Chapter 16

Harry was in the spare room sorting through boxes when his phone rang. He ran back to the bedroom, where the phone was plugged into the wall. Christine.

‘Hi, Chris,’ he said. ‘Yeah, I’m still not feeling the best. I’m going to take things easy at home again today.’

He didn’t have to fake the sniffles; the dust from the boxes had set him off. Christine said she hoped he was feeling better soon.

Harry returned to the spare room. At the bottom of the box was a manila folder, bursting at the seams, held shut with old rubber bands. He took it out to the dining room table and set it down. He was already sweating, but seeing the folder after all these years gave him heart palpitations. It brought back so many memories.

SWENSON was scrawled across the front in red pen. He remembered the day he wrote it. Things were going well, not just with study but in general. Boozy afternoons at the rec club, reinforcing the illusion that he and his classmates were ‘real’ journalists. There was a sense of camaraderie with the rest of the students in his year – Redwood aside. The Swenson story had taken on a life of its own. The documents associated with it had multiplied until the story needed its own folder. He shook his head.

The story was good.

Maybe, but Harry couldn’t deal with it right now.

On impulse, he grabbed his notebook and keys and headed out the door. In a few minutes he was standing outside Bill’s house. He pushed through the gate, waded through the overgrown garden and into the cool shade under the verandah.

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 any more.

‘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.’