Hold on, she said, hold on, and gently closed the lid again. Then she ran, still talking to him or to herself, she didn’t know. I’ll get help, I’ll get help, hold on, she said as she took the stairs two at a time.
Detective Moon made his way back down the stairs to the basement as the paramedics carried someone on a stretcher, still alive though barely, up to the ground floor.
Detective, said a patrolman he knew but couldn’t name. He nodded. The only survivor? he asked, indicating the man on the stretcher as he disappeared through the open door.
Yep, said the patrolman. The girl in the other box was already dead and it looks as though someone had been in the third one until recently. It still smells pretty lively.
He looked in at the boxes, there were holes in the bottom of each with catheters running through them, the lids had scratch marks on the inside. They smelt of decay and fear and blood and piss. The house, or its inhabitants at least, were well known to the police throughout the state, but everything had gone quiet here since the father of the family had died.
The kid wasn’t involved in any of his dad’s business, as far as we knew, he said and the patrolman nodded, though he didn’t know if that were true or not.
What’s missing? he asked.
A body, said the patrolman, looking in at the empty box. The other three don’t look as though they’ve been used for a while and a car’s gone from one of the garages. The rest of the guys are checking upstairs now.
The note wasn’t giving anything away, the detective said. Did the guy in the box say anything? As he asked, the paramedics returned and lifted the body bag onto the stretcher and carried it away. It offered little resistance.
Who’s in there? the detective asked them.
Some girl, said the first paramedic, looks young, looks like a runaway, there were tracks on her arm, but it’s hard to tell. There’s not much left of her.
Not much left of her, the detective repeated. What, like remains?
Not like that, like she went down to nothing, said the paramedic, like she gave in. And he nodded and found himself writing this down as the paramedic said it.
He went back up the stairs where Mona told him that it was the black Lexus that had gone from the garage; it had always been his favourite car.
Does he own a gun? the detective asked. Lots of guns, she replied and then told him how he would spend his days down at the peripheries of the property setting up targets on his makeshift range. Some days, she said, all you heard from morning until night was the sound of gunfire.
He sighed. Can you show me where? He followed her down through the expansive garden to the high hedges and trees that bordered the carefully kept lawn. There was a small, weathered cross stuck in the ground across from the path they were on. It listed badly.
Pet? he asked her.
The dog in the photograph, she said, and pushed past the bushes and on into the trees. In the clearing there were the remains of a beehive with a flat piece of wood balanced on the top acting as a makeshift table. The clearing had been pared back to give the makeshift shooting gallery some range. There were various targets, some charging silhouettes, others conventional numbered circles, pockmarked with bullet holes. When he saw the figure propped up against the trunk of a fallen tree he drew his gun and motioned for the housekeeper to step back. He moved slowly forward, but knew before he was within ten feet that it was from the third box. He moved to check the pulse at his neck and then he saw the black holes grouped closely on his chest. Pieces of a paper target were still stuck to him, held in place with congealed blood.
What is it? asked the housekeeper, but she kept her distance.
Target practice, I guess, said the detective. And then he shepherded the housekeeper from the clearing, through the sun-filled trees and back to the house where he knew he’d be able to find some help.
Song 5: Box (Reprise)
His office ceiling was low, but the room stretched on forever. There were thousands of lightbulbs of differing shapes and sizes that covered most of the available space above his head. Some were burnt out and black, others hypnotically bright, one or two flickered indifferently, buzzing into darkness and then blooming back into silent life. The light didn’t reach much past the bulbs themselves, penetrating no more than two or three feet down from the ceiling and barely dispersing the creeping gloom. The room was filled with binders and boxes full of files and filing cards. Some bulged with paper, precariously stacked, but somehow they remained intact. There was no obvious attempt at order. Red, black and green folders dominated in the main, but the odd boxy oblong of navy blue or steely grey stuck out (literally in some instances) here and there. In the distance, when a heavy door banged open and shut, the discordant tapping of hundreds of typewriters could be heard clicking away, tiny metal keys striking red and black ribbons, the inky cloth deadening the impact. Like an army marching in its socks, he thought. Endless tiny silver bells resonating shrilly and abruptly, then the sudden zipping sound as rollers were pushed from right to left and a new sentence began to run from one margin to the other, a still faintly vibrating bell waiting to come pealing into life again. He preferred it when the door was closed; the sound hurt his head otherwise. He looked up as someone came in to load another pile of black filing boxes on to the edge of his desk. He gave the courier a baleful look, but they’d already turned their back and squared their shoulders and were soon lost among the teetering columns of paperwork. He heard the door opening and the trilling metallic chorus rose up again in a rush until it was muffled by the heavy wooden door slamming shut. Then it was suddenly quiet. He stood up and walked to the window, but the window was always dark, the view always obscured. He peered at the glass, but the only thing he saw was himself looking back. His brow, he noticed, was furrowed. He rubbed hard at the jutting shelf of flesh between his eyes. He looked tired, dissatisfied. Another bell rang somewhere, not a typewriter bell, something with more clarity. He turned to see an envelope set squarely on his desk and crossed the room to open it. The index card inside was covered in tight red script and in one corner there was a small box that someone had neatly ticked. He held it up and regarded it over the top of his glasses, then he walked to the first pile of black folders and carefully pulled the top box down from the unsteady pile. Inside the box there were hundreds of index cards tightly bound together in neat batches. He pulled the elastic bands apart and playfully catapulted one in a looping arc into the corner of the office. It bounced off a red folder and disappeared into a shadowy corner. He matched the card from the folder with the one in his hand, found a paperclip in his top pocket and joined them together, making sure their corners were precisely matched. He placed them in the folder and then returned the box to its jaggedly concave pile. He grunted a little as he pushed it back into place and then he returned to his desk and waited. He’d filed him away, which meant that he’d be here soon.
He woke in darkness and lay there letting his eyes adjust. It was quiet, just the low hum of an air conditioning unit and the occasional flickering in the shadows that made him think someone was coming, but he was alone. The box he was in was shut tight with a slit in the hinged door set almost directly above his face that let the air in. He had kicked and thrashed around in the tight blackness when he’d first awoken, but he’d simply bloodied his knuckles and cracked his knees, the impact making him exhale loudly. That had been how long ago, hours or days? He didn’t know. The space was too confined for him to even raise his watch to his face; he was immobile, held, stilled. A figure finally approached the box after moving slowly about in the darkness above and flicked a switch that filled the basement with shocking white light. It was as if the walls had been broken down and daylight allowed to come flooding through the room. He blinked rapidly, tears flushing across both cheeks, and found himself gulping hard as if his head had been thrust underwater, then allowed briefly back to break the surface before it came rushing once more into his mouth. His coughing racked his chest and the vo
ice shushed him. Lying there in the dark he could hear keys jangling against a hip, he heard a bottle of wine being slid from a shelf, the chink of glass as it was manoeuvred free, he waited for someone to speak, but the footsteps faded, disappearing up a set a wooden stairs. There was a pause and the darkness suddenly shrouded him again as a door locking shut was the only hook he could find to attach his fear to. At first he worried about things rushing up at him, tearing the box apart, lunging hungrily. Then some days he’d pray for something to break the box and make him free, if only momentarily.
He’d been attacked while sleeping in the park before and so when the man had approached him on the secluded bench he was instantly wary, but he’d proffered beer and money almost instantly and so then he thought that he was simply cruising the park to hit on him. Some guys came out here, on a temporary lam from their real lives, and offered to suck his cock for cash. He knew guys who did it, and even though he’d lost himself somewhere, he hoped he still retained his dignity. He couldn’t square those actions away no matter how hungry or thirsty he got. The man had just laughed when he’d told him this.
I’m not that guy, he’d said to the man, attempting to hand the crumpled dollars back to him. He’d held onto the beer, though. It was cold and felt right in his fist.
I’m just out here helping my fellow man, said the man and he smiled as he said it. It was dusk and only getting darker.
What happens, asked the man, to put a man like you out here amongst all this? He indicated the neat verges and lush flowering islands of the surrounding park landscape. He patted the bench they were seated on.
Aren’t there places you can go at night, shelters, hostels?
He was chugging the beer and only half-listening. The dollar bills sat between them and he was thinking of the places he’d slept in the last few months, the basements, the benches, the hallways of boarding houses, next to a heating duct out by the airport, the foyers of banks where they kept their teller machines, underneath bridges, in store doorways. He’d spent the occasional night in shelters, but there was always fighting and noise there and noise was the one thing he couldn’t stand. The man was staring at him and when he turned to look at him he saw his mouth twitching as if he couldn’t control his emotions, as if he couldn’t, as his dad used to say, keep a lid on things.
I’m sorry, he began. He knew that he’d missed something, something that this stranger seated next to him thought important and now he was angry that he’d missed it. He could always sense fury and misery on people as if they were telegraphing their thoughts, their actions as obvious as those of feral dogs. The twitch of the lips, he knew, was one step away from a widely swung fist, a lunging head. He’d been in enough bars, in enough bar-fights, to become alive to the ions of energy in the smoky air as they crackled with the looming threat of impending violence. Now out here in the early autumn night he felt the irresistible twist and a turning of things, of an animal readying itself for attack. He hunched in on himself ready to take the blow and judged the weight of the can in his hand to see if it had enough heft to it that he might use it as a weapon. He tried to stem the charged current rising in the air around him, the bloody sparks of the inevitable blow, but the man was staring at him silently now, his reddened eyes unblinking in his thin, pale face. Then there was a sound behind him and two other men moved quickly forward from beneath the bushes and trees, clamping a gloved hand (he could smell the leather invading his nostrils) over his mouth and pinning him against the bench. One embraced his while the other held his head in place from behind as the man drew a hypodermic syringe from his coat pocket and placed the point gently into his neck and pushed the plunger home. From a distance they made a strange tableau: the four men in an embrace, three of them looking almost tenderly on at their fallen friend. The men carried the unconscious figure into the shadows and then one picked up the crumpled bills from the bench and took a drink from the beer can, wiped his mouth and threw it on to the grass where its contents oozed into the earth leaving a fleeting golden trail that bubbled into nothing. Moments later it was quiet and the next person that came along merely picked up the can and placed it in the bin.
Hey! He shouted, Hey!
He pummelled at the lid of the box, he kicked against the wood until he felt a sudden tugging in his crotch. He calmed suddenly and brought his hands into his lap, his knuckles brushing against the wood pressing down on him. There was a catheter running down the inside of his thigh, taped to his leg, disappearing out of the bottom of the box. The sense of intrusion made him moan loudly and his voice was echoed somewhere off to his right. Someone was nearby, their desperation intermingling with his. He stopped, terrified by the sounds. When he was younger his mother had taken him to her Pentecostal church where almost every service ended with the congregation speaking in tongues, a swaying mass praising The Lord, hands raised high before passing out with their mouths open, unquestioning like salmon stranded on a rock. It scared him and he’d stand very close to his mother, his hands clenched tightly as he clung to her skirt, hiding his face as people gesticulated and fell all around him. He bit his lip and waited for the moaning to stop and was surprised when it slowly became a soft tuneless humming, like the sound of a distracted child amusing itself. He called out, but was ignored as the noise became softer and more enchanted. The lights overhead buzzed into life and the steps approached quickly and he felt someone hovering over his box. A tube appeared through the slit and he instinctively nuzzled at it like a lamb, but he couldn’t remember how he knew to do this, had he done this before? He licked indulgently at the nozzle and felt instantly calmer, almost dreamlike. A hand came through the slit and stroked his cheek and he welcomed the touch.
You’re settling in, good, someone said and then he felt himself fading into a dreamless sleep.
Whenever he woke he imagined that he was undergoing a CT scan and that the humming he heard was the gently revolving drum dissecting the inner workings of his brain and feeding the information in hazy blue sheets to the rows of doctors seated behind the glass just out of sight. Then he’d smell the wood and the oil of the box, the musty, still air. Once, he’d been blinded by the light overhead – the difference between his enforced night and day was becoming more extreme as he grew more weary and his muscles became more atrophied – and listened fascinated as the box nearest his was opened and the person lying listlessly there was removed.
Is he the one who sings? he asked in a voice that he didn’t recognise as his own. A shadow moved across his box and he saw a silhouette briefly take shape and then shatter in the light.
Sang, said the figure, correcting him. He hefted the small, lifeless form over his shoulder and carried it away.
He played that scenario over and over in his head; it was the new hook he hung his thoughts and fear on. He became aware of his own inertia, of the liquid going into and out of his body, that he was just a vessel transporting fluid from one point to the next. I’m an aqueduct, he thought, and smiled in spite of himself. He could barely feel his face any more; he was becoming as lifeless as a mannequin, adrift in the void. He’d try to talk to the man when he came to see him. He could sense his presence, feel him sitting there on an upturned crate sometimes with the lights on, sometimes in the darkness. The man reached out and touched the boxes with the flat of his hand and would talk in a low voice. He sounded distracted and sad and would never engage in conversation directly. As he lay in the box he’d call out to him with words that sounded as soft as tissue paper, but the man would just shush him and again the slow blackness would descend and when he came to again the cellar would be empty and still.
Cross Country Murder Song Page 8