Night Vision

by Ella West

Overview

In the dark, Viola sees things no one else does . . . until the night she sees something she shouldn't

Viola was born with a genetic condition that makes sunlight deadly. In the dark of night, when most teenagers are tucked up in bed, Viola has the run of her parents' farm and the surrounding forest. She is used to seeing hidden things through her night-vision goggles, but one night she sees something that could get her into a whole lot of trouble . . . Viola has always believed she would be dead before she was 20, but now she must decide just how far she's willing to go to help her parents keep their beloved farm. Is it okay to steal from a thief? What if the thief might be a killer? And what if the killer threatens to come after her and her family? Night Vision is a heart-thumping thriller that will leave you breathless.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781743435489
Publisher:	Allen & Unwin
Publication date:	04/01/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	807 KB
Age Range:	11 - 14 Years

About the Author

Ella West is a novelist, playwright, and journalist. She is the author of the Thieves trilogy.

Read an Excerpt

Night Vision

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By Ella West

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2014 Ella West
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74343-548-9

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CHAPTER 1

A car has stopped on the side of the road, the noise of tyres on gravel warning me. Through the trees I see the headlights turn off. Few people travel this road, which is no more than a logging track, and none at this time of night. I let the tree trunks slide past my fingers as I go closer to see. The sun sank behind the mountains at least an hour ago, and although the twilights are stretching out as spring comes, it is dark.

The driver has got out and is looking around, up and down the road, at the forest on the other side, this side. He has dreadlocks, blond ones tied back from his face with a bandana, and is wearing jeans with holes at the knees. He needs a shave.

He is trying to see in the dark, let his eyes adjust to the starlight, the moon yet to show itself. He feels his way along the car to the boot and opens it. There is a faint glow from the light inside. He begins to yank something out, something large and heavy.

Suddenly he's startled and stops. Maybe it was the bird that flew past him? I saw it, but I know he couldn't. He pulls the something out again, this time working harder, faster, almost frantic. He gets it out of the boot and half drags, half carries it to the open driver's door and pushes it into the seat. It's a person, a man. A fat man with a beard and long hair. He's wearing a suit, a striped tie jagged around his throat. The man must be unconscious or dead. I look to see if his chest is rising and falling, or if there are any other signs of a heartbeat (like you sometimes look for in a movie when the person's supposed to be dead but is obviously not because he's really an actor so of course he's alive), but I'm too far away.

I've sat down quietly, four rows of trees in, watching, snuggled up against a trunk. That way, if he does look towards me, he will only see a strange bump against a tall pine in the dark. But he doesn't. He's too busy catching his breath. His hands are on his hips, his shoulders heaving. He's thin, maybe only half the weight of the man in the driver's seat, so he must be strong to do what he's just done. He takes other things out of the car boot, but I can't see what they are. He leaves them on the side of the road, by the trees. I am very, very still.

I know this man. Last year, in the early summer, I watched him check his dope plantation. He had carefully planted the tiny seedlings in potting mix between the tree trunks, ringed them with possum traps, probably believing that no one came into the forest.

He didn't know about me. I had come across the little garden several weeks earlier and knew enough to leave it alone. The night I saw him, he was fussing over the plants, but several weeks later everything was gone. He must have worked out that not enough light would get to the forest floor to make them ever grow well.

But now he has the car's bonnet up, doing something to the engine. He lets the bonnet fall. The noise echoes around the trees. He has forgotten to be quiet and is suddenly looking about again, wary, not that he can see anything. It's too dark. All he can do is listen. He will have to learn to use his ears and not his eyes.

Hesitating, as if he doesn't want to do it, he closes the driver's door with a soft click then reaches in through the open window and fumbles with something by the fat man. He must have turned the key in the ignition because the sound of the engine rumbles in the quiet. The headlights stay off. The man backs away and there is a loud noise and white flames. I turn away, the light hurting my eyes, and put another two rows of trees between me and the road. The glow of fire will be reflected by the night-vision goggles I'm wearing. My pale face and robotic-looking eyes will be seen.

But the man has not turned towards me. Instead, he's staring at the burning car, the brightness it has created in the night. I take the goggles off. The fire is so dazzling I don't need them. The man looks up, and so do I, suddenly our thoughts the same. Will the flames touch the trees? Will the forest burn? There is no wind and it rained last week, but not even a month of rain will stop a fire in a Canterbury pine forest.

I think the burning car is far enough away from the trees. The man must think so too because he lowers his gaze again. All of the car is engulfed now; the part where the fat man is looks as though it's burning the brightest. Is that possible? Does human flesh burn well? Human fat? I hope the fat man was dead when he was dragged out of the boot.

There is a smell, apart from the fuel and plastic and bubbling paint on metal. I don't want to think about it.

The man with the dreadlocks grabs his belongings by the side of the forest and slips between the trees, my trees, away from the light of the fire. There's an explosion. I look back at the car. Something must have blown up. Maybe the fuel tank? It's burning fiercely now. I can feel its heat. I turn my back to it and hunt for the man, putting my night-vision goggles back on. There he is — a white intruder between the pale green of the tree trunks and the blackness beyond. Night vision turns everything into shades of green or white or grey. The goggles are heavy. At first I felt clumsy wearing them, the weight strapped to my head making me feel unbalanced. I would stumble, my neck would hurt the next day, but soon I got used to them. Now, I don't even think about it.

The goggles were my birthday present from my parents when I turned twelve. They used to be impossible to buy; the United States government controlled their legal sale to keep 'the upper hand' in night-time warfare by not letting anyone else have them. They figured out night vision when fighting in Vietnam, although it can't have been that useful because they lost that war, didn't they? I don't know how my parents got my pair, or how they could afford them. I checked on the internet — they're expensive. I spend a lot of time online. It's how I know lots of things.

The man is having trouble moving through my forest. The light from the burning car is far behind us now, but his eyes have probably not adjusted to the darkness yet. He tries to run down a row of trees but loses his way every few minutes and bangs into trunks and branches. Once, he trips over a tree root. He should have brought a torch. He should not even be here. I wait while he gets up and brushes the pine needles off himself, and then I continue to shadow him, several rows to his left and well behind. I can see now he's carrying a spade and a bag of some sort. He keeps looking at what I think is a compass. I can see the tiny glow it gives out. We jog along like this for at least an hour. I check my watch occasionally while I wait for him to find his way again. He must have done this route before, in daylight. He seems to know where he's going.

Another logging road cuts through the forest up ahead. Will he cross it? If he does am I able to safely follow? There is probably enough light from the moon and stars to make me out on the narrow strip of gravel, if he chooses to look back.

We've come to the road and he's stopped. I linger, keeping the distance between us, worried he will hear my lungs working, my heart beating, through the whisper of the pine needles from far above. He's walking along the line of the road, just inside the trees, looking for something. There it is. Another car. With the night-vision goggles it's impossible to see what colour it is but it's large, a different make to the last one.

He's counting trees, six back from the edge of the road. I can see his lips mouthing the numbers. He drops the bag and begins to dig a hole by a tree with the spade. He works hard, frantic, forcing the blade into the stony soil between the tree roots. He takes the bandana off and wipes his face. The dreadlocks pile onto his shoulders.

He digs again, until the hole is deep and big, then he stuffs the bag in and pushes the soil back on top using his feet. On his hands and knees he scatters pine needles. I'm afraid to breathe.

The man goes to the car parked on the road, unlocks it and opens the boot. He hauls something out and struggles back up the bank and into the forest — he has a large stone. He places it where he's dug the hole then picks up the spade and looks around again even though it must be too dark for him to see much of anything. The possum in the tree above me grunts as I shift my weight from one foot to the other and the man whips around with the sound. He's staring right at me. I stay perfectly still. There's nothing else I can do.

Finally, he walks back to the car, still stumbling, and places the spade in the boot. As he drives off, slowly and carefully so the gravel is not disturbed, I think of a mnemonic to remember his licence plate number.

PCH990. Peter's Cats Have 990 lives.

The stone is heavy but not impossible for me to lift. It's a river stone, maybe from further up the road. There is a river in a gorge, a steep drop from the forestry, but the road drops down to it and crosses a concrete bridge. The stone is not out of place in the pine forest, but it would be difficult to find one like it. The perfect marker perhaps? I carry the stone to another tree, still six trees in from the road, but another six along to the right if you are facing the road. Six and six. Peter's Cats Have 990 lives. I walk back to where the stone was and cover the ground with more pine needles. The man has not made a very good job.

CHAPTER 2

My name is Viola, not like the flower, the poor cousin of the showy pansy, but like the musical instrument. My mother plays the viola, and I am learning. Most days its rich, mellow notes fill our house — the dark, empty spaces full of sound. My mother is occasionally asked to play in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra when one of their regular viola players is sick or overseas. It means she is away sometimes. It's difficult for me to go with her.

I wake each day, when dusk is already here, and lie listening to my mother play. Bach's melodies or Strauss' Don Quixote lift me out of bed. The quick bow work and her nimble fingers make me envious, and I work at stretching my own fingers so, one day, I too will be able to reach all the fingerings and maybe have the chance to play in an orchestra, like my mother. I want to hear the music swell and grow around me into some wild, enormous being before it swirls past the conductor to the auditorium and out into the world beyond. Of course I will have to change my name. Viola can't play the viola — everyone will laugh about it behind my back. I will change my name to Isabella or Charlotte or Clare without the 'i'.

One day, if there is to be a one day in the future for me.

I have Xeroderma Pigmentosum, or XP for short. Most complicated and deadly things it seems have abbreviations. My body is missing a vital gene that stops sunlight, UV light in particular (ultraviolet — another abbreviation — I know), from damaging my DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid), which makes me who I am. Lots of things damage DNA, like smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol and doing drugs, but most of the time bodies can repair the damage. With XP, the body can't. The damage is irreversible and it adds up. There are only about a thousand of us XP kids in the world. Few make it into adulthood. However careful we are, we always slip up sometime and the sun burns our flesh in seconds. It starts with blistering and then our skin ages and wrinkles. We develop skin cancers and they metastasise quickly, before anyone realises, and they grow into our vital organs and then we die.

My pale skin is already marked with freckles and moles, even though my parents have been so careful. The sun shining through a window or a bare fluorescent light bulb switched on damages it in seconds. Normal light bulbs are okay, but if I want to go out in daylight, I have to rub maximum protection sun block into my skin and even then still wear gloves and long pants and always socks and shoes and hats with cloths that cover my face so only my sunglasses can be seen. When I was young, Mum used to dress me up like this and take me into Ashburton, take me shopping with her and to the playground. I hated it. The clothes made me hot, and everywhere we went people would laugh at me, or point, or stare. It made me mad. Now I'm older I don't let her take me anywhere in the day. Now I only go outside at night, like vampires and werewolves. Anyway, it's safer that way.

They call kids with XP moon children. It's better than an abbreviation.

We live beside a forest in the Canterbury foothills. It is not a real forest. It's planted. As I have grown, so have the trees, and now we are both tall. They are Pinus radiata, or radiata pines as we call them, from California, and they are strong and straight, their branches pruned from them almost all the way up their rough trunks. The dead pine needles lie thick on the ground underneath, so little else grows. The trees march in lines; only a narrow slit of dark sky can be seen between, and a star or two, if they happen to fall there.

The forest is my playground, my territory. My parents believe it's safe. No one lives there; no one goes there at night, usually, except for me. One day, it will be logged and replanted with seedlings, which won't even come up to the top of my legs. For both of us, our days are numbered.

Although the waving pines let little light down to my level, I still only enter the forest when the sun is gone, when it's dark, just in case. At the third row I usually stop and listen to what the trees have to tell me about their day — whether a soft breeze is lifting their needles way up high or a wild nor'wester is smashing against them. Sometimes frost is settling on their tips, icy dancers sprinkling their magic.

But now I have to get home. Watching the car fire and the man dig his hole has taken up my evening. My mother expects me back before midnight, midnight at the very latest. She wants me inside and safe on my laptop, doing my school work or watching a movie before she goes to bed. She tries to protect me, even though she knows I am going to die anyway, one day soon.

I run. Whatever the man with the dreadlocks has buried will have to wait. The pine needles slip under my feet, the sticky sap from the trees wet on my fingertips. The house finally stands out in a white glare against the dark emptiness of the garden and paddocks. My mother doesn't bother leaving the back door light on for me. She knows what the house looks like with night vision. My parents both tried the goggles, after they gave them to me, to see what they were like. My father uses them occasionally when he goes possum or rabbit shooting, although he says the spotlight works just as well — the animal caught dazzled in the bright light giving him time to aim and shoot. Usually I go with him, holding his gun while he drives the four-wheel motorbike, me clinging onto the back over the bumps of the paddock, jumping off to open gates. The possums spread TB (another deadly abbreviation), which is a lung disease that used to kill people before there were antibiotics. As well as eating dope plants, possums also eat native bush. The rabbits eat the grass the sheep are meant to eat, and their burrows make holes in the paddocks. That's why we have to kill them both.

The farm does not make us a lot of money. Wool prices are low, and although everyone keeps saying they are getting better, they never really do. My dad says once, in the fifties, you could buy a new car with just one bale of wool. Farmers paid for their farms in two or three seasons of shearing. Now, clothes and carpet are made from recycled plastic milk containers, or corn husks, not wool from a sheep's back.

We make what we can by selling the lambs to the freezing works each autumn. They are slaughtered and cut up and packaged for sale in supermarkets in England and France, but the market is small. Americans eat beef steaks and beef burgers and beef tacos, and many Asians find our sheep meat too fatty, so we can only really sell to the Europeans, who are very good at growing their own roast lamb.

On the Canterbury Plains by the sea, and in the river valleys, the farmers make lots of money milking cows. Huge herds. A thousand cows or more. I've seen the irrigators the few times we've gone to Ashburton, driving at night. The long metal frames spray water onto the pastures even in the darkness, rotating slowly around the paddocks on their rubber wheels. We can't milk cows on our farm. There is not enough water and the grass isn't good enough. This is sheep country. And rabbit country and possum country. It grows good Californian pine trees.

My mother has been reading by the fire in the living room. She is ready for bed, in her pyjamas and dressing gown and sheepskin slippers. She closes the back door behind me, watching as I carefully pack the night-vision goggles into their case. I know she worries about me. There is no mobile phone reception on the farm or in the forest. No way for me to call for help if I need it before sunrise.

'What have you been up to?' she asks. 'It's almost midnight.'

'Just walking.' I take extra time closing the goggles case, my back to her, while I tell the lie. If I told her about the fat man burning, about how I followed the man with the dreadlocks through the forest, about how I moved the stone, what would she say? What would she do? I know she would get upset, and I know it would be the last time she ever allowed me out at night. There's no reason to tell her.

'I saw a possum,' I say.

'When you're old enough to get a gun licence you can take the gun with you.'

You have to be sixteen to get a gun licence in New Zealand, and I'm not counting on making it to sixteen. Mum really has no idea. Anyway, who is going to check on whether I have a gun licence or not when I'm out alone in the dark?

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Night Vision by Ella West. Copyright © 2014 Ella West. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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