Nicholas entered the house through the back door, carrying a posy of store-bought flowers. Suzette watched as he gave them to Katharine and told her he had moved out into a flat. Katharine nodded, put the flowers on the kitchen sink, went to her bedroom and shut the door behind her.
Nicholas looked at Suzette. ‘I know they were cheap flowers, but honestly. .’
Suzette narrowed her eyes at her brother. Katharine was angry with Nicholas, and Suzette couldn’t blame her. The two women had spent hours after dinner last night arguing over whether or not to telephone the police and report Nicholas missing. Suzette had had the final word, saying that enough police had been to 68 Lambeth Street in the last week, and Nicholas was probably out on a bender and that might be a good thing. But she’d never guessed he’d gone and found a flat without telling anyone.
Nicholas explained about seeing Gavin’s suiciding ghost every time he opened the door, and Suzette’s anger ebbed a little.
‘I know you couldn’t tell Mum that. But you could have told me.’
‘I’m telling you now. Besides, Mum never seemed too keen about having me back.’
‘Uh-huh. Did you consider it might not be you that’s worried her? The night you get back, a child goes missing and is murdered. A couple of days later, a face from the past knocks on her front door and blows his head off. Can you blame her for being a little fragile? Anyway. Here. .’
Suzette reached into her bag and pulled out her notebook. She flipped it open to the page on which she’d copied the rune that they’d found faintly carved into the health food store’s doorframe. She looked up. Nicholas was staring at the sketch with an odd expression on his face. ‘It’s the mark from Mrs Quill’s old shop door.’
‘Oh,’ he said quietly.
‘It is a rune. I looked it up.’ She flipped to the next page and read from her scribbled notes. ‘The third rune, Thurisaz, takes its name from the god Thor, from which is derived the old English word Thorn. But the rune has other meanings, including Protection and Devil. It’s not a rune to be trifled with. Thurisaz is the most difficult and potentially dangerous of the runes of Elder Futhark. Only a strong will can control it; it will control the weak. It is a war rune. It is associated with the colour red for blood.’ She looked up at her brother. He was staring out the window. ‘Did you hear that? Was it a bit boring for you?’
He nodded.
‘Well? It’s a dangerous rune, Nicky. What do you think we should do?’
Nicholas looked at her, then he smiled. There wasn’t a hint of happiness in it. He reached across for her notepad, flipped to a new page and started writing. ‘I don’t think we should do anything.’ He stood, his chair scraping on the floor. ‘That’s the address of my flat. I’m going to get my stuff and go home. You should go home, too. Get home to Bryan and the kids.’ He kissed her on the forehead.
Suzette was so surprised that she said nothing, simply watched Nicholas as he walked to the hall doorway, where he shrugged. ‘So, it’s a rune. It’s old. Anyone could have put it there. But thank you for looking.’
He smiled again at her, and in a moment was just the sound of footsteps echoing in the hall.
Katharine could feel the stillness in the air of her house as Nicholas let himself out the squeaking front gate. She went to her bedroom window and watched him walking down the street carrying his suitcase. Afternoon sunlight cast a long, thin shadow behind him, and she watched it till he was around the corner and gone.
She cursed herself for her foolishness, locking herself in her room like some jilted debutante. But when Nicholas had handed her flowers and said he’d moved out, thirty-odd years cracked like some fragile ice bridge and fell away, and she found herself stranded back in time, staring at a man who looked so much like Don, hearing him say almost exactly what Don had said the night he finally listened to his wife and moved himself out. Katharine felt her eyes clouding with tears again, and angrily wiped them away. Christ, she’d told Don to move out. Screamed at him to go. He’d begun drinking and she had every reason to see him out of her and the kids’ lives. But when he actually did it. . And did she run out into the street and call him back? No. And now her son had gone, again, what did she do? Nothing. She dried her eyes and shoved the damp tissue in her pocket.
She went to the door and carefully opened it a crack. The kettle was starting to sing. Suzette was still in the kitchen. Katharine had heard Suzette’s voice as she spoke with Nicholas; although she couldn’t make out the words, she’d heard the urgent tone. What were they talking about? Why did the thought of having her children back here in Tallong knit her stomach into a tight ball of worry?
Because of her. Because of Quill.
Quill. A woman she hadn’t thought of in twenty years. But was that true? Weren’t there nights when she dreamed of that dark little shop where dresses and suits hung like the capes of villainous creatures in some bad old Christopher Lee film? Quill was long dead, long gone. Why had Suzette brought her name up the other night? Was it coincidence?
Katharine wiped under her nose, ran fingertips through her hair, straightened her dress. Yes. Of course it was coincidence. But to be sure, to be certain, a few questions might be asked about Quill.
She knew who to go to. She would go tomorrow.
She opened her bedroom door wide and went to sit with her daughter.
Ackland Street pastries. The sun-warmed timber of the wharf at St Kilda, daintily lifting its skirts as it stepped into summer waters. Good music. Great coffee. Life.
Nicholas lay on the couch in his flat, thinking of places to pack and leave for. Melbourne sounded inviting. So did Perth. And the Hunter Valley. And Launceston. In fact, anywhere sounded good. Anywhere but here.
He had no idea of the time, but it was long, long past midnight. He couldn’t sleep. Every time he shut his eyes, images appeared, haunting his skull as surely as ghosts haunted his life: Gavin’s scalp lifting, popping up like a magician’s trick bouquet; Mrs Boye spitting at an impassive Christ; Teale, arms like Frankenstein’s undead creation, chasing him through dense forest; a dead bird with a head of woven twigs; a strange arrowhead mark carved into the walnut stock of Gavin’s gun.
A dangerous rune, Suzette had called it. Too fucking right. So dangerous that he hoped he’d confused her enough, or pissed her off enough, that she’d book a flight home to Sydney tomorrow.
His tired eyes slid shut, and straightaway more dark images played like a silent newsreel: Tristram dropping to his knees and crawling into the spidery tunnel; Laine Boye’s eyes, inscrutable; Rowena’s eyes, shining with youth; Cate’s eyes, open and dusted with white powder; carved stone; the Green Man; dark woods dense with sentient trees; the oak grove at Walpole Park. .
Nicholas’s eyes flew open. He felt suddenly ill.
The face that he’d seen as he sped past overgrown Walpole Park at Ealing on his motorbike, the face that made him crash — a face glimpsed just for an instant, a half-memory, a ghostly dream from the other side of his life — had been shrouded in leaves, just as the ceiling boss at the church was.
The Green Man.
He shook his head. You see things that would send a person insane; ergo, you are probably insane.
But he wasn’t insane; close, perhaps, but not yet. And he was sure of one other thing: he couldn’t leave town. The Thomas child’s body had been found three suburbs away, but Nicholas had seen his ghost dragged by invisible hands into the woods. Tristram’s body had been found kilometres away, but Suzette had seen his ghost on the gravel path on Carmichael Road. The boys’ bodies may have been found elsewhere, and their supposed killers had confessed to murdering them a long way from Tallong, but their ghosts didn’t lie. The boys had died in the woods.
Something in there killed them, thought Nicholas. And you and Suzette are the only ones who know that.
As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t leave.
There would be no sleep tonight. He stood, yanked on a jumper, snatched his keys and strode out into the pre-dawn chill.
Fog had closed the early morning down to a smoky dream. Nicholas had walked for what felt like hours, hoping that his long strides and the cold air would empty his mind long enough for him to rush home, pack his suitcase and speed to the airport. Instead, his traitorous feet took him through the thick mist to the 7-Eleven near the railway station. He agonised outside long enough for his light sweat to turn icy, then stepped inside and purchased two items, cursing himself for a fool every moment of the transaction.
Then he walked to Carmichael Road.
The fog swallowed all sound. No dogs barked. No cars passed. He could only see a few feet in front of him. As he crossed Carmichael Road, his footsteps on the tarmac were jealously hushed by the moist air. He stepped into the knee-high grass and felt the chill of it eat through his jeans to his calves. He ploughed a wet path to what he guessed was roughly the middle of the gravel track, and stood silent, waiting.
For twenty minutes, nothing happened. The wet, frigid air seeped into his collar, up his sleeves, into his shoes. He had to bite his lip to convince himself he wasn’t still asleep on the couch, dreaming that he was here in this pearly grey world of cold. An elderly woman in a pink cardigan walked past on the other side of Carmichael Road with a tiny white dog — two faint spectres in the mist. She didn’t see Nicholas, and was dissolved again by the cloudy grey. He waited another five minutes. The cold burrowed into his skin, his eyes, his bones.
Then a flicker of movement ahead on the path.
Nicholas hurried. As he grew closer, the figure grew sharper through the fog like a diver rising from obscure depths. A young girl crouched on the path. She was shoeless and wore a plain sundress. His first thought was that she must be freezing. Then he saw that tall blades of damp grass speared painlessly through her legs and arms. She was as insubstantial as the mist.
My God. Tristram. The Thomas Boy. This young girl. Maybe Owen Liddy. How many children have died in those woods?
Nearer, he could see the shift the girl wore was a pattern from the 1940s. Her face beamed in delight: she’d found something wonderful on the path. She looked around cautiously, hopefully, checking that its rightful owner wasn’t around and she could claim the treasure for herself.
The girl bent again to pick up the invisible object she’d found. The moment she did, her translucent eyes widened in sudden disgust and she jerked away from the vile thing. Nicholas felt his stomach tighten; he knew what would come next. The ghost girl’s head whipped up toward the woods and white terror slammed across her face. She jittered back to run, but got not a step before her arm shot out like a signal post’s and she jetted away through the mist towards the invisible woods, mouth wide in terror, dragged by something unseen, powerful and fast.
A cold worm of fear shifted in Nicholas’s stomach. But he didn’t follow.
Instead, he started searching the path. It took less than a minute for him to find what he was looking for. He bent and parted the wet sword grass. There. A butcher bird. Grey wings, white belly, loose feathers over a swollen body. Legs snipped neatly off. Head gone, replaced with a sphere of woven twigs that was greening with mould encouraged by the recent rains. Hints of rust red peeked from under the ill green. The small bird’s death-curled claws were stuck in like horns.
He knew without doubt that just a few days ago, Dylan Thomas had seen this same bird on the path.
Nicholas picked up the talisman. He plucked out the feet, pulled off the woven head, and angrily tossed the legs, false head and body in three directions.
There. Now I’ve touched the bird.
He turned and strode through the sword grass towards the woods he knew were waiting.
As he pushed through the tightly packed scrub, tendrils of fog curled in his wake. With mist obscuring everything but the few steps in front of him, there was less of an overwhelming palette of green to assault his eyes and he was drawn to details he would otherwise have overlooked: how close the trunks were to one another; how one tree was armoured in bark as dark and thick as a crocodile’s hide, while its neighbour was pale grey and smooth as a girl’s calf; how the carpet of leaves underfoot bled tea-coloured water as he squashed it, and how it sucked lightly when he stepped off; how the exposed rocks in gully walls bore spots of pale green moss rounded like spray can spatters on their tops and black shadows like beards below; how vines curled up trunks like possessive serpents, rose straight like jade zippers, or clung with their own green claws like headless jade dragons. Some trunks were metres wide — striated tendons in the wrists of straining giants. Some massive beeches had tumbled with time and lay prone like beached whales, barnacled with funguses that reminded him of human ears. Some had fallen and exposed clumps of roots twice a man’s height — colossal, arthritic fingers probing the mist.
As he moved deeper, the fog drew even closer about him and moisture beaded on the fabric of his jumper and jeans. The half-light of misty dawn dimmed further as the dark canopy overhead closed tighter. He walked cocooned in a silent dusk, and had to stretch out his arms so he wouldn’t collide with tree trunks that loomed suddenly, their limbs so madly twisted that they reminded him of Mexican catacombs where the dried dead were stacked standing, their leather-and-bone limbs crooked at angry angles.
He lost track of time. When he reached the low cliff that led down to the gully and the water pipe, he was unsure if he’d been walking ten minutes or fifty. The gully was thick with fog, and the dark green tops of shrubs poked through it like the mouldering heads of drowned people. He checked his watch and a shudder ran through him. It was nearly eight. He’d been in these cheerless woods an hour and a half.
He slung the plastic 7-Eleven bag over one shoulder and carefully descended the gully face. At the bottom, he walked cautious steps away from the steep bank until his feet clacked on the stones of the wash bed. Then he turned and followed the dry creek until a dark shape coalesced from the thick fog. The pipe. Its flanks loomed like the hull of some ghost ship. Below the red metal, the twin skull eyes of the tunnels watched him.
Okay, he thought. Let’s go.
He felt his body vibrate with the hard thudding of his heart. He took a breath, feeling the biting harshness of cold air lick his throat, and knelt. From the plastic bag he pulled out a new torch and a squat spray can with a plastic lid.
You could just go back, he thought. Just go back, never come down here again, never see another terrified ghost, just go back and leave town and get a job in a new office and buy a new flat and ignore the dead and-
‘Shh,’ he told himself. He couldn’t go back. Something was in there, beyond the pipe. Something that took children. Something that had taken Tristram.
He touched the bird. It should have been you.
Something that wanted him to come in.
Fine, he thought grimly. I touched the bird. Here I come.
He flicked on the torch. In the crepuscular gloom of the fog-bound woods, the white-yellow beam was cheery and bright. He clenched his jaws and shone the light into the nearest of the twin pipes. What he saw made him reel.
The tunnel’s length, all four or so metres of it, was thick with spider webs: some were fresh and shining like silver wire; some were loose and dusky as old shrouds. Among the webs, dotted like black stars in a diseased firmament, were spiders. Thousands of spiders. The shaking torchlight scanned them: some had round, shining bodies with black osseous legs that stroked the air; others had abdomens orange as spoiled juice, swollen thick and looking full enough to pop; some were small and busy, tending webs with legs that moved as delicately as human fingers; others were as big as tea saucers, hairy and fleshy. Some fussed with spindle limbs over the silk-wrapped corpses of their prey or silk-wrapped bundles of their eggs. The torchlight winked off thousands of black, unblinking eyes.
Nicholas felt gorge rise from his stomach. How did Tristram force himself through there? How did he not go instantly mad being dragged through that?
Then another thought struck him: Maybe he did go mad. Maybe he was lucky to, considering his bloody, lamb-like fate.
Nicholas swallowed back the peppery bile and took the plastic lid off the can. It was a bug bomb. The illustration on its side showed a variety of cartoon insects clasping their hearts in theatrical death. The can rattled as he shook it. Satisfied, he aimed its nozzle at the pipe mouth, put his thumb on the tab and pressed it down with a plasticky click. Insecticide hissed out as the tab locked on, and he threw the erupting spray can hard into the curtains of web in the pipe. He guessed it travelled nearly halfway into the pipe until the webs snagged it.
He backed away till he could barely see the pipe’s black mouth through the fog. The echoing hiss of the spray in the tunnel sounded low and mean, like the sighing exhalation of some entombed dark god, unhappily woken. The hissing slowed and thinned and died down to a stop.
For a few moments, nothing happened. Then spiders came crawling from the pipe — first in ones and twos, then by the dozen. They rushed out on panicked legs, or staggered out to perform mad pirouettes, or crawled out weakly, stunned. Some curled and perished on the spot. Some scuttered left and right into the woods. Some scrabbled weakly towards Nicholas; he crushed them with his shoe, nauseated by the dark liquids and small, glossy organs that shot from them.
It took fifteen minutes for the exodus of dying spiders to cease. Nicholas checked his watch. It was just after nine thirty. He waited a few more minutes for the poison to finish its killing work, then looked around for a stick with which to clear the cobwebs. He found one as thick as a pool cue, and returned to the pipe’s mouth. They’ll all be lying on the bottom of the pipe. Oh, Jesus. He hadn’t thought of that. If he’d planned this at all, he’d have bought a disposable pair of plastic overalls, thick gloves, goggles and a mask. Moreover, he realised he couldn’t hold the torch, crawl and clear cobwebs at the same time. He’d have to go in the dark.
He tucked the torch in the back of his jeans, slipped the one plastic bag he had over his left hand, gripped the stick with his right, sucked in a mighty breath and crept in.
As his body blocked the already thin light, the tunnel ahead fell into instant, sepulchral dark. He whisked the stick in front of him, left and right like a blind man’s cane. It tick-ticked off the sides, echoing like chattering teeth. Move fast. Don’t breathe. The first few feet weren’t so bad, but he felt the give of spiny things crushing under his hand and under his knees. But as he went deeper, so became the bed of fallen spiders. His flicking stick grew heavy with web, coated thickly as if with hellish spun sugar from some demented circus sideshow. His knees grew sodden with the juices of squashed arachnids. But what was underhand was worst. The thin bag felt woefully insubstantial as he placed it again and again on the ragged, sometimes shifting bed of spider bodies. He felt the twiggy legs and rounded bulges of the large ones. As his weight shifted onto his arm, it pushed his hand down through a centimetre, then two, then three of inhuman flesh. He vomited. Tears welled and flowed. He sucked in lungfuls of acrid air and filaments of web invaded his mouth. The fumes made him retch again. He scurried forward. The stick, heavier and heavier, failed to clear the curtains of web and they shrouded his face and hair. Dead spiders knocked against his cheeks and eyelids. Those not quite dead clambered up his arms and in his ears. His bagged hand slipped forward and he fell like a horse on ice, his face burying in the hard-soft, dead-alive carpet of spider flesh. He screamed and let go of the stick, propelling himself forward as fast as he could. The circle of light at the other end grew larger and larger. His wet shoes slipped as he scrabbled for purchase, his hands squelched and his sleeves grew soaked. He hurled himself out of the tunnel.
He leapt to his feet and jumped in circles like a mad dog, wiping his hands furiously on his jean legs and clawing at the grey caul over his face and head. His lungs roared and his head swam. His stomach heaved again, vomiting nothing but salty spit. His heart raced and tears poured from his eyes.
‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!’
He pulled spiders from his hair and wiped them from his jacket. Some had gone down the front of his jumper and T-shirt, so he jerked his shirt out violently, shaking the spiny cadavers onto the ground. He stopped his rabid dance. His panicked panting slowed to shuddering breaths.
He was through.
Clear of the pipe, Nicholas realised he had no plan beyond getting through the spidery tunnels. Without any other clear choice, he began following the rock wash bed of the gully floor.
The woods here were even denser than on the other side of the pipe. Ancient trees conspired together, dark limbs intertwining so closely that it was almost impossible to tell where one ended and another began. Vines with ribbed stalks thick as shins curled up trunks and over one another. The forest floor was an unsteady sea with tall waves of damp roots and deep troughs filled with decaying leaves that smelled as cloying and vital as human sweat. The fog was lifting, yet here it remained as dark as evening, and Nicholas couldn’t see more than five metres ahead before the trunks and curling vines merged to become a thick curtain. No breeze stirred the dark ceiling of leaves overhead.
How could he possibly explore the entire area? What would he find? And if he did find something, what could he do once he had? Did you bring a camera? A compass? A weapon? No, no and no. What an idiot. And then a thought bloomed brightly, trampling his foolish feeling and chilling him: Nobody knows you’re here.
He noticed the stream bed underfoot was narrowing. He sensed that he was heading slightly uphill, but the hunched trunks, the fallen trees leaning against each other like drunken titans, and the clutching undergrowth made it impossible to judge. Roots arched over the rolling ground like stealthy fingers. He knew from the street map that if he could travel straight, he would eventually meet the river. He couldn’t be sure whether the dry watercourse was running straight, twisting left or right or meandering wildly — it hunted under dark schist and round knobbed elbows of roots. So was the river half a kilometre distant, or would he cross the next ridge and slide down into brown, frigid water?
He was lost.
Worse, he was thirsty and, now his empty stomach had recovered from the crawl through the tunnel, hungry as hell. As he climbed, the rocks grew sparser and the undergrowth wilder. Leaning trees had been covered in thick curtains of vines so they took the form of elephantine beasts, hulking antediluvian monsters with shimmering hides of shadowy jade. Soon, Nicholas was scrambling, climbing hand and foot over saplings and fallen, rotting trunks hoary with moss. He seemed to reach a low crest, and stopped.
Below, visible through a narrow gap between the tight-packed trees, was a path.
He carefully edged his way down to it, pushing aside thorny shrubs and crawling between close trunks. After much panting and straining, he slid out onto a narrow stony track that wended between the trees. To his left, the path seemed to go slightly uphill; to his right, it seemed to fall slightly. Which way? Any sense of direction was long gone, and without glimpse of the sun, he couldn’t pick north from south. He was trying to decide when a flicker of red caught his eye.
Tucked nearly out of sight behind a tree root off the path was a small patch of strawberries. The plants’ serrated leaves were peppered with tiny fruit each as small as Nicholas’s thumbnail. Seeming to sense that food was near, his stomach growled. He pinched one of the berries off — it was firm but yielding and ripe. Well, thank God for small mercies, he thought, and popped the fruit in his mouth. It was deliciously sweet. He knelt and plucked and ate, only stopping when he recalled standing on St James’s Street eating a large punnet of strawberries while Cate had a job interview; the runs they gave him an hour later were a loud and painful reminder of the paucity of public toilets in central London.
Cheered by the pleasant fullness in his belly, Nicholas regarded the path again. The trees lining the downward slope seemed less tightly packed and sinister, so he headed that way.
A small thought nagged him: Why is there a path here at all?
Never mind, he told himself, I’ll find out soon enough.
And why haven’t you seen any dead children? Clearly, he was in the wrong part of the woods. Let’s see where this path goes, and if it goes nowhere, I can eliminate it from my next search. This seemed completely reasonable. He’d follow this path to its terminus and then follow it back. Yes, but why is there a path?
Nicholas grew annoyed with his own arguing voice. Animals? Maybe a feral goat or something — who cares? This was the easiest going he’d had all morning. He could walk without being scratched, there was a mild breeze, glimpses of sunlit sky winked between the leaves overhead. The woods either side were actually quite pretty. Elkhorn ferns grew from the trunks of some, their green fronds hanging pleasantly like peacetime pennants. The air was crisp and smelled clean and lively. He was, he discovered, in a good mood. Regardless of this hunt for. . whatever, he must make a point of returning to this delightful little track.
The path curved as it circumvented first one wide, friendly trunk of a fig tree, and then another, and then straightened again.
As Nicholas stepped around the last trunk, he stopped and stared.
The path kept straight ahead, widening slightly. The woods each side retreated to allow a clearing. Its gently sloping ground was a carpet of low ferns and guinea flowers; at the bottom of the grade was a fast-running creek that burbled over glistening rocks before its clear waters broke into a wide pool a stone’s throw across. An almost perfect circle of blue sky rode overhead.
But what made Nicholas blink in wonder was the boat.
Moored at one edge of the pond was a wooden sloop. It was, he thought, the loveliest ship he’d ever seen. She wore white lapped timbers, a fresh blue canopy and waxed hardwood rails. Her style was old, from the century before last, but her proportions were neat and spry, and she sat very prettily parallel to the shoreline. Sunlight winking off the glass portholes of her wheelhouse made her seem to smile and sparkle.
Nicholas beamed back, delighted.
Why is there a boat here?
‘Shh,’ he hushed himself again. He stepped off the path over the soft, fragrant blanket of green down to the water’s edge, and ran his hands along the boat’s timber flanks. Her white paint was almost blinding after the gloom of the forest. What a beautiful surprise!
Footsteps. Nicholas turned.
Coming down the path was the old woman in the pink cardigan, walking her tiny white terrier — the pair he had seen outside the woods on Carmichael Road so many hours ago. The old woman was speaking quietly to her dog, whose tail wagged contentedly at the praise. She held herself tall, reminding Nicholas of the proud elderly women of Paris, always dressed beautifully, walking with grace. Suddenly, the woman noticed him and stopped in her tracks; she was so startled that she dropped the dog’s lead.
‘Garnock,’ she called to the terrier.
Garnock took a few brave steps towards Nicholas.
This isn’t right. .
‘Shh,’ he reprimanded himself again — he didn’t want this good mood to pass, and here was someone to share it with.
‘Hello!’ he called.
The woman looked anxiously behind her to see if there was anyone coming up the path who she might summon help from.
‘It’s all right,’ called Nicholas.
It’s not all right.
‘I don’t usually see others here,’ said the woman. Her voice was clear and strong. Nicholas could see that she would have been a pretty thing in her youth. Garnock took a few more steps towards him, and his tail wagged cautiously.
Now you have to go, said the voice in Nicholas’s head. It’s not too late if you go now.
He patted the hull of the boat. ‘I just found it myself. She’s a beaut, isn’t she?’
The old lady smiled and nodded agreement, some small relief in her eyes. Still, she watched Nicholas cautiously. ‘She is indeed.’
Garnock was just a couple of feet away now. His eyes were brown and shining, his tail started wagging faster.
Go! For God’s sake, go NOW!
‘What’s her name?’ he asked.
The old lady nodded at the bow. Nicholas followed her eyes. The boat’s name was printed in black on the white timbers: Cate’s Surprise.
Nicholas blinked, and looked back at the woman, a question on his lips.
Garnock jumped, and his teeth sank deeply into Nicholas’s hand.
It was as if a black shroud fell over the world. The trees rushed in, gnarled branches and green-black leaves closing over the sky. The pond drained into itself, drying in an instant to become a choked bowl of wild and vital thorn bushes. The largest and oldest of the trees all leaned in the same direction, as if away from a mighty gale, and the lush elkhorns that nodded from the tree trunks became hanging shards of rotting cloth or harshly bent rusted iron. The boat heaved over on its side, sucking into itself like a collapsing lung, its white paint stripping away to reveal a skeletal wreck of grey, warped boards. The painted name flaked away to different letters: Wynard.
Nicholas tried to turn his head, but it whirled vertiginously and his eyes struggled to focus. He looked down at Garnock the terrier.
The dog’s white coat dissolved away as if by invisible acid, revealing a dark brown shagginess beneath. Its legs cracked and grew, and from its flanks sprouted another four long, cadaverous shanks. Its snout and face split and peeled away, revealing another one, two, four, six unblinking eyes, and its white teeth cohered to become two curved fangs as big as bear claws; wet and sharp as needles.
Nicholas looked at his hand — two ugly, red-circle punctures were bleeding slowly. The world of the dark woods spun. With huge effort, he lifted his gaze to the old woman.
Of all the things, she alone had remained unchanged.
‘How did you enjoy my strawberries?’ she asked pleasantly.
Nicholas’s eyes rolled back in his head and the world went black.
Suzette knocked on the cheap front door of the flat. ‘Nicholas?’ she called loudly, and knocked again.
No sounds behind the door. Crickets chirped in the hibiscus bushes below. From the flat two doors up came the perky jabber of a daytime chat show. Nicholas wasn’t home.
Suzette let out a long breath and sat on the concrete steps. It afforded a view of the monolithic slab side of the building: pale bricks and pale mortar, its only feature being the flat’s street number in pressed metal, the numerals attached to a motif of a Mexican in a sombrero sleeping under a lolling palm tree.
The anger that had been leaking out of her like lava all morning was finally spent, and she was weary. Nicholas had stunned her yesterday afternoon; his dismissal of the rune in Quill’s old door as happenstance left her momentarily unsure what to do. He was out of the house and gone by the time she’d rallied her thoughts, and her confusion had begun to heat into a boiling fury. It was so typical of Nicholas to turn his back on a gift of knowledge and walk away. He’d been like that as long as she could remember, and it made her sick with fury. Everything came so effortlessly to him: he’d never studied and had sailed through school, while she’d had to study with monkish devotion; he’d pick up a pencil and draw with easy flair, while the few times she’d secretly tried to sketch a face or vase, the monstrous results had needed swift abortion; he was born with this blessing of second sight, something she had spent thousands of her free hours reading up on, working on her craft with herbs and charms and signs of earth and water. . and now he was simply walking away from an opening truth, and expected her to do the same, to just pack her bags and go home. She was so furious, so red-eye-blind with anger at him, that she did pack her bags, stumping past Katharine as she huffed from bedroom to bathroom to the telephone where she checked for the next flight to Sydney. .
But she didn’t go.
Her conscience wouldn’t let her. The rune on the health food store door was just what she’d told Nicholas: a blood rune; a dangerous rune. Yes, maybe it was coincidence that they’d found it on the door of an old woman who used to give her the willies, but as her life went on, Suzette believed less and less in coincidence. Was it coincidence that two boys, almost the same age and from the same suburb, were murdered in the same way by different men a quarter of a century apart? She didn’t think so. Quill was certainly long in the ground, but a rune did not die, and Suzette was sure it had something to do with the deaths of Tristram and the Thomas boy. The fact that Nicholas wasn’t in his flat, lolling on the sofa, made her feel that he believed that, too. What was he hiding from her?
She picked herself up and wrote a tersely worded note, which she stuffed under his door.
It took around ten minutes to get to Myrtle Street and its heavy-lidded shops. Even in daylight, the sight of them sent her heart tripping and her feet tingling, ready to run. But she wasn’t a child any longer; she had knowledge of many things. She climbed the low steps to the tiled veranda outside the shopfronts and walked briskly to the door of Plough amp; Vine Health Foods.
A handwritten sign inside the glass of the door read ‘Closed for stock take’. The ‘o’ in ‘stock’ was a smiley face with petals around it. The shop within was dark.
Suzette let her eyes probe the gloom, expecting any moment to see something shift, to see a small, bent lady peer from between the gibbets of hanging things. . but the shop was still.
She flicked her eyes to the doorframe. The glossy white paint was a bright ice storm of reflections of the day outside the awnings and of her own face. She ran her fingers over the silky surface. . and felt the small, invisible grooves. It was there. Her fingertips tingled at the touch of it. Blood rune. War rune.
She pulled her hand away.
If she felt it, Nicholas must, too. What else did he know?
Kelmscott Heights had a small driveway entrance flanked by two dark brick piers crawling with ivy. The drive itself was gravel and crunched under the tyres of Katharine’s car. Old camphor laurel trees lined the drive; their crocodile-bark trunks cast cool shadows and their branches met overhead, creating a cosy leafed tunnel. At the end of it was the main building of the retirement home: a two-storey brick house with steep eaves and, like the front fence, frocked in dark green ivy. A newer wing ran off at an angle, and separate cottages were divided by neat hedges, politely pruned citrus trees and red-flowered bottlebrush. Kelmscott Heights, Katharine realised, was no ordinary retirement home. Pamela’s family must have money.
The young man at the counter seemed delighted that Pamela had a visitor. His name badge read ‘Nathan’, and he gave Katharine very clear, if slightly patronising, instructions to Pamela’s room in Roseleigh. ‘That’s the AR wing,’ he explained in a stage whisper.
Katharine just bet his boyfriend liked Nathan to whisper ‘Come on my face’ in that exact tone of voice.
‘And “AR” is. .?’
Nathan rolled his eyes, as if Katharine were joshing; surely a good friend who visited often would know that? ‘Assisted Residents. Pamela requires quite a bit of care now.’ He let the last word linger like an accusation.
Katharine smiled thinly and leaned closer. ‘Couldn’t give a fuck. I’m just here to see what I can steal,’ she stage-whispered back. She enjoyed the shocked expression on Nathan’s young face. ‘Kidding, of course.’ She waved and headed to the lifts.
The walls of the AR wing were adorned with bright pictures painted by residents’ grandchildren and dozens of photographs that invariably showed smiling faces anchored by the blank stare, scowl or confused off-centre look of an elderly wrinkled man or woman. They’re mostly senile, realised Katharine. She started reading door numbers, and found her way to room sixteen.
Pamela Ferguson was sitting under the window reading a Tami Hoag novel. The room was surprisingly large, and furnished with some pieces that must have come from Mrs Ferguson’s own home: a blackwood bookcase, a small china cabinet full of Lladro figurines, a small silky oak coffee table on which sat a Chinese abacus that looked — and may well have been — five hundred years old. On the bedside table was a fading framed photograph of a jolly-cheeked man with wrinkly eyes and a bad combover; the deceased Mr Ferguson, guessed Katharine. She realised suddenly that even though she’d shopped at Mrs Ferguson’s greengrocery for nearly two decades, she had never asked Mr Ferguson’s first name.
Katharine coughed into her fist.
Pamela Ferguson looked up and pulled her bifocals down on her nose to peer over them. Her eyes brightened in recognition. ‘Katharine!’
They hugged and exchanged pleasantries. Pamela Ferguson had shrunk with age — nature’s way of finally letting us buy smaller dress sizes, she explained — and Katharine watched with sadness as the once sprightly woman strained to reach into the bar fridge for milk as she made tea for herself and her guest.
They sat and chatted for a while. Katharine complimented Pamela on the lovely grounds and the gorgeous view; Pamela explained her brother had developed and sold a software company and had left her quite a bit when he died, which allowed her to stay here.
‘Pam, this is going to sound. . honestly, a bit stupid. You seem just fine. Why are you in here?’
‘In the Alzheimer’s Revenge wing?’ suggested Pamela. ‘It’s temporary, until a cottage becomes vacant. And the only way to speed that up is to sprinkle a bit of rat poison in someone’s cacciatore.’
The women laughed. The easy silence that followed encouraged Katharine to state her business.
‘Have you been watching the news, Pam?’
Mrs Ferguson shook her head. ‘I’ve given it up for Lent. Sudoku, that’s my thing now.’
Katharine nodded, then recounted how Nicholas had returned from London, how the Thomas boy went missing, and later was found with his throat cut. The man who confessed to his murder died in prison within days of the crime. Katharine looked carefully at Mrs Ferguson. The older woman drew a deep breath through her nostrils.
‘Anyway, all this got me thinking of when Nicky’s friend Tristram died,’ said Katharine.
‘Of course,’ said Mrs Ferguson. ‘All a bit similar, isn’t it?’
Katharine nodded. ‘Suzette asked me if I remembered Mrs Quill.’
She watched the older woman. Mrs Ferguson said nothing. She nodded to Katharine, go on.
‘Mrs Quill,’ repeated Katharine. ‘She used to scare Suzie, remember? Do you know. .’ She hunted for the right words. ‘Why do you think she worried her?’
Mrs Ferguson drew in another of those long breaths. It was a sad, finite sound. ‘I worked next to Mrs Quill from the day I took the lease on my fruit shop to the day I dropped the shutter for good. And not one second in between did I like that woman.’
‘Why not?’
Mrs Ferguson fixed Katharine with a firm stare. ‘Baobhan sith.’ Then she laughed and shook her head. ‘Fiddlesticks. That’s my nanna talking, superstitious Scot she was. I just never took to Quill. She was always polite. Always said hello. She always paid her rent, never a day in arrears, though who knows how she turned a quid in that haberdashery. There were days went by when I never saw a soul enter her shop.’ Mrs Ferguson shrugged and looked again at Katharine. ‘But nights when I worked back, making fruit salad from the bruised stock or cleaning up the grapes where such-and-suches went picking at them, and I knew Quill was still in her store two doors up. .’ She shivered. ‘I didn’t want to go up there. I thought if I did, I wouldn’t come back. I have to say it was a happy day when I heard her sister won the lottery and bought her a house in Hobart.’
Katharine frowned. ‘I heard she moved to Ballina and died.’
Mrs Ferguson’s eyebrows rose. ‘Oh? Well. That’s funny, because I also heard. .’
She looked out the window at the gently swaying callistemon. Bees hummed on the red fluffy flowers. Clouds had crept over the sun and the day had gone dull and cool. She fell silent.
‘Pam?’ said Katharine. ‘Pamela?’
Mrs Ferguson jerked at Katharine’s voice and turned. Her eyes widened in surprise.
‘Katharine! What are you doing here? How lovely. Here. .’ The older woman stood and shuffled to the kettle, switched it on. ‘I should be at the shop, but I’m not a hundred per cent today. How’s your Donald? Where’s little Suzette?’
Mrs Ferguson peered around the room. Katharine realised Pamela’s placement in AR was no temporary measure.
‘She’s at home, Pam. So’s Nicky.’
‘Oh.’ Mrs Ferguson was disappointed. ‘You don’t look well, Katharine.’
‘I’m fine. Pam, can I ask you something?’
‘Don’t ask me for limes. The markets want eighty cents a pound for them and that’s robbery, I won’t pay it.’
‘No. What’s a. .’ She hoped she had the pronunciation right. ‘What’s a baobhan sith?’
Mrs Ferguson’s eyes brightened. ‘Baobhan sith? I haven’t heard that since my nan passed on. Funny old cow. She was sure there was a woman in her street when she was a lass who was one.’ Mrs Ferguson looked at Katharine slyly. ‘The white women of the Highlands. They sometimes appear in a green dress. They prefer the night. They seduce young men, charm them with their dancing. . then drink their blood.’ She chuckled at the foolishness of it.
Katharine stayed just a little longer, waiting until Mrs Ferguson was again staring out the window before she quietly stood and crept from the room.
She was glad to get to her car.
Singing.
A woman’s voice from across dark air, a siren song; faint, tugged at jealously by the wind.
Awareness swam up out of nothingness, like a slow bubble rising through the night sea. Nicholas realised he was moving. His feet and hands felt a million miles distant, ice cold and unreachable. He could not command his legs, arms, lips, eyelids. But he could sense the subtle rise and fall of his chest, although there was a heaviness there. He could hear the rustle of leaves, a surf-like whisper. He was supine and yet he was moving. Under his back, his buttocks, the underside of his thighs and calves, under his forearms and head, were thousands of tiny shifting knuckles. He willed himself to breathe deeper, but his lungs kept at their shallow work, tight and pained as if labouring under a weight.
The singing grew clearer: ‘. . his face so soft and wondrous fair. .’
The woman’s voice was lovely and high. Where was he?
Open your eyes.
He couldn’t. He tried another deep breath, but his lungs ignored him and kept their own shallow rhythm. A memory surfaced: I was poisoned.
‘. . the purest eyes and the strongest hands. .’
He was being carried up a grade. Slowly, recollections of his last few lucid moments came back in pieces: the boat, the sky, the old woman, the wild strawberries, the juice, the bleeding holes in his hand. .
Open your eyes.
He tried again. Nothing. He was deep inside himself; only his ears were unfettered, letting in the chittering of tiny legs underfoot and the lilting song.
‘. . I love the ground on where he stands. .’
Open your eyes. You can’t fight what you can’t see.
But another voice in Nicholas’s head spoke just as loudly: Are you sure you want to see? He remembered the dog’s flesh falling away, and the huge spider crouched there, dull spiny hairs on its long, multi-jointed legs, its black eyes sparkling. Then another flash returned. The name on the boat: Cate’s Surprise.
Was that a memory? Or a vision infected by. .
How did you like my strawberries?
A dark thing bloomed inside him. Anger.
Whatever, it was mean, he thought.
He focused on his ire, blowing on its embers, brightening it. How dare she? How dare she use Cate’s name? His heart thudded. He told his lungs to breathe deeper. The air sucked in.
‘. . I love the ground on where he stands. .’
Okay. Open your eyes.
With a mental fist, Nicholas gripped the bright coal of outrage in his belly, letting it burn and hurt. Good. Now, move it up. He lifted the bright pain to the spot behind his eyes. Forget what you saw before. You don’t know what was real and what was not. What matters is what you see now. He grimly tightened his imagined hand around the coal, letting the pain and the anger grow brighter and sharper, focusing it like the pinpoint of light from a magnifying glass behind his eyes. Ready? Open!
One eyelid cracked open a sliver.
In the gloom, he could see the weight on his chest was no poisoned hallucination. Perched there like a spiny, deformed cat was the spider Garnock. All eight orbs of its stygian, unblinking eyes seemed to be trained on Nicholas’s face — and they noted the movement of his eyelid. The spider’s forelegs shifted, readying to pounce.
Oh, Christ, thought Nicholas. This is going to send me insane.
The spider’s two curved fangs were as dark as ebony, rooted in hairs in its head and underslung with two swollen, grey-pink sacs. The points of the fangs were wickedly sharp and glistening. They tack-tack-tacked together, a bony clicking like knitting needles that was surprisingly loud.
‘Really?’ came the old woman’s voice. ‘Well. We’re here, anyway. Put him down.’
Nicholas felt the wave beneath retreat as the knuckle lumps supporting him slipped away first from his head — depositing it on moist-smelling earth — then his shoulders, arms, back, buttocks, legs. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed hundreds of spiders, dark grey and hunched and large as sparrows, streaming away. A jolt of new terror went through him like a spasm and his stomach heaved.
Maybe I’m insane already.
Above him were small gaps in the dark treetops; smoke-coloured cloud drifted overhead. Then the view was obscured by the old woman’s face.
She wasn’t that old, Nicholas could see now, maybe in her mid-sixties. Her eyes crinkled as she smiled, but there wasn’t a speck of warmth there.
‘Hello, Nicholas.’
He opened his mouth to speak, but only a shuddering breath escaped his throat.
She took her eyes off his and ran her gaze over his forehead, his hair, his cheeks, his neck. She clucked to herself, then resumed singing in the softest voice: ‘. . and where he goes, yes. .’
Nicholas closed his eyes and concentrated. His limbs felt carved from frozen meat. But he willed his head to turn. It did, just a few degrees. The new angle afforded him a little more view of his surrounds. He could just glimpse the tip of a stone chimney, topped with rusty iron baffles to dissipate the smoke and send it out widely. The top of a wooden trellis, lush with leaves — maybe beans or pea stalks. And the tops of a circular grove of trees.
‘. . I love the ground on where he goes, and still I hope. .’
He flicked his eyes down. The old woman knelt over him, her eyes taking in his arms, his chest. He was wrong: her hair wasn’t white, it was grey, and she would have been sixty at the most, closer to fifty. A smile teased her lips. ‘. . that the time will come. .’ The tip of her tongue darted out, slick with saliva. Her hands were trembling.
‘Who. .?’ whispered Nicholas.
Her eyes rolled back to his and her smile broadened.
‘Who, indeed. Who, indeed. .’
She stroked his face, and her eyes returned to his belly. But her hands stayed on him, drifting down his cheeks to his neck, across his chest.
‘And how is your little toe? Still there, eleven of ten? Or have you tried to hide your little deformity?’
Nicholas felt his blood thud in his ears. How did she know?
‘Garnock,’ she whispered.
Nicholas’s heart tripped as the huge spider appeared in his periphery, then stepped, one delicate leg at a time, onto his chest to stare down at his face. He groaned and shut his eyes. Her hands were down at his groin. He felt her unzip his fly. Oh, God, no.
‘. . When he and I will be as one. .’ sang the old woman. Her hand slipped inside and softly curled around and cupped his penis. No, no, no, no. . He screwed his eyes shut. ‘. . when he and I will be as one. .’
As she stroked him, he grew harder. No! he screamed, but again only a whisper came out, and his body — untouched since Cate died — didn’t listen and stiffened more. Her stroking grew faster.
‘. . When he and I will be as one. .’
The weight of the spider on his chest was horrible, stifling. He couldn’t move. The old woman’s hand was eating him as hungrily as her eyes had.
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she whispered.
Nicholas wanted to leap out of his skin and run. His brain screamed. This, said the cheerful voice in his head, is what it’s like to lose your mind.
‘Yes!’ said the old woman, and he came. The warm spasms rolled up through his guts and his body jerked involuntarily.
‘Yessss,’ she whispered. Nicholas heard the scraping sound of tin on glass — a lid going on a jar. ‘Garnock. Off.’
The weight stepped from Nicholas’s chest. Then he felt a damp, cold hand pat his cheek. He opened his eyes. The old woman was regarding him. She would have been ninety or more; her face was grey and wrinkled as a kicked blanket. Yet her dark eyes shone with the same delight.
‘We’ll see you again soon, pretty man.’ Her ancient voice was now as dry as ash. ‘Garnock-lob?’
Two hot skewers drove into the flesh of Nicholas’s exposed thigh, and fire swept up to his skull. The world shrank and fell away into oblivion.
He dreamed he was a bird.
His legs were numb, because they were gone. His head was gone, too, painless and vanished. But his body — dead though it was and swelling with rot — still had feeling. It was sodden wet and cold. Ants were crawling over it, exploring for places to nest and feed. He was quite content to lie there and decay, until his body felt something poking into its side. Without eyes, he couldn’t see, but he knew it was a boy holding a stick, poking him, disturbing his death, seeking to drag him out onto a path. He was the bird, but he was also the boy. All was well, though.
Because this is the plan. This is what we need to bring him. It is the cycle.
But the prodding stick?
Flesh, not stick! Flesh and blood! Because blood is the only sacrifice that pleases the Lord. .
Nicholas’s eyes blearily opened.
A large woman stood above him, poking him with the tip of a brightly coloured umbrella. Nicholas screamed. The woman screamed, too, and skittered backwards. Despite her size, she moved surprisingly fast.
‘He’s alive!’ she called to her husband in the car on the road. She hurried into the passenger seat and the car roared past.
‘Dirty druggie! Disgrace!’ shouted the man before he swiftly wound up his window and sped away.
Nicholas was lying in the dry sword grass outside the woods. Everything hurt. His hands and feet felt like they weren’t flesh but wet dust, heavy and lifeless. His clothes were damp. His heart thudded dully, and his head felt full of acid sand. But he could move. He rolled onto his side, dragged his knees to his chest and slowly pushed himself up onto all fours. Ropy spittle fell from his slack lips. The minute it took him to sit on his haunches seemed an eternity.
He sat on the path, breathing heavily from the effort, and squinted at his watch. It was four thirty; the sun was kissing the rooftops in the west. An arm’s length away on the path lay the body of the butcher bird, its woven head re-attached to its perishing, lifeless body, its pathetic severed legs again poking out like antlers. Beside him was a clean plastic 7-Eleven bag. He reached painfully and picked it up. Within were a new torch and a bug bomb can, the latter also unused, its lid still attached.
Nicholas looked at his knees. No sign of the virulent sludge of squashed spiders — but his clothes were all wet; soaked through.
Was it all a dream?
He looked at his hand. In the flesh between his forefinger and thumb were two red-rimmed and throbbing punctures. The pain in his upper thigh told him he would find two more wounds there.
She did this, he thought. She washed my clothes. Bought new goods. She did it so no one would believe me if I blabbed. She did it so I wouldn’t believe myself.
But he could prove it! He could run now, into the woods, to the tunnels under the pipe, and the left one would be full of torn cobwebs and squashed, dead spiders. But he knew, with cold clarity, that the pipe would have been emptied of dead spiders and filled with live ones busily spinning fresh webs. The empty bug bomb container would have been spirited away.
He looked around at the woods. In the late afternoon light, they brooded, patient and dark. There was no way he wanted to go back in there, not today.
She got what she wanted.
He remembered, then, the wrinkled hand stroking him, his jerked expulsions, the horror of the catlike weight on his chest as he heaved in orgasm. He felt utterly exhausted. Raped. Emptied.
He climbed to his feet and began a slow stagger towards Bymar Street.