Dark Horizons

by Dan Smith

  The others standing with me were watching Jason with intent, digesting his words, believing them. But I was concerned that no one was asking any questions, and when Jason lifted his friend’s head into his lap, a livid mark was visible around Matt’s exposed throat before Jason leaned forward to cradle the corpse, hiding it from view. I looked around at the others, but saw no reaction. It was as if they didn’t see what I did. Or as if they didn’t want to.

  It was Kurt who broke the silence. He took a step away from the semi-circle and bowed his head for a few moments before beckoning Jason, hugging him and patting his back. With that done, he turned to us, sweeping his eyes across each one of us. His gaze fell on me last, as if he were gauging my reaction, then he took a deep breath and cleared his throat. ‘As hard as this is, we all have a decision to make.’

  I glanced across and saw that Helena was watching me again.

  ‘There’s no decision to make,’ Jason said, standing up. ‘He wouldn’t want to be anywhere but here. We’re all he had.’

  Kurt nodded and scanned the group once more. ‘Does everybody agree?’

  A few people nodded, some mumbled, Michael spoke aloud, his voice clear. ‘Yes. We all agree.’

  Kurt let his eyes meet mine again, holding them there. ‘We all agree?’ he said again. ‘We sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ I heard myself say, and I shifted my gaze to see Helena still watching me. I had no idea what I had just agreed to, but the way Kurt looked at me, I didn’t think I had any other choice.

  ‘Then we should start right away,’ said Kurt. ‘Michael, bring the cangkuls.’

  The semi-circle began to break apart now, some leaving alone, others in pairs, but they all headed in the same direction into the trees. I looked about me, wondering what to do next. Everyone else seemed to know what they were doing, as if they had specific roles to play in such a situation. But I remained where I was, because Domino stayed still beside me.

  ‘You’re one of us now,’ Kurt said, coming closer. ‘Go with Michael. We have a burial to attend to.’

  I looked at Domino. ‘A burial? I don’t—’

  ‘Go on,’ said Kurt. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  I hesitated, once again glancing at Domino. ‘You’re going to bury him?’

  ‘We’re going to bury him,’ Kurt said.

  ‘But we can’t.’

  ‘What else would you have us do?’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe—’

  ‘Please,’ Domino said. ‘You’re with us now.’

  I faltered, torn, looking for an alternative. There were two paths for me to take. I could stand alone and be apart, or I could fall in line and be one with the others. With Domino.

  ‘Your choice,’ Kurt said, as if he knew what was in my mind.

  ‘Please,’ said Domino. And still I was under her spell, so, with terrible doubts, I chose what I thought to be the easier path. I turned to follow Michael, catching up with him as he reached the back of the longhouse.

  He snapped his head round when he heard me approach, his whole body stiffening. ‘He send you to help?’ His manner was suspicious.

  ‘Yeah, but I’m not sure what’s going on here. I mean, shouldn’t we get a doctor, or the police or something?’

  Michael came close to me. ‘Matt’s dead. He doesn’t need a doctor, and he sure as hell doesn’t need the police. What you think they’d do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Help?’

  ‘They’d turn this place over and move us all out, that’s what they’d do. Put us all in prison.’

  ‘Prison? I thought Kurt said he had someone …’

  ‘They know the kind of shit we get up to,’ he butted in, too fast, not waiting to hear what I had to say. ‘Drugs, that kind of thing, but they leave us to it. They leave us alone to get on with it because we don’t disturb anyone and we don’t get in anyone’s way. And because Kurt has a guy in the police and because every now and then the right people get a nice little gift that keeps them happy. But we bring a body down, one that’s died from OD, what the hell you think’s gonna happen?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘They’ll have to come up here, that’s what. They’ll come up here and they’ll steal our way of life that we got. They find all these drugs and they see the way we live, they have to do something about it. They can’t turn a blind eye when we stick it in their faces.’

  ‘But we have to tell someone. I mean, what about his family? Doesn’t he have any family?’

  ‘Does he? Shit, I don’t know. But if he had people out there he cared about, then he never mentioned them to me. Never told Jason. He wouldn’t have spent so fucking long here, would he, if he had someone to go back to?’ He stared at me, then sniffed and softened. ‘That’s why we’re all here. You, me. We have no one else, Alex. No one to come looking for us and disturb the peace. We got too many connections, we’re not allowed to stay, not since …’ He shook his head.

  ‘Not since Sully?’

  ‘Kurt doesn’t like outside influences.’

  I remembered Domino saying something like that to me before, and it made me think about my own situation. No brothers, no sisters, no parents. No friends to speak of. No one to give a shit. No one to come looking for me if I didn’t come back to England.

  ‘The people here, Alex, they were Matt’s family. Your family too, now. He had anyone else, he’d have gone to them a long time ago.’

  ‘It still doesn’t seem right,’ I said. ‘It feels like we should tell someone.’

  ‘Who would you tell? We have our own way of dealing with these things.’

  ‘This has happened before?’

  Michael looked down at the ground, pursing his lips in deep thought before looking me in the eye. ‘You know what would happen if they came up here, took a close look at the way we live?’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘You know what they do to people in this country when they catch them with drugs?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘They execute them, Alex. I heard about people getting put up against trees and shot without so much as a sniff of a judge. So what do you think’s going to happen when they come up here with their guns and they find a bunch of crazy foreigners? Drugs, dead body. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them thought it might be fun to have some hunting practice out in the woods.’

  ‘That wouldn’t happen.’

  ‘No? You think it wouldn’t?’

  I was about to reply, but Michael turned his back on me and continued moving towards the rear of the longhouse. ‘They’ll be waiting on us,’ he said. ‘We better get a move on. Show some respect for our friend.’

  I followed him to the back of the longhouse where there was a small outhouse with a crooked wooden door covering its entrance.

  Michael pulled back the door, the lower corner arcing in the groove worn in the hard dirt. He leaned into the gloom, half in and half out, taking something in his hand and passing it back to me.

  ‘Take this,’ he said, holding the cangkul out to me. A cross between a pickaxe and a shovel, I’d never seen anything like it at home. A smooth wooden shaft like a pickaxe handle, with a flattened blade fixed at a right angle at one end. I took hold of it and waited for him to pass out another.

  With one in each hand, I stepped away from the outhouse, allowing Michael to come out, he too with a cangkul in each hand. He closed the door with his foot, pushing it into place.

  ‘What about his neck?’ I said. ‘Did you see Matt’s neck? The bruises on his face?’

  ‘I didn’t see nothing.’

  ‘It looked like—’

  ‘Enough talking,’ Michael said. ‘We got digging to do.’

  I stayed where I was, undecided. We were going to bury a man without any contact with the authorities, and the notion of it was absurd to me. I came from a place where everything was steeped in law and formality, where our lives were governed and confined by every rule we had to obey. And yet here we were making our own laws, our own r
ules. It felt unnatural even if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  ‘So we’re gonna just bury him?’ I asked. ‘And that’s it? No doctors, no police? As if nothing has happened?’

  Michael came close to me, let me feel his size. ‘You think of anything better?’

  ‘What if he’s not dead?’ Even as I said it, the thought filled me with cold horror.

  ‘He’s dead,’ Michael said. ‘You saw him just like I did. There’s no way Matt’s alive. Anyway, Kurt’s a doctor.’

  ‘A kind of doctor,’ I said. ‘And no one seems to know what that means.’

  ‘We already talked about that, Alex. You ask too many questions. Maybe you’re not ready to be here with us.’ He walked past me, making it clear he didn’t want to talk any further, so I kept quiet and followed him out of the main clearing and along the path I’d taken last night.

  The sun was creeping higher and its rays were penetrating the canopy above us. I looked up, seeing the sky among the firs, no clouds to dampen the sun. I wished that I was away from the forest, that I was sitting where I had been with Domino when I first laid eyes on Danau Toba. I wanted to see the sun glittering on the surface of the water and I wanted to taste the breeze that skimmed its surface. Instead I was compelled to follow Michael, deeper into the trees, closer to the place of execution where I’d been last night. Closer to the place of burial.

  A couple of paces behind him, I watched as Michael trudged the path, both cangkuls in one hand, balanced over his shoulder. As always, he was without shirt. The muscles were tight in his back, bunched and sinewy, running the length of his torso and trailing into the top of his shorts. I wondered how long he’d been in this place, subject to the rules that I assumed to have been created by Kurt. He’d said the people here had no one to come looking for them, and it split my feelings between sadness and a sense of belonging. If what he said were true, then these people were just like me.

  25

  We came into the clearing where the execution stone lay cold, but Michael continued walking, back among the trees again, deeper into the forest. After a few minutes I saw people standing in a group, surrounding a patch of ground swept clean of leaves and pine needles. I could see where they had used their hands to tug foliage from the soil and throw it to one side to leave the ground exposed. They were standing around the bare patch in silence, apparently waiting for Michael and me to arrive.

  A little further away, Matt was lying dead. Kurt and Jason sat beside him.

  When we came closer, some of the people stepped aside to allow us through, and Kurt and Jason stood, coming over to meet us. They each took a cangkul from us and we moved apart far enough so as not to hamper the digging.

  Jason struck the ground first, and the rest of us followed. The soil was dense and moist, shot through with a nervous system of roots, some like shoelaces and others as thick as my forearms. The digging was hard work, the cangkuls struggling to cut through the thickest roots, but everybody took their turn. The sweat was heavy on my brow when Alban tapped me on the shoulder and took the cangkul from me. I nodded as I handed it over and stepped away to let the digging continue.

  I watched the hole become deeper and wider as each of us took a turn, and before long I found myself watching Domino hefting the tool over her shoulder and driving it into the soil. I saw the exertion on her face, the sweat forming in her hairline and the way her chest flushed with the effort. It reminded me of the day I had watched Helena cutting the tree.

  When Chris took the cangkul from her, Domino came to stand beside me, breathing hard. Her hand reached for mine, encircled it and squeezed. I looked at her, seeing her eyes ringed red. She forced a tight smile and nodded.

  By the time everybody had taken a turn at digging, the hole wasn’t deep enough, so we began stepping in once again, taking over from those who were tired. I found myself digging with Helena, both of us standing waist deep in the hole that was now only big enough for two. I listened to her breath and I remembered what I had seen last night. I tried to understand why my mind had played such a trick on me. It must’ve been because of what happened in the lake. If it hadn’t been for me, we might’ve already had one burial. Two bodies. I shuddered at the thought and found myself slowing in my digging, stealing glances at Helena until Alban stepped forward to relieve me of my duties.

  Standing with the others again, none of us speaking, I watched Helena dig until she, too, was relieved, this time by Kurt, who resumed with great fervour, as if he, as leader, needed to assert his strength and resolve.

  Helena climbed out of the hole and went to stand at the opposite side from me. For a moment our eyes met, and she held my gaze for a second longer than she needed to before she glanced at Domino and then looked away.

  In all, the digging must’ve taken two hours, and it surprised me how quickly I became used to the idea that Matt was dead. This burial process was a catharsis for the group. By being physically involved in what was happening, we each bore a part of it, and I understood, right then, that what we were doing was not wrong. A benign acceptance came over me and I began to feel calm, almost glad to be here. This was his family, and a family is entitled to bury its kin.

  My mind was only brought back into focus when I noticed a shape, maybe twenty yards further in among the trees. It was difficult to make out what it was, but it wasn’t natural. It wasn’t a tree or a plant, the shape was too regular. It looked as if it had been made by man. No more than two feet tall, solid, square, out of place.

  I leaned to one side, trying to see better, but whatever it was, it was partly obscured by the fronds of a fern. All I could see was hard-edged shapes in the forest. I could count at least three, but I had no idea what they were. A trick of the light, perhaps.

  ‘Enough,’ I heard Kurt say, bringing me out of my daydream, and I turned to watch him lay the cangkul aside and climb out of the hole. He dusted himself down, knocking the soil from his naked torso, then put out a hand and someone passed him his shirt. He pulled it over his back and buttoned it, looking around at us, saying, ‘It’s time.’

  Jason climbed down into the grave and took hold of his friend as Michael and Kurt lowered him in. He held Matt under the shoulders and put him in the bottom of the hole, deep enough for him to be out of sight from those of us encircling his final resting place.

  At my mother’s funeral, the men had worn dark suits, dark ties. The women had worn dark dresses. Some had worn hats. Old women holding handkerchiefs to their faces. People even brought black umbrellas, but there was no rain that day.

  When I looked around Matt’s grave, the picture was very different. A truer representation of what Matt had meant to the people who were here to put his body into the ground. Sarongs, flip-flops, batik and bare chests. Fifteen of us like that. Fifteen faces turned towards Matt’s grave. Fifteen people willing to participate in this ritual; the burial of someone they had lived with, slept with, eaten with. Fifteen people who considered themselves isolated enough to settle into this life without concern for that which they may have left behind them. Men and women who were barely even men and women.

  I cast my eyes around the motley collection of people who believed themselves alone enough to adopt this lifestyle. A common bond dragging them together, forming a surrogate family that meant they were no longer alone. I wondered how many of them had found what they were looking for and how many of them had simply stayed because it was easy. Or because they had been persuaded by Kurt that this was what they wanted. And, for that reason, I was not like them. I was here only for Domino.

  Jason climbed out from the grave and stood at the edge, looking down at his friend. He ran a hand across his short, untidy beard. The beard that tried to hide acne scars not more than a few years old. After a moment’s silence he took a deep breath and spoke, his eyes still lowered.

  ‘I … I don’t really know what to say. You all knew Matt. He was a good guy. Never did anything to hurt no one. Never said a bad thing. Liked to have a goo
d time. I suppose he could be a bit of a dick sometimes, you know, be a bit annoying, getting so bloody hyped up, running about like a lunatic, but … yeah, he was a good bloke. I’m gonna miss him …’ He stopped speaking and swallowed hard, fighting back his emotions. He looked at Kurt, who nodded, urging him to go on.

  ‘He was kind of like a brother to me,’ he said. ‘To us all, I know, but …’ He looked down again and sniffed hard. ‘He was like me. Brought me here. Found exactly the kind of place we were looking for. He told me he wanted to stay here for ever, chilling out, getting high, having a good time. He said …’ Jason’s voice became strained. He stopped speaking and we waited. I expected him to say something else, the way he’d finished, but he lapsed into a long silence, which was finally broken when Kurt stepped forward and handed a cangkul to Jason.

  Jason took it and shovelled the first heap of dirt onto Matt’s body. With nothing to protect him, the hard patter of soil fell on cloth and skin, like heavy rain on hardened ground. A prosaic and necessary end. It scattered across his stomach, fell into the spaces between his arms and his chest and, as with the digging, each of us took a turn at returning the soil to the hole we’d made. The ritual was coming to a close and we were hiding Matt beneath the trees. We were erasing him from the community, from this world, with only our memory of him to account for his existence. Once he was lying, dark and decomposing, becoming part of the forest, he would be gone, leaving nothing behind.

  We each stepped forward when it was our time, and we kept our solemnity as we took the cangkul and threw the soil. I tried not to look at him when I cast it over him, tried not to imagine him sitting up and dusting it off or suffocating underground with the musty scent in his nostrils and a silent scream in his clotted throat. I tried not to imagine the grit beneath his eyelids.