Crimson Lake

by Candice Fox

  ‘Anyone accusing him of being a messiah?’

  ‘Oh, there are a couple dripping with Bible passages.’

  ‘No mention of feeding him to saltwater crocodiles, though.’

  ‘Nothing that I saw. But I didn’t look that closely.’

  ‘What does the Bible say about crocodiles?’ she wondered aloud. She sat down at her computer and started clicking. The cats were circling my chair like round, furry sharks, mewling for attention.

  ‘Oh crap, there are heaps.’ Amanda scrolled through the pages. ‘Leviticus reckons you can’t eat crocodiles because they’re unclean. Now these are to you the unclean among the swarming things which swarm on the earth: the mole, and the mouse, and the great lizard in its kinds, and the gecko, and the crocodile, and the lizard, and the sand reptile, and the chameleon.’

  ‘Well I’m screwed. I had three sand reptiles for breakfast.’

  ‘No eating them, and no mating them to other animal species,’ Amanda said.

  ‘What? What the hell am I supposed to do with them then?’

  ‘Just leave them alone, Ted.’

  I folded my arms.

  ‘In Exodus it talks about the Egyptians being in dread of the children of Israel, who were multiplying and growing mighty. The Pharaoh calls on all his people to throw Israel’s newborn sons into the river.’ She took on a man’s voice as she read from the screen. ‘Drown the Hebrew babies! Feed them to the crocodiles!’

  ‘Doesn’t say anything about secretly gay authors,’ I concluded.

  ‘It does not,’ she said. ‘When Leviticus talks about man lying with man as he lies with woman, it says that he should be put to death, but it doesn’t describe how.’

  ‘This guy just didn’t want anyone doing anything,’ I concluded. ‘I’m sure he was a real treat at dinner parties.’

  ‘What else have you got there?’

  ‘There’s a six-month bank statement.’ I showed her the pages. ‘I haven’t looked at it yet.’

  ‘Well, you start going through that. I’m putting together some passages from the Chronicles books that I want to show you.’

  I leant on the desk and started highlighting patterns in spending. Jake had a membership to a tiny gym at James Cook University that he paid fortnightly. I drew a thick black line through all of those, his phone and electricity bills, countless purchases at 7-Eleven and Woolworths for weekly groceries. In the month before he died, he’d bought a new keyboard online, a bunch of stationery and something from Workplace Health Online. I took the code from the purchase and punched it into Google on my phone. It was a shoulder brace to prevent slouching. Occupational hazard of an author, I imagined.

  The pages in front of me were steadily turning black. There was one transaction that caught my eye, a very irregular debit to an account without a description. A personal account. I highlighted it in pink.

  After the substantial royalty checks that came into the account from his agent, Cary Minnow, Jake would send an amount to the mystery account. Sometimes the amounts were very large. Sometimes they were small. They were always whole numbers. I explained the pattern to Amanda.

  ‘The amount he’s transferring isn’t a regular percentage of the royalty he’s putting away for tax?’

  I looked at the numbers. ‘No. Sometimes it’s about ten per cent. Sometimes it’s half. A month before he disappeared he sent nearly all the royalty payment to the mystery account. And the mystery account doesn’t look like it’s one of his. He has two short-term deposits and this everyday.’

  ‘What are his savings like?’

  ‘Pretty close to the wind for someone getting this kind of income.’

  Amanda strummed her fingernails on the desk. She scratched at the scary rabbit tattoo on her hand.

  ‘The payments are getting steadily bigger though?’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘If he’s paying a loan shark,’ she said, ‘the guy might have recognised he’s onto a cash cow and started steadily increasing the interest. If Jake was hooked right before he died he might have been borrowing cash to spend on games and sending the repayments back through his account.’

  ‘But why would they kill him?’ I asked. ‘If he’s a cash cow, and he’s still making payments?’

  ‘It’s a pretty unsustainable relationship, loan shark and client. Only one person really has any fun. Maybe Jake wanted out, who knows?’

  ‘We will, soon.’

  ‘Let me read you these,’ she said, opening Jake’s second novel, Whisper. ‘There are passages in the books, beginning in number two and continuing in books three and four, which don’t really belong in the narrative. At least that’s what I think. Whenever the main character Adam is alone, he starts feeling like there’s a … a thing after him.’

  ‘Go for it,’ I said. One of the cats, a heavy black and white bundle of fat, stopped circling and leapt up onto my lap. It stretched along my leg, purring deeply. Amanda started to read from the book.

  It’s a creature without shape, a shadow that follows, always at my heels, stretching and yawning as the day draws on. It never increases its pace, but wanders silently as though on a string, this needful thing, and it gobbles up the bits of me I leave behind. Blood, thoughts, sins. I do not know where it came from, but I turn every few steps and try to discern if it is closer, and I toss and reel in terror in the night that one day I will see it closing in.

  ‘Sounds unpleasant,’ I said. Amanda switched books and started reading from Rise.

  Sometimes I can ignore it. But it knows me, and it loves me, and a part of me feels guiltily hungry for that love. Isn’t that why I have come so far? Because in a strange way I am addicted to the light that falls on me, the light that leads this Mephistopheles creature to follow, and I’m afraid that if I hid from it in the darkness I’d never find a way back to the warmth of that mountaintop glow.

  ‘Mephistopheles. I know that name from somewhere.’ I frowned. Amanda sat staring at me with her arms folded, her chin gently jutting with rhythmic twitches. ‘I feel like I’ve heard that name before.’

  ‘So do I.’ She tapped the keys of the computer.

  ‘Something’s hunting Adam but he kind of likes it. Or at least, he doesn’t do anything about it,’ I said. Another cat leapt into my lap, fighting for space with the first one.

  ‘Adam likes the warmth and the glow, which to me might be a metaphor for the giddy feelings Jake gets from his addiction,’ Amanda said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘In his last book, Rapture, he writes about the thing that’s following him being so close now that he knows he’s going to fall into its embrace.’ She pointed to a passage in the book beside her as she scrolled through Google with her other hand. ‘I’ve done this to myself. Flirted with glory. And now that lurching beast has come as the clock winds down to receive his happy prize.’

  ‘I know this,’ I said.

  ‘Mr Mistoffelees is one of the characters in Cats, the musical,’ she said.

  ‘Cats?’ I gasped theatrically, pointed to the creatures all around the apartment. ‘It’s you! You killed Jake!’

  Amanda sighed dryly, imitating my usual response to her antics.

  ‘No, the name rings a bell for another reason. The thing coming for the dude as the clocks wind down. Mephistopheles. It’s a play. A Shakespeare play? Doctor …’

  ‘Doctor Faustus?’

  ‘That’s the one! The guy sells his soul,’ I said. It had been more than two decades since I’d been at high school. I was proud of my memory.

  ‘Aren’t you clever?’ Amanda turned her computer monitor towards me. ‘Take a look at this. It’s not Shakespeare, it’s Christopher Marlowe. But you were close.’

  On the screen was an academic article published by the Journal of Christian Literature. The title read ‘Hell is just a frame of mind: Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus and the fiction of Jake Scully’.

  ‘Someone should give me a certifi
cate,’ I said.

  ‘The article compares the thing that follows Adam around in the books to the devil in Doctor Faustus coming back at midnight to claim Faustus’s soul.’ Amanda glanced over the article. ‘Faustus sells his soul to Lucifer for power and pleasure for a period of … twenty-four years. Faustus gets one of the devil’s messenger boys, Mephistopheles, as a personal servant in the deal. But Faustus doesn’t really use his powers for anything special. He messes around a lot. A good angel tells him to repent before the devil can take his soul. He doesn’t. Time runs out.’

  ‘I think I liked that play.’ The cats had settled, one curled against my stomach, one across my knees, hot weights on my thighs.

  ‘The article seems to suggest both the play and Jake’s books explore the theme of the idiot guy who doesn’t really know the power he has, who wastes his influence and his gifts, and is stalked by something that’s going to come get him. Faustus and Adam are both haunted.’

  ‘And maybe Jake himself, if we’re reading it correctly.’

  ‘Says here there are two different versions of the play,’ Amanda said. ‘A 1604 version and a 1616 version. In one of them, the play says it’s never too late if Faustus can repent. In the other, it says it’s never too late if Faustus will repent.’

  ‘So in one version he has the power to save himself. And in the other version he doesn’t.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So which was it for Jake?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She waved at my phone. ‘Let’s do some ringing around and find out!’

  I stared at my phone for a half an hour or so. Tried to count myself down to dialling and chickened out a bunch of times. Then I just bit the bullet and called. The phone rang, and when he picked it up, Davo sniffed loudly before he spoke. He used to do that in the old days. Habit. I felt strangely sad.

  ‘Inspector David Birch.’

  ‘Davo, it’s Ted.’

  There was a silence. I heard a chair creak.

  ‘Sorry, who?’

  ‘It’s me. It’s Ted.’ I could hardly breathe. ‘Mate, I’m up in Queensland. I’m calling because I –’

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, calling me?’ Davo’s voice was suddenly low. His breath rattling in the phone mic. ‘What the … How dare you. You fucking piece of shit.’

  ‘Dave,’ I said. ‘Please. Just hear me out, all right? I need your help. I’m working on –’

  The phone went dead. The trick now was to call Morris before Davo called him and warned him off helping me in any way. My hands were shaking as I scrolled through my list of contacts.

  ‘Inspector Morris Wakefield.’

  ‘Morris, it’s Ted. Please don’t hang up. Please. I’m not trying to reconnect.’

  ‘What –’

  ‘I’m not trying to reconnect. I’m not trying to get back into your life. I’m not causing trouble, here, Morris. I’ve tried Davo. I just need one small thing.’

  Another long silence, the sputtering of background noises. I waited for the click, the beeping. After a few seconds I chanced speaking again.

  ‘I’m working with an investigator up here in Queensland,’ I said carefully. ‘We’ve taken on a missing persons case. I just need a quick look at the guy’s bank accounts. That’s all.’

  ‘I don’t want anything to do with you, Ted. I really don’t.’

  ‘I totally understand that,’ I breathed. ‘I do. And I’ve tried to respect your wishes until now.’

  ‘I’ll help you this one time, and then you never, never contact me again. Understand? Never again.’

  ‘Thank you. Thanks, Morris, I –’

  ‘What’s the guy’s name?’

  ‘Jake Scully.’

  ‘Date of birth?’

  I gave it. I opened my mouth to say thank you again, but the line was dead.

  When I told Amanda the owner of the mystery account Jake was frequently sending money to was one Llewellyn J. Bruce, she wasn’t surprised at all. She kicked off her bike and began riding like she’d known all along where we were headed. I followed her to a dock on Thomatis Creek, where she piled into a flat-bottomed airboat like she owned it, leaving me to pay the weathered old dockman for its hire. Amanda sat in the front of the thing and I drove. I took us along the creek until we reached the open water, watching the wind rip through Amanda’s hair, yanking her shirt back to reveal a great yellow rose tattoo on the back of her neck. Now and then she pointed, and I saw a fat, mud-brown body slither into the water from the banks, the creature gliding out, eyes only above the water, before sinking as we passed with just a bubble or two to indicate its presence.

  We pulled up at another dock somewhere south-west of where we’d started, in an inlet that I guessed was near Yarrabah. Out on the ocean the waves crashed around Rocky Island Reef, a disturbance in the calm that drew seagulls from the cliffs sheltering the bay. Amanda waited for me for a moment before trudging off into the undergrowth so fast I had to jog to keep up.

  ‘So you know this guy, then?’ I asked.

  ‘I know of him,’ she said. ‘Stay on the trail. We’re in croc country.’

  I followed her along a sandy path through the mangroves until I saw the beginnings of a clearing up ahead. Where a lagoon cut into the dense forest a little camp had been assembled, two large open steel boathouses filled with assorted junk, a scattering of plastic tables and chairs, a fire pit that had blackened the earth for some metres around. The sand here was grey and sad patches of grass gripped it here and there. A troupe of dogs rushed at us as soon as we arrived and barked us into the gathering of men.

  I could see who Llewellyn Bruce was right away. The others, hard men with skin mottled black and blue with ancient tattoos that had been ravaged by the sun, stood back to allow him to see us. Bruce, the largest and most tattooed of the group, licked a set of badly crowded teeth in anticipation as he assessed us.

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’ Bruce asked as Amanda came to a stop in front of him. The gathering of men gave a chuckle around us. Amanda put her hand forward, and in a move that surprised me, Bruce shook it. I guessed it was the tattoos.

  ‘I’m Amanda Pharrell, and this is Ted Collins,’ Amanda said. ‘We’re here for a quick chat about –’

  ‘Drugs,’ Bruce said, pointing at Amanda’s face.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Dogs,’ someone near me said. I shook my head.

  ‘Bikes,’ said someone else.

  ‘We’re here about Jake Scully,’ I told Bruce. His face fell, his white goatee sagging into the folds of his bronze face.

  ‘Oh. Nothing interesting, then.’ He started walking. The crowd dissipated. A majority of the men went back to a motorcycle by the nearest shed that was partly assembled. We followed Bruce to a makeshift bar by the fire pit. ‘Boring, boring, boring. No one ever surprises me anymore. Unexpected visitors. Here I was thinking the boys had remembered my birthday and got me a stripper. Shoulda known you weren’t no stripper. Look at your tiny tits.’

  Amanda looked at her chest. Weighed her breasts in her hands.

  ‘They’re all right. There’s a good handful to them.’

  ‘Bee stings,’ Bruce sighed.

  ‘If we could get onto the matter of the day,’ I said. ‘We know Jake Scully was making regular payments to you from his everyday bank account, probably for repayment of a loan. Can you confirm for us that you loaned him money?’

  ‘No,’ Bruce said. He took a huge hunting knife from behind the bar and began wiping it clean with a dirty rag.

  ‘So you didn’t loan him money?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. All I said is I won’t confirm that for you. Who are you two anyway?’

  ‘Jake’s wife hired us,’ Amanda said. ‘We’re private dicks.’

  ‘Oh, you’re dicks all right.’ Bruce sniggered at his own joke, looked at the blade in the light through the palm trees. ‘You think you can just wander up here from the water and knock on my door any time of day? What kind of oper
ation do you think this is?’

  ‘You don’t have a door,’ Amanda said.

  ‘Look, we’re not interested in what kind of operation this is.’ I pushed Amanda aside, away from the reach of the blade. ‘Jake’s missing, and that’s what concerns us. We hope you can shed some light on what happened.’

  ‘Shed some light?’ Bruce pointed the knife at my chest. ‘You’re a cop.’

  ‘I used to be,’ I swallowed. ‘Most private detectives have some law enforcement background.’

  ‘You look familiar.’ He flipped the knife a couple of times. He was taller than me. If I tried to run, I figured his stride would outreach mine. ‘You’re a cop, and you look familiar. This is getting worse and worse for you two.’

  ‘If you tell us what we want to know, we’ll get out of here. Really. We’re not here to give you a hard time.’

  ‘Guh,’ Bruce grunted. He stuck the knife into his belt, looked down at the dogs gathered around him, sniffing at his crusty knees. ‘What kind of birthday is this?’

  He walked off towards the mangroves, the little posse of dogs following him. I fell in behind, glancing back at the camp, at the men sitting around the bike, smoking, drinking beer. The sandy path led deep into the mangroves, widening at a wooden pontoon that had been beached by the side of a creek. Bruce stood in the circle of dogs for a moment before reaching down and plucking up the lowest and the fattest of the lot by a roll of its neck, a chocolate-brown half-breed that was slowly going white all over. Before I could understand what was going on, he took the knife from his belt and stuck it into the dog. I felt Amanda jolt by my side. But none of us made a sound. Not us, not the dogs. Not Bruce. The dog in his grip went limp instantly.

  ‘In through the armpit, up into the heart,’ he said, withdrawing the blade. He wiped the blood on the dog. ‘It’s the kindest way.’

  Amanda was jamming her elbow into my ribs. In the water, centimetres below the surface, a shape had appeared, the pale, almost yellow-brown of a large croc head reflecting the light from above. There was no telling how big the animal was from the muddy depths, but the head hovering there was as long as my arm. I pulled Amanda back towards me. I guessed I would have to throw her aside if the thing leapt at us.