The Dark and What It Said Read online

  But three days later, feeling like a recaptured fugitive, he was given a bottle of tablets and returned all those miles west to Graxton.

  ***

  “And how are we today, Mr Lewisham?”

  “Why is it,” he said, staring up at the ceiling of his room, “that the moment someone is incapacitated otherwise normal people begin addressing him in the collective first person?”

  “Beg yours?” said the young woman at the door of his room.

  “Never mind. You’re late today, Mary. You might like to give the typewriter an extra dusting.”

  Mary dropped her bag at the bedroom door and put her hands into her apron pockets. “I saw the amount of dust that was on it when I was here on Wednesday, Mr L. That same page is still sticking out of it that was sticking out of it two weeks ago.”

  “I’ve only been out of hospital a few days. Your local G.P., Machen, told me to take it slowly.”

  “I heard what Doctor Machen said... As if you do get yourself excited, cooped up here most days like a prize barnyard fowl. But there are limits to taking it slow. You’ll rust away just lying there.”

  “Ah, Mary. You’re getting more and more like the daughter I never had.” He popped a tablet into his mouth and washed it down with a glass of water. “Writing’s not all pounding out words on a typewriter. There’s a lot of researching to be done. Which reminds me, have those books come in from the State Library yet?”

  Mary hefted her bag and brought out two large tomes. “That’s why I was late. I was waiting at the station. They were on the eleven o’clock train that didn’t come in till twenty past.”

  “Aha!” He took the two books and began thumbing through them with almost childish eagerness.

  “Mr L, coming from the Smoke as you do, you probably don’t reckon I’m too sharp on such matters, but I have eyes in me head and I read the papers sometimes. Them books there that you ordered special from Brisbane got nothing to do with the War. I know who Crowley is and I looked ‘thaum-at-urgy’ up in father’s dictionary on the way here. That’s blasphemy those books are.”

  “Nonsense, m’dear.” He was turning pages slower now, stopping to read headings and study sketch drawings. “They are about the War. Crowley started it. He was pulling rabbits out of a hat and by mistake pulled the Kaiser out by his whiskers. Isn’t being pulled out of a hat by your whiskers excuse enough to send a hundred million young men to kill each other?”

  “You’re not talking sense, Mr L.”

  Lewisham peered at her over the top of the book and frowned. “No. I’m not. But that’s because there was scarce sense to begin with. Tell me, Mary, have you ever heard of the Henleys?”

  The change of subject threw her for a second, but she quickly regained her balance. “Henleys. Yeah... I know the story,” she said, sounding like she knew less than she was saying. “They’s the ones that got murdered a long time ago somewhere around here.”

  “Yes. Somewhere around here.”

  “A man and his two sisters went into a paddock one night because... well, you know.”

  “Know what?”

  “They were at it.” She tittered nervously.

  “Eh? What do you mean ‘at it’?”

  “You know... at it.” She darted her eyes sideways a couple of times, and gave an embarrassed laugh. “But their father caught them and bashed their brains in with a stick and then shot the horse and cut off its thing and then he went and hung himself.”

  Lewisham regarded her first with astonishment then with a tolerant smile. “Dust, Mary, dust!”

  Time and retelling breaks truth into rubble, the cemetery stranger had said. When Len Flynn had come visiting in Ipswich Hospital, he’d told Lewisham he’d visited the Henley monument. But where Lewisham had seen a wreath of lilies laid, Flynn had found only a scattering of dead flies.

  Lewisham plunged into the books, but had read only a couple of minutes when he called to Mary sweeping the front room carpet.

  She poked her head around the door again. “Yes?”

  “Mary, do you know what a poltergeist is?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do know what a poltergeist is. It’s a ghost that chucks things about. And well I should know, too.”

  She made to go again, but he called out, “Wait! What do you mean well you should know? Have you had one in your house?”

  “No, not in my house -- in gran’s house... father’s parents had one throwing things about when he was just a boy. Smashed anything that could be smashed it did, and turned the whole place inside out, so they tell me.”

  “When was this?”

  “Well, like I said, when me dad was a boy.”

  “Yes, yes, Mary, but what year? What year?”

  “Mr L, don’t get excited. Remember your heart. Well, I reckon it must’ve been round the turn of the century.”

  “1898?”

  “Suppose.”

  “Have you ever heard other stories of poltergeist activity in Graxton round about that time?”

  She leaned on her broom. “You hear stories, Mr L. Towns like this are rife with stories about this and that. Who’s to say what’s true and what’s been made up to be better than the neighbours? But they say there were other houses and other farms here and there about Graxton with poltergeists in them round the same time. Copycats, I reckon. Wanted to go one better.”

  “Thank you, Mary.” He returned to his thaumaturgy book where his finger still rested on the heading “Residue Phenomena: Poltergeists, Apparitions, etc.”

  Immediately after such ceremonies and experiments, random poltergeist activity is often experienced at distances of up to a mile or more. These dissipate after a few days. However, more substantial phenomena occur at the focus, and can continue in discrete form for many years. This can include what is popularly known as ghosts, and is not always connected with the original Magic.

  Later, when Lewisham was giving Mary her shillings for the week, he asked, “‘Poltergeist’ is not a word many people know, town or country. How did you come to hear it?”

  “Well, it was Gran’s word when she told the story.”

  “And where did she learn it?”

  “From a man who worked some of the farms round about. A swaggie he was, but he knew some odd things for all that, so Gran said.”

  Lewisham sat up sharply. “Was he called Knight?”

  “Yeah. Ridley Knight; that was his name.”

  After Mary left, Lewisham swung himself gingerly out of bed and pressed his eye to his bedroom keyhole. Something dark and blurred and shot through with oscillating light occupied the whole view. He caught glimpses of a skull face in too-close-up and imagined he heard the clack of bone against bone. He crept across the kitchen’s stone floor, still wet from Mary’s mop, glanced briefly through the back door keyhole, then turned away again with a shudder, unable to face what grinned there. He returned to the front door. Michael was there in its keyhole, glancing left and right in a sick anxiety. The stars and bush and fence were still visible in the back bedroom keyhole. What’s more, he was sure something was now moving there in the moonlight.

  ***

  All that afternoon and into the night he pored over the book on magic and the book on Crowley and how he worked that magic. At half past ten power was cut off. He lit two candles and continued reading.

  Bradley and Montpelier completed the incantations at sunset and killed one of the two injured cats. They then raised a gold ring each to an eye and gazed through it, seeing the expected Devil astride its reptiles miles to the West, although the basement wall was but a few yards away. Obeisances were enacted. Promises of power were made by the Devil. Whether these promises were kept is difficult to ascertain. Bradley died in an unexplained accident two years later in that very same basement, the house then standing vacant. At the time of his death he had not visibly gained in material wealth or spiritual power. Montpelier, however (and here it must be remembered that it was he who drew the original Parchment) did gain s
ome notoriety within arcane circles, but died in penniless obscurity in his sixtieth year. His last words were reputed to have been: “Has it all come to nothing?”

  The failure of the Bradley-Montpelier Experiment is often blamed on a lack of will to carry it through properly. Something of far more personal value than a stray cat should have been given for proper returns. There were rumours which persisted for years afterwards that a re-enactment of the Ceremony could be seen through the keyhole of the basement door. Figures usually described as being something like Bradley and Montpelier were often reported in the house during their lifetimes and long after their deaths. The cries of cats were said to drift through its corridors. Unexplained figures were met with during the one formal investigation of the house subsequent to the Ceremony; these have been variously theorised as unconnected memories and ghosts of later tenants, or entities which slipped through a gap opened unintentionally by Bradley and Montpelier. An example of this is a young man of a liquid appearance often seen leaning out of an upstairs window crying, “Fire!” though there had never been a fire at this house. The apparition of an ugly woman was sometimes seen chasing an amorphous mist which some perceived to be a child. Those who saw the woman never saw the child and those who saw the child never saw the woman, save as a formless darkness. It is sometimes thought the reappearance of Bradley and Montpelier were attempts by the essence of the men, both during life and afterwards, to re-establish a level from which they could regain power through the use of captured ‘spirits’ which were attached to and brought in by subsequent dwellers in the house.

  At one o’clock, with his head swirling, Lewisham put out his candles and fell into a deep sleep in which he dreamt that Michael was standing guard over him. In the morning he awoke from the best night’s rest he’d had since this thing had begun.

  ***

  Later that morning he dropped himself down on the back doorstep with his bottle of heart tablets, a pencil and notebook, and began work on his Gallipoli book again. But writing came hard that morning, and he found himself coming back to ponder his earlier words about the Battle of Lone Pine having been a “knowing sacrifice of the youth of Australia”. Sometimes he’d cast a glance towards the woods beyond his yard. At one point he made a tube of his hands, like a telescope, but did not dare bring it to his eye. There was no door, no barrier here; just the backyard stretching off into the woods and the horrible hollow beyond. Eventually he put everything aside, went in and fetched out the two library books.

  Len Flynn visited around lunch time and brought a thermos of tea and some bread and jam. For a while they spoke of nothing in particular, and at times lapsed into long awkward silences.

  This got to Lewisham after a while and he suddenly interrupted Flynn’s small talk, saying, “Did you take another look through the Benson photos?”

  “Well... yes,” Flynn said, happy at last to drop pretence. He took an oblong of cardboard out of his shirt pocket and gave it face down to Lewisham. “Are you sure?” He looked up at the wide blue Queensland sky. “It was broad daylight in the library too.”

  Lewisham said nothing but, hesitating only briefly, flipped over the old photograph.

  Knight. Not waiting in the shadows of Murphy Road, not committing the unspeakable in a moonlit paddock, not the unreal photos. Knight in his dark tweeds and hat and string tie. Knight standing beardless in the backyard of the Graxton police station in 1898. Though the clothes were the same as those of the stranger he met in the cemetery, the face was dissimilar, and Lewisham recalled how he’d imagined he’d looked like Michael, had his son lived to age forty. The thing that had left a wreath of flies at the Henley monument had deliberately mocked him.

  I knew the two girls, it had said with a smile.

  “Do you think that’s wise, Arthur?” said Flynn, indicating the two books of arcane knowledge sitting on the step beside him.

  “Yes,” said Lewisham in as steady a voice as he could muster, though he felt sick. He briefly outlined to Flynn what he’d read of the Bradley-Montpelier Experiment. “Do you see, Len? Bradley tried to stop it by going back and facing it, but he hadn’t the necessary power behind him. He hadn’t made much of a sacrifice.” He handed the photo back, face up. “I have, in Michael. That’s what Knight is after.”

  “Come away, Arthur,” said Flynn suddenly. “Come away.”

  Lewisham pulled away from his friend’s hand plucking at his sleeve. “Leave me be.”

  “Sell this place. Sell it, burn it down.”

  “And go where? Back to Melbourne? Back where I came from? Or somewhere with no ghosts? There are ghosts everywhere, Len. I might as well try to run from my own thoughts, and I’m getting too old for that. You have to face them down -- ghosts of all sorts -- or they’ll beat you mind and body. Leave me be. Tell Alice I’ll come visit as soon as the doctor allows.”

  So Flynn left and Lewisham returned to his work with renewed vigour.

  In the late afternoon a cloud -- or so he thought at first -- crossed the sun. He looked up. There was no cloud. The sun shone brightly behind the tall apparition standing swaying above him.

  “The Henleys are lying dead in Quinn’s Paddock, and such a mess you’ve never seen in your life.”

  Lewisham nodded quietly to it and the figure turned and stalked across the yard, losing thickness and detail until it was a thin shadow lost amongst the trees.

  He stood. Knight would be there in the hollow. He had to be, for his skull face was no longer stumbling in and out of view in the keyhole. Dead these many years. Dead like Bradley and Montpelier had died; like he expected Crowley, already on a slide, to die -- in poverty, powerless and alone. He who made the greater sacrifice would prevail. Knight’s wasn’t a sacrifice; Knight had lost nothing.

  Lewisham moved off on faltering steps, past the earth closet, gently through the trees due west, following the wheel tracks, one side wobbly.

  Isle of the Dancing Dead

  "Is it true," said young George as he filled in his first grave, "that the best place to hide from a ghost is in a cemetery?"

  "Yes," said the grave-digger, shovelling. "Most times you'd be right aholding to that notion. But not here. Not in this particular cemetery. Not with the Chenoweth Grand Tomb not five hundred yards behind you."

  "A haunted grave?" George turned about, studying the lawns and masonry. "Which one?"

  "You've not seen it yet?"

  "Fair go, Monty. I've only been on the job six hours."

  "Well, you'll know the Grand Tomb when you see it." He chuckled. "Or, if you're a Chenoweth, when you hear it."

  "How's that?"

  "Later, lad. One grave at a time."

  When they'd finished and patted down the earth, Monty conducted George through a maze of headstones to the centre of the cemetery where the young grave-digger suddenly found himself at the edge of a small lake. In the middle of this lake was an island, and in the middle of the island was a squat, black marble building.

  "The Chenoweth Grand Tomb," said Monty proudly. "One hundred and fifty years old and the grandest mausoleum in the southern hemisphere -- and its maintenance and the keeping of its doors are my responsibility alone."

  "Haunted?" asked George.

  "Haunted by the Wailing Woman. There's been times in the past eight years that its coffins have been found danced about, higgledy-piggledy, when it's opened to put another Chenoweth to rest. But as they say, there's no rest for the wicked, and the Chenoweth Grand Tomb is proving it. A hundred year ago some Chenoweth massacred some blacks camped on their land. What with the Chenoweths being rich squatters and the blacks just being blacks, nothing ever came of it. Not as far as white man's law was concerned, anyway, because it's said the family was cursed by a koradji man -- a sort of witch doctor -- and ever since then the murderers and their descendants have danced in death to the crying of the Wailing Woman."

  "Have you ever heard this Wailing Woman?"

  "No. She can't be heard by any but Chenoweths about to d
ie and those already dead."

  "Why is there a lake?"

  "It's a defence. It was dug ninety years ago in the belief that spirits can't cross water, and that a defence is more convenient and dignified than shifting all the dearly departed."

  "Does it work?"

  "Yes, most times. I remember five year ago a summer that burnt the lake to little better than mud, and that's when I last saw the Grand Tomb opened."

  "And the coffins?"

  Monty smiled. "What do you think?"

  George thought, and over the next few days asked other work mates about the tomb, discovering little that Monty hadn't already told him, other than, when the occasion arose, the island could be reached by a pontoon bridge stored in a special shed. Unfortunately for George's curiosity, maintenance of the island's lawn and garden was a once a year job, and unorthorized entry onto the lake and island was strictly forbidden. George had to make do with standing at the lake's edge during lunch hour, staring out at the black tomb on the island, thinking.

  A few months later millionaire W.W. Chenoweth senior became critically ill. Like discreet vultures, the cemetery management hovered in anticipation, assigning Monty the task of grooming the island. Permitted to chose his own assistant, he chose George.

  ***

  George pressed his ear to the black marble wall and heard a voice say, "Take your partners for the Danse Macabre!"

  He spun around, coming face to grinning face with Monty. Embarrassed, the youngster went back to his weeding.

  "Five year they've had to jig," said Monty with a chuckle. "Do you think they'll pick today?"

  George poked at the dirt with his weeding tool. "That's not what I was listening for."

  "So what were you listening for?"

  "Water."

  "Oh yes."

  "No, Monty. I'm serious. I've been thinking over this dancing coffin caper, and I reckon the Chenoweths are causing this so-called curse to come true themselves."

  "Themselves?"