The Darkening (34 page)

‘Miriam . . . ?’

Miriam walked a few steps and whirled again, eyes brightly ferocious. ‘I mean it, shithead!’ she spat. ‘You follow me and I’ll kick you to death!’

Hannah stood frozen. She’d never seen her sister this angry. She remembered a half-heard warning from Mum:
Miriam’s going through a phase right now. She’s growing up fast and lots of changes are happening to her. She’s liable to be a bit testy.

Wow, you reckon?
thought Hannah.

She watched Miriam stalk off on her long, thin legs. She fought the sudden urge to bawl, slowly rolled up her painting and walked to the terminus of the school’s avenue, which turned down Carmichael Road.

I’ll tell
, Hannah thought hatefully.
I’ll tell Mum that Miriam used the F-word. And I’ll make it stick worse because I’ll fess up to using her lip gloss first, and second I’ll cry.

Cheered a little by this plan, she walked easier. The afternoon was warm and she opened up her school cardigan. The woods grew closer on her right. They looked fine: thick and secret and old. When Dad used to read stories about enchanted princesses sleeping the years away in emerald groves, it wasn’t forests thick with European pines that Hannah had imagined, but woods like these: lush and healthy and wild and filled with hefty-trunked paperbark, glossy ash, lumbering and shadow-branched figs and scrambling, dark-footed lantana. Trees as tall as churches, some so thick with vines they looked like green-furred dinosaurs. The woods were beautiful. As she passed them, she left the footpath and took the gravel track that cut through the dried grass strip that fringed the tree line.

Besides, it wasn’t
woods
that hurt people. Sure, you could get lost and freeze to death, or you could break your leg or your neck, but if you were careful, the woods were safe as anything. It was
people
who hurt people.

With this thought in mind, it seemed to Hannah that she saw three things at once.

The first was unimportant: someone had driven black star pickets into the ground near the footpath and wired between them a sign made of white plastic.

Secondly, a man stood on the other side of Carmichael Road. He had been staring at the sign, but now was watching Hannah.

The third was so exciting her heart began to race. The sight of it made her forget the other two things instantly. It lay smack in the middle of the path, glinting like a huge gem in the sunlight.

It was a unicorn.

It looked like it was made of glass, but as Hannah stepped closer, she wasn’t so sure. Glass was usually smooth and bulgy; this had fine, chiselled legs, rippling and strong. She could see the striations in the horn, the fine detail of the creature’s course mane hairs, its beautiful wise eyes. Its flanks were scalloped and muscular. It looked alive and frozen at the same time, more made of ice than glass, or perhaps carved from some magical, transparent wood. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

‘Excuse me!’

Hannah reluctantly looked up - she didn’t want to take her eyes off the unicorn. The man had crossed the road and was coming towards her.
He wants the unicorn
, she thought wildly.
It’s his unicorn, but
I
want it!

‘Young lady?’ he called.

Hannah calculated. She had time. She could grab the exquisite figurine, put it in her bag, and run.

‘Don’t!’

She reached down and snatched the unicorn.

And as she did, it felt as if the earth jumped a step to the side. She lurched. The sky seemed to dim. The sun sank lower. The woods, so benign and inviting, suddenly loomed dark and dreadful. She looked at her hands.

Instead of the lustrous unicorn, she held a dead plover. The bird sagged limply. Its head was gone, cut off and replaced with a ball made of twigs and painted with a funny mark. It was hideous. So horrible. So
dead
.

She was staring at it, about to scream, when the man grabbed her arms.

Nicholas was staring at the ceiling of his flat and deciding that it was indeed stucco. This was the sole conclusion that he had reached in two hours. He had bumbled around the flat, circumnavigating the dining room table and the open notebook lying there. He had rung Suzette to find that Nelson’s fever had diminished but not gone, so she had moved him onto a cot in her and Bryan’s room.

Nicholas had forced himself to sit, intending to make a list of names and places - Quill, Bretherton, Sedgely; shop, woods, church - to see if their placement together might catalyse some epiphany he felt was ripe and ready. But the instant his buttocks hit the chair, he was up again. He couldn’t stay inside any longer. He had to go out.

He willed his feet to take him to Lambeth Street. Suzette had said that their mother had sounded short on the phone, and some placating might not be a bad idea. But the instant Nicholas’s feet touched the Bymar Street footpath, they started towards Carmichael Road.

The wind had risen through the night; it tugged urgently at treetops and made the power lines sway and moan. High overhead, clouds were hounded fast across the sky, and the sun, though impoverished of warmth, was so bright it hurt the eye.

Nicholas walked onto Carmichael Road. He stayed on the footpath opposite the woods and walked towards the point where Winston Teale had once stopped his olive green sedan. Movement flickered in the grass verge and Nicholas squinted.

Dylan Thomas took a few frightened steps back, then his arm spasmed out straight as a mast’s boom and he jerked as he was rushed towards the woods and into the dark trees. Then, in an orchestration that was unsettling, high clouds passed over the sun just as Nicholas saw something else that made him flinch. A sign had been hammered into the hard strip of grass bordering the woods.

Stiff-legged, he walked along the footpath till he was opposite the new notice. ‘Application for Subdivision’ it said; ‘Barisi Group, Developers’. A small logo of a black Romanesque stallion flanked the large print.

Nicholas’s mind flew back through the old papers he’d found at the library - auction flyers, auctioneers’ names, surveyors’ names. Funerals of men. Murders of children.

He blinked as a terrible realisation dawned on him. Every time the woods were threatened, a child went missing and died. Here was another application to invade the woods. Quill was going to kill another child.

At that very moment, a small girl appeared on the path.

She was maybe nine or ten, with dark brown hair in a ponytail and thin legs ending in shoes that looked too big. She spotted Nicholas and looked quickly away back to the path. Then her scissoring steps slowed and stopped. Her eyes had found something on the ground.

Nicholas felt the world slow to a quiet halt. The wind seemed to cease. The very sunlight seemed to freeze in the air, becoming so fragile that a single gesture would shatter it and let darkness flood the sky. The woods, a wall of black shadow, ghostly trunks and dark green waves, seemed to swell, growing taller and closer to the girl.

Bring her
.

The voice in his head was low, as old as stone and as strong as night tides, a powerful rumble almost too low to hear; it vibrated through him like a whale song or thunder.

Bring her.

He shook his head as if to clear it. ‘Excuse me!’ he called out to the girl. His voice sounded impotent and exhausted.

The girl looked up at him, frowning. She was so small. It would be easy to grab her, to fold her in his arms and . . .

Bring her in.

He took a step towards her, and stopped himself.
No
.

She was looking at the path again. Nicholas knew what lay there. A dead bird with a woven head, and if she touched it she would die.

She
will
die
.

‘Young lady?’ he called. His feet moved again, and this time they wouldn’t stop. They were carrying him to her, across the road. It was hard to breathe. His throat was tight. His hands went to his collar and pulled it away; as he did, his fingertips touched the wood beads of the necklace. It felt heavy and tight around his neck and the sardonyx stone was uncomfortably warm.

Take it off.

Yes, he could just take it off and grab her and bring her in, she wouldn’t be heavy, cover her mouth and —

No!

The girl was looking at the path and back at him. She was going to grab it!

‘Don’t!’ he called, but his voice sounded so thin he could have been on a distant hilltop.

If I can’t stop walking
, he thought,
I’ll run
. He jolted his legs into a sudden sprint.

She knelt and picked up the dead bird.

BRING HER IN!

Nicholas stumbled. The voice was so low it set his teeth shaking; it seemed to convulse his organs and whip his blood. The animal gravity of the woods was as primal and strong as any need to sleep or eat or fuck. His crotch bulged with a new and thumping erection. The necklace was hot, burning. He couldn’t breathe.

Then he heard them.

In the woods. A chittering. The rustle of a thousand unseen spiny legs on shadowed leaves. They were coming.

The girl stood rigid, staring at the dead bird in her hands, its head a ball of twigs and marked with blood. Thurisaz. Nicholas grabbed her by the arms.

Bring her—

‘No!’ he yelled, and picked her off her feet. He staggered - she felt as heavy as a man, as two men; too heavy. He swooped one hand under her thin legs. The tick-tick rustling was getting louder. He bent, shaking under the strain, and scooped up the dead bird talisman and shoved it into his pocket. He took a quaking step, then another, away from the woods.

The chittering of leaves gave way to a rustling in the grass behind him.

His legs were burning with effort, lactate already racing like bushfire through his thighs. He took another step, another, another . . . and ran.

Just as he stepped onto the path, he cast a look behind.

The grass was turning black. It was as if flood waters had instantly risen to halfway up their stalks. Only the tide was not dark water: Nicholas knew it was a rising wave of black and grey spiders.

He turned and ran like hell.

This was the last box. Pritam pulled it down from the shelf, dropped it unceremoniously on the floor, and began emptying its contents.

Rifling through the other archive boxes had yielded a hodgepodge of curiosities: photographs of a twenty-years-younger Reverend John Hird smiling with disabled children under the World Expo monorail; a yellowing folder containing John’s papers discharging him from 3RAR; another envelope holding the location and number of his brother’s crematorium plot. Pritam set these aside.

Other finds were not personal and less interesting. Tax receipts for repairs, three notepads containing bookings for the church hall, an audit of plants in the church grounds, receipt for a mimeograph machine.

Pritam had spent the day trawling through the boxes, occasionally answering a telephoning well-wisher or a knock at the door, confirming in a cracked and tired voice that, indeed, the Reverend John Hird had passed away last night; that, yes, he went peacefully, and agreeing that, indeed, he had been unwell a long while. John certainly was a very strong spirit, an inspiration. He was, most surely, with his Lord now. Yes, there would be a service.

And so to the last box.

If the previous cartons had been pedestrian in content, this was numbingly dull. Old bus timetables. Ticket stubs for bus travel. Suggestion-box notes held together with a rusted bulldog clip. A large envelope marked ‘Fundraising’. Within this last were four smaller envelopes labelled by decade, the topmost reading ‘1970-80’. Pritam opened it.

Inside were a few copies of a flyer printed in purple ink - he was pleased the mimeograph got used. They advertised a fête: ‘Fun for the Family!’, ‘Sack races!’ and ‘Home-baked cakes!’. Handwritten lists of helpers and their duties (‘R. Burgess, set up trestle tables & remove rubbish’). Faded Polaroid photographs of the big day: ladies shyly holding their iced cakes and smiling. Children with long hair and flared pants were lashed together at the ankles, running and laughing. A wide-tied man wagging his finger at the camera while eating a pie. A woman staring, unsmiling, at the camera.