“Emu,” I said.
“Was it? Servants and tenant farmers ran off, and livestock died. So the Earl called in the witch known as Mother Gwynne. She told him the body had to be surrounded by moving water, and to bury that,” she gestured at the bone I was holding, “with him as it was his source of magic. That stopped the haunting, though it didn’t put him to rest; possibly Mr. Scudamore told you about the children who wandered into the maze one night?”
I nodded.
“When the brooks running into the maze dried up five years ago, the pond water stopped moving, and the ghost began to come out into the maze itself. If it wasn’t for the bone, the ghost would’ve broken loose. It’s going to break loose tonight.” She peered despairingly through the banisters.
I sat down beside her. “What if I put the bone back.”
“The spell’s broken,” she said, and she was probably right. “Mother Gwynne said he couldn’t rest because he wasn’t buried in his own land, so you might think the obvious thing would be to ship his remains back to Australia. But she warned that the moment his bones leave the island he’ll come chasing them.”
What had been so wrong with winter back home?
I tried to remember all I knew about Aboriginal burial customs, which took about ten seconds. All I came up with was something to do with trees, a half-formed idea at best. Then, scraping the bottom of my brain, I recalled that during an inquest into Black deaths in police custody the court was instructed to refer to the dead only as “Deadfella” and “Deadlady,” as it was Aboriginal law that no record of the name, no image or belongings of the individual must be allowed to exist after death. I said, “There may be a second reason why Birdfellow doesn’t rest. Is there anything connected to him that’s still in the house: writings, drawings, paintings, belongings?”
“There’s only the diary I hoped you’d find on the library shelf and a portrait painting up in the roof.”
I suddenly remembered where trees might come into all of this. “Better find it and bring it with the diary to the southeast lawn. Get the groundsmen to hollow out one of the gum trees with axes.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Shift old Birdfellow’s bones.”
The front door opened. Keenen entered, his footsteps echoing in the hall, slowing to a stop at the bottom of the stairs. He saw the emu bone in my hand and went very pale.
“But I won’t be shifting the bones alone,” I said, and meant it.
“It’s like Burke and Hare.”
I said nothing to Keenen’s comment. The sun was going down, the shadow of the marble ruin creeping over us. I just kept digging, and presently our shovels brought up vertebrae. Birdfellow had been buried facedown, an ancient way of burying the feared dead.
We dug with small spades, with our hands and with the care of archaeologists, gathering up the arms, legs, pelvis, ribs, every vertebra, every finger and toe bone. And of course the skull and its gray, stringy beard with the little kangaroo skin pouch tied into its strands. “This contains magic powders,” I said to Keenen, trying to sound like I knew what I was talking about as I placed the pouch in the canvas sack with the bones. One of the eye teeth on the lower jaw was missing, had probably been knocked out as part of manhood initiation ceremonies. But to make sure we sifted the bottom of the grave until just on sunset when we made a hurried retreat from the island.
As we reached the gate in the inner wall, I yielded to temptation and turned around for one quick look. There was a shadow over the island, somehow darker than the night coming on; a shadow that seemed to flex out across the water. I hurried Keenen through the gate, pulling it shut on its rusty hinges. We were out of the garden, but not yet out of the woods. There was still a long, crooked course ahead of us to the southeast lawn.
A couple of minutes later and several alleys into the maze we became aware of a growing dryness in the air, a smell of deserts and a sense of open spaces.
“The ghost is following its bones,” said Keenen.
I nodded. “God knows what’ll happen if it finds them, and God help us if it finds them with us.”
“I think it’s about to catch up,” whispered Keenen.
We dodged through a gap into a dead end to hide.
The bones in the sack rattled of their own accord. We hugged it tightly, smothering the sound. Then Keenen went “Ugh!” as something writhed inside the bag. We flung it from us. It hit the ground with a dry crunch, then began to squirm as if something alive was inside, fluttering, pushing, clawing to get out. I kicked it back against the wall where Keenen and I stood on it, hearing bones snap. It was only then that I realized there was the sound of birds in my head, getting closer.
We lay down with our faces to the wall, making ourselves small and silent with our arms wrapped around the bag. The bird sounds and the desert dryness grew, seemed to beat against the wall we hid behind, then faded. We waited a minute, maybe two, but heard, felt smelled no more.
We did the bone-bag shuffle back into the main alley. Keenen, while wed been digging up Birdfellow’s grave, told me he’d had Mrs. Winton coaching him on the ins and outs of the maze from the library diagram since the night of my arrival (an unsurprising revelation), so I followed on blind faith. He took what he explained was the roundabout way out as the ghost would be stalking the more direct route, at least at first. Both of us wanted to carry the sack by its extreme edges, but we knew it would only rattle again. So we held it close, all the time afraid of sudden squirmings.
We had torches, but didn’t dare use them. There was half a moon out, which helped sometimes. But a lot of the alleys were still in deep shadow.
A kookaburra’s laugh, a strident oooohahahaaaoooorrrr of mental noise right between the ears, no telling direction or how close. We froze.
“It’s trying to psych us, make us panic,” I said, not admitting how good a job it was doing on me. “It’s probably reached the entrance and now knows we’re still here.”
Keenen wet his lips. “If it’s at the entrance, we’re trapped. It can just sit there and wait.”
“Yeah, that’s a thought.” It’s what I would’ve done if I were the ghost. But then ... I wasn’t the ghost.
We were huddling in the shadows of a five-way junction of alleys, looking this way and that and over our shoulders when it happened. The bag wriggled and a skeletal arm ripped out, thrusting into the air, wavered a moment, then clutched at Keenen’s throat.
The old man yelled—and the arm fell back into the sack with a laugh of clattering bones.
“No more!” Keenen yelled. He threw the sack from him. “No more! No more!”
He ran.
And so did I, because panic is contagious.
A blur of walls, of benches and statues. A blaze of stars as I ran headlong into a dead end.
I collapsed, dazed and shaking, eyes watering from the blow to my nose. And in all this, the raucous cawing of crows heard with the mind and a human scream heard with the ears.
Then silence.
For a long time only silence.
Something was scraping along the pavement outside in the main alley, coming nearer. A scrape, a pause. A scrape, a pause, coming on, coming near. I tried not to imagine what it was. I wished I had a stick to smash its bones to dust.
The only moonlight in this alley was far up one wall. All else was dark. I felt for the torch in my pocket. I had to will my hand to switch it on.
It was almost at my feet, that one arm, bones white in the light, dragging the bag behind it. The bag reared up as I stood there, staring stupidly. The bony fingers spread and struck.
The torch went spinning, hit the wall, went out. Finger bones, cold and clicking, smelling of the grave, dug into my face. The bones in the bag knifed through the sacking, into my leg, into my side.
I pulled away, bringing my head against the wall, smashing the hand against stone. Its grip loosened. I wrenched it from me. But the finger bones closed about my hand, trying to crush it, make me
cry out so the spirit of these bones stalking the alleys would come.
I pushed to my knees with all my strength, swinging the arm, bringing the bag around after it in a half circle, smashing it against the wall. Bones splintered with a lovely crack! But the grip was still there. I swung the bag again and again. “Goddamn it! I’m trying to help you!” Finally the arm itself snapped and the bag sagged to the ground like a K.O.ed fighter, the skeletal hand dead in mine.
As quick as I could, I shoved all the bones I could find back in the sack. There were noises in my head like tinkling bells, the bush chimes of the bellbird getting louder and louder. I limped from the dead end alley, dragging the bag behind me.
“Now where?” I asked myself. I had no idea which way I’d run, not even which way was in and out. Birds were singing, chiming in my head, louder than before. I struggled off as fast as my leg and side allowed, leaving a trail of blood old blind Harry could’ve followed. I was trying to find a familiar statue or flowerbed. But everything looked so unfamiliar. Behind me the maze pushed back into angles of darkness where a form, a shape glided and flitted. Parrots screeched. I’m dead, I thought.
But a long moment passed and nothing happened.
Something white lying on the path back down the alley caught my eye. It was a bone fallen from the sack, and it occurred to me then that maybe other bones had fallen out of rips in the bag, and that the thing tracking me had been stopping to pick them up with an exalting cry of parrots.
Hoping this was true I dropped a rib here, a collar bone there to keep it busy as I worked my way through the maze. I was beginning to feel the loss of blood, starting to get cold, dizzy, and tired. It wouldn’t be long, I knew, before I’d get to the point where I’d throw down all the bones, sink down into sleep, and never wake up.
The most useless thing in the world is a sundial at midnight.
But the moment I stumbled up to it I hugged its pedestal, knowing now there was a fighting chance. It was a landmark I remembered. Nearby was one of my dirt mounds from yesterday, farther along another and another. Across this dead oblong garden and through that gap, over to the right and round to the left, a back-track here and—
I dropped an ankle bone at the gate, hoping it would slow it down just that little bit more. It was still some distance to the southeast lawn and I was in no condition to sprint.
There were lights on in the house, far away. The grounds were moonlit, except for the slim sticks of tree shadows.
“Hello!” said someone from a distance. I stared behind me, disoriented, saw the gate to the maze swinging wide.
The next thing I knew I was being picked up off the grass where I’d collapsed. Someone said, “Quick!” and someone else said, “For Gawd’s sake don’t look back!”
They carried me and the bones between them like so much hand luggage toward a waiting smell of petrol. I must’ve been holding on to the bag with a death-grip as they didn’t even try to take it from me. They just ripped open the bag, and I saw as if from a long way away the two groundsmen tumbling bones into the newly hollowed out gum tree.
There was just one more thing to be done—and damnit!—it should’ve been done already.
Mrs. Winton, hands fluttering with nerves, stepped back from the painting of Birdfellow, an old black man with a mysterious pouch tied into his stringy gray beard. Beside the painting, face up and open, was the diary.
Mrs. Winton looked down at them, shook her head sorrowfully.
“It has to be,” I said, surprised at the croak my voice had become. “No images, no record of name, nothing of the dead must be allowed to exist after death. It’s their way of life. It’s that portrait and his name in that diary that’s keeping him earthbound and angry just as much as not giving him a proper tree burial in 1823.”
From the direction of the maze came the sound of something big galloping across the manor grounds toward us.
A match scratched a spark. The petrol-soaked painting and diary whoofed into flame. In that sudden glare I glimpsed the emu, far bigger than any in nature. Its neck was an elongated travesty of a human neck, and far above it a human face of ebony and gray. In that instant I read in its features anger, and then ... happiness?
Birdfellow’s portrait had crisped, the book, each word and name shriveling, had become an open flower of fire.
A few seconds later I looked back into the silent darkness and knew we were alone.
Later that night they found Keenen wandering the maze, eyes vacant and staring. It was many days before he was reeled back to reality, before doctors were able to convince him that his eyes had not been clawed out. He never went back to the Manor, having now an aversion to birds and their noises. Where in the world he’ll find a place without birds is a place I can’t imagine. Certainly not the maze island which now teems with water fowl.
I would’ve liked to have been a fly on the wall the afternoon Mrs. Winton explained things to His Lordship, in particular why one of his trees on the southeast lawn had been so strangely mutilated, then plastered over. But on that afternoon I was still in the local hospital being treated for, among other things, serious loss of blood and what the doctors described as nervous exhaustion.
“If there’s anything to be learned from all this,” Keenen said, the day they wheeled me down to his ward for a visit, “it’s that you should always put things back where you found them.”
And it was just such a thought that had me laugh near to breaking my stitches when I read that the Earl of Woodthorpe had cut down a gum tree in his Manor grounds and was air freighting it out to Australia. Naturally, most people assumed the Earl’s mind had thrown a rod.
I knew otherwise.
BRIAR ROSE by Kim Antieau
She opened her eyes to white and realized she knew nothing.
The nurse was white, too.
“Good morning, sugar,” the nurse said. “Do you know who you are?”
She shook her head and wondered where the window was. Maybe if she saw the sunlight, maybe if she saw the world really existed, she would know. Silly thought. The world existed. It was she, she was certain, who was not supposed to be.
“Turn over,” the nurse said. Her voice was as pretty as anything she could remember. Though that wasn’t much. She turned over. The nurse threw off the covers and pulled up her hospital gown. “Lookie here, girl,” the nurse said. “Maybe that will jar your memory.”
She looked down at her own bare ass, twisting her head and arching her back. A small rose bloomed on her white butt, its red petals surrounded by a crown of thorns.
She touched it.
“Maybe my name is Rose,” she said.
“All right, Rose, honey,” the nurse said, putting the hospital gown and covers back over her bare skin. “We don’t know who you are either. You came in with glass all over your arms, cut deep.”
Rose held up her bandaged arms.
“You said you’d fallen through a plate glass window.” The nurse smiled. “We decided to take your word on that and not put you in the psych ward. All you have to do now is eat that shit they call food, rest, and get better. Just whistle if you need anything.”
The nurse in white smiled; for a moment, Rose thought she was dressed in shining armor. Rose shook her head and the nurse was gone. She closed her eyes and reached into her memory. Nothing. Except a man with a needle that looked like those wood burners they used in shop class when she was in high school. “Have you come to be transformed?” the man asked. “I don’t think so,” she answered. “I just want a rose tattoo.” He hummed some tune, Beethoven’s Fifth, while he rat-ta-tat-tatted on her backside.
When he was finished, he smoothed a bandage over the patch of skin and handed her a card with care instructions, as if she had just bought a sweater. She pulled up her pants and went home. Home? She couldn’t really see it, only her reflection in the mirror, somehow, as she pulled off the bandage and looked at the scab forming where he had drawn the rose with his needle and ink.
; “There now,” she said. “I am whole again. I am myself. My body is mine.”
Rose opened her eyes and started to call to Nurse White, to tell her she did know something. Instead, she closed her eyes again and went to sleep.
In the morning, after she ate the shit they called food, Rose got out of bed, found her bloodstained clothes, and got dressed. She was frightened until she thought of the rose blooming on her butt, and then she was no longer afraid. She walked into the hallway, got on the elevator, and went down to the lobby. Outside through the revolving doors, Rose saw a world she had never seen before, bright, noisy. White with color. No, bright with color. She reached into her pockets as she went down the street, away from the hospital. She pulled out forty dollars, crumpled up in her front pockets. That was it.
She hummed Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture as she walked. Pigeons shadowed her as she went down the street, toward the tall buildings and bridges arching the river or expressway. The pigeons dogged her steps, looking for handouts. As she walked she remembered nothing except the rose, knew nothing except the feel of her own skin under her hand. She smiled. Ignorance was bliss.
When she got downtown, the pigeons swore at her and flew away to the Burger King parking lot. Rose went onto a street called Burnside and walked until she came to a door which said: TATOOS. CLEAN SURROUNDINGS. NO ONE UNDER 18 ADMITTED. Rose gently pulled off the gauze from her arms. Scabs traced the places the glass had cut. She dropped the gauze and scabs into a garbage can and then pushed the door open and went inside.
The man with the wood burner looked up when she came in. He smiled. He was the man from her memory.
“Sorry, honey, I can’t take it off.”
“I don’t want it off,” she said. “I want another one.” She stepped past the swinging door and into his domain of stencils and needles, inks and memories. She looked at the drawings on his walls.
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