Firenight

By Reinier Krol

In her battle against depression, self-harm and self-destruction, 17-year-old Sara Baines discovers an unlikely hero. Herself. Experiencing all the excitement of falling in love for the first time, she unearths an unimaginable adventure of forbidden passion with a courageous boy. Together they uncover a diabolical plan of murder, mystery and terror. When one of Sara’s friends becomes a victim of the sinister plot, Sara and her ally will risk everything to save her. Their heroic efforts unleash an intolerable hell of deception, action and destruction. Ultimately, Sara must discover the value in her own life if she is to save the lives of her friends... and the boy she loves!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Reinier Krol
• Release date: Aug 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301347469

Reinier Krol

Reinier Krol is an Australian-based writer/filmmaker with 20 years experience in the entertainment industry; working as a director and producer on various shorts, docos and corporate videos. He has also written a number of feature-length screenplays.He published his first full-length novel, “Loch Ness” (as Reinier J. Krol) in 2000, before focusing on writing, directing and producing for the screen.He has returned to prose because of his passion for the themes explored in Firenight.The author is indefatigably passionate about raising awareness of the growing emotional struggles of young people, depression and teenage suicide prevention. Coming from a background of counselling young people, the author has seen first-hand the emotional challenges young people face and the all-too-often path to self-destruction they choose.The author encourages everyone to proliferate a much-needed dialogue and understanding within the community about the scope and seriousness of this otherwise, out-of-sight-out-of-mind – and devastating – crisis facing young people today.

Book preview

Chapter 1

When you stare at death, it stares right back at you. From that moment on, something changes. Something deep inside of you forever longs to reach beyond your worldly reality and touch again – if only for a single breath – that inevitable Afterworld glimpsed in the instant of madness. Or maybe it’s just me. What I know, is on that frigid night, part of me betrayed death. Its awful vengeance has haunted me since, and yet I feel insanely seduced by it.

That night. Cruelly cold, pathetic and mentally marooned, I searched for an absolution that simply, rationally, didn’t exist. I had slogged through the day languishing in the thick maple syrup of self-pity and it had tasted so yummy. The unstoppable tears had massaged my cheeks to jelly, but the self-inflicted burns on my wrists and forearms made me feel perversely and wondrously alive. Ironic, I thought, walking along the train tracks that night.

For ninety-three days, the maelstrom had gathered, slowly splintering my world to the four winds and I could take it no more. As I encroached through the muted darkness alone, I was wildly captivated by my doomed fate.

I was about to die – and I loved that idea.

Earlier in the afternoon, when mom again chose to have no recollection of her commitment to pick me up after school for a driving lesson, my exhilarating moment of liveliness was abruptly asphyxiated and I withdrew back into my hermit shell, willing my intolerable life to end.

Of course, the driving lesson itself was immaterial. If mom wasn’t there to pick me up, it meant only one thing. She was with her! I hated her. Actually, I hated them both.

Three months before that night, I once more yearned to feed my obsessive compulsive cleaning disorder. My room was impeccable, but the rest of the house was obscene. I didn’t care that everyone else’s point of view only hissed wild accusations of hallucination at me. The house was vulgar and it needed attention.

It needed my attention.

Waking with excited anticipation, I knew I had to devise a full-scale exodus of the Baines family – my family. Extra hands would expedite my grandiose cleaning plan, but if I needed to personally check and go over every bench, tile and speck, as history proved I would, then any help would ultimately turn out to be an unwanted drain on my struggle – with the added burden of spite seeping from the sponge. No! This needed some serious solo action and the easiest way to guarantee my being alone, was to invite the entire family to help me clean.

Oh no. I’m… we’re going out for coffee.

"Really? Who’s we?" I asked my sister, Mika.

Dad and I, she answered, hopefully.

Never one to understand the subtlety of manipulation – or any human way of acting for that matter – dad simply stared blankly before he sheepishly added, I don’t remember that.

Mika clawed her bony fingers around dad’s wrists and dragged him from the house like upset prey. We’ll be a couple of hours, she grunted, her voice trailing off as they made good their escape.

Mom was less impressed. Didn’t you have a big clean last month?

That’s not the point, I said. We should be doing this once a week.

Sara, the house is clean.

Was it? I stepped with delightful purpose to the kitchen window and slid my middle finger the entire length of the third slat of fake-wood blinds suspended halfway down the glass. As the dust accrued on my digit, I felt a satisfying smile itching to reveal itself. I turned back to mom with my middle finger raised intentionally facing the wrong way, giving mom the bird. Oops! Finally, twisting my whole hand, I showed mom the thickness of filth.

You see! I snapped. Do you know what dust is? It’s mostly dead skin. Dead flakes of people skin. Urrgh!

Mom hesitated a moment, no doubt thinking about the same vanquished exchange only a month earlier. Fine. Whatever, she finally said, disgruntled.

It’s nothing personal, I yelled after her, as she too scrambled for the door in haste – my mission accomplished with all the finesse of an elephant.

In mom’s defense, I had watched that third slat like a warmonger since my last cleaning fixation thirty-two days earlier when I first noticed its grossness. For no logical reason, certainly none that I could imagine, whenever mom thrust the feather-duster through the house, she always missed that third slat from the top. At first, I thought she was intentionally screwing with me, but ultimately, it turned out to be just another item on mom’s ever-growing list of idiosyncratic annoyances, like her inability to open milk cartons. Who can’t open milk cartons?

I never mentioned that third slat to her. I left it alone, as excruciatingly difficult as that was, just waiting to pounce. Boy! had it proved effective. The wait, and my pain, had been deliciously worthwhile.

One hour and three minutes into my operation – seven minutes behind schedule – I reached mom’s study room. It was mom and dad’s study room, but dad never ventured in. He was so fearful of technology, he believed simply breathing on mom’s Hewlett-Packard laptop computer would send it into some frenzied sort of technophobe-meltdown and destroy it. Besides, mom ran her yoga business from that room and dad didn’t think much of yoga. Actually, he hated yoga. The study room only reminded him of how little he still had in common with his hatha-yoga guru wife – my mother.

There was nothing exceptional about the study room. The two-foot tall statue of Buddha planted on a small pedestal table wouldn’t furbish everyone’s place to work, but mom often insisted The Enlightened One inspired her Samadhi – her search for inner peace. For me, it presented as little more than another spot where dead skin grappled in its last throes before eternal condemnation to oblivion.

Oh! It was tough being so passionate about cleanliness.

I twisted the feather-duster between mom’s yoga book collection and the top of the stained-pine bookcase in which they were housed. The next shelf down was business management manuals, equally in need of tender caressing by feathers to remove their flaky covering. The bottom shelf stowed just two books… on tennis. Dad! They had been there when I was born, seventeen years earlier. Dust didn’t discriminate against the old. Dad’s geriatric books were a favorite resting place for dead skin.

Adjacent to the bookcase, stood a steel filing cabinet with three pull-out drawers of clientele information. It was crammed with beige folders, each bursting with handwritten sheets of paper recording class attendances, contact information, physical assessments, fee summaries, timetables and whatever other meaningless hocus-pocus mom could shove in there.

As I wiped the cabinet with a damp sponge in my left hand, I briefly thought about just throwing all the paper out. Hell, mom would probably kill me and then throw me out too.

Buddha was next. His immovable stare was hypnotic. It felt almost immoral attacking Buddha with a dirty sponge and cheap fake feathers. I hesitated. I don’t know why because I was definitely not religious, but there was something about the cross-legged sculptured figure. The Enlightened One. Maybe mom was right. Maybe that fat, gold-crusted statue did inspire. It was almost like Buddha was talking to me. Not words, more like an irrational sense of foreboding. Maybe I had simply inhaled the smell of too many cleaning products.

Focus Sara.

All the same, the Buddha statue would not escape a clean. I gently massaged the feather-duster around the chubby sculpted likeness of the religious enlightener, strangely afraid to be my usual obsessive self.

Maybe it was that diversion from my instinctive cleaning savagery – or maybe it was simply because I was unco – but as I rounded the statue’s left side, I blinked. My mind ever-so-briefly deflected to thoughts of Mika and dad having coffee and then, I clumsily dropped the feather-duster behind the Buddha. I faintly heard it bounce off the back of the statue with a hollow clang before it slid down the wall against which the table was positioned.

Crap!

I eased forward trying to locate the handle of the feather-duster, but the bloody thing had vanished out of sight. Leaning further, I embraced the statue in an uncomfortable pose and peered behind.

Nothing. Huffing and puffing in frustration, I dropped to my knees. If only mom could see me, I thought. I was literally kneeling before Buddha. It felt stranger than I would have liked.

I bowed forward ungracefully, angling my body and extending my arm under the table like an elephant trunk looking for peanuts in a dark alcove. Still nothing.

The damned feather-duster was going to be the death of me.

Frustrated, I wanted to scream, but suddenly, my search froze rigid and I sat as still as Buddha himself.

My eye-level was flush with the bottom of the statue and my forehead rested on the table top edge that extended a hand-width out on all sides from under the square base on which Buddha sat. Something peculiar registered in my mind. It was a subconscious realization at first, but as the idea developed in my head, the anomaly became obvious and even more intriguing.

The table on which Buddha sat was not facing forward!

I would have dismissed it as one of mom’s irrational annoyances, but as I impulsively branched my hand along the left side of the table, my pinkie brushed something unexpected. Something metallic. I hooked my head curiously, following my left arm down to my hand and then, I saw it.

A drawer.

Beneath the delicately carved table top edge, slightly recessed and inconspicuous, I saw a small compartment. In the center of the dark-wood panel where my finger had stopped, a petite, slightly-worn copper handle protruded temptingly.

Beneath the table top on the other three sides, matching wood panels hid the drawer neatly from any eyes casually looking into the study room. My curiosity frenzied. It was the drawer that bothered me. There was something about positioning the table to hide that drawer in that way.

Mom had never hidden anything from me – nothing I knew about anyway. Even though I was tough on her cleaning and those milk cartons, I loved her. She was my mom. She awakened my passion for drawing and painting, and she drove me each week to gymnastics and proudly cheered and encouraged me even when I consistently fell from the uneven-bars. Whenever I needed a soft place to lay my head or an understanding shoulder to catch my tears, she was there for me… always.

I had no reason to doubt her or to question her or to think anything awful or suspicious. No reason at all.

And yet that oddly-positioned table and that drawer in her study room provoked a feeling I had never associated with my mother before.

Uncertainty.

My fingers had not released their grip on the drawer handle. I was still deciding in my mind whether or not to comfort my curiosity when I consciously felt the muscles in my left hand tense and pull at the petite handle. It didn’t budge.

The drawer was locked.

An alien resolve possessed me. My nosiness couldn’t deal with the drawer being secured and before I could blink, I categorically determined that I was getting into the hidden compartment. Why would the drawer be locked? I thought. In an instant, I forgot mom’s history of soothing words and her tolerance and her patience. I wanted… No! I needed to know what was in that drawer.

Twisting my head sideways, I examined the dark-wood panel. Just above the handle there was an obscure indentation. A hole… for a key. I ran my finger along the smooth timber and over the keyhole, as if doing so would magically bring me closer to the secrets beyond. It only made me more determined.

I needed to find that key.

The door on the side cupboard of the adjacent desk opened much easier than I expected. I nearly pulled the damned thing from its hinges. The cavity revealed nothing much interesting – nothing that housed a drawer key.

There were three reams of spare white paper, another stash of beige folders and a box of blue ball-point pens, still unopened. At the very back of the cupboard was a box of 3.5 inch floppy disks. I couldn’t help but giggle at mom’s typical dinosaur technology, but frustratingly, there was no key inside.

I moved onto the filing cabinet and ripped through the paper like a fox on Red Bull, bringing only further bedlam to the chaos inside the steel cupboard. It felt oddly satisfying, but still no key.

Stacked against the cabinet, a handful of shoeboxes overflowed with more papers for filing. I grabbed the first box, dropped cross-legged to the hardwood floor and removed the lid.

Oh my God! How can anyone possibly run a business with such calamity in a box? The first cardboard coffer was a mix of receipts, purchase orders and more receipts. No neatness. No system. No…

Order. Buddha!

All at once, the shiny statue spoke to me again. The filing cabinet and shoeboxes had been distractions. Secrecy required forethought and some systematic planning – some order. Buddha was a beacon of harmony, of bringing things together. Mom had said so once herself. Buddha was order. If that key was going to be anywhere, it had to be within Buddha’s grasp.

I was suddenly sure of it.

I slid my butt back to the pedestal table and sheepishly stared up at the gold statue. With my fingers like the inquisitive tentacles of an octopus, I sleuthed the table – every niche, every angle and every cranny. My first search uncovered nothing, only bitter frustration. I paused, looked up at Buddha again for inspiration and then felt the focus of my eyes dragged away sideways.

How had I not seen it earlier?

Underneath the top of the desk, hidden as deviously as the hallowed drawer itself and kept in place with a strip of adhesive tape, I saw it.

A key.

The key. And because it was placed so intentionally and precisely out of view, it screamed sneakiness. I suddenly, and unexpectedly, felt coldness in my bones. An argument erupted in my internal dialogue. If there really was a secret in that drawer, if mom really was keeping something from me – from all of us – did I really want to know? Did I honestly want to jeopardize my perfect little world?

Stuff it. Of course I did.

Morality or self-preservation weren’t going to stop me. I twisted the key from the grip of the adhesive which clung on desperately like a loyal gatekeeper. The sound of the key tearing away made me instinctively turn and look behind me. I felt like a young child again, stealing my favorite chocolates from the kitchen pantry while mom pretended she wasn’t looking. Mom wasn’t there watching me in the study room. No one was, except Buddha.

There was no doubt in my mind that the key was a match for the lock guarding the drawer. I hesitated again, hating the indecision that so often crippled me. Come on, Sara.

I convinced myself I was without choice.

How bad could the contents of the drawer really be?

Why did I only think it would be bad anyway?

Why did people almost always think the worst at first thought?

The key slipped into the lock without resistance and twisted with equal ease and a soft metallic clang. My fingers trembled nervously. I took a firm hold of the drawer handle again. One last moment of indecision and then…

Part of me had expected an unnerving creaking sound as I pulled at the drawer, like in those ghost movies when the doomed guests arrive at the haunted mansion and slowly open the unattended front door.

Not the secret drawer. It slid from underneath the table like a smooth, well-oiled precision instrument. Nothing spooky about that. It was clinical. Mom’s secrets, if there actually were any, weren’t going to reveal themselves dramatically like a sinister cloak-and-dagger expose. No! The revelation of what hid in the secret drawer would be a cold ripple in a pond of indifference.

I only half-opened the drawer at first, waiting for the skeletons to jump out. My attraction to the dramatic literally expected tiny, bouncing constructions of bone and disrepute to reveal themselves unceremoniously.

None did.

Taking an intense breath, I grabbed hold of the drawer again and pulled it fully from its hiding-hole and into my lap. I sat motionless, staring into the depth of the drawer, a space no bigger than one of mom’s yoga books. Buddha sneaked a peek as well. The fragrance of fine-wood polish tickled inside my nose and I suddenly recognized that maybe the drawer did not entertain as much covert use as I had expected – as part of me had wickedly hoped.

I snatched at the handful of papers in the drawer and examined each in turn with equal scrutiny. The first article was an unsealed envelope. As I slid its contents into the open, guilt besieged me. What was I really doing? Curiosity had always propelled me into action – and more often than not into trouble as well – but exploring mom’s drawer was different. I thought about how I would feel if mom searched through my stuff as I was through hers, especially my secret things.

Locke, Day and Eddison, I said aloud, reading from the glossy letterhead of the paper in my hand. Lawyers.

It was a last will and testimony. Mom and dad’s. The coldness in my bones returned at the thought of losing either of them. Mom had issues and dad… well, dad had bigger issues, but the sickening image of being left alone and funerals and death was heartbreaking. No. I didn’t want to read mom and dad’s will, and I quickly refolded the paper.

Next, I located a faded receipt. The cash register ink was barely legible, but I could make out that it was from a jewelry store about a year earlier. I was not familiar with the store, but it was definitely not local. One carat gold ring with a precious stone setting. Fire-opal. $1,999.

I felt a strange, conflicted recognition. Mom didn’t particularly care for jewelry herself and I couldn’t recall any conversation about a fire-opal ring for anyone else and yet, I was without doubt that I had seen that ring before.

The final bundle of papers in the secret drawer was a collection of house-related odds and sods, fastened with a rusted paperclip. Scanning through, I glimpsed some power bills from way back, an invoice for when we had the in-ground swimming pool built and a valuation of the house itself by one of the local realtors. There were other documents too, but all equally without much song and dance and definitely nothing that cried an opera of secrets.

I hung my head, half disappointed, but also half comforted that mom was mom and that my life could simply resume its focus on what was important – like cleaning. A calming smile crept onto my face and radiated away any lingering concerns.

Everything was going to be fine.

Hustling the papers of various sizes into an obsessively neat pile, I then looked straight into the drawer in anticipation of returning mom’s secrets back into the darkness.

And there it was.

I had missed something. In the very bottom of the drawer, flush against the back and its color oddly blending in with that of the wood on which it lay, was another envelope.

Oh, I said, surprisingly loud.

Placing the documents still in my left hand to the side, I slowly reached for the rust-brown envelope in the drawer. There was no hesitation, confident my earlier, momentary lapse of faith in my family, was little more than a curious misconception.

Scribbled on the front of the envelope was my mother’s name.

The envelope was not sealed and I buoyantly wriggled its contents free. It was a card. A birthday card. How boring, I thought.

As I spread open the unworn cardboard, I almost expected a banknote to fall free and flutter back into the drawer – it was that sort of daft card. It reminded me of nanna.

I was still smiling.

But the card contained no banknote, only a handwritten message in black pen which I read, quietly mouthing the words in silence and never blinking – not once – as my smile slowly faded…

Love of my life,

The year just past, a year of you and me,

Has shown my heart all that love should be.

We kissed, we touched, we held each other tight,

The end of your troubled days are sweetly now in sight.

My dearest love, to you I proudly say,

I’m yours alone and Happy Birthday

Love always, your Helen W.

Chapter 2

Breathe Sara. Your lungs need air. Breathe.

I don’t know how much time I lost in my comatose state, but I suddenly heard my body talking to me, screaming at me. Several more heartbeats passed before I drew my first breath of New Sara air. New Sara. That moment, that instant of reading those despicable words scribed in their evil blackness, was when my history split into two. There was Sara before that moment and New Sara since. Happy Sara and cheerless Sara. Hopeful Sara and pathetic Sara. Living Sara and…

I dropped my eyes back to the birthday message – that insidious piece of cardboard. I read the scribbled poem a second time and lingered on the last line. Love always, your Helen W.

Helen W.

It could only be one person. Helen W. Helen Wexler. Doctor Helen Wexler. Our family doctor Helen Wexler. I almost choked as the name stuck deep in the nether regions of my throat. I had known Helen all my life.

Then, other fragments of the rhyme howled off the card at me. Love of my life… you and me… we kissed… my dearest love… I’m yours alone…

OH MY GOD!

I wanted to scream louder and angrier than ever before, but my furor found no voice, muted and crippled by the sudden fading light in my eyes.

And then I saw the stars… I was about to pass out.

Flinging the empty drawer aside, I collapsed my head forward, desperate to increase the blood flow to my brain. Bowing ungraciously before Buddha, I felt the birthday card crumple as it wedged between my torso and crossed-legs.

The fortress of my emotions suddenly and totally gave way. I tried desperately to hold myself together, but tears flooded from my eyes with an unstoppable resolve. With bitter comfort, it spared me from conking out as the sudden surge of emotion seized the stars and blackness in my eyes and dispelled them to oblivion. Without warning, I found myself feverishly alive.

I sat back straight and read the card a third time through the blurriness of my tears.

Love of my life. Helen W.

As I had experienced so forebodingly before, I pictured dad having coffee with my sister. Dad. My father. My mom’s husband. One of Helen’s patients. When I had earlier scrutinized the initial contents of the secret drawer, relief had washed away any doubt from my body. I thought everything was going to be fine.

It couldn’t be any worse.

The birthday message – the wording of it, the tenderness, the passion, the love – hidden away so precisely in mom’s favorite room. Mom was having an affair with a woman!

Oh my God!

Still no voice, but my emotions continued unabated to tumble into my abyssal trench of hell. No! Worse than hell.

I had to physically wipe my face because I could no longer see beyond the tears and the intolerable darkness creeping like cancer through every vein and every artery. Hell was real. Hell was alive, and it was gushing through my body at overwhelming speed.

No matter how resolutely I tried to think, or how deliberately I tried not to, the words racing through my whole body traumatized my every capacity of human movement.

Mom was having a lesbian affair with our family doctor!

Finally, the whispers breached the crevices of my soul and nauseousness completely overpowered me. With my very last frazzle of energy, I dragged myself from the study room into the adjacent bathroom. Three monstrous steps and I bowed my head into the porcelain toilet bowl at precisely the moment puke and the bitter cocktail of pain and anger chundered from my mouth.

Most of it missed the bowl.

I gripped the cold porcelain with both hands trembling. A second wave of rejection pickled my esophagus and glamorized the white dunny-can. The taste in my mouth was awful, but it was the stench that made me want to vomit again.

My fingers ached from their vice on the bowl. I still felt morbidly feeble and feared releasing my grasp may bring back the stars and the blackness and send me crashing lifelessly to the tiled floor.

What was happening to me?

Emotions I didn’t even know human beings were capable of experiencing surged through my body. The mental pain atrophied any power to physically move – to do anything other than bash my brains out. I found a position on the floor that suppressed the heartache… a little. Laying there on my side, with my legs curled high up to my chest, I endured my emotional rebirth.

The hemorrhage of thoughts was unending. My perfect world was no more. Everything I believed about mom – every confidence and hope cast in my deepest of hearts about her – was suddenly poisoned with doubt. How could she do this? And worse, how could she keep it secret?

The year just past…

I felt the muscles in my neck constrict, like the serpent of mom’s betrayal slowly squeezing Old Sara from my cold and beaten body. A year of you and me… A year!

It was the first time I wished myself dead.

The pain stabbing at me as I lay on the bathroom floor was like none I could have ever imagined – none I had ever been struck by before. My body shivered as if a constant deluge of the devil’s voltage flooded through me. And when I searched deep inside the nightmare to glimpse at the fiendish composer of my agony, I saw only mom – complete with horns and pitchfork. In a few diabolical breaths, she had transmuted from nurturing protector to the harbinger of death.

No matter how still I lay, I could not stop the torment. Questions queued behind one another, each wanting a cruel bite at my suffering. The most savage attack came from that fourth line of Helen’s poem, the end of your troubled days are sweetly now in sight.

What did that mean?

What troubled days?

Why would it be sweet?

I could not take a breath without gulping a mouthful of hurt and uncertainty.

I clenched my knees evermore tightly to my chest. It was the worst moment of my life and I dead set imagined, in that instant, that my desolation, my pain and my blackness could crumble no further into my private hell.

I could not have been more wrong.

Chapter 3

That night.

Three months had passed since I read those despicable words and the darkness felt more alien than any night before it. A cruel chill surfed among the midnight breeze and, as I drew breath, I tasted only the sweetness of my impending deliverance. I forced each step forward, restraint, as if I walked through a trough of gooey marshmallow.

The train tracks were deserted, as vacant as my battered soul.

My flashback to when I first discovered mom’s secret in the study room flowed with dreadful ease into the nightmarish memories of the three months since. I had no way of stopping the surge of hate, the thoughts of betrayal or the flood of unending pain. I had tried everything.

Pills.

Counsellor.

Hurting myself.

There was no reprieve – no lasting solace. All had failed.

I had failed.

New Sara was an avatar consumed by torment and relentless pressure, forever besieged by choking anguish.

That night, I determined New Sara would be reunited with Old Sara – lifeless Sara – and, according to my cheap, glow-in-the-dark Cinderella watch, destiny was arriving in…

7 minutes, 30 seconds…

As I dropped my trembling arm back down and Cinderella out of sight, I stopped walking. I was captivated by the smell of freshness in the nearby trees. The delightful scent was sharpened by the recent rains and the cool air tickled my nose as I drew in the fragrant air.

I would miss that.

I saw an immeasurable number of stars glistening in the moonless dead of night above me. Their shimmers and luster were like the approving winks and smiles of an empathetic audience – and my only company that night.

When nanna had passed away years before, mom urged me to pick a star to remember nanna by. She’ll always be watching over you, mom had said, comforting me with a tight hug. All you have to do is look up and she’ll be there.

I reached a quivering hand to my chest and felt for a familiar comfort. I grasped at the delicate, silver cross dangling from a fine necklace. It was a present from nanna that I’d always cherished and kept with me. I missed nanna as I glanced into the starry darkness of other worlds.

I wondered with uncertainty if anyone would pick a star and think of me after that night.

6 minutes, 38 seconds…

Pulling myself from the incredulous trance, I resumed my bleak course along the deserted train tracks. I wasn’t far from home, but home had never felt so distant before.

In the three months since I had discovered mom’s secret – Buddha’s secret – my world had decomposed with frightening ferocity. Just as mom was no longer mom, home was also no longer home. For seventeen years, no matter how terrifying or how wretched the world was around me, solace always befriended me with a soothing embrace as I walked through the front door of home. That refuge was gone and my only solidarity that night was the cold and the darkness.

The railway line writhed its way through the limestone escarpment. Walls of steep and sharp rock rose high above me on both sides of the tracks, like stadium seating for the devil’s tradesmen about to witness the calamitous acquisition of their latest sacrifice.

For three months, I had pleaded with the devil for an end to my freefall, but each day, agonizing fractures gathered beneath me. No one was there to catch me, no one understood, and every hour I plummeted profoundly into the bottomless inferno of my emotional misery.

That night, I had decided I could deal with it no more.

I needed to stop falling.

4 minutes, 12 seconds…

A train was my unbending solution. The diesel locomotive of the imminent freight transport was sure to stop me, dead. I had checked the timetable on the internet. The limited information available had specified the train’s arrival time at its final destination and at several transition points sporadically located along its journey. Tracing the route backwards, I calculated the scheduled time at which moment it would pass through my arena of absolution.

The mathematics had taken forever – I was seriously hopeless with numbers.

I wouldn’t miss those.

The approaching behemoth was a primary coal carrier owned by Meijboom Fuel Transport. A single locomotive pulled one hundred and thirty-nine carriages filled with raw brown-coal from the mine processing station in the country’s center to the shipping docks on the coast for export.

I was in no doubt that it would do the job I so desperately hungered for.

My plan wasn’t much of a plan. The train would come, announced by its glistening headlights. I would sit cross-legged on the tracks, close my eyes and wait. It would be over in a breath. No more pain. No more unbearable frustration. No more wishing myself liberated from the agony.

2 minutes, 58 seconds…

The gray stones beneath my feet looked wintry-blue in the faint light reflected in the starry night sky. The stones crunched like breakfast cereal as I stepped awkwardly forward, ever closer to the end of my life.

When I last checked my watch, I noticed a soft trembling in the tips of my fingers and yet, I felt strangely calm. My body – my physical being – would, in moments, be violently torn to hundreds of fleshy, disgusting fragments, but my spirit was serene, tranquil.

The enormous freight train would barely notice the collision and all the websites I had searched about taking my own life had guaranteed no pain. I learnt that girls statistically favored an overdose on tablets of some sort as a suicide method, but I demanded no possibility of failure – as pills had apparently proved. No. A speeding train was, without question, more desirable, I thought.

Zero chance of failure.

I checked Cinderella’s pointing arms on my watch again and noticed the tremors in my fingers remained feverishly apparent.

1 minute, 13 seconds…

And then I saw it. In the distance, I clapped eyes on the unmistakable headlamps of the freight train. Over the years, I had seen the train pass through many times before and I recognized those lights like an old friend at the front door. The light was tinged with a faint, but beautiful, orange hue. It made me think of the sunset.

I stopped walking. I don’t remember it being a conscious decision, I just noticed the wooden railway sleepers beneath me stopped moving. There was no noise. Strange, I thought. I was certain I should have heard the locomotive, even at that distance.

The last minute of my life felt like an eternity. My knees crumpled and my legs folded beneath me. I yelped like a wounded animal as a pointy stone pricked me in the butt.

Ouch!

There was nothing glamorous about suicide, but I wasn’t about to go down winning any awards for gracefulness. I was such an amateur suicide-hound.

My eyes never broke their locked gaze with the alluring light hurtling towards me. It was difficult to gauge an exact distance, but the light just got bigger and bigger as it encroached with quiet stealth upon my last breaths of human air.

I calmly grasped my hands together in my lap and forgot all about the pain in my backside – I forgot about my pain altogether. I don’t remember drawing breath or blinking or even thinking. The singular reflex that reminded me I was still alive was a solitary tear that gathered, hesitated a lonesome moment, and then began a morose journey down my trembling cheeks.

As the tear escaped from my face and dropped into oblivion, I suddenly heard the mechanical pulse of the train. At first, only the heavy grunt of the locomotive pierced through the darkness towards me, but gradually, the clickety-clack of the carriage wheels, bridging the tiny gap between each length of steel track, got louder and louder.

In harmony with the escalating clatter, the radiance of light speeding towards me dispersed into two distinct beams – the two headlights of the locomotive. I knew the train driver would not see me until it was too late.

I was counting on it.

The illumination was beautiful, calming and everything I had hoped. My eyes squinted briefly in the intensity, but then I closed them altogether. I didn’t need to force them shut. I was resigned and they happily sunk over my eyes as I glimpsed the last of my earthly view.

It would be all over in seconds.

The sound of the train drowned out all thought and emotion. It became deafening. It roared ferociously and, for the first time that night, I let fear creep in. It wasn’t second-thoughts type fear, it was more like, Oh my god! You’re about to be smashed into smithereens, Sara, type fear.

10 – 9 – 8 – …

In my final seconds, my muscles suddenly constricted the lifeblood that had flowed so serenely through my veins. My hands gripped each other tight. My mouth fell open as I drew in my last breath. The train was close. I could sense it.

My life was over.

The sound of the train screamed violently, ready to devour me. The devil began his victory dance. 3 – 2 – …

My eyes flicked open.

A monstrous explosion louder than any sound I had ever heard before burst around me like a thousand bombs all going off at once. The brilliant luminosity of orange, yellow and white lights engulfed the darkness and, for a moment, I believed I was floating in the epicenter of Heaven. Death was a symphony of angelic radiance, blessed with the applause of immeasurable thunder, more beautiful than I had ever imagined.

But something wasn’t right.

As the fierce light of the explosion decayed, my eyes locked onto an inconceivable sight. Before me, little more than an arm’s length away, was the locomotive, stopped dead on the tracks. As I sat cold and motionless and with my eyes fused on the bewitching scene so close before me, the front of the locomotive began to crumple as if the staggering strength of steel was being pushed in by the finger of God.

The metal plates folded with astonishing ease as the gray, metallic shape of the locomotive was crushed beyond recognition. Shattered glass fragments, like a thousand daggers, jabbed towards me with deadly intent, but diverged inexplicably and safely around me as if I was seated in a protective viewing bubble, casually observing the catastrophic destruction at arm’s length.

As the front of the behemoth collapsed into itself like a car smashing into a cement pole, the rear of the locomotive rose into the night sky, higher and higher.

The thunderous noise of devastation was accompanied by the stinging smell of burning steel and sparks and scraping metal. My heaven of brilliant light had transformed into a blazing furor of unimaginable hell.

Then, in the darkness beyond the rising diesel engine, the train’s other carriages dashed into view. The wheeled coal carts poked out from all sides behind the locomotive. One rose even higher than the engine and towered into the darkness.

The sound was excruciating, impaling the shadows without contrition. I wanted to unlock my hands – still viced in my lap like inseparable lovers – to block my ears. But I could not move. I was mesmerized, entranced by the stunning display of light and sound and absolute mayhem.

What had felt like minutes, transpired in mere seconds and the chaos of demolition and decimation abruptly gave way to an unnerving silence. As the insufferable roar of noise trailed away along the tracks, the night was swiftly blanketed by an uncanny desolation.

I felt suddenly petrified.

What was more concerning though, was that I wasn’t dead. The mammoth locomotive had come and inexplicably stopped frozen on the tracks, a mere breath in front of me. Metal and fire and glass exploded around me with all the violence of total annihilation and yet, not a scratch or splinter marked my body. I had felt encapsulated in the palm of God as the devil danced around me. As the symphony of destruction had passed, I sat on those tracks alone, with carnage strewn everywhere, but I wasn’t hurt or in pain or dead.

I was very much alive – and I shouldn’t have been.

The confusion played tirelessly on my mind. So many questions bombarded my still-very-much-ticking brain, that I couldn’t reason a single answer into reality.

How could this happen?

How did the train stop in an instant?

And why wasn’t I dead?

My first movement was in my neck muscles. As if my body released from a magical trance, I suddenly felt human again – earthly – and the blood massaging my backbone inspired me to twist my head.

All around, I saw small fires sparkling in the shadow of night, creating the illusion of miniature spherical worlds in a universe of darkness. Debris of every imaginable geometry and size inhabited the alien landscape around me. Glass, metal, rubber-tubing, wheels, axles and even engine parts layered the ground like some weird science-fiction wonderland. Shreds of deformed steel – metallic limbs torn from the locomotive – crawled halfway up the surrounding escarpment, trying in vain to escape the battleground.

I had never seen such ruin.

Instinct suddenly quaked my body with strength and resolve. My intuition was telling me I needed to shift my butt into gear, but I felt sluggish, drugged by the stupor of disconcertment. I still didn’t understand why I was alive. I didn’t understand anything. The unbelievable seconds had passed in slow-motion and, at that moment, I also moved with lead in my bones.

My desire for gruesome self-destruction had brought me resolutely to the arena of carnage, but with fortitude renewed in my ticker, all I wanted was to bolt from the turmoil. It was the only sane idea I could wrestle from the anarchy in my head.

I pulled my hands apart, twisted my torso towards the darkness behind me and turned my back on death.

I had betrayed my own deadly sin.

My body wanted to scramble, to run away as far and as fast as my tired and leaden-legs would let me.

As I thumped my hands down and assumed a start-line position like a focused athlete in a sprint, the wooden railway sleeper that I gripped felt cold to touch. I was ready to go and I looked up the length of the track into the gloom.

And then, I saw the most unexpected sight I could never have imagined.

Only a few feet away, centered on the railway tracks, stood a presence… a person…

A man!

Both his arms were raised to chest height and extended towards me – towards the carnage. The man’s gloved palms were open and his fingers spread. He wore a full-length coat that flowed with angelic grace in the stiffening breeze, like the cape of a superhero, and I wondered, for an instant, if I was dead and God was standing there and had decided to go gothic for the occasion.

Miserably, the airflow felt too chilled and the stench of wrecked metal around me was too sickening – I was definitely alive and it definitely wasn’t God standing there.

The mysterious man’s face was hidden by a tied fabric and a black, wide-brimmed hat pushed down to his eyebrows. The man’s barely-visible eyes were the only evidence that he was, in fact, human.

I sensed those eyes were locked with my own, but I could not clearly see them in the darkness.

It was a strange feeling, surreal even.

My arms wanted to reach out towards the silhouetted man, but again, a crippling shutdown of my ability to move left me crouched like a statue, still poised to set off on my sprint. How foolish I must have looked.

A shriek of crashing metal jerked my attention away from the man’s gaze and I couldn’t defeat the temptation to look behind. The coal carriage that had peaked into the night sky and suspended itself perilously atop the mangled locomotive, lost its battle with gravity. It crashed to the ground and found a new nest amongst the scattered coal.

My glimpse away was for the briefest of moments, but when I turned back towards the man, he was gone – vanished. I could not see him clambering up the rocky incline or running into the darkness down the tracks. He had literally disappeared.

New and surprising sounds began to emerge from the shambles behind me, including a disgruntled, raspy voice. Bloody hell, was the utterance, or something like that.

I turned. Towards the rear of the mangled locomotive, I saw a door swing open on a single remaining hinge. It flapped momentarily, and then tumbled onto a pile of scrap on the ground beneath it.

It was the train driver.

Instantly, I knew I had to get nicked. Guilt delayed my departure for a breath or two as I wondered if I should help the driver, but when a forceful leg kicked from the wreck, followed by a second volley of verbal abuse, I knew he was okay.

Everything started to happen faster. I not only heard the hissing and whining of the train wreck, but the sirens of distant emergency vehicles groaned louder with each flurry of cool breeze. Faint voices gathered overhead on the embankment either side of the tracks as the world around me came to view the fallout of my battle with the devil.

Move Sara, I thought.

I pushed off with one hand still on the railway sleeper and the other grasped tightly on the cold steel rail line. There weren’t many options for fleeing. I could either scamper up the rocky slope or run like a rabbit down the tracks and hope the blackness of night would shroud me from the crowds.

I did a bit of both.

My gut told me to run. I hated it when it did that. I staggered into the obscuring gloom, sucking volumes of air into my lungs. All I savored was metal – tiny floating particles from the mayhem trying to escape, like I was.

After sprinting uncomfortably on the uneven railway sleepers – and unable to breathe – I crossed the gravel beside the tracks and jumped onto the embankment, clawing my talons into the beige-earth to stop sliding back down. The escarpment rose at a steep angle to the height of a house.

I had some work to do.

I urged myself on like a spider-woman and crawled upwards. The rocks cut my hands and scraped my knees, but the adrenalin gushing through me suppressed my doubts and my pain just enough.

I reached the top quicker than I expected and pulled myself awkwardly over the top.

The cool damp grass on which I found myself was a soft and relieving resting place after the rocks and the metal and glass. The air tasted crisp, pure and it soothed my throbbing lungs. Laying on my back, sucking in the pleasure, I saw the stars again and an unexpected reminder that I had come to the arena to die, metaphorically poked me in the heart.

Ouch, again!

I threw my hands to my chest to make sure I was still breathing. My lungs sucked in air like a Hoover, but something was missing. Nanna’s silver-cross necklace.

I wanted to cry, but found no more strength for even that. I loved that necklace. Nanna would be so disappointed in me.

How could I lose it?

Devastated at my loss, I sat up and my grief was quickly deflected to what I saw.

For the first time, the extent of destruction I had caused became frighteningly clear. It was awful.

What had I done?

How could this happen?

How did the train stop?

A little way down the track to my right, I saw the locomotive. It was crushed at the front so extensively, that the length of the locomotive had halved, pushed into itself like a squashed marshmallow. The force of the impact must have been incredible, but I couldn’t comprehend what the locomotive had collided with to cause the destruction.

Was it me? Impossible.

Behind the locomotive, the carriages lay jack-knifed, twisted and overturned. Some had broken free from their coupling and cart-wheeled up the embankment. Coal was strewn over every inch and into every crevice. It looked as if Satan had dropped his secret stash of black marbles and blanketed the ground like some twisted, dark-winter moonscape.

The faint voices I had heard, gathered into a chorus of disbelief as the shadows of people emerged from everywhere to see the incredible panorama. The bewildered train driver stood alone beside his wounded engine, scratching his bald head – his mouth agape. He looked more confused than I felt. Red and blue flashing lights strobed in the nearby tree tops, announcing the imminent arrival of fire engines, paramedics and the police. The police. I needed to get going again.

I glimpsed one more time at the metallic bloodbath and let the image sear into the back of my eye sockets. I wasn’t likely to forget the view in a hurry. It was quite some view. My legs felt broken they were so tired, but somehow, I dragged myself away and let the darkness swallow me.

As I staggered aimlessly into the shadows of shrubs and trees, my perplexity about the train and the instantaneous end to its journey was overwhelmed by just one thought…

The man.

Who was he?

Where had he gone?

What role did he play in my not being dead?

I had felt his anonymous stare. I had seen his unwavering hands and yet, I knew nothing.

His mystery haunted me as I stepped sluggishly onwards into the unknown. A strange longing bewitched me as I scampered through the darkness. It wasn’t the desire of a warm bath or a soft bed or even a comforting embrace from mom – I definitely didn’t want that. No. New Sara wanted only one thing…

To know more about the man who had saved me from death!

Chapter 4

Three days later, misery crawled back into my veins with frightening voraciousness and my hatred resumed. Mom refused to drive me to school because she suddenly had an appointment.

Helen. Bitch.

My hands still ached bitterly from the scrapes and bruises. I couldn’t even hold a pen, and so I still had not finished my analytical essay on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Worse, a monstrosity of a zit, the size of Vesuvius, was erupting in the middle of my forehead, transforming me into some sort of mythical beast.

Still, it should have been worse. I should be dead.

Questions continued to surge through my head like caffeine-grogged worms in a vegetable garden.

What the hell had happened?

How?

Who, or what, was the silhouette with the freaky hat?

I was no mechanical expert, but I knew trains didn’t just stop dead, normally.

My eyes had stared at death, tasted its bitter solace, and stumbled within a breath of its deliverance and yet, there I was, sitting in Mr. Dobson’s English class, still whole – mentally fractured, sure – but my dance with the devil had not taken my lifeblood, as I had selfishly hoped.

And as it should have done.

Secretly scrutinizing the horde of gleeful faces around me, I wondered if any of them, in their consummate and untainted private universes, had any idea of the blue-devils screaming inside my head. Not many of them liked me. I didn’t really know why. Mom once told me that I failed to make enough of an effort with people.

My fifth year of High School was two days from being over. Holidays. The time had gone quick up until I discovered mom was a lying, cheating lesbian. Prior to that little gem of a find, I was averaging somewhere amongst… well… the average.

My previous essay had come back with a myriad of suggestions – improvements. But Mr. Dobson had exercised some generosity in awarding the grade. I needed him to be just as forgiving with the current work: Draw comparisons between Ridley Scott’s science fiction epic and Aldous Huxley’s text, Brave New World.

"Mr. Dobson? When it says draw, I’m thinking you won’t let me literally draw, right?" I had asked, when I received the assignment.

"No, Sara. It’s an essay!"

It’s not that I was a bonehead, I was just so much better at drawing stuff. Mrs. Repich, my art teacher, loved me. She had returned each assignment of the past year with heartfelt encouragement.

…Sara?

It took a while for my whacked-out brain to register someone called my name. My ears were telling me it was a boy, but it took ages to for the signal to travel up to my cerebral sponge and smack my cognition.

Sara? he asked again, with all the confidence of a pumpkin.

I finally looked up and may have smiled, but it wasn’t a conscious display of endorsement. The boy hesitated, waiting for a more resolute sign of affirmation that was never going to come.

Do you mind if I sit next to you? he asked.

Dillon Arkman. He was only a little older than I was, but a typical DIG – Digital Imagination Generation. He loved his computer at the expense of any social genius. Dillon was more like a character from one of his games, which I imagined was a sneer he would actually find flattering.

He loved tracksuits, but not sporty Nike or Adidas. Dillon was more into stuff that his mom made for him at home. Not that I had anything against that. Hell! At least his mom created stuff, as opposed to mine, who was more apt at destruction.

I continued to stare up at him without talking. His features were plain, like his tracksuit. He did have a tinge of boyish-charm, but his geekiness defined his character – and that of his friends.

At least he had friends. Dillon was doing better than I was in Mr. Dobson’s English class.

Sara? he asked a third time.

Oh, for God’s sake, I snapped, sit down already.

I thought he might run home, but like a nervous jittery-bug, he sat beside me. I saw his hands trembling, and I felt a sudden and unexpected empathetic connection. His subtle expression of fear reminded me of three nights earlier when my hands had also shuddered. Fear was a common link between all of us, no matter what brand tracksuit we wore.

Sorry, I said, belatedly.

But Dillon did not respond.

I really was sorry. At least, I believed that I was.

As Mr. Dobson walked into the classroom with his usual authoritative resolve, I felt my familiar fear twine around me, itching to bully its roots into my veins and upset me. A tall and stocky Abraham Lincoln-esque man, Mr. Dobson spoke with antiquated eloquence and grandeur. He loved to teach. It was obvious in his voice. His passion captivated a class when he recounted one of his many anecdotes with unmatched bluster. Some days I thought he believed he was Abraham Lincoln – a scholar of the students, by the students, for the students.

The prominent English teacher placed his brown-leather satchel onto his desk and couldn’t help but propel himself into a yarn. His story was interesting enough. Something about a doco that had hijacked his attention on television about the life of ants, and how it had reminded him of a Utopian society. He gave old Aldous Huxley a run for his money.

My mind should have paid more attention and fought off its desire to think about the despicable with more heroic intent, but I couldn’t do it.

I sneaked a drawing-compass from my green pencil case into my right hand and then crossed my arms to hide the macabre pleasure I was about to get high on.

I pressed the sharp, metal compass point gently against the soft skin on the inside of my forearm. It didn’t prick the skin. It felt more like a thorn. But the pressure was enough to frenzy the endorphins in my brain to besiege my fears.

The human body was amazing that way. It responded flawlessly to protect itself. It healed from within. If the body became punctured and broken, it regenerated blood cells at remarkable speed, and grew its own skin to heal the wound. And if the mind foundered in sadness, it released happy chemicals to take up the fight. Those happy chemicals – the endorphins – had become my best friend in just three months.

My only friend.

As the enzymes streamed through me, my mind fractured away from the English class and away from Dillon, whom I sensed was awkwardly inching closer.

Mr. Dobson’s voice slowly faded to silence and, without deliberate want, I dreamed my way to being alone, back in mom’s study