‘Run, Molly, run!’ Horace screams as he drives his shoulder high into his older brother’s ribcage, now exposed by Aubrey’s raised right arm. A rifle shot explodes aimlessly into the sky and Horace and Aubrey roll onto dirt hard, the way shot black buffalo roll onto dirt. And the Hook brothers of Darwin, Australia, twist and turn and wrestle and roll in the soil as 188 green and grey and silver Japanese aircraft soar above them. Some eighty-one Kate horizontal bombers, seventy-one Val dive-bombers and thirty-six Zero fighters in attack formations.
The brothers scratch at each other’s eyes and cheeks and they scratch at their shared past. Horace’s mouth finds the flesh of his brother’s shoulder and he bites deep into it. Aubrey’s hands find his brother’s Adam’s apple and he squeezes hard. Horace’s left hand finds Aubrey’s left eyeball and his thumb pushes against that white-flesh lychee organ. They are wolves, both, and they want blood, but blood is flying through the sky above them.
‘Run, Molly, run!’ hollers Horace Hook through his choke-gripped neck.
Molly runs. Past headstones and trees towards the flat yard that leads to the cemetery house. Then a whistle sound, like a boiled kettle whistling, the largest kettle ever boiled, and this impossible kettle is falling through the sky. Now she hears other whistles: five, six in chorus. Giant boiled kettles dropping towards her. The whistle sounds seem to bend, like the very sound is fixed to a curved wire in the air and that wire is arched like a rainbow and that rainbow ends somewhere in Hollow Wood Cemetery. And the whistling gets louder and louder and louder and she knows the falling kettles are getting closer and closer and closer. But she can see the cemetery house now and she will go there even if it’s cursed, and she will hide beneath the house and lie flat against the downstairs concrete and wait all this out. Just Molly Hook and the brown snakes cooling their bellies.
Run, Molly, run. Foot after foot. Boot after boot. But the whistling, that terrifying whistling, so loud and so close, it’s falling on top of her. A sound is falling on her. A sound that has transformed in the sky into something physical. Now it’s so near it makes her fall to the ground and put her head between her legs and her twig-thin arms over her ears and her scalp. And finally the terrifying whistling ends in a violent explosion that rumbles across the earth and rattles Molly Hook’s growing bones. Yard dirt rains upon her and she feels like she’s sitting beneath a tip truck and a team of town labourers are unloading a tray of council dirt on top of her body, and she knows she must get up and run again because she will suffocate beneath all that flying earth. She stands up and moves forward three steps, but something has wrecked her equilibrium and she falls face-first onto the dirt.
She raises her head once more and tries to focus on something, anything, between the grey smoke and earth debris, and she finds what must be the cursed cemetery house, but it is no longer the house she grew up in. Half of the house is missing, flattened into the dirt. The other half stands exposed, like it has been sliced down its centre and its domestic innards are spilling onto the ground. Molly can see the kitchen stove in broad daylight. She can see her mother’s bookshelf, fallen on its side beneath half a tin roof sheltering devastation and destruction, household items – plates, glasses, ornaments – shattered and spread across the yard.
More whistling now. Closer and closer. And Molly watches the earth away to her right explode in fire and dirt, and she runs forward but the earth explodes again up ahead, so she turns and runs and runs and runs back through the smoke and dirt and violence and war. The whistling sounds are all around her still and now she knows they are bombs, war bombs, falling from the sky and thumping into earth, and she barely has time to react to one earth-tearing explosion before she has to react to another, changing her direction with every thunderous eruption.
But then the sounds fade. The whistling is not in the sky anymore. There’s only a sharp and thin whistling of a different kind in her ears. A ringing. Run, Molly, run. She can’t see her father and uncle. She can’t see the scrub in front of her. She can’t see the gravestones of Hollow Wood. Run, Molly, run. Foot after foot. Boot after boot. Her heart. Her cursed stone heart somehow beating for her. Pulsing for her. Moving her forward. Run and run and run and then fall.
Molly drops into a hole in the earth. Her feet land hard on uneven ground and her body lands spine-first on uncovered bones. She wipes dirt from her eyes and looks up out of the hole she’s fallen into and realises she’s in the grave she just opened, a rectangular prism five-and-a-half feet deep in the ground. She turns and finds her mother’s hollowed-out face and draws a deep breath, then rolls instinctively off her mother’s skeleton. Yet this hole down here feels safe, safer than what’s happening up there, so she squeezes her body into the space between her mother’s left arm bone and the grave wall. And there she stays. As another bomb drops somewhere on the terrifying land above her, she reaches instinctively for her mother’s hand, the thin bones resting on the broken waist bones.
Keep your eyes on the sky, Molly. Keep your eyes on the sky.
And the edges of that grave become a window frame for Molly Hook. Then the smoke drifts away and all that fills the grave window frame now is a rectangle of perfect blue
