Chapter 3 - The Crocodiles and the Box
Despite spending more than a month in Darwin, neither David nor Anne had ever travelled beyond its rural outskirts. So they had a real sense of adventure as they drove out of town with Alan and Sandy, sitting in the back of a large Toyota Landcruiser Station wagon. They went down the Stuart Highway, the same way they went to Berry Springs last Christmas. They came to a big sign left, proclaiming ‘Arnhem Highway’, pointing to Kakadu. They took this road. From here it was all new to them.
First they passed through a town called Humpty Doo, just a few shops and a string of houses and larger blocks. The name gave it a picture book feel, akin to a Humpty Dumpty place in a children’s story. After it was left behind there was only featureless scrubby land until they rounded a small hill and came out onto a wide expanse of swampy plains.
A minute later they crossed a wide expanse of brown water signed “Adelaide River” and advertising tours to see the jumping crocodiles. This gave Anne goose bumps as it brought home to her the reality of this place, this wide placid river with a sense of hidden danger.
Soon the open plains were left behind and scrub land resumed. They rounded more low hills and, before she realised where they were, they were crossing another river. The sign ‘Mary River’ flashed past. Anne saw a broad tree lined river pass below.
She called out to Alan in the front. “Could you stop for a minute, Susan told me something about this place. I need to remember it.”
It came to her. Susan described discarding tools and heavy items from Marks truck, stopping in the middle of this bridge and throwing them into the water. She suspected most things did not really matter but they might want to try and search for the number plates and the guns left here.
She recounted her memory of Susan’s words while Alan and Sandy listened attentively, “Susan said she stopped at the far end of the bridge, behind us. Then, after listening and looking for sign of anyone else nearby, she realised it was a good place to dispose of all these last heavy things of Mark’s that she could not burn and had not thrown in the waterhole. So she reversed back onto the bridge, far enough to be fully out over the water, and then the threw them all into the water.”
Alan was nodding. “Yes worth checking out. Maybe it is a needle in a haystack, but who knows. I doubt we will find number plates but the guns are worth looking for. Even some of the boxes and tools may tell us where they came from and help us track other places where Mark has been.”
They reversed back, got out and peered over the side.
Anne tried to imagine her friend standing here on that dark night, exhausted, terrified, fleeing for her life, but almost to safety. It felt surreal as she gazed over the water below, with only reflected trees, sunlight, and an occasional bird and insect to break the calm. She could not reconcile these two competing images in her mind.
They drove on. In half an hour they were at the billabong. It looked like nothing much at all; an open car parking space, a few blackened stone piles, some dense shady trees with a papery bark and, on the other side, a pool of dark blue-green water, about a hundred yards wide, extending out of view in both directions.
Alan walked them around the site. He pointed out the hill low on the horizon. It matched Susan’s description. He showed them the locations from the main features of their investigation.
As he talked on Anne was overcome by a huge sense of unreality. How could she align this beautiful, peaceful place with the horror seen through Susan’s eyes and told to her?
She said, “Where are the crocodiles? I feel I should be able to see them. The way Susan talked this place is full of them. Yet instead I hear birds singing, the water is still and there is nothing in sight."
Alan replied, “You are right, it takes a long time before those of us who live her get a real sense the hidden danger we cannot see. After we search at the hill we will come back here for lunch, Sandy has packed a picnic. Then, if you sit quietly and watch, you will begin to understand. It is hard for visitors to grasp what lies below the surface of these places.”
They walked over to the hill, along with a police photographer and a man carrying a pick and shovel. Alan carried a thin metal rod to probe the soil for soft areas. At the far side of the hill Alan pointed to a flat rock in the place where the ground became level. It was singular and distinctive. He asked Anne, “Do you think this is the place she described?”
Anne looked carefully and shrugged, "Maybe." As she came close, she saw a smaller flat rock, about a half a metre across, resting of the earth surface, right next to the large flat rock. She pointed to it. “That is the place, I am sure.”
Alan walked over and stood alongside, “Isn’t it amazing, Only three weeks ago I stood right here, on the bigger rock and looked all around, wondering where to search to try and find whatever it was that Susan had hidden. The one place I did not look was at my feet. If I had I might have guessed this was a hiding place.
The photographer clicked his camera several times as he recorded it all. Then Alan bent over, lifted the smaller flat rock and placed it aside. With the steel rod he probed the ground underneath. At the edges it was hard but in the centre it went straight in. About a foot down it hit something hard which sounded metallic.
Anne’s heart pounded. Everyone else had the same tense look on their faces that she was feeling.
The man with the shovel carefully dug the soft centre soil away, an inch at a time. When the hole was knee deep Anne heard the shovel make a scraping sound. That was definitely metallic.
A shiny metal corner was exposed. More photographs. Alan bent down. He pushed away the remaining dirt. A rectangular metal box object, around ten by fifteen centimetres, was revealed.
He turned to Sandy, “Yours from here, I think.”
Sandy put on disposable gloves. Then, grasping the very edges with the fingers of opposite hands, she lifted the box out and placed it on the dirt beside the hole. She took a plastic specimen bag and carefully slid it inside.
They all stood around, looking, knowing that inside was a story of vanished lives. It seemed too easy, almost unreal.
It was a remarkably ordinary box, shiny metal with traces of rust in a few places. And, as Anne had described, recounting Susan’s words, they saw transparent tape around the edges to seal the lid to the bottom part. Sandy would take it back to the laboratory to open. That was really it, the end of the search, a mere ten minutes work. A few more photographs, but the evidence gathering was done.
They returned to the billabong for their picnic, all sombre now. They sat in a patch of deep shade ten metres back from the edge of the water, under a large paperbark tree leaning back over the land. There was a muted sound of fruit bats squabbling in some distant trees alongside the billabong and a few bird noises.
Nobody spoke. They all sat facing and gazing out over the still water. There was barely a breath of breeze. The day was hot but not sweltering in the shade.
Anne was lost in her own thoughts and the others appeared the same. Finally she spoke, perhaps reflecting other thoughts. “It is strange being here now that Susan has told me what happened and how it all unfolded. So far I am the only one with that full story inside my head. I have told David some parts. In a few days I will have it transcribed. Then you will all be able to read her own words, hear her own voice and relive her actual experience.
"But, even though I know it happened inside my head, I can’t make it feel real. I can’t see her reality, feel her panic, feel her complete terror. I should be able to see it through her eyes, now that she has told me. My eyes see only a picture of shady trees and an empty billabong, pretty but with nothing else.
As she spoke Anne saw a movement in her furthest vision, far across towards the distant shore, in a place where tree leaves hung low on the water and formed the deepest shade. The movement slid slowly from deep shade to bright sunlight. As light reflected she saw eyes glisten. They watched her with implacable patience.
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Now it was real, her mind had connected with this being, the hairs on her arms stood up and goose bumps ran down her spine. She took David’s hand and pointed; the creature, still far out, was sliding and gliding in an empty water-space with no apparent motion. It was a shape shifting shape that moved inexorably towards them.
Now they all watched, mesmerised, gripped by strange inability to move. It came to half way and kept on coming; now it was closing on the bank where they were. They stayed paralysed, barely able to breathe, still fully unable to move, while it slid without visible motion towards them. It seemed to have a power to make the invisible water flow in their direction and it sat within this invisible flow. As it shape shifted forwards, first its scales separated and became discrete things, then the knobs on its head and eyes took shapes of their own.
Finally Anne realised that the invisible motion had stopped. Before them, resting in the water a bare ten metres away, was an object of ancient saurian stock, her mind labelled it as a creature pulled out of ancient aboriginal dreamtime legend. Its length equalled the distance which separated them. Its girth surpassed the biggest river trees. It rested, unmoving, save for an occasional eye flick. It made no other move, it was at rest, now parallel to the bank, watching with a single eye.
None of the other watchers spoke or moved, all seemed trapped in this mesmeric miasma. Finally it sunk beneath the waters, inch by inch, and was no more.
Anne shook her head. She said to David, “Was that real? Or was it something that only I saw, an imaginary creature inside my mind.”
“No it was real. Hard to believe any creature could be so big, still and silent. And, although it is undoubtedly dangerous, I felt no sense of danger as it looked at us. Do you think that is the crocodile Susan tells of, the one that came and took Mark’s body away from the others?”
Anne nodded, “Yes it must be, I cannot imagine there are any other crocodiles here that big. What do you think Alan?”
He replied, “Yes, that must be the one, it is far and away the biggest I have ever seen. Sandy and I have seen it once before. I have never heard others tell of it. It did something similar the day they found and removed the other part of Mark’s body, the forearm. That day only Sandy and I saw it. We did not tell others of it then, of how it came close by and watched us, as if trying to communicate, it sounded mad.
“That day it stopped close by the edge, motionless, like now, and it looked at us the same way before it went away. I could have sworn that day it was trying to tell us something, perhaps seeking the return of the body parts we had taken, signalling its loss.
“Today it does not seem to be trying to send another message, only telling us it is still here and it is waiting, waiting for us to return what we have taken away.”
They looked out over the water again. Of this huge crocodile there was no more sign. But now two other large sets of eyes and noses had taken its place, slowly cruising up and down in the middle of the billabong, separate and yet linked through some commonality of presence.
Anne wondered if these were the other two crocodiles Susan had spoken of, participants in the human feast on that fateful day. Their size matched Susan’s description and their joint purposeful patrol seemed to connect them. However, she felt these were only crocodiles; large and dangerous, but without the mind-numbing life presence of the other.
Now they all started talking as they ate their sandwiches. The ordinariness of the day returned. They talked of other things, each unwilling to try and put words around what they had seen.
But this place would never feel the same for Anne; she knew there was something here, like a spirit of this place. It was seeking and calling for a kindred spirit. She thought of Susan and of her crocodile spirit dreams. A chill washed over her. She did not think she was superstitious, but here there was something no ordinary words could fit around.
Anne now felt a strange, unfathomable anxiety for Susan-Emily. It was as if this creature was telling her, mind to mind, there was unfinished business, and it would never release the hold over what it owned.
Anne’s mind told her that Emily had created a separate life from the Susan of that day. But her emotions told her that this link was not so easily broken. The spirit of the creature of this place would keep calling to Susan, like a restless soul it would not let her find peace. She shivered and tried to dispel her morbid imagination, the idea that this crocodile being could summon its own.