Lyrebird Hill (15 page)

I began to drift.

The sound of rain dimmed, the air grew warm. I was no longer in my car on a deserted road – but in a cosy room filled with the scent of buttery scones and hot chocolate, where a grandmotherly woman sat in a patch of sunlight bowed over a well-thumbed volume of fairytales.

‘Once upon a time . . .’

Despite the rain, Granny H’s little cottage was cheery and dry. Candles burned in the corners of the room, and she had lit a fire in the potbelly. She chose a book of fairytales from the cluttered
shelf, and settled onto her chair. Opening to the marked page, she began to read.

‘Once upon a time there lived a sheep farmer, whose greatest treasure was his lovely daughter. Beauty was her name, and her father worked hard to provide her with every comfort. They lived in a roomy house and dined on seed cakes and rabbit stew, and Beauty always had pretty clothes to wear. But one unfortunate day, wool prices bottomed out and the farmer found himself penniless. Beauty wanted to help her father, and so she accepted the proposal of a wealthy landowner who lived in a faraway part of the country. One fine morning, she set out for her new husband’s estate . . .’

I was sitting cross-legged beside the Wolf on a thick rug at Granny’s feet. Her latest instalment sent a ripple of goosebumps across my arms and up into my scalp. I looked at the Wolf from the corner of my eye. He was motionless, his gaze fixed on Granny H, his boy-mask hiding his true, fearless nature.

Granny turned the page and continued her tale. ‘Knocking on the manor door, Beauty waited for her new husband to greet her. But when the door swung wide, she found herself staring – not at a handsome husband, but at a hideous creature. He wore a man’s clothing but had the shaggy head of a bull and shoulders like boulders. His eyes burned hot-poker red. Curling back his lips to bare long yellow fangs, he spoke in a surprisingly genteel manner, which Beauty found most disconcerting.’

Here Granny paused, and then said in a deep gravelly voice, ‘“Welcome, dear Beauty. Welcome to my humble abode.”’

I gasped, then giggled.

The Wolf caught my eye and winked.

We’d heard this same story a million times, but with each telling the Beast grew uglier and scarier. Sometimes he turned out to be not the handsome prince under a witch’s spell, but the evil witch herself in a beast’s disguise, tricking Beauty into a life of sorrow and slavery. Granny H knew all the fairytales, but she
never told them properly. They always seemed darker and more thrilling than the ones we read in books.

Granny sat back in her chair and shut her eyes, signalling that the story – at least for today – was over. The roof creaked, and outside the wind swished in the treetops, but no one moved. The tale might be told, as Granny liked to say, but its spell lingered, laying claim on our hearts and making us yearn to find our way back into the magic.

I woke with a start. Lightning flickered around me, and rain continued to hammer the car roof. I’d been dozing, but the woman reading from the book of fairytales had not been a dream.

Granny H – the woman I now knew as Esther Hillard – had been our neighbour. Her husband was dead, and she lived alone in a little settlers’ cottage a couple of kilometres upstream from our farmhouse, on the other side of the river. It was an easy thirty-minute hike, over a natural bridge of stepping stones and up into the trees.

She’d been a kind lady – a baker of scones, a champion brewer of hot chocolate, and a skilled storyteller. Her voice was reedy and expressive, and her stories had never failed to fill me with excited dread. In fact, now that I thought about it, her stories had tweaked my young imagination, lingering with me into adulthood, eventually inspiring me to open a bookshop.

I imagined her now, sitting in the lounge room at Lyrebird Hill, her glasses balanced on her nose, a paperback in her lap. She might read late into the night, like I was often prone to doing, finally trundling off to bed in the wee hours, bleary-eyed and replete.

Thunder rumbled overhead.

I was gripped by a desperate longing to warm myself in our wood-fired kitchen, sipping tea with the woman I’d once known as Granny H. Suddenly there was nowhere else I wanted to be:
just there, in my old home, nestled in the valley surrounded by bushland . . . listening to Granny’s tales and spinning a few of my own, basking in the company of a woman who had, during the difficult years of my childhood, shown me much kindness.

Another drum roll of thunder vibrated the car. Seconds later, a dazzling starburst of pure light tore open the sky. As it soared upwards then swept past me, I realised it wasn’t lightning – it was car headlights. I flashed my own headlights, but I was too late; the other car had passed.

Throwing open the door, I stumbled out into the rain and ran after the retreating tail-lights, waving my arms and yelling. As quickly as it had appeared, the vehicle vanished along the road. I stared after it. Rain pounded me. Within moments my clothes were sopping, my hair plastered over my face; my hopes of rescue sluiced away.

Getting back in the car, I slammed myself inside and then sat for a damp eternity listening to the water drip off my jeans legs and puddle in the footwell. The dashboard clock showed 10.30pm. There was no point trying to walk anywhere; it was too dark, too wet.

I pulled a warm jumper and track pants from my overnight bag, then climbed into the back seat. Manoeuvring myself to almost horizontal, I pulled the picnic rug up around my neck and stared through the misty window. My stomach grumbled. Thunder boomed in the distance. I pictured myself at home, burrowed under the covers of my queen-sized bed; I tried to imagine that the din of the rain was actually the ocean outside my bedroom window, pulling its waves back from the beach then rushing them in again.

For a moment it worked.

Then from somewhere drifted the spicy golden scent of bush flowers.

All of a sudden I was no longer in my own imagined bed. This new bed was narrow, the cotton sheets tucked tightly
around me. Moonlight shone through tall windows, and on the far wall was a bookshelf crammed with antique dolls. With a jolt I realised I’d stumbled from one daydream into another – because here I was in the cramped room I’d once shared with my sister. I looked at the other bed.

It was empty.

I shivered. Dragging the rug up over my head, I squeezed shut my eyes.

Midnight finally came around. Mum and Jamie were asleep, even the rats in the roof were quiet. Climbing out of bed, I stripped off my pyjamas and replaced them with the old nighty.

The nighty was threadbare and reached nearly to my ankles. The neck and cuffs were trimmed with pearl buttons and lace. I’d found it in one of the upstairs bedrooms, crammed into a cardboard box with a bunch of other old-fashioned clothes. There were boxes everywhere up there, packed along the walls and piled to the ceiling, all covered in dust and grot. Upstairs was out of bounds to Jamie and me, but I loved sneaking up there and escaping into the dusty darkness, working my fingers under the box lids and pulling out the treasures packed tightly inside. Tattered books and jars of hairpins and moth-eaten silk hankies with embroidered flowers, even some little pans of dried-up watercolour paint.

And the nighty.

Sliding open my bedroom window, I climbed outside and ran to the woodshed where I kept my bike. Barefoot, I rode towards the Spine.

The track was dark, and as my bike rattled over stones and fallen sticks, my insides were like a milkshake. I was shivering, too – but not from cold. My shivers were from Granny’s story. It made me want to run willy-nilly into the dark, to throw back my head and laugh like kookaburra.

But I kept quiet. That was Rule Number Three. I was allotted one shriek at the end of the game, but even that must be carefully disguised to sound like the bark of a fox. Until that moment, nothing was allowed to pass my lips, not even a sigh.

Leaving my bike at the bottom of the Spine, I entered the tea-tree forest and clawed my way through the brittle branches, stopping occasionally to free my hair or drag the nighty from the clutches of a sharp twig. I moved stealthily, rolling heel-to-toe then bounding for a step or two, trying to sound like a wallaby.

The Beast was near. I couldn’t see him or hear him or smell him, but the skin on the back of my neck was crawling and I wanted to stop and wee. I didn’t dare. The Beast was near, and soon he would find me.

I stopped, looking up through the network of tea-tree branches. The sky was black velvet, the stars flaming match heads. All around me, the grey midnight world of the bush was coming to life. Gum leaves rattled in the treetops, bats twittered as they swooped for moths and beetles. Cicadas, bullfrogs, the scuttle of a lizard in the leaf dross—

And the quiet crunch of approaching footfall.

My heart kicked once, then began to gallop. I stared over my shoulder, licking my dry lips. Darkness like a wall. The moon was a fingernail, shedding no light. Only the stars shone, picking out the frilly beards of moss that grew from the branches, making the ribbon gums glow white. Looking east I saw the knobbled Spine, arching against the sky like a dinosaur’s backbone—

A crash of motion. A dark mass loomed. Twigs crunched, a branch splintered away from its trunk. I lurched sideways but the creature grabbed me, pinning me against his shaggy body. I twisted and tried to throw myself away from him. His grip faltered, his stranglehold loosened, and I tasted a moment’s freedom . . . but then the Beast’s claws reclaimed me and dragged me back against him.

The momentum of our struggle pulled us over and we hit the ground in a tangle of limbs. I took the opportunity to sink my teeth into his arm. His skin was hairy and as tough as elephant hide, tasting of salt and old leather. The monster grunted in surprise, then rolled on top of me. He was heavy, I couldn’t breathe. Through my eyelashes, I braved a look at my captor. He was staring down at me, a hideous monster with the head of a bull, and eyes that burned like fiery embers.

I gave another token struggle, but my heart wasn’t in it. The Beast pinned my wrists over my head and bent closer, his face a finger-span from mine. I could smell his rank breath, feel the heat of his huge deformed body through the thin fabric of my nighty. I shivered. The night seemed suddenly too dark, too close. My position was hopeless, so I fell back in surrender.

This only seemed to excite the Beast. Lowering his muzzle, he pressed his lips to my ear.

‘Welcome, dear Beauty,’ he rasped. ‘Welcome to my humble abode.’