Hades

by Candice Fox

  Eden and I stood behind the owl and watched as the briefing was conducted. The divers zipped up their suits and moved into position. The sun was warm on my shoulders and I shrugged off my jacket. When I turned up my shirtsleeves, Eden glanced at my tattoos. I folded my arms and closed my eyes, feeling drunk on the warmth of the morning. It was the kind of day for lunching in outdoor cafés on the harbor, for strolling home and snoozing in the afternoon with Eden stretched out beside me. Her long white limbs sweat-slicked and stark against the sheets. Who wanted to work on a morning like this? The weekend was coming. The surf would be up.

  The divers submerged and the camera delayed for a moment or two with the jolt of the water around the diver’s head. More people had crowded in around us. For ten minutes there was nothing but blue and black shadows dancing on the screen. The audience murmured in anticipation. I glanced over and saw Eden’s limbs had tightened, the stringy muscle of her forearms flexing in the shadow of the tarp.

  Twenty minutes—and nothing more than the flailing of the nameless diver’s limbs and the occasional glimpse of the others as they sunk together. The rise of the seabed materialized on the screen, and there was a notable shift in the mood of everyone around us. There, on the screen, was the rocky edge of what looked like a wide sea cavern. And in the cavern were about twenty weed- and sludge-covered toolboxes.

  It was two hours before Hades opened the door to the hidden storage room again. The little girl was crouched in the corner farthest from the door, her arms tucked against her chest and her eyes wide. Hades hefted the limp body of the boy up onto his shoulder and spread a thick blanket out on the concrete floor. He let a pillow fall from his fingers and laid the body down. The girl watched, taking in the bandages around the boy’s skull and his sunken eyes with barely contained terror. The boy was wearing an unfamiliar man-sized T-shirt. Hades groaned as he crouched above the boy, spreading a thinner blanket over his sleeping body and tucking it under his chin. When it was done he stood and met the girl’s eyes.

  “Come with me,” he beckoned, reaching out his hand.

  She didn’t move.

  “If I was going to hurt you, I’d have done it by now.”

  The girl shifted on her bloodstained feet, thinking. She rose up slowly, taking tentative steps towards the man.

  Hades took her hand and led her into the kitchen. He directed the girl to sit on the edge of the table where the boy had been lying minutes before. The stranger’s body was gone, the pool of blood mopped up and bleached away. There were bundles of bloody rags on the table beside the girl, cotton bandages and the clipped ends of medical wire, an open first-aid kit and a pair of scissors. The girl recognized her brother’s soiled clothes dumped in a black garbage bag on the floor.

  Hades filled a bowl with warm water. He set it beside the girl. Her eyes followed everything—his hands, his face, his tired steps back to the sink where a bottle of Johnnie Walker now stood. He poured two glasses. The girl shook violently as he approached her, her tiny nostrils flaring.

  “This’ll make you feel better,” Hades said, taking her hand and pressing one of the glasses into it. Her fingers were sticky with blood. She looked at the whisky, then at his face. Hades swallowed his drink and set the glass down with a sigh. The girl hesitated.

  “It’s okay. I promise.”

  The girl gulped the scotch as she had seen the man do. She winced and coughed.

  “Good work,” Hades said.

  He half-filled her glass again. When he picked up a cloth and rinsed it her brother’s blood turned the water in the bowl a pale pink. Hades tried to take the girl’s chin in his hand but she flinched away. He seized her face in his wide fingers and she whimpered.

  “Settle down.”

  The scotch worked quickly in her veins. As he began cleaning the mask of blood away she was stiff and resistant. She soon softened up. Hades dipped her face and inspected the deep gash in her forehead. It was about four centimeters long, running across her hairline. He put down the cloth and looked at her. She had a chiselled appearance that would make her seem sharp and calculated when she was older. Dangerous and beautiful. Both children were greyhound thin. Hades wondered which dead parent they took after. The girl sighed with exhaustion as Hades cleaned her hands.

  “What’s your name, girl?”

  “Morgan.”

  He spread her fingers and examined the scrapes on her palms. Her face was inches from his, her big eyes downcast to the ruined flesh. He tried to guess how old she was. Probably five, he supposed.

  “What did they hit you with, Morgan?”

  “A stick,” she whispered, tears sliding down the edge of her jaw.

  Hades wrapped her hands in bandages. He took out the needle and the wire and her eyes followed his fingers, drunk and sad.

  “Did they mean to kill you both?”

  “I think so. They said so. They made us kneel on the gravel. They yelled at each other.”

  Hades nodded, threading the fine wire through the soft white flesh surrounding the gash in her head. The girl didn’t flinch. She stared at his chest, licking her wet coral-colored lips.

  “What’s going to happen to Marcus?” she asked.

  “He’ll either wake up or he won’t.”

  “Are we going to stay here?”

  “For now,” Hades said, pulling the second stitch tight. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll figure something out.”

  Outside the house, beyond the mountains of trash, a truck blasted its horn on the highway. The sound spoke of the world outside the kitchen, an unimportant and distant place. A place of lost things. The girl’s tears were silent. Hades rested his palms on her forehead as he worked to pull the wound closed. When he was done he patched the wound with a clean cotton bandage and stood back like an artist assessing his work.

  The girl whose name was Morgan sat still, studying the floor as though she had forgotten he was standing there, as though considering some terrible decision. Hades frowned and felt a knot grow in his stomach. There was a strange coldness to her eyes now. It gave him the feeling that something he couldn’t name, something that had been there only moments before, was now dead and gone.

  He had never seen a child look that way.

  4

  We opened the first box on the concrete marina between two police buses, protected from the media by more blue plastic tarps. Everyone was pretty sure what we were going to find, but rather than driving people away it sucked them in, a macabre freak show. Eden and I crowded around the box with the area chief and a forensic specialist while the nobodies of the investigation whispered and shushed each other. The sun beat in on the side of the tarps, illuminating the shadows of dozens of bodies.

  The forensic guy knelt down and wedged a chisel under the rusted lock of the toolbox, prying it open gently. Eden stood over him with her arms folded. She took off her sunglasses and her dark eyes examined the careful process, her head tilted slightly as though she could already smell the terrible stench that would erupt when the sludge seals were broken.

  I saw the face first. The girl hadn’t been cut up to fit into the box, as we found later that many others had. She was curled in a fetal position with her hands and feet tucked under her body, her torso a perfect fit for the confines of her coffin. Her face was pressed into the dark corner, her nose a little lifted and her milky eyes wide open. She was fresh. Around a week dead by my guess. Tiny life-forms panicked and streaked over the surface of the water in the box, taking shelter in the folds of her body. The girl’s long blond hair was tangled around her throat, swirling like seaweed in the disturbed water. There were wounds on her, deep grooves in her lower back, but the inside of the box was dark and I couldn’t see them properly at my angle. Her thin bony back was milk white, blotched here and there by the draining of blood and fluids. It was as though she had curled up in there to hide and someone had sunk her to the bottom of the ocean.

  I looked at Eden. There was no emotion in her face. She stared down at the
girl as though she were reading the fine print on a contract, attentive but distant. The area chief covered his mouth and nose with his hand against the smell.

  “What is she?” I asked the forensic guy. “Sixteen?”

  “Eleven. Twelve.”

  I chewed my lip. When no one spoke, I shrugged and said what everyone was probably thinking.

  “She’s pretty fresh. Probably that missing girl.”

  “Shut it up,” Eden ordered, turning and pulling away a corner of the tarp where men and women scrambled back to let her through.

  Most people hate the smell of mice. Jason had never understood that. There was something earthy and wet and warm about the smell of rodents, something natural that defied the sterility of the modern home. It brought him back to his childhood, to the caverns and tunnels and alleyways made by the beams beneath the house. He would crawl in there and dig treasures into the dirt, peer through the floorboards, listen to conversations. There were mice and rats under the house, nestled into crevices and squeezed into dugouts, small cities of rolled and coiled newspaper and dried grass. Jason liked to watch their little families, the licking and stroking and picking they imposed on each other, the silent ease with which they decided to sleep or play or fight. Things were not like that in his family. There was only noise and pain, locked doors and crying in the night. The mice didn’t care if he picked his nails, if he couldn’t recite his multiplication tables, whether his shirt was ironed or his face clean. The mice couldn’t hurt him. The mice couldn’t call him names. He envied their uncomplicated lives.

  Jason was fascinated by the things that humans shared with the animals and the things they tried to leave behind. Bonds really puzzled him. Curled in his bare immaculate room, reading silently beneath the blankets by the light of a small flashlight, he had read that brolgas—those lanky, dancing, stony-colored birds that strolled the lake near his home—found a partner to breed with and stayed with that mate for life, no matter what. Imagine that. Jason had set out the next weekend on his lone wanderings to find a brolga and see this incredible natural magic in action. On the way he encountered some of his schoolmates—cruel, freckled, sun-bleached kids who threw pencils at him in class and made fun of the way his mother cut his hair. They were huddled in a group skipping rocks by the edge of the lake. When they set upon him, sneering and laughing and pointing and interrogating him about his purpose, he explained what he knew about the brolga and that he planned to catch one alive. All day under the wicked sun he labored to catch one of the swift, graceful, wide-winged birds. He used every conceivable trick he could think of—creeping, swimming, snaring, baiting, trying to strike them down with rocks. The schoolkids had hounded him like a rabble of street dogs, yabbering and rolling and barking laughter every time he failed. When Jason finally got hold of a bird and its mate had rushed out of the water, squawking and honking and flapping its wings in fury, the children had fallen silent, awed, and Jason had laughed, victorious. He’d teased the angry bird by wringing his partner’s neck, slowly, gently, scattering the feathers in the wind. The male bird filled the air with its noise. Jason turned to his schoolmates and grinned, showing them the limp bird.

  “See?” he said. “They love each other. Animals can love each other too.”

  Sometimes the animals he hunted and trapped and played with in the wild weren’t enough. Jason liked to have animals in his life. His ever-expanding collection of beetles, lizards, snakes, his encouragement of stray cats and dogs, got him beaten and locked up and starved plenty of times but the impulse never completely died. The animals didn’t want anything from Jason other than food, affection, warmth. He loved their stupidity, their simplistic natures. Make a dog your own, secure its loyalty, and you can beat that dog within an inch of death and it will return to you, love you, guard you. Jason knew that. He admired loyalty. It reminded him of the brolgas. Jason was fascinated by the intersection between wild and dependent things, becoming a slave of one creature to another. The unnaturalness of it. Much of life was like that. He wanted to scratch, to bite, to fight, to crawl away into tight holes and forget the world outside. Instead he was a loyal dog, a beaten yet obedient creature, an enemy to his own instincts. A mouse living in a tank instead of a hole.

  The small dark apartment in Chatswood wasn’t right for anything larger than a tank of mice but the adult Jason didn’t mind. He sat by the tank in the mornings and watched them going about their business—digging or sleeping, running madly on the little plastic wheel.

  When he put his finger into the tank one of them rushed forward and gripped on, hoisting its warm velvet-soft body up onto his hand. Trusting. He sat in the light from the venetian blinds, cracked open just enough to allow some view of the outside world, and ran the mouse over his hands, smiling at its frantic dash from one palm to another, over and over, never recognizing where it had been, no care for where it was going. People were inexplicably like mice. Panicky, wide-eyed, utterly at the will of a callous, fleshy-palmed god.

  Jason put the mouse on the table and watched it sniff and scurry around the objects lying there, the scalpels of various sizes lined up in foam trays, the glass bottles and packets of paper towels, the rolled bandages and coils of medical wire. The mouse stopped and munched on the edge of a stack of papers littered with names, ages, birthdates, blood types, addresses. Beginning at the corner of the page, it tore tiny strips off with its pink paws.

  Taking a scalpel from the tray, Jason pinched the mouse’s ear between his thumb and forefinger gently, feeling its impossible thinness and softness, his most careful touch surrendering the creature’s entire head to his will. A whisper of flesh. He looked at the scalpel, considered, then gave the ear a wag. He let the mouse go, stroking its curved spine with the flat of the blade. Ticcing, twitching, jittering life beneath the fur. Jason lifted the scalpel, let it dangle, point down, before releasing it. The point of the scalpel dug into the table a few centimeters from the mouse’s right front paw. The animal was unfazed. Jason pried the instrument from the wood, lifted it again, higher this time, and aimed better. The scalpel chunked into the wood, just missing the mouse’s nose.

  The television, barely audible, caught his attention. On the screen police officers were swarming on a pier like ants, crawling over it, meeting each other, gnashing pincers and pawing, all in black. In one sequence a young man was being ushered unwillingly into a van. Jason had encountered him in the early hours of that morning, a man he had been certain he would never see again. More panning shots of the crowded marina and then one of a steel toolbox. Jason felt fury and pride tingle in him briefly before the familiar calm smothered the emotions. He sucked air between his teeth.

  When the story ended he looked back at the creature on the table, carefully cleaning its whiskers by his hand. Careless, brainless thing. Jason lifted the scalpel at a full arm’s height, squinted, let it settle in his fingers for a long moment before letting it go.

  5

  We found a quiet corner of the café on the marina to use as a base for the afternoon. It was near enough to the crime scene that specialists and witnesses could come and report to us, but distant enough from the fray that we could organize ourselves without the distraction of the chaos down on the water. Eden finally passed me some responsibility—rounding up security tapes from the marina, calling in marina staff for interviews, sending a progress report back to the station. She sat across from me munching spicy potato wedges between phone calls, glancing out now and then at the sinking sun glinting on the water. A troop of bicyclists clad in spandex of every color of the rainbow took a nearby table, clacking in on plastic shoes, ordering gluten-free chips and smoothies, laughing with long teeth. Yellow and lime-green fish circled the pier pillars beneath us, visible through the glass that lined the balcony. I watched them as I spoke, envying their calm, meaningless paths.

  In time we’d made all the calls and taken all the notes we could. I ordered a scotch and Coke, and Eden asked for a bourbon on ice.

 
; “So there’s not much we can do until the forensic team gets back with the report on the bodies. We should catch up tonight,” I suggested as the café staff began packing up the cutlery on tables around us. “We’re going to be working pretty closely from here on. It might be nice to know something about each other.”

  Eden smirked. I felt a lump in my stomach.

  “I like a bit of professional distance. It’ll make it easier to not take a bullet for you one day.”

  “Oh, come on, a couple of drinks.”

  “The whole homicide team goes out together now and then.” She lifted her eyes to mine briefly. “They’ll be at The Hound tonight from six. If you want to bond, we can bond in company.”

  “The Hound? Urgh. Woman, where are your standards?”

  She paused, staring at her drink. “Eric will be there.” It sounded like a warning.

  “Why would I care if Eric’s there?” I asked, the lump in my stomach growing. “He’s my partner’s brother. We should be mates.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” She smiled and shrugged. “It’s worth a shot. Don’t be surprised if he doesn’t want to bump chests with you. It takes a long time to become close to Eric.”

  I raised my eyebrows in answer. The revelation didn’t surprise me.

  I’d been to The Hound before but never liked it as a hangout. Too many cops. A drunken night out at The Hound tended to turn into a dick-measuring contest between street cops, encouraged by grizzled detectives and captains and presided over by nonchalant paramedics and firemen. At The Hound officers fresh from training at Goulburn, surprised and disheartened by the lack of understanding and appreciation they received from old hands in their new occupation, could mingle with their heroes in the business—cops who’d been on the beat a good six months longer than they had. This kind of mingling encouraged war stories and the comparison of arrest tallies, the showing of scars and narration of chase tales. Abilities were questioned and motives examined. Fitness feats and beep-test scores were lamented over. As the glasses emptied, fights erupted and poured out onto Parramatta Road, where the missed swings and pained howls were watched by families of every conceivable ethnic origin who lived in apartments above the neighboring Haberfield shops. No arrests were made, of course, and the black eyes and split lips that ensued were chuckled over in the office the next morning. Promotions, easy beats and pay bonuses were awarded to young guns who could land a fist after ten schooners. I didn’t like that kind of competition. I preferred to drink alone, the older I got.