Hades (An Archer & Bennett Thriller)

by Candice Fox

  A man appeared. Jason felt electric terror surge through him, the impulse followed closely by rage that almost blinded him.

  “Who the fuck is this?” he asked as Sandra opened the door.

  “My husband, Reg. He knows. He’s known the entire time.” She shrugged a little, afraid. “It’s his money.”

  Jason sighed and pushed past her into the hall. The husband was another bent and big-eyed creature, a bald top shaved close, leathery neck crisscrossed with wrinkles. Jason had known about the husband but hoped somehow to catch the woman alone. He enjoyed the quiet tension of a woman on her own, the sparkle of threat in the air, the knowledge shared between them of what he could do, what he was capable of. Had he wanted to hurt the Turbot woman he could easily have done so, but the husband made things messier. Jason resigned himself to communicating his disappointment through sighs and sternness rather than violence.

  He went to the dining-room table and dumped his things. Sandra and Reg watched him. He began unpacking, clumping things into piles.

  “We want to know more about the donor,” Reg said.

  Jason let out another sigh, long and loud like a hiss, closed his eyes and let his head hang. When he looked at Reg, the man winced slightly.

  “Fuck you,” Jason said. “Fuck. You. Reg. I don’t know who told you you had any say in this, but it sure as hell wasn’t me. Your wife and I have made an agreement. There’s no turning back now. Shut your fat head and tell your bitch to sit over here.”

  Sandra seemed to waver between loyalties. Eventually she crept to the chair at Reg’s nod and sat down.

  “The donor,” Jason sneered. “Jesus H. Christ. Who the fuck is the donor to you? What if the donor was your neighbor, Reg? The local priest? The mayor’s wife? What the fuck are you going to do about it? You need this heart or Sandra is going to die.”

  “We were under the impression that the donor would be someone of... of suitably low, uh . . . worthiness of life.”

  Jason shook his head and took a stethoscope from the table. He fitted the earpieces.

  “Take off your shirt.”

  Sandra looked up at him.

  “Take it off.”

  She glanced at her husband, cringed, moved as though in pain as she slipped slowly out of the garment. Jason stood over her, sniggered at her plump brown breasts inching their way up into fat rolls at her armpits.

  “You wanted a junkie.” He nodded, glancing over his shoulder at Reg. “A prostitute or a violent sex offender, something like that. Sure, maybe I could have gone down that road, and you might have thought to yourself that you were complicit in the death of someone who deserved it or who was probably going to kill themselves anyway out of selfishness, stupidity, greed. What you don’t understand, Reg my friend, is that it doesn’t matter.”

  Jason made some notes on a clipboard on the table. He listened to Sandra’s back, counted the irregular, half-certain heartbeats against his watch.

  “Of course it matters,” Reg bristled. “We’re . . . we’re not . . . animals.”

  “That’s exactly what you are,” Jason sighed, pulling a syringe from a box and unwrapping it from its plastic sheath. “You’re animals. You think putting on a tie and slipping on Italian leather shoes and waddling your fat arse to your Lexus every morning doesn’t make you an animal? You think that because you listen to fucking Chopin you’re not an animal?” He laughed. The Turbots listened, each as hard as a rock, watching the doctor’s face. In the yard a dog was barking, pawing at the screen door. No one moved to placate it.

  “Let me illustrate this for you,” Jason said, waving the syringe to accentuate his words. “Couple of years back, on my way into work, I was on a train that hit a man. Terrible thing, you know, I mean here we are, fifty or more people in the carriage, all standing chest to chest and crotch to crotch and trying our best to ignore each other, and someone—some junkie probably, some person unworthy of life—decides to run out and leap in front of the train. We knew what had happened, even back in carriage eight. You just know, you know? There was a distinct locking of brakes, a pause and then a poetically wet foomp!”

  Sandra and Reg both screwed up their faces. Jason nodded as he prepared to draw Sandra’s blood.

  “So when the announcement comes, as it inevitably must, everyone is mortified. There’s sorrow in the carriage so tangible you could have bottled it and sold it to Hollywood. People are covering their mouths and saying, “Oh God,” and crying—this one woman, she even prayed. Ha! The train sits there while emergency calls are made. No one can get off, of course, because bits of this guy are strewn everywhere and there are pictures to be taken and reports to be written. An hour passes. People start to talk to each other, you know, as strangers do. People begin to look at their watches, sigh, wriggle around. There’s no air-conditioning. When another hour’s passed, people start to get restless. They beat on the windows and try to talk to the cops, ask how long it’s going to be. They swear and they make phone calls. They start bickering with each other, get stuck into their packed lunches, sweat, pick their teeth, talk about what’s wrong with society. A fight breaks out. Women cry and babies scream.”

  Jason capped the blood and plasma vials and labelled them, slotting them into foam cartons. He wrote some dietary instructions for Sandra on a piece of paper and weighed it down with the fruit bowl in the center of the table.

  “People care for as long as it’s socially appropriate to care,” he said finally. “They love and they hate and they share and they feel guilt as long as they need to, and not a second longer. You can switch that off whenever you want to. You can make it so that you don’t feel anything at all. You’re an animal. Homo sapien, that’s you. Most evolved primate of the family Hominidae. Guilt is not in your nature, Reg. It’s not in your DNA. Never was, never will be.”

  The doctor packed his things away and hefted the bag onto his shoulder. He glanced at his watch and noted the date.

  “I’ll see you in two days,” he said, looking Sandra in the eye and ignoring her husband. “I’ll expect you to be alone.”

  He got too old for them. That was Hades’ reasoning for sending them to school when the boy was thirteen and the girl was eleven. He was too old to equip them for a world of friends he couldn’t choose, jobs he wouldn’t understand, for a world he couldn’t protect them from. He told himself these things, though it still hurt when Eden pleaded with him to change his mind and Eric erupted with rage. They couldn’t live and learn with him at the dump forever. They would need to live in the real world, even if it meant pretending to be something that they weren’t.

  He told himself that normal children needed schooling. A long-silenced voice at the back of his mind, however, whispered about the good it might do for their strange ways. Interaction with others their age might stop them, he hoped, from sneaking out and wandering alone at night in the countryside. It might stop them from talking about justice. It might stop them from hurting and hating and planning things.

  For weeks the old man waited anxiously at the kitchen table every afternoon for the children to arrive home from school, and for weeks he silently agonized when Eden ignored him on her way into the house and Eric stormed in and slammed his backpack into the kitchen wall.

  The teachers told him they were brilliant, calculated and at times almost militant in their work. Their books were immaculate. Their assignments far exceeded expectations. Eden obliterated records on the running track. Eric declined, when invited, to represent the school in boxing championships at a national level.

  Hades was pleased.

  However, despite these triumphs, they were also quick-tempered, withdrawn and resentful of the other children. Eden spent her lunches in the library. Eric spent his picking fights. Hades held out hope that things would change.

  A year passed, then two more. Reports of their detachment continued but the mood of the children lifted. Eden kissed him on the head on her way in. Eric sat down and stole the newspaper from under his fin
gers. Eric remained a loner, but once Hades heard Eden talk about a girl named Rachael or Rebecca or something, about how the other girl had taught her how to make bracelets out of colored bands. Eric hated the girl, said she was a fat loser who didn’t even have the balls to raise her hand in class. Hades assumed that was just jealousy. Eden had a friend, even if it was a shy, overweight girl who hung out in the library with her, and if he held out hope long enough Hades supposed Eric might get one too, some other overconfident, volatile little billy goat he could butt heads with.

  The old man supposed that things weren’t all that bad.

  He didn’t see the killing coming.

  Hades thought it was a client at his door. The way the footsteps approached with the barely contained urgency of a killer needing help reminded him of the many desperate customers who had appeared in the doorway. A robbery goes wrong and a banker is shot. A small-time drug war erupts and a gang leader is executed. They would appear there, sometimes men, sometimes teens, blood-spattered and wide-eyed.

  Help me, Hades. I’ve made a mistake. I’ve made a terrible mistake.

  When the old man looked up from his newspaper and saw Eden standing there like that he choked on his scotch. She stepped over the threshold hesitantly and wiped her sweat-damp hair back from her temples with bloody hands. Her eyes were wild. Hades rose, in a daze, from his chair.

  “Hades,” she breathed. “We’ve made a mistake.”

  She was still wearing her school uniform. It wasn’t unusual for the children to be home late from school without explanation. Hades assumed they’d decided to walk home in the rain. They would arrive, dripping wet and laughing, fighting and shoving each other into walls. The rain brought out the animal in them.

  A wholly different animal was looking at him now.

  “What’s happened?”

  “We . . .”

  She was lost for words. Eden was never lost for words.

  “Whose blood is that?”

  She backed towards the doorway, her eyes pleading. Hades wrenched his jacket off the chair and ran after her.

  Her rack-thin body disappeared into the dark, slippery like the body of a cat. It didn’t matter. He knew where she was going. Hades ran blindly through the rain. The workshop lights glowed in the darkness. The world jolted as his old bones carried him, the square of golden light arriving too fast.

  The scene might have looked staged to a novice in the art of killing. Eric stood by the worktable wearing one of Hades’ plastic aprons, a long silver hacksaw in his hand. The body of a man lay on the table, missing his legs from the knees down. Blood ran in thin ink streams off the edge of the table and onto the floor, pooling in shapes of marble on the concrete.

  There were many things wrong with this scene. The killer was a boy. Beside him a blood-soaked girl stalked guiltily to center stage.

  “I told you not to get him,” Eric growled at her.

  “What have you done?” Hades ran a hand through his hair. He gazed at the body. “What have you done?”

  The children were silent. Absurdly, Hades found himself checking the corpse’s throat, hoping for a pulse.

  “Hades,” Eric sighed, gearing up his reasoning voice. “Look . . .”

  “No,” Hades snapped. “You. I want to hear it from you.”

  He pointed his stubby finger at Eden. The girl squirmed, unable to decide where she should rest her eyes. That morning she’d braided her long black hair. She gathered it up now, knitting her fingers through the messy weave.

  “He’s my teacher,” she mumbled. “My science teacher. I decided we should take him, not Eric. I waited in the rain by the bus stop. I knew he would drive past. He offered to give me a lift. I led him back here. You wouldn’t have had to know except . . . except we couldn’t move him all in one piece, and the saw won’t go through . . .”

  “Great,” Hades snarled. “That’s great. I wouldn’t have had to know. I wouldn’t have had to know you’d murdered someone in my workshop!”

  The rage was making him tremble. He found that his throat was closed. Eric fingered the blade of the saw quietly, his expression blank as his nails wandered over the bloodied teeth. The boy glanced at Eden and she sighed and let her shoulders drop.

  “I found him with Renee,” she said, flicking her head at the corpse.

  Hades tried to breathe slowly.

  “Who?”

  “Renee. My friend. Renee.”

  “She’s not your friend,” Eric said.

  “Shut up!” Hades snapped. “What do you mean you found him with her? What were they doing?”

  Silence fell. Eden licked her lips.

  “They weren’t . . .” Hades began.

  “She told me all about it,” Eden murmured. “She said they would do it all the time in the art room cupboard when everyone was at lunch. It’s at the back of the hall and you can lock it from the inside. She didn’t like it. She said she didn’t know how it started but she wanted it to stop.”

  The words were tumbling out of Eden. Her hands gathered up the cloth of her skirt and squeezed it tight.

  “She told me if I said it was happening to me too, then maybe we could do something about it together. She was afraid to do it alone.”

  Hades waited for the tremors in his body to stop but they didn’t. He asked himself if he had ever expected this. He realized that he had, that the dread that he was feeling was a much-denied and long-anticipated thing. He had known this would happen. He had seen it in their eyes, heard it in their whispers.

  “This man was a monster, Hades,” Eric said. “He deserved to die. It’s the right thing. It’s justice.”

  The old man wiped at his eyes, looking over the corpse on the table. They had made an amateur mistake. The children hadn’t anticipated the wetness of the blood and the strength of the bones, the way the saw would slide and refuse to cut. An adult body needed a long-tooth saw. The section cuts should try to take in cartilage, not attempt to sever mid-thigh.

  “Get out. Both of you. Get out of here,” the old man said.

  “He was a beast.” Eric frowned, confusion and rage mingling in his features. “He was a fiend, Hades. Don’t you underst—”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” Hades panted, his jaw locked. “You’re children. You don’t get to decide who lives and who dies.”

  Eric dropped the saw. It clattered on the concrete. Eden was hugging herself, looking over her shoulder at the two as though she couldn’t bear to face them. The boy wandered around the table, pausing in the doorway to the rain-soaked night.

  “We were never children,” he said before he left.

  13

  He didn’t feed her. Martina lay as night fell, thinking about kidnappings, sex slaves and torture, and she decided that if the man was going to keep her for any length of time he would have fed her. A day came and went since she had seen him, she guessed. She sat with her back to the doorway, not wanting to look at the steel operating table, or let her thoughts turn into visions of blades and pulsing organs, pooling blood and her own screams.

  Whatever he planned for her would come soon. It would come before she could starve to death. It would be hours, not days. If she wanted to live she would have to get out before he returned. She did want to live. She wanted to live like she never had before.

  In the long silent hours and chilling darkness Martina had time to consider what her death might be like for the people she would leave behind. Luckily, she supposed, she was an orphan. There was a string of ex-boyfriends who would feel a stab of regret, a bunch of friends who would sob for her, but sitting there in the dark with nothing of her life to grasp onto, Martina Ducote realized that her exit from the world would be an insignificant ripple on the surface of a large ocean. There would be Facebook tributes and flowers at her apartment gates, speeches and crying and hugging at a church somewhere. But those things go. Those things fade. If anyone ever found out who did this to her she would live on only as a name in a list in a true crime b
ook somewhere, if she was lucky. If not, it was the newspaper archives for her.

  Insignificant. No one was coming.

  Martina realized in the dim blue of growing morning that there was no one who she could rely on to search for her, to find her, to save her. If she was going to live, it would have to be through her own efforts.

  The pain of hunger prevented her from sleeping or lying still and she crawled laps of the cage, trying to find a weak spot. The base was iron, welded to the bars, and the padlock on the cage door weighed a kilo. She pushed her legs through the bars and tried to move the cage along the ground but the awkwardness of the position made her strength useless.

  She cried and then growled at herself, furious with how easily she accepted defeat. Wiping her face, she cleared spent sweat and tears from her cheeks.

  “Okay, okay,” she murmured, breathing deep. “There’s a way. There’s always a way.”

  The wall beside the cage looked like drywall. She wondered if she could kick through it with her heels, making a hole to the outside of the house that she could yell through or make a signal. Martina scooted to the edge of the cage on her backside and fitted her legs through the bars, giving the wall a mighty whump. Not only did her heels pierce the drywall but the cage rocked slightly. She looked about her. How much did the whole cage weigh?

  She shoved her feet against the wall, slowly this time, testing the tipping weight of the cage. Martina gripped the bars above her and shoved, feeling the base of the cage lift slightly under her backside.