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 awareness 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 toward 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 at it a thousand mornings. But it looked different now, the way a room looks different after you've been away from it for a long time — everything in the right place but slightly off-register, like a photograph that's been 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 cold water. I sat up too fast and the room swung sideways — a sickening lurch that pushed the taste of something stale and metallic 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 lost.

I was still in my clothes. The jeans were 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 around my ankles like something I'd been trying to kick off all night, and the pillow was on the floor, halfway under the bed. The room smelled of stale breath and sweat and something else — something faint, mineral, 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 that 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 key had pressed itself into my palm hard enough to leave an impression — 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. It looked like the key had been writing on me in my sleep.

For a long, stupid second, I tried to believe that none of it had happened. That the key was just a piece of junk — something from the shed, a broken part from a piece of equipment, 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 too little food, the kind that leaves a residue on the day but fades by lunchtime.

Then I felt my foot.

The right one. The throb had been there since I woke up, a dull, insistent pulse beneath the blankets, but I'd been ignoring it the way you ignore a headache when there's something more urgent to think about. 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 dried blood that had turned 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 from a cave floor in another world, sitting on my body as plainly as a fence-wire scratch or a splinter from the shearing shed.

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

I couldn't walk around the house barefoot. Mum would see it before I made it to the kitchen. She had a radar for injuries — always had. Seven kids on a farm meant someone was always bleeding or bruised or nursing something they didn't want to admit, and Mum had developed an almost supernatural ability to spot a wound from 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 she'd turn it toward the light and ask what happened. And she'd look at 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 would cushion the cut and hide the blood if it started again. I pulled them on slowly, carefully, hissing through my teeth as the cotton dragged across the wound. Then boots. They were by the door where I'd left them — yesterday? A lifetime ago? — the leather stiff and cold, the inside slightly damp from the last time I'd worn them in the paddock. My foot screamed when I shoved it in, the stiff leather pressing the cut flat against my sole, but I gritted my teeth and laced them 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 mattered.

The Portal Key went into my right jeans pocket. Deep. All the way to the bottom seam, where it sat against my thigh, heavy and warm from my hand. I pressed my palm flat over it through the denim and held it there for 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 as I stood in my bedroom and tried to remember how to be the person my family expected to see at breakfast.

The house was awake around me. I could hear it in layers — the familiar creaking and settling of old timber, yes, but underneath that the sounds of people. The clatter of crockery in the kitchen — plates being stacked, the metallic ring of a pot on the stove. Water running through the pipes, someone in the bathroom. A door closing at the back of the house — the laundry door, the one with the loose hinge that Dad tightened every spring and that worked itself free again by autumn. Voices, muffled by walls and distance, the rhythm of them more identifiable than the words. Mum's voice, steady and warm, asking something. A child's voice answering — one of the younger ones, Catherine or Raymond. And from outside, through the window, the booted footsteps on the verandah that could only be Dad, already out, already working, his stride carrying the particular weight and purpose of a man who'd been up since before the sun and had already decided how the day was going to go.

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

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

Jeremiah.

He'd said he'd be back before five. 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 — spoken in the doorway of Kenneth's room while his portal hummed behind him and the light of colours spilled across the floorboards.

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

He could be downstairs. He 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. He could be in the paddock already, earning his keep, making good on the bargain. He could have come back at four-thirty, rumpled the sheets, moved the towel, and walked downstairs like a man who'd slept soundly in a comfortable bed and was ready to work.

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

The two possibilities lived side by side in my chest, each one pushing against the other, and I couldn't eliminate either one without doing the one thing I absolutely could not do.

I couldn't ask.

The trap was so simple it was almost elegant. I couldn't walk into the kitchen and say, "Has anyone seen Jeremiah this morning?" because the question was a confession. It said: I don't know where he is. It said: something about his presence in this house is uncertain. It said: maybe you should check his room. And the moment anyone checked that room — if the fiction hadn't been maintained, if the sheets were still smooth and the towel still folded — the whole structure collapsed. Not just the story of where Jeremiah had slept. Everything. The portal. The key. The cave. The world I'd walked into barefoot 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 fell across the floorboards in a warm bar, catching the dust motes that hung suspended in the still air. The house smelled the way it always did in the morning — toast browning, eucalyptus oil from the bathroom, the faint metallic sweetness of the water tank warming in the sun, and underneath it all the deep, permanent smell of old timber and old carpet and old love. The smell of a hundred years of people living in the same walls.

Kenneth's room was three doors down on the right. The door was closed. I stood in my doorway and stared at it — at the familiar grain of the wood, the brass knob, the faint scuff mark near the bottom where Kenneth used to kick it shut with his foot when he was carrying his violin case. I listened. Strained to hear breathing, or the creak of bedsprings, or the pad of feet on the floor — any sign that someone was in there, that the fiction had been maintained, that I could go downstairs and face my family without the dread that was 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 silent. If he'd made the bed look right and headed to the kitchen, I'd hear nothing behind that door either. The silence proved nothing, either way. But it didn't comfort me.

I walked to the door. My boots were quiet on the boards — quieter than bare feet would have been, actually, the rubber soles absorbing what wood would have amplified. I put my hand on the knob. The brass was cool and smooth, warming under my grip. I turned it slowly, the way you'd turn a tap when someone's sleeping — incremental, patient, controlling the sound. The latch released with a soft click that seemed to echo in the empty hallway.

The hinge groaned. Of course it did. That hinge — the one that had been perfectly, impossibly silent when the portal was open, the one that had groaned like a living thing when I'd pulled the door shut afterward — it groaned now, low and drawn-out, announcing my entry 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 with a physical force — a cold, spreading sensation that started in my stomach and reached outward into my limbs. 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, bearing no dent, no impression, no trace of a head that had rested on it. The towel, still folded on the chair by the desk, its edges aligned. The curtains still drawn. Kenneth's model plane hanging motionless on its string in the still air. The cricket bat in the corner. Allan Border on the wall, frozen mid-grin, oblivious.

No Jeremiah. No sign of him. No warmth in the room, no residual human presence, no jacket on the back of the chair or shoes by the bed or any of the small, unconscious traces a person leaves behind when they've occupied a space. The room was as empty as it had been at one in the morning when the portal light had shrunk 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 had spoken my name. I stood in the middle of Kenneth's room in the morning sunlight and felt the ground shift under me.

He wasn't back. Or he was back and he 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 through the front door and hadn't thought to stage it.

Or he was still in Strechna. Still gone. And the promise he'd made — I'll be back before five — was worth exactly as much as every other thing he'd told me, which was to say: 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 underneath it — deeper, steadier, like a current running beneath choppy water — something else moved. Practicality. The same instinct that kicked in when a fence went down in a storm or a ewe got stuck in the creek and there wasn't time to think, only to act. The emergency instinct. The farm instinct.

Fix the room. Whatever else was true — whether Jeremiah was downstairs eating toast or lost in another dimension — the bed could not stay like this. If Mum came up here. If Dad glanced in on his way past. If any of the kids pushed the door open looking for something of Kenneth's. The untouched bed was a problem that existed right now, in this house, in this moment, and it was a problem I could solve.

I moved. The sheets first — I pulled them back roughly, bunched the blanket to one side, dragged the flat sheet loose from its hospital corners. Too neat. Mum's beds had hospital corners you could bounce a coin off, and a slept-in bed didn't look like that. I creased the fitted sheet, pulled the pillow from its position and pressed my fist into it — twice, three times — until it held an impression that looked like a head had been there for hours. Then I dropped it back on the bed at an angle, slightly off-centre, the way a bloke who didn't make beds would leave it.

The towel. I took it off the chair, unfolded it, scrunched it slightly, and hung it over the end of the bed frame. Not folded. Not neat. The way you'd drape a towel if you'd used it that morning and didn't think twice about where it landed. I opened the curtains — a man who'd slept in this room would have opened them 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 convincing one, not if you looked closely, but a plausible one. A man had slept here. He'd gotten up, used the towel, left the bed unmade, opened the curtains, and gone downstairs. That was the story the room told, and it would hold as long as nobody examined it too carefully.

I crossed back to the door. Eased it open, slowly, checking the hallway through the gap before committing — the way you'd check a paddock gate before letting yourself through, 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 room. She was standing — bare feet on the floorboards, planted, still, her nightie hanging loose at her knees and her dark hair tangled around her face in the wild, uncombed mess of someone who'd only just gotten out of bed. But her eyes were awake. Fully, completely awake. Fixed on me with the same unblinking, unsettling focus she'd turned on Jeremiah from the staircase the night before, the look that had made me think of Blue working the sheep — patient, watchful, calculating angles.

My hand was still on the doorknob. I pulled the door shut behind me in a single, reflexive motion — too fast, the urgency obvious, the hinge groaning its complaint as the door swung closed and the latch clicked. She couldn't have seen inside the room. Not from that angle, not in the fraction of a second before I pulled the door shut. But she'd seen me. Seen me pulling it shut. Seen the speed of it, the guilt in the gesture, the way my body had moved to block her line of sight before my brain had even registered 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 sounds of the household carrying on beneath 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 verbal equivalent of a photograph — a way of marking the moment, establishing 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 have noted all of it.

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

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

She looked at the closed door behind me. Then at me. Then at the door again. Not quickly — deliberately, like someone reading a sign, making 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 distant clang of something in the kitchen. Janice tilted her head. The smallest movement. A bird adjusting its angle of observation.

"You look terrible," she said.

"Cheers."

"Like you haven't slept at all."

"I slept."

"Your boots are on."

She said it the same way she'd said everything else — flat, quiet, observational. No emphasis. No accusation. Just the fact, placed in the air between us. Your boots are on. Meaning: you are fully dressed. Meaning: you didn't just wake up. Meaning: whatever you've been doing this morning, getting out of bed wasn't the first part of it.

I looked down. She was right. I was standing in the hallway in full work gear — boots laced, shirt tucked, jeans belted — coming out of another man's bedroom, pulling the door closed behind me like I didn't want anyone to see what was inside. The picture it painted was obvious and wrong, and I could see the wrongness of it registering behind Janice's eyes — not as understanding, not yet, not as anything she could name or categorise. But as data. As a piece of something she was assembling, slowly and carefully, in whatever quiet room she kept behind her forehead. She didn't know what the picture meant. But she'd remember every 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 challenge. Didn't blink. Just looked at me for one more second — one second too long, one second past the point where a normal twelve-year-old would have shrugged and moved on — and I saw it in her face. Not suspicion exactly. Something quieter and more patient. The expression of someone who has just been handed a piece of a puzzle and is content to hold it, turn it over, and wait for the other pieces to arrive.

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

I stood with my hand on the doorknob 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 rose from the kitchen, saying something to one of the kids — a gentle instruction, the tone you'd use with Raymond or Tania, the little ones. The kettle was building toward a whistle. Somewhere outside, a magpie opened up — that long, rolling warble that sounded like the land itself was clearing its throat. Ordinary sounds. Safe sounds. The vocabulary of a life that still existed, that still functioned, that still went on cooking breakfast and boiling kettles and calling children to the table while upstairs, three doors down, a room full of staged evidence waited behind a closed door.

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

I walked down the hallway toward the stairs. Every step was a performance now. The way I held my shoulders — loose, easy, the posture of a bloke who'd overslept and was in a hurry, nothing more. The way I walked — careful on the right foot, shifting my weight forward onto the toe to keep the pressure 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 outline 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 expected, was almost simpler. 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 hadn't 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 open beneath my feet. Where the only thing between me and catastrophe was the ability 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, asking for more juice. The scrape of a chair. The clink of a mug. A spoon stirring. The kettle clicking off.

No Jeremiah. Not that I could hear.

I went downstairs.