The Dark and What It Said Page 15

  "If there's anything to be learnt from all this," Keenen said, the day they wheeled me down to his ward for a visit, "it's that you should always put things back where you found them.”

  And it was just such a thought that had me laugh near to breaking my stitches when I read that the Earl of Woodthorpe had cut down a gum tree in his Manor grounds and was air freighting it out to Australia. Naturally, most people assumed the Earl's mind had thrown a rod.

  I knew otherwise.

  Time in a Rice Bowl

  "Christine's turned into a Chinaman and disappeared!"

  It was midnight. Numb with sleep I was wondering if I'd heard my sister right, or whether there'd been some interference on the phone line. Her ten year old daughter had disappeared. Christine had turned into a Chinaman and disappeared. "Rhoda, talk sense!" I was only now beginning to wake up, beginning to think, God! Here she goes again.

  "Ernie, will you... please, please help me! You're the only one I can turn to who knows about these things!”

  "Rhoda, listen. Have you taken anything? Pills or --"

  “You're not listening to me!"

  There was a sudden silence, then a sort of sob that made me think she was only just hanging on to her reason. Her voice, trembling, said, "Can you get over here straight away?"

  "I'll be there as fast as I can.”

  "Not here... not the house. Gower Street. Do you remember Gower Street?"

  "No, not really." Right now I was having trouble remembering what day it was, let alone a street in a suburb I hadn't lived in since I was a kid.

  "Up Darren Road," she told me, "through the railway gates at the top of the hill, second street on the left. The vacant block next to the pizza parlour on the corner. Hurry! I don't know how long the laundry will stay there!"

  It was close to half twelve when I hit the freeway, the bike's twist grip wrapped back against the stops, the tacho almost red-lining. Rhoda had once verged on a nervous break-down when her husband was killed in an industrial accident two years before. For a time she spaced herself out on tranquillizers, and I knew if it hadn't been for Christine, Rhoda might've prescribed for herself a shorter, more intense course of sleeping pills instead. So what was the meaning of this 'Chinaman' thing? A relapse? I hoped not. Yet thinking of the alternative didn't make me feel any better.

  You're the only one I can turn to who knows about these things.

  Darren Road was a blur of street lighting. The railway crossing had me airborne a moment as I roared across it. I slowed for the left turn, leaned the machinery into Gower Street and braked. The bike slewed into the gutter and stopped. Rhoda came running out of the darkness, hauling me off the bike hardly before I'd got out from under my helmet.

  "Quick! Quick!" She hurried me into the lot.

  Underfoot and round about, grass poked up from the broken brick foundations of a long-ago house. I half believed Rhoda now, and had horrible ideas about what she was leading me to. "Have you called the police?" I said.

  "Of course not!" she said, as if it'd been the stupidest question ever uttered. Her voice rang off the walls on either side. I glanced about the empty street, hoping nobody had heard. "This is nothing the police could handle," Rhoda continued, quieter, but still with that on-the-edge tone. "That's why I called you.

  "Eh? Since when do I specialize in little girls turning into Chinamen?" All the same I was beginning to have my suspicions and it was turning me cold. I grabbed her shoulders and spun her round. There was no grog on her breath, but it was too dark to see her eyes properly.

  She pulled away. "Ernie, I'm telling you the truth!"

  "You've tripped out on us before!"

  "Christine's here. You've got to believe me! You've got to help me!"

  I hesitated. I'd seen and heard weird before, having had close and unpleasant experience of the supernatural in the past. Yet Rhoda was quite capable of making all this up and then believing it if she'd gone on another binge. I said as calmly as I could, "Tell me what happened."

  Rhoda took no notice. She stood in the middle of the lot, staring up, then to either side at nothing. "You'll see it soon, she said.

  "See what?" I was almost sure now she'd slipped off the deep end again and was going under for the third time. Almost sure. "See what?"

  "Smell it? It's nearly... nearly..."

  I sniffed, faintly smelling soapy steam, though I didn't stop to wonder who might be boiling up washing at this hour. "Rhoda, tell me what --"

  Walls flashed into existence around us, there for an instant, dissolving again into nothing. And in that instant the smell of laundry had intensified, hitting my nose like a blow.

  "There!" Rhoda cried. "Did you see it? Did you see it?"

  "Calm down and tell me what this is." Calm down, hell. I could hear panic growing in my own voice.

  "I don't know what this is. All I know is that Christine's lost in it somewhere."

  The walls blinked into existence again, looking utterly solid with its peeling candy-striped wall paper. We were in a passageway. At the far end I saw big tubs under open sheds, all shrouded in steam.

  The walls vanished.

  "Now do you believe me?" said Rhoda, making me feel like a doubting fool.

  The smell of laundry hung faint in the air, but increasing, coming at me in waves of soapiness. Rhoda raced towards the back of the lot yelling, "Christine! Christine!" -- and once again I was looking down that passageway with Rhoda running into a long-dead back yard.

  The walls flickered like a faulty neon as reality kicked in and out. I charged down the passage after Rhoda, slipping on grass, tripping over bricks and stumbling through the walls like a ghost. I fell into the back yard.

  "Rhoda!"

  "Christine's here! I know she's here!" Half seen in the flickering steam, my sister ran back and forth between the sheds of bubbling tubs, log fires burning beneath them. Behind it all a tree by the back fence was madly alternating between a slender sapling and gnarly old age.

  The sapling, the tubs, the sheds shimmered and steadied a moment. Rhoda, suddenly still, stared behind me.

  "Christine?"

  But what was standing at the back door on bony feet, watching, was not the brown haired little girl whose smiles and crazy chatter I remembered. It was ragged, stooped and horribly thin, the face blurred like an elusive memory.

  Rhoda swore and rushed at the figure. I jumped to catch her -- and there we were in the empty lot with her cries echoing from wall to wall, the smell of soapy steam gone. She stood where the apparition had been a moment before. I touched her arm. She didn't respond, just stood there, turning slowly to look now here, now there at weeds and broken bricks.

  There were lights on in houses where only minutes ago there'd been blind windows.

  "Best I get you home," I said, guiding her back to the street. "Before the cops come and bounce us both into rubber rooms.”

  With some difficulty I managed to get Rhoda onto the pillion seat of my bike; she kept turning to stare into the vacant lot. We arrived outside her home just in time to see a strobing blue light go tearing down Darren Road.

  ***

  Rhoda refused to go to bed. I had to settle for her sitting in a chair by the front window.

  "Christine will be all right," I told her.

  "How do you know?" Her hands were shaking. Shock was setting in,

  "Because I know about these things. OK? Listen, I learnt a lesson in trust tonight. I'd like to think we both did. Do you believe me that Christine will be all right?"

  She hesitated, then nodded. "Yes."

  I turned out the light and quietly left the room, feeling an utter bastard lying to my sister like that.

  The plastic plaque fitted to the bedroom door read 'Christine Sleeps Here' in gold lettering. Beneath it was a cameo of a little girl asleep in bed.

  It was dark inside. As I snapped on the light a sort of scraping sound came from near the dressing table. I had an impression of something crouching there, an impre
ssion that was gone even as I realized it. Then another sound, a muffled bump as something hit the carpet.

  It was a bowl of fired-clay with a wide, steep-sided shape. It was filled with a clear liquid, and though it'd fallen on its side none had spilled.

  There was no mistake about it being a liquid. Surface tension curled down the edges, it rotated slowly in the bowl and offered little resistance to a pencil stirred through it. The pencil caused no ripples and came out perfectly dry. In fact I couldn't make the liquid ripple at all. It just stayed there no matter what side-up it was held.

  The outside of the bowl was streaked and clogged with dirt, as though it'd just been dug up. Some cleaning and rubbing with my sleeve produced no genie, but it did uncover etchings of Chinese characters. Something at last was beginning to make sense, only I didn't know what.

  ***

  Rhoda wore her long winter coat down to the lot, even though it was not a particularly cold day. I hadn't shown her the bowl, knowing the effect it would have on her. For the same reason I hadn't wanted her to come down with me, though it was probably better, possibly safer, than having her rattling around her empty house.

  Rhoda wandered restlessly about the lot, hugging her coat close about, sunglasses hiding the red eyes she thought I hadn't noticed. Sometimes she stopped and sniffed the air, and so did I. There was nothing to smell but an occasional drift of diesel fumes from the busses on Darren Road.

  For some reason I thought the tree by the back fence might yield a clue. But its bark was clean of any carvings, and there were no hollows or holes where things might be hidden. On either side of what had been the back yard were concrete slabs, cracked, grown over with weeds and bearing traces of having been scorched in the long, long ago. When I showed Rhoda these she regarded them with horror and looked away.

  "Tell me about Christine," I said. "What happened yesterday?"

  Rhoda gave a little shrug. "She came home late from school and said she'd been playing."

  "Did she say where? With who?"

  "Maybe here. Don't know with who."

  Or what? "Did she have anything with her?"

  "Just her school bag."

  "Did she do or say anything out of the ordinary?"

  "You mean other than turn into an old Chinaman?"

  "I mean from the time she got home till the time that happened," I answered, more sharpish than I'd meant to.

  "I don't know!" Rhoda threw up her hands. "She chatters on thirteen to the dozen!"

  "Don't you listen to her sometimes? What did she do at school that day? Who did she play with? What did she find and bring home? Don't you take any notice of your own kid? You know, Rhoda, if it hadn't been for that now-you-see-it-now-you-don't last night I'd swear you'd been popping pills again."

  Rhoda rounded on me. "Why don't you try being a single parent and hold down a job at the same time! See if you've got the time and energy to listen to every --"

  "Calm down. Calm down." I waited for her anger to subside. She took a deep breath and looked to left and right, but not at me. "Think back to yesterday," I said, "when Christine came home. You said she was late. Now you remembered that because it was something out of the ordinary.”

  "I suppose."

  "So you should be able to remember what you were doing when she came in."

  "I was... um, I was doing the ironing in the living room.”

  "OK. Did she have anything with her?"

  "Anything with her?" By her tone I knew she suspected this to be more than a chance question. She shook her head. "Just her school bag... no, wait. Not even that. I heard her go into her room first and put her bag away." Rhoda looked off into space. "I thought that was unusual because she had to pass the living room door to get to her room, but... she always comes to see me first no matter where I am in the house when she gets home."

  "Did you ask her where she'd been?"

  "Of course I asked her where she'd been!" She paused. "Sorry. She said she'd been to Gower Street." Rhoda looked at me in sudden surprise. "I didn't remember her saying that until just now. She said she was down in Gower Street... at the holding ground. What the hell is a holding ground, Ernie?"

  "Don't know. But it sounds vaguely familiar." It also sounded vaguely disturbing for reasons I couldn't recall. "Did she say anything else?"

  "Prattle about school I suppose. Look, I'd only been home half an hour myself and there was a whole lot of ironing and --”

  "OK. OK. Did she say or do anything out of the ordinary during the evening?"

  Rhoda sighed, thought for a second. "She didn't watch as much television as usual. After her few jobs -- drying the dishes, loading the washing machine for the morning, things like that -- she spent most of her time in her room. You know something, don't you."

  "I don't know yet. Tell me how she disappeared."

  "I put her to bed at the usual hour. Some time later -- it must've been long after eleven -- she came out of her room, and I thought she was sleep walking; she had that look about her, you know?" Rhoda ran a hand through her hair and started walking about the lot again with me at her side. It was plain she was hating this particular memory. "I saw her face wrinkling like a rotting fruit, and her hair was going black and kind of twisting into a pigtail. She walked out the front door, and every step she took she grew thinner and taller, then stooped and shuffled like an old man. I flew out after her but couldn't catch up, even though she was taking such small steps and I was running. I followed her to... well, to what we saw last night. A shop of some kind is how it looked from the outside, and it was shimmering like a heat haze. Christine -- or whatever it was she'd turned into -- opened the front door and went in. I couldn't touch the door, couldn't feel it at all. I passed through it like it wasn't there. Then the whole thing started blinking, started fading out. I just stood there calling 'Christine! Christine!' I --Jesus Christ! I don't think she was even breathing!"

  I took Rhoda in my arms and held her a moment, unable to think of anything to say short of lies. I walked her back to her place and made a pot of tea. When I returned to the lot later that morning I started searching, and soon found what I'd been hoping to find: in the middle of what had been the back yard, a bowl-shaped hollow where something had recently been dug up.

  ***

  After ringing our workplaces and making our excuses --flu, scarlet fever, black plague, something like that -- I dropped Rhoda off at the local library in the hope she'd be able to find out something about Gower Street's vacant lot via the local historical society.

  "We're not done yet," I told her as we parted. "Christine’s safe and we'll find her." But I asked myself, How the hell do you know?

  All the way down Railway Avenue to the town hall the bike's rear view mirrors kept giving me glimpses of a white blur dodging about the trees behind me. When I pulled up outside the town hall I gave the avenue a good long look. It was empty and still, save for autumn leaves spilling along in a stray breeze. Most would've put it down to imagination and forgotten it. I let it go to the back of my mind where I knew it would paw at me.

  There was less bureaucracy and red tape than expected in finding the title deed to the lot in Gower Street. It appeared to have been a commercial laundry around the turn of the century, owned by a certain Mr Lee Ho Chin. Circa 1912 the property was seized by local authorities for back taxes and non-payment of rates. The building was demolished. And that, apparently, was that. All I had was a name and a time, no reasons why.

  I biked slowly back down the avenue, watching the trees, watching the mirrors, seeing no white blur this time.

  Back at my place I looked up Holding Ground in an occult encyclopaedia, flipping through the pages with an awful foreboding. I knew the term in connection with something I couldn't quite remember. Something not at all pleasant. And when I found it I thought of Christine and broke down.

  It said: Holding Ground. See Death March.

  ***

  I made a cold meat salad for tea. Rhoda was in no mood fo
r cooking, and even less for eating.

  "What's Christine having for tea tonight?" she said, toying with the salt shaker on the kitchen table. She'd had no luck with the historical society, and had greeted my discoveries at the town hall with a dull "So what."

  “Names are handles to grab,” I told her.

  "How will that return my daughter?"

  I took the salt shaker from her fidgeting fingers. She took it back and pulled away.

  "I tried to get in contact with a witch today," I said.

  "'Tried to'. That means you failed."

  "Whatever answered the phone sounded like furniture being shifted around, but shaped into a voice. It promised to pass on the message."

  "So now I'm putting my trust in the noise of tables and chairs being shoved about." Rhoda lifted her eyes to the empty chair on the other side of the table, tucked in neat against the edge.

  "Do you want a drink?" I asked.

  "Yeah, sure. Let's go down the pub and get pissed paralytic." She shook her head "No I don't need booze or pills for a crutch anymore, Ernie. I won't do Christine any good with my face down the loo or a stomach pump down my throat."

  Good for you. "You asked me this morning if I knew anything." I left the kitchen, went into Christine’s room and returned with the Chinese bowl. I plonked it down in front of Rhoda. She looked at me with a sort of dull surprise. Like a stage magician demonstrating that there was nothing up my sleeves I showed her the contents of the bowl, showed her it was not a solid by taking her hand and dipping in a finger. It caused no ripples.

  I turned the bowl on its side.

  She stared at it for a good thirty seconds in a mixture of astonishment and horror. "What the hell is it?" she said at last.

  "A long time ago in China, when a man or woman died far from their native province, sometimes a relative or friend would find a wizard and pay him to re-animate the corpse and lead it home. The wizard would wait until he had a number of these commissions, stored buried but undecayed in what was called a Holding Ground, then he'd set out on something known in Chinese magic as the Death March. These dead people would walk in single file, with the wizard in front holding a rice bowl of water out before him. When they reached their destination the water was spilt on the ground and the bowl broken to bits. Only then could the bodies decay and their souls rest in peace."