Walking Shadows (11 page)

What if something went wrong and he couldn't think his way out of it?
What if it goes exactly
as planned?
I couldn't imagine what
afterwards
would be like, for Gary or for me.

Afraid of not knowing what was to come, and because I'm not always very bright, I followed
them.

Twenty minutes walking through even semi-tamed bush is no joke for a city girl who mistrusts the
scuttling things that live in the outdoors. Poisonous things with bitey fangs that are even less
particular than vampires. I fell behind, but managed to keep Gary's brightly coloured shirt in
view.

More worryingly, some element of civilization was always in view - either the dirt road through
the trees, or prop tents and wooden cottages designed to extend the fantasy that this through-road
was part of the 1850s. At one point I saw a neatly laid out, life-sized diorama that I dimly
recalled was used in the sound-and-light show in the evenings. Every time the trees thinned a
little, the town of Ballarat was visible below the hill, with all its 21
^st
century
accoutrements.

Alberto and Gary stopped at a scrappy corrugated iron lean-to in a tiny clearing surrounded by
thick scrub. Another fake cottage was visible through the trees, but the lean-to seemed to offer
sufficient shelter for the task. Alberto obviously thought so. He and Gary stood staring at the
rickety structure like two road workers regarding a fascinating pot-hole.

What was I supposed to do now? If I interrupted, would it prevent Gary doing this thing? If I
stopped it, would Alberto go on a killing spree? He wanted to die; Gary had no choice but to help
him. Every option made me feel sick. So I held my breath and listened.

Gary broke the silence. "If you've changed your mind, that's okay."

"No. I haven't." If anything, Alberto seemed at peace.

"Do you want to do it some other time?"

"No." Alberto stood tall. "If it were done when 'tis done, eh boy?"

Gary looked puzzled.

"Not up on your Shakespeare, Mr Hooper?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Maybe you are more familiar with this one:
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in
this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time
."

"Um. Maybe."

"What do they teach you people these days?"

"I don't know. I haven't been to school since the 60s."

"I used to teach, in these very goldfields. They took what they could get. Even a
half-Chinese man." An austere pursing of his lips. "Though they were not overly enamoured
of the Spaniard in me either."

Gary made no response.

"I was so many things. Teacher. Painter. Goldminer. Carpenter. I learned carpentry from my
father in San Francisco, before I came out here, and became something even more objectionable than
foreign
."

Gary dropped his gaze, obviously not wanting to look at the implement in his hand.

"Life's but a walking shadow, boy. It used to be full of sound and fury. There isn't even
that any more."

"I don't know about that."

"You will. When it's gone beyond your mortal lifetime and everything is strange, and your
memories are fading like mist. You will be an alien in your own world."

"I felt like that pretty much all the time I was alive, anyway."

"Then perhaps you'll be one of those to last."

Gary made no reply.

"I'm ready now." Alberto positioned himself in front of a sturdy eucalyptus tree,
raised his hands over his head and held onto the branches. "Give my regards to Magdalene. Tell
her that I hope she burns in hell and I wish she had never made me."

"Ahhh. Okay."

Gary hefted the weapon, a long-bladed chisel, sharpened edges glinting in the sun. After a moment
testing the weight of it, he placed his free hand against the tree trunk, above Alberto's shoulder,
bracing himself. Then, with sudden speed and ferocity, he thudded the chisel into Alberto's side.

I gasped, then swallowed the sound, afraid they'd hear me, but they were otherwise occupied.

Alberto grunted as the broad, sharp blade sank deeply between his ribs. He slumped, though he
didn't fall. His eyes, screwed shut before impact, opened.

"Shit." Gary showed every sign of wanting to run away except the actual running.
"Let me, ah…" he tried to wrest the blade free but it was stuck.

Alberto struggled to stand straighter; that thing just sticking out of his chest.

"Quick, boy. It hurts."

Gary nodded dumbly. Instead of trying to remove it, he placed both hands against the handle and
shoved. A good, solid crash into the chisel head and it sank more deeply into Alberto's chest. On
the next strike, Alberto's body drooped against the tree trunk. Gary twisted the chisel, making a
cavity. With a sickening crunch, a hole gaped in Alberto's side and Gary plunged his hand into it.
His fist emerged clasping a leathery lump of flesh.

I could almost make out the blood seething around the wound. I told myself it was shadows. Then
it distinctly pooled and flowed out of the body, viscous like mercury. It slid cohesively out of the
shrinking, collapsing body of the person who had once been a human being. I turned my head to follow
its progress, but it sank into the earth. Gone.

Gary staggered away, holding his hands away from his own body, as though they might turn on him
next.

I caught my breath, held it.
Don't scream. Don't cry. For God's sake, don't be sick.

That's when Gary saw me. I started towards him, stopped abruptly at the desolation I saw in his
face.

"You weren't supposed to see," he said bleakly.

"I didn't want you to be alone." That didn't help either of us.

Alberto's once-handsome Eurasian features hardly looked like a face any more. With the animating
fluid gone, his skin was shrivelling and his body slowly caved in on itself. He looked grisly and
pathetic. Gary stood unmoving, like he had turned to stone, with Alberto's dead heart in his
hand.

"What do we do now?" I asked.

"What?"

"What's next?"

"I have to burn it."

I took a deep breath. Another. It kept the horror at bay. "What do I do?"

"You don't do anything." Gary turned away from me, crouched at the entrance of the
shabby lean-to. I hovered behind him and watched him drop the heart into a hole, no doubt prepared
earlier by Alberto. In the shadows, Gary splashed a small jar of blue fluid over the organ. He
picked up a box of matches, struck one, and gingerly dropped it.

The heart burst into flames. The flames arced and suddenly Gary's fingers were alight.

I lunged for him, grabbed his hand. He pulled away.

"Gary!" I grabbed his arm, shoved his hand under my armpit and closed my arm over it.
When I let go, my T-shirt was scorched and his hand was red but not burning.

Fluid gathered underneath his skin and repaired the damage. Gary stared at the process,
transfixed. His shoulders twitched and the lines of pain around his eyes made him look like Alberto
had done, before the final blow.

"You didn't have to," I began angrily, smothering fear and distress in wrath.

"If I haven't done it right, and he comes back…"

"He can't come back. He's dead."

"Not until he burns," Gary insisted, "This one time, a man, with no hands, hardly
any face, burn scars all over. He made Mundy finish it. Mundy made me…"

Gary made a concerted effort to pull himself together. "I have to be sure it's done. I
promised." The words had the sting of desperation behind them.

In the end I helped him carry Alberto's body to the lean-to and throw it onto the fire.
Desiccated vampires burn fast. Flames were licking around the hollows of Alberto's eyes. The smell
of charred meat was appalling.

Alberto could not be any more dead.

The body burned to ashes with surprisingly little smoke. We threw soil over the
remains and collapsed the sheets of corrugated iron over the top of the dirty grey pile.

Instead of returning through the town, Gary and I walked through bush to the fence line that
surrounded the Sovereign Hill site. He helped me over the high fence then leapt down after me.

Wordlessly, we walked back into town, stopping in an unfenced front yard to wash up as best we
could with the garden hose. I worried that someone would stop us to find out why we were so
dishevelled; forgetting that this was rural Victoria and that looking dishevelled was practically a
dress code in some places. In any case, it was a hot day which meant that people were either inside,
hiding from the heat, or had driven to cooler or more outdoorsy locales, like a football game. Rural
Australians aren't keen walkers. The upshot was that nobody passed us or challenged us. We made it
to the station in plenty of time to board the last morning train to Melbourne.

The silence stretched on. I couldn't think of anything to say. My head was full of unspeakable
images and half-formed questions I couldn't yet bring myself to ask Gary. Like "Why did Alberto
want
you
to do this?" and "How many times have you done this before?"

There was also the question of why Alberto had wanted to die. This ennui that I had witnessed and
Gary had spoken of didn't seem to move at the same pace for everyone.

Mundy was much older than Alberto, and he seemed to find sufficient reason to keep on going. Was
it less a matter of biology and more one of attitude? Did it come hardest to those who had tried to
maintain a connection with the world? Mundy was so self-interested that maybe he found his own
survival fascinating enough to keep motivated on an annual basis.

I glanced at Gary, sitting opposite me, staring out of the window, as expressionless as he could
make himself.

"So how was that, on a scale of one to 10?" When I started saying it, I thought it was
going to come out light and flippant. Instead, it was sarcastic and bitter, and I realised I was
furious.

"Depends on the values of the one and the 10," he replied steadily, not looking at
me.

"Don't you go all mathgeek on me," I told him bluntly, "I can't believe what I
just did out there."

"I didn't ask you to do it." He was far from neutral, whatever he was trying to
project. "I didn't tell you what was happening for a reason. You couldn't help sticking your
nose in my business. You never can."

"Was I supposed to let you get on with that alone?"

"Yes." Gary was rarely visibly angry, but he was certainly deeply unhappy with me. My
own fury flared up.

"So this is what you do when I'm not around, is it?"

"Lissa, I do a lot of things when you're not around. I had a so-called life long before you
showed up."

"You kill vampires." My breath caught. Fury bled away leaving behind all that the anger
had been hiding. Shock. Fear. Shame.

Gary's own anger vanished at the change in me. "Sometimes. Not often. Hardly ever,
really."

"Gary, you killed that man." And had more or less just confessed to killing others.

"Yeah." A blink, and an expression like he had lost everything he'd ever had in the
world. His shoulders hunched. "You know I'd never hurt you. Don't you?" he said quietly.

Swallowing hard, I nodded. I couldn't make myself speak. Gary hadn't done this thing on his own.
I had helped him.

"I," he faltered, "I didn't want you to know about that. You weren't supposed to.
You shouldn't have been there. I made a mess of it." He looked out of the window, his brow
furrowed. After a long, long moment, he said, "I get it, if you don't want to spend time with
me anymore."

Another swallow against the sour taste at the back of my throat. I did not for a moment think
that Gary would ever harm me. This thing with Alberto had not been a cold-blooded killing. It was
nothing like Magdalene's casual euthanasing of Thomas, and it was not Angela Priestley's murders of
revenge.

The shock was easy to understand. Talking with Gary beforehand, carrying out Alberto's wishes had
offered an awful logic, to make sure he didn't do worse things. The fact of the killing was much
more raw and terrible.

Unravelling my fear was a little harder. It wasn't Gary I was afraid of. So what made me cringe
inside?

I'm afraid of the way death comes so easily even to people who are not supposed to die.

Death had always clung to my life like chewing gum to hair. This was the first time I had ever
actively participated in it.

I don't want killing things to come so easily to me.

And that was the root of my fear, and my shame. I had done this thing, thinking it would be,
well, not easy but that it wouldn't matter in the way that the deaths of people I loved had
mattered. Alberto had threatened murder to get his way, and helping him die had seemed a simple
option. He was already dead, after all - surely killing the dead was just finishing the job,
unpleasant and ugly but ultimately the natural order and… and…

The urge to crawl out of my own skin and leave it behind with the things I'd done, seen, heard,
smelled today, was abrupt and overwhelming. I wanted to rip out my soul, if I had one, and scour it
with a wire brush until no trace was left of my choice to be part of even a willing death.

It should have happened as Gary had planned it. I'd have had a lovely day wandering around
Ballarat's art galleries and bookshops. Met Gary later and wondered why he was even more socially
awkward than usual, and he wouldn't have told me. He'd have come home with me on the train and we'd
have arranged to see a film together on Sunday.

Belatedly, I stifled that thought process too. I haven't played 'I wish things were different'
since Belinda died and everything went to hell. My new approach, I reminded myself, was to
make
things different using the life I had to hand.

There was no escaping what I had done. All I could do was choose differently for the future.
Death mattered, regardless of whose death it was, and not my choice to make, ever
ever
ever
.