Wintering

by Krissy Kneen

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ‘Who is this, please?’

  ‘Jessica. Jessica Weir.’

  ‘I’m sorry, miss, but this was the last number—’

  ‘Matthew’s on his way home. From work. He’s late. He should be home soon.’

  And only the ocean breathing into the silence as if her own chest were rising and falling without fail. As if his heart were still beating. As if nothing in the world had changed. ‘We’ve found a car, miss, but there’s no sign of a driver.’

  When Jessica’s partner disappears into the dark Tasmanian forest, there is of course the mystery of what happened. The deserted car; the enigmatic final image on his phone.

  There is the strange circle of local women, widows of disappeared men, with their edgy fellowship and unhinged theories.

  And there is the forest itself: looming over this tiny settlement on the remote tip of the island.

  But for Jessica there is also the tight community in which she is still a stranger and Matthew was not. What secrets do they know about her own life that she doesn’t? And why do they believe things that should not—cannot—be true? For her own sanity, Jessica needs to know two things. Who was Matthew? And who—or what—has he become?

  Praise for An Uncertain Grace, shortlisted for the Stella Prize

  ‘Endlessly curious and inventive.’ Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Just gripping.’ Australian

  ‘A beautiful, dark read.’ NZ Listener

  For my father, Barry Elphick, my heart in the deep south

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  WINTERING

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ALSO BY KRISSY KNEEN

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  Jessica liked the torchlight. She liked the way her footsteps seemed to echo louder in the surrounding dark, the way the torch bounced off the stalactites, the mineral glitter. This was how a show cave should be: quiet, black, infused with a wintery chill. She could taste the morning and the cave’s acidity in the air. She bent to lift a scrap of paper off the floor, stashed it in the plastic bag. It already contained a crazy assortment of human detritus: a tissue, a receipt; a dropped cotton bud, of all things.

  She was thinking of the unseen waste that would have entered the fragile ecosystem of the cave with this litter. Skin cells, hair, mud dragged in from God knows where and all the microorganisms that would be squelching through it. Hastings Cave was constantly contaminated, a dirty cave. This is what would happen to Winter Cave, her cave, the cave where she had carefully gathered her research. It would be a tragedy if it was ever opened up for public display. She felt the hairs on her arms rise imagining it. The torchlight fell on the little cluster of stalagmites that the guides called Titania’s Garden.

  A flash of red. What was that?

  Entrails. A little pile of animal viscera strewn along the rock.

  Jessica ducked under the chain-link barrier. This particular part of the cave system had a very thin floor, seemingly carved out by a relentless current—little waves and eddies etched into the surface, glistening pools. She knew that the river had flooded the cavern at one time or another. Just thinking about it made her uneasy as she placed a tentative foot on the flowstone. The water rising fast in the cramped space, the huge teeth of the rock formation closing on you from above as you struggled against the tide.

  She had anticipated skulls. She sometimes imagined whole skeletons lurking beneath the solidified sediment; thought one day a stalactite would snap off and the grinning jaw of a human skull would emerge, screaming like something from a horror film. She had heard things at night too. Odd cracks and clicks when she was locking up and her imagination conjured spirits of the dead. The ghosts of massacred Aborigines rising up, serial killers hiding among the shadows. But this actual gore was unanticipated. Shocking. There should not be any kind of animal down here in the depths of the earth, let alone a dead and disembowelled one.

  She shuffled out onto the shelf, paused. One careful step after another.

  It was a possum, a large one, bristling black and mean-mouthed. The face had been gnawed into. The eyes were gone, sucked from the skull. The stomach had been ripped open and, when she bent to take a leg in one hand and dragged it to one side, she could see that it had been gutted—the organs the most succulent parts. The carcass, speared onto the rod of a stalagmite, must have been shoved down with extraordinary force. The blunt-ended rock pushed through the creature’s flesh. A thousand years of rock growth damaged in an instant.

  Jessica thought briefly about taping off the area, setting it up like a crime scene. Photographing the corpse and bringing in the team of investigators to unravel the mystery. It was quite possible the possum had crept into the cave just before closing time, when the great iron doors were swung shut and double bolted—but what sort of predator could possibly creep in to kill it in such a brutal way? And then sneak out again past a locked gate?

  No, the killer must have come up via the river caverns. Something sure-footed: able to manage the treacherous climb and somehow find its way back out again.

  Unless it was still lurking here somewhere.

  Jessica felt a shiver creep along her shoulders and swung her torch sharply into the corners of the chamber. There was no time for a CSI-style investigation; the first group of tourists would be assembling in an hour. She grimaced as she lifted the carcass, stone cold but still oozing blood. She popped it into her plastic bag, along with the cotton bud and the Band-Aid and the ticket stub. The guts dragged behind, slapping against the edge of the bag. Jessica pursed her lips and made a small sound in the back of her throat as she picked up the flaccid trail with her fingers and secured it inside the plastic.

  The stalagmite, coated in thick red slop, would certainly be damaged by this. Normal skin acids from hands reaching out to grab a column did enough harm. There was a slippery patch of ground and a formation stretching from floor to ceiling at the bottom of the incline where people would reach out to the cold damp pillar to steady themselves. She didn’t blame them. They slipped in their useless city soles. One old man had fallen on her tour and she had wondered about fractured hips and winches before he heaved himself up off the floor of the cavern, refusing any help, limping on his way.

  A woman died once. Not in the cave, but that was where she collapsed. It was on Jessica’s day off; she heard about it later—the defib machine barking orders in its mechanical American accent, the struggle to get the woman back up the two hundred and fifty stairs. She died in the ambulance, but it was clear that the caves had claimed her, and the next morning, on Jessica’s regular dawn litter round, there were signs of death: coins spilled and left to bleed their metals into the acidic damp; the instruction sheet from the defibrillator trampled and dampening at the edge of a stair; a single glove. She’d picked it up and turned it in her hand and wondered if perhaps it was her glove, the woman’s, dropped while she was still living. Jessica had held it to her nose and gasped at the scent of violets.

  As she neared the entrance of the cave she was breathing more deeply. All those stairs and now the air rushing in to meet her with the sun. It always snapped a little colder at dawn and Jessica shrugged her parka more firmly onto her shoulders. She would have pulled her hood up if it wasn’t for the blood on both hands.

  A clang. Metal against metal. She stopped, rested her elbow on her raised knee, caught between steps as she listened to the rattling from above. And what if someone were to lock that gate while she was here in the dark? What if, more likely, the dog or fox or whatever it was that killed the possum was there at the top of the stairs, leaning against the heavy metal door? She listened. More clanging and, yes, the sound of foot
steps. Human: boots, stomping across the wooden platform. Jessica hurried up the last twisting flight.

  ‘Gus?’

  Gus turned, tucking his brown shirt into his trousers. He was wearing a ludicrous beanie with floppy woollen lappets falling over his ears. Each one was finished off with a plait and a pompom: he looked like a schoolgirl interrupted while dressing for a sports carnival. He swept the beanie off his head when he saw Jessica, lifted his fingers to tousle his thick dark hair. Stopped when he saw the gory bag.

  ‘What the fuck?’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘What indeed.’

  ‘What is…A cat? Dog?’

  ‘Possum.’

  ‘Seriously.’

  She nodded. ‘There’s a bit of it left in Titania’s Palace.’

  ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘Crawled in? I don’t know.’

  Gus walked to the edge of the stairs and looked down.

  ‘Like a satanic ritual or something?’ Gus asked.

  ‘Oh God, I hadn’t even thought of that. The organs were gone. I thought maybe a dog.’

  He reached over to the light switches and flicked them, waited for the loud hum as the whole system turned on. ‘Did you go all the way through?’

  ‘Just to Titania’s Palace.’

  ‘I’ll get a bucket.’

  ‘And gloves. Thick gloves.’

  ‘Did you bring your gun?’ Half a smile.

  She shook her head as if this might be a serious question. He was joking, but, not for the first time, she wished she had never told him about the gun. It seemed to have become a recurring motif.

  ‘It won’t still be in there, right? The dog or whatever?’ He checked his watch. ‘Half an hour till the first group gets here.’

  ‘Better get that bucket.’ She waited, nervously, peering down into the cavern as he disappeared into the workers’ room.

  By noon the possum was all but forgotten. The temperature was bitter and there was no whiff of dead smell near the bin where Jessica had dumped it. The corpse might well have frozen solid if not for the heater that the staff crowded around between tours.

  In the afternoon she was on her fifth tour when she looked up to the ceiling of Titania’s Palace, and her train of thought reminded her. She was thinking terrible things about a young boy on the tour, all grabbing hands and stomping boots. Jessica hovered near him, wary. He was only small, his head no higher than her waist, and yet he seemed to suck up a disproportionate amount of energy. She was wound up, cranky. She looked up to the long thin formations on the roof that were called straws, and imagined snapping one off and stabbing the boy in the eye with it, and that gave her the jolt to remember the disembowelled corpse.

  The boy’s mother was a broken shell of a creature, wrapped in layers of fabric. Thermal underwear, jumpers, a scarf and a puffy jacket. Jessica watched her shivering despite the swaddling. She had arrived with the boy tugging on one of her hands—a towrope for a stalling vehicle—a man in a red beanie barrelling up the track in front of them. Jessica watched him stop at the stump of an old-growth tree, wider than the girth of five large men. The rest of the tree had cracked and tumbled to the ground beside it, a creep of green blanketing the damp trunk, which crumbled off into the forest. The man in the red beanie had assumed a fake martial-arts pose, kicking at the trunk, saying Take my picture, take my picture as the child leapt up to kick at the tree with his father. Not a posed kick, but a genuine bark-destroying thump. The mother reached wearily into her handbag for a camera as the son whinged at her to hurry up and take our picture now. Now!

  Now those same boots were stomping too close to the stalagmites. Jessica manoeuvred herself between the child and the delicate rock formations. She imagined picking the kid up and bringing him down hard on the particular stalagmite that had already proven itself so apt for homicide.

  ‘Look!’ The boy was yelling so loud that they could probably hear him back at the guides’ room. ‘That one’s as tall as me! Look! Take a photo.’

  Jessica dropped to a crouch beside the child and pointed to the little patch of stalagmites, Titania’s Garden.

  ‘See in there?’

  The boy nodded, mercifully quiet for the first time in forty-five minutes.

  ‘See that big fat one there?’ she whispered.

  The child nodded again. He was already bored with listening. He shifted his weight from foot to foot as if he needed to pee.

  ‘Something was killed this morning.’

  ‘For real?’

  ‘Yep. A possum. A big possum. Almost as big as you. Something lifted it and crashed it down onto that big fat one there. It ripped through his body like he was made of jelly.’

  ‘Mum—’ he began to yell in his renewed excitement, but Jessica held his arm tight and shushed him quickly.

  ‘That thing that killed him? It might still be in here. It might be waiting in the darkness there at the end of the chamber. It might be waiting for the noisiest little boy to come along. They like the noisy ones, these apex predators. Have you heard of that? Apex predator?’

  The boy, quiet now, nodded gently.

  ‘Well, they like the smallest and the noisiest ones. So I am just wondering if it is safe for you to be yelling like you did? Or to be kicking at the stalagmites or touching the columns, leaving the scent of your hands and feet for the apex predator?’ The boy stared, silent and wide-eyed.

  ‘Not saying that’s how it is going to happen. I just think it’s possible. Don’t you?’

  The child had turned to stone. He tucked his hands behind his back and crept away from Jessica quietly, tiptoeing towards his mother.

  ‘Okay. Titania’s Palace.’ Jessica stood and swept her hand around. ‘That’s what we call this chamber. And you know we are so far down in the cave system by now that it is almost totally dark in here without the lights. Do you want to see that? Have you ever been in a cave where they turn the lights out?’

  A few people nodded. A few said yes. Jessica stepped towards the light box mounted on the wall. ‘Okay,’ she said. I want you to be really quiet. Super quiet, or the cave beasts might start to pay a bit too much attention.’

  Laughter, shuffling. The boy turned his face into his mother’s hip.

  ‘Let’s find us some cave beasts,’ the boy’s father said, guffawing. And Jessica wondered if she should spin the man the same story she had frightened the boy with. It might take more than a retelling of events. She could take him upstairs and lift the lid on the metal bin and show him the possum corpse.

  She hit the light switch. The group fell silent. She saw the memory of light at the corners of her eyes and heard the people breathing, the sound of her own heartbeat pumping blood through her ears. A shuffling. People, probably, but she was quick to flick the light back on. Too early. She usually waited up to five minutes in the pitch black.

  Relief flooded over her with the light. Nothing there in the cave with them, just people, scuffing their feet in the dark. She looked over to the child, who had turned very pale. He lifted his face, pleading with his mother. ‘I don’t feel well.’

  In winter the sun rises at eight and sets at five. Barely nine hours of light. By four it was time for Jessica to heft the complicated metal lock and turn the key till it clicked in place. She had checked all the chambers and rooms, every corner of darkness on the stairs. She usually liked to do her last check in the dark with a torch. Communing with the dark, she called it. Today she left the main lights on. There were cave crickets clustering on the ceiling. Dark spiders beginning to emerge from their hides among the straws and stalactites in the dark corners of the rock face above. No sign of anything but arthropods. She heard the bolt click with something like relief.

  ‘We’ve got to lug this bloody thing back now.’ Gus was huffing as if he had been running. It was the cold getting into his lungs.

  ‘We could just go into the forest a bit and ditch it there.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that encourage whatever it is to just han
g around the caves?’

  Jessica shrugged. ‘There’s nowhere to bury it down at the shack.’

  ‘Can’t we put it in with the rubbish?’

  They both stood looking down into the metal bin.

  ‘Okay,’ Gus said eventually. ‘You take your side…’

  It still didn’t smell bad. It wouldn’t start to for days—a week, or longer. The sun barely touched ground in the forest. Everything damp and icy, the ground frozen to the core. The roadkill on the roadsides stiff, locked into their final moments.

  ‘What do you think did it?’ Jessica asked as she hefted her side of the bin.

  ‘Aren’t you the scientist?’

  She narrowed her eyes, made a thin line of her mouth. ‘After—what? Eight years’ study?—I can be pretty sure it wasn’t slaughtered by a glow-worm.’

  ‘Ha, ha. I don’t know. Dog? Feral cat? Probably a dog.’

  ‘Yeah. I guess it must have come up from the creek somehow.’

  ‘Does it creep you out to think of all the parts of the cave we haven’t explored?’

  She looked at him. ‘Are you going to pick your end up?’

  Gus actually giggled. ‘Thought you’d never ask.’

  They hefted. Gus grunted. They shuffled together, the dead weight swinging between them.

  ‘On three,’ said Gus.

  ‘Just lift it.’

  It landed with a metallic thud in the bin.

  ‘Hey, Jess? I’m having a thing this Friday.’

  ‘A thing?’

  ‘Gathering. Small gathering.’

  ‘Is it your birthday?’

  ‘Something like that. And I wondered if you wanted to, you know. I’d like you to—just pizza, but my flatmate’s making the bases from scratch and Lidia’s coming and some people from here…’

  Jessica frowned. She liked Gus. She liked Lidia. She liked pizza.

  ‘Bring Matthew, of course.’

  Matthew hated Gus. Matthew hated Lidia. He would be furious if she went alone. She remembered that one time she stayed back drinking with them after work. She frowned. Backed away from the memory cautiously. They were in a good place now, she and Matthew. They had come to a beautiful balance. She tried to imagine his arm around her. His breath on her neck, kissing her gently the way she liked it.