Watcher’s Web

Chapter 2-1

2

THE UTE CAME to a screeching halt, scattering gravel and dust in a cloud that wafted past the open windows.

Brendan grinned. “There you are, Jess.”

Across the fence, beyond a section of desiccated grass, the tarmac spread out; a grey expanse of asphalt with white painted lines. On it waited a single-engine plane. A man in blue uniform sat on the folded-out stairs.

“Is that it?” asked Brendan.

Jessica glanced at the dashboard clock. Ten minutes late, if the thing could be trusted. “Bloody hell, I hope so.”

She grabbed her bag and opened the car door, stepping into the dust and late afternoon heat. “Thanks for the lift.”

“No worries.” He tipped his hand to the rim of his hat. A broad grin split his face, and his eyes betrayed that he still held hope for the date he’d asked her on a few weeks back. As far as John Braithwaite’s farm hands went, Brendan wasn’t that bad, but after that business with Luke, she wasn’t getting involved with any of them again.

She slammed the door and ran. The man in the blue uniform—the pilot, she now realised—pushed himself off the steps.

She called out, still running, “Is this Westways flight 265 for Sydney?”

“Sure. You’re Jessica Moore?”

“Yes.” She stopped, panting. They’d waited for her. How . . . good of them; how . . . totally embarrassing. Stupid bloody bull.

Jessica handed her bag to the pilot, took off her hat and clambered up the stairs.

A man in a grey suit looked up from his computer, his expression vacant. What would he be seeing? An exceedingly tall girl with lanky black hair, in a dusty shirt and jeans, smelling of cattle s**t. Wonderful.

“I’m sorry.”

He grimaced and went back to his machine. OK, so he was annoyed. Missed a meeting, an important deadline. I bloody said I was sorry.

He looked up again, meeting her eyes. A slight frown.

The other passenger paid her no attention. Also a man, perhaps in his forties, he wore faded jeans and a black leather jacket that had seen better days. He had tied his greying blond hair in a ponytail, the end of which disappeared under the collar of his jacket. He looked, for all she could think, like an ageing hippie escaped from a commune up the north coast somewhere. One of those with no pesticides, no poisons and no bloody crops either. He held a book on his lap and didn’t even look up when Jessica excused herself to squeeze between the seats. She slid sideways into the back, bumping her head on the ceiling. Her phone beeped in her pocket.

She pulled it out. The screen displayed a message, please return my call when you can, from an unknown number.

The businessman glared over his shoulder.

Yeah, yeah, I’m turning it off.

She pressed the off button down and the screen went blank. Her mind churned. Who could that be? The only people she knew who would write in full sentences were her parents and John Braithwaite. Their numbers she knew off by heart, especially her mother’s, because she sent messages every day to check on her well-being. Sending their shy, weird, traumatised and vulnerable daughter off to boarding school in the city hadn’t been easy on her mother, but after the events at Pymberton High when Jessica was fourteen, there had been little alternative.

Jessica stared at the blank screen, pushing down memories of receiving vile messages she used to receive daily at that time. Apparently some people in town bought phones just so that they could harass her anonymously.

She shivered.

That crap wasn’t about to start again, was it? Nothing had happened for over three years.

She settled on the back seat, wriggled to find the seat belt while the pilot slammed shut the luggage compartment and climbed into the cabin, pulling up the stairs behind him.

A few flicks on the instrument panel and the propeller rattled into life.

Bloody noisy, it was. It was only that John Braithwaite paid for her ticket, because otherwise she preferred the train.

But she had made it.

Stupid bull. Stupid . . . whatever had happened.

That should teach her not to play with this strange ability anymore. Every time she thought she understood it, some s**t like this happened.

The pilot threw off the brakes and the plane jolted into action. He had put on headphones and was talking to air traffic control, his voice barely audible over the rattling propeller. Outside the window, wing flaps moved up and down and back into their normal position. Jessica knew the motions; she had been through this before. She still didn’t like it.

The plane turned onto the runway and gathered speed. Engine noise exploded; a weight settled on her chest. The rumbling of the wheels stopped and the plane rose sharply until the cockpit window showed only merciless blue sky.

Jessica looked to her right. Down there was the main road, the Henderson orange farm and the place of those city folk who’d come to town a few years back to breed emus. A bunch of the silly birds clustered around a feed trough. She’d heard the owners were doing quite well. In the distance, farmland merged into wooded hills which, further still, ended abruptly in the cliffs of the western Blue Mountains, tinged orange in the afternoon sun.

The sight gave her a shiver of excitement. She might live in the middle of the city, but she had no doubt about where she belonged. I love a sunburnt country, so the poem by Dorothea Mackellar described the bush. Well, she wasn’t much of a poet, but that was her world, all right. No stress, no nosy idiots, and space to get away from it all when life became too complicated. For her, it meant space to let the sparking mist flow from her and let it whip at the trees and tear bushes bare without anyone noticing. Things had become better since she figured out that she needed to do this every few days, because the tension built up inside her, especially in hot weather or if she’d spent a lot of time in the sun.

The memory of the incident with Angus still chilled her. There had never been other people in the mist, or voices.

She wiped the sweat from her upper lip.

No need to worry. Nothing had happened, right?

Jessica took a book from her bag and opened it on her knees. Sunlight slanted in through the window, spilling across pages of Japanese text. Of course she didn’t need Japanese for Vet Science, but she liked languages and she was good at them. She squinted through her eyelashes, letting the patterns of the text draw themselves before her, as if floating in the air above the page. Then she hesitated. If she used the mist for seeing the patterns in the text, would the web form again and would there be someone else at the other end?

She gazed out the window, feeling uneasy.

A puff of smoke from a bushfire rose in the distance. From up here, the landscape looked grey, washed out, parched. A road sliced through paddocks directly below her, and on it a tiny white car moved. A mother collecting kids from school, a farmer going into town, a sales rep travelling to his next assignment.

Without warning the familiar landscape melted before her eyes.

* * * *

She saw rolling hills covered in rainforest. Mist hung in the valleys, with wispy clouds reaching over the ridge tops. Ahead, the hills fell to a floodplain with reeds and small pockets of trees. Sparkles of light reflected off a huge stretch of water. At the horizon was the grey silhouette of an island, its outline jagged, square and stair-like, as if covered by buildings. The evening sky was deep green above, fading to yellow and orange at the horizon.