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“It's my cat,” said Elliana.
Frankie looked at the animal. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and squinted, readjusting his thick glasses. The animal squatted in front of them. Its coat shimmered, the late afternoon sun catching the grey and blue glimmers.
“It doesn't look like a cat to me.”
Elliana put her hands on her hips and squared her jaw. “Mate, he’s my cat,” she repeated. “Are you telling me that I don't know my own cat?”
Frankie shrugged. “I didn't know that cats had feathers.”
“Some do. He’s rare.”
“Ok.” He didn't look convinced. The boy bent down to pat its head but withdrew his hand quickly, as if he had been burned. “Shit, is it supposed to have eyes like that?”
“His eyes,” said Elliana with menacing quiet, “are fine.”
The boy took a step back and glanced around. The afternoon sun was touching the top of the gum trees as it sank below the mountains.
“He’s a big bugger.”
“She’s very well proportioned, actually,” said Elliana. “This breed is always larger than other cats.”
“Looks a bit like a platypus,” he suggested.
“Have you ever seen a metre-long platypus with feathers and red eyes?” she asked
He admitted that he hadn't.
“And teeth?”
“No but to be fair I've never seen a cat that looks like that either.”
“It sounds like you don't know that much about animals,” said Elliana.
“Yeah ok. Anyway, I’d better be off.”
“Already?” she said. “You just got here.”
“The sun’s going, and I don't want to be riding past your bit of river after dark. My Nanna says that the bunyip lives out here.”
“Don’t be a dickhead, there’s no bunyip out here.”
“That’s not what my nanna said. She said people have always told stories of bunyips in this part of the Huon.” He squinted behind him at the water in the distance, fringed by trees. “She said that your property is the starting point. That’s why...” his voice trailed off and he rubbed at his face.
“That's why what?”
“Nothing.”
“There’s no bloody bunyip, ok? Don’t you think I’d know about it?”
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Elliana remembered a school trip up to Hobart a year or so ago, when they had gone to the museum and seen the ancient megafauna.
Elliana and her classmates gazed in awe at the diprotodon.
“Think of it as a giant wombat,” said the guide. “A giant wombat with big teeth.”
“But not carnivorous?” said a girl, her voice hopeful.
“Yeah, imagine that thing chasing you down and ripping you apart,” said a voice from the back, and an excited titter ran through the group.
“Shut up Max you dickhead,” Elliana had said. “Look at those teeth. They're for grinding, not ripping.”
“That’s right,” said the guide. “But does anyone know what mythological creature the Diprotodon is supposed to have given rise to?”
“Dragon?” said one boy.
The guide tilted her head to one side and squinted at him. “No-oo. Anyone else?”
“Godzilla?” said another.
The guide shot a stricken glance at their teacher for assistance.
He clapped his hands to get the group's attention. “An Australian mythological animal.”
“Bunyip,” said one of the older girls, rolling her eyes. “The stories say they live in billabongs and waterholes and drags people to their deaths.”
“That's right,” said the guide.
“If there was a bunyip out here don't you think I'd know about it?” Elliana repeated.
Frankie shrugged again and frowned at the animal that sat in front of him, staring off into the distance.
“Maybe. I dunno. Are you coming to school this week? Miss Bailey says she’ll ring your mum if you don’t come back soon.”
“Mum’s sick,” said Elliana. “So it would be no good Miss Bailey sticking her nose in anyway.”
Frankie rode off, puffs of dust flurrying behind him as he peddled away. The sunlight tinged his hair red as he disappeared out of sight.
He could move quickly for a little bloke.
“Come on Jelly Meat,” Elliana said to her cat.
She squatted down and touched his back. His body shuddered, as if there was a current running through him.
“What's the matter? Are you ok?”
A noise rose up in the distance, from where the serpentine murky water splayed out over the paddock. The Huon River was expansive in some areas, but here, water had flowed out of it many years ago, pooling into a waterhole on the property. A low howling grew to a wavering crescendo which cut off abruptly, although the noise continued to hang in the air for a few moments. Jelly Meat rose up on his thick legs and lifted her head, sniffing the air, her elongated face waving gently back and forth, red tinged eyes half closed. A low rumble came from his belly, and Elliana wrapped her arms around him and picked him up. A damp smell rose from the fur that ran under the creature’s feathers, and Elliana shouldered her way through the screen door into the darkening, silent house. Jelly Meat waggled his behind to be put down as the door clicked shut behind them and she placed him down on the lino, bending to give him a gentle kiss on the head before he disappeared into the gloom of the kitchen.
Frankie was an idiot. Of course Jelly Meat was a cat. Dad had told her so, years ago, the night that he carried Jelly Meat home after finding him with his foot caught in a rabbit trap. Her father had told her to look after him, to nurse him back to health, until he was well enough to head back out into the wilderness.
But then Dad had shot through and Jelly Meat had healed but the right time to let him go had never come. And now he was all that she had.
Elliana stood in the empty house, listening for any noise. The TV wasn't on, nor the radio, and the hum of the fish tank filled the room. She didn't know why she left the filter going; the fish were long dead.
But sometimes it was the only comforting sound that she could hear.
She pulled some two-minute noodles down from the shelf, filled a bowl with water and upended the packet into it. The water had a brown tinge to it, thanks to the burst of rain last night. “Just enough to wash the possum poo into the gutters,” mum would have said.
Maybe mum would be home soon.
Perhaps.
She watched the glow of the microwave for, as she always thought grudgingly, four minutes. Pushing the empty bottles that lined the wall under the sink out of the way, she reminded herself to put the recycling bin out.
There was a snuffling in the hallway as Jelly Meat nosed along the wall, finding his way in the darkness. He was fidgety tonight, pacing back and forth along the corridor, his belly low to the ground and his side brushing against the peeling wallpaper. There was a scratching noise as his feathers caught on the fraying flocked green flakes that had once been a wall of lush leaves and branches, some catching in his whiskers as he leaned against the wall.
He pushed his head against the fly screen door and opened it into the night. It was full dark now, the low moon just rising in the east, its hook hung heavy against the distant mountains that hugged the horizon. The microwave beeped behind Elliana as she followed Jelly Meat outside.
The keening noise rose up again from the far paddock, and the cat replied, in a strange, never heard before voice. Before she could take hold of him, he slipped down the steps and cut his way through the long grass of the front paddock faster than she had ever seen him move.
“Jelly Meat,” she called after him, her voice piercing the night, but he ignored her. After closing the screen door behind her, Elliana ran after him.
When she was little, very little, she hadn't been allowed anywhere near the river. It was too dark, too deep. There had been too many fences for her to get through. Now, she could easily climb, and there was no one to stop her anyway. Jelly Meat had a good start on her, but she knew where he was heading and didn't need to follow the same path, under broken fences and bent barbed wire. She pulled herself over the metal gates and wooden stiles until the lights of the house twinkled far away in the distance and the dark smell of the waterhole filled the air.
The river was a tourist attraction in some places, picturesque and expansive, but here it was stagnant and boggy, with dead gum trees jutting out of the still dark water.
There was a rustling to Elliana’s side and Jelly Meat appeared, roughly bumping his thick body against her leg. She dropped her hand to caress his head, and as she did so a noise rose from the swamp in front of her. A high, keening cry that hung in the air for a moment. Something huge flew overhead. An owl. Its wings rustled the hair on the top of her head. How big could an owl grow?
Crouching down, she wrapped her arms around Jelly Meat’s neck.
The quarter moon illuminated a ripple emanating from the surface of the water, a slow, lazy undulation that made the moon’s reflection jerk. A noise came from the bush that bordered the river, the gumtrees that stretched all the way to the Hartz Mountains. She had always been told not to go there, not to walk into those trees because they didn't stop and once you were deep enough, chances were that no one would find you until your bones were bleached white from the elements–if the Tassie devils left anything of you at all.
The sound of something crashing through the dark trees took all her attention, but she noticed that under her hands Jelly Meat was thrumming and bristling.
Elliana felt very, very small.
“Come on,” she said, wrapping her arms around his neck and pulling him close. “Let’s go. Let's go home.” She turned her head to find the warmth and safety of her house, but a mist covered the yellow glow of home, hiding the only guide she had.
She pulled her animal’s neck again, but Jelly Meat was as solid and as immovable as a boulder. A noise that she had never heard pulsed deep within him.
Although she was looking down, trying to shift her cat, she noticed a change in the nature of light around her. A sickening greenish glow diffused the mist. She thought the mist itself was changing, but then realised something else was rising up from the ground, a vapour with tendrils that wound gently around her limbs. Before her brain registered what was happening, she felt a sharp tug around her ankles and gripped Jelly Meat’s neck tighter to stop herself falling forwards.
The movement on the water had stopped, but the sounds from the surrounding trees were more purposeful, the cracking of low lying bushes and the snapping of twigs in the gum trees metres above her.
Her feet grew numb, as if the cold and the mist was swallowing her senses. “Help me Jelly Meat.” Dogs could do amazing feats of bravery; pulling their owners out of quicksand or from burning buildings – was there any reason that her cat couldn’t do the same?
“Let’s go home,” she said as electricity bristled inside him. “Come on boy.”
Her legs couldn't move at all, the malaise that had fallen over them now eddied up through her body. With a thrill of joy, she felt Jelly Meat stand up and lurch forwards, her arms around his neck not hindering his movements. “Yes boy,” she cried, not minding that her voice was shaking because the ground was moving. “That’s it, good job!”
In the sick light that hung over them, Jelly Meat glowed the same colour as the mist; his feathers and the fog mirroring each other in a strange symbiosis.
Her body slid over the damp grass, and she twisted her head to look behind them, the light of the house now low and hidden by the mist.
She tugged on Jelly Meat’s neck. “Good job boy. Now turn around, let’s head towards the lights.”
Instead, she slid closer to the black maw of the water that spread out in front of her. ‘Not this way,’ she said, her arms clinging to him. ‘Not towards the water, home!’
The dark water was rippling from the vibrations that shook the ground and something dark was blocking out the stars. The scrape of Jelly Meat’s strange prehensile feathers against her bare arms triggered something in her, and Elliana had a blazing burst of clarity and understanding. Of course Jelly Meat wasn't a cat! Everything was so, so crystal clear, and for one giddying moment she felt utterly grown up and wise.
She couldn't feel her body at all now. A soporific detachment washed over her. The mist was already digesting her, but of course she didn't know that. As Elliana was dragged into the dark water, the last thing she saw was the rictus face of her parents, waiting for her just below the surface.
About the Author:
Eva Leppard lives in lutruwita (Tasmania) with an elegantly sufficient amount of children and a disturbingly large number of rescue animals, all of which she raised by hand whether they liked it or not. She writes fantasy and occasionally science fiction (usually by accident), and her debut novel The Pitfalls of Being a Goddess will be published by Between the Lines Publishing in late 2022.
For updates, head to https://justevastories.com/
The Australian Capital Territory has more monsters per square meter than any other state or territory.
