The Darkening (38 page)

. . .
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 millimetres 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 centimetre. 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 realised 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.

23

N
icholas woke with a splitting headache. He blinked blearily and checked his watch. 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 kilometres 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 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 elder-wood 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. Grey 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 recognised two of the officers: they’d visited his mother’s house the evening the Thomas boy went missing. He smiled without an ounce of fondness.

‘Silverback and Fossey. Don’t you guys miss Rwanda?’

The officers were unamused.

‘Sir, we need to ask you some questions.’

Pritam 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, boiled 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 all 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 Google and started typing.

‘Eleanor Bretherton 1880s’.

The search revealed only one unhelpful curiosity: Macmillan had published a book by Mary Ward entitled
Miss Bretherton
in 1885.

He dug deeper. He logged onto and searched the Anglican database. Then he rifled electronically through records at the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. He emailed the Department of Immigration for information on how to secure lists of free settlers from the city’s founding in 1859. He searched the State Archives for shipping manifests, cargo allocations, passenger lists.

By a quarter to nine, he had found absolutely nothing.

More tea. A quick piss. Back to it.

‘L. Quill, Tallong’.
Search
. Several Quills in several different states. Back to Births, Deaths and Marriages. He guessed a birth year, around 1910, her death around 1995. Several L. Quills, but none the right age, the right gender, the right place. This, he told himself, was not unreasonable: Quill could have been born interstate and died far from home. To search every state’s and territory’s records could take days. Weeks. It was hopeless.

Nicholas would say that she meant it to be hopeless
, he thought.

He made toast, chewed slowly, debated stealing a quick nap. Rain pattered again on the roof and tapped through the trees.
English weather
, he thought. He stopped chewing. An idea crystallised in his mind. English. If Quill
was
as old as Nicholas thought, surely she came from Britain, one way or another. Either freely or . . .

He typed: ‘Convict Ships to Moreton Bay’.
Search.

Three ships. One arrived twice; one three times; one just once. The
Elphinstone
, the
Bangalore
, the
County Durham
. All left Spithead, all docked Moreton Bay.

Pritam clicked
County Durham
. Master: William Huxley. She arrived 2 October 1850, having sailed 144 days. Convicts embarked: male - 154, female - 34; disembarked: male - 147, female - 30.

He clicked the hyperlink and the female convicts’ names appeared.

Eighth on the list was ‘Quill, Rowena’. ‘Trial place: Trim, Meath County. Crime/s: Fraud. Prostitution. Term: Life. Comments: Pardoned 1859.’

Pritam sat back in his chair. He was stunned. A quotation by Flavius Josephus crawled in his skull: ‘Now when Noah had lived three hundred and fifty years after the Flood, and that all that time happily, he died, having lived the number of nine hundred and fifty years . . .’

Pritam.

His eyes stung from staring at the screen, but his heart beat excitedly. 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 sidelights and peered out. He could see no one. However, the church was on a corner block, so 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 jabbed him in the shin.
That’s bad luck, that.

‘Pritam!’

Who
is
that? So familiar . . .

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 so tired, he wasn’t sure . . . was this a dream?

‘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 tarmac. Car and victim finally stopped. The rain fell blindly.

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

The 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 colour 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.’

Quince, thought Suzette, would make a fine stockbroker. Practical mind.

‘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 shown the slightest interest in 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 got more than a quarter way through it.