Napoleon's Roads (14 page)

There were two things she wanted to tell me. The first she recounted with some amusement, albeit an amusement unusually brittle. One of the villagers, a drunkard named Anton, had evidently seen the panther one night when we were there, and had been muttering about it ever since. No-one was taking him seriously and she would not have thought it worth mentioning had it not been for a piece she had just come upon in the local newspaper. Some sheep in a nearby village had been killed during the time we were there. Attacked and partly devoured by some other animal or animals. The attacks were being attributed to a pack of dogs seen in the area over recent months. It probably
was
the dogs, she assured me, and I readily agreed, but she was nervous that someone, perhaps Anton himself, might make a different connection. At least one other, according to Anton, had seen the panther, or been told by another that
they
had seen a panther, and although this was unverified it seemed to suggest that a rumour was spreading.

‘Like an urban myth,' I commented, ‘or a rural version of one'.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘and let's hope people treat it as such'.

I smiled to myself as I recounted the story to the panther – who eyed me quizzically the whole time, as if recognising something pertaining to himself, but then closed his eyes, unfazed, and returned to his dreaming – and then, I think, after a period of reflection concerning any lessons there might be for our own night wanderings, I rather forgot about the matter. Certainly there were people who had seen him – and seen him with me – but there seemed so far to have been almost a benign conspiracy to say nothing. No-one in my non-panther life had mentioned him, let alone any rumour of a panther at large in the city. It was not, after all, as if the city was without its own mythic bestiary: the alligators that supposedly inhabited the sewerage system, dogs the size of ponies that lived in the bowels of the disused abattoirs, vampire bats that flew out on moonless nights from the old hospital incinerator tower.

Our life together was our own, it seemed to me, all the more private and carefully guarded as our relationship developed. I appeared to draw something human out of him, or answered to it, and he, who knows?, drew something panther-like from me – became, in the longer and longer nights of winter, a kind of witness to my loneliness, my secrets, and, yes, for I
was
a man alone, an angered man, an embarrassed man, my furies, my disappointments, my desires, my confessions. And he seemed to swallow them, even in some way to understand. Although the season was rapidly cooling, we would still go, some nights, to visit the National Gardens, and on others wander the deserted streets and laneways, farther and farther from home. And on other nights, he, I, would go out to prowl alone. I fed him on dreams, I fed him on disgust. I fed him on all the horrors and pornographies of this human world. What in return he was trying to instil in me, with those slow-burning, emerald-yellow eyes, that infinite patience, I will never truly know.

~

The first of the murders occurred in late autumn. Murders, killings: I didn't know. A homeless man in a small park by the river. I thought little of it. Such killings, always heinous, are sadly never uncommon. And the detail escaped me, if any had been given at all. It was out of our way; we had never been to the river together, let alone the culvert by the roadside there where homeless people would shelter on inclement nights. Nor did I think too much about the second – although I did raise my eyes at it, and read about it to my companion – of a young man, a drug addict, in the very lane from which I had been brought the packaged meat those several months before.

It can't have been much after this, a fortnight perhaps, time just enough for me to make no immediate association, that I read the first unconfirmed account of the sighting of a large black cat in the vicinity of the National Gardens. A discussion ensued amongst various editorial correspondents, during which other glimpses were reported, earlier such stories remembered, and even an account recalled from almost ninety years before of a panther kept as a pet by a resident of the quarter, a retired general from one of the Central American republics who had reputedly used the creature in his tortures there. Word was spreading, or rather an idea; it seemed only a matter of time before the stories of the murders – there was a third, which seemed to me quite unrelated, but alarm was catching – and those of the panther collided. My companion was with me every bit as much as he had been, and I had never known any violence in him, but I felt, nonetheless, a bleak apprehension germinate within me, like the seed of a rank and poisonous weed.

It was the next murder, the fourth, that unleashed the storm. A sudden, terrible thought came to me as I read of it. The young woman with the silver hair, in the National Gardens, very near where we had been used to meeting her. Murdered most viciously, for, for the first time, the police were releasing details, making connections. These killings, for they now called them that, appeared to have been done by some great cat. There were claw patterns, deep lacerations at the neck of the victims that could only have been made by large, powerful jaws. The sightings of the jaguar, they had reluctantly concluded – jaguar, or puma, or panther – had been actual, no illusion, and it was this beast they now searched for. They urged people to exercise the greatest vigilance in the area, to report anything, however minor, that might seem related, and at the same time warned us strongly against taking this matter into our own hands. Already vigilante groups had formed, and the police were working to discourage them. Experts were being consulted. Tissue analyses were underway. The situation would shortly be under control.

And of course I doubted him, more than doubted. How could I not? And began to fear. The evidence was overwhelming. The sheep in the village near my sister's. His night prowlings. The claw pattern. And the girl – that, of all things; that it should be
her
– seemed to my abyssal confusion as damning as it was unthinkable. But how could I betray him? It would have been easy, but I could not bring myself to do it. And yet by the same token it was impossible to keep him with me. People
had
seen us together. It was only a matter of time, days, perhaps hours, before one of these reported us. And if he had turned upon
her
, how could I be sure that he would not turn upon me? Neither of us was safe while he was there. Nor could I escape with him. I could only expel him somehow, evict him, and hope that no others, himself included, would lose their lives as a consequence.

The night immediately following the report of the girl's murder I took advantage of his absence to lock the French doors and – something I'd not done since he arrived, but I thought it might convey a message – draw the thick curtains across them. I felt soon his heavy drop to the courtyard, felt his presence on the other side of the glass, felt, like a physical ache, his eyes as they attempted to pierce the fabric, but did nothing. And on the third day, for it took that long, felt – knew, clearly – that he had gone.

For the next two weeks I scoured the papers and listened regularly to the news for further sightings but none were reported. And no further murders. There were now several vigilante groups roaming the night streets armed with sticks, knives, guns, drinking as they went, primed with their drugs of choice, urgent for an encounter, and the city itself was fixated upon the issue, but there was nothing, no sign. I went out only during daylight, and by routes as far from the Gardens as I could. Whenever I arrived home I expected police at my door. But in fact all was suddenly, eerily silent. Until the fifteenth night, when, shortly after twelve, a pounding on my street door flooded me with a sense of imminent disaster.

It was the one-legged man from the Gardens entrance. ‘Come!' he said, nothing more, but from the look in his eyes I knew I had no choice. Immediately I followed, without so much as locking the door, scarcely believing how swiftly he travelled, his crutches pounding onto the pavement, his body swinging through the arc of them, crutches thrust forward and pounding again. In almost no time we were past the entrance and into the dark paths, heading – how was I so sure of it? – towards the clearing by the rotunda.

The howl that came from me as I saw him there even now wakes me, on the worst of nights, as if in a vain attempt to spare me the agony of that last stare, or the loathsome, heart-rending image they had made of him, strung up between the posts at the top of the rotunda stairs, arrows from a crossbow in his side and neck, a piece of wood strapped into his mouth, exposed to their hideous version of the death of the thousand cuts, his sleek fur matted and glistening with blood. I flung myself towards him but some powerful brute grabbed my arm and threw me to the ground, landing at the same time – or was this someone else? – a heavy blow on the back of my skull, as if to bring me instant, almost merciful darkness.

I woke at dawn on the cripple's bench, stinking of alcohol, my head pounding, the ragged ends of a horrid dream clinging to my mind like the remains of someone's excrement. At first I had no sense of where I was or how I had come to be there, but all too quickly it came back. I vomited, between my legs, then staggered to my feet and made my way to the clearing. Nothing. No corpse. No stain between the posts of the rotunda. Nothing. Until, prompted by some heavy rancidness in the air, I fell to my knees, pulled away some rotten boards and crawled under, to see the spooled blood still only partly congealed, felt my hands, my knees in the pool of it.

I sobbed alone there, a long while, but then, coming to myself, realising that I could not risk being seen like that, washed myself as best I could in the duck pond nearby, and made my way home, or rather found myself there, the memory of how I reached it submerged in the questions overwhelming me. How could he have allowed himself to be caught like that? How could it have been that he could not fight them off? How could he have done what he had done? How
could
it have been
he
?

For weeks I was in a stupor. Slept heavily. Drank heavily. Could not work. Correspondence piled up in the hallway. Newspapers were dumped unread by the door. Until eventually there was a headline I could not ignore. Another murder, with the same profile, the same horrid wounds. A nurse, on her way home from a late shift at the Women's Hospital. The panther, again, but not
that
panther, not
my
panther, surely. And I experienced a gruesome re-awakening. Was he still here? Alive and dead at the same time? Had that been him? Had I – it was only now that the chilling possibility occurred to me – been living in the same house in which that general had once lived?

I had all but resolved, in extremis, to take my bizarre, scarcely credible story to the police – to sacrifice
myself
, if that is what it meant – when a further headline arrived, blaring and triumphant. ‘The Panther', for so they now dubbed him, had been caught, a young fitter and turner who worked in a prestige machine-shop on the edge of the city, making custom parts for classic cars. A lone sociopath, obsessed with big cats, who had fashioned for himself an artificial claw – a gruesome photograph was provided – with which to disfigure his victims after he had at first beaten and then throttled them, paying particular attention to their throats to cover signs of their strangulation.

That is thirty years ago. And now, hotly discussed, there is talk of his release. The whole matter stirs again. And I am still alone, still in the same house, still writing, almost seventy. Lingering, for reasons I can't explain. I have my admirers, as I have always had, but am in most common respects quite unsuccessful. Those critics who pay my books any attention say almost to a person that they are beautifully written, even haunting, but that there is always some indefinable thing missing, an unspoken absence around which everything turns. Every year, in late summer, I visit my sister, who also remains alone. And every year, in autumn, I go to the Art Gallery, to stand before
Bestiary
.

I can see him, there in the shadows.

He never looks at me.

The author would like to acknowledge the following prior publications:

‘Napoleon's Roads':
Heat
, Number 2 (new series), 2001, and
The Kenyon Review
, Volume XXV, Number 3/4, 2003.

‘Kabul':
The Best Australian Stories 2002
, ed. Peter Craven, Black Inc., 2002, and
The Literature Quarterly
, Volume 45, Issue 1, 2001

‘A':
Antipodes
, Volume 16, Issue 1, 2002.

‘The Dead': Vagabond Press, 1999 and, translated by Nataša Kampmark, in
Pri
č
e iz Bezvremene Zemlje
(
Tales from a Timeless Country
), an anthology of Contemporary Australian prose (Agora: Zrenjanin, 2012).

‘Crow Theses':
Southerly
, Volume 58, Issue 3, 1998.

‘A Time of Strangers' (from ‘Ten Short Pieces'):
Agenda Magazine
, Volume 41, Issues 1–2, 2005.

‘The Wall':
Heat
, Number 5 (new series), 2003.

‘The Lighthouse Keeper's Dream':
Best Stories Under the Sun
, ed. Michael Wilding, David A. Myers, Central Queensland University Press, 2004.

‘A Traveller's Tale':
Hermes
(University of Sydney Union) ‘Odyssey' issue, 2012.

‘The Cellar':
The Warwick Review,
Volume 6, Issue 2, 2012.

‘Swan':
The Best Australian Stories 2012
, ed. Sonya Hartnett, Black Inc., 2012.

‘The Panther':
The Best Australian Stories 2014
, ed. Amanda Lohrey, Black Inc., 2014.

A number of these stories, translated by
Nataša Miljković, have also appeared in
Atlas unutrašnjih suprotnosti
(
Atlas of the Inner Antipodes
), selected stories of David Brooks (Knjižerna radionica Rašić: Belgrade, 2015).

and to thank:

Madonna Duffy, wonderful publisher, and Jacqueline Blanchard, meticulous editor, and all other staff at UQP, and Tim Curnow, Teja Brooks Pribac, Aashish Kaul, Christopher Cyrill, Felicity Plunkett, Julie Clarke.