by Ben Onslow
April 5, 2027
“They killed him,” I say.
“We shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” says Ela.
“But we haven’t found anything that disproves the document, and I bet they killed him because he talked about it. Do you want to keep looking?”
“No,” says Ela. “I’ve had enough of Jacob’s documents.”
I disconnect the computer. “What do you want to do now?”
“I don’t know.” And Ela stretches, arms over her head, back arched, the little cardigan thing she’s wearing riding up.
She’s got to be flirting; nobody looks that good by accident.
I stand up. Reach behind her and turn off the study light, meaning to go back to the lounge. She moves to go out the door too, and we sort of bump into each other.
I change my mind about going back to the lounge. Draw her towards me. Slide my other hand under her hair and kiss her. It’s nice.
Ela goes with it. Seems pretty happy to be kissed. Her hands slide up to my shoulders.
It’s all good.
Then I hear the back door opening.
“Are you still up Jack?” calls Mum from the lounge.
“Yeah, I’m in the study.” I step away.
“What are you doing in there?”
“Looking up stuff on the computer.”
I pull a face at Ela; she half laughs, then bites her lip.
“Where’s Ela?” asks Mum. Her voice is moving along the passage.
“She’s here too.”
Patsy appears at the door.
“Why’s the light off?” she asks.
“We were just coming out.” I slide through the door past her.
The computer flickers in the background shutting down. I’m sure Patsy watches as we walk back to the lounge. I know we are standing way too close, the backs of our hands touching. Ela is tugging on the hem of her top with her other hand, smoothing it back down over her hips.
Mum will hate it. She says being pregnant at seventeen had been no fun and she makes it her mission to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else. Especially now with the whole Vector thing happening.
I’m pretty sure Patsy will have an opinion.
For once she doesn’t comment straight up. I breathe a sigh of relief.
In the lounge, Ela pecks me on the cheek.
“I think I’ll go to bed now,” she says. “Thanks for a lovely day.”
“Good plan.” I want her out of earshot as quickly as possible. I give her a minute, then walk down the passageway. No point in letting Mum stew.
I stop at the study door. The lights are back on. I lean against the frame. Watch Mum turn the computer back on to check her mail.
Ela calls out goodnight and the door of the guest bedroom shuts.
Patsy takes a deep breath.
“I thought you had a girlfriend,” she says as she stares at the computer screen.
“Not anymore,” I say. “See you in the morning.”
Mum takes her eyes off the screen and looks over her shoulder at me.
“What happened?”
I shrug. That’s actually none of her business.
When she doesn’t get an answer, Patsy goes back to watching the computer screen. Deleting the ComMails she’s read as if that’s all she’s interested in.
Then after a few stabs at the screen she proves it isn’t.
“Stay away from her,” she says, still studying the screen. “She’s pretty and she seems nice, but she’s young, she’s Elite and she’s the granddaughter of your boss.” Then she turns around and looks at me again. “If you don’t want to go to university next year you still need a job or they’ll make you go.”
“I know Mum,” I say, trying to cut the lecture short. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Be sensible.”
“I’m just looking after her like Jacob wanted me to.”
“Make sure that’s all it is, and stay in your own room tonight.” She turns back to the computer screen.
I slowly push myself away from the doorway.
Well, that was about as embarrassing as I expected. Trust Patsy to come straight out with it. She never could just go with the flow. I envy Nick. His mum prefers not to notice things and pussyfoots around. Though considering the Joe/Lucinda situation, that approach hasn’t worked out too well for their family lately.
Next morning Patsy is up, dressed ready for work, make up on, hair dried.
I’m up too. Had a shower. Having breakfast.
Mum’s doing her usual thing after we’ve had a run in, acting all conciliatory, as if she thinks it’s all sorted now to her satisfaction. She’s all, ‘I’ve had my say, let’s get on with things.’
Ela arrives, showered and dressed too.
Mum smiles at her, friendly, welcoming, not fierce and critical like she sounded last night when she was talking to me.
“Did you sleep well?” Mum asks.
Ela nods. “Yes, thank you.”
“What would you like for breakfast? You can have toast again or there’s porridge. Jack can make it for you.”
“Thank you, but toast is fine,” says Ela very politely.
I’m sitting on the other side of the table eating toast and Marmite. Look up, give her a bit of a nod.
Mum leaves in a flurry of activity and instructions to me about remembering the washing and putting the cat out the way she usually does.
Then things get awkward. Ela makes toast and finds the butter and glances at me as I finish eating. I go to the bench and rinse my plate and mug and put them in the dishwasher.
“Do you have jam?” asks Ela.
“I’ll get it for you.” I open the cupboard and pull out a jar of jam, strawberry, black top on the jar, three hand drawn red strawberries on the label. The breakfast show croons quietly from the VidScreen in the lounge.
I put the jar beside the toaster. Look at Ela for real this time, and she looks back.
I put one hand out, brush the hair off her face and tuck it behind her ear, pause, watching her watching me. And the world closes in very small, a world where only the morning light, the cat winding around our legs and dark espresso coffee exists.
What the hell.
I kiss her.
And this time.
I’m breath taken.
Heart stopped.
Gone.
Me and Ela sit on the couch and go through the box file to find out what’s left. We look at the plans; they’re CAD drawings of a building.
“What is it?” asks Ela, looking at the lines and boxes.
“Some sort of storage facility. This looks like the ventilation system.” I point at the coils and tubes drawn there. I pull out the next drawing and study it to see if I’m right. It’s all familiar. I’ve seen these drawings before in Dad’s study before he left. “This is based on designs they used for EarthShips. It was Dad’s thing.”
“What’s an EarthShip?”
“A house that can exist off the grid, doesn’t need an external power supply, uses the temperature of the earth for heating and cooling, that sort of thing.”
“How does that fit in with the rest of the stuff?”
“Don’t know.”
Ela points to the line of numbers that have been handwritten at the bottom of the plan. “What are the numbers? It looks like some sort of pattern.”
23022032. I recognise the number sequence straight away too.
“It’s my birthdate – it’s a palindrome. When I was a kid I’d play around with the numbers and see how many other patterns they’d make.”
“What’s a palindrome?”
“A word or sentence that reads the same backwards or forwards.”
“The 23rd of February,” says Ela. “That’s soon.”
“Yeah, a week.”
“How old will you be?”
“Nineteen.”
“Ancient.”
“Nice,” I say, and she grins.
Then we get to the journals. I take th
e real old one to look at it and a photo falls out.
Ela picks up the photo and studies it. “This is my great, great, great grandfather and his wife Mere.” She hands me the photo.
I study it too, then study Ela. “Mere looks like you.”
“You mean the eyes and hair? It runs in the family. Look at Jacob.” Ela takes the old book from me. “And this is that great grandfather’s journal. He was William Hennessey. In 1890 he bought the land Jacob farms. All the text in the journal is handwritten in cursive. Well that’s what Dad said it was anyway. It’s hard to read.”
I flick through it and it looks bloody hard to read, all scrawled and faded. We give it a go anyway but it takes a while.
We get to this bit.
We entered the final clearing and saw Mere standing there near the fall beside a cave. She was beyond beautiful, an ethereal creature. Moss hung from the dark trees in soft tattered shapes, framing her with ripped banners of pale grey lace. Her feet bare, she was in a simple white dress, looking as if she borrowed light and power from the silver waterfall, the grey of her eyes haunting. She had been bathing in the water and her coal black hair was loose and hung in damp tendrils around her face and shoulders and the dress clung to her body.
“I always liked that bit of the story,” says Ela.
“I can’t see how this fits anything either.” I start to read the rest.
“Do you know where that waterfall is?” Ela takes the book off me.
“Nah.”
“I do.” Ela flicks through the pages. “And the night Jacob got hurt he told me to take you there. Remember he said to take you to the clearing when we visited him? It’s the same place. Jacob and I go there sometimes when I’m visiting.”
“Where is it?”
“Not far from the back of the farm. You just have to follow a track through the bush. You can get to it from the walkway too, but it’s harder and takes a lot longer.”
“Does it still look the way he describes it?”
“A bit. There’s some moss but not long banners of it. There’s always that mist though. The waterfall is meant to be a family secret. I’ve never seen anyone else there.”
I take the journal back, focus on the script again.
“Let’s see why Jacob thought it was important for us to read something a hundred and fifty years old.”
We’re up to Mere taking William back to the clearing and asking him to help look after it.
William writes about Mere by the waterfall again and the way she looks. He goes on a bit, especially when she goes for a swim.
She slowly unbuttoned her dress and let it slip from her shoulders and fall in a heap around her feet. She stood there, her body silhouetted, golden in the light, against the silver of the falls, her hair falling over her shoulders and down her back.
“Wow, evocative image.”
“Evocative?” asks Ela.
“I do read. When are you going to take me to this waterfall?”
“We could go today.” Then she thinks of something else. “You know, that’s something I hadn’t realised before. At the waterfall, the water in the pool is warmer than it should be.”
“Do you think it’s a hot spring?”
“Maybe, but I haven’t heard of any hot springs on the mountain.”
“Me neither. Te Aroha and Katikati have hot springs and it’s all one range. It could be possible.”
I put the book down.
“I can’t be bothered with this anymore. What about you?”
“No, I’m sick of it. Jacob could have been a bit less mysterious; just told us what this is all about.”
“Walls have ears,” I say, like Jacob does.
“Very funny,” says Ela.
I sit there thinking about the journal. I’ll say one thing for William Hennessey and his story. If things start to get boring he’ll throw in a knife fight, or a cave filled with gold, or a naked woman.
“You said they use a HoistEM to look for uranium and water.” Ela’s moved on from the journal. “Can it do anything else?”
“There’s probably a website. We could look it up.”
I don’t get off the couch and go to the study: it’s pretty comfortable sitting there.
“What’s the plan?” she asks.
“Check the farm. You’re going to take me to that waterfall, visit Jacob.”
I stretch my legs out and recross my socks.
Then she asks, “Why was your mum so angry last night?”
“You heard?”
“Yes, and your mum’s pretty scary.”
“Yeah,” I say. “And she’s likely to turn up here at any moment to check why I’m not at work.”
I go to get off the couch. Ela puts out her hand to stop me, but I get up anyway. “Come on; let’s see if we can work this out before we go see Jacob.”
I’m backing Mum’s car out of the garage. Ela’s standing by the door ready to shut it, and Vincent and the sidekick come out of the pub. They are in civvies; must keep the VTroop officer’s uniforms for the base – and missions like killing old people.
“Jack,” says Vincent, hand held out like he wants to shake. It’s the last thing I’m planning on doing with a murderer.
Keep my hands on the steering wheel. “Vincent,” I say.
He changes the hand into a chin scratch.
“You off to work?” he asks. “Your mum says you work for Jacob Hennessey and he’s been hurt.”
I guess it was me who asked her to talk to him and she had to talk about something. Not that she found out anything useful. During the being conciliatory talk this morning she said all Vincent told her was he is on holiday.
“Yeah, he’s in hospital,” I say, “and dogs need feeding.”
Ela shuts the garage door, gets in the passenger side of the car.
“Ela Hennessey?” asks Vincent. “Jacob’s granddaughter?”
Ela nods, and Vincent watches her sort of speculatively.
“You helping with the farm work?” asks Vincent, and Ela nods again. “Anything interesting for a visitor to do around here?” he asks.
Apart from kill a couple of innocent olds and smash their place to bits.
I shrug. “Pretty boring around here.”
The sidekick’s leaning against the ESD parked near the guest entrance, watching this exchange.
And have you ever seen a couple of cats playing with a mouse?
Get the impression me and Ela might be the mice?
“I better let you go.” Vincent smacks the roof of Mum’s car with his hand, then walks over to the sidekick. They both get into the ESD and leave.
Now I know they’ve gone, it occurs to me it might be a good time to search their rooms. I know where Mum keeps the keys for the cleaner. Might find out something useful.
I look at Ela. She slowly releases a puff of breath.
She’s not going to go for the search the room option, might leave that for another time.
20.
The Vault
Saturday 18th Feb 2051
10:35 a.m.
My first view of the waterfall is mind blowing. I’d read about it in the journal, listened to Ela talk about it. But nothing prepared me for the dark beauty of it.
“I didn’t expect this.” It’s haunting: the water cascades down like a fall of diamonds. Steam mists up from the pool diffusing the rays of light that stray through the canopy of leaves.
“Lovely isn’t it?” She looks around taking in the serenity and peace. “It’s strange I didn’t realise that the water was warm.”
“It’s amazing.”
Ela shows me a bowl shaped hollow in the granite. She dips her fingers in the water and trails them over the surface.
I walk around the clearing, taking in the hanging moss, the smooth grey stones and the silver waterfall cascading down into the mist, the dark reflective water of the pool. I’m awed by the beauty and at being let into a secret Ela’s family have kept for over a century and a half. I watch
her standing by the pool catching the drops from the waterfall. It reminds me of William’s description of Mere.
Beautiful.
I walk past a group of trees at the edge of the clearing and start to search around by the cliff.
“What are you doing?” asks Ela, joining me.
“Trying to find something.” I kick aside the undergrowth and push branches away.
It takes a bit of searching but eventually a few metres from the waterfall, amongst the ferns and leaf litter we find a heap of rocks, piled into a crack in the granite. It looks like several flat rocks have been carefully wedged against each other. Ela helps pull the ferns back. When we have cleared everything off the rocks we look at the stack.
“It has to be manmade,” says Ela, standing back, considering it.
“Yeah, I think we’ve found it.” I’ve been adding it all together – the Willises, the Hoist Em, the heated water here, Dad’s plans, Jacob’s endless supply of seeds – and have a suspicion about what we’re going to find behind those rocks.
I try to pull a rock away but nothing will shift.
“Found what?” asks Ela.
I climb up onto one of the rocks and look at the stack. There’s a lever embedded into the top under the overhang.
I reach up and pull on the lever.
“What is it?” Ela asks.
I hear a click, jump away from the rubble, and land beside her. A big flat rock slowly hinges down so it’s tilting away from the rock wall, leans against the pile in front of it. Behind the rock is an entrance.
“Clever,” I say.
Ela grins. “It’s not easy to see even when it’s open.”
“Hop up on the stone and climb in.”
“You go first. It looks pretty dark,” says Ela.
I climb back onto the rock, put one hand on the tilted slab to steady myself, and the other on the cliff wall, then jump down into the opening.
Ela looks through the entrance into the cave. The only light is coming from the opening. It’s not really a cave: it’s more like a mine; heavy timber beams are holding up the ceiling, but it doesn’t go very far. There’s a massive metal door, surrounded by concrete, sealing the other end with a keypad at the side. I can hear a faint hum coming from behind the door.