‘Where the hell do we go now?’ Aubrey barks behind her. But the volume of his voice has been turned down by the wind in Molly’s ears.
Her eyes straight ahead. Her eyes fixed on the end of the promontory.
‘What the hell are you staring at?’ Aubrey calls to her.
And the wind blows so hard now against Molly that it’s an effort to walk forward, and she has to push her slight frame on.
‘Where on earth do you think you’re going?’ Aubrey shouts.
He watches the gravedigger girl walk slowly across the flat rock. She seems transfixed by something. Mesmerised by a sight he cannot see. All he sees is the deep country below them. All he sees are the edges and Molly Hook walking towards the void. Her boots occasionally lose their footing on the uneven surface but she keeps going. Her hands gripping her chest. Her palms over her heart.
‘Get back here, Molly,’ Aubrey hollers through the wind.
She’s following in the footsteps of her mother, he tells himself. A Berry through and through, he tells himself. He raises the gun.
‘You don’t get out that easy,’ he shouts.
The girl keeps walking. Aubrey fires a warning shot above Molly’s head.
Molly freezes. Aubrey can see she is still a yard or two from the end of the plateau. Molly turns around.
‘Not until you’ve found my gold,’ Aubrey calls, his pistol pointed at her chest.
The wind blowing the curls of her dusty brown hair across her face.
‘I wrote a poem, Uncle Aubrey,’ Molly says. ‘It’s about you. And it’s about me and Mum. It’s a beautiful poem, Uncle Aubrey. It’s graceful.’ She looks up at the grey sky. ‘It’s called, “We Are Treasure Buried by the Sky”.’
And Aubrey Hook watches the gravedigger girl turn around again and then he watches her disappear into the rock surface. She simply vanishes. Not over the edge. But into the very rock itself. And for a moment Aubrey Hook believes in magic. For this trick must be the work of Longcoat Bob or the work of the spirits because children don’t just vanish into sandstone.
He lowers his gun and, confused, dumbfounded, edges slowly forward to the place where Molly Hook disappeared, and he sees now that she was standing above a cavity, a hole in the rock that drops into blackness. Roughly ten feet wide and ten feet long. A bizarre eroded opening with the most uncommon shape.
Aubrey Hook recognises that shape immediately. It’s the shape of a human heart. She did it, he thinks. She stepped inside her heart of stone.
*
She sits in a bed of dirt, nursing an ankle that twisted and almost broke when she landed. She sits inside a rock cave looking up to a ceiling as high as the ceiling in the cemetery house in Hollow Wood. She looks through the hole in this ceiling and that hole is the shape of a heart, a heart framing nothing but grey sky.
The outline is rough but plain as day, like the hearts she has seen tattooed on the arms of singlet-wearing soldiers and farmers in the pubs along Smith Street. A fiction heart. An artist’s version of a heart. The kind of heart shape you draw an arrow through.
She turns her head and sees an opening where more light is shining in, a natural archway at the bottom of a short downward slope. An access point not much bigger than the door of any Darwin house that suggests there are other ways to enter the belly of this strange rock formation than from a hole in its roof.
Her hands run along the dirt floor and she finds several rocks that are cold to the touch. Then she finds more rocks sitting on top of these rocks and more on top of those. A whole pile of rocks. One or two the size of honeydew melons. Some the size of mangoes. Some the size of cricket balls.
Then a sound from the cave roof.
‘Make yourself scarce,’ Aubrey Hook calls.
She looks up to see him standing in the grey-sky light. He’s looking down into the darkness, his eyes finding the shape of the girl below. He drops Molly’s duffel bag through the hole and he uses the bag’s thump to gauge the distance to the ground. He doesn’t step into the hole like Molly did, but slides into it like he used to slide into the sacred graves of Hollow Wood, clinging now to as much ceiling rock as he can, leaving his legs to dangle in the black air before dropping down to the unseen floor he can only hope exists.
He falls hard on the earth and his legs collapse and his side slams into the pile of rocks that Molly just ran her hands over. The pain in his shoulder causes him to howl and the howl bounces between the walls of the cave.
Aubrey breathes deep. A wheezing in his lungs. Molly can’t see him clearly. Too dark. But she can smell him. The alcohol still leaching out with his sweat. The odour of tobacco in his clothes and from his mouth. He’s running his hands frantically across the rocks he tumbled onto. Now the smell of naphtha fluid, the flash of the turning flint on Aubrey’s worn metal cigarette lighter. Flash and flash and flame. The small lighter flame inside the cave, and then his face lighting up. His black eyes. The flame shimmering against his black eyes and Molly sees something in those eyes. A kind of dark wonder across them. A fever.
He feels it before he sees it. The tingle of it runs from the base of his spine to its top. He swings the lighter over the pile of rocks and the rocks bounce light back to him. A gold light. A vivid and wondrous and fevered gold light from the patches of precious gold metal inside these rocks.
The lighter flame roams across the pile of rocks and Aubrey allows himself
