by Candice Fox
“I’ve enrolled you both with Monash,” Hades said quietly. “Distance education. I had to pull some hefty strings. Eden, you’re going to focus on the physiological side of things. The body, the mechanics of it, the ins and outs of disposing of it. Autopsy. DNA. You’re also going take a major in criminal law. Eric, you’re going to concentrate on the practical side. Ballistics. Bloodwork. Physics. You’re going to take sociology and psychology as electives. This isn’t going to be like regular university. You get perfect scores or you start again. This isn’t about getting an education. It’s about arming you for what you will become.”
The children stood like mannequins, limp-armed, silhouetted against the sickly orange light outside, barely above blackness.
“I’ve already withdrawn you from the high school. You start here tomorrow.”
“We’re not old enou—”
“You are now.” Hades took a thin stack of papers from one of the shelves above the desk, slapped them on the glass. The gold foil on Eric’s new passport glinted against the light as Hades’ body passed. He moved through the short hall. One door led off to a tiny kitchen, another to a bathroom. Eden could smell the fresh paint on the walls as she followed. She watched the old man heft a hidden trapdoor up from the bathroom floor, the edge aligned with the foot of an old pink toilet she recognized from the sorting center. Hades disappeared into the hole. She followed, Eric holding the shoulder of her shirt as she placed her feet on the rungs.
A concrete room. Against the care and consideration that had been put into the upper rooms, this place was painfully empty. A steel table, bolted to the floor. Bare shelves. Hades stood looking at his blurred reflection in the table as Eric landed on his feet at the foot of the ladder with a thump. Eden thought about going to the old man. Putting her hand on his. She didn’t. The three of them stood in silence.
“I won’t give you the things you require for this room,” Hades said. “When I come here to teach you, I’ll bring my own tools. I’ll give you the basics, the necessities of the craft, and nothing more. When you’re capable, I won’t come to this place again.”
He watched them, and noticed in quiet horror how young they looked in the light from the overhead lamp. Perfect skin. Bright eyes. He thought quietly that Eden was at the age now that she should be getting a woman’s shape about her. She wasn’t. The muscles of her upper arms were curved and toned, like a teenage boy’s, her chest flat and her feet and hands long. Animals, the two of them. Built for running. Built for killing. Caught in time like spiders suspended against a mighty wind. A twinge of pain rippled through his chest, an old warning instinct, and then was gone.
“Why are you doing this?” Eden asked.
“Because I love you,” the old man said. It was the first time he had said it. “Don’t you understand that? I’ve loved you from the first moment.”
And that was how it was when all was said and done, no matter what he saw when he looked at them—the way Eden could look like an angel and feel like a child when she was in his arms, the way Eric could be such a stupid boy, strutting around and puffing his chest out, desperately imitating a man, full of hidden terrors and needs. No matter how much Hades fantasized about the two of them being children, moldable and teachable and eager for love, they had stopped being children the night they were given to him, the night their parents were killed. Hades had fallen in love with two chimeras, two monsters in disguise, incapable of feeling the way he felt, of loving the way he loved. The horror they had experienced had cut a hole in them and they would be driven in vain to fill that hole for as long as they lived. Dogs with a taste for blood, enslaved to the need.
But he loved them anyway. He loved them with a complete and undeniable love, the love of a father. The best he could do was try to turn their killer instincts on those other monsters out there in the night who deserved it, and in a twisted and sickening way maybe they would be making the world safer from the same darkness they each carried. The best Hades could do was try to help them understand how to do it right so that they fed their needs without causing unnecessary suffering, which he knew would only grow new needs, and without getting themselves caught, because he didn’t know how he could ever deal with that.
The old man drew a breath and sighed, let his eyes finally leave those of the girl.
“Just because I love you doesn’t mean I won’t kill you both if you do wrong here,” he said. “I planned to bury you that night, the night I found you. I had a place picked out. It’s not something that’s beyond me. I’m not sure you know right from wrong yet but I’m hoping it’s something you can learn. This is a place for the evil ones and never for innocents. Never for innocents, you understand?”
He stabbed a stubby finger into the surface of the table. The steel shuddered, made a thundering sound. The children nodded, mouths closed. It was the confused and wide-eyed nodding of the hopelessly wicked.
The old man walked back to the hill shack alone.
Martina didn’t know how long it took to get to the door. The time passed in furious heartbeats and now and then stopped completely when she was sure she heard tires on the gravel outside the house or the beep of a car horn on a distant highway. He was coming. He was coming. Martina would freeze and wind her arms through the bars of the cage and grip on, determined not to be removed from it. It was hard to breathe. Sometimes the terror was so strong that noises warped into voices, the creaks and groans of the old house becoming cackling laughs and scraping boots.
Come on, baby. Let’s play.
Martina got to the door and shoved the cage through, centimeter by centimeter, only to howl with despair as it came to a stop, wedged at an angle between the doorframe and the corridor wall. She gripped the frame with her fingernails, pulled, twisted, rocked back and forth, knocking her elbows on the cage. Nothing.
Endgame.
Martina sunk to the bottom of the cage and cried breathlessly for a long time, surprised by her own noises and her inability to stop them, the moaning and the howling and the chattering of her own teeth.
Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.
“No, no, no, no, no,” she murmured, dragging herself up to her knees. “No. Not yet. Not yet.”
She looked around her at the hall. There was nothing but bare space, a window boarded up at the end before a door to another room, piles of dust and animal hair crowding along the baseboards like grey waves. Near the door to the room she’d escaped from was a wooden broom leaning against the wall covered in spiderwebs. Martina stared at it. She couldn’t move the cage farther down the hall because of the frame of the bedroom door. It was only a wooden frame. A wooden frame keeping her from staying alive. She pushed her shoulder into the bars of the cage, reached out as far as she could reach, knocked the broom over and dragged it towards her by its bristles. Trembling, bumping the broom against the walls and cage bars and her own limbs, she maneuvered it into the cage with her and grabbed hold of the handle outside the cage, bending it back with all her might. The broom handle began to crack. Slowly. Martina squeezed her eyes shut and pulled. The broom cracked more. She rocked and pushed, her hands sweating and sliding on the unpolished wood, now and then breaking into sobs.
The broom snapped, and just as it did she heard a car door shut outside somewhere. Martina gripped the bars around her, fought the urge to be sick again. Long, slow deep breaths shuddered over what felt like holes in her lungs, painful muscles straining in her chest against the urge to lose control. No footsteps followed. Had it really been a car door? Martina hugged herself for a moment, gripped her hair and pulled her legs into her chest. No sound. Her face was wet, tears and sweat and snot, hot like a mask. She swept back her hair and slid the broken broom handle into the cage, twisting it apart.
Yes, yes, yes.
Just as she planned. The shorter section of the handle, from the split to the rounded top, had broken away from the base with a nice sharp edge. Martina turned around, pushed her arms through the other side of the cage and s
lid the sharp edge experimentally into the tiny gap between the doorframe and the wall, knocking chips of paint onto the floor. She levered. The frame moved. Martina pushed the broom handle farther into the gap, bashing it with her palm until the bones in her hand ached, as she levered and levered until the outer section of the frame was slightly askew. She extracted the broom handle and wedged it into the gap again, higher this time.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please, God, please.”
The doorframe cracked, wobbled on its long thin nails as she rocked the broom handle back and forth. With clawing fingers she dropped the handle, ripping at the frame as it hung by the very tips of the nails holding it to the wall. Martina screamed as the frame tumbled to the ground. She pushed the cage forward and giggled hysterically.
One more doorframe and she could fit the cage into the room that held the steel-top tables. The key to the cage had to be in there somewhere. If it wasn’t, there was no hope.
14
I was in a foul mood the morning after our meeting with Cameron Miller. The kind of mood where having to part your lips to mumble hello to someone is enough to piss you off. I felt stale all over standing at the coffee station trying to figure out how to use the machine. The mug I had grabbed was stained at the bottom and read “Only Gay in the Office!” I’d left the station at 1AM and had only driven home because the very sight of the place was making me furious. I’d showered, watched some early-morning religious programs that told me how my soul was going to burn in hell and returned worse off after a fevered half-snooze at the kitchen table.
Eric, wearing Armani and smelling of Boss, slapped my shoulder so hard and so suddenly that the sugar was launched off my spoon and across the counter like a spray of glass.
“Good morning, Fran-kie,” he sang. “The world says hell-o!”
“There are guns in this place, you realize,” I said. “They’re everywhere.”
“Well, if you’re going to go on a shooting spree, friend, let me know. I’d love the recognition of bringing you down.”
He slapped me again and wandered away, whistling. I was about to spew some abuse over my shoulder when I noticed Captain James standing by the door to the smoker’s balcony, admiring our apparent camaraderie with a moustachey smile. Things seemed on the up-and-up when I sat down at Doyle’s desk and picked up the glossy funeral booklet sitting there. Eden and I, it seemed, had been invited to celebrate the life of Courtney Turner.
The booklet actually made me feel a little better. It reminded me of how trivial my lost sleep was in the scheme of things. I was flipping through the booklet when Eden walked in, wearing black jeans and a pair of heeled boots you could cripple someone with and a grey hoodie with the sleeves rolled up. She looked tired too. The braid down the back of her head was crooked.
“Another day in paradise.” She yawned as she passed. I grunted in response and burned my tongue on my coffee.
The booklet was artfully presented. There were photos of Courtney opening Christmas presents and proud on her first day at school, her arms behind her back and her birdcage ribs thrust out. The back page was dedicated to a class photograph surrounded by messages written by her classmates.
We love you Court. We’ll miss you. We know you’re watching us up in heaven.
I sighed and kept flipping. There was a picture of Courtney and Monica sitting together on a bed with their arms around each other. Monica was slightly older and her hair slightly darker, but otherwise they were almost identical. Crooked smiles and big, glowing, excited eyes. Monica was holding a caramel teddy bear under her arm. The bear was wearing little green scrubs, a bouffant cap and a stethoscope. Doctor Bear.
I tipped my head and held the paper a little closer to my nose.
Monica’s feet were bare and the bed was unmade, white sheets pulled back behind the girls.
“Eden,” I said. She wandered over holding her booklet in one hand and a mug that read “World’s Best Dad” in the other.
“Hmm?”
“Where do you reckon this picture was taken?” Eden sipped her coffee and turned to the page I was on. Her eyes were bloodshot. I kept a finger on the photograph.
My heart began to pound. Eric was leaning back in his desk chair with his hands behind his head, feigning sleep. Eden’s coffee was frozen in the air, inches before her lips.
The sensation growing in my stomach was like that of something forgotten, some important thing that I knew needed to be recognized, now, before chaos erupted. My mother had called that kind of feeling the hoo-has—the unaccountable knowledge that things were not as they should be. I had the hoo-has bad.
I got up and wandered over to Eric’s desk. He let one of his eyes open to a small slit and watched me pass like a snake eyeing a mouse.
“Has anyone seen Monica since Courtney went missing?” I asked. Eric frowned. I paced in front of his desk, waiting for him to answer. He let his hands drop down from his head and crossed his legs on the desk before him.
“You’re actually talking to me, aren’t you?”
“Cut the bullshit for just a minute,” I said, thoughts snapping together in my brain. “Has anyone from the department seen her?”
Eric looked past me for a second, frowning.
“There’s not really been any need to. She’s at her grandmother’s place all the way out in Richmond. I think someone’s conducted a phone interview with her but she’s a kid. She doesn’t know anything.”
“No one’s seen her, though.”
“No.”
“This picture’s not that old. It doesn’t look more than a year old,” I tapped the booklet. “Look at this picture and tell me those two girls aren’t sitting on a hospital bed.”
“This doesn’t mean anything necessarily,” Eden said. “She could have visited the hospital recently for anything.”
She sat on the edge of my desk while I picked up the organ transplant waiting list. My hands were shaking. I flipped through, looking for Monica’s name. There was only one Monica, and her surname was Russell, not Turner. I felt the air rush out of me. Eden smirked.
“Jeez,” she said. “Heads would have rolled if we’d missed a thing like that.”
“Yeh,” I sighed. “It was a stupid idea.”
I scratched at my chest. My shirt was suddenly irritating me. Eric went back to snoozing and Eden wandered away. I tried to get on with checking the list of leads, running through my emails, fixing up the reports I’d written. But I couldn’t sit still. Quietly, I picked up the phone and got onto the front administration desk, got them to call through to Dr. Claude Rassi.
“Oh good, you’re back,” I said.
“Just got in this morning. How can I help?”
“This is going to sound pretty stupid,” I told the doctor. “But I didn’t know any other transplant specialist to call. I’m just curious. I’ve got a weird feeling. I want to look at the medical history of a girl named Monica Turner. Have you got access to that national database thingy?”
I heard Dr. Rassi’s leather desk chair groan as he shifted in it. His breath crackled on the phone.
“You got all her details?” he asked.
“Somewhere.” I shuffled my papers around.
I fed the doctor the details. He was silent for a long time.
“My national database thingy doesn’t have a Monica Turner with that birth date in it. Which either means she’s never been sick or she’s changed her name, and she’s not Turner in our records.”
“Changed her name,” I murmured, slowly rising out of my chair. “What, so you can have one name on your birth certificate and one name with Medicare?”
“No,” Rassi said. “Your name with Medicare has to be the same name that’s on your birth certificate. Your legal name. That’s the law. But you can assume a name, start using it, signing things with it, going by it, long before you change it with the registry—there’s nothing illegal about that. She could have been using Turner for a year without us knowing about it while
her real name is something else.”
“Could she have changed it unofficially at school?”
“As long as she had her parents’ permission.”
“She just started a new school . . .” I stuttered. “So all her new friends would know her under Turner . . .”
“Sorry?”
“So if her mother didn’t change her name with Medicare, if she’d never been Turner on her medical records, they’d all still be under her former name.”
“That’s ri—”
I dropped the phone on the desk and ran into the kitchen. Eric watched me go. I skidded to a halt behind Eden as she stood looking into the fridge. She yelped when I grabbed her arm.
“What’s Eliza Turner’s maiden name?” I asked. She stared at me. “What is it?”
There was a cold, electric tension in the car on the drive back to the Turners’ house. Though we were in an unmarked car, passersby somehow seemed to sense our dark purpose. It felt like they were staring.
We had run out of the office, leaving Eric to get the warrant organized by the time we got to the Turner house. Eden’s body was rigid. Her hands, illuminated on the steering wheel by the glow of early-morning street lamps, looked white-knuckled and hard. She had barely cut the engine before she was striding up the concrete path towards the porch. I passed her in a sprint as I let the full force of my anger surge through my leg, into my foot, through my boot and into the door.
The door exploded open as our backup pulled into the drive. From the porch, I saw Derek Turner jolt violently in his chair at the kitchen table and Eliza leap up with a scream.
“Police!” Eden snarled, shouldering in beside me and covering Eliza. “Get on the fucking floor!”
“Oh Jesus!” Derek howled, crawling numbly off his chair. “Oh Jesus!”
There were two plates of scrambled eggs and toast on the table. The smell of roasted coffee filled the room.
“Mr. Turner,” I said. “I’m going to ask you once where Monica Russell is. You don’t tell me, I’m going to put a bullet right in the back of your skull.”
