NOVEMBER 1982 NOVEMBER 1982It was Sunday morning, and Nicholas and Tristram were deep in concentration, hunkered in patches of sunlight on the hardwood boards of the Boyes’ front veranda. They had set up two enormous opposing ramps made from Tristram’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of orange Hot Wheels racetrack. Every so often, the boys would look up from their labors and grin at one another. They were getting ready for one hell of a car crash.
Tristram and his family lived in the street behind the Closes, in (if you asked Katharine Close) a palace of a house. Nicholas would jump the Closes’ back fence (a rickety line of perennially damp hardwood palings held together by a thick crest of trumpet vine), run through Mrs. Giles’s yard, then up Airlie Crescent to the enormous house at number seven.
The Boyes had moved in two and a half years ago.
Nicholas and Tristram became friends. Tristram would shortcut through Mrs. Giles’s at a quarter to eight every school morning, and he and Nicholas would begrudgingly escort Suzette to school. Imagining that he and Tristram were her bodyguards, ready to pounce on would-be attackers or leap in front of assassins’ bullets, compensated for her girlish chatter about love spells and bar graphs and how smart bees were.
After school when homework was done, and at weekends, Nicholas would visit the Boyes’ house. This was better, because their place was a palace compared with 68 Lambeth Street. The Boyes had four bedrooms as well as Mr. and Mrs. Boyes’ master bedroom, which had its own bathroom (Tristram snuck Nicholas in for a look one Saturday when his parents had left them home alone and Gavin was playing some football final), another two bathrooms (Tristram called them dunny cans), and wide verandas on three sides. Best of all, the entire house was on stumps, so there was a palace-worth of cool, dark dirt underneath for racing scooters, conducting experiments with bleach and sundry garage chemicals, building Owen guns, and torturing ants by dropping them in conical ant lion pits and watching them taken from below like hapless sailors by a hungry kraken.
Nicholas sometimes had Tristram over to his house, but there was less to do there. The Closes’ house was small, its underneath exposed and useless for private acts like making army IDs and shanghais and plans of conquest. The only place that was dark and away from his mother’s scowl and Suzette’s curiosity was the garage. But Nicholas didn’t like taking anyone else in there. It was Dad’s space. His tools were there. His old suitcases were there. Being in the garage made him feel weird—angry and sad and a bit lonely. He could hardly remember his father, but stepping into the dark garage with its smell of grease and sawdust brought a flash of the only enduring image of him: a scarecrow-thin man leaning over the whitewashed garage bench as he sharpened a saw with one hand while drinking from a squat bottle of amber liquid with the other; then, hearing Nicholas, he looked down and smiled—half of his face bright with yellow light through the dusty window, half as dark as the cobwebbed shadows in the garage’s far corners—and slid the bottle away into the bench drawer. No, the garage was not a place for games.
This Sunday morning, Nicholas had come over straight from church (the Boyes didn’t go to church—further evidence of their grand good fortune). Suzette had changed into shorts and T-shirt to tend her little garden patch. She’d found an old book somewhere that had belonged to their dad, and had become excited about planting tiny seeds and urging them up into curling green things. After a spat over TV channels, Nicholas had once threatened to dig up Suze’s garden and she’d gone totally spack, hitting him and screaming that he’d better not dare! The one male in a house with two females, he’d been wise enough not to. As Suzette screwed on her sunhat, Nicholas had pulled on his gym boots, kissed his mother’s cheek, and jumped the back fence.
He and Tristram had eased into the day’s play with a hunt through the Boyes’ games cupboard. While Nicholas and Suzette had an incomplete chess set and a deck of cards, the Boyes had an Aladdin’s cave of entertainment: Bermuda Triangle, Payday, Microdot (complete with cool plastic Lugers, stiletto knives, and wirecutters), Mastermind, Grand Mastermind, Squatter, The Game of Life, Mouse Trap, Clue, Chinese Checkers, Monopoly (British and American versions), several decks of cards, and a roulette wheel that Tristram said came from a P&O steamer. But this was too bright a day for the lethargy of board games. The sunlight had a tart sting, the jacarandas were dropping sweet blizzards of lavender flowers, nasturtiums blazed between roses … no, today called for violence. So they set up the killer jumps for their Hot Wheels cars.
“We’re going to Fraser at Christmas,” said Tristram, slotting an orange plastic tongue into the end of a section of track. The boys had appropriated the whole front veranda and had nearly finished the two ramps, each facing the other. At the farthest ends were kitchen chairs for height. The tracks swooped down to the floorboards, ran two meters, then swept up ramp stays of phone books and atlases. If they timed their releases right, two cars should collide spectacularly in midair.
“Oh?”
“You don’t know where Fraser Island is, do you?”
Nicholas shrugged. “Up your fat arse?”
Tristram chuckled. The boys had just discovered the joy of insults, and Nicholas was the acknowledged master. Not knowing what or where Fraser was didn’t upset him, but news of the Boyes’ trip did: if Tristram went away, the Christmas break would be really boring.
Tristram pulled out his ace. “Dad’s going to hire a Land Rover.”
“A Land Rover? Really?” Nicholas couldn’t disguise his excitement. Land Rovers were what the SAS sped to battle in. They had aluminium bodies and wouldn’t rust. “Wow. Will your dad let you drive it?”
Tristram shook his head and grinned. That was one thing Nicholas liked about him: he might be rich, but he was honest. “I reckon he’ll let Gavin drive it, though. He’s thirteen now. Dad learned to drive on Pop’s tractor when he was thirteen, so …” His ramp finished, Tristram squatted back on his heels and looked at Nicholas. “What were you going to tell me?”
“About what?”
Tristram came to Nicholas’s ramp to help him finish.
“You said you found something on the way home from school on Wednesday, then you went all funny and shut up.”
Nicholas felt some warmth go out of the morning. The dead bird outside the woods. The bird with no head … well, with a strange head made of woven sticks and its own scrawny legs. He had wanted to tell Tristram about it on the way home from school Thursday and Friday, but Suzette had been with them and he didn’t want to freak her out with gory talk about birds with legs cut off and the weirdos who did such things. She was really easy to upset right now; for instance, she hated walking home past the shops, but wouldn’t explain why. And, to be honest, he didn’t know how to phrase the story about the bird. He wanted to sound cool about it, matter-of-fact. But he also wanted his best friend to know how creepy it was, how the sight of it—not just limp and dead, but so helpless and mutilated—had made his stomach grip tight with unexplainable fear.
“I found a dead bird down near the woods.”
Tristram tore the sticky tape off with his teeth and secured track to the telephone books. “So?”
“It had its head and legs cut off.”
He watched for Tristram’s reaction. This would be the decider: if Tris’s expression was serious, Nicholas could finish the tale with its bizarre ending. But if he wore his “what bullshit” look, Nicholas would shrug the story off and change the subject to a cool book about Tiger tanks he’d found in the library. Tristram looked up, and Nicholas felt a wave of warmth for his friend: his expression was both serious and inquisitive.
“Yeah? Cut off like by a mower cut off? They mow that grass out front.”
Nicholas shook his head. “Cut off, cut off. On purpose.”
He described how the bird’s head was gone and replaced with a handmade sphere of woven twigs, the poor creature’s legs as horns, and the strange symbol painted there in what had to be blood. By the time he’d finished, Nicholas’s voice had dropped to a whisper and his heart was thudding in his chest.
“And?” asked Tristram. They knew each other well enough to know when things were still unsaid.
“And I think …” Nicholas bit his lip and frowned. “I think something came up behind me.” From the woods. He shook his head. “I smelled something really bad, and then I ran home.”
“Was it … was it a grown-up?”
Nicholas thought about that. “I don’t know. I think so. Whatever it was, it felt … it felt big. And old.”
Tristram nodded, chewed his lip. “Did I tell you I found a cat down there? When we first moved in, before we were friends. A dead cat on the gravel path.”
Nicholas shook his head.
“It was just bones really,” said Tristram. His voice dropped steadily to a whisper. “Dead for ages. Orange fur, all dried up like a mummy. But it was a mess. Its paws were cut off.”
Nicholas stared. He didn’t mind being trumped—cat beat bird hands down. Besides, Tristram wasn’t showing off, not this time. In fact, this was the first time he could ever remember Tristram looking … well, so worried.
“Did you tell your parents?”
“Tell your parents what?” asked Mrs. Boye, emerging from the shadows of the hallway carrying two fruit cordials and a plate of TeeVee Snacks. She was what Nicholas would describe in later years as a stately woman: well dressed, well spoken, well educated. Utterly humorless.
“That we’re going to make some noise,” said Tristram without missing a beat.
He turned to Nicholas and shot him a wink that Mrs. Boye couldn’t see. Nicholas smiled to himself—Tris was one smooth bastard.
“Well, we’d rather you didn’t,” said Mrs. Boye, surveying the ramps. “Your father’s had a big week and we’re going to have a rest.”
Mr. Boye was a Businessman who worked for an Investment Company and often had to Extend Himself on Behalf of the Firm on evenings and at weekends, so if he and Mrs. Boye wanted a rest, then total silence was expected of the Boye boys.
“Why don’t you go to Nicholas’s house?” she asked Tristram.
Never mind asking me, thought Nicholas. But Tristram looked over at him and winked again, slyly.
“Sure,” said Nicholas.
“Have some morning tea then,” said Mrs. Boye, and left for the darkened master bedroom.
The boys drank and surveyed their handiwork. “It would have been good,” said Nicholas. He looked over at Tristram. His fair-haired friend was grinning. “What?”
“Let’s check it out.”
Nicholas knew what he meant. The bird. A sudden fear galloped through his stomach, but he swallowed it down and grinned back. “Tommy guns?”
“Of course.”
They quickly drained their drinks and flew.
They moved like shadows, quiet and slow, hunched to stay below the grass line. The dry fronds chattered around them in the warm air, hissing a constant warning to beware. They gripped the stocks of their submachine guns. Tristram led; there was never a question about that—he was bigger and tougher, and if he had to go down to a Jap bullet, goddammit, he would. Nicholas saw him raise his left hand and they both dropped like stones. Nicholas crawled up.
“What is it?”
“Got any grenades?” hissed Tristram.
Nicholas looked around him. His fingers fell on a lumpy rock peppered with pink quartz. “Only one.”
“Well, hell,” whispered Tristram, and he looked at Nicholas with narrowed eyes. He cocked his head and grinned crookedly. “You better make it count then.” He pointed.
Nicholas carefully raised his eyes above the grass line. About four meters ahead was the pillbox (disguised cleverly as a council garbage bin). He lowered again and pulled an imaginary pin from the rock.
“Cover me,” he said, then counted silently: three, two, one …
They both leaped to their feet. Tristram aimed his tommy gun (a wooden chair leg with a nail for a trigger and a crosspiece screwed below for a magazine) and fired: “Ach-ach-ach-ach-ach!!,” while Nicholas drew back the rock and hurled it in an overarm cricket bowl. Then they both hit the ground.
Clang-rattle-rattle-clunk. The sound of rock falling inside the metal drum.
Tristram grinned. “Good throw!”
Nicholas beamed. The sun was high and hot, they were dusty and dirty and totally happy. Life was grand. “We got ’em that time,” he agreed.
“That, my friend, calls for a Lucky,” said Tristram, and he pulled out a packet of white candy cigarettes. He shucked the box at Nicholas, who drew one and put it in the corner of his mouth. Tristram drew another. Nicholas thumbed an invisible Zippo and lit them. They puffed and sucked, stood and walked.
They were on the gravel path, wood guns slung around their thin shoulders. To their right, Carmichael Road ran like a lazy, bitumen canal. To their left was the crowding mass of the woods. You can just feel them, thought Nicholas. Even with your eyes shut, you’d know they were there. Alive. Shadowed and watching. Waiting to breathe you in and in, to draw you deep inside, warm and moist and dark and smelling of secrets, where strange hands would lift you and take you …
“… around here?” asked Tristram.
Nicholas shook his head, clearing it. “What?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Tristram.
“Fuck off,” said Nicholas.
Tristram looked at him, shocked for a moment—then he burst out laughing at the bold use of the King of Swear Words. “You fuck off!”
Nicholas joined in giggling, and Tristram’s laughter redoubled.
Tears rolled down their faces, an innocent baptismal to mark the last time the F-word would offend either of them. Nicholas stood and wiped his face. He saw a car pull up on the far side of Carmichael Road: an unremarkable olive green sedan.
“So, guttersnipe,” said Tristram, pointing, “here’s about where I found the dead cat.” The last two words stole the humor from the air. “Where’d you find the bird?”
Nicholas looked around, getting his bearings, and pointed. They moved up the path twenty paces or so.
“Here somewhere …” He stopped on the track. “Jeez.”
It was still there. Tucked into the grass, invisible to a casual glance, the bird’s little body had swollen in the heat, its feathered skin now a round balloon. Legs snipped off clean exposed matchstick sections of bone. The death-tightened claws for horns. The sharply dangerous lines painted in rust-brown blood. There was nothing accidental or joking about it. The bird was murdered, and its corpse twisted and changed into a thing that felt … evil.
Tristram was staring at the dead bird. His jaw was slack and his eyes were wide. A smile curled his lips. “It’s beautiful,” he whispered. Without hesitation, he knelt and gingerly took hold of the woven head. It was still securely spiked to the body and he lifted the tiny carcass out. As he did, white fluid began to drip from the bird. No, not fluid, but pale, wriggling pupae. Maggots.
“Wow …” The delighted smile grew wider on Tristram’s face.
Nicholas felt his stomach roll sickly, the way it did when he had the runs, weak and afraid. “You shouldn’t touch it, Tris. Tris!”
He bumped Tristram’s arm and Tristram dropped the desecrated creature on the path. The swollen body popped open with a bright whiff of rot and maggots started worming out from their nest.
Tristram stared at the infested thing, suddenly horrified. “Oh, yuck.”
Despite the drop, the round woven head was still attached to the tiny corpse, as if determined to see a job through.
“I can’t believe you picked it up,” said Nicholas.
As he rocked back on his feet, movement across Carmichael Road caught his eye. The driver’s door of the green car opened. A man was alighting: a large man in a dark suit. In the harsh overhead sun, his face was cast into binary tones of sharp light and dense shadow, yet it seemed he was looking at the boys.
He is looking at us, thought Nicholas. I can feel it.
“Tris. We should go home.”
Tristram was wiping his hands on his shorts, staring at the dead bird. “I thought it was—”
“Let’s go,” hissed Nicholas. Tristram looked up.
The man strode across the road toward them, straight at them through the grass. He was even bigger than Nicholas had thought: solid as a rugby player, but older, in his forties. Somehow, middle age made him even scarier. The man turned his head left then right with deliberate slowness, calibrating the surrounds. He wasn’t looking for other adults to join him in chastising these boys for throwing stones and carrying toy guns.
He’s checking for witnesses.
There were none, and the man hastened his pace.
Nicholas and Tristram looked at each other. They couldn’t run to the road. If they tried to dart left or right up the path, the stranger could cut them off without even trying. There was only one way to flee.
They ran into the woods.
In his ten years, Nicholas had been afraid many times. But this was his first taste of terror. Adrenaline on his tongue was bitter. Low branches and tough shrubs tore at his face and bare legs. Beside him, Tristram’s eyes were wide and his fair hair flew out behind. They ran like men in snow, having to take exhausting, high-kneed steps to clear the thick, ancient knots of vine and undergrowth. From behind them came the steady crach-crunch crach-crunch of heavier footsteps. Nicholas dared a look back. The suited man was a rhino between the trees, his heavy strides smashing through the stems that would trip the boys.
He was gaining.
Nicholas could see the fear on his friend’s face. Neither of them needed to ask why a strange man was chasing them. They both knew—everyone knew—that there were men who took children.
“Which way?” he whispered. His cheeks were wet; he realized he was crying.
“We should …” gasped Tristram, “… split up.”
The thought of being alone with the man after him sent a shock of new terror through Nicholas. “No way!”
“That way … he can’t … get us both.”
The woods were becoming denser and darker as all but the tiniest chips of sky remained visible overhead. Wide trunks and buttressed roots grew closer together, forming a shadowed and slippery maze. Flinty rocks peeked sharply from under wet brows of rotten leaves.
The boys scrambled up a steep slope, grazing knees and palms on spiny vines and hidden shale. The man was just a dozen steps behind them. Nicholas’s ears were ringing as his blood thudded, but over that he could hear the man’s breath pistoning in and out with horrid monotony. He could keep this pace up all day! But it wouldn’t take all day to catch them. Just minutes. Moments.
The prospect of seeing Tristram disappear between the trees and being alone with that huge, unstoppable man after him made his bowels watery. But Tris was right.
“Okay,” Nicholas gasped. “Over the ridge. We’ll split.”
Tristram nodded.
Nicholas stole a glance back, and let out a yelp. The man was only two body lengths behind, striding up the sharp rise, arms stretched out for balance. Years later, he would be watching Boris Karloff in James Whale’s Frankenstein, and the image of the monster lumbering, arms out wide, made him suddenly lose control of his bladder. The most terrible thing of all was the man’s face. It was slack and expressionless. There was no anger, no lust. He was as emotionless as a crocodile. And he would catch them.
Nicholas felt fresh hot tears sting his eyes. Lungs burning, he drew the deepest breath he could and yelled: “Help!!”
The word died without an echo, swallowed by the trees. What idiots! Why didn’t we yell when we were near the street? Their stupidity made Nicholas cry harder.
“Help us!” yelled Tristram. Again, the words were held tight by the greedy trunks of black figs, the dark ferns, the endless leaves.
They were nearly at the top of the slope. Nicholas looked at Tristram. No tears, but his face was tight and pale. A wave of jealous love went through him. Tristram pointed at himself, then left. Nicholas nodded—he’d go right. They crested the hill.
Their plan fell apart as Tristram suddenly vanished.
Nicholas, a step or two behind, saw him simply drop away into nothing. He slowed a second, just enough to brake his momentum so he, too, didn’t fall over the steep edge. Crash! Tristram hit the gully floor three meters down.
“Oh.” The small sound was much worse and packed more pain than a scream.
Nicholas swung to look behind. The man was only a few steps away, powering up the last of the slope—close enough for Nicholas to smell him: a mist of sweat and cigarette smoke and Old Spice.
Without another thought, Nicholas jumped.
He dropped through the air for what seemed an endless moment, waiting for huge hands to snatch him back … then hit the moist, leafy gully floor. Tristram was rolling onto his feet, nursing his right arm; his wrist was bent at the wrong angle.
“Your arm—”
Tristram shook his head and looked up.
The man had reached the cliff edge above. His massive chest, thick as a horse’s, swelled and sank with huge breaths. He regarded the boys, the drop, the cliff that diminished as it ran left. Then he cocked his head as if listening to something far off, some distant siren song only he could hear.
“Come on!” hissed Nicholas.
He and Tristram ran up the creek bed at the bottom of the gully, their feet rocking on the smooth stones, risking sprains for speed.
Tristram stopped. “Oh, no.”
Ahead, a huge shape had appeared behind the trees. Horrible despair returned like a forgotten nightmare. “The pipe.”
They’d rarely come this far in, and only once down here to the gully and the huge, old water pipe that crossed it.
The man was clambering down the cliff face, hands neatly grasping the wild quince and cudgerie saplings growing stubbornly from the rocks. He moved with the speed of a gorilla born to the forest.
There was no splitting up. The woods to the right were choked so thick they were impenetrable. The very air seemed dark green—not a glimmer of sunlight, just ancient shadow. Nor could they go back: their pursuer was less than thirty paces away. Left was the only course, unless …
Tristram peered at the base of the pipe. Two tunnels, like barrels of a giant shotgun, penetrated the concrete. Nicholas knelt to look in. The circles of light at the far ends were thickly dotted with familiar shapes. Spiders. Hundreds of them.
His heart seemed to stop in his chest and his eyes watered. The thought of a single spider made his skin crawl. These long, dark nests turned his terror into panic. The world grew silver at its edges—he was going to faint.
“Get help.” And without another word, Tristram dropped to his knees and crawled into the closest tunnel.
Nicholas looked around. The man was striding toward him. His hands were huge. For the first time he noticed the bulge at the man’s crotch.
“Fuck you!” he yelled. He turned and ran.
Smack into a branch.
He had just enough time to stagger back and see the man’s silhouette fill his vision … then everything fell away to instant, coal-black night.
He woke to the whisper of leaves.
His eyes flickered open. The trees surrounding him were so deep and dark that he could have been a drowned sailor on the cold floor of the sea. No wind moved the ocean of black branches above him, yet leaves still rustled somewhere out of sight. He turned his head.
The movement made nausea flood through him. He opened his mouth and a pitiful stream of half-digested biscuits and cordial spilled out. But now the sound of movement was louder. His vision rolled like a poorly tuned television, lurched, rolled, then steadied.
A small distance away, white flesh drifted above the ground. Limbs drooped like the necks of dead swans. Everything was so dark. Nicholas raised his head and strained to focus.
Tristram was being carried past, cradled in large, dark hands. The boy’s naked limbs were starkly white in the stygian gloom, swaying loosely. His head lolled back too far, his fulvous hair streaked with something darker. A wedge of darkness divided the white of his throat. Then Nicholas caught a glimpse of bone.
He tilted his head to see who carried Tristram, but the world slipped off its axis, heeled, and fell … He retched again, and his eyes rolled back in his head.
He woke a second time to feel tears on his cheeks.
No. Not tears. Rain. Drops clattered on the canopy of leaves overhead, coalesced, and fell in heavy, cold dollops.
Nicholas rose to unsteady feet, and, arms outstretched in a pose that, had he been able to see himself, would have reminded him horribly of the man who had pursued them. Nicholas began shuffling his way home.
Four hours later, he was wrapped in his mother’s arms. After seeing her brother was home safe, Suzette had curled on the sofa and fallen asleep. Police cars were parked out front, their blue lights coruscating sapphires in the downpour. A bath, and a policewoman with his mother inspecting his head, his neck, his penis, his bottom. Questions, questions, questions. Did he know the man who chased them? What color was his car? Did he say anything while he chased them? Was he bearded or clean-shaven? Tris’s parents sat with Gavin in the next room. Mrs. Boye sent hollow glances through the doorway at Nicholas, as if by the intensity of her concentration he might suddenly transform into her youngest son.
The Boyes left. The police left. The kettle boiled. Sweet tea. Bed.
And, through it all, rain.
The search of the woods for Tristram Hamilton Boye was postponed due to the unseasonably heavy rain. As it turned out, a search was unnecessary: the Frankenstein’s monster man told police where to find the child.
Nicholas sat rigid beside his mother watching the news. A television reporter described how Winston Teale, second-generation owner of furniture retailer Teale & Nephew, had presented himself at Milton Police Station and told the desk sergeant where they could find the body of the missing Tallong child, Tristram Boye. The television flashed images of plainclothes detectives poking around a demolition site not a kilometer from the police station, two suburbs from Tallong.
A week later, Katharine Close made Nicholas wear a tie for his court appearance. All through the hearing—including when the prosecutor asked Nicholas to point out the man who had chased him and Tristram on November 1—Nicholas watched Winston Teale. The man no longer looked terrifying. He seemed smaller. His eyes shifted like caught mice in a cage, as if he couldn’t quite believe that he was in the docks of the Magistrates’ Court. And when Teale looked at Nicholas, there wasn’t a gram of recognition. He seemed even more confused by his own words during questioning.
“You killed Tristram Boye?”
“Yes.” Teale’s voice was that of a smaller man.
“How?”
“I … I believe I cut his throat.” He explained that he had used a carpet knife from his warehouse.
“Why did you kill him?”
Teale blinked, frowning. The courtroom was so silent that Nicholas heard a train horn sound at the distant railway station.
“Mr. Teale?” urged the magistrate.
“I don’t remember.”
“And transported him to the lot on the corner of Myner Road and Currawong Street?”
“Yes.” Teale’s voice was unconvincing.
“How?”
Again, Teale shook his head. “My car. The trunk of my car, I think. Yes …” Teale shrugged and gave an apologetic smile.
Nicholas felt eyes on his neck, and looked behind.
His mother was watching him, a frown line dividing the brow between her eyes. Her lips smiled, but her eyes kept watching.
Winston Teale was convicted of murder and deprivation of liberty, but hanged himself with his shirt the night before he was due to be sentenced.
Nicholas had no more cause to jump the back fence and run past Mrs. Giles on his way to visit the Boyes.
Cyclone season came and its hail-teeth winds blew away newspapers carrying the photo of his murdered friend.
One school year finished. The river flowed brown. The city sighed a mournful puff of car fumes and stale perfume and electric train ozone, then shrugged her steel shoulders and braced for her footpaths to be stamped upon by New Year’s drunks and her spiry hair stained bright by fireworks.
Time ticked on.
Katharine Close forbade her two children to ever walk past the Carmichael Road woods.