Chapter Two

She was doing what?” Joss leaned forward so that her shoulder-length hair flopped across her eyes. Impatiently, she pushed it back.

“She’d play a note and then tap the stone with a stick. Go figure.” Mark stretched on the grass in front of his twin sister and her friend, Molly.

He had made his way down the creek to cold concrete pillars that held up the viaduct. There, he climbed back up to the main path. Walking along, he had heard Joss’s unmistakable hoot of laughter from above him. He stopped, confused for a minute, then realized he must be just underneath Molly’s house, which backed onto the ravine. So he had climbed up the steep slope to the ledge of lawn where the two girls were sitting.

“What kind of notes?” asked Molly. She was leaning forward too in her wheel chair.

Molly’s appearance was startling. She had muscular dystrophy. The disease made her painfully, painfully thin so that the upper part of her arms were hardly any thicker than her wrists. Her face was small and pale. The first thing you noticed was a huge pair of blue-grey eyes under a cap of fine, fair, shining hair. Then you noticed the wheelchair and the wasted body that was almost like some slender creature from another world.

But by now he was so used to her appearance he hardly noticed it at all. He looked at her thoughtfully, trying to replay the tune in his head. “Well, they were like this,” he said and tried to hum them. When he repeated them, Jocelyn hummed too in her croaky, tuneless way. “Shut up, Joss,” he said. “You know you can’t sing. You’ll make me forget.”

Molly tried humming them too. Her voice was true and clear. “That’s right,” said Mark. He got restlessly to his feet.

“Where are you going,” asked his twin.

“I don’t know. Over to the park maybe. Home maybe.”

“Don’t tell Ariel.”

“Why not?”

“Weirdoes in the ravine. She’ll freak.”

“I don’t want to talk to her anyway,” he said gloomily. “If Mom and Dad don’t get back from that conference soon, I’ll murder her. I’m going over to Alasdair’s and see if he’s around. See you.”

Jocelyn watched her brother disappear around the corner of the house towards the street.

“His jeans are getting too short again,” she said. She shook her reddish-brown hair—its colour was about the only point of resemblance between the twins. “He’s getting to look like a telephone pole. Oh, well,” she lay back on the grass and stretched her arms luxuriously. “They say you can never be too rich or too thin.”

“Yes, you can,” said Molly grimly.

Joss sat up quickly. “God, Molly, I didn’t mean that. I didn’t think when I said it...”

“I know.”

“And at least you’re rich too,” Joss said irrepressibly.

Molly laughed and pushed the lever on her wheelchair with her long, delicate fingers, turning to face the ravine. “I wonder what’s going on down there.”

“I could go down and see if I can find her too.”

“We could go down,” Molly corrected.

“We’ll never get your wheelchair down here.”

“We can go round to the main path. It’s wide enough, and my chair goes over just about anything.”

“It says, ‘No motorized vehicles,’“ Joss said with a laugh.

Molly laughed too. “So let them give me a ticket.”

As they made their way across the lawn, Molly said suddenly, “I have an idea. Wait a sec.”

Her wheelchair growled softly away over the patio towards the handsome house. A minute later, Joss heard her calling, “Trudy, Trudy!” to the pleasant young woman who helped look after her. “Where’s that thing Dad brought me?”

Then she was trundling back across the patio with a narrow black case on her lap. It had a keyboard like a miniature piano along one side, with each of the keys numbered and a panel of buttons like a calculator at one end.

“What’s that?” Joss took it up and turned it over, curious. She pressed one of the keys and jumped when it played a short, high note.

“It’s like a baby music synthesizer. Look.” Molly took it back and touched a few notes on the keyboard. Then she touched a couple of buttons on the end panel. The box played back the same sequence of notes in rapid succession, making a little tune. She touched another couple of buttons and the tune played again, only this time more slowly and sounding as though it was played on a violin.

“You can store the notes in computer memory and then do all sorts of things to them,” Molly explained. “Dad got it for me when he went to Singapore last month.”

“Neat,” said Joss. “But what do you want to do with it now?”

“I was thinking about those notes Mark said the wild woman was playing. I’d like to put them in. I sort of recognized the pattern. If you put them together, they’d make a chord.”

She touched the keys carefully for a few minutes and finally, satisfied, touched the buttons on the computer panel to make the sequence play back.

“Now listen, if you put them all together ...” This time, the notes played back almost simultaneously, like a guitar making a sweet strum.

“But Mark said it was a kind of flute she was playing.”

“Right.” Molly touched a few more buttons, and the notes came out single, clear and soft. “Okay, let’s go.” She tucked the synthesizer into the carry-bag at the side of her wheelchair.

The wheelchair’s thick tires bounced heavily on the dirt track down into the ravine. The green peace of leaves folded over them. The birds were mostly quiet in the early afternoon warmth, and insect sounds moved drowsily around them. They went without saying much, until Molly said at last, “Mark was somewhere between the viaduct and my house when he saw her. We need to get down to the creek about here.”

Joss looked doubtfully down the steep slope. The creek bed had cut a deep furrow and ran well below the path to their right. A little further along from where they had stopped, a side track branched off at an angle. It looked like it might take them down towards the creek at a slightly easier angle. “Let’s try through there.”

But they’d only gone a little ways before it was clear—to Joss anyway—that the wheelchair wasn’t going to be able to make it. “Look, you wait here and I’ll go on down and see if I can find that rock.”

“No,” Molly said stubbornly. “I’m coming too.”

“Molly, you just can’t. What if the chair gets stuck. You know how heavy it is.”

“I’m coming too.” She put the chair into reverse a bit, then rammed it forward at one particular rut, bouncing over it at last. She put up her hand to push away a branch.

Joss sighed. “Well at least let me get in front of you and scout out what’s coming.”

They fought their way along for a few meters more, until Joss shrieked, “Stop!” Molly cut the power to her chair, peering around Joss. The path fell away in front of them “What’s the matter?”

“Back up, back up,” Joss said breathlessly. “The bank juts out over the creek here, and there’s hardly anything to hold it up. Just get BACK.” Molly was trying to peer over the edge of the bank, but hearing the panic in her friend’s voice, she put the chair into reverse and retreated a short distance up the path.

“Look,” said Joss, coming to join her. “I think the rock may be down below us, but it’s quite a drop. I’m going to climb down and see.”

“I’m coming, too.”

“Molly, you just can’t. It’s a four-meter drop. You’d go down like an avalanche.” Seeing the mutinous gleam in the other girl’s eye, Joss said, “For pete’s sake, Molly, will you ever admit there are things you can’t do?”

“I have to all the time.” Her voice was hard.

Joss dropped into a crouch beside the wheelchair, pleading. “Look, let me just climb down and see if there’s anything there worth seeing. If there is, we’ll try and figure out a way to get you down there.”

“Okay,” Molly said at last, slowly.

“Okay.” Joss stood up and brushed the clinging twigs off her shorts. “Here I go.” She disappeared over the edge of the bank, using a small tree trunk as a support while she reached for footing. A thump followed by a rustle seemed to indicate that she was making progress.

Molly rested her head against the high back of the chair and swallowed hard. Then she looked up into the canopy of leaves overhead, and past them to the scraps of blue. The peace of the ravine crept back. She listened to a small chirring sound, wondering if it was a squirrel. Then she remembered the synthesizer and pulled it out. She touched the play button so the five notes sounded. It seemed as though, for a moment, everything stopped to listen.

Meanwhile, Joss was wishing she had jeans on instead of shorts. Her legs were a hatch pattern of scrapes from dead twigs. But she had made it down to the creek. There, on the other side, was what had to be the flat rock her brother had described. There was the pool gathered around its base and a bank—not quite so high as the one she had just climbed down—behind it. She looked up and down the creek, trying to figure out whether there was any possible way of getting a wheelchair down there, and shook her head despairingly.

There was no sign, however, of Mark’s wild woman. Joss waited quietly for a few moments to see if anything would show up, then decided to climb back up. As she stood up, she heard the musical notes play, then play again. She pushed between the branches again to make her way up the bank. A buzz of angry mosquitoes had collected around her almost as closely as the leaves as she sweated and climbed, standing on branches and reaching for others to pull herself up. Just as she gave herself one last heave up over the edge, she heard a strangled shriek.

“S’all right. Only me,” she gasped, and lay face down for a few moments. But when she looked up, Molly wasn’t looking at her at all. She was staring up into the face of another, bizarre figure crouched over her chair. The wild woman.

“Who . . . who are you?” Molly gasped.

The wild woman gave a savage half-laugh, half-snort and said something. Molly couldn’t even guess what language it might be. The words were baffling, but the tone was an exact mockery of her own voice.

“What are you saying?” Molly’s voice rose even higher.

The woman mocked her again, her deep brown, clear eyes peering intently at Molly’s face, then reached down to grab the fragile shoulders. Joss started to pull herself up from the ground. “Don’t touch her.”

But the strange figure stopped her in her tracks with a compelling gesture, and gripped Molly by the shoulders again, shaking her until the girl’s head fell back. Then the wild woman bent down and placed the tip of her tongue deliberately on Molly’s forehead, clamping her shoulders more tightly while the girl squirmed. The scene only lasted a second or two until the wild woman let go so abruptly that Molly’s head flopped sideways on the back of the wheelchair. Then the woman said something again in her strange, guttural language.

“I ... don’t ... know. I don’t know,” Molly said.

The figure turned her bright, ancient eyes towards Joss, and with another sharp gesture of her arm—this time it looked like one of exasperation or disgust—walked rapidly past her to the lip of the embankment. She swung herself over the edge and disappeared with hardly a rustle.

Joss’s knees came back to wobbly life and she ran over to the wheelchair. “Are you all right? What did she do to you?”

Molly put her hand to her forehead. “She just touched me with her tongue,” she said. “It hurts a bit. Like a sunburn.”

“Let me see.”

Molly pushed her hair back to show her a small, semi-circular reddened patch on the forehead, right in the middle. Joss looked at it intently. “I think it’s fading,” she said after watching for a few minutes. “You’re okay otherwise?”

“A little shaky,” Molly admitted. “Where on earth did she come from?”

Joss sat down beside the chair. “I have no idea. I couldn’t even guess what language she was speaking.”

Molly looked puzzled. “Well she spoke English a bit, anyway.”

“What do you mean? It was all gibberish.”

“No.” Molly shook her head. “She was asking me where the spindle is. That’s what she kept asking at the end.”

Her friend stared up at her. “No, all I heard was that weird language.”

“Maybe you just weren’t close enough to hear.”

“I could hear all right. She was not speaking any language I’ve ever heard.”

Molly felt strangely upset, almost queasy. “I heard her,” she insisted. “She was asking for the spindle. You must have heard her.”

Joss shook her head, slowly and definitely. “I didn’t hear anything at all like that.” She paused and thought. “And what the heck is a spindle?”