“No Junk Ma - ,” said a sticker on the letter box. And a wet brass sign read: “Wind Rest”.
On the opposite side of the road, soaked under dank gum trees, Mick and Darren glanced nervously around.
The sheet metal sky hung low over the big grey house nestled among foreign conifers in this exclusive outer suburb of the Yarra Ranges. A fashionably faux Tudor dwelling, its vast front lawn was enclosed by a high hedge of expensively manicured English Box. It had rained for weeks.
“Fuckin’ rain,” said Mick. “There’s supposed to be a drought on!”
“What d’you reckon?” asked Darren, adjusting his headphones and tugging the sodden brim of his cap. “Nobody home, just like Hog said. Walk in, grab stuff, walk out.”
“Yeah, maybe,” said Mick. “I don’t trust the cunt.”
“Should’ve parked closer, but. TVs are heavy - “
Mick scowled. “Hog’s not interested in hardware. He wants cash, cards. If we’re lucky we’ll score big.”
Darren rubbed his mottled arm. “Good skag, but, yeah?”
“That shit was shit! Hog fucks it up it with fuck knows what. And if this is supposed to be so fuckin’ easy, why doesn’t Hog do it himself? We’re being screwed!”
“Nah, not Hogg,” said Darren. “He’s a mate - “
Mick shook his head. “He’s a bloodsucking cunt.”
“At least it wasn’t a Goofball.”
Wiping drizzle from his jowl with the back of his hand, Mick scowled at the tinny sound of his companion’s headphones. Dim thunder rumbled through the clouds, taunting him. He flicked the hood over his shaven head and plunged his fists into his pockets.
“And turn that crap down!”
Darren pretended to decrease the volume and shrugged. He was sixteen, pug-nosed, and wore a drenched ex-East German army flak jacket, his bleached shoulder-length hair sticking to his face.
Despite knowing each other since dropping out of secondary school, Mick was unsure why he stuck with a slow-witted kid four years his junior. He only knew that he and Darren had always hung around together on the streets, seemed always in trouble at school, and both had drunk, violent but otherwise invisible parents.
“Can’t do a thing about it, can you?” Mick’s father would jeer after each beating. “Not a fuckin’ thing!”
For the past month, home for Mick and Darren was a car wrecker’s yard.
“Hey, Mick, got any Violet Crumble left?”
Mick sighed and wished he was elsewhere but knew there was nowhere.
Their objective sat on a large hillside block partly obscured by trees. Facing parkland, it bordered a state forest at the rear, the last house in a courtyard. Wading through the underbrush, the youths approached the forest-side to be confronted by a high bluestone wall crawling with red Bougainvillea. Finches darted through the drizzle.
“Cool flowers, Mick.”
Clenching his fists, Mick crushed his frustration. “With thorns as long as your thumb, dickhead! How are we supposed to get through that?”
Darren trudged through a swathe of wet ferns. “We could use the gate.”
Mick glanced at the cast-iron gate to their right and sneered. “Yeah, right. You reckon it’s unlocked just for us?”
Shrugging again, Darren opened the gate. Mick swore through his bad teeth. Wary, they paused in the gateway before hastening through a forest of multi-hued hydrangeas ponderous with rain.
“I like gardens,” whispered Darren. “And trees. Me Mum used to have this potted plant - same colour as that one but different. One time Dad was so shit-faced he chucked it at the cat. Nearly flattened Mrs Aziz downstairs. Hey, that’s a Silky Oak - “
“Darren,” hissed Mick, tugging the headphones from his companion’s head. “Shut the fuck up! Oh shit!”
He glanced down at the large coil of excrement wedged between the cleats of his army surplus GPs. Rain streamed down his neck.
“Jeez, that’s the biggest dog turd I’ve ever seen, Mick.”
Both youths glanced up simultaneously but saw no sign of the turd’s originator. The garden shimmered in the drizzle. Scraping his boot on the lawn, Mick pulled up a rusty garden stake and signaled Darren to keep moving. Darren nodded and edged nearer a large bay window.
“Mick! Check out the size of the plasma screen. Pan-aaa-sonic!”
Suppressing a sudden urge to use the stake on his friend, Mick gave him a shove instead, and they moved to the back of the house. The door was double-deadlocked but an adjacent laundry window was an obvious point of entry.
“Lucky Hog said about there’ being’s no alarms and that,” whispered Darren.
“The bastard didn’t say anything about a fuckin’ dog, did he!”
“When do we bang up? Reckon we could - “
“Shh!” hissed Mick. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
Mick’s grip tightened on the stake. “I heard a bark.”
“Probably a dog, Mick. Fair dinkum drives me old man berko! Neighbour’s dog yapping all day long, at night even, jumping the fence, shitting on the front lawn - “
“Darren!”
“Should I break the window?”
“No, I’ll break the window,” sighed Mick. “You watch out for dogs. Right?”
With a resolute nod, Darren peeled the wet hair from his cheeks, flicked open a butterfly knife, and stood back, hands in pockets, chin jutting as he scanned the wide, landscaped yard from side to side as if waiting to cross a busy intersection. Shaking his head in exasperation, Mick sighed.
“Fuck it, Darren. Break the window. I’ll be the look out.”
Darren nodded, putting the knife away. “I’ll count to three, okay?”
Mick closed his eyes, doing some counting of his own. “Just break the fuckin’ window so we can do the fuckin’ job and get the fuck out of here!”
Shrugging, Darren pulled a rock from a bed of purple violets, glanced at Mick, counted to three beneath his breath, and struck the window. He looked back and gave the thumb’s up sign. As he reached through a curtain to probe for the latch, his hand was seized by the waiting Doberman.
Mick was surprised by his friend’s girlish shriek. Shocked, he dropped the garden stake and sprinted for the back gate. Behind him, growls and screams rang through the drizzle. At the gate Mick stopped and swore. It was deadlocked.
“Shit-for-brains, Dazza!” he hissed.
Mick turned to see Darren running in the opposite direction clutching a bloodied forearm. In the laundry window, tangled in lace, a big dog struggled to get out. It was a very big dog.
Mick scrambled up the gate and through the Bougainvillea, knowing the scratches would sting for hours. His face cross-hatched with cuts, Mick fell from the wall and lay winded in the sodden underbrush. Distant barks prompted movement. He headed for the car, half expecting to find Darren cowering within. Instead, he watched a police van pulling up alongside his rusty Torana.
No current registration. No driver’s licence. Not to mention outstanding parking fines and a small ziplock bag of weed under the seat. And the fit he carried in his coat pocket.
Face bleeding, Mick ran back towards the house and cut into the forestry preserve, Dobermans no longer seeming such a threat. Occasionally glancing back to see if he was followed, he dodged vast gum trees festooned with pennants of stringy bark, jumped rotting logs, and pushed through snarls of blackberry.
Mick soon tripped, tumbled through the ferns and lay gasping on the saturated bush floor. Muddy, clothes soaked, he cursed Darren and his dealer for conning them with promises of easy pickings. Struggling upright, he continued running in the wrong direction.
He suspected being lost when trees appeared closer together, the scrub thicker and the gloom gloomier. Less rain was getting through. He stopped to listen but heard nothing but a warbling magpie practicing scales like a lunatic on a flute. By mid-afternoon he knew he was lost. His cuts itched and his legs ached. He was cold. He was angry. But at least the rain had stopped.
Delusional thoughts of beating Hog to death receded when Mick came upon a firebreak, the overgrown path winding through the trees like a welcome mat. It was overwhelmed by feral blackberry bushes. Mick would have left the path there if not for the hat.
Fingerprinted with blood, Darren’s baseball cap perched like a odd bird’s nest among brambles. Mick grabbed it and glanced around but saw and heard nothing. Even the mad magpie had ended its recital.
Mick soon found a swathe of crushed bracken. It looked as if someone had fallen, struggled, then scrambled to their feet to plunge recklessly into the stinging blackberries. The direction was circuitous but unmistakable. And clearly painful. It led to a wall, an ancient hedgerow so thick that Mick could make no headway. He did, however, find Darren’s headphones.
As he followed the hedge he caught glimpses of a tall, red-brick chimney festooned in ivy and topped with a tilting terracotta dragon. He probed the hedge for entry but it was impenetrable. How had Darren gotten through? he wondered. Had Darren gotten through? he wondered.
And then he heard the Doberman. There was no mistaking that deep, resonant bark. It sounded very close. Mick immediately found a way through the hedge: straight up and over, accumulating more lacerations.
By now Mick was itching and aching. His face and hands felt like raw tattoos. Thorns snagged his duffel coat. Twigs peppered his short-cropped hair. He tumbled over the hedge and hunkered down in the grass, a dandelion in his eye. Heroin hunger twitched in his blood. Slowly, he raised his head.
He was in another vast yard, this one long neglected. Weeds grew from a rust-red wheelbarrow filled with rotten manure. Contorted, lichen-coated old apple trees dotted the block, and the sick scent of rotting fruit filled the air. The trees looked half dead. So did the house.
A Victorian era monstrosity, its mottled weatherboard was grey and green with moss. Ancient Norfolk pines towered over it like exhausted giants. Wilting roses crawled up its walls. The door beneath its collapsed veranda was boarded up, as were all the windows.
As Mick waded through the grass, crows jeered at him from the chimney. He snatched up an apple and pitched it their way. Cackling, the birds flapped effortlessly skyward and a dislodged brick plummeted down the roof to crash into a ruined greenhouse. He envied their quick escape.
Picking his way past holes in the veranda floor, Mick tried to peer between the boards nailed over a bay window. A mouldy velvet drape obscured his view. The front door was not only boarded up but padlocked with an additional external bolt. He gazed uneasily at a grinning brass gargoyle, sea-green verdigris coating the eccentric knocker. Moistening his lips, he tried to move it but it was rigid.
With some difficulty, Mick made his way through the wet wild undergrowth that had once been a lush garden,. He found a concrete water trough coated in algae and moss. Mosquitoes rose around him.
“Fuckin’ blood suckers,” he muttered, slapping at the tenacious insects. “Darren, you flake, where the fuck are you?”
“Up here Mick!”
Startled, Mick flinched and glanced up to see Darren’s bleached scruffy head leaning from between some boards in a second floor window.
“What the fuck are you doing? How’d you get in?”
“Found a ladder. Mint! Round the other side. But watch your step, it’s a bit fucked.”
“You’re a bit fucked! You scared the shit out of me!”
“Meet you round there. Watch out for the dog, but.”
“Darren!”
Swearing and slapping mosquitoes, Mick struggled through a tangled obstacle course of blackberry, rose, fern, ivy and sword grass. Propped precariously against the wall on the other side of the house was a weather-beaten ladder with some rungs missing; some rotten, some suspect. More moss and lichen. Mick gazed up at Darren’s face, shook his head, and cautiously tried his weight on the first rung. It snapped.
“I’ll hold it for you.”
“Don’t touch anything,” yelled Mick. “Just wait for me. And keep an eye out for the dog.”
“No worries, Mick, it’s still behind the woodpile.”
Glancing ruefully over his shoulder at a rotting woodpile not five metres away, Mick saw the pointed ears rising to reveal the chiseled skull, yellow eyes and leering fangs. With a sonorous growl, the big black Doberman leaped forward, scattering logs. Mick scurried up the ladder like a possum on a mission and fell through the window onto a mildewed carpet. He lay gasping for breath. He was on a landing spanning the width of the house.
“I’m gunna kill Hog,” he hissed. “I’m gunna fuckin’ murder the bastard!”
“Where would we get our shit from then?” protested Darren. “We need him, Mick.”
“Shut up! Just shut up!”
“Come on, Mick. Let’s do some. I could use a hit.”
Sitting up, Mick noticed Darren’s hand for the first time. It was wrapped in drenched newsprint. It dripped dark red. He leaned back against a sideboard stacked with old newspapers, his face very pale. He grinned sheepishly.
“Mick. I’ve got no fingers.”
Mick swallowed hard. Unwrapping the bloody paper revealed a raw mess. Mick noticed the blurred image of an astronaut and the headline: “ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND”.
“This is fucked,” Mick muttered as he dug into his coat for a dirty bandanna to staunch the bleeding.
“Maybe I should see a doctor?” said Darren.
“We’re not seeing anyone with that dog out there. Let’s find you someplace to lie down.”
Darren winced. “Doors are all locked.”
Sure enough, all four doors off the landing were padlocked, additional to the regular door locks. Mick paused at a yellowing, gilt-framed print on the wall, a reproduced etching of a medieval city-scape of tower after tower with a winding river spanned by bridge after bridge.
“Praha, 1636,” read Mick, squinting in the gloom. “What the fuck’s that mean?”
“It’s Prague,” said Darren, peering over Mick’s shoulder. “See, it says it in English: View of Prague.”
Mick glanced back at Darren and the growing puddle of blood at his feet. Swearing, he kicked the nearest door in frustration. His boot shattered the moldy wood panel. Within minutes, he had smashed open the entire door.
Darren swayed on gelid legs. “Coffin,” he said.
Perched on a trestle in the middle of the big gloomy bedroom was a coffin wrapped in chains and padlocks.
“At least you can crash for a while,” said Mick, nodding at a brass bed in a corner.
Darren slumped onto the musty bedspread, clutching his bandanna-bound hand. Outside, the Doberman kept barking.
“Mick, please...”
Examining the dust-covered coffin and its handles and decorative fittings, Mick glanced up, eyes aglow. “Gold!”
“Sweet,” said Darren, biting on his pain. “How much do you reckon Hog will get?”
“Fuck Hog. That prick set us up. This is ours.”
Glancing around, Mick dismissed an ornate candelabra on a side dresser and instead grabbed a cast iron hat-stand to pry off the tarnished fittings. Slipping, he popped open the old padlock instead. As the chains noisily unraveled and dropped to the floor, both youths watched in rigid disquiet.
“That was easy,” said Darren uncertainly. “What d’you reckon’s inside?”
“Boy-fuckin’-George.”
Shrugging, Darren rose with a grunt and shuffled across to face Mick over the box. He ran his uninjured yet bloody right hand over the tarnished crucifix fastened to the lid.
“Yeah, gotta be gold,” whispered Mick, giving the locked lid a tentative push.
He tapped it with his knuckles, as if knocking on a door, and looked across at Darren’s pallid face. The maimed youth shrugged. They raised the lid together.
The first thing they saw was the grinning skull with its rice-paper skin, sparse grey hair, and claws clasped over the thinning fabric of a once-black velvet gown. The second thing they saw was the ruby ring.
“Now you’re talking,” said Mick, dropping the hat-stand and raising a pall of dust.
“Fuckin’ mint!” said Darren, his mangled hand bleeding down the tilting lid. “Dead set, Mick, this is our score!”
“Dead and set,” chuckled Mick, gingerly grasping the corpse’s bony, parchment-covered finger. “With this and the gold... Oh shit!”
The finger had snapped off like a stick of chalk. Mick examined the ruby.
Darren reached across the open coffin. “Give us a look - “
As the ruby exchanged hands, Darren’s wound dripped onto the skull, blood trickling into hairline seams, into sunken eye sockets and in between yellow teeth. As Mick began dismantling the coffin’s gold fittings, Darren groaned and slumped back on the bed. Outside, among the shabby Norfolk pines, crows sang a hoarse dirge and the sun was setting.
“Mick,” whined Darren, clutching his disfigured, trembling hand. “You promised.”
“Chill, Daz, just gotta get this done and we’re done,” winked Mick as he gathered their booty in an old pillow case that promptly disintegrated from the weight. “Shit! We’ll just have to stuff our pockets.”
“This really hurts.”
Even in the growing gloom, Mick was shocked to see how pale his friend had become. Darren obviously needed help but they could both still hear the dog. Mick cleared the dresser, set alight the distorted old candles, and assembled his gear. First, he injected himself. Then Darren.
“Gunna get me a fuckin’ iPod,” said Darren, fiddling with his mp3 player. “And the new System of the Down album.”
“Almost forgot,” said Mick, pulling the headphones from his coat.
“Sweet!” said Darren, bending them back into relative shape and plugging them in. “Gunna get new ones... and a new hat.”
Then it was dark, except for the quaking candles.
“We’re out of here as soon as that dog goes” said Mick, stretching out on a dusty, sheet-covered chaise longue. “Gone, gone, gone, Daz. You just hold on.”
“She’ll be right,” slurred Darren, propped in a corner of the bed, wrapped in musty, blood-patched blankets.
“Right,” murmured Mick. “It’s all good, mate. You’ll be okay.”
“I’ll be fuckin’ great, ma-aaate,” drawled Darren.
Shuddering, Mick wondered where he would score next. He could feel the tension in his veins, in his hands, in his teeth, but had no heart to confess the bad news to Darren: not a grain of Hog’s bastardised heroin was left. He watched Darren fade away.
Mick scowled at the thought of approaching Hog again after this fiasco, yet knew it was inevitable. Pride was a luxury beyond his reach. He could already hear the dealer’s sneer. He could already hear his smug, self-certainty: “Not a fuckin’ thing you can do about it, sport!” He fell asleep to muffled barks and a terrible, high-pitched scream.
When Mick opened his eyes the dog had stopped barking but he could still hear the scream. He gazed at the dresser where the candle sticks had shrunk to stumps. He rubbed the deep blue bruise in the crook of his aching arm. There were others, smaller, darker, but this one was recent, crusty with blood. The fact that he could not remember how it got there meant little.
Life was full of similar mysteries. Skin riddles. A scar here, a scar there. A vague thought, quickly forgotten. A sudden awareness of some new sore. Another self-inflicted blood puzzle discovered in the tangled bed sheets of late afternoon awakenings while his parents did nothing but brawl. So he had left. Their vehemence no longer appalled him, no longer touched him. He wasn’t even there anymore.
Drowsily glancing at the bed, Mick saw that it was empty. And when he rose and lurched to the coffin he saw that it too was empty. He shook his head.
“Jeez, Dazza, what have you done now?”
He shrugged into his coat and massaged his arm again. Silence inflated around him like a gas-filled balloon. Leaning against the coffin, he watching the dissipating steam of his own breath in detached bemusement. Now you see it, now you don’t. Then he noticed the coins scattered on the floor: five cent pieces, ten cent pieces, twenty cent pieces. He grinned and clumsily stooped to scoop them up.
His fingertips slipped through the wet spots, leaving streaks.
Mick staggered backward to bump into the vacant casket. In a winding path, the drops of blood snaked out the door. Shaking his head, he grabbed the guttering candelabra and found himself placing one flat, jelly-foot after another until he stood once more on the landing where the moon had spread an anemic sheet down for him to walk upon. He grasped the dusty balustrade and swallowed hard.
“Daz!” he hissed. “Where the fuck are you?”
He looked down over the balustrade to see Darren sprawled in the quaking glow of candlelight that shone from a doorway below.
Stumbling down the stairs, head buzzing and limbs slow to react, Mick accidentally dropped the candelabra and froze stiff, watching it clatter down ahead of him. In the ensuing silence, he heard a distinct sigh and the sound of shifting couch springs. He cast a quick glance upstairs but the moonlight had deserted him. Clutching the balustrade, he shakily edged forward, pushed by darkness.
The only light came from the slightly parted drapes in the arch of an adjacent doorway, bathing Darren’s paralysed expression of bewilderment in a warm amber glow. His injury looked far worse now, the wrist bone a white knob mauled almost beyond recognition, as if the Doberman had chewed the entire hand off. Throat constricting, Mick crouched and touched his friend’s cold face. And then he gagged and tumbled backward.
Darren’s neck was a gaping hole with the trachea protruding, the flesh colourless.
“Fuck, Daz,” he whispered. “Fuckin fuck!”
“Mustn’t blaspheme,” called a female voice from beyond the drapes.
Swallowing, Mick reached into a pocket of Darren’s army surplus flak jacket and withdrew the butterfly knife. He rose on trembling legs and approached the purple brocaded drapes.
“At least that’s what Papa would have said,” the voice added blithely. “Are you staying out there all night?”
Mick could not identify the accent with its glottal l’s, rolled r’s and heavy th’s. He took a deep breath, tried to stop trembling, but found he could not. He followed his shaking blade through the musty drapes.
Countless flickering candles were scattered around the formal sitting room: clustered on an upright piano, on a dusty davenport, on a sideboard and on a small round table at the elbow of the girl sitting with her legs folded beneath her on a mottled leather Chesterfield. Darren’s buzzing headphones were slung around her neck. She was examining the mp3 player.
“I believe them bones are me, some say we’re born into the grave?” she said quizzically. “I prefer Janacek.”
She appeared to be in her late ‘teens, with long, strawberry-blonde hair, a long neck. aquiline nose and high cheekbones. She held a glass of red wine in her left hand and was dressed in the same discoloured, once-black satin gown Mick had seen on the skeleton in the coffin. But she was no corpse. Through the threadbare velvet Mick glimpsed firm white skin.
She took a languid sip of wine and smiled. Her blue, almond-shaped eyes seemed to glow. She was gorgeous but had an awkward smear of lipstick on her chin. Flinching, Mick realised that her left hand ring finger was missing.
“There were the most beautiful parlor palms in those once,” she said, gesturing to two terracotta pots flanking the doorway. “But everything dies eventually, does it not? Particularly if neglected. Would you like some Burgundy?”
“Who are you?” Mick tried to say, but the hoarse noise he actually produced was more of a “Ha-wa-wa-oo?”
The girl giggled and covered her mouth with the back of her right hand. The ruby ring glimmered. Mick’s head pulsated. His own hands felt swollen. The violated artery in his arm throbbed.
“Come and sit down, boy,” said the girl, patting the mottled leather chesterfield. “Here, next to me. Do not be coy. You need a new friend.”
Moving as if dreaming, Mick approached the girl. He stood over her, swaying slightly. She cocked her head and patted the cracked leather seat again. He slumped beside her, unable to take his eyes off her bright blue eyes and bemused smile. He saw now that the stain on her chin was not lipstick at all. Wine, maybe? he thought.
“Wine?” the girl again prompted, reaching for a bottle on the table and pouring into a heavy cut crystal goblet that shimmered like jewelry in the candlelight. “It is from my Papa’s cellar. He doted on his collection like a cat with its kittens. He would be furious to see us drinking like this. So crude!”
Numbly accepting the glass, Mick stared at the bottle, knowing little more about wine than the older the better. He noted the late-1950s vintage and sculled it, gagging a little. Again, the girl giggled.
“Quite the connoisseur, are you not?”
Mick found himself shaking his head but was unable to stop staring at her. “I’m na-na-not much of a dra-drinker.”
“I am,” the girl smiled, gazing at him over the rim of her own goblet as she sipped. “I would die without an occasional sip.”
Mick swallowed, words slurred. “Who are you?”
“Zdena,” said the girl, refilling his glass.
“Pra-Pra-Pra - ,” croaked Mick, sentence dissembling before he could focus his thoughts. Zdena winked.
“I was a country girl, actually. Stary Smokovec.”
“Da-Darren,” Mick faltered. “What happened?”
Zdena’s eyes glimmered and her smile hardened. “I did. He was too easily frightened. He panicked. Not like you, boy.”
“What did you do to him?”
“What did I do?” Zdena sighed, sipping wine, running the wet, tapered tip of her tongue over her lips. “Well, first, I grabbed his neck and crushed his larynx to stop him screaming, then I took a bite out of his throat but it tasted a little bitter, so I dragged him from the room and threw him from the balcony. Call it a tenderising process.”
Mick’s jaw hung open, the wine glass slumped in his lap, wine leaking over his thigh. “You killed him!” “
“He was already dead. As are you, boy.”
Mick sat forward - slowly - and the goblet clunked to the carpet. “You... killed... “
“I killed my mother, actually,” said Zdena wistfully, arching her back and stretching her long, pale arms. “Unintentionally, of course, during birth. But it is the human condition, is it not, that we so often hurt the ones we love most?”
“Human,” croaked Mick, eyes glazed, his heart thumping as if to erupt from his ribs. He watched candlelight shudder up and down the mildewed walls like rain falling on a window.
“Papa was inconsolable, blaming himself. However, he hired a wet-nurse to take care of me and attempted to get on with his life. He worked hard. As a guide. That is what he was: a mountain guide. The best in the High Tatras!
“We lived in a little town snowbound most of the year but popular with fat politburo chiefs and their Warsaw Pact guests who took immense pleasure in slaughtering chamois, eagles and bears, and in doing so imagining they had actually proven something more than their own impotence.
“Bitter and remorseful after mother’s death, my father satisfied his employers in their every whim, garnering their favour. He was determined to raise enough hard currency to leave his once beloved, now cursed mountains.
“One fierce night in 1966 Papa and some East German officials were caught in an alpine hut and I was left at home with the woman who had been my wet-nurse. She had become my father’s... companion, and was asleep from too much slivovitz. I was reading fairy tales in front of the fire: Pushkin, my favourite. There was a terrible blizzard outside, rattling the shutters and wailing like a thousand banshees. It was very late and I was half asleep myself, when suddenly I looked up to see... something. A shadow rising in the corner of the room. And here I am. Just like that!”
Zdena smiled again and reached across to pour herself more wine. Mick wished he could move.
“I was fifteen. I do not remember anything else until I awoke with Papa at my bedside with a very worried look on his face, surrounded by wrinkled, serious-looking old men and women. Not too late, they said, not too late.”
She raised a hand to her throat and gave Mick such a direct look that he recoiled. As she stared, her large almond eyes seemed to enlarge and brighten as if burning inside. Mick sat as rigid as a stalactite. And then she looked away and he slumped in exhaustion.
“But it was too late. I lay ill for several weeks, recovering slowly, yet remaining in a rather sickly state. Papa nurtured my recuperation with all the love and devotion of an overindulgent parent, to little avail. On the pretext of holidaying in Italy for my health - officially sanctioned, thanks to Papa’s connections - Papa planned to get as far from Czechoslovakia as he could imagine.
“He was running away, you see, not from Communism or the sad memory of my mother, but from something he had not even seen. Needless to say, it did him no good. For I had seen. And it had left its mark on me. Literally! By the time we had reached Brindisi, I was no longer ill. In fact, I had never felt better.”
“Australia?” Mick croaked. “Why?”
Zdena laughed and Mick felt a stream of ice-water chill his bowels. “It is at the end of the Earth! Papa liked Australia because it was far, far away from anywhere that mattered and, as he put it, both ancient and young, ignorant of its past and indifferent to its future. I doubt that he himself recognised the analogy. Amusing, really.
“And so, he made a home here, in the Land Down Under, and found a job with yet another government bureaucracy; one less personally intrusive. This house was a neglected ruin even then, but with his old-world stoicism he eventually had it looking quite lovely. The fruit trees he was particularly fond of. Pears. Apricots. Apples. And I continued to sip just enough of his precious blood each night to keep my strength up.
“I did not wish to kill him, you understand. After all, he was my father. And every now and then, when the need threatened to overwhelm my love for him, I went hunting. Did you know? Scores of people went missing in the late 1960s: that was me.”
Again, she smiled, both attractive and repelling. A tremor grew in Mick’s jaw, as he attempted to speak, but no words emerged. He sat hunched on the Chesterfield, fingers entangled in a white-knuckled grip. Zdena’s smile faded.
“Did they succeed?” she asked, fixing him with a daunting eye.
“Pa-pardon?”
“The moon,” said Zdena in a flat voice. “The Americans?”
Unable to look away from her glaring expression, Mick struggled to understand her question. He had a vague recollection of moon landings but not in his lifetime and only as a cursory note in some long-forgotten classroom lecture. His knuckles hurt and he thought he might be sick.
“In 1969 Papa locked me in that box upstairs,” Zdena said, pulling Darren’s headphones from her neck and tossing them aside. “It was my great moment of weakness, as I had tried to do as he so often had begged of me: no more killing, no more innocent blood. Innocent! In this world of mortal men? Who dares claim innocence!
“But he promised to provide me with nourishment himself. He promised, in Mother’s name, that I need never hunt again, that he would do the hunting, if only I would be patient while he sought out a deserving victim, some wretch nobody could care less about, some irredeemable thug, some lost and aimless wastrel. He swore on that which was most precious to him. He swore! And he lied! I lay down in that awful coffin as if the the guilty one was me.”
The crystal goblet imploded in Zdena’s fist. Raising an eyebrow at the mingling blood and wine, she idly picked winking shards from her hand and continued, reciting mockingly: “Cinderella is sorting the peas: bad ones those, good ones these, yes and no and yes. No cheating. No untruthfulness – “
She paused and tilted her long, white, swan-like neck to stare blankly into the dark of the ceiling before continuing: “No blood is flowing. Just red birds from distant parts are clearly heard as, plumage ruffled, they alight.” *
Zdena’s brow furrowed, her eyes glimmering and her lips curled in concentrated, barely contained rage.
“I loved Papa. I trusted him. But he abandoned me. I daresay he simply shut up this place and crawled away somewhere to die of pathetic old age. I was discarded. But all children survive the clumsy efforts of their parents at parenting. We grow, we learn, we see their follies and failures and sort fact from fiction, do we not?”
Mick whimpered and felt urine leaking in his lap.
“Time is irrelevant but it does become... tedious,” said Zdena pensively, holding up a sliver of crystal to the candlelight. “Instinct informs my heart. In the Tatras I was graced with a primeval gift beyond human comprehension. Now, because I have been alone so long, I bestow that gift upon you, boy.”
“You can’t!” Mick blurted.
“I did,” smiled Zdena. “Upstairs, while you were still dozing. Just a sip. Just enough to wash your veins clean and help you see clearly.”
Mick clutched his elbow. Crashing jets shrieked in his skull. Squeezing shut his eyes, he wanted to coil into a small safe ball and vanish, but when he looked again Zdena was still there, plucking glass from her red palm. Licking her hand, she cocked her head, her fair hair cascading over her shoulder. Candles quivered in Mick’s blurred sight. He lurched forward, propelling himself from the leather sofa like a drunk and spun back around, the butterfly knife still in his hand.
“The world teems with people,” said Zdena softly. “Billions at each others’ throats. Selfish, thoughtless, rapacious. Insatiable. A plague consuming everything, ruining everything, sparing nothing. Greedy beyond reason or even self-preservation. But I offer you redemption, boy. Come! Change! Together we can eradicate the disease.”
Zdena unfurled her legs, the rotten velvet shredding across her thighs. Slowly, she swung her bare feet to the floor, careless of broken glass. Her face was a white mask with eyes of quartz as she held out her hand and rain – or something - tapped on the shuttered window.
*Miroslav Holub (1923—1998) - “Cinderella"
