A simple farmer receives a horse from the gods, a man sells ice creams named after missing schoolkids, the demolition of a hotel brings an old horror to light, a wounded soldier finds the real enemy is in his own camp, a family inherits a peculiar r...
When my Great Uncle Alfred died we moved into his cottage in the hills: me, my sister Milly, my Mum, and our cat Muffy. Mum and Dad were separated, but I still saw him from time to time. After we moved into the new place I saw him a lot less though. Mum told us it was a chance to start a fresh new life. But I didn't want a fresh new life. I wanted to go back to the old one. Camila (I call my sister this because she hates it) sided with Mum of course.
"You're starting high school next year," she said. "It's the ideal time. You won't be so disrupted." This is how she spoke to me: like I was a child. She was only two years older than me though.
"What about you?" I said. "You'll have to leave all your friends."
That was nasty. We both knew she had no friends.
Her face coloured. "You'll understand when you're older," she said, and huffed out.
Oh I understood all right. Being an hour further away from Dad meant less chance of seeing him. Which was fine with my sister, because she didn't like going to Dad's anyway. He doesn't understand me, she'd say, knowing this was exactly what Mum wanted to hear. Understand her? What was there to understand? She just hated the fact that her nonsense didn't work on Dad.
Mum had inherited the cottage because she was old Alfred's closest surviving relative. His only sibling (my grandma) had died a few years ago, and he had no kids.
I'd only met him once before, at Grandma's wake. He was the oldest person I'd ever seen. A positive mummy. His hair was as grey as steel, his skin like leather, his wrinkles as deep as canyons. When he looked at you his eyes seemed to go right through your skin and pierce your soul. The rare times I heard him speak his voice was this weird, windy thing, and you had to get right up close to him to hear what he was saying – not that you'd want to. He smelled kind of smoky and wild, like a dog that's got wet in the rain then lain too close to the fire. Mum told me he had been a great traveller in his youth, though where he'd gone, and what he'd done when he got there, she didn't seem to know.
He'd died in his cottage. I wasn't given any details. I wondered what he'd died of, which room he'd popped his clogs in, how long it had taken to find the body, and what it was like when it was finally found. You know, all the usual stuff.
Anyway, this charnel house was what we moved in to.
Calling it a cottage was being generous. Only Mum called it that, as in "we're going up to the cottage". She had all these romantic notions about it. But in reality it was a shack. It was out at the edge of town, way down near the Lerderberg River, in a deep, misty gully where everything was dark and damp. The road that led there was dirt and full of potholes. A creek went under the road at a crossing, but if there'd been heavy rain the creek went over the road and you were stuck up there. Oh yeh, it had all kinds of advantages.
The cottage itself was a hundred-and-fifty years old. Technically it was called a miner's cottage, because it had been built by gold miners who'd gone there to seek their fortunes. It was gloomy, with tiny windows and low ceilings. Did I mention that the internet barely worked? Sometimes your phone didn't either. And the power went out at least once week. It was lucky I hadn't made any friends at my new school, because at least I didn't have to make excuses for why they couldn't come over.
"Where's your sense of adventure?" Mum said to me with a laugh.
"He'll get used to it," my sister said.
Muffy just looked at me like I was a bug she thought she should probably not eat.
Poor Muffy. I mean, I never liked that cat, but she didn't deserve what happened to her.
We'd got her ages ago, when we were still living in Melbourne, back before Mum and Dad separated. She was the ugliest cat in the world. She had a squished-up face and a gigantic feather-duster tail. If you said something to her a look of utter disdain would cross her face. She'd seem to consider what you'd said, find it wanting, then sidle off without a backwards look, her tail swishing contemptuously. The only person Muffy had any time for was my sister. She loved my sister. Someone had to I guess. Wherever my sister was you knew Muffy would not be far away, ready to give you a withering look and a contemptuous swish of the tail.
So there I was, stuck with three judgmental females watching my every move and giving me with disdainful looks, new school, no friends (for once I had something in common with my sister), stuck in the middle of nowhere in a dump of a house someone had died in. What a wonderful new life I had.
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Okay okay I'll get to the rug. Just setting the scene first. Sheesh.
