Moonlight Downs Read Free Page A

sick from whatever was possessing them, and they did tend to make speedy recoveries, though my father contended that that was more from fear of their doctor than anything else.
    But when the doctor had it in for you, that was it. You might as well give up the ghost, say your good-byes, start the sorry business. He could rip the bones out of your body with a single glance, send his manti— his spirit familiar—into your skull and suck the eyes out of their sockets, seduce your woman from the other side of a claypan, turn himself into a whirlwind and hurl you into the clouds.
    Blakie’s origins were a mystery. Some of the old people said they’d seen him as a boy, chained to a tree out at Kilyubatu, in the desert north of here. The Kilyubatu mob swore that he’d been raised by dingoes. Teddy Bushgate had it on good authority that he’d been thrown, fully formed, out of a volcano. Us kids, except for Hazel, who was strangely immune from the universal terror and seemed almost fascinated by him, called him Mamu: the Demon.
    My old man told me once that, as far as he could piece together the story, some missionary mob had taken the young Blakie to an orphanage in Adelaide, from where he’d absconded into the desert. He emerged years later, blistered, burning and mad as a car-load of camp cooks.
    When the Moonlight mob were hunted off the place he stayed behind, of course: if Adelaide couldn’t contain him, Bluebush sure as hell couldn’t. And when they came back he was still there, roaming across the country, as wild as the whirlwinds that rattled the camp from time to time.
    One of which whirlwinds, it appeared, was about to be unleashed.
    Bindi pulled over. I had little choice but to do the same.
    ‘Why are we stopping?’ I groaned.
    ‘Oh, more better we let him give us an earful now,’ Lincoln replied. He’d always been pretty casual about Blakie. Lincoln had been in Darwin working on the wharves when it was destroyed by Cyclone Tracey, and Jack reckoned he’d been pretty casual about that too. ‘Otherwise he might get really wild.’
    If Blakie wasn’t really wild already, I didn’t want to be there when he was: he stormed up to the convoy, caterwauling and cat-walking, letting fly with a volley of spittle and spite which didn’t diminish even when he got to Lincoln. If anything, it intensified: he halted, roared, dragged the poor old bugger out of his seat and hoisted him into the air. There must have been twenty people there, but such was the awe in which Blakie was held that they just sat and gaped like a load of slaughterhouse cows.
    He had a fist pulled back, apparently about to belt Lincoln, when he suddenly stopped, distracted by something.
    Me.
    He stared at me with those ferocious eyes, and I wanted to shrivel up and disappear. He forgot about Lincoln, dropped him with a thud and moved in close to me. Very close: I could feel his parasites hopping over to check me out. His hair was as black and greasy as a morning-after frypan. There were desiccated grasshopper legs on his lips and dead blowies in his beard. His face was a mess of scabs and scars, his nose looked like the sort of thing you’d scrape off your bull-bar. I got a close look at the inside of his mouth: it was a concerto grosso of cold sores, hot breath and black teeth.
    ‘Mechanic daughter?’ he grunted, his curiosity evidently piqued. ‘Em’ly Tempest?’
    If I’d been thrilled when Lincoln remembered me, I felt horrified that Blakie did.
    ‘Just passin through, Blakie,’ I assured him. ‘Just passin through.’
    He gave me a look which made it abundantly clear that if he had anything to do with it I’d keep on passing.
    ‘You bin city?’ he asked.
    ‘Been to the city,’ I answered, nodding politely.
    ‘Which?’
    ‘Adelaide. And Melbourne,’ I added, remembering that he was said to have unpleasant recollections of the City of Churches.
    Lincoln, meanwhile, had climbed to his feet, and put a hand on Blakie’s shoulder to