Night Lights, page 10
“Perfect day to go underground,” joked Uncle Marty, peering through the kitchen window, “and get away from all this terrible sunshine.”
Mum flicked him lightly with a tea towel. “The mine tour is only forty-five minutes. You can worship the sun gods after that.”
Dad was opting out of the mine tour. He said he was feeling out of sorts so he’d stay behind with Scout. According to Mum, he’d tossed and turned all night, prompting her to crawl into Nika’s bed in the wee hours of the morning for some unbroken sleep.
“We can postpone it till another day, Tugger,” Marty offered. “I know you’re keen to see the gold mine.”
Dad sipped from his cup of tea and didn’t respond. It almost seemed like he was sulking because Marty had changed his mind about coming along. Dad was finding fault with everything Marty did, from the way he cooked last night’s hamburgers to his method of starting a fire in the wood heater. All of Marty’s attempts at conversation with Dad were met with grunts or stony silence, so the fact that my uncle was suggesting we postpone the gold mine until a day that Dad could join us was pretty generous of him.
Mum, on the other hand, insisted that we stick to the plan.
“The tours are only on twice a week,” she said. “And Nika’s finally perked up. It will be good to get out of the cabin.”
And not soon enough, I thought, noticing the shadow creeping over Dad’s face.
When Mum came out of the bedroom a short while later dressed in the novelty T-shirt that Uncle Marty bought her from the UFO Museum, Dad made a derisive sound about the design – a cartoon alien making heart hands with the caption ‘I believe in YOU!’
“Christ,” Dad muttered, giving her the once-over. “What the hell is that?”
Mum lifted her chin and said, “A gift from my brother.”
I noticed the way she purposely left her parka unzipped so the T-shirt was on full display, even though she must have been feeling the cold.
After spotting Mum’s T-shirt, Nika insisted on bringing her UFO stress ball, refusing to stow it in her little pink backpack alongside Bunny.
“You know she’ll drop that somewhere,” Dad grumbled as we were leaving.
Mum answered in a monotone. “It’ll be fine.”
“Well, if she loses it,” he added, “you can deal with the tantrum.”
Mum shot him a scathing look. “I’m pretty good at that,” she said. “I’m getting plenty of practice.”
I kept my head down as we exited the cabin, not wanting to draw Dad’s ire. Once we were all in the car, Uncle Marty attempted to lighten the mood.
“That’s a fine-looking T-shirt you have there,” he said to Mum.
“I know!” she replied haughtily, then burst out laughing. Her shoulders dropped like the tension had been released.
We played a silly game of I Spy on the short drive to the gold mine, and when we pulled into the car park beside the wooden barn, there were three other parked cars and a few people milling around. After being corralled into the chilly barn to pay for the tour, the four of us were absorbed into a group of twenty for a quick presentation about the gold mine’s history. Before heading into the mine, we were required to don white hard hats, enjoying a laugh at each other’s expense when we were instructed to slip shower cap-style hairnets on beforehand. It seemed like hair lice should be the least of our worries in a town that was known for UFOs, but we complied all the same. No hair net, no hard hat, no mine tour.
The entrance to the mine was an underwhelming hole in the side of a densely covered mountain, the size of a double doorway and reinforced with damp wooden beams. Our tour guide warned us to stick together and not deviate down any of the smaller mine shafts that were chained off from public access. He was around my dad’s age, tall and lanky with a goatee, and he was wearing an orange hard hat with a headlamp attached to the front. He seemed fairly laidback, and his instructions were firm and friendly. We followed him along an eerie tunnel illuminated by bare light bulbs strung on a black power cord. Every now and then we passed flickering kerosene lanterns, no doubt added for atmosphere rather than necessity.
We soon understood the need for hard hats due to the lumpy walls and low ceilings of jagged rock. More than once Marty and I bumped our heads in areas where the tunnel narrowed. The tour guide stopped at regular intervals to give us all a chance to ask questions and take photos. As was always inevitable whenever we were in a group of strangers, some elderly person always had to quiz my mother about Kannika.
Today it was a grey-haired woman in a nylon tracksuit. She’d been sliding my sister curious looks instead of keeping track of two rowdy children who kept running ahead up the tunnel. She’d already boasted to us that they were her grandsons.
“Is she adopted?” the woman asked my mother, pointing a knobbly finger at Nika. Before Mum could answer, the woman followed up with a blunt, “Where’s she from?”
She made it sound like Nika was a doll we’d plucked off the shelf of a department store. Even in the dim light I noticed the way Mum’s jaw tightened.
“Where was she born?” Mum clarified, doing well to hide the impatience in her voice. “Thailand.”
She usually offered a few more details about the village where Nika’s birth mother lived. Today she clearly wasn’t in the mood. When the older woman finally noticed her grandsons being reprimanded by the tour guide for removing their hard hats, she hurried ahead to sort them out. Mum purposely slowed us all down so we were at the back of the group.
“Let’s put some distance between us and that family,” she murmured to Marty.
My sister was lagging behind anyway, still low on energy. She refused to let anyone give her a piggyback. Every now and then she tossed her stress ball into the air and caught it, obviously in good spirits even though she wasn’t feeling a hundred percent.
The tour guide happily rattled on, explaining how the mine produced almost fourteen tonnes of gold during its fifty years of operation. My mind drifted to Graeme at the UFO Museum, his suggestion that this area may be rich in something else that extraterrestrial visitors wanted. It was laughable, really. But that didn’t stop me from peering down the chained-off tunnels as we passed them, almost expecting some kind of alien life form to emerge from the darkness and stalk us at the rear of the group.
Nika was growing tired. She dropped her stress ball a couple of times instead of catching it. Each time it happened, Mum or Marty absently picked it up and handed it back to her, straining to hear the guide’s commentary about the miners’ grim working conditions. When Nika tossed the ball and fumbled her catch again, it fell near Marty’s foot and he inadvertently kicked it into the rock wall. It rebounded and skidded into a chained-off mine shaft, quickly disappearing into the shadows.
“Mum-mum!” Nika squawked. “My ball!”
Mum and Marty stopped and looked down, scouring the ground.
“It went in there,” I said, indicating the tunnel. “Hang on. I’ll get it.”
I hesitated in front of the rusted metal chain linked from one rock wall to the other. It was only waist-high and easy enough to step over. All four of us instinctively glanced towards the tour guide. The group had already pulled ahead.
“Be quick about it,” Mum urged in a low voice. She stared into the darkness as though she might spot the ball and guide me directly to it. The tunnel was pitch-black. The golden glow from the main tunnel didn’t reach any further than a couple of metres.
I swung one leg over the chain, then the other, pausing long enough to switch on my phone’s torch light. It didn’t illuminate much, so I bent over and held it low to the ground, sweeping it from left to right.
The deeper I moved into the tunnel, the more it felt like the craggy walls were closing in. I couldn’t even hear the tour guide anymore, or the elderly woman calling out to her unruly grandchildren. Behind me, the silhouettes of Mum, Marty, and Nika lingered on the other side of the chain. I’d come much further in than I’d realised.
Ahead of me, somewhere in the darkness, came a high-pitched screech. Short and sharp, almost machine-like.
I stiffened.
Something’s in here with me?
Straightening to my full height, I pointed my phone into the gloom. The darkness absorbed all light, rendering it useless.
My pulse kicked up a notch. I just needed to find the ball and get out.
I directed the light at the ground again as new sounds echoed down the tunnel. Voices. Words tumbling over one another, reverberating in layers. I couldn’t make much sense of it until—
“What the hell did you do to it?”
The words punched through the overlapping echoes. A male voice. Whoever it was sounded angry. The last thing I wanted was for them to stumble across me in an area of the mine that was off limits.
I quickly returned to my task, finally spotting the silver stress ball tucked up against the jagged rock wall like a precious metal waiting to be mined. As I snatched it up, more words reached me in the darkness.
“It’s dead.”
I gripped the ball tighter, my fingers digging into the foam.
“Owen,” Marty hissed behind me. “Hurry up!”
I scurried back towards the main tunnel. Mum and Marty moved aside to allow me through just as a tall figure stomped into the space between them. He flicked on his headlamp, temporarily blinding me.
“Hey!” barked the tour guide. “Get out of there!”
Sheepishly, I straddled the chain and handed the silver ball to Nika. The rest of the tour group had backtracked and gathered around to gawk.
“These tunnels are closed to the public,” said the guide. His laidback nature from earlier was now replaced with impatience. “What do you think you’re doing?”
He peered past me into the darkness, a hint of panic in his expression. Anyone would think the walls were about to cave in.
“Our apologies,” Mum said. “My daughter lost her ball. We were retrieving it.”
The tour guide must have heard the brusqueness of Mum’s tone. He chose to drop it, quickly ushering us to the front of the group where he could keep an eye on us. Mum placed a reassuring hand on my back as we passed everybody’s judgey stares, including an arched eyebrow from the tracksuited grandmother who really had nothing to look superior about.
“Thanks, Owee,” Nika said in a tiny voice, slipping her hand into mine.
It warmed my heart, though certainly not the tour guide’s. He was stiff and detached for the remainder of the mine tour, and I half-expected him to turn around and give me another serve. When we finally made it back out into the open, he directed our group to the barn to remove our hard hats, but he didn’t accompany us inside. Instead he moved off to the edge of the parking area to make a phone call. I became instantly paranoid that he was calling the cops and I was going to be charged with trespassing.
“Don’t worry about it,” my uncle said, following my sightline. “That dude’s clearly spent too much time underground.”
Marty and I waited in the car while Mum took Nika to the restroom. I watched the tour guide pass by through the back window. He loped all the way across to the other side of the parking area, where somebody in a beanie and puffer jacket was emerging from an unmarked bush track at the side of the mountain. They had a brief but tense conversation with lots of head shaking. Only when the person in the puffer jacket whipped off their beanie in frustration did I notice a shock of white-blond hair.
Bruno. Again.
Was this guy freakin’ everywhere?
The two of them walked back across the car park together, no longer speaking. I shrank into the back seat as they passed our station wagon, hoping to remain invisible. Unfortunately, Mum and Nika chose that exact moment to return to the car. Both Bruno and the tour guide tracked their movements, and Bruno’s eyes found mine staring back at him through the rear passenger window. He muttered something to the tour guide and they both frowned.
Seriously? They were blowing this whole incident out of proportion.
Besides, my attention had snagged on something far more perplexing. As Mum buckled Nika into the back seat, then climbed into the front to start the car, my eyes remained locked on Bruno’s face.
I touched my hand to the side of my head, feeling a phantom ache from our head clash two days ago.
It doesn’t make sense.
A red graze was now slashed across Bruno’s temple in the exact spot it hadn’t existed yesterday.
I found it hard to settle for the rest of the day. I offered to walk Scout since it was still sunny and it seemed like a shame to waste it. This time I stuck to the road and avoided the bush track behind the cabin. Twenty minutes down Prospect Way towards town, followed by a thirty-minute trudge back uphill. A decent stretch of time to turn things over in my mind.
The tour guide’s overreaction was weird. The Bruno thing was even weirder. There was that black car we’d seen lurking near the cabin yesterday, that freakish bang on the door on our second night, not to mention Zoey’s missing brother. And what about those eerie words echoing down the mine shaft?
“It’s dead.”
There was enough bizarre stuff going on in this town even without the UFO mania.
After dinner, I tried to text Erin with an update but received the Waiting for connection message. It was probably just as well since I’d rambled incoherently about the day’s events. Erin would probably think I was deranged.
Dad had kept to himself for most of the afternoon, and started drinking well before dinnertime. There were five empty beer bottles on the floor beside the couch where he’d been parked for the last few hours. He ate dinner there instead of joining us at the table, and only peeled himself off the seat cushions long enough to get Nika into the bath. Mum chatted to Marty at the kitchen sink as they washed up, and when Mum brought up the nosy grandmother on the mine tour, it momentarily drew Dad’s attention away from the TV.
Mum and Marty’s light banter soon morphed into a more serious discussion about intercountry adoption. I could tell Dad was listening in by the way he occasionally glanced in their direction.
“You remember Leanne from my workplace?” Marty said. “She and her husband adopted a young Taiwanese boy?”
Mum handed him another plate to dry. “Of course.”
“Well, they heard a horror story about another couple who adopted from Thailand,” Marty went on. “Turns out the adoption agency they used was dodgy, and there were loads of irregularities in the paperwork. Fudged legal documents. Birth mothers coerced or flat out not giving consent.”
Mum sucked a breath through her teeth. “God. That’s awful.”
“Yep,” Marty agreed. “Now, years down the track, Thai authorities have discovered some of the adoptions weren’t legal because the children had been trafficked.”
“No,” Mum said, wincing. “Those poor families.”
“It’s a whole mess,” Marty added. “Investigations are ongoing, apparently.”
Dad shifted on the couch, half-turning to face the kitchen. He was frowning. “What are you getting at?”
My uncle’s head jerked around like he was surprised to find out Dad was listening.
“I’m not getting at anything,” Marty said. “I’m just telling Jane about what came up in a conversation with my co-worker.”
“So you think Kannika’s adoption was dodgy?” Dad said in a combative tone.
My stomach tightened.
Marty laughed, more to defuse the situation than to play down the subject matter. It was obvious to all of us that Dad was at least five beers deep. Probably more.
“Of course not,” Marty said.
Dad pushed himself to a stand, swaying slightly. “So why bring it up, then? Bloody know-it-all.”
Marty took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of his nose, a mannerism he shared with Mum. He was clearly trying not to bite back for Mum’s sake, but the strain was showing.
“Calm down, okay?” he said. “It was a casual conversation between me and my sister.”
“I see what you’re trying to do. You think by accusing me of—”
“For god’s sake, Mick!” Marty snapped. “I’m not accusing anybody of a dodgy adoption, okay? Nobody’s coming to take your daughter away. Jesus.”
Dad staggered another step, bumping into the arm of the couch. “What did you just say?”
“Marty,” Mum pleaded, placing her hand on her brother’s arm. She held her other hand up at Dad. “Mick, give it a rest. Please.”
“Sit down, Tugger,” Marty said.
“Or better still,” Mum added, “go to bed and sleep it off.”
In the hallway the bathroom door was ajar; I could hear Nika splashing around. I hoped she hadn’t overheard any of this.
Dad crossed the room slowly, dragging heavy feet. He threw one last dark look in my uncle’s direction.
“You’d love that, wouldn’t you?” he said. “You’d be the first one to call authorities and have Nika taken away, just to screw me over.”
Marty scoffed in disbelief. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that. I love your kids, and my sister. I’d never do anything to hurt them.”
“If you love kids so much,” Dad fired back, “why don’t you adopt one of your own and leave mine the hell alone.”
Marty made a quiet pffft sound and shook his head. There was nothing more to say – Dad’s responses were petty and irrational. I wouldn’t have blamed Marty if he’d marched over to shake some sense into him. Thankfully my father staggered to the bedroom and slammed the door.
Mum and Marty exchanged a look heavy with meaning.
“I know,” Mum said, raking frustrated hands through her hair. “I know!”
She was answering a question that her brother apparently didn’t need to vocalise.
Dread snaked its way through my guts. It suddenly seemed like this holiday was an ultimatum of some kind, like things were coming to a head. It felt like our family would return home from this cabin very different to the one that arrived.
Not knowing how we’d be altered was what worried me.
