by Iain Ryan
At the front of the room, an old man waits by an elaborate black booth. As you walk down the centre aisle, he disappears behind a curtain on the side of the booth and a low murmur floats out. A minute later, the old man reappears, bows to the altar and shuffles past.
‘Yes?’ says a voice. It comes from the booth.
‘Who goes there?’
The curtain parts and a weathered Elven face peers out. An old nun. She wears a black garment around her head, obscuring her hair and ears. ‘Speak, tell me.’
‘I come searching for the one they call Rohank.’
‘And what do you want with him?’
‘I need magic performed.’
‘That’s not our way. Come closer.’ The nun’s sharp black eyes scan the length of you as you near. ‘Rohank won’t see you in this state. Step inside here. I’ll hear your confession, then we can talk more about my brother and his treatments.’
‘What is this confession you speak of?’
‘Confess to the gods all ye who carry a burden,’ she says, and, reading your face, she adds, ‘You tell me all the bad things you’ve done.’
‘In return for what?’
‘Purity. A blessing.’
‘Does it work?’
‘Of course it works. This is what we do all day. Now, come in here.’
The nun closes the curtain to her side of the chamber. You reluctantly cram yourself into the small compartment adjoining it. As your eyes adjust to the darkness, you spot the nun’s silhouette in the small grilled portal. She incants something in an ancient language, something almost completely alien to you, but you pick up the odd word. Acknowledge. Conceal. Prosper. In the plain language she says, ‘Speak now of your transgressions.’
‘I woke in a cave. I have no memory from a time before that.’
‘Yes, yes, but have you broken the directives of the gods?’
‘I do not know these rules.’
‘Have you killed?’
‘Yes. Many. Both orc and man.’
‘Did you steal that which belongs to others?’
‘Can you steal from the dead?’
‘You can.’
‘Then yes, I’ve stolen gold, equipment and livestock.’
‘Have you lain with one outside of marriage?’
‘I have.’
‘Does any of this weigh on your mind?’
‘No.’
‘No? Not at all?’
‘I’ve overworked my horse. It’s a beast of a thing, but it deserves better. I feel bad about the horse.’
‘Did you beat it with fist or branch?’
‘No.’
‘Did you lay with it?’
‘What?’
‘Did you lay with your horse.’
‘I did not. It’s not a well-tempered animal.’
‘Good. Do you acknowledge the gods?’
You remember something. It comes fast. A flickering memory.
Muscles strained.
Humid air.
A roar of eternal damnation.
I of unlord, I of—
‘What is it?’ says the nun.
‘Might I be without the gods?’
The nun clears her throat. ‘That is a very dark question. Answer me this and think very carefully before answering.’ She clears her throat. When she speaks again, her voice sounds different, sinister, almost ghoulish. ‘Who hunts in the dead of night?’
You answer without thought. ‘A woman.’ The nun’s voice is like a trance or potion working through you.
‘Who swallows the tide when no tide comes?’ says the nun.
‘She does.’
What is this? The booth tightens. Your nails dig into your palms.
‘Who binds the names to the nameless one?’
‘The woman. The woman does,’ you hear yourself say.
‘Do you seek her out?’
‘I must. I’m here.’
‘You can rest now.’
You escape the booth. ‘What is this witchcraft?’ you scream. ‘Who is this woman you force me to speak of?’
‘Be calm,’ says the nun. Her natural voice has returned. She steps out of the booth, gathering her robes around her legs. She is short, even for an elf, her head barely reaches the height of your waist. ‘Come. I’ll take you to Rohank. He’s been waiting for one such as you.’ She takes one more look at you. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes, yes.’
ERMA
After what happened with Craig, I try to keep things steady. I go to work. I go home. I go to the gym. For four days, it’s all a straight line, a clear vector. Back to my to-do lists and calendars. And for four days – days that feel like weeks – there are no interruptions. No one hits up my answering machine with creepy messages. No one mentions my year away or the incident. By Day Four, the hand I busted on Craig works again and there’s no word from him. He probably doesn’t even remember what hit him. That’s what I tell myself.
But then I slip.
An afternoon meeting with David Brier gets to me. He’s on the final draft of his thesis. He seems to have thrived without my supervision. It irks me. After I give him my notes, he rolls a cigarette in my office and says, ‘Fancy a beer?’ We start at the UQ staff bar. The second glass goes straight to my head and I blow off training for the night. David mentions a show upstairs at the Shamrock Hotel and after pizza we take the bus in to the Valley together. It’s after we get off the bus, as I draw money from an ATM, that he notices my bandaged hand.
‘How’d you do that?’
I’m tipsy so I tell him the truth. ‘I had to hit a guy.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Just had to.’
‘You mean, a guy attacked you? Were you walking alone?’
‘Doesn’t matter. And I never walk alone.’ I hold up my fists. ‘I’ve got these.’
David screws up his face.
I shadow-box him like a drunk girl, showing no form at all. I guess I’m flirting. ‘Even the devil is the lord of the flies,’ I tell him.
David likes that and everything is going fine until he stops walking and says, ‘Remember when you asked me about Jenny? This is the spot where we got into that shouting match. This is the spot right here.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I say, slapping his arm.
We’re outside the Fortitude Valley train station. An encampment of junkies and crazies line the pavement, hitting up the suburban drunks as they stagger out into the cold.
David doesn’t seem to notice the rabble. ‘Last year, when you were looking for Jenny, you asked me about the last time I saw her. It was right here.’
I can feel the facade slipping.
Just push it …
‘Let’s keep going.’
David doesn’t hear me. ‘I was standing here where I am now, finishing a smoke. Jenny was right over there, out on that footpath where those girls are now. Right here is the last time I saw her. She was screaming, “Fuck you man, fuck! You!” It was like months had been erased or something because she was screaming about you as well. Isn’t that strange? It’s crazy strange. I thought her and I were over our weirdness by then, but obviously not. That was, like, eighteen months ago now. It feels like, damn, it feels raw now, know what I mean?’
Feels raw? For you?
I look across the street. Two skinny girls in black tube dresses stand outside a grimy club entrance. The glowing sign above them reads Sam Hell. A strip club. It’s the name I beat out of Craig.
I say to David, ‘I’ve got to go.’
I act as if I’m heading home but really I circle around for a cheap takeaway coffee (to sober me up) then back through the Chinatown Mall and along Wickham Street to Sam Hell. The same two skinny girls are still outside. There’s a ‘Dancers Wanted’ sign in the window. I walk up to the man on the door and say, ‘I want to talk to the boss.’
The truth about Fortitude Valley is that it’s worse in the mornings. Friday and Saturday nights are full of routine street violence – men beating up men
in cab lines and dark corners – but the weeknights are fairly calm. You could go down there at nine o’clock on a Tuesday night and leave with the impression that the Valley isn’t much more than a dirtier iteration of Brisbane’s retail district. No, the real collision happens in the mornings, between five and nine. That’s when the dark parts of the Valley reappear – the deranged and the random – and those elements slam straight into the early morning commuters and New Farm joggers. Five to nine are the witching hours. It’s a bad sign that the owner of Sam Hell wants to meet me at 8.45 a.m.
The door to Sam Hell opens. A woman pops her head out. ‘Erma?’
I gave them my real name. I don’t know why.
The woman leads me down to the club floor. The house lights are on and in the bright fluorescence the place has the ambience of an Elizabethan-themed porn film. Burgundy carpets, mist rising up from a recent steam clean. Gold-rimmed mirrors. The timber and brass furniture that might pass for refined in the dark is sad and chipped.
‘Over here,’ says the woman. She takes me across the dance floor to a set of long deep booths. In one of the booths, a man – mid-fifties, receding grey hair, red polo shirt – eats McDonald’s from a paper bag. Across from him is a girl with the body and face of a fifteen-year-old. In the next booth along, there are three big men, all in black shirts, just sitting there.
‘Morning,’ says the man in the polo shirt. ‘I’m Roberto and this is Kylie. That’s right, isn’t it, love?’
‘Carla,’ says the girl. Her eyes are pinned. Up close, she’s older than she looks but not by much. Late teens, at a stretch.
‘Right, right. Carla and Erma. I like it. So, have you two worked in clubs before?’
Carla nods. ‘I do Thursdays at Bad Girls.’
‘OK, sure.’ He turns to me. ‘Don’t take this personally, love, but you don’t look like much of a dancer. You done this before? Stand up again and let me have a look at you.’
‘I’m not here for a job.’
‘No?’
‘I spoke to someone last night. I had some questions about—’
‘No questions,’ says Roberto. ‘What the fuck is this?’
‘All I want is,’ and I unfold my picture of Jenny. It’s been in my hand the whole time. ‘This girl. I’m looking for this girl.’
The room goes quiet. The men in the next booth are listening now. Roberto leans over and snatches the photo from my hand. Stares at it. ‘Yes?’ he says.
‘She has something of mine.’
He looks at me. No answer.
‘She’s called Jenny. Worked here about eighteen months ago. Do you have a lost property bin or something like that?’
While Roberto continues to stare at the photo, one of the other men steps out. He puts himself off to my side, slightly behind me. I turn and we lock eyes for a moment. I recognise the look.
Roberto breathes out. ‘We don’t do—’
‘I’m just looking for a dictaphone,’ I say, panicking. ‘That’s all. That’s it.’
‘The fuck,’ screams Roberto and the photograph hits me first, followed by a hail of litter from his McDonald’s breakfast. ‘The fuck! Don’t interrupt!’
Carla squeaks. Hot tea leaches into my shirt. Then there’s a knife. Roberto has a blade in his hand, catching the light. Hands drag me out of the booth.
‘You ever come down here again, I’ll open you up,’ shouts Roberto, waving the blade around.
I struggle with the hands.
A quieter voice says, ‘Stop moving goddamnit,’ and by some miracle I stop before I’m punched.
‘Get her the fuck out of here!’
Then we’re all moving – across the dance floor, past the bar, up the stairs – moving until my head and shoulders slam into a wall and the wall hinges open. There’s daylight behind it. The ground rises up and rough jagged concrete rips my palms as I roll across the pavement. The doors to Sam Hell slam shut behind me.
I can’t breathe.
Can’t focus.
There’s a woman in a business suit standing three metres from me, waiting for a bus, a cigarette hanging from her mouth. ‘Fuck,’ I snarl through my teeth. ‘Fuck.’ The woman averts her eyes.
After Sam Hell, I’m angry. Throwing me out of there, onto my fucked-up hand – it doesn’t put me off.
Quite the opposite.
It gets my back up and if anything, it makes the whole thing real. Whatever the hell Jenny got into at the club, it feels like a part of the violence she visited on me. A piece of the overall picture. It’s the only thing that feels remotely close to what happened between us. The transition Jenny made, that could have happened in Sam Hell. In my mind, there’s an overlapping vibe. There’s an explanation lurking. And it fits my kitchen wall timeline as well. It puts a place to a very specific period, that serves a very specific end. Because there’s another thing about the Valley worth mentioning: it’s still part-owned by the Queensland mafia, the Agrioli family. When I look up the club, I find very little at first. But when I search for the owner ‘Roberto’ and add ‘Agrioli’ I get hits. I get his photo.
The Courier Mail tells me Roberto Agrioli did a four-year stretch in Boggo Road Gaol (receiving stolen goods) and came out September 1984. Then there are mentions of him during the Fitzgerald Inquiry. During the dark eighties, he manages the Summer Nights brothel up on McLachlan Street with his brother Joe, a real big shot in the family. Roberto escaped Fitzgerald by the skin of his teeth but went back to the clink anyhow in 1992. Extortion and minor drug possession.
Back out in 2000.
Still out in 2004.
And around Jenny.
‘That’s about it,’ I say to myself. This is the sort of guy who could get her a gun or have one lying around. This all makes sense for the first time. I call Detective Edwina and leave a message.
Days pass. I train. I show my face at the office. I follow up calls and emails. I dodge David Brier. I delete an email from the UQ Conduct Committee, subject line: ‘Outstanding Disciplinary Action #2584’. I wait for a call back from the police or from Archibald Moder or his people. With no fresh leads on my Dictaphone, I sit tight and the idleness makes things worse.
Just push it down …
– dark place and – oh, sorry – Where was I?
‘I’ll hurt her too.’
It all circles around like a roulette ball ready to drop into my memories of that night with Jenny:
Why did she fucking do it?
Why did she try to kill me?
Why did she kill herself?
You don’t die for me.
And I sense something worse deep down. Some larger truth in the muck. I pace my apartment, awake all day and night, unable to fight back the anxiety, the motion blur, the seasickness. I am a barbarian wandering a foreign land like the one in my dreams. Sero. I keep coming back to that vision of the ocean creature, the giant squid from Thailand. The sickly white eyes in its face. The brown-green tentacles and the tightness of them wrapping around my arms, pulling me in. It feels as real as concrete.
One night, as I’m staring at the timeline on my kitchen wall, I realise I can’t remember how long I’ve been standing there. Minutes? Hours? I’m snapped out of the daze by a new connection, a thought so jarring I actually look around for an intruder or the cat.
Where am I on this timeline?
I imagine the line retreating back past July 2004. I see glowing markers going way back, off the wall into the air. I can sense chaos back there. My own internal chaos mixed in with Jenny’s recent trouble, bringing us together, fated. Because we all have parts of ourselves that we don’t want to deal with. We all have things we did or failed to do. We all have the stories we choose to tell ourselves in order to live. Our mistakes are always born of these lies. Did my own delusions have a hand in bringing Jenny to my door? Should my faults be on this timeline too? Is there some unconscious lockbox inside myself that explains what happened? Or am I blaming the victim?
My hand aches.
My head hurts, eyes burning.
Sleep deprived.
I look up to the ceiling and imagine the squid sitting above me, like a decorative ornament on an antique map, overseeing all this.
Its tentacles slide down the wall.
Christ.
I think I’m losing my fucking mind.
SERO
16
The nun shuffles along quickly. She weaves through the city, tut-tutting at your clumsiness as she ducks under carriageways and slips through narrow cobblestone corridors. ‘Come on.’
‘Where are we going?’
She points to the skyline above.
‘Is Rohank in the sky?’
The nun stops. She takes a small pouch from the folds of her robes and fusses with it. She licks her hand, then carefully takes your hand and places a speck of something on the palm. ‘Take this. It’ll keep you awake. And it’ll help with the dark.’
The crystal material is without taste but the poison surges through your arms and legs almost immediately. The night sharpens.
‘It’s good stuff, isn’t it?’ says the nun. ‘You’ll see it all with a clear heart now.’
You look back up into the sky and see a dark brick tower looming over the city.
Crystal magic.
The devil’s work.
‘How long to reach it?’
‘An hour or so. You want another piece of medicine?’
You take it.
17
The nun says, ‘Careful now. The path is slight here.’ You travel along together, your feet on slimy cobblestones and wet dirt. The nun follows a wall around a large circular pool and into a pitch-black stone corridor. The darkness takes on a slight ochre hue. You can see in it, like a cat.
The nun guides you up a staircase, through a series of hallways. She is still moving quickly, taking almost no note of her surroundings. She knows this passage well. Eventually, you come to a strange timber antechamber lit by torchlight. There is an iron gate set in the wall. The nun goes to the gate and yells something unintelligible into the void beyond.