The Darkening (13 page)

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 & 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 & 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.