"Cairns runs on reef trips, screaming birds, and the rule that you always check your shoes"
Priya Shah is twenty-five, in the third year of an English Literature PhD called Beds of Dread, about why the bed is the most frightening place in the Gothic novel. She has been terrified of spiders since she was seven, and because her family is Jain she will not kill one either. Now she has landed in Cairns in the steaming last weeks of the wet season, six days before she gives a paper at an international symposium, armed with a spider catcher her little brother has labelled NOPE and a note on her phone that says, in capitals, that there are no funnel-webs in Cairns. She checked. She checked four times.
Her hostel is the Croc & Cockatoo, an old timber house on stumps where the bar is a seven-metre fibreglass crocodile and the owner, Mick, pours beer into its mouth. Jaz on the front desk welcomes her with 'Everything here can kill you, but most of it can't be bothered.' A wild cockatoo called Dennis tried to eat the new Partner Hub within an hour of its installation, and the staff have named it the Toad, after the other thing that was brought to Queensland for pest control and took over. Priya's dorm, Cassowary, holds a Canadian who came for a week in 2016, a Kazakh coder hiding from her boss, a Korean banana picker learning Australian from a list written in 1974, Sadia, a paramedic student still shaken by what she saw in Québec, and, in the bunk directly under Priya, Dane Kilroy, a wildlife influencer with 2.1 million followers and a rattlesnake tattoo that says RESPECT THE FANGS. The Wi-Fi password is CheckUrShoes. It is not a joke.
Every bed has a heated mattress pad, and every night at ten past one they all warm up except Dane's, whose little control box never lights. Something taps under Priya's bunk in the dark. A pad in the next dorm catches fire at three in the morning, and inside its burnt quilting is a silk tube that Jaz recognises, from a carton shipped out of Hornsby. Dane laughs it all off on camera. Then a cyclone turns towards the coast, the shutters come down on their own, and the Hub orders every guest back to their assigned bed. Priya sits in the doorway on a kitchen chair with her feet off the floor and refuses to get into hers. Dane is already in his, livestreaming.
Age: 25
Type: Gothic-literature PhD student and lifelong arachnophobe
Fatal Flaw: Reads the fine print on everything, then carries the spider outside anyway
Role: Protagonist
Age: —
Type: Wildlife influencer with 2.1 million followers
Fatal Flaw: Treats the Deadly Ten as a checklist
Role: Victim
Age: —
Type: Front desk, bookings and reef trips
Fatal Flaw: Knows everything that lives in Queensland and trusts none of it
Role: Ally
Age: 20
Type: Paramedic student from London
Fatal Flaw: Came to the tropics to get warm and got the Hub again instead
Role: Medic
Age: 64
Type: Owner of the Croc & Cockatoo since 1994
Fatal Flaw: Signed up for free things with his old trawler pen
Role: Keeper of the building
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Warm Beds for Everyone"
The curlews started screaming at ten past nine, the way they always did, and Tevita Fifita, who was one hundred and ninety-four centimetres tall and weighed as much as a small fridge, dropped a mattress pad on his own foot.
"Every night," he told the empty dorm. "Every night, bro. You'd think I'd be used to it."
He wasn't used to it. Nobody was used to it. The bush stone-curlews of Cairns were long-legged, yellow-eyed, grey-brown birds that stood around in car parks and on the lawns of the Esplanade all day looking like they'd been told bad news, and at night they opened their beaks and made the exact sound of a woman being murdered in a horror film. A long, rising, broken wail, and then another answering it from the next street, and then another, until the whole suburb sounded like the soundtrack to something you'd turn off. Tourists rang the police about it. Tourists rang the police about it most weeks. Jaz on the front desk had a laminated card she handed to new guests that said, in large friendly letters, THE SCREAMING IS BIRDS.
Tevita had grown up in Logan, south of Brisbane, where the birds just said things like caw. He had been in Cairns for four years. Everybody called him Tiny, because it was Australia, and Australia had rules. The curlews still got him.
He picked the pad up. He shook out his foot. He looked around the Cassowary dorm, and sighed.
Six beds. Three bunks, white-painted steel, the old kind that clanged when you climbed them. A ceiling fan turning slow above each one, stirring the wet heat around like soup. Louvre windows, open, with flywire across them and the dark garden outside full of noise: the curlews, the frogs, the geckos going chk-chk-chk on the walls, somebody laughing by the pool, and, over everything, the soft enormous hiss of the wet season, which in Cairns in late March was less a season than a room you lived inside. It was nine o'clock at night and it was twenty-nine degrees. The humidity was so high that the air felt like a damp tea towel that someone was holding over your face with love.
And on every bed, in a neat roll with a cable coming out of it, a heated mattress pad.
"Who's cold," Tiny said, to no one. "Who is cold. In Cairns."
Fictional reviews of the fictional Croc & Cockatoo, quoted from the book.
☠ "welcome to the tropics, sadia. warm beds for everyone. exposure: moderate. ☠" — @HostelReaper
☠ "cassowary, bed 4. reserved. ☠" — @HostelReaper
☠ "cyclone mode active. for your safety, all guests please return to your assigned beds. ☠" — @HostelReaper