Watcher's Web (2 page)

Jessica handed
her bag to the pilot, took off her hat and clambered up the
stairs.

A man in a
grey suit looked up from his computer, his expression vacant. What
would he be seeing? An exceedingly tall girl with lanky black hair,
in a dusty shirt and jeans, smelling of cattle shit. Wonderful.

“I’m
sorry.”

He
grimaced and went back to his machine. OK, so he was annoyed.
Missed a meeting, an important deadline.
I bloody said I was sorry.

He looked up
again, meeting her eyes. A slight frown.

The other
passenger paid her no attention. Also a man, perhaps in his
forties, he wore faded jeans and a black leather jacket that had
seen better days. He had tied his greying blond hair in a ponytail,
the end of which disappeared under the collar of his jacket. He
looked, for all she could think, like an ageing hippie escaped from
a commune up the north coast somewhere. One of those with no
pesticides, no poisons and no bloody crops either. He held a book
on his lap and didn’t even look up when Jessica excused herself to
squeeze between the seats. She slid sideways into the back, bumping
her head on the ceiling. Her phone beeped in her pocket.

She
pulled it out. The screen displayed a message,
please return my call when
you can,
from an
unknown number.

The
businessman glared over his shoulder.

Yeah,
yeah, I’m turning it off.

She pressed
the off button down and the screen went blank. Her mind churned.
Who could that be? The only people she knew who would write in full
sentences were her parents and John Braithwaite. Their numbers she
knew off by heart, especially her mother’s, because she sent
messages every day to check on her well-being. Sending their shy,
weird, traumatised and vulnerable daughter off to boarding school
in the city hadn’t been easy on her mother, but after the events at
Pymberton High when Jessica was fourteen, there had been little
alternative.

Jessica stared
at the blank screen, pushing down memories of receiving vile
messages she used to receive daily at that time. Apparently some
people in town bought phones just so that they could harass her
anonymously.

She
shivered.

That crap
wasn’t about to start again, was it? Nothing had happened for over
three years.

She settled on
the back seat, wriggled to find the seat belt while the pilot
slammed shut the luggage compartment and climbed into the cabin,
pulling up the stairs behind him.

A few flicks
on the instrument panel and the propeller rattled into life.

Bloody noisy,
it was. It was only that John Braithwaite paid for her ticket,
because otherwise she preferred the train.

But she had
made it.

Stupid bull.
Stupid . . . whatever had happened.

That should
teach her not to play with this strange ability anymore. Every time
she thought she understood it, some shit like this happened.

The pilot
threw off the brakes and the plane jolted into action. He had put
on headphones and was talking to air traffic control, his voice
barely audible over the rattling propeller. Outside the window,
wing flaps moved up and down and back into their normal position.
Jessica knew the motions; she had been through this before. She
still didn’t like it.

The plane
turned onto the runway and gathered speed. Engine noise exploded; a
weight settled on her chest. The rumbling of the wheels stopped and
the plane rose sharply until the cockpit window showed only
merciless blue sky.

Jessica looked
to her right. Down there was the main road, the Henderson orange
farm and the place of those city folk who’d come to town a few
years back to breed emus. A bunch of the silly birds clustered
around a feed trough. She’d heard the owners were doing quite well.
In the distance, farmland merged into wooded hills which, further
still, ended abruptly in the cliffs of the western Blue Mountains,
tinged orange in the afternoon sun.

The
sight gave her a shiver of excitement. She might live in the middle
of the city, but she had no doubt about where she belonged.
I love a sunburnt
country,
so the poem
by Dorothea Mackellar described the bush. Well, she wasn’t much of
a poet, but that was her world, all right. No stress, no nosy
idiots, and space to get away from it all when life became too
complicated. For her, it meant space to let the sparking mist flow
from her and let it whip at the trees and tear bushes bare without
anyone noticing. Things had become better since she figured out
that she needed to do this every few days, because the tension
built up inside her, especially in hot weather or if she’d spent a
lot of time in the sun.

The memory of
the incident with Angus still chilled her. There had never been
other people in the mist, or voices.

She wiped the
sweat from her upper lip.

No need to
worry. Nothing had happened, right?

Jessica took a
book from her bag and opened it on her knees. Sunlight slanted in
through the window, spilling across pages of Japanese text. Of
course she didn’t need Japanese for Vet Science, but she liked
languages and she was good at them. She squinted through her
eyelashes, letting the patterns of the text draw themselves before
her, as if floating in the air above the page. Then she hesitated.
If she used the mist for seeing the patterns in the text, would the
web form again and would there be someone else at the other
end?

She gazed out
the window, feeling uneasy.

A puff of smoke from a
bushfire rose in the distance. From up here, the landscape looked
grey, washed out, parched. A road sliced through paddocks directly
below her, and on it a tiny white car moved. A mother collecting
kids from school, a farmer going into town, a sales rep travelling
to his next assignment.

Without
warning the familiar landscape melted before her eyes.

*     *     *

She saw
rolling hills covered in rainforest. Mist hung in the valleys, with
wispy clouds reaching over the ridge tops. Ahead, the hills fell to
a floodplain with reeds and small pockets of trees. Sparkles of
light reflected off a huge stretch of water. At the horizon was the
grey silhouette of an island, its outline jagged, square and
stair-like, as if covered by buildings. The evening sky was deep
green above, fading to yellow and orange at the horizon.

*     *     *

Bloody hell,
what was that?

Jessica clawed
at the armrest of her seat, heart thudding.

The hippie
flipped a page in his book. The businessman’s head drooped.

She looked out
the window. Brown paddocks, white specks: grazing sheep. Nothing
strange, just the dull greyness of the Australian bush.

It was so
stuffy in this cramped cabin. Jessica turned her face into the flow
of cool air from the air-conditioning vent.

God, now she
was getting worried. She’d dealt with all that shit when she was
younger. Her parents had traipsed off with her to countless doctors
and other professionals, yet the only thing they’d found out was
that no one knew what it was, and the only thing she could do was
to learn to live with it. Up until now, she’d thought she was doing
well, but obviously she had thought wrong. Damn it, damn it.

Something
tickled the skin at her elbow. She lifted her arm to look for the
culprit—a tiny spider or some such—but found nothing.

Feeling sick,
she leaned back in her seat, but as soon as her elbow touched the
armrest, a shock went through her. She sat up with a jolt and
placed her hand on the window—a current went through it and the
panel underneath it, and . . . Now tendrils of mist
spread from the floor and the walls of the plane.

The two male
passengers sat reading and sleeping, and the pilot stared ahead,
moving his head in a rhythm as if singing to himself.

The tickling
spread from her hands to her back and her legs, everywhere her body
touched the plane.

This was
ridiculous. Fool or not, something was going on here.

She called
out, “Excuse me.” Her voice was hoarse and didn’t rise over the
noise of the engine.

Now the very
air tickled, as if it was alive with static electricity. Jessica
reached for her seatbelt, ready to push herself up and tap the
pilot on the shoulder.

There was a
flash, turning the world into a seething mass of white. Jessica
couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe.

The plane
lurched and shuddered.

She must have
been knocked out, because the next thing she knew her eyes had gone
funny and everything looked blurred in rainbow colours.

Her ears
popped. Fog trailed past the window, and the only sound was the
ominous rushing of air. The propeller turned idly at the nose of
the plane. Her ears popped again.

The pilot’s
voice was loud in the eerie silence. “Repeat—reporting engine
failure . . .”

Jessica sat
stiff in her seat, every muscle cramped with fear. No, she didn’t
want to die, she didn’t want to die . . . she didn’t
. . . Heat flowed from the seat into her hands.

The trickle of
warmth grew into a flood. It made its way up into her arms and
though the soles of her shoes into her legs. Pain stabbed her
forehead, as if a vial of acid had exploded there, spreading down
her neck, her shoulders, her arms; burning, eating everything in
its path.

She was
flying, flapping her arms, which had become great white wings. She
was a swan, and as long as she kept moving her wings they would
never reach the ground. Pain increased until it felt like her skin
was on fire, and still it grew. Over the thuds of her pounding
heart, the world slowed to an unreal, hypnotising pace, in which
the pilot’s attempts to restart the engine felt like they were part
of another universe.

The
businessman shouted, “Come on, fucking re-start the engine!” He
grasped the back of the seat before him as if ready to do so
himself.

The pilot
called into his headset, “Mayday, mayday, mayday.”

The burning
heat inside her grew so strong that Jessica could no longer bear
it. She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out.

The pilot
turned around. “You guys wearing your seatbelts? Lean on the
seat—Fuck!”

Glass exploded
everywhere. Jessica was thrown into the wall. The noise was
horrible: screeching, something tearing at the outside of the
plane. Then a gentle cracking of wood, and the hammering of her
heart in her chest. And pain, like molten lava, flowed over her
skin.

Silence.

Chapter
3

S
EMI-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 . . .  Shit, shit, shit.

“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.

“Shit!” 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.