Authors: Anne C. Petty
December 1969
“Shit, mate, that was close!”
Ned opened his eyes and saw Ollie standing over him. Just a few feet away lay the body of a death adder, its head blown off by the pistol in Ollie’s right hand.
Suzanne ran to Ned and threw her arms around him, holding on so tightly he had to pry her hands loose. “It’s alright, baby, it didn’t strike. See, I’m okay, you can let go.” He took another long look at Ollie. “I didn’t know you could shoot like that.”
“That’s what you’re payin’ me the big bucks for, matey, to save yer skin from the likes o’ them.” He kicked at the limp serpentine body and retrieved his flashlight. Shining its wide beam over all the recesses of the cave, Ollie appeared satisfied that no more surprises hid in the darkened corners. “All clear,” he announced.
Ned got to his feet, brushing dirt from his shorts and legs.
“God, Neddy, if that thing had …” Suzanne let the sentence hang, her eyes wide with fear.
“Shh. It didn’t, and I’m fine. This is the Outback. Those things are going to happen. We just can’t afford to be careless.”
“I know,” she said, breathless. “But I would die if something happened to you.”
Ned bit his lip. “Then I’ll have to be even more careful.” He smiled and kissed the top of her head, hoping to mask his own fears.
Ollie cleared his throat. “Perhaps you two’d like a cool swim after all this excitement?”
They followed him back out to the main cave entrance and up a tumble of limestone boulders to another terrace. At eye level, a stream of clear water emerged from a cleft in the rocks and splashed down into an elongated shallow pool, then spilled over the side and plunged freefall to the river below.
Ollie took off his boots and socks, emptied the pockets of his shirt and shorts, and waded into the pool fully clothed. He sat down in the cool water and cupped it in his hands, thoroughly dousing his face and hair. “C’mon in, the water’s fine,” he said, leaning back against a rock ledge.
Ned and Suzanne followed suit, and soon all three of them were sitting in the limestone basin. Ned lifted his face so that the spray coming out of the rock wall fell over his head and shoulders. It was ice cold and pure heaven to his sweat-soaked body. He sat in the water long after the other two had climbed out and set about making lunch from their provisions. He’d felt fevered when the Quinkan had invaded his mind back in the smaller cave, but now he was clear-headed and fully resolved to go forward and defeat this thing. And not just for himself. If he and Suzanne ever had children, he wanted to make sure their lives would be free of its shadow.
“Hey man,” he called, standing up and feeling the cold water run down his legs like ice melting in the heat. “Why were some of those figures painted upside down?”
“Those are yer sorcery images. Aboriginal legends say that if a man is buried head down, when it comes time for the spirit to exit his nose and fly off to heaven, it can’t get out, so instead, he’ll be trapped between worlds as a ghost.”
“And a spear aimed at the head?”
Ollie brushed flies away from his face. “Could be a curse. When a doctor-man points a bone at somebody, even in a painting, it usually means bad business. Sometimes you’ll find sorcery pictures like that hidden way back in the darkest corners where nobody’ll see ‘em, prolly to keep the curse a secret.”
Ned wrung water from his hair and went to join the others; he was hungry, but his mind was elsewhere. That bit in Ollie’s yarn about getting trapped between worlds had struck a chord, and he couldn’t stop thinking about it.
They ate a brief lunch of fruit, cheese, and tinned corned beef, and drank their fill of the cold spring water, refilling their canteens and water bottles for the trek down into the gorge. Ned walked out to the edge of the terrace and looked across the chasm to the other side. The reddish sandstone cliff was eroded into horizontal striations and elongated chunks like a Titan-sized brick wall peppered with tufts of green that he realized were the tops of trees and vine thickets. He spotted at least three narrow waterfalls tumbling down the flanks of the cliff into the gorge. The flat top of the bluff was covered in a green gum forest as far as he could see. Directly in front of him, the sky was bright blue with clumps of bluish-gray stratus clouds mirroring the formations of the land. Far away to the west, the sky took on a magenta tinge, and the clouds were darker underneath, pregnant with more rain.
“We got dozens of caves and shelters like this one all along the cliffs on both sides of the gorge,” Ollie was saying. “I’ve explored a few, but I thought we might go further down toward the river and look for an overnight campsite.”
Ned sat down, closed his eyes, and tried to calm his breathing, waiting to see if he could slip into his “seeing far” state. At once, he felt the Taipan Ancestor enter the top of his head and slide down his spine, wrapping her cool golden body around his shoulders and chest. Trembling, he framed the question in his mind: Where’s the site I’m looking for? Immediately the answer came, whispered in his mind like the flick of a forked tongue in his ear: Below.
He opened his eyes, and the sensation faded, to be replaced by a sudden urge to jump up and run. The Ancestor was gone, but Ned knew Ollie was right; they should go down into the gorge. He was feeling the magnet’s pull again, so intensely now that he would have dropped everything and flung himself over the cliff in order to get there as fast as possible if his rational brain had not held the impulse in check.
He stood up. “It’s down there,” he said. “I’m certain.”
“Down we go, then,” Ollie said, hoisting his backpack. He walked out onto the giant’s staircase again. “I’ll go first and find the best way down. Just follow in my footsteps, and take yer time. Plenty of dingoes and roos have gone up and down these rocks, so we can, too.”
Ned felt lightheaded, stepping downward, following Ollie and Suzanne, but he kept his difficulties to himself. The sooner they got to the bottom the better, and he wasn’t about to stop them so he could sit down and wait for the feeling to subside. Looking at his arms, he received a momentary shock as he realized the markings were gone. Not one scale pattern anywhere. He rubbed his palms vigorously over his forearms, but nothing appeared. He was suddenly, inexplicably, unmarked. Confounded, Ned stumbled after the others, his only clear objective now being to reach his destination somewhere at the bottom and face his worst nightmares.
* * *
The sun was low on the horizon by the time they stood on a ledge just above the waterline. The river was high in its rocky bed, and there was no sandy bank on which to camp. But from this vantage point, reddish light from the setting sun hit the rock wall above them at an angle, revealing a sizeable shelter not far from where they stood. A cluster of paperbark trees obscured the entrance, and further down, red gums stood with their feet drowned in the river. A small waterfall beside the shelter’s entrance made a shining trail of silver down the ruddy cliff.
Ollie led them along the sandstone slabs and boulders, picking his way carefully and poking the clumps of shrubs and grass for snakes with a walking stick he’d fashioned from a fallen tree branch. At last they were all safely standing just outside the overhang of the shelter. Even in the fading light, they could see clusters of red spatter-painted hand stencils on both sides of the sloping entrance and finely executed paintings on the rock walls within. Beside the entrance, the weathered image of a large dingo was incised on a boulder that was vaguely dog-shaped, with rounded body, small head, and ear-like protrusions. Inside, more images of dingoes adorned the walls of the cave.
“Dingo Dreaming,” Ollie stated. “Dingo clan people used this site.”
Thunder boomed in the distance, promising more rain pouring onto the land and into the rivers and streams before the night was over. The shelter seemed high enough above the river, and after he’d checked the inside of the cave for “nasties,” Ollie pronounced it a suitable campsite.
Ned dropped his backpack on the stony floor of the cave and sank to his knees, bathed in sweat. Voices filled his head, cresting and ebbing away, like the drumming sound of rain moving up the canyon. His vision blurring, he stared at the rock wall, trying to make out the tall reddish figures in conical headdresses topped with what appeared to be tassels or feathers. They did not seem to be done in the same style as those they’d seen in the large cave near the top of the bluff.
“Are these Quinkans?” he asked.
“Older,” said Ollie, looking them over. “That mob,” he said, indicating the largest of the humanoid figures, “those are Ancestral beings, but they don’t look like any Quinkan figures I’ve ever seen. My guess would be that this is a ceremonial site, not a habitation shelter.”
Suzanne stood beside him, looking at the parade of figures. “How can you tell?”
“Well, first off, there’s that engraved rock by the entrance. Carvings like that are old, I’m talkin’ thousands of years. And there’s no occupational stuff, like campfire ashes, stone tools or shards, animal bones, or bark and wood sleeping platforms that I’ve seen in other caves. And look,” he said, walking away from the entrance. “There’s a dished area further back, see? For dancing, or some kind of rituals, I’d reckon. And here we have a stone slab long enough for somebody to lie on, or be held down on. My guess is that we have an initiation site, where boys would get circumcised and a tooth knocked out or senior men would be inducted into shamanic mysteries of some kind.”
“Fascinating,” said Suzanne. Her voice sounded hollow and distant to Ned, as if she were speaking through a tunnel. Other voices were calling him, pulling him. Ned staggered to his feet.
“It’s here,” he gasped. “The place is here.”
“What? Are you sure?” Suzanne took his hand, but he was having difficulty distinguishing the warmth of her flesh from the fevered state of his own body.
“Not in this room, this gallery, but further back and down. There’s a chamber connected to this room somewhere.” He was beginning to see the outline in his head of the interconnected cave system and of the place where it exited through a split in the rock at the base of the cliff, except that now, during the Wet, that particular point of entry and the distinctive rock formation that marked it were under water. He would have loved to be able to go down to the riverbed and compare it to his drawings, but that wasn’t possible.
Ollie stood in the cave entrance, looking out at the canyon. “It’s getting dark. We ought to be making a fire.”
Ned stumbled and nearly fell. “I don’t think I can help you,” he said, holding onto Suzanne for support.
“No worries, I’ll go back to those trees we passed and collect some fodder.” He was looking at Ned with a frown. “You look right knackered. Just sit and I’ll be back in an eye blink.” He strapped his long bush knife to his belt and went out of the cave.
Ned gripped Suzanne by the shoulders. His heart was thudding in his chest to the point of breathlessness. “I can’t wait for him.”
“Neddy, what do you mean?”
“Got to go now.”
Suzanne grabbed his arms and then sucked in her breath. She was looking at his forearms.
“I know,” he said, breathing hard. “They’re gone. Please let go of me, Suzanne. There’s a way into the cavern below, I can see it, but I don’t want you to follow.”
“Ned, please wait till Ollie comes back, and we’ll all go together.” She was gripping his arms with her thin, birdlike fingers.
Ned shook his head; he heard the Rai calling in their whispery voices. He went to his backpack and took out the drawing of the tjuringa and stuffed it in his pocket. It was then he remembered the quartz chunk Ollie had given him and that he’d kept in his shorts pocket; it was hot against his thigh. He pulled out his own flashlight and inspected the back of the cave, looking for an opening that would lead to the sacred site he knew was somewhere below.
Thunder rolled across the top of the bluffs and echoed inside the canyon.
“Ned, I’m begging you, please wait.”
He was desperate now and pushed her hands away. “Here it is,” he said, looking up. The flashlight beam rested on a small opening in the rough rock wall where the ceiling sloped down just above his head. He found footholds and handholds in the rock, and before Suzanne could stop him, he’d scrambled up to the opening and crawled inside. He could hear Suzanne’s distraught voice behind him, but her words no longer registered. The only words he could hear were in the high keening song of the Rai, and a harsher voice that cackled and hissed in a rasping counterpoint.
Ned found himself wedged into a very narrow tunnel that barely accommodated his man’s frame with its heavy boots. In his mind flashed the image of thin, dark-skinned people about the size of Suzanne moving on their bellies toward the chamber below. He pushed with his toes and worked his way over the rough surface of the tunnel, turning his shoulders left and then right, working his way down the sloping passage until it widened abruptly, and he fell headlong into the chamber below as the small ledge at the end of the tunnel crumbled and gave way.
Ned landed painfully, face-first, on a tumble of rocks and lay dazed for a moment. Sitting up, he tasted blood. Touching his mouth, he discovered that his upper lip was split. Touching it warily with his tongue, he also realized that one of his front teeth was broken off.
“Shit,” he whispered to himself. His voice sounded thick and deadened in the still air of the chamber. He sneezed and wiped snot, dust, and blood on the front of his T-shirt. The air made him choke, and it smelled like a rat’s nest or a snake’s den. Gripping the flashlight, he looked around. The room was narrow and high, with many paintings on the slanting walls. Dingo images were prominent, but also ibis, flying foxes, barramundi and other fish, crocodiles, turtles, numerous snakes from only a few inches long to monumental serpents that stretched across an entire wall. Also prominent were Ancestor figures with large round heads and wavy lines emanating from them like rays of the sun. Ned was so astonished, he almost forgot the pain in his mouth.