Deceased Estate by Geoff Shearer

"YOU can't defame the dead. Actually, you shouldn't defame the dead. You see they have this torturous way of seeking recompense. And it can get quite bloody."

PROLOGUE

JUNE 9, 1989

THE days of innocence are balanced by nights where the coldness of being alone picks stealthily into your fears. It is best to sleep ... to close your eyes to it all. And so, whenever mummy turned out the light, little Sophie would squeeze her eyes shut until they hurt, until the blackness that shocked her bedroom was lost within its own intangibility ... until her lungs decided to work again.

Sophie McAdams, 6, was a good girl. Her daddy called her his "little bundle of joy"; while mummy had a million cute names for her – "sweetykins, gorgy-worgy, angel, pumpkin, preciouskins" – millions of them. Her dad sold new cars at the "mega wega lot" and her mum made cakes, kazillions of cakes!

Many a Sunday, Sophie and her older brother Joshie were spirited off to grandma's while mummy and daddy went off to fight fires and create firebreaks and other exciting things that were far too dangerous for her to attend. In her eyes they were more like international spies or superheroes than volunteer fire brigade members.

She'd proudly boasted a couple of years back that her parents were "fallen tears", until grandma had corrected her diction: "They're volunteers, dear. Volun teers."

"What an absolute idgiot." Joshie had spat at her in the afternoon sun in grandma's back yard, with a typical single-digit years' worth of worldliness in his voice.

Unrepentant, Sophie had continued: "Fallen tears, fighting fires with their bared hands!" And skipped off back into the garden with a screw-top jar and its contents of captured ladybeetles held aloft to one side ...

In the blackness of the earthy pit she now found herself in, Sophie could imagine those fires as her brave mummy and daddy told them to GO AWAY.

They looked touchable as they shimmered in the air. At first glowing in front, then surrounding her and the blackness she was in until it transformed into a "real" landscape. She could imagine the fires raging and crackling, before hissing and retreating like scolded snakes, or scalded snakes, as her brave mummy and daddy sprayed water over them. GO AWAY. She could imagine the heat of the fires even though the unseen four walls around her were radiating a chilly numbness.

She could imagine her brave mummy smiling. A black smear across her forehead, her hair sweaty and flecked with white ash as her brave daddy kissed her on the cheek and told her "well done" before he turned and strode off to battle another raging front of flame. Mummy smiling. Mummy holding her little preciouskins by the shoulders as she told her "well done". Well done for waiting patiently to be rescued. Well done for not crying. Congratulations on being a "big girl", a "brave girl", a "real champion".

The only problem was Sophie didn't feel like that. She just wanted something, someone, to stop the wretched feeling of desperation that sunk into her - like fingers did as they dug into warm play dough – and which threatened to tear her little body to pieces.

Go ...

... away.

She just wanted a hug.

* * *

Sophie had no concept of time. It felt like weeks, but was it just days? Or was it even just one long, stupid, stupidly long hour?

All she could make sense of was that a lot of time had passed since she'd fallen.

There had been a half light from a thunderous rainy sky on the day she fell.