“He used the brushes.” With speed, he hooked at something in the air and began to drag. She could see the ghost forming; a man, quite short, very muscly.
“No, not him! Not him! The girls. My girls.”
“They’re not here. Be happy about that. Not here. Gone elsewhere.”
She watched him with disbelief. He turned to go back to the car and then stopped. She watched his whole body shiver.
“Come on,” he said.
SEVENTH DAY
TUESDAY
NIGHT
Roy had to drive back. Dora couldn’t. She was struck dumb, struck blind, struck numb. She’d thought she’d speak to her girls. She wanted to hear, “Mummy, we love you. Mummy, not your fault,” but he said they were gone. She knew she should be happy, her girls released like that, but all she wanted to do was sleep. She couldn’t see the dead man, but she felt him and knew he was with them, sitting on her lap, perhaps, because she felt a pressure there and she could smell him, a stink of fried onions and burned cheese. As Roy pulled in front of the house (and he was a terrible driver, complaining all the way that he had to do it, almost killing them twice in collisions) she threw herself out of the car and ran inside, into her room, and took two sleeping pills, wanting to numb it. Stop it. But stupid. Stupid. Why would she sleep, and she didn’t even think of this until they were down her gullet, why would she sleep when he was on his way?
She couldn’t sleep.
She curled up in bed, forcing her eyes closed because otherwise they dried up in her head. A day or two; she didn’t know. Walking overheard as if someone was wearing army boots or they were going bowling. Walking over her, she felt feet, felt the pressure of feet on her bed, and smells of them seeped in to her dreams.
•••
A knock on the door. Roy. “Trevor is going to have a sleep. If you want to listen you can, or I can tell you what he says.”
She wasn’t sure she could bear it but wanted to hear it firsthand. She didn’t want it watered down; she wanted to know what the man who’d killed her daughters said. What were their last words? She’d ask him that. Did they love her?
She’d ask him that, too. Trevor waited in his room, one of the nicer ones that cost a bit more. The walls were painted a pale yellow and the ceiling was much higher than in other rooms. There was a cupboard, too, set in the wall, and windows to let the light in. He had a shelf of Roy’s books and a collection of romance novels.
Val wasn’t there, and Dora didn’t ask where she was. She kissed Trevor’s hand. “I hope this doesn’t hurt too much. I don’t think he’s a nice man.”
“I’m a nice man,” Trevor said, kissing her hand back. “He can’t beat me.”
He lay down on his bed. Roy placed the hairbrushes beside him. He didn’t say anything for a while, although he started to shake. The doctor watched him, mouthed he’s okay.
Then Trevor started to stroke his own hair. Stroke, stroke, stroke. “Such pretty hair,” he said, his voice soft, like a whisper. “Such lovely brushes. I wish I had long hair like them.”
Trevor brushed his own hair. Dora felt her fists clench. She wanted to pummel him, punch his face until his nose bled.
“Run run fast as you can,” he said, and “the bones the bones the bones bury the bones.”
Dora said, “Did they say they loved me?” and Trevor startled, half-sat up.
“Did they? Did they say I was good to them?”
“These little ones have no mum. These little ones are running because they are hungry. I made them cheese on toast but they didn’t eat it.”
Trevor started to mumble.
“I gave them McDonalds,” Dora said. She didn’t know who she was telling. “They weren’t hungry. They should have come home to me.’
“The bones the bones bury the bones,” he said, then he clutched his chest. Trevor’s eyes opened wide and dark. Dora jumped forward, wanting to see into them, see what was reflected, but nothing.
The doctor moved her aside. “Fuck, I think he’s having a seizure. Old bastard. You shouldn’t have got him to do this. Fuck fuck fuck.” The doctor loosened Trevor’s collar. “Get out, give me room, call an ambulance,” he said, and they did all of those things.
•••
Most of the residents watched the ambulance drive away. “Did you hear your daughters?” they asked her and she shook her head, “but almost,” she said, “and he spoke about them,” so they were all at Roy, get my sister, get my brother, and he said, “It’s not manageable. I can’t control it. We don’t want these people in the house.” He said as an aside to Dora, “He said to bury the bones. I think we should bury the bones and see if that calls the captain. You promised you’d try again.”
She didn’t ask what bones; bones filled the place. She’d seen them in alcoves, hanging on walls, propping up books.
“What good do you think that will do?”
“It’s an old wrecker’s superstition. Whoever finds the body has to bury it.” Roy said. “I bet there were plenty who didn’t do it.”
They walked around the rooming house. There were more bones than Dora had noticed before, some over doors, some hiding behind books.
She felt she was moving step by step, surviving minute by minute. She felt bad that Trevor had been so powerfully affected, but angry, also, that he had told her nothing. She thought he deserved the pain, that he should have dug harder, he should have attached himself to that murderer and told her more.
There was no grass in the tiny tiled back courtyard so they went out the front garden. They were joined there by Luke, Freesia, Larry, and Mr. Cox. Roy laid down a bone he’d chosen, one long and human, on a plastic mat and formed minced meat around it. Then he wrapped it in plastic wrap.
“The body’s long gone so we’ll make him a new one. He deserves the best,” Roy said, although Dora could see it wasn’t the best mince, but hamburger mince run through with fat and gristle.
They covered more bones this way.
Roy dug a hole, placed the meaty bones in and covered them up. “They’re all the bones I have,” he said.
•••
She wondered about the killer’s message, to bury the bones. She wondered what else the killer had buried in the backyard.
She made an anonymous call to the police, telling them to dig hard, dig further.
•••
Bones were found.
•••
She felt strong enough to call her ex-husband in jail, to tell him “You did the right thing. You saved other children by killing him.”
He cried when she told him. She called him a hero, a good man.
•••
She awakened to find Roy standing over her.
“Can you hear the clock? He’s here. He’s definitely here.” He held the dress up for her again. “We need to give it a go. I’m just waiting for the doctor to come back.”
“How’s Trevor?”
He screwed up his face as if annoyed at her for being distracted.
“Luke can do it. He was the emergency medic onboard his ship,” Dora said.
Luke had been quiet for days. He’d channeled a young boy and made the mistake of listening to his own voice after on a recording. He’d not wanted to see anyone. She’d dropped food off to him, taking plates of breakfast.
She went up to see him and asked him for a favor. “And watch over me,” she said. “I don’t want Roy groping me while I’m lying there and not moving.”
•••
“Where’s my next puppet, ay? Who’s the one keeps waking my men up, keeps waking my women up. Won’t let us sleep. Curse on you. Curse on you and may your blood turn to rust, may you shrivel and live long in agony for what you’ve done.
May your children be fatherless and your wife a widow.
May your children be wandering beggars;
; may they be driven from their ruined homes.
May a creditor seize all you have;
may strangers plunder the fruits of your labor.
May no one extend kindness to you
or take pity on your fatherless children.
May your descendants be cut off,
their names blotted out from the next generation.”
Dora spoke on and on and on until Roy cried out, leaped forward to try to smother her with a pillow, and Luke stepped up and elbowed him in the nose, which poured forth so much blood over her face she blinked her eyes open, sat up.
Then she really did fall into an exhausted sleep.
EIGHTH DAY
WEDNESDAY
BREAKFAST
There was no breakfast ready, so the tenants went into the kitchen and made do. There was bacon, spaghetti, eggs, baked beans; they cooked the lot, laughing as they did, feeling like rule-breakers.
Roy was gone and no one knew where. No one was bothered. Dora was the only one who knew why; her carefully designed words, her fake captain, had made him run.
Dora felt lighter, as if the place had emptied out of the mess.
“Check us out,” Julia said. “We’re survivors. We really are. We are still here. Forget about how hard it is, how failed we seem; we are still alive, when many others aren’t. We are survivors.”
The day was cold and wet. They all dragged blankets onto the veranda and sat there, protected, watching birds bathe in the puddles, a stray dog hunch past.
“We’re the lucky ones,” Julia said.
And yet even as they sat there, enjoying their coffee, Luke came through the door.
“They’re still coming,” he said, and he seemed so frail Dora had him sit down before he fell. The clock ticked and the sound of the sea seemed louder, too, and they all went to stand on the road to watch the ghosts drag themselves up the hill.
Dora felt a terrible tiredness, a weariness so deep she had to lie down. The others, too, all of them so tired they couldn’t make it to their bedrooms but curled up there on the veranda, and closed their eyes, and waited for the ghosts to come.
•••
Psalm 109 (the “cursing psalm”): And he donned a curse like his garment, and it came into his midst like water and into his bones like oil.
About the Author
Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had stories in print every year since. Her stories have appeared in Australia, the US, China, the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, and have been selected for both Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’s Best of the Year Anthologies.
Kaaron has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Fiji. She has published five novels (Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, The Grief Hole and Tide of Stone) and seven short story collections, including the multi-award winning Through Splintered Walls. Her most recent short story collection is A Primer to Kaaron Warren from Dark Moon Books.
Her novella “Sky” from that collection won the Shirley Jackson Award and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. It went on to win all three of the Australian genre awards, while The Grief Hole did the same thing in 2017. This year, she has three Aurealis nominations: Tide of Stone, A Primer to Kaaron Warren, and Crisis Apparition, a novella.
Kaaron was a Fellow at the Museum for Australian Democracy, where she researched prime ministers, artists and serial killers. In 2018 she was the Established Artist in Residence at Katharine Susannah Prichard House in Western Australia. She’s taught workshops in haunted asylums, old morgues and second hand clothing shops and she’s mentored several writers through a number of programs.
She was Guest of Honor at the World Fantasy Convention in 2018, and will be at New Zealand’s Geysercon in 2019, and Stokercon 2019
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