Darkest Place (22 page)

It was miraculous Howard was home. He headed across the foyer to the storage room like Superman without a cape: long, emphatic strides, jaw squared, happy, he said, to take a break from his studies. Carly limped along behind, making sure he didn't get distracted while he collected a ladder.

‘Where are you painting?' he asked as she unlocked her door.

‘Up in the loft. Sorry, there's another set of stairs.'

‘No problem. I'm going to miss these call-outs.'

‘Are you going somewhere?'

‘The UK.'

‘Oh, when?'

‘Next semester. I'm taking up a position in the physics faculty at Bath University.'

‘Nice.' Not the physics but the Roman ruins and the new start.

‘So you'll have a different me next year. The body corporate is advertising this month.'

Carly hoped they found someone who would actually supervise. ‘Okay, well, thanks for the news and the ladder.'

When he was gone, she stood at the bottom of the stairs and eyed the gloom above. Her ankle ached, the cuts on her hand stung. She drank a glass of water, ate a biscuit, not sure if she was hungry or nervous. Vents and rats and solid black ceiling space. What the fuck was she doing?

She should be calling a real estate agent and getting the hell out, not climbing a ladder. She should follow in Howard's footsteps and escape to Bath University. Any university. Finish the social science degree she'd begun, forget sustainable work and live the student life on government allowances and loans, degree after degree, uni after uni, so she never had to stay, so she could leave when she made a mess of it.

She glanced at the view, at the cold, crisp day outside, the wedge of harbour in the distance. The French windows, the rustic brick, the sheen of stainless steel. Her apartment. It was hers. Brooke and Dakota had laughed here. Christina dropped by. Elizabeth's silver vase was gleaming on the kitchen counter. She'd given it to Carly for courage to follow her dreams.

This place was her dream.

 

It took some manoeuvring to wedge the A-frame ladder through the sliding door and into the wardrobe. Carly was sweating before she'd started to climb. Grimacing, she pushed her sore foot into a walking shoe and laced it loosely, then tied her hair back, pushed her mobile phone into the back pocket of her jeans, picked up the torch and put her foot on the first rung.

It was like rising into a fog – visibility dropping, the atmosphere close, the sounds of her hands and rubber soles on the metal treads bouncing off the walls of the wardrobe.
She stopped three rungs from the top, the trapdoor an arm's length away and looked down. Her feet were just about level with the top shelf – if she was more agile, uninjured and less frightened, she could possibly climb the shelving, stand on top and reach the trapdoor. Was that how Nate did it?

Wanting both hands free in case she overbalanced – something that felt like more than a possibility as she tried to keep the weight off her sprained ankle – she slid the torch strap over her wrist, the light swinging and bouncing around the wardrobe as she reached for the grid of tiny squares. A slight resistance when she tugged, a
snick
as a magnetic catch released. Slowly, cautiously in case it fell, in case something fell out, Carly eased it down. It was hinged on one side; she smelled dust as the trapdoor passed her face. Remembering Talia's name on the manhole cover, she lifted the torch and took a closer look at it.

The frame was white, a fine wire mesh covered the grid of squares. There were no names, only fingerprints, but not in the dust – there wasn't any dust. The cover was clean, really clean, as though it had been wiped recently. The prints were dark smudges from dirty fingers. Someone had been there.

Carly's torch went up first, then her hands, holding on as she climbed to the top of the ladder. Head and shoulders in the ceiling, she shone the light around. It didn't tell her much, its weak beam casting only a small, pale circle on flat surfaces. What she saw, though, was another tunnel: sides formed by massive beams, ceiling by the underside of the flooring above, the base a giant checkerboard of timber framework inset with pads of insulation. Beyond the short, filmy play of her torchlight was only blackness.

Uneasiness prickled across her shoulderblades. Nate was in hospital and sedated, she reminded herself. The
worst that could happen was falling through a ceiling. Breaking a leg. Or her neck. Or rats. Shit.

‘Don't think about it.' She said it out loud, talking to the anxiety that was fidgeting in her muscles. ‘Do it now.'

She hauled herself up and sat on the timber frame that surrounded the vent, the ceiling so low her scalp was pressed to the floor above. A bubble of pale light glowed around her, the dust made her nose itch. It was uncomfortable and close but she was grateful for that – without it, the darkness and whispering echoes might have made her feel like she was alone at night on a cliff. It wasn't entirely black beyond her torch beam. There was a patch of weak greyness in the direction of Nate's loft, the dim glow from the open vent in his loft leaking into the pitch blackness. Her destination.

She tested the plasterboard between the checkerboard framework, feeling a slight give. She'd have to stick to the cross-timbers – only she needed a few seconds to think about how. They were too narrow to crawl along one without toppling, too wide apart to spread her knees across two, and the next cross-timber was more than an arm stretch away. She pushed the torch onto the padding ahead of her, squatted at a T-intersection and lurched forward with her undamaged hand … banging her spine on the ceiling before thumping onto the next timber. Then hung there as though she was playing Twister and deciding how to get her feet to the yellow dots. She thrust sideways and sat in one motion, butt on another cross-timber, beam at her back.

‘Like that,' she said quietly.

Favouring her injured hand and ankle, she repeated the lurch and thrust five times before she was looking into
Nate's loft, lit only by the daylight from the living room below. Carly pulled the phone from her pocket and took photos: of the tunnel, the hole with its missing vent cover, the view into Nate's apartment.

The flash barked at the darkness, filling the space with bursts of white, giving her a glimpse of what lay ahead. More tunnel, more timber grid and insulation. A lot of it, probably all the way to the corner of the warehouse. It made her feel trapped and exposed, too big and too small. Made her wonder what Nate felt when he was up here. He'd been a sailor, he'd travelled the ocean at night – vast, open spaces with stars in the sky, wind in his face and water rolling beneath him. Why had he come here in the first place? He said he'd had rewiring done last year. Had he found it then? Had he got into her apartment when it was vacant, saw Carly when she moved in and decided to get to know her better?

‘What the fuck, Nate?' He couldn't answer, maybe he never would, but the sound of her voice in the blackness was reassuring.

The plume of light from her wardrobe hovered like a ghost in the distance. A little creepy but quite bright now that her eyes were accustomed to the dark. She rubbed her knees and started back. Overbalancing twice, a knee and then a hand dropping onto the plasterboard, snatching it up again and holding on tight so she didn't topple the other way.

Finally back above her own wardrobe, she sat, breathing hard, sweat and dust on her face and hands, and a buzzing in her muscles. Not anxiety. It was exertion, exhilaration. More than that. She felt strong, energised, bold, able. Words she hadn't applied to herself for a long
time. She flexed her throbbing ankle and her sore hand, looked back to where she'd come from and forward to where the tunnel headed. Nate was in hospital, he couldn't reach her here, not today. And she wanted to see what was down there, how far she could get. She flicked on the torch and kept going.

 

Carly lurched and thrust until she found another vent set into the insulation. It was the same as Nate's: square, louvred slats instead of wire mesh – was hers the only one with the rectangular cover? She hadn't seen the cover of Nate's up close, but this one was caked with grey-brown dust. Had he replaced the one above her wardrobe and kept it clean so he could slide in and out easily, noiselessly? Wondering if this one was inside a wardrobe or above a bed, Carly dropped her cheek to it, tried to peer through. Saw nothing.

Glancing back only briefly, she continued on, lunging into the shadows to the last apartment in the row, two doors down from Carly's. She knew she'd reached it when she saw the vent set into the insulation – a rectangular hole with a wire-mesh cover, the same as hers except for the solid coating of dust. She shone the beam down, caught the shapes of shelving and stacked boxes, the outline of closed doors. Alternating vent covers? Maybe Nate
hadn't
replaced hers, but he'd kept it clean.

She was out of apartments to crawl over now but kept lurching. Three more and she saw a brick wall up ahead in the gloom: the corner of the warehouse. It was what she'd come this far for, to touch it and say
Been there, done that
. She tossed the torch one more time, its beam shrinking to a coin of light on the insulation, and hefted both hands
to the last cross-timber. As her weight transferred over them, she stopped, not sure why, her body responding to an instinctive brake. Then she felt it – a whisper of cool breath on her face. She smelled a trace of something earthy in the air, a strand of hair tickled her temple. Reaching for the padding beneath her, she found the torch, aimed it – and her stomach pitched.

It was the end of the tunnel, and the space where the insulation pillow should have been was a drop into nothingness. A black hole, literally.

‘Don't do anything stupid, Carly,' she breathed.

Slowly, awkwardly, she lowered herself to the insulation, spreading her weight cautiously across the plasterboard, her face at the edge of the abyss. Played the light around the hole. No roof, no floor, at least not that she could see with a torch.

The two massive beams that formed the sides of the tunnel continued all the way to a brick face opposite. On her left, above and below the beam, was a stud wall, its pale timbers stretching up and down into darkness like endless ladders. It was the outside of the last apartment on the next wall, Carly guessed. The black hole was a void between the two corner apartments.

She tilted the torch down, saw only darkness. It was possible the hole was only as deep as the loft below her, five metres. Except the slight upward breeze carried a hint of the outside world – the dankness of decaying earth, the tang of exhaust fumes. Possibly it dropped four storeys to the bottom of the warehouse. In which case, rats weren't the worst thing that could happen in the dark.

Wriggling backwards, the insulation scratching at her clothes, Carly climbed onto the cross-timber behind, shimmied across it to the wall and sat. Mouth dry,
adrenaline sparking in her veins. Jumping as her ringtone shattered the silence.

‘Carly, it's Bec.'

Her voice in the darkness felt like company but Carly was wary – it was Nate's sister, she was at the hospital with him. ‘Bec, hi.'

‘Everything okay?'

She glanced left and right: eerie tunnel, black hole to oblivion, sitting on a two-by-four so she didn't fall through plasterboard and break her neck. ‘Sure.'

‘Right, good, well, I'm with Nate,' she said, something tight and forced in her tone.

It made Carly wonder what Bec knew. ‘How is he?'

‘He's awake. He can't talk but he wants you to know some things. He's written them down. He wants me to say them for him.'

An apology? An explanation? ‘I'm listening.' It didn't mean she'd accept it.

There were muffled noises on the other end, a question or confirmation. ‘He has the building plans,' Bec said.

Carly frowned. He was telling her how he got into her apartment? Did he feel bad about it now he'd spent a little time in hospital? Convenient for his sister to be doing the talking. ‘Right.'

Enunciating as though she had a learn-to-read book, Bec said, ‘He found it. He has marked them. I should get them. What?' A pause, more muffled words.

Listening to the offstage conversation, heat started to smoulder inside Carly. Dread and fear, her usual fuel – and an anger that felt like oxygen.

‘Nate, it's okay. Calm down,' Bec said. Then louder: ‘Carly? He wrote, “You should get them”. I thought he meant me but he means you.
You
should get them.'

‘Get what?' She had no intention of getting anything for him.

‘Uh-huh, that's right,' Bec said, then dropped her voice, spoke quickly. ‘I don't know.' Another pause, brittle brightness in her tone. ‘This one? You mean Carly. Okay. Carly, are you there?'

‘Yes.' But not for long if the conversation kept going like this.

‘Nate says you should look at the corners.'

Carly shifted the torch beam to where the stud wall met the brickwork. ‘At the corners?'

‘That's right.'

‘What corners?'

‘So you've got all that?'

‘No. I …'

‘Good,' Bec said. ‘I've got to go now. His doctors are here.' A pause. ‘Thanks. Bye.'

Carly stared at the screen. Heard a tinny voice and lifted it to her ear just as Bec spoke again – hurried, hushed words. ‘I'll call you back.' Then the line went dead.

Bec's tight voice and the muffled asides with Nate seemed to hover in the darkness as Carly shuffled around, getting into position for the lunge-thrust back.
Get what?

The mobile barked again.

‘I'm so sorry about that.' Bec's voice was low this time, as though she was trying not to be heard.

‘Where are you?' Carly asked.

‘In the corridor outside Nate's room. Where are you?'

‘In a library.' This place was quiet like one.

‘Right.' Bec hauled in a shuddering breath. ‘Sorry. I'm upset. It's Nate, he's …' Another shaky intake. ‘He's been awake for a couple of hours and really confused and agitated. There's a specialist with him now.'

Carly squatted on a junction of cross-timbers, the ceiling pressed to the back of her head. ‘What sort of specialist?'

‘A brain woman. For the concussion. Because of the confusion and agitation. Look, I wanted to apologise about that phone call. He was insisting I ring. I promised I'd call you but he was getting worked up about it. I thought it might help if he heard me actually read it to you. Sorry it didn't make any sense.'

Some of it did: he had building plans, he'd found the tunnel – and now Carly had, too. The rest, she figured, was some kind of confused admission. ‘Did it calm him?' Was that why he'd insisted, so he could get it off his chest?

‘More or less,' Bec said. ‘He's better than when he came to. He thought you were in hospital. Or dead. He was going nuts. I had to call for help. A couple of nurses had to hold him down until I convinced him I'd seen you this morning. It was awful.'

Dead?
‘What did he think had happened?'

‘I'm not sure, exactly. His jaw is bandaged up, he can only make sounds through his teeth and he was upset and getting the shits with writing everything down.'

Hard to explain what he'd done with a notepad and pen. ‘Maybe he was thinking about my sprained ankle and cut hand.' Maybe concussion had made him think it was worse.

‘No, it wasn't that. He remembered you'd fallen down stairs. It was something else. I think he thought you were with him when he was beaten up. Seriously, Carly, he thought you might've been dead.'

Carly shifted on the timber, thinking of his texts yesterday afternoon.
Don't go home till I can get there.

‘The doctor says there could be memory loss,' Bec said. ‘She said he could be associating his injury with the last thing he can remember.'

He'd left his apartment with a hole in the ceiling. ‘What does he remember?'

‘You, obviously, but … he's not making a lot of sense. He's agitated and angry. Mostly because we can't understand. Before the doctors came, he kept writing “Tell her. Tell Carly”. Underlining it and tearing the page out of the notebook and putting it in my hand.'

Tell me everything. Tell me like I don't know.
It's what Nate said to Carly when he was cleaning her wounds, checking her for bruises, asking how many sleeping pills she'd taken. He'd refused to leave her, he'd wanted Carly to stay with Christina because she had a bedroom without a loft. ‘Does he remember what he did yesterday?'

‘He remembers being with you and he remembers getting beaten up.'

Would he tell Bec if he remembered taking the cover off the vent to crawl around in the ceiling?

‘My brother is a fallen hero, Carly,' Bec said, regret in her tone now. ‘He was everyone's good guy until that yacht went down. Skipper for this boat, navigator for that boat, the man with all the answers when his mates had a problem. Just about everyone he knew slept a night on his couch sometime or another. Then it all went to shit. His girlfriend's family blamed him for putting her on that yacht. The cops blamed him for being negligent. He was looking at manslaughter charges until the inquest. No one wanted him on their boat and he didn't trust himself to go anywhere near one. I know him, Carly, I've seen what he's been through and if you were with him when he was attacked, his first thought would be about you. Whether he'd gotten you hurt, whether he should've saved you too.'

Carly ran her teeth over her bottom lip, realising she knew the man Bec was talking about. The man who carried his pain across his shoulders like he was wearing it, who watched the marina so he would remember. She turned her head, looked towards her apartment, the ghostly plume of light barely visible. Nate had been beaten up and was worried about Carly. He'd told her not to go home until he was there. He said he had building plans, had found
it
. She'd thought he meant the tunnel she was sitting in.

‘Bec? Have you still got the message he wrote down?'

‘I shoved it in my pocket.'

‘Can you read it to me again?'

‘Hold on.' There was a pause. ‘Okay, here it is.' She went through it slowly, like a poem. ‘I have the building plans. I have found it. I have marked them. You should get them. Look at the corners.'

Carly focused the circle of torch beam on the insulation at her feet while she thought the words through. ‘It is separate sentences or commas in between?'

‘Sentences. Each one on a new line.'

‘Like bullet points?'

‘Yes, five bullet points.'

‘Five separate ideas.'

‘I guess so.'

Carly aimed the light at the end of the tunnel. Okay, she was looking. Two corners in the hole to oblivion. Two beams meeting brickwork. Oh, and a third corner – the north-east corner of the warehouse.

‘Carly, I've got to go,' Bec said. ‘I want to talk to the specialist before she leaves. Will you make it in later?'

Five minutes ago the answer would have been no.

‘Yes.' Maybe. She wasn't sure. She felt as confused as Nate's words. She pushed the phone into her pocket, rubbed at the dust that was gritty on her face. Was he confused? Guilty and confused? Or …

Carly got to her knees again, wanting to be back in her own apartment now. Nate, the fallen hero. He'd told her it didn't matter what she'd done, that he couldn't bear to be next door when he could help, that he'd make sure she didn't fall. She'd believed him. She'd believed him right up until she'd found the trapdoor in her wardrobe.

But the words Nate had written for Bec to read, his
agitation that Carly was dead or injured – it didn't make sense if he'd been getting into Carly's loft through a tunnel and scaring her.

She shifted ideas around as she lunged and thrust. If Nate's message wasn't about guilt, maybe it wasn't all that confused.

If he wasn't confused, maybe it was Nate being brief – five concise ideas – and maybe he thought Carly knew what he was talking about.

If Nate wasn't the bad guy, maybe he thought she trusted him.

I have the building plans. I have found it. I have marked them. You should get them. Look at the corners.

She kept the words afloat in her head as she thrust on, heaving, bumping her spine, overbalancing.

Building plans
– meaning renovation plans for the warehouse.

It
– he'd found the way into her loft through the vent.

Marked them
– maybe he'd circled her vent on the plans. Carly had seen building plans before, there were always pages of them. He could have marked more than one page.

Get them
– the plans, from wherever he had put them. In his apartment?

The corners
. Which corners? The corners of the pages he had marked?

She paused, looked up. There were corners everywhere – the tunnel, the vents, the grid of timbers, the void at the end. How many corners can you find in this picture? She peered into the darkness beyond the reach of her torch, imagined the crawl space all the way to the other end.
Look at the corners
. Did he mean the ones at either end of the east wall?

Was it a warning? Get the plans and be careful in the corners because there were deep, black holes. Would he expect her to come up here? She'd put her head inside the manhole in the ensuite and declared it creepy and dirty. He'd probably expect her to be scared. No, he wanted her to
look
at the corners, not beware of them.

She shook her head, started again, saying it out loud. ‘I have the building plans. I have found it. I have marked them.'

Okay, he'd marked the access to her apartment on the renovation plans.

‘No, wait.' There was only one vent in her loft, an
it
, not a
them
.

If Nate wasn't the bad guy, if it wasn't Nate getting in, there had to be another access point – a way into the tunnel from somewhere else. She glanced over her shoulder. There were seven apartments along the east wall – seven vents.

You should get them
. ‘The plans.' Yes, she wished she had them now.
Look at the corners.

She sat on her haunches, rubbed her ankle. She could use the vent to get into Nate's apartment and search for them. Except Nate had used a stepladder to look into the ceiling and Carly wasn't tall enough to get back up once she'd climbed in. She rubbed the bandage on her palm. Why draw her attention to the corners of the plans if he'd marked the pages? Wouldn't she see his notations?

She repositioned her feet, ready to push forward again. He said
corners
, not ‘the corners of the tunnel' or ‘the corners of the page'. Just corners. She closed her eyes, imagined plans, the bulk of the warehouse. It was a huge cube, lots of corners. But what if she stood in front of it, out on the street, and Nate said, ‘Look at the corners'?

She raised the torch, shone it back towards the void. She'd look there. Where the walls met.

What was in the corner?

Nothing. It was empty space, blackness up and down.

The hairs on her arms rose. The sensation she'd felt as she hung above the plasterboard. She'd felt a cool whisper on her face, smelled a hint of something in the air. From the void.

Nate told her to get the plans and look at the corners of the warehouse. He didn't expect her to come up here, he thought she'd see and understand.

She ran a hand over her hair, letting the ponytail slip through her fingers. The apartments were designed like Lego bricks. If there was a void where the east and north walls met, there were probably matching ones at the other three corners. No roof, no floor. An upward breeze, something earthy in it. A pulse picked up in Carly's throat.

Was Nate was telling her there was another way into the tunnel? Up or down the shaft at the corners of the building?

Had someone used the void to get to her vent?