Cover of Darkness

By Rory Westgarth

It is hot and dry--the middle of a heat wave. One man polices the outback. Another man wreaks havoc and leaves behind a trail of destruction and carnage. In the middle stands an innocent child.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Apr 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781645364382

Rory Westgarth

The author was born in Australia, is a citizen of the UK, father of five, and married to the wonderful Danielle.

Book preview

Epilogue

About the Author

The author was born in Australia, is a citizen of the UK, father of five, and married to the wonderful Danielle.

About the Book

It is hot and dry—the middle of a heat wave. One man polices the outback. Another man wreaks havoc and leaves behind a trail of destruction and carnage. In the middle stands an innocent child.

Dedication

For Maxine Haigh, my grandmother, who always believes

in me.

Copyright ©

Rory Westgarth (2019)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Ordering Information:

Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

Publisher’s Cataloging in Publication data

Westgarth, Rory

Cover of Darkness

ISBN 9781645364382 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019935777

The main category of the book — Fiction / Thrillers / Suspense

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published (2019)

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 28th Floor

New York, NY 10005

USA

[e-mail]

[phone]

Chapter 1

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. He genuflected.

Go on, my son, the voice from the other side.

He fingered the rosary inside the shadowed booth. He went to speak and then he closed his mouth again.

Take your time if you are hesitant. The voice was sure and slightly clipped with the faintest accent from some unknown, unfamiliar quarter. Shadows flickered in the light through the lattice-worked wood between serving to separate the faces of those who confessed and those confessed to.

Yes, Father. It’s been some time since my last confession.

It is a common thing I hear, my son.

And then rapidly, he burst forth with a nervous fumbling arc of anxious narrative.

I was involved with a group of people. Bad people. They did things, anything really, as long as they got richer. He paused, unsure, and then continued, They did things to other people for money or to get their money. They moved drugs, weapons, and robbed places and people. And sometimes they hurt people. Badly hurt them amongst all the bad things they did.

This is your confession, my son. Not theirs.

Yes, Father.

Go on.

I got involved through money. I gambled. And I’m not good at it. I lost all I had. I lost it all. I’m a cliché. House, family, and everything I’d planned and built for. Then I had no choice but to ask for help. I owed so much to them and they made me work to work it off. There were some rewards. But when they get their claws into you, your life isn’t your own anymore. There were rival people and they used my experience to make headways into them. Now my wife and kids won’t even talk to me or answer my text messages. She’s still my wife, he said in an act of defiance. The paperwork hasn’t been done so we’re not divorced yet. He genuflected again rapidly.

You speak of organized crime. A business.

Yeah. That’s what it is. But I can’t go to the police coz they’ll kill her and the kids too. Father, he said with real actualized terror. Help me, Father.

Go on.

I hurt people too. Bad people. I justified it by saying they’re bad people. I thought I was almost helping society by hurting bad people. It’s pathetic the way we justify ourselves and I was lying to myself really for a long time. The first person I hurt, I made a vegetable. He’s in the nuthouse now; dribbles from his lips like an imbecile. The third is nearly the same. Lost the use of his left side. Frightened stupid.

And the second?

Yeah. The second. She’s dead. I didn’t mean to kill her. I just found out two days ago. That’s what brings me here, I guess.

What did you do?

I killed her. I just killed her.

He looked up and his eyes rolled back slightly in his skull. He fingered the rosary and listened to the silence that greeted him beyond the latticework, like the knowing of nothing in a man’s soul. He saw the flicker of shadows as the priest moved about in the box, and the passing of light furtively, then shadows again. The stale air in the box was like an atmosphere of confessed secrets and untold mystery stitched against the guilty hearts and tongues of men. He thought the priest in there must have been praying or doing some other silent, unseen, sacred thing that priests do in secret for saving men’s souls.

With a sudden start, the flimsy, wooden, ornamental door swung wide and in a moment, like quicksilver, the priest was in the cubicle. The door itself swung reflexively back shut and the priest put his hand on the man’s mouth, as though ushering no further confessions. The dark cloth flurried as the expectant gripped the cross-section of the sacramental cross, picked up from the altar, and shifting it menacingly between the man’s ribs. The soiled dank and murderous bubbles darkened and then streamed down the man, the slight spray that subsided having splashed the inside booth. The man bit at the priest’s hand and tried to grip the priest’s neck but the priest held back, arms elongated like branches, and the man could not reach. The man did not reach and he died there in the confession box at the Church of Saint Somebody of Palestine.

The priest stepped out of the booth, wiping the smear of blood on the man’s trouser leg as he did so, and glanced at the beads laid prostrate against the worn carpet of the bottom of the booth; flaccid, still inanimate and powerless, and offering no solace now.

The priest walked past, in the open-colored marble of the nave, and across to the vestry where the real priest lay slumped in the slippery pond of his own blood, hued scarlet ruby, and chartreuse. He walked past and out into the heat where eucalypts and jacarandas waved high in the muggy breeze, and then he got into a nondescript white van. He put the keys in the scratched bowl of the ignition and turned it. The van didn’t start the first time. It started the second time and he sat there a moment, staring at himself in the rear-view mirror. He studied the shape of his eyes, his brow, the lines of his hair, and his nostrils as the air exhaled and inhaled the fleshy parts of his nose as they fluted membrane like bellows. Then he turned away and put the van into reverse on the shaft stick. He reversed and drove out of the car park and into the multi-colored horde of cars of the metropolis, like streaks of hued metal, torn and stolen from the structured fabric of the very earth. They moved on, an eternal herd. His hand slightly stung from the man’s bite and the blood dripped where he had perforated it. He found duct tape in the glove box of the van and, while still driving, placed a tissue from his pocket on his hand and wrapped the duct tape around it to bandage it.

Out on the lonely bitumen, stretched capillary-like across the barren-hard land heading out west, the saltbush pockmarked the ground, sucking nutrients greedily. The small wind-worn gums gnarled like creatures from children’s nightmares, arms flung, reaching unknown hosts, and dry spinifex taxed of all hues and bleached the color of the angry sun.

He drove for hours on the bitumen. The road seemed bound for nowhere, told tales of nothing save weary journeys, and was etched along the hours of man. Scoops of shrubs and the golden ochre of the very earth gave way to open vistas of wheat, barley, oats, and other grains. The monarchs hovered from Salvation Jane to hardy, nameless wildflowers and back again. And this gave way to scoops of shrubs again, endlessly cycling above the hard crustscape, like the surface of a planet drifting in space; which it was.

The van’s miscellanea rattled steel and wood, and clanged like a choir of mindless, inanimate, and soulless creatures while a spray of mosquitoes buzzed from rear to cabin and back, mirroring the outside schema. He scratched at the tape covering the healing wound on his hand, which itched incessantly. He pulled up and checked the large folded sheet-map as the dusk spread like scarlet eiderdown against the oncoming blackness, snuffing out toil and replacing it with the dreams of man. He clicked the pushbutton above the cabin and the driver’s side of the van became illuminated in a white glow. He fingered the trail on the map. He stopped and looked about him. Out towards the darkening horizon. The sun was gone now. The sky was bruised royal blue. He seemed to consider something a long time. He fingered with the center of his bottom lip and timelessness enveloped him. His eyes snapped to the right and into the rear-view mirror as the headlights swung in behind him. He tensed slightly. He reached for the pushbutton again and hovered gently on it. Then as the car’s taillights dimmed to park and the driver’s door opened, he pushed the switch and the van was swallowed in the night.

How ya goin’?

OK.

You havin’ car trouble? the man asked, his large nose bulbous and skin-weathered; observable even in the poor light. A myth of red wine, cigarettes, and salty meat etched there.

No.

I saw ya here. I thought ya musta been waiting for someone. Waiting for help. Nobody stops here mate.

The priest smiled. He turned to face the stranger and the stranger saw the dog collar for the first time. The stranger went to speak but then slowly, he seemed to process everything, and found everything to be seemingly in order or to make some sense.

Then he said, Well, the coverage isn’t so good out here. Yeah it got worse when the government, they deregulated the phones. Now, every day, it seems this one phone company bought out that company. I was with one company – changed hands three times in one year. Started out something net, and then net something, and then something else net.

The priest smiled, the skin narrowing and shrinking into wrinkled flesh around the jelly spheres of his eyes, and his sockets glued to the man before him.

Where ya headed to?

Up the road a bit.

Oh yeah? Ya goin’ to Pirie? Or past Pirie?

Past Pirie, said the priest.

Well, watch out. The highway cops patrol that area around Pirie pretty heavily. Both sides. My mate gone done the other night on this side of Pirie. Don’t seem to matter what time day or night.

OK.

The man ran his hand though his sandy grey hair, thinning at the temples and brushed back and styled like ethereal oldness and yesterday’s gone. Well, I’d better leave ya to it.

OK.

Glad to know ya OK. He walked back to his car and the priest looked back and saw the headlights come on and the indicator signal, with its orange glow. The engine revved deeper and the car swung out onto the highway. He was gone, the red taillights dimming in the distance quickly as the oncoming white reflectors also glowed like spectral beings in momentary flashes as the headlights splayed across them.

He turned the interior light back on and restudied the map a little. Outside, the nocturnal marsupials were present in the dark and small life sounds pierced the silence of the dark. He looked at the unfurled map, seemed to suddenly decide, and then sprang into action. He folded the map and wound the window up. He turned the light off, the headlights on, stepped on the clutch and brake, shifted into neutral and started-up the first time, driving out onto the black bitumen and into future times and future things not seen and done.

Sometime in the night, he stopped for petrol. The poorly realized rustic petrol station contrasted against the greyness of the savage bush, including a spray of Sturt Desert Pea with its black eyes on red flumes. The signage was sun-damaged, sun-bleached, and devoid of color. The smell of unleaded petrol was sharp and claustrophobically fervent in both nose and throat. He filled the van. He went inside, pausing fleetingly while the station attendant turned on the automatic door, which creaked with the burden of sliding sideward, admitting the priest and the ambience of the slack lack of activity without.

The attendant watched him. An Indian or Pakistani. Maybe Sri Lankan or on the outside Bangladeshi. He didn’t know which and didn’t have the care to ask neither. He glanced over as he walked slowly down the stubby, tightly, randomly, stocked aisles. An aberrant waste of old packaging and the colored rainbow of tinfoil wrappers. He sloped over to the instant coffee machine against the wall and looked at the selection. He fumbled in his pocket for the two-dollars-fifty and pushed the button for flat white. The paper cup dropped chaotically into the tray and the shot of watered milk flowed into the cup, stopped with a start, and then the brown oily fluid and the strong pang of coffee hit him, turning his insides. He put the lid on the cup and swirled it once inside its cup.

Hello, said the attendant. He smiled awkwardly. His name said ‘Dravid’ on his white name badge.

Hello, said the priest. Paused. Dravid. Obviously Indian.

Dravid laughed awkwardly. Immaculate white teeth contrasted against his dark skin.

How much do I owe you?

Forty-six dollars, thank you.

The priest pulled notes out a pocket and pulled out two twenties and a ten. Keep the change, he said to Dravid.

Thank you, said Dravid and he rang up the till, put the