The Dweoming Well

How much land does a man need?

2015-02-19T21:55:00.000+08:00

On the weekend I was reminded of Tolstoy's brilliant answer to that question, which I think I first read in high school.

I can still hear Pahom's heart pounding fit to burst, see his body bent in a headlong rush to the finish—“An hour to suffer, a life-time to live.”

NaNoWriMo (a day late)

2014-11-30T23:59:00.000+08:00

It’s NaNoWriMo, or (Inter-)National Novel Writing Month (I guess InNaNoWriMo is one syllable too ridiculous). NaNoWriMo is “a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing” with the goal being 50000 words of rough draft by the end of November. I’ll be posting chapters of a work-in-progress titled The Redactor here.

I love feedback, positive or negative, but beware: this is genuinely a first draft. The plot is a sponge, and any good ideas you send my way might be absorbed. ...which, for a guy who likes to nail down his endings early, is a little scary.

The Redactor, Chapter 00

2014-11-02T20:40:00.000+08:00

The Redactor

re•dact (rɪˈdækt) : to put into suitable literary form; edit.

The gun never wobbles in the movies.

My hand squeezed the grip so tight it was sliding on the sweat. I stared along the barrel at the kid, but it wouldn’t sit still. The sight was drawing crazy circles round him when all I wanted was a bead on his chest.

Maybe it never wobbles in the movies because they don’t task forty-year-old professors of literature with murder—particularly forty-year-old professors of literature with a heart condition and a fear of needles.

So much can change in a week.

Murder? Yeah, I wanted to murder this kid. I wanted my bullet to tear a hole in an artery. I was giddy to see him ragdoll to the ground, blood gushing onto the street.

I just hoped that before he died he had the presence of mind to look for me. I wanted him to know I made it. Me, Jack Griffin. I played his game. And he lost.

I’m tempted to ask, “How did it come to this?”

Fact is, I know precisely how it came to this. It’s documented in ridiculous detail on the kid’s website.

The Redactor, Chapter 01

2014-11-02T20:00:00.000+08:00

Six Days Earlier

“I’ve got a feeling in my blood,” the kid said. “You ever get that? The desire to seduce someone?”

“No,” I lied.

“Only, it’s not seduction.” He licked his lips and seemed to consider. “Feels more like murder.”

“Murder?” I said thickly, trying to gauge Hiero’s mood. Was he depressed? Or was this just the latest attempt to coax a novel from his experience and imagination. Literature students can be obtuse. And of all my students, Hiero was the hardest to read. Finally I forced a laugh. “You need to pick a vice. Yesterday it was--”

He spoke over me. “What would you say if I said I want to kill a man?”

Was this suicide talk? But it didn’t fit, coming out of Hiero’s mouth. I played along.

“You want to...?” I said.

“Kill a man.”

“Kill a man, yes.”

“Homicidus Hieronymus,” he added.

The kid’s full name was Hieronymus Edgar Beck. He nearly always referred to himself as Hiero.

“Homicidus?” I checked.

He nodded.

I leaned back in my chair and let my eyes roam through my office. My gaze inevitably fell on the bookcase taking pride of place, nearly filling the long wall. Its shelves bowed under the weight of classics. I scanned the shelves, reading names—Chandler, Lewis, Nabokov, Salinger, Tolstoy, Vonnegut. This was no book-of-the-month portfolio club set. These books were marked by life, picked from charity shops, garage sales, laundromats, each stained by the grit of life, dog-eared by fingers uncaring or eager.

How I loved those books. How I hated those books.

“This guy you want dead. How does he die?” I probed. “Blade, poison, fire, blunt force trauma, asphyxiation?”

“All of the above,” said Hiero.

“You need to choose.”

“Choose?” He said it like it was a foreign word. Gen-Y—always want all the options.

He took a sheet of paper from a manila folder in his lap and wrote. The scratching of his pen was the only sound for the time it took him to write.

“Then there is the matter of forensics,” I said. “What trace evidence will the medical examiner find? Where does it lead?”

“Traces,” he said, stressing the sibilant. “And they lead to the climax. A school of red herrings, and one black.”

“Black? I’m not sure that’s in the idiom.”

Idiom is not a word I throw into many conversations. But lit students like it. Hiero loved it. Or so I assumed. He had come to my office most days of the year. He fancied himself the next J.D. Salinger, and he meant to write the next Catcher in the Rye. He said he had one book in him. But that one book would be a cracker.

I watched him scratching in his notepad, and wondered if I’d miss our talks when he returned home. He was on exchange, and semester had almost finished. He was flying home to the US next day.

“You’ll have to choose,” I said. “Murder needs precision. Say you pick poison. Okay. Is it Hemlock or Arsenic? Dilation of the pupils, dizziness, trembling, paralysis; or headache, drowsiness, diarrhea, leukonychia striata—white patches—in the fingernails? Hemlock grows by the side of the road in Washington. And Arsenic looks like cholera in Haiti.

“The devil is in the detail. You won’t fool your readers if you don’t know it back to front.”

He lifted his gaze from the notebook and smiled. “So I’ll research,” he said, eyes glinting behind a curtain of chestnut bangs.

I hammered the point. “Agatha Christie knew her poisons so well that a real murder was solved using one of her books.”

“Life and art,” he said with a smile.

“Art and life,” I replied in what had become a shared verbal tick. An in-joke.

Night had fallen when we said our goodbyes. I locked up my office in the pale green light of an emergency exit sign.

—and slipped on the corridor tiles. I crashed onto my hip and sent my briefcase careening into the darkness.

When I’d collected myself, I discovered what had caused my fall. I’d slipped on a manila folder. Loose paper had slewed from it onto the tiles. I gathered them up, then held the folder up to the poor light.

Printed on one side of the folder in permanent marker was Hieronymus E. Beck. And below that, The Immortal Novel.

I’d slipped on the notes for Hiero’s novel.

And my life would never be the same.

As I drove home that night I struggled to drown the pity I felt for Hiero. Back home, without my goading, he would probably forget about writing. Besides, he lacked talent. Real talent. With his looks, he would have more chance in Hollywood. I convinced myself it was a good thing he had lost the notes. That even if I knew where he lived, I wouldn’t return them.

But my conscience must’ve been uneasy. At my apartment, I ate a microwave dinner at my writing bureau, and examined his notes.

The folder held even less than I had first thought. Besides loose sheets, there were five sets of stapled pages, each of two or three sheets, and all titled Research. The cover page of each set appeared to be a typed template, and the last two were blank. Hiero had probably paid twenty bucks for a decrepit typewriter from a charity shop. Another Hemmingway-wannabe.

Shit — guilt, guilt.

I retrieved the topmost and held it to the light to read. The first line of the template said Means. Next to that, in curling script, was written, Asphyxiation.

The next item was Scene, followed again by the curling script: riverside path, near bush.

Then came Time: Evening, and finally, Victim: Female jogger. Redhead. An ellipsis, then Large-breasted.

I gave him a tick for the hyphen, then laughed, thinking, Hollywood and Hiero would get along fine.

A memory of my ex-wife killed the moment. I read on.

Below the cover page were notes written freehand. Hiero had made a study of methods for asphyxiation. Under Garrotting, he had Thickness and texture of rope, and wire. Even a kyoketsu-shoge—a weapon of ninjitsu, and relic of feudal Japan. The likely particulate trace evidence left by each, the texture left upon skin, the chance of rupturing the skin, and the likelihood of crushing the cartilage of the windpipe. He had drawn diagrams of the larynx, littered with details of angle and force, and concluded the minimum strength required.

I adjusted my opinion of Hiero’s career aptitudes. This kid needed to get into engineering. Safer in the current economic climate. Paid better too.

Sleep hit me before I got a chance to look at the rest of his notes. I binned the remains of my dinner and climbed the steps to my bedroom. The bed felt empty that night, and I blamed Hiero’s hormone-charged imagination.

Tomorrow I’d visit Bedbarn. Stop sleeping in one half of a queen-size bed.

The Redactor, Chapter 02

2014-11-02T19:59:00.000+08:00

Morning rose in glorious light, but I didn’t make it to Bedbarn.

A newspaper had been stuffed through my mailbox, even though I’d killed the subscription a month ago.

I read it over breakfast. It was on page seven that I found the article about the assault.

The previous night the victim—described as being in her early twenties—had been jogging the path that winds around Point Walter on the river, when a hooded man had leapt from the bushland adjoining it and wrestled her to the ground.

I didn’t want to hear if she’d been successfully sexually assaulted. My eyes flicked forward by habit to the next article.

But they caught on a word in italics: kyoketsu-shoge.

Kyoketsu-shoge.

It came after the words ‘knife’ and ‘cord’ and was in brackets, and was no doubt the late-night research of some bored intern, but there it was.

The attacker’s intent had not been rape. He had meant to garrote the girl. Murder her. With a kyoketsu-shoge.

My vision glazed for a moment, then refocused to read the rest of the article. With relief I read that she had ‘fought her attacker off”, escaping with minor lacerations to the throat—and the weapon.

The kyoketsu-shoge was the sole reason the assault was news, and perhaps why it had been crammed into the stop press.

A tearing sound briefly drowned my senses. It came from within, and I think it was the sound of my life peeling away from what the average guy calls Reality.

When it subsided, my head tried anxiously to stick it back down.

Hiero’s dossier had said “Asphyxiation”. Sure. But how many assaults did the city of Perth host each year? Tons. Whole handfuls. And assault by museum artefact...?

The dossier said “Evening”. Well, that was the obvious time to strangle someone.

It said “Female”, too. So what? Weren’t they all.

No photos, so I couldn’t check if she had red hair or big boobs.

It said, “Kyoketsu-shoge”.

Shit. (Peeling sound).

I hurried to my writing bureau, where I’d left Hiero’s dossier, hunched over like an old man, and pawed through the sheets for the one I wanted.

When I found it and read the notes on asphyxiation, a ripple of relief rolled through me. No — it didn’t say kyoketsu-shoge. It mentioned kyoketsu-shoge, among many, many alternatives. The stats were looking up again.

Come on home, Reality. The coffee’s on.

I stuck her back down, but as fast as I did, a corner dog-eared up: and what if this _girl_ who was attacked _jogging_ by a _river_ near _bush_ in the evening—with a kyoketsu-shoge!—had auburn bangs and big tits?

“Murdoch Police Station,” said a voice. “What can I do for you?”

I pressed the phone receiver to my ear. My mind went blank.

“Hello?” said the receptionist.

“Hi. I— Do...” Professor of literature, note.

“Sir?” she said, and the sunshine had dropped out of her voice. “What is your name, and who do you want?”

“My name?” I said. “I’d rather not say.”

There was a pregnant pause on the line. It may have been my imagination that heard the line suddenly hiss as if it had been switched to speakerphone.

“Would you like to be transferred to Crime Stoppers, sir?”

“Yes, yes. Crime stoppers.” What the hell was I saying?

There was a click, and the line swelled with a community announcement about opening hours and the commissioning of a hospital. Then it cut out mid-sentence.

“Crime stoppers,” said another female voice.

“I’m calling about the assault last night—the girl. The kyoketsu-shoge. I...” What?

“Do you have information pertaining to the crime?” said the voice.

“Yes. No. I wanted some information.”

“This is not a reporting service, sir. If you would like to—”

Then the mind-fart: “The girl. Did she have red hair and large breasts?”

The receptionist said a word I didn’t catch, then one I did: “Sicko.” She hung up.

I laughed. It was an odd sound.

I dialled emergency.

“Emergency services,” said yet another voice. “Which service do you require: police, ambulance, or fire?”

“Police.” Why weren’t all the questions multiple choice?

The line cut-over to a call tone, which was promptly picked up.

“Police. Please describe the nature of your emergency.” A man’s voice. Clipped tones.

“I need to know—”

“Is there an emergency, sir?”

“No. I—”

“Then I must inform you that two false calls have been logged originating from this number. If you persist, charges will be pressed. Do you understand?”

I hung up. Dropped the phone like a snake.

Then I walked circles in my study with a palm pressed to my forehead.

A police man had just been rude to me. Me, who had never had so much as a speeding ticket.

Okay. Okay.

I picked up the phone again and dialled international.

The call ping-ponged through the network, and rang for what seemed an age.

“Sparkes,” said my ex-wife.

“Jean,” I said.

“Shit, not today, Jack.”

“Good morning to you, too,” I said.

“It’s not morning here, Jack. It’s the afternoon. The morning finished hours ago, and I’m still trying to wash off the stink of faculty politics.”

“Play their game, Jean, and you stink their stink.” I couldn’t help it.

“Oh!” she said, and the sarcasm came dripping out of the handset. “I forgot I was talking to the man with the pristine arse. How’s that novel coming, Jack?”

“How’s Tracey,” I said.

“Always the segue,” she said, but the venom dried up. “Tracey’s on the east coast for the month. She’s taking a holiday. There’s a seminar by Robert McKee—some screenplay guru.”

“Screenplays? When did my daughter develop Attention Deficit?”

Jean laughed, and it made me smile till I remembered why I’d rung.

“Jean, be honest—”

“Always am.”

I told her about Hiero’s notes and the assault.

She said, “This Hiero—he’s in your exchange group?”

“Yes. What do you think?” I said.

“What do you mean, what do I think? Attention deficit. That would make a nice screenplay—you could be played by Tom Cruise in the movie, and your student could be Leonardo Di Caprio.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. Or maybe Tom Hanks.”

“You think I look like Tom Hanks?”

“Call me later, Jack. I feel like crap.” She hung up.

The Redactor, Chapter 03

2014-11-02T19:58:00.000+08:00

I didn’t sleep well over the weekend. Neither could I read to battle the insomnia. It felt like a month had passed when I got to my office Monday morning.

I was still holding my briefcase, with the key in my office door lock, when a secretary collared me.

“Did you hear the news?”

“No. What news?” Why was I smiling?

“Rhianne Goldman was attacked last week. One of our students.”

“Rhianne?” I said, conscious of my lungs hauling air.

“Pretty young thing, on exchange from Santa Fe. Doing journalism.”

It leapt out of my mouth before I could shut the gate: “Does Rhianne have red hair. Big breasts?”

The secretary’s hand went to her own ample bosom and fluttered.

“I—” I said, wracking my brains for words that would patch my reputation. Couldn’t find any. Hang it. “Well? Does she?”

“Yes,” she said. “And, I suppose she is ... quite well proportioned.”

“Big?” I said, and gestured for emphasis.

She shook her head and strode back along the corridor.

I closed my office door, flung my briefcase down, and booted my computer. Within minutes I was scrolling through the university’s student database looking for two contact numbers. One each for Hieronymus E. Beck and Rhianne Goldman.

I found both, and scribbled them in my diary.

I turned to the phone on my desk, then hesitated. Which to call first?

The cautious half of my brain thrust my hand toward the receiver, and loaded my fingers with Rhianne’s number.

A male voice answered. “Yes?”

“It’s Jack Griffin. I wanted to speak to Rhianne.”

“Are you a reporter?”

“No, no—professor of literature. Rhianne is a student of mine. I wanted to see how she is.”

“Traumatized. Why don’t you call again next week.”

“No—it concerns her degree. It could impact her visa. I must speak with her. I’ll be brief.”

There was a silence, then the rumble of a receiver being put down.

A minute later a girl’s voice said, “Hello?”

“Rhianne, you don’t know me. But I’m a professor at the University of WA.”

“You’re calling about my visa?” she said uncertainly.

“No. That was a lie, but please don’t hang up.”

More silence. Then, “What do you want?”

“This will sound crazy, but I need to know if you know who attacked you.”

I heard rustling, and then a wet, sniffing sound.

When Rhianne finally spoke, it sounded laboured. “I can’t talk now. I have to go—”

“Please don’t hang up,” I said, louder than intended. “Just tell me if you saw him. What did he look like?”

Just tell me he was five foot nothing, or weighed twenty stone, or had dark skin.

She hung up.

I replaced the receiver, leant back on my chair, and raked my hands through my hair. I screwed my eyes up and watched the firework patterns wriggle in the dark. When I opened them again my gaze fell on a whiteboard beside the door. Half of its surface was covered in a tangle of green marker—a mind map for my novel that was in permanent gestation. The other half was the schedule of my contact hours for the semester just finished. Lectures and tutorials were blocked out of a grid representing the week.

The sight of that grid usually depressed me. It said, students. It meant work. Tunneling for coal in dark minds.

But today it prompted a different chain of thought. Students—always joking around. And Heiro, the biggest joker of all.

Then it was as if a great filter had been yanked from in front of the sun. The light spilling through my window suddenly blazed whiter.

It was all one big joke. A last pull of the professor’s chain before Heiro left for home.

And I’d swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

A smile spread over my face, and seemed to loosen my muscles in a wave from neck down.

Definitely Hollywood.

Rhianne had to be in on it.

And the paper? said the cautious half of my brain. The police?

The room plunged back into gloom.

I wasn’t thinking straight. With a glance at the portal in my office door, I trundled my bottom drawer open, and retrieved the bottle of Johnny Walker stashed there. I unscrewed its lid and took a nerve settler.

Before I replaced it, I held the bottle to my eye and with a shock, noticed it was almost empty. The cleaner must have found it. It was the first bottle I’d put there, and that was only three months back.

I called the second number.

No answer. Hieronymus would be gone, home in San Francisco. I wanted to talk to his host family.

I looked up his record again in the student database and scribbled the address on a post-it note. Some instinct made me record Rhianne’s too.

Quarter of an hour later I was pressing the doorbell of Hiero’s billet.

Someone was home. There was a family mover parked in the drive, and its hatch was open.

I heard footsteps thump on a wood floor and the door swung open. A girl of about ten years stared up at me, but before she could speak a woman, evidently her mother, appeared and shushed her away.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hi. Sorry to bother you. Did you know your car hatch is open?”

“Ohhh,” she said, then shouted over her shoulder, “Renae!”

She smiled at me and stepped out onto the porch. I walked beside her to the car. She tugged a bag of shopping from the boot and slammed the hatch.

“Thanks,” she said.

“No problem. You must be a glutton for punishment—big family and an exchange student.”

Confusion wrinkled her forehead.

“Sorry?” she said.

“Hiero Beck, the American exchange student billeted here? He left Saturday?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Perhaps you have the wrong address?”

“Perhaps,” I said, and had a struggle keeping the smile on my face as I took my leave.

I sat in my car for a long time, staring at the family mover parked in the drive, without seeing it. My fingers drummed on the steering wheel, until calm stole over me.

Enough prancing around. I needed to take an axe to the root.

The Redactor, Chapter 04

2014-11-02T19:57:00.000+08:00

The front door of Rhianne’s billet didn’t have a doorbell. I rapped on it with my knuckles, and grimaced at the racket it made in the quiet suburban street.

The door swung inward to reveal a gloomy entryway and a pervading silence. A man stepped out of the gloom and closed the door behind him.

“Can I help you?” he said, somehow making it a threat.

“The name is Masters. I’m from immigration—” His expression tightened “—here to help,” I hastened to add. “Rhianne’s visa terminates this week, but, under the circumstances, she will be allowed an extension. She just needs to sign.”

“You have the paperwork already?” he said, suspicious.

I yanked the manila folder from my briefcase. And held it up, back to front. Heiro’s name taunted me from the reverse side.

The man disappeared back into the house, and I took it as an invitation to follow.

A flight of stairs reached up from the gloom into a loft lit by high windows.

“She’s up there,” he said, indicating the stairs. “The doctor said she is still in shock. Don’t be long.”

He vanished down the corridor, and I mounted the steps.

Rhianne was lying curled up in bed. She made a pitiful lump beneath the covers.

When I entered the room she sprang into the corner like a disturbed spider, bedclothes snarled around her slight frame, and somehow managed to shrink even further. Blister packs of some medication lay on a bedside table, half-used.

I came to a halt by the bed under her wide-eyed gaze. Her red hair was collected up into a loose ponytail, and revealed an alabaster neck scored on either side with angry red welts. A speckle of dried blood and scab ran in a line down each welt.

I reached for my most soothing voice. “I’m really sorry, but please, will you just look at this.” I held Heiro’s folder toward her.

She continued to stare until I’m sure her eyeballs must dry in their sockets, until at last she blinked. The spell seemed to break, and she examined the folder I held out.

“What is it?” she said.

“It’ll be easier if you just look.”

She took the folder, laid it in her lap, and, without remarking on what was printed on its cover, folded its cover back.

A murmur of conversation floated up the stairway as I watched her gaze zig-zag over the first page, the one that detailed her assault in meticulous detail. I fancied I even saw her gaze dip to her bosom.

She finished reading the top page, flipped it over to read the next, then glanced up at me.

“What is this?”

I heard the front door thunk and footfalls in the corridor below.

“Never mind what it is. Do you know Hiero—Hieronymus Beck?”

She shook her head. “Should I?”

“He’s an American,” I said.

She frowned.

“Not because he’s an American,” I said, exasperation leaking through my made-calm. “He’s a lit student on exchange at UWA.”

“I’m doing journalism,” she said.

I heard the footfalls pause, then come clattering up the stairs. Fear tugged my guts.

“Look—did you see your attacker or not? I can get his photo from student services.”

She shook her head again. “It was dark. He wore a hood.”

“Is that it?” I barked. “How tall was he? Above six foot?”

She shrank away.

“I don’t... He was—” Her eyelids drew together, and I knew what she was going to say before she said it. “—about your height.”

Of course he was. Heiro was about my height.

The clatter on the stairway died as the same feet fell on the carpet at the stair’s head. Two men I didn’t know entered ahead of the man who had greeted me at the door. The newcomers were smiling in a way that struck my blood cold.

So this is what it feels like...

The older of the two men extended his hand, and I took it on reflex. We shook hands, and he said, “Sir, I’m detective Thomas, and this is detective Palmer.” I gave the other man my right hand, which had turned into a dead fish.

“We’d like to have a chat with you,” said Thomas. He gestured to the doorway. I retrieved the folder from where it had fallen on the bedclothes, and walked out of the room, feeling four sets of eyes on my back.

Minutes later I was seated at a kitchen table, facing the detectives.

“Coffee?” said Thomas. “You want some coffee?” he said to me, then to his partner, “You want some coffee?”

I said yes just to be agreeable.

Palmer rose, switched an electric kettle on, and began poking into cupboards for cups and coffee.

“So, Mr Masters?” said Thomas.

“My name is Griffin, Jack Griffin,” I said. Lay it all out. This was good. Sanity was settling again on my shoulders like snowfall. The police is where I should have gone in the first place.

A theatre scowl appeared on Thomas’s brow. “But the owner of this house says you introduced yourself as a Mr Masters from immigration.”

“I’m a professor at UWA, and—” I smiled. God it felt good to be having this out face to face. “—you need to see this.” I slid the folder toward him. “I fear I know who assaulted Miss Goldman.”

Thomas’s eyes didn’t leave me as he reached for the folder, turned it right-side up, and opened it. I made sure he was reading the right paper, then sat back. The kettle was roaring like a jet, and I found myself salivating for the coffee.

Thomas muttered something, and a moment later my brain interpreted it. He’d said, “kyoketsu-shoge.” He glanced at me. I answered him with a twitch of my eyebrows.

The kettle clicked off and its wail died like it had been dropped from a cliff. The other detective poured three cups, and the aroma of coffee filled the small kitchen. He placed a mug on the table for each of us and sat.

Thomas slid the still-open folder in front of his partner.

“Mr Griffin, do you know why we log calls to all police services?”

I shook my head. I didn’t, but I wanted to know. Little-known facts like that made great detail for a story.

“Because perpetrators of violent crimes—it should come as no surprise to a man of your intellect—are as thick as two bricks.” He sipped his coffee and grimaced. “And twisted. Do you know how many rapists call us up to see how big was the wrecking ball they put through some young lady’s life?”

I didn’t. And I didn’t want to know anymore.

Sweat sprung out under my armpits, and trickled down the inside of my upper arm.

“I called because of that folder.” I jabbed a finger at it. Palmer closed it, raised his head, and thrust his bottom lip out, plucking it with thumb and forefinger.

“Hmm,” said Thomas. He retrieved a notebook from his shirt pocket and a pen stowed in its spiral binding. “Do you know Miss Goldman?”

“Well, yes—now.”

“Before today.”

“No.”

“Never set eyes on her?”

Was that a trick question?

“I can’t guarantee I’ve never seen her. UWA has over twelve thousand students, and she’s in the same faculty. But I don’t remember having seen her before today.”

Thomas scribbled in his notebook.

“What were you doing last Friday evening, between Nine and Eleven?”

“I met with Heiro.” I stabbed a finger at the folder. “That Heiro. Then went home.”

“And you live?”

“Nedlands.”

“Full address, please.”

I gave it, and Thomas took forever to record it with his ponderous script.

“Anyone verify your whereabouts?”

Shit. Something else to blame Jean for.

Then another voice: Nah-ah, Jack. The blame game goes back much farther than that, and you started it.

“No,” I said, gulped coffee, and burned my throat.

“Okay, Mr Griffin. We’ll leave you be for the moment. But please don’t go anywhere.” He smiled the death-smile again.

As I walked back down the corridor, and out onto the lawn, I felt strange, as if my feet were numb.

The Redactor, Chapter 05

2014-11-02T19:56:00.000+08:00

I woke with a fever at 2:33 in the morning.

But it wasn’t a fever. I’d snarled myself up in the bedclothes and sweated through a nightmare.

But this nightmare didn’t linger like normal. Its power dispersed in an instant, was squeezed to the edges of my mind by one thought: the other notes.

Heiro’s folder held five sets of notes. One had been enacted. A failure, but not for want of trying.

I hurried down the stairs to the ground floor of my apartment in the dark. I missed a step and felt a moment of terror when my torso lurched forward and tipped me off balance, before I clutched the balustrade and fought myself upright.

In my study, I found the pull-cord of the reading lamp by feel, and raked the folder to me. I opened it and hunted for the next set of notes in the sequence.

I found it and ran a finger down the margin of the topmost page. I stopped at Means. The next word was Poison.

Poison?

My mind flared with the memory of goading Hiero to nail the details—that’s where the devil lay.

So, I’ll research, he’d said, and smirked at me from behind his fringe. The devil gets around...

I scanned the page for the details, while telling myself this was all hypothesis. Loose conjecture that I could drop any time, no harm done. The door to my study could burst open, and the candid camera enter, and I’d laugh it all off.

For scene, Hiero had written—a bedroom a hundred feet above a sprawling, glittering mass of humanity.

Great time to get poetic.

Then tagged on the end, almost as an afterthought—Hong Kong.

For Time, he’d written, A Celebration.

My eyes flickered before I reached Victim. I had to fight some compulsion to look away, slip the paper beneath the others.

It said: female, Asian.

That narrowed it down to—what?—1 billion? If I was to infer this female Asian had normal breasts, maybe that cut it down another—

I gave that calculation away.

A bedroom in a Hong Kong high-rise and a celebrating woman.

It sounded like the setting line of a screenplay.

No, it’s a prophecy, damn it. Wake up.

But the oracle has drunk too much of the mystic wine, part of me protested. What the hell could I do with Hong Kong, female, party? Antarctica, penguin, standing around, was hardly worse.

And what kind of a celebration did you have in your bedroom?

The memory of Hiero’s eyes struck me again. Their glint forced me to calm. I rehearsed a few facts. I was an intelligent man. I’d been told just that today by a policeman. Wonderful.

I recalled what I knew of Hiero, to recollect how the world looked to a student. I tried on his shoes, walked around in them a while. They didn’t take me any place I wanted to go, but everywhere I went, I bumped into other students.

Rhianne was a student. An exchange student, like Hiero

What were the chances?

Who cares. It was an easy hypothesis to test and, if no good, discard.

From the back of my bureau I dragged my laptop, opened it, and waited while it booted. My fingers hung over the keypad, ready to enter my password, but it went straight through to the desktop. I was too intent on my test to notice the anomaly.

I opened a web browser and hit the bookmark for the university staff portal. Soon I was peppering the student database with queries.

Students from Hong Kong? Many.

Exchange students from Hong Kong? A handful.

Studying humanities? Two.

And—thought the intelligent professor—exchange students from Hong Kong with a birthday in the next week or so? One.

I clicked on that student’s profile. I never should have. I forgot that profiles included a colour photo.

Li Min gazed out at me, eyes crinkled by her smile. Hair bobbed, and wearing the kind of checkered blouse that either meant she was a square, or conducting some subtle subversion. She was an arts student, so probably the latter.

Her smile looked genuine, in any case.

Would she still be smiling on her birthday—tomorrow?

Crap.

I spun on my chair, and hauled myself back up the stairs to my bedroom. It felt empty during the day. Cavernous at night. Through a chink in the curtains I glimpsed channel markers winking red and green out over the Swan River. The breeze streaming through the open window smelt of frangipani.

I undressed, then redressed in track pants and t-shirt. I descended to the ground floor, and keyed the alarm to arm. The last thing I did before I bounded off across the lawn was to press the button on my Medline watch that told it I was going for a jog, and that it was okay to be in the Orange Zone for a while. Told it I was happy to walk at the precipice of death for a few minutes tonight in order to push away that unknown future time when my heart would throw me over the precipice without my say-so.

I should have stretched, would pay for it tomorrow. But I needed the rush of air around me, the thump of my feet on the tarmac. The smell of sprinkler-wet grass. I needed to think.

The Redactor, Chapter 06

2014-11-02T19:55:00.000+08:00

“Sorry, Mr—”

“Professor.” I corrected the woman behind the Qantas ticket counter.

“Sorry, Professor Griffin, the chances of getting on that flight are slim. The wait-list is already long.”

I thanked her and shuffled off the head of the queue.

I set my briefcase down on the floor and shrugged my shoulders in an attempt to stretch my neck. I felt stiff from the base of my spine up. The buzz of the airport’s eternal twilight filled my ears.

There were no seats on Qantas Flight 97 from Perth to Hong Kong. The prophecy written on the sheet in my briefcase foretold the imminent murder of Li Min. But Fate had spoken again. The next flight with seats wouldn’t get me there on time.

Can’t argue with Fate.

Besides, Hiero wouldn’t do it. Perth was one thing, and he can’t have meant more than to scare Rhianne. She was a slim girl. If he’d meant murder, she’d be dead. So he’d done his research, and learned what mortal fear looks like, and how the garrotting wire feels in your palms as it pulls taut on young skin.

But Hong Kong? He was yanking my chain.

I wandered past a bar, and ran my eye over the bottles arrayed behind it. Perhaps a snifter would loosen my neck.

Then I remembered her voice on the phone. I’d called Li Min’s number and reached her answering machine. The same smile I’d seen on her photo was in her voice, and I could see her speaking, recording the message, telling me, telling the world, she would be away until the next day. Her birthday.

Surprise lit the face of the woman at the Qantas desk when she looked up to see me again. She took a moment, evidently, to remember me, and what I wanted. She smiled tightly.

“I’m sorry, the wait-list hasn’t shrunk any.”

“How about Business Class,” I said.

She shook her head.

I sighed.

“First?”

Now her eyes lit with a new light. She tapped at her keyboard and confirmed there was a vacancy.

“How much is that?” I said.

She told me.

I did the sums in my head. It was more than a month’s pay, and my bank balance was already skimming, bouncing just above the mortgage line like a skipping stone. If I paid for this ticket, the stone might just bite on water and plunge into the silt...

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

The last thing I did before boarding flight QF97 to Hong Kong, was photocopy all of Hiero’s notes, and post them to a nonsense address in Queensland, with a return address of Murdoch police station.

The Redactor, Chapter 07

2014-11-02T19:54:00.000+08:00

First Class was worth killing the mortgage.

I drank red wine before my entree of Ibérico Jamón Crostini with Date and Ricotta, again before my mains of Porcini Mushroom Cannelloni, and again after my dessert of Hazelnut, Coffee and Muscovado Syrup Cake, to bed it all down. And to bed the wine down, a finger of Glenlivet Single Malt Scotch Whisky.

On the video screen, which folded out from beneath my lounge chair like something from the International Space Station, I watched the movie Twelve Monkeys, the one that proved to me that Bruce Willis can act. When that was done I lay my seat back, closed my eyes, and strafed the radio channels. I found a Sibelius marathon and left the dial there. The music reminded me of our honeymoon. We had played CDs of classical music so loud the hotel management had called. Sibelius had done it.

That was seven years ago. Hong Kong.

That’s what I was doing. That was my cover for this ridiculous flight. The story I could quickly own. It was a re-enactment... spoiled only by the cold, empty seat my hand found by my side.

Eventually I slept, and my dreams were full of Sibelius, and the voice of an announcer who became as God.

But I must have drifted too deep for the radio to reach me, because I later dreamed of a meeting with Hiero. It was odd because it was simply a memory, with only the slightest embellishment.

I remembered Hiero telling me he wanted to write a modern Gothic horror. He had written a short story to test the waters, and read it to me.

His story began with the return of a man’s wife one day from shopping. She had left the house to shop for groceries, but returned with a large, square, parcel wrapped in brown paper, and tied with string. Oblivious to her husband’s questions, she ushered him into their bedroom, laid the object down, and gestured for him to open it.

Playing along, he began to tear away the brown paper, when through a hole he saw an eye staring back at him. The eye looked human, but its whites were lurid yellow. The shock of that burning gaze upset his balance and he fell back from the object.

Impatient, his wife tore the remaining paper from the painting, lifted it onto a hook, and stood back to view it.

“Isn’t it...” she said, but fell silent, lost in the image.

“What is it?” said the man, sufficiently recovered to appraise the painting in the whole.

“A painting,” she said.

“I can see that. But where did you get it? And why? And what on earth is it?”

“I bought it from little old wisp of a man with a cart. He was parked out front of the mall this morning selling art. He said it is very old. I couldn’t resist—it’s so, so... spiritual.”

The man agreed it looked old. The oil paint was cracked and crazed, and the wood frame was marred by numerous dents as if it had been dropped.

The subject was a creature vaguely man-like. It stood in a grotto, surrounded by stunted trees, so gnarled they had dug their crowns into the ground; and rocks that were pitted from wind and rain. The creature’s skin was dull red and raised in knots and marred by burls like scales. From its head sprouted horns like elephant tusks, yellowed by age. They erupted from its head in four directions, behind and before, and either side, and were hung with tatters of rotting velvet, and resembled a grotesque crown.

But despite the creature’s nightmarish form, it was its gaze that froze the man’s blood. The eyes seemed to burn with a light of their own.

“How much did it cost?” he said. It was all he could think to ask.

When his wife appeared not to have heard him, he repeated the question.

“Two thousand dollars,” she said.

Anger flushed his cheeks, but something about his wife’s posture stopped his mouth. She stood erect, head canted to one side, gaze fixed on the painting.

The next morning, after she left for work, he took the painting down, wrapped it in a towel, and drove to the mall. There he hunted for a cart loaded with paintings and a little old man, but found no sign of him. Worse, no one seemed to remember him.

He returned with the painting, but left it covered by the towel, stowed in the attic.

When his wife returned to find the painting gone, she flew into a rage. She stormed through the house until she found it and hung it again on the same hook.

That night as he lay beside his wife, listening for the rhythm of her breathing that would tell him she was asleep, and feeling the eyes of the creature staring at him unseen in the dark, he made a vow. When morning came he would talk to her. Reason with her that something so grotesque had no place in their house, let alone their bedroom. If she forced him to, he would insist.

He would take the painting down, drive to the dump, and watch it burn.

He knew better than to speak now, angry and afraid.

Vow made, he fell asleep. He fell asleep before his wife. Something that had not happened since the first years of their marriage.

It was the smell that eventually alerted their neighbours, who summoned the police. The man’s decaying body was found in the same position in which he had lain down to sleep.

His wife was nowhere to be found, and became the prime suspect.

The second suspect was whoever the artist was who had been commissioned to paint a scene of a grotesque monster, clasped in embrace with the dead man’s wife.

A judder woke me to semi-darkness and the thrum of the Boeing 777’s turbines. My ears popped with the rising air pressure. We were descending on Hong Kong.

The last image of that memory-dream to linger was of the creature staring at me past the wife’s tresses. The creature winked.

The Redactor, Chapter 08

2014-11-02T19:53:00.000+08:00

I had planned to check into a hotel, then hit the streets to hunt down Li Min, but I settled for sticking my head under a tap in the men’s toilets of Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok airport. The dream of Heiro’s Gothic horror had blown away any thought of pretending I was in Hong Kong to reminisce.

Plus I only had a few hours buffer. Technically, her birthday began at midnight. I didn’t want to learn the hard way of a pedantic streak in Hiero.

I would find Li Min, and, doing my best to look sane, warn her to be anywhere but her bedroom—or apartment—on her birthday. No more lies. They just sat around like unexploded ordnance.

The address I had copied from the student database was for an apartment block in Sai Ying Pun. I withdrew some cash from an automatic teller, then waited forever for my luggage to appear. Somehow it had ended up on the wrong carousel. I exited Arrivals, and merged with a throng of travellers surging toward the taxi rank.

There was no queue I could discern, and on any other day, I would have floated at the fringes of the crowd, too polite to push forward. But the adrenaline coursing in my veins energized me. My height gave me a good view to curbside. I picked my spot, and drove toward it, surging forward into the smallest gap, and standing firm when the shoves came back.

Soon I was seated in the backseat of a red taxi, steeping in the Cantonese chatter of the driver, watching a million people I would never meet again drift past outside. The air was humid. The taxi’s air conditioner droned hard but added nothing but its noise to the cab’s atmosphere.

The apartment block was one of five built to the same design. Each offered a grand view of the other, and not much else.

I got out, paid the driver, and was deciding whether to ask him to wait when he tore off with a howl of the engine.

I retrieved the slip of paper with Li Min’s address from my pocket and double-checked I was in the right place. Jade Gardens blazed in green lights, in English and hanzi. Each of the five towers was numbered.

I realized, with a dip of the stomach, that the address on the slip was not. I’d have to try each until I found the right one.

I began with number one. Its elevator shot me to the twenty-second floor in seconds, and I followed the signs to apartment fourteen. It was the last along the corridor. I knocked on the door, but no one answered. I would have to stake it out if I ran out of luck in the other towers. I had no idea what I would do if I hit another vacant apartment.

In tower two I was invited to dinner by a smiling couple and their three kids. I regretfully declined, but was thinking, what the hell, if I found my girl, maybe I would return with a bottle of Merlot.

Tower three was an elderly couple.

Tower four’s fourteenth floor was being pulled apart.

Tower five housed a German man, who I roused from bed. He offered me some choice Deutsch and slammed the door in my face.

I returned serve to the blank face of the door with a few choice words of English and retreated to the lift.

I returned to Tower One, the readout on my Medline watch blazing iridescent green at 10:33. Blazing next to the time was heart icon, and a pulse reading. I was pushing 130 bpm, needed to calm down.

On the twenty-second floor, I found apartment fourteen again and knocked. No answer, so I planted my backside on the door and slid into a sitting position on the floor.

I soon learnt to discern whether the lift at the end of the corridor was rising or falling based on the rumble of its passage. Only three times in the next half-hour did the lift speaker ping announcing an arrival.

It made me wonder how many occupants the building had.

Which suggested another thought.

I rose from the floor with crackling knees, and strode down the corridor to apartment fifteen, and rapped on its door.

A young Asian man answered. He wore a singlet and boxer briefs, and massive headphones hung from his neck.

“Do you know the occupant of apartment fourteen?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Know if she’s in?”

I watched him trying to read me.

“Have you tried knocking?” he said.

“Yes. Is she out much, at night?”

His mouth tugged down at the corners.

“She keeps to herself,” he said.

I thanked him and returned to fourteen.

I tried the apartment on the opposite side of the corridor, but got no answer.

Slumping onto the floor again, I checked my watch: 10:57.

My thoughts drifted, only to be snagged on a memory of the dream I’d had that evening on the plane.

I remembered Hiero telling his Gothic short, and one detail leapt out at me.

It was the smell...

Feeling like a fool, I twisted around onto my knees until I could dip my head to the crack at the bottom of the door.

I sniffed—and got a nose full of dust that set off a sneezing fit. When it subsided I tried again with less gusto.

The faintest odour of chaos touched my nostrils. I sniffed again, straining to identify it. It could be curdling milk.

I sprang to my feet and returned to apartment fifteen. The guy didn’t bother with being polite this time.

“I have a blown fuse in my car and can’t get the hatch open,” I said. “Do you have a toolbox?”

He gave me a look like I had to be kidding.

I went down the apartments, rapping on doors, until finally, at apartment three, I found a middle-aged man, who disappeared and returned with a steel toolbox. He yielded it in exchange for my driver’s license.

The box banged against my leg as I carted it back to apartment fourteen, straining to quiet its clanking contents.

I put the toolbox down, opened it, and rummaged through it for a screwdriver. I found a twelve-inch flat-blade, and with a quick glance up and down the corridor, set it to the doorjamb.

For a moment I felt like I was about to pop the safety seal on Life.

Then I squeezed on the lever until, with a sharp crack, the door jumped backward.

I eased through the gap, and pushed the door shut.

It was very dark, the only light coming from the corridor where the door didn’t shut properly, and the corner of a venetian blind that was caught on an empty vase.

I crossed the room gingerly, fumbled for the blind’s dongle, and opened its louvers. Hong Kong light pollution leaked in, and my eyes adjusted.

The room comprised a kitchenette, dining area and lounge. Between a small, circular dining table, a two-seater couch, and a couple of bookcases, there wasn’t a lot of room left.

I stuck my head over the kitchenette’s sink and sniffed at the dishes piled in it. Two wine glasses sat on the draining board. Lumps of something whitish sat in the bottom of the sink amid a tangle of chicken bones. They might account for the smell.

Two doors were set in the wall opposite the kitchenette. Bedroom and bathroom, I guessed. I crossed the room, and chose one.

Turns out I chose the bedroom.

The bedroom was even darker than the living room, but even so, I couldn’t miss it. Hanging over the edge of the bed, angled to catch the scant light coming from behind me, was a thin leg.

I swept a hand down the inside of the wall and caught the light switch. Dazzling light blazed over the room, and burnt the scene into my memory.

Li Min lay on top of the covers, naked, one leg crooked over the side of the bed, arms folded up over her head to meet, forming a love heart. She wasn’t smiling any more.

I moved to her side, and my hands went out mechanically. Her skin was cold to the touch. With two fingers I felt for a pulse at her throat, but it was as still as everything else in the apartment. Dead.

I retraced my steps into the living room, and for a moment wondered vaguely where the phone might be. I would call for an ambulance.

The next thing I knew I was hunched over in a dark space that smelt of tile cleaner—the toilet. I don’t remember how I got there. My guts surged again and again, like an animal trapped in my rib cage. My mouth gaped involuntarily. I don’t know how long I squatted there, but nothing came out of my mouth but a trickle of spit.

When the vomit-reflex finally let go, I collapsed onto the floor, my trunk wrung out and aching. And only then did great sobs tear their way out of my throat. Whole-body sobs. A child’s sobs.

After that, I sat for a time in darkness on the toilet floor, and listened to the echo of my breathing.

I returned to the bedroom and forced myself to look at Li Min. I had never seen a dead body before—except once, at the funeral of a great aunt, although I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t constructed that memory from overheard conversation.

I cupped a hand under her leg that hung over the side of the bed, and gently lifted it and arranged it next to the other. It moved easily, which I guessed meant she hadn’t been dead that long. In her wardrobe I found a dressing gown, and draped that over her.

My senses played tricks on me and I fancied I could smell Hiero’s aftershave in the air.

I had to fight the urge to sit down again. My eyes wouldn’t stop blurring. But the thought that he had stood in this same room only hours before steeled my nerves.

I surveyed the room and tried to piece together the last moments of Li Min’s life.

A bedside chest of drawers held a lamp with a rice-paper shade, patterned with flowers and bees. Beneath clustered a zoo of stuffed animals around a digital alarm clock and box of tissues. Lying in the scant space left was a shallow dish, still glistening with a trace of moisture, and a hypodermic needle, the kind I had seen in the dirt beneath the cisterns of public toilets.

So Hiero’s “poison” had been heroin? Heroin in a massive, killing dose.

I hunted through the drawers. The top two were filled with underwear, socks, and handkerchiefs. The bottom drawer held only one item—a pink journal with lock. On the floor at the base of the drawers lay a condom wrapper, torn nearly through.

A sharp rapping sound startled me, but not from fear. Anger was fast burning that off. Someone was knocking on the outer door. The light coming from the living room swelled.

Without thinking, I stooped to wrench the bottom drawer open, retrieved the journal, and thrust it down the front of my shirt. With a final glance at Li Min’s still body, I strode from the bedroom.

The outer door was half open, and two faces were poking comically through into the gap, silhouetted by the corridor light.

I hefted the toolbox, pulled the door open, and brushed past them.

“Blocked toilet,” I said without stopping.

They were a little couple with wizened faces. The man chattered at my back, but I didn’t stop. At apartment three I exchanged the toolbox for my driver’s license, and if the owner thought anything strange, he wasn’t saying.

I had to walk a long way before I could hail a taxi, but I was glad for the exercise. The last thing I wanted to do then was sit alone.

I gave the driver the name of the only hotel I knew in Hong Kong. The one Jean and I had stayed in seven years before.

The hotel was expensive, and the taxi had taken the last of my cash. My second mistake in Hong Kong was to use my credit card to secure the room. The first had been to secure a toolbox with my driver’s license.

The Redactor, Chapter 09

2014-11-02T19:52:00.000+08:00

Barely half-an-hour.

That’s how long it took the police to track me down.

My guess is the nosey couple had found Li Min’s body, and called it in. The police had canvassed the corridor and obtained my details from the man with the toolbox. It isn’t hard to copy down a driver’s license. A search for my name in the hotel registry database would have quickly yielded my hotel.

On reaching my room, I had tossed my briefcase on the bed, and taken a shower. I’m not normally a long showerer, but when I towelled off, the clock by the bed told me I’d been in there for almost half-an-hour.

I put my trousers back on, found a small bottle of bourbon from the minibar, and took it out onto the balcony. I was on the fifth floor, close enough to see the police car arrive, and its officers stride purposefully into the lobby. A minute later the phone rang. I answered. It was the concierge, checking that everything was to my satisfaction.

Checking that I was in.

The phone call confirmed it. The cops were coming for me.

For a moment I contemplated waiting for them to arrive. My anger seemed to have burned itself out, and now I simply felt sick. The urge to wait for the police was strong. They were the good guys. I was a good guy.

But then I remembered Detectives Thomas and Palmer of Murdoch Police Station. I remembered the death smile. You didn’t give the good guy the death smile.

I threw a shirt on—no time for the tie, which smelt of vomit in any case. I picked up my shoes, socks, and briefcase, and slipped out the door, and along the corridor toward the fire stairs.

I bounded down the stairs on bare feet, and had reached the third floor landing when I heard the clap of hard-soled shoes rising up the stairwell, and the measured breathing of a fit man. I ducked into the corridor, shut the door, and pressed my ear to it.

My wrist buzzed once, and I realized my Medline watch was bleeping at me. The adrenaline of my flight had pushed my heart rate into the red zone. I wrapped my hand over the watch to mute its noise, and tried to think calming thoughts.

The clap-clop of standard issue shoes rose, until they sounded from the other side of the door, then began to die away.

I lifted my hand from the watch. My heart rate was dropping back into the green zone. I opened the fire door, and with a glance up the stairwell, continued, padding slowly downward on my bare feet. I didn’t want to die. I also didn’t want to burst from the stairwell into the lobby looking like a fugitive.

At the ground floor, I paused to put my shoes on, took a breath and squared my shoulders, then entered the lobby.

Through the glass revolving door that gave onto the street, I could see a tour bus parked, its freight hatches thrown open. It had evidently disgorged its passengers into the lobby. The buzz of voices and clatter of luggage feet on tiles filled the air.

I set my face toward the revolving door and headed for it, my back prickling with imagined glances. I hoped there was no cop stationed on the street.

There wasn’t. I walked till my feet began to ache, stopping only at an automatic teller to drain my savings accounts dry. I had $5722.25 in my wallet, and after that it was the credit card, and a big fat blip on the radar every time I charged it.

When I finally found a public phone with an enclosed booth, I entered, shut the door, and hunched over the machine to take a little weight off my feet.

I picked up the receiver, slipped a $10 note into its slot, and dialled Australia.

“Murdoch Police Station. How may I help?”

“I want to speak to Detective Thomas,” I said. Then added, “Tell him it’s Jack Griffin,” thinking that ought to shift him off his donut.

Tinny holding music, then a gruff voice. “Thomas here, Mr Griffin.”

“How’s the investigation going, Detective Thomas?” There was a tremor in my voice.

“So, so,” he said, as if I’d disturbed his rest about as much as rain a rock. “We have one person of interest who doesn’t follow instructions too well.”

“I guess you’re talking about me,” I said.

“Uh-huh. Want to tell me about it?”

“I’m in Hong Kong.”

That put a ripple through his calm.

“Then if you want to avoid a world of trouble, you’d better get your arse back in Perth.”

“He’s done the next one.”

“Who’s done what?” he said irritably.

“Detective Thomas of the Murdoch police station, I’m on the phone to you to tell you that Hieronymus Beck has murdered another girl. The next one on his list. You do remember the list I showed you this morning? Now do you believe me?”

There was a long pause, then he said, “Okay, but the best place in the world for you right now is here, so—”

“Okay?” I said, almost a shout. “Li Min. Her name was Li Min. And now she’s dead.”

I hung up.

The digital readout on the phone said I had $5.60 credit left. I dialled the US, California.

A sweet voice spoke from the receiver, and echoed in my head: “Hello?”

“Tracey, Honey, it’s Dad, I just—”

A giggle interrupted me, then, “Just Kidding. You got the machine. Leave a message at the...” Beep.

Where was she? It was early morning in San Francisco, and Tracey had never been an early riser.

Then I remembered. She was in New York, attending a seminar by some screen guru. Damn.

I hung the receiver up, and waited without much hope for it to return my remaining credit. It didn’t.

From the safety of the booth I scanned the street for uniformed cops. Nothing. Across the street a damaged neon sign advertised an Internet cafe. I exited the booth, crossed the street, and descended steps that hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. I bought a watery coffee and an hour’s credit, and wedged myself into a corner seat in front of a terminal.

I must’ve been the oldest patron by twenty years. I hefted my briefcase onto the desk by the terminal, and hunkered down behind it.

Behind closed eyes, my thoughts eddied and wouldn’t sit still. Li Min’s face kept bobbing to the surface, and then came the painting of the devil creature and its yellow eyes. I felt again the cold shower water that had made me shiver, and remembered how my eyes had stung when I’d cried again. I don’t know if the tears were for the girl or me. Probably me. I didn’t know her from a bar of soap.

But hardly anyone has seen her the way you have...

The part of my brain that I would have until then called cautious kept jabbing me with the assertion that the police hadn’t been looking for me.

But beneath it, a harder voice, told it to shut up. Start working on a way out of this hell.

I knuckled my eyes, and opened them. No one was looking at me. Okay.

My first task was to gauge Hiero’s next move. But I had failed at that once already. I decided to take my own advice. I would research.

I opened my briefcase and took out Li Min’s journal. The cover was so pink. I shot an embarrassed glance about the room, but no-one seemed to be paying me any attention.

The journal’s lock was thicker than the usual bon-bon treat securing a girl’s journal (A guess based on a sample of one—my daughter). But the clasp it was holding was weaker than a tin can. It tore away easily, and I folded the journal’s cover back.

The first page was covered in a neat, small script. The date at the top left of the page indicated the first of January. Li Min was a journal keeper. I flipped forward till the writing abruptly disappeared and I hit blank pages, then backtracked to her last entries, looking for what exactly, I wasn’t sure.

As I read, the dead girl’s voice spoke in my mind. And her favourite word was Hieronymus. Never Hiero. Always Hieronymous. It was an infatuation, complete and utter. I skipped back through the year to find where the infection had begun, and found her first glowing tribute to the ebullient American with the brown hair and deep blue—almost alien eyes—and the chivalrous manner. As I flicked forward, the voice told me of group dates to the movies and karaoke, coffees with friends, and ultimately, dinner alone. They read heavy books together on blankets by the river, and she learned of the novel he dreamed to write. She believed the dream.

And having believed the dream, her journal entries grew terse. The end of semester closed in, and she feared their parting would be the end of their relationship.

She wrote nothing in the final week of semester, and her journal ended with one last abrupt entry. It had been written only yesterday. It said: tonight we celebrate our love. Love was followed not by a full stop, but an absurd winking emoticon.

Following that was the last phrase Li Min wrote in her journal, perhaps the last she ever wrote: Cometh the hour, cometh MC Griffin.

I shook my head, frustrated, and glanced about the cafe. But there was no-one there to help. No one that understood.

It took a moment for the bomb to drop.

Griffin?

I scanned the last journal entry again. Obviously I had misread.

But no. There on the page, in stubborn ink: Cometh the hour, cometh MC Griffin.

Griffin?

I’d dropped acid and this was my trip, only I’d forgotten I’d taken it.

Griffin.

The girl I didn’t know knew me. The dead girl, the hard-liner in my head added.

And why MC Griffin? Of what Celebration was I supposedly Master, pray tell, dead girl? Your celebration of love?

What the hell was I doing in Li Min’s journal entry for the day she died?

Hoping to silence the dead girl’s voice, I clapped the journal shut and threw it back into my briefcase, and withdrew, instead, Hiero’s folder.

I wet the end of a finger and flicked through his notes, past the injured girl, past the dead, to number three. I pulled it out and extracted the key parameters.

Means: Blunt force trauma

Scene: Vienna, Hauptbahnhof

Time: TBD

Victim: Chalky.

He had dropped the poetry, which was helpful, but the information was scant. Means, city, even place. But no time. And Chalky? The name wasn’t familiar. It sounded like a nickname.

Assuming Hiero was targetting exchange students, would it be enough to determine which one he had next in his sights?

I pushed the folder aside, pulled the computer keyboard over, and entered the code for my hour’s credit. Soon I was looking at the familiar login screen for the university student database. I entered my credentials and fidgeted while thousands of miles away a computer tucked into a room the size of a closet on the university decided whether to trust me.

The seconds mounted till at last it replied, Forbidden. Not friendly, but unambiguous. Someone had terminated my access.

Which was either an error—possible—or the police had contacted the university. And the only reason I could think of for them to do that was that they suspected I was on the loose and intent on fiddling with students.

Ignoring the part of me that said, ‘Bugger them—forget about it and let them find out the hard way who is fiddling with the students’, I rubbed my face with both palms and tried to think of Plan—which plan was I up to now, anyway? Let’s call it Plan F.

The professor was hiking into Plan F, and Hiero, the alpha male, was still cruising on the alpha plan.

Think, man.

I looked again at the screen that was still telling me politely, but forcefully, that I was Verboten, when I noticed the fine print at the bottom of the screen, the essence of which was that in the event I thought the response mistaken, I should contact the administrator.

A glimmer of hope. Plan F grew legs. I would contact the administrator. An administrator, to be precise.

I closed the database screen and logged into Skype. Within the program, in a pane on the left, a list of my contacts was displayed. For each contact a small icon indicated if they were logged into Skype, and whether they were available. I scanned the names until I found the one I wanted—Matthew Price. His icon was a happy green, indicating he was online, like always. Matthew Price was a geek, a techie through and through. He would be the first on the list for surgically implanted ‘net connections when they became available.

He was there, and a click away. He was also an administrator of the university computer systems. He would be able to get me into the database.

Matthew Price also happened to be an ex-boyfriend of my daughter. And in this case, that was good. Theirs had been an amicable parting, and I had always had time for him. I hoped it would be enough now.

I initiated a chat session: “Matt. Can you talk?”

A full three seconds later his reply bobbed onto my screen: “Sort of. In the thick of a rollout... what’s up?”

“I need you to run a query on the student database.”

“Can’t you?”

“No. I can’t login.” Please don’t ask me why.

“OK. Send me the details. I’ll run it tonight.”

“It’s urgent. I need it yesterday.”

A pause.

“Send it through.”

“I want a student with...” What? I wracked my brain for where to start. “A name like ‘chalk’.”

Another pause.

“Okaaay. What sort of like? Includes chalk, sounds like chalk, hobbies include collecting chalk?”

Smartarse.

“Whatever you’ve got,” I said.

A full minute passed, while I watched the cursor pulsing on the screen. Then his reply came.

“Not much there. Best I got is Ryan Faulk.”

“Is he an exchange student? Sorry, meant to say to limit the search to exchange students.”

“Nope.”

Damn.

I snatched up Heiro’s third sheet and ran my eye over it again.

That’s when I noticed the ‘a’ in chalky had an umlaut over it. It was faint, but there.

I typed: “Okay. Forget chalk. Just give me students from Germanic countries.”

Two minutes passed this time, and then a list spewed onto my screen. It had to be twenty names long or more. This was getting me nowhere. Maybe the umlaut was just fly crap.

My mind returned to Time. The first sheet had a time. The second was vaguer. But this had no time at all? Nothing but TBD—To Be Decided. No help at all.

Did I need to get more lateral? Maybe TBD stood for something else. I squeezed my mind sideways. Maybe it was an abbreviation for a time period, a celebration, a season...

I dragged my Skype connection with Matthew to one side, and opened a web browser. I searched for definitions of TBD.

The first definition my search returned was something called TBD Fest. My pulse quickened. Clicking around the site I discovered that TBD Fest was “a multi-day festival that embraces creativity through music, art, design, food and ideas.”

Perfect. My mind filled with a vision of students thronging a stage, surging half-seen to the music, and prowling at its edges in the near-dark, Hiero.

But after my initial excitement I saw that the festival was held in October, not November. And Sacremento, not Vienna.

Returning to the results of my search I discovered that TBD might be a record label, a restaurant, an organic food importer or an accountancy firm. It could mean To Be Delayed, To Be Deleted. To Be Discontinued.

Equally well it might stand for Tick-borne Disease, Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Triazabicyclodecene (good for all of your Horner-Wadsworth-Emmons reactions needs).

It could signify The Best Deceptions.

In short it could mean just about anything.

It could even mean Tipsy Borderline Drunk, which was becoming more appealing with every minute I sat in that Internet Cafe.

It took a memory of Li Min’s forever stilled body to snap me out of my self-pity.

Only then did I gain the presence of mind to step back. Perhaps I was being too lateral. Hiero’s second sheet, the one foretelling Li Min’s murder, had been figurative, slantwise. But the first sheet, detailing the attempted murder of Rhianne Goldman had been straight down the line.

I activated Skype again and typed another message: “Give me the cities of all exchange students that did humanities this semester.” Li Min had returned to her home city at the end of semester. Perhaps Chalky, whoever he or she was, would too?

Scant seconds elapsed before another list rolled up onto my screen, pushing the names above.

I scanned the cities listed there, until my gaze struck one: Vienna, Austria.

“Which student lives in Vienna,” I said.

“Annika Krieder,” came the reply.

On a hunch I searched for that name and ‘chalk’, and was immediately rewarded: Krieder, derived from kriede, the German word for chalk.

Chalky. I’d found my man. Woman. It appeared Hiero was targeting females. I could add that to the next search.

Next? Damn. For a moment I’d begun to think I was playing a game.

I asked for her phone number in Vienna, but Matt could only find an address. I copied that down, and said, “Thanks, Matt. Hope you get your rollout done.”

“No probs, Professor,” he replied. “Glad to help.”

Professor? He never called me professor. Matt’s rollout mustn’t have been going so smoothly...

The last thing I did before logging off was to send Jean an email. They say communication is vital to marriage. A degree in literature doesn’t help any. My emails simply said: “I’m in the shit.”

The Redactor, Chapter 10

2014-11-02T19:51:00.000+08:00

I crept up from the Internet cafe and onto a street thick with nightclubbers, and an hour later, into a hotel that didn’t even have an English name. From the number of barely dressed women that approached me on the street, I gathered the hotel was charging by the hour. The receptionist out front took my cash and my name, Steve McQueen (mental note to come up with a fake name beforehand next time), and didn’t ask for ID.

When I stumped up the stairs and found my room, a cleaner’s cart was still parked in the corridor outside of it. Inside I found a Filipino lady talking into a phone and jouncing a pillow from its cover with one arm. She glanced at me without stalling her conversation, pulled a fresh pillow cover onto the pillow with the phone pinched in the crook of her neck, and exited the room into the corridor, tugging the door shut on her way out.

It wasn’t clear whether she had actually finished cleaning the room. I took a shower and found a wreath of hair clinging to the drain, but perhaps that was a feature. Like the paper sash they leave over toilets.

When I exited the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, I lay another towel on the bed. The bed had a spread on it, but its pattern was the kind that masks dirt and stains. The kind that can get away with being washed once a year.

From the bedside table I pulled the telephone and a slab-like phone book. Pages had been torn from it in many places, maybe for a phone number, maybe for a handkerchief, maybe for a lot of reasons. I flipped through it with only a vague notion of what I was looking for.

A lot of flipping later I stumbled onto my first pawnshop. It was called Happy Pawn.

I’d researched the dark side of pawnshops in Thailand and Taiwan for my novel, and hoped it would apply to Hong Kong. As my fingers punched the phone buttons, I couldn’t suppress a shiver of excitement to be calling one up now.

I called the listed number, and got a barrage of Cantonese. I said, “English?” and the line hung up. I put one finger on the next pawnshop and dialled again, with the same result. On the third I reached an answering machine. The message was in English, and was telling me about a number of businesses, including a pawnshop, when the message cut out, and a dry voice said, “Huh?”

“Is this the Sing Ping pawn shop?”

“Huh,” said the voice, using the term now in the affirmative.

“I was looking to purchase an item, and wanted to know—”

“Huh,” said the voice again, the word now meaning, ‘Hurry the hell up and tell me what you want.’

“I wanted to buy a...” I found I had to cross a threshold to finish the sentence, like a hiccup that wanted out. “Passport,” I finished.

“Uh-huh,” said the voice.

Progress.

“What kind?” it continued.

“Australian,” I said.

“New or doctor.”

I gathered he meant an entirely new passport or an alteration to an existing one.

“I have a passport, but need to alter the details. The name and number.”

“Doctor, uh-huh. Chip?”

“What?”

“It have chip?”

I had no idea what Mr Huh was on about.

“I don’t know. How do I tell?”

“Feel cover. Is it fat or thin?”

I lugged my briefcase onto the bed beside me and retrieved my passport. I flipped open its blue cover and pressed it between my fingers.

“Thin, I think,” I said.

“Ha-huh,” said the voice. “Good. Easy. Cost $12999. Bargain.”

Thirteen thousand!

“Look, I’ve only got five grand—five oh-oh-oh—and I need a thousand of that to buy a plane ticket.”

A pause.

“Okay, I do you budget.”

I had no idea what a budget passport was, but I said okay. He asked me if I wanted to courier it over and back, but I said I’d come—I had no way of guaranteeing I ever saw my passport again. He gave me directions and hung up.

The passport place was nothing like what I’d imagined, and neither was the man to whom I’d spoken. His shop, which was in actual fact for electronic appliances—stereos, camcorders, laptops—was well-lit and polished, glass and chrome, on the third level of a shopping mall. The man himself was clean cut in a grey suit. He wore a red bow tie, and I caught the gleam of gold cufflinks from beneath his suit sleeve. A wisp of grey hair floated above the dome of his head, a failed comb over. He was speaking to customers browsing in the shop, which was how I recognized him.

When he was done with them, I sidled up to the counter and whispered, “Passport?”

He said, “MP3?” and walked me through to a booth that formed an alcove in the store for listening to audio devices. He gestured toward a seat, and as I sat, took the passport I held out to him. He disappeared into a back room, and reappeared a moment later to talk to other customers without missing a beat.

Sing Ping Electronics was utterly unlike the image of passport-forging pawn shops I’d formed from researching the black-market for my novel. Maybe it was just Hong Kong.

To look the part, I clasped a set of headphones over my head and ramped the volume up on the small device attached. Its buttons were no bigger than pimples, the whole device swallowed in the grip of an anti-theft vice.

An hour later, having, among other things, been told in song that I couldn’t outrun some guy’s bullet in a crooning, trance-inducing voice, I was getting restless. I crossed and re-crossed my legs, and my gaze kept hunting for the store owner, looking for some sign that my passport was done.

He ignored me, floating through the room, impeccably dressed, unflappably smiling.

I thought that by coming here in person I could safeguard my passport. But what if it simply disappeared? I wasn’t about to go to the police.

As if on cue, a pair of police officers strolled past the shop front. My eyes went to the steel bulk of the gun holstered on the nearest officer’s hip. If it was standard issue, it was probably a Smith & Wesson 10, a six-shot, double-action revolver.

Guns have always fascinated me in the same way snakes do, and I had researched them for my novel in unwarranted depth.

So many varieties, but they all boil down to one simple, efficient mechanism. The hammer strikes a combustive powder, which explodes in a pressure wave that is channelled along a (possibly rifled) tunnel to fling a small, dense object or objects through the air and into flesh, which is crushed and torn under the impact.

Typically the blood leaks out of the target, taking with it the magic that turns the Universe’s most complex arrangement of atoms into pig chow.

A crude mechanism. But like the combustion engine, wrapped up in shining steel, and made to seem modern, even elegant.

I realized with a start that I had been staring at the gun. When I glanced up I found the officer’s eyes on me. I swivelled on my chair and attempted to dig the music.

Forty-five minutes later I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to be greeted by the benevolent gaze of the pawnshop owner. In his hand was a parcel, which he gave to me. When I had counted out the money—and he had double-checked my counting—he said, “Thank you, sir. Shop here again.” He turned away, paused, and turned back to me long enough to say, “Dress down a little,” and gave me a wink.

I am dressed down, I thought. I’m not wearing a tie. But I didn’t say it.

In a toilet cubicle around the corner from the shop I tore open the package—and breathed a sigh of relief when inside it I found my passport. Well, a passport. It no longer claimed to be the passport of Jack Benjamin Griffin. It was still me in the photo, but the name alongside it was Trevor S. Williams. The number had been altered too, and I found a number of immigration stamps for Hong Kong and other cities in Southeast Asia scattered through its pages that hadn’t been there before. Trevor was younger than me by four years—mental note to put a spring in my step. Clipped to the passport was a note in a barely legible hand that said, “Expat in Hong Kong.”

Back at the hotel I stayed long enough to cut my hair with a beard trimmer I’d picked up from a convenience store near the hotel. When I was done I bowed my head toward the mirror and strained my eyes to check the job. I was shocked to see how pronounced was the horseshoe-pattern baldness creeping across my scalp. A small, white crescent of scar tissue was carved into the left side of my skull. The memory of the fall that had produced it flashed through my mind—a dive into deep snow and the numbing strike of a ski blade. And Jean’s voice, “Jack, are you—”

I shook it off.

My cheeks were disappearing beneath a thick, salt-and-pepper stubble, and I touched the trimmer to it before deciding I would leave it.

In a bag on a bed were a few other items I had procured with my precious cash. A t-shirt, blue jeans, and joggers. I stripped off my shirt and trousers and redressed in the new clothes. When I looked again into the mirror I saw the image of a man who was attempting to cling to a childhood long faded. Fine.

I tilted my chin up and stared the man down. No, that guy there was a poet-gypsy. A rambler, a collector of experiences, one whose senses were flung wide open to any and every morsel of life that might happen to fall within his reach.

For a fleeting moment, an urge stronger than the desire to reach Annika Kreider before Hiero took me. I wanted to write. I could feel it in me, deep as my bones. The upswell of the Muse I had so long been without. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that if I could sit at my laptop, or over a notebook, I could knit the sentences that would diagnose my life.

Strange that I picked that moment to finally come clean on the reason for the embryo of a novel I had brooded over so long: it was not to stake claim to professional kudos, nor even for the creative joy. I wanted to write—needed to write—to work out how the hell my life had run off the tracks, and parted company with a wife and daughter whom I had loved. Did love.

The Redactor, Chapter 11

2014-11-02T19:50:00.000+08:00

It is physically impossible to make yourself not be nervous. To be aware you are nervous causes nerves.

This realization came to me as I was striding toward the metal detector standing between me and my departure lounge at the airport. I could feel sweat springing out on my forehead, and tickling me behind the ears.

What if the police had circulated my photo? What if the passport alterations were obvious? I had no way to tell they weren’t. What if my face tugged three ways when I tried to lie to immigration?

By chance I caught my own reflection in a mirror before I joined the end of a line waiting to pass through a metal detector. My scalp was freshly shorn, my face grizzly, my clothes down-played, but hanging at the end of my arm was something that jarred with everything else: my briefcase.

Without breaking stride I veered into a restroom as if that had been my intent all along.

I placed my briefcase on a bench, snapped its catches back, and opened it. Its contents were a mess of the paraphernalia of a professional academic. I retrieved the remaining papers from Hiero’s dossier, folded them, and stowed them in a jeans pocket. Then I pawed through the papers piled in the briefcase’s base—a couple of bad essays I hadn’t returned to their authors because I’d written expletives in their margins, a journal paper on yet another interpretation of Beowulf, a form letter from the university extoling its new workload management system, and a parking ticket I’d fought hard to have waived. I dug through the litter and back through time until I reached the base of the briefcase and saw the stain left by a banana that had once, long again, lain there forgotten for weeks.

Why did I never clean this crap out?

I gathered it up and dumped it into a bin.

Tucked into pouches and pockets on the inside of the briefcase lid were smaller items—pens, a thumbdrive, a photo of Jean and Tracey, conference name badges, and a tangle of lackey bands that were beginning to crack with age. I took the thumbdrive, photo, and the Schaeffer pen engraved with my name, a gift from the university for fifteen years of mind-strain. The rest I tossed into the bin.

The inside of the briefcase was almost bare now, but for the lint collected in its corners and creases, and a pack of business cards held together by a bull-clip. I picked up the cards and squeezed the clip’s jaws open.

I flipped through the cards, reading each one after the other. I had mementos from GPs, Physicians, Cardiologists, Immunologists, Endocrinologists, Neurologists, Dieticians and Naturopaths. I even had a card for a friendly Psychiatrist, who tried to convince me I was thinking my heart into a terminal velocity. I had a more productive conversation with the acupuncturist. He at least recognized I was the nail that had been hit with a variety of hammers, and made me a cup of tea.

If the paper in the base of the briefcase was the sedimentary record of my working life, this pack of cards was the same for my dance with the medical fraternity.

I had swung down the line from one partner to the next, and finally fallen off the procession with this diagnosis: idiopathic orthostatic tachycardia syndrome.

Idiopathic from the Greek, idios, meaning “one’s own” and pathos, meaning “suffering”. I.e., your own unique brand of pain.

Sorry, Mr Griffin, but we don’t know why your heart stops beating when it stays too long above 160 beats per minute. Best to live calm, eh?

To my mind, that idiopathic resembles idiot is no accident.

Idiopathic attached to any diagnosis is its doom. It means the sample space for your disease is one. You’re it. And medical science doesn’t do ones. Clinical studies, and the drug companies that pay for them most definitely, don’t do ones—unless the one is followed by the word ‘billion.’

So the diagnosis is your polite instruction to leave the party. No more dancing for you. Something in your biology, or psychology, or pathology, or some other -ology, is irreparably, mystifyingly, screwed. Get over it, and get on with whatever life it leaves you. And be aware that unpaid bills will be handed over to our debt collection agency. Have a nice day.

I never sunk so low as to get an aura-photo, but what’s the bet even that would have come back green with purple polka dots?

I pressed the cards together, re-clipped them, held them over the bin, and hesitated.

That pack of cards had become part of me. Every one a joker. I knew it was a sick kind of nostalgia to hold on to them.

But I put the pack in my pocket.

With a final look at my empty and forlorn briefcase, I exited the restroom.

Striding again toward the metal detector I felt naked.

When I stepped beneath the detector it shrieked at me. I ignored the attendant’s instruction to try again, and instead walked over to her pointing at where I imagined the implant next to my heart was, the one that communicated my heart rate to the Medline watch travelling through the X-ray machine.

Knowing I was going to fail every metal detection test was actually kind of soothing. There was no tension that came of waiting to see if it would go off. It always did.

She called over a male officer, who frisked me, and gave me the okay.

At immigration, I lied like a pro, and the officer stamped my passport with a smile and told me to have a nice flight.

As I joined the flow of travellers heading for the flight gates, it occurred to me why it had been so easy: barring the odds and ends in my pockets, and the chunk of silicon near my heart, almost nothing remained of Jack Griffin. I had even left my name behind.

The Redactor, Chapter 12

2014-11-02T19:49:00.000+08:00

Thirty-thousand feet in the night sky above the sands of the ancient Persian Empire, modern day Iraq, I had finally found calm.

A calm that was broken minutes later, at 12:39 AM Hong Kong time.

My heart had been beating at a leisurely 80 bpm. Seated in Cattle Class of the Emirates airlines Airbus A380, my decisions were limited to whether I would have the satay chicken with rice or the beef and vegetables, and when precisely to empty my bladder of its beer ballast. Until the plane landed, I was in Fate’s iron grip.

After the cabin lights dimmed, I switched on my personal light and pulled out my fifteen-year pen and a notebook I had bought at the airport. I had doodled in its margins and begun turning over in my mind the plot of my novel.

The small video screen embedded in the chair in front of me was a distracting glare, and it was when I navigated its menu to kill the screen that I noticed I could access the internet.

With a moment’s hesitation I called up my email.

My inbox was full of stale letters, but for three new messages, marked in bold. Two were spam. The third was from Matthew Price, the university systems administrator.

I opened it and read the following message:

Jack.

I looked into your login problem. Not sure what’s going on there, but—get this—your account was hacked a couple of weeks back. I don’t know what the hacker wanted or got. But I traced the attack origin to a cloud server on the west coast of the US (which doesn’t mean much).

I hope you don’t mind, but I returned fire and hacked the server. Turns out its currently registered to a H. Beck. Does that name meaning anything to you? I poked through the server’s file system and found the only active branch of the tree besides security patches (hah!) is a Wordpress blog. I’ll paste the address below. It’s private, but I dug the admin password out. It’s ConRadsh3art. Doesn’t make any sense to me, but maybe you’ll have more luck.

Sorry to disturb you. He or she may just be some script-kiddy who got hold of a hacking library, but better to be safe...

Cheers, Matt.

My heart was no longer beating at 80 bpm.

I quit the email and entered the blog address Matt had sent me. The internet browser loaded up the address, and a title blazed on the screen, painfully bright in the dim cabin: The Immortal Novel, by Hieronymus Beck.

My hand went to Hiero’s novel notes stowed in my back pocket. I wriggled in the seat until I could extract them. I placed the folded-up wad on the tray table, unfolded it, and smoothed the paper flat.

The topmost sheet described the (attempted) murder of Rhianne Goldman. The title of the page was Case notes #1 for The Immortal Novel, by Hieronymus Beck.

My eyes flicked again to the screen and I scrolled down.

More text. A date—yesterday’s. And “Chapter 8”. Below that was a handful of paragraphs of text. As I read, the hairs on my neck stood up.

Deed done. The heroin flooding Li Min’s system has shut down her heart.

Some girls look good with short hair. Li Min looks good dead.

I don’t mean to be cruel. It’s true. A quiet has settled over her fragile body, now that her anxious spirit has set sail on eternal waters. Her skin is smooth to the touch and already cooling. With a finger, I travel over it, across her flanks, which are covered in almost microscopic down—find a small birthmark on her inner thigh I hadn’t noticed before. Got to slow down, lover boy.

An idea occurs to me. I grasp her wrists and lift her arms, which had come to rest at awkward angles. I lift them above her head, and bow them into a heart shape.

Ah, true love.

Then I’m laughing. What a prick.

I tweak her nose, and begin the mop up.

Condom. My underwear—third wear, turn them inside out. Shit, I wouldn’t be surprised if the washing machine spits these guys out. Her underwear, just to be safe. Wipe off the lamp switch, drawer handles and top, door handle. In the living room, let’s see. Rack back through the ol’ memory. Did I touch the kitchen taps? Rinse some dishes? Doesn’t sound like me. Do ‘em anyway. Wine glass, the one without the lipstick. Glossy magazine. Pretending to be interested in Wood Turning—those were hard yards, but worth it. Light switch and done. Need to hurry now. [MC coming.]

“Night, honey,” I say into the quiet apartment, and exit stage left.

I finished reading the entry and lay back in my seat. A kind of heat was prickling all over my body, and my temples were throbbing. I flicked my wrist to see the Medline’s display—in the orange, okay.

I blinked and read the blog post, Chapter 8, again. Hiero had recorded how he murdered Li Min and put it on the internet. Sure, it was private. But all it would take was a click of a button to publish it to the world.

And there was that reference to MC. Just like the one I had found in Li Min’s journal. She had written it in anticipation of Hiero’s arrival. But she had written MC Griffen.

What did it mean? It made no sense.

Hiero’s text blazed at me from the video screen. I shut my eyes, but behind my lids there was an even brighter blaze—the memory of Li Min’s lifeless body, which shock had seared onto my brain. I tried to push it away, but it didn’t budge. I had to open my eyes.

My thoughts swam for minutes until finally my mind bit on a thought. I switched back to my email and wrote a message to Jean.

Jean — still in the shit.

You have to see this, and then, please, forward it to the Murdoch police station in Perth, with the subject Re: Jack Griffin and Rhianne Goldman.

Go to the URL I’ll paste below. It’s a blog of that little shit recording what he is doing. It’s there in black and white, an account of how he murdered a girl in a Hong Kong apartment.

The blog is private, but you can enter it with user ‘admin’ and password ‘ConRadsh3art’.

Now do you think I have ADD?

Message sent, I switched off the screen and put away Hiero’s notes and my notebook. The urge to write had evaporated. I pressed the call button, and when a hostess arrived I asked for the stiffest drink they stocked, wondering at what point they refuse to provide alcohol.

Turns out to be the fifth drink.

The Redactor, Chapter 13

2014-11-02T19:48:00.000+08:00

My ears popped.

We were dropping through thick cloud toward Vienna.

The PA had announced that the entertainment services would shortly be switched off. I wasn’t sure if that included the Internet in Economy, but I hastened to check my email just in case.

One new email.

I opened it. It was from Jean.

Jack, now I’m starting to worry, goddamn you. If it were only ADD, I could live with that. Did you break your crown again, Jack? Get on the bottle?

I checked the URL you sent me. Yes, it exists, but no, the password you sent me doesn’t open it.

Look, I’m sorry. I just read what I wrote. I’m concerned. Where are you anyway?

I had to suppress the urge to swear. I opened a new browser window and entered the address of Hiero’s blog. It asked me for the password, which I typed.

And in response I got an Access Forbidden. I was locked out.

I switched back to my email and typed a message to Matt. He got the password once, he could get it again.

But before I could hit send, the browser died. The screen switched to a world map, with a plane closing in on Vienna. The system had been shut down.

No suppressing the swearing this time.

We had landed, and I was still stewing on the failed password when immigration loomed, and a new fear spiked my belly. I’d had eleven hours on the plane to concoct my story—Trevor William’s story—and hadn’t done anything. I was walking up cold to a guy trained to spot nervous liars.

I joined the end of the line, which was moving at snail’s pace. When I reached its head, the officer said, “Good morning, sir,” with a thick Teutonic accent.

I looked into his eyes and with a sinking feeling saw his was an X-ray gaze. Might as well throw my hands up and yell ‘sanctuary’.

“Mmm,” I managed, and deposited my passport onto the counter.

With a smile, he flicked it open.

My mind raced. Was it more suspicious to watch him or not, or a mix of both? Maybe that was precisely what they looked for! My scalp tingled with that sensation that means you’re going to sweat.

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.

Wasn’t that Sibelius good? Better with a drink. I could use a drink.

“You’ve had a hair cut, sir,” he said, looking at his screen with a smile and tapping at his keyboard with deliberation.

Haircut! You idiot. Was that suspicious?

I just smiled and ran a hand over my scalp, not trusting myself to speak.

“And what is the purpose of you visit to Vien, Mr Williams?”

Purpose?

“Visiting friends,” I said.

“Without luggage?” he said, a slight crease forming over his brow, still not looking at me.

“Good friends,” I said with a breathy laugh.

“You like Mozart?” he said. “We have a little statue to Mozart.”

“I like Mozart.” Love Sibelius.

He tapped some more at the keyboard, gaze still inscrutable.

“I hate Mozart,” he said, then—

Bang.

He stamped the passport. I nearly wet my pants.

“Have a good stay in our city, Mister Williams,” he said, and was nodding at the next person in the line.

Just like that I was through.

I had gone ten paces when another officer came alongside me and said, “Would you please step this way, Mr Williams.”

I discovered much later that what Mr Huh of Hong Kong meant when he said ‘budget passport’ was that the man I was pretending to be had flags on his passport. He had been caught travelling with small amounts of marijuana that he claimed were medicinal, but which were obviously to be sold to make a little extra holiday money.

The result of this was a strip search.

They got two-thirds the way through before my Medline went into the red zone, and when I told them that if I didn’t calm down, they would soon be frisking my corpse, I guess they figured they had scared Mr Williams enough and didn’t want a lawsuit on their hands.

No mention was made of the name Jack Griffin inscribed on my fifteen-year pen. I guess they thought Mr Williams was a petty thief as well as small time drug trafficker.

I cleared customs with a curious sense of relief and the smell of latex rubber on my skin.

The Redactor, Chapter 14

2014-11-02T19:47:00.000+08:00

The first thing I did on the other side of Viennese customs was to stop at one of the airport’s currency exchange counters and convert a chunk of my hong kong dollars into Euros. The next was to locate one a free Internet terminal.

I emailed Matt for the password to get back into Hiero’s blog, and looked up directions to the address I had for Annika Krieder, Chalky. With a shiver, I realized that Hiero was in this city, somewhere out there.

The address wasn’t near a subway station, so too far to walk. Speed was of the essence, and anyway, a thick snowfall was blanketing the city. The sight of it made me spend precious minutes and precious Euros on the cheapest overcoat and hat that Hugo Boss stocked. I shrugged the coat on as I stepped outside, but the cold still took my breath away. I hailed a cab, a brown Mercedes, and gave the driver the address.

The apartment was in a tenement row beyond the ring road, in the new city which looker older than the old. The kind of place where a couple had kept their daughter locked in a basement for years. I asked the driver to wait (was thinking more and more of accruing witnesses to my not murdering) ran up the short flight of steps and into a cool lobby. I found a buzzer for apartment 27 and pressed it.

There was no reply, so I pressed it again.

When I still got no reply, I ran a hand across the buzzers. Voices came through the speaker like scattershot, and the door clunked open.

The building had no elevator, being only three floors high. I raced up the stairs, then along the corridor on the second floor till I came to apartment 27.

I put my ear to the door and listened. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I heard the muted throb of a television. I knocked long and loud.

At last, I heard a shuffling tread approach the door, and heaved a sigh of relief.

The door opened to reveal a short woman with greying hair caught up in curlers and a vast bosom restrained by a faded floral nightgown.

“Was?” she said through a frown. Behind her, German voices droned in the universal language of soap opera.

“I wanted—do you speak English?” I said.

The frown deepened. The door began to close.

“Wait,” I said, and placed a palm firmly in its path. “I’m looking for Annika Krieder. It’s very urgent.”

She stopped pushing the door, and the frown eased.

“Annika?” she said.

“Yes, yes.”

The old lady disappeared, leaving the door ajar. She returned and thrust a slip of paper at me. I read it, and to my dismay realized it was a forwarding address.

The cold on the street was bracing after the stuffy building. The taxi driver had the engine running to keep warm, and a plume of exhaust was boiling from the rear of the car.

I slid onto the back seat and handed him the new address. He grunted, put away the paper he was reading, and drove.

I watched the cab fee readout rise, all the while thinking of my dwindling cash, which had taken a hit already when I converted my Hong Kong dollars to Euros at the airport.

The new address was within the old city, and frustratingly close to where we had passed not half an hour before. I again asked the driver to wait, and leapt onto the pavement and hurried to the door of a slim townhouse of five stories. Inside, I found the glass lobby door unlocked. I took the elevator to the fourth floor, muscles tense, and was soon rapping on the door of apartment 4c.

The door swung inward under the blows of its own accord. I ran my fingers along the door jamb and felt the sharp pain of a splinter. Someone had forced the door.

Without thinking, I shoved the door back onto its hinges and entered.

Another quiet living room. Bars of muted winter light sheared the gloom in places, and revealed a clutter of tall, reserved leather couches and armchairs. Standing over them were pedestal lamps and dark bookcases, crammed together with barely enough space to maneuver. Beyond them was a kitchenette beneath a large, curtained window. Dark doorways gaped left and right—I thought of what I’d found in the bedroom in Hong Kong.

But to get to either, I would first have to wade through the wreckage strewn over the floor. Every bookshelf had been emptied, its books flung down. Vases and picture frames from a mantel had been swept into a heap, and I saw at least three paintings or prints that had been torn from their hooks and smashed on the coffee table.

I was looking at a thorough ransacking.

Or something meant to look like one.

I picked my way through the debris, hearing something crunch and tinkle under my feet more than once, and toward the left doorway. It led to a small bathroom. The mirrored door of the vanity cabinet hung at an angle from one hinge, and its contents had been smashed and spread across the tiles.

I returned to the living room, and tiptoed to the other doorway. It led to the bedroom, which had also been turned upside down, but was mercifully empty of dead bodies.

Back in the living room I swept a pile of magazines from the couch and sat. Unconsciously I sucked on the finger that ached dully at the splinter site.

The taxi was waiting. The fare rising by the minute, but I needed to sit and clear my head.

“What are the chances this break-in is a coincidence?” I said into the thin air.

And was surprised when I voice like my own answered.

“Possible, but you’d be a fool to believe it.”

It was my voice.

No, it was my daughter’s voice. It was Tracey’s.

It was both. My voice in the still air of that wrecked apartment; and hers in the vault of my mind.

It seemed my novel wanted out in any way it could. If that meant hijacking real life, then so be it.

It had taken Jean and Tracey to leave my life for me to realize how much I talked to myself. My next thought was that perhaps I was finally going mad. The concoction of drugs I’d tried over the years to heal my idio-pathetic heart had finally congealed into a mutant mess and was eating me away from the inside.

Then I remembered that a young girl’s life was hanging by a thread.

I decided to play along.

“This has to be Hiero’s doing,” I replied.

“But why?” said Tracey with my voice. “He didn’t trash Li Min’s apartment. He just...”

I looked the room over, still rooted to the spot. It was every person’s nightmare, wasn’t it? To return home to find that strange men had been in your house, in your space—the space where you lived so much of your life. Had touched your things with their fingers. Leered at your photos. Tracked mud over your memories.

Break-ins. Police statistics listed them in the category Crime Against Property. They should be listed under Crime Against Person, Grievous Bodily Harm.

“He wanted to scare Annika,” I said.

An image of Tracey leapt from my mind and into that room. She turned her green eyes toward me. She had freckles again. (Why did I give her childhood freckles?)

She shook her head. “It’s wrong,” she said. “Hiero doesn’t scare. He charms.”

“Then maybe there is something here he wanted.”

I carefully retraced my steps through the wreckage, while in my mind’s eye, Tracey probed among the wreckage. Strangely, I felt glad for the company.

I lingered, looking for a pattern, something at odds with the chaos of destruction.

But nothing jarred. If it had hung, it had been torn down; if it could be moved, it had been flung. The only exceptions were the largest breakables, vases, a mirror, a porcelain lion. They had not been smashed.

I touched a large vase of modern design.

“Why isn’t this on the floor in pieces?”

“Noise?” suggested Tracey.

I glanced at the bookshelf where a sleek silver stereo had also avoided destruction.

Its speakers were putting out a faint hum and I turned the volume a notch down to prompt an electronic readout. It was set very high.

I winked at Tracey. “Clever girl,” I said, and wondered if that was a kind of arrogance.

Annika Krieder was home fresh from university. It was reasonable to guess she hadn’t found a job yet and slipped into a daytime routine. Had Hiero expected to find her here, and flown into a rage when he found the apartment empty?

No. The destruction was too controlled.

On the wall a great, glass-fronted clock chimed the hour—ten chimes then fell silent. But the second hand kept winding around. Tick, tick... all the way to the heat death of the Universe, and the end of all clocks.

How many murders before we got there? ... one less if I got my backside into gear.

I traced the telephone by its wire to where it lay smothered in books.

“You sure you want to do that?” said Tracey. Her heart-shaped face held a wry grin. I decided I would handle it alone from here. She disappeared and I was alone.

I shook my head a moment, then scooped the phone from the floor and tapped the hook till I got a dial tone. Then I called international, to Australia, and the directory by heart. I asked for Price, suburb of Subiaco. The female voice said she had found the number, and would I like to be put through.

I said yes, and waited.

It was the middle of the night in Perth, Australia. Matt had probably only just made it to bed. Too bad for him.

While I waited I thought about the long shot I was trying. It had taken Hiero less than a day to write up the murder of Li Min, judging by the timestamp in his blog entry. What if he was even now blogging his actions? If I could find Hiero before he got to Annika, and forestall him, I wouldn’t even need to find her.

A voice came on the line, male. I began to speak, then realized it was not Matt’s voice. It was his father’s. And this was an answering machine.

I waited for the beep, and said, “Matt, it’s me, Jack. I need you to get me the password to that blog again. The one you gave me stopped working. Please hurry. This is urgent.” I paused. “Deadly urgent.”

I hung up and, with a last glance at the wrecked apartment, left.

I emerged from the townhouse into the heart of Vienna to discover the taxi was gone, lured away by a better fare.

It was cold, Sunlight glittered on the snow swept off the sidewalk. I jammed my hands in my pockets and hunched my shoulders and walked just to be moving. I passed shops, which vented warm air as customers came or went. Each burst full of the aromas of perfume, or pastries, or frying meat. I turned a corner, and then another, and a great plaza opened out in front of me. At its center, standing massive and solid, was a building looking like an oversized fairytale keep. It was in fact a church, the Cathedral of Saint Stephen, which had stood on that spot for 900 years—battered by the passions of war, and the steady gnawing of the elements, but erect still. Knots of tourists were scattered across the plaza, taking photos, or craning necks to take in the cathedral’s vast roof.

But from the corner of my eye, I spied an internet cafe. I hurried toward it, with the rueful acknowledgement that the internet was fast becoming my chief vice. But I had been surrounded by strangers now for 72 hours straight (barring hallucinations) and was hankering for friends. Hell, acquaintances would do.

Inside the warm cafe, I had begun drafting an email to Jean—an argument really, for my sanity—when a message arrived in my inbox.

It was from Matt Price.

I stuck the message for Jean into the drafts folder and brought up Matt’s.

Had he got my voice message already?

He made no mention of it. It appeared we had crossed wires. He said,

Jack.

You’re right, the password has been changed.

I checked back on the server to see if there was any evidence my own hack had been spotted. That looks okay, but I realize that the password I gave you would have expired an hour at most after I gave it to you. Whoever set up that server is some tight ass. He’s set it up so the passwords are randomly cycled every hour and SMS’d to a phone number. It would be a great system, IF he’d locked the server down properly. >-)

I’ve set up my own silent service to copy the password to your email account, so you can login to the blog any time. Hope that’s okay.

Later, Matt.

No sooner had I closed Matt’s message, than another appeared. I opened it and read a single alphanumeric word. The latest password p3QUod4u.

I called up Hiero’s blog and entered the password, hunt and peck on the keyboard.

The screen filled with the latest entry. I was in.

More than that. My long shot had hit.

Then I read the title properly and my heart sank, suddenly a deadweight in my chest.

The topmost entry was titled: The human body, such a fragile organism.

Cathartic. That’s the word. It was tremendously cathartic to rip Chalky’s apartment to shreds. To grasp every item—no matter the item—and hurl it down. She was such a prissy person. Perhaps I should have let her live long enough to see the mess. She might have died at the sight of it.

Ah well, can’t unwind the past. The person formally known as Annika Krieder is now just a piece of meat. An amazing transformation, from life and warmth and voice, to inertness, a cluster of organs, food for microbes. And the alchemy that turns this gold of life into the lead of death? A simple shove.

But it has to be the right shove at the right time.

And how had I, the magician, learned the secret of invoking this correct shove? From the train timetables I found in Chalky’s apartment.

Train timetables? I thought. Of course. Hiero had broken into Annika’s apartment to learn everything he could about her movements. He’d ransacked the place to cover his purpose. Heavy with foreboding, I read on.

Yes, Chalky is prissy. And very orderly, bordering on Obsessive Compulsive. I found her stash of timetables, and no doubt she carried another copy with her. The ones I found were neatly marked with her travel plans, colour-coded. From them I learned which train line and station she would be using today.

However, I don’t think she intended to catch the train in the manner she actually did. Her flight through the air was reminiscent of Piggy’s in Lord of the Flies. Even to the shattered spectacles. So too was the way her body crumpled on impact.

And here, suddenly, I read something that confused me.

Hiero had just described how he murdered Annika.

The very next line, he did it again. Only it was a different murder.

She paused to survey the platform below, which was thick with moiling passengers. Her train had already arrived, and she hurried toward the stair, her handbag jouncing against her hip.

I’m a helpful guy, so I gave her a hand reaching the platform. Straight over the edge of the railing, and thirty death-dealing feet to the concrete. Her flight through the air was reminiscent of Piggy’s...[PASTE]

But when understanding came, my heart flared with hope.

I sat back and frantically tried to corral my thoughts. Hiero’s latest blog entry described him murdering Annika—twice. First by shoving her in front of a train. And then again by pushing her over the edge of a concourse. Both “blunt-force trauma.”

Two murders. But only one could be true.

Or neither.

If Hiero’s blog was describing two ways Hiero might murder Annika, two contingencies, it would mean she still lived. For the moment.

I gathered my things and leapt out of my chair. I’d only used a fraction of my credit.

On the street I collared an elderly man in a long coat.

“Vienna Hauptbahnhof. Do you know it?”

“But, of course,” he said and pointed at his feet.

I doubted very much I was standing on the rail hub of a major European city, and my skepticism must have shown.

“Fifty meters down,” he said, “and then five minutes by U-Bahn.”

I tore off in the direction indicated. If I had to pitch a tent and stake out the station for the rest of the week, I would. I only hoped I wouldn’t arrive to find an ambulance, and police, and chalk...

The Redactor, Chapter 15

2014-11-02T19:46:00.000+08:00

My first miscalculation was that Vienna Hauptbahnhof was impossibly huge.

I knew it would be big, but when I asked my mind for an image of a railway station it handed me something I was familiar with, which was one of Perth’s provincial patches of concrete. Not the sprawling, multi-level hub of a European city.

This would be haystacks and needles unless I could narrow it down. Then I remembered Hiero’s blog passage. He hadn’t just said Vienna Hauptbahnhof, he had said the line. I found a digital information board and looked up the line. Platform 5.

A map of the station indicated the location of platform 5 and I wove through the crowd attempting to think calm thoughts. Calm thoughts. I would find Annika. She would be surprised to see me. Then I would tell her how close death had come. And she would believe me. It seemed to me that it wasn’t just her life I was racing to preserve. But my own too.

But on reaching the platform, there was no sign of her. Or him. There was no train at the platform, so I went back and forth along the lip of the platform scanning the waiting commuters, until the weight of curious stares forced me to stop.

Escalators connected every platform to the level above, which had to be a thirty foot drop. Far enough to kill barring a miracle. A drunk might fall that far and live. Something to do with relaxed muscles. I prayed that Annika was plastered.

Further down the platform, an elevator was working in a transparently walled shaft. There was a third contingency Hiero didn’t seem to have covered. If Annika took the elevator to reach the platform with the train already idling, then he wouldn’t have the opportunity to push her in front of it or off the gallery. In that case, she and I could board the train together, where she would be a captive audience, and would have no choice but to hear me out.

But then again, what were the chances she would take the elevator if the train was already at the platform? Half of not much. She would choose the stairs.

And Hiero would give her that helping hand.

I swore, and began pacing again.

There was an ache reaching up through my calves and into my lower back when I heard the scream.

The scream that was suddenly drowned by a metallic screeching that made the concrete rumble. My head twisted round in the direction of the noise. It had not come from this platform.

Another scream tore the air. It wailed on, until the screeching sound died away, and went on alone for what seemed an eternity.

I ran, dodging through the crowd that suddenly seemed magnetized and drawn to that sound.

I reached the platform and took in the scene at a glance.

A train was pulled up, two-thirds the way along the platform. Through its windows I could see passengers sprawled over each other, their faces wearing embarrassed smiles, or simple wide-eyed shock. In front of me, the platform was thick with people. A grey-haired woman in a heavy coat had fainted. One man simply stood with his index finger pointed at something below the lip of the platform. A young man raised a cellphone and its flash burst over the front of the train, reflecting. Another man turned and slapped the phone from his hand.

I strained onto my tiptoes to see to the platform’s edge as cries of Hilfe! and Ambulanz! rose. A minute ticked by, and another, and I could neither get to the platform edge, nor see Hiero.

It was then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a still figure. Maybe I noticed him because he was the only person not running or standing. He was leaning on a railing, thirty feet above the platform.

By the time I focused on him, he had turned his back and was walking calmly away. He wore a long coat with the collar pulled up and a shapeless felt hat. He walked with the loping ease of an athlete or an egotist.

And then I was after him, my shoes slapping on the concrete. I bounded up the escalator, two and three steps at a time.

It was only as I reached the escalator’s head and bounded after him that I heard the angry cries rise from below, now calling for the police. I turned my head once and looked back, just enough to see a sea of faces looking back up at me. I saw the same index finger that had been thrust at something in the dark below the platform’s edge pointed at me.

A thick foreboding suddenly crystallized. The figure fleeing even now was wearing the same bland winter gear as me. The cheap coat and hat I had purchased at the airport that had seemed to offer a veil of anonymity now marked me a potential murderer.

I pounded after the escaping figure, along a walkway, up another escalator, and out onto a mall, but I couldn’t close the gap between us. We had barely gone a hundred meters before my Medline began beeping angrily at me.

For a moment I drove myself harder. I would catch him, and if my heart exploded in the process, too bad. I would pin him to the ground with my corpse.

But he was gone. I turned a corner, and scanned the street hunched over, hands on knees, but saw no sign of him. He had escaped.

I hailed a taxi, and slumped onto its back seat. I was gulping air, and it took me a moment to recover my breath enough to speak. I gave the driver the only address I could think of at the time—Annika’s address, the first one—and only later feigned a change of mind, and asked the driver to take me to a hotel out of the way.

When I had checked into my hotel, I used the internet terminal in the lounge to log onto Hiero’s blog. Sure enough, he had already updated the latest entry. The murder now read:

However, I don’t think she intended to catch the train in the manner she actually did. We had a surprise meeting. We chatted. I convinced her to ditch her plans and come with me to the Tiergarten. (I love German!) I walked her to the platform lip as “our” train approached, and whispered in her ear that I was going to show her something most people never see.

I shoved her in the small of the back with one arm, and feigned to save her with the other. Her flight through the air was reminiscent of Piggy’s in Lord of the Flies. Even to the shattered spectacles. So too was the way her body crumpled on impact. The look on her face at the end as she corkscrewed right way up was priceless. Delicious.

I spent the rest of the night mentally drafting my surrender. Put down the dice.

Hiero was not just evil. He was insane. Had to be. And I needed to short circuit his game any way I could.

The Redactor, Chapter 16

2014-11-02T19:45:00.000+08:00

I woke the next morning to the smell of whiskey and a head packed with sawdust.

“You really slipped in the shit this time,” said Tracey from the gloom, seated in the room’s only chair. Except she would never have said ‘shit’—I berated myself for the off-character dialog.

I opened the curtains a crack, rode a wave of nausea, and counted the minibar bottles scattered through the room. Apparently it was all of them.

When I opened my wallet with clumsy hands, I counted the cash and realized I would barely have enough to pay for the bar, let alone the room.

A bottle of bourbon had a stain of liquor at its base, so I tipped the bottle above my mouth and let the dregs dribble into my throat. I was my own physician, and I had prescribed a dose of hair of the dog.

At last I tried my voice, which came out in a croak: “How was I to know he would switch train lines?”

I took hold of my head and spilled some angry tears. Tracey watched in silence.

When I had sniffed up the last tear, and raked my scalp, forgetting it was bald, she said, “He’s making up the rules as he goes along, Dad,” and for a moment I felt like the child. “Edit, cut, paste. Whatever fits his fancy.”

In a sudden pique I said, “I’ll kill him.”

Tracey’s smile was mixed with pity. “No you won’t.”

Pity from my own daughter. I wasn’t going to take that. I gripped the hallucination in my mind and extinguished it.

I made my way to the bathroom. It wasn’t much bigger than a closet. I dashed water on my face and rubbed my cheeks. They were rough with stubble, but shaving was the second last thing I wanted to do right then.

The last thing I wanted to do was get on the telephone. But I might as well charge the call to the room. In for a dime, in for a dollar.

I looked up the numbers I needed for an international call, put the phone on speaker, and dialed.

I sat on the edge of the bed with my head in my hands and listened to the phone’s faint hiss and the ping-pong of my call racing through the network.

A call tone, finally. Four pulses, then someone picked up.

“Hello?” said a voice.

“Matt,” (At last) I said. “You need to give the police the passwords—”

“Mr Griffin?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Did you hear me? You need—”

“I got your message,” he said.

“Well, never mind that. You got there ahead of me. The passwords are working, but I need you to give them to the police so they can look at the blog too.”

Silence.

“Mr Griffin...”

There it was again. Mr Griffin? What the hell was wrong with the kid.

“I got your message, but I have no idea what you’re talking about. And—”

“What do you mean—”

“—the police have been here.”

“Wait. Wait. Back up. What do you mean you have no idea what I’m talking about? The passwords for Hiero’s blog. Remember? They cycle. You cracked his server.”

“Mr Griffin,”—Arg!—”those things you said I did, I didn’t do. I haven’t spoken to you since... it must be last holidays.”

I felt heat flush my cheeks, but my gut was growing cold.

“I know we haven’t spoken,” I said, voice rising. “I tried to call you. We Skyped, text chat, last week.”

“No, we didn’t. I was on leave last week. At beach camp. Digital detox. I haven’t Skyped anyone in weeks.”

“Shit...” I breathed the word, long, like a sigh.

I must’ve been silent a long time, because Matt said, “Mr Griffin? Are you there? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I thought I’d just stepped in shit, but it seems I’ve been flushed down the toilet.” I lowered the receiver, then raised it once more. “Whatever they say about me, Matt. It’s not true. Don’t believe it.”

And with those sage words I hung up.

I sat there in silence and tried to make the world stop spinning. The hardarse in my head reeled off the score.

I was (mostly) alone in a hotel room on the other side of the world, in an unfamiliar city filled with people speaking an unfamiliar language. I was broke, and suspected of at least one, possibly two, murders. I was doomed with the foreknowledge of another murder about to happen, and my one ace in the hole, my one window into the mind of the killer, which had seemed too good to be true, was in fact too good to be true.

The blog was a honeypot and I was Winnie-the-Pooh.

Hiero had somehow intercepted my attempt to communicate with Matt. Had impersonated him and set me up to read his blog.

But why?

I suddenly understood those guys you see on street corners and train stations who hit themselves on the head.

Quickly I packed my meager belongings and descended to the lobby. I stashed Li Min’s journal next to Hiero’s notes into my coat pockets in an attempt to not look like I was skipping out on my bill.

Before I left I checked the blog again. I read the latest entry with that same car-crash-can’t-look-away feeling:

On to the next adventure. By train, this time, I think. The 08:52 from the Hauptbahnhof on through a cavalcade of German cities, the names of which put me in mind of a dozen B-Grade World War 2 movies, and finally, Gare de L’Est, Gay Paree!

Not the Orient Express, but the same romantic sense of that old European passage. Wintering trees and cigarettes and cocktails in the dining cart.

And there it was. Hiero’s rampage rolled on again like that train. And now it was almost certain he knew I was reading his account of his exploits.

Well, I was getting on that train.

From a boutique telecoms store I bought a prepaid phone, and loaded every last cent onto it, for voice and data.

I called the Murdoch police station from memory and asked for Thomas. My call was dispatched and seconds later a very alert Thomas spoke. “Tell me you’re on your way home, Griffin.”

“No, I’m on my way to do your job. He’s killed again, you know. Vienna. Hauptbahnhof station. Yesterday, right in front of me. I’m not going to let him do it again.”

“What you nee—”

I hung up.

Barely thirty seconds later the phone buzzed. No caller id, but it had to be Thomas. I turned the phone off. Let him stew.

Vertically Challenged Story

2014-02-20T21:34:00.000+08:00

This is a crowdfunding project for a short story anthology that I have a story in. The anthology is called Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction.

And this is a shameless plug. See? Completely different.

Dark Matter

2013-12-31T22:18:00.000+08:00

Rasputin “Monk” Lowdermilk wanted to end it all. But when he is run down by a car on the way to his suicide, he finds that life is just beginning.

As he recovers from Chrysler-induced head trauma, he begins to discover strange new abilities. He can draw portraits so precise they look like photographs. He can remember with flawless clarity everything he’s ever seen or heard, no matter how trivial. He can read strangers so well it verges on telepathy.

But with these gifts come strange visions tinged with menace. And the one thing Rasputin doesn’t know is that his new abilities have been noticed, by ancient and evil forces who recognise what the gifts mean and what they will become. Unfortunately, his new life is only of benefit to them if he’s dead.

Dark Matter is a cerebral mystery that plays fair—and dares you to solve it.

Strawman Made Steel

2013-12-31T21:22:00.000+08:00

Janus McIlwraith knows New York City. From the grimy basement bars where the underclass mutter and curse to the gleaming penthouse apartments where the elite plot and control, he's seen it all, and he's never been happy about it. He's a private investigator who works the city the old fashioned way. No internet. No databases. No smartphones.

Not that he has a choice in the matter.

Because Janus knows two New York Cities. There's the one with Facebook, The Tonight Show and iPods. And there's the one he enters through the mirror, the one with genetic supermen, skyscraper canons, and a certain subatomic particle that's misbehaving...

And when McIlwraith takes on the case of the rich boy whose brutalized corpse is found in a dumpster, he little realizes how deep the case will cut―right to his very core, to the place where, like this city, his own soul is split in two.

Ancient Schmegyptians

2013-09-03T14:12:00.001+08:00

I was enjoying a book in Townsville Library the other day (we like free) when my youngest son thrust a different book under my gaze. His was a book on Ancient Egypt. I like Ancient Egypt, and it was a small book, so it was no chore to read it. Chapter headings included the usual suspects: Worship, Recreation, Family Life, Law and Punishment… and I'd made it most of the way through when my attention was snagged by a curious note. An ancient egyptian, said the book, had each year to register their occupation. To fail to do so could mean death. The law applied to everyone, including bakers, farmers, artisans--and here comes the snag--and robbers? Yes, that's right. In Ancient Egypt, one could register to be a professional thief.

The book went on to explain that if said thief was caught with the loot, the victim was still only entitled to recover 75%, leaving, presumably, 25% for Grundy & Sons Robbery Co. How bizarre.

Professional thief with union-accredited ‘I'm nicked. I give up’ headdress.

I'm always on the lookout for societal quirks like that. It's just these sorts of oddities that can grow into interesting fictional cultures with which to populate fictional worlds. At the very least, legitimate thievery could make for some interesting career posters.

But when I later attempted to research Ancient Egypt's professional thieves I ran into a brick wall. The only mention of them I found was on a web page that referenced a book from the 1800s. I was beginning to think someone was having a lend… until I turned up digital copies of two references from the 1880s, which indeed mentioned this curious law, and even gave a name to the official in charge--the Shekh of Thieves. Truly bizarre.

I say two references, but on closer examination one book appeared to have, barring a little commentary, stolen text from the other word for word. Ironic.

The book I was reading before Jos thrust Ancient Egypt under my nose was The Neverending Story, which I think has become one of my favourite books. But more on that later…

Free SMS

2013-08-06T19:36:00.000+08:00

Acronyms aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Anyway, Strawman Made Steel, my hard-boiled detective fiction in a New York that went to hell and returned with crazy eyes, is free until the 8th of August. It's here: amzn.com/B00DT4LO6S

Or you can press the widget thingy to the right and down a bit. Yep, that one.

I am J.K. Rowling

2013-07-19T20:37:00.001+08:00

...okay. That might be a lie. Well, it is a lie.

But I did finally publish a detective novel.

Now, back to lunch.