SORRY TIME
By Anthony Maguire
A Sense of Place Publishing 2017
Copyright © Anthony Maguire
All Rights Reserved.
Published in eBook format by A Sense of Place Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-0-9944791-4-3
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Cover design Jessica Bell
National Library of Australia Cataloging-in-Publication entry
Creator: Maguire, Anthony, author.
Title: Sorry time / Anthony Maguire.
ISBN: eBook 978-0-9944791-4-3
Subjects: Murder-- Fiction.
Suspense fiction.
Australia, Central-- Fiction
Middle East-- Fiction.
1 THE OWNER HAS LEFT THE BUILDING
DR JONATHAN CHASELING – young, bearded and hipsterish-looking – navigated his car around ruts and potholes on a relentlessly straight, orange-red dirt track stretching away to infinity. Up ahead he saw a lone tree, a ghost gum with thin, white branches reaching for the sky like skeletal hands.
A few minutes later, he parked near the tree, which was growing in a hollow beside the track. There was no mobile reception here, so he couldn’t take a GPS fix or use Google Maps, but the tree was a landmark that would help him find his way back to the car, a RAV4, normally white but now coated with red dust.
A 26-year-old medical graduate on his way to Alice Springs to start a hospital job, Chaseling had detoured off the main highway to check out this place. It was renowned for marine fossils – a legacy of the time, aeons ago, when this part of Australia was covered by a vast inland sea. He got out of the car and walked into the scrub.
Taking a weaving course round scattered patches of saltbush, he kept his eyes to the ground, which was littered with small pieces of flat, rust-coloured sandstone. Every now and then he stopped to pick up a rock and look at it, turning it over in his hand, hoping to see the form of a trilobite or other long-extinct species.
He’d been walking for about 10 minutes when he saw a flat slab of stone, almost a metre long, distinctive because it was the only large rock he’d seen since leaving the track. Chaseling bent down and gripped the edge of the slab. He gave an experimental tug but it didn’t budge. Then he shifted his right foot forward to give his body some leverage and put his back into the job, hauling upwards with both hands. There was a sucking noise as the slab came away from the damp earth beneath.
Holding the rock on its edge, he looked down at the patch of dirt he’d revealed – and noticed something white and rounded protruding from it. An ancient sea shell, perhaps. He set the slab down off to the side. Then he started scraping away the ochre dirt with a finger-length, sharp-edged piece of flint that had been underneath the rock. He gave a gasp. Staring up at him was the eye socket of a human skull.
His hands shaking, he uncovered the other socket, which like the first was filled with compacted dirt. Next he scratched away the earth over the mouth, revealing a perfect set of teeth. Probably an Aborigine from the times before white settlement, Chaseling thought to himself. The teeth seemed to be grinning at him. He looked down at the piece of flint in his hand. It was a dark tan colour, very different in shade and composition to the other rocks in this area. And the picture became clear. This had been the dead person’s prized knife and it had gone to the grave with him. Or possibly her, although judging by the large size of the skull and teeth, it had most likely been an adult male.
Now he knew what to look for, he could see the shape of a rib cage in the dirt. And his eyes were drawn to something else. A small, disc-shaped object the size of a dried apricot, but thicker. It was caked with earth like chocolate on a Kinder Surprise egg. He picked it up – it was heavy, some kind of rock – and scratched at the dirt with the piece of flint. There was a flash of phosphorescent colour. Opal! His heart started thumping with excitement.
As he uncovered more of the precious stone, he saw that it had raised, spiral ridges radiating out from its centre. It glittered with a kaleidoscope of hues – now emerald green, now a brilliant magenta morphing into electric blue, each shade burning with a fire from deep within the rock. He uncapped his water bottle and rinsed the stone. He thought how 100 million years ago or even earlier, a marine snail – an ancestor of the modern-day nautilus – had lived and died in a primeval sea bed. Its shell became filled with silica-rich mud and fragments of marine life. And after the sea retreated, the contents of the shell gradually transformed into a gem which shimmered with the green of long extinct seaweeds, the blue of ancient fish scales, the iridescent purple of giant sea urchin spines and the brilliant red and orange of prehistoric jellyfish. It could well be worth of a fortune.
Chaseling put the flint back down where he’d found it. After a few moments’ hesitation, he placed the opal in the pocket of his cargo shorts. It won’t be missed, the voice of his shadowy other self whispered inside his head. The previous owner has left the building. He scooped up some dirt and covered first the grinning mouth, then the eyes and nose socket of the long-buried skull.
He put the slab back in place and walked towards the ghost gum, setting up a brisk pace because the sun was low on the western horizon, while in the east there was a line of ominous black clouds. He hadn’t noticed them before.
2 DANGER: KANGAROOS CROSSING
THE ACCIDENT HAPPENED minutes after Chaseling steered his car off the dirt track and joined a bitumen road that would take him to the Stuart Highway.
The car was doing 100km/h and had just rounded a very gentle curve in an otherwise straight road when lit up in the headlights he saw a large, orange-brown kangaroo. It was sitting back on its haunches at the edge of the road, watching the car approach. Then it hopped onto the blacktop and into the path of the car. Chaseling stamped his foot down on the brake. But he was too late.
The tyres screeched, then THUMP! The nose of the RAV4 slammed into the unfortunate animal, hurling it five metres up into the air in front of the car where it did a somersault before gravity took hold and it came crashing back down. With a crack of breaking glass, it hit the windscreen – and stayed there, glued in place by wind pressure.
Pressed against the blood-smeared mosaic of shattered glass directly in front of him was the face of the kangaroo. Its teeth, stained green, were bared in a rictus of agony and one of its eyes had been crushed to red jelly. The sight was so shocking that Chaseling, for a crucial second or two, failed to take in the fact that the skidding car was veering off the bitumen towards the dirt verge. He started to correct the steering while easing his foot from the brake pedal. But once again he was too late.
The front left wheel of the car bit into the dirt and suddenly the car careered sideways onto the verge. Raising a cloud of dust, the RAV performed a 360 degree spin on the loose surface of dirt and stones. A signpost loomed. Chaseling braced for the impact. With a jolting crunch of metal against metal, the car hit the steel pole, atop which was a sign with an image of a hopping kangaroo and the words ‘NEXT 20 KM.’
Chaseling’s head whiplashed forward, then back again, like John F. Kennedy in the Zapruder film. Then all was still. The steel pole, bent over at a 45 degree angle, was embedded in the front of the car. Chaseling rubbed the back of his neck, which was feeling as if it had been karate chopped. With his other hand, he turned the ignition key. There was just a clicking sound. He picked up his iPhone from the floor in front of the passenger seat, where it had ended up after the accident. No bars, he was in a dead spot. He sighed and got out of the car.
There