That window could've been broken ages ago, she told herself, as she slid along the cold plaster wall. No one really looked after this place. She used the reasoning to temper the panic that always built when she couldn't see anything.
The hallway that led away from the stairs was windowless, and the darkness was built of shadows and blacker voids behind them that could conceal anything.
They'd kept her blindfolded in the basement when she was twelve, and she knew that terror grew so quickly in the absence of light that it could push all vestiges of sanity from the mind. She waited for the numbness to kick in. The sensor that tripped when she experienced any emotion too strongly should have engaged by now. But her anxiety continued to climb.
Jill decided to take control of her feelings by tuning in carefully to all of her other senses. The house creaked and moaned in the quiet way that old houses complained as they aged.
She steeled herself to enter the doorway on her left. The master bedroom, she remembered, pushing the door backwards with her left hand and then following her gun into the room. She swept through quickly, back flat against the walls when possible, listening for breathing or movement in the dark. Nothing.
Back in the hallway, Jill froze. There. A sound, behind her. Footsteps. She squatted, and then crawled back towards the noise. Peering over the balustrade of the balcony, she spotted Gabriel patrolling. She let go of her breath. He'd heard her too, and signalled. She moved back into the hallway, and made her way into the second room. A bathroom. Tiny. She checked the possible hiding places and made her way to the third room along the hallway. Joss's room, she remembered, as she pushed the door back.
Jill heard the woof of the knife as it sliced through the darkness, but didn't feel it when it bit into her gun hand. Pain or not, her gun clattered to the ground, and she screamed into the mask in front of her. Panic detonated behind her eyes as she struggled to get her left hand up to strike, but he had the momentum and he used it to pull her to him, towards the knife. When she stopped screaming to breathe, she thought she heard him giggle. She pulled backwards with everything she had, but he had hold of her jacket.
Every millisecond of the next few moments seemed to register. She saw his eyes widen and at the same instant, she detected movement behind her. He heaved her towards him with the force that still reverberated from his original strike, and smacked his forearm across her throat.
Gabriel stood in the doorway. His gun pointed at them.
Cutter chortled in her ear and she felt his arms and chest tense to pull the machete sideways, to slice her throat. She absorbed his madness, and the physical power that accompanied it, through the skin of his arm on her neck.
Gabriel's eyes met hers.
Yes, she told him, without a word.
Then there was just white. No sound.
The blast blew them backwards and Jill flew through the air with Cutter, landing merged with him on the floor at the base of the bed. Her cheek rested against his neck. Above his nose was purple-red, wet. His right eye and the top of his skull were pulverised.
Her mouth filled with the smell of singed wool, cordite, and vaporised blood.
Jill's hearing returned in stutters. She listened to Cutter living and dying with each breath. The death rattle.
She couldn't move. She lay there breathing in this man's soul as it left his body. She felt close to him, part of him, dying there with him. Her mouth on his neck, she whispered into the blood. Not long now, she told him.
But Cutter first had something to say.
Because they made no sense, and she'd never been certain that she had actually heard them, Jill had never repeated the words to anyone.
'Coming, Grandfather.'
'Thanks,' Jill managed in the back of the ambulance.
'Sorry,' said Gabriel.
She couldn't hear him, couldn't hear anything at the moment actually, as the deafness had returned, but she'd seen him mouth the word. She nodded and tried to touch her face. The medical attendant pushed her hand away. The bullet had been so close that her cheek was seared. The ambo sprayed something cold on her skin that felt wonderful.
'Tell me you're a great shot,' she said to Gabriel. She couldn't hear herself. She was probably shouting.
He smiled at her, reached forward and gently smoothed her fringe from her forehead.
'I'm a great shot,' she saw him say.
Gabriel's hand continued down the length of her hair and onto her shoulder, then stopped. Emotions scudded across his dark eyes like a storm across a night sky. She saw grief, guilt, hope. A question.
She reached up and found his hand, held it tight and closed her eyes. She rested her injured hand on her chest.
Underneath, the butterfly pendant seemed to tremble against her heart.
35
OCCASIONALLY CHLOE HEARD someone sobbing. Felt a little sorry for the girl. At least, it sounded like a girl. You never can tell, she thought sleepily, it sounds kinda muffled. Hands bound behind her back, ankles shackled to the bolt in the brick wall, Chloe Farrell no longer recognised the moans as her own. The gag in her mouth had long ago dried her saliva; her throat rasped raw from screaming through the cloth, but this discomfort and the spasms from her contorted muscles now failed to register. The thirst and pain had pushed her to an altered state of consciousness, a nowhere land, which she accepted, matter-of-factly, as the waiting room for death. After four nights bound and gagged on the floor in Cutter's subterranean room, squashed between his bed and a wardrobe, Chloe was comfortable in the silent softness of her mind.
She was careful, however, to stay away from the edges of this dreamlike state. If she let her mind wander too freely it found the memories – the consciousness of what had happened to her. The images stabbed into the protective bubble surrounding her psyche and filled it with blood.
When the memory played, the recording didn't stop until it had gone right through. Forced to watch it all, what the man had done to his stomach on the bed above her, Chloe had at first tried screaming to herself to run instead of entering the room with Henry Nguyen. Now, she just waited until the memory played out and the muffled nothingness returned.
He'd be back, he had told her, four nights ago.
On the floor, bound to the double-brick wall, the girl whimpered and sobbed. In her mind, far away, Chloe Farrell tuned out the sound and waited to die.
Maryana Miceh couldn't figure out why Mummy had been crying all morning. Probably Daddy said something mean again, she thought. She and Uncle Ken had been watching the boring news all morning. Maryana hadn't even been allowed to watch Hi-5. She had thought that her mum would have liked watching Hi-5 better, because the news just made her cry harder. When she asked Uncle Ken what was wrong, he told her everything was going to be fine, and picked her up and squashed her in a hug. She told him to put her down because his whiskers were scratchy.
When she'd tried to see what they were so interested in on television, Uncle Ken had led her away. Then he had scrooched down to her height and put his hands on her shoulders. He went all serious and she had wanted to smack him because he looked like he was going to cry too. Uncle Ken never cried and he shouldn't start now, while Mummy was so upset. But all he told her was that Henry wouldn't be renting with them any more. Maryana had felt mean and happy at the same time, because she really didn't like Henry. She knew that was un-Christian, because he had always been nice to her and because he had a sore stomach, but she couldn't help it, and she had smiled. Then it had occurred to her that this was probably a Bad Thing. Probably that's why Mummy keeps crying, she thought. We need the money from the rent.
Maryana wondered what would happen to Henry's room now. Maybe she and Eva could use it for playing again. She had been nowhere near the room since she'd seen that man's sore tummy. Now, knowing he wasn't coming back, she ran down into the backyard and squinted through the crack in the wall. Henry had left all his stuff in there. Maybe he didn't want it anymore. That wardrobe looked pretty old. Kneeling
on the grass peering in, Maryana thought about the money. Maybe we could have a fete like they did at school last month, she thought. She had heard Mrs Marshall telling Mr Jacoby that they'd made shitloads. That sounded like a lot.
Maryana stood back up. It was hot today. Probably soon they'd be allowed to go swimming.
What was that? She jumped at the sound, dropping back to her knees in the grass.
Again!
Someone's crying in there!
Maryana Miceh ran as fast as she could up to the kitchen, and she could run pretty fast. She'd beaten Jasmine Hardcastle in cross-country last week.
Epilogue
SWEAT STUNG HIS eyes and he used the hand holding his knife to wipe his brow. The scrub here was the thickest he'd encountered, and he hacked at some tangled vines draped like a monstrous spider's web between two trees, blocking his path. Joss had come at this clearing from a different approach yesterday. But he knew it was around here, somewhere.
Shirtless, he tucked his knife back into the equipment belt slung low around his hips. For the tenth time in as many minutes, he pushed dirty blond hair out of his eyes. Maybe he should cut it all off again, he thought.
Just when he was beginning to worry that he'd gone completely off course, Joss found the area he'd been searching for and pulled an axe from his belt. He set to work chopping branches from the fallen tree, the timber dry and covered in papery bark, perfect for firewood.
He didn't stop until there was way too much to carry back. He doubled over, hands on hips, and caught his breath, staring at the sandy soil around his feet; he studied a rivulet of sweat slipping over an ankle and into his sneaker. Fitter than he'd been in a long while, he recovered quickly and straightened, then set to gathering all the wood he could carry into a sling he'd brought for the purpose.
Striding from the scrub that bordered the isolated beach, Joss was forced to squeeze his eyes tight when the brilliance threatened to overload his senses. He opened them again, blinking, and made his way towards the camp. The colours were amazing. The perfect white of the sand and impossible turquoise of the ocean ahead; the honey-tan of Charlie, now five, shovelling sand into her little yellow bucket; and the molten-red of his wife's bikini. She lifted her huge sunglasses and winked at him, a small smile on her lips.
Once he'd stacked the firewood near the tent and the embers of last night's campfire, he kicked off his shoes and walked back through powdered sand. He dropped onto his towel next to his family, and grabbed the bottle of water next to Isobel. As he drank, an image of cold beer flicked up, a mental advertisement, but he quickly changed the channel. He leaned back in the sun, his mind again shifting through scenes of life before today.
There was no way he'd ever have consented to go to rehab until he'd reached the point where he simply had no resistance left. That night, pulling up behind the detective's vehicle at the house in Mosman two minutes before the troops arrived, he'd left Isobel and Charlie in the car. Finding Cutter missing part of his head on the floor of his old bedroom was just too much.
That had been seven months ago. He'd spent three of them in an inpatient unit with around thirty other thirsty vets. He'd left some new friends and old habits at the hospital, along with a couple of the worst memories. He'd also left the person he'd become closer to than anyone else in his life, other than the two people with whom he now shared the beach. Carrie, his therapist. In her office at the hospital, she'd done combat duty with him, walked through his memories, exploring, in exhaustive detail, the experiences he feared had almost pushed him into the madlands his poor mother had inhabited.
Carrie had been at his mum's funeral last month, Isobel holding onto her tearfully before they left. Isobel and Carrie had also done a tour of duty together, during individual and family therapy sessions.
He'd left the bill for the treatment to Veterans' Affairs.
Not that money was an issue now really. He could be retired today if he felt like it. He'd never have believed the house in Mosman would have sold for so much.
But taking the winter off to holiday in the Top End would do fine. He smiled lazily, watching Charlie scratch an itch on her pink zinc-covered nose, the action sticking sand to her face. She scratched again, and more sand smudged into the pink cream.
She'd start school next year, they'd decided. And he'd go back to the insurance company. As much time as you need, the partners had insisted, sending a monthly bouquet of flowers out to him at the hospital. He'd given them to the nurses before the other guys had seen them.
Isobel told him that his work colleagues had telephoned her and offered their support, expressing their shock when they'd learned he'd served the country in Rwanda. Great, he'd thought more than once since then; they were the type of guys who'd want war stories every lunchtime, but wouldn't eat with him again if he told them the real deal.
Charlie stood from her sandcastles and moved around to the left side of his chair; she carried her bucket with her everywhere. Her nose was now completely covered in pink sand, and she swiped a tentative finger at it every couple of moments, gluing on some more.
'Um, do you want to go for a swim, Daddy?' she said. 'I'm hot.'
'Yep. Me too,' he smiled at her. 'But maybe you should go and show your mum your face before we go swimming. You've gotta do something about your nose.'
She gave him a look of quiet indignation, then half-dragged and half-rolled herself across his stomach, the most direct route to her mother.
'Mummy,' she said, standing proudly, pot-bellied in her yellow bikini, her bucket by her side, 'Could you please fix my nose? I'm not decent.'
Dr Leah Giarratano has had a long career as a clinical psychologist. An expert in psychological trauma, sex offences and psychopathology, she has had many years' experience working with victims and psychopaths. She has worked in psychiatric hospitals, with the Australian Defence Force, and in corrective services with offenders who suffer severe personality disorders. She has assessed and treated survivors of just about every imaginable psychological trauma, including hostages; war veterans; rape, assault, and accident victims; and has worked with police, fire and ambulance officers.
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