Flesh, like the mud, remembers.

Standing here with the mire up around his waist, pausing with shovel in hand, Grayson tries to ignore the electric tingle of ant feet under his skin as it spreads down his back all the way to his heels.

‘Problem?’ Melody asks.

There sure is, he feels like telling her. Grayson peers up at the looming, splotchy trunks of the lilly pilly trees, fearing the rainforest still retains the memory of what Father Delean did here. He fears the tree-ferns branching above might suddenly scream the truth right in their faces.

‘Nup,’ he lies, keeps digging.

After another half hour, he’s still come up with diddly squat. The hole, a metre by a metre in the memory mud, has started to feel like a grave. How it contours hungrily around him. When he asks Melody for a hand getting out, there’s a shrill edge to his voice which carries down the sloppy bank and echoes among the cinnamon wattles lining the urgent, silver rushing of Monbulk Creek.

He squirms and kicks free of the hole, then lays flat on his back a moment, absorbing the broken tops of mountain ash as they bob back and forth in the soothing winter wind. A relieved smile breaks open on his face. Melody hunkers in her woollen red flannel, already picking through the dirt he’s lobbed into a pile beside the exhumed earth.

‘What you got there?’

Rather than answer him, she takes her water bottle. Cleans the object in her muddy hand and picks off more chunks of earth.

‘Spearhead, maybe?’ he suggests.

‘Must be Bunurong. Shit me, imagine how old this is.’

After sitting up, wiping the sweat from his brow and tugging his black beanie back on, he trudges over and sits on the rock beside her. Arbored safely by the immense tree-ferns, packed away in a damp pocket of greenery, from here they can see the wide open dig site.

In comparison to this morning, this swatch of rainforest along the creek looks eerily unpeopled. Just an hour ago, there’d been seven of them. The other diggers and the ABC camera crew. The excavator which scooped at the earth where a boffin had lined in pink with his can of spray paint now sits forlorn without a driver.

Grayson had hung in there after the others left, especially once he saw Melody keep shovelling despite everyone else announcing they were done for the day.

Melody turns the ancient spearhead over in her hand now. ‘Dunno what I was expectin’ really.’

‘Kinda glad,’ Grayson admits. ‘That we didn’t find anything.’

She smiles at him, lifts the stone whittled into shape centuries ago. ‘But we did.’

‘You know what I mean.’

They were searching for bones. Human remains. A tenebrous dread, tight in their throats, had dogged their digging all day. Notorious pedophile priest Father Graham Delean had convinced the owners of this rainforest block – Melody’s parents – back in the eighties to let him use it as a youth camp for wayward boys. Chose certain boys, his favourites, to accompany him down to the creek. Some had never been seen again.

‘Yep,’ Melody admits, runs her fingers through her unwashed hair and then yanks on her beanie, far more worn and weathered than Grayson’s. ‘I know what ya mean.’

Grayson stares at the spearhead in her hand. ‘Going to keep that?’

She snaps out of her fugue, stares at the artefact sitting muddily in her palm. Tosses it back into the dirt. ‘Spose it could be a bit disappointing?’

He frowns. ‘Come again?’

‘No bones means no juicy details for ya podcast.’

Her voice has hardened when mentioning what he does for a living a couple of times already; Grayson’s learned not to take it personally. There were too many in the true crime community who’d overstepped boundaries. Lied and exploited. The best he can do is develop some genuine seal of trust between them. Do better where they’d done so much wrong.

‘I’d rather have no juicy details at all if it means we find out there aren’t really any kids buried down here after all.’

‘Sorry. That was unfair.’

He shrugs. ‘I didn’t think so.’

They step out from under the fecund overhang of lilly pilly trees and lean their shovels against the excavator for when they resume digging after the weekend.

They’ve just reached the messy far bank, climbing up through a wet smear of leaf-mash, when voices halt them in their tracks. They both look up to watch three high school kids, still with their dark blue blazers on, pick their way free of the red stringybarks on the far side of the dig site. There’s a mean lilt to their laughter which resounds among the forest heights.

‘Oi!’ Melody shocks Grayson by calling out.

All three boys go still, as if caught out scribbling something obscene on a toilet wall. They glare back at Melody and Grayson, then slowly relax. ‘Check it out,’ one of them says. ‘It’s that crazy bitch from town.’

‘How many times do ya need to be told?! Fucken stay outa there!’

‘Can’t tell us what to do!’ another one yells back, but all three of them hustle away.

‘Little shits.’

Grayson breathes, watching her reproving eyes. He envies her strength, her sheer pig-headedness. ‘The hell was that about?’

Melody sighs, nodding to the compact density of lichenous trees into which the creek feeds and disappears. ‘There’s an old train carriage in there. Abandoned decades ago. The rainforest’s grown all through it and shit.’

Grayson stares at her.

‘I thought ya wanted me to let ya in on more local history?’

‘I was never much of a train guy.’

‘Anyway, some of the local kids up here have got it into their heads that the carriage is haunted. Some little turd took a selfie in there and it did the rounds on the Facebook community page about six months ago. In the back of the picture there was somethin’ like shadows behind his stupid, smiling face.’

‘Shadows?’

‘It was just his shit camera phone takin’ a shit photo.’

He peers into the procession of tree-ferns, their umbrella-like fronds grey-green beneath the steely light, and he’s not sure why, but he shivers with delight.

‘See, local story up this way is that there were these two Bunurong boys back when the timber getters sawed and cut their way through here. When they hauled as much mountain ash out as they could. These two boys spent their days sabotaging the work of the loggers, stealing equipment and setting tents on fire and doing anything they could to curb the clearing.’

‘Cool,’ Grayson says. ‘Like the first Greenie activists, eh?’

‘This kid who took the selfie in the carriage, he reckoned it was the ghosts of the Bunurong boys behind him in the picture,’ she explains. ‘And I mean, if ya squint hard enough, sure, it does kinda look like two human shapes, I guess. But it’s just a ghost story. Don’t have to travel far out this way to hear one like it.’

They stand there and listen, not to the purling winter wind, but to the voices of the high school kids fading.

‘Now every little turd in Belgrave and beyond has gotten it into their heads that if they stand in the carriage and take a selfie, they’ll see these two Bunurong boys behind them.’

Grayson turns then, raises his eyebrows at her. ‘What do you reckon?’ He nods in the direction of the haunted carriage, shielded by mossy trunk and frond. ‘Should we go see if it’s true?’

She snorts. ‘Go for ya life,’ Melody tells him. ‘Just do it well away from me.’

*

After digging all day, their ramble back up the hill, through the lichened pillars of top-heavy mountain ash, just about kills Grayson. But at least his skin isn’t all restive and jittery like it was by the creek, so close to where Father Delean may or may not have buried some of the boys he’d needed to keep quiet thirty years ago. Bewitched as he was with the rainforest, Grayson still fears what truths it might expose.

They reach Melody’s Amarok parked under the outlying forest, where it looms along the edges of town. ‘Wasn’t expectin’ this,’ Melody says, taking a piece of bark which has dropped onto the top of the ute and flinging it away.

‘Expecting what?’ Grayson pants.

‘You all puffed like this.’ She waves a disgusted hand at him.

‘Eat shit. We’ve been at it all day.’

Melody laughs. It’s not as loud and as chesty as he would’ve liked, but he also realises it’s the first laugh he’s gotten out of her in two weeks. Finally, Grayson thinks. A breakthrough.

A fortnight ago, he wouldn’t have dreamed about talking to her in this way; it would’ve been way too personal. She’d been so quiet at first, brittle. Her emotions always threatening to pierce the surface of her hard eyes like a speartip. But they’ve been hanging out for a while now and Grayson’s shocked to realise she’s finally letting her guard down. And he’s taken an easy liking to her combative sense of humour.

‘Well, if you’d actually pulled your weight down there, maybe I wouldn’t be this knackered?’ he asks.

Melody laughs again. This time, he hits the nail on the head. The desired sound he was looking for. Her chest churns deep inside, until she coughs. ‘I’m just pullin’ ya chain. You were in top form down there, Gray. Top form.’

Darkness slowly claws itself over the Dandenong Ranges as Grayson sits in the front passenger seat and lets the pain of all day shovelling settle uneasily in his muscles. A faint curtain of drizzle is ushered by a solemn wind; it kisses the windscreen between his face and the rainforest canopy. Suddenly, all he wants is to be back outside, prone to the assault of the elements.

‘I’m goin’ back tomorrow,’ Melody tells him behind the steering wheel. ‘Don’t expect ya to come with me. And I appreciate ya stayin’ back today. I just wanted to let ya know.’

He nods and has just opened his mouth to answer, not entirely sure what he’ll say, when his phone pings. He takes it from his pocket and opens the message. Lilah, a selfie. Her eyes are wrinkled shut and she’s blowing a kiss at him from the other side of the continent.

Suddenly immobilised with longing, he stares at the love of his life, then the vista of red dirt and mulga inundating the frame behind her glossy, white-blond hair. Country so very hot and dry compared to the canopy of mountain ash outspread above him. So very far away.

‘That the missus?’

Grayson nods, shows her the selfie.

‘Where is she again?’

‘Over in the Goldfields, in WA. Some bushwalker went missing out there back in February.’

‘All by herself?’

‘Yep, that’s me girl. Independent woman. Tough as nails.’

‘Missin’ hiker, eh? The next ep for ya podcast or what?’

‘Yeah, maybe. It piqued her interest enough for her to jump on a plane and go have a look.’

‘Must miss her.’

If only you knew, he thinks.

Sloping off the wet hill below further tangles of vine interwound through the heights of slender tree-ferns, the drab clutter of Belgrave finally slashes itself into view through the long trunks. Old Monbulk Road is so wet from the rain, Melody has trouble braking to watch Puffing Billy emerge loudly around the green mess of the hill.

It hoots and the ghostly blue smog which rises from its chimney lifts among the canopy to choke the trees. They sit and watch as it rattles across the janky rails right in front of the ute. Just the one passenger by the look of it. Just one in that long carriage. The pallid face of an old man peers out at them as if scrutinising deep sea fishes in a macabre aquarium.

It takes Grayson a moment to realise it’s the train tooting again, and not the rainforest finally voicing the unvoicable. Finally screaming the truth at them. What happened along the banks of Monbulk Creek. All the things it refused to forget.

He must jump in his seat because Melody’s hand rests on his arm. ‘Christ almighty, talk about givin’ me a bloody heart attack,’ she says.

Grayson blinks at her. ‘Sorry?’

‘Ya nearly leapt outa ya skin.’

He peers out the dotted windshield at the tourist train now receding, rearticulating itself back through the tall tree-ferns.

 ‘It’s just Ol’e Puffin’ Bill,’ Melody tries to reassure him. ‘Not like ya haven’t seen it a million times before.’

Once the train has gusted from view, that old man’s face hangs before Grayson’s vision like a retinal burn. His stomach swirls and the inside of the Amarok pulls hard to one side, as if he’s suddenly beset by vertigo.

After a while, Grayson stops pawing at his face and tries for a smile. ‘Poor old bugger,’ he says, swallowing away his sudden unease. ‘Must be lonely.’

‘Who’s that?’ Melody asks, putting the Amarok back into drive.

‘The old man. On the train.’

Melody doesn’t react. Instead, she pulls across the empty train tracks.

‘You didn’t see him?’

‘Nup, sorry,’ she tells him. ‘I didn’t see no old man.’

*

By the time Melody’s terrorised her way through the wet traffic out of Belgrave and down the long hill to Upper Ferntree Gully, neither has said a word to each other since seeing Puffing Billy snake out of the rainforest, the long carriage and its lonely passenger.

A coronae of hazing rain lists around the closest streetlight but all Grayson can see is that nonchalant old man on the train. His brain tries hard to enforce some revelation on him, but in his fatigue, he chooses ignorance. Feels that urgent tide of reckoning reel back and subside.

They pull up to his joint along Railway Avenue, the lonely fibro one bedroomer with lattice fortified along the crawlspace to forbid the neighbourhood cats from entering. ‘Bit quiet,’ Melody says once she’s parked in the driveway. ‘Ya sure ya gunna be right?’

He blinks. ‘Eh? Yeah, I’ll be right.’

‘All by yaself, that’s all.’

As if he needed reminding the house would be empty and cold when he stepped inside. That the love of his life had jetted off to the opposite side of the country to go looking for a missing hiker out in the Little Sandy Desert and would not be back for two weeks. That he had another week of digging ahead of him, praying they wouldn’t unearth the bones of a child.

‘I’ll be fine.’ He hauls in a deep, overloaded breath and looks at her. ‘How would you feel about being interviewed?’

Melody’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. The brittle sound of the rain palpating the top of the ute. ‘For the podcast?’

He nods.

‘Aw, dunno if that’s somethin’ I’m up for, Gray.’

The exertion of the day has taken its toll, what they were searching for. The potential for ribcages, grey with age, coming unstuck beneath the shovel blade. The reek of death in the decades of grieving mud.

In his exhaustion, he forgets himself. ‘It’d just be for context. After all, you grew up with Delean. Knew him better than most. I think it’d be good to get your opinion. How you felt about him.’

‘How I felt about him?’ Her voice sounds choked in the awkward dark of the cab, and Grayson knows he’s gone too far.

He hears himself asking her again, the urgency. The pushiness. After so long trying to foster trust between them, just like that, he’s cut himself off at the knees.

‘Yeah, we don’t need to go into anything else,’ Grayson quickly adds.

‘Anythin’ else?’ Again, that unbearable airlessness in her voice. She swiftly starts the engine again, so they can no longer hear the rain above their heads. ‘Ya know he never did nothin’ to me, don’t ya?’

Grayson feels his face go numb. He can only stare back at her wordlessly.

According to the courts and Delean’s extensive previous convictions, the priest had only ever abused prepubescent boys. Glaring into Melody’s shaken eyes, he can’t help but wonder now. He wonders if she lied about seeing the old man on the train.

‘Anyway,’ he tries to wave this away, his hand trembling. ‘Have a think about it, eh?’ He’s already got the door open, midway through escaping, when the ute starts to reverse.

‘It was just a thought.’

*

Numbers melt away from the dripping clockface.

Try hard as he might, he can’t face the empty inside of the house for long. Sleep calls to him and, with every sinew in him overstretched like this, he should be able to burrow his troubled mind into the pillow.

Instead, he stares at the clock in their room, the impossibly slow turning hand. Lilah had asked him to remove it countless times after they’d moved into the rental, had called it tacky more than once. He’d never found the time. Too fixated writing up the script for the next episode of their podcast.

He drags a chair to the wall, takes the clock from its little brass hook. Looks down at it counting the hours away without her but only sees the face of the old man, alone on Puffing Billy.

Grayson flees the house for the yard, hugging his jacket tighter. The night train screels on the tracks below, pausing at Upper Ferntree Gully Station; he looks to the blackshaped mass of the Dandenong Ranges and imagines the metro carriages slipping, serpentine with light, up through their unlit slopes. An unstoppable spearhead of light piercing the dark.

He picks his way up through the blockade of man ferns, cannot face the empty expanse of their bed. It may as well be a tundra stretching to the horizon. In such expanses, he’s often revisited by the ruff of remembered hands. Unwanted touch.

‘Ya know he never did nothin’ to me, don’t ya?’ Melody tells him again, the outrage blistering in her eyes.

Just because she didn’t remember, didn’t mean nothing happened. During their research into Delean’s past, he’d chanced upon the case of Brodie Macrae. It was common knowledge he’d been a victim of the priest, but Macrae himself never believed he’d been sexually abused. Instead, he’d created an elaborate, horrifying fantasy to explain away what had happened to him just up the hill from Belgrave at the youth camp.

Macrae believed he’d been visited on a regular basis by some kind of goblin that would climb out of the rainforest and in through his bedroom window at night. This sufficiently explained the strange bite marks Macrae would wake with but not remember how he received. The pallid imp, of course, had the ability to put children to sleep, whispering in their ears like a Sandman. What Macrae refused to accept was many of the other boys who attended the youth camp suffered similar bite marks and none of them had ever seen some nightmarish goblin crawling toward the base of their beds.

Once he’s clambered up onto the ridge, constrained by the welcome proximity of mountain grey gums, Grayson finally catches his breath, even as it tries to escape him in a thin, vertical exhaust. The orange lights of the tracks chicane away below him and from up here, he can see the English ivy gushing through the chain-link fences and clawing out into the tree-ferns.

‘I’m goin’ back tomorrow,’ Melody told him earlier.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ he says aloud.

Because his mind’s already made up; he had planned on resting over the weekend, facetiming Lilah as often as he could. But he can’t let Melody go back to the dig site alone.

Grayson peers down in the dim light. Two swamp wallabies nibble at some cinnamon wattles just a couple of metres from his feet, tiny beneath the lilly pilly trees. Their soft eyes steady on him, and for the first time in a long time, he’s lucid, present. Whole.

Here it is. Time’s fraudulent promise; that any given moment could ever stand still long enough not to be stolen away in a tumult of competing eddies.

He would cling to this moment if he could. If he didn’t see the old man’s face again, feel those dry hands.

There’s still so much work to do.

*

In the dark of the sidehills, he can only make out the headlight of the locomotive at first. A stamen of green light which burns like the moon on fire.

He’s running, crashing through mother shield ferns, raking his hands over their fronds, panting and muttering to himself as the train bullets after him. Because, somehow, he knows who’s riding the quiet carriages, who sits within staring with dead eyes out the foggy windows, their misery untold.

Run hard and fast as he likes, it still catches up with him. He thinks of the two swamp wallabies now, somewhere far behind him, and hopes they’re not in the ghost train’s path because it forges ahead through the bracken without tracks and will surely crush them to death. It snakes its way out in front of him and Grayson nearly screams when he see the faces through the windows within each long, clanking carriage.

The seats are filled with boys, hundreds of them, the same age he was when the dry hands reached for him. Despite each of them flickering with green fire, they remain pallid and unburnt beneath the lick of flames.

They stare lifelessly ahead into whatever awaits.

*

The dream eases off, slowly muscling him back toward the veil of morning.

When he does sit up, damp and freezing cold, Grayson blinks up at a blue fairy-wren. It burns against the overcast, riding the branch of a cinnamon wattle, and he can’t help but wonder if it dragged him from the dark, led him out like a beacon on a vast ocean of night. Saved him from the ghost train.

He picks his way down out of the man ferns until he’s back at the house, no way of telling what the time is after leaving his phone on his bedside table last night. After seeing it hasn’t even gone eight o’clock yet by looking down at the ugly clock face he’d left on the top of the bed, he quickly showers and dresses and hurries out to the Pajero.

Upper Ferntree Gully is always sluggish to get moving this early in the morning, so he’s got a clear path up the hill. Still, the quarter past eight train squeals its way up to the platform alongside and Grayson holds his breath, fearing he’ll turn in his seat and see those hundreds of boys, strangely unscathed in their caul of green fire.

A sinkhole opens in his chest with relief to see the usual ragtag crew departing the train instead, the eshays in socks and crocs, black beanies and North Face jackets.

He grins and bears it through the choked traffic and once he’s back into the rainforest, he parks against a procession of tree-ferns. No surprise to see that Melody’s ute is already here, in almost the exact same place as yesterday.

Once he reaches the dig site by Monbulk Creek again, he frowns at the two shovels still leaning against the excavator. No sign of Melody. The tingle of ant feet below his skin again.

He’s just reached for the same, long-handled shovel which had put him in such an ache yesterday, when he glances up at the dense profusion of rainforest from which they’d seen the three high school boys come sauntering yesterday. The trees glow an algal green and he recalls what Melody had told him about the old train carriage hidden down there in the entanglement. About it maybe being haunted.

‘Mel?’ he sings out. ‘You in there?’

He pushes through the English ivy, blunt fingernails tearing at it to get free. No sign of a track, some clear-cut path to show him the way. He would’ve thought there’d be trails still all though the Dandenongs, cut by the timber getters in the 1800s when they axed and depopulated the tallest mountain ash. When those two Bunurong boys tried their hardest to end the devastation.

‘Mel?’

The bulky carriage which lurches out of the dank lilly pilly trees is a perfectly unnatural shape out here, after the gentle brushing of frond and falling leaf. When Grayson sees the faded maroon of the cab, he can’t help the cold shiver in his muscles take on a perverse throb of delight.

‘This kid who took the selfie in the carriage. He reckoned it was the ghosts of the Bunurong boys behind him in the picture.’

Grayson lingers before the empty carriage now, noticing the pockmarked interstices of silver light coming through the canopy, while the vines twine themselves through broken windows and unused hinges. He takes out his mobile and thinks he should snap a selfie of himself beaming here below the dripping trees and send it to Lilah.

Might be able to spot a couple of ghosts in the background, he thinks.

Instead, he watches his hands grip the railing of the carriage, watches his feet climb the steps. The door already open. Steps inside to the find the once-ornate seats greened with epiphytes bursting to life. A scrambling fern growing up through a hole in the floor.

His chest caves inward further, threatening to spit his heart out on the floor like a bloodied gobbet of phlegm, to peer up and find someone already in the carriage with him.

Takes him a split second to realise it’s Melody, her back turned, only her visible breath spiring away from her mouth. Silent inside the empty train carriage.

Instead of calling out or asking if she’s okay, Grayson thumbs at the camera icon on his phone and holds it up. His reflection sallow, all the excitement gone now and just terrified. Thinks this is how he must look on those nights alone upon the empty tundra of his and Lilah’s bed. When the disembodied hands find their way back to his cold skin.

No, it wasn’t Father Delean who’d hurt him. Someone else, a long time ago. But they’re all Father Deleans, aren’t they? The same pallid goblin beneath so many different masks, crawling toward the foot of your bed with its mousy teeth bared.

Grayson wrinkles his eyes shut. Come on, get your shit together.

He’s already survived the worst thing that’s ever happened to him. The rest can only be paper cuts.

Grayson opens his eyes and studies the empty seats in the camera screen, expecting they’ll fill with dead kids – those night riders – awash in green flames. Expecting the two Bunurong boys to appear in the ferny aisle behind him, still inimical in their resistance.

‘Boo,’ Grayson mutters and presses his greasy thumb against the thin cracks in the glass and hears a click.

Sweat drips from his nose as he flips the phone over and summons the photograph to the screen. The picture shows his absurdly frightened face. Eyes clamped shut at the moment the photo snapped. And standing right behind him is Father Delean. The old man has both hands on Grayson’s shoulders, his chin resting gently against the side of Grayson’s neck, and he’s grinning.

‘Gray?’

He starts and looks up at Melody. She teeters in the ferny aisle of the old carriage, startled by his sudden appearance.

‘The hell are ya doin’?’ she snaps.

Still rattled, he doesn’t think before answering, ‘I wanted to see the boys who tried to save this place.’

Then looks back down at the selfie on his phone. Him standing in a ratty, ancient train carriage with his eyes shut hard while the dead priest stands behind him. He’d never believed in ghosts, not really. Not until this moment.

Melody’s eyes widen. ‘Can I see?’

Grayson notices how the green mass of rainforest continues to press, decade by decade, up against the windows, until one day, he can imagine, the whole carriage fills with its fecund weight. He clears his throat. ‘There’s nothing.’

He deletes the picture on his phone.

‘Nothing there.’

*

Watching Melody ramble through the heath wattles back into the open dig site, Grayson draws himself to Lilah. Imagines himself into the red vastness of the mulga, until his spectral legs are walking beside her. Until he sees her feet fall in cracked scarlet country, sees the wildflowers bursting blue and lilac around her as she goes as if they’d been lured into eruption by her loveliness.

‘What ya grinnin’ about?’ Melody asks.

He takes out his phone and positions the rainforest at his back, before snapping a picture of his idiotic, contagious smile, and texting it to the far side of the continent.

Once he pockets the mobile again, he meets Melody’s eyes. ‘Ask you a question?’

‘Shoot.’

‘What were you doing in there?’ He nods back toward the carriage.

Embarrassment swarms her eyes. ‘Not sure, really,’ she mutters and looks at her feet. ‘Just provin’ somethin’ to meself, maybe? Like maybe I’m not scared no more?’

Once they reach the excavator again, they take a shovel each and return to where they’d been digging yesterday. With each spadeful of mud scooped aside, he thinks of all those boys on the night train he dreamed about last night. Looks to the various muddy wounds they’ve opened along the creek.

Then thinks of the selfie, Father Delean with his hands on Grayson’s shoulders. There are so many more of us, he thinks, than there are of you.

He peers over at Melody as she plants her shovel in the ground and walks over so they’re side by side, stronger together.