The night after I buried the little man I woke suddenly from a dream about Dirty Joe's book. It was a dream about the circus, except there was a storm at the circus, and instead of a roaring lion I could hear a screaming horse, and the Ape lay dead on the beach covered with flies.
Sophie was snoring lightly next to me in the bed. I lifted her arm off my waist and she rolled over and murmured something and went back to sleep.
I'd put the book back in the filing cabinet and locked it. I figured Sophie wouldn't go looking for it there, and anyway, I'd hidden the key behind the filing cabinet. So I went down to the office and got the key and opened the filing cabinet and got the book out. Then I got a blanket from the cupboard under the stairs and went into the lounge room and curled up on the sofa with the book. Only then did I look at the cover.
The black rabbit was gone.
Where it had been sitting the grass was matted. In the background there was a dark wood that I'd never noticed before, and just in front of the wood was a house. Perhaps the rabbit had been in front of the house and blocking it from sight? It had always been kind of dark in the picture after all, with the sun setting away out of sight somewhere, and the rabbit's shadow long and weird on the grass. The house looked black in the light. It was tall – like maybe three storeys high – and had a narrow pitched roof. The ground sloped away behind it, and in the far distance rose a black mountain range.
My heart was racing as I flipped through to the back. I wondered what had been happening inside the book all that time it had been locked in the filing cabinet. Or maybe there wouldn't be anything there at all.
There was though.