Forty Minutes in the Dark

Violet released the breath she had not realised she was holding. Her forehead found the door's cool surface. Her body trembled with the particular violence of adrenaline that had served its purpose and was now withdrawing, leaving behind the shaking and the nausea and the clarity that came too late to be useful.

She told herself she was safe. The words formed in her mind and dissolved before they reached conviction. She pushed herself away from the door and faced the hallway.

The house was dark. The familiar darkness of a home whose occupants were asleep — the hallway clock ticking its patient count, the photographs on the walls reduced to shapes, the particular scent of lemon oil and old timber and Evelyn's domestic presence saturating every surface. The darkness should have been comfort. It had been comfort every night of Violet's life, the darkness of a house that contained her family and her belongings and the accumulated evidence of sixteen years of ordinary existence.

She moved down the hallway. Her trainers, still damp from the run, found the floorboards with a sound that seemed amplified by the silence into something that announced her passage to anyone or anything that might be listening. Each step carried her further from the locked front door and deeper into the house's interior, past the bathroom and the linen cupboard and the door to Jasmine's room — closed, as it should be — and toward her own room.

The wrongness registered before she could identify its source. A shift in the air. A quality of disruption in the hallway's atmosphere that her conscious mind processed as unease before her eyes supplied the evidence.

Her bedroom door stood ajar.

A finger's breadth. No more. A sliver of darkness bleeding from the gap into the hallway's lesser dark. The angle was wrong — the door's position deviated from the closed state she maintained with the habitual consistency of someone for whom the closure of doors was not preference but principle. She kept it shut. Always. The door's current position was not the result of a draught or a settling of the house's aged frame. It was the result of a hand.

The realisation arrived not as thought but as sensation — a coldness that began in her stomach and radiated outward through her limbs, settling into her fingers and her feet and the base of her spine with the particular weight of certainty. Someone had opened this door. Someone had entered her room. The someone might still be inside.

She should have turned back. She should have woken her parents, retreated to the kitchen, found a telephone. Every rational faculty she possessed was issuing instructions that her body declined to follow, overridden by the same compulsion that had carried her to the cemetery and the Silver Queen and every other boundary she had crossed in the past four days — the need to know, the refusal to retreat from information regardless of the form in which it presented itself.

She moved closer. The floorboards betrayed each step with creaks that sounded like detonations in the silence. The gap between herself and the door diminished. The darkness beyond it deepened as she approached, as though the room were gathering its shadows in anticipation of her arrival.

She whispered her sister's name. The sound emerged thin and unsteady, a question directed at the darkness with no expectation of an answer that would bring relief.

The silence held.

And then the voice came.

It arrived from inside the room — from the darkness beyond the door's narrow gap — with a quality that was not loud but penetrating, pitched at a register that bypassed Violet's ears and landed directly in the centre of her chest. Low. Male. Carrying an amusement that made the words themselves irrelevant because the tone communicated everything the content did not.

The voice informed her that Jasmine was not there. The statement was delivered with the casual precision of someone correcting a minor misapprehension — helpful, almost courteous, as though the speaker were performing a small service by clarifying which member of the household was and was not present in the room Violet was about to enter.

Then, after a pause calibrated to allow the first statement's implications to reach their full depth, the voice spoke again. Closer. The distance between the sound's origin and Violet's position had contracted without any audible movement to account for the change, as though the speaker had crossed the space between them by a method that did not involve footsteps.

The second statement was simpler. It confirmed what the first had implied.

Someone was in her room. Someone who was not Jasmine. Someone who had entered through means that a locked front door and closed bedroom door had not prevented. Someone whose voice carried the particular confidence of a person who understood that their presence in this house, in this room, in the dark, with a sixteen-year-old girl standing alone in the hallway, constituted an act of violation so complete that the violation itself was the purpose.

James Brown had been in the room for forty minutes.

He had entered through a method that the house's conventional security — its locks, its doors, its weatherboard walls — had no capacity to prevent. The Portal had deposited him in the space between Violet's bed and her desk with the particular disorientation that transit always produced, a momentary vertigo that resolved within seconds into the sharp awareness of a new environment and the assessment protocols that decades of practice had refined into reflex.

The room was exactly what he had expected. A teenager's sanctuary — maps on the walls, books stacked in precarious towers, the detritus of a mind that consumed information faster than it could organise what it consumed. The bed was empty, the sheets still holding the vague impression of a body that had departed through the window whose curtains stirred in the night breeze. The girl was not home. He had anticipated this. He had watched her leave the cemetery. He had known, before the Ironsand driver complicated matters with his clumsy pursuit, exactly where she was and approximately when she would return.

He had come for the journal.

Sally Harlow's research materials — the leather-bound notebook and the folded map that the girl had extracted from the Silver Queen that morning — represented a complication he had chosen to address directly rather than delegate to intermediaries whose competence he did not trust. He had watched the girls find the compartment. He had watched them flee. He had calculated that the materials would be brought here, to this room, because teenagers stored their important things close to where they slept, the way animals cached food near their dens.

The backpack was not present. The girl had taken it with her to wherever she had gone — the cemetery, based on his earlier observation. This meant the journal was on her person rather than in the room, which transformed his visit from retrieval to something more flexible. Something that offered opportunities he had not initially sought but that his nature, once presented with them, could not resist.

He searched the room anyway. Not with the frantic displacement of someone ransacking, but with the methodical attention of a man who understood that information existed in layers and that the absence of the primary target did not preclude the discovery of secondary materials. He examined her desk — the newspaper clippings, the notes in her handwriting, the connections she was drawing between Sally Harlow and Emily Sullivan. He noted the map of Australia with its coloured pins. He read the spines of the books stacked beside her bed. He opened the drawer of her bedside table and examined its contents without disturbing their arrangement.

The examination took fifteen minutes. What it told him confirmed what he had already assessed: the girl was intelligent, persistent, and operating with a clarity of purpose that exceeded what her age and experience should have permitted. She had assembled connections that Sally Harlow herself had taken months to develop. She had identified locations that even his own familiarity with the region had not suggested she could access. She was, in the language he used for such assessments, a problem that was compounding.

The remaining twenty-five minutes he spent in the room were not about information. They were about something else — something that existed in the space between professional necessity and the appetites that professional necessity provided cover for. He sat in the dark on the edge of her bed. He touched the pillow where her head lay each night, the impression still faintly warm. He opened her wardrobe and ran his fingers along the fabric of clothes that carried her scent. He picked up the framed photograph on her desk — Violet and Jasmine, grinning in afternoon light — and held it close enough to study in the darkness.

These were the rituals. Not of investigation but of anticipation. The particular pleasure of occupying a victim's space before the victim knew they had been selected, of handling their belongings with an intimacy they had not consented to, of sitting in their darkness and breathing their air and constructing, in the privacy of his own mind, the architecture of what would eventually occur. The journal was a problem to be solved. The girl was something else. The girl was a project.

He heard her arrive home. The front door's impact, the lock engaging, the ragged breathing of someone whose evening had involved more exertion than planned. He heard her move down the hallway with steps that tried for silence and achieved only the particular noise of someone whose body was still operating under the influence of fear.

He positioned himself. Not near the door — that would be crude, the tactic of someone who relied on proximity rather than precision. He stood in the room's deepest shadow, near the corner where the wardrobe met the wall, a location that the door's narrow gap would not reveal to anyone looking in from the hallway. The bedroom door he had left ajar deliberately. Not wide enough to be obvious from a distance but sufficiently displaced from its customary position that the room's occupant would notice the discrepancy.

The ajar door was the first move in a game whose rules he had written and whose outcome he controlled. The girl would see it. The girl would approach. The girl would call out — for her sister, most likely, the name that love made instinctive in moments of fear. And then he would answer.

The moment arrived with the precise choreography he had designed. Her whisper. The silence he let unspool afterward, counting the seconds, letting the emptiness do its work before he filled it. The first statement — Jasmine's absence confirmed, the helpful tone, the courtesy that was itself the cruelty. The pause, exactly long enough for the implications to register. Then the second statement, delivered from closer, the distance between them contracted through a single silent step that the darkness concealed.

He could hear her breathing. Shallow. Rapid. The particular rhythm of a body whose flight-or-fight response had been activated for the second time in an hour. He could smell the night on her — eucalyptus and dust and the faint metallic tang of sweat produced by terror rather than exertion.

He had no intention of harming her tonight. Not physically. The timeline he operated on permitted patience, and patience was one of the few luxuries his particular vocation afforded. Tonight was about establishing something — a presence, a knowledge, the understanding that her private spaces were not private, that the walls she trusted could be breached, that the darkness she slept in was occupied by someone who could enter and depart without leaving evidence that any authority would know how to interpret.

The fear he had planted would grow. It would compound the fear she already carried from the Silver Queen, from the journal's desperate final pages. It would make her reckless or it would make her cautious, and either response served his purposes. Reckless girls made mistakes that isolated them. Cautious girls withdrew from the support networks that might otherwise protect them. Both outcomes narrowed the field. Both outcomes moved the timeline forward.

He waited in the dark, listening to her breathing, savouring the particular intimacy of terror shared between two people when only one of them understood the rules of the game they were playing.