‘Can you hear that?’ I whispered.
There was a phone ringing somewhere in the building at the same time as the ringing in the earpiece. Scarlet pressed ‘end’ and the ringing in the building stopped a second later.
We looked at each other in the light of the phone.
‘That was weird,’ I said.
I grabbed the phone and pressed the green button to re-dial the number. Silence. We both listened, faces pressed close to the phone. The earpiece rang. A second later the phone rang again in the stairwell. Or was it in an apartment? It was the ‘old phone’ ringtone that I used to have on my phone, a bit like the one in the horror movie I saw. A shiver wriggled through me.
After one more ring the call was answered and the phone outside fell silent.
‘Yeah,’ said a voice.
We heard the man out on the stairs, maybe one floor down. I ended the call.
‘It’s him.’ I lowered the phone. It bumped on the handle of my crutch and clattered to the floor. So loud.
Silence for a moment.
Then steady footsteps up the stairs.
I picked up the phone and ushered Scarlet towards the bathroom.
THIRTY
SIEGE
Scarlet gripped one of my crutches, pointing the foot of it at the locked bathroom door, prepared to attack if the door should open. I held two chemical spray bottles, ready to squeeze the triggers into the intruder’s eyes.
I got us into this, I thought. I did this. Now Scarlet is involved, too.
I could hear his footsteps, slow and deliberate, out in the hall. Every second was an hour. Magic rubbed against my leg, breathing quietly for the first time since I’d met her. She knew how serious this was now.
Why hadn’t we run for our lives up to her apartment?
There seemed to be so little oxygen. I felt droplets on my arm. Sweat of mine or Scarlet’s. I wasn’t sure. We were bound together in this.
There was a loud bang on the front door of the apartment. Not a fist. A shoulder. We both jumped. A second bang followed by clattering. I pictured the door falling open, heavy deadlock parts scattering to the floor for the second time today.
For a moment the crack beneath the bathroom door glowed yellow with light from the stairwell. Then it was gone. He had closed the front door.
A shadow passed the bathroom door, left to right towards my father’s bedroom.
We should have run while he was in there. Was he at the entrance or right inside the bedroom? I listened hard but he was very quiet.
Harry’s cheap metal coathangers clanged gently together like wind chimes. I prayed that he wouldn’t check the lower drawers in the wardrobe, particularly that thin, middle drawer with the small, hanging, brass handle where the knife was.
‘Let’s run,’ I whispered, close to Scarlet’s ear.
‘No.’
‘We should.’
‘What if –’
The handle twitched on the bathroom door. It was a low, silver handle, hip height, the kind you push down to open. I could just make out the shadow of it. I knew that the lock was a piece of flimsy plastic.
Please make him go away.
The handle twitched a second time and there was a loud crack of plastic and metal. The door flew back, revealing the enormous silhouette of him painted pitch-black against the backdrop of city light from the rear window. He was even bigger than I had remembered or imagined, towering over us, filling the doorway.
Magic barked while I squeezed both triggers, filling the man’s eyes with long, thin jets of spray. He reached for his eyes and I sprayed again and again. Scarlet whacked him under the chin with the crutch. He stumbled back. She rushed forward, ramming her shoulder into his gut, and he fell against the bookcase. Scarlet ran and I pole-vaulted forward on my crutches, dragging Magic out of the bathroom and across the apartment to the front door.
Scarlet flung the door wide. I felt fresh, cool air hit my nostrils. The fluorescent light blinded me after so long in the dark. Scarlet headed for the stairs to the sixth floor.
‘Come!’ she called.
But I knew I couldn’t make it up the stairs fast enough and running up there would mean being trapped in the building. He would follow me, not Scarlet. I had to go down, had to get outside. I could hear the enormous man’s feet lumbering across the apartment already. I thought of the lift for a split-second but it would be slow, a deathtrap.
‘Take Magic,’ I said, pressing the collar into her hand.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Run!’ I said, taking my crutches in my right hand, the dark timber banister in my left, and launching myself down the first three stairs. I landed on my left foot, feeling the deep impact in my ankle, jarring my knee hard, but my body quickly wrapped the pain in an adrenaline bandage and I hopped down to the first landing. The stairs snaked their way down next to the lift. Two flights for each storey. Ten flights to the bottom. I had to keep moving.
I looked up and saw Scarlet’s hand sliding up the banister as she ran.
I leapt down five steps and then another three to the next landing. I caught a blurred glimpse of Mick Kelly coming down the stairs after me, blood smeared across his wide face from Scarlet hitting him with the crutch. He was not in uniform. This was not official police business. He did not deserve to be a police officer.
It made me so angry I felt sparks fly up from my chest and into my brain. The anger drove me on and down the stairs. He would get what he deserved. I would make sure of it.
I hopped across the landing to the top of the next set of stairs, clutched the banister and made two giant leaps down to the fourth floor. Every time I landed I felt the two phones in my shorts pockets, Scarlet’s and mine. Damn. I’d pocketed hers when we’d run for the bathroom.
I saw a fire alarm button behind glass. I tried to stab it with the rubber end of my crutch, but missed and hit the wall. I stabbed again, got it this time, smashing the glass and hitting the button squarely, but no alarm sounded. I pressed the button with my thumb but, again, nothing happened. So I hopped across to the next set of stairs, knowing that I had wasted precious time.
He’s going to get me, I thought. He’s going to get me.
But people would hear the noise of our chase. They would come to their doors. They would know that Kelly was a bad man, chasing a child at midnight.
I jumped and landed hard on my working leg over and over again. Down, down, down, leaping and jarring the staples in my right knee, crunching the cartilage in my left, my foot screaming from the recent attack by the flying elephant. Third floor, then second.
Kelly was halfway down the same set of stairs as me now. I could feel the dark shape of him looming. He was big and slow but I, with my stupid leg, was slower. My breath burned in my chest and sweat spilt from every pore. The sparks of anger were a fire inside now, burning me up and blending with fear to make molten lava. I made it to the first-floor landing, hopped across and launched myself down towards the foyer.
He was three steps behind as I swung myself around the banister onto the final flight. I could see the front door and freedom. I breathed hard, feeling broken. Mick Kelly reached for me and I jabbed the feet of my crutches back at him, stabbing him in the hip, shoving him off balance. I felt such panic that, rather than leaping three or five steps, I made the split-second decision to leap down all eight steps at once. If I could land on my feet, I would almost certainly get away.
I jumped. A strangled ‘Gah!’ escaped my mouth. I swam through the air, spinning my arms for balance like a long-jumper. I realised that I was going to overshoot the end of the stairs. It would be a crash-landing. I had brought this on myself – this fall, this end. Another poor decision.
I hit hard and stopped dead. Blunt pain shot through my feet and calves, into my shins and knees. My hips and back jarred and my spine seemed to collapse like a domino run, each small bone colliding with the one above it. The pain split me in two.
I tried to roll and absor
b the forward motion but I fell on my shoulder, flipped, then slammed the front door with the soles of my sneakers with such force that the safety glass shattered, raining down on my legs and torso.
I couldn’t move. I saw the brown-yellow of timber and foyer light above me and felt the pain, complete and deadening. Then there was the shape of Mick Kelly standing over me, shoulders heaving with exertion.
Mum always told me, ‘If you’re in trouble, make sure you never get taken to a second location. If someone grabs you, scream your lungs out, fight, let everyone know you need help. If you’re taken to another, more private place, that’s where bad things can happen.’
So I screamed my lungs out. It sounded to me, in my dazed state, like my scream was coming from someone else. I was pretty sure that screaming for help was not in ‘Harry Garner’s Ten Commandments of Crime Reporting’, but none of that mattered now.
I tried to sit up but, before I could, a gloved hand fit roughly across my face. It was clutching something moist and chemical-smelling. I saw his sickly, white, golf-ball-dimpled face and double chin in close-up. He pressed that wet cloth hard over my mouth and nose. I tried to turn my head, to shake off his hand, to hold my breath, but I had no choice but to inhale. His other hand grabbed the front of my shirt and I was dragged out the front door, down the stairs onto the wet street, into the sharp night air, my heels kicking behind me as I faded away.
THIRTY-ONE
BOOT
I woke cold, with a dead-dry mouth and tongue, the smell of fuel and the roar of an engine all around me. My arms and legs and torso itched all over. I tried to sit up and smashed my head hard on metal, then fell back down. Pain ripped at my skull. I went to rub it but my hands were bent back behind me, tied with what felt like a thin wire or strap.
I was in the boot of a car. It slowed abruptly and I slid forwards and smashed my shoulder on something hard and sharp behind the back seat. The car took a left over rougher ground. My tailbone was now jammed against the wheel well. I could feel dirt or mud and rocks pinging up and hitting the metal, vibrating right through me. The back of the car went into a slide as though it was about to spin before the wheels gripped again and we sped forward.
I tried to drink in details. The smell of fuel and old, wet carpet and burnt brake pads. The deep snarl of the V8 engine. It had to be a V8, like my Uncle Chris’s Monaro that he only drove on weekends and that Mum said was a ‘total bogan-mobile’. On the right side, the rear lights made my feet and legs glow red. My feet felt wet, too. A steady stream of water leaked through a crack in the boot. Rain drummed loud and heavy above me.
The dirt road was filled with rough bumps and ruts. Through the engine noise I could hear the familiar guitar and vocal of the Rolling Stones song ‘Brown Sugar’ on the stereo. One of Mum’s favourites. It made me long for home, where I was safe and bored and angry. I made a vow that if I survived this, I would never be angry again. Boredom beat fear any day.
My head felt heavy and my eyes burnt hot. I had never been in a car boot before. I wondered how long I’d been unconscious. Unconscious, I thought. He had done something to me. Chloroform – was that what Mick Kelly had used on me? I’d looked it up when I was writing Harry Garner: Crime Reporter #2: The Case of the Human Skull and I read that it could take a few minutes to subdue someone with chloroform, so maybe not.
The car drove on and on along the rough dirt road. I felt like I was inside the pages of one of my own comics. It wasn’t as fun as I’d imagined it would be. I fought the cloudy feeling in my head but still I slipped in and out of time, the vibration of the car lulling me to sleep – in and out, in and out – before I woke sharply as the car slid to a stop. Engine off. Music off. Red light gone. Dead black. I stretched my eyes wide to make sure that they were actually open. I don’t think I really knew what darkness was till that moment.
The sound of heavy, beating rain.
I lay there, not moving. No one got out of the car. Minutes scraped and scratched by.
I thought of the phones that had been in the pockets of my shorts when I ran from the apartment – Scarlet’s and mine, one on either side. It didn’t feel like I had either of them now. He must have taken my backpack and both phones.
My throat burnt with thirst. I hoped the heavy rain would cover the gentle scraping sound I made as I carefully twisted my body around. I needed the water pouring through that crack like nothing else I had ever known. I slipped my mouth side-on beneath the leak, spraying my face and eyes. I couldn’t remember a better feeling in my life. My stomach and brain and skin and every sense jerked to life when that liquid hit my system, like I was reborn. I was in the worst situation I’d ever experienced and I was having the best feeling. Life was strange.
Was I thirteen yet? Probably. It had to be after midnight. Happy birthday to me. Thirteen years on the planet and I don’t think I had ever, for even a minute, really felt glad just to be alive or thankful for a birthday present as simple as a drink of water. I slipped my face out from beneath the flow and gently rested my cheek on the soggy, smelly carpet floor of the boot. The water felt cool and good pooling around my cheek and temple.
I lay there, almost happy, for a few minutes till the rain began to ease. It fell into a steady shhhh on the boot lid and, soon after, seemed to stop. A door opened, the suspension squeaked. Dread filled me. Someone stretched and groaned. Mick Kelly, I assumed, unless he had passed me on to someone else to do his dirty work.
Footsteps in muddy puddles moving towards the back of the car. I tried to sink back into the boot, to disappear. Click. I closed my eyes and lay dead still as the boot squealed open and I was assaulted by bright white torchlight. I breathed slow and steady, ready for what may come. A hand grabbed my shirt and dragged me up. An arm went under my legs and lifted me. It made me think of when I was little and I would pretend to fall asleep in the car so that Mum would carry me and put me into bed.
My head lolled against Kelly’s shoulder and I dared to squint. In the torchlight I glimpsed his silver hair and wrinkly neck and the treetops above. Kelly slammed the boot shut with his elbow, my head shifted and I got a good look at the car. It was old and red. Big. A V8, definitely.
Inside the car, through the rear window, I saw the back of another man’s head.
THIRTY-TWO
ALL IS LOST
Mick Kelly dropped me hard to the ground, my ribs splat-cracking muddy earth, my arms tangled behind me. I swallowed the pain, didn’t make a sound.
Kelly opened the back door of the car and my father climbed out, hands tied like mine, his crooked shape set against the orange glow of the car’s interior light. He had a thick strip of silver tape across his mouth. The right side of his face looked bruised and bloody up to the corner of his eye. He was old and beaten but still alive.
I was so devastated and happy to see him. Devastated that he was in the same danger as I was. Happy that he was alive and that I wasn’t alone. This was the reason he hadn’t come back tonight. Mick Kelly had taken him. That’s why Harry broke his promise to me.
When did Kelly take him? I wondered. On his way back to the apartment? In the foyer? How did he know my dad lived there – was it the electricity bill? I cursed myself for not telling Harry about it.
He shuffled the three or four steps towards me. I struggled up from the ground, my hands still tied, and he gave me an armless hug, burying his head in my neck.
‘I’m sorry, Sam,’ he whispered, muffled and lispy through the tape on his mouth. Then he said something else. I heard it as ‘I’ll try to get us out of this’, but that may have been wishful thinking. He may have said ‘Let’s go catch a fish’, which seemed unlikely, or ‘I really need to do a whiz’, which was a definite possibility. I needed to go pretty badly myself.
Kelly pulled Harry away by his shirt collar and slammed the car door. I leaned on the side of the car to steady myself. I was crutchless. The wind swirled and the leaves hissed from the high tree canopy. It was a night-time sound I knew from t
he bush behind our house, but I was used to hearing it through a pane of glass, curtains drawn in the warmth of my room. I had spent so much of my life playing in the bush, building cubbies and climbing the tallest trees I could find, but I was always freaked by the bush at night, when it felt ancient and inescapable, like a black hole. It could inhale you in a single breath and you would cease to exist. There’s no arguing with a force that powerful.
For a moment I thought I heard the distant hum of an engine, but then it was gone, muffled by the sounds of a struggle between my father and Kelly. Hands tied, Harry was fighting a losing battle. I wondered what Harry Garner: Crime Reporter would do in this situation. The truth was that I would never have written anything this real. Even when all seemed lost, my readers (that is, me) somehow knew that Harry would get out of it. He was a black belt in jujitsu, a firearms expert, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the human body and its most vulnerable points for attack. My father, my non-comic-book father, was strong, determined, focused, but he was not a deadly weapon.
I’ll try to get us out of this.
But could he?
Kelly shone his torch towards the mouth of a narrow, overgrown track. He shoved me in the back.
Harry tried to say something through the tape.
‘Walk,’ Kelly said over him.
I tried to put my right foot down and take a step. The pain was like a cartoon electrocution. I could almost see my bones through flesh.
‘I can’t,’ I told him, my voice trembling. ‘My knee. I need crutches.’
Harry tried to speak again and Kelly pointed the torch beam directly into his eyes. Harry lowered his head in surrender, squeezing his eyes shut against the blinding white light. Then Kelly’s fat, hairy hand reached out and ripped the tape off Harry’s mouth in one quick movement.
The Fall Page 11
