Dark Places

by Evans, Jon

  After maybe five minutes I heard a shout and nearly jumped out of my skin. I looked up. And nearly jumped out of my skin again.

  "Balthazar Wood!" Morgan shouted. I could barely hear him through the rain and the sea. "As I live and breathe!"

  I was about halfway along the beach. He was a little further along, maybe thirty feet away from me, between me and the ocean. I could see footprints leading back towards the ocean. He wore a blue swimsuit and carried a parang in his right hand like he knew how to use it. I was sure he did. He was the Great White Hunter, after all. He seemed an unreal figure, something out of a bad dream, looming out of the rain with his shaved head and that blade in his hand and those Chinese-dragon tattoos on his arms, as heavily muscled as a Marvel Comics superhero. His eyes shone with anticipation and his face was stretched into a giant carnivorous grin.

  I backed away towards the road along the slope, moving slowly, thinking furiously. He followed, equally slowly. There was no rush after all. He had me at his mercy. There was no way I could scramble to safety up this steep slippery slope, and there was nowhere else to go. He must have been waiting for me. He must seen me from up high, come down and swum along the beach in order to catch me by surprise.

  "I gave you a little examination, Woodsie!" he cried. "I put you to the test, and I'm sorry to say that you've failed!"

  No: there was someplace to go. There was the ocean. He was a stronger swimmer than I was, but could he swim fast carrying that parang? I very much doubted it. But he'd already thought of that, he was moving to cut me off, staying between me and the surf.

  "I warned you, Paul! I told you to fuck off and leave me alone! But you just couldn't do that, could you?"

  My anger had abandoned me when I needed it most. My limbs were weak with terror. I was shaking so badly I could barely focus my eyes. "You sick fuck!" I hurled back at him, or tried to, but I had no breath in my lungs. He must have read my lips; he laughed.

  "Don't you go worrying about those beautiful Swedish ladies you came down here to rescue now," he said. He was close enough that despite the drumming rain I could hear him without shouting. "Were you dreaming of saving their lives and receiving a few grateful blow jobs? They've landed you in a world of trouble, my boy. But they're still compos mentis, they're just fine. They went off back to Bali last night. Not without giving me a fond farewell though. That Ulrika is a wildcat in bed. You think I'm going to rid the world of a piece of ass like that? Now that would be a real sin."

  "How?" I asked, still breathless. "How could you kill Laura? Why?"

  His lips thinned and he spat. "That whore Mason? Fuck her. That cunt got exactly what she deserved."

  I would make him pay, I told myself. If I somehow got out of this I would make him pay. "And Stanley Goebel? Did he get what he deserved?"

  "Ah, him. Woodsie, I swear, I didn't even know his name when I did him. He was an act of pure opportunism. Just one more for The Bull. One more just like you."

  He raised the parang high, to slash downwards, and stepped towards me. I wish I could say I tensed myself for a furious never-say-die battle, ready to fight like a cornered wolverine. But the truth is when I saw that blade gleaming above me in the rain all my rage and courage melted away and I cringed away from him, arms over my head, whimpering.

  He could have swung the parang and ended my life. Instead he kicked me behind the left knee and I crumpled forward onto my hands and knees. I closed my eyes and waited for the fatal blow. But it still didn't come.

  "You never know, Woodsie," he said. "Maybe if you try very, very hard you could convince your old mate Morgan that you really would leave him alone if you lived. Maybe if you sound just pitiful enough. Maybe if you show him what a truly pathetic fuck you really are."

  He was only toying with me. I knew that. He wouldn't let me go, not now, no matter what I said or did. He just wanted to humiliate me before killing me. I scrabbled backwards on my hands and knees towards the rocky slope. One possible chance. But I felt too weak with fear for it to work. He followed.

  I was going to die here. I felt a terrible cold certainty. These were my last moments on this earth. I tried to say something, to beg and plead like he wanted me to, to play for time, but I was so frightened I couldn't even speak. Not in words. I tried, but all that came out of my mouth were meaningless moaning noises.

  My right foot came into contact with solid rock. I stopped backing up.

  "Very disappointing, Woodsie," he said, as I crouched at his feet. "I thought you'd put up more of a fight. But you're just a snivelling little worm, aren't you? You and your woman both. That cunt Mason. She begged and sobbed and pleaded and sucked and licked, she did. But it didn't do her any good in the end. You'll have to try a little harder than —"

  Maybe it was the mention of Laura that gave me strength. Maybe it was just raw animal instinct, fight or flight, a last desperate convulsion of muscles. He hadn't noticed that I had backed into the rocks behind me like a sprinter backs into starting blocks. I lunged forward with all the strength I had, not at him but past him, and I ran for the sea. I don't know if he swung at me or not, but if he did, he missed. After a few steps I stumbled, tripped up by the combination of forward momentum and rainsoaked sandals, but somehow righted myself midstride and continued into the surf.

  When the water was thigh-high and I could no longer run I paused to tear my sandals off and dared a glance over my shoulder. One of the six-foot waves nearly knocked me off my feet but I managed to keep my balance. Morgan followed me into the water, moving at an unhurried jog. He had discarded the parang on the beach.

  He looked amused rather than concerned. I knew why. I had no hope of outdistancing or outwrestling him. I was a comfortable swimmer, I had spent most of my teenage summers on the shores of Lake Muskoka in Canada, but Morgan had grown up on the beach. He swam like a shark. And he was at full strength, where I was sick and weak with fear and couldn't fully extend the knee he had kicked. All things being equal, he would easily reach me, and when he did, he was much too strong for me to have any hope of survival.

  But all things were not quite equal.

  I dove into the water and started to swim, controlling my motions, trying to keep my stroke smoothly powerful instead of frantic. After a few dozen strokes I allowed my feet to dangle downwards for a moment, and I felt it.

  The riptide. My salvation. It grabbed at my ankles and pulled and in moments I had been sucked right in. Johann had been right, it was a monster, two or three hundred feet a minute. I swam straight into the center of the flow, allowing the current to carry me straight out, and then I turned, treading water, and looked for Morgan.

  He was behind me, not far, maybe forty feet away. We were still in the bay but the sea was already so rough I could only glimpse him from wavetops. The gap between us widened. Then he reached the riptide, and he abruptly stopped swimming, started treading water, and looked out to the fearsome waves of the open sea, only a hundred feet away now.

  I knew what he was thinking. I had nothing to lose. I was obviously better off taking my chances in the open ocean and hoping that a stray boat picked me up or the tides happened to wash me back to dry land. Better some chance than none. But he had to work out whether it was worth risking his own life here in the water by expending the time and energy required to find me, catch me and kill me. Not easy when we got out to the open water with its high waves, not on a day like today, not with the sun plummeting towards the horizon.

  He turned and swam away, parallel to the beach, out of the riptide, away from me.

  I had no time to feel relief. The current dragged me out of the bay and into the full, colossal, relentless force of the sea. I nearly drowned in those first few minutes. The churning waves threw me around like a rag doll, like a twig in a flood. I tried to float face up, but they immediately drove me under. I went back to treading water, but I had to work so hard to keep my head in the air that I knew I could not last long. Even when I did manage to breathe I had to keep m
y mouth pursed in a narrow slit to filter out the thick rain. When I breathed in just as an errant wave hit, and choked on a mouthful of salt water instead of a lungful of air, I panicked and only just managed to keep afloat with a frenzied dog paddle before getting hold of myself again.

  I gave up on keeping my head above water all the time. I tried to conserve my energy, letting myself drift beneath the surface, coming up just long enough to breathe. This worked better than all-out struggle, but I could still feel myself growing slowly weaker. And I could no longer see land or even guess in which direction it lay. Downwind, probably. I could barely work out which way the wind blew, much less make any progress in that or any other direction. But I got the vague impression that the current was carrying me exactly the wrong way.

  Looking back it's amazing how calm I felt. I guess fear is all about imagining the future, and while I was in the water I was much too busy staying alive to imagine anything at all.

  Time passed, quite a long time, but I had no sense of it. After a while it seemed as if I had always been in this ocean, struggling for my life, that my other memories were nothing more than a momentary daydream. I was dimly aware that night was falling, the storm was abating, the rain slacking off and the waves growing calmer. But my muscles too were weakening, and I had to expend every iota of energy I could muster just to keep my head above water long enough to breathe.

  When the silence was broken by the violent yodel of a horn I was so startled that I lost the rhythm of my movements and nearly drowned again. But I clawed my way back to the surface with desperate spasmodic movements, woken from semiconsciousness, perceiving the meaning of that horn through the thick fog of total physical exhaustion. A boat. There was a boat nearby.

  I tried to shout, but between exhaustion and my brine-burned throat, only a wheezy rasp emerged. The horn sounded again, even louder this time, so loud it was actually painful. When my head submerged I could hear the thick churning sound of the boat engine through the water. A few moments later I saw lights, and heard human voices, and I found some untapped reservoir of strength and began to swim towards the light.

  When I next looked up I was blinded by one of the lights. I waved my hands high in the air and tried to shout. Again I failed. But it didn't matter. They had seen me. "Over there!" a woman shouted. "There's someone over there!" I treaded water, forcing my limp arms to wave, until the boat loomed up next to me and strong hands pulled me on board.

  I grabbed a railing to stay upright, my legs too weak to stand unsupported, and looked at my saviors. Four Indonesians and three white people. I recognized the whites. Johann and Suzanne. And Talena Radovich.

  "You stupid fucking idiot," Talena said, and gave me a big hug.

  Chapter 17 Ends, Tightened

  By the time we docked I had started to recover. I had drunk about a litre of fresh water, my legs were strong enough to walk or at least stagger, and my mind had more or less fallen back into place. The memories of my encounter on the beach, and my ninety minutes in the water, already seemed completely unreal. I felt very much like I had woken from a nightmare.

  Before getting off the boat that had saved me — a fair-sized boat, about forty feet, from the look of things a dive boat when not being used to rescue stupid tourists who went to the beach alone and got caught in the riptide — I thanked the Indonesian boatmen profusely and gave them most of the soggy wad of Indonesian cash in my travel wallet. Johann, Suzanne, Talena and I walked back to the Anda Cottages, only a few minutes from the dock. They led me into the common room, sat me down, and bought me a richly deserved bottle of Bintang.

  "You are very lucky," Johann said, "We warned you about the riptide."

  "If your friend hadn't come looking for you —" Suzanne shook her head.

  "Yeah," I said. "Well." I stared at Talena. I couldn't get over her presence.

  "We're glad you're all right," Suzanne said. "You must be very tired. So are we. See you in the morning?"

  "Sure," I said. I hugged them goodnight, as did Talena. I felt a brief and entirely unjustifiable spurt of jealousy when she hugged Johann.

  Talena and I sat back down and stared at one another for a moment.

  "What are you doing here?" I finally asked.

  "Saving your stupid, ignorant, pathetic, moronic, stubborn, bullheaded, perverse, idiotic, shit-for-brains, skinny little ass," she said. "What does it look like I'm doing?"

  "Oh." I considered what she had said and added "Thank you."

  "Since you so promptly broke your promise to email me every day —"

  "The rain knocked the phone lines out," I protested. "I couldn't."

  She gave me a skeptical look. "Yeah, and I'm sure you tried as hard as you possibly could. Anyways I took a couple days off and burned some frequent flier miles to see what kind of trouble you'd gotten yourself into. And then this morning I get this email from some freaky-ass address telling me that you've found the guy and you know his name. So then I figure you're really in trouble. And I have had the day from hell, believe you me. I got to Tetebatu about an hour and a half after you left, and it was hard enough getting there, never mind here. Lucky for you I bumped into your Dutch friends. We went down to the beach and found your sandals in the water. So we came back here and got the boat. Seems like it happens a lot. You're lucky they know exactly where the current takes people after the riptide gets them."

  "Yeah."

  "It wasn't just the riptide, was it."

  "No."

  "What happened?"

  I told her the whole story, omitting none of my stupidities.

  "Well," she said, when I had finished. "Well. Well, you're just very lucky to be alive, aren't you now?"

  "Yeah," I said. "I think you saved my life."

  She barked a laugh. "No shit, Sherlock."

  "Well. Jeez. No one's ever saved my life before. I guess… "

  "Stop," she said. "Don't get all maudlin on me. I hate that."

  "Oh. Okay."

  She finished her beer. "Also there's a theory that when you save someone's life you are then karmically responsible for everything that they do for the rest of their life. And no offense but considering your recent errors of judgement that sounds like a real Atlasesque weight on my shoulders so I'd really rather be reminded of the whole subject as infrequently as possible if you're okay with that."

  "Fine," I said.

  She stood up. "I think it's time for us to get the hell out of Dodge. Let's go."

  "Go? Where are we going?" I asked.

  "We're going to pack your things and leave town."

  "It's too late for the bus."

  "Bus?" She shook her head, amused. "You've been traveling on a shoestring too long. I hired a taxi for the day. Only twenty bucks, you know."

  "Oh," I said. She was right. That alternative had never even occurred to me.

  I packed quickly, thinking of Morgan following us to the Anda Cottages for a bloody denouement. Then we were in her taxi and she was talking to the driver in Indonesian as we pulled away.

  "You speak the language?" I asked, surprised.

  "I spent a couple months here researching the last-but-one edition," she said. "And it's the world's easiest language. No grammar, no tenses, no verb forms, no nothing. You wouldn't want to write poetry in it but it takes about two weeks to learn."

  "Oh," I said, feeling hopelessly incompetent next to her.

  About twenty minutes later I said "We have to go to Tetebatu."

  "What?"

  "Tetebatu."

  "What for?" she asked suspiciously.

  I had realized what it was that had nagged at me all day yesterday, was what for. "There might be a clue there. An important one."

  "Paul, listen to me," she said slowly, as if speaking to a child. "You almost died today. There is a bad man out there who wants you dead. We're getting you out of the country as soon as we can without making any detours."

  "I'm going to Tetebatu," I said. "You can come or not."

 
"You ungrateful little shit!" she exclaimed, amazed. "What happened to thank you for saving my life?"

  "What happened to not reminding you about that?… okay, sorry, that was uncalled for. But I just need to go to Tetebatu for thirty minutes. To look at the computer he used there, that's it. Then we can leave."

  She gave me a long, level, unimpressed look. But then she leaned towards the driver and gave him new instructions, and not very long later — taxis really were a lot faster than traveling via bemo — we were back in Kotoraya.

  The taxi couldn't make it up the muddy road to Tetebatu, but I paid a small boy to go roust a cedak driver out of bed, and a hundred thousand rupiah convinced him to take us up there. Us because Talena wasn't letting me out of her sight. Several times the cedak got stuck and we had to get out and push, and we both slipped and fell more than once, and by the time we got to Tetebatu we were both covered with mud and Talena was furiously not speaking to me.

  I went straight for the Harmony Cafe. What had nagged at me was that when I had gone to see Morgan the morning before last, before he left for Kuta, he had been at the computer — even though the phone lines were down. What was he doing? My guess is, considering the comment he'd made the previous night about being more careful on the Internet, was that he was trying to wipe out traces of what he'd done on that computer. I wanted to check in case he'd left any trail. I sure hoped he had. I didn't want to tell Talena I'd brought her here and caked her in mud for the sake of a wild-goose chase.

  I bought a Coke and sat down at the Harmony Cafe's computer, Talena at my shoulder. First of all I checked the browser history, and then the Temporary Internet Files directory. As I'd suspected, all the files there had appeared within the last two-and-a-half days. He had wiped the directory and browser history clean before he left.

  "So we're here for nothing?" Talena said, ready to erupt.