The Broken Ones (49 page)

Oscar lay on the cold, damp concrete, listening.

There was no sound except the ringing in his ears and the harsh, fast gasps of his own breaths. His heart pumped pain around his body. He had only one round left in the gun.

He held it tight on his chest, pointed at the door, for a long, long time.

Over the shaking barrel of the .22, he peered carefully out the ugly hole wrenched in the toilet door. Misty gray light of early morning shone through the basement windows. He could see the damp floor, the workbench with its scattered mess, the twisted crumple of the gun cabinet. In the middle of the room was the dead boy. He gave a small smile and raised his thumb.

Jon found him seated at the dining table, drinking from a bottle of cooking sherry he’d discovered at the back of the pantry.

The big man looked around at the smashed chairs, the shattered cupboards, the loaded rifle in front of Oscar.

“Oscar,” Jon said carefully. “What the fuck?”

Oscar shrugged stiffly.

“What happened?” Jon asked. “I couldn’t get you on your phone. You weren’t home. What the
fuck
?”

Oscar watched Jon turn slowly, surveying the damage. He didn’t
know what to say. In the basement, he had found the rest of the .22 cartridges, fully loaded the magazine, and gone through the house. There were no feathers. There was no lingering smell of the crypt. No sign of forced entry. Only a drunk, distraught man who’d just lost his father and his partner and his job, and a trail of destruction.

“You’re bleeding,” Jon said, looking at Oscar’s shoulder, shirt, bare feet.

Oscar nodded again and offered the grappa bottle to Jon, who batted it away.

“What happened, man?”

Oscar wondered if he should tell him. Tell him about the symbol, about Haig, about the missing children and the altar and the Burney Relief and the owls as big as Alsatians.

But he knew how it would sound.

“I drank too much,” he whispered. “It’s nothing.”

Jon lifted him. “I’m taking you to Emergency.”

Oscar shook his head, and nausea swelled in his gut.

“I’ll call you later.”

Oscar tidied the house. Straightened the chairs. Swept up the broken glass and the splintered wood. And shivered the whole time. He sobered quickly and rode home.

He was sprinkling salt into a shallow saucepan of water over the gas ring when he realized that she was behind him. He could almost feel her eyes wandering over the puncture wounds and shallow slices in his bare shoulders.

“What have you done now?” she asked.

He turned around.

Zoe stood in the doorway, her bags in her hands, undecided. Four paces behind her, the dead boy stood watching, too. The sunlight was harsh.

“You should go,” he said quietly.

Her eyes narrowed, and she stepped into the kitchen, putting down the bags.

“What happened?” she asked.

He shook his head. She made him sit. She poured some salt water into a bowl, dipped a cloth in it, blew gently to cool it, and dabbed at the wounds. He gritted his teeth.

“What did this?” she asked.

“You have to leave the city, I think,” he said.

Her pursed lips seemed to say that she was considering the same thing. She dipped again, and the water stained pink.

Oscar looked up. The dead boy was closer. He was looking not at Oscar but at Zoe. He extended a finger and cut a
Z
into the air. He made an
O
with fingers and thumb, then pulled their tips tight toward his pale palm.

Oscar stopped her hands and looked at her.

“Do you have any deaf kids at Elverly?” he asked.

“Why?”

“Do you sign?”

“A little.”

Oscar repeated the three letters the dead boy had made.

Zoe raised an eyebrow. “Cute. I didn’t know you signed.”

Oscar felt like a fool. “I don’t,” he said, and looked at the dead boy. “Who are you?”

The dead boy’s wormhole eyes seemed to fix on Oscar’s moving lips, reading them. He frowned, and Oscar could see his chin tremble. Then his head jerked and his hands rose and began to move. Oscar awkwardly emulated every movement: he patted his chest, tapped two fingers of each hand together, then held up crossed fingers.

Zoe watched and spoke. “My. Name. Is …”

The dead boy licked his lips and signed each letter. Oscar copied.

“J-a-m-y. B-r-u-m.”

Oscar stared. “Hello, Jamy,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

The dead boy nodded and gave a small smile.

“You were deaf?” he asked the boy. “You read lips?”

Jamy nodded shyly. Then his hands rose again.

Oscar copied; Zoe interpreted.

“I. Am. S-o-r-r-y.”

Jamy turned his empty eyes to the floor. Outside, sunlight made the windows bright and the boy seemed to glow. Motes passed through him.

“Sorry for what?” Oscar asked.

The dead boy’s hands rose and performed a graceful, simple pantomime. One hand was a car. The other a person. The car swerved. The person fell.

Oscar felt a strange lightness in his chest. He felt empty, almost weightless. He looked at the boy with the downcast, horrible eyes.

“That wasn’t your fault,” he said.

The boy shrugged.

Then he seemed to steel himself. He raised his hands and signed again.

“And,” Zoe interpreted.

Jamy’s hands fell mute at his waist.

“And? And what, Jamy?”

The dead boy pursed his lips. Chin still low and narrow shoulders hanging, he signed some more.

Zoe said, “Let. Me. Show. You.”

Chapter
36

Z
oe’s arms tightened around him as he took each corner. Every pothole caused the bike to shudder and pain to spark in his body. Steam rose from the wet asphalt, and the sun flared on the glass towers of the city. Every time Oscar rounded a corner, Jamy would be on the side of the road or at the lights ahead, standing still, one hand pointing the way. Oscar would see Jamy retreat in the rear-vision mirror and the next moment when he looked ahead, there the boy would be again.

Traffic was sparse, and thinned further as they wound past the light-industrial buildings of the Valley down into the riverside suburbs. The sun was a harsh but heatless winter light that made him squint.

Jamy appeared on a corner near a smashed telephone box. He raised a hand and gestured for Oscar to slow and turn down into a side street. As he passed the boy, Oscar could see his thin, pale fingers shaking.

They stopped on the verge of an overgrown park. Oscar knew it, though he’d not been here for years. He, Sabine, Jon, and Leonie had visited once for a boozy Sunday picnic. Above the thigh-high grass rode the blackened tips of children’s play equipment, scorched by a long-ago fire. Oscar and Zoe dismounted. Jamy waited in the grass and gestured for Oscar to follow. Oscar looked at Zoe; she nodded.

The boy’s passage didn’t disturb the grass as he led the way. Oscar plowed through it, feeling his feet squelch as the sodden ground let cold liquid run into his shoes. Zoe followed.

Ahead, on the far side of the lake of grass, was a row of massive fig trees. Oscar recalled how inviting they had once looked, their wide canopies offering cool shade under which picnickers could lounge while
their children climbed the friendly limbs. But now the trees were untended and wild: their domelike canopies were lushly dark, and their lowest branches hung down almost to the tips of the thigh-high grass. Beyond them, the river.

Jamy walked toward the third tree and cast a look back to be sure Oscar was following. The boy neither rushed nor tarried, a condemned man’s pace. The ground smelled spoiled, overrich with moisture and rot. Oscar glanced back toward the road. There were no cars.

Jamy didn’t duck but passed through the low-hanging coins of leaves into shadow. Oscar stooped. As he moved into the tree’s dark shadow, the lush grass gave way to stragglier yellow blades and eventually a mulchy floor of damp twigs, spongy rotten leaves, and stands of mushrooms. They were now in a private semidarkness that smelled of woody damp. Massive branches as gray as slate rose into a nightlike canopy; the few tiny glimpses of sky became the stars. Out of the sunlight, the air was cold. Jamy waited.

The trunk rose from the ground like a giant, fluted wrist twelve feet wide; from it struck a wild spiral of huge roots, each emerging from the trunk at shoulder height, writhing and curling out to a good ten paces from the trunk before plunging down into the black carpet of leaves. These buttress walls of live wood were covered with graffiti, a thousand carved initials, but none was fresh. In toward the trunk, the tall roots formed twisting trenches that seemed to descend to burrows and secret places.

Jamy led them toward the trunk.

“It smells,” Zoe said quietly.

It was worse than that. The air was becoming thick with sweet rot. Somewhere, flies buzzed.

Jamy stepped into one of the tunnel-like alcoves between the roots and waited.

Oscar reached into a pocket and found his flashlight. Its circle of light was shockingly bright in the gloom. He looked up at Zoe.

“I’m coming with you,” she said.

They went into the strange tunnel, crouching where a loop of root as thick as his thigh curled over its sisters. Oscar played the flashlight down the slick passage of wood, but it curled away into darkness. He touched the smooth bark to steady himself; it had the uncomfortable feel of animal hide. The buzzing grew louder, like the hum from a
midnight hive. They stooped lower, duck-walking into the twist and downward into the earth. The smell grew stronger: spoiled meat.

The roots now rode in all directions, forming a warped, slick shaft that was almost erotic yet utterly repulsive and claustrophobic. Things with many legs scuttled away from Oscar’s flashlight beam. They were forced to crawl. Finally, the tunnel stopped. A metal dinner tray blocked the way; on it was printed a sketch of Melbourne’s Carlton Gardens. The stench was almost overpowering in the clogged air. Oscar’s stomach spasmed. He looked around at Zoe; she nodded grimly—do it. He gritted his teeth and pulled aside the tray.