"You need to factor this in," was all Peter said as he handed it over. He looked more drawn than ever, as if he had barely slept the night before.
"Last night?"
"Last two nights."
"You kept it to yourself."
Peter ran a hand through his dark hair. "Look, I have to be sure, okay? I have to know that it's not—just coming from me. That I can trust it."
"And you do?"
"I'm satisfied now, Doctor Dan. I couldn't make this up."
Dan leant against the car door and read the carefully typed words.
TRANSCRIPT 3
[miscellaneous sounds]
"You're the one who took the Kellar woman. Those poor women in Zurich. You're going to take out all my teeth!"
[sounds]
"Take them out? Oh no. Not this time. Toother was very specific."
[sounds, like things being shaken in a metal box]
"Toother?"
"Yes. Your name please?"
"What difference does it make?"
"But isn't that what the experts advise? Always try to use names? Don't let them dehumanise you. My name is Paul."
"Your real name? Not Toother?"
"It'll do for today."
"Then I'll be Janice. For today. Who is Toother?"
"Why, your host, Janice-for-today. The one who taught me all I know. Mostly he takes, but sometimes he gives."
"Gives?"
"Sometimes. I have my little hammer and my little punch, see? And you have such a full, generous mouth. Today we are going to put teeth back in. Lots and lots, see?"
[more rattling sounds]
"Big teeth. Men's teeth. We're going to call you Smiler."
[more rattling sounds]
[victim sobbing]
[victim screaming]
Dan left Peter to drowse for much of the journey south, but as they were on the bridge crossing the Hawkesbury River, he glanced aside and saw the dark eyes watching him.
"You okay?" he asked.
"Sorry for losing it back there," Peter said, as if resuming a conversation from moments before. "Things are escalating for me too. With this latest—exchange—I get something about his trophies."
Dan wished he weren't driving right then. He pulled into the low-speed lane. "You see them?"
"Just lots of—grimaces. You know, teeth without lips. It's the most terrifying thing. Bared teeth. No skin covering. Like eyes without lids. Horrible."
"Are they on shelves, in drawers, boxes, what?"
"Displayed. Arranged somehow, secretly. Nothing like smiles or grins. I just see them as bared teeth, Doctor Dan. In a private space. Sorry. It isn't much."
"Try, Peter. Whatever you get. These voices—"
"It's more than just voices. It's reciprocal now."
"Reciprocal? What does that mean?"
"It isn't just going one way. He knows I've been listening. Accessing his files. He was very angry at first, but now he's enjoying it. He's fighting back."
"How, Peter? How does he fight back?"
"Sending things, thoughts, images. They're not mine. It's more than delusions, Doctor Dan, I'm sure of it. More than my usual hypersensitivity. I just had to be sure."
"Understood. Go on."
"It's Rookwood. All those graves. I keep seeing the bodies, vulnerable, helpless, keep seeing the teeth. They're mostly all teeth, lots of dentures too. But there's such anguish. Such rage."
"Female burials?"
"Female and male. They're all murmuring, chattering. Some desperately wanting to be picked, calling 'Pick me! Pick me!' Others hiding. Desperately hiding. As if alive. They're not, but it's like they are for him."
"Is there a voice talking to you now?"
"Like a voice, Doctor Dan. Not a voice, but like one. I have certainties, just know things. He wants it like that."
"He's found someone he can share with. He hears the bodies calling to him you say?"
"How he sees them. Calling, begging. 'Pick me! Pick me!' Or hiding, resisting. Furious. Either way he sees it as liberation, sees them as all waiting to be chosen. The living victims too."
"He's saving them?"
"Liberating them is his word, yes. Living or dead, it doesn't matter. It just means a different method of retrieval."
"Retrieval!" Dan gave a laugh, completely without humour. "But he's in the area?"
Peter shrugged. "It's a huge cemetery, Doctor Dan. It's not called the Sleeping City for nothing. He's committed so many desecrations there. You can't begin to know. Secretly. Passionately. This is his place for now."
"Peter, I trust you completely. Just let me know what you get. Anything."
It was strange to walk the grounds of the decommissioned, largely deserted mental hospital at Gladesville later that morning. The former wards and out-buildings had been turned into offices for various governmental health services, so by day it was like a stately, manicured, museum estate. There were still vehicles in the carparks, people walking the paths, roadways and lawns, giving the place a semblance of its former life.
Dan walked those daylight roads now, glad that he wasn't doing it at night. After dark the offices and carparks were deserted, but had a strange new half-life, quarter-life, life-in-death. Instead of being left to stand as part of a vast col of blackness overlooking the Parramatta River, the old sandstone buildings and empty roads were lit, as if beckoning, urging, waiting for those willing to surrender bits of their sanity to make the place live again.
When Dan reached Cornucopia, he found Harry waiting at a table outside the café door.
"I've driven past this place a thousand times," Harry said, "and never knew how big it was. Where's Peter?"
"He sends his apologies. Said he wants to keep his mind off this for now."
"Doesn't want me asking questions," Harry said. "I can understand that."
"Harry—"
"Dan, I know how it can be for him. How it was. Just say hi for me."
They went in and placed their orders, then sat watching the clear autumn sky above the sandstone walls. Harry took out his notebook.
"The Deering woman went missing from a holiday house at Cottesloe Beach in 1967."
"That's Western Australia, isn't it?"
"Right. There was blood, definite signs of a struggle, but no body. And before you ask, there were no teeth fragments."
"You've been thorough."
"Now that there's international scrutiny, we have different resources available."
"What did you tell Sheehan?"
"That it came up in a missing persons keyword sweep. In the last three decades alone there are thirty-six names of missing persons nationally where blood mixed with saliva was found at locations where each of them was last seen."
"Oral blood?"
"Right. So tell me what Peter has found."
Dan passed him the transcript folder. "Harry, you might want to finish eating first."
Dan found it hard to sleep that night. They were in separate rooms in an otherwise empty, former staff residence at the southern end of the hospital grounds, a converted single-storey brick house. It was a cool, late autumn night, pleasant for sleeping, but with all that had happened, Dan felt restless, too keenly aware of the empty roads outside and the lit, abandoned buildings, so normal, yet—the only word for it—so abnormal, waiting in the night.
The lights are on but nobody's home.
The old euphemism for madness kept coming back to him. No doubt there were security personnel doing the rounds, one, possibly more, but, just the same, there was the distinct sense that Peter and he were the only living souls in the place.
Dan kept thinking of what Peter had told him that morning, of the bodies as repositories for teeth, grimaces, smiles, lying there waiting, hiding, some calling, chattering in darkness, wanting any kind of life, others dreading such attention.
It was absurd, foolish, but Rookwood Necropolis was barely ten kilometres away, 285 hectares of one of the largest dedicated cemet
eries in the world, site of nearly a million interments.
In his half-drowsing state, Dan kept thinking, too, of the old 1963 movie, Jason and the Argonauts, of King Aeëtes collecting and sowing the teeth from the skull of the slain Hydra, raising up an army of skeletons to combat Jason and his crew. Dan imagined human teeth being first plucked and then sown in Rookwood's older, less tended fields. If the Hydra's teeth raised up human skeletons, what sort of creature would human teeth raise up?
He must have fallen asleep at last, for the next thing he knew Peter was rousing him.
"Doctor Dan?" Peter said, switching on Dan's bedside light.
"Peter? What is it?"
Peter was fully dressed, his hair and eyes wild. "He's got someone! Right now. He has someone!"
Dan grabbed his watch, saw that it was 12:16 am. "He told you this?"
"No. But I saw anyway. He's furious that I saw."
Dan climbed out of bed, began dressing. "The reciprocal thing?"
"It backfired, yes. Showed me more than he wanted. He's so angry, but he's enjoying it too! He's still enjoying it."
"The drama. The added excitement."
"Yes. We have to hurry!"
Dan reached for his mobile. "Where, Peter? I need to call Harry."
"Good. Yes. An old factory site in Somersby Road. A few streets back from the cemetery. But I need to be there. I have to be closer, Doctor Dan. Her life depends on it."
"Those women in the transcripts . . . ?"
"Never woke up. None of them."
"Understood."
Harry answered his mobile before Dan's call went to voicemail. He sounded leaden from sleep until Dan explained what they had. "You'll be there before I will, Dan, but I'll have two units there. Four officers. Best I can do for now. Where are you?"
"Still at the hospital. Heading out to the car. We'll need an ambulance too, Harry. The Somersby Road corner closest to the cemetery. Tell them to wait for us. No sirens."
"Right. You're sure about this, Dan?"
"Peter is."
"I'm on my way!"
"Harry, Peter stays out of it. How do we cover ourselves?"
"Anonymous tip. A neighbour heard screaming. I'll have a word with whoever turns up. Go!"
Two patrol cars and an ambulance were waiting at the corner of Somersby Road, lights off, ready. There was no sign of Harry's car yet.
"You Dr Truswell?" an officer asked, appearing at Dan's driver-side window when he pulled up.
"Yes. Look—"
"Harry explained. I'm Senior Constable Banners. Warwick Banners. Just tell us where to go."
"It's there!" Peter said, pointing. "That building there!"
"Right. Follow us in but stay well back, hear?"
"We hear you," Dan said, and turned to Peter. "You have to stay in the car, okay?"
"I know," Peter said. "And keep the doors locked."
Dan joined the police officers and paramedics waiting at the kerb. It took them seconds to reach the building two doors down, a large brick factory-front with closed and locked roller-doors and smaller street door. The premises looked so quiet and innocent in the night, and not for the first time Dan wondered if Peter could be mistaken.
There was a single crash as the street door was forced. In moments they were in off the street, standing in utter quiet, in darkness lit by the beams of five torches.
Again it was all so ordinary, so commonplace. But Dan knew only too well how such places could be terrifying in their simplicity. He had seen the Piggyback Killer's rooms in Newtown, such a mundane blend of walls, hallways and furniture until you opened that one door, found the two coffins. He had seen Corinne Kester's balcony view and the shed with its treacherous windows, had seen Peter Rait's own room come alive in a wholly unexpected way right there at Blackwater. Such simple, terrifying places.
This, too, was such an ordinary, extraordinary space. Who knew what it had been originally: a warehouse, a meat packing plant, some other kind of factory, but taking up the entire ground floor, large and low-ceilinged, with painted out windows and a large, windowless inner section that took up most of the back half of the premises. Given the absence of screams being reported in the neighbourhood, it was very likely double brick or sound-proofed in some other way.
Dan followed the police and paramedics as they pushed through the double doors into that inner precinct. At first, it seemed totally dark. Then Dan saw that intervening pillars concealed an area off to the left lit by a dim yellow bulb. The police deployed immediately, guns ready, and crossed to it. There was no one there, just signs of where the occupant had been: a table and chair, a cupboard, a modest camp-bed with tangled bed-clothes, a hot-plate and bar fridge to one side where it all stretched off into darkness again.
Deliberate darkness. Darkness as controlled theatrical flourish, prelude to shocking revelations, precisely calculated anguish and despair.
The police led the way around more pillars. The stark white light of their torches soon found the old dentistry chair near the back wall, securely bolted to the floor, revealed the victim strapped down, alive but barely conscious, gurgling through a ruined mouth filled with her own blood.
The paramedics rushed to her aid, began working by torchlight as best they could.
Dan made himself look away, forced himself to look at what else there was in the shifting torchlight that wasn't this poor woman, gurgling, groaning and sobbing. He noted the straps for securing the chair's occupant, the elaborate padded clamp for holding the head, the metal tables and dental tools, other tools that had no place in dental work, the stains on the floor, dark and rusty-looking. The air smelled of disinfectant, urine and blood and something else, something sour.
An officer finally located a light switch. A single spot came on overhead, illuminating the chair and the woman, showing her ruined face and more: an array of mirrors on adjustable stands, video and audio equipment, shelves with old-style video and audio tapes, newer-style DVDs.
Souvenirs. An archive.
Dan scanned the row of audio tapes; the first were dated from the sixties.
Peter Rait's voices.
But all so mundane in a worrying sense. Though terrible to say, these were the workaday trappings of sociopaths and psychopaths the world over, how they, too, made mundane lives for themselves out of their horrific acts.
But there was a large, heavy door beyond the woman in the chair, like a rusted walk-in freezer door with a sturdy latch. Dan focused his attention on it as soon as the torch beams revealed the pitted metal surface. An exit? A hideaway? Another inner sanctum in this hellish place?
An officer approached the door, weapon ready, and pulled it back.
It was a storeroom, a small square room empty but for a large chalk-white post nearly two metres tall. The post was as round as three dinner plates, set in concrete or free-standing, it was hard to tell, but standing like a bollard, one of those removable traffic posts used to stop illegal parking, though larger, much larger, and set all over with encrustations.
Not just any encrustations, Dan knew. Sets of teeth in false mouths, fitted at different heights, randomly but carefully, lovingly, set into the white plaster, fibre-glass, concrete, whatever it was. Dentures made from real teeth, corpse teeth, teeth taken post- and ante-mortem, some of them, all of them spring-loaded and deadly!
A trophy post.
This was where Toother kept his terrible collection, displayed it for his pleasure—and, yes, for the calculated and utter terror of others.
A door slammed somewhere in the building.
The police reacted at once. The officer holding the storeroom door let it go. It was on a counterweight and closed with a resounding boom. Another shouted orders. One hurried back to secure the main entrance. The rest rushed to search the outer premises, to find other exits and locate their quarry. Footsteps echoed in the empty space.
It all happened so quickly. Dan stood listening, hoping, trusting that Peter was still out in the car, safe.
Movement close by caught his attention, brought him back. The paramedics had the woman on their gurney at last. The awful gurgling had stopped and they were now wheeling her away.
For a terrible moment, Dan was left alone with the chair under its single spot, with the tables and instruments, the archive shelves and heavy metal door, now mercifully closed.
Then there were cries off in the darkness, sounds of running, more shouting. Two gunshots echoed in the night.
Then, in seconds, minutes, however long it was, Harry was there, two officers with him.
"We got him, Dan."
"Harry. What? What's that?"
"We got him. Toother. He's dead."
"Dead?" Peter was there too, appearing out of the darkness. "You did? You really got him?"
"We did, Peter," Harry said. "He was running out when we arrived. Officer Burns and me. He was armed and wouldn't stop. Colin here had to shoot."
Dan placed a hand on Peter's arm. "No more voices?"
"No," Peter said. "No voices at all now."
"We got him, Peter," Harry said.
But Peter frowned, gave an odd, puzzled look as if hearing something, then crossed to the heavy door and pulled it back. "Harry, I don't think we did. Not this time. Not yet."
The storeroom was empty, of course.
UP THE FIRE ROAD
Eileen Gunn
-Andrea-
The main thing to understand about Christy O'Hare is he hates being bored. Complicated is interesting, simple is dull, so he likes to make things complicated.
Used to be the complications were more under his control. Like one time he went down to Broadway for coffee, but the coffee place was closed. So he hitched a ride downtown, but the driver was headed for Olympia on I-5, so Christy figured he'll go along for the ride and get his coffee at that place in Oly that has the great huevos. He ended up thumbing to San Francisco and coming back a week later with a tattoo and a hundred bucks he didn't have when he left home. I think he was more interested in doing something that would make a good story than he was in getting a cup of coffee. But I did wonder where the hell he was.
Eclipse One Page 12
