The Darkening (3 page)

He would return to London on a Friday, poorly shaved with a sore back and bowels clotted by the stodge of fry-up breakfasts, in a van filled with old crap that cost perhaps three hundred quid yet was worth twenty times that to his employers and customers. He became Nicholas Close, Master of Old Shit. Need some tattered books, a rusty shotgun and decrepit fishing gear with a distinctly Gaelic twist? Call Nicholas Close. He’s shameless, mildly charming, and he’ll find it cheap. Oh, and did you hear? He used to be a designer or something.

London had finally, shyly, revealed her lucrative teat. One job alone had paid the deposit on the flat. And that contract had led to a permanent consultancy with a firm that opened Irish pubs in Kuala Lumpur, Dubai and Santiago. Nicholas had been charged with the dubious task of vivifying new spaces with objects whose original owners were long dead. It was tolerable and various, and the travel was good. He intended to get back to design next month, next financial year, after Christmas.

He met and married Cate. The mortgage had been reduced at a good clip. But the amusing collectables, the money, the diminishing loan statements, everything, lost its value the instant he walked into the flat in his wet and scraped motorcycle jacket and found why Cate hadn’t answered his call.

You killed her
.

‘Shh,’ he told himself.

Because you just had to take the bike.

‘Shut up.’

There
, said the voice in his head,
arguing with yourself. The slippery slope to madness. No wonder you couldn’t keep a job.

No. Not true. He was never fired. He quit.

And why was that?

Because the old shit he sought for a living tended to be found in old places. And the older the place, the more chance it had of being . . .

He didn’t want to think the word.

Go on
.
Say it. It doesn’t bite. Not any more.

‘Haunted,’ he whispered.

The word hung in the air like despair in a dying man’s bedroom. It was still hanging, as if it were itself a ghost, when Nicholas sucked it back in with a gasp.

Time had frozen here.

While his mind had dragged through the thorny brambles of his last few months in London, his hands had steered him by dormant habit onto Carmichael Road and the suburb of his childhood.

Tallong.

For eighteen years it had been his home suburb. Earth was broken here not twenty years after the city was founded in the mid-1800s. Then the rolling hills of Tallong had been cleared of dense native forest, dotted with farmhouses and infected with Friesian cows and sheep. But the town became a city, and as it breathed in and its chest pushed out, the paddocks of Tallong were striped with gravel streets. Distinctive homes of chamferboard with one window glinting from under a corrugated iron gable and a cheeky wink for a side veranda began to spread along the new roads - avenues with names occasionally Aboriginal but mostly Anglo, as breezy as open sulkies and jauntily optimistic as the residents who built there. Pennyworth Street. Wool Street. Harts Avenue. Princess Street.

Tramlines were laid. Gas lines went in. Tarmac covered the gravel. Tramlines were ripped up. Telephone poles were sunk between yawning jacarandas and festive red-frosted bottlebrush.

In the sixties, when memories of the privations of war and rationing had lost their sting, the wood and iron houses were viewed with eyes now brought to a critical sharpness by the sight of rockets streaking skyward from Kennedy and Baikonur and Woomera. Some houses were torn down and replaced with monolithic hulks of pale brick and yellow glass. Septic tanks were drained and sealed. Sewer lines were dug in. The suburb grew green and fat and settled, a contented dame lounging by a slow loop of river; the fat queen of a well-made hive. Her only wildness was a wide corner of untouched native forest at her edge. Two square kilometres of rippling hillocks thick with trees, ripe for razing and selling and sprinkling with a thousand new houses.

It was the sight of the woods that made Nicholas suck in his breath and step on the brake. They were still there.

He stared out the side window. He was on Carmichael Road, the street he’d walked almost every day to and from school until something happened when he was ten, something that made him change his route. But even then he’d passed the woods each week; in buses on his way to high school, on foot on his way to the train station and college.

Seventeen years he’d been gone. In that time, the value of the houses here must have tripled. Yet this huge tract of densely wooded land sat at the edge of the suburb, unassailed. The moon was up now, furbishing the pelt of the treetops silver. The forest’s bulk glowered below, black as shadowed eyes under a severe brow, watching . . .

He opened the door and stepped into the crisp night air. He walked across the crackling grass of the no-man’s-land between Carmichael Road and the dark-toothed edge of the woods.

How could they still be here? Some developer should have snapped up the huge block, cleared it, slashed it, veined it with new streets with bromidic names like Spinnaker Court and Mahogany Place, and salted it thickly with pastel-rendered McMansions. Yet here they were, extant and untouched. Was it crown land, fiercely guarded by some cleverly written covenant? Maybe a park was planned? Perhaps the developers were just waiting till house prices boomed again?

Nicholas’s feet crunched on gravel, and he stopped.

He stood on the same path he used to take home from school, a path that once yielded all sorts of treasures. A path on which he’d found something small and disturbing, something silently awful and strange and offensive . . .

His nostrils flared and his heart - as if having heard its own starter’s pistol - began thudding in his chest. The memory of a hot November day a quarter-century ago reached out of the woods, put its sly hands inside him and knotted his stomach. He’d been ten. He was with his best friend, Tristram. Running. Terrified. Chased. Soon after, Tristram was dead.

Apart from the silvery whisper of the chill air in the leaves, the night was silent.

Nicholas realised he was avoiding looking at the tree line. He dragged his eyes from the electrum crowns of the trees down to the dark trunks. They stood like a row of black teeth, endlessly huge, stretching left and right into the night. The maw of some undersea thing, some behemoth, sentient and unquiet. Waking as it scented prey.

Something’s coming
.

The woods were alive. His heart hammered behind his sternum. Something inside the trees had sensed him, tasted him on the cold air. Recognised him.

It was coming.

Go!
he yelled in his head.
Run!

But his body was frozen. His feet would not move. His fingers sat cold and still as icicles. His eyes were locked on the darkly grinning trees, waiting for them to open and for whatever they held to reach from their damp innards and take him and consume him and leave him slit and empty and drained as Tristram’s little body had been so many years ago. And part of him welcomed that fate.

Nicholas flinched. A raindrop hit his scalp. Another, his cheek. And another. His head, as if released from some dark spell, jerked upward.

The sky that had been clear and starry at the airport was now an eyelid half-closed; clouds as black and inscrutable as the woods before him had consumed the sky to its zenith and were marching further overhead, already dropping their ordnance of cold, heavy drops.

A whisper of white flickered at the corner of his eye. He turned, catching a glimpse. Something small and pale flickered away between the dark trunks, as if devoured by the trees.

His galloping heart was shaking his whole body. He again told himself to turn; this time his body listened, and he put his back to the biding woods and strode through the matchstick grass to his car.

It took all his willpower not to run.

Rain rioted on the tin roof.

Nicholas watched his mother pour steaming water into a teapot, glumly mesmerised by the billowing clouds of steam. The sight of her making tea was so familiar that it could have been transposed, with just a little loosening around the edges, from two decades ago. The kitchen had been freshened with new benchtops and a stainless-steel fridge, and his mother was a bit heavier and just a little shorter, but nothing significant was different. Seventeen years, and nothing had changed. The thought made him tired.

‘Your sister is coming up from Sydney tomorrow.’

Katharine Close’s voice had a singsong matter-of-factness that suggested schoolteacher or marriage counsellor. In the early seventies, she had been a weather girl at a local television station - a shapely lodestone for the discussion of meteorological events in service station garages and on fairways. Katharine had just been offered the upward move to reading the six o’clock news when she fell pregnant with Nicholas. Motherhood then separation then widowhood conspired to pretty well put a bullet behind the ear of her fledgling television career. She raised her two children alone. When they were both old enough for school, she cleaned houses until she had squirrelled away sufficient to buy herself a kiln and wheel. Then she sheeted up a small studio between the stumps under the house and taught herself the secrets of clay and flux and glaze. She paid for her habit by selling her pots and platters at farmers’ markets and teaching a handful of students when the mood took her. On the kitchen dresser, Nicholas saw berthed a small armada of perhaps twenty teapots.

Katharine handed him a steaming cup.

‘Suzette’s coming up,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘I have no idea. To see her brother?’

‘I only just arrived.’

His mother tapped her spoon sharply on her cup. ‘Yes. Selfish bitch.’

They drank in silence a while. Above the surf-like rataplan on the roof, Nicholas could hear the house ticking around them as it cooled. He felt his mother’s eyes crawling over his face.

‘You look awful,’ she said.

‘Cheers, Mum.’

In his memories, his mother’s hair was perpetually chestnut, worn tight as a fiercely guarded nest. Now it was grey and loose.

He took a biscuit from a plate, scrutinised it, and put it back. Katharine tutted and whisked it up, then dunked it in her tea. It was a gesture Nicholas remembered from a frugal childhood - nothing wasted. Nothing, except time. Even after his father died, some two or three years after he left them, Nicholas never saw Katharine with another man.

‘Seeing anyone?’ he asked.

She scowled at him over the rim of her cup. ‘I see lots of people. None worth talking to.’

‘Having a thing with the clay man? Dalliances with horny delft pedlars?’

‘No.’

‘You’ll get a reputation.’

‘As what? A cranky old dyke?’

Nicholas shrugged.

‘Grand.’

They ate and drank in silence.

‘You know they offered me five hundred thousand for the house?’

‘Who?’

‘People.’ She waved the word away. ‘Not bad, though, for an old girl.’

‘Not bad,’ he agreed.

Rain gurgled in the downpipe outside, a visceral rush of cold water in dark places. He thought about mentioning the Carmichael Road woods, asking his mother how they could still be there, asking if she thought, too, that they lurked with the menace of a group of shadowed men on an otherwise empty street, men whose silhouettes were drawn taut with latent trouble. But he felt foolish trying to catch the words, and so let them swim away into the ocean-like patter outside.

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t make Cate’s funeral.’ Katharine said it boldly, but the silence that followed bled the words dry.

Nicholas ran his tongue around his teeth, as if hunting for a civil thing to say that might be caught there.

‘No airline would have carried you, you were sick as a dog,’ he said finally. ‘She liked you.’

Katharine smiled. It bloomed and died on her lips. ‘Poor man.’

He looked up. She was watching him carefully, wearing the same owlish look he knew from thirty years ago, when he was five and thinking of raiding the biscuit jar. A look that warned him against doing something he might regret.