A New Kind of Dreaming

by Anthony Eaton

  It wasn’t necessary for the young cop to climb any further, however. With a sudden, sharp click, a beam of harsh bluish light sliced into the gloom. In the dark hold, the intensity of the light was blinding. Slowly and methodically it probed through the darkness ahead of them, moving inexorably in their direction. Eventually, inevitably, it crossed Cameron’s leg, the reflective panels on his running sneaker gleaming white in the beam.

  Slowly easing himself a little further into the hole, Robb lifted the beam until it shone directly into Cameron’s face. The boy shielded his eyes from the glare. Then the cop swung the beam across onto Jamie. Unlike Cameron, though, Jamie stared straight into the blinding spot, unable to make out anything, but keeping his stare firmly locked on the burning circle of light.

  For twenty or thirty seconds, all three froze. Then the light went out. It was like being plunged into the depths of a mine; the darkness was blinding. Bright spots danced across Jamie’s vision, and he briefly heard the girl’s voice echo somewhere in the back of his head, but he forced it out of his mind.

  ‘Sarge?’

  Constable Robb’s voice boomed in the stillness.

  ‘Yeah, what?’

  The tiniest of pauses.

  ‘There’s nothing in here except dust. Can I come out now?’

  Butcher grunted his assent and Robb scraped his way back to the hatch. They heard him climb down the side, have a muffled conversation with Butcher somewhere towards the stern, and then a minute or two later the four-wheel drive roared into life and faded away down the beach towards town.

  twelve

  ‘Careful.’

  ‘Damn!’

  Jamie’s knee throbbed as he eased himself slowly onto the sand alongside the boat.

  ‘How’s your knee?’

  ‘Sore. I’ll get back, though.’

  ‘Let me know if you want to take a break.’

  ‘Yeah. Let’s get movin’, eh?’

  The two trudged along the beach. They’d stayed in the bottom of the boat, still and silent, for about twenty minutes after the four-wheel drive had departed. Eventually Cameron had climbed out, checking that they were alone again. Getting Jamie back down onto the sand with an injured knee had been tricky, but after some lifting and a fair bit of swearing they’d managed it. Neither spoke until they were well clear of the wreck, a few hundred metres back towards town.

  ‘What do you reckon that was all about?’

  ‘No idea. They were looking for something, that’s for sure.’

  ‘They were lookin’ for me.’

  Cameron nodded. ‘That’s the way I saw it.’

  ‘So why didn’t Robb turn us in, then?’

  ‘Don’t know. It’s difficult to say with Robb. I think it’s mainly Butcher who’s after you.’

  ‘So what’s Robb’s game?’

  ‘It’s hard to guess. He’s been here a couple of years now, but nobody knows too much about him. He tends to keep to himself.’

  ‘All the time?’

  ‘Pretty much. I heard a rumour that he had some relatives in town, but no one ever sees him down at the pub, or out with people, so it’s probably just talk. There was a fair bit of gossip about him when he first arrived.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘He was brought in to replace McPherson. The other cop. You met him yet?’

  ‘Once.’ Jamie recalled the drunk staggering up the road on his first morning in Port Barren.

  ‘Yeah, well there’s some real problems with him. He used to be a pretty good bloke, but then a few years ago he started goin’ on binges. Drinking himself stupid for anything up to a week at a time. Didn’t used to do it too often, but in the last year or so he’s been getting worse and worse. He still does the odd shift, when he’s sober, but a lot of the time he’s not much use to anyone. They can’t move him, ’cause there’s nowhere else will take a drunk copper, and in any case, for some reason Butcher won’t let him leave, so they’re pretty much just waiting for him to drink himself to death. That’s why Robb got posted here – early replacement. He seems to be a pretty straight character by all accounts.’

  Jamie shrugged. He remembered that night outside the admin building. He was certain that Robb had known that he was there, standing in the darkened street. He considered telling Cameron about the incident, but decided not to. Instead, he changed the subject.

  ‘You reckon there’s somethin’ special about that boat?’

  ‘Special?’ Cameron threw him a funny look.

  ‘Yeah. Why would Butcher care that I’d been out there? Jamie suddenly remembered something. ‘What was that story you were gonna tell me?’

  ‘Story?’

  ‘Back before Butcher arrived – on the boat. You were starting to tell me somethin’ – why you wouldn’t normally hang around out there.’

  ‘Oh yeah, that.’

  ‘So?’

  Cameron gave a kind of awkward shuffle, avoiding eye contact.

  ‘Like I told you, it’s nothing major, only a kid’s story.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘That boat. There’s a bit of history attached to it.’

  ‘History?’

  ‘Yeah. Stuff that happened ages ago. Some of the kids round town are a bit superstitious. You know how it is.’

  ‘Superstitious?’

  ‘Ghosts. That sort of rubbish.’

  ‘You sayin’ it’s haunted?’

  ‘Not haunted exactly, just’ – Cameron paused, looking for the right word – ‘bad. A bad place to hang out.’

  ‘How come? What happened?’

  Only the crunch of Cameron’s shoes on the red sand broke the silence. Jamie limped along next to him, waiting for an answer.

  ‘You know what that boat was?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Does it look familiar to you?’

  ‘The boat?’ Jamie tried to imagine where he might have seen it before.

  ‘Not that exact boat obviously, but that type of thing.’ Jamie answered with a blank look.

  ‘The shape . . .’ Cameron tried again. ‘Does it remind you of anything?’

  There was something recognisable about the old hulk, Jamie thought. He’d felt that the first night he’d seen it, even in the dark, but he couldn’t pin down what it was.

  ‘Perhaps . . .’

  ‘Think about the news.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘On tele.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘All the time. You’d see one every couple of months at least.’

  Jamie finally realised.

  ‘Reffos?’

  ‘Yeah. It was a refugee boat.’

  ‘I thought they burned them.’

  ‘Not always. Usually they burn them to punish the skippers, but in this case it didn’t matter.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘The skipper was dead.’

  Jamie absorbed this.

  ‘What’s that got to do with Butcher and Robb?’

  Cameron stopped, a serious expression on his face.

  ‘Listen, if I tell you about this you can’t mention it to anyone, okay?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Just give us your word that you won’t mention it. At all. There’s people in town won’t appreciate you knowing this story.’

  ‘Fine, whatever.’

  ‘No, not whatever, I’m dead serious. You won’t mention this. Not to Lorraine, not to Archie, not to anyone.’

  ‘Okay, I told you, you’ve got my word.’

  Cameron stared long and hard at Jamie before speaking. As he began talking they started to move again. Very slowly.

  ‘When I first arrived, there were more kids in Port Barren than nowadays. That’s the way things
tend to go around here – sometimes the town is packed, sometimes it’s virtually empty. This was four years ago – I was thirteen, and we all used to hang out down at the jetty in the afternoons. You know the one?’

  Jamie nodded.

  ‘Most of the time we’d just be sitting around talking, or kicking a footy or something, pretty harmless stuff. There were a few older kids, probably about the same age as we are now, but they seemed like adults then.’

  A slight breeze drifted across from the desert, sending ruffles skidding across the surface of the flat sea.

  ‘One afternoon there were about eight or nine of us at the jetty, and this year-eleven guy, Jess, was telling us about a haunted boat he said was parked up the beach. Really talking it up, he was. Reckoned they’d found it all shot up a few years earlier, and that there’d been bodies all over it, and blood soaked into everything. We all thought he was trying to get a reaction out of the younger kids, so we played along with him.’

  Jamie threw a sideways glance, but Cameron was lost in the memory of that afternoon.

  ‘It was really hot, but we couldn’t go in the water because of the stingers, and everyone was pretty bored. No one had the energy to kick the footy, so when someone suggested that we all go and check out this haunted boat, it seemed like a good idea. You know, something to do. A couple of the little kids refused to come. Jess had put the wind up them really badly, but there were still five or six of us prepared to have a look.’

  A flurry of dust, caught up by the breeze, whipped across the beach, stinging Jamie’s bare legs.

  ‘I can’t remember how long it took us to walk there. Must have been only fifteen or twenty minutes, same as now, but it seemed a lot longer. All the way, Jess was telling us these stories about the boat.’

  ‘How did he know them?’

  ‘He reckoned he’d overheard his dad talking to his mates about it when they were drunk. Said that a few blokes from the town had found it a couple of years earlier, on a fishing trip. Drifting and all shot up, full of bodies. They’d towed it back and then there’d been all sorts of goings on. But I’ll get to that.’

  ‘What happened when you got out there?’

  ‘By the time we reached it, everyone was pretty spooked. We’d been working ourselves up, and Jess had done a pretty good job of convincing us that the thing would be soaked in blood and covered in bullet holes. It was a bit of a let-down to find out that it wasn’t.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘A couple of kids started making jokes at Jess for talking it up so much. So he dared one of them to go on board.’

  ‘Did they?’

  ‘Yeah, one did.’ Cameron paused. His brow furrowed in an effort of memory. ‘A red-headed kid, Andrew his name was. He was a total nutter most of the time, real fiery and always up for a fight. I heard somewhere that he had problems at home. Must have been fourteen or fifteen then. He fronted up to Jess, said he didn’t believe a word of it, then turned and walked over to the boat.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘We were all pretty nervous. None of us thought he’d actually do it – go on board, I mean. He walked around the back of the boat, and everyone was waiting for him to chicken out. One of the girls was so scared she was crying. But a minute or so later, Andrew appeared up on the deck, grinning like an idiot, and taking the mick out of Jess even more than before.’

  Cameron stopped. Jamie waited for a few seconds, giving him time to continue, but Cameron remained quiet, too caught up in remembering the story to keep telling it. In the end Jamie prompted him.

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Sorry – no. What happened next was what freaked us all out.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We were all relaxing a bit and laughing at Jess when someone grabbed Andrew.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘From behind. This figure rose up and grabbed him while he was standing on the deck making fun of Jess.’

  ‘Shit! Was he all right?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. He was fine, but it was late afternoon, and the sun was behind them, so all we could see from the beach was this dark shape grab him and drag him backwards onto the deck. Turned out to be McPherson, but we didn’t realise that at the time. All of us just went nuts; a couple of the younger ones burst into tears, one of the girls screamed, and the whole lot of us, including Jess, bolted for town.’

  ‘What about Andrew?’

  Cameron looked embarrassed.

  ‘We left him there. We were all uptight and nobody even stopped to think. Everyone just ran.’

  ‘What happened to him, then?’

  ‘He turned up at school the next day with a black eye. He was pretty shitty at all of us for taking off. His old man was furious and tried to get McPherson kicked off the force, but Butcher pulled some strings and put a stop to that. In the end the family packed up and left town. I guess he ended up in the city somewhere.’

  Jamie turned the story over in his head. It was strange, but not strange enough to explain Butcher and Robb’s behaviour that afternoon.

  ‘So just because some drunk cop hit a kid there, everyone thinks it’s haunted?’

  ‘No. That’s just part of it. That’s why all the kids stay away from the place. It’s become a kind of local myth.’

  ‘So what’s the rest of it.’

  Cameron stopped again. As he looked at Jamie, a rare cloud drifted across the sun, briefly taking the glare out of the afternoon, making everything seem curiously undefined. ‘This is the bit you can’t talk about.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know the first part? The bit about the fishing trip?’

  ‘The young blokes finding the boat drifting?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Well, it’s true. My old man told me about it. After he heard what happened to Andrew, he told me the story as a warning not to go back out there, or to bring it up around school. He said it was a pretty sensitive issue.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘’Cause the bloke who found the boat and towed it back to town, six years ago, was Port Barren’s young new police sergeant, Elliot Butcher.’

  thirteen

  ‘You’re kiddin’!’

  ‘No joke. Dad filled me in on what he’d heard around the place, which wasn’t a lot but enough to know that a couple of years earlier there’d been some pretty strange events surrounding that boat. We were still new to the town and the last thing he wanted was me making us unpopular by sticking my nose into the town cop’s dirty history. That was why he warned me about it.’

  ‘What’s the whole story, then?’

  ‘I don’t know all of it.’

  ‘Tell me what you do know.’

  Cameron paused, gathering his thoughts again. They’d arrived back at the edge of the townsite, but neither made any attempt to climb up the rocks to the carpark. Instead, they walked in silence to the jetty, the same one that the kids from the town had hung around four years earlier. Once seated in the slatted shade, Cameron continued.

  ‘They reckon it was a refugee boat that was attacked by pirates. You know the type you hear about on the news occasionally? They use machine guns and fast inflatables and attack just about anything that floats, usually in the South China Sea, or the Straits of Malacca, but sometimes a lot closer to Australia.’

  ‘Why would they attack a reffo boat?’

  Cameron shrugged.

  ‘They just take whatever they can get. Most of the people on these boats are carrying everything they own with them, so there’s probably some family treasures and those sort of things which would be worth a few dollars. Either way, they reckon that’s what happened on our boat. Pirates came aboard, machine-gunned everyone, blew up the engines, radios and steering, and took whatever they could find.�
��

  ‘They killed everyone?’

  ‘Almost. The fishing cruiser that found the boat was probably one of those anchored out there.’ Cameron gestured at the few pleasure craft floating off the beach on their moorings. ‘There were a few young blokes on board, including the two new town cops – Butcher and McPherson. Our drunk mate. They were the two that went on board and found the bodies.’

  ‘Shit! What did they do?’

  ‘As far as Dad knows, they organised a rope and towed the boat back to Port Barren. Butcher was the youngest sergeant in the police force at the time, and he probably thought that bringing the boat back would be good for his career. Turned out to be pretty much the end of it, though.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘They didn’t check the boat properly. There was a survivor – a young girl, nine or ten years old. They found her when they got the boat back here. She didn’t speak any English and she was in a pretty bad way. Instead of being impressed, the immigration authorities were furious. They launched a full investigation – that’s another reason why they didn’t burn the boat; they wanted to have it checked over thoroughly, and they tried to have Butcher charged with neglect for not calling them in immediately. Said they’d have him charged with bringing an illegal immigrant into the country if she lived, and that they’d press for manslaughter if she died. Either way, Butcher was in the shit.’

  ‘Looks like he managed to get out of it though.’

  Cameron threw him a look.

  ‘That’s where the whole story gets really strange.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The girl needed a lot of attention. She was just about dead, and half out of her mind. No one was sure where she was from, and nobody understood her language. She was put in the nursing station, and the flying doctor was called to bring an interpreter up and to take her back to hospital in the city. An hour or so out of Perth they had engine trouble and had to turn back. It was the following morning by the time they arrived here.’

  ‘Then what happened.’

  ‘Nothing. The girl was gone.’

  ‘Gone?’