Leah Giarratano - Voodoo Doll

I'm coming, Cutter.

Leaning against a counter in Joss's kitchen, Cutter stared at his diluted reflection in the glass of a cabinet. While he listened to the quiet movements above him, he allowed himself some time to think about what he was going to do to Mouse. He couldn't believe the fucker wouldn't come tonight, that he didn't know his fate for turning Cutter down.

He selected a toothpick from a tiny bowl on the counter next to him, and worked at some food caught in his teeth. As usual, when using a toothpick, he couldn't resist the urge to press the sharp thing deep into the softest crevice of the gum, the agony mushrooming a feeling he equated to what love must feel like. He sucked happily at the metallic tang of his blood.

Studying the now slimy wooden splinter in his hand, it occurred to him that he should use the needles on Mouse. Perfect. He sucked the toothpick dry before placing it on the bench. Lately, he couldn't get enough of that taste.

He needed to hurry now. He walked into the loungeroom carrying the twelve-litre container in one hand and the machete in the other. He slashed a few times at the couch in the centre of the room and began sloshing the accelerant over the furniture.

Esterhase could see no way out of it. He felt sick, his limbs rubbery. He'd been pissing his shit out for over a week. Everything he ate turned to water. And his gut ached. He rubbed it unconsciously as he stood silently in the upstairs hallway of the house in Balmain.

Cutter had explained about Joss. Esterhase still felt disbelief. He hadn't even recognised him when they'd done over that house in Green Valley. But Joss was only part of the problem. Man, the whole thing was so fucked up. If he killed Cutter, this prick Joss still knew too much. And if he didn't do this job with Cutter, the cunt would completely schiz and he'd be next. Mouse had better be packing for Vietnam right now, he thought. Cutter had just smiled when he told him Huynh wouldn't be coming. Esterhase had nearly shit his pants just looking at him.

He breathed in the dark, his heart hammering. Too many things could go wrong. Who knew when Mouse would break, or when Cutter would get them all caught. He had to do this job tonight, and then he was getting the fuck out of the state. Shit, maybe he'd even go to New Zealand.

Esterhase stood in the dark thinking about what he had to do tonight. He bent forward slightly as the fist in his gut squeezed at his innards.

Isobel had thought it impossible for her heart rate to increase further until she heard the furtive footsteps stop outside the room. She'd spent a few moments agonising over the possibility that Joss could return quietly to the bedroom and she might hit him by mistake, but she knew now as certainly as if there were no door between them that the person standing out there was not her husband.

The corridor outside the double doors was black; the light in the bedroom with her, slightly brighter. She stared so hard at the rind of darkness that she thought she was imagining it when the door finally began to move. Terror wrestled with rage; her senses focused, and she squeezed the bat harder. Ready.

The scream of a siren split the air and Isobel recognised their fire alarm a heartbeat before the door flew open and her nightmare barged in. While the siren shrieked, the dance between her and the masked man seemed silent, slow.

I'm sorry Joss, she said internally. I let him get closer than a metre.

Somehow, the man had got hold of the end of the bat. He raised the knife above his head. Isobel could almost feel the pain in her shoulder where she imagined it would slice into her. Her daughter's blue eyes danced in her vision and she sobbed goodbye. Then, with the strength of a grief beyond anything she had ever experienced, she drove the bat forward into the chest of the man in front of her, propelling him three feet across the room. She felt the movement of his weapon as it fell past her ear. She considered picking it up, but, bent double, he was already preparing to move forward again.

Instead, she went to meet him.

Isobel lifted the bat above her shoulder and kept her eye on the ball, just as her brothers had taught her. She swung, the bat slamming into his temple, the thud shuddering up her arms and into her neck, causing her to bite her tongue.

With the fire alarm sobbing in her ears and blood from her tongue on her lips, Isobel spoke quietly to the man unconscious in her bedroom. She ignored the smoke swirling around her feet and his body.

'You leave my family alone,' she told him. 'You leave us alone.'

He didn't move, but she kept the bat close, and bent down to him. The fire alarms bawled for attention: it seemed as though there had never been silence. She was aware of a heat somewhere behind the doors, but she had to know. Carefully at first, and then scratching, clawing, she ripped at the balaclava covering the face in front of her.

The skin at his temple was already beginning to bulge. Somehow, she knew that his brains were leaking out of a fracture in his skull. The long dark hair curled into the hollows of his neck, like snakes nesting comfortably with the spider tattoos.

He had carried the other children through the carnage, crying, just like this, crooked in his right arm. Joss couldn't hear his daughter's sobs over the sirens, but he felt them, wet, against his shoulder. The alarms deafened him, just as the mortars had, but he was well practised at relying on his other senses. He stayed close to the wall, moving slowly, ignoring the bodies at his feet – back from Charlie's room to the bedroom, to Isobel.

The balaclava walked out of the smoke.

And they faced each other.

He manoeuvred Charlie a little higher. Her legs clung to him, terrified. Inconsolable at being woken from her sleep by this noise, she buried her face deeper into his neck. She didn't see the shock in the masked man's eyes when he saw that his opponent carried a little girl.

Joss smiled at him. The sight seemed to confound the man further. The enemy shifted his machete in his hand.

Joss knew somehow, with certainty, that this was not Cutter. This fact heightened his impatience. He willed the man to act.

The enemy signalled to Joss to raise his hands. Joss walked forward, quickly, still grinning, watching the other's eyes widen with anger, disbelief, watching him raise the machete, wave it, a warning.

Joss kept his left hand pressed tight against his leg until they stood eye to eye. He watched the other's internal dialogue – this guy's crazy! Should I do something? He's holding a kid! The fucking house is on fire!

Joss studied the eyes even more closely when he plunged his knife into the masked man's diaphragm. As awareness dilated the enemy's pupils, Joss angled his body sideways a little, turning Charlie's body towards the wall. The blade of his knife buried in the other man's gut, Joss felt his opponent's heart beat in his hand. He stared intimately into the other man's eyes and pulled the knife upwards.

When he felt the flames climbing the stairs, Joss reclaimed his knife and wiped it on his leg. Charlie's body now shook with coughing. Joss's eyes streamed in the smoke.

He walked into his bedroom, heard the mortars falling, and listened to the howls of the orgiastic Tutsis drunk on the blood of the Hutus in the camp. He stepped over another body, and looked around for his wife. His saw the open window and crossed the room quickly. In the light from the half-moon, he saw that Isobel waited.

Joss handed their daughter through the window, and climbed out to join her on the roof.

JILL SHUT THE bedroom door, but she imagined she could still hear the woman rocking out there, back and forth, by the bay window. It reminded her of a circus tiger pacing its cage – the obsessive movements of a beast driven mad by captivity. She'd spoken to many sufferers of schizophrenia, and some told her that the medications made them feel just like that, imprisoned in a chemical cage in their mind. She focused on the room in front of her to distract herself from Joss's mother. Perhaps Mrs Preston-Jones was fortunate to be oblivious to the trouble her son faced.