DAY 25: Tuesday
A midnight trip to the river. Stupid.
Mum thought we were mad. She stopped chopping the onions for dinner.
‘You haven’t done that since you were six.’
‘It’ll be fun,’ I said.
I grabbed the cutlery from the drawer and started setting the table. It wasn’t even my turn but I thought it might soften Mum up so she’d let us camp on our front lawn.
‘Tearley’s bringing over her tent, so she’ll sleep in that one and Wrigs and I will sleep in my one,’ I added.
Squid looked up from the jigsaw puzzle he was doing on the floor. ‘Can I camp, too?’ he said.
‘Good idea,’ said Mum. ‘Squid can stay with you.’
Squid! That would be a total disaster. The whole camping idea was just a cover so we could sneak down to the river and video Mr Black going into the deserted house.
None of us wanted to go back inside the house at night. So instead we were going to wait on View Street and video Mr Black as he went down the path towards the house. Then we’d wait until he came back out and follow him as far as we could, to see where he came from. We were going to play Shadows for real.
‘No way,’ I said to Mum. ‘That will wreck everything. We’re going to stay up all night telling horror stories. They’ll be too scary for Squid.’
Mum put on the most mum-est voice ever. ‘All I’m saying is, if you were five going on six, the most exciting thing you could do is go camping with your big bro for the night. Isn’t that right, Squidy?’
Squid had forgotten the jigsaw puzzle and was stuffing his face with the bread I had just put on the table.
‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘But, Mum, if you were eleven going on twelve, the worst thing you could do is have your little brother hanging around when you had your friends over.’
Mum just gave me that look that said, ‘Don’t even bother, you’ve lost.’
So Squid had to stay with us.
Tearley and Wrigs came around just before it went dark. We set up our tents on the front lawn. I had to think of a way of getting rid of Squid, otherwise there would be no way we’d be able to go down to the river to video Mr Black.
As soon as night fell, we all crammed into one tent. I decided to tell Squid the scariest story I could think of.
I told him about a little boy who went camping in his own yard. The boy had a great time but about a week later he started to get headaches. They got so bad, he found it hard to think or even keep his eyes open. His parents took him to the doctor but she couldn’t find anything wrong.
It got to the stage where the boy’s head hurt so much he thought he would die. It felt like the whole inside of his head was moving around. He scratched the top of his forehead, just where his hair started, and something crawled onto his finger. It was a little bug, like a small beetle. He felt again and another bug crawled onto his finger.
Then he noticed there was blood on his finger. He felt again and found a little hole in his skin. Blood was oozing out of it. Then a bug came through the hole. And another one. And another one.
The boy’s mum rushed him to hospital and the doctors had to open up his head. It turned out that, when he was camping, an insect had burrowed into the top of his head and laid eggs. Hundreds and thousands of them.
As the eggs hatched, the newborn bugs started to crawl around and look for food. They were eating the boy from the inside out. There was nothing the doctors could do.
Squid jumped up and ran back into the house.
Then Wrigs bolted as well. As he pushed past me I saw the veins in his neck popping out. Total Wrig-out. By the time Tearley and I got out of the tent, we could see Wrigs running up the street towards his place.
I chased after him. When I got to his house, he was sitting on his front balcony.
‘What happened?’ I said.
‘I just had to go to the toilet,’ he said.
‘You could have gone at my house.’
‘I wanted to use my own,’ he said.
‘Bull. You got really scared.’
‘Did not.’
‘You did, and that was just a kid’s horror story,’ I said.
‘I wasn’t scared. I had to go to the toilet.’
Tearley finally caught us up and came running up the front steps. ‘You’re such an idiot, Wrigs,’ she said.
The veins in Wrigs’ neck popped out again. It looked like we were about to see a double-Wrig-out.
‘Am not,’ said Wrigs. ‘Nothing scares me.’
Tearley said, ‘You’re so weak, there’s no way you would have followed Mr Black tonight, you would have chickened out.’
‘Oh yeah?’ he said. ‘Well, I bet you wouldn’t go down into the deserted house in the dark.’
‘When?’ said Tearley.
‘Now,’ said Wrigs.
Tearley looked like she didn’t want to answer.
‘I will,’ I said.
As soon as I said it, I felt sick. I remembered the noise of something scraping, scratching, trying to get out, last time I was there at night.
Wrigs and Tearley were both looking at me. It was too late. I had said it. I had to do it.
‘I’ll go if you go,’ I said to Wrigs. ‘You reckon you’re such a tough guy.’
‘Okay,’ he mumbled.
‘This is the deal,’ I said. ‘Me and you have to go into the house and touch the manhole.’
Wrigs looked like he wanted to run away, again.
‘And just to make sure, we have to video it.’
‘All right.’
I could hardly hear him.
So Tearley grabbed Wriggler’s camera and the three of us headed down to the deserted house.
We got to the pathway just before midnight. There was a full moon so it wasn’t as dark as last time I was there at night. We were all trying to act cool but we were pretty edgy.
I led the way through the grevillea bushes and onto the path. There was a whooshing sound and then a huge crash. We all froze, and looked at each other.
Then Tearley started laughing. I thought she’d gone mad.
‘What’s up?’ I said.
‘At least we know the EWS works,’ she said.
The early warning system. I’d totally forgotten about it. The bad news was that, now it had gone off, it wouldn’t work again. There was no way we could reset it in the dark.
Wrigs said, ‘Maybe I should be the lookout, just in case anyone comes.’
‘No way,’ I said. ‘Tearley, you be the lookout. Give me the camera.’
Tearley passed it over. I switched it to the night-vision mode. Even though it was bright outside in the full moon, it would be dark in the house.
‘Okay. Let’s go,’ I said.
Wrigs and I raced into the house. I made Wrigs take the lead so he couldn’t chicken out. We ran down the hallway into the kitchen. We couldn’t find the manhole in the dark. I stamped on the floor.
All I could hear at first was the bup, bup, bup sound of my shoes on the wooden floorboards, but finally I heard a boing noise. We both dropped to our knees to touch the metal door.
There was a tap on my shoulder.
‘What the …?’ I said.
It was Tearley. She had followed us inside. We’d been making so much noise we hadn’t heard her.
‘I was just seeing if you were okay,’ she said.
‘I nearly died of a heart attack,’ I said.
‘I got scared out there by myself,’ she said.
Then we heard another noise. It sounded like someone walking down the pathway. We raced into the little room behind the kitchen and hid in the shadows. There was no space in there so we huddled together.
If someone came in through the door we only had one escape route. An old broken window. Wrigs was closest to the window, I was in the middle and Tearley was closest to the doorway to the kitchen.
It was a disaster. We were sitting there, just waiting to be caught.
The person outside reached the bottom of the path but they didn’t come straight into the house. They walked around the outside, stopped right in front of our broken window and stood looking out over the river. We could see the shape of the person in the moonlight.
It was Mr Black.
He was carrying a hessian bag again.
And it was moving.
I turned the video camera and pointed it at him.
As I switched it on, a little red light came on to show that the camera was recording. We hadn’t noticed the red light before, but if Mr Black turned around he would see it for sure.
I turned the camera off, just in time. Mr Black turned towards us. He mustn’t have been able to see us in the dark.
He looked away again and walked around to the front entrance of the house. Then he walked down the hallway, his torch flickering around to show him the way. Tearley pushed as hard against me as she could, so she wouldn’t be caught by the beam. The light flashed across her leg but Mr Black mustn’t have noticed. We heard him put down his bag, and put the torch on the ground.
Tearley’s weight moved off me. She squeezed past me and Wrigs and climbed noiselessly out of the broken window beside us.
I pushed Wrigs and pointed after Tearley. I wanted him to follow her, but he was frozen with terror.
We could hear Mr Black fumbling with the latch, and a key turning.
The door to the manhole creaked as it opened. Mr Black was picking up his torch when there was a crash from outside the house. It sounded like a brick hitting the corrugated iron that we used for the EWS.
Tearley! She must have done it to distract Mr Black and give us a chance to get out.
Mr Black called out, ‘Who’s there?’
He sounded startled. He was breathing heavily.
Mr Black stumbled down the hallway and out into the night.
Wriggler scrambled to the window and threw himself over the sill.
I wanted to follow him, but this was the one chance we had to see what was in the hole. I raced into the kitchen and almost tripped over the hessian bag. It was sliding across the floor all by itself.
The manhole was still open. It was too risky to jump into the hole. Mr Black could be back any second. So I lay down next to the opening and hit the record button on the camera.
Then I stuck my arm down into the hole and panned the camera around, hoping it would film something.
I was just pulling my arm out when Mr Black’s torchlight came bobbing down the hallway. I didn’t have time to get back into the other room.
‘Where are you?’ he said.
I was a goner. I turned off the camera and backed into the corner of the kitchen nearest the fireplace. I wished the wall would swallow me up.
‘Come out! I know you’re here,’ Mr Black said.
How could he know I was here? Had he caught Tearley outside?
He tripped on something and his torch fell to the ground and went out. He swore and groped around for the torch.
Once he found it, he banged it a couple of times, and it flickered on.
‘I can hear you, yeah. Come to Papa,’ he said.
I didn’t make a sound. I was holding my breath. I wished that my heart wasn’t beating so loudly.
He flashed his torch across the floor until the light landed on the hessian bag. The bag was still creeping across the floor by itself.
‘There you are, yeah. You okay?’ His voice softened. ‘You come with me.’
Mr Black had been talking to whatever was in the bag. He didn’t know I was there.
He picked up the bag and lowered himself into the hole. I waited as long as I could … it felt like hours but was probably only a few seconds. Then I crept past the hole as quietly as possible, and up the hallway and out into the night.
I was halfway up the pathway to View Street when I saw the silhouette of someone standing in the middle of the track just ahead of me. Mr Black had brought someone with him. I was surrounded.
I was going to turn back to the house and take my chances that Mr Black wouldn’t find me, when the person turned around and said, ‘Hurry up, Digs.’
It was Tearley. She was waiting for me.
‘Where’s Wrigs?’ I said.
‘That’s him at the top of the street,’ she pointed.
We bolted back to my place. I kept thinking I could hear Mr Black running after us. But I didn’t look back.