Through the Tiger's Eye (4 page)
It didn’t seem too strange to Lucy when the Tiger-cat appeared again, dragging something out of the bushes with its teeth – not a mouse but a piece of tin, about the size of a car numberplate. The Tiger-cat was tugging at it, trying to dislodge a corner caught on a vine. Lucy stepped forward to help, and the Tiger-cat dropped the metal and began to purr.
The surface was muddy but not rusty. Each corner had a small hole drilled in it and when Lucy looked closer she could see writing. It must be a plaque, like the one outside their doctor’s surgery.
She rubbed at the metal and tried to read the words, but just managed to smear mud all over it. Somehow she knew she had to read it. The Tiger-cat purred and twisted against her legs. Lucy reached down to rub its head and it let her, staring at her fiercely even as it purred with pleasure.
It jumped lightly back onto the top step and stared commandingly at Lucy, right into her eyes. Holding that golden gaze, all of a sudden Lucy began to shake. She wasn’t scared, quite the opposite. Lucy didn’t know why her body was doing what it was doing, but for some reason she didn’t want it to stop. She felt an ache in her chest and in the middle of her forehead and then . . . her skin just dissolved into the air around her! The air rushed in where her skin used to hold it back, and her body rushed out. Or the air and her body got all swirled up together and there wasn’t any difference any more.
All the time she was staring at the Tiger-cat and the Tiger-cat was staring at her. Their line of sight was a golden rope holding her fast, and Lucy didn’t need her body any more.
The odd thing was that even though Lucy couldn’t feel her skin, she knew she was smiling. She was one big smile. Then she felt a tug, as if the Tiger-cat had yanked the rope that joined them, and a picture began to form in her mind. The Tiger-cat’s golden eyes changed subtly and Lucy knew something even weirder was happening. She was still in that same suspended smiling state, her mind holding fast to the Tiger-cat’s mind at the other end of the rope.
Only the Tiger-cat was changing.
The Tiger-cat’s stripes blurred into the distance. Lucy felt as though she had been blown gently backwards down a long tunnel and could barely see the other end. Then the tunnel suddenly shrank and Lucy floated forward again, like a dandelion seed-head on the wind, and saw
the tiger-striped face melt into a person’s face, one lined with old age.
Like a camera shifting focus, one minute the Tiger-cat’s image was sharp and clear, the next it blurred and shifted, and when it sharpened again Lucy was staring at . . .
an old lady, with a wrinkled face and eyes the same gingery-gold as the Tiger-cat’s. The old lady’s tawny eyes filled with tears and Lucy’s smiling feeling vanished. She was flooded with sorrow.
Lucy blinked and the Tiger-cat’s face was back. A second later it shifted and changed again, this time into a face Lucy recognised.
The girl from her dream! The one with the twisted hair, the one who had looked into the jungle and asked for help with her eyes and then escaped with the little boy.
Lucy blinked again and found the Tiger-cat gazing at her fiercely from the top of the stairs.
Shivering, Lucy felt herself slowly come back inside her skin, aware of her body again, tingling all over. It was as if her skin was an envelope she had stepped out of for just a moment. Then she grew back inside it, filling it up again.
Her mind was spinning. Who was that kid, and what about the old lady with the ginger eyes? Maybe she’d been right about the house the first day she saw it, when she thought they might find a corpse inside.
The old lady in the Tiger-cat’s mind was scared about dying all alone.
Lucy was as certain about that as if the Tiger-cat had said it out loud.
She had a sudden vision of Grandma getting sick without anyone in her family knowing. What if she died and had no time to say goodbye to the things she loved? – like her favourite red rosebush and her chickens and her grandkids.
‘An old lady lived here and we have to find her,’ she said suddenly to all the trees and the moist morning air and the sunlight – and the Tiger-cat.
The Tiger-cat must have thought she had said the right thing because it relaxed and began washing itself, still sitting on the top stair. T-Tongue gave a relieved whimper and stretched, before inspecting the first stair from every angle, sniffing the stone warily, keeping a prudent distance from the Tiger-cat. It looked perfectly innocent, licking a stripy paw and washing behind a rounded ear; but weren’t cats supposed to have pointy ears?
Ricardo’s voice broke into her thoughts. ‘I know we have to find the old lady, stupid! The Tiger-cat just told us that. Do you think I’m deaf or something? I
told
you it could talk.’
Lucy wasn’t about to get into a fight with Ricardo over whether the Tiger-cat could talk or not. Even if she hadn’t heard it talk,
it had beamed video clips right into her brain.
And it had made T-Tongue behave.
Ricardo began chattering away to the Tiger-cat, ‘Don’t worry. Grandma will know where the old lady is. She knows everyone. And those kids – you tell us where to find them and we’ll help them too. That’s a slack school they go to – teachers shouldn’t have guns in the playground. They should tell their mums and dads and they should complain about the food too – it looks gross and they shouldn’t chuck it on the ground. They shouldn’t have wild animals from the zoo there either. We’ve only got chickens at our school. We’ve got a rooster called Ugg Boot and . . .’
The Tiger-cat must have worked out that Ricardo would have kept talking all morning because it twisted lightly, leapt off the top stair into the shadowy jungle above . . . and disappeared.
T-Tongue gave a strangled bark and bounded up the stairs after the Tiger-cat . . . and disappeared too! Lucy dropped the plaque and ran, with Ricardo right beside her, clambering up the slippery stairs. One, two, three, four, five . . . as Lucy hit the top stair, one foot slid into space. For a nanosecond she was suspended, one leg and arm dangling into nothingness, one hand clutching Ricardo. Then, like a slow-motion replay, she watched first herself then her little brother tumble off, with Ricardo desperately clutching at thin air. They were catapulted, cartwheeling, into blackness.
Thump! Lucy did a somersault and landed in what felt like a nest of snakes, half-buried in mud and wet sand. There were slimy coils all around her, under her hands, under her back. She lay stunned, unable to breathe or speak. But T-Tongue licking her face, Ricardo whimpering beside her and the thought of snakes were enough to get Lucy on her feet.
Miraculously, she was still holding the torch. In torchlight the snaky things resolved themselves into the roots of an enormous tree, some thicker than her arms and legs, fanning out everywhere over the floor of a muddy hole. It was a pit, but not a snakepit. Phew. Shining the torch up, Lucy could see where they were. The offending step was still there, and she could see the early-morning sky, but so far above her head that it was hopeless to think about climbing. There must have been a landslide or something, sweeping away the track above the stairs. Only the roots of the gigantic tree held the rest of it in place above their heads.
Ricardo was clutching his arm, crying. Forget about the holidays, Mum was going to ground Lucy for the rest of childhood.
‘Give me a look.’
She shone the torch on Ricardo’s arm. He was holding his elbow. He must have whacked his funnybone on the way down.
‘Can you bend it?’
Ricardo gingerly flexed his arm once, twice. He started to breathe again.
‘Can you clench your fist?’ Lucy asked, remembering first aid.
He could, both of them in fact.
Just then T-Tongue decided to take matters into his own paws. He sniffed the air, stiffened, barked and shot across the floor of the pit towards what looked like a dark wall – and disappeared!
‘T-Tongue!’
Amazingly she heard a faint bark, as though he had already gone quite a long way. She shone the torch on the wall, revealing a gaping hole behind a pile of broken wood. Huge beams poked up out of the mud and sand like dinosaur bones. Lucy scrambled past, and the hole became a tunnel with smooth earth sides – a hungry mouth disappearing into the blackness of the hillside.
T-Tongue had decided to go adventuring under a mountain that might collapse on his head any minute. Great. Lucy heard his barks grow faint, then stop.
‘We have to get him!’
The thought of her puppy lost at the end of that tunnel was too much. She took off into the blackness, calling and whistling desperately. Ricardo stumbled after her, determined not to be left behind.
The tunnel seemed to go forever. The further they went, the smellier it got. A dark, dank, watery smell. And the air got colder. Lucy felt as though they were tramping into the very centre of the earth. She tried not to think about cave-ins.
And then a crisis: the tunnel forked. In the weak torchlight Lucy could see that the left-hand fork sloped downwards, further into the mountain. The right-hand fork sloped upwards, towards where the sky should be. Ricardo thought T-Tongue would have gone up, not down. Lucy thought T-Tongue wouldn’t even notice a second tunnel if he were chasing something. If the something had gone down, so had T-Tongue. Lucy looked at her torch and saw how pale and yellow the light was. The batteries were running out.
‘T-Tongue!’ she screamed down the left tunnel.
No answer.
‘Let’s try this one,’ she said, moving into the right, up-sloping fork. She couldn’t face heading down that other dark wormhole with a dodgy torch.
‘If he’s not up here, we’ll go back home and get more batteries,’ she said, trying not to think about how they would get out of that hole. Ricardo was only too happy to agree.
The tunnel went steadily upwards and in a little while Lucy felt a change in the air.
‘I think we’re getting close to the top,’ she said.
As she said the words, she felt the panic she had been squashing down rise in her throat. She almost choked with fear. That was weird. She had been scared back there but hadn’t had time to really notice. Now they were almost back up at the surface, she felt weak with relief.
They rounded a bend and saw sunlight spearing through a mass of creepers and vines. Lucy and Ricardo smashed through, emerging scratched and hot into a different kind of tunnel, one the jungle had grown itself. The canopy above their heads was so thick that little sunlight filtered through, but the colour! The trees and shrubs glowed fluoro green. Lucy had never seen anything like it.
There was a faint path, but in some places the creepers and bushes were so thick that Lucy and Ricardo had to crawl on hands and knees. After a few metres, Lucy looked back and couldn’t see the tunnel. She glanced up, and between the towering trees caught a glimpse of the cliffs looming behind.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘That’s the escarpment, so that way’s west. All we have to do is head downhill away from that and we’ll hit our back yard again. Or one of the neighbour’s. Or at least we’ll hit the road.’
But there was a warning voice in Lucy’s head. She knew stories of bushwalkers lost for days without food on the escarpment. She looped her red hair-scrunchie on a bush to mark the path to the tunnel.
‘It’s hot as,’ said Ricardo, panting.
His face was streaked with dirt and sweat. It
was
really hot – hot even by Kurrawong summer scorcher standards, and far too hot for this time of morning. Lucy guessed it was about 6.30 a.m., maybe quarter to seven if you counted fifteen minutes with the Tiger-cat before it got them into this mess; yet the sun was up above their heads, shining strongly down through the trees. It didn’t make sense.
A second later Lucy stopped thinking about anything except the incredible sight opening up before them. There, as they rounded a bend in the track, was a scene from a nightmare.
There was the nightmare barbed wire and the nightmare rickety old house – but no nightmare children or soldiers. The fire had turned to ash and the place was as quiet as a graveyard, which somehow made it worse.