Alan Baxter - The Gulp - Five Tales of Horror

“Why stick around if the place is bad?” Patrick asked. “You guys are a successful band, I’d expect you to live in Sydney or Melbourne or something. Or even another country!”

Edgar shook his head. “Nah, this place is fucked, but it’s home. Been here ages.”

“You don’t look over thirty! Were you born here?”

“Don’t let looks deceive you, we’ve been around a while longer than that.”

Patrick opened his mouth to ask more, but Edgar slapped his shoulder and turned away, effusively greeting another small group sitting nearby. He fell in amongst them, talking and laughing.

“There?” Simone said, pointing.

A collection of three sofas in one corner was mostly empty, except for two young women and the drummer, Shirley. The four of them wandered over.

“Can we join you?” Ciara asked.

“Of course,” Shirley said. She was strikingly beautiful, Patrick thought. Her hair was so thick and straight and red it looked like crimson silk.

The other two women stood up and one said, “We’re going for another drink.” They smiled at Patrick and his friends and strolled off.

“Amazing gig,” Torsten said, sitting down. The others followed suit.

Shirley raised a glass with a generous measure of something like bourbon in it. “Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it.”

She still had her contacts in, Patrick noticed, her irises a deep red-brown. But the dark makeup around her eyes seemed to have faded a little, the branches of capillary-like lines not so evident. Rubbed off a bit, maybe. But it wasn’t smudged.

“We’re infamous around here for always being in character,” Shirley said, as if reading his mind.

He realised he’d been staring. “Oh, sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’re either ‘that cool band’ or, especially among the older folks, ‘those fucking weirdos’.”

“I think you appear cool,” Simone said.

Shirley laughed. “Thanks. I like the way you put that.”

Simone blushed slightly.

Patrick was mesmerised by Shirley’s languid grace. Her hair gleamed in the low light. She was not only a beautiful woman, but powerfully confident. That came, he supposed, with being hugely successful and popular. The three men in the band were equally good-looking and relaxed in their skins. “I don’t mean this as an insult,” he said, “but we’ve never heard of Blind Eye Moon before. I know we’re from far away, but you guys are amazing, it’s incredible we don’t know you.”

Shirley smiled, shrugged. “We’re big on the local circuit, we tour Australia every year. But we’ve never really felt the need to go overseas. None of us are great with air travel. And we’re more about the live moment than the studio album, you know?”

“You must have a Soundcloud or something though?” Ciara said.

“Nope. We don’t like that stuff. Just old-fashioned CDs. We’re not about the commercial side of music. We play gigs, sell CDs, merch, make enough money and that’s it. We’re about experience, not riches.”

“Well, good for you,” Torsten said. “That’s real integrity.”

“Just a shame for all the people elsewhere in the world who’ll never hear your music,” Patrick said.

“They’ll have to come to us.”

Ciara gestured around herself. “You’re obviously doing well for yourselves, living in a place like this. You own it together?”

Shirley looked around the large room, blood red fingernails tapping against the cut glass of her tumbler. “It’s a fine place, hey? But nah, we don’t own it. Bram owns it. He lets us live here.”

“Bram?” Ciara asked.

“Edgar’s… father, I guess? It’s complicated, you know how family can be.”

There was a moment of silence, then Shirley said, “Edgar tell you about the house?”

“1862?” Patrick said, trying to remember. “Governor Charles Gulpepper.”

Shirley nodded. “He tell you what happened to Gulpepper?”

“No.”

“Went mad. Had a wife.” Shirley pointed to one of the portraits. The woman depicted was beautiful, and young, with long straight brown hair. She had incredibly sad eyes, Patrick thought, despite the gentle smile she wore. Next to that was another painting, the same woman with a man in a suit, looking grave. Gulpepper himself, Patrick presumed. Another painting showed Gulpepper with a tall, thin, white-haired man. “Gulpepper married her in Sydney and brought her down here,” Shirley went on. “She gave birth to four children in six years while the town grew. There’s a museum in town, talks all about the early history of The Gulp. You should take a look. Anyway, he killed them all.”

“What?” Simone’s word was more a gasp.

“I told you, he went mad. One night, people saw him on the cliff top, where the lighthouse is now? The lighthouse wasn’t finished at the time, only half-built. Anyway, a few people saw the Governor standing on the cliff edge, arms raised like he was addressing some gathered crowd, but only the ocean was there. Then he stretched up and leaped, dived right off the cliff. The people ran to see, and his body was washing back and forth against the rocks, broken and bleeding. They weren’t able to retrieve him from there, and by the time they’d rowed a boat around the point, the body was nowhere to be found. So the story goes.

“Anyway, they sent a couple of people up here, to tell his wife. They found four long wooden stakes standing up in the garden, out there by the front of the house. On each stake, one of his children had been impaled, skewered from arse to mouth like little human kebabs. All of them between three and nine years old.”

“Fucking hell,” Patrick said. Ciara was silent and pale beside him. Torsten and Simone sat tight-lipped, both leaning forward in fascination.

“His wife was inside. She was naked. Laid out on the floor like a star, like when you make a sand angel on the beach, yeah? Except her arms and legs and her head were all chopped from her body and separated by a few feet. Sorta spread out.”

“That’s horrible,” Ciara said.

“That’s The Gulp,” Shirley said.

“Why did he do it?” Patrick asked.

Shirley shrugged. “No one knows. He went mad. Why does anyone do the mad shit they do? Especially here. Kept talking about dreams, people said, but no one really understood it.”

“I’d have trouble living in this place knowing that history,” Torsten said.

Shirley pointed to a spot in the middle of the large room. There were no seats there, just a big rug. “Right there is where they found her. If you move the rug you can still see the blood.”

“After more than a hundred and fifty years?” Ciara said, aghast. “Surely not.”

“Soaked into the wood and never came out. Sanded, stained, varnished, the blood always comes through. Have a look if you want.”

“I don’t want!” Ciara said. “Why hasn’t anyone just torn up the floorboards and replaced them?”

Shirley grinned. “Apparently they have. Three times. The blood always comes back. I need another drink.” She stood and walked over to the large dresser with the bottles without another word or a backward glance.

“Fucking hell,” Patrick said. “Think that’s true?”

“I think maybe some is true and a lot is embellished,” Torsten said.

“Embellished?” Simone asked. They spoke a moment in German, then Simone nodded. “Yes, agree. They have a…” She looked at Torsten again. “ Das Ansehen .”

“Yes, a reputation,” Torsten said. “A brand to maintain, yes? They’re even still in makeup.”

“Musicians,” Ciara said. “Like all creatives, they’re a bit weird.”

“Shots!”

The room cheered as Edgar turned from the dresser with a large silver tray. It was covered in shot glasses, each filled with a pale green liquid. He moved around the room and each person took a glass, then held it, waiting. He got to Patrick and friends and they followed suit.