Dark Places

by Evans, Jon

  All of which might lead me to The Bull II, if he existed. There weren't many places around here for an adventure traveler. The drunken beach-bum culture here in Kuta Beach? Definitely not. Culture and dances and art in Ubud, a little further north? No. In fact the only Bali possibility mentioned in my SFO-purchased Indonesia: a travel survival kit was a live volcano named Gunung Batur, in the middle of the island. You could climb to the top of it and fry eggs on the hot rocks there. I thought that might be exactly the kind of thing The Bull II was into. Because I thought he and I might be into exactly the same kind of thing.

  Not counting killing random strangers, of course.

  * * *

  It was three days after the cookies-and-minefield incident that Laura and I finally came together. The night Robbie got lost in the desert. Damn fool went for a walk and got caught out by sunset. Then, instead of staying where he was, he kept walking, trying to find us. It was an hour before Emma, who was at that point Robbie's girl, realized he hadn't gone for a nap. We all rushed out to look for him before Hallam could stop us and impose some kind of organization on the search.

  Our camp that night was in the shelter of a U-shaped sand dune. Most of the others ran out towards the mouth of the U calling Robbie's name, but Laura and I, who had been spending a lot of quietly nervous time near each other in the previous three days, slogged up the dune, sliding two steps back for every three steps forward, until we reached the top. Our idea had been that maybe he had his flashlight with him and we could see him from the top.

  The moon was nearly full that night, which in the Sahara means you can easily read a newspaper by its light. We could see a long way. But there was nothing but the desert wind, so fierce that contrails of sand were visible six inches above the dune, so loud that it swallowed up our cries of Robbie's name as soon as they left our lungs. Laura raised her hand to protect her face from the wind, and without even thinking about I stepped between her and the wind and put my arms around her protectively. She looked up at me, her eyes wide, and held me tight.

  "I hope he's okay," she said. I could barely hear her over the wind's howl.

  "He'll be fine," I said. "He'll stop when he realizes he's lost. Hallam will find him."

  A few seconds passed, and then I lowered my head those final two inches and kissed her for the first time.

  It was the headlights that interrupted us, I don't know how much time later, the headlights of the Tuareg Land Rover that had miraculously stumbled across Robbie wandering through the desert five miles from our camp and, even more miraculously, tracked us back to this particular sand dune. After returning our lost sheep they camped beside us, and Laura and I spent most of the rest of that night beneath their big canvas tent. It was one of my favourite memories, sitting with my arms wrapped around her as we and the Tuareg nomads in their sky-blue robes sat around their fire, sang songs from our respective homelands, and ate grilled chunks of a dead lamb that stared at us accusingly from the back of their Land Rover. It was a good night. It might have been the best night of my life.

  * * *

  Three suspects.

  Lawrence Carlin because he had carried an ill-concealed torch for Laura long after she dumped him, and he was a menacing figure we had nicknamed the Terminator only half in jest, so tightly coiled that it was easy to imagine him snapping.

  I thought maybe we had seen him snap, just the once. In Nouadhibou, during a long hot hungry wait outside the passport office, a cloud of a flies so thick they actually obscured the sun descended on the truck. They didn't bite, but they crawled all over us, feasting on our sweat, buzzing and twitching. It was enough to drive you mad.

  It drove Lawrence into a killing frenzy. A quiet, emotionless, expressionless killing frenzy that must have lasted ten minutes. He stalked barefoot up and down the truck, smashing flies into unidentifiable blotches with his sandals, paying no attention to the catcalls which slowly diminished into a silence which was both awed and a little bit frightened. Under those circumstances, believe me, ten minutes is a very long time. It was funny, yes; we often mocked him about it afterwards, yes; but it was also genuinely scary.

  For a long time he didn't like me. That was understandable. From his point of view, I had stolen his girl. Their breakup had been amicable enough, and they were only together two weeks, and he was always polite to both of us, but I often sensed cold hostility beneath the courtesy, and on several occasions I noticed angry glances directed at me. Little things. Perfectly understandable. But still.

  In Cameroon, after her death, he and I became close friends. Grim friends, joined by mutual grief and shock, but close friends all the same. The others helped me, supported me, those nights I got desperately drunk and maudlin; but Lawrence actually joined me. Some nights he seemed as torn up and despairing as I did.

  Maybe because he had a guilty conscience.

  Michael Smith, despite all his charm, because of an incident that occurred in Ouagadougou, popularly known as Wagga, the capital city of Burkina Faso, quite a pleasant place despite being the fifth poorest country in the world. He and I were walking down the road, a pathetic-looking small boy scurrying alongside us, trying to sell us a model car made of meshed wire. You saw them all over, small boys with model cars. As by this time both of us were old Africa hands we ignored the small boy completely. Until we turned a corner. The small boy, on the outside of our turn, had to sprint to keep up up with us, looking up at us and pleading for our custom in soft broken French as he ran. He never saw the oncoming car.

  There was a wet thump a little like a water balloon hitting pavement. Then the small boy lay dazed on the ground, blood oozing from his mouth and his left leg. And Michael laughed. He laughed as if he had just witnessed a Buster Keaton comedy routine, not a malnourished child's serious injury.

  I stopped and stared, not knowing what to do. The car — a Mercedes with tinted windows, almost certainly belonging to a government official — reversed slightly and then drove around the fallen body and away. I took a step towards the victim but Michael grabbed my arm and pulled me back.

  "What — what are you doing?" I demanded.

  "We have to go," he said. "They'll blame it on us. They'll call the police. We'll be arrested, we'll have to pay off everyone and their dog, it'll be whole days of hassle."

  Other passersby began to congregate around the boy, who hadn't moved except for a couple of spastic twitches. A small pool of blood thickened in the dirt around him. The Africans looked at us darkly and muttered to one another. I didn't know what they were saying but I could tell from their tone of voice that they were moving from shock to outrage in a hurry.

  Michael stepped into the street, tugging me along, and waved down a taxi.

  "We can't just leave him," I protested feebly.

  "There's nothing you can do," Michael said, his voice now irritated.

  He pulled me into the taxi. And to tell you the truth I didn't really resist.

  He was probably right about what would have happened. He was probably right about my inability to help. It wasn't that which put him on my shortlist of potential murderers. It was that laugh, that instinctive amused laugh, when he saw the car smash into that little boy.

  Morgan Jackson because he was the Great White Hunter, friendly but utterly without empathy, a man who had never had a moral qualm in his life. He told stories about hunting wild pigs for sport in his native Australia, relishing every gruesome detail. He left the truck several times, alone, for up to a week, and never told us much about where he had been when he got back.

  He was fun to be around, and he seemed to like me and Laura. But if he didn't like you, he made it pretty clear that he didn't much care whether you lived or died. And with Morgan you knew it wasn't just an expression. If I had been with Morgan instead of Michael that day in Wagga, he wouldn't have laughed. He would have kept walking without paying the wounded child any notice at all.

  One night in Ghana, I remember, we hacked the campsite out of the bush with
machetes, a job Morgan took great pleasure in. Around the fire that night the talk turned to the wildlife in West Africa. More precisely to its nonexistence. There were allegedly a couple of hundred elephants in Ghana, but for the most part the denizens of West Africa's game parks had all been killed and eaten during the region's periods of drought and famine.

  "Must have fucked you off to hear that," Robbie said to Morgan. "The Great White Hunter comes all the way here and there's no animals left to hunt."

  "Not a problem," Morgan said.

  "Why not?"

  Morgan smiled. A toothy predatorial smile. "I can always hunt Africans," he said. "If I feel the need. No shortage of them, now, is there?"

  After a moment we collectively decided it was a joke, just another outrageous Morgan quote, and we laughed. Uncomfortably, but we all laughed. Except for Morgan himself. He just continued to smile.

  * * *

  Bali is a small island, and it took me only two hours by air-con tourist bus and no-air-con bemo (a van with two benches in back, jammed full of about twenty people, their luggage, their pets, and their families) to get to the town of Penelokan, on the edge of Gunung Batur's volcanic crater. Indonesia was ridiculously green. I have been to many lush tropical places but Indonesia's green was so deep and pure it seemed surreal, as if a drug had heightened my senses. Statues of Hindu gods in stone and wood marked every crossroad, each one a little artistic gem, perfectly rendered. Metallic crooning gamelan music wafted through the air at every other turn. The men wore white and gold, and the women wore sarongs so brightly coloured they nearly burnt my retinas.

  The view from Penelokan was stunning. The crater was a perfect circle maybe ten miles in diameter and four hundred feet deep, and Gunung Batur rose, red lava over green forest, from the exact center. A crescent-shaped lake took up the eastern third of the crater. The remaining floor was scarred by previous volcanic flows, some of which had overrun whole towns. Not far from Gunung Batur was a sea of black lava from which rose a verdantly green cone-shaped hill. The black lava reminded me of Mile Six Beach near Limbe. And of Laura's naked corpse splayed on its fine black volcanic sand.

  I hitched a ride on a pickup truck down the steep switchbacking ribbon of road that led through a volcano-destroyed ghost town to the settlement of Toyah Bungkah at the foot of the mountain. Hill, really, maybe 2000 meters high, and that in heels. But nobody ever shelled out fifty US dollars for a guide to lead him up a hill.

  Toyah Bungkah was pleasant enough. Scenically located between the mountain and the lake. More lodges than you could shake a stick at, and stores selling Cokes and Marlboros and Snickers and the other American logos you could find anywhere in the world these days, but the people seemed a lot more friendly than those of Kuta Beach. Lots of would-be guides, but they didn't hassle me too much. I didn't intend to climb Gunung Batur. I was just here to check the lodges. I had noticed in Kuta Beach that I had had to sign in to my bungalow, and was hoping that was a universal government mandate.

  It was. What luck. I pretended to consider staying at each lodge in turn, actually pretty typical shoestring backpacker behaviour, except I wasn't seeking the lowest price and then trying to bargain it down, I was looking through all the registers. No joy. No Lawrence Carlin, no Michael Smith, no Morgan Jackson. And no Stanley Goebel, although I doubted The Bull II was still traveling under that passport.

  By the time I had exhausted the possibilities, it was still midafternoon, and I was depressed and disappointed. If I rushed I could still make it back to Kuta Beach tonight, but what was the rush? I had struck out there just like I had here. My whole flight to Indonesia was beginning to feel like an embarrassing moment of madness. It was nice of Talena to have been concerned, but I should be so lucky as to be endangered. I decided to stay the night and in the morning climb Gunung Batur. Since I'd apparently come to Indonesia to exercise futility, I might as well try to enjoy myself.

  I didn't hire a guide. How hard could it be? You just went up until you could go up no more. Admittedly there were a few false starts in the forested trails, and a couple more past the treeline on the barren lava crags that rose to the top, but I made it. Two weeks on the Annapurna Circuit had toughened my legs so much that this low-altitude ascent felt like a walk in Golden Gate Park. The lava was razor-sharp, but that just meant my boots gripped it more firmly.

  The top was a U-shaped wall around the central crater, like a castle wall surrounding the treasures within. The interior of the crater was lushly green. There was a distinct smell of rotten eggs, and at one point I smelled burning rubber and looked down to see my boots bubbling on one of the hot rocks. Only a few meters separated me from magma, I reckoned, quickly stepping away.

  The last eruption had been some twenty years ago, and historically speaking, Gunung Batur was about due for another, saith the Lonely Planet. Looking down I could see a half-dozen black frozen-lava rivers running all the way to the lake. I wondered how it felt to live in Toyah Bungkah, knowing that any day you might be immolated by a river of searing lava. I guess not that different from living in San Francisco, knowing that you're next-door neighbour to the San Andreas Fault.

  I climbed back down and hitched a ride back up to Penelokan with a friendly French cyclist named Marc. Three bemos and three hours later, at nightfall, I was back in Kuta Beach, at the Internet World cafe, reading the latest addition to the Thorn Tree conversation.

  BC088269 11/10 04:07

  Green. And a ski mask.

  How you been, Paul?

  It was him all right. It was the last line that gave me shivers. That friendly how-you-been. As if he knew me. As if my copycat The Bull II theory was correct. I should have felt triumphant, but I felt frightened, and looked around in the cafe as I read it, as if he was right there, watching me.

  Then I checked my email. Talena reported that the latest message was from a different IP number and that I should come home now. I reread it. She had not mentioned what the new IP number was.

  It was 8 PM Indonesia time. I couldn't remember if that made it 8AM or 6AM or 10AM or what in California. Also I was too pissed off to care. I found a Home Country Direct phone, gave the AT&T operator my credit-card number, and called her at home. It rang three times and went to the machine. I pushed Next Call and dialed it again. And again. The third time, she picked up.

  "Whosit?" she croaked.

  "It's Paul, how's it going, what's the new IP number?"

  "What?"

  "You said there was a new IP number but you didn't tell me what it was."

  "Paul… fucking… fuck. Do you know what time it is here?"

  "No."

  "It's four in the fucking morning."

  "Well, I'm sorry. Now what's the number?"

  "Fuck you, you obsessive shit! I was trying to sleep!"

  I swallowed and admitted to myself that I was arguably being a little rude. "I'm sorry. But, look, I flew halfway around the planet for this, and I need your help."

  "Aw, fuck. Call me back in five minutes." And the line went dead.

  I went and got a green Fanta. My favourite soft drink, tragically unavailable anywhere in the world outside of Southeast Asia. Africa had had a whole rainbow of various Fanta colours… except for green. I gave her seven minutes and called her back.

  "Hi, you annoying rude little shit wake-up caller," she said, but she sounded grumpy rather than angry. Her voice sounded tinny.

  "And a top of the morning to you too."

  "You having any luck over there?"

  "No," I said.

  "Good. Come home."

  "Talena. Just give me the new number. I'm sure you have it already."

  "Yes, I do," she said. "But I'm not going to give it to you. You're just going to use it to get in trouble."

  "Talena… " I hesitated. "Look. There were actually a couple of things I never told you, because they just sounded totally crazy."

  "Well. You sure pick a good time to fess up."

  "I think I may already know t
his guy. And I think he might have already come after me on the trail in Nepal."

  There was a pause and then she said "You better unpack that a lot."

  I told her about my copycat truck-killer theory, and about how the man in the ski mask had pursued me on the trail, which I hadn't mentioned before for fear of sounding paranoid.

  When I was finished she said "So your pet madman has already tried to kill you and you're going after him again?"

  "Yeah," I said. "But, listen, I know what I'm going to do when I find him."

  "Yeah? What's that?"

  "Nothing," I said. "If I see a face I recognize I'm going to turn right the fuck around and come straight back to California that same day. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred thousand rupiah."

  "Well, I'm glad to hear your sanity is leaking back to you in dribs and drabs."

  "But I need to know if I'm right," I said. "And if I'm right I need to know who it is. And to have even a chance of that I need you to give me the new IP number. Please."

  "He might have left Indonesia, you know. What if the new number's in China? You going to follow him there?"

  "No. Then I'm going to sit on the beach for a week and come home."

  She thought it over. Then she thought it over some more. As I opened my mouth to plead my case again she said: "All right. On one condition."

  "What's that?"

  "That you email me every single day like you promised to do. There was no email yesterday."

  "I'm calling you now," I protested.