Where the Streetlamps End

The car had been sitting cold beneath the dark for hours and made no effort to disguise it. The seat pressed stored chill through Karen's trousers and into the bone beneath. In the back, Fern shifted once, gave a low breathy huff, and closed her eyes with the resolve of a passenger who intended to sleep through whatever came next. Jane coaxed the heater upward in her usual sequential fashion, low first, then a notch higher, and the vents rattled before offering a tentative thread of warmth along the floor mats.

They pulled out from the driveway and eased onto Berriedale Road. Jane never rushed the edges of things. The tyres rolled over the bitumen with a soft crunch, and beneath it ran the low, steady thrum of the engine. The silence between them had shape and texture, built over years of shared lifts and weather-worn commutes, of muddy boots and lukewarm thermoses. It knew when to fill a space and when to stay out of the way.

Streetlights passed overhead in measured intervals, casting warm pools that spread across the pavement in elliptical halos, washing over crumbling garden walls and letterboxes leaning askew under the weight of years. Jane flicked the wipers. The blade swept away the fine mist gathering on the windscreen, clearing the world briefly before the condensation crept back.

The turn at Wallcrest Road came into view, branching left in its usual unassuming way. And there sat Luke Smith's house. The split-level brick with the deep slope of garden they had all once remarked on during a week of heavy rain, when the mulch had slid halfway to the back fence. It crouched on its corner lot, the roofline neat against the black swell of the hillside behind.

Not a single light burned. No porch lamp, no bedroom glow behind the thin blinds, not even the pale hum of the kitchen fluorescents that Luke habitually left on like a small lighthouse. Just uninterrupted dark, thick and unmoving. The house did not look asleep. It looked absent.

What neither woman knew was that Luke had barely been home all day. His hours had been consumed by errands that belonged to no recognisable category of ordinary life: camping supplies purchased and transported through a dimensional Portal, cash withdrawn for purposes no bank teller could have fathomed, a fledgling settlement in Clivilius taking shape in dust that had never known terrestrial growth. The darkness of the house was not the stillness of rest. It was the aftermath of a man who had turned everything off because he did not want to be found.

The car crawled past. Karen kept her eyes on the house until it vanished behind hedges and the curve of the road. Jane observed that it was unlike him. Karen agreed but offered nothing further. After the oddness of his phone call and his week-long absence from the morning bus, the silence of the house settled heavier than it ought to have.

The last of the suburban lights fell behind them like a curtain lowering on the familiar world. Beyond it, the sodium glow faded, and with it went the safety of clear edges and easy landmarks. The road narrowed and began to wind upward, coiling through the foothills with the hesitant logic of a thought forming mid-sentence. Trees grew taller and closer, their presence no longer scenic but watchful. Stringybark and peppermint gums leaned over the bitumen, their long limbs arching toward each other across the road. The headlights picked out their trunks, pale and ghosted with dew, like bleached vertebrae rising from the understorey.

Mist had begun to collect at the verges, creeping low along the ground, thicker in the dips and hollows where the air turned colder. Not yet dense, but enough to suggest the land was exhaling.

Karen knew this route by feel. Its dips and cambers lived in the soles of her feet, in the lean of her body when a turn approached. Years of late-night returns had etched it into muscle memory. But even the most familiar paths started to feel strange when the bush closed in.

Somewhere between the gully where a possum's eyes flashed silver in the headlights and the steeper climb beyond, the conversation turned to Luke's old stories. The ones he used to tell on the morning bus, delivered with the earnest specificity of a man describing places he had actually visited rather than merely imagined. A world of red sand and azure skies. A city of bridges. Stone sentinels standing guard at gates that should not have existed. He had called it Clivilius, and he had spoken of it with such granular conviction that both women had quietly filed him under the category of harmless eccentricity and left it at that.

Neither of them had thought much about it at the time. Luke was Luke. Warm, a little odd, prone to enthusiasms that surfaced without warning and retreated just as quickly. His dream-stories had been charming in their way, part of the fabric of their morning commute, no more alarming than his habit of buying too many coffees or forgetting his umbrella on the seat.

But sitting in the dark with the bush pressing close and the memory of his strange phone call still unresolved, the stories wore differently. They felt less like whimsy and more like testimony. Jane raised the question that neither of them had previously thought worth asking: whether Luke had actually believed what he was telling them. Karen considered this longer than she expected. At the time, she had not given it much weight. Looking back, she was no longer certain. Perhaps he had believed every word. Or perhaps he had simply needed someone to listen.

The bush crowded in with sudden closeness, trunks rising tall and bone-pale, packed tightly like watchers at the edge of an old path. The sensation turned in Karen's gut. Not dread, but something adjacent. It felt as though they were travelling inward rather than forward, deeper into something held and old, as though the landscape had curved quietly closed behind them.

Jane reached across and nudged her elbow. A small, grounding touch, solid enough to bring her back. Nearly there, she said. Karen nodded and forced herself to exhale. A long breath out. The sort that reminded you that you were still tethered. Still here.