Even Molly feels the glowing. Some nuggets are so exposed and pure already that they look to Molly like large clumps of roughly torn honeycomb. Like stuff she could pull from holes in trees.
This precious gold stuff Aubrey will pull from the heart of stone and carry back to Darwin as a new man. He will be transformed by the deep country and the twinkle of his eyes and the shine of his shoes will say nothing of the blackness inside him.
Aubrey tries to count them all. Thirty gold nuggets. Forty nuggets. But he loses count. And he allows himself a giggle. And that giggle turns to a laugh and that laugh turns to a howl that echoes through the cave.
Molly has seen that look upon Uncle Aubrey’s face before. It’s a look of satisfaction. He turns to Molly and howls and the girl brings her knees to her chest and she wraps her arms around her legs, studying the fevered man before her. Howl. Howl. Howl. That deranged howling from deep inside his white spirit stomach. The noise that is made when the tectonic plates in the stone of his heart rub against each other. Howl. Howl. Howl.
Aubrey stands and rushes, breathless and panting, through the arched opening. His eyes adjust to the light and he sees that the cave opens onto a sandy clearing fringed by black wattle trees and native nutmeg trees and patches of vine forest. He looks back and up to find that he is now standing below the high promontory where he and Molly stood minutes earlier. To his right is another rushing waterway crossed by another makeshift bridge of eucalypt trunks, and to his left he sees a narrow path that disappears between rock walls. Two ways out of the clearing.
He rushes back into the cave, picks up Molly’s duffel bag and dumps the contents in the dirt. The goldminer’s pan that started all this. Shakespeare’s life’s work. The red rock that Molly pulled from her mother’s chest, the red heart of Violet Hook that turned to stone.
Aubrey frantically fills the duffel bag with the nuggets that shine brightest in the flamelight. Less rock, more precious metal. Smaller nuggets that might weigh ten pounds, larger ones of maybe twenty pounds and even a few he’s certain are heavier than thirty in his hand. He’s working with such urgency that he pays no mind to Molly when she reaches her hands across the floor in search of the rock she pulled from her mum’s chest. Violet’s rock. But she finds something else instead. Something that cuts her forefinger when she tries to grip it in the darkness. The paring knife.
She crawls along the dirt floor with the knife and her left hand finds her mother’s rock and she has all she cares about, so she crawls into a space against the cave wall and this space has a view up to the grey sky through the heart of stone. And she asks the sky for just one more gift. A fork of lightning to stab through that hole and burn Aubrey Hook to cinder. A bomb from a death plane. The same kind that tore Horace Hook in two and wedged him inside a tree. A long-lost mother with curled brown hair to come and take her away from the shadow. Take her away from him.
Aubrey slips a total of ten gold nuggets into the duffel bag and braces his legs as he tests the weight. He strains. He feels a vein in his right temple about to pop, but the gold fever gives him strength. He manages to haul the bag over his shoulder and, satisfied he can bear the weight of all this found gold, he carries it out of the cave and drops it in the centre of the sandstone clearing. He then marches hurriedly back into the cave and picks up one of the largest nuggets, a hunk of gold-heavy ore shaped like a bull’s head that must weigh forty pounds or more. He drops it at Molly Hook’s feet.
‘I’ll carry the bag,’ he says. ‘You’ll carry this one.’
Molly holds her mother’s red rock in both hands.
‘No,’ she says.
‘Come on, child, let’s go,’ he says. ‘Pick up the rock.’
‘No.’
‘You will carry that rock out of here or you won’t be goin’ out at all,’ Aubrey says.
Aubrey stands over her now. His black hat and his black shadow face fill the heart-shaped skylight.
I don’t fear death, she thinks. I have a heart of rock. Molly shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says.
Aubrey takes the pistol from the back of his trouser belt. Points it at Molly. Casts his eyes briefly around the dark cave.
‘Then I guess this hole is the last grave you’ll ever dig yourself into,’ he says.
His right forefinger slips across the trigger.
Molly looks past the gun to the sky above the shadow’s head.
And the frame of grey sky now fills with the frame of Yukio Miki. The sky gift pilot wobbling, groggy and spent, and living and dying. His family’s sacred shortsword in his right hand. His eyes struggling to fix on the shadows moving in the darkness below him.
Aubrey Hook and his long and bony trigger finger.
Then Molly holds the red rock up with two hands. She presents it to Aubrey, presents it to the sky. There is little light flowing in through the heart-shaped frame, but all of it catches the colour of the rock. The colour of blood.
The girl holds the rock as if it is a source of power, as if it is some kind of magic shield forged inside her dead mother’s chest that could somehow protect her from a bullet. Her mother’s stone heart. Her mother’s heart. She holds it there. She holds it there. She holds it there.
‘Why couldn’t you love me?’ she whispers.
And Aubrey Hook
