The Dark and What It Said Page 8

***

  “In Memory of Douglas aged twenty-seven, Celeste aged twenty-four, Myra aged nineteen. The dearly beloved children of James and Amelia Henley, who were the victims of a horrible tragedy perpetrated near Graxton on December 26th, 1898. Requiescant In Pace. This Monument has been erected by public subscription to the memory of the above innocent victims.”

  It was a warm afternoon, as most afternoons were in the Queensland countryside. The sky was blue and the grass a crisp yellow. Lewisham waved flies away with his hat and stepped back to get the grey stone obelisk into perspective; in Graxton’s little cemetery of simple crosses and modest stones it was a monster. He had never in his life visited a graveyard outside of a funeral, the last time being sixteen years ago when his wife had died in the flu epidemic following the World War. He wasn’t sure why he was here now; perhaps to prove to himself that Douglas, Celeste and Myra had really existed; perhaps to see that nothing cabalistic had been scrawled on their stone. As he walked around its rusting iron railing he reflected with a grim smile that this was not the best place for a man with a newly acquired belief in ghosts. It could be just asking for trouble.

  He stopped and thought that over. Perhaps he was asking for trouble. Unconsciously, perhaps, he was daring them -- whoever, whatever they may be. Here I am, he thought. Do your worst. Feeling defiant, he scanned the graveyard, the road, the bush and fields beyond.

  Crows made lazy calls in the surrounding wattles and gums, and flapped between branches. Something rustled through the grass. Flies darted and droned about Lewisham’s head, getting in his ears, buzzing.

  Something stirred on the other side of the obelisk. He leaned around it, expecting to surprise a lizard or rabbit. Instead he beheld a figure all in black, stooping before the Henley grave. His heart raced, as did his brain, filling with fear, regretted bravado and visions of death’s-head spectres. He cried out. The figure stood, revealing itself to be a man in dark tweed, a string tie and wide-brimmed hat.

  Lewisham let out a deep sigh and felt rather foolish, especially when he saw the wreath the man had just placed against the stone.

  Smiling, the stranger said, “I’m sorry. Did I startle you?”

  “I suppose you did. I turned myself around not half a minute ago, yet never saw you coming.”

  “Perhaps I approached in such a line as to be hidden by the monument.”

  “That must be it,” said Lewisham with a little desperation. He glanced down at the wreath -- Turk’s Cap lilies -- then up at the stranger’s face. He guessed his age as forty, and thought he looked something like Michael, had he been alive now: the same nose, something of the same eyes. “Are you a relative?”

  “No,” said the stranger. “Are you?”

  “No. But I have an interest.”

  “I trust not a morbid one. You know the history?”

  “I was told it this morning, although I’ve lived in the town almost two years now. Which is odd, come to think of it, as I would’ve thought the story to be well known hereabouts.”

  “Only the older folk of the district remember. Graxton’s population has shifted in the last few years, and a good many who lived through the event have long since moved away or died. The young might think they know, and others who weren’t here, but only at second and third hand. Time and retelling breaks truth into rubble. I fancy you have heard some garbled version involving frozen expressions of horror on the faces of the victims, mutilation of the horse, unexplained parchments and animal prints found nearby. It is one of history’s passing sensations, best forgotten.”

  “And yet you lay flowers on their grave.”

  “I knew the two girls.”

  “Then you must be older than you look and know the facts of the matters’

  The stranger smiled. “You flatter me. Questions without answers are only torments to yourself and a burden to others. There are no answers here.”

  “You mean in the cemetery?”

  “I mean in Graxton. There are no truths to be found out; none within human reach at least. Don’t believe all you hear. Let mysteries lie. Good day, sir.”

  The stranger touched the brim of his hat and stalked off among the stones. Lewisham watched him disappear into the scrub, then turned and made his way back to his bicycle leaning by the cemetery gates. All the way he swatted flies from his face, and it was only then he realized he hadn’t seen the stranger bothered by a single insect.

  When he arrived home Lewisham checked the scene in the keyhole. It was exactly as it had been the time before and the time before that. He didn’t think of it now as an endless loop of film but rather as an overture awaiting the raising of a curtain. He felt he was tempting fate by peeking, even for a second. Who was to say when the curtain may fly up and he be witness to the whole hideous business.

  His sleep that night was fitful, shot through with slices of incoherent dream; formless but triggering a jumble of emotions: fear, anger, dread, awe. At one o’clock he jerked awake and stared into the darkness. Had a door just slammed in his silent house?

  He held his breath and listened. But all he heard was the all-encompassing bush silence, and the footsteps come creeping he feared never eventuated. He breathed again. Just a dream noise sounded in the mental ear. Doors were preying on his mind. This sort of thing had happened before, he recalled. Other places, other times. One morning in his Melbourne flat he’d woke to the sound of clawed feet scuttling across kitchen linoleum, fading into infinite distance. On another morning years later he distinctly heard someone yell “Beee-eeeeeeee” right outside his room. There was no sequel or explanation for either event.

  Tricks of the mind, he told himself, lying there in the dark. But then his Melbourne flat hadn’t had a bizarre history; its keyholes weren’t haunted.

  Keyholes. Realisation startled him. He sat up. Keyholes. Why just the back bedroom keyhole? Why not the back door? The front door? His own bedroom door? What might they not show?

  Half eager, half afraid, he swung out of bed and groped for the matches and candle on the night stand. In rural areas electricity was often deemed unnecessary in the wee hours, and suppliers acted accordingly. With the candle lit and left burning on the stand, he left his room, closed the door and peered though the keyhole.

  For some moments he saw nothing. Not blackness, not a night scene slowly resolving on the eye, but a grey murk. Then it seemed that there was something after all: something very small, very far away emerging, swaying from the grey. A figure, tiny and indistinct, walking slowly and deliberately towards him. Was it imagination, or did it wear dark clothes and a black, wide-brimmed hat? Surely it was too far away to see such detail. Yet at one moment he was sure, while in the next it was again but an undefined stick figure.

  The back door was next. With intense foreboding, for the door faced west, he peered into its keyhole.

  A naked figure stood erect against a sky aflame in dying sunset, its body all scrawny and wasted, thin arms crooked and outstretched. Eyes -- small, black and hard -- stared from a head too long, too narrow for its grinning mouth. Wishbone legs hooped an arch on bare feet resting on the ridged backs of two crocodiles gripping the ground with crocodile claws.

  Lewisham backed away, reeling from the macabre vision. He retrieved the candle from his room with shaking hands and made his way to the front door. He stooped and looked through the keyhole.

  “Michael!”

  ***

  Len Flynn was taking the morning air outside his shop when he spotted Arthur Lewisham shuffling up the middle of the main street. Looking neither left nor right he performed miracles of chance in not being struck down by passing wagons and motors. Flynn dashed into the road and guided Lewisham safely to his verandah. He sat him down on a wooden chair, then glanced through the window, but for the moment was unable to catch his wife’s eye as she busied herself serving a customer.

  “You’ve seen something,” Flynn said.

  Lewisham nodded, and in a shaken, broken way, almost a repeat of the pr
evious morning, he told Flynn what he’d seen, holding back only the keyhole apparition of his west facing back door.

  “But what has your son to do with it?” asked Flynn.

  “Good god, man!” Lewisham burst out of his lassitude. “Don’t you think I’ve asked myself that same question all these hours? I’ve sat in my room and babbled to myself all morning. I’m going mad, Len. Those damned ghosts are driving me out of my mind.” He went on to describe the man he’d met in the graveyard, but neither Len Flynn nor Alice, when she came out from the shop, was able to put a name to him.

  “I thought not,” said Lewisham in a tone of self-satisfaction.

  In the Flynns’ kitchen he was given a splash of brandy in a glass to steady his nerves. He drank it readily, despite the fact he was an almost total abstainer.

  “Those clothes you say this bloke was wearing,” said Flynn as Lewisham coughed down his liquor. “Reminds me of the way a swagman around here used to dress. Always wore dark tweed and a hat like the one you described. Round about thirty-odd and beardless, which was unusual for the time, particularly for a swaggie. Drifted in and out of town, wouldn’t be seen for months, then he’d turn up again and work a while at a farm or at the butchers, sling his swag and disappear. Not that I’m saying he’s the fellow you asked about. He hasn’t been seen hereabouts for donkey’s years. Come to think of it... Alice, wasn’t he found dead in Sydney round about 1903 or 4?”

  She squinted, remembering. “Seems I did hear something like that. Maybe secondhand and long afterwards; maybe someone from hereabouts was in Sydney when they read about him being found dead in the gutter. Face down in his own vomit, he was.”

  “He got questioned by the coppers, just like me. They really looked at him hard at one stage, so I heard.”

  “And his name was... Knight,” said Alice, face brightening with remembrance. “Yes. I remember him now. Used to come in here sometimes. He’d be the last one you’d pick for a swagman. He used words that went right over my poor head. ‘Necro-pol-is’ was one I recall. In fact I recall it well because it was the day of the Henley burials. He had his work clothes right enough, did Knight, but he always travelled dressed to the nines. Some used to think he was a gentleman who’d come down in the world.”

  “Years on the track would knock the polish off a man like that, Alice,” said Flynn. “Or kill him. It’s catch as catch can on the road; only the selfish and the ruthless survive a life like that. And you know,” he said, rubbing his chin, “there was something of that about Knight; something about him that made you think you never saw all round him.”

  “Yes, well, swaggie or not,” said Lewisham, “this fellow I met in your cemetery certainly wasn’t a seventy-year-old. In fact, though he looked hardly old enough, he said he knew the Henley girls.”

  “Lots of people round here knew the Henleys,” said Alice. “They were a well respected family. You’ll have read on their stone how it was paid for by public subscription.”

  “It’s a shame,” said Lewisham with the air of someone thinking out loud, “that there are no photographs of this man Knight.”

  “Who says not?” said Flynn.

  “Are there?”

  “When this happened the town came alive with newspaper men and their photographers, and that’s to say nothing of police photographers and everyone else who could work a Kodak. Graxton’s photographer of the time, old Frank Benson, bequeathed most of his to the people of the district. They’re kept at the town hall.”

  As they made their way to Graxton Town Hall through the bright morning sunshine, Flynn said, “When you saw your boy through the front door keyhole, what was he doing?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You said the other figure was walking towards you; was Michael walking towards you too?”

  For a long moment Lewisham didn’t answer, then he glanced at Flynn, surprised. “I don’t know. Queer, that. I have no memory of what I saw, yet I know I saw him.”

  “And you remember what you saw at the others?”

  Lewisham nodded, pensive.

  “What about the back door keyhole? You never mentioned that.”

  “No, I haven’t. And I’d rather not, at least for the time.”

  At the town hall they were directed down an echoy passage, cool and dim to the library. After a lengthy wait, several boxes labelled F.E. BENSON BEQUEST were brought out.

  “Old Benson had set his shop up here long before my time,” Flynn whispered as they spread yellowing photographs over the library table, “and he didn’t pass away until just a few years ago, so his collected works are quite substantial.”

  The bulk of the photographs were portraits done in Benson’s studio. All but a few of the later prints were strangers to Lewisham, posed stiffly solo or grouped around items of furniture before various backdrops. Flynn with his thirty-seven years residence now and then made noises of recognition as some forgotten face was unearthed. Some of the prints of places were more familiar, however: the Station Hotel; the Brian Boru Hotel; various of the outlying farmhouses, particularly those along Murphy Road (“That’s the Henley place,” Flynn said, tapping one of these with a finger); the streets, emptier then but still dirt and dust; the stores and shops along the main drag, often housing a different merchant or tradesman than they did today.

  “Ah,” said Flynn. “Here’s a picture of the Henleys.” He passed it across: a middle aged man and woman sitting on chairs in an outdoor setting, behind them a row of eight boys and girls ranging from child to late twenties. “The young fellow standing behind the old gent, the one wearing the moustache, that’s Douglas. The two girls on the right are Myra and Celeste.”

  Lewisham bent over the picture for a time, studying it in silence, looking into each set of eyes in turn, trying not to imagine this upright young man and those two lovely girls lying broken and violated in Quinn’s Paddock.

  “The surviving children have long since moved away,” said Flynn. “Though James Henley and his wife Amelia never left the district, despite all, and both passed away in the twenties only months apart. They’re out in the cemetery not far from their children’s monument. The old lady used to visit it every Sunday and cry and wail something piteous.”

  “I read a book on folklore once,” said Lewisham, his eyes on Amelia Henley sitting with her husband and children in happier times. “It said too much grief and sorrow could bring a ghost back because it stopped it from resting. I wonder... It said dogs could see ghosts, and if you looked between a dog’s ears you would see the same ghost the dog saw. And if you gazed steadily through the eye of a needle... I wonder if all small apertures...” He trailed off vaguely as somewhere above them the town hall clock struck the hour.

  “Arthur, I really should be getting back to the store. Will you be all right here?” Lewisham nodded and Flynn left, promising to return later to help pack up.

  Lewisham carried on sifting through the photos, looking for the man in dark tweed, beardless, thirtyish. Before long, however, he felt the missing hours of sleep creeping upon him, the unnatural stress of the last couple of days, and the monotony of passing tired eyes over more posed strangers, more half-familiar landscapes. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes a moment, then with an effort resumed his work.

  Here was one of a bush scene, lightly wooded, a horseless sulky to one side tilted down on its shafts. In the foreground an Aborigine crouched. Lewisham turned it over and read in pencil: “Quinn’s Paddock 28 Dec. ‘98. Henley sulky and black tracker Paddy Perkins.”

  “I doubt you found tracks that led anywhere in this world, eh, Paddy,” said Lewisham. He put it down and picked up another at random. This was an oddity among the rest: a night view of an empty road, lit by a full moon. The next photo was a copy of the last... or was it? Lewisham examined it closely: same road, trees, ironbark post and rail fence picked out in the same garish moonlight. Same deep shadows gathered beside the road in the foreground... No! Where the shadow in the first was unbro
ken, something had pushed out from it in the second. The third photo he picked up was much the same, save that the thing pushing out of the shadows had moved out a little further and there was now something coming along the road: a one-horse sulky carrying three people.

  Without looking, without questioning, Lewisham picked up another photograph. The sliprails into Quinn’s Paddock were down and wheel tracks, one side wobbly, traced their way through.

  By now his heart was pounding and his hands were far from steady as they picked up another picture. He didn’t want to see. But his hand came up just the same and practically pushed the ghastly thing into his face.

  Here was his picture of Knight. Here was the man in dark tweed and string tie, half turned into the moonlight showing ugly emotion on that beardless, thirtyish face, doing it; the educated, well spoken swaggie with his trousers open, doing it, with a thick branch in his upswung hands, doing it; three more for the necro-pol-is lying terrified there half in moon shadow on the grass, all heads pointing West where distant but distinct the grinning thing stood on crocodile backs stretching out its thin gathering arms.

  Lewisham looked up, horribly shaken. Douglas, Myra and Celeste sat with him at the table. They were smiling. He thought, Why are you smiling? Don’t you know? Don’t you care? Still smiling, the girls’ heads sloughed off at the sides. Bone and brain and brain-fluid gushed forth, splattered on the table, on the photos. Blood squirted from a neat round hole in Douglas’s forehead, spraying over Lewisham, salty and warm.

  Horror tightened in his chest. He fell face-forward into the photographs and gore, dimly aware he was having a heart attack.

  ***

  At the Ipswich Hospital, halfway east to Brisbane, the doctors diagnosed a heart flutter, though tests showed his heart was strong and they puzzled over the cause. Lewisham knew better than to tell them. He spent his time fearing the moment a nurse would smile and say, “You’re going home tomorrow.” He did not look forward to leaving hospital. He did not relish the thought of sleeping again in his neat little Murphy Road cottage.