The Darkening (27 page)

But what was it?

For a silent room, the library was annoyingly noisy: rustling paper, the phlegmy clearing of throats, the
sotto voce
titter of chatting librarians.

Nicholas shut his eyes and tried to silence his thoughts, ignored his racing heart, emptying a space for the memory.
What was the boat’s name?
It had been written in black, cracked and faded, barely visible on the grey, splitting timber. One word, it was one word. Started with ‘W’ . . .

Nicholas opened his eyes.

He typed ‘Wynard’, then ‘Boat’.
Search.

He held his breath.

‘Search results: 1 hits’.

He clicked the link.

The caption of the photograph read: ‘Former ferry boat
Wynard
docked at private jetty, Sherwood, 1891’.

There she was. The sepia photograph was of the same boat he’d seen resplendent in fresh paint on a mirage pond, then decrepit and collapsed in a choked gully.

Here’s proof I’m not crazy.

Nicholas sipped his water as his heart thudded. What did this all mean? He closed his eyes and concentrated, trying to get all the images he’d seen into some order in his mind.

The woods. Many planned subdivisions. Many scheduled auctions. Yet none had transpired; the woods had remained undeveloped and untouched. Why? Had the auctioneers been unable to sell them?

He opened his eyes and typed ‘Auctioneer, Thorneton’.
Search.

Three thumbnails: that same flyer for the Arnold Estate subdivision; a photo of a rakish, smiling man in a boater hat accompanied by a heavyset woman in a bustle that was an explosion of tulle; an old photo of the stone Anglican church where Gavin’s funeral service was held.

Nicholas felt a flutter of fear. But why should that be surprising? The church had been the centre of Tallong for more than a century. He clicked to enlarge the image.

The caption read: ‘Funeral service for P. Thorneton, Auctioneer. 1901’. The photograph showed undertakers in top hats with black ribbons sitting atop a horse-drawn hearse. Mourners grim as crows were grouped around the dark stone church. Pritam’s Anglican church. The church of the Green Man. The building, only decades old then, looked centuries old, as grim and severe as something that had forced its way bitterly up through hard earth.

Nicholas typed another search: ‘Surveyor, Raff, Patterson’. He bit his lip, then typed ‘Funeral’.

He sipped water while the search bar filled.

‘Search results: 2 hits’.

The first photograph was unrelated - it showed the tombstone of a Glynnis Patterson from Toowoomba. But the second made Nicholas’s breath hiss in through clenched teeth. ‘Funeral Service for Elliot Raff, Surveyor, 1881, Henry Mohoupt, Undertaker’. The image was cracked, making the dull grey sky look fatally wounded. A crowd of mourners beside a horse-drawn hearse outside Pritam’s church. The trees were shorter and the dresses were fuller, but otherwise the photograph was almost identical to the one taken twenty years later.

Nicholas wrote a note to himself: ‘Church?’

He sat back and rubbed his eyes. It was midday. The surrounding carrels were full. He looked outside. The river ran alongside the library, swollen and brown. Its opposite bank was laced tight with an expressway that ducked and weaved in and out of itself, feeding into a business district studded thickly with skyscrapers and office buildings. Bruise-blue clouds loitered discontentedly at the horizon.

Nicholas stretched his neck, trying to get all the new facts straight in his head. Auctioneers plan to sell the woods. Each dies the same year they try to sell them. Surveyors plan to divide the woods. Each dies the very year he plans to slice up the woods.

He turned back to the monitor and typed ‘Water pipe, construction’.

‘Search results: 21 hits’.

It took him ten minutes to reach the last, telling image. The caption didn’t surprise him: ‘August 3, 1928. Workers boycott construction of water pipeline through western suburbs following multiple fatalities’. The photograph showed a bullock team and an empty dray beside dislocated sections of three-metre-high pipe. Behind the dour men and lumpish oxen, the woods glowered. He skipped to the end of the text accompanying the photograph and read the words: ‘. . . the unpopular pipeline was diverted through a neighbouring suburb’.

He reached into his satchel and pulled out Gavin’s cigarettes, slipped one into his mouth. A woman opposite levelled a scornful stare at him. The middle-aged man sitting next to him sent him a thundery look, then got up and walked away. Nicholas jiggled the cigarette in his mouth; the dry whisper of the filter on his lips was comforting. The woods had been unassailable. Auctioneers, subdividers, council pipes . . . something wanted no one in those woods. But the church . . . why did the church keep cropping up?

He typed ‘Anglican church’, then hesitated. What had he seen written on the foundation stone? He closed his eyes and concentrated. Standing outside the cold, mossy church in the rain, peering over to the marble stone, reading the lead letters . . . ‘Dedicated to the Glory of God, 1888’. He typed the year.
Search
.

‘1 hits’. He clicked the link.

He stared. His good mood vanished as suddenly as if a door had opened and an arctic night world of cold had sucked away all warmth.

‘The Right Reverend Nathaniel de Witt stands beside Mrs Eleanor Bretherton who lays foundation stone for Tallong Anglican Church, 1888’. While the Reverend de Witt smiled, Bretherton looked at the camera with undisguised contempt. In one gloved hand, she held a guide rope attached to the heavy stone that was suspended by an overhead crane outside the frame. But it wasn’t her expression that held Nicholas’s stare. It was that he recognised her.

Eleanor Bretherton looked exactly like the old seamstress from Jay Jay’s haberdashery that he remembered from his childhood. The old woman who’d freaked out Suzette. Mrs Quill.

That’s impossible
, he thought.
How could Mrs Quill appear identical nearly a century later? Bretherton must be her grandmother, or great-aunt or something.
But those explanations rang hollow. Certainly, Nicholas was trusting memories twenty years old, but the similarity between Bretherton and Quill was an uncanny coincidence.

Only the voice in his head said it was no coincidence.

He typed ‘Quill, Haberdasher’.
Search
.

‘Search Results: 0 hits’.

He thought a moment, then typed ‘Myrtle Street’, hesitated, then, ‘shop’.
Search
.

His jaw tightened as he watched the search bar fill. ‘1 hits’.

As he reached for the mouse, he saw his fingers were vibrating. He was shaking. He moved the cursor over the link.
Click.

An old image appeared. ‘Sedgely Confectionery shop, Myrtle Street, c. 1905’. A solitary, timber-clad shop with a deep awning sat alone on the corner of unpaved Myrtle Street. Words painted in its windows proclaimed ‘Boiled sweets’, ‘Choicest Fruits of the Season’ and ‘Teas, Light Refreshments and Ices’. Nicholas peered. It was in the same place where the group of shops stood today - the convenience store, Rowena’s health food store, the computer repairer. In front of the confectionery store stood a woman in a white dress. She must have turned away from the camera as the photograph was taken because her head and face were smoky and blurred. The caption read: ‘Possibly proprietress Victoria Sedgely’.

Nicholas’s mouth went dry as a crypt.

The woman in the photograph held in her arms a small, white terrier.

Katharine swore as the spinning clay collapsed in on itself and what was to have been a tureen folded into a damp, malformed thing that brought suddenly to mind a birthing film a nurse had shown her when she was pregnant with Nicholas - the folded, exhausted clay lips looked horribly like that film’s mother’s bloody vulva. Katharine ground the spinning wheel to a halt with the heel of her hand, scooped the aborted pot off and pounded it into a ball that she slapped onto the block of clay at her feet.

Why am I angry?
she asked herself. Normally, a few hours in her under-house studio was distracting enough to wick away any vexed thoughts. Not today. She switched off the wheel with her toe. In the new quiet she could hear the steady patter of rain on the bushes outside the window. The day was dark. She rose and went to the tubs to wash the already drying patina of pale clay from her hands.

Her anger confused her. She’d returned from seeing poor Pam Ferguson feeling detached from herself, like those patients one reads about who observe themselves from the high corners of operating rooms while undergoing surgery.
Quill
. Katharine hadn’t thought about the woman in twenty years, and then, suddenly, she couldn’t get the sight of the wizened old thing out of her mind.

Pamela’s words had disturbed her, and she’d slept poorly last night. Stuff and nonsense, she’d told herself while she lay in bed, stiff as a corpse, fruitlessly willing sleep to come. Stuff and nonsense; Pamela was a superstitious old Scot. So what if Katharine had heard that Quill moved to Ballina but Pamela Ferguson thought she moved to Hobart? Christ, the old seamstress must have been dead at least fifteen years, what did it matter? What had she called her? White woman of the hills? Osteoarthritic woman of the overlocker, more like it. Stuff and nonsense.

What would Don have said?

Katharine shut off the tap with an irritated twist. What would Don have said?
‘Can you make that a double, love?’
she thought bitterly.

Ah. But the drinking came afterwards. What did he say about Quill before all that?

Katharine dried her hands. She didn’t need to think about that. Don was long dead; dead, in a way, even before he died. Quill was long gone, too. Life was for the living.

‘Stuff and nonsense,’ she repeated to herself, and reached to switch off the light. The warm yellow of the tungsten bulb clicked off, leaving the room a dull aquarium slate; light swimming in through the window fell on the distorted lump of clay under clear plastic. It looked horribly like a broken head, and in Katharine’s mind appeared a vivid memory of Gavin Boye’s shattered face as a white plastic bag was zipped up around him. Yes, life was for the living, but the living were dying again. She closed the door and hurried upstairs.

The house was quiet. Even a week ago, returning to this silence would have been welcoming, a cocooning balm for her to luxuriate in, a private hush in which she could curl up, read a book, doodle designs on a sketchpad, stare idly out the window at the hibiscus . . . But today, the silence was eerie. The furtive whisper of the rain on the roof made it even more unnerving.

‘Suzette?’ she called. For a moment, she had the terrible thrill that her daughter was down at Myrtle Street with Pamela Ferguson and something bad was about to happen. Then she remembered Suzette was a grown woman now. She was in no danger.

‘In here, Mum!’ Suzette’s voice came from her old bedroom up the hall.

Katharine walked up and looked through the doorway. Suzette was leaning over an open suitcase that was half-packed. It was a sign of how effectively the Close women had been avoiding one another; Katharine had no idea her daughter was returning to Sydney today.

‘Almost done?’ she asked lightly.

‘Almost,’ agreed Suzette. ‘I’ll have to ring a cab. Black and White or Yellow?’

‘Stork or Flora?’ replied Katharine. ‘They’re much of a muchness.’

Suzette nodded; she’d figured as much.

‘Your brother all right?’ asked Katharine.

‘I think so. A bit . . .’ Suzette stopped folding clothes and thought for a moment. ‘I don’t think it’s good for him here. I’ll go home, and maybe talk him into moving down.’ She fixed Katharine with a look. ‘Then I’ll get you down.’

‘I’d have to sell both kidneys to afford to live in Sydney, and then where would I be?’

Suzette shrugged. ‘I could help.’

Katharine bristled, and fought back the stubborn urge to bite. ‘Thank you, love, but I own this place and it’s fine.’

Suzette smiled thinly, as if hearing a safe bet won.

‘Listen,’ began Katharine. ‘The other morning, over breakfast . . .’

‘It was fine, Mum, I just don’t like porridge—’

‘No, no. You asked me about . . . about Mrs Quill.’

Katharine saw her daughter’s hands freeze for a moment in midair, before they continued their busy packing.

‘Yep,’ agreed Suzette.

‘Why?’ asked Katharine, still trying to keep her voice as airy as possible. ‘What made you think about her?’

Suzette cocked her head. ‘I thought you couldn’t remember her?’

Katharine shrugged. ‘Since you mentioned her . . . bits and bobs. Little old thing. Pleasant enough. Hardly saw her outside her shop. I don’t know where she lived, but it couldn’t have been far.’

Suzette was looking at her hard. ‘What makes you think that?’

Katharine thought. What
did
make her think that?

‘I never saw her drive. And on the odd evening I saw her walking with her silly little dog—’