Knocking woke him. His eyes flew open, and for the first time since leaving London he woke knowing exactly where he was. Home.
KNOCK KNOCK.
The rapping of heavy knuckles on wood. Someone was at the front door.
The sea grey of pre-dawn stole between the venetian blinds. Nicholas rolled over and checked his watch. Quarter to six. He licked his dry lips and got out of bed. As he pulled on tracksuit pants, he caught sight of himself in the duchess mirror. A pale man with straw-blond hair, bleary eyes and a distracted expression. The look you saw on shoeless men in tube stations and on sparrow-fingered street-corner preachers — a face you’d give wide berth to because it seemed one ill-aimed word away from crazy. So it’s come to that, he thought: avoiding my own eyes.
He pulled on his T-shirt as he lurched like a newly docked sailor down the narrow hallway toward the insistent knocking.
His mother’s door was shut. Once again, hefty snores came from behind it. Suzette’s door was shut too; from behind it rumbled snores a half-octave higher but equally lusty.
‘How about I get it?’ asked Nicholas.
Twin snores answered.
More knocking. The patient raps of a visitor who knows that someone is home.
Nicholas passed the kitchen. The sky outside was low and pregnant with rain. Who knocks at quarter to six in the morning? Only bad news.
He unlatched the front door.
A man stood there. He was perhaps forty, but his face wore fifty years worth of miles. His suit was expensive but rumpled. His tie was neatly knotted and his hair carefully combed. He’d shaved, but small tussocks of whiskers sat out like reeds in a grey swamp. The skin under his eyes looked as thin as old chicken meat; the eyes themselves were blue and overly bright.
Drugs, thought Nicholas. Good drugs that are more than adequately compensating for sleeping pills. This guy is wired.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked carefully.
He’s lost. He’s trying to get home from a huge night and needs a phone, a cab, a twenty.
But the man said nothing. He simply stared at Nicholas, fighting a smile and winning. The look on his face was. . what? Desperate? Starved? Haunted?
Yes. Haunted.
The man finally spoke. ‘Nicholas.’
Nicholas blinked. The voice was distantly familiar. Then the little smile bobbed again on the man’s lips, a brave boat in drowning seas, and years fell away. Nicholas recognised a face he’d never seen as a man. It was a face he literally used to look up to. A Boye boy.
‘Gavin?’
Gavin grinned. It was a skull’s rictus.
‘Wow. Gavin. You look. .’ Nicholas put out his hand. Gavin looked at it as if he’d never seen an outstretched hand before. After an uncomfortable pause, Nicholas let it fall. ‘Right. Um. Listen, do. . will you come in?’
The smile sank away and the years slipped back onto Gavin’s face like the tide returning. He shook his head, and his gaze on Nicholas was unblinking. He was big, easily six-two, and Nicholas suspected he could move fast. So take it easy. .
‘How are you? How are your parents?’
Gavin didn’t answer. Instead, he looked slowly over his left shoulder and then over his right. Above pine trees in a distant park, a dozen or so crows wheeled and dipped in the grey sky like windblown black ash. Gavin’s movements sent a sudden chill flood through Nicholas’s testicles. That’s exactly what Winston Teale did before he chased Tristram and me into the-
‘Woods,’ said Gavin.
Nicholas stopped breathing. Pins and needles pricked the soles of his bare feet and his neck pimpled cold. He could see past Gavin’s shoulders that the street was empty, not another soul in sight.
‘You’re up pretty early.’ Nicholas wanted it to sound casual, but the words came out cracked, his mouth suddenly dry as sand. ‘Do you want to do this another time? Come over for dinner? Suzette’s up visiting.’
Gavin shook his head slowly, once. Nicholas noticed that he carried in one hand something wrapped in a black garbage bag.
‘I was told you were back,’ said Gavin. His voice was soft. Dreamy. He nodded, as if a subtle milestone had been met.
Nicholas found it hard to drag his gaze back up to Gavin’s face; it was like looking at the sun, painful and dangerous. Gavin was unhooked, a boat adrift in rapids and rushing for the falls — but still afloat.
‘Yeah. I’m back. What’s in the bag, Gavin?’ But Nicholas thought he already knew.
Gavin twisted his head, as if he hadn’t heard the question. He was casting back in time. Remembering. He smiled — another death’s-head grin. ‘You know, Mum had tutors for us both. Tris really didn’t need one. Mum only got him one so that I wouldn’t feel stupid.’
‘You’re a smart guy, Gavin. You were never stupid.’
‘Tris. .’ said Gavin fondly, his voice drifting far away. ‘Trissy was the smart one.’
Nicholas watched the big man stand there, his eyes decades away. Quick! whispered the voice in his head. Shut the door, now!
That instant, Gavin’s eyes flicked and locked on Nicholas’s. A task remembered. ‘I have a message,’ he said.
In a motion so fast and fluid that Nicholas could hardly register it, Gavin pulled a gun from the bag. It was a hunting rifle, sawn off so short that the ragged cut sectioned through the front of its walnut stock. The severed barrel was ugly and raw as an eye socket. What a waste of a good Sako, thought Nicholas, and was instantly dismayed by his reaction. Had it been a snake or a spider, his body’s electric impulse would have been to leap back. But he didn’t live in Baghdad or Los Angeles; fear of guns wasn’t wired into his DNA. Instead, he was offended that a fine gun had been butchered. You fucking tosser, he thought. You deserve to die. A feeling like cold jelly filled his stomach.
Gavin cradled the gun easily in his hands so its rough snout pointed at Nicholas’s midriff.
‘A message,’ said Nicholas, his mouth suddenly full of saliva, his empty cold-jelly stomach threatening to erupt. ‘From who?’
Gavin watched him a long moment. Nicholas thought it was like staring into an insect’s eyes — there was nothing human there. Gavin shrugged again and shook his head as if to say, I just can’t remember. With an easy, firm movement he shifted the gun so that its barrel eye stared at Nicholas’s face.
And suddenly the cold jelly was gone from Nicholas’s gut. In its place was a warm, new idea. Here it is. A way out. And I don’t have to do anything. Just stand here a moment longer and it’s over. And from that warmth bloomed another thought: No more ghosts.
He looked up to Gavin’s eyes. They were brimming full, and his patchy cheeks were wet.
‘Tris loved you coming over. Saturdays. Cheese sandwiches. Watching Combat. Remember?’
Nicholas nodded. The two men looked at each other a long moment. A calm statement formed in Nicholas’s mind. He’s going to shoot me now.
‘It’s okay, Gavin.’
Gavin nodded. With a practised hand, he drew back the gun’s bolt and chambered a round. The street was still. No one had an inkling that in a few heartbeats, a man was going to die.
Nicholas suddenly realised his fingers in his pocket had curled around something — wood beads and stone. The necklace Suzette had given him.
Gavin cocked his head. His eyes lost their sharp focus. His lips trembled. When he spoke, his voice was so soft that Nicholas wasn’t sure he heard right.
‘The message is: He touched the bird. But it should have been you.’
Gavin put the sawn barrel under his own jaw and pulled the trigger. The CRACK was sudden and as visceral as a lightning strike. Nicholas jumped.
The crows wheeling in the sky galvanised and took flight. Gavin was still standing. His lower jaw was mostly gone. He shook his head stupidly and the flaps of skin and white bone shook like a chicken’s wattle. He shrugged, and his cheeks lifted the broken flesh — a macabre, embarrassed smile at his error. He swiftly reloaded, put the gun deep under his chin.
‘Gavin-’
CRACK. This time, the top of his head seemed to levitate slightly. He crumpled to the ground like a dressing gown that had missed its hook. The gun clattered on the stoop.
In the next street over, a dog began barking. To the south, the grey sky became a curtain of slate where rain was falling.
Nicholas watched Gavin’s body for a moment, then let himself fold to sit on the front step. A packet of John Player Specials poked out of the dead man’s jacket pocket. Nicholas leaned forward and pulled it out. Then he fished in the pocket again, found a lighter.
‘Nicholas?!’
Two pairs of bare feet rushed down the hall towards him. Nicholas lit a cigarette. ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I got the door.’
‘Oh my goodness. .’ whispered Katharine.
‘Who is it?’ asked Suzette. Her face was as white as paper.
‘Gavin Boye.’ He sucked in lungfuls of smoke. His hands shook. ‘He was a smoker.’
‘Oh my goodness.’
Nicholas fought the urge to cough. He could feel his sister and mother standing, staring. ‘Maybe phone someone?’ he suggested.
‘I’ll go,’ whispered Suzette.
Heads were poking out of the doors and windows of neighbouring houses. Nicholas waved cheerlessly to them. Then he felt something on his lip and wiped it off. The gobbet was hard white and soft pink. He retched dryly between his knees.
‘I’ll get a cloth,’ Katharine said thinly, and walked away on unsteady legs.
As Nicholas wiped the ropy spittle away, his eyes were drawn to the truncated rifle that lay neatly beside Gavin’s body. Something was carved into the stock. The gouges in the walnut were fresh, pale against its darker burnished surface. The figure was a rough oval. From it sprouted two jagged lines like antlers. Within the oval was a symbol: a vertical slash with a half-diamond arrowhead on one side.
Nicholas flipped the rifle over so Suzette wouldn’t see it.
By ten o’clock, Nicholas had counted eleven police officers step through the front gate, and Katharine Close had made tea for all of them. Four had arrived — lights and sirens — in answer to Suzette’s telephone call, then another two who left soon after discovering the claim had already been staked, then the police photographer accompanied by the scientific officer who phoned an armoury specialist. Finally, two plain-clothes officers introduced themselves, a man and a woman. Nicholas instantly forgot the man’s name, but the woman’s was Waller, and he thought she would look quite pretty had her face not been saddled with a heavy scowl. By the time these last two arrived, Nicholas had told the story of Gavin’s unexpected arrival and even more unexpected departure five times. He told it yet again to the detectives.
All through the recounting, the large male detective took notes and Detective Waller watched Nicholas and scowled. As usual, and without questioning himself, he omitted the bulk of the conversation he’d had with Gavin, restricting it to Gavin saying that he’d heard Nicholas was back, and that he felt it should have been Nicholas, not Tristram, who died in 1982.
‘Died?’ asked the male detective.
‘Murdered,’ answered Nicholas. ‘Like the Thomas boy. You guys should keep records. They’re quite handy-’
‘You were involved in a homicide when you were a child?’
‘I nearly was the homicide when I was a child,’ said Nicholas.
He touched the bird, but it should have been you.
He was awfully tired. Shock, he knew, could weary a person, but this was just fucking tedious.
‘I hadn’t seen Gavin in more than twenty years. I don’t know how he knew I was back, but it’s not commercial in confidence. I’m sure he was resentful that Teale murdered his brother instead of me. And yes, these are his smokes.’
Nicholas lit another one, and offered the open pack to the detectives. They refused, and he saw them exchange a glance.
Katharine arrived quietly at the lounge room doorway with a refreshed tray of tea and cups, placed it, and just as silently retreated. Nicholas just wanted to sleep.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘You guys. .’
‘Is that it?’ asked the male detective.
‘I really fucking wouldn’t mind if it was.’
He rubbed at his stubbled chin and felt a lump come away. It was a piece of pinkish bone the size of a match head. He felt his tongue sink back in his throat. He just wanted to shower and get to bed.
‘Okay.’ The male detective folded his notebook, then looked again into Nicholas’s face. ‘Why do you think he didn’t shoot you?’
‘Well,’ said Nicholas, ‘it took him two shots to hit his own brain. Maybe he was afraid he’d miss.’
‘What sort of a relationship did you have with him?’
Nicholas sank his head in his hands. ‘What relationship?! Christ, I thought we were done!’
‘What sort of a relationship did you have with Gavin Boye as children?’
Nicholas smoked, and shook his head. ‘He was my best friend’s older brother.’
‘Were you lovers?’ asked the female detective.
Nicholas felt his eyebrows rise. He was almost delighted to be surprised. ‘No. I lost my virginity at nineteen to a girl named Pauline McCleary who could probably have spent those three minutes much more productively. I’ve never had nor wanted to have sex with a male of any age, although if I was going to turn I think that Sean Connery has a nice voice but Robbie Williams looks like a harder fuck.’
Her scowl remained fixed on Nicholas, unshiftable as desert sandstone.
‘We’re done.’ The male detective stood. ‘Thank you, Mr Close. You’ve had a very disturbing morning and I strongly suggest you consider making an appointment with a qualified counsellor. We can recommend one if you like. Thank you for the tea, Mrs Close,’ he called into the kitchen. Nicholas watched him reach into his pocket and switch off the tiny digital recorder there.
He followed them to the front door, where the female detective hesitated. ‘Do you recognise the mark on the gun stock?’ she asked.
Nicholas met her eyes. ‘What mark?’ Lying, he realised, was easy when you just didn’t care.
The male detective nodded, and the pair left.
Nicholas helped mop the blood off the front steps before he finally took his shower, then he went to bed and fell into a sleep as deep and empty as the night sky.
Suzette popped another two ibuprofen from their foil card, put them in her mouth and concentrated on swallowing them. She had the unpleasant sensation of the hard pills ticking at her molars like loose teeth, and into her mind jumped the horrible flash of Gavin Boye folded on the front stoop, his eyes partly open and seeming to stare at the potted philadelphus, his own shattered teeth grinning from his red and ruined slash of a mouth. Her head throbbed. For the hundredth time she wished she were at home and could grab some mugwort from her herb garden. Finally, the pills went down.
When he woke, his room was dark. Thunder rolled grimly outside, stabbed by flashes of lightning. He was shaking and so cold that his muscles had spasmed tight, making it difficult to sit up. As soon as he did, a swell of nausea rode up to the back of his throat. He put his feet over the side of the bed and reached with jittering fingers for his watch. It was nearly two in the morning.
He touched the bird. But it should have been you.
Something had wanted him dead a long time ago. And now that something knew he was back. It had sent Gavin. And it wants me to know that it knows.
Why didn’t Gavin shoot him?
Because he wasn’t supposed to.
Nicholas kept his eyes open, because whenever he closed them he saw the top of Gavin’s scalp rising on its little font of red and grey. You’re one small step from the loony bin, my friend. Not content with seeing reruns of suicides — you need premieres now?
He felt hungover, foggy.
What possessed Gavin to do that?
The words hovered in his mind like smoke in a closed room. What possessed him?
Someone had left a glass of water on the bedside table. Nicholas reached for it. His hand quaked with every beat of his heart, making tiny, circular ripples.
What possessed Gavin? Was it the same thing that had possessed Elliot Guyatt to march into Torwood cop shop and admit he killed the Thomas boy? The same thing that had possessed Winston Teale to confess to Tristram’s murder?
Teale did murder Tristram!
Did he? Teale certainly chased us into the woods. .
Exactly!
Only. . Teale was built like a bull. He couldn’t have fitted through the tunnels under the water pipe.
Nicholas sat upright, suddenly wide awake.
That’s right. Not too sharp, are you? Twenty-five years you’ve had to figure that out. Maybe Teale was just the sheepdog. Maybe Teale didn’t kill Tristram.
‘Then who did?’ he whispered.
The same person that told Gavin to kill himself. The same person that made a talisman from a dead bird.
Nicholas put his feet over the bed edge. He had to talk about this, lance it before it swelled in his head like a sac of spoiled blood and poisoned him. He had to tell Suzette. He stood and struggled into his hoodie with shaking arms.
The hall was dark. Suzette’s door was open. Her bed was unmade.
Nicholas frowned and padded to his mother’s door. No snores came from inside.
‘Mum?’
Nothing. He put his hand on the doorknob, but let it rest there. He could feel her wakefulness on the other side of the door. A dull slosh of anger rolled inside him, which he swallowed down.
Can you blame her, weirdo? You’re an albatross.
Nicholas realised he was still shaking. His legs were weak and vibrated like cello strings. He shuffled to the kitchen and made tea, then stumped to the lounge room.
Suzette was curled asleep on the sofa, her face a deathly grey in the television’s glow. The set’s volume was so low it was no wonder he hadn’t heard it.
He sat beside her and watched as he sipped his tea. After two infomercials (one for a company that implied it would loan you cash even if you’d just broken out of prison and held schoolchildren hostage, and another showing pretty women with loose morals who could not possibly make it through the night without his phone call), a news update. Elliot Guyatt, remanded in custody and due to face court next week charged with the murder of local seven year old Dylan Thomas, had been found dead in his remand cell, having apparently suffered a brain aneurysm. A coroner’s report was pending. Today, the funeral service for Dylan Thomas had been held at St John’s Anglican Cathedral, with his schoolmates forming a guard of honour. .
Nicholas dropped the remote three times before he could switch off the set.
It took over an hour to fall asleep.
But once asleep, he dreamed.
He was Tristram. Sweat poured down his temples, his armpits, his crotch. He was on his good hand and knees, pushing through a dark, cobwebbed tunnel. With every inch forward, spider webs cloaked his face, clogged his nostrils, coated his lips. Tiny legs spindled on his arms, his neck, his lips and eyelids. He wanted to scream but couldn’t, because spiders would get in his mouth. The tunnel seemed never to end, and the webs got thicker, and the numbers of spiders on his legs, his arms, crawling down his shirt, burrowing into his ears, became so great they weighed him down. Soon, the webs over his eyes as were thick as a shroud; they shut out the light and cloyed his limbs so he could not move. He screamed now, but the spider silk was wrapped tight about his jaw and he couldn’t open his mouth. He struggled, but the sticky silk held him tight. And the spiders — thousands of spiders — stopped crawling and started to feed.