The Black Snow

“Snow globes are meant to settle. This one just kept moving—like it knew I was watching.”

I slipped into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind me, the parcel tight against my ribs. The weight of it pressed strangely, more than its small dimensions should have allowed. It wasn't just matter inside that box. It was significance. The kind of weight I'd learned to recognise over twenty-three years—the difference between ordinary objects and evidence, between things that belonged in the world and things that had been placed there with intent.

Sandra didn't follow. She rarely did when I retreated to the study. Whether it was trust, habit, or a carefully cultivated truce, I couldn't say. It wasn't distance—not exactly—more a long-settled understanding of territories. Hers was the gallery, the committees, the endless logistics of a life half-lived in the orbit of other people's art. Mine was the work, the cases, the files that hummed with the static of lives cut short. Between us: respect, sometimes friction, always the unspoken permission not to press.

I was grateful for that silence now. Grateful in a way that made me feel guilty, because gratitude for your wife's absence wasn't something a marriage should require.

Inside the study, I didn't bother with the light. The room received just enough from the morning—a pallid wash seeping in through the blinds, cutting the space into narrow strips of shadow and muted brightness. The carpet, once beige, had long since surrendered to the traffic of years, its fibres worn flat in the paths between desk and door, chair and filing cabinet. The muted stripes of light across it gave the impression of bars—a cell of my own making, though one I'd chosen willingly.

This was my space. My sanctuary. The one room in the house where the detritus of the job could spill unchecked: case files stacked in careful disorder; photographs clipped to corkboards in constellations only I could decipher; scrawled notes stuffed into manila folders that carried the peculiar metallic scent of police issue. Sandra never touched this room. She didn't dust, didn't straighten, didn't ask. She knew it for what it was—not just an office, but a vault. A place where I kept the things that couldn't be shared at breakfast tables or brought into the warmth of family life.

The air still carried a faint trace of old smoke, though I hadn't lit a cigarette in over a decade. A ghost of the years when long nights at the desk meant one case bleeding into the next, nicotine lacing the hours together while Sandra slept alone and the children grew without me noticing. The smell had seeped into the fibres, into the wood, into me. It mingled now with the must of old paper, the faint tang of ink and dried adhesive—the smell of work that never really ended.

And into that weight of memory, I carried the parcel. A new file of sorts. One that didn't belong on any official record. One I hadn't asked for, but which had found its way here nonetheless.

The study accepted it without comment, the way it had accepted everything else.

I peeled the packaging open carefully, letting the card part with a muted sigh. The tissue inside had been folded with the kind of precision that spoke of deliberation rather than haste. Whoever had prepared this wanted control, wanted the unboxing to feel ceremonial. Two folds, exact, and then the reveal.

A snow globe.

Not papers. Not a coded letter. Not a crude threat in bold red pen. Worse. Far worse. Because a message wrapped in brutality can be confronted head-on. But this — this was subtle, insidious. A message that wore innocence like a mask.

My hands went still.

The globe sat in my palm with the unsettling poise of an object that belonged to no season and no child's shelf. Its silver-plated base gleamed faintly in the dim light, cold and smooth as if it had never been touched by human warmth. Yet its weight unsettled me. Heavier than its size allowed, as though what it held inside wasn't water at all but something denser, something secret.

The glass dome was seamless—no clumsy joint, no mould line betraying mass production. This wasn't a trinket from Salamanca Market or a last-minute airport souvenir. This was crafted, considered. The kind of piece made not to be bought, but commissioned. A one-off. A statement.

On the underside, no manufacturer's mark, no sticker. Just a clean silver plane. And on the base itself, an inscription, etched with the elegance of a theatre programme:

"MONA – 25 July 2018."

The letters were crisp, deliberate, etched with too much care to be casual.

I held it there in the filtered grey light, unable to look away. My breath stalled somewhere behind my teeth, locked in that narrow space between disbelief and comprehension. A snow globe. Of all things.

But there was nothing innocent about it.

Nothing at all.

Five days from now.

The date of the gala. Sandra's gala. My gala. The one etched into our household calendar in neat blocks of red ink, circled twice as if the world would stop for it. Her midnight blue dress already hanging on the bedroom door in its plastic shroud, waiting for its public unveiling. The event tied now to three things I couldn't ignore—the invitation burning against my chest, the dead man in Row A, Seat 6, and now this.

The snow globe weighed heavier for that knowledge, though it barely filled my palm. No covering note, no sender's signature, no invoice slipped between folds of card. Just this object—clean, deliberate, final. A timepiece disguised as a keepsake. A deadline, hand-delivered to my doorstep.

I rotated it slowly, watching the light crawl across its surface. The base gleamed like surgical steel—metal that had never been ornamental, only functional. My father had worked with men who used such tools, back on the building sites in Coburg. Never trust something that's too clean, he'd said once, showing me a chisel that had never been used. Means it's for show, not for work. This globe wasn't for show. But it wasn't for work either. It was for something else entirely.

The globe itself was immaculate. No scratches, no dust on the glass. Its contents gleamed faintly as I tilted it, the liquid inside sluggish, thicker than water but lacking the quicksilver shimmer of mercury. Not decorative. Something else. Something chosen.

And no snow. No sparkle. No miniature monument of Hobart's skyline, no pastoral fantasy, no saccharine scene meant to charm tourists.

Instead: black ink.

Suspended in the viscous fluid like smoke captured mid-breath, it drifted in shifting curls and knots. Slow, reluctant, with the strange coherence of something aware of its own performance. The shapes coiled and dissolved, gathered and stretched, like they were straining towards form but never quite arriving.

And as I watched, I had the unmistakable sensation it was aware of me. That its twisting darkness bent and rearranged not at random, but for an audience. For this audience.

For me.

Like a living shadow, caught in the act of changing into something else.

Not snow. Not decoration. A message.

And a warning.

I gave it a gentle shake.

The globe answered with motion—slow at first, then quickening, as if the ink within had only been waiting for provocation. It coiled back on itself, stretched thin like strands of kelp tugged by a hidden tide, then folded inward again. No flakes. No glitter. No benign choreography. Just movement without form.

It was like watching thoughts spill into being, then collapse. Like memories dissolving before they could take proper shape. It had the same unsettling pull as the photographs I'd studied a hundred times in dim-lit offices—blood dispersal blooming in water, shadows on walls where violence had left its fingerprint, the cold geometry of aftermath. The Barwick basement. The shipping container at the docks. Jennifer Liu's blood pooling beneath the pharmacy counter.

Snow globes are supposed to settle.

This one didn't.

I raised the globe higher, turning it so the thin wash of morning light pushed through the slats of the blinds and spilled across the glass. The ink reacted instantly. It recoiled, dissolving into a ghostly transparency, like smoke dispersing too fast. For just a heartbeat the darkness thinned—retreating from illumination like a truth too raw to survive exposure.

And in the clearing, something took shape.

Not random. Not accidental. Deliberate.

It hovered in the globe as if waiting to be noticed: a table—no, not a table. A slab. Cold, unadorned. And stretched across it, a figure. Human. Limbs splayed too evenly, head turned at a precise angle, body made into a display rather than left to rest. Not reverence. Not mourning. Something crueller. A parody of ritual. A gesture drained of sanctity and left only with spectacle.

My grip tightened on the base. The air seemed thinner in the study.

Beside the slab, another shape flickered into coherence—upright, fixed, faceless. A figure too vague to name but too certain to dismiss. Masked, perhaps. Watching. Waiting. The presence of intent carved into its stance.

And then, as quickly as it had formed, the scene disintegrated. The liquid swallowed its own revelation, pulling it back into chaos. Swirls thickened, dissolved, reknit into formless darkness.

Gone.

Had I seen it at all? Or had the globe only suggested it, nudged my mind into making its own horrors from the ink?

A planted image. A trick. A memory that wasn't mine—but might yet become.

I lowered the globe slowly, reluctant to part with it yet desperate to be free of its weight. It felt denser now, heavier than the moment I'd first unwrapped it—not in ounces or grams, but in the way certain objects gather meaning and press it into your skin. It had left no mark on the glass, but somewhere deeper, beneath the ribs where unease is born and given shape.

The air shifted with it. Not the object, not even me—the room itself. As if the walls had tightened, leaning in by a fraction too small to measure. Shadows thickened in the corners, though the light through the blinds hadn't changed. The back of my neck prickled, that ancient, unwelcome signal: watched. Known.

The globe wasn't simply a message. It was a mirror. Not a reflection of what I could see, but of what I couldn't. The concealed. The withheld. Fragments released like smoke, calculated revelations rationed out in glimpses. A slow performance, scripted by someone who knew exactly where to place the pauses.

Without thinking, I wrapped it back in the tissue. The paper crinkled like breath being held. Instinct guided the act—the same instinct that dictates when to draw a weapon, when to call for backup, when to step around blood so as not to disturb its story.

I pulled open the second drawer of the desk. The one that never needed to be opened, because what lived inside had long since ceased to matter. Service medals in their shallow cases—the ones Mum had been so proud of before she died, the ones Dad had looked at with that complicated expression that might have been pride or might have been worry. Commendation letters typed on departmental letterhead. Old internal reviews from inspectors who barely remembered my name. Tokens of acknowledgment. Things designed to prove a career had shape, had worth. Things I'd hidden away, precisely so their weight wouldn't hang over me daily.

I placed the globe beneath them. Let the medals and letters shift against one another, their muted clink a hollow welcome to this new, unwelcome guest. Not an honour. Not an award. A reminder. A warning.

Then I shut the drawer. Not locked—never locked. Just shut. As though wood and brass and old paper could contain what had been delivered. As though concealment might delay inevitability.

But the inscription burned clearer than ever, carved across the inside of my skull:

MONA – 25 July 2018

Five days.

Five days to untangle why a stranger had been arranged in a velvet chair with Sandra's invitation in his pocket.

Five days to make sense of the shapes I'd seen in the swirling dark.

Five days until curtain rise. Until the climax of a performance I hadn't asked to be cast in—but one I was already bound to play.