2007
Nicholas watched his younger sister alight from the taxi, her chatty, white smile winking at the cabbie unloading her bags. He let the blinds fall and sank on the bed. Suzette hadn’t brought her husband on this trip to see her sad widower brother, nor her children. I’ll be nice, he decided. Answer her questions. Accept her sympathy. Send her home tomorrow.
‘Your sister’s here!’ called Katharine brightly.
‘I know!’ called Nicholas in matching tone.
Rattling of the latch, the birdsong of greetings and compliments, rustling of plastic bags, the friendly thump of footsteps. Then Suzette was in the doorway, arms folded.
‘Get out of my room.’
The last time he’d seen her was at his wedding in Osterley Park. Her hair was longer, but she was still tall and pale and pretty, with a stance like a bouncer.
‘No.’
‘It’s my room.’
‘Not any more.’
‘I’ll tell Mum.’
‘Then you’d be a dirty little dob artist.’
‘MUUUM!’ she yelled, as brutally as a cheated fishwife. ‘Tell Nicholas to get out of my room!’
‘Nicholas, let your sister have her room back,’ called Katharine. The smile in her voice suggested she enjoyed this old game.
Nicholas sighed and got to his feet. He walked up to his sister. She grinned. He kissed her cheek. She grabbed him and squeezed him. He found himself sinking into the hug. She rubbed his back.
‘Dear, oh dear,’ she said.
Suzette felt him gently release himself from her hug, watched him turn his face away and suggest that while she unpacked he might ‘make some fucking tea or some shit?’, then he was down the hall. The room felt hardly emptier without him. She hadn’t expected him to look so. . gone.
She stood in her old bedroom a moment, trying to reconcile the thin, insubstantial man with the voice she’d heard on the phone just a week ago. He had sounded so fine, so balanced and normal, that no alarm bells had rung. Suzette chastised herself. She prided herself on being sensitive to people, to being good at reading faces, decrypting moods and deciphering subtle expressions — yet this huge lapse had occurred and she’d missed her own brother slipping over that twilit border into a dark and alien place. How? He’d sounded so reasonable on the phone from London. No, don’t come to the funeral. She’s gone. Thanks, but Nelson and Quincy need you there. Cate’s folks are looking after me. I’ll be fine. Was he that good a liar? Or did he just say what she wanted to hear, absolving her of the need for that exhausting flight and the eviscerating drain of a funeral?
She lifted her suitcases onto the single bed. The springs let out a familiar squawk, recognising their old sleeping mate. She unzipped the larger case and pulled out her toiletry bag and make-up purse.
She’d failed. She and her mother both. Even before Cate’s accident, he’d had enough death for one lifetime. Now he looked like death himself.
‘Tea’s made!’ called Katharine from the kitchen, amid the staccato ticking of cutlery on china.
‘Okay!’
All this brightness. Pleasant voices and biscuits and tea. No wonder Nicholas was a mess. This was how they’d been taught to deal with grief and heartache: a cup of tea, then back to the washing or into work or on to the bills. Keep busy, don’t worry others, the world’s got enough problems of its own without yours. That was the Lambeth Street motto. Totally fucked.
‘Oy!’ called Nicholas.
‘Coming! Christ. .’
Maybe it wasn’t too late. She was here, wasn’t she? She must have sensed something was wrong, because. .
She pulled from her suitcase a small parcel wrapped in tissue paper. This might help. She slipped it into her pocket.
‘I don’t have sugar any more!’ she yelled sunnily, and hurried down the hall.
Katharine let her children wash up the dishes, casting her ear into their conversation like an angler who doesn’t really care if he catches a bite. Nicholas asked about his nephew and niece. Nelson was fine. His sixth birthday had a pirate theme and he got too many presents so Suze and Bryan returned half to the stores. Quincy was enjoying her pre-school and had taken to looking through Bryan’s old telescope at the moon, which pleased Suzette for some reason.
Katharine went and folded laundry. Her family was together again. Well, as much as it could be.
What was she supposed to do now? She was out of practice. Was she supposed to be wise? Was she supposed to explain how she’d coped when Don left? Was it time to tell them how her heart had risen to her throat when she saw two policemen at the door a few nights ago; that she’d had the helpless feeling of being wrenched back through time to a night thirty-odd years ago when two policemen knocked at the same door to tell her that there’d been a car accident and Don had been at the wheel? Was she supposed to make things right?
She folded the last towel, smoothing down a sharp crease. No. Her grief was her own, and Nicholas’s was his. He’d have to cope.
And the dead boy? A child goes missing the night Nicholas returns. What does that mean? Nicholas had lost a father, a friend, a wife. . and now he was back and more death. What sort of a grim harbinger was he? She remembered the night he was born. It was a Sunday. Don’s smiles were peppered with frowns. ‘Funny day,’ he kept saying. Was it her bad luck passed on to him? Was it Don’s? Or was there something darker still?
‘Hey.’
Katharine jumped at Suzette’s voice at her shoulder.
‘Hay makes the bull fat,’ she replied, trying to disguise her racing heart. What had she been thinking? Such nonsense. Old wives’ tales and rubbish. ‘What are you up to?’
‘We’re going for a walk. Need anything?’
Katharine nearly blurted, I need you to stay here. She bit her tongue. Where had that come from? ‘Can you pick up some milk?’
A minute later, she was in Suzette’s bedroom, watching her children close the front gate behind them. They walked down towards Myrtle Street, just as they used to twenty-five years ago — her daughter, still with the mop of brown hair she’d had as a child, and her son, tall and fair but with a crane frame so familiar that Katharine could swear it was Donald walking away. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. She had a sudden urge to fling open the window and shout to her little girl, ‘Get away from him! He’ll get himself killed and you with him!’
She smoothed her dress to wipe the stupid thought away, then went to the lounge room and turned the TV on loud.
Nasturtiums blazed cold orange fire on the sloping banks that led down to the train tracks. Two pairs of silver rails curved like giant calligraphy around a far bend. They’d come from the nearby 7-Eleven and let themselves under a rusted chain-link fence to sit on mossy rocks at the top of the bank. From here they could look along to Tallong railway station and its sixty-year-old wooden walkway that crossed above the tracks. Beyond, red roofs and green roofs were peppered among the trees, marching up the suburb’s hills. They reminded Nicholas of pieces in a Monopoly set, playthings in some larger game. He chewed fruit pastilles. Suzette ate caramel corn from a brightly coloured bag. Overhead, clouds the colour of pigeon wings tumbled in loose ranks. Evening was coming.
The small talk was done. Nicholas had asked after Bryan (he was well, recovering from a cold), about the kids’ teachers (capable, but a bit soft with such wilful little blisters), about Suzette’s work as an investment advisor (going very nicely, thank you: two new corporate clients this month). As he finished his last sweet, the conversation fell into quiet and he braced himself for the turn of the tide. Suzette would start asking about him. She’d ask how he was holding up. She’d see if he’d visited a counsellor. She’d tell him it was okay to cry.
But Suzette remained silent. She simply sat beside him, licking her fingers and retrieving the last sugary crumbs from the bottom of the popcorn bag. She seemed content to do so for another hour.
‘I don’t like your hair that colour,’ he said to break the silence.
She licked her fingers. ‘Fuck you. Bryan does.’
She looked at him. Her eyes were a steely blue, her gaze as solid as granite. He could see why her financial planning business went so well — her clients would be too scared not to believe her if she said ‘buy now’.
‘I heard a boy went missing,’ she said.
Nicholas nodded.
‘They found him in the river. .’ He nodded to the north-east. ‘Couple of clicks.’
Suzette kept her eyes on him. ‘Mum said he was murdered, too.’
Murdered, too. He knew what she was thinking. Murdered, like Tristram.
He nodded again.
A stainless-steel train whummed past, sighing as it slowed to stop at the platform. Men in shirts and ties and women in sensible black skirts alighted and started up the wooden stairs of the crossover, heading home.
He saw Suzette was frowning. It was the same concentrated scowl she used to wear solving fractions at the dinner table and correlating statistical charts on her bedroom desk. We don’t change, do we? The patterns we slide into in childhood fit us for life.
‘What?’ he asked.
She shook her head — nothing.
He looked back at the train station. There was just one person left on the crossover now: a girl in a yellow anorak. From this distance her face was a blur, her hair a dark pistil atop a fluffed golden bloom.
‘I’m waiting for you to tell me that I couldn’t have done anything to stop Cate dying.’
Suzette crumpled the empty popcorn bag and shoved it in her pocket. ‘That it was an accident?’ she asked.
‘Or some similar shit, yes.’
Suzette nodded. ‘Well. I don’t really believe in accidents.’
Nicholas looked at her again.
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m not saying it was your fault.’ She met his gaze. ‘But. . nothing happens without a reason.’
He felt a warm knot form in his gut.
‘Don’t give me any God Wanted Her Home in Heaven bullshit, Suze. I saw her-’
He bit his tongue. He’d been about to say how he’d seen Cate falling from that invisible ladder time and again, over and over, her dead eyes staring at nothing, then rolling to him, blank as slate, without a trace of the person he’d loved and married. That wasn’t heaven. That was hell. He felt Suzette watching him.
‘If God is eternal, if time means nothing to him, I reckon he could have waited a few more years for her,’ he finished.
On the pedestrian overpass, the girl in the yellow anorak pulled up her sleeve. To check her watch, Nicholas guessed. Someone was late meeting her. But then she climbed onto the crossover’s rails, balanced for just a second, then stepped into space.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Nicholas leapt to his feet and his breath jagged in his throat like a hook.
The girl lay motionless on the track a moment. Her arm lifted a little as she tried to sit. . then her anorak seemed to fly apart. She became a small, violent storm of feathers and red as an invisible train tore over her body, dragging pink flesh and one leg and shards of yellow thirty metres up the track. Then she was gone.
‘You okay?’ asked Suzette. ‘Nicky?’
Nicholas saw his traitorous hand pointing at the track and willed it to fall by his side.
Suzette looked down at the train line, squinting. ‘What is it?’
Nicholas looked around. And there, a flash of daffodil two hundred metres away. The girl in yellow was slowly making her way down the steep slope of Battenberg Terrace, her body whole, her face a smudged thumbprint.
Nicholas’s heart was kicking in his chest.
‘Nothing.’
Suzette frowned sceptically. ‘Uh-huh. .’
Nicholas put his hands in his pockets. He’d only been out of London a few days and he had already lost his poker face. The sun was now resting on roof ridges in the west, and here in the shadows the air had grown cold. The ground beneath the round lily leaves of the nasturtiums was black. He turned his back to the railway station. He didn’t want to see that again.
‘We should go home,’ he suggested.
Suzette’s careful eyes slid between him and the tracks. Then she cocked her head and fixed Nicholas with a hard look.
‘I was in love with him, you know.’
‘Who?’
‘Tristram.’
Nicholas blinked, disoriented by the change of subject. ‘I didn’t know.’ He thought a moment. ‘That’s ridiculous. How old were you? Nine?’
‘Eight.’ She took a breath. ‘I saw him a couple of times.’
‘You saw him more than that. He was over every time his bloody parents wanted a nap.’
Suzette’s eyes were still fixed on him. ‘No. I saw him after he died.’
Nicholas suddenly felt the air grow tight around him. His heart thudded slow, long beats as if his blood had suddenly taken on the consistency of arctic sea-water, just a degree away from becoming ice.
‘Where?’ he whispered.
Suzette looked him in the eye. ‘Running into the woods.’
She got to her feet, dusted off the back of her jeans.
‘Let’s walk.’
They climbed back through the rusty fence and down onto the road. The sky in the west lost the last of its furnace glow and grew purple and dark. Birds hurried to find shelter before the last light was gone. A cold breeze stiffened.
A month or so after Tristram was found murdered, she’d defied their mother and walked down to Carmichael Road. There, on the gravel path through the grass verge, she’d seen Tristram kneeling, picking something up, then running away into the trees. The sight had scared her senseless.
‘I reckon I felt how you just looked,’ she said, smiling thinly. ‘Like you just saw a ghost.’
She watched her brother. His dark eyes were fixed on the cracked footpath. He was motionless. Finally, he spoke.
‘Do you still see them?’ he asked. ‘Ghosts?’
She shook her head. ‘I saw him twice more. I snuck down one afternoon when you were sick, and another time when Mum went to work or something. He did the same thing. Picked something off the path, backed away, ran into the woods.’ She shrugged. ‘But after that, I never saw him again. Or any others.’
She watched him nod slowly. He let out a long breath. He was working up to telling her something.
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘Some books say that puberty either enhances or drowns clairvoyance and second sight, but it wasn’t that with me. Maybe I just had a. . a flash. Either that, or maybe Tristram had reached his proper time.’
‘Proper time? To what?’
‘Die.’ She could see her brother’s face tense as he digested this. ‘That’s what ghosts are, I think,’ she continued. ‘Spirits of people who are killed, or take their own lives, before their. . you know, appointed time to die.’
Nicholas’s eyes were shadowed shells beneath a grim frown.
‘Ghosts,’ he said so softly it was barely a whisper. ‘Can I tell you about ghosts, Suze?’
The words made her heart start to trip.
She nodded.
He took a breath, and then he spoke for a long time.
He told her about the motorcycle crash, and borrowing the phone from the horse-faced couple he hit. About hurrying home to find Cate crooked like a broken exclamation mark, head bent too far backwards over the tub, her open eyes unable to blink out the dust that coated them. About the Yerwood boy with the corduroy jacket and screwdriver. About all the ghosts that silently conspired to send him home. He told her that there were ghosts here, too, including the suicide in the yellow anorak. The sun had sunk below the hills, and lights glowed orange in the houses they passed. The air was faintly spiced with scents of frying meat and onions. He finished by telling her how he’d chased the Thomas boy into the woods two days ago, and lost him at the same place he’d lost Tristram — the shotgun tunnels under the tall, rusted water pipe.
‘Those tunnels full of spiders,’ she said.
Nicholas looked at her, shocked.
‘What?’ she asked. ‘Do you think I never went in there?’
He shook his head.
‘More fool you then,’ she said.
She stopped them outside a blue Besser-block fence, where fading graffiti demanded ‘Free East Papua’ and exclaimed that ‘Fellatio Sucks’. She pushed the back of his head. ‘Here. Let’s have a look.’
She stood behind him and lifted his hair, finding the scar on his scalp. He’d never seen it of course, but he’d felt it. The edge of the concrete step of the Ealing flat had left a lumpy scar a thumb’s length across.
‘You think that’s why I’m seeing ghosts?’ he asked. ‘A clout on the head?’
‘Something started your seeing these things. Maybe it was the shock of losing Cate. Maybe that nasty bump just cleared the plumbing.’ She rapped his head with her knuckle and grinned. ‘When’s my birthday?’
‘My memory’s fine, bloody hell-’
‘When?’
Nicholas rolled his eyes. ‘October thirty-first. Halloween girl.’
She sent him a dark smile. ‘Yes and no. Yes, correct date — and by the way you owe me a present from last year. But, no, not a Halloween girl. Halloween’s different down here. All Hallows Eve. The Celts called it Samhain.’ She pronounced it sah-wen. ‘For us in the south, the end of October is Beltane, the return of summer. Our Halloween is six months opposite.’
She watched Nicholas do a quick calculation in his head. ‘April thirtieth.’
She nodded.
‘My birthday,’ he said quietly.
She nodded again, and bumped his shoulder with her own.
‘You’re the Halloween child. And a child born on Samhain is said to have second sight.’
As they walked, Nicholas felt a lightness in his chest. What did this mean? Was his sister just telling him what he wanted to hear? That they both had some gift — or some curse — to see the dead?
Or are visual delusions wired into our faulty genes?
He felt her eyes on his face, as if she could sense his doubt.
‘You used to have inklings,’ she said. ‘I remember. Like the time you told me not to use the toaster. Mum ignored you and plugged it in, and it sparked and gave her a shock. You just knew, didn’t you?’
‘I’d forgotten about that.’
She quizzed him. That wasn’t the only time he’d had a notion, a gut feeling, scraps of information of things, places, people that really he couldn’t have known.
It was true, though Nicholas had never given it thought. Throughout his life, every few weeks or months, he had uninvited, inexplicable feelings that something wasn’t quite right or that someone was ill or this thing was broken or that thing wasn’t lost but in a mislabelled cardboard box under the house.
During a year nine school excursion to the state art gallery, he and four classmates had been about to cross the street to the footpath opposite when Nicholas had the strongest feeling that walking on the other side would be a bad idea. He convinced his classmates to remain where they were by saying there was, he was sure, a milk bar on this side not far along where they could chip in and buy cigarettes. Not a minute later, a speeding taxi mounted the opposite kerb and came to a shatterglass stop against a power pole. The cab driver had suffered a mild stroke and lost control of the cab. Had Nicholas and his fellow students crossed the road, they’d all be in hospital — in a ward or in a steel drawer.
At seventeen, taking his driving test, he’d disobeyed the transport officer and refused to take a right turn down a Rosalie side street. He failed the test, but saw on the news that night that an unapproved LPG cylinder on a caravan parked in suburban Rosalie had freakishly exploded, destroying the caravan and sending shrapnel shards of metal into the street that was, mercifully, empty of traffic — the very road Nicholas had refused to turn down.
And he recalled one night in London when he sat curled on his couch, miserable with a heavy head cold, only half-hearing his flatmate Martin’s invitation to ‘get off your lardy white arse’ and come to a party off Portland Road. Nicholas felt lousy — it would have been a tight bet whether there was more mucus in his lungs or his stomach — but the moment Farty Marty mentioned the party he knew he had to go. Two hours later, sniffing like a coke addict but dressed in the best clothes he owned, he met Cate.
And, of course, there’d been his work around London. He’d always seemed to know which village house would yield the fading valises and old carved bookends he was hunting.
Yes, he’d had inklings. Notions. Gut feelings. Until now, he’d thought everyone had them.
‘What does it mean?’ he asked.
Suzette smiled. He could barely see it in the dusk. ‘It means I don’t think you’re crazy.’
The evening sky was gunmetal grey. Shadows were blue and amorphous. Headlights were diamonds. Her brother’s profile was all dark angles. Finally, he looked at her.
‘You’re a financial advisor, Suze. How do you know all this stuff?’
‘You see the dead. How do you not?’
‘Well, I do go to phone Psychic Hotline but always end up dialling Lesbian Nurses Chat-’
‘Do you have to make fun of everything? It’s bitter.’
Overhead, a carpet of flying foxes flew west from their mangrove riverbank havens, an armada of black cuneiforms against the cloudless evening heavens, their leather wings eerily silent. The air was crisp, faintly spiced with car fumes and potato vine.
She took a breath. ‘Well, of course it started with Dad’s books.’
Nicholas looked at her. ‘What books?’
She blinked, amazed. ‘His books? In the garage?’
He was still staring at her. Finally, he guessed, ‘In the suitcases?’
‘Yes, in the suitcases! Jesus! Are you saying you never looked in them?’
She remembered the way her mother would tell her to go fetch Nicholas for dinner. She’d find him, a thin boy with a shock of straw hair, standing in the middle of the tiny, dark garage, staring. She knew he felt their father’s death much more keenly than she did. Sometimes, he’d be staring overhead; stacked on planks strung through the trusses up there were three small cardboard suitcases. Their mother had never forbidden them touching the cases, nor had she ever encouraged it. They were just there, the only reminder at 68 Lambeth of a man that Suzette couldn’t remember.
But, clearly, Nicholas could.
‘I didn’t want to touch them.’ He spoke slowly, carefully. ‘I figured he left them because he was coming back. Then when he was dead, I didn’t want to touch them ’cause. .’ He shrugged. ‘That would have meant he definitely wasn’t coming back. But you. . you had a look?’
More than a look. On weekends, when Mum was busy cursing her new potter’s wheel and Nicholas was away at the library, she’d unfold the creaking wooden stepladder and pull down the suitcases. One was a pale olive green, the other two a beige and black herringbone. They weren’t heavy — there wasn’t much in them. One held a grey cardigan, patched trousers and half a dozen Dr Pat tobacco tins containing sinkers, spinners, hooks and fishing line. The other two cases contained what Suzette kept coming back for.
Books.
Some were cheap, flimsy things with titles like Master Book of Candle Burning and Coptic Grimoires. One book was thick with black and white plates showing turn-of-the-twentieth-century spiritualists pulling ectoplasm from their noses and ears. There was Beowulf, The Sixth Book of Moses, A Pocket Guide to the Supernatural. And the two books that Suzette had spirited into her own room to hide among her Susan Cooper novels: Roots, Herbs and Oils and Signs and Protections.
She explained all this to Nicholas. His face was shadowed, but she could see his eyes were bright; she wasn’t sure if he was smiling or furious.
‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘Mum hates that shit. Any time there was a show with Doris Stokes or some spoon-bending freak, she’d turn it off.’
Suzette looked at him patiently. ‘You might have noticed that our parents didn’t have the jolliest marriage.’
‘What do you mean, though? Dad was. . what? A druid?’
‘I didn’t know him, Nicholas. All I know is what I found in his suitcases.’
Nicholas turned his sparkling gaze to her, as if finally realising a hidden truth. ‘And you. . Jesus! All those herbs and rubbish you grew in the garden when you were a kid. I thought you just liked gardening! That was. . what? Hemlock and mandrake and double-double-toil-and-trouble shit?’
Suzette pursed her lips. ‘You never asked.’
‘So, what do you do? Sacrifice piglets while baring your buttocks to the harvest moon? Christ, you’re a fucking economist. I thought you’d come up here to talk sense into me and tell me I need to see someone who can dope me up with Thorazine, and here you are telling me. . Fuck, what are you telling me?’
Suzette fought the urge to snap at him. ‘I’m just saying there’s more to the world than the periodic table.’
‘And what does Bryan think about you being into. .’ He fumbled for the word.
‘Witchcraft?’ she offered.
Nicholas laughed, but the sound blew away in the night wind.
‘Bryan’s fine with it. Weekends he helps me weed my herbs. He buys books that he thinks will interest me. And speaking of the moon, he loves it when my animal side comes out-’
‘Fine, whatever.’ Nicholas cut her short. ‘And the kids?’
‘Quincy, nothing. All she wants to do is look for Saturn’s rings and bring home every creature from the pound. Nelson, though, he’s. .’ She looked at Nicholas. ‘He’s like you. Gifted. But ignorant.’
Nicholas bristled. ‘I’m not ignorant.’
‘You are about magic.’
‘That’s because I don’t believe in magic.’
‘Christ, Nicholas.’ She stopped, hands on hips, waiting till he turned around. ‘You’re haunted. You see the dead. How can you not believe in magic?’
‘Magic is just stuff that scientists can’t make any money out of explaining.’ He turned and kept walking. ‘Though I’m happy you have a hobby. Are you a good witch?’
She caught up with him. ‘I own three Sydney houses outright and have five negatively geared investment properties. I’m good at everything I do.’
‘I meant “good versus evil” good.’
‘People are good or evil. Magic is magic. Some is performed with good intentions. Some isn’t. Some is easy. Some is hard. It’s like physics. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Nothing comes free. You need to put in effort. You need to make sacrifices.’
She saw Nicholas stiffen at the last word.
Then she glanced up. They were at an intersection. To the right, beyond hopscotch puddles of streetlight and shadowed picket fences, was the squat, heavy-browed building. The shops. Suzette felt a familiar old worm of fear turn in her belly.
They’d reached Myrtle Street.
They stepped under the awning and their footsteps echoed on the tiles. This had turned out to be a very weird evening. Suzette — sensible, nose-buried-in-financial-theory-textbooks Suzette — into magic? And his dead father, too? Nicholas brushed hair from his face. It felt unpleasantly like spider web and he shivered.
The shops were all shuttered and dark.
He’d expected a wave of pleasant nostalgia to suddenly overtake them, and they’d laugh about the lollies they’d gourmandised and the ice creams they’d loved that were no longer made. Instead, the dumb fronts of the shops were oddly hostile. This was their home suburb; it shouldn’t feel so grim, so unsettling.
It’s because we’re being watched.
The thought shuddered through him like a shot of vodka. The streets were quiet. Nothing moved. They were alone.
‘Mrs Ferguson’s fruit shop,’ said Suzette.
He turned. Suzette was peering in the window of the failed Tibetan restaurant, angled light from a distant streetlamp weakly picking out the empty bains-marie and bare shelves. ‘She had an old set of imperial scales. Remember? She converted weights to metric and did all the maths in her head.’
Mrs Ferguson. A pleasantly plump lady with a gold tooth who wore a pencil perpetually tucked behind one ear. He remembered.
‘Yep. And that old Texas Instruments calculator the size of a brick next to them? Only to prove to customers that her totals were right. They always were. Hey, we should go.’
But Suzette was staring, deep in memory. ‘Did you know she tutored me?’
Nicholas was surprised. ‘Mrs Ferguson? When? Where?’
‘Nights you had soccer. At the back of her shop. I used to hate it.’
‘Hated maths? But you’re such a fucking nerd-’
‘Not the maths, not Mrs Ferguson. But being back there. . I hated that.’ She shuddered.
Here, now, with the world more shadow than substance and the wind making the power lines moan, he could understand. And again the feeling struck him: something’s watching us.
‘We should go,’ he repeated.
‘Okay,’ said Suzette. But instead, she nodded at the new shop: Plough amp; Vine Health Foods. All they could see in the glass was their own ghostly reflections; the shop within was as black as the waters of a deep well.
‘This was Jay Jay’s.’ Suzette leaned closer, trying to see in. Nicholas fought an insane urge to yell ‘Get back!’ Her eyes were fixed on the dark shop window. ‘Do you remember the old seamstress? Mrs Quill. She freaked me out. She was why I hated coming here at night.’
Nicholas had vague memories of a bent-backed old woman tucked behind a counter much too large for her, perched like some benevolent old parrot, nodding and sending a smile as he passed. Behind her hung ranks of shirts, pants, skirts and dresses that used to bring to mind a picture that, for a while during primary school, had haunted his dreams: from a book about the Second World War, a photograph of a dozen or so Russians — men, women, children — hanging dead and limp from a huge and leafless tree. A chill went through him and, as it did, another memory returned.
‘You used to hate walking past these shops,’ he said. ‘When you were small. You used to cry.’
Suzette frowned. The line between her brows was just like their mother’s. She nodded to herself. ‘I think if I knew then what I know now. . I’d say Mrs Quill was a witch, too.’
She shrugged her shoulders, as if to shuck off an ill thought, and reached into her pocket. She pulled out a tiny parcel wrapped in tissue paper. ‘Hey. I brought you something.’
Not here. Not while we’re being watched.
‘Lovely. Can it wait till we get home?’
‘Fucking hell, Nicholas,’ said Suzette, cranky. ‘I don’t want Mum to see, okay?’
‘Why not?’
‘Christ! Because she doesn’t understand that kind of stuff! We talked about this.’
Nicholas turned his back to the dark-eyed shop and removed the ribbon, unstuck the tape. Inside was a necklace. It was made of wooden beads and sported a polished brownish-white stone set in silver.
‘The stone is sardonyx,’ explained Suzette. ‘You said you had some headaches, so. .’
‘They stopped.’
‘Yeah. “Thank you” works, too. The wood is elder.’
Nicholas turned to face the streetlight. The stone was an inch across and cut in a square crystal, milky clear with tigerish bands of blood red. The beads were a dark timber, roughly spherical but each showing dozens of facets where they’d been cut by hand with a sharp knife. A woven silver cord held them together. It was, he had to admit, a piece both pretty and oddly masculine.
The feeling of being watched had gone.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
Suzette didn’t answer. She was staring at the front door to Plough amp; Vine Health Foods. She leaned closer and frowned.
‘Look.’
He followed her gaze and felt his stomach take a slow roll.
In the dim light it was just possible to make out an indentation in the wood doorframe. The mark had been painted over perhaps three or four times, and would be invisible in daylight. But in the angled light from the streetlamp, it was fairly clear. A vertical line, and halfway down it, attached to its right, a half-diamond. The mark that had been drawn in blood on the woven head of the dead bird.
Nicholas felt a cold wave of dread rise through him.
‘Let’s go home, Suzie,’ he said.
She was entranced, leaning closer. ‘This is a rune.’
‘Wonderful. Come on. It’s cold.’
‘Wait,’ she said, and reached into her purse. She pulled out a pencil and notepad and copied the figure.
Tell her! Tell her all about the bird and its twig head and the mark. . the mark, what does it mean? But another voice was stronger, calmer. No. Keep her out of it. She has children of her own to watch.
‘Mrs Quill,’ she whispered to herself.
Nicholas put the necklace in his pocket, took his sister’s arm and gently led her out to the street. ‘We’re going. I’m starved.’
The lie hurried him along.
Katharine turned the oven on low and started doling mashed potato onto three plates. How strange. She was out of practice being a mother. Nicholas had left home nearly twenty years ago. Suzette had lived in Sydney for ten. Katharine had grown used to the silence around her.
It wasn’t fair. They left you and you coped. Then they came home and you had to worry all over again. Not fair. Not fair.
And yet now they were under one roof again, the instant they stepped on the street, she was anxious.
Because of the street. Because of Tallong.
‘Nonsense,’ she whispered and reached for the saucepan of meatballs.
Because you opened the door to something evil.
The front door rattled open.
Katharine jumped at the noise, dropping the ladle with a clatter on the tiles. Tomato sauce spattered blood red across the floor.
‘We’re home!’ called Suzette.
‘Miss us?’ asked Nicholas.
Footsteps tromped down the hall.
Katharine quickly wiped up the sauce as her children stepped into the kitchen. Both of them blinked at the red flecks, and both seemed to sag a little with relief when they figured out what it was.
‘You okay?’ asked Suzette.
Katharine smiled thinly and nodded. ‘You forgot the milk, I see.’
After dinner, the three members of the Close family sat on the lounge and watched the news.
No one said anything as the newsreader reported that Elliot Neville Guyatt, a thirty-seven-year-old cleaner recently moved up from Coffs Harbour, had presented himself at the Torwood Police Station and confessed to the abduction and murder of eight-year-old Dylan Oscar Thomas. The overlay pictures showed a slim paperclip of a man looking thoroughly confused as police escorted him from the paddy wagon into the watch house. Guyatt made no effort to hide his face. He walked as if he were caught in a dream.
Nicholas lay on the creaking single bed in his old room. He was awake, listening to the feminine lilt of his sister and mother talking. The wood walls filtered out the detail of words but left a melody that spoke of shared blood.
His old bed. The family together. Childhood again.
The shops remained the same. The woods remained the same.
Children were still dying.
He was suddenly wide awake.
Elliot Guyatt had confessed to killing the Thomas child, and the body was found in the river, miles from Tallong. Winston Teale had confessed to killing Tristram two suburbs distant, hiding his body at the construction site. Nicholas had always thought his memory of seeing Tristram’s drained, dead body floating past a bad dream, a hallucination brought on by sheer terror.
But Suzette said she saw Tristram after he died, running from Carmichael Road into the woods. And Nicholas himself had seen the Thomas boy’s ghost dragged into the trees. The boys didn’t die miles away. The boys died in the woods.
Nicholas rolled to look out the window.
Suzette had probably reached the same conclusion and dismissed it as irrelevant. So the men killed the children in the woods, rather than out in the streets. What did that mean? Probably nothing. Would it bring them back? No.
Yet, it was disturbing. Disturbing and unsurprising that the woods were a killing place. A small piece in a newly begun puzzle that just seemed to fit with a satisfying click.
He would pull Suzette aside in the morning.
For a long while, he stared at the stars. Without knowing when, he slipped into sleep, and dreamed that gnarled, shadowy hands were carrying him away through dark curtains of silk.