THE GLEN HARTWELL HORROR

Some mysterious force --- bats? ---, is killing people by the hundreds!

1.
THE SUMMER OF 1998-’99

The dirty, grey-brown waters of the Yannan River, in Glen Hartwell, have always been notorious as a breeding ground of terror. In 1998, there were still a few centenarians who could give supposed eyewitness accounts of the Glen Hartwell Beast: a gigantic mass of living, humanoid green algae, which in local mythology had stalked the banks of the Yannan in the late 1880s. Lurking upon the murky river bottom. But there was a million years of evolution separating the science fiction of the Slime Beast and the science fact of the very real horror which haunted the banks of the Yannan River throughout the summers of 1998 to 2001 inclusively.

It was on the eleventh of December 1998, a Friday, when the wave of death and terror began in Glen Hartwell. The first victim was Julian Hirshliefer, an accountant employed by the Victorian Department of Agriculture.

In her official statement to the police, Mrs Hirshliefer said, “Every morning at five o’clock sharp, I’d get up to prepare Julian’s breakfast. That way, he could sleep in a bit longer, and, of course, I could always return to bed after Julian had left for work.

“I’d set the bacon frying, then walk to the corner milkbar to pick up the daily paper, the Glen Hartwell Herald Daily Mail, and purchase a carton of Rev -- the only kind of low-fat milk Julian would drink. When I returned, I’d put on Julian’s eggs and toast, and prepare a cup of Nescafe instant coffee.

“Usually Julian’s alarm clock would start ringing about that time, and he’d be dressed and ready to eat two or three minutes later.

“This morning, though, to my surprise, he allowed the alarm to ring right down. After six or seven minutes, when he still hadn’t appeared in the kitchen, I went upstairs to see if he’d fallen asleep again.”

“And you found your husband dead?” asked Senior Sergeant Danny Ross.

“Yes,” said Mrs Hirshliefer, on the brink of tears; “he was just lying there on his back, covered in blood ... I must’ve been lying next to him like that, without even noticing anything was wrong when I got up. Of course, it was still dark out, and I just slipped on my dressing gown without even turning on the light ....”

The coroner’s report found that Julian Hirshliefer’s death had resulted from a gash or bite to the throat, which had mutilated the jugular vein, causing Hirshliefer to bleed to death in a matter of seconds. The report found that the accountant had been killed by a person or persons unknown.

At first, surprisingly, the local press seemed to either ignore the bizarre death entirely, or else gave it a brief mention as a filler. However, they soon began to take more interest as the death tally soared, with eleven more killings in only six days! All of the deaths were by mutilation, and all in roughly the same region: Glen Hartwell, Perry, Daley, Percival, and LePage.

After the twelfth killing, the newspapers began to label the killer “The Glen Hartwell Vampire,” drawing upon the fact of the mutilated throats and loss of blood. Things weren’t helped when the first attack survivor, Cecil Haynes, described his attacker as being, “Like an insane thrashing of giant wings ... crushing me, smothering me ... sharp talons ripping at my throat ... huge fangs that gripped and tore at my hands, when I tried to defend myself ....”

“Like the Nightmares of legend,” wrote a reporter in the Glen Hartwell Herald Daily Mail. “Ethereal beings who swoop down onto their prey in the dead of night, to lie across their faces to smother their victims to death.”

In the BeauLarkin Evening Star, it was suggested that, “The killer is reminiscent of the creatures in Daphne du Maurier’s masterpiece ‘The Birds’. Is Glen Hartwell the location chosen by Mother Nature to enact in real life Miss du Maurier’s haunting tale of terror?”

Perhaps at this stage, I should introduce myself. Unlike the tall, dark and handsome, or blonde Adonis types who popular fiction usually depicts as the “hero”, my physique is far from impressive. I am a one-hundred-and-sixty-five centimetre tall, bald biochemist, with a face which is outstanding only for its plainness. And at fifty-three (in December 1998), with a slight paunch, Nathaniel Dwight Foley was anything but a budding sex symbol.

For the past six years, I had been in charge of the biochemistry department at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) laboratories, a position which I had been promoted to after eleven years of service in the CSIRO. Before that, I had been employed for nine years at a small Victorian biochemical firm, after having graduated with first honours from a Diploma of Applied Chemistry at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

It was toward the end of March 1999, by which time the death count had risen to forty-nine, that I received a memo from the Minister for Science and Technology, informing me that the Premier, Jeff Kennett, had decided that the CSIRO was to take over the investigations, since the Department of Health had made no progress at all, and the public, spurred on by the opposition, in a bid to force an early state election, were calling for Mr Kennett’s blood.

The memo ended, “The premier advises that he would like the matter to be resolved as speedily as possible, preferably in under a month.”

Despite Jeff Kennett’s suggestion, it took nearly a fortnight to even set up a proper base of operations in Glen Hartwell, since the Glen Hartwell and Daley Community Hospital (situated on the border between Glen Hartwell and Daley) had no research labs of its own at that time.

In the meantime, I stopped in to see the local coroner, Jerry 'Elvis' Elvis, for the low-down on the first forty-nine deaths.

“We’re keeping all of the bodies on hold until we know what killed them,” said Elvis, a tall, thickset man with long, bushy black hair and long sideburns, which explained his nickname.

After a quick discussion in his office in Dien Avenue, we drove down to the local morgue on Baltimore Drive, so that I could examine the frozen remains of a teenage girl.

“We’re copping a lot of flak from some of the next-of-kin, needless to say, but we can’t afford to let the corpses decompose or be cremated by the relatives, until we know what the hell is killing them,” said Elvis.

“Are all of the wounds like this?” I asked, stooping over the corpse to peer down at the great hole in the girl’s throat. The hole, the size of a fist, had been punched deep into her windpipe, almost severing the head from the body. The edges of the wound were almost perfectly free from tearing and appeared to be a perfect circle, as though a sharp-edged tube had been thrust rapidly and deeply into her throat.

“Yes, exactly,” said Elvis. “Though not all of the wounds are in the throat, although most are. Some are in the chest, over the heart mainly, on the underside of the elbows, or even at the top of the thighs. One menstruating girl was wounded directly upon the vagina. You can imagine the mess that it left her in ... ” And indeed I could! “There is only one wound each on some bodies, three or four on most, and up to fifteen on a few.”

“And the amount of blood loss is identical in all cases?” I asked.

“No. It appears to be roughly a fixed amount for each wound. So that a body with ten wounds will have lost ten times as much blood as a body with only one wound.”

“So each wound is either the bite of some kind of creature or some kind of extracting device?” I suggested.

“Yes, but God only knows what you could use to extract blood, that would leave an opening that size.”

“Could it be some kind of suction device?” I asked, as the body was returned to cold storage.

“Anything’s possible, I suppose,” said Elvis, “but what? No hypodermic yet devised has a nozzle that size, and even a vacuum cleaner pipe would only be about half the diameter at best.”

Although used to the sight of blood, I was sickened by the sight of the lifeless teenage girl and was relieved when Elvis suggested that we return to his office in Dien Avenue, where we could sip Bushels coffee (with just a nip of Jack Daniels in it), while we talked.

Over the next two weeks, I assembled a team of surgeons and medical staff from Glen Hartwell and the surrounding districts, as well as shipping in a large number of my people from the CSIRO laboratories.

With Elvis’s permission, I had the corpses, by then fifty-two in all, transported to the Glen Hartwell and Daley Community Hospital, where they were systematically dissected and analysed.

Then while the autopsies were being conducted (having not been previously done, except on the first seven, as Elvis did not have the staff to cope with the mounting death toll), I arranged with Danny “Bear” Ross (aptly named, as he was a giant of a man, nearly two metres tall, with a barrel-shaped chest and long, shaggy hair), to be allowed to interview the relatives.

It was a painstaking, time-consuming and fruitless task, which did nothing except raise the hackles of the next-of-kin. Who were livid at having autopsies performed on their loved dead against their will (a thing allowed by Australian law in cases of plagues, or of great numbers of related, inexplicable deaths), and ruled out the possibility of the killer being some type of mutant viral disease. Since all of the victims died during the night while sleeping, and no known disease has ever been so time-related.

Despite Mr Kennett’s suggestion that it would be politically expedient to resolve the “murders” within a month, by the end of May 1999, we had got nowhere. However, fortunately, the death rate had started to drop off from the start of autumn. By the thirty-first of May, there were sixty-one deaths; however, there had not been a new death in more than three weeks.

Thus ended the first summer of deaths, “Not with a bang, but with a whimper!"

2.
THE SUMMER OF 1999-2000

Not so the second season, however, which most definitely started with a bang, with an even dozen people being slaughtered over the last week of November 1999. By then, Jeff Kennett had been voted out of power, and Steve Bracks, the new Victorian Premier, blustered about Kennett's inability to stop the Glen Hartwell Vampire, but, of course, could offer no solution himself.

In a bid to stop the panic before it started, as much as to defend himself against allegations of incompetence from the newspapers, Bear Ross called an immediate press conference and put forward his theory that it was probably all the work of a psychotic madman.

Far from reassuring the local press, Bear's suggestion only set them off on their merry way again:

“DANGEROUS LUNATIC ESCAPED FROM QUEENS GROVE RESPONSIBLE FOR SEVENTY-THREE MURDERS!” read the headlines of the Glen Hartwell Daily Record, taking liberties with Bear’s idea, to cause near riots in Glen Hartwell, as people began to demand the closure of the Queen’s Grove lunatic asylum on the border of Glen Hartwell and Wilhelmina.

“Sure, we’ve gotta have loony bins to lock the crazies up in,” said one old man on national television, “but why do we gotta have one here?”

Deciding to play safe and steer well clear of politics, the Merridale Morning Mirror announced “GLEN HARTWELL VAMPIRE, REALLY INVASION FROM OUTER SPACE!” The article stated that they could prove that Earth was under invasion by the dimensional-shamblers from Yuggoth (H.P. Lovecraft’s name for former-planet Pluto).

On the other hand, the Glen Hartwell Herald Daily Mail remembered Elvis’s earlier use of the term “bites’, and suggested that we were under attack from a herd of savage Tasmanian Tigers. “THYLACINE INVADE THE GLEN!” their headlines announced. They went on to explain that the tigers had been secretly breeding in Westmoreland and Wilhelmina (two neighbouring ghost towns) for decades, until building up sufficient numbers to swoop down to attack us to take revenge on the human race for driving them to the very brink of extinction.

My own theory was that it was either a maniac (or herd of maniacs) with some new type of suction device, or else some kind of feral beast (though probably not the much maligned Thylacine). However, I did not completely rule out the possibility of some bizarre new disease or possibly some form of mutant beast created by the nuclear fallout from the illegal French atomic tests in the South Pacific, or even a delayed reaction to the British tests at Maralinga in South Australia in the 1950s.

Before I could get started on the second year’s research, however, I was the next victim of the horror. Obviously, my attack was not fatal, or I would not now be writing up this official report.

I went to bed at nearly two AM on Monday, the third of December, having worked a fifteen-hour day, feeling exhausted and desperate for sleep. I had hardly set my head down on my pillow, however, when I heard a thump-thump-thump against the fly screen on my open bedroom window.

Surely it can’t be raining the first week of summer? I thought as I lay on my back on top of my quilt -- as I always sleep in the heat of summer.

But then, even as I was thinking of rain, I heard a series of rending sounds, as the thin netting began to give way beneath the assault being inflicted upon it.

In only seconds, I heard the beating of wings that Cecil Haynes and half a dozen attack survivors since him had reported. Then, as the creatures began to swoop around my head, I raised my hands to fend them off, revolted at the sickly feel of the huge, bloated bodies which crashed into my hands and bald head.

As the creatures began to bite (or slash?) at my hands, I yelped and instinctively lowered my hands, but then I felt a vicious “biting” at my neck and another at the side of my head, and immediately began to beat furiously at the attackers with my two hands again.

All of the time that I was fighting off the beating wings and savage teeth? -- claws? -- I found myself thinking: Bats! Some kind of greatly oversized vampire bats! I knew that when panicked bats would swoop blindly at people’s heads, and get tangled in their hair (not a problem with my shiny dome).

“Bats! It’s bats!” I can vaguely remember muttering as I was rushed away in an ambulance. But even as I passed out, I realised that it was not the right answer. Yet Daphne du Maurier’s flesh-eating birds didn’t feel right either. While being attacked, although half delirious with terror, I had had enough awareness to be able to discern the sharp edges of the creatures' tube-like suckers? -- cutters? -- against the flesh of my hands, face, and neck.

When I awakened, I found myself looking at the face of the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I was about to try the line about, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” when I realised that, of course, I had seen her before; fifteen years before when we had been lovers.

“Gina?” I said in surprise.

“Dr. Gina Foley now,” she said, smiling at my surprise to see her. “I’ve been part of the research team since five days before you were attached,” she said, answering my next question before I even had time to ask it. “But you’ve been too busy poring over dead bodies to waste time pawing over a living one.”

I blushed in embarrassment as her jibe reminded me of when we had dated years ago. At the time, I had just started to go bald, as we went on to be lovers for four delightful years, until our careers forced us apart.

I started to compliment Gina on how beautiful she had become in middle age, but before I could form the words, she said, “It’s not bats.”

“Not bats?” I asked, bemused, looking at her beautiful face as I lay slightly propped up on the hospital bed.

“You were rambling about bats when they brought you in here, so we checked for them straight off, but it’s not bats.”

“Checked for them?” I asked. “But how?”

“Oh, that’s right, you don’t know, of course,” said Gina, sitting lightly upon the side of the bed. “We found a dozen gigantic tissue cells around your bed, where they attacked you. So we rushed them down to Melbourne to check them under R.M.I.T.’s electron microscope. It took them a week to get the microscope into focus ....”

“A week?” I asked, amazed.

“That’s right, you’ve been unconscious for ten days now.”

Seeing my look of disbelief, she nodded to assure me that she was not joking.

Of course, I knew how long it could take to get an electron microscope into focus. In 1973, when the University of California had finally proven the Atomic “Theory” by magnifying a tiny scrap of carbon until they could photograph a single atom, clearly showing the protons, neutrons, and electrons, it had taken them six months to get the electron microscope into proper focus.

“And it is not tissue from a bat,” insisted Gina.

“Then what is it?” I asked.

“We don’t know yet,” she admitted. “It’s skin cells from some animal, bird, or insect, but they’re so grossly mutated that they aren’t readily identifiable.”

“Mutated?” I asked, carefully sitting up on the bed, trying my best not to pull the drip-tube out of my left wrist. “You mean by radiation?”

“Could be. But the cells themselves aren’t radioactive as they should be, if they received enough radiation to cause this kind of mutation.”

“Then what?’ I said, more thinking aloud than asking Gina.


“THE COMING OF THE BEAST!” declared the Glen Hartwell Daily Record, the day that I was released from hospital, on Christmas Eve 1999, in an article which quoted the Reverend Fred Nile as saying that the Glen Hartwell Vampire was the son of Lucifer, summoned up to Earth by the evil, lecherous, fornicating ways of modern humanity.

It was Christmas Eve, but hardly a time for celebrating, with the death count now pushing the hundred mark. (The ninety-seventh fatality had been reported that morning.) However, the fact that we now knew something about the killer, namely that it was some form of mutant bird, flying animal, or gigantic insect, gave us some hope. Plus, of course, I had been reunited with my long-lost lover. So that seemed reason enough to take at least a half day off to celebrate Christmas Day with Gina.

It was an atypical Australian Christmas Day, pouring rain all day long, which made the traditional turkey and dumplings more palatable than usual. And also gave me some excuse for extending my half-day leave into a whole day, spending the second half of the day making love with Gina.

I had not been beeped, as expected, during Christmas Day; however, when we drove into the hospital on Boxing Day, we were both surprised to find out that there had been no attacks the day before.

“Whatever it is, it cannot travel in the rain,” said Gina, looking hopefully toward the sky, where dark clouds were gathering.

“Either that,” I joked, “or else it is angelic wings of death, so they had to take God’s birthday off.”

I was hardly back to work when I had to attend a meeting with the coroner, Elvis Green, and Danny Ross. The topic of discussion, of course, was the mutant tissue cells.

“It is vaguely possible that the mutant creatures, whatever they are, could have resulted from a local disaster five years back,” said Elvis, as we all sat in plush armchairs around his paper-laden desk. “A nuclear physicist, William Hanna, one of the original project planners involved in the Woomera Rocket Range in South Australia, moved to Glen Hartwell in the early 1970s, after Woomera was shut down.

“He went completely insane and fantasised that the government had shut down Woomera solely to stop him from winning a Nobel prize. He started to build an atomic bomb in a giant, black Nissen hut in his backyard in Province Street.”

“That’s about three Ks down the road from here,” explained Bear Ross.

“Anyway,” continued Elvis, “something went wrong. No one quite knows what, but his attempted bomb leaked and irradiated him to death, along with much of the flora and fauna between Glen Hartwell and the neighbouring ghost town, Wilhelmina. Some of the area is still radioactive."

“Then how can you investigate the area if you can’t get near it?” asked Gina.

“Because if the radiation from the Dead Zone, as local Stephen King aficionados insist upon calling it, caused the creatures to mutate, clothed in a radiation-proof suit and carrying a Geiger counter, I should be able to get close enough to be able to find some sign of the creatures.”

So it was decided that Elvis and Bear would investigate the Dead Zone, while Gina and I would go down to Melbourne in a bid to convince R.M.I.T. to allow us to ship the electron microscope to Glen Hartwell.

It took us nearly a month to convince R.M.I.T. to risk the destruction of the supersensitive device by allowing it to be shipped to The Glen. During that time, the death toll climbed passed one hundred and twenty.

There was a rapid escalation in the death rate from early February, and by the start of autumn, in early April, the death count was five short of an even two hundred! The death count slowly crept passed the double century, to reach two hundred and three, before the killings ended again with the onset of the cold weather.

This time, we would not shut down the special investigation section, but would work year-round in the hope of solving the mystery of the Glen Hartwell Horror (or Vampire, as the media still called it) before the start of next summer.

The Dead Zone had turned out to be a false alarm, and so our only hope was that the electron microscope would help us to track down the mutant strain.

3.
THE SUMMER OF 2000-2001

We ran hundreds upon hundreds of tests, focused and re-focused the electron microscope, always hoping that this time would be the time that we’d solve it; each time failing. By early November 2000, we had failed to track down the killer and were starting to lose heart.

Although Premier Bracks had authorised virtually limitless funds for our research, it did not provide a rapid result since you cannot accelerate painstakingly slow biochemical processes by spending more money.

The summer of 2000-1 began with us despairing of ever reaching a solution. But then things began to move quickly. Just as we started to receive not-so-subtle hints that Mr Bracks was thinking of replacing Gina and me (as the death tally reached the two hundred and twenty mark), we reached a solution.

Early in the week before Christmas, Bear Ross went down to the Yannan River, which flowed through the industrial western reaches of the Glen, looking for three teenage boys who had been missing for two days.

The boys were never found; however, Bear provided us with the missing clue when he stumbled back to the hospital (almost crashing his police car through the large front doors), covered in “bites”, after having been attacked by the creatures down by the river, the first known attack victim in broad daylight.

It was Gina who pieced together the important clues: the attacks were all at night (except for Bear, who had invaded their lair); only in summer; the creatures attacked their victims with some kind of proboscis-type pipe, and they bred in, or on, the banks of the Yannan River.

“Therefore, they just have to be gigantic, mutant mosquitoes,” explained Gina, waiting for us all to laugh at her suggestion. However, although we may have laughed at the idea two years ago, with the death tally well beyond two hundred, we were now desperate enough to consider any suggestion.

Besides, the idea of mosquitoes did make sense, since mosquitoes do use a pipe-like proboscis, which they punch into the flesh to draw out a tiny drop of blood. So, a grossly oversized mutant mosquito could have caused the horrendous holes which had been punched into the bodies of the two hundred-odd victims. So, we began to run a new series of tests, specifically looking for a correlation between the mutant cells and mosquito cells.

“There’s no doubt about it,” I admitted the next day, as we examined new photographs taken through the electron microscope. “They’re unquestionably greatly outsized mosquito cells.”

“It’s easy when you know how,” said Gina soothingly, realising that I was feeling foolish at not having reached this conclusion eighteen months earlier.

Once we had tracked the killers to their lair, it was simple enough to douse the Yannan River in thousands of litres of petrol, then set fire to it while fifty or so police officers from Glen Hartwell and the surrounding districts stood upon the banks, armed with flame-throwers, ready to burn to a cinder any of the eagle-sized mosquitoes which were fast enough to escape from the blazing river.

It was much more difficult, however, to track down the cause of the giant mosquitoes. However, after six months of extensive research, we were able to conclude that the mosquitoes had mutated as a reaction to lethal chemicals being pumped into the Yannan River by a neighbouring glue manufacturer, Megarithe Chemicals.

4.
THE SUMMER OF 2006-2007

Although we were able to prove the correlation between the chemicals pumped into the river and the mutant mosquitoes to our satisfaction, it has turned out to be much more difficult to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” in a court of law. So, five years later, in January 2007, Megarithe Chemicals is still pumping millions of litres of glue by-products into the Yannan every year. And so it is only a matter of time until the giant mutant mosquitoes arrive again.

Or perhaps something much worse! Water rats proliferate along the muddy banks of the River Yannan, so maybe we will one day see the realisation of James Herbert’s fictional horror, with a plague of giant water rats. Who knows?

Only time and the law courts can decide.

THE END
© Copyright 2025 Philip Roberts
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia