CHERRY WILDER
Back of Beyond
CHERRY WILDER IS a New Zealander who lived for many years in Australia and now resides in Germany. She published poetry, short stories and criticism before turning to science fiction, fantasy and horror in 1974. Her latest novel is Signs of Life, a sequel to Second Nature, and her short fiction has been published in such anthologies as New Terrors, Dark Voices, Skin of the Soul, Isaac Asimov’s Ghosts and the first two volumes of The Best New Horror.
About the following story, she explains: “I wrote ‘Back of Beyond’ way back in 1975 as a specifically Australian strange story to submit to some British strange tale collection – there was absolutely nowhere in Australia to submit such a story to at the time. The merest hint of genre drove literary magazines up the wall and the men’s magazines and women’s magazines were very specific in their requirements.
“The story was never published – in fact it was sent out only once and that to our dear departed Robert Aickman who said some kind things about the writing, with the result that I began a literary correspondence with him in 1976 when I came to Europe. I was glad to revise this story for the Penguin spooky anthology Strange Fruit, edited by the indefatigable Paul Collins – I tightened it up considerably, changed a name or two and, most importantly, included the episode with Old Billy, the Aboriginal, who gives Albert a warning.”
As the following story once again confirms, it is about time that some enterprising publisher issued a long-overdue collection of Cherry Wilder’s self-proclaimed “horrid tales” . . .
“THE OLD HOMESTEAD is behind the trees,” said Mrs Rice.
The coffee table in front of her was covered with photographs of Blackwattle, set out in rows like a game of patience.
“Dougal Boyd – ”
She took up a Polaroid of a dark man on horseback.
“He won’t set foot in the old place. But she goes there!”
Mrs Rice chose the picture of a fair woman under a jacaranda tree. She half rose in her chair and passed the photographs to her hostess.
Mr Albert Mandeville was not concerned with Blackwattle. He was more interested in the basket of strange plants that Mrs Rice had brought to tempt them. He picked them over, touching a seed case, a furry petal, with his strong, tallowy magician’s fingers. His wife, Vivien, cried impatiently:
“Is there a photograph of the missing boy, the son?”
Mrs Rice selected a faded snap of a young man in ragged shorts mounting a theodolite on a tripod.
“Fergus Boyd,” she announced.
Mr Mandeville took the photograph from her outstretched hand, glanced at it briefly, then looked at his wife. Vivien’s aura was golden: the sunlight streaming off the balcony turned her hair to its original colour. He never tired of watching her. She seemed to him quite unravaged by time and sickness; when he looked in the glass he saw all the lines they had earned upon his own face. Even her frail health was a gift, for it allowed him to cherish her.
“We’ve retired,” he said to Mrs Rice. “You know that. Vivien has not given so much as a floral reading for two years.”
“We’re practically incognito,” chimed Vivien.
She flickered her fingers and he passed her the photograph.
“We’re unknown in this part of the world,” he continued.
Mr Mandeville hoped that this was true. When they decamped from the house in St John’s Wood he had snapped off the past like so many black threads. All their arcana was dispersed; he had retained no more than a dozen, or perhaps thirteen volumes from his enormous library of the occult.
Albert Mandeville had personally burnt the files of their clients, until the furnace choked and thick curls of smoke hung over the crenellated roof of their toy house, like earthbound spirits. A huge box of tricks was disposed of discreetly at a magic shop; the marvellous machine for making ectoplasm fetched a high price on the black market. They departed on a grey day, staring through the rain at the last of England like true immigrants.
Mr Mandeville did not need to consider an assisted passage to Australia. His investments were steady; he was able to squander his royalties on Vivien’s creature comforts. Sometimes he wished that he could have disposed of his wife’s most precious gifts.
“Oh you can’t escape!” exclaimed Mrs Rice.
He looked down sharply at the mousy, sycophantic little woman. Time and again she began to say something threatening, then turned it off with a compliment.
“You are The Mandevilles!” she said.
Vivien beamed and lifted a hand.
“Well, you must tell us about the case,” she said kindly.
“Not another word!” said Mr Mandeville. “You remember what the doctor said!”
His lined face took on a look of comical severity.
“That doctor’s a fraud,” said his wife.
“No, he’s not,” said Albert Mandeville, speaking from vast experience. “Mrs Rice, I’m afraid we cannot even consider . . .”
“You must help Mary Boyd, poor woman!” pleaded Mrs Rice. “It would be an act of pure charity.”
“Indeed?” said Mr Mandeville. “I thought she was very rich.”
Mrs Rice snapped her handbag shut and made another of her sallies.
“I’m sure the newspapers would love to get hold of you both!”
“The newspapers?” said Vivien faintly.
“They love celebrities,” added Mrs Rice, with a timid smile.
“I can’t have Vivien attempting anything . . .” said Mr Mandeville.
Vivien murmured: “Please, Albert . . .”
He saw the amethyst flash on her ring finger; she was twisting a lock of her hair. The signal meant “I have good vibrations.” Mr Mandeville shrugged and sighed.
“Oh very well!” he said testily. “What is it you want, my dear?”
“If I could have some object associated with the boy – with Mrs Boyd’s son.”
Mrs Rice leaned forward smiling:
“These flowers are from his grave.”
Mr Mandeville clapped his hands in exasperation.
“The boy is dead?” he cried, “Vivien cannot operate as a trance medium! The doctors were quite positive!”
“Hush, Albert.”
Vivien’s soft voice was commanding. He rested the basket upon her knees. Her small, firm hands moved over the leaves and flowers; she stared into vacancy, lifting a red cluster of stamens to her pink lips.
Albert Mandeville still watched in hopeless admiration after more than thirty years. He felt himself no more than a clumsy practitioner of stage magic, while Vivien was a true sensitive. The trances had been no more than a pandering to suburban taste; he did not believe that Vivien communicated with the dead. The spirit guides “Running Deer” and “Wee Jeannie” were a set of impostors, conjured up out of Vivien’s obedient and protean consciousness. But this, this was very truth: she felt, she understood, she knew.
And yet she “bore her faculties so meek . . .”; admitted to blind spots, inauspicious influences. Malice and ill will blocked the channels, so she said. Vivien was not very good at seeing what was in store for herself or for those close to her. She had not warned him, for instance, about the policemen at Stonehenge. She had not expected to be photographed in the haunted ballroom at Chistle Castle. She had been mortified when he broke a leg, climbing in the Dolomites.
Now Vivien looked up from the basket of exotic plants.
“You’ve no need to worry, Albert. Has he, Mrs Rice?”
Mrs Rice leaned forward, her eyes fixed on Vivien.
“Why? Why?” she prompted.
“I shall not need to attempt a trance,” said Vivien, “because Fergus Boyd is not dead.”
“Mary will be relieved,” sighed Mrs Rice. “We tested you.”
“Where did the flowers come from?” asked Mr Mandeville.
He directed his question at Mrs Rice but Vivien answered.
“They grow wild beside a stone fence.”
> “Yes indeed,” said Mrs Rice. “Oh, I will tell Mary Boyd everything about you!”
“They grow wild on a grave,” insisted Vivien. “The boy, Fergus, used to go there in the early mornings . . .”
“Quite uncanny . . .” breathed Mrs Rice.
“Below . . .” said Vivien, closing her eyes. “He knew what lay below. Anger, anger and frustration . . .”
She opened her eyes.
“It’s the grave of a large dog, a German Shepherd.”
“Poor old Prince,” said Mrs Rice. “He was put to sleep when Fergus was quite a kiddie.”
“Put to sleep?” echoed Vivien. “The dog was shot. The bullet entered the skull in this region.”
She bored at her temple with a stiffened forefinger. Ada Rice caught her breath; the crystal clock on the mantelpiece chimed the half-hour.
“Six-thirty? I must go,” she said. “I have another appointment.”
She ran about all day long doing errands for rich women; she was a widow who lived by her wits. Now she produced a bulky envelope.
“Some cuttings – you know – about the case.”
She kissed Vivien goodbye and made some whispered arrangements. At the door she said to Mr Mandeville:
“Please don’t be cross with me. The Boyd connection – immense benefit to us all.”
“Vivien wants to help your woman,” said Albert Mandeville loftily. “That’s all there is to it, Mrs Rice.”
When he went into their charming sitting room he was surprised to find the same look of apprehension on his wife’s face. Before she could say “Please don’t be cross,” he bent and kissed her.
“Anything you wish,” he said. “Anything in the world.”
“We are going to fly to Blackwattle,” said Vivien dreamily. “Imagine that.”
“This is an extraordinary country,” grumbled Mr Mandeville.
He leafed through the clippings in the envelope and handed them one by one to his wife. The first headline, MILLIONAIRE’S SON GOES BUSH, was followed by FERGUS BOYD SEEN BY CROCODILE HUNTERS, and then by FEARS FOR GRAZIER’S SON.
“What’s a grazier, I wonder?” asked Mr Mandeville, and answered himself. “A rancher I suppose.”
The next headline was smaller. MOTHER SUMMONS DUTCH MYSTIC.
“Aha!” said Mr Mandeville. “That will be Kooning – or could she afford Oesterhaven?”
“Poor woman,” said Vivien. “They are both charlatans.”
Mr Mandeville studied the last clipping and then he began to laugh.
“We had better take care,” he said. “The father is a violent man.”
The headlines read: MYSTIC BRINGS ASSAULT CHARGE, DOUGAL BOYD FINED.
“Oh that’s incredible,” said Vivien, “ ‘He shook him like a rat . . .’ Hank Oesterhaven must weigh fourteen stone.”
“Here’s a family group. The boy’s twenty-first birthday,” said Mr Mandeville. “Let me shut the window now that the sun has gone.”
Vivien snatched the newspaper photograph greedily and began to study the faces.
“I’m not cold!” she said. “You have shut me away for so long.”
As Mr Mandeville shut the window he took in the still water and the great arch of the harbour bridge, with one red light winking at the top of the span. He wondered if they might fly over the harbour on their way to Blackwattle.
When the day came they flew inland; the pilot, a lantern-jawed young chap with a local twang, told them how three men crossed the mountains and found rich pastureland on the other side. The little plane bounced on over these pastures and brought them, sneezing, through the edge of a red dust cloud. They flew over another country town and the pilot said:
“Now you can say you’ve been ‘back of Bourke’!”
“What does that mean?” asked Mr Mandeville, juggling his wife’s nasal spray which refused to work at this altitude.
“Oh, ‘back of beyond’!” laughed the pilot.
They came twisting down out of the cloudless sky and landed in the middle of nowhere. Vivien was so excited she could hardly wait to be helped down. Peering through a shimmering haze of heat Mr Mandeville began to pick out solitary trees, a windmill, a tankstand. Near the runway was a tiny shack with a corrugated iron roof; two Aboriginal men in overalls, one old, one young, sat outside playing some sort of board game.
As he led Vivien away from the plane Albert Mandeville had the sensation that they were exposed to view. Their two tiny figures were inspected from a distance, then brought close, as if the horseman, no more than a hieroglyphic beside the farthest tree, had raised binoculars. A dust cloud from the opposite direction drew his attention to a wide track and Mary Boyd drove up in a new dust-coloured station wagon.
She was a tall, soft-featured woman who climbed awkwardly out of the car.
“My dear . . .” said Vivien with professional gentleness.
Mary Boyd put out both hands to her, blindly.
“You can help me,” she said. “I’m sure you can!”
Mr Mandeville was moved by her display of trust. Vivien gripped the big, freckled, faltering hands of the younger woman with perfect confidence and smiled.
The pilot was calling; he had not even turned off the motor.
“Thank you Stan!” shouted Mrs Boyd.
The plane took to the air and flew away, as casually as a dragonfly. Mr Mandeville stared after it; he felt they had all been left behind.
“He’s going to the northern strip,” explained Mary Boyd. “Has to deliver some vet supplies. Excuse me a moment, I will just have a word . . .”
She walked over to the two men beside the hut; Vivien gave a soft gasp of discovery.
“What is it?” he demanded. “What do you feel?”
“Nothing.” She still smiled, eyes closed.
She paused in a Napoleonic attitude, one hand inside the jacket of her linen suit to still the racing of her heart. Mrs Boyd came back and said to Albert Mandeville:
“Would you say hello to Billy, the old man? He wants to speak to you.”
“Of course!”
He hurried across to the hut and saw that the board game was draughts. The old man, Billy, was very nearly as tall as Mr Mandeville himself, with a massive head; white hair curled over his rutted brow and his skin was deep, matt black. He stared at Mr Mandeville with great intensity and whispered in his own language.
“He says you must be careful,” said the young man. “You will have bad luck. He gets these ideas. He asked your name, er, Mister – ”
“Mandeville.” He held out his hand and the old man shook it, with a sad smile and a shake of the head.
“Is there any way”, asked Mr Mandeville, “to get rid of our bad luck?”
The old man did not need a translation. He whispered a reply.
“You and the lady should not tell the truth,” said the young man.
“Thank you,” said Mr Mandeville gravely.
He reached for his wallet and said:
“Would Billy be upset if I . . .?”
They both grinned shyly; he gave the old man ten dollars and a calendar notebook with a ball point pen attached, a gift from a bank. He strolled back to the two women.
“We must get Mrs Mandeville out of this heat,” said Mary Boyd.
“Is your husband at Blackwattle?” asked Mr Mandeville.
“No!” Mary Boyd shook her head. “He’s at the northern property. The stud.”
“Did he ride over?” asked Mr Mandeville.
He swung round and stared but the skyline was wiped clean. The horseman had gone. Mary Boyd did not answer his question; she looked over her shoulder, swung her gaze from right to left as he had done.
Vivien asked suddenly:
“Have you had rain?”
“Not for months,” said Mary Boyd.
“Well, I think you will get some very soon,” said Vivien, full of good humour.
“Oh good!” cried Mary Boyd. “Need every drop!”
They clambered i
nto the station wagon and went careening over the low brown hills. Below them, after a mile or so, there appeared the oasis of Blackwattle: the trees, the lawns, the cattle at their long trough of bore water. Behind the Spanish colonnade of the new villa the old homestead rose up among the black wattle trees.
Under the shadow of the first gum trees Mary Boyd gazed down at the empty courtyard of the new house; they coasted down a long slope with the engine switched off. Vivien was exhilarated although Mr Mandeville was sure she did not miss the tension, the air of haste. Mary Boyd steered her guests away from the garden with its prodigal rows of sprinklers and plunged them into the cool depths of the house.
Luncheon was ready; the Aboriginal maids called and chattered in sweet bird-voices. When Mary Boyd poured sherry the glasses rang like bells under her unsteady hands. At table she whispered to Vivien:
“Shall I start telling you about my son?”
“Not yet,” said Vivien. “Be calm.”
Mr Mandeville was afflicted with a nervous appetite; he took more lamb, more aspic, more wine. Vivien was avoiding his eyes but she signalled constantly: “good vibrations” – the lock of hair twisted, “make conversation” – the right palm flat on the table. Albert Mandeville did as he was instructed, plucking at his long ear-lobes in a perpetual question of his own: “What is the matter?”
When the girl brought cheese and coffee Mary Boyd excused herself. They heard the clicking of the telephone.
“It is going to rain.” said Vivien.
“Is that all?” exclaimed Mr Mandeville vehemently. “Good vibrations indeed. Even I can feel that woman’s anxiety . . .”
He strode about the room peering at the Spanish rugs, the Indian brass; the decor was costly but too garish for his taste.
“Be still!” hissed Vivien. “I will find that boy!”
Albert stalked into an adjoining room, a man’s room, with sporting prints, a reek of pipe tobacco. He found himself staring into a black open cupboard. Three sporting guns stood in a wooden rack in the cupboard; one space was empty. He heard Mary Boyd speaking on the telephone in the hall.
“Where is Mr Boyd? Where is the Boss? Speak up – I can’t hear you!”
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