Lescott and Harris’s eyes met as Lescott edged along his own gallery of death. As he made his way along the mezzanine corridor above the great hall, his eyes ran across a series of paintings that told the story of the Beaumont family. Each man who had led that famed and celebrated family featured, dating back to what looked like Restoration England. Every few steps Lescott took, the family moved forward thirty or so years. The fashion captured, the style of the painting, even the technique changed from painting to painting. What remained constant, was that like the one below, these portraits had been vandalised. The men’s faces had been painted over with a deathly visage.
Then he came to the end, and found himself staring into the eyes of Richard Beaumont. This portrait was recent. He recognised the thin neat moustache twisted into points at the end. He recognised those strange bushy eyebrows which had also been waxed and styled into sharp points. But the expression on Beaumont’s face caught him by surprise. It was something like a smile, but with more than a hint of a snarl to it. He looked into Beaumont’s dark beady eyes, and he was quite sure that Beaumont had posed in such a way, that this was part of his great design. He knew that whoever came to be looking at this portrait would be walking through the corridors of hell as they did. It was gamesmanship.
At the end of that Ungreat Hall, the narrow walkway became a larger balcony. Sitting in that shadowy space lit by dying candlelight, Lescott found the source of the silent music the pair below were dancing to. Sat there were the members of a ghostly string quintet. Two violins, a viola, and two cellos. These corpses looked fresh. In fact, they had barely started to decompose. They showed the discolouration that heralded livor mortis, but they had not begun to decay. Perhaps they had perished only recently, perhaps Beaumont had made a breakthrough in his homemade embalming process.
But it wasn’t the freshness of the materials, nor the imagination of the ghastly art that stood out to Lescott. It was in the details that you could really see Beaumont’s skill. Particularly the eyes. Somehow, they didn’t look dead at all. They looked trapped, like the men were all too aware of the horror that had befallen them. Like they were caught in a place between life and death, never existing nor escaping, only suffering.
Harris knew smoking cigarette after cigarette would provide the homeowner with forewarning of their presence. He didn’t care. That toxic crutch of tobacco and paper was all that was giving him the strength to keep going.
He lit a cigarette as he entered a laboratory filled with gruesome experiments. He lit a cigarette when he came to look upon a pair of the dead playing cards in the gloom. When he entered a chapel, he wanted to light two. What sort of house has its own chapel, Harris asked himself. And this was no small imitation of a church with an altar and a cross on the wall. This was a church. Its footprint was that of the Christian Cross. It was real life, in the scale of both space and the congregation filling the space.
Taking up the entire East Wing, the chapel was an above-ground graveyard. The pews were filled with the bodies of walk-on players at various stages of decomposition. Harris stilled the trembling of his lip as he stood against the backwall taking it all in. He stared at the back of each head, looking for movement, but he saw none in the back few rows.
As he strode through the aisle, lightning struck nearby. A flash of brilliant white light burst into the room through stained glass windows all around. In that split second, Harris could have sworn that each of those bodies had turned their head towards him.
“Fuck,” Harris gasped.
Once the remnant light of the lightning strike had subsided, Harris moved over to a wall and began lighting candles. If he was going to wade through that deranged tapestry of death, he would do so with open eyes. It was as he moved through that place of heresy that the scope of Beaumont’s crimes became clear. He and Lescott had been searching for a man who exclusively killed or stole the bodies of Aboriginal Australians. They had been wrong to do so. This man’s crimes were many, it seemed racial discrimination was not one of them. In that congregation of the dead, all races, genders and ages were present. The Death Car and the Old Man with the Bible scarcely scratched the surface of his wickedness.
Another of Shelley’s poems sprang to mind. Adonais, an elegy of poor young John Keats, in which the poet wrote, ‘No more let life divide what Death can join together.’ All here had lived separate lives. Lives of wealth, lives of poverty. Lives of empowerment, lives of oppression. Lives of opportunity, lives of misfortune. But the moment Richard Beaumont had happened upon them, they were unified in terror.
Harris counted forty-two lost souls in that silent audience. It occurred to him that the police done their job earlier, many of these could have been saved an inglorious death. To overlook the plight of a single solitary Australian, is to condemn the entire population. When one single soul gets left behind, we all suffer.
But the time for philosophical musing had come and gone. There was movement at the end of the chapel. A shifting of human mass against the wooden structure. Heavy, rasping breathing that foretold the coming death of a man.
Harris grabbed a candle from the wall and inched forward. When the soft light reached the foot of the wall, Harris sighed. He knew what lay ahead; it was what you found at the focal point of all Christian churches, a cross. This cross had pooled blood at its base. As the light slowly beat out the darkness lingering on the wall, the wooden structure became clear, then a pair of bloody feet, thin legs, a wounded torso, outstretched arms, punctured hands and a head crowned by a garland of thorns hanging limply. This man was not yet dead. It pained Harris to leave an innocent man behind, but unless Beaumont was apprehended, there would only be more suffering.
Every time Lescott walked into a new room, he was met by some fresh layer of hell. Each time he saw the corpse of a woman knitting a cardigan or a young child playing hopscotch, he told himself he was fine. He told himself that he could make his way to the window without incident. He’d edge his way over, and with one eye shut, he would draw open the curtains to shine light on the latest depraved scene. The one-eye-shut thing was a trick Harris had taught him from his army days. By keeping that eye shut, when light flooded through the room, one eye stayed adjusted to the dark.
Each room he went into, he worried more and more. Each room he found devoid of life, heightened the chances that the next room would contain a madman. The hardest door to open was always the next door.
He passed a study, a top-floor sitting room, a billiards room, and then a library. Each of them inhabited by the dead. In the study, a man sat behind his desk writing. Lescott grabbed at the thick stack of pages in front of him and gave them a onceover. It was nonsense. The ramblings of a madman. Vengeance this and God’s work that. It was spurious drivel. The man’s singular and disturbed interpretation of several religious texts had corrupted him. His ideology was confused and contradictory.
As Lescott moved through the dark of the next room, he walked straight into something at waist height and cursed. A large object lay in the middle of the floor. He reached out to feel his way around it, and identified it to be a billiard table. He could feel the felt cloth on the table and the spongy cushions. It all felt quite damp and left the skin of his hand itching. As he got to the window at the far side of the room, he ripped it back to reveal a man bent over the table about to take the break. Behind him stood a companion. A man who looked down at the table while he chalked his cue.
Lescott could see the monster’s thought process in the building of his collection. The freshness of the corpses betrayed his motives and created a narrative behind his crimes. Beaumont had found himself a man to play snooker, but the man was left alone. That just wouldn’t do. Sometime later he’d gone back to find that man a companion. It was as clear as day that, what the man wanted, whatever insanity he dreamed, he went out and got.
The sitting room, Lescott was relieved to discover, was a little lighter. The windows, unlike in the other rooms, were covered by what appeared to be woven c
urtains. The weave was loose and amateurish, allowing a good deal of light in through the gaps. Lescott considered how out of place the homemade curtains were and how peculiar they looked. Then it made sense. Upon the settees around a fireplace were three women in a knitting circle. Lescott let out a deep breath. The further he went into that odious, cadaverous maze, the more emotional he became. The taking of life is not meant to be a foible.
The library, the last room in that wing of the house, was as spectacular a private library as you might find. A circular room, containing thousands of books, all piled high in messy stacks that covered the walls. In the middle of the large space was a pair of skeletal readers. On this pair Lescott noted a good deal of dirt; it seemed they had been dug up after decomposing in the round for years. Even the flies and the maggots had long since gone.
The contents of the shelves had a common theme throughout. It was probably the largest private collection of grimoires in the world. They were books regarding the occult, dark magic, sinister mysticism, and satanic theology. This was not the collection of a man of God. ‘The Clavicule of Solomon’, ‘Dragon Rouge’ and ‘The Book of Shadows’ were amongst the titles Lescott spotted. He picked up a hard back with ‘Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie’ upon the spine. It was damned heavy. The papyrus pages and hand-bound cover, with the Seal of Solomon upon it, felt old, a century at least. It looked like it was worth a fortune to those with more money than morality. It was also in French and as such he could make little sense of any of it.
While he inspected that sinister volume, a strange feeling came over him. He became acutely aware that he was being watched. He had the unmistakable feeling of eyes boring into him from nearby. Such was the size of the book he was holding, he needed both hands to do so. That had meant putting his gun inside his belt. He was effectively unarmed.
He didn’t move. He was scared to do so. He raised his head slowly and looked to his left and right. Nothing. He looked straight ahead and gasped. In the space he had created by removing the book from the shelf, a dead set of eyes were focused on him.
Lescott stumbled back in shock, dropping the book, and falling amongst the pair of deceased readers. He had no time to stand, he dragged himself backwards over the polished wooden floor to give himself a little space. He pulled his gun and waited for the lifeless eyes to walk around the bookcase and confront him, but they never came. Beaumont, Lescott assumed, was elsewhere in the house and this was just a cadaverous doll.
When Lescott worked up the nerve to get to his feet and inspect this latest corpse, he almost laughed. Standing there, in a tweed jacket complete with elbow patches, wearing thick spectacles was what he assumed to be the resident librarian. How had he not seen that coming?
Harris was downstairs looking through a grubby window, in a mouldy frame, into something altogether filthier. There, in what would ordinarily have been a backyard, beneath a second looming oak, was a cemetery. Rows and rows of makeshift gravestones of sticks and rocks lined up as far as he could see. Whether the graves were functional or decorative was difficult to decipher, but given the hell Harris found himself walking through, he believed them to be the final resting place for Beaumont’s discarded dolls.
Having cleared the East Wing, Harris moved into the West Wing. The first room he entered was a dining room. Such was its style and size, it could have held hundreds of tables; Sydney’s premier pig trough for the rich and famous. But dust covered the floors, cobwebs were absolutely everywhere, and the rats that had moved in were frenzied and loud. There was one table in the middle of the room, a long banquet setting. The bastard had created his own version of the last supper. Harris laid his eyes upon the thirteen White and Aboriginal males acting out the Lord’s last shindig.
In front of the thirteen men were plates of food. An excessive banquet, that clearly hadn’t been there much more than a few days. Choice cuts of meat, loaves of bread, fish, vegetables, potatoes, rice; all barely recognisable in their rotten state. The festering food filled the room with a stench that rivalled the smell of the bodies. Bottle flies swarmed above the table. Rats scurried beneath it. The table top was practically vibrating under the mass of wriggling maggots upon it. Harris left the outrageously cruel room and moved towards an open door that led into a kitchen.
Upstairs, Lescott had made his way back through the Great Hall’s long, narrow balcony. He had come to the wing of the house that held the mansion’s sleeping quarters. There had never been any evidence to suggest Beaumont’s hellish desire for death was linked to misplaced sexual deviancy. That would change in the moments ahead. It would become clear that Beaumont could not separate sex from violence. A likely sign of abuse during his childhood, Lescot would conclude.
The first bedroom he walked into was a picture of sexual aggression. His subjects, a pair of young adults, had been manipulated into a scene of domestic violence. It portrayed rape. The woman was wearing an expensive, but now moth consumed, ball gown. She was pushed up against the wall. She wrestled the man who was pushed up against her. She clawed at his face with her fingers, doing whatever she could to escape this predator.
The attacker, wearing a tuxedo, had one hand on the woman’s throat and the other under the gown. His tuxedo trousers were lowered. Lescott didn’t inspect the arrangement too closely; it turned his stomach when he noticed that Beaumont had taken special care to scratch the man’s face down to the bone.
Once he had cleared the rape room, he moved through the wing. He checked off disgusting bathrooms and several other bedrooms filled with similarly perverse displays of niche sexual behaviour. Then he came to a room that, in the dark, appeared quite empty. He crept slowly around the bed, towards a large window, and a closed curtain.
His heart began to race when shadows moved against the wall. The darkness, the drink, the fatigue and the cocaine he used to battle it were playing tricks on his ever more fragile mind. It took him far longer than it should have to realise that the movement was his own. A large mirror covered the wall. He bit his lip and stifled a desperate laugh. Of all the things he had seen in that place, the thing that had put the most fear into him, had been his own damned reflection.
He reached up to the curtain, as he had done in dozens before that one, but in this one, as he went to pull it, he finally saw what it was he had been looking for. Out of the corner of his eye, from within the darkness, he saw the pale face of the murderer, Richard Beaumont. Those black eyes were staring at him hungrily. He was sure of it. This was Beaumont. So Lescott fired his gun twice at what he assumed was centre of mass, it was too dark to see. The sound of Beaumont’s body hitting the floor? Well, it didn’t come. There was no gasping for breath nor groaning in pain.
Lescott ripped the curtain open and light flooded the room. He placed his head in his hands when he saw he’d fired two shots at a portrait of the man. This was torture. Each near-miss, rattled him that little more. His fragility was beginning to overcome his calm. That face, the ghastly sight, that had appeared so close, so three-dimensional and so real, had faded back into the wall. Lescott needed a strong drink. He needed fresh air. He needed to sit down.
Thwarted by his refusal to obey it, Lescott’s fight-or-flight response was beginning to trigger something inside him. More and more the shadows in that house seemed to taunt him. His psychosis was returning. At the worst possible time.
That’s a major flaw in the human condition. When all is well, all is well. But when things start going wrong, our frailty reveals itself. The moment we need strength the most, that’s the moment it abandons us.
Lescott felt dizzy as he walked into what looked like the master suite, ignoring the hairs on his arms standing upright, and taking short sharp breaths to push himself on. His collar felt tight. His mouth dry. Even breath was becoming a laborious task, the air was filled with filth and spores of God knows what. They might, he reasoned, have just been better off burning the entire place to the ground.
The master room was another show of insane opul
ence. Artwork that looked much like Blake’s etchings of the Inferno hung upon the walls. But the real hell in that room was on the four-poster bed. It was the site of a pulseless orgy of abuse. A dozen bodies strewn across the bed, and onto the floor. Beaumont had been working on this room for years. This, to Lescott’s mind, was a depiction of some childhood trauma that Beaumont had undergone years before. At the centre of the orgy, on the bed, were a naked man and woman, with hands all over a child.
Lescott left the room after little more than a glance. He’d had enough. There was just one more room on the top floor of the house. Then he could make his way downstairs and enjoy the strength that comes with numbers.
Harris looked around the kitchen to see the mansion’s staff preparing a festering banquet. Chefs, scullery maids, and kitchen boys; they were all represented. A brass kettle sat upon the cooktop, whistling loudly. Harris moved his way around the maids, the chefs, the waiters and turned the gas off. Beaumont was close. Perhaps he had been in the kitchen when they had entered the house.
As the whistling of the kettle ceased, the air filled with the sound of scurrying. There were rodents all over the house. That was no surprise. There were several in the kitchen. But when they scuttled away in fear, Harris could still hear that damn noise. These rodents were beneath him.
Those wooden floorboards that creaked under every step were hiding a secret, he was sure of it. As he moved slowly between the staff of the deceased, he softly prodded at the floor with his leading foot. He was looking for a trapdoor. He found it.
He opened the hatch to reveal a blanket of darkness so comprehensive that the room above ground seemed all the darker when exposed to the cellar. The trapdoor’s hinges had rusted over. It wouldn’t open fully. As such, it wouldn’t stay open under its own weight. He needed something to prop it open. As it happened, he found just the thing. A broom in a maid’s hands. The stiffness of death had set into the woman, it took quite some prising before the broom could be released from the icy grasp of her fingers. As he wrestled, he found himself looking in her eyes. This was not the Tuesday he’d had in mind at the beginning of the week. “Thank you, my dear.”
THE DEVIL IN THE RED DIRT: DIVIDED IN LIFE. UNIFIED IN MURDER Page 52
