Almost Caught

"There's the kind of trouble you walk into. And then there's the kind you carry with you, quiet as your own shadow."

The ceiling was wrong.

That was my first thought—not a thought, really, more of a sensation, a half-formed sense that the world I was looking at didn't match the one I'd fallen asleep in. The ceiling was white. Familiar. A crack ran from the light fitting towards the window, the same crack that had been there since I was fourteen, the one Dad kept saying he'd replaster and never did. I knew this ceiling. I'd stared up at it a thousand mornings. But it looked different now—the way a room looks different after you've been away from it a long time, everything in its right place but slightly off-register, like a photograph reprinted a fraction to the left.

Light was coming through the curtains. Not the grey, tentative light that came before dawn, the light I was supposed to wake to, the light that meant five o'clock and chores and the day beginning in the dark. This was warm. Golden. The kind of light that only happened when the sun was already well above the treeline, when it had cleared the roof of the machinery shed and was hitting the east-facing windows full in the face.

I was late.

The realisation arrived like a bucket of cold water. I sat up too fast and the room swung sideways—a sickening lurch that pushed the taste of something stale and metallic up into the back of my throat. My head was thick, packed with cotton wool, and my eyes felt like they'd been rubbed with sandpaper. I'd slept—eventually, finally, after God knows how long staring at that cracked ceiling—but my body felt worse for it, not better. Like sleep had been a fight and I'd come off second best.

I was still in my clothes. The jeans twisted around my legs, the denim creased and damp with dried sweat. My work shirt had ridden up on one side and bunched on the other. The blankets were knotted round my ankles like something I'd spent the night trying to kick off, and the pillow was on the floor, halfway under the bed. The room smelled of stale breath and sweat and something else—something faint and mineral and cold. Like stone. Like the inside of a cave.

My right hand was locked around the Portal Key.

I hadn't meant to fall asleep holding it. But there it was, gripped so tight my fingers had locked in position, and I had to peel them open one at a time, the joints protesting, the blood rushing back into the tips in hot, prickly waves. The Portal Key had pressed itself into my palm hard enough to leave a mark—the fine lines of its etchings stamped into the flesh like a brand, red and raw against the pale skin. I stared at the pattern. It looked deliberate. Like the thing had been writing on me in my sleep.

For a long, stupid second, I tried to believe none of it had happened. That it was just a bit of junk—something off the shed floor, a broken part from some machine, a thing Kenneth had left behind that I'd picked up and forgotten about. That last night was a dream. A bad one, vivid and detailed, the kind you get after too many beers and not enough food—the kind that leaves a residue on the day but burns off by lunchtime.

Then I felt my foot.

The right one. The throb had been there since I woke—a dull, insistent beat under the blankets—but I'd been ignoring it the way you ignore a headache when there's something more urgent to deal with. Now I pulled my foot up and looked at the sole, and the dream collapsed.

The cut was there. A thin, ragged line across the ball of my foot, maybe two inches long, the edges crusted with blood gone dark and flaky overnight. The skin around it was puffy and pink, tender to the touch, hot when I pressed it with my thumb. It throbbed in time with my heartbeat—steady, insistent, real. A wound off a cave floor in another world, sitting on my body as plain as a fence-wire scratch or a splinter from the shearing shed.

There was no dreaming that. No explaining it away. That cut had come from stone in a place called Clivilius, and it had followed me home through a portal I'd opened with a device that drank my blood, and it was going to bite every time I put weight on it for a week.

I couldn't go round the house barefoot. Mum would see it before I made the kitchen. She had a radar for injuries—always had. Seven kids on a farm meant someone was forever bleeding or bruised or nursing something they didn't want to own up to, and Mum had worked up an almost supernatural knack for spotting a wound clean across a room. She'd see the cut. She'd crouch down and take my foot in her hands—gentle but firm, the way she did everything—and turn it towards the light and ask what happened. And she'd watch my face while she asked, because Mum never just listened to your answer. She read the way you gave it.

Socks. I found a pair in the top drawer—thick ones, work socks, the kind that'd pad the cut and hide the blood if it started up again. I pulled them on slow and careful, hissing through my teeth as the cotton dragged over the wound. Then my Blundies. They were by the door where I'd kicked them off—yesterday? A lifetime ago?—the leather stiff and cold, the insides still a bit damp from the last time I'd worn them in the paddock. My foot screamed when I forced it in, the stiff leather mashing the cut flat against my sole, but I gritted my teeth and laced them up tight and told myself it was no worse than a blister. It was worse than a blister. But the cut was hidden, and that was what counted.

The Portal Key went into my right jeans pocket. Deep. All the way to the bottom seam, where it settled against my thigh, heavy and warm from my hand. I pressed my palm flat over it through the denim and held it there a moment, feeling the shape of it against my leg. A stone in my pocket. A grenade. A door to somewhere else, riding against my hip bone while I stood in my own bedroom and tried to remember how to be the bloke my family expected to see at breakfast.

The house was awake around me. I could hear it in layers—the familiar creak and settle of old timber, yes, but under that the sounds of people. The clatter of crockery in the kitchen—plates being stacked, the metal ring of a pot going onto the stove. Water running through the pipes, someone in the bathroom. A door bumping shut at the back of the house—the laundry door, the one with the loose hinge Dad tightened every spring and that worked itself free again by autumn. Voices, muffled by walls and distance, the rhythm of them easier to pick than the words. Mum's, steady and warm, asking something. A child answering—one of the younger ones, Catherine or Raymond. And from outside, through the window, the booted tread on the verandah that could only be Dad—already up, already working, his stride carrying that particular weight he got when he'd been going since before the sun and had already settled, on his own, how the day was going to run.

I was late. Late enough to be noticed. Late enough for Dad to have clocked the empty chair where I should've been sitting an hour ago, and to have filed it away in that running ledger of disappointments he kept somewhere behind his eyes. Late on the morning after he'd given a stranger a week in his house. Late on the morning I was meant to prove him wrong.

The thought of going downstairs—of walking into that kitchen and meeting his eye across the table—sat in my stomach like a rock. But that wasn't the worst of it. The worst of it was the other thought, the one that had been building since the second I opened my eyes and saw that golden light through the curtains.

Jeremiah.

He'd said he'd be back before sunrise. Before the family woke. Before anyone could check the guest room and find a bed that hadn't been slept in. He'd be there, he'd said—sitting at the table when Mum put the kettle on. That was the deal. That was the promise, made in the doorway of Kenneth's room while his portal stood open behind him and its colours spilled across the floorboards.

But I'd slept clean through five. Slept through whatever time he might have come back, slept through whatever quiet opening and closing of doors the whole pretence needed. I had no idea what time it was now—six, maybe, or later—and no idea whether Jeremiah was even in this house.

He could be downstairs. Could be at the kitchen table right now, cup of tea in hand, the picture of the grateful houseguest, thanking Mum for breakfast and asking Dad about the fence line. Could be out in the paddock already, earning his keep, making good on the bargain. Could've slipped back an hour before anyone stirred, rumpled the sheets, moved the towel, and come down the stairs looking for all the world like he'd slept the night through in a warm bed and was ready to work.

Or he could still be in Strechna. Still in Clivilius. Still in another world, in a settlement I couldn't reach, on the far side of a portal I couldn't open. And Kenneth's room could be sitting down the hallway exactly as I'd left it—sheets turned back, pillow smooth, towel folded, the pristine, damning proof of a guest who never came to bed.

The two possibilities sat side by side in my chest, each one shoving at the other, and I couldn't rule out either without doing the one thing I absolutely couldn't do.

I couldn't ask.

The trap was so simple it was almost neat. I couldn't walk into the kitchen and say, "Anyone seen Jeremiah this morning?" because the question was a confession. It said: I don't know where he is. It said: something about him being in this house doesn't add up. It said: maybe you'd better check his room. And the moment anyone checked that room—if the story hadn't held, if the sheets were still smooth and the towel still folded—the whole thing came down. Not just the story of where Jeremiah had slept. Everything. The portal. The Portal Key. The cave. The whole frozen world I'd stepped into at midnight while my family dreamed.

I had to look for myself. Before anyone else thought to.

I opened my bedroom door. The hallway stretched ahead of me—quiet, sunlit, ordinary. That stripe of golden light from the window at the far end lay across the floorboards in a warm bar, catching the dust motes hanging in the still air. The house smelled the way it always did of a morning—toast browning, eucalyptus oil out of the bathroom, the faint metallic sweetness of the water tank warming in the sun, and under all of it the deep, permanent smell of old timber and old carpet and old love. The smell of a hundred years of people living inside the same walls.

Kenneth's room was three doors down on the right. The door was shut. I stood in my own doorway and stared at it—at the familiar grain of the wood, the brass knob, the faint scuff near the bottom where Kenneth used to boot it shut when his hands were full of his violin case. I listened. Strained for breathing, or the creak of bedsprings, or the pad of feet—any sign that someone was in there, that the story had held, that I could go down and face my family without the dread building behind my ribs like pressure in a sealed tank.

Nothing. Just the house.

That didn't mean anything. If Jeremiah had come back and gone downstairs, the room would be just as quiet. If he'd made the bed look right and headed for the kitchen, I'd hear nothing behind that door either way. The silence proved nothing. But it did nothing to settle me either.

I crossed to the door. My Blundies were quiet on the boards—quieter than bare feet, funnily enough, the rubber soles soaking up what the wood would've thrown back. I put my hand on the knob. The brass was cool and smooth, warming under my grip. I turned it slow, the way you'd turn a tap with someone asleep in the next room—easy, patient, feeling for the exact point where the latch would give without a sound. It released with a soft click that seemed to go off like a shot in the empty hallway.

The hinge groaned. Of course it did. That hinge—the one that had been perfectly, impossibly silent while the portal was open, the one that had groaned like a living thing when I'd pulled the door shut afterwards—it groaned now, low and drawn-out, announcing me to anyone within earshot.

I slipped inside and pulled the door almost-shut behind me, leaving a crack, and looked.

The bed was untouched.

The sight of it hit me like a physical thing—a cold, spreading feeling that started in my stomach and ran out into my arms and legs. Everything was exactly as Mum had left it. The sheets turned back at a precise angle, the fold clean and deliberate, the way she did it for guests. The pillow plump and smooth, no dent, no impression, no trace of a head that had ever rested on it. The towel still folded on the chair by the desk, edges squared. The curtains still drawn. Kenneth's model plane hanging dead still on its string. The cricket bat in the corner. Allan Border on the wall, frozen mid-grin, none the wiser.

No Jeremiah. No sign of him. No warmth in the room, no jacket over the chair, no shoes by the bed, none of the small, unthinking traces a person leaves behind just by being somewhere for a night. The room was as empty as it had been when the portal light shrank to a point and died.

My mouth went dry. A metallic taste, sharp and sudden, flooded the back of my tongue—the taste of adrenaline, the taste of fear, the same taste I'd had in the cave when the voice spoke my name. I stood in the middle of Kenneth's room in the morning sun and felt the floor shift under me.

He wasn't back. Or he was back and hadn't come up here. Or he was somewhere else in the house, somewhere I couldn't hear from this room, and the bed was untouched simply because he'd come in the front door and never thought to stage it.

Or he was still in Strechna. Still gone. And the promise he'd made—I'll be back before sunrise—was worth exactly as much as every other thing he'd told me: as much as it needed to be worth in the moment he said it, and not a cent more.

The panic was a live thing in my chest now, clawing at the inside of my ribs. But under it—deeper, steadier, like a current running below the chop—something else moved. Practicality. The same thing that kicked in when a fence went down in a storm or a ewe got herself stuck in the creek and there was no time to think, only to move. The emergency instinct. The farm instinct.

Fix the room. Whatever else was true—whether Jeremiah was downstairs eating toast or lost in another world—the bed couldn't stay like this. If Mum came up. If Dad glanced in on his way past. If one of the kids shoved the door open hunting for something of Kenneth's. The untouched bed was a problem that existed right now, in this house, this minute, and it was one I could actually do something about.

I moved. The sheets first—pulled them back rough, bunched the blanket off to one side, dragged the flat sheet loose from its hospital corners. Too neat. Mum's beds had corners you could bounce a coin off, and a slept-in bed never looked like that. I creased the fitted sheet, took the pillow and drove my fist into it—twice, three times—till it held a dent that looked like a head had been on it for hours. Then I dropped it back at an angle, slightly off-centre, the way a bloke who never made a bed in his life would leave it.

The towel. I took it off the chair, shook it out, scrunched it a bit, and slung it over the end of the bed frame. Not folded. Not neat. The way you'd leave a towel you'd used that morning without a second thought for where it landed. Then the curtains—anyone who'd slept in here would've thrown them open when he woke. The light came in strong, turning the room bright and ordinary.

I stepped back and looked. The room told a story now—not a watertight one, not if you looked hard, but a story. A man had slept here. He'd got up, used the towel, left the bed unmade, opened the curtains, and gone down for breakfast. That was what the room said, and it would hold as long as nobody went over it too carefully.

I crossed back to the door. Eased it open, slow, checking the hallway through the gap before I committed—the way you'd check a paddock before you let yourself through the gate, making sure nothing was waiting on the other side.

Something was waiting.

Janice was standing in the hallway. Four feet away. Close enough to touch.

She wasn't walking anywhere. Wasn't on her way to the bathroom or the stairs or back to her own room. She was standing—bare feet on the boards, planted, still, her nightie hanging loose at the knee and her dark hair tangled round her face in the wild, uncombed mess of someone just out of bed. But her eyes were awake. Fully, completely awake. Fixed on me with that same unblinking focus she'd turned on Jeremiah from the staircase the night before—the look that had put me in mind of Blue working the sheep, patient and watchful, working out the angles.

My hand was still on the knob. I pulled the door shut behind me in one reflexive motion—too fast, the urgency written all over it, the hinge groaning its complaint as the door swung to and the latch clicked. She couldn't have seen inside. Not from that angle, not in the sliver of a second before it shut. But she'd seen me. Seen me pull it shut. Seen the speed of it, the guilt in it, the way my body had moved to block her line of sight before my brain had even caught up to what I was doing.

We stood there. The two of us, in the hallway, with the morning sun coming through the window and the smell of toast drifting up the stairwell and the muffled racket of the household carrying on below us. A nineteen-year-old with a secret the size of another world, and his twelve-year-old sister in her nightie, barefoot, hair like a bird's nest, looking at him the way a scientist looks at something under glass.

"Morning," she said.

It wasn't a greeting. It was the spoken version of a photograph—a way of marking the moment, fixing the scene, noting for the record that this had happened. You are here. In this hallway. Coming out of that room. At this hour. Looking like that. I've noted all of it.

"Morning." My voice came out near enough to normal. A minor miracle, given my heart was trying to punch its way out through my shirt.

Janice didn't move. Didn't shift her weight, didn't look away, didn't fidget. She stood like she'd been planted there—which, I realised with a crawl of unease, she might well have been. How long had she been standing there? Had she heard the hinge? Had she been watching that door before I even opened it?

She looked at the shut door behind me. Then at me. Then back at the door. Not quickly—deliberately, like someone reading a sign twice to make sure they'd got the words right.

"You slept in," she said.

"Yeah."

"Dad noticed."

"I figured."

A pause. The house settled around us—a creak from somewhere below, the far-off clang of something in the kitchen. Janice tilted her head. The smallest movement. A bird adjusting its angle.

"You look terrible," she said.

"Cheers."

"Like you haven't slept at all."

"I slept."

"Your Blundies are on."

She said it the same way she'd said everything else—flat, quiet, matter-of-fact. No emphasis. No accusation. Just the fact, set down in the air between us. Your Blundies are on. Meaning: you're fully dressed. Meaning: you didn't just roll out of bed. Meaning: whatever you'd been up to this morning, getting up wasn't the first part of it.

I looked down. She was right. I was standing in the hallway in full work gear—Blundies laced, shirt tucked, jeans belted—coming out of another bloke's bedroom, easing the door shut behind me like I didn't want anyone seeing what was inside. The picture it made was obvious and wrong, and I could see the wrongness of it landing behind Janice's eyes—not as understanding, not yet, not as anything she could put a name to. But as data. A piece of something she was fitting together, slow and careful, in whatever quiet room she kept behind that forehead. She didn't know what the picture meant. But she'd remember every last detail of it.

The silence between us stretched. One second. Two. The kind of silence that has teeth.

"I was getting ready for work," I said. "Trying to catch up."

She held my gaze. Didn't nod. Didn't argue. Didn't blink. Just looked at me one more second—one second too long, one past the point where a normal twelve-year-old would've shrugged and wandered off—and I saw it in her face. Not suspicion, exactly. Something quieter and more patient. The look of someone handed a single piece of a puzzle and content to hold onto it, turn it over, and wait for the rest to turn up.

Then she turned and padded off towards the bathroom. Bare feet silent on the boards. She didn't look back. She didn't need to. The look she'd given me was still hanging in the hallway like the afterimage of a bright light, and it would be there a long time.

I stood with my hand on the knob and the morning sun warm on the back of my neck and my pulse going like a jackhammer. The toast smell was stronger now. Mum's voice lifted from the kitchen, saying something to one of the kids—a gentle instruction, the tone she kept for Raymond or Tania, the little ones. The kettle was working up towards a whistle. Somewhere outside a magpie opened up—that long, rolling warble that always sounded like the land itself clearing its throat. Ordinary sounds. Safe sounds. The vocabulary of a life that still existed, that still worked, that still went on cooking breakfast and boiling kettles and calling kids to the table while upstairs, three doors down, a room full of staged evidence sat waiting behind a shut door.

I let go of the knob. Wiped my palms on my jeans. Felt the Portal Key pressing against my thigh through the denim—heavy, warm, patient as Janice herself.

I walked down the hallway towards the stairs. Every step was a performance now. The way I held my shoulders—loose, easy, the set of a bloke who'd just slept in and was hurrying to catch up, nothing more. The way I walked—careful on the right foot, rolling my weight forward onto the toe to keep it off the cut, trying to make the adjustment invisible, trying not to limp. The way I kept my right hand in my pocket, pressing the Portal Key flat against my leg so its shape wouldn't show through the denim.

This was my life now. Not portals and other worlds and the vast, terrifying silence of a cave on the edge of an empty ocean. That was the extraordinary part—and the extraordinary part, in a way I hadn't seen coming, was almost the simpler of the two. Out there, in the dark, with the snow on my skin and the voice in my head, at least the strangeness had been honest. It never once pretended to be anything other than what it was.

This was the hard part. The hallway. The stairs. The kitchen. The family. The ordinary world, where every face was a question I couldn't answer and every question was a trapdoor waiting to drop open under my feet. Where the only thing between me and disaster was being able to walk into a room full of people I loved and act like nothing had changed.

At the top of the stairs, I stopped. Listened.

Voices from the kitchen. Mum's, warm and steady. One of the kids—Raymond, I thought, angling for more juice. The scrape of a chair. The clink of a mug. A spoon going round in a cup. The kettle clicking off.

No Jeremiah. Not that I could hear.

I went downstairs.