Fall (10 page)

Hooky was haunted. But she didn't mind. To be haunted was never to be alone. From the moment they had come and taken her from her classroom to the principal's office, sat her down and told her that her parents were dead, she had almost never been without her mother and father's presence, or the presence of something she believed in the beginning had been them. They hung on her, weighing heavy and hard in her chest like a rock on a chain, a lump at the base of her oesophagus. Never satisfied, as they had been in life – but unlike in life it was those around her who they were never satisfied with. She became a kind of voice for them. A puppet. She became the advocate of angry ghosts.

In the beginning it had made her silent. Drew her back from the cuddling and the crying and the sweets that had come when her parents had died, the inevitable flooding of love. She felt choked, suffocated by the smells that erupted all around her – flowers, fresh and then rotting and then dead in brown water, the food, the cakes, the pickled things. It had made her explode at those who tried to help her. Her teachers. Her friends. The awkward scruffy-haired cop named Frank who didn't quite know how to be around her, who couldn't decide if he should treat her as a victim, a child, a woman, a survivor, an oppressed ethnic minority, a toxic entity.

The hurt in her chest had receded around him for some reason, the way it did when she managed to fight her way into her father's office, into his hard leather chair – the only place where she could get the true smell of him, the feel of him, onto her skin. That haunting hurt had pulled and pulled her there, and she hadn't known why. Then she overheard the three officers at the computers arguing about who had blown their cover in the teen chat room, who didn't know anything about teen language, whether Miley Cyrus was still cool or not, what LOL meant and when to use it. She'd felt tugged forward on that chain again, a slave to the dark desire that no longer had a face or a name, that she wasn't sure really was her parents anymore, but a thing that had grown like a tumour in her, a hateful and vengeful thing. When she began lying online, she felt in control for the first time since their deaths. She felt alright with being haunted.

It was a strange sort of desire that drove the thing in Hooky. Sometimes it wasn't exactly right, if rightness could be drawn out and separated from everything that was wrong, from everything that would earn her a mark against her name – bad girl, girl on the wire. In the early days, cast out of the North Sydney Metro offices and put on a train back to her aunt's, she found herself wandering aimlessly through Chinatown towards Paddy's Markets, feeling the twisted justice pulse in her. An elderly woman had stopped at the McDonald's attached to the Entertainment Centre, shook off a leopard print umbrella and set the pretty item on the bricks outside the restaurant before going in and joining the queue. Hooky was watching with her hands in her pockets, coming up the street behind a group of girls about her age, when she saw one of the girls – a thin, lean
creature with pink streaks in her hair – dart out and snatch up the umbrella and continue walking, her pace never slowing, the theft so seamless and natural it was almost expected. Hooky followed the girl into the public bathrooms inside the Market City shopping centre, waited for her to emerge from the stall, and punched her, just once, square in the nose. The blow had been right on target, crushing the hard, narrow bones there and launching a rush of blood right down the front of the girl's sparkly top. Hooky turned and left. Returning the umbrella to the old woman didn't even crossed her mind. She didn't know if what she'd done had been justified, had been ‘right'. She didn't know if justice was a real thing, anyway. All she knew was that the burning in her chest was eased.

Sometimes Hooky felt compelled to cheat people. To make them believe things about her that were not true. She told herself sometimes that she did these things to hone her skills for her games with the perverted souls who lurked online – the men who wanted to be daddies pushed too far by teasing stepdaughters, the women who wanted to teach boys how to make love. But she was also aware, on some level, that she cheated and lied just because it was fun. She would strike up a conversation on a bus with an older man and build a Hooky that was not real, a twenty-one-year-old Hooky with a boyfriend named Ted who worked in graphic design, a Hooky who lived in a trashy little apartment in Erskineville and who couldn't get enough of this vegan café there. Hooky wasn't vegan. She'd only been to Erskineville once. The lies weren't even particularly extravagant. But the way the older man nodded, accepted, didn't question – that was what thrilled Hooky. No one questioned her. People trusted. Hooky could be anyone she wanted.

She began to buy costumes for her fantasy lives. Snappy suits and ragged jeans and an old stained chef's uniform, silk-lined party dresses and demure librarians' dresses, ankle-length and olive green. Money wasn't a problem. Her parents, ever practical, had left her everything and not bothered with conditions, because they knew their family wasn't the kind to waste their fortune in clubs and bars, to spend it on stupid cars and leave her and her sister high and dry for the rest of their lives. She made the necessary arrangements to have her sister's share of the inheritance ordered over to her through Victims of Crime, to continue her parents' investments, to take over their share portfolio, and she signed her name on the deed to her home. Hooky sold the house in which they had been killed for a quarter of what it was worth just weeks after the murders faded from the headlines.

Sometimes Hooky trawled the nightclubs, made men buy her drinks, played the naïve Japanese tourist dumped by her friends, curious and a little frightened by white guys and their loudness. Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese – these guys didn't know the difference, didn't care, as long as she played to their expectations, was cowed and grateful and a little surprised by her own passion after a couple of vodkas. Naughty oriental girl. Sometimes she indulged the fantasies of older businessmen, sometimes women, sitting at the bar at the Union Hotel with her expensive heels hanging off her toes, writing gibberish on napkins as she listened to a call from some director on USA time who didn't exist. She never went home with them. That was the cheat. That was the point of it all. It was all lies. When their backs were turned, she vaporised.

Hooky knew, deep down, that she was in training for something. That the thing inside her wasn't only pulling her
through these little fantasies idly but was also growing, escalating, becoming hungrier. She was evolving into a skilled con woman. Soon cheating people with her chimera games wouldn't be enough. She'd begin robbing them. She'd begin hurting them, making them cry. Emptying bank accounts and ruining lives maybe. It was something she could see looming on the horizon like a wave, but there was no running to the shore before it crashed over her. Her legs were stuck, sinking, being drawn out from beneath her.

Maybe one day she would start killing them. Luring them to their deaths. The thought that there was a killer inside her was terrifying. Was that inside her the way it had been in her sister, a killer genome cooking away chemicals in her brain, building a desire to inflict pain? Would the ghosts that had once been her parents haunt her so long that only blood would sate them?

Hooky was getting her morning fix of illusory online games at Sydney Metro police station when a woman came to the counter and rapped on the surface. Hooky leaned back in her chair and saw glossy painted nails, acrylics, and went back to her conversation with Badteacher69, her fingers darting over the keys. It wasn't Hooky's job to go to the counter. As a matter of fact it wasn't officially Hooky's job to be anywhere near the Sydney Metro Homicide Department at Parramatta, but she'd been hanging out hoping Frank and Eden would come in with news about the case, and so far she'd bluffed confidence about her computer access well enough that no one questioned her presence or activities. When the woman tapped again and called out a friendly hello, Hooky looked around and saw no one was near. She unhooked her headphones and went to the counter. The woman was small and blonde and pretty, with
a neat, blunt-cut strawberry fringe on a freckled, uncreased brow. The woman glanced at Hooky's outfit and the younger girl straightened her camouflage-pattern singlet, pulled up her baggy black pants full of items she'd never carry in a handbag.

‘Can I help you?'

‘I'm looking for Detective Frank Bennett,' the woman said. ‘I'm his girlfriend, Imogen.'

‘Oh.' Hooky laughed. She wasn't sure why she did, at first. Maybe it was the fact that the woman was so small and neat and stylish – hardly Frank's type. Hooky had never considered what Frank's type might be, but this woman looked like something best handled with care. She thought of Frank's big callused hands, the way he was always knocking things and crushing things, like every room was slightly too small for him, like everything was slightly too delicate. ‘Oh, right.'

‘I've brought him lunch,' Imogen said, setting a plastic Tupperware container on the counter. Hooky nodded and took the container, tried to determine what its contents might be. She saw raw carrot. Tried not to smile.

‘Well, Frank's out, Imogen. So …'

‘When will he be back?'

‘There's no telling,' Hooky said. She felt her eyebrows dart together. ‘Like, he could be anywhere.'

Hooky knew her tone was patronising, but couldn't help it. It was just the funniest thing she'd seen in a long time, some wifely figure right out of Pleasantville with her perky heels and her gold bracelets, dropping off lunch for her Frankie-bear. Hooky had once seen Frank eat a muffin with the paper still attached to it. Starving and brain dead and filthy from crawling beneath some drug dealer's house all day digging for
a dead newborn baby, his hair stained black with some kind of muck and sticking out in spikes from behind his ears. Her amusement really had nothing to do with the woman at all, but Hooky watched as a coldness came over Imogen's face.

‘So you're Hooker, are you?'

‘Hooky,' she said.

‘Right,' Imogen nodded. Her features reassembled into the smile. ‘I get it now.'

‘He's spoken about me?'

‘Yeah, some,' Imogen smirked, looking at Hooky's shirt again. ‘I feel so stupid.'

‘Why?'

‘Oh, I was worried. It's silly. I didn't realise you really are just a child.'

Hooky's face darkened. Imogen turned on her heel, and Hooky watched her breeze through the automatic doors into the street.

Eden was on the edge. There was no doubt about that now. At first, when Merri had told her of the woman trying to get a picture of her birthmark, Eden had been able to control her inner ‘flight' reflex, the whispering voice that made her want to drop everything and run, as she had imagined doing so many times before. Hades had always made sure she had a plan in place. Money, a bag, a new identity. Going to ground, being reborn as someone new – these things didn't concern Eden. Usually.

Going undercover had taught her how to shed herself completely, like taking off a suit. Eden herself was a construction, after all. A mask she had been wearing since the morning she and Eric had become Hades' ‘children', since they adopted their new names, settled into their new life with the Lord of the Underworld playing Daddy. Eden wondered, sometimes, what sort of person she might have become if Morgan Tanner, the girl she had once been, hadn't had to be snuffed out. Who was Morgan Tanner? Who would be born when Eden Archer was dead? Eden wandered, head down, up the hill to the little shack at the centre of the Utulla tip, towards the warm golden lights of her home.

Whenever she visited now something was changed, moved slightly, upgraded to allow for Hades' slow decline, the back
that wouldn't hold under the weight of certain tools, the old knees that cracked when walking down steps. Everything was closer to the little house to eliminate the need to walk over uneven ground for long distances – the letterbox shifted up nearer the front door, the sun bench where the old man liked to sit and watch the workers now beside the steps, under the awning. Eden was glad. Hades insisted on living by himself out here, beyond the reach of anyone who might change a light bulb for him, who might lift a heavy pot out of the oven. But there she went again – fantasising, dreaming of lives that were not real. He was not a vulnerable old man. His hands were worn, but hard. His mind was dark, but quick. He was going to die one of these days as lethal and as malignant as he always had been. There would be no spoonfeeding in a nursing home. No adult nappies. He would meet a bloody end one of these nights with one of his clients willingly, or he would push someone into it – an end in war was Hades' only end.

Eden did not find Hades in the house. She walked over the hill towards the work shed. She passed beneath huge structures lining what had once been a rocky stone path but was now a set of immaculate steps cut into the hillside and laid with terracotta tiles to save the old man's ankles. A giant grizzly bear made from hundreds of bottles towered over her, the glass warped and melted together, the chest of the beast pocked and holed with open glass mouths strapped down against a ribcage of old wood wrapped with hunks of wire. A mouth roared at the sky, the innards of the skull pipes and tubes welded and tied together, the gaping eyes of microwave doors tilted, sad, one burned through from an inner explosion. Across from the bear, a lion was frozen mid-pounce; the claws reaching over Eden's head were
polished brass parts from a series of ancient machines – clocks and printing presses, and the dozens and dozens of typewriters chucked into the tip each month. Down the lion's back, a rippling curve, thousands of typewriter keys spelled gibberish, the letters glimmering in the growing dark, black and white and yellowed with age. She stepped through the open door of the shed, no barriers between her and the old man, nothing stopping some stranger from wandering in here and seeing him at his dark work, as always. Hades had never been one to hide. He was too ancient to bother with precautions.

Hades was bent over a workbench. A body lay on the table before him, the thick head turned away. An old handsaw rocked in his fist, back and forth. Eden walked around the table in time to see the corpse's left knee crack off heavily, flopping wetly to the table.

‘What seems to be the problem, officer?' Hades said. He put down the saw and wiped his hands on the cloth apron he would later burn, smearing black blood down his chest like war paint. Hades had always liked getting bloody. He didn't wear gloves or a mask. Tiny blood droplets had spattered his left cheek. Eden took out a handkerchief, sighed, swiped at her father's temple.

‘What is this? You said you were done.'

‘I am done.'

‘Well, who's dropped this on you then?'

‘Oh, that idiot Jesse Jeep. It was a favour returned. That's it, now. I really am done.'

‘Uh-huh.' Eden glanced into a huge duffel bag lined with black garbage bags sitting behind the table. ‘And you've got to do his chop work?'

‘The chop work was sort of half done.' Hades shrugged one shoulder. ‘Arms, at least. You know these kids, Eden. They have no stomach.'

Eden sighed again and began rolling up her sleeves. Hades handed her a long-toothed hacksaw and she set it to the man's right knee. She was about to begin cutting when she noticed a basket on the other side of Hades' feet, overflowing with old blankets.

‘What is that?' She nodded. As she spoke, the creature in the basket seemed to awaken from its slumber. A pink nose on a caramel snout emerged from the blankets, snuffled the air for a moment and then sunk away.

‘Is that a roo?'

‘No. It's a dog.'

‘You got a dog?'

‘I don't go out and get things, Eden.' Hades smiled a little. ‘You know that.'

For a while, they sawed the body apart in silence, Hades stopping now and then to sip from a blood-covered mug. Eden stood to the side so that the spray of fluids from the backward motion of the saw didn't stain her trousers. As she was laying the leg in the duffel bag, she paused.

‘Hades, there's another leg in here.'

‘What?'

‘You heard me.'

‘I just put a leg in there.'

‘Yeah,' Eden said, holding up the leg she'd cut by the calf. ‘So there's two in the bag and one in my hand.'

Hades put his saw down and limped over. He looked into the bag, looked at the leg in Eden's hand.

‘Well then.'

‘Yes. Well then.'

‘That's a tricky sort of business,' Hades sniffed.

‘Someone's mixed up the distribution. Looks like a woman's. Calf is shaved.'

‘That's two grand right there, that extra leg.' Hades pointed to the bag with a stubby finger. ‘The price I gave was for one body. One. Not a body and a … a tenth.'

‘You better call him up then.'

‘Oh, I will,' Hades blustered, muttered to himself as he set the saw to the corpse's throat, took a handful of hair and began to swing the blade. ‘The cheek of these young people. The absolute cheek.'

‘Could have been an honest mistake.'

‘These young pricks.'

‘Hades, I want to talk about my parents.'

The old man stopped sawing. Leaned on the head on the table, his forearm mashing the face into the bruised wood. The saw made wet patterns against his trouser leg as he hung it there.

‘I'm almost certain I've told you everything I know, girl.'

‘No one ever knew?' Eden shifted the leg in her hands, looked down at the toes against her forearm. The toenails were sharp. Yellow. ‘Even Maggie? You never told her where we came from?'

‘All I told Maggie was that if anyone ever came asking, her daughter had dropped two brats off on me, just before she necked herself. Eden, a girl, and Eric, a boy. Daughter had only been dead a week at that time, so Maggie welcomed the money. It was a simple lie. Two grandchildren she never saw, given back to their deadbeat dad. Didn't know nothing about them, didn't know where they were.'

‘What if someone approached Maggie?' Eden said. ‘What if someone asked to see pictures of the children?'

‘Maybe there never were none. Jesus. I don't know. It's been, what … twenty years? More?'

‘There was a Western Australian kid that went missing. Bainbridge. Ten years ago, almost exactly. You seen the news?'

‘Redheaded kid. I saw it. Didn't know the name.'

‘The Stronghearts Foundation has been running with it. The anniversary. They've been getting the government behind all these old cases.'

‘So?'

‘So people don't forget, Hades. Not ten years later, not twenty years later. They're still writing books about Mr Cruel. That's twenty-six years ago, the first one.'

‘And?'

‘And I looked at our case. Eric's and mine. They're bumping the reward money up by a hundred thousand dollars. The Stronghearts Foundation has recommended the government increase the reward money on a bunch of old cases to get them all solved. Us, the Evans girl, the Beaumont children. The redheaded kid, Bainbridge. There's a big push right now.'

‘The reward money has always been big, Eden.'

‘Maybe it'll be big enough now for someone to act on a hunch. Maybe someone's decided to just … go for it. I don't know.'

‘Eden.'

‘Maggie. You gave her our birth certificates, didn't you?' Eden chewed her nails. ‘Some … school records?'

‘I made it real, Eden. I've done it before.' Hades adjusted the grip on his saw, prepared to begin. ‘You're not the first human beings I reinvented. If you'll stop biting your hands
off and think for a moment, you'll remember that reinventing people is a bit of a talent of mine. I've never failed.'

‘What if you failed this time?'

‘Eden.'

‘What if someone found out we weren't real? What if someone connected us to the Tanners?'

Hades put down his saw. He walked forward and took the leg from Eden's hand, dropped it into the bag.

‘My fucking birthmark was in the paper.'

Hades cocked his head.

‘This.' Eden touched her side. ‘It was in all the news reports at the time we went missing. My only unique distinguishing feature. Twenty years ago it was all over the news. And now hundreds of thousands of people must have seen it on the front page of the fucking
Herald
when Frank carried me out of that farm.'

‘You look at the case files for your parents' murders, Eden, and it'll say bikies,' Hades said. ‘It's stamped unsolved, but there's a good four or five leads that all end with bikies. Some pieces of shit skinheads in the Dugart gang or someone or other found out about your father's research money and blasted the two of them, came up empty-handed. Botch job. Sold you or buried you or something. No one asks these questions, Eden, not anymore. No one's going to come after you because of a birthmark. The lead officer on your case is dead. He'd be the only person on earth who would remember something as tiny as that.'

‘I think you're wrong. I think someone is looking for us.'

‘You're being paranoid.' The old man tucked a strip of her dark hair behind her ear, remembered how hard it was for
her to accept the touch of another human being and stopped. ‘There have been times, over the years, that you've –'

‘Someone visited Maggie. Asked her about her grandkids. Someone approached my massage therapist looking for a photo of my body.'

‘What?'

‘Yeah. This is serious,' Eden said.

Hades' jaw twitched, just once. A tiny tic in the muscle beside his ear.

‘I feel it,' Eden said. ‘Someone knows.'

The old man paused, looked at his work on the table, one of thousands of ended lives he had hidden over the years. Since he retired, his life had been all about hiding things, burying things, making things clean. Tying up loose ends and folding down corners, making murder not only clean and neat but easy, economical. Out in the grounds of his tip only the souls of those buried there remained, the leachate acid built up between the layers of landfill dissolving rapists, murderers, stand over men, con victims and gamblers who'd pushed the grace of their bookies too far. Sometimes Hades heard screams in the night, but there was no telling if they were from those lost and frightened out there in the dark, or if they were echoes of his own past, memories tucked around corners and thrust into shadows, people who'd deserved his wrath, people who hadn't. He reached out and took his daughter's hand, squeezed the fingers, stained them with blood, and it was as he had done the night she came to him, a tiny child newly orphaned, a problem he had to fix. He had stained her. He had made her the monster she was.

‘If it surfaces, we'll bury it,' Hades said. ‘That's what we do.'