The Secret of the Lonely Isles (11 page)

‘Hey, look! People have been here,' said Tyler.

‘Wow, we found it!' said Zac in wonder. ‘We actually found it!'

Maddy wasn't entirely convinced. ‘How do we know someone didn't just land here once and cut some timber? Not the people from England, just some sailors passing, or some people from the mainland?'

‘You're so negative Maddy,' said Tyler.

‘After all we've been through to get here, of course this is it!' Zac agreed with him.

Ella shook her head. ‘Maddy's quite right. We shouldn't make any assumptions. A good researcher evaluates what he finds on its own merit, not on what he wants it to explain. We need to look further, see if there's more convincing evidence.'

They headed across the valley, through the trees, till Jem stopped. ‘We dunno where we're going, and we could get lost if it gets any thicker. Let's go back to the start, and work round the bottom of the slope. Looks like there's a lot of big rocks 'n' stuff. C'mon.' He was so glad to be back in his own element again, on land, where he knew how things worked. And where there were no dark watery depths to be lost in.

They stopped after a couple of hours in a little clearing, and sat down on the grass to eat. The sun was already high overhead, but the green canopy above shaded them and kept them cool. As they ate biscuits and fruit, Tyler regaled them with stories about old Japanese soldiers on remote islands in the Pacific, left behind when World War II ended, still defending their positions even after fifty years had passed.

‘Our teacher told us at school, true God! Nobody told
these old guys the war'd finished, and they just kept livin' in the bush, stealin' chooks from the local village, or livin' off the land on some uninhabited islands. They musta gone crazy on their own all that time. The teacher said that the Japanese had to send special people to talk 'em into comin' out and goin' back to Japan. They thought that the leaflets dropped from planes telling 'em it was all over and to come out, was just a trick by the enemy.'

‘D'you reckon anyone could still be living here?' asked Maddy hesitantly. ‘I mean, could some of the settlers have survived?' She glanced around the clearing, and Jem felt a sudden chill, as if they were being watched.

Tyler laughed. ‘Mads, they'd be a hundred years old! I don't reckon anyone who came here in 1912 is still gunna be around!' He laughed again.

‘Well, not the original ones,' said Jem, ‘but they could've had kids, and then those kids had kids of their own, and so on, couldn't they?'

‘Well, I suppose it's not impossible. But you would think that someone might have noticed fires or smoke at some time over the years.' Ella munched her apple thoughtfully.

‘Well, if anyone's still livin' here, I hope they're not gunna be scared of us, and attack us or nothin'. We should keep our eyes open,' said Zac, staring around at
the forest as if he expected crazy old soldiers to come screaming out of the bushes at them.

Jem agreed. ‘Anyway, we should keep going till about midday, then head back again, or we'll be walkin' in the dark.'

The walls of the valley were solid rock. It was smooth and shiny – Ella said it was probably basalt – and here and there it had broken into rubble piles, which they skirted around, but occasionally long cracks and small caves showed up, havens for birds and small animals. The valley was otherwise quite flat, carrying tall stands of healthy timber. Birds flew up squawking every so often, and some kind of ground bird could be heard scuttling away in the undergrowth as they passed. They came across a creek at one point and began to follow it, but the scrub alongside it became too dense, and they went back to the rocks again.

After another couple of hours of scrambling over rocks and pushing their way through thick undergrowth, Tyler stopped under a shady tree, and said, ‘It's got to be lunchtime.'

‘Yeah,' agreed Maddy. ‘This is such a waste of time. I've got green ants and prickles all over me. There's nothing here!'

Zac nodded, and Ella looked tired.

‘Okay,' said Jem. He glanced up at the sun. ‘It's about midday anyway. If we go on any longer, we won't have enough daylight to get back again, so let's have lunch and then go. We can have another look tomorrow in the other direction.'

It was late afternoon when they finally reached the bottom of the slope they had climbed down that morning. Jem stopped and pulled out his water bottle and took a long drink. Tyler, Zac and Maddy had another look at the tree stumps. They were grey and weathered, but plainly had been cut by humans with a saw. Tyler found the rusty head of an old mallet lying among some rocks nearby. He placed it on top of the nearest stump.

‘Ya never know,' he grinned. ‘The owner might come lookin' for it!'

That night they sat in the cockpit, staring out at the walls of the caldera guarding the cove.

‘I reckon,' said Jem, ‘that if we're gunna have a proper look over this island, then we should take a bit of camping gear and spend the night. It's stupid
coming back when we've only got halfway, and it's not that big – we'd get right across it in a full day, easy.'

The others agreed, but Ella looked worried. ‘I don't know,' she said, her forehead creasing in a frown. ‘Your parents might not be happy about you doing something like that. What if there are wild animals, or snakes?'

‘You don't get snakes on volcanic islands,' said Tyler. ‘Not unless they've been brought there. I read about it in a book. Places like New Zealand and Lord Howe Island – they don't have snakes 'cause they rose up out of the sea.'

‘And there won't be any wild animals to worry about – we haven't heard any dingoes, and they'd be howlin' their heads off after we been crashin' around everywhere,' added Zac.

Jem nodded. ‘There might not be
any
animals on this island, only birds 'n' insects 'n' stuff.'

‘Good thing Mum made us take those compressed foam mattresses,' said Maddy. ‘They don't weigh anything, and it's not cold at night. It'll be fun, really it will.'

‘And plenty of food – we need to take plenty of food with us,' said Tyler. ‘I'll organise the food. You never pack enough, Maddy!'

Ella looked at them all, and closed her eyes briefly.
‘All right,' she said, ‘you're in charge. We'll go tomorrow morning. But only for one night!'

The sun had barely cleared the horizon by the time they stood at the rim of the caldera the next morning. Each carried a loaded backpack with a thin cylinder of mattress strapped underneath. Jem gazed across the green sea of the forest canopy to the blue sea beyond it.

‘I reckon we should head across the middle, right to the other side of the island.'

‘How far d'you reckon it is?' asked Tyler.

‘About four or five kilometres maybe. Hard to say,' said Jem.

‘Well that won't take us long – five ks is nothin'!' said Zac confidently.

‘Yeah, but it's not a straight line across a paddock. By the time we go around things and through thick scrub 'n' stuff, it'll be more like ten.' He lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes and swept them around the horizon. ‘There's a higher cliff top or somethin' over there – we might be able to see it from the floor of the valley. Let's head for that.'

Ella took a compass sight of the rocky outcrop, which was a dull grey mass against the pale blue sky, and they set off down the slope. They passed the old weathered stumps, and headed into the bush. Every so often, Ella stopped and took a new sighting. The forest wasn't as dense as it looked from the edge of the caldera, and the walking was easier than the previous day. Sometimes the land rose up, and gave a view of the far side, and she could take a sighting off the outcrop again. As they went, she showed the others how to do it, and they took it in turns to pick a target, walk to it and take the next compass reading.

Here and there along the way, other trees had been cut down. Grey, weathered remains of sawn-off sections lay on the ground around the stumps. A little further on, Jem halted and stared into the bush to one side. ‘Look at that!'

It was a rusted length of heavy gauge wire, still twisted around a sturdy tree, and the wire had cut deep into the trunk. Nearby were the remains of old posts, some still standing upright in the ground at regular intervals. Rusted wire was still twisted around some of them, but the rest of it was long gone.

‘Well, ship builders didn't build fences,' said Tyler. ‘This has to be a sign of people living here! Who'd go to all the trouble of building a fence?'

Jem walked around the posts. ‘This isn't a fence, it's a yard. Or it was. It's too small to be a paddock.'

Ella and Maddy took cameras out of their packs, and photographed the posts.

‘Hmm,' said Ella, putting the lens cap back on her camera, ‘someone kept animals penned up here, and a very long time ago it seems. This is extremely interesting.'

An hour's walk brought them to a small clear creek. Regularly placed flat rocks made it possible to walk across the creek without getting their boots wet.

‘D'ya reckon that's natural?' said Tyler.

‘Nah,' said Jem, ‘I don't.'

He glanced around, but the bush was quiet and still, apart from a few birds in the trees. From here on, there were more signs of human intervention in the landscape, more thinned out areas of bush,
and more stumps. As they walked along, Zac and Tyler chatted.

‘If those Japanese soldiers could survive for so long on a Pacific island, why not here? I mean, you start out with twenty people, some of them are gunna have babies and stuff,' said Tyler. ‘There could be a whole colony of people still living here!'

‘Nah – we woulda seen somethin' by now,' said Zac. ‘Or they woulda heard us and come 'n' seen who it was. Anyway they probably couldn't grow enough food here. Look how hard it was for them fellas at Port Essington. Heaps of them people died there.'

‘Yeah but that was like a hundred and seventy years ago. These guys came much later, when there was better medicine and tinned food ‘n' stuff. They coulda brought a heap of stuff with 'em and survived for ages. They mighta had to start eating the weaker ones, you know, like in a life raft,' said Tyler with a wicked grin.

‘Yeah! They'd have to draw straws to see who was next, ay. And then …'

‘Shut up you guys! said Maddy. ‘You're making me feel really creepy!'

She marched ahead of them, and caught up with Jem. The country was easy to walk through, and Jem hiked along wondering what had happened to the people who had cut down the trees and put up yards, wondering
why he kept dreaming the same dream, and wondering what it all meant. He was staring at the ground, thinking about the dream, when Maddy cried out.

‘Jem! Look!'

Tyler, Zac and Ella caught up with them and stopped, eyes wide. Almost hidden by the tangled scrub was a small wooden hut. Its rough-sawn timber slabs were mottled with rot and lichen and its roof had half-fallen in. Clearly no one had lived there for a very long time. The door was closed, and Jem put a hand on it and pushed gingerly. It fell in with a crash that made everyone jump and look around nervously, as if expecting an irate owner to accuse them of vandalism. He looked at the others.

‘You first,' whispered Maddy, looking a bit scared.

Jem stepped through the doorway, and peered into the gloom inside. There were a few broken bits of furniture, and some rubbish on the floor. It looked completely abandoned.

‘Wow,' said Maddy, peering in after him, ‘so people really did live here. How old d'you reckon it is?'

Ella followed Jem inside. ‘It's difficult to say. It could be fifty years or more, depending how long the timber lasts in this climate.' She gazed around the room. ‘It looks like anything useful was removed though. That's a good sign. It might mean we'll find much more recent evidence.'

They left the hut, and kept walking. Jem led the way. There was no actual path to follow, but his feet seemed to have a mind of their own. He wasn't at all surprised when he climbed around a large fallen tree, and found himself in the middle of what was once a small village square. The ground had been flattened and paved with large smooth stones, still quite visible through a covering of grass and bushes and the odd sapling that was growing between the stones. Around the edges of the square were several small buildings. Four of them were huts similar to the last one, except in better condition. The remaining buildings looked like storerooms or sheds.

Three of the huts were empty, their roofs falling into the rooms below. The fourth hut was also in a dilapidated state, but when Ella pushed open its front door the light through the holes in the roof shone down onto furniture and household items. Blackened pots hung off hooks on the back wall. A well-made wooden table stood in the middle of the room, thick with dust and debris but quite intact. Shelves around the walls held stacks of crockery, serving bowls and bottles. Another shelf held a row of mouldy, decaying books, and an old bird's nest. At one end of the hut was a bed, made up with sheets and blankets, but it was clear that no one had slept in it for a very long time. The windows were
shuttered, so apart from dust, leaves and the occasional bird, not much else had found its way inside. A mouldering rug lay on the uneven stone floor.

‘Do you think someone still lives here?' said Tyler in a loud whisper.

‘I don't think so, it's too derelict,' said Ella, gazing around the room. ‘It's interesting that there's furniture in here, but none of the other houses had any.'

They stepped back outside into the fresh air, and inspected the storerooms next. One storeroom was lined with shelves, mostly empty, although there were several stacks of crockery and other kitchen utensils. Some large tin washtubs stood on the floor in a tidy stack. The other storeroom held furniture – beds, tables, chairs, cupboards, lengths of timber, all kinds of things.

‘It looks like this was Harvey Norman's, ay!' said Tyler. ‘They musta done their shopping here!'

‘I think perhaps that someone has taken these things from the empty houses we saw, maybe when the occupants had died, to store them for future use,' said Ella, and they moved on to the sheds. The first turned out to be a workshop with tools and a rickety-looking wheelbarrow, and at the back was a forge with a pair of bellows, the leather rotted almost completely away. A heavy anvil and hammer stood to one side.
The next shed was a carpenter's workshop. One wall provided hanging space for dozens of rusty old tools – hand saws, hammers, augers, pinch bars and so on. A hessian bag had rotted and split, spilling rusted nails across the rough wooden workbench, but otherwise everything was neat and tidy, apart from a thick layer of dust and leaves.

The last building was different. Unlike the others, it had a stone path leading to its front door. It consisted of a single room, without any sign of a kitchen, or any shelving. It had wooden benches around the four walls, and a shuttered window on each wall.

‘I think this was a gathering place – a church if you like,' said Ella, gazing around. ‘Quakers didn't go in for churches as such – they didn't have priests or ministers – but they had meeting houses where they held regular gatherings. This would've been a meeting house, I'm sure of it.'

They went back outside, and stood in the middle of the little square looking around at the buildings.

‘So where is everybody?' asked Maddy. ‘It looks like people were here not that long ago, and there's all that stuff in the huts. What happened?'

Ella shook her head. ‘It's hard to say. Perhaps they all left – maybe a ship came past and they all got on board and went home again. But then I'm sure I'd have found
some record of that, some newspaper article certainly. These people were obviously here a long time. Their rescue would have been big news back in England.'

‘Yeah – they'd all be Robinson Crusoes!' said Tyler.

‘Do you reckon they died?' asked Zac.

‘Yes, I think so,' said Ella. ‘But I don't believe they ate each other.'

‘I was only joking!' protested Tyler quickly. ‘I didn't mean that, really.'

‘I know,' she smiled, ‘but it's a fair comment. People do such things when they're desperate to stay alive. Look around you. Does this look like a desperate situation? Neat houses, carefully stacked storerooms, tools all in their right places. No, I don't think things went terribly wrong here. I think it's more likely that they just slowly died, of sickness, or accidents, and finally old age.'

Jem shivered in spite of the hot sun. He had a sudden flashback of the dark-haired boy on the cliff top, and wondered if he was the last person left alive here, to die all alone.

They found the remains of a cobbled path leading down a short distance to a shallow creek nearby. Several large flat rocks lay along its edge, and Jem had a vision of women doing their washing here, and laughing with each other. The water was clear and sweet, and
reminded Jem of the spring back home. As he stepped out onto one of the flat stones, he startled a small group of reddish-brown birds which squawked and flapped as they darted into the undergrowth on the other side of the creek.

‘Did you see that!' said Jem excitedly. ‘Chooks! They were chooks!'

‘They musta gone wild and survived in the bush,' said Zac. ‘No dingoes here then, that's for sure.'

Across the creek they could see a pair of small buildings. One was the same as the huts in the little square, but in better condition. The other was smaller and looked more like a toolshed. The remains of what might have been a chicken run sagged at the back of them.

‘A chook pen!' said Jem. ‘Those birds really were chooks then. The people musta brought them from the ship before it sank. Well at least they would've had chickens and eggs to eat.'

They pushed through the undergrowth to the front door, and stood there hesitating, till at last Ella put her hand out and lifted the latch.

The door swung in with a long loud creak that made Jem's hair stand on end, and he couldn't help glancing around to see if someone had heard the noise and was rushing up to yell at them. The roof had no holes, so it was dim inside, and Ella forced open the shutters on
the two windows, flooding the room with light. There was a table in the middle of the room, with six chairs around it. On one wall stood a wooden dresser made of hand-sawn timber and stacked with blue and white china plates, bowls, cups and saucers. Several jugs were lined up on the top shelf. A large enamel teapot had pride of place in the middle. Further back on the far side was a bed made up with sheets and pillows, and a patchwork quilt. At the back wall was a workbench for preparing food. Cooking pots and pans hung on hooks against the wall, and several large knives lay on a wooden board to one side. Here, a door opened to an outside kitchen, which was basically a fireplace made of blackened stones with an iron tripod over it for suspending cooking pots. A large pile of firewood was neatly stacked to one side.

It all looked as if someone had tidied up ready for visitors, except they'd forgotten to dust for a while. Everything was thick with the pale grey stuff, years of it. Cobwebs hung in strands from the rafters, and webbed the legs of the chairs.

They went outside and looked across at the last building left to inspect. It was quite a lot smaller than the little house, and only had one window and one door, both of which were closed. The roof was intact.

As Zac and Tyler headed towards it, Jem had a
sudden wave of apprehension, and called out sharply, ‘No! Don't go there!'

Ella cried out to them at the exact same time, an unmistakable warning in her voice that pulled both Zac and Tyler up short.

‘What?' said Tyler, looking quizzically at them, and then glancing nervously at the ground. ‘What is it, a snake?'

Zac stood stock still, staring at the ground to see where the danger lay.

Jem opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, and just looked at Ella. She glanced at him, as if to say, yes, we both know what's in there …

‘Don't go inside, boys,' she said grimly. ‘I have a bad feeling about this one. Let me look first, okay?'

They stood back, and watched as Ella carefully opened the door, and stepped through. After a few moments she re-emerged, blinking in the sunlight after the dimness of the little hut. She took a few deep breaths, exhaling as if to clear stale air from her lungs.