The Dead Path (26 page)

Pritam set his jaw and unlocked the internal door that led into the church proper. He flicked a switch and the long, vaulting room flickered unhappily into half-light. He fought the need to glance overhead and check that the Green Man wasn’t staring back at him through dark, unblinking eyes. Instead, he kept his gaze level and sat in the foremost pew in front of the image of Christ crucified before a strangely lush, tree-studded backdrop, bowed his head, and prayed for the souls of lost children. Without knowing when, he slipped from prayer into fitful dreaming.

He was on Calvary, but the hill was devoid of crosses and peppered instead with incongruous trees. One was cleaved through the trunk. He was caught in the crush of it, broken and dying. Eleanor Bretherton was directing a regretful John Hird to saw off Pritam’s feet, hands, head. “It’s for Mother Kali, you loafing black tit,” said Hird cheerfully. No one heard Pritam cry out in his sleep, his whimpers echoing down the nave to be quashed by the dispassionate rumble of rain.

  I
n his tiny flat, Nicholas sat on his bed staring out the rain-smeared window down Bymar Street at the yawning darkness at the end that was the woods, imagining a million spiders marching silently through the deluge.

Chapter
21
   

  H
annah Gerlic was dreaming of wings.

In the dream, she was trapped in a cage—a strange, spherical cage made of hard twisted wood, or maybe of bone. She was screaming, but no human noise came out of her mouth. Instead, the sound from her throat was the panicked batting of wings, of terrified birds flapping madly to escape. But the
wap-wap
cry was drowned by the wretched scratchings of a hundred real birds scrambling around her, all squawking and beating, trying to escape the cage. Their claws scratched her neck and face and hands; their beaks drove into the soft flesh of her ears, her thighs, her eyelids; their wings beat her. She screamed and cowered and tugged fruitlessly at the wood-or-bone cage. Suddenly, the beating and scratching and spearing ceased. The birds fell still, electric and listening, claws hooked onto the cage or into Hannah’s flesh or hair. Another noise. A tick-tick. A crackling. What was it? It sounded like heating metal, or rain on tin, or …

Suddenly, she screamed and the birds took wild wing.

Hannah’s eyes flew open.

She was instantly wide awake, and the dream of wings and bones disappeared like a stone dropped in deep water … all except the noise. The tick-tick sound. A gentle tapping. Testing.

She was in her bed, and her room was dark. Her Hannah Montana alarm clock said it was 2:13 a.m. (the letters stood for
ante meridiem).
It was raining outside; raining hard. And yet, over the rain, she heard the tick-tick noise. The scratching, tapping, testing sound. She rolled over and looked at the window.

Her stomach did a roller-coaster lurch.

There were spiders on the sill. Hundreds of spiders. Their stiff, black bristles glistening with rain. Each was at least the size of Hannah’s hand. They were piled on one another, five or six deep, and they were scratching at the glass and poking their legs into the thin gaps around the frame. Hundreds of bristled black legs were poking, prodding, scratching, trying to get in.

Hannah’s window was what Mum called double-hung sashes and what Dad called a pain in the arse to paint: two wooden-framed windows, one inside and below the other; the top was fixed, but the bottom one could lift vertically and be held open by hinged supports in the frame. The windows locked with a swiveling brass catch.

The catch was almost undone.

The swivel was barely caught on its stay plate. Just a tap would loosen it and the window would be free to rise. As Hannah watched, a spider pressed against the glass and slipped one long, spiny and graceful leg up between the window frames and patted the catch with its hooked foot.

Without thinking, she leapt from the bed and slammed the catch hard shut, slicing off the spider’s leg. Her stomach threatened to gush itself empty over the carpet as she stumbled back to her bed. She opened her mouth to shriek.

But before she could, her eyes widened and the scream died in her dry throat.

Something was crawling over the scuttling mass of spiders, shoving them out of its way. It was itself a spider, but a size Hannah thought impossible. It was large as a cat. It shuffled aside its tiny cousins to crouch on the sill. Its ugly nest of unblinking eyes—like enormous drops of glistening black oil sitting in a dense carpet of bristles—seemed to fix on Hannah. The creature’s legs were as thick as carrots.

Hannah stared, shaking.
It’s huge it’s huge it’s huge!
It was big enough to simply smash the window in.

As she watched, frozen solid, the huge spider brought one leg before its head and raised its horny foot vertically in front of its curved fangs. The breathing holes beneath its abdomen let out an audible
hiss
.

Oh my God,
thought Hannah.
It’s shushing me to stay quiet.

The large spider began scooping the smaller spiders aside. The hundreds of legs withdrew from probing the gaps around her window and the spiders fell away. As they did, the giant, feline spider gracefully and silently stepped back and down and out of sight. In just a few seconds, all the spiders were gone. It was as if they’d never been there; as if they’d been a wakeful extension to her nightmare in the cage. Except she could see on the inside sill the hairy section of leg she’d sliced with the catch, lying like a bit of black pipe cleaner. Her bed was shaking. She realized it was her heart pounding.

They were coming to get her. She knew it. Just as she knew that the horrible thing she’d picked up that afternoon—the dead bird that someone had cut up and
changed
—had been left for her and no one else. Her urge was to throw the covers over her head and crawl into a ball.

That won’t help!
she told herself. This was like those movies on the TV where the idiots did nothing instead of doing
something
, like locking the door or driving away or calling the cops.

Hannah swung her legs over the bed and padded to the door. There was a brass latch under the handle. She turned it and tried the handle. Locked. Good. But there was a two-centimeter gap under the door. More than enough room for the smaller spiders to crawl through.

Then she heard a sound that made the soles of her feet tingle.

A long, low squeak.

The back door was swinging open. They were coming.

She had to wake Mum and Dad and Miriam! Hannah opened her mouth and drew back a deep breath—

No! You yell, and the spiders will have to kill them. They’re here for you!

Hannah’s eyes began to sting and her vision softened with tears. What should she do? She looked around for something to shove under the door.

There was a framed picture on the wall; it was a poster of Hermione Granger (whose real name was Emma) and she’d begged and begged her parents for it and agreed to pay it off with her pocket money. The frame was thick plasticky stuff cast and colored to look like wood; it was as thick as her thumb. She ran to it and took its bottom edge. It was heavy. She strained and lifted. The picture came off its hook suddenly and its weight tipped her backward. She threw back one foot and dropped her arms, gaining control just before she overbalanced. She turned and staggered to the door.

Black spindly legs were probing through the gap. A row of spiders was hunched there, low on their bellies, starting to crawl under.

Hannah dropped Hermione’s picture facedown on the carpet, expecting the crash of breaking glass. But it just thudded.
It’s plastic,
she realized gratefully. She slid the poster toward the door.
It won’t fit!
she thought wildly.
It’s too big! It’ll jam on the frame and they’ll just crawl right over it and get me and bite me and drag me out the back door and through the rain and down
 …

… 
to the woods.

The thought of the Carmichael Road woods suddenly drenched her with more terror than the sight of the searching, testing, hairy legs. They were nearly in. She aimed the picture frame square at the door and shoved.

It squashed the spiders back and slid neatly between the jambs with just a couple of millimeters to spare each side. A nearly perfect fit.

Hannah knelt on the floor, eyes wide, breathing hard, suddenly wanting badly to go to the toilet. Rain rumbled on the roof.

Then the picture frame moved.

It slid back into the room a centimeter. Then another. The spiders were pushing it back.

Hannah scampered forward and sat all her weight on the frame.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a scratching at the door, and the handle began to slowly twist. First one way. Then the other. Then it jiggled—click, click, click. She could imagine monstrous, thorny feet on the other side pressed hard against the door.

She realized her lip was trembling. She was going to cry.

Stop it.
Stop it.

The scratching stopped. The door knob ceased moving.

Quiet, except the hushed hiss of rain.

They’ve gone,
she thought. Relief as sweet as cordial flooded through her.
They’ve gone.

Then she heard another slow, sly noise down the hall.

The door to Miriam’s bedroom was creaking open.

Chapter
22
   

  N
icholas woke bleary-eyed with a splitting headache. It was quarter to nine. How had he slept so late? Then he remembered how frustratingly last night had gone. What a fractured quorum he’d convened: an Indian Christian minister, a recent widow arcane as a sphinx, a white witch forced a thousand kilometers away … and himself.

Well, it was like the old saying: If you want something fucked up properly, form a committee. That’s what he’d done. Who knew how much later into the night Pritam Anand and Laine Boye had kept arguing about whether Quill was alive or dead, whether the murders were connected or coincidence. Nicholas felt a fool for telling them so much.

Fuck them both.

He believed more than ever what he’d said last night: Quill was
smart
. She knew no one in their right mind could believe that a woman could live so long, could hide in the middle of a crowded suburb, could get away with so many murders.

He showered swiftly, dressed, slipped on the elderwood necklace. There was a pay phone outside the shops on Myrtle Street. He needed to see how Suzette was doing.

The world outside felt waterlogged. The torrential rain last night had swelled the gutters to fast-running freshets. The footpaths were wet, and the grass strips flanking them leaked water onto contiguous driveways. Gray clouds massed overhead, pressing down like monstrous fists and threatening to finish work left undone.

Nicholas jingled his pocket—a few coins, enough to phone Sydney and see if Nelson was improving. What if he wasn’t? What if he got worse? What if he died? He felt a slow wheel of fear tighten straps in his gut.
Then it will be your fault.

A car slowed behind him. Then another vehicle slowed and stopped a few steps ahead of him. Police cars. Four doors opened and four officers stepped around him.

“Mr. Close?”

Nicholas recognized two of the police and smiled without an ounce of fondness. It was Waller, accompanied again by her huge mountain gorilla constable.

“Fossey and Silverback, together again. Don’t you guys miss Rwanda?”

Waller’s scowl didn’t budge a millimeter.

“Mr. Close, we’d like to ask you some questions.”

  P
ritam had been up since six.

He’d awoken sore and cold on the pew, and the sight that greeted his eyes was of Christ suddenly sideways, as if God had decided crucifixion was, in fact, a poor fate for His only begotten son and so had uprooted the cross.

Pritam stood, shambled to the presbytery, put on the kettle. He felt as if he’d had no sleep at all. Sipping tea, he unplugged the telephone, plugged in the modem, and switched on the church laptop.

Laine Boye had been right. If one dismissed Nicholas Close’s theories, boiled away the speculation and happenstance, all that was left was one simple coincidence: Eleanor Bretherton looked uncannily like Mrs. L. Quill. Pritam wished he could dismiss that as a fluke, but he’d seen John staring at Bretherton’s photo and turning pale. That was enough to warrant a bit of effort. He opened his search engine and started typing.

An hour later, Pritam sat back in his chair. He was stunned. His eyes stung from poor sleep and from staring at the screen, but his heart beat excitedly. His Internet searches had been an instinctive crawl, sniffing after suppositions, following flimsy hunches. He’d expected in his heart to find nothing. Instead, what he’d discovered shortened his breath. A quotation by Flavius Josephus crawled in his skull: “Now when Noah had lived three hundred and fifty years after the Flood, and all that time happily, he died, having lived the number of nine hundred and fifty years …”

Pritam
.

The printer—he had to find the printer. Nicholas and Laine would need to see this—

Pritam?

He looked up. Was someone calling him?

He listened. Only the steady tocking of the clock, the whisper of drizzle. No.

Anyway, the printer. He’d seen it in the storeroom and—

“Pritam?”

He froze. There was someone calling him from outside. He went to the side window and peered out. He could see no one. However, the visitor could be round the front.

“Pritam!” came the voice again. A man’s voice, and his tone was urgent. Pritam fetched an umbrella from the hatstand.

“Pritam Anand!”

“Coming!” he called. He struggled to free the umbrella, accidentally pressed its button and it popped open, one rib jabbing him in the thigh.
That’s bad luck, that.

“Pritam!”

He opened the door and hurried outside. The rain spat on the umbrella. He walked carefully along the slick path beside tall hibiscus bushes. The voice had come from the road fronting the church. There! He could see a figure on the opposite footpath. The man held an umbrella and leaned on a cane; his shadowed face was unclear through the drizzle.

“Pritam?”

Pritam squinted. The man’s stoop was familiar. But it couldn’t be …

“John?”

Reverend John Hird stood on the other side of the road. He waved the walking cane he held. Beside him was a small suitcase.

“They released me from the hospital! I’ve been trying to phone, but it’s been engaged all morning. Have you been downloading porn, you dirty black reprobate?”

Pritam smiled and frowned simultaneously.

“But, John, you … I saw you …” Had he dreamed Hird’s death? He was suddenly so tired, he wasn’t sure of anything.

“Here!” John waved him over. “Give me a hand.”

“Okay,” said Pritam, stepping onto the road. “But I don’t—”

The car hit him with a dull and meaty thud, and hurled him up the road. The driver slammed the brakes too hard and the car slid. One locked wheel snagged Pritam’s leg and ground flesh and bone into the bitumen. Car and victim finally stopped. The rain fell blindly.

The old woman watching from across the road hobbled quickly away.

  T
he kitchen smelled sharply of herbs and oils. In small, clean bowls were blue borage flowers, dandelion flowers, plucked waxy ivy leaves. In a glass bowl was maidenhair. In a mortar was a handful of poplar bulbs. Suzette lifted the heavy pestle and started pounding them into a tart, scented paste.

“What are you making?”

Suzette looked up. Quincy was in the doorway.

“I thought you were playing with Daddy?”

Quincy shrugged. “He fell asleep.”

Suzette nodded. Both she and Bryan were exhausted. They took turns watching over Nelson; neither was game to fall asleep unless the other was awake and watching the rise and fall of his chest. Nelson’s color had improved, and his eyes flickered open from time to time, but he quickly slipped back into a hot, herky-jerky sleep. She and Bryan had made a quiet pact the day Nelson fell ill that they would not worry Quincy. Suzette knew the hex would pass and Nelson would revive, so there was no point making Quincy fearful.

“So, what are you making?” repeated Quincy.

“Elephant paint. To paint elephants with.”

Quincy rolled her eyes. “It’s not elephant paint. We don’t have an elephant.”

Suzette smiled. “Do you want an elephant?”

Quincy thought about it. “Yes.”

“It would have to sleep in your room,” said Suzette.

“Can’t it sleep in yours and Daddy’s room? It’s bigger.”

Quincy
, thought Suzette,
would make a fine business negotiator.

“No, Daddy’s allergic to elephants. It would have to be in your room and your bed.”

Quincy wrinkled her nose.

“No elephants,” she decided.

Suzette nodded—wise decision. She mixed the other ingredients in with the poplar paste. She had woken from her short sleep exhausted and furious with Nicholas, who still hadn’t called. Did he give a rat’s about his nephew? She’d decided to turn her bright indignation into action, and started this healing mix. Now, how was it applied? She seemed to think it was pasted over the heart and bandaged. Or was it on the temples?

“Pass me that book, sweetie?” She nodded at her kitchen dresser, its shelves loaded with books on herbs, spells, and charms; a book on healing herbs was open on the dresser top.

Quincy skipped over, delivered the book, and skipped back to the shelves. She’d never taken notice of her mother’s hobby, but today she was perusing the spines with interest.

“Want me to put on
Dora the Explorer?
” asked Suzette.

Quincy pursed her lips and shook her head. She reached up and pulled out an old book. Suzette watched from the corner of one eye as Quincy opened it. She was a good reader for her age, but this book would be full of words she wouldn’t know; it was one of Suzette’s father’s aged volumes:
Herbs of Old Europe.
It wasn’t surprising that it attracted Quincy’s eye: its fading cover was dotted with stars and mystic symbols, a fantastical image that belied the utilitarian descriptions inside. It was so dull, in fact, that Suzette had never gotten more than a quarter way through it.

“Can we have a Pan?” asked Quincy.

“I beg your pardon, hon?”

Quincy turned and said, “I don’t want an elephant. But can we have a Pan?”

Suzette could see she was holding a scrap of paper in her hand. “Show me?”

Quincy brought the scrap over and handed it up to her mother. Suzette wiped her hand on her apron and took it.

It was half of a page torn from a book that looked like it had gone out of print eighty years ago. In the center of the page was an etching of a satyr under a night sky, rubbing his hands and capering beside nymphs in a water pond. Suzette blinked—he sported a raging erection. Beneath the picture, most of the caption had been torn away, leaving only “Pan: Greek god, son of Hermes …”

“Can we get one?” asked Quincy again.

Suzette didn’t answer. In a small patch of yellowing page between the etching and the torn edge was written in ballpoint pen: “???” She had no way of knowing, but she was sure the handwriting was her father’s.

“I don’t think so,” she said softly.

She folded the paper away and slipped it into her apron pocket. Pan? It must mean nothing, surely; just something that caught his eye and he kept it. But the etching felt so oddly discomfiting. Why did he keep it?

And why did he leave it for us?

“Why not?” asked Quincy. “They look funny. He’s got no pants!”

“I don’t think you’d want one, honey biscuit.” She put on a bright smile. “Come on. Let’s put this on your brother.”