Dead Man Walking - Part 1

“...denn die Todten reiten schnell.”

-Dracula, Bram Stoker

There was a dead man living amongst us; we just didn’t know it to start with.

I say “living” but you know what I mean. Actually, at that stage, he was more like a Schrödinger’s corpse, neither dead nor alive, and we wouldn’t know the answer to that question until someone lifted the lid on the box where he’d been mislaid. The first I knew about it was when his girlfriend came into the store.

I have people come in all the time looking to put posters up in my windows. These are usually A4-sized photocopies advertising local events like piano recitals, auric healing workshops or weekend fairs. I draw the line at commercial activities such as French language lessons or car sales – anything that’s a blatant plea for a quick buck or a career advancement; I aim for things that front good causes, or which have a community focus. Sometimes, just out of curiosity, I let someone put up their notice just to see what happens – like Michaela the self-professed shaman (barista by daylight), who offers drum and smoke-lodge workshops to enable people to “self-heal” by getting into contact with their spirit animals. Tom almost snorted his coffee when he saw the sign.

‘Self-healing through spirit guides?’ The sneer on his lips was palpable in his tone.

‘I’d run the notion past Louise before I strapped on my bovver-boots if I were you,’ I cautioned. Tom and Louise had been going out together for a little over a year now and spirit guides to Louise were like honey to flies; a casual dismissal could rain down domestic disharmony.

Tom had changed somewhat in the face of his new lifestyle arrangement. Gone were the faded black t-shirts displaying the logos of serious musos past, like Depeche Mode and The Joy Division; nowadays, he wore lurid tie-dyed and rainbow-printed explosions sourced from the many alternative lifestyle shops that pepper the ‘Mountains. Today he was wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt with a hyper-colour image of Ganesha, probably taken from some Hare Krishna literature of yore. I clearly saw Louise’s hand in this, along with the futile ponytail that Tom was cultivating at the nape of his otherwise bald head; that he still wore his black leather jacket and stovepipe jeans I cheered as his line in the sand against a complete makeover.

‘Seriously?’ Tom turned from the window as I finished pricing a stack of Roger Hargreaves kid’s books at a dollar each for the front sale table. ‘She claims here that her workshop will enable the dedicated believer to find success in their workplace. What: is some phantom gerbil going to whisper stock tips in their ears?’

I winced at the facetious ghost reference – they make me think of things I’d rather not poke at too much. ‘Probably not,’ I replied, ‘but people like to align themselves with clans and teams: your totem is a kangaroo? Guess what? So’s mine. Snap! We feel good about each other. It’s like football; or astrology...’

‘You’re using pseudo-science to justify New Age fruitiness?’

I waved my stack of Mr Men books dismissively. ‘Not at all. I’m just saying that we’re social creatures and we like to belong: I read William Faulkner; you read William Faulkner; we get along. Maybe that’s how we understand the world, by grouping ourselves within it.’

‘So, if my totem is a brown snake, I should get together with other brown snakes and form a book club, to better understand the universe?’

‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘All I know is that Michaela believes in it, other people believe in it, and she thinks that she can better peoples’ lives with her workshops; she’s not simply out to make money from other peoples’ gullibility...’

‘...at $35 a head,’ Tom cut in.

‘So, she has overheads.’ I fanned my stack of Hargreaves’ booklets and held them out to him.

‘You know who buys these most of all?’

‘Mr Men books? Dunno: kids?’

‘Adults do. Grown-ups.’ I held them out: ‘go on, take your pick. Which one do you like best? Mr Bossy? Mr Happy? Which one is your totem?’

Tom looked at me coolly, then swigged his coffee. ‘Touché,’ he said.

A ginger blur zoomed across the floor from the shelf of books on pregnancy issues and coalesced as a husky cat on the doormat, anxiously circling. Seconds later, the bell above the door jingled and Louise pushed her way in.

‘Ooh!’ she chortled, her poncho flapping and filling the shop with her patchouli perfume, ‘you have Michaela’s poster in your window! Tom! We should do this course!’

Fortunately Tom had his back to her, otherwise she couldn’t have missed the expression of distaste that crossed his features. As she moved to the counter, the Marquis jumped up beside her and gratefully received his dose of ear-scratching, his purrs thundering across the room. The Marquis is inscrutable in all things save this: he will drag himself across broken glass for a fondling from Louise.

‘Oh!’ she cried, riffling through my book stack as I poured her a cup of herbal tea, ‘do you have Little Miss Chatterbox? She was always my favourite.’ I cocked an eyebrow at Tom; he gave me a black look.

There was a squeal from Louise: ‘You do! You do! Can I have this one?’

‘It’s yours,’ I said. ‘What are you guys up to today?’

Tom drained his mug and thumped it down on the counter, causing the Marquis to dart him an annoyed yellow glare. ‘We’re off to talk with the publisher,’ he said, ‘we have to finalise the cover artwork for the book.’

We’d had an – incident – last year which closed the book on several unexplained deaths and disappearances in the local area. Tom and Louise had penned a narrative of those events and it had been enthusiastically snapped up by a big Sydney publishing house. Tom, an old hand at the True Crime genre with a couple of respectable titles under his belt, was au fait with publishing, but was thrown a little by the caveats and conditions which Louise had brought to the process. The insistence upon paper sourced from renewable stocks and the use of soy-based inks were complications that had bewildered everybody involved for awhile.

I rattled mugs back onto their tray. ‘What was wrong with the last image? I kind of liked that one.’

‘Too negative,’ said Louise flatly, putting her cup on the tray next to the coffee mugs, ‘I wanted something more uplifting. After all, this is a story about closure and the resolution of grief, not just a ghoulish police procedural...’

I could see how the blurry photograph of a woman’s fallen body criss-crossed with police tape might not convey that impression.

‘...And the model was a Capricorn,’ said Tom staring pointedly at his watch.

‘Was that an issue?’ I said.

‘Well, this book has more of a Gemini flavour to it,’ began Louise earnestly, ‘and her Earth energy was giving off a conflicting vibe for the project...’

‘Whoops!’ said Tom, ‘train’s almost here: we’d better get going. Don’t forget the house-warming tonight. See ya!’ They bustled out and I was left to get on with my day. I stroked the Marquis whose gaze was trailing in Louise’s wake: he offered me a look that indicated I was the least of lesser options, and hopped down to stalk off into Modern Literature.

‘Don’t you forget who buys the cat food ‘round here,’ I muttered after him.

The doorbell jingled again and someone walked into the store. I stood up from stashing the tray under the counter and turned to see who it was.

It was a woman in her mid-twenties, or thereabouts; she was dressed in leggings and a large, chunky white jumper of the cable-knit variety. She had clunky gym boots on her feet and she carried a plastic bag, like the ones that supermarkets dispense. She looked tired, as though she’d just missed out on a good night’s sleep. The main thing I noticed though, was that her long blonde hair hadn’t been brushed. If a guy comes into the shop with unbrushed hair, it says one of two things: he’s lazy, or this is some kind of hipster statement; when a woman hasn’t brushed her hair, something is up.

She stood looking around the store for a beat, then turned to face the windows. She shoved her hand into the bag she was carrying and pulled out a sheet of paper as she turned to look at me for the first time.

‘Can I help you with something?’ I asked.

‘Would it be alright...?’ she started, then closed her eyes. She took a deep breath, then started again. ‘Could I put one of these in your window? It’s very important.’ Her voice cracked a little as she handed me the piece of paper that she held.

On it was a large photo of a smiling young man. He was in a joyful mood, his sunglasses pushed up to the top of his head and sunlight playing across his features. He was unshaven and there was a glint of gold in his left ear, echoing another which ran along the side of his neck to disappear into his t-shirt. It was a cocky face; its owner sure of himself, in full-swing party mode, slightly flushed from too much beer and sun. His hair wasn’t brushed. In large letters above this picture was the word “MISSING”. I looked up at her.

‘Boyfriend?’ She nodded, pressing her closed hand to her mouth, her brows crinkling. It wasn’t a difficult guess: the photo had been cropped pretty harshly, but it couldn’t hide the curve of a woman’s cheek pressed against his; the upwards corner of smiling lips; a hint of flowing blonde hair; the same features belonging to the woman in front of me now. There was text at the bottom of the page which I scanned quickly, a phone number and some other details.

‘It says here that he went missing last night. He’s been unaccounted-for for, what? A little over eight hours?’

She nodded jerkily. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and that’s just so not like him. Josh wouldn’t have left me alone for so long without letting me know how he was doing. The police...’ She finished lamely.

‘You’ve spoken to the police?’

‘Yes,’ she waved vaguely towards the back of the shop. ‘At the Ridgemont. They’re...’ she trailed off again.

‘I’m sure they’re doing whatever they can,’ I said reassuringly. ‘In the meantime, leave this with me: I’ll have to move some stuff around in the window in order to put it up.’

‘Thank-you,’ she said nodding and switching her plastic bag to the other hand. ‘Anything you can do to help.’

I held open the door for her as she left: she ducked nervously through onto the pavement and walked towards the take-away shop. Huynh, the owner, was sweeping and putting out his signs, getting ready for the day’s trade. I watched as she pulled another page from her bag and passed it to him telling her story once more. There had to be at least two reams of paper in that bag.

I looked at the impudent young face on the page again, as I let the door jingle shut. Then, watching Huynh shake his head and try to give the poster back, I folded my copy in half and went back to my daily duties.

*****

That sounds a little harsh, I know.

I’m aware that the whole “24-hour wait before announcing that someone’s missing” thing is a load of codswallop; but even still, an eight-hour absence didn’t seem to me to be worth the drama. I sat on the poster while I went about some trivial tasks: dusting; sending off a CD order; organising a couple of sales that came through the website. Whilst sweeping the footpath outside later on, I noticed that there were a few posters on display in my front window advertising events which had come and gone. There was also the poster that Dylan had asked me to display for him, the one which showed a blurry humanoid object beneath the legend “Have YOU seen this CREATURE?” I don’t know what Dylan and his friends are smoking on a regular basis, but they’re convinced that Yowies stalk the surrounding bushland and they’re keen to document one in action. Like I said, sometimes I put up posters just to see what will happen. At that point it seemed a bit churlish of me to have a “wanted” poster up for imaginary beings and to not display one for a real person so, just after lunch, I reorganised the window and Blu-tacked up the poster of ‘Josh Henley: MIA’.

(The cynical side of me still thought that Josh was currently waking up in some stranger’s bed with a massive hangover and a lot of explaining to do.)

I allowed myself the luxury of closing ten minutes early that evening. Friday nights are a little slow: I normally sell a lot of DVDs through the afternoon then everyone packs off for pizza or fish and chips and beer and heads home to stay warm. There are the odd mopokes who have nowhere to go, so they try to see how long it will take before I insist they leave and close the doors. Today however, there was no-one to give the boot to. The Marquis had found a comfy spot on a high shelf on a stack of two Chronicles of the Twentieth Century: when I called him, he stared at me, yawned ostentatiously, then curled up once more. That was the signal that he’d be spending the night here, so I opened a tin of cat food and left him on guard duty.

As I locked the back door behind me, I could feel a chill rising in the air. The sky was heavy with thick cloud that piled up along the horizon; the fading sunlight was a dull silver gleam beyond. I wrapped my scarf around my neck and rattled my keys as I loped across to where my bike was parked, chained to a steel pole which supports the stairs of the neighbouring building. Trundling down the asphalt slope of the delivery dock I skirted Huynh’s rubbish bins and rolled onto the road: across the way were the wetlands surrounding the stream that winds its way past the village shops and down towards the valley beyond. My home lay a short distance across the highway and I pedalled quickly to build up some warmth against the chill dampness that was being carried on the rising wind.

Our village lies like a three-armed starfish on a rise at the mid-point where three valleys meet. The highway and the railroad keep pace with each other before parting company at our shops and moving either side of the western-most lobe of the township, meeting up again beyond. This was my part of town, the oldest bit of the settlement. Tom and Louise had moved into a house together on the easternmost limb of the disabled starfish, a section where the buildings were newer and pushing out into wilder tracts of the surrounding bush. They were having their house-warming this evening and, while I could have ridden my bike out to their joint, I had decided to bush-bash my way through the intervening gully and swampland: the difference between a 40-minute bike ride and a 20-minute hike made the choice a simple one.

(It’s not actually as difficult as it sounds: there are hiking trails all through the bush around here and they’re well-maintained by the National Parks people so that the tourists don’t get lost; at night, if you’re familiar with the terrain and carry a good torch, it’s a fairly easy walk.)

It was a stunning evening. The air was still and cool; cold enough so that a steady tramp wouldn’t raise an awful sweat. The sky quickly darkened overhead and a scattering of stars turned into a myriad as I got further away from the intermittent streetlights and the solar-powered garden lights that seem to have become a fad amongst my neighbours. The clouds were building and creeping slowly from the west, but I’d be well and truly arrived by the time they caused any major change to the weather. I turned left off the ragged edge of bitumen that served as a road and hopped onto the dirt trail that led down into the darkened gully beyond.

Flicking on my torch, I hopped down two sets of stairs made from rough cut logs, a half-dozen steps in each. On either side, dense foliage sprang up, hardy ti-tree and knotty banksias and grevilleas. I came to a choice of ways: left would take me into the village where my shop was; right would take me deeper into the bush and off towards Tom and Louise’s new place. Directly ahead of me – unseen but distinctly heard – was the stream winding its way towards the Jamison Valley to the south: this was a continuation of the waterway that ran behind the village and under the highway. For the next part of my journey, we would be keeping each other company. I took the right-hand path.

Every now and then, the trail would change its nature, from a hard-packed dirt track, to a walkway of thick planks, sunk into concrete moorings; sometimes there would be a bridge and I would pass over the chuckling water to stride along the opposite bank. I was deep now in what the local environment experts call ‘vertical swamp’: on either side of the stream, heavy stands of heather-like foliage clung tight to the steep sides of the gorge; this tight-knit undergrowth caught all the shed vegetation of the overhead canopy and formed a kind of natural sponge that held water suspended in its grip. The environment was damp and spiky, lush with a multitude of floral plants and a heaven for little birds and reptiles.

Of course, all that moisture meant that the path needed constant upkeep and there were stretches that had gone from dirt to black, squishy mud. These required a bit of smart jumping and hopping, and I was glad for the light of my torch.

I soon reached a point where I could hear the falls in the distance. The placid little stream I was trotting alongside, turned into a massive overflow up ahead, throwing itself off the towering cliff top and into the valley below. The spectacle of all that plummeting water brought tourists all year ‘round and, to give it its due, it certainly is an impressive sight. I stopped and pointed my light straight up: the branches and leaves of the gum trees shone eerily pale in the glow, backed by the blackness of the sky; clicking off the torch made them vanish to be replaced by the cold, indifferent sparkle of stars. A high breeze had picked up, and those distant lights winked on and off as invisible limbs moved across them.

I clicked my torch on again and flashed it along the trail: ahead there was a low, white-ish stone by the path and I headed towards it. Once there, I stepped from the track and moved carefully towards the bank of the stream, ducking beneath the arms of a bottle-brush tree. Below, the stream had widened and spread out at this point into a shallow pool, a waiting area before the final rush towards the cliffs. Several rocks thrust their heads up through the water and these formed a natural bridge across the pool to the far bank. This wasn’t part of the tourist walk; this was a short-cut known only to the locals.

The opposite bank was a bit tricky but I managed to make (semi) dry land without falling backwards into the water. From there it was a bit of a bush-bash up the slope but I was soon on a much overgrown track that didn’t see much use, by humans at least. I rattled my way up a scree slope and was soon standing on a jeep trail, used mainly by fire trucks and the National Parks service. From here it was only a quiet stroll in the starlight and a short detour along a fire-break before getting to Tom and Louise’s place. A pale golden moon began to lift above the tree line as I marched on, silvering the gum leaves as they flickered in the night breeze. The road shone white in the darkness and soon there was enough moonlight to orientate myself without the need of my torch.

On either side of the road, walls of ti-tree stood at head height, moaning as the wind soughed through them; distantly to my left, taller eucalypts nodded in the rising wind, their leaves crackling like faint static. I began playing an old Eighties tune in my head as I rounded a bend, when suddenly I saw it.

It had frozen - no doubt surprised by my sudden appearance - as I did the moment I clapped eyes on it. It was tensed ready for action and every line of it spoke of coiled strength. I couldn’t see its face because of the pervasive shadow but this also served to heighten the impact of the creature’s rough, shaggy hide. From what I could tell, its arms were held low in front, possibly helping it to rise up from the ground in response to my entrance; long strands of lighter-coloured hair thrashed around its head in the wind. I was in no doubt: I had just encountered...

*****

‘...A Yowie?’ Tom’s voice was incredulous. We were sitting in the backyard of his new house, at a picnic table under a wattle tree, its limbs be-jewelled with prayer-flags and tinkly wind-chimes, courtesy, no doubt, of Louise. The windy night air was alive with the buttery astringence of early wattle blooms.

I leaned forward and re-filled my glass with wine. ‘Scoff all you like,’ I said, ‘but for a moment there, that’s exactly what it looked like.’

‘A dead grass-tree?’ He cocked an eyebrow at me looking unconvinced. In the background, Marc Bolan was carrying on about a “hubcap diamond-star halo”, something that had never made much sense to me, and Louise and her friends were dancing energetically – if not skilfully – to it on the backyard patio.

‘I know now that it was a dead grass-tree,’ I said, ‘but at the time I didn’t. I had this instant, visceral response to it; something told me absolutely that it was a fellow being, but at the same time my brain was telling me that what I was seeing was something very, very wrong. Somethiong utterly inhuman...’

‘Uh-huh,’ Tom sucked at his beer bottle. ‘You been dipping into your Lovecraft section recently?’

‘Of course, it was dark,’ I went on, ticking off points on my fingers, ‘I didn’t have my torch on. But I wasn’t psyching myself up for an encounter, or daydreaming about monsters. It just looked – absolutely looked – like a human-shaped being, stopped suddenly while rising up off the ground. The lines of it; the shape of it, was one-hundred percent on the mark...’

‘Apophenia,’ Tom cut in.

‘Gesundheit,’ I responded. ‘What the hell is that?’

Tom leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he watched the dancers having fun.

‘Apophenia is the ability of the human mind to make meaningful images out of random data. It’s how we see shapes in clouds, or Jesus on a tortilla. You get a suggestion of something and your brain fills in the blanks, making you see something that isn’t really there.’

‘Okay,’ I said putting down my glass, ‘plausible theory. But even with the torch on it still looked real; even when I could see it for what it was. Creepy!’

Tom put down his beer bottle and stood up.

‘So what? Are you saying it was a Yowie that has the ability to turn into a dead grass-tree when surprised? You were taken in: end of funny story. Now are we going to let them have all the fun at this shindig?’ he jerked his thumb over to the patio as “Dancing Queen” began to break over the backyard to shrieks of delight.

‘Apophenia it is then,’ I conceded, standing up and following him across the lawn. I made sure my phone was handy as I walked: what Tom refers to as his “dance style” is nothing less than a kamikaze nose-thumbing at the genetic crap-shoot that landed him with haemophilia. Add a couple of beers and the risk factor goes through the roof...

*****

More soon!