Authors: Candice Fox
Hades (12 page)
“This guy does a lot of work to get this gig in order,” I said. “A
lot
. He has to know his prospective client is the kind of person who will take the deal. Financially and emotionally. Even if they aren’t, he has to know he can hook them in some way so that they won’t reveal him. There’s so much groundwork. So much preparation. It must all be fun and exhilarating or he just wouldn’t bother.”
lot
. He has to know his prospective client is the kind of person who will take the deal. Financially and emotionally. Even if they aren’t, he has to know he can hook them in some way so that they won’t reveal him. There’s so much groundwork. So much preparation. It must all be fun and exhilarating or he just wouldn’t bother.”
“I don’t think it’s a question of effort and payoff, Frank. I think it’s one of necessity. It’s a lifestyle. He just feeds the desire to get to the beginning of the ritual.”
“The ritual?”
“I’m only speculating,” Eden’s eyes darted towards me and then away, “but he’s doing the same thing over and over again. It’s planned, prepared, orderly. A contained experience between him and his client, him and his victim, in a makeshift operating theater. Imagine standing over the two of them with your scalpel in hand and slowly, carefully, taking life from one and giving it to another. Playing God. I can imagine it’s a pretty amazing experience, however abhorrent it is to us. An experience worth waiting for and ultimately something he can’t live without. Once it’s over the countdown begins until he
needs
to do it again.”
needs
to do it again.”
An ambulance whooped as it slid into the traffic circling the Royal Randwick Shopping Centre.
“Just speculating, huh?” I smirked.
“All doctors have some kind of God complex. Why would you be one otherwise? The hours, the stress, the years of training, the responsibility. Then you become a lifesaver. A hero. A demigod.”
“But his desire is tied up with taking life.”
“Yes, what a delicious duality for an unsound mind.”
We entered the underground parking lot and slipped into the motor-pool car. Eden’s cheeks were flushed like she’d run up a flight of stairs. A silence fanned out in the vehicle as she started the engine, that cold stillness that follows a line half-crossed. I felt ill at ease.
The old man disappeared for six days, telling the children not to follow him. Of course they knew exactly where he was. At sunrise Hades would slip into the dense forest that lined the east side of the dump, a playground of rotting logs, hollowed 200-year-old eucalypts, lantana as dense and unforgiving as razor wire. Eden and Eric had spent much of their childhood nights there, creeping, exploring, hooting and hollering and chasing, having snuck out of their beds the moment Hades began to snore. When Eric tried to follow Hades down to the forest on the second day, he was stopped by the dump workers, who had been warned that if they let him pass they’d pay with their jobs. He noticed other men, strangers, meeting Hades at the gate before sunrise. When he tried to enlist Eden’s help in sneaking around the boundary of the neighboring farm, trying to find Hades in the forest that way, she declined. She was too hurt at Hades’ silence. The old man hadn’t spoken to her since the night they had killed the teacher. When she had implored him to forgive her, Hades left the house and wandered alone in the alleyways and streets created by the stacked bodies of cars, old household appliances, rotting bookcases and bedside tables.
On the seventh night, 168 hours since they had committed their first human killing, Hades looked into Eden’s eyes. She stopped inside the hallway, her schoolbag slung over her shoulder, and watched him rise from his chair. Eric had been crashing and rumbling his way into the house with such relief to be home that he thumped right into Eden from behind.
“Leave your things here,” the old man said, pointing at the ground. He walked towards them and the children sunk into the wall as he passed.
He didn’t wait for them at the door. When Eric and Eden emerged from the house, Hades’ squat figure was distant on the path that led through the dump towards the forest.
The children ran. Twenty meters or so behind the old man, they stopped. Eden’s breath came in hot whimpering rushes. Her brother’s face was set, the eyes locked on the skull of the man in front of him. The bush was swaying with an icy wind that lifted the hair off Eden’s brow and burned her lips. She folded her arms against the chill and let her body brush Eric’s as she walked, his arm eventually coming around her shoulders and pulling her close.
“He can’t take us both at once,” the boy said. “We see one other person down here, I want you to go. You understand? I’ll take care of everything.”
“I don’t want to go,” Eden whispered. “Eric, please, make it all better, please.”
“Hurry up,” Hades snapped over his shoulder. Eden fell silent. They entered the forest and followed the uneven trail behind Hades. They passed a pile of disturbed earth, a vast dump of soil that smelled of rain and decay. Ten minutes passed in silence. Above them, the black canopy writhed and swayed against sky lit a dull orange by the dump’s sodium lamps.
Hades waited for the children at the edge of the path. They stopped three meters away from him. Hades thought that they looked afraid. He was glad. A cat moaned somewhere, gearing up for a fight, the sound causing Eden to jolt in the frame of her brother’s arm. Hades let them sweat under his glare for a minute or so. Eric held his glance while Eden shifted stones with the toe of her shoe.
“This is where you’ll be spending your days from now on,” the old man said, gesturing behind him. The children looked, squinting into the dark. Hades walked up onto the porch of a house, the steps seeming to materialize beneath his feet from the night, as though he had willed them there. Eric let Eden go and wandered forward, taking in the roof of the tiny bungalow, the recycled corrugated iron and mismatched pillars that held up the porch—one oak, one painted pine, one ornate wrought iron. Hades unlocked the front door, a heavy mahogany thing he had been saving for some time, fitted with stained glass, like something from a confessional booth. This is what you’ve been doing your whole life, he thought as he entered. Collecting the waste of others. Gathering the unwanted to you. Building your life from it.
The newness of the things inside the house was stark against the used scraps and bits that made up its exterior. In the first room, two large L-shaped desks, the barcode stickers still on them, polished black and inlaid with glass. Huge lights hung over them, ambient bar-lamps. Two great bookcases lined the back wall, stacked with volumes. Eric went to the shelf nearest him and ran his fingertips over the spines. Some were leather-bound, inlaid with gold, as thick as bricks. Some were paperback textbooks, covered with clear contact paper. They were categorized by subject, date, relevance. On the upper shelves Vesalius’s
De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
by Isaac Newton. On the lower shelves titles like
Hematology in the Technological Age, The Science of Ballistics, Autopsy: Finding Justice for the Dead.
De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
by Isaac Newton. On the lower shelves titles like
Hematology in the Technological Age, The Science of Ballistics, Autopsy: Finding Justice for the Dead.
Eden was standing in the middle of the room, her shoulders rising and falling gently as she panted. There was something like a heartbroken relief in her face. She let her eyes wander over the things arranged on the desks—the sleek silver laptops, one each, the stacks of notebooks and paper, the jars of pens. Under the window a reading place—two couches facing one another, a wide coffee table.
“I’ve enrolled you both with Monash,” Hades said quietly. “Distance education. I had to pull some hefty strings. Eden, you’re going to focus on the physiological side of things. The body, the mechanics of it, the ins and outs of disposing of it. Autopsy. DNA. You’re also going take a major in criminal law. Eric, you’re going to concentrate on the practical side. Ballistics. Bloodwork. Physics. You’re going to take sociology and psychology as electives. This isn’t going to be like regular university. You get perfect scores or you start again. This isn’t about getting an education. It’s about arming you for what you will become.”
The children stood like mannequins, limp-armed, silhouetted against the sickly orange light outside, barely above blackness.
“I’ve already withdrawn you from the high school. You start here tomorrow.”
“We’re not old enou—”
“You are now.” Hades took a thin stack of papers from one of the shelves above the desk, slapped them on the glass. The gold foil on Eric’s new passport glinted against the light as Hades’ body passed. He moved through the short hall. One door led off to a tiny kitchen, another to a bathroom. Eden could smell the fresh paint on the walls as she followed. She watched the old man heft a hidden trapdoor up from the bathroom floor, the edge aligned with the foot of an old pink toilet she recognized from the sorting center. Hades disappeared into the hole. She followed, Eric holding the shoulder of her shirt as she placed her feet on the rungs.
A concrete room. Against the care and consideration that had been put into the upper rooms, this place was painfully empty. A steel table, bolted to the floor. Bare shelves. Hades stood looking at his blurred reflection in the table as Eric landed on his feet at the foot of the ladder with a thump. Eden thought about going to the old man. Putting her hand on his. She didn’t. The three of them stood in silence.
“I won’t give you the things you require for this room,” Hades said. “When I come here to teach you, I’ll bring my own tools. I’ll give you the basics, the necessities of the craft, and nothing more. When you’re capable, I won’t come to this place again.”
He watched them, and noticed in quiet horror how young they looked in the light from the overhead lamp. Perfect skin. Bright eyes. He thought quietly that Eden was at the age now that she should be getting a woman’s shape about her. She wasn’t. The muscles of her upper arms were curved and toned, like a teenage boy’s, her chest flat and her feet and hands long. Animals, the two of them. Built for running. Built for killing. Caught in time like spiders suspended against a mighty wind. A twinge of pain rippled through his chest, an old warning instinct, and then was gone.
“Why are you doing this?” Eden asked.
“Because I love you,” the old man said. It was the first time he had said it. “Don’t you understand that? I’ve loved you from the first moment.”
And that was how it was when all was said and done, no matter what he saw when he looked at them—the way Eden could look like an angel and feel like a child when she was in his arms, the way Eric could be such a stupid boy, strutting around and puffing his chest out, desperately imitating a man, full of hidden terrors and needs. No matter how much Hades fantasized about the two of them being children, moldable and teachable and eager for love, they had stopped being children the night they were given to him, the night their parents were killed. Hades had fallen in love with two chimeras, two monsters in disguise, incapable of feeling the way he felt, of loving the way he loved. The horror they had experienced had cut a hole in them and they would be driven in vain to fill that hole for as long as they lived. Dogs with a taste for blood, enslaved to the need.
But he loved them anyway. He loved them with a complete and undeniable love, the love of a father. The best he could do was try to turn their killer instincts on those other monsters out there in the night who deserved it, and in a twisted and sickening way maybe they would be making the world safer from the same darkness they each carried. The best Hades could do was try to help them understand how to do it right so that they fed their needs without causing unnecessary suffering, which he knew would only grow new needs, and without getting themselves caught, because he didn’t know how he could ever deal with that.
The old man drew a breath and sighed, let his eyes finally leave those of the girl.
“Just because I love you doesn’t mean I won’t kill you both if you do wrong here,” he said. “I planned to bury you that night, the night I found you. I had a place picked out. It’s not something that’s beyond me. I’m not sure you know right from wrong yet but I’m hoping it’s something you can learn. This is a place for the evil ones and never for innocents. Never for innocents, you understand?”
He stabbed a stubby finger into the surface of the table. The steel shuddered, made a thundering sound. The children nodded, mouths closed. It was the confused and wide-eyed nodding of the hopelessly wicked.
The old man walked back to the hill shack alone.
Martina didn’t know how long it took to get to the door. The time passed in furious heartbeats and now and then stopped completely when she was sure she heard tires on the gravel outside the house or the beep of a car horn on a distant highway. He was coming. He was coming. Martina would freeze and wind her arms through the bars of the cage and grip on, determined not to be removed from it. It was hard to breathe. Sometimes the terror was so strong that noises warped into voices, the creaks and groans of the old house becoming cackling laughs and scraping boots.
Come on, baby. Let’s play.
Martina got to the door and shoved the cage through, centimeter by centimeter, only to howl with despair as it came to a stop, wedged at an angle between the doorframe and the corridor wall. She gripped the frame with her fingernails, pulled, twisted, rocked back and forth, knocking her elbows on the cage. Nothing.
Endgame.
Martina sunk to the bottom of the cage and cried breathlessly for a long time, surprised by her own noises and her inability to stop them, the moaning and the howling and the chattering of her own teeth.
Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.
“No, no, no, no, no,” she murmured, dragging herself up to her knees. “No. Not yet. Not yet.”
She looked around her at the hall. There was nothing but bare space, a window boarded up at the end before a door to another room, piles of dust and animal hair crowding along the baseboards like grey waves. Near the door to the room she’d escaped from was a wooden broom leaning against the wall covered in spiderwebs. Martina stared at it. She couldn’t move the cage farther down the hall because of the frame of the bedroom door. It was only a wooden frame. A wooden frame keeping her from staying alive. She pushed her shoulder into the bars of the cage, reached out as far as she could reach, knocked the broom over and dragged it towards her by its bristles. Trembling, bumping the broom against the walls and cage bars and her own limbs, she maneuvered it into the cage with her and grabbed hold of the handle outside the cage, bending it back with all her might. The broom handle began to crack. Slowly. Martina squeezed her eyes shut and pulled. The broom cracked more. She rocked and pushed, her hands sweating and sliding on the unpolished wood, now and then breaking into sobs.
The broom snapped, and just as it did she heard a car door shut outside somewhere. Martina gripped the bars around her, fought the urge to be sick again. Long, slow deep breaths shuddered over what felt like holes in her lungs, painful muscles straining in her chest against the urge to lose control. No footsteps followed. Had it really been a car door? Martina hugged herself for a moment, gripped her hair and pulled her legs into her chest. No sound. Her face was wet, tears and sweat and snot, hot like a mask. She swept back her hair and slid the broken broom handle into the cage, twisting it apart.
Yes, yes, yes.
Just as she planned. The shorter section of the handle, from the split to the rounded top, had broken away from the base with a nice sharp edge. Martina turned around, pushed her arms through the other side of the cage and slid the sharp edge experimentally into the tiny gap between the doorframe and the wall, knocking chips of paint onto the floor. She levered. The frame moved. Martina pushed the broom handle farther into the gap, bashing it with her palm until the bones in her hand ached, as she levered and levered until the outer section of the frame was slightly askew. She extracted the broom handle and wedged it into the gap again, higher this time.
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