The Ones Who Wait

"The dark doesn't only take what it kills. It keeps the ones left behind, waiting at its edge for what it will never give back."

The held breath I'd carried down the slope let go the moment we passed through the gate, because no one inside it was holding theirs. The noise reached me first — voices over voices, a dog barking at another dog, somebody laughing too hard at his own joke — and then the heat off the cooking fire and the smell of fat spitting on the grill, so ordinary, so close to a hundred evenings I'd stood through at home, that for a breath the head on its post behind me might have been something I'd dreamed up out on the walk.

Beatrix came through the gate at my shoulder and then she was gone, folded back into the crowd as though she'd never left it, the wine bottle swinging up in greeting and the careful face she'd worn on the slope gone soft and social. She crossed to a man propped against the end of a table with a beer at his hip, and I knew him: Jarod, who'd come out of the Portal that morning, run a truck dry of cash an armful at a time while I stood and gawped, and grinned at me the whole while like we were old friends. He said something to her and she gave it back, the two of them dropping into a low quick back-and-forth with no room in it for me.

The beer in his hand, the meat on the grill, the lamps strung over the tables — all of it had come up out of that truck this morning, and no one here was pretending otherwise. Jarod's eyes found me over Beatrix's shoulder. He lifted the beer an inch in salute, and went back to her. I went to find my family.

My father had the grill cleared already, the last of the meat going onto a tray that Chris carried off to the tables. I came up on his blind side, meaning to get my face in order before he turned round. Wasted effort.

"There he is," he said, not turning round. "We'd near given you up."

There was welcome in it, and under the welcome the old weighing, my father taking my measure without a glance to do it by. I kept half a step back and let my breath out through my nose, and felt like a fool for it. I'd half convinced myself he could smell the vodka on me through the grill smoke.

"Walked back with Beatrix," I said. "The long way."

"So I gathered." He squared the empty tray. "Learn anything?"

Everything she'd told me on the slope came up at once — the dark, the pack, the marks under her sleeve, the animal that had gone through a door shut to the rest of us. None of it was mine to lay on the grill between us.

"That it's a long walk," I said.

He huffed, which might have been a laugh, and pushed the tray into my hands. "Make yourself useful, then. Your mother's bringing the rest out."

Mum was halfway between a motorhome and the tables, a loaded tray on each arm and Karen behind her with more. Bread, bowls of salad, a pot that steamed in the cooling air — she'd been cooking since the idea of the potluck was decided, feeding the fear down with both hands. I lifted a croquette off the top of her tray and put it in my mouth whole.

"Jerome." Quick and sharp. "They're for the table."

"Quality control." It came out mangled, because the inside of the croquette was molten, properly molten, and I'd committed to it now, in front of her. I held it where it was and smiled and felt the roof of my mouth give up its skin.

"You'll quality-control yourself out of any dinner." She turned the tray away from me, but she was nearly smiling, and that was the whole of what I'd wanted — her eyes on the tray and not on my mouth, no cause to come close enough to catch what was under the food. The moment she bent to set the trays down I spat the thing into my palm. Still too hot to hold. I dropped it, and Lois had it off the dirt before it stopped rolling, gone in one wet snap, so that when Mum glanced back there was only me, red-faced and blameless, and a golden retriever working her jaws around the evidence.

She squared the trays on the table, edges to edges. Her eyes kept going past me to the fence, to the dark coming up behind it, and back to the food, and out again.

"You alright?" I asked, lower.

"It's been a long day." She didn't look up. Then she did, and made herself brighten, and it came close. "Go and eat something you haven't pinched."

I got a plate and found the family settling at the near end of a table, Charles dropping into the chair beside me. Around us the camp had fallen on the food and thought nothing of it. We didn't. Dad waited until the four of us were together, and then he found my eyes and held them, and gave the smallest tip of his head. You. He didn't say it aloud. He didn't need to.

So I bowed my head, and Mum bowed hers, and Charles shut his eyes and pressed his mouth flat — half a breath off laughing, and glad past saying that it hadn't fallen to him. A foot away Chris was building a roll one-handed and a dog was working the bench legs, and none of it reached the four of us. I asked the Lord to bless the food to nourish and strengthen us, and to watch over us in this place, the words falling into their old order without my help. I asked it with raspberry vodka still ghosting the back of my throat, over a plateful of meat bought with money I'd watched a stranger steal that morning, a stone's throw from a severed head on a post. I said amen, and they said it after me, and it went nowhere in me, and not one of them knew.

I carried my plate toward the central fire, away from my mother's reach. A small brown-and-white Shih Tzu lay in a dog bed set a careful way back from the flames. Henri — Luke's, or Luke and Jamie's. I knew him the way I knew most things about my brother now, secondhand, off the edges of what he posted and never said. He wasn't begging with the other two. He lay with his chin on his paws and his ears up, his whole small body pointed out at the dark past the fence, and when I crouched and held a knuckle out he sniffed it, thumped his tail once, and went straight back to it. On guard, I took it for — the one creature at the gathering with the sense to keep an eye on where the danger came from. I left him to it.

I was halfway down my plate when the light failed. It drained out of the sky faster than seemed decent, the grey over the hills gone in a few breaths, until there was only the fire, the strung lamps, and a wall of black standing up past the fence where the land had been. The talk didn't stop, but it shifted. A couple of heads turned to the fence and came back. A man got up without a word and built the fire higher. Nobody there had been in this place long enough to be easy with the dark; they only had more practice than I did at talking through it. I had none at all. And for the first time I understood the fire wasn't lit for the cheer of it. It was the wall.

Which is how I came to be sitting with Kain, who had the chair nearest the heat and no intention of leaving it — the bandaged leg up on a crate, the crutches in the dirt within reach. That morning I'd seen him across the clearing and thought, motorbike. I knew better now. I couldn't look at the leg and see a leg. I saw what Beatrix had shown me on the walk.

"You're a Smith," he said as I came up. Easy, friendly, no edge to it — or almost none; there was the smallest snag under the word, there and gone before I could be sure of it. "Whole lot of you came through this morning. You'll be the quiet one."

"Jerome." I pulled a spare chair round to his good side and sat.

"Kain." He put his hand out. A broad dry grip, a tradesman's, holding most of itself back. "Sit. You're a long way up from down here."

"How's the leg?" Not asking felt worse than asking.

"Coming good." He looked at it without fondness. "Itches like buggery, which apparently is it telling me it's mending. I'll keep it." He'd been letting me not ask the rest. "Something came at it out of the dark. Few nights back, before there were any fences. You'll have passed the head on the gate on your way in."

"I saw it."

"That's the one that lost." He said it lightly, but the lightness was a decision, not a feeling. "Stay inside the wire after dark and you'll not have to meet the others. That's the whole of what you need to know about this place."

A stubby sweated in the dirt by his good foot. He caught me looking at it.

"Want one? Jarod's got a tub of them, don't ask me where from." Whatever crossed my face, he let it go without comment. "Or don't. Your call."

"I'm right, thanks." My parents were a table away. The one drink I'd already had tonight had cost me enough.

"Suit yourself." He let me be, which is likely why I stayed. He was easy to sit beside, and he talked without seeming to work at it — the football he was missing, a house he'd left half-built, how he'd be no use to a soul on these crutches at the only trade he was any good at. Then, with no change in his voice:

"Got a baby on the way. Back home." He said it to the fire. "Brianne. She'll have it without me, the rate this is going." He turned the stubby a quarter-turn in the dirt and let it be.

I had nothing for that. Nothing true, and he'd have heard a comfortable lie before it left my mouth. So I gave him the only honest thing I had.

"I hope you get back for it."

"Yeah." He drank off the last of the stubby and set it down. "Me and all, mate."

The quiet that came after wasn't an awkward one. Across the fire Henri lifted his head, looked out at the dark, and lowered it again.

"That's Luke's," I said, for somewhere to put my eyes. "Henri."

"Yeah." Kain considered the little dog. "Out here every night, that one. Won't be coaxed in. Just lies there with his face to the black." The care he took over it told me there was more coming. "He had a brother. Duke." A pause. "Didn't make it." He didn't go into it, and I didn't ask; whatever had happened was shut up tight in the way he closed the word off.

I looked at Henri properly then. He had his chin back on his paws and his eyes on the dark past the wire, exactly where they'd been when I crouched to him. I'd taken him for a sentry — the sensible one, keeping watch on the quarter the danger came from. I had it backwards. He wasn't watching for what might come out of the dark. He was watching for the one who'd gone into it: lying every night at the warm edge of the only world he had left, waiting on a brother who was never coming back across it to him.

Something turned over in me, low and cold, and not all of it was for the dog.

Kain saw my face do whatever it did. "Got one of my own, back home," he said, easing us both off it. "Hudson. Big galumphing labradoodle— never had a bad mood in his life, eats anything that isn't nailed down." The corner of his mouth lifted, then steadied. "Haven't said this to anyone yet. I'm going to ask Luke, soon as I can, whether he'll bring him over. A dog you can carry through in your arms — easy enough."

He went quiet a moment, and when he spoke again it had dropped lower. "Could ask him to bring Brianne, too. Her and the baby both — six months gone, you don't get the one without the other now." A breath that wasn't quite a laugh. "Only it goes the one way, doesn't it. She comes, she's here, and that's that — no road back to the life she had. And I keep turning it over of a night, whether I've any right to pull her into this. The dark, and what's in it, and a head on the gate." He didn't land it anywhere. I could see it was a thing he picked up and put down most nights, still undecided. "A dog's a simpler kind of love. I'll start with the dog."

He'd handed it to me like a confession, and it was one — given to the new bloke, the quiet one, because the quiet one was safe to give it to. And it cracked me straight open.

"I've got a dog," I said.

It was out before I'd decided on it. Kain waited.

"Millie." Her name was a mistake in my mouth; it brought the whole of her at once. "Border collie. I got her off the RSPCA — she'd been knocked about, badly, and it was a long time before she'd let me near her. She's mine now. Properly mine." I made myself stop, and then the rest came anyway. "She's epileptic. She had a fit yesterday, the worst she's had, and the vet kept her in. She was still in the cage this morning, when we —"

I didn't finish it. There was no finishing it.

She was still in the cage now. In a pen at the Craigmore Animal Care Centre with the lights left on and the other animals crying around her, where I'd dropped her to be collected first thing — and first thing had come, and instead of walking back in through her door I'd walked through a hole in the world. She'd have her chin on her paws and her ears up, her eyes on the front of the cage, certain the way she was certain of nothing else that the one who always came would come. The same as Henri had his eyes on the dark. The two of them ran together in me until I couldn't hold them apart.

"Ask Luke," Kain said, low. "For yours and all. He's your brother — he'll do it for you quicker than he'll do it for me."

I didn't answer. The thought that came wasn't of Luke. Asking my brother for anything meant crossing back over the silence we'd let stand between us, and I wasn't sure I had it in me tonight. But there was someone else who could open that kind of door. I glanced across the fire before I'd decided to, to where Beatrix stood with the bottle still in her hand and the firelight caught in her silver hair, and the thought arrived almost shy of itself: I could ask her. She'd walked me back in out of the dark once already. She might carry a frightened dog through a wall for me, if I could find the way to put it to her.

It didn't ease the ache. It put an edge on it. But it was the first thought all day that pointed back towards home instead of further from it.

Some while later — there was no sky left to measure the hour by — I left Kain to the fire and drifted to the quiet end of the tables, where a man and a woman sat a little apart from the rest. He was solid, unhurried; she had a long dark plait and her boots up on the rung of an empty chair. I'd seen her that morning: the one who'd come striding in from the direction of Bixbus and pulled Karen away from me mid-job without so much as a hello. She looked at me properly now.

"You're the one who was at a sanctuary," she said. "Karen said. Adelaide Hills, was it?"

"The Wildlife Haven. Volunteered there, couple of years." It was the first thing anyone here had known about me that wasn't my surname, and it loosened something in my chest.

"Grant." The man put a hand out. "My sister, Sarah. Bonorong in Tasmania. We ran it." He said it plainly, but there was the same flat drop in his voice the rest of them got when home came up.

Bonorong I'd heard of. Anyone who'd ever carried a hurt animal in this country had heard of Bonorong, and I said as much, and Sarah's mouth tugged sideways, pleased in spite of herself. For a few minutes the three of us talked the only shop I had out here — what comes in, what you can save, the ones that go anyway, the ones that surprise you and live. It was the nearest I'd stood all day to ground I knew.

"What do you make of it?" I asked. "Whatever's staked at the gate."

Her face changed. "Nothing. That's what's doing my head in. We got here after — after the attack, after they'd already killed that one and put it up. I've spent my whole life able to name what's in front of me, and out there is a world of animals I can't get within a mile of, starting with the one that did that to his leg." She tipped her head at Kain, then at the black past the fence, and made herself look away from it. "We know exactly what everyone here knows. Stay in after dark. That's the lot."

"She hates not knowing more than she's scared of them," Grant said. "Give her a week." He said it mild, but his eyes went to the fence the same as hers had, and nobody at that end of the table was as easy as they were letting on.

Sarah caught me looking at her a beat too long and I turned it into reaching for the water jug. She was ten years older than me and sure of herself in a way I'd never managed, and I let that be all it was.

The fire got fed higher again, big enough now to shove the dark back off the nearest tables, and the talk loosened and went looking for somewhere to land. It landed on us.

"Oi — Smith." Nial, down the table, a grin already starting. "Is it true what Adrian reckons? Your lot came through with half a truckload of dunny roll?"

The laugh ran down the table, and Charles was on his feet before it finished, plate still in one hand, the firelight up the side of his face and the look on it that meant a story was coming whether anyone had asked for one or not.

"Funny you should ask," Charles said.