Dark Places

by Evans, Jon

I flung the window open and stared out at the glorious sight of Gunung Rinjani above the rice paddies for some time. Even the thickly overcast day could not dim my joy. After a little while I arose and dressed and went to the Mekar Sari patio to collect banana pancakes and rose tea from Femke. I took them back and ate and drank sitting in the chair under my window. The same chair in which Morgan Jackson had sat not twelve hours ago, a parang in his hand, hunting me. It seemed like a bad dream, like a scene from a childhood TV show.

  Had he meant to kill me? Had he decided not to only because I was awake and alert? I didn't think so. I thought he had been telling the truth, that he had only meant to warn me, and had brought the parang to keep me from going after him. I've always liked you, Paul. Which was true. I'd always gotten along well with him. Better than most on the truck.

  Funny that he had called himself The Bull though. He knew that I knew that he wasn't, that he couldn't have killed any of the people in Southern Africa, because he was with me on the truck during that time. Maybe somewhere in the twisted pathways of his mind he had decided that he was The Bull and the other killer was the copycat. It made no difference.

  I should have felt terrible fear or terrible fury. I felt neither. Somehow they had cancelled each other out. Instead I felt immensely relieved. Last night's confrontation had somehow provided the closure I had stayed for. I would do as he said, I would stay in Tetebatu another day, and tomorrow I would go to Mataran, let Talena know what happened, and leave the country. But I certainly wasn't going to leave him be. I would find some way to get him. Not here, not in Indonesia, not mano a mano, not without a plan. That would be little more than suicide. But I had his name, now, and I knew where he lived. Mission accomplished. I had not merely identified The Bull, I had faced him and taken him by the horns. Well, maybe not quite… let's just say I had run with The Bull. Anyways I felt I could leave with my head held high. I knew it was a stupid macho thing to want to feel that way in the first place. But it still made me feel good.

  I anticipated telling my story to Talena, sitting in the Horseshoe across from her, looking into those blue eyes as she looked back at me with…well, quite possibly with disgust at my violation of my promise to her, and the reckless stupidity of following Morgan through the night. But I felt good about the image all the same. Surely she would be impressed, on some level, at what I had done. I was eager to go home and tell her all about it.

  First, though, I wanted to accentuate my stupid macho feeling of accomplishment. I wanted to go fuck with Morgan's mind just a little.

  I stepped into the Harmony Cafe. He wasn't around, but the Swedish girls Kerri and Ulrika were there, and we said hi and smiled at each other. They sat next to their Karrimor packs, obviously waiting for Morgan and Peter. I bought a Coke, thinking wistfully of the two pairs of perfect breasts I'd seen last night, and asked them where Morgan was. They pointed me to a dark room just off the patio.

  I had to duck my head to get in the doorway. It was the computer room, dirt-floored, furnished with a single desk. Morgan sat behind the computer. He was wearing his much-battered Tilley hat with shark's teeth. When he looked up and recognized me he looked alarmed. I felt alarmed too. Suddenly coming over here and pulling a hair from The Bull didn't seem like such a smart idea.

  I recognized the pattern his fingers made on the keyboard — Alt-F4, closing down whatever window he had had open — and then he relaxed back, cool as the proverbial cucumber, and said "And what can I do for you, Mr. Wood?"

  My idea had been to leave him with the notion that maybe I hadn't been behind that mandi last night, that I hadn't heard his soliloquy. Just to seed a little uncertainty in his life, keep it interesting. I suddenly wasn't sure if that was such a good idea. I cleared my throat and said in a worryingly quavery voice "Just came by to say goodbye. You off today?"

  "We are indeed. Kuta Beach. The Lombok version. And yourself?"

  "Thought I'd stay here for the day," I said, "maybe go back to Mataran tomorrow, Bali the next day."

  "That sounds very sensible," Morgan said.

  We looked at each other for awhile.

  "Well," Morgan said. "You take care of yourself."

  "I'll try," I said. And I turned to walk away, kicking myself for having come at all.

  I walked back to Mekar Sari. The air was so thick with humidity that I felt as if I was swimming not walking. The phone lines were not yet back up. I felt bad about breaking my email-every-day promise to Talena, but I figured I would feel even worse if I broke my staying-here-until-tomorrow promise to Morgan. And it wasn't really my fault, what could I do about the monsoons knocking out the phones?

  I spent the day playing chess, eating, and reading through my Lonely Planet. Indonesia actually sounded like quite a cool country and I would have to come back here sometime. But I wasn't going to stay for my whole three weeks. I had plans already forming. I wasn't going to come after Morgan Jackson here, but if he thought I was going to leave him alone, he was terribly mistaken.

  Something nagged at me all day long, the feeling that I'd forgotten something important. I ignored it in the hopes my subconscious would throw it up when least expected; but the hopes went unfulfilled. I fell asleep trying to make myself remember it.

  The next morning I went to the patio for my banana pancakes and rose tea, and Femke added one more ingredient to the breakfast; a folded piece of paper, taped shut. I looked at her quizzically.

  "Your friend Mr. Jackson gave it to me before he left," she said. "To give to you this morning."

  "Oh," I said. I managed to get to the relative privacy of the chair below my window before tearing it open and reading it. The words were scrawled so clumsily they were nearly illegible, but I managed to decipher it:

  WOODSIE OLD BOY

  AREN'T KERRI & ULRIKA A TREAT?

  NEVER DONE TWO AT THE SAME TIME BEFORE

  BUT DOWN IN KUTA

  THEY'RE GOING TO MEET THE BULL

  JUST THOUGHT I'D LET YOU KNOW…

  HA HA HA & TA

  I read it again. I felt very cold.

  I was sure they were already dead. That was why he had me wait a day.

  Even if they weren't I knew I shouldn't go after him. Here in Indonesia, without some kind of a plan, I wouldn't have a chance. He would kill me. I should leave him be, follow yesterday's plan, go home and there work out some way to get him. Rushing after him to save two perfect strangers was the worst kind of foolishness. This changes nothing, I told myself. Go with yesterday's plan. Yesterday's plan was sound.

  Yesterday's plan was sound, and sensible, and utterly cowardly. It was very convenient how my elegant plan for revenging myself on the man who had murdered Laura involved letting him walk away and kill two more girls. Very convenient how it got me the hell out of danger as soon as was humanly possible. Abandoning the two Swedish girls, perfect strangers or no, was the act of a contemptible coward, and I knew it. Even if I was sure that they were probably already dead.

  What if they weren't? He couldn't plan for everything. Maybe something had gone wrong. Maybe he'd gotten sick. They might still be alive. And even if they weren't, the sooner I got there, the better chance of getting the authorities to catch him before he left Indonesia.

  Even as I contemplated this a raindrop the size of a marble smacked into the sheet of paper, smearing the cheap ink. I looked up. Dark clouds roiled the sky. I could see flickers of lightning on the horizon. The monsoon was back, and this time, I could tell, it wasn't going to fuck around.

  No time to lose, I thought, and five minutes later I was packed and paid for. Femke looked at me as if I was crazy when I told her I had to go to Kuta Beach right away. I guess I could understand why. It was already pouring as I began to slog along the rice paddies towards the road. Not quite running, but close.

  I left the parang behind. I was through with that particular madness.

  Chapter 16 Meet Me On The Beach

  It cost me a lot of money to get to Kuta that day. I can't bla
me the drivers. I wouldn't have wanted to go anywhere in that weather either. The storms of the previous few days had been mere warmups for the main event. The rain hit so hard I thought it might leave bruises. Visibility was approximately three feet. The cedak driver who took me from Tetebatu to Kotoraya wore his arm out whipping the horse with his bamboo switch. The bemo drivers were only a little better off. At one point on the leg from Kopang to Praya the driver slammed on the brakes and swerved so hard that two wheels briefly left the road. The road was too slippery for the brakes to have much effect, and I thought for a second that I was going to be roadkill, but the driver weaved with superhuman skill through a herd of water buffalo that appeared suddenly out of the monsoon like dark omens.

  In the end I made it. My watch told me it was five o'clock. This Kuta Beach was nothing like the one on Bali. It was simply a road that ran along the coast, with jungle on one side and beach on the other, and eight hotels clustered near the T-junction that connected to the rest of the island. I walked along the road to the nearest hotel. I didn't hurry. I didn't mind being soaked any more. I and all of my possessions had been soaked all day.

  I checked into the Anda Cottages, which had no Morgan/Peter/Kerri/Ulrika in the register, went into my cottage, changed into my swimsuit, and hung the rest of my clothes out to dry. I didn't feel the desperate need for speed that I had felt when the day had begun. After seven hours of travel, there didn't seem any point in worrying about another fifteen minutes. And nobody was killing anybody in this downpour, of that I was pretty sure, not unless Morgan was going to break into their room and start swinging a parang wildly, and that seemed unlikely. His modus operandi was the ambush.

  And besides the most likely scenario was that they were dead already.

  I went to the common room to find out what was going on. I wasn't sure how I would bring up the subject. "So, anybody find a couple of murdered Swedish girls around here?" didn't seem like a winning conversation-starter. But then I saw faces that I recognized, Johann and Suzanne, the Dutch couple from Tetebatu, drinking Bintang-and-Sprite shandies. They waved at me and I joined them.

  "When did you get here?" Suzanne asked.

  "Today," I said. The waiter came by and I asked him for a beer and then, as I realized I hadn't eaten since the banana pancakes except for half a pineapple in Pao Montong, a dish of nasi goreng.

  "You came here through the rain?" she asked.

  I nodded and smiled sheepishly.

  "We didn't think the roads were open," Johann said. "We were supposed to take a Perama bus back to the ferry today, but they said they could not go because of the monsoon." Perama was the Indonesian tourist authority, which provided air-con buses between major tourist destinations. A little more expensive than bemos, and without their gritty authenticity, but a whole lot more comfortable.

  "The roads were pretty bad," I admitted. "I'm surprised I got here."

  "Have you been in Tetebatu?" Suzanne asked.

  I nodded and drank greedily from my Bintang, which tasted wonderful and felt much-deserved. "How are things around here?"

  "They're good," Johann said, and Suzanne nodded her agreement. "Very peaceful. You can rent mopeds and bicycles and go up and down the road. An excellent road with nothing on it. The beach right here," he motioned towards the sea, "is not so good… "

  "Coral pebbles, not sand," Suzanne clarified. "Difficult to walk on or lie down on."

  "The surfers like it, though," Johann said, and he and Suzanne exchanged looks and laughed at some private joke.

  "Lots of surfers here," Suzanne said.

  "But down the road to the east, maybe two miles… "

  "Oh, yes, there's a perfect beach," Suzanne said. "Wonderful. A big white… " She made an arc with her hands, searching for the right English word.

  "Crescent," Johann filled in. "It must be nearly a kilometer long."

  "But it's dangerous," Suzanne said. "You must remember, if you go there. The owner here, he says there's a terrible riptide in the middle of the beach, and people die there every year. Swept out into the ocean and drowned."

  "There are no signs there, can you imagine?" Johann said. He sounded a little outraged. "No signs at all. It's disgraceful. But as long as you're careful, it's a perfect beach. And there's nobody there."

  "A few locals with coolers on their heads, selling Cokes and pineapples, and that's it. No buildings, no stores, no hotels," Suzanne added.

  "Sounds like paradise," I said. My nasi goreng had arrived and I attacked it with a will as they chatted to each other, nostalgically, in Dutch.

  Five minutes later I felt a thousand times stronger. "Listen," I said, "I ran into an old friend of mine in Tetebatu, I think he was coming here, have you seen him?" I described Morgan and company.

  "Oh, yes," Suzanne said. "The big man with all the tattoos. We had lunch with them yesterday. The girls seemed very nice. There was no Dutch man with them, though. I think he went east to Flores instead of coming down here. Just your friend and the Swedish girls."

  "They went out to that beach, didn't they?" Johann asked her.

  "They did," Suzanne said. "During the rain. When everyone else was staying in they went out to the beach. Your friend said that it was best then, that swimming in the rain was better because you didn't get so hot."

  "And nobody follows you around trying to sell you a sarong," Johann added, and they both laughed. Sarong salesgirls were the bane of Indonesian travelers. I didn't laugh.

  "Did you see them afterwards?" I asked.

  "Let's see… did we?" Suzanne said, thinking about it. "I think we saw your friend last night, on the road."

  "Yes, we did," Johann said. "But not the Swedish girls."

  "That's right," Suzanne said. "Just your friend Morgan."

  I sipped from my beer to cover my consternation. I felt so cold I nearly shivered. Morgan had taken Kerri and Ulrika to a deserted beach yesterday, a beach already known for death by drowning, with the monsoon thundering down and nobody else around. And he had been seen again, but they had not.

  "I have to go," I said, putting my beer down half-finished. I was sure it was too late but that was no reason to delay. "I forgot something. I'll see you later."

  I fled from their startled okays and went back out into the rain. It had not let up, which seemed amazing to me. Surely all the fresh water in the world had poured down on Indonesia in the last eight hours, and there could be no more to dump on us. I went to the roofed area I had caught out of the corner of my eye when I had entered the Anda Cottages compound, where the mopeds and bicycles were stored, along with a crudely lettered "For Rent" sign.

  An Indonesian boy who couldn't have been more than twelve years old sat watching the bikes. I told him that I wanted to rent, and he looked at me as if I was crazy, but only for a moment. Every Indonesian knows that all white people are crazy; taking a bike during the height of a monsoon was not insane enough to be noteworthy. Mad dogs and Englishmen and all that.

  "You want bike or motorbike?" he asked. His English was passable. For a moment I wondered how many languages he spoke. Most of the Indonesians in the picking-white-coconuts business could conduct business in English, German, Dutch, and Japanese, at a minimum.

  "Bike," I said. I wanted to get there fast but I'd never driven a motorbike before and figured these were not ideal conditions to learn in. He gave me a battered old iron thing which was a little too short and reminded me of the bike I once rented in China that lost its pedals five miles from town. But better than nothing. I wheeled out of the Anda Cottages and headed off down the road, in the direction Johann had indicated, looking for the beach.

  * * *

  The road was superb, no cracks or potholes, and nobody else on it. Jungle to my left, coral beach to my right, rain absolutely everywhere. I could barely hear the roar of the surf over the machine-gun noise of rain on the road. Once I built up a good head of steam the bike moved like a racing machine, carried along by its own massive inertia. The road in
clined slightly upwards, which was good. I didn't like my chances going downhill at this speed in this rain with these brakes. The beach began to slope downwards to my right, steeper and steeper, until there was a wedge of vegetation between me and the coral gravel, a wedge that widened and widened until I had jungle on both sides. It was getting darker; either the clouds were growing even thicker or the sun was setting. The jungle was thick as a wall, and the clouds were so low I seemed to be riding through a tunnel.

  Suddenly the jungle to my right vanished, replaced by a steep rocky slope that dropped to a beach so white it seemed to glow. Crescent-shaped, like the blade of a parang, the beach ran almost perpendicular to the road and was framed by a high wall of jumbled rock too steep to be navigable anywhere but where it met the road. It was a good half-mile long and I could only just make out the other end through the rain.

  The opening in the wall of jungle to my right was only about a hundred feet long, and by the time I'd reacted and the brakes had stopped the bike, the beach was once again hidden behind vegetation. I walked the bike back to the rocky slope above the beach, leaned it against a tree, and began to descend. My Teva sandals were soaking wet, and the rocks were slippery with rain, and I had to use my hands to brace myself on several occasions.

  Then I was on the beach. It was amazing how white the sand was even though it must have been darkened by the rain. Fine sand, damply solid, easy to walk on. It was about a hundred feet wide at its thickest. The storm was intensifying now, and I had to shield my eyes with a hand to see anything. The whitecapped waves roared and plunged into the beach again and again, as if they wanted to pillage it, carry every grain back to Davy Jones' Locker. Even in the bay they were at least six feet high. The open sea was twice that size, a churning maelstrom of whitecaps.

  I couldn't see anything but sand, sea, rocks, and jungle high above. It didn't seem likely that he'd hide bodies here. They would have stood out like crazy against the sand. Maybe he'd hidden them under cairns of rocks? Hard work, but he was a big strong guy. I began to follow the line of the rocky slope, looking carefully under the rocks. The sky had grown darker still and I had to squint against the rain.