by Jaye Ford
‘Carly, what’s wrong?’
‘It’s just been a shitty day.’
‘Okay, I’m listening.’
The shitty day line was meant to steer Dakota away from the subject, but Dakota didn’t hedge. And Carly wanted to talk now. She was tired of herself, of the police, of her fear. Maybe just tired. She took a breath and a chocolate, just held onto the ends of its wrapper as she spoke. ‘I came here to find a better me.’
‘Well, that’s cool.’
‘Only I don’t like who I found.’
‘Oh.’ She frowned. ‘How did you want to be?’
‘Brave. Assertive. Happy.’ She untwisted the chocolate wrapper. ‘The bits of me that I used to like.’ Before she’d become brash and reckless, then damaged and anxious.
‘Personally, I think you’re great. But, okay, why can’t you be that other you?’
Because Carly couldn’t change what was on her police profile, because Nate was hurt, because a man could get into her apartment. ‘I think it’s too late.’
Dakota tipped her head in doubt. ‘You’ve only been here a few months.’
And she’d been Charlotte a long time. ‘I don’t know how to do it now.’
‘But you remember how you used to be, right? The brave, assertive, happy bits.’
‘Yes.’
‘So be like that.’
‘I don’t think it works that way.’
‘Sure it does. I mean, if you know what bits of the old you that you want to be, then when you do something, think about that and just, you know, be that.’
If it had been anyone else Carly might have rolled her eyes, but it was Dakota and Carly chuckled. ‘Just like that?’
‘Yeah. Why not?’ She picked up a chocolate, plopped it in her mouth and talked around it. ‘You said it’s been a shitty day and now you feel shitty too, and maybe you think the old you might have gotten through a day like that without letting it make her feel shitty. Because she was happy and assertive, right? So if you want to be like her, you could think about a better version of everything that’s just happened. Your neighbour was found by those kids – yay. He has a broken jaw and not brain damage – yay. You have an excuse to keep dropping around to his place with pots of soup he doesn’t have to chew – nice. He needed knee surgery anyway. And you have a very clever friend with chocolate and a spare bed and a list of career options to keep your mind off your shitty day.’ She picked up her mug and tapped it against Carly’s. That simple.
Carly’s eyes snapped open, her brain momentarily confused by purple walls and black curtains. Then she saw the bottles of hairdressing supplies and a foam head, remembered she’d stayed at Dakota’s and fell back to the thought that had woken her.
Carly would climb the ladder.
Twenty-year-old Carly would get on that ladder in the void. Without a doubt. Probably without hesitation. Possibly with a shout of Hell, yeah! Energetic, agile, persistent Carly. Who’d ridden trail bikes, joined the Rural Fire Service and climbed rock faces. Who wasn’t afraid or anxious or ashamed. Who didn’t spend her life on the verge of tears.
Be that.
Thirty-three-year-old Carly sat up and swung her feet to the floor. She’d laughed at Dakota’s simplistic advice. But maybe it was that simple. If you know what bits of her you want … be that.
Climbing the ladder might give Carly everything she needed. Evidence of someone getting in, an access point that suggested who, fingerprints, signed documents, backpack, bar fridge. Proof she could take to the police, a way to make it stop and claim her life back.
And if it did none of those things, if she had to leave the apartment and start over again, climbing the ladder would still give her something she needed.
It would give her a chance to be the person she wanted to be.
42
Younger, eager Carly got instructions from her cautious older self and stopped at a hiking store on the way back to the warehouse. Not thinking about the cost or the risks, she bought a brighter torch with a head strap and a smaller one with a belt clip, eighty metres of rope, a harness, carabiners and a belay device that would stop her descent if she fell. It felt like a hundred years since she’d even thought about climbing anything, and this was a ladder, not a sheer cliff face, but it was a long way down and the fall would hurt the same.
‘Have an awesome climb,’ the guy in the store said as he handed her the receipt.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Carly paused on the bottom rung of the A-frame in her wardrobe, tipped her face to the gloom above the shelves – and climbed.
Snick as the trapdoor came down. She hitched her butt over the edge of the vent frame and pressed a button at her forehead. A brighter, wider beam filled the width of the tunnel and lit the way like a headlight.
As she pulled her feet into the ceiling, apprehension began to gather. It was nine thirty in the morning, she told herself. He came at night. He’d only ever come at night.
That she knew of.
On her haunches, anxiety sparking, she listened to the silence. You need to do this, Carly. Or go back to Burden.
It only took a few minutes to reach the void, the lunging familiar, her ankle loosening up as her body warmed with the exertion. On her stomach again, pushing her head out over the drop, she tipped her forehead down to shed light on the drop beneath her.
Under the brighter beam she could see a yawning, rectangular space. Red brick, pale stud walls, the hint of something less black in the bottom, too far away for the torch beam to define.
She uncoiled the rope and reached into the void, both hands suspended in the updraught, her hips anchored behind the last cross-timber, instinct insisting she was about to fall … and it rushed back at her – the whoosh of air, black space filled with screaming. She shook her head, shook it off, slung the rope around the closest rung of the ladder and fastened a knot, fed the other end through the carabiner and the belay device. Spent time checking and rechecking her gear, fingers trembling, mouth dry. Sipping water, glancing into the abyss, telling herself to be brave, assertive, happy, goddamn it. Then slowly, cautiously, keeping her butt anchored to the lip of the tunnel, she found rungs with her hands, then feet and, before she thought about it, before her memory threw back the last time she was on a rope, she thrust her torso into the void.
Adrenaline swept through her veins. She gulped at the air. Hung for long, paralysed moments. Skin tingling, scalp damp, fear wedged in her throat like a hunk of unchewed bread – and something steely and euphoric pulsing inside her.
Hell, yeah.
Her goal was the bottom of the ventilation shaft. Carly felt the way with her feet, one rung at a time, dropping her head every few steps to aim the torch into the space below. The brickwork in front of her face was cold and held the tangy smell of masonry. The stud wall on her right was close enough to touch with her elbow. It was about five metres to the next tunnel, but it felt like half a day before it appeared as a wide, black mouth in the wall below her.
The ladder ran out where it reached the beam above the third floor and started again underneath it. On the way back up, it would be safest to climb into the tunnel to reach the upper set of rails. On the way down, though, it was a short abseil – easy in theory, but as Carly prepared herself, soles of her shoes flat to the wall and her hands clasping the last rung, she heard Debs’ voice and froze. Not words, but laughter. Loud and raucous, like it had been from the top of the canyon that last day.
The water in Carly’s stomach tried to come back up. A hiss droned in her ears. In Carly’s mind, Debs chucked her gear to the ground. ‘You should come home more often, Carl. I’m a lazy-arse when you’re not here to kick my butt.’
‘Well, you’re here now.’ Carly whispered the words she’d crowed back then.
‘And thank god for that,’ Debs replied. ‘I forgot how fucking brilliant this place is. So stop pissing around with your gear, get yourself on that rope and let’s do what we came for.’
Carly finger
ed the harness at her waist, remembering how that day had started. Remembering that Debs, not the one she saw in her dreams. Wondering what her best friend would say to her now.
‘Well, you’re here now.’ Carly said it again. Then held the rope, released the rung and leaned out. Walked down the wall and pressed her body to the next section of ladder. Like she used to do it. ‘Like I came to do.’
The bottom of the void looked flat and grey in the torch beam now. She sensed more than she saw as she descended – a change in the sounds that bounced back at her, cooler, fresher air moving across her face and, eventually, a soft, rhythmic whirr, as though the shaft was a giant mechanical lung.
Finally, she hung above a concrete floor in an empty room, elated to have made it, disappointed that was all there was. The fan, she now saw, was on the outside of the wall, in a unit fitted into what must have been a doorway in the original warehouse. A thick layer of dust clung to every surface of the space, as if it was the filter for every piece of fluff, lint and microfibre that was sucked from the apartments above.
On the wall behind her was a door.
She descended the last rungs, disconnected from the rope and took photos – of the ladder going up and the door leading out – then she stood at the door and listened. The only sound was the hum of the fan.
The door pushed into another dim space. She cocked her head around, let the torch on her forehead light the narrow, windowless room beyond. There was a group of machines huddled in the middle. One looked like a ride-on floor waxer, another some kind of hoist on wheels. She couldn’t identify the others. Maybe they were Transformers waiting for a signal to reassemble into weapons.
There was a second door on an adjacent wall. Carly crossed the floor and opened it, recognising the light and shadows on the other side. The foyer. Its centre was ablaze with sunshine, the columns closest to her casting long, dark shadows that seemed to point right at her. A man with a large box on a trolley was waiting for the elevator. Up above, someone was on the stairs.
Surprised, relieved, already thinking about catching the lift back up, Carly had taken a step out before remembering the harness around her waist, the powdery dust covering her clothes and the fact she didn’t have a key to her apartment.
At the bottom of the ladder again, head down as she reconnected the rope, Carly saw footsteps in the dust. Hers. Which meant the man in her loft hadn’t walked through here. She grimaced at the darkness overhead – no evidence and a hard climb up.
She had to pause twice before she reached the first tunnel, her thighs burning with each upward step. Sitting on the edge of the first-floor tunnel, flicking her gaze around the void as she gathered herself for the next set of rungs, she saw a hole at the opposite corner. Just like the one she’d seen yesterday from the fourth-floor tunnel. In the stronger beam of light, she saw two rows of rungs around the brick walls, foot- and handholds that led to the opening. What was there, she wondered? It was shortlived, though, replaced with I’m not climbing over there to find out.
She stopped three times on the next section, breathing hard and blowing on the blisters in her palms. On the ladder to the third floor her thighs and arms burned, her neck ached from looking up and her sprained ankle pulsed inside its shoe. At the crawl space she rolled over the lip and sank on her back into the insulation. It was scratchy and stank of dust and she wanted to keep going, but her body refused.
Somewhere further along the padding, Brooke’s ceiling opened into this passage. The giant beams on either side of the tunnel held up the apartments on Carly’s floor. She aimed the torch at the timber above her. Strip flooring for the living room above. Her own living room was three apartments from the void. Had he come through her floorboards?
She sat, shone the light down the tunnel. There was no hatch in her floor, nothing to suggest he’d got in from underneath, but she was here and her body ached from climbing and she didn’t want to go home empty-handed.
It was the same as the tunnel above: beam walls, insulation and cross-timbers, square vents like the one in Nate’s bedroom and rectangular ones like the trapdoor in her wardrobe. The third one along made Carly sit back on her haunches.
Its white frame was clean except for a couple of smudges. Just like Carly’s.
Blood beat in her ears. Was this his apartment?
She glanced up. The apartment overhead was hers. Did he live beneath her?
Leaning over the vent, shining the head torch through the grid, the shelving appeared in the glow below. She pulled the small torch from her harness and angled the beam around. There were rows of neatly stacked boxes on the top shelf, clothes hanging below. Long items. Dresses. And one very high-heeled boot by the door, on its side. Carly frowned, ran her beam across the top shelf again. They were shoe boxes, lots of them.
Okay, a man could collect shoes, but the one boot she could see was a stiletto. And there were dresses. Maybe the man in Carly’s loft was the shoe-collector’s partner. Or a cross-dresser. Or … Splaying fingers across the vent, she gave it a push. Snick. It dropped away on a hinge, opening into the apartment below – and she heard his breathy voice again. You’re my best, Carly.
‘Does he visit you, too?’ she whispered.
Skin prickling with that thought, she glanced back at where she’d come from. This vent and Carly’s were the third ones in from the void. Maybe he lived in an apartment between here and the void, with easy access to both of them. Or nearby or … She turned, lighting the way ahead of her, towards the other corner of the warehouse.
‘Maybe it’s not just us.’
43
It took twenty minutes to reach the opposite corner of the warehouse. There was a void between the end apartments, she counted nine vents along the tunnel, five of them rectangular grids, all of which opened with a snick. Three had been cleaned recently. Carly took photos of them all.
On the way back, she sat above a rectangular vent trying to remember if Brooke’s door was the third or fourth from the corner. She shone the torch around the wardrobe below, searching the clothing for something that looked familiar, wanting to call down Get out of there.
She didn’t though. The idea that it wasn’t just Carly, that a man in black might have crawled through here too and dropped silently into other apartments, had filled the darkness with something new and poisonous. There was urgency to her lunging as she headed back to her rope, her gasping and thrusting reminding her of the scrambling escapes from her bedroom. She’d sprained her ankle on the stairs and Brooke had broken her leg. Carly had pushed at the walls of her apartment and Talia had left holes in the plaster. Talia had opened the manhole and written her name in the dust. She’d driven into a tree with sleeping medication in her system and Nate had asked Carly what she’d taken and told her not to drive.
Was she seeing connections that meant nothing? Brooke had no memory of how she’d fallen down her stairs. She wasn’t scared in her apartment and she hadn’t had nightmares.
Maybe Carly had it wrong. Maybe she didn’t want to be the only one. Maybe the vents had been cleaned for … what? Maintenance? Who would know?
‘Nate. Maybe.’
There was something new inside Carly as she followed the corridors to Nate’s hospital room. Something calmer, bolder. Not the same as brave and assertive but it felt good.
‘Have you seen yourself today?’ she asked him.
Nate shook his head.
‘Probably best if you don’t.’ The swelling was a little better but the mass of bruising had spread. Deep purples and bright greens ran a mottled track from his eye socket to his chin. The bandage around his head looked like it was holding his face together.
He watched as Carly sat in a chair then made a throaty sound, pointing at her, waving his finger up and down.
She’d tried to hide the soreness in her muscles, it obviously hadn’t worked. ‘I’m a bit stiff. The spare bed at Dakota’s.’ She shrugged. ‘How are you?’
He pulled his hospital table closer,
wrote on the notepad. Glad to see you.
‘Sorry I didn’t get here sooner.’
You went back to the apartment.
It wasn’t a question. Had he seen the change in her too? ‘Yes.’
Another noise from his throat as he tried to talk.
She took his hand, wanting to reassure him, but he turned hers over and found the blisters. He touched them gently, grunted. What?
‘You’re not going to like it.’
He made a face that said What the fuck? and Don’t do it again and I care about you.
‘I know, I know. But I’m okay and it’s an intriguing story, if you can overlook the danger.’
Deep frown, louder grunt.
‘Yes, it was dangerous but I need you to not freak out so you can help me understand what I found.’
Eyes wide, pointed look.
‘I won’t tell you if you do that.’
He glanced away, took a few sharp breaths, looked back and nodded.
There were plenty of times he wanted to interrupt. Carly could see it in the stiffening of his spine and the twitching of his lips. He picked up the pen a couple of times and Carly pushed his hand back, wanting to tell it all before the details got lost in other explanations.
‘In the end, I needed to rest in the tunnel above the third floor and I found something I didn’t expect.’
She told him about the three clean vents, showed him the photos she’d taken. Nate shook his head in response to her question: no reason for the vent covers to be cleaned for maintenance. More head-shaking when she asked him about building inspections or electrical work, heating or air flow or the big fans in the ventilation shaft. No obvious reasons for the vents to have been wiped down.
‘What are the holes in the stud wall?’ On her way up the ladder, she’d seen them on every level.
Pre-fab chutes.
She frowned. Waited while he wrote an explanation.
The beams run parallel to the east and west walls of the building, forming the tunnels you’ve been crawling through. The vents draw air from the apartments, which is pulled towards the ventilation shaft by the fans at the top and bottom of the void.
