“What do you mean by ‘funny’?” Denny asked.
Ellie punched my arm. “Spill.”
I looked at Thiago, who nodded as if to say “go right ahead, tell ’em”.
I hesitated. Did I really want to get into all this? My last visit to Australia had ended badly partly because I’d stuck my nose where it wasn’t wanted. Was I really going to do exactly the same thing again?
It turned out I was.
“Okay,” I said, leaning in closer to Ellie and Denny. “Listen up.”
I PUT ON my ultra-serious face. “The antelope’s butt smelled of paint.”
“So?” Denny said. “What’s wrong with the painting smelling of paint? I mean, it is a paint-ing, right?”
I raised my eyebrows and waited for the penny to drop. Sure enough, after a second or two, Denny’s eyebrows shot up to match mine.
“Oh,” he said, louder than I liked. “The painting shouldn’t smell of paint—”
“Because it’s supposed to be twenty thousand years old,” Ellie said, completing Denny’s thought.
“Exactly,” I said, sitting back.
“The paintings are fake!” Denny hissed. He was bouncing around in his seat and it wasn’t just because we were driving across a dried-up creek bed. He slapped his hand on the back of my seat. “I knew there was something weird about that guy!”
I glanced at Ellie, who was sitting quite still. “What’s up?”
“I don’t know …” she said. “It’s a pretty big thing to accuse Brushes of faking the paintings.”
I looked at her like she was nuts. “What else could it be? Anyway, I’m not accusing Brushes. Not yet. Not until we’ve figured something out.”
“What’s that?” Denny said.
“Why he faked them,” I said.
“If he faked them,” Ellie corrected. “Maybe they were fading away and he was worried they’d disappear. Still bad, I know, but different to faking the whole thing.”
I opened my mouth to argue and then closed it again.
Ellie was right. Brushes’ crime might be vandalism, not forgery. There was a big difference. Now I was A Man of Experience, I knew that it paid to pick who you fight—and where.
I looked out of the bus window. That was the thing about the outback—there was plenty of space to hide things, plenty of space to get lost. We were a long way from home out here.
It was no place to be making enemies.
WE GOT BACK to Kamp Kulture in the middle of the afternoon, hot, dusty, and tired. While Vern started setting up for dinner, Brushes took the rest of us off to a nearby billabong.
Okay, I admit I didn’t know what a billabong was until we got there. For those of you who also don’t know, a billabong is kind of a swimming hole in a creek—the bit where the water is nice and shallow. The one Brushes took us to was a cool pool of blue water with a few green trees (the only green thing for miles around) bending toward its surface. It looked great … apart from one tiny detail.
“Go swimming?” I gulped.
I’d been swimming in Australia before and it hadn’t turned out so well. That time it was sharks that I’d mainly been worrying about (although it turned out I should have been more worried about losing my shorts). Now I had a whole new croc-shaped worry.
“That’s the idea, Texas,” Brushes said.
I ignored him and glanced at Ellie. “Uh, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said. “What about crocodiles?”
Brushes laughed. “There aren’t any crocs around here!”
This was the moment. We had to tell him about the big croc we’d seen. Even if we did have our doubts about Brushes and his whole cave painting scam, we couldn’t let the other kids become croc snacks without saying something. Other than Glen, who’d started feeling sick on the bus ride back from the caves, everyone else was busy changing into their swimming gear. I knew if we didn’t tell Brushes soon, things could get pretty ugly out there and that blue water might start turning red.
“Actually,” I said, “that’s not strictly true.”
Brushes glowered at me. “What?”
“We saw one last night,” I said. “I, uh, needed to pee and so did Ellie. While we were out there, well, like I say, that’s when we saw one. A croc, that is.”
For some reason I didn’t mention I’d been standing on the back of the croc having a pee when I’d noticed. I don’t know, out in the cold light of day—or even the baking hot sun of mid-afternoon—not noticing when you’re standing on the back of a three-ton croc seems a little dumb.
“You sure about this?” Brushes said. His voice got even growlier than usual. It sounded like he’d been chewing sandpaper. “It’s real dark out there, mate. Your mind plays tricks. A foreign kid like you might have confused old Crocodile Rocks with an actual crocodile.”
I shook my head. “Uh, nuh, nope, it was definitely a—”
“You know, Brushes might be right, Rafe,” Ellie said. “We could have mistaken Crocodile Rocks for a real one. We don’t want to get into a boxing match about this, right?”
“Yes, that’s ri—What?” I said, doing a double take. I stared at Ellie in disbelief. Was she completely nuts? I’d been standing on the back of the croc right in front of her! We’d been chased through the desert about ten snappy feet away from being croc chow! “There’s no way we—”
And then, midway through my sentence, my mouth closed like a slammed door.
I’d figured out why Ellie was lying.
EVERYONE WENT SWIMMING apart from me and Glen. Even though I was now 100 percent sure that the big croc that had chased us last night definitely wouldn’t show up, I still didn’t like the idea of dipping so much as a Khatchadorian toe in an Australian bathtub.
With Brushes watching me far too closely for me to talk properly to Ellie, I sat on a rock in the shade of the tree as the others splashed about, and tried to get my thoughts in some kind of order, which was kind of like trying to make a scale model of the Sydney Opera House out of soup. I picked up a pebble and tossed it back and forth from hand to hand. After a while, I put the pebble in my pocket. I decided it was going to be my lucky pebble from now on because I had figured it all out …
Later on, when all this was over, I found out that it’s a big no-no to take anything from sacred Indigenous land—even a pebble. I didn’t know at the time. I just thought it was a regular pebble.
The clue to how I knew Ellie was lying about the croc was when she said she didn’t want the talk between Brushes and me to become “a boxing match”. That didn’t sound like something Ellie would usually have said and, just as I had been about to start an argument about the croc with Brushes, what she was trying to tell me hit me.
The box.
YOU KNOW THAT feeling when you’re trying to think of something and it’s right on the tip of your tongue, only you can’t quite squeeze it out? That was what this was, except that when Ellie said the word “boxing” I did remember. I remembered the box.
The box was something that had been tickling my brain bone ever since I’d seen it behind Brushes’ secret trailer, and it looked like it had been doing the same to Ellie.
If we’d got it right, the whole thing went something like this:
1. If Brushes was up to something dodgy in the caves, even he wouldn’t risk the lives of all the Young Artists in a creek where there was a chance of a crocodile …
2. … which meant that Brushes knew—not guessed—that the crocodile was nowhere to be seen because …
3. … the croc was safely tucked up in the box behind the trailer.
I totally get that all of this stuff could easily have been me putting two and two together and coming up with 76.3, but it just felt like I was right. Haven’t you had that feeling before? Like there isn’t a real solid logical reason you know something but it doesn’t matter because you just know.
That was what it was like for me, sitting there under the shade of a coolabah tree.* I knew.
Despite the h
eat, I felt a little shiver of excitement. Because Brushes was letting everyone swim without worrying, I knew that something fishier than a truckload of sardines was going on. It had to do with the cave paintings and the croc and the dudes in business suits and shades, and with those mystery lights out at Crocodile Rocks.
The only question was what, exactly. I felt like there was a big, really complicated jigsaw laid out in front of me with the important pieces there … but all in the wrong place. I needed information from the outside world if Rafe Khatchadorian, ace detective, was going to crack the Case of the Vanishing Croc wide open. And since we were stuck out here for another week, it didn’t look likely that I’d be able to find out anything.
But I knew a kid who could.
THAT EVENING, EVERY time Ellie and I looked up from talking, we’d find Brushes glancing at us from underneath his face fungus. Time dragged, mainly because Brushes decided to “encourage creativity” by getting Vloot to make a clay bust … using Brushes as a model.
“Man, that bloke’s got a big head,” Denny whispered.
He and Ellie and I were sitting with our backs against a rock with our feet pointed toward the fire.
“I don’t know,” I said, peering at Vloot’s sculpture. “I think it looks about right.”
“No,” Denny said, “I mean he fancies his chances. Only a big head would get someone to make a statue of himself, right?”
It wasn’t exactly a statue but Denny was right. There was something kind of odd about the whole thing.
“I don’t think Vloot wanted to do it, either,” Ellie said. “I heard Brushes sort of insisting. Weird.”
Brushes might have stayed at the camp forever if it hadn’t been for Glen and His Exploding Butt. Remember I told you Glen hadn’t been feeling too good on the bus back to camp? Well, things got a whole lot worse for poor Glen, who had a bad case of Exploding Butt (don’t worry, his butt didn’t explode anywhere near us. There will be no exploding butt pictures), which meant Vern had to take him back to civilization.
Vern scooped Glen into the bus and set off for Bigbottom Creek. I wasn’t all that sure that being back at Bigbottom Creek would be much of an improvement, but I guess Glen would only be a short sprint from a bathroom. To be honest, I wasn’t worried about Glen. He came from a country that ate deep-fried chocolate bars and haggis. He’d be fine.
Once Vern had gone, Brushes went through his old stretch-and-yawn routine before heading out of camp to what he told us (again) was a patch of bare ground … but which we knew was a fifty-foot LuxCamp G6 “Executive Range” air-conditioned trailer hidden in a secret ravine.
With Brushes and Vern out of the picture, and all the other Kamp Kulture kids bedding down for the night, it was time at last for my super-secret spy network to spring into action.
MY SUPER-SECRET spy network was called Denny.
I mean, Denny was right there with his access to the net and everything. In about ten minutes flat he’d got all the information we needed.
“This is the photo Ellie took of the logo on the side of the cars at the ravine,” he said. “The image wasn’t clear enough, but I’ve cleaned it up.”
Denny zoomed in on the words on a banner underneath the logo.
“MegaGlobal Industries,” he said. “It’s the second-largest mining operation in the world. And here’s where it gets really interesting: MegaGlobal owns Crocodile Rocks, which used to have a diamond mine operating there about thirty years back. There were a bunch of rumours about Crocodile Rocks having some Aboriginal Australian cave paintings, so MegaGlobal shut the whole place down. There was a court case about it but, just before it started, McGarrity found the cave paintings here and it all went quiet about Crocodile Rocks.”
Ellie’s jaw dropped. “Wow.”
“Very,” said Denny. “There’s more: MegaGlobal Industries does a lot for charity and sponsorship. One of those sponsorships is what brought us all here. They are the money behind the Young Artists Cultural Campout and they own the TV station that broadcasts Brushes McGarrity.”
“So McGarrity is in MegaGlobal’s pocket,” I said, trying to piece it all together in my head.
“Looks like it.” Denny flicked a finger, and a map of Australia flashed on-screen. He pointed at an area colored in red. “This is where the crocs are. There’s no record of a crocodile of any size getting this far south.”
“So that means …?” I tried—and failed—to figure out exactly what Denny did mean.
“This croc was brought in,” Ellie finished helpfully.
Denny nodded. “Exactamundo.”
Another image flashed up, this time showing the logo of a trucking company. “Outback Trucking,” Denny said. “Specializes in the transportation of large animals. Crocodiles a speciality. Owned by—”
“Let me guess,” Ellie said. “MegaGlobal Industries?”
“Correct.” Denny brought up another webpage, which had a picture of a large rectangular cage that looked exactly the size of the box behind McGarrity’s trailer. “The ReptoHouse XXL Cage costs eight hundred dollars and one was ordered by a McGarrity, B., of Bigbottom Creek last month. Look familiar? I’m figuring that McGarrity is using the tame croc to keep people’s noses out of Crocodile Rocks.”
Ellie looked up at us. “Something tells me we might need to go and take a look at the ravine again.”
ARMED WITH DENNY’S information, which slotted plenty of missing pieces into the jigsaw, the three of us headed out into the desert again.
To be honest, I would have felt a whole bunch better if we really had been special-agent types, but, out there in the dark, we were just three arty geeks with some wild ideas, all of which could be wide of the mark by the width of the Pacific Ocean.
Maybe finding out what Brushes McGarrity and MegaGlobal Industries were up to—or if they were up to anything at all—was way out of our reach. Despite all this kind-of-sort-of-possibly being my idea, I now wasn’t sure I wanted to get this serious about it all.
On the one hand, it did look very much like something was going on out at Crocodile Rocks and that McGarrity was in it up to his bristly red neck. But on the other hand, it really wasn’t any of my business.
Denny, though, wasn’t about to let things go. Ever since he’d found out that Crocodile Rocks was part of an Aboriginal Australian land rights claim, he’d been pretty determined to dig deeper. He’d discovered that five hundred pounds of meat had been shipped out a few days before the camp started. We figured that this could be for the croc, which meant, in theory, that it shouldn’t be that hungry.
In theory.
“There,” Ellie said, once we were close to the ravine. “See the light?”
Denny, who had missed all the “fun” when we were out here last night, took a moment to see what Ellie was pointing out. “Okay, got it,” he said.
We slowly moved forward. I could feel my breath quickening and told myself to relax.
I’d been in these situations before. I was, after all, A Man of Experience.
At the edge of the ravine, we lay down on our bellies and wriggled to the lip of the cliff. Just like last night, Brushes was sitting on a sun lounger, chatting with the men in suits. I swallowed hard as I looked at the empty crocodile cage. Meat or no meat, being out here with a thing like that was no joke.
Ellie nudged my elbow and gestured for us to drop back. With Brushes and The Suits safely tucked up at the ravine, it was time for us to take a closer look at what was going on over at Crocodile Rocks.
IT TOOK US about an hour to get to Crocodile Rocks and that hour was right up there with the lousiest ones of my life.
We were on foot and in the dark, and the whole time we were out there, there was the very real possibility of bumping into that croc … or any of the other six trillion toxic animals that live in Australia. So, all things considered, it wasn’t exactly a stroll in the park. I’d have been happier dancing into Mrs. Stricker’s office wearing a tutu.
Eventually, though,
we arrived at a spot where we could see what was going on. We climbed carefully up a rocky slope, toward a ledge which overlooked the crocodile’s mouth—the area we’d seen the lights disappear the previous night.
“Whoa,” Denny said as we all looked down. “Check it out.”
The lights at Crocodile Rocks weren’t coming from cars—they were coming from trucks. Lots of trucks. Diggers too. In fact, judging by the number of vehicles going in and out, there was a totally serious operation going on down there.
“Looks like MegaGlobal mean business,” Ellie said. She lifted her camera to her eye and started filming.
“Seems pretty busy for a place that’s supposed to be closed,” I agreed.
Denny unpacked his mobile satellite kit. “We have to get this on the internet,” he said.
“Wait,” a rock next to Denny said. “Not so fast.”
We all froze.
Whatthefreakinwhatwhat?
Now, I don’t know about you, but when a rock starts talking, it kind of gives you a shock. As far as I was concerned there were only three possibilities:
1. This wasn’t actually happening. Maybe I was having one of my fantasy moments.
2. We had stumbled into a parallel universe.
3. There really was a rock talking to us.
I was kind of edging toward the parallel universe theory when the rock began to move, and I stopped trying to make sense of what was happening. We watched, paralyzed with fear, as the rock got to its feet (yup, the thing had feet) and stood up, silhouetted against the truck lights coming from Crocodile Rocks. Small stones and dust cascaded down from the creature’s head and skitter-scattered across the ground. It was something straight out of a horror movie.