The room was black. A male voice on the radio spoke of God. She reached out a hand to still the voice and was confronted by a narrow beam of light.
‘Who’s a lucky girl tonight? Ah-ah, Aunty Stell just won the lottery.’
Then the light blazed overhead, flooding the room, framing the figure in jeans and sweatshirt.
‘No!’ she cried. ‘No.’ Only halfway back from sleep, she tried to rise up in her bed, but he was on her bed, on her, his weight pinning her legs beneath the quilt.
‘No.’ She hit out at him. She swiped at his face, and grasped at his hair, but he caught her hands and held them in one of his own strong hands and he laughed.
‘Come on. Don’t be coy. You like it. Admit it. Did I give you a taste for it, eh? I hear you’ve been getting a bit from old Steve lately.’
She opened her mouth, screamed in his face, and quite casually, he backhanded her, connecting hard with her ear.
No hand had been raised against her in too many years. She had forgotten the shock of the hard hand. For an instant she cowered from him and it gave him the advantage. A yellow, plastic-handled Stanley knife held at her throat, he stripped, tossing his shirt, his jeans to the floor. He dragged the quilt back, the radio fell to the floor, and the voice died.
‘No playing around tonight, Aunty Stell, or you get cut,’ he said, and he ripped her light cotton nightgown from neck to hem, he slashed her blue briefs at the hip, then he entered her, brutally, painfully, muffling her screams with a pillow held to her face.
The chance, the time to scream was gone. Now she sucked air through the fibres, but not enough air – not enough to scream. Lungs bursting, mouth open, she sucked cloth, not air.
Red mist beginning. Red mist, clouding her brain. The world was darkening, sliding away.
No more time to live, to care, to grow, to write. No new bathroom window. No new curtains. No more dreams.
The pain in her lungs and throat overrode all other pain. Soon that pain would die too, and she would die. This was how it was written down to happen. She was Maidenville’s number three.
But I have just begun to live, she thought.
The world was going far away. Dark now. Time became another time of sucking air through feathers. Another heavy hand, pressing down, down.
Heavy footsteps pounding up the stairs.
‘Angel! Angel! What in God’s name –?’
And the hand slid from the pillow, and the pillow slipped, and crushed lungs sucked in air . . . kept sucking in air, until air exploded in a hash dry sob. She coughed. She gagged, and she sucked air enough to scream it out at the figure looming large above her, large against the light.
Spitting brown/grey shape with her vile accusations and her mad eyes, her kitchen knife in hand to cut out the bad.
But it was the wrong shape. It was saying the wrong words.
‘Lick me,’ the new shape said, pushing his genitals at her face. ‘Go on. Lick me with your silky tongue and I might let you live for a while.’
‘Bow to her will, Daughter. Don’t argue with her when she is not rational.’
‘Better . . . that I . . . am dead.’ A hoarse whisper. Uncertain to whom she was replying, she closed her eyes against this insanity, clinging to these last moments of her life, searching her mind for some sanity. Her lips pressed together, she moaned, moaned long, her head shaking, denying, until the moan became a hum and the hum became a melody, Miss Moreland’s song, perhaps seeking strength from the one who had been her strength.
He hit her again. He sat back on his heels. Hit her. Again. And again. And each time it jolted her brain. Jolted her out of the now and into –
‘Say the magic word. Say it. Say it.’
‘Shut that up, or I’ll kill you now. Shut up with that bloody song. I hate it. It was stupid. It was a stupid bloody funeral, her sitting up there with her stupid dark glasses on, staring at me, accusing me. It was a bloody mad house, you crazy old bitch. And my bloody old man made me help carry her out. You need locking up. My mother said you needed locking up, and so does he.’
She sobbed a breath, then a second. She blinked at the light, then closed her eyes against it, and she hummed. It was all she had, and she clung to it.
‘Shut up.’ If he hit her, she felt no pain. ‘Are you listening to me? I said, shut that up.’
‘Are you listening? Are you listening to me?’
Thump.
‘Look at me.’
Thump.
‘Say the magic word.’
Thump.
‘Look at me. Look at me, I said.’
Thump.
‘I’m talking to you. Don’t you pass out on me. You look at me. I want you to look at me. Now.’
Thump.
‘Don’t you pass out.’
She opened her eyes, and her tongue tasted blood, and she saw his tongue sweep his lips, and she saw his feral eyes were afraid.
‘Yeah. That’s better. That’s better. I’ve got a bun in Kelly Murphy’s oven. Do you know that? Wouldn’t it be a laugh? Wouldn’t it just . . . if they did the autopsy on you and found out you were pregnant?’
Cut. Cut out the bad.
‘Men with their love, and their lust, and their filthy needs. He wants to stick it in you. I know. They all want to make whores out of their little daughters, make their little bellies swell with seething crawling little parasites. You’ll find out.’
‘Old goody-goody two-shoes, didn’t tell a soul. I knew you wouldn’t. I bet if it had been someone else you would have told everyone.’ He kneeled between her legs, watching her, and she watched his thumb slide another centimetre of steel from the plastic handle of the knife. She made no response when he pressed the blade to her throat. He pressed harder. She swallowed, and her chin lifted.
‘I could cut your head off with this right now. It’d be easy. Just like nothin’. Just like cutting the head off a dead rabbit.’
Nothing. No sting of pain. Heat. Only heat.
He smiled, repeating the action an inch lower, wanting to see her cringe, wanting her little rabbit chin to tremble.
‘It could slit your throat open with one swipe, let your blood spout across the room. You’d be dead in ten minutes. I read somewhere that if you cut that artery, here, you can bleed to death in ten minutes. Your heart stops, but your brain doesn’t. You’d be lying there dead and your brain would still be asking, Why? Why? What did I do?’
He’d given her a word, and she used it.
‘Why?’
‘Because I felt like it, and because you’re it. You’re this fucking town, you are – with your holier than shit act, your little beige pleated skirts hiding your black knickers. Panting around after my father. You wanted it. Your tongue was hanging out for it. Fucking shit town, and you’re just fucking shit too. I know all about you and my old man. You think my mother is your friend, but she hates your guts.’
Shivering uncontrollably, each breath of air a shallow sob, words were fought-for things, and she could not grasp one. She was in and out of time zones. She was in the past, and in this bed.
‘She thinks you did it with him. I hear her going on, and on, about you and him. Maybe I should tell her different, eh? Set her mind at rest. What do you think, Aunty Stell? Do you think I should tell her that the old man didn’t get into your frilly knickers?’ He slapped her face with his free hand. ‘I asked you, what do you think?’
She lay limp beneath him, her eyes closed. His left hand pinched her nipple while he watched for her reaction. There was none, but Thomas craved response. ‘It’s your fault too about old lady Moreland. You can blame yourself for that one,’ he said, checking out the other nipple, wondering why Kelly had nothing to grip onto and why old Stell had no boobs but nipples worth sucking on. He licked the nipple, bit her, then laughed. ‘I did it to her too. You should have seen her crappy old face.’
Now she reacted. Her eyes opened wide. Now he got what he wanted. She shook off yesterday, and his second-hand words, and she rose up from the pillow, screaming in his face. He wasn’t ready for it. Her breasts were bare, her briefs, caught on one ankle, he was kneeling between her legs, and she screamed as she should have screamed on that day in the shed. She screamed, and she hammered him with her fist, drew breath, and screamed at him.
‘Beast. Vile demonic little beast.’ She sucked in more air and screamed it out. ‘Evil, black-souled demon. May you burn in hell for all eternity.’
Her brain was functioning now. Telephone. The telephone. One button would bring Sergeant Johnson. Doctor Parsons. Steve. One button. Turn it on, and press one button. The right button. Get it in your hand. You’ll only have one chance. Don’t look at it. Look at him. Look at evil. Grab the telephone and hit the button then hit him with it. Aim for his eye with the aerial while you scream. She drew a breath. Held it. Then she grabbed wildly for the phone, but he saw her aim and he grasped the phone first, tossing it behind him at the wall, forcing her down.
‘You liked that, didn’t you? Want to hear some more? Want to hear what she said to me?’
‘May God strike you dead. May God strike you dead. May God strike you dead,’ she chanted over and over. ‘May you die in pain and agony, and rot, you demonic evil little beast. May you feed the dogs in hell.’
‘There isn’t any hell, and there isn’t any heaven, and you shut up about it, and listen to me. Do you know what she said, I asked you? She said my grandfather would be proud of me. I was halfway through doing it, and she started laughing. She’s sort of choking herself laughing, and I thought the old bat was getting to like it. Then she sort of stiffened, came up at me, and an electric shock went through her. And I thought, wow. Like, wow, lady, and here I’ve been wasting it on Kelly Murphy. Then she sort of sagged, gagged, and when I got off her, she didn’t move any more. First dead body I ever saw.’
Stella lay shaking her head, backwards and forwards. Tears were coming now, tears to weaken her, but she must not weaken. She screamed again, killed her tears.
‘Shut up, or I’ll have to finish you now, and I’m not ready yet. Don’t you want to know what happened? I’ve been dying to tell someone. That’s the worse part about it, not being able to tell anyone. I was going to tell Kelly, but her old man won’t let her out. You want to know the grisly details?’
‘Kill me, Thomas. Kill me now or I will see you dead.’
‘What’s your hurry? Dead is for keeps. I can vouch for that. I stuck around for a while after she croaked, just to see if she was going to wake up, but she didn’t, so I put her in her bed and covered her over with a blanket, tucked her in, walked out and shut the door. Did you know that they didn’t find her for nearly two days? A neighbour found her. She was probably fly blown.’
An involuntary sound, the pitiful cry of a trapped beast, growled in her throat as she lay there, denying the vision of the grand old lady violated on her own bed, but laughing in his face. She didn’t cry.
‘Why? Why?’
‘Because I felt like it at the time, and because I thought she’d be easy, and because you’re a stupid old bitch. You just took it, and then you kept your mouth shut. What did you think I’d do? Forget it? It’s like something else, man. It’s like . . . like the power, and you’re not real anyway. You’re a fake, like this bloody town is a fake. I watched you walk into church that day in your little straight skirt and your little tight-arsed shoes as if nothing had happened. As if I’d done nothing. Was nothing. Nothing!
‘Do you reckon old lady Moreland wouldn’t of dobbed on me? Lucky for her she croaked, or I would of had to do it for her. Cut her with my knife. I was going to anyhow, going to practise on her. Go for the carotid artery. See what it felt like. I picked an easy one to start with, but she wasn’t so easy as I thought, the tough old cow.’
‘I wish you dead, Thomas Spencer.’
‘Wish in one hand, and spit in the other, and see which one fills up first.’ He hit her behind her ear with the handle of the knife gripped inside his fist, and the combination of fist and handle sent an agonising jolt of pain through her head. ‘You’ve got the guts of a rabbit and rabbits don’t deserve to live.’
Willpower held onto consciousness, but it was minutes before she could hear his words.
‘Are you listening to me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Bend to his will, give him what he wants.’
Her head was throbbing. Next time, next time may be the last. ‘Yes. I am listening, Thomas.’
‘People used to reckon you did it with your old man too. Living here with him behind your fence, hiding your sin with your lacy knickers behind the hedge. Everyone thought so. Your mother told them he did it to you.’
The kitchen knife. Sharp.
Red on her stomach.
‘Cut it out. Cut all the bad out.’
Footsteps pounding the stairs.
And the man with the gnome face smoothing child Stella’s brow, threatening the minister, ‘Put her away, or I swear to God I’ll report it. She’ll kill this child one day.’
‘It is not her fault. Her father. She was barely thirteen when the bastards aborted her child. It is self loathing, and not her fault, Parsons. She is seeing herself again in her own child.’
‘She goes, or you get this little one out of the house.’
‘The turns come and go. She will be all right again.’
‘Do you want to be charged as an accessory to your own child’s murder?’
‘I’ll speak to Miss Moreland. Perhaps she could board at the school until – until things settle down.’
Stella lay watching the ceiling turn, lurch down at her, swim before her eyes. She could hear the whooshing whirr of blood-waves in her ears. Slowly she gained control of her mind. Red pain faded into a pinkish mist through which she could see pure distilled evil . . . as she had once seen Angel. Pure essence of evil leaning over her bed, this same bed, her mouth spitting accusations. She saw the hand rise and she cowered.
‘No more. No more. I’ll be good,’ she begged, and she turned her face to the side. One eye had closed. The other looked down at the clown heads she’d embroidered only hours ago, a lifetime ago. One clown eye was blind too. It was staring at her from its plastic bag. Its long legs waiting in another bag, waiting to be joined to the body.
I am as the clown. I have one eye, my other is closing now. My limbs are missing. Numb. I have been unpicked. My right leg is still held to me by a stitch or two, but not my left. Is it there, or in some plastic bag, awaiting the rest of me?
For how long he had been sitting astride her, she didn’t know. Cat with a broken mouse, playing with the broken mouse until the fun is over and the mouse dies.
‘We’re going to drown. We’re going to drown,’ cried timid Mousy One.
‘Oh goodness gracious dearie me, our little lives are done.’
The seed he had spilled was drying on the sheet, gluing her skin to the sheet . . . like stiffening eggwhite, tightening the skin.
Egg. Birth. Death. Grave.
She tried to move her left leg. The knife touched her throat.
‘Stay where you are.’
She was dead if she must rely on defeating him with muscle. Bow to his will as she had bowed to another . . . play the old cat and mouse game again. She used to know how to play that game.
‘I love you, my dearest mummy. You are the best mummy in the whole world. Let’s go for a walk in the garden, Mummy, and we’ll find some flowers, and I’ll pick some for you, and you will be like famous Angel in the photo. Come on, Mummy. You open the door and we’ll go and pick some flowers.’
Trees to climb in the garden. Fences to clamber over. Safe in the garden. Old Mr Bryant over one fence. Mrs Wilson over the other. Just get the door open a crack, just get outside, and see which way the game would go today.
Play the game, Stella. Roll the dice and see if your lucky number comes up. Maybe you’ll find today’s magic word.
But Mousy Two, her chin held high, was circling round and round.
‘Please don’t despair, keep swimming, a way out may be found.’
Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. High heels across a floor.
It startled Thomas. He moved, turned to the window and Stella snatched her left leg free, flexed the muscle, raised her knee, taking the weight from her heel to the sole of her foot. Blood started its painful journey down from her buttock.
‘What’s that?
‘Miss Moreland always wore shoes with heels,’ she said.
His eyes were wide. A child’s eyes, but his hand was a man’s. Again the knife came close to her face. ‘Don’t you try that on me. You can’t get at me with your tricks. I read a book once where the dame wouldn’t shut up with her psychobabble, so the hero cut her head off. Then he went to sleep, which was stupid, and the headless corpse rose from the dead and she got him with an axe. It was plain stupid in the end. As if he’d go to sleep. He’d be hyped up. Hyped out of his brain.’ He looked at her, the knife’s point placed between her eyes. ‘He’d be on a real high. Couldn’t sleep if he tried. I couldn’t sleep after I did Miss Moreland. Didn’t sleep until they found her on Monday, then I crashed. I was out of it for sixteen hours solid.’
Her left eye refused to see, but the other turned to look at the out of focus steel blade, the yellow of handle.
Tap, tap, tap.
He silenced, listening again to the dragging sound of wood on metal, followed by a louder tap, tap, tap.
‘It’s the tree. It’s the tree knocking against the roof. You lying old bitch. You knew what it was, didn’t you?’ He hit her. ‘Didn’t you? You knew, didn’t you?’
‘Please, Thomas – ’
‘Please what? Want me to do it again, eh? Want to take some pleasant memories with you to Jesus? Want to help me this time. Lick me with your silky tongue – buy yourself some time. I did it three times in one night with Kelly Murphy. She’s got a good tongue.’
Tap, tap, tap.
His eyes grew wide again, then he said quickly. ‘It’s like that poem – something about knocking at my wee small door, and nothing much was stirring on the still dark night. It’s black as pitch outside – a good night for creeping around. Nothing much stirring in the still dark night. No-one saw me come here. No-one will see me leave. No-one will think it was me. I’m lily white. I go to church on Sunday.’
‘People see many things now that the hedge is gone.’
‘Did you guess I did it?’ His smile was a naughty boy’s.
‘Did you know it was me who put that mouse in your drawer, Aunty Stell?’
‘I knew, Thomas,’ she replied to the part of him who had placed the toy mouse in her dressing-table drawer, to the part of him who had once loved to sit at her side and listen to the old poems, the stories. She searched his face now for that part that remained the child, a child who might still be reached.
‘No-one’s got a clue that I did Miss Moreland. I hid my bike in front of the hospital then crept around the garden to the units. I knocked on her door and she let me in. “What can I do for you at this hour, Thomas Spencer?” she said. So I showed her.
‘No-one saw me creep up the stairs. I did it when you and Mummy was in the shed getting the stuffing.’
‘No-one saw me coming in here. I put my bike behind your shed.’
‘Someone always sees, Thomas.’
‘Good old God? Don’t give me your God crap.’
‘Your mother will know you were out.’
‘My mother knows nothing. She comes home from work at night, and she wipes off her stupid supermarket grin, and she gets stuck into the old man. He gives me some money for take-away, just to get rid of me, and if I’m lucky when I get back they’ve taken a couple of sleeping pills and they’re both snoring. They don’t know if I’m back or not till breakfast. They don’t give a fuck what I do, and they couldn’t care less either. They’re shit parents. Too busy making war and lousy money to care what I ever did.’ He stopped, and he tossed his hair back from his brow. ‘I’ll be home for breakfast in the morning, and she’ll say, “What did you do last night, Tommy?” She won’t listen to what I tell her. I could say, “Oh, I fucked old Stell, then cut her throat, got home around dawn,” and she’d still say, “Good boy. Don’t forget to put the garbage out, will you?”’
‘Clever Thomas.’
‘Yeah. Serial killers need to have a brain or they don’t get to be serial killers. Get it? They get caught first time, which would affect their success rating. They’ll blame your murder on some stranger, someone just passing through, and they’ll talk about the pokies at Dorby, and the highway going through the town, and how it’s bringing bad elements in, and they’ll say how the government ought to put in a bypass, and how if the hedge was still up and the gate shut, that you might have been still alive today.’
‘Perhaps they will.’
‘I’ll rob you, take any money you’ve got hanging around, upend a few drawers and things, make sure I don’t leave any fingerprints.’
He looked at the bedhead, then at his hands. ‘I haven’t touched anything. I touched the door handle at Miss Moreland’s bedroom, but I wiped it clean. Anyway, they haven’t got my prints on record so they’d have nothing to compare them with, would they?’
‘As you say, Thomas.’
‘Stop doing that.’
‘I’m sorry. What am I doing?’
‘Calling me Thomas all the time. It’s like you’re my bloody aunty or something.’
‘An honorary aunt. Wasn’t I always an honorary aunt? Weren’t you always my favourite honorary nephew?’
‘You’re nothing to me. Just a good fuck.’ He fondled her breast, nursed on it, and she became his toy, his old abused rag doll.
She didn’t fight him when he entered her again. She felt no pain, no shame. It meant only that she was able to raise her other knee, to place both feet flat on the mattress. There was nothing to be gained from pleas or tears. She must conserve energy, relax her muscles. Her good eye was wide open now. It was watching the greedy boy’s face lose its personality as a heaviness saturated his features.
How close he is, and how . . . how vulnerable, she thought, so vulnerable because of his youth and his lack of fear. Fear is good. Fear is necessary. How certain and sure he is of his supremacy. Little boy with his knife in his hand and his raping weapon driving into her, driving deeper, and deeper, between her legs.
She moved beneath him, aware that if she was to live until morning, she must stay in this place of no pain and no shame, she must view this happening as from a great distance. He had told her of the rape of Miss Moreland. Now she would be obligated to tell the world of his deed. And he knew this. Her Thomas was no fool. He had never been a fool, and to save himself, he must certainly kill her before he left the house tonight.
The hand that held the knife was supporting his weight on her pillow. Her throat might be slit with little need for movement, but his concentration was not now on the knife.
Tentatively her left hand rose to stroke his shoulder, just as it had when he was a child. She allowed her fingers to move to the nape of his neck where she smoothed and stroked his hair.
‘Dear Thomas,’ she said. ‘How I loved you when you were small. Of all the little boys in town, I loved you best,’ but her other hand, her right hand, was over the side of the bed, seeking, circling, reached for . . . something. Anything. Knitting needle. Something. Hope. Anything. ‘You were such a beautiful little boy. I used to pretend you belonged to me. How I wanted you to belong to me.’
Her seeking fingers touched only the plastic bag, half filled with clown heads. It continued its circling, then returned to plastic. Her one eye watched his face, saw his own eyes close. She moved beneath him as she grasped the bag, tilted it, up-ended it, allowing the small knitted heads to tumble soundlessly to the carpet. Her hand keeping low, she drew the bag along the edge of the bed, until her arm was at full stretch. And she held it there, her fingers inside its open end, her thumb gripping . . . gripping it . . . until . . .
‘Dear Thomas.’ She stroked his neck with her fingers, matching the rhythm of her fingers to his motion. No pain, only the heat of him, and the tension in her right arm. She moved her feet, pressing her heels into the mattress.
He stiffened. He screamed as a child might scream. His neck arched, his eyes closed, and he flung his head back.
And she struck.
Her left hand came together with her right. The bag held open by her palms, slipped easily over his head, exactly as she might slip a similar bag over a finished clown.
Simple. Easy.
At the same time she bore down on her heels and flung her weight at the off-balanced youth, pushing him to his back, her action sliding the bag down . . . down to the still slim vulnerable boy’s neck, where her hooked thumbs gripped the plastic, while her hands, with a twist and a turn, wound the excess around her palms.
Fast motion. Slow motion. Time lived in another place. Seconds became minutes and minutes hours.
He rolled to the side. She rolled with him, straddling him, locking her ankles now behind his knees, holding him inside her.
Green eyes grew wide in protest behind the film of plastic they now shared with another green-eyed clown, but the big clown mouth was not smiling; it grew wide, pink, it sucked plastic. Its nostrils flared and whitened as they sucked in the transparent film. The throat bulged.
Her hands were strong. They had learned to be strong. Now they fought for her life, joined together by a twisted plastic bag. She was locked in a battle to the death and there could only be one winner.
Fists hammered against her. The knife drove into her rib cage. She felt no slice of pain. Perhaps it was the handle. If not, then she may not outlive him long. But she would outlive him. She would outlive him. Vengeance is mine, said the Lord, but tonight vengeance belonged to Stella.
Like a wild-west rider, she rode him while he bucked and fought to be free of her. Her hands were crushed beneath him. Hot. There was heat in her knees, her hips, but no pain. No room for pain. He kicked at air, fought for air, then the knife dropped with a clunk to the carpet, and too late his fingers sought the plastic, clawed at the film of plastic.
But slowly.
With no nails to grip, to rip, his movements were slowing.
Slow.
Slower.
More slowly.
And more slowly still.
He stopped fighting, sagged.
And she breathed. She looked.
His face had changed colour behind the plastic film glued to his features as if a paintbrush had painted it there. The small clown head, with the green eyes and the glint of gold, smiled as it clung to his ear.