Jeff had started banging on the tabletop. He stood, leaning forward. I could see that things could very easily get out of hand.
“Hey, hey,” I said. “We’re not the enemies. We’re all worried. But it’s not for us to decide. It’s in the hands of the police. They’re at Ruby’s shop right now, working out what to do. We’ll hear soon enough. All we need to do is look after ourselves in the meantime. Lock up tight.”
Tamsin and I left for home soon after.
Life changed for a while. We lived behind locked doors. I didn’t take my usual walk down Sweetheart’s Way. And I kept a cricket bat beside the bed of a night. Not much use against a gun, I know, but somehow, the thought of having a gun in the house scared me even more.
“Is it worth it?” Tamsin asked. “All this uneasiness, this fear, just to own some property? It was supposed to be a beginning, but it doesn’t feel like that, anymore.”
I knew what she meant. I didn’t pick up a paintbrush for days, not able to see a future here, not sure where we were heading.
But we did settle. You can get used to anything, I found, even finding a dear old neighbour dead on the linoleum. You can’t live on high alert forever. It’s just not physically possible.
And it was a fine place, really. This part of the world felt ancient, prehistoric. Giant ferns, skittering marsupials, the air clear and fresh, the quiet addictive. Despite the time wells, I felt centred here. Much more than I ever had in the city. At least once a day, we’d go walking in that clear air. I’d had a lot of struggle and complication in my life, but this place was helping to give me some space between me and all that. We’d had a glitch but now, we were on our way again. It was senseless to lock ourselves away when we were surrounded by all of this.
It became our habit to take a morning walk together, a different route every time. We found trees that must have been a thousand years old, creeks full of jumping trout, old miners’ huts made of hessian and lime, still containing a bed and shelves and a bench full of dusty tins of food. And we found the skins. We smelled them before we saw them. Round a bend and there they were, a dozen or so rabbit skins hanging from the branches of a eucalypt, sinister flags twisting slowly with the breeze.
“What is it?” Tamsin whispered.
It felt threatening. It was clearly mental. Hell, it was both. Whoever had done this had some agenda I couldn’t even begin to grasp. That made it dangerous. “C’mon,” I said, “Let’s go.” Whatever it was, there was something wrong about it, a wrong feeling, a wrong sense. Just wrong.
Later, at the pub, Tamsin asked Malcolm about it.
“Sounds like someone’s camping around here, using old-time skills, things my grandad taught me. Only, why hang them up like that? They’d be flyblown within hours, ruined. No, when you think about it, it doesn’t make sense.”
We thought it might be witchcraft, but Milla said no, didn’t seem like anything she was familiar with. It set our teeth on edge, all of us, and we grew wary and afraid again. Tamsin and I began to talk about moving. We had no place to go, people like us didn’t have much choice, but it seemed clear we couldn’t stay here. There were too many things we didn’t understand about this place, too much dissonance going on for me, creating an almost unbearable tension. I could see it was the same for Tamsin. She wore a constant frown and a faraway expression, and held her body rigid as if she were becoming uncomfortable in her own skin. When we made love, she held on to me so tight it hurt, as if she were trying to stop from sinking, drowning. We kept close to home after that, only venturing out to get our supplies. We might as well have been living in some apartment in the middle of one of the cities, for all the countryside we saw. And we checked on each other constantly. If I hadn’t seen Tamsin for half an hour or so, I’d go wandering, searching all the rooms, make sure I’d placed her, that she was safe enough for the next little while.
Whenever I was at the shop, I made sure Tamsin locked herself in. But you can only make a place so safe, can’t you? I’d forgotten the milk that morning, so I’d had to go out for the second time if we wanted our morning coffee. I’d found croissants and had bought a dozen. They were frozen, of course, but exotic enough for a town like Hills Point. I couldn’t wait to show Tamsin. Only, it wasn’t just Tamsin in the kitchen. She had company. An odd-looking man, bearded and black-hatted, wearing dirty, white oilskins and a dark waistcoat, and from the stink and colour of him, he hadn’t washed in months.
It was him, I knew, as soon as I saw him. He was the shift. This man had come through the time well and it had closed up behind him. Is that what it took to close a time well? Human sacrifice?
I tried to place him in time. Somewhere in the mid 1800s, I thought.
“Get you there,” he spat when he saw me.
I froze. Too many shocks piling one on top of the other.
“Get you there!” he yelled, “or you won’t be able to. I’ll do the same to you as I done to the shopwoman.”
So, he had killed Ruby.
“And that stupid girl who tried to bewitch me.”
Milla? Brave Milla.
“Oh, no!” Tamsin gasped.
“What do you want?” I asked him.
“Tell me,” he said. “Where be this?”
“Hills Point,” I told him. “You’re in a small town called ‘Hills Point’.” I could feel myself consciously slowing my speech, enunciating more clearly.
“Where be this?” he said again. “What country have I come to?”
I saw the tremor in his hands, the size of his pupils. If this man had come through the well, the passing through had changed him, you could tell. The symmetry of his face, his body, was slightly off, his colour wrong, his hair, up close, far thicker than normal hair.
And he blurred. I thought it was my eyes, at first, but no, holy hell, it was him. That’s right. When he moved he blurred. He got all pixelated and smeared-looking, almost as if he were lagging behind himself, as if, all around him, space, time were unstable. God, it was weird. Creepy weird. Scary weird. I wondered if it hurt, blurring like that. I was terrified he’d touch me and suck me into his pixelated lag space, almost more afraid of that than of being shot. But, most of all, I was afraid he’d hurt Tamsin. We had to be careful. This was a desperate man, a scared man, and probably an insane one. He had killed Ruby and Milla. Who knew what he was capable of?
“It’s Australia,” Tamsin whispered.
“Then why your foreignness?” he shouted. “I don’t believe you. You are not Englishmen.”
“We’re Australian,” I said. “Not English, Australian. And you, what are you?”
“British, of course, brought out here for something that weren’t my fault. And now, stuck here and hating the damned place. But towns like these. Why do we not know of these places?”
Tamsin slid down to the floor.
“Up!” he shouted.
“She’s afraid. Let her be.”
“If she don’t get up, she won’t never,” he threatened. I could see by his eyes he meant it. He was a man with nothing much to lose.
I helped Tamsin to her feet and held her there.
“Then, if this be Australia,” he continued, “this is where I stay. Not in that godforsaken, backbreaking wilderness I came from.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “You will probably have to stay. The, ah, road you came through has closed up.”
“But am I dead?” he muttered to himself. “Is this Hell?”
God only knows what private torment he was living in now.
“No, you’re not dead,” I said, trying to keep my voice as steady as I could. “But you probably shouldn’t stay in Hills Point. We are only a town of 30. You need to go somewhere bigger.”
I had no other plan but to get him away from us as far as possible. I had to get him away from Tamsin.
“Eh, bigger, you say. And where would that be on this lonely continent?”
“A town of thousands,”’ I said. “There are lots of towns like that. Somewhere you can be lost in the crowd. Somewhere no one can find you.”