Kalina
Moderator
Cemetery Rose by Leigh Blackmore
"Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones achase,
Than, moonless, one's own self encounter
In lonesome place"
-Emily Dickinson
It didn't start out as a terrifying experience. Kilworth wasn't the sort to be easily frightened by things as insubstantial as moving shadows, or by wind shaking the dry leaves on the cemetery's huge trees, or even by the proximity of hundreds of long-dead corpses.
Ray Kilworth knew photography, if he knew anything: its sights, its sounds - its smells even. Expert in using the old techniques, he was particularly proud of his albumen prints, his way with a chemical bath, the fine effects he could produce by using collodion negatives. Although the process was slow, he liked the warm image tones he could obtain by using printing-out paper. He even occasionally used calotypes, as he loved their light-diffusing effect. When really bored, he would make simple carbon prints. He did his burning in by hand; digital was too clinical for his taste. He was adept at bringing out an image's finer shades in the developing tank: It was old-fashioned, but it felt right to him: something about its mystery, the way the latent image would come up like a shimmering ghost.
Lately he had become fixated on the idea of photographing cemeteries. Someone had once shown him a book by New Orleans photographer Clarence John Laughlin; he had been struck forcibly by the photographers' vision of old houses came up, spooky and vine-covered, the trees surreal, ghostly. Another of his rolemodels was David Robinson, who could conjure the warm sensuality from the cold marble women of European cemeteries.
He put down his copy of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience , which he'd studied at high school, and turned to again recently, looking for – what? Solace? A deeper meaning to his current existence? He sat absently staring out over the back garden of his place at Berala, which overlooked Route 45 Olympic Drive. Out there was a small plot of ground, partly covered with stones, with a spindly, leafless tree. At the very back was a shed he'd converted to a darkroom.
Next morning, Kilworth set off to see his friend Alex Thornton, a specialist in the cultivation of rare flowers. The festival banners along George St flapped and fluttered beneath a sky the colour of dirty cottonwool; the weak sun reduced the streets to tracts of dull twilight.
Now, a fresh idea occurred to him. He had a catchy title – CRUCIFIXATION. That would sell it. And the perfect location - Rookwood Necropolis: a ghoul's paradise, the largest nineteenth century cemetery in the world, located within spitting distance of Sydney's Olympic Park precincts, and only a stone's throw from his own home. He had grown up in its vicinity, and something about the great sagging headstones and the dismal, overhanging foliage seemed to beckon him. The ‘necropolis' (he felt the meaning – ‘city of the dead'- shiver through his bones) a sprawling, mile-square place as extensive as Sydney's CBD, was a suburb in itself.
The place was huge, a silent world full of crumbling vaults and Victorian architecture, an Australian Highgate. He decided to immortalise it in haunting black and white.
###
"Tell me about the Cemetery Rose" said Kilworth, leaning back in a chair opposite Thornton's desk. He had heard vaguely of a rare rose that grew in Rookwood Cemetery and thought it might add interest to his shoot.
Alex smiled. "Sure. At Rookwood, the flower is a damask-style rose so rare that its species can't be positively identified. OK, the Cemetery Rose is not as rare as say, a Blue Rose, or that rose-breeder's fable, the true Black Rose. But Ray - it's rare, rare enough to be valuable. Rare enough to be worth photographing. Rare enough that if one could identify it, perhaps breed it commercially, you could make a lot of money."
Kilworth liked the sound of that. "What's so special about Rookwood?"
"Shit" said Alex, "the place is a virtual time warp; it contains some of the rarest specimens of heritage roses in Australia. Look, rose gardens in cemeteries generally are quite common, real Cemetery Roses less so. They are typically "found" roses, in other words, roses not known to be widely disseminated. Look here". Alex had pulled a large rose encyclopedia from his crowded bookshelf and was pointing to photos as he flipped through, for Kilworth's benefit. "There are a couple of ‘Cemetery Roses' in the U.S – the hybrid Tea rose (Bot: Chinensis), the Titus County one, which is dark red. There is a North Texas one, which as it fades, darkens to near black, but doesn't drop its petals. There's a Chester County one, which is light pink. There's also a rose known as the Cemetery Keeper's Peach Tree Rose."
"Yeah? What's this about a Blue Rose?"
Alex chuckled, and shook his head. "A rose breeder's pipedream. Researchers have been trying for years to hybridise one, utilising transgenic technology."
Kilworth fought his impulse to interrupt. He was getting impatient.
"The genetic sequences encode flavonoid pathway enzymes," Alex continued, "enabling manipulation of the flower's pigments. I've talked to companies in Australia and the Netherlands which have engaged in the technological race; all of ‘em have patented technology to produce the Blue Rose but none of ‘em have succeeded – yet."
"Fascinating," said Kilworth. "And you mentioned a Black Rose?"
Alex spread his hands flat, palms downward, a dismissive gesture. "Maybe one day we'll succeed in hybridising a Blue Rose, but the Black Rose is a myth. Oh, I've seen some that came close. There's Black Jade, a very dark glossy red variety with blackish highlights. There are natural roses that start black in bud, but which open a shade of purple or deep crimson. But as for a real Black Rose – forget it, my friend. You might as well look for the Holy Grail".
###
Late that same day, Kilworth walked briskly along Railway St, Lidcombe, past tawdry shops, the air of failure around their doorways. Old-age pensioners shuffled across the pavement in that peculiar way that made you unsure whether to move left or right.
He passed the mason's shop, its yard cluttered with granite and marble bric a brac destined for grave monuments.
The East St entry gateway was surrounded by streets crowded with traffic. Crows cawed endlessly from the eucalypts beyond. As Kilworth went through the main gate, the hum of human commerce began to die down. Welcome to the Necropolis. Kilworth noticed at once the curious combination of sounds here, so unlike the normal ambient background of city streets. There was the wind rustling through the trees, the chirp of birdsong, and only a faint, subdued burr of distant traffic.
Many things were whispered about Rookwood- The Sleeping City, they called it - even when he had been at school near here. Since that time, Kilworth had nursed a perverse fascination with its atmosphere, the way brittle brown leaves would tumble between the graves in the dark.
His destination was the Museum of Funerary History. He pulled out the map of the grounds he'd picked up at the main entrance gate, noting the museum's location. It took him longer than he'd anticipated to walk through the extensive grounds to reach it. His backpack slowed him only a little, but a trickle of sweat broke out on his brow as he laboured between the graves. His equipment was light and simple. When in the field, he carried two Nikon FM12s, each with a 55mm lens. In his backpack he stashed a 200mm telephoto and a 24mm wide-angle lens. He liked to take all his photos with natural light and a handheld camera (no flash, no tripod). He had thrown in, as usual, four rolls of Kodak TMX400 and a couple of portable arc lights for night work. He generally relied on good old-fashioned feel, the camera's weight in his hands, his instinctive judgement of how to combine light, focus, depth of field.
Reaching the Museum's entrance on Memorial Ave, Kilworth glanced across at the Jewish section, with its well-kept lawns, and black marble headstones with elaborate Hebrew inscriptions.
A black-clad group of family and friends solemnly surrounded a grave. Further away, nearer one of the perimeter fences, he saw a rug spread on the grass. A family handed each other sandwiches, a thermos flask between them on the rug. The place was obviously popular with some as a picnic spot. In the other direction he glimpsed the cinnamon blur of a cat streaking across a pathway between graves.
Out of nowhere, a raggedy woman suddenly accosted him.
"Roses!" she squawked, thrusting a handful of large blooms at him. ‘Five dollars, five dollars!"
"No thanks" said Kilworth firmly. She looked disappointed, and headed off towards the picnicking family. He watched her retreat, a large ungainly woman clad in a scrappy red dress. She tried her luck with the picnickers, but she had none; they turned their backs on her. He couldn't help wondering what she was up to, but as she disappeared amongst the graves, he realised he'd arrived at the historic 1925 Rookwood Crematorium. Inside was the Museum of Funerary History. Entering through the heavy wooden door, he gazed around; unusual caskets and urns from around the world filled niches along the walls, and various glass cabinets arrayed throughout the foyer, but he was looking for something different – some information that would give him a focus for his photographs.
He intended to look up a few local legends at the Museum library first.
The sullen man at the office spoke little, directing Kilworth with nods and gestures to the area where he could find the information he sought.
In a volume titled Legends of Rookwood, he found various accounts of unusual happenings in Rookwood over the years since the eighteen-hundreds. William Davenport, a famous spiritualist, had been buried at Rookwood. Davenport was one of two brothers (Ira was the other) who had become a sensation due to their ‘supernatural' powers – instruments played, bells rang, objects flew about. In Australia in 1910, the magician Houdini had visited Rookwood and made a point of restoring Davenport's grave. Another legend that caught his eye was a sketchy tale of a creature composed of sticks, rags, leaves and earth that was reputed to haunt the grounds in the late nineteenth century.
Kilworth turned the pages, absorbed. Yet another nineteenth century legend told of a butler who had lived at The Gables, a Victorian-era house in East St opposite the cemetery. This butler, axed to death in 1865 by a guest at the house, was somehow linked to the rumours of a dark, thin figure and his pet or companion, a spiderlike creature. They were said to roam the cemetery at will, and had frightened several gravediggers over the years with their nocturnal appearances. In the 1960's, there had been incidents of vandalism in the cemetery, and the suggestion that these had been connected with black magic rites.
.
Kilworth began to feel cramped and uncomfortably hot in the Museum. He went outside, and toiled along the nearest pathway. Clumpy grass grew wild and rank alongside the path, yet the plentiful roses seemed carefully tended. Apparently a small team of gardeners and heritage enthusiasts were slowly restoring both the gravestones and the original plantings. Magnolias and camellias flourished amongst the lantana along the roads. In Spring the cemetery would explode with flowers, but there were hefty fines for picking any.
Dusk was falling as he came to the florist's, a small kiosk covered with flaking paint. Kilworth spoke to the bored-looking man at the desk, a reedy dark-complexioned fellow. The flowers that stood around him on the counter were more wilted than he was.
"Excuse me" Kilworth began.
"Can I help you?" The man did not raise his eyes from the newspaper spread on the counter in front of him.
"Yes – ahh – I wanted to buy some flowers." It was the obvious excuse for putting a query about the woman who had crossed his path earlier.
"Yeah," said the man, continuing to read his paper.
Why are people so goddamned prickly?" thought Kilworth. As the fellow met his gaze, Kilworth found himself looking into a pair of eyes the colour of cold porridge.
"I ran into a woman selling roses before," Kilworth blurted out.
The man shook his head. "Don't have nothin' to do with her".
"I'm sorry?"
"That's Rose. Cemetery Rose, we call her. Bloody mad. Get your flowers here, nice and fresh.
She's no good, sleeps in the bloody cemetery all the time." He rolled his eyes.
"A bit mental, is she?" Kilworth tried to humour him, despite the fact that the man kept the right side of his face constantly turned away.
"We got everything you want here. What you want today, sir?"
.
Kilworth looked around at the poor selection of flowers, trying to find a bunch that was fresh. "Those look good to me," he said, pointing to a group of mixed colours.
"Sure. That'll be ten dollars". The vendor held the flowers up to drain the water from the stems, then gave them a good shake. He started to wrap them in clear cellophane.
The booth at his back was dim and shadowy. Kilworth thought he caught a glimpse of movement back there – someone else? Something seemed to be squirming in the thick darkness at the man's back. In Kilworth's mind awoke an old darkness, somehow akin to this one.
The man cleared his throat noisily. "Any memorial ribbons with that?"
"Ah – no thanks, that'll be all."
The man shrugged. Again Kilworth sensed a slight movement in the dark. Someone or something was lurking back there, just out of sight. It made him feel uneasy. His hand shook a little as he handed across a ten-dollar note, which the man took and put in a change drawer.
"That Rose, forget her". Was there a threatening tinge in his voice, as well as warning?
Kilworth was already walking away. Officious little shit, he thought. He continued down the drive towards the Anglican section as a light rain began to fall.
Looking for shelter from the rain, Kilworth was drawn to a skeletal-looking building surrounded by graves and palm-trees. It was the Anglican Ornamental Brick Resthouse. The rough red and white bricks of the walls, pierced by arched windows, were stained by graffiti: "Stick loves Kathy", "Nazi Punks", "Danielle Woo here 8/7/87". Typical teenager stuff, rebellious assertions of identity daubed in messy white letters. Dirt and dust smeared the originally multicoloured tessellations of the floor tiles. Kilworth took in as he glanced upward that the roof above was a wooden ceiling with a half open trap in the very middle. He noticed more scribbled graffiti on the far inside wall: "Prince Vlad rules" over a swastika. Guess it was those Nazi punks again! thought Kilworth, shaking his head. He sensed that the world was rich with mysteries, but the graffiti spoke only of banality.
Kilworth realised the dusk was thickening, and decided to camp out in the Resthouse, ignoring the dust and debris. Visitors weren't supposed to do this, but he didn't think he'd be caught; and if he stayed overnight, he might capture on film something really special. He glanced around again. Might this have once been a place where black magic had been performed?, he wondered. He had, of course, remembered to bring the arc lights, and was equipped with a sleeping bag as well He could photograph some of the tombs by moonlight; it would be more atmospheric.
Shrugging off his backpack with some difficulty, he made ready to get a couple of hour's sleep.
The tarnished moon, a once-shiny coin that had passed through too many hands, hoisted itself above the trees. Light like pale ice spilled into the Resthouse and bathed the surrounds. He pulled the sleeping bag around him and huddled close to one wall.
As the gloom drew in, he found those ancient powers of night that have always had a hold on human souls could still affect him. He was not abnormally liable to fantastic delusions, but here, in such a place, surrounded by the sleeping dead, with the wind soughing through the trees, it was easy for strange fancies to arise.
About an hour later, the moon had retreated behind a cloud, and the crumbling Resthouse lay shrouded in darkness. Just on the verge of falling asleep, he fancied he heard a muffled sound from above. It seemed to come from the trapdoor that led into the roof.
Before he could move, a dark shape swarmed down the shelter's inside wall. Flinching back against the wall, he glimpsed the bulky shape moving swiftly and silently downward, silhouetted against one of the arched windows. Then he lost sight of it. A few seconds later there was a sound like the plop of a large leather bag dropping onto the ground. Gooseflesh prickled his skin.
Okay, I'm out of here, he thought. Shadows danced and pulsed. Wriggling out of the sleeping bag, he abandoned it like a cast-off skin, grabbed his equipment pack and set off among the tombstones in the rain. He wasn't sure what he had seen, but he wasn't hanging around to find out. In the uncertain light, he could not be sure some shapeless thing was not following him through the trees. He pulled the crumpled map of the grounds from his pocket, peering at it under the moonlight. Best to head for Necropolis Circuit, away from this section of the cemetery.
He had time to regret, while he ran, that the Mortuary Station, proudly adorned with herald angels, no longer stood here. From the museum he had learned that it had been dismantled stone by stone, and rebuilt in Canberra as a church. The original station would have made a picturesque photo for the CRUCIFIXATION book. He mourned its absence, thinking of the grand old days when the trains used to bring in corpses from Central Station in the city, perhaps stopping off along the way to take aboard another coffin, and finally reaching Rookwood where the rail system was constantly used to offload the corpses prior to burial. But even without it, there was more than enough strangeness in Rookwood to occupy him.
Suddenly, with a roar and a howl, something rushed past him, knocking him to the wet ground. It was a yowling, screaming mess of flailing arms and legs. The breath knocked out of him, the camera in his hand was flung to his arm's full stretch, but as unexpected as the attack had been, he didn't let it smash.
He looked up to see what had set on him. It was the woman from outside the Museum. ‘Cemetery Rose', the florist at the kiosk had dubbed her. She had on a shapeless red skirt, and a red pullover two sizes too large for her scrawny body.
Several long threads dangled from an unravelling spot at the breast, and she also wore was a ratty-looking jacket, which may once have been suede, but now rubbed bald in patches like alopecia. Despite her ungainliness, her shoulders were appallingly thin beneath the rags.
Mad eyes, she had. In her tangled hair, full of leaves, was a red rose, full-blown; it lent her strange kind of wild beauty. Kilworth and the woman looked at each other – he caught a glimpse of her milky, rheumy eyes - but before he could call out –he had no breath to – she gathered up her skirts and made off between the graves.
"For God's sake!" said Kilworth, picking himself up and giving chase. He caught up with her in a few moments and grabbed her by the arm, swinging her around. "What was all that about, eh?"
Rose, by way of reply, proffered him a brilliant red rose from the battered bunch she drew from beneath her coat. "Don't go out there! Dangerous! Thing that crawls!" she got out, in a breathless wheeze.
She babbled similar phrases until, gradually, Kilworth was able to calm her down. He regarded her with a mixture of pity and revulsion. What had she once been? An actress? A dancer? Beneath the blowsy surface he could still detect traces of beauty run to seed. Once she had been a rich wine, mellow and delicious. Now she was a corked vintage, cheap, nasty, past its prime. Her breath was rancid; she was human refuse, the cemetery's child. Blake's famous lines ran unbidden through his head:
"O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy.
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy".
"Secret! Show you!" she cried. She pointed towards some trees nearby. Something in her manner convinced Kilworth she was worth taking seriously despite her dishevelled appearance. He grasped both her hands in his.
"Rose", he said, "you must show me".
The pressure of her hand on Kilworth's arm overcame his disgust at the reek of alcohol on her breath. She gave him a crooked, autumnal smile and urged Kilworth forward through the nearby graves. "Black, it's black!"
"What?"
"You'll see" she leered. He was trying to trust her, but the florist's warning lingered in his mind. She let go his arm and stumbled ahead, merely looking back now and again to make sure he was still following. Kilworth was unsure why he followed her at all, but her secretiveness had piqued his interest.
She stopped outside a grove of trees, and pointed. "In there," she said.
"Lead on then, "said Kilworth. He had come this far.
She pushed through the thickly tangled undergrowth, a smudge of darkness beneath the trees. He did his best to follow her, pushing overhanging branches aside. "What is it, Rose? Where are you taking me?"
"Black!" she said. "You'll see." He could see she ached to tell someone her secret.
Kilworth stumbled after her, forgetting his earlier fear, the incident in the Resthouse. If this turned out to be nothing but a prank or a dead end...but some inner sense told him that Rose had something important to impart.
The wind was rising, and the moon was bright as an arc light as they entered a clearing between the trees.
Suddenly Rose stopped.
Ahead of them, beyond a series of low-lying unkempt graves overrun with grasses, was a solid wall of growth. Rose-stems were weaving thick and green amidst the plant-life, everything dappled by the moonlight that struggled through the surrounding foliage. Rose was pointing, and hopping from one foot to another. "Look, look" she cried. "Look there!"
Kilworth peered into the growth, still uncertain what so excited her. For a few moments he could see nothing unusual, just the same flowers and shrubs he had observed all through the cemetery. The blooms here grew profusely, and he suspected that this was Rose's private harvesting area for the blossoms she sold. Perhaps there was something special about the soil here; some nutrient combination that was unusually productive and fruitful, for the growth did seem especially luxuriant.
Then, as his vision adjusted to the half-light, he began to discern a bloom which looked different from the rest. It was a rose, a rose that looked very dark. If it was red, it was the darkest red he had ever seen. He blinked. My God! It wasn't a dark red at all, but of a hue so deep that it could only be described as black. He took a few faltering steps forward. Thunder rumbled overhead.
Rose could hardly contain her excitement, dancing and pointing. "Black, black!" she cried. He stared at her in astonishment, before returning his gaze to the bush where, he now saw, a whole cluster of black blooms adorned the shrub. He was stunned. It really existed! He was no rose expert, but he knew how rare, how impossibly rare, this sight was. With mounting excitement he gazed on the beautiful blooms, black as midnight, black as dead suns in the infinitude of deep space.
Alex Thornton's words came back to him: "The Black Rose has long been thought to be an impossibility, but people are fascinated by the idea of its existence. Like the ghost orchid, like the white tiger, its perennial allure consists in its rarity." The rose, Thornton had explained, was generally considered the most beautiful of blooms, in fact a metaphor for Beauty itself; a pure black version would be considered a paragon, a superlative, some kind of floral Quintessence. Kilworth could see why – the bizarre beauty of the blooms before him awed him into silence.
An inexplicable chill came over him. He had found the Holy Grail. Immediately, though he knew he could get rich out of this, he anticipated the problems which would flood in with the discovery. Other people would try and get control. They might even harm him to steal such a rare find as this. He had to keep it a secret. Rose was obviously not in her right mind, didn't realise what she had here. Why had she chosen him to reveal it to? He didn't know, but he was grateful to her.
He clasped her arm. "Thank you, Rose; you've done the right thing".
She smiled crookedly. "Black, black!" She was still excited.
"Yes, black," he said. ‘Now we mustn't tell anyone else about this, do you understand?" He slipped a fifty-dollar bill from his wallet and crushed it into her grimy fist.
"Here. Go and get some good food, get yourself something nice, OK?"
She looked at the money, slow wonder dawning in her eyes. This was more than she sometimes made the whole week selling flowers to the mourners. She stuffed the money somewhere inside her rags, with an expression of low cunning.
He wondered what he could do. What did he know of hybrids, grafting, cross-fertilisation? But perhaps he could take the rose, transplant it to his own garden, where he could keep watch over it.
Pulling his camera from his pack, he tried to photograph the bloom in the exacting light. The Cemetery Rose, the true one, pure velvety black, was inexpressibly beautiful. He took his time photographing it. Once he had it in shot, he used several rolls of film, capturing in extreme close up the delicate beauty of the blossom.
But soon the rain, which had been a drizzle, became a downpour. A sporadic rumble of thunder became a continuo as the rain turned to a howling storm.
He could do no more in these conditions. Shouldering his pack, and ushering Rose back out of the grove, he carefully marked the spot in his mind so he could find it again. Rose went off through the graves, presumably to spend her money somewhere. He headed home, to think.
###
It is night again. Kilworth is wandering the City of the Dead.
On the cemetery's Anglican, the Serpentine canal, empty of water, starts shallow, then becomes five or six feet deep as he follows it. Silent stone angels gaze over ornamental ponds and latticed summerhouses.
The canal's winding path has led Kilworth to the Independent section, which is swathed in gathering night. He shivers, pulling his coat close around him. Stifling his nervousness, he comes to a building constructed of honey-coloured Pyrmont sandstone. Looming above him is the cemetery's largest monument, the incredible Frazer Vault, built in 1894 at a cost of five thousand pounds by Maurice B. Adams, architect. A high Victorian Byzantine Gothic masterpiece, it dwarfs everything around it. Four French-influenced gargoyles perch high atop it, channelling rainwater away from the roof. Most of the narrow small-paned windows set high in the walls are cracked or gaping open; he hears the chittering of birds roosting in the vault's upper reaches. Large black ravens perch on surrounding tombs closer to ground level.
The place might conceal anything. Dried-out corpses might lie piled up like cordwood against the inside walls. Or, he imagines, misshapen, boneless things might be lurking inside, impatient to drag someone like him in with them. It's somehow easy for him to think this. But his heart is in his throat, and he is frightened, more frightened than he has ever been.
Remember when everything was new and strange? a faraway voice seems to say. Water pools in the building's crevices, drips down the sandstone. He hears the tolling of St Michael's chapel bell, a slow, deep note. He looks around frantically for shelter from the sound.
The vault's large bronze doors echo ominously when he ventures to knock on them.
The doors groan. He gasps. A thin white hand appears at the doorframe's edge. He screams and keeps on screaming. Something sluggish, a figure, which he can vaguely see has a shrunken, hideous visage, seems to be spilling from the tomb's opening, blurred and swollen
As it squirms feebly towards him, he awakes, sweating. His throat is raw from screaming.
He is in his own bed, at home in Berala.
###
Two days later, unable to eat or drink, afraid to sleep again, still haunted by the nightmare's vividness, Kilworth again wound between the brooding lichen-encrusted graves. He intended to dig up the bush on which the Black Rose bloomed; but that was for later, when dark fell. Dead dried leaves and twigs crunched underfoot on the cracked earth of the narrow, uneven paths. Large trees entwined their gnarled branches above the pathways.
In the old Catholic section, past Necropolis Drive, huge grey-blue cacti and straggling flowery shrubs grew from many of the graves, nourished by whatever still lay beneath. He marvelled at the maze of headstones in sandstone and marble, at the bewildering variety of crosses, carven angels, and Celtic decorations that adorned the uncountable graves. Loose marble tiles and granite fragments lay in a chaos of tumbled masonry.
Many of the flatbed tombs lay half-engulfed by earth, and subsidence had shattered or tilted many of the headstones, lending them a crazy air. Faded plastic flowers littered the graves where they had fallen. Sundried brown grasses struggled through cracks on the tombs themselves and in the paths between them. He shot a roll of film as he passed through the tomb: rusting iron railings with fleur-de-Lys–topped spikes, surrounding headstones almost entirely effaced by wind and weather.
A dry culvert, like the one from his nightmare, snaked its way across the grounds. Number One Serpentine Canal was brick-lined, perhaps two and a half feet wide, and several feet deep. The thought of what might have been at the Resthouse, and what might be capable of concealing itself in those culverts, made Kilworth shudder involuntarily. Yet it was the Black Rose that filled his thoughts. Its beauty seared his consciousness like a black brand, its very existence subtly alluring as the siren's call.
Wandering further, Kilworth gazed bewildered at still more concrete pillars, which boasted tortured figures of crucified Christs, and multiple versions of supplicating Marys. Many of the headstones here were rusty-red with oxidation, above cracked black-and-white tessellated pavements. Atmospheric, yes. He snapped off shots here and there.
A bit further on, he came to a church – the chapel of St Michael the Archangel. Buried all around were generations of priests, white marble headstones topping greenish, lichen-covered stone graves. Not far away, a lawn was covered with a myriad of small memorial headstones. The chapel itself had large distinctively arched wooden doors, and many stained glass windows, the most impressive of which was rose-shaped.
Roses seemed to be haunting him. Two angel statues adorned the peaks at the front, and a large cast-iron bell topped the building. He seemed to have been irresistibly drawn here.
He read the inscription above the door, which proclaimed: "It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they might be released from sins." This was undoubtedly meant to be comforting, but for Kilworth it evoked a vision of the multifarious dead for whom no one had prayed, still locked in their sins and writhing in their graves, their bodies straining against the encompassing shrouds and coffins that held them in. Kilworth ran a hand across his sweaty brow. His thoughts had begun to run amok in this place.
He continued to the grove where the Black Rose grew. Its cloying scent filled his nostrils as he dug around its roots. Placing it with infinite care in the sack he had brought with him, he was careful to avoid the large thorns that ran like sharp vertebra along the plant's thick green stems. Bundling the sack over his shoulder, he made his way out of the trees.
Enough for one day. He would take his booty home. After a half hour walking, he came to the cemetery's perimeter gate and went out.
At the house, he placed the Black Rose at the centre of his dining table, drawing down the sack so he could bask in the aura of its glossy black petals, drinking in the strange, subtle scent it exuded. There would be no sleep for him this night either; he must watch the Rose, ensure that no harm came to it.
###
Next evening, fainter from hunger than ever, his eyes aching from lack of sleep, he returned to the chapel. Although he carried his camera, the original purpose of his photo shoot seemed to have dissipated; the cemetery itself, the Black Rose in particular, had begun to obsess him.
As he drew near the chapel, some shape seemed to be obscuring building's front, for he could no longer see the distinctive door's arch which he had observed yesterday. He peered through the gathering gloom. The shape was a dark figure, its face pale, lolling against the chapel's nearest wall. Above it, steeped in dimness, something seemed to scuttle from the roof and drop to the ground near the tall figure's feet. Fellow necrotourists? He didn't think so. He stopped in his tracks, heart pounding. Had he seen them before in his nightmares?
Maybe, he told himself, he was seeing things, his mind playing tricks. The human mind wants there to be an order in everything, doesn't it? So it creates patterns in chaos, order where none exists. A dark shrub becomes a crouching figure, a rubbish pile half-visible in the twilight seems a prostrate body writhing feebly – one explanation for phantoms – or so he rationalised, listening to his own scratchy breathing here in the dusk.
Dismayed, he cast quick looks left and right, unsure whether he was more afraid to see the figure moving, or not to see it. He came to a horrible realisation: something that wanted to catch him in its lethal embrace had been waiting for him, and for no one else.
A shiver passed through him and his skin went cold. He began, slowly, to back away.
He had not yet seen the figure's face, but his imagination began to give it one. It was a face composed partly of darkness, held together by shreds of flesh, with two eyes the colour of cold porridge, above a mouth with all the compassion and softness of a lamprey's.
Then, it stepped out into the half-light. Glinting fire seemed to play around its head.
At its feet, something smaller scuttled and hesitated, scuttled forward again, disappeared into the long grass. Kilworth suddenly understood that an unspoken hierarchy that existed between these creatures; the Thin Man was in charge, the creature its familiar. This was the creature he had sensed moving in the back of the florist shop, and which had been roosting in the Resthouse's roof when he had camped there.
He felt something slither past his leg; something with vestigial limbs He caught a glimpse of it – it was black and shiny as anthracite, spiky with tufts of hair or fur. He thought of the thing touching him with its clacking legs and its body furred with coarse hair, and felt as though fingertips were lightly walking up his spine.
A religious man might have called it a blasphemous abnormality, but Kilworth did not have such a facile option. For him, such things were resistant to interpretation. It dawned on him that nothing he could do would save him, for he believed neither in the possibility that these creatures could really exist, nor in the efficacy of any supernatural gimmick he could level at them.
No, he was alone with them. Out here, safe and familiar were meaningless terms. If the creatures existed in the face of all his well-reasoned scepticism, then the world was upside down and he was doomed. They were the servants of something unimaginable.
Moments later, backing towards the canal, he heard a dry rustling coming from the bricks. There was a slithering, and a staccato scrabble of its claws on brick. He mustn't be fooled into hiding in the canal.
Trees partly blotted out his view back to the chapel. Caught between the Scylla of the Thin Man, and the Charybdis of the smaller thing, whatever it was, Kilworth wasn't sure which direction to run. He wanted to cry out, but the wind stirring in the trees made a continuous "shhh" as though warning him to keep silence.
His fear welled up anew. He turned, frantically casting from left to right for a haven. Darting across behind a large gravestone, leaves crackled beneath his feet, twigs snapped with a treacherous loudness. What terrified him most was the thought of all the ground he'd have to cover between here and possible safety. His mouth tasted of iron, and licked his lips, which had gone dry. The lights outside the Necropolis were but a feeble glimmer. Rookwood's gates were locked at dusk, and he had missed the 3.30 bus out of the grounds, the last one for the day.
Breathing hard, his hands clasped to the headstone's roughness, he ventured a look back towards the church. Squat gravestones, mottled with moss and darkness, dotted the ground between him and where the tall figure had stood.
But now the figure wasn't there.
His heart quickening, he saw it again. It was slowly, silently moving towards his hiding place. As the figure approached, Kilworth could faintly make out the line of sutures stitching the flesh – if it was flesh – of the man's face. The sutures ran from its temple down the face's right side and along the neck, disappearing beneath the black cloth of its buttoned up suit. In those terrible eyes there was no human spark, only a dull intelligence that enabled it to exert control over its inhuman companion, and to keep hunting until it caught its prey.
Kilworth rose from his concealed crouch, his knees already aching and his stiff back protesting. The Thin Man was only paces away. Kilworth seemed hypnotised to the spot. The strength seemed to have left his limbs, and his breathing was muffled, uneven.
The Thin Man reached him, and placed its hand on his shoulder. The gloved hand that rested on his shoulder seemed to have been shredded to rags of cloth. Then he realised that the ragged threads that trailed from the hand were not cloth at all, but flesh...
The thin one spoke. Its voice was as guttural as a dying man's death rattle, yet simultaneously sibilant, like wind in autumn leaves, or the fluttering wings of a bird as it beats, trapped, against a windowpane.
"The Black Rose is ours."
Now its fingers were about his neck. He had a glimpse of cold, grey eyes gazing into his at close range. The fingers made a slashing movement and Kilworth felt as though his throat had been cut from ear to ear. With trembling fingers, he felt gingerly at the nape of his neck. Blood was trickling from the open wound, and he felt its wetness on his fingers.
In his shock, Kilworth dropped the camera. He tried to cry out, for help, but fear choked his voice to a whisper. He jerked away from the Thin Man's grasp and with a surge of strength, he pushed the thin figure hard; it stumbled back and away from him. He bent groundwards, fingers instinctively searching for the camera. Shivering with dread, he felt around on the humid earth. He held his breath.
Then his hand fell on a smooth surface, his fingers seeking purchase but finding none. In the semi-darkness he could not see the whole shape, but clutched what felt like the camera's outer casing. As he drew his hand closer to him, it slid along the thing and he realised it was long, far longer than the camera would be even had he grasped it by the lens. And what his fingers clutched was thin, as well as long. A horrible suspicion formed, and just then t a weight at the other end of what he was grasping jerked slightly. His fingers slid over a joint, and he realised with a shudder that he was grasping, by one of its legs, the revolting spider-thing.
With a shock of repugnant dismay, he snatched his hand away, and a cry of disgust escaped his lips. Judging by the size of the leg he had inadvertently grasped, the thing itself must have a body the size of a large cat.
He kicked out, and felt his foot connect with a dull but satisfying thud.
He half-saw the thing roll away from him. In the grasses around the nearest gravestone, a tangle of legs was sticking up, waving about. It must have landed on its back and was struggling to right itself. A sick feeling flooded the back of his throat. He clutched his fingers to the wound in his throat; t
Next moment, the thing was up again and sprang violently forward against him, landing heavily on his chest. He tried to beat it off with his hands. It gave off an overpowering smell of filth and decay, and its body's furriness as his hands brushed it made him feel sick. It dropped into the grass again, and he hastily backed away, keeping his hands up protectively in case it leapt again. Wind shuddered the fallen leaves, and raised ripples on the surface of the ornamental pond.
Suddenly Rose appeared, as if from nowhere. She picked it up, that thing, cradled it in her arms like a baby, the tattered folds of her old red dress swathing it from view. Viciously, she flung it against the bole of a nearby tree. He heard it slam into the tree trunk and fall to the ground. He could only hope she had killed it.
The Thin Man turned towards Rose, momentarily abandoning pursuit of Kilworth. Kilworth gasped in terror, adrenalin pumping through his system. He would run while his persecutors were distracted.
He could make the fence if he ran now. In that slim hope, he put his trust.
He ran, panting, gasping, hurtling across graves, thumping down aisles of trees, his clothes catching in overhanging branches. He sensed the Thin Man close behind, vindictive, implacable, giving chase.
He was nearly there. The fence's wire perimeter loomed ahead. He hunched over for a second, a stitch in his side, and gasped for breath. He listened. Nothing, save the night winds in the foliage.
He hurled himself up and over. Just as his body was three-quarters across, he felt a shooting pain through his ankle. A hand had grasped him, and was pulling him back into the cemetery. Almost mindless with fear, Kilworth shot a quick glance back over his shoulder. The Thin Man's grin was fixed, the lamprey mouth set in hideous intent.
Kilworth jerked his leg violently, his foot slipped through the Thin Man's hold. With a surge of terrified triumph, he made it over the fence, dropping to the ground outside. He felt the Thin Man fall back, flailing against the inside of the wire fence.
Something told him the Thin Man couldn't leave the grounds. He fled home in a panic frenzy, limping on his wounded ankle. A bloody trickle still ran from the wound the Thin Man had inflicted on his throat.
He spent the night sleepless, tossing on his bed, his throat bandaged. The wound was not as bad as he had at first feared, but painful enough to add to his discomfort. The ankle where the Thin Man had gripped him as he scaled the fence was fiery with pain. What would they do to Rose? He was sure they would harm her. But in his cowardice he stayed away all morning, and for the rest of the day.
Unable to concentrate, staring nightly at the Black Rose, its scent filling his head, its blackness seeming to insinuate itself into the fabric of his soul, he began to face the irresistible compulsion to return to Rookwood.
He had to find out what had become of Rose.
By the time he had steeled himself to do so, it was a week later.
###
As he entered the cemetery for the last time, the shadows deepened, thickened. Approaching the grove of the Black Rose, he slowly became aware of an overpowering smell.
Then he found Rose, what was left of her.
Her body was lifeless, her raggedy clothes thick with congealed blood. The smell of death, of decay, rose up to meet him. The body was slumped against a tree trunk on a weedy patch of ground. She was virtually faceless, her eyes and cheeks destroyed by maggots. They had clustered in Rose's hair, which he could see stirring as they teemed at the back of her neck. Her mouth was a distorted rictus, the lips peeled back revealing crooked teeth. Dried blood filled her mouth. There was no longer a nose, and only a little discoloured flesh remained on the head. The eyes were the worst, for they were nothing now but sightless pits.
Kilworth, gagging and reeling back as his nostrils caught the body's full reek, his mind frantic to block out the reality of this death, recalled unbidden Baudelaire's lines from "The Carcass" in The Flowers of Evil
"The flies buzzed and droned on these bowels of filth
Where an army of maggots arose,
Which flowed with a liquid and thickening stream
On the animate rags of her clothes"
For a few moments he was filled with remorse, with shame and sadness for Rose's pathetic end. How could he have allowed this? Yet part of him had expected she would be dead when he found her again.
Then anger kicked in. The uncertainty gnawing at his soul became need to take action. He would have vengeance. He turned away, disgusted, as some maggots disgorged themselves from her ruined head and writhed on the path before him.
Then, suddenly, just as he saw the slimy black trail leading to the tree bole, something dropped from the canopy of foliage above. He sensed a shape crawling toward him, his nostrils quivering at the thing's stale animal odour.
The creature surged forward. It seemed to be twitching, lurching towards him as though wounded.
He knew what he had to do. Dislodging a broken piece of headstone from beside one of the graves, he hefted it in his hand and waited. The creature appeared out of the long grass, poised to leap. He hurled the heavy piece of stone. It hit with a sickening thud, and a sound like a celery stick being snapped in two. The thing slumped to the ground. Its legs twitched briefly, and then it was still.
The killing of the creature was small recompense for Rose's death, he felt, but it was the only kind of justice he knew how to dole out.
###
A few hours later, Kilworth stood in his darkroom shed, surrounded by developing trays, and containers of fixative hypo. He was bringing up a print in his signature style; the hues looked dissolved in darkness. The image swam up slowly into view, shimmering like a ghost. It showed the Black Rose. In the background was another shape, blotchy and unfocussed: the Thin Man.
Kilworth took the print out and set it on the patio table to dry. He sat back in the old chair there, the one with the torn plastic cushions. The sky was staining the evening with darkness, which seemed to tug at him convulsively.
The exhausted light gave him a distorted view of the back garden, which overlooked Route 45 Olympic Drive. Close to the back patio's cracked cement, dry, crumbling leaves had fallen from the nearby tree. Weeds and grasses, dotted with blown dandelions and dried-out stalks, filled the backyard. They stood so tall that he could barely glimpse the brick back fence with its top edge ragged as some ancient battlement. Safe at the back, sheltered from the winds by the wire enclosure he had put up, was the Cemetery Rose. Replanted, fed with rich dark humus– the Black Rose.
Its macabre beauty brought him perverse pleasure. He would foster and feed it, nourish it with his own darkness. It would grow and prosper, and when the time was right he would know what to do. Perhaps the Thin Man would help him know what to do.
His mind seethed. Humans, he thought. We rut in the dark, but it is not until we encounter true darkness that we are brought to understand. He would feed the Black Rose, and it would feed him, and then there would be an accounting. A black flame, all-penetrant, would burn through him before he went out again into the world to exact vengeance on it
As he moved towards the Black Rose, which seemed to strain eagerly forward towards him, he was already on the verge of disclosing to it all the details of his own inner delirium. Then came a sound that was ugly, even to his own ears.
He began to laugh, and didn't stop.
"Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones achase,
Than, moonless, one's own self encounter
In lonesome place"
-Emily Dickinson
It didn't start out as a terrifying experience. Kilworth wasn't the sort to be easily frightened by things as insubstantial as moving shadows, or by wind shaking the dry leaves on the cemetery's huge trees, or even by the proximity of hundreds of long-dead corpses.
Ray Kilworth knew photography, if he knew anything: its sights, its sounds - its smells even. Expert in using the old techniques, he was particularly proud of his albumen prints, his way with a chemical bath, the fine effects he could produce by using collodion negatives. Although the process was slow, he liked the warm image tones he could obtain by using printing-out paper. He even occasionally used calotypes, as he loved their light-diffusing effect. When really bored, he would make simple carbon prints. He did his burning in by hand; digital was too clinical for his taste. He was adept at bringing out an image's finer shades in the developing tank: It was old-fashioned, but it felt right to him: something about its mystery, the way the latent image would come up like a shimmering ghost.
Lately he had become fixated on the idea of photographing cemeteries. Someone had once shown him a book by New Orleans photographer Clarence John Laughlin; he had been struck forcibly by the photographers' vision of old houses came up, spooky and vine-covered, the trees surreal, ghostly. Another of his rolemodels was David Robinson, who could conjure the warm sensuality from the cold marble women of European cemeteries.
He put down his copy of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience , which he'd studied at high school, and turned to again recently, looking for – what? Solace? A deeper meaning to his current existence? He sat absently staring out over the back garden of his place at Berala, which overlooked Route 45 Olympic Drive. Out there was a small plot of ground, partly covered with stones, with a spindly, leafless tree. At the very back was a shed he'd converted to a darkroom.
Next morning, Kilworth set off to see his friend Alex Thornton, a specialist in the cultivation of rare flowers. The festival banners along George St flapped and fluttered beneath a sky the colour of dirty cottonwool; the weak sun reduced the streets to tracts of dull twilight.
Now, a fresh idea occurred to him. He had a catchy title – CRUCIFIXATION. That would sell it. And the perfect location - Rookwood Necropolis: a ghoul's paradise, the largest nineteenth century cemetery in the world, located within spitting distance of Sydney's Olympic Park precincts, and only a stone's throw from his own home. He had grown up in its vicinity, and something about the great sagging headstones and the dismal, overhanging foliage seemed to beckon him. The ‘necropolis' (he felt the meaning – ‘city of the dead'- shiver through his bones) a sprawling, mile-square place as extensive as Sydney's CBD, was a suburb in itself.
The place was huge, a silent world full of crumbling vaults and Victorian architecture, an Australian Highgate. He decided to immortalise it in haunting black and white.
###
"Tell me about the Cemetery Rose" said Kilworth, leaning back in a chair opposite Thornton's desk. He had heard vaguely of a rare rose that grew in Rookwood Cemetery and thought it might add interest to his shoot.
Alex smiled. "Sure. At Rookwood, the flower is a damask-style rose so rare that its species can't be positively identified. OK, the Cemetery Rose is not as rare as say, a Blue Rose, or that rose-breeder's fable, the true Black Rose. But Ray - it's rare, rare enough to be valuable. Rare enough to be worth photographing. Rare enough that if one could identify it, perhaps breed it commercially, you could make a lot of money."
Kilworth liked the sound of that. "What's so special about Rookwood?"
"Shit" said Alex, "the place is a virtual time warp; it contains some of the rarest specimens of heritage roses in Australia. Look, rose gardens in cemeteries generally are quite common, real Cemetery Roses less so. They are typically "found" roses, in other words, roses not known to be widely disseminated. Look here". Alex had pulled a large rose encyclopedia from his crowded bookshelf and was pointing to photos as he flipped through, for Kilworth's benefit. "There are a couple of ‘Cemetery Roses' in the U.S – the hybrid Tea rose (Bot: Chinensis), the Titus County one, which is dark red. There is a North Texas one, which as it fades, darkens to near black, but doesn't drop its petals. There's a Chester County one, which is light pink. There's also a rose known as the Cemetery Keeper's Peach Tree Rose."
"Yeah? What's this about a Blue Rose?"
Alex chuckled, and shook his head. "A rose breeder's pipedream. Researchers have been trying for years to hybridise one, utilising transgenic technology."
Kilworth fought his impulse to interrupt. He was getting impatient.
"The genetic sequences encode flavonoid pathway enzymes," Alex continued, "enabling manipulation of the flower's pigments. I've talked to companies in Australia and the Netherlands which have engaged in the technological race; all of ‘em have patented technology to produce the Blue Rose but none of ‘em have succeeded – yet."
"Fascinating," said Kilworth. "And you mentioned a Black Rose?"
Alex spread his hands flat, palms downward, a dismissive gesture. "Maybe one day we'll succeed in hybridising a Blue Rose, but the Black Rose is a myth. Oh, I've seen some that came close. There's Black Jade, a very dark glossy red variety with blackish highlights. There are natural roses that start black in bud, but which open a shade of purple or deep crimson. But as for a real Black Rose – forget it, my friend. You might as well look for the Holy Grail".
###
Late that same day, Kilworth walked briskly along Railway St, Lidcombe, past tawdry shops, the air of failure around their doorways. Old-age pensioners shuffled across the pavement in that peculiar way that made you unsure whether to move left or right.
He passed the mason's shop, its yard cluttered with granite and marble bric a brac destined for grave monuments.
The East St entry gateway was surrounded by streets crowded with traffic. Crows cawed endlessly from the eucalypts beyond. As Kilworth went through the main gate, the hum of human commerce began to die down. Welcome to the Necropolis. Kilworth noticed at once the curious combination of sounds here, so unlike the normal ambient background of city streets. There was the wind rustling through the trees, the chirp of birdsong, and only a faint, subdued burr of distant traffic.
Many things were whispered about Rookwood- The Sleeping City, they called it - even when he had been at school near here. Since that time, Kilworth had nursed a perverse fascination with its atmosphere, the way brittle brown leaves would tumble between the graves in the dark.
His destination was the Museum of Funerary History. He pulled out the map of the grounds he'd picked up at the main entrance gate, noting the museum's location. It took him longer than he'd anticipated to walk through the extensive grounds to reach it. His backpack slowed him only a little, but a trickle of sweat broke out on his brow as he laboured between the graves. His equipment was light and simple. When in the field, he carried two Nikon FM12s, each with a 55mm lens. In his backpack he stashed a 200mm telephoto and a 24mm wide-angle lens. He liked to take all his photos with natural light and a handheld camera (no flash, no tripod). He had thrown in, as usual, four rolls of Kodak TMX400 and a couple of portable arc lights for night work. He generally relied on good old-fashioned feel, the camera's weight in his hands, his instinctive judgement of how to combine light, focus, depth of field.
Reaching the Museum's entrance on Memorial Ave, Kilworth glanced across at the Jewish section, with its well-kept lawns, and black marble headstones with elaborate Hebrew inscriptions.
A black-clad group of family and friends solemnly surrounded a grave. Further away, nearer one of the perimeter fences, he saw a rug spread on the grass. A family handed each other sandwiches, a thermos flask between them on the rug. The place was obviously popular with some as a picnic spot. In the other direction he glimpsed the cinnamon blur of a cat streaking across a pathway between graves.
Out of nowhere, a raggedy woman suddenly accosted him.
"Roses!" she squawked, thrusting a handful of large blooms at him. ‘Five dollars, five dollars!"
"No thanks" said Kilworth firmly. She looked disappointed, and headed off towards the picnicking family. He watched her retreat, a large ungainly woman clad in a scrappy red dress. She tried her luck with the picnickers, but she had none; they turned their backs on her. He couldn't help wondering what she was up to, but as she disappeared amongst the graves, he realised he'd arrived at the historic 1925 Rookwood Crematorium. Inside was the Museum of Funerary History. Entering through the heavy wooden door, he gazed around; unusual caskets and urns from around the world filled niches along the walls, and various glass cabinets arrayed throughout the foyer, but he was looking for something different – some information that would give him a focus for his photographs.
He intended to look up a few local legends at the Museum library first.
The sullen man at the office spoke little, directing Kilworth with nods and gestures to the area where he could find the information he sought.
In a volume titled Legends of Rookwood, he found various accounts of unusual happenings in Rookwood over the years since the eighteen-hundreds. William Davenport, a famous spiritualist, had been buried at Rookwood. Davenport was one of two brothers (Ira was the other) who had become a sensation due to their ‘supernatural' powers – instruments played, bells rang, objects flew about. In Australia in 1910, the magician Houdini had visited Rookwood and made a point of restoring Davenport's grave. Another legend that caught his eye was a sketchy tale of a creature composed of sticks, rags, leaves and earth that was reputed to haunt the grounds in the late nineteenth century.
Kilworth turned the pages, absorbed. Yet another nineteenth century legend told of a butler who had lived at The Gables, a Victorian-era house in East St opposite the cemetery. This butler, axed to death in 1865 by a guest at the house, was somehow linked to the rumours of a dark, thin figure and his pet or companion, a spiderlike creature. They were said to roam the cemetery at will, and had frightened several gravediggers over the years with their nocturnal appearances. In the 1960's, there had been incidents of vandalism in the cemetery, and the suggestion that these had been connected with black magic rites.
.
Kilworth began to feel cramped and uncomfortably hot in the Museum. He went outside, and toiled along the nearest pathway. Clumpy grass grew wild and rank alongside the path, yet the plentiful roses seemed carefully tended. Apparently a small team of gardeners and heritage enthusiasts were slowly restoring both the gravestones and the original plantings. Magnolias and camellias flourished amongst the lantana along the roads. In Spring the cemetery would explode with flowers, but there were hefty fines for picking any.
Dusk was falling as he came to the florist's, a small kiosk covered with flaking paint. Kilworth spoke to the bored-looking man at the desk, a reedy dark-complexioned fellow. The flowers that stood around him on the counter were more wilted than he was.
"Excuse me" Kilworth began.
"Can I help you?" The man did not raise his eyes from the newspaper spread on the counter in front of him.
"Yes – ahh – I wanted to buy some flowers." It was the obvious excuse for putting a query about the woman who had crossed his path earlier.
"Yeah," said the man, continuing to read his paper.
Why are people so goddamned prickly?" thought Kilworth. As the fellow met his gaze, Kilworth found himself looking into a pair of eyes the colour of cold porridge.
"I ran into a woman selling roses before," Kilworth blurted out.
The man shook his head. "Don't have nothin' to do with her".
"I'm sorry?"
"That's Rose. Cemetery Rose, we call her. Bloody mad. Get your flowers here, nice and fresh.
She's no good, sleeps in the bloody cemetery all the time." He rolled his eyes.
"A bit mental, is she?" Kilworth tried to humour him, despite the fact that the man kept the right side of his face constantly turned away.
"We got everything you want here. What you want today, sir?"
.
Kilworth looked around at the poor selection of flowers, trying to find a bunch that was fresh. "Those look good to me," he said, pointing to a group of mixed colours.
"Sure. That'll be ten dollars". The vendor held the flowers up to drain the water from the stems, then gave them a good shake. He started to wrap them in clear cellophane.
The booth at his back was dim and shadowy. Kilworth thought he caught a glimpse of movement back there – someone else? Something seemed to be squirming in the thick darkness at the man's back. In Kilworth's mind awoke an old darkness, somehow akin to this one.
The man cleared his throat noisily. "Any memorial ribbons with that?"
"Ah – no thanks, that'll be all."
The man shrugged. Again Kilworth sensed a slight movement in the dark. Someone or something was lurking back there, just out of sight. It made him feel uneasy. His hand shook a little as he handed across a ten-dollar note, which the man took and put in a change drawer.
"That Rose, forget her". Was there a threatening tinge in his voice, as well as warning?
Kilworth was already walking away. Officious little shit, he thought. He continued down the drive towards the Anglican section as a light rain began to fall.
Looking for shelter from the rain, Kilworth was drawn to a skeletal-looking building surrounded by graves and palm-trees. It was the Anglican Ornamental Brick Resthouse. The rough red and white bricks of the walls, pierced by arched windows, were stained by graffiti: "Stick loves Kathy", "Nazi Punks", "Danielle Woo here 8/7/87". Typical teenager stuff, rebellious assertions of identity daubed in messy white letters. Dirt and dust smeared the originally multicoloured tessellations of the floor tiles. Kilworth took in as he glanced upward that the roof above was a wooden ceiling with a half open trap in the very middle. He noticed more scribbled graffiti on the far inside wall: "Prince Vlad rules" over a swastika. Guess it was those Nazi punks again! thought Kilworth, shaking his head. He sensed that the world was rich with mysteries, but the graffiti spoke only of banality.
Kilworth realised the dusk was thickening, and decided to camp out in the Resthouse, ignoring the dust and debris. Visitors weren't supposed to do this, but he didn't think he'd be caught; and if he stayed overnight, he might capture on film something really special. He glanced around again. Might this have once been a place where black magic had been performed?, he wondered. He had, of course, remembered to bring the arc lights, and was equipped with a sleeping bag as well He could photograph some of the tombs by moonlight; it would be more atmospheric.
Shrugging off his backpack with some difficulty, he made ready to get a couple of hour's sleep.
The tarnished moon, a once-shiny coin that had passed through too many hands, hoisted itself above the trees. Light like pale ice spilled into the Resthouse and bathed the surrounds. He pulled the sleeping bag around him and huddled close to one wall.
As the gloom drew in, he found those ancient powers of night that have always had a hold on human souls could still affect him. He was not abnormally liable to fantastic delusions, but here, in such a place, surrounded by the sleeping dead, with the wind soughing through the trees, it was easy for strange fancies to arise.
About an hour later, the moon had retreated behind a cloud, and the crumbling Resthouse lay shrouded in darkness. Just on the verge of falling asleep, he fancied he heard a muffled sound from above. It seemed to come from the trapdoor that led into the roof.
Before he could move, a dark shape swarmed down the shelter's inside wall. Flinching back against the wall, he glimpsed the bulky shape moving swiftly and silently downward, silhouetted against one of the arched windows. Then he lost sight of it. A few seconds later there was a sound like the plop of a large leather bag dropping onto the ground. Gooseflesh prickled his skin.
Okay, I'm out of here, he thought. Shadows danced and pulsed. Wriggling out of the sleeping bag, he abandoned it like a cast-off skin, grabbed his equipment pack and set off among the tombstones in the rain. He wasn't sure what he had seen, but he wasn't hanging around to find out. In the uncertain light, he could not be sure some shapeless thing was not following him through the trees. He pulled the crumpled map of the grounds from his pocket, peering at it under the moonlight. Best to head for Necropolis Circuit, away from this section of the cemetery.
He had time to regret, while he ran, that the Mortuary Station, proudly adorned with herald angels, no longer stood here. From the museum he had learned that it had been dismantled stone by stone, and rebuilt in Canberra as a church. The original station would have made a picturesque photo for the CRUCIFIXATION book. He mourned its absence, thinking of the grand old days when the trains used to bring in corpses from Central Station in the city, perhaps stopping off along the way to take aboard another coffin, and finally reaching Rookwood where the rail system was constantly used to offload the corpses prior to burial. But even without it, there was more than enough strangeness in Rookwood to occupy him.
Suddenly, with a roar and a howl, something rushed past him, knocking him to the wet ground. It was a yowling, screaming mess of flailing arms and legs. The breath knocked out of him, the camera in his hand was flung to his arm's full stretch, but as unexpected as the attack had been, he didn't let it smash.
He looked up to see what had set on him. It was the woman from outside the Museum. ‘Cemetery Rose', the florist at the kiosk had dubbed her. She had on a shapeless red skirt, and a red pullover two sizes too large for her scrawny body.
Several long threads dangled from an unravelling spot at the breast, and she also wore was a ratty-looking jacket, which may once have been suede, but now rubbed bald in patches like alopecia. Despite her ungainliness, her shoulders were appallingly thin beneath the rags.
Mad eyes, she had. In her tangled hair, full of leaves, was a red rose, full-blown; it lent her strange kind of wild beauty. Kilworth and the woman looked at each other – he caught a glimpse of her milky, rheumy eyes - but before he could call out –he had no breath to – she gathered up her skirts and made off between the graves.
"For God's sake!" said Kilworth, picking himself up and giving chase. He caught up with her in a few moments and grabbed her by the arm, swinging her around. "What was all that about, eh?"
Rose, by way of reply, proffered him a brilliant red rose from the battered bunch she drew from beneath her coat. "Don't go out there! Dangerous! Thing that crawls!" she got out, in a breathless wheeze.
She babbled similar phrases until, gradually, Kilworth was able to calm her down. He regarded her with a mixture of pity and revulsion. What had she once been? An actress? A dancer? Beneath the blowsy surface he could still detect traces of beauty run to seed. Once she had been a rich wine, mellow and delicious. Now she was a corked vintage, cheap, nasty, past its prime. Her breath was rancid; she was human refuse, the cemetery's child. Blake's famous lines ran unbidden through his head:
"O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy.
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy".
"Secret! Show you!" she cried. She pointed towards some trees nearby. Something in her manner convinced Kilworth she was worth taking seriously despite her dishevelled appearance. He grasped both her hands in his.
"Rose", he said, "you must show me".
The pressure of her hand on Kilworth's arm overcame his disgust at the reek of alcohol on her breath. She gave him a crooked, autumnal smile and urged Kilworth forward through the nearby graves. "Black, it's black!"
"What?"
"You'll see" she leered. He was trying to trust her, but the florist's warning lingered in his mind. She let go his arm and stumbled ahead, merely looking back now and again to make sure he was still following. Kilworth was unsure why he followed her at all, but her secretiveness had piqued his interest.
She stopped outside a grove of trees, and pointed. "In there," she said.
"Lead on then, "said Kilworth. He had come this far.
She pushed through the thickly tangled undergrowth, a smudge of darkness beneath the trees. He did his best to follow her, pushing overhanging branches aside. "What is it, Rose? Where are you taking me?"
"Black!" she said. "You'll see." He could see she ached to tell someone her secret.
Kilworth stumbled after her, forgetting his earlier fear, the incident in the Resthouse. If this turned out to be nothing but a prank or a dead end...but some inner sense told him that Rose had something important to impart.
The wind was rising, and the moon was bright as an arc light as they entered a clearing between the trees.
Suddenly Rose stopped.
Ahead of them, beyond a series of low-lying unkempt graves overrun with grasses, was a solid wall of growth. Rose-stems were weaving thick and green amidst the plant-life, everything dappled by the moonlight that struggled through the surrounding foliage. Rose was pointing, and hopping from one foot to another. "Look, look" she cried. "Look there!"
Kilworth peered into the growth, still uncertain what so excited her. For a few moments he could see nothing unusual, just the same flowers and shrubs he had observed all through the cemetery. The blooms here grew profusely, and he suspected that this was Rose's private harvesting area for the blossoms she sold. Perhaps there was something special about the soil here; some nutrient combination that was unusually productive and fruitful, for the growth did seem especially luxuriant.
Then, as his vision adjusted to the half-light, he began to discern a bloom which looked different from the rest. It was a rose, a rose that looked very dark. If it was red, it was the darkest red he had ever seen. He blinked. My God! It wasn't a dark red at all, but of a hue so deep that it could only be described as black. He took a few faltering steps forward. Thunder rumbled overhead.
Rose could hardly contain her excitement, dancing and pointing. "Black, black!" she cried. He stared at her in astonishment, before returning his gaze to the bush where, he now saw, a whole cluster of black blooms adorned the shrub. He was stunned. It really existed! He was no rose expert, but he knew how rare, how impossibly rare, this sight was. With mounting excitement he gazed on the beautiful blooms, black as midnight, black as dead suns in the infinitude of deep space.
Alex Thornton's words came back to him: "The Black Rose has long been thought to be an impossibility, but people are fascinated by the idea of its existence. Like the ghost orchid, like the white tiger, its perennial allure consists in its rarity." The rose, Thornton had explained, was generally considered the most beautiful of blooms, in fact a metaphor for Beauty itself; a pure black version would be considered a paragon, a superlative, some kind of floral Quintessence. Kilworth could see why – the bizarre beauty of the blooms before him awed him into silence.
An inexplicable chill came over him. He had found the Holy Grail. Immediately, though he knew he could get rich out of this, he anticipated the problems which would flood in with the discovery. Other people would try and get control. They might even harm him to steal such a rare find as this. He had to keep it a secret. Rose was obviously not in her right mind, didn't realise what she had here. Why had she chosen him to reveal it to? He didn't know, but he was grateful to her.
He clasped her arm. "Thank you, Rose; you've done the right thing".
She smiled crookedly. "Black, black!" She was still excited.
"Yes, black," he said. ‘Now we mustn't tell anyone else about this, do you understand?" He slipped a fifty-dollar bill from his wallet and crushed it into her grimy fist.
"Here. Go and get some good food, get yourself something nice, OK?"
She looked at the money, slow wonder dawning in her eyes. This was more than she sometimes made the whole week selling flowers to the mourners. She stuffed the money somewhere inside her rags, with an expression of low cunning.
He wondered what he could do. What did he know of hybrids, grafting, cross-fertilisation? But perhaps he could take the rose, transplant it to his own garden, where he could keep watch over it.
Pulling his camera from his pack, he tried to photograph the bloom in the exacting light. The Cemetery Rose, the true one, pure velvety black, was inexpressibly beautiful. He took his time photographing it. Once he had it in shot, he used several rolls of film, capturing in extreme close up the delicate beauty of the blossom.
But soon the rain, which had been a drizzle, became a downpour. A sporadic rumble of thunder became a continuo as the rain turned to a howling storm.
He could do no more in these conditions. Shouldering his pack, and ushering Rose back out of the grove, he carefully marked the spot in his mind so he could find it again. Rose went off through the graves, presumably to spend her money somewhere. He headed home, to think.
###
It is night again. Kilworth is wandering the City of the Dead.
On the cemetery's Anglican, the Serpentine canal, empty of water, starts shallow, then becomes five or six feet deep as he follows it. Silent stone angels gaze over ornamental ponds and latticed summerhouses.
The canal's winding path has led Kilworth to the Independent section, which is swathed in gathering night. He shivers, pulling his coat close around him. Stifling his nervousness, he comes to a building constructed of honey-coloured Pyrmont sandstone. Looming above him is the cemetery's largest monument, the incredible Frazer Vault, built in 1894 at a cost of five thousand pounds by Maurice B. Adams, architect. A high Victorian Byzantine Gothic masterpiece, it dwarfs everything around it. Four French-influenced gargoyles perch high atop it, channelling rainwater away from the roof. Most of the narrow small-paned windows set high in the walls are cracked or gaping open; he hears the chittering of birds roosting in the vault's upper reaches. Large black ravens perch on surrounding tombs closer to ground level.
The place might conceal anything. Dried-out corpses might lie piled up like cordwood against the inside walls. Or, he imagines, misshapen, boneless things might be lurking inside, impatient to drag someone like him in with them. It's somehow easy for him to think this. But his heart is in his throat, and he is frightened, more frightened than he has ever been.
Remember when everything was new and strange? a faraway voice seems to say. Water pools in the building's crevices, drips down the sandstone. He hears the tolling of St Michael's chapel bell, a slow, deep note. He looks around frantically for shelter from the sound.
The vault's large bronze doors echo ominously when he ventures to knock on them.
The doors groan. He gasps. A thin white hand appears at the doorframe's edge. He screams and keeps on screaming. Something sluggish, a figure, which he can vaguely see has a shrunken, hideous visage, seems to be spilling from the tomb's opening, blurred and swollen
As it squirms feebly towards him, he awakes, sweating. His throat is raw from screaming.
He is in his own bed, at home in Berala.
###
Two days later, unable to eat or drink, afraid to sleep again, still haunted by the nightmare's vividness, Kilworth again wound between the brooding lichen-encrusted graves. He intended to dig up the bush on which the Black Rose bloomed; but that was for later, when dark fell. Dead dried leaves and twigs crunched underfoot on the cracked earth of the narrow, uneven paths. Large trees entwined their gnarled branches above the pathways.
In the old Catholic section, past Necropolis Drive, huge grey-blue cacti and straggling flowery shrubs grew from many of the graves, nourished by whatever still lay beneath. He marvelled at the maze of headstones in sandstone and marble, at the bewildering variety of crosses, carven angels, and Celtic decorations that adorned the uncountable graves. Loose marble tiles and granite fragments lay in a chaos of tumbled masonry.
Many of the flatbed tombs lay half-engulfed by earth, and subsidence had shattered or tilted many of the headstones, lending them a crazy air. Faded plastic flowers littered the graves where they had fallen. Sundried brown grasses struggled through cracks on the tombs themselves and in the paths between them. He shot a roll of film as he passed through the tomb: rusting iron railings with fleur-de-Lys–topped spikes, surrounding headstones almost entirely effaced by wind and weather.
A dry culvert, like the one from his nightmare, snaked its way across the grounds. Number One Serpentine Canal was brick-lined, perhaps two and a half feet wide, and several feet deep. The thought of what might have been at the Resthouse, and what might be capable of concealing itself in those culverts, made Kilworth shudder involuntarily. Yet it was the Black Rose that filled his thoughts. Its beauty seared his consciousness like a black brand, its very existence subtly alluring as the siren's call.
Wandering further, Kilworth gazed bewildered at still more concrete pillars, which boasted tortured figures of crucified Christs, and multiple versions of supplicating Marys. Many of the headstones here were rusty-red with oxidation, above cracked black-and-white tessellated pavements. Atmospheric, yes. He snapped off shots here and there.
A bit further on, he came to a church – the chapel of St Michael the Archangel. Buried all around were generations of priests, white marble headstones topping greenish, lichen-covered stone graves. Not far away, a lawn was covered with a myriad of small memorial headstones. The chapel itself had large distinctively arched wooden doors, and many stained glass windows, the most impressive of which was rose-shaped.
Roses seemed to be haunting him. Two angel statues adorned the peaks at the front, and a large cast-iron bell topped the building. He seemed to have been irresistibly drawn here.
He read the inscription above the door, which proclaimed: "It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they might be released from sins." This was undoubtedly meant to be comforting, but for Kilworth it evoked a vision of the multifarious dead for whom no one had prayed, still locked in their sins and writhing in their graves, their bodies straining against the encompassing shrouds and coffins that held them in. Kilworth ran a hand across his sweaty brow. His thoughts had begun to run amok in this place.
He continued to the grove where the Black Rose grew. Its cloying scent filled his nostrils as he dug around its roots. Placing it with infinite care in the sack he had brought with him, he was careful to avoid the large thorns that ran like sharp vertebra along the plant's thick green stems. Bundling the sack over his shoulder, he made his way out of the trees.
Enough for one day. He would take his booty home. After a half hour walking, he came to the cemetery's perimeter gate and went out.
At the house, he placed the Black Rose at the centre of his dining table, drawing down the sack so he could bask in the aura of its glossy black petals, drinking in the strange, subtle scent it exuded. There would be no sleep for him this night either; he must watch the Rose, ensure that no harm came to it.
###
Next evening, fainter from hunger than ever, his eyes aching from lack of sleep, he returned to the chapel. Although he carried his camera, the original purpose of his photo shoot seemed to have dissipated; the cemetery itself, the Black Rose in particular, had begun to obsess him.
As he drew near the chapel, some shape seemed to be obscuring building's front, for he could no longer see the distinctive door's arch which he had observed yesterday. He peered through the gathering gloom. The shape was a dark figure, its face pale, lolling against the chapel's nearest wall. Above it, steeped in dimness, something seemed to scuttle from the roof and drop to the ground near the tall figure's feet. Fellow necrotourists? He didn't think so. He stopped in his tracks, heart pounding. Had he seen them before in his nightmares?
Maybe, he told himself, he was seeing things, his mind playing tricks. The human mind wants there to be an order in everything, doesn't it? So it creates patterns in chaos, order where none exists. A dark shrub becomes a crouching figure, a rubbish pile half-visible in the twilight seems a prostrate body writhing feebly – one explanation for phantoms – or so he rationalised, listening to his own scratchy breathing here in the dusk.
Dismayed, he cast quick looks left and right, unsure whether he was more afraid to see the figure moving, or not to see it. He came to a horrible realisation: something that wanted to catch him in its lethal embrace had been waiting for him, and for no one else.
A shiver passed through him and his skin went cold. He began, slowly, to back away.
He had not yet seen the figure's face, but his imagination began to give it one. It was a face composed partly of darkness, held together by shreds of flesh, with two eyes the colour of cold porridge, above a mouth with all the compassion and softness of a lamprey's.
Then, it stepped out into the half-light. Glinting fire seemed to play around its head.
At its feet, something smaller scuttled and hesitated, scuttled forward again, disappeared into the long grass. Kilworth suddenly understood that an unspoken hierarchy that existed between these creatures; the Thin Man was in charge, the creature its familiar. This was the creature he had sensed moving in the back of the florist shop, and which had been roosting in the Resthouse's roof when he had camped there.
He felt something slither past his leg; something with vestigial limbs He caught a glimpse of it – it was black and shiny as anthracite, spiky with tufts of hair or fur. He thought of the thing touching him with its clacking legs and its body furred with coarse hair, and felt as though fingertips were lightly walking up his spine.
A religious man might have called it a blasphemous abnormality, but Kilworth did not have such a facile option. For him, such things were resistant to interpretation. It dawned on him that nothing he could do would save him, for he believed neither in the possibility that these creatures could really exist, nor in the efficacy of any supernatural gimmick he could level at them.
No, he was alone with them. Out here, safe and familiar were meaningless terms. If the creatures existed in the face of all his well-reasoned scepticism, then the world was upside down and he was doomed. They were the servants of something unimaginable.
Moments later, backing towards the canal, he heard a dry rustling coming from the bricks. There was a slithering, and a staccato scrabble of its claws on brick. He mustn't be fooled into hiding in the canal.
Trees partly blotted out his view back to the chapel. Caught between the Scylla of the Thin Man, and the Charybdis of the smaller thing, whatever it was, Kilworth wasn't sure which direction to run. He wanted to cry out, but the wind stirring in the trees made a continuous "shhh" as though warning him to keep silence.
His fear welled up anew. He turned, frantically casting from left to right for a haven. Darting across behind a large gravestone, leaves crackled beneath his feet, twigs snapped with a treacherous loudness. What terrified him most was the thought of all the ground he'd have to cover between here and possible safety. His mouth tasted of iron, and licked his lips, which had gone dry. The lights outside the Necropolis were but a feeble glimmer. Rookwood's gates were locked at dusk, and he had missed the 3.30 bus out of the grounds, the last one for the day.
Breathing hard, his hands clasped to the headstone's roughness, he ventured a look back towards the church. Squat gravestones, mottled with moss and darkness, dotted the ground between him and where the tall figure had stood.
But now the figure wasn't there.
His heart quickening, he saw it again. It was slowly, silently moving towards his hiding place. As the figure approached, Kilworth could faintly make out the line of sutures stitching the flesh – if it was flesh – of the man's face. The sutures ran from its temple down the face's right side and along the neck, disappearing beneath the black cloth of its buttoned up suit. In those terrible eyes there was no human spark, only a dull intelligence that enabled it to exert control over its inhuman companion, and to keep hunting until it caught its prey.
Kilworth rose from his concealed crouch, his knees already aching and his stiff back protesting. The Thin Man was only paces away. Kilworth seemed hypnotised to the spot. The strength seemed to have left his limbs, and his breathing was muffled, uneven.
The Thin Man reached him, and placed its hand on his shoulder. The gloved hand that rested on his shoulder seemed to have been shredded to rags of cloth. Then he realised that the ragged threads that trailed from the hand were not cloth at all, but flesh...
The thin one spoke. Its voice was as guttural as a dying man's death rattle, yet simultaneously sibilant, like wind in autumn leaves, or the fluttering wings of a bird as it beats, trapped, against a windowpane.
"The Black Rose is ours."
Now its fingers were about his neck. He had a glimpse of cold, grey eyes gazing into his at close range. The fingers made a slashing movement and Kilworth felt as though his throat had been cut from ear to ear. With trembling fingers, he felt gingerly at the nape of his neck. Blood was trickling from the open wound, and he felt its wetness on his fingers.
In his shock, Kilworth dropped the camera. He tried to cry out, for help, but fear choked his voice to a whisper. He jerked away from the Thin Man's grasp and with a surge of strength, he pushed the thin figure hard; it stumbled back and away from him. He bent groundwards, fingers instinctively searching for the camera. Shivering with dread, he felt around on the humid earth. He held his breath.
Then his hand fell on a smooth surface, his fingers seeking purchase but finding none. In the semi-darkness he could not see the whole shape, but clutched what felt like the camera's outer casing. As he drew his hand closer to him, it slid along the thing and he realised it was long, far longer than the camera would be even had he grasped it by the lens. And what his fingers clutched was thin, as well as long. A horrible suspicion formed, and just then t a weight at the other end of what he was grasping jerked slightly. His fingers slid over a joint, and he realised with a shudder that he was grasping, by one of its legs, the revolting spider-thing.
With a shock of repugnant dismay, he snatched his hand away, and a cry of disgust escaped his lips. Judging by the size of the leg he had inadvertently grasped, the thing itself must have a body the size of a large cat.
He kicked out, and felt his foot connect with a dull but satisfying thud.
He half-saw the thing roll away from him. In the grasses around the nearest gravestone, a tangle of legs was sticking up, waving about. It must have landed on its back and was struggling to right itself. A sick feeling flooded the back of his throat. He clutched his fingers to the wound in his throat; t
Next moment, the thing was up again and sprang violently forward against him, landing heavily on his chest. He tried to beat it off with his hands. It gave off an overpowering smell of filth and decay, and its body's furriness as his hands brushed it made him feel sick. It dropped into the grass again, and he hastily backed away, keeping his hands up protectively in case it leapt again. Wind shuddered the fallen leaves, and raised ripples on the surface of the ornamental pond.
Suddenly Rose appeared, as if from nowhere. She picked it up, that thing, cradled it in her arms like a baby, the tattered folds of her old red dress swathing it from view. Viciously, she flung it against the bole of a nearby tree. He heard it slam into the tree trunk and fall to the ground. He could only hope she had killed it.
The Thin Man turned towards Rose, momentarily abandoning pursuit of Kilworth. Kilworth gasped in terror, adrenalin pumping through his system. He would run while his persecutors were distracted.
He could make the fence if he ran now. In that slim hope, he put his trust.
He ran, panting, gasping, hurtling across graves, thumping down aisles of trees, his clothes catching in overhanging branches. He sensed the Thin Man close behind, vindictive, implacable, giving chase.
He was nearly there. The fence's wire perimeter loomed ahead. He hunched over for a second, a stitch in his side, and gasped for breath. He listened. Nothing, save the night winds in the foliage.
He hurled himself up and over. Just as his body was three-quarters across, he felt a shooting pain through his ankle. A hand had grasped him, and was pulling him back into the cemetery. Almost mindless with fear, Kilworth shot a quick glance back over his shoulder. The Thin Man's grin was fixed, the lamprey mouth set in hideous intent.
Kilworth jerked his leg violently, his foot slipped through the Thin Man's hold. With a surge of terrified triumph, he made it over the fence, dropping to the ground outside. He felt the Thin Man fall back, flailing against the inside of the wire fence.
Something told him the Thin Man couldn't leave the grounds. He fled home in a panic frenzy, limping on his wounded ankle. A bloody trickle still ran from the wound the Thin Man had inflicted on his throat.
He spent the night sleepless, tossing on his bed, his throat bandaged. The wound was not as bad as he had at first feared, but painful enough to add to his discomfort. The ankle where the Thin Man had gripped him as he scaled the fence was fiery with pain. What would they do to Rose? He was sure they would harm her. But in his cowardice he stayed away all morning, and for the rest of the day.
Unable to concentrate, staring nightly at the Black Rose, its scent filling his head, its blackness seeming to insinuate itself into the fabric of his soul, he began to face the irresistible compulsion to return to Rookwood.
He had to find out what had become of Rose.
By the time he had steeled himself to do so, it was a week later.
###
As he entered the cemetery for the last time, the shadows deepened, thickened. Approaching the grove of the Black Rose, he slowly became aware of an overpowering smell.
Then he found Rose, what was left of her.
Her body was lifeless, her raggedy clothes thick with congealed blood. The smell of death, of decay, rose up to meet him. The body was slumped against a tree trunk on a weedy patch of ground. She was virtually faceless, her eyes and cheeks destroyed by maggots. They had clustered in Rose's hair, which he could see stirring as they teemed at the back of her neck. Her mouth was a distorted rictus, the lips peeled back revealing crooked teeth. Dried blood filled her mouth. There was no longer a nose, and only a little discoloured flesh remained on the head. The eyes were the worst, for they were nothing now but sightless pits.
Kilworth, gagging and reeling back as his nostrils caught the body's full reek, his mind frantic to block out the reality of this death, recalled unbidden Baudelaire's lines from "The Carcass" in The Flowers of Evil
"The flies buzzed and droned on these bowels of filth
Where an army of maggots arose,
Which flowed with a liquid and thickening stream
On the animate rags of her clothes"
For a few moments he was filled with remorse, with shame and sadness for Rose's pathetic end. How could he have allowed this? Yet part of him had expected she would be dead when he found her again.
Then anger kicked in. The uncertainty gnawing at his soul became need to take action. He would have vengeance. He turned away, disgusted, as some maggots disgorged themselves from her ruined head and writhed on the path before him.
Then, suddenly, just as he saw the slimy black trail leading to the tree bole, something dropped from the canopy of foliage above. He sensed a shape crawling toward him, his nostrils quivering at the thing's stale animal odour.
The creature surged forward. It seemed to be twitching, lurching towards him as though wounded.
He knew what he had to do. Dislodging a broken piece of headstone from beside one of the graves, he hefted it in his hand and waited. The creature appeared out of the long grass, poised to leap. He hurled the heavy piece of stone. It hit with a sickening thud, and a sound like a celery stick being snapped in two. The thing slumped to the ground. Its legs twitched briefly, and then it was still.
The killing of the creature was small recompense for Rose's death, he felt, but it was the only kind of justice he knew how to dole out.
###
A few hours later, Kilworth stood in his darkroom shed, surrounded by developing trays, and containers of fixative hypo. He was bringing up a print in his signature style; the hues looked dissolved in darkness. The image swam up slowly into view, shimmering like a ghost. It showed the Black Rose. In the background was another shape, blotchy and unfocussed: the Thin Man.
Kilworth took the print out and set it on the patio table to dry. He sat back in the old chair there, the one with the torn plastic cushions. The sky was staining the evening with darkness, which seemed to tug at him convulsively.
The exhausted light gave him a distorted view of the back garden, which overlooked Route 45 Olympic Drive. Close to the back patio's cracked cement, dry, crumbling leaves had fallen from the nearby tree. Weeds and grasses, dotted with blown dandelions and dried-out stalks, filled the backyard. They stood so tall that he could barely glimpse the brick back fence with its top edge ragged as some ancient battlement. Safe at the back, sheltered from the winds by the wire enclosure he had put up, was the Cemetery Rose. Replanted, fed with rich dark humus– the Black Rose.
Its macabre beauty brought him perverse pleasure. He would foster and feed it, nourish it with his own darkness. It would grow and prosper, and when the time was right he would know what to do. Perhaps the Thin Man would help him know what to do.
His mind seethed. Humans, he thought. We rut in the dark, but it is not until we encounter true darkness that we are brought to understand. He would feed the Black Rose, and it would feed him, and then there would be an accounting. A black flame, all-penetrant, would burn through him before he went out again into the world to exact vengeance on it
As he moved towards the Black Rose, which seemed to strain eagerly forward towards him, he was already on the verge of disclosing to it all the details of his own inner delirium. Then came a sound that was ugly, even to his own ears.
He began to laugh, and didn't stop.
