Night Lights, page 5
That was as far as she got before Nika folded at the waist and puked all over the floor.
NOW
It’s ten minutes past check-out time when Zoey’s purple hatchback pulls into Motel Tropicana’s driveway. My relief is overwhelming. It almost surpasses my embarrassment for needing to involve her in the first place. She must think I’m a helpless kid, unable to care for myself let alone my little sister. I swallow the shame like a bitter pill and try to focus on what I can control. This is only the first step in what is bound to be a long and complicated day.
I pull our room’s door closed behind Nika and flag down the car as it moves through the car park. It makes a sharp turn, coming to a stop on an angle in front of our room. The engine idles for a moment as Zoey watches us through the windscreen, her expression hidden behind large sunglasses. We barely know each other. I’m putting my trust in a virtual stranger.
Finally, she cuts the engine and the door pops open. I brace myself for her to slam it, though I don’t know if she’s still pissed at me. She didn’t sound angry on the phone.
“You okay?” she says, removing her sunglasses. She hooks them into the pocket of her denim jacket as her gaze falls on Nika. Her eye makeup is dark and smoky, applied with a heavy hand and hard to look away from. “How are you, Beautiful Flower? Feeling better?”
“Mm-hmm,” Nika says shyly, swinging Bunny in one hand.
“Have you checked out already?” Zoey asks me. Her dark hair is scraped into a rough and ready ponytail.
I can barely look at her as I mumble, “I’m not sure if the room’s paid for. I don’t have any money.”
“Okay.” She jerks her head for me to follow her. I ask Nika to sit and wait in one of the plastic patio chairs outside our room.
Zoey holds out her hand. “Give me the key.”
I place it in her palm as she walks towards the office, her black buckled boots clunking against the concrete. Without hesitating, she pops it into a box marked Key Drop.
As she’s walking back to me, she says, “They always take credit card details when you check in. Your parents will get charged now that the key’s returned.”
“What about things like phone calls?”
“They’ll charge that to the credit card too,” she says.
“What if the room was paid for in cash?”
“Then they’ll have your parents’ address details and post them an invoice.”
Dad probably supplied a fake address, I don’t mention out loud. He mumbled something to Mum yesterday about paying cash for petrol so it couldn’t be traced. Who or what does he think is tracking us?
“It was my dad,” I say as Zoey veers towards her car. “Who checked us in, I mean. My mum wasn’t with us.”
“Where is she?” Zoey asks.
“I’m hoping she’s back in Wooralla.”
“Wait.” She stops and turns. “You aren’t sure?” We both glance at Nika, her gumboots swinging back and forth between the legs of the patio chair. Zoey leans close to me, her brows knitting together. “Are you guys in some kind of danger?”
I struggle to meet her eye. “I honestly don’t know.”
She says nothing for a beat, her head on an angle. I scratch my shoulder nervously and my eyelid twitches. I try to blink it away.
“Are you …?” she says.
“What?”
“You seem a bit … strung out.”
I dig my knuckle into my eye socket and massage my eyelid. “I haven’t been sleeping very well.”
“That’s all?” She says it like she’s not sure she should believe me. Does she think I’m on something? I open my mouth to try to explain about the sleepwalking, but Zoey’s already turning away. She walks over to Nika with her hand outstretched. “Ready to go for a ride?”
I hurry over to the rear passenger door of Zoey’s car, trying not to appear completely useless. As I open it and inspect the back seat, I groan under my breath. No car seat for Nika. Why would there be? It’s in our station wagon, wherever the hell my dad has taken it.
“Hang on,” Zoey says, moving to the back end of the car. She opens the hatchback’s rear door and bumps around for a moment, producing a black booster seat you can use with the car’s existing seat belts.
“My mum runs a family day care,” she says. “Sorry I couldn’t get my hands on a proper car seat at such short notice.”
“No, this is good. It’s great in fact.” I muster half a smile. “You’re a lifesaver.”
Zoey shrugs off my comment.
“Here, munchkin,” she says, crouching in front of Nika. She offers my sister her phone. “You like Pokémon?”
Nika gives her a coy nod.
“She’ll use up your data,” I say. “You’re already doing too much for us.”
Zoey brings a finger to her lips. She then pulls some white earbuds from her back pocket and gives them to my sister as well. “These will help you hear better in the car.”
“Oh, she’ll be fine—”
Zoey cuts me off with a look.
She helps Nika plug them in and get the app going before straightening up and stepping aside so I can assist Nika into the booster seat.
As I move past her, Zoey leans forward and lowers her voice. “You need to talk to me.” It’s more of an order than a suggestion. “It’s probably best if your little sister doesn’t hear a word of what you’re about to say.” She arches an eyebrow as if to say, Am I right?
And it’s the strangest thing: my chest hollows out and I find myself blinking back tears.
I know I’m exhausted, and I know I’m probably fighting off whatever virus Nika and Mum have had, but I’m at serious risk of losing it right here in this motel car park. I quickly duck my head inside the car before my emotions spill over.
Uncle Marty’s always telling me it’s okay to cry, and I get the feeling Zoey isn’t the kind of person to judge. But Nika’s watching me with bright, trusting eyes as I buckle her into the booster seat. I need to hold it together for her sake.
As we drive out of Warragul, I search the streets for my family’s blue station wagon. I only relax my grip on the door’s armrest when we pick up speed on the highway and everything starts blurring into one.
“So your dad ordered you to get in the car?” Zoey asks. “Without packing anything? Without your dog?”
“Or my uncle.”
“I’ve gotta be honest,” she says. “It sounds bonkers. Why on earth would you go with him?”
I don’t know how to describe it; the mood hanging over that cabin, the freakish events that had us all on edge.
“I mean … he’s my father,” I say. “I’ve always had to do what he says.”
“What about your mum? When did you last see her?”
“Yesterday. After we left Wooralla we stopped for petrol. While Dad was filling the car, Mum told us she had to use the restroom.”
I shift uncomfortably in my seat, remembering Mum’s dazed expression. She didn’t seem at all like herself.
Look after your sister, she told me. Everything’s going to be okay.
“Then she jumped out of the car and ran towards the service station’s shop instead of the restrooms at the side of the building. I heard Dad yell something and he started fumbling around with the petrol pump. After a few seconds he took off after her, but when he came back later he was alone.” I chance a quick look at Zoey’s profile. “Dad paid for the petrol and we took off again. He didn’t say a word to me until we pulled in at that motel.”
Zoey’s quiet for a few moments, checking her mirrors and changing lanes. “What the hell happened at that cabin?” she mumbles, more to herself than to me. “Are you sure you want to go back there?”
Pretty damned sure I don’t.
But it’s not like I have any other plan. At the very least Nika and I will be reunited with Uncle Marty. Maybe Mum’s already there.
“I’m hoping I’ll find something that makes sense,” I say.
Zoey gives me a sidelong glance. She doesn’t press me, though it looks like she wants to. I’m tempted to ask her about the UFO Museum, about what people have seen and experienced in Wooralla.
Has she seen things?
What does she think happened to her brother?
Now that the fog of the last nine days is lifting, these sorts of questions seem childish and silly when held up and examined under the bright glare of this July morning.
“Listen,” I say. “I’m really sorry about the other day. Saying what I did about your brother.”
Zoey almost looks at me, instead keeping her eyes on the road.
“I-I obviously don’t know what I’m talking about,” I stumble on. “I didn’t mean to be insensitive—”
“Can we not talk about this right now?”
“Yeah. I mean, no. That’s fine.” I turn towards the window. “Sorry.”
If Zoey has any other questions for me, they’ve dried up along with her patience. We drive in silence for a while, my eyelids becoming heavy. At some point fatigue catches up with me, because when I open my eyes we’re passing the billboard for The Flying Saucer.
I jerk upright in my seat, checking for drool at the corner of my mouth.
“Do you want to head into town first?” Zoey asks. “Maybe have a look around?”
Her face has softened, a trace of humour in her expression. Have I been snoring?
I shake my head. I need to find Uncle Marty. I need to search for Scout.
“I have to go to the cabin,” I tell her.
With some reluctance, Zoey flicks on the blinker and takes the left-hand turn onto Prospect Way. As we climb higher up the mountain, Zoey guides the car over potholes and around bends with ease, her mouth set in a determined line. I keep a lookout for Cooee Cabin’s letterbox, trying to give Zoey some indication of how much further it is.
“Don’t worry,” she says, her voice oddly flat. “I know where to go.”
DAY THREE
Seven days ago
I tugged gently on Scout’s lead, coaxing her towards the walking track I’d spied in bushland behind the cabin.
“Come on, pup. This way.”
She’d been reluctant to come outside this morning, and showed no interest when Mum and Marty left earlier to drive Nika to a medical centre in the nearby town of Hadley. Usually it was a battle to keep Scout from pulling ahead, her lead jerking this way and that as she tried to explore everything all at once. Today she seemed subdued, even skittish, snout raised to tentatively sniff the chilly air.
It was still spitting rain. It tapped against my rain jacket and pinged off nearby tree branches. I figured it was light enough that we wouldn’t get soaked through, and I couldn’t stand another minute inside the cabin with Dad on the warpath. He’d woken up cold and grumpy, complaining of a sore neck and a headache. Join the club, I thought. We were probably all coming down with whatever bug Nika had picked up.
Nobody was talking about that bang on the door yesterday. Not in front of Dad anyway. He’d decided it was a freak gust of wind, maybe a bird or a bat, and sneered at my suggestion that somebody might have been pranking us.
“Rubbish,” he’d said. “Who’d bother coming all the way up here on a wet night to wind up complete strangers?”
But I noticed how he kept an eye on the windows for the rest of the evening, at least until the beers kicked in and he became much less focused.
At the start of the walking track, the air smelled of wet eucalyptus leaves and the cabin’s chimney smoke. The deeper Scout and I wandered into the bush, the surroundings took on an earthy scent of damp bark and stagnant puddles. The ground was thick with ferns and detritus, but there was an obvious trail leading downhill towards the valley. I decided I would follow it for half an hour before doubling back, unless the rain got heavier and forced us to turn around. Sticking to the trail meant I wouldn’t get lost out here, especially since I had no Google Maps and barely any phone signal to speak of.
After ten minutes of walking, some of the stiffness in my hips and shoulders began to ease. I’d slept badly, my body bowing with the sag of the couch. At one point during the night, I’d woken myself by sitting upright and waving my arms around. I hadn’t done stuff like that since I was a kid. Zach and I shared a bedroom back then, and sometimes he found me standing beside my bed or near the window, not responding to his questions because I was still asleep. It would freak him out and he’d screech for Mum and Dad, effectively waking me up. I’d blink at them all bleary-eyed, wondering where I was and why they were all hovering around me.
I thought I’d grown out of that sort of thing. It reminded me of Nika’s weird behaviour yesterday, how she’d complained about hearing noises before squealing her lungs out. Maybe she hadn’t been fully awake. Maybe whatever illness she’d picked up was making her delirious.
Scout yanked on the lead as we reached a steep section of the trail. She was more agile than me on the narrow path, and my tentative footing was slowing her down. After the third time of her jerking forward and almost upending me in the mud, I reached down and unclipped the lead from her collar.
“Don’t take off,” I warned her, shoving the lead into my backpack.
She bolted ahead down the trail but soon doubled back when she realised I wasn’t keeping pace. She seemed content to keep her head low and her nose busy with all of the new scents, occasionally wandering off the track here and there, always re-joining whenever I called.
As we reached a break in the trees, I noticed the unmistakable sound of trickling water.
“What’s that, Scoutsy?”
Her ears pricked up the way they always did when she was listening for possums along the back fence at home. When she realised it was something as unexciting as a nearby creek, her tail wagged a few times before she returned to her investigation of a hollow log.
We were almost in the valley now. The trail flattened out, and I spotted the creek winding through the bush. The overnight rain had created a fairly decent flow. Myrtle beech trees towered overhead, their moss-covered trunks and gnarled branches bulging with knotty gargoyle faces. The pop and chirp of frogs temporarily ceased as I rustled past them in the undergrowth.
Scout hesitated up ahead. The trail intersected with the creek here, some partially submerged stepping stones the only way across. In dryer weather this crossing would have been an easy few steps across a pebbled creek bed, but today it would be trickier: a balancing act on slick stones in half a foot of water. When Scout sensed that I intended to follow her, she bounded across the creek, more than happy to get her muddy paws soaked.
Halfway across, I discovered a picturesque view of the creek winding away through ferns. Muted light broke through the tree canopy like something you’d find on a tourist postcard. Taking care to keep my balance, I pulled my phone out and snapped a photo for Erin, then, on a whim, flipped the screen around to take a selfie. I angled the phone low to try and show the scale of the surrounding trees in the corridor of green behind me.
It was an unflattering angle – all chin pimples and cavernous nostrils. I took another one, then another, my calves burning as I held my unnatural pose on the stepping stones. Unsure why I was so intent on sending a decent photo of myself to Erin, I enlarged one of the pics to check my face was in focus. It wasn’t, but the myrtle beeches behind me were. One of the knobbly trunks was throwing a strange mottled shadow against the tree beside it.
I glanced over my shoulder. Weird. The shadow wasn’t visible to the naked eye. I scrolled to the previous photo, then the one before that. The shadow appeared in both of those too. It was elongated, tucked between tree trunks. Grey. Almost solid.
I snapped another selfie from the same angle as before, and scrutinised it like I had with the previous pictures.
The shadow was gone.
Behind me, something skittered up a tree trunk. I jerked my head to look, my gaze drawn to the tree canopy. Some of the high branches suddenly quivered with activity. As suddenly as the branches shook, they settled again. A few leaves gently spiralled towards the ground.
As I craned my neck further, my foot slipped off the stepping stone. It dolloped into the creek.
“Shit!”
It was only shallow, but ice water gushed into my sneaker.
“Ugh!”
I dashed to the opposite bank, my shoe squelching as it hit the walking track. Scout reappeared at the sound of my voice, bounding towards me and sniffing around my wet ankle.
She stopped. Her ears and tail stood upright. She stared up into the tree canopy and released a low growl.
“Come on,” I said, hurrying past her. I had no desire to hang around here any longer. I patted my thigh to draw Scout’s attention. She hesitated, growling again, only following when I whistled over my shoulder.
After another ten minutes of walking, at a decidedly brisker pace than before, we reached a clearing where the creek opened out into a large pond. All around us the mountains loomed, seeming three times larger down here in the valley than from Cooee Cabin’s verandah. The highest peak was most likely Wooralla Ridge, the mountain mentioned by the grizzled old bloke from the diner.
Across the other side of the pond was a small timber structure not much larger than a caravan. It might have been one of those camping huts for hikers, though the windows were boarded up with plywood on the outside like it hadn’t been used in some time. Beyond it was the end of a remote access road. It reminded me there were old gold mines under these mountains, and shacks like these might be hidden all over the place. I was keen to take a closer look, but the pond was swollen from last night’s rain. I’d have to go further down-creek to find a shallow place to cross.
Up ahead, Scout burst out of the undergrowth, barking wildly as if she’d been spooked. The explosion of sound echoed around us, through the trees and across the water.
“Jesus!” I said, clutching my chest. “Scout!”
She ran at me along the narrow trail. I jumped out of the way to let her pass, her paws kicking up mud as she disappeared in the direction we’d come from.
