There's a Morepork on my Street

There's a morepork on my street. He lives in a big Norfolk pine up near the top of the hill, the other end of the street to me. He stands guard up there, when I walk past in the evenings he always sends me off with a hoot. Then when I come back later on in the night he’s still up, standing guard and telling me that he’s still there. Watching me come and go.

His tree is a big one, some of the trees on my street are bigger than the houses, which is saying a lot. His pine must have been there a long time, it would’ve come along with some of the first houses here. Now newer buildings surround it, even a tower of apartments. It still stands proudly near the top of the hill, marking its place in this old suburb in a relatively young city. And it holds in it the little owl with the loud voice. There’s morepork on my street.

The Patchwork Train

Tucked into a little gully there’s a yard filled with old trains. Steam engines gone all rusty and a collection of some of the cars that were towed behind them once. Where there isn’t rust on them, there’s spray paint, in most of the places there’s both. Early on a winter’s morning the fog hangs low and gives the air a milky look. There’s a shed in the middle of the yard and already it’s starting to echo with clangs of metal and the sparks of a welder as the old man who lives there plays with the parts he’s stripped from the dinosaurs rusting outside.

Lights slowly come on through the windows of the houses scattered in the area around the yard. It’s not a densely populated part of the town, on the fringe really. In the houses the people are reluctantly getting prepared for their commutes, it’s business as usual, another cold morning to fight through.

The silence is broken quickly though. A cracking sound rings out, loud enough to wake anyone who was still winning the battle with the alarm clock. The sound bounces around and slowly makes its way up out of the valley, it almost wanted to hang around with the fog and make a party of it, but physics has its way and eventually the ringing ends.

People rushed from their houses and down towards the old man’s yard. A dark grey plume of smoke waved the flag for help. There must have been a dozen of the neighbors accumulated at the shed, all in differing stages of readiness for the day ahead, shirts un-tucked or dressing gowns wrapped around bodies that were still wet from the shower. They all looked into the shed and then at each other. Back and forth, looking for some kind of explanation or at least recognition of the strangeness of what had happened.

There wasn’t any sign of the old man, that was the first thing they looked for. But once it was clear that he wasn’t around, they started to piece together the rest of the scene. There were train tracks leading into the shed, designed to get the old beasts in to work on. The tracks were now glowing hot, smoke was rising off them. On top of that oddity was the obvious elephant in the room, the fact that the elephant was completely missing from the room. You see the old man kept one old steam engine in there, away from the corroding elements. It was his pride and joy, the thing that he scavenged for and pulled apart the others to repair. It had always been in his shed because it hadn’t existed before he’d pieced it together from whatever good parts he could find.

Now the patchwork train was gone and the only thing left in the old man’s shed was a smoking railway track that led to nowhere.

The Robbery

The night-time was dark in the little valley. Tom and Davo crossed the train tracks that separated the trees in the park from the slope of houses between here and the main street. It was quiet, with just an echo of traffic from the street above bouncing off the hill behind them and back again. The house they had been watching was completely dark inside now that the sun had scurried away and dragged with it the last of the light. They could make out the white outline of the fence, a solid white barrier about six feet high.

Tom carried the small ladder with him, it was important that they didn’t hang about too long on this side of the fence, being seen here was the biggest danger. In the back yard of the house was an outdoor table and chairs that Davo could use to scramble back over, but that was much less of a concern. Davo didn’t like being out in the open like this “quickly man, bring the ladder over to the corner” he rasped in that half whisper half bark that people use when they’re trying to be both quiet and heard. Tom didn’t answer, he just scuffed his feet across the loose gravel on the side of the train track and pulled his jeans up with his free hand.

The ladder made a thwack sound against the fence, Davo was looking around anxiously and Tom could feel that there was tension in the air, he chose to deal with the tension by pulling his jeans up again, this time with both hands.

“Ok, hold the bottom of the ladder still for me, when I get over the top just go and hide in that bush. I’ll whistle or something when I need you to come back and help me”.

Tom was just about to pick up the ladder and head for the camouflage of the bushes when Davo stopped and made a kind of whimpering sound. He was halfway through lowering himself into the back yard, only his elbows, shoulder and face were above the fence. Tom lookrd up, Davo looked scared. Tom mouthed, hardly speaking at all “you alright?”

“I thought you said they took the dog with them?”

“They did, I saw it get in the car when I was waiting for you”

“What was that noise then?”

“What n…”

And then there was a screeching noise, not the sound of any kind of dog Tom had ever heard. A sound that was more like a scream than a bark. There was a strange orange flash and Tom thought he saw a shadow looming over the fence, a formless darkness that was twice the size of his friend who’d just disappeared.

Afterwards Tom thought about what had happened, he tried to beat himself up for a while, about the decision that he’d made. But he’d pretty quickly come to the conclusion that he didn’t have any decision to make, given the circumstances there was no other course of action to take. He can’t think of anything he could have done except run. Tom got out of there as fast as he could, he didn’t consider picking up the ladder, and he had moved well past concern for his friend, he had only felt fear.

For the first few days he’d kept expecting Davo to turn up at any moment. Or maybe the police would come around asking questions. He even thought that maybe he should check the hospitals or even the police, but there isn’t a lot of institutional support for criminals injured on the job. After a while other friends and even Davo’s family started to ask Tom if he’d seen him. He couldn’t tell them, so he remembered the second to last time he’d seen Davo and that was what he told everyone, he was almost starting to believe it himself after so many months.

No sign of Davo ever turned up, and after a while Tom stopped expecting it to. It was hard to grieve for his friend when he wasn’t really sure what had happed to him. Part of Tom was also still scared by not knowing, occasionaly he felt the fear that had sent him running that night. This lingering fear wasn’t helped on sleepless nights when Tom was struggling to sleep, when the night was still and quiet and he could swear that he heard that same screeching noise somewhere outside his window.