by Candice Fox
‘Be gentle with yourself,’ the nurse advised.
‘What … happened?’
‘Your body is very badly scarred,’ the nurse murmured. ‘We think that the doctor in Bangkok attempted the abdominal lipectomy on the first night you arrived. He performed what is commonly known as a tummy tuck. The next day – the next day, Tara, before your body could recover from what was, quite frankly, a savage procedure – he went ahead with the breasts, the arms, the back. You’ve got to understand … this person had little medical training. Well, little training in Western medical procedures. You’ve undergone an incredible physical trauma.’
‘Get me up,’ Tara said.
‘You really can’t –’
‘Get me up,’ she snapped.
The nurse didn’t move. Tara yanked back the blankets, felt nausea stir in her stomach. She clawed at the chrome bed frame, her new, strange form shivering violently, making the plastic bracelets on her wrists flap against the bars. The woman with the kind, leathery face eventually came to her aid, slipping under her arm, a human crutch. The floor was dust-flecked, cold linoleum, the painful trek from the bed to the bathroom traversed a thousand times before by faceless ghosts, a stumble-and-a-half of agony before the blessed stability of the white plastic shelf in front of the glass. Tara stared at the unfamiliar face in the mirror. Reached up and touched the limp side, dragged the corner of her mouth up so that it aligned with the other, then let it fall. Her nose had been broken. When, in all this, had her nose been broken?
The bandaged, robed body before her was a crooked white question mark, not the round, solid hulk that she was used to. Her shoulders were high and her neck was low as she rested there, a rageful bird, both bewildered and terrified by the new world around it.
What am I? she wondered. She stared and shook. What am I now?
‘Did you tell her?’ someone whispered.
‘I think she knows what’s happened to her now, but not the other thing,’ the nurse said. Tara looked, but the voices came from beyond the bathroom door and she couldn’t travel back on her own. She leaned, saw a slice of white coat. A doctor.
‘You need to tell her. Best she gets both halves at once, get it over with. Perfect timing. The shrinks can come in just in time and clean up the mess and we can all get back to what’s important.’
‘She’s still coming round,’ the nurse said. ‘I think I’m only just now getting through. It’s been days of mumbling. But I think she’s comprehending now.’
‘Good,’ the voice said. ‘Well, I need you back in A&E in an hour, so make it snappy, yeah? Sorry, dear, you fucked yourself. You’ll be scarred for life. Oh, and your mother’s done herself in. Best of luck, see you later. Right? Then back on the ward. Got me? We can’t hold their hands forever, even the rich ones.’
There were footsteps, a sigh. Tara gripped the ledge before her.
Eden felt sheepishly happy, just for a moment, as she wandered across the wet green grass of Bradfield Park, passing softly through the crooked gates and pathways made by the elbows and shoulders of a thousand people. She was a fox slipping between dopey hounds, her ears pricking naturally to laughs and squeals and breathy sighs, the static excitement of a mob. It was a curious little ripple of happiness that pulsed in her. For a moment, she relished being in the crowd – because for at least one killer tonight, these were hunting grounds, and Eden never felt more comfortable than when she walked among prey.
She could understand the appeal of them to the Parks Strangler. The runners fluttered and flapped together in gaggling grounds like plump, stupid chickens, their muscles and tendons stretching as they readied themselves for flight. Taut calves hitched and strained, bulbous shoulders rolled upwards, then fell. Eden thought of blood, and there was so much blood here tonight, flushing in excited cheeks and pumping through jugulars. She yearned quietly, lifting her head and breathing in the scented air, pregnant with chemicals – deodorant, tiger balm, zinc, the sugary tang of energy drinks, tablets, gels. In the human-thick evening, the light beyond the harbour hit its deepest blue, wedged between an approaching storm and the black, still water. Then the orange street lamps along Alfred Street flickered and came to light, eliciting a long, low cheer from the crowd. Weighty anticipation, as real as the smell of the soil stirring in desire for the rain, another cheer as lightning pricked the distant suburbs. She picked her way up the hill towards the thick trunks of the old bridge, stopping to look at the birds high above swirling over the crowd, ducking for moths attracted to the lights.
Hunting grounds. Was Eden being hunted at that moment?
She looked at the crowd around her. Now and then she caught a face turned towards her, eyes on her own, catching her briefly before turning away. The lanky young man in black lycra, stretching his gangly arms above his head. The portly middle-aged woman in a trio of women laughing and chewing on her water-bottle nib. The old man sitting alone beneath the sprawling tree, one half of his face lit by the glass-front apartment buildings above Luna Park, an ancient mask as he tied the laces of his bulky running shoes. Somewhere a radio station was commentating on the runners assembled at the start line, a row of stoic Kenyans and fat-free middle-aged men huffing and swaying at the ribbon. Was the killer here tonight? Eden stood beneath a sprawling tree and tried to guess. If she’d ever been the sort of killer to garner this sort of attention, she was sure she’d take the bait. How does one stay home from such a grandiose event, organised almost in tribute to one’s night-time games? Eden couldn’t imagine her own work ever causing such a stir. Most of her victims were old men with long-held morbid fetishes – the public-toilet child molesters and cinema masturbators of the world. Where they were women, they were hard, loveless women. Black widows, Munchausen by proxy sufferers, the occasional corporate assassin. Clara, the baby-faced Byron Bay beauty, had been a breath of fresh air. The victims of the Parks Strangler were these fresh-faced girls, vulnerable to the crushing glimpse of love handles in shop windows, the all-too-common call of the jogger’s pathway to panting redemption. They were incredibly easy to relate to, these women. They were all daughters, colleagues, girls next door. Eden’s victims were shadows. That’s what gave her the longevity she enjoyed as a hunter. Complete lack of public outrage.
Her trail of thoughts was broken when Frank swam into view beside her, flipping the bill of her black baseball cap in the annoying manner of a guilty brother. He stood on the hill beside her and looked at the writhing crowd. He was unshaven and mussed from sleep, the special operations shirt ill-fitting on his now-lean frame sagging at the collar. There was a police-issue leather jacket slung over one arm.
‘Spotted the killer yet?’
‘Not yet,’ Eden said. ‘Glad it’s going to rain though. Plenty of hoodies around. Very helpful.’
‘Are you going to jump rides?’ he asked. The two hadn’t discussed their own operations on the ground. It was good practice to have at least one of them stationed at the police command centre on Macquarie Street to field calls from cops out on patrol, assess what sounded promising and disregard the usual complaints that came with crowd control – men brawling, women falling, the inevitable mid-event heart attack. Frank must have assumed it would be Eden out in the crowd jumping rides from one patrol car to another as complaints came in.
‘I might run some of it,’ she said.
‘You sure you should?’
‘Thanks for the concern, Dad. But I know my own body. I’ll hop a ride out to Kensington, then run some of that. Maybe run to Coogee, get another ride back. I want to spend at least some of it on the road. In amongst it.’
Frank nodded. ‘Well. Be careful. You’re not more than a week off that crutch.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘I want to be right there if we get anything.’
A low rumble of thunder over Balmain. The crowd whooped and cheered. Eden spotted the girl, Hooky, coming up the hill towards them, bright green Doc Martens gripping the wet slope, making muddy tracks between the peopl
e moving slowly to the start line. The girl had a computer tablet tucked under her arm.
Short blonde hair, Eden thought. But no, Hooky wasn’t the journalist who had turned up at Hades’ home. For one, the old man had said it was a woman, and Hooky was all girl. The tiny chunks of polished wood in her earlobes, the leather straps on her wrists. That hangdog troubled-teen look she gave everything and everyone, as if at any moment she would be misunderstood, under-represented, oppressed, the way so many teenagers were convinced they were.
Oh, yes, the girl was brilliant. She had potential. And her upbringing, the murders. Eden didn’t know much about that, hadn’t bothered to look into it, but she recognised that something had changed in the girl, that the survival instinct was alive in her. When someone close to you is murdered, it flips a switch inside. The world is no longer an inherently good place – it is full of predators and you realise, however explicitly, that you must become a predator in order to be immune from the same fate. It was all very simple to Eden. Her switch had been flipped early on. She had grown and evolved along those killer lines, and now she was more beast than she was anything else. Frank had been flipped, but he was so concerned with keeping those dark thoughts and melancholies under wraps that it was all he could do to stay sober at the same time.
Eden wasn’t sure how far gone Hooky was. But she didn’t have time for such meaningless curiosities.
‘Alright,’ the girl said in greeting, peeling off the cover on the little tablet. ‘Let’s talk about chip timing.’
‘What on earth is chip timing?’ Frank wrinkled his nose.
‘I’m about to explain, Grandpa,’ Hooky sighed, drawing up a map on the screen. ‘Just hold onto your suspenders. We’ve got ten minutes until the start gun, so no stupid questions.’
‘No stupid questions,’ Frank murmured, waggling a finger in Eden’s face. The older woman rolled her eyes.
‘All the runners have a microchip embedded in a little foam pad on the back of their race bibs,’ Hooky continued, pointing to the crowd. Eden looked at the numbers before her, pinned to the front of singlets and jackets. ‘When they pass over an electronic mat on the ground at the start line, their chip registers and a start time is assigned. At the finish line, when the runners pass over another electronic mat, the microchip is blipped again, thereby giving an accurate digital time in which they ran the event. You keeping up?’
‘I think so.’ Frank nodded. Eden nodded.
‘The runners take their registry number, the one written on the front of their bibs, and look up their results online. The chip timer also sets off an automatic camera which flashes pictures of the runners as they cross the line. So they can punch in their number and get pictures of themselves starting and finishing the event.’
‘This would be really useful,’ Eden said, ‘if we knew the killer was going to register for the event. Which is about as likely as me winning the thing.’
‘Well, it won’t be useful for that,’ Hooky said. ‘But it will be useful for discovering if anyone goes missing from the race.’
‘How?’
‘Well.’ Hooky drew up the map on the tablet, tapped and highlighted the starting point, where a blue bubble flashed, indicating the location of the device. ‘There are electronic mats at the start line and finish line that’ll tell us when runners start and when they finish. But if, say, you were some kind of technology whiz, some kind of absolute fucking genius, you could hack the system and get access to all the runner microchips during the race. Then you could set up GPS markers, say, every five hundred metres. Like the mats, the GPS markers would give you an electronic signal, a blip, every time a runner passes over them. A runner would start the race at the start line, and then every five hundred metres, blip, blip, blip, until they reach the finish line.’
Eden took the tablet from Hooky. Looked at the little bubbles intersecting the running paths on the map, flashing as they waited for the runners.
‘Why are the markers so close together? Five hundred metres isn’t very far.’
‘I’ve rigged the system so that every runner in the entire event has ten minutes to complete each marker. You’d have to be going pretty damned slow to not make it five hundred metres in ten minutes. Every person who starts the race will show up on my system. If they don’t get through all the markers in time, it’ll send up an alert at the marker they missed. The alert will come right here, to this device. If, for some reason, a runner drops out of the race, we’ll know. We’ll know which five hundred-metre block they went missing in. We’ll know who they are, and where they disappeared within ten minutes of the runner missing the checkpoint.’
‘This is … this is amazing!’ Frank took the tablet from Eden, stared incomprehensibly at the screen.
‘Yes, I agree, I’m amazing. But it’s an imperfect plan,’ Hooky said. ‘If someone sprains an ankle and stops midway through the race, you’re going to get an alert. If someone stops to chat to someone on the sideline, and doesn’t make it over the next marker in time, you’re going to get an alert. There are thousands of people in this event. I suspect you’re going to get fucking dozens of alerts.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Frank said. ‘We’ll send someone to investigate every alert we get. You never know. One of these might be someone getting snatched off the track.’
‘It doesn’t help if your killer doesn’t nab someone in the race.’ Hooky looked at the crowd, distracted. ‘There are no rules. Anyone is fair game. They might go after one of the spectators. But fuck it. I thought it might be a useful tool.’
There was howling from the start line. Eden recognised Caroline Eckhart’s voice on the speakers, fronting a techno track for the radio station covering the event. The stirring of the crowd, the call and response, the stamping of feet at the ribbon.
‘I said, are you ready to run?’
‘She’s a little star, this one,’ Frank growled, looping an arm around Hooky’s neck, crushing the girl’s head against his chest. ‘Oh, she’s a genius.’
‘I’ll keep in contact with you on the road,’ Eden said, watching, waiting for her partner to disentangle himself from the teen. She pointed to the girl. ‘Get this one a radio. You can feed me alerts and see if I’m nearby.’
‘Right,’ Frank said. He grabbed the girl by the back of the neck, a big brother’s grip. ‘You’re coming with me, young Einstein.’
Ruben stood on the ledge beneath the attic window and looked down at the grass underneath his feet. He’d broken into a few places in his life when things became desperate – once into his own bedroom after his parents had caught him out in the night and barred him from coming back in. A storm was brewing beyond the tree-lined park, just beginning to sprinkle the cars parked alongside the iron gates with rain. He’d spent the afternoon listening for sounds in the attic room, and when he was convinced no one was home, he began to climb. On top of the garage, he suddenly remembered the white van, and peeled back a worn sheet of corrugated iron to peer into the gloomy space. The van was gone.
He was well aware that his curiosity about the person in the attic room had crept beyond healthy interest. When he stood on the steps outside the police headquarters with his papers in his hands, he had questioned what drove him, what sick pull had hold of him and was reeling him in towards the attic room. He felt pain and terror behind the door at the top of the stairs – but it was more than that. He had told the disinterested Australian policeman he thought that whoever was in the room was the killer. The words had rolled off his tongue, and it was only as he said them that he knew he’d believed this from the moment he read the gossip articles about the Harper girl, and that this had grown and swelled in his mind when he heard the snarling beyond the door.
The Harper kid is a psycho … The physical and psychological fallout from bad choices …
Bad, bad, bad. There was no better word for what Ruben had heard centimetres from his fingertips, a person, a thing, raging at the wood, a slave to the badness infecting its own
body. He couldn’t see her, but Ruben could feel the black cloud swirling inside the room. He felt the chill of its wispy fingers slithering under the door in his first moments in the Harper house. There was no cleaning away that badness, no matter how hard he scrubbed.
The boy reached up, gripped the chipped railing beneath the attic windows and pulled. He flipped his elbows up onto the ledge, pushed up and shoved at the windows. Blessedly, they gave easily. He slid over the windowsill and through the curtains.
It was dark inside the attic room, and the air was thick with mould, the wet, damp mould of old bathrooms, metallic on the tongue. There was no light. He scrambled to the wall and tried the light switch by the door. A bulb, long-unused, snapped on above him, shuttering to life angrily like a child shaken awake. At once, the faces pressed in on him as though they had been waiting for him in the dark. It seemed, in the first moment of terror, that they all turned towards him. But in a moment he realised that there were too many. That the hundreds and hundreds of faces were static and not real. He realised, as he crouched by the door, that they were all the same face.
Joan Harper. The sharp blonde woman from the gossip columns, the one photographed sitting placidly at a restaurant with a friend. There were pictures of her littered over every surface, tacked to every square centimetre of wall. Photographs from the house. Young Joanie in her teenage years, squeezed into frame between two other blonde girls, her white teeth gleaming in a Cheshire cat smile. Joan Harper on the bow of a yacht, her short hair whipped across her forehead. Joan Harper on her wedding day, pulling on her snow-white heels. Leaning against one corner was a huge oil painting of Joan Harper reclining in a red leather wingback, her fingers coiled daintily around the stem of a wine glass.
All the pictures were eyeless. Where the eyes should have been were ovular black hollows, scribbled out so that the paper tore and black lines wound around and around the taut cheeks of the Joans crowding up into the corners of the room. The mouths gaped in identical black ovals, howling, hundreds of ghoul Joans screaming from the walls.