THE DEVIL IN THE RED DIRT: DIVIDED IN LIFE. UNIFIED IN MURDER

by Michael Smith

  Harris felt Lescott’s hand on his collar. He kicked. He screamed. He begged to be left behind, where he might ask for forgiveness. Lescott was in a rush. Their journey was only entering its adolescence.

  A door slammed behind Harris and any prospect of a swift return was vanquished. He gingerly lifted himself to his feet and turned to scold Lescott. But which one?

  As he turned, he was met by the sight of two of the blasted men. One standing by his side, the other sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room. The man by his side was catastrophically despondent at the sight of himself sitting in the corner of the room, catastrophically despondent.

  The man in the armchair was a man possessed by the very spirit of misery. He had in his hand a bottle of unidentifiable alcohol. From where Harris stood, he could smell it. It was strong. It would have been better suited to cleaning rust from truck engines than it was to lubricating Lescott’s weakening insides. Lescott raised the bottle and he drank and drank and he drank. Breathless consumption that should have emptied the bottle several times over. But the bottle simply would not empty. As he poured from a seemingly endless supply, it gushed down his mouth, soaked his clothes and began to pool on the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Harris asked and turned to his guide at his side when the man in the chair refused to stop long enough to answer.

  “Have you not eyes to see?” Lescott answered the question with a question.

  “I don’t understand.” Harris looked down at the booze that was fast filling the room.

  “He is drowning the thing that ails him. He is ridding himself of the thing that brings him nothing but misery.”

  “What’s that?” The liquid was at Harris’ neck, he turned to see his guide was almost completely submerged.

  “Myself.” Lescott’s answer was lost as the rising levels of booze engulfed his face and nose. Harris attempted to tread water for a moment, but it was a lost cause. The room became entirely flooded.

  When the waters subsided, Harris was no longer in that dreaded room. He hit the polished floor of a bank foyer in a heap. It was one of the older banks in Australia, by the looks of it. It was grand. Booze-sodden marble covered the floor. Old paintings hung from the walls, each and every one of them championing a man important in the bank’s history. They dated back to the eighteenth century. Yet the face of the man never changed. A black-eyed, bushy-eyebrowed man with a wispy moustache.

  Money began to rain from the ceiling, some notes but many coins, and as they landed on Harris they hurt. Harris took refuge under a nearby desk and watched as Detective Chief Inspector Alan Livingstone entered through the antique oak doors that led out to the world. Livingstone was not alone, he dragged a flailing man by his ankles as he crossed the floor. Work made easy by the flood that had not yet drained away. When he reached a counter, he was greeted by a bank teller who offered him a wide sycophantic smile, at least that’s how it looked. It’s hard to tell if a person is smiling when the organic matter has been stripped from their face and their skull has been left bare.

  “I’m here to make a deposit. And a withdrawal,” Livingstone proclaimed, as he struggled with the man.

  The teller handed his customer a truncheon of solid gold, and Livingstone raised it high over his head before bringing it crashing back down upon the man. Over and over until the man was dead and the gold weapon was drenched in blood.

  Under the desk, on the other side of the room, Harris watched as Livingstone hauled the man onto the counter. As he did, the deathly bank worker neatly stacked bars of gold bullion next to him, each of them dripping with blood. The blood poured down the counter and across the floor. Harris scurried backwards away from the blood, one desperate movement at a time until the marble floor beneath him ran out.

  The cool feel of marble under his flesh was no longer, instead now his hands slid over golden sands. Not the red sands of Australia’s central desert. This was something altogether more worrying: this was the blood-soaked dust bowl Harris had barely survived as a young man, all those years ago.

  Troops hastened across the sand. Young boys, some of them too young to even grow a beard, hastened across the sand as bullets whistled through the air and ripped through flesh. Mortar shells flew overhead and came down in almighty explosions that sent sand and bone scattering. The oppressive heat from a roaring sun in a clear blue sky beat down upon the poor boys. The moment their skin could even think of releasing sweat to cool them off, it evaporated. This was the theatre of war, where no role was any more significant than a walk-on. Where too many characters would be swiftly killed off without so much as a second’s consideration from the heartless writers, sitting in comfort thousands of miles away.

  When Harris saw the line of troop carriers approaching from the distance, he closed his eyes. “I don’t need to see this.”

  By his side, Lescott placed a hand on his shoulder. “How can we even start to write our future when we cannot acknowledge our past?”

  “I’ve lived this once. I don’t need to do it again?” Harris growled at his guide. It was no use; a mortar shell landed nearby and created a wall of sand and blood between them. Harris looked over at the troop carriers as they came to a stop. Several unlucky boys never even made it out the back of the vehicle as they were blown to smithereens. Harris didn’t mourn them long as he watched his younger form hop onto the sand. The poor boy raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun and was cut down at once.

  The lad crawled amongst bodies and shrapnel as he wheezed and gasped to refill his airless lungs. As he crawled and rolled down the dune in a desperate bid for escape, he left an indelible blood stain on the sands. Harris moved to comfort his younger self, but his feet sank into the sand. The harder he fought, the deeper he sank until he was gone. The last thing he saw before he plunged beneath the ground was his young, innocent self. A boy who was quite lost and completely alone. He would remain so for the rest of his life.

  As Harris fell downwards in direction, he moved backwards in time. To a place from before Australia, before the war. To church. To many, the church is the safest of spaces. A place for contemplation, for the cleansing of the soul, and for community. Not for James Harris, not since before he could remember. To him it was a place of torment, a place of cruelty, of exploitation. A familiar face met Harris there. A face from his early years that he never wished to see again. A face that had haunted his dreams for three decades. That of a priest. A man charged with his safety.

  The priest descended from the pulpit and began a slow walk through the pews, slowly but surely, he walked over to Harris and Lescott. Harris stumbled backwards and dragged himself away from the oncoming priest. As the priest moved closer, he reached out to touch Harris. Harris could smell the man’s scent, an all-too familiar experience that sickened him to his very core. Harris closed his eyes and hoped to God that the earth would swallow him whole and let him escape the predator who had preyed on him as a young defenceless boy.

  It did.

  As he closed his eyes, he saw all the people who had paid the price for the cruelty that had befallen him as a boy, as a young man. The street fights in which he spilled blood and forged his reputation. The bar brawls he had enjoyed to soothe the anger and bitterness eroding his soul bit by bit. The beatings he had doled out to those who would not, or simply could not, pay whatever sum his employer had arbitrarily decided he was owed. He remembered it all. And so, he opened his eyes.

  What met him was his own reflection. He was in what you’d call a dark room, only there were no walls, no floor and no ceiling. There was just Harris and a sink with a mirror hanging above, hanging on nothing at all. The tap dripped, dripped, dripped. As it hit the porcelain, it echoed with unnatural volume and duration. Every single drip rattled his very bones.

  Harris looked into the mirror and saw tired eyes, a pallid face, track-marked arms and knuckles with scars forming over scars. It was a picture of external hardness that belied the vulnerable young boy who still lay wi
thin him, no matter how hard he fought to kill him off.

  Behind him, Lescott stood. His angst to move forward had extinguished. They were nearing the end of a harrowing journey. Sometimes it’s best to keep going, when it’s Hell you’re going through. Other times, as horrible a moment as you find yourself in, it’s best to linger for a while. There is always a deeper circle of torment awaiting you. Lescott sighed.

  “What?” Harris asked.

  “If we are ever to leave this place, I need to ask you a difficult question,” Lescott paused. “One you’ve probably avoided asking yourself.”

  “If it gets me out of here, ask away.” Harris didn’t know just what it was he was going through, but he knew he’d had quite enough of it.

  “Look at yourself in the mirror and tell me… Can you go on…? Can you live with what you have become?”

  Harris looked at himself and ran the question around in his head. There was no easy or fast truthful answer to that question. So, he didn’t ask it of himself. He allowed his mouth to speak the lie his body had been living for decades. “Yes.” Harris looked beyond his shoulder at Lescott. “Is that the right answer?”

  “No.” Lescott smiled sympathetically at Harris. “But yes, you can leave.”

  Harris looked around, it wasn’t clear just how he was supposed to leave. There was nothing in that space, even Lescott’s shadowy form had dissolved into the blackness, leaving Harris alone with nothing but the mirror and incessant dripping of the broken tap.

  The face in the mirror had changed the moment Harris had answered his guide’s question. Where seconds earlier, a truthful reflection of Harris had moved as he did, something else entirely now moved, entirely of its own accord. It was scornful. It mocked him mercilessly. Harris watched it for a moment, before throwing a haymaker at the glass surface to break the mirror and end the derision. But his reflection had other ideas. It raised a hand of its own and caught Harris’ fist mid-punch. Struggle as he might, he couldn’t release himself. The apparition behind that surface had his measure. As he pulled, the apparition pulled back. The man and the embodiment of his demons remained in equilibrium, even as they melted into the sink, circled the drain, and disappeared down the pipe.

  Harris fell; for how long, he could not say. For what is time when you are hurtling through infinite darkness, with nothing to occupy you, but the murder of your beloved mentor at the hand of a man you despise? It could have been years, it could have been seconds. The answer likely lies somewhere in between.

  Harris watched Watson walk up behind Prince and put a bullet in him, over and over. Seconds, moments and hours ceased to be measurements of time. They became units of the guilt he carried in witnessing the demise of his oldest friend. Harris’ departure from Sydney had been an act of self-preservation, but he saw now that it was a betrayal he would live and die with.

  Chapter 36

  Back in Sydney, Elsa had come out of the opiate cocoon that had held her in its cold, sweaty embrace for days. She’d woken up, having undergone something of a metamorphosis. The moment she saw Harris had taken her things and left she had walked over to the sink to splash her face. She raged with a fury the likes of which not even Hell has seen. As she looked at the water dripping down her once-flawless complexion, and through her limp lifeless hair, she asked herself a question. Did she like who she was becoming? There really is nothing like opiates to instil an existential crisis in a person.

  Her career was taking its toll on her. She was overworking herself, because everyone wanted a piece of her. At this point, she wasn’t sure how much she had left to give. She flew all over the country, having meetings with seedy executives who’d invariably try to put their seedy hands upon her. At first, she’d seen the benefit in allowing lecherous men the dream that one day they might get their pound of flesh. Lately, she’d sickened of it. The life of a singer was not worth selling her soul for. It seemed all it did was make a perverse boy’s club rich and erect. But where was her power?

  Once upon a time she had used men’s insistence on using her to further herself. She’d picked them up and put them down with ease. With Harris, it had been different. In her own, detached way, she loved Harris. Marriage and children were likely never on the cards for her. Whatever it was one needed to participate in that selfish act of starting a family, she didn’t have it, nor did he. However, she could have happily committed to a future of the two of them together, with a suitcase full of skag. But she supposed that had gone now.

  Wrongly assuming he had gone out to buy cigarettes or to meet his dealer, she had waited for him. In that time, that seemingly endless period between night and day, she remembered the conversation they had had. He wanted to leave, she’d said no. It seemed he had gone regardless. Once she realised this, she was done waiting.

  In that squalid place, Elsa Markle had indeed transformed herself. She put away the looks that had got her what she wanted, when she wanted it, for so long. She didn’t pity herself and nor did she mourn the shift within her. She decided that it was time to want for different things, namely real power. She decided that it was time to use her mind. A far more dangerous weapon all together, for let me tell you, her wits were sharper than most of those who suckled at the teat of Sydney’s underbelly. She’d enjoyed making men shudder with lust, now she would make them quake in fear.

  It was this dark change that brought her to knock at a Palmer Street door. Here, she was met by a pair of watery blue eyes, diluted by age, but still in full possession of far more nefarious expertise than any other who walked those streets. Behind that door, along a rickety corridor, and into a lounge of tacky velvet, Elsa Markle struck up a partnership with none other than Matilda Devine. Though he did not yet know it, Sydney had just become a far more dangerous place for James Harris, and for us all.

  Chapter 37

  Lescott wasted much of their first day in Alice Springs bouncing between a drunken stupor and a hungover agony. He’d drank until the sun came up. Then he drank a little longer. He couldn’t quite tell if he had slept, if he had nodded off it can’t have been for more than twenty minutes. He had spent the best hours of the day with his head over the bowl, emptying his bursting stomach into the bowl. It was there that he may or may not have caught his forty winks; he could tell this because his right arm, the arm he’d used as a pillow between him and the toilet seat was quite deadened with numbness.

  Sometime in the afternoon, he realised he was in a room that had essentially been replastered with vomit. Sometime the night before, Lescott had broken the room’s single, standing fan with an errant kick to stop its rattle. The day was hot and he was now sweating profusely. His hair was drenched, his armpits sodden and his groin and legs were quite soaked. Not, he would soon come to realise, with sweat. It was urine. How better to end this swim in human soup, than by jumping in the shower, clothes and all? That shower might just have saved his life that day.

  The landlord of the Stuart Arms listened to Lescott squelching all the way down the stairs. There was so much water in the bottom of the man’s shoes that every time he stepped, it displaced more and spilled onto the carpeted surface. The man was drenched and looked like a living, breathing mental breakdown. “Are you ok there, friend?”

  “Bit too much to drink I’m afraid.” Lescott rubbed his head as he looked around for Harris.

  “Would you like my wife to make up your room?”

  “No!” Lescott shouted when he thought of the state of the bathroom. He’d used towels to try and clean up the mess he had made, but they’d simply smeared it across every surface. “I’m a private type of person. I’ll clean the room myself.”

  The landlord looked at Lescott suspiciously.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have seen my…” Lescott paused, it was a small town. “Brother.”

  “Last night you told me he was your partner? That you’d come from Sydney to investigate a series of disappearances…”

  Lescott cringed, he’d been so loaded and he had insist
ed on the landlord drinking with him. So much for discretion. “Did I say brother?”

  “Your partner was behaving very strangely earlier.” The man paused to look at the drenched wretch before him, the irony was lost on neither of the men. “He said he was going to go outside, to be in nature, and sit under a tree. He said he wanted to sit on beetroot ground under a blueberry sky. And to listen to the flowing over the river and the song of birds. Because that’s all life is.”

  Lescott laughed, “I’m sure that sounded strange. That’s just him.”

  “That was five hours ago… He was carrying a gun.”

  Lescott ran out of the building, squelching with each step. In his black wool suit and heavy cotton shirt, he wasn’t dressed for the desert. As he ran he kicked up red dirt that clung to his sodden clothes and skin, it made a disgusting red paste that dried quickly under the burning sky. Fortunately, at the rate he had begun to sweat, he imagined it would rinse him off entirely before too long.

  Then he found him. Sitting against the trunk of a lone Desert Oak hundreds of metres outside of town. The Englishman was sitting with his revolver laid carefully beside him, that damn opal from Coober Pedy on the other side, a pile of spent cigarettes between his legs. Lescott, wilting in the heat of the desert, had expected to find him broken and forlorn, if not dead. The bastard looked like Steve McQueen or Paul Newman. In light, grey suit trousers, a white, short-sleeved shirt, a wide brimmed stockman’s hat and a pair of wayfarers. It pissed Lescott off. He looked like he should have been sipping cocktails with Grace Kelly on the French Riviera, not drinking stale beer that smelled a little like farts, with Lescott who smelled a lot like piss, in Alice Springs. Lescott was infuriated by the apparent ease with which his partner had acclimatised to the area. “What the fuck are you doing out here?”

  “Just being. You know?” Harris looked at Lescott and all of a sudden, Lescott was no longer the concerned party. “What happened to you?”