by Ophelia Keys
Chapter 3. INDIGO FOUND
thursday, december 17
Indigo
I woke with the beautiful sensation of being held by someone bigger than me. Granted, I’m pretty small, so just about everyone is bigger than me. But it was still one of my favourite feelings. I just lay there, breathing quietly and feeling them breathing, until the unsettling realisation started to grow on me that I had no idea who was holding me.
I sat up, fast. Two unwelcome facts hit me simultaneously. First, that I was lying in bed with Dylan. Second, that I was completely naked. Thankfully, I hadn’t woken him. He had just rolled onto his back. But my confusion only got deeper when I leapt up and scrabbled around for some emergency clothes. All I could find on the floor was Dylan’s t-shirt and a crumpled white slip that I had never seen before. I stared at it for a while, ridiculous threesome scenarios occurring to me, while I turned it this way and that. Definitely not mine. It was made of some flimsy, synthetic fabric with faint blue and pink cross stitches around the hem. Really it looked like something from the fifties.
Dylan made a sudden huffing sound and it struck me that I really didn’t want him to find me standing naked in the middle of the room, staring at lingerie. In-fact, the time-honoured course of action would be for me to get dressed as quickly as possible and vacate the area, thus allowing him to disappear with grace and ensuring we could pretend the whole thing had never happened. That’s what we’d done the last few times anyway. But that was a couple of years ago, and I really thought we’d moved on from all that. I knew I had to get out of the room but the problem was, once I’d found some clothes and was fully dressed, I just had to look at him. Because I had the weirdest feeling that it had been ages since I’d seen him last.
He was still wearing his jeans, but his chest was bare and I was kind of shocked at how gaunt he looked. He had one arm flung out and it was so wiry it seemed that his forearm was actually wider than his biceps. He had bruised streaks under his eyes too. Truth be told, he looked rough as guts. Kind of like one of the guys from the half-way house nearby. Just out of prison and apparently open for suggestion as to how to get back in as fast as possible. Granted that Dylan’s control-freak tendencies never seemed to extend to his own person, but I hadn’t noticed how bad he was getting. As for the shadows under his eyes, I guess we must have had a huge night and I probably looked no better.
By this stage I’d been staring at him so long that the inevitable happened and he woke up and looked right at me.
‘Oh,’ I said, backing off and actually blushing. ‘Hi …’
But instead of giving me the awkward ‘just friends’ line I’d been bracing for, he jumped straight up and hugged me so hard that my toes actually lifted off the ground. Then he held my arms, stood back and stared at me. His eyes looked terrible, red-rimmed so their grey was almost blue. I was just opening my mouth to ask (sarcastically) about his drug problem when he shook me, really hard. It was just for a second but it frightened the hell out of me.
‘Indigo!’ he said, angrily, still not letting go. Then it seemed like he was lost for words. He just bored into me with his strange, new blue eyes and his fingers bit into my arms.
‘Let go of me,’ I said, so startled I was shaking. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Indigo, where have you been?’
Up until that point I’d been fine. A little trembly at the knees maybe, but basically fine. That question changed everything. It was lucky he had such a death grip on my arms because the whole ground suddenly swung sideways under my feet. A huge realisation had grabbed me. I couldn’t really say what it was, only it was so big that I had to hold onto him while the world swung crazily around me.
‘Indigo?’
I was lying underground, I remembered it now. Lying on my back in the darkness for ages. I couldn’t speak or lift myself up. I was sinking down into the earth and my mouth was filling up with sand.
‘Sit down. I can’t hold onto you.’
I found myself sitting on the edge of the bed gasping like a landed fish. Dylan was crouched in front of me.
‘Just try to breath slowly,’ he said. He’d moved on from the angry thing, and for once I was happy at his gift for detaching at crucial moments. He was just about smiling at me in his effort to be reassuring.
‘You’re fine,’ he said. ‘Just breathe.’
I breathed. ‘How long have I been gone?’ I asked, once I’d stopped gulping in air and could speak.
He hesitated for about five seconds before answering, so I knew it was going to be bad.
‘Over a month.’
‘Oh,’ I said, and at last my own brain was kicking in with the detachment trick. Total dissociation might be a better description.
‘We found you under the stairs,’ he added, as if that was the most normal thing in the world.
‘Under the stairs,’ I echoed, politely. It was really as if one of those security screens in a bank had suddenly come down. I couldn’t make enough sense of that wisp of underground memory to even begin to share it. Plus the mental numbness was now spreading throughout my body in an almost pleasurable way.
‘Indi, what happened?’
He might as well have been talking about a stranger. I was so entirely blank I couldn’t even say, ‘I don’t know.’ I just sat there, staring at him, until that got too awkward and then I stared at the ground.
He stood up. ‘I’ll get you some water.’
Pleasant as the numbness was, I knew I didn’t want to be alone. Silently, I got up and followed him out of my room, (legs really shaking now), past the blocked stairs, up to the kitchen. He gave me a look as we went in, but if there was something I was meant to be worried about, I couldn’t work out what it was.
Ani was sitting at the kitchen table, but she jumped up when I came in and pulled out a chair for me, helping me into it like I was a hundred years old.
‘I’ll make you some camomile tea,’ she said – like that was the answer to all the world’s troubles. I just sat there, staring at my upturned hands as if they belonged to someone else. Dylan sat opposite me.
‘You can walk,’ he noted.
‘Yes,’ I answered. We sat in silence for a while. I wasn’t sure what his point was.
‘You can’t have been lying down there very long.’
I didn’t say anything to that. It was interfering with my pleasant disengagement. Under the stairs? Missing for a month? Ani was stuffing handfuls of camomile into the teapot.
‘Well, of course …’ she said, banging the strainer against the sink. ‘She may have only been gone a few seconds. You know, if you consider time being totally relative and all that stuff.’ She seemed to be waiting for a response, but Dylan was acting as if he hadn’t heard her and I was trying to understand her without success. Over a month. It was impossible.
‘You’re very white though,’ he said, still staring at me. ‘So you’ve been in the dark for a while.’
I stood up. ‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ I said.
I just couldn’t bear to hear them discussing it like that – discussing my absence, which I did not fully believe. And it sounds childish but I really didn’t enjoy watching Ani bouncing around in her singlet and tiny shorts (actually I was not entirely convinced they weren’t just underpants). Although Dylan didn’t seem to have noticed. And I shouldn’t really care if he did notice. It seemed like all I could focus on was the insignificant stuff, and the only way I could think about my absence, was to wonder what might have happened between those two. In an imaginary world – where I really had been gone for a month.
I went down to my garden, if you could call it that, just a long stretch of bricks running alongside the house and the empty servants’ quarters, shadowed by a very high wall. When I stepped out into the sunlight I had that feeling you get when you’ve been in bed for awhile with a bad flu. You get outside and everything looks new and amazing. I just stood there, feeling the heat passing up through the soles of my feet and watchin
g the sunlight beating against my bare arms. They were startlingly pale, like the underbelly of a fish. Definitely paler than I remembered. I stopped looking at them and looked around instead.
Everything seemed weird and over-exposed. My eyes were really aching. I had filled a long, wooden box with flowers and herbs and someone must have been ignoring the water restrictions and watering them all the time because they were absolutely thriving – so insanely green that I went over just to run my fingers through the leaves. There was something about the light and the growing things that was allowing me to feel alright, even though I knew that the protective barrier was getting thinner and thinner by the second. Every few moments I could feel it, my mouth blocked and filling. A wave of panic would crest in my body, then slowly and magically dissolve into the warmth of blankness.
I really didn’t like any of the options I had come up with. Had the follower taken me down into the sealed rooms? Had I been awake the whole time? And if I had been, was the memory of choking on sand just a nightmare, or my way to think about something more appalling and visceral? Perhaps it had simply stored me under the stairs, the way a butcher bird will hang its prey in the fork of a tree. In which case I must have been in some sort of strange hibernation. In which case it must be coming back. I knew I wouldn’t work it out simply by thinking about it. If I knew the answer it was too neatly sealed off inside of me. I pictured it like some massive surgery that only shows as a few neat stitches on the outside. I had so little to go by, but I sensed something huge and terrible had happened.
I found myself looking at the blank downstairs windows. I’d tried to peek in when I first moved there but I could only catch glimpses through the cracks in the blind. Everything had been dim, just lumps of furniture and the dark rectangle of an inner doorway. I drifted over to them now, without really thinking about it. I didn’t really feel nervous, it was all half imaginary anyway. The bricks got cooler against my feet as I reached the part that was always in shade. Despite the dry summer, the velvety moss was pushing water up between my toes. I ignored the padlocked door and pressed up against the first window. It’s where I’d had the best view in the past – the edge of an empty fireplace and half a doorway – but this time it was totally covered by the blind. The next window was no good anymore either. I tried not to think about this too much. It was only when I reached the final one – right at the end – that I found I could see underneath the blind. If you can call bumpy black shapes against a charcoal background ‘seeing’. It looked like a junk room. I guess it was the room pretty much opposite the space under the stairs. I was cupping my hands around my eyes to block the reflections on the glass when I realised there was someone standing right behind me. I span around. It was only Ani, holding a cup of tea. I had no idea how she had come down the metal stairs without me hearing. I let out a pretty unsteady breath.
‘You’d better drink this,’ she said. Then she glanced at the window behind me in the funniest way. It was kind of a knowing look, I guess. And all of a sudden, and quite unfairly, I was thinking of one of those sorcerous pre-raphaelite paintings, the way her hair was whisping out around her face and the little cup held cradled in both hands. All that was really missing was an absinthe-green, semi-transparent gown. Of course, I took the tea and it was just plain old camomile tea (which I hate by the way) but I still felt pretty unsettled. I guess my mind was a bit of a mess at that point.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked. I walked past her, toward the sunlight.
‘I’m fine. I’m okay.’ Too brightly.
Dylan was coming down too now and I wondered whether they’d ever let me be on my own again.
‘I’m still here,’ I said, kind of smiling.
He didn’t smile back. I guess it was clear to him what I’d been doing.
‘We need to talk,’ he said, cutting through the politeness in his customary way.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk with Ani-of-the-knowing-look standing right behind me, but he was already starting.
‘You shouldn’t be on your own. For a while anyway. It could come back.’
‘And what will you do?’ I asked. ‘If you’re with me?’
He had no answer to that.
‘I need some space to think,’ I said. ‘You can’t follow me around forever.’ I took my tea and clanged back up the stairway, wishing I could take back the last sentence. It sounded like the most ridiculous kind of Freudian slip. What I was really wondering was – can it follow me around forever?
It might seem odd, but after that nothing happened. For a little while, at least. Dylan was pretty much living on my kitchen couch by then. We didn’t really discuss it. He just never went home. I was relieved. Not that you’d know he was there. He had a way of cleaning up all his stuff, the bedding and everything. It all went into the top cupboards, that I couldn’t actually reach, and usually by the time I was up everything was packed and put away with an almost military neatness.
Christmas passed and was pretty weird because I spent it with my whole family, just a normal Christmas. My disappearance was still unreal to me. It was ludicrous actually – just the idea of it. When they commented on how pale I was looking, I just had to smile and shrug. I couldn’t tell them I hadn’t answered my mobile for a month because I’d been trapped downstairs in my own house (I’d found about twenty messages from my mum from that time, just little things but it seemed like she knew something was up). When my dad asked me, sort of jokingly, where the hundred dollars was that I owed him, I couldn’t say – well, actually I’ve been in the thrall of some sort of supernatural being for weeks and now I’m completely skint. The measly five hundred I’d made from my client all went in repaying Ani my part of the rent, and keeping up with the next lot of bills. Not that she’d asked. But I felt bad about it. I was so disconnected from what happened (whatever that was), I could only focus on the little things.
Dylan and Ani came to Christmas too. It was clear to me that neither of them had anything else to do – just sit boredly in the kitchen listening to Christmas carols through my laptop. Of course, dad had to give Dylan a big hug and joke about how he needed to get to the gym, build himself up a bit – because girls liked that sort of thing, et cetera, et cetera (looking from Ani to me the whole time, as if trying to work out what the romantic situation was). Dylan took it in pretty good part. I was even kind of enjoying myself, sitting round fondly heckling the Queen’s Christmas speech and all that. Only every so often, Ani would give me this funny, thoughtful look. I know that she’d helped Dylan pull up the boards, when he got that idea I was downstairs. And she even carried me upstairs with him. But I still got this weird vibe from her and avoided her as much as I could really. It was unfair of me perhaps, but I couldn’t shake the feeling she wasn’t completely on my side.
As for the follower, I never saw it. But I couldn’t sleep properly. And sometimes when I got up to creep to the bathroom, I would hear the TV on in the kitchen, and I would realise that Dylan couldn’t sleep either.
thursday, december 31
Everyone knows that New Year’s Eve is the most irritating time of the year. It’s impossible to decide what to do. Do you wander down to South Bank, through the shoals of drunken teenagers and their blaring plastic horns? And then hobble home because it’s just that bit too close to justify waiting in massive queues for a taxi? Or do you sit at home, grumpily, telling yourself you didn’t want to go out anyway and regretfully dashing outside at the last minute to catch the fireworks? I opted to go out. I made it pretty clear to Dylan and Ani that I was going out with my friends, it was just getting too claustrophobic with the three of us. Of course, it had been so long since I called any of my friends – they were already full of plans for the night – intimate, friend of a friend’s parties that they just felt a bit awkward taking someone else too. I persisted in the fiction anyway. I was already dressed up with (small) heels and everything, it would be too tragic to admit I had no plans. Of course, it turned out that Ani actually had a p
arty to go to and would have been quite happy to invite me if I hadn’t had my fictional social life. In-fact she seemed strangely disappointed that I wasn’t free. And that just left Dylan sitting, cross-armed in front of the brainless New Year’s coverage. I hesitated a moment before I left.
He had no plans for New Year’s. He’d long ago made a concerted effort to get rid of the few friends that he had. Not because he hated people (I assumed), just because he was always busy with writing and things (though he sometimes had long mysterious absences during the day, when he knew Ani would be home with me). I think it was harder for him than it was for me. I couldn’t remember much that had happened (just odd dreams), whereas he’d had a whole month of just not knowing where I was and thinking I might be dead. It was like he was still getting over it somehow.
Really, I should have asked him to come out with me. But I needed to get away. He gave me a look, up and down. I was wearing a nifty black dress from the actual thirties that my great grandmother had made.
‘You look nice,’ he allowed.
‘Why, thank you.’
‘Do you need a lift?’
He had the saddest old bomb of a citroen parked outside his house. It would take as long to walk there as it would to get to the city.
‘No, I’m good. I’ve got my mobile.’
I clicked down my laneway in a business-like manner. I was not as nervous as I expected, being on my own. And before you start to yell at me – what the hell were you thinking? – let me just point out that no one can live under 24-hour surveillance. Not happily anyway. I think Dylan understood that. That’s why he had to let me go. I needed to reclaim my independence before I became one of those people that are too afraid to poke their heads out the front door. New Year’s Eve seemed like the perfect time to do it. People everywhere.
You’d probably rather I told you straight up and didn’t leave you in doubt (with a drawn out description of clicking heels, dark alley). I never made it to the city. I wasn’t even halfway up Queensberry Place when Ani stepped out and stopped me. She didn’t say anything at first but she had a strange, solemn look about her. Almost like a child. Her eyes looked even bigger with kohl around them and she looked really tired – kind of haggard. It was like something was worrying her so much it was changing her whole face. She touched my arm with her narrow fingers. A sort of chill ran across my skin.
‘There’s something I need to show you,’ she whispered. ‘Take off your shoes.’
She didn’t even wait for a reply, just started walking fast back towards my gate, her own shoes held in one hand. I hesitated, wanting to say I was going to miss the fireworks, I’d get holes in my patterned stockings et cetera, but I could see something important was happening. For one thing, she must have been waiting about an hour in the laneway for me to come out. By now she’d reached my heavy metal gate and was trying to lift it as quietly as possible. I slipped off my shoes and ran to catch up. I took her place and lifted and pushed the gate in a way I knew would be quietest. We left it open. There was no way to close it quietly.
We tip-toed through the narrow garden, shoes in hand – like naughty girls sneaking out to a party only, for some reason, we were sneaking in. I could see the rectangle of light, high up from the kitchen and could hear the TV. I wasn’t sure why we were trying so hard not to involve Dylan. It worried me a little, as it was already clear where Ani was leading me. I had this feeling that if I was going to brave the underbelly of the house, I wanted to let someone know. Like when you go bush walking and are meant to register your plans with someone in case you tumble down a cliff and no one realises you’re missing for the next week. Of course, it would be impossible to tell Dylan without him getting involved and clearly Ani was doing everything she could to make sure that didn’t happen. I was so curious I just followed.
She stopped at the darkened window beneath the kitchen, putting her shoes down, carefully standing them upright so the moss didn’t stain them. Her dress was just a pale shimmer in the dimness. To my surprise she simply pushed the glass upwards with her hands, then inserted her fingers under the window and lifted. It opened easily. I just stood there gaping at her like an idiot. She lifted herself up lightly to sit on the sill, then ducked her head and slipped her long legs into the room. The darkness ate her up straight away.
I suppose you already know that I’m kind of an adrenaline junkie. Like anyone, I don’t really like being afraid, but I love that moment when you launch yourself into something new and dangerous. My fragments of memory of being down there had just about slipped away and I was mostly left with curiosity. Not an idle curiosity mind you. It was a desire to know, to really fully understand what had happened to me while I was gone. It just hadn’t occurred to me to do something as simple and daring as this. Dumb I suppose. Or maybe really smart.
The windowsill was a little tricky, given my height, and my desire not to rip my heirloom party dress. I dragged myself up until my hip bones hit the sill, then half fell into the darkness. I stood up as fast as I could. It really was black in there. I reached my hand to my throat instinctively. The room had an unused smell. The warm night air was too still to change it. It took me a moment to make out Ani’s silhouette against the different darkness of the inner doorway. She was just standing there, very still. There were some tall shapes in the room too, I guess hat stands and old skis or something like that, but it was impossible to tell how close they were. The gloom made everything seem too close.
I picked my way towards her, stretching one hand in front of myself, my feet and legs coming up against boxes and books, something falling and banging so hard against my shins, that I forgot Dylan was right above us and swore pretty loudly. Ani turned to shush me – at least I think that’s what she did, it was really too dim to tell. I just heard the hiss of her breath. I saw the glimmer of her dress as she moved into the hallway, beside the stairs. There must have been a little street light slipping in there. It glinted off her eyes too as she turned to check if I was following.
‘What is it?’ I whispered as quietly as I possibly could.
I regretted speaking straight away. The darkness muffled my voice and amplified it. A listening feeling came down. It was like a whole crowd of people had suddenly stopped talking and turned to stare at me. I pressed my hand over my mouth, wanting to take the sound back. Ani just turned and disappeared from view. I hurried to follow her, looking left to right as I moved into the passageway by the stairs, fearing some sudden death blow from the darkness. I didn’t really expect the follower would be there. I just felt that something was there.
Ani was standing near the front door. I could hear a straining metal sound and a kind of scrabbling. I passed the stairs and crept up behind her. It was the front room. I could just make out that there were boards across the door and she was working at them quietly but furiously. She had a small metal tool in her hand that she must have brought in her purse. She was forcing the nails up and they were pulling free one at a time and falling quietly to the carpet.
‘Ani!’ I hissed. ‘What are you doing?’ I glanced behind me as I spoke, checking that there was no one by the stairs.
She just kept working at the nails.
‘I’m going out!’ I whispered, my fear finally cresting. ‘We’re not meant to be here.’ I started back down the hall, but the deepening blackness stopped me. I turned again, saw her leaning in, using her whole body to slowly force a board loose.
‘What are you doing?’ I whispered again, my voice catching. It was just too strange. I stared at her for a while but the darkness behind me suddenly swelled and seemed about to grasp me. I quickly pressed my back against the wall. There was nothing there, of course. I could almost see in each direction now, but I still felt as if something were about to grab me from behind, through the wall itself. I just stood there breathing painfully. I was waiting to raise the courage to pass the closet beneath the stairs, to rush through the black room and to the open window.
‘Ani, ther
e’s nothing there.’ I said it so weakly that she couldn’t possibly have heard.
She stopped. She pretty much had all the boards free now. She walked back to me and stood just a little too close, not even glancing at the shadows around us.
‘You’re wrong, Indigo,’ she said, in a hoarse little whisper. ‘There’s something she wants you to see.’
I just stared at her as the words sank in.
‘What do you mean she?’ I said, finally.
She stared at me for a moment, only it didn’t seem like she was looking at me – more like she was listening. She suddenly turned and walked straight back to the door, ripping the last board free with a groan of metal against wood. She pushed the door open and went straight in.
‘I’m not going in there,’ I said, to the empty hall.
Of course, I already knew that was exactly what I was going to do.
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