The Darkening (41 page)

Miriam was dead. Hannah searched inside herself for the smallest feeling that disagreed, but found none. Miriam was gone. And if it hadn’t been Miriam, it would have been her. The fact that she was so relieved not to have been taken by the spiders and cocooned up alive and screaming to be bitten and poisoned and sucked dry or whatever else spiders did made her feel guilty and even glummer. Something had tried to get her yesterday, leaving the horrible dead bird disguised as a crystal unicorn. It had failed, and instead had taken Miriam to the woods.

As Hannah sat, her lap warmed by Swizzle and her buttocks by the hot sting of a hard slap, surrounded by a buzz of men and women in blue and her parents clenching each other’s hands, she realised what she had to do.

She couldn’t bring Miriam back. But she could kill whatever had taken her.

26

N
icholas sat on the toilet. He thought if he could sit there long enough, he could get back enough composure to find his way out. Then his stomach heaved again. He rolled onto his knees just in time and a thin stream of amber bile gushed into the bowl. He gripped the stainless-steel rail beside the pedestal as he vomited.

‘Fuck it,’ he whispered.

Time to go out.

He didn’t want to go. It was horrible. But he knew he had to.

He got to his feet, wiped his mouth with some paper towel, and unlocked the toilet door.

Dead floated by like bodies on the sea after a tsunami. They rolled by on invisible gurneys, some thrashing wildly, some almost motionless; some choked silently, arched like fragile bridges, some sobbed with pain. They rolled to and fro between the curtained bed bays of the Emergency ward.

Nicholas felt his knees threaten to give way.

‘Help you, mate?’ asked a harried male nurse.

‘Lai—’ Nicholas swallowed back a stubborn mouthful of gorge. ‘Laine Boye?’

‘Bed twelve.’

Nicholas nodded thanks. An old woman suddenly lurched in front of him, pulling on catheter lines in her arm that had been binned who knew how many years. She fell gracelessly to the floor, looking up at Nicholas, before unseen hands scooped under her thin shoulders and dragged her into a nearby cubicle, depositing her on a small, shifting sea of overlapping ghosts. In their midst, an unshaved patient chewed thoughtfully as he read a newspaper. Feeling Nicholas’s eyes on him, he peered over the paper’s edge.

‘You right?’

Nicholas nodded stiffly and hurried away.

Laine lay on the trolley bed in bay twelve. A saline drip line snaked into her arm. Monitor leads were attached like lampreys to her upper chest. A red-glowing plastic thing was attached to one long-fingered hand like some electrified leech. About her drifted a fog of overlapping ghostly bodies.

Nicholas fought the electric urge in his legs to flee.

‘Yes, sir?’

A round, black African nurse bowled into the bay, not looking at Nicholas as she quickly grabbed Laine’s chart, scanned it, then went to check the rate on the drip.

‘I brought her in,’ he replied.

‘You her husban’?’

Laine’s face was placid, unmindful of the misty sea of death floating around her. Again, Nicholas was struck by the classical lines of her cheeks, her eyes.
This is how Orpheus must have found Eurydice, asleep beneath a shifting veil of spirits . . .
but perhaps without the blurts of rough laughter from the medicos’ fishbowl office in the middle of the ward. Again, he noticed the fingernail-fine scratch on her cheek.

What happened to your face? Mrs Boye?

Yes.

She’d lied. Quill had done this. But how? When?

‘No,’ he answered.

‘Relative?’

Nicholas shook his head.

‘Uh-huh,’ said the nurse, suspicious.

An idea occurred to Nicholas. He reached to his neck and unclasped the elder-wood and sardonyx necklace.

‘She wanted this. Can I put it on her?’

‘No.’

‘It means a lot to her,’ he said.

‘Then why in’ she wearing it already?’ The nurse glanced at the rough necklace, then fixed Nicholas with a humourless, don’t-waste-my-time arch.

‘Fine. Can you give it to her for me?’ he asked.

The nurse watched him for a moment, sighed far too loudly, then held out her hand.

He dropped the necklace onto her light brown palm. As its touch left his skin, the world suddenly lurched and he staggered. He heard a rustling in his ear, a high-pitched squeal like a million cicadas trying to burrow into his skull. The bay and the nurse swam out of focus.

‘Sir?’

‘Feeling . . .’

The nurse pressed the necklace back into Nicholas’s palm and shut his fingers over the wood and stone. The world steadied, leaving only the aching weariness.

The nurse was watching him anxiously with careful eyes. ‘I think you need it much as her.’

She looked away and wouldn’t meet his eyes again.

‘Nurse?’

She hesitated beside the bay’s front curtain, anxious to be gone.

‘Can you tell me where Intensive Care is?’ he asked.

‘Take the lifts to five,’ she said, and lifted her meaty arms to wave him out of the ward as if he were an evil smell.

Pritam was in a closed ward sealed with glass. An oxygen tube fed under his nose. A neck brace held his face rigid, and a web of stainless-steel frames hovered over his body. To Nicholas, he was a rock in a squally sea, lying motionless as men and women surged around him silently: jerking, vomiting, dying, lapping into one another like morbid smoke. There were so many that they were a blur, but through the thrashing haze Nicholas saw their eyes - dozens of eyes - watching him.

His heart beat fast and his neck grew hot.

I’m going to faint
, he thought.

Just go. Pritam won’t know.

The duty nurse walked past and Nicholas asked her in a voice that, he hoped, sounded more upset than selfishly miserable how Reverend Anand was doing. She explained that the operation to repair a split renal artery had been successful, and he would be in theatre again tomorrow morning to set his pelvis, left leg and two breaks in his clavicle. A CT scan had revealed a minor swelling of the brain that was being monitored.

The nurse left, and Nicholas fixed his gaze on a spot in the corner where no dead seemed to accrete. He stared at it, thinking.

Quill. She’s done this without raising a sweat
.
As Suzette said, she’s divided us. And divided, and divided. What a joke. What a fool I was to think we could do anything.

And Miriam Gerlic was dead; he was grimly certain of it.

Pritam opened his eyes and blearily looked around.

Nicholas called a nurse. Through the glass, he watched her enter Pritam’s small room and speak with him, asking basic questions. Can you tell me your name? Do you know where you are? Do you know what day of the week this is? Do you remember what happened? Pritam’s eyes wandered across the trelliswork of steel supporting him, over the ceiling, down to the glass and finally found Nicholas. His mouth moved, and the nurse pursed her lips. She reluctantly waved Nicholas inside.

He didn’t want to go, but his legs shuffled him in.

‘You can stay for a minute,’ said the nurse, stumping out. ‘The doctor’s on his way.’

Nicholas looked down at Pritam. The young reverend’s normally brown face was as pale as milk. He raised his eyebrows.

‘Lazy bastard,’ said Nicholas. ‘Hell of a way to get out of Sunday service.’

Pritam smiled. His eyes stayed on Nicholas. They twinkled like night stars under the shifting layers of heaving, gasping, weightless dead.

‘It was John,’ he whispered. ‘But it wasn’t John.’

Nicholas shook his head slowly - I don’t understand.

‘John called me over the road,’ croaked Pritam. ‘But John’s dead. It was Quill.’

The name hit Nicholas like a wave of frosted air.

‘Laine’s in here, too,’ he whispered.

Pritam’s eyes closed and he took a rattling breath. ‘How?’

Nicholas shook his head again, and shrugged. ‘And Hannah Gerlic’s sister is missing.’

Pritam’s eyes rolled up to the ceiling.
Is he talking to God?
Nicholas wondered.
Begging? Interceding?
The reverend’s eyes slid back to Nicholas; Pritam was fighting to stay awake.

‘Key under . . .’

‘I can’t hear you, Pritam.’

‘. . . key under the mat,’ he whispered.

Nicholas understood. At the presbytery. ‘Oh, that’s clever.’

Pritam gave a weak smile.

‘Computer. Last search.’ He licked his dry lips. ‘’kay?’

Nicholas nodded.

Pritam’s eyes folded shut. He sank back under his shroud of writhing ghosts.

Nicholas watched the steady rhythm of the coloured lines on the monitor. He departed as fast as he could.

It took the taxi driver three-quarters of an hour to negotiate the rain-worried traffic and get to the Tallong Anglican Church. On the way, Nicholas dozed.

‘We’re here,’ said the cabbie.

Nicholas paid with a credit card. As the cab drove away, he looked at the road where Pritam had been hit this morning. There wasn’t the tiniest sign anything had happened.
And that is how she works. Accidents and scapegoats. Even her murders are neatly explained and easily forgotten.

The presbytery key was, indeed, under the rubber and coir mat. Nicholas entered. A half-cup of cold tea rested beside the computer; the screensaver scrolled shots of sunsets, mist over placid ponds, light streaming through trees, silhouettes of praiseful people on cliff tops arching to the heavens. He touched the mouse. ‘Connection timed out’ read a message box. He shut it and clicked the ‘refresh’ arrow. The modem whistled.

He stared as the page updated.

The manifest from the
County Durham
. Female convicts. Eighth on the list was Rowena Quill.

Nicholas sat heavily and for a long while did nothing.

‘Rowena,’ he whispered to himself.

What a fool.
As much a fool as Gavin Boye. As Elliot Guyatt. Sucked in and played like a fiddle. A pretty smile and a laugh and he’d been chumped.

He unplugged the modem and rang Suzette.

Suzette made sure Quincy wasn’t in the room before she hissed, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to fucking wait a few more days and call back then?’

Her brother astonished her with an apology.

Then he stunned her into aching silence with his news. He told her about finding Hannah Gerlic outside the woods. About the plover with the rune head. The meeting with Pritam and Laine. His detainment by police. Discovering Pritam was shattered like a hated toy in hospital, and Laine collapsing into a slumber like Nelson’s.

Suzette realised she could see the pulse in her wrist hammering like a tiny creature trapped under her skin.

‘A cut on her cheek?’ she asked. ‘How, do you think?’

Then he told her what he’d found on Pritam’s computer. That in 1850 a female convict transported from Trim, Meath County, arrived here, and her name was Rowena Quill.

‘Rowena,’ said Nicholas quietly. ‘The name of the young girl in the health food store is Rowena.’

Suzette sat down heavily. ‘Oh,’ she whispered.