The Threshold at Penrose Park

The track from Gordon's campfire led them deeper into Penrose Park than either of them had intended to go. The fire behind them shrank with each step until it was no more than an orange smudge against the scrub, its warmth and its company already belonging to a place they had left rather than a place they could return to. Their torches cut thin lines through the dark, and the dark swallowed the light at its edges without effort.

Penrose Park had been a campground once, and the evidence of that former life persisted in ruins the landscape was slowly consuming. Corrugated shelters with roofs rusted the colour of dried blood. Concrete blocks cracked and fissured by decades of heat and cold. Signs on warped posts, their lettering scoured away by wind-driven dust until whatever they had once said was anyone's guess. The place had the quality of something abandoned in haste and never reclaimed — the bones of a community's attempt at recreation, left to the Outback's patient appetite.

The ground cracked beneath their feet with each step, and the sound carried too far in the silence. The trees that clung to life out here had been shaped by hardship rather than design, their trunks twisted, their branches clawing upward like arms reaching for something that wasn't there. In the moonlight they looked less like trees and more like figures frozen mid-gesture, and Violet had to remind herself, more than once, that they were not watching her.

The air had changed. Violet noticed it first as a taste — metallic, sharp, like old pennies on the tongue. It had nothing to do with the dust or the eucalyptus. It was something else entirely, something that did not belong to any atmosphere she had breathed before. Mandy tasted it too, and her response surprised Violet. She spoke of her grandmother's stories — spirits in the land, places where the veil between worlds grew thin, the taste of their proximity in the air. It was the kind of talk Mandy would normally have laughed off, but she wasn't laughing now. Her voice was quiet, and the words came out with the careful weight of someone repeating something they had been told by a person they loved, and finding, for the first time, that they could not dismiss it.

The stars overhead were impossibly bright. The Milky Way burned across the sky like a wound, so vivid it seemed to have depth rather than merely surface. Mandy looked up and said her grandmother had told her that when the stars were this bright, the spirits were closest. Neither girl could think of anything to say after that, and they walked on in silence.

Then the whispers came. Faint, half-formed, arriving at the very edge of hearing where the line between real sound and imagination dissolved. They might have been the wind moving through cracked structures. They might have been something else. Violet asked Mandy if she had heard them, and Mandy said yes, and the fact that both of them had heard the same thing made it worse rather than better, because it removed the comforting explanation that either of them was imagining it.

The toilet block appeared at the end of the track like something that had been waiting for them. It squatted in the moonlight, squat and permanent, its concrete walls streaked with rust and grime, the paint long gone, the surface fissured into something that looked more like skin than stone. Weeds pressed against its base and scrub leaned against its sides, the landscape slowly pulling it back into the earth from which its materials had been drawn.

Mandy asked Violet to come inside with her. Her voice was small, her bravado gone, and in the moonlight she looked very young. Violet said she would wait outside. She would keep watch. The decision was practical and immediate and it was also the decision that placed her alone in the dark while her friend disappeared behind a door that closed with a thud heavy enough to carry across the whole of Penrose Park.

The hinges shrieked as Mandy pushed through. Her torch beam swept cracked tiles and stained walls before the door swung back and shut with a sound that was too loud and too final for what it was. The thud rolled across the emptiness and did not come back. In the Outback's silence, a sound like that carried a long way, and anything within range now knew that something had happened at this spot.

Violet stood alone.

The darkness closed around her completely. Her torch gave her perhaps ten metres of visibility, and beyond that the world existed only as shapes inferred from shadow — the silhouettes of trees, the bulk of the building behind her, the ground she could feel but not see. Her heart hammered in her ears. Her breathing came shallow and quick, the instinctive response of a body that understood, before the mind could form the thought, that it was being watched.

The campfire was somewhere behind her, impossibly distant, its voices and warmth belonging to another world. Mandy was inside the building, separated by walls and a closed door. Michelle and Rebecca were with Gordon and Liam at the fire. Every person Violet knew was elsewhere, and the distance between her and all of them felt less like metres and more like a gulf that the darkness had carved specifically to isolate her.

Her torch beam found nothing it had not found before — earth, scrub, concrete. The ordinary components of a place that had been ordinary for decades. But the absence of a visible threat did not mean the absence of a threat, and Violet knew this in the part of herself that operated below thought, in the ancient wiring that had kept human beings alive in landscapes like this one since before they had language to describe what frightened them.

James Brown stood in the scrub at a distance the darkness made impossible to determine, and he watched.

He had been there since before the girls left the camp. He had followed their torchlight through the scrub, keeping the distance that his experience told him was correct — close enough to see and hear, far enough to remain invisible. The campfire and the two young men had been an interruption he had not planned for, but patience had never been a difficulty. He had waited through Gordon's stories and the laughter and the cigarettes, still and silent in his chosen position, his breathing controlled, his body generating as little sound and movement as the situation demanded.

Now the moment he had been waiting for had arrived. Not this specific moment — he had not required Mandy to need a bathroom or the door to close with precisely this timing — but the kind of moment. The girl, alone, without witnesses, in a place where help could not reach her before he did. The conditions had been assembling all evening, and they had finally converged.

He did not move yet. He knew from long practice that the minutes immediately following isolation were the worst time to approach. The body's alarm was at its highest, every sense straining outward, the nervous system flooding its host with the chemicals that made flight and fight possible. But the body could not sustain that pitch indefinitely. If nothing happened — if the threat remained invisible, if the darkness produced no shape and no sound — the alarm would begin to fade. Not fully, not out here, but enough. The shoulders would drop. The breathing would steady. The torch beam would slow its frantic sweeping and settle into something calmer.

That was the window. He waited for it.

The door of the toilet block remained shut. Mandy was inside. The torch wavered in the dark. The stars burned overhead with the same cold brilliance that had illuminated every night of Violet's sixteen years, and would continue burning long after this one was over.

Violet waited for her friend. She did not know that someone was waiting for her.