Indigo

by Ophelia Keys

  Chapter 7. NOT YET

  thursday, january 7

  Indigo

  Some people might say that knowing is better than not knowing. But for me, found and buried was worse. It took away all doubt. There was evidence now. Of what I’d allowed to happen. Everything looked a bit different that next day. Too clear. Like changing the settings on a photo. If you sharpen things a little they look more real – but if you push it too far it becomes over-focused, hard-edged and strange. Sounds were different too. It was like hearing everything a few seconds after it happened.

  And I kept wondering, if the follower did want to help me, as I was starting to secretly hope – why had it sent me down there again? It had freed the ghost. But it had put all the weight on me. The weight of knowing everything. And now I felt like a haunt myself. Not real anymore. Or too real. It was all the same.

  So I slept badly. The night after we buried the child. When I finally woke up I peeled off the slip and flung it away from me. I wasn’t even sure where I’d found it in the confusion of my dreams. It had seemed the coolest thing to wear in the heavy heat. Well, I was hardly going to sleep naked with the windows open and my dreams of someone hanging over my bed. Though what help a thin film of fabric might offer, I’m not sure.

  Ani was getting ready for work and somehow talked me into going with her. I’m not sure how. It was still all a bit of a blur. There she sat me down and plied me with copious coffees under the watchful but apparently helpless eyes of her manager. I told her about the dreams, about the questioning, about the half-formed thought in my mind that it was trying to help, to show me something, just like a ghost. That I needed to understand it.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Ani, instantly. ‘There’s some stuff in life you actually don’t want to know about.’ She shot a number of questions at me, between serving an apparently endless flow of breakfasts. ‘How are you going to protect yourself?’

  It was irrelevant because I was always exposed.

  ‘Why don’t you let me help?’

  I wasn’t even sure I was stopping her from helping. Wasn’t sure what she could do anyway.

  ‘You’re kind of becoming a ghost, right?’ This with a macchiato in one hand and a latte in the other, and the impatient eyes of the next table on her.

  By this time I was so full of coffee I’d almost reached an altered state of consciousness and seemed to be finished with the processing of each thought before it had fully formed in my mind. Her strange and sudden questions were starting to wash over me, while my own thoughts were running on and on. I was a detective of some sort, not a hunter. I let others take over, but there was no one to take over now. I had to find out more, to get rid of it. Had to get closer before I could move away. My response to all mysteries eventually was to leap in, confront, flee. But fleeing wouldn’t work this time. The ideas kept flying around, crystal clear but meaningless, because they were all whirling together. But through the confusion of Ani’s conversation, dissected by her ambivalent coffee serving, a clearer idea was trying to surface. Avoidance made everything take longer. And so I would have to stop avoiding. Would have to keep seeking and asking until I was certain.

  Ani was right. It was good for me to be out. Once I’d made a decision about what to do, I found myself having the strange realisation that not everyone around me was being shadowed by ghosts or supernatural beings. That some really were quite concerned that their coffee milk had been overheated – and that this was a serious blip on their otherwise pleasant day. People were shopping for clothes and walking dogs and unexpectedly running into each other with huge displays of hugging and kissing and laughing. And many were interpreting the sun as the sign of a beautiful evening to come, rather than an unrelenting and oppressive force that was hurting their eyes and their brain. Evening beckoned, with sausages and beer and assorted dips in shady gardens with the bass of a live band nearby and an incredibly pink sun sinking into the smoke haze. And later would be the spectacle of the fruit bats flying overhead in the twilight and the magical power of beer to create camaraderie with the most unlikeable of people. And I might eventually be one of them (impossible as it currently seemed). Well, I was not one of them yet, but I had the growing sense that I wanted to be.

  ‘I’d just like it all to be over,’ I said to Ani, but she was finally in café mode, whisking past so quickly she couldn’t have heard me.

  I walked home slowly under my unreliable umbrella – the glue of the handle melting in the heat, which gave me the feeling it must be around forty Celsius and possibly inching higher. Eventually the whole handle just slid off and I put it in my bag and kept walking.

  Dylan was in the relative cool of the house, typing at the kitchen table. He used to edit government reports from time to time and I had the feeling he might be doing something like that, due to his deep frown and the plunger of mostly drunk coffee beside him.

  ‘Hot out?’ he asked, without looking around. I slumped onto the couch.

  ‘When’s the change coming?’

  He kept typing. ‘They’re saying it’s just going to get overcast, maybe some storms around. No rain really. Wind. Bushfire weather.’

  ‘So when is it going to rain?’ I asked, plaintively, as if it were up to him. I had an idea I would think more clearly if it would just cool down ten degrees or so.

  ‘The Bureau is silent on that point.’

  He meant the Bureau of Meteorology, which we generally had bookmarked on our computers as a matter of high priority throughout the summer. And which I would usually be checking regularly on a forty degree day, (it’s thirty-nine point three now … forty point five … the change is over Geelong … etc), but now I just didn’t have the enterprising spirit for it.

  I stayed there for a while, listening to the soothing tapping of the keys but I had the feeling that Dylan was unhappy with me so I went down to the landing of the stairs. I stretched out, convincing myself it was noticeably cooler there – at the lowest point of the house. At least, the lowest point that was not infused with evil. I laughed at that thought and then wondered if I might be getting heatstroke. Ani found me there a couple of hours later. I must have fallen asleep. But at least I didn’t dream of him. I woke up to see her standing over me, looking even taller than usual from that angle.

  ‘You should come to St Kilda with us. Everyone from work’s coming. Fish and chips and beer on the beach.’

  ‘Too life-be-in-it,’ I said, flinging my arm over my eyes. ‘I’m going to bed anyway.’

  She stepped over me. ‘Well, I’m taking you out again tomorrow. You need to get out.’

  She was gone only briefly and came back with a towel over one arm. She put a glass of cold water beside me, like an offering.

  ‘Isn’t the house nice now?’ she called, like an afterthought, and shut the front door behind her.

  I wasn’t completely sure what she meant.

  ‘Have you been on the stairs this whole time?’ asked Dylan, who always seemed offended by my misuse of furniture and architecture. (For example, I always like to sit on the back of the couch, which he thought ridiculous). He looked down the stairs at me, clearly disapproving.

  ‘It’s cooler here.’

  ‘Don’t you find it …’ he looked towards the covered stairs, so close my hand kept brushing accidentally against the wood.

  ‘There’s nothing bad down there now. There’s just …’ I thought about it, allowing the back of my hand to brush against the nail heads. ‘… Answers.’

  He didn’t answer and it was a sign of how tired I was that even with him looking down on me disapprovingly my eyes just seemed to shut and I was asleep straight away.

  friday, january 8

  Indigo

  I don’t like to put things off. That doesn’t mean I’m not scared. It just means that sometimes short-term terror is better than gradually being worn out from looking over your shoulder. In fact it’s probably fear that launches me into danger. The fear of being taken un
awares. But although I intended to take action straight away, I seemed to have some sort of sleeping sickness. I got up from the landing and went to my room. I slept all the way through to the next morning. I couldn’t really say what I dreamed about. Just that I woke up aching all over. It was as if I’d been running all night. And I felt like everything was a bit out of focus. Maybe I was getting the flu. I didn’t even get up that early. By the time I went to the kitchen, Dylan was already up and had finished his breakfast. He poured me a coffee, without speaking. I drank it, but it might as well have been water. I couldn’t taste anything. I saw Dylan’s mouth moving – but his words only came to me very slowly.

  ‘I said – more coffee?’ he repeated.

  ‘Where’s Ani?’ My voice seemed all stopped up with cotton wool.

  ‘At work already. It’s late. Are you okay?’

  I thought about it for a while. Whether to tell him about what I was planning. I knew he would not be a fan. But he was rarely a fan of anything I did. ‘I’ve got to go down there again.’

  I’m not sure if he said anything. He probably did. But I was numb as I walked out. The terror thing, I suppose. Maybe Lily was gone. But I couldn’t forget the hands around my throat. Didn’t want to go down there. But absolutely had to. Waiting was unbearable.

  He caught up with me pretty fast, but there was nothing he could really say to stop me. I wasn’t even sure if he was speaking. I was drifting through some sort of dreamy underwater world. It was only when I was standing in the front room that I came back to myself. I realised I had bare feet and the carpet felt kind of unpleasant, dirty and dry from years of dust. I looked through the door. I saw the shadowy inner passageway, the diagonal line of the stairs and the bars of the balustrade, marching up to the blank ending where the landing should be. And, right ahead of me, the little doorway. The little, black space under the stairs.

  ‘Dylan?’ I asked, disconnected from my own voice. Not sure yet what I was going to say.

  ‘What?’ He was standing right behind me but I didn’t turn around, couldn’t turn my back on the stairs.

  ‘Why did you kiss me?’

  There was a bit of a silence.

  ‘It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.’

  His tone made it quite clear that it had not been the right thing at all. And I would have to agree in terms of the general levels of awkwardness. I wasn’t even sure why I’d asked him about it at such a stupid moment. Things just seemed to be happening without my really planning them. I chose not to look him in the eye. I took a bit of a breath to focus myself. I went forward and for some reason turned right, deeper into the house, into the living room (holding my breath as I passed the door under the stairs, not liking that it was ajar because I knew we’d shut it when we left). I’d never been in the lounge room. At least, not in any waking state. The blinds fitted so close to the windows, only the tiniest of seams of light were left, which really just made the room seem darker in comparison.

  ‘Let’s get this over with,’ Dylan said, moving past me. He flicked the light switch a few times but nothing happened. ‘It’s no good you being down here.’

  My heart sank a little lower. Because I knew why he had kissed me. I could hear it in his voice even now. He wanted to help. And he meant it kindly, I was sure. He had seen I was stuck, unable to even see the outside world anymore. He had tried to shock me out of it, stop me in my downward plunge. In a way it was a classic Dylan manoeuvre. He was always focused on the problem at hand and, though I thought of myself as reasonably tough, he was forever steamrolling over me, eyes on the greater good.

  ‘Yes,’ I murmured. ‘I suppose that’s my problem. I can’t think of anything else. I’m stuck in a loop.’

  He was moving forward to open one of the blinds and didn’t seem to be listening to my nonsensical murmuring. I’d pretty much forgotten where I was for the moment.

  ‘Are you coming?’ He gave up on the blinds, they were jammed shut. It was difficult to make anything out, but I could see there were no boxes in here, just some chairs and a couch, with cushions flung across them as if they were still in use. Or as if someone had stopped using them very suddenly and never come back to them.

  ‘Stay close to me,’ Dylan said, but I couldn’t quite make out his expression in the gloom.

  We moved right through the lounge room and into the kitchen. It was much lighter. There was a high, dusty window, showing a curve of the outer stairs, so I knew we were right under one end of my bedroom. I went to the cupboard, looked at the jars of old flour and webby grains. They didn’t seem at all marked. If Lily had fed me from them, she’d left no trace. But why would a spirit leave physical signs, anyway? I touched my throat as I thought about it, aware of the bruises that Dylan and Ani were too polite to mention – that is, after their (ignored) suggestions that I should see a doctor. And the little burst blood vessels still in my eyes. It was clear that Lily was perfectly able to leave marks. Or had been.

  ‘There’s nothing here anymore,’ I said, drawing a line through the dust with my fingertip. ‘Nothing downstairs. Doesn’t it feel like that? Now that the little bones are gone.’

  He didn’t answer.

  In my mind I was seeing Dylan. Just the shadow of him against the sky. He’d dug a really deep hole, breathing hard, unspeaking. We were going to take turns, but once he started it, it was like he couldn’t stop.

  ‘Maybe she’s with him now,’ I said. But I didn’t mean in an afterlife. I saw her standing over his bones at that cemetery, watching over him still. Too engulfed in guilt to ever leave. I’m not sure exactly what happened then. It was as if the front and back doors had opened all at once and a huge wind rushed through. When I turned around I realised that Dylan wasn't standing there. In fact, I didn't feel like he was anywhere near. I ran into the lounge room and then I stopped. Because I knew someone was there. Between me and the doorway. And I suppose I realised that I’d called it to me. The painful little twist in my heart. That thought of the child and the spot of overturned earth. Maybe it was like a flash of light in its grey world.

  The room seemed even darker than it should be. So I couldn't say how I knew it was there. I felt it blocking me in. I listened and listened. Nothing. Then a flash, so bright it ached. I scrunched my eyes shut then opened them again. Another couple of quick flashes, a tinny popping sound, and then the light was burning above, the bulb blinding for a moment. But I wasn't shutting my eyes, because it was there. It was there and much too close to me. I threw myself back, blinking hard.

  ‘Indigo,’ it whispered, long and drawn out. I scrambled back and almost fell onto an old green couch. I couldn’t see it straight on. Like when you’re looking at something in the dark and you see it more clearly when you look to one side. Only there was no way I was going to look away for a second. I couldn’t get a grip on how close it was but I could see that Dylan was definitely gone.

  ‘Why are you following me?’ I had no control over my voice.

  ‘In-di ...’ it said. I was starting to hate the sound of my own name.

  ‘I don't need you,’ I answered.

  It was drifting closer. Though not walking, not drifting really, just becoming blurrily closer.

  ‘In-di-go,’ it said, with the same drawn-out thrill as before.

  Stuck in a loop, I thought. And the horrible possibility was still there. That it was a ghost. Not a helping or a sad ghost, but a hungry, grasping ghost – feeding off my fear and everything bad that was in me. Making more as it fed.

  I was edging away around the room until I'd backed into the hard rim of the mantelpiece and there wasn’t any further for me to go. It was still right before me, no matter where I went.

  ‘Why did you send me down here?’ I whispered.

  It was right up in front of me, breathing blank air into my face. It reached out very slowly.

  ‘You wanted to ...’

  ‘No!’ I said, panicking. ‘Not yet!’

  There was a loud
sound. Like a thud and a crack all at once. It fell to one side. But it was gone before it reached the ground. I saw her for an instant. Ani, holding a plank across her shoulder, on the backward swing. Then the bulb popped and flickered off. We were alone in the room. I felt a lightness in my entire body. I couldn’t tell if it was shock or joy. It seemed that she was a bit shocked herself, because she took a moment to say anything.

  ‘I thought I’d try hitting it,’ she sounded surprised at her own daring. ‘Dylan’s been fantasizing about it for ages.’

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

  ‘I know you’re trying to do the right thing,’ she said, moving closer, eyes dark smudges. ‘But you have to believe what you’re saying a hundred percent.’

  ‘What can I do? It keeps coming to me.’ I’m not ashamed to admit it, there was a kind of hysterical edge to my voice. ‘Will you hit it with a plank every time it comes?’ I was laughing a little bit, but it was mostly at the thought of Ani lining it up like a golfer. It was only when Dylan appeared in the doorway that I remembered he was missing.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ he asked, out of breath.

  It still seemed humorous. ‘Ani hit it with the plank.’

  ‘Why are you laughing?’

  ‘I think her brain’s broken,’ said Ani, but it sounded like she was smiling.

  ‘And that’s funny how?’ Dylan’s disapproving voice seemed strangely comical. I had to put both hands over my mouth.

  ‘It’s getting too close,’ he said. ‘We can’t protect you forever.’

  I sobered up quite quickly at this. Despair was threatening again and I was starting to wonder why I had panicked. The whole reason for going down there had been to try to talk to it. Or something like that. I couldn’t actually remember my exact reasoning. In fact, it was possible it didn’t have much to do with reason at all. I was having the faintest feeling of clarity.

  ‘I think I need to stay away from here.’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ asked Dylan. He had two settings when he was angry: silence or sarcasm. Silence was the worst, so I suppose he was taking it all quite well. I was glad I couldn’t see his face though.

  ‘Or perhaps you could move in down here, and meditate on that dead child day and night?’ he suggested.

  ‘Shush!’ Ani said, quickly. ‘Don’t talk about it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She shook her head. ‘Don’t know. Just feels bad suddenly.’

  There was a pause and I could tell he was considering what she had said. I looked around the room, half expecting something else to happen but everything was absolutely still.

  ‘Let’s take a vote,’ he said, after a while. ‘I move that we get out of here now and don’t ever come down here again. Ani?’

  ‘Definitely. Not until Sunday anyway.’ She took a moment to realize we were waiting for more. ‘Things will be different on Sunday.’

  ‘Because?’ prompted Dylan.

  She flung the plank away. ‘Don’t know yet. Let’s get out of here.’

  The moment we got out I took in a big gulp of air. A few gulps of air actually. They were both walking ahead of me, but stopped to wait. The lightness was definitely gone and a sense of dread was falling. I walked past the blinded windows and tried not to look into them. I couldn’t trust myself not to see something in those reflections. The follower standing right behind my shoulder, for example. Dylan brushed me gently with his hand as I passed him and I jumped, jolted through with fear.

  ‘Come on,’ said Ani, coming back for me. ‘Come up and have a huge glass of wine.’ She reached out to take my hand and we walked up the stairs that way, even though it took us possibly twice as long. She drew me into the passageway and it struck me how much better I felt in the second story of the house. As if downstairs was a different world altogether.

  ‘You just need a break from it all,’ she said. ‘It’s that simple.’

  ‘You’d better make it a bottle then,’ I replied. ‘And some alprazolam while you’re at it.’

  Dylan made a half amused, half derisive noise behind me but Ani just frowned.

  ‘How will you protect yourself if you’re not even in this world?’ she demanded.

  She always managed to say the most unsettling thing possible.

  saturday january 10

  Indigo

  Dylan had some wine in the fridge. It was a habit of his, to always have something chilled, as if an impromptu dinner party might break out at any moment. I watched him pour it, a little hungrily. I wasn’t about to let it sit, so it was too cold – a golden dew broke out on the glass straight away. I put my hands around it, cold as it was. It had a summer smell of fruit. Reminding me of summers I had actually enjoyed.

  ‘So where do you think you’ll go?’ asked Ani. ‘I mean if it takes you?’

  She said it as if she was asking about my holiday plans. Dylan looked as if he thought it in bad taste, but I suppose it was a fair enough question.

  ‘Lost time.’ I still felt a little strange talking about it. ‘I started to remember things about being down there. About Lily. But I never remembered anything about it. So I suppose in the beginning it was a kind of nothing. Like being dead.’

  ‘Being dead’s not nothing,’ said Ani, straight away. She took a deep draught of wine as if preparing to launch into an explanation, but Dylan spoke first.

  ‘Perhaps it’s just your memory that’s wiped.’

  This was not a pleasant idea at all.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Ani, enthused. ‘You might have been gone for years … but in another world. You know, on another plane of existence.’

  ‘Well that’s just nuts,’ said Dylan.

  She give him an annoyed look, but I thought there was some affection in it too. Which made me wonder. He certainly gave no sign of being fond of her in any way. Not that it was anything to me. It would just be absolutely the last straw, that’s all.

  Ani knocked back her second glass in a few gulps. ‘I have to go and wash myself,’ she said, picking up the bottle. ‘Your follower’s given me the heebie-jeebies. I’m spidery all over.’

  ‘It’s not my follower.’

  She poured me a fresh glass without answering, then she left. I sipped at the wine. I’m not sure it was making me feel any better. It was perhaps making my muscles relax a little, but I’d been so tensed up for so long it was only causing them to ache. We sat silently for a while. Dylan hadn’t touched his drink. I was trying to come up with a way of saying what I was really thinking. But in the end there was no positive spin I could put on it, so I just came right out with it.

  ‘In a way it was easier when I didn’t exist.’

  Silence.

  I tried to explain. ‘I know there wasn’t anything good, but there wasn’t anything bad either.’ I could tell he was watching me, but didn’t want to look at him or I’d lose my nerve. ‘I suppose that’s why I can’t quite get rid of it.’ I would never have said it to Ani. But, she apparently already knew. That I couldn’t send it away.

  I met Dylan’s eye and he was giving me a pretty dark look. Big surprise. But I was simply telling the truth.

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ I said. ‘I just need to get out of the house. It’s like there’s no air in here.’ I got up and left him.

  The sun was high and still reddened by the smoke of distant fires. There definitely were bushfires now. I was not so cut off from the media that I could miss that. But it all seemed like a million miles away. I was lost in my own haze. It had been drifting down then lifting for days. Well, ever since they found me, to be completely truthful. An altered state where everything seemed clearer but the actual world was strange. I felt I could see all the answers suddenly just ahead of me, could almost grasp the meaning of the follower’s presence. If I could just follow it a little further, like a will-o’-the-wisp, I just might be able to understand it all. It was a seductive dream logic that a tiny part of me recognised as fatally misleading but still couldn’t resist.


  I walked up the centre of the laneway, arms stretched out to either side for balance. The road seemed to sway and dip anyway. The whole world appeared to be at sea. I’m not sure how I eventually crossed the streets. I don’t remember doing it. I was trying not to think of Dylan’s face. I suppose I’d said the wrong thing to him. But it was the truth. Nothingness had been easier.

  The park was saturated green and I sank down into the grass, feeling the prickle of it against my legs. The sun was really punishing, but I couldn’t get up and move into the shade. I was trying to remember what had happened there. The woman, Grace, and the pusher. And then Lily with the haggard face. Haggard because maybe she’d been half starved when she died. The little boy. But I couldn’t remember what he looked like anymore. It had been completely wiped out by the knowledge of how he looked now. A big, sick guilt was sitting on my stomach. I would be hated by everyone – if they only knew. If my family found out what I’d done – they would be horrified. Sure, they’d still love me, but they’d be thinking of it whenever they saw me. Dylan had known it was wrong from the beginning. Had warned me not to get involved at all. But had somehow tried to stay a friend. The follower knew. Had latched onto me because I was guilty. I was starting to realize I could never get rid of it. That’s what Dylan didn’t fully understand yet. That it would always be with me no matter how far I moved. I could close my eyes to sleep in ten years and there it would stand in all its comforting hunger, waiting for me, promising to take me away whenever I reached the point where it was too much. It had always only been a question of how long.

  I passed my hands over the grass. The park was full of bright sun and deep shade. There were lots of people there, lying down in the shade or just walking. The follower was already there in the blue shadows beneath the trees. I didn’t even need to lift my eyes. Maybe I wasn’t brave enough.

  I spoke very quietly, because I don’t think it needed to hear the words like an ordinary person.

  ‘What would it be like,’ I asked. ‘If I went with you right now?’

  And although it was quite a distance away, I heard it perfectly clearly.

  ‘Nothing,’ it said.

  I let the word sink in. I pulled up a piece of grass and looked at it, saw the light shining through its veins. I looked at the still water nearby. ‘Yes, I think I want to go.’

  saturday january 10

  Dylan

  I knew that Indigo probably shouldn’t go out on her own. But I just sat there at the kitchen table. I was so angry I couldn’t move. Ever since I saw it take her in the kitchen I’d been having this vision. The follower, like a big, heartless child tugging the white slip over her head. Indigo, a loose-limbed doll. I was sure he had his own reasons for taking her downstairs, under our feet. (It, it. I corrected myself. Not he). But would I ever be able to work it out? And was there any point? I tried to. I tried to visualise what I’d seen as if that would help me to understand. I’d been right there with her. Was it my loss of time, my loss of concentration that had allowed him to pass me, carrying her? Or perhaps they’d really just disappeared in the kitchen and reappeared downstairs, a sinister little space fold. Either way, I had the feeling that being moved that way could break your sense of self. Or erode it anyway. And Indigo was eroding. All looked well on the surface, but the foundations were crumbling away. I recognized it. But it seemed like there was nothing I could do to help. Even in an emergency I was no use. One moment I’d been with her in the dark kitchen and she was talking about the boy – saying she couldn’t feel anything down there, now that his bones were gone. And then I woke up on the kitchen floor, face pressed against the linoleum. Some sort of supernatural joke.

  Mostly I was angry. That’s what happens when you’re powerless. I learned this from my teasing half-brothers. The ones that made my life pretty much a misery for fourteen years. When I finally fought back against them I was too angry and I really hurt them. Though no more than they’d hurt me, if you consider all the accumulated hidden bruises and the (worse) sharp barbs about my mother that are lodged under my skin forever now. Of course, they ran and told straight away – one with blood streaming from a (no doubt) broken nose and the other with a reddened (soon to be black) eye. Any guilt I might have had was drained away when they laughed at the first blow. My father’s fist sharpened by the fact it was early in the morning and he was relatively sober. His stupid, lumbering anger was all for me. They were jubilant, like prisoners seeing all the punishment go to one inmate (safe for today, safe for a few weeks maybe!). And my stepmother’s face (she drifted in behind him) pure hatred under her outward, limp gentleness and soft protestations. I had always been evidence of that despised other woman. She couldn’t forget her for one moment now I was living in their house.

  Well not for long, because I was sixteen and I’d had enough and I left that same night. I had a bruised rib and a shiny lump on my cheek, but I also had a feeling that was welling up stronger and stronger. A kind of furious joy that couldn’t be taken from me. A power. But I was controlled after that. Knowing that child fear could become rage. The feeling of adrenalin spiking with a kind of horrible pleasure and that sense of looking at yourself from the outside, not knowing what you might do.

  Well, at last I had a place for it to go now. Because I had this other image stuck in my mind. So struck I had thought it must be some sort of premonition. Had known it was when I saw Ani’s delicate hands gripping that heavy plank. There were various scenarios to begin with. Me running to find it in the kitchen, or downstairs. The hated thing would have its back to me. And I would have a hammer in my hand. The exact one I’d used to pull up the nails on the stairs – dull green handle with the rubber peeling off. Like I said, it started differently but it would always end the same. I’d line up the back of its head. And with a wide, strong swing, I’d crack its skull. And then it was just swinging and swinging until it was down on the ground and there was no hardness to hit.

  I put my head on my hands, down on the kitchen table. I was reaching the end of my dark fantasy loop when Ani broke in.

  ‘I thought I heard Indigo go out,’ she said, sounding amazed. She was wrapped in a towel and looked as if she’d just been fished up from the bottom of the ocean. There were droplets sliding off her and her hair was dripping water across the floor. ‘Are you just going to sit here brooding?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘I know you’re fine – what about Indigo?’

  I felt like I was waking up out of some sort of nightmare. ‘I can’t lock her up.’

  She came a little closer and pressed her hair against her towel to stop it dripping. ‘Has it occurred to you that she’s only choosing it because she thinks she doesn’t have you?’

  I just sat and looked at her. Because I still didn’t want to believe Indigo was actually seeking it out. ‘She’s not choosing it,’ I said, after a while.

  ‘Are you still in total denial?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Why do you think she keeps going down there? Where it locked her up? Where all those horrible things happened?’

  ‘I don’t know. To find out about the girl.’

  ‘Lily’s dead and gone. I’ll bet a hundred bucks that follower thing is telling her to go down there. It wants her there. Wants her thinking about that little kid every second of the day – trying to remember if she heard it crying from under the stairs. Reminding her of what happened in the park. It wants her stuck in her guilt so she can’t ever get out. You already know that’s what it’s doing.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what I know,’ I said, feeling the blood rushing through my body. I was picturing Indigo standing in the dark, in the white glow of the clinging slip, telling me about her feverish dreams. And I’d done nothing.

  Ani sat down at the table, fixing me in her full glare. ‘There’s no point trying to scare me. I just took out some sort of astral spirit with a piece of wood.’

  ‘I’m not trying to scare you,’ I began, but she br
oke in.

  ‘Why don’t you get out of make-believe land for five minutes? Why would she say no to it? What’s keeping her here, anyway?’

  ‘Certainly not me,’ I said, darkly.

  She banged her hands impatiently on the table. ‘Well, it’s worth a try, don’t you think? I reckon she’s been wanting to disappear ever since we found that kid under the stairs. She’s been drifting in and out, if you know what I mean. That thing’s been working on her every night, wearing her down. So if it’s not you she wants, you’d better think of something else just as good or maybe even better. She needs alternatives right now. Hope.’

  I just sat there and looked at her. All the anger had drained out of me and her pop-psychology lecture had left me more shaken than cynical. My mind was starting to work again.

  ‘Ani …’ I leaned forward across the table. ‘Surely she hasn’t gone to the park?’

  She simply crossed her arms and gave me a stony look.

  I was totally unfit. But you don’t need to be fit when you’re operating on adrenalin. I ran hard. I barely noticed the heat. The gardens seemed much too big, too full of people. And I wasn’t sure which was the right place, so I just made for the nearest water. It was a pond really, with tall rushes in it. I saw Indigo was sitting in the grass, looking at the water. I stopped when I saw her, like I’d hit a wall, gasping in the smoky air. Just grateful she still existed. But then I saw it. It was in the cool shadows, just standing there and looking at her with its horrible, hungry look. But maybe I’m exaggerating, because it was hard to make out its face clearly. There were people everywhere. They had no idea Indigo was about to disappear. I could see it in the slow, thoughtful way she was drawing her hand over the grass. She was right back in the middle of it all. Remembering. She stood up, dusted off her clothes and started to move towards it quite naturally but I ran and grabbed her before she was half-way.

  ‘Dylan?’ she said, as if amazed. ‘What are you doing here?’

  I was still a bit out of breath. ‘What do you think?’ I looked around but I couldn’t see it anywhere.

  ‘You don’t understand.’ She was actually looking around for it, as if I was in her way. ‘I’ve realised it’s actually a part of me.’

  I was full of selfish jealousy, as if it were a man. ‘It doesn’t care about you at all!’

  ‘But it’s here for a reason. To take me ...’

  I couldn’t listen to her. ‘It was following that other woman for years, then it dropped her like a ton of bricks the moment you appeared. Indigo, you’re not special to it. It just wants to annihilate you.’

  Something about the word made it seem real suddenly, sucked all my stupid envy out and it seemed to hit her too. She stared at me for a while then sat down abruptly on the grass and hid her face. I looked at her for a moment. She seemed so insubstantial, like she might vanish even without its help. People were watching us kind of surreptitiously, probably thinking what a jerk I was to just be standing there looking down on her. I sat down with her. I wrapped my arms right around her so that she was hidden for a moment. It seemed like the right thing to do.

  ‘Now you’ve sent it away,’ she said, in a tiny voice. She wasn’t actually crying at all, just sounding defeated and very tired. ‘What will I do now?’

  I could feel the anger coming back. Because she was acting like she was still looking to learn something from it, when I knew quite well she just wanted to vanish off the face of the earth and it was no more caring of her than a gun or a knife. Even so, her fingers were curling around my arm as if she meant to keep me close.

  ‘Did you consider asking me for help?’ I asked. ‘You know I love you, and it doesn’t care about you at all.’

  She pushed me away so she could look at me.

  ‘What did you say?’ she asked.

  ‘You know it doesn’t care about you.’

  She narrowed her eyes and bit her lip. ‘No, the other thing.’

  I stood up quickly and gave her my hand to lift her up. She wasn’t looking around at all now, just staring at me with unsettling intensity. I’ve never been particularly good at reading Indigo. I was still trying to think of something to say.

  She looked towards the pond and stood very quietly for a moment. The alertness had drained out of her face.

  ‘I need to go home,’ she said, tiredly, and my heart kind of sank.

  We walked back. She didn’t look at me very much, just frowned against the sunlight as if thinking hard. I was only half watching her. I was expecting every moment to see it, to have it loom out of some shadowed porch. But we got back, all the way up the stairs and shut the door against the sun and there was no sign of it. I looked down at her. She started to speak and I steeled myself a bit. It was just automatic now – because she mostly said things I didn’t want to hear.

  ‘When you said you loved me …’ she said, slowly. ‘I don’t suppose you meant you were in love with me?’ She gave me a very steady look, but it was wonderfully clear to me she’d actually stopped breathing.

  I took a moment to look at her and the tension was draining out of me so fast it was almost painful. She had a little strand of hair over one eye, stuck to the edge of her lip. I brushed it aside, noticing that she didn’t draw back. She took in a sudden breath though and just waited. Everything seemed too still, almost like the whole house was watching. I leaned forward, leaving her time to step away. But when I kissed her she stood on tip-toes and kissed me back, as if we’d never been apart. She wrapped both her arms around my neck and I half-lifted her into her room. Under her clothes, she was even lighter than when we’d found her. All her fears and cares had worn her away into unfamiliar, angular shapes. Only the soft feeling of her mouth was exactly the same. The sound of her beautiful, sighing breaths. And her half-closed eyes looking at me with a calm knowingness that was cat-like. You might think I’m exaggerating. You might not look twice at Indigo if she passed on the street, but there was something supernatural about her when we made love. It was the way she looked at me as if she’d known me for a thousand years and she loved me right down to my soul.

  I think that when the fear drained out of her at last, all the exhaustion flooded in. We ended up wrapped together like we’d been shipwrecked, her whole body trembling even in her sleep. Tired as I was, I wasn’t planning to shut my eyes at all. I was afraid she would wake up and wander back into her strange, disconnected world. Or maybe it could even appear by the bed, just reach out to touch her and leave an empty space between my arms. I stayed awake a long time, half lost in the remembered rhythm of our kisses – sleepily daydreaming about her, feeling there was at least a small portion of goodness in the world now. A few times she woke up and drew closer, watching me quite solemnly. But she would fall asleep again almost immediately.

  ‘I think it’s safe to sleep now,’ she whispered, once. I think it was soon after that I finally fell asleep too, as the twilight came down. But it was pretty clear to me that it was not safe.

  ****