Afterlight

by Lim, Rebecca

  ‘Not much more we can do tonight,’ I said, crossing my arms. ‘Leave now. Go home.’

  Inwardly, I was cringing, remembering the time I’d told Eve to take her problems to someone else and she’d pushed me so hard I’d blacked out. Outwardly, I made my body language so fierce and spiky and unfriendly that any casual observer could see I wanted Jordan gone.

  ‘What?’ he said, sounding hurt. ‘But we could start calling. It’s not even seven yet. There’s, what, a hundred Kellys to knock over? And I think we, uh, established that we can handle, um, spending time together. I’m good to go, if you are.’

  I noted the faint flush that moved across his cheekbones with interest, but hardening my heart, I snarled, ‘We’ll do it tomorrow. Or maybe next week. Sure, we’ll call every one of those people, but we’ll take our time doing it. I mean, no sense hurrying, right? Seeing as she’s already old news. What’s the goddamned rush? I’m sick of being pushed around by a dead stripper just dumb enough to get herself killed. Now get out of here, J. I like you, but I can’t stand being around you right now.’

  Jordan stood up, still looking uncertain. He twisted the armbands around one wrist, saying, ‘You said so yourself, Soph. It can never wait.’

  I could tell from the way he was holding himself that he didn’t really want to leave.

  But I thought again about the man in Room 3, and what he was doing to our floorboards.

  ‘I’ve decided it can,’ I sniffed dismissively. ‘She was a ho, Jordan. A lowlife skanky skank. Why even bother, right? We’ve done enough. This is pointless.’

  I felt guilty even before the words left my mouth. ‘You know, she probably had it coming. She probably deserved exactly what was done to her.’

  Jordan went still like a cornered animal.

  I only got the faintest whiff of violets before my entire bedroom vanished around me.

  13

  It wasn’t like the last time: a polite show reel involving strange faces, strange places somehow projected behind my eyes.

  No. This time I was inside a…memory?

  Some tiny part of me registered that I couldn’t have moved. Dimly, I still sensed my trainer-shod feet resting on the pitted jarrah floorboards of my bedroom, heard my own laboured breathing in my ears.

  But my eyes were telling me that I was standing on a gravel-strewn railway line that cut straight through the heart of a quiet suburban street. The street—hilly, steep and narrow—stretched away from me on either side of the track. It was edged with compact Victorian workers’ cottages; the homes built so closely together that they seemed like houses made for little people, mostly of timber, mostly rundown.

  I turned to look behind me and saw two small, badly lit train platforms, one on either side of the rails, empty at this hour.

  It was dark. So dark: only a few houses along the street had lights on.

  Then a single porch light flashed on at the front of the faded blue weatherboard house just down the hill. The place had been built right up against the railway line; the track itself formed one of the property’s side boundaries.

  The front door swung open and emitted a curvy woman wearing a black tank top and black jeans, flip flops, her long black hair worn unbound and forwards across her shoulders. In the warm porch light I caught a glimpse of a tall, lean shape just inside the open door. The woman leant up on tiptoes and gave the shadowy figure a lingering hug, planting a kiss on the person’s pale cheek, before the door was shut behind her.

  The woman looked up at the sky before letting herself out the front gate and turning right, away from me standing on the track, almost instantly blending into the night.

  I had known who she was instantly.

  I tried to call out her name, tried to warn her against leaving the safety of the little blue house, but my throat wouldn’t work. I could still feel my bedroom floor through the soles of my shoes, but all my eyes could see were the weeds twining up through the gravel on the railway tracks, all they registered was the flashing of the red signal lights on both sides of the crossing.

  I raised my hands to my face and red light pulsed over my skin like a visual representation of my beating heart, and I knew I was inside one of the last moments of Eve’s life, unable to prevent the terrible something that would happen next.

  Until this moment, I’d been deaf to my surroundings. But then a piercing whistle blast caused me to look up, away from my hands, and back at her.

  The sound caused Eve to look over her shoulder, too. Then she turned towards the track, towards me. There was a lit match cupped in her hands, a cigarette jammed in one corner of her mouth. For an instant, it seemed as if she looked straight at me. By the light of her flickering match I imagined recognition in her face as we stared at each other across the lowered railway barrier.

  Then her features contorted in a fear so terrible I actually recoiled.

  She turned and ran down the hill, and I began to move, too. But then a whistle blast sounded so loud and so close in my ears that I only had time to turn and throw up my hands, open my mouth wide to scream, before I was hit by a night express train.

  Was I dead?

  It seemed forever before I could force my eyelids open.

  A dangling frieze of amber glass teardrops hung overhead. They swung gently in the cold drafts that have always plagued the upstairs bedrooms at The Star. Tiny air bubbles were suspended through the glass, and the light the teardrops cast was soft and beautiful. I seemed to be in one piece.

  ‘Am I dead?’ I murmured, knowing I couldn’t be, because the afterlife would have to have better light fixtures than this.

  Jordan expelled a pent-up breath and laughed, a sound warm and lovely.

  His face came into view over mine and I realised that my head was resting across his legs.

  ‘This is nice,’ I said softly. ‘Maybe I am dead.’

  Jordan’s mouth lifted at the corners. ‘And now you’re haunting me? You wish.’ His face grew sombre. ‘What happened? What did you see?’

  The questions sounded normal, coming from him. ‘You were standing there, looking frozen,’ he said, ‘head bent like you were listening. Then you went down like a sack of potatoes.’

  I shifted uneasily as I relived the horror. ‘I, uh, got hit by an express train.’

  ‘You what?’

  I told him about the particle of Eve’s past that I’d just been immersed in and saw a look of resignation flit across his face. I also told him about the time Eve had caused me to black out when I wouldn’t help her.

  ‘It was my fault then, too,’ I mumbled. ‘I didn’t want to help her, she got angry. But tonight, I made her angry on purpose, so that she would show me more. She saw someone that night, when she left that blue house. Someone she knew who frightened her.’

  ‘So when you told me to leave, you weren’t really trying to get rid of me then?’ Jordan breathed, leaning closer.

  But he straightened when I grabbed his arm from below, remembering. ‘Jordan, I heard the train’s whistle. It’s, like, when our eyes met inside that memory, Eve switched the sound on for the first time. I’ve never been able to hear sounds before, you know, when
she shows me things. What does it mean that I could…hear?’

  Jordan frowned. ‘I’ve never heard of that happening; that your “gifts” can get changed or…augmented like that. Daughtry might know why that is. I’ll have to ask him.’

  I swallowed, remembering the front grille of the speeding, phantom express train. ‘Do you think whoever was chasing her…died?’

  Jordan helped me sit up. ‘That part’s easy enough to check. Let’s see if there’s any word of a fatality at a suburban rail crossing, say, in the last month.’

  He pushed me off his legs, suddenly eager to know, because it gave us a shortcut into that list of Kellys my computer had spat out before. Maybe.

  While Jordan crossed to my computer, I hugged my knees to my chest, my bum still on the floorboards, head still pounding with the frantic ghost echoes of that railway signal.

  ‘If we find the right crossing, we’ll find Carter Kelly and the blue house,’ he said, sinking down in front of the screen and starting to type.

  But as he tried a handful of different search angles, I saw his shoulders slump.

  ‘Nothing involving a pedestrian and a railway crossing in the last few weeks,’ he muttered, shoving his fringe out of his eyes. ‘There were two involving cars, but they occurred in broad daylight. Whoever was chasing her couldn’t have died.’

  ‘How about going back and looking for suburban railway lines that cut through residential areas?’

  ‘Good idea,’ Jordan replied, fingers already moving on the keys.

  My bedroom door opened abruptly and I turned. Gran—with a plate piled high with food—looked down at me on the floor, then across the room at Jordan, who’d swung around in my desk chair, wide-eyed at the sudden interruption.

  ‘You really are doing research,’ she murmured in disbelief. ‘Thought I’d have to lever you two apart with a crowbar. Brought sandwiches. Figured you’d be hungry.’

  She set the plate down beside Jordan’s right arm then came back and stood over me, saying softly, ‘You look like hell, pet. Can’t this wait till you’re feeling better?’

  I shook my head, too tired to pick myself up off the floor as Jordan walked over and handed me a sandwich with Cook’s pungent curried-egg salad mashed in between the two triangles of white bread. I wrinkled my nose at it before taking a bite, feeling uncomfortable as Gran and Jordan continued to stare down at me like I was something squashed onto the floor.

  I almost choked when Jordan said, ‘She needs looking after, Mrs Teague.’

  ‘That she does,’ Gran agreed, regarding Jordan gravely over her reading glasses. ‘About bloody time one of you blokes took notice.’

  She took a deep breath, then said with a forced air of casualness, ‘It’s getting real late, Jordan, so you’ve got two choices. Head on home and come back first thing or, when you’ve finished up on the computer, take your pick of the upstairs bedrooms’—Jordan’s eyes widened in surprise as Gran added smoothly—‘save for those rooms already occupied, of course.’

  ‘Of course, Mrs Teague,’ Jordan said. ‘Thank you, that’s, uh, very kind of you. I’ll just call Mum and let her know what I’m doing. Soph and I are working on something together that can’t wait. It’s important.’

  ‘It’s always important,’ Gran snorted, ‘until the next bloody thing comes along. Just remember that.’

  She helped me up off the floor and I sank down on the edge of my bed gratefully, watching as Jordan took out his mobile phone and laid it on the edge of my desk.

  Gran stood looking at me for a moment more. ‘Just be careful,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’re up to and I don’t want to know, but don’t go putting yourself in harm’s way, love. Your karma’s good enough and we don’t need any more free publicity…’

  She bustled out the door, calling back over her shoulder, ‘I’ll put towels in the aqua bathroom, Soph, show him where it is, and get some sleep, for God’s sake. You’re not well.’

  In the background, Jordan finished his call to his mum and laid his phone back on my desk.

  ‘She’s cool, your Gran,’ he said, sliding back into my desk chair.

  All I could think was: He’s staying the night. Just wait until that gets out.

  Claudia P. was going to pummel me extra, for sure.

  Because if you’d told me that the untouchable Jordan Haig and I would go from zero to sleepovers in the space of a single day, I would’ve said you’d obviously checked your brain at the door and someone had trod on it in the bargain. But here we were.

  ‘What did you find on those train stations?’ I countered.

  Jordan turned back to the screen. ‘Describe the house again,’ he said. ‘We need to narrow down the number of stations that cut through residential streets then match them against the Kellys that are publicly listed.’

  It sounded like a big job, and I told him so with my eyebrows, but Jordan shrugged. ‘We have to start somewhere, right?’

  I told him again that the house had looked the same general vintage as our pub. ‘Victorian, you know, 19th century. But low ceilings, and timber, because it was built as a residence, not a public house. Everything in the street packed in tight, all built shoulder-to-shoulder. So, yeah, working class. Old. It was blue, had a hip-high picket fence with a gate in the middle, no off-street parking.’

  While I talked, Jordan printed out the list of C. Kellys we’d found and handed it to me together with a red pen he’d found by rootling around on top of my messy desk.

  ‘What you’re describing is inner city,’ he mused. ‘Could be any direction though, but I’d discount anything that isn’t close to a river of some kind. I’m thinking the Maribyrnong River, or the Yarra.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ I said uncertainly. ‘Eve never showed me a river.’

  Jordan’s expression went bleak. ‘I’m sure. You know how she gave you a taster of what her last moments were like? I’ve had those, too, but different ones. A river figures in there somewhere, trust me. Given the type of house we’re looking for, cross out all the names and addresses that are outside the inner-Metropolitan area, then give us back that list, okay?’

  Jordan typed away on my laptop while I did what he asked.

  ‘Where’s Bittern?’ I queried.

  He shook his head. ‘On the Mornington Peninsula, I think. Holiday houses for rich people. Lose that one.’

  When I was done, I had a list of nine.

  ‘Give it here,’ Jordan said, as he studied the highlighted possibilities.

  He brought up all the C. Kellys again on the screen and started clicking on the first one.

  I went and stood over his shoulder. ‘There’s a map option,’ I pointed out. ‘I didn’t know you could do that, pull a person’s location up on a map. That’s kind of…freaky.’

  ‘And intrusive,’ Jordan muttered. ‘But useful.’

  One-by-one, flicking between directory view and street view, we started ruling people out. Dejection started creeping back into our voices as we talked over each other.

  ‘No train line.’

  ‘No bodies of water.’

  ‘Houses are too new.’

&n
bsp; ‘Blocks are too big.’

  ‘Lots of light industrial.’

  ‘Borderline too far out, don’t you think?’

  The seventh set of details was for a place in Northcote, not far from where we were now.

  When the street map came up, Jordan moodily flicked straight to the satellite imaging for the area. ‘Look at this,’ he snarled. ‘Street after friggin’ street of same-same. Do you want ant view? Or God view?’

  I punched him in the shoulder. ‘Zoom out,’ I insisted. ‘More. More.’

  ‘God view it is, then.’

  I stared at the patterns of light and dark on the screen, all the tiny, photo-realistic little houses that from this magnification looked like pieces from a board game. Something about the satellite imagery for the Northcote C. Kelly was bothering me, though. Cutting down through the left edge of the map and snaking across the bottom was a lush, dark-green line. The curvy line was punctuated by the green of public parks and reserves. I was looking at ovals, playgrounds, walks. Kilometres of them.

  So much…green.

  Including the dark green of trees, I realised.

  ‘Trees that need water,’ I muttered aloud.

  ‘What?’ Jordan hadn’t seen it. Maybe I was wrong.

  ‘Go back to the directory view,’ I begged. ‘You know, the pastel, cartoony one.’

  ‘Why?’ Jordan exclaimed. ‘I still don’t know what I’m looking at.’

  I shoved him aside and bent over the keyboard, clicking back into the stylised road map for the area and jabbing at the screen with one finger.

  The screen was suddenly colour-coded and artificial-looking again, cartoony, just like I’d said. And covered in tiny names that explained everything. Every single thing we were looking at was labelled. Street names, parks, walks, everything.