Strange Ink

by Gary Kemble

  The front door was open. Harry could see bookcases inside, filled with old, dusty tomes. Ornate rugs covered the floorboards. On the Balinese-style coffee table was a stack of Save the Tower pamphlets, weighed down with a small brass Buddha. The wind blew through the central hallway, bringing with it the scent of joss sticks.

  ‘Hello?’ Harry called out.

  At the back of the house, someone stirred. Then Bill’s silhouette bobbed down the hallway.

  ‘Mr Hendrick, I presume.’

  ‘Hi, Bill. Congratulations.’

  They shook hands. ‘Come in, come in,’ Bill said.

  Bill placed a hand at Harry’s back and guided him through the house.

  ‘No need for all those pamphlets now, I guess,’ Harry said.

  ‘Ah. I dunno about that. You know what politicians are like. What Cardinal says now and what he does when he gets in are two different things. But we’re in a better position now than a week ago. Drink?’

  ‘Ah yeah, just water thanks.’

  ‘Take a seat outside, I’ll bring it out.’

  The back verandah looked out over a garden no less unkempt than the front. But unlike some of the houses around here, this one looked like the ground was being reclaimed by the sub-tropical rainforest that once dominated this area. Harry took a seat on a cane chair next to the one Bill had evidently been sitting in. His glasses were on the coffee table, sitting atop the half-finished Brisbane Mail cryptic crossword.

  Bill emerged with two glasses of water, condensation already beading their sides.

  ‘Here you go.’

  Harry took the glass. Bill sat down with a small grunt of satisfaction.

  ‘So, working on a follow-up?’ Bill said, nodding at Harry’s notebook.

  ‘Kinda. I’ve been thinking about what you said about Swenson. Wondering if it’s worth chasing.’

  Bill sipped his water. Shrugged. ‘It’s all about getting the evidence. I’m sure he’s dirty, but he’s also cunning. You don’t get away with it for as long as he has without being cunning.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Harry gulped some water. He stared out into the garden. ‘Actually, that’s not the main reason I’m here,’ he said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘No. You know that symbol I passed to Fred?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  For a moment Harry thought he’d chicken out. Then he turned in his seat, pulled the hair up from the back of his neck. Bill gasped. Harry waited for more. He could hear Bill breathing heavily. He turned back. Bill’s face was pale.

  ‘How?’ he said.

  Harry recounted the story about the first tattoo. He was getting good at it now. He stopped there, wanting to see what Bill had to say without giving him any more information.

  ‘Where are you living?’ Bill said.

  Harry told him.

  ‘Oh shit. A couple of years back. There was an old guy, living at your place. People thought he went bonkers. Started getting tattoos. Hanged himself, in the end.’

  Harry shook his head.

  ‘Yeah, Harry. He had the tattoo. That tattoo.’

  Harry climbed up out of the seat. Bill grabbed his arm. Bill’s hand was hot and sweaty.

  ‘Harry – it was Andrew Cardinal’s dad.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah, caused a big stir at the time. It was all hushed up. I figured Cardinal’s dad had pissed off the wrong person. Someone versed in the dark arts. But if it’s happening to you as well, it’s worse than that. This is deep shit.’

  The old man rubbed his face. Harry had left his house wanting to find answers. But looking at Bill, he wasn’t so sure anymore.

  ‘Look, I’ve told Fred this story,’ he said. ‘Haven’t told anyone else. Not even my wife.

  ‘I did a bit of travelling after the war. Fred and I, we saw some fucked up shit in the desert. Did some fucked up shit. All credit to Fred – he came back, got things right with his sweetheart and settled down.

  ‘But me, I just couldn’t do it. Needed to depressurise, you know? I came back from London the slow way, through Europe, down through Afghanistan, India. South-East Asia. Home to Brisbane via a tramp steamer, if you can believe it.’

  Harry sipped his drink. Bill looked past the verandah into the yard, although Harry doubted he was seeing anything out there.

  ‘I was staying with a family outside Kabul. They lived in a mud hut, plonked on a vast, sparsely vegetated plain where they tended their goats. Living as their parents had done, and their parents’ parents.

  ‘I’d been there about a week. I helped them out with their goats. They seemed happy to let me stay. Then one night, we’d just had dinner. We were sitting around, listening to the wind whistling through the cracks in the roof. All of a sudden their oldest son bursts into the room, jabbering.

  ‘I’d picked up a little Pashto, but this was beyond me. But you didn’t need to speak the lingo to know he was scared. Terrified. It was that sort of fear that spreads like a virus. The father said something to the wife and the other kids, grabbed his rifle and headed out into the night.

  ‘I followed. I wanted to help, if I could. There were screams coming from the village. An open fire was the only light. On the way down, the father tried to explain in his broken English, with a bit of Pashto mixed in.

  ‘I didn’t really get it. Something about someone having crossed the local Mullah Sensee – the local medicine man, if you will. There had been a disagreement over money for services. You know the deal. A curse was laid. The man’s goats started dying. The man retaliated, smacked the Mullah Sensee’s head open with a shovel, buried him while he was still bleeding to death.

  ‘It seemed like that was the end of it. But judging by the screams, that wasn’t the end of it.

  ‘We found the man, in the light of the fire, naked. His body was covered in tattoos. I thought he was on fire, at first. Then I realised he was trying to burn the tattoos off his body. His legs were a charred mess, blisters already rising on his skin. He was using a shovel-blade, heating it up and pressing it against his body.

  ‘He was screaming, over and over again. The father told me later he was saying, “He’s inside me. He’s inside me.” The father struggled with him, wrestled the red-hot shovel-head off him. Held him to the ground. The man’s eyes rolled up in his head as he lost consciousness.

  ‘As he lay there in the light of the fire I saw the tattoos. And there was one like that, like yours, on the back of his neck.’

  Bill put his clammy hand on Harry’s arm again.

  ‘That night, the father whisked me away, told me I shouldn’t get involved. Urged me to leave at dawn. He refused to answer my questions. The next morning, he pretended none of it happened.’

  Harry took a sip of water. ‘What do you know about it?’

  ‘The tattoo on your neck? It’s a protection sigil. It was actually widely used but usually people would scratch it on a bit of paper, fold the paper up and carry it around with them.

  ‘What I saw that night was different. The Mullah Sensees had the ability to apply the symbol as a tattoo, and it went from just a protective sigil to something that had the ability to wreak vengeance on people, if the protective aspect failed.

  ‘And this thing has latched on to you, although I’m guessing if you’re not the first one, then you’re probably not the intended target. Stating the obvious, you need to figure out what those tattoos mean, before it’s too late.’

  CHAPTER 17

  Rob sat at a corner table in the Shelter Bar, nursing his beer, as the Friday evening crowd heaved around him. He popped a couple of tablets from the foil sitting on the table and swallowed them with a mouthful of VB. He wasn’t supposed to take them with alcohol. He pretty much wasn’t supposed to drink anymore. The doc reckoned the grog, along with the heavy-duty painkillers, was killing his liver. But lately Rob had a feeling that his liver was the least of his worries.

  Chucky Cheese and the Misfits fired up in the corner, bathed in weak gels that had trouble compe
ting with the evening light filtering through the windows in the front. The Shelter was meant to be a temporary building, pre-fab and down and dirty, much like the riff Chucky was belting out right now, while the neighbouring Story Bridge Hotel was being refurbished. But once the upgrade was completed, many of the old bar flies didn’t feel at home among the shining brass, polished wood bar, the up-market menu and the imported beers. So the Shelter stayed. It suited everyone. The bar flies and students still had somewhere to down cheap jugs of VB, and the yuppies could sip their organic low-carb shit without feeling threatened by real people.

  As the riff cranked, the painkillers kicked in. Rob both loved and hated the sensation. He hated it because the slightly dopey feeling was about a million miles from what he would consider acceptable in a threatening environment back in his SAS days, and he considered the whole Brisbane sprawl a threatening environment these days. But he loved it because it dulled the chronic pain in his lower back, and it turned down the volume on the screams he seemed to hear all the time now. Terrified screams from the poor souls escaping the burning wreck of the Fajar Baru, screams reverberating off the mud walls of the compound in Afghanistan. The screams of his mates, as the Black Hawk they were in spun out of control off the coast of Fiji.

  There were a couple of people dancing now, if you could call it dancing. One woman, maybe late fifties, was jiggling up and down. Her limp grey hair bounced around her head. She was skinny, almost anorexic – except women that age didn’t get anorexic, right? It reminded him of a spirit taking a body and shaking it like a rag doll. But he didn’t want to follow that train of thought, so he sculled the rest of his beer. He scratched at his neck.

  Kyla pushed through the crowd with a fresh jug, condensation beading on its sides. She was beautiful. Worry lines were the only blemish. She offered him a crooked smile. It was subtle. No-one else in the place, even if they’d been looking at her, would have noticed it. And in that moment Rob felt compelled to get a gun somewhere and just go and finish this thing. Or, if he couldn’t do that, throw himself off the Story Bridge. Cardinal wouldn’t worry about her. She wouldn’t be considered a threat. And she would move on, she could leave this life behind.

  ‘What you thinking about?’ she said.

  ‘Taking you home and making an honest woman of you.’

  She put the jug down and sat across from him. He took her hand.

  ‘Too late for that,’ she said.

  She poured herself a drink. Pulled a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit up. His hand slipped under the table to where her leg jittered up and down, as though the electric current from Chucky’s solo was running straight through her body.

  He couldn’t really believe she’d stuck with him. This wasn’t how he’d imagined things panning out for them. By now they were meant to have kids. He was meant to have one of these cushy security consultant jobs in the Middle East that all of his mates – the ones still alive – kept telling him about. Instead he was still stuck in this shit-hole, the shit-hole that had inspired him to join the army to get away from the place. And now he had enemies.

  Kyla blew smoke in his eyes. ‘Seriously, what are you thinking about?’

  He drank some more beer. It didn’t help. He leant closer.

  ‘You know, when I was in, they used to tell us to minimise risks. It’s a pretty fucking dangerous job, but you do what you can to minimise risks,’ he said. ‘But what about you? How can I protect you?’

  She pulled his head to hers and kissed him, hard on the lips.

  ‘Don’t worry about me. It’s us. Okay? Cardinal is going to pay for what he did, all right?’

  Chucky finished one song and started a new one. He howled into the microphone. Someone turned up the amp and they couldn’t talk anymore. Rob stared into Kyla’s eyes and that was okay. One song led into another. The dance floor filled up but it was just light and movement. The volume cranked again. A glass broke and someone cheered.

  ‘Rob!’

  He could barely answer, barely tell where the voice had come from. He’d nodded off. Fucking painkillers.

  ‘Rob!’

  He jerked, saw Kyla rising from her seat. The revellers parted when they saw the bikies striding through the bar, and were even keener to get out of their way when they saw the grimy Dreadnorts patches on their backs. Crow, with his flabby gut hanging down over his belt buckle. Heathy with his greasy blond hair hanging down around his shoulders, a tear tattooed under one eye. Cardinal’s henchmen. Crow had a pool cue, snapped in half. Heathy looked unarmed, which meant he probably had a gun or a knife hidden somewhere. Heathy flexed his shoulders and the Celtic bands writhed on his neck.

  Rob tried to reach over the table to push Kyla to one side but she was too far away, he was too groggy and he only succeeded in knocking the table over.

  Drunken patrons stumbled over each other to clear out. Crow helped one on his way, planting a hand in his face and pushing, hard. The man staggered backwards, flipping over a table with Chaplin-like grace and landing on his feet. He looked around, as though waiting for applause, and was barrelled into by a woman in a tight white dress, who cursed as her cocktail went down her front. Someone laughed.

  The band played on. Kyla blocked the Dreadnorts’ path to Rob, bum resting on the edge of a table. Heathy sneered, leant over to push her away. Kyla reached behind her, then whipped her arm around too fast to see. A tinkling smash. Shards of glass fell to the ground. Heathy staggered backwards, eyes wide, pawing at the holes in his grubby black t-shirt. Blood oozed down his front, blackening his jeans.

  ‘Fucking bitch!’

  She brandished the bloodied, broken schooner glass at Crow, who laughed and smacked down with the pool cue, catching her knuckles. She screamed and the remains of the glass fell and shattered.

  Rob shuffled forwards, still trying to clear his head. Crow advanced like a tank, pushing the table out of the way. He lashed out with the cue. Rob ducked, but not quite fast enough. The cue glanced off his head, sending a wave of black stars skating across his vision.

  Despite the beer and the drugs, the training took over. Rob slipped under Crow’s cue, grabbed it and twisted, pulling the bikie past his balance point so he speared head-first into the floor. He’d be lucky if he’d be able to turn his head in the morning.

  Rob lifted the pool cue and went for Heathy, who was advancing on Kyla with a hunting knife. As Heathy lashed out Kyla ducked back towards the band, who were only now starting to realise the gravity of the situation. The bass guitarist fumbled, the drummer fell silent.

  Rob moved into Heathy’s blind spot. Kyla backed right up to the low riser the band were set up on and Chucky stepped forward, trying to put himself between Kyla and the bikie.

  Rob slammed the pool cue down on Heathy’s head, hearing the crack and feeling it down his arms, all the way to his damaged spine. The pool cue split with the force of the impact. The bikie dropped, a bag of meat and bones.

  Kyla kicked him in the face, once, then again. Now that the band had fallen silent, Rob could hear the sirens in the distance. Chucky was still reaching out, backlit by a golden light that made him look almost beatific.

  Rob grabbed Kyla, pulled her away. ‘Come on, we’ve got to go.’

  He glanced over at Crow, who was starting to lift himself off the beer-soaked carpet. As he pulled his head up, he left a couple of teeth behind.

  ‘Kyla. Come on!’

  Chucky raised a hand. ‘Godspeed, dude. Godspeed.’

  Rob felt a ridiculous amount of affection for the beefy blues player. He yanked Kyla through the mob of rubberneckers, out the front doors and down the steps onto the pavement. Rob surveyed the scene, looking for further threats. The Harleys waited at the curb. The Story Bridge towered above them. The sirens were louder out here and as he watched he saw flashers gliding over the bridge.

  At the bottom of the steps Kyla gravitated towards the bikes. Rob tightened his grip on her hand. As she turned to follow him she spat at them.<
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  They ran towards the river. Rob’s back hummed with pain. Beside him, Kyla spewed an endless string of expletives.

  At the riverbank there was an old jetty, a weak light illuminating the sign: Holman St Ferry. Rob’s face was drenched in sweat. He’d left his painkillers on the table.

  ‘Those fucking cocksuckers,’ Kyla said. ‘Why can’t they leave us alone?’

  The sirens drew near, then cut out. He looked out over the dark mass of the Brisbane River, and the buildings beyond, lit up and reflected in the water. A ferry chugged towards the jetty.

  ‘They’re never going to leave us alone,’ Rob said.

  ‘Why can’t we just go to the police with what we’ve got?’

  Rob shook his head. ‘Because it’s pointless, unless we take them down completely. The whole lot. From Cardinal down to those fuckers.’

  He nodded towards the Shelter Bar. He pulled Kyla close to him.

  ‘It won’t be long. Redwood’s putting together a few things. And when it’s done, we’re going to blow the lid off this thing and they’re all going down.’

  The ferry pulled in. In the golden light from its cabin, Rob could see the tears rolling down Kyla’s face.

  ‘I think we should visit Ahmed,’ Rob said.

  Kyla pulled away from him. Her eyes twinkled in the gloom. ‘Are you serious?’

  Rob shrugged. ‘I know you don’t believe in it. And I’m skeptical myself. But we need all the help we can get.’

  She rested her head against his chest.

  ‘Come on, it’ll all be over soon,’ he said.

  ‘I hope so,’ Kyla said. Barely a whisper. ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Hey, Johnsons don’t quit, right? Isn’t that what I told you when we first started going out?’ Rob said.

  ‘I think it was after you first asked me out. After I said no,’ Kyla said, a fragile smile touching her lips.

  ‘Whatever,’ he said, and she laughed.