"The Guard" by Madeleine D'Este

Tamieka tried to muffle her voice. ‘I told you I’m broke…I have to go. I’m at work. Yes. Really.’ She sighed and squeezed her eyes shut. ‘Ok. Later.’

She ended the call and stared at her cracked phone, before slipping it into her ill-fitting work trousers. 

‘Are you quite finished?’ Martin sneered as she rejoined the group. 

‘Sorry,’ she mumbled into her chest. 

‘Rule number one. No personal calls during shift.’ Martin, the team leader, was pink and fleshy like a raw sausage. ‘In this job, you’ve got to keep your wits about you.’

Eyes downcast, she nodded. 

‘Come on then,’ he said to the induction group. Three men and two women in matching grey polyester uniforms. ‘I’ll show you the alarms set-up in the Grand Hall. Pay attention, alright?’

Six pairs of safety boots squeaked on the gleaming marble floor. They followed Martin through the empty foyer, past the wood-panelled ticket booth and underneath a twenty-foot-high poster for the Treasures of Eastern Java suspended from the ceiling.

‘Sounds like you’ve got trouble.’ The other woman sidled up to her, the elegant amber-skinned Eshe.

Tamieka shrugged and chewed her ratty fingernails. 

‘Money or men?’

Tamieka rolled her eyes.

‘Both?’ Eshe sucked on her teeth. 

‘Keep up!’ Martin yelled. ‘The Grand Exhibition Hall is through here.’

Stepping through the doors, they fell silent. Bright with daylight, the Grand Hall ran one hundred metres long. The tessellated glass ceiling soared above their heads, a patchwork of skylights rippling like a stormy sea. Peanut-coloured tiles lined the walls, dotted with statues and glass cabinets. Even with their rubber soles, every footstep echoed. 

Open-mouthed, Tamieka drifted through the Hall until one statue made her heart stop. On a podium sat a curvaceous woman with the head of a smirking fox. She stared at the pigeon-grey stone monument, her hand fanned against her chest. 

‘Come on, Tamieka,’ Martin said. ‘We haven’t got all day. The doors open in half an

hour.’

She pointed at the beguiling fox-faced woman. ‘What is this?’

‘I don’t know,’ he snapped. ‘Come on. This way.’

‘It looks so old.’ Her eyes followed a red smear running down its neck and chest, as fine as a brushstroke. A hint of rose oil tickled her nostrils. 

‘Of course it is,’ Martin said with a huff. ‘Everything here is priceless. That’s why we have bloody jobs.’ 

Eshe elbowed her. The rose smell was probably Eshe’s perfume. ‘Come on, dreamy.’ 

‘I’ve never been to any place like this before,’ Tamieka said as she dragged herself away from the mysterious statue. 

‘We used to come here for school trips," Eshe said.

‘Not my school,’ Tamieka said. ‘They wouldn’t let us in some place like this.’

She glanced back over her shoulder, the vulpine eyes were following her. 

‘When I signed up for the security course, I never thought I’d end up somewhere like this,’ Tamieka said.

‘I know.’ Eshe sighed. ‘It’ll be boring as fuck standing next to paintings all day. Who’s going to steal them? At least in a shopping centre, there’ll be some action.’

‘Keep up,’ Martin called out. 

‘He’s such a dick,’ Eshe groaned as they continued down a narrow corridor. ‘Not even thirty minutes gone and I hate him already.’

Tamieka nodded, but her mind was still in the Hall. 

Tamieka didn’t get assigned to the Grand Hall. Instead, Martin put her in the children’s museum. ‘You’ve got kids, haven’t you?’

Tamieka smiled painfully. ‘Indy-Jade is almost seven. Rio is four.’

‘Perfect. You’ll know how to handle the little buggers better than the young blokes.’

Tamieka wilted. Rather than guarding the statue, she spent seven hours stopping brats scribbling on the walls. While distracted parents treated the museum like a day care centre.

On her break, Tamieka made a special detour to see the sculpture again. This time, a tour group of middle-aged women circled it, all intently listening to a female guide with a brutal arty haircut.

‘…fox spirits are feared and revered in many cultures, particularly Han Chinese and Japanese.’

When the guide led the women over to another glass cabinet, Tamieka stayed behind.

This time she scoured the Hall, checking the cornices for cameras, recalling Martin’s instructions on the alarm system. 

Minutes before closing time, she made an unnecessary circuit of the Gift Shop.

‘A security check,’ she said in an authoritative tone to the shop staff, who shrugged in reply. On the shelf, she found the heavy hardback exhibition book, and after wincing at the price tag, she glanced around. The Gift Shop staff were huddled together by the till, tapping on their phones and organising after-work drinks. No one would notice if she borrowed the book overnight.

Home was a blur of dirty dishes, squabbling and snotty noses. But while Tamieka cooked and folded clean clothes, the statue played on her mind. When everything was done, and she’d switched money between accounts like a shell game in order to pay her final notice electricity bill, she sat down to flick through the book. The section on the goddess was short, but enough. She took out her phone and wrote a list. Equipment she needed and phone calls to make.

In the stuffy meeting room the next day, Martin droned on about safety incidents and the number of postcards being nicked from the Gift Shop. Tamieka inspected her gnawed nails while the others stared blankly at their shoes.

‘You might have heard about Mo,’ Martin said. ’Poor bloke took a tumble off his motorbike on the weekend. So this means we’re short this week. I’m looking for volunteers for some extra shifts over the next few nights?’

‘I’ll do it!’ Tamieka blurted, her reply like gunfire. 

Martin recoiled, then pressed his lips into a colourless line. ‘I don’t usually like females working nights.’

‘Can you say that?’ Eshe raised an eyebrow and Martin grumbled under his breath.

‘I could really do with the extra cash,’ Tamieka said.

‘Don’t you have kids?’

‘I’ll sort something out.’

Martin looked at the other three men in the room, all slouched in their plastic chairs with heads lowered. ‘Well,’ he grunted. ‘if there are no other takers.’

‘Thanks,’ Tamieka said, hiding a smile. 

Before taking her place in the children’s room, she visited the fox-faced sculpture.

This time, when no one was looking, she laid her palm against the cool grey stone.

Later on her break, Tamieka sheltered out of sight in a doorway, vape in one hand, phone in the other. 

‘I need it for tomorrow night,’ she said, exhaling a fake-strawberry scented cloud. ‘You promised. You owe me.’

The call ended, and she licked her lips, ticking another item off her list. 

Two nights later, the skirting boards of the Grand Hall glowed with green night lights.

Through the glass ceiling, a full moon hung in the sky, waves of white light cast on the marble floor.

The statue, her statue, was spot lit by the moon. She checked her phone, almost one o’clock, almost time. She did another casual circuit of the Hall before returning to the podium with a bag in her hand.

At the base of the statue in the moonlight, she laid out a bronze bowl, a red rose nicked from the museum gardens, and a curved Damascus steel dagger. She slashed the sharpened blade across her palm. Blood dripped into the bowl as she clenched her fist and muttered a devotional verse. She crushed the red petals and dropped them into the mixture. Rusty-scented blood and sweet rose oil infused the air. With another invocation, she dipped her fingers into the bowl and traced a bloody line down the statue’s neck and across her chest. Then she smeared a similar red stripe on her own skin. 

Blood. Rose. Moonlight. Three nights in a row. 

And after the third night, it was done. 

‘Let’s make a start.’ Martin clapped at the front of the room.

‘Where’s Tamieka?’ Eshe said with a frown. 

‘I thought you were mates?’ Martin said.

Eshe shrugged.

‘She quit.’

Eshe sighed. ‘I told her it was going to be boring.’ 

‘Got some cushy job in Asia somewhere. On a resort, I think. Thailand. Or maybe Bali. Anyway, she’s gone.’

Eshe grumbled to herself. ‘Some bitches have all the luck.’

Madeleine D'Este is a Melbourne-based writer of dark mysteries. Her supernatural mystery novel The Flower and The Serpent was nominated for the Australian Shadow Award for Best Novel 2019, and her Australian gothic novella Radcliffe was released by Deadset Press in August 2023. Find Madeleine at www.madeleinedeste.com