Afterlight (16 page)

The woman looked up at the sky before letting herself out the front gate and turning
right, away from me standing on the track, almost instantly blending into the night.

I had known who she was instantly.

I tried to call out her name, tried to warn her against leaving the safety of the
little blue house, but my throat
wouldn’t work. I could still feel my bedroom floor
through the soles of my shoes, but all my eyes could see were the weeds twining up
through the gravel on the railway tracks, all they registered was the flashing of
the red signal lights on both sides of the crossing.

I raised my hands to my face and red light pulsed over my skin like a visual representation
of my beating heart, and I knew I was inside one of the last moments of Eve’s life,
unable to prevent the terrible
something
that would happen next.

Until this moment, I’d been deaf to my surroundings. But then a piercing whistle
blast caused me to look up, away from my hands, and back at her.

The sound caused Eve to look over her shoulder, too. Then she turned towards the
track, towards me. There was a lit match cupped in her hands, a cigarette jammed
in one corner of her mouth. For an instant, it seemed as if she looked straight at
me. By the light of her flickering match I imagined recognition in her face as we
stared at each other across the lowered railway barrier.

Then her features contorted in a fear so terrible I actually recoiled.

She turned and ran down the hill, and I began to move, too. But then a whistle blast
sounded so loud and so close in my ears that I only had time to turn and throw up
my
hands, open my mouth wide to scream, before I was hit by a night express train.

Was I dead?

It seemed forever before I could force my eyelids open.

A dangling frieze of amber glass teardrops hung overhead. They swung gently in the
cold drafts that have always plagued the upstairs bedrooms at The Star. Tiny air
bubbles were suspended through the glass, and the light the teardrops cast was soft
and beautiful. I seemed to be in one piece.

‘Am I dead?’ I murmured, knowing I couldn’t be, because the afterlife would have
to have better light fixtures than this.

Jordan expelled a pent-up breath and laughed, a sound warm and lovely.

His face came into view over mine and I realised that my head was resting across
his legs.

‘This is nice,’ I said softly. ‘Maybe I
am
dead.’

Jordan’s mouth lifted at the corners. ‘And now you’re haunting
me
? You wish.’ His
face grew sombre. ‘What happened? What did you see?’

The questions sounded normal, coming from him. ‘You were standing there, looking
frozen,’ he said, ‘head bent
like you were listening. Then you went down like a sack
of potatoes.’

I shifted uneasily as I relived the horror. ‘I, uh, got hit by an express train.’

‘You
what
?’

I told him about the particle of Eve’s past that I’d just been immersed in and saw
a look of resignation flit across his face. I also told him about the time Eve had
caused me to black out when I wouldn’t help her.

‘It was my fault then, too,’ I mumbled. ‘I didn’t want to help her, she got angry.
But tonight, I made her angry on purpose, so that she would show me more. She saw
someone that night, when she left that blue house. Someone she knew who frightened
her.’

‘So when you told me to leave, you weren’t really trying to get rid of me then?’
Jordan breathed, leaning closer.

But he straightened when I grabbed his arm from below, remembering. ‘Jordan, I
heard
the train’s whistle. It’s, like, when our eyes met inside that memory, Eve switched
the sound on for the first time. I’ve never been able to hear sounds before, you
know, when she shows me things. What does it mean that I could…
hear
?’

Jordan frowned. ‘I’ve never heard of that happening; that your “gifts” can get changed
or…augmented like that. Daughtry might know why that is. I’ll have to ask him.’

I swallowed, remembering the front grille of the
speeding, phantom express train.
‘Do you think whoever was chasing her…died?’

Jordan helped me sit up. ‘That part’s easy enough to check. Let’s see if there’s
any word of a fatality at a suburban rail crossing, say, in the last month.’

He pushed me off his legs, suddenly eager to know, because it gave us a shortcut
into that list of Kellys my computer had spat out before. Maybe.

While Jordan crossed to my computer, I hugged my knees to my chest, my bum still
on the floorboards, head still pounding with the frantic ghost echoes of that railway
signal.

‘If we find the right crossing, we’ll find Carter Kelly and the blue house,’ he said,
sinking down in front of the screen and starting to type.

But as he tried a handful of different search angles, I saw his shoulders slump.

‘Nothing involving a pedestrian and a railway crossing in the last few weeks,’ he
muttered, shoving his fringe out of his eyes. ‘There were two involving cars, but
they occurred in broad daylight. Whoever was chasing her couldn’t have died.’

‘How about going back and looking for suburban railway lines that cut through residential
areas?’

‘Good idea,’ Jordan replied, fingers already moving on the keys.

My bedroom door opened abruptly and I turned. Gran—with a plate piled high with food—looked
down at me on the floor, then across the room at Jordan, who’d swung around in my
desk chair, wide-eyed at the sudden interruption.

‘You really
are
doing research,’ she murmured in disbelief. ‘Thought I’d have to
lever you two apart with a crowbar. Brought sandwiches. Figured you’d be hungry.’

She set the plate down beside Jordan’s right arm then came back and stood over me,
saying softly, ‘You look like hell, pet. Can’t this wait till you’re feeling better?’

I shook my head, too tired to pick myself up off the floor as Jordan walked over
and handed me a sandwich with Cook’s pungent curried-egg salad mashed in between
the two triangles of white bread. I wrinkled my nose at it before taking a bite,
feeling uncomfortable as Gran and Jordan continued to stare down at me like I was
something squashed onto the floor.

I almost choked when Jordan said, ‘She needs looking after, Mrs Teague.’

‘That she does,’ Gran agreed, regarding Jordan gravely over her reading glasses.
‘About bloody time one of you blokes took notice.’

She took a deep breath, then said with a forced air of casualness, ‘It’s getting
real late, Jordan, so you’ve got two choices. Head on home and come back first thing
or, when
you’ve finished up on the computer, take your pick of the upstairs bedrooms’—Jordan’s
eyes widened in surprise as Gran added smoothly—‘save for those rooms already occupied,
of course.’

‘Of course, Mrs Teague,’ Jordan said. ‘Thank you, that’s, uh, very kind of you. I’ll
just call Mum and let her know what I’m doing. Soph and I are working on something
together that can’t wait. It’s important.’

‘It’s always important,’ Gran snorted, ‘until the next bloody thing comes along.
Just remember that.’

She helped me up off the floor and I sank down on the edge of my bed gratefully,
watching as Jordan took out his mobile phone and laid it on the edge of my desk.

Gran stood looking at me for a moment more. ‘Just be careful,’ she said. ‘I don’t
know what you’re up to and I don’t
want
to know, but don’t go putting yourself in
harm’s way, love. Your karma’s good enough and we don’t need any more free publicity…’

She bustled out the door, calling back over her shoulder, ‘I’ll put towels in the
aqua bathroom, Soph, show him where it is, and get some sleep, for God’s sake. You’re
not well.’

In the background, Jordan finished his call to his mum and laid his phone back on
my desk.

‘She’s cool, your Gran,’ he said, sliding back into my desk chair.

All I could think was:
He’s staying the night. Just wait until that gets out
.

Claudia P. was going to pummel me extra, for sure.

Because if you’d told me that the untouchable Jordan Haig and I would go from zero
to sleepovers in the space of a single day, I would’ve said you’d obviously checked
your brain at the door and someone had trod on it in the bargain. But here we were.

‘What did you find on those train stations?’ I countered.

Jordan turned back to the screen. ‘Describe the house again,’ he said. ‘We need to
narrow down the number of stations that cut through residential streets then match
them against the Kellys that are publicly listed.’

It sounded like a big job, and I told him so with my eyebrows, but Jordan shrugged.
‘We have to start somewhere, right?’

I told him again that the house had looked the same general vintage as our pub. ‘Victorian,
you know, 19th century. But low ceilings, and timber, because it was built as a residence,
not a public house. Everything in the street packed in tight, all built shoulder-to-shoulder.
So, yeah, working class. Old. It was blue, had a hip-high picket fence with a gate
in the middle, no off-street parking.’

While I talked, Jordan printed out the list of C. Kellys we’d found and handed it
to me together with a red pen
he’d found by rootling around on top of my messy desk.

‘What you’re describing is inner city,’ he mused. ‘Could be any direction though,
but I’d discount anything that isn’t close to a river of some kind. I’m thinking
the Maribyrnong River, or the Yarra.’

‘You’re sure?’ I said uncertainly. ‘Eve never showed me a river.’

Jordan’s expression went bleak. ‘I’m sure. You know how she gave you a taster of
what her last moments were like? I’ve had those, too, but different ones. A river
figures in there somewhere, trust me. Given the type of house we’re looking for,
cross out all the names and addresses that are outside the inner-Metropolitan area,
then give us back that list, okay?’

Jordan typed away on my laptop while I did what he asked.

‘Where’s Bittern?’ I queried.

He shook his head. ‘On the Mornington Peninsula, I think. Holiday houses for rich
people. Lose that one.’

When I was done, I had a list of nine.

‘Give it here,’ Jordan said, as he studied the highlighted possibilities.

He brought up all the
C. Kelly
s again on the screen and started clicking on the first
one.

I went and stood over his shoulder. ‘There’s a
map
option,’ I pointed out. ‘I didn’t
know you could do that, pull
a person’s location up on a map. That’s kind of…freaky.’

‘And intrusive,’ Jordan muttered. ‘But useful.’

One-by-one, flicking between directory view and street view, we started ruling people
out. Dejection started creeping back into our voices as we talked over each other.

‘No train line.’

‘No bodies of water.’

‘Houses are too new.’

‘Blocks are too big.’

‘Lots of light industrial.’

‘Borderline too far out, don’t you think?’

The seventh set of details was for a place in Northcote, not far from where we were
now.

When the street map came up, Jordan moodily flicked straight to the satellite imaging
for the area. ‘Look at this,’ he snarled. ‘Street after friggin’ street of same-same.
Do you want
ant
view? Or
God
view?’

I punched him in the shoulder. ‘Zoom out,’ I insisted. ‘More.
More
.’

‘God view it is, then.’

I stared at the patterns of light and dark on the screen, all the tiny, photo-realistic
little houses that from this magnification looked like pieces from a board game.
Something about the satellite imagery for the Northcote
C. Kelly
was bothering me,
though. Cutting down through the left edge of the map and snaking across the bottom
was
a lush, dark-green line. The curvy line was punctuated by the green of public
parks and reserves. I was looking at ovals, playgrounds, walks. Kilometres of them.

So much…green.

Including the dark green of
trees
, I realised.

‘Trees that need water,’ I muttered aloud.

‘What?’ Jordan hadn’t seen it. Maybe I was wrong.

‘Go back to the directory view,’ I begged. ‘You know, the pastel, cartoony one.’

‘Why?’ Jordan exclaimed. ‘I still don’t know what I’m looking at.’

I shoved him aside and bent over the keyboard, clicking back into the stylised road
map for the area and jabbing at the screen with one finger.

The screen was suddenly colour-coded and artificial-looking again,
cartoony
, just
like I’d said. And covered in tiny names that explained everything. Every single
thing we were looking at was
labelled
. Street names, parks, walks,
everything
.

‘You’re supposed to be
gifted
,’ I said dryly, tapping the bottom of the screen. What
had been dark green in the photographic view had morphed into a dull, pale-green
sward, cut through by a thin ribbon of
blue
.