Alan Baxter - The Gulp - Five Tales of Horror

“Weird how?” Zack asked.

“Dunno. Just not his normal self, you know? He doesn’t look well, either. He’s so pale.”

“Maybe he’s sick?”

“He goes out a lot at night. Mum’s really upset about it.”

“I’m sure he’ll be fine. You want to come over to mine instead? My mum’s gone to see her cousins in Bega.”

Maddy was highfrom some good weed Dylan had. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. She might stay with him for a while yet. She was enjoying her walk home in the moonlight, the cool air of approaching autumn invigorating. The streets were quiet. After midnight, The Gulp seemed to slip into a coma. A poster on a telegraph pole caught her eye, photocopied black and white with a picture of a straggly-haired young man. Have you seen Daniel? in bold letters across the top. She turned up Tanning Street past the post office and made her way up the shallow hill, then down the other side. She paused as she came by the playground on the opposite side of the street behind the beach. A figure stood just past the park, staring out to sea. They were motionless. Uncannily so.

Maddy frowned, recognising Jack Parsons. As she watched, someone else came wandering up and stood beside him. Wendy Callow. They didn’t speak, didn’t even acknowledge each other. Just stood there. A moment later, Mr Brady joined them. Maddy walked on, slowly, watching from the corner of her eye, glad of the street and the park between them. The three just stood there, staring at the ocean.

When she reached a patch of deep shade under a fig tree, Maddy paused again. There should be one more. Sure enough, after a moment more, a woman walked slowly across the grass past the play equipment and joined the others. Stephanie Belcher, Maddy presumed. The social worker.

When Belcher reached the group, they all turned as one and walked back across the park and onto Tanning Street. Lurking in the shadows, Maddy watched them head towards the harbour. They walked out of sight, never having said a word to each other.

Part of Maddy wanted to follow, see what they did, but she didn’t dare. Her role in all this, whatever it was, had ended. She hoped the promise to leave her and Zack alone would be kept.

Blind Eye Moonwere playing and Patrick had no idea if they were any good. The Monkton Tavern was packed for the Friday night gig, and so many locals had said to check them out it seemed like a necessary part of the trip. Backpacking was all about immersion in the local culture, after all. In Thailand they’d gone trekking into the jungles of the north and visited the Karen hill people. In Malaysia they’d developed a taste for hawker street food. In Darwin they’d been mesmerised by the vast splendour of Kakadu and were keen to learn about the local folks who showed them around there. It was all so far removed from Dublin. Leaving for a one-year trip around the world had been the best decision of his twenty-four-year life. Ciara had needed to cajole and badger him about it for months, sure. He was a creature of habit and took some convincing, but she had been right. He’d told her so and would tell her again. That they travelled so well together was also good evidence a life together would be long and fruitful. But he needed to wait until they got home to Ireland to put that to her. A proposal on the trip would fundamentally change the nature of what they were doing.

Torsten and Simone came back from the bar, carrying beers. The brother and sister had turned out to be excellent travelling companions, the four of them sharing the costs and the driving of a small camper van. It was a little cramped inside, but not too bad. To take a break from the confines they planned to book into a motel for a couple of nights in Monkton. Warm showers, comfortable beds, and other home comforts every few days made the whole thing more bearable. They were backpacking, but not slumming it.

Having driven from Darwin, down through Alice Springs to Adelaide and then along the coast to Melbourne on their own, Patrick and Ciara had welcomed the team up with the German siblings, for financial reasons if nothing else. Two weeks road tripping along the coast from Melbourne to Sydney together was proving to be good fun.

“Took so long to get drinks!” Torsten said, sitting down and sliding a beer across. “They’re four or five deep at the bar.”

“Lucky we got a table,” Patrick said.

Ciara returned from the bathroom, took her seat. The four of them raised their glasses and clinked them together.

“I talked to a girl in the bathroom who said Blind Eye Moon are the best band in the world,” Ciara said with a laugh.

“So good we’ve never heard of them before,” Patrick said.

“Maybe big only in Australia?” Simone asked. Her accent was strong, her English not as good as Torsten, who spoke almost fluently.

“Maybe,” Ciara said. “But we’ve been here two months already and never heard of them before. We’ve been catching as many local acts as possible. Honestly, I think they’re something of a local phenomenon with a bit of a cult following. Lots of folks here seem really into them. You see all the t-shirts?”

Patrick nodded, gestured with his glass. “Yeah, look at this place. It’s big enough, and heaving, but there can only be, what? Five hundred people, tops? If they were as big as all that, they wouldn’t still be playing pub gigs in small towns, would they?”

The Monkton Tavern was a long building with a high A-frame roof and slate floor. Patrick had begun to recognise a few features of Australian architecture and knew this was a little different to anything he’d seen before. It was old, built down near Monkton harbour, in the oldest part of the town, so it had to be colonial. Regardless, it was a good space with a long bar and a raised stage at the far end with an impressive looking PA stack and light array. For a small town, it seemed the Monkton Tavern was a hub for entertainment. They’d got there early, hence the luck with a table, and were already a few beers deep. The booze buzz was settling in, the crowds were reminding him of Dublin’s busier nightspots, and Patrick thought they were in for a good night. At least, they would be if the band were half as good as their numerous groupies seemed to think they were.

“Yo, Monkton!”

The crowd roared and surged forward, the space around the tables opening as people thickened towards the stage. Patrick hopped up, stood on his chair for a better look.

“Stage is still dark,” he said.

The instruments were in place, two dull red spotlights reflecting weakly off the polished wood of the guitars and drum kit.

The crowd began to chant. “Blind Eye Moon! Blind Eye Moon!”

“Heeeey, Monkton.” The man’s voice was cajoling now, full of humour.

“No support band?” Patrick asked, looking down. His friends smiled and shrugged.

The chant grew louder. This band had really ardent fans, Patrick thought. The red spots winked out, plunging the stage into total darkness. The crowd began cheering and baying, feet stamped in a one-two, one-two-three rhythm. People began clapping the same rhythm. Voices rose with it. “Blind Eye! Blind Eye Moon! Blind Eye! Blind Eye Moon!”

A massive distorted guitar chord slammed out through the PA and the crowd exploded. Patrick winced against the combined volume as the stage burst into view from the multicoloured array in the ceiling. Three men stood across the front of the stage, each with a guitar, the one on the left the bass player. All three wore black clothes, black sleeveless t-shirts, their arms a mass of colourful tattoos. Their faces were pale with heavily kohled eyes, long hair, two black, the one in the centre blond. Behind them a woman stood behind her drum kit, also in black, also heavily kohled around her eyes. Her lips were painted blood red and her hair was long and straight as vibrantly scarlet as her lipstick. The guitar chord rang on, then the woman raised her sticks, struck them together one-two-three-four, then attacked her skins. The guitars all kicked in together, tight as hell, and the roaring of the crowd was lost in a powerful, thundering riff, galloping along with double kick drums underneath like a machine gun.