The Dark and What It Said

by Kennett, Rick

“Make that wretched crying stop!” she said suddenly in a voice not her own. “Make it stop!”

  A tear formed in her right eye and trickled down her cheek. It was more than I could stand to see. I took her shoulders and shook her, once, twice. She blinked, suddenly awake and stared around. “Ernie? What’s going on? Why...” She brought a hand to her face and discovered the tear. She looked from her wet finger tip to me, puzzled.

  I sat her down on the edge of my bed and told her what she’d done and what she’d said. But all she could remember was a confused dream of slowly approaching doom and discordant music.

  ***

  “Collateral damage.”

  “Exactly.”

  Borrowing a car from Mrs Roberts next door, Sonja took Axel over to her mother’s place, some nine or ten kilometres away. It was Saturday, which was just as well as neither of us looked particularly bright after last night’s developments. Axel, on the other hand, was sticking his head out the car window and happily slobbering, a far cry from the cringing, whining mess he became at each manifestation, a victim of something he could never understand.

  “Collateral damage,” I said, recalling a bit of military doublespeak for civilian casualties.

  “Exactly,” said Sonja, and drove him off to safety.

  Now it was just the combatants, or at least for the moment a combatant, very singular. After doing the breakfast dishes I sat down and tried to read, but my attention kept straying. I couldn’t find interest in a video or record. There was a sense of waiting in the house which was getting oppressive.

  “Activity,” I said to myself, and looked for where Sonja hid the Hoover. Not finding it, I had to settle for a carpet sweeper. Now whether the activity and the thought were related or not, I don’t know, but while I was push-pulling along the front hall it occurred to me: Whatever happened to Mr Millstead? He wasn’t mentioned on the deed to the house. Emma Millstead had been the sole owner, so presumably she was widowed or divorced by 1931. She’d been British, so I guessed her marriage certificate and anything pertaining to Mr Millstead would be in the British Public Record Office which could be accessed through the Australian Joint Copying Project. But that was in Brisbane and still a weekend away. There was nothing to be done until then... or so I thought. A casual glance out the window made me think otherwise.

  I took a stroll outside, heading next door, making sure the woman working in the garden there saw me coming. This was Mrs Roberts, the neighbour Sonja had borrowed the car from.

  “Hello,” said Mrs Roberts, shading her eyes from the mid-morning sun. She was white haired, she was wrinkled and dark and looked about fifty, although she may have been much older. “You’re the chap staying with Sonja, aren’t you? Up from the south or somewhere?”

  To these charges I pleaded guilty but insane.

  “So Sonja’s left you to mind the house?” she said.

  “Just to take Axel over to her mother’s place, so I thought I’d go for a bit of a walk.” I had to remind myself that I was not telling a lie, strictly speaking. (I was going for a walk; my motivations for it were completely beside the point.) We got talking then, and as unobtrusively as possible I moved the conversation around to the previous owner of Sonja’s house.

  “Mrs Millstead? Oh, yes, I remember her,” said Mrs Roberts. “A very private lady, though. Kept to herself a lot.”

  “She was a widow wasn’t she?”

  “I had the impression from what little she let be known that her husband had died very early on and she never remarried.”

  “And she died in the house?”

  “Yes. It was such a shock to the people in the street that knew her because even though she was probably well over ninety she was a strong woman for all that. The sort of person you think’s going to go on forever. I often saw her from my kitchen window pottering about in her backyard, and sometimes at night I’d see her in her dressing gown, bounding up and down the back stairs like an eighteen year old flapper.”

  “What was she doing running up and down the stairs?”

  “Lord knows what Mrs Millstead did with herself, night or day. She was a queer old duck in some ways, if she’ll excuse me saying so. She had money, but; that was obvious.” Mrs Roberts paused, remembering. “Sonja told me not long after she moved in that all the windows were nailed shut. I suppose we all have to take precautions these days against thieves, but that was going a bit far.”

  “Maybe she kept her money under the bed.”

  “If she did they never found it.”

  “Or told anyone they found it,” I said half joking.

  “No, I won’t have that,” said Mrs Roberts with a hint of reproach. “It was Mr Dale who used to live opposite who found her, and never a more honest man has ever drawn breath.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, you don’t want to hear stories like that about the house you’re living in,” she said.

  I only just stopped myself from yelping “Yes I do!” and instead said, “Well, now that I know part of the story I might feel more comfortable living there if you’d tell me the rest.”

  “Well, Mr Dale shifted not long after this happened, and this happened almost seven years ago, so my recollection of what he told me might be a little foggy, but it seems he’d seen her lights on, day and night for five days straight, so he went over to see if she was all right. He knocked on the front door, and when there was no answer he went around the back. There was washing on the line and the back door was open. So he started up the stairs, and was halfway up when he smelt – well, I think you know what I mean.”

  I nodded, my imagination supplying more than I wanted.

  “She was sitting at a table in the middle of the main room with her head down in a book,” Mrs Roberts continued. “And the flies were thick about her face.”

  ***

  Ever get something you wished you’d never asked for? And the flies were thick about her face. I carried that image back to Sonja’s house, back to the room where it’d happened. My eyes kept straying to the table.

  “Did you buy this place furnished?” I asked Sonja when she came home around lunch time.

  “Furnished? Yes, I did. Why?”

  I told her. “Did you know that story?”

  “Not in such detail. I hope you didn’t sound like a ghoul asking questions like that. I’ve got to live here, you know.”

  “Mrs Roberts gave you a funny look when you returned the car ? “

  “Well... no.”

  “There you go, then. I was all discretion and tact. And another piece Of puzzle slotted in.”

  “You mean that we now know Mrs Millstead ran up and down the back stairs at night like a young woman? What does that tell us?”

  “That Mrs Millstead was a young woman at night?”

  “Ernie!”

  “No, seriously. Mrs next door said she was always in her dressing gown when she did this. Mrs Millstead was sleep walking, y’see?”

  “Sleep running, you mean. A ninety year old woman?”

  “Not when she was asleep, Sonja. When she was asleep she was eighteen or however old she was when this thing happened.”

  “The sinking ship?”

  “Yes, she could’ve been running up and down companionways in her mind. She may have lost her husband at sea.”

  “’Make that crying stop’. That’s what I said in my sleep.”

  “’Make that wretched crying stop’ is what you said, Sonja. Who do you suppose she was talking to?”

  “Mr Millstead?”

  “Whoever he may have been. In all my searching yesterday I never once came across his name, yet it must be written down somewhere... That’s it!”

  “What is?”

  “A way to get some information, a thread to pull now, today.” I leafed through the phone book, found a number and made a call. When the other end answered I gave them Mrs Millstead’s name and date of death, and eventually received a positive answer. I grabbed the bike helmets down from the
top of the bookcase and tossed Sonja hers. “Come on, we’re going to do some heavy reading.”

  “But the library closed at twelve.”

  “We’re going to a different public amenity,” I said.

  ***

  “Heavy reading.” Sonja snorted and made a face as we threaded our way through the acres of marble in the Toowong Cemetery, Brisbane’s largest graveyard. It terraced over hillsides and chequered into thickly wooded areas: tombstones, mausoleums, obelisks, statues; and somewhere amongst them lay Mrs Emma Millstead.

  The cemetery’s administration office had left Mrs Millstead’s burial record at the front desk as I’d requested in my phone call, and we were able to find the grave’s location on a map of the place immediately we arrived. It’d been a bit of luck finding the cemetery where Mrs Millstead was buried straight away; she could’ve been buried at any of the smaller graveyards, like the one five kilometres south of Castle Hill Road where Sonja’s father was interred. But as this was the only one with its offices open on Saturday it was the obvious starting point, and luckily I hit pay dirt -- if you’ll excuse the phrase -- first off.

  “What exactly do you expect to find, Ernie?” Sonja asked as we started off along the trails.

  “More info, ‘Loving Wife of, something about Mr Millstead. I think he’s the key to this.””

  Half an hour later we were on high ground, resting beneath the shadow of the Blackall Monument, a tall Victorian spire which dominates the central hill. The cemetery spread out below us like a miniature city of streets and towers. The hike up the hill had taken a lot out of me, and more than once I’d had to sit on a tombstone to wait for a dizzy spell to pass while Sonja made anxious noises about returning.

  “No! No! No!” I grouched each time, and eventually we pressed on to the top.

  Once there, however, Sonja put her foot down. “This is not doing your health any good, Ernie. The way you’re pushing yourself you’ll have a relapse.”

  “Give me five minutes. Anyway, it’s all downhill from here.”

  “Yes, but from the grave back again is all uphill. Your pneumonia has left you in a bad way, and if you push yourself too much you could give yourself a stroke or something.”

  “Bullshit,” I said, unable to think of more reasoned argument.

  “Give me the grave location card. I’ll go and see what it says on the stone.”

  “OK... OK, but take the map too, or you’ll wander this cemetery for the rest of your life.”

  “Like the Flying Dutchman? I’ll be back before you can say Waar is de zevenentwintiggste handschoenenafdeling, alstublief.”

  “In other words you’ll be gone all day.”

  Her laughter trailed eerily among the graves and was gone.

  Time went by, and while I waited my mind turned to the sort of fancies best not thought of in graveyards. What if night came and Sonja hadn’t come back? What if she never came back? What if Mrs Millstead resented our prying into what she may have done, may have been sad over or ashamed of in her past and came stalking me through the graves and I couldn’t run? What if she was even now watching me from behind the Blackall Monument with her face thick with flies?

  I spun about. There was nothing there. I started a circuit of the monument to prove there was nothing there, and halfway round I almost collided with Sonja coming the other way.

  “I’ve just returned from the grave,” she said, grinning.

  “Strictly not funny!” I gasped. “So what did it say on the stone?”

  She handed me the grave location card with some pencilled notes on the back. “You were right about there being a mention of ‘Loving Wife of’. There was also Mr Millstead’s date of death, 15/4/12, but that’s about all, apart from his christen name.”

  “Which was?” I looked at the card and read, “Ernest?” Why did I feel some one had just then walked over my grave? “Coincidence.” I said.

  “Maybe. “

  We made our way down to the cemetery entrance by easy stages. While biking back to Castle Hill Road a memory dropped into place so hard it jolted me on the pillion seat, causing the bike to swerve about for several seconds. When she had it under control again Sonja slid it to a stop in the gravel, lifted her visor and got ready to abuse me in English, Dutch and any other language to hand. Instead she stared at me in surprise, and I can only suppose I must’ve looked as shocked as I felt at that moment.

  “Fifteen, four, twelve,” I said numbly.

  “What?”

  “The fifteenth of April, 1912 -- that’s when the Titanic went down.”

  ***

  Neither Sonja nor myself had more than a layman’s knowledge of the event; I only knew the date because it’d been a history question I’d failed at school. To find out more we did the rounds of the retail and second-hand book shops of Brisbane, but none were able to help us. So we went to a video library, found A Night to Remember, took it home and ran it through that evening.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Sonja as THE END came up over a scene of floating wreckage. “They put twenty-two hundred people on a ship that had lifeboats for only a thousand?”

  “The past’s a foreign country. They speak a different language there. OK, if we take the film as reasonably close to real events what have we learnt from it?”

  “That the poorer you are the more chance you have of being left to drown.”

  “Tut tut. Cynicism in one so young.”

  “I’m older than you by a year so I’m allowed to be cynical. Anyway, didn’t you hear that crew man say, ‘If they’re going to lower them why don’t they put some people in them’? Some of those boats were going away half full. And, after the ship had gone down, what about what was said in one of those boats about going back for the people in the water, and the man at the tiller said ‘Wait till things settle down’, and some one else said, ‘Wait till they’re all dead of cold you mean.’ Bet that was indicative of what happened in most of the half empty boats.”

  “Would you have gone back?”

  “Of course.”

  “Would you?” Why had I said that? I was vaguely aware of the sea and of the fact I was not quite in control of what I was saying. “Would you have risked being swamped in that freezing water? If all the boats had gone back there would’ve still been a thousand people left floundering.”

  “Better than fifteen hundred left floundering.”

  “Yes, but would you have risked it?”

  “Mr Lowe picked up people from the water,” said Sonja in that voice from the previous night.

  “Mr Lowe was a hero, Emma my dear,” I said, my voice also changing, the sea returning the cold to the room. And with the sea came strands of music, but vague as if only half remembered. “You and I were not heroes, old girl. We were just ordinary, frightened people, and you did what ordinary, frightened people do at times like that.”

  “Ernie, I didn’t want to leave you, but no one in my boat wanted to go back and I never even had the courage to protest.”

  “Well, you couldn’t very well be expected to stand out against massed opinion, could you. There may have been space in the boat, but you could hardly have picked up all of us. You would all have died had you come back. We would have pulled you all down with us in a panic.”

  “I did die. I died in life. I crept as far away as I could go, yet I never really left the ship, Ernie, and I never really left you.”

  “And I never really left you, Emma. To see the way your dreams and memories tortured you tortured me four fold. Many’s the time I tried to speak with you but you had built a wall around your mind and it kept me out.”

  The music and the sea altered, merged, became a prolonged rumble, growing louder and louder. I saw the great ship in my mind, standing vertical in the water, her innards ripping loose, crashing to the bows submerged deep. Her lights blinked, and went out forever. She held for a moment rearing blackly upright in the ocean, then began her plunge, going, going, sliding faster and faster, engulfed a
t the end in froth and steam, surging bubbles, a wave, and gone.

  Sonja slapped her hands to her ears as Emma said, “Oh, make that wretched crying stop!”

  The chaos subsided and the sea returned, combined with another, more horrible sound of moaning and wailing, the cries of the drowning and the freezing close by.

  “Emma, dear, only you can make the crying stop when you stop doing this to yourself. If there’s any guilt it belongs to the men who sent so many people onto the ocean knowing there were lifeboats for less than half. Don’t take their punishment, dear. They’re not worth it. Come with me now. Come out of your darkness. Come towards the light...”

  “All this time...”

  ”... towards the light...”

  Something seemed to fall out of me. I blinked as if awakening, just in time to see Sonja doing the same thing. The room was warm, and outside the night was still and quiet.

  ***

  On the day before I was to return to Melbourne, Sonja and I went on a bit of a ‘book crawl’ in nearby Ipswich. In a little second-hand shop we finally found a book on the Titanic, Geoffrey Marcus’s Maiden Voyage. The Titanic’s a fascinating subject, and I found this particular book particularly so in an unexpected way because it made me wonder if it might have been this one Mrs Millstead had been reading when she suffered her heart failure.

  It’s all speculation, of course. But Mrs Millstead had spent most of her life hiding as far from the disaster as she could get, and I can’t help wondering what might have happened had she opened the book at the photos and read, not the caption “The Titanic off Queenstown”, the ship’s last port of call in Ireland, but the printing error, “The Titanic off Queensland.”

  About the Author

  Rick Kennett is an Australian writer of science fiction, horror and ghost stories. His novels The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and In Quinn's Paddock, both feature Ernie Pine, the reluctant ghost-hunter. His short stories, including the adventures of Martian space-girl Cy De Gerch, have appeared in a wide variety of magazines, anthologies and podcasts.