ONE

Today I plan to murder someone.

You have no idea how much planning is involved in a murder. I suppose I could have just shown up on the doorstep with an axe and taken it from there, but that plan looks better on paper. Plus some people are easier to get to than others. Maybe I should correct myself: You have no idea how hard it is to get away with a murder.

I’d be planning this for a long time. Six years, give or take a few months. I like to think of that as dedication.

I’d been sixteen when I’d taken a part time job at Gill’s Clearing and Landscaping. Sometimes we did heavy work in large garden renovations--the kind that required the removal of trees and stumps or moving big rocks, mostly though, we cleared trees and weeds from paddocks. I think he was dubious a girl was going to be any good at that when he hired me, but Gill is a good guy. He’ll give anyone a go.

People thought I was a dork--too quiet, never popular. But I was strong. I could push Gill’s truck around like it was a wheelbarrow. I could take down trees as thick as my arm with a machete in one strike. I could have carved through a person in seconds.

I knew, I’d hung a sheep carcass from a tree to check. It’s messy work, hacking up a carcass with a blade.

I did one last inventory check.

Hair pulled back in a pony tail to keep it out of my eyes, check. Proper cameo army fatigues from the surplus store, check. A faded cameo tank top with a pony on it from valley girl, check. Six year old running shoes permanently moulded to the shape of my feet, check. Three foot long stainless steel machete, check.

I was going for simplicity. If nothing else, I wanted to be able to ditch everything and run. And boy could I run in these shoes. They were starting to fall apart and one had computer cable instead of laces, but I trusted them to get me there.

And I trusted the machete too. I swished it back and forth.

Luckily my neighbours know me well enough they wouldn’t think anything of seeing me packing large blades into my car.

I love small town suburbia. Everyone knows everything about everyone, but they all act surprised when it turns out there’s a killer at number twenty four Aspen street.

I got in my car and drove. A few miles out of town and all I could see were road signs and wheat paddocks beyond the edge of the bitumen. There was nothing out here. Not even farm houses. Just empty miles of future bread and thresher accidents waiting to happen. I also saw some sheep. Dirty, ugly, fat sheep. They were a welcome reprieve.

I turned on the radio. Two loud disk jockeys assaulted me with piercing laughter.

“It’s not very often you get celebrities come along who don’t need last names, you know? We have Madonna and Fergie--”

“There aren’t many guys. Guys need last names.”

“But it’s quite an achievement. Madonna and Fergie aren’t common names. But if anyone says Alex we know just who they’re talking about.”

“It’s got to suck being a regular person called Alex right now. Imagine you’re working at a supermarket and the boss calls you over the PA. All the customers go crazy.”

More laughter. I switched the radio off in disgust.

It was thirty miles until the trees came into view. The forest sloped up out of nothing. Weeds became scrub became the leaves of massive trees. The road only passed by it for four hundred meters before veering south into more sheep and wheat and road signs, but if you had good eyes or knew what to look for, there was a dirt road that turned off, passing through a dilapidated gate and winding away under the green.

I slowed and turned up the road. As I passed under the canopy the little dirt track curved and just like that the main road was gone. I was invisible from the rest of the world. Someone could drive past now and not know I was here. Once you made that little turn you knew there was no help coming.

The road was badly pitted by rain and time. My little hatchback was old and about as far from a four wheeler as a car could get. I felt like it was trying to throw me out as we bumbled through the ruts. I bounced so hard my head actually hit the roof.

It was about half a mile before I reached what was probably once a car park. Now it was just a pitted space that turned into a pool when it rained and a slurry of mud when it didn’t. There were rotting wooden barriers around the edges and an empty brick shell with bare pipes waiting for toilets and sinks that never arrived.

I parked. There were never any other cars here. I didn’t understand it, but mine had never been tampered with, so I wasn’t afraid to leave it.

Stepping out of the car was like stepping through the back of the wardrobe into Narnia. The rich, deep smell was older than mankind. There were things rotting here that had been living before we had fire. Massive round trunks were thick with moss and lichen. Every branch was festooned with huge, hoary clumps of old man’s beard. Ferns grew everywhere else.

It made me think of Guillermo Del Toro. It made me think of Hayao Miazaki. Here there be dragons. Here there be little girls with heartbreaking narrative set against lush and epic backdrops.

I stood for a moment, listening to the silence. Somehow my clothes were loud here. I could hear my own breathing--later, when I’d been walking a while, I’d be about as subtle as a herd of cows.

Deep in the trees a bird called. A bug whizzed past.

I set off, sneakers crackling over decades of fallen twigs and leaves and hacking at things absently with the machete as I passed. It was cool under the trees. Virtually no light filtered down to the forest floor. Even so, after a half mile my skin prickled with sweat and little insects hovered bothering me. The forest floor was swampy in some places and my sneakers were soaked through with brown, stinky water.

I had reached the trudging stage.

A shrill sound snapped me back into focus. A laugh, it sounded like hyenas fighting over a carcass in the dark. Not human at all, but it was muffled by the trees and heat and dry, pungent air.

I slid over to the trunk of a tree and hunkered down, the machete clenched tight in my fist.

They appeared through the green. Even though I’d been in high school with most of them, they’d have been hard pressed to convince anyone they were older than sixteen. Hannaha, Mary, Eden, Isabelle and two girls I didn’t know, but I thought one of them worked at the coffee shop in the mall.

They were all gorgeous. Effortless so. Six runway models lost in the wilderness and loving it. Part of me was waiting for them to start walking in slow motion with their hair billowing back. But that didn’t happen, they just laughed some more, chatting happily and slapping at bugs. They even looked like they were sweating a little.

I locked my eyes on Hannaha. (Yes, Hannaha--pronounced ‘Hannah-ha’.) The walking cliché. She’d been a cheerleader when we were in school together. She was always bubbly and sparkly and I knew every guy I dated thought about her when he jacked off.

It was her fault Samantha was dead.

Hannaha and Sam had been in the same year. Sam was into dance and cheerleading too, but even before my father ran off and my mother broke down, we were poor and Sam just wasn’t cool enough to hang out with Hannaha and her friends.

She’d been thrilled when Hannaha had invited her to a party in the woods. These woods. It was supposed to be a ‘big thing’. Cool people were going. Famous people. There was going to be free booze, a DJ and rampant promiscuity.

The police questioned everyone when Sam didn’t come home and they all said the same thing. Sam had got drunk, vomited on her jeans and decided to go home. No one wanted to give her a lift because of the smell, but they were all sorry now. They all wished they hadn’t just let her wander off on her own. My big sister.

No one had seen who had taken her or if she’d driven off with someone.

To be honest, it sounded like something Sam would do. It would have been easier if Sam had been a teetotaller and I could scream: ‘You’re lying, Sam wouldn’t do that!’. But she would. I know she didn’t though. Not this time.

Hannaha led her out there. Hannaha baited her. And Sam was so excited to finally be accepted. She’d been so happy. That made it worse somehow.

This machete was for Hannaha.

I stayed down, watching them as they continued on parallel to me. I couldn’t risk them seeing me. It didn’t matter if I couldn’t see them anymore. I had a pretty good idea where they were going. Though technically this would be my first time going there, I’d trekked through these woods a lot since Sam had died.

I could still hear them, faintly, when I started off again. I moved more carefully now. Quietly, my hand white knuckled over the wooden machete handle.

It was another fifteen minutes before I saw the compound through the trees. I have no idea what it was intended to be. It was all concrete and quite extensive. I thought maybe someone was planning on building some kind of recreational retreat here. Something with a large restaurant, a few function centres, maybe a day spa. There was another cleared area about three hundred feet from the compound that was probably the intended building site of cabins.

Either way, it had all been built and abandoned some time ago and the forest had reclaimed it with virile efficiency.

I hunkered down for a bit, watching for signs of life. There were none. Just bugs and the occasional bird. You’d have thought this pocket of wilderness would have been teeming with wildlife.

Then again, I could have been sitting on a deer before I noticed it. I’m not exactly Miss Naturalist of the Year.I lost patience when the mosquitoes found me and a spider crawled up my arm. It wasn’t large, but another few inches of legs and I would have been capering around screaming like I was on fire.

Normally I doused myself in insect repellant before I came into the forest. I guess I’d been to preoccupied with the idea of killing someone to remember today. Stupid.

I stood, checked myself all over for more spiders, then started up the gentle rise to the closest doorway. I touched the concrete wall. It was cooler than I expected and faintly damp. I’d never been this close. I wondered what I was going to find inside:

Beer cans? Hide-out furniture? An altar dedicated to Satan and pentagrams painted in blood? I honestly expected all three.

The first room was empty. There were some dead branches and leaves, but that was all. Somewhat of an anticlimax, actually. I scanned the top of the walls. Nothing but the trees overhead.

I let out a slow breath and crossed the room. I was ready to walk right into the next room when I saw something through the doorway. A bone.

Specifically a vertebrae bone. It was red--just like in horror movies when they have gory corpses that look fake and have usually just been projectile vomited out of an alien or a giant snake. That had always annoyed me in movies. We’ve all seen meaty bones in the butcher, we know what they look like. But this was was a bad-horror-movie-prop-bone red.

My first thought was: it’s not real.

My second thought was: it’s an animal bone.

I started to notice the smell then. Not butcher-shop-fresh, or even rancid-flesh-horrific. It was more like that mummified mouse in the back of the closet. Old rot. Quiet death.

I licked my lips, tasting bitter sweat.

You can do this, I thought.

I stepped into the doorway. It was a big room and there were a lot of bones. In the center of the room, under the open sky, the pile was about five feet deep. It sloped out from there like a pile of laundry. Bones clustered in all corners, some still connected with sinew, some faded from red to brown.

Scattered liberally throughout the pile were humans skulls. I counted to twenty one before I gave up. There was no animal skulls. Nothing to betray that some of these remains belonged to sheep or cows or pigs.

There were carrion beetles everywhere, clicking, scurrying and fucking between the bones. Also, there were a lot of snails. I read somewhere they liked chewing on bones for the calcium. Well, now I had proof. There were no maggots, just a few flies. This was all too old for them.

I sagged against the door frame. It was too much. There were too many. I thought I’d been prepared for this, but I wasn’t.

How had the police missed this? How had they combed these woods for Sam’s body and not found this mountain of death? I knew the answer, but I didn’t want to believe it.

This pile hadn’t been there then.

This pile had gathered in the six years since Sam had vanished. Maybe less. Maybe they cleaned it out every few years. Every year. God, every month.

What the hell was I doing here?

A voice drifted over the wall. Animated conversation, another hyena chuckle of laughter. I felt sick, but not with fear. I had to do this. For Sam. Maybe for all these dead people before me. They’d all had families like mine. Families who didn’t know what had happened to them. How many other girls like me had sat on their beds, numbly waiting for sisters who were never coming home? How many fathers had left? How many mothers now drank in the dark? All because of this pile of bones.

So many people who would never know if they should have a funeral or keep hoping.

I blinked back hot tears.

I stepped into the bone room, picking my way carefully between the fallen. I didn’t want to step on anything and I didn’t want to make a noise clearing myself a path. Some fancy footwork and a near fall got me to the far side and I found myself in a corridor.

The sun came out for a moment and the heat increased. Dust motes danced all around me.

I followed the sound of voices, then spotted a crowd through a doorway. I ducked back quickly, pressing myself to the wall.

“...And I was, like, ‘no way’? You know? Right?” the bubbly, vapid voice of Isabelle.

I leaned forward a little to peer into the room. So much for the six of them I had seen coming here. There was about thirty people in there. I thought maybe the room was going to be a dining hall of some kind. It was split level and the ‘kitchen’ had a low concrete wall separating it from the rest of the room. There was a short flight of stairs and a ramp separating the levels and a few old steel drums.

Most of the group were sitting on the stairs or the edge of the split. Some lounged on the ramp and there was even one or two on the half wall. Isabelle was sitting on a steel drum in front of the others, like they were an audience to her mindless stupidity.

Everyone there looked like they were in their late teens. All of them were a little shorter than average--five one to five five--and all but two were female.

At first glance, I had thought they were all beautiful. They all had that build, that bone structure, that backstage at a fashion show look. But as I scanned the group, trying to put names to faces, I realised some of them had.... flaws.

One of the girls was bald--her head reflecting the light like a mirror ball. Another had eight fingers on each hand, another had an under-bite like a bulldog and one had no nose: just two holes in her face where her nostrils might have been.

“She’s too skinny,” Hannaha said from the ramp. “That guy in the ice cream store is ace.”

The ice cream store was staffed by women, but the owner Greg Tafferty was a big, fat cheery guy. He looked like Santa Claus if Santa Claus wore shorts and lived on a diet of sweetened dairy products. He was a nice guy though. When little kids dropped their cones on the ground he always gave them free replacements. You could always get a free cone if you showed a lot of cleavage too.

He wasn’t a saint, but I wasn’t about to let him end up on that bone pile.

“No, he’s too close to home,” a male voice said. Someone I couldn’t see. Someone who was too close to the wall. But I recognised that voice. That burnt sugar and smoke voice. They’d only been running the teaser for his latest movie every single commercial break of every single prime time show for the past month.

Alex stepped into my line of sight and I dropped back against the wall, heart pounding.

“It’s too hard,” one of the girls whined. “Getting strangers out here is too much work.”

“Yeah,” Mary said. “If they don’t trust us, they’re too cautious.”

There was an air of petulance about the girls. Pure childishness, I envisioned any moment someone was going to be on the floor pounding their fists, kicking their feet and screaming.

On the other hand, I really wasn’t gaining anything standing here listening to them debate who they were going to kill.

I had to do what I came to do, even if Alex was here.

Please, I thought, don’t make it him.

I stepped into the doorway.

They all stopped to look at me. It was odd, all those eyes on me. It felt simultaneously like stepping into a room and realising you are the fattest one there and that dream everyone has where they arrive at school naked.

I hefted the machete uncertainly.

 

 

COPYRIGHT. TALITHA KALAGO. 2009