📖 The Ghost of Emily - Chapter 21

In which a monster sees a monster in the silhouette of a hero.

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Jake and Olivia returned to Reynard’s keep as the dark finally settled in. The pair marched across the grass to a reception of wide eyes bulging out from under skinny faces, and dry lips being involuntarily licked. Jake held a large buck across his shoulders, wearing it like a hunch of furry armour, its branched horns thrusting out to one side of him. The leeches looked on as he marched with ease carrying a beast larger than any game they had likely seen in many months. The feat of strength, to these small, weak and hungry men, must have looked super-human. Every leech stopped what he was doing, and turned slowly to watch Jake out of sight. He stepped through the front doors that Olivia held ajar, stomped across the wooden floor of the hall and came to a halt before the seated Reynard, who was cooking a tin of baked beans at the base of the hall stage.

Reynard looked up at him, and for a moment, Jake could see the fear in his eyes. He stood high above Reynard, and realised that in the silhouette he formed against the main hall fire, he must have looked like some kind of monster, his shoulders massive, his edges jagged with thick needles of fur thrusting upward, and with a many-bladed curved weapon held out beside him. Reynard recoiled slightly, bracing himself in his seat. Jake leaned forward to begin to roll the buck over his head, but paused in surprise when he saw Reynard bow his own head. Reynard’s hands trembled, and for a moment his expression seemed serene to Jake. Does he think I’ve come to kill him? Is he submitting? What does he think I am? Unwilling to allow the unintentional charade to continue any longer, Jake dropped the great beast with a tremendous thud onto the floor before him.

The absence of Jake’s mighty muscular scarf revealed to Reynard the crowd of militiamen standing behind him in a trance-like silence, only broken by the odd crackle of burning wood, or the rumble of a hungry stomach.

Reynard looked down at the buck and, finally realising what it was, he smiled up at Jake, who was panting slightly after the long journey under his heavy load. As he caught his breath, Jake was the first to speak. “So... who’s your butcher around here?”

Reynard roared with laughter.

Later, as Jake and Reynard sat around the leader’s private fire eating delicious flakes of deer meat, they watched Olivia in the dark corner tending to her father, who was curled up under a blanket. Olivia and her father were whispering to one another, and Reynard was watching intently, disconcertedly. “Ah... I can’t wait for that old bastard to kick it," he said, with half-masticated meat slopping around between his teeth.

“Why?”

“He’s as useless as a chaste whore.”

Jake felt compelled to argue, but he refrained.

“I only keep him here for her, you know. She loves him so much; she can’t bear for him to die.”

Reynard’s eyes stayed locked on Olivia’s body in the shadows. Jake looked on too, but suspected the feelings the sight of Olivia evoked in him were vastly different to whatever Reynard was feeling as he squinted, almost hatefully, in her direction.

“Do you love her, Reynard?” Jake finally asked.

“Ha!” Reynard laughed unabashedly. “Love? I don’t know what love is, Jake. What fucking good is love?” Jake said nothing, and Reynard turned his gaze back to the fire, looking lost in memory. He sighed, then his shoulders fell, and his voice softened. “No... that’s not true.”

It was as if a lens had been lowered, its distortions and discolourations sliding out of Jake’s field of view, revealing the real Reynard. Small man. Tired man. Sad, old man.

“I loved once. I loved someone very much. With all my heart. With all my body. I thought I loved her more than life. Do you know that feeling, Jake?”

Jake was astonished that Reynard was opening up like this. He hadn’t expected the buck to inspire such trust, so soon, but he knew he needed to keep it going, and build upon it. “To love someone more than my own life? Sure, I’ve felt that.” He lied. To Jake, the notion was truly absurd. Without his own life, how could he feel love? He embraced the selfishness of love and felt no shame in calling it what it was. But for now, he needed to help Reynard feel as if he were understood.

“Mmm, yes I thought so. You always seemed... so... sensitive,” said Reynard, still staring into the flames, no longer chewing his food. Jake waited. And eventually Reynard spoke up, a little annoyed at the silence. “Well, go on then! Tell me about her. Was it your wife? Or some lover on the side?”

Jake looked at Reynard, irked by his assumptions of infidelity. “My wife. Her name was Emily. I met her when I was very young. We were teenagers. She was... so beautiful. And so gentle.”

“And great in the sack, no?”

“Sack?” Jake enquired, innocently.

“Her pussy, Jake. Felt good on your prick, no?”

Jake grimaced slightly at the crudeness of Reynard’s choice of words. “I didn’t know about that. We waited until we were married.”

“What!?” Reynard was truly astonished. “What are you, fucking Catholic?”

“I don’t know what that means. We agreed to do it that way. We spent a lot of time together. We were affectionate, don’t get me wrong... and we explored. But when we knew we both wanted children and we wanted to spend our lives together, we got married. It was easy to wait. It felt... more sacred.”

Reynard scoffed, and shoved a fork-full of buck meat into his mouth. “And what became of her?” he mumbled between chews, waving his fork in a circle as if to hurry the story past the boring piety and to the gruesome climax.

“I think she got tired of fighting… to stay alive, you know? Her parents crossed over. They came back to her. It was the first time we’d ever seen a ghost. First it was her father. Then her mother. And the third time... I don’t know which one it was, but it visited her when I wasn’t there, and she never came back. We had talked about it, she pleaded with me to go, and to take the...” He was about to say children. “… dog. We had a dog. She believed the ghosts. She really thought she was going to paradise.”

Jake dropped his fork to his plate with a grunt of capitulation to his own emotional confusion and distress surrounding the topic of conversation. “I don’t know...” Jake mumbled, defeated.

Reynard was watching him again, and he seemed to empathise. “It must have been very hard for you," Reynard half-whispered.

Jakes eyes shot up, meeting Reynard, and seeing some glimmer of humanity within them for the first time. For a fraction of a moment, they met in understanding. Reynard quickly turned away, and began his own tale. “Her name was Clementina... Tina.” A flash of a boyish smile appeared, then his lips twisted into a grimace of pain. “I too met her when I was young. But... we were friends, you know, for the longest time. I had girlfriends, many. She had boyfriends. We were just kids. We’d console each other when one fling didn’t work out. Eventually we realised... hey, why not us? We got married a few years later. Too young. Much too young. We had a honeymoon in Suisse. It was... it was a happy time.”

Jake waited for the rest of the story, but Reynard just kept staring, silently, into the flames.

“What happened?” Jake finally insisted.

“What happened!?” Reynard suddenly sounded angry. “Civil war is what happened, Jake. France fell to pieces. After the Eiffel Tower fell, so did the rest of France. And this one weekend, I was in Arras for some work... she was home in Paris. And things turned to shit. Everything got fucked up. Airports exploding. Declarations of Sharia Law in some parts of France, and Germany, Sweden.” He fell quiet for a moment. “I met a guy, he owned a small cargo ship headed for England, they were shipping out that afternoon from Calais. He saw how scared I was... and he said that one of his crewmen was sick that day. He had room for one more aboard. He offered to take me over the channel. So I went.” He lowered his head, and Jake saw his shame.

As if feeling Jake’s judging gaze, he snapped his head up again. His eyes flashed red and yellow with flames. His face bore a renewed resolve, as if he could confess his own failings, but would be damned if he would judge himself - or let anyone else judge him - as wrong. “Yeah. I ran. I floated across to England. I took all of my money out of the bank and got on the first plane from Heathrow to Sydney. Found myself somewhere to live in the Blue Mountains, where I could lay low. Then... the fucking slopes came, bombed the shit out of Sydney and Canberra. So I went farther west again. I spent a long time running. Until your mother found me. She taught me a thing or two, oh yes. She taught me how to take control of my life again. And so... you see!” He gestured his arms outward, one still holding the plate with remnants of meat and bones sliding around on it. “I learned her lessons well. Now I’m in control. Now I’m the one people are afraid of!” His eyes widened, letting brighter and longer tongues of fire sparkle in their glazed surface.

Jake looked him right in the eyes, defiantly, unwilling to be one such person who feared this broken, psychopathic little man. “And your wife? What happened to her?”

“Huh?!” Reynard snapped, obviously frustrated to have his self-aggrandising shattered by Jake’s immovability. “Oh... I don’t fucking know. The bitch probably died or got herself assigned to some harem. Who cares." His face returned to the fire and he continued gnawing the flesh off of deer bones.

“The bitch? You didn’t say she-”

“They’re all fucking bitches, Jake! All women! You should’ve met my mother; she was a real piece of work. See this?” He rolled one sleeve up to show Jake several circular scars on his shoulder. “Not bullet wounds like I tell the men. Cigarette burns, care of my loving mama. All. Fucking. Bitches. The sooner you learn it, the better you’ll be. They’re good for two things - pussy, and making babies. You could call that one thing, I suppose," he snickered at his own cleverness, while Jake continued staring at him, incredulously.

“You said Olivia was your finest hunter," he challenged.

Reynard turned to him, a little enraged, then he laughed. A mighty, thunderous, too-loud laugh that made the heads of the militiamen turn for a moment, each of them wishing to be included in the joke. “Well...” he kept chuckling, “look at this!” he gestured at the buck horns that hung above them, nailed onto the front of the stage. “That turned out to be bullshit, didn’t it, Jake? You are our finest hunter," and with a lift of his plate as salute, he shovelled the last pieces of meat into his mouth and swallowed, almost without chewing. “Don’t let the women distract you, Jake. They are for eggs," he said, matter-of-factly.

Jake chose not to challenge, hoping to salvage the trust that he had just begun to cultivate with Reynard. He saw Olivia moving up the stairs behind her father, who was climbing slowly to convey his frailty. Jake wondered if she felt his gaze on her body, as she turned and looked at him, her eyes smiling slightly, the tiniest gesture of warmth possible.

“I hear you’re planning to attack the ghost.”

“Oh you do, do you? Olivia told you?”

“I’ve heard whispers.”

“Eavesdropping, Jake?”

“Your men aren’t exactly... discreet," Jake raised an eyebrow as if to imply isn’t that obvious? Right on cue, a pair of laughing militiamen fell to the ground in a drunken wrestling match, four of their comrades egging them on.

Reynard chuckled amenably. “I guess you’re right. So, what of it?”

“I want to come.”

Reynard turned to him, his own eyebrow raised now as if to say is that so? “Your job here is hunter, not militia. Besides, I know you know more about first aid and medicine from that wild-woman mother of yours than any of these brutes.”

“No doubt. All the more reason you should take me on the attack. If there are injuries, I can help.”

“More reason? That’s one reason, Jake. Why else should I take you.”

“I’ve got lots of guns.”

Reynard’s face fell still. He searched Jake’s for the tell. But it was not apparent. “Where?”

“I have a large cache a few hours walk due east of here.”

“Due east? Ha! Really." It should have been a question, but it seemed more like an acknowledgement of a coincidence.

“That’s right, why?”

“Well, Jake. We just happened to find out today, while you were out hunting, that the local ghost has taken up residence in a wheat silo on a farm about four hours due east of here. One of our scouts came back this afternoon and told us he saw it go in, and shut down. Some kind of sleep... standing up, if you believe it.”

Jake puzzled for a moment at the thought.

“How many guns?”

“Seven or eight. Two of them are military-grade. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the cache.”

“How do you know it’s even still there?”

“It’s buried. I dug for a whole day to hide it safely. And no one else would think to dig there.”

Reynard nodded, accepting the claim. “Ammunition?”

“Lots.”

“How many rounds?”

“I don’t know. Hundreds, easily.”

Reynard’s eyes widened, then an uncontrollable grin stretched across his red face. “Alright, Jake Thorne. You’ve bought yourself in to the attack. But when we get there, I want you to stay back, alright. I’ve got buffoons in the militia, and I’ve got leeches-a-plenty who want to come inside. They’re eager to be on the frontline... they want to impress me. You... I don’t need you to impress me. I know what you can do. I need a medic, and when we get back, I need a hunter. So you’ll stay back, okay?”

Jake nodded, in truthful agreement.

“Why do you want to come anyway?”

Jake looked at him with a face that said really?

“Ah... I understand," Reynard answered himself. “Revenge it is. We leave at dawn, Jake. Be ready.”

Reynard stood up, and surprisingly to Jake, proffered his hand for a deal-sealing shake. Jake obliged, then ascended to his room, where he found Marcus waiting to brief him on the use of his device.

---

Jake brushed a grey veil of powdered rocks from the top of the huge metal box. He looked at the many other hands aiding him. Some fingers were blistered, some bleeding after the difficult hour of digging. When the top of the box was clear, Jake knelt down and lifted the combination padlock with one palm, and started twisting its dial clockwise, then counter-clockwise, then clockwise again, until it popped open with a satisfying click. He took a step back, gesturing with his hand to relinquish ownership of the hidden contents to the man standing next to him.

Reynard looked down at the box with an excited, anticipatory beam. He looked up at the nine militiamen he had brought along, and, with nothing but brief eye contact and a pair of nods, commanded two of them to open the box. There was a soft hiss as the stale air was released from the box’s rubber seals as the two men cracked it open with a hard jerk to its lid handles. They tossed the heavy lid aside and it landed with a crunch on the gravel nearby.

Reynard stared at the contents, his mouth hanging open slightly, his expression frozen. He smiled again. “Goooooood...” he groaned, under his breath. Then, as if a bolt of lightning had struck him, he straightened his back and slapped Jake hard on the arm in a gesture intended as friendly approval. Jake grimaced in annoyance, but his strong frame didn’t buckle. “Good, Jake! This will do nicely.”

The militiamen stood around the case in awe. It was loaded full of weaponry: a large collection of hunting knifes; an antique bayonet in a leather sheath; two lever-action Winchester Model 94 rifles; four Remington bolt-actions; two large ammunition cases full of pre-loaded magazines and single rounds, and to Reynard’s delight; two large black pistol-grip rifles with sights and long curved magazines.

Reynard picked up one, almost delicately, and held it across his raised palms. “Is this...?”

“M4. Australian Army," Jake replied, anticipating the question.

“Fully automatic?”

“No. Three-round burst.”

“Where did you find all this, Jake?”

“A year ago I raided a farmhouse. We found a cellar underneath it. Most of this cache was from there. There were photographs. From what I can tell the owner was in the Army, and he fought in Canberra in the war before the machines. I don’t know much about that time, only what my mother told me about the foreign attacks, and the battles on the ground in Canberra and Melbourne. But I recognised this gun, my mother used to have one. The place - this soldier’s house - was totally abandoned. I guess the soldier either disappeared into the woods, or he crossed over with the ghosts.”

“Well... whatever the case, we thank him!” laughed Reynard as he studied the gun, found the magazine release and depressed it, dropping the curved extrusion into his other hand and checking it for cartridges. Naturally, it was empty. He slapped the magazine back into place, then slung the unloaded rifle over his shoulder and bent down to pick up its twin, which he promptly tossed over to his favourite militiaman. The man caught the rifle with a look of delight on his face, and began studying it in a similar way.

Jake was beginning to feel that he had put himself in much greater danger by giving this arsenal to his captors. But then he felt the weight of his backpack once more; the heaviness of Marcus’s tablet and the bulky, battery-laden device it was slotted into. He felt the hard cylinder of the remote trigger in his pants’ pocket, and remembered that this cache he was handing over was the only way to get himself invited on the mission to attack the ghost in its lair. The device secretly hanging on his back was the only chance they had to learn more about the machines, and find any weakness they could take advantage of.

As the militiamen collected guns and small clips and magazines in order of their place in Reynard’s arbitrary hierarchy, fast footsteps approached from the east, and everyone turned to see the young leech scout tearing across the pebbly creek bank towards them. He was puffing and panting, his energy all but spent on the rapid journey across the wood.

“Is it there?” Reynard shouted as the leech ambled over.

The leech nodded, unable to speak over his heaving for air.

“Right. Militia! We go!” Reynard shouted, turning slightly to address his army of twenty.

The militiamen cheered wildly. Some of the leeches joined in the cheer, Jake figuring they were the ones hoping to move up the ranks and become militiamen.

Reynard turned back to his scout, who had finally arrived and collapsed to his knees, gasping. Reynard knelt down to him. “Good leech," he said, patting his scout on the head. Reynard handed him a canteen of water, which was received eagerly, then offered him a sheathed knife from the cache.

The leech looked at it nervously, then at Reynard, his eyes asking for elucidation.

“You are in the vanguard now. Welcome to the militia.”

The leech’s eyes were wide as he reached up and took the knife. Jake couldn’t tell if he was overjoyed, or terrified. He looked sick with hunger and exhaustion. Jake wondered if any of last night’s buck had made it down the stairs, or if the portly militiamen had devoured it all. No wonder the leeches were desperate to ascend.

The militiamen threw their rifles on their shoulders once more, all of them now armed, some of the leeches being given older rifles, or knives. Nobody had taken the sheathed bayonet. Jake’s rifle had been confiscated by Reynard for the vanguard, so he slid the bayonet into his belt, just in case.

Now with Jake’s cache emptied, Reynard’s men began their march eastward, paying little regard for the leeches who awkwardly trailed behind them in twos. They were carrying cumbersome wooden boxes, which emitted a strong smell that reminded Jake of rotting fruit, and was giving him a headache.

---

Gus prised the trapdoor open, revealing Jake’s and Maisie’s travel packs as he had left them, the two large rifles, the bandolier of ammunition, and the bow and quiver of arrows. None of it had been touched since he hid it here. He exhaled a sigh of relief.

He could hear Nimrod’s claws tapping on the wooden floorboard of the lounge room as he slowly paced about, sniffing around the base of the coffee table.

He can smell Maisie, Gus thought, suddenly heavy-hearted. Then, remembering his purpose, he reached down and one by one fished the weapons and packs up into the kitchen behind him. The first thing he looked for were straps of dried meat in Maisie’s bag. When he found one, he immediately started gnawing at it, as he studied the largest rifle laid out across his knees. Its stock was a dark wood-grain, cut and moulded to a comfortable contour for a hand larger than his. Gus knew this weapon would be awkward for him to operate, but its length and higher calibre was going to be much better suited to his target and range than the child-sized Crickett rifle, which he used for target practise, and his father occasionally used for picking off rabbits and possums when they needed a quick and easy meal.

He looked at the marking engraved into the side of the rifle’s steel barrel.

.30-06

“Dot-thirty, line, o-six," he said out loud, reading slowly and pointing to each letter and symbol as he said it.

He knew this was the calibre mark, which his father had taught him. He had never heard of this calibre before. He was pleased that he recognised the number symbols now, and that he himself, alone, had worked out what number symbols meant and how to read them.

He’d spent the last two days staring at all of the symbols he could find in the books that were packed into the cavities of the motorhome. He had found some scraps of paper and a pen, and as he studied the books, he jotted down a symbol on his paper every time he saw a new one. After flicking through over a dozen, he had found fifty-two disparate symbols of letters, some of which seemed like larger versions of other symbols. He noticed the larger symbols appeared mostly as the first letter after a dot. The dot, he assumed, symbolised the end of a sentence, since the mark itself - when made with a pen - felt like it had finality to it. There were other strange markings though, like dots with tails, and double tailed-dots floating above the letters. He didn’t understand these, but he wanted to.

He also identified ten disparate symbols for numbers. He knew they were numbers because he usually found them at the top or bottom of a page, and the sequence from page to page was always the same from book to book.

Once he had jotted down the symbols as separate characters, he went about marking the sequence out, and when he realised that the 1 meant page one, it was easy for him to assume with confidence that the next page showed the symbol for two, then three and so on. When he reached page ten, he had to puzzle over it for a much longer time and cross-reference other books to make sure the symbolism was consistent, before drawing any conclusion. Soon enough he had cracked the code, and realised that a two-digit number showed first the number of tens, and secondly the number of units. Three digits showed hundreds, tens and units. And once he had established this logical understanding, the reading of numbers came easily to him.

It was the letters that were confounding, as he had no way to tie the sounds of words to the letters they were spelt with. Phonics were far more abstract than numbers, as far as learning to read them went. He knew he would need a teacher, and he had held on tightly to Livy’s words to him when he told her he couldn’t read. I’ll fix that, she had said. He couldn’t wait to start.

As he folded the last of the strap of dried meat into his mouth, he carefully pulled a single round of ammunition from the bandolier and spun it in his fingertips to examine the butt. It also read .30-06, and he smiled with pleasure at the match.

He turned the bullet again in his hand, feeling the weight of it. It was intimidatingly large compared to the .22 bullets he was so used to loading into his little Crickett. It felt like a weapon of great power. It felt like exactly what Gus needed to rescue his father.

He slid the bolt of the rifle action back and examined the chamber, which was empty. He carefully inserted the round into the internal magazine, and pushed down, feeling it click into place. Another round followed, pushing the first round deeper down, and soon enough his rifle was loaded with five rounds of .30-06 ammunition. He slung the bandolier over his shoulder, and was surprised at the immense weight of it. He stood up and raised the rifle, heedful of the danger within it. He slid the bolt closed, careful to keep his fist clenched so as not to accidentally brush the trigger and discharge a round. Then, keeping the muzzle of the rifle pointed downward and his fingers well clear of the trigger, he stepped into the lounge room and found Nimrod lying sullenly with his chin between his paws.

He was lying in the spot where Maisie had sat as they had studied the elephant carving together.

Gus felt the sadness that was all over Nimrod’s face. “Listen, Nimmy." The dog raised his chin and cocked his head in attention. “You’re gonna have to stay here, buddy. I may not make it back. I can’t ask you to come with me. I’m going to leave the back door open. If I’m not back by tomorrow night... you need to find Livy, okay?”

The dog groaned, then yipped softly.

“I know you want to come too, boy. But I can’t risk losing you. Besides, I won’t need your nose. I’m not hunting. And I know exactly where they’re going. Livy mentioned a cache. There’s only one cache left, and it’s at the creek a little east of here.”

Nimrod cocked his head to the other side.

“You remember. The farmhouse we raided last winter. We found the cellar. That’s where these came from," he tapped the ammunition belt across his chest, and shook the gun gently. “Papa and I put the rest of the weapons in a big case down at the creek near that farm, and we buried it there. There’re heaps of guns and bullets in there. If this Reynard person is planning some kind of attack, they’ll go there first. I’ll start at the cache, and track them from there. I’ll be fine.”

Gus knelt down and scratched the ear of his beloved friend. “I love you, Nimmy. If I don’t come back... you need to live for both of us, okay?”

Nimrod flattened his chin against the floor once more, and didn’t move, while his young master snuck out the back door, hopped the fence, and ran stealthily into the forest.