The Darkening (49 page)

‘A hatch.’

He pressed against the curved rectangle. A slight give inward. He pressed harder and a loud ‘clack’ echoed within the pipe. When he released his pressure, the steel hatchway opened outward on oiled hinges.

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Catch me.’

Before Nicholas could argue, she’d slid down the side of the pipe into his arms. She wriggled to the ground and pulled the hatch wide, poking her head inside.

‘Wow,’ she repeated, and the word echoed away into pitch darkness: wow-wow-wowwww . . . She climbed up inside the pipe. ‘Did you bring a torch-orch-orch . . . ?’

‘No. But . . .’ He reached into his duffel bag and pulled out one of the Zippo knock-offs. ‘This will do.’

‘Here,’ said Hannah, ‘you hold that and give me the gun.’

Nicholas pulled her out of the hatch.

‘I’ll keep the lighter and the gun. You follow me.’

It was easy to decide which way to go inside the pipe. One direction was thick with dust and littered with insect carcasses. The other was almost spotlessly clean.

By the flickering flame of the lighter, they walked through the darkness, saying nothing, listening to their footfalls dance to and fro like ripples in some subterranean lake. The barrel of the Miroku occasionally ticked off the curved metal walls, the sharp sound chased away by a long, lonely echo.

‘How will we know when to get out?’ whispered Hannah.

‘We’ll know,’ replied Nicholas.

And they did.

After what felt like hours, but was less than three minutes, two faint slits of light hovered in the darkness. As they got closer, it was clear they were the top and bottom cracks of another hatchway. When they reached it, light trickled in all four sides of the rectangle. Inside was welded a grab handle. Nicholas wondered what poor sucker Quill had seduced into doing this steelwork and what rotten fate had befallen him.

He looked around at Hannah. ‘Not too late to go back.’

She shook her head.

He nodded, extinguished the lighter, hefted his gun and pushed open the hatch.

At their feet was a wider, clearer path through the trees. Nicholas recognised it as the track he’d found the day he ate those strawberries. Clearly, Quill wasn’t concerned about hiding her presence on this side of the pipe.

He turned and helped Hannah out of the hatch.

‘Okay?’

She nodded.

He checked his watch. It was nearly four. There was less than an hour and a half of daylight left.

‘Then let’s go.’

34

A
chill wind blew hard as the sun inched closer to the hills in the west. It sucked away moisture, leaving her skin dry and her eyes raw.

Katharine Close’s arms were so tired that they burned, yet she kept hacking at the soil of her garden bed as if it were a beast that needed violent subduing. What else was there to do? Her hands were blistered inside the gardening gloves. She had spent the last few hours digging, pulling weeds, clipping stems, trying not to think.

But she did think.

Maybe it was time to go. Maybe enough years had passed that she could admit she’d won. She’d laughed at Don, to his face and to his memory, waving a nasty blowtorch over the hidden things he’d believed. What room was there for bone-pointing and curses and witchery for children born in the time of rocket ships and global warming? How could lines on stone or wood have potency when real power lines crisscrossed the skies on poles, breathing useful life into computers and LCD televisions? What fear was there of spells when corpses, hands bound and heads shot, were being pulled daily from the Tigris?

At nights, though, Katharine shivered. She remembered how she’d marched, fair-faced, into Mrs Quill’s store, handed the old woman her children’s clothes and blessed her with kind words and smiles. She’d shouted down that impotent voice inside her that agreed with Don. What else was a modern, single mother to do? Curl away and make the sign of the evil eye each time the old crone passed?

And yet that’s exactly what she did do. She remembered a cold winter’s night, as empty and still as the inside of a bell jar. Suzette and Nicholas tiny and asleep in their beds, and Don six years in the grave. She had been ready to go to bed herself when she heard a soft
clip clip
of footsteps on the street. She had crept in darkness to the front room and peered between the venetian blinds. Looking up at the house was the dot of the old woman, her face a black shadow. And yet Katharine had imagined her eyes, bright and sparkling, dancing and ravening, looking back. Hungrily. As if knowing there were two ripe young children within. In the pragmatic daylight of the next morning, Katharine had ridiculed herself for her fears - the old dressmaker was perhaps a little senile and lost, or just wanted some friendly company but hadn’t the courage to knock on the door.

But two days later, Tristram Boye was pulled dead from under a woodpile two suburbs away, his little throat cut wide to the world.

Katharine put down her trowel. Maybe it was time to admit not that she’d won, but that she’d lost. She should sell this empty house. Listen to her daughter and buy an apartment near her.

A flicker of white jigged in the corner of her eye.

She turned, wincing at the tight pain in her punished neck and shoulders. A small white terrier trotted cheerily along the path at the side of the house. It sparked a memory, something she and Suzette had discussed just a few days ago. Hadn’t Quill owned a little white dog?

‘Shoo! Go home, you naughty . . .’

The words died in her mouth.

The dog stopped at her call. It turned and regarded her with black pebble eyes.

Katharine had grown up on a property and animals had been an everyday part of her childhood, but only once before had she seen a creature regard her with this cold contempt. It had been spring, and a nesting magpie had begun swooping on anyone who neared her tree beside the utility shed. It was the weekend, and Katharine had been helping her father make a new chook house. He was working on the coop roof, and asked young Katharine to go to the tool shed and fetch tinsnips. She had stridden to the shed, and in her last few steps heard the dry swoop of wings on air. She put up her hands just as a flash of black and white feathers rocketed past her, blowing her fine hair around her ears. Fired by her suddenly tripping heart, she sprinted through the open door into the black, cave-like shed. Deep in the cool dark, she turned. Through the doorway she watched the bird land in the square of squintingly bright sunlight. The magpie hopped to the edge of the doorframe, and stopped, peering into the darkness of the shed. Its eyes were black as stones, shiny and cold. They found her. The bird watched her, calculating whether or not to attack. And young Katharine knew that if it did, it would attack without reservation, biting and spearing with every cell in its body focused on the task of hurting her. The bird held her captive in the shed until her father found her an hour later, tears rolling down her cheeks.

The little white dog watched Katharine now with the same look of icy appraisal, its round coal eyes scrutinising her, deciding whether or not to attack.

Katharine realised her skin felt frozen hard. She was terrified. Terrified by a small dog that stared at her in a way no dog had. Then a realisation struck her: its ribcage hadn’t moved. It wasn’t breathing.

Because it’s not a dog
, said a voice in her head.

Then the creature turned and trotted up the stairs to the back door. Katharine watched it rise with eerie fluidity to its hind legs, turn one paw, hook and swing open the screen door, and slip inside the house.

‘Laine!’

She climbed to her feet, ignoring the jagged pains in her hips and back, and ran.

35

T
he
Wynard
was wretched. The boat lay on her side like the mummified body of a long-dead elephant, her grey hull beginning to cave and collapse as moisture and unseen insects completed their rotting work; her timbers were faded and bleached like cow bones. Far overhead, wind roared like fire in the treetops, an invisible wave endlessly crashing.

Nicholas shifted the shotgun to one hand and checked his watch. It was nearly four. The winter sun remained hidden by a million leaves, but he could feel its distant warmth vanishing from the day with greedy speed. The air here in the deep green shadows was frigid and still. Hannah shivered beside him.

‘Which way?’ she asked.

He looked around the hunching curtains of green and black. At the boat, the track had petered out.

‘I don’t remember.’

The last time he’d left here, he’d been carried unconscious on eight thousand spindle legs, Garnock riding on his chest like a stygian cavalier.

The ground ahead, thick with vine and root and trunk, seemed to rise. The air that way had a slightly sour tang. Nicholas reasoned that the river couldn’t be far away, its salty mud banks thick with mangroves and rancid with the droppings of flying foxes. He nodded that direction, and he and Hannah started again uphill.

As they crawled between the ancient trees, picking their way through the dense shadows over mossy flood-felled trunks and under incestuous, noose-like vines, Nicholas told Hannah everything he knew about Rowena Quill. About the woman’s arrival a century and a half ago. Her pseudonyms. Her faces, hiding carefully behind spinster smiles in the cool dark shops on Myrtle Street. Her killings. Her spiders.

When he’d finished, Hannah was silent for a moment.

‘She must be very lonely,’ she said.

Nicholas looked at her. She shrugged.

‘Maybe that’s why she’s so mean,’ she continued. ‘Because she’s sad. Everyone she loved is dead and left behind.’

Nicholas stopped. The trees around them now were more shadow than substance. Even Hannah’s face was a grey mask, as featureless as the sandy bottom of a deep pond.

‘I think we have to turn back.’

Hannah blinked. ‘We can’t. If we don’t get her today . . .’ Her voice trailed off with a shudder.

Nicholas nodded.

‘Hannah . . . ?’ A voice as thin as smoke wended from the dark belt of trees up ahead. Nicholas watched Hannah’s eyes widen and her face tighten like a fist. His own heart began to gallop.

‘Haaaannahhh?’ A girl’s voice. A pained voice.

Hannah’s eyes darted between the woods and Nicholas.

‘It’s Miriam,’ she whispered.

Nicholas saw goose bumps on his arm. He shook his head. ‘It’s not.’

‘It is! She’s not dead! They were wrong!’

She started forward. Nicholas snatched her arm and wheeled her round. He grabbed her chin and made her focus her wild eyes on him.

‘It’s not your sister, Hannah. Think about it.’

Hannah blinked. She nodded.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Stay here.’

He looked around to orientate himself, then cocked the shotgun and stepped into the deeper gloom.

‘Haaannnahhh? Help me, Hannaaaahhh!’

The voice was a keening tapestry of pain and sorrow. It made Nicholas’s skin crawl. What was it doing to Hannah?

He moved as quickly as he could, but the trees were wide and old and huddled tight as conspirators. The spaces between them were filled with even older stumps that rose from the rustling ground like the broken teeth of titans. It was growing so dark. Nicholas suddenly realised what a stupid thing he’d done. He’d left Hannah alone.

‘Hannah?’ The voice was no longer scared; it was relieved and cheerful. A shadow shifted between the gloomy trees ahead of Nicholas.

‘Miriam?’ he asked, carefully swinging the gun barrel up towards the movement.

‘Hannah!’ replied the voice delightedly. And suddenly the shadow jolted forward.

It was a spider at least the size of Garnock, a widow with gloss black and hairless legs, each as long and thick as a cricket stump. They moved a shelled body as big as a water-filled black balloon. Yet the spider jumped from tree to tree with amazing speed; one moment swaying like a ready boxer, the next leaping and landing with eerie silence, so fast that Nicholas barely had time to thumb the hammer back.

‘HHHaaaaaa!’

The voice changed from human to something utterly alien as the spider’s fangs lifted and it pounced. Nicholas pulled the trigger. The blast was loud but was squashed instantly by the disapproving trees. The spider jerked, but its momentum carried it right at him - he scrambled sideways and the spider hit the tree behind him with the wet crack of a giant egg smashing. It slid lifeless to the dark leaves, its long finger-bone legs quivering in death palsies.

Nicholas turned and ran.

‘Hannah!’

He sprinted downhill, dodging between trunks and jumping over spiny branches, sliding and falling and rising and running. Ahead, he heard Hannah scream in terror.

‘Hold on, Hannah!’

He thumbed back the shotgun’s other hammer and jumped over the last log into the clearing.

Hannah stood shaking, eyes locked on something hidden from Nicholas’s sight by a wide trunk.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

She pointed, and he stepped closer to see what she faced.

He felt his own legs turn light as dust.