by Ingrid Fry
She smiled, revealing perfect teeth. ‘Good afternoon. I apologise for disturbing you, and calling unannounced. I know how annoying it can be. I am looking for Maggie, the daughter of Professor McLaine. I’m an old friend of his.’
She took out a photograph from the depths of her cape, and held it in front of me. ‘This is us in my dressing room after a concert.’
My psychic radar was on high alert. ‘Danger, Will Robinson, danger!’ The Lost in Space robot inside my head was waving its arms.
Her features were powerful—strong jaw, black eyebrows, and an expression that was knowing, proud and haughty. Her body, from what I could tell, seemed slim but muscular. Androgynous, I reckoned.
‘You’re Maggie,’ she stated.
‘Ah, um, yes. And you are?’
‘I,’ she said, pausing for effect, ‘am The Maestro.’
‘The Maestro!’ I said loudly. ‘You’re the Maestro.’
Jason scrabbled around in the background clearing the table.
‘Yes, indeed,’ she said, looking at me oddly. ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘Ah, no, sorry I don’t. I’ve never heard the Prof, I mean Dad, mention your name.’
‘May I come in?’
‘Sorry, of course,’ I said, meaning exactly the opposite.
I opened the door and she swooshed in, black shiny high heel boots clicking on the floorboards. I hoped her heels wouldn’t mark them.
She reached out to pat Boo. ‘What a lovely dog.’
Boo growled and drew back.
‘Sorry, she takes a while to feel comfortable with people.’ Especially Amazonian sized folk wearing swishing capes.
She swept up to Jason and grasped his hand. ‘And who have we here?’
‘Jason, my partner.’
‘Mmmm, so handsome and such a powerful handshake! I adore that in a man.’
I rolled my eyes behind her, and she wheeled around. I pretended to be looking at something on the ceiling.
‘How can we help?’ I asked. ‘Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?’
‘Green tea would be lovely. Gyokuro if you have some.’
Jeez, she didn’t want much. It was one of the most expensive teas in the world—one of Dad’s favourites—and, yes, I did happen to have some.
‘Sorry, only got Japanese Sencha.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Fine.’
Oh, beaut. Now I had two people who could raise their eyebrows at me. I glanced across at Jason, and, as expected, he raised one too. I couldn’t help but giggle.
‘So, Maestro, how did you know the professor?’ Jason asked, as I clattered around in the kitchen.
‘He was, as I’m sure you know, a patron of the arts. He had a particular affection for classical music. We met at an after-concert soirée. I was the conductor at the concert, but wasn’t keen on attending the after party. They can be frightfully boring, depending on who’s there. And indeed, it was frightfully boring, until Maggie’s father and I gravitated to each other. We clicked instantly and remained firm friends from then on.’
‘Did you know the prof was musical and played electric guitar?’ Jason asked.
‘My word, yes, he was marvelous! I remember him quite drunk one night and he played me Love You till Tuesday, an absolutely silly ditty written by David Bowie back in the late sixties. I can still see him bobbing around the room singing ‘Daa daa da dum, Daa daa da dum.’
I listened from the kitchen and felt like I wanted to be sick. I couldn’t get my head around Dad being with this woman. She was entirely different to Mum. And Dad’s behaviour—drunk, playing her songs—it seemed out of character. He obviously met The Maestro after Mum died, and I knew Mum would want him to be happy and move on, but it shocked me, and really, I was shocked at myself for being shocked. I guess I’d never imagined Dad with someone else.
The Maestro tilted her head and scrutinised me. ‘Do you have his guitar, Maggie?’
‘Sure do. It’s a Gibson Les Paul Custom, absolutely gorgeous.’
I served the tea and we sipped it in awkward silence. The Maestro drifted off into a world of her own, gazing with unfocused eyes at the nearby mirror. She made us all jump when she abruptly banged the table. ‘There are no more developments regarding the whereabouts of your father?’
This was said more as a statement than a question.
‘No, nothing,’ I said.
‘Dear Maggie, I have deliberated long and hard as to whether I should share this information with you. Time has passed, and as it appears your father is lost to us, I think it is only right I enlighten you. I would always keep his confidences, but in this situation, I think it’s appropriate to share, which is why I came here today.’
My heart was beating in my throat, and my throat constricted to strangle my heart. Who was this woman and why didn’t Dad ever mention her to me? It sounded like they were pretty cosy, with him playing guitar to her an’ all. Mum would be spinning in her grave.
I realised I’d been tearing the edge of a magazine into tiny strips. The Maestro watched me with a kindly face and soft eyes.
‘Maggie, it’s difficult for you. I understand. We can do this another time perhaps?’
‘It’s fine. Go ahead.’
Jason leant across the table and rubbed the back of my neck. ‘I’ll make us all a fresh cup of tea. Wait, better still, it’s getting close to the cocktail hour. How about a drink of something?’
His suggestion was the best idea I’d heard all day. ‘A glass of bubbles please.’
‘Same for me, please,’ the Maestro said.
Jason grinned, doing his best to lighten the mood. ‘And one VB for me, coming right up. Mags, where are the champagne glasses?’
Jason knew full well where everything was kept. ‘Use Dad’s crystal ones. I’ll show you where they are.’
We buried our heads in the glass cabinet, and Jason whispered, ‘Do we tell her about the baton?’
‘No, not yet. There’s something dodgy about her.’
‘The cape’s dodgy, and she’s eccentric for sure, but she seems okay to me. I can see why the Prof and her would get on.’
‘Yeah, whatever,’ I whispered, making my way back to the table.
‘Okay,’ the Maestro said, ‘there is no easy way to say this, so I’ll tell you what the Professor told me. He was in CERN for a while, as you probably know, assisting on a special project, plus observing and advising on other projects.’
‘Yes, he kept us in the loop about that,’ I said.
‘It’s a long story, but I’ll be as succinct as I can. The Professor rang late one night, sometime after his return to Australia, asking if he could visit me. He seemed anxious, not his usual jolly self. Of course, come around, I said.
‘When the Professor arrived at my door, he stank of petrol, was streaked with blood, and was pale and visibly upset.’
‘Blood streaked!’ I said.
‘Wait. I’ll explain from the beginning. He told me that during an inspection of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, he’d spotted a cockroach near one of the detectors.’
Jason and I locked eyes. There was a strange tingling all over my body and I knew I’d turned white. She’s telling me my goddamn vision.
‘Are you all right, Maggie? You don’t look so well.’
‘I’m fine, thanks. Keep going.’
‘Anyway, he caught the cockroach, and his colleague gave him a cigarette packet to put it in. They didn’t like to kill things and planned to release it later. He thought it was an unusual specimen, and wondered how it could have survived in the harsh environment.
‘Being slightly absent minded, he completely forgot about the cigarette packet, and the cockroach, which he’d tucked away on the inside of his jacket.
‘When he returned to Australia, he attended the Australian Synchrotron to complete some work. Whilst taking a break in the tearoom, he searched for a handkerchief in his jacket, and discovered the cigarette packet, and the cockroach, which seemed aliv
e and well. He put the packet on the table, made a cup of coffee, and was then called away to take a phone call.’
The Maestro paused to take a sip of champagne.
‘In the meantime, a young lab assistant came in to take a break. When the Professor returned to the tearoom and opened the door, he saw the lab assistant sitting on the chair with the cigarette packet in his hand. The assistant, and this is how he described it to me, “Imploded before my eyes, vapourised in a silent whorl of blackness that sucked out all the dust and debris in the room”.’
Jason gave me a knowing look. ‘Crikey.’
‘In a split-second, the assistant vanished, and the only thing remaining was an extraordinarily clean tearoom, and a large black cockroach sitting on the chair where the assistant had been.’
Jason and I locked eyes again. I felt unsteady, as if all the air had been sucked out of the room.
Cockroach. The word filled me with dread. My waking dream must have been a premonition, but it was much more. I still sensed the insect in my brain, scurrying around in my skull, plucking at neurons for the fun of it. And the dust eating blackness she talked about. Was that the Dark Force? I squeezed my skull between the heels of my hands (it helped to abate the scurrying sensation) and turned my attention back to the Maestro.
‘The Professor was in absolute shock of course. What was he to do? Who was he to tell? There were no security cameras in the room, so who would even believe him? They’d think he was mad, or worse, had murdered the poor assistant.
‘The Professor wrapped the cockroach in a paper towel, cleaned the room of his fingerprints, and left. All the while he hoped he wouldn’t disappear into a black hole as well.’
I felt sick. Jason must have noticed. ‘Are you all right?’
I nodded feebly.
‘Shall I continue?’ the Maestro asked.
‘Yes, please.’
‘Now, where was I? Oh, yes. On the way to my apartment, in need of a stiff drink, he stopped at a bottle shop to buy some brandy. Two customers in the shop became upset and aggressive, and pushed him into a rack of bottles. Luckily the proprietor intervened.
‘By this point, he hadn’t eaten for hours, so he stopped at a supermarket. There, he noticed a man breaking off expensive vine tomatoes from the vine and substituting them as ordinary tomatoes. He challenged the man’s behaviour. The man lunged at him, dug his fingernails into the Professor’s face, and raked them all the way to his chin. Apparently, the man’s face was so twisted with rage he didn’t look human. The man fled, chased by one of the supermarket attendants who had witnessed what happened. The Professor was in shock and bleeding profusely. Luckily, the perpetrator was caught and arrested. Police at the local station cleaned up the Professor’s face before he headed on his way.’
‘Poor Dad.’
‘That’s unbelievable,’ Jason said.
‘Shall I keep going?’ the Maestro asked, with a concerned look. ‘You’ve turned pale.’
‘It’s normal for me. Keep going.’
‘The Professor stopped for petrol at a convenience store. A group of young people were hanging around in the shop. They became violent towards him, dragged him outside, bound him in a bowser hose and soaked him with petrol. One of the youths was searching for a cigarette lighter when the police happened by and rescued him in the nick of time.
‘The Professor said at the police station that the offenders were upset and dazed. They insisted it was totally out of their character to behave in such a way. The Professor believed them and didn’t want to press any charges, much to the disbelief of the police.
‘Your dad continued to my apartment, and in the course of the relatively short trip, he was subjected to five episodes of road rage.
‘The worst occurred when stationary at a red light. A smartly dressed woman in a black Maserati screeched to a halt in the lane next to him. She opened her car door, extended two well-turned legs garnished with black, shiny high heels, and walked to the back of her car to retrieve something from the boot. The Professor, who admitted he’d been rather fixated on her shapely legs, thought she’d retrieved an umbrella. The illusion was violently shattered as his windscreen imploded. The woman had a crowbar, which she used to smash in every window of the Professors car, in record time, despite the constraints of a tight skirt and high heels.’
‘Impossible,’ Jason said. ‘A friend and I tried to smash in the windows of a car with a crowbar, and it’s not that easy. The crowbar kept bouncing off, and when the window did shatter, my friend cut his hand from all the glass.’
I looked at Jason with wide eyes. ‘You smashed a car window with a crowbar?’
‘Yeah, relax, Max. It was an old wreck at Ash’s place. Maestro, there’s no way a woman like the one you described, could’ve done so much damage in such a short time, if at all.’
Go, Jace. I knew he was looking for loopholes, and this one seemed big enough to jump through.
‘My dear, I would beg to differ. It’s exactly what the Professor told me. The woman had superhuman strength; it was as though she was possessed. Her face was ugly with rage, and she did indeed cut herself, but it didn’t slow her one iota.
‘Anyway, continuing on,’ she said, dismissing Jason’s assertion, ‘it was three in the morning when he finally arrived at my apartment. At that stage, he said he wouldn’t have been surprised if I had turned on him with a meat cleaver.’
‘Oh, poor Dad,’ I said, and burst into tears.
Jason appeared to be about to laugh.
‘Jason!’
‘Sorry, Mags, sorry, totally wrong. But the story sounds so insane it’s funny, really.’
He turned to the Maestro in an attempt to divert my furious attention away from him and his insensitivity. ‘You’ve got to be making this up.’
‘There you have it!’ the Maestro said. ‘It’s exactly the dilemma the Professor found himself in. Who was going to believe such a story? The Professor knew the cockroach was involved with the assistant’s disappearance. He discussed numerous theories, his preferred, being the cockroach had absorbed radiation and microscopic black holes from the Hadron Collider. This didn’t kill it, but transformed it into an entity which triggers and magnifies the negative psychic energy of human beings, specifically, anger and rage. He thought its food was the negative emotional energy generated by humans.’
‘So why didn’t you kill the Prof with a meat cleaver?’ Jason asked.
She smiled. ‘Probably because I don’t own a meat cleaver. But seriously, I don’t know. Maybe because I loved him? I do know wherever we went with the roach we were subjected to unprovoked human rage.’
‘Where’s the roach now? Did you kill it?’ Jason asked.
‘I wish. We were out for dinner one night, and left it at my apartment, sealed in a Tupperware container. On our return, the container, the cockroach and my two dogs had vanished. I haven’t seen them since.’
Boo sat up startled and gave a loud ‘Phhht!’
‘That’s awful,’ Jason said, his face in serious mode.
The Maestro’s eyes filled with tears. I went over and put my arms around her. She smelt of lavender.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ I said.
‘Since then, the crime rate in my area has tripled, and a woman was stabbed and killed right outside, simply over a parking space dispute. Plus, there’s no dust in my apartment anymore, not a fluff, dust bunny or dog hair.’
‘Nasty,’ Jason said. ‘You’ve got to have dust. I’d be getting the hell out of your apartment.’
Suddenly, the Maestro didn’t look so Maestro’ish or powerful anymore. In fact, she appeared crumpled and sad.
‘So, this entity’s primary purpose, other than absorbing people and small creatures, is to trigger and magnify people’s inherent anger and pain, which then generates more anger and pain, literally a vicious circle, which keeps it fed with what it likes,’ Jason said. ‘Hmmm, things are starting to add up.’
The Maestro glanced sharply at
him. ‘What things?’
I flashed Jason a look. ‘The things Jason said, in response to the things you said.’
A raised eyebrow on each side of me was an apt response to that bit of stupidity.
‘You don’t trust me, do you?’ the Maestro said.
‘No, sorry, I don’t. I don’t know you well enough to trust you. I take a while to trust people.’
‘Fair enough, I understand. Where do you want to go from here?’
‘Another drink would be good. And pizza. Would you like to stay for pizza, Maestro? It would give us an opportunity to get to know each other better.’
‘Lovely, thank you.’
Jason ordered the pizzas and we amused ourselves looking at the pizza app on the iPad.
‘The app says the doorbell’s going to ring in three seconds,’ Jason said.
We all counted, ‘One, two, three…’
Ding. Dong. Right on cue.
We settled ourselves around the table and began hoeing into the pizzas. Well, Jason and I did the hoeing, the Maestro ate in a more refined manner.
‘You know, your dad has a similar rock,’ the Maestro said, munching a piece of thin-crust gourmet pizza, and pointing in the direction of the sideboard.
‘Rock?’ Jason asked.
She pointed. ‘Yes, the one on the middle shelf there.’
Jason and I turned to look, and there was the crystal sphere. Jason had forgotten to put it away with the rest of the things. Good one.
‘It’s exactly the same as his, except yours has lost its luster. The cockroach hated his rock, you know. When the professor put the roach near it, the roach went ballistic. As soon as he moved the roach away, it settled down. Where did you get it?’
I pointed to the bowl on the coffee table. ‘Boo collects rocks. She brings in choice specimens from the backyard as gifts for us. She brought that in too. It’s the largest in her collection.’
‘And what about the feather in the bowl?’ the Maestro asked.
‘Another of Boo’s obsessions,’ I said. ‘She normally doesn’t collect them though; she just rolls on them. She’s quite particular about the types of feathers she chooses. We believe the one over there is an eagle feather. Boo rolled on it, picked it up carefully by the quill, and carried it all the way home to add to her collection.’