Authors: Anne C. Petty
“I know that. I’d probably be dead by now except for her,” he said, clasping Suzanne’s hand tightly.
“Then I suggest you two crawl into yer sleeping bag and rest up. The site we’re heading for tomorrow is half a day’s trek into the scrub, and I don’t fancy carrying either of you on me back.”
* * *
The laughing call of a kookaburra ricocheted across the clearing. Early morning sunlight spilled down into the campsite from a sky painted in pale blues, pinks, and yellows. The day promised to be fine following a series of late-night downpours that rolled across the area after Ned and Suzanne had collapsed, exhausted and drenched in sweat, onto their sleeping bags. Igloo-shaped, the tent offered a mosquito-screened window and zippered doorway, which they’d been forced to close during the rain. Overall, it had been a hot, damp, and disturbing night with neither of them sleeping for any extended period.
They’d made a quick breakfast of pan-fried bacon and damper, a pasty bread made of flour, water, and salt that Ollie prepared while they packed up their tent. Finishing breakfast off with coffee and mango slices Mrs. Barnes packed for them, they were ready to head into the bush. Ollie locked and secured the Land Rover, and made one last check of the three packs they intended to carry with them. As Ned understood it, the plan was to trek down to the most accessible rock art galleries that Ollie knew about, explore the area further by following Ned’s instinct, camp near the river that night, and then head back to the campsite if they didn’t find anything.
Ned watched, mystified, as Ollie gathered up three rough-cut quartz crystals from the campfire’s edge. One was a shard half a hand long, milky around the base but clear at the point, and the other two were more rounded, golf-ball sized with clear faceted outcrops embedded in a coarse rock matrix. He didn’t remember seeing them when he’d gone to bed last night.
Ollie put the elongated one in the breast pocket of his bush shirt and buttoned the flap, then he held out his palm with the other two.
“Take these and keep ‘em on ya,” Ollie instructed. Ned took a one, rolling it in his palm. Suzanne took the other and tucked into the pocket of her shorts.
“What’s this for?” she asked.
“Quinkan protection,” Ollie said, adjusting his backpack straps over his shoulders. “Lore from my Aboriginal pals. Those aren’t just any old crystals. They got Senior-man business in ‘em, made for the express purpose of warding off the nasties. If a Quinkan slips up to the camp, the crystal activates so the firelight shines in their eyes and chases ‘em away, or something like that. My bushie friends never go to sleep in the Outback without putting ‘em around the campfire, and neither do I.”
Ned looked at Suzanne and saw what he thought was an expression of mixed bemusement and relief. Clearly, Ollie had decided to become an ally. The fact that he seemed to take the possibility of Quinkans at face value was the one thing that gave Ned any hope at all of succeeding in this hopeless task. The whole thing was madness, but now that Ollie knew, more or less, what they were searching for, Ned reckoned his chances at slightly better than even.
“Two things to watch out for,” Ollie said, standing at the edge of the trees. “Keep yer eyes peeled for green ant colonies in the trees and bushes, and watch for snakes in the grass. Stay close to me and shout out if you need help. There are a couple of springs we can drink from once we get closer to the river, but it’s a four-hour hike, so don’t drink up your water supply all at once. Ready, mates?”
Ned took a deep breath. He was jittery, knowing in the back of his mind that somewhere ahead waited terrible things. But he hoped at the same time that whatever he discovered would bring this whole miserable business to an end. Ollie set off into the trees, following a faint footpath.
“You next,” Ned said, motioning to Suzanne. She nodded and hoisted her backpack a little higher onto her shoulders, then followed Ollie. Ned took one last look at the campsite with its guardian Land Rover and turned to catch up with the other two. He was used to walking everywhere he needed to go, and was actually looking forward to the trek itself, as long as the weather stayed clear. It was warming up rapidly as the sun climbed higher, with an accompanying humidity that was enough to sap your strength long before your actual muscles were too tired to walk. Ned pulled his hair into a ponytail and stuffed in up under the bush hat that Ollie’s mother had insisted he take along. A slight breeze evaporated the sweat on his neck and face, so he wasn’t too uncomfortable, except for the unrelenting tiny black flies that bedeviled men and animals alike everywhere in the Outback. All you could do was swat at them.
Ollie made good time for the first couple of hours, which Ned kept track of with Grant’s watch, but by noon they were all slowing and stumbling over their feet on the increasingly rocky, tumbled scarp. House-sized chunks of weathered sandstone, half hidden among groves of eucalyptus, jutted toward the sky, wind-blasted temples for goannas and rock wallabies. At last, Ollie headed toward one surrounded by thin-leaved stringybarks and a single sentinel palm standing tall on its bare gray-brown trunk.
The pinkish-red sandstone block was as high as a two-story building and nearly as wide, with fissures splitting its face into many small crevices and a few large enough for several people to stand up in. The shade inside the largest split was blessed relief from the baking noontime sun. Ned took his hat off and fanned his face, swatting flies. Suzanne flopped down on the sandy floor of the shelter, heedless of a couple of fat centipedes crawling in tandem near her foot.
“Look,” said Ollie. He pointed over his head.
Ned caught his breath. A panorama of beasts and birds painted in ochres of red and yellow, some with white outlines, crossed the ceiling of the gallery as if on parade: kangaroos or wallabies, crocodiles, dingoes, scrub turkeys, fish, flying foxes, and more. The dingoes were of particular interest because they were remarkably similar to the one he’d drawn in the tjuringa sketch.
Suzanne pulled her camera out of her backpack. “I don’t know if this will come out,” she said, “since it’s so dark up under here, but here goes.” She aimed up at the rock ceiling and clicked the shutter.
“You might want to save yer film,” Ollie said. “This is only the first gallery on the way to the bluffs and the river. Lots more where these came from.”
“Any Quinkans?” Ned was craning his head back to see the entire scope of the paintings.
Ollie gave him a look. “If you mean paintings, I’d have to say no, but I’ll show you a place pretty soon that’s chock-a-block with ‘em. We’ll hang out a bit here whilst the heat of the day passes, then we’ll see what we can find.”
“Cursed flies!” exclaimed Suzanne, swatting at her face.
“Yah, Aboriginals use a paste of animal fat to keep ‘em off,” laughed Ollie.
“What I wouldn’t give for a cold shower,” said Ned, thinking that he’d never been so hot and sticky and miserable in his whole life, even though he’d grown up in the Florida swamps with no air conditioning.
“That’s on the way, too,” said Ollie. “Nice little spring and waterfall when we get to the bluff. Cool you off right smart.”
They lapsed into silence, listening to the black flies buzz, when Ned realized that Ollie was watching him closely.
“What’s on your mind, man?” He stretched himself out on the ground beside Suzanne.
“Just wondering if you ‘feel’ anything,” Ollie said.
“No, I don’t. But I’m a little spaced out, just being this close to places where Aboriginals once lived. I sense their presence, in a dim way, like breath on the back of my neck.”
“How’s your arms?”
Ned held them out. “Faded a bit.”
Ollie took a look. “I dunno how you live with that. I’d be fed up to the back teeth long before I got to be your age.” He stood and stretched. “Ready to move out?”
They shouldered their packs once more and moved out of the shade into the early afternoon haze and heat. Although white-hot sunlight blazed down on them, far to the west the sky was darkening with a massive buildup of purple thunderheads.
Ollie led them on an uphill track through gray-white box eucalyptus and spindly melaleuca, past an occasional termite mound, and through waist-high grass where Ned narrowly avoided plowing through a massive green-ant nest. He brushed the outer fringes of the yard-long colony with his knee where it was pasted with silken larval glue across a thicket of vines. A single ant clung to his thigh, pincers biting for all it was worth, but he was several feet down the trail before the rest came boiling out to see what had disturbed their tiny civilization.
“Goddamn, that hurts like shit!” Ned swatted the ant away and rubbed the swelling red spot where it had dug in, imagining what it would feel like to have your entire torso covered in such bites. Ned shivered in spite of the heat, realizing that, in a way, he already knew. His arms and chest weren’t bothering him at the moment, but when the scale designs were pulsing, it could be close to unbearable.
They were off the track now, and Ollie stopped occasionally to check his pocket compass. At the top of a sharp stony ridge, he came to a sudden halt. “Have a go at that,” he said, grinning.
Ned and Suzanne scrambled up the rocky scree and stepped onto a narrow plateau with a vista that was literally hundreds of miles worth of sloping scarps and rolling hills covered in an ocean of gum trees. The edge of the bluff dropped off steeply to form a narrow gorge with sparkling water far below. Ned felt dizzy looking at it; he estimated the drop at many hundreds of feet down. Riverine red gums filled in much of the area around the base of the cliff, their smooth, pale trunks thrusting nearly a hundred feet high along the sandstone wall. From that far away, their blue-gray foliage appeared dusted with tiny white stars in a wet-season flush of blossoms.
Ned held his breath. It wasn’t the exact plateau in his paintings, but it was damned close. He had the sudden urge to leap over the edge to the bright ribbon of water below. Gulping, he stepped away from the precipice.
“Good god, Ollie, are we going down there?” Suzanne asked, hanging tightly to the trunk of a bloodwood rooted into the sandstone at the top of the ridge.
“Dunno, the route’s up to his nibs here.” He nodded toward Ned. “There’s a huge shelter just below us that you can’t see from here ‘coz it’s cut back underneath this lookout. You can access it from an ancient rockfall my Aboriginal mates call the giant’s staircase. Want to give it a go?”
Ned nodded, still shaken from the brief couple of seconds where he’d imagined himself diving over the edge of the cliff.
Ollie turned away from the plateau and backtracked for a couple of yards, and then took a side trail that paralleled the rim. Then it angled down into a cut in the rocks, and Ned could see that indeed a steep ridge of boulders and sandstone slabs allowed them to carefully work their way down to another broader shelf some fifty feet below.
A flock of rainbow lorikeets swept up the gorge, calling and trilling, their shrill voices filling the canyon. The rocky terrain sprouted tufts of saltbush and other tough grasses, and an attractive flowering shrub Ollie called a goanna bush clung to the steep incline in a showy display of small lavender-pink flower sprays drooping like fern fronds.
At last they found themselves on level ground, with the scarp falling sharply away to their left and on their right a cave entrance tall enough to drive a double-decker bus through. Somewhere nearby, the sound of trickling water made continual background music.
“Y’see?” said Ollie. “Have a gander at these beauts.”
Ned followed him inside the cave where it was blessedly cool. At first it was too dark to see much, but as his eyes adjusted, an incredible array of figures surrounded them on nearly every rock surface. He recognized the usual conglomeration of birds, fish, and reptiles, including a vast undulating yellow snake that stretched completely across one long back wall. But then he spotted the dark red ocher figures fronting the entrance to a smaller cave and his blood froze. He guessed what they were.
“Here’s yer Quinkans,” Ollie said cheerfully. “These fellas are just the advance guard, so to speak. Lots more through there.” He indicated the entrance to the inner cave, which was still high enough for a man to walk through without stooping. “Take me torch and have yerself a look,” he said, pulling his flashlight from his pack and offering it to Ned.
But Ned was rooted to the spot, staring up into the sightless white eyes of the nearest Quinkan. It loomed over them, larger than life, with arms outstretched and the seven digits of each hand splayed wide. Flaps like floppy dog ears sprouted from both sides of its head, and a long penis hung down between its thin legs. A host of similar, smaller figures were clustered around it.
Wordlessly, he took Ollie’s flashlight and stepped through the entrance of the smaller chamber. Steadying his shaking hands, he played the light over the walls. More dark red Quinkans in varying sizes and shapes leapt up the walls and over the ceiling, flanked by numerous shapes of crocs, emus, and snakes. An inverted male figure with what looked like a barbed spear protruding from its head dominated a panel off to his left.
On the ceiling, directly over his head, an enormous spotted dingo rode the back of a wide-bodied snake painted in white and red crosshatch designs. Ned stared, open-mouthed. He jerked and nearly dropped the flashlight as the hissing voice of his tormentor announced itself in his head.
“Welcome, Neddy,” it rasped across his brain cells. Ned felt himself slipping into a trance state, his fingers losing their grip on the flashlight and his knees collapsing under him. The death adder rose up in his fading vision, balancing vertically on its banded stocky body, its flat arrow-shaped head displaying impossibly long fangs phosphorescent in the dim light. Ned hit the floor, and a moment later a loud clap of thunder popped near his ear. Suzanne shrieked.
Chapter 29