This was the norm. What I had sensed was projection, vanity. Need.
I ordered a beer and stood with it at the bar so I could be seen, not wanting to approach the group, hoping she might excuse herself and come over at least, even if just to ask how I was settling in, anything to qualify the dreadful ordinariness of the scene.
I saw her notice me, saw her recognition and waved. She waved back, but cursorily, then leant in to say something to her friends. There were general glances in my direction, made with no attempt at tact, followed by more leaning in and laughter. I heard the unmistakable bray of Gemma’s laugh as she continued talking, glancing over as she did so. Her friends did likewise, stupid naked leers on their faces.
I felt utterly foolish. There was a rush of anger, swelling to fury, but all quiet, all contained. What I deserved for projecting onto strangers. I drained my glass with as much dignity as I could manage, making it a ‘just here for a quick beer’ thing, then turned from the bar. I forced myself not to hurry, just walked out into the heat and glare again, returned to the car and headed home.
I was doubly furious with myself. This had the intensity of adolescence with all its excruciations, the familiar déjà-vu agonies recalled from countless, intense teenage trysts back when so much—even the clown-fear—was bright and new.
But while I just wanted to be home and out of what the day had become, I didn’t take the Summerland Way. I took the Edenville turn-off again and thundered along it, making as much of a dust cloud as I dared (this adolescent still had to pay for ruined suspension). Most of it was a blur.
As I neared the Risi mailbox, I pulled over and killed the engine, let the dust cloud sweep past me and fall away to nothing in the sudden quiet. I sat listening to the day. Smiled at myself. Finally laughed. Fool, fool, fool.
The Risi mailbox had saved me, brought me out of it. Bless the Risi mailbox! The breeze stirred the grass along the road and around the fences, brought the smells of hot fields and dust, the sense of infinities and bittersweet belonging. There was a jet contrail high up, an incandescent plume, barely in the world.
The adult was back in control, chastened and foolish but endlessly forgiving. I couldn’t begin to understand the sense of loss I felt. They said that self-obsessing was the religion of the new millennium, but, whatever this was, it went beyond Julia, lost and gone. It came of fear, of the intense sense of place, of being at this only point in my life as something finite and passing. Again, again, again. Ready to be in love with love. In lust. In rapture with rapture. Still. With something rich and adequate to match the expansiveness I’d felt. Holy Meg, how I needed it! Justification. Redemption. A chance.
It was good just to sit there, treasuring the quiet, savouring the breeze that shivered the hairs on my arms and sent seed pods sailing from the crowns of the dried-out thistles along the road. I breathed deeply of the day. On impulse, I opened the door and stepped out, stood in the afternoon. On crazy impulse, from the frantic hope of something, anything, I crossed to the Risi mailbox, wanting a letter addressed to me, another invitation, another chance. Something.
There was nothing. My envelope had gone. No, not nothing; there was a dried-out sprig of gumnuts right near the back: a tight cluster of the tiny gourd-helmet shapes on a twig, maybe twenty, thirty or so, just sitting there on the warm tin like—the thought slipped in—a jester’s rattle, left there for whatever reason.
Again I smiled at myself, at what Jack would say if I told him about my quest for Gemma. I’d probably adjust reality, say I was writing all day. It’s what adolescents did. What adults did. Edited out the bad bits.
Or perhaps I’d log it all exactly as it happened, see how it felt and pull it later. Jack always granted that I wouldn’t tell everything. It was easy to imagine what he’d say. Adolescence, for good or ill, remains forever in the full pendulum swing of what a person is. You never recover from childhood or adolescence, from any part of that crucial making. How could you? That winning, losing, earning. Yearning.
I closed the mailbox, returned to the car and started the engine, continued slowly along Edenville Road. Had I been seen? Well, no matter. Make them wonder. I had just re-learned a lesson learned a hundred, thousand, ten thousand times across my life. Try to see what truly is.
Finally I was at the Rankins’ front gate and checking for mail. There was nothing.
Then I saw it, pushed right back: a sprig of gumnuts like the one in the Risi mailbox, dozens of the little dried-out bell-chambers on a branching twig. I brought them out into the sunlight, shook them so the small grey-brown gourds rattled.
Something after all. The possibility of—well—possibility.
I looked up at the hillside and smiled.
God bless the Risis!
That evening I lost myself in work, revising a chapter of the book that had dragged and had always felt like business for its own sake. Now I managed to create some suspense, a better sense of pace, and I was enjoying Rollo Jaine more than ever. I always liked it when my main characters started surprising me again.
I worked on the article too, making good progress until the portable air-conditioner in the study gave out. I remembered that Beth’s Things You Might Need list on the fridge said there was an extra fan in the storage room. That would do for now, and save me putting on the main air-conditioner in the living room.
I fetched the key from the kitchen, unlocked the door and looked in on the boxes and shrouded shapes. Beth had left the wire-framed fan on the floor to the left of the doorway where it was easy to find. As I moved to get it, I noticed the plastic clipboard on top of some boxes: Beth Rankin’s inventory of what she’d put in storage. I didn’t stop to consider whether I should browse it or not, but immediately regretted doing so. Not because dolls or masks were mentioned—Beth was alert enough to have used code for those—but because something had escaped her attention.
Two simple words: Sewing Stand.
Not Sewing Mannequin, Sewing Dummy or Dress Mannequin, not even something neutral and safe like Sewing Things.
Sewing Stand. How could she have known?
I tensed, felt the panic ghosts rising from deep down, the clamminess, the constriction and sudden shortness of breath. Time to back away, to lock the door and be gone.
I couldn’t do it. Instead, I studied the draped forms. Somewhere in here, probably tucked back in a corner, was that most unsettling of indoor scarecrows, something so innocent until you considered what it was: a woman’s torso with adjustable baize-covered panels, set about a metal pole on a stand, often a round metal base whose casters whirred over tiles and polished floors. With its panels and segments it was a workaday Venus de Milo and, worse, a quadruple amputee mockery—no, quintuple, there was no head either!—something mutilated, but so decorously, oh so politely. You could leave one in a drawing room.
I didn’t need recollections of The Silence of the Lambs or Boxing Helena, Tod Browning’s Freaks or that opening segment of the old 1972 Amicus film Asylum to stir the dread. It was sharply there, brought on by simply imagining the form, the distinctive lines and curves, the soft fuzziness over hard, adjustable plates linked by grooved, metal strips with little plastic adjustment wheels in between.
My mind raced at the prospect of this most intimate torture device being here, so close by. For that’s what she was! An absolutely domesticized Iron Maiden, armoured and armless. Oh yes! Made for ironing! And irony! Yes!
And she moved under your hands, had her way with you even while you had your way with her. It went beyond the sexual, beyond perversion and paraphilia, yet at the same time resonated with all those things. How could it not? She was la Mâitresse machine indeed.
Her name in all her manifestations was—what else?—Madame Sew, and I had long avoided those cosy sewing rooms where she lived, or those thrift-shop windows where she stood like a fetishistic Amsterdam whore displaying her close-cropped charms.
All things considered, my acquaintance with the lady had been surprisingly ea
sy until now. I had once left an acclaimed French restaurant in Los Angeles because the menu had been wheeled in on just such a torso, a fine signature touch for everyone else but for me an utter horror, the Madame’s gutted form presented with all her lovers’ billets-doux attached. Growing up, I’d missed out on Christmas and birthday presents from an aunt because I’d refused to set foot in her home again. Madame Sew was too often there in the living room, stuck with pins and fragments of cloth like some Frankenstein work in progress.
Those were my two main memories; the rest sat in the imagination.
It occurred to me standing there that in all the things I’d told Jack over the years, I’d never mentioned her by name, had never wanted to give her that much force in my life. Naming changed everything.
Well, she was here now, hiding back in the press of things in this small close space. It brought the sweats, the pressure in the chest, the continuing shortness of breath.
Fool, fool, fool that I was for looking!
I dropped the clipboard, grabbed the fan and locked the door, then hurried out to the fridge and scanned the list again. There was nothing else I’d need. If necessary, I’d get Len Catley to move the thing away, have him keep it at his place for the duration of my stay. I certainly wasn’t going to let the cruel and subtle Madame ruin my time here.
That was in the first hour. In the second hour I had to know one way or the other.
There was no perfect time. Once again, daylight would have been better, of course, but it was happening at 9:25 on a Monday evening. It had to be now.
I unlocked the door again, switched on the light and regarded the shrouded forms. I’d braved the TT disks. I’d done well. This was just another job to do.
I tried to track Beth Rankin’s thinking as best I could, this kind mistress of codes. She had written Sewing Stand readily enough, forgetting herself, but perhaps had unconsciously registered Madame’s ‘doll’ potential just the same and placed her in the corner furthest from the door. That was what I felt. Madame was in the corner.
Away came the dust-cloth covering the spinning wheel. Now it looked like a torture device too, all deadly curves, hard wood and spindles. The next sheet away revealed an exercise bike, the next a stack of cardboard boxes marked ‘Books’ and some concertina files. The third exposed more boxes and a sewing machine on a wooden table. I was nearly at the corner. The next sheet would be it.
CHAPTER 6
My breathing came in laboured gasps, horrible to hear. The clamminess and dizziness were there, the racing heartbeat, but this side of a syncope, a total shut-down, I had to do it. I might never find the courage again.
Jack, oh, Jack, I thought. How would the readers of our article react? Was this the sort of thing to bring to the larger world?
Writer Fixated on Sewing Dummy!
Sex Maniac Confesses: Give Me an Oedipal Proxy Every Time!
Domestic Prostheses Let Me Back on the Streets!
Potential Serial Killer Diverted by Makeshift Sewing Surrogate!
Laughing and terrified, I began drawing away the sheet. No matador flourish—voilá!—to cause Madame to come toppling forward into my arms. No assisted trappings of life. Just a slow, torturous hauling away, my hand a detached and separate thing locked on the edge of the fabric.
And there she was. Worn and well used, possibly a thrift shop special given a new life—new half-life, quarter-life, whatever it was—but another turn. Shiny silver plate atop the neck, slightly pitted with rust at the edges, grey chest and body panels, a drab steel grey, with little white adjustment wheels set between the segments. The points of her breasts were worn through to the plastic or fibre-glass from years of use, years of too tight bodice fittings and who knew what else? A rust-pitted chrome silver pole went right through her centre, from neck plate down to round metal base. And, yes, she was on casters. I could see the edges of a set. Such a well-used, experienced Madame this one, seasoned veteran of sewing rooms, quiet hours and hauntings by appointment.
And how is Madame feeling tonight?
So so, David. Sew sew. Thank you for asking.
It was done. I had faced the demon. Shaking and dizzy, with perspiration cooling my brow and a headache drumming in time with my heart, I’d done it.
And now there was a final tolerance test if I could manage it. I’d slept so easily after finding the bottle-trees wrecked. I’d survived the new images on Disks 4 and 5. Now forcing myself, forcing it all, I raised the sheet and draped Madame again, did the same with the other things that kept her pinned in her corner. Like reciting a mantra, like working through a ritual, yes, completing an exorcism, I moved back the way I had come, restoring the room to its previous order, then switched off the light and locked the door behind me.
Done. It was done. I made peppermint tea and carried the plunger and a cup through to my room. Then, after using the bathroom, I took a sleeping tablet and turned in, finding it easier to distract myself with Renault’s fine writing than I expected. Feeling the sedative take hold, I had to smile. Leave one thing, I’d told Beth Rankin, and The Mask of Apollo had been it. Little could either of us have known there had been something else.
But that had been dealt with too.
A sound woke me, or a dream of one, because it wasn’t repeated and may have been imagined. I had no idea of the time, but reached out and touched the tea plunger. It was cold. An hour must have had passed at least. I was well on the way to morning.
I lay there feeling wooden and vague from the sedative, listening to the wind in the trees.
Be easy. Be easy about this, Davey, I told myself. You knew it would happen.
I had. I’d known that, sooner or later, Madame Sew would use my imagination, my dread of her, to arrange some kind of follow-up. I had hoped to make it through to morning, but here it was.
It was so easy to picture her in the storeroom, little white adjustment wheels beginning to tweak this way and that between the plates, eet-eet eet-eet, moving the body panels in and out ever so slightly, letting her breathe.
That chilling image was among the earliest memories I had of her and quickly brought the rest. They had their own momentum, their own logic. I lay there feeling leaden, weighed down by the very drugs meant to bring release, and knew that such thoughts had to run their course.
Of course she had such powers. She was never meant to be complete in any conventional sense, never meant to have a head instead of the round silver plate where the neck ended, to have arms, legs or groin, just the pole through her middle as if—like some enemy of Vlad Tepes or Shaka Zulu—she had been dismembered and impaled on a silver shaft. This hemi-demimondaine, this lady of darkness, worn but full of promise, was complete in her cloven, mutilated state, was smooth and svelte with it. Little wonder that here she was, making the most of her emptiness, compensating for any shortcomings by taking over the late-night thoughts of the susceptible few.
The horror wormed its way up. What an unsuspected travesty was standing, breathing, just a room away. How had we managed to allow such things: leaving the trunk of a body in a spare room, a child’s nursery, out in the back shed?
There was no stopping it. I’d won with the bottle-trees and the TT marathon. Now it was her turn. She couldn’t smile at her victory; she had never been made to smile, but here she was.
Complete in my own way, Davey. Never forget!
No, no smile, just the glint of moonlight off pitted silver where her neck ended. Just the panels shifting ever so slightly in the dark as she learned to breathe again. Or, better yet—worse yet!—snapping in and out, click-click, in jerking mechanical doll fashion, click-click: an improbable, malformed lady of the night ready to be about her business, plates full and wide, ready to snap back.
I lay in a sweat that had nothing to do with the evening’s humidity or the surge of adrenalin spiking through the sedative. For me terror would never be the swish swish of the Reaper’s scythe. For me it was the click-click, click-click of the shifting plates or the
eet eet eet of those little white wheels turning, moving the panels along their grooved metal tracks, or the sudden brrrrrrrr of casters on a polished wooden floor.
The trap was complete. I was locked in full-clown again, paralysed and helpless, slowed by the medication and, yes, made easier prey by it.
I did the only thing I could do. I went into my fear again, ran the Jack-mantras. Hurting and afraid, I thanked the Madame for providing me with this opportunity to know my fear, to deal with the damage she was causing. Even if none of her injuries could be pushed aside, neutralised, then I would examine them, accept them as facts and fit them back into a larger world of cause and effect, where they existed simply as bits of interesting clinical data and not—most definitely not—some rough, harsh magic.
Madame wanted to keep it in my mind. I kept forcing it into the consultation room with Jack riding shotgun.
I had this privilege, I kept telling myself. Others were oblivious to such things, but I had this to do, this task. I was the prince of terrors. I worked with dread.
Finally, somewhere in the tangle of thinking about what Jack would think of me thinking about Madame, that sort of convoluted braid, I slept again, simply from exhaustion. I slipped into a broken, troubled sleep that finally became heavy and long and blessedly free of dreams.
I had to remind myself that the new day was Tuesday 9th January, the days at Starbreak Fell blurred so, all with the same bright sunlight, the back-to-back sameness of glare, shimmering views and hazy distances. The bushfire plumes seemed painted on the ranges, identical to those of the day before. It was easy to imagine scenic flats arranged against the hills, or some miraculous gelid fire, the flames locked in graphic slow-mo, the smoke barely stirring.
Though I slept late from sheer exhaustion, I finished breakfast by 9:30, was showered and dressed by 9:45 and ready to tackle Madame Sew.
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