“Yeah.” Steve starts the car. “Ain’t that the truth.”
****
When every bone in a face gets broken, the face itself becomes unrecognisable. It’s like a plastic bag full of water — flat and swollen, all defining shape gone. The contents of the head spread out like toothpaste, mixing with marrow and the blood released from broken bones. Clots form, cells spend seconds repairing damage before the whole thing stalls, a result of the unresponsive central nervous system. The body begins to settle and deteriorate, committing itself to the next stage.
Reconstruction in clay comes from guesswork and whatever evidence of wear can be found on the skin, where perhaps a cheekbone or jaw sat, where the brow might’ve protruded, where the redness on the sides of the nose were found. But the real face, the real body, has to be scooped and rolled up into a bag and carried carefully, sloshing like soup, to a freezer before forensic work can begin.
****
“There it is,” Adrienne points.
From a distance it looks like a circus, blue and white police cars, blue uniforms, yellow tape flapping in the wind. A sunny carnival atmosphere prevails, TV cameras and journalists parked a reasonable distance away. Everyone waits for the big top to go up, the next act to begin.
They approach. The officer recognises Adrienne and waves them through. Behind blue plastic sheets they find the body below street level. It’s floating in a stormwater drain and visible through a one-metre square grate.
“What’ve we got?” Adrienne asks.
“A man. Was a man, anyhow. Looks like jelly now.”
Detective Tarling is senior to Adrienne by about fifteen years. He’s an old dog with an impassive face. They go back a way. Tarling was at her first precinct. She’d recognised him as a man of quality and started shadowing him, looking for a mentor. Looking for an example. Rumours began about the two of them. Claims they were an item.
Tarling told everyone it was absurd but he didn’t tell them why. Fifteen years back you didn’t ask and you didn’t tell. Most people who made the assumption probably figured it was Adrienne who was the gay one.
In the end, Adrienne asked for a transfer. She never did find another mentor.
“Same M.O.,” Steve observes.
“Thought it might be,” Tarling says. “Hard to miss. Any leads?”
“Apparently,” says Steve, “it’s evil spirits.”
Tarling is unperturbed. “Usually is.”
“So, I guess no one’s moved the body recently?” Adrienne asks.
“You see any buckets?” Tarling asks.
She crouches and grips the edge of a drain outlet, peering in. The stench is unbearable. Every shitting, vomiting junkie in the city crammed into one room couldn’t smell this bad. The body looks like a sack pushed up against the grate, spread out, blocking nearly the whole outlet. Water rushes around it, making the skin ripple. It’s naked, and the dark hairs on its chest and arms and legs, the dark V of hair around its genitals, are pressed flat by the weight of water. The insides must’ve floated away by now, out to sea.
“Kids thought it was a balloon or a clown suit or something,” Tarling says. “Until the face rolled round and looked at them.”
“Counselling?” Steve asks.
“Oh, years of it, I’d imagine,” Tarling says.
“I guess there were no flash floods lately, no spelunking deaths or losses?” Adrienne asks. It’s a stretch, even she admits it. No spelunking death ever looked like this.
The others reply there’s been nothing they’ve heard of.
“How’d it get in here?” Adrienne examines the grate between her and the body.
“Reckon it was dumped in a stormwater drain and floated here,” Tarling says.
“How in hell do we get it out?” Adrienne murmurs, more to herself.
“Same way it was killed,” Steve suggests. “Supernaturally.”
Adrienne gets back to her feet and wipes her palms against each other. “You two are a big help.”
She goes to talk to the officers who first took the report. They’re both still at the scene, faces pale as ash, chins rigidly upright. Clearly can’t wait until they’re dismissed so they can crawl into a couple of pint glasses. They don’t have a lot more to add to what she already knows. Found by a couple local kids who freaked out, thought it was the bogey man. She thinks how glad their parents will be, to have acquired two kids with new, improved attitudes.
“Have you requested the underground maps from the city?” she asks.
“On it,” one officer confirms.
He looks pleased to have something to do. She leaves him to it.
The body doesn’t look like it’s been in the water for longer than a day or two — the skin is intact, pale but not discoloured — but there’s no telling exactly where it was dumped.
Adrienne watches the police divers arrive. They’re in full wetsuits, hesitating on the side of the drain.
“Reminds me of a story,” Steve says.
Adrienne’s heard it before, but Tarling listens with grim enthusiasm. The story goes: The body of an obese man was put in a morgue locker too soon, while it was still inflating from post-mortem gases. When they went to pull it out hours later, it was stuck. Wedged in tight, its bloated arms and belly filling the locker, blocking any hope of removing it. They pulled and pulled on the gurney to no avail.
Finally they had to saw off the arms, leaning into that stinking metal cavity with a bonesaw. First cut they made, the insides exploded all over the young intern tasked with the job. Rumour has it he’s in obstetrics now. “But if you buy him a beer,” says Steve, “or three, he’ll tell you the story. Right down to the colours of the muck he had to wash out of his hair.”
Tarling chuckles. “Nice.”
****
Off to one side are the gawkers; onlookers who’ve been attracted by the police presence, the tents and trucks. But behind them is a different group. A smaller group, three men and a woman. The woman stands in the middle with the men surrounding her like a security detail. She’s small, with black, curled hair piled high on her head and heavy make-up that makes her lips glow red and her eyes look like spilled ink. What’s most unusual isn’t the woman’s exotic presence, though. It’s the fact that in the middle of the sharp winter day she’s wearing a sleeveless evening gown, gold with a gold star under her breast that gathers the cloth from shoulder and waist and bunches it into a cascade spilling towards the ground.
“Who’re they?” Adrienne asks.
Tarling turns. “Looks like a pop princess.”
Steve shrugs. “Concerned member of the public?”
“Hey!” Adrienne starts towards them.
The men ignore her but the woman looks, dark eyes glowing almost red. She sizes Adrienne up and then she turns on her heel. The men part to let her through and then they follow her to a black limousine parked behind them.
“Hey!”
Adrienne breaks into a jog. She dives under the police tape and pushes through the line of gawkers. She runs up the hill and reaches the car just as it’s pulling away. She thumps a fist against the window and pulls out her badge with the other hand.
“Open the door!” she shouts. “Stop the car, open the door.”
The car continues to move forward, the men staring mutely away from her.
“I’ll smash in the damn window!”
It’s only the woman who meets her eye through the glass, only the woman that gives a deep nod, as if of recognition. Adrienne feels a powerful wave of nausea pass through her, her insides turning to bile. As the car careens away, she doubles over and retches powerfully into the gutter, arms and legs shaking. Juddering groans push from her body and tears pour from her eyes. Her left hand burns. Between thumb and forefinger, the skin is red and inflamed and there’s an image there, like a tattoo. Or a brand. An eight-pointed star with a circle in the middle, like the one on the woman’s gown. She doesn’t know what it means, but she knows she got off lightly.
Her bones are intact, for one thing.
The woman in the car must’ve taken a liking to her. Or to something she said.
CHAPTER THREE
“You okay?” Tarling is crouched beside her.
Steve runs to her side, out of breath and gasping, sounding almost worse than she does. “What the hell just happened?”
The nausea has passed, but Adrienne feels hollow and torn apart, like her bones are about to slide loose of her skin. She keeps flexing her left hand, exercising the burnt webbing on the side of her thumb.
“Recognise this symbol?” she asks.
The others shake their heads.
Tarling says, “If it’s a tatt, I’d say it’s infected.”
Adrienne tries to breathe deeply. “Did you get the license plate?”
Tarling taps his breast pocket where his notebook sits. “I got it, but are you sure you want it?”
She does. She radios in the plates. Her belly feels pummelled, like someone’s done the Houdini-death-punch on her. Her muscles ache. Not to mention the burn-tattoo throbbing on her hand. That thing in the car, it hadn’t even touched her. What would happen if she came skin-to-skin with that monstrous being, that all-powerful bitch?
She’s pretty sure she doesn’t want to find out.
She shows Steve the text from Nina, the one with the address for the Cult. While he drives, she Googles ‘eight-pointed star symbol’ and gets a long list of possibilities. There’s an eight-pointed star on the Iraqi flag, and an eight-pointed Christian Star of Redemption. She pinches the skin of her hand to ease the ache. Further down the page, one reference leaps out.
“Inanna, or Venus, later Ishtar,” she reads, before her voice trails off.
“What?” Steve asks.
“Keep driving.”
“Nearly there, boss.”
They’ve reached Balmain. The car skirts the main street. There’s a heavy traffic of baby-strollers and trendy cafe-goers. They twist up and down hills and past winding streets with their mix of old and re-furbished pubs. It’s a difficult suburb, the streets are narrow, confused and crowded, crammed into a space that’s too small for all the life oozing out of it.
They go the wrong way up a one-way street to reach the house, an unimposing two-storey cottage with a token veranda at the front. Jasmine spirals around the balustrades and up the ornate faux-iron structure to the second storey. The balconies are white and the front door is a deep red.
It looks perfectly normal from the street.
After the fourth knock the door opens, just barely. A young woman peers through the gap. She’s mostly hidden behind the door and it’s only then Adrienne remembers the whole nudity thing. She can’t tell if this woman is naked, but she feels it’s an uncomfortable possibility.
“Detective Garner.” Adrienne holds out her badge and then gestures to Steve. “Detective Mack. We’d like to talk to the residents, please.”
The woman’s eyes widen. She shuts the door without a word.
“Do we wait?” Steve asks.
“I guess we wait.” She fingers her ribs experimentally, checks the star-shaped burn on her hand. It doesn’t look any worse. It doesn’t look any better.
After a minute, a woman in a satin dressing gown pulls the door open. She’s older than the first woman, fresh-faced with grey-and-black-streaked hair loose to her shoulders. It’s clear she’s not wearing anything under her gown. The cloth slides over her hips and shoulders smoothly, leaving little to the imagination. Even her cellulite shows.
“I’m so sorry, the gentleman will have to wait outside,” says the woman.
Adrienne turns to Steve. He’s pale with surprise, brows high.
“Sure,” he says.
He turns his back on the woman as if he intends to guard the house, shoulders rounded, hands clasped in front of his groin.
Adrienne steps inside. It’s hot, and when the woman directs her to a coat rack, she gratefully takes off her jacket. The woman waits expectantly, but Adrienne isn’t planning to remove anything else.
Despite it being the middle of the day, the house lights are on. Maybe to counter the fact all the blinds are drawn. The woman slowly, and with great gravity, leads her to a room painted in deep red. There’s an assortment of unmatched chairs lining every wall. Five other women are already in occupation. There’s no sign of the young woman who first opened the door. These women are older, tipping into a collective age of about three hundred. And they’re naked.
Not nude, nude implies cunning, surprise, manipulation. They’re naked just because they’re naked, and they sit on the floor or the few chairs or the arms of the chairs and they smile or don’t smile, offer tea or wait with patience for Adrienne to speak.
“Would you like a chair, Detective?” asks one woman, offering to vacate her own.
“I’ll stand,” Adrienne says.
A ripple of restrained laughter echoes across the room.
“What can we do for you?”
“I’m investigating a series of murders.”
No reaction from the women. It’s as if whatever happens outside their walls is irrelevant. After a pause, one of the women speaks, the one to offer her chair. “I’m so sorry to hear that, Detective.” She crosses her legs unselfconsciously and leans back, hands on her thigh.
“What’s your name?” Adrienne asks her.
“Ishtar,” she replies.
Adrienne freezes.
“We all go by that name here,” says the woman calling herself Ishtar. “The original goddess, the every-goddess. We are all—”
“Okay,” Adrienne cuts her off. “But if you worship her as a god, isn’t that blasphemous?”
“Goddess,” Ishtar the woman corrects. “And no. She is honoured.”
“Really?” Adrienne says. “Have you asked her?”
The woman laughs. “I’ll ask at the very next opportunity.”
“When do you think that might be?” Adrienne keeps her face stone-still.
The woman pauses, her own smile fading. “Are you making fun of me?”
“Afraid not,” Adrienne replies.
Something happens in the room then, some shared emotion that isn’t surprise.
Another woman asks, “You think she’s...here?”
“Could be. What would you say to that?”
It’s hard to gauge what the women are feeling. They stare at her, mute and tense. Adrienne thinks it’s probably a mix of her no-nonsense cop demeanour with the longed-for-but-not-quite-believed implication of what she’s saying. Ishtar herself might be available to them. Ishtar might be here on earth.
“Have you seen her?” asks the woman, the talkative one.
Adrienne lets them stew before answering, “Say I have. Why would she be here?”
The woman gives her a thoughtful look. “It’s 2012. The Age of Aquarius is returning, the time of the god Anu. Gods and goddesses are set to roam the earth, to jostle for power in the new millennium.”
“That explains the timeline,” Adrienne says. “But not the location. Why here?”
“Maybe,” the woman speculates, “this is far enough away from her homeland that she feels she’s safe to start her bid for power. Hidden from the other gods.”
“And what’s her bid for power gonna entail, exactly?”
She dreads the answer. She’s already seen what the goddess can do. The aches and burns, the gut-wrenching nausea from her own encounter won’t easily be forgotten.
Ishtar’s followers look between themselves uncertainly.
“You don’t know, do you?” Adrienne asks.
“The transition from one age to another is unpredictable. Disruptive—”
“How disruptive?” Adrienne asks.
“As disruptive,” she says, “as you can imagine. Floods, earthquakes...”
“The gods can cause that?”
“If she’s here, now,” says the first woman, “there’s a chance she’s the first. That makes her powerful. And vulnerable
.”
“I don’t get the impression she’s particularly vulnerable.”
The woman doesn’t smile. “She’s vulnerable to jealousies. Attack by gods or humans who are, perhaps, pushing their own gods.”
By now it’s clear the women don’t know enough to lead her to Ishtar, but maybe they can point her in another direction. Some way to stop that mad goddess. “Which humans would that be?”
“Anyone with faith these days might be an assassin for their god,” says one of the women.
Adrienne thinks of the Catholic priest. She doesn’t buy it. “How many gods should we be expecting?”
They look at her, their faces blank. “How many do you need?”
Adrienne returns their stares sourly. “Shit.”
****
Back in the car, she gives Steve an earful. No reason for it, she’s just mad as Hell and if she keeps up the anger and the verbal ranting, she can escape the other knowledge pressing on the back of her skull. She’s afraid. She hasn’t been this afraid since she was twelve and thought she was drowning in a neighbour’s pool. The sensation of water closing over her head, sealing her in, that’s exactly what she’s feeling right now.
Steve listens calmly. When Adrienne pauses for a breath, he says, “What you need is a nice walk by the seaside.”
Adrienne’s blood is freezing solid under her skin.
“There’s been another one, hasn’t there?” she asks.
Steve nods. “Bondi Beach.”
“Shit!”
Shitshitshit.
“Fuck!” She glares balefully at the closed door behind which the naked Cult of Ishtar sits swapping stories and offering each other tea. “I left my jacket in there.”
“Go back for it?” Steve asks.
“Nah, fuck it, never liked that jacket.”
She rocks back and forth in the passenger seat while Steve guns the engine.
CHAPTER FOUR
The body reveals nothing more than the others, though his clothes are found inexpertly buried on the beach.
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