Visitor, p.1
Visitor, page 1
Table of Contents
Visitor (Crocodile Dreaming, #1)
Chapter 1 – Safe Home – Day 31
Chapter 2 - Holiday Alone – Day 1
Chapter 3 – Cairns and the Barrier Reef – Days 2-4
Chapter 4 – Magnetic Island – Days 5-9
Chapter 5 – Sydney and Melbourne – Days 10-16
Chapter 6 – Alice Springs – Days 17-18
Chapter 7 – Simpson Desert and On – Days 19-21
Chapter 8 – The Big Waterhole – Day 22
Chapter 9 – To the Gulf and Hell’s Gates – Day 23
Chapter 10 – Fishing Calvert and Robinson – Day 24
Chapter 11 – Discovery – Day 25
Chapter 12 – Borroloola – Day 25
Chapter 13 – Heartbreak Hotel to VRD – Day 26
Chapter 14 – Out on the VRD – Day 26
Chapter 15 – On a Big River with Crocodiles – Day 27
Chapter 16 – Running the Night Tides – Night 27
Chapter 17 – Truth – Day 28
Chapter 18 – Captivity, Searching to Escape – Day 28
Chapter 19 – The Last Night – Night 28
Chapter 20 – Marco’s Story – Night 28
Chapter 21 – Crocodile Destiny – Day 29
Chapter 22 – Hiding the Shame – Day 29
Chapter 23 – Escape – Day 29-30
Chapter 24 – Devil Spawn – One month later
Visitor
Book 1
Crocodile Dreaming Series
Novel by
Graham Wilson
Copyright
Visitor
Graham Wilson
Copyright Graham Wilson 2023
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 grahamwilsonbooks@gmail.com
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my family and close friends, particularly my wife, Mary, who supported me on my writing journey.
Thank you also to the many backpackers and other travellers I met while living in the Northern Territory. Some of you came with me on my travels; many shared your experiences of the world from which you came and of journeying through this land. From you came many ideas for this story.
Special thanks to the aboriginal peoples of the NT, with many aboriginal friends giving me insights for parts of this story.
Most significantly, thank you to a large unseen crocodile, probably still living in a remote Arnhem Land billabong, who almost had me for dinner. Teeth marks, visible on my leg today, remind me of my own real-life encounter. This actual creature sits at the centre of this book’s imagined story. I am often asked to tell the true story in outback bars.
My sense of the silent power of this predator remains with me yet. Along with aboriginal mythology and other people’s stories, it feeds my fascination for these huge ancient creatures, barely changed since the time of the dinosaurs. Some of the largest crocodiles I have seen, which live in very remote parts of the Northern Territory, rival those in this created story.
Also thank you to readers of earlier versions of this story. Your comments, mostly positive, encouraged me to keep going with improving this series. Reviews, both the good and bad, give great insight into how to improve the telling of a story.
Along with the excellent professional editing advice provided by Kathryn Moore, these reviews were very valuable in helping me see areas where both the plot and the way it is told needed to be improved. As a result, it is hoped readers will find this is an even better version of the original story that has captivated many of you over the years since it was first written.
Author’s Note
This is a novel set in Australia’s Northern Territory, a place where I lived and worked for four decades. Locations used are places I know, including small towns, aboriginal communities, cattle stations and many remote, rugged and beautiful natural locations for which it is famous, places with names like Uluru and Kakadu. These give an authentic backdrop to this story.
This is a work of fiction. The characters are not real people. However, elements of the story have a real basis, as experienced by me, or as tales of the bush, spoken around campfires or over bars, somewhere in the Australian Outback. While the general locations described around the Northern Territory exist, many finer details are not accurate; they are created as a canvas on which to paint the story.
Backpackers are part of Outback Australia. Occasional horror stories occur and gain wide coverage. Some, like those of Joanna Lees, Josef Schwab, or the awful deeds of Ivan Milat, contributed ideas to this novel. However, these are rare events, as likely to happen in big cities or in other countries. They do not typify most people’s experiences of these remote places.
The setting of this novel is an external frame for the story. It tells of the journey of two people both through real locations and within themselves. In bad situations they do awful things, despite desiring goodness. This reflects human experience. Each of us has an ability to make terrible choices and do evil if we cease to value life, but even the worst people may have parts that are good and decent. This book is also an impossible love story, with love destined for destructive failure.
Alongside this story of people’s lives, this book seeks to capture the essence of 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 modern comforts, the intrinsic character of this place, the ‘Territory’, remains little altered. Ernestine Hill, in her famous book of that name, called it ‘a land too vast for human imagination’. It remains so to this day.
Wildlife is abundant. Stations still muster cattle and buffalo for a living. Aboriginal people live off the land and know it with an intricate understanding, as they have done for 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, as they have from the dawn of time.
My thanks to the innumerable real characters of the Northern Territory who contributed to this story by lighting creative fires in my mind through the sharing of their own stories and memories.
Visitor is Book 1 of the Crocodile Dreaming Series.
Other books in this series are:
Book 2 – Victim
Book 3 – Void
Book 4 – Vanished
Book 5 – inVisible
Book 6 – Vertigo (Vengeance Part 1)
Book 7 – Vortex (Vengeance Part 2)
For those who wish to read these books in ebook form they will be released progressively over 2023-24 from major ebook retailers. Print books will become available from online sources and selected bookshops on a slightly slower timetable.
If you wish to contact the author directly in relation to these books or other writing information please email the address
grahamwilsonbooks@gmail.com
Prologue – The Watchers
I watch him as he watches her.
I am an ancient being set apart from time. Before today I have seen him many times, both from close and afar. Part of him is twinned with me. He glimpses but knows not. We share the spirit of a dreamtime ancestor of this ancient land, one which calls us to him. Soon I will reclaim him. I will never release him, no matter what comes to pass.
And he will bring with him another. She neither knows nor sees what approaches. She thinks the future is her own. But she is as linked to him as he is to me. She will think she is free, but the links will hold her fast. When it is time I will claim her too.
***
A man stands alone above the shoreline, partly hidden by the foliage of a tree. He watches her. He desires her.
He wants to know who she is and all about her.
He came to Cairns early today, a week after hunting down a man. His end came far out in the Arabian Desert. It was fitting.
He remembers that day. What little remains of that man, once the birds and jackals finish their pickings, will soon be bleached white, matching the shade of the sand, then fast covered and hidden from sight within ever-shifting dunes.
He feels no remorse, only a small satisfaction that it is done. It was a kinder end than what this man offered to some he hurt. Where justice fails, vengeance is his part.
Now he is back in his homeland, this vast empty sweep of the familiar. It is a harsh land with odd fingers of civilisation like this tourist mecca on the beach. Here is a place of visitors, many visitors, some beautiful. He has known and sampled others alike to this one he watches now. Some have gone on their way, returned to their own lands. Some never left this land but are become a permanent part of its substance. For some it was from misfortune. For others it was due to his actions.
He feels faint regret at their passing, but it is now separated from him by layers of far distance, the distances of time and loss, and, moving beyond that, the distance of new experience.
Now he seeks another. He has just seen her standing on the beach. She appears like some he has known before, breathtaking in her beauty and vitality. He senses her wanton abandon as he watches, distant, through the tree. She dips toes in wavelets, dark hair flowing back. She sweeps hands above her head and arches her body backwards, goddess like, as if embracing
He must be more careful this time, lest some new bad thing happens to her. He senses she is both courageous and breakable.
***
Susan relaxes into her seat as the aeroplane levels out. She is going home, still alive. She glances at her hands. One tightly clutches her passport and boarding pass—her tickets to freedom—the other grips the armrest of her seat. She forces herself to loosen her grasp and pack her travel documents away. She prays to God to let it all be over. She has escaped; the evil is gone from her life. Soon she will be home free.
As these thoughts flow through her awareness she senses another is there, watching her, waiting and biding its time.
She shudders and pushes the idea out of her mind.
***
I am the watcher – she thinks she is free.
My time will come – she will return to me.
Chapter 1 – Safe Home – Day 31
Susan awakes with a jolt, feeling wrenched back into consciousness. Her head has been slumped into an uncomfortable position. Now her neck aches. There is a large woman squashed into the seat next to her. It seems this person has given a nudge to stop Susan falling onto her, not exactly friendly. But then Susan has barely spoken to this woman in the last fourteen hours.
Since she boarded this plane in Singapore, her sole stop after leaving Darwin, Australia, Susan has retreated into a cocoon, sleeping the hours away, with the barest of interludes for loo breaks and food, before returning to her slumbering respite. It’s as if she has spent a whole day and night of her life locked away in a sealed time capsule.
Now she’s totally disorientated. Here she is, approaching London; a month of her life has vanished into nothingness.
Gradually her mind pulls back fragments of those last awful days in Australia; a man’s smiling, almost handsome face, devoid of normal emotions, memories of crocodiles, blood and torn body parts, images of a white four-wheel drive with a big cooler box on the back. The images wash over her.
She suppresses them with a shudder and looks around. London cannot be far now; people are waking and preparing for their 6.00 am touchdown at Heathrow. Some have raised slide windows. Early grey daylight squeezes through the gaps.
Breakfast is being served. The smell makes her ravenous. She eats the offered croissant and scrambled egg with relish. Afterwards, there is urgency as stewards remove breakfast trays and clear away.
The plane slows and drops into its final descent. She raises her own plastic slide. It is mostly grey outside. They are flying under a blanket of cloud, but with lighter sky to her left and behind her. It must be southeast England, somewhere over Kent. They are scooting over farmlands, roads and villages, lush green in early dawn light. Further away are glimpses of busy roads and large towns. The gloomy sky matches an unquiet anxiety within her. Is it really over? Is she safely home? Or will the police be waiting for her at the arrival gate?
Suddenly a shaft of sunlight pierces through the cloud. It lights the countryside with glowing golden light.
Her mood soars as her eyes follow the path of the light. It’s as if her connection to horror is broken. She smiles, unable to suppress infectious joy. Everything will be all right. She is alive! She knows life will be good again.
How great it will be to see her family and friends. None of them need ever know. She made a visit to Australia, travelled far and wide, saw interesting and beautiful places; that’s her story. If anyone asks where she’s planning to travel to next, she’ll tell them she loved her trip to Australia, but her travel bug has been sated. She’s happy to be back home.
The woman sitting alongside her must catch something of her happy mood. She catches Susan’s eye and smiles. Susan smiles back; joy is a contagious thing.
The woman introduces herself as Annabel. She seems friendly. Susan knows it’s her, not this woman’s demeanour that’s changed. She lets herself be drawn into a conversation about trips and travel. She explains that she was really exhausted from her trip, but now she feels ever so much better, after that long, long sleep.
Soon they are making a final approach. There’s a slight jolt and body push as the airliner brakes on the black tarmac.
As they pull up at the terminal Susan feels amazingly refreshed and confident. A bad dream ended with the morning’s sunshine—her anxieties belong to a far distant place and time. She gathers her minimal possessions—an overnight bag, book, cardigan, purse—and follows the slow procession of departing passengers down the aisle and out to the concourse. She hopes her mum and dad will be here to meet her. Perhaps also her gawky brother, Tim, and her Gran, Elizabeth.
She skips baggage collection, as she only has hand luggage, and is quickly in the customs line of nothing to declare. She says a silent prayer they don’t want to pull out and check all her hand luggage. There’s nothing obvious, but she doesn’t want them to look too hard. What she has is minimal and, with a British passport, they quickly wave her through customs.
Now she’s almost at the front of the passport queue. Anxiety bubbles up. Will they pull her aside? She glances up quickly, looking around for security. There’s no obvious sign of police waiting. Her tension eases a notch. She holds up her passport and is through before she has time to think.
Suddenly there they are, all her family members as expected. Her mum and dad are together in the centre, with Gran and Tim to each side. She rushes into a group hug, feeling her dad’s grizzled face brush her cheek and inhaling the familiar scent of her mother’s perfume. She feels her Gran’s light touch on one shoulder and a firm, almost punch from Tim on the other, as they all come together.
The familiar sameness of these people, one’s that she thought she’d never see again, takes her words away. She stares at them all in breathless silence.
“How brown you are!” her Gran says.
Her dad smiles. “How’s my girl?”
“Hi, sis, no new Aussie boyfriends in tow?”
“You look drawn around the eyes dear, all the bright sun and late nights,” her mum adds.
When her dad asks her where’s her big bag of luggage Susan already has this story worked out. She feigns an annoyed expression. “It went missing on the last leg of my trip. I only noticed getting off the bus, arriving in Darwin. Didn’t have time to try and find it before my plane left. I’ll have to make some calls when I get the chance.”
They drive home to Reading, following the familiar M4 motorway through increasingly lumpy morning traffic. Views of green fields and distant water have a soft surreal feel in the early morning light, so different from the barren harshness of what she left behind. Signs for Windsor Castle and Eton flash past with wonderful familiarity.
A couple times random thoughts jump into her mind, memories of that other place of nightmares, but she resolutely pushes them away.
Once home, she leaves her overnight bag in her room. Everything is just as she left it—was it only four weeks ago?
The smell of food draws her to the kitchen. Her dad has bacon and eggs sizzling. They sit around over coffee and chat. She tells stories of her first two weeks—the Barrier Reef, Sydney, Melbourne, but not much about the trip through the outback. It doesn’t matter. She’s done and seen enough in her first two weeks to fill the conversation and satisfy their curiosity. They’re none the wiser.
Tim stands. “Must go, sis, or I’ll miss my first lecture, you know that boring anatomy subject you almost failed.”
Mum stands to go with him. “Sorry, darling, me too, I must go with Tim. See you tonight for the rest of the news.”
As they walk out Susan is struck by the unreality of it all. Routines have continued unchanged in her absence, life in a parallel universe.
Dad and Gran chat with her for another minute as they finish cups of coffee. Dad puts his empty cup down, scoffs the last bit of bacon and says, “We’d better go too. I’ll drop Gran home on the way. There’s a Paddington train in twenty minutes, which I should be on. Will you be okay on your own? I imagine you’ll want to stretch out for a good sleep.”
“Yes, I’ll be fine. Bed sounds so good.” She stands and hugs each in turn before they leave, another layer of disjunct reality.
