Redbelly Crossing

It was the blood on the doorknob that caught his eye.

There wasn’t an all-body plunging sensation, his animal instincts alerting him to the horrors that lay in wait beyond the door to room number four; the smell of death in the air and the darkness within didn’t yet make all the hairs on his body stand on end and his stomach swan dive to the pit of his bowels. All that would come later. For now, Rob Winter, publican of the Redbelly Inn, simply stopped and looked at the smear of red and knew his morning routine had been disrupted.

It was a strict routine. At a march, Rob exited his car at precisely seven o’clock every morning, leaving it in the gravel space by the keg-room door, understood by locals to be his spot. He went directly to the beer garden, where he lifted the lid off a steel bin and scooped out a half-litre of birdseed and poultry pellets, using a cut-down plastic milk bottle that lived in the bin. If he didn’t feed the peacocks first, they followed him from room to room issuing their ear-splitting cries, now and then tapping at the windows with their beaks, waking the guests at the inn. One had even come into the office once. Annoying, bossy birds. Rob didn’t know who had originally owned the peacocks. Two had simply shown up in the beergarden, and before he could settle on whether to have them carted off by the council or scour the internet for someone who might adopt them, there were six. Not a simple task, getting rid of six peacocks.

After turning on the coffee machine, starting the pumps, clearing the keg lines and opening the basement doors to clearout the stink of spilt and ancient beer – some of it had first seeped into the sandstone one hundred and fifty years ago – Rob made his coffee and sat down to read his emails. Having completed that infuriating technological kerfuffle and being well into his walk-through of the inn’s accommodation floor now, he was on his way to the blessed terminal step of the morning routine – sitting for a quiet moment at the front window of the empty bar and watching the river across the street, whispering to himself his daily prayers.

Now that goalpost had shifted into the distance. Was invisible, almost. Rob stared at the blood on the doorknob, then noticed more beneath it, splashed on the bottom of the door. He scratched at his thinning orange hair and sighed.

This wasn’t the first time there’d been blood in the hallway outside the guest rooms. Punch-ups and drunken accidents were as ubiquitous in rural pubs as Akubras, high-vis and oversized schnitzels. Rob raised a fist and knocked on the door of room four, gently, so as not to wake the guests in other rooms.There came no answer. The second, third and fourth rounds of rapping produced no movement, no sound.

Rob went out of the hallway, down the stairwell between the accommodation building and the pub proper, and into the office beneath the guest rooms. He wrangled the computer into displaying the account for room number four, and instantly remembered the ponytailed young woman with the laptop and the polite if aloof demeanour who had checked in the previous afternoon. He took out his phone and dialled the phone number listed for the account. The call went straight to voicemail. As hedialled twice more and got the same result, thoughts occurred to him about the internet problems he’d had that morning. About the valley in which the pub sat, with its temperamental allowances and denials of contact with the outside world. Rob took the spare key card for room four that was attached to a lanyard and hung on the rack on the wall just inside the office. It was his instinctual noting of the time on the clock above the door,and the hard rectangle of the key card in his palm, which issued to Rob the first murmur of warning from deep inside his soul. On legs made slightly unsteady by nerves, the small, bespeckled publican went back up the stairs and again to the door of room four. He knocked, louder this time, the noise drawing out the man staying in the first room along the hall. The scruffy guy in his thirties was already dressed in high-vis gear and yawning, offering no greeting as he stood outside room one, just staring in curiosity at Rob’s activities. The publican rapped his loudest, then put his mouth close to the crack of the door.

‘Ms Lutz?’ he called.

No answer.

He swiped the key card against the panel and knocked once more, before turning the knob and opening the door as he called out, ‘Ms Lutz, are you awake?’

Rob pushed the door fully open.

He stared at the blood on the floor, and felt the plunge.