Hades

Hades didn’t know how the children came up with their new names. One morning they just started calling each other by them and naturally he followed. From the moment that Eric awakened, Hades felt distanced from the girl. He hadn’t been close to her in those initial days but she and Eric engaged in a relationship that was utterly exclusive and strangely intimate. They spoke in a language of gestures and looks. Now and then Hades heard them whispering in the night when they were supposed to be sleeping in the secret room, and he could never make out what they said.

The decision to keep the children never really happened. In the beginning he’d put off the heavy, painful question of what was best for them—and for him—until he knew whether the boy would survive, and then he put it off again until he was sure the boy was going to keep on surviving. Before he knew it three weeks had passed and he was taking the children into account when he ordered his shopping. Whenever thoughts crept into his day about how he would raise them and where he would keep them and just how fucking ridiculous the entire idea of running his nighttime business alongside being their father was, Hades simply banished the thoughts and did something else. It was easy to do. The children were always there. Hanging about under his feet or cuddling into his chair with him or trying to tell him stories in their wandering, illogical, wide-eyed ways. A month flew by and a routine fell into place.

The children revealed themselves to be different almost from the very beginning. Eden was a quiet and mysterious child. She kept secrets that he could find no sense in keeping—like where she had been for hours at a time, even if she was only down at the sorting center helping to fold clothes or over at the gate watching the morning crew arrive. She sang quietly to herself. She did anything Eric asked of her, dropping whatever she was doing to follow him out into the mountains of trash. But she had agency of her own, despite her obedience to her brother. When Hades went to his shed she would be there trailing behind him, strangely frightened that she was unwelcome in his workshop. She would watch him for hours as he sketched and built and experimented with his sculptures.

One morning he found her alone there, copying one of his design sketches. He had snuck up behind her and watched with fascination as her surprisingly skilled hand took in the shape of the iron dragon, never faltering, never needing to be erased. When she had followed his design as far as it went, she began to add things, change things, stripping away the bulkiness and clumsiness of Hades’ original plan, adding details he hadn’t considered. When she had discovered him watching she burst into tears, figuring somehow that she was in trouble.

Rarely she let him put his arms around her. When he held her that day she confessed miserably that she had always wanted to help him build the trash animals. When he asked her why she hadn’t told him before, she couldn’t answer.

If the murder of her parents had made Eden a reserved and damaged child, it had awakened something wild in Eric. He was exactly the opposite of the girl. Eric wandered in the garbage from sun-up to sundown, playing imaginary games, talking aloud to himself, engaging in one-man wars with the workers. He made elaborate plans to harass the staff—spying and keeping surveillance records, organizing booby traps, playing them off against each other until fistfights erupted that he’d watch with glee. He collected treasures from the garbage and buried them in secret locations, tinker boxes of machinery parts, jewelry, notebooks and maps. He was outgoing and curious. He questioned everything. He would return to the house as the sun was setting, ragged-haired and feral-eyed, starving and short with his words. But when Hades played the radio in the kitchen in the morning Eric would play air guitar and sing aloud, displaying an impressive memory for lyrics.

At night Hades read to the children in the tiny living room, sunk into the couch with one on either side, a scotch resting in his lap. He couldn’t think of another way to educate them. He read to them from Dickens and Wordsworth, James and Haggard. When Eric showed interest, he read them Patrick Suskind’s Perfume and the dark tales of Poe. He indulged Eden with Shakespeare, which Eric hated.

Whenever Hades was confronted by a decision about the raising of the children—how to answer their questions about the world, explain away their fears, how to direct them towards making the right decisions in their simple black-and-white lives—he found himself working more through experiment and chance rather than personal experience. All he remembered of his own mother and father was the glow of the house fire that consumed them, being so young when they disappeared from his still-expanding world with their tenderness and unconditional love in tow. After them had been the street, for how long he didn’t know, where he’d lived like an animal without a use for things like fairness and respect. The only way Hades had got off the street was through demonstrating his natural talent for brutality. A man had died to earn him his place in the care of some of Sydney’s most evil men. No, there was nothing in Hades’ past that he could use as a model for a healthy childhood. He’d learned about respect by beating it into people, and fairness was something he’d rarely witnessed—it was like the blur of a beautiful creature retreating from him into the dark. He was sure a couple of people had loved him over the years, but never in a parental way and never with the vulnerability of a child. He wasn’t even sure he could spot love in someone else, let alone demonstrate it himself. Uncertainty itched at the man’s insides. There seemed to be no rules and Hades didn’t like that.

The first time the children killed they were eight and ten.

Eden and Eric had settled into a life at the dump that seemed to Hades to be uncomplicated and comfortable, the kind of life that children who had been broken needed to repair their hearts. He gave them free rein to explore and play and dream and run wild during the day. At night he schooled them, following Eden’s interests into classic literature and European history and Eric’s passion for science and war. Hades didn’t risk sending them to school. Though he had commissioned the forged birth certificates and medical papers and other things he would need to prove their legitimacy, some part of him feared that one day someone would recognize them from the newspaper reports and television clips and missing posters that had followed the slaying of their parents. Some part of him feared that one day they would be gone from his life as abruptly as they had come. Though villains of every nature still arrived at his door seeking his help, the little ones gave him a reason to believe that not all of his life was dedicated to evil.

Hades had watched the news religiously in the beginning to try to understand how such a colossal fuckup could have occurred, though he could only do this when the children were in bed and he was sure they were asleep.

From what he could gather, their father had been a lanky, quiet guy who made some discovery about isolating a gene that encouraged skin cancer and the scientific community had gone nuts about it. The mother was some kind of well-recognized creative type, a jill-of-all-artistic-trades who every now and then wrote snappy feminist columns for the newspapers. She was a dark, glamorous woman who was pictured with paintbrushes holding up her shimmery black hair or clay dust drying on her long, slender fingers, a woman who was always laughing and talking and touching people’s shoulders when she talked.

There was plenty of news footage of the huge house on the lake, the shattered windows and the white-clad forensics officers tiptoeing through the chaos taking photographs. There were pictures of a set of gates with flowers and teddies and angry scrawled messages of vengeance towards the killers. The news reports likened the Tenor children to the three Beaumont kids who’d disappeared from a beach near Adelaide in the ’60s, and within days the assumption seemed to be that they were dead. Newspaper opinion pieces called for the kidnappers to burn in hell and other rather uncomfortable punishments. Much of the initial rage and hurt at the missing children made Hades stir in his bed with guilt. But not a single relative was mentioned in the media during the hunt for the Tenor family killers and interest in the case died, however slowly. He consoled himself by standing in the doorway to the children’s bedroom and watching them sleep, oblivious to the angry ripple they had caused in the world.