Watcher's Web

by Patty Jansen

  She turned away from the wreck and trudged down the slope.

  At the stream, she stopped to fill the water bottle. The water was crystal clear and probably fine to drink. The city girls at school always wanted to muck around with water purification tablets, but if they were camping in the mountains, she never used any.

  As she straightened to screw the cap back on, someone touched her shoulder from behind.

  5

  JESSICA WHIRLED around and faced . . . Brian.

  “What the fuck are you doing here, sneaking up on me like that!”

  He took a step back, wide-eyed. His jacket was dirty and torn, his face smudged with mud. His hair was a tangle of sticks and branches, and one of his hands was bleeding.

  Shit. “I’m sorry. Did you see the others?” Why the fuck hadn’t he responded when she called?

  He nodded, wordless. There was a hardness to his face that chilled her. What had he seen last night? How they were killed? Had he been in hiding until now?

  “Are you OK?” Her heart was still beating like crazy.

  He nodded, again wordless. He didn’t look OK to her. Had he thought she was abandoning him?

  “I . . . I thought everyone was dead.” Stupid. She had seen a third body on the forest floor, but she should have checked to see if it was him.

  “It’s OK.” His voice was a lot more subdued than it was yesterday.

  She shook her head. It wasn’t OK. “I’m sorry.”

  A wordless silence hung between them. She studied his face: haggard, dirty, younger than she had initially thought

  She continued, uneasily, “I was about to leave. I think we need to get out of here in case those idiots come back.”

  He nodded again. “Do you have any water?”

  She gave the bottle to him, and he took it, screwed the cap off and drank. All of a sudden, her world had changed. She wasn’t alone, and someone had survived. Not the person she would have chosen, but someone else nevertheless, and she was glad of that.

  He handed her back the bottle. While she bent down to re-fill it, her stomach rumbled uncomfortably, acid burning in the back of her throat. She was hungry, but thinking of the food they didn’t have would only make it worse. She had to hang on. A day or two at the most and they would surely find their way back to civilisation. She stuffed the bottle in her backpack’s side pocket and swung the pack onto her shoulder.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Where to?”

  “Up there. See if we can find a way out of this bloody jungle.”

  She expected him to argue. Maybe she hoped he would argue, say he had picked up some sound and a rescue crew was coming. But he said nothing.

  And that was weird, too. Certainly people would be out there looking for a missing plane?

  This is not the Australian bush.

  “Do you have a preference for which way to go?” she asked, just to make sure.

  He shrugged, not meeting her eyes.

  “I was going to go up the hill, because we might see something from up there. I also think that those men will think we’ll follow the creek.”

  “Fine.”

  Well, he wasn’t going to be much use to her if he was going to act like this. What happened to his I-know-everything attitude he’d had yesterday?

  Jessica took the lead up the hill. There was no path, and the hillside was a tangle of low branches and large mossy boulders. Slippery and hard to climb. Brian would push her up, and then she would reach down, hanging onto whatever branches were close, to pull him up as well. He would grunt with each climb, his hands slippery with sweat. An odd smell it had, too, reminiscent of wood fire.

  Her jeans stuck to her legs, making it even harder to climb. Riding boots were not the right shoes for this job either. The soles were much too thin and smooth.

  At least half an hour had passed by the time she clambered onto the crest of the ridge. About halfway up, she had already seen that the rainforest was just as dense up here as at the bottom and they would not be able to see anything, so it was not as if she had expected a grand vista, but she felt drained anyway, looking at all those tangled trees.

  She dropped her pack into the leaf litter. Shit—how much of this blasted jungle was there?

  Brian clambered up behind her and sank down, his back against the trunk of a tree. His face glistened with sweat. When she pulled him onto the last few boulders, she had noticed how his hand had trembled. No stamina, no bush experience.

  She handed him the bottle.

  He gulped, water running down his cheeks, which she noticed were smooth-skinned, with still no trace of beard growth.

  She itched to ask how old he was, but she knew even the farm boys who worked for John Braithwaite already had hairs on their chins at fourteen or fifteen, and there was no way this man was that young. Laser treatment? She had wondered why men didn’t use it. How fashionable could it be to walk around with a hairy caterpillar on your face? The idiotic fact was that men somehow liked having to drag a knife over their skin every day. They liked their beards, and here was a man who didn’t have one. At all.

  A transsexual? She saw them sometimes, in the city or out in Oxford Street, and—well—you weren’t supposed to say so, but usually you could pick something odd about them. Not that she cared—whatever they did with their lives was their business.

  But with Brian’s deep voice and his angular face—no way. His light blue eyes met hers. Jessica averted her gaze. If she knew what was good for her, she shouldn’t stare at him.

  The silence lingered. She put the bottle back in the side pocket, taking as long as she could. When she looked up, he was staring at her. Next thing he was going to ask a question about sparks, or flashes of light.

  “Do you think those men will come back?” An uncomfortable question, but she could think of nothing else to distract him.

  He shrugged—that seemed to be all he could do.

  “Who do you think they were?” Or what, rather, but that was an uncomfortable thought as well.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see.”

  More evasion? Hard to tell. His eyes looked vacant.

  “How did you escape?”

  “I ran . . . fell down the creek . . .” He shrugged again—the habit was getting on her nerves, as was his accent. “Don’t know. It was dark . . . I fell asleep somewhere.”

  Asleep? After all that? She thought she’d called pretty loudly. But she didn’t press the point. They only needed to walk for a few days at the most to get out of this jungle. Soon, there would be a dirt road or a power line they could follow, or maybe a farm house. She didn’t need to know things he didn’t want to tell her. They’d be rescued and go their separate ways and she’d never see him again.

  Brian met her eyes in that intense look. Piercing light blue. Eyes of an albino almost, but his hair was pepper-and-salt grey, the end of the ponytail still under his jacket. Wasn’t he hot in that thing?

  She pushed herself up. Her muscles screamed protest, but she gritted her teeth.

  “Let’s go.”

  He scrambled to his feet, unsteady, all thin legs with prominent knees. A grasshopper, her mother called her for that same reason. Could never buy clothes that fitted properly.

  Freak, farmhands would call her behind her back.

  She gestured for him to go first, and then stared at his back. He really was very tall and long-limbed. His fingers were very long, too.

  They were going down the hill again. That was easier, but also more dangerous. Sometimes there were no branches to hold onto and the only way down the boulders was to carefully slide on their backsides and hope neither of them would lose grip and fall into the bottom-less crevices in between the boulders.

  Another rainforest creek ran in the next gully. Across that, another slope of boulders. Bloody hell, the landscape was like a giant version of road corrugations. There just seemed no end to the dense cover of trees, hiding the sky from sight. No sign of civilisation. Not the faintest
trace of anything familiar. No sound.

  By the time they reached the next valley, also with a creek, the light was turning grey. Jessica’s watch said 11pm. It was still doing something, but not displaying the correct time. Moisture damage?

  This particular gully spread out into a mossy glade, where the creek pooled into a waterhole from which it trickled lazily over algae-covered rocks.

  Brian sank down on the moss and promptly fell asleep, leaning back against a tree trunk, his mouth open. In the fading light, his face stood out like that of a ghost. Exhausted, not used to bush-bashing. His hands rested in his lap, with fine, long fingers, now green and scratched, but with clear impressions of rings he normally wore. What working man wore jewellery on all his fingers? She hadn’t asked him what he did for a living, but he looked like an artist to her. Jessica wandered down to the waterhole, shivering because the back of her shirt was still wet from her backpack. Her stomach cramped from lack of food. Soon, they would have to make a decision—slow down to find something to eat, or press on towards the safety of civilisation. Except where would they find food? Bush food was not unfamiliar to her, but she had seen nothing edible, nothing even remotely familiar. No lilly-pillies, no quandongs, or anything that grew in rainforests. She had no idea what these tangled trees were. She had never seen them before. That gnawed at her. She knew bush plants well enough to recognise a few edible ones. She knew gum trees, or ash, but they were big trees that had straight mottled or pitted trunks and leaves all the way above the rainforest shrubbery, not like a covering of fur on their trunks.

  Then there were the animals. Apart from the carnivorous slugs, she had seen no animals. There should have been bush turkeys; there should have been lyrebirds scratching around the leaf litter and whip birds calling out in the shrubbery, although you hardly ever saw them.

  She glanced over her shoulder. Brian was still sound asleep.

  As quickly and as silently as she could, she peeled off her clothes and slipped into the water. Its freshness enfolded her. The sandy creek bed was soft under her feet. Beautiful.

  There had to be a volcanic spring somewhere nearby, for the water was warm and had a faint sulphuric smell. Like New Zealand. Another chill. There were no volcanic springs in Australia.

  Or were there? Hadn’t she heard of some place near . . . she had forgotten, but it was somewhere up the coast. How the heck would the plane have ended up there?

  Stop fretting, Jess. Wherever we are, worrying is not going to change it.

  She rinsed her hair and sat on the sandy bottom until her body shone pale in the low light.

  When she turned to clamber out, Brian was awake and watching her.

  She gasped and jumped up into a crouch, covering herself with her arms. He couldn’t have seen anything. She had no boobs to speak of anyway. She didn’t even have the hairy bits you-know-where. There was nothing to see. She was ugly and boyish and bony.

  Yet he was staring.

  She stared back, her heart hammering. Here she was, naked, alone in the forest with a strange man. He might be exhausted, but she was a seventeen-year-old girl and a grown man would have no trouble getting from her what he wanted.

  Brian didn’t move. He sat there, leaning back on his hands, his legs stretched in front of him and crossed at the ankles. Damn, she couldn’t see his crotch—that would be a dead giveaway. Why was he doing this? She needed him if they had to climb more boulders tomorrow. She didn’t want to go alone, but she bloody well didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him.

  He said nothing, and Jessica stayed in the water, just the top of her shoulders exposed. The air was getting nippy. A drop of water plinked into the pool, and a moment later, another one.

  Great. It was raining.

  Eventually she asked. “Would you mind?”

  “What?”

  “I’d like to get out.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” His voice was warm, bemused, but maybe she only imagined that.

  He turned sideways, but not quite enough for her to be sure he wasn’t watching. She crab-walked to the bank, grabbed her shirt and pulled it over her head wet and cold. Then she crawled out of the water and angled for her other clothes. God, those undies stank, but her clean ones were in her backpack which sat exposed on the bank. Bugger. She pulled the dirty ones on as quickly as possible. Getting into her jeans with wet legs was harder, but she managed it. What now? Go back to him and . . . what?

  “Brian?”

  “Yes.”

  An uneasy silence.

  Then he said, “Come and sit here. I’m not going to harm you.”

  Suspicion rose. They all said that. Sex wasn’t supposed to hurt, was it? And if they enjoyed it, the girl should enjoy it, too. Never mind that she had never enjoyed the feel of a sweating male body against hers. Men stank and they hurt her. All of them. God, that Luke at John Braithwaithe’s farm had been a beast. Women like it rough, he had said, and, knowing little better, she had put up with it for far too long. Problem was, he was nice during the day, and he paid for trips to resorts up the coast and even Thailand. He made her feel accepted.

  God, she didn’t even like resorts.

  And where he got the money was still a mystery to her.

  Vulnerable women attracted abusive, manipulative men.

  She called back through the forest, “There is a soft patch of moss here. I’ll sleep here tonight.”

  Silence.

  “I’m sorry if I upset you,” he said. “I was just curious.”

  Curious about what?

  “I didn’t mean to disturb you . . . Jessica.” That was the first time he’d used her name.

  Well, you were disturbing me.

  Jessica sat down, a comfortable distance from him, her legs folded before her as if ready to spring. She didn’t know whether to keep watching him or to turn away. She wanted to do both, to make sure he couldn’t sneak up on her, to make sure he didn’t interpret her watching him as interest. She was finished with men.

  He continued, “I want to thank you. You seem to be well-trained for this situation, this . . . forest.”

  “I’ve done a lot of bushwalking.”

  Another silence. He shifted; leaves rustled. “Where were you travelling?”

  Why was he so talkative all of a sudden?

  “Just to Sydney.”

  “Family there or . . .”

  “No family. I go to school there.” Maybe she shouldn’t have said that. Next thing he’d want to know what school. But he didn’t.

  More drops were now trickling from the tree canopy. The uneasy silence lingered. A twinge of shame crept through her. All day, they had helped each other. He had pushed her up rocks, and she hadn’t felt embarrassed by his touch. Why now? What was the harm in a chat? She was just being paranoid. As long as he was talking, he wasn’t doing anything else.

  “What about you? Were you travelling to Sydney?”

  “Yes.”

  “Family?” He’d have a wife waiting for him somewhere.

  “Business. I have no family in Australia.”

  “They’re all overseas?”

  He stiffened. Averted his eyes. “Yes.”

  “What country?”

  “New Zealand.”

  No way. Not with that accent. “Where did they come from before that?”

  He gave her a sharp look. She could almost hear him think you ask too many questions. The suspicion meter went up again.

  She stammered, “Well, I thought . . . because of your accent . . .” But she let it go. Wrong subject. One obviously didn’t go there with him. This man was one hell of a strange puppy.

  He rose, brushing leaves from his trouser legs, a useless gesture, since his trousers were as filthy as dirt-caked as hers. “If you don’t mind, and if it’s appropriate, I’d like to wash myself as well.”

  “Go ahead.” Appropriate? He’d just been staring at her while she was naked and now he asked about appropriate?

  He stumbled his way to the wate
rhole, wincing and stiff. At the bank, he finally took off that leather jacket. He folded it carefully and put it on a rock, as if it was precious. He reminded her of one of John Braithwaite’s young farm hands, who had a jacket that had been given to him by some singer or other.

  Underneath the jacket Brian wore a checked flannelette shirt, as was popular with workmen. This one looked new, the red and blue stripes still vibrant. He unbuttoned it and peeled it off, discarding it in a heap on top of the jacket. His skin was ghost-white, with a tattoo on his left shoulder blade. Some sort of emblem, but he was too far away, and it was too dark for her to see exactly what it was.

  Next he unbuttoned his trousers. She turned away, because there was no way she wanted to give him the slightest impression that she was interested in him.

  Water rippled and splashed.

  Drops trickled from the trees in increasing frequency. They pattered on leaves, dripped down trunks. The little fern-gardens on tree trunks glistened with moisture. The pool in the creek had already merged with the night.

  By the time Brian splashed out of the water, it was almost completely dark.

  It was now raining in all earnest. There was nowhere to shelter—the tarpaulin had been burnt in the nightly attack. Jessica found a marginally dry spot under an overhanging tree branch, but tree roots stuck in her backside, water trickled down the trunk and she kept thinking about carnivorous slugs and then thinking about food and that made the hunger pains worse. At times, too, tingling air crept over her skin. Just like she had felt before the plane crashed. She shivered. The accident had all been her fault. The more she thought about it, the more certain she became. She stared into the dark, her thoughts tangled in mires of worry. In her thoughts, she faced a court investigation into the crash. A mechanic would say, There was nothing wrong with the engine, Your Honour. And then everyone in the room would look at her.

  Ridiculous of course, but it kept her awake, and it stirred unwelcome memories of a time when she’d been thirteen and innocent, when the blue web was still something she thought she controlled and she was facing a judge at least four times her age in a wood-pannelled courtroom packed with folk from Barrow Creek who had travelled to the city to see her put in her place. She could still hear the judge’s voice, speaking clearly as if he thought she was stupid. You do understand, Jessica, that you’re being accused of the murder of Stephen Lewis Fitzgerald . . .