The 13th Descent: Book One of The Rosefire Trilogy (2 page)

W
oken by familiar whimpers, groans, and thumps, I lay still, holding my breath, trying to figure out if it’s coming from my grandfather’s bedroom or the piddle-stained sheep skin rug by the fireplace.

I hear the
tell-tale
stumble...curse...stumble...clink...
CURSE!
and I know exactly what’s happening. Georgie Pa has drained the bottle and he’s searching for more, and Chip is either taking on a car or he’s in battle with one of the huge mutts from next door. For a mini Fox Terrier, he snores and dreams like a Rottweiler.

I sit up
, rub away the cobwebs and stare helplessly into the darkness. Georgie Pa made me promise to keep my distance when he’s like this. And I have learned firsthand that interrupting one of Chip’s dream tussles could result in the loss of a finger.

I
have just seen the people Georgie Pa has toasted every night for the past ten months. Sleep is the only time they come. Now I’m awake, I know I won’t see them, but I still search the shadows dreading, hoping. They don’t show themselves, but the tingling at the back of my neck whispers that they are near.

D
uring the day it’s much easier. These ghosts shy away from the light. But at night, they come out and dance to the tune of our nightmares. To keep them away, Georgie Pa drinks. Chip fights. I search the closets for their skeletons.

Our house is small
and the walls are thin, so it’s hard for the living to guard their secrets here. If Georgie Pa knew what I was up to, he’d change his mind and send me off to France in a heartbeat: off to Nanna’s family and their kooky post-pubescent pilgrimage. Apparently, the women in her family have been taking this trek for centuries. My mother included. Some of the stops along the way sound interesting, but it’s why they all go that once sounded like a lot of hocus-pocus crap to me. Georgie Pa used to make it painfully clear that he didn’t think much of the whole thing either.

But
now I think Georgie Pa and I could use a little bit of that black magic to help us to see through the heat of flames into the warmth of the past. Even though I’m breaking one of his rules, I still go through Mum and Nanna’s things looking for it. There are times when the heat subsides just long enough for me to sense their glow, but when I reach for it, it spits, fizzles, and falls to ash. Then I feel guilty about what I’m doing, until the next time.

The old man
would blow another gasket if he knew how many nights I have spent amongst their things, but in his present state, I don’t think he’ll be catching on anytime soon. It’s Chip I need to watch out for. Between his hyper highs, his sulky lows, his spontaneous barking at empty corners and his all-round weird behaviour, I have caught him, more than once, dragging random things out of my room to one of the many holes he has dug in and around Mum’s once beautiful rose garden. It seems we are both digging through the dirt searching for our dead.

Georgie
Pa says that Chip is grieving too. He believes that animals understand more than we give them credit for and because they can’t tell us what they are thinking and feeling, they do all they can to show us. Using Georgie Pa’s analogy, maybe Chip thinks that if I can’t find my things I won’t leave too? Or he’s trying to tell Georgie Pa that I’m hiding something? I think he’s just being a bratty little snot because he’s hoping Nanna will magically appear to tell him off.

But
Chip was the only one of us who was with them in their final moments. Another witness, Father Yarden, said Chip jumped out of the car window, barking hysterically at Mum and Nanna as they fought with the locked doors, heartbeats before the car blew up in flames.

Chip used to go everywhere with Nanna.
Every day she would walk him into town. Most of the local shopkeepers know him and the beef jerky treats he likes best. They miss him and they always ask me to bring him by, but these days, it’s a challenge to get him to walk on a lead let alone getting him to go anywhere near a car.

I was supposed to go with them that night
, but a sudden bout of stomach flu kept me at home hugging the toilet bowl. Georgie Pa mentioned that he was feeling squeamish, so Nanna insisted that he stay home too. Don’t want to spread it around, she said.

All thanks to the holy
man who brought the bug to Sky High in the first place. And he made damn sure we all caught it.

When
Father Yarden burst onto the scene two years ago, Nanna, Mum and I started going to St. Peter’s with Georgie Pa. Not to mass, but to the monthly GGM’s – Global Goodwill Meetings – the good Father started up shortly after he came to town. Morning teas to support cancer research. Fundraising for the orphans in Africa and such. No one has been game enough to ask, but most of us figure that Father Yarden is in his late thirties to early forties. He’s tall, dark, fit, and easy on the eye, well presented with not a hair out of place – I’m sure he’s no stranger to that
Grey’s Away!
hair dye – as well as being outgoing and friendly, so it’s no miracle why local women of all ages discovered that they did actually have some spare time to put towards a good cause. Word of this soon got out and a good chunk of Sky High’s male population started coming along too.

Going to c
hurch was never Mum’s, Nanna’s or my thing. Nanna always said that true faith doesn’t need a name, and, on this, I have always gravitated towards her point of view. But after Georgie Pa dragged us all to the first GGM, we were hooked. These meetings became a religion the four of us wholeheartedly believed in and Georgie Pa loved every minute of it. We’d all leave the church hall on a high, chatting about the friends we caught up with and our shared plans for the upcoming event. I don’t know if it was the mixed spread of bakery treats and good company or because it soothed our consciouses and helped to put our first world problems into perspective, but we all looked forward to the first Saturday afternoon of the month.

But i
t was in the church car park on a GGM Saturday when our whole world went up in flames. Mum and Nanna were the only casualties because they, and Father Yarden, were the only people there. Father Yarden says that was because Mum and Nanna stayed after the meeting to help him clean up. Sounds like them.

Now, no
local will park in that spot, let alone set foot anywhere near its recently painted bright-white boundaries. Out of respect? Superstition? Fear? Who knows. People left flowers there for a while, but that stopped a few months back. To someone who doesn’t know any better, that empty space by the front doors is just a convenient place to leave your car while you’re inside trying to save your soul.

I assumed
that restoring the face of the church would be the first thing on the agenda, but the GGM after Mum and Nanna’s funeral was dedicated to planning a fundraiser for me and Georgie Pa. Georgie Pa less than politely refused. And he has refused to have anything to do with the church since.

The straightforward li
fe of a townie has been
BLOWN SKY HIGH!
as some vile city newspaper journo put it. Our sleepy little hillside shire where no one used to lock their doors now has metal bars barricading every stained glass window. Alarm boxes with lights, sirens, and cameras that stare you down with their accusing eye now greet you at most shop fronts and home entryways. Pictures of the victims, a middle-aged local primary school teacher and a little old lady who has lived in Sky High for most of her life, have been burnt into the collective consciousness of the hills: their deaths a blackened representation of who they really were and how they lived.

M
y mother: Smart. Warm. Patient. Softly spoken. Beautiful.

My grandmother:
Structured. Generous. Wilful. Feisty, but completely harmless.

And
it would’ve been Georgie Pa and me too, if what turned out to be food poisoning hadn’t saved our lives.

The inco
nceivable has scorched the safest, most God fearing town on Earth, and its heat has reduced the strongest man I know into a broken wisp of smoke. Where do you even start pointing fingers? And why would anyone want us dead?  

Everyone still insists that
it was a case of mistaken identity, but who in Sky High could possibly deserve death by car bomb? I’m constantly nauseous from going around in circles, only to find myself back in the same strange place with the same strange person.

This house and
Georgie Pa.

Some of his
drunken ramblings are so warped they scare the living daylights out of me. Talk of bubbling, red puddles seeping into the earth, and paths of gold leading across the sea to the Apple Isle. Then he carries on about how, “From blood and bone, trees of emerald green bear rosy fruit!” and curses giants draped in red cloaks, all before completely losing it over fields of pyres, mounds of ash, and the smoke shrouding the moonlight that made him lose his way.

The Apple Isle
is the only part that makes any sense to me. Out of all of Nanna’s bedtime stories, the one about the king, the maiden, and the golden apples has always been my favourite.

Georgie Pa
used to be a bookworm and Aunt Romey thinks that when he drinks he goes into the fantasy worlds he has read about over the years, trying to distract himself from thoughts of how Mum and Nanna met their end. I think about how Nanna used to say that a drunken man speaks a sober man’s mind - ipso facto, Georgie Pa must be completely nuts when he’s off the grog too. 

I stay
wrapped up in the warmth of my bedcovers, watching the dawn trying to pry its way through the slit in my heavy curtains. I know I’ve been lingering too long when I hear Chip’s claws tap dancing on the kitchen tiles, his none too polite way of saying that it’s high time I got my arse out of bed to start going through the motions.

After
a quick trip to the bathroom, I head straight to the kitchen, tip a can of meaty dog slush into Chip’s bowl and change his drinking water. I fill up a large glass with cold water from the fridge, pop two aspirin out of the foil, and quietly make my way to Georgie Pa’s room. After I replace the empty bottle of scotch on his bedside table with the water and the pills, I take off his slippers, cover him up with his quilt, and lightly kiss him on his frowning, sweaty brow.

He
stirs and peers up at me.

“
Annie?”

“No,
Georgie Pa. It’s me, Ren.”

“Oh,” he croaks
as he tries to sit up. “School today?”

“Yep.
Aunt Romey will be here in…” I look over at his bedside clock, “Shoot! In half-an-hour!” I yell.

Georgie Pa
winces.

“Sorry,” I whisper. “
Gotta run. Love you.”

“Love you too, kid,” he
whispers back as he groaningly reaches for his glass of water.

I
scoff down my breakfast, making more of a mess than Chip did. After a quick shower, I throw on my school uniform, tie up my hair, stuff everything I need into my school bag and race for the door. I fling it open to find Aunt Romey standing on the front mat flicking through her huge set of keys.

“Good timing,” she says. “Running late?”

“Yep. Is Mike out there?” I ask.

She nods and smiles.
“Waiting patiently, as always.”

She doesn’t get us
at all. I roll my eyes at her and her smile gets bigger.

“
So, anything out of the ordinary?” she asks.

“No,” I sigh.
“One bottle and about four hours sleep.”

Expressionless, she nods again.

I give her a quick peck on the cheek. “See you after school, OK?”

“
OK,” she says, throwing me a kiss. “Learn something!” she hollers after me as I bolt down the porch stairs.

“Oh, and
no matter how much he whines, don’t let that mutt in my room,” I call over my shoulder.

Mike
is waiting in his usual spot, sitting under the huge Black Wattle tree by our front gate.

He sees me and stands. “Mornin’.
”

“Mornin’ yourself,” I puff.

“Run a marathon?”

“Feels like it. Slept in. Running late. You know.”

“You slept?” he asks, surprised.

“Yeah. A bit. Had that dream again.”

He puts his arm around me and we start the short walk to school.

“But this time they broke fre
e and they walked out of the fire with not a scratch on them. Then they walked over and hugged me, and I woke up,” I explain, trying to shrug off my disappointment.

“What
does your aunt say?”

“I h
aven’t told her yet. I’ll fill her in tonight.”

It’s a mild S
pring morning. The cockies are squawking, the kookaburras are joking, and the little singsong birds have all joined in a high pitched chorus trying to be heard over the din. We walk the rest of the way talking about normal things like what we think will be on the canteen menu this week, what the school committee is planning for our senior muck-up day, and who Liesel Hadley’s current squeeze is.