Dark Horizons

by Dan Smith

  ‘What does it matter?’ said Michael, his words clear to me now. ‘He’s not one of us. He never was. Right from the start I didn’t trust him. Let’s just kill him and go.’ One bloodied hand held the parang loose by his side; the other seemed to be controlling Helena, who had recovered from her fall.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Helena said, looking in my direction. She wore a frantic expression as she pulled against Michael’s grip. Or perhaps she was holding him back, stopping him from coming to me.

  ‘He’s seen too much,’ said Michael.

  ‘He can’t stay with us,’ Kurt added.

  Domino put her hand on my head, touching it to the spot where Michael had hit me. It felt wet and when she took her fingers away, they were tipped with blood. ‘He’s bleeding.’

  ‘I can make him bleed some more.’ Michael pushed Helena out of his way and stepped forwards. Kurt took her arm, held her tight.

  ‘No.’ She struggled.

  ‘No.’ ‘No one’s going to touch him.’ Domino stood and faced Kurt. ‘He came for me. Got me out of that place down there, which was more than you managed.’

  ‘I was working on it.’

  ‘And I like him.’

  ‘Well, you can’t keep him, D.’

  ‘He’s not a dog,’ said Helena.

  ‘He might as well be,’ Michael told her.

  Then they fell silent, each of them watching me, and I tried again to get to my feet. By wedging my back against the rock and using my legs to push backwards, I was able to shuffle into a crouching position. From there, it was much easier for me to achieve my goal. I turned, put both hands on the rock and pulled myself to a stand. I took a deep breath and faced them all.

  ‘Just leave me.’ The world swam around me. ‘Leave me here. You go. I’ll be fine. I won’t tell … I don’t even know where you’re going. What can I do? Please. Leave me here.’ I was struggling to think, could hardly speak, my breath coming in halting rasps. If they left me here, I might die alone – but rather that than Michael use his blade.

  I looked over at Kurt, seeing double, trying to focus on both of him. Domino standing close to him, Helena wrestling his grip.

  ‘Domino, Helena, you don’t have to watch this.’ He nodded at Michael, who pushed me back against the rock and raised his machete. Inhuman with his naked torso and his bloodied skin.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ said Helena, breaking away from Kurt. She rushed to stand between Michael and me. ‘Leave him alone.’

  ‘Helena.’ Michael dropped the blade a touch. ‘Move.’

  ‘Help him,’ Helena said to Michael, putting her hand on him. ‘Please.’

  He looked down at her hand, the first real sign of affection I’d ever seen her show him. It seemed to calm his madness, bring sanity to his expression. He relaxed under her touch, looked into her eyes.

  ‘Please,’ she said again, putting her other hand on his face. ‘I’ll do whatever you want. I promise.’

  He watched her, lowering the parang.

  ‘Anything,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll come with me?’ His words considered. Deliberate. Slow.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wherever I go?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Michael glanced across at his leader, who was standing with his sister.

  ‘Please,’ Domino said to her brother. ‘I owe him this much.’

  Kurt stared past her, his eyes on me, clenching his teeth, the muscles working in his jaw. ‘All right. All right, we’ll leave him.’

  ‘We should take him somewhere.’ Helena still held Michael’s gaze, keeping him calm. ‘He might die out here.’

  ‘Then he’ll have to take his chances,’ said Kurt. ‘Don’t push your luck.’

  Domino came to me and squatted at my side. She looked at me with sadness and leaned forward to kiss my head. ‘It’s the best I can do.’ Then she stood and went to be with her brother.

  ‘Forget about him,’ Kurt told his sister. ‘He’s not one of us.’

  Michael took one last look at me, shook his head as if I were a sick animal in need of mercy killing. Then he turned his back and walked away, pulling Helena with him.

  Drained of energy and life, I watched them leave, the four of them. The last of them. They crossed the clearing where so much had happened, left the stone that had seen blood, and met the mouth of the path at the edge of the clearing. Kurt was the first to disappear from view, then Domino, Helena and Michael.

  ‘Wait.’ Helena’s voice, then she was re-emerging from the trees. She ran across the clearing and crouched beside me, taking my hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, speaking in a hurry. ‘We should’ve gone. After that night on Samosir, I shouldn’t have come back. We should’ve left.’

  Behind us, Michael called for her. His fury was rising.

  ‘As soon as I see a chance, I’ll leave him.’ A tear fell from her right eye. It trailed the length of her nose like a heavy raindrop and settled on her upper lip.

  Michael was out of the trees and coming across the clearing. Walking fast, swinging the parang in his right hand.

  ‘Kurt’s wrong,’ I said.

  ‘About what?’

  Closer now. Michael’s face set hard and grim, his fingers tight around the wooden handle.

  ‘Saying we don’t have anyone to come looking for us. You have me. I’ll find you.’

  Helena bit her lip, her eyes glistening. ‘How?’

  Michael’s heavy footsteps pounding the soil. Close.

  ‘Just remember Our Toba,’ I said. ‘You can remember that.’

  ‘Our Toba? Like that night? I don’t understand—’

  ‘Just search for it. Our Toba.’

  Now Michael was behind her, the tall savage in his dark paradise. ‘We have to go. Now.’ He leaned down and grabbed her arm, pointing his parang at my throat, daring me to stop him.

  Helena reached out and touched the fingers of my right hand. ‘Our Toba,’ she whispered as Michael pulled her up. ‘Our Toba.’

  And then our connection was broken. And Michael was dragging her away, taking her out of my life.

  48

  I don’t know how long I stayed there, delirious by that rock, thoughts swimming like wraiths in my broken mind. Terror spinning and wheeling. The fear of dying in that lonely place. Images of death ploughed through my thoughts like the bus that had brought me to these dark horizons. I saw Domino, a vision of deceitful beauty with her golden hair and easy nature and malign intent. In my confused and demented dreams she stood over the body of the man she had killed, side by side with Michael, upright and lithe, his heavy-bladed machete in hand, blood decorating his skin, shining in the light of fire. But now they were not in the forest, they were under the glow of the hospital lights and they were surrounded by the dead and the dying, the awful moans and the stink of fresh blood. And then I saw the woman’s eyes. The old woman who had spilled her life onto the road in front of me. The woman who had so needed that final human touch.

  I was not going to die. Not here. I would not die in this place. Somehow I forced all thought but that from my mind. I willed my eyes open and I refused to succumb to the enticement of sleep. And with the evanescence of those horrors, I focused on reality. I concentrated, and I summoned the strength to move.

  Using the rock that was to have been my execution block, I stumbled to my feet and tested my strength. I put one foot before the other and I took the path back to the main clearing, seeing nothing around me, thinking only of making my body work for me, forcing it to take me where I needed to go. One step at a time. And there was only one place I could go; only one person to whom I could turn for help. Richard.

  I remember little of my long and laboured journey down the hillside and out of the forest. It was the last time I would be among those trees, see that view of the lake, but I don’t remember it. Perhaps it was better that way.

  I found strength I didn’t realise I had, and I made my way to Richard’s place where Hidayat treated me well,
kept me hidden long enough for me to recover from my injuries. I told them both what had happened, and at night I sometimes heard them talking to one another, their tone one of concern. But Danuri’s disappearance from the world and the horrors of the community didn’t touch us again. The only thing that connected any of us to that place and what had happened up there was Richard’s friend – the one who had organised Domino’s release – and I suspected that was why nothing came of it. Korupsi had worked in our favour.

  I don’t know if anybody found Danuri’s body or the graves in the forest. No one came looking for him. He was no different from any of the others who had died there.

  49

  I stayed with Richard and Hidayat for just over two weeks, and as soon as I was well enough, I left Lake Toba. I had come away looking for something that I hadn’t found. And now I saw the terrible irony of that place in the trees. It was only when I was away from it, as I had been on Samosir, and for those few moments I spent alone with Helena, that I was ever really myself. That was what Domino and her community had taught me. It had shown me not who I was, but who I was not.

  When my bruises were faded and the burns close to my eye had hardened, Richard took me across the lake one last time. ‘You’ll have some good scars,’ he said as I stepped off his boat. ‘A few stories to tell.’ Around us the world lived. The noise of children in the water, of boats and trucks. The sounds and the smells of the market were just as they had been before.

  ‘Who’d ever believe it?’ I asked. ‘And who would I tell?’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to stay longer? Last chance.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘And you’re not ready to go home?’

  ‘There’s nothing for me to go back to.’ We had discussed it already, Richard and Hidayat sitting together, me feeling embarrassed and grateful for their concern. ‘Anyway, I still want to see the things I came for. And I need to see if I can find Helena.’

  ‘You really think you’ll be able to?’

  ‘There might be a way.’ I was clinging to the faint hope that Helena was still here somewhere, that I would somehow be able to contact her.

  ‘Well, I hope it works.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I stared over at the market and I remembered the many stalls. ‘Wait here,’ I said. ‘A couple of minutes.’

  ‘OK.’

  I jumped onto the jetty and jogged along it, dodging the children who were using it as a diving board. I went across the road to the market and found the stall I was looking for.

  When I came back, Richard was sitting in his boat, smoking a cigarette. A man was trying to sell him an ornamental knife with a brass handle but Richard waved him away.

  He stood and I gave him a package wrapped in brown paper. ‘For Hidayat. It’s not much but …’ I shrugged.

  Richard felt the weight of the package. ‘What is it? You didn’t need to buy anything.’

  ‘It’s the least I could do. And tell him I’m sorry about his ulos. Kurt put it on the fire.’

  Richard looked at the package. ‘That’s what this is? A replacement?’

  ‘Not so much a replacement,’ I said. ‘I know they mean something. Symbolic.’

  Richard smiled. ‘This one will, too.’

  From Parapat I took a bus to Brastagi, where I found an internet café and created the means for me to reach out to Helena. My actions were born from hope rather than expectation, but I’d thought about it while I was recovering, wondering how I could find her, repeating the words Our Toba over and over in my mind. I heard them now not as I had said them the night of the storm, but as I had heard them from my own mouth that day by the execution stone. As if they were spoken by someone else, slow and laboured, a fragment of an idea behind them, and there was only one way I could think of using those words to find Helena.

  I remembered Helena said that when she needed to lose herself she had gone to a café on the corner, looked through websites, and I thought she might do that again. So I signed up for a free site and started putting something together. Something basic with a few photographs of Toba I stole from other sites to decorate my own. Seeing them reminded me I had no record of my time there. Nothing at all to show for my experience. When I arrived, everything was taken from me, and when I left, I had nothing. ‘You’re never free to do what you want until you’ve lost everything you got,’ I had said to Domino, but what I really wanted now was to be myself. And to find Helena.

  While I waited for her contact, I saw the sights, met other travellers like me, climbed the volcano Sibayak and saw the crater. I went to Bukit Lawang, saw the orang-utans, the feeding stations. I stayed in a jungle hut for several days, experiencing the rainforest, soaking it into my pores, but everything felt empty. I wouldn’t be comfortable until I knew what had happened to Helena, and out there I was too far away from civilisation. If she tried to contact me, I wouldn’t know.

  So I went to Medan, dirty and crowded though it was, and I checked my site at the earliest opportunity.

  Among the photos on the screen there were short notes I’d written, hoping that Helena would see them. Details of my travels around Sumatra and where I would go once I moved on to Bali.

  I scrolled down and saw the message.

  ‘We should have gone that night, Alex. After the storm. We should have left it all behind.’

  Three sentences. Seventeen words that meant nothing to anyone but me. There were other messages above and below it, some even referring to ‘Alex’ and ‘that night’; messages from travellers who’d stumbled across the website without knowing what it was or what it meant. Travellers, backpackers, hippies, wistful tourists. People whom Kurt would despise. People who’d been there, said it was part of them, too. I’d made it easy for anyone to leave a message, so I’d attracted those who felt the need to leave their mark. Individuals looking for a sense of belonging, wanting to share their Toba. Something larger had grown from the tiny seed I planted there in the ether, but those seventeen words were the only ones that meant anything, and I knew they were from her. No one else could have written them.

  ‘We should have gone that night, Alex. After the storm. We should have left them all behind.’

  I stared at the words and wondered why Helena hadn’t told me where she was or given me any way to find her. Perhaps the message was incomplete. Perhaps something, or someone, had stopped her. I replied and for a day or two I waited for another message, but none came and I imagined Michael looking over her shoulder, watching everything she did. Controlling.

  Helena might have typed the words from across the world, but there was a chance she might still be in Indonesia, so I decided to stay close, for a while longer at least, and continue as I’d originally planned. I took a plane to Bali, spent a few days in Kuta, the place where Michael and Sully had first met Helena. It was a world away from the quiet isolation of the community in Toba. It was noisy and crowded, an assault on the senses. I only stayed as long as I did because I knew it was a place that Michael favoured and I half hoped that he might go back, that I might see Helena there. But I found no sign of her.

  Moving on, I made Ubud my base, among the rice paddies of Bali’s central foothills. I visited Kintamani volcano and Pura Besakih – places both beautiful and worthy, but unable to fill the void inside me. I began to think I would never find what I was looking for, that what I wanted was lost on the slopes of Danau Toba.

  And then I saw her again.

  50

  Sitting in a losmen in Ubud, I turned away from the computer screen while waiting for it to start up and I stared through the dirty window. Outside, people passed on the road. There were more than usual and I watched them for a while, the different faces passing, young people meeting and talking. I didn’t notice the lack of smiles, the uneasy tension in their body language. I was watching them, but I wasn’t seeing them.

  Inside, amid the smell of a thousand travellers who had passed through this place, sat on this chair, put their fingers on this keyboard, I
ignored the babble, tuned out the conversations of others. I drew inwards, shutting out the noise, and turned back to the monitor as I browsed to my site expecting to see only what I saw every time I looked at it. It had been weeks, eleven at least, since Helena and I had parted but still there was nothing from her since that first message.

  As I expected, the site was barren of anything useful. I sighed at the screen and clenched my teeth, hoping she was all right, that she hadn’t given them any reason to hurt her. I counted those seventeen words, read them and reread them, wishing there was something more I could do, knowing I’d look at them again that day.

  ‘… bomb …’ I heard the word from behind me and I glanced up, beginning to wonder at the unusual activity. There were five other computers and people were grouped around them, pointing at the screens, putting hands to mouths, shaking their heads. At the table beside me, a couple were staring at their monitor, the girl with tears in her eyes. I watched her for a moment, then turned to scan the room, seeing others in a similar state. Shock. Despair. And I kept hearing that word.

  Bomb.

  I went back to my own screen, closed the page so that my website dissolved and was replaced with the homepage. And in the centre of the screen, beside a small photograph, was the headline for a news item. ‘Bali Terror Attack.’

  I clicked the link and there, staring out from my computer was an image that stole my breath.

  It was her. Unmistakeable. Helena was looking out at me from my computer screen.

  With a trembling hand, I clicked the article and filled the screen with her image.

  She was standing between two people I didn’t recognise. To her left, a woman, and to her right, a man. The man, his pale trousers streaked with dirt and his shirt ripped open to his waist, appeared to be supporting most of her weight. He had one arm around her shoulder, the other across her waist as she struggled to stay on her feet. The woman, dark hair cut short, white shirt smeared red, was also helping to keep her upright. She was holding her hands, their fingers intertwined, searching for comfort. Needing human contact.