by Iain Ryan
‘I don’t know.’
The other two girls appear. The one with the taser steps around Alfie’s body, kneels down and stuns him on the side of his face.
‘You should probably save the batteries on that thing,’ says Laura. ‘We might need it.’
The girl with the taser seems unnaturally calm. Still crouched by the body, she says, ‘I remember this guy,’ and gives the man another blast, this time burying the weapon deep in his crotch.
From the billiards room, we follow a polished concrete passage under the house. We pass a spiral staircase leading up and a series of locked doors. The music heard earlier grows louder and louder. The party is close now as we step into a dark open space.
I hit the lights.
Two black sports cars. A garage.
‘Keys.’
We fan out and search the walls, benches and cupboards.
We can’t find them.
‘We had a garage door like this,’ says one of the girls, the one who has remained silent until now. She points to a box mounted on the wall.
‘Open it,’ says Laura.
I hit the lights off again.
A motor whines. The giant two-bay door of the garage begins to rise. It’s dark out but light beams in. The music comes louder still. We all duck under the door while it’s opening and I feel the cool open air on my skin. There’s a long paved ramp ahead, two ten-foot retaining walls either side, and a giant gleaming orb out of view on the ground above. We’re about halfway up the ramp, running barefoot, when we hear the shouting.
Movement ahead.
One of the girls stops. Laura curses. She grabs my arm and pulls me back the way we came. I struggle for a split second but then I see it: a group of men walking casually over the lip of the drive above.
Voices echo around the hard surfaces.
‘What are you girls doing out?’ says a familiar voice.
Then we hear them laughing.
We run back through the garage and into the house, down through the basement corridor, past the locked doors and up the spiral staircase to the front door – the door I walked through of my own volition a few weeks ago – and at the door two men rush out of the darkness and grab Laura by the hair and arms. I swing with my two pieces of pool cue. I collect one of them around the head. The girl with the taser puts the other one down. Two more men launch in and one of these gets his hands on the taser and within seconds the fight becomes chaos. Impossible to track. They drag one girl to the ground, yelling at her, prising at her hands. Laura rips loose and both of us run to the second floor and we keep running. We need a window. We need a room with an open window. I don’t know where the third girl is but more men come flailing in, shouting. There are five of them and they corner us. I land one good blow but someone gets the pool cue out of my hand and wraps it across my knees. I stagger around. I fight one of them as best I can. I punch him, knee him, drive his head into a protruding wall corner. After that, there’s a scrum until I scrap my way loose, someone’s wet hair in my hands, slipping as I move. I run the length of the house, past the horrors of my fellow escapees under attack, past two more men coming up the stairwell, and into a cramped study in the furthest wing of the manse.
There’s a lock on the door.
I have seconds to live.
I rip furniture around in an attempt to barricade the door but it’s useless, just fucking useless, so I keep moving, trying to drag a dresser free from the wall. I’m crying and I can’t stop. The tears start to blind me. I frantically tear at the mask without unbuckling it. The mask stays fixed but in the jostling around, I notice something rattling on the wall above the dresser.
I stare at it and the world falls away.
Is this it?
Is this where everything ends?
Is this the thing?
I hear men grunting and fighting outside but it’s right at the back of my consciousness. I hear women’s crying. Stomping. Cursing. Someone knocks on the door, testing the lock. Someone kicks at it but it holds. I keep staring at the thing on the wall above the dresser.
A voice says, ‘Erma, come on out of there and we’ll let you all live.’
It’s Harlan.
I yell, ‘Fuck you, I want to see Archibald.’
I reach up and pull the object from the wall.
It’s a sword. A real sword.
A straight Dao in a sheath.
I draw it out and look at it. A single-edge blade. No hand guard. A worn grip. Old. But well kept. Recently sharpened too.
‘Where’s Archibald?’
I swing the weapon through the air, practicing my Thailand drills. The blade turns and glides. It’s not too heavy.
‘Erma?’ Harlan says. ‘What are you doing in there?’
There’s something else on the dresser.
A mirror.
I look into it.
I take the mask from my face and it’s you staring back at me.
YOU
The details of Dora’s room fade and change and you find yourself standing naked with your sword drawn, waiting for the demons outside to make their start. They kick again at the timber door. Splinters spray. You move into position.
The last moment.
I of unlord, I of—
The door comes open.
A fiery explosion sounds.
A demon steps in and you catch a glance of some strange weapon in his hand as you swing through the entire arm.
‘Harlan,’ someone shouts.
The demon falls after his severed limb, wailing. You circle around and lunge for the next, a set of fluid movements now. You swing and the blade tears through more muscle and bone. The second demon drops, split, half decapitated.
Into the hallway beyond. You lose your footing, slipping in gore and dipping under the arc of a timber baton as it whistles through the air. You kneel forward and sweep the sword across the rotund gut of the thing with the bat. His innards slop to the floor like muddied water from a bucket.
The rest of the demons turn and run.
You follow.
Ahead, in the strange hall, one of the demons squares up with you as the rest clamber around. It aims a long weapon. The end of the weapon explodes and some invisible arrow rips into your side. In return, you throw the sword through the demon’s skull and his magic weapon slides across the floor, dropping over the edge of a balcony. You sprint to the fallen body and rip the sword loose and keep moving. The hallway opens to a stair beneath you and you watch as the remaining attackers rush and stumble down. One jumps to the floor below. As he lands a blast sounds, another thunder-crack. It’s further away this time, coming from below. The side of the demon’s head sheers loose. This panics the rest of the horde and they trip back up the stair towards you, hesitating halfway as they spot you standing at the summit.
A girl runs into view below, screaming. She is badly beaten, wearing a strange parchment-like robe caked in blood. In her hands, she holds the long weapon from moments ago.
The demons are trapped.
‘Please,’ cries one of them.
‘We won’t say anything,’ says another. ‘You can let us go. You can—’
CRACK.
The girl has fired the weapon again. The chest of one of the demons blasts open.
‘Oh my god, oh, uhhh, shit.’
They run up the stairs. It is you they come to.
You with your full memory.
With history.
With clear purpose.
The hero.
You swing the sword.
Blood sprays.
A jaw is ripped loose.
A severed leg drops and tumbles.
A demon wearing a man’s eyeglasses begs for mercy, holding his chest but standing tall and clear. You know the man: glasses or no glasses. He cries out as you swing the sword through his neck uncapping a sewer of gore inside him.
The girl with the magic weapon – a gun – collects another injured girl and calls out the name Laura three times.
A weak voice answers. Laura appears from behind a door on the second floor. ‘I’m going to find a phone,’ she says, limping past. ‘Don’t leave without me.’ There is strange recognition in her eye. She knows your face.
While Laura looks for the phone, you busy yourself with the dying, staking each of them through the heart. None of them struggle. You find the one called Harlan back in the study where you started. Despite his missing arm, Harlan has crawled across the room, slumping himself against a wall, his skin as white as a statue. His eyes move when he notices you. He holds out a strange object. A small silver box. Some talisman that conjures occult recognition in you.
Dictaphone.
‘Please,’ he says.
You take the box and place it at his feet.
‘Please,’ he says a second time.
You nod. You cut his throat and let him die.
After Harlan, you check the rest of the upstairs chambers, looking for hidden creatures. You find an ailing demon with a shaved skull in one room. He hides beside a strange bed, his leg braced, a thin medical drip inserted into his arm. He stares at you with hate-filled eyes as you step closer.
‘Bitch,’ he mutters, barely able to speak. ‘Bitch, bitch …’
You answer without thinking, in a voice you recognise.
‘Hello again,’ you say as you align the sword to the level of Roberto’s eye.
You push it in slow.
There is one more. An old one, almost done for. He sits slumped into a couch beside a long wall of flat glass, just a black human shape against the dark landscape of trees outside. The man shakes his head in the darkness. ‘Erma, what have you done?’ he wheezes.
‘I stopped them.’
‘Oh Erma, you were doing so … Come, come and sit with me.’
You refuse. You stand in front of him, so close you can hear him panting.
‘Archibald, I’ve got to go now.’
‘Oh, I see. Leave me here, dear girl. There’s nothing more I can do for you if you won’t stay.’ He waves you away. ‘No more.’
You reach down and pull the old demon forward. You prise open one of his hands and put the sword in his grasp. You position it so his arm is outstretched with the blade pressed into his solar plexus.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m not doing anything, Archibald.’
‘But, but what is this?’
You run the tip of your finger along the blunt side of the sword and say, ‘This is a line.’ You grab his hand and the shoulder of his nightgown and start to bring the two together, plunging the blade into him.
‘Erma! Stop! Stop!’
‘Fate is real, Archibald. You told me that.’
At first the blood drips out of him, a patter on the floor. Then it begins to spill quicker. He mouths your name. He tries again and gapes like a fish but no sound comes out – only blood.
‘We’re together now,’ you say.
You push the blade harder and it sinks all the way through. He starts to squirm. ‘Shhhh, Archibald. Listen. Listen to it. This is the place where we intersect. It’s happening.’
He’s spluttering weakly now. Dying, you suppose. You tip him all the way forward until he flops to the ground. The stained sword comes out of his back and catches the light and you crouch down to check his pulse but some part of him is still in there. You rest a hand on the back of his head and pat gently. ‘It’s OK,’ you say. ‘I’m here, Archibald. I’m right here.’
The girls drape you in blankets and linens and together you leave the house full of corpses and walk the long road away. The road takes you down through gardens in the night wind. Tall pines sway in the shadows, roaring and dark until visited by other-worldly colours.
The blue of oceans.
The red of the desert sand.
A fast-changing combination sprays the leaves and branches as you collapse from fatigue, as if struck. Warmth spreads across your side. Sprawled out on the ground, you watch the night sky and feel yourself drawn towards the afterlife. The three girls crowd around you, shouting your name. You smile back at them and close your eyes. At last. You feel yourself fading. At last. The stone is cold beneath you.
PART FOUR
4 YEARS LATER
BRISBANE, QUEENSLAND
ERMA
The applause rings out over the auditorium, rising to a crescendo as the speaker readies her notes. She holds up a hand, motioning to the crowd for quiet. A ripple passes up the room as everyone sits down. The first words bellow out. ‘Staff, alumni, guests and, of course, graduating class of two thousand and nine. I welcome you to the end of your journey. I’m sure the last couple of years have been trying, but here we are in this magnificent room together, celebrating your achievements, finishing the Herculean task you’ve undertaken. I’m here today to send you on your way. But before I do that, the Vice Chancellor has asked me to present you with a few parting words of advice.’
She’s a famous writer apparently. That’s what it says in the programme. I’m not sure what type of writer she is but the fawning parents around me all crane their necks to get a better look, so it’s not literary fiction or peer-reviewed work.
‘You see, a life such as mine is spent in glorious solitude. The life lessons I’ve learned are, for the most part, taught to me by people I’ve made up. Fictional characters. Things I’ve created. People and worlds and events under my strict control. In other words, I’ve spent the better part of my life talking to myself. I’m not sure I’ve got all the …’
Breathe.
I’m not good with crowds these days. After the escape and the trial, the throng of reporters and onlookers was intense and prolonged. It was too much attention accompanied by a barrage of opinion on something I barely understood myself. It was a bit much to take in.
Officially, I was accused of killing nine men. Unofficially, I was a hero. For a stretch, everyone wanted to praise me or spit on me. There were days of both. Weird, bipolar days.
Warrior, monster.
Innocent, murderer.
The whole thing wore at me, and when I wasn’t in court, seeing the A2 colour blow-ups of the armless and disembowelled, the fury of all that jostling and probing and testifying was intercut with the not-so-glorious solitude of home detention and, later, a court-ordered respite in a clinic. Even then, no one could let it go. I got letters, apparently. Some of the men’s rights groups picketed the clinic.
Onstage, the speaker laughs. ‘I had to ask myself, was I a monster for seeing the structure of this terrible story, for noticing the beats of her misery, or was that my writer brain doing its thing?’
I’ve lost the thread of her argument.
‘Couldn’t it just be that the part of my psyche that’s professionally tapped in to how stories work silences the compassion and care momentarily? It’s times like this I remember that writing doesn’t inform and corrupt the human experience but, instead, mimics it, draws from it, tries its best to raise itself to the level of so-called ordinary life. Both distraction from and dedication to, that’s what I do. And you all know this. How many times have you thought to yourself, This is just like a movie, but about your own lives? We all narrate ourselves. It doesn’t matter who you are. We all seem to exploit the world, in aid of our stories.’
Breathe.
I got through it.
Of course, I got through it.
I survived the trial. There were technicalities. Lost evidence. Bungled paperwork. According to the lawyers, it might have been Archibald Moder who killed everyone, then himself. There was enough doubt. I think enough people wanted there to be.
After that, I got through the clinic too, probably because I needed it. On the whole, my recovery wasn’t so bad after the initial commotion passed. The clinic was boring and tedious and emotionally difficult but I got to trust my therapists, especially the after-patient guy on the outside, Dr Dannen. At my very first session, Dr Dannen tells me to forget my mother. He gives me permission to do that,
to admit that I hated her with good reason and to get on with my life. I took to it. In fact, within a few months of Dr Dannen, I’m as done as I’ll ever be with my family and my bad experiences growing up and the time I got locked under the house by a group of men and maybe murdered some of them – that’s what Dr Dannen called it. Never a euphemism. There was no incident with him. Dr Dannen talked about it plainly because it wasn’t really the thing that interested him. He was more interested in what I did next. He might have been the only one.
‘And I say to you, class of two thousand and nine, seek out your story, seek out your passion, please seek it out.’
Fuck this bitch.
As famous as this author is, she’s overstaying her welcome. The kid next to me is playing with his watch, flicking the light on and off. Beside him, an older man – grey beard, jeans, leather shoes – is staring at me, trying to place me. In a split second the recognition arrives and he looks away, turns his whole body from me.
Another round of applause rings out.
Aspirational music blasts from the PA.
The graduations start and we watch the students trundle up for their degrees. I hated these ceremonies when I was an academic. I’m here today because Laura from the house finished her thesis. I’ve only spoken to the girls from the house a handful of times over the years. Didn’t want to intrude. Figure they must feel the same. But I wanted to see this.
When Laura’s name is called, I stay in my seat but watch the overhead screen. She’s virtually unrecognisable now: long brown hair spilling out from under her mortar board. Actually, I’m not even sure it is the right Laura.
I check the programme.
It is her.
The whole thing makes me want to break down, but I don’t.
I heard later that the university conducted their stupid sexual harassment hearing in my absence. Remember that? While I was locked in a dark hole under someone’s house in the mountains, a couple of admin people from the university were at a meeting talking about my private life. Funnily enough, it didn’t go their way. All the boys I slept with kept their mouths shut. Ryan Solis, the one Jenny was so enamoured of, went on the record saying we never fooled around while I was working on his thesis review, which is untrue – we did – and instead, Ryan talked a blue streak about Jenny and her quirks and contrivances. He told them how fixated she was on him and how unrequited it got. He told them about how she harassed him. And he told me all this over the course of a few afternoons in my apartment. He actually wasn’t the only one of those guys to visit. Even Louis, my ex, called from the States to check in. All these men, all these smart young guys, curious all of a sudden. I guess most people don’t know a murderer.