by Sam Millar
In the distance, the remote farmhouse and surrounding area came into view. The building looked disjointed—a mirror fractured. The land was lumpy and the edges were contoured, girding the lone road leading to the large farmhouse. The road itself shone with the black, denuded glare of ageing asphalt, guiding the way like a liquorice tongue.
Unnaturally, the place was absent of the noise of machinery and human occupancy. Only the sounds of branches rubbing together, like stridulating crickets, could be heard; and the only movement came from a pageant of crows swooping in for landing in one of the haggard-looking fields where three scarecrows took centre stage, guarding.
Ignoring the ragged sentinels, the crows rummaged at will, drilling with their beaks.
The scarecrows’ spectral strangeness absorbed Jack, making him think of an effigy of Calvary.
The Graziers’ farmhouse clung, crab-like, to the side of a massive barn. Jack could make out rusted machinery poking from the barn’s dilapidated siding. Everything seemed chaotic and unused as if no human hand had touched it for decades. Off the side of the road, he could see the bulky outline of an old car, a dent the size of a portable television blazoned along its side. The car rested in the shadow of the farmhouse, arrogantly or complacently exposed. There was little doubt in his mind that it was the same car that had come at him on a snowy night all those weeks ago, recklessly indifferent.
Through misty morning light and shadows to the last line of fields, Jack began to wend his way cautiously in the direction of the farmhouse, avoiding the carved path. The soil beneath his feet was slightly sodden and spongy. It stank with the smell of rainy green. Overhead, the sky was ugly and gorgeous, like a bloody salmon gutted to the neck.
Red sky in the morning, he thought, gently touching the gun housed inside its shoulder holster, reassuring himself.
He had no evidence of wrongdoing by Grazier—only raw belief; but more importantly, he had no right. Benson would explode if he knew what he was up to, compromising the case on raw belief. Wilson would have him arrested. That was a certainty.
He had to be careful, though. Search enough, but not too far. Find something—something sufficient to allow Benson to have a search warrant issued—then quickly get the hell away from this godforsaken place.
Hunkering down, he edged his way towards the Graziers’ car, tumbling awkwardly beside it, feeling like an old fool acting out a stuntman manoeuvre.
The car sat crookedly, one tyre in a muddy hole. Running his hand over the dent, his eyes scanned the tiny particles of blue scratched alongside the original white. There was no doubt in his head that the blue was his own car’s paint.
There was a single window halfway to the corner and he moved to that now, crawling on belly and elbows, crouching so low to the ground that his shadow hurrying along beside him looked deformed, misshapen.
Knackered, he rested his head directly below the windowsill.
Easy now … don’t rush it … don’t mess up at this stage of the game.
Allowing his left hand to crawl up over the warped windowsill, its decayed wood crumbling on the pads of his fingers, he could feel chunks of peeling paint, and knew instinctively at that terrible moment that they contained lead. If someone had ever placed them across the tongue of a little girl called Nancy, they would have caused her to go into convulsions and die—a terrible and excruciating death.
He could hear Shaw’s gruff, acerbic tongue, mocking him, relegating him to a non-professional civilian: Calvert, speculation is reincarnation. Neither can be established without proof, you fool.
Proof? You want proof? I’m going to get you tons of the stuff; so much, in fact, that you’ll not know what to do with it, you nasty old bastard.
Removing his gun from the shoulder holster, Jack checked it one last time, making sure the initial chamber was empty—a precautionary tactic in case of an accident—and then returned it to its warm bed of leather, before standing, upright, his back tight against the wall.
Leaning forward, he peeked inside the window. Too dark. Impossible to see a damned thing. His armpits were damp. He could smell his own body odour and something else. It wasn’t pleasant. Not fear, he told himself. Caution.
Taking a deep breath, he moved stealthily towards the front of the farmhouse.
As expected, the large front door wasn’t locked. Miles of rocky roads and forests isolated the Graziers, and a visitor would be an irregularity, an oddity. The Graziers certainly had no need for locked doors. Perhaps others did.
Manoeuvring steadily, Jack eased into the darkness of the hall, making a sharp right in the direction of a room. Falling into the room, he allowed his eyes to adjust to the dimness. It was a bedroom—of sorts—with a single bed stretched out in the centre. The bed was accompanied by a small chest of drawers, paradoxically making the room look even emptier. It was the barest room he had ever seen in his life.
Atop the chest of drawers were sealed hair tonics. Hair clippers sat alongside smirking cut-throats. There were a few magazines in the room, honeycombed into a wooden bracket against the wall. The magazines were mostly, not exclusively, back copies of Barbers’ Times.
Jack scrutinised the inside of the chest of drawers, careful not to disturb the contents. Socks and underwear. A few shirts, white and heavily starched. Did Jeremiah wear those? Jack cast his mind back to his experience in the barber’s shop, when he had thought that Grazier was going to cut his throat.
The room reeked of loneliness, though the unmade bed contradicted that. Could this be a visitor’s bedroom, a fugitive’s? Could this be Harris’s bedroom?
Cautiously, Jack proceeded out of the room and down the thin hallway where the darkness was easing, a little at a time, to a uniform grey. Eventually, his surroundings brightened enough so that he was able to look about and take stock.
The other rooms in the house flowed easily into one another, devoid of any clutter or furniture. They were almost clinical, unlived in, like props for a stage. The furniture was neat and perfectly rendered, as if from a picture. The rooms disturbed him, though he couldn’t say why—only that their ambience was tranquil, yet strangely menacing.
Stepping out of a room, Jack scanned the hallway. A closed door to his left beckoned. Beneath the door wrote a pencil of thin light, beckoning him towards it. He eased opened the door, revealing a bedroom far larger than the lonely specimen he perceived to be a visitor’s. This room did not have a woman’s touch, but Jack speculated that it belonged to Judith and Jeremiah, if only by a process of elimination.
He panned his eyes around the room and was automatically drawn to a lone picture adorning the wall. Susanna and the Elders, stated the inscription. It was a print of a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, an artist familiar to Jack as one of the first women artists to have achieved recognition in the male-dominated world of post-Renaissance art. A fiend by the name of Tassi had raped her, and the trauma of the rape and subsequent so-called trial had impacted on Artemisia’s life and paintings. Her graphic depictions were cathartic and symbolic attempts to deal with the physical and psychological pain inflicted upon her by men.
Susanna and the Elders told the story of a virtuous young wife sexually harassed by the spying elders of her community, as she sat bathing; they had hoped to blackmail her into having sex with them. The painting depicted the gesture of one of the Elders raising his finger to his lips, warning Susanna to be silent, while the other Elder loomed large, leering menacingly and conspiratorially. The canvas spoke volumes with a single scene, and the finger to the lips was exceptionally chilling.
There were two wardrobes stationed on either side of the painting, guarding it. One had its doors slightly ajar, and he could see quite clearly its contents of plain-looking dresses. Above them, a rack of shoes—black, conservative—rested. They looked well used and scuffed—travelled, a more diplomatic word. The astringent smell of mothballs was overwhelming.
Easing the doors of the other wardrobe open, Jack scanned quickly, finding n
othing of significance; he chastised himself for wasting time, being a voyeur. He needed something tangible, something to convince Benson of the necessity of a search warrant. Deep down, he was beginning to believe that he was clutching at straws. Whatever he was searching for wouldn’t be here, waiting for him to find it. It would be well hidden.
It was a splinter of morning sun coming through the window that made him glance over his shoulder. The golden sliver reflected off a box perched on a shelf, catching his attention.
The circular box was quite beautiful, if somewhat macabre. The dark, mahogany lid depicted a decapitation scene. It was more of Gentileschi’s work in the form of the beautiful, if somewhat ghoulish, Judith Slaying Holofernes.
Holding the box in his hands, Jack shook it gently, as if not wishing to disturb the contents. Something sounded from within.
For a heart-stopping moment, the bedroom door opened slightly. His body stiffened, but it was only the morning wind flexing its muscles. Nervy but undeterred, he spilt the contents of the box on to the bed.
Photos. Twelve. All Polaroid. Children. Naked. Different poses.
Jack shook his head. He wondered immediately what the implications were. He didn’t want to find this sort of stuff, confirming his worst fears: Grazier and Harris were obviously working as a team.
But why would Grazier keep the pictures in his bedroom? Wouldn’t his wife discover them? Was she in on it as well? Shit, he was unprepared for that. Up to now, he had assumed that paedophilia was exclusively an all-male disease—a perfectly reasonable assumption when he thought back to the people arrested while he was in the force.
There had to be a logical explanation. Perhaps Grazier and Harris had threatened her, forced her with threats?
The thought made him fear for Grazier’s wife, almost as much as he feared for Adrian. Why was she not about? What had Grazier done to her? What if Harris hadn’t fled the country, but was here, somewhere on the property, armed and lurking about?
Jack knew that, unlike the magazines found at Harris’s cottage, there could be no turning up his nose at the photos. The clue to Adrian could be staring him in the face, at this very moment.
Deliberately forcing himself to enter clinical mode, Jack no longer allowed the pictures to be repulsive. If he allowed them to shock, then they—not he—would hold the power.
Turning to the task at hand, he studied the photos, trying desperately to find some clue as to their location or the perpetrator who introduced them to the world. He remembered once, down at the station, how they had enhanced a similar-type photo and got lucky when the taker of the snapshot was exposed in the fear-filled pupil of the child. But he doubted very much that luck would be with him on this case. So far, luck had avoided him. Besides, these pictures were grainy, not too professional looking. They were battered and finger-worn. Why was that? Paedophiles could update their collections at an alarming rate, via the Internet. So why hold on to these coarse items? Why were they so special that Grazier or Harris refused to dispose of them, and risked getting caught?
Initially, he had thought that perhaps one or two of the pictures would be of the McTier girl, but the more he studied the pictures, the more he understood their startling truth: they were all of the same child, a boy.
The face of the little boy was obscured by carefully placed shadows. The taker of the photographs didn’t want the boy’s entire face to be exposed. Why was that? Fear that the face would betray him, lead a trail right to his door, if the boy were recognised?
The boy was bony and awkward, with stunted chest and ribs that jutted out like plastic butterflies. But it was the tortured eyes that Jack kept returning to. They looked dead, impassive, but still betrayed something, something that went beyond terror and fear. There was power in the darkness of the pupils, unmerciful power. They seemed to be laughing at him, mocking, as if knowing the power they would one day wield. He had witnessed the eyes someplace else, but he couldn’t recall, almost as if they had hypnotised him into not remembering.
Think. Where?
Debating whether to pocket the photos or return them to their wooden enclosure, Jack finally decided on the latter, placing the box back perfectly, resting it just where the barely visible dust ring left a halo on the shelf.
Time to leave, he told himself, retracing his steps down the hallway.
Stepping outside the farmhouse, he was immediately assaulted by the cold, refreshing his face. He felt terribly unclean, tainted by the photos. He was gasping for a cigarette, but resisted the urge. He would wait until he got back to his car. Now was the time to leave, alert Benson to what he had seen. He hoped that his ex-partner would have a good squad of cops here within the hour, depending on the rough terrain. A helicopter would get them here in less than ten minutes, but he doubted if Benson would try to get Wilson to authorise that.
Leaving this terrible place was the rational thing to do, but reasonable actions had become alien to Jack, lately. Instead, inexplicably, he made his way cautiously down the snaking path, directly towards the sheds. Some mysterious force was pulling him towards them.
Once again, the stillness of the place unnerved him slightly. Not even a crow cawing from the nearby fields. Where are the Graziers? He thought about taking the gun from its holster, but cautioned himself against such an act. Breaking and entering was bad enough. Openly armed into the bargain? He doubted very much if he could talk himself out of that one. Wilson would love that.
Where to start? he wondered, studying the large hangar-like sheds. There were so many of them. Most appeared dilapidated beyond repair. Only one seemed to be in a functional state. It was windowless and this piqued his curiosity.
Treading softly, he made his way towards the entrance of the shed and leaned an eye against the partially opened door. The stench oozing menacingly from the shed hit him full in the face, forcing him to pull away, take a breather.
C’mon. Move. It’s only shit and blood. You’ve smelt worse than that. A million times worse than that.
By eliminating more and more possibilities, Jack’s mind and body became more and more fearful of what waited on the other side of the door.
He took a deep breath. Entered …
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“‘Will you walk into my parlour?’ said the Spider to the Fly; ‘’Tis the prettiest little parlour, That ever you did spy …’”
Mary Howitt, “The Spider and the Fly”
THE SHED DOOR squeaked loudly and Jack cursed it as he slithered in. A glow from an old paraffin heater painted pale jaundice on the wooden walls. He considered the stifling stench that was running riot. It tasted like garbage and discarded meat. Gratefully, he welcomed the fumes from the heater almost as if they were sweet-smelling perfume battling against the combined army of stenches.
Other than the humming of an old freezer, there was little sound in the shed. From the corner of his eye, a tiny red glow faded in and out of the shadows and fractured light. It was like an SOS signal. He turned to see its source, his eyes trying desperately to focus in the semi-darkness.
A woman, obscured, sat in shadows, almost motionless, a cigarette trapped between her teeth. It unsettled him, her statue-like presence. She did not speak, simply stared disconcertingly at him while sucking gently on the cigarette. There was little doubt in his mind that this was Grazier’s wife, Judith. She seemed to be appraising him in soundless speculation, and he marvelled at the control she maintained as she spoke.
“This is private ground. You’re an intruder. Trespassing can get you killed. I have the right to defend myself against intruders.” Her voice was barely a whisper, but it was strong, a voice that made one listen. “What’s your name, and what are you doing on my land?”
For a second, Jack’s tongue became wood, refusing to acknowledge her questions. Fortunately, his brain was as sharp as ever. “Jack … Jack Benson. My car skidded off the road, about a mile back. I took the nearest path, hoping to find a phone box so that I could call the emerg
ency breakdown company. I didn’t mean to trespass, but I saw your farmhouse and banged on the door. There was no answer.”
Jack heard a sound, not too far from where Judith sat. It was an eerie, unsettling sound, and it made the skin crawl on the back of his neck.
“Well, you’ve wasted your time. We don’t have phones—don’t have too many modern appliances. All the so-called towns around here are little dots,” said Judith. “The nearest dot, Bellvue, is about two miles away. Your best bet would be backtracking until you come to Bellvue. Plenty of phones there, I believe.”
“Two miles? To be honest, I’m just about beat. That accident winded me, bruised my ribs slightly. I noticed your car parked at the farmhouse. Would there be any chance of getting a ride into—”
“Car doesn’t work. Hasn’t worked in years. No, best thing would be for you to head to Bellvue, on foot. They’ll take care of you. Good people there, I’m told.”
That sound, again, coming from somewhere to her left. It was like a faint cry; like the muffled sound of a baby, as if someone was pressing a pillow on its face.
Jack’s heart moved up a level.
“What’s that sound? The little squealing sound?” he asked, forcing a smile, hoping she couldn’t read his eyes, the hardness in them.
“Sound? Oh that. You really want to know?”
Noticing too late the cut-throat partially hidden and resting in her curled-up fingers, Jack quickly became conscious of his gun pressing against his body as he edged slightly closer, warily.
The squeals became louder, more numerous, as if permission had been granted by some strange command, as if they were warning him to flee, make a run for it while he could.
What seemed an eternity ended by Judith’s movements as she reached to reveal the source of the horrible tiny sounds gnawing at his ears.
“Rabbits. Don’t you just love them when they make that sound of complete hopelessness?” said Judith, effortlessly pulling a squealing rabbit unceremoniously by the ears from a large trap stationed at her side. The creature made the sound a hungry baby makes searching for a nipple—a haunting sound so ominous it reached to the ghetto of Jack’s soul.