Seven Threads

by Jason Fischer

  “Can you read?”

  Toby nodded, unfolding the pages. His fingers trembled a little. The Dutchman tinkered with the lamp, fixing the light as bright as it would go.

  “INFANT SNATCHED FROM THE CRADLE” the headline read. Toby scanned each line, the horror growing on his face. The newspaper was little more than a rag, and the reporter had taken free licence with the more salacious details of the case.

  “Here’s another one,” Cornelius said, pushing papers onto Toby as fast as he could read them.

  “THIRD BABY STOLEN”

  “ANIMAL ROBBERS STRIKE ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS”

  “SOCIETY MATRON MISSING, FEARED DEAD”

  “The dates, boy. Mind the dates on the papers. You’ll find all of this has occurred since you fled from that awful cave.”

  “What is all this?” Toby whispered. He slumped to the floor, papers spilling from his hands. Realisation washed across his face.

  “Evil, boy. Pure evil, and it walks the streets of Sydney. You and your larrikins have freed this thing.”

  “My boys. Where are my boys? Are they doing these things?”

  The Dutchman did not answer for a long moment, working a mortar and pestle. He tipped a foul concoction onto the burning coals, something that looked like spiders, dead leaves, and flakes of human skin.

  “The moment I got off the boat, I noticed your boys,” Cornelius said. “Caught their stink on the street. Bitter experience tells me what kind of monster the Blackwattle Push serves.”

  As the Dutchman spoke, he seemed to hum with energy, a vibration that crawled under Toby’s skin and buzzed around in his teeth. He loomed above the boy, a primal force that would not be denied.

  Toby didn’t know what was happening. Cornelius seemed like a bear wearing a man’s skin, watching him hungrily. He’d dreamt many things in the Chinaman’s opium hut, but nothing like this. What he felt probing around the corners of his mind was all too real.

  “What I’ve been able to glimpse of their deeds,” the Dutchman indicated his arcane equipment, “tells me that I have found the agents of this evil. But until now, their lair has been hidden from me. My esoteric vision is being turned aside, thwarted by that old mongrel.”

  The smoke wafting out from the brazier made Toby’s eyes water. He felt light-headed, and swore he could hear a distant drumming.

  From a drawer, Cornelius produced a black hunk of metal, the rudest example of the blacksmith’s art. It had been beaten into the shape of a railroad spike, an iron tooth that shook slightly in the Dutchman’s grip. Toby could not look away from that sharp point, and felt it turn a hungry regard towards him. Suddenly, the quivering spike keened and wailed, though it had no mouth, filling the room with the sound of a rusted hinge, of a violin’s screech.

  “I forged this myself, from the leavings of a fallen star,” Cornelius said, making a visible effort to restrain the spike. “Trust me when I tell you that this will pin our enemy down.”

  Toby whimpered, and felt the warm flood as his bladder released down his leg. He’d never been more frightened, not even when he saw the thing in the cave....

  “You are the only member of the Blackwattle Push to have kept your soul from that shadow-hound’s tongue. You have seen its marker stones, and fled intact. The sun has washed this taint from you, and that gives you something of a resistance to that dreaming dog.”

  Kneeling, Cornelius pressed the iron spike to the floorboards, fighting it with all of his strength. It shivered and whimpered and stabbed at the wood, frustrated at the nearness of Toby’s flesh.

  With one swift motion, the Dutchman swept a silken cloth over the iron spike, and it lay still. Thus wrapped, he placed the arcane weapon in his pocket.

  “I charge you with this, Toby Jangles. You will return with me to the lair of Kurpangga, the devil-dingo that should not be. You shall see to it that the beast sleeps for another age.”

  Toby nodded quickly, eyes fixed to the pocket that hid the enchanted spike.

  “Now, you will repeat my words, and know that you are entering into a most serious oath.”

  Shaking on the floor, Toby said the words. He belonged to the Dutchman now, for better or worse.

  #

  “Your larrikins will come, the moment they learn their master is in danger. I have a man on retainer, a most useful sort. We shall need him tonight.”

  Toby followed Cornelius down the streets of Sydney, a lost pup. The oath he’d given still rattled around in his mouth, and he felt an almost physical bond to this monster, to that impossible iron beast that slumbered in his pocket.

  They met the man in a boarding house, a dim-lit place that stank of cabbage and unwashed men. Somewhere within, a pair of drunks quarrelled, and an old man wept to the derision of his neighbours. Cornelius strode to a particular door, and knocked upon it merrily.

  A man answered, a leathery sort with cold eyes. The room was a tiny cubby, with a cot and not much else. Cornelius introduced the man as Bunberry. The man did not say a word to Toby, and with an economy of movement he swiftly gathered a selection of weapons from a trunk.

  With wide eyes, Toby saw Bunberry holster a trio of pistols to a complex harness, and he strapped a cavalryman’s sabre to his side. Once he had shrugged into a sailor’s greatcoat, this small arsenal was hidden from casual view.

  Then he produced a British rifle, a great big Brown Bess, complete with a wicked looking bayonet and enough powder horns to start a small war. Bunberry wrapped all of this into a canvas, and belted it up with ropes until it resembled a swag, which went over one shoulder.

  “I’m ready,” Bunberry said. It was all that Toby ever heard him say.

  They left the boarding-house, Cornelius leading the way through the night streets. What folk were out kept at a distance, and the sly-grog houses were closed. As they entered Pyrmont, Toby wondered at the Dutchman’s sense of direction, taking turns and shortcuts that only a local would know.

  “You knew all along,” Toby said numbly, realising the quarries were nearby. “You knew where it was.”

  “Hush, boy,” Cornelius said, draping a friendly arm across the boy’s shoulders. “I’ve yet to lie to you. We trailed the Push through normal means.”

  “But – but you said-”

  “My good boy, I have given oaths in low places. I cannot speak a falsehood,” Cornelius said, and Toby could not tell if this was a point of honour or a frustration to the man. “Bunberry, be a good fellow and watch for the Push boys. We are close.”

  The trio approached the sandstone quarries, and had the cobbled streets all to themselves. Toby noticed that all the doors and windows were shuttered, and in some cases nailed and barred. There wasn’t so much as a starving dog to be seen, and if there were rats they had the good sense to hide in the deepest of holes.

  They reached the quarry known as Hellhole. The gates were locked with a thick chain, and above, a sign painted in a shaky hand.

  “DIGGINGS CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.”

  There was a small shack for a nightwatchman, but no lamplight shone through his window. There was no-one to see them, and none to protest when Bunberry put a bullet through the lock.

  Unwrapping the chain, Cornelius pushed into the quarry. He fetched a lantern from the nightwatchman’s shanty and used it to light their way across the work yard. Tools had been left out to rust in the weather, and a shed door flapped in the wind, squealing on unoiled hinges.

  The pit caught the rain, and had poor drainage. Soon it was like slogging through a swamp, and it seemed a miserable place to labour for stone blocks.

  Once more, Toby saw that narrow crack in the ground, and the cave looked even more menacing, a stone mouth ready to snatch them all up. Someone had rolled a barrel of gunpowder here, but mere feet from the entrance it lay in pieces, the staves cracked open with hammers and axes. The powder was scattered all around, trodden into the mud by a multitude of footprints. A melee. A fuse cord lay nearby, cut into many pieces.
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br />   “Watch how they defend their nest,” Cornelius told Bunberry. The gunman took apart his swag, and primed the big rifle with the ease of long practice. With one precise movement he attached the bayonet. The mercenary shrugged out of his greatcoat and took a position before the cave, an arsenal at his fingertips.

  Nodding to the man, Cornelius pressed Toby in the small of the back, herded him towards the source of all his nightmares. For one long moment the boy resisted, whimpered at the memory of the monster within.

  “Go,” Cornelius said. The word was a lash, a command that could not be disobeyed. The boy shuffled forward, jerky movements like a puppet’s. The pair entered the cave that the Scots could not destroy, walked beneath a million glyphs never marked by the human hand.

  “There was a war, in the earliest days of this world,” Cornelius mused, translating on the fly. “Terrible beasts fought in the lakes of magma and on the curing mantle, fighting for possession of the world that would be. The devil-dingo lost, and so he was sealed into the stone.”

  Toby’s eyes darted from left to right, looking once more at the murals and sigils. A giant with a squid’s face pinned down a dog with its foot, with lesser monsters crowded around in victory. The next picture showed a curled-up dog, trapped in a womb of stone.

  “Kurpannga has been dreaming down here for a billion years,” Cornelius said. “He has entered the myths of the natives, and sowed chaos and darkness into these new settlements. Now, the bloody Scots have dug him up. And your villains have crept in and poked him with a stick.”

  Toby paused, but the next moment Cornelius crooked a finger. He tottered forward as if he were on a leash.

  Behind them came the echoing crash of Bunberry’s rifle, followed by a piercing scream. Next, the repeated crack of his revolving pistols, greeted by pained cries, howls of dismay.

  “Your larrikin fellows have come to stop you,” Cornelius said. “Step lively, in the event that Bunberry’s aim is less than true.”

  They ran through a twisted spiral of cave, the bobbing lantern revealing glimpses of pre-human artwork even more alien than that by the entrance. Whenever Toby lagged, Cornelius would curse at the boy, hauling him onwards with the enchantment, using his fists when even that did not suffice.

  Behind them, one final gunshot, and then a clamour of shouting. Bunberry was shouting something, but then he gave rise to an awful scream, a blood-curdling cry that echoed through the cave for many long moments.

  Even as the man fell silent, several voices raised laughter. Footsteps rang into the cave, accompanied by one wit who set to howling. Cornelius dragged Toby by the collar, and panting and wide-eyed they spilled into the inner sanctum of that place, a low-roofed chamber where the stalactites ran with slime, like mossy fangs.

  Once again, the row of standing stones, like an ancient jaw-bone had been set into the bedrock. The stink of wet dog and rot pervaded everything. Cornelius gagged.

  Underfoot were dozens of bodies. Desiccated husks, still dressed in clothes. The stolen babies, the missing society marms and prostitutes, all of them lay scattered across the cave floor.

  Even as the Blackwattle Push closed in for the kill, Cornelius pushed Toby forward, crunching across the carcases. The boy landed painfully on his knees, trembling as he looked upon the arrangement of stones.

  “What am I meant to do?” the boy said, literally shaking with terror. “How do I stop it?”

  “Just wait.”

  Long-starved of sunlight, the stones seemed to drink at the lamp-light. The shadows that danced around on the slimy walls moved, running together like bodies of water down the path of least resistance. A shape rose up from behind the master stone, a physical presence that loomed over the two men.

  The shadow formed a face, a snout that ran across the cavern wall, splitting in two. The jaws opened wide, and a tongue snaked out, a vine of darkness that moved sinuously, testing the air. When it brushed against Toby, it ignored Cornelius entirely, and pounced on the boy with visible excitement.

  “No!” Toby screamed and made to flee, but Cornelius held him still. The shadow tongue slid into the boy’s ear, questing around for whatever it fed on.

  “It remembers you,” Cornelius said, struggling to hold Toby still, even as the boy shook and fought and cursed. “I did not lie to you, boy. In your circumstance, you have developed a resistance to Kurpannga’s attention.”

  At that moment, he turned Toby around, pushing him up against the largest standing stone. With one motion, the Dutchman retrieved the star-nail from his pocket, and shook the silk covering loose.

  The spike leapt free and buried itself in Toby’s chest. It wriggled, and pushed through, shrieking and gouging until it pierced the rock itself.

  The shadow dog grew frantic, and raced around the walls, searching for escape. It became a pack of snapping animals, a snake that tried to withdraw its shadow tongue from the boy’s ear. But inch by inch, it lost the fight, and the devil-dog was drawn into the boy’s head.

  Toby Jangles hung there, pierced through the heart, fastened to Kurpannga’s rock. He lolled as if drunk, feet drumming, eyes rolling back in their sockets to show the whites. For a long moment, the cave was silent but for the dripping of wet stone. In the tunnel, the larrikins had gone silent, their curses and cries instantly snuffed.

  Then Toby opened his eyes, and stared straight at Cornelius. The scared boy was gone, replaced with something wild-eyed, something without a trace of human emotion.

  He opened his mouth, and barked ferociously, spittle flying everywhere. When Cornelius walked away from the pinned boy, Toby howled. It was a pitiful cry, that spoke of hunger and loss, of a prison that had lasted for a billion years.

  #

  Cornelius stepped over the lifeless bodies of the Blackwattle Push, scattered in the tunnel like so much cold meat. The moment he’d trapped Kurpannga in Toby Jangles, these puppets had collapsed with cut strings.

  Taking his time to muse over the carvings in the tunnel, Cornelius found what he was looking for. Whispering over his thumb-nail, he gouged into the sandstone, changing one of the sigils in a minor way. Stepping lively, the Dutchman exited the cave, watching as the sandstone shifted, melting like toffee and fusing into an unbroken whole.

  In moments, it was as if the cave had never been breached, the facing pure and unmarked. Cornelius stepped over the broken body of Bunberry, eyebrows raised at the damage the larrikins had done. He’d seen an execution once, where a murderer was torn apart by horses. Bunberry appeared to have met a similar fate.

  With more firepower than the Kelly Gang, he’d done nothing more than slow Kurpannga’s puppets. The Dutchman mourned the waste of a good man for all of a second.

  Cornelius traced around the body parts with a chalk, whispering and muttering until these too sank into the viscous stone, sealing poor Bunberry within a secret grave.

  The Dutchman left Sydney within the week, his business done. His instruments showed a new visitation, evidence of an Elder God over in New Zealand. Before he left, he bought the deed to the Hellhole quarry from one Charles Saunders, a man who swore that he’d be unable to turn a profit from “that awful sinkhole”.

  He simply closed the place down.

  It was almost one hundred years till Cornelius Tesselaar returned to Kurpannga’s prison. He travelled under a different name, and in the clothes for that era. By his side, a beagle he’d named Toby pulled at his leash.

  “The children play down there,” the town manager told Cornelius, a sheaf of planning papers in his hands. “Soccer when it’s dry, and they swim in the hole when it’s rained. Filthy place, and the children who lurk here aren’t much better.”

  “What are they like?” Cornelius asked. “The children who play here.”

  “Monsters,” the man said. “Mark my words, half of them will end up in jail, and the other half will end up dead.”

  “Fill it in,” Cornelius said. “You may have the land, and build your council works on it, but f
ill in that hole as soon as you can.”

  “Too right,” the council man said. The beagle named Toby lay on the very edge of the pit, and began to howl for all he was worth.

  Pigroot Flat

  The flies should have given fair warning to Hazel. That, or Codger straining at his leash and barking like an idiot. But the dog was asleep, his feet twitching in a dream. Hazel was wool-gathering in the garden, turning pigshit into the red earth and wondering if anything would grow. A dozen flies became a hundred, then the tin-cans began to rattle.

  Dropping the shovel, Hazel ran.

  Swearing at the useless dog, she knocked him in the ribs with her boot. Codger barked then, barked for all he was worth. Hazel hauled him along by the collar, and the stupid mutt yipped excitedly, doing his best to wriggle out of her grip.

  Hazel had done a turn or two as a roustabout, and years spent throwing sheep and feed gave her ropy arms strength. More cans rattled, and she dragged the pig-dog up the ladder, even as he yipped and gagged and choked on his collar.

  Early on she’d spent a whole day on the roof, and nightfall saw her sunburnt and thirsty. She had a camp up there now, slept there most nights. A beach umbrella, food and water, a swag and some chairs. The old rifle and the CB, for all either were worth. Codger couldn’t be trusted not to fall off the bloody roof, and so he was tied to the TV antenna.

  He barked enough to do himself an injury. Hazel sighed, and watched as her visitors ran around the yard, buggering everything up. Dozens of them today, tripping over the ankle-high fencing wire, rattling the tin cans and cowbells she’d attached every few feet.

  They were in the garden now, knocking over stakes and squashing the seedlings. The sound of breaking glass came from the green-house, and they even tried the doors on the four-wheel drive, chattering excitedly as they pounded on the windows.

  “Ba Ba Ba!” they shouted gleefully. HAZEL’S ECO TOURS, a dusty decal read on the driver's side door. The tires were flat, the engine out and in pieces.

  “Stupid bastards,” Hazel said, wincing as they clattered around on the porch, ran through the house underneath her. It got that it wasn’t even worth fixing up the doors and windows, so she just left everything open now. That way, they’d go through the house with a minimum of damage, and pour out into the backyard when they got bored.