Beyond the Labyrinth

By Robert Menzies

Normie, a Vietnam veteran, is now an itinerant drunk who makes his home in a hidden cave. When exploring his new home he discovers a labyrinth of caves and makes a grizzly discovery of human remains.
As he explores deeper into the caves he makes another startling discovery: a hidden world inside the labyrinth, in which human beings exist, completely cut off from the rest of the world.
Normie is able to connect the discovery of the human remains with the inhabitants of the hidden world, with some frightening and devastating consequences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Menzies
• Release date: Jan 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310219788

Robert Menzies

Robert Menzies is a retired school principal who now lives with Merilyn his wife of forty-two years at Hope Island on Queensland Australia's Gold Coast. Robert has a daughter Jacquie, a son Ben, a daughter-in-law Natasha and two grandchildren William and Isabella.

Book preview

Chapter 1

He took a good long slug of his bottle of rum, and then chose the passageway that was easiest to enter. It started off okay and he had to bend over slightly to prevent hitting his head on the roof. But as it lengthened, it also became smaller, and soon Normie was crawling on his hands and knees, wishing ruefully he’d been able to bring his rum with him.

The walls of the passage were dry, devoid of any rivulets of water or moss. The floor was also dry, not damp and muddy as many caves are. This aided his progress considerably.

He shone his torch onto the roof of the passageway and found it to be in a similar state. Small stalactites were beginning to form telling him that, geographically this was a fairly young cave, maybe a hundred thousand years old.

He had spent some time hiding out in similar caves in Vietnam, and he knew from these experiences that in dry caves, stalactites formed much more slowly than in their wet counterparts, so it was difficult to tell from this just how old the cave really was.

He persevered with his crawling and before long the passageway began to open out. Soon he was able to walk again, albeit in the manner of the hunchback of Notre Dame.

Suddenly the passageway opened out into another cave. He shone his torch furtively around the walls, only to see more ancient-looking Aboriginal paintings and a large pool of jet-black water in the centre. There was also another circle of blackened rocks nearby which had been used as a campfire.

He shone his torch up onto the ceiling expecting to see more bats, but could see none. The passageways were probably too small for bats to fly through – at least he hoped that was the case. In the fetid darkness, the air reeked of the water’s coldness as it dripped incessantly from the cave walls and of fresh bat droppings recently added to the hundreds of layers of guano after thousands of years of habitation by these evil-smelling, cat-eyed little creatures of the underworld.

Then he saw something that made his blood run cold.

In the corner were the rotted remains of a human body. The body was lying on the floor of the cave – had been there for some time. The flesh and most of the clothes had rotted away leaving only a white bony skeleton. But every bone was in place and it was obvious that it was the skeleton of a human being – man or woman – he couldn’t tell. He broke out into a cold sweat, despite the permeating coldness of the cave. He swung his torch around to see if he could see anything else, but to no avail.

Moving closer, he took another look at the skeleton in the freezing air. In order to get a better view he brushed a greasy knot of hair from his face and took a wary step towards the grizzly sight before him. As he came closer, his nostrils dilated with the rancid odour of decay. Whilst the body’s flesh had rotted away, some of the clothing was still intact, hanging off the bones and lying in rotting pieces on the rocky floor.

He stood staring at it for quite some time, unable to drag his eyes away. How had this person got here? Had he or she come here to die or had the body been brought here for concealment? He shone his torch carefully around the mossy walls and rocky floors to see if he could find a clue.

He wandered a little farther away and began exploring the rest of the cave. It was very similar in nature to his own, but it had no light source as his did. It was larger than his, and had a number of thin, narrow passages leading off in different directions.

Suddenly the ray of his torch caught something shiny as he swung it around the walls of the cave. An object had glinted in the feeble ray of the torch as it passed over it. He retraced the path of the light ray – and there it was again.

He crawled carefully over to the source on his hands and knees, dragging himself slowly across the rocky floor. Concentrating the ray of his torch on exactly the same spot, he was able to make out a rusty and tarnished object with only enough shine left on it to provide a feeble glint. He picked it up and examined it – it was an old bracelet. He placed it in his pocket, knowing there was no point in trying to examine it under torchlight. He reckoned that once he got it into the sunlight he’d be able examine it more carefully. It just might provide him with a clue as to the identity of its owner.

Normie had seen enough. He turned back into his passageway and made the arduous trek, crawling on hands and knees back to his own cave. His half-full bottle of rum was still waiting patiently for him, beckoning him to take a hearty swig.

He downed the whole bottle in a couple of gulps to calm his nerves, then grabbed his sawn-off shotgun, checked that it was loaded, and placed it carefully on top of his swag. Moving to the cave entrance, he gazed down at the scene before him. In contrast to the coldness deep within the cave, the air was hot and smelled like fresh cow manure and wet hay.

In the distance he could see the sharply punctuated shape of the Blue Mountains as they emerged out of the bushy horizon like a camel’s hump. He gazed at the sparkling little mountain stream that bubbled away below him, separating and insulating his cave from the rest of the world. It meandered gently through the tall gum trees, their leaves fluttering in the morning sunlight like millions of moths around an open flame.

He retraced his steps to the inside of his cave and lay down on his rough old moth-eaten mattress, still clutching his beloved shotgun.

He did not sleep well that night.

Chapter 2

Up until now, Normie had been living in a disused old dairy, but upon discovering the cave, he decided to move in for the rest of the summer.

Life was like that. Never stay in one place for too long, even if you like it. The old dairy hadn’t been the worst place he’d lived in, not by a long shot. The smell of old cow-shit, the cold concrete floors and the drafty holes in the rotten timberwork hadn’t made it five star accommodation, but at least it’d been out of the weather and people had left him alone; that was all Normie wanted from life these days.

Ever since Vietnam, Normie had been a plonko. When he came back from ’Nam in seventy-two at the tender age of twenty-four he’d been a broken man. Agent Orange had stuffed up his head and his lungs, not to mention the trauma he’d suffered from being stuck in the tropical jungles at the relentless mercy of the Viet Cong. He’d completed three tours of duty and had survived three years in the jungles of Vietnam; and how he’d survived, he never really knew.

When Australia finally pulled their troops out in seventy-two, they sent him home to what he expected would be a tumultuous hero’s welcome for someone who had laid his life on the line for his country. What he got was nothing more than distain and contempt. There’d been no hero’s welcome – in fact, there’d been no welcome at all. His wife hadn’t even turned up to welcome him home – she’d taken up with some other bloke whilst Normie had been away. He arrived at the docks in Sydney to nothing but derisive and disinterested stares from the general public. Even all his old friends saw the war as a terrible mistake and a consummate disaster, and somehow, irrationally blamed Normie and his hapless comrades for the whole sorry mess.

Normie had suffered interminably since he’d returned home. He had contracted this painful rash that nobody seemed to know anything about, and a thing the doctors called spotted lung from exposure to Agent Orange, and he had recurring nightmares from his three years in the jungle at the hands of the Viet Cong guerrillas. His small pension had done little to ease the burden and he had quickly taken to the bottle. He’d been sacked from his first job as a night watchman for being drunk on duty, and from then on every job he started finished in embarrassing and ignominious dismissal. With no money left and nowhere to live, he’d taken to the road.

He had no idea how long he’d been on the road. Vietnam seemed eons away now; he reckoned he must’ve come home about forty years ago – that would make him about sixty-three years old, he supposed.

He’d come to the little country town of Banko a few weeks ago after having wandered the country for he didn’t know how many years as a vagrant, taking odd seasonal jobs like picking up spuds or picking fruit and living in shanties, barns, dairies and old sheds – anywhere that provided a little shelter. His war pension had long since ceased, so he had managed to find some short-term work on a farm just out of Banko pickin’ spuds for a while. The farmer had given him an old disused dairy to live in.

Late one afternoon Normie had been washing the spud dirt off in the gently flowing little stream that adjoined the potato crop where he was working. He happened to look up at the cliff-side leading down to the creek, and noticed what appeared to be an indentation in the rocks, almost completely concealed by trees. Swimming across to the other side of the creek, he climbed up the cliff-side and discovered that it led into what appeared to be a small cave in the hillside. He wandered inside to find that it was in fact quite spacious and had once been inhabited.

Suddenly and unexpectedly he’d been accosted by a black mass of screeching, flapping, evil-eyed creatures. Falling to the rocky floor in shock, he half expected the creatures to attack him. Instead, they glided low over his head like a regiment of black stealth bombers, out into the bright sunlight. He sat on the floor watching the flock of bats head off over the distant horizon.

It was immediately obvious to Normie that he was going to have to share his new accommodation with these evil-looking things – he knew from experience that they were very difficult to avoid – but they were harmless, once you got past their squawking, their incessant flapping, their silent, watchful eyes in the dark and the stinking shit that they left lying all over the place.

Normie had dragged himself up off the rocky floor and looked around him. There was an old mattress lying on the floor, with a moth-eaten blanket lying on top of it. In the middle of the cave floor, there was a small circle of blackened rocks where a fire had been lit regularly and there were some crude and ancient Aboriginal drawings on the walls.

The inside of the little cave was dry and cool and felt like the sort of place he could call home – for while at least. He did some exploring and discovered the cave had a number of passages leading off in different directions. There was no light, apart from the thin stream of filtered sunlight that made its way through the crack high up in the roof, so he was unable to explore any farther.

Normie knew a little about caves from his time in Vietnam, where it was necessary to be extremely vigilant when entering or passing them because they provided excellent cover from Viet Cong guerrillas who could be waiting in ambush. He’d discovered from bitter experience that the Cong preferred aboveground caves to hide in rather than belowground ones. This was because aboveground caves were completely dry and quite warm, whereas belowground ones were always cold and wet and streams of running water constantly covered the walls.

It was for this reason Normie was particularly taken with his latest discovery. He also knew that the only problem with aboveground caves was that they were also very attractive places for bats to live. He didn’t mind the odd bat, but too many of them could spook a bloke in the middle of the night.

He noticed a couple of Little Bentwings still hanging upside down on the roof, minding their own business, their beady little eyes shining like tiny torches in the darkness – and that was quite okay. He could get used to the bats but he found it difficult to get used to the stink of bat shit. The floor of the cave was inches deep in dried guano, a product of many years of bat habitation. Oh well, he’d had worse things to deal with in his time.

He decided to explore a little farther into the cave. He was immediately fascinated by the gigantic roots of the fig trees above which had wound their way down into the cave itself, penetrating into the bowls of the mountainside. The roots came straight out of the cave roof, seemingly finding their way through solid rock, running down the walls and plunging into the rocky floor. Some roots stretched from roof to roof like gigantic steel cables, covering the entire roof area and criss-crossing each other in a myriad of fascinating patterns.

So taken by this fine accommodation, Normie decided it was infinitely better than the intolerably hot, cow-shitty old disused dairy. It had a corrugated iron roof and during the hot summer days and nights, it had been unbearably hot to live in.

So he’d moved in here for a while to see what it was like. The cave was always beautifully cool, even on the hottest of days. He’d never lived in a cave before, but he reckoned if the Aborigines could do it there was no reason why he couldn’t.

Besides, it was nice and private – the only way to get to it was by swimming across the creek and climbing the cliff-face – although exceptionally well hidden, it wasn’t far from the main road. He could thumb a lift into town whenever he needed supplies.

He’d go back to his sweltering little shit-hole, get what little possessions he had and return to his new dwellings by nightfall. No-one would ever know where his new home was and he could live there in peace indefinitely – at least for the rest of the summer – with his bottle of rum and his swag, leaving home only to do the odd day’s spud-pickin’ and to go into town for the necessary supplies.

He checked carefully the level of his rum supply. It’d been getting down. He’d have to make another trip into town in a couple of days to replenish his medicinal stronghold. He didn’t want to let it dwindle to nothing, that’s when he found it hard to withstand the temptation to get on the metho – and that made him real bloody crook. He also had to get into town to buy a few snags, some Billy tea and of course a torch so he could do some exploring. His six months of spud pickin’ each year provided him with enough cash to purchase the necessities of life.

He’d been offered a few days potato picking on the McCall property. Murray McCall was not a big potato grower but each year he planted just enough to provide for himself and a few of the neighbours. He’d approached Normie whilst the little vet had been doing a couple of days work on a neighbouring property. Normie had been surprised at the offer. Normally the potato-picking season didn’t commence until December, and it was now only October. But Normie had been a seasonal worker long enough to know that this was what was referred to as a ‘seed crop’, an early crop that was used to provide seed potatoes for the next season’s planting.

He’d jumped eagerly at the opportunity for some work; his rum supplies had been getting low, he liked Mr McCall – and he’d been living on the grazier’s property free off charge – unbeknown to McCall, of course.

‘Where can I pick you up in the morning, Normie?’ McCall had asked.

‘At the bridge will do,’ Normie had replied, selecting a pick-up spot about a kilometre from where his cave was situated.

‘Where do you live these days?’

‘I got me a humpy down in the bush,’ was Normie’s standard reply, and McCall didn’t press for any more information.

When he’d arrived home that afternoon after work, Normie had gone for a quick swim in the creek. The pristine-clear water had been cool and refreshing and made him feel clean and rejuvenated. His torch battery was still strong, so he’d prepared himself to crawl through one or two of the labyrinths to see what he could find.

It was during the little crawling expedition that he’d come across his gruesome discovery.

He sat on his haunches now, inside his cave, wondering what the hell he should do about his find – if anything. Endless years of having to live off his wits had taught him that if he ever gained knowledge of something that others did not, there was a good chance he could use it to his own advantage. That was the way his mind worked these days after decades of being treated as a social reject.

He caressed his beloved old rifle lovingly, his hands as callous as snake-skin, scaly and rough to the touch, the lines in his palms impregnated with dirt and grease from years of failing to wash himself properly. He ran his gnarled, dirt-encrusted fingers through his locks of red unruly hair and rubbed his stubble thoughtfully.

Now, how could he use this knowledge to his advantage?

Chapter 3

Murray McCall lazed luxuriously in his trusty old squatter’s chair and puffed contentedly on his freshly lit Havana cigar. Life was pretty good these days for a grazier who’d been through the school of hard knocks. Murray thought back over the years of droughts, floods, crop failures and hard times, and wondered at his capacity to have withstood God’s onslaughts for all those years and still come out of it with his marbles intact.

He took another sip of his Tooheys Draft stubby, followed by another puff of his Havana and laid back in his favourite chair, gazing over his beautiful four thousand hectares, his Braford cattle grazing contentedly in the lush green fields before him after the recent heavy rains. In the early morning autumn air, the cattle’s humps were coated with frost. The heat from their bodies melted the ice and made the entire herd glow with an almost ethereal aura in the soft morning light as they grazed contentedly on the lush green pasture.

He could quite happily sit here all daydreaming, but there were things to do. He had to go into town today to have a chat with the local stock and station agent and place an advertisement for a share-farmer. This was a decision he’d made after a great deal of careful thought. He couldn’t bear to sell his beautiful property; he wanted to die here on his veranda doing exactly what he was doing right now.

His twin sons were both at university. Jim was doing medicine and Will was doing a law degree; neither of them had any great interest in taking over the property, which saddened Murray deeply. But he had to keep things in perspective: his two boys had grown up here and lived through the intense periods of pain and suffering of the farmer’s life – through the agonies of droughts and floods and through the ecstasies of the odd good year when everything seemed rosy and money was being made. But those years had been few and far between. His boys had seen the light some years ago; they were both good scholars and had opted for stable, professional careers away from the farm. You couldn’t blame them for that.

The boys’ mother had died five years ago, bless her. Jill had been the only love of Murray’s life. They’d been married in the tiny local chapel way back in fifty-six and they enjoyed forty-nine years of married bliss. Jill had been Murray’s backbone for all those years. As well as bringing up her two sons with devoted love and affection, she had been Murray’s financial manager, sounding board, counsellor, confidante, conscience, wife and lover and she had carried out all tasks with passion, perseverance and never-ending patience.

Murray had been devastated when Jill was struck down with breast cancer seven years ago. The chemo had worked the first time and they had all rejoiced in her amazing recovery. But cancer is insidiously deceptive and it lay in wait like a python waiting to strike. When it struck the second time, it was ruthless and Jill quickly deteriorated. Her strength and resilience had been truly inspirational for Murray and the boys, and right up until the very day she died, she had always worn a happy loving smile on her beautiful face. Despite the pain she was suffering, she had died with a smile on her face.

With both his boys at university, life over the past three years had been very lonely for Murray. But he had his beloved property and he’d thrown himself into a regimen of hard work for six, sometimes seven days a week. It had blocked out the pain and the loneliness, and Murray had learned to live with his grief. But he was turning sixty-two in a few months time and he was tired – he needed a rest. He’d asked both the boys, the last time they were home for holidays, if either, or both of them might consider taking over the property, and their answer had been as Murray had expected: ‘No thanks, Dad. We want to live our lives; we don’t want to be tied down to the shackles of farm life, at the mercy of the elements, like you and Mum were.’ He could understand their point of view, but still it disappointed him deeply.

Murray didn’t need to sell the place to finance his retirement. Jill, in her feminine wisdom, had made sure that he took out a very good superannuation policy way back when they were first married, and she steadfastly maintained payments to it over all those years. The policy was now worth just over a million dollars, a nice little nest egg for him.

Murray’s only alternative was to find a share-farmer who was willing to work the farm and leave Murray in his trusty farmhouse, sitting on his beloved veranda, smoking his malodorous Havana’s. He wouldn’t interfere with the share-farmer too much, he told himself, he would just keep a watchful eye over the way things were being done. He was quite content with his decision; it was the best he could come up with in the circumstances that prevailed.

As Murray was about to drag himself out of his contemplation and get himself cleaned up to go into town, he noticed a motor vehicle coming up the track to the homestead. By the way it glimmered brightly in the morning sun it looked like a new model.

As it approached, Murray could see that it was in fact a new Mercedes. He watched as a very large, grossly overweight man dressed in a tailor-made suit stepped out of the car with a briefcase in hand and climbed heavily up the pathway, perspiration beginning to form in heavy drops on his swarthy forehead after leaving the air-conditioned comfort of his expensive car.

The stranger cumbersomely shrugged off his suit jacket and slung it heavily over his shoulder, then trudged awkwardly up the long walk to the veranda. Reaching the top of the landing, breathless in the astonishing heat and puffing heavily, he proffered his sweaty, glistening hand.

‘David Bartholomew,’ he announced between puffs of his thick lips, wiping his now saturated brow with a silk handkerchief. ‘Mr McCall? Pleased to meet you.’

Murray stood and shook his hand with perfunctory casualness.

‘Take a seat,’ invited Murray, indicating the spare squatter’s chair beside him, and sitting back down in his own. The big man lowered himself slowly and gratefully into the vacant adjacent chair. Every inch of his skin was slick with sweat.

The man’s obviously a cityite Murray observed quietly to himself as he took in the soft and pampered features, the rounded shoulders, and the rotund heavily jowled face that displayed a simple naiveté about life out here. His expensive deodorant emitted an odour that at once bombarded Murray’s senses. It was not an unpleasant aroma, but it made Murray feel uncomfortable: it was not a natural country smell and it carried with it a warning of alien invasion.

‘What can I do for you?’ asked Murray suspiciously.

‘I’d like to make an offer on your property.’

‘It’s not for sale.’

‘What would you say your place is worth?’ the big man persisted.

‘Oh, about four million, I guess,’ replied Murray casually. ‘But I told you, it’s not for sale, I’m sorry.’

‘I’ll give you five million.’

Murray did a double take. He looked across at Bartholomew to see if he was joking. The big man’s face was deadly serious.

‘Why would you offer me a million more than the property’s worth?’ Murray asked.

‘Oh I’ve done my homework. Your property is worth five million dollars to my client. I’m offering you what it’s worth to him.’

‘Well, I’m very flattered that you think it’s worth five million dollars to anyone. But I’m sorry, I’m not selling.’

Bartholomew leaned across to get closer to Murray. ‘Mr McCall, I am acting for a very wealthy organization. They want your property very much. They will pay you a lot more than you could ever expect to get elsewhere.’

‘Why do they want it so badly?’ Murray asked, his suspicious eyes finally beginning to show a modicum of interest.

‘I am acting on behalf of one of the largest pastoral companies in Australia. We want your property to breed a new strain of Hereford-Brahman cross – it’s an ideal environment to develop this new hybrid breed of cattle, and it’s reasonably close to their research facilities in Bathurst.’

‘Brafords,’ muttered Murray. ‘Haven’t you noticed that my property’s full of them. There’s nothing new about Brafords.’

‘Oh this is a brand new strain,’ Bartholomew replied quickly. ‘With thirty percent more beef production per carcass. It will revolutionise the industry.’

‘But half my property is just rugged bush land that you couldn’t even raise a single cow on!’ retorted Murray. ‘There are only about two thousand hectares suitable for grazing; the rest is just vertical cliffs and heavy scrub.’

‘And it’s the good two thousand hectares my client wants,’ replied Bartholomew. ‘But we have to take the good with the bad, so that’s the offer. I think you should take it. You’re at retirement age; you can spend the rest of your life touring the world if you like; it will make you a very wealthy man.’

Murray stood and gazed out at his treasured pastures. The green paddocks were dotted with his prize Brafords and beyond them was the Great Dividing Range, which rose up, blue and majestic in the clear morning sky, the saddles and peaks glittering in the morning sunlight. There was no way he was going to leave this: it was his home.

‘And what if I don’t want to ‘tour the world’? What if I just want to stay here and spend my declining year’s right here on this veranda? You don’t get it do you? I’m not selling.’ Murray rose from his chair. ‘Been nice meeting you.’

He waited for the big man to drag his obese body out of the squatter’s chair. Finally, the two were facing each other.

‘I’ll give you five point five million cash deal. That’s at least half a million more than my client thinks your place is worth, and about a million and a half more than you’d get on the open market Mr McCall. You would be crazy to turn it down.’

Murray couldn’t believe what he was hearing. What the hell was going on?

‘Give me your card and I’ll think about it,’ Murray replied dismissively. The big man smiled winningly and reached into his top pocket, extracting a glossy business card. Murray took it and read it. ‘David Bartholomew. Consulting Agent’, was all it said, with an email address, and a couple of phone numbers.

‘Have you got any other form of identification?’ asked Murray.

‘Just look me up on the Net,’ Bartholomew replied, a satisfied grin on his rotund face. ‘I can’t reveal the name of the pastoral company involved for reasons of confidentiality, but I’ll be in touch.’ He proffered his large, sweaty, hairy hand, which Murray shook half-heartedly.

As the big man made his cumbersome way down Murray’s front steps into his Mercedes, Murray had the distinct impression that David Bartholomew and his clandestine client were not strictly on the level. Something didn’t feel quite right.

He would need to make a few enquiries.

Chapter 4

Murray’s mind was in a quandary. He knew instinctively that his property was worth no more than four million dollars at the most. Why would anyone want to pay him almost half again what his property was worth?

Obviously, someone knew something about his property that he himself did not. It had to be mineral deposits of some type: Gold? Silver? Uranium? Who knows – but he was intent on finding out.

He knew the arable section of his property like the back of his hand, having mustered cattle on it for many years. But he did not know the rugged part of his property well at all – the two thousand hectares which had come with the property when he had bought it for a few thousand dollars thirty-two years ago. Apart from the odd excursion with his two boys when they were kids, Murray had kept out of the rugged bush-land section. He knew it contained some steep cliffs, a small mountain, in the middle of which was an extinct, heavily forested volcanic crater.

He had only ever seen the crater from the air whilst flying over in a chopper, but it looked extremely inhospitable and the only way you would get to it would be to drop in from a chopper or become a mountain-climber and scale the sides of the mountain. Around the steep, rugged sides of the crater were a couple of small waterfalls and below the waterfalls, a lot of thick, heavy scrub. Perhaps that was the part of his property that Bartholomew’s client was interested in – despite his claims to the contrary.

Murray made a decision: he would hire another chopper and get a closer look at his property from the air. He might just discover something interesting. There had to be something of extreme value hidden on it somewhere – it just wasn’t normal for anybody, no matter how wealthy, to try to purchase his property for the price they were offering.

When the chopper first arrived at the back of Murray’s farmhouse, he was rather disappointed at the very small size of it, expecting something much larger and more imposing. He had a little difficulty squeezing his large body into the tiny cockpit beside the pilot, but after a little gentle persuasion, he managed to complete the task. The cockpit was hot and stuffy and the perspiration was running off his body like a western river in flood.

‘Doesn’t this damned thing have any air-conditioning?’ he asked the young, trendy-looking pilot who was sporting a very fashionable and carefully trimmed two-day growth on his face.

‘Yeah, it does,