by Candice Fox
“Miss Ducote,” Eden said, “I’m Eden Archer. This is my partner Frank Bennett.”
Martina reached out and shook my hand. I noticed the rope marks on her wrist.
She saw my grimace. “They’re not as bad as they look.”
“I don’t think we have to tell you you’ve done an incredible job.” I smiled. “From what I’ve heard you really kicked ass.”
She sighed. “Yeah, well, unless he’s collapsed from delayed cerebral hemorrhaging, he’s halfway to Perth by now.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’ve provided us with some crucial evidence. There’ll be nowhere to hide, not when we know who he is.”
Martina nodded and licked the split in her bottom lip. The remains of smeared makeup under her eyes made her look even more exhausted than I’m sure she was. I noticed the heels she had been wearing on the bedside table, already evidence-bagged. The straps had worn red grooves of raw flesh into her ankles.
“He talked about my blood type and he said I had a working heart,” Martina said, watching the doctor wrap her feet in bandages. “I saw a news story the night before I was taken about a . . . about a man who was stealing people’s organs. In the room where I found the keys to my cage there were two operating tables.”
No one spoke. The doctor had stopped what he was doing and was crouching, looking up at the woman on the bed. Martina gazed at me, and for a moment I felt like the only other person in the room.
“He wanted my heart, didn’t he?”
I nodded. Martina opened her hands and stared down at her palms where the skin had been torn from tripping and breaking her fall on something rough. Three of her manicured nails had survived the ordeal.
“I think I can take you there,” she said.
Eden stirred beside me and I felt my heart twist in my chest.
“Where?”
“Back there,” Martina said, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Back to the place where he kept me.”
They were very different learners, the two of them. For Eric, it was all about locking himself in the house in the forest, back bent and head down, frowning under the light, hours and hours spent in the same rigid chair. He needed to memorize, summarize, make lists, color code and organize things on calendars. The shack was always dark, silent, immaculately clean, the windows closed against the wind that threaded and wound through the trees.
Eden was his opposite. In the winter months she liked to sit in the sunshine that filtered through a bottlebrush tree at the bottom of the hill, her hair pulled up into a bun with a ribbon, her mouth and nose submerged in a grey wool scarf as she flipped through the pages of the monstrously large book on her lap. Hades would watch her through the front screen door, see her lift her head and stare off into the distance as she linked concepts and came to conclusions, her lips gently murmuring words.
They needed no encouragement, the two of them. They fell into a routine of studying, writing, planning, reading, from the light of morning to the shadows of dusk. When he tested them, Eric sat in the kitchen chair, upright, unblinking, like a hound waiting for dinner. Eden liked to do things while she recited her answers, stirring a pot on the stove, filling in a crossword puzzle, braiding pieces of her long hair. Now and then when he was wrong Eric would erupt into violence. Eden was never wrong. When he gave her the scores she would shrug and go back to her work.
In their second year Eden came to the shack and presented him with a paper he had not asked for, placing it on top of the novel he had been reading. She went to the fridge while he looked at it, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his uneven nose.
“And this is?”
“It’s a correction,” she said, sitting down across from him with a glass of milk. “For the textbook. They’re wrong. I thought they should know about it.”
Hades looked at the paper, lifted the first page and frowned.
“Protection of intestinal epithelial cells from clostridium difficile toxin-induced damage by ecto-5-nucleotidase and adenodine receptor signalling?” he asked, lifting his eyes.
“You betcha.”
“What do you want me to do with this? It can’t go anywhere under your name. You’re supposed to be seventeen.”
“I thought maybe you could hand it in anonymously.” She licked the milk from her lips. “You know? Like a letter to the editor?”
The old man nodded thoughtfully and watched her go into the sitting room, flopping onto the couch with her half-empty glass. He put the paper aside and didn’t think about it for days. When he posted it to the contact who had allowed him to enroll the children in the course, a gambling addict he had occasionally enslaved over the years, the man offered Hades twenty thousand dollars in order to publish it under his name.
After some consideration, he decided to tell Eden about the offer. Unlike Eric, he knew she would deal with the news humbly. She was always embarrassed when he praised her and he enjoyed it. He went to the front door and opened it, stopping on the first step when he saw Eden sitting at the bottom of the hill on her favorite tree stump, her back to him.
There was a boy sharing the stump with her, the space barely big enough for two backsides and the careful distance a girl of fifteen required from the opposite sex. Hades felt his jaw tighten. Making his way down the hill, he recognized the long curly hair that ended at the nape of a thick bronze neck, the wide shoulders of the Savage boy. Elijah Savage had been working for Hades for thirteen years as a dump-truck driver. His son had the same wide, calloused bricklaying hands and seemed to enjoy the same cheap cigarettes. Hades felt a mixture of blinding rage and fatherly joy. The Savage boy was a good boy, wholesome and forgiving like his father, with the kind of gentle good humor that characterized well-raised men. Hades stood behind the youths and listened. The boy’s cigarette leaked smoke over his shoulder.
“A biochemical catalyst?” the boy was saying. “Is that, like, some kind of explosion?”
Hades was surprised to hear Eden laugh.
“You’re going to be the catalyst for a murder investigation in a minute, Savage, you keep slacking off,” Hades said.
The boy leaped off the stump and backed away from Hades a step or two, his dirty boot rolling on a stone by the side of the road.
“Whoa, yes. I gotcha, Mr. Archer.” The boy saluted.
“Uh huh.” Hades watched him go, taking the seat he had occupied. The Savage boy let his eyes drift to Eden for half a second before he turned and jogged back to the gathering of men near the sorting center. Eden closed the book on her lap and drew her legs up into the lotus position, one of them hanging over the old man’s lap. They looked at each other and she broke into a rare grin that filled his heart with light before her eyes flicked away.
“You don’t even have to say it,” Hades sighed. “I’m, like, totally lame. Right?”
17
Displacement. Wandering. Jason felt as though the world had somehow been tipped and not righted correctly so that he was walking on slanted tiles, trying to keep his balance between leaning walls. It wasn’t just the blow to the head. He couldn’t return to the apartment. It had been risky to even contemplate as the news reports kept increasing and his blurry, half-formed picture kept appearing on the screens around him. And the house at the foot of the mountains was a loss now. There was no center to his world, no axis on which to pivot. Where were the mice? What would happen to them? He imagined them, pawing the glass, padding at surfaces they could not see.
The light above him in the public toilet was flickering, coughing to life an electric purple that made his eyes in the mirror look black. Outside, a train rumbled into the station, didn’t stop, went squealing away again like an angry child. His hand trembled as it held the tweezers. Glass in the sink, spotted with his blood. He turned his head and felt the wound, winced as the instrument scraped against bone. He still felt pain. That was good. The naturalness of it made his limbs warm, made the crooked purple world seem a little righter. He washed his hands and raked his fingers over t
he hole, trying to feel any glass that might remain. He hadn’t even thought about the woman yet, the one who had escaped him. He was afraid of the fury, of what it would make him do.
Jason had pulled two stitches into the gash in his head when the man entered the bathroom. He was not in a position to look, holding one end of the thread through his skin between his teeth, the needle above him and to the left, almost out of sight. He heard shuffling footsteps and felt the air leak in from outside. A lanky, halting figure appeared in the mirror beside his own, long hair and a leather jacket, huge gaps between narrow nubs of grey teeth. Jason had seen him outside on the bench, waiting, making a young woman sitting there uncomfortable with his close, loud talking. Some mentally ill homeless nobody creeping around the earth being a problem to everyone he encountered. Shadow person. Man of smoke.
“What you doing?” the man asked. His voice was high-pitched, cronelike, the voice of an elderly woman. “You hurt yourself?”
Jason let the air escape his lungs slowly, gently, between his teeth. The wound was bleeding again. He had only just managed to stem it before the homeless man entered. The air smelled of urine, nearer and more immediate than it had been before. Jason slid the stitch from the wound and stood there half-sewn, his hands gripping the sink to stop the shake.
Before he could open his mouth, the man spoke again.
“Can’t get a bus. Nope. Not at all.” He shook his head. “Bus strikes all over. Reminds me of the Whitlam days. The bad old days. I’ve called my mum. Maybe she could get you to a doctor on the way home, if you want. I could ask her. She’s nice. She’ll probably do it.”
“You called your mum, did you?” Jason’s voice shuddered from between his lips. The rage was pressing at the back of his eyes like fingers trying to worm their way out of his tear ducts. He looked at the man. He had to be forty. “You live with your mum?”
“Off and on. Can’t stand her cooking. Can’t cook for shit, my mum. Heh. Heh. Can find better stuff on the streets, yes sir. Don’t have to clean my room up none neither. Don’t have a room, do I?”
The man’s head bobbed slightly, eyes hungry for approval. For friendship. Jason gripped the handle of his bag tightly, heard the leather groan, the buckle pop open.
“I know you,” he said.
“Really? We’ve met before?”
“Oh yes.” Jason licked his bottom lip, felt the stitches in his head pull tight. “You’ve been wandering around the edges of my life from the moment I was born. You, the un-right, the slightly off, the occasional rarity. Sick one. Damaged one. Runt who should have been pushed from the litter and starved but was not because of the stupid rules we make, because of the laws we write, because of the continuous unreasoning idiocy of it all piling one on top of the other until all we’re doing is walking around in one huge, disgusting hallucination. You, the over-hugged, over-soothed, over-supported. You’re a walking problem. You’re this.” He pointed to the hole in his head. “You’re a wound that no one’s got time to close.”
“Hey.” The man half-frowned, uncertain. “That’s a mean thing to say.”
“Parrot, that’s what you are.” Jason stepped towards the man, into the cloud of his urine smell. “Parroting the words you overhear. The Whitlam days. The bad old days. You got any fucking idea what you’re talking about? You can’t even manage to get from point A to point B. You can’t even manage to shake off your own dick.”
Jason was trembling from head to foot. His lips stopped moving but the words still came. Parasite. Leech. Burden. Sucker of teats. Bag of skin. Useless, useless creature. Just another example of the world’s lack of instinct, of the will to simply close his mouth and nose and remove him as methodically and as effectively as the amputation of a rotting limb. The world was so full of these unnatural creatures wandering, bumping into each other, fumbling in the dark. Inside them were organs, blood, bones, plasma to feed the strong, nutrients that should have been returned to the earth from whence they came to fuel trees, grass, plants. The circle interrupted, bent out of shape. User of good air.
The man was sucking it in now under Jason’s hands on the floor of the bathroom.
Drawing it into his mouth as he drew it into the wide, gaping slash in his throat.
Jason felt blood on his face as he worked. It was not all his own.
“You,” he grunted, slicing and slicing, hacking away wet flesh. “You. Are. Unworthy.”
18
Martina Ducote had wandered into the Grose Vale 7-Eleven at the base of the pristine Blue Mountains, off Bowen Mountain Road, a main arterial to the nearest signs of civilization. The killer had driven her, unconscious, a good two hours west from the city. Eden drove us up the sloped driveway of the gas station and parked beside two patrol cars. I could see four Grose Vale police officers leaning against the hoods, smoking.
Martina had been quiet for most of the journey, staring out the windows at the bushland rolling by, rubbing the bandages on her wrists. She had fixed her hair, and now it hung dead straight in a neat bob that framed her face. She was exotically beautiful despite the bruises and scrapes that lined her jaw. Big eyes and lips, a wondering look about her all the time, like she was trying to decide whether to up and leave her entire existence, shut the door on who she was and disappear. One foot in life, one foot out. She hadn’t even let the hospital keep her overnight, nor had she let us put an officer in her place. She seemed determined to get on with things. All of that could have been the rigid determination of a very strong woman or it could have simply been shock—a refusal to acknowledge the horror and instability that would, very soon, push its way into her consciousness and drop her like a stone.
In a way it was more helpful if she did go home, though we’d never have asked her to do it. If the killer ever went after her again we had her apartment covered by patrol units 24/7.
When I picked her up that morning she was dressed in a white top and jeans, and there were no friends or family to accompany her. I didn’t ask why.
We got out and did the characteristic chest-puffing and belt-adjusting with the Grose Vale cops, talking about the chill of the morning in the shadow of the Bowen Mountain. Martina stood by uncomfortably, watching as forensics officers wandered in and out of the crime scene in the store. The cops seemed to recognize her from the newspaper photographs. One of them whispered something to another about her looking better in the clothes she was in now than she did in the famous party dress that had been all over the news. I felt sickened by the sleaziness of it, even though I agreed.
“Okay.” The lead cop clapped his hands loudly. “Let’s get moving, huh?”
Martina led the way awkwardly and uncertainly, pausing by the wall of bushland at the side of the road, trying to find a way in. I held back some brush and let her through. We fell into a rough line, the Grose Vale cops at the rear, Eden in the middle, Martina and I up front. Eventually Eden got sick of the progress and went ahead, jogging and sliding sideways down the embankment like a mountaineer. Martina watched her disappear, one of the few times she lifted her head to look beyond her own feet. She must have tucked her hair behind her ear a hundred times as we walked together down narrow animal trails. The light was sparse, hitting the forest floor in small golden pools.
Martina’s hand brushed mine and we both apologized at once.
“It’s, uh,” she swallowed, “it’s totally different out here during the day.”
“Must have been scary, scrambling through here in the dark,” I said.
“People have asked me if I was scared he might chase me into the bush. I didn’t even think about seeing him again until I got to the gas station. I was more worried about getting lost out here. I didn’t . . . I couldn’t know how far it was.”
She seemed a little breathless suddenly, like she wanted to sit down. There was nowhere to do so.
The Grose Vale cops passed us without interest, splitting up at the bottom of the embankment and taking two paths winding in the same general direction.
Martina crouched for a minute or two, then rose up beside me, hanging on to my arm for support.
“My feet hurt.”
“If it was just you and me I’d probably carry you,” I said. For a moment she looked like she didn’t know whether to take me seriously or not. “I can’t be doing stuff like that with other men around, though. I’d make them look bad. They might hurt me.”
I shrugged helplessly. She cracked a half-grin.
“You couldn’t carry me with those bitch-ass arms.”
We walked for a long time in silence. When it got awkward we spoke briefly about stupid things. Whether it was too cold for snakes. The terrain. Why old people like bushwalking. She always seemed ready to laugh. I’ve never really been “the talker” in my job but I sure as hell knew Eden wasn’t going to do it. Sometimes talking rubbish with a victim could spur memories they didn’t know they had.
When the local cops lost their way they let us lead again. Martina stopped and squeezed her eyes shut, breathed for long moments, oblivious to the noise as Eden reappeared through the bush to our right. She looked up at a ridge of mountain above us, turned around and seemed to judge its relation to another distinctive peak where the rock jutted through the canopy like a broken tooth.
“That way.” Martina pointed to the north.
“She’s right.” Eden nodded ruefully. “There’s a farm up there, two hundred meters or so. I’m pretty sure it’s the one.”
“How do you know?” I asked, but she turned and jogged away. Everyone else followed. Martina stumbled and gripped me hard, and through my shirt I could feel her hand shaking. We were alone again.
“You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure?”
“He’s not here,” she said, sounding as though she was struggling to believe her own words. “He wouldn’t come back here.”
The smell of smoke became overpowering, stinging in my eyes and throat. As we approached a break in the bush I noticed the leaves were coated in wet ash. We emerged into the long grass beside a barbed-wire fence.
