SIX - 1952
The side door was unlocked.
Josie pulled it open, slipped inside, and closed it quietly behind him. The hallway was dark, but the street lights shown in through the windows and he could see his feet as he walked.
All the houses on Tamarama Street had been there for a long time. They were wooden, old, had original moldings and door frames. The floors were planked wood, and they often creaked and moaned under the weight of feet. This house smelled musty, mostly because it hadn't been lived in for a long time.
The house was small, and the hallway was narrow, a tunnel. Josie felt the walls close in, felt like he might be closed into a coffin. His breathing went hard and deep in his chest. But he kept going, deeper and deeper into the dark, one foot in front of the other. He could see a light glowing from under the door of the room, two doors down on the right. He walked slowly past the first door.
He hadn't noticed the first door was cracked open, just slightly. And that one eye stared out at him. Watching. Josie took another careful step. He could almost reach the door handle to the second room.
But then, before he had time to fight back or get out, the door of first room swung open, and he felt something jump out behind him.
"Bahhhhhhhhhhhhh!"
Josie spun around. His eyes wide with fire and fear.
It was a trap.
It was some kind of monster. Its face was grotesque, mangled and ensconced in a bright shining light, so that every sinew and flap of skin was visible. Josie panicked, stumbled backwards and fell on the floor.
That's when the monster lumbered toward him, stood over him, and yanked and pulled at its face. It ripped its skin off, chunks of thick skin and fat from his face flew down around Josie. The beast was transforming, melting, morphing into something else, something possibly much worse.
Then, the monster pulled the last bits of skin away.
Josie caught a glimpse. He saw what was under the mask.
A grinning girl. He blinked and looked again.
It was a girl, and she wasn't just grinning, she was laughing hysterically.
"It's a mask!" she said. "Isn't that super-fun?"
Josie sputtered at her, his mind reeling. He was confused and embarrassed.
"I make these cool molds out of clay and then poor in liquid latex, and paint them..." Emerald Phan explained.
Emerald held out her hand to help Josie up, but he refused it and got himself up.
"OMG! The look on your face!" she cackled.
"Why did you do that?" Josie's heart was beating so fast he thought his chest might burst.
Getting to her house had been such a huge risk. He had to move bush to bush, tree to tree across the street, making sure Mrs. Kippelibby wasn't staring out the window, waiting for any opportunity to call the police. And just when he ran, bent over across the street, lept over her fence, bolted up onto the side porch and let himself in through the screen door, he was beside himself with panic, with the idea that one of those reporters would train their cameras on him, that he would be thrown in Juvie.
Emerald's little prank made him furious. He barely knew her and already he was sure he hated her.
But Emerald seemed completely unfazed by Josie's anger. It occurred to him that she might not care what anyone thought of her.
"C'mon in Giraffe-Boy." she said, grabbing his arm and pulling him into her room.
"I'm Emerald."
"Josie," he said, absent-mindedly, look around.
"I know, Giraffe-Boy."
Josie got it. "Giraffe-boy." Because he was tall. Original. Like he had never heard a tall joke before. She already annoyed him. He wished he hadn't come here at all.
He stepped inside her door, and she shut it behind him.
Emerald's room was not at all what he expected.
"She's a slob," he thought.
There were stacks of unpacked boxes, clothes matted into a ball on the floor, scuba equipment lobbed into the corners, stacks of books, notebooks, ocean maps and a jar of pens and sharpies on her nightstand. There was a whole work table with plastic mannequin heads, and masks hanging on them. Old molds were heaped on top of one another on one end, a basket brimming with paints and brushes on the other end.
Josie walked over and looked at the masks. Some were bloody, some with gashes cut into the cheeks, some screaming in horror, some looked like they were covered in charred flesh. One had a cleaver poking of out the top of its skull, with brain matter running down on side of its face. They were all gruesome. He had no idea how she slept in this room, with all these gory eyes following her around.
"I like horror movies," she said bluntly, watching his face.
She pointed to a tray of fake teeth, some perfect, some broken, some decayed and rotted, black and ground down to nubs.
"Girl's gotta have a hobby," she said, with more than a tinge of sarcasm in her voice.
On the other side of the room, there were photos haphazardly tacked up onto the walls, a woman on a boat, surrounded by sharks, dead and hanging from hooks, their blood puddling at her feet. There were articles from magazines, newspapers. Josie recognized her dad in many of the photos.
"Where's your dad?" Josie asked, more to fill the void than anything.
"At the lab. He's been working on the disappearance of the small fish along the coast," she told him, "He thinks it's global warming..."
Emerald made a point of dramatically rolling her eyes.
Josie didn't say anything. He waited, not wanting to be the first one to mention the monster in case she was playing him, ridiculing him, setting him up, recording their conversation.
He remembered the prank Grotty played on him in science. Wasn't everyone out to set him up?
"You know it's Bangkok, right?" she said, incredulously.
"What do you know about Bangkok?" he asked her.
And with that, Emerald walked over to a plush blue curtain that covered one wall and drew it back. It was a whiteboard, huge, filling up the wall, on it were maps, photos, newspaper clippings, old pages torn out of textbooks, underwater photos, and scribbled notes written in different colored sharpies, with arrows linking those notes to different photos of people and places.
It was truly the most impressive thing Josie had ever seen.
"You can't tell the adults," she said conspiratorially. "Grown-ups are brain dead. They think you're crazy when you talk about sea monsters."
"Tell me about it," Josie mumbled, getting closer to the board to get a better look. It was the truest statement he had ever heard.
"How?...How do you know about Bangkok?"
"I've been following him. My mother, her name was Imogen...she went missing..." she walked up to the board and pointed to a newspaper clipping about her mother's disappearance. Imogen was boarding a shark finning vessel in the photo.
Josie thought she looked determined and brave, very sure of what she was doing. Unlike him. His whole life was uncertainty of purpose. He was nothing like Emerald's mother. He could never be that brave.
"I think Bangkok is behind her disappearance. It's connected somehow. I'm going to get to her before he kills her."
Josie looked at her face, the small lamp on her nightstand showered her with the glow of yellow light, even though she was quite tiny, she was formidable.
"How do you know she's alive?"
"I just know."
That was all she said, and he half thought she was crazy. How could Imogen have saved herself from the monster all this time? If she were alive, wouldn't she just come home? Wouldn't she call? Surely, she must be dead and Emerald was in some kind of denial. Surely she just wanted to believe her mother was still alive.
And yet, he was sure Trinket was still alive.
Josie saw one particular newspaper clipping. It was yellowed and torn at the edges, a black-and-white photo of a man and a woman being hung from a gallows. A mob of people stood around watching them die. Josie moved the tack and took the clipping off the board.
A chill rain the length of his spine and down his legs.
"That's Petros and Ana Papadopoulis. That photo was taken in 1952. It's just one of the stories..."
"Stories?" Josie asked, watching Emerald's eyes get thin and intense.
"There are dozens of stories," she tapped a few keys on a tablet and showed him news story after news story, "people who've been accused of killing children, that never laid a hand on them."
"Like me?"
"You are just one of them. This guy, Petros, came to live on the coast. He was from Greece and he came here with his wife, Ana, and baby son, Clio. They settled into a small house near Maroubra. One day the boy was playing by the sea, and then disappeared. All they found was a his white sailor hat with little blue anchors embroidered on it.
Josie leaned in to look at a black-and-white newspaper photo. It was the baby from the Organic Food Store.
He felt dizzy and cold. he stumbled back into a chair.
"They searched for days and never found Clio's body. The police blamed the parents, said they abused the boy and killed him, drowned him in the sea when no one was looking."
Emerald touched the photo of the hanging.
"They said Ana and Petros had gone mad, talking of monsters and giant squid, and nightmares. They were plagued with nightmares," Emerald said, tacking the photo back on the board.
"All of Sydney showed up to see it." Emerald told him, all hushed and quiet.
"While they strangled, people watching said Petros and Ana kept cried out for 'Bangkok'...When they died, the crowd cheered."
They were both quiet for a moment.
"That's going to be me, isn't it?" he asked.
Josie thought he might be suffocating. An invisible cord tightened across his chest.
"They won't hang you," she said, matter-of-factly, "They don't do that anymore...But they'll let you rot in prison."
"Trinket is alive," he blurted out, bringing himself to his feet. "In the Organic Food Store."
"How do you know, Giraffe-boy?" she was looking at him now. He could see her out of the corner of his eye. She believed him.
"The same way you know your mom is still alive."
Emerald didn't know what to say.
"....And Bangkok is out to sea," he added.
Then, Emerald was off running about her room, furiously rummaging through boxes and bins for supplies. She threw torches, rope, a crow bar and box cutters into her pack.
"What are you doing?"
"If Bangkok is gone, and Trinket is alive in the Organic Food Store, we have to get her out of there...tonight."
"Us? No, not us....are you crazy?"
There was no way he was going to break into the store. The news crews were parked out front, the police, what they all wanted was for him to screw up. He was crazy for even being in her house. Why had he risked it all for this crazy girl who wanted to break into a building and play the big hero? He was so mad at himself. He should've just stayed in his room. Bad things happened when he ventured out into the world, all kinds of conflicts with other people, messiness.
Josie Brown hated messiness.
"This is stupid," Josie said, although what he really thought was that she was stupid.
All he wanted was to run back home and pull the blankets up around his head and wait for all of this to go away.
And that's what he decided to do.
"I'm out of here." Josie told her, and put the hood up on his jacket and walked out of her room.