The Gulp

by Alan Baxter

  There were ten or twelve others, all chatting with the comfort of familiarity. Patrick and his friends loitered back a little and let everyone else enter first. The band still wore their black clothes and makeup as they led the group into a huge sitting room with a massive bay window. All manner of couches and armchairs were dotted around, a few low tables, a giant television in one corner. Paintings hung on the walls, mostly portraits but a few landscapes, all quite old-looking. An ostentatious chandelier hung glittering from the twenty-foot-high ceiling, and Edgar flicked a switch to turn it on, then used a dimmer switch to set the brightness low. Shirley went to a computer on a desk in the corner and started some music, old school Pantera, Patrick realised. There had to be speakers all around the large room, as “Mouth For War” seemed to blare from every side, every corner.

  People sat themselves around, flopping comfortably into chairs and couches, chatting and laughing. Patrick and his friends stood slightly awkwardly just inside the door.

  Edgar appeared beside them, swept his long, blond hair back behind his ears with a grin. “Welcome to the Manor! Make yourselves at home.”

  “Maybe we could pop into town or something?” Patrick said. “Get a case of beers or...”

  Edgar laughed. “There’s nothing open in The Gulp after nine o’clock. But don’t worry, we have plenty of grog.” He pointed to a corner where a large fridge was plugged in and beside it a dresser covered with a forest of spirit bottles. “Me cassa, you cassa, mates!”

  “Thanks!”

  “This house is amazing,” Ciara said.

  “Isn’t it? Built in 1862. Home of Governor Charles Gulpepper, the colonial arsehole who decided to make this little bit of paradise his own. He established a colony here and this was one of the first permanent buildings to go up. Oyster farming mostly, at first. Then other fishing too and the town grew, but it was all a big mistake.”

  “Mistake?”

  “Yeah, place is cursed as fuck.”

  “This house, you mean?” Patrick asked.

  “Nah, The Gulp. Whole fucking town.”

  Ciara laughed nervously. “Really?”

  “Yep. Place is fucked.” Edgar grinned, led them over to the drinks. He opened the fridge and handed around stubbies of Little Creatures pale ale. “Good Aussie brewery, this one. Cheers!” He clinked bottle necks with each of them.

  “Why stick around if the place is bad?” Patrick asked. “You guys are a successful band, I’d expect you to live in Sydney or Melbourne or something. Or even another country!”

  Edgar shook his head. “Nah, this place is fucked, but it’s home. Been here ages.”

  “You don’t look over thirty! Were you born here?”

  “Don’t let looks deceive you, we’ve been around a while longer than that.”

  Patrick opened his mouth to ask more, but Edgar slapped his shoulder and turned away, effusively greeting another small group sitting nearby. He fell in amongst them, talking and laughing.

  “There?” Simone said, pointing.

  A collection of three sofas in one corner was mostly empty, except for two young women and the drummer, Shirley. The four of them wandered over.

  “Can we join you?” Ciara asked.

  “Of course,” Shirley said. She was strikingly beautiful, Patrick thought. Her hair was so thick and straight and red it looked like crimson silk.

  The other two women stood up and one said, “We’re going for another drink.” They smiled at Patrick and his friends and strolled off.

  “Amazing gig,” Torsten said, sitting down. The others followed suit.

  Shirley raised a glass with a generous measure of something like bourbon in it. “Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it.”

  She still had her contacts in, Patrick noticed, her irises a deep red-brown. But the dark makeup around her eyes seemed to have faded a little, the branches of capillary-like lines not so evident. Rubbed off a bit, maybe. But it wasn’t smudged.

  “We’re infamous around here for always being in character,” Shirley said, as if reading his mind.

  He realised he’d been staring. “Oh, sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. We’re either ‘that cool band’ or, especially among the older folks, ‘those fucking weirdos’.”

  “I think you appear cool,” Simone said.

  Shirley laughed. “Thanks. I like the way you put that.”

  Simone blushed slightly.

  Patrick was mesmerised by Shirley’s languid grace. Her hair gleamed in the low light. She was not only a beautiful woman, but powerfully confident. That came, he supposed, with being hugely successful and popular. The three men in the band were equally good-looking and relaxed in their skins. “I don’t mean this as an insult,” he said, “but we’ve never heard of Blind Eye Moon before. I know we’re from far away, but you guys are amazing, it’s incredible we don’t know you.”

  Shirley smiled, shrugged. “We’re big on the local circuit, we tour Australia every year. But we’ve never really felt the need to go overseas. None of us are great with air travel. And we’re more about the live moment than the studio album, you know?”

  “You must have a Soundcloud or something though?” Ciara said.

  “Nope. We don’t like that stuff. Just old-fashioned CDs. We’re not about the commercial side of music. We play gigs, sell CDs, merch, make enough money and that’s it. We’re about experience, not riches.”

  “Well, good for you,” Torsten said. “That’s real integrity.”

  “Just a shame for all the people elsewhere in the world who’ll never hear your music,” Patrick said.

  “They’ll have to come to us.”

  Ciara gestured around herself. “You’re obviously doing well for yourselves, living in a place like this. You own it together?”

  Shirley looked around the large room, blood red fingernails tapping against the cut glass of her tumbler. “It’s a fine place, hey? But nah, we don’t own it. Bram owns it. He lets us live here.”

  “Bram?” Ciara asked.

  “Edgar’s... father, I guess? It’s complicated, you know how family can be.”

  There was a moment of silence, then Shirley said, “Edgar tell you about the house?”

  “1862?” Patrick said, trying to remember. “Governor Charles Gulpepper.”

  Shirley nodded. “He tell you what happened to Gulpepper?”

  “No.”

  “Went mad. Had a wife.” Shirley pointed to one of the portraits. The woman depicted was beautiful, and young, with long straight brown hair. She had incredibly sad eyes, Patrick thought, despite the gentle smile she wore. Next to that was another painting, the same woman with a man in a suit, looking grave. Gulpepper himself, Patrick presumed. Another painting showed Gulpepper with a tall, thin, white-haired man. “Gulpepper married her in Sydney and brought her down here,” Shirley went on. “She gave birth to four children in six years while the town grew. There’s a museum in town, talks all about the early history of The Gulp. You should take a look. Anyway, he killed them all.”

  “What?” Simone’s word was more a gasp.

  “I told you, he went mad. One night, people saw him on the cliff top, where the lighthouse is now? The lighthouse wasn’t finished at the time, only half-built. Anyway, a few people saw the Governor standing on the cliff edge, arms raised like he was addressing some gathered crowd, but only the ocean was there. Then he stretched up and leaped, dived right off the cliff. The people ran to see, and his body was washing back and forth against the rocks, broken and bleeding. They weren’t able to retrieve him from there, and by the time they’d rowed a boat around the point, the body was nowhere to be found. So the story goes.

  “Anyway, they sent a couple of people up here, to tell his wife. They found four long wooden stakes standing up in the garden, out there by the front of the house. On each stake, one of his children had been impaled, skewered from arse to mouth like little human kebabs. All of them between three and nine years old.”

  “F
ucking hell,” Patrick said. Ciara was silent and pale beside him. Torsten and Simone sat tight-lipped, both leaning forward in fascination.

  “His wife was inside. She was naked. Laid out on the floor like a star, like when you make a sand angel on the beach, yeah? Except her arms and legs and her head were all chopped from her body and separated by a few feet. Sorta spread out.”

  “That’s horrible,” Ciara said.

  “That’s The Gulp,” Shirley said.

  “Why did he do it?” Patrick asked.

  Shirley shrugged. “No one knows. He went mad. Why does anyone do the mad shit they do? Especially here. Kept talking about dreams, people said, but no one really understood it.”

  “I’d have trouble living in this place knowing that history,” Torsten said.

  Shirley pointed to a spot in the middle of the large room. There were no seats there, just a big rug. “Right there is where they found her. If you move the rug you can still see the blood.”

  “After more than a hundred and fifty years?” Ciara said, aghast. “Surely not.”

  “Soaked into the wood and never came out. Sanded, stained, varnished, the blood always comes through. Have a look if you want.”

  “I don’t want!” Ciara said. “Why hasn’t anyone just torn up the floorboards and replaced them?”

  Shirley grinned. “Apparently they have. Three times. The blood always comes back. I need another drink.” She stood and walked over to the large dresser with the bottles without another word or a backward glance.

  “Fucking hell,” Patrick said. “Think that’s true?”

  “I think maybe some is true and a lot is embellished,” Torsten said.

  “Embellished?” Simone asked. They spoke a moment in German, then Simone nodded. “Yes, agree. They have a...” She looked at Torsten again. “Das Ansehen.”

  “Yes, a reputation,” Torsten said. “A brand to maintain, yes? They’re even still in makeup.”

  “Musicians,” Ciara said. “Like all creatives, they’re a bit weird.”

  “Shots!”

  The room cheered as Edgar turned from the dresser with a large silver tray. It was covered in shot glasses, each filled with a pale green liquid. He moved around the room and each person took a glass, then held it, waiting. He got to Patrick and friends and they followed suit.

  “Absinthe?” Patrick asked.

  Edgar grinned. “Sort of. It’s a Blind Eye Moon special. We call it Blind Eye Moonshine.”

  He put the tray down and took a glass of his own, then turned to the room. “To the mind! To the power of the intellect! To imagination!”

  “To imagination!” everyone shouted back.

  Patrick looked at his friends. “To imagination!”

  They smiled and slammed their shots, along with everyone else. The Blind Eye Moonshine was sweet and tart at the same time, and hellaciously strong. It burned on the way down and then seemed to instantly heat Patrick from the inside out like a supernova in his gut.

  “Holy shit!” Ciara said, looking at her empty glass.

  Torsten blew air out and Simone said, “Phew!”

  “That was quite something,” Patrick muttered. His vision swam a little.

  “You like it?” Edgar asked. “This is the only place in the world you can get it.”

  Patrick’s lips felt numb, his tongue swollen. “It’s quite something,” he said again, lost for any other words.

  Edgar leaned over behind where Shirley had been sitting and came up with an acoustic guitar. He sat on the arm of the sofa, put the guitar on his knee, and began to play. He picked out a haunting melody that immediately insinuated its way into Patrick’s blood. Then he began chords and started to sing in a strange language. It was similar to Gaelic, which Patrick spoke, but not quite the same. He listened hard, almost understood phrases, then they slipped away again.

  A clean, lilting melody came over the top and Patrick saw Clarke had found a guitar too, playing along in harmony. Shirley came and stood behind a nearby armchair, using her palms to play a soft beat against its leather back. Howard, short of a bass guitar presumably, picked up the tray of shots and went around the room again. Everyone held their glasses up and Edgar paused briefly and said, “To imagination!” then continued his song.

  “To imagination,” the others in the room said and downed their shots once more.

  The heat grew in Patrick, spreading through his body like ink dripped in water. He decided maybe he wouldn’t have any more if he was offered, it seemed like more than simple alcohol, however strong. He liked it a lot, and that’s what gave him pause. He liked it too much.

  The night grew late, the band playing quiet and powerful acoustic songs. Howard even came up with an acoustic bass and played a hypnotic solo that seemed to stretch sound like rubber.

  Despite his earlier decision, Patrick had a third shot of Blind Eye Moonshine and time stretched then as well. He and his friends talked with other partygoers, they talked with the band between songs, they drank more still, but bourbon now, and Bundaberg rum. The strange green liqueur wasn’t offered again, for which Patrick was vaguely thankful, though he missed it too.

  He found himself staring out the front bay window of the large room, across a well-manicured lawn and old, established shrubs. The view dropped away after the garden and he realised he saw a faint pale smudge in the distance and a soft horizon. He was looking at the ocean, far away over the roofs of the Gulp, and dawn had begun to lighten the sky.

  The room had fallen to silence and Patrick tore his gaze away from the view to see why. As he did so, Edgar began to sing. That same strange almost-Gaelic language as the first song, but no guitar now, no accompaniment. Just Edgar’s voice, pure and soft, as pitch-perfect with the lilting melody as it had been belting out heavy metal anthems. This melody had something of the lullaby about it. As that thought occurred to Patrick, his eyelids became heavy. He managed to think, He’s putting me to sleep, and a swift, icy rill of panic went through him, then his eyes closed and darkness swept in like the tide.

  Patrick dreamed.

  The house was dark and still, a cold breeze rippled his hair. Ice rimed every surface, glittering softly in moonlight that leaked through the windows. He took a step forward and something sucked at his shoe. He looked down. He stood in a massive pool of blood, almost black in the darkness. He tried to call out Ciara’s name, but his voice was a whistling wheeze. His throat tightened. His heart began to race, breath short and shallow. He ran to the front window, wet footprints in his wake, and looked out. The moon hung full and heavy over the ocean far away. Then clouds rolled in, roiling dark black and purple. Lightning forked and the surface of the ocean heaved as rain fell. Then the sky split, deep red like a wound, and creatures fell from the clouds. All manner of shapes, long and gangly, short and squat, limbs writhing as they tumbled to the waves. Only tiny silhouettes in the distance, he had no idea what they were, people or something different. A sound forced the hairs on his neck to stand up, a howl, but not animal. Not exactly. Like a person trying to howl like a wolf.

  Pounding feet on floorboards, rushing up behind him. He spun around, but no one was there. He tried to call Ciara’s name again, but only croaked a cloud of condensed breath. A shadow passed the door, out in the hallway, a tall, sinewy figure loping by.

  He ran to the door, looked out. No one there. More ice over everything in the hallway, the side tables, portraits, coat rack. A frozen draught came in through the open front door. He went to it, looked out over the opulent entrance, stone steps leading down to the gravel driveway. The dark roiling clouds churned above, a wind blew, cold and carrying the salt scent of the ocean, and something less pleasant. Something rotten.

  A long, bony hand with blood red fingernails came down on his shoulder. He cried out, though it was barely a sound, as the hand turned him. The arm was as long and thin as the fingers, attached to a hunched body over seven feet tall, skeletal, with fish-belly pale skin. Except around the eyes, where the fles
h was blackened, cobwebs of black veins spreading out over the cheekbones, up over the forehead. The eyes were glowing deep, dark red. The other hand rose in front of his face, the overlong fingers weaving hypnotising patterns in the air. Those deep red eyes stared hard into his as the creature leaned forward, face to face. Its breath was a marine stench.

  He sensed it drawing something from him, sucking something out, some essence. Something important. Whatever it was taking, he needed it, couldn’t spare it. He tried to scream no, but his breath was a whisper. His legs numb, face slack, darkness lay gently over him.

  Patrick awoke with a pounding in his head and a mouth like the bottom of a birdcage. He groaned and rolled over, and fell off the couch onto the rug with a thump. He grunted and turned into a sitting position.

  “Yeah, it’s a bit like that.”

  He looked up to see Ciara smiling at him from an armchair, where she sat curled up, knees to her chest, eyes narrow. “You too?”

  She grimaced. “Haven’t had a headache like this in a while.”

  “We haven’t drunk like that in a while.”

  “Truth.”

  Patrick looked around the room, saw most of the previous night’s revellers were gone, but four or five remained. Torsten and Simone were spooned on a couch perpendicular to the one he’d just fallen from, both still sleeping. “We all just passed out last night?” he asked.

  “Guess so. I don’t remember.”

  “Can I smell bacon?”

  Ciara nodded, then winced. “Coffee too.”

  “Gods be praised.”

  “Careful who you pray to in this town, hey.”

  They turned to see Howard, the bass player, carrying a tray piled with bread rolls and that enticing smell of bacon. He leaned down and let them take one each.

  “Get these into ya,” Howard said. His voice was gravelly, but kind. “They’ll cure what ails ya.”

  “Coffee,” Shirley said, putting a large metal jug on the same dresser as the booze that had caused all their problems.

  Well, maybe not all of it, Patrick reflected. The green moonshine Edgar had shared around was nowhere to be seen. He hadn’t seen where that came from.