Tide of Stone

by Kaaron Warren

  “On the second night, I couldn’t sleep, so I went and sat in the bar carriage. I didn’t talk to anyone, too shy, but I sat and drank brandy for hours, looking out into the dark, listening in to conversations. After a while, probably around midnight, I was finally alone. The barman had closed up for the night, but he’d left me half a bottle, charged to my room, which was nice of him.”

  “Didn’t he want to fuck you, though?” the Priest asked.

  “If you’re good I’ll tell you the story of the third night on the train,” I said. “For now, I sat there, almost nodding off but not quite, thinking about what I’d do in Adelaide, who I’d find. What adventures I’d have, things I’d see, what I’d eat and drink and what all that would feel like. Then my heart started to race and I didn’t know why. It was a scent in the air, something exciting to me. And there was the teacher, standing there beside me.

  “‘Sorry to sneak up on you,’ he said. ‘I’ve been trying to be quiet, not to wake any of those darn kids up.’

  “‘There’s a lot of them!’ I said. He said there was and we spoke a bit about that, but I couldn’t get over how good he smelled, and he must have been the same because he said, ‘I don’t usually do this, but you smell amazing,’ and he leaned over and kissed me so hard that he pushed me back in my chair. I had to brace myself! He tasted like oranges, sweet oranges, and maybe a bit of brandy as well. All I know is I felt dizzy with it and I knew I wouldn’t say no, not matter what he asked me.”

  “What did he ask you?” the cannibal said.

  “He didn’t say anything at all, not in words. But he took my hand. Actually, I think I took his hand first. And we went to the end carriage, where they stored all the stuff, like the spare luggage and things like that. And he kissed me again and before we knew it we were stripped off and we could make as much noise as we wanted, shouting into the scream of the train, rocking into the rhythm, and no one has ever, ever fucked me as deep as that man did.”

  “You’re not like other women,” the grandfather said.

  “Women are like me, these days. You’d know that if you were out there.”

  The first Black Widow said, “One of them came out here preggers. Took her a while to realize. We were the ones who told her in the end, weren’t we? I knew it early on. Pregnant women have a nasty little lean to them.”

  That would have been the female keeper who’d helped me. Kate Hoff, 2010. She came back early, because of the pregnancy.

  “You’re not preggers, but you’re fertile. You won’t have trouble once you decide you want children.”

  “You know that if you fuck three men in the same week, you’ll get the strongest baby known to man. It’s a fact. Fuck ’em all for the sake of the baby. But don’t think about the baby when that big cock is heading up the velvet path. Don’t think of it,” the second Black Widow said.

  None of this embarrassed me.

  I missed my sex life. Thought of boyfriends I’d had, and of Max. But less than I thought I would. There was nothing sexy about the Time Ball Tower and the dryness that seeped up from the insides. The smell of them. The thought of them. They heard everything. If I moaned in my sleep, they asked me if I’d had a sexy dream. And if I snored? “We thought you had a man up there.”

  “Actually, it sounded as if you were being murdered,” the Executioner said.

  They were trying to rattle me, like my brothers did, telling me I had nightmares when I remembered nothing.

  “Maybe I did have a man in. Maybe I summoned one up to see me right.”

  “Tell us about him.” And I did, luring them in once again, making them slaves to me. They remembered everything; no pain was lost, no good thing. All of it made them suffer. I showed them a couple of pictures on my laptop. Sexy half-naked men who I said were my lovers.

  “Show us more pictures.”

  “Show me family,” Wee Willie Winkie said.

  Information about their descendants was handed out as a reward and I supposed he’d earned it, warning me about Grayson. He hadn’t abused me or tried to disgust me with stories.

  “Why do you even care? You never did.”

  “We’ve had a lot of time to think about it,” Grayson said.

  I open a new screen. The information was all there, ready to be doled out.

  “Okay. The Winkies. Last count, direct descendants of your parents, two hundred and one.”

  “My children?”

  “Nothing on record of yours.”

  He asked every year, apparently. There was a certain pleasure in watching his face fall.

  “So none of these are yours. But they did come from your sisters and brothers. They’re almost yours. Three died recently. One a stillbirth. Baby unnamed, it says. They called him Wee One, but I doubt for you. One ninety-eight-year-old, died peacefully in bed.”

  “Bastard,” he said. “Fucking cunny bastard.”

  “And one was drunk, smashed his car into a tree. One’s a novelist. If I’d known, I would have brought his book over. If you’re good, I’ll tell the next keeper.”

  “Me next, me,” they all whispered, “me, me, me,” their voices whistling through broken teeth, gaps, those foul gums hard and yellow.

  “You do good things, you’ll hear good things,” I said. I had footage of some families, stuff from the internet. A couple of news clippings. Families lost and broken. “Although I’ve very little good to tell. Sins of the Fathers. What you did has set your family back. If you’d been a good person. If you weren’t locked up. Your family would be in a different position now.”

  Did they care at all?

  The grandfather still begged for news.

  “What do I get for it?”

  “A story. The true story of my crimes. My confession.”

  Burnett had told me, all we have is our storytelling. All that’s left to us is our voices.

  I got my stool.

  “You look at me and see an old man. A grandfather. It wasn’t always the case. Once I was young and handsome. That’s why I have this air of confidence about me. You never forget being good-looking, even when you’re old. I had ‘em all over me. They thought I was a catch. All you had to do in those days was not be a rotter and you were ahead. I’m sure that’s the case today as well. Older women—unpleasant to me, but I worked my chops on them. It’s the little ones who were my friends. Somehow it was better if I knew them. You want details?”

  “Go on then,” the others called out, nasty bastards, but I didn’t want to hear it.

  There are some things you don’t need to hear.

  He did so with relish, egged on by his room-mates. They all loved the nasty. None of them wanted a happy ending. They wanted stories about serial killers. How many, and were the bones all found?

  Do people’s faces change when they confess? I took his photo, time-lapse, clicking away many times looking for that moment.

  “My granddaughter came out here in ’21, took a boat herself and came to see me. She believed I was innocent. We are all innocent, she believed. We paid our debt and should be allowed to die. She was ahead of her time. She still is, I’m sure.”

  “If she was still alive.”

  I would never tell him about Renata.

  Some of them had tiny tear beads on the cheeks; some had them on their chests. They were quite firm, opaque.

  The things were so beautiful I wanted them to cry more.

  “Do you ever think you’ll get out of here? What’s the time frame?” I asked, knowing there was none. “The FBI keeps fingerprints for ninety-nine years then destroys them. I wonder if that would be right?”

  “Then we should be released after ninety-nine!” they said. “We should!”

  “You’ll never get out. You never will,” I said, and this did make them cry more, those lovely crystal tear drops.

  “My children?” It was the man delivered in 1938, when my grandmother Frances was keeper, and he moaned louder than the rest.

  “Your children? The line ended w
hen they died. You’re at the end.”

  His wife was deep in catatonic depression. They never spoke. He walked past the children’s room daily for four months without ever going in.

  He’s not the only one who killed by starvation.

  I squatted by him, trying to get a glimpse of the man my grandmother had described: This prisoner was skinny, lucky for me, in soft clothes that felt sticky and I wouldn’t have touched him if I didn’t have to. He snuffled at me, sniffing deeply as if getting one good one in. Reminded me of Clyde Blue at school, who stood close without touching and you always knew he was there because of the breathing.

  There was nothing left of that. Nothing.

  “I read your file. You say, “I was a bad father.” That barely covers it. It doesn’t show you let your two daughters starve to death because your wife wasn’t fucking you and you were annoyed at her.”

  “Not just that. She never spoke to me. I was like a ghost. She never washed or cooked, and we never said a single word to each other.”

  “What did you think your children were eating?”

  He shook his head.

  “Do you know how long it takes a child to starve?”

  “They were quiet. If they’d cried, I woulda done something.”

  “They were too weak to cry. Waiting and waiting for someone to feed them.”

  This was the whole point of it. The justification, the reason. The guilt he felt. Every day, for eternity, because anything else wasn’t enough.

  His wrists were thickly calloused and partly cut through from so long in chains.

  “Take them off. I’m so weak now, I’m no danger.”

  After the death of his children, he’d killed many more, each time, he said, hoping for relief. He said, each time hoping someone would stop him.

  “Leave them on!” Wee Willie Winkie said. “He’ll strangle you the moment he gets the chance.” Laughing. They don’t really look out for each other, although they showed each other affection when they could. Desperate for physical touch. It must have been so much worse when they couldn’t even see each other. You’d think their sexual desires would be long gone. Only a memory. But they still want it, although I haven’t noticed an erection amongst any of them. Makes them cross, as it should. Things change, and your standards slip. That’s the way it is. Any port in the storm, as they say. They used to keep the female prisoners separate, but it’s hard to tell them apart now, isn’t it?

  “Leave them on. You know what he did? If he killed you, you wouldn’t be the first.”

  “You can talk!” the man in chains said. “That Tristram Barton never fell down the steps. Those bastards slaughtered him like a hog. Not me. They dragged his stupid fucking basket out, to keep up the impression he was still alive. Meanwhile, he was lying dead and rotting. But they got too slow and couldn’t get to the basket in time.”

  Then they were all at it, with their slow, infuriating voices, accusing each other, trying to make me believer that one of them was better than the next.

  I drank a bottle of wine. And part of another.

  Nothing worse than wanting a party and there’s no one to party with.

  Why did they hate trumpet music? I played some on my laptop and it did agitate them. Made them moan and fidget.

  “It’s Gabriel, blowing his judgment.”

  “Releasing all the sinners from Hell.”

  “And we’re not there. No release for us to Heaven.”

  “Cruel.”

  “We want an ending. We want that.”

  They would wink out to nothingness, if they were ever forgiven.

  I promised to stop if they answered some of my questions. I asked them about the so-called “secret” prisoners. The evils, the awfuls. Hitler, Mussolini, the ones I’d been told never died at all.

  “No such things,” they all said.

  “Maybe it’s you lot.” I was bored that day. “You’re Hitler, aren’t you? And you’re some other arsehole.” I went down the line, re-naming them all. I’d read about a leprosy hospital where the first step was to separate them from reality by giving the patients new names. I think they rather liked it.

  Mr. Madden, first told me about Hitler and the rest. But he wrote such a boring report. I was disappointed. He’d seemed quite philosophical and I thought he might give me some insights.

  I went upstairs before I gave in to the temptation and picked one of them up to dance.

  Shocker of a hangover.

  I had a sudden thirst. Desperate for a beer. Hair of the dog that bit me. I thought of the whiskey upstairs but didn’t want that. They didn’t need to smell it on me. Didn’t need to know I liked a drink. They’d use that if they could. There was the wine, too, and that I couldn’t resist.

  The Ball dropped.

  The Ball dropped.

  The Ball dropped.

  I swept the floors, up and down. So much dust gathering.

  It was time to attend the troll. Don’t let the troll’s outline wash away. We contain it this way. Control it. This means what we see is not imagination, it is truth. Reality.

  There were buckets of charcoal and a suction ladder that would cling to the wall outside. I headed out there to do my duty. Every profession has its superstitions. This was one of ours and I wasn’t the one to break it without good reason. I really was bored, anyway.

  I placed the ladder beside the troll-like stain and climbed up. I thought I could hear breathing but knew it was the wind wrapping around the Time Ball Tower, so loud out here. I began the outline. The edges didn’t shift, I knew that, and the troll image wasn’t spongy. This was not a real thing. It was imagination. It was like a giant itself, and I remembered what Burnett had said, that the tower was a giant. He wouldn’t like to see this up close. I outlined the troll in anti-fungal paint, first.

  The sun darkened. A storm was on its way so I worked faster, wanting it done before the storm so that there was less chance of it washing away, singing to myself, looking out to the mainland hoping someone was watching me. That someone cared.

  “Oh, please,” the wind said. “Please, please, please.”

  I finished the outline, climbed down the ladder and pushed the door open. Inside, it was dark. I knew it was the storm coming, but I felt as if the troll was growing over the windows, blocking me in.

  I was covered in coal dust, could feel it in my hair, gritting in my eyes. I had to secure the prisoners, but I wanted to shower first. Really there was little to be done; strap them down, make sure the windows were barred shut, the shutters down against the wind.

  “How is our troll?” Grayson said. “Does he send his regards?”

  How did they know? I didn’t answer him.

  “Your fingernails. They always forget the fingernails. Dead giveaway that you’ve been talking to the troll.”

  Coal dust rimmed them, black, filthy.

  “You shouldna climbed the ladder drunk. Might have fallen off. Watch out he doesn’t leak in. He does that in bad weather. Leaks in and then you’ll never be done with him,” the second Black Widow said.

  “He likes the ladies. Remember in 1953? The keeper took a woman in here. She saw too much. You can look her up. She was dead in a month. One of those unexplained accidents,” the grandfather said.

  The wind picked up, and I could hear water gushing down from the roof.

  He winked. “Keeper couldn’t get it up until the troll took him. Then he couldn’t stop. But he knew she’d seen too much.”

  Did I feel different after being up close and personal with the troll? Time would tell.

  “Storm coming,” I told them. “Sun showers mean the worst storm.”

  “Move us to watch. Let us see it.” They were desperate for the slightest entertainment.

  “Let us sit underneath where at least we might feel a drop, a wisht of wind,” said the Councilor, who missed the open air.

  They talked sometimes of nature, as if it were a dream dimly remembered. The rustle of leaves. The shape of t
he clouds. The change of seasons.

  I tried to move him, and a piece broke off. Some had a small pile of broken pieces behind them, a reminder to be gentle.

  I’d move Burnett when I returned, set him in a place where he could see all. A high house with a view. He deserved that at least.

  I shuttered all the windows. Let us see, they called, it’s all we’ve got, but that wasn’t the way. I had books, candles, torches, music on downloaded, print-outs of my photos (all paid for. We had a budget of thousands for our project. Some of us wanted to use the money for other stuff, but it wasn’t transferable. You used it, or you lost it.)

  They whimpered to me, stay, stay, and there was something about being needed like that.

  “I’m going to get cozy upstairs,” I said. “Hot drink. Things to do.”

  The Executioner pushed himself up slightly. “But I want to change my last words. Write it down for me so I don’t forget.” He knew the value of last words. The importance of being ready.

  “Can you still read?”

  “You can read it to me.”

  I knew it was a delaying tactic, but there was something chillingly good about the way these people worked on their last words as if anyone would care.

  “Okay, then.” I sat beside them, pen out.

  No person in history has had as long to think about it.

  We sat in silence. “Come on, then!”

  “I can’t think of anything. Give me an idea,” the Executioner said.

  “I don’t want to sound like an idiot,” Grayson said.

  “Or a lunatic or lost soul.”

  “I can’t write your last words for you,” I said, but I fetched a book of famous last words a keeper had brought over. That helped. I almost enjoyed myself and so did they

  They got there in the end and I updated their last words on the laptop. (“Into thine hands, Oh Lord” and “May the loved ones forgive me” and “This is my fate, thank you Lord”) I updated the photos, too.

  “Look at her, looking at her flat box,” the Executioner said. He had thick strong thumbs. He’d strangled many more. He’d described strangling a kitten and a child. It was like he was reciting a poem.