Demons by Wayne Macauley Read Free Book Online

mirror-smooth lake.
She knew where the key was, under the rock, and let herself in.
    The cottage smelled shut up and musty—her uncle had been sick in hospital lately
and had let the property go—but Elena soon threw open the windows and doors to let
the sea breeze in. She spent that first evening eating the woody carrots she’d pulled
out of the garden (they must have self-seeded, as had an ad hoc mix of potatoes,
pumpkins and spinach), sitting on a kitchen chair outside the front door looking
at the pelicans skimming the lake and listening to the surf on the other side of
the bar. The sunset was beautiful. She slept that night a peaceful sleep and woke
for the first time in months without a headache.
    The cottage sat on a small hill above the lake that fed through a narrow channel
into the sea. The upper reaches of the lake branched out into rivers and creeks,
poking their way up, narrower and narrower, into the high mountains behind. (She
and her brother had gone with her uncle one day up one of these rivers, paddling
and then dragging their canoes until, high up, they reached the source.) There was
a grassy slope below the house with a few tea-tree bushes on it and a clump of denser
tea-tree where the land met the water. The nearest house was half a kilometre away.
At night you could hear the seagulls squawking and the possums scratching in the
roof, and beneath all that, like a low drone, the sea. Aside from the occasional
sound of a car gearing down to get up the hill on the far side of the point, there
was nothing human out there.
    The house was built in the eighties from scavenged timber and tin, and the furniture
and fittings all dated from that time. The next morning, after curling up on the
couch in a sleeping-bag she found rolled up in the top cupboard, Elena set to work
cleaning the house and getting rid of anything she might be allergic to: the clock
radio beside the double bed, the portable radio on top of the fridge, the microwave
oven, the television, all the old soaps and shampoos and other toiletries from the
bathroom; the synthetic curtains, cushions and bed linen. She put all this stuff
out in the shed where her uncle kept his boat, the junk he had collected and the
timbers and windows left over from when the house was built. She left the fridge
in the kitchen—it was too heavy to move—but she didn’t turn it on. Last of all she
gave the house a clean from top to bottom, but with warm water only, heated on the
old wood stove, using a cotton singlet. There was a packet of beeswax candles in
the bottom drawer in the kitchen and one by one she set these candles around the
house.
    That afternoon she went into the garden, wearing the old straw hat she found in the
shed, and started pulling out weeds. It felt good out there. It was one thing, she
thought, to be told you can’t tolerate anything new and artificial and that you must
be among only natural things, but it was another to live it. She felt an energy,
a vigour, she’d not felt in ages. Even her mood had changed; she was no longer grumpy,
pissed off with everyone, disillusioned about who she was; she just was , here, now,
out in the garden, under the sun, pulling weeds on this bright day. And always, above,
behind, beyond all this was the soothing sound of the sea, so unlike the things in
the box with the rubber band around it ( Without me how will you wash your hair? Without
me how will you drive your car? Without me how will you be entertained? ) that to
think of it swelled her soul to twice its normal size.
    She spent a good while out in the garden, she seemed to have slipped through a hole
in time and come out at a place where clocks didn’t count; the day stretched out
in front of her; she felt vibrant, alive. When she was tired she’d sit down on the
step; when she felt like digging, she’d dig. The soil was sandy loam and the spade
cut it easily; before she knew it she had, as well as weeding the five beds already
there, dug out the