by J. P. Pomare
‘He’s your son, Freya.’
Aspen.
AMY
‘WE’RE GOING TO need you to sign a couple of pieces of paper, all very standard.’
Corazzo stands near the bed with his arms crossed. He is always close now, always nearby. When he is not here, I feel the fear again.
A new man with too-small spectacles and tiny hands folded in his lap sits nearby, speaking quickly. When our eyes meet he instantly looks away. I’m finding that happens more and more. Most people don’t maintain eye contact with me, only Corazzo does. It’s like I’m a dangerous animal. They all look away, staring at their hands, or the ceiling, or at something just over my shoulder. This man looks at Corazzo when he is talking to me.
He rises to pass me the clipboard but Corazzo tenses, stepping between us. He takes it from the man and hands it to me.
‘Sign?’ I say. ‘What does he mean?’
‘Write your name,’ Corazzo says, leaning over to jab his finger at the page. ‘On that line.’
‘My name?’
‘It just means you agree with what is written in the statement here.’
I quickly read through both the pages, recognising my own words. All the things I told Corazzo and the others. I write my name. Amy. I hand the clipboard to Corazzo, who passes it back to the man. He leaves without another word.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ I say, looking up at Corazzo. I remember everything Adrienne told me about the outside world. Everyone pretends. Everyone wears a mask.
‘Mean what, Amy?’
‘I didn’t mean to cut that man with the knife. I was scared.’
‘He’s a big boy. He’s patched up now. No harm.’
‘Will you protect me?’ I say.
‘Of course. We all will.’
‘My dad is going to be so angry.’
He sucks his lips. ‘Amy, you look at me. You just keep telling everyone what you have told me, and I will make sure you are safe. We’ve got your Adam, he’s been arrested.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it again.’
‘Well, you will need to do it one more time, okay? But we’ll make it really easy for you. You’ll be in a big courtroom with a lot of people to look out for you. It’s important that you tell them what he did. Otherwise your mum will get the blame. And others.’ He crouches so he’s at my level and looks me straight in the eye. ‘Don’t you worry, Amy. We’re going to practise – you, me and Mrs Bourke. We’ll practise what you need to say over and over until it is easy. That way, when you have to do it in front of everyone in court, you won’t need to think at all.’
Mrs Bourke comes and sits with me most days. When we were first introduced, she smiled at me. It was a smile so warm and broad that her eyes almost closed. I tried the smile on myself. It felt good.
Corazzo is never far away. Sometimes he goes out to help at the Clearing, but then he comes back to see me to tell me what has happened. He reports back about my brothers and sisters. Mrs Bourke asks me questions and I do my best to answer. I know it is easier if I answer the questions the way she wants me to, if I tell her that I’m feeling better and that I can see that Adrienne is not really my mother. I know that if I act like everybody else, if I greet them with a smile, if I sit still and don’t try to escape, they won’t keep such a close eye on me. So that’s what I do. I try to act like them. I act the way people do out in the world, just how Adrienne would want.
‘You can’t protect me,’ I say to Corazzo now. ‘You think you can but you can’t.’
FREYA
Thirty hours missing
‘CAN I … can I see him?’
‘That’s not the best idea.’
Aspen was here. It was Aspen camping out. What did he want? To meet me? To watch me and know me? To punish me?
I feel something a lot like sadness deep inside. I let a few tears slip from my eyes. McVeigh watches me, her head slightly tilted. I dab at the tears with my sleeve.
‘I can’t just sit here – I need to be doing something to help find Billy.’
‘I’ll have to arrest you if you try to leave,’ the detective counters.
‘Can you at least give me some space?’ I plead. ‘Just an hour or so to clear my head?’
The sun is descending behind the tree line. ‘I can’t leave you alone.’
‘Am I a suspect?’
‘A suspect in what exactly?’
‘Do you think I’ve done something to Billy? Do you think I’m involved?’
McVeigh touches her ear and licks her lips – a tell, she is about to lie or she’s simply nervous about something else. ‘Can I be honest?’
‘Please.’
‘The media are all over your history. They know that you were abusive in the past.’
‘With Aspen? That was Wayne lying. I was— ’
‘Not Aspen but Billy.’
‘Abusive to Billy?’ I think about the black eye, the broken arm, the bruises on Billy’s wrist and his missing teeth. Then again I feel that vacuous pain inside, I miss him so much.
‘The police believe you may have a case to answer.’
I can hear Rocky scratching at the bedroom door. I look at McVeigh, who nods, then rise and cross the lounge to let him out.
Maybe Aspen only wanted to meet me. If I hadn’t been so curt and dismissive when I first encountered him near the river maybe we could have talked.
‘Is it okay if I use my phone?’
McVeigh sucks her lips. ‘Sure.’
I pick up my phone to text Wayne.
I found Aspen. He will be at the police station soon. Long story.
The sun is setting. I know it’s only a matter of time until they arrest and charge me. Who can help me? Corazzo. I text him.
I’ve been set up. The police have got my prints on pliers that they think have been used to pull out one of Billy’s teeth. They think I’ve got a history of abuse. I don’t know what is coming next.
Corazzo’s reply is almost instant. They’ve got someone in the police, Freya. Be careful.
My heart begins to thump. McVeigh is watching me. I don’t let the mask slip to show her my suspicion; I shape my face to casual indifference. I bow my head and flick my thumb up the page as if scrolling through Instagram, but in the meantime, I slide my eyes sideways. Through the kitchen window, I see the Disco, parked only ten or fifteen metres away.
They won’t let me leave my house, I type.
A reporter is holding one finger to her ear and talking into a microphone at the top of the driveway; she must be doing a live cross. I stand up, walk over to the kitchen window and drop the blinds.
Corazzo messages back. NOT NORMAL. Who is the cop?
McVeigh.
Get out. Run. Go somewhere no one will find you. Then let me know and I’ll come to meet you.
‘Are you texting someone?’ McVeigh asks.
I glance up. ‘Oh, just my brother.’
‘He’s in Bali, isn’t he?’
‘How do you know that?’
‘It’s my job to know.’
‘Of course,’ I say. I take my teacup and go back to the kitchen. ‘Are you sure you don’t want some tea yourself?’ I ask.
‘I’m more of a coffee drinker. Have you got anything else?’
‘I’ve got kombucha.’
‘Alright, I’ll try a kombucha.’
There’s only a third of the bottle left. I pour it all into a glass and take it back to the table.
She sips. ‘That’s … sweet.’ She takes another sip. She blinks rapidly, licks her lips.
I lean against the bench watching her, thinking about Corazzo’s message. Get out now. She drains the glass then looks at me. Her eyes seem to be having trouble focusing. Suddenly, she pushes herself to her feet.
‘What is it?’ I ask.
She holds herself up over the table, blinking hard.
‘Jennifer?’
‘What did you do?’
‘What do you mean? I haven’t done anything.�
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She blinks again, her eyelids drooping. ‘You drugged me,’ she slurs.
‘That’s impossible,’ I say. ‘You saw me pour it.’ And then it dawns on me. I had drunk a glass of kombucha from this bottle just before I fell into a deep sleep the day Billy was taken. It had tasted sweeter than usual. Whoever took him knew my routine, knew I drank a glass with breakfast every day. Knew I gave Billy a glass too. It was all planned. ‘No,’ I tell her, ‘it wasn’t me, I swear.’
She takes her radio from her belt. ‘I’m calling this in.’
‘No,’ I say, frantic. ‘You can’t. I didn’t do anything – I’m being set up!’ I have to stop her from making the call. ‘Rocky, defend!’
Rocky leaps forwards, his entire body tense and bristling.
‘If you move, he will attack you.’
The hand holding the radio begins to tremble. I see her throat rise as she swallows.
‘If I give the command,’ I continue, ‘he will latch on to you and he won’t let go.’
She’s watching my face, struggling to keep her eyes open, her breathing slow.
I’ve been played by someone who knows my habits, can predict my every move. Someone who can ensure that all the evidence points to my guilt. I reach for the keys to the Disco, then hit the master switch for the roller shutters.
‘Freya!’ McVeigh says, her voice urgent but faint. ‘What the hell is this?’
Rocky takes a step towards her, growling.
The shutter over the door is getting lower and lower. I bend and step backwards through it.
‘Rocky, here now.’
He bolts towards me, just squeezing through the gap in the door before it is fully closed. McVeigh is entombed within my home. I run to the electrical mains at the side of the house and kill the power.
The cameras at the top of the driveway are trained on me, avidly watching my every move. They machine gun their shutter clicks.
I climb into the Disco, leaving Rocky outside – with any luck Derek will collect him – I gun the motor, and the Disco shoots up the driveway. The reporters scatter as I fly towards them.
My mind is racing as I try to put the pieces together. Henrik has escaped, but he can’t have taken Billy alone. If this has something to do with Blackmarsh, there’s only one place to go. I set out towards Eucalyptus Acres.
UnCULTured Podcast – Episode 37
‘Breaking Blackmarsh: The disappearance of Sara McFetridge’
On a sunny summer afternoon in February 1997, the small figure of Sara McFetridge was seen rounding the bend less than a football field’s length from her home. Sara had a skip in her step; it was a Tuesday, which meant she and her grandfather, Tim Yule, would be eating fish and chips for dinner. Less than a minute later, Sara was snatched from the side of the road and never seen again.
Today, we are in Victoria, Australia to take a closer look at what really happened.
It wasn’t until eight days after the disappearance, when a peculiar case landed on the desk of Chief Inspector Dominic Corazzo, that a break in the investigation came: seven-year-old Sara had been abducted and murdered by the secretive Blackmarsh cult.
Sara’s body was never recovered, despite the tireless efforts of search parties scouring the North Tullawarra National Park. They searched the seam of native bush that runs all the way up to Wallaby Station, twenty kilometres north of the Clearing where the cult was based.
Sara, described as inquisitive and clever by those who knew her, had made several attempts to escape, facing increasingly cruel punishments.
‘When Masters decided to kill Sara, it was not in anger but in a move calculated to instil a sense of consequence in the other children,’ explains Andrea Bourke, one of the psychologists who worked closely with the children rescued in the subsequent raid of the cult’s headquarters. ‘It was a sophisticated brainwashing regime; he knew exactly what he was doing down to the very last detail. These people were extremely intelligent. I mean, Adrienne Smith-Atkins served only two months in a cushy jail cell. They abused these children for fifteen years and she gets two months.’
Even though police had a reliable statement from one of the children who had witnessed the torture and death of Sara McFetridge, they feared it wasn’t enough.
‘It’s difficult to get a prosecution after a certain amount of time has passed, and it’s almost impossible when no body and very little physical evidence is recovered.’
That’s retired detective Dominic Corazzo.
It was Corazzo who first encountered Amy Smith-Atkins, a teenager who fled the cult after Sara’s death, and his early work on the case gave prosecutors a real chance of securing a conviction. Amy was the only one of almost a dozen abused children deemed fit to stand trial. This is me speaking with him.
‘Why was Amy the one to testify?’
‘We made a decision that Amy had to be the one. There was something different about her. She could keep it together and was the only one we felt we could ethically put in front of the defence lawyers.’
‘Did any of the other children contradict Amy’s testimony in any way?’
‘Well, there are always going to be inconsistencies when you’re relying on the memory of ten extraordinarily damaged children.’
‘I read the book about the Blackmarsh group, Dark Paradise, which contains extracts from Amy’s journal. Pretty confronting stuff in there.’
‘Oh yeah. I saw it first-hand. Burns, cuts, broken bones – you name it.’
‘And Adrienne Smith-Atkins … was she more involved than people think?’
‘No, I don’t think she was. She was away travelling much of the time and was largely oblivious to what was going on in her absence. We got our guy.’
It should also be noted here that, as a result of the Blackmarsh investigation, a separate task force was set up to investigate police corruption in Victoria. Although no charges were laid, many links between the Blackmarsh cult and members of the police were discovered.
‘Were there Blackmarshers within the police force?’
‘The balance of probability suggests there were.’
FREYA
Thirty-one hours missing
I ROAR OUT onto the road. For a moment I imagine Adam standing there, his beard scraggly, black hair curling about his ears. What does he look like now? I wonder. I blink the vision away as I cross the dip over the drain. A dozen or more cars are parked along the narrow verge.
I switch my phone off and the radio on, scrolling through static until I find a talkback station. As I near the town, a police car flies past me heading in the opposite direction, back towards my house, its lights flashing and siren blaring. I hold my breath, watching in the rear-view mirror, expecting to see red brake lights, but it continues on, disappearing around the bend. They didn’t recognise my car.
My gaze still on the road behind me, I notice headlights turn on in the twilight; there’s a car following me. I frown. I drive on, my eyes flicking between the road in front and the rear-view mirror. It can’t be a reporter; they weren’t expecting me to leave the house and they were too slow, too stunned to follow. It can’t be the cops either. The car tailing me is staying back, not crowding me; if it was the police they would be in pursuit mode, ordering me to pull me over.
Posts tick by at the roadside, the white centre line flickers, sliding ahead like a lit fuse. I know I’m driving too fast.
Adam, I think. Always Adam.
Ghost gums line the road, anaemic limbs reaching out above me. It reminds me of the road down to the Clearing. It isn’t so far from here but of course no one would be there. I’m sure some people visit. Those fanatics online. They brag about the memorabilia they have collected – a hairbrush, notepad, pillows – all purported to have come from the Clearing. Some still search out in the bush for Asha’s remains, hoping to stumble upon them, as though they’re better equipped than hundreds of police and search teams.
I once took a perverse sort of pleasure in reading those Blac
kmarsh forums deep into the night. It was like reading the diary of an ex-lover. I’d scroll through the conspiracy theories, marvelling at both how close they were to the truth about what happened and how far off, how inane, how fantastical. Occasionally a thread would descend into the cobwebbed corners of the darkest fantasies. Orgies of hate. Sex. Rape. Murder. Fantasies projecting onto each other. Want to know how to find a psychopath? Easy. Download a Tor browser and search almost any forum, you’re likely to find at least one. The challenge is separating those who wish for violence from those few insane enough to actually perpetrate it.
I round a gentle bend, the needle drifting towards one-twenty. The lights of the trailing car recede into the distance. I exhale and ease my foot off the accelerator.
Adrienne only wanted blonde, blue-eyed, pale children because she wanted to create a family in her own image. It was the ultimate act of narcissism, not some Aryan dream. The prophecy was false, there was no plan to save the human race; it was all just plain narcissism. Adrienne convinced all of us at the Clearing that if she died the world would end and the only way to save it was to find her twelve perfect children. In moments of weakness I wonder if she really is my mum. Maybe, like the others, I was stolen away. But the truth is her blood flows in my veins. I know I am different. I was there first, before she set about collecting the rest of the twelve.
The police were never able to pin anything substantial on Adrienne; she escaped with only a couple of minor charges. She could still travel the world freely. It must have killed the police. Perhaps her dementia is just another deceit. Perhaps that’s what I inherited from her: the power to wear the skin of another. But it can’t be; some things you can’t fake: the vagueness in her milky eyes, the lapses into confusion, the rambling … Not even I’m that good at being someone else. I know her memory really is failing and soon I will be free of her.
I pull off the highway and take a back road up through the hills. I turn down a dusty track, cutting through farmland, then turn again and begin to descend.
Death makes life real, Adrienne told me once. There were other deaths out there. Deaths that would never be reported. They were not memorable enough. Adult deaths. Deaths from infection, accidental drowning, deep sleep therapy. Oversupply of insulin. Then the bodies disappeared, and we never spoke about them again.