Gus and the Starlight by Victoria Carless

Author:Victoria Carless
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Gus wasn’t sure if she had imagined their conversation during Ghostbusters, but there Stevie was after everyone had left, waiting by the blank screen.

She arrived around ten pm. After the final credits rolled, Gus had raced through the dishes piled in the Moonbeam sink and the nightly drive-in shutdown routine and then ducked off at bedtime on the pretext of brushing her teeth.

With the drive-in lights turned off, the stars showed up more in the night sky, glinting almost brashly, although Gus supposed they were always there, whether she noticed them or not. Stevie pointed to the exit under the sleeping drive-in sign. They were going off-site.

Are we heading to the library to research comets? Gus wondered. They would have to break in, like characters in a detective story. It probably wasn’t a good idea. She already had a bad name at one library for not returning books.

Together they crunched up the gravel driveway of the Starlight, and continued on the road out of town, which was flanked by the silent canefields. They too were quiet as they walked. The only sound was the screech of a flying fox as it cursed the bare mango trees.

Gus trained the torch she had pinched from the caravan on the slick dark road as they walked. Stevie stopped when they reached a gap in the planted rows of cane.

‘Let’s go this way,’ he said pointing to a dirt track. ‘We’ll follow the headland.’

‘You mean, down there?’ Gus asked.

She shone the torch on the track, at the end of which there appeared to be only darkness. The sugarcane rustled and danced to an invisible night tune. It made goosebumps rise on her skin.

‘Yep,’ said Stevie. ‘You can trust me.’

‘All right,’ said Gus. ‘But if you try to murder me, I’ll come back and haunt you, I swear,’ she warned.

‘It’s a deal,’ Stevie replied.

He stepped onto the dirt track and Gus followed.

The cane formed an archway over the path as they walked, closing them off from the sky and stars. It seemed to Gus they were walking into the very heart of darkness. When she looked back towards the highway, the rows of cane appeared to have drawn closer, so that the entrance from the road was no longer visible. She told herself she had been reading too many spooky stories.

They had walked a few hundred metres when she heard the sound of water coursing steadily over stones.

In another twenty metres or so they were at a crossroad. Beyond the track, the bank sloped down to a wide river, just discernible through bordering gum trees.

‘Coming?’ Stevie asked.

Gus nodded and followed as he stepped over the headland. They picked their way down the bank to the water’s edge.

They walked a way along the edge of the river through a twist of trees. After a while Stevie stopped. ‘This is the spot,’ he said.

Gus looked around, shining her torch into the night.

Paperbark trees dipped their roots into the dark water. Downriver a hundred metres or so, someone had built a crude fishing hut out of tin and fibro.

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