Stolen (7 page)

There were no bodies. No dead people. It was just us inside the one-room shed. And the colors.

I was sitting in the middle of it all. There was dirt and dust, plants and rocks … all of it scattered over the floor around me. My arms were covered in blood. At least that’s what I thought at first. Everything was red, all of my clothes stained with it. I touched my forearm. It didn’t hurt, nothing did. I lifted my arm to my nose. It smelled like dirt.

“It’s paint,” you said. “Made from the rocks.”

I spun around quickly, found you. You were between me and the door. Your face was wild, your mouth tight and angry as you looked me over. Your eyes were dark. I started shaking. I crawled backward, reaching behind for something solid to hold between us, but all I could grab were sprigs of flowers, needles of spinifex. I backed up until I reached the wall. Then I waited; every bit of me focused on you, on what you’d do next, on where you would move. My breath was coming in bursts. I wondered how hard I could kick you. Could I get past you to the door?

You watched me. You were wilder than I’d ever seen you, but you were still as stone. Just the sound of my breaths, getting faster and faster, hung between us. Your hands were clenched in fists. I saw the veins sticking out on the back of them and the whiteness of your knuckles. I risked a look back at your face.

Your eyes squinted tight, as if you were trying to fight something inside you, some deep emotion. You groaned. But the tears came anyway. They ran down your cheeks quietly, slipping over your jaw.

I’d never seen a man cry before, only on TV. I’d never even seen Dad close to crying. Those tears looked so odd on you. It was like the strength of you just seemed to sap away. The surprise of it stopped me being so scared. I took a deep breath and looked away. The walls were painted in large streaks of color. There were bits of plants, leaves, and sand stuck to them.

You took a step toward me, and instantly my eyes switched back to your face. You crouched down on the backs of your heels. You didn’t move into the area that I was in, the area filled with sand and stickiness. You stayed on the edge, just looking at it all … just looking at me.

“You’re sitting in my painting,” you said at last. You leaned forward and touched a leaf. “I made all this.” You moved your hand along the edge, stroking the sand. “There were patterns and shapes, made from the land….” Your face went rigid and angry again as you surveyed the damage I’d done. Eventually you shrugged, sighing as your shoulders dropped down. “But you created a different pattern, I guess…. In a way, it’s almost better. You’re part of it.”

I saw the line I had made as I’d crawled along the floor, the paint I’d spread everywhere. Shakily I got to my feet. A bundle of twigs tumbled from my lap. I looked at your face, with your red-veined eyes and tear tracks, at the tension in your jaw. You looked crazy then, someone mentally ill who didn’t believe in taking his pills. I ran sentences through my mind, trying to figure out what to say to get out of that room without upsetting you further. How could I get to the door without tipping you over the edge? How were people supposed to act with madmen? But you were the first to break the silence.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” you said, your voice level and reasonable again. “I was worried about the painting. I’ve been working on it … for a long time.”

“I thought you were going to … I thought …” The images were too horrible to get the words out.

“I know.” You ran a hand through your hair, turning parts of it red from the sand in your fingers. You seemed serious. Your face was tired and empty-looking, your forehead wrinkled up.

“Just relax,” you said again. “Please. Just relax. For once. Neither of us can go on like this. Just trust that it’s all for the best.”

Your face was earnest, like you really did want the best for me. I stepped through that strange painting of yours and came up pretty close to you, closer than I wanted to be.

“OK,” I said. My body was shaking again; it was all I could do to keep upright. I had to keep my voice light and friendly. I knew that much about crazy people. As long as the tone is right …

I summoned up the courage to look you directly in the eyes. They were wide, not so red as before. “Just let me go,” I said. “Just for a bit, a little while. It’ll be OK.” I tried to make my voice soothing; I tried willing you to say yes. Again, I glanced toward the door.

The tears were running down your face again. You couldn’t hold my gaze. Instead, you leaned your forehead against one of the piles of sand. The red grains stuck to the wetness of your cheeks. You gulped as you swallowed your tears. You brushed some of the sand, sweeping it into a neat line, and hid your face from me.

“Fine,” you said. You said it so softly that at first I thought you hadn’t said anything at all. “I won’t stop you. I’ll only save you when you get lost.”

I didn’t wait to hear it again. I stepped past you. I was so tense, waiting for you to grab me, waiting for those rock-hard fingers on my thigh. But you didn’t even move.

The door opened easily. I pushed down the handle and stepped out into a white, hot blast of sunlight. You made a sort of sobbing noise behind me.

I started running, past the second building and toward the rocky outcrop of the Separates. I kept looking behind me, but you weren’t following. Sweat was pouring off me before I’d even gone a few feet. I jumped over small bushes and stumbled over dry, exposed roots. I closed that hundred feet in about ten seconds, I think. I was glad for those leather boots.

I slowed down when I neared the boulders. Again, I noticed the wooden stakes sticking up from the ground, evenly spaced around them, and the line of plastic piping leading from the house. I could follow that. I looked down the small crevice where the pipe entered the rocks, the gap that had looked like a pathway from the veranda. But was it the right way? The other option would be to follow the edge of the boulders, skip going through the middle entirely, and get to the other side that way. But that would mean losing the pipe. And I still thought it was part of some larger water system, that it would lead me to another building on the other side.

I heard a thud from over near the outbuildings and made a quick decision. I would follow the pipe.

The path was rocky and uneven, getting narrower all the time. But it was cooler in there straightaway, as if the cool was radiating off the stone itself. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the shadowy light from the boulders towering above. The path became so narrow I had to walk with one foot on either side of the pipe. Soon the rock sides felt like they were starting to close in on me, pressing me like a flower. I stretched my arms out and laid my palms on the cool, dry stone, as if pushing it back. I tripped over the pipe as I hurried, using my hands to steady myself. The path got narrower still but I could see light at the end. Was it the other side already?

Another few feet and I got there. But it wasn’t the end. Instead the path opened into a clearing. The light was brighter but greenish, filtered through vegetation. I stopped. The clearing was the size of a large room, but with thick bushes and trees around the edge, some growing up the rock sides and spreading out above. There were other pathways, too, leading deeper into the rocks. It was so different from the stark openness on the other side, a different environment entirely. It was the first real bit of green I’d seen for ages.

I took a few steps to the middle of the clearing. The pipe curved around to the right and down one of the larger pathways. There were some cages just before it. The chickens! When I walked toward them, they started clucking. I knelt and looked through the wire. There were six, scrawny like rags. There was another cage next to them with a rooster inside. I stuck my finger through the wire and stroked his black tail feathers.

“Poor feller,” I murmured.

I pulled the lid of the hens’ cage until it swung open. I stuck my hand inside and felt for eggs, thinking I could take them with me before I disappeared. But there were none. I wondered about setting the birds free, but I didn’t want them to come clucking back to you and show you where I’d gone.

There was a thick patch of vegetation behind the chickens’ cages. Strange yellowish berries hung from some of the branches, and small apple-shaped lumps peeked out from deep in the undergrowth.

I glanced back down the narrow path. I was taking too long. You could catch up to me any moment. So I left the chickens. The quicker I could get through the clearing, the better.

I followed the pipe. The path it went down was wider and flatter than the last, and I had to step through several patches of thick grass. I wondered about snakes. What would I do if I saw one? I saw a movie once where a man tied rope around his arm above a snakebite, but he tied it so tightly that later he had to have his arm amputated. I tried to push that thought out of my mind; it wasn’t exactly helpful right then. I kept going, hoping I was traveling in the right direction. It seemed like I was walking in a straight line toward the other side. The sun was above me, beating down strongly, but it wasn’t the same kind of stifling heat as near the house. The vegetation was getting thicker. Inside those boulders, it wasn’t like the desert at all. I hadn’t walked far before the path opened up into another clearing. It was smaller than the last and even denser with plants. I followed the pipe through the middle.

The pool was so closely screened by foliage that I almost walked straight into it. Instead, the thick arm of a tree caught me just in time.

Rock overhung the pool, sheltering it from the sun. There was a cave at the back, just above the water, with moss growing around the entrance. That dark hole could have been hiding anything. Snakes, crocodiles … bodies. I shivered.

I clung to the tree arm and stared out, faintly listening to the birds chattering somewhere above. The water was deep and dark, but it wasn’t murky. I could see right down to the sand and weed at the bottom. I should have known there would be water at some point. Why else would all those trees be there? They certainly weren’t surviving on rain.

I knelt at the edge and stuck a finger into the water, then gasped and took it back. The water was cold, ice-cold, almost. I wanted to jump in … jump straight in and drink it all up. But I just sat there, resting on my heels. I was so stupid. I was looking at all that water, dehydrating more every second, and not touching a drop. I didn’t know if I could drink it, you see. I didn’t know what was in it. All I could think about was a TV show where an explorer guy drank from a river and a tiny fish swam into his stomach and started eating his insides; then a doctor had to stick a long tube inside him to get it out. There were no doctors around that pool. And I didn’t want a tiny fish in my insides, so I gave up on the water idea. I stood up and walked around it, trying to find where the pipe came out the other side.

But it didn’t. The pipe stopped in the pool, not leading anywhere else. I ran my hands through my hair as I glanced around. You were right, it seemed. There were no other buildings using that water supply.

I tramped around the small clearing, looking for another way out, a way to get me to the other side of the boulders. There were two other pathways, but they were even narrower than the one I’d come in on, more overgrown, too. I stepped gingerly down the larger one. If I had been worried about snakes before, it was nothing compared to my thoughts about that path. The grass was up to my knees at points, and there were things moving and rustling around me. I thought I saw something in the rocks near my hands, something slithering away. Loudly buzzing flies were hovering around my head, too, being drawn to my sweat. I kept walking until that path turned into a dead end of rock and I had to turn back. I tried the second, smaller pathway, but that soon became too narrow.

I went back to the main clearing, but the other paths out of that were no better, either. I just got more lost, tangled up in the maze of the Separates. I don’t know how long I spent trying to get out. It was hard to keep an idea of time in that place. It felt like forever. But one thing I did know, you hadn’t followed me. Not yet. I clung desperately to the hope that you thought I’d run somewhere else. I tried another, smaller path, squeezing myself flat to fit between the rocks. But when I came back to the main clearing yet again, I realized I was going around in circles.

That’s when I finally woke up and had my idea.