Lies Within the Rainforest (79,435 words)
When 48-year-old British journalist Simon Jones reads about the increase in women being tortured in Papua New Guinea to extract confessions of witchcraft, he’s drawn back to his time there twenty-five years earlier and to the reasons he wrote his first news article on PNG.
In 1987, Simon is a teacher with Voluntary Service Overseas in a remote Highlands school. He soon learns that his predecessor, Marcus Johnson, an African American, vanished two months earlier. The teachers offer conflicting explanations for Johnson’s departure. When Simon discovers $300 hidden in his house, he contacts Johnson’s parents, who confirm Marcus had never returned home and file a missing persons report.
Simon gets to know Trevor Hawthorn, an Australian Pentecostal Evangelist missionary working in Karani, a remote village hostile to outsiders. Through his mini-hydro projects, Trevor has spread electricity and religion. He is seen as a genius and demigod. Initially impressed, Simon grows uneasy after hearing Trevor preach to the students about cleansing women of witchcraft by fire and brag about his tight control over his pastors.
In a nearby town, Simon meets Dave, an Australian doctor, who invites him on a medical trip to Karani. While Dave examines a decomposed corpse to rule out death by witchcraft, Simon notices the victim’s sweatshirt matches the one in a photo of Johnson. Initially reticent about interfering, he informs Johnson’s parents and contacts the police.
As the only foreigner at the school, Simon becomes increasingly isolated. The principal’s wife introduces him to Evelyn, a local primary teacher. They begin a passionate love affair that tests Simon to his limits, as it has to remain secret for Evelyn’s own safety. She reveals that Moses Tambul, a Pentecostal preacher from Karani, who also vanished the previous year, had demanded compensation from Johnson over an alleged affair with his daughter, Mara, a former student. Johnson denied the claim, believing it was retaliation for accusing Moses and other Pentecostal pastors of torturing women to extract confessions of witchcraft.
When Johnson’s father arrives in PNG, he shows Simon a letter from his son claiming that Moses had threatened him. They visit Moses’s abandoned church in the rainforest and discover Johnson’s shirt and a cross bearing a human skeleton. Frustrated by the villagers’ silence about Johnson’s fate, his father leaves. Simon’s quest to uncover the truth becomes obsessive.
Evelyn’s visits are sporadic due to attacks by jealous men. Simon’s isolation and helplessness deepen as he struggles with the violence against women. Johnson’s father sends him photos recovered from his son’s camera. One shows the inside of Moses’s church, but without the skeleton. Another shows a naked blindfolded PNG woman seated outside the church with deep lacerations across her back. Among the blurred onlookers stands a white man.
A student reveals that Johnson had gone to Karani just before he vanished. Simon returns but is turned away. On his way back, he revisits the church, hoping to learn more about the skeleton, and encounters Mara. Concerned for her safety, she reluctantly admits that Johnson had met her father there the day he vanished. The body the doctor examined was her father’s.
That evening, Mara’s uncle storms into Simon’s house, telling him to keep quiet or share Johnson’s fate. Fearing for his life, Simon flees to New Zealand in an attempt to build a new life, haunted by the horrors he witnessed and realising he must take action.
Twenty-five years later, he hears Trevor is dying in a Brisbane hospice. Seizing the chance for answers, he arranges an interview under the pretext of discussing societal changes in Karani. But when he shows Trevor the photo of the tortured woman, the old missionary freezes. After previously confirming he was the only outsider they trusted, he abruptly ends the conversation.