Hayley stared out the window the next morning and gave a disheartened sigh. So much for the stuffed cat theory. Looked like she could cross that one off the list, she thought as she watched the birds jumping up and down on the soft toy’s head and swinging off its tail. Either it looked too cute for the lorikeets to take seriously or these birds didn’t realise they were supposed to be terrified of a cat. Admittedly, a stuffed cat really didn’t pose that much of a threat, but there wasn’t any ethical way to tie a real cat to the bush in order to scare away the birds.
Hopefully she’d have more success solving Errol’s problem. It seemed from her research that the reason for his clingy, needy behaviour was that he was lonely. Donkeys apparently needed the company of other donkeys or animals. Her quest to find Errol a friend, and in doing so find some peace and quiet for herself, led her to a small farm half an hour away which had listed a miniature donkey for sale on a community buy, swap and sell site.
Hayley pulled up at the farm and was greeted by a smiling woman in her mid-thirties.
‘Have you ever owned a mini before?’
‘No. I have a bigger one currently. I’m after a companion for him.’
‘Well, these make great companions. We got ours as a baby for the kids, but they’ve outgrown their donkey love in favour of dirt bikes,’ she said dryly, as the droning of a motorbike sounded somewhere further down behind the house.
Hayley heard the familiar sound of a braying donkey as it spotted them walking towards its pen.
‘When the kids played with him all the time he never made a peep, but lately it’s been getting worse, which is why we’ve decided to sell him. He’s lonely and it breaks my heart to hear him crying out for some attention.’
The donkey wasn’t as small as she’d imagined a miniature donkey to be, but he was smaller than Errol by probably half a metre. Hayley followed the woman into the pen and immediately the animal came up to them for a pat and a cuddle. Where Errol’s back came to about chest height, this little guy was at hip level. His light grey fur was fluffy and he had two caramel-coloured splodges around his eyes and a white muzzle.
‘What’s his name?’ Hayley asked, rubbing him behind his long ears.
‘Flynn.’
Hayley’s gaze snapped up. ‘You’re kidding.’
The woman looked across at her quizzically. ‘No, that’s what the kids named him. They were obsessed with the movie Tangled when we got him. Why?’
Hayley felt a smile creep across her face. Maybe there was something to this fate business after all. ‘My donkey’s name is Errol.’
The woman’s eyes lit up and she laughed, ‘Errol…Flynn.’ ‘I think that’s a sign if ever I saw one,’ said Hayley, looking back into the big dark eyes.
It was too nice a day to write. She couldn’t seem to settle; everything distracted her and her focus wasn’t on the story. Hayley looked out the window and made a sudden decision. She was going to go exploring.
Thanks to Errol’s escape she’d seen the paddocks surrounding the house, but she hadn’t seen much of the rear of the property and she decided there was no better time than right now. She went into the spare room and searched the remaining boxes for the stash of bags she hadn’t gotten around to unpacking; right at the bottom of the last box she found her old canvas daypack. She pulled on the closest thing she had to acceptable footwear—a pair of joggers—and headed back to the kitchen to grab a bottle of water, some fruit and a muesli bar.
Outside, she was struck by the absence of heehawing. Flynn’s arrival had been a huge success. Hayley had been a little concerned the two donkeys wouldn’t get along, but she needn’t have worried, they’d become inseparable. They made a funny sight, the long and the short of it, but Errol hadn’t made a peep since Flynn’s arrival. The next job was to make a bigger enclosure so they could have more room to graze and wander.
She closed the first gate behind her and took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the heady scent of warm sunshine. The grass was growing rather long and she was wary of snakes. Clearly the land hadn’t been used for some time; no livestock had been grazing here to keep the grass under control. She climbed up a short incline, her puffing making it embarrassingly obvious her fitness levels needed improving. At the top she had a rest, bending slightly and placing her hands on her thighs to catch her breath.
The little knoll looked over a flat open paddock. The walk down the other side was a little easier than going up had been. An old tree, or rather the remains of an old tree, lay rotting away where it had fallen who knew how many years ago. Hayley ran her hand across the sun-bleached timber, her fingertips tingling at the smooth weatherworn trunk as she imagined the stories this old tree could have told.
A cloud moved across the sun and a small shiver ran down Hayley’s back. Everything slowed down. Sounds became muted, as though coming from a great distance. What was happening? Maybe it was heatstroke. She should have told someone where she was going…
Her scalp felt prickly, and tiny black spots appeared before her eyes. She blinked but couldn’t clear her vision; an image seemed to detach itself from the hazy heat vapour across the paddock. It was a man on horseback, cantering towards her.
Out of the corner of her eye she caught movement and turned slightly to see a woman in a long dress running towards the rider. Hayley watched as she stumbled and fell to the ground, but immediately picked herself up again and continued running, her long dress bunched up in one small hand as she sobbed. Her hair was loose, falling down past her shoulders in a dark blonde curtain.
The man pulled up his horse and slid from its back, scooping the frantic woman into his arms and holding her tightly. The look on his face was utter anguish mixed with such love that Hayley felt her own heart ache in response. Who were these people? She saw the man ease back and cup the woman’s tear-streaked face in his big hands and say something. Hayley frowned: why couldn’t she hear? They were standing no more than a few metres away from her and she could see their lips moving, yet she couldn’t hear a thing.
This couldn’t be real. She had to be having some kind of weird lucid dream. Maybe she’d fallen and hit her head…
The couple seemed to be having a troubled discussion. The woman was crying as she clutched at the man’s black coat, then suddenly they both turned around. For a moment Hayley’s heart stopped. They were looking in her direction, but not at her. She slowly turned her head and followed their gaze. At first she couldn’t see anything, but then she caught sight of something mounting the crest of the hill. More men on horseback. They were dressed oddly, in old-fashioned clothing like some kind of historical re-enactment group.
Part of Hayley knew it was unreal, absurd, yet she couldn’t look away. She couldn’t move. Her legs felt heavy.
The men brought their horses to a halt a short distance away. Hayley turned to look at the couple near the tree and saw the terror plastered across their young faces. She didn’t know who these people were or what was going on, but the fear was tangible, hanging heavily in the air around her.
She wanted to reach out and do something, but at the same time she knew she couldn’t. Suddenly the young woman turned and ran. Hayley saw the man shout and spin around to face the advancing horsemen just as one of the men raised his rifle and a puff of smoke exploded from it. The scene unfolded around her in terrible detail. The shot hit the young man squarely in the chest as he threw himself between the woman and the other men, but as he fell, the young woman lurched forward, a large red stain spreading across her back.
Hayley could only stare helplessly. She tried to move but her legs were too heavy, then everything went blurry once again and she blinked to find herself alone in the paddock, beside the fallen tree that had been standing only moments before.
Hayley clutched at her chest. It felt just like the time she fell from a tree in the backyard when she was small. She was gasping for air but couldn’t breathe. Fear clawed at her, until in one huge rush her lungs suddenly remembered how to work again. What the hell had just happened? She wasn’t asleep—she was still standing for goodness sake! She could smell the warm, earthy scent of the grass and feel pasture under her feet. The sound of insects going about their business buzzed all around her. In the distance she could even hear a cow calling out…but nowhere could she hear the hoof beats of retreating horsemen or see the bodies of the two young lovers on the ground where they’d fallen.
Hayley sunk onto the fallen trunk and took her water bottle from her pack. You’re losing your mind, Stevens. It had to be heatstroke…or even a stroke. She couldn’t rule anything out right now. That had been disturbingly real and she had no logical explanation for it, though there clearly had to be one.
Hayley took a long swig of water and wiped the back of her hand across her mouth as she considered the old tree she now sat on. The bark had long since fallen off and it was in a bad state of decomposition at one end but, in its day, it must have been huge if the thickness of the trunk in the middle was anything to go by. Like the tree the two lovers had been shot under…Goosebumps prickled along her arms. The tree before her had long since lost all its leaves and most of its structure, but the fork in the trunk remained. It was the same tree from her vision…or whatever the hell that had been.
You’re a writer, she reminded herself irritably. It was probably her imagination trying to give her a story to write. But she’d never experienced anything like that before. It was as though she’d been there, had witnessed something truly horrific. It had felt so…real.
A hot bath and a glass of wine was what she needed, she decided. As she reached the top of the small rise, she examined the ground carefully. There was no sign of anyone having been up here, and certainly no churned-up ground from excited horses. She gave a small snort and set off down the other side. Just because she couldn’t come up with a sensible explanation for what had just happened didn’t mean there wasn’t one. For the life of her, though, she didn’t know what it could be.