Feeding the Demons (16 page)

Clive had decided to come to as many sessions a week as he could for the next few months and Kit had offered him a cancellation. He seemed tense when he arrived and sat down heavily on the mattresses without looking directly at her.

‘I’m full of hatred,’ he said.

Kit nodded. ‘We all are,’ she said, ‘until we realise it. Until we can admit it.’

‘What can I do about it?’ he asked.

‘Feelings of hatred are powerful energies in your mind. It’s no use trying to fight them with other parts of your mind. You just end up with a civil war between your ears. Let’s try a different approach.’

Half an hour later, Clive lay back with his eyes closed, deeply relaxed.

‘I want you to give the demon of hatred a form in your imagination,’ said Kit. ‘Tell me what he looks like.’ She saw his face move to become very grim.

‘I can see him very clearly,’ Clive said. ‘He looks like a medieval inquisitor. He’s dressed like a Dominican. A shaven head with tonsure. Long, cruel fingers. I think he would be good at turning the thumbscrews. He has a tight, pointed face. No lips. Just a hard white line. Goodness.’ His voice changed. ‘My mother had a mouth like that.’

There was a silence. ‘His eyes. I can’t really see his eyes. They are shadowed. Like a death’s head. He is very big. And very powerful.’

‘We’re going to feed him up,’ said Kit. ‘Really feed him up. Because the more he’s pushed away, the more he’s denied by you when you start to feel guilty and bad about the thoughts in your own mind, the more hateful and powerful he becomes. You start to feed him and then you pull the food away from him before he can ever satisfy himself. The more famished a demon becomes, the more dangerous.’ She paused. ‘Can you imagine me making a bowl out of the top of my skull? Imagine I can just lift the whole top of my skull off and turn it upside down.’

She saw Clive smile slightly at this, but he continued to breathe evenly. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘this skull bowl is growing, becoming bigger and bigger until it is a huge cauldron. It is so big it can take anything you want to put in it. What can we do to feed this demon?’

His voice was soft and slow. ‘I’ve never fed a demon before,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what they like to eat.’

‘If they’re not fed, they’ll eat human minds and hearts. That’s why it’s essential that we feed them well.’

He lay silently for a moment. ‘We can put a whole loaf of bread in the cauldron,’ he said. ‘And a whole tub of butter and a jar of jam.’

‘He needs more than that,’ she said. ‘He’s been famished all your life so his appetite is ravenous. He’s like a genie in a bottle.’

Clive’s breath became quicker. ‘Let’s give him all the loaves of bread in the world,’ he said. ‘And all the butter.’

‘That’s more like it,’ said Kit. ‘Anything else?’

Clive was warming to the exercise. ‘Let’s give him all the silos of wheat in the world.’

‘Tip them all into the cauldron,’ said Kit. She could see the change in his energy. His face was pinker and the cells more filled. ‘Pour in all the wheat.’

‘And all the milk in the world,’ he added. ‘And all the cows.’ He stopped. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Is it all right to do that to the cows? I like cows.’

‘All cows,’ she said. ‘All the cows are going into the cauldron.’

‘And all the sheep. And every chicken in the world.’ He paused again. ‘And all the pigs. This demon is very powerful. He wants more than just food.’

‘Give him what he wants,’ said Kit. ‘For the first time in his existence let him feel what it’s like to get what he wants. To be satisfied. Let him have satisfaction. No guilt, no shame. Just feed him.’

‘In goes my wife. In goes my mother. And my girlfriend. All the buildings in the world are going into the cauldron,’ said Clive. ‘And all the volcanoes, all the great mountains of the world. All the oceans. All the ships, the cars, the rivers, the aircraft. All the military installations. Rockets. Bombs. And let’s give him the moon,’ he added. ‘And the stars and the sun. All the galaxies. Yes,’ he added, ‘even the ones we don’t know about. In they go into the cauldron.’

‘You’ve got almost everything in there now.’

‘I think all the people should go in, too.’

‘Good,’ said Kit. She took a deep breath.

‘There’s something else,’ he said. ‘Something else that should go in.’ She saw a frown line his forehead. ‘I want the whole world to go in.’

‘Into the pot with the whole world,’ she said.

‘There are still the galaxies,’ he said, ‘and deep space.’

‘In they go,’ she said.

‘And now me,’ Clive said in a barely audible voice. ‘That’s everything now.’

His breathing was slow and steady and there was a long silence which Kit finally broke. ‘The cauldron is completely filled,’ she said. ‘You could invite this demon of hate to sit down comfortably and take up a demon spoon and eat and eat and eat until he’s so full he just drops off like a leech.’

There was a long pause. Kit sat, watching the movements on the man’s face. He was somewhere a long way away in his mind, feeding the demon.

‘Yes,’ he said faintly. ‘He’s feeding. He’s cramming everything into his mouth. It’s huge. The size of the Harbour Bridge. He is so starved. He’s eating everything, getting bigger and fatter. Now he’s even huge enough to contain God.’

Kit saw one tear roll down his face. It was more, she thought, than the normal lacrimation of a trance state. His breathing was fuller and richer. His chest and even his belly moved. She noticed a subtle change in his body energy and his upper chest seemed to relax while his legs looked more as if they belonged to him.

After a while, Clive opened his eyes and looked around. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Well, well.’ He closed his eyes again for a while. The barest smile touched his lips as he opened his eyes again. ‘The room seems different,’ he said. ‘It feels like it’s changed.’

Kit waited, sitting up.

Finally he smiled at her. His face was younger and softer. ‘That was a very interesting experience,’ he finally said. ‘I felt something happen in me. I can’t explain it.’

‘You don’t have to,’ said Kit. ‘Just have it.’ She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘When you feel steady enough,’ she said, ‘it’ll be time to go. I’ll look out and see if my next client has arrived.’

•

Gemma had forgotten until she arrived home that Taxi was still missing. The sudden pang caused her to go on another search for him, calling him from the front of the flats, peering down the scrubby incline in front, wondering if he’d climbed down onto the rocks to do a spot of fishing. She left a note under Mrs Ratbag’s door asking if she’d seen him, and posted a picture of him and her phone number on the upstairs verandah that formed a communal area for the two upstairs units. Everyone seemed to be out when she knocked. She went downstairs again, worried about her missing cat. To take her mind off him, she went through her accounting system, but it only made her miss him more. He should be here, driving her mad, jumping up on the desk, treading on the keyboard, forcing the computer to do weird things until she banished him. She filed away Noel’s and Spinner’s most recent field reports and tidied up, needing this routine work to settle her down. She rang Noel, and talked about setting up electronic surveillance at the Cross Weld Construction warehouse and offices.

She took out Philip Hawker’s notebooks again. They were unofficial lists of names and dates, of interviews and only the name ‘Dr Rowena Wylde’ meant anything to her. She struggled to make sense of the untidy, hurried writing. According to his notes, Philip Hawker had visited Rowena Wylde twice. He had also visited an Arik Kreutzvalt at North Sydney, the first time four days after the murder of her mother, the second a week later. ‘20.9.67 4.45pm. Routine house call’, she read. ‘States Chisholm made call because subject is on heavy medication—not able to drive to the rooms. Stayed about twenty minutes. K states he and AC talked about his condition.’ Under this was scrawled in another pen but in the same hand, ‘AC’s only house call in records that week. Check criminal record’. This was underlined heavily. She wondered briefly whether the ambiguous note in Philip Hawker’s youthful hand meant that Kreutzvalt
had
a criminal record, or was a reminder for the note taker to check out whether or not he did.

Gemma lifted her head and stared at the wall. This was one of her father’s patients, someone to whom he’d paid a house call on the day of the university dinner. The day of her mother’s death. She opened the drawer and pulled out her father’s statement, made to the police the night her mother died, skimming it until nearly halfway down. ‘At about two-thirty .
 
.
 
.’, she read, ‘went to the bank but because there was a long queue, did not get money out then. Made a brief house call to a patient’. Was Arik Kreutzvalt that patient? ‘After that, I left and drove straight to the house.’

She found Philip Hawker’s number and phoned him, but there was no answer and no answering machine. She rang Angie. Her heart was sad about her missing cat. Nothing that I love stays, she thought, thinking of the disconnections of her life. I’m getting introspective like Kit. What Beatrix Potter tale should I read? she wondered as she made her way up to the car. ‘The tale of a bad lost cat,’ she thought, but no such tale existed. She had a feeling it wouldn’t be something from Beatrix Potter that demonstrated her tale. It would be more like something from the Brothers Grimm. The oppressive feeling she had, of missing something about the effigy killer, would not leave her alone. She reviewed the crime scenes in her mind and was still trying to make sense of the incongruities when she realised she’d driven the whole way to the police centre on automatic.

•

‘This is how she was,’ said Angie, talking as the crime scene video ran silently on, glancing at her watch. ‘She’s gone to the morgue for the autopsy. Her mother’s there with her. I left her sitting beside the body with one of the bereavement counsellors, stroking her daughter’s hair. Some kind soul down there had cleaned the body up and put dressings over the worst of the wounds. I’ve also got some close-up photos.’

Gemma picked up the newly developed pictures, then turned her attention back to the crime scene video. She saw a rolled-up fabric bundle lying partly hidden alongside a fallen tree trunk.

‘That’s what we saw first,’ said Angie, looking over her shoulder. ‘The bushwalkers had pulled some of the timber away, wanting to get at some dry wood for the barbecue area.’

Gemma sifted through the prints until she found one of the body, free now of the enclosing doona. Bianca lay with her knees drawn slightly up and both hands under her chin, still wearing what looked like the top of shortie pyjamas. But the savage wounds were clear to see, concentrated around the front of the neck and the upper chest. ‘Not much blood,’ she said.

‘The blood’s somewhere else,’ said Angie. ‘Wherever she was killed.’

‘Where is the other part of the pyjamas?’

Angie shrugged. ‘She only had the top when we found her. We’re continuing to search the area.’

Gemma carefully went through the rest of the photographs, thinking about the conversation she’d had with Kit, how they’d both come to the same conclusion that something big had changed in the world of the killer. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ asked Gemma, looking at her friend.

‘About this?’ said Angie, tapping a photograph with a clear-laquered fingertip. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘The stab wounds are so frenzied. We’ve seen that before on your clothes as well.’

‘If it’s the same guy, I mean,’ Gemma added.

‘I’ve got a feeling it is,’ said Angie.

‘And yet this is so methodical,’ said Gemma. ‘This gift wrapping.’ She indicated the layers of plastic and fabric. ‘These pictures are saying something to me.’

Angie nodded and started picking up the photographs and laying them out in sequence, moving from the distant to close-up shots. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re right.’ First, she put down a long shot of the body dump site. Under the haphazard stack of brush and leafy branches, the fabric of the doona could just be seen, looking like a dumped mattress. Next to that, she laid a close-up of the rolled-up doona, and beside that picture another of the garbage-bagged body lying on the doona with the bloodstained fabric now spread out on either side. Then at the end of the row of photos she put down a picture of the ravaged body of Bianca Perrault, now freed from the dark green plastic, lying curled up on the top of the mess that surrounded her. Her beautiful hair still shone in the sun and Gemma could see the fabric of her shorty pyjamas had a pattern of green and red teddy bears.

‘You tell me,’ said Angie. ‘What
are
these pictures saying?’ She slid off the table top where she’d been sitting and went to a drawer in her office, pulling out a packet of cigarettes.

‘But you’ve stopped smoking,’ said Gemma.

‘Just started again,’ said Angie. ‘I met someone on the weekend. A real dish.’ She shrugged. ‘And I cracked. I just had to have a smoke.’ She waved the unlit cigarette towards the ceiling. ‘I just hope I don’t set the bloody smoke alarms off.’ She lit up with a match and blew the smoke away, dispersing it. ‘I’ve got to get copies of these photos for the rest of the team.’ Angie blew more smoke defiantly out of her mouth. ‘God, I needed that,’ she said. ‘This guy was fantastic in the cot. He was everywhere at the same time. Still don’t know how he did it. It’s months since I did anything wicked.’

‘That’s not wicked,’ said Gemma. ‘This is,’ and she pushed the last photograph in the row along the table towards her friend.

Angie picked it up. ‘What’s got into him?’ she asked, looking at Bianca’s body. ‘What’s happened to him that things are so different this time?’

Gemma studied the pictures again, her eyes moving along the row she’d laid down, each layer unwrapped to reveal the next stage, until instead of a Russian babushka doll the violated human body showed in the middle of the bloody wrappings.

‘Your little friend Bo Bayliss came in after all and sat with Devlin for three hours,’ said Angie. ‘I’ll get you a copy of the face she came up with.’ She hopped off the desk, killed the cigarette in the sink and left the room.