Fireshadow Read Online Free PDF

heat grew strangely muted as Vinnie weaved between the crumbling remnants of the old prison camp. Very little remained, just some concrete foundations and a few low stone walls. Grass covered the clear areas of ground, but much was already tangled and overgrown. The old town site, where he had camped, seemed shunned by the forest, but the same was not true here. Jarrah saplings, already well on the way to two-hundred-year adulthood, were interspersed among the ruins, bringing with them clumps of dappled shade and undergrowth and attendant wildlife. Tiny birds picked and hopped, and the buzz and drone of insects played a constant background to the morning.
    A quiet unease edged into his mind as he walked. This place had a sense about it. Once he wouldn’t have been aware of it, but now there it was, a fluttering awareness, unsettling the calm he was chasing.
    At one corner of the camp the stump of a jarrah that had once served as a guard tower stood alone in a clearing. The tree itself was long dead, its life severed when its crown was cut off to leave a base for a platform, years since removed. Still, the trunk had endured, had kept solemn vigil over the departure and decay of the camp. Its wood was marked in the places where iron rungs had once been hammered into the living timber.
    Men lived here, thought Vinnie, studying the tower. Lived and worked and died here, in the bush, and the real prison wasn’t the rows of wire and the spotlights and the armed guards. The real prison was the forest itself. He studied it; pressing in, always there, beyond the perimeter, alive, dark and threatening.
    A cloud drifted across the face of the sun, and the sharp relief of the morning faded into haziness. In Vinnie’s imagination young men, soldiers of foreign armies, marched through the muddy trails of the Australian forest, cowed and startled by its brooding atmosphere.
    Under a clump of scrub at the far end of the camp a blackened, unnatural mass caught his attention, almost missed in the quiet of the morning. Coils and coils of rusted barbed wire, lay exactly where they had been cast years ago, entwined and entangled now with native thorn creepers. The years had dulled the shine of the steel, pitted it with oxidised craters, but the knotted spikes still looked sharp, vicious.
    Crouching, Vinnie stretched a hesitant finger. The skin of his fingertips was still soft and pink and the spike left a small impression, a gentle dimple in the tender new flesh, and briefly Vinnie was a modern sleeping beauty, pricked by a spindle of darkness and falling into a cavern of sleep – descending through layers of thought and feeling into a dark cell of night – waiting for someone who would wake him and bring him back into the world, into a proper life, out from this half-world of shadows.
    It took some seconds for Vinnie to shake off the despair, to return to the world of the real. There were no fairytale spirits here. All that lingered in this place were the passing hopes of the men who had been brought here, lived for a while, and, in the way of things, moved on.
    Making his way back towards the trail, a patch of mossy ground stood out from the surrounding brush. A carpet in a small, shaded clearing that the forest had still not reclaimed, right at the edge of the site. Something about the velvety smudge of dark green was incongruous and Vinnie tried to work out exactly what.
    The sun emerged, the shallow contours of the ground fell again into perspective and Vinnie saw it clearly. The moss grew in the shape of a large heart – perfect in form and symmetry. It was not natural. The earth here had been shaped by human hands, and now that the image was clear Vinnie could see the remains of the rock border that had once bounded it.
    Strange to think that in this secluded corner of the bush someone had laboured to create this shape. For what purpose? As a symbol of lost love? Someone left behind, or killed in the war? Or was it