Riding the Whirlpool

Riding the Whirlpool

Return of the Breaker Part 2

Prequel to Crocodile Dreaming Series

Author

Graham Wilson

Copyright

Riding the Whirlpool

Return of the Breaker Part 2

Graham Wilson 2019

Published by Smashwords

BeyondBeyond Books Edition

Crocodile Dreaming Series

ISBN:

Smashwords Edition Licence Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without prior approval of the author. For permission to use contact Graham Wilson by email at grahambbbooks@gmail.com

Author’s Note

This is a novel set in Australia’s outback, a place where I lived and worked for four decades; travelling to many places including in large and small towns, cattle stations, aboriginal communities and among remote, rugged and beautiful natural places for which it is famous, places with names like Uluru, Kakadu and Arnhem Land. These provide the background to this story.

This novel is a work of fiction. The characters are not real people. However, elements of stories have a real basis, as experienced by myself, or as stories of the bush, told around campfires or over bars, somewhere in the Australian Outback. While general locations described around the Northern Territory and other parts of Australia exist, many details are not accurate; they are created as a canvass on which to paint the story.

Backpackers are part of outback Australia. Occasional horror stories occur and get wide coverage. Some, like the Joanna Lees story, or the awful deeds of Ivan Milat contributed ideas to this novel. However these are rare events, as likely to happen in cities or other countries. They do not typify most people’s experiences of these places.

The setting of this novel is an external frame for the story. It tells of a journey of a person through places and within himself. In bad situations he does awful things. This reflects human experience. We all have the ability to make terrible choices and do great evil if we cease to value life, but even the worst of people may have parts that are good and decent. So, as to the man at the centre of this story, the question of whether he is evil or just a victim of bad circumstances, that is a judgement that only you can make. The question I ask myself is if, in the same set of circumstances, I would have behaved differently. We each can only answer that honestly for ourselves.

Alongside that personal story this book seeks to capture the essence of a place called the Northern Territory of Australia, the centre and north of the Australian continent. This land remains alive in my imagination from when I lived and worked in it. Despite the coming of modern civilisation; with roads, air transport, communication and comfort; the intrinsic character of this place, the ‘Territory’, remains little altered. It is what Ernestine Hill called, in her famous book of that name, ‘a land too vast for human imagination.’ Wildlife remains abundant. Stations still muster cattle and buffalo for a living. Aboriginal people live off the land, as they have done for untold millennia past. Stockmen tell tales around campfires, gazing in awe at immense star filled skies. This is a place where life moves slowly, as befits a land where time is driven by nature. Brilliant desert colours, huge tropical storms and endless emptiness live on.

My heartfelt thanks to innumerable real characters of the Northern Territory who contributed parts to this story. They did this by lighting creative fires in my imagination through sharing their own stories and memories.

This is a prequel to the Crocodile Dreaming Series of 5 novels also published by this author. It provides the back story before the original series begins.

Books in this series which follow are:

Book 1 – An English Visitor (Ed 1 – Just Visiting)

Book 2 – Crocodile Man (Ed 1 – The Diary)

Book 3 – Girl in an Empty Cage (Ed 1 – The Empty Place)

Book 4 – Lost Girl Diary (Ed 1 – Lost Girls)

Book 5 – Dance of Shadows (Ed 1 – Sunlit Shadow Dance)

Reader Reviews of Books and Series

Just Visiting - Excellent !!!!!! : So good! So impressed with this this story, can’t wait to read the whole series. This book has it all, romance, suspense, danger, secrets beauty culture, family, travel and so much more! The description of the country of Australia is wonderful, so many times writers get carried away with too much description of scenery etc. I found this author made the reader visualise the whole picture which is very important to this particular book. I hope everyone who comes across this book will read it, you won’t be disappointed. Highly recommend!!!!

An English Visitor

Really liked this book and want to read the series. Eerie story from Australia about a young English girl off on an adventure to Australia. She meets up with a young Australian man and they take off together so he can show her the outback. She starts noticing things a bit off with him and the story unfolds involving crocodiles, aborigines etc. Don’t read before going to sleep!

Series Reviews

I highly recommend this series; if you enjoy suspense novels or reading about Australia and especially both, you'll be happy you got a hold of this.

You must read this series ….. the content is excellent

It's superb... So sorry to finish it!

I read this series one volume at a time, over the last two years. It's very entertaining, well-written and really makes you feel like you're there with the characters. I can't praise it highly enough!

What a good series, so many stories, so many lives, growing darker with a thread of hope

A compelling story, told with sincerity. It would make a good plot for a television mini-series!

I thoroughly enjoyed this combined series. It is a nicely composed, thrilling script with essentially a fairy tale goodness. With this book I had my virtual tour through Australia.

Prologue

It’s Susan again.

For three years now this half told story has driven me mad, eating into my restored sanity, consuming me. It began with what I tell in the Epilogue of the previous half of this book, variously known as ‘Crocodile’s Child’ or ‘Return of the Breaker’, based on Mark’s two assigned titles of the story.

When I discovered it, a notebook hidden in a space in the wall of a place where the man who I remembered a Mark Bennet, but who was called by most, ‘MB’ used to sometimes live, I thought this was the real story of his life, self-told, the good and bad, warts and all.

And so it was, in part. But that was the problem: it was only a part.

When I started it and saw the 200 pages of dense hand-writing, written in the hand I knew so well, it seemed like it would be the full story.

So I immersed myself in it, reading with relish and imbibing a mix of joy, sorrow, love and horror. It was not a pretty story; three parts horror to each part good, but it was one I needed to read and one that deserved to be told.

I would not allow myself to read ahead, to skip or preview. I was firmly determined to read it line by line, to taste and fully know it only as each part unfolded. But as the pages unread dwindled, until but a bare handful were left, and then none remained, I knew this story went on far, far further.

This I knew from my own personal knowledge of parts unwritten that this man, my once upon a time lover, had told me directly or of which his diary gave glimpses.

I started to feel short changed, conned. In my mind I called him a bastard for fooling me yet again, giving me something to whet my lips but nothing at the end of which I could find understanding, nowhere near enough to give me real meaning, to satisfy my need to know and try to comprehend.

I began to wonder whether, rather than the man I still held to be a good man I had loved, but who had become bitter and twisted as luck ran against him, he was in fact the monster that others claimed, one who most delighted in delivering torment to his victims as a form of vengeance.

Of course my most beloved Vic, the man I thank God for every morning and night, and most especially when a smile lights his face, told me it was not so, that whatever parts of bad he had in him, he did not deliberately torment, and that he finished things he begun. So, if he had set himself to tell a story, he would finish it unless fate intervened.

Of course fate did intervene, but this fate was in a time and place of his choosing, a time when he had decided to end it of his own volition, even if the manner of its ending was not his exact plan. And that ending was at least two weeks after he could have left the first part of this story in Alice Springs where I found it. That was because for those last two weeks I travelled with him, day and night, to other far-away places, right until the very bitter end.

So there was clearly enough time for him to write more. I even had an inkling of seeing him with a second book in addition to his diary, that book which he had bequeathed to me as a parting gift.

In our weeks together there were times when he would go off alone with binoculars and a notebook or two, sometimes carrying a rifle. I understood this was part of his need to commune with the empty places and spaces that fed his soul. I had seen his diary in his hand at times thus, the one that I have since read. I also recalled seeing a second notebook too, though when or how often I could not be sure. That notebook was a thing akin to the one I found which gave me the first half of this story. I assumed back then it was an extra place he used to make notes. Perhaps it was. But, in hindsight, perhaps it was much more: a second unfinished part of this story.

So, three years on, I am determined to make one final effort to find the last part of the story of the second Breaker, the one known to most as MB.

***

My mind has been replaying those last few days I was with him; days after we went mustering on the VRD, beginning with the night on the boat in the big river of tides. When running the tides was done I remember how we sat still together in the small hours and talked. I am almost sure he had this notebook then, resting in his lap. I think once or twice he had it in his hands; his finger touched it as if to draw a thing from it.

I do not think he wrote in it, but he had put it in his briefcase with papers which he took to the meeting the next morning. As we drew close to the end of our boat journey, just as I was waking, I am nearly sure that he had this notebook and his diary resting on his knee. As I looked at him, half asleep, I remember he was sorting through papers for the meeting and when it was done he returned these papers to one compartment and these two books to the other of that leather briefcase. The diary was there a day later when I opened it, along with some other papers, but the other notebook was not. Not that I specifically looked for it but, if it was there I would have found it, and I am sure there was no other book there on that final day.

If this is so then it could be he left it at Timber Creek, in a safe place or with friends there. It is something to check, though I doubt he did so.

And, if it did not remain at Timber Creek, then it must have come on with us to the place of the crocodiles. I did not find it in the car or with his things. I took out everything I could find and checked each item, one by one, before burning or throwing each in the river.

The memories of that day, of all his things I held and discarded, are stamped like diamonds in my mind, sharp edged and blazing in cold light.

Could I have missed it and thrown it away. I doubt it. I know I did not burn it. Perhaps one of his boxes I threw in the river had a false bottom; perhaps it was within the lining of a gun case I threw in the river.

I cannot say for sure but it does not seem right.

But, if not there, then where, where, where?

Could he have been writing it yet when I disturbed him on that last early morning? It seems it was important to him to finish the story, his recording of a singular destiny. So I can imagine him sitting up these last few hours, when I slept my sleep of terror, to finish what was told. I know he told about me in a final diary chapter and wrote me a letter which he left in my passport. But those two things were the work of a bare half an hour. There were perhaps three hours from when he left me to when I woke.

If this other notebook was left somewhere at the site the police would have surely found it. I am told they combed the site for days, searching for clues as to his fate and that of the other who was with him on that last day.

It was me of course but they did not know it then. Their site search was done just after Charlie found that first part and then divers found more bits remaining of him in the lair of the crocodiles.

So, if it was left somewhere on the site, they would have surely found it!

But then, perhaps not!

I am told that, once they had found the things from the water, the car track and footprint, they packed up and left the site. Then, soon after this, they discovered his car where I left it and found my identity. So it appears that after this they lost interest in the site. They had all that they needed to tie me to him and me to the site, a tyre track, my footprint, my DNA in the car, and of course all the evidence of my deception. And to make it really easy for them I did not contest it. I pled guilty, knowing what I had done and carrying the shame.

So their evidence was not tested, I made it simple by admission.

Perhaps, after they had found these first things at the billabong that told of a murder, they only half looked further. It could be so.

All at once it comes to me in a rush, like a flaming fire of vision. In a flash I know it is so, it truly is so. A memory, unbidden leaps into my mind.

It is of Alan, as he later told it to Vic and others. He was searching for a better explanation after I had given the clue, that momentary lapse when I admitted there was another thing hidden there that they had not found. My part was but a word or two and a gesture that slipped out in my desire for cleverness. It was about the box of passports I had taken and buried at the foot of a little hill nearby.

Of course I did not say it in so many words, but my reaction to a question gave a clue, even though he did not know for what or where to look. In the end that search was futile, the clue was for a thing unknown in an uncertain place. It was like a needle in a haystack, the task was too big and the one day allowed was too short. It ended as a day of failure. He searched but found no treasure trove, then went on to Katherine where he found the vital clue.

But I recall now that he did make a finding on that day, one then deemed to be of no importance, one that slipped past notice amongst greater events. It was finding the crocodile totem, Mark’s most beloved possession.

On that day, after the main search was done, and before he left the site, Alan squatted in the grass beside the billabong, trying to place himself inside the mind of MB, to see it as his murder victim saw it on that fateful day.

And, as Alan was there, resting on his haunches, beside still water, trying to share MB’s same vision, his hand touched the ground beside him; a place hidden under a bush, far away from prying eyes. As his hand rested there it touched the crocodile totem, a fluke but strangely directed. Alan had pulled it out and put it in a bag for later checking. But of course that checking did not happen, the trial was done and then I was gone. And, when I fled I took the bag holding the totem. It was returned by a strange turn of fate to a place near where it was first found. Here Charlie found it once again.

They searched the site again, better this time, with nothing more found. But this was months later, after a wet season passed, taking with it whatever traces may once have been there.

I see again that crocodile totem, the thing most special to MB. Why was it left there? Was it dropped by mistake and found by accident?

Mark would not have left his special totem untended; never would he have dropped it by mistake. It was too important to him for that. It was his mark of belonging, a connection to the only real family he ever had, a thing he valued above all others.

In all the time I knew him I never saw him do a thing without purpose. If it was there it was because he intended, the leaving was intended and the place too was intended, perhaps even the finding was intended.

In that instant I know my search is now almost over. I know where to go. His crocodile totem was placed just there in order to guard and mark this place for others who would later know it and understand its meaning.

Who are these others to whom it was left? There are Buck and Vic, guardians of his will. There is Charlie who knew him not but to whom the spirit of the crocodile spoke. There are Alan with Sandy, who together searched for and found the truth.

But it was not left there for them to find. None of them saw him with my clear unshadowed eyes. None of them knew him as did I. In fact there is only one, it is me, the custodian of his future in all its parts, his things, his children, his name, his memory. It was left for me. It is now mine alone to find.

At last I know where to look.

***

A week has passed. Today it is just Alan and I by the waterhole. I decided that, even though I am sure it will be here, I want no others to share my disappointment if I am wrong. And, if it is true as I think, that the last of his story lies buried here, I need my own private space to commune with his spirit before I decide what to do.

I think this story must be told to its bitter end. But, until I have held it in my own hand and felt its life force, I cannot know for sure.

So Alan takes me to the place he found it, as best he can remember it. He stands back to leave me to look on my own. And he stands guard, in a clear place with an open view out over the water, perhaps five meters away, revolver in hand. He watches with high alert lest some denizen of the deep would seek to do me harm, knowing that his gun must be my saviour.

But nothing stirs. No spirits of the place are about, walking on the land or moving beneath the water. Today is not their day.

I settle on my haunches as others have before. And with my hand tool I scrape and probe the soil, as others have before, but now with clear purpose. A few minutes pass of nothingness. I have scraped a centimetre from the top of all the soil within reach, removing leaves, sticks and flaky soil, looking for any discontinuities. I move a half step to my left to widen the circle. Amongst the loose stuff my tool hits a thing which gives a small metallic clink.

I look towards the noise and see the place. It flashes a glimpse of blue, In that instant it reminds me of the wing of a fairy wren dipped in milk.

As my eyes focus I know it. It is the sister stone of