The Crocodile

Technology comes even to the Australian rural coast. Against all expectation, I've found a net cafe in town, right next to a general store that doubles as a retailer of sheep dip.

It's strange being down here without Megan. I don't think I've ever done it before. The stormclouds keep intermittently dissolving into sweeping rains, whipping the sea into a churning dark monster, and it's so typical of a hundred days of my childhood that I expect to find Megan beside me, or waiting for me down the street, or looking out the windows as I come home.

We scattered the ashes last night, in a brief moment of clear weather. I don't know what I expected to feel, but whatever it was I didn't feel it. The contents of the urn went out into the sea, and it was just like skipping pebbles or kicking dust.

Afterwards I lay awake in one of those thin kid's beds that we keep down here, and I felt the same feeling I had as a child; that something was watching me. Like the night was alive with a single ancient intelligence, and close by my ears its inscrutable brain was pondering upon me.

As a child when this feeling came it terrified me; Megan called it the Crocodile, and said it wasn't scary because it wasn't interested in us. There's an old ship's bell hanging from the wall in the guest bedroom, and Megan once told me I could sleep easily, because she could hear the Crocodile well, and if he came for me, she'd ring the bell.

The bell never rang. And Megan was right anyway; there's nothing out in the night more sinister than the romance of the moon with the sea, and the flickering shadows born of that union. This land dreams on whether I keep vigil or not.

Help!

I've been kidnapped!

By which I mean my parents have showed up at my place with the "surprise" that we're all going down to the coast place two days early. It seems a certain Mr Chase Oxley suggested to them that I need to get out of the house. Screw you, Chase.

So now I'm posting this from my mobile phone in some country town while my dad's filling the tank with petrol. Black Mountain's off; I'm not going to be back in Canberra until early next week. Aargh! Just when I'd made up my mind to resolve this thing!

... I don't suppose there's a chance any of you could find someone from Canberra to go check up there for me at all? I'm freaking out that it's going to be gone before I get back. In normal circumstances I'd hit up Chase but I don't think he's going to be receptive. (Him and I will settle this when I get back, mark my words.)

Going Up

Okay, it's time for me to stop wavering around and take matters into my own hands. Whether or not it's a message for Megan, someone clearly wants me to go up Black Mountain and look for something which has been buried.

I'm going to go out this morning and buy some decent digging tools, and then I'll head up and have an explore this evening.

Now that I've decided to go, I can't wait to see what's up there. I'm also worrying I've stuffed around too long and the trail's grown cold. This much nervousness and excitement demands that I go make a good cup of coffee. I'll blog again this evening.

Progress!

Chase has let me know again that he isn't even going to open the front page at Who Is Megan Kyle, let alone read the forums. Other than that, though, I'm astounded by how succesful my call for help on the internet has been.

Firstly, a team effort discovered that the company that Megan was working for before her death, Vanadium Network Solutions, has mysteriously closed up shop and is claiming they haven't been operating for about two years. Which is just a lie. I know Megan worked there. The evidence should be in the Cadmean Recruiting database, in the form of Vanadium's job ad. If only we knew what username and password Vanadium used to register it, we could retrieve the ad, but the chances of prying that information out of Cadmean's matching officers seems slim.

A message hidden in the source code of the Vanadium site (found by Tipsila) leads to a blog run by someone calling themselves Occluder (discovered by Esteed). The blog itself is scattered with hidden messages that seem to imply whoever's running it knew that my sister was going to die well ahead of the event. (Thanks to Freshness for finding those.) I've been leaving comments on the blog since we found it but they just keep getting deleted. It seems like someone doesn't want to come out from behind their curtain just yet.

Lastly, there's Megan's video. Or at least, the video which appeared on Megan's blog. It shows a variety of views of Black Mountain and the Telstra Tower (notable Canberra landmarks). We're thinking that maybe Megan left or buried something on the mountain, but I'm a little unsure exactly what to do. There's a lot of bushland up there to cover.

All that still adds up to a lot more than I ever expected to find when I opened the website. The accomplishments listed abover are just some of the genius that's already been applied to this mystery; I'll try and list more as I get the chance. Thanks to everyone who's helped so far, and if you're reading and haven't got involved yet, now's a great time to jump in! Remember to post anything you learn in the Who Is Megan Kyle forums so I can try and get my head around it.

Rain And The Window

Phillip, you can't see the rain, but when he comes I'll ring a bell.

The funeral was today. It was a small service; mostly just me and the family. Aunt Sally and Uncle Rod came down from Sydney. Chase was there, and a couple of Megan's friends from school. It was a cremation; the urn went back to Mum and Dad's place. We're going to take it down to the coast place next weekend to scatter the ashes into the sea.

It leaves me thinking about the message Megan left me in the email.

When I was 8, and Megan was about 5, we were at the coast place over Easter. There's these thick glass windows through the living room - thick like the bottoms of bottles - and out and through them you can see the shape of the Pacific Ocean like an abstract painting rendered in shifting panes of blue light.

It was afternoon, and Mum and Dad were out, I think buying groceries, and we're in the living room in the fading light of day, in that kind of twilight gloom that comes with an Australian spring. The air has had that expectant feeling that hopes for a storm, and as we're sitting on the tatty old couches the first drops of rain start falling in hesitant waves across the house roof.

We can hear it - and we can feel the change in the air rush through, as the shadow of the storm becomes the storm itself - and Megan gets up and rushes to the window and looks out at what might be the distant waves driven before the downpour.

She says to me, "I can see the rain, Phillip."

And I look, out through those same windows, but I can't see anything. It's just a blur. So I tell her she's wrong, that she's imagining it. But she says it again, "I can see the rain," and I just know that she's right, that to her the drops of rain are really visible. And I stood with her, and I just watched out through the bottle-thick glass, and knew that though we were looking through the same lens we were seeing completely different worlds.

I think that's the first time as a child that I really understood that other people see things differently to me. It was my first inkling that the way I saw reality was possibly not the only way to see it.

So now that this video has appeared on Megan's blog - I have to wonder whether what's in the urn is really all of Megan. I have to think that, just maybe, there's a bit left, still free. So just now, I did what I should have done last Thursday - I replied to the email she sent me.

I'm too late. I got this back:

--
Title: No Message
On 1/29/07, Megan Kyle wrote:> Gone.

Sifting The Dust

I'm actually logging on today from Megan's computer. I'm in her house, in her study, in the room where she died. It's kind of creepy.

At the same time, though, this room is so Megan that it's really comforting. It feels safe here. She's got that picture Chase did of her in a yellow papier-mache frame on the desk and it kind of feels like she's watching me. It's a good feeling.

I'm here because I'm sorting through her things. Her rent is only paid up for about another ten days so we have to go through her stuff in a hurry. (We = me, plus mum and dad.) We're deciding what to take ourselves, what to put in storage, and what to get rid of.

It's an emotional rollercoaster. Megan was a packrat, with a surprisingly wide variety of possessions, and I keep running into things I'm not expecting. Probably the worst was I found a big box of photos from when Megan and I were kids and I had to go and get some air outside and pull myself together.

I've yet to find any of Megan's copies of Peter Pan, though. She had at least three, including a hardback that I gave her for her birthday a couple of years ago. If any of her friends are reading, do you know if she lent them out or anything? I'd really love to know what happened to them.

Emails

It seems that I'm not the only one who's receiving these emails from my sister's account. Whoever's sending these things out has been busy. All logic says this is a horrible joke being played on a very large scale, but after learning about the message in the "5th Rail" email, I don't know what to think.

Cadmean Recruiting has been kind enough to give me as much time off work as I need, which is good because my family needs me a lot right now. I'm spending time with my parents, so I'm not online as much as I could be. Which is probably for the best, because I might go mad if I end up just staring at a screen wondering who's out there.

If you've received any emails from "Megan Kyle", or seen anything else having to do with her, I've set up a site to collect your stories. You should travel over to www.whoismegankyle.com and sign up to the forums there.

Your concern and care in this difficult time are greatly appreciated.