Dark Oceans

by Mark Macrossan

  ‘Rhu…’ His mouth began to work but stopped, gave up. He gave up, and lay back, and just let himself enjoy it, like a prisoner before a firing squad, smoking his last cigarette. Yet his cock was the cigarette and she was the prisoner, it was all wrong, Jesus, the drugs, it must be the…

  ‘Rhu…’

  She was using a hand now, as well as her mouth, and skilfully, so skilfully, better than she’d ever done before: she had him on the point of coming and kept him there. She was, truly, a virtuoso… virtuosa…

  And then suddenly, she stopped, stood up, put her drink down, turned around so that she was astride him, facing the other way, and slowly lowered herself over him, and onto him, pulling her bikini bottoms down as she did so. Took him into her, deep into her, and then rode him, truly rode him, violently, slamming her buttocks down hard on his stomach.

  And she screamed a scream so loud it frightened a gull that’d been watching from the top of the mast. The gull flew off with a squawk.

  And all Roy could think of was where it would head to now. Where would the gull go now, if not this boat? It’s a big empty ocean, a whole world of dark oceans, out there…

  19. A Massive Jolt

  [Sydney Airport, N.S.W. (-33.9444, +151.1756), 19 Oct 2013, 1.10PM]

  It seemed like a massive jolt – it was enough to wake him up which was saying something – but it was just the plane touching down. Touching down? Plane? What was he doing on a plane? And for that matter, touching down where?

  The truth of it was that Mikkel Backstrom – Mick to his colleagues in the Forensics Division of the W.A. Police Department – was hungover. Wickedly hungover. And it was going to take no small amount of time to piece together what was going on.

  He rubbed his eyes and ran a hand over the top of his bald head. Looking out the window to his left, he guessed Sydney airport. He glanced to his right and a short blonde girl in denim shorts smiled at him nervously. He thought of asking some questions but knew it was extremely unlikely his mouth would co-operate. An announcement confirmed his worst fears: Welcome to Sydney airport, where the time is ten past one in the afternoon. Checked his watch which was insisting the time was ten past ten. Perth time.

  Think. Think. They had to have come from Perth. Arrival 10.10 a.m. Perth time, five hour flight, no, flying east, quicker, just over four hours, so he must’ve left Perth around… six a.m. Must’ve got to the airport around five a.m. But why?

  Fragments of the previous evening returned. Friday night drinks. With… A long list of friends and pubs and bars flashed before his eyes. Was it a new nightclub he’d never been to before, never heard of? Weren’t there a couple of girls, mocking and teasing, but sticking around anyway…? Or was that the week before? All his Friday nights were blending into one.

  Mikkel looked down and noticed what he was wearing: fluorescent boardshorts patterned with large, black and yellow squares, and a white t-shirt with some kind of Aboriginal design on it, neither of which he’d ever seen before let alone owned. He had a pair of thongs on his feet (he’d never travel in thongs, or shorts for that matter) and there was a bag under the seat in front of him which he didn’t recognise.

  He snatched a look at the marble smoothness of the brown legs next to his own and looked away again. Quickly, in theory, although nothing Mikkel ever did was quick, never mind on a day like today.

  Out the window an Air China jumbo was taking off for some faraway shore. Mind you, given that he was waking up over three thousand kilometres away, this was a faraway shore. Christ. What happened?

  Deano. Deano was there, now he remembered. Deano, Dean Howard… who he did a job with only two days ago. Which was when it all came flooding back to him. The ship in the desert.

  And the rest. The horrible, horrorful rest.

  20. In The Darkness

  [Great Sandy Desert, W.A. (-19.7500, +121.7256), 17 Oct 2013, 12.40PM]

  Something was moving in the darkness.

  Mikkel and Dean had been staring through a jagged hole in the back wall of the captain’s cabin of the Destino En Distancia. Dean was telling him they had to investigate. And just as Mikkel was about to articulate an argument that the shorter of the two – Deano – should go in first, something in there moved.

  A mouse? A bilby? Another Pig-Footed Bandicoot?

  Dean lifted his lamp, directing it into the darkness, and then slowly moved towards the hole. At first the light on the ground only picked up more of the same, pieces of wood, and sand and orange-brown earth. When Dean changed the angle of his lamp though, the light illuminated a tail, then a reptilian body, and then the head of a most extraordinary and frightening creature: it was a huge lizard, maybe two and a half metres long, speckled black and white, its snake-like head side-on to the light so it could watch them.

  It was a perentie – the largest lizard in the land.

  It had been chewing on something, something it held in its claw, but for a few moments it was dead still, just staring at the two men with one large eye – a yellow iris almost completely covered by an enormous black pupil. Unwavering, unblinking. Unpredictable.

  If Mikkel and Dean were wondering about its potential for aggression, they didn’t have to wait long. In a split second, as quick as a camera flash, the perentie had shot out of the hole and clamped its powerful jaw around Dean’s leg. Taken by surprise, Dean leapt and tripped and stumbled over backwards to try to get out of its way, and for an instant Mikkel thought it might go for Dean’s throat. But the perentie continued to grip Dean’s leg and thrash around, its tail lashing out at Mikkel at the same time. Not that his attempts at rescuing Dean were anything other than half-hearted. By this stage Dean, unsurprisingly, was screaming up a storm.

  And then it was gone. Out into the light, into the harsh Australian sun.

  It was probably over in a few seconds, although it felt like minutes. All that was left was the sound of Dean’s groaning. Which was considerable.

  ‘What the fuck WAS that??!!’ he yelled, now that he could articulate sentences again. ‘Ahhhhh,’ he moaned. ‘Was that a goanna or a fucken crocodile?’

  ‘A perentie, Deano. Haven’t you been to the Perth zoo?’

  ‘A peren… Fuck. Are there any more in there?’

  ‘I’m not about to find out.’

  ‘Hey I’m the one that took one for the team here. Fucken… check the hole Mick. Check the fucken hole.’

  ‘You know those things are venomous.’

  ‘Oh great. Aaaaaargh! Feels like someone’s sawing my fucken leg off!’

  ‘Seriously, they are. But don’t worry. You’ll live. Just may be a bit uncomfortable for a while.’

  ‘Oh really? You think? Christ almighty.’

  ‘I think we can give the tourniquet a miss on this occasion,’ Mikkel said as he held his lamp towards the hole in the wall and cautiously moved towards it.

  ‘Aaaaaargh.’ Dean was still complaining.

  ‘Quiet.’

  ‘Just wait til one of these fuckers chooses your leg for lunch.’

  ‘Exactly what I’m trying to avoid, can you shut up for a second?’

  Despite Deano’s huffing and puffing, Mikkel was pretty sure there was no sound coming from the hole. He gritted his teeth and slowly stuck his lamp hand forward into the unknown.

  Nothing moving. Nothing speckled black and white. Nothing that looked like any type of crocodile.

  Mikkel pushed forward through the hole, avoiding its sharp edges – but there was plenty of room even for his tall frame.

  Inside, there was another room, much like the one he’d just been in, only much smaller, no doubt some kind of antechamber. Did they have toilets on these things? But like the main cabin, it was empty. No furniture, no treasure chests, not a sailor’s dagger in sight. Just a few animal skeletons and whatever it was the perentie had been chewing on. Mikkel took a closer look.

  ‘Mick? You still in one piece in there?’

  He’d been expecting the perentie’s meal to be brown, or re
d, but it was a kind of white-ish-pink in colour…

  ‘And not swallowed whole?’

  … and smooth. Furless.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Mikkel said. ‘but…’

  It looked like a piece of flesh of some kind.

  ‘But what?’

  With the epidermis attached. The outer layer of skin, in other words. Complete with sweat pores. Which meant it had to be one of two things. It was either the skin of a domestic pig… but as far as Mikkel knew, there weren’t too many domestic pigs roaming the Great Sandy Desert…

  ‘But what?’ Dean repeated.

  Or it was the skin of a human.

  ‘Mick?’

  *

  Decomposition rates of human flesh tend to be faster the warmer the air, yet slower in dry conditions and, especially so if encased in sand. So everything considered, both Dean and Mikkel agreed that in the event it turned out to be human, it was likely the flesh they located in the interior of the Destino En Distancia at approximately 12.40pm on Thursday 17 October had been attached to a living human being somewhere in the range of between twelve and thirty-six hours earlier. Obviously further testing would be required and what was left of the perentie’s meal was slipped into one of the many ziplock plastic bags the two police officers had at their disposal.

  A quick search of the surrounding area – or as quick as it could be, with one of them now walking-impaired – revealed nothing further of any interest other than one thing, something they’d missed on their way in: a third set of tyre tracks, not belonging to the deserted vehicle on site (the Pathfinder) or the geologists’ Jeep. Other than the tyres being Bridgestones (possibly Dueler HP Sports) and belonging to a four-wheel drive, probably a large one, a Jeep or SUV, there wasn’t much else they could do either: the tracks gradually disappeared when they merged with those of the Pathfinder and both faded away anyway after they hit an ancient stony watercourse of which, in this area, there were many.

  They could, however, be reasonably confident they were synchronous with the tracks of the Pathfinder and the Jeep.

  Even assuming the item in their ziplock bag turned out to be human in origin, the whereabouts of the owner was still anybody’s guess and because they only had so long to comb the Great Sandy Desert in unseasonable forty-plus degrees heat before becoming perentie-food themselves, Dean and Mikkel called it a day and headed back to the chopper. Dean’s limp was getting worse anyway.

  Their anti-social pilot, Travis Seward, was still where they’d left him: slumped on the ground in the shade of a tree – a majestic Desert Bloodwood – with his back against its trunk. And not just in the same place, but in the same position too. He could have been dead, if they hadn’t known him better.

  ‘Travis!’ Dean called out.

  ‘Find anything?’ Apart from raising his eyes, Travis still hadn’t moved; he appeared to talk without even moving his lips.

  ‘My shout if you get us back to Broome by two-thirty!’

  It was now just after 1.20pm. Broome was just over 200 kilometres away. The BK117 had a top speed of 250 kph, so an hour’s flying time was eminently doable. And if they made it to Broome by 2.30pm, they’d make the 3pm Virgin flight, delivering them back in Perth just after 5.30pm. If they missed the 3pm, the next one that day wasn’t until 6.15, which would mean back at 8.45 and that’d be that for their Thursday night, especially as they’d have to deal with the sample they were carrying first…

  Travis moved. Lifted his left wrist up a notch, glancing at his watch.

  ‘Yeah that’s fine, but… I gotta warn you.’ Travis slowly, slowly stood up and brushed the red earth off his trousers. ‘I get pretty thirsty on Thursday nights.’

  Dean needn’t have worried about his promise though, because they never made the 3pm flight. Not even close.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Travis said, noticing Dean’s limp.

  ‘Lizard.’

  Travis raised an eyebrow. And then his body jerked slightly, as a gentle chuckle rippled through him.

  *

  They’d come in from the north and the BK117 was positioned facing south. When they took off, Travis gunned the chopper forwards at the first opportunity to get clear of the cloud of dust they were kicking up. In doing so, they flew out over the Destino itself and drew a long, languid arc over countryside they’d not yet traversed. Their view took in the near-white sands of what looked to be an old riverbed and then, further on and stretching into the distance, the boundless grooved landscape – looking like a vast, orange, corrugated roof – which was dotted with spinifex and bloodwoods, and the occasional desert walnut: compact, dark, and gnarled. There was even a snappy gum, with its white, twisted trunk, startling, almost handsome, the way it stood out against the red earth.

  They banked sharply over an area of raised ground that looked – to Mikkel – like a gigantic burial mound. And then, when they were probably just over two kilometres from the Destino, Mikkel spotted something out of the corner of his eye, something out of place. It was a bottle-shaped boab tree – odd enough in itself, as far south as this, in country this arid – but there was a bright patch on it. At first it looked like a large, white bird had settled among its skeleton branches (as the tree was not yet cloaked in its wet season greenery)… but it wasn’t a bird.

  ‘What’s that?!’ he shouted to Travis, who raised his eyebrows when he saw it and obligingly took them on a detour.

  As they drew closer, the white object morphed before Mikkel’s eyes – from a bird, to a white cotton sheet recently blown off someone’s line, to a pair of overalls, to a blow-up doll for heaven’s sake…

  It was a naked woman. A naked, white woman.

  She was draped over the upper branches of the boab tree, facing the sky, limbs splayed lackadaisically, staring into the brutal, tropical sun. She was clearly dead.

  Dead, and draped over the branches like some horrible Christmas decoration.

  To add to it, Mikkel had the uneasy sensation that the body had been positioned for the benefit – for the viewing pleasure – of the airborne, rather than the ground-bound.

  Travis put the BK117 down straight away, a respectable distance from the boab so as not to disturb any evidence but not so far that the boys would have to trek to get there. Dean’s leg was bad enough as it was. Which was also the reason it was Mikkel and not Dean, the better climber of the two, scaling the tree a few minutes later, after some photographs were taken.

  What happened next was a blur, much of it irretrievable – which wasn’t a bad thing, given the nightmarish quality of what he could remember. There was the climb up into the boab in that terrible heat, besieged by the surrounding red earth that seemed to suck the oxygen out of the air, and seemed, somehow, to threaten to engulf them all at any moment. There were the leafless branches that tore at his clothes. And from that unforgiving, barbed-wire tree, there was the struggle to recover the body, the naked body of the young woman. The body of a girl who once, but no longer, needed his help. There were no protests as he manhandled her. There was no resistance offered as he grabbed her legs, her breasts, her neck, there were no complaints as he battled to get her down. And it was a battle, it was all one terrible, interminable struggle: that was what he remembered most of all.

  The body was already in a poor state. Which was hardly surprising – especially to him, of all people – but even so, when he thought about it now, it made him want to gag all over again. They estimated twenty-four hours. The body had been decomposing – in that heat – for a day. She’d been alive, in other words, the day before. You’d never have known it though. By the time they got to her, she may as well have been there a week.

  Mikkel remembered having a discussion with the others, the men he was with, about what sort of further search they would conduct. But even now, just about all his brain would register, would recall, about that part of the day, apart from flashes of the struggle to get the body down, was the image of the splayed body in the branches. Taken from the air though, not
the ground, the view from the helicopter, blown up, magnified, as if it was a photograph, but of course it wasn’t, it was a tattoo. A permanent tattoo on the tissue of Mikkel’s brain.

  There was something else he remembered. As far as they could tell – given the stage of decomposition – there was no skin missing from the girl’s body (Caucasian, blonde, approx. 165cm / 5’ 5”, blue eyes, slight build, no obvious distg. feat.s and no pubic hair – prob. waxed, ie., a ‘full brazilian’). With this in mind, it was becoming increasingly likely that the tissue sample they’d found earlier was human, and not only that, but that it came from the (living or, as things were shaping up, more probably dead) body of the missing man.

  It went without saying that by that stage, the chances of them making it back to Perth in time for Thursday night drinks were miniscule at best. Proverbial snowball’s. And snowballs in hell is exactly what they were, it occurred to Mikkel. It wasn’t just the heat, either: he didn’t know it at the time, but things were about to get worse.

  A careful search was now required, but Mikkel and Travis doubted Deano was up to it. Travis reckoned the perentie venom wouldn’t do too much harm, but with the conditions as they were, there was no point in taking any chances and they ought to curtail things. So a quick search was conducted with Dean hobbling around, and to speed things up, Travis pitched in as well.

  It might have been quick, but from Mikkel’s point of view at least, it wasn’t quick enough to avoid making more unpleasant discoveries.

  Body parts, to be precise. A hand (R., male). A thigh (R., male, excl. knee). A toe (4th(ring) toe?, L?, male?). And a penis (male). All items had been cut rather than torn, and were found not far from the boab in their own shallow graves, thus temporarily preserving them, for the most part, from the likes of the perentie. They only found them because each had a twig or branch sticking out of the sand above it.