The Fire at the Edge of Things

The glow was gone. One moment it had been pulsing at the scrub's edge, cycling its impossible colours against the horizon, and the next the darkness had closed over it like water over a stone. The four girls stopped mid-stride, suddenly aware of how far they had walked and how completely the scrub had swallowed the path behind them. The camp was somewhere at their backs, its distance impossible to judge. The glow that had drawn them out was nowhere at all.

They drew together in the dark, shoulders touching, breath audible. For a long moment nobody spoke, and then Michelle asked where it had gone, her voice carrying more frustration than fear, the tone of someone who had been lured and then abandoned.

It was Violet who spotted the second light — smaller, steadier, the warm orange of an ordinary fire flickering through the scrub ahead. A campfire. Human company, which should have been a relief but was not, because the question of who would be sitting at a campfire in the scrub near a Girl Guides camp at midnight was not a question with comfortable answers.

They approached, and the fire resolved into specifics: flames bending in the breeze, the smell of eucalyptus smoke and heated earth, and a figure sitting motionless beside it.

Liam Abernathy sat hunched toward the flames with the kind of stillness that had nothing to do with relaxation. He looked like someone holding himself in place by effort rather than ease, his face alternating between shadow and sharp relief as the firelight flickered across his features. A folded pocketknife rested in his hand with the casual certainty of an object that lived there habitually. He was twenty years old and he looked older, the fire carving hollows beneath his cheekbones that the daylight would not have produced.

He and Gordon had driven out from Broken Hill that afternoon, the way they always did — a fire, a vehicle, supplies for a night in the scrub, and the understanding between them that these outings served purposes neither bothered to name aloud. Gordon's obsession with the supernatural and Liam's appetite for the region's darker stories had been fuelling their joint expeditions for years, along with the cannabis Gordon used to sharpen his perception and the silence Liam preferred to whatever passed for conversation.

Liam had heard the girls coming long before they reached the firelight. He chose not to move. He preferred being found at rest.

Michelle recognised him first — her brother's friend — and the recognition produced unease rather than relief, because Liam sitting at a fire in this scrub on this night was not the same Liam who occupied the margins of her brother's social life. Rebecca whispered the question they were all thinking: what was he doing here, the same night as the camp, and was it really a coincidence?

Liam's answer came not as explanation but as warning. There were things out here, he said, his voice low and steady. Things that hunted. He was not performing a ghost story for their entertainment. He spoke with the conviction of someone who had spent enough time in Silverton's abandoned places to have seen things he could not explain, and the words carried a weight the girls could feel settling over them like cold air.

He told them about a backpacker. Found out here, years ago, the remains in a condition that dingoes could not account for. The official story had been rewritten into something manageable — an animal attack, case closed. Liam said he had seen what was left, and no animal had done that. The story landed in the firelight with the sickening specificity of something remembered rather than invented, and its parallels to Sally Harlow's murder, discovered in the same region and subjected to the same institutional suppression, were ones Violet registered without Liam needing to draw them.

His final observation — that numbers made no difference to a psychopath — sat in the air between them until nobody could think of anything to say.

Gordon Richards arrived from the darkness with all the subtlety of a grenade.

He had been hiding beyond the firelight since before the girls appeared, waiting with the particular patience of someone who found other people's terror genuinely funny. The ambush was his design: the lunge from the dark, the hands grabbing Rebecca, the explosion of screams that tore through the scrub and echoed off the gum trees. Gordon doubled over laughing, delighted with himself, apparently incapable of registering that the girls were shaking too hard to find it amusing. Rebecca was in tears. Violet was furious. The transition from mortal terror to anger took different amounts of time for each of them, and the anger, when it arrived, was directed at Gordon with a force he seemed genuinely surprised by.

His contrition lasted about ten seconds. No harm done, he said, hands raised, still grinning, already moving on. The phrase said everything about how seriously he took what he had just put them through.

They settled around the fire eventually, the circle expanding to fit six, the girls on one side and the boys on the other with the flames between them. Cigarettes were shared. Gordon talked, because Gordon always talked, especially out here where the scrub and the night and the cannabis loosened whatever restraints the daylight imposed. He spoke about what he had found in the abandoned mines — markings underground that he could not date, formations that made no geological sense, the feeling in certain shafts that something was present that had nothing to do with ore or rock. Liam corroborated from his quieter position, his contributions fewer but more precise, the two of them interlocking their narratives with the practised ease of people who had been telling these stories together for years.

Then Violet mentioned the glow. The pulsing light. The colours.

The look that passed between Gordon and Liam lasted barely a second. It was not meant to be seen. Violet saw it. A flash of recognition, a quick calculation about what to say, and the mutual decision to say nothing useful. Gordon recovered first, dismissing it as a shooting star or a trick of tired eyes, his smirk arriving too fast and his voice carrying the false lightness of someone covering something that mattered. Liam said nothing at all, which told Violet more than Gordon's deflection. They had seen the colours. They knew something about what produced them. And the fact that four girls had witnessed the same phenomenon frightened them in ways their bravado could not entirely conceal.

Mandy broke the moment. She needed the bathroom. Her voice was thin and shaky, her bravado stripped away by the evening's accumulated fear, and she looked, in the firelight, very young. Gordon pointed vaguely into the dark toward an old dunny somewhere in the scrub, the gesture casual and careless, the tone of someone who had spent enough nights out here to forget that other people found the dark frightening.

Violet stood immediately. The thought of Mandy walking alone into the scrub that Liam had just populated with stories of things that hunted was not something she could allow. They left the fire together, the darkness receiving them completely, the torch cutting a thin cone of light that the surrounding blackness consumed at its edges. Mandy's hand found Violet's arm, her fingers clammy, her grip communicating everything her voice could not.

Behind them, the fire crackled on. Gordon's voice carried through the scrub, the cadence of someone still telling stories, still holding court, still filling the night with words about the things he had found beneath the ground. He did not know yet that this was the night he would spend the rest of his life trying to undo.