She sings of wild black storms, but all Yukio Miki sees is sunshine. And she saves her last word and her last look from the stage for the pilot who fell from the sky. And he understands that last word of her song, he can translate it, and that word is drawn from the end point in the maze of Greta Maze, and what’s waiting at the end of that maze is that last word and that word is ‘together’.
Molly claps loudly. ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ And Greta Maze bows to her imaginary audience and Yukio Miki wants to open his mouth but he’s frozen stiff and what use has he for a mouth, anyway, when no kind of mouth, not Japanese or English or French or Woop Woop, could ever convey his desire to hear her sing an encore or how good it feels to know what high heaven sounds like?
*
Silence now in a bush cathedral of trees where little light gets in. Molly walks ahead, Greta behind her, then Yukio. Darkness in the deep country and a narrow dirt track running deeper still into dense wilderness.
‘Do you hear that?’ Greta asks, stopping.
Molly and Yukio stop with her.
‘Hear what?’ asks Molly.
The sound of cicadas. A bird whistle.
‘Never mind,’ Greta says.
They walk on through ferns and rambling monsoon forest climbers.
Greta stops again. ‘You hear that?’
‘Hear what?’ Molly asks.
‘Piano keys,’ Greta says.
But Molly doesn’t register what Greta says because she has spotted a fork in the path ahead and she runs to it because she can see something flashing among a stand of trees where the path splits in two, one path turning west around the trees and the other turning east. The forest is dark, but dappled light shimmers through it when the wind blows and then shadows move across the strange cluster of seven grey-brown trees standing almost sixty feet high.
Molly walks over to the trunk of the largest of these trees and caresses its majestic torso with skin like a tessellated mosaic of thick bark fragments that took some reclusive and fine forest artisan a decade to create. Her fingers find wounds in the tree and she notices that these wounds – like bullet holes or puncture wounds from thrown spears – are on all the trees at this strange junction, and from these wounds run thin rivers of blood. She runs her forefinger along one river of blood and realises it has hardened to a waxy substance, like something her father would have used to seal an envelope.
The tree blood has stained the trunks of the towering natives. ‘“Out damned spot, out I say,”’ Molly recites to herself. She digs out her gold pan, studies her grandfather’s secret words, Tom Berry’s etched notes to self. Then she calls to Greta and Yukio, ‘“West where the yellow fork man leads, east in the dark when the wood bleeds”!’
She looks down the eastern path, a thin animal track winding through thick forest. She looks down the western path, a thin animal track winding through thick forest.
‘We go this way,’ Molly says, excitedly peering down the eastern path.
Yukio nods but Greta seems preoccupied. She’s looking up at the forest ceiling, a dense roof of palms like ship sails and branches that stretch and probe through all that green the way a jellyfish’s tentacles stretch through oceans.
‘Can you hear that?’ she asks. ‘It’s faint.’ She looks down the western path. ‘It’s music.’ But the faces of Molly and Yukio say they can’t hear it and Greta wonders if she’s hearing things because she’s tired and her stomach has been empty for the past six hours and her mind has been ravaged by war and monsters.
But there it is again. Music. The faintest sound of music. Piano. She wants to say a word out loud but she holds that word in. A word from her childhood. A German word her father said. Liebesträume.
‘Greta,’ Molly says. ‘This way, come on!’
And Molly skips down the thin path heading east and the pilot and the actress follow. But then she stops on the spot. ‘Wait, I hear something too,’ she says. ‘But it’s not music.’ She listens harder to the forest, her right ear up to the sprawling green canopy. ‘It’s a waterfall.’
*
Molly in the sky-blue satin dress, dirt-stained and creased, clomping along the dirt path in her dig boots. Bert the shovel helping to prop her up as she walks. The sound of a thunderous waterfall growing louder as the forest thins out. She feels it in the air, its spray fuelling a mist that seems to be permanently watering the giant ferns and grey-green cycads she passes.
And then the waterfall comes into full view and it opens up to Molly Hook like a new world. An immense natural hall with a sky roof and mighty walls made of deep red sandstone, walls so dramatic Molly has to believe they were chiselled by Norse gods or the Lightning Man or just Father Time. A waterfall that Molly finds as deafening and spectacular as would be a thousand white horses charging over that same 250-foot cliff face. A rapid torrent rush so forceful she has to shout to have her voice heard by her fellow travellers. ‘Is this a dream, Greta?’ she screams and Greta smiles and shakes her head, her face wet with spray.
Molly looks across the scene. A black and purple and white spider in a vast
