Permanent Collection

The fence is chain-link, taller than him by a head, topped with three strands of barbed wire that have rusted into lace. Dean Laird puts his boot on the first diamond of mesh, pushes up, swings his legs over the gap where the wire has corroded to nothing, and drops to cracked asphalt on the other side. His headlamp catches weeds growing through the parking lot, waist-high stalks splitting the concrete into gray teeth.

Beyond the lot, the entrance archway. Cinder block painted to look like a rainforest canopy, the greens and yellows blistered into patches of bare wall, the paint lifting in curls the way labels lift off jars left too long in storage.

He clips the GoPro to his chest harness. Checks the battery icon, the green bar past the midpoint. He tilts the lens down to catch his boots on the cracked asphalt, tilts it back up. The red light blinks.

"What's going on legends, Deano here, and we are out the front of Bayside Wildlife World, Bass, southeast of Melbs." His voice stays low, the whisper he uses at sites that might have security. "Shut down 2012. Licensing dramas, welfare complaints, the works. RSPCA came through, seized every animal. Everything else just left to rot, ay. Gone to the bush."

Past the entrance, the gift shop. Windows gone. The shelves stand bare except for a single plush koala lying face-down on the linoleum, its synthetic fur matted flat, one glass eye wet with his headlamp's reflection. The cash register on the counter, drawer open, tray removed. A price board on the wall behind it, chalk letters still legible: ADULTS $15. CHILDREN $8. FAMILY $40.

Dean holds the shot for six seconds. Cuts. Pans left. Holds. Cuts. His subscriber count runs 206,000. Average view duration on his urbex content holds at fourteen minutes. He places his six-second holds the way a fisherman places bait: at intervals designed to keep the line taut.

The path splits beyond the gift shop. Left toward the animal enclosures. Right toward the service buildings. He goes left because the sky is clear and the moon gives enough light to see without the headlamp. Crickets in the grass. Wind pulling through the corrugated steel of a building somewhere to his right, a low hum that rises and drops with each gust.

The enclosures are empty concrete pens with rusted chain-link fencing and hand-painted signs. WOMBAT. EASTERN GREY KANGAROO. FALLOW DEER. The paint has faded to pastel suggestions. In the kangaroo enclosure, a child's shoe in the dirt, small, red canvas, the rubber sole peeling away from the upper like a mouth that can no longer close.

He narrates as he walks. The park's history, pulled from Reddit threads and forum archives. Rex Garnett. Ex-grazier out of Warragul. Park originally licensed under Rex and Patricia Garnett, 1996. She ran the school group bookings, the educational signage, the public side of things. The forums reckon she's the one who kept the RSPCA from shutting it down sooner. Left him in 2008. Moved up to Cairns. Three RSPCA complaints after that. A magistrate's court appearance in 2010 for operating without adequate veterinary oversight. Animals in enclosures too small, veterinary care inconsistent, an emu with an untreated leg fracture displayed through an entire summer before a visitor reported it. The RSPCA came with trucks. Loaded the animals. Left the buildings. Left the filing cabinets, the feed bags, the plush koalas in the gift shop, the chalk prices on the wall.

The reptile house is a long, low building of corrugated steel with the door hanging from a single hinge. Inside: empty terrariums along both walls. The air tastes the way a pet store smells on the third day after the last employee quit.

He moves through fast. Reptiles hold viewers for an average of forty seconds before the retention graph drops.

The service road curves behind the reptile house toward a cluster of four buildings at the back of the property. Three stand open, doors removed or kicked in. The fourth is locked.

Cinder-block walls. Corrugated-steel roof. A roller door faces the service road, padlocked with a chain that has turned the color of dried blood. A personnel door on the side, also locked, the deadbolt set in a frame that has softened in years of weather. Dean puts his shoulder into it. The frame gives on the second hit, splinters pulling away from the bolt plate, and the door swings inward.

A nail hammered into the door frame at shoulder height, and on it a plain gold band, tarnished to the color of weak tea.

The air makes his eyes run. His collar over his mouth does what holding your hand over a hole in a boat does. The shed holds its heat the way a body holds a fever, warm enough that the difference registers on his skin the moment he steps inside, and the heat carries the chemical into his mouth, past his tongue, into his throat, down. The taste stays. The taste is the first thing in this building that is alive.

His headlamp finds the tank.

Steel frame gone rust-orange along every joint and weld. A glass enclosure the dimensions of a shipping container, the panels thick, laminated, clouded from the inside with years of chemical condensation. One panel has a star-shaped fracture radiating from an impact point, the outer layer cracked, the lamination holding. Through the murk of the glass, through the green-yellow liquid filling the tank to a hand's width below the rim, the shape.

Longer than the Hilux from bull bar to tow hitch. Gray-white belly. Gray-black dorsal. Floating in formaldehyde the way a goldfish floats when you come home and the bowl is warm.

A great white shark.

Its mouth is closed. Its left eye, the one facing Dean, is black, the pupil indistinguishable from the iris, a single dark disc aimed at the ceiling. The pectoral fins hang spread at the body's sides, frozen at the moment the shark tried to change direction. The dorsal fin breaks the surface where evaporation has lowered the level, and the exposed tip is dry, pale, cracked like leather left in the sun.

Dean's headlamp does not move from the glass. The GoPro's red light pulses against his chest. The crickets outside are gone. The wind is gone. The shed's sealed air holds only the faint tick of cooling metal in the roof and the suck-pop, suck-pop of his own breath pulling shirt cotton against his lips and releasing it.

"Bloody hell," he says. The words flatten in the dead air. "Oh, you absolute beauty. Deadset, look at the size of her."

He walks the perimeter. Trash floats on the surface: a Coke bottle, cigarette butts swollen into bloated cylinders, a TV remote control with its battery cover missing.

He films the shark's teeth through the murk, each tooth the size of his thumb from knuckle to tip. He holds the GoPro to the glass and films the eye, filling the frame with it, the black disc and nothing else. Pulls back. Walks the length of the tank, letting the camera drag across the body from snout to tail. Narrates the history. Caught in gill nets off Port Lincoln, South Australia, 1998. A juvenile female, dead in the net before the crew hauled it aboard. The fishermen froze the carcass in a mate's cold storage until Rex Garnett bought it for eight thousand dollars, drove down with a refrigerated truck, built the tank himself, and filled it with formaldehyde.

"The council never approved it," Dean says to the camera. "No permits, no engineering sign-off on the tank, nothing. The bloke just threw a shed over it, padlocked the door, and charged punters an extra fiver to have a look. Ran it like that the whole time the park was open."

The fumes drive him out. He steps into the night air, and the eucalyptus off the fence-line trees is so clean by comparison that his lungs lock on it, pulling it in hard, gasping. He leans against the Hilux's tailgate on the highway shoulder and spits and spits and the spit tastes the same as the air inside the shed. He stops at the servo in Lang Lang and buys a meat pie and the taste is in the pie. He brushes his teeth while the house is dark around him, leaning over the bathroom sink, and the taste is in the bristles.

He posts the video before the sun comes up. By the time he wakes, 412,000 views. By end of the week, 1.4 million. Sixty cents per thousand. He does this math in the shower. He does this math at red lights. He does this math while the formaldehyde taste coats his teeth and his tongue and the back of his throat. The shark is worth more to him dead and floating than it was to anyone alive and swimming, and he does not think about what that means because the mortgage is due on the fifteenth.

He goes back. This time with a respirator, the half-face kind with twin cartridge filters rated for organic vapor and acid gas. He bought it at Bunnings for sixty-two dollars. His subscribers told him to in the comments. They told him other things, too. Bring a crowbar. Bring a UV light. Check the other buildings.

He opens the tank.

The lid is plexiglass, warped from heat, sitting loose on the steel frame. He slides it back a hand's width. The shark is right there. An arm's reach below. Its skin has bleached to the color of old newspaper, and up close the texture is visible, rough, covered in dermal denticles so fine they look like sandpaper. Dean reaches in. His nitrile-gloved fingers touch the dorsal fin where it breaks the surface. The fin is stiff above the waterline, leathery, but below, where it submerges into the chemical bath, the tissue gives under pressure, soft in a way that makes his hand pull back before his thoughts can catch up.

The video gets 1.2 million views before the second sunrise. Nine thousand four hundred comments.

The ninth most upvoted: theres a bricked up wall behind the tank at 14:22 you can see it. whats behind it.

Dean watches his own footage. Pauses at 14:22. Behind the shark's tank, at the edge of the headlamp's reach, the wall. He had walked past it. The camera caught what he missed. He screenshots the frame, zooms in. The bricks along the base are lighter. Newer.

The comments multiply. Two hundred and sixty responses to the comment about the wall. Theories, speculation, demands. go back. open it up. bring a sledgehammer. Further down: i reckon garnett was growing weed back there look at the ventilation setup in that corridor. And: seen walls like that at an old abattoir in ballarat. cold storage behind every time. probably keeping feed frozen. His subscriber count crosses 280,000.