TOOTHER

TERRY DOWLING

A

s Dan Truswell gave his signature three-three knock on the door in the modest hospital tower of Everton Psychiatric Facility that Friday morning, he couldn’t help but glance through the second-floor window at the new sign down in the turning circle. Everton Psychiatric Facility it said. He’d never get used to it. That was the more politically correct name for Blackwater Psychiatric Hospital, just as words like client and guest had completely replaced patient and inmate.

“Peter, it’s Dan.”

Dan didn’t enter Peter Rait’s room, of course. That wasn’t their arrangement. He just waited, looking at his reflection in the small mirror Peter kept hanging outside his door, surprised not so much by the slate-grey eyes and fly-away hair but by how white that hair had become. He was fifty-nine, for heaven’s sake! It was something else he’d never get used to.

Finally the door opened and Peter stood there in his pyjamas.

“Careful, Doctor Dan. That’s a dangerous one.”

“They all are, Peter. Carla said you’ve been yelling. Another nightmare?”

Peter looked tired, troubled. His black hair was tousled from sleep. “They don’t usually come this often now. Harry’s going to phone.”

“Harry Badman?” Dear industrious Harry was two years out of his life, distanced by the usual string of promotions, secondments and strategic sidelining that marked the lives of so many career detectives in the New South Wales Police Force. “All right, Peter, so how does this dream relate?”

“Ask Harry about the teeth, Doctor Dan.”

Dan thoughts went at once to the recent desecration at Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery. “Is this about -?”

“Ask him.”

“What do you have, Peter?”

“I can’t say till he confirms it. Ask him. He’ll know.”

Dan made himself hold back the rush of questions. “It’s been a while.”

Peter did finally manage a smile, something of one. “It has, Doctor Dan.”

Dan smiled too. “Phil knows?”

“Some of it. I’ll give him an update at breakfast. But it’s important. Very important.”

“Tell me the rest, Peter.”

“I really can’t.”

“There are voices?”

“God, yes. But strange.” Neither of them smiled at the bathos. What internal voices weren’t? “They’re coming over time.”

Dan frowned. This was something new. “Across years?”

“The first is from the sixties.”

“More, Peter.”

“Let Harry start it.”

You’ve started it! Dan almost said, but knew to hold back, just as Peter had known how much to use as a tease.

“Listen, Peter -”

“Talk later. I’ll leave you two alone.”

And he closed the door. Dan, of course, looked straight into Peter’s mirror again, had the good grace to laugh, then headed downstairs.

Forty-nine minutes later, as Dan sat in his office reviewing the patient database, Harry Badman phoned from Sydney. There was the inevitable small-talk, the polite and awkward minimum that let them stitch up the years as best they could. Dan Truswell and Harry Badman liked one another a great deal, but their friendship had never been easy far from where their respective careers met: for Harry, pursuing the more dangerous exponents of extraordinary human behaviour; for Dan, fathoming the often extraordinary reasons for it.

Finally Harry’s tone changed. “I need to see you, Dan.”

“It’s about what happened at Rookwood last Saturday night, isn’t it?”

“What have you heard?”

“What was in the news. A grave was desecrated. A recent burial.” Dan said nothing about teeth. This had been one of Peter Rait’s dreams after all, and it had been a while since the intense, still-young man had been ‘active’ like this. More importantly it was Dan’s way of testing Peter’s special talent after all this time.

“Samantha Reid. Aged 41. Buried on Friday, dug up on Sunday sometime between two and four in the morning. Cold rainy night. No-one saw anything. The body was hauled from the coffin and left lying beside the grave.”

“So, not just a grave ‘tampered with,’ like the papers said. Your people are good, Harry. Why the call?”

“Things were removed from the scene. I’d like your take on it.”

“Stop being coy. What was ‘removed’?”

“The teeth, Dan. All the teeth.”

Dan had an odd rush of emotion: revulsion, fascination, the familiar numb amazement he always felt whenever one of Peter’s predictions played out like this. And there was the usual excess of rationalism as if to compensate. “What do the deceased’s dental records show? Were there gold fillings?”

“Dan, all the teeth. And it’s not the first desecration. Just the first to make the news.”

Dan knew he’d been slow this time, but allowed that he was out of practice too. “There were others?”

“From secluded and disused parts of the cemetery. Much older graves.”

“But recent desecrations?”

“Hard to tell conclusively. Not all were reported back then. It didn’t look good for the cemetery authorities. The graves were tidied up; nothing was said. We would have assumed these earlier violations were unrelated except …” He actually paused. Had the subject been less serious, it would have been comical.

“Come on, Harry. Someone’s collecting teeth. What else do you have?”

“That Rattigan murder in Darlinghurst a month back. The pensioner, remember?”

“Go on.”

“She wasn’t strangled like the media said.”

“No?”

“She was bitten to death.”

Dan was surprised to find that his mouth had fallen open in astonishment. “Bitten?”

“At least two hundred times. Increasing severity.”

“These could be different crimes, Harry. What makes you think they’re related?”

“Teeth fragments were found in some of the wounds. Very old teeth.”

But not in very old mouths, Dan realized. “Dentures made from these older desecrations?”

“Exactly.”

“Surely there was saliva DNA from whoever wore them.”

“No,” Harry said.

Dan grasped the implications. “So, not necessarily biting as such. Someone made dentures from these older corpse teeth and - what? - killed the Rattigan woman using some sort of hand-held prosthesis?”

“Spring-loaded and vicious. All we can think of. And that’s several sets of dentures, Dan. We’ve traced teeth fragments back to the occupants of three older desecrations: graves from 1894, 1906 and 1911. All female. No fragments from newer teeth -”

“Too new to shatter.”

“Exactly. But there could be other teeth used, from other desecrations we don’t know of. There are some very old graves there; we wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell. So all we have is a major fetish angle. Something ritualistic.”

“My phone number hasn’t changed, Harry.” The accusation hung there. You didn’t call sooner!

“You’ve got your life, Dan. Annie. Phil.” The barest hesitation. “Peter. I didn’t want to intrude.”

Dan stared at the mid-morning light through his office windows and nodded to himself. “You’ve profiled it as what?”

“I’d rather not say. That’s what this is about. Getting another take.”

“Official?”

“Can be. You want the file? I’ll email a PDF right now. Drive up tomorrow first thing.”

“See you at the Imperial Hotel at eleven.”

“See you then.”

Seventeen hours later they were sitting with light beers in a quiet corner of the Imperial on Bennet Street trying to make the small-talk thing work face to face. They did well enough for six minutes before Harry put them both out of their misery.

“You got the file okay. Anything?”

Dan set down his glass. “A question first. You kept something back on the phone yesterday. You said the Rattigan woman was bitten to death.”

“That’s what happened,” Harry said. He looked tanned, less florid than Dan remembered; in his casual clothes he could have been another tourist visiting the local wineries.

“Her teeth were taken as well, weren’t they?”

Harry barely hesitated. “How’d you know?”

Dan lifted a manilla folder from the seat beside him. “The results of Net searches. Know what a toother is, Harry?”

“Tell me.”

“It was a vocation, to call it that, associated with body-snatching back in the eighteenth, nineteenth centuries. Back when resurrectionists - lovely name - dug up bodies to sell to medical academies for their anatomy classes. There were people who did the same to get the teeth. Sold them to dentists to make false teeth.”

“Dug up corpses?”

“Sometimes. Or did deals with resurrection men already in the trade. Mostly they’d roam battlefields and take teeth from dead soldiers.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not when you think about it. It was much better than getting teeth from the gibbet or the grave. Ivory and whalebone were either too expensive or decayed. No enamel coating. Teeth made from porcelain sounded wrong or were too brittle. Corpse teeth were better, soldiers’ teeth usually best of all, injuries permitting. Sets of authentic Waterloo Teeth fetch quite a bit these days.”

“What, dentures made from soldiers who died at Waterloo?”

Dan nodded. “Fifty thousand in a single day. Mostly young men. Supply caught up with demand with battles like that. But that’s the thing. There weren’t many battles on that scale. Demand outstripped supply.”

“You already knew this stuff?”

“Some of it. You know what I’m like. And that’s quite a file you sent. I stayed up late.”

Harry had his notebook on the table in front of him. He opened it and began making notes. “Go on.”

“Back then there just weren’t enough corpses of executed criminals or unknown homeless to satisfy the demand. Not enough from the right age or gender, even when you had poorer people selling their own teeth. Some resurrectionists began killing people.”

“And these toothers did too.”

“There’s little conclusive evidence that I’m aware of. But that’s the point, Harry. You do a job like this, you try to make sure there isn’t.”

“But body-snatchers can’t be doing this.”

“It presents that way is all I’m saying - a similar MO. If the cemetery desecrations and the Rattigan death are related, as the fragments suggest, we need to allow a context for it.”

Harry wrote something and looked up. “So this joker could be proceeding like a modern-day toother.”

Dan shrugged. “Just putting it forward, Harry. He took the Rattigan woman’s teeth. Used others to kill her. So, a psychopath possibly. A sociopath definitely, probably highly organized. A latter-day resurrectionist? Not in the sense we know it. But we only have the teeth being taken and the single recent murder. I assume there are no similar cases in the CID database?”

Harry shook his head. “The usual run of biting during domestics and sexual assault. Random mostly. Nothing like this.”

“Then he may be escalating; either a loner doing his own thing or someone acquainted with the old resurrectionist methodology.”

Harry started writing again. “Do you have more on that?”

“Going back a hundred, two hundred years, he’d see a likely subject, get them alone and have an accomplice grab them while he slapped a pitch-plaster over their mouth and nose -”

Harry looked up. “A what?”

“A sticky mass of plaster mixed with pitch. Mostly used during sexual assault, but what some resurrectionists used too. Silenced your victim and incapacitated them. Suffocated them if that was the intention. All over in minutes.”

Harry was suitably horrified. “They just held them till they expired?”

“Or did a traditional ‘burking’ - covered the mouth and nose with their hand till the victim asphyxiated.”

“This actually happened?”

“It did. The biting takes it in a completely different direction, of course. Was the Rattigan woman drugged or bound?”

“Not that we can tell.”

“That tends to suggest an accomplice. Someone to help restrain her. Do Sheehan’s people have anything?”

“Just the fetish, ritual angle, Dan. A loner after trophies. It’s early days. But you’re taking it further, saying there could be an accomplice, someone getting the teeth for someone else - who then makes dentures and uses them to kill.”

Dan glanced around to make sure that they weren’t being overheard. They still had the bar virtually to themselves. “Just another possibility, Harry. Much less likely. And no conventional client. There’s no economic reason for it now. It presents like that is what I’m saying.”

“Okay, so either a loner or a gopher for someone who originally wanted the teeth for fetishistic reasons but is escalating. He now kills people and does the extractions himself. Focusing on females?”

“Seems that way. But until we know more I’m still tempted to say a loner with a special mission.”

Harry drained his glass and set it down on the table. “So why do a new grave? Why show his hand like this? Was he interrupted before he could finish? Did he want people to know?”

“He’s fixated. He may have seen the Reid woman alive and wanted that particular set of teeth. Like in the Poe story.”

Harry frowned. “What Poe story?”

“‘Berenice’. A brother obsessed with his sister’s teeth extracts them while she’s in a cataleptic coma.”

“Where do you get this stuff, Dan?”

“They’re called books, Harry. But this guy is doing it for himself. And I definitely believe it’s a he. He could be using the more traditional techniques.”

“Drugs would be easier.”

“They would. But he wants them fully conscious. So we’re back to the ritual aspect you mentioned.”

“That emblematic thing,” Harry said.

“The what?”

“Two - three years back. That conversation we had at Rollo’s. You said that people try to be more. Have emblematic lives.”

Dan never ceased to be amazed by what Harry remembered from their conversations. “Emblematic? I said that?”

“Four beers. You said that. Make themselves meaningful to themselves, you said. Do symbolic things.”

“Okay, well this is his thing, Harry. We can’t be sure if he’s following aspects of the old toother/resurrectionist MO but Sheehan’s right. Given the special dentures he’s made for himself, doing this has some powerful fetishistic or symbolic meaning for him. And he may have done this a lot: gone somewhere, seen a lovely set of teeth on someone, arranged to get them alone, then suffocated or bitten them and taken their teeth.”

“That’s horrible. You actually think he may have already done that and hidden the bodies?”

“Because of the desecrations, the older teeth being used, that’s how I’m seeing it, and it may get worse.” Dan thought of Peter Rait’s voices. They’re coming over time.

“How could it - ah! He may start removing the teeth while the victims are alive. And conscious?”

Dan deliberately left a silence, waiting for Harry to say it.

It took a five-count. “You think it’s already got to that! But the coroner’s report for the Rattigan woman showed the extractions were post-mortem.”

“Harry, I think that may have been her one bit of good fortune. She died just as he was starting.”

Harry shook his head. “Then we can definitely expect more.”

“I’d say so. And it depends.”

“On what, Dan? On what?”

“On whether it’s local. Someone developing his ritual. Or if it’s something international that’s been relocated here.”

“International?”

“Ask Sheehan to check with Interpol or whoever you guys work with now. Find case similarities. Forced dental extractions. Post-and ante-mortem.”

“Can you come down to Sydney?”

“Phone me Monday and I’ll let you know. I need to speak with someone first. You could stay around. Visit some wineries, come over for dinner tonight. Annie would love to see you.”

They both knew it wouldn’t go that way. Not this time. Not yet. “Sorry, Dan. I need to get going with this. Take a raincheck?”

“Roger that,” Dan said.

At 2 pm that afternoon, Dan met with Peter Rait and Phillip Crow at a picnic table sheltered by the largest Moreton Bay Fig in the hospital grounds. Peter, thin, black-haired, pale-skinned, on any ordinary day looked a decade younger than his forty-two years, but his recent nightmares had given him an intense, peaked quality that Dan found unsettling. He sat with a manilla folder in front of him.

To his left on the same bench was Phil, four years older, fair-headed, stocky, with the sort of weathered but pleasant face that Carla liked to call ‘old-school Australian.’ He looked up and smiled as Dan arrived. “Just like old times, Doctor Dan.”

“It is, Phil,” Dan said as he sat across from them. He had to work not to smile. Peter and Phil were his ‘psychosleuths’, their talent pretty well dormant these last three years. Officially, both men had been rehabilitated back into society; both had elected to stay, their choice, taking accommodation and rations in return for doing odd jobs. And called it Blackwater Psychiatric Hospital, of course.

Given Peter’s present state, Dan couldn’t enjoy the reunion as much as he would have liked. He went straight to the heart of it.

“Peter, tell me about the voices.”

Peter took two typed pages from the folder in front of him. “Here are the transcripts,” he said, sounding every bit as tired as he looked.

Dan was surprised by the odd choice of words. “Transcripts? How did you manage that?”

“They keep playing over. Two different conversations now. Two different victims.”

“But how -?”

“I just can, Doctor Dan, okay? It’s pretty distressing. You can’t know how awful it is.”

Dan saw that Peter wasn’t just tired; he was exhausted. “You can’t stop it?”

“Giving you these might do it. Getting them out.”

“Nothing else?”

“Not yet. Please, just read them.”

Dan looked at the first page.

TRANSCRIPT ONE

[miscellaneous sounds]

[male voice / mature, controlled]

“As they say, there is the good news and the bad news.”

[terrified female voice, quite young]

“What do you mean?”

“You have a choice here. The good news is that you’ll wake up. All your teeth will be gone, but we’ll have a relatively easy time with the extractions and you will wake up. You’ll be alive. The alternative - you make my job difficult and you won’t wake up. That’s the deal.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“What’s it to be?”

“Why?”

“It’s necessary. What’s it to be?”

“There has to be a reason!”

“I’ll count to three.”

“Just tell me why! Please!”

“One.”

“For God’s sake! Why are you doing this? Why?”

“Two. Choose or I will.”

“You can’t expect me —”

“Three. Too late.”

“No! No! I want to wake up! Please! I want to wake up!”

“All right. Just this once.”

“One question.”

“Go ahead.”

“You could drug me and do it. Do whatever you want. Why do I even have to choose?”

“Now that’s the thing. And, really, you already know why. I need you conscious for it. I may drug you at the end. Oh, dear, look. You’re pissing yourself.”

[sobbing]

“Why? Why? Why?”

“You’re not listening. It’s my thing. I need to see your eyes while I’m doing it.”

“Another question.”

“There always is. What is it?”

“What will you do with - with them? Afterwards?”

“Make a nice set of dentures. Maybe I could sell them back to you. That would be a rather nice irony, wouldn’t it? Irony is quite our thing.”

“What about me? Afterwards?”

“You’ll wake up. Hate us forever. Go on with the rest of your life.”

“But I’ll wake up? I will wake up?”

“Make it easy for us now and, yes. You have my word.”

“You’re saying ‘us’ and ‘our’.”

“Oh dear. So I am.”

“What’s that over there?”

“I think that’s enough questions.”

“What is that?”

[sundry sounds]

[victim screaming]

[audio ends]

Dan looked up. “Peter -”

“The next one, Doctor Dan. Read the next one, please. Same male voice. Different female victim.”

Dan turned to it at once.

TRANSCRIPT TWO

[miscellaneous sounds]

“You’re crazy!”

“I hope not, for your sake. Major dental work needs a degree of control.”

“But why? Why me?”

“The usual reason. Chance. Purest hazard. You were on hand.”

“Then pick someone else!”

“From someone else’s viewpoint I did. But enough talk. We have a lot to do.”

“Listen. Listen to me. My name is Pamela Deering. I’m a mother. I have two little girls. Emma and Grace. Aged 7 and 5. My husband’s name —”

[muffled sounds]

“Ssh now, Pamela. No more bonding. We have a lot to do.”

“What? What do we have to do?”

“Let’s just say that your girls and hubby will have to call you Gummy instead of Mummy.” [pause] “That’s our little joke, Pamela.”

[sobbing]

“Please. Please don’t do this.”

“We have to, Mu — er — Gummy. It’s our thing. It won’t take long.”

“You’re saying ‘we’, ‘us.’ You’re not alone. There’s someone else.”

“Tsk. How rude of me. You want to meet my associate. Over here. Try to turn your head a little more.”

[sundry sounds]

“But that’s not -”

[victim screaming]

[audio ends]

Dan lowered the pages. “There are two of them. He’s not a loner.”

“Seems that way,” Peter said.

“Do you get accents at all?”

“Educated male. Educated enough. Enunciates carefully so it’s hard to know. The first woman sounds English. The Deering woman sounds Australian.”

“But not recent. Over time, you said.”

Peter nodded. “Sixties, seventies.” He gestured to include Phil, as if he were equally part of this, both of them hearing the voices. “You have to protect us, Doctor Dan.”

“I always do. That comes first.”

“How will you?”

“Our old method. You aren’t mentioned. Any locations you give, I’ll have Harry say a phonecall came in, anonymous. Someone overheard a disturbance, cries, screaming. Wouldn’t give their name.”

“They’ll buy it?”

“Why not? It happens more and more these days. Remember, we all need to stay out of this.”

Phil leant forward. “What happens now?”

“We have a name,” Dan said. “Pamela Deering. Harry can check that out. Meanwhile, Peter -”

“I’ll keep dreaming.”

“You don’t have to. We can give you a sedative.”

“No,” Peter said. “I’m doing it for them.”

Dan saw the haunted look in the tired dark eyes. “We need this, Peter.”

“I know.”

Thirty-two cases were listed in the international database, Harry told Dan on the phone that Monday morning, different countries, different cities, different decades, though it was the sort of statistic that convinced them both that many others existed.

“They say two thousand people a year in New Guinea are killed by coconuts falling on their heads,” Harry said. “How do you get a statistic like that? It can only ever be the ones you hear about. It’s like that here. These are just the ones that came to the attention of different national authorities and have anything approximating a similar MO.”

“What about the time-frame, Harry?”

“Dan, we’ve got cases going back to the 30s and 40s, even earlier. Prague. Krakow. Trieste. Bangkok, for heaven’s sake! They can’t be the same person. It can’t be a generational thing. It doesn’t work like that.”

“I’d normally agree,” Dan said. “But you say the MOs are similar for these thirty-two?”

“Victims bitten to death, post-or ante-mortem; the various odontologists’ findings give both. Their own teeth removed before, during or after; again there’s a range. Older fragments in the wounds in some instances, say, nineteen, twenty per cent.”

“Harry -”

“You’re not going to say a secret society. An international brotherhood of toothers.”

Dan gave a grim smile. “No, but look how it presents. It’s as if a very old, well-travelled sociopath has been able to find agents across a lifetime and still has at least one accomplice now, doing his dirty work. The Reid disinterment was done manually, not using a back-hoe. That took a lot of effort.”

“You believe this? Sheehan may not buy it.”

“At this point I’m just trying to understand it, Harry. Rookwood and Darlinghurst suggest he may be local, at least for now.”

“Can you come down to Sydney?”

“On Thursday. I’ll be bringing Peter Rait.”

Harry knew enough about Peter’s gifts not to question it. “He has something?”

“For your eyes only.”

“What, Dan?”

“Check if you have a missing person, a possible victim named Pamela Deering.” He spelled out the name. “It could be from the sixties or seventies.”

“How on earth did -?”

“Harry, you know how this has to be done. Yes or no?”

“Yes. Yes. Pamela Deering. Bring Peter with you. You got somewhere to stay?”

“I’ve arranged for unofficial digs at the old Gladesville Hospital on Victoria Road. There’s a coffee shop on the grounds called Cornucopia. Meet us there around mid-day Thursday, okay?”

“Cornucopia. Got it.”

“And bring a map of Rookwood Cemetery will you? The adjacent streets.”

“You think he lives in the area?”

“Peter needs it.”

“Done.”

At a convenience store roadstop in Branxton on their drive down that Thursday morning, Peter presented Dan with a third transcript.

“You need to factor this in,” was all Peter said as he handed it over. He looked more drawn than ever, as if he had barely slept the night before.

“Last night?”

“Last two nights.”

“You kept it to yourself.”

Peter ran a hand through his dark hair. “Look, I have to be sure, okay? I have to know that it’s not - just coming from me. That I can trust it.”

“And you do?”

“I’m satisfied now, Doctor Dan. I couldn’t make this up.” Dan leant against the car door and read the carefully typed words.

TRANSCRIPT THREE

[miscellaneous sounds]

“You’re the one who took the Kellar woman. Those poor women in Zurich. You’re going to take out all my teeth!”

[sounds]

“Take them out? Oh no. Not this time. Toother was very specific.”

[sounds, like things being shaken in a metal box]

“Toother?”

“Yes. Your name please?”

“What difference does it make?”

“But isn’t that what the experts advise? Always try to use names? Don’t let them dehumanize you. My name is Paul.”

“Your real name? Not Toother?”

“It’ll do for today.”

“Then I’ll be Janice. For today. Who is Toother?”

“Why, your host, Janice-for-today. The one who taught me all I know. Mostly he takes, but sometimes he gives.”

“Gives?”

“Sometimes. I have my little hammer and my little punch, see? And you have such a full, generous mouth. Today we are going to put teeth back in. Lots and lots, see?”

[more rattling sounds]

“Big teeth. Men’s teeth. We’re going to call you Smiler.”

[more rattling sounds]

[victim sobbing]

[victim screaming]

Dan left Peter to drowse for much of the journey south, but as they were on the bridge crossing the Hawkesbury River, he glanced aside and saw the dark eyes watching him.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Sorry for losing it back there,” Peter said, as if resuming a conversation from moments before. “Things are escalating for me too. With this latest - exchange - I get something about his trophies.”

Dan wished he weren’t driving right then. He pulled into the low-speed lane. “You see them?”

“Just lots of - grimaces. You know, teeth without lips. It’s the most terrifying thing. Bared teeth. No skin covering. Like eyes without lids. Horrible.”

“Are they on shelves, in drawers, boxes, what?”

“Displayed. Arranged somehow, secretly. Nothing like smiles or grins. I just see them as bared teeth, Doctor Dan. In a private space. Sorry. It isn’t much.”

“Try, Peter. Whatever you get. These voices -”

“It’s more than just voices. It’s reciprocal now.”

“Reciprocal? What does that mean?”

“It isn’t just going one way. He knows I’ve been listening. Accessing his files. He was very angry at first, but now he’s enjoying it. He’s fighting back.”

“How, Peter? How does he fight back?”

“Sending things, thoughts, images. They’re not mine. It’s more than delusions, Doctor Dan, I’m sure of it. More than my usual hypersensitivity. I just had to be sure.”

“Understood. Go on.”

“It’s Rookwood. All those graves. I keep seeing the bodies, vulnerable, helpless, keep seeing the teeth. They’re mostly all teeth, lots of dentures too. But there’s such anguish. Such rage.”

“Female burials?”

“Female and male. They’re all murmuring, chattering. Some desperately wanting to be picked, calling ‘Pick me! Pick me!’ Others hiding. Desperately hiding. As if alive. They’re not, but it’s like they are for him.”

“Is there a voice talking to you now?”

“Like a voice, Doctor Dan. Not a voice, but like one. I have certainties, just know things. He wants it like that.”

“He’s found someone he can share with. He hears the bodies calling to him you say?”

“How he sees them. Calling, begging. ‘Pick me! Pick me!’ Or hiding, resisting. Furious. Either way he sees it as liberation, sees them as all waiting to be chosen. The living victims too.”

“He’s saving them?”

“Liberating them is his word, yes. Living or dead, it doesn’t matter. It just means a different method of retrieval.”

“Retrieval!” Dan gave a laugh, completely without humour. “But he’s in the area?”

Peter shrugged. “It’s a huge cemetery, Doctor Dan. It’s not called the Sleeping City for nothing. He’s committed so many desecrations there. You can’t begin to know. Secretly. Passionately. This is his place for now.”

“Peter, I trust you completely. Just let me know what you get. Anything.”

It was strange to walk the grounds of the decommissioned, largely deserted mental hospital at Gladesville later that morning. The former wards and out-buildings had been turned into offices for various governmental health services, so by day it was like a stately, manicured, museum estate. There were still vehicles in the carparks, people walking the paths, roadways and lawns, giving the place a semblance of its former life.

Dan walked those daylight roads now, glad that he wasn’t doing it at night. After dark the offices and carparks were deserted, but had a strange new half-life, quarter-life, life-in-death. Instead of being left to stand as part of a vast col of blackness overlooking the Parramatta River, the old sandstone buildings and empty roads were lit, as if beckoning, urging, waiting for those willing to surrender bits of their sanity to make the place live again.

When Dan reached Cornucopia, he found Harry waiting at a table outside the cafe door.

“I’ve driven past this place a thousand times,” Harry said, “and never knew how big it was. Where’s Peter?”

“He sends his apologies. Said he wants to keep his mind off this for now.”

“Doesn’t want me asking questions,” Harry said. “I can understand that.”

“Harry -”

“Dan, I know how it can be for him. How it was. Just say hi for me.”

They went in and placed their orders, then sat watching the clear autumn sky above the sandstone walls. Harry took out his notebook.

“The Deering woman went missing from a holiday house at Cottesloe Beach in 1967.”

“That’s Western Australia, isn’t it?”

“Right. There was blood, definite signs of a struggle, but no body. And before you ask, there were no teeth fragments.”

“You’ve been thorough.”

“Now that there’s international scrutiny, we have different resources available.”

“What did you tell Sheehan?”

“That it came up in a missing persons keyword sweep. In the last three decades alone there are thirty-six names of missing persons nationally where blood mixed with saliva was found at locations where each of them was last seen.”

“Oral blood?”

“Right. So tell me what Peter has found.”

Dan passed him the transcript folder. “Harry, you might want to finish eating first.”

Dan found it hard to sleep that night. They were in separate rooms in an otherwise empty, former staff residence at the southern end of the hospital grounds, a converted single-storey brick house. It was a cool, late autumn night, pleasant for sleeping, but with all that had happened, Dan felt restless, too keenly aware of the empty roads outside and the lit, abandoned buildings, so normal, yet - the only word for it - so abnormal, waiting in the night.

The lights are on but nobody’s home.

The old euphemism for madness kept coming back to him. No doubt there were security personnel doing the rounds, one, possibly more, but, just the same, there was the distinct sense that Peter and he were the only living souls in the place.

Dan kept thinking of what Peter had told him that morning, of the bodies as repositories for teeth, grimaces, smiles, lying there waiting, hiding, some calling, chattering in darkness, wanting any kind of life, others dreading such attention.

It was absurd, foolish, but Rookwood Necropolis was barely ten kilometres away, 285 hectares of one of the largest dedicated cemeteries in the world, site of nearly a million interments.

In his half-drowsing state, Dan kept thinking, too, of the old 1963 movie, Jason and the Argonauts, of King Aeetes collecting and sowing the teeth from the skull of the slain Hydra, raising up an army of skeletons to combat Jason and his crew. Dan imagined human teeth being first plucked and then sown in Rookwood’s older, less tended fields. If the Hydra’s teeth raised up human skeletons, what sort of creature would human teeth raise up?

He must have fallen asleep at last, for the next thing he knew Peter was rousing him.

“Doctor Dan?” Peter said, switching on Dan’s bedside light.

“Peter? What is it?”

Peter was fully dressed, his hair and eyes wild. “He’s got someone! Right now. He has someone!”

Dan grabbed his watch, saw that it was 12:16 am. “He told you this?”

“No. But I saw anyway. He’s furious that I saw.”

Dan climbed out of bed, began dressing. “The reciprocal thing?”

“It backfired, yes. Showed me more than he wanted. He’s so angry, but he’s enjoying it too! He’s still enjoying it.”

“The drama. The added excitement.”

“Yes. We have to hurry!”

Dan reached for his mobile. “Where, Peter? I need to call Harry.”

“Good. Yes. An old factory site in Somersby Road. A few streets back from the cemetery. But I need to be there. I have to be closer, Doctor Dan. Her life depends on it.”

“Those women in the transcripts …?”

“Never woke up. None of them.”

“Understood.”

Harry answered his mobile before Dan’s call went to voicemail. He sounded leaden from sleep until Dan explained what they had. “You’ll be there before I will, Dan, but I’ll have two units there. Four officers. Best I can do for now. Where are you?”

“Still at the hospital. Heading out to the car. We’ll need an ambulance too, Harry. The Somersby Road corner closest to the cemetery. Tell them to wait for us. No sirens.”

“Right. You’re sure about this, Dan?”

“Peter is.”

“I’m on my way!”

“Harry, Peter stays out of it. How do we cover ourselves?”

“Anonymous tip. A neighbour heard screaming. I’ll have a word with whoever turns up. Go!”

Two patrol cars and an ambulance were waiting at the corner of Somersby Road, lights off, ready. There was no sign of Harry’s car yet.

“You Dr Truswell?” an officer asked, appearing at Dan’s driver-side window when he pulled up.

“Yes. Look -”

“Harry explained. I’m Senior Constable Banners. Warwick Banners. Just tell us where to go.”

“It’s there!” Peter said, pointing. “That building there!”

“Right. Follow us in but stay well back, hear?”

“We hear you,” Dan said, and turned to Peter. “You have to stay in the car, okay?”

“I know,” Peter said. “And keep the doors locked.”

Dan joined the police officers and paramedics waiting at the kerb. It took them seconds to reach the building two doors down, a large brick factory-front with closed and locked roller-doors and smaller street door. The premises looked so quiet and innocent in the night, and not for the first time Dan wondered if Peter could be mistaken.

There was a single crash as the street door was forced. In moments they were in off the street, standing in utter quiet, in darkness lit by the beams of five torches.

Again it was all so ordinary, so commonplace. But Dan knew only too well how such places could be terrifying in their simplicity. He had seen the Piggyback Killer’s rooms in Newtown, such a mundane blend of walls, hallways and furniture until you opened that one door, found the two coffins. He had seen Corinne Kester’s balcony view and the shed with its treacherous windows, had seen Peter Rait’s own room come alive in a wholly unexpected way right there at Blackwater. Such simple, terrifying places.

This, too, was such an ordinary, extraordinary space. Who knew what it had been originally: a warehouse, a meat packing plant, some other kind of factory, but taking up the entire ground floor, large and low-ceilinged, with painted out windows and a large, windowless inner section that took up most of the back half of the premises. Given the absence of screams being reported in the neighbourhood, it was very likely double brick or soundproofed in some other way.

Dan followed the police and paramedics as they pushed through the double doors into that inner precinct. At first, it seemed totally dark. Then Dan saw that intervening pillars concealed an area off to the left lit by a dim yellow bulb. The police deployed immediately, guns ready, and crossed to it. There was no-one there, just signs of where the occupant had been: a table and chair, a cupboard, a modest camp-bed with tangled bed-clothes, a hot-plate and bar fridge to one side where it all stretched off into darkness again.

Deliberate darkness. Darkness as controlled theatrical flourish, prelude to shocking revelations, precisely calculated anguish and despair.

The police led the way around more pillars. The stark white light of their torches soon found the old dentistry chair near the back wall, securely bolted to the floor, revealed the victim strapped down, alive but barely conscious, gurgling through a ruined mouth filled with her own blood.

The paramedics rushed to her aid, began working by torchlight as best they could.

Dan made himself look away, forced himself to look at what else there was in the shifting torchlight that wasn’t this poor woman, gurgling, groaning and sobbing. He noted the straps for securing the chair’s occupant, the elaborate padded clamp for holding the head, the metal tables and dental tools, other tools that had no place in dental work, the stains on the floor, dark and rusty-looking. The air smelled of disinfectant, urine and blood and something else, something sour.

An officer finally located a light switch. A single spot came on overhead, illuminating the chair and the woman, showing her ruined face and more: an array of mirrors on adjustable stands, video and audio equipment, shelves with old-style video and audio tapes, newer-style DVDs.

Souvenirs. An archive.

Dan scanned the row of audio tapes; the first were dated from the 60s.

Peter Rait’s voices.

But all so mundane in a worrying sense. Though terrible to say, these were the workaday trappings of sociopaths and psychopaths the world over, how they, too, made mundane lives for themselves out of their horrific acts.

But there was a large, heavy door beyond the woman in the chair, like a rusted walk-in freezer door with a sturdy latch. Dan focused his attention on it as soon as the torch beams revealed the pitted metal surface. An exit? A hideaway? Another inner sanctum in this hellish place?

An officer approached the door, weapon ready, and pulled it back.

It was a storeroom, a small square room empty but for a large chalk-white post nearly two metres tall. The post was as round as three dinner plates, set in concrete or free-standing, it was hard to tell, but standing like a bollard, one of those removable traffic posts used to stop illegal parking, though larger, much larger, and set all over with encrustations.

Not just any encrustations, Dan knew. Sets of teeth in false mouths, fitted at different heights, randomly but carefully, lovingly, set into the white plaster, fibre-glass, concrete, whatever it was. Dentures made from real teeth, corpse teeth, teeth taken post-and ante-mortem, some of them, all of them spring-loaded and deadly!

A trophy post.

This was where Toother kept his terrible collection, displayed it for his pleasure - and, yes, for the calculated and utter terror of others.

A door slammed somewhere in the building.

The police reacted at once. The officer holding the storeroom door let it go. It was on a counterweight and closed with a resounding boom. Another shouted orders. One hurried back to secure the main entrance. The rest rushed to search the outer premises, to find other exits and locate their quarry. Footsteps echoed in the empty space.

It all happened so quickly. Dan stood listening, hoping, trusting that Peter was still out in the car, safe.

Movement close by caught his attention, brought him back. The paramedics had the woman on their gurney at last. The awful gurgling had stopped and they were now wheeling her away.

For a terrible moment, Dan was left alone with the chair under its single spot, with the tables and instruments, the archive shelves and heavy metal door, now mercifully closed.

Then there were cries off in the darkness, sounds of running, more shouting. Two gunshots echoed in the night.

Then, in seconds, minutes, however long it was, Harry was there, two officers with him.

“We got him, Dan.”

“Harry. What? What’s that?”

“We got him. Toother. He’s dead.”

“Dead?” Peter was there too, appearing out of the darkness. “You did? You really got him?”

“We did, Peter,” Harry said. “He was running out when we arrived. Officer Burns and me. He was armed and wouldn’t stop. Colin here had to shoot.”

Dan placed a hand on Peter’s arm. “No more voices?”

“No,” Peter said. “No voices at all now.”

“We got him, Peter,” Harry said.

But Peter frowned, gave an odd, puzzled look as if hearing something, then crossed to the heavy door and pulled it back. “Harry, I don’t think we did. Not this time. Not yet.”

The storeroom was empty, of course.

Terry Dowling (www.terrydowling.com) is one of Australia’s most acclaimed, awarded and versatile writers of science fiction, dark fantasy and horror. As well as being author of the internationally acclaimed Tom Rynosseros saga, his US retrospective Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear earned him a starred review in Publishers’ Weekly and won the 2007 International Horror Guild Award for Best Collection.

Terry’s stories have appeared in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, The Year’s Best SF, The Year’s Best Fantasy, The Best New Horror and many times in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, as well as in such anthologies as Dreaming Down Under, Wizards and The Dark.

Table of Contents

Start