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  "I'm sorry, dear, you can't."

  "Huh?" I paused halfway up. I'd driven 1500 kilometers with not much more than fuel breaks; I was numb with fatigue, starting to see double.

  Great-aunt Tansy began cutting pastry mixture with a metal template shaped like a heart. She looked up at me, eyes wide and watery blue and honest. "This is Saturday night."

  "What there is left of it. I know, I should phone around, catch up with people, Tansy, but I'm bone tired. After I've have a good soak, I think I'll just slip into—

  "No, darling, that's what I'm saying. You can't have a shower upstairs. Every Saturday night, recently, there's been a corpse in that bathroom."

  Rather carefully, I came all the way down the stairs again, not clattering, and poured a cup of coffee and waited. Tansy did her magic with strawberry jam, popped the tray into the hot oven, began blending a fresh mix for date scones. She made the best jam tarts since the Queen of Hearts, which I guess made me the Knave, since I'd pilfered plenty of them over the years. She sat perched on a three-legged stool beside the heavy oak kitchen table, rolling an amorphous lump of putty in flour with an old-fashioned rolling pin. As ever, no conscious effort went into the expert motions of her hands: It was a tantra, as graceful and automatic as my martial-arts kata when I was in the zone. Absentminded as an old hen, Great-aunt Tansy, and twice as industrious.

  After a time, I said, "I can't have a bath tonight because you have a dead man in the bath." Anyone else, I'd have laughed, or said something scathing. But it was Aunt Tansy's testimony, and she was in her eighties, as fragile as expensive glassware.

  "You can use mine, August, downstairs. In fact, I think you should, and the sooner the better." Her white bun of ancient silky hair bobbed. "The fact of the matter is, my dear, you stink like a polecat." I watched her press down on the white, datey dough, and the clean round shapes of the scones came out of that putty and sat snugly on the tray she had waiting for them. I felt the sleepy contentment of that large old eccentric nineteenth-century house closing around me again, and my mind phased away from her mad statement. It was easy to forget at Aunt Tansy's, which is why I so greatly enjoyed my—I yanked myself out of distraction, forced myself to think about a corpse in a bathroom.

  "Always the same corpse, is it?" I drained the last of my cool coffee.

  "Heavens no, child, don't be absurd. There's a fresh one every week." She took the scones over to the oven, slid them in above the tarts. The tray rattled. "All shapes and sizes. Last week it was a nice-looking young fellow in a tweed suit." She came back to the table and held out her shaky cup; I poured more coffee. The poor thing was trembling, and it wasn't the caffeine; she was scared stiff. My bemusement turned to dismay. They keep promising a cure for Alzheimer's, but as far as I knew firm kindness seemed the only available prescription. Tansy had done a lot for me.

  "What happens to these bodies?" Pretty difficult, humoring an old lady's delusions without making it obvious. And Tansy was sharp.

  "They're always gone in the morning. Sometimes a bit of blood, you know, but I wash out the tub with citric cleanser and you'd never know there's been a body there."

  Her cup clattered faintly on its saucer. I was getting scared myself.

  "How long's this been going on?"

  "It started just after you left for the bush. Let's see—six of them so far. And another one tonight, I expect."

  I had seen some strange things in my life, not the least of them my lunatic school friend Davers running about an Adelaide football field in cleated boots and his sister's frilly dress, pursued by jocks, but never anything so weird or bloodcurdling as quiet little Great-aunt Tansy talking about corpses in her upstairs bathroom.

  "You've told the police, I suppose?"

  She gave me a scornful look.

  "August, they'd have me committed to an insane asylum."

  Her trembling worsened. I felt ashamed. You didn't just drive your aged relative to the local clinic and ask them to run some tests on her sanity. Or did you? I was starting to think that I'd need to call my aunt Miriam and her husband Itzhak in on this, and did some calculations. No, it was still only about six in the morning in Chicago, which is where they were living at the time. Let it ride, I told myself, see what we can work out right here and now. Besides, incredibly enough, some part of me was beginning to assume that something strange was happening in the old house, something she'd misinterpreted rather unfortunately. I'd never known Aunt Tansy to be entirely wrong about anything important. Could this be the deranged work of one or more of her psychic clientele? Maybe she'd given one of them a bum steer, and this was payback time.

  "I'll just go up and have a quick look," I said, and took our cups to the sink.

  "You be careful, August," she told me. To my immense surprise, she reached down and held out an old cricket bat that had been leaning against one table leg on her side. "Take this. Give the buggers a good whack for me."

  Then she insisted on a final cup of cocoa for both of us, so I rolled my eyes to heaven and gave in. I packed Great-aunt Tansy off to bed early in her slightly sour old-lady-scented ground-floor bedroom at the front of the house, and went upstairs.

  ***

  I opened the bathroom door and gazed around carefully. Tiled walls, pale green, pleasantly pastel. It struck me as odd, peering about the large room, that for years I'd bathed here and made stinks without ever really looking at it. You take the familiar for granted. Two large windows, dark as night now, gave on to trimmed grass two full stories below, and the fruit trees and organic vegetable plots of the back garden. Between them a pink washbasin stood on a pedestal, set beneath a big antique wall-mounted mirror, at least a meter square, with a faint coppery patina, the silvering crazed at the edges. The claw-footed bath itself filled the left-hand corner, opposite a chain-flush toilet bowl of blue-patterned porcelain like a Wedgwood plate, next to the oak door with its ornate geometrical carvings. The toilet's cedar timber seat was down, naturally, and masked by a rather twee fluffy woolen cover that Tansy might well have knitted herself. A flower-patterned plastic screen hung on a steel rail around the bathtub, depending from white plastic rings as large as bangles. Tansy did not approve of separate shower stalls; a bath was how she'd washed as a girl, and the wide old fixed showerhead was barely tolerated. I didn't mind, I enjoyed a long soak as much as anyone three or four times my age.

  I pulled the screen back on its runner and studied the bathtub, which of course was empty, fighting an urge to throw off my sweaty clothes and jump in for a steaming soak. The ludicrous possibility that six corpses had shared that bathtub hung in my mind, even as I shook my head with self-mockery.

  The place smelled wonderful; that's what I was noticing most of all. Scalloped shells at bathtub and basin alike held a deep green translucent chunky oval of Pears Soap, a green deeper than jade, and its aroma seemed to summon me back to childhood, when my mother washed me with the perfumed scents of cleanliness and herself, then dried me briskly with a fluffy towel smelling of sunlight. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, caught myself sighing, opened them. Just an ordinary bathroom, really. Perhaps cleaner than most. Aunt Tansy was punctilious. The house was large and rambling but tidy; with the help of a middle-aged "treasure," Mrs. Abbott, who came by twice a week and took over most of the vacuuming and dusting, she ran a taut ship. A ship insufficiently taut, apparently, to prevent a weekly visitation from the dead.

  I glanced at my watch. Little wonder I was tired, it was nearly 11:00. Great-aunt Tansy was a woman of regular habits. She always watched television while baking until the end of the Saturday-night movie, cleaned her teeth, was in bed by 11:30. Her Saturday corpse must put in its appearance by the time she switched the TV off at 11:15 or so, and be gone when she rose for church at 7:30 on Sunday morning.

  "Madness," I muttered aloud, removing my heavy boots, and climbed into the bath, holding the bat in one hand. By leaving a gap between the plastic screen and the tiled wall, I was able to watch the closed
and locked windows through the small aperture. This meant sitting on the slippery rounded edge of the bathtub and stretching my neck into a ridiculous position, but I decided a few minutes discomfort for the cause was worth it. I thought of Tansy's gesture in insisting on shared cocoa and wished for something equally mundane to calm my jitters. Half my friends in school would have lighted up a cigarette, but the foul things made me sick, and besides even if I smoked there'd be little gain in advertising my presence. I caught myself. To whom? This was a delusion, an old lady's mad fancy.

  The silence took on an eerie aspect. In her room below, Tansy might be sleeping by now, or perhaps lying awake, eyes wide and fixed on her dim ceiling. In the bathroom, no sound but my own breathing, not even the movement of wind in the trees below. I felt for a moment as if mine were the sole consciousness active in the whole world. A trickle of cold sweat ran down my back, something I've only ever read about. In the last few weeks I had driven a powerful little bike across vast plains, much of the landscape nearly barren due to the El Niño drought and maybe the greenhouse effect, I'd once come close to a fall from the skidding machine under the hooves of a hundred spooked cattle, and that had scared me without getting in my way; that was fear in the service of sharpened instincts and self-preservation. In Tansy's deathly quiet bathroom, I felt like wetting my pants. I got out again, lifted the wooly toilet seat, pissed for a while, flushed, left the seat up. This was my bathroom now, by default. I climbed back into the bath, cool on my feet through the socks, sat down again on my narrow perch.

  My neck hurt. I got a sudden picture of how grotesque I looked, craning on the edge of the tub, laughed softly to myself and stood up, unkinking my spine, put my hand on the curtain to yank it back. The window nearest to me screeked ever so slightly, and I heard it open a little.

  This was impossible. I was on the second floor of a tall old structure without fire escape or any of that modern namby-pamby nonsense. I'd checked carefully to confirm my memory of the garden: no new lattices, the trees were all sensibly positioned meters away to prevent fire hazards, and Tansy's ladder was inside the house, not even outside in the locked shed. Dugald O'Brien was not raising a single whuffle in the night, let alone a bark at intruders. What the hell?

  My heart slammed and my mouth was dry. I pushed against the edge of the bath, back corrugated by the tiles of the wall, stared with difficulty through the gap. The nearer window was quietly pushed all the way open. I heard a muffled scuffle and a summery female back appeared in the window frame. A long brown leg came over the windowsill, probed for the floor. My boots were sitting in plain view beside the toilet. Well, lots of people leave their clothes scattered about. Not in Tansy's house. But then these intruders would hardly be familiar with the nuances of Tansy's housekeeping policies. Don't be ludicrous, August, what would you know about what they know about?

  There's a half-naked woman climbing in through a second-story window!

  She stood in the bathroom, her back still to me. It didn't seem right to whack her with the cricket bat, which I still clutched in my numb right hand. Sensible but unsporting, and it wouldn't teach me anything about her bizarre activities. She was leaning out into the air, grunting and heaving, and suddenly hauled in the heavy front end of a very dead adult male. The body stuck, shaking the window frame.

  "Don't shove, Maybelline," she said angrily. "You got the shoulders jammed."

  There was a tricky moment when the corpse withdrew a little, as she angled the shoulders, then surged back into the room to join the two of us. The far end of the corpse came into view, supported by an overweight muscular woman. Her biceps rippled impressively as she pushed the stiff hindquarters over the sill. The first woman let the carcass thud to the tiles. With a businesslike grunt, Maybelline vaulted into the room. She was hairy-legged; like the first woman, she wore a brief summer garment. I thought I was drugged, or hallucinating, and then the first woman turned to face the bathtub, and I was sure of it.

  Beauty like this you do not see, I told myself numbly, not in the real world. (That estimate was so astonishingly wrong, in such an astonishing way, that I simply note it here for the record.) Neither of the young women was much older than me. University students, maybe, playing a preposterous prank. They moved about their macabre task with dispatch and grace, making a minimum of noise.

  "Help me with his clothes, loon."

  Inside half a minute they'd stripped him of his shoes, bloody suit, and underwear. No attempt to search his jacket for wallet, nor to rifle his pockets. These were not pranksters, and certainly not simple thieves. He was blubbery and covered in hair about the back, shoulders and chest in the Mediterranean fashion; his hairstyle had been a comb-over, which flopped repulsively to one side as they jostled him. I saw a large black hole in his left breast, and thick, oozing blood. My own heart was ready to expire from overwork. The tough wench took the murdered man under his armpits and hoisted him toward the bath.

  "Loon, get the feet."

  She wasn't saying loon, it was more like "lyoon." Lune, the Moon seen from France? Wait for it, I thought. Surpri-ise! Beautiful Lune grasped the edge of the plastic screen, threw it back along its runner. I stood up fast, bowed with a sweep of my right hand, and stepped out of the bathtub.

  Both women stood petrified. In that moment of silence, stocky Maybelline's grip failed in fright, and the corpse hit the tiles again with a flat, unpleasant thump. "Fuck!" she said, and shot out through the window. I'll never again underestimate the speed of a corpulent human. Lune gave me a look of lovely, utter confusion, let go of the man's legs.

  "Ember?" she said. "What are you—? Your shroud is..." She trailed off, while I wondered what she was babbling about. "You're not Ember," she said, then, and bolted for the window.

  "Sorry," I said, and slammed the cricket bat down on the sill. She jerked back her fingers, stared at me in outrage, open-mouthed, and flew at me like a cat. I was brought up nicely never to strike a woman. The corpse was leering up at us. I fell over on top of him, bringing Lune down as well, pinning her arms. She had the most improbable cobalt eyes and smelled really, really nice.

  "Get off me, you oaf. You stink! How long is it since you had a bath?"

  It was so terribly unfair I just burst out laughing and let go of her.

  Big mistake.

  ***

  Lune had me in a headlock a second after I'd released her. She smacked the top of my head against the toilet bowl. I yowled and got free, stumbled to my feet, head ringing, slammed down the open window and locked it. In the night beyond, as the pane came down, I saw no sign of Maybelline or the crane that must have hoisted two women and a dead man up to this floor. I locked the window, and the cricket bat caught me behind the right knee.

  "Ow! Fuck! Will you stop that!" I yelped. As I turned I saw her in the big mirror, bat raised for a lethal stroke at my bruised skull. She was off balance for a moment as she brought it down; I sidestepped, kicked one leg of the corpse sideways to catch her next step. Lune fell into my arms. I was shockingly aroused, and tussled her into a sitting position on the toilet. The seat was up, and she cried out indignantly as her backside hit the rim. One leg came up and her foot caught me in the thigh; something flashed, light off metal, and I went shudderingly cold. From the heated rack I grabbed a thick, fluffy, warm towel and shoved it in her face, grasping her right foot and dragging it up so that she slid forward on the toilet, banging her spine. There was a small row of silvery hieroglyphs carved into the instep of her foot.

  She threw off the towel, saw my shock. I assumed she failed to recognize its nature. "The mark of the beast," she said sarcastically.

  "Are you going to stay put, or do I have to hurt you? I'd rather not hurt you," I said. Then: "What?"

  "My ID number," she gibed. "My use-by date. That's what you think, I suppose? Another stupid mutilation fad."

  I wasn't thinking anything of the sort, but it was a useful suggestion.

  "Yeah, well, it's preferable to a bolt throu
gh your tongue, I suppose." I have nothing against body jewelry, but it seemed sensible to follow her lead up the garden path. I had the cricket bat by this point, and sat down opposite her on the edge of the bath. "How did you get in? Who's this?" I nudged the dead guy who lay with one leg stuck out.

  "The world is not as it seems," she told me. She dropped the toilet seat and cover and sat poised on it. I had never seen anyone so gloriously lovely—not at the movies, not on television, certainly not in this slightly down at heel suburb.

  "No shit," I said. Without taking my eyes off her, I twisted at my waist and pushed down one sock, left it dangle for a moment from my big toe before falling to the tiles. The silver carven hieroglyphs on my sole were pretty much the same as Lune's. Her throat convulsed. I could almost see the cogs whirring in her brain.

  After that long moment of silence, she asked faintly, "What do they call you?"

  "They call me August, Lyoon. They call me that because it's my name."

  Lune was breathing hard, but keeping herself under control. I could see her make up her mind. She was so beautiful I wanted to whinny. I reached down and pulled my sock back on with one hand, getting the heel stuck under my insole. Tansy had something to do with this. It had to be her doing. Or my dead parents. Lune said, then, "You've read Charles Fort, August?"

  "No." What, now we'll have a reading group? I glanced at the locked windows, waiting nervously for the backup troops to come barging in, maybe waving copies of the collected works of Charles Fort, whoever he was.

  "He said, 'I think we're property.' And you are, you poor goose."

  I didn't laugh; it was too depressing for laughter. Aunt Tansy downstairs drifting in senile delusions, this gorgeous person upstairs heading for the same funny farm. No, wait. Tansy wasn't delusional. There was a corpse, and so presumably one had been delivered on each of the previous six Saturdays. Delivered by women couriers, for all I knew, then disappeared in the early hours of Sunday morning. It didn't bear thinking about.