Sydney Sandstone

“You have dialled emergency Triple Zero. Your call is being connected.” Click. “Emergency. Which service do you require — police, fire, or ambulance?”

“Uh, police, please. I found a dead body.”

“What state and city?”

“Sydney, New South Wales.”

“Which suburb?”

“Millers Point.”

“Can you be contacted on this mobile number if needed?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m transferring you now, please stay on the line.”

Click.

“Police emergency, where are you located?”

“Thirty-six Pottinger street.”

“Are you in immediate danger?”

“Uh, no. We found a dead body.”

“Is the dead body, is it at the address you said?”

“Yeah.”

“Please stay on the line, a unit is on its way. Do you know who the body belongs to?”

“Yeah.”

Pause.

“Can you give me their name?”

“Robbie Townsend.”

“And you’re sure he’s dead? Has an ambulance been called?”

“Yeah nah, he’s dead all right.”

“When and where did you find him?”

“Just now, man. We’re doing a reno, see, and we came to work this morning. Door wasn’t locked, but we didn’t think nothing of it, we ain’t often first to arrive. Trailer was still locked, anyway. So, Jimmy opens it up, we take our tools and go up to the second floor and out on the balcony. We’re doing the sandstone façade, see. That’s where we see him.”

“Can you describe how you found the body, please?”

“He’s in the wall.”

“What do you mean, in the wall?”

“He’s, like, part inside the wall.”

“Was he under a collapsed part of the wall?”

“No, man. Like, fused to the stone. You seen Star Wars? He’s like when Darth Vader froze Han Solo in Carbonite. His back’s in the wall, with his arms and legs, but his face and chest are sticking out. Same screaming look on his face, too. Only, he ain’t stone or black like Han. Not all of him. The bits sticking out are still real, still… squishy.”

🧱

The blue Ford Falcon navigated the narrow street, went two wheels up on the curb, and stopped. The doors opened and two people stepped out. The driver was a late-twenties woman, brown-skinned, her black hair pulled into a tight bun, wearing a no-nonsense dark pants and jacket over a light blue blouse. The passenger was a fortyish man, sporting metal-rim glasses and a short-sleeved, button-down, white shirt, and carrying a briefcase that looked out of a 70’s Bond movie.

“Bloody hell, how did they get here so fast?” The man indicated the TV van parked at the curve of the street.

The woman shot him a sidelong glance. “You’re kidding, right?” At her companion’s incomprehension, she added, “Capital Makeovers? The TV reno show?”

The man shook his head.

“You’ve got to get your nose out of books occasionally, sir. It’s the latest real-estate reality TV. Pitting teams in capital cities to renovate older buildings to capture the iconic,” she made air-quotes, “vibe of each city. Our crime scene is in this season’s Sydney challenger property. They were doing well, too.”

“Joy of joys. Explains why the assistant commissioner insisted I wear a nice shirt.”

The two walked along the row of neat yellow and grey concrete townhouses, to where the street opened onto a little garden. At the back of the garden was a cottage, a small enclave of freestanding early 20th century architecture sandwiched between modern brick or concrete apartment blocks. On the far side was a small laneway separating the house from a public park with green grass and children’s playground. Now the cottage and green lawn were a hive of police activity.

As the two approached the police tape keeping a few smoking spectators out, they flashed their warrant cards at a uniformed policemen standing guard. “Detective Inspector Jacob Finkel and Detective Sergeant Mohini Elliot, Unusual Crimes.”

The policeman lifted up the tape for them, and as they stepped under it a police sergeant stepped out of the building.

“Ah, Jack. Glad you’re here. Definitely one for you. SOCOs confirmed the death and took a few samples, but otherwise kept the scene clear for you. They’ll finish going over it when you’ve done your bit. My guys are keeping the tradies and the grieving widow sequestered in the tent there.”

“Thanks, Zak,” said Jack. “Just keep the journos away and let us do our thing.”

“Righto.”

Inside, Mohini turned to her senior. “Scene?”

“Scene.”

The two donned blue PPE coveralls, slippers, and gloves from a box marked ‘NSW Forensic Evidence & Technical Services Command,’ and climbed up the stairs.

From outside, the front of the house was obscured by scaffolding, but standing on the balcony afforded the two police detectives gorgeous views across the Sydney Harbour, from the old finger wharves of Walsh Bay to North Sydney across the water, with the top of the Harbour Bridge just visible above the row of townhouses to their right.

“Fuck me sideways,” Mohini breathed. “Not something you expect to ever see on a cop’s salary.”

“You’re seeing it right now,” came the laconic reply, “and enjoying it a lot more than the sucker who paid the gazillion dollars for it.”

They turned from the blue skies and water to the wall of the house. Half the wall was stripped, showing plain dark-red bricks. The other half was covered in slabs of aged Sydney sandstone — mottled grey, faded from the original warm brownish gold but full of character all of its own. A man’s face, shoulders, and chest stuck out from the new tiles. Skin and bone submerged back into the stone, a half-excavated fossil still partly flesh and blood. Streaks of iron-rich red veins swirled away across the tiles, tracing a suggestion of the man’s body trapped inside.

Jack looked about, placed the briefcase on a stack of grey sandstone tiles, and said, “You start.”

Mohini took out her iPhone, connected a wired headset, stuck one earbud in and adjusted the microphone, and opened the voice recorder app. “Victim is male, appears in his mid forties, visually identified by tradesmen working on the site as Robert Townsend, owner of this property. Victim is embedded in the stone cladding, only face and upper torso protruding. Confirmed by forensics to be a real human, but unable to determine extent of body inside stone. The edges of the body where it meets the stone are blurry, and it’s hard to determine whether the flesh continues under it or some of the protruding body is already petrified.” She snapped photos on her phone as she continued to describe the visible aspects of the scene and the relevant facts from the briefing they had received on the way.

Satisfied that she covered the scene in sufficient detail, she raised an eyebrow at Jack. He nodded. Mohini clicked the two clasps and opened the briefcase. She extracted a contraption like a toy xylophone, with copper tone-bars and dark, aged wooden frame. She sprinkled a few grains of salt from a Saxa shaker on the bars, then gently hit each one with an iron hammer. She bent down to inspect the patterns of salt crystals. “Aethereal spectrometry shows only human presence, no indications of the recent presence of any bestial or pantheonic entity. There are no lingering malefic or venefic energies above normal background levels.”

Next, Mohini selected a clear cylinder from a set of three in the open briefcase, about an inch thick and a foot long. She gingerly approached the body, held the cylinder horizontally parallel with the wall above the man’s head, then moved it slowly down. At the boundary of flesh and sandstone, pastel purples swirled inside. “Ectoplasmic scanning indicates recent activity from an unprogressed spirit.” She performed a series of figure-eight movements around the body and wall, noting the kaleidoscopic shifts in whirls and hues. “Chromatic aberrations confirming a spirit of human origin. It’s not the victim, I don’t think it’s recent, but… I can’t tell the age.”

“Slow down, breathe, and… ?”

“Try the reverse,” Mohini completed. She twirled the cylinder in a mirror image pattern, making slower, more deliberate motions. “One to two centuries old.”

“Very good,” said Jack. “What’s next?”

“Determine if the malignant spirit is still active in the area, address it if it is. Then check if we can reverse the entombment process and extract the body from the stone. With a bit of luck we can then leave the corpse for Forensics, while we go talk to the witnesses.”

Jack nodded. “Proceed.”

Mohini took out a candle and placed it on the scaffolding plank at the feet of the dead man. She took out a set of two metal triangles hanging from a bar balanced on a tripod, like the scales of justice, and placed it on the plank just behind the candle, framing it. She lit the candle and hit the one triangle with the iron hammer. Noting the lack of disturbance to the flame and the resonance with the other triangle, she declared, “There’s something here, but whatever it is, it’s dormant. I’d say the site is secure, at least for now. I’m not sure how to extract the body and undo the partial petrifaction, though, or even in which order we should try.”

“Ah, there’s a trick for that. Here, let me show you.” Jack hummed as he took out an evidence bag and a Leatherman multi-tool from the briefcase. He opened the tool’s blade and passed it through the candle’s flame a few times. With delicate care, he used the tip of the blade to chip the sandstone away from the body’s shoulder, and collected the fragments into the evidence bag without touching them. He made sure to collect samples with the red veins running through the stone, where the arm disappeared into it.

He sealed the bag and placed it in the briefcase. “Take a closer look, and you’ll see how the flesh is submerged in the stone, and only slowly petrifies without a clear demarcation. It’s an interesting question whether the body is still fully delineated within, or completely fades away somewhere inside. I dare say someone will be feeling like old Michelangelo, ‘every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.’ Exposing the body will likely be the first step, whether or not reversal of the petrification process is possible. My gut feeling says he’s beyond rescue and they’ll need strong pallbearers for a casket funeral, but we’ll get some blood samples later for testing together with the stone samples.”

“And is that the trick?” Mohini asked, dubious.

Jack snorted. He leaned over the scaffolding, and yelled down, “Zak! Forensics still around? Send ‘em up, will ya? Thanks, mate.” He turned back to Mohini and winked. “The trick is to navigate the bureaucracy and make it someone else’s problem.”

Mohini had finished packing the equipment back into the briefcase by the time two PPE-clad crime scene technicians came onto the balcony.

“We’ve established the site is safe,” Jack said before they could speak. “No residual metamundane effects to worry about, no fear you will be interrupted. We’ve left the biological matter untouched to avoid any contamination or destruction of traces. We’ll type it all into COPS when we get back to the station, but for now he’s all yours to do your magic. I’d suggest leaving a wide margin around the contours of the red veins in the stone, but what do I know — I’m just the bookworm, I’ve never been handy with power-tools.”

He strolled back inside and down the stairs, only calling for Mohini to follow.

Hope you enjoyed this first chapter of the Sydney Sandstone novella!
It has been published in full in the Rainbows aren’t just for Leprechauns anthology.

keep reading at Rainbows aren’t just for Leprechauns