by Zane Lovitt
Around the turn is a wooden gate and the first-floor landing, barren but for the caramel carpet. Surprising how bright it is: I expected this to be the gloomiest part of the house, but Rudy seems to have reserved that for himself below.
I consider the gate. Someone has closed it and secured it with a small latch. Thirteen-year-old Rudy, knowing he’d never be back.
I undo the bolt, half-wondering if it will come off in my hands, but it snaps open easily, squeaks as I move through it, stays intact. To my right is the living room: a big couch, lots of books on shelves and a long collection of items I don’t recognise until I do recognise them and they’re compact discs. An old box television—not a flat-screen but an enormous CRT like a bakers oven—faces out from the sideboard along the south wall. A phase of light through the lace blind catches the silt in the air like tear gas and I put my hand to my mouth, partly to keep myself from sneezing, partly to shut my nose against the smell. Tastefully arranged on the wall are baby photos, infant Rudy wrapped in cotton, entirely indistinguishable from every other baby ever born, the hope in his eyes glimmering with irony. Lining the hall is a quality bench table, handsome wood enamel and sturdy and adorned with a single framed pic of Cheryl as a young girl, taken in the sixties going by the hairstyle and the discolouration. She appears to have been ambushed by the photographer, all naive gawk and big lashes, as unconcerned about the veil of time as newborn Rudy.
I walk through to the master bedroom.
Maybe I expected the roof to be collapsed or wild animals to be moved in, a coven of witches dancing around a cauldron. But it’s just a stillness in here beneath a membrane of dust. The air doesn’t seem to carry sound: I can’t hear my heartbeat but I feel its frantic pump of blood in my head.
A section of carpet the size of an Xbox has been cut out and the chocolate underlay is mangled. The wall beside it features a fake fireplace in a marble frame: how they pimped out master bedrooms a hundred years ago. Piled on the mantel is all the boring real life stuff that no longer has any meaning: receipts, business cards, photos and frames left in a bundle by Cheryl under the strain of divorce, or by some zero-fucks-given investigative officer: I’m not an interior decorator, mate.
On the wall above it as well as on the door I see tiny spatters of black blood, circled with pencil and marked with alphanumeric codes: TM1, GH3…I tilt my head, consider them, try to decipher them, but there’s no point and I have to keep moving. Past the mantel stands a chest of drawers where the fateful vase once stood. I expect to see a circular mark to indicate its position, but of course all of this dust has settled in the years since that derpy milk bottle was taken from its spot and never returned.
A couple of tasteful paintings hang on the walls and there are built-in robes and another dresser, Cheryl’s, between the two windows that look out over Grand Street. It’s hers because of the make-up, the jewellery box, the undergarments in the top drawer that’s slightly open, that reminds me of how pointless what I’m doing is. If there was evidence up here then the police found it. Glen Tyan found it. There’d have been no hurry back then: Tyan had all the time he wanted. And he would not have spent it terrified that Rudy might discover him here.
I peer through the window, past the putrid disassembly of the balcony to the same old street, now partially obscured by pyramid trees. Flashes of colour motor by. A family packs prams and children into a people mover and one of the children is in meltdown, cherry-faced and screaming. Don’t go into the bedroom, she cries. There’s a ghost that lives in there.
The blood spatters and the carpet cut-out are enough to render it haunted, but the lifelessness helps too. I picture Cheryl coming home, up the stairs and in through that doorway, discovering Rudy. Did she surprise him? What was he doing? Or was she here first, flopped on the mattress and weighing up her future with the flaky Kenneth Penn when Rudy got home from school, inflamed already by a scrap in the schoolyard. He was surprised to see her, didn’t react well. An unkind exchange. Another. Cheryl told him he was the brick wall between her and happiness. He triggered. She didn’t know yet how dangerous he was…
Aside from the vase I can’t imagine what else in this room could have mattered in those moments. The trial transcript alluded to nothing.
The smell is just the smell of closed windows, of the air after an age. Clothing, bedding, even the copper bed ornaments have turned in these conditions. Just like Rudy has. So forget the smell, Jason. Forget your crapsack dust-mite allergy and get your hands dirty.
Like in the bungalow, my search begins careful, becomes less careful as I realise how pointless it is to cover my tracks. In the wardrobes I find clothes riddled with moth holes and another box TV and a metric tonne of ladies’ shoes. The men’s dresser is empty but for a few damp ties. Behind tables, between clothing and under beds I look. Behind dressers, behind drawers, behind behind. No results found.
Meanwhile, I’m sneezing myself a prolapsed arsehole.
Tyan’s hiding space, where he kept his money; Whaley’s, where he stored his newspaper cut-outs—both of those I reckon I could uncover in a picosecond. So is Rudy more shrewd than them?
I’m about to give up on this room, head to the back of the house that overlooks the bungalow, when a last possibility sings out: the heating duct. A folded metal grille where the dresser meets the south wall, larger than the others. I lower myself to the floor.
Unscrewing it will require some kind of tool and I tap at my pockets, pull out my keys. I still have the key to Mum’s room at the hospice, the key I was supposed to return. But like they get a lot of break-ins at the Belladyne Palliative Care Facility. Like they get a lot of people giving back their keys. Death is distracting.
So this thing can risk ruination. Even so, I say the words ‘I’m sorry’ out loud as I twist it into the screw head.
The process takes a human lifetime and my sneezing is worse and my eyes sting like the dust really is tear gas, but god bless whatever is keeping Rudy away so long. Finally I wrench back the grille and see now that the space in the floor is not large. A toddler could fit in there but nothing bigger. Plumes of dust come with it.
There’s nothing as I look down, just scratched metal and bunnies of lint, forests of them. I poke my head in, look in both directions but it’s too dark to see. Even with my phone I can’t illuminate the ducts. There might be a horde of gremlins flipping me the bird, close enough to touch, and I wouldn’t know.
The bedside table here is completely clear, probably Piers’s side before he moved out. The other nightstand features another ancient Telecom landline that was surely out-of-date long before Rudy closed this room off to humanity. It features no LCD display, just buttons on a piece of jaundiced plastic. As well as the phone there’s a lamp.
By some wizardry, the lamp still works.
With the shade off it’s skinny enough to fit in the duct, a tight fit with my fat head in there as well. I manage it with a light scratch across my nose, sneeze, send up wafts of visible air. There’s positively nothing in the duct as it runs to the front of the house. I haul out, reposition the lamp in the other direction and squeeze my face back in there like I’m asking for it. Like, whatever lives in here, a wild boar or a facehugger, I really want it to hug my face.
And I have to hump the floor to change the angle because my head is blocking the light. The plastic edge of the register cuts my neck. I strain into the guillotine. I fumble with the light. I burn my little finger and a face comes at me from the dark. A yell.
My yell. More of a scream. Loud enough for me to crack my scalp against the roof of the duct and the pain makes me scream again as I wrench myself out and jam my wrist on the carpet and more pain stabs my arm.
Listen.
Whatever’s in there, it isn’t moving. It hasn’t scurried away. It hasn’t freaked out like I just freaked out.
It’s this silence that gives me confidence. Even the most dangerous animal would react to the first disturbance in thirteen years. With the lamp
held out, supplicating, I feed myself back into the floor.
It’s a face. Like a mask. Empty-eyed, a jagged hole for a nose and more mushroom-brown than white. Beyond it there’s more brown-white. An ivory pile. A dinosaur fossil. The bugs have been and gone. It looks back at me as if its last thought was to die in such a way as to terrify the human who found it.
What made me scream was: the moving of the lamp—it moved the shadow, created the illusion the fossil was lurching. That, and I’m a furry, furry pussy.
The long nose of the skull rests on two fang-like canines, pillars holding the jaw off the aluminium base, decayed black like an infection that only now is preparing to spread into the nose and eyes. Around the animal’s neck, as if there were any doubt in my spiralling mind, hangs a silver-chain engraved with just a word: Busby.
And before I can so much as ask him how he got here, the front door of the house thunders closed.
56
My first thought is to climb out the bedroom window onto that birds nest of a balcony, try to catburgle myself down a drainpipe or a tree. But these windows haven’t been opened since forever, so getting outside will make noise. And like I could catburgle anywhere.
What’s hopeful is: Rudy won’t come up here. Even if he heard my footsteps he’d blame it on ghosts. But that doesn’t solve the problem of getting out of the house.
Poor naked Busby, he’s got no ideas. Stripped so thoroughly it almost seems improper. Did Rudy kill you too? Did Cheryl do it and Rudy flipped out?
But I can have all the imaginary-dialogue-with-dead-pets I like once I’m out of the Alamein house. For now, a murderer is lurking below like an enemy sub. He stomps those unmistakable footsteps along the downstairs hallway.
I reattach the heat register as best I can, not particularly well but at least the screen is back in place and you’d have to look to see the screws are loose. Very gently I get to my feet and go to sit on the bed, but the groan of ancient springs would be too noisy. I don’t want to walk anywhere in case the floorboards creak, so I just slump on the spot, ponder what to do.
The best scenario is for Rudy to go out, the front door or the back, into the world or down to the bungalow, though it seems he only spends time down there to sleep or to fine-tune his pile of nonsense. So the front door. Call him and ask him to meet somewhere. Somewhere nearby. Tell him it’s important. Once he’s gone, I can slip out, meet him and make up any story I like.
I reach into my pocket. And draw out my phone.
Now, unmuffled by my jacket, delivered of its bondage, with air in its lungs and light on its touchscreen, my phone greets the world with a full-throated song of liberation.
Rudy Alamein flashes across its front. The robotic ringtone cuts through the air.
A loathsome, piercing noise meant to rouse me from whatever daydream the caller’s interrupting. I shut it off in less than a second but it seems to echo through the house indefinitely, bleating off the walls and in my ears.
Rudy is calling me. From downstairs.
Maybe he didn’t hear the ringtone. Maybe he thought it was birds or neighbours.
My ears yearn for knowledge, stretch invisible tentacles through the house, laid open and ticklish to the softest whisper.
Nothing. No speaking. Rudy isn’t leaving a voice message.
A wing flap from outside. A car’s locomotion far away. The hiss of ambience dialled so far up you’re terrified the music will start to play.
Awareness comes to me before the sound does. In the quality of the silence. It’s the silence I created as a little boy, sneaking out of bed and down to the living room to watch TV over my mother’s shoulder as she lay on the couch.
The silence of someone trying to be silent.
Then it comes, the snap of a wooden step, a footfall on the carpet.
Rudy coming up the stairs.
After a vicious and silent profanity, I hobble on my softest feet to the bedroom entrance, have no time to exit. Instead I slide into the small recess between the open door and the mantel, pray that Rudy lacks the nerve to enter the cursed room where he did the terrible thing so long ago.
After a single, eternal minute, the footsteps reach the top of the stairs. A sliver of light below the door hinge invites me to see for myself, but any movement in this space might be noticed. I hold still and listen.
Nothing. No footsteps. No creaky floorboard. Rudy must be stopped on the landing.
He doesn’t have the nerve, I tell myself. I’m safe in here.
A muscle in my lower back cramps and I shuffle to stretch it, feel the tension all the way through me. What is he doing? Has he gone back down the stairs?
My body aches, unaccustomed to this much self-imposed traction. I consciously relax my hips and shoulders…
A word. A throaty whisper, directly at me, five inches from my ear.
‘Mum?’
Rudy on the other side of the door. I put a silent hand to the wall to dampen my shock, steady myself.
He’s made his way along the hall without a sound and now he’s practically in the room. Will he really come in after thirteen years? Just because he heard another phone ring?
Of course he will. He thinks he’s going to die tonight. He’s come to say goodbye.
I sense another step forward.
The offensive option: ambush Rudy with a push to the ground and sprint from the house. I’m not fast. Neither is Rudy. It would put paid to everything we’ve planned. Tyan would be disappointed.
But it might be the best chance I have of surviving the next few seconds.
The form steps past the door into view, edging into the room, waiting for another sign. So close I could waz on his leg. The abandoned stillness of his parents’ life holds his attention. The view from the windows. The square of carpet removed. He only has to turn around and there’s his ghost. Cornered.
Suddenly Rudy falls to his hands and knees, lowers his head and peers under the bed, surprising whoever’s there. Which is no one. But he gives it a good long look, abrupt bird-like movements of his head.
I look to my phone. Is this an effective weapon? The screen tells me I’ve missed a call, gives me the option of calling them back.
I do.
In the silent moment that follows, as a cavalcade of technology lights the Beacons of Gondor and summons help for Jason Ginaff, I might really waz on the floor.
The landline by the window bursts into life, dumb and merciful, decades old but it rings as though it was freshly minted this morning.
Rudy’s head jolts up.
He pushes himself to his stumbling feet and lurches around the bed. And I lurch around the door, reel into the hallway, hope the uncreaking floorboards will be as forgiving for me as they were for Rudy.
Through my phone I hear nothing. Nothing, as in the ringing has stopped. Rudy has answered. But he’s not speaking, just waiting for his mother’s supernatural voice to freak him out.
I end the call.
At the stairs I pull off my shoes, hope stockinged feet will make me that much quieter; fast-creep, taking as much shock in my knees as I can against the steps. Deafeningly loud to my own ears but maybe quiet enough.
With the blood thrilling in my brain I arrive downstairs, socks scratching against the sorry carpet, continue along the hall, walk against the wall where the floorboards are less likely to squeal on me, another trick I learned as a boy to fool my mum. Who knows what Rudy is doing upstairs. Still searching for the ghost? Catapulting down here to catch me in my escape?
I reach the front door and pull it open and urge it to close quietly as I step outside. But this thing doesn’t do quiet, doesn’t seem to manage any movement at all without a rattle and a crash. I’m saved by a passing tram with a rattle and a crash of its own that masks the sound of the door shuddering into place.
Even so, I bolt like a thief, out the front gate, glimpse nothing in the bedroom windows as I go, only stop to look over my shoulder when I reach Montague Street.
Just an empty footpath.
57
You can shoot these chickens. Shoot them or stab them. I’ve done that before and on purpose too, not just when I was shooting someone else. They die with a pirouette and a burst of blood and feathers and once I killed all the chickens in the marketplace because there might have been a medal for it. Like Chicken Pwner, +5000 XP. But there was no medal. I was just a dude killing chickens.
According to Wikipedia, Karachi is the second most populous city in the world. Oh the irony that right now it’s empty but for five gnarled white stooges with bald heads and guns. My gnarled white stooge sits with a bead on the market entrance, squatting behind a bamboo cage where one of these chickens is spooked as balls: clucking and flapping and marching in and out of my sightline. It would be worth drawing attention to my position just to shoot it and shut it up.
But I’ve seen enough dead animals today.
The Busby discovery was less gory, more archaeological, though I have to accept that someone put him there. That duct was too narrow for him to have crawled in from someplace else, and not even the most gifted cocker spaniel is going to unscrew a heat register then screw it back. Not from underneath the floor.
Through my headset comes the inane whine of a ten-year-old Kiwi puce-farting his vowels and I mute him out, mute them all. They’ll find me soon enough and when they do I’m not going to listen as they shit the bed in unison. In the previous game, [JIVE] FaNcY_tUrDs meleed me for jacking his care package. He called me a ‘cocksucking piece of gutter meat’. His cerebral cortex would snap clean in half if he found me camping.
I can’t deny that I find stillness like this gapingly relaxing. Gunshots and explosives call to me from a distance, but here I am, tucked away in secret. Just like Busby.
Something else I have to consider is the likelihood that Rudy killed Busby. And if he did it the same day he killed Cheryl then Glen Tyan’s attendance, the entire crime-scene investigation, was probably completed before the body began to putrefy and smell, refrigerated by the winter cold. There would have been no reason for anyone to check the heating ducts. No one went upstairs ever again and Busby’s disappearance was explained away by the front door left open.
