The Cabin Sessions E-Book

Isobel Blackthorn

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

It's Christmas Eve when hapless musician Adam Banks stands on the bridge over the river that cleaves the isolated village of Burton. A storm is rolling into the narrow mountain pass. He thinks of turning back. Instead, he resolves to fulfill his obligation to perform the guest spot at The Cabin Sessions.

Fear stirs when he opens the door on The Cabin's incense-choked air. Local plumber Philip Stone is already there, brooding.

Meanwhile, Philip's sister Eva prepares to take a bath. Memories begin to surface concerning one fateful day by the river, and the innocence of her beloved brother.

Leseprobe

THE CABIN SESSIONS

A DARK THRILLOGY

BOOK 3

ISOBEL BLACKTHORN

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

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About the Author

Copyright (C) 2020 Isobel Blackthorn

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2022 by Next Chapter

Published 2022 by Next Chapter

Cover art by CoverMint

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many have been involved in the creation of this story. I am indebted to all the wonderful musicians who attended the legendary open mic at Kelly’s Bar and Grill, a log cabin nestling in a mountaintop forest east of Melbourne.

I hasten to add that no character in my story bears any resemblance to all those patrons and artists.

This book would not have been written without the early involvement of the open mic’s host, songsmith and Scottish troubadour Alex Legg, a passionate man with an enormous heart who furnished me with an insider’s view of running an open mic.

From those early drafts emerged a story that took years to evolve into its current form. For that, I am indebted to the sharp and creative mind of my daughter, musician and composer Elizabeth Blackthorn. I extend my gratitude to Suzanne and Dave Diprose, who gave their thoughts and suggestions generously, as did Annie Dixon and Max Lees.

My heartfelt thanks to Jasmina Brankovich for her engagement and valuable feedback.

For Dave Diprose

CHAPTERONE

ADAM

Guitar case in hand, he shut the lychgate of the churchyard, relieved to close behind him his day. Still prickling in his mind was the certain knowledge that beyond the turmoil of the skies the Moon would tonight slide into the earth’s umbra and glow blood red. The day’s Gazette had given over a whole two pages to the event, including a coloured photo of a previous Blood Moon, an insert portraying an astronomical explanation, and the musings of stargazer columnist, Stella Verne.

That an eclipse augurs the death of a king, the ancients observing the firmament in the deserts of Mesopotamia knew. After all, they bore witness to the happenstance, those soothsaying men of yore, they would not have reasoned otherwise. Without the benefit of modern science, the correspondence had taken root in the collective psyche, even finding its way into early Christian history. Millennia later, in those predisposed, the omen still held sway; helped along by Stella Verne and the Gazette.

In the dawn of the day Adam had been feeling in the totality of his being in balance, if precariously. Then he’d read Verne’s piece and the news lodged in the vestibule of his mind. At first a mere filament of dust on the doormat. But on his way to work the filament soon multiplied into a cloud that threatened to suffocate his sanity. By the afternoon he had to reassure himself that he knew no kings. He tried to shake his mind free, anxious not to find himself unhinged.

On the journey home, he’d managed to reason away as sensationalism Verne’s Blood Moon auguring in what must have been an otherwise uneventful twenty-four hours. And in a fleeting moment of cynicism as he’d readied to leave his house for the evening’s sessions, he knew that no one in the region would witness the event as the heavens would be obscured by the rapidly coalescing cloud.

Noting the warmth of the evening air on his skin, he strode down the lane, passing the Stone’s weatherboard cottage: circa 1900 and tastefully restored, with a bullnose veranda and elegant finials. A house that stood in large grounds adjoining the once hallowed land of his own abode. He scarcely knew the owner, Philip Stone, but he pictured the sister, Eva, curled up somewhere inside, perhaps reading a book as she seemed wont to do. Or perhaps he’d find her with her brother, celebrating Christmas Eve at The Cabin. It was a thought that generated some cheer.

The day had been uncommonly hot and close; the time of year might otherwise have brought a light breeze to soothe the skin and a cool night for restful sleep. Yet the solstice had seen a climate so at variance with the norm, it had instilled in the residents of Burton at best puzzlement or unease, at worst a babbling hysteria. Several times in the previous few days he’d stood at the counter of the general store and found himself privy to the grim ruminations of someone or other on the topic of the weather, as if the sunny native disposition had arrested at the foot of that cleft of a valley. On Christmas Eve, the scaremongering had been worse than ever, as the prospect of a storm of hitherto unknown intensity moiled over the plains to the south and to the west. While not yet eight o’clock, the sun had long since fallen behind the mountains, leaving Burton in shadow to be darkened further by the cloud that amassed beyond the peak.

Wafts of cool air stroked his cheeks and the bare skin of his neck. Wafts that soon became a breeze and as he reached the bottom of the lane, a fearful wind funnelled its way up the valley. Turning the corner by the gnarly sycamore tree, he faced into the brunt of it, the wind buffeting his guitar case and pressing his trousers to his legs. He battled his way to the old beam bridge, with its timber deck and iron railings. He crossed halfway and set his guitar case at his feet and leaned against the metal, feeling through his pants the hard cold against his hips.

Below, the river flowed in deceptively languorous fashion, having long before carved a deep channel through the sandstone, moving apace, undeterred by the tangle of fleabane and horehound on its banks. Whence it began in the springs of the mountains to the east, the river gathered to itself numerous tributaries, pressing through the confining cleavage of the mountains to emerge like a blessing on fecund plains, and wending on through the city to the coast.

In the twilight, the water appeared black to Adam, the rush of its movement unheard beneath the wind about his ears.

He stood for some moments, pinned to the railings by the wind, uncertain whether to head back home and survive the storm on his own, or proceed across the bridge to The Cabin where he would find company, of a sort: the regulars, locals all of them. His indecision held him fast, for were he to return home he would endure a night of relentless wailing as the wind found its way through every crevice; much of the old church, after years of renovation, still in disrepair. It was not a comforting prospect, yet were he to join the others in The Cabin he would be forced to endure wailing of another sort, the bemoaning cries of a demented crone, the sort of demented crone one would expect to find in a strange old town like Burton. Yet he was beholden, for he’d been at last invited to fill the guest spot at tonight’s sessions, Christmas Eve no less, and whilst few would be in attendance on this foul night, he could not let down his mentor, the one and the great Benny Muir.

He picked up his guitar case, lifting his gaze from the watery gloom. The town, scattered to either side of the river, was obscured from view by thickets of laurel and dogwood, dwellings kept hidden by their owners covetous of seclusion. Even the general store squatted low on its haunches behind a privet hedge. From the vantage of the bridge The Cabin was barely visible, only its low gabled roof emerged from the slope of the hill. A few paces on and it would be gone.

He left the bridge as if leaving behind a watershed; so intense was his certainty that whichever path he took would somehow assure his fate.

His had not been a convivial day, riven as he was with anxiety that never left his soul. He had reached an age of slow recognition that the mess of thought and feeling that propelled him this way and that, affecting his every mood, was a fraying ball of wool. All he knew for certain was he might unravel at any moment and it was an effort to keep himself wound tight.

Yet his was angst he could make only partial sense of, the sort of inchoate angst manifesting in one who never belonged or was properly loved. He carried a gnawing sense of not being worthy, and as the world had rejected him so he rejected himself.

He never knew of his father, for his mother and grandmother never spoke his name after he absconded from his responsibilities prior to Adam’s birth. Although it was mentioned that he’d laboured at the steelworks on the far side of the city. His mother, a singer who earned a meagre living fronting skiffle bands and taking in washing, had been a bony, careworn woman, the one photograph in his possession rendering her more Billie Holliday than Sarah Vaughan in spirit. She took to mothering like a cuckoo, leaving him at his grandmother’s house whenever she performed, and one time she never came back. He was only two at the time. Left with no choice, his grandmother, a widowed pensioner who spent all day every day knitting and spitting platitudes by way of wisdom, raised him to be a good and honest boy. He did his best to fulfil her expectations, making sure he was well behaved, mild in manner and ever eager to please.

His grandmother lived in a plain old house in a suburb by the sea, a suburb filled shoulder to shoulder with plain old houses. While the other kids from the local school ran amok on the beach or in the park, chasing seagulls, skimming stones and building sand castles, or playing mock battles with stick swords, he sat alone in his room and read Tom Sawyer and Heidi and Little Women, in fact wading through all the classics on his grandmother’s bookcase indiscriminately.

He remained a good and honest boy until his voice broke and his eyes fixed on his music teacher, Mr Hodder. Angst grew alongside his fixation and he yearned to fall into Mr Hodder’s arms, kiss him passionately, fumble for his satisfaction. But Mr Hodder, he knew, was married, apparently happily, and there was never a glimmer of desire in those cool, recondite eyes. Adam had no choice but to repress his carnal urges and wait, wait until he’d escaped his grandmother’s knitted prison.

After many lonely years of adulthood, Adam relinquished his virginity to the front man of a Lee Reece cover band: The Reece Effect.

It had been a balmy summer’s night and the city bar full of smartly turned out, heavily scented men. The Reece Effect was crammed into a corner stage area, not much larger than a king-size mattress: two guitars, bass and drums. The singer stood on the floor in front, facing the left speaker as he talked to the bass player on the stage. He was a crane of a man, reaching the height of the guitarists behind him. His formidable stature enhanced by his hair: slickly quaffed, glossy and swept back from his face. Hair that lent him a further two inches of height. As the singer turned and Adam saw the width of his shoulders, he quickly adjusted his spindly crane analogy. The singer had a long, strong-featured face of Latin pallor, with the eyes of a hunter on the prowl, and a pencil moustache that accented his full spreading lips. The bass player struck up a pulsing groove and the singer slid into it. Holding his mike stand, he sang and those full lips parted, unveiling a complement of large white teeth. His appearance was altogether striking if disquieting, the sort that turned stolen glances into long gazes. As if underscoring the countenance, he wore black patent leather shoes with white button-down spatterdashes, an incongruent match with the red satin body shirt he wore tucked into black drainpipes. His manhood making a tennis-ball bulge in the crotch.

When their eyes met, Adam couldn’t help but be dazzled by the singer’s swaggering charm. Instantly beguiled, Adam left the bar, wine glass in hand, and took up a seat near the stage. At the end of the night, when the crowd had thinned and the band played their last song, the lead singer attended exclusively to this new adoring fan.

Always on the road, wooing audiences at venues far and wide, Juan Diaz was a rare breed of singer songwriter able to exist on the proceeds of his craft. With tattoos on his collarbone and a crucifix dangling from his left ear, he was ex-army fit, a man tough enough to front a drunken rabble. Yet his animal allure that could enchant the unwary from the first, fogged Adam’s vision and he became Juan’s partner and devotee.

Four turbulent years later, and Juan Diaz was a man Adam feared, a man too cruel, too vainglorious, too dangerous to countenance in his proximity.

Ever since the demise of this one union of promise, angst returned to become a fixture of Adam’s psyche, abrading his sensitivities like thistle.

It was with a leaden heart and an ambivalent mind that Adam followed the road that followed the river to The Cabin. He paused again, this time at the edge of the privet hedge outside the general store, a ramshackle hodgepodge of a building clad in rotting weatherboards and flitches, with closed in verandas of asbestos sheeting painted a pale cream. The roof sloped every which way to accommodate a concatenation of small and narrow rooms.

A dim light shone through a small window. The proprietors, Rebekah and David Fisher, would no doubt be partaking of an unhealthy dollop of festive fare, and with luck their bellies rendered so full neither would muster the will to move beyond their threshold, though he doubted luck had the power to override habit. A habit never once broken by either party, one that found them every Wednesday night in attendance at Benny Muir’s Cabin Sessions.

To his left, the northern mountaintop was shrouded in cloud. The wind pushed him on, past a vacant block where once he’d tried and failed to stave off Juan’s wrath after a night of heavy drinking, Juan in a frothing rage and Adam placating that he hadn’t, truly hadn’t flirted with Philip Stone. Seconds later, Juan abandoning him in a bruised and bleeding heap.

The flashback stirred in him another recollection, one he hastily pushed back under the trapdoor, where it languished in an interior space he named his oubliette, an appellation appropriate for its contents.

He turned up the track to The Cabin, now in full view: a log cutter’s cabin constructed from ancient trees that once towered in the forest. The logs of the walls were heavy and dark. In the wall overlooking the river, the square-eyed windows set wide apart, the long nose of brick chimney flaring between, and the low hat of roof, altogether lent The Cabin a menacing visage. A visage worsened when the proprietor of this lonely hostelry, Delilah Makepeace, had, in a whimsy of faux vintage, replaced the window’s glass with trellised panes.

The wind, much colder now, curled around his calves and coursed through the thin jacket he’d slipped into on his way out his bedroom door thinking at the time he might find himself overly warm. His guitar case swung about and slapped his thigh. The cold propelled him on and as he approached, The Cabin took on a softer feel, for the small amount of light that emanated from the trellised panes looked warm and inviting.

He came to a sudden halt as he rounded the front wall. Penetrating the howl of the wind were three sharp crashes as if something heavy and dense had slammed into metal. He listened, straining, unable to move, the wind hard on his side. The door to The Cabin not three strides thence, but a courageous impulse quelled apprehension, and he stepped on, cautiously, and peered into the gloom of the yard.

Beer kegs were lined up against the wall like fat men’s paunches. Otherwise the veranda was empty. He made out the elements of Delilah’s garden, the stone birdbath poised on its pedestal, the gnomes dotted here and there, and the clipped bushes of herbs. Beyond, where the garden petered, a woodpile and a corrugated iron incinerator.

Familiarity took hold and he relaxed at the sight of a figure heaving into the incinerator what looked like lengths of sawn branches. Beside the stranger, a barrow piled high with leaf litter. This was no time to be clearing debris but Delilah was a fastidious woman who had surely required of one of her patrons he clear away the remnants of a fallen tree.

Berating himself for his fearful sensitivities he made to turn when the figure straightened, and a quick burst from the headlights of a car flashed into sight a face of such unpleasantness Adam felt himself cower. He couldn’t recognise its owner. The light vanished and he heard the thud of a car door in the distance. Without wasting another moment, he turned back, desirous of the comfort of The Cabin, no matter who was inside.

He pressed the latch and pushed open the heavy old door, ready to greet Benny setting up the stage. A rush of hot, heavily incensed air belted his senses as Delilah called to him to close the door fast and tight. The Cabin’s ceiling was low, and the incense formed a dense haze anyone standing was forced to inhale. Wall lamps gave forth a subdued glow through crooked tasselled shades. Walls of logs piled one atop another and varnished brown mahogany sucked into themselves much of the lamplight. Delilah had yet to light the table candles. Adam was slow to realise there was no one seated at either of the two tables of polished oak—small and round yet still they took up much of the available floor space—and no one in the nook right beside him. The open-hearth fireplace with its carved timber mantelpiece was the main feature of the room. No fire had been lit in the grate, the heat source a column heater positioned over by the old oak barrel in the far corner of the room.

Delilah was standing at the mantelshelf in regal pose, bedecked in the full-length gown of deep purple she wore on Wednesdays. Her performance gown she called it, velveteen, with a plunging neckline and ruffled cuffs. Her lips were painted an equally deep red, her glossy black hair tonight swept back in a topknot bun with braided wrap, and she was holding her head imperiously high as if attempting to lengthen her neck. She looked as she always did, markedly handsome, yet she appeared distracted, the incense in her hand hanging from her grasp. Her gaze shifted from Adam to the stage to the bar, where it remained, leaving Adam to take in for himself Benny’s absence.

Where every Wednesday by seven o’clock a microphone stand and Benny’s Domino amp would be centred on the small dais of black carpet, there was an empty space. Adam turned, scanning The Cabin, absorbing the solemnity, opening his mouth to speak and closing it again when he noticed Nathan Sandhurst, bow backed on a bar stool, pretentious in his Ray-Bans, his head so low it might at any moment fall in his cider; and Rebekah and David’s daughter, Hannah, eyeing her sop of a boyfriend derisively from behind the counter.

‘There’s been a tragedy,’ Delilah said, directing her statement to Adam, a statement all the more ominous conveyed in a timbre uncharacteristically high in pitch, and not at all that deep, husky voice she had.

‘Benny?’

She made as if to answer when Adam’s neighbour, Philip Stone, came through from the kitchen, entering the room via the bar. He seemed out of sorts and Adam speculated that he, too, might have encountered the figure with the phantasmagorical face. For coming from that direction, he must have passed by the incinerator and it puzzled Adam why he had entered in such a manner, when he said, addressing Delilah, ‘The old gal’ pipe’s rusted through and needs replacing.’

‘Oh dear,’ she said indifferently.

‘Not to worry, I’ve fixed it,’ he said, rolling down his shirtsleeves and buttoning his cuffs. Seemingly not cognizant that when it came to the finer details of plumbing no one in the room gave a care, he went on, ‘The bitumen spray and tape is only temporary so you’d better put a bowl underneath to catch the drips and avoid using the sink. Should hold over Christmas. Then I’ll replace it with nice new PVC. And a waste trap.’

Delilah expressed her gratitude. Of course, Adam thought with some relief, Phillip was her plumber, he was everyone’s plumber. Standing there by the bar in a stark white shirt, tailored fawn pants and polished leather shoes, Philip Stone must have been the most well-groomed plumber the world had ever seen. Adam couldn’t fathom how a man who spent his working hours crawling under houses amongst blocked or leaking drains could present himself so impeccably, a practice that had instilled in Adam an inexplicable unease from the first. A reaction shored by a rumour Benny had given voice to, that untoward things had occurred in the Stone house. Then again, untoward things were said to have gone on in every house in Burton and Adam made every effort to dismiss the whole of it as gossip. Besides, although they were neighbours, Philip was to Adam virtually a stranger, Adam having had no recourse as yet to acquire his services. They’d not exchanged more than a sentence, save for that one occasion when they’d engaged in light-hearted speculations about the goings on of Nathan Sandhurst, the exchange that had resulted in Juan’s pummelling.

A self-contained man, when here for the sessions Philip generally maintained his reserve, talking almost exclusively with Delilah, or sitting alone waiting for his turn on the stage. He wrote soporific ballads, delivered in soft baritone, and Benny always put him on before or after the guest spot, a safe slot, for anyone present would either remain focused in anticipation of the main act or still be bathing in the afterglow of a dynamic set. Benny had let Philip perform the guest spot only the once, on a low-risk night years before Adam had moved to Burton, when the usual crowd was at the funeral of Rebekah’s older brother.

Adam shifted his weight, his guitar case heavy in his hand. Philip glanced around, hesitating at the sight of him then pinning him with his china blue eyes. Phillip had fine blonde hair cropped to within an inch of his skull, a cut that accentuated a receding hairline, giving his wide forehead prominence and hiding nothing of his elfin-like face. His mouth, small and irregular, the bottom lip thicker than its counterpart, looked pinched. Adam felt instantly disconcerted. He smiled and, thinking he’d hid his reaction well, steered his gaze back to Delilah.

‘You were about to tell me…’

She caught her breath. ‘Quite dreadful. You better sit down.’

Despite his guitar case pulling on his arm, he didn’t move. He detected beneath the fog of incense something sour, fetid: if he were not mistaken, the odour of rotting flesh. ‘What’s happened?’ he said in a low voice, mindful of the foreboding the ancients ascribed to an eclipse. The Blood Moon was still to occur and whatever had happened to Benny did not strictly align, but as Stella Verne stressed in the Gazette, the ancients allowed an orb of potentiality. At the very least, Adam sensed Delilah’s news would cohere with the tightening of his abdomen.

‘So sudden,’ Delilah said, her voice now modulated. ‘So terribly sudden.’ She tugged at the large green stone hanging from her neck, drawing it back and forth along its long gold chain. ‘One week a small growth on his back, the next,’ she clicked her fingers, ‘he’s gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘The funeral’s next week.’ She gave him a pitying look. And with that she crossed the room and joined Nathan and Philip at the bar.

Adam found his legs weakening and made for the nook. He put down his guitar case and sat side on at the end of the seat with his elbow resting on the table. His mind a tumult of memory, he sunk his head in his hand.

Last Wednesday, Benny had seemed in fine spirits. Adam had been on his way to The Cabin when Benny swung his Volvo estate into the patch of dirt that served as The Cabin’s car park, pulling up beside a pile of roughly sawn logs—the remnants of the tree that had fallen across Burton Road East the previous day, slamming into Rebekah and David’s garage and narrowly missing a passing car.

Adam waved from the footpath and Benny waved back, cheery as ever. He went over and leaned against the passenger-side window, watching Benny roll a pinch of pipe tobacco in the palm of his hand and tamp it in the bowl of his Peterson, tobacco falling like sawdust to join the scatterings of scrunched paper bags, loose CDs, empty coffee cups and unopened letters littering the car floor. ‘You’re nae gonna ask to get on early?’ he said. Adam laughed and told him no. He’d never pressure Benny.

A hefty man with a pork-belly paunch, Benny was not the sort Adam would normally consider a friend, for Benny looked as he was, forthright, in the tradition of rural Scotland: a farmer’s boy of sixty. He had thick wiry grey hair framing a large strong-boned face, with bottom-heavy lips, eyes small brown dots beneath thick angled eyebrows. He dressed casually in a plain white shirt and brown trousers buttoned below the belly, and ever since he’d taken to wearing a pair of fawn cowboy boots he had the look of the wannabe but well-past-it rocker. He was a Muir, an entertainer and an entertaining man at that, and Adam found his friendship restorative.

Benny sucked on his pipe, indifferent to the gurgling of the tar-slurried stem. When he’d had enough he plopped the pipe, still alight, in his shoulder bag and got out of his car. Refusing Adam’s offer of help, he opened the boot and heaved to shoulder and to hand his microphone stand, Domino amp and guitar case, along with his red tartan vanity case full of his ‘Only Muir’ and ‘More Muir’ recordings; all his own compositions, inspired by the Bothy ballads and cornkisters he grew up with.

Every Wednesday he would open the sessions with songs of lost loves, songs of protest and songs of victory; lyrics of suffering and heartache sung with the power of conviction. Adam always maintained Burton was lucky to have Benny. He’d even had a couple of minor hits back in Scotland. The first was his Jacobite battle song, Bonnie Prince No More, which he claimed reached Number Five in the Scottish regional charts, a song that hoisted him on the folk wagon to tour all over Scotland, and even as far as Norway, Holland and Germany. On the wagon himself, his second hit was a love song which did modestly well on the regular charts. Then Benny replaced ‘you’ with ‘Jesus’ and the song took on a new life and became a number one church hit. Thankfully, by the time he came to Burton he’d dropped the ‘Jesus’ in favour of the original.

Benny was fond of telling of his successes to anyone who paid attention but there was much doubt in Burton over the validity of his claims. Delilah was equally fond of saying when Benny was out of earshot that if he hadn’t seen more value in a bottle of whisky than his own talent he might have found enduring success. Instead, in a dramatic fall from sobriety, after turning up to the final gig of a tour drunk and stumbling off the stage, his career was cast aside by the industry like yesterday’s bread, stale and well past its use by.

Poor Benny, too self-effacing despite his braggadocio, too humble, too kind. Gone? To have avalanched off this mortal coil within one week? It was Benny who’d helped him with his stage craft, Benny who’d taught him the aerodynamics of a song, Benny who’d stood by him the day he asked, no begged, Juan to leave. And Benny who’d soothed his shattered heart.

Adam lifted his head. Needing a distraction, he stood, blinkering from view Delilah in conversation with Philip at the bar, and Nathan, still slumped on his stool in his Ray-Bans. He wandered the room making pretence of studying the photographs dotted about the walls, plain-framed sepia images of log cutters with crosscut saws wearing their pride from boot to hat, standing erect beside felled trunks of magnificent girth. Tough men, hard men, log cutting men, Burton’s pride. Above the nook hung twin photographs, one of the general store, all spruce with ‘Fisher’s General Store’ written in bold lettering on a rectangle of board nailed above the entrance doors, and one of The Cabin sporting its original rickety veranda. Both buildings set in a wide sweep of cleared and dusty-looking ground. Absent from Delilah’s collection was a photograph of the church, built in 1885 in modest chapel style. It had never before occurred to Adam odd that his own home, a building of much local significance, didn’t feature in Delilah’s display. Perhaps no adequate photograph had been taken. Or if one had, for surely one had, Delilah had not the fortune to acquire it.

He crossed the room. Through the window to the left of the fireplace he watched the wind tearing ribbons of bark from tree trunks, and he doubted anyone, even the Fishers, would venture out. He lingered by the window until Delilah and Philip left the bar, there being little space with Nathan spread-eagled on his stool. Once they’d taken their drinks to the nook he crossed the room and greeted Hannah with as cheery a smile as he could manage. She returned it with an even weaker one of her own.

‘What’ll you have?’ she said.

‘A glass of sauvignon blanc please, Hannah.’

The telephone sprang to life and she turned to answer it, tapping a lacquered pink fingernail into the number holes as she listened, and issuing a moue before setting down the receiver in its cradle without a word. Then she reached for a wine glass and the half-empty bottle nestling in an ice bucket and poured generously, shooting a cool look in the direction of Delilah before returning the bottle with a flourish. She was a plain and slender girl, large-eyed, her looks marred by a smothering of ill-applied makeup and lank, dyed-blonde hair. She had on high-waisted skin-tight slacks and a baggy cropped jumper of cobalt blue. Her demeanour was at once sour and sleazy. She did nothing to endear herself to anyone, leaving Adam convinced that some unhealthy creed had corrupted her at a young age. It was the vacant stare that had Adam persuaded, the sort of vacant stare worn by someone whose beliefs, however tightly or loosely held, formed a wall where a window should have been, a wall through which she would never see.

He took a sip of his wine and paid with a large bill. While he waited for his change Nathan stirred, slugged his cider, removed his Ray-Bans and slid from his stool, making his way in unsteady fashion down the room and on outside.

When Adam looked back, Hannah had disappeared. Delilah and Philip were in the thick of a conversation that appeared to Adam private. Not half an hour had passed since he’d stood on the bridge, pressed against the railings by a determined wind, and gripped by indecision. A lifetime might as well have gone by since, and he leaned his back against the bar, sipped his wine and, holding the glass by its stem, took in the room, at last settling on the incense sticks smouldering on the mantelpiece and the festive gold tinsel draped in unevenly spaced arcs beneath.

The wind gathered pace outside and he felt a compulsion to leave before it was too late, battle his way back home, a lone figure clutching a guitar case to his breast. And as if in response heavy spats hit the windowpanes, spats that grew rapidly into a torrent and his impulse vanished, replaced by the certain knowledge that he was trapped.

Delilah and Philip appeared unmoved, their conversation, conducted in low voices, obliterated by the downpour. Adam found himself privately watching the door, wanting it to open, hoping Nathan would reappear. As the minutes passed he grew concerned for his welfare—the stranger by the incinerator could still be out there—and he was anxious too for any sort of presence to ease the sombre mood that seemed to be pervading the room in the absence of Benny and his Sessions. He pulled his eyes from the door. It was then he noticed Philip’s guitar case propped against the barrel in the back corner of the room. So the sessions were to continue, or had Philip, too, come here in ignorance and anticipation?

He glimpsed Delilah eyeing her watch. The distress she’d displayed in speaking of Benny’s death replaced with an assured calm. Nathan entered with a rush of cold air and she told him to shut the door hard and fast as if in this single command she asserted her authority and anyone inside The Cabin would thence know it was hers. She was a presumptuous woman; a parvenu Benny had called her. Her father had been the local pastor, a miser who’d left her mother scratching about like a half-starved hen for every morsel she could find.

Nathan swaggered back to his stool, acknowledging Adam with a slight tilt of his head. Dressed in a tight short-sleeved shirt of blue with red buttons, and matching thin blue pants and red plimsolls he must have been bone chilled but showed no sign of it. The wind had tousled his hair, the neat asymmetry of his side-swept bang a shaggy mess resting on the wedged undercut beneath.

‘Dreadful night to be out,’ Adam said.

‘I haven’t been home,’ he said flatly, returning his Ray-Bans to his face.

‘It was hot in the city earlier.’

‘I wasn’t there either.’ He gave Adam a smug smile.

Adam took the hint with disappointment. He had no idea why Nathan was in such a costive mood. His was not the manner of a grieving man. Besides, he wasn’t so close to Benny to suffer his passing. Perhaps an altercation with Hannah? Whatever the cause Adam was left alone to muse.

The conversation in the nook continued apace, Delilah and Philip furtively drawn together save for the occasional moment when Philip leaned back in his seat, put his hands on his thighs and nodded sagely.

It was with irritation that Adam turned to the bar and downed his wine, convincing himself the storm was abating as the rain eased, and if he were quick, he’d make it back to his house before it came heavy again. Then a frisson of guilt rippled through him that he was about to abandon the Sessions, which were set to proceed it seemed, for Delilah was surely waiting for someone to appear, a replacement, not that Benny could be replaced. Still, he ought to go home. In solitude he could take in the loss of his ally and begin to grieve. Not exactly a comforting thought but he didn’t relish spending the evening with the present company, and as the minutes ticked by there was every chance no one else would come. Rebekah and David were the only contenders. Joshua and Ed lived too far out of town to make the journey in foul weather and Alf was unwell. Eva, Philip’s sister, although again back in town, would without doubt have arrived with her brother if she was coming. At least Cynthia hadn’t shown up, for he’d be forced to keep her entertained by virtue of the circumstances in the room, providing him further impetus to leave before she burst through the door.

A titter of laughter in the nook and Philip flashed a look in Adam’s direction. Nathan emitted a rumbling belch. Adam turned to the bar.

A pendant light illumed the kitchen. Hannah was nowhere to be seen. The sink cupboard was propped open by a large plastic bowl. The back door stood ajar, the key swinging in its lock, and storming into Adam’s mind was the figure he’d seen by the incinerator, no doubt still lurking outside along with whoever had pulled into the car park, their headlights illuminating the scene for the briefest moment.

A forceful rush of wind and a distant groan of thunder and he made up his mind to stay despite feeling alone and exposed. He had no idea how he would fare. Already he felt choked by the incense and the rank odour lurking beneath, an odour that emanated he knew not whence, an odour the others seemed determined to overlook as if it didn’t exist, as if it were a stench he alone could smell, causing him momentarily to question his olfactory responses even as he applied himself, by way of distraction, to ascertaining the source.

Pointing his face in the direction of the kitchen he took a discreet sniff. Then he spied Hannah standing on the far side of the room, head bent down, her posture—she was side on—an appalling blend of sway back and hunched shoulders, her buttocks, flattened by her slacks, two side-on saucers atop spindly legs. A fold of belly flesh hung over her waistband. She was so caved in as to be bereft of dignity and Adam might have pitied her were she not supercilious with it. She appeared listless and adrift, yet she had an occupation, two in fact, tending the bar and attending the phone. One might say she was flat out, engaged as she was in activities that required little of her.

Adam straightened, lifting his chest. He was a man who spent five days of every week talking smoothly through his headpiece to a never-ending series of callers at Chattergulls, the largest telephone company in the outer suburbs of the city. Gainful employment and he prided himself on being good at it.

He took another sniff of the air and decided the smell was not emanating from that direction, for which he was grateful. Casting an eye about the room he could see only one other possible location, the chimney, and he recollected a tale, oft told by the Fishers to newcomers at the general store, and he hadn’t believed it upon first hearing several years before and he had all but forgotten it as a result. That once a possum had fallen down the chimney and become trapped in the soot about halfway up. Some say they heard its cries, but Delilah maintained the first she knew of it was the smell, although anyone close to the chimney breast would report a low buzz. It wasn’t until the maggots fell that she dealt with the poor dead thing and arranged for Joshua to sweep the chimney. Apparently, there was a remarkably high population of blowflies in The Cabin for weeks.

That smell must have been as rank. When he’d listened to David’s possum tale, Delilah’s negligence had seemed to him so astonishing as to be implausible, but with the passing of the years, nothing of that sort surprised him living here. Neglect was an accurate summation of Burton. Whether it be the paucity of street lights, sealed roads and storm water drainage—provisions other towns took for granted—the old weatherboard huts left to rot on their stumps, or the abandoned spot mills and caravans in the hinterland, Burton was pretermitted in favour of more amenable locations.

The town reached its pinnacle of progress a decade before, when a subdivision of acre blocks on the sunnier, drier, north-facing slope, was gazetted and approved, with buyers and builders to the ready. Buyers and builders quickly frightened off by a ferocious bush fire that razed that part of town, while the rest of Burton, the soggy boggy rest where the sun strained to reach even in summer, was spared.

Languishing at the bottom of this deep and narrow valley, fed by a single road that turned to dirt half a kilometre on before snaking its way through the mountains, Burton was not a town for the fun loving, the open-minded, or the innovative. Residents and their dreams stagnated, the river carrying away not their anguish, or their troubles or their woes, but their hope.

Adam had despised Burton from the moment he moved with Juan into the old church on the sunless side of town, and was met with hostility when he entered the general store, Rebekah all but refusing to serve him once he revealed where he resided, although he had to admit that Juan’s provocative behaviour hadn’t helped.

In their first week in Burton, Juan had gone to help Adam with the groceries. Adam wished that he’d remained in the car as agreed, Juan expressing a desire to listen to the news on the radio, for it would have made his life in Burton much easier thereafter. Adam was at the counter checking out his purchases when Juan breezed in and, in front of an incredulous Rebekah, put an arm around Adam’s shoulder, cupped his face in his free hand and planted a wet kiss on his lips. ‘What’s keeping you, sweetheart?’ he said. ‘Not flirting with the staff, I take it?’

The only reason they were not barred after that was the Fisher’s obligation to deliver them their mail.

Rebekah ignored them both from then on until Juan moved out and then she ingratiated herself into Adam’s favour by offering to clean for him. He supposed it was her way of exerting control over a building that would always be for her a house of god.

It was Juan’s dream to renovate an old church, and the Burton building was all Adam could afford. Juan’s contribution was to be physical, in helping to carry out the renovations. Yet he contributed little, stopping once he’d fixed the plumbing, plumbing which caused a ripple of consternation and much disapproval amongst the locals for failing to employ Philip. Eva had divulged the gossip during one of her infrequent visits to Burton to see her brother. Adam was passing by and found her resting against the front gate of Philip’s property with her elbows on the top rail, and she’d called him over all small smiles and hesitations, nevertheless eager to bestow upon him an air of caution and Adam had been cautious ever since.

Three years passed and Juan became intolerable, his departure forcing Adam to fend for himself. He couldn’t rent or sell the church in its partially renovated condition without incurring a hefty loss and he was reluctant to abandon the only home he’d owned. So, he’d stayed.

Benny had been his deliverance.

A great sadness welled in his heart and he again toyed with the thought that he might after all head home when the phone rang. Hannah shuffled in and answered it, and when she hung up she said, ‘Hey, this is a killer storm that’s comin’.’ Her eyes widened. ‘It’s a freakin’ monster.’

Delilah paused to shoot her a cool stare then continued talking to Philip. Nathan didn’t move. Adam felt compelled to respond.

‘How so?’

‘My friend Tracy says half the city’s without power. Trees down, roofs ripped off. Ocean’s flooding shops.’

‘It’ll miss us,’ Nathan said without looking up.

‘What would you know?’

‘Lightning never strikes in the same place twice.’

‘You reckon?’ Hannah said through curled lips.

‘Yeah. And we had that storm last week. Someone else’s turn this time.’

Hannah’s glare was contemptuous.

At the sight of her, of Nathan, of Delilah and Philip, suffering the nausea he now felt inhaling the vile stench barely masked by the incense, a sudden burst of bravery swept through him and he made to leave despite the imminent weather, heading for his guitar, planning to grab it on his way by with the briefest of farewells.

He was reaching for the handle of his guitar case when the door of The Cabin opened with a rush of cold air.

Adam paused and looked up, curious to see who, out of the Session regulars, had arrived, anticipating two lardy behemoths to corner the door for it had to be the Fishers, Rebekah and David.

Delilah leaned forward in her seat. A look of relief appeared in her face as the figure of a man closed the door behind him. She stood and walked round and greeted him with a warm smile. ‘So pleased you could fill in at such short notice.’

‘It’s good to be back.’

Adam straightened and waited, clawing back what little equanimity he had, forcing his face into a bland expression.

Juan was slow to notice him. When he did, a grin spread across his face.

CHAPTERTWO

EVA’S DIARY – MONDAY 15TH DECEMBER

There’s a lone loose thread in my pink quilted bedspread. I can’t help picking at it, worrying it free. As the stitching unravels I desist, and smoothing out the satin fabric, I sit up. Facing me is my own image, reflected in the winged mirror of my white-painted dressing table. I look to the row of dolls lined up on the high shelf above, legs dangling. The dolls of my childhood, staring straight ahead with their big doll eyes. In the centre is the odd one out, a rag doll, with woollen hair in bunches, a floppy doll leaning on the shoulder of the big mamma on its right.

Good or bad, omens come in peculiar ways. I wonder what the rag doll would think about that. This omen is surely good; my first day back and I’ve achieved a new personal best. All the better for I had not been expecting to manage so long after the labours of yesterday.