Equinox: Serial Killer

By C. T. Patrick Diamond

In this literary thriller, Tim Roper and Paul Morel each become a character in the other’s narrative: the watcher being watched. Their experiences of childhood abuse and murder are superimposed, one upon the other, to produce a double vision of evil.

Tim tells of growing up in the “Deep North” of Australia as an only child after World War II. Driven to become a serial killer, he marks the Equinox of leap years with double sacrifices to Mithras, the soldiers’ god. After 20 years and a botched kill, he takes his leave but will have to strike one last time.

Meanwhile, Paul tells of a sabbatical in Sydney as a retiring Canadian professor who obsesses over tracking down the Equinox killer and his own inability to complete a New Gothic novel. These compulsions awaken repressed memories of growing up in Toronto as an only child orphaned in an evil household.

Tim and Paul’s violent, sexual, and artistic experiences are silhouetted against their insistent introspections on a cast of mythical, historical, and literary figures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C. T. Patrick Diamond
• Release date: Nov 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311499554

C. T. Patrick Diamond

Dr C. T. Patrick Diamond is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of Canada. His major nonfiction works include The postmodern educator: Arts-based inquiries and teacher development (with Carol Mullen, New York: Peter Lang, 1999, 2006, 504 pp.), Teacher Education as Transformation: A Psychological Perspective (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991, 140 pp.) and Distant Drummer (Sydney: McGraw-Hill, 1972, 216 pp). Since returning to Australia, he has been a consultant or adjunct professor at several Australian Universities. He specializes in arts-based narrative inquiry, a multidisciplinary form of educational research and representation that is grounded in literature, the visual and performing arts, and the humanities. He has three children and lives with his partner in Sydney, Australia.

Book preview

PREFACE

This is neither a true nor personal story. Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. When actual historical figures, events, dates, and places are introduced, their treatment is wholly fictional and some names have been changed. If any offense were perceived, we would change any detail. We seek only the license which poets and madmen take.

What follows is a set of two fictionalized memoirs interwoven as a novel, with Tim’s chapters presented in the third person and mine (Paul’s) in the first person. To deal with the pronoun problem, we use all masculine forms. This is simply to disencumber the text. No disrespect or exclusion is intended.

EPITAPHS

God ... set this house on fire, ... and frightened the Master of my soul with horrors, and heavy apprehensions, and so made an entrance unto me. (John Donne)

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it. (Tennessee Williams)

Paul’s prologue: Midnight March 21, 2004

I have just destroyed an impostor for masquerading as me, Paul Morel. In this online battle of wits, I outdrew and outgunned the black-hat cracker, leaving him web dead. Mithras-like, I was being doubly alert, as another Fall Equinox was being ushered in Down Under and on a leap year. But it will not yield so much as a beach bonfire or bushfire alert. No dreaded headlines to be dredged back up. Just innocent schoolboys struggling to balance eggs on their ends for good luck and lovers sighing in hope that, despite early warning signs, they too might align like the sun and the earth. The anniversary of the successive torching from 1968 to 1988 of six young couples caught in their cars parked by the beach. By Equinox, an Australian serial killer, who surrendered to his dark gravitational forces only on those leap years, drawing others into his orbit and then cannibalizing them like a death star. Bookending his reign of terror by pulling first one solitary male and then another into the flames. When the world, like a drunken Humpty Dumpty, was distracted and tilting at a dangerous angle, this killer, grown all awry, had struck repeatedly. Still at large.

Chapter 1

Tim Roper’s time to kill [and] a time of war, March 21, 1968

Tonight marks Tim’s debut public outing as Equinox: Serial killer. He is controlled and detached as always, thinking of himself only in the third and never in the vain-glorious first person. After repeating his evening prayer of All hail, Mithras, father of our fathers! he clicks shut the back door of the rented bed-sit and of any emotions, blending into the shadows of the parking lot behind Villa Marina, a Sandgate block of flats. Ready for his first double sacrifice, a celebration of one of his sun-god’s main feast days, the Autumn Equinox. Throbbing with pent up heat and anticipation, the threatening thunderstorm still has not broken. Reports of intense high temperatures melting the wax of hives and drowning the bees Icarus-like. Also of massive die-offs of birds and fish. Not just poisoned by insecticide but in biblical-like anticipation of what was to come.

And Tim has a special evening in mind. Decked out not in black tie but spotless: skin-tight T-shirt, split running shorts, corded belt, machete, fingerless gloves, Nike runners, and cap, carrying a small backpack. All in black, he checks the contents of his kill kit before stowing it in the boot of his car: balaclava, metal lighter, flashlight, and the trophy revolver his father had souvenired while in New Guinea. A .22-caliber automatic Beretta. And some other things for later.

Now 28-years-old, despite school classmates breeding before and after taking off down the aisle, Tim stayed his single, childless course. As he will later discover while leading another life abroad, also the age at which Egon Schiele had died. A Viennese draftsman obsessed with the human figure, contorted, wrenching, and writhing, with embrace and revulsion all in one. Always alert and never putting out of mind anything that might parallel or affect the success of his seven-fold mission, the need for revenge rather than just for pain had been hard-wired into Tim’s brain stem. A scholar of religion, wars, murder, and mayhem, he is no mere hobby or impulse performer, timing his sacrificial offerings to coincide with the propitious movements of the heavens.

After supper and driving for an hour North, he turns off the main highway to head east towards Bribie Island. A set of beaches he knows well. Where the Pacific breakers are tamed to a dull swell at the entrance of Moreton Bay by the largest sand dune islands in the world. Unlike at other leap year Equinoxes, no cyclone has combined with king tides to hurl massive waves against the coast. No curdled foam blown along the shingle. Just measured calm.

Tim has already patrolled this kill zone in preparation. Where by day little nippers learn to swim close to the shoreline. Dreaming of one day becoming lifesavers and icons of desire. Small boys unwilling as yet to cast off from the sagging inner tubes buoying them up. Until the rubber chafes their private parts red raw or an envious undertow pulls them under. Where other youngsters on the beach look up from building their tiny coastal fortifications to gaze at pods of dolphins paralleling the shore. As blunt nosed surfers’ allies, they are able to ram and drive off sharks, despite gaping jaws and rows of razor-sharp teeth.

By the time the apprentice masons stare back down at their drip sandcastles, patiently fashioned from water-based lava, everything is crumbling and collapsing into their crude moats. Loss of innocence later when they learn that dolphins collude to serve as short-term accomplices of shark packs, jointly corralling sardine shoals into bait-balls. Swarms of Gannets dive-bombing from above. An attack launched from all sides, climaxing in a feeding frenzy. Suddenly in summer.

Tim slows down to bump across the two-lane bridge over Pumicestone Passage. Named for a convict trio of Paddies bolting North in 1826. Feet cut and bleeding from the jagged shards as their backs had been at the flogging Triangle, courtesy of Commandant Logan, the Beast of Brisbane Town. Hoping China or a better life lay just over the hill or a few miles to the North at worst, they had fled with only one fire stick between them for the shellfish or game they hoped to find. Later reduced to eating each other.

Tim glides along Memorial Avenue in his military green Valiant, a Chrysler Charger known as a Greek Mercedes or Wog Chariot. Later, to perfect his ritual, he will use rentals. For now, he passes one featureless Island suburb after another, homing in on his preferred ocean beach. Turning off the radio with its retro lyric, Come said the boy, let’s go down to the sand/... Let me be a man for you, he repeats a boyhood motto out loud: Punish the strong and save the weak. As he will at midnight.

Tim runs the car in under the fallen branches of a Ghost Gum beside a deserted sidetrack. Cloaked in darkness and leaving no tire marks on the bitumen. Just far enough from Woorim and its family caravan park. Where campers are happy enough by day but by nightfall and after the grog are at loggerheads. Tim has parked close also to his original ordeal pit. Where at 20 he had dedicated himself to Mithras, the Roman soldier’s god. Remote from the boozing and raucous laughter of the Blue Pacific Hotel.

There a cast of local diehards, daring the coming storm, are leaning back on creaking plastic saucer chairs scattered along the footpath. Festooned overhead with strings of party lights. Some gaps like missing teeth. A flashing red neon sign: XXXX hits the spot. Forex, the ever-popular Queensland brew, which sparked the burning question: How long could a real man live on beer alone? Or stay as drunk as 10 Abo’s. Tim is more interested in a single X. Used by Mithraic priests to mark the foreheads of the all-male faithful. Transforming military companions into Miles or Soldiers. The same pagan X as in Xmas before it was stolen by the Christians. Before converting as Paul, Saul of Tarsus had been both a Magi priest of Mithras and a Pharisee. Known as Simon Magus, he had attained the highest grade of the mystery cult. Paul had converted to Judaism only to please a sweetheart who then spurned him. The future barker for the Jesus movement was the son of freed slaves, spinning like a weathervane in the political breeze. A Roman Jew who admitted: I have become all things to all men. Responsible for the bastardization and fusing of primitive Judaism and Mithraism that came to be known as Christianity.

No longer facing the wartime swill with its dreaded 6-o’clock Time gentlemen, the locals still scramble for a last round before 10:00pm closing. One of the rowdiest, a wannabe-boxer in open-faced, black leather headgear, had fathered twins when only a teenager. Too proud for his baby sister to go on the pension, he made her give them up for adoption before taking out insurance cover on her life. Their offspring went on to become the first in a long line of twin Goth clones. The father-brother was known as Cobber but it should have been Koba, as he was not to be crossed. Became a fishin’ an’ drinkin’ buddy of Colin Roper, Tim’s father, once he did up an old Holden ute and could drive to ocean beaches to drop a line. Colin was mocked behind his back as a Blowhard or Ever-ready for being quick to launch into another yarn about how once again he had come out on top. Always beginning with, I’ll never forget ... .

Despite drunken mateship being hailed as the closest thing to the common good in Aussie, such fragile pub friendships, like sibling sex, can turn ugly, ending in violent punch-ups: Who’s your daddy? Bars are even more dangerous for a blow-in or anyone singled out as not quite one of them: Bloody galah! or Fucking poof! Tim will one day take his leave from these shores as Charles Darwin had in 1836: without sorrow or regret.

Well rehearsed, Tim opens the car boot and fingers his backpack one more time. Next he tethers the barbed head of the machete hanging from his belt to his left thigh with a second slip-knotted thong. Like a cross-drawing gunfighter. Then he jogs along the sandy trail with his knees building to a fiery quickness. Skirting the streetlights leading to the secluded laneway, he lopes from shadow to shadow like the proverbial black fella’s dog. Not in blazing noonday heat but in the sticky evening humidity.

Having been forced to accept from childhood that the drawn-out pain of suffering drives human affairs rather than surges of instant pleasure, Tim installs himself inside a natural bower to wait. A strategic blind under the overhanging She-oaks where he can watch the root rats gather in their parked cars. First hot and sweaty and then ripe and ready. Far better that Tim strike before a dude could launch a surprise attack on his lady. Clumsy gropers and not a sack artist among them, their hand-me-down motto remained: Treat ‘em mean to keep ‘em keen. No wonder Tim had vowed to rescue mothers-to-be and budding offspring from the cruel fate that might await them. Perhaps the sea breeze tonight might ease the girl’s farewell with its promise of sweet release. As it had Tim’s boyhood anxieties in his Shorncliffe tree house. And as serving Mithras, the sun-god, now did.

As a self-ordained soldier-executioner, Tim is ready to answer the call not to boobs and blowjobs but to arms and revenge. Short-cropped hair and a strong body with his father’s arms and shoulders. Tim had not thanked but topped Old Roper four years ago with no one any the wiser. That first kill would be recognised only later and by chance. And by a long lost rellie.

Tim and his mother, Nora, had been granted a rare breather in ‘41 when Colin was posted to Moresby in New Guinea (PNG). The RAAF base heavily bombed by the Japs who were feigning an impending invasion of Australia with 60 raids on Darwin, the Northern Territory capital. When Tokyo Rose, a turncoat Japanese-American, was warning her fellow orphans in the Pacific that defeat was inevitable. But she was only one of 12 broadcasters playing popular U.S. music and using that call sign. The use of stand-ins would not be lost on Tim.

All details of Australia’s first mainland casualties were censored. Everything north of what the politicians, safe and sound in Canberra, called the Brisbane line was to be abandoned. The bloody pollies! were prepared to sacrifice Rockhampton and the tropics to the Japs, a term of hatred still used today. In 1943, ignoring the red crosses, the Japs torpedoed a hospital ship on its way to Moresby, massacring 268 wounded military, carers, and crew off the Queensland coast. Sharks circling the few surviving rafts.

Near the Passion Pit, the local spot for a quick screw, Tim will play a waiting game while the night’s quota of young studs are courting the girls. Where two bush avenues cross to form a T-junction thick with Cotton Trees or Sea Hibiscus. And Oleanders with poisonous, milk-white sap capable of killing a child. Providing cover for couples on heat to park and neck unseen. Either living at home with parents like the bloody I-ties (Italians) or hitched and already out for a spin with a newbie. Car as shaggin’ wagin or mobile pad. Ready to engage in what the Sunday newspapers grandly called carnal knowledge or criminal conversations.

Both streetlights at the intersection had been knocked out by skylarking larrikins. No worries as Tim will supply the scene with back lighting. From tonight the T in his notebooks will stand for Terror at every fourth March Equinox: previously his but now that of others. The M already dedicated to the Middle Eastern mystery cult of Mithras, lord controller of the known world and all its changes.

An eager if novice executioner, Tim stares at the last two cars. Spread apart like the legs inside. Same old game. From tonight he will have warned all green girls that, although they may not have heard of Hamlet or Ophelia, they must not believe any swain’s false vows and promises. Such idle shows of affection are mere sparks and should not be mistaken for fire. If they ignore the heads up (literally) they will have merited their fate. Tim hums a snatch from a bush song: You’ll never catch me alive me, said he.

Almost midnight. At last, only one target left. Red with protruding front snouts. A General Motors Holden and no Ford. Still greedy inside. Come on, baby. Just one more go. Just you wait. Tim peels latex gloves over his bike mittens. The only use he now has for protection. Cap off and balaclava on. Time to drive out night with day. The car windows and windscreens steamed with humidity. Heart-shaped doodling on one side. The couple still groping inside are not expecting any one to call.

Hooded and armed, Tim strikes as both an avenging and a rescuing angel. A stab of blinding flashlight as he steps out of the darkness and rounds onto the passenger’s side. Streaked blonde hair shook out from a ponytail and scanties crumpled on the dashboard. Like a startled doe or jill caught in a hunter’s headlights, she could already have a joey in the pouch. Not acknowledging this could possibly also involve the murder of a germinating life, he shoots her clean through the left breast: I must be cruel only to be kind. No double tap to the head. Hickeys or love bites already tattooing her neck.

Through the shattered window, Tim’s eyes bore into those of her stunned fella’. Then darts across the vinyl seat bench like a fiery snake to strike at his real quarry, the young bull fully erect. Unshaven and wearing only a torn T-shirt grey from previous clean-ups. All the shaking, pissing, cringing, and reeking of fear brings Tim’s kill-thrill to climax.

Like a sniper’s target being ripped apart before even hearing the shot, the driver cannot process what is happening. Drowning in it all. There had been no warning signposts or media firestorms to alert him to what was to come. In the split second separating life from death, he catches the intruder’s hot breath and deeply intoned prayer: "Nama. All hail, Mithras. I sacrifice to thee!"

Tim lingers for a second, storing in memory the spectacle of a would-be pants’ man or Casanova gutted and humiliated. Had meant to rip the bullet through the receding hairline but, on his first night out, it plunged below instead. Just above the bridge of the previously broken nose. Hitting an eye with such force it rolls out of the socket and lolls down his chest: That’s what you get! Man enough for you?

Taking only seconds so far, Tim clicks open the stainless steel Zippo lighter and tosses in his lit firebomb. A wick torn from a child’s bed-sheet, soaked in sandalwood oil, and swaddling a container of four ounces of Swain lighter fluid. Rubber banded. All over the bench seat. Fire the oldest form of purification and most terrifying weapon of war.

To complete the ritual, Tim carves the Greek ∏ or star symbol into the roadside sand with the butt end of his stainless steel torch. The twin sign, both letter and number, left in memory of Tim and his unsuspecting other half. But never etched into any victim’s palm. Then drops one of Colin’s prize red rose blooms. Discharging the last drop of tension and in payback for past ordeals. His first heart-racing double now complete!

A final inspection of the unfolding tableau. The car is beginning to spurt from within. Bodies jerking about as if alive. Red and orange merging into green and blue flames. Not able to leap over the towering fire, Tim cleanses his hands instead in its glow as he would later his whole body in oil. Longing to watch the changing colours play across the faces of the crowd of aroused spectators when they arrive from the pub. Just before everything erupts into a golden fireball like a lightning bolt from an angry god. Flashing deep violet and spouting a black pall of smoke. But Tim has already melted into the darkness of the sand dunes and the shifting tides of time.

When the police finally show up, they roll their eyes at one another and want it to be no more than another abandoned stolen car. But, as things cool down, they will find human remains. No joyride cover-up. Gunshots? Some Commo hippy passing through must have done it. Later called the unsub.

Tim has eased his Valiant Charger back onto the main road and cruises to the highway heading back to Sandgate. Yes, as the model’s advertising jingle had promised, the unbelievable can happen to you. Like scoring his first double header and ensuring that the sun, having waned on March 21, will return again as all-powerful. He hears before he sees the single fire engine churning up the highway. Arriving too late to enjoy the evening’s highlights.

A half hour later Tim stops at a deserted Shell servo. The storm bucketing down at last. Before the age of CCTV and security cameras, he peels off his T-shirt and renews his spirit in the downpour. Always anxious about running on empty, Tim fills the petrol tank to overflowing. Paying in cash to avoid any telltale trail like the credit cards that later would lead to a smiling Ted Bundy.

Tim by then will have collected all the published details of Ted’s FBI case and execution. Found guilty of only two counts of first-degree murder, three of attempted first-degree murder, and two of burglary. Only Bundy would ever know how many coeds (young college types in the personals) he actually did for. Joined the century club. A super-sized serial. Tim will be more disciplined, sacrificing only every four years, and to his fire-god rather than to lust. And almost retiring in 1988, the year before Bundy’s execution.

Back in Sandgate Tim parks in the usual spot behind the flats and quietly mounts the back stairs. Opens and clicks shut the door of his renter. Nodding in salute to the fire shrine. A thurible he designed and dedicated to Mithras eight years ago. Burning precious oil. Devotion fed by reading about the Roman wars of conquest and classical myths as antidotes to his Mick upbringing.

Sipping fridge-cool water, Tim remembers how he had been introduced to Sol Invictus, his master. During a rare family outing and after drinking from a brand new bubbler at the Queensland Museum. An imposing Hall and facade of rose-red and cream bricks near the Ekka grounds. The rusting corrugated iron roof cracking its knuckles in the noonday heat.

A little heralded exhibition on Imperial Rome. A mason-friend had unexpectedly given Colin a family pass. A brazier burning sandalwood oil first caught Tim’s eye as next did a series of photographic and didactic panels: a bas-relief from a Roman crypt and a San Marino mosaic showing a series of trials involving the worship of Mithras, the legendary bull-slayer. Colin hissed for Tim to keep up. Lingering himself over a collection of red and black vases with wrestlers locked in tight embraces and with Hercules slaying the bull. All naked. But Tim’s imagination had been fired up by the seven rites of initiation. Unlike most Australians for whom only a three-step ascent mattered: from bronze through silver to gold. Only sporting prowess in the Olympics, footy, or cricket could provide the test of a real man: guts and determination. Life as a game of sport. But for a serial it involves racking up a body count.

Tim stopped at the third panel devoted to the origins of the bullfight or taurómaco. The bull is an object of universal fascination first because of its awesome virility and second because its death had symbolized the end of the Age of Taurus. Leading to much myth-making in pre-Christian religions, including the Old Testament and Mithraism. The Spanish ritual still climaxes with el momento de la verdad. When the torrero exposes his chest to the horns of the bull as he leans over its head to plant the sword between them. Related to the Minoan sacrificial act of bull-leaping.

While Nora was trying to find the lav before the slow steam train ride back to Shorncliffe, Tim rifled through the brochures at the reception desk. A bow-tied, precisely spoken curator stepped out of his office. At first impatient, then intrigued by the 11-year-old’s persistence, he agreed to take his name and details. Colin later rounded on Tim for giving that bloody pansy the time of day.

Using a red public phone box near the Shorncliffe band park the next Saturday morning and refusing to be fobbed off, Tim insisted the Museum staff follow up on the sources as requested. Spent his first cheque from that Toronto aunt to have sections translated from the French and German. All arranged by the curator whose interest had been piqued by the attentions of his youngest ever might-be recruit.

A month later Tim collected a thick envelope from the postal box he had rented in his mother’s maiden name, Page. Posties knew Tim often had to do things for her. And so he became a devotee of Mithras. Celebrating first in his heart and later in his bed-sit where he built a mini-shrine to his fire-god. Greeted on entering and leaving with the Roman All hail!

The salute had been recycled as Heil Hitler! with the German masses surging towards their Nazi Messiah with arms stiffened at 45-degrees. His name on almost everyone’s lips except those of Johann Elser, an obscure Munich carpenter whose lone protest Tim will later read about in a two-volume Hitler biography. In it, Churchill described Hitler as having "conjured up the fearful idol of an all-devouring Moloch of which he was the priest and incarnation." After Tim’s self-administered consecration, only the name of Mithras would be on his lips. As he pursued his warrior studies first as an earnest schoolboy novice, then uni student, and finally an equally private teacher in his other life by day. Meditating at night on the ways of his god.

Branded regularly as a hapless boy by his father, Tim had waited until 1964 to repay that debt. And to induct himself into the first (half-) stage of the mysteria as a Raven or Messenger. Keeping the other half on lay-by until 1988. Tim a meticulous record keeper. But now in 1968, as a result of his first double sacrifice, Tim has ascended to the second degree of the Nymphus or Bridegroom of Mithras. Although publicly preaching resistance to gross indecency, this ultra blokey Roman soldiers’ faith had always centred on male–bonding. Using the handshake as a goodwill gesture to demonstrate undying faith in each other. Binding up their wounds and sharing secrets.

Tim did not then suspect the real reason he had been drawn to this brotherhood: as the only form of intimacy he could then tolerate. And at a distance. The well loved, men only religion had been white-anted by Paul who plotted and schemed until Jesus usurped the place of Mithras. As Abel had that of Cain. The god’s warlike practices were then cannibalized by a gaggle of women and slaves, weaklings and paupers, turncoats and petty bureaucrats all calling themselves Christ-ians. Gentiles who, as Paul taught, did not need to become Jews before joining the Jesus movement. Jostling and swelling at the feet of the Nazarene like a pool of scavenging pigeons. Even today pasty-faced fundamentalists, in halls thrown up along the Sunshine Coast North from Bribie, still claim Jesus as their Redeemer. At the newly founded uni, only the kangaroos, unlike thought and sexual orientation, are allowed to roam free. Most Aussies would only ever hail a sporting great as their possible messiah.

But tonight Tim has demonstrated his allegiance to Mithras, a member of the Middle Eastern trinity of fire. Merging with Moloch of the Canaanites and Mithra of the Persians. For centuries in Australia, small nomadic tribes had also honoured fire and the same-sex marriage of the first man, Abo-Tani, to Plume Birinyi, the god of fire. The union burning his private parts. The Aboriginals initiated their young men into the sacred mysteries through jumping over a fire, circumcision, and bloodletting. Frightening away the devils by whirling bull-roarers or carved sticks tethered with strings of human hair around their heads. Men’s secrets. As the sound of rushing flames would be music to Tim’s ears.

To provide a plotline or sequence for his rituals and reason enough to stay his course, Tim adopted Mithraism as a personal Gnostic religion, propitiating and ensuring the loyalty of his military god. Also able to follow his own destiny. Like Julian the Apostate, scholar and warrior, Tim wanted a return to the old, pre-Christian ways and to overthrow God the Father, the tyrannical first person of the trinity. A monster with much to answer for, including sending his only son as a lamb to the slaughter. By 1968, Tim had dealt with his own father but not with the remaining legacy of pain. This would be eased at each successive leap year Equinox.

Unlike Jesus, Mithras had never been some minor historical figure. As a symbolic warrior-god his mythic authority could always be invoked. Gentle Jesus, meek and mild was only an unruly, unmarried Rabbi. Crucified as a common criminal under a Roman governor who washed his hands of the whole affair. With rat-like cunning, Paul then scapegoated the Jews to win favour with the Romans.

Just after midnight and with screams of another drunken domestic flooding in from the next-door Sandgate flat, Tim showers away the remains of his first seaside double kill and anoints his body with oil. Slicking it all over to soothe his spirit. Only later in Venice would he use sandalwood as a lure. For now he busies himself with detailing his latest fire observances. All in his Pompeian red kill book kept locked away with his backpack and other regalia in the green trunk with its dimpled lid. A deadly almanac. First thing tomorrow morning he would add a second newspaper clipping. Then successive comments to the margins. Later interpolating flimsy paper, pale green like new willow bark, for special entries. Having no one yet with whom to share his secrets. Head bursting.

Flicking off the overhead light and settling into his one chair, Tim vows that, as he had learned to his cost as a boy, others would learn to theirs: that March in Australia means the Autumn Equinox. September in the rest of the world as when Celtic herders lit ceremonial bonfires to mark Halloween and the change of season. Also seized on by the Christians and turned into All Saints’ Day, ushering in All Souls’ Day.

Tim had learned to wait for the leap year Equinox. Internalizing and disciplining the ache as when everything hovers between Hell and Heaven. With dangerous weather just over the horizon as when the acqua alta driven by intense lows threaten to overwhelm the canals and squares of Venice. The intended setting for the last station of Tim’s via dolorosa, stretching from 1964 through 1988 to 2003. Begun when he was strong enough to strike down all opposition and impose a new order. A tantalizing moment of equipoise until his war games could heat up. Imposing a topography of beachside terror. Breeders beware. Like birds sensing predators and raising fewer chicks.

Down Under, if the monsoonal storms did not break in February, the whole of Brisbane and the seaside would smother under a blanket of humidity. Empty skies and baking sun. But not even temperatures soaring over the century and deaths of the weak could distract the nation from the excitement of a cricketing hero’s reported ton at Lord’s. Snatching the Ashes away from the dreaded Poms in the fifth and final test. Sport as war without the shooting.

But then, after the clouds had piled up all day and thunder rumbled in the distance, suddenly, after tantalizing weeks and as the sunlight ebbed, the horizon would turn green. Flashes of heat lightning streaking across the sky. White chains rushing forward and cracking open the heavens. Sheets of torrential rain pounding the ocean of corrugated roofs. Trees as proxy lightning rods were struck down and their branches torn off. Drains unable to cope. Flash flooding. The Brisbane River only waiting to burst its banks and resume its old ways. Sweaty fathers invoking Hughie, the rain god, to send ‘er down, as they slammed shut windows and doors. Eaves no protection. Guttering overflowing from leaf dams, torrents spurting from rust holes. Water tanks brimming. Rushing to return to the sea. Tim had cut out a prayer to Hitler from a 1940’s Ford Motors German magazine: Like currents in a torrent lost/ We all flow into you.

Similarly unleashed, Tim would strike down the threatening darkness every four years for the next two decades. At the Equinox and beside those great levellers, the beaches of southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales. Exalting his god and exorcising his own pain. Paying homage there and at his bedroom shrine: All hail, Mithras, god of consuming fire.

A stinging right eye reminds Tim of how an internal storm had marked his debut that previous morning. The excited wall of a capillary had burst leaving him with a star-shaped fire eye. A medal awarded in anticipation of his first double header. Tim was no amateur shooting fish in a barrel but a newly sprung virtuoso killer and on the rampage.

Stretching out on his army surplus cot and waiting for sunrise, Tim distances himself from the ache in his groin by retracing the topography of another killing field. The back lanes of Victorian East London where Jack the Ripper had topped an orgy of five (or six) street performances in just four months with a Masonic bedroom finale. A soirée prepared for the three months gone Mary Kelly, tearing out her uterus and heart. But Tim would take no body parts. No trophies or spoils of war except from men on their own. And to mark his first and last strikes.

Tim had prepared for his Bribie double kill with a Shorncliffe at home with his father in 1964. Colin tucked up in bed like Mary Kelly. No more diary entries at day’s end after that for Colin. While Tim showed the exit to the Shorncliffe abuser, his own entry into the company of serial killers had gone unrecognized. Only Tim then knew his life’s work had begun.

Too excited to sleep and unable to keep the thumping and squeals now coming through the wall at bay, Tim retraces his earlier drive to Bribie. All fired up after a hurried bite, he had driven North from Sandgate. A bayside refuge for pensioners and working class battlers. Gulping for air Tim had headed out along the old Gympie Road through Aspley, a bank managers’ enclave like St. Lucia to the West. Once the site of sugar plantations and now UQ, the Queensland Uni, where he had studied in the 1960’s. Encircled by the Brisbane River, typically Aussie: upside down with mud on top. Bull sharks, immensities of muscle with 50 rows of teeth and explosive in shallow water, cruised its lower freshwater reaches in search of nursing grounds. Tim would be no less deadly.

He again feels the car accelerating and hurtling along the dimly lit highway. Had always been able to take refuge in the secret chapel of his thoughts and imaginings. Such periods of uninterrupted self-exchanges served as his version of tugging at the universe. A dark echoing flow, reaching out and back in time helping him to make some sense of things where really there was none. Forays into the unknown, searching even for the illusion of connection. Words could not do justice to what he had gone through as a boy but they were all he had. Once he found his warrior lord, he vowed that, by wield[ing] the weapons of Mithras and the Light, no darkness may stand against us.

He had slowed down at Forest Glen and drifted mentally on the soothing calm and murmuring of its gently moving gully streams, floating like a foetus reluctant to come to term. A rain forest oasis and haunting reminder to Greenies, those peace-loving eco-warriors, of how many things face extinction here. One third of mammals already gone, the worst rate in the world. Abo children are also at risk in their own land: attacked by eye-infecting flies, blindness, substance abuse, and kidney disease. A life expectancy of only 35 years. Generations of government neglect and public unconcern. Neither sorrow nor recognition for another 40 years. The Howard government would send in troops in 2007 only on the pretext that paedophile gangs were operating in remote Indigenous settlements. Yet, despite the hysteria, no prosecution for child abuse would result and reports would conclude that there was no evidence of any systematic child abuse. Many of their communities live on mineral-rich lands.

Tim next passed the Glass House Mountains silhouetted against the darkening west. Cathedral-like monoliths that should have served as a warning to Colin as he passed by on his way to Bribie fishing trips: Beware the quiet son. As should the growing collection of things gone missing. But Colin had been lulled into a false sense of security and was too self-absorbed to make it all add up. Unable to grasp that every evil deed leaves an indelible record in the dreaming land.

Tim had shared the Glass House Dreamtime myth with his year-nine pupils at Sandgate High, including John Driscol, the dwarf paperboy with deep gravelly voice. About the mountain family scrambling to escape an incoming tidal wave of grief. The eldest son, Coonowrin, had panicked and run, abandoning his mother Beerwah, pregnant with yet another mountain. In anger, Tibrogargan, the ape-like father of all the tribes, clubbed the coward, dislocating his neck. Then turned his back on Coonowrin forever. Unable to straighten up, he was known thereafter as Crook Neck. The family’s domestic shame turned to public tears that still flow as tiny streams to the bay. Tim’s father was the dingo in the Shorncliffe family. Another cowardly sadist would later dump the remains of a naked boy in that same swampy bushland.

In his mind-cave, Tim took comfort in strange coincidences and telling twists of fate, sharing them also with his history classes. Like those that ensnared Captain James Cook. Sailing offshore in 1770, he had named this group of weathered volcanic plugs the Glass Houses. In memory of the cone-shaped glass furnaces of his boyhood Yorkshire. During World War II, Aussie troops had called military prison a glasshouse. Tim’s father had always vowed he would rather do boob (prison) time again before he would let Nora or Tim fly the coop. Mocking their bent heads with: Bloody martyrs. Ya love your nerves. They learned they were of no value as persons or family. Colin never thought about consequences and was twice pinched by Joeys (MP’s) for being violently drunk and AWOL in Moresby. Cook had charted that same New Guinea coastline after skirting the east coast of Australia.

Urged on by an earlier poor sighting of the Venus eclipse in Tahiti, Cook and Joseph Banks, his 27-year-old botanist, had sailed to the great unknown southern land. Despite having sailed half way around the world to witness the planets aligning, only a small, black spot glided over the face of the sun. A transit that occurs only every 243 years but then in pairs just two leap years apart. The dusky shade surrounding the evening star was a portent of the even worse luck that would overtake Cook.

His third voyage of discovery would be his last. After the added disappointment of not finding the Northwest Passage to Europe, Cook had returned to Hawaii in 1776. Only to be stabbed and clubbed to death in the not so friendly islands. Tim’s kill books showed that his patron saint, St. Timothy, had also been bludgeoned to death. As was St. Sebastian after surviving the flurry of arrows. Like a meagre cache of medieval relics, only Cook’s thigh, scalp, and hands were recovered. The rest had been cooked and served up. Tell-tale scars on the salt-preserved hands had confirmed them as his. These few remains were placed in a coffin and buried at sea. The navigator had become one of his own remarkable occurrences. Tim’s record keeping sought to chart such intriguing co-incidences. Lonely Cook had left no direct descendants as his six children had either pre-deceased him or were barren.

Amid the continued noise of neighbours making up and making out, Tim comforts himself that he no longer is his father’s helpless offering. Having crossed the previously unknown territory of parricide and following up with this double hit has assured his independence and eventual place in criminal history. And in a Murderpaedia to be assembled by someone else. Tim’s dark presence that had first passed over the face of the earth at Shorncliffe would now return every four years somewhere along the same coast. Until Tim had drafted six couples (and two singles) into his master plan to ascend to the lap of Mithras.

Drowsing and lapsing into the first of three fevered dreams, Tim sees his dark portrait featured at the centre of a movie poster. Flanked to the left by the waning moon and to the right by the rising sun: as twin torchbearers, the Fall and Spring Equinoxes would close in on each other like distant cousins. Tongues of fire bursting over one and book pages opening over the other.

In Tim’s second dreamtime sequence, three scenes are conjured up as from a silent movie. Faces without sound like his first victim couple. And, like the Glass Houses, the twin-heads of Notre Dame are brooding over everything with a terrible secret. Esmeralda, the gypsy-dancing girl, is being rescued, Tarzan-like, by the Hunchback, Quasimodo. Grateful for the water she had given him after his public whipping. As Ben Hur was said to have taken pity on Christ. On special occasions, heartless mayors in medieval French towns would buy a condemned criminal from another town so they could entertain their citizens with a public execution preceded by an escalating torture sequence. Cruelty for its own sake.

Tim’s second clip highlights taking revenge: the Hunchback, no longer the Archdeacon’s lapdog, turns on and hurls his adoptive father from the balcony. Punishing him for tormenting Esmeralda. Then, like a stained glass window freed from its stone moorings, the tableau spins out of control. Shattering in mid air, slivers of rose-coloured glass ignite in a firestorm of sparks that reform as a triptych from Bosch or a study by Francis Bacon.

Its first panel shows Tim being branded as a boy, carcass-like. His left hand outstretched, palm facing up. In the second, as a wide-screaming Inquisitor in black and torching others. In the third, as a faceless avenger in white setting himself ablaze. The pitch-black backdrop then turns blood red. Such a complicated series of reworked portents could be signalling either confirmation of the acceptance of Mithras of Tim’s first double sacrifice or providing an omen of something else.

Woken by the first rays of the sun, Tim leaps as from a bed on fire and then jogs expectantly along the Sandgate esplanade. To the paper shop beside the Beach movie theatre. Greeted by scattered piles of the Courier-Mail, the conservative daily, spilling its headline and feature onto the footpath:

Couple’s killing shocks BI community

How scary is this? asked the local paper man. Just a couple of kids minding their business. Now they’re goners. Residents are worried and day-trippers could be scared off. The hotel proprietor said: We’re pretty relaxed around here but we want answers. Do the coppers have any leads? The spot where the couple was killed is a remote car park on the oceanfront. Two locals told police they heard gunshots around midnight. Transients often try to camp in the area but it is patrolled. The drifter responsible has likely moved on.

On the way back to his room Tim hums triumphantly to himself: "To everything there is a season." Lifted in the ‘60’s by the Seekers, an Australian folk-pop group, from the Book of Ecclesiastes. Turn, turn, turn. Another Aussie knockoff.

The police will at first resist picking up on any pattern in the beachside killings even though the same objects (really symbols as Tim will later recognize) continue to pile up around them at each leap year Equinox. Constituting a clearly distinctive MO. Still more couples shot and burned with unnerving similarity. Their age or sex unable to be determined for weeks. And then only from dental records. Tim’s turn to reap. A determined avenger with no time then for companionship or unmanly misgivings. Even distanced from himself in his third person memoir.

Chapter 2

Over the Pacific, December 2001

Call me Professor Morel with no second l despite the French Canadian connection. First name Paul and no longer answering to Pip. Using the first person to rescue the sound of my own voice, I am beginning a last sabbatical year. This long sonata-like movement will mark the beginning of my (re)search into what I once would have self-effacingly termed the cultural self-identity formation of an Australian serial killer called Equinox. I will use writing as my main method of inquiry, seeking to flush him out by exploring pivotal moments in his life course and back history, fleshing it all out.

Always straining for possible connections and seeking to ferret out unexpected insights, I already know that the rounds of my reflections will be as introverted and convoluted as my shuffling use of references and tenses. But, as in an upside down or fun-fair mirror, I will avoid all contact with my past and childhood self, hiding out behind a cover story dedicated to things of literary and often limited academic interest by piling up all manner of scholarly distractions to block the return of memories. Even as I shield my skin from the sun with long sleeved shirts, light parachute pants, outsize panama, and flies-eyes dark sunglasses.

Gladly accepting my I’ll never remember condition and deploying several backup or survival mechanisms, including a profound inability to recall the given or first names of those who should have been closest to me and all but total face-blindness towards them. Leaving their identities and distinguishing facial landmarks blurred like censored film footage curled up on the cutting floor. Such memories are not part of the childhood diary and photographic album that I carry around mentally with me. More like a tabula rosa. Despite my willed or acquired prosopagnosia and other assorted disorders, by year’s end I will be able to confirm that any serial killer’s claim to memory loss is almost certainly false. As any pretension to criminal genius is just as unwarranted.

It is December 13, a day associated with the Zodiacal element of fire. As the world around me rapidly contracts and to ward off any panic attack, I bury myself in my notes and jottings. Trying to ignore the advanced age of the Canadian Airlines DC-10 as it lumbers up above Toronto and out over the Great Lakes. Then droning over Ohio, the Mid West, the Rockies, and California before levelling off five miles above the Pacific and its fiery volcanoes. To touch down briefly among fields of Hawaiian sugarcane before plunging on back into the darkness, imprisoning me once more in mid-air. Finally to land in Sydney, Australia. The lowest point of the inhabited known world.

Earlier that morning, struggling to close up my luggage brimming with books and files, I had wondered about why I had postponed this return trip for so long. On my last year of research leave from the University of Toronto and committed to collaborating with Rose Matthews, a former childhood friend and now colleague at the University of Sydney. I remember her name only because of the succession of patient E-mails she had plied me with over the years. I reassure myself that we will not have to meet too often. Her character will prove too inconveniently trustworthy for my purposes.

Always hiding out behind some pretext, in this case that of an officially approved plan of study that bound me to complete a book with the grandiose working title of In two voices. Supposedly dealing with twinned narrative inquiries. However, my real plan is to draft a novel about how serial killers are made and how evil enters and rules the world, baffling detection and beggaring explanation. My secret obsession. I will diarize and contrast details from my dull academic lifeworld with what I hope to discover about that of Equinox. Still at large after his first recorded double strike in 1968. I had also planned that by using a colon the book’s title would allow me to have a second bite of the cherry. Signalling accumulation as my preferred strategy.

Although spinning at opposite ends of the earth and despite obvious contrasts such as sweltering coasts and cocky bravado versus frozen lakes and muted civility, I will look for the qualities that an unlikely Australian and Canadian pair might share. I will fly two related flags as I search out parallel trajectories. Not like those comparisons of noble Greeks and Romans as drawn by Plutarch but those of an Australian serial killer being pursued by a Canadian professor. Although never one to wave anything, I had pinned small enamelled badges of the maple leaf flag to my backpack and tagged hand luggage so as not to be mistaken for an American. Laptop and Palm Pilot my prized travelling companions.

With their superior textual communication and search functions, both electronic devices exemplify how snail mail and the printed book have been successfully challenged for convenience. Even as the scroll was replaced by the codex after early Christians in the 4th century decided to read in the new, compact, and flexible format. Also a symbol of their wilful rejection of the classics and wisdom of the ancient or so-called pagan world. Written on the skins of animals rather than as earlier on Egyptian papyrus, these continuous rolls of parchment had provided editable, record-keeping texts that were unwound from one umbilicus to the other. Thus the word, explicit, is taken from the Latin for unrolled. Today scholars can once again search or scroll through a text, but now with far less effort. As, earlier that morning over coffee, I had been searching through flag entries both in my Palm organised under V and online. Although Electronic mail (E-mail) predated and played a crucial role in creating the Internet, I dread the possibility of either being exposed to ransomware or being cyberstalked and toyed with.

As I had found, vexillology is the study of display emblems that sum up a collective or organizational identity. Deriving from the Latin for a standard or a banner of fabric, as once used by Roman legions and still by Catholic bishops. All sides believing God [is] on our Side (Deo Vindice). Flags combine spectacle, rallying points, and communication. There is even a maritime one for taking on or discharging explosives: the red and white B for Bravo. As I will later find, it could have been appropriately flown outside my Toronto home. The national flag is also red and white, consisting of three vertical bands: red (hoist side), white (double width and square), and then red again. A Fall maple leaf in the centre of the triptych.

I can remember a much smaller flag. Australian and stapled to an HB (hard and black) pencil leaning at an angle out of a spent Vegemite jar on mother’s desk. Her study and private bedroom were forbidden territory for me as a boy already obsessed with books and dictionaries. Her diaries and other things were strictly off limits. If caught trespassing, she would pick up the heaviest volume at hand and swat my forehead with all her might. Thump. Right between my eyes. That’s what you get. Perhaps the repeated blows damaged my frontal lobe and even the deep-seated third or pineal eye. This tiny gland, named for its pine cone shape, has been linked to sleep, memory, and was once nominated as the so-called site of the soul. I still am criticised for saying so very little, displaying a uniformly blank expression, and being slow to respond to others. Socially (and sexually) no risk taker. Mocked as mother’s jelly(fish), words or language became my weapon of choice. Armed as an academic.

Now, after years of practice in averting that inner eye and holding up the dull shield of memory against my Mother Medusa, I cannot recall a single feature of her face. And not alone in that. Although the original Renaissance Man, Leonardo da Vinci, could sketch from memory every detail of whatever he had seen, even in passing, he was unable to remember anything of his mother’s face or name. Dissociative amnesia. I too am haunted by this same sense of loss but would never beseech Hermes, the ancient psychopomp, even at the moment of death, to quickly grant me cold water from the Lake of Memory to drink. Far better to continue to gulp down oblivion from Lethe, the pool of forgetfulness.

I was unmoved by all the patriotic images of Australia (known as Straya) that flooded the world media in 1988 to mark the bicentenary of its British occupation. Discovered 18 years earlier by Captain James Cook and his botanist, Sir Joseph Banks. The Union Jack still haunts the upper hoist-side quadrant of the navy blue field of its flag. A large seven-pointed star lower down. The remaining ground featuring the white Crux constellation. A national emblem inspired not by stargazing Down Under but by the rebellion and death of 22 republican protestors at the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat.

As described in my notes, at sunrise on December 3, 1854, a mob of gold miners, including boys as young as 16, had taken to the barricades against corrupt politicians and the police, demanding basic rights and freedoms. Flying the Southern Cross banner just when the mother country was distracted from March of that year in the Crimea. Fighting that had begun in 1846 over which of six churches would control the keys to Christ’s tomb, the so-called holy sepulchre. Forty worshippers were killed when rival groups fought not only with fists but also with crucifixes, candle-sticks, chalices, lamps, incense-burners, and bits of wood torn from the sacred shrines. Still continuing to the present day. Be not amazed [indeed] … . He is not here (Mark). Even the four gospel witnesses could not agree about the time of day or who were present when the stone was rolled away from the tomb. The melancholy spectacle of the warring factions continued on with knives and pistols being smuggled into the chamber by either side. In the end, the English, French, and the Ottomans went to war with the Russians for control of the Crimea, involving 300,000 causalities. But, by 1914, the Turks had realigned themselves with the Germans against the English, French, and the Russians.

Ignorant of such religious intrigue and power politics, after landing there on April 25, 1915, Aussie Diggers showed great pluck under Turkish fire to become a second generation of icons of protest against injustice. The proud tradition of rugged independence was upheld on that Anzac Day when they were ordered to dig, dig, dig, until … safe. Valourized as bronzed heroic sportsmen who scaled the steep cliffs at breakneck speed. Refusing to salute their Pommy officers and only at their best when fighting a hangover. Both sets of events were misrepresented as snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat, providing the fledgling nation with its defining birth pangs. But the actual scuffle at Eureka had lasted only 10 minutes.

Despite a lifelong social whirl and web of powerful connections, no provincial flags had flown at half-mast to mark my parents’ deaths. With only the barest funeral amenities observed, they were not interred together. I was in my last tween year. Only a vague intuition of a car with its engine running in the garage and another exploding in the street. Then a hasty police interview and a Bay Street executor bundling me off to boarding school. Although run by the Society of Jesus, the model for Himmler’s SS, it luckily was no military academy or gung-ho boot camp. I overheard the lawyer complaining about all the paperwork: mother had also set up a trust fund for a cousin in Australia, another only child. I was left with settlement enough. Otherwise shunned or shrunk from.

Now inflight and above it all, I am spared the incursions of phone, fax, or E-mail and can retreat once more into my inner self. Stacked to overflowing with reflections on all sorts of subjects: esoterica to go. I have the usual earned academic qualifications (what Aussies call guff) but really am an autodidact whose kit bag of notes and references is always in danger of splitting apart. My preferred inquiry mode is to stumble on, trusting that some trivial detail that I have recorded will go on to yield unsuspected but useful synchronicities. Until then, I will keep wandering through my expanding universe with wilfully little awareness of my role in it. But not entertaining any thought about things closer to home means that I am also at risk of being capsized by any unexpected return or rebounding of events.

As both my Murderpaedia with entries at varying stages of completion and my endless literary references below will confirm, I have amassed a horde of scholarly fragments about killers and artists, including how Edgar Allan Poe and Patricia Highsmith shared a fascination with revenge and a birth date, January 19. Trying to extend the web of dark associations, I found, for example, that the notorious child killer, Albert Fish, had been strapped into the electric chair three days before that. But such things really do not add up. Birth and death days are only of personal significance. My accumulation of citations and chance coincidences are poor substitutes for family connection, personal commitment, and intimacy. Hiding out behind a buffer of incidental details with, as foreshadowed by Emily Dickinson, ourself behind ourself concealed. Denying any and all access to my early self and life and feelings about them. But what could have led me to conclude that living and working alone is better than playing or being with another? Only later being able to recognize this stylistic example of chiasmus as presaging others to come in plot and character development.

Earlier that afternoon, a Diamond taxi had arrived at the house, #21 Shorncliffe Avenue, Forest Hill. Given my interest in cars and things electrical, I immediately recognised it as a Chevrolet Equinox. A more recent model than my parents’ twin set, one red, the other white. We had lived, as I still do, in an old moneyed suburb of Toronto, the commercial and multicultural hub of Canada. A latter day, Renaissance city-state. The calm exteriors of its marbled and linoleum-free mansions giving no hint of the realities within: cruelty, depression, adultery, abuse, molestation, suicide, death by misadventure, and murder. As everywhere.

With the impatient driver slamming his door shut after finally locating my address, for the first time in 50 years I heard my father hiss: "Calice, pussy Paul. Mustn’t cry out. The neighbours will hear." Locked in my bedroom with no way out, a clown-like figure floating above me. A freak with a bird and wearing what I would later recognize as a parody of a smile from ear to ear. I would burn that print long before realising it was a detail from a wall-sized Venetian crowd scene.

The cab had parked in the driveway of the detached, two-storey home. Ivory stucco-ed brick with matching details. Behind the shadows of Maples trees lining the street with trunks still scarred and blackened, it was the only home I had ever known. I had long ago stripped its interior of all photographs and memorabilia for fear they might betray other things better left undisturbed. However, I did spare the cellar. With brass numerals blackened by neglect, there had never been a nameplate for the house; perhaps it should have been AOWL, for Abuse Our Way of Life. And a flag flying upside down beside the front door to signal distress. Our very own Bleak House and no Amity Place. As a boy, they were always accusing me of being mentally AOL, Absent Without Leave. Now I am going Down Under for a year but with leave approved.

Before the angry driver could lean on the useless doorbell, I grabbed a bunch of house keys (the real estate agent has the other) from the flowerless mirror ledge. My boyhood miniature Model-T Ford still on proud display like a medal or flag. Radio-controlled. Battery now white with age. A dim memory of speeding it over the smooth hardwood floor beneath the tall Venetian mirror in the front hall, across the kitchen tiles, and then bumping