Volcano Street (18 page)

Something thudded down beside her: his rucksack. She sank to her haunches. Hurriedly she tugged at the fastenings and pushed back the flap. She scooped stiff hands into the coins. How deep they were: how deep, how cold. They clinked from her fingers in an icy surf, and clattered heavily into the hessian bag. Her heart thrilled. After all those issues of
Lion
, after all those Tom Swifts, after all those Saturday nights at the Ozone, here was adventure, real at last. No longer Skip Wells, she was a safecracker, ear against a bank vault, feeling for the click of a combination; a cat burglar (black mask, black jumpsuit) spiriting away diamonds across pitching rooftops; a pirate, parrot on shoulder, sinking a shovel into the place marked X on a dog-eared, crumbling map.

‘Hurry up,’ called Honza.

‘I’m going as fast as I can.’ For a time it seemed that more coins slid down the sides of the rucksack than went into it, but at last it was full.

Neither Skip nor Honza had considered how to lift a laden bag from the well. On the first try, half the coins tumbled out. Skip cursed as the avalanche slid around her, hard and chill. Adventure! This was adventure? Her back ached, her hands were numb, and the stench in the well had grown worse, a dank fetor that wrapped
itself around her like octopus arms. Clumsily she bundled more coins into the rucksack, secured the straps tightly, and raised it, gasping, above her head.

‘Christ!’ Her arms throbbed like tensile wires. ‘How in hell will we get this home?’

Gritted teeth obscured Honza’s answer. ‘Slowly.’ Or was it: ‘Search me’? He leaned so far over the edge that she feared he would fall in. Relieved of her burden, Skip slumped against the wall, then sprang away at once, feeling the slime squelch against her back. Above, the rucksack thudded to the ground beside Honza.

The Qantas bag next. Floppy vinyl slapped her head. Now she was a boxer, punch-drunk, reeling into the ring but certain, in jangling seconds, to take the knockout blow. Groaning, she bent over, heaving up more of the rattling coins that seemed never to diminish, like sand on a shore. Rattle, crash. Rattle, crash. Honza said something, but his words were lost. She steeled herself. Adamantine, that’s what she must be. Marlo had taught her that word, Skip thought proudly. Adam-Ant-I-Am. I’m escaping, she told herself, I’m running away, but where she was running and why had become, in this reeking darkness, a question as mysterious as the meaning of life or why Karen Jane had to be a crazy bitch and not a proper mother like other people’s mothers. They wouldn’t really let her out, would they? She was nuts. Rattle, crash. Rattle, crash. Skip was a machine, if machines could ache, if machines could shiver, if machines could sob in disgust, horror and sadness – but that sound … What was that sound?

A whoop. A shout. Footsteps thundering nearer, nearer.

Skip froze. The cops!

Where was Honza? The moonlight was brighter, and glinted on the coins, the Qantas bag, the slick encircling walls, but no face, no figure, was visible to her above the narrow well mouth. ‘Honza?’ she called faintly, then louder; she heard him – was it Honza? – call out, then more yells: ‘Get him!’ and ‘Come on!’ and a wild war whoop
all strangely distant from down in the well, and the dull sickening meat slap of punches connecting. The cops? It couldn’t be. Skip scrabbled at the well’s sides, but her hands found no purchase in the slithery dark. She cried out, ‘Honza! Honza!’ but heard only echoes in return. They swirled around her, growing faint. Then there was silence from above.

Now a shout. Now a snigger. ‘Bugger it, you’ve knocked him out. Kick him.’

Thop! Thop!
‘Ain’t moving.’

She recognised the voices. Shaun Kenny. Andreas Haskas. And the silhouette of Brenton Lumsden was leaning over the well.

Lummo let out a long whistle. ‘Well, well! And what have we here?’ he said, like a
Play School
presenter introducing a surprising but delightful segment. He turned and called back, ‘Haskas! Leave him.’ (The
thop!
had been repeated.) ‘Get the hose. Seems the well’s run dry.’ Lummo’s laugh was high, too high – a girly giggle.

‘Bag’s fucking heavy.’ Kenny, with the rucksack?

‘Leave that!’ cried Skip, and all the Lum’s Den laughed. Now the three of them appeared above the well, shoulders jostling; she heard the hiss of the hose, and could only stare up, gaping, as the cold shock hit her. Flung back, splayed against the well wall, she convulsed as if from a thousand volts.

‘Cool off, Skippy! We don’t like thieves in Crater Lakes.’

The spray slammed and slammed her; she twisted to avoid it, but all she could do was stumble in circles, pursued by the pitiless jet of water. She collapsed, coins jabbing her knees and hands; she gulped; she struggled to breathe, and barely registered when the spray ceased.

Shouts broke out above. There was the thud of retreating feet, then all Skip could hear was the writhing of the hose, muffled now, soaking a patch of lawn above, then dying out as the water dribbled to a stop. Now there was silence, but for the boom of Skip’s heart in her ears, the intolerable unending throb of her pulse. Shivering, she
plucked at her shirt, her jeans. What had happened? Had Honza, coming round, seen off the Lum’s Den? Something had frightened them away. But where was Honza now? Had he turned off the hose?

She filled the silence with his name.

She filled it again.

She looked up, blinking. The moon was a blinding glare.

She heard a footstep, a breath.

The form that now appeared over the well’s rounded edge was neither Honza’s, Lummo’s nor any boy’s; the figure was tall, a man’s, but its head was strangely hidden – cowled, that was the word, like Vincent Price at midnight, stalking his victims for the wax museum.

Something in Skip’s chest crashed like a body through a rotted floor. This was a dream made real: as if a story she had heard but never believed, a story bizarre and arabesque, had been revealed as prosaic truth, propelling her into a dimension she could neither understand nor explain.

A hand reached down, a man’s hand in a leather glove, extending from a sleek black sleeve. The words Skip heard were whispered – ‘Quickly. Come’ – and sounded posh, too posh by far for Crater Lakes.

For a moment she shrank away, but she knew she had no choice. Vincent Price would have her. The thought came as the hand engulfed hers:
He’s murdered the boys, now he’ll murder me
. But he tugged her hand and she let him. There was no resisting fate. With his help, she scrambled free of the well, then collapsed in a heap on the grass. Bewildered, she looked up at the man above her. Gloves. Cowl. Cape. Or an overcoat, perhaps, with a hood. All black, in any case, black as night. She tried to see his face but he turned, as if the sight of her pained him, and began to walk away. She stared in dumb surprise. He was leaving? No wax museum? No murder? Without another word, the stranger slipped across the lawn, coattails billowing, to be swallowed by darkness.

Trembling, Skip rose. She clasped the edge of the well to help her stand.

Honza lay some feet away, moaning. She went to him, shook him. His rucksack had gone and there was no sign of the Lum’s Den. All was quiet. Saturday night on Volcano Street had reached its end at last. Wondering if the cowled mysterious stranger had been a figment of her imagination, if he had really stood over the well and held out his hand to her, Skip gazed solemnly in the direction he had gone, as if she might still see him there, his tall form dark and strange against the moonlight. But there was no one. Nothing.

‘Vincent Price.’ She said the name like a prayer.

Chapter Nine

Something was drumming,
k-plak-plak-plak
, like a bundle of sticks being dropped, picked up, then dropped again. The shuddered face stared back from the glass, eyes-nostrils-mouth black pits in snow. I’ve escaped, Skip said to the dark window. For how long now had they driven through the night? Bush, like a river, rushed past the headlamps. From above, from the truck’s high cab, it looked, in its streaky pallor, like the bitter foamings of a dying world. Everywhere darkness. Everywhere death.
K-plak-plak-plak
. Geiger counter clicking off the end of time. Country music jangled from the eight-track: Buck Owens, that philosopher, who had to do only one thing and that was act naturally. The driver laughed, as if this were a joke. Skip pulled her eyes from her reflection. How many hours had they been on the road? Never, until now, had she looked at the driver.
K-plak-plak-plak
. Something under the dashboard scratched, thumped, skittered, like rats inside a wall. The cowl had slipped. That smile was no smile. That hand on the wheel was a skeleton’s hand.

In states between sleeping and waking, time can shimmer, part, and meet itself again like raindrops on a window, slipping down and down. Dreams and dreamy sick half-impressions make nights
endless, or so it seems to the sleeper-waker, shifting on furrowed sheets. Peace, if it comes, is fleeting, and forgotten at once when the night ride resumes, a wearying progress – no progress at all – through room after room of a decaying palace. The mind, in some outpost of reason, knows that night must end, that somewhere there is morning, like a town reached at last after too long a journey, with its smells of breakfast, its eye-pinching light through the updrawn blind. But the waker-sleeper travels on, no hard floors underfoot, the ghost condemned to haunt the empty halls. All night Skip shuddered through the labyrinth.

‘What is it? Are you sick?’ The voice seemed muffled, as if through cloth.

Skip’s eyelids flickered. Marlo, by the window, stood turned towards her; the blind cord swayed. Brightness burned obliquely through the glass.

‘Something in here smells.’

‘I don’t know.’ As if this were an answer.

‘You’ve missed breakfast. Will you stay in bed all day?’

‘You didn’t say.’

Marlo moved above her. Hair still wet. So clean. ‘You’re filthy.’

‘You should have said, Marlo.’

‘Said what?’

‘Said I was right. Rigby isn’t good. He’s bad. Auntie Noreen isn’t good. She’s bad. Why would you believe them instead of me? I’m the one you love.’

‘You’re burning.’ Cool fingers touched Skip’s forehead.

‘Vincent Price. He was there.’

‘Oh, Skip! You’re really sick, aren’t you?’

Then Marlo was gone; Skip had wanted her to pull down the blind. Sunlight throbbed on the Swedish sauna floor. Already it licked the dishevelled bedclothes, not so much creeping as advancing in sudden leaps each time Skip shut her eyes for an instant. Something
in her struggled but she made no move, only sank deeper into the seamy sheets.

How had she got home? She wished she could believe that everything the night before had been a dream: the well, the coins, the jetting icy water, the cowled figure that had vanished into the dark. Why should all that be real, more real than a jolting semi-trailer with a skeleton at the wheel? The dashboard rats made sounds she really heard. The palace in decay was a place she had been. All of it was real and all of it illusion: like the journey home with an incoherent Honza, walking their bikes for much of the way; like the hot swirl that possessed her as she floundered into the sleepout, tearing at her clothes, urgent for sleep that it seemed would never come, not in that undaunted night.

A voice: ‘Stuck together with his sticky fingers all that summer with his sticky fingers wouldn’t let his father stick his sticky fly above the jungle after the sleepout went up used to sit by him here all that summer sick with scarlet fever sticky sticky fly always close to his mother said to Valmai yes said to Valmai just hasn’t found the right girl yet Baz hasn’t but good boy close to his mother marry a nice girl when he comes back if there’s ever hardy har a nice girl in the lake to watch it watch it flat on his back a boy needs his privates see har har judging by his sheets on washday hardy har not that I’m a stickybeak watch it fly after his tonsils come out used to sit by him a nice girl in the lake on her back with his sticky fingers boom boom …’ And Skip thought of a girl adrift on water, tangled up in reeds, and a plane, grey-green, thrumming over the jungle, sides still sticky with Airfix glue, and in the plane a boy called Private C who burned with fever as bombs fell on the green sea below, the private sea where the green girl drifted.

The girl sank in that private sea. Brightness on the bedclothes grew sharper, sharper. Draw the blind: the blind, draw it. But down she went, down the wishing well to the centre of the earth, where
slime dank as dinosaurs slithered from the walls, and Vincent Price was waiting, dark-shrouded, foreboding.

She started awake. ‘He’s real.’

Noreen Puce, wedged in wicker, creaked and cracked. On the low table before her was a tray: teapot, fruitcake, bikkies, chocs; a modest morning tea, offered in good faith to Baby Helen, and if Baby Helen – well, couldn’t let it go to waste. Blearily, Skip watched as her aunt, anal mouth oozing chocolate cake, waved at the Airfix F-111, at Barry’s sporting trophies, at the open wardrobe which disclosed a glimpse of his jackets, shirts, trousers. Oh yes, he was a good boy, our Baz, and as Auntie Noreen again addressed the subject of the girl he might marry, a nice girl here in the Lakes, the appalling notion filled Skip that the girl her aunt had in mind was Marlo. Why not? It was ideal! They could run Puce Hardware together when old Dougie retired.

Among Noreen Puce’s better characteristics was a buoyant forgetfulness. In the sunny sleepout, on the cusp of afternoon, she might never have considered Baby Helen to be a nasty little tearaway. The niece was sick; the aunt must minister. With her purple-puckered lips flecked with brown, with her Sunday roast in the oven, Auntie Noreen had not a worry in the world except, perhaps, the problem of raising herself, as she soon must, from the wicker chair. Comfy it was, comfy indeed, but her rump had got stuck in it more than once before now, and those creakings, those crackings, were ominous as fate.

And what, she wondered aloud, was that smell in here?

Footsteps sounded on the decking outside. A head appeared around the door, then darted back, but not before Auntie Noreen had seen it. ‘Eh!’