The Darkening (47 page)

Nicholas gripped the shotgun with his right hand and cradled its lower barrel over his left forearm; the rope of the duffel bag dug painfully into his shoulder. He was a long way from the sporadic traffic of Carmichael Road, so the risk of being seen was minimal.
Zero, in fact
, he corrected himself.

As he stepped over thick roots and under low, damp branches, he realised that, even as a child exploring in here with Tristram, he’d never seen other children playing here, nor teenagers smoking, nor retirees bird-watching. Other parks in other cities were havens for teenagers and derelicts, but Nicholas had never found a beer can or a milk carton in these woods. This was a haunted place. People knew it in their hearts, even if they never thought it in their heads, and stayed away.

For a while, he followed the eerie, backwards-flying form of a dark-haired boy dressed in long shorts that were popular in the sixties. He’d recognised the child from the Tallong yearbook: Owen Liddy. But the sight of Liddy’s terror-split face was too horrible to watch, so he tacked right far enough to avoid the ghost.

He groaned as he saw another.

A small, raven-haired girl emerged from behind the wide, fluted trunk of a fig to slide herself over one tall, finlike root. Pale skin, thin limbs. Nicholas blinked. It was Miriam Gerlic.

His eyes narrowed.

The girl wasn’t being dragged away; she wasn’t wailing in silent dread. She was frowning and picking her way carefully over the obstructing root. And she was carrying her school bag. It wasn’t Miriam at all.

‘Hannah?’

Hannah turned at the sound of his voice, then fell suddenly from sight.

‘Your Aunty Vee’s here, puffin.’

Hannah’s father stood in the doorway of her bedroom. Grey bags like oysters sagged under his eyes and stubble roamed carelessly on his cheeks.

‘Okay, Dad.’

He nodded and stepped away down the hallway. To Hannah, he had turned into an old man overnight: hunched and mumbling and pale.

She listened. Her Aunt Vee’s usually loud and husky voice wrestled with her parents’ exhausted pleasantries. The screen door hissed and slammed shut. Hannah sat up on her bed and set aside her Elizabeth Honey paperback. Mum and Dad were going out. They weren’t telling where, but when Hannah was told she couldn’t come, she figured that they were going to: a) the police station; b) the morgue (which was where dead people were stored); or c) the gravestone shop. Aunty Vee would mind her during their absence.

Aunty Vee was Mum’s younger sister. She was pleasantly round and smoked and swore and was Catholic and kept wondering aloud why Mum wasn’t Catholic any more. The subject of Mother Mary’s Undying Love would come up later; for now it would be hugs, tears and food.

A short while later, Hannah was standing on the front patio with Vee’s hirsute sausage arms wrapped around her, waving as Mum and Dad backed out of the driveway, speaking low and unheard words to one another. When Hannah looked up at Vee, her aunty smiled but her eyes were red and wet. ‘Let’s eat!’ she said.

While Vee busied herself preparing a lunch fit for a circus troupe, Hannah quietly went to the laundry to filch the items on the mental list she’d been compiling all night. Fly spray. Matches. The local newspaper. She looked for anything marked ‘Inflammable’ (which apparently meant the same as flammable, only more flammable) and found a half full plastic bottle of methylated spirits. Then she crept softly through the kitchen for two more items. Vee was near the sink, buttering bread and farting like a Clydesdale, and so didn’t see or hear Hannah float past.

At lunch, Hannah ate sparingly. When Vee quizzed her about why she wasn’t eating, she tried her first gambit. ‘I’m a bit upset,’ she said softly. It worked like a charm. Vee bit her lip and hugged her. ‘Of course you are, of course,’ she said.

Hannah pushed her luck. ‘I didn’t sleep much last night,’ she said. ‘Is it okay if I have a lie-down?’

Vee looked relieved. ‘Absolutely, hon!’

Hannah lay on her bed and read for exactly half an hour, then sneaked into the lounge room. Vee was asleep on the couch, thick ankles demurely crossed, snoring.

Hannah hurried back to her bedroom, filled her school backpack with the purloined bits and pieces, then rolled up her dressing gown and her tracksuit and shoved them in the bed so it would appear to the casual glance that she was still in it.

She slipped out the back door.

It took her less than five minutes to jog to Carmichael Road. She stopped on the footpath opposite the woods, more or less at the same spot where, two days ago, Nicholas Close had stood, reading the sign, watching her. That development sign was now covered in black plastic, and the shroud gave Hannah an odd, cold feeling.

She checked left and right, then crossed Carmichael Road to the strip of tall sword grass. The tall tree line loomed in front of her, waving at her, the wind shaking the leaves in delighted applause at her arrival. Or hissing a warning.

An adult would have hesitated. An adult would have wondered if she were about to undertake an errand of dangerous foolhardiness. She’d second-guess herself; after all, didn’t the police have a confessed killer in custody? She’d wonder how she could possibly have seen a black wave of spiders at her window, working the locks with intelligence that arachnid entomology had never witnessed. She’d curse herself as a coward for doing nothing while her sister was stolen. But Hannah was young and her doubts were not adult but of adults. She knew what she’d seen was true. She knew that she hadn’t imagined the crystal unicorn set to trap her. She was angry for being deceived. She knew things that no one else did, and there was no choice: she had to
do
something. She stepped between the trees, and light fell away.

Walking into the woods gave Hannah the feeling she was sinking underwater; the fiery crackle of wind in high leaves became more and more distant, as if she were dropping into the depths. Shadows became thick and liquid. Spears of sunlight as thin as fishing rods probed down from the high canopy. The only sounds that were sharp were the wet crushing steps of her slip-on shoes on damp leaves and soggy twigs, and her panting breaths that were coming faster and faster. This was hard work, climbing over moss-furred logs and under looping vines. To go ten metres forward, she had to wend and wind another ten around twisted, scoliotic trunks, over hunched roots, under needy, thorny branches. This was going to take a while.

After twenty minutes, she was slick with sweat and exhausted. She brushed wet leaves off a nearby log and sat. From her backpack she pulled a water bottle. As she sipped, she took inventory of her other goods: insect spray, a paring knife with its blade wrapped in Alfoil (so it wouldn’t stab through the sides of the pack), the half-empty bottle of metho, newspaper, matches. Satisfied, she capped her water and slid the pack over her shoulders and pressed on.

She’d lain awake most of the previous night wondering how to kill the giant spider that had taken Miriam. Clearly, it was smart - or at least knew enough about little girls to set a beautiful, sparkling unicorn as bait. It was magical: it had put some sort of charm on the dead bird, and it commanded the smaller spiders. But there was the possibility that the big spider at the window wasn’t in charge, that it was just another lieutenant in the spider army. There could be an even bigger spider - a giant spider like the one that Sam Gamgee fought in
The Lord of the Rings
- and that thought made her tummy tighten. Of course, whatever was in charge might be something else entirely; it might be a witch or a warlock or some sort of vampire that drank the blood of children. Considering these limitless possibilities, Hannah dismissed a dozen weapons, from arrows dipped in insect spray to crucifixes. The only weapon she knew of that killed
everything
was fire. A bomb would have been better, but she didn’t know how to make a bomb. Fire would have to do.

She was tired.

From the outside, the woods appeared to gently roll towards the river, but within, the forest floor rose and fell sharply, and the going was hard. Small but sharply cut gullies wound between massive trunks. Rises were steep, made slippery by the dense carpet of wet leaves. Hannah’s footfalls disturbed beetles, uncovered swollen white grubs, and sent crawling things to scatter for new, damp dark.

Her legs were too short to step easily over the big roots of old, old trees that hooked like enormous sly eyebrows out of the spongy dark ground. Her eyes probed ahead of each step to avoid rocks that lurked under thick caps of sodden leaves. And so she was most way up a steepish slope before she realised that a huge Moreton Bay fig was directly in her path. It was easily four metres wide, and each of its buttressed roots spanned out another six or seven from the trunk and was half a metre thick. The nearest rose high above her head. To move forward, she had either to scramble over one of these tall roots or backtrack. She checked her watch and a sharp twinge of panic raced through her tummy. It was already well after two - she didn’t want to be caught in the woods after dark.

She followed one root away from the tree until it had diminished enough in size for her to get her arms over it. She crooked one elbow over the root. It was as cold and damp as a fish. She hoisted one leg up till she’d straddled it like a hobby horse. She rocked her weight from one hip to the other, and began her slide down the other side when she realised just in time that the ground below fell away sharply. She balanced awkwardly, wondering what to do next.

‘Hannah?’

Her head jerked up at the voice. She caught a glimpse of the man from Carmichael Road, the man who had been there when she woke up in the church, then she overbalanced and fell.

One foot hit the steep, slick ground and slid instantly away. She tried to hold on to the root, but it was so slimy and broad that her fingers found no purchase; her shoulder wrenched sharply and she careened down the slope. Shrubs lashed at her as she tumbled, and her knees and elbows struck evil-edged schist hiding under the mulch. She turned twice before she hit a fallen beech trunk. Her head struck it with a thud. Were the log not decades fallen and soggy with rot, she’d have split her skull open. Even so, the pain was sharp and her elbows and knees were badly grazed.