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Authors: Stephen Irwin
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deeper. Two parallel tunnels, each almost a metre wide, pierced the concrete foundation like dark nostrils.
Nicholas stopped, lungs still working hard to reclaim the oxygen he’d spent in the frantic chase. His panting was the only sound. No wind shifted leaves. No bird called. No insect chirped.
The pipe, he could see, was too high to climb. It ran who-knew-how-far into the woods in each direction. The only way to pass beyond it was to go under, through the narrow tunnels.
He walked up the creek bed closer to the pipe, and his footsteps castaneted stones together; the sound echoed in the shotgun tunnels like the cavernous clicking of some dead giant’s teeth.
He knelt.
The twin tunnels ran right through the concrete base of the pipe, four metres or more. They were as dark as night, but he could just make out circles of light at their far ends. But those circles were dimly shrouded and imperfect. Black shapes moved across them, roughening their edges and peppering them with little shifting silhouettes.
Spiders.
Both tunnels were thick with webs and spiders. And whatever happened to the dead boys happened on the other side.
Nicholas got to his feet, turned around, and started back down the creek towards the gully cliff, heading back to Carmichael Road.
For the second time in his life, the spiders had beaten him.
5
NOVEMBER 1982
I t was Sunday morning, and Nicholas and Tristram were deep in concentration, hunkered in patches of sunlight on the hardwood boards of the Boyes’ front veranda. They had set up two enormous opposing ramps made from Tristram’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of orange Hot Wheels racetrack. Every so often, the boys would look up from their labours and grin at one another. They were getting ready for one hell of a car crash.
Tristram and his family lived in the street behind the Closes, in (if you asked Katharine Close) a palace of a house. Nicholas would jump the Closes’ back fence (a rickety line of perennially damp hardwood palings held together by a thick crest of trumpet vine), run through Mrs Giles’s yard, then up Airlie Crescent to the enormous house at number seven.
The Boyes had moved in two and a half years ago.
Nicholas and Tristram became friends. Tristram would short-cut through Mrs Giles’s at a quarter to eight every school morning, and he and Nicholas would begrudgingly escort Suzette to school. Imagining that he and Tristram were her bodyguards, ready to pounce on would-be attackers or leap in front of assassins’ bullets, compensated for her girlish chatter about love spells and how smart bees were and bar graphs.
After school when homework was done, and at weekends, Nicholas would visit the Boyes’ house. This was better, because their place was a palace compared with 68 Lambeth Street. The Boyes had four bedrooms as well as Mr and Mrs Boyes’ ‘master bedroom’, which had its own bathroom (Tristram snuck Nicholas in for a look one Saturday when his parents had left them home alone and Gavin was at some football final), another two bathrooms (Tristram called them ‘dunny cans’), and wide verandas on three sides. Best of all, the entire house was on stumps, so there was a palace-worth of cool, dark dirt underneath for racing scooters, conducting experiments with bleach and sundry garage chemicals, building Owen guns, and torturing ants by dropping them in conical ant lion pits and watching them taken from below like hapless sailors by hungry kraken.
Nicholas sometimes had Tristram over to his house, but there was less to do. The Closes’ house was small, its underneath exposed and useless for private things like making army IDs and shanghais and plans of conquest. The only place that was dark and away from his mother’s scowl and Suzette’s curiosity was the garage. But Nicholas didn’t like taking anyone else in there. It was Dad’s space. His tools were there. His old ports were there. Being in the garage made him feel weird - angry and sad
Nicholas stopped, lungs still working hard to reclaim the oxygen he’d spent in the frantic chase. His panting was the only sound. No wind shifted leaves. No bird called. No insect chirped.
The pipe, he could see, was too high to climb. It ran who-knew-how-far into the woods in each direction. The only way to pass beyond it was to go under, through the narrow tunnels.
He walked up the creek bed closer to the pipe, and his footsteps castaneted stones together; the sound echoed in the shotgun tunnels like the cavernous clicking of some dead giant’s teeth.
He knelt.
The twin tunnels ran right through the concrete base of the pipe, four metres or more. They were as dark as night, but he could just make out circles of light at their far ends. But those circles were dimly shrouded and imperfect. Black shapes moved across them, roughening their edges and peppering them with little shifting silhouettes.
Spiders.
Both tunnels were thick with webs and spiders. And whatever happened to the dead boys happened on the other side.
Nicholas got to his feet, turned around, and started back down the creek towards the gully cliff, heading back to Carmichael Road.
For the second time in his life, the spiders had beaten him.
5
NOVEMBER 1982
I t was Sunday morning, and Nicholas and Tristram were deep in concentration, hunkered in patches of sunlight on the hardwood boards of the Boyes’ front veranda. They had set up two enormous opposing ramps made from Tristram’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of orange Hot Wheels racetrack. Every so often, the boys would look up from their labours and grin at one another. They were getting ready for one hell of a car crash.
Tristram and his family lived in the street behind the Closes, in (if you asked Katharine Close) a palace of a house. Nicholas would jump the Closes’ back fence (a rickety line of perennially damp hardwood palings held together by a thick crest of trumpet vine), run through Mrs Giles’s yard, then up Airlie Crescent to the enormous house at number seven.
The Boyes had moved in two and a half years ago.
Nicholas and Tristram became friends. Tristram would short-cut through Mrs Giles’s at a quarter to eight every school morning, and he and Nicholas would begrudgingly escort Suzette to school. Imagining that he and Tristram were her bodyguards, ready to pounce on would-be attackers or leap in front of assassins’ bullets, compensated for her girlish chatter about love spells and how smart bees were and bar graphs.
After school when homework was done, and at weekends, Nicholas would visit the Boyes’ house. This was better, because their place was a palace compared with 68 Lambeth Street. The Boyes had four bedrooms as well as Mr and Mrs Boyes’ ‘master bedroom’, which had its own bathroom (Tristram snuck Nicholas in for a look one Saturday when his parents had left them home alone and Gavin was at some football final), another two bathrooms (Tristram called them ‘dunny cans’), and wide verandas on three sides. Best of all, the entire house was on stumps, so there was a palace-worth of cool, dark dirt underneath for racing scooters, conducting experiments with bleach and sundry garage chemicals, building Owen guns, and torturing ants by dropping them in conical ant lion pits and watching them taken from below like hapless sailors by hungry kraken.
Nicholas sometimes had Tristram over to his house, but there was less to do. The Closes’ house was small, its underneath exposed and useless for private things like making army IDs and shanghais and plans of conquest. The only place that was dark and away from his mother’s scowl and Suzette’s curiosity was the garage. But Nicholas didn’t like taking anyone else in there. It was Dad’s space. His tools were there. His old ports were there. Being in the garage made him feel weird - angry and sad
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