Clowns At Midnight (9 page)

Fool, fool, fool that I was for looking!

I dropped the clipboard, grabbed the fan and locked the door, then hurried out to the fridge and scanned the list again. There was nothing else I’d need. If necessary, I’d get Len Catley to move the thing away, have him keep it at his place for the duration of my stay. I certainly wasn’t going to let the cruel and subtle Madame ruin my time here.

That was in the first hour. In the second hour I had to know one way or the other.

There was no perfect time. Once again, daylight would have been better, of course, but it was happening at 9:25 on a Monday evening. It had to be now.

I unlocked the door again, switched on the light and regarded the shrouded forms. I’d braved the TT disks. I’d done well. This was just another job to do.

I tried to track Beth Rankin’s thinking as best I could, this kind mistress of codes. She had written
Sewing Stand
readily enough, forgetting herself, but perhaps had unconsciously registered Madame’s ‘doll’ potential just the same and placed her in the corner furthest from the door. That was what I felt. Madame was in the corner.

Away came the dust-cloth covering the spinning wheel. Now it looked like a torture device too, all deadly curves, hard wood and spindles. The next sheet away revealed an exercise bike, the next a stack of cardboard boxes marked ‘Books’ and some concertina files. The third exposed more boxes and a sewing machine on a wooden table. I was nearly at the corner. The next sheet would be it.

CHAPTER 6

My breathing came in laboured gasps, horrible to hear. The clamminess and dizziness were there, the racing heartbeat, but this side of a syncope, a total shut-down, I had to do it. I might never find the courage again.

Jack, oh, Jack, I thought. How would the readers of our article react? Was this the sort of thing to bring to the larger world?

Writer Fixated on Sewing Dummy!

Sex Maniac Confesses
:
Give Me an Oedipal Proxy Every Time!

Domestic Prostheses Let Me Back on the Streets!

Potential Serial Killer Diverted by Makeshift Sewing Surrogate!

Laughing and terrified, I began drawing away the sheet. No matador flourish—
voilá
!—to cause Madame to come toppling forward into my arms. No assisted trappings of life. Just a slow, torturous hauling away, my hand a detached and separate thing locked on the edge of the fabric.

And there she was. Worn and well used, possibly a thrift shop special given a new life—new half-life, quarter-life, whatever it was—but another turn. Shiny silver plate atop the neck, slightly pitted with rust at the edges, grey chest and body panels, a drab steel grey, with little white adjustment wheels set between the segments. The points of her breasts were worn through to the plastic or fibre-glass from years of use, years of too tight bodice fittings and who knew what else? A rust-pitted chrome silver pole went right through her centre, from neck plate down to round metal base. And, yes, she was on casters. I could see the edges of a set. Such a well-used, experienced Madame this one, seasoned veteran of sewing rooms, quiet hours and hauntings by appointment.

And how is Madame feeling tonight?

So so, David
.
Sew sew
.
Thank you for asking
.

It was done. I had faced the demon. Shaking and dizzy, with perspiration cooling my brow and a headache drumming in time with my heart, I’d done it.

And now there was a final tolerance test if I could manage it. I’d slept so easily after finding the bottle-trees wrecked. I’d survived the new images on Disks 4 and 5. Now forcing myself, forcing it all, I raised the sheet and draped Madame again, did the same with the other things that kept her pinned in her corner. Like reciting a mantra, like working through a ritual, yes, completing an exorcism, I moved back the way I had come, restoring the room to its previous order, then switched off the light and locked the door behind me.

Done. It was done. I made peppermint tea and carried the plunger and a cup through to my room. Then, after using the bathroom, I took a sleeping tablet and turned in, finding it easier to distract myself with Renault’s fine writing than I expected. Feeling the sedative take hold, I had to smile. Leave one thing, I’d told Beth Rankin, and
The Mask of Apollo
had been it. Little could either of us have known there had been something else.

But that had been dealt with too.

A sound woke me, or a dream of one, because it wasn’t repeated and may have been imagined. I had no idea of the time, but reached out and touched the tea plunger. It was cold. An hour must have had passed at least. I was well on the way to morning.

I lay there feeling wooden and vague from the sedative, listening to the wind in the trees.

Be easy. Be easy about this, Davey, I told myself. You knew it would happen.

I had. I’d known that, sooner or later, Madame Sew would use my imagination, my dread of her, to arrange some kind of follow-up. I had hoped to make it through to morning, but here it was.

It was so easy to picture her in the storeroom, little white adjustment wheels beginning to tweak this way and that between the plates,
eet-eet eet-eet
, moving the body panels in and out ever so slightly, letting her breathe.

That chilling image was among the earliest memories I had of her and quickly brought the rest. They had their own momentum, their own logic. I lay there feeling leaden, weighed down by the very drugs meant to bring release, and knew that such thoughts had to run their course.

Of course she had such powers. She was never meant to be complete in any conventional sense, never meant to have a head instead of the round silver plate where the neck ended, to have arms, legs or groin, just the pole through her middle as if—like some enemy of Vlad Tepes or Shaka Zulu—she had been dismembered and impaled on a silver shaft. This
hemi-
demimondaine, this lady of darkness, worn but full of promise,
was
complete in her cloven, mutilated state, was smooth and svelte with it. Little wonder that here she was, making the most of her emptiness, compensating for any shortcomings by taking over the late-night thoughts of the susceptible few.

The horror wormed its way up. What an unsuspected travesty was standing, breathing, just a room away. How had we managed to allow such things: leaving the trunk of a body in a spare room, a child’s nursery, out in the back shed?

There was no stopping it. I’d won with the bottle-trees and the TT marathon. Now it was her turn. She couldn’t smile at her victory; she had never been made to smile, but here she was.

Complete in my own way, Davey
.
Never forget!

No, no smile, just the glint of moonlight off pitted silver where her neck ended. Just the panels shifting ever so slightly in the dark as she learned to breathe again. Or, better yet—worse yet!—snapping in and out,
click-click
, in jerking mechanical doll fashion,
click-click
: an improbable, malformed lady of the night ready to be about her business, plates full and wide, ready to snap back.

I lay in a sweat that had nothing to do with the evening’s humidity or the surge of adrenalin spiking through the sedative. For me terror would never be the
swish swish
of the Reaper’s scythe. For me it was the
click-click
,
click-click
of the shifting plates or the
eet eet eet
of those little white wheels turning, moving the panels along their grooved metal tracks, or the sudden
brrrrrrrr
of casters on a polished wooden floor.

The trap was complete. I was locked in full-clown again, paralysed and helpless, slowed by the medication and, yes, made easier prey by it.

I did the only thing I could do. I went
into
my fear again, ran the Jack-mantras. Hurting and afraid, I
thanked
the Madame for providing me with this opportunity to know my fear, to deal with the damage she was causing. Even if none of her injuries could be pushed aside, neutralised, then I would examine them, accept them as facts and fit them back into a larger world of cause and effect, where they existed simply as bits of interesting clinical data and not—most definitely not—some rough, harsh magic.

Madame wanted to keep it in my mind. I kept forcing it into the consultation room with Jack riding shotgun.

I had
this
privilege, I kept telling myself. Others were oblivious to such things, but I had this to do, this task. I was the prince of terrors. I worked with dread.

Finally, somewhere in the tangle of thinking about what Jack would think of me thinking about Madame, that sort of convoluted braid, I slept again, simply from exhaustion. I slipped into a broken, troubled sleep that finally became heavy and long and blessedly free of dreams.

I had to remind myself that the new day was Tuesday 9
^th
January, the days at Starbreak Fell blurred so, all with the same bright sunlight, the back-to-back sameness of glare, shimmering views and hazy distances. The bushfire plumes seemed painted on the ranges, identical to those of the day before. It was easy to imagine scenic flats arranged against the hills, or some miraculous gelid fire, the flames locked in graphic slow-mo, the smoke barely stirring.

Though I slept late from sheer exhaustion, I finished breakfast by 9:30, was showered and dressed by 9:45 and ready to tackle Madame Sew.

The first step was to haul her out into the sunshine, deprive her of her shrouds and gloom and formidable corner setting. I put on music, REM’s
Automatic for the People
, then unlocked the door to the spare room. It had to be done quickly. I pushed by some stacked things, leant over and drew back the curtains, then opened the windows. In moments, the soft, honey-toned gloom was gone. Glare and heat filled the little room. The conquest had begun.

I began pulling away the dust-cloths then, burying the inevitable thought that Madame would not be there, that she would have worked her Maimed Madonna’s magic and escaped during the night. Off would come the final shroud and—hey presto!—there would be something else entirely.

Tricked you again, Davey boy!

But she was there, in her place. I was tempted to lift the shrouded form while it was still covered, but I already had the tremors, was already reeling with quarter-clown and more. The daylight helped, the brutal glare and heat, but the thought of her panels shifting under my hands as I lifted her, the
sense
of a struggle, was simply too much.

So away came the sheet, exposing the drab grey panels and worn breasts again, the silver neck plate like a paint-tin lid. Then, only then, did I reach over, grab her sides and lift.

There was no resistance. The plates did shift under my hands, yes, but much of the eerie force had gone. It was all part of the physical world of moving furniture. REM blared from the speakers, the thrilling beat of
The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite
. I was resolved, distracted, high-curve enough to continue. I hoisted Madame aloft and carried her at arms’ length out into the hall, then out the door and onto the terrace, set her down on the grass in front of the embankment. She was still frightening there, still scarecrow terrifying, and I was shaking when it was done, but she was out of the storeroom.

It had all happened so quickly. It was barely ten o’clock, and I dared not lose momentum. I phoned Len Catley and babbled something about needing to impose on his kindness and store something that was rattling the bars of my personal cage.

Len had been briefed by the Rankins; he was solicitous and neighbourly: why not bring it over right now?

I did so before the mind-games became worse, before Madame could exert her force on the forest and vanish into its green distances, before she could get tricked up in the smudges of bushfire light on the hills and work her mischief from afar. She was just a sewing dummy now, just a
Sewing Stand
as Beth’s list had said.

I half-draped her in her sheet again and laid her gently in the back of the car, so gently, not a vindictive act, no cause for reprisal. I was crazy, crazy, grinning all the while. Then I locked the storeroom (not replacing the dust-cloths this time; I wanted no more shrouded forms), locked the house and drove over the hill, turning onto Edenville Road and heading for Len’s house on its low tree-sheltered hilltop near the intersection with McDonald’s Bridge Road.

The car’s air-conditioner made it a pleasant enough drive and my sunglasses defeated much of the light. It was only when I pulled up outside Len’s front door that the heat hit me again. The yard was deserted. Two of his dogs were barking from the back shed.

‘Hiya, Dave,’ Len called, coming out onto the veranda, the screen door slamming behind. He wore a checked shirt over his scrawny frame, and dark work trousers. His grey hair was tousled, not from sleep, but from his habit of never really bothering to comb it. ‘Another scorcher, eh?’

‘Sure is, Len. What about those winds you promised?’

‘You wait and see, my son. Mark it in your diary. Feast or bloody famine round here. You’ll be sorry you doubted me. How’s the writin’ going?’

‘Getting there. It’s these winds, you see. Now, I reckon if I get those –’

‘Yeah, righto. Funny bugger, aren’t ya? Come in and have a cup of tea.’

Why not, I asked myself. Why not give myself over to an hour or two of one-liners and quips about the weather, tips on country living and, with luck, gossip about the locals. I needed to wind down a bit, and what better way was there?

‘That’d be great, Len. Thanks. This is what I’d like kept a while, if it’s no bother.’ I didn’t hesitate; I lifted Madame from the back of the car.

‘No bother, mate,’ Len said. ‘Beth explained how it was. But, listen, if you plan to stay in the area a while, I can probably get you a real one of those.’ And he gave a wink.

I laughed, oh how I laughed, and while I did manage to carry Madame Sew into the cool dim front hall, I felt such relief and gratitude when Len took the thing from me and set it down to one side. He called out to his wife. ‘Hey, May! Dave Leeton’s here. I’ll put the kettle on.’

We didn’t go into the living room, just went through to the kitchen. Len set the kettle going and we sat around a well-worn wooden table. Clean but faded yellow curtains were drawn over the windows. To one side an old refrigerator rumbled away. In the hall behind us, a grandfather clock ticked heavily, as if barely able to make it from one second to the next.
Clock Walk
. Too mawkish for a title, but there it was anyway. And
Clock Talk
. It was all slow time here.

‘May’s in the shower,’ Len explained. ‘She won’t be long.’

‘I’m not interrupting anything?’

‘Dave, we’ve been up since five. Morrie and Will are shifting part of the herd over to Macleane’s bore. I’m free till eleven.’

And so it went. May came in, a jovial, solid, freshly scrubbed woman in her sixties, and we swapped pleasantries. She laid out scones, jam and fresh cream, then served us tea in chipped mugs. It was all wonderful, and inevitable research material for me. I was learning to prize things like this all over again: just seeing the ways people did things, made cups of tea, matched their lives to routines—it gave me back my seven years with Julia, and years beyond. How we decorated kitchen walls, hallways, living rooms, existed in time.
Clock Talk
, yes. How we tried to get by, timewise.