Watcher's Web

by Patty Jansen

  Her ears popped. Fog trailed past the window, and the only sound was the ominous rushing of air. The propeller turned idly at the nose of the plane. Her ears popped again.

  The pilot’s voice was loud in the eerie silence. “Repeat—reporting engine failure . . .”

  Jessica sat stiff in her seat, every muscle cramped with fear. No, she didn’t want to die, she didn’t want to die . . . she didn’t . . . Heat flowed from the seat into her hands.

  The trickle of warmth grew into a flood. It made its way up into her arms and though the soles of her shoes into her legs. Pain stabbed her forehead, as if a vial of acid had exploded there, spreading down her neck, her shoulders, her arms; burning, eating everything in its path.

  She was flying, flapping her arms, which had become great white wings. She was a swan, and as long as she kept moving her wings they would never reach the ground. Pain increased until it felt like her skin was on fire, and still it grew. Over the thuds of her pounding heart, the world slowed to an unreal, hypnotising pace, in which the pilot’s attempts to restart the engine felt like they were part of another universe.

  The businessman shouted, “Come on, fucking re-start the engine!” He grasped the back of the seat before him as if ready to do so himself.

  The pilot called into his headset, “Mayday, mayday, mayday.”

  The burning heat inside her grew so strong that Jessica could no longer bear it. She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out.

  The pilot turned around. “You guys wearing your seatbelts? Lean on the seat—Fuck!”

  Glass exploded everywhere. Jessica was thrown into the wall. The noise was horrible: screeching, something tearing at the outside of the plane. Then a gentle cracking of wood, and the hammering of her heart in her chest. And pain, like molten lava, flowed over her skin.

  Silence.

  3

  SEMI-DARKNESS, mist, the dark shapes of tree trunks.

  Jagged shards of glass jutted out from above the plane’s instrument panel. Pieces of glass also glistened in the pilot’s hair. He hung sideways in his seatbelt, almost a silhouette in the dim light.

  Humidity mingled with the overpowering smell of fuel, which clung to Jessica’s skin like a film of grease.

  “Are you all right?” asked an unfamiliar voice, deep and male, muffled in the stuffiness of the cabin.

  Jessica tore her gaze from the pilot’s limp form and almost screamed. Her eyes, her face, her skin burned like fire. Waves of sparks travelled under the skin of her forearms, swirling over her hands, disappearing under the sleeves of her shirt, where she could feel them running up her shoulders, down her back . . .

  Shit, I can’t move.

  “Are you all right, girl?” the hippie repeated. He had an accent she couldn’t quite place, Eastern European maybe. Diffused light cast a silky sheen over his sweaty face.

  Yes, Jessica wanted to say but she only managed a tiny nod. Tears stung behind her eyes. She should have cheered and laughed. Still alive. How often did people survive small plane crashes? But she had felt this burning over her skin only once before and that was a time she didn’t want to be reminded of. She worried that he could see the sparks. Had people seen the sparks back then, with Stephen Fitzgerald? Her parents had said nothing, and her mother was the first to see her, after . . . Shit, shit, shit.

  “We’re leaking fuel.” The hippie turned the door handle. Branches cracked under the weight of the door as it swung down.

  “If you’re not injured, this is not the time to play damsel in distress. Let’s get you out.”

  He reached for Jessica’s arm. A spark crackled from her elbow, over her lower arm, down her hand to his fingers.

  “Shit!” He jerked back, hitting his head on the ceiling. “Damn it, you could have blown us up.”

  Jessica glared at him. Do you think I can bloody help it?

  His eyes were an eerie light blue, lighter than she would have thought possible. His face was very narrow and his skin looked as soft as that of the year-seven boys at St Patrick’s College whose beards hadn’t started growing.

  She muttered, “Sorry.”

  But the spark had released some of the tension and she could now move her arms, even though it still hurt. She would need to rage at something and release the mist to fix this. Quite a bit of mist, too.

  She scrambled over the seat he had vacated and slithered backwards out the door. Every time she put down her knees, a burning pain flowed through her. Sparks flew from her shivering hands, warming metal, fabric or plastic under her touch.

  A knee-deep carpet of broken branches littered the forest floor. Her shoes caught on twigs, causing her to stumble on unsteady legs. Out here, the smell of fuel was even stronger.

  “Help me, girl. We need to get them out.” The hippie flung aside a black bag and a newspaper. The businessman leant against the window, his eyes half-open, blood seeping into the collar of his shirt.

  Something clicked in her mind. What was she doing? Forgetting everything she’d learned about first aid? “You’re . . . you’re not supposed to move injured people. You might make their injuries worse.” Her voice sounded high, awfully childish.

  He shot her an irritated look. “Yes, if the victim is in a safe place—which we are not. You know how flammable Avgas is? Even a mobile phone signal can set it off. Here—get a move on. Take that somewhere safe.” He shoved the first aid kit into her hands.

  She had no energy to argue with him, tell him that mobile phone story was an urban myth. Besides, the sparks she gave off might do the trick and she didn’t want to argue about them either.

  Jessica clutched the first aid box to her chest and pushed up the slope through the tangle of branches. Pain spiked through her feet with every step, as if she were walking on knives. On her arms the sparks swirled, forming patterns, as if schools of tiny fish swam under her skin.

  “Hurry up, girl,” came his voice from behind her; the staccato accent heightening the unfriendliness.

  Damn it. Who did he think she was? She would hurry if she could, if only she had some time to get rid of these sparks. Jessica plonked down the first aid kit and retraced her steps.

  He had pulled the pilot out of the wreck and placed him against a rock. The man’s chest moved in shallow breaths, and he clutched a bloodied hand in his lap.

  “Girl. Help him to wherever you’ve put the first aid kit. Do something about his hand.”

  Irritation boiled. “I have a name. It’s Jessica.”

  Again, she met those weird eyes in a moment of silence.

  Like this, he didn’t look like an ageing hippie at all. Much too uptight, no Peace, Man attitude. Maybe he belonged to a bikie gang, and was used to bullying his minions around. Not the best character to get into a fight with when you were stuck in an isolated valley.

  She glanced at the silhouette of the businessman in the plane. A trail of blood ran down the window.

  “Don’t you want help getting him out?”

  “I’ll get him. You worry about the pilot.”

  Jessica bent down, looped her arms under the pilot’s shoulders and heaved, clamping her jaws against the pain. When she lifted him to about knee-height, he became too heavy and she had to put him back down.

  “You feel hot,” the pilot whispered.

  Jessica pressed her lips together. Tell me something I don’t know. At least she no longer sparkled like a Christmas tree.

  “Can you get up?”

  Of course, she should have asked that first. Girls, her father had mocked often enough, always do things before they think.

  With a groan, the pilot turned over and managed to push himself to his hands and knees. Jessica draped his arm over her shoulder, and pulled him up until he stood on his feet. Apart from his hand, he had no obvious injuries.

  By the time she eased him down against the trunk of the tree where she had left the first aid box, the sparks under her skin had gone completely, although she still felt as tense as hell.


  He groped behind his back. “Ouch, what’s this? It’s all prickly.”

  He was right and she only started noticing the strange trees now. The trunks of all the trees were strange, all prickly with fronds and leaves as if a piece of lawn had wrapped itself around it. Weird. Very weird.

  She flipped open the first aid kit, a comprehensive affair that folded out, with bottles and syringes on the top shelf inside the lid. The pilot gave her a suspicious look.

  “I’m just going to bandage your hand,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ve done this before.”

  Lots of times, save that she had been working as assistant vet nurse, and her patients had been horses, breeding cattle and working dogs.

  He relaxed a bit. Looked away. “Sorry. My name is Martin.”

  “Jessica.”

  “You don’t look . . .”

  Didn’t look what? Old enough to have this kind of experience? “I’m studying to be a vet.” Slight exaggeration—she needed to make the entrance score first.

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  She found bandages and disinfectant—the pilot cursed when she put it on his hand—and affixed thin strips over the cuts. Then she bandaged up his hand.

  A cracking of branches announced the hippie’s arrival, stumbling backwards as he dragged the limp form of the businessman on a picnic blanket. He came to a halt next to the pilot, let go of the blanket and straightened, panting. His sweat-slicked face looked white. For all his bravado and bluster, she didn’t think he had much experience in emergencies.

  As he stood there, digging in the pocket of his jacket, it occurred to her that he was as tall as her. Few people were.

  The skin on the businessman’s face had faded to pasty grey, the cheekbone pushed in, the ear filled up with blood, which ran down his face, his neck and shoulder. His chest moved in slow, shallow breaths. Jessica couldn’t keep her eyes from his injury. Last year, when working for the vet, she had attended a horse that was hit by a car. It had a broken leg, and internal injuries, but there was much less blood than had seeped into the man’s jacket. The vet had seen no option but to put the animal to sleep.

  She knew: this man was going to die.

  Jessica took a wad of bandage from the first aid kit, intending to wipe blood out of his nose to make breathing easier.

  “What the bloody hell . . .” The hippie’s voice sounded loud in the silence. He held his mobile phone in front of him. “The battery has died.”

  “Try mine,” said the pilot, holding out his phone.

  The hippie took it, but it had the same problem. Jessica could see it in his face before he spoke. “Nothing. Not a bloody thing.”

  Both men faced her. She took her phone out of her pocket, but the screen was dead, too. Strange.

  Jessica turned back to the businessman, but her face tingled. Nausea washed over her, black spots floated before her eyes, she swayed . . . Long-fingered hands stopped her falling into the leaf litter and propped her up against a tree. A bottle was pressed to her mouth. She gulped, stale water soothing her throat, running down her chin, onto her shirt.

  “You’re sure you’re not injured?”

  The hippie’s face floated in and out of focus, his weird eyes fixed on hers; Jessica shook her head. Shit. Now he was going to think she fainted because of the blood.

  He sank down to his knees, wiping her face. “Your skin feels hot . . . what’s that?” Frowning, his finger traced the erratic pattern of small reddish spots on her upper arm. “Old injury?”

  She pulled her arm back. It was as if he picked on all her peculiarities. The spots were not that clearly visible, and there were many odd things about her that most people would comment on before mentioning them. The words “creepy” or Dracula featured commonly in those descriptions.

  “It’s nothing. A birth mark. I’ve always had that.”

  Always. Not even her mother knew how those spots came to be on her skin, or the burn on her leg, now hidden under her jeans, and she had been only three weeks old when she stopped being anonymous, abandoned “baby J” and started being Jessica Moore.

  She tried to soothe her nerves and convince herself that he knew nothing of the web of light she used to control animals. He knew nothing of her feelings just before the crash. He knew nothing of the sparks.

  But she wasn’t entirely successful.

  He smiled, uneasily. “Just take it easy, girl. None of us are made of steel.”

  “My name is Jessica!”

  He flicked up eyebrows of white hair. “Jessica.” In a tone as if he didn’t believe her. His gaze turned to the businessman. “You’re OK to clean him up a bit? You need help?”

  “No!” Spoken more angrily than she intended, but who the hell did he think he was, bossing her about? She was not a softie. She unwrapped a clean wad of bandage and drenched it with disinfectant.

  The hippie turned away and spoke to the pilot. “Did air traffic control reply to your distress signal?”

  The pilot gave a helpless shrug. “It was all so fast I never got a chance to talk to anyone. As soon as the lightning struck us, the radio went dead. I’m not even sure anyone heard my call.”

  “You’re sure it was lightning, mate? Couldn’t have been flying too close to power lines or anything?”

  “Not at that height. Yeah, I think it was lightning. No idea where it came from, but the weather does weird things at times.”

  “You’re not wrong there, but that would have been the strangest lightning I’ve ever seen.”

  Jessica shivered. It wasn’t lightning, she was sure of that. Anyone else would know that, too, having noticed the distinct lack of clouds in the sky. What sort of brain did this man have in his head? A brain that was avoiding the obvious conclusion: that the crash had something to do with her.

  Things had started to go wrong the moment that . . . whoever it was . . . started tugging at the web she had cast at Angus. Something had happened. She had felt the prickling sensation of a current through the plane, so there was no reason the hippie couldn’t have felt it. She saw the sparks under her skin, so he might have seen them, too.

  He had definitely seen the sparks leap off her skin.

  He sank down on a knotted root next to the pilot, not looking at her, or avoiding her gaze.

  “Any idea where we are?” he asked.

  The pilot shrugged. “Not the faintest fucking clue, mate. I mean, according to the map we’d be somewhere on the western slopes, about fifteen minutes out of Lithgow, but I don’t know of any country like this on the western slopes. It’s like we’ve landed in some kind of fucking hidden valley. Like the one where they discovered this . . . this . . . flaming tree . . . oh, what’s it called?”

  “The Wollemi Pine?” Jessica said.

  “Yeah, that’s the one. A prehistoric kind of valley. I mean, aren’t there supposed to be gum trees in this country? You got any idea where we are?”

  Soft thuds of drops of water falling from trees were the only reply to his question.

  “How long before the airline discovers we’re missing?”

  “Not too long. What’s the time?” Eyes wide, the pilot stared at his wrist. “Would you believe it? My fucking watch has given up the ghost, too. It says it’s just past four, but it must be later than that. It’s getting dark.”

  Jessica’s watch too, said five minutes past four, but the seconds were still ticking over.

  The pilot looked up where tree trunks disappeared into the mist. “They’d be searching for us right now. I don’t know how long it’d take.” He groaned. “Shit, my head hurts.”

  The hippie got to his feet. “Well, it looks like we’re stuck here for the night unless the mist lifts. Do we have any food?”

  Silence.

  He shrugged. “Suppose that would be asking a bit much. Let’s see what we do have. A tent of some sort? It looks like it might rain.”

  “There’s a tarp in the plane,” the pilot said.

  “Come on, girl, you look b
ig and strong; I could use some help.”

  Jessica very much wanted to tell him where he could stick his patronising comments and orders, but there was nothing else to do, so she pushed herself up and followed him back to the wrecked plane, thinking that even though she and the pilot had introduced themselves, he had not. When he stopped to hold a branch aside for her, she looked into his sweat-slicked face.

  “Forgive me asking, but do we know each other?”

  A closed look came over his face. “Should we?”

  “I didn’t think we did, so I don’t know your name.”

  “Uh, sorry. My name is Brian.”

  A slight hesitation. Not his real name, no way, not with that accent. Someone on the run? She forced a smile. “Nice to meet you, Brian.”

  He didn’t reply.

  They reached the plane wreck, where he crawled into the luggage compartment and extracted the tarpaulin, which he handed to her without meeting her eyes. The uncomfortable silence lingered.

  By the time Jessica had helped Brian string the tarpaulin between the branches of two trees, it was almost dark. Since he had told her his name, Brian had spoken only the most necessary words. Silence hung between them like heavy syrup. He glanced at her, and she glanced at him, trying to do so when he wasn’t watching, and being unsuccessful at least half the time. Those light blue eyes chilled her. He was sizing her up or something. Not quite a pervert, since he’d made no move to touch her when they were alone. But something was odd and creepy about the way he looked at her.

  To get away from his stare, Jessica collected pieces of dead wood and put them in a pile, but however much Brian tried, the pilot’s cigarette lighter would not cooperate. He went back down the hill to the plane wreckage and came back with a container. The look on his face spelled thunder, so Jessica was happy to get out of his way and watched from a distance as he sprinkled Avgas over the wood. The smell of fuel drifted on the air. He flicked the cigarette lighter.

  Nothing.

  He flicked the lighter harder and harder, his mouth set in a grim line. His lips were very thin.

  After a while, Jessica started feeling sorry for him. He so clearly wanted to play scout leader. “Maybe the lighter is out of fluid.”