‘“The longer I stand, the shorter I grow,”’ Molly recites. She opens a small tin of pineapple pieces with a rusted can opener, sucks the syrupy juice down first and lifts the wedges of preserved pineapple to her mouth with grubby fingers.
Her eyes follow the flow of the creek, which disappears into a tunnel of foliage, where monsoon vines and scrub and weed have woven together to create a perfect cylinder that snakes off into the blackness. That tunnel, Molly thinks, could be just big enough for the old Ghan train to Adelaide to run through.
‘They say you can’t see nuthin’ in the daylight further up this creek,’ she says out loud. ‘It gets so dark up there you need a candle to find your way out, even in the daytime.’ Molly looks round at Greta. ‘That’s how it got its name. Candlelight Creek.’ She turns back to the tunnel. ‘“The longer I stand, the shorter I grow,”’ Molly repeats.
Greta nods her head, something dawning on her. ‘A candle,’ she says.
Molly nods. ‘Candlelight Creek. The water that leads to the silver road.’
‘You plan on walkin’ up there?’ Greta asks.
‘That’s the way to the silver road,’ Molly says.
Greta feels a cold shiver in her bones. ‘It gives me the willies,’ she says, looking deep into the tunnel. ‘You ever been up there?’
‘My dad told me never to walk up Candlelight Creek,’ Molly replies.
‘Why?’
‘He said it’s very dangerous.’
‘What makes it so dangerous? What’s up there?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Whaddya mean you don’t know?’
‘Dad never told me.’
‘Why not?’
‘I was never supposed to go up there so why would he tell me what’s up there?’
Molly stands and grips Bert the shovel tight as she slides down a steep mossy embankment connected to the side of the bridge which leads to a path running adjacent to Candlelight Creek.
‘Maybe we should respect your father’s wishes,’ Greta says, standing nervously at the top of the embankment.
‘Silver road’s the only way to your gold,’ Molly says. ‘And wherever that gold is, I reckon Longcoat Bob won’t be too far from it.’
Greta stares deep into the tunnel of foliage, her bones tingling.
‘You got any candles?’ she asks.
*
The deep country creaks and moans. Soon the gravedigger girl and the actress are so far up Candlelight Creek they can no longer see where the creek begins or ends. The water is clear, but there’s so little light under the archway foliage that the creek looks black and glassy. The thick monsoon vine forest lining the creek narrows and encloses to a kind of natural and suffocating tube of wild growth, only ten feet wide in some parts. Their feet stepping and sliding over moss-covered bank boulders lining the water. The relentless ear scratch of cicadas. The smell of mud and earth and mangrove.
Greta’s foot slips on the slimy buttress root of a blush satinash tree and her increasingly damaged saddle shoes land in the shallow left edge of the creek. Gripping the handle end of Bert the shovel, which Molly extends to her, she pulls herself back out.
‘Why d’you want to find this Longcoat Bob so bad, anyway?’ Greta asks.
Molly pauses to think on this. ‘I’m gonna ask him to lift the curse,’ she says.
Greta takes a moment to get her breath. ‘You know, Molly, there’s such a thing as rotten luck and it’s a fact of life that it lands on some people more regularly than others.’ Another deep breath.
Molly nods. ‘I know.’
‘Do you think we should talk about what happened to your dad back there?’
Molly turns, looks back up the creek. ‘Nah, I don’t think we need to talk about that.’
She moves on. Thick jungle now. A closed canopy of palms and ferns and wild weed. Strangler figs germinating in the forks of trees, their aerial roots wrapping round their life-giving hosts and slowly killing them. Vines and climbers merging and turning into suffocating monsters in the dark that seem to whisper to each other. Molly can hear them, talking about the gravedigger girl and all she has seen in her short life and why she’s come so deep into Candlelight Creek, and about her troubled father, the good man and the bad man all at once, wedged into the fork of a tree, his leg blown off and resting by a thunderbox. Poor little gravedigger girl.
‘Ya reckon Uncle Aubrey is still alive?’ Molly asks.
Greta pushing along the creek edge, her hands pulling a spiky fern frond away from her face. ‘I fear it’s gonna take more than a world war to finish off your uncle.’
‘Stop,’ Molly says.
‘What?’
Molly frozen stiff. ‘Stop moving,’ she whispers. She stares up along the creek. ‘See up there. Eyes in the water.’
Greta leans forward to peer further up the creek. She mistakes it for a log at first. Then two milky white eyes blink in the glassy water.
‘Shit,’ Greta says.
The eyes disappear beneath the water and then the eyes reappear, breaking the water closer to Molly and Greta on the creek edge.
‘Crocodile,’ Molly whispers. She can see the creature’s body clearly now. Almost twelve feet in length, half of that being its tail. Green-brown scales that shimmer in the water, colours blending like the insides of gemstones; a skin as ancient and earth-born as the old rocks she finds deep beneath Hollow Wood Cemetery. A long snout and a thick jaw and rows of bloodstained, conical teeth – teeth for biting into lizards and bats and rats and wallabies and gravedigger girls who step too far out of Darwin. Then a second pair of milky white eyes emerges behind the lead crocodile and then a third pair of eyes emerges beside the second one.
‘You see them?’ Greta asks nervously. ‘We need to go back, Molly.’
‘Wait,’ Molly says. ‘They’re freshies. Freshwater crocs aren’t like saltwater crocs. They don’t attack like salties. Freshies are more . . .’ – she searches for the right word – ‘graceful.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Greta replies. ‘Graceful? For fuck’s sake, let’s go.’
‘Sam says he talks to these fellers,’
