There in the Black Dust

By B G Rees

Seventeen-year-old Liv Warner is being followed by crows no one else can see.

Their dark eyes watch her, study her, waiting for or wanting something, and when they beat their wings, the world changes.

Powder, fine and black as soot, falls from their wings, figures writhing and screaming within. It covers everything; the bushes, the people, houses. Everything but Liv.

In that black dust, she sees them; the murdered women with their broken bones and bleeding wounds. They tell Liv of their killer. They call him Mags. They remind Liv of her mother, also murdered and discarded. Left to rot.

Liv has to help them.

At first, Liv only sees that black dust when the crows show her, but soon that stuff starts creeping in everywhere, and that can’t possibly be good.

When Liv sees a classmate in that dust and finds out the truth about the dead girls, she realises stopping Mags is going to be much harder than she thought, and finding him seems impossible...

• Language: English
• Publisher: B G Rees
• Release date: May 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005130428

B G Rees

B G Rees lives in regional Victoria, Australia, where it once snowed for 30 whole minutes. She lives with her partner, Ava the White Swiss Shepherd and Echo the Ninja Cat.In her spare time, if she's not writing or reading, she'll be online playing World of Warcraft.

Book preview

There in the Black Dust

By

B G Rees

Copyright 2022 B G Rees

Smashwords Edition

Cover done by GetCovers 2023

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Chapter One: The Girl Under the Bush

Chapter Two: Nicole

Chapter Three: Present

Chapter Four: Party

Chapter Five: Older

Chapter Six: Alive

Chapter Seven: Mags

Chapter Eight: Harper

Chapter Nine: After

Chapter Ten: Heartbeat

About the Author

Other titles by B G Rees

Chapter One:

The Girl Under the Bush

I reached out to turn off the infomercials that droned softly, constantly, like the background score of a movie. I glanced at dad sleeping on the couch. His eyes were closed, but I felt his accusatory stare, as if he’d known I was about to turn the TV off and let the silence in. I paused, remote in hand.

Better leave it.

I dropped the remote back on the table, then picked the vacuum cleaner back up. I still had the lounge to finish, but movement at the window caught my eye.

A crow was perched on the speed limit sign in our front yard, staring at me like it wanted something. It tilted its head and fixed me with one dark and depthless eye. That sharp-looking beak opened and closed, its call muted by the glass. It stared down at the big black 50 on the sign as if wondering its meaning.

Two more flew in to perch next to the other. They sat side by side, wing to wing, eyes shiny obsidian beads tracking me. I froze. Couldn’t take my eyes off them.

I stumbled over the cleaner hose to open the window. I had to hear them, had to know what they were saying. I winced as the wood frame squealed. The crows’ pleas came through the flywire, each separately, as if sectioned off by the tiny wire squares.

Whadya looking at, Liv?

Nothing, dad. I snatched my hand away from the window frame. Sorry if I woke you.

Sorry if I woke you had become my catchphrase, and I said it now without thinking. Dad rolled over onto his back, eyes closed, and flung one arm over his head. He still wore the uniform shirt with his name braided over the pocket, though he hadn’t worked at Rodd’s Auto in a couple of years.

I leaned against the window and turned my ear towards the flywire. It was as if those birds spoke to me, a language I could understand if only I tried.

One of them spread its wings and beat them against the air. A fine black dust fell from them, as if they were disintegrating. The dust drifted in a lazy swirl, and shapes and figures I almost recognised danced through it.

I drew closer, moulding myself to the window. Those figures weren’t dancing; they were writhing, pain stretching their faces thin. They were torn apart in agony, only to be reformed again and again in the dust. I wanted to save them and run from them at the same time.

They faded as the dust fell, disappeared as it did. When I looked back to the sign the crows were gone. Beneath it were three piles of glittering dust that soon vanished, scattered by the breeze. The sound of those cries was fading, forgotten. Why had I thought of them as pleas, as if they were asking something of me?

I finished the lounge and dismantled the cleaner as dad snored lightly on the couch. A corner of something poked out of his pocket. The photo. The one he took out when he thought no one was watching. My mum at Eighty Mile Beach where we used to go as a family.

Hoarding that photo was the only thing that made him seem like a real person to me. A person with feelings who could miss someone who was gone. Mostly he was just a cardboard cut-out who sat or slept on the couch; an actor who didn’t believe in his part. Who left his empty bottles on the floor there like an offering to some ancient beer god.

Did he even notice someone took them away?

Everything rushed in on me, crashed over me, drowned me in waves of silence, their muted power broken only by the whispers of but wait there’s more, and the clinking of empty bottles. I had to get out.

I left the cleaner, went down the hall and out the front door. I slammed it behind me, the boom echoing against the emptiness inside the house. My breath hitched and a small sound escaped me.

I hurried across the road without looking and crashed into the nature reserve. Long grass poked at me and bushes slapped at me until I found a track. It was littered with empty bottles and rubbish, dirty and sodden, faded from the sun.

I veered off onto the smaller track I thought of as my own, towards the brook that trickled through the back of the reserve. The track climbed to a rocky outcrop that hung over the shallow water. There I could lay on that sun-warmed stone face and pretend there was nothing more in the world than the rock and the brook.

I tried to ignore the crows that followed me.

They watched as I passed, eyes dark, feathers shimmering blue in the sunlight. Their unwavering stares were the itchy sensation of ant feet crawling across my skin.

The track became a stage on which I performed in front of a hostile audience, critics who judged my every move. Then the bush pulled back from the path and my audience watched from up high, perched on the branches of gum trees.

I was about to climb to my rock when the first crow swooped me, flicking my hair as it passed. I thought only magpies swooped – and only then to protect their babies. I’d never heard of crows doing that. When another flew at me, I put my arms up to cover my face. I spun to watch it go and another one buzzed past.

Two flew at me, hovering in front of my face, their huge wings beating a wind strong enough to blow my hair back. The sun shrank as the sky darkened. Lightning tore through it like tears through paper, as if the sky was scrunched up in invisible hands and shredded into pieces. The steady rip of thunder vibrated my bones.

Dust began to fall from the crows’ wings in a familiar pattern. Figures writhing, screaming. Shapes gliding just beneath the surface. Shadows of unseen monsters.

I recoiled from them as that dust fell over everything, black and fine, like sand. The world greyed and seemed to turn with a guttural groan, as if shifting on its foundation, grinding and unwilling.

Those big, black birds were covered in that black stuff; two charcoaled pieces of firewood. A touch would turn them to dust and they would crumble.

A mob of kangaroos thumped down a parallel track. Three, no four of them, grey with that dust; their backs, their heads, as if they were statues forgotten on a shelf no one cleaned. They moved through a world of ash layered in greys.

I was the only thing unaffected, as if the dust would not stick to me. The one real thing here, a-

beacon of life in an endless darkness

A beacon? Where had that thought come from? And why did it make me so uneasy? I glanced around the bush, seeing furtive movement behind every tree, feeling watched by things with dreadful needs and urgent, alien hunger.

Paranoia. Overdramatic much? There was nothing there.

Dust blew across the path in an absent wind. Every tree, bush, and rock bled dust, as if they were slowly disintegrating.

A space around me cleared. The sandy path my feet touched and the green of the banksia bushes my legs brushed emerged, as if my body had wiped a clear patch in a dirty window. The banksia crowded the path like onlookers at an accident scene, and there underneath them beside the track I saw something.

There in the black dust, I saw her. Hair, spun in red and gold in the half-light that dappled the path. Fingers half-buried beneath the sand. Her body mostly covered in leaves and bushes, as if she’d been shoved under one and left to rot.

I smelt her.

Ripe and rich; it made me gag. I crept closer. I had some vague idea that I’d know her. That I should look at her face so I could identify her.

I squashed the fleeting thought that it was my mother. That somewhere she too had lain rotting and forgotten, an afterthought. Left to die alone, knowing no one would save her and she’d never see her family again.

Just like this girl.

The girl under the bush’s skin must have been pale and creamy once, but now it was rudely stained with a dark rot. Her eyelashes were long and sandy coloured, her face lightly freckled.

When she opened her eyes, I stopped breathing.

The crows continued to beat their wings. The sound merged with the pounding of my heart, synchronised so well I couldn’t tell them apart.

Her eyes clouded over. But, even as cataracts corrupted that lovely blue, she opened her mouth and spoke.

He found me at the bus stop, under the roof, deafened by the rain.

The sound of her voice was like the sound of sand being poured from one glass to another, as if her lungs were filled with that black dust and they pushed it through her vocal cords as she spoke.

Her sadness and loss was a kick in the gut that had me gasping for air. Her face began to turn grey. At first I thought it was more dead rot. She seemed to have just been uncovered, and the air was finally working its sweet decay on her skin. But it was the dust. She was turning to dust.

The banksias too were turning to dust, and that corruption crept across the sandy path toward me. She whipped a hand out and snapped it around my leg. I squealed and tried to back away.

Where her hand pressed against my skin, the dust started to spread. My calf, my ankle, and my foot turned grey and a coldness, an absence, as if I was no longer there, spread up my leg. When my toes started to crumble, I had to look away. A hallucination. That’s all it was.

She spoke again, but I barely listened.

He said his name was Mags.

I was fixed in place, petrified like wood. My bones replaced with stone, my blood changed to dust, my tissues turned to ash. I tasted that ash in my mouth, thick and dry.

Then her face crumbled and collapsed. The rest of her followed and soon there was only ash. Or dust. Or sand. Whatever that stuff was.

The crows’ wings beat one last time and then were still. The silence was so deep it was offensive. I felt as if my heart had stopped beating, the two sounds had been so closely entwined.

The dust blew away in the last wind of those wings and left a world full of light and garish colour, as if it had scoured away any ordinary Earthly dullness. The sand was too bright, illuminated in the sunlight like a spill of molten metal. The greens were too green, the blues too vivid. The sky cleared and the lightning and thunder stopped as quickly as it had started.

I wiggled my toes in my thongs; ten.

Beneath the banksia bushes, a pile of dust in the vague shape of a girl was being pulled apart by the wind. The crows too were gone, turned to piles of ash.

I was alone.

*

I had to tell someone. I had to get her help. Not rescue. It was too late for that. She was lost, confused. If people knew what happened to her maybe she could be in peace.

I ran back through the bush as if the crows were still swooping me. Dad and I didn’t have a phone so I had to go to our neighbour’s, Mrs Ryder. I banged on her front door breathing hard, pain machine-stitched into my side.

Olivia, what’s the matter?

I found a girl. In the bush.

Tears pricked my eyes. I blinked hard and swallowed, trying to hold it in.

She’s dead. I found a girl in the bush and she’s dead.

Where? Mrs Ryder gently took hold of my elbow and pulled me inside.

She put her arm around my shoulders, the way my sister, Beck, used to when I was upset. It was unnerving. Awkward. She let go as soon as I was inside, as if I was too hot to touch. Or too cold.

Near the brook. There’s an overhang where I- I broke off.

She didn’t need to know I liked to lay there and think about better things. I wasn’t freaked out enough to babble.

She was just before the brook, under some bushes.

Mrs Ryder sat me on the couch in the front room and left me there. I stared out the window at her letterbox and, beyond that, the empty road. The nice normal corner where Jared and I met each weekday to walk to school.

On the other side of the road was the reserve. The verge where tufted, untidy grass gave way to low scrub, which, in turn, gave way to the slim silver trunks of gumtrees. Somewhere over there she lay, alone now. Again.

Mrs Ryder was in the kitchen calling the police.

I’d found a dead girl in the bush. A dead girl. In the nature reserve where I went every week, alone. Had she just been walking those tracks the way I did, when- No.

He found me at the bus stop

What bus stop though?

The one on the road outside the reserve? Or one further away? I supposed it could be anywhere. If you were going to murder someone you probably wouldn’t dump their body near where you took them from. I guess.

He said his name was Mags

It was distinctive, but it meant nothing to me. It sounded like a nickname. The police would never believe the girl under the bush told me. I’d have to keep it to myself. But what if it could help them find him?

The police are on their way. Mrs Ryder came back in and hovered over me. Do you want to wait here with me? I could come out with you when-

No. I stood up. Thank you. For calling. I better go talk to my dad.

You seem very upset, and no wonder! Are you sure you-

Yes, I’ll be fine.

She nodded. Well, I’ll be here if you need me.

Thank you, I said, and went home, letting myself in through the front door.

Dad had been on the couch when I left but now it was empty. More offerings waited at the end of it on the floor. I sat there where he normally sat so I could watch the road, watch for the police.

I didn’t know where he went. I never knew. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, I worked at The Pizza Spot after school. I bought food with the money I made. If I didn’t we’d never have any. Dad must find money somehow for whatever he drinks, but I didn’t know where from. I didn’t want to ask and I didn’t want to know.

Finally, a police car pulled up between Mrs Ryder’s place and ours. I went out the front to meet them.

Hi.

Hello. Olivia, is it? The first one asked as he got out of the car.

I nodded. His teeth were neat and straight, only one slightly more prominent than the others. So, probably natural. They weren’t exactly white but they were clean; he brushed regularly.

I’m Sergeant Clarke, and this is Constable Jarrett. He nodded to his partner, then turned back to me. You found the girl?

Yes. I can show you where.

They both stared at me, watched me. They reminded me of the crows. Beady eyes following my every move.

No, it’s best if you wait here. You just tell us where and we’ll go have a look.

I explained the way to the brook and described the bushes where I found her. They headed into the reserve side by side. That made me think of the crows again, perched on the speed sign in our front yard. Side by side, wing to wing.

I shuddered.

You okay, Olivia? Mrs Ryder came up beside me.

I knew she wanted to put her arm around me again, but I didn’t look at her. Didn’t give her an invitation.

Yeah.

She turned to look at the house. Where’s your dad?

I shrugged. He should be home soon.

I’ll wait with you.

I wanted to say I didn’t need her to, but I knew from her tone she wasn’t asking. If I told her to go she wouldn’t. I didn’t know why she felt she had to look after me. I’d been doing fine looking after myself up until now.

It was so quiet, waiting there on the street. Is that what the dead girl listened to? Silence while the world passed her in hushed and reverent tones? Is that all that’s waiting for us after we pass? Silence? A magpie warbled nearby breaking the spell. At least it wasn’t a crow.

The officers were gone a long time, maybe forty-five minutes or so. We waited in the front yard without speaking. We could have gone inside and sat down, but I kept expecting them to show up any moment, and Mrs Ryder was sticking with me no matter what.

Finally, the blue of their uniforms flickered through the trees. They walked slowly and talked between them. Sergeant Clarke had an open notebook in one hand and a pen in the other.

Olivia, can you tell me again where you saw the girl? he asked as they reached us.

Under a banksia bush beside the track, near the brook and the overhanging rock.

He watched me closely as I told him, as if I was lying and he was looking for tells.

We didn’t find anything there, Constable Jarrett said.

I don’t know what you mean. Though I did.

Of course I did.

Crows that shed magic dust, worlds that shift, and a dead body that talks about the man who murdered it. It hadn’t happened; it can’t have happened. But it’d seemed so real. How could I have made up something like that? Just made it up, out of nothing?

There was no body, and no sign there ever was a body there. Constable Jarrett said, his eyes cold, his mouth a grim line.

Tell me what you saw, Olivia, Sergeant Clarke said. The fence sagged under his weight as he leant on it.

I told them about the girl with red hair, fair skin, and blue eyes. I didn’t tell them about Mags and the bus stop. There’d be no question then, for them, that I’d lied. Or worse; seen something that wasn’t there.

Why don’t we go inside, sit down and talk about this, Sergeant Clarke said.

He followed me into the house with Constable Jarrett and Mrs Ryder behind him. The sergeant and the constable sat on the couch,

side by side

glanced at dad’s offerings and then at each other. Mrs Ryder stood by the front door looking like her worst childhood nightmare had come true; the music had stopped and she had no chair.

I’ll stay if that’s all right, Sergeant. Olivia’s dad has gone out for the afternoon, I think it’s best she has an adult she knows present.

Of course. He nodded to the armchair next to the couch. "Olivia, why don’t you sit down and tell