Dead Souls

by Campbell, Ramsey; Warren, Kaaron; Finch, Paul; McMahon, Gary; Hood, Robert; Stone, Michael; Mark S. Deniz

  We drank a hell of a lot and why Dean kept giving it to me without making me pay I didn’t know and I didn’t choose to think about it either. I drank and watched the comings and goings, checking out an occasional punch-up when alcohol and loss turned some bloke sour, and sat in the dark talking to Dean, who in fact didn’t talk much, but when he did was keen to gossip. “See him?” he said, indicating a suave-looking bloke in a nice suit, who had turned up late, played a few rounds and then spent the rest of the time talking to another bloke in a suit. Dean told me his name. It was sort of colourful. “You heard of him?”

  “Sure,” I said, not really clear about where I’d come across it. Probably in a newspaper. I thought he was some kind of crook — now, of course, I’ve been aware of his nefarious activities for decades.

  “He’s great,” Dean whispered, with a husky envy. “Gets away with friggin’ everything. I heard he throws these wild parties up his place at Palm Beach that’d make ya bloody dick drop off with the excitement. Naked women everywhere. Takes pictures while they fondle themselves. Whips ‘em. That kind of shit. Wish he’d invite me over some time.”

  We fetched more beer and then a couple of bottles of scotch from a van that seemed to be the main source of supply, and drank ourselves silly, while the game went on inside and the night got fuzzier. By midnight I could hardly stand and Dean was trying to sing “you’re sixteen, you’re beautiful and you’re mine” with obscene lyrics that never managed to make much sense. Finally I passed out in a sandy hollow next to a bush I was pissing on.

  ****

  Sunlight was like needles being stuck in my eyeballs when I woke up next day. My head was throbbing, my throat was dry and felt like I was breathing in sand, and just about every part of me ached, from having lain across knots of grass all night, I guessed. I pushed myself up, squinting and groaning, then gave away the attempt because I couldn’t get my balance and just fell sideways into the shade of a bush. Damn sun. Damn wind. Somewhere in the distance I could hear surf. Or maybe it was just the ringing in my ears.

  I drifted out of consciousness and back again and this time, an angular face was leering down at me.

  “God,” I moaned, “What’s the time?”

  “About three.”

  “In the afternoon?”

  “You slept in, baby.” Dean squatted next to me. He was wearing the same cream-coloured slacks he’d had on last night, but now he was stripped to the waist. His hair was matted and damp, as though he’d been swimming, and he’d smeared his nose with white sun-cream. “Maybe you better pull ya daks up, eh?” He reached out and grabbed my dick and that was when I suddenly realised one of the reasons I’d had trouble getting up earlier was that my trousers were around my ankles. His fingers squeezed.

  “Hey, let go!” I yelled, shock driving away the pain in my head. “What’re you doing?”

  He grinned, squeezing harder. “You were enjoyin’ this last night.”

  I pushed at him. “Frig off! What are you? Some sort of queer?”

  Suddenly there was a knife in his hand — a half-inch, long-bladed one that had appeared from nowhere; the point pressed in under my jaw, piercing the skin. I pulled my head back, but he kept up the pressure and I felt blood running down my neck. He was still squeezing. “Be nice,” he said, “or I’ll rip it off and shove it down ya throat.”

  He grinned at the look of pain and horror that was skidding over my face; then he relaxed his grip and began stroking me instead. “Nice little John Thomas you’ve got there, Mikey.” He kept my head back, the knife cutting into my skin, so I couldn’t see what he was up to. I cringed in shock when I felt his tongue on my glans.

  “Christ almighty!” I choked.

  “More than a mouthful now, eh?” he said, and his thick lips went right around my dick, surrounding it with warm breath and moisture. In that position keeping the knife against my throat was difficult; I felt the pressure ease. As it did, I pulled back, grabbed his knife-hand and pushed him away, screaming at him. Bush tangled me up and I swore again. Suddenly his knife was pressed against my stomach. “Keep movin’ around so much...” he whispered, “...and I might slip.”

  “Shit, Dean!” I said, and he laughed.

  “That dick of yours ever been in anything warm, Mike? Other than your hand, that is?”

  “Get stuffed!”

  “Feisty little bastard, aren’t you?”

  Suddenly the blade disappeared. “Pull ya pants up,” he said, moving back. “I got something better than my mouth to put ya dick in.”

  “Get away from me!”

  “While you were sleeping like a baby, I went into Cronulla for some breakfast.” He reached back. “Here.” He tossed me a Wagon Wheel and a bag of Smiths Crisps.

  I knocked them aside and squirmed about, trying to cover myself up. “I don’t want anything from you, you friggin’ pervert.”

  “Saw this bird I rather fancy,” he said, smirking. Then he added, “She’s got a friend.”

  I didn’t care; all I wanted to do was get away from him. I stood and began to move backwards across the sand dunes. He watched me for a moment, his dark eyes cold and cruel. “Come on, Mike...” he said. “It was just a joke.”

  “Some joke!”

  “I’ll give you fifty quid if you stay! Told the chick you’d be here.”

  “Forget it! You’re a goddamn lunatic.”

  He shrugged. “Lunatics can be fun,” he said, but didn’t come after me.

  ****

  I was already on the platform of Cronulla station when I realised my wallet wasn’t in my pocket. It was a new leather one, not full of money, but full of the only money I had — a couple of pounds. My initials were etched on it and everything. Halfway back to the reserve, I thought to wonder whether Dean had taken it. I wasn’t at all sure I’d want to fight him about it.

  Wind was blowing sand everywhere. My head had started aching again. It was what day? I tried to think. Oh, yeah. Monday. The beach was sparsely populated, because the weather had turned the surf choppy and the guards had closed it. All I wanted to do was go home — I felt pretty sick. But I made it along the track and headed out over the sandhills, searching for anything familiar, so I could find the spot where I’d spent the night. I wished I hadn’t thrown away the Wagon Wheel. I was hungry.

  Wanda was a bleak and miserable landscape that afternoon, wide and windswept — like a desert, if it hadn’t been for the ocean surging like a grey mist on the far side of the hills. I pushed closer to the edge of the scrub, squinting against the sun and the wind, not finding what I was looking for, though there was plenty of other litter — scraps of newspaper, crushed wrappers, cigarette stubs, broken bottles, driftwood. Then, as I crested a sandhill covered in tea-trees, I saw some figures in the distance, off to my left. They were moving along the beach, right up from the water’s edge. There were three of them. I couldn’t make out details, but I just knew it was Dean and the two girls he reckoned he was going to meet.

  I ducked back and flattened myself on the hidden side of the dune. Peering over the top, I watched them approach and then cut across in front of me, perhaps fifty feet away. They were nice-looking girls, it seemed, at least from that distance. I guessed they were about fifteen or sixteen, both medium height — shorter than Dean — and slim. Both had shoulder-length hair, tossed madly at the moment by the wind, framing childish, smiling faces. They might have been sisters, except one was dark and the other fair. The fair one was wearing a blue and white jumper and white shorts. The dark one was in a swimsuit, with a green shirt over it. Fair was talking animatedly, though Dean wasn’t listening. The girls looked concerned. Dark kept looking back, like she’d forgotten something. I heard her say, “...thought I saw Wolfgang a while ago. Maybe we should go back. The kids...”

  “Just a bit further,” Dean said, and used his weight to pull them on.

  These girls weren’t tarts. I wondered what story Dean had used to get them to come with him — or what they’d do wh
en they got to wherever they were going and it became clear what he wanted. Curiosity got the better of me. I slithered along the slope and followed just out of sight. The wind would cover the sounds of my movement.

  “I’m going back,” said one of the girls suddenly. The voice seemed close. I stopped and squirmed along the side of a rise covered in flailing grass tufts. The trio was about twenty yards away, down in a hollow.

  “We should keep looking,” said Dean. “I tell you I saw the kid around here someplace.”

  “Peter’s ten,” the fair one added, “They’ll be all right. We told them to wait for us.”

  “Maybe we should check he hasn’t come back by himself.” Marianne glanced toward the top of the sandhill.

  “What’s wrong?” said Dean, with mock indignity. “Think I’m lying, do you?”

  Dark ignored him. “We ought to go back, Chrissie. If he’s still missing, we can get help.”

  Dean’s face went dark and intense. I tensed along with him, but for different reasons, afraid.

  “Okay,” he said, “Okay. Here’s the deal. I want Christine to stay. You, too, if you want. But Chrissie stays...”

  Christine frowned at him. “What do you think...?”

  He gestured to shut her up. “It’d be a shame to waste all this isolation.”

  Marianne backed further, dragging her friend. “You stay away from us. We’ll call the police if you touch us.”

  “Touch you?” Dean laughed, a low, mirthless groan. Then, suddenly, before the girls could react, his right fist swung out and cracked into Marianne’s face. She shrieked, stumbling to her knees. “I’ll do more than touch you!”

  In that moment of shock, Christine took a step away from him. She whimpered. Marianne was clutching at her face. Dean reached down, grabbed her shirt and tore it off her. She tried to get away from him, but he hit her again and ripped the top of her swimsuit down over her breast. She was screaming hysterically. He stood back, then kicked her in the stomach.

  I’d leapt up by then and was stumbling down the sandhill, yelling for Dean to stop. This distracted him; he looked up and grinned. “I was wonderin’ where you’d got to,” he said.

  “Leave them alone!” I skidded to a halt in front of him, getting between him and Marianne. Christine was looking at us in dazed indecision, torn between helping her friend and running. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Dean?”

  “Hey,” said Dean jovially, “I’m big-time, man. Boss’ll be king in May. I can do what I want.” With that he pulled his knife out of the sheath at his side and lunged at me. I fell backward and the blade tip scored lightly across my T-shirt, cutting it and drawing blood in a line down my chest. I struck at him, missed and lost my balance. The knife came at me; I kicked and suddenly felt intense pain in my right thigh. Blood splashed on the sand and I cried out. “Stay outta this!” Dean yelled, and kicked me hard in the face. I fell away, the wind turning black around me, sand spinning into sucking maelstroms of fractured light. Pain exploded in my head.

  I wanted to yell “Run!” to Christine and maybe I did. I couldn’t tell and can’t remember. I tried to push myself up and backwards. Where was Dean? My eyes had gone funny — tight and out of focus. I crawled in the sand.

  Someone screamed. It was a terrible cry, sizzling with pain and horror. I forced my eyes to focus and thought I saw Dean and Christine about twenty feet away, dancing. No, not dancing. His knife was gouging into her back for the second time, while he held her shoulder and pulled. She was jerking and shrieking; red spurts of blood got caught on the wind and spun out over the sand. Dean let her body drop; she was too weakened by shock and her wounds to get away, but she wasn’t unconscious either. She was still screaming. Dean moved slightly to one side, picked up a piece of pipe or something that was lying there and went back toward her. I tried to get up, but my legs folded. Dean smashed the pipe down on the back of Christine’s head and the screaming stopped.

  The rest is a blur, though my mind played over it again and again for half a decade, and even now, more than twenty years on, it’ll come back in dreams when I’m depressed or anxious. I’ve sorted the fractured impressions, the memories blurred by my own injuries and hysteria, until they fit into a sort of story — a fiction to give it form so it can be coped with; but I’m not confident of the truth. Maybe I don’t want to be confident of the truth. It’s not a secret of identity — I knew who the murderer was. But it is a secret. One that haunts me, sometimes making me violent, sometimes drawing out acts of irrational charity.

  Dean dragged the bloody but docile body of Christine back across the sand. Sunlight caught on a chain bracelet she wore on her wrist, sparking like a warning. Marianne was moving, whimpering and moving, though I don’t think there was much consciousness there. He dumped the corpse next to her, ignoring me, leaned and drew a hard stroke of the knife across her throat. Blood. Cries. She was still moving, even then, so he stabbed the blade into her chest. There was more blood, lots of it.

  Both must have been dead, but it didn’t stop him. He beat at them, first one, then the other, with his fists, muttering something, swearing. I couldn’t hear. I was barely conscious. Perhaps I wasn’t conscious at all. I don’t know. I must have been crawling away, vaguely aware that he’d kill me too, when he was finished with the girls. It wasn’t something I thought about, as such. I wasn’t capable of thought. But my body knew and it wanted to get away. It crawled through the sand, trying to escape from the nightmare.

  Yet all the time part of my mind must have been noting what Dean was up to, because images of it come, like ghouls from the darkness, eating at me in the night. I feel the tearing of their teeth, cringe in pain. Dean stripping the girls. Baring himself. Getting down on his knees in the sand. Crawling. Toward the corpses — one, then the other. Circling. Approaching. Making strange mewling noises. Lying over them. Crawling on them. Up, down on their dead flesh. Up, down. Paroxysms. Cries. Fondling them. Up, down. Crawling. Crawling.

  ...While I crawled through the sand away from him. How I managed it, I don’t know. Perhaps the intensity of his homicidal passion was so great he simply forgot about me. Until it was too late. Maybe forever. Perhaps he remembered but figured there was nothing I could do. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know how to find him. Perhaps I simply became part of his memory of an orgy of violence. A confederate. Perhaps in his mind I was always, or never, with him.

  ****

  There was a blank time when I knew nothing. I must have wandered through the scrub, maybe for hours. Made my way home. Eventually. No one noticed me, or if they did, they never told the police about it, because despite the extensive search that followed discovery of the murders, despite the obsessive soliciting of witnesses, no descriptions of anyone like me, tentative or otherwise, ever appeared in the papers. I don’t remember what story I told Mum and Patrick. Certainly it didn’t involve either Cronulla or Wanda Sands. Wherever I’d been, nothing had happened there, nothing terrible. My T-shirt was torn, I had a nasty knife cut across my chest and my thigh was bleeding — but there was a normal explanation, a fight between friends, dares and rough sport. An accident. I don’t know what I said, but whatever it was they believed it — or pretended to. Perhaps they thought I was the Wanda Beach killer. Perhaps I was. Nothing was clear for a while. My mind was in torment. I stayed out of their way and tried to act normally.

  I began reading the newspapers. The mutilated bodies of Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock were found by someone called Peter Smith on the Tuesday, buried in shallow graves in the sand. The community was outraged. Cops swarmed over the beach. They searched it for clues, finding nothing. Not the knife. Not the pipe. Not even my wallet. It must have been lost too far from the crime scene, in the scrub rather than on the beach. Wouldn’t have mattered much if they did find it. There were initials on it — mine — but what sort of a lead was that? Unless they already knew about me, they’d never put a name to them. There was nothing to help in the wallet eit
her. Two pounds. Some coins. A picture of Hayley Mills, who I’d fancied for a while. No pictures of me or my family. No driver’s licence. No credit cards. That was in the days before every kid over twelve had the magic plastic of capitalist wish-fulfilment in his pocket. So, nothing to connect with me.

  ****

  The days go by. Bushfires rip through the bushland surrounding Sydney. BOY SAW YOUTH WALK INTO SANDHILLS WITH SCHOOLGIRLS. A man who worked on the railways shot during an attempted holdup. DEATH CAME ON A DIRTY BEACH. DUNES TO BE SIFTED IN MURDER CLUE HUNT. APPEAL BY POLICE. Dawn Fraser declared “Australian of the Year”. Finally CLUES HUNT ABANDONED AT MURDER BEACH. The leader of the Opposition, Mr Robert Askin, says that the police force must be strengthened to prevent such outrages in future...But the state Opposition was attempting to “gain political capital at any price” in its criticism of the strength of the New South Wales Police Force, the Premier Mr Renshaw, said yesterday. POLICE SEEK VITAL CLUE FROM EIGHT ON WANDA BEACH. The election date still isn’t set. APPEAL TO PUBLIC BY POLICE. Fourteen Liberals fight it out in a party pre-selection for Vaucluse. Timothy Evans, hanged in London in 1950, is posthumously pardoned. Dawn Fraser performs a schoolgirl prank with a flag. Jeanette McDonald dies, of a heart attack, 57. A man in Amsterdam drills a hole in his skull “To achieve the effect of smoking marihuana cigarettes”...I experience reality much more intensely, he says. The Stones play in Sydney. Winston Churchill is sick.

  ****

  By 25 January Churchill was dead and the Wanda Beach murders had disappeared from the papers. No clues. No one in custody. Nothing.

  Nightmares plagued my sleep. And what of Dean? Maybe I wanted to find him. Maybe I didn’t. I don’t know. I took to wandering along the beach, once the cops had stopped keeping an eye on the place. I skirted around the murder scene itself, looking at it through sun and the blustery autumn weather, feeling my mortality and seeing the violence again and again. Anger welled in me. I thrashed at the sand, tore at the bushes. I cursed my parents, broke things, stole a car and went for a joy ride. I beat up a bloke down the street because he looked at me in a way I didn’t like. I got drunk whenever I could.