Watcher’s Web

Chapter 3

3

SEMI-DARKNESS, mist, the dark shapes of tree trunks.

Jagged shards of glass jutted out from above the plane’s instrument panel. Pieces of glass also glistened in the pilot’s hair. He hung sideways in his seatbelt, almost a silhouette in the dim light.

Humidity mingled with the overpowering smell of fuel, which clung to Jessica’s skin like a film of grease.

“Are you all right?” asked an unfamiliar voice, deep and male, muffled in the stuffiness of the cabin.

Jessica tore her gaze from the pilot’s limp form and almost screamed. Her eyes, her face, her skin burned like fire. Waves of sparks travelled under the skin of her forearms, swirling over her hands, disappearing under the sleeves of her shirt, where she could feel them running up her shoulders, down her back . . .

Shit, I can’t move.

“Are you all right, girl?” the hippie repeated. He had an accent she couldn’t quite place, Eastern European maybe. Diffused light cast a silky sheen over his sweaty face.

Yes, Jessica wanted to say but she only managed a tiny nod. Tears stung behind her eyes. She should have cheered and laughed. Still alive. How often did people survive small plane crashes? But she had felt this burning over her skin only once before and that was a time she didn’t want to be reminded of. She worried that he could see the sparks. Had people seen the sparks back then, with Stephen Fitzgerald? Her parents had said nothing, and her mother was the first to see her, after . . . s**t, s**t, s**t.

“We’re leaking fuel.” The hippie turned the door handle. Branches cracked under the weight of the door as it swung down.

“If you’re not injured, this is not the time to play damsel in distress. Let’s get you out.”

He reached for Jessica’s arm. A spark crackled from her elbow, over her lower arm, down her hand to his fingers.

“s**t!” He jerked back, hitting his head on the ceiling. “Damn it, you could have blown us up.”

Jessica glared at him. Do you think I can bloody help it?

His eyes were an eerie light blue, lighter than she would have thought possible. His face was very narrow and his skin looked as soft as that of the year-seven boys at St Patrick’s College whose beards hadn’t started growing.

She muttered, “Sorry.”

But the spark had released some of the tension and she could now move her arms, even though it still hurt. She would need to rage at something and release the mist to fix this. Quite a bit of mist, too.

She scrambled over the seat he had vacated and slithered backwards out the door. Every time she put down her knees, a burning pain flowed through her. Sparks flew from her shivering hands, warming metal, fabric or plastic under her touch.

A knee-deep carpet of broken branches littered the forest floor. Her shoes caught on twigs, causing her to stumble on unsteady legs. Out here, the smell of fuel was even stronger.

“Help me, girl. We need to get them out.” The hippie flung aside a black bag and a newspaper. The businessman leant against the window, his eyes half-open, blood seeping into the collar of his shirt.

Something clicked in her mind. What was she doing? Forgetting everything she’d learned about first aid? “You’re . . . you’re not supposed to move injured people. You might make their injuries worse.” Her voice sounded high, awfully childish.

He shot her an irritated look. “Yes, if the victim is in a safe place—which we are not. You know how flammable Avgas is? Even a mobile phone signal can set it off. Here—get a move on. Take that somewhere safe.” He shoved the first aid kit into her hands.

She had no energy to argue with him, tell him that mobile phone story was an urban myth. Besides, the sparks she gave off might do the trick and she didn’t want to argue about them either.

Jessica clutched the first aid box to her chest and pushed up the slope through the tangle of branches. Pain spiked through her feet with every step, as if she were walking on knives. On her arms the sparks swirled, forming patterns, as if schools of tiny fish swam under her skin.

“Hurry up, girl,” came his voice from behind her; the staccato accent heightening the unfriendliness.

Damn it. Who did he think she was? She would hurry if she could, if only she had some time to get rid of these sparks. Jessica plonked down the first aid kit and retraced her steps.

He had pulled the pilot out of the wreck and placed him against a rock. The man’s chest moved in shallow breaths, and he clutched a bloodied hand in his lap.

“Girl. Help him to wherever you’ve put the first aid kit. Do something about his hand.”

Irritation boiled. “I have a name. It’s Jessica.”

Again, she met those weird eyes in a moment of silence.

Like this, he didn’t look like an ageing hippie at all. Much too uptight, no Peace, Man attitude. Maybe he belonged to a bikie gang, and was used to bullying his minions around. Not the best character to get into a fight with when you were stuck in an isolated valley.

She glanced at the silhouette of the businessman in the plane. A trail of blood ran down the window.

“Don’t you want help getting him out?”

“I’ll get him. You worry about the pilot.”

Jessica bent down, looped her arms under the pilot’s shoulders and heaved, clamping her jaws against the pain. When she lifted him to about knee-height, he became too heavy and she had to put him back down.

“You feel hot,” the pilot whispered.

Jessica pressed her lips together. Tell me something I don’t know. At least she no longer sparkled like a Christmas tree.

“Can you get up?”

Of course, she should have asked that first. Girls, her father had mocked often enough, always do things before they think.

With a groan, the pilot turned over and managed to push himself to his hands and knees. Jessica draped his arm over her shoulder, and pulled him up until he stood on his feet. Apart from his hand, he had no obvious injuries.

By the time she eased him down against the trunk of the tree where she had left the first aid box, the sparks under her skin had gone completely, although she still felt as tense as hell.

He groped behind his back. “Ouch, what’s this? It’s all prickly.”

He was right and she only started noticing the strange trees now. The trunks of all the trees were strange, all prickly with fronds and leaves as if a piece of lawn had wrapped itself around it. Weird. Very weird.

She flipped open the first aid kit, a comprehensive affair that folded out, with bottles and syringes on the top shelf inside the lid. The pilot gave her a suspicious look.

“I’m just going to bandage your hand,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ve done this before.”

Lots of times, save that she had been working as assistant vet nurse, and her patients had been horses, breeding cattle and working dogs.

He relaxed a bit. Looked away. “Sorry. My name is Martin.”

“Jessica.”

“You don’t look . . .”

Didn’t look what? Old enough to have this kind of experience? “I’m studying to be a vet.” Slight exaggeration—she needed to make the entrance score first.

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

She found bandages and disinfectant—the pilot cursed when she put it on his hand—and affixed thin strips over the cuts. Then she bandaged up his hand.

A cracking of branches announced the hippie’s arrival, stumbling backwards as he dragged the limp form of the businessman on a picnic blanket. He came to a halt next to the pilot, let go of the blanket and straightened, panting. His sweat-slicked face looked white. For all his bravado and bluster, she didn’t think he had much experience in emergencies.

As he stood there, digging in the pocket of his jacket, it occurred to her that he was as tall as her. Few people were.

The skin on the businessman’s face had faded to pasty grey, the cheekbone pushed in, the ear filled up with blood, which ran down his face, his neck and shoulder. His chest moved in slow, shallow breaths. Jessica couldn’t keep her eyes from his injury. Last year, when working for the vet, she had attended a horse that was hit by a car. It had a broken leg, and internal injuries, but there was much less blood than had seeped into the man’s jacket. The vet had seen no option but to put the animal to sleep.

She knew: this man was going to die.

Jessica took a wad of bandage from the first aid kit, intending to wipe blood out of his nose to make breathing easier.

“What the bloody hell . . .” The hippie’s voice sounded loud in the silence. He held his mobile phone in front of him. “The battery has died.”

“Try mine,” said the pilot, holding out his phone.

The hippie took it, but it had the same problem. Jessica could see it in his face before he spoke. “Nothing. Not a bloody thing.”

Both men faced her. She took her phone out of her pocket, but the screen was dead, too. Strange.

Jessica turned back to the businessman, but her face tingled. Nausea washed over her, black spots floated before her eyes, she swayed . . . Long-fingered hands stopped her falling into the leaf litter and propped her up against a tree. A bottle was pressed to her mouth. She gulped, stale water soothing her throat, running down her chin, onto her shirt.

“You’re sure you’re not injured?”

The hippie’s face floated in and out of focus, his weird eyes fixed on hers; Jessica shook her head. s**t. Now he was going to think she fainted because of the blood.

He sank down to his knees, wiping her face. “Your skin feels hot . . . what’s that?” Frowning, his finger traced the erratic pattern of small reddish spots on her upper arm. “Old injury?”

She pulled her arm back. It was as if he picked on all her peculiarities. The spots were not that clearly visible, and there were many odd things about her that most people would comment on before mentioning them. The words “creepy” or Dracula featured commonly in those descriptions.

“It’s nothing. A birth mark. I’ve always had that.”

Always. Not even her mother knew how those spots came to be on her skin, or the burn on her leg, now hidden under her jeans, and she had been only three weeks old when she stopped being anonymous, abandoned “baby J” and started being Jessica Moore.

She tried to soothe her nerves and convince herself that he knew nothing of the web of light she used to control animals. He knew nothing of her feelings just before the crash. He knew nothing of the sparks.

But she wasn’t entirely successful.

He smiled, uneasily. “Just take it easy, girl. None of us are made of steel.”

“My name is Jessica!”

He flicked up eyebrows of white hair. “Jessica.” In a tone as if he didn’t believe her. His gaze turned to the businessman. “You’re OK to clean him up a bit? You need help?”

“No!” Spoken more angrily than she intended, but who the hell did he think he was, bossing her about? She was not a softie. She unwrapped a clean wad of bandage and drenched it with disinfectant.

The hippie turned away and spoke to the pilot. “Did air traffic control reply to your distress signal?”

The pilot gave a helpless shrug. “It was all so fast I never got a chance to talk to anyone. As soon as the lightning struck us, the radio went dead. I’m not even sure anyone heard my call.”

“You’re sure it was lightning, mate? Couldn’t have been flying too close to power lines or anything?”

“Not at that height. Yeah, I think it was lightning. No idea where it came from, but the weather does weird things at times.”

“You’re not wrong there, but that would have been the strangest lightning I’ve ever seen.”

Jessica shivered. It wasn’t lightning, she was sure of that. Anyone else would know that, too, having noticed the distinct lack of clouds in the sky. What sort of brain did this man have in his head? A brain that was avoiding the obvious conclusion: that the crash had something to do with her.

Things had started to go wrong the moment that . . . whoever it was . . . started tugging at the web she had cast at Angus. Something had happened. She had felt the prickling sensation of a current through the plane, so there was no reason the hippie couldn’t have felt it. She saw the sparks under her skin, so he might have seen them, too.

He had definitely seen the sparks leap off her skin.

He sank down on a knotted root next to the pilot, not looking at her, or avoiding her gaze.

“Any idea where we are?” he asked.

The pilot shrugged. “Not the faintest f*****g clue, mate. I mean, according to the map we’d be somewhere on the western slopes, about fifteen minutes out of Lithgow, but I don’t know of any country like this on the western slopes. It’s like we’ve landed in some kind of f*****g hidden valley. Like the one where they discovered this . . . this . . . flaming tree . . . oh, what’s it called?”

“The Wollemi Pine?” Jessica said.

“Yeah, that’s the one. A prehistoric kind of valley. I mean, aren’t there supposed to be gum trees in this country? You got any idea where we are?”

Soft thuds of drops of water falling from trees were the only reply to his question.

“How long before the airline discovers we’re missing?”

“Not too long. What’s the time?” Eyes wide, the pilot stared at his wrist. “Would you believe it? My f*****g watch has given up the ghost, too. It says it’s just past four, but it must be later than that. It’s getting dark.”

Jessica’s watch too, said five minutes past four, but the seconds were still ticking over.

The pilot looked up where tree trunks disappeared into the mist. “They’d be searching for us right now. I don’t know how long it’d take.” He groaned. “s**t, my head hurts.”

The hippie got to his feet. “Well, it looks like we’re stuck here for the night unless the mist lifts. Do we have any food?”

Silence.

He shrugged. “Suppose that would be asking a bit much. Let’s see what we do have. A tent of some sort? It looks like it might rain.”

“There’s a tarp in the plane,” the pilot said.

“Come on, girl, you look big and strong; I could use some help.”

Jessica very much wanted to tell him where he could stick his patronising comments and orders, but there was nothing else to do, so she pushed herself up and followed him back to the wrecked plane, thinking that even though she and the pilot had introduced themselves, he had not. When he stopped to hold a branch aside for her, she looked into his sweat-slicked face.

“Forgive me asking, but do we know each other?”

A closed look came over his face. “Should we?”

“I didn’t think we did, so I don’t know your name.”

“Uh, sorry. My name is Brian.”

A slight hesitation. Not his real name, no way, not with that accent. Someone on the run? She forced a smile. “Nice to meet you, Brian.”

He didn’t reply.

They reached the plane wreck, where he crawled into the luggage compartment and extracted the tarpaulin, which he handed to her without meeting her eyes. The uncomfortable silence lingered.

By the time Jessica had helped Brian string the tarpaulin between the branches of two trees, it was almost dark. Since he had told her his name, Brian had spoken only the most necessary words. Silence hung between them like heavy syrup. He glanced at her, and she glanced at him, trying to do so when he wasn’t watching, and being unsuccessful at least half the time. Those light blue eyes chilled her. He was sizing her up or something. Not quite a pervert, since he’d made no move to touch her when they were alone. But something was odd and creepy about the way he looked at her.

To get away from his stare, Jessica collected pieces of dead wood and put them in a pile, but however much Brian tried, the pilot’s cigarette lighter would not cooperate. He went back down the hill to the plane wreckage and came back with a container. The look on his face spelled thunder, so Jessica was happy to get out of his way and watched from a distance as he sprinkled Avgas over the wood. The smell of fuel drifted on the air. He flicked the cigarette lighter.

Nothing.

He flicked the lighter harder and harder, his mouth set in a grim line. His lips were very thin.

After a while, Jessica started feeling sorry for him. He so clearly wanted to play scout leader. “Maybe the lighter is out of fluid.”

“Don’t you think I’d have checked that?”

He flicked the lighter again and again, sweat sheening his arms. It was probably not such a good idea to needle him so much. She could almost feel his anger.

“It doesn’t really matter. I mean—do we really need a fire? It’s not cold.”

He turned around, glaring at her. He took a deep breath, held it for a second or two before letting it out again. “Look, girl, why don’t you attend to the others?”

“My name is Jessica, not girl.”

He gave her a withering look.

Jessica sat down next to the pilot under the tarpaulin, glaring at Brian’s back. All right, so he didn’t want to be helped. Well, f**k him.

She pulled her knees up under her chin.

“Are you all right?” came the pilot’s whisper.

“Yes, it’s just . . .” She shrugged.

“He’s a bit odd, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.” She was glad the pilot volunteered.

“Do you know him?”

“No.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh. I thought you did. You know he’s the only reason we waited for you at the airport?”

“He is?” Her heart jumped.

“He told me he’d be happy to wait when I said there was another passenger coming.”

A chill crept over her back. This guy kept staring at her. He made no effort to introduce himself, but picked up on peculiarities of hers that no one noticed—and yet seemed to gloss over the most obvious ones. Between that and the accident and the mysterious message on her phone . . . It couldn’t all be a coincidence, or could it? Or was she being overly suspicious? Heaven knew she’d had plenty of reason for that.

No, her imagination was running away with her. She had never met anyone who knew about the mist. Why would she be sharing a plane with one?

In all likelihood, she would have asked the pilot to wait, too, knowing how hard it was to find alternative transport in the country. But somehow he didn’t feel like the kind of person who would have that much concern for other people.

“I’m beginning to wish I missed the flight,” she said.

“You’re not the only one. I was rostered on a different flight and took this one only so that I could go to my brother’s birthday tomorrow.”

“I’m—ouch!” Something pricked the skin just above her sock. Something black, soft and slimy, like a slug. She swiped at it, flicking it into the bushes. “Yuk, these things bite.”

“What is it?”

“Some kind of black slug. Look there, on your shoe.”

He pulled his foot closer to see. His face twisted into a disgusted mask and he flicked the creature off. “Great, leeches.”

It wasn’t a leech, she had seen plenty of those on last year’s school kayaking camp, but Jessica wasn’t going to argue about it. Blood-sucking slugs were the last thing she felt like dealing with. She pulled her socks up as far as they would go and stuffed the hems of her trouser legs in them. From the sound of shifting leaves, she gathered Martin was doing the same.

A bit later, Brian joined them. He sank down in the leaf litter and heaved a great angry sigh. The pile of sticks lay like a large dark mole hill. No one spoke.

They sat in the advancing night, sharing drinks from Martin’s water bottle, while drops of water plocked on the tarpaulin. Every now and then, Brian would get up to check on the businessman, but he never said anything when he came back and Jessica never asked. She knew the news couldn’t be good.

Martin fell into some kind of fevered sleep. He mumbled and tossed and turned, every now and then letting out snorting snores that made Jessica sit up straight and strain her ears. When would the rescue team come?

The night drowned in shrills and cries and buzzes. Wings fluttered close to her face and tickling creatures ran up her legs under her trousers. Some time later, a breeze picked up and blew away the veils of mist. Gnarled black shapes materialised: the trunks of enormous trees covered in growths so they looked like yetis with arms stretched towards the sky. Mossy boulders dotted the hillside like marbles thrown by a giant hand. A patch of moonlight travelled across the treetops, showing the canopy above.

“The mist is lifting,” Brian grumbled and after the long silence his voice sounded loud. It was very deep, and rumbled in his chest. “That means tomorrow the search party will have no trouble finding us.”

Oh, she hoped so. He creeped her out. Seriously.

More drops of water fell on the tarpaulin; strange noises drifted from somewhere far off. Jessica scratched exposed skin at every itch. Carnivorous slugs. Furry trees. In all the time since the crash, she had not heard a single familiar bird call. The trees, with their covering of ferny plants and large branches so close to the ground, did not look familiar either. On kayaking trips with school, she had traversed rainforest gullies full of tree ferns and giant gum trees with white trunks like graceful nymphs, where the sound of whipbirds and the laughter of kookaburras rang in the forest. Here, there were none of those familiar things. Just where had they landed?

“You have a sleep,” Brian said after a while. “I’ll keep watch and wake you when I hear something.”

Jessica was not tired in the least, but she lay down anyway. Her thoughts went around in circles. Maybe she was silly, but she didn’t trust him. He was weird and made her nervous.

She couldn’t stop scratching herself, checking her skin for the horrid black creatures. Every now and then, she held her breath for as long as she could, listening for the sounds of the forest, as if the slugs made a hungry sucking noise. Then she would remember the crash, the frightening sensation of falling, and she would try to piece together how it could be that the day had passed so quickly. Nothing made sense. Then she would drift off, only to be jolted by a grunt or a snort from Martin. And remember that she wanted to stay awake. And find herself covered in sweat. She would look up to see Brian’s silhouette sitting there, staring into the dark. But somehow, sleep managed to claim her.