by Alison Evans
After I tried and failed video calling Jalen, I may or may not have thrown my phone across the van.
Twitter is loading but so slowly that I feel like I'm ageing at a rapid pace just watching my phone try and load the timeline. It's still sending a tweet from three minutes ago, so we're definitely in another black hole. It says I have reception, and yet here we are, watching that goddamn loading wheel spin and spin and spin and spin.
Christie pokes her head out of her doona cocoon, her hair sticking in every direction. When we're driving, the front two seats get the heater. The rest of the van, though, falls victim to the wind coming in from the skylight, even though we closed the cover, and it's fucking freezing. I'm wearing my coat that usually makes me start to boil if I wear it inside and I'm only just warm.
The music lets me know that we are the crazy kids. We are, we are.
"Do you know where we are?" Christie says, squinting in the sudden light. She yawns.
"Christie, were you sleeping under that?"
"Yeah, so?"
"You could have suffocated and died!"
I thought she was just using her phone or something under the doona, but she was sleeping? She could've been dead and I'd still be sitting here, occasionally kicking her foot by accident because I don't know how to contain my limbs. Dead friend and no internet: literally the worst possible situation.
"Calm down, Roslyn; I'm actually invincible," she says, closing her eyes and leaning her head against the window. "You worry too much."
"You better not be lying to me," I tell her. "How would I tell your dear ol' Ma that her sugar pie has ceased to be?"
She grins. "Fuck off."
"It would be hideously tragic."
Sam's mp3 player says that it has to kiss itself because it's so pretty.
@roslyn: finally, lyrics I can rlate to
And as I press send on that tweet, the error message comes up right away. No internet access. Never again. I'm going to die in this van. I lock my phone and shove it in my pocket, god fucking damn it.
Julie says something to us, and even though the front seats are only a metre away, it's incredibly hard to hear anything they're saying. We can hear the song lyrics fine, but this is mostly due to the fact that they're screaming.
"What?" I yell.
"You wanna stop in Heidelberg?" Julie says. "We could be there in maybe an hour and it's got a castle in it."
"Heidelberg," Christie repeats. "Gross."
There's a Heidelberg in Australia. "I used to catch that train to get to Vee's house," I tell Christie. "Never been."
"It's probably for the best, it's a bit shit."
"And besides, our Heidelberg doesn't have a castle," I say. "So is there really a point?"
"You win this round, Germany," Christie says.
"So, what? Yes or no?" Julie says, turning around in her seat to frown at us.
I look at Christie, who nods. "Hell yes to Heidelberg, I guess."
Julie turns to Sam and they start talking, but we can't hear what they're saying again. My phone buzzes in my hand and Jalen's sent me an email. I go into the app and find that I can't actually load the email. I apparently had enough reception to receive the email, but not actually read it.
"Please!" I shout at the phone. "Please load, for love of all that is good and—" The email finally loads. "Oh, I've got it, thank Christ."
"You are the biggest dork," Christie says, nudging my foot with hers. She brings out a book I didn't know she had stashed in her doona and starts to read.
The music tells me to clap my hands (clap my hands).
*~*~*
We see the turrets before anything. They're sticking up into the sky, just like we're in some kind of Euro-centric fantasy novel. They're not that tall like in cartoon castles; the turrets are small, and barely stick over the other bits of castle.
"Holy shit," Sam says as she pulls up to park. "We're gonna go see a mother-flippin' castle."
"Should've dressed for the occasion, to be honest," I say. "Gonna look like peasants."
We're parked on a hill above the whole town. There's a river running through it and we can see a church cross sticking up over the other buildings. We have to travel down through a snow-covered forest, and I slip; Christie catches my arm and I manage to not break my butt. Through the bare trees, we can see the castle. It's huge.
"How many people would've lived in that?" Christie says. "It's massive."
As we get through the trees, we come into a sprawling garden that has fountains and statues and shit in it, it's fancy as hell. We pause at the edge of a garden that looks down into a little valley. Even though there are heaps of people living here and plenty of people around, it's a very quiet place.
The castle is in ruins. As we walk up to it, we see that the right half of the front has collapsed. There's moss and crap growing all over it, and it's all blackened; the walls are metres thick, so whatever did that much damage must've been something.
We have to cross a huge bridge to get into the castle. Once we do, I feel like I've gone back in time. Everything is made of wood and brick, and cobblestones are everywhere. After Prague, I never wanted to see another cobblestone again, but at least this time I'm not dragging my huge-ass bag over them up a goddamn hill.
There's a pharmacy museum that we find, and there's things on display like mandrake roots, apparently real unicorn horn, and possibly actual human remains. There are a surprising amount of taxidermied animals, too. Christie leans in close, her face up against the glass as she stares at all the equipment. Her eyes are so wide.
We keep going. I don't want to say it out loud, but the castle is a little overwhelming. The whole concept of castles and royalty is rank, and to be here, where they all lived and made peasants do all their shit, is a bit jarring. Down a little further, we come into the wine cellar where there's a huge barrel, maybe three metres tall. It can probably hold more wine than I could drink in my whole life.
"Holy shit," Julie calls out. "Come look at this!"
We walk through a crowd of tourists that suddenly appear. When we see what Julie's talking about, Sam whistles, Christie doesn't say anything.
"What the fuck?" I can't help but swear my head off. "Why the shit would you actually need anything so abso-fucking-lutely ridiculous as this shitty fucking barrel, I mean, seriously?"
The barrel is huge. More than huge. Even in my wildest barrel-related dreams, I don't think I could have ever imagined something this size. It's at least six times my height and it just keeps going.
I try and take a selfie with it, but even with the camera angled right, I can barely get in the top and you can't tell what it is just from the photo, so I end up asking Christie to take the photo for me. I look tiny in comparison.
We climb a bunch of stairs to get to the top of it. As we look down, I get vertigo. I take a photo and then back away. Vertigo from standing on top of a bloody wine barrel, Christ.
*~*~*
"Well, I've got no clue where we are," Julie says, sighing as she puts down the map. She pulls her chewing gum out of her mouth and wraps it around a finger a couple of times before chewing it again. Laini used to do that. I need to stop missing people.
"You're supposed to know where we are," Sam says, stiffly. "You're the navigator."
"I know." She blows a bubble with her gum, and it pops.
Sam clicks her tongue as we speed up a little. We're gaining on the car in front.
"What?" Julie replies. "It's not like you've been a good navigator. I'd say we're all fairly shit at it."
"But you're navigator now and you're getting us lost now and we need to find this place before it closes at nine." Sam indicates and moves over to the next lane of traffic.
Christie widens her eyes at me and I raise my eyebrows at the argument; she goes back to reading her book and puts in her headphones. I'm too nosy, though, so of course I'm gonna listen.
"No, wait…" Julie says. "You shouldn't have taken this exit."
> "You fuckin' told me to take that exit!" Whatever composure Sam had is now well gone.
"Fuck's sake, calm down." Julie unbuckles her seatbelt.
"What are you doing?"
"Roslyn, swap with me." She thrusts the map into my hands and motions for me to get up so she can have my seat. "She's impossible."
"Aw, shit," I say. "I can't navigate. My mum banned me from navigating."
"Well, I sure as fuck ain't doing it anymore."
"But literally, my twin has to do it every time and they hate me for it. I am so bad, you have no idea."
But I still end up in the front seat with no fuckin' clue what I'm doing. I tell Sam to get on the Autobahn, and we might be going the right way, but I've really got no idea at all. As soon as we're on the highway again, she's speeding along like no one's business. This is how I die. This is definitely how I die. Holy shit.
"Okay," I say after about half an hour. "We gotta turn off here."
"What, now?" she says, watching the exit go past our side.
"Yeah. You missed it."
"I'm three lanes over!" she says. "You've gotta give me some warning! Jesus Christ."
"Well, I don't know, I don't drive!"
"You're like twenty-five years old!" she says. "You should know how to drive!"
"Hey," I say. "I am twenty-one and I should be nothing."
"Well, you should learn how to fucking navigate."
"This road map is really shit, I don't think you understand," I say, waving it around. "Have you tried to navigate with this thing? Because I know when Julie was driving, you were using your phone and my phone is shitting itself and can't get reception out here, so please for two seconds, can we calm do—oh, my god slow down!"
Sam slams on the brakes and we have to switch lanes to avoid a car that's going thirty Ks under our speed.
"Sam, what the fuck, how did you even get your license?" Julie yells from the back. She unbuckles her seatbelt and stands behind us, so we can actually hear her. "I told you to stop tailgating in a motorhome on the fucking Autobahn, all right? Pull over and let me drive, you've been going for three hours now."
Sam pulls over to the side and shoves the van into park. She unbuckles her seatbelt and it flings out as she pushes past Julie to go sit down in the back. They don't do anything by halves, these two. They hate each other as much as they love each other.
I can hear Sam muttering as Julie gets in the seat.
"All right, Roslyn, where are we going?"
I show her where the campsite should be. "It doesn't seem to be that far from where we are. Maybe an hour's drive? I'd look it up, but my phone won't connect to the internet."
"It's fine; we should be right." She's deliberately cheery and her niceness is slightly terrifying. Her eyes are bulging a little bit.
We get lost a couple more times, but she doesn't get angry. I think she is angry, by the way she keeps tutting and gripping the steering wheel whenever I get something wrong. But she keeps it in, I think, because Sam couldn't. It's a tense atmosphere, not anywhere near fun. I ask the others if they wanna swap, but Christie is asleep, or pretending to be, and Sam shakes her head vigorously at me.
Eventually, we make it to the campsite we've been aiming for. It looks very closed. My stomach sinks. They are all going to kill me. I don't want to die in the van.
"It's closed," Julie says as we pull up to the gate.
"Fuck," I say.
"Didn't you check the website?" Sam says from next to me; she's standing again. "You said it was open."
I turn around to face her and I see Christie behind her, making a face that clearly says I'm so sorry you're about to be murdered.
"Christie said it was open," I say.
"It said it was open," Christie says. "I think?"
"You think?" Julie repeats.
"Come on, let's just go look at the sign." Before they reply, I jump out of the van and walk up to a box next to the gate. The others follow me and we inspect the writing. It's all in German.
"Holy shit. This thing takes Deutsche Marks," Christie says, reading the box. They were phased out in like, 1999."
See, how does she know these things?
"What the fuck, Christie?" Julie says. "Didn't you read the site?"
"I did!" she protests. "I just didn't see that it had closed. I mean, I barely even speak German!"
"You said you'd been living in Berlin," Sam says.
"Yeah, well, you don't need to speak German to live in Germany."
"Jesus Christ." Sam walks a couple of steps back, hands in her hair. "I just want to have a shower and charge my phone."
"Come on," I tell Christie. "Let's go see the office."
The office building is up a little hill and looks very closed and possibly haunted. Goddamnit.
"I mean, I knew the website looked like it was from the nineties," she says as we trudge up the driveway. "I just didn't think that it'd be literally from the nineties."
There's a doorbell next to the door, so we ring it and wait. There's no sound and it's starting to creep me out by how deserted this place is. We are legit in the middle of, like, paddocks and shit. It'd be hella easy for someone to murder us.
"No one's coming," I say after we ring the bell for the fourth time. "Let's go back to the others."
"All right."
They've got back in the van, and before we return to them, Christie suggests we look in the shed that's a little behind the gate on the side of the road.
"Maybe it's got some more info," she says, so we cross the dewy grass. I get out my phone to use the torch because the streetlight doesn't quite reach the shed.
If this campsite has allegedly been closed since last century, why in the world do they have a working streetlight? It's off the main road and this place looks abandoned as shit.
We get to the shed, and something smells a little off. I shine my torch on the door and it's shut, locked with a heavy padlock. There's a weird, dark stain on the concrete just in front of the door.
"It smells weird," Christie says. She leans closer to the door.
I notice that the shed has blacked-out windows.
She pauses. "It smells like…"
I sniff. "Meat. Rotting meat."
"We've found a real-life murder cabin," she says, and laughs. But then she looks at the padlock and the blacked out windows and the weird stain and the fields around us. "Fuck," she whispers, crouching a little. "We've found a real-life murder cabin."
And her fear makes me feel it, too. We pissbolt back to the van.
"Start the engine!" Christie says as she jumps into the back door.
Julie's in the front again, and Sam's driving. I jump up behind Christie and shut the door, making sure it's locked. As we're driving away, we explain the definite murder cabin we narrowly escaped from, and they laugh.
"Hey, you weren't there," Christie protests. "It was scary."
"We were wondering what you were doing," Sam says, giggling. "Your faces both went scared as shit at the exact same time."
Christie shakes her head at them. Soon, we calm down enough to sit down and buckle our seatbelts on.
We eventually find another campsite on the outskirts of a city, but it's closed. Unlike the murder cabin campsite, this one's only closed for the night, so we park on a side street. I try to fall asleep without thinking of that cabin which was definitely not a murder cabin. Except that it probably was.
Christie falls asleep almost instantly, brave as anything. I listen to the steady rhythm of her lungs in the dark and look out through the skylight as I start to sync my lungs up with hers.
Chapter Ten
Christie
When the caravan park opens in the morning, we drive up to the office and a small woman pops out of the door. It's freezing when we get out of the van to greet her. I want to be back under the doona, listening to Roslyn email Jalen.
"Hallo," she says, and then a couple of long German sentences I don't understand. She eventually stop
s when she sees our incomprehensible faces.
"Er, sorry, mein Deutsch ist schlecht," I say. At least, I think that's how to say that my German is bad. "Wir um... wollen eine Campingplatz. Bitte."
Campingplatz is a new word, I only learnt it when we were driving into the place because it was on the sign.
"Ja," she says, nodding. "Wie viele Nächte?"
I blink. She means how many... somethings. Nights! "Zwei." Two nights. "Bitte." Please.
She nods. "Electricity?"
"Yes."
She nods and disappears into the office.
"Wow. Such German," Roslyn says, laughing as she smiles at me. "But no, you're doing more than I ever could, so thank you."
When the woman comes back, she's got a piece of paper with her and she starts walking away towards a plot. Roslyn and I follow her while the others stay with the van. She opens a box with power sockets in it and shows us where to plug in our van.
She points to a building. "Wasser. Ja?"
"Ja." I nod. She said water, so I guess that's the shower block, and maybe there's a washing machine. "Du hast, er, Waschmaschine?"
She points to the building again. "Waschmaschine, ja."
A man emerges from his caravan. It looks quite permanent; he's growing plants around it and there are wooden lattices propped up against the thing.
"Mark!" the woman calls out to him, then says something about speaking English. I think.
The man, presumably Mark, turns to look at her and calls out in German, waving as he starts to walk over to us.
"Mornin'!" he says to Roslyn and I in the strongest Yorkshire accent I have ever heard, then turns to the woman and they start speaking very fast to one another. It's probably not very fast, but because it's in German, it seems like it. Roslyn and I exchange glances.
"So you need someone to explain the contract to you?" he says.
"Eh?" Christie stares at him.
"What, can you speak English or not?"
"What? No, yes, we can. What contract?"
Mark turns to the woman and they're speaking in German again. She holds up a finger and walks away.
"She forgot to tell you, didn't she? So where are you lot from, then?"
"Melbourne," Roslyn says. "You're English?'