The Broken Ones

by Stephen M Irwin

  The sergeant on shift in the Fingerprint Bureau glared at Oscar suspiciously as he handed over the cards on which he’d rolled the dead girl’s prints.

  “Late,” she said.

  “Isn’t it?”

  Her stare weighed a ton. She cast a warning glare over her shoulder at him, then went to the Morpho terminal and scanned the card. She returned ten minutes later, shaking her head.

  No matches.

  He returned to his office, printed blowups of the photographs he’d taken of the symbol, put them into an envelope, and drove to Gelareh Barirani’s flat. He slipped them into her letter box, then headed back toward home. It was after eleven, and the moon loitered over the city. Milky light fluttered down through clouds as fine as feathers, turning the wet roads silver and casting shadows as black as ink.

  Haig.

  It made sense, to a point. Yes, Haig wanted the case. Yes, Haig had the connections to fast-track a cadaver’s destruction and the history of intimidation that explained a public servant fleeing town on a moment’s notice. But why murder a young girl? Extortion? Although Oscar had seen even the least likely people charged with the most repulsive of acts, he couldn’t picture Haig involved in torture. The mutilation, that unsettling, cruel symbol, made even less sense. Haig was pragmatic, if nothing else. No. If Haig was involved, it was as a facilitator. He was working for others. But Haig wasn’t charitable; he worked for a fee—either favors or cash. Neither was easy to trace.

  Oscar pulled into the driveway and his headlights blared on the graffitied shutter door to his garage. He left the car running and stepped out to undo the padlock. As he stooped to kneel, something shifted in the shadows across the street, and his heart jumped to a sprint. A poinciana tree spread dark fingers over the footpath behind him, and in the shadows below it was the dead boy, his pale face hovering like a moth.

  Oscar didn’t want to turn away from him; the feeling of being watched was a regular itch between his shoulder blades. Even after all these years, he disliked knowing that the dead boy might be behind him. The boy was confusing. On one hand, he seemed to shun Oscar, rarely appearing in a small room with him. But outdoors and in large spaces, he was never more than twenty or so yards away, silently staring. Was he bound to Oscar, as if by an invisible lead that allowed him no farther away? When Oscar drove, he watched the windows, kidding himself that he wasn’t looking for the boy. Did he fly behind the car like a ghastly banderole as Oscar drove? Or did he flicker between places, jolting from here to here to here like a face glimpsed across platforms through a speeding train? Oscar didn’t know. The boy was simply there, whenever he paused at traffic lights or arrived at his destination, watching, sometimes shifting on his spectral feet as if anxious to pass on a message then flee, yet he never advanced or retreated. On the one jet flight Oscar had taken since Gray Wednesday—a trip to Melbourne for his uncle’s funeral—he’d clicked his seat belt and looked up the aisle. In the alcove where the flight attendants prepared the meals stood the boy, shyly stooped, not seeming to notice when people stepped through him, watching Oscar through those empty, well-like sockets. Was he as resentful as Oscar about being shackled to a stranger? Did he blame his living, breathing anchor for his torment? It was hard to read a face from thirty paces; harder still when that face had no eyes.

  Oscar slid a key into the padlock. And the boy took a step toward him. Then another.

  The hairs on the back of Oscar’s hands rose. In three years, the boy had never taken more than a step toward him. What if the ghost kept coming? What if he put himself in front of Oscar’s face and never left, forcing him to stare forever into those socket holes where eyes should be? Would he go mad? Would he, like so many killers he had interviewed, fumble for a weapon and stab or swing or shoot, his mind snapped and screaming?

  “What do you want?” Oscar said. His voice sounded as dry as old paper.

  The boy took another step closer and stopped. His pale fingers opened and closed, as if in indecision.

  Oscar forced himself to turn away; his heart jolted behind his ribs as he turned in the glare of the headlights and undid the padlock. When he lifted the shutter, the beams speared into the dark.

  At first, he had the irrational thought that Sabine had left her purse on the garage floor. But Sabine had left a long time ago, and this was, on closer look, too misshapen to be a purse. He stepped into the cold garage, his legs throwing long spindly shadows. He stopped next to the object on the dirty concrete. It was a dog’s head, resting in the very center of the garage. Its lips were drawn back in a terrified snarl. The eyes were gone, and the headlights shone in slick, purple sockets. The fur was stained magenta with blood and other fluids but had once been tan; the muzzle was narrow and pointed, the black flesh of the nose bisected by a deep cut. It was Terry/Derek, the yapper from down Oscar’s street.

  He knelt and looked closer.

  Flesh and tendon and blood vessels hung from the base of the dog’s skull like wet streamers from a grotesque party favor. The head hadn’t been severed; it had been torn from the body. And the skull itself seemed askew, all odd, lazy angles and frowning asymmetrically in on itself. Crushed, Oscar realized. It reminded him of the lizard and rat heads that Sissy would occasionally leave as gifts or trophies on the back doormat. Oscar stood and turned a slow circle. Dust rose in the beams of the headlights like tiny cold sparks. Nothing else seemed amiss. Suddenly, something clapped in the darkness, and Oscar’s head jerked up. Twelve feet above the concrete floor, a bank of hopper windows lined the far wall—three large frames with flaked paint and glass caked with grime, each hinged at the center. One clattered, swinging loose in the wind. Loops of narrow chain ran from each frame to a hook set at shoulder height. The chain of the loose window dangled, unhitched.

  Oscar carefully pulled the window closed and threaded a cold metal link over a hook.

  He returned to the head and cautiously paced around it, searching the dust for footprints. The only ones he saw were his own. Had a person done this? No man he knew had the strength to wrench the head off a dog and crush its skull. Had the dog been caught under a truck, its jamming wheels ripping the head off?

  Oscar went outside and inspected the ground under the windows. There were no telltale depressions from ladder marks. He returned inside, pulled old brochures from a box against the wall, and scooped the head off the slab; as he got another grip on it, he could feel that it was still a little warm. He took it out and dropped it in the gutter; the broken plates of bone ground together like pieces of a smashed bowl in a small, wet sack. He idled his car into the garage and drew down the shutter; it clattered as loudly as a train, then fell to a silence so profound that the click of the padlock echoed up the street. He looked around.

  The skull was a lump in the gutter. The street was empty, except under the dark coral branches of the tree across the road, where the dead boy stood watching. When he caught Oscar’s glance he deliberately looked up to the wispy clouds.

  Lose the hat, the blind woman had said. You need to watch the skies.

  Oscar hurried home.

  He fed Sissy, washed, and slipped naked into bed, curled against the cold. He lay still for a long time, listening to every shift and sigh the house made. Finally, he slept.

  He was walking down either a corridor or a tunnel, dark and miserably cold. The walls were stone or brick, and his steps echoed and re-echoed. He was lost. Ahead, something glowed with a strange light that was neither natural nor comforting—a greenish, rotten luminescence. He wanted to turn back, but behind was pitch darkness. He pressed on toward the glow. It came from a wall that closed off the passageway. It seemed to be made of long, narrow bricks. No; as he got closer, he saw that wasn’t right. It was not a wall at all but a high, wide tapestry—a hundred feet across, and so high its top was lost in inky darkness. This curtain was woven with the bones and skulls of ten thousand people. Femurs and rib bones were the weft, and humeri and ulnae the warp. Skulls were ivory sequins. This awful
drapery was the source of the sick, eldritch light—and behind it was a yawning darkness more terrible than the narrow, blind confusion he’d left behind. He knew he had to go. Then the curtain rippled. The bilious light shimmered, and he heard an unmusical tinkle, the discord of a thousand untuned pianos as bone ticked against bone. Something was on the other side. Something huge. It was coming.

  He turned to flee, but his legs and arms were leaden and refused to shift. He fell to the ground, but the best he could manage was a desperate crawl, fingers and toes scrabbling for purchase on the slick rock floor. The bones clattered, a sound louder than the breaking of boulders. The air shifted as something massive moved behind him, coming closer, coming fast. He screamed in terror. Whatever had woken behind the curtain of bone shrieked in hungry delight.

  Chapter 11

  Winter sunlight was a bright shout, spearing down between lush green leaves and bouncing countless diamonds off frosted car windscreens.

  Oscar’s hands felt light on the wheel. Despite the dog’s head, and despite his dreams, he had awakened feeling refreshed, and as he drove he hummed. He hadn’t saved a life, but he’d saved a body from destruction. He was on the job, and it felt good.

  He remembered a morning, more than twenty years ago. He’d risen quietly and padded on bare feet down the hall to the kitchen. The night before, he’d heard his father return late. Someone had raped and killed a young boy in the bayside suburbs; Sandro had been one of the detectives on the task force. Oscar had guessed they’d found another curled and voided little body. The silence that came home with Alessandro Mariani was as solid and dreadful as a corpse, so frigidly still that Oscar had heard the two words his parents had spoken from all the way across the house. “Another?” his mother had asked. “Yes,” Sandro had replied. Vedetta Mariani knew her husband well enough not to ask any more. Sandro claimed he didn’t bring his work home, but he did: not in words but in arctic silences where he’d stop mid-sentence to stare for long minutes at something deep in his own mind, and in his sudden bursts of white-hot anger at a drawer that wouldn’t close properly or a pen that had run out of ink. Oscar would look to his mother, who would smile softly, shake her head, and remind him that Papa would be fine in a minute or two. But that night, two decades ago, the dread quiet had been so profound, and his father’s sleepless pacing through the hall so untouchable, that Oscar thought the house would be frozen by sadness forever. The next morning when he’d crept to the kitchen, Oscar was shocked to find his mother at the stove frying salsicce and his father, dressed for work, behind her with his arms around her waist, both of them smiling as they slowly swayed to Jerry Vale turned low on the radio. After Sandro had left for work, Oscar asked his mother how his father could have forgotten last night’s horrors so easily. “He hasn’t forgotten,” she’d replied. “But he’s smart enough to know that today is not yesterday.”

  Oscar arrived at his destination. He parked his car and went into a white pavilion.

  In the cold marble hallway hung dozens of framed black-and-white photographs. As Oscar passed, one caught his eye: the old image was of a monkey in a silk jersey and a matching cap on the back of a grinning greyhound; dog and monkey both looked oddly serene, as if the moment captured couldn’t be more natural. From ahead came a metallic crack that made Oscar flinch, followed by a swelling chorus of men’s voices and the harsh, rising tones of a race announcer. Oscar stepped again into brittle winter sunlight.

  A low turquoise rail ran along the inside of the oval track, and a surging mass of dogs chased a mechanical lure. The announcer’s words over the loudspeakers were also a swirling race: “Up the inside comes Jet Stream followed by Ragged Ace and Hardly Shaken and into the far turn as No Argument thunnnders up from behind.…”

  Oscar found Teddy Gillin among the dozens of men leaning hopefully on the trackside fence. The race finished. Men tore up tickets and left the fence.

  Gillin’s silver hair was combed, his tie was neatly knotted, and his suit, though twenty years old, had been pressed with care. Oscar could see that Gillin’s blue eyes were bloodshot but bright with intelligence. They rolled when they saw Oscar.

  “No.”

  “I haven’t even asked for anything,” Oscar said.

  Gillin clasped his hands behind his back as he walked back toward the pavilion. Somewhere, someone cheered, and punters shot sour glances in that direction. “Your being here is question enough, and I say, thank you but no.”

  Gillin’s voice had rounded diction that sounded more British than Australian. Oscar loved the man. Dr. Theodore Gillin had been Oscar’s general practitioner as long as he could remember. Sandro and Vedetta Mariani had taken young Oscar to Gillin for tetanus shots, a split scalp, concussion, two broken arms, tonsillitis, mumps, and a frank (and, frankly, embarrassing) talk about nocturnal emissions. As an adult Oscar took himself to Gillin for flu shots, ingrown toenails, ear infections, and a referral for sperm-motility testing back when he and Sabine had been planning to start a family. The scales had tipped when Gillin’s love of drink outweighed his cautious care for his patients and he administered a quadruple dose of diamorphine to a girl who was fortunate to live. The girl’s family sued, and Gillin was struck off the medical register. He lost his wife and his house. Oscar often wondered about that drink that had tipped Gillin over the edge. Had he poured the shot knowing that this could be the one that would kill his career?

  “How’s your father?” Gillin asked.

  “You know. Only happy when he’s in a right shit of a mood.” Gillin glared from under heavy white brows, and Oscar sighed. “He’s fine. Apart from the arthritis.”

  “He still on Warfarin?”

  Oscar nodded, although it was only an educated guess. Sandro Mariani liked discussing his health almost as much as he had enjoyed talking about his work.

  “Make sure he keeps up his blood tests.”

  “They cost a fortune.”

  “Then find a fortune. It’s your father’s health, for Christ’s sake. Money comes and goes; parents don’t.”

  “That’s not my experience.”

  They made it to the pavilion bar. Oscar ordered two Tullamore Dews, one neat, and tried not to flinch when the bartender gave the price. Oscar handed Gillin his drink.

  “May misfortune follow you the rest of your life—” Gillin began.

  “—and never catch up,” Oscar finished.

  He winced as he sipped, but the whiskey bit kindly on the way down and spread warmth through his belly. Gillin downed it as easily as tepid tea.

  “You hate gambling as much as your old man does.” Gillin waved to the bartender for another, then looked sidelong at Oscar. “Here for the fashion tips?”

  “I need a smart doctor.”

  Gillin chuckled humorlessly. “Then you’re two moves behind.” His eyes narrowed. “You haven’t got the clap, because idiots like you don’t screw around. It’s not heart disease, because of all the red wine you Mediterraneans drink.”

  “I’m not Italian.”

  Gillin waved that away. “So, what is it? You hooked on something? Go cold turkey, grow some balls.”

  “I need a postmortem.”

  Gillin’s eyebrows rose a little. “Get a pathologist.”

  “I had a pathologist. Two pathologists. One has disappeared and the other is actively uninterested.”

  Gillin looked at Oscar for a long moment. Then he sighed and swirled his whiskey glass, inspecting the amber liquid. “I remember soon after your father brought you home. What were you, six?”

  “Five.”

  Gillin nodded. “Small blond kid. Angry little bastard. You’d got it into your head you didn’t like your new house or your new family, and you went to run away. Climbed out the second-story window, over a garage or some such?”

  Oscar remembered the corrugated-iron roof of the carport outside his bedroom window. In October, the jacaranda near it was thick with panicles of purple flowers. When the breeze blew, a surreal lavender snowfa
ll would cover the roof, which in sunlight buzzed lazily with bees. He remembered vividly running away with great success at fifteen, and the frigid distance that had developed between him and Sandro afterward, but he didn’t recall this earlier incident.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, you’d waited until late—at any rate, it was late when Sandro brought you to me—and you’d climbed out of your window onto the roof so you could jump to the tree, like some chimpanzee. Only you were more like some retarded chimpanzee who couldn’t climb and couldn’t jump. You missed by a mile and landed on your head on the grass. Half a foot to the left, Sandro said, you’d have hit concrete and split your skull like a melon. He brought you to my home surgery. You’d opened your scalp and were bleeding like it was going out of fashion. And Sandro was crying.”

  Oscar shook his head. He couldn’t imagine Sandro Mariani’s stern, soldierly face wet with tears.

  “He said, ‘Look after his head, Teddy. He’s a smart boy. Look after his head.’ ” Gillin looked at Oscar. “Given that you are ignoring very strong hints from two stiff-shifters—who, unlike you, actually completed their degrees—I have to wonder if your father wasted a trip that night.”

  Oscar sipped. “Or whether you failed to look after my precious head.”

  The race caller announced the scratching of two entries from the next race. Gillin sat upright, staring out across the track.

  “I’m Joe Blow, Oscar. Worse, I’m fallen. Any findings I made, any statements, would be non gradus anus rodentum. They’d be ridiculed, or worse.”

  “I’d keep your name off the paperwork.”

  Gillin shook his head. “Do you know how long it’s been since I looked inside a dead person? 1970. I remember, because it was the year Hendrix died and I was wondering what they’d find inside him. Robert Johnson was my guess.”

  “I don’t want an internal autopsy—I’m hoping we can get that later. I just want your thoughts.”

  For the first time, Gillin was lost for words. The men drank in silence. Around them, punters checked their watches, finished drinks, and began the shuffle back to the racetrack.