by Tara Moss
Eat fire, fucker.
Makedde walked to the wall, took the old wooden shelving in both hands and in one—two—three pulls, wrenched it from its position. The shelf teetered forward and fell in slow motion, crashing across the floor in a chaos of shattering glass, liquor and splintering wood, the edge of the shelving hitting her burning captor hard in the ankle as he struggled to get clear of it. She saw him holding his face and rolling on broken glass next to the mattress, which now rose in flame. He was trying to put his clothes out. His hair was still burning. She felt strangely disconnected from the scene, disconnected from everything but her bright clarity, her survival.
Eat fire, fucker. Eat fire.
Numb, shaking madly and with sweat beading on her skin from the building heat of the cellar which had so long held her in deathly cold, Mak turned and made her way up the staircase, scarcely seeing the steps, her feet knowing just where to fall. The edges of the staircase were catching now, slowly, with a line of low flame that ran up the treads in a zigzag. She was untouched by it as she leaped from stair to stair. She was apart from it. And behind her, a deep animal moaning began. The man’s skin was melting under flame. His hair was burning away. The chain rattled as he struggled and rolled, trying to put himself out. She did not turn to look. It is you, or me. She reached the top of the stairs, and found that the door to the cellar was still ajar and opened at the slightest push. It swung open on its hinges. There was a shiny new padlock resting on one side, the key sitting in the lock.
How much of my life did he take? How much of my life did he spend?
There was a cracking sound. It was the wooden stairs, already breaking with heat and flame. Smoke was billowing out with a horrible smell—wood and dust and flesh burning. He was burning alive down there. Burning and chained. His flesh would be burning off his bones.
She did not look.
Makedde closed the cellar door behind her, locking the smoke in, and muffling the sounds of the crackling flame, the searing death below. She snapped the padlock shut, and with dusty bare feet walked across the uneven floorboards of an old farmhouse and out into a winter evening in the countryside of Burgundy, cold, moist grass pushing up between the toes that had held the key to her escape.
CHAPTER 59
Makedde Vanderwall stood barefoot and dishevelled on the gravel driveway of the remote farmhouse, emptied by a deep exhaustion. It was only the queer adrenaline of survival that continued to animate her with unnatural energy, propelling her until she was safe from immediate danger. But when would that be? Where? Through stinging eyes she saw shades of green stretching in all directions, the sky glowing an overcast white. Wood fences intersected the fields like stitches. Stitches and scars. Stitches and scars. Mak recognised nothing of her surrounds. On a hilltop in the far distance she could see glimpses of an ornate church of some kind, and what looked like a small village. Here and there were cottages dotting the expanse of fields. If Paris was nearby, it was hiding very, very well.
As you stand here, he is burning and suffocating in that cellar. He’d had so many scars. You touched them. You kissed them.
She would be haunted by those moments, and yet she was alive. Behind her, the farmhouse was smoking.
Leave this place.
Leave everything, Mak.
There were no fire trucks, no cop cars, no neighbours rushing to her aid. She could not tell how far away the next neighbour lived. She was alone. She wanted to keep moving until she was far from the place of her confinement. She thought of Bogey waiting for her in the hotel room in Paris. She wanted to be there. She wanted to collapse into his arms, and not move or speak for a tremendously long time. She needed transportation. Right in front of her in the driveway there was a car. It was rusted and old. The tyres were flat. It might not even have petrol in the tank. Hopeless. It looked as if it hadn’t been used for years. She could run to the nearest neighbour’s house. Perhaps call the police.
No.
She remembered how little the police had done for Tobias Murphy, for her slain friend Catherine Gerber. Never mind her father’s convictions, never mind how she’d been raised to believe in justice and truth. Never mind Andy Flynn. Never mind the Cavanaghs. No, she’d had enough of the police and their justice. She’d had enough of playing by the rules while others flaunted their immunity.
Leave this place.
Leave everything, Mak.
The farmhouse appeared to have a garage attached on one side. She ran to it, and tried the tilting door. It didn’t budge. She moved around the side and found a smaller door. It was unlocked. He must have driven here. He must have a car. She threw the door open, and with a sense of a prayer coming true, she found herself looking at a black Mercedes, just sitting there, waiting for her to jump inside. At the sight of it, she nearly cried with relief.
Oh, yes. Finally. Yes.
She opened the car door and searched around the driver’s seat before realising that the keys were actually in the ignition, clearly ready for her captor to make a quick getaway if he needed to.
But he was not going anywhere. She was.
In the back seat there was a briefcase. Perhaps it held the man’s identification. The case was locked.
There was a crash of glass as the windows of the farmhouse blew out. The fire was gaining strength. She had to leave, and fast. There was no time to retrieve her phone, her wallet.
Go, go…
With a renewed sense of urgency, Mak leaped into the driver’s seat and turned the ignition. She groped around the dash for a remote to open the garage door, and not finding it, pulled open the glove box. Instead of a remote controller, a Glock pistol fell out onto the passenger seat next to her. She blinked at it. There was a wallet in the glove box, and a passport—no, four. There were four passports in the glove box of the car. She had no time for this. She had to get away before the garage went up in flames.
Mak leaped out of the car and found a chain pulley alongside the garage door. Using all her strength she pulled until the door lifted outwards. Light streamed into the dark space. Relief. She was nearly there. She could speed off and leave this horrid place behind…
And then Makedde saw something that made her freeze in her tracks.
Out of the corner of her eye, a familiar sight. Something that didn’t belong here. Something she didn’t want to see in this garage, in this farmhouse, in this horrible place. It was the tips of a pair of shoes. Pointy shoes. Black pointy shoes.
She choked.
No.
Silently, tears began to fall from her eyes. She did not even notice them. She did not wipe them away.
Black shoes were poking out from a bundle wrapped in plastic. Familiar shoes. Wrong. This is wrong. This can’t be. Her instincts registered the horror before her brain did. She clambered towards the shoes, and kneeling, began to unwrap the plastic sheath. It was the shape of a body.
No.
No!
She tore at the plastic, desperate. Pulling away the layers of her grim find, she began to make out the features of the dead body inside.
Black hair. Glasses. Leather jacket.
Bogey.
Bogey, Bogey, Bogey, Bogey, Bogey…
She had known the instant she saw those shoes that it was Bogey, and that he had somehow tried to save her, that he was dead now, because of her, and it would be the final nail in her coffin. In that moment she knew with certainty that she could never return to a normal life. Not with what she had seen, what she had experienced. Makedde loved this man, she had found new love with him and he had shown her new possibilities, new emotions, the chance of a new life. It was precisely because he loved her that he was now there in front of her with his throat cut open. His eyes were open, unseeing, sunk back into his pallid face. His beautiful lips were dotted with smears of blood. He had been dead for at least a day in that garage, or days, while she had been chained up in the cellar just below him, wishing so badly to be near him.
I’m going to go mad.
Perhaps she had gone mad already. This life of hers was madness. Everyone who had ever told her that things would be okay—Everything will be okay, Mak—was wrong. Everything in her world was wrong. A trembling began all through her body, and she found herself temporarily unable to act. She wanted to crawl inside his plastic shroud and hold his body, and die there with him, let the flames engulf them both. She realised the danger. If she kept standing there looking at Bogey’s body she would die.
Numb, moving like an automaton, Makedde walked to the car and popped the trunk open. Inside, she found cash, jewels and what she recognised to be a sniper’s case and the tools of a hitman. The man who had abducted her had been a professional. She had known it, and now she knew in her guts that the Cavanaghs had set the man loose on her, and that they would not be satisfied until she was dead.
With an unnatural strength powered by adrenaline, Makedde lifted Bogey in her arms, and bore his body to the open car. With a tenderness too late, she laid him in the trunk, gently closed his stiff eyelids, and kissed his cold lips. She closed the lid and took a breath. Around her, there was more glass smashing, and the sound of cracking. The garage was heating up. The blaze outside was getting bigger now. The whole farmhouse would go. It was time to leave.
Makedde got into the driver’s seat, gripped the stick shift, put the car into gear and drove.
Blind to everything save the winding road before her, Mak drove through the French countryside for hours without stopping until sheer exhaustion made her pull the car over. She fell asleep across the front seat with the doors locked, the loaded Glock near to hand, and the stick shift digging into her ribs. She woke thirsty, bruised and in darkness, a bloodstreaked leather jacket wrapped around her. The Mercedes clock glowed the hour of 10:10.
She remembered driving away in the car. At some point she had woken, shaking violently, and had removed the jacket from Bogey’s cold body and wrapped it around herself for warmth, along with his scarf, which was now bundled in the back seat, dark with dried blood.
It took her a moment to orient herself, and seconds later, the tears began. She ignored them. She wasn’t interested in tears. She was interested only in revenge.
The man she loved was dead in the trunk of the car, and she had enough weapons, jewels and cash to make a new life, under the radar, a life where the Cavanaghs and their thugs could never find her.
They wouldn’t need to.
She would find them.
It was not the life she had wanted, not the life she had asked for. It was the life she had to lead.
EPILOGUE
In his thirty-two years of performing autopsies, Dr Auguste had never before come across a fully grown man folded neatly into a small box. Puzzled, the Chief Forensic Pathologist ran through the case notes in his mind as his assistants removed the ornate wooden panels of the contortionist’s stage box, within which the deceased was tightly folded. With considerable care, the panels were cut away, leaving the exposed remains on Dr Auguste’s autopsy table, balled up like a bloated fist.
The deceased, apparently, had been an accomplished contortionist.
Mr Arslan Gosulja had been missing for just over two weeks, and appeared to have been dead nearly that long. Sheltered from the elements, his body’s decomposition had not been rapid, but had clearly taken hold. The once slender physique had ballooned to the shape of the box, and the deep black-purple discolouration of post-mortem lividity was evident along all the lower extremities, strongly suggesting that he had died in this position, trapped in the box.
Dr Auguste could not help but imagine his final days. Within the first twenty-four hours the man would have felt a desperate hunger and thirst, and increasingly unbearable pain in his muscles and joints. Delirium would surely have set in early. He would have experienced giddiness and hallucinations. His tongue had split open from dehydration. As he neared death, his eyelids likely would no longer close, and he would have spied the dark world around him through the holes in his box, helpless. There would have been little else for him to do in the hours leading to his death than watch his mother, the notorious and disgraced actress Bijou, while she went about her routine, covering her grief and bewilderment in an alluring layer of powder and perfume and jewellery, believing her son to have abandoned her. Terribly distraught, she had called the police when she became aware of the terrible smell in her bedroom.
The assistants manipulated the deceased across the table, laying the remains flat. Removed from its deadly container, the body moved easily, rigor mortis having long since passed. Had this man expired from dehydration, a form of positional asphyxia, or death due to one of the complications of prolonged immobility, such as a pulmonary embolism or the pressure effects on skeletal muscle? It might prove difficult to determine.
‘Passez le scalpel,’ Dr Auguste ordered.
The case, which became famous once Bijou’s scandalous relationship was leaked to the papers, was one of the strangest in Dr Auguste’s illustrious career. He later sought out and purchased a handsome out-of-print book on the subject of contortion and entérologie—or ‘packanatomicalisation’ as it was sometimes called in English—and it sat on the shelf of his office for many years.
He never did find the time to read the text, nor did he again come across a case involving such strange practices, but whenever a visitor noticed the book he retold the story of the curious man in the box. Of all the confounding aspects of the case, the single question that continued to trouble Dr Auguste was this: having voluntarily placed himself in the box, why had this Arslan Gosulja not cried out to his mother for help once he had become trapped and recognised the seriousness of his position? His death would have been agonising. And he had been just a heartbeat from her for days.
Silently watching.
THE END
A Note About The Grand Guignol
I conceived of writing about my fictional troupe, Le Théâtre des Horreurs, after watching a documentary about Paris in the 1920s, a time when the Grand Guignol was patronised by the likes of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller. Sadly, I discovered that the theatre at 7 Cité Chaptal, though still standing, bears little resemblance to the notorious venue of the Grand Guignol, which performed ‘naturalistic’ horror plays there from 1897 to 1962. Investigating the tiny theatre in Paris (at the time of writing it was the International Visual Theatre, staging plays for the hearing impaired), I was saddened to find the original interiors gone, including the oft-written-about carved angels left over from its earliest days as a chapel, and no reference to the theatre’s incredible past except for a little plaque on the corner of Cité Chaptal and Rue Chaptal making mention of its once notorious and yet seemingly near forgotten past. In this novel I have taken literary licence by restoring the venue to the splendour of its heyday, angels and all—my homage to what once was.
Acknowledgements
It can be very difficult to be close to a writer finishing a novel. I would be truly remiss not to acknowledge my friends and family, and thank them yet again for the incredible patience they have shown in supporting my writing, particularly over the three years it took me to complete Siren. I would also like to thank HarperCollins Publishers Australia, and particularly Linda Funnell, for the ongoing support of my work. Thank you so much for believing in me. Thank you also to Bolinda Audio, who, like HarperCollins Australia, have been there with me since my first novel was published in 1999. And thank you also to the readers and publishers around the world who allow me to do what I love for a living.
I have the good fortune of having the most wonderful literary agent, Selwa Anthony. Thank you for your guidance and friendship from day one, and for making my dreams of becoming a published writer come true. Thank you also to Mitch Kaplan and KSGB Literary Agency in Los Angeles for the support and belief in me. Big thanks also go to Michael Schenker and Rob Dorfmann at 2 Roads Pictures, Craig Schneider of Pinnacle PR, Martin Walsh and Chadwick Management, Saxtons, Sisters in Crime, Karen Phillips, Di Rolle, magician Adam Mada
, contortionist Arslan Gusengadzhiev of Zumanity (who is nothing like the twisted Arslan character in Siren, despite the name), SWAT leader Doug Martin for correcting my ‘mash’, ‘Big’ John McCarthy for choking me unconscious for Makedde’s Catacombs scene, and West EFX for literally setting me on fire for research for my farmhouse scene. I was gratefully unsinged. I am also grateful for the assistance of Chief Forensic Pathologist Dr Jo Duflou, forensic polygraph examiner Steven Van Aperen, Carl Donadio of Once Blue, Tony Zalewski and the Australian Institute of Public Safety, and Mike Evans and the Australian Security Academy where I completed my Certificate III in Investigative Services in 2008.
I would like to acknowledge French writer Maurice Level, author of Le Baiser dans la nuit, translated as The Final Kiss, and first performed at Le Theatre du Grand-Guignol in 1912, and the invaluable book on the Grand Guignol, Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror, by Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson, University of Exeter Press, 2002. The fragments of play dialogue I’ve used were adapted from translations in this book. I would also like to acknowledge American writer Jack Kerouac and his novel On The Road, quoted in this book.
And to my gloriously patient friends Alison, Gloria, Mindy, Liz, Amelia, Desi and Robert, Manual, Tracey, Misty and Alice, Nafisa, Lionheart, Joel, Erica and Stephen, Linda (Miss J Forever), lovely Hugh for the quote, the Literary Salon crew, the Hillbillies and the Poets, and especially Berndt, Dorothy, Nik and Annelies. I thank each of you for showing support and for being there for me in your own way during these recent roller-coaster years. I love you all.
