Watcher's Web

by Patty Jansen

  She shivered involuntarily.

  Every now and then, she thought she heard Brian’s voice, mumbling something, talking in his sleep. She couldn’t make out his words, and at times she thought he was speaking in his native language. His voice scared her. It sounded like he was ready for the loony bin.

  She must have dozed off a bit anyway because all of a sudden, the light was blue, and she lay on her back in the leaf litter staring up at the tree canopy. A damp smell rose from the forest floor, but it had stopped raining.

  Brian was still asleep, on his side, his back facing her, his jacket covering his shoulder and body. His hair was loose and spilled into the leaf litter.

  Overnight, it had turned brilliant white.

  6

  WHITE HAIR? That was ridiculous. No one had white hair except elves in fairytales. No one under forty at any rate.

  Well, she had to hand it to him—without that dye he looked younger, his face kind of high-class with a long, straight nose, high cheekbones and thin but well-defined lips. His eyes were closed, his eyelashes half-moon crescents of silver hair. His eyebrows, too, had turned white. Albino.

  He was handsome. Not drop-dead gorgeous like some sultry-eyed teenage football hero who’d be arrested for drunk behaviour and groping women by the time he was twenty-five, and fat and ugly by the time he was thirty, but the type of handsomeness that didn’t age.

  But why the disguise?

  Who the bloody hell was he with his dyed hair and his accent and his evasive replies? Why was he on the flight, why had he suggested the pilot wait for her? Why did he seem to notice things about her other people didn’t and ignore things that other people mentioned? Did he perhaps have anything to do with . . . the plane crashing, with the web, with the male voice on the other end?

  As quietly as she could, she crossed the space between them and crouched on the moss next to him.

  She breathed out slowly, and let the strands of mist flow from her, tentative. The blue mist snaked around his sleeping form, caressing him like ghostly fingers. It wasn’t right, using it on a person, and it was something she hadn’t done for a long time. He might notice; she might find out something she’d rather not know. Worse, she might go too far and that thought sent shivers along her spine. Back in the time of innocence, she had done so many things that still gave her nightmares. She had never known what harm these threads could cause until it was too late. The mist was weak—she needed energy, sunlight, food to work this trick. The strands snaked over his jacket, and sought out the warmth of his skin. Buried in his arm.

  She braced for the onslaught of memories she was about to face. Animals were easy—their emotions were simple, but people . . . Painful and ugly memories, heartbreak, lies and treason, that was the kind of shit people’s minds unleashed. Once she had probed a classmate and had hurt for days with what she had found in the girl’s memories. Adults actually did that to their children?

  But with Brian . . . nothing came.

  He had no thoughts, no dreams. What the hell? Everyone had dreams, even if they didn’t remember them. How could he have no thoughts? He’d have to be dead. No, for some reason his thoughts were inaccessible to her. She stared, heart thudding, trying to think of reasons, other than that he had some sort of training in avoiding having his thoughts probed.

  His chest moved with a deep breath. In-out. The exhaled air ticked over her hands like a horse’s swishing tail. He stirred and mumbled. As Jessica retreated, he opened his eyes and stared at her as if he knew she’d been doing something.

  “Good morning. Slept well?” Her voice sounded too high.

  He sat up, groaning. “I’m sore everywhere.” He frowned at her. “Is anything wrong? Did I say something?”

  “No.”

  Jessica couldn’t meet his eyes, and turned to her pack instead. She trembled. Who was this man?

  “I think we’d better be going.”

  Shit. He was going to notice that his hair had turned white, and wonder why she hadn’t said anything. It was the sort of thing she would comment on, in a normal situation.

  She heaved the pack up. Her shoulders protested with a stab of pain. God, not more hills to climb. More moss boulders, more tangled tree roots, there was no end to it. She peered at the tree canopy, trying to determine the direction of the sun. West—the direction they had been heading since leaving the wreck. She plodded off, but after a few paces noticed the absence of footsteps behind her. Brian still stood at the creek bank, his face turned up, looking at the tree canopy.

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  “Is there . . . much point in going that way?”

  “Should we be going any other way?” What did he know about navigation? He’d said nothing all day yesterday, had been absolutely no help whatsoever in making decisions. Why the change of mind?

  He shrugged. “We don’t seem to be getting anywhere.”

  “Tell me, where is this anywhere we’re supposed to be getting? Out of this fucking jungle would do me.” She couldn’t help irritation seeping into her voice. Hunger stabbed at her belly, made her head pound. She wasn’t in the mood for arguing. Having a fight would solve nothing either. They needed each other. She breathed out heavily, stifling jangled nerves. “Do you recognise anything? Did you hear anything?” Of course he didn’t. He was just trying to play boss again.

  When he spoke, his voice was hesitant. “I thought, maybe yesterday . . .”

  What the fuck? “Yesterday? What did you hear yesterday? Why didn’t you say anything yesterday?”

  Does he even speak the truth? But her heart jumped in spite of her suspicions. Anything to get out of this bloody mess.

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “What was it? What did you hear?”

  “I thought I heard branches cracking. That way.” He pointed downstream from the creek.

  “That’s a reason not to go that way. If those trigger-happy lunatics are following . . . What else could it be? If they were true rescuers, they’d call.”

  Shit, shit, shit.

  He stared at her, as if that thought hadn’t occurred to him.

  “Come on, let’s go before they catch up.”

  She started off, up the hill. This time, Brian followed.

  Some time much later, when the light was turning golden, Jessica scrambled onto an area of land free of trees at the top of a hill. Cloud brushed the ground, but within a few steps of the tree line, the mist thinned and then disappeared altogether. A warm, dry breeze touched her face.

  “Hey, Brian, look!”

  They had arrived at the top of an escarpment, and below lay a marshy landscape. Cloud-brushed cliffs stretched to her left and right as far as she could see. Ahead, a large cloud blocked the sun, its edges ringed with light. The marsh disappeared from view in a glare reflected off the water. This looked just like . . . Yes, she remembered the vision just before the crash. That meant there would be . . . She scanned the horizon. The island, with its jagged profile, protruded from the bath of silver like the back of a barnacle-encrusted whale. Even from this distance, the square outlines of buildings were clearly visible.

  “Where the hell are we?”

  Brian just stared, his mouth open, green smudges on his face.

  “Come on, where are we?”

  Not the Australian bush.

  “I . . . don’t know.”

  “I don’t believe that. You’ve been hiding something. What is it?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Yes, you do. What’s your name? Who are you? You have something to do with this, don’t you?”

  “I tell you—I don’t know where we are.”

  “Does this look like the Australian bush to you?”

  “No, but we could be somewhere north.”

  “Where the sun sets in the ocean? Rubbish! The sun rises from the water on the east coast. Who are you? Not ‘Brian’. Not Australian, not even from New Zealand. You’ve been gawking at me all along. Just what are you after?”
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  “I swear, I have nothing to do—”

  A branch cracked in the forest.

  Jessica froze, eyeing the wall of rainforest. “Did that sound like footsteps to you?”

  He turned his head and listened. “Maybe.”

  Shit. “Come! We have to get out of here!” How could he be so calm?

  “No. Stay. We’ll be fine.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We’ll be fine, really.”

  “Oh yeah, you know these guys. That’s why they’ve killed two of us, huh?”

  “I tell you, we’ll be fine.”

  “In the same way Martin and the other guy were fine? I don’t think so. I don’t believe you. You’ve been having me on these past few days. What was this about going the other way this morning? Why didn’t you tell me what it was you saw, or heard? You’ve been telling me shit—”

  “It was not my fault, I—”

  “I don’t care. I don’t believe you anymore. I don’t care if you’re happy to let those gun-happy idiots get us, but I’m going to—”

  Bushes rustled behind him.

  There was no time to think, no time to find a place to hide. Jessica ran to the jagged edge where the escarpment fell away. Bloody hell, what a gaping drop. At least a few hundred metres, all the way down to the marshland. Small shrubs clung to the cliff face, the rock soft yellow. A bit to the right, the cliff had eroded to form a little valley. Jessica ran in that direction and hesitated again, teetering at the cliff edge.

  Branches cracked, and a bush moved violently. The pursuers were at the edge of the forest. There would be twenty, maybe thirty seconds before they saw her. She glanced down the gully.

  “Brian, if you want to save your arse, come over here!”

  God, it was steep.

  Brian turned to the forest but didn’t move.

  There was nothing for it. No time to wait for him. She launched herself down the slope. Her feet landed in loose gravel and slid out from under her. For a terrifying split second she realised she was falling, and powerless to stop it. Bushes and rocks whizzed past like blurs. She clawed at the rock, grabbed at passing branches, and tried to find purchase in the gravel with her feet. Her hands slid over stone; branches broke; whole bushes ripped out by the roots, spraying dust and gravel in her eyes.

  With a jolt, she came to a halt in a pile of stones and was, a few seconds later, blasted in the back by an avalanche of gravel. Stones bounced around her, over the rocks into the reed bed.

  When her heart had calmed and the roaring of blood in her ears had stopped, Jessica became aware of an unmusical clattering, like thousands of sticks rapped against one another in quick, staccato beats, so loud it hurt her ears.

  She pushed herself to her feet.

  Behind her, the cliff rose in a towering wall of yellow rock. A white trail marked the rockslide she had just come down.

  A bit further along the base of the cliff the reed beds gave way to a beach, which ended perhaps a few hundred metres ahead in a spit of sand. That beach looked inviting. She could take off her clothes there, and wash them. Maybe, too, she could find something to eat there.

  Jessica scrambled down the gravel, shook stones out of her shoes, and pushed through the shoulder-high vegetation. The clattering noise was even stronger here, as if an entire army of cicadas lived amongst the reeds. Mud sopped under her feet and sucked at her shoes with every step, but eventually she made it to the beach.

  At that moment, the cloud at the horizon moved away and sunlight flooded the sand, eerie and wan.

  Jessica squinted into the light. Weird. The sun looked so small and blue, and such an unusual glare gilded the bottom of the cloud that had just moved away. Almost as if behind that cloud hid . . .

  No, that couldn’t be possible.

  Jessica stared, her heart pounding.

  The cloud continued to move away; the gilded edge intensified, until . . .

  A second glow of light flooded the marshlands, more yellow, brighter than the first.

  Jessica turned around. In the low sunlight, her body cast a long shadow over the sand. Two shadows rather, which mostly overlapped except for a thin yellowish edge on one side and a bluish edge on the other.

  Two suns.

  Until now, she had the distant hope that the plane had crashed in a hidden valley. That there was a big lake whose existence had slipped her mind. That the men had been poachers. That somehow she would come across a road or a farm and find that nothing strange had happened at all.

  Not any more.

  Grey clouds, sunlight and white water mixed in a haze of tears. She let her backpack slide from her shoulders.

  What was the point of going on? She might as well lie down and never wake up. The killers were not poachers, but some kind of alien with unintelligible motives. She remembered the small size of the figures and their dreadlocks, and their scent.

  They might as well catch up with her; it made no bloody difference. She was alone and she would never get back home, where she could lie on her bed reading while a fly buzzed at the window. Where the breeze brought a scent of gum trees and magpies yodelled on the roof.

  In her mind, her mother said, “As long as they haven’t found the wreckage, there is hope.”

  No, there wasn’t. By now, her parents would be mourning her, her mother’s eyes rimmed with red while stroking her picture on the mantelpiece. The school would have a memorial service. Mei Ling, Jacqui, her other friends, dressed in formal school blazers, clutching bunches of flowers and crying on each other’s shoulders.

  Kreeeek, kreeeeek.

  What the hell was that?

  On the sand between two bushes sat an animal about the size of her forearm. It looked like a large lizard, with popping black eyes and orange slitted pupils. Its head was pointy like a snake’s, but the skin shone with sparkling gold and looked wet like a frog’s.

  She stared at it and the animal stared back at her. Then, as it came to her that if she could catch it, she could probably eat it, it turned around and ran off in a gallop-like gait, most unlizard-like, with an arched back, tail held high. Jessica jumped forward and crashed through the bushes after the creature, grabbing its tail with both hands.

  A frightened squeal, Kreeeeek!

  She swung the animal above her head, intending to smash it down on the sand, but somehow, it had managed to pull itself up and clamped a pair of jaws over her thumb. “Ow!” She let go of the tail. The lizard fell to the sand and scuttled away, across the beach, into the water.

  Jessica stared after it, panting, her head throbbing with pain.

  She rubbed her thumb where the lizard had bitten. A v-shaped red mark had appeared, but the teeth hadn’t even broken the skin. Coward that she was. Anyone else would have clubbed it over the head. Anyone else who didn’t spend a lot of time fixing up animals. Shooting rabbits was easy. You did it from a distance. Bang, bang, bang. Rabbits were introduced pests anyway. But to kill an animal by wringing its neck with her bare hands . . .

  She kicked up a spray of sand in her anger. Having thought of food had made her stomach pains worse. If she was to survive, she had to slow down, find things to eat. But she couldn’t even kill a lizard to save herself.

  The ghost of a breeze touched her sweaty face, bringing the smell of wet mud and the clattering noise from the reeds. There was also another sound. Rustling, swishing and a whistle . . .

  Jessica peered over the bushes. Something moved in the reed bed to her left.

  The killers.

  7

  JESSICA RETREATED into the shrubbery at the bottom of the cliff.

  First one and then another figure came out of the reeds. Against the glare of sunlight, they were nothing more than black shapes. Small, dressed in rags, with mops of untidy hair like reggae singers. Five of them.

  How could they have come down that cliff so quickly?

  They stopped on the beach, talking and gesticulating. Any minute now and they would see her footprints
and then they only needed to follow the trail.

  Jessica broke a branch off a shrub and pushed backwards through the vegetation, sweeping the fine sand over her footprints as she went. It was a botch job and if these trackers were worth their salt, they’d find her in a jiffy, but what else could she do? Branches snagged on her clothes and scratched her arms. She stopped to peek. The knot of men broke up and one pointed at the water’s edge, the spot where she had stopped and noticed her double shadow. Two of the men followed her tracks up the beach. They disappeared into the bushes.

  Faster she walked backwards, and faster still. Step, sweep, step, sweep, step.

  A whistle echoed. They would have found her backpack. Shit.

  Jessica turned and ran as fast as she could. The men shouted; branches cracked.

  She jumped over and between bushes. Something funny was going on with her right shoe. Parts of it flapped loose and her sock was filling up with sand.

  If she could reach the river beyond the sand spit, swim across, she might escape if the men couldn’t swim, or at least not as well as she could.

  The shrubs ended abruptly.

  Jessica launched herself into the open, weaving between tussocks of plants. Here she could gain speed and take advantage of her longer legs, get away from them as fast as possible. She ran up a low sand dune, around the corner of the cliff into an invisible curtain of . . . something.

  Her hands tingled; the skin on her face pricked. The feeling exploded over her chest, down her stomach, her legs, like pins and needles in her entire body.

  She had to stop running because her legs threatened to buckle under her.

  From where she stood, a meadow sloped down to a lazily churning river. In the middle of the grassy space stood a circular wall, and on this wall about a dozen tall metal poles. Each of these poles bore a glass “eye” at the top that collected beams of light reflecting from hundreds of silver dishes attached to the cliff face behind. The eyes then directed the light to the top of a pillar in the centre of the circle. There, the light simply disappeared. Some sort of collection plant for solar power.