He tested a big knife against his thumb, found the edge wanting. Even as Hazel moved her lips in a silent plea, Gilbo worked a whet-stone over the blade.
"An army of savages, real cowboys and Indians stuff. Their land, and they fought for it tooth and nail. So, my great grand-dad lost one sheep too many, and saw red. Fixed this here chain into a stump, much like this one. Went out on his horse, sent a mob of blacks running. Killed three or four, dragged an old woman back by the hair."
Tested the edge, drew blood. Smiled, but it was just a quick twitch of the lips, his eyes set in a cold lizard stare.
"Kept her in the chain for a week, shot every black face that came to save her. In the end her mob were just trying to bring food and water, but he shot “em just the same."
He ran the blade along her leg, little steel kisses that parted her skin, sent a trickle of blood into the red clay. She screamed, and her curses echoed through the lonely scrub.
"Turns out the meat chain was good fun. Character building. This here is a family heirloom. I've worn it too, and now it's your turn."
Gilbo brought her into the family tradition, a long and bloody lesson. He did not kill her that day, or the next. He promised that one day she would die in the meat chain, but only when she begged him for it, and only when he had a kid to pass this dark legacy onto.
Eventually Hazel agreed to these conditions, and she meant it too. Then he let her go. The visible wounds healed in time, and Gilbo never laid a hand on her from that day.
He had another outlet.
Hazel found a new role as Gilbo's apprentice. Lost waifs, hitchhikers and tourists, they all took a turn in the meat chain. Hazel was part lure, part caddy, and she handed over the knives, watched happily as her man carved up the women she'd befriended.
One night, Hazel put sleeping pills in Gilbo's curried prawns, concerned that he was going about things wrong. Quite simply, he didn’t love them. Everything Gilbo did to the girls in the meat-chain was hateful, an act of violence, dominance. It was his legacy, and he didn’t even understand it.
The true secret of the meat-chain was intimacy, a love that transcended all common sense. She saw glimmers of it, lurking around her man’s shoulders as he went to work.
Even as the life rattled out of them, the girls always loved him. Friendship stripped down to a bare honesty, even as their skin parted from flesh and their flesh parted from bone. They shared confidences with their hulking killer, more than even Stockholm’s Syndrome could explain.
These girls needed to be treated properly. With respect.
Gilbo woke in the meat chain, and died slowly. Hazel did her best to make him proud. About a week later she put him in the ground with all the others, and took over the family business.
Beautiful backpackers from Europe, leggy blondes with light smiles. They came to stay at her block, lured by the cheap rates. Green-friendly tours, run by a female owner-operator. A safe destination. It was hardly a success, but she got by.
Some came alone or in twos, and these were the tourists she sometimes introduced to the meat chain. Over days she befriended them, learnt their innermost secrets. They grew to love her, as she loved them, even as she ran Gilbo's tools over their bodies.
She wasn't deaf, knew that the tourists giggled at her crooked nose, her gappy smile. Teased her in their Nordic tongues, even as the four-wheel drive bounced their pert bodies around. Time was not kind to Hazel's looks, and no-one kissed her anymore. Still, she gave these girls new kisses, in all the places that the handsome men kissed them.
Hazel's circle of friends grew year by year. In the times that the chain was empty, she'd sit by the dam, reliving these brief friendships. She remembered them fondly, and mourned them with kindness.
Then one day, the world ended. New friends were hard to come by.
#
"This is the meat chain," Hazel told the dead girl. The corpse smiled up at her, reaching for her with mitten hands. She brushed aside the reaching hands, continued with the script.
"Chain," the dead woman echoed.
Apparently Gilbo's dad introduced the oven-mitts into the ritual; this was about the time that law-men took to scraping dead women's fingernails, to see who they scratched at in their last moments. Hazel figured a mass grave was damning enough, but praised her dead father-in-law today. The resurrected girl could do little to infect her.
Hazel wore a butcher's apron, rubber gloves that reached almost to her elbows. A bandana, soaked in vinegar to keep out the stink, and thick safety goggles from the shed. No sense risking a bit of spit or blood landing in her eyes.
She ran through the history of the chain, told her new friend all about her part in its legacy. She'd always found the initial begging and screaming a little annoying, so it was a pleasant surprise that the dead woman went along so cheerfully. She even echoed the words as best she could, and Hazel had never laughed so much.
But then it all went wrong. The woman happily let her peel off the rotten skin, take off layer after layer of meat. But the pain was missing. There was no communion to this, no intimacy. The dead woman did nothing but gurgle happily, even after Hazel took her slimy tongue out by the roots.
"It doesn't work!" Hazel cried. Wielding knife and saw, she broke the woman down into her individual parts, left with a neat stack of rank meat that continued to writhe. Normally this was a meditative time, a goodbye to a new friend. Hazel was shaken to the core, and hacked away messily. She’d never been lonelier, or more frustrated.
Empty.
Safe or not, it was time to leave Pigroot Flat.
She left the dead woman by the side of the dam. The stack of severed limbs continued to twitch and shiver. When Hazel limped back to the house, an arm rolled onto the ground, kept rolling until it was thrashing around in the dam.
Only then did Codger deem it safe enough to come out of hiding. He was canny enough to know that the pigs would be back, and they’d make short work of all that meat. He stole across the yard, wary of his mistress. In seconds he was back under the verandah, dragging the dead woman’s head by a hank of hair. Her jaw still worked, and the remaining eye regarded the half-starved dog with love.
“Doggy,” she mouthed, her blue lips curving up into a radiant smile.
#
Hazel spent a long time by the dam, bidding her friends goodbye. She made her final peace with Gilbo, and left Pigroot Flat, left her history slumbering beneath the earth. Codger trotted behind her but she threw stones and curses, drove him into the scrub. The dog had tasted people flesh now, would probably turn on her if she got too weak.
The township of Katherine was an open-aired graveyard, full of playful corpses. They splashed around in the Gorge, others wheezing rotten laughter as they kicked the footy. One even had a fishing line out, the hook dangling a good foot above the water.
The cars all sat on flats, batteries long dead. Gilbo might have got one working, but Hazel was no bush mechanic. Snatching a bicycle from a dead man's hands, she ignored the invitations to play, dodged their skeletal fingers.
She pointed the bicycle down the cracked highway, and rode.
Every place was the same. The apocalypse had rolled over every farmhouse, every roadhouse, every sheep station and shit-shack. Numb, burnt to leather by the sun, Hazel passed through Tennant Creek, Davenport, Alice Springs. The dead, red heart of Australia.
By now the idiot dead were little more than skeletons in the sun, sinew holding bones together, skin drawn taut. They waved enthusiastically, shuffling after her bicycle.
On the day she saw the crude fort, she was walking like a dead thing herself. The chain on her bicycle had snapped, but she pushed it mindlessly, useless pedals clicking, busted tire dragging. An enclave, set almost a mile from the highway. Behind the barricades, a stand of trees. Perhaps a waterhole?
The gate opened. Figures rushed towards her. Hazel dropped the bicycle to the red earth, and shook with silent sobs.
People embraced her. Someone pre
ssed a water bottle against her lips, and she gulped it gratefully, water running down her filthy face.
They led her into their compound, and she gazed around in wonder. Buildings, green gardens, livestock. Kids, playing in the street.
People, dozens of people.
The first she’d seen in years.
They closed the gate behind her, and Hazel clutched the old schoolbag close, the one marked KATHERINE AREA SCHOOL. Dangling from the open canvas flap, a loop of rusty old chain.
“You’re amongst friends now,” someone said to her, and she smiled.
The House of Nameless
The date had been going well, all things considered. No girl in her right mind ever thought she would sit down to dinner at a minotaur’s house, but then again no-one knew that Raoul could cook up a storm.
“I’ve been saving this for a special occasion,” he said, bumping open the kitchen door with his broad hip. He had a freshly baked pavlova resting across the palm of one broad hand, his free hand proffering a bottle of Sauternes that was pinched between his enormous thumb and forefinger.
He stopped short. The girl was sitting rigid in her seat, gripping the edge of the table and trembling. There was a stranger in his house, standing right behind her, resting his hands upon shoulders made bare by her evening dress.
He was a patch of murk and drab, and Raoul found it difficult to look directly at him. His eyes seemed to slide off the intruder’s shape, as if he were too greasy to hold light and form.
Raoul growled. His horns were sharp enough to pierce an engine block, but he hesitated. There were measures in place to keep weak minds out of this house, and this intruder had bypassed them all.
The man stank of rot, and was sniffing at the girl’s scalp, long and lovingly. The intruder was blurred around the edges, not a definite shape so much as a smudge. He moved in jerky fits and starts until he stood before Raoul.
“I knew you, back in the One-Way-World,” the stranger said. “You were Mithras then.”
“Get out of my house,” Raoul said. “Now.”
“I will undo all of your works,” the man said, turning sideways and inside out till he was gone.
Raoul hushed his weeping date. He gently licked her forehead with his broad flat tongue, massaging the incident out of her mind. The minotaur sent the blank-faced girl safely home, realising with some embarrassment that he had already forgotten her name.
#
He checked and refastened every door, even the basement door that led out into the cold vacuum of space. With the girl gone he let the subterfuge drop, and the true nature of his domicile asserted itself.
Gone were the chandeliers, the immaculate mosaic flooring, the tapestries and hangings. His rats-nest of an apartment emerged, complete with flaking stacks of periodicals, weight sets, and mismatched furniture that had started to buckle beneath his weight.
The only true thing to appear in Raoul’s spiderweb had been Picasso’s Minotaur Kneeling Over Sleeping Girl. An original, and the lurid drawing had made his date a little nervous, but ultimately curious. He thought it only fair to give her some hint of what his true intentions were, and it was an ice-breaker if nothing else.
“You looted this,” she had said, arching an eyebrow. She touched his arm as she took in the image of the virile bull-man, lurking over the innocent girl, waiting. The date had been going very well, before something with the power to break through his safeguards had appeared in his house.
Raoul didn’t believe in phones, but he had a battered old note-pad on the counter, propped up against a grimy kettle. It had an elaborate sketch in ballpoint on the cardboard backing, a puppy curled up and sleeping.
If someone phoned him, their words appeared on the topmost page. Raoul found that he preferred to wander around in his squalor and think for half-an-hour or more of what to say, then to write a suitable reply underneath the words of his caller.
This came over on the phone as if he had said the words himself, and the pacing of his speech seemed quite normal. The minotaur liked having the advantage of hours of thought, a chance to reference his various books, or the means to outthink his various lady-friends if one of them happened to call and he was with someone else.
Specifically, he’d invented the device to deal with Lune.
“Hello, it’s me,” he wrote.
“You’d best be scribbling out an apology,” her words appearing in her own neat hand. “I know you just had a visitor.”
Long minutes of thought. He knew she was cunning enough to keep eyes on him, jealous enough to wish him harm. Powerful enough to deliver it.
“I had more than a visitor. Someone broke into my house.”
“Into your house?” came the writing, cramped together in an excited scrawl. “You’ve gone to great efforts to keep everyone out. Including me.”
“Please, Lune. This man, this intruder, he stank of the old ways. Aren’t you concerned?”
“If it’s to do with the One-Way-World, I suggest you go see Nameless. I’m done talking.”
Her final sentence underlined itself several times, indicating that Lune had terminated their conversation with extreme prejudice.
#
Raoul visited the house of Nameless. In truth it was the echo of his family home, a sagging mansion full of ghosts and sour days. There was a beach and a caravan park below the cliffs, but these places and the happy sounds that floated up from them were only there to torment Nameless.
“Come in,” he told Raoul. The minotaur stepped over the muscle-bound ginger tom that was sometimes one cat, sometimes a dozen resting on every surface, snarling. The cat/s were scared of Raoul now, having attacked him only the once.
They went through the kitchen, past the dining table set with plastic place-mats for a family that would never eat together again. There was room after room full of memories and photographs, and the sunlight drifting through the windows was pale. It was always dusk here, and Nameless would not turn on the lights.
“Up here,” Nameless said, and they climbed the stair. There was an old child gate at the bottom, busted now. Up and up, winding, and there were more floors than it looked from outside. They climbed until Raoul snarled impatiently and terrified Nameless into giving him the top floor, the little den of Father.
“I’ve got this video,” Nameless said, and hands shaking he slipped the cartridge out of the paper case. “THE FUNNY TAPE!” the label read, and he fed it into the guts of a big chunky VCR.
They sat on the dusty couch, the minotaur and the little nothing-man. There was a photo of his family on top of the TV, and everyone but Nameless had their backs turned to the camera.
The tape started, and it showed a young Nameless, back when he had name and life and love. He frolicked on the beach with friends, turning cartwheels to impress the girls.
“Is this how you waste your days?” Raoul asked, knowing the answer. He could taste it in the air, the funk of a house where each day was a hundred years of dusk and loneliness.
“There’s more,” Nameless mumbled, but stopped the video, cheeks flushing.
“So, given eternity, you would sit here and stew over your misspent youth,” Raoul said. “Enough. I would have your thoughts on a matter.”
Nameless ejected the tape, reverently sliding it into its case. He rested it on the coffee table, lined it up within its boundary of dust.
“I had a visitor, in my house,” Raoul said. “Uninvited.”
“In your house?” Nameless pursed his lips, frowned. “That’s tricky.”
“Stank of the Old Ways, and that from a man who was hardly there. He spoke of the One-Way-World.”
“Ah.” Nameless drifted into a powerful memory, and Raoul was caught on the edges of this thought, almost drawn into the reverie. The minotaur stood up and with one hand flipped the sofa, knocking Nameless onto his back.
“Why?” the man said, winded. He got up, blubbering and clutching at Raoul’s thick furry legs.
??
?There’s enough of the One-Way-World in your head to cause trouble,” Raoul said.
“I’ve been good,” Nameless whined.
“You’ve dragged more than one fool into that mind of yours. Now tell me what you know.”
“The man. That blurry, secret man,” Nameless whispered. “I thought of him today, when I was making a sandwich,” and Raoul knew he was lying, there was never a scrap of food to be found in this house.
“The truth, NOW,” Raoul said, and put enough god into it that the knick-knacks on the windowsill bounced around and the window shook. “Or I will turn you out and close this house to you.”
“I was reading my high-school yearbooks,” Nameless said, terrified into truth. “I was reading the names, and when I saw a photo I thought of the man.”
“Show me,” and Nameless was hauling a carton out of the nearest shadow. It was brimful of curios and memories, a lifetime of hoarding every encounter, every word. There were lovenotes with the folds worn away, the ink nearly read from the page. Scout badges, speeding fines, broken condoms, the whole box and dice.
Nameless produced the yearbooks, and gave a guilty grin.
“Meant no harm by it. Just looking.”
“You were trying to find your name,” Raoul said. “Try, it’s not in there,” and surely Nameless must realise that every mention of it was gone. Excised throughout the whole universe, from his birth certificate onwards.
“Show me the photo,” and Nameless was flipping through the pages, past the photos of the formal and the signature page. He stopped at a class shot, rows of kids grinning or scowling at the lens. It was Nameless’s class.
Nameless got the faintest of connections to Raoul’s intruder, and Raoul carefully captured the very edge of this thought. He had a trail now, and tore the page out of the book.
“Finally, you’re useful for something. I’ll leave you to it,” Raoul said, tapping the video case with his massive sausage fingers. Nameless sat still as Raoul left by the front door, moving only when the wake of the minotaur’s far-travel had settled.