Blood River

by Tony Cavanaugh

  As I stepped out the front door I saw her, ahead, as she jogged out of the driveway and onto the footpath. I followed.

  There was a moon but the sky was dense with fast-moving black rain clouds. Every now and then another dark cloud would pass in the sky and reveal a burst of moonlight. The weather bureau had forecast no more rain for the weeks ahead. Even at this hour, it was hot. Anthea was jogging in her black outfit, along the footpaths that wound down the hill to the creek and our target location. Old trees hung from either side of the narrow streets. All was quiet. No-one driving.

  —

  AFTER THE MEDIA release went out and after the news of Nils hit the airwaves and after I tasked the Officer-In-Charge of Homicide to re-open the Slayer case so, in media-speak, we could all move forward with confidence, I got a text message.

  I have two phones. One is my business number, which seems to buzz day and night. The other is personal and hardly ever rings, because hardly anyone has the number. Not even Damon could get this one. Mum had it. Billy does. Jen White does.

  Jen sent me a photo she said she’d taken from the day before. A string of human teeth. Five teeth, maxillary canine teeth. The trophies. The elusive hard evidence that pinned the victims’ DNA to the killer.

  Her sister.

  The second photo was a wider shot, of the cabinet in which the teeth were mounted, at the bottom of a wall of cabinets, the rest all filled with butterflies.

  At first I thought it was a pathetic joke. Then I was shocked into disbelief. Then it slowly began to make sense. Right house, wrong sister. I didn’t bother with the why. Like the drum-chested little Irish prosecutor twenty years ago, all that mattered was that she did it, not why she did it. Right now I couldn’t care less about the why. Maybe, after the killer has gone down and I have some time, I’ll consider the psychology, the black hole of a serial killer’s mind, but for now, as I stared at the photo, I had only one objective.

  And then a third text. She is going to try to kill again tonight. Be at the back of the Breakfast Creek Hotel from 2am. I’ll meet you there.

  So, here I am, at two in the morning, in a side street behind the hotel, music thumping out over the din of drunken laughter.

  —

  BY TWO-FORTY we had arrived. Fifty metres ahead of me, Anthea had melted into the dark shadow of a laneway that ran off a street behind the hotel. The street was full of parked cars, on both sides. The racecourse was on the other side. I could hear the shouts and bombast yells of guys, the laughter and screeches of girls, all pouring out of the hotel as they made their way through the car park, onto the dark streets and up towards us.

  I texted Lara and, hearing the shuffle of feet, realised that she was behind me. She’d been waiting in the shadows of the same street, where the roots of large jacaranda trees had cracked through the concrete of the footpath. The moon snuck in a short burst of white light every few minutes.

  ‘She’s there,’ I whispered.

  ‘I know. I saw her arrive. She’s standing at the corner of the street and the laneway. It’s a good place for a kill.’

  We heard someone approach, feet dragging and an unsteady step. A drunk man.

  Here he came, around the corner from the hotel car park, fumbling with his car keys, pressing the zap release to get a bead on where he had parked. Pointing his keylock in both directions and swaying on his feet. Well past the legal limit. He was in his thirties and wore a dishevelled suit with a white shirt hanging out. He would have looked business-like in the morning. Now he was a scruffy pisshead.

  A car, parked just beyond where Anthea was waiting, beeped and its orange lights blinked. As the man began to shuffle past the entrance to the laneway, he stopped and looked in.

  She stepped out and walked up to him. In her hand, by her side, was the long, wide blade.

  Blood River

  ‘YOU’RE DEAD,’ HE SAID, MY DAD.

  He didn’t mean to hurt me. He was just being a dad, sitting at the end of my bed, telling me a story and all kids like to hear spooky stories, don’t they?

  I was four and I know, from the experiences with my girls, that all memories are erased, but for the occasional, indistinct and hazy image, when a child turns five. There’s a switch which gets turned on. Erase, delete.

  But not to me, not when I turned five. The story of Blood River, which he told me at the age of four, sitting in the dark, on the end of my bed, stayed with me forevermore.

  Haunted me then. Haunts me now.

  ‘I’m not dead,’ I told my dad, starting to cry. ‘I’m here, in bed!’

  He laughed, but not, as it seemed to me then and now, at a little girl’s innocent protestations but at her foolishness.

  I see it now, I saw it then.

  ‘And being dead,’ he continued, ‘you’ll have to cross the Blood River, to get to the world of the dead; is it heaven or is it hell? Only once you cross the river, the ferryman’s journey, will you know what your destiny is. Where are you going, Anthea? To heaven or to hell?’

  ‘I don’t like this story, dad.’

  ‘Nor did your older sister but she never complained.’

  No. Jen never complained. And, being the older of us, she had already forged what was acceptable. If she hadn’t complained about anything then I had no right to either. Jen was the precedent and I was the follower.

  Dad’s journey, from the land of the living to the land of the dead, crossing the Blood River. He places me in a small wooden boat, pushes me away from the edge of the river. It’s night and a storm is raging all around me. Hail, rain, bolts of lightning, but not over me; I am protected, in a calm, as I am rowed across the river. I am four. I am five. Six. Sixteen. I am seventeen. Twenty. I am now as I was always then, being rowed across the dark river while a tempest raged around me, protected from the winds and the rain. There are no lights. There is no city. There are no people, but for the ferryman who rows me towards the other side, its shore seeming to recede as I grow closer. The ferryman has no eyes. In their place are two silver coins. That’s the price of the trip, that’s what I paid him as dad placed me into the little boat and gave it a push, on the edge of the river, casting me across the black water.

  ‘Don’t look down,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘Because that’s where they are.’

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘The tormented souls of the dead. The river bed is writhing with their entwined bodies. They have not made it to the other side of the river or, if they did, they were cast back into the blood waters of hell, disallowed from travelling any further. Can you hear them?’ he asked.

  I could. I still can.

  Thousands of slithering bodies held down to the bottom of the river, groaning in torment as they try to get away. Get free. They have been lashed to the river bed, the mud oozing over them under them through them. Naked, writhing bodies. Sea-snakes burrowing inside them, sliding into their eye-sockets, into their mouths, wriggling into the vaginas of the women and into the penis-eyes of the men. Sea-snakes the colour of red and orange, roiling inside the bodies of the damned as they try to escape the agonies of being bitten and eaten from inside, as the snakes enjoy their prey. The water is so heavy they cannot rise to the surface but, says dad:

  Look, look at that.

  What, dad? I asked in tears.

  The surface of the river as you are rowed across it.

  And I did what he said and looked down. All around me on the surface of the Blood River were the ears and tongues and the lips of the men and women and children and babies, which had been sliced off. Floating on the gentle swell of the river. As the cries of torment and agony rose from below, through the press of water.

  They were screaming at me.

  Stop! Help! Reach down to release me, little girl. Save us!

  But they are chained to the riverbed. Their arms are locked around one another and the devil’s force plays with them as he holds them down, sometimes dragging them deeper under the
mud, sometimes gorging them up, like volcanoes. But they are never released from the limbs of the others which form the chain that binds them.

  Can you hear them, Anthea?

  Yes dad, I can hear them.

  I still do.

  I hear the dreadful scent of decay.

  This is the Blood River, this is what my father led me to at the age of four and smiled as he placed me into the little wooden boat, placing the silver coins into the empty sockets of the ferryman.

  You never reach the other side. The journey never ends. You never feel the rain, nor the wind. The tempest never touches you.

  But you hear what is below you and you can smell what is below you and if you lean over and look down, you can see it because even though the water is blood-red and black, you can see right down to the bottom as if it were clear. You can see them, the tormented souls, staring up at you.

  They are there, my fears and aoifes. I put them there. I can hear them wailing in pain, calling my name. I told them my name, I whispered my name as I rode them to death, I told them who I was and that they were about to cross the river of blood but that they would not make the other side because you can’t. You never will. It keeps on receding. I told them they would be dropped into the river and sink to the end, where waiting arms, outstretched by the thousands upon thousands of God’s children were waiting to embrace them into the mud and the blood, locking them into the inferno of my hell.

  You’re dead, I said, to them.

  The Life of Butterflies

  ‘HEY,’ WE HEARD HER SAY, AND AS THE DRUNK MAN TOOK A step towards her, as she retreated a step back into the dark of the laneway as if to entice him in, Lara bolted across the street, with a ‘Police! Don’t move!’

  In her hand was a gun. Shocked, the drunk would-be victim spun around, lost his balance and fell to the ground.

  Anthea didn’t move.

  ‘Drop the knife,’ said Lara. At that moment I realised she had not come alone – three other officers, all in uniform and carrying firearms, stepped out of the dark, just up from where we had been waiting, and then, in a daze of confusion, I heard the sound of a police siren coming at me from one direction and a second one from the opposite direction. Anthea had not moved. Lara stepped up to her, turned her around and handcuffed her as the two police cars converged on them.

  Suddenly the street was crawling with police. And the snap snap of the red and blue lights had lit up the entire area of small houses and narrow streets at the bottom of the hill.

  The drunk guy was totally confused as he was led away by a cop.

  Another cop picked up Anthea’s backpack and another bagged her knife into an evidence container. Someone was telling Anthea that she was being arrested for an attempted murder and was the subject of further investigations relating to three homicides in Brisbane in 1999 and that she would be driven to the city watch house and brought before a magistrate later this Sunday morning, in an emergency sitting. Did she understand?

  She nodded. There was not a fraction of emotion on her face. It was like she had shut down. Maybe she had.

  As they led my sister to one of the cars, pushing her into the back seat, she looked across the street and I stepped out, holding her gaze. For just a moment the moon appeared, casting a white glow across us, and then was hidden again.

  —

  THIS CANNOT BE happening. I planned this meticulously. How the fuck did Jen know what I was going to do? I cannot believe the betrayal. This is not happening. It’s a mix-up. They’ve got nothing on me. I didn’t slash him. No blood. How can they even imagine they can charge me with attempted murder? They cannot. I’m a respectable person, a professor at the most prestigious university in Queensland – people respect me, look up to me, I walk along the streets with my head held high – and they think they can pin an attempted murder on me? It’s a joke. And if they think they can get anywhere near me with the killings of 1999, they’re living in an altered universe. Robbie will hire a tribe of lawyers and they will decimate the police and then we’ll sue them, sue their sorry arses from one side of the city to the other. Wrongful arrest, defamation. I’ll write a book about it. And what was the Police Commissioner doing there? She belongs at a desk, not on the street. It’s absurd. That has to be a sackable offence, leaving your desk and being on the street in a so-called operation in the middle of the night. I need to contact the Police Minister. Robbie knows the Premier. She will not be happy. That Asian bitch is going down. I’m going to make her life a misery. They can’t touch me. Is it a crime to be walking along the street at night with a backpack and a knife inside it? And a pair of pliers? No. No, it is not. Is it a crime to whisper to a drunken guy at the end of a laneway, asking him if he could join me? No. No, it is not. I might have been lost. I might have been distressed, in need of aid. I wasn’t going to kill him. I am not The Slayer. They have nothing on me. They are so going down. This is going to be the end of careers.

  —

  ANTHEA HAD NEVER been in a police car before. Most people haven’t. The police officer who was driving kept glancing at her, through the rear-view mirror. He was young. Which made her think of her girls.

  —

  THERE ARE FOUR stages to the life of a butterfly. The first is, obviously, birth, when the butterfly is an egg. Eggs are laid in any of the seasons but rarely during winter. After four or five days, the egg will hatch in the second stage of what’s known as metamorphosis and this stage is when it becomes a caterpillar. Not everybody knows that a caterpillar is a baby butterfly.

  —

  THE POLICE OFFICERS – the young driver and the other young officer sitting in the passenger seat – hadn’t been told anything about the operation. They had no idea what was going down, and when this woman was thrust into the back of their cruiser, in handcuffs, amid a crazy melee out on the street, they hadn’t been told who she was or what, indeed, was the charge against her. Just take her to the station at the Valley, put her in a holding cell until she’s ready to be formally charged. So, that was their part in the capture of The Slayer. The real Slayer. Just a ferryman’s journey, a ride across town of no more than ten minutes. Soon after they’d crossed the Breakfast Creek and were driving towards the station, the street lights buzzing over them with pockets of yellow-beam light, on an empty two-lane road, as a smatter of rain hit their windscreen, but no more than a smatter, all washed away with one swipe of the blades, their phones began to buzz with incoming texts. u have the slayer in yr car

  —

  SHE COULD SEE the look on the driver’s face, as he looked up from his phone, to the mirror and stared at her in –

  – in what? What was it she saw in his face?

  Fear. Admiration. Respect.

  She leaned back in the seat and held his gaze, as if daring him to keep a watch on The Slayer.

  —

  NOBODY REALLY knows how many different types of butterflies there are in the world. Google will tell you there are approximately twenty thousand. Anthea, never one for approximates, believed, through her research and field work, that there were twenty-one thousand, three hundred and forty-six.

  One of her most memorable sightings was of the incredibly rare Ornithoptera alexandrae, also called The Queen Alexandra Birdwing. Its wingspan can get up to nineteen centimetres long. This was when she went to Papua New Guinea, on a long and arduous field trip. With a long yellow and black-spotted body and wings that have pale green shapes and yellow spots with black circles, blue spots and a brilliant red heart-shaped area beneath its eyes. The female of the species has a wingspan that can reach up to twenty-eight centimetres. A sight, when she was stuck in a rain forest, she would never forget. She tried to catch one, for her wall at home, thinking how magnificent it would look in her lounge room. But it was too high off the ground, too far away. Too elusive.

  —

  WHAT WILL HAPPEN to the girls? She began to wonder. Who will tell them and what will they think? And, remembering how it was for her, when she was si
xteen, when Jen was arrested, how she encountered walls of horror and incredulity at what people said her sister had done and how people stopped talking to her and walked on the other side of the street to avoid her, how the school suggested she should leave for the good of the others and how friend after friend peeled away until she was only left with a loyal group of girls who stayed in her circle, how her mum and dad lost their lives through grief and despair. Was this what was to befall the girls? Who would look after them? Fuck: Would they be put into care? Would Robbie handle it? No, he was weak. He would crumble with the pressure.

  Guilt suddenly riding through her, she began to dread the inevitable confrontations with her husband, with her daughters. She wished she would die. Now. If only the police car drove off the side of the road, killing her. Then she wouldn’t have to face them.

  None of this was meant to happen.

  She didn’t want to see any of them. She vowed never to see them. She’ll plead guilty, go straight to jail and never have to confront them, explain to them that she killed men by cutting across their necks, cutting open their mouths and ripping out a tooth, all the while adoring Him and where is He now? Not fucking here in the back seat of a police car, that’s for sure. No, He’s gone, like everyone has always gone.

  Don’t think about how the girls will feel when they discover what you did to the bodies. Remember when you used to smirk when another pedo would get done and you’d wonder how his wife and kids would respond when they knew that dad was wanking to the images of eight-year-olds? That’s you Anthea. That’s you and the girls and the Head Folds. Just put that out of your mind. It’s okay, you won’t have to see them ever again. Maybe it’s better if they do go into care so they can forget about you like you’re going to have to forget about them.