The Dark and What It Said Read online

  The Dark

  and

  What It Said

  Rick Kennett

  Cooperative Ink

  Copyright © 2016 Rick Kennett

  All Rights Reserved

  Published by:

  Cooperative Ink

  www.cooperativeink.com

  The Dark and What It Said is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior written permission from the copyright holder, except in brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. Please direct permission requests to [email protected] with “Attention: Permissions Coordinator” in the subject box.

  Cover design by C.S. Fuqua.

  First Electronic Edition

  May 2016

  Acknowledgements

  The stories contained in this collection first appeared in the following publications:

  “The Dark and What It Said,” Andromeda Spaceways In-Flight Magazine #28, 2007

  “Anningley Hall, Early Morning,” The Ghosts & Scholars Book of Shadows Volume 1 [Sarob Press], 2012

  “Dolls for Another Day,” The Ghosts & Scholars Book of Shadows Volume 2 [Sarob Press], 2014

  “Chinese Whispers,” Agog #1 [Agog Press], 2002

  “The Cross Talk,” Acquainted With the Night [Ash Tree Press], 2004

  “All On St Mark’s Eve,” The Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine, June, 2010

  “Due West,” Eidolon #25/26, 1998

  “Isle of the Dancing Dead,” The Fifth Book of After Midnight Stories [Robert Hale], 1991

  “On the Other Side,” Midnight Echo #5, March, 2011

  “Out of the Storm,” Chills #6, 1992

  “The Outsider,” Ghosts & Scholars #14, 1992

  “Time in a Rice Bowl,” The Reluctant Ghost-Hunter, [Haunted Library], 1991

  “The Seas of Castle Hill Road,” Eidolon #9, 1992

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Dark and What It Said

  Anningley Hall, Early Morning

  Dolls for Another Day

  Chinese Whispers

  The Cross Talk

  All On St Mark’s Eve

  Due West

  Isle of the Dancing Dead

  On the Other Side

  Out of the Storm

  The Outsider

  Time in a Rice Bowl

  The Seas of Castle Hill Road

  Introduction

  I've never seen a ghost, but when I was eight I heard one.

  It was on one of those many nights I spent alone watching TV in my grandparent's home in the Melbourne inner suburb of Kensington. Behind the Stromberg-Carlson television set, a nice piece of furniture in its own right, was a long window which had once looked onto the backyard, but now looked into what was known as the back kitchen, part of a built-on flat my mother had occupied, and my mother had been dead all my life barring three days.

  On TV, I recall, was a comedy set in the theatrical world starring Red Skelton. Then something began to rap on the lower left pane of the window. More curious than frightened I crept off the chair and looked through the window into the darkness behind where I saw absolutely nothing. The knocking continued for several seconds, then ceased. I returned to the chair, trying to convince myself it had been freak vibrations from passing traffic. But deep down – and perhaps not so deep down – I didn't really believe it.

  It never happened again and I never mentioned it to anyone for a very long time, mainly because I simply put it out of my mind. What we cannot understand we tend to put to one side. Occasionally the memory of that night would surface, only to be dismissed as something odd that had happened long ago that I could never properly explain. The obvious answer was that it was the ghost of my mother, and perhaps it was.

  Other ghosts took over in later life. I read the 'true' ghost hunting adventures of Elliott O'Donnell in Screaming Skulls and Ghosts With a Purpose, and even wrote an essay on the subject of ghost hunting for a school English exam. Later I found the more honest ghostly fiction of M R James in old paperback editions of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary while scratching about in the back shelves of a Melbourne science fiction bookshop. I read them in a single gosh! wow! gulp, recognizing “Casting the Runes” as the basis of the movie Curse of the Demon, watched on that long ago Stromberg-Carlson beneath the dark back kitchen windows.

  The influence of M R James is evident in several of these stories. “Anningley Hall, Early Morning” and “Dolls for Another Day” were written specifically for anthologies of prequels and sequels to James' ghost stories. It's no coincidence that one of the grave diggers in “Isle of the Dancing Dead” is named Monty, and there are aspects of James' “A School Story” in “Chinese Whispers.”

  “Out of the Storm” evolved from many Sunday afternoons working in the engine room of the museum ship HMAS Castlemaine and pondering the belief that ships have souls.

  “The Dark and What It Said” won the 2008 Ditmar Award for Best Short Story, though 'best' is, at best, subjective. I sometimes say this story even scared me when I wrote it – not just because it includes my only ghostly experience but also other instances I find disturbing.

  “Due West” is based on an historical mystery, the unsolved Gatton murders of 1898. The sequel to “Due West” is my short novel In Quinn's Paddock featuring Ernie Pine, part scardy-cat, part hero, psychic investigator by default, ghost-busting under protest. Ernie appears in – or rather is dragged kicking and screaming into – “The Outsider”, “Time in a Rice Bowl” and “The Seas of Castle Hill Road.”

  The Dark and What It Said

  It didn’t start with their leaving the train at Ferndale in the foothills, backpacks loaded. Nor when they entered the Matagong Ranges, hiking boots on upward trails of gravel and clay, cold winds sighing almost humanly through the trees. Not even when bad weather caught them three days later on a lonely mountain road, little more than a dirt track, making them pitch camp in the early afternoon. It started when Rudy on all fours pushed through the tent flap and said, “Jeez, I hate that!”

  “What? My cooking?” said Andrew, stirring dehydrated vegetables in a pot bubbling on their little one-burner stove.

  “Yeah, that too.” Rudy threw the torch in ahead of him now that he was back in the light of the hissing kerosene lamp. He closed the flap behind him, zippering out the rain and the cold night wind. “No, I mean people dumping old car bodies in the bush, cluttering up the place. Isn’t that what junk yards are for? There’s a rusty old hulk just up the slope here. Almost banged into it in the dark while I was looking for a big enough tree to pee on. Looks like it’s been there for years.”

  “The tree?”

  “The car.” Rudy reached for a towel amongst his bedding and started drying his hair wet from the rain.

  “Eh? What sort of car?”

  “Dunno what make -- some old sedan by the look of it. Rusty and pretty overgrown with branches and bushes. Smelt sort of funny too, sort of sour, so I didn’t really take a good look. Wheels were still on, though. Tyres too, but flat. Odd for a wreck to have its wheels still on."

  “Probably stolen,” Andrew said. “Stolen, then brought out here and stripped of its radio and stuff.” He dropped a couple of beef stock cubes into the pot, followed by a handful of instant mash for thickenin
g. “Was all the glass still in place?”

  “Um … yes, come to think of it. I remember my torch glinting off the windscreen. Not sure about the side windows though.”

  “And was the engine still under the hood?”

  “Didn’t look. Like I said, too dark and wet and smelly to go poking about under the hood. But you might be right about it being stolen. I’ll check it out in the morning.” Rudy rummaged in his backpack sitting in a corner of the tent and brought out the two plastic plates which served as their only crockery, followed by a couple of plastic forks salvaged from the last take-away they’d had before leaving the city. “Say, when I was out there did you call me?”

  “Not me,” said Andrew, adding, “Give us your plate,” and began spooning out a brown concoction that smelt better than it looked.

  “Hmmm. Could’ve sworn I heard you say ‘Hey there’ or something. Maybe it was a night bird. Maybe the wind in the trees. Who knows.”

  “Maybe you’re going bush-happy.”

  Rudy laughed. “No, I enjoy it too much. There’s more to bush walking than getting out in the open, getting the country air. Even more than giving you self reliance, it gives you self belief. You know?” He started looking through his pack for the bread they’d bought the day before at that mountain township, their last contact with civilization. “A good pair of boots and some common sense are practically the essentials. Tell someone where you’re going and you can’t go wrong.”

  “You did tell someone where we were going, didn’t you, Rudy?”

  “Huh? No, I thought you did.”

  “What?” Andrew glanced up into a perfectly straight face -- then saw that his friend’s eyes were smiling. No way would Rudy ever overlook a fundamental rule of bush walking. But there was something else that bothered Andrew. With some forced casualness he said, “What about snakes?”

  “What about them?”

  “Despite all this,“ Andrew said, pausing a moment to listen to the rain pattering against the nylon sides of the tent, “it’s coming on to warmer weather. Won’t they be coming out of their holes about now?”

  “Snakes feel your footsteps through their bellies. They slither off long before you see them.” Rudy handed out slices of staling bread as if he were dealing cards, three each. “It might be a cliché, Andrew, but they are more scared of you than you are of them.”

  “I doubt it. I’m terrified of them.”

  “Shouldn’t be.” Rudy dunked bread into the contents of his plate. “As my grandpa used to say, snakes and ghosts are overrated.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “Good stew,” said Rudy, eating.

  “Scratch feeds are my specialty,” said Andrew, then prompting repeated “Ghosts?”

  Rudy gave his friend a sour look. “You’re not gunna tell me you’re scared of ghosts as well as snakes?”

  “In all the time we’ve been bush walking together this is the first time you’ve mentioned ghosts.”

  “And this is the first time you’ve got skitty about snakes. So what?”

  “Are there ghosts in these mountains?”

  “There are more ghosts in cities. But … yeah, the Matagong Ranges are big enough to have its share of ghost stories … but, shit, Rudy, they were made up by old timers in the olden days. I’ve hiked these mountains for years and I’ve hardly ever seen a ghost.”

  Despite his passion for the Great Outdoors, Andrew had to admit to himself that lonely places sometimes got to him. Lonesome places like the Matagong Ranges generated ghost stories. For all he knew they generated ghosts as well. In his childhood --not that long ago -- he’d twice heard rapid knockings on windows facing into empty rooms. And lying awake one night watching the oblong of his open bedroom doorway, dimly outlined by light down the hallway, he’d seen something hunched and black, framed for a few seconds, creep by in silence. Then the hall was again empty and remained so for the rest of that frightened, wakeful night. It had foretold nothing, it had never appeared again. But he kept his room door closed at night from then on and never again watched open doorways for fear of what he might see go by. He’d told no one of any of these things. Not his parents, not any of his friends. Not then, not ever.

  ***

  Midnight. Or so Andrew thought. Rudy had the only watch.

  He’d woken some minutes before from uneasy dreams and was lying in his sleeping bag, looking up into the dark. The smell of dinner had disappeared earlier while they’d drank coffee and played cards. The tent, Andrew now thought, smelt of all the Summer forests and Autumn hills it had ever been pitched all the years Rudy had owned it, and whoever had owned it before him. And perhaps -- he took a long, silent breath -- perhaps just a hint of something sour, something he couldn’t identify and didn’t like. The patter of rain on nylon, the sound they had listened to for the last nine hours, had ceased. The wind too had dropped, was no longer making almost human noises among the trees. A heavy, uncanny silence enveloped the night, both outside and within the tent, like that which had preceded the rapping on those childhood windows, like those few watching seconds before the hunched and creeping thing had crossed his doorway all that time ago.

  Beside him, Rudy rolled over in his sleeping bag and someone outside grunted, “Hey you there.”

  Eyes wide in the dark, going suddenly cold, Andrew listened in this immense silence. Waited for the voice to speak again, hoping he wouldn’t hear again, maybe just a night noise, maybe just a waking dream, just a dream, maybe the wind, imagination maybe maybe maybe.

  Seconds passed but the sound he dreaded to hear again was not repeated. As quietly as he could, Andrew unzipped his bag, freed an arm and nudged his sleeping friend.

  “Rudy!” he whispered. “Rudy! Wake up!”

  The dark beside him muttered sleepily

  “Rudy, there’s someone out there.”

  “Wot?” said Rudy heavily.

  “Shhh. I just heard someone talking outside the tent.”

  They listened, both of them, to the deep silence of the night.

  “You were dreaming,” whispered Rudy at last. “You’re --“

  The voice grunted again. Where it came from they couldn’t tell, couldn’t even be sure of the words exactly. Hey you there? Ya you care? But it was close and surely addressed to them. Here in the depths of the scrubby faraway in the middle of the black of the night it could only mean trouble. Unbidden memories came to mind of stories of crime in lonely places: forest murders and shallow bush-land graves not found for years, not found at all.

  Rudy was first to move. He sat up and groped for the torch while Andrew struggled to escape his sleeping bag. Whatever threatened outside was best faced standing up and in the open, not lying in a ready-made nylon shroud, no proof against anything but rain.

  Rudy zipped open the tent flap, gently, slowly, a few teeth at a time. He and Andrew edged together and peered out. Not that there was anything to see. So dark was the night they might as well have been on the far side of Oblivion. With fear surging through them their sense of smell grew acute: the smell of the forest damp after the rain, of dripping branches and rotting leaves on the ground … and something else, sour, bad. Their hearing sharpened too. They listened for the sound of breathing, for footsteps squelching in the wet grass, for the click of a gun being cocked.

  It was easy in the night to imagine someone, something standing over the tent, large, tall, silent, malign. In the mind’s eye it was always large and tall, always silent and malign.

  Spurred less by bravery than by a need to know what the night might hide, Rudy flashed the torch on, swinging the beam around in an almost frantic fashion, shining now on branches sparkling with rain drops, now on the wet grass, now on the empty road, lonely in the forest depths.

  They scrambled from the tent, the light flicking up the slope and into the trees behind them, swinging back and forth.

  A tree, another tree, another tree … the moving torch beam set their shadows off in a marching line slowly left to right,
thin black fingers pointing to things out of sight.

  The light touched on a bulky, indefinite shape, hard by a tree, obscured by a low branch across the top of it.

  “What’s that?’ whispered Andrew.

  “That old car body I told you about,” Rudy whispered back. He moved the light along, then swept it all around to catch whatever might be creeping up from behind. Nothing was creeping up from behind.

  “Maybe it was a night bird like you said before,” said Andrew, not at all sounding like he believed it. “I’ve sometimes heard a bird call that sounds like ‘Whatcha reading.’ Maybe there’s something out here that hoots ‘Hey you there’ at night.”

  As he said this Andrew thought Rudy turned his face towards him, but in the dark he couldn’t see his friend’s expression. Nor at that moment did he want to.

  High in the trees a stray breeze rustled the branches, shaking last droplets to fall cold onto the grass around them. Nothing moved except Rudy’s light across the trees, across the grass, across the old car body, into the thick scrub beyond. He turned the beam back to the car. The light glinted on its unbroken windscreen, flashed across flat tyres, over the doors and hood, rusted but undamaged. The light seemed unable to penetrate its dark interior.

  They returned to their tent where the torch remained switched on until the kero lamp was pumped and primed and lit. They dragged their sleeping bags outside and remained in the open, comforted by the regular hissing of the lamp and its ring of illumination, sitting up, determined to watch out the night. Overhead vast clouds rolled by and cleared, revealing stars in a patch of sky cut jagged on all sides by huddling treetops.

  The great forest brooded in the dark, all shadows. Nothing came down the road, nothing came out of the trees.