Dark Oceans

by Mark Macrossan

  Someone had gone to a lot of trouble, not to avoid detection, but to be noticed.

  There was one other thing they found. And like the first of their findings, it was on the boab tree. But this time it wasn’t a body or a part of one, it was nothing macabre at all, just a little mystery. Something had been carved into the bark of the trunk. Boab markings can last for centuries – Dean pointed out Aboriginals often left symbols on boabs – and this particular one looked just that: centuries old.

  It looked like a crude version of the carving in the Destino, or at least a part of it. Unlike the more complex carving in the ship, this one consisted simply of a ten-sided figure divided up into a number of different shapes, all straight-sided (or “rectilinear” in Dean’s words). It was as if someone had roughly copied a section of the Destino carving from memory.

  And that’s exactly what must have happened, Dean reckoned.

  He also said the carvings, especially the one in the Destino, reminded him of fractal geometry and its use in Islamic tiling and traditional African culture, and of particular geometric shapes repeated on an infinitely shrinking scale in architecture and seen, for example, in aerial photography of huts in Tanzania. Fractals, he pointed out, was where the more something was magnified, the more the same pattern kept reappearing. Like a snowflake, for example, or even, some would say, the Universe itself.

  ‘You’ve heard of the Fibonacci Sequence?’

  Dean posed the question to no-one in particular, although he was hardly expecting a response from Travis. So Mikkel pitched in.

  ‘Isn’t it… a sequence of numbers where each one is… ?’

  ‘An infinite sequence where each one is the sum of the previous two.’

  ‘The previous two, that’s right. Zero. One. One. Two. Three―’

  ‘Three five eight thirteen twenty-one thirty-four fifty-five eighty-nine―’

  ‘OK, OK,’ Mikkel said. ‘Jeez. Another hobby?’

  ‘To cut a long story, it’s something that crops up in nature a lot, it’s related to the Golden Ratio.’

  ‘So what’s that.’

  ‘The Golden Ratio is one point six one eight zero three two seven eight―’

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘It goes on. You see it in classical architecture, geometry, that sort of thing. And divide a Fibonacci number by its predecessor, you get an approximation of the Golden Ratio which gets closer, the further towards infinity you go.’

  Mikkel made a point of looking at his watch.

  ‘My point is,’ Dean went on, ‘the Fibonacci sequence, the Golden Ratio, fractal geometry, they’re all related, you find them in nature, you find them in infinity tiling in Islamic architecture, and, well… Some even say it’s proof of God.’

  And on that note…

  They stared at the weather-blasted, time-worn carving on the boab for a few more moments. All very curious, Mikkel thought, but compared to everything else they’d found that dark day…

  It was almost three by the time they decided to call it quits. Dean’s injury ruled out a more painstaking search, and Mikkel thanked his lucky stars for small mercies.

  *

  He thought he remembered thanking his lucky stars, at least, but it occurred to him maybe he didn’t thank them at all. That day – that Thursday – was breaking up in his head, breaking up and fading away into fractals, and fractals of fractals, and…

  The flight attendant was smiling at him as he emerged from the tunnel at the arrival gate where the passengers from his flight were pouring out into the terminal building and off into the real world to continue their lives. The bag Mikkel was carrying, the zip-up shoulder bag that had been under the seat in front of him on the plane, turned out to contain clothes he did recognise because they were his – a pair of shoes, jeans and t-shirt – and even more than the fact that the contents were all, inexplicably wet, what disturbed him most of all, although he wasn’t yet sure why, was that the bag bore the words “Broome: It’s One Pearl Of A Town”.

  Was there really a body in a tree? A ship in the desert? Did he even go to the desert on Thursday? But of course he knew he had.

  What’s more, he almost didn’t make it back.

  *

  By the time they’d stashed their gruesome cargo, no-one was speaking. They all just wanted to get out of there. It was nothing to do with Thursday night drinks anymore (they’d missed their flight anyway), but the thought of staying an hour longer suddenly felt like a form of torture. Dean’s injury seemed to have plateaued – he hadn’t broken into a feverish sweat, but on the other hand he wasn’t looking that crash hot either, he was as pale as a ghost.

  The landscape seemed full of ghosts: the ghostlike trunks of the snappy gums, not to mention the real ghosts…

  As soon as Travis fired up the BK117, Mikkel felt his chest expand, like he could suddenly breathe again. The red earth seemed to back off a little bit, even before they’d begun to move. The sensation of relief – or release – grew even more pronounced as they disconnected from the ground and rose up into the cool, blue sky. Mikkel decided that this time he wasn’t going to be the one to give them a reason to hang around – he’d keep his eyes on the horizon, on their destination, and not look down. No matter how many bodies there were down there, dangling from trees.

  It happened about thirty seconds after take off.

  The helicopter had just finished its turn and straightened out when it suddenly started juddering. It felt like riding a bike over cobblestones, or a corrugated iron roof. Mikkel and Dean looked at Travis who was glancing at his instruments and shaking his head. Shaking his head and cursing, so the prognosis looked bad.

  ‘We’re not gonna make Broome,’ he said. ‘If we’re lucky we might make Sandfire.’

  The other two nodded – what else could they do? – and Travis turned the craft around again, this time with some difficulty – and nudged them in a new direction: a fraction north of due west, straight for the ocean. Travis was indicating sand seemed to have somehow got into the fuel lines, or something like that, Mikkel wasn’t sure, all he knew was he wished he hadn’t seen the body in the tree.

  “Sandfire” was the Sandfire Roadhouse and Caravan Park on the Great Northern Highway – one of only two roadhouses on the entire six hundred kilometre stretch of road between Port Hedland and Broome, and the closest to their current position. It was, therefore, their closest source of fuel, their closest source of supplies and their closest access to internet and telephone connections. And ‘closest’ counted for a lot in these parts, especially when your means of transport had a question mark over it.

  A question mark, but unfortunately you could now add an exclamation mark as well: the shaking was getting worse – the juddering had upgraded itself from worrying to violent and Dean looked like he was about to throw up. Mikkel was beginning to wonder exactly how lucky Travis had meant they had to be to get to Sandfire, but now was obviously not the time to ask. They were now only flying at about a hundred and fifty kilometres per hour, and Sandfire was over sixty kilometres away, so that meant they had to hold it together for twenty or thirty minutes. Still, Travis appeared supremely cool, and Mikkel loved him for that.

  They were flying low, maybe at a hundred metres or so, possibly less, and with all the violent juddering, it felt as though they still hadn’t broken free of the grooved, red terrain flashing by below them. As if it was indeed the landscape causing all this. And in a way, perhaps it was, Mikkel thought, and was reminded of the contents of the plastic bags just behind where they were sitting.

  It felt like an eternity, but eventually they found themselves flying over the Mandora Marsh, with its paperbark trees and mangroves and waterbirds. And water! all turquoise and white, what a sight that was, what a welcome relief from the relentless ochres and reds of the endless country around it. Like an oasis on Mars.

  21. Edge Of Nowhere

  [Sandfire, Great Northern Highway, W.A. (-19.7725, +121.0917), 17 Oct 2013, 3.30PM]


  A small settlement on the edge of nowhere, Sandfire consisted of a handful of buildings planted next to the Great Northern Highway – an empty two-lane bitumen road stretching almost endlessly in both directions: to the north-east, towards Broome, and to the south-west, towards Port Hedland. The clump of buildings, like the clumps of wiry shrubs and trees covering the flat, red landscape, was sandwiched between the highway and a dirt runway for light planes.

  The BK117 obviously didn’t need a landing strip, but there was a circular clearing adjoining it specifically for helicopters. Travis steered the vibrating aircraft towards it, and deposited them with a bone-jarring crunch that Mikkel initially put down to the malfunctioning engine.

  After the dust had settled and they began to unbuckle, Mikkel looked across at Travis who seemed to have undergone some sort of metamorphosis: all of a sudden he looked shattered. He just sat there, with glazed eyes, his sunglasses now off, staring out through the windscreen at the vista of red earth with its legion of low shrubs disappearing to the horizon – like he was a lookout who’d just spotted an army of overwhelming force.

  ‘Well done Travis mate,’ Dean said. ‘You’re a legend. Great effort.’

  But Travis said nothing and didn’t move. Mikkel and Dean were happy to do the same, and the three of them sat there in silence until a man in a blue checked shirt, loose-fitting grey trousers, a large straw hat, and over-sized gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses emerged out of the dusty glare to greet them.

  ‘Gedday,’ he said. ‘You all right?’

  Mikkel and Dean got out, but to begin with, Travis remained where he was. Something inside there, in his internal workings, seemed to have snapped. Like the engine of his helicopter. He eventually showed signs of life (barely) and got out and made a half-hearted attempt at joining, or at least appearing to join, the conversation Mikkel and Dean were having with Rod, the Sandfire Roadhouse manager. They explained their need to clean out the engine and refuel and told him they were there on police business. Dean kept things on a need to know basis – in relation to the human remains, he simply commandeered a separate cold storage unit for their use (he’d deal with the health inspectors if it came to that), saying they had “a few items” in need of a bit of temporary refrigeration. Rod eventually acceded to the storage request but under protest. Travis, his sunglasses back on again, stayed out of it.

  “Temporary” was a relative term and as it turned out, they wouldn’t be heading off again in a hurry. Travis was spooked. He’d lost his nerve. He’d been fine on the flight back – a hero, as Dean put it – but it seemed to have taken its toll. That, and the body, Mikkel guessed. The body and the body parts. But Travis, despite managing to summon the strength to carry out the necessary refuelling and repairs, refused to fly them. He was convinced there was something else going on apart from sand in their engine. He seemed to be under the impression the whole countryside had it in for him, so Dean made an executive decision that they’d spend the night there and head back to Broome the next day when everyone (meaning Travis) had recharged their batteries (meaning recovered their wits). It was the off-season, so luckily there were rooms available.

  He might have been stuck in the middle of nowhere for his Thursday night, but Mikkel consoled himself with the thought that he would make up for it the following night, on Friday. (Which is, he was now guessing, exactly what he went and did.)

  With Travis a casualty and not much use to anyone, Mikkel and Dean with his limp were left with the job of getting the body and the other various plastic bags into cold storage. Rod watched them with a troubled look on his face, but asked no questions. Any mug could have seen that they were carrying a body (although when they later rang their Perth base, they were told there had already been an inquiry from a worried roadhouse owner, so they figured Rod at least knew they weren’t murderers). And as Mikkel and Dean struggled with their “naked lady in plastic” as Deano so helpfully put it, they were observed not just by Rod, and a shirtless guest with a stubby of beer in his hand, but also a commotion of noisy geese, a parade of strutting peacocks and a bored-looking camel. It was the goanna though that freaked Deano out – unsurprisingly perhaps – and he actually dropped the body bag when the docile lizard ambled into view.

  A fine old lot we are, Mikkel thought. All this Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, anyone would have thought there was a war on. And in a way, as things turned out, there was.

  Later on, when Dean reported in to their superiors in Perth and told them about the body and the other human remains, he also told them about the Destino. It was agreed that for the time being, that particular finding should be kept a secret, at least from the media and the general public, until it could be ascertained whether or not it was the real McCoy, and if it was, until the archaeologists or whoever had had a chance to look over it before it was plundered by souvenir hunters. Sure, the location was pretty remote, but you couldn’t be too careful. After all, there were plenty of unscrupulous operators out there.

  That evening, little was said over their burgers and beers – none of them had the stomach for much drinking, Thursday night or not – and when Mikkel finally retired to his room (air-conditioned thank God) he could barely remember what had happened to the rest of the day. And as he lay on his bed, thinking this very thought, he caught himself staring at a spider in a web in the corner of his room and realised he’d been staring at it for about half an hour. Which was when the heart palpitations began, for no apparent reason, and he didn’t get to sleep until after 2 a.m.

  *

  Dawn occurred around 5.30am, which was exactly the time that Mikkel was woken by a terrible screeching. It was tacked onto the end of a horrible dream and he was relieved to discover the noise was coming from the peacocks and not from whatever it was in his dream that had made him break out into a cold sweat…

  When he finally emerged at 8am, the sun was already blazing. The other guests had, for the most part, already gone or were in the process of leaving. Somewhere an engine was running. He caught sight of a curious wallaby, watching him from a patch of scrub nearby. As he strolled between the buildings of the settlement, he caught a glimpse of the helicopter. Travis was next to it, busying himself with something, which struck Mikkel as a good sign. As was the sight of Deano leaving the restaurant, despite the reminder that he could still taste the barbeque sauce from the burger the previous night.

  The blue of the sky was already losing its lustre as the sun rose ever higher.

  Mikkel greeted Dean and tilted his head in Travis’s direction.

  ‘We gonna be right to go?’

  Dean nodded. ‘We’re out of here. Hope you’re packed. We’re leaving in fifteen.’

  ‘Minutes?’

  ‘No fifteen days.’

  The thought of staying there, in the Great Sandy Desert or the edge of it or wherever they were, gave Mikkel the creeps to an extent he couldn’t have fully explained. He hurried back to his room and grabbed his things. The spider was gone. For some reason that stuck in his mind.

  The way Mikkel saw it, there was at least one event in most people’s lives, somewhere along the line (be the line long or short), that seems in retrospect so critical, so fundamental in shaping what follows, that the person feels compelled to believe – and could be forgiven for believing – that it was more than purely a matter of chance that caused it to happen. That it was, in some way, either their fault, or their destiny. Or both. (Chance is almost always overlooked as the culprit, people love to blame themselves – what breathtaking egos we all have!). What happened next to Mikkel – or what he caused to happen, whichever way you looked at it – was shaping up as one such event.

  Mikkel and Dean were repacking the BK117 for their flight to Broome. For obvious reasons, they left to last the recovery of the ‘items’ in cold storage. Their final run involved carrying the body. They were weaving their way through the settlement, past some of the other guest rooms, ignoring the puzzled looks from one of Rod’s employees and from a cou
ple of nosey geese when Dean – whose limp had returned – needed a quick breather. They deposited their load temporarily in the shade of a nearby grove of trees, and as Dean wiped the sweat out of his eyes, Mikkel happened to notice, in the red earth of the rough avenue they were following, tyre tracks identical to the unidentified third set they’d seen near the Destino. The Bridgestones. Most people wouldn’t have been able to tell that they were the same. But Mikkel had always been blessed – or cursed – with an eye for detail and an almost photographic memory when it came to anything that interested him. It hit him with force, like someone had hit a switch and bathed a dark scene in bright light.

  In normal circumstances, there would have been no question about what to do next. It was what he was there for, what he was paid to do, and unlike the day before, when he was suffering from claustrophobia and heat exhaustion in the Destino, and worse later on, he was clear-headed and feeling fine. But these were not normal circumstances. Just as the thought of spending fifteen days there was intolerable, so was the thought of spending even one more day. And that was a real possibility if he drew Dean’s attention to the tracks. They’d be obliged to follow the lead. They’d have to do a full job on the whole of Sandfire – the rooms, the books, guest details, the grounds… it didn’t bear thinking about. Mikkel decided on a compromise. He’d ask Rod a couple of questions and worry about it later. They could always come back. And in terms of covering his arse: they were all exhausted, so it’d make sense that some things might not occur to them until later…

  ‘So, er, Rod,’ Mikkel said a short time later, after they were all packed and ready to go. ‘Been many guests over the last few days?’

  ‘Pretty average for this time of year. Last month of the tourist season, so, you know…’ and he shrugged.

  ‘I mean, what types? Just the last two or three days for example.’