoned pet-food bowls, cracked coils of garden hose, a marble birdbath filled with evil smelling water—a muddy, browny-green, kind of like my eyes.

  At the back, the Victorian sash windows looked solid and impenetrable and welded shut. I didn’t fancy breaking in through one of those, figuring that the point of this exercise couldn’t possibly involve me and a stint in a juvenile detention centre. Eve couldn’t want that, I wouldn’t be any use to her in the lock-up. Still, really starting to sweat now, I told myself to just take a peek inside then call for backup. There was something about the whole set-up that had my skin crawling.

  Heading up a set of cement stairs, I noticed a screen door ajar and a pet flap built into the back door. Kneeling down, I pushed the flap in cautiously and the most disgusting odour I have ever detected in my life wafted back out of the darkness through the gap.

  It was piss and shit and worse, all rolled up. Like the toilets at the footy, or The Star after an international soccer final, except left to stew for days on end—no, years. I let the flap fall back and sat down hard on the top step, gasping for air.

  ‘What do you want me to do, Eve?’ I gagged. ‘Clean up? Jesus.’

  Part of me argued, pretty persuasively, that I should just call for backup now and get the hell out of there. And then what? It was never that simple. I wasn’t supposed to be there just to observe. That was Eve’s job. I was her hands, her body, her go-to girl.

  Shuddering, I stood up and tried the back door. And, bloody hell, it opened.

  I took a deep breath and entered what must have been the kitchen, where the smell was so bad that I had to take my jumper off and tie it around my face. There were plates of rotten food piled up high on the kitchen table, around the sink, cups full of swampy liquid, mould climbing the ends of the kitchen curtains, the fruit in the fruit bowl, piles of actual shit everywhere.

  As I tiptoed through to the hallway, trying hard not to touch anything, there was a sudden loud sound of scattering and I rocked back in fear until I figured it must be animals of some kind. Rats? Cats? I relaxed. They didn’t bother me so much—I’d encountered them often enough in the cellar at home. Maybe meeting Eve had toughened me up more than I knew.

  Weak sunlight filtered in through the bedsheets over the windows in the rooms that led off the hall. I could see some of the old furniture looked really beautiful, but the effect was spoilt by that overwhelming smell of shit and rot and worse that was cut through with a top note of… maybe something dead?

  A chill flashed across my skin. Maybe that was why I was here. I reached into my pack and gripped my mobile phone, ready to do the deed—whatever the hell it was—and run, run away.

  As I crossed into the front part of the house I saw it. The body of an old woman, surrounded by cats, more than a dozen of them, like a furry guard of honour. She was lying facedown on the carpet in the doorway of a front bedroom. It was piled high with old newspapers, magazines, boxed-up records, folded paper shopping bags in their thousands, an army of lined-up shoes and hatboxes, rolls of unused toilet paper in baskets. If there was a reason for it all, it escaped me. You could barely see the unmade double bed, like a lonely ship under cover of a knitted afghan blanket, bobbing in the midst of that sea of crap.

  I didn’t want to touch her, I thought she was long gone, that her cats were keeping her cold body company and I should just make my anonymous call to 000 and beat it. But as I got closer, the cats reared and spat as one, like a living wave, and I realised it was worse than that, they were beginning to eat her to stay alive: there was fresh, bright blood all over the back of the woman’s legs where they’d begun to gnaw.

  I am not ashamed to say that I untied the jumper from around my face and vomited.

  Time sped up after that. I beat the cats off, screaming like a hysterical banshee, and turned the woman over before calling an ambulance and wrenching the front door open for some air, any air—anything to replace the stinking fug inside the house. And I propped her up a bit, and talked to her, and covered her with that disgusting, hair-covered afghan blanket, all the while thinking she was already dead, and what was I doing here, what had Eve been thinking? Would the police think I’d done it? And before I knew it, a pair of them charged up the footpath towards me, fingers pointing, shouting, Hold it right there, young lady, we want a word with you, and even though I hadn’t done anything, the thought that I would go to jail froze me on the spot.

  Somehow, she was still alive. They told me later it was a cocktail of port and medication, old age and malnutrition, and if I’d waited even half an hour more the cats could’ve had her. It was that close.

  Turned out, the neighbours really had called the police when they’d spotted me skulking around the old lady’s place and I’d called emergency services, which equalled one big, fat circus when everyone arrived, sirens screaming. Hatherlea Street had never seen anything like it.

  Imagine Gran’s surprise when she turned on the Tuesday evening news. Some hard-nosed journo had even managed to dig up the Crime Stoppers call I’d made with that kid’s mum, which made me—for that day at least—bigger than, I dunno, Brangelina.

  6

  While I’d been wagging school to save the old woman—who turned out to be a reclusive, cat-collecting miser, with a fortune in gold bars buried in her back garden—word of the miracle that had happened in the girls’ toilets had filtered everywhere.

  Of course, even if I’d been at school I would have had no idea what people were saying about me because I never really know what’s going on. Like how skirt
s were suddenly short again this year and knee-highs were back, whereas last year all the girls I knew had been wearing long skirts and anklets, thin black Alice bands and yellow nail polish. When the wind changed and brought the scent of distant danger to the herd, I just never felt it.

  Anyway, Linda Jelly may have been the weakest link in the Ivy Street food chain, but even she had friends. In my absence, her friends had told their friends who told their friends that psychic Storkie Teague had somehow done it again—right on school grounds this time. She’d made spooky-arse writing appear on the wall and it’d scared the living crap out of the toughest bitches at Ivy Street High. Which meant that Claudia P. and her best mates were gunning for me, and the three of them grabbed me the moment I stepped back onto school property the morning after the Hatherlea incident and locked me in the gymnasium storeroom for a personal touch-up.

  The teachers at Ivy Street were deaf, dumb and blind, or they liked to see scientific principles, the law of the jungle, in action. Despite the fact I was screaming my head off, no one heard, saw or remembered me being bundled through the gym by the Gang of Three just before the bell rang. I was doomed.

  ‘How’d you do that?’ Claudia said pleasantly, referring to the message Eve had helpfully posted on the mirror. Like no time at all had passed, Sharys reattached herself to the nerves of my left elbow, and fear began to take wing through my body again like a trapped bird.

  Harmonica, or whatever she was called, moved into guard position in front of the door as Claudia commenced massaging a balled-up fist like a professional prizefighter readying to defend the heavyweight crown. I knew I’d be lucky if I left school today with the same face. But Claudia was smarter than that; she’d monstered more people than I’d had hot dinners. So she didn’t aim high, she just punched me in the guts, a quick one, two. I went down on all fours and rolled over, seeing purple and retching.