I couldn’t get any results for the first line on Google, so the next day I went out to the university library to see if I could track it down. It took me a couple of hours, but I found it eventually, a passage from the surviving fragments of a poem by an ancient Greek philosopher by the name of Empedocles, called On Nature, which made a kind of sense, although I couldn’t remember Luce ever showing an interest in the classics. But Empedocles would certainly have interested her. Apparently he was the first to propose a detailed explanation of the origins of species, and of the mechanisms by which a couple form an embryo. He was also a radical pacifist and vegetarian, believing that animal slaughter was murder, meat-eating the equivalent of cannibalism, and animal sacrifice a blasphemy. It was he who originated the idea that the world was made up of four elements-earth, water, air and fire. He suggested that two opposing forces operated on these elements: one, which he called philia, or love, to bind them together, and the other, neikos, or strife, to break them apart. So the passage Luce quoted was really about the basic physics of the world:
For with earth do we see earth,
with water water,
with air bright air,
with fire consuming fire,
with Love do we see Love,
Strife with dread Strife.
But Luce had altered the last line, changing Strife to Death. Was that a mistake, or deliberate?
Empedocles was a mystic, too, with lots of ideas about the transmigration of souls and the cycle of reincarnation through various natural forms, and the more I read, the more I was reminded of Marcus Fenn’s ramblings about Steiner. I also remembered him quoting Greek sources in that video of him at Oslo, and I thought he must have put Luce onto this.
I also discovered a rather disconcerting thing about Empedocles, concerning his death. It was said that he killed himself by climbing to the top of Mount Etna and throwing himself into the active crater, so that no one would find his body and people would think that he had been taken up to heaven as a god. When I read that I felt the hairs prickle on the back of my neck. The legend went on to say that the volcano coughed up one of his bronze sandals, revealing the deception. Another version had it that the volcano erupted when he jumped in, sending him flying up to the moon, where he still wanders around, living on dew. I thought of the moon guiding us out of the lagoon that night at Lord Howe.
More confused than enlightened by this research, I returned to my room at the hotel. Luce’s chalk bag was lying on the desk, and I opened it and saw again the black insect curled up inside. The sight of it took me back to the pinnacle of Balls Pyramid, as the first fierce spots of rain had hit us. I pulled the insect out and disentangled it as best I could, and was surprised by its size-five inches, twelve centimetres, long. Its shiny black shell was tinged with red, and of its six legs, the rear pair were the biggest and most muscular. I had never seen anything like it; it seemed rather primitive and formidable, and I wondered what it was doing in Luce’s bag.
So later that morning I took it to the Australian Museum in the centre of the city, threading my way through a long crocodile of ankle-biters in school uniforms queuing up the steps and through the sandstone entrance. A helpful woman at the inquiry desk told me to take the lift to an office on an upper floor, where another woman, equally patient and attentive, scrutinised my grubby little specimen. I felt faintly ridiculous, like one of the schoolboys down below, showing his very interesting find.
‘Oh! I know what that is. Goodness. Was your grandfather a sailor or something?’
I looked perplexed.
‘I just thought … This is extinct, you see. Has been for years. Dryococelus australis-the phantom phasmid.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The Lord Howe Island Land Lobster. It’s a phasmid, a kind of stick insect. It was only ever found on Lord Howe Island, and it was killed off when rats got ashore from a grounded ship in 1918. We have quite a few specimens in our entomology collection. There’s one on display in Insects, down on level two. So, how did you come by it?’
‘Oh … long story. A friend found it. Bit like what you said, probably, left by some old relative.’ Old Uncle Marcus perhaps. ‘So it’s been extinct for a while?’
‘Oh yes. There’s a small island near Lord Howe where they found the last remains, but no live specimens unfortunately.’
‘That wouldn’t have been Balls Pyramid, would it?’
She beamed at me, clever boy. ‘That’s right! Some people landed there in the sixties, and found a few dead phasmids.’
I found their specimen on level two, in a glass case labelled RARE AND CURIOUS. Apparently it was extinct on Lord Howe by 1935. In 1966 three dead ones were found by the first climbers on Balls Pyramid. How they’d got there was a mystery, for the phasmid was wingless.
I walked out of the museum, crossed the street to Hyde Park and sat on a bench in the sun. Young office workers were lying on the grass, eating sandwiches and sunning themselves. I was thinking of the sentence in Luce’s draft final letter to me.
I feel
So she’d been thinking about the phasmid before she went out to Balls Pyramid on that final fatal day. Perhaps she had written the draft the day before, after they’d made their first landing there, maybe on the evening of the party. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that the group would have been much more interested in investigating the phasmid on Balls Pyramid than yet more gulls’ eggs. The rats had never reached the Pyramid, so no one could have been sure that these strange creatures hadn’t survived out there. What could be more intriguing to a bunch of young zoologists than the possibility of rediscovering something thought extinct for seventy years? And yet Damien hadn’t mentioned it.
If Luce found the dead phasmid on her final climb, did she keep it in her chalk bag with the note as another kind of veiled message? If so, it, like the poem, could surely only have been directed at Marcus. It upset me to think that her two final messages might have been intended for him. But what did they mean?
I was struggling with this when my phone played a little tune in my pocket. It was Anna, wondering if I’d spoken to Damien yet. I apologised for not getting back to her sooner, and told her about my talk with him.
‘Mm …’ I could imagine her eyebrows furrowed in concentration as she thought about it. ‘It does sound right, doesn’t it?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You’re not sure? It’s pretty close to what you thought, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose that’s what bothers me. He already knew all about our trip-Bob had called him.’
‘Oh. But still …’
Then I told her about the poem and the land lobster, and the way they seemed to refer back to Marcus.
‘Damien was particularly keen that we shouldn’t talk to Marcus again. Too upsetting for the poor bloke.’
‘You want to go anyway?’
‘Yes. He also wanted me to get you to back off. You’re too hysterical, apparently.’
‘Hysterical? Me?’
‘Yes. He said you attacked him at the inquest.’
‘Oh, that. It was a bad time for me, Josh. I told you.’
‘Yes. So, you want to go out to Castlecrag tonight? We could grab a bite to eat first.’
I picked her up from her flat that evening at six, and we had a pizza on our way through town. There was a sudden shower and the traffic slowed and became more congested, headlights and wipers on. By the time we reached Castlecrag the light was fading beneath the heavy clouds. I turned off into the winding laneways of the Griffins’ estate, and came to a stop outside the house in The Citadel.