Friday Brown (24 page)

‘I’ll miss you,’ Bree said.

Carrie agreed. ‘Me too. When you get back to the city you’ll find him back in the train station, or swimming with his fish. You’ll see.’

I kept looking, furious that I was alone out there, alone in thinking Silence had never left.

Arden watched from the church steps, chainsmoking, backlit by a square of dim light.

I checked inside some of the houses, calling his name. I dared to tread the brittle porch surrounding the old pub, but the windows and doors were still boarded up. Only my own prints were left in the dust.

I followed the river about as far as I could downstream, until the thickening scrub grew too dense. Wherever piles of branches had snagged and collected, I used a long, heavy stick to paw through them and break them apart. Leaning out over that water, seeing the river toss trees like they were toothpicks—it was as close as I’d ever been to death.

When the torch battery died, I worked my way back by faint moonlight and the glowing doorway, feeling sick and defeated. I needed to sleep.

If Silence had been taken by that river, he was lost.
That night, the wind picked up. The old church moaned and creaked. Our swag configuration had changed and we were clearly divided into two factions: Arden’s group of Malik, Darcy and AiAi crammed together up on the pulpit, while Joe, Carrie, Bree and I lay on the far side near the entrance.

I half-dozed with my senses on high alert. A few times I imagined a voice—Silence’s raspy voice, out there, calling for me—but the wind snatched every sound away and it was too difficult to make anything out. I sat up and tried to catch the faint ringing noise that was bugging me, to separate it from all the rest. I was aware of Bree, watching and listening, too.

Joe’s watch glowed green in the dark. I leaned over, turned his wrist and tried to read it.

He lifted his arm and groaned, ‘It’s only eleven o’clock. Go back to sleep.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Me neither,’ Carrie groaned. ‘I need to pee.’

‘I’ll go with you,’ I offered.

Carrie passed me her torch. I fumbled and dropped it. The noise, a resounding hollowness, made me wonder if there was something under the floorboards of the church.

Outside, I faced away to give Carrie privacy.

I played the torch over the walls of the church and took a slow, measured route around the side. There were piles of junk all over the place. Everything sharp and jagged. In most places the walls weren’t visible, hidden behind sheets of iron and rusting machinery.

On the second lap I found it. A hatch door. A timberframed doorway that led underground. The opening was shrouded in broken cobwebs and flattened grass.

The sound started when she was doing up her pants—or maybe it had started earlier and we just couldn’t hear it from inside.

Clang, clang, clang. Clang, clang, clang.

I froze and aimed the torch beam in the direction of the sound. It was eerie, like hearing a foghorn through mist. The light couldn’t penetrate the clouds of dust and bounced back.

My stomach dropped.

Carrie stepped into the glare. ‘Do you hear it?’ she said, her face white and pinched. ‘It sounds like a bell.’

‘I hear it.’

Clang, clang, clang.

The wind whipped stinging dust into our eyes and the backs of our legs. I shone the torch to light the way for Carrie, but at the entrance I stopped.

‘Go on in. I’ll be there in a minute.’

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, breathing hard.

‘I need to go, too.’

‘I’ll wait for you.’ Her teeth chattered.

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘I said I’ll wait.’

‘Oh, never mind.’

Inside, Arden was sitting up. ‘Where have you two been?’

‘There’s a noise. Like a ship’s bell. Do you hear it?’
Carrie said. ‘It’s freaking me out.’

Arden stared up at one of the high, gaping windows. After a moment, she snapped out of her trance and slid from her swag. She picked up something glinting, metallic. Her flick-knife. She held it loosely, paced sideways to the entrance of the church and stood there, head cocked. Listening.

Clang, clang, clang.
Faint, but still there.

I watched her expression carefully. There was nothing. It was empty.

‘It could be a loose roof sheet. Or a rattling pole. It’s just the wind,’ she said. ‘It’s okay. Go back to sleep.’

‘I want to go and check,’ I said.

She waved the knife. ‘I’ve heard of people being sliced in half by flying corrugated iron,’ she mused. ‘Better stay inside. It’s nothing. There’s only us. It’s just the wind,’ she crooned. ‘Everyone, go back to sleep.’

The tip of the knife followed me as I lay down and covered myself.

I waited.

An hour later, Arden was asleep. Hard asleep. Her long, matted hair fanned out over her pillow, snaking onto the floor. The knife had slipped out of her grasp.

I took it. I slipped outside and crept around to the side of the church. The hatch door had been opened. The weeds surrounding it were trodden flat, oily handprints marked the edge.

I used the point of Arden’s knife to prise it up. It swung open easily.

I didn’t know what I expected to find. Most of all, I prayed that Silence would appear out of the dark. But he didn’t. There was nothing alive down there. The air was still and dead. It was sucking emptiness, a vacuum.

The torch beam moved over shadowy, twisted shapes covered with decades of dust and dirt. A steep flight of steps led down, down and the dark pressed closer. My heart raced. I started shaking and couldn’t stop.

I took a deep breath. Footprints in the dust. I stepped into them. I followed them to a corner where they stopped near a dark, huddled mass on top of a mouldering crate.

Underneath a sheet of canvas that crackled and dissolved in my hands, I found Silence’s things.

The knife was cold and certain in my fist. I leaned close enough to smell the sweetness of Arden’s breath. Everything was wrong; her breath should be foul. She should be hideous. She should be dead.

I raised the knife and ran my fingertip along the blade. I left a bloody fingerprint on her pillow.

It was like cutting through an umbilical cord. I considered leaving her dreadlock lying next to my fingerprint—but that would have been too dangerous. It wasn’t the time for petty gestures.

So I placed the knife back where I’d found it. I tucked the dreadlock into my pocket.

A talisman, to keep.

It was the longest night. An unbearably bright morning. I hadn’t slept and I staggered outside, squinting.

I went through the motions. Packed my things, chattered about returning to the city to find Silence. I accepted heartfelt hugs and goodbyes from Bree, Carrie and Joe.

Arden relaxed. She was upbeat, full of energy. She couldn’t wait to get out of there.

Finally, Arden and Malik started the car. The others stood by, ready to wave us off.

‘Let’s go. We’ll drop you in town.’

I looked at Arden and tried to remember what it was that I’d found so charismatic in the beginning. The light slanted away from her, as if repelled. She was so beautiful, and always would be, but now I could see all her shades of crazy. How
off
she was. How nature made its most deadly creatures alluring precisely so they could lure their victims close.

Maybe that was the thing about beginnings—they always seemed better than middles or endings. And if I only ever had beginnings and my past was so perfect, then the future would never measure up. I didn’t want to live like that.

‘There’s nothing here for you anymore,’ Arden said.

How many times had I told myself that?

I knew for sure in that instant—it was only ever what you did today that counted and I’d promised Silence I wouldn’t leave without him.

I shook my head. ‘I’m staying.’

‘What?’ She had a moment of confusion that morphed into fear. ‘Get in the car.’

I smiled. ‘I won’t make it on my own. I want to stay.’ I linked an arm through Bree’s and kept my expression blank.

The effort was too much. My nose started to drip.

‘We’ll be ready to go when you get back,’ Joe said.

With the others looking on, there wasn’t much she could do. ‘You’re bleeding,’ she said and wound up the window. The troop carrier sprayed us with dust.

Bree stared at me. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I have proof,’ I said, wiping my nose. The blood was pink and thin. ‘Maybe now you’ll believe me. We have to find him.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

AiAi went lookout. Carrie wandered off into the bush. Darcy and Joe took the outbuildings, haysheds and water tanks. Bree and I scrambled under the church.

Bree went down first. I hesitated at the opening. I took slow, calming breaths as she disappeared into the murk. Could I face it again, that crypt-like deadness, the ceiling pressing down like the lid on a coffin?

‘What if we don’t find him?’ Bree called.

I thought of Silence’s things, hidden in the crawlspace. His sleeping bag, shucked and loose as a discarded sock. Clothes, a rusted razor, his toothbrush—too many things left behind. I remembered his notebook, etched with all the things he wanted to say, but couldn’t.

‘What if we do?’ I called back. I shook off my dizziness and followed her.

‘You know that Darcy or AiAi will tell her we’ve been looking, don’t you?’

‘Yes. I don’t care anymore.’

We huddled close with a single torch, crept through the labyrinth of boxy storage spaces with a ceiling so low we had to squat in places. The bobbing disc of light caught on pieces of furniture entwined like new-age sculptures, broken pews and crates of gold-leafed Bibles stacked high.

The air under the church had been used up long ago. It reeked of mildew and old things turning to dust. We had wisps of webs in our hair, dust in our lashes and cold sweat on our skin. Bree caught her leg on a rusted nail. A trickle of blood travelled from her knee to her ankle.

Each dark corner led to another. My bones ached with cramp and cold. We breathed through our mouths, shuddering relief when the rush of old air from some hidden, closed-up space proved to be just that—old air.

The shout, when it came, made me jump. It sounded far away and I couldn’t tell who it was, but the pitch was unmistakeable.

Bree grabbed my hand. I could feel the vibration of her fear. We shimmied out of the hatch door and ran blindly until we could hear voices.

Carrie and Darcy were waiting at the base of the old tank.

‘What?’ I gasped.

‘Joe is in there,’ Darcy said. She hooked her thumbs
in her belt loops and rocked on her heels, looking down at the ground.

‘What?’ I said again, gagging on the word.

Carrie shook her head and bit down on her lip.

I scrambled up the ladder and shone my torch into the black hole.

Joe was standing with his back to the wall. His breaths came quick and shallow. A flickering torch was lying half-sunk in wet leaves. I traced the direction of his stare.

‘No,’ I breathed.

Silence was curled up under a blanket of leaves, like a sleeping child. He looked peaceful, as if someone had covered him over and tucked him in tight. The pale moon of his cheek was blue, blue as a fragile egg, and his forelock fringe was neatly brushed aside. His bare foot poked through the leaves; his fist was in the air; and all around him the proof that he’d died as he’d lived—without hope.

Breath left my lungs in a whoosh. The sky tilted and I grabbed the edge of the ladder to keep myself from falling.

Joe watched in horror as I lowered myself into the tank. I had to touch Silence one last time.

I passed the back of my hand across his cold cheek. I kissed his cold lips and pulled his hood over his face. All essence of him was gone.

Joe snapped out of his trance. He lurched from the muck with a rude, sucking sound. Wordlessly, he passed
me his torch and a handful of sharp, cold metal. He hoisted himself onto the roof of the tank and lay there, heaving.

Above me, a piece of sky, benign and blue.

Joe pulled me back up. Out on the roof, where Silence and I had claimed the stars, I opened my hand and stared at Joe’s offering.

‘They were screwed in,’ he said. ‘From the outside. He couldn’t get out even if he…’ his voice broke.

‘Maybe he climbed in there. Maybe he was hiding,’ Darcy said from below, her eyes bleak.

My hand flew up. I threw the four rusted, metal screws at her.

‘Did he tighten these up, Darce?’ I yelled. ‘Did he screw them down so tight he couldn’t get out once he was done hiding? How could he do that
from the inside?’

These were the images in my mind that would play forever: Silence sleeping, his raised, defiant fist, muddy claw-marks on the walls of the tank, ten thousand dings and dents. He’d tried so hard to get out. And all the while he would have screamed in his useless old man’s rasp as the knee-high muck he stood in sucked up precious oxygen.

When we’d all woken to the strange, rhythmic clanging, Arden had reassured us. She’d crooned like a den mother. Had never seemed more benevolent and
human. Nothing can hurt us here. Because there’s only us. And we’re family. It’s just the wind.

Or the strike of a rock on tin. Like the one Silence had clenched in his fist.

‘They’re back,’ AiAi puffed, white-eyed, skittish as a foal. ‘They’re coming. What’s going on? Did you find anything?’

Joe slid down the ladder, mindless of daggered splinters in the palings. He folded in half and collapsed onto the ground. His face was white and slack; his hands shook as he tried to light the nub of a burnt-out cigarette.

Carrie hugged herself and rocked, her jaw juddering.

Darcy, kneeling in the dirt, her hands over her face, her fingers interlinked like a church and steeple. Praying.

Bree moaning,
No, no, no.

‘Did you find him? Did you find Silence?’ AiAi’s eyes darted around to each of us, trying to piece together a picture from all those fragments of grief.

I slumped on the roof of the tank, visible for miles. I didn’t care. My limbs felt leaden, like I was getting the flu. My feet were stained dark. Everything was painfully acute: the cooling tin on the back of my legs, the slow slug of tears on my cheek, the stink of damp and death.