Uncle Nathan was already missing by the time the children returned from school. The old house was still and silent, the door to Nathan’s workshop closed.
The house was the only property this far out along the ridgeline, four kilometers from the nearest school bus stop. Leo and Cam were always the first to be picked up each morning and they were always the last to be dropped off. By the end of the school week, Cam was feral with exhaustion and Leo was lucky to get her home at all without carrying her there himself.
That Friday, the walk back from the bus stop seemed to take forever. The sun had baked the unpaved road hard and orangey-red, and heat rose from the ground in dusty swirls. The cicadas were louder than usual, their shrill orchestral stabs drowned out even Cam’s incessant whining. From the moment they stepped down off the bus, she had oscillated between extremes of manic energy and melodramatic collapse. Less than halfway along that endless road, she exploded, flung her bag in the dust and herself down after it, refusing to move even one step farther. Leo threatened and cajoled, but only the promise of carrying her bag and of making her favorite dinner when they got home could get her to keep dragging one foot in front of the other.
The sun was drooping by the time they arrived at Nathan’s, their shadows long in the dust. In sight of the fading weatherboard, with its leaf-stuffed gutters and slumped tin roof, Cam forgot her exhaustion and sprinted to the edge of the woods. There she clambered in the gums and swung from the spider’s web of ropes that Nathan had erected when the children first moved in.
Leo approached the house more cautiously, scanning the treeline for the mob of roos that often lounged there. He had stumbled among them one evening, calling Cam in from the forest for dinner, and been threatened by the leader of the mob: an enormous bull roo. It had towered over Leo, chest puffed, biceps and neck swollen with hostility. Leo had run, made it back to the house without incident, but had ever since been cautious, terrified of encountering that monster unprepared again.
The screen door banged behind Leo and he dropped both of their bags against the umbrella stand in the hall. He inhaled the musty air with its odd mélange of teak oil, dust and sulfur, stood a moment to listen to the dull, deadened ticks of the grandfather clock, the creaks of the old house settling as it cooled.
The kitchen was dim and just as Leo had left it that morning, the mugs and bowls still in the sink, the cereal box still open on the counter. He folded down the lid of the box, put it away in the cupboard, opened the freezer and blinked at the glare. From among the packs of fruit pies and frozen pizza, the bags of sausages and chicken nuggets, Leo took a half pack of fish fingers, the oven chips and a bag of frozen mixed veggies. Cam would complain about the veggies, but she could suck it up; someone had to make sure she grew up big and strong. Leo turned on the oven, shook the chips and fish fingers out onto a baking tray and slid it onto the middle shelf, closed the oven door. While the oven softly groaned, Leo put away the washing up from the night before, leaving out two plates and two knives and forks, filling a pan from the tap and putting it on the rings to heat. He shook the bag and frozen veg rained into the pan—sweetcorn, peas, tiny cubes of carrot. He set two places at the breakfast bar, filled two glasses with milk, drained one, filled it again, wiped the mustache from his upper lip.
Cam burst in just as the timer on the oven dinged—conveniently too late to help. She hopped up onto her stool at the breakfast bar and shook tomato sauce all over her chips. Her face was bright red and she was panting, like she’d run twenty times round the house. She stuffed sauce-drenched chips and fish into her mouth with mucky fingers, chugged at the glass of milk between swallows, drummed at the bar with dangling feet. She wiped her lip with the back of her hand, leaned back and let rip a belch so loud it made her laugh. She lunged for the sauce, but Leo pulled it out of her reach.
“Eat your veggies,” he said.
Cam’s brows furrowed and she snarled at her brother. “Sauce!”
“If you want more sauce, you’ve got to eat your veggies.”
Cam growled, forked veggies into her mouth until it was bursting. “Mmnnf!” she said, her hand outstretched toward the bottle.
Leo slid it toward her, shaking his head. He was still eating his dinner, steadily and with care, when Cam pushed herself back from the counter and clomped toward the bedroom. She left her cutlery, plate and empty glass.
He called after her. “Hands!” But even as he said it, he knew she would ignore him.
Leo finished his meal with methodical formality, brought the knife and fork together on his plate. He sighed, stacked Cam’s plate on his own, wincing at the sauce that smeared against his thumb. Gathering up the cutlery and the glasses, he placed them in neat groups beside the sink. As he plugged the drain, turned on the taps and squirted in the dishwashing liquid, some detail registered faintly, some absence he could not put his finger on, but which, as he cleaned first the glasses, then the plates and at last the cutlery, left him with a vague sense of unease.
It wasn’t until after he had washed up and he and Cam were in the living room together that he realized what had been missing. Cam was kneeling on the floor beside the footstool, drawing intricately detailed plans for an underground hideaway. Leo was curled up in the worn leather armchair, struggling to concentrate on the copy of To Kill a Mockingbird he was supposed to have finished by Monday. He read the same sentence over and over five times before finally lowering the book to his knee. It was the coffee mug. Uncle Nathan’s coffee mug had not been in the sink.
This minor revelation drained the last of Leo’s energy. He closed the book, put it down on the footstool beside Cam’s sprawl of loose pages, the scrappy bubble-diagrams of secret rooms and tunnels.
“Come on,” he told his sister. “Bedtime.”
He was too tired to register her complaints, too tired to harass her to brush her teeth. He was so tired he didn’t even notice, as he stumbled to bed, that the door to Nathan’s workshop was not limned with its usual yellowish light.
Behind the door, the darkness and the silence pressed; as though shadow and the lack of sound had substance, weight, and a longing to burst free of their constraints and engulf the house with absence.
—
Leo and Cam would have disappeared into the foster system if it weren’t for Uncle Nathan. When their mother was sent away, he came to collect them, drove them and their two suitcases, out beyond the city, up and over the mountains to his home at the edge of the woods. On the way they stopped at a roadside café for milkshakes and toasted salad sandwiches. There, Nathan told them the rules.
The rules were few: tidy up after yourselves; don’t disturb your uncle; and keep out of the workshop. Beyond that, Nathan didn’t seem to care what they did. They had no bedtime, no foods off limits. They could have lain around all day eating lollies and watching TV, if only Nathan had one. But he didn’t trust it. “That’s their apparatus of control,” he told them on that first day, when Cam was whining about her favorite show. “That’s how they get inside your head. Trust me, you don’t need that shit knocking around up there.”
Nathan didn’t take much stock in school either, called it “their indoctrination machine.” It made no difference to Nathan whether they were home in the days or not, so long as they didn’t disturb his work. But he humored Leo, let the boy enroll himself and his sister on the condition that he, Nathan, was not expected to get involved in any way, that he would never have to meet a teacher or discuss their “so-called education,” and that the children would make the journey there and back by themselves. He teased Leo about it whenever he could. Cam always joined in, though with more ferocity than her uncle, resenting her brother’s insistence that they both attend ‘the machine.’
Nathan never explained who exactly “they” were, though he referred to them often. It seemed to be a catch-all expression for everything wrong with the world—vaccination; big pharma; rigged elections; contrails; electromagnetic energy and the 5G wireless service. “They” were always seeking out new ways to restrict his personal freedoms. He was eccentric, certainly, very likely a little cracked, but at least he wasn’t mad. As long as the children stuck to the rules, he was a benevolent, albeit distant, influence, and Leo was grateful to him for taking them in.
It wasn’t at all clear to Leo exactly what it was that Nathan actually did. He seemed to be an inventor, or scientist of some description, though Leo had yet to glimpse any output from all those hours shut away. Nathan spent so long in his workshop, or over on the other side of the property tinkering with his ‘instruments,’ that the children often went to bed without seeing or hearing from him at all. Then, out of the blue, he would appear the next morning, brimming with energy and excitement, urging them all to be up and out and doing something together. On one of those days, he dragged them down to the river and set up a rope swing with Cam, was the first to leap, yelping, into those brisk waters. On another, he drove them out along a road even more dusty and rutted than his own, out to a plummeting ridge, where they scrambled down rocky paths into the silence and splendor of the valley blue gum forest. On still another, they journeyed to the ruins of an iron smeltery, where he let them clamber through labyrinths of collapsed brick. Nathan marveled at the obelisks of once molten iron, rambling about alchemy and the proper process by which to attain the albedo.
Perhaps Leo imagined that tomorrow, Saturday, would be one of those days; one of those delirious joyful days where he could let down his guard, if only a little. Just enough to allow himself a moment’s enjoyment.
—
Leo was woken, deep in the night, by the storm. Thunder grumbled and growled and lightning flashes cast eerie shadows on the wall of his bedroom.
There was no rain, only the rolling, rumbling boom as of great beings awakening in the sky, stretching down enormous limbs to shake the earth. The sounds were vast and alive and so close Leo could almost taste ozone. When lightning struck a tree at the edge of the wood, the crack was so loud it startled him out of bed and over to the curtain. On the other side of the bedroom, Cam snored, unruffled by the noise.
Leo peered out the window and into the dark of the yard. The storm continued to move, the thunder receding, though lightning still flickered, illuminating the yard in sheer blue-white bursts. With each flash, Leo caught details: a heap of rusty oil drums, the skeleton of the shed, Nathan’s tumbledown Holden Special. In one brilliant silvery flare, so long and slow it seemed frozen in time, Leo saw, over by the wreck of the lightning-struck tree, a figure.
The flash burned in Leo’s eyes, filling the dark with dancing spots of color. He strained to make out the shapes of the tree, the person—if that is what it had been—but there were only the blue and red and pink fireworks dancing across his vision. Then the lightning flashed again and he saw it. The bull kangaroo.
The distance and the darkness and the silent bursts of light made the bull seem bigger than he remembered.
It was . . . watching.
Again there was darkness and, when his eyes at last adjusted, all Leo could see was a ring of embers glowing among the trees on the other side of the yard.
Then the glow was obscured. The roo was moving.
Leo ducked away from the window, his heart clobbering against his ribcage. His throat was parched, aching. The thunder rolled, more distant now, and resonant, describing the contour and depth of the valley beyond the forest. Flicks of lightning pulsed. He squeezed his eyes shut. Cam snored.
When, at last, the thunder receded and Leo’s heart had slowed to a mere pounding, he forced himself back up to a crouch. He listened, but Cam’s loud and oblivious breathing eclipsed all other sound. Careful to part the curtain as little as possible, Leo peered out into the flickering dark.
Nothing. Even the glow from the tree was gone. Had it ever been there?
Another silent flash illuminated the yard and Leo yelled. The roo was there, only meters away, and moving.
Leo dived beneath his bed, dragged the cover down after him. He clutched the blanket to his face, pressed it hard against his eyes to mask the sobbing.
What frightened him most was not the size nor the closeness of the roo. Despite the dark and the drama of the storm, Leo’s reason was intact—he knew it could not get inside. It was the way it moved. Perhaps it was a trick of the dark, or the way the lightning flickers resounded in his eyes long after they had ended, but something about the movement of the roo was wrong. The great bull had seemed . . . empty. An enormous, deflated balloon dragging itself toward him across the yard. No, not dragging itself. Being dragged.
And behind it, blocking out the ember-glow of the lightning-struck tree and the faint illuminations of the moon on the shed, on the car, masking even the pinpricks of silver-blue stars, a vast and pernicious blackness. Closing in around the house.
—
“What you doing down there?”
Leo startled, banged his temple on the wooden slats beneath the bed. Cam peered in at him, her face upside down and flushed, her hair dangling in dirty twists of gold and brown. He would have to make sure she washed it, he thought, before the weekend was out.
“You playing hide and seek or something?”
“Something like that,” said Leo. He coughed, lungs filled with grit and dust from under the bed. There was something stuck to his lip. He peeled it off. A ball of lint.
He shooed his sister with a hand, pulled himself out and stretched, popping joints. The night seemed distant and mad, the storm a wild dream. He couldn’t remember going to sleep. Had he fallen off the bed?
Leo padded through to the kitchen with Cam walking backward ahead of him, babbling on about some rubbish. He opened the fridge, pulled out juice, a box of eggs. He touched the kettle. It was cold. Nathan’s cup still hung on the mug tree; the weird chicory powder he drank every morning still sat on the shelf.
Leo turned to Cam. She was chugging orange juice straight from the carton. He pulled it away from her lips, gestured vaguely toward a glass. “You seen Nathan?” he asked.
Cam pouted, grabbed for the juice, but Leo held it behind his back.
“You seen him?” he asked again. “This morning?”
Cam growled, shook her head.
Leo stood for a moment, half staring, seeing not his sister but his own tumbling thoughts. Cam snatched the juice and scurried round to the other side of the breakfast bar.
Still preoccupied, Leo rummaged around the dish rack for a pan. He placed four eggs in the bottom, ran enough cold water to cover them, put the pan on the stove. While the water came to the boil, he went out the front. The screen door banged behind him.
He walked the perimeter of the old weatherboard house, his feet kicking up dust. It was already baking and the air was jagged with the shrill of cicadas. There were the oil drums, the shed, Nathan’s Special. Leo scanned the treeline, looking for a sign, some clue that might point to his uncle’s whereabouts. But it was just as it always was. Though maybe not quite. One of the old gums at the edge of the wood had lost a limb. There was the fresh black of charcoal down its side, like after a bushfire, and Leo remembered the glow, the lightning. He shuddered.
In the kitchen, the water in the pan was bubbling over. Cam was curled on the floor in the corner, playing with a wooden ark and animals, two by two.
“Has this been boiling long?” asked Leo.
Cam shrugged without looking up. Leo sighed and took the pan off the heat.
They ate hard-boiled eggs with bread and butter. Leo made tea and they sat in silence at the counter. When they had finished, Leo piled everything in the sink but did not wash up.
“I’m going to look for him,” he said. “In the workshop.”
“Nathan said not to.”
“We’ve got to. He might’ve had an accident or something.”
“We’re not allowed,” said Cam.
Now it was Leo’s turn to shrug. He was acting brave, but it was only for Cam’s benefit. He didn’t want her to get scared.
The truth was Leo had already begun to spin theories about what had happened to their uncle. None of them were good. All the accidents, the falls, the fatalities. He always did this, always had. Whenever their mother was late even ten minutes Leo imagined the worst, his mind spiraling to the phone call, to the funeral, to the desolate years beyond. Though he was anxious to find Nathan, and though he feared getting in trouble for breaking one of the only rules, that rational fear was overwhelmed by the other terrible possibilities. Better to get in trouble and Nathan be alright than . . . than what exactly?
They stood outside the door to the workshop. Leo bent his ear toward it, straining to hear through the wood to the uncharted space beyond. He knocked, tentatively at first, but then louder. The sound reverberated dully in the empty corridor.
“Uncle Nathan?” he said. “Uncle Nathan? It’s me. Leo.”
He turned to Cam, swallowed. Her eyes were wide.
He knocked again. “Uncle Nathan?”
His hand closed around the brass doorknob. It was loose and rattled when he gripped it. He turned the knob, pulled the door open toward them.
“Oh no,” said Leo. “No.”
Behind the door was a broom cupboard. Except for the lightbulb that dangled by a wire from the ceiling, and the dust-bunnies and cobwebs and the crumpled-up piece of paper in the corner, it was entirely bare. Bare, but for the writing.
The side walls were unpainted gyprock, the back raw weatherboard. Leo could see, exposed, the frame of the house, the skeleton of splintery wooden beams. The walls did not reach all the way to the back, but ended at a gap on either side, a crawlspace of about six inches between the outer wall and the inner. The cupboard was less a room than a gateway to the inside-out spaces of the house. And writing covered every surface.
From floor to ceiling, every wall was close to black with tightly packed, barely legible scribbles. The words, the strange drawings, seemed to have been burned into the wood. The hieroglyphs covered walls, beams, even the wire from which the bare lightbulb dangled. Writing disappeared round the corners of the boxish room and into the bowels of the crawlspace. When Cam flicked on the harsh bare bulb, she and Leo stood there dumbly, staring.
Leo’s heart dropped to his belly. There was no workshop.
Uncle Nathan was completely mad.
—
Leo’s mother had never been truly well. She’d always had that streak of insanity, even on the good days.
Cam was younger, so had seen less of the dark side of Cassandra’s madness than Leo. She saw only their mother’s ‘quirks,’ the energy and excitement, remembered only those precious few times Cassandra had given them all of her attention, lavished them with gifts and treats and adventures. Cam remembered only the good, because Leo had always been there to protect her from the rest.
For Leo, the good days were the worst. What Cassandra saw as recompense, the guilt payment for her fragmentary lapses, to Leo was a time bomb. All the hugs and smiles and lollies in the world couldn’t dull the suspense as he remained alert, every sense heightened, scanning every cue in the hope of warding off her next explosion.
Like the time before Cam was born, when Cassandra was maybe seven- or eight-months pregnant. They were at home together, the cupboards bare, and five-year-old Leo was starving. She had been wracked with guilt, set him in front of the TV, told him she’d be back in five minutes. She left, locking the door to their apartment behind her. She was gone so long that Leo fell asleep where he sat.
He was woken by a commotion in the kitchen. The living room was dark but for the flicker of a cooking show on TV. He heard onions frying in a pan. The pictures of the TV chef searing a steak made his stomach tumble. He could almost smell the delicious food. From down the corridor, the clatter of pots and pans, the clink of glass. Leo rose, knees creaking, followed the unlit hall to the source of the noise. The kitchen lights were so bright they hurt his eyes. But though the sounds continued he could not see his mother. It wasn’t until he rounded the small island bench that he found her, sat on the floor with her legs in a half lotus, surrounded by plastic supermarket bags. The floor was covered with mason jars, some empty, some half-filled with red lentils. Cassandra heard him come in, turned, smiled a strained, agonized smile. She patted the floor beside her.
“Come on over, sweetheart,” she said. “You can help your mama.”
Leo sat, leaned into her, pressing his cheek against the belly so full and firm.
“What are you doing, mummy?” he asked.
“We have to check them. You see?” Smiling, she held up a single orangey lentil between her thumb and forefinger. She brought the lentil toward her face until it was only a hand’s width away, furrowed her brows, narrowed her eyes, turned the lentil this way and that. “You see?” she said again and dropped the lentil into a jar beside her knee.
Leo’s stomach growled and he looked with longing at the shopping bags. Cassandra reached for a bag. “Here. You can have your own.”
Leo took the bag, heavy with shopping and opened it in his lap. The bag was full of unopened packets of red lentils.
Cassandra handed him an empty metal pan and a jar. When Leo did nothing, when he just sat there clutching the bag, looking up at his mother with confusion in his eyes, she said, “Let me show you.” She cut the top off the bag of lentils, poured them into the pan, reenacted the pantomime of selecting a lentil, bringing it up to her eyes for scrutiny, then dropping it into the jar.
Leo imitated her actions, though he had no idea what he was supposed to be looking for. He picked a lentil, wiggled it back and forth in his line of sight, plopped it into the jar. The process made no sense. Why couldn’t they just tip the bags straight into the jar? Or, better still, put the pan on the stove and make dinner? Leo hated the tasteless, porridgy dahl Cassandra made, though at that moment he would have eaten anything. But he knew better than to correct her, or to point out the obvious, so instead he picked lentil after lentil, pretended to assess them for whatever mysterious characteristics his mother was checking for. Slowly, so slowly, the jar began to fill. But there were still so many bags.
How long did they sit on the floor that way? How many lentils had he ‘checked’ before his head began to droop? He didn’t mean to do it. He was just so hungry, so tired. He didn’t even realize that he was pulling out handfuls of the tiny red dots, sprinkling them into the jar without looking. He was almost asleep when his mother screamed.
“YOU. HAVE. TO. CHECK. THEM.”
She roared and flailed her arms, sending pans and jars and lentils flying. The two fullest jars hit the wall, bouncing one into the other, exploding instantly. Shards of glass and dry pulses sprayed across the linoleum.
Cassandra tore at her hair, shrieking. She ran out of the kitchen, her bare feet leaving smears of blood in the chaos of lentils and jagged glass.
Leo had a lump in his throat as hard and painful as a stone, a weight in his belly so heavy it smothered his hunger. His eyes twitched but there came no tears; he had learned it was best not to cry, to always push down his own feelings for the sake of his mother. He sat there a long time after she left, the mess on the floor and the night silence like echoes of her departure. He strained with every sense to hear her. Would she return? What would she do if she found him sitting there still? Whatever he did, he knew, would be the wrong thing.
The next morning, Cassandra found Leo curled in a ball on the kitchen floor. Beside him, the dustpan brimmed with glass and lentils streaked with blood. A supermarket bag was propped open against the wall, filled with bloody litter. His hands, one still clutching the sweeping brush, were covered in tiny cuts.
That had been her first truly dreadful episode, and the agony of guilt she had shown on finding him, on remembering only flashes from the night before, had driven her to the first of the great extravagant apologies. Over the years, those make-up treats became to Leo more frightening than the manias that preceded them, but that day he welcomed her fawning, her tenderness. He almost allowed himself to relax, spooning down mouthfuls of ricotta hotcakes with strawberries, syrup and ice cream, swallowing gulp after gulp of hot chocolate and marshmallows. He almost believed, too, in her contrition—her apology was so sincere, so alive with remorse, he could almost imagine that the shadows had truly passed, that it would never happen again. He wanted so badly to believe her, wanted so badly for her to be happy.
Perhaps, when his sister came, things would be different. Perhaps then the madness would ease and they would be happy all together. A happy, normal family.
—
Leo grabbed their hats. He rubbed sunscreen on his arms and face and neck, then did his best to cover the squirming Cam. He pulled her hat down onto her head. It was squint. She pulled a face.
They ventured into the baking heat of the day. It was only ten past ten by the old grandfather clock in the corridor, but already the air shimmered. Their feet kicked up dust as they walked.
Cam was immediately distracted, scrambling up into the trees by her network of ropes. Leo paused at the edge of the forest to confront the lightning-struck tree. He reached out a hand to touch the ring of charcoal, half expecting it to burn. It was gritty and warm, but no longer smoldered. He wiped the smut on his jeans, toed the fallen limb on the ground, stepped past it and into the relative cool of the wood.
The shade was a relief and Leo took off his hat to wipe sweat from his brow. There were paths here beneath the trees, dusty tracks where leaf litter had been cleared and dirt packed down. There must be one that Nathan followed, disappearing into the forest to work on his ‘instruments.’ But which? They all looked equally unpromising.
Leo picked a path and set off. “Wait,” yelled Cam from above.
But the trail he had chosen fizzled before she caught up with him, fading to nothing beside a pool of stagnant blackish water, filmed with shimmering oil. Cam poked it with a stick. Bubbles broke the surface, releasing a stench so foul they both recoiled.
“Let’s go,” said Leo, and they retraced their steps to where the paths had forked.
The second path led them deep into the wood, past thickets of new-growth gum trees jostling for space between their old established relatives. There was a slight but definite incline to the path and, as they descended, it widened, the landscape changing subtly around them. The trees were older here, colossal, with great twisted boughs and snaking roots so massive the children had to clamber to get over them. Beneath the monumental gums were explosions of green—tree ferns and ancient cycads—and the moist fresh smell of life in abundance commingled with decay. Down and to their left, the muffled trickling of a hidden creek.
“I’m thirsty,” said Cam.
“You should’ve drunk something before we left.”
“I’m tired.”
“You’ll be alright.”
“I’m bored.”
Leo shrugged.
“Where we going, anyway?”
“To find Nathan.” He said it with certainty but did not look up for fear his expression would betray him.
“It’s too far.”
“Not much farther now.”
In truth, he had no idea how far it might be, or even the extent of their uncle’s property. They could be walking for days and never find the end of it. They could wander unknowing into the national park and starve to death searching for a way out of that infinite expanse. They could be lost in the bush forever searching for some instrument that didn’t exist, a phantom machine which, like the ‘workshop,’ would turn out to be nothing but an expression of Uncle Nathan’s garbled imagination.
“What’s that?” said Cam.
Leo looked to where she was pointing. At the edge of the path, something protruded from the drifts of gum leaves. An image flashed in his mind of a pair of boots, toes pointing skyward. And attached to the boots, Uncle Nathan, stiff and cold and dead. He shuddered.
Cam ran over to investigate, her lethargy sloughed in an instant by curiosity. Leo followed, but cautiously. “Cam,” he called. “Don’t touch it.”
But she had already picked it up, one of them anyway. It was a piece of black metal, strangely shaped—a clasp, or a clip of some kind. There was a heap of them, half covered by the crisp gray-green leaves. Bored with her examination, Cam tossed the clip, bounded over to sweep the forest scurf from a stack of two-by-fours. Leo’s stomach tightened.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s keep moving.”
Up ahead the trees were thinning. Leaf litter made way to tufts of grass. The spots and dapples of patchy light grew brighter, the shade withdrawing. The air, now hot and dry, carried a faint smell of burnt wood. The path around them faded to nothing at the outskirts of a clearing.
“Bloody hell,” said Leo.
“What is it?” said Cam.
“It’s the instrument,” Leo said as he stared at the charred monstrosity. “It’s Uncle Nathan’s machine.”
He had no other words to describe it. The construct in the clearing was not like anything he had ever seen or read about or learned of in school. Even in dreams, Leo could not have conjured an assembly so strange, with a purpose so opaque. It dominated the open space between the trees, like a partially flattened crown built entirely from narrow wooden beams. The tips were scorched, and it was not clear if this blackening were part of the design or a product of its use. It seemed . . . intentional somehow and reminded Leo of the burned writing in the cupboard. Just looking at it gave him a queer feeling, a sense of wrongness and dread that hinted of things beyond what he could see.
His first thought was that Cam would want to climb it and he turned to tell her not to. But she was cowering at the treeline, shaking her head.
“Let’s go, Leo. I don’t like it.” Her voice had a tremble in it he’d never heard. Cam was always the fearless one.
“We’ve got to find Nathan,” he said. “Don’t worry. There’s nothing to be afraid of. It can’t hurt us or anything.”
But it was a lie and he knew it. The more he looked, struggling to comprehend that incomprehensible structure, the more he was gripped by a coldness from within. It seemed to warn of plenty to fear and a certainty of pain. And yet, they had to look, had to try and understand it. What else did they have to go on?
Leaving Cam at the edge of the wood, he stepped into the baking heat, willing himself forward to examine it more closely. She ran to catch up, pressed against him, gripping his hand.
Holding each other close, they made their way slowly, falteringly around the edge of the instrument.
It was bigger than it appeared from the treeline. The prongs of the scorched wooden crown towered above them, as tall as the roof of their uncle’s house. Taller. And where it met the ground, the struts were buried crudely beneath the dirt. As they drew nearer, Leo realized it was not so much a crown as a flower, with great blackened petals and a second construct at the center, like a burned and broken tepee. The wood was most charred at this middle point, black and distorted, reminding Leo of the lightning-struck tree and the embers glowing red in the night. It seemed a conflagration had burst from this central hub and encircled the structure, lapping at the flower’s petals like a flaming, sightless insect.
They were so close now that, had Leo dared to reach out, his fingers would have brushed the splintery outer struts. The smell was stronger too: burnt wood and sulfur; the faint tang of ozone. Each two-by-four they passed was connected to its neighbor by the black metal clasps.
At the center of the instrument, flowing outward from beneath the conical structure, there were . . . what could he call them? Drawings? Designs? Patterns etched in the orangey dirt. Some were lined with small round stones. Others capped by obscure symbols, eucalypt sticks bound with twine. There was a grim symmetry to the design, as though it somehow mirrored or revealed the construct of burnt wood and metal that loomed over him and Cam. Leo could not explain the intuition, but the markings on the ground, he knew, were a part of this machine, its expression in another, somehow vaster form. They were the engine, the purpose, the source of power. Looking down on them felt like falling: a fall without end through infinite space. A fall with neither up nor down. Only cold blackness forever and ever.
It seemed they had been walking the circumference of the instrument for an eternity. The uniform design of the outer structure and the hypnotic arrangement of the central markings together lulled both Leo and Cam into a kind of trance, a waking daze in which only they, the instrument and the baking heat of the sun were real. They were perhaps halfway around the outside of the clearing when Cam moaned.
“What is it?” Leo glanced down at her, surprised as though woken.
She shook her head, gripped his arm so tight it hurt.
The instrument was more badly burned on this side. Two of the petals had collapsed, exploded outward by some pressure from the center. Scattered across the ground ahead of the children were heaps of charred wood and slag. Even the dirt was scorched. A trail of blackened earth led through the debris to the edge of the forest, where the trunks of the trees and the overhanging leaves were all seared.
“You’re right,” said Leo. “We should go.”
He picked up his pace, almost pulling Cam along, trying to shake his lethargy. He had the strong urge to run, to be away, as far as he could get them from that infernal structure. Wrongness pervaded every corner of the clearing. It crackled with a weird electricity that jangled deep in his bones. The urge overwhelmed him and he ran, dragging his sister behind him.
They fled the clearing by the nearest opening, half sprinting, half tumbling along the leaf-strewn path.
It was only when the stitch beneath his ribs grew too painful to ignore that Leo slackened his pace, came falteringly to a stop. Cam collapsed onto the ground beside him. She made no show of her exhaustion, merely lay half curled among the leaves, sobbing quietly.
As his breathing slowed and the pounding of his heart subsided, Leo looked around them, realizing only then that this was not the same way they had come. He had no idea where this other path might lead, only that they could not go back, that they must never again lay eyes on Uncle Nathan’s monstrous, purposeless creation.
The awareness of being lost sunk to his belly like a stone. All around them was unfamiliar. He had no sense of the direction they were pointing, only that the light seemed wrong and the path devoid of any landmark he recognized. Cam still lay on her side, her eyes fixed on some faraway point. She was quiet now, having abandoned her sobs for a silence Leo found more disturbing. The only sound in the dead, still wood was their breathing and the drone of flies.
“Come on,” said Leo. He tugged at his sister’s arm. “We’ve got to keep moving.”
She let him pull her up and drag her behind him, as lifeless and empty as a puppet. But she didn’t complain, continued to put one foot down in front of the other.
They came upon the body round the next corner. Even before they saw it, the smell assaulted them, rich and rank and inescapable. Leo gagged, covered his mouth with his t-shirt.
The corpse lay across the full width of the path. Its enormous size made the space seem cramped, as though the forest were closing in around them. Flies covered every surface. Leo recognized it immediately. The bull kangaroo.
The discovery seemed to wake Cam from her stupor. While Leo hung back, his arm across mouth and nose, she stepped toward the stinking heap. She picked up a stick and poked at the body. Flies panicked, swirled and landed again, disappearing into the mass of black that seethed over every inch of the roo.
Cam swiped at the flies, exposing ever-larger sections of the roo’s flank and midsection. It was entirely without fur, and scored into the red rawness was a uniform pattern of coils that made Leo think of a bottle cap. He was thinking, too, of the bull he had seen in the depths of night, the weightless body with its strange fluttering movements.
Cam whacked the ground with her stick, discharging an explosion of flies. Bared yellow teeth. Taut knots of muscle. Lidless eyes staring, frozen in surprise.
Leo turned and ran for the edge of the path, vomiting egg and orange juice until there was nothing left in his stomach.
—
The trip to the museum was another of Cassandra’s apology specials. Another morning of pancakes and strawberries and ice cream. More promises that Leo could have whatever he wanted. That it would never happen again. Not ever.
Leo couldn’t even remember what triggered it—another wild over-reaction to some untraceable slight. Cam was a baby then, old enough to sit up, but still too young to crawl. She mostly slept as Cassandra pushed her in the stroller through the museum.
The museum was, for Leo, an extraordinary treat. He loved especially the airy mezzanine floors, with their wood-framed cases displaying row upon row of bugs and beetles, butterflies and moths. He was awed by their number and variety and would pore over the contents of each glass case with meticulous care, examining every specimen in detail. He marveled at their colors and shapes, how similar they seemed, and yet how different. All the hand-typed paper labels and the words he could not read, the pins inserted with exquisite care through the bodies of each tiny creature. The wonder and diversity of life, only frozen in time; so much easier to fathom than life as it was lived, always in motion, always unpredictable.
That day, though, their time in the insect gallery was tense and unsatisfying. Cassandra’s earlier remorse made way to a mounting irritation. She quickly tired of Leo’s silent contemplation of the static, miniature world within the glass cases. The walkways of the mezzanine were too narrow for the stroller and, though it was quiet, the few people that tried to pass them did so with a grudging politeness that rankled. Leo sensed all this through invisible antennae, forever scanning for shifts in his mother’s mood. His back was tense, almost crackling with discomfort at her restlessness. He was too aware of her anxiety to concentrate on the butterflies.
Leo relented to her suggestion that they head down to the café, allowed her to lead him from the gallery and into the dim corridors of the museum. They must have taken a wrong turn—or, more likely, Cassandra had never known which way she was heading—for they found themselves in an older section of the building, a dark wing lined with glass cabinets illumined from within. Leo wanted very much to hold his mother’s hand, but he knew better than to reach for it. The exhibit stretched on into darkness, with only the oozing glow from the cabinets to light the way.
Inside the cabinets dangled costumes from other lands and other times. They hung behind the glass, shadowy and strange. All of them empty, like bodies deflated.
Leo could still remember Cassandra’s sharp intake of breath, the pain as she gripped his shoulder, the strange moan that escaped her throat. In dreams, he still heard the echo of her footsteps on parquet as she ran back down the corridor and out of the museum, her strangled cries reverberating off the glass.
It seemed an eternity before the museum guard found him there, alone with the baby in the stroller, surrounded by shadows and silence and the creepily suspended clothing.
—
“So what was it then? A monster?”
“I don’t know,” said Leo. “I’m only telling you what I saw. It was so dark. But whatever was behind the roo was darker—blacker than night. It blocked out the stars.”
Cam went quiet, brow furrowed.
They were almost back at the house, walking a familiar path through dappled afternoon light. Leo had thought them lost, but the path from the roo led them by twists and turns to the stagnant, stinking pool. The weirdness of the morning was lifting now they knew where they were, knew that home was only moments away.
Cam’s spirits seemed greatly restored by each step they took toward her own stomping ground. It was as though her essential Cam-ness had been drained by Nathan’s diabolical instrument—by the mere sight of it. The further she got from that construction of wood and metal and stone, the more like her noisy and hyperactive self she became.
Leo had brooded on whether to tell Cam what he had seen the night before. He’d been protecting her for so many years, shielding her from the full brunt of Cassandra’s madness, that it had become a habit. He didn’t want to expose her now to the horror building inside him. But Nathan was gone and in a few hours it would be dark again. And then what? Whatever it was, he couldn’t face it alone. And, if they were to be prepared, Cam needed to know.
At last, she looked up. “It’s alright, Leo,” she said. “We can get it, whatever it is.”
—
“Uncle Nathan? Uncle Nathan?”
Leo’s voice rose as he called out into the empty house. The sound was strange and hollow and seemed to hang there in the silence as he paused, listening, in the entryway. He closed the front door behind him with a soft click.
Cam had stayed outside at the edge of the wood. She was clambering in her network of ropes, making “preparations.” When Leo left her, she was hauling sticks and largish rocks up into the treetops, tinkering with imaginary traps.
It made him anxious leaving her alone there, but the climbing soothed her. The familiar space—her space—helped her let go of whatever malaise had gripped her that morning. Besides, it was full daylight outside. Whatever he thought he had seen in the depths of last night would surely not come out in the afternoon sun? And who knew what the evening might bring? Nathan might be back. Anything.
Leo gave the workshop a wide berth as he made his way to the kitchen. Anger bubbled in him at the thought of it: the empty cupboard with its web of scribbles. Madness. Everywhere, the madness of grownups. And he and Cam paying the price, over and over. He thought of forgetting the search, abandoning Nathan and his insane projects, just packing their bags, running away to start a new life, just the two of them. But he knew that idea, itself, was madness, that he and Cam could not survive alone out there. At best, they’d be living on the streets, never knowing where the next meal was coming from. At worst, they’d be found, packed off to foster homes or an institution. They’d be separated. It was unimaginable.
No, whatever happened, they would stay here as long as they could. Together.
Opening the freezer drawer, Leo appraised the contents with a new eye. There was enough food to last them a few weeks, more if they eked it out. Then there were the tins. They’d be right for a while. And when they weren’t . . . ? He’d just have to work that out when the time came. He took out two frozen pizzas, placed them on a baking tray and set the timer on the oven.
The emptiness of the house pressed in on him. The dead, still air, the creaking of the tin roof in the afternoon heat. Outside there was a commotion in the trees, cockatoos and their grievances. He went to the window and looked out at the bare yard, the woods, the far peak of the mountain. It all seemed alien to him now, hostile. Even the house did not feel safe. He tried to spot Cam, up in the treetops, but the angle was wrong; she was round the other side of the house where he couldn’t see her.
Leo went back to the kitchen, pulled out drawer after drawer. He found the flashlight in the cupboard under the sink—heavy and black, as long as his arm. A disc of light appeared at his feet when he clicked the button; at least some things of Nathan’s were just as expected. He stood for a moment outside the workshop cupboard door, then tugged it open and stepped inside.
The light was still on from before, the air in the cupboard close and dusty. Leo breathed slow and deep, willing his pulse to calm. Uncle Nathan’s graphomania pressed in from every wall.
It was madness, every word of it. Leo struggled to make sense of what he was reading, but it was all over the place, a hotchpotch of staccato journal entries tumbled together with arcane symbols, incantations and some sort of primitive bestiary. There were diagrams, too, shapes Leo recognized as early sketches of the structure in the clearing. He followed his uncle’s scattered trains of thought out of the cupboard and into the crawlspace, reading by the flashlight gripped awkwardly against his shoulder.
Perhaps he hoped the notes would make things clear, that all would be explained: Nathan’s disappearance; the storm in the night; the queer emanations that seemed to pulse from the vast wooden instrument; even the corpse of the bull kangaroo. But it was impenetrable. The scribbles were barely legible and many were written in a language Leo did not understand—Latin, maybe, or Greek. The bits that Nathan had scribbled in English made no sense either. He referred often to “The Opus,” wrote as frequently of “The Opening” or “The Breach,” and peppered every note with magic-sounding hokum words like “The Beyond,” “The Umbral Prince,” or “The Wasting Shade.” It was gibberish, the ravings of a madman convinced of some inscrutable higher purpose.
The more Leo read, the less sense it made. With each baffling sentence he struggled to comprehend, his anxiety mounted—a black fear that bloomed inside him, cold and vast and dark, devouring joy and hope. There wasn’t enough air in the crawlspace. The walls were too close. And still the writing stretched on and on, far into the shadows beyond his flashlight beam.
When the oven timer dinged on the other side of the wall, Leo startled, banged his head on a beam and dropped the flashlight. Spots burned in his eyes, everything black but the strip of brilliance at his feet. He struggled to tamp down his panic, his urge to pound at the walls until he burst through, back into openness, clean air and daylight. Instead, he crouched, contorting his body to fit that narrow space, snatched the flashlight from the mess of shredded insulation, dust and rat turds. Just having it in his hand was comfort enough to regain control of himself. He shuffled back the way he had come, toward the bare cupboard and the relative sanity of the house.
—
“Nathan’s not coming back,” he told Cam. “We have to forget about him.”
Leo had expected tears, or a scene, but she simply pursed her lips and nodded. Ropes dangled above them from her favorite tree. Its limbs groaned faintly, leaves rattling.
“But what about the monster?” she said.
Leo thought for a moment. He wanted to tell Cam that there was no monster, that they had nothing to be afraid of. He wanted to reassure her—and himself. But as the afternoon wore on and the sky reddened, the memory of what he’d seen the night before pressed ever more urgently upon him. The hollow puppet of the kangaroo. The vast black shape that blotted out the stars. He felt the approach of night as a loosening in his bowels, a cold that gripped him from a place so deep it could not be warmed by sunlight.
“I don’t know.” He turned to her, put on his bravest face. “We’ll think of something. The important thing is that it’s just us. There’s no grownup coming to help. We’ve got to look out for each other.”
Cam stared at her feet, screwed up her mouth. She looked up at her brother and smiled. “It’s alright, Leo,” she said. “We’ll be alright. I have a plan.”
She put down her plate of cold pizza crusts and scampered up the ropes into the boughs of the towering angophora. Her face appeared above him, a distant moon beaming down.
“Come on,” she said.
Leo sighed, put down his plate and followed her up into the tree. It took him five times as long to get up as it had his sister. He was no fan of heights and the wavering ropes, the distance to the ground, made his head spin, his belly tumble. When at last he hauled himself up to her level, he debarked onto the thickest branch and clung to the trunk with his eyes closed, willing the seasick feeling to subside.
Cam sat beside him, holding on to nothing. Her feet dangled on either side of the bough, jiggling restlessly forward and back.
“Welcome to The Hideaway,” she said proudly, gesturing around the treetops with a grand sweep of her arm.
Leo forced a smile, trying hard not to look down. He had never joined her up here before, never seen the world as she saw it. “It’s great,” he said, his grip on the trunk tightening. “I love it.”
Cam beamed and Leo felt a twist of guilt. How happy it made her, him being here. Why had he never done this before?
“So, tell me your plan.”
Cam’s excitement bubbled over. Her feet waggled crazily. “Right. Yes. The plan. So, we hide up here and wait for the monster.”
“We wait for it?”
“Yes, up here. And we keep watch, see. And when the monster comes,” and here she paused and gestured below them toward the path, “when the monster comes from down there, we pull this.”
She held a rope out toward Leo. When he didn’t take it, she shook it at him. “Go on,” she said. “Pull it.”
Leo hugged the trunk so tightly he felt the scaly bark press into his cheek. He reached for the rope and tugged. There was resistance, so he pulled it again. The rope went suddenly slack and there was a whispering in the leaves as it snickered down from above them and pooled on the ground below.
“That wasn’t it,” said Cam. She covered her embarrassment with close scrutiny of two other ropes. “Pull this one.”
Leo shook his head, unwilling to release his grip on the trunk.
Cam shrugged. “So we wait up here for the monster, and when it comes, we pull this.” She tugged hard at the rope in her left hand.
There was a sound from behind Leo, like a cartoon spring, and a mad rustling as something hurtled through the forest toward them. A rope above Cam’s head stretched taut and swung in a ponderous arc. Below them, the sound of crashing. Cam grinned proudly.
Without slackening his hold on the trunk, Leo peered out and down. A rock the size of a melon swung like a pendulum across the path. It was lashed on every side with knotted rope, and sharp sticks jutted from the knots. It looked like an enormous, primitive mace.
Leo stared at the rock swinging slowly back and forth across the path in receding arcs.
“Wow,” said Leo, genuinely impressed. “You made that? Yourself? This afternoon?”
Cam beamed, reddening. She shrugged as if it were no big deal.
“Not all today,” she said. “The Hideout’s always had defenses. Me and Nathan . . .” She trailed off and her brows furrowed.
Leo looked down at the spiked rock dangling above the path, still gently swaying. For a long moment neither he nor Cam said anything. They just sat there on that high bough, as the shadows merged and color drained from the leaves. The cicadas had long ceased their shrilling. From somewhere overhead, the kee-ow of a black cockatoo was engulfed by the descending quiet of twilight.
“We should—” Leo gestured toward the rock.
They climbed down. Leo: tentative, shaking, every muscle taut. Cam: darting, impatient, performing feats of minor acrobatics as she waited for her brother. When Leo’s feet at last made contact with the ground, his knees were trembling. His relief was so intense he almost wept.
He let her take charge, directing him to pull the rock back from the path—careful not to snag his forearms on the jagged spikes—and raise it high enough above the ground for her to loop the guide rope. From there, they could haul it into the treetops. While Leo gripped the rope, Cam scampered back up to tie the slipknot. By the time she came down, the trap charged, the last of the light had faded.
Cam shivered. It wasn’t cold, but Leo understood. It was the dark. Night changed everything.
There was a sound from deep in the forest, a loud crack and a commotion of leaves.
“We should go inside,” said Leo. “Just for now.”
“It’s probably dinner time,” said Cam, and her small sweaty hand found his.
More noises from the among the trees—leaves rustling and a thumping on the earth. Roos, Leo told himself. Just a mob of roos. But his heart was thundering, his whole body tense. Hand in hand, he and Cam turned their backs on the forest and began to walk toward the house.
At first their steps were measured, as though willed to be slow. But Leo’s foot caught on a rock and he tripped, almost spilling them both. That tumble broke the spell and they sprinted for the cottage.
They turned the lights on all through the house, everywhere but in the bedroom, where they closed the door, peered from the corners of the window at the shadowed yard. Oil drums. Shed. Nathan’s Special. The dark mass of the forest. They couldn’t see anything. No movement. Nothing. Cam fidgeted restlessly.
“Can we eat now?” she said.
Leo nodded but continued to strain his eyes, trying to make out shapes in the blackness.
A grim mood enveloped him, something like despair. As long as the sun was shining and they distracted themselves with the search for their uncle, he and Cam could pretend they were independent and free, old enough to make decisions, have adventures. Defeat monsters. But now it was night and Nathan had not returned—would not, Leo was convinced, ever return. Now it was night and all he could think of was the sagging puppet of the bull kangaroo, the vast black emptiness behind it. The kangaroo skin would be stinking by now, crawling with things, like the hideous lump of meat it was torn from. Again and again, Leo winced as the image flashed through his mind. He and Cam. Would it hurt?
He squeezed his eyes shut, wiped with his palm at the wetness there. “OK,” he said. “Yes. Let’s eat. Whatever you want. I’ll make you whatever you want the most.”
“Even pudding?”
“Only pudding, if that’s what you want.”
“I want pancakes, the fat ones. With syrup and ice cream and—”
“We don’t have any strawberries.”
“Then just pancakes and syrup and ice cream. Just like the ones that—”
“I know,” said Leo. “I know the ones.”
—
They sat at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, stooped over stacks of pancakes that dripped with ice cream and sweet syrup. The pancakes hadn’t risen the way Leo wanted, and the syrup was the cheap kind—maple flavored—but still it felt like a victory. And Cam seemed happy enough. But, when it came to eating, they found that neither of them was hungry.
On the plate, the pancakes steamed deliciously, their odor nostalgic and filled with comfort. But in the mouth . . . Leo found he could not swallow. Even the soft, white vanilla ice cream seemed to stick in his throat, the sickly syrup tasted bitter and wrong. He lay down his fork and stared at the empty sink.
Cam was bent over her plate, fork hovering, eyes fixed on golden swirls of syrup in the melting ice cream. She had the air of a seer, of one seeking in those arcane patterns secrets of the future and the past. She sighed and her shoulders slumped.
“Do you remember that time Mum took us for pancakes? She had a bad morning, broke something and shouted. I cried, but you didn’t. She felt so sorry, she took us out for breakfast.”
“I don’t know,” said Leo. “There were so many times.”
“It was the time she bought the frisbee. After, anyway. She took us for pancakes with strawberries and ice cream and said we could go anywhere, do anything. And I said I wanted to go the beach and play frisbee and that’s what we did. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” said Leo. “I do remember. It was one of those sport-shop frisbees, red and yellow and a bit spongy. And she threw it too hard and it ended up in the surf and got lost.”
“Yes, but before that. When we were on the beach and Mum was playing with us, and even you were smiling, you were running around too, after the frisbee. You forgot to be so serious. In the café, Mum had looked so beautiful and sad, but that afternoon we were all happy. And even after we lost the frisbee it was still a good day because then we swam in our undies and I caught a wave. Then we all walked together on the wet sand and Mum had her arms around us both. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” said Leo and his head hung. He remembered it now clearly, the memory pressing down on him like a great weight—Cassandra, her absence. Where was she now? In some faraway room, talking to herself, babbling insanities and thrashing against her constraints? Or drugged to the eyeballs, aware of nothing but the mad movies looping in her head? Either way, it was worse than death. Sometimes, Leo wished she were dead. That would be better than this in-between place, this tangle of hope and despair. All this endless longing. While she was alive, there was always the possibility she would return, that he and Cam would once again have her back—their ‘old’ mother—looking sad and beautiful, chasing a frisbee across the sand. Happy memories were the worst. Perhaps that was why he seemed only to remember the bad times. Broken glass. Lentils. And the constant, unwavering vigilance.
Grim silence had descended over the kitchen. Leo and Cam leaned over their plates, ice cream pooling, pancakes untouched. The room was heavy with the memory of Cassandra, her presence, her absence. From outside, beyond the wood, thunder rolled, deep and long and filled with menace. Leo swallowed.
He took their plates to the sink, caught his reflection in the dark window. With the lights on, he could see nothing beyond the glass. Only the room behind him, Cam at the breakfast bar, and himself in the foreground, looking anxious and tired. He could see nothing outside. But anything outside could see them—could see everything.
Thunder rumbled again, closer this time. Leo’s reflection in the window was splintered by a blue-white crack of lightning.
“Turn off the light,” he said to Cam, his voice a croak. “We need to turn off all the lights.”
“Why—” Cam started, but Leo cut her off.
“Just turn off the lights!”
She hopped down from the stool and over to the switch. Leo ran into the corridor, flicking off lights as he passed. Cam called from the darkness behind him. “Leo? What is it? Don’t leave me alone!”
He felt his way back toward her. Even before his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, her hand found his. Lightning burst again like a camera flash, illuminating the breakfast bar, the stools, the dining table and chairs. Leo pulled her from the room.
“What, Leo? What is it?”
Leo’s throat was so constricted he could barely speak. “It’s coming.”
“What, Leo? What’s coming?”
Fumbling along the wall with his hand, he tugged her along the corridor, past the workshop, toward the bedroom. He almost fell through the open door, dragging Cam after him. The curtains were open, as they had left them, and the room was lit brief and stark by another flash of lightning. A shadow passed before the window.
Without a word they both dived to the floor, crawled beneath the bed. Side by side, they squeezed together as far under as they could fit, hidden but for the glint of their black eyes peeping from the shadows. It was dusty under the bed, and airless. The little gasps of Cam’s breath were hot against Leo’s face. His heart beat so hard he could feel it in his ears. Then came the scraping, and brother and sister inhaled sharply as one, neither daring to breathe out.
It was a rasping, scratching sound, like a claw, a talon, a knife. Something hard and horribly sharp dragging over the boards outside the cottage.
“Leo,” Cam sobbed. “Leo, what—”
Leo shushed, brought a finger to his lips, rolled his eyes toward the window. The scraping was coming closer, almost outside the bedroom.
Then came the voice. It was just outside and yet far away, a whisper from some cold place beyond the silvery stars. Or was the voice inside his head? A voice of madness and despair, of command and betrayal.
“Chil-dren,” it half spoke, half sang. “O chil-dren.” Scrape. Scrawp.
The voice was tinny and high-pitched, a mosquito-whine played half-speed through a detuned radio. Whispers of distortion and TV static.
“Chil-dren . . .”
Lightning cracked and the boom of thunder was immediate. The storm was right above them. Beside Leo, Cam was weeping. In the blue-white flash, the figure at the window was illumined.
“Uncle Nathan!” Cam’s voice cracked with relief.
But Leo knew what he had seen. The face was Nathan’s, but the eyes were hollow and black. The body moved, yet took no steps. It floated like an empty suit—fluttered rather. And behind it . . .
The blackness. So deep and dark it obscured the stars.
Leo shuddered.
“I don’t think that’s Uncle Nathan.”
The shadow passed out of sight of the window. The scraping moved away toward the front of the house.
The door, Leo remembered. We didn’t lock the door.
The thunder growled, low and deep and bottomless, a belch without end from the cold of the heavens. Cam shuffled farther under the bed, as far back as she could go in what little space they had left.
Leo felt her fumbling against his leg and reached back. He took her hand and squeezed.