When Jo, Hal and Benny arrive in Elyora the absence of takeaway coffee is the least of their problems. At each other’s throats and without transportation, phone service or somewhere to stay, they accept the hospitality of the enigmatic Lazarus at the original Elyora homestead.

As day turns to night, the sanctuary of the rambling house becomes a terrifying alternate reality of memories peeling back onto themselves to expose secrets and paranoia dating back to 1942.

To escape Elyora and return to 2012, Jo must remember who she is and find Benny and Hal before they succumb to  the same fate as those who came before them.

Dedication

With thanks to Lesley,

who saw the diamond in the rough.

Elyora

Jo watched Benny out the corner of her eye: hands strangling the steering wheel, eyes shifting between the endless stretch of highway on the GPS screen and the ELYORA 4KM sign on the opposite side of the road. A semi-trailer roared past, rocking the van and blasting hot, gritty air through the window.

‘I say we confer with the Gee-Sus,’ said Hal in his best evangelical voice as he reached between Jo and Benny to tap the spring-mounted dashboard messiah. ‘The question you seek, the Buddha knows. Choose not the Gee-Sus.’

‘I told you,’ Benny snapped, ‘it was on the dash when I bought the van.’

Jo started folding the strip map of the New England Highway. ‘Elyora’s not on here.’ Benny snatched at it, and it tore in two. ‘You destroy everything you touch,’ she spat and threw her piece at him.

‘Why don’t we just turn around?’ Hal suggested, pulling on his beanie, serious now. ‘This was obviously a bad idea.’

‘No!’ Benny and Jo whipped around to scorch him with matching death stares.

‘We vote then.’

Jo and Hal raised their hand in favour of keeping to the highway.

‘Two to one,’ Hal said.

Benny snorted and threw the torn map into the footwell. The Tarago’s tyres bit into the gravel and the van bumped onto the tarmac, stopping several metres up the highway.

Jo jerked around in her seat to face him and snarled, ‘What are you doing? We voted.’

The metronomic ticking of the blinker ratcheted up the tension as they waited to see if the time bomb of band ethics exploded.

‘I need coffee. Now.’

He floored it and the van shot between two semis, across the highway and onto the road to Elyora.

It wasn’t that Benny had ignored the most basic rules of band life. It wasn’t even that he hadn’t slept and was missing when it came time to leave. What really got to her, gutted the last of her tolerance for him, was the growing fear they would be late for their first interstate gig.

Fucking Benny.

It was 1.37pm. Sound check was at 7.00pm. They were more than five hours out of Brisbane with delays on the Cunningham Gap and peak hour traffic ahead.

Travelling away from the highway. And Brisbane.

The road narrowed from two lanes to one. Open paddocks gave way to scrappy bush that thickened the further they drove. The smell of eucalyptus and lemon myrtle replaced diesel fumes and summer crops. The occasional ghost gum towered above the tangle of bracken and smaller trees, marking distance in the absence of road signs. One-two-three-four. Ten. Twenty. Fifty.

‘How far did the sign say?’

‘Four clicks,’ Hal yawned.

‘We’ve gone more than that.’

‘You’d know,’ Benny muttered, tucking a wayward dreadlock behind his ear.

‘Basic maths, dickwad. We’re doing eighty Ks an hour. Four Ks is one twentieth of that. One twentieth of sixty minutes is three minutes. We’ve been off the highway for more than three minutes.’

‘What are you blathering about?’

The clock on the dash displayed 1.38 in faded LED green. Her phone said 1.37.

Jo wrenched around in her seat. ‘Hal, what time does your mobile say?’

‘One thirty-six.’

‘We turned off the highway at 1.37. It can’t still be 1.37.’

Static hissed in the speakers. Julia Stone’s voice distorted to a squeal and the volume went haywire. The engine seized and caught. The van bunny-hopped once, twice and then stalled. Benny struggled to steer, ploughing the passenger side into long grass before they came to a stop.

The hollow click of the ignition sounded like a cigarette lighter out of fluid.

Jo kicked the dash. ‘You said you had it serviced!’

‘I did.’

Benny yanked on the handbrake, turned the key a dozen times then stared out the windscreen.

‘So you’re just going to sit there and meditate it back into working order? Fucking brilliant!’

‘Would you shut the fuck up?’ He tugged on the bonnet release and got out, slamming the door behind him.

Hal climbed in behind the wheel. ‘A word of advice, the whole poor me thing doesn’t suit you.’

‘I am not a poor me,’ Jo yelled at Hal’s back as he followed Benny out onto the bitumen.

‘Go and turn it over again,’ Hal said after they’d spent several minutes peering under the bonnet, debating what to do next.

In the end Hal suggested Benny try the engine again. He settled behind the wheel, ignoring Jo, and turned the key. A dozen more fruitless attempts and he thumped the heel of his hand on the steering wheel, sounding the horn.

‘Jesus fucking Christ, Benny!’ Hal’s furious face appeared at the driver’s window, rubbing his head. ‘You really are a fuckwit.’

Benny shoved the door open, pushing Hal out of the way. ‘The town’s just down here, right? We’ll walk.’

‘Sounds like an awesome idea, Benny,’ Jo said in her best faux-ho voice.

‘Well, stay here.’

Hal slammed the bonnet shut. ‘Let’s calm down. Okay? And think about this. You got service on your phone, Jo?’

‘Nope.’

‘Benny?’

‘Nada.’

‘Me neither. So we lock up the van and go together to find the NRMA.’

Jo kicked the dash again and swore under her breath as she slid into the back to put on her boots. When she emerged she found Benny halfway down the road and Hal brushing his teeth, rinsing with a vile fluoro-yellow liquid in an old Fanta bottle.

‘It’s not piss,’ he said, between spits. ‘It’s Berocca!’

‘Whatever,’ she shrugged.

By the time she’d locked the van and checked the trailer, Benny had already disappeared around the bend. Hal was crouched at the passenger mirror inspecting his teeth.

‘Stop stressing,’ he said, wrapping his arm around her as they walked away from the van.

‘What about the gig?’ she asked, resisting the urge to rest her head against his shoulder.

‘We’ll be back on the road…forthwith. It’s an electrical issue. A cactus battery or spark plug. At worst an alternator.’

‘Since when did you know anything about cars?’

‘C’mon Marlowe, think? No hiss or tick or clunk, nothing dripping and that weird thing with the stereo.’

‘I confess,’ Jo said. ‘I prayed to Gee-sus for an end to the siblings Stone.’

They laughed and he squeezed her tight. ‘Think you need to be more specific with your request next time, sista. Now if it were the black ops sheep—’

She drove her hip into his. ‘Don’t start with the black ops sheep. Seriously, you gotta find new material, dude.’

‘And what better place to find new material,’ he said, letting go of her to fling his arms wide, ‘than the middle of frakin’ nowhere.’

‘You’d think there’d be some old mansion or something up on the hill,’ he commented, ‘but nada.’

Hal pointed farther down the road, to a path cut into the bush. ‘Perhaps your mansion’s at the end of that.’

Benny passed the joint to Hal and the three of them shared it as they walked along the track; the unspoken agreement to take the diversion voiced in the bets they made on what they’d find at the end.

The path terminated at the edge of a large clearing. An abomination of a house stood two-and-a-bit storeys high in the centre. The elegant L-shaped ground floor of sandstone, gave way to a malformed second storey of weatherboard. Rusted scaffolding clung to the short end of the L in a partially constructed third storey of grey, warped uprights.

‘Whoa, I wished I’d bet on an ugly mother of a house,’ Benny whistled.

‘Why?’ Jo stared at the misshapen building. ‘Why would you bother?’

‘There’s probably as much to do here as there is in Nundle,’ Hal said, the stub of the joint jammed into the corner of his mouth.

‘Looks deserted, man.’

‘Someone mows the grass though.’

‘And some dude, waters it.’ Hal sniffed. ‘Betcha there’s a river or a creek nearby. No-one out here would waste tank water on a lawn.’

‘I could so go a swim,’ Benny said, wiping the sweat from his face.

‘Hell yeah.’

‘Hey!’ Jo grabbed Benny’s arm. ‘We’re trespassing. Hear that? Someone’s singing Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.’

‘Huh?’ Hal screwed his face up, head cocked to one side.

She hummed a few lines.

‘Nada.’

‘I don’t hear anything, either.’

‘Jesus Christ, how stoned are you two?’ She snatched the butt from Hal’s mouth, ground it into the dirt and stomped back into the bush. ‘Well?’ she said, stopping, hands turned to the sky like the dashboard Jesus.

Hal paused at the plain wooden sign, yellowed with age, which welcomed them to Elyora. ‘Makes Nundle look like a metropolis.’

A ramshackle general store came into view first, the boards stripped of colour by time and weather; the front verandah sagged under the weight of a jasmine vine in full bloom. Auto corpses pock-marked the paddock between the general store and the servo. On the weed-riddled forecourt stood two towering, rusted bowsers shaped like coffins—the Golden Fleece branding bleached to amorphous blobs.

Ghosts of advertisements for fertiliser and seeds haunted the galvanised iron shingles of a large shed across the road. Stock and holding pens sprawled, choked with grass and scotch thistles, behind. The main street ended with a discoloured war memorial and an overgrown park. A paint-flecked swing set and a huge corroded slide languished in the wild grass.

The only sign of life was a flock of squawking rainbow lorikeets in the canopy of a huge elm. Weathered picnic tables, splashed white with bird shit, huddled underneath.

‘There’s no church,’ Benny said.

‘Or pub. Nundle’s got a pub.’

‘No telephone,’ Jo said, an edginess creeping into her voice. ‘Even Woolomin has a phone box.’

‘Had,’ Hal corrected.

Benny turned a slow 360 degrees. ‘I fucked up.’

Hal kicked at the edge of a pothole. ‘No shit, Sherlock!’

‘Let’s go,’ Jo said and started back toward the highway. ‘We’ll flag a—’

A generator engine sputtering to life close by cut her off.

Hal pointed to a light in the servo’s office window. ‘There’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.’

‘Looks like no-one’s been here in decades,’ Jo said as they walked onto the broken forecourt apron, her attention fixed on the oxidised Golden Fleece sign jutting out over the office door.

‘Except the person who forgot to turn the light off.’

Benny went straight to the door, turned the handle and pushed. When it opened he shot Jo a cocky grin and walked in.

She grabbed Hal’s arm when he went to follow. ‘That light wasn’t on when we came into town.’

‘Well, it’s on now. You wanna get to Brisbane?’

A naked bulb hung from a long length of electrical cord in the centre of the room, wavering slightly—the air disturbed by their entrance. A counter ran the length of the shared wall with the workshop. Shelves lined with spark plugs, fuel filters and other small parts filled the back wall of the waiting room. Two large lockers sat behind the counter. A dusty calendar hung on the wall; a woman in a white string bikini sprawled across the bonnet of a red hot rod, dark hair falling in thick curls. Printed on the tear-off month below: OCTOBER. Then, 1974.

They stopped at the counter. On top: a simple metal cash box, a chewed yellow Bic pen, a blue invoice book with large oily fingerprints on the cover and a tarnished metal bell. Jo ran a finger across the counter and showed the clean tip to Hal, who shrugged.

When she reached to tap the bell, Benny hit her hand. ‘I hate those things.’

Calling out hello? he walked to the door stencilled WORKSHOP—NO ENTRY and tried the handle.

Typical, Jo thought, thinks every door opens for him and she hit the counter bell hard—twice. The dull metallic pings ricocheted around the unattended office. Benny scowled and Jo grinned in return.

‘What can I do you for?’

The three of them spun toward the voice, startled.

A man in blue overalls stood in the front door, wiping his hands on a filthy rag. His face bore no welcome, darkening as he looked from face to face, fixing to stone when he came to Benny.

‘Awesome to see you, man.’ Benny strode forward, extending his hand. ‘Our van’s shit itself up the road.’

‘Van, ay?’ the mechanic said, ignoring Benny’s proffered hand, dropping the rag on the bench and reaching for the packet of Drum in the breast pocket embroidered with ‘STANLEY’.

‘We’re looking for the NRMA, man.’

‘No NRMA ’round here, mate.’

Benny took a step back and tugged at the end of a dreadlock. An awkward silence fell as the mechanic rolled a durrie.

‘So you need a tow,’ he finally stated and dipped his head to a Zippo lighter.

‘Actually, we need to get to Brisbane.’ Jo came up next to Benny. ‘We’ve got a gig in—’ She pulled her mobile from her pocket and stared at the blank screen, then up to the clock on the wall.

The black hour hand pointed between the one and two. The minute hand hung, in an unhinged way, a little below the seven.

‘One thirty-seven,’ she whispered.

‘Clock’s been like that since them outtatowners built that bastard of a science compound over the river.’

‘What kind of experiments bugger up clocks?’ Hal asked.

‘The kind they do behind barbed wire, ay,’ the man replied, narrowing his eyes.

‘You real, man? I’ve never heard of Elyora.’

‘Cause you’re so the über peace activist,’ Jo hissed.

‘Maybe the electromagnetic field here is screwed—’

‘It’s not some fucking sci-fi movie,’ Benny snapped.

‘—Stellar spot to break down, Ben,’ Jo cut across them both.

‘I wish you’d do us all a favour and shut your fucking mouth.’

‘I won’t stand for no bad mouthin’ sheilas, ay.’ The rollie moved with his bottom lip. ‘You should apologise to the pretty lady, mate.’

Benny scowled, grunted a petulant apology and returned his attention to the mechanic.

‘So, what’s wrong widya car?’

‘Van,’ corrected Benny.

‘Well, didya van just up and die on the Elyora Road?’

The three of them nodded.

‘Yep,’ he said, sucking on his durrie. ‘S’pect it’s a fried alternator, ay. That’s the usual.’

‘Told you it was electrical,’ Hal whispered in Jo’s ear, cringing away from the toxic glare she gave him.

‘Well, onya bike. Night comes quick ’round ’ere.’

‘But it’s only, like, two. Three tops.’

‘As I said,’ the mechanic repeated, eyes boring into Jo. ‘Night comes quick, darlin’.’

He ambled behind the counter and took a dirty set of keys from a row of hooks beneath the calendar.

‘Gonna need one of you fellas to give me a hand with the hitch.’

They looked at each other and Hal eventually said, ‘It’s your heap of shit, Benny,’ abdicating any responsibility.

The mechanic gave Benny a piercing look and mumbled under his breath as he stalked past him out the door. Hal took a seat and, as Jo joined him, the car keys jabbed through her short pocket into her thigh.

‘Benny, stop,’ she called, dashing out the door.

He turned, his eyes travelling over her body in an all too familiar way. ‘Once we get the van back, how about me and you go find somewhere quiet to make up?’

He leaned in to give her a kiss and she snapped her head away.

‘Not in this lifetime.’ She slammed the keys into his hand. ‘Enjoy your big boy ride in the tow truck.’

‘C’mon, Jo, don’t be like that.’

The truck roared to life inside the workshop and parrots exploded from the branches of the elm.

She crossed her arms over her chest. ‘Your ride’s leaving.’

He went to say something but shook his head and walked toward the workshop. Once he was gone, she wished he’d never come back.

The tow truck thundered out of the workshop. Benny sat with his arm bent out the window, eyes dead ahead, like he couldn’t see her. The truck lurched out onto the road and the sun glanced off the tow hook as it swung back and forth on the hitch.

It looks like one of the carcass hooks in the cool room at home, she thought and squinted down the road after the truck.

Hal sat beside Jo, reassembling his iPhone. ‘I don’t get it. The battery was fully charged.’

‘The doors open the wrong way,’ Jo said absently, staring at the calendar on the wall.

‘Doors?’

‘On the tow truck. They’re arse about.’

‘Suicide doors,’ Hal said, shoving his phone in his pocket. ‘I’m thinking it’s less an electromagnetic occurrence and more of…’

And he was up and out his seat before he could finish the sentence, and Jo found him standing between the pumps—only an inch or so taller than them.

‘What if those scientists created a moebius, here in Eloyra.’

‘The dude from The Matrix.’

‘Not a Morpheus. Moebius: a theoretical loop in time and space. Named after a Mobius strip.’ Jo looked at him blankly. ‘Think the recycling sign.’

‘Like the infinity symbol.’

‘Kinda.’ Hal ran his hand over the bowser face. ‘These are late fifties I reckon. The old man would be creaming himself over this chrome bezel. Banging on about it being the last of the Art Deco influence.’

Jo shook her head. ‘I can’t believe you just said Art Deco.’

‘Art Deco. Art Deco. Art Deco,’ Hal chanted, brandishing the pump nozzle like a sword.

Petrol splashed over the concrete when he depressed the handle, shifting into the two handed hold of a light sabre.

‘Jesus, Hal.’

‘It’s okay,’ he said, jamming the nozzle back in the bowser. ‘It didn’t even register, look. Zero-zero-zero.’

‘Thirteen cents a litre!’ Jo wiped the grime off the glass. ‘Maybe we time travelled.’

‘In Benny’s van?’ Hal pulled a face and Jo laughed then crossed her legs.

‘Argh. Stop it. I think I need the loo.’

‘You don’t know if you wanna take a slash?’

‘I don’t know if I want to go search the workshop by myself.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘There’ll be spiders.’

Hal flinched, then tried to relax into the nonchalant facade she’d seen him put on when girls knocked him back. ‘Me? Scared of spiders?’

‘You’re the biggest arachnophobe ever. Boris.’

‘Boris? I can’t have black ops sheep but you can use obscure musical references as insults.’

‘Fuck off,’ she said and started off in the direction of the workshop.

‘Hey.’ He caught her around the waist and spun her to face him. ‘You don’t have to do it anymore—prove you’re good enough to be with him.’

‘And you never acted all alpha muso around him.’

‘I wasn’t doing it to get laid.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Jo said. ‘That worked out real well for me, didn’t it?’

Like a developing Polaroid the workshop emerged from the gloom as her eyes adjusted. Dust and old engine oil laced the cool air. Each footstep disappeared in a small cloud. Hal stopped suddenly, his eyes tracking a spider climbing a gossamer line.

‘It’s just a daddy long legs,’ Jo said, tugging gently on his hand.

‘Most poisonous spider. Ever’

‘Yeah, but useless at piercing human skin.’

Hal let go of her hand and started to draw circles in the dirt with this right foot, then left.

‘You are so not coming any further, are you?’ Jo shoved him when he didn’t reply. ‘Go do something useful—like get us something to eat and drink. Damn.’ She felt for her wallet. ‘I’ll owe you.’

‘You’re forever in my debt, Marlowe.’

‘You wish, Boris. Behave yourself,’ she called after him.

‘Only if the black ops sheep don’t get me. But, if they do.’ He paused at the door and knocked one heel against the other. ‘I’ve been practising my best take me to your leader.’

Four cars lay in various states of repair across the workshop bays: an orange-red, two-door Ford Capri with the bonnet up and huge chunks of the engine missing; a boxy green Holden ute—engine cavity empty; a newer yellow station wagon with the interior stripped; and an old LandCruiser missing a back axle, hanging mid-air on a hoist.

At the back of the workshop a long bench ran beneath a tool wall, just like the one in her Grandfather’s shed: a place for every tool and every tool in its place. A few empty spaces outlined missing tools, like a crime scene. Jo picked up a spanner from the bench and hung it on the wall, then removed it. The surly mechanic had struck her as someone who would lose his shit if someone touched his tools.

The toilet was completely feral—a poorly lit box attached to the back of the workshop with a door that wouldn’t close. Attached high on the wall was the metal cistern, a corroded chain-pull hanging from it. A dirt halo swallowed the plumbing, and the toilet roll holder, bent and clinging by a single screw was, of course, empty.

She thought of squatting behind the shed but, experience told her, the moment she did the tow truck would thunder around the corner into full view.

It flushed—a definite bonus—dirty water pouring over the stained enamel. Shorts down, she was suddenly relieved she wasn’t one of those prissy city girls who could only pee in a picture-perfect receptacle. Dusty Playboys lay to one side of the loo and she flicked through them, waiting to drip dry. They were dated 1973 and 1974; the women—in the pictures young and pert—were now old, wrinkled and sagging. Someone’s Mum or Nan. The thought made her sick, more than the collusion to exhibit their bodies in such a way.

The workshop appeared lighter after the dark loo, but the feel had shifted. Deliberate and desertion. Those were the two words that sprung to mind. The workspace was devoid of oil trays, empty bottles of mechanical fluids, discarded parts; authentic signs of every-day use.

It’s just for show, Jo thought as the first icy tendrils worked their way up her spine.

The coolness of the workshop bore down on her. The cars became cannibalised corpses as shafts of light coming through the window shifted and the shadows lengthened. The smell of rotting meat caught in the back of her throat; something crunched under foot.

Run!

She bolted for the strip of light between the workshop doors and burst out, stumbling blindly across the concrete, only stopping when she came to the road. Chest heaving, she gulped down lungfuls of hot, dry air to quell the dread spiralling up from her bowels.

Under the harsh eye of the sun, sweat washed clean the workshop’s clinging menace. Panic gradually subsided, reforming as frustration: Where are you, Benny?

The noise of the generator stopped and the town fell quiet.

The lack of noise was worse than the sentient malevolence within the workshop and she started to hum Andrew Sisters’ melodies, looping them into each other. Humming was meant to relax her throat and, by extension, her body and mind, but the notes snagged on her throat. She forced her throat to work, and the melodic vibrations distorted into lyrical grunts.

Chattanooga Choo Choo...I wanna leave.

Get Your Kicks on Route 66…put as many Ks between Elyora and me.

The Freedom Train…never think of this place again.

Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree…Benny, where are you? Oh god oh god oh god.

The final song became a parasite, burrowing deep into her, dislodging everything else. The calm normally associated with humming became a seeping disembodiment. The humming mutated to singing, but the voice that swelled within was not hers. It rose in a clear, high pitch, impossibly beyond her range.

Stop. Stop it now.

Her fingers closed around her throat, as though it was someone else’s. The squeeze, a second-hand experience felt from beyond.

You cannot have me!

And the singing ceased mid-lyric.

Alone in the middle of the road she stood panting. The waning heat sucked the last of the life from the day. Rushing to fill the void was the dread from the workshop. It stewed in the pit of her stomach like a bout of imminent diarrhoea. Like stage fright. But with stage fright you at least knew the cause of the anxiety. And you knew where to find the audience.

She couldn’t shake the thought Elyora had assembled an audience for her.

Watching from a distance.

Biding its time.

A once-domesticated wisteria slowed her progress through the front yard of the General Store. She expected, with each step, the perished wood of the store stairs to give way. A locked door was reward for the precarious ascent. The rusted frame that once held the newspaper headlines crunched as she walked over it. At the front window, she expected to see eyes peering back out at her. The filthy glass protected any secrets within.

‘Coo-eee.’ The sound amplified through her cupped hands and she yelled, ‘Hal?’

The sun-sharpened grass and weeds came to her waist, scratching her bare legs. She moved along the side wall, from window to window, standing on tip-toe trying to see in.

If Hal could get in, he would. She’d never understood how he got off on the thrill of doing something just a little bit wrong—never anything too extreme or dangerous. Just enough to get them into a shit-load of trouble somewhere like Elyora.

It was like he’d been telling black ops sheep stories for so long he thought he was some human-merino hybrid ninja. In the final year of high school he’d broken into the shooters’ hut on the neighbour’s property and nicked as many cans of peaches and baked beans as he could carry, even though he didn’t like them—just ’cos he could.

‘Hal?’

Dozens of faded orange crates, full of empty soft drink bottles, stood stacked against the back wall of the store; the steps next to them, collapsed. She continued around the far side of the store and something charged her, sent her sprawling in the long grass.

‘Boo!’

‘Jesus fucking Christ, Hal!’ Jo pushed him off her, heart hammering fit to dismantle her rib cage.

He rolled onto his back, laughing. ‘The look on your face!’

She was back on her feet, fast, and kicking him.

‘You dead shit.’

‘Stop. Stop. Please,’ he begged as her kicks thumped into him.

He pulled himself up onto his knees and she stopped.

‘Fuck off,’ she snarled when he reached up for her.

‘It was just a joke.’

‘Well it wasn’t funny.’

‘This place needs some livening up.’

‘What this place needs is to be seen in the rear-fucking-vision mirror of our van.’

Jo stormed off through the grass towards the road. Hal limped after her, picking grass seeds from his beanie and calling for her to stop. At the road he caught up with her. She stood looking down the buckled tarmac, to the point where it disappeared into the bush.

‘It’s like the bush ate it,’ Hal observed, stroking her pinkie with his.

‘It’s like you go down there and fall off the end of the world,’ Jo said, shoving her hand in her pocket. ‘Like Benny went down there and is never coming back.’

‘And that would be a bad thing how?’

‘It was rhetorical, Hal.’

‘Is the band breaking up?’

‘What?’ Her flushed face contorted in a way Hal had never seen before.

‘Well, you know, with you and Benny—’

‘The band’s not breaking up just because Benny and I did.’

‘But I was just thinking—’

‘Fuck! Stop thinking, Hal.’

‘I can’t help it.’

Jo started back toward the servo.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To give you something useful to think about.’

‘There’s something wrong in here,’ she said stopping next to the engine-less ute. ‘Can you feel it?’

‘Feel what?’

‘How it’s…creepy? Look at it. It’s too perfect. Like a movie set.’

‘So the guy’s a bit of a neat freak. You can’t sneeze in my Dad’s shed without him going postal—’

‘It’s not that. My Granddad’s shed-proud too.’ She pulled him through the workshop to the toilet in the back. ‘Look.’

‘Holy frakin’ hell. I thought the shitter at our place was bad!’

‘No, these.’ Jo collected up the Playboys and shoved them at him.

‘Aww-right! Retro porn.’

‘Why has he got a pile of Playboys from 1973 and 1974?’

‘I dunno, he forgot them. Maybe there’s another shitter inside the office—or he does it at home.’ He dropped the magazines on the workbench, picked the top one, flipped through it and moved onto the next. He opened the magazine to the middle, tipped it sideways. Jo snatched it out of his hand.

‘You’re not taking this seriously.’

‘Sure I am.’

‘Why old porn?’

‘I’m a bloke. Why, not?’

‘Riddle me this, Batman. The calendar on the wall in there is from October 1974. The same month the last of these were printed.’

Hal shrugged and Jo hurled the mags back in the toilet. ‘This town is bent.’

‘You’re just paranoid after all that—’

‘Don’t blame the weed. I am not paranoid.’ She wrung her hands, struggling to articulate herself. ‘It feels…wrong. In-my-gut wrong.’

Hal shrugged again. ‘Just feels like the same-old-same-old arse-end town.’

Her fingers dug into his arm. ‘Promise if the van doesn’t start, or that weirdo mechanic can’t get it fixed tonight, we walk out and hitch a ride back home.’

Hal thought for a moment. ‘Sure, if it will calm you down, okay.’

Jo let go and marched back onto the driveway.

‘Stop with the stomping? I promise—Hey!’ Hal pointed to the park across the road. ‘The place isn’t deserted.’

A man sat on the swing, a baby in his lap. The squeak of the chain carried across to the servo, replaced a minute later with the dull roar of the tow truck.

Hal pulled Jo into a rough hug and said, ‘It’s all good,’ and kissed her on the forehead. ‘I see us, having beers and laughing about the Benny Arbor incident. Fauna Bate forever, yeah?’

Maybe.

Jo wanted to feel Hal’s simplistic optimism but, bereft of it, nodded absently and turned back to the swings. And the neatly mown park she swore had been unkempt, and overrun with weeds, when they arrived.

Another durrie burned between the mechanic’s fingers while he kept an eye on the chain feeding back around the drum. Jo’s impatience won out over the need for diplomacy—or whatever Benny and Hal were waiting for.

‘What’s wrong with the van?’ she asked him.

‘Don’t know yet, ay. Need to put her over the pit, but reckon it’s probably the ’lectrics.’

‘Yesss!’ Hal punched the air. ‘Knew it.’

‘You said earlier some kind of research facility in Elyora has screwed with the clocks. Is it more than that?’

‘Outtatowners,’ the mechanic said and spat on the concrete. ‘Think you bloody know everythin’.’

‘I think there’s permanent electrical issues here and that’s the problem with the van. I want you to tow us back out onto the highway.’

‘But we just got the van here,’ Benny said, his face reddening.

Jo scowled at Benny. ‘Do you want to stay here?’

‘Won’t do no good, darlin’,’ the mechanic said, shutting off the winch, swaggering past them to detach the hitch. ‘Alternator’s cactus. Finito.’

‘You said you didn’t know what was wrong with it,’ Hal said, joining Jo and Benny at the front of the van.

‘It’s kinda—whaddaya folks call it,’ he mumbled, unhooking the winch hook. ‘Phenomena ’round ’ere. Dead alternators.’

He walked back to the winch beating the hook against this palm. The last of the chain fed back around the barrel and the engine shut off, the hook at face height.

‘It’s beer o’clock now. I’ll be onto it first thing Mondee.’

Benny walked in front of him. ‘Hey, man! I don’t think you quite get it. We need to get back on the highway. Or at least get somewhere with phone service. We need to call the venue to let them know what’s goin’ on.’

‘Mate, you need an attitude adjustment.’ He dropped his durrie into the dust and ground it out with a rundown boot heel. ‘Now get outta me way.’

‘We can’t be a no-show.’ The pitch of Jo’s voice fluctuated with panic, but she forced a smile. ‘Would we be able to use your phone, please?’

‘No dog-and-bone here, darlin’.’

‘I’m no-one’s fucking darlin’,’ she spat, furiously. She wrenched the side door of the van open. A minute later she climbed out with a backpack and her guitar in a soft gig bag. ‘I’m hitching a ride and I don’t give a shit what direction they’re going.’

‘We said we’d stay together,’ Hal said, pulling the beanie off his head and jamming it in the back pocket of his shorts. ‘It’s just one night.’

‘C’mon, babe,’ Benny said, putting a hand on her arm. She shook it off.

‘Don’t c’mon, babe me. If you’d just stayed on the fucking road we wouldn’t be here.’ Right in his face, she hissed, ‘If you’d kept your dick in your pants, like you should have, we’d be in Brisbane now.’

One angry footstep resounded after another, down the road, past the Welcome to Elyora sign and around the bend. What passed for a town disappeared from sight. Past the bend, resting in the shade of the gums was the man from the park.

He turned at her approach, a child’s sippy cup in hand, and smiled. ‘Car trouble?’

‘Something like that,’ Jo barked, without stopping.

‘Where you off to?’ he persisted, passing the cup from one hand and back again.

‘The hell out of here.’

‘It’s going to be dark soon. You shouldn’t go down the road alone.’ He placed the sippy cup on the canopy of the stroller with exaggerated care and waited for her to stop. ‘It’s not safe for a woman to be out alone.’

‘In Elyora? What a load-a shit.’ She went to walk on but hesitated, pushed the wet fringe off her face. ‘I’m sorry.’ She turned back and tried to muster an apologetic smile. ‘It’s been a cluster-fuck of a day.’

The man rocked the stroller back and forth. ‘Breaking down in the middle of nowhere doesn’t really bring the best out in people,’ the man said, his voice brightening.

He wheeled the stroller around to face her and a baby waved chubby arms with the same uncoordinated zeal she knew from playing with her nephews when they were little. She smiled her first genuine smile in twenty-four hours and waggled her fingers in a wave, inciting more excited arm jerks from the baby.

‘He likes you,’ the man said.

‘Unlike your mechanic,’ she muttered. ‘So, if I take your advice and don’t walk back to the highway to hitch a ride, where do you suggest I stay? Or at least get a drink?’

He shook his head. ‘Teetotallers built Elyora, so there’s no pub. And no-one really comes to visit who doesn’t already have somewhere to stay, so no motel.’

She snorted. ‘Well, I’m shit out of luck.’

The thought of spending the night in the back of the van was too much. Then she remembered the trailer full of expensive gear was unhitched on the side of the road. Shit.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, and headed back toward Elyora, hurrying her pace as the sun dipped below the tops of the trees.

‘Knew you’d be back,’ said Benny matter-of-factly, lounging against the side of the Tarago, blowing smoke rings. ‘All talk. No action.’

‘No action?’ she snapped, dumping bag and guitar against a bowser and flying at him.

The first punch connected with his jaw and the joint dropped from his mouth. The following left hook mashed his nose.

Hal caught her from behind, before she could swing again and tried to reason with her.

‘Shit, my nose!’ Benny moaned, blood seeping between his fingers.

‘You’re a fucking poser,’ she yelled, struggling against Hal. ‘That’s why you’ve got a fucking Jesus doll on the dash. Some stupid fucking in-joke from when you were at HillSong, belting out Christian rock and screwing virgins. And the Kiss snow dome was some 70s tribute band. And now you’re the next what… Angus Stone? With those fucking dreadlocks and the beard!’

His fingers came away red and sticky, and his eyes widened. ‘You fucking bitch, you broke my nose!’

Jo fought free of Hal and stood, feet hip-width apart. The tremors started in her hands and quickly spread, but her voice remained eerily flat and emotionless. ‘You called me chicken.’

‘I never called you chicken,’ he blathered, trying to staunch the blood flow.

‘Then you deserve it for everything else.’

‘Hey.’ Hal stepped warily between her and Benny.

‘Someone needs to do something about the trailer,’ she said, talking to him and through him at the same time.

‘That guy’s picking it up. You don’t have to worry about it.’

‘Excuse me?’

They all turned. The man with the stroller stood to one side of the bowsers.

‘I was speaking to your friend down the road. She told me you’re in a tight spot with your van breaking down. There’s no accommodation in town, but you are all welcome to stay at my house. It’s nothing special but the little guy and I would be glad for the company.’

‘Thank you. That’d be great,’ Hal slipped one arm around Jo then reached out his other hand. ‘I’m Hal. This is Jo. And the bleeding dude is Benny. And together we’re Fauna Bate.’

‘Oh, you’re a band.’ The man took Hal’s hand and shook enthusiastically. ‘Lazarus,’ he introduced. ‘Ethan Lazarus. And my wingman, Gus.’

Hal dragged their gear out of the van while Benny cleaned his face under the tap in the park. Jo stood awkwardly in the driveway with Lazarus, watching her knuckles bruise up.

‘It’s actually Josephine,’ Jo said off-handedly. ‘Josephine Belato.’

Ethan extended his hand and she offered her unbruised one. He hesitated, looking at it as if he’d forgotten he’d initiated the act. For a fleeting moment, with the glimmer of temptation in his eye, she expected him to press his lips to her hand. Then his large sweaty hand closed around hers and she swore his thumb caressed the side of hers.

Strangers don’t go around doing that kinda shit, she told herself.

‘Thank you, Mr Lazarus,’ she said swallowing hard, trying to break the uncomfortable silence growing between them. ‘For taking us in, I mean.’

‘Just Ethan. And it’s my pleasure.’ He glanced at their clasped hands and turned them so hers was on top. ‘You’re not married,’ he said, his brows drawing together, taking the softness out of his expression.

‘Not likely.’

‘But I thought—’

‘We’re just in a band. And I’m a girl with four older brothers and a short temper.’

He released her hand and smiled. ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’

She coughed, made a lame excuse about Hal needing her help and fled behind the van. Hidden, she rubbed her hand against her cut-offs and wished she could erase the memory of how he’d looked at her.

They left the servo behind, shadows clustering along the edge of the road, like a crowd gathered to watch a passing-out parade. Benny and Lazarus took the lead, Benny striking up conversation about an obscure folk band Jo had never heard of, using a clean sock to soak up the last of his bloody nose.

Jo leaned in to Hal and whispered, ‘Lazarus…as in, raised from the dead.’

‘It’s just a name.’

‘Nothing’s ever just a name.’

Hal raised his eyebrows. ‘I’ll take a bed over the back seat any day.’

‘He asked me if I was married.’

‘Perhaps he didn’t want to offend by offering a double bed or something like that.’

‘You’ve got an answer for everything.’

He shrugged.

‘He shook my hand like he hadn’t touched a woman in years.’

‘The dude’s dilemma, I get,’ Hal said in his best Yoda voice.

‘I’m serious,’ Jo hissed.

‘So am I.’

In a staggered line, the four of them walked past the Welcome to Elyora sign. The further they walked, the more Jo worried Lazarus’s house would be the awful place they’d spied earlier. And the closer they moved toward the highway, the stronger the feeling became. She hummed the opening refrain of Tom’s Dinert to calm herself, seguing into the lyrics when Hal began beat boxing, harmonising the refrains with her. Their voices wrapped around each other. A flash of anger flooded Jo’s voice when Benny joined on the next refrain. The intrusion! But the third voice amplified the harmony, no matter how much she wanted to counter it. The fourth voice, a rich baritone, was the real surprise when it began.

A capella, it rose through the warm, fragrant air, anchored by baby gurgles and blurts. The pressure in her chest relaxed and she soared along the thermals of the song.

It ended as naturally as it began and the strung out line compressed at a familiar path into the bush. Jo slipped her hand into Hal’s, the lightness of singing draining away, a brooding uneasiness filling the vacuum.

‘You will have to forgive the mess the house is in,’ Lazarus said, catching his breath.

‘No need to apologise, man. We’re all just grateful for somewhere to doss.’

‘I reckon he was a stockbroker, or some kind of hipster exec before he came here,’ Hal whispered, as they wound their way through the bush. ‘His hair cut gives him away, as much as his DIY skills.’

‘Shhhh!’

A blood-red sun kissing the horizon greeted them on the other side of the bush. As they walked down the path, cutting through the unmown part of the clearing, the house’s shadow lengthened, stealing out across the lawn toward them. The sandstone appeared to glow for a minute, bathed in the last rays of sun and then faded. In the lingering amber twilight, the house looked as though it was emerging from the brightness of the day, to greet them in more modest sepia tones.

‘Do you have a phone?’ Benny asked, when they stopped on the perimeter of the lawn. ‘We need to ring Brisvegas. Explain what’s happened.’

‘No telephones here,’ Lazarus said, shaking his head. ‘The Government brought a line in while they were here but they dismantled it, along with everything else, when they left.’

‘There was never a phone line here? Ever?’

Lazarus nodded. ‘I believe there was a telegraph line once.’

Jo put her hand on his arm, stopping him from walking on. ‘Stanley said there was some kind of facility over the river that messed with the clocks. But he didn’t say it was a government thing.’

‘Stanley’s pretty cut up about what happened over there.’ Lazarus looked at Jo’s hand on his arm and smiled. ‘The Government didn’t treat the locals very well. And they’re an insular lot, with long memories. They don’t understand you can move on if you want to.’

Lazarus gave a little push on the handles of the stroller and looked regretful when Jo’s hand dropped from his arm.

‘Why’d you move here?’ Hal asked. ‘Jo and I grew up in the country. Couldn’t wait to get away.’

‘And Armidale’s so the big smoke,’ sniped Benny.

‘Sometimes your options are limited, and you make the best of what you have.’ The comment was for Hal, but he looked straight at Jo while he spoke. ‘I inherited the place and Gus and I are doing the best we can with it.’

They congregated at the back steps to pull off their shoes.

‘Just line them up there,’ Lazarus said, pointing to a strip of concrete to the left of the steps.

‘I can’t,’ said Hal, clutching his orange and lime green trainers to his chest.

‘You should be right for creepy crawlies.’

At the mention of spiders Hal paled and looked under the house.

‘Leave your shoes against the shower wall at the end of the verandah if that will set your mind at ease.’

‘According to Jo I am a rampant arachnophobe,’ Hal said, joining Jo on the bottom step.

‘Off you go, Boris,’ Jo teased.

‘Stop calling me Boris.’

‘Only song to survive all of the The Who’s live gigs,’ Lazarus commented, looking up from the stroller.

Jo’s face lit up. ‘Townsend said it was Hendrix’s favourite Who song.’

‘But it was only released on single in Japan.’

‘As a B-side,’ Jo added. ‘So you know your music,’ she said, walking up the steps beside him.

‘Trivial stuff mostly,’ he said, brushing past to open the warped wire door for her. ‘How about I get you all sorted out for rooms, and we can talk more over dinner?’

The house was cool and welcoming.

Proper, welcoming, she thought. Not like that workshop.

She wandered down a short corridor and waited in the door of the kitchen for Lazarus to take the lead. They snaked through the house: left down a longer, darker hallway, doors shut on both sides; left again; right into a shorter one.

‘I don’t recommend you go exploring,’ Lazarus advised over his shoulder. ‘The house is a culmination of the grand ideas of those who came before—and it has a tendency to take you where it wants you to go.’

‘Sounds like the TARDIS.’ Hal’s voice made it clear he didn’t intend it as a joke.

‘Bigger on the inside, you mean?’ Benny said, oblivious to the nuance in Hal’s tone.

‘No, having a mind of its frakin’ own,’ Hal snarked and tried to move back away from the spiral staircase at the end.

Lazarus motioned for him to go up and she caught a glimpse of the worried look souring his face from the second loop of the staircase. Then Benny stepped between and blocked her view.

‘A bit of a rabbit warren, eh?’ Benny said quietly, lips close enough to brush against the lobe. ‘Reckon we name our first album The Elyora Rabbit Hole.’

‘Sounds like a concept album,’ said Jo flatly, leaning away from him. ‘And you said concept albums were musical wank.’

‘In concept, yeah, but—’

‘Full of buts,’ she snapped. ‘Everything comes with your brand of qualifier. So many butts, being with you is like being lost at a full moon festival.’

He took a step back from her, his hand moving up to his nose. Lazarus clapped him on the shoulders and turned him toward the stairs.

The backpack and the guitar made it a tight fit. The coil of the stairs carried an inward, rather than an upward, motion and she arrived at the top disorientated.

The hallway is running in the wrong direction to the one below?

No, I’m just a bit dizzy.

Hal, Benny and Lazarus waited halfway down, Benny chatting to Lazarus about his favourite concept albums. Hal stood slightly apart, perspiration beading on his forehead, backpack clasped to his chest.

‘Looks like that corridor in The Shining,’ he hissed in her ear when she stopped beside him.

‘You’re freaking yourself out. It looks nothing like the Overlook Hotel.’

‘Not like the movie, but—’

‘There’s a room with bunks at the end,’ said Lazarus, cutting Hal off. ‘It’s set up for kids, but you guys should be right.’ He opened a door to his left. ‘And for Jo.’

A four-poster bed dominated the room, a mosquito net draped over the wooden frame. A large bay window filled the wall, a lace curtain floating in and out.

‘Thank you, Ethan,’ Jo said and gave Hal’s hand a quick squeeze.

Sprawled on her side, the expensive quilt pushed to the end, she lay on the cool, clean sheets relishing the feel of them against her bare arms and legs. Eyes closed, daydreams chased the nightmare day away: a stunning sunrise through the translucent curtains and the early morning air, fragrant with dew and jasmine; sitting in the bay window, Lazarus and baby Gus playing under the sprinkler below, a lazy breeze billowing through white sheets on the Hills Hoist, cooling the sweat on her arms; lying in a deck chair, the umbrella of the mulberry tree above, a Chandler… no, an Agatha Christie paperback in hand, ice cubes shrinking in a long glass of homemade lemonade.

A knock at the door pulled her back and, taking a moment to feel the heaviness of the present, she dragged herself off the bed and unlocked the door. Hal shoved through, slammed the door and stormed across the room to the window, dragging the curtains aside.

‘There were no windows like this on the second floor,’ he said, looking down. ‘Come to think of it, the entire second floor looked fucked. Yet—’ He let go of the curtains and motioned to the room.

‘There’s nothing wrong. Calm down, Hal. Please.’

He stalked along the wall, pulling his beanie off his head and then jamming it back on. ‘There’s hundreds of shoes under the house, like those old Holocaust photos.’

‘Hal, c’mon. It’s a farm, not a concentration camp.’

Hal seized her by the shoulders, shaking her hard. ‘It’s all wrong.’

‘Your fingers are digging into me.’

‘You felt it earlier in the workshop. I feel it here. Emptiness. Like there’s stuff here but it’s not really here.’

She put her hand on his chest and tried to push him away. ‘Let go. You’re hurting me.’

He propelled her toward the door. ‘Back at the workshop. I promised I’d hitch a ride with you on the highway if the only other option was to stay. I’m ready. Let’s go.’

‘You’re freaking me.’ She pulled free of his grasp, his fingerprints rising red on her skin. ‘What the hell’s got into you?’

‘I can feel you slipping away.’ Gossamer light, fingers caressed her cheek, then cupped the side of her face. He leaned in, his words barely audible. ‘And it’s getting stronger. Pulling you away from me.’

His lips pressed against hers. The audacity of it stunned her. The proximity of his body and his hands sliding down her side, across her back. How his body fused to hers. His lips lingered, waiting for her response.

The buzz in her head ate the echo of his words. And the urgency and fear carved in them. It would be so much easier to kiss him than fight him.

My best friend…

‘No!’ She shoved him hard and stumbled backward. ‘You’re my mate. We’re just mates.’

‘I don’t feel that way. I never have,’ he whispered.

‘Shut up. Don’t say anything else.’

She sat on the bed, head cradled in her hands. Hot tears slipped over her wrists and down the inside of her arms.

‘You can’t tell me you didn’t know.’

Don’t do this, Hal. Please, don’t.

He dropped to his knees on the carpet. ‘I’ve been in love with you since the first time I saw you on that school bus. The band was just an excuse to get close to you again.’

She cleared her throat and straightened her back. ‘What about all those girls you screwed?’

‘It was only meant to be a bit of flirting. When it didn’t make any difference to you, I just—’

‘You’re fucking unbelievable. You’re no better than Benny.’

He caught her wrist when she tried to hit him, and sat beside her, holding her hand. ‘You have to listen to me.’

‘I’ve listened enough.’ His hand tightened around hers when she tried to pull it free.

‘I love you, Jo.’

‘I don’t love you, Hal.’ The words choked out, the conversation cut off by a knock at the door.

‘Let me go, Hal,’ she said, resisting his efforts to pull her back to the bed.

The door opened and Benny walked through. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘didn’t realise you were both in here.’

‘Hal was just leaving,’ Jo said, making no effort to hide her wet face as she crossed the room.

Benny reached out to touch her tears and she shied away. Hal stood behind her, close enough for Benny to cock an eyebrow at him. ‘Lazarus suggested we go into town for a pub meal.’

‘There’s no pub,’ Jo said, trying to step away from Hal without getting any closer to Benny, who was blocking the doorway.

‘The pub’s in Cain Avenue, off the Elyora Road,’ said Lazarus, wandering up the hallway to join Benny at the door. ‘Most people think Elyora’s the old general store, and the servo, but you have to turn off Elyora Road to get to the main town.’

‘You told me there wasn’t a pub. That the town was built by tee-totallers. You said—’

‘Elyora’s an old homestead town.’ Lazarus jiggled Gus up and down. ‘Town probably pre-dates any do-gooder abstinence attitudes.’

‘But you said—’

‘There’s no motel, true, but a town with no beer?’

‘Perhaps you’ve had too much sun, babe.’

‘Don’t call me babe. He said it.’

‘I could murder a steak and a cold beer,’ Hal said, pushing past her, the space between them briefly swelling with the echo of her final words. Words she wanted to take back. ‘Let’s go, dude,’ and he slapped Benny on the shoulder.

‘Wait. Give me a minute, guys.’

‘Only if you want to sit alone in the Ladies Lounge,’ Lazarus said, stepping between her and the boys. ‘Women aren’t allowed to drink in the public bar.’

‘It’s not the 50s.’

‘May as be in Elyora. Why don’t I run you a bath?’ A door closed down the hallway and she was alone with Lazarus. ‘If you can hold Gus for a minute.’

Bloody hell, Jo thought. He just circumvented— and the baby caught a handful of her hair.

‘Owww, Gus!’

Another door closed.

She untangled the sweaty fist and hoisted the baby up so they were face to face. ‘Why don’t we go look out the window, Gus?’ she said. ‘I know you’ll like that.’

The twilight obscured the detail of the view below.

Like I ever saw anything clearly, she thought and wished for a clean slate with Hal, or chance to take it back. And say the right thing. Do the right thing.

Whatever that is.

‘Shit-shit-shit.’

The smile dropped from Gus’s face and she realised she’d spoken aloud.

‘Hey. How about a song? A song with…Gus in it.’ At the mention of his name, his smile returned and a bouquet of spit blossomed between the cupid bow lips.

‘It’s not what you say,’ her brother Derek had told her when she’d been preparing to babysit her nephew the first time. ‘It’s how you say it.’

So she sang Paul Simon’s Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover in her best up-beat voice. Gus cooed and chirped; his hand batted against her chest.

‘She said, “Why don’t we both sleep on it tonight.”’ A second voice mirrored hers at the final verse. Lazarus blushed at her from the doorway. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to, I mean…it’s just…I—’ he stammered. ‘The bath is running.’

‘Paul Simon’s biggest ever hit,’ Jo offered, to take the edge off his embarrassment.

‘Ironic in an American market: a mistress’s advice on how to leave one’s wife, though it’s false advertising.’ Jo handed Gus over. ‘Fifty ways and he lists how many?’

‘Jack. Stan. Gus. Roy. Lee,’ Jo counted. ‘Five.’

‘So. Who left you?’

‘Benny.’ She stared at the carpet springing between her toes. ‘He slept with a guy last night. And Hal...’

He said he loved me. She shook her head. Couldn’t bear to articulate it out loud.

‘He loves you.’ The shock of insight burned through her face before she could contain it. ‘You going to biff him too?’

A rabbit caught in the headlights had nothing on her in this moment, and she blurted out, ‘And your wife?’ in an effort to deflect his attention.

‘She died.’

Jo stumbled over an apology but he waved it away. ‘Better to celebrate a life than mourn its passing. She liked to drink wine in the bath. I can get you one if you’d like?’

He was halfway down the stairs before she could think to say yes or no.

A seven-branch candelabrum illuminated a freestanding bath, long and deep enough to sink to your chin in. The gold embellishment on the claw feet glowed. Water charged from shining, brass taps and a lavender-scented towel, big enough to fit two of her in, sat folded on a chair next to the bath. A framed Pears Soap advertisement hung on the wall and a pedestal sink completed the minimal fixtures, free of dental and shaving clutter.

She stripped off her sweat-stained singlet and dusty cut-offs, unhooked her bra, rolled her socks off and flexed her toes on the checkerboard tiles, enjoying the feel of the smooth, clean tiles.

A squirt of body wash under the running water generated drifts of iceberg bubbles and she watched them detach and accumulate at the other end of the bath.

They always find their way back to the others, she thought.

When the bubbles cloaked the entire surface she shut off the taps, tested the water and rested her tattered copy of The Big Sleep on the edge before sliding in.

The hiss and crackle of the bubbles and the buoyancy of the warm water was soothing. Long hair entwined around her hand, she took a deep breath, closed her eyes and relaxed back into the water’s embrace. She let herself fall, sinking with the slow outflow of breath, until she was completely underwater.

Cold fingers seized her ankle and yanked her deeper. Water roared in her ears and she writhed against her captor. Columns of bubbles materialised in the distance, knitting themselves into cords as they moved toward her in hypnotic undulations. They wrapped around her ankles and legs. Wound upward in increasingly tight loops over her hips and stomach. Frantic fingers fought for purchase on the warm enamel. Screams dissolved in her mouth. The bath wall liquefied and her hand broke through into colder water. A shift in the current picked her up. Something moved through the water with her, singing. The vibrations filled her with peace.

Give yourself to me…

Under the apple tree...

The fight leached out of her and the water bore her away.

Male voices and the passage of heavy feet shattered the weightless surrender. She fought the crush of the water. Lungs exploding. Treading water, she turned around and around. Disoriented. Was the way to the surface up or down? Left or right?

In the end she propelled herself away from the singing. Icy fingers grappled to clamp hold of her ankle again. But she kicked this time. Hard. And felt bones shatter.

Kick. Kick harder.

She surfaced with such violence the water swept over the bath, picking her paperback up and dumping it on the tiles. Coughing and spluttering, and trying to suck in air, Jo sat shaking, eyes shut, fingers welded to the bath edge. Her heart beat too fast, then not fast enough. The panic persisted long after her breathing stabilised, and the pins and needles in her limbs receded.

When she finally opened her eyes and dared to look, the trickster image of a lolling blanket of bubbles greeted her. The water gently curled around her. But the throb of her ankle warned against discounting it as her imagination.

A knock at the door startled her.

‘I have your wine,’ Lazarus called through the door.

‘Don’t come in,’ she called, half-climbing, half-falling out of the bath.

Cocooned in the towel, hair clinging to her face and fingers gripping the door to hide the shaking, she looked through the gap.

‘I didn’t mean to scare you,’ he said, holding up the glass of wine.

‘I’ll take it downstairs.’

‘Is everything okay?’ His face looked kind and caring in the muted light and for a moment she was tempted to pour everything out. Invite him to chase away the demons with the soft movement of his hands sponging warm water over her back. Tracking the bump of her spine. Sweeping aside her wet hair.

Get back in that bath. With a strange dude? Come off it.

‘I’ll be down in a minute. Help you…cook dinner,’ she stammered and closed the door.

The Big Sleep laid spine-up more than a metre from the bath, bloating with bath water. She picked it up and shook it out.

It’s just a bath, she told herself, taking tentative steps across the wet tiles, until she was close enough to peer in. In the wavering half-light of the candles, with the bubbles gone, it looked bottomless.

Hungry.

Waiting for me to reach in.

She gathered up her clothes and returned to her room, leaving Lazarus to pull the plug.

Ethan abandoned his attempts to wipe the orange mush from Gus’s face. ‘Give me thirty to bathe and settle Gus and I’ll cook us up an omelette.’

‘You’re going to bathe him upstairs?’ Her hand jerked at the mention of the bath and wine sloshed against the edge of her glass.

‘It’s like holding an oiled pig in the shower.’ He lifted Gus from the highchair. ‘Help yourself to more wine and make yourself at home in the sitting room. There’s a bunch of old vinyl, a gramophone and heaps of books.’

Jo placed her glass on the table, away from the mess of mashed vegetables and took one of the candelabras into the hallway. She wandered down the hallway to the left and tried the first door. A rush of cold air bothered the flames and she shivered. The room smelled of wood polish and neglect. The muted light from the candles revealed nothing of interest: a ridiculously long dining table, a sideboard and china cabinet. The connecting door led through to a formal lounge room.

Ancient traces of tobacco smoke hung in the old air. Stiff-looking couches dominated the room accompanied by smatterings of ashtrays that looked more like ornate tables. A large mirror sat on the mantelpiece, broadcasting ghost-like images of the room. In the centre of the mantle piece was a large crystal decanter—the only object with any hint of permanence in the mirror. Memories of her Grandfather swept over her as she opened the decanter and sniffed: him sipping two fingers of neat scotch while revising the form guide, a transistor radio replaying the day’s turf results in the background, her turning the pages of a book that got thicker the older she got.

Nostalgia died when she glanced into the mirror and saw her face obliterated in the reflection. Cracks made her flesh appear clawed, hanging in strips, small unblemished patches residing where the decay didn’t eat in; all framed by hair hanging in long twisted knots, water dripping from the ends. The disfiguration—so complete—she was beyond recognition.

The sound of the stopper bouncing on the hearth snapped her attention away from her horrific duplicate.

‘Shit!’

On hands and knees she searched, fingers, fuelled by panic, floundering in the dark. She finally found the stopper lying flush against the base of the fire grate. Relief whistled through pursed lips as she reached for the candelabrum. Cross-legged, she sat turning the crystal stopper over and over in disbelief it wasn’t even chipped. She put it aside and leaned over the small pyre of scrunched newspaper and kindling in the firebox to read the date on the newspaper: Monday, 28th October 1963.

The newspaper disintegrated as she tried to pull it free. She lifted one piece of wood, collapsing the entire structure. At the bottom of the rabble of dust and wood, the corner of a photograph protruded.

Jo excavated the photograph. Under the light of the candles, she wiped it clean against her t-shirt and a woman in a straw hat smiled up at her. A baby, resting on her narrow hip, twisted away from the photographer, a pudgy hand aloft, reaching for the leafy bough above. The woman looked tired, her lips curled into the caricature of a smile.

On the back, in looping cursive:

Eleanor & Gustav, Elyora homestead, July 1942.

Musty air, laced with memories of Chanel No.5 and tobacco, waited on the other side of the connecting door from the formal lounge room. The sitting room at last!

Jo placed the candelabrum on the mantelpiece, noted with no surprise the 40s-style clock with hands frozen at 1.37, and flopped in the nearest armchair to examine the photo.

‘Who are you, Eleanor?’ Jo asked. ‘And why are you so unhappy?’

Unhappy?

It’s just under the smile. In her eyes.

‘Who wanted to burn you? And why?’

Devoid of answers, the Marlowe side of her brain suspiciously silent, she got up and flicked through the rack of albums beside the gramophone table.

Caught between the cover of two albums was a 78 of the Andrews Sisters’ Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree. She hesitated, reminded of the way the song possessed her out on the Elyora Road.

Possessed?

A touch of sunstroke, more like? Dehydration?

In the safety of the house, the wine melting her reservations, eroding the collection of awful memories, she pulled the record from its cover and placed it on the turntable. Wound the crank.

How dangerous can one song be?

The needle dropped into the first groove and a looping crackle led into a slow, descending trombone baseline, followed by a blast of trumpets. Photo abandoned against the candelabrum, she began her search for a novel to read.

One entire shelf was devoted to Agatha Christie books, all hardbacks—more than 30 in all. Flicking to the imprint page of The Moving Finger, the last book on the row, she saw it was published in 1942.

A first edition!

The slow gait of the song’s second verse ended and the candles flared. The double-time chorus blared through the speaker and a fire sprung to life in the fireplace. The sound of a glass falling onto floor boards. Female laughter. Then she saw the silhouette of a couple swing-dancing across the wall in front of her.

Jo turned to see a woman in a long red dress spin out and then back into the arms of her dancing partner. Waistcoat unbuttoned, shirt sleeves rolled up; his bowtie hung unknotted beneath his collar.

‘You’re as beautiful as you were the first time we danced,’ the man said, his face flushed.

‘And you said you couldn’t dance,’ she teased, her German accent giving the words a hard edge.

‘In the worst German you ever had the misfortune to hear, or so you told me later.’ Her hand went up to his cheek.

‘‘‘What do you do in Flensburg?” I asked you in English. The look of relief on your face, leibling.’

‘‘‘Go to the Opera to be enchanted by beautiful women,” I said, knowing there was no point in lying to you.’ He nuzzled her neck.

‘And how they gossiped. They didn’t understand the way the heart stretches. How who, not where, is the importance,’ she said, her body straining against his. ‘All they cared about was that you were an ausländer.’

‘Eleanor,’ he sighed, pushing the dress straps from her shoulder. ‘My Eleanor.’

‘Eleanor?’ Jo breathed and took a step toward them.

The needle screeched across the vinyl, catching in the middle and playing flat, ticking loops.

‘Jo?’

Ethan lifted the needle from the final groove and rested the arm in the cradle. ‘Dinner’s almost done—you a Christie fan, too?’ he asked, tipping his head to read the title on the book spine.

‘I prefer Chandler,’ she mumbled as the fantastical version of the sitting room dissolved. ‘I’ll…I’ll be right with you.’

She pushed the book back into the space and looked along the shelves for Chandler, stopping at a worn, leather bound bible. Her father had one similar, handed down from eldest son to eldest son. Resting the bible on the mantle, she traced her finger down the handwritten entries stopping at the marriage of Eleanor and Ethan in 1938.

Ethan’s grandparents?

A closer look revealed three things: they had only one child—Gustav, who died, aged six months, in October 1942.

Eleanor died a month later.

They were the final entries in the bible.

The kitchen looked festive: two candelabra, an embroidered tablecloth, slightly tarnished silverware and a vase of handcut flowers. He had appeared downstairs in a clean shirt and shorts, smelling faintly of aftershave.

Jo bothered the pieces of omelette with her fork, moving them from one side of the plate, rather than eating them.

‘I’m sorry it’s not much,’ Lazarus broke the silence, watching her fork skitter around the outside of the plate. ‘Forced simplicity. The ultimate downsize.’

‘No, it’s fine.’ She skewered a piece of egg and chewed slowly on it. ‘Doesn’t it get lonely here, if it’s just you and Gus?’

‘More than you’d know,’ Lazarus said topping up her wine glass. ‘Gus is pretty decent company for someone whose conversational repertoire starts and ends at ‘bah’. But it’s…hard.’

Jo took a long sip from the wine, trying to figure out how to swing the conversation the way she wanted it to go. Without seeming nosey. ‘You inherited the house from your Grandparents?’

The bottle hovered over the top of Lazarus’s glass. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘I’m not planning on going anywhere.’ When he said nothing, just stared at the label on the bottle, she continued. ‘If you’re lonely why don’t you just go back to the city? My Mum always said you only make things as complicated as you want them to be. No-one’s forcing you to stay, right?’

Lazarus tipped the bottle then changed his mind. Plate in hand, he dumped the rest of his dinner in the bin.

‘It’s not so much an inheritance as a legacy. And it comes with certain obligations.’ The sound of the tap running, and the wheeze and pop of the washing up liquid, filled the space she didn’t dare to. ‘Freedom is an illusion. When you realise that—life is easier.’

Jo scoffed the last of the omelette and joined him at the sink, trying to reframe the conversation so she could ask him about Eleanor and Gustav.

‘One cooks, one cleans. That’s the rule where I come from,’ Jo said, pushing him aside with her hip. ‘Go check on Gus? I’ll have these done by the time you come back, and we can finish the wine outside.’

By then I’ll have worked out how to ask my twenty questions.

‘Would you play for me? It’s been so long since I heard anything vaguely like live music.’

‘How long?’ she asked, dropping the plates through the bubbles—but he’d gone, taking half the light with him.

Sing ‘Eleanor Rigby’. That’d be a conversation starter.

Or ask him who Gus was named after.

She picked up the cutlery and dropped it in the sink, retrieving the cast-iron frying pan from the side of the combustion stove.

Why care about the woman in the old photo? Who is she to me?

Who do you want her to be?

I should mind my own business.

But you won’t! Will you, Marlowe?

One plate sat drip-drying in the rack and as she reached for the second the bottom of the sink fell away. The worn lino beneath her feet turned to sand and water lapped at her toes.

A naked couple lay entwined on a boulder in the middle of a river, their bodies yielding to each other along the contour of the granite. A sheath of dark hair obscured the woman’s face. She grunted with pleasure and arched her back, bare breasts thrust toward the full moon. Long, anchoring fingernails dug into her lover’s tattoo.

She recognised the kenji design. ‘Hal!’

Hal lay beneath the woman, cupping her breasts.

The woman brushed aside her hair—the same motion swept the clouds across the moon. The temperature plummeted and two slate-blue eyes burned into hers from across the dark expanse of water, the rest of her face hidden in the shadows.

‘He is divine, Josephine.’ Her voice sounded like the movement of water against rocks. ‘Do you understand what you let go?’

The clouds shifted and the moonlight penetrated the water, illuminating the thousands of bones littering the river floor.

‘Come closer.’ Her eyes faded. Scarlet lips glowed. A skeletal finger beckoned her into the water. ‘Just one step.’

A scream caught in her throat. The moon came out from beneath the clouds. Blood, not lipstick, smeared the woman’s mouth and a sickening recognition filled her. The woman who cradled Hal’s flaccid body, who bit deep into his water-logged cheek, was the woman in the mirror.

Me!

A hand fell on Jo’s shoulder and the scream displaced in her throat. The sound of running water brought her back to the kitchen.

‘Oh, shit-shit-shit.’

The old taps resisted her effort to turn them off quickly and water cascaded over the edge of the sink.

She turned to Ethan, standing behind her. ‘I don’t know what it is with me and water. I’m sorry.’

She grabbed a tea towel from the bench and dropped it into the puddle, then squatted to soak up the water. Her hands shook as they herded the water across the lino, the effort doing little to hold the water or dislodge the image of staring at her gruesome self from across the river.

Ethan grabbed another tea towel and joined her on the floor. Their efforts collided; his fingers stopped on hers and she looked up, surprised at the touch.

‘You’re shaking!’

She pulled her hand from under his and stood up. ‘We need a mop.’

Lazarus caught her arm, stopping her from walking away. ‘It’ll dry in this heat. Leave it.’

His face flickered in and out of the light and Jo had the same feeling he was going to kiss her. But not on the hand this time. Taking her into him. Devouring her. Just like that woman…

…like I did to Hal.

‘You’re shaking,’ Lazarus repeated. His grip on her tightened a little. ‘If you’ve seen or felt something strange, you can tell me.’

His face hardened.

Eyes filled with a mixture of dread and…longing.

Longing?

Shadows consumed half of his face but rather than give him a menacing look it gave him an air of vulnerability. She wanted to reach out and place her fingers on his cheek. Trade her fear for his pain.

He’s not real. If I touch him my fingers will pass right through him.

He’ll pass right through me.

‘My wife, she saw and heard things.’

She was here? Did she kill herself?

And she realised she’d thought it aloud. ‘I mean—sorry. Fuck!’ She tried to walk off. ‘It’s none of my business.’

His hand released her arm and she stopped, stared at the pool of water, wiggling her toes in it.

Benign. Just water.

‘She drowned. In the river beyond the clearing.’

‘Hal thought there was a river,’ she said quietly, stepping onto a patch of dry lino.

‘Yeah, there’s a river,’ he repeated, words shaped like razorblades, cutting into her. ‘It starts and ends there.’ Wine glass and the bottle in hand, he walked past her. ‘I’m going outside. Don’t feel obliged to join me.’

The heat of the day loitered in a perfect summer’s evening, the sort that the New England Highlands enjoyed once—maybe twice—a year. The stars played peekaboo as an almost full moon rose above the tree line. Jo lurked on the bottom step with her guitar, watching Ethan.

Underfoot, the grass was warm and muffled her barefoot approach. The wooden frame of the deckchair creaked when she sunk into it, and creaked again when she relocated to sit cross-legged on the grass. Her hair fell in a curtain, hiding her face from Ethan’s gaze.

How gauche I am. How insensitive.

Eyes closed, she imagined herself on the back step of her parent’s house with her guitar, where she’d spent the years of her adolescence trying to figure out how she felt, what she wanted. Especially after her mother died.

Music, the conduit. The connection. Moving in and out like the tide, shifting her consciousness like a weather vane in a storm—pointing her in this direction and that. Discriminating between the choices, until the tempest passed and one path, one choice, remained.

She took the capo from her pocket, strapped it onto the neck of the guitar. Her fingers moved lithely and the opening bars of I Am A Rock melded with the night air. She sang quietly. Hesitant. But her voice built and surged across the verses. And then faded. The final chord hung in the air and Ethan sighed.

Before he said anything, she pulled the capo off and sung a pared back version of Who Are You moving to the Big Empty, Endless Summer and Hearts A Mess… losing herself in the music. The chaos of thoughts stilled.

Jo sensed his departure as the chair behind her groaned during the opening bars of When Doves Cry. She kept playing even after he walked off toward the house.

I tried. Short of being obvious… Chicago’s Hard to Say I’m Sorry

When Dove’s Cry though… what exactly were you trying to say?

At the end of the song the applause shocked her.

‘When Dove’s Cry kept Dancing in the Dark from a number one spot,’ Ethan said from somewhere behind her and she swivelled to peer at him over the neck of the Maton.

He had a blanket folded over his arm, another bottle of wine and her glass.

‘How do you know so much about music?’

He pulled the deck chair back and spread out the blanket with her help.

‘Having you here opens things for me. Wine?’ he offered.

She nodded and sat next to him, the guitar laid across her lap.

‘Do you do requests?’ he asked.

‘I have a friend who plays piano, does gigs in fancy bars in Sydney,’ she said. ‘He says, if he had a dollar for every time someone requested Piano Man he could give up music and live like Hugh Heffner.’

Ethan lay on his side, propped up on his elbow. ‘Do you sing how you feel? I always wanted to know that, but it felt like a stupid question to ask.’

She shook her head. ‘Not for me. I feel what I sing. It’s like a train of thought.’

‘When Dove’s Cry?’

‘I was lost in the music. It has a way of, I guess, moving toward an end point. If you let it.’

Ethan’s breathing sounded uneven. It reminded her of how she struggled to breathe normally the first time Benny crawled into her bed.

‘Did your folks play?’

‘No, but they loved music. Though Dad claimed nothing after Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door was worth listening to. Said music packed up and retired to the Bahamas after that.’ She lay the guitar down and rolled on her side to face him. ‘Were you a music journo before you came here?’

‘I’d have loved to see Fauna Bate play.’

Jo sighed and rolled on her back, hands folded over her chest. ‘I always believed we’d make it. That Fauna Bate was the real thing. You know? And I thought our first interstate gig was the big break.

‘I woke up this morning stupid, crazy excited. The big break just hours away. Not days or weeks or months or years.’ She rolled back onto her side and laid her head on her outstretched arm. ‘My Granddad said you’re only ever one step away from knowing nothing. Today feels like that. The Big Empty.’

He reached across to push a stray strand of hair behind her ear. ‘This morning I woke up and thought it would be just another day of Gus and I. Then you appeared. Walking down the road.’

She closed her eyes, waited for him to seize the opportunity to kiss her. There are worse ways to rebound. She’d watched Hal do it enough times to know.

‘I think we should go inside,’ he said, the words struggling to find their way out of his throat.

The dark hid the blush burning her cheeks as she rolled onto her back.

How could I be so off the mark?

Clouds whipped across the sky. The stars disappeared one by one. Distant strains of Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree rose up from the bottom of the clearing, riding on the freshening air.

Everything sounds like the Andrews Sisters here.

Ethan looked in the same direction she was gazing.

‘Let’s go,’ he said, pulling her to her feet and passing her the guitar as lightning flickered in the distance. ‘That storm’s headed our way.’

With a hand on the small on her back, he cast a final glance in the direction of the river and gently propelled her toward the house, the rug and the wine left to the elements and ants.

Time it right and Benny’ll walk in through the back door and find Ethan between my thighs. Caught in the act. Just like I did with him this morning.

And Benny’s betrayal resurfaced. The way the morning sun sliced through the venetian blinds and made it look like she was seeing the entire thing through bars. The way the guy had been clutching the bed head, grunting obscenities, while Benny pounded him from behind. The way Benny’s muscles bulged as he held tight to the guy’s hip on one side and his shoulder om the other. The way he hadn’t even bothered to look surprised, or guilty, when he finally saw her standing in the doorway.

Like he wanted her to see.

If this is payback, you’re only sinking to his level.

Ethan’s hand curled around the guitar and eased it from her grasp. Placed it carefully against the wall. His hand slipped around her waist and he started to pull her closer, then stopped.

She reached behind, threaded her fingers in his and pulled herself to him.

I don’t want to be alone.

‘Not here,’ he whispered, taking her by the hand into the kitchen, pressing her gently into the wall by the doorway. One hand settled on the wall above her shoulder and he leaned into her, his breath brushing her cheek. And she waited for him to kiss her. But he traced the line of her jaw and collarbone with his finger, followed the curve of her breasts, trickled down over her ribs, terminating beneath the waistband of her shorts, stopping to caress the point of her hipbone.

The waiting was too much.

Her lips were hard and demanding against his, her tongue flicking between their lips. She pulled his shirt away from his body and pushed it up. Chest smooth; a small thatch of hair in the centre. Chocolate coloured nipples swelled at the touch of her tongue. Stomach contracting under the butterflies she drew with her finger tips. She kissed and licked and nibbled at him, all the time moving lower.

Finally he reefed his shirt over his head. And she followed. T-shirt. Shorts. Stripping them from her body with no desire to tease him, to draw it out.

Ethan reached behind her and, with one clammy hand, freed the clasp on her bra. The straps fell from her shoulders and the lace bra held for a moment then dropped to the floor. She tugged at his belt buckle and a second pair of shorts joined the trail of discarded clothing.

‘Not here,’ Ethan pulled away breathless, trying to ignore the insistence of her hand stroking him through the thin cotton boxer shorts. The bench stopped him from moving back further. She hooked her fingers in the elastic, pulled the boxers down and knelt before him. He gasped when her mouth closed around his cock.

‘Not here,’ Ethan repeated with considerable effort and pulled himself free of her mouth. He kicked the boxers free and sunk to the floor in front of her.

‘This isn’t about him. Or her.’

His cock poked against her leg and all she could think of was the thin scrap of lace between them. She could push it aside, straddle him right there, back pressed into the kitchen cupboards, his face between her breasts.

‘This is just about you and me,’ he said, his voice strangled. ‘And whatever comes of that.’

Before she could wrap her fingers around him again and demolish the last of his resolve, he hauled her off the floor and led her upstairs.

Rain battered the iron roof. Lightning flickered in the window. Ethan dozed beside her. She ran her fingers over her breasts, nipples raw and tingling. The nerves deep within her abdomen still quivered. Ethan had kissed and caressed, licked and stroked her to orgasm. Taking as much pleasure outside of her as he had inside. He drew it out a second time until the delicious frustration forced her to finish it. Knowing how his body responded, what he liked best, she manoeuvred herself on top and straddled him. His mouth clamped around her nipple, her thighs gripping his hips, the momentum built until she finally she’d cried out, loud enough to wake the dead, as the heat exploded and consumed her.

Now his hand rested on her chest, her heart-beat rebounding against his cool palm.

But she had to pee. And the sticky mess between her thighs, cold and congealed, demanded attention. If she stayed and went to sleep it was guaranteed Hal or Benny would catch her, dishevelled and stinking of sex, as she dashed back to her room in the morning.

‘Don’t go.’

He caught her arm and she sat down on the side of the bed.

‘I’m just—’ His lips trailing across one shoulder stopped her protests. A hand glided over her hip and down her stomach. Fingers slipped between her legs and grazed her clitoris. She shuddered and her eyes slipped closed; total body surrender easier than justifications for leaving.

Downstairs the sound of the wire door slamming jolted the sensation of pleasure aside, making room for the guilt to bleed in.

‘I can’t.’ She pulled away and stood up. ‘If I stay, it’ll just make it more awkward in the morning.’

Lightning flared in the window behind her and thunder followed in the distance. She remembered too late their clothes lay abandoned on the kitchen floor downstairs and she hurriedly pulled on a stray shirt hanging on the bedpost.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I thought—’

‘It was good, don’t get me wrong. But,’ she struggled to find the right words. Words that…

…won’t demolish his ego.

‘I thought there was something between us. Something… more than just—’

‘Friends with benefits.’

The mattress squeaked and he stood behind her. She flinched as his arms slithered around her, reaching beneath the cotton for her warm skin. He kissed her neck. Rolled her nipple between his fingers. ‘It was more than that. You felt what I felt?’

‘I felt sorry for you. I felt sorry for me.’

‘A mercy fuck?’ He let go of her and lurched back like she had hit him.

The rain hammered on the roof and the curtain blew around him.

She pulled the shirt around her. ‘What did you think was going on?’

He pushed the curtain away and took a step closer to her. ‘That you’d stay.’

‘Here? With you?’

‘Would it be so bad?’

‘You even have to ask that?’

The claustrophobia of a future with him, trapped in the middle of nowhere, with just him and the baby, pressed in around her and she fled the room, slamming into Hal in the hallway.

He grabbed her by the forearms and stared. ‘So that’s how it is, is it?’ His face contorted in anger and he pushed her out of the way.

‘Hal?’

‘Shut the fuck up.’

‘It’s not what you think.’

‘Then what the fuck is it?’ he yelled, stomping away from her, slamming bedroom door.

In the dark of her room, crying so hard her whole body shook, she found the torch in the side pocket of her backpack and wrapped the large pink towel around her. The stairs groaned under foot and the creaks of the cooling house sounded like whispers as she crept along the hallways, the torch cutting a tiny swathe of light through the darkness.

The rain lashed the back of the house and she ran across the verandah to the bathroom-cum-laundry enclosed at the end. She closed the door and locked it, then hung the towel on a hook, laid the torch on the floor and turned on the taps. Hot, earthy water—river water—spouted from the dual shower heads and she stood between them choking on hiccupping sobs, scrubbing at her body with a half-used cake of Sunlight soap. Beneath the dripping hood of her hair, she watched the water and the soap-suds disappear down the drain until the water ran clear.

The sound of singing came to her, not borne on the wind, but travelling through the plumbing. Words migrated through the sluice of water running over her body, their synesthetic touch gentle and soothing as a warm flannel. The movement was fantastical. Hypnotic.

The drain blocked and water pooled at her feet, the level rising quickly up the low tiled lip of the shower recess. The singing reverberated through the water, into her feet and up her legs. The voices sung her down to the river, promising to wash away the stain of her mistakes.

She ripped aside the shower curtain and ran, naked, for the door. Her wet fingers struggled with the lock and she punched the door in frustration. The lock seized and she pulled the knob, shook it, shoved against the door and finally collapsed, crying hysterically at its base, uselessly banging her fists against it.

The singing intensified. The fibro walls shook and the pipes shrieked. The water spilled over the shower lip and crept across the tiles. Fingers splayed against the wood, blood breaking through newly formed splits in her knuckles, she willed the door to give way.

Release me! Pllleeease!

The roar of the rain on the iron roof grew deafening. Lightning burned brightly below the door and thunder rocked the house. Cold air howled through the space between the door and the floor, chilling her as she raised herself up onto her knees to batter the door.

You let all the women who came before me down to the river. Let me go too.

The house pressed in around her and for a moment all was silent: the storm, the singing, her own beating fists, muted.

All the others were not you, Josephine.

My Eleanor.

The house promised to protect her and she crawled back into the shower. Crouched beneath the spray, the hot jets flailed against her shoulders. The blood on her knuckles rinsed away, dissolved into obscurity in the trapped water. She reached up and turned the taps off. The drain exhaled bubbles and after a watery gasp, began to suck the water from the shower recess, the voices syphoning away with it.

With nothing left to lose, she surrendered and accepted the house’s vow to replace the turmoil with peace, and the bad memories with happy ones. The same promises poured into the house’s foundations seven decades earlier and echoed ever since in the stone and mortar, in the nails and wood and panes of the house that Ethan Lazarus built.

A juvenile rooster, strangling the dawn cry, woke her. An unfamiliar room came into focus through slitted eyelids. A jackhammer pain drilled into the back of her eyes and she wailed—the sound reverberating with sickening intensity in her head.

Later, a candle flickered in the dark.

‘Hey, Jo,’ Hal whispered, gently placing a cool washcloth across her forehead.

‘The house,’ she croaked. ‘It did something.’

‘You’re running a fever.’

‘I said yes because the women in the river wanted me.’

He stroked her clammy cheek. ‘Shhhh, you need to rest,’ he said, and leaned forward to kiss her cracked lips as the darkness reformed around her.

Jo bolted upright and screamed, ‘I’m burning.’

Hal, frightened out of sleep, sat blinking in a chair beside the bed. She started to climb out of bed and Hal scrambled to stop her.

‘It’s too hot. Too hot,’ she screamed. ‘Let me go.’

‘It’s the fever,’ he said, letting all his weight fall on her wrists until the fight emptied out of her.

Tears fell on her fiery face, like the first raindrops of a summer afternoon thunderstorm. She tried to reach up to catch them, but the darkness kept her arm pinned to the damp sheet.

The rain woke her. It was late—much later than she thought. Her lower abdomen pulsed and she put her hand over it. The spark of an urgent memory struggled for traction on the slippery edge of her fevered brain. The memory failed to take hold, and she closed her eyes. Her hand slipped to the mattress, and the mosquito net, pulled to the side, fell back into place.

The sound of running water echoed around the room, and she felt the giddy sensation of standing on linoleum as water pooled around her toes. Hal. The word flashed in neon swirls, as though squeezed from a giant techno-coloured tube of toothpaste. A beanie-wearing spider named Boris hid behind a fortress of peach tins. Crude and disturbing, two words in block letters shook free from the ground, rising like sky scrapers: Fauna Bate. A dog wound around her legs, long fur tangled and mattered.

‘Benny you bad dog,’ she scolded and it ran from her and hid in a shed where the smell of road kill, rotting in the summer heat, made her gag.

She tried to call out for water, but the words evaporated on her lips.

Songs swirled, condensed and finally broke in the cloudburst of a single lyric, repeated: falling farther from just what we are.

Falling down. Never to get up again.

Shivering. A body quake. The sheet. Nothing. Cold. So cold. Curling up foetal. Exhausted. Voices head-butting. Skull throbbing.

…Do you sing what you feel?

…Nothing decent came after Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door.

…I need coffee. NOW.

…There are hundreds of shoes under the house. Like the Holocaust.

…You are as beautiful as the first night I danced with you.

…They’re coming, Eleanor.

… Josephine. My Eleanor.

The slipstream of dreams caught and spun her into a kaleidoscope world she could taste just as much as she could feel, see and hear.

Germany: cold and salty. She stood on a rocky beach and made a wish to never be cold again and threw a shiny pfennig into the water.

Rough and warm—the feel of his hands on hers. He was in Flensburg to further his architecture degree. She fell in love first with the freedom in his accent, then the careless way he held himself. But it was the taste of tobacco, in their stolen kisses, she remembered at night.

….A telegram: a promoter inviting her to sing at Manchester Opera House. The small slip heavy in her pocket as Ethan knelt and proposed. Her Father said nein, to England. And to Ethan. The Auslander! So they eloped to Gretna Green. Married by the blacksmith’s forge, the ‘I dos’ tasted of ash and iron and forever. He was first on his feet, from the private box, as the standing ovation spread through the audience on her opening night.

…One last telegram. This one indelible with his father’s words: Return home on next ship STOP war imminent STOP I forbid you to enlist STOP You are needed at home. STOP.

‘You’ll love Australia,’ he told her, his drawl peppered with something else. But she couldn’t place it at the time. Didn’t wish to. All she could think was that her wish to escape the cold had been granted.

She woke a final time, the thin sheet a sodden shroud, wrapped tight around her body. The heat haze distorted the shape of the bay window and a slight breeze sucked the lace curtains in and out of the gap between the window and the sill like an old man wheezing through the holes where his teeth used to be.

The heat: her own personal Hades. She yearned for the cold, for Flensburg and chill of her father’s house. The pfennig… she willed it returned to her hand from the depths of the Baltic; her wish revoked so she could go home—war or not.

Her parched mouth ached and when she tried to lick her lips, they were cracked and tasted of blood. She slowly untangled herself from the stinking cotton and sat up. With great care, she swung her feet over the edge of the bed and flexed her toes. One hand on the cot, she stood and wobbled. Using both the cot and bed as supports, she took one hesitant, shuffling step after another, until she came to the end of the bed and risked the distance to the bureau, and the jug, unaided. The warm water stung her dehydrated mouth. Her throat resisted swallowing and the water spilled over her chin and down her naked chest. The room tilted and she replaced the jug, lest she drop it. Arms folded atop the bureau, she lowered her head and waited for the dizziness to pass.

Delicate women fainted.

If you listened to the gossip in town, Eleanor Lazarus was many things. No-one had ever accused her of fragility though. Even last summer, when she’d been heavily pregnant, she hadn’t succumbed to the worst heatwave on record.

She pulled on a pale pink shift, wasted muscles protesting when she lifted her arms over her head. Dressed enough for the circumstances, she half-shuffled, half-walked to the door and opened it.

‘It sounds like a threat to me,’ a familiar voice snapped.

‘I’ve no interest ’er nibs hidden upstairs.’

She took two cautious steps out into the long hallway, her hand on the wall.

‘I’m not hiding anything. She’s ill.’

‘Sumthink’s up. Hell. Last time it rained in this bloody town was October 1974. Then the new sheila arrives and, holy bloody Moses, storms and rain every night. I’m not the only one puttin’ two and two together and waitin’ for somethink to come up.’

‘Droughts break eventually.’

She moved slowly so her footsteps wouldn’t be heard below.

‘Not here they don’t, mate. I haven’t seen that boy with the beanie around, ay.’

‘And I haven’t seen the dreadlocked one since he went into town.’

She found the top of the stairs and sat down to listen.

The voices paused for a moment, chewing over the words, then, ‘We ain’t havin’ no pooftas here. I’m not spending the rest of eternity with one hand coverin’ me arse.’

‘I didn’t kill the one with the beanie, if that’s what you’re alluding to. He’s just adept at playing hidey.’

‘You think this is a game, mate? You havin’ fun yet? Are ya!’ The sound of crockery shattering made her jump. ‘There’s more’an hundred blokes up there in the town who ain’t been with a woman, some for more’an four decades. They’re gonna come down here, to find out why you ain’t moved up to town like you’re meant to and when they do, they’re gonna be damn pissed to find the malarkey you got goin’ here.’

‘What makes you think they’ll come this close to the river?’

There was silence.

‘Let’s get one thing straight, matey. This is where you rot for the mistakes you made in your other life.’ It ripped up the stairs as a snarl. She shivered and pressed into the wall. ‘There’s no startin’ over here.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong. Old man Lazarus built this house to honour her.’

‘Honour her.’ A dry laugh. ‘Half the stinkin’ town is gone because of her. She drowned me sister-in-law and me brother shot himself rather than live on without her. And she’s gone and turned the tables on us all, bringin’ all them outtatowners in. Don’t talk to me about honourin’ that bitch.’

‘You said this was penance. We were meant to finish what he started after she died. He didn’t build this house as punishment. He built this as a home for her, of good memories of their life together, so she wouldn’t be alone.’

‘Don’t get more alone than face down in the river, mate.’

‘The research station didn’t just release her. It amplified his hope. We’ve all got a chance to be free. He’s alive in these walls, waiting to be reunited with her.’

‘I ain’t heard a bigger load of bullshit in decades.’ A chair scraped across the floor, followed by footsteps across floorboards. ‘You can call yourself Ethan Lazarus if you want. And you can call ’er nibs upstairs Eleanor and pretend she’s your missus. But you ain’t him, ay. And she ain’t her. You can’t rewrite history. That storm brewin’ every night, it ain’t just a bit of bad weather, mate.’

The wire door slammed and silence returned to the house.

She sat for a long time trying to make sense of the conversation, shivering despite the heat. In the end she closed her eyes. Lay her hot cheek against the cool inner wall of the stairwell and slipped away.

‘Jesus!’ Someone said above her. She struggled to open her eyelids, heavy with sleep.

‘Ethan?’ she whispered, his face zooming in and out of focus. ‘What happened?’

He reached out and helped her sit up. Beneath her feet, the stairs dropped away.

‘When did you get out of bed?’

‘I don’t know.’ Her head swarmed with ghosts of conversations and things she thought she remembered, but they disappeared when she tried to grasp them. ‘I was dreaming there was an argument.’

‘You could have fallen,’ he said. ‘Let me put you back in bed.’

‘No, no more bed,’ she cried. ‘I’m too hot. Take me downstairs, to the cool.’

‘You’re sick,’ he said, almost whining. ‘You need to be in bed.’

‘The heat is killing me.’ She started to weep. ‘I feel like I died.’

‘It’s the fever. I almost lost you.’

She buried her head in his shoulder and he stroked her knotted hair.

‘I could put one of the canvas chairs under the mulberry tree for you?’ he said. ‘If you promise to try some soup.’

‘But it will be hot. All I can think of is snow and ice and cold weather and a shiny pfennig and how... how I’m cursed.’

‘Shhhh,’ he soothed and gently massaged her scalp. ‘You’re going to be okay. You remember who you are?’

She pulled her face out of his damp shoulder and stared at him. Of course she knew who she was. She was…was…Eleanor.

Eleanor Gertrude Lazarus nee Waitz.

She held her right hand up, felt the dip where her ring usually sat.

‘I took it off,’ he said, stroking her cheek. ‘You lost so much weight I was afraid you’d lose it. I’ll run a shower and get you some clean clothes. And when Gus wakes I’ll set the sprinkler up under the mulberry.’

She remembered them talking about pumping water up from the river. ‘Just like you promised? Before I got sick, liebling?’

He nodded and kissed her on the cheek, then swept her up in his arms to carry her down the stairs. ‘Just as I promised, Eleanor.’

The breeze carried the promise of rain and took the edge off the sweltering heat. The mercury dropped twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit in ten minutes. Ethan shut off the sprinkler, dragged the hoses under the house and returned the tray with the soup bowl and teacup to the kitchen. Enlivened by the cooler temperature and the soup, she eased herself out of the canvas chair she’d half-sat, half-laid in, reading the new Miss Marple mystery, The Moving Finger, her sister had sent from the United States. Gus played in a large, muddy puddle, his small hands splashing at the water in delight. She carefully picked him up and wrapped his naked body in a striped towel, pressed him against her and swayed from side-to-side humming a song she couldn’t remember the name of. Gus squirmed to be free of the towel and her embrace, his arms reaching for the ground.

Ethan returned and collapsed the canvas chairs, stowed them on the verandah out of the wind and disappeared inside the house again. The trail of muddy water Gus had been playing in snaked up the hill to where she stood, and she watched it pool around her feet, turning the dirt to mud.

When the water had soaked into the ground, she looked across the tree line to the broiling air in the east and the enormous thunderhead looming above it. Thunder reverberated in the distance and lightning danced along the bruised underbelly of the storm. The wind picked up and she leant into it, letting it claw and drag her hair free from the loose bun. The skirt of her sundress snapped around her bare legs. Mulberry leaves tore from the branches above.

A sonorous boom shook the ground and a shower of purple-red berries fell like clotted blood, the riper ones exploding and staining the white and green floral fabric. Lightning ripped open the sky and lit the clearing in an x-ray brilliance that burnt an otherworldliness into it, stripping away the mock familiarity. She welcomed the transformation. The foreignness soothed her.

Gus wailed and she turned to stare at the baby in her arms: eyes squeezed so tight they disappeared in the flesh of his face, mouth wide-open and red in contrast. Staring into the gaping, angry hole she felt as though she would fall in and be lost forever within him if she didn’t look away. She covered his head with the towel and pulled him into the comfort of her emaciated breasts, bouncing him up and down.

Tiny dust clouds popped and fizzed on the ground in the wake of large raindrops, a peppered staccato that built rapidly into sheets of horizontal rain slicing across the clearing.

‘This is where you go to rot for the mistakes in your other life.’ That was what the man in her dream had said.

The branches of the mulberry bobbed and shook and bent in the wind above her. She imagined sinking her fingers into the moist earth below, burrowing to find an anchor against the voices.

...On her knees she planted rows of lavender and rosemary alongside the house. Bright petunias watered in the newly turned garden beds at the front. The townswomen laughed at her, their shrieks rising and falling in the wind.

This is not Germany. If you want bright, pretty flowers go home, Nazi bitch.

She pulled her hands free and madly wiped the filth down the front of her saturated dress. The wiping turned to slashing. She knelt on the black and white tiles, dragging Ethan’s razor through the soft flesh of her wrists. A carmine flood welled up and seeped down her arms, collected and spread outward like the tide that had flowed from her each time her body rejected the life growing within.

The humiliation of her tormenters bled out through her wrists, along with the pain and betrayal, the grief and the loss.

She looked across the clearing and saw white sheets and towels, blooming with stains, billowing in the wind; she heard failure in each squeaking rotation of the shiny Hills Hoist. The wind caught it and turned it faster. And faster and faster and faster until it became swirling waters and within the vortex women’s voices surged forth as the river broke its banks, roiling in the flash flood beyond the clearing.

‘Eleanor? ELEANOR! Get out of the storm.’

Get out? I can’t leave the one place I desperately want to escape, she thought. But the thought—an echo augmented across the decades—belonged to hundreds of faceless women entranced by the tune carried on the relief of a breeze on a blistering summer afternoon. The song as much a lure to the river as the promise of cool water on sweaty skin. It was the thought of the women who were nothing more than bones scattered along the river bed.

‘ELEANOR! For Chrissakes we need to get inside!’

A scream tore from her throat and she dropped to her knees, abandoning the baby to the mud. Rain drove through the canopy of mulberry and she was buffeted back and forth by the gale. Strains of the Andrews Sisters howled in harmony with the wail of the wind and she jammed her hands over her ears.

Eleanor was singing her down to the river.

Eleanor—forever free from the threats and terror, and rough bandages binding her wrists.

Eleanor. Face down. Floating.

Eleanor. In the river. Exacting her revenge.

The slap brought her back to the present. Ethan lifted Gus out of the mud and yanked her to her feet, propelling them all toward the house, through the onslaught. His hand slipped on her wet, muddy arm and he grabbed hold of her dress to tug and drag her behind him as best he could. With each step she became heavier and Ethan struggled to pull her along.

‘NO!’ She screamed when they came to the Hills Hoist and she leapt forward to push him away. ‘I’m dead. Let her have me.’

‘You are not dead,’ he screamed in her face and they struggled beneath the washing line, spinning like a whirly-gig. ‘You will not die this time.’

The wind whipped his words away before they reached her ears.

He grabbed the belt on her dress and hauled her along by it. His hold on the baby was slipping and he begged her to help him or he’d drop him. Their baby boy.

At the house he shoved her up the stairs as a deafening crack tore through the yard, followed by the scream of wood. They both turned to see the mulberry tree, rent in half by a lightning strike, crash to the ground, the smell of charred wood and ozone singeing the air.

She collapsed on the cold, wooden steps and he left her there to take Gus inside. Her stomach threw itself against her gullet, until there was nothing left to purge. When he returned he found her passed out.

‘‘‘This is where you come to rot for the mistakes you made in your other life.” That’s what he said,’ she whispered, her teeth chattering.

They sat side-by-side in front of the combustion stove.

‘Life isn’t about mistakes. It’s about hope,’ he said.

‘There’s no hope,’ she said looking up through lucid eyes, ‘Not for Eleanor or Ethan. And not for us.’

The pre-dawn laughter of kookaburras stole through the open windows and woke her. She rolled away from Ethan’s warm body and eased out of bed. The first smudge of dawn lit the sky to the east as she stepped onto the back verandah, pulling her robe tighter around her. The twisted corpse of the mulberry tree sat beyond the Hills Hoist, a hulking silhouette against the new day. Dark prints marked her passage across the dewy lawn. She placed a hand on the tree’s trunk. Her fingers explored the blackened, scarred terrain and stroked the wilted leaves hanging from branches now touching the ground. Dead, and she had almost gone with it.

Beyond the clearing, the river was silent.

No voices raised in song to lure her to its banks.

No visions of a tortured woman with bleeding wrists.

Thinking about it, as the coming heat of the day burnt away the moist coolness, she believed Ethan. She had been too sick to be out of bed. Over stimulated. Overwrought.

But she was a sensible woman and sensible women…

….packed their bags and went home to Germany if they were unhappy.

Why didn’t you do just that, Eleanor? Why didn’t you go?

She shook her head. Brain fever, she told herself. Whatever sickness she’d survived had cleaved her mind in half just as surely as the lightning had destroyed the mulberry tree.

Feeling faint again she rested against the trunk. If she sullied her mind any longer with these double thoughts and feelings, they would become real, and then she would be lost. Ethan would lock her in a room, away from the world, to spend the rest of her life imprisoned in madness.

Sensible women were practical women. A mind given to flights of fancy needed repetitive tasks to still it. Bring order to the chaos. She sucked in a lungful of crisp air to clear her head and returned to the house.

‘Grubs up,’ she said in her best Australian accent. The knife sawed through the warm loaf and her mouth watered despite her weak stomach. A thick slice with raspberry jam and she’d be, what did Ethan say, right as rain?

She stared at the butter dish on the top shelf of the Crosley, relishing the cool air on her face.

‘What have you and your Papa been eating while I was upstairs, bärli?’

With the exception of a couple of bottles of beer and a cold cut of meat wrapped in yellowed muslin the kühlschrank was empty.

The baby blurted and slapped his hands on the top of the highchair table.

‘It’s early still. Not too hot to walk into town.’

She lifted him out of his high chair and kissed him on the check.

Deck chairs lay abandoned on the bare boards, barring access to the hat hooks by the back door. Gus sat on the floor clapping his hand as she carried the chairs, one by one, to the other end of the verandah. Underneath the second chair she found a bizarre set of shoes: garish lime-green, orange, soft and shiny. Something within her, something deep, knew what they were. Turning them over, end-to-end, she tried to reconcile the two parts of her—one at odds with the other. When she couldn’t, she threw the shoes into the back of the old wardrobe where her Ethan kept his hunting paraphernalia. She hummed a song she couldn’t remember the name of as she closed and locked the door.

Hats on head, worn boots laced over her silk stockings, she drove the pushchair across the clearing. A line from a letter she’d written to her sister repeated again and again in her head.

…no land for fancy shoes. The best summation of Elyora she’d ever contrived to commit to paper.

The evening rain had barely settled the dust and the temperature climbed with the sun. By the time she arrived at the Welcome to Elyora sign, sweat soaked through her stockings and the cotton dress clung to her indecorously. In the shade of a tree, her straw hat fanning her face, she tried to calm her ragged breathing. Gus looked at her with wide eyes. He twisted in the pushchair and reached up for her. She marvelled at how strong he was, untroubled by the heat. Always happy. So like his Papa, her little bärli.

‘Best get on then,’ she said, re-pinning her hat and setting the pushchair on the road, humming as she forced herself to put one foot after another.

She parked Gus’s chair at the steps of the general store and took him out. Beside the door, the Sydney Morning Herald’s headline announced: CHURCHILL’S WARNING TO JAPAN.

From inside she could hear the wireless beep the hour, followed by the music that preceded the news. Gus grabbed for the brim of her hat.

‘Nein, bärli. Nein. Not Mutter’s hat,’ she said, pausing two steps from the top to pry his hand away.

The wire door slammed against the weatherboard wall and a spindly woman in a black dress, a face pulled taunt by her severe hairline, stormed onto the verandah barring her way.

‘Don’t you be thinkin’ I’m gonna sell you anythin’, frauline. I’ve told your husband,’ she spat, ‘and I’ll tell you now, I don’t serve no Nazi-lovers.’

‘Ma’am, I’m no Nazi-lover,’ she said politely, understanding now why the fridge was empty.

The woman stepped closer and Gus began to cry. Citrine spittle sprayed them, followed by the woman’s cursing.

‘Nazi bitch.’

Eleanor tried to wipe the spit from her face and back away at the same time. A second glob hit her in the eye as the heel of her boot slipped off the edge of the step and she fell backwards. Her hand grabbed for the railing, finding it at the last moment, and she slammed onto a step, several down from where she’d stood. She sat fighting back tears, her lower back and hip throbbing in pain, echoing the wild thump of her heart. Gus clung to her, face ashen, tears spilling from his wide green eyes.

‘I’ve got a right mind to get me gun and shoot you now,’ the woman screeched. ‘Just like you monsters shot me Harry.’

Eleanor stood, squared her shoulders and walked, trembling, down the remaining steps with what grace and decorum she could muster.

‘Flamin’ arrogant bitch. You’re gonna burn for you sins,’ the woman hollered. ‘You and that yella husband of yours. Your judgement day is comin’. You hear me? It’s comin’!’

Gus screamed when she jammed him in the pushchair—and set off for the road, reining in the need to run from the angry slatterns and Nazi whores slashing at her back. Tears blinded her and she had no idea which direction she was heading; distance from the saumensch her only motivation.

Ethan’s father forced him to come back. Guilted him into returning home with the charge his duty was, as first born, to the farm. The mistakes of the Great War would not be repeated, where all the brothers enlisted.

He’s not a coward, you pathetic, bitter saumensch. You don’t understand Ethan’s sacrifice. My sacrifice.

At The Great War memorial she broke down and stumbled into the adjacent park. She strapped Gus into the pushchair and left him in the shade of the elm by a newly-painted picnic table. At the tap on the far side of the picnic area, she kneeled in the dirt and cupped the hot, coppery water in her hands and rinsed her face. Hunched over, to maintain what modesty the circumstance afforded her, she scrubbed the yellow flecks of spit from her sleeve with the dress hem. The viscosity of it turned her stomach. A searing eruption of vomit shot from her mouth and nose, and she hung her head. Wretched and sobbing, she let her stomach empty.

The water, foul and tepid, did little to rinse away the acerbic taste of bile and reconstituted tea.

Gus sat kicking his legs excitedly back and forth, staring at the tap. She left it running and dunked Gus, fully clothed under the water. Let him play until they were both soaked. They could walk home in damp clothes.

Propriety be damned.

With Gus returned to his pushchair and her damp hair pinned beneath her hat, she stared down the road. The thought of walking past Mrs Briggs sparked a new wave of nausea, but her stomach held. Back-and-forth, back-and-forth the pushchair rocked over the edge of the bitumen with the ebb and flow of her thoughts.

Report Mrs Briggs’ threat. That is the job of the politzist.

Copper, she corrected.

But he too had lost a son in Europe and, like all the others who had lost someone to Hitler, he blamed her. Her sister had written of German ex-patriots being rounded up. Put in jail. Or worse.

No. Just go home.

Home? Elyora is not home.

The heat haze gave the garage, store and produce shed a buckled and decrepit look. She touched her fingers to her face. The skin was cool and slightly coppery.

It’s not heatstroke, just a trick of the light.

The sun reflected off something shiny on the garage roof and she noticed for the first time the narrow lane running beside the garage, a ratty cypress hedge growing parallel to it.

A small detour will settle my nerves, she told herself and strolled toward the lane.

Two converging hedges almost met halfway down the lane, providing through access into the backyard of the garage. An eerie sense of abandonment settled over her when they emerged from the hedge to stand on the outer edge of a battalion of parked automobiles.

Half a dozen rows filled the space between where she stood and the back of the workshop, reaching right across the paddock, and another dozen rows filed down the slight incline to the dry creek bed at the bottom. Confusion and lucidity tugged at her as she walked between the rows mouthing the names and the number plates on the cars she passed: Falcon, Escort, Bluebird, Commodore, Corolla, Sportswagon, Victoria–the Garden State, Queensland–the Sunshine State, New South Wales–the Premier State, SA–the Festival State. At the end of the row she’d counted twelve automobiles.

A place for everything and everything in its place, her mother once said.

Another shiny surface blinked in the sun and she followed the intermittent flashing to a small, brown bus-van at the end of the bottom row. When she got close enough, she saw it was a familiar Volkswagen medallion, swinging slowly like a pendulum in slow-motion.

Five marks a week you must put aside, if you want in your own car to ride, and Hitler had sold the idea of a people’s car to the masses.

In the shade between the brown van and its red neighbour, she left Gus chewing on her hat while she tried the bus door. It opened and she climbed inside, the bottom buttons of her dress popping free of their eyelets. Her hand cupped the keys hanging from the steering column: Give peace a chance, the cheap metal key ring proclaimed.

A rap of the medallion sent it spinning.

First and only car I ever badged.

That’s what he got for stealing my girlfriend.

She tapped the Jesus doll and watched it jerk back and forth, bound to the dashboard by a coil.

You’re a fucking Buddhist man, why you got Gee-sus there? Trying to double dip on the good karma.

Her finger moved to the side and caressed the snow globe next to it.

Nothing like sticking a snow dome to a dash to make it obsolete.

It was stuck there when I bought the car, man. You really think I’d put a KISS snow dome in my car?

You really want me to answer that, dude?

She leant across and opened the glove compartment. An odd looking toothbrush and tube of toothpaste fell onto the floor.

Inside was a torn map…

Is there anything you don’t destroy?

…and a red purse.

An amazing collection of shiny cards filled it. The raised letters and numbers on some of the cards reminded her of the Braille books her father brought home from Berlin for her blind aunt. One card had a photograph on it. She pulled it free and held it up. Dark braids fell over the shoulders of the young woman in the photo. Intense green eyes stared from an impassive face.

She tipped the mirror on the windscreen down. The woman who stared back: a thinner, wide-eyed, doppelgänger.

The narrow sundress caught around her shins as she scrambled from the van and she fell, hitting the ground hard with her shoulder. She lay hyperventilating, clutching the red purse to her chest. Curled into a ball, the returning memories felt like blunt force trauma.

The Brisbane gig—the Tarago breaking down—Fauna Bate—Benny—Hal.

She couldn’t breathe.

The ugly, misshapen house…

Where she’d lived… lived as the wife of…

The man from the park.

A blurt from behind scared her and she slowly turned, chest heaving, to find herself gazing at a six-month-old baby strapped in an ancient stroller, kicking his feet and waving a straw hat.

She scuttled backward, the buttons of the dress skirt ripping.

The baby strained against the straps, his arms reaching for her. ‘Mumumumum.’

My wife died. She drowned in the river beyond the clearing.

‘No. Fucking no! No-no-no.’

Knees to chest, shaking fingers locked around shins, she sat five feet from the stroller, staring at his hands opening and closing like the beak of a baby bird. She dropped her head and wrapped arms over the top to hide. Tears rained down on her thighs, soaking into the laddered silk…

…of another woman’s stockings.

My stockings.

Eleanor’s stockings.

Yes, my stockings.

No! Eleanor-from-the-photo. Eleanor-dead-in-the-bible. Her stockings.

Trembling she felt the contours of her cheekbones, traced along to her ear over the empty piercing holes, and down to the rogue lump of a lymph gland on the left jawbone. She held her right hand up to her face and stared at the thin scar across the knuckles, where engine cogs had torn through when she was fourteen.

And Dad said suck it up and hold down the screw driver again. But the blood…

The rediscovery ended at the bump on her collarbone.

When I fell off the top of the hay bales chasing Derek when I was six.

A chill slithered down her back as the thought ended and she crawled slowly through the long grass to the stroller, staring into the cherub face. She stopped in front of him. Dirty hands stretched out to touch her as her eyes narrowed and she scowled at him.

…at Gus. His name is Gus.

I don’t fucking care what his name is.

Welcome back. We missed you.

One hand on the Tarago to steady herself, she scanned the sea of cars, taking in the subtle shifts in colour and shape from large boxy models, faded paintwork and grey tyres long deflated at the top to smaller shiny, round-bodied models with fully inflated tyres. Everything from old fifties models down to the new Honda Civic beside her.

It wasn’t the representations of all the decades that was fucking with her head, but the sheer number of cars in the paddock.

Where were their owners?

She started with the Civic.

The air inside it smelled of vomit and rotten banana. Long blonde strands of hair clung to the headrest of the passenger seat. She unlatched the glove box. It took several pulls for it to open and, when it finally let go, it was jammed with stuff. She emptied it item by item: CDs, a service logbook—which she flicked through to find it was last stamped early December 2011—a tampon, half a roll of Quickeeze, a Centrelink letter addressed to Anna Gideon and a bunch of day care receipts in the same name, a Moleskine notebook filled with illegible writing and at the bottom, a black lace G-string.

A compartment beneath the stereo held a melted lipstick, faded parking metre tickets and a half-eaten packet of Throaties. In the centre console she hit pay dirt: a black wallet and a change purse. From the wallet she pulled out a Queensland license: Matthew Gideon, aged 32. An address in Ashgrove.

Ethan Lazarus.

No, Matthew Gideon.

She turned around, stomach roiling, and saw the baby capsule in the middle of the back seat.

Gus.

From the detritus in the foot well she found the day care receipts and opened them all up.

No, his name is Alex.

The newest receipt was dated last November. She slammed the door and walked around to the front of the car. The registration sticker: 02/2012.

Ten months out of rego.

She peered around the side of the car to the stroller. Alex writhed under the straps, eyes screwed shut, bawling, a vortex of misery trying to draw her in. From the backseat she retrieved a long, multi-coloured, toy caterpillar. It rattled when she held it up and shook it. Alex’s crying faltered. His face split into wet-eyed concentration and he tried to launch himself forward.

The day care receipts suggested Alex hadn’t been born in Elyora, but Alex—

—should be ten, twelve, fourteen months. Or older?

But he was only six months. Seven tops. Sitting independently when—

—should be crawling. Toddling.

She walked slowly toward the stroller. The grass whispered in her wake.

When she got close enough for him to reach the caterpillar, she held it out and stifled a scream as his bloated fingers clawed at hers and wrenched the toy away. First he shook it and then thumped a pneumatic wheeze from it. Watching him she knew it had been his toy.

Alex. Anna. Matthew.

Gus. Eleanor. Ethan.

Fact, fiction and carefully crafted lies—they all crashed and laid waste to any understanding she had of what was. Her memories fragmented. The past violated. And the clues: scattered across a paddock of abandoned cars.

Or beyond?

Rather than crawl through hundreds of empty cars, she decided to confront Ethan. Matthew. With his driver’s license as proof of his duplicity, she’d force the truth out of him.

In a plastic bag she scrounged from the back of the Civic, she shoved Matthew’s wallet, the day care receipts, the service logbook, and tied the handles to her wrist. On the way back to the stroller she found her wallet lying in the long grass and put it in the bag too. The slam of the Tarago door echoed across the paddock like a gunshot and was answered in the distance by a deep roll of thunder.

The chill in the air promised more than just rain and, gripping tightly to the handles of the stroller, she stared dumbfounded at the looming storm: the thunderhead rising above the boiling, black clouds was an exact replica of yesterday’s. At the back of the garage workshop, she threw herself at the rear door. Once. Twice. Three times. It refused to budge. Defeated, she grunted and kicked it. In the full blast of the wind, she ran around the corner looking for another way in. The front door was locked. A hurried search of the driveway turned up a hand-sized chunk of concrete. The wind swallowed the sound of the smashing glass and gave the disquieting impression the world was blunted and moving progressively slower.

Her hand hovered at the small hole she’d made in the window, the glint of glass fangs infecting her confidence. A bolt of lightning hit the roof of the produce shed and moments later a shattering detonation of thunder shook the ground. Cursing, fingers and then knuckles, hand and then wrist went through the hole. Her fingers stopped at the chunky lock beneath the keyhole. After long minutes of ineffectual groping, as the storm bore down on them, the latch finally released and the door swung inward.

A willy-willy tore up the road, stripping leaves from the elm, consuming anything else not securely anchored along its erratic path. Then it slowed and appeared to choose a course: a direct line for the servo.

She shoved the stroller into the office. The door slammed against the inner wall and the window shattered and fell in a spray to the ground. A second gust of wind blasted debris into the office and Jo hunched over, protecting her face. The lightbulb, a former beacon of hope flickered above her, swinging wildly on its cord, then exploded, showering them in glass.

She was running for the counter and had crouched behind it, stroller shoved in the corner, before her head caught up. The baby played with the caterpillar, poking, squeezing and shaking the sounds from it, oblivious to everything else.

The calendar above her head tore from the wall and struck her.

Last time it rained in this bloody town was October 1974.

Then the new sheila arrives and holy bloody Moses.

She looked from the calendar in her lap up to the clean square on the wall and saw the keys to the tow truck hanging below it.

Her ticket out of town sat in the farthest bay, bleeding out of the gloom as her eyes adjusted. Something loitered near the truck. Or someone. She waited, Alex perched on her hip, for the next flare of lightning to better see what it was.

‘Hello?’ she called out, and kicked herself once the words were out of her mouth. Only one person would likely be in the workshop. And Stanley was the last person she wanted to see.

The wind tore at the roofing iron and rattled the windows in their frames. The shadow moved and she took a step back, the jangle of the keys and the rattle of the caterpillar an audible amplification of her nerves. She slowly walked around the orange-red two door, then the ute. Just before the station wagon she tripped on something.

At her foot lay a dusty sandal.

Benny’s.

‘Benny?’ she called, moving toward the tow truck. ‘Is that you?’

The shaped moved slightly in the darkness.

‘This isn’t funny, Benny. Whatever went on between us before, whatever I said, whatever you did, it doesn’t matter now.’

Lightning flared and she recognised the coloured shirt.

‘Benny?’

He sat awkwardly on the tray of the truck, his back to her.

‘You fucking arrogant son-of-a-bitch,’ she swore and marched over to him.

She tugged on his shoulder with her free hand and he whipped around. Lightning flared again and she screamed, stumbled away from the eyeless sockets staring out of Benny’s face.

The hoist support punched between her shoulder blades bringing her to a jarring, gasping halt. More lightning strikes, like camera flashes, and she saw the mummified head swing back and forth on the tow hook. FLASH—skin pulled tight over the bone structure—FLASH—a toothless mouth gaped beneath the oversized beard—FLASH—the mass of dreadlocks sat like the amputated tentacles of a giant octopus.

Benny. Oh God, Benny.

She compulsively wiped her hand against the dress, but couldn’t look away from the macabre display.

His withered body was lost inside the tie-dye shirt, the hem falling to his knees, withered exposed legs below. Shrunken feet swung above the brown fisherman’s pants and his other sandal. FLASH. She saw the ring she’d given to him, lying in the dust on the floor and began to tremble.

She squeezed the baby tighter, fearing she’d drop him as the workshop contracted to a single pin point in which Benny’s body swung around and around, like a needle on a thread.

Shivers became immobilising shakes. Legs threatened to fold. Choking, hyperventilating breaths punched into her lungs and her head filled with fog. Before it claimed her, a single word pierced through, stitching together the tattered remnants of any nerve she had.

Hal.

The wind slashed at the roofing iron. The pressure exploded the window, tearing Benny’s body from the hook and dumping it a metre away, between her and the path to the cab of the truck.

She tried to take a step, but couldn’t. Panic exploded and demolished her will to move closer.

There’s enough room to walk around it, she told herself.

A sheet of iron peeled off the roof and she knew she was out of time. One tiny step after another she approached the back of the truck, and then with her back to the tray, side stepped around the crumpled heap. She didn’t take her eyes off it for a minute, as though it would reanimate and attack her. One hand groped behind, across the pitted paintwork looking for the door handle. A scream choked in the bottom of her throat when she found nothing. She kept sliding along the side of the truck, moving closer and closer to the front.

The wind liberated another sheet of roof iron directly above and her fingers found the door handle and they scrambled into the cab, slamming the heavy door shut.

The baby lay, screaming, on the seat next to her. She’d given up trying to console him. Her hands shook so hard it took three attempts to get the key in the ignition.

It took seven goes for the engine to show any signs of life. It caught on the eighth and idled roughly. The cab bounced with the throb of the engine. When she tried the accelerator, her foot pressed too hard and the engine roared, then too soft so it barely revved. The clutch was heavy and she had to sit right on the edge of the bench seat to get it all the way in. The gear-shift at least wasn’t a problem, she’d been driving paddock bombs with ‘three on the tree’ for as long as she could remember.

She yanked at the handbrake, before she lost her nerve, and revved the engine, trying to get a proper feel for it through the churn of emotions.

Double pump the clutch.

She fought the gear stick and transmission to find first and when it finally ground into gear, she gave one last gentle press of the accelerator and hoped for the right timing. Clutch-out-accelerator-in and the truck moved forward. Foot planted on the accelerator she hit the workshop doors with as much speed as she could. The doors broke. But the engine coughed and stalled before she could save it.

‘Fucking piece of shit!’

The truck was half-in, half-out the workshop, but she had a clear view of the road. Out of the wailing maelstrom walked the mechanic, a posse of men following close behind.

Ignore the men. Concentrate on the truck.

The engine lurched and stalled.

It’s still in gear.

She yanked it out of gear and it roared to life when she turned the key. The men broke into a run. The engine whined as she rode the clutch. The truck shot free of the workshop doors, across the servo driveway and bounced onto the tarmac just ahead of the men.

She crunched into second gear and it back-fired twice then bellowed past the ghost of Mrs Brigg’s shaking a fist at her from the verandah of her store.

A sickening thought surfaced when she sped past the Welcome to Elyora sign. There was no Farewell from Elyora on the reverse side.

No-one is meant to leave here?

This is where you rot for the mistakes you made in your other life.

She’d made plenty of mistakes in her life, but she wasn’t rotting the rest of her life away in Elyora for them. She was getting the fuck out. Just as soon as she found Hal.

A plan was forming, to take the old homestead driveway, cut across the hill and into the clearing, but she was driving too fast. She turned too late and then failed to break hard enough. The impact with the stone gatepost threw her against the wheel and Gus went flying into the footwell.

When she picked him up he was bleeding from a cut on his head.

‘Shit!’

The metallic smell seized her stomach and she wound the window of the cab down, and took long jagged breaths to quell the need to vomit again. She waited for him to cry but he appeared stunned.

Not knowing what to do, and worried she’d hurt him further, she jammed him between her thighs and started the engine.

‘Just a little longer,’ she begged of the truck and twisted the key.

The engine turned over, but rattled in a terminal way.

Slowly accelerating forward, the truck demolished the rest of the gatepost and wheezed up the hill. The decline allowed them to coast into the clearing when the engine gave out, coming to a stop just inside the line where the wild grass met the lawn.

The wind howled around the eaves and the unfinished third storey of the house as she raced up the back steps, the air swampy and stinking of death.

‘Hal?’ she yelled from the top step, pulling the wire door open.

The door crashed into the frame behind her and a cold blast of wind whistled inside.

‘HAL!?’

When there was no reply she sprinted through the hallways and up the corkscrew staircase to leave the baby Alex in his cot, where she hoped he’d be safe, and she could continue her search for Hal. At the top landing, she ground to a halt, her free hand going out to stop them both from pitching forward.

She wanted the view ahead to be of the safe, known hallway that greeted them on their first night there. Hell, she’d even go The Overlook Hotel’s infamous hallway over the abomination before her: a ramshackle construction of mismatched and discoloured plasterboard and exposed framework. Doorless rooms gaped like eyeless sockets. The holes in the roof became viewfinders, in which to observe the seething vortex of clouds above.

She shuddered and moved back onto the staircase, going slowly despite the screaming urge to run—fast. On the ground floor she waited at the foot of the stairs for it to morph into something unrecognisable and when it didn’t, tried to head back to the kitchen. But the hallways twisted and turned her inward, into a labyrinth that finally terminated in a T-intersection lined with doors.

The baby cried and her arm ached from the weight of him. Every door she tried was locked. The last knob turned and they found themselves in the formal lounge. The fireplace was reset. She broke it apart with the fire poker. Underneath, as she hoped, was the photo of Eleanor. She put it in the plastic bag still tied to her wrist, shifted the baby onto her other hip and tried both connecting doors. Only the one on the right worked. She detected the faint scent of Chanel No. 5 and relief surged through her. The drapes kept the room in perpetual darkness and she felt her way to the window, dragging aside the heavy material. The bible was in the same place and a clumsy flip through assured her she had not dreamed Eleanor and Gus up.

They were at the bottom of the list. Just as she remembered.

Both dead, seventy years ago.

When it made less and less sense, she searched the drawers for a lead pencil and started again. A house, a river and a building denoting the servo appeared in scribbles on the tablecloth. In a frenzy she wrote notes, dates, diagrams—everything she knew for certain and anything else that came to mind. She withdrew into herself, feeling for places where there were echoes of Eleanor still, trying to find any tiny shards of truth left behind.

A clock somewhere in the house chimed and she looked up at the clock on the wall above the combustion stove. The minute hand jerked and stationed itself pointing directly to the hour.

1.00pm.

The metronomic tick punctuated the silence and she sat, staring at the clock face, waiting for the minute hand to tick over again.

The hypnotic movement of the hand as it ticked past one notch then another, then another, kept her from thinking about Benny. Not the confounding cluster fuck that was Elyora. Or the storm outside.

Benny.

Infuriating, charming, self-centred, talented, chameleon, liar-liar-pants-on-fire, Benny.

One-Fourteen

Benny, the first night they met; meditating cross-legged in a creek at a bush doof; the moon high and full and the play of the light making him look as though he floated above the water.

One-Fifteen

Benny, who pressed his lips to the backs of her knees and made her want to lose herself in him.

One-Sixteen

Benny, who sang Frank Zappa to her, naked in bed, his dreads splayed like earthy sunrays on the pillow, a haze of ganja smoke obscuring his untidy room.

One-Seventeen

Benny, who’d said eternity would never be long enough to love her.

‘Eleanor?’

Ethan stood in the kitchen doorway panting, drying blood spattered up his arms. The dislocation from the past to the present hurt: the agony of a heart breaking beneath a mountain of lies.

She looked up slowly. ‘I’m not Eleanor.’

Ethan hesitated at the door, sticky fingers curling around the architrave. ‘Where’s Stanley?’

‘Like I fucking know.’ She stared at the blood on his arms and picked up the bread knife. ‘I found Benny hanging from the tow hitch at the servo. I guess I didn’t dream that argument, did I?’

When he didn’t answer, she eased herself from the chair, the knife held steady before her.

‘Eleanor. Put the knife down.’

‘I’m not Eleanor!’ she screeched, slicing at the air.

Ethan’s shoulders collapsed and his head dropped.

‘It was you and Stanley. Arguing about my friends.’

‘We were arguing about you.’

‘I know about me. And I know about Benny. Where. Is. Hal?’

A slick of gore remained on the wood when he let go. ‘It was an accident.’ He started toward her, bloody hands held out in supplication. ‘I tried to stop him from going down there. To the river.’

She could see it all then. A full moon, the river, the two of them fucking on a boulder. A rotting woman, red-mouthed, feeding…

The knife clattered to the floor.

Jo shoved past Ethan and hurtled down the back steps. In a calm oasis, beneath the rusted Hills Hoist, stood a facsimile of Hal: beanie jammed on his head, orange board shorts sitting low on his bony hips, a towel thrown over his bare shoulder partially covering the kanji tattoo on his upper arm.

When Benny first saw the tattoo he’d wound him up about it. ‘Why the hell did you have yak poo tattooed on your arm?’

‘It says hero,’ Jo whispered under her breath.

The wind caught the Hills Hoist and a tortured squeal tore through the membrane of the past and present.

‘Hal,’ she yelled, running for him as fat rain drops fell on her.

He paused for a moment and looked up to the house.

‘Don’t go down to the river,’ she called.

He flicked the towel onto his other shoulder and ambled away from the house. She chased after him, yelling, ‘Don’t leave me!’

As the words left her mouth, she was broadsided, crashing to the ground.

‘You can’t follow him,’ Ethan said, straddling her, pinning her wrists to the ground.

‘Let me go. I can stop him.’

The rain poured down, carrying with it hundreds of ethereal voices raised in an all-too-familiar song.

‘I called to him… but he was too far away… you were too sick.’ Crimson rivers ran down across arms and hands. ‘You don’t know just… how sick you were. I tried. I called to him.’

‘You wanted him dead,’ she screamed. ‘You wanted me all to yourself.’

She smashed her forehead into his mouth, pushed herself out from underneath him and ran.

Run, Eleanor. Run!

The rain turned the ground to mud, and she slid and fell, then slid again as her boots failed to get traction. At the corner of the house a horizontal fork of lightning split the sky in two, throwing the entire landscape into dazzling relief. Above the clearing, men filed through the bush, heads bowed in protection from the rain, Stanley at the head of the line. The slow pace they trod indicative not of the weather, but hunters who knew their quarry was cornered.

Jo stopped and stood, hands clenching and unclenching, turning from one side of the clearing to the other. And for a moment she remembered Benny looking from the GPS to the Elyora sign.

If only…

She stared up toward the road and the men disgorging from the bush. Then down the clearing, to the river.

What makes you think they’ll come this close to the river?

It was time she found out, just what the fuck was down there.

‘What’s in the river, Matthew?’ she asked, bursting into the kitchen.

He kept his back to her as though he didn’t hear.

‘How close is too close to the river?’ Matthew turned to look at her but remained mute. ‘The men are coming down here from the road. How close is too close?’

‘I knew I couldn’t trust Stanley,’ and something snapped in him. He threw the facewasher down, stormed out of the kitchen, through the connecting door to the dining room, and whipped the curtains back from the window. Outside, a dark line of stop-animation silhouettes formed an ever-lengthening perimeter beneath the strobe lighting of the storm.

‘What’s going on? It was just Stanley and a few men back in town.’

‘I broke the rules and now the men want what I’ve had.’

‘Had?’ Jo frowned, then realised exactly what he meant. It ran through her guts like a meat hook. ‘But there’s a hundred or more—’

‘—and they’re pissed off. Really pissed off.’

‘The cars behind Stanley’s workshop. Where did all the people go?’

Matthew looked out the window, back to her, and she understood.

‘And the women?’

Matthew dropped the curtain and shook his head, refused to look at her.

‘TELL ME!’ she screamed. He put his face in his hands and shook his head. She lunged at him, pulling his hands free. ‘You said your wife drowned in the river.’

‘My wife wasn’t in her right mind. She never recovered from our baby dying.’

‘Your baby is asleep in the high chair in the kitchen. Your son—Alex. ’ He looked up her, confusion etched deep in his face. ‘I found your car. When did you come here, Matthew? When did they tow you in?’

The clock in the room next door chimed the half hour.

1:30.

Matthew began to sob quietly.

‘How long have I been here?’ she asked.

‘I have no idea.’ His voice quavered and sounded like he was talking from a long way away. ‘Time is not linear here. Days last for months, hours disappear in seconds. Night lingers.’ He reached for her hand and she snatched it away. ‘Ethan swore you were our salvation.’

‘Salvation, my arse!’ She ripped the curtains aside again. The last man filed down through the long grass and joined the perimeter line, stretching in a half-moon shape around the back and sides of the house. ‘Why are they stopping?’

‘They’re afraid of Eleanor.’ Then, ‘It’s happening all over again.’

His dull and disembodied eyes, flicked between her and the window.

She snapped the curtain closed. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

He started to cry. ‘Eleanor. The mob.’ His voice modulated, the annunciation morphed. ‘Oh, Eleanor. I’m sorry my love.’

‘I’m not fucking Eleanor!’ she yelled, and slapped him.

‘How could they have hated you, Eleanor? Beautiful. So strong.’ He blubbered, burying his face in his hands. ‘They only saw you as their enemy.’

So what did you do, Eleanor?

What did you do when their hatred rained down on you?

‘You can make it out along the river.’ Matthew looked up at her, his voice wavering between the two tones, though a streak of clarity cut through the flatness in his eyes.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘If you go along the river you can escape. The men won’t follow you down there.’

The idea of going near the river terrified her more than the mob waiting beyond the clearing.

‘What’s in the river, Matthew? I need to know.’

‘Take Alex. Please. Eleanor won’t hurt you if you have him.’

‘Eleanor’s been dead seventy years.’

‘She won’t harm a baby. It’s the only other thing she ever really wanted.’

Jo thought of the baby, smeared in its own blood, asleep in the highchair.

‘He’ll slow me down,’ she said and stood up. ‘I’ll take my chances with Eleanor.’

One final question snagged her at the door and she turned back to Matthew. ‘What were you and Anna doing before you turned off the highway?’

Lucidity coalesced in his features. ‘Anna? She was…we…we were…arguing. She…she accused me…of having an affair.’

‘You’re all fucking the same.’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ he snapped, the cobalt blue striation in his irises flaring with the lightning. ‘Anna had postnatal depression. I was taking her home, to her parents, to get help. I couldn’t cope with her and Alex.’

‘Why stay then? Why be part of this?’

‘Because the women we love bind us here. I’m no freer to leave than any of the men out there.’

‘Loved,’ she corrected, standing just a little bit straighter, shoulders squared.

In the kitchen, lightning briefly illuminated the clock face on the wall.

1.37.

This is how it ends.

And she ran for her life toward the river.

The river appeared unexpectedly and she skidded to a stop, arms wheeling wildly to keep her from falling into its fast flowing depths.

When she regained her balance she called out across the water, in short, panting breaths, ‘Eleanor! I know. What. Happened.’

Wet hair gouged her eyes as she bent over to catch her breath.

‘Brought up by the Baltic Sea,’ Jo yelled into the darkness, ‘but never learned to swim. Did you drown trying to escape? Or did you throw yourself in, knowing you’d die?’

The wind screeched through the trees and the water below boiled.

‘I feel the pain your feel, Eleanor. I saw the way they treated you. That Briggs woman spat on me, just like she spat on you.’

The river began to heave. Waves surged outward, crashing over the bank, thumping into Jo and slamming her against a tree. Then the water poured back into the river, dragging her with it. She caught hold of a small sapling and hung on, as the water hungrily sucked at her.

‘You try my patience.’

Hovering above the water was Eleanor, feet skimming the surface.

Framed by dark twisted hair, water dripping from the ends, Jo realised it had been Eleanor’s reflection, not hers, in the mirror the night she’d first found the photo in the fire grate.

The beautiful woman with the operatic voice and the luscious body, the devoted mother and loving wife, was nothing more than the shadow of a rotting corpse entombed in the river. Translucent strips of flesh hung not just from her face but her arms and legs too and where it still adhered to the bone, muscle and sinew, bite marks punctured it.

Jo let go of the sapling and struggled upright to face the horror. ‘What the hell are you?’

Eleanor took a step closer to the bank. ‘I am Weiderganger.’

The word struck with the speed and venom of a taipan.

‘The strange men who constructed their building of barbed wire gave me a chance to walk again. Gave my voice the projection it needed to sing the town’s women down to the river. To feast on their flesh as their cruelty and prejudice once feasted on me.’

She proffered a skeletal hand, a water-logged band of skin cushioning the bone where her wedding ring still sat. ‘I’ve been waiting for you, Josephine.’

Jo clenched her fists. ‘You can’t have me. I’ve done nothing to you. And neither did any of those other people you’ve hurt. The ones who aren’t even from here.’

‘Don’t fear me, Josephine. I am not dämon. I am engel.’ She stretched her hand further, cocking her head slightly to one side. ‘I am relief from pain. Eternal release.’

‘I don’t want relief. I want to leave.’ Jo glanced at the proffered hand, repulsed by the temptation she felt to grasp it. ‘Please, Eleanor,’ she begged. ‘Let me go.’

Eleanor crossed the water and stood on the riverbank in front of her, water dripping from the hem and sleeves of her faded sundress: a horrific washed-out mirror image.

She seized Jo’s hand then dropped it like she’d been stung. What was left of the flesh around her eyes tore wide.

‘You feel him in me. You feel Ethan, don’t you?’

She took a step closer towards the wreckage that was Eleanor, buoyed by the hope her body was more than just a conduit for Ethan’s memories.

‘I’ve been living in the house he built. And part of you—the loving, rebellious, happy Eleanor—is up there with him. In the boards, the nails, the mortar, the stone. She’s as much alive as he is. But he’s waiting for the rest of you.’ Jo reached out to touch Eleanor’s icy arm. ‘They denied you peace in life, but he offers it to you in death.’

A tiny hint of slate-blue burned in Eleanor’s faded irises and a smile slowly formed on her cadaverous face. The smile grew into a laugh that gushed with the sound of water forced between rocks and drained away to the merry trickle of a tiny creek.

She walked away from Jo, each step a sickening squelch that drew the mud and the rain to her, so they became part of an ever-shifting phizog of dread as she withdrew from the riverbank.

‘Josephine,’ she called, pausing on the edge of the bush. ‘Elyora always claims what rightfully belongs to it.’

Jo had no idea how far or how long she’d been half-walking, half-stumbling when she saw the first of the surveyor’s sun-bleached, pink tags on the trees. Ignoring the uneven and slippery ground, she ran for them and the freedom on the other side.

The first cramp caught her like a steel-capped boot to the lower abdomen; a vicious, internal tearing just above her pubic bone. Doubled over, she leaned a shaking shoulder against a tree and tried to breathe through it. When the pain subsided she took several more steps before a second round of cramps dropped her to her knees in the mud. She stayed there for several minutes fighting the pain before she tried to stand again.

Clutching her stomach, she zigzagged back to the Elyora side of the surveyor’s marks and the pain stopped dead, leaving the ghost of a dull ache similar to period pain.

She pulled up the skirt of her dress and saw a thin trickle of blood slide down her thigh, soaking into the top of her silk stocking. About to berate her body’s timing, she pulled the dress higher, above the garter belt to her waist. Her fingers slowly swept over the fecund mound between the jagged promontory of her hips and pelvis.

Something inside fluttered. The flutter tumble-turned above her pelvis when she put her hand over it.

The constant nausea.

‘She won’t harm a baby. It’s the only other thing she ever really wanted.’

Eleanor’s unexpected release.

She cupped her hands over her abdomen and remembered the first night in the Lazarus house. With Ethan. Matthew, she corrected.

The brevity of Eleanor’s warning became all too clear, compounding the shock of the discovery: a baby conceived in Elyora bound her there. The suddenness and intensity of the pain left her in no doubt about what would happen to her if she tried to leave.

The surveyor’s tags flapped in the wind, a distinct, visible line between two worlds openly mocking her.

On one side, men poured into the clearing to hunt her down. A man caught between two realities, waited for them with his chubby abomination of a child while his counterpart held vigil over love, even beyond death.

And Benny swung from a tow hook, while Hal drowned in the river.

Elyora: gorging on lies, deceit, revenge—death—in a never-ending loop.

She knew there was only one side of the line she wanted to be on.

Five litres of blood, maybe six, she knew. That’s got to buy enough time to make it to the highway.

Gritting her teeth against the instant resurgence of pain, she ran past the markers, then stumbled to a walk, staggering from tree to tree until the agony forced her to her knees and the flow of blood held her there. She surrendered to the bloodmetallic smell of blood mixed with earthy loam, and relaxed into the moist comfort of the viscous womb closing around her.

‘What’s the big sleep?’ Hal asked, flipping through her ratty paperback, more impressed with the breeze the action created, than actually looking at any of the words.

‘Death,’ she said, taking the book from him and reading the last page.

‘Are you afraid to die?’ He stretched out on the old couch on the back verandah of her parent’s house and folded his arms under his head. ‘I don’t think I am.’

‘I’m not sure,” she answered. ‘I just know I don’t want to die any time soon.’

She jolted back to consciousness.

Away from Hal.

Back to the slick of mud chilling her cheek.

Back to the incessant drumming of the rain.

Back to the pain shredding her insides; to the betrayal of her body, hot and sticky between her thighs.

‘Black ops sheep don’t do extractions here,’ she grunted and hauled herself out of the mud.

On hands and knees, she fought the ever-expanding wave of pain and nausea, and the agonising convulsions of her womb to keep moving. A thick trail of blood marked her slow passage.

When she could no longer crawl, bereft of energy to keep her eyes open, she dragged herself blindly forward, hand over hand, toward the wail of the semi trailers on the New England highway.

Elyora © Jodi Cleghorn 2024

First published as ‘Elyora’

in Review of Australian Fiction: Rabbit Hole Special Edition, 2012

Digital-first publication as ‘River of Bones’

by Endeavour Press, 2013

This edition, ‘Elyora’ by Inflorescence Publishing

eISBN 978-0-6486271-0-4

All Rights Reserved

Cover and Internal Design by The Booktress

Edited by Lesley Halm

The right of the author to be identified as the author of this works has been asserted by them in accordance with the relevant copyright legislation in the country of their residence: Australia: Part IX of the Copyright Act 1968; and generally under section 6bis of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination.

www.jodicleghorn.com

info@jodicleghorn.com