‘Stop there,’ Aubrey Hook instructs Molly.
Him.
They stand at the edge of the maze. The lightning has led them out.
A high sandstone plateau. Tree-lined edges falling away on either side to canyons far below. Only one direction to go now. Straight ahead. They can hear water. Fast water. Rapids.
Aubrey stands alongside Molly. He holds Tom Berry’s goldminer’s pan in his hands. He runs a finger along the back of the pan. The final line.
Own all you carry, carry all you own
Step inside your heart of stone
‘What does that mean?’ Aubrey asks.
‘You wouldn’t understand it,’ Molly says. ‘You have to be graceful to understand it. You have to be poetic.’
Aubrey places his right hand on the back of Molly’s neck. He squeezes hard. ‘Let me try to understand,’ he whispers. He shakes her hard.
Molly says nothing.
‘What does it mean?’ Aubrey barks through clenched teeth. He pushes her head closer to the pan.
Molly reads the words.
Own all you carry, carry all you own
Step inside your heart of stone
‘It means we must face the truth of who we are, Uncle Aubrey,’ she says. ‘Everything you have ever done and everything you will ever do . . . you must own it. Because you are those things. You carry those things with you. My grandfather knew this. My grandfather knew the person he had become. He couldn’t escape it. Wherever he went, he had to carry himself with him.’
She looks up into Aubrey’s eyes. ‘You must own all you carry too, Uncle Aubrey,’ she says. ‘Step inside your heart of stone. You must embrace it now. Step inside it. You are the heart of stone.’
‘Where’s the gold?’ he asks, impatient.
‘All you’ve ever wanted was treasure,’ Molly says.
‘Where is it?’ Aubrey barks.
‘My mum was treasure,’ she says. ‘She glowed. She was like the glowing. She made you gold sick. So sick that you had to have her.’
‘Where is it?’ Aubrey barks.
Molly looks across the plateau to a path that climbs to a ridgeline running across the horizon.
‘It’s just beyond that ridge,’ Molly says.
Aubrey steps back and points the handgun at the space between Molly’s eyes.
‘Walk,’ he says.
*
They pass boulders in piles and boulders standing alone. One shaped like a hot-air balloon. Another like a tractor wheel. The gravedigger girl and the shadow walk beneath the grey sky. Half a mile. One full mile into a high range. Angular pyramidal shapes and jagged edges that remind Molly of the thorny devil lizards she once saw with her father in the central deserts beyond Tennant Creek. The path bends around a series of broken ridges that remind Molly of the meat-tearing canine teeth of the stray dogs of Darwin town, then it curls dangerously along the right edge of an exposed plateau and Molly stops to assess the drop to the canyon below. She kicks a red-coloured rock and she leans over the edge of the plateau to watch it bounce three times down an almost-sheer rock face and disappear into a vine forest canopy maybe a hundred yards below them.
The path narrows to less than a foot wide as it skirts a granite ridge that blocks their passage to the other side of the sprawling range.
‘Keep moving,’ Aubrey says.
‘The path’s not wide enough,’ Molly says, studying it. Loose rocks and yellow dirt drop away sharply. ‘This is a path for rock wallabies, not gravediggers,’ she says. ‘We gotta turn back.’
‘Walk,’ Aubrey says.
Molly turns her head right and peers into the canyon below, her cold skin telling her to turn back to the rock face on her left. She turns that way and hugs the ridge wall as she steps sideways, one slow and sure foot after the other, along the narrow path, her uncle following close behind. Pressing her chest against the rock, she feels for handholds but finds only smooth grey granite. She keeps shuffling along, boot after boot after boot, and then one of those boots steps on a loose rock and Molly slips and she feels her body part from the rock face. Her arms flail, trying to find something to take hold of, but all she can grip in her fists is air and her body falls backwards towards the canyon below. Then a hand wraps around her left wrist as she falls and all the weight of the gravedigger girl is dangling from the bony left arm of Aubrey Hook, who screams in pain as the girl’s weight pulls on the festering wound from his brother’s rabid dog bite back in godforsaken Hollow Wood Cemetery.
Aubrey’s agonised wailing echoes across the canyon and he closes his eyes to fight the pain and when he opens them again he’s staring into the eyes of Molly Hook. Own all you carry, he tells himself. Carry all you own. The eyes of Molly Hook. Lift her up, he tells himself. Let her go, he tells himself. Step inside your heart of stone, he tells himself. The girl offers nothing. The girl, he tells himself, is ready to fall.
Then Molly poses a question he has never asked himself. ‘Why could you not love me?’ she asks.
Such calm in the way she asks it. Such ease in the way she hangs from his hand.
Let her fall, he thinks. Lift her up, he thinks. And he howls as he lifts the gravedigger girl back up to the narrow path. As he drops her, he catches his breath and she does too, her body pressed flat against the hard granite wall.
‘Walk,’ he
