Chapter One
Rye
People call me Rye. Actually, it’s Ryan Jackson, but not many people use my full name. It’s sort of the culture here, you know, to shorten people’s names, but at least I wasn’t saddled with something like “Macca” or “Steve-o”.
So it’s been Rye for a while now. It’s quicker to say, anyway. One less syllable can make the difference between life and death in this place. I wish I was kidding.
I shouldn’t have gone first, since I don’t know how to start all this. I’m not a writer or a poet or anything like that; Tamara would’ve been the better option. Me, I like video games and movies - the more zombies, the better - but I’m not a big book…guy. But the others insisted so...yeah, here I am...
We splurged on this diary after our arrival in Leirwick. You have no idea how much paper costs, here. At home, you just grab some and use it. You print of hundreds of things a day, and never really think about the cost. Here, a diary like this was all of our wages, combined. And then Laklas had to chip in a few shillings, as well. But we needed it. The whole point of the diary is to keep track of everything that happens – and has happened. It’s, like, evidence, I guess? Not that people will take this seriously. Before computers and TV and stuff, people wouldn’t have questioned what we recorded. But now, I guess, it just seems like an elaborate way for a group of runaways to get out of punishment.
We did have a camera for a bit. I don’t know what happened to it. I think we lost it in the first few days, along with all the evidence on it, which people would still claim was faked. Jeez, are people cynical these days or what? It wasn’t like we were trying to prove Big Foot existed.
But these diaries aren’t just evidence. Not to get all touchy-feely on you, but I guess they’re a way to cope with everything as well. You know, write it down and get it out of our systems. Forget about everything we’ve seen. And, in case we don’t get home...
As of starting this it’s been nearly, God, six months, since we got trapped. A long six months, most of which we all spent in various states of consciousness. I’m kind of hoping that won’t become a trend.
...It all began just a few days after I moved to my new house…The corridor was dark and quiet. A strange wind blew through it, ruffling my blood-splattered shirt. I breathed lightly, trying not to make a sound as I crept across the scuffed and torn carpet. The old mansion echoed with a quiet groaning. Was it the wind, or something more sinister?
My hand tightened around the gun, the metal reassuring in my hand. Ahead of me the corridor ended with a single, battered door, swinging slightly on its hinges. Running as lightly as I could, I reached the door. I leaned my back against the wall, sucking in a few steadying breaths, gun held close to my chest. Beyond the door was the courtyard. Only God knew what I’d find there.
“Okay,” I breathed and, in one fluid movement, whisked myself around and kicked down the door.
“Uuuuuuh...” the zombie moaned, its face, full of rotting teeth, filling the screen, limp arms held out ready to give me the embrace of grisly death.
“Argh!” I shouted, pumping the trigger of the gun for all I was worth. The zombie jerked and shuddered. I slammed the butt of the gun down on its head. Brains squelched over my hands. Shoving the now – hopefully inanimate – corpse aside I stumbled into the courtyard.
“Uuuuuh...” the horde of zombies groaned, shuffling toward me. I heard a revving and noted several of them had managed to find chainsaws, and other items of a sharp and pointy nature. Wonderful.
“Argh!” I shouted again, emptying clip after clip into their decomposing flesh.
“Husshhhhhhh...” the hiss of Mum’s iron drowned out the epic battle as she pressed one of Dad’s shirts.
“Rye? What on earth are you doing? Stop making that noise or your father –”
“What the hell was that noise?” Dad’s shout rang from the other end of the house.
“Nothing!” I shouted back. So, what? I’d gotten a little bit too much into the game, that’s all. It happens, right?
“Nothing,” Mum called back. “Just a video thing.”
“Stop bloody shouting!”
“See,” Mum said, smugly, returning to her own war against creases. “What did I tell you?”
“Mmm...” I said, frantically smashing buttons. No time for finesse, I’d been killed six times, already, trying to get through the courtyard. It took nearly two hours just to get there and I had no idea where the next save point was. Who the hell thought it’d be a good idea to put them so far apart, anyway? The developers were sadistic arseholes.
The iron hissed again as Mum pressed one of my school shirts – one more depressing reminder that school started back in a week. The other was the largely unfinished pile of homework on my desk. Man, final year sucked. The teachers seemed to think we had no lives.
And I knew, if I wanted to get into medicine, I should put the controller down and make some sort of attempt to finish a few of those essays. You know how all kids go through that, “I want to be a doctor/fireman/butterfly” stage? I never grew out of it. Mum’s a doctor – a surgeon, really. When I was little Dad would pick me up from kindergarten to see her at the end of her shift. Dad tried to get me interested in his job...whatever it was. All I knew was that the high point of having a desk job was the vending machine in the hallway. Mum’s job meant she was saving people’s lives – with the added bonus of a vending machine in the cafeteria. I was convinced, for years when I was little, that she was a superhero. Pissed Dad off no end.
I never grew out of that wanting to be a doctor, but school was doing its best to shake me. I needed an insanely high score and all that qualified me for was a whole other set of tests. I was still reeling from the mid-year exam. That’d been hell. One girl from my class actually passed out at the end of it.
So, needless to say, I really should’ve been doing homework.
Maybe after I’d tried the courtyard one more time…
“Your sister is visiting over the weekend.” Mum was doggedly trying to engage me in conversation.
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Bringing that nice Ian boy with her.”
“MMM-hmm...” I hoped the emphasis would stop her talking. It did not.
I heard the iron clunk against the ironing board, giving off a disgruntled hiss as Mum came to sit on the couch. She leaned forward, squinting at the screen.
“Ew...what is that?” I couldn’t see what she was pointing at but, given the hours and hours of back-breaking cleaning (after which we all emerged covered in suspicious black grime) the lounge room was fairly clean now, I assumed it was the game.
“A game...shh!”
“That’s horrible! Why do you want to play that?”
I rolled my eyes, furiously thumbing the buttons on the controller. “What, I can’t like zombies now?”
Mum sighed and leaned back. “Have you finished your homework?”
“Mum, I’m eighteen.”
“Oh, so that means I can’t ask about your homework?”
“I’m getting to it! I just want to try and finish thi…dammit!”
The doorbell rang, heralding my doom as a zombie sunk its teeth into my neck. I groaned and rubbed my eyes as the animated blood flew. I’d been playing too long. My head was pounding and my eyes ached; a gaming migraine heralding its arrival. Mum stood and turned back to her ironing.
“That’ll be for you,” she said, lifting a skirt out of the basket.
“What? No,” I frowned. “No one even knows the address yet. I haven’t told anyone.”
Mum looked pointedly at her skirt, avoiding my eyes. “I told that nice girl of yours, Tamara, where we were.”
I stood and turned to gape at her. My heart plummeted into that peculiar little part of your stomach that only exists when you’re utterly devastated. Now I had an almost-migraine and I wanted to throw up.
“M-Mum...are you kidding me? We broke up. A month ago. I told you about it.”
“Oh...did you?” She still wasn’t looking at me.
I scowled at her, crossing my arms. “I’m not answering the door.”
“Yes, you are. I’m ironing.”
“Well...well...I’m doing homework! Can’t get into medicine without doing homework...”
“Looks more like video games, to me.”
“Muuuuuuum...”
She sighed, thumping the skirt down on the kitchen table and bending to grab a shirt. “Oh, for God’s sake, Ryan, stop being a wuss and answer the door.”
I glared at her one more time before tossing the controller to the ground. Wonderful. Fantastic. Just what I wanted on my holidays, an awkward moment with my ex. Who dumped me. Cheerfully. With a great big smile on her face. Her perfect, supermodel face...
I stormed down through the narrow corridor of the house, shoving past the piles of boxes. I peered into my room as I passed. More boxes, though now my desk was accompanied by my bed and a mattress. Well, that was a plus, no more sleeping on the dirty floor. I stepped back out of my room and smacked into a tower of the damn things. I aimed a kick at the bottommost one. There was a shout from the master bedroom.
“What?” I shouted, poking my head into the room. Dad was bent over the pieces of his and Mum’s bed, a piece of the frame in each hand, a wide variety of power tools at his feet. I swallowed. Dad and power tools. Not a good mix. I quietly thanked God that I’d unpacked the first aid kit this morning. From a box labelled “China”. Go figure.
“Don’t kick the boxes, idiot.” That was the extent of my Dad’s cursing. He’d been, “brought up right”.
I waved an airy hand, turning my back as a power drill started up. I shut my eyes briefly at the noise, waiting. But, thankfully, there were no screams this time. With nothing left to hold me back, I walked back into the front hall and stared at the door. Through the frosted glass window, a huge, bubbly pane that stretched out beside the front door, I could see two blurry shapes. Two? I groaned. That could only mean one thing...
“Hello? Whoever that is, I can see you standing there!” the blurry outline of a face pushed up toward the glass. I sighed and turned to open the door.
My eyes went straight to the long – long – legs of a blonde girl who stood, bent double, still peering through the window.
“Tamara,” I said, trying to wrench my eyes away from those – did I mention long? – legs. The girl looked over her shoulder with that stupid coy grin of hers and stood. Slowly. Damn her. She turned and posed, leaning back against the brick wall of the front veranda. She always posed, whatever she did. Consciously or unconsciously, she was always posing. Probably because she’d been a model for a few years now and in pageants before that. Tamara knew how to put on a show. She tucked her hands into the pockets of her hoodie, the hem of which actually fell lower than the “shorts” she wore. I say “shorts” because you could barely classify them as shorts. A belt with legs was a better description.
Damn, I loved those shorts.
“Hello, Rye.” She flicked her hair back. It was choppy and blonde and bouncy. My mouth went dry. I managed a nod.
“Uh...hi...” the hesitant little voice snapped me away from Tamara’s Cheshire cat face. I turned to look at Lily Bischoffs. I knew it was her as soon as I’d seen two shadows at the door. Lily and Tamara were as inseparable as night and day, and just as different. Where Tamara was tall and leggy and stunning, Lily was…just another teenager. Her hair was long and brown, usually scraped into a ponytail. She wore, like, jeans and jumpers – once I think she wore some sort of skirt when we all went out – but mostly just, well, normal clothes. Like today. Blue jeans and a baggy looking purple and blue jumper that had a twig of eucalyptus poking out of the pocket. There was always some sort of plant life attached to Lily. The girl was obsessed with science and biology – nearly as obsessed as Tamara was with literature (yeah, believe me, I didn’t think she’d be into that stuff either when I first met her) - and was always crawling into some sort of bush or something.
Tamara and Lily had been friends since before Tamara and I dated. Ever since, in Grade Nine, when Lily got bumped up into our year. They were both insanely smart and insanely good at hiding it. Well, at least Tamara actively hid it. She seemed to get a kick out of people thinking she was an airhead. Lily, on the other hand, well, I mean, she was brilliant. Ask her anything about science and biology and all that stuff and she could give you an hour long lecture on it. But her social skills were slightly...non-existent.
“Hey, Lily.”
Lily shuffled her feet. “Hi, Rye, I hope you, like, don’t mind that we came over, it’s just I was at Tamara’s and she, like, got bored and said we should come over here – not that we, you know, only came to visit because we were bored, that’s just what happened – but I said that, like, she was the only one who was invited and I shouldn’t just come over if I hadn’t been invited because if you didn’t want me here that would be awkward and –”
See what I mean? Unless she was talking science, the girl couldn’t hold a conversation. “Lily, hey, it’s fine. I’m glad you came.” She looked at the ground. I wondered if she thought I was lying. I wasn’t, really. Even Lily was a better buffer between Tamara and I, than my Mum.
Tamara tilted her head. “You going to ask us in?” I wrinkled my nose at the stench of mint as she rolled a piece of gum around her mouth. She was always chewing gum. Always. Now, any time I smelt mint, I thought of her. Made brushing my teeth hell, sometimes.
“Yeah, yeah, come in.” Guess what I really wanted to say.
I stepped aside, Tamara ushering a hesitant Lily in before her. I turned to shut the door as Lily wandered vaguely up the corridor. A hand grabbed my shirt and pushed me against the wood. Tamara stepped close. Now, I’m a tall guy, really tall actually, but Tamara was able to stand nearly nose to nose with me. I threw my hands up nervously.
“What? What did I do?”
“Nothing,” she waved an impatient hand. “Look, I just wanted to say I was sorry how it all, you know, ended. When your Mum called, I thought you hadn’t told her. I didn’t know what else to say, so I said I’d come over.”
“Yeah, sorry about that. I did tell her but...” I let the sentence trail off lamely. It didn’t help that she was pretty much interrogating me.
Tamara laughed. “I see. I always liked your Mum,” Tamara let me go, smoothing down the front of my shirt. “Friends, then? No more awkwardness?” she thrust out a hand, giving me that damned grin again. I ignored it and nodded.
“Yeah, friends. Sure. I’ve totally gotten over you dumping my arse and ripping my heart out.”
Tamara laughed and patted my cheek. “They always do.” She opened her mouth to say something further when an agonised shout cut her off, followed by a clatter. Without a second thought, I ran to the master bedroom as a pale faced Lily hurtled back down the corridor, as if fleeing the scene of a crime. I pushed past her and into the room.
Dad was sitting on the floor, bent over and clutching his hand. The drill was buzzing happily away on the floor, dancing itself into a complex pattern, dangerously near its own cords.
“Tam! Power!” I shouted, skidding to my Dad’s side, ignoring the blood. “Lily, get Mum.”
Tamara hurtled over, flicking the power off and wrenching the plug out. “Don’t call me, Tam.”
“Oooh...” Dad muttered, pressing his hand to his chest, completely ignoring my attempts to see what the hell was wrong.
“Dad, lemme see.” I grabbed his hand. There was a fair amount of blood; it looked like he’d nicked his hand. At least, I hoped it was just a cut and not an actual hole in his hand. Hands were tricky things to do surgery on. I pulled off my shirt and pressed it against the wound, wrapping it tight to staunch the blood.
“What the hell have you done to yourself this time?” Mum was by my side suddenly, helping me get Dad to his feet. “Hospital?” she asked me.
I nodded, as we eased Dad up. “Yeah. It was his hand. You know how that goes. Would you grab a pizza or something on the way home?”
“If we get out before ten, yeah. There’s biscuits and stuff in the cupboard if we don’t.”
“Nnnnnh...I’m right…here…” Dad groaned as, between us, we marched him to the front door, Mum berating him the whole way.
“Told you to be careful, didn’t I? I told you, every time you pick up one of those bloody tools something goes wrong. Thank you, Lily,” she nodded as the girl held the door open, her mouth hanging wide at the sight of the blood-soaked shirt. Mum and Dad disappeared out to the car. I took the door handle from Lily’s nerveless grip and shut it. When I turned back she was looking at the floor again, making a weird squeaking noise.
Tamara broke the silence with a snort. “Rye?”
“Yeah.”
“Go put a shirt on, show off.”
I shook my head wordlessly at her and ducked back to my room, rummaging around for a while. For some reason the box labelled SHIRS contained a pile of old porcelain...things. You know, the weird figurines and stuff all mothers manage to accumulate. I finally found one wedged under my pillow and pulled it on, listening as Tamara and Lily muttered together out in the hall.
I poked my head out the door. “Go look around or make yourselves a coffee or something. I better clean up that mess before it soaks into the floorboards.”
“’Kay,” they passed me by in the corridor as I headed back to my parent’s room. “Bit dingy, isn’t?” I caught Tamara saying as I grabbed a rag from a pile near the door and went to wet it in the bathroom.
That girl had no tact but, in this case, she was right. The house was an old farmhouse – the original builders had owned all the surrounding land before it had been developed. It sprawled half-way up the hill the estate was built on, looming there like a low slung spider among the tall, boxy, two-storey units that had sprung up over the years. But no one had ever wanted to pull down the original house. It wasn’t heritage listed or anything, people just said it didn’t feel right. It was a “little slice ‘o history”, a reminder of good ol’ Aussie building. Or something like that.
Good ol’ Aussie buildings seemed to consist of a lot of leaky rooves, weatherboard siding and corrugated iron. And let’s not forget the spiders.
The last owner had died in the house. She’d been old, too tired and creaky to really keep up with the house anymore. Hence the fact that most of the house was covered in crap – dust, dirt, spider webs, you name it, the house was covered in it.
I scrubbed over the mess Dad had left behind with the rag. I got most of it up, thankfully not much had fallen on the wood. Mum would have kicked Dad’s arse if it had. I slapped the pink-stained rag into the en-suite sink and washed my hands. Mum and Dad could argue over it, now. It’d give them something to do. Maybe they could sand it out, before sealing the floors.
I wandered back down to the lounge room, only to find the sliding door to the backyard open, and a nice spray of rust over the carpet. Mum was going to kill me; I was supposed to have cleaned the old fly-wire thing off two days ago, before we’d cleaned the carpets.
I shut my eyes for a moment and leaned against the door. I didn’t really want to go out into the garden, anyway. Not only was it an overgrown mess of plants and weeds and trees that leaned at awkward angles that could harbour any kind of lovely, venomous things, but that’s where they’d found the old lady. She’d been sprawled in the knee-high grass at the foot of this old, lonely paperbark tree that stood at the bottom of one of our paddocks.
It was creepy. I mean, why had she been out there at all?
I eased my way out onto the veranda, finally, and looked around. The whole thing was rain-swollen and buckling. Dad and I – because Dad refused to hire a contractor – had a lot of work ahead of us to get it safe again. Nails were slowly rising, and half the boards were cracked or cracking. And the gutters needed replacing, as did the portion of roof in my room. We’d only figured out there was a hole in the roof during the last rainstorm when the real estate agent’s clever little piece of wood-printed linoleum had given way, spilling water over half my things.
I looked around, hands in my pockets. Tamara was nowhere to be seen but I could just see Lily crouching beside the patch of grass where they’d found the old woman, down the bottom of the closest paddock. The grass and weeds there were all dead and shrivelled, making a sort of lasting silhouette of her body. I shivered.
“Hey, Lil, where’s Tamara?”
Lily looked up. “No idea. Look at how all the grass here is dead, Rye.” The dizziness in her voice was gone now, now that she was focused on something. She leaned closer to the grass, plucking a few leaves. “I don’t think it’s the same as the lawn most people use, the Stenotaphrum secundatum species. This looks more like a pasture grass, a Microlaena stipoides maybe.”
“Yeah,” I struggled for a response to that. What could you say to that? “That’s where they found the old woman. She’d been there a couple days they reckon. Weird how all the grass and stuff died around her, isn’t it?”
“Really?” the girl didn’t recoil as I thought she would. Instead she leaned forward, poking at the ground. “Well, that would explain it then. See, the body would have stopped the photosynthesis. And there would have been things in her that could have poisoned the grass.”
“Things?”
“Chemicals, bodily fluids. It’s actually quite fascinating - ”
I stepped back, hands still in my pockets. “Right. Thanks.” I really didn’t need to think about that. But that rambling did remind me of something. “Oh, wait, that reminds me, I wanted to ask you a favour.”
Lily froze a moment. Then she stood slowly, picking up an armful of weeds and plants she’d obviously pulled from the garden, looking embarrassed as she tucked them in her pocket. Most people would’ve probably yelled at her for pillaging their gardens but she was actually doing us a favour. The more she took, the less we had to do.
“O-Oh?”
“Yeah. There was some biology stuff I don’t get, for homework? Something about osmosis. I was wondering if you’d give me a hand tomorrow, or something, to get it straight? I left everything late again, as usual...Lily, what’s wrong?” I stared at her horrified face. She looked on the verge of tears. What the hell did I say? Oh God, Tamara was going to kick my arse. “Lily, seriously, are you okay?”
“I-I...I’m, like, so sorry,” Damn, here came the rambling again. “I have, like, work tomorrow and I can’t get out of it because I took off the first two weeks of holidays to, you know, get my homework done and Dean was pretty upset about it and said I have to, like, do shifts all this week and –”
I held up my hands, smiling. “Lily, it’s fine. Don’t stress! I’m sure I’ll get it figured out.”
“No! I mean, no, I mean, of course you will but, like, I could come over tomorrow night or something and help you after work, if that okay and, like, you guys don’t have anything to do or dinner to eat or something, I mean, you’ll have dinner and all but maybe after and stuff...”
“That’d be fine, whatever you can do.” I patted her shoulder, awkwardly. There was something about Lily that made you just want to, I don’t know, indulge her. Like a little sister or something. “You have my number, right?”
“Y-yes...”
“Cool, call me when you’re on your way and I’ll make sure I’m not mucking around or anything.” I smiled and rubbed my head. It was still pounding, but the fresh air was helping somewhat.
“A-are you okay?”
“Yeah, just a headache. Self-inflicted.” We’d started back up to the house, wandering around the garden. Lily tugged random plants out as she went, ooh-ing and aah-ing and babbling on about how she’d never seen plants like them before.
I was a little more concerned by the fact I couldn’t see Tamara anywhere. The garden wasn’t big, in itself, and the two paddocks were on the side of the hill, so you could see right to the end of them both. I could even see Mum’s old mare, chewing on something right at the bottom of the second paddock from where we were.
“She did come out here with you, right?”
“What? Oh, yes...” Lily was peering down at a patch of sunburned, overgrown ferns. Lily was peering into them interestedly. “I’m sorry...I’m sorry that you and Tamara broke up.”
“Oh...thanks?” I rubbed the back of my neck. This was not a conversation I wanted to have. And there was this weird inflection in her voice.
“I thought, like, you guys were good together. You okay?”
“Yeah...well...you know...”
“I –”
Whatever Lily had been about to say died on her lips as a frightened scream rang through the air. Tamara, screaming? Hell was supposed to freeze over before that happened. We exchanged one glance and, dropping the “samples”, Lily and I ran back to the paddock.
“Tamara?” I shouted, skidding through the long grass to her side. She lay, sprawled, at the foot of the paperbark tree, staring at it with an open mouth. She was sitting right in the patch of dead grass. Her eyes were wide and shocked. I touched her shoulder. “Tamara? What happened? Are you hurt? Where are you hurt?”
She scrambled up, suddenly, as Lily touched her shoulder too. Tamara shot a wide-eyed glance at the tree and backed away.
“What?” she asked suddenly.
“What?” Okay, I sounded like a parrot, but it was the first thing that came to mind. Before Lily or I could move, Tamara surged forward. She started circling the paperbark tree, muttering to herself. She kept her hands pinned to her sides, as if she didn’t dare even brush the bark.
A part of me didn’t blame her. If you haven’t ever seen a paperbark tree, trust me, they’re hideous things. They have these thin, dark green leaves and tiny bottle-brush like yellow flowers. Mum’s allergic to them; she hates them. But it’s the bark that really makes the tree ugly and illogical. You know, when you lean against a normal tree, the bark is really firm and, usually, tough and scratchy? The kind of thing you’d rather not run into, otherwise you end up grazing your arms. Paperbark trees are completely different. You push against them and the bark is all spongy and springy. You just have to poke it and your fingernail makes a dent. A tiny scratch will make the bark peel back like dead skin. It takes barely any energy to rip whole chunks of the bark away.
This one was especially ugly. It had huge, circular rent in each side. The branches had swept themselves up high into the air, like it was trying to draw away from the earth itself. It was ugly.
“Tamara, tell us what’s wrong!” I snapped, tired of watching her stumble about.
“No!” Tamara said suddenly. The way she said it, it wasn’t as if she was responding to me. It was more like she was arguing with herself. “This isn’t right!”
“What isn’t right?” What was this, some psychotic episode? I didn’t know how else to explain how unhinged she was. This wasn’t like Tamara.
“Tamara, you’re scaring me!” Lily whimpered, watching from my side.
“I-I-what was that? What was that? You-I-you won’t believe me,” she ran a shaky hand through her hair, stuttering. Tamara never stuttered. “I-it-I –”
She was reeling and disoriented. My heart was racing madly as I watched her. This wasn’t good. She looked sick. Like she had a fever.
“What’s wrong?” Lily made a grab for her arm as she passed. “Stop moving, you look, like, sick. You should, you know, sit down for a bit –”
“No! Stop it, get off! I-I...what was it?”
“What? What won’t we believe?” I motioned Lily to move behind me as I stepped toward Tamara. If she was delirious, we needed to get her inside at the very least. Then, possibly to the hospital.
“I-I went...somewhere else...” she said it like she could barely understand the words. Like she was questioning herself even as she spoke.
“Oh,” I said slowly, carefully, moving forward. This definitely sounded like some kind of episode. Tamara was never one to muck around like this, normally. “Okay, where did you go? Into the house?”
“No!” Tamara suddenly slammed a fist into the tree. Into the centre of one of the circles. “I mean –”
Lily and I stumbled backwards with a shout. She had vanished. Mid-sentence, the moment her fist hit the tree, she had simply disappeared. There was a dent in the grass where she had been standing, but Tamara was gone.
“Tamara!” I ran forward, reaching out toward the place she had been standing, trying to find her.
My hand hit the tree and then...
...the feeling was like nothing I’d ever felt. Like a kick in the head, that’s what it was like. Everything was spinning, like one of those crazy, anti-gravity rides at carnivals, only ten times worse. My stomach made an abruptly quick journey to my throat and sat there, threatening to leap out my mouth any second. I felt like I was going to fall down, that I should’ve fallen down, only I couldn’t.
Suddenly it all stopped. I stood there, teetering with this horrible feeling of vertigo. The back paddock fence, with its ratty bushes, had disappeared. I caught a few flashes of scenery as my head spun – but it was all so bizarre. There were enormous silver-coloured trees with great boughs of yellow and red leaves. Bright yellow and orange flowers hung low to the ground, dipping towards the grass.
I glanced groggily around and jumped. Tamara stood right next to me, as clear as day, staring about as well. Our hands were practically touching. She turned to me, eyes as wide as they could be. We were standing inside a strange, wooden arch, looking out at somewhere that definitely wasn’t my back garden.
“You see it too, right?” she gasped out.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. What could I say to all of this? With my free hand, I grabbed one of hers and, with a push that should have been so easy but seemed to suck all the strength from my body, I pulled us back into the arch…
...and into another whirl of vicious spinning. We flew backward, straight into the patch of dead grass. My head was pounding and something was digging right into the middle of my back. Somewhere, Lily was screaming over and over, “Where did you go? Where did you go?”
For a few moments I couldn’t move. Everything was spinning and my stomach still sat happily in my throat, jumping each time I swallowed. I didn’t even realise my hand was still curled around Tamara’s – who was flopped over my stomach – until she swatted me limply with her free one.
“Let me go,” she coughed, struggling to stand up. “You’re crushing my fingers.”
I let go and, after a moment’s shoving and scrabbling, we both stood up, staring at the tree. It suddenly seemed more sinister outside. A dark, ominous presence crouched in my garden. Crouched over the dead-grass silhouette of the previous owner...
No! I snapped myself out of those thoughts. This wasn’t some horror movie. This was real life.
Tamara groaned and grasped her head. “You saw it? Tell me you saw it!”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to say what I thought. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. “I-I...I mean...Tamara...it was just a hallucination...”
“Of what, Rye? Hallucination of what? Of ******** space travel or whatever the ******** that was!”
Lily gasped. I glared at Tamara.
“I don’t know what it was, Tamara. All I know is – Lily! Don’t touch the ******** tree!” I dove on her, wrapping my arms around her, surprisingly, thin waist and hoisted her backward. She gasped and froze in my grip. I put her down, pushing them both toward the house. Lily was staring at me, her face pale with shock.
Tamara’s eyes were still locked on the tree, a hungry look in her eyes, now, even as I ushered her away. I shivered and pushed them on, into the house. I didn’t know what had happened. Maybe we both had some weird allergic reaction to the bark. All I knew was I didn’t want anyone near it. I didn’t want to be near it.
I herded them down the corridor to the front door. Both of girls started to protest.
“Rye, tell me you saw it! Please, just tell me!”
“I don’t understand! What happened? What happened?”
I somehow managed to open the door and get them both outside. My heart was still pounding. I could feel sweat beading on my forehead. I needed to sit down. I was going to pass out.
Yeah, I’m so manly.
Tamara glared at me on the doorstep, lips pursed, arms crossed. “You saw it, I know you did!” she snapped, turning her back. “I’m coming back, tomorrow and then you’ll see!”
Not if I could help it, I thought. I’ll cut the bloody thing down before then.
Lily shot me another panicked glance, then one at Tamara, as if she wanted to keep arguing, to ask again what had happened. She hovered on the doorstep before changing her mind, and running down the stairs.
“I’ll, like, see you tomorrow...Rye. For study...Tamara, wait!”
I leaned against the front door, trying to look casual, while quietly propping myself up on shaking legs. Silently I told myself I’d seen nothing. Nothing had happened. I’d played too many games. It was a migraine. A shared hallucination, brought on by allergies. It. Wasn’t. Real. I kept repeating that as Tamara hauled up her bike and she and Lily sped off down the long drive and out onto the road. Only Lily looked back, face apologetic, before her ponytail whipped her across the eyes.
I stayed, leaning in the doorway, until Mum and Dad pulled up, the smell of pizza and antiseptic wafting with them, still repeating the words over in my head.
It. Wasn’t. Real.
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