Greta is crying now, too, but she keeps her weeping silent. ‘Ssshhhhh,’ she whispers again, as much to herself as to the baby.
The endless howling of Aubrey Hook’s laughter. The confidence in his voice. The whole black shadow of his being spreading across the stone city.
‘You left me for dead, Greta!’ he calls across the maze. ‘You left me for dead in that miserable, godforsaken cemetery.’
Stone pillars gathering around Greta. Leaning over her. Pressing down on her. They want to take her. They want to drag her back to Aubrey Hook but she won’t let them.
She’s spent from the running. Spent from the crocodiles in Candlelight Creek and the monsters in the tin mine and the sleepers and the dreamers and the poison-eaters inside the vine forest. She has to stop. She leans over her knees to suck in air. The baby feels so heavy. She turns in a circle looking for a place to hide and she sees an alley running to what looks like a wall of shrubbery. And shrubbery means the edge of the forest and the edge of the forest means a way out of the maze. So she runs down the alley and she’s almost at the forest edge when again she hears the voice of Aubrey Hook. Too close now. Too close for her to make a single movement.
‘You’ll die out here alone, Greta,’ Aubrey calls. ‘Show yourself.’
Greta crouches down, presses her back against a stone wall. Even the baby senses the danger in Aubrey’s voice and he stays silent, though Greta does not remove her hand from his mouth.
‘I won’t hurt you,’ Aubrey calls. ‘I love you, Greta.’
Even closer now. Greta realises he must be on the other side of the very stone wall she is leaning against, with her knees up to her chest where the baby rests. She can hear Aubrey’s footsteps, his boots on the gravel.
She shuffles along the stone wall towards the forest edge until she runs out of wall. She cannot move any further, can only listen to his footsteps coming closer to her. One more corner for him to turn and Greta Maze will be lost again in the shadow of Aubrey Hook.
One step. Two steps. Three steps. Greta breathes deep to hold her silence in.
‘Are you there, Greta?’ Aubrey calls. ‘I know you’re there, Greta!’
Then the voice of Molly Hook. ‘Stop it,’ she says, flatly.
‘Let her go,’ Molly says. ‘Let her go and I’ll take you to Longcoat Bob’s gold. I know exactly where it is, Uncle Aubrey. You can have it all. You can have everything you’ve ever wanted. But you can’t have her.’
Silence now in the city of stone. Aubrey Hook turning to face Molly.
‘And how will you find Longcoat Bob’s gold out here?’ he asks.
‘I’ll follow the lightning,’ Molly says.
Aubrey turns just in time to see a fork of lightning shooting down from the gathering storm clouds. He turns back to Molly, points his revolver at her heart.
‘Walk,’ he says.
Pressed against the sandstone wall, Greta waits for the sound of Aubrey’s boots to fade. Then she scampers low to the edge of the maze, a wall of shrubs with white fruits, and she ducks down into them with the baby at her chest and she crawls and crawls to the only safety she has now – the safety of the vine forest. But she’s moving so fast and so frantically that she doesn’t see that the shrubs screen a sharp gully slope and as she pushes face-first through the final layer of shrubs she drops down this unseen slope and it takes every ounce of her strength to roll to one side and hug the baby to her chest as she shoulder-slides on loose leaves and dirt and grass to the gully floor, which she hits with a thud.
Her view from the gully floor is of yellow flame trees. A cluster of floral fire lit by a kind of yellow Greta once thought she would see only in her dreams. But there is still danger in this gully. Footsteps. Someone padding across the forest floor. Someone so close there is no use in moving. And she resigns herself to the shadow of Aubrey Hook. He heard her in the shrubbery, she tells herself, and he followed her down the gully. She was foolish to think she could ever escape him.
The footsteps stop. Silence in the forest. Then a man leans into her view, blocking the fire of the flame trees. An old man. Black skin. A very old man. Grey hair. And a long black military coat with gold trim the colour of the leaves on a yellow flame tree.
CARRY ALL YOU OWN
The blue sky over Darwin saw too much, she tells herself. It could not understand the horrors it witnessed and it ran away with the wind to think on them. The sky is grey now and the grey sky will not speak to Molly.
A gunpoint walk across sandstone rubble and earth. Her dig boots on rock. Her sky-blue dress. Her Uncle Aubrey a few paces behind her, a hand inside her duffel bag.
Follow the lightning. Yellow forks dropped from mansions in the sky. The crashing lightning but still no rain. The sky can wallop but it cannot weep. She wants to go above it now. She wants to go beyond the sky to where her mother is and where her grandfather Tom Berry could tell her the true story of the long walk and she could look into his face and see when he was lying.
She places a palm against her chest. Her fingers feel for her heart, push down on her chest. I do not fear death, she tells herself. And if she does not fear death – if there is a part of her that wants
