by Bill Hussey
‘Fuck it!’ Jack shouted. ‘Hold on.’
The seatbelt cut into her shoulder. As she jolted forward, she saw a huge metallic structure fill the windscreen. Stones flew up from the drive and chinked against the wings of the car. The Ford Escort came to a halt a foot short of the gate.
‘Dawn, I’m sorry. Christ, how didn’t I see that thing …?’
‘Not your fault,’ she groaned, massaging her neck. ‘Looks like there should be a three-headed dog guarding it. You might’ve noticed it then.’
The gate was almost the width of the drive, and as tall as the topmost branches of the elms. It was a mesh of weathered metalwork with three praying figures at its apex. The eyes of these supplicants were smooth against their cheeks, their pupils long eroded.
‘Cheery,’ Jack murmured, getting out of the car. ‘And padlocked. Can we call Mrs Malahyde?’
Dawn snapped open her mobile and shook her head: ‘No signal.’
‘Well, I reckon we could squeeze around the sides.’
He took a step back, judging the gap between foliage and frame. Pushing his back against the body of the gate, he began to ease himself through. He slipped on the moss-coated roots that ruptured the path, grasped the latticework and regained his balance. The figures atop the gate shuddered.
‘Nothing to it. Come through.’
Dawn, being slimmer and more agile, made easier progress, but the roots were her only footing. She glanced down. The driveway sat on a raised bank of earth. On either side the ground fell away sharply. Her eyes swept along the almost vertical drop. Her head reeled. The forest bed, eight feet or more below, appeared to rush towards her. She stumbled. It came quickly: that sickening moment of a fall, when gravity sets about its work and you know that no amount of clutching at the air will save you. Resigned, yet afraid, she waited for the impact.
Jack’s hands closed around her.
‘You all right?’
As she righted herself, she saw his smile tighten. He snatched back his hands and folded them beneath his jacket.
‘I’m fine. You all right?’
‘Course,’ he said.
They trudged up the path, away from the gate. Turning her back on those three figures, Dawn felt a childlike thrill, both exciting and dreadful. The kind she remembered from childhood, when her father had finished her bedtime story and was crossing the room to turn off the light.
They emerged from the drive and stood blinking in the sudden glare. A house of glass, beautiful and cold, threw the forest into their eyes.
Two
‘Quiet Time’ at St Augustine’s Care Home for Retired Priests was never strictly observed. Today was no exception. There came the occasional fart from the unashamedly flatulent Father Janson; the careful hum of Fred Astaire numbers from the bibbed and drooling Father Mantou; insectile clicks from Father Connolly’s throat. For Father Asher Brody there was only the voice, its words echoing to him down the years: Do you feel it now, as your faith closes in about you?
Filtered through the rain, October sunshine dappled the Day Room with spectrums of coloured light. Father Brody, sitting in the window, did not notice the display. In the place where the old priest’s mind took him, there was neither colour nor beauty nor sunlight to warm his skin. Pretty lights had no place there.
Brody made up his mind. He reached for the telephone. There was a faint click before the hum of an expectant line. He hesitated, replaced the receiver and flattened out the newspaper on his knee.
Missing … last seen … Car abandoned … large build, dark hair, dark eyes …
The article sat above the lonely hearts, horoscope and WI pleas for jumble sale bric-a-brac. Dark eyes. Brody snatched up the phone and dialled. It rang once.
‘Garret? You there?’
‘Father Brody?’ Christopher Garret’s voice piped down the line. ‘I didn’t expect …’
‘Forgotten our arrangement, Father? I was to be told of anything relating to the boy.’
‘Really, Asher … You … you knew my views …’
‘Our arrangement: if I left quietly, you would keep me informed about him. You took a fucking oath. I’ll be in Crow Haven by nightfall.’
The receiver slammed into its cradle. Eyebrows rose upon the foreheads of nurses and volunteers, regarding the old priest as if he were a child that had stamped its foot in a tantrum. Brody glared back and heaved himself from the armchair.
As he left the Day Room, Asher Brody felt a twinge of uncharacteristic envy. Not of the stroke victims, who silently railed against the prison bars of their bodies, but of those whose minds had given up the hopes and terrors of the metaphysical. Once, in their days of useful service to the Church, they had probed and preached the questions of Immaculate Conception, Transubstantiation, Resurrection: the whole shebang. Now they cooed at rainbows and let saliva hang unchecked from their chins. A realisation slipped into Brody’s consciousness: life without anticipation was what he craved.
Reaching his room, he made quick work of packing the few belongings he would need. Bones cracked as he hunkered down and selected three journals from the bottom of the wardrobe.
Crow Haven: 1976, Crow Haven: 1984 – ’85 and Crow Haven: 1995.
The oldest diary, much like the seventy-six year old Brody, had a scored and weary appearance. When its first page had been filled, on 6th January 1976, he had already looked older than his fifty years: his hair, iron grey, his skin aged by half a century’s exposure to an unrelenting sun. The Asher Brody who had made that first entry, however, had possessed boundless energy, equalled only by an industrious mind. And yet, a little under three months later, despair had nearly killed him.
He looked back at the forty or so other journals strewn inside the wardrobe. They had not been opened in years. He felt sickened by the perversity that only three periods of his existence meant anything to him: those recorded in these Crow Haven diaries. The rest of his life seemed as if someone else had lived it. When he remembered the days of his youth in Darwin, he imagined them as he had once imagined the adventures of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. The boy who had camped beneath the stars of Kakadu, kayaked its canyons, discovered that its beauties and dangers were often the same thing, was no more real to him than the characters of Mark Twain’s Mississippi.
The day his brother infected him with the adventure bug, even that seemed distant and unfamiliar. He had been six years old when his mother read aloud Charlie’s first letter home. The world of violence and hazard, hinted at in that wartime correspondence, had excited him. He vowed that one day he would have his own adventure. His mettle would be tested. His courage would hold. But the fantasy of patriotic hand-to-hand combat was to go unfulfilled. Being academically gifted had been his downfall. His father determined that, while one son was a hero of the physical world, the other would be a champion of the spiritual. Arid land and cyclone devastation bred a hard, ferociously religious people in that part of the Northern Territory. His father had been one of the hardest. Asher had not dared cross the old man.
And so he was sent to the only seminary on the continent, the Ecclesiastical College of St Patrick, near Sydney. Under the tutelage of Father Samuel Willard, Asher Brody had found God despite himself. But faith did not dilute his zeal for adventure. During Vespers, meditation periods, visits to the Blessed Sacrament, he imagined himself the hero of some great battle. His war, shaped according to his studies, would not be manmade, like his brother’s, but a crusade given by divine mandate. This holy quest, however, was denied him. After three decades of dutiful service, the passion in his heart for derring-do began to cool.
Then, arriving in the parish of Crow Haven, he had found an adventure at last. An adventure which had taught him that age-old lesson: be careful what you wish for.
Asher Brody looked back upon his past. For all the detail and colour, it seemed like a web of artificial memories. Only what had happened in Crow Haven in ’76, ’85 and ’95 was real and vital to him. Now Crow Haven was calling to him a
gain.
‘Father? I’m sorry to interrupt. I knocked.’
Sister Agnes Hynter was not given to sweating, but beneath the brew of Vicks, talcum powder and camphor, Brody could detect a whiff of perspiration. He followed the look cast over his suitcase.
‘I’m taking a trip,’ he said. ‘To visit my old parish.’
‘You’re feelin’ worried, then? ’bout something in …’
‘Crow Haven. You look ill at ease, Sister; it doesn’t suit you. Unless Father Gregory’s pinching your arse.’
‘Father!’
The nun blushed and giggled. As Brody had planned, mock outrage defused the tension.
‘What is it, Agnes? No secrets between us I hope.’
‘Course not. It’s jus’ Father Garret … he phoned. Said you sounded upset.’
‘He’s more perceptive than I give him credit for. I’m very upset.’
‘Well, Father Garret, he … He doesn’t think you should go back. He didn’t give no reason.’
Brody lifted his suitcase from the bed and patted the vacated spot. She sat, and he placed the Crow Haven journals in her hands.
‘Three diaries, Agnes, covering nineteen years. But they concern one place. One secret. Tell me, how long have you been in God’s service?’
‘Forty something years.’
‘And you feel His presence?’
‘Every day.’
‘And you’ve never questioned that presence? Never demanded proofs of His love?’
‘Make demands of God, Father?’
‘Why not? After all, the Church has done that very thing. Many times, it has gone through jittery phases and cast around for tangible proof of the divine. Saintly relics, witnesses to miracles and crying Madonnas, stigmata. And then there are the devils.’ Brody rapped the oldest diary with his knuckles. ‘Possession and exorcism. The come-one, come-all, big-top hoopla of the Church; pure Las Vegas. I once thought of devils as the bogeymen of unenlightened priests. A stick with which to beat faith into the young and simple-minded. I know better now. One must be strong in the Lord to beat the devil down. When my time came, I was weak, and my weakness cost a young boy very dearly. Very dearly … It’s all here. In these books. My testaments. I’ll tell you a little of the story they contain, to make you understand why I must go back.’
Sister Agnes moved very little during Brody’s long story, but the turning of the world never stops, even for the strangest tales. The afternoon sun retreated across the carpet. Gold turned ochre and, as Brody finished, twilight was deepening the shadows in the corners of the room.
‘I thought this would be the last word on the matter,’ Brody said, picking up the ’76 diary. ‘But, as I told you, more was to come. Now that Simon Malahyde has disappeared, I must go back. Something is about to happen. I can feel it.’
‘Yes,’ Sister Agnes said. ‘Yes, I think I see now.’
Cawing came from the clump of copper beeches at the end of the garden. Brody went to the window and searched for the bird in the fingers of the trees.
‘A crow, like tattered black cloth, flew into the clearing …’ he whispered.
He did not need to consult his journals. The bird flew again inside his mind, plucking synapses as it went. His hand clutched at his chest.
There was a chink of keys. A grind-click as Sister Agnes locked him inside.
‘Sister? What are you doing?’ he rushed to the door. ‘Sister!’
He pounded until his fists ached. Then he turned to the book that lay open beside his bed.
‘Show me my path, O Lord,’ he murmured. ‘And sustain my faith in the dark days to come.’
Three
Anne Malahyde knew that she could watch the two detectives and remain unseen. It was one of the few redeeming features of this house. This glass tomb. The windows would reflect the forest and keep her hidden.
The woman was in her early thirties, thin beneath her winter coat. She stood with her back straight and her shoulders braced. There was challenge in that stance, but her gloved hands lay folded across her stomach, as if she were protecting something. Her face was impish but set hard. The man looked very young to be a senior officer. He seemed unable to keep still, forever straightening his clothes and ruffling his hair. Taken in isolation, his features shouldn’t work: an overly-developed jaw, large eyes and an uneven tear of a mouth. Mismatched components that pulled together into a face that was striking, if not handsome.
In her youth, Anne would have pictured him undressing her. Imagined his fingers pulling at her knickers. She’d been insatiable then. Every man she met, every strapping young customer she had served in the tea rooms where she’d waitressed, had been cast in at least a brief fantasy. Of course, she had calmed down when she started seeing the wealthy Peter Malahyde. He had been older than her; so much older it had seemed. So less virile than the boyfriends of former days. That wasn’t to say their sex life had been non-existent. Despite Peter’s growing feelings of inadequacy, the sex had been okay. Right up until the time his face began to peel away.
Lust and craving: these emotions were remembered clinically now, for sex was part of living, and she hadn’t lived in any real sense for such a long time.
They were here to ask about Simon. What did she know about Simon? Nothing. Weeks after Peter died, she had given birth to him without pain or passion. For years, he was just a little person who played in the garden, in the woods, and whom Anne made meals for when she remembered. Sometimes his resemblance to her late husband had shocked her into realising his presence but, by the time he was ten years old, his face had changed. At about that time he had gone to boarding school. She arranged for him to stay with minders at local hotels during the holidays. The only word she had of her son for seven years was end-of-term reports which always went unread. When he returned from an institution in Geneva last summer, they had exchanged a few inconsequential words. He had decided to stay at home while he studied at the university. Since then, he passed like a ghost through the house. Ghosts were things that Anne Malahyde refused to see.
Something had happened to Simon as a child. Just before he left for his first boarding school, that nosy priest had come to see her. The one who had been with Peter when he died. The priest had said some crazy things. Then, a day or two later, he had abducted the boy. Father … Father Bowman? Father Brodman? She could not recall. He was delusional, the younger priest – the man she now knew as Father Garret – had told her. He would be shut away somewhere. The police had asked if she wanted to press charges. It had seemed a lot of hassle. Now she wondered what that old priest had tried to tell her.
But what did she know about Simon? For seventeen years she hadn’t given him much thought. Her life had been one long apology that could never be heard. Simon had played no part in it. No, she’d known nothing about her son until four nights ago, when he had woken her with a kiss. And now she knew everything. He had told her a truth that made all those years of grieving for her late husband a cruel sham. A truth that frightened her, because what she now knew about Simon meant that death was not always the end: things could come back.
A house of glass. Shivering aspens reflected in the panes that ran the length of both storeys.
‘I’d no idea there was anything like this in these parts,’ said Jack.
‘Art Deco,’ Dawn murmured. ‘Thirties design, though it doesn’t look that old. Probably based on the Villa Savoye …’
She stopped. Jack was grinning at her.
‘History Channel,’ she said, starting towards the house.
It was so smooth. So dazzlingly white. Its skeleton of girders and skin of pre-cast concrete had been dressed with so much glass that she couldn’t decide if it was beautiful or tawdry. As she faced it, she saw that the lower left wing of the house had no rooms, just a series of concrete pillars that supported an isolated second storey. Between the supports were trellis frames woven with the husk of a dead grapevine. Above, all the windows of that suspended level had been bricked
up.
Dawn rang the bell. She had no time to withdraw her hand before the door opened. A woman, dressed in tones of black and grey, a headscarf tied under her chin, stood with disconcerting stillness upon the threshold. She made no move to greet them.
‘Good morning,’ said Dawn. ‘I’m Sergeant Howard, this is Inspector Trent.’
Anne Malahyde did not respond, but stood aside. They entered a cylindrical hall with an iron staircase spidering around its walls.
‘Beautiful house, Mrs Malahyde,’ Jack said.
Dawn looked up to where the staircase met the first floor landing. Her eyes fixed on a door, very unlike its well-polished, dark wood sister across the hall. It was grey with dust and paint hung from it in thin, curling tongues. From a quick assessment of the layout, she guessed that it led to the bricked-up wing of the house.
‘Dawn?’
At Jack’s touch, she stirred herself. They followed Anne Malahyde through an archway and into a lounge full of dated ’80s furniture. Dawn and Jack settled on a cream sofa while Anne lit a cigarette and stood smoking by the window.
‘Now, before we move on to any new information, I want to go over a few areas,’ Jack said. ‘Your son disappeared Monday night. Bed not slept in. Says here you didn’t hear him come home.’
‘That’s right.’
‘We found his car abandoned at a quarry some way out of the city. Nothing inside to indicate his whereabouts. We have a witness who saw Simon that night. A Mr …’
‘Father Garret,’ Dawn said, passing him the statement. ‘Was out walking and saw Simon pull into the drive at two a.m.’
‘So he came home at two and drove off again some time before six, Tuesday morning. Which is when you noticed the car was gone. Now. What has Simon’s behaviour been like recently?’