The Dark and What It Said

by Kennett, Rick

  The stars were sharp and clear in the night sky. He was no astronomer or bushman and was unable to say whether they were the same constellations seen through the keyhole. The trees, on the other hand...

  He held up his lantern and looked hard at the trees in the paddock behind his property. Were they the same as those in the keyhole?

  He tended his urgent business, after which he again studied the trees, moving out amongst them. With some imagination they might be made to stand in the same positions as those in the vision now etched into his memory. Only these seemed taller.

  He lowered his lantern and looked at the sky, so black and brilliant with stars. It was a sight alien to city nights with their garish lights, as was the intense silence all around: unknown in the noisy city. The silence felt as if it had power to weigh down on him, to squeeze from all sides and crush him.

  Feeling oppressed, almost stifled, Lewisham chanced to glance down and saw narrow wheel tracks close by his boots in the dirt.

  He crouched to look more closely. Wagon tracks. Farmers roundabout still used horse-drawn vehicles, and he’d often seen such tracks on Graxton’s dirt roads. These were recently made if he judged aright the crispness of the imprint. One of the tracks, he saw, wove in and out slightly as if the wheel that made it wobbled. He looked back along the track and saw his own lighted back door. He looked the other way and saw only the darkness of the bush and the vague shapes of trees.

  “Imposs --” he began, then held his tongue. It was a word that had that day lost all meaning for Arthur Lewisham. He stood and followed the tracks into the trees. They kept straight on for four or five hundred yards, then varied slightly to left and right. Lewisham followed for about a quarter of a mile and was about to give up and return to his house when the tracks suddenly swerved hard to the right and, after another couple of hundred yards, ran across the top of a spur and dropped out of sight.

  Lewisham hesitated. Anything could happen here. It was a lonely place, and dark but for his lantern. He held it up, the squeak of its handle so loud in the utter silence. He swept its light into the hollow, tracing the tracks down the slope. At its utmost limit he thought he could discern shapes: big shadows by the trees, prone oblongs in the grass.

  The place smelt of blood, reeked of dread and fear beating up out of the dark with a strength and intensity that totally overwhelmed him. It entered seeping, pushing, leaping, bellowing into his mind until suddenly, aimlessly, irrationally he turned and fled from the hollow darkness.

  Back along the tracks he went, back through the trees, running like a boy, frightened as a child, not looking behind, not daring, never stopping until he reached, panting and blowing, falling, stumbling, feeling all his years, the wooden back wall of his earth closet.

  ***

  Alice Flynn opened her provisions store at eight o’clock on a bright blue morning, just as she had every day except Sundays and Christmas for the past thirty-seven years. Passing farm wagons and motor trucks kicked up dust along Graxton’s main street. Other doors on other stores opened here and there, and another day began. What made this one different from the usual run of workdays for Alice Flynn was the sight of Arthur Lewisham propped up beside her door, fast asleep with his bicycle leaning against the wall beside him.

  She bent down, looking closely into his face. Mr Lewisham was a regular customer, never failing to drop by whenever he dragged himself away from his work and came into town. She knew him to be of sober manner and appearance. At least he had been until now. There was no drink on his breath, but his clothes were rumpled as if he’d slept in them all night, and they were grass stained, too, and dirty as if he’d spent the night in a paddock.

  Alice dashed back into the shop and roused her husband, Len, from his breakfast. By the time they returned, Mr Lewisham was already bestirring himself. Mumbling apologies but no explanations, he climbed to his feet and brushed himself down as best he could.

  “What --” began Flynn, but stopped at a sharp glance from his wife.

  “Come and have a cup of tea in the back, Arthur,” said Alice, and guided him into the shop.

  Flynn sat Lewisham down in his own chair and joined Alice at the kitchen stove as she stoked up the embers to warm the kettle. “Looks like he’s had a nasty turn.” he said in a low voice.

  Alice nodded. “Something’s shook him up. Maybe something’s wrong out at his house.”

  “I’ll go take a look. You be all right here?”

  “I’ll manage. Do you think you should go by way of the police station?”

  “Let’s see what’s what first, Alice, before we go bothering the coppers.”

  Unnoticed by Lewisham who was staring at the jar of raspberry jam on the table, Len Flynn grabbed his hat and left the room. He mounted Lewisham’s bicycle and trundled down Graxton’s main street in the direction of Murphy Road.

  Alice poured hot water into the teapot and set it down on the table. “Let’s give it a few minutes to brew,” she said to Lewisham. She drew out the seat opposite him and waited for him to speak.

  His eyes wandered about the kitchen, coming back to the jam jar with something like a flinch. He said, “I... I just need to be with people a bit, sit calm and tell you, and you’re the only people I really know in Graxton, and...” He gave it all out then in a rambling, repeating, hesitating way: the keyhole, the tracks, and what they led to.

  “You probably think I’m mad,” he said finally. “I would in your place. I don’t know what it means. All I know is that I saw it, and no one will convince me otherwise.”

  “Wagon tracks,” said Alice with an odd expression on her face -- an expression that’d been growing as Lewisham had told his story. “A moonlit night. Arthur, have you been talking to any of the old residents of the town?”

  Lewisham shook his head. “The only person I talk to during the day, apart from myself, is Mary who comes and does the housework three times a week. How old do you mean?”

  “People our own age: fifties, sixties. Mary’s only twenty and probably wouldn’t know.”

  “Know what?”

  “I was thinking perhaps you had heard some talk and had dreamed, but I don’t think you’re the type.” Alice leaned forward. “Arthur, if it wasn’t for that keyhole business I might say someone is trying to give you a fright. Wheel tracks can be faked, but the rest is too uncanny to get round. You’re sure what you saw?”

  “Did I not say so? I hope my writing’s not so boring as to cause me to fall asleep and dream! On the other hand, if you’re implying someone is playing the fool, to frighten me for what ever reason...” He hesitated and spread his hands. “Who would possibly do such a thing?”

  “‘Who would possibly do such a thing?’ Arthur, they were the very words they used thirty-seven years ago.”

  “There is something here you’re not telling me.”

  “Would it put you out if you moved away from Murphy Road?”

  “You mean run away from a haunted house?”

  “You did last night. You ran from your yard and slept in the paddock opposite, so you tell me.”

  “I hardly slept, Alice.”

  “Perhaps all the more reason to go elsewhere. Perhaps -- and I say this as a friend -- away from Graxton.”

  “Why? What’s here in Graxton I should avoid?”

  “A piece of this town’s history we don’t much like to discuss, such a time ago that it was.” She leaned through the kitchen door as the first customers of the morning entered. “At any rate, I think it’s a story a man should tell you. You’ll understand when Len comes back.” She stood and strode into the shop, saying over her shoulder, “I’ll wager he finds nothing.”

  Len Flynn did find nothing. He told his wife as much when he returned twenty minutes later. “See, I said there was no need to involve the coppers. Nothing wrong at his house, anyway.” He glanced through into the kitchen where Lewisham was sitting over his cold tea. “Did you find out what’s up?”

  “Did you check
the yard?”

  “Naturally.”

  “I mean for tracks.”

  “What sort of tracks?”

  “Wagon tracks. With one wobbly wheel.”

  Flynn blanched. “What did he say he saw? For god’s sake, Alice, what’s he been at?”

  “Poor bloke’s either got the DTs or there’s ghosts in his house.”

  As she repeated Lewisham’s story to him, Flynn felt as if a chill wind had crept into the shop.

  “He doesn’t seem to know the story,” said Alice, “yet he knows about the wheel marks, the full moon the night it happened, and the place where it happened. Whatever his shakes are about I think he deserves to know what happened once out on Murphy Road.”

  Len Flynn nodded and stepped into the kitchen, closing the door behind him.

  ***

  “You can always tell them, Arthur. They always stop in the same place along Murphy Road. Tourists mostly. Doesn’t happen much nowadays, so long after the event and what with money so tight and people less able to travel. But we used to see it a lot before the War and through the Twenties. Usually they’d lean on the fence and stare out at the paddock right where your house is now. It’s easy -- and maybe a bit ugly -- to guess what they’re thinking, looking out at the field and the trees beyond. There were no houses along Murphy Road back in 1898. Back then it was wooded right up to the road. Thirty-seven years ago it happened, in that paddock, among the trees, and under the light of a brilliant full moon.

  “It had to do with the Henleys, who were a large family working a grazing farm about five miles up from Graxton on Murphy Road. They were a well-liked and respected part of Graxton’s farming community; not particularly wealthy, but comfortable for all that. There were eight Henley children in all, but what happened involved the three middle children: the oldest boy Douglas, twenty-seven, and the two girls; Celeste who was twenty-four and Myra, who had just turned nineteen. I have only vague recollections of them because Alice and I had been in Graxton just six months, and custom was slow to build in those early days. We arrived in June, 1898, and this... this thing happened towards the end of the Christmas season of that year -- the night of Boxing Day, the 26th of December.

  “Douglas and the girls left their parents’ farm that evening in their sulky to go to a dance at the Divisional Board’s Hall, just where Murphy Road runs into the main street here. Turned out the dance was cancelled because of low attendance, and at nine o’clock they closed the hall. A witness saw the three Henleys drive by in their sulky at ten minutes past nine. When they saw the hall closed they turned about and started up Murphy Road again, towards their home. They never arrived.

  “In the morning, when their parents woke and found they had not returned, they sent their son-in-law, Kevin O’Donnell who was visiting... they sent him on horseback along Murphy Road to look for them. The sulky had a loose wheel, and they were worried there’d been an accident. At least it was easy to follow the crooked track it made in the dirt.

  “Kevin followed the sulky’s tracks towards Graxton, but it wasn’t until he got to the sliprails at the entrance of a place called Quinn’s Paddock that he saw any tracks coming back. It seemed that the sulky hadn’t stopped at the entrance, but had swept right through and on into the trees. Kevin took the sliprails down -- they had the marks of the sulky’s wheels upon them -- and followed the tracks in.

  “They bore due west for a distance, then wandered between west and south-west as if the driver wasn’t sure of his direction. After something like a quarter of a mile, the tracks suddenly swerved to the south and kept a straight line for two or three hundred yards. Kevin O’Donnell followed them over a spur and looked down into a hollow.

  “The first thing he thought when he saw them was that they were having a picnic. Celeste and Myra were lying on a rug together under a spotted gum tree whose trunk looked from a distance splattered with something red and lumpy; Douglas lay a little distance away, beside the sulky. All three were lying in the same direction, heads to the west, feet to the east. Their horse was slumped in the sulky’s shafts. Kevin didn’t go any closer. He turned about and galloped straight to the police barracks. His first words there were, ‘The Henleys are lying dead in Quinn’s Paddock, and such a mess you’ve never seen in your life!’

  “A medical examination showed that Douglas had been shot in the head at close range. The girls had both been raped, and then bludgeoned with terrible violence. Their skirts were in disarray, their corsets undone and their petticoats splattered in blood and semen. There were scratches and other injuries about their... um, lower persons, if you follow my meaning. A thick, knotty stick was found nearby covered in blood and brain. Yet apart from the bodies themselves, there was no sign of a struggle: neither the rug they were on -- all smooth and tidy -- nor the ground round about, which should’ve been torn up something fierce, but wasn’t. And of course the three of them, all arranged perfectly east-west.”

  ***

  In the sanity of the morning sunshine, Arthur Lewisham returned to Murphy Road. There were no tracks in his backyard, and nothing to show they had ever been there. Nothing within the cottage had been disturbed and the same unfinished sentence remained poking out of the typewriter.

  Determined to fight this down, he went out into the woods behind his house, and after some searching found what he thought was his hollow of the night before. But he couldn’t be sure. No shapes, no fears or dreads. On the far side was a spotted gum, like the one Flynn had mentioned found besplattered with ‘something red and lumpy’. If this was the same tree, it had been cleaned by years of rain and insects. He didn’t inspect it. He returned home.

  “They never found out who did it,” Flynn had said. “Lots got questioned --newcomers to the district, swagmen and the like. They even looked at me pretty hard at one time, seeing as we’d only been here six months. People going up and down Murphy Road that night said they’d seen a man standing by the sliprails, like he was waiting for someone. No one ever did identify him and no one ever did get charged.”

  Lewisham thought this over as he reached his backyard again and gazed back into the woods. For a long time he debated with himself about looking through the back room keyhole again. In the end he did, and the moon and stars, fence and trees were still there. He drew away, revolted, knowing now what it all meant.

  Later that day Len Flynn came up to the house and, at Lewisham’s solemn invitation, put his eye to the back bedroom keyhole.

  “Do you see it?” asked Lewisham. “Do you see it?”

  “Yes,” said Flynn in an odd sort of voice.

  “I’m glad.”

  They talked the matter over in the front room.

  “Perhaps,” said Lewisham, “a constant observation of the vision might eventually reveal the instigator of the outrage. Perhaps it’s like a cinema film on an endless loop, going round and round.”

  “Do you have the nerve to keep your eye on it?” said Flynn.

  Lewisham made no answer to that. Though he had as yet seen no movement in the starry scene, just the expectation, just the thought that he might see something if he looked too long frightened him. After Flynn had left he sat far from the door and pondered.

  East and West. Was it just coincidence the way the three bodies had fallen, or was there meaning in their alignment? The thought was repugnant: it smacked of cabalistic practices. Black magic, here in the bush; here among level-headed farming folk. It was ridiculous.

  Yet, leaving aside the unlikeliness of the setting, wasn’t direction the theme of an occult book he had once read? Compass Obeisance. Much emphasis, he recalled, had been placed on compass points, particularly the West, in the various occult acts the book examined. No corpses had been involved, of course, but those of the Graxton Mystery could have been an independent refinement or addition. The head, so these things said, was the temple of the soul, and the bodies of Douglas, Celeste and Myra had all been laid head-first due West.

  Human sacrifices were suppos
ed to be a common thing in black magic, though Lewisham doubted it occurred a tenth as frequently as people thought. However, he had heard rumoured that sex magic was often practised at black masses by those who fancied themselves witches and sorcerers. That man Crowley in England, for instance; a sordid poet of no great distinction, he had found a greater fame or infamy in his promotion of sex magic, earning him the title of The Great Beast, England’s Worst Man and The Wickedest Man in the World.

  Lewisham had always considered such hyperbole as examples of yellow journalism and Crowley himself as a mere charlatan. But now, as he sat musing over last night and all that Len Flynn had told him, he was not so sure. Thirty-seven years ago, when Crowley was beginning his career in magic -- actual, fake or self-delusional -- had someone else in Graxton reached a peak in their own?

  It was not just the westward alignment of the bodies -- any madman could do that. It was the other details Flynn had touched on in their discussion which had brought Lewisham to thinking this way: the lack of signs of a struggle at the murder scene, though the ground was soft; the lack of tracks save those of the sulky going in, with none going away; the absence of anything heard or seen by others passing along Murphy Road on that bright, moonlight night; the two sets of four claw marks found side-by-side some distance from the scene which an aboriginal had identified as crocodile claws; the scrap of parchment found in the paddock some days later scribbled over in no known writing; the empty meat tin with the hole punched through its bottom, found in the sulky; why the Henleys went into Quinn’s Paddock to begin with...

  Such was Arthur Lewisham’s train of thought, which he soon left off because of the lack of answers to any of these mysteries. Yet during the day, in which he sat at his work desk and wrote nothing, his mind returned again and again to the idea of the Graxton Mystery as Occult Act.