The Darkening (50 page)

If the last spider had been big, this one was huge. Its body was the size of a sheepdog, squat and dense, bristling with sandy brown hairs. It was reared up on six legs; its front two pawed the air, tasting it. A cluster of red eyes stared out from a nest of ugly grey hair. Its fangs shuffled noiselessly.

‘Kill it, Nicholas.’

He raised the gun, and squeezed the trigger.

And as he did, he noticed the straps tucked in the folds where the spider’s tubelike legs met its thorax. Hannah’s knapsack! As the hammer fell, he jerked the gun aside. The blast shook a sudden hole in the bush beside the spider, which jerked in silent pain. As it moved, its horrible appearance melted away, becoming Hannah on her knees, her hands tied behind her back, and a tiny red circle of a single shotgun pellet hole in her calf. Her mouth was gagged with rags.

Nicholas whirled, nauseated that he’d been so stupid.

The other Hannah stood behind him, grinning. She stepped forward lightly and Nicholas felt a sting in his arm. He dropped the gun and blinked. The smiling Hannah held a syringe in her hand and, as she stepped back, her limbs lengthened and her hair grew. Rowena Quill, young and blonde and beautiful, stood in front of him, smiling as only one truly pleased with herself can.

‘Hello, my pretty man.’

36

G
avin was explaining why he’d cheated on her. ‘It’s not because I don’t love you,’ he said, smiling his charming, lopsided, I-can’t-help-being-me grin. ‘What attracts me to them is what attracts me to you. It’s not a choice thing, angel. It’s just what happens. It’s what happened when I first saw you. When I still see you. I want to stop it, I do. But I’m just afraid that if I stop being attracted to other women, I’ll stop being attracted to you, too.’

Behind him, in an airport lounge, sat a group of long-haired, long-legged women, speaking quietly amongst themselves with the sweet whistling of trapped birds. As Gavin fell silent, they all turned to look at Laine. And they all smiled the same pretty, sympathetic smile. Gavin smiled, too, and offered her a pumpkin seed.

‘Laine?’ called one of the pretty sing-song women.

‘What?’ she snapped. She’d intended the word to sound steely and tough, but it came out small and wounded.

‘Laine!’

No; it wasn’t any of the women calling. It was someone else. Someone farther away . . . yet strangely closer. Then she heard the screen door bump shut.

Laine sat suddenly upright in the bed.

The bedroom door was silently swinging open. And into the room stepped one long, bristled leg, placing its hooked foot stealthily on the floor. Then another followed it, moving with completely inhuman fluidity. The legs belonged to a squat, solid spider as large as a fox.

Laine felt her exhaling breath flute down to a whisper as her throat tightened with terror.

At the sound, the spider hunched and adjusted itself with unbelievable speed to face her. Two large, black hemispherical eyes were orbited by six smaller ones, all sitting on a grey-haired bump of a head that would feel, Laine knew, as hard and alien as a bristled watermelon. Between the spider’s two front legs was a pair of fangs, sharply pointed and hard as polished ebony. The fangs curled in, wet themselves on the glands tucked under its crablike mouth, then extended again, glistening wet with poison.

‘Hello, Garnock,’ said Laine with a forced pleasantness that defied her nearness to the cliff edge of total panic.

Her left hand was farthest from the spider, and it crept out from under the bedsheets, hunting for a weapon.

The spider, low to the ground, took an incredibly slow, very careful step forward. It raised itself slightly on its legs and Laine heard a faint hiss from under its thorax as air was sucked into its lungs there. The spider then released it in a whisper that set the hairs on the back of her neck hard.

‘Aaiiide.’

Oh God
, she thought madly.
It’s trying to say my name
.

Her sneaking fingers found the alarm clock. Useless - she could grab it but every chance was that the cord plugged into the wall would stop her swinging it. She kept hunting for the other object she knew was there.

The spider steadied itself on its feet, tensing its legs and reminding Laine deliriously of how a golfer wiggled his feet and hips, positioning himself for a clean swing. Again, she heard air drawn in and released in a controlled hiss: ‘Maaaie maaaiee.’

She understood the bastardised words:
Bye bye
.

Her fingers finally touched what she wanted: the smooth, round steel of a spray can. But as she grabbed, her sweaty fingers slipped and the can clattered across the floor and rolled impotently into the corner.

Laine’s eyes widened.

Garnock’s mandibles parted. A smile. Then it leapt.

But the spider only moved a fraction before it was slammed back down to the floor with a hard ring of steel on wood. Two tines of a pitchfork had speared through its bony shell and pinned it to the pine floorboards.

Katharine turned and retched.

The impaled creature let out a horrible hissing wail, and its horned feet scrabbled against the floor, gouging the polish. Its fangs pistoned up and down like thresher blades. It was pulling the fork out of the floor.

Katharine stepped carefully behind the skewered spider and leaned more weight on the pitchfork handle. Her stomach convulsed and she strained to keep from gagging.

‘It was a dog. It looked like a dog when I stabbed it . . .’

Laine padded quickly across the floor and scooped up the pressure can of insecticide. She glanced over to Garnock.

It was wheezing and straining against the tines. The hairy armour of its exoskeleton was starting to tear, and a puddle of blue haemolymph spread beneath it.

‘I think it’s going to pull itself free,’ said Katharine quickly.

It was true. Though it would kill itself doing it, Garnock was aiming to pull its flesh right through the pinning tines. Laine popped the lid off the spray can. She stood in front of the giant spider and watched its fangs swoon up and down.

‘Bye bye, indeed,’ she whispered, and sprayed insecticide right into the nest of its eyes.

The spider let out a piercing whistle that bubbled in the blue liquid leaking from below it. Its legs pounded a sloshing tattoo on the boards. Laine kept the spray going, saturating the spider’s head, covering the creature in a pungent chemical fog.

‘Come on,’ she whispered, grabbing Katharine’s arm as she slipped past Garnock. It twisted on its impalement and Laine saw its fangs stab the air as she passed. The women hurried down the hall.

‘We should leave that for a while,’ suggested Laine.

‘Yes,’ agreed Katharine. ‘I’ll boil the kettle.’

They were in the kitchen, Laine helping Katharine make tea. Outside, daylight was fading from the sky.

‘When did Nicholas say he’d be back?’ asked Laine as lightly as she could.

Katharine frowned and checked the wall clock.

‘He didn’t.’

The telephone rang. Katharine and Laine glanced at one another. Katharine picked up the phone.

‘Hello?’ she said. As she listened, her eyes stayed on Laine. ‘When?’ She nodded. ‘Is anyone there going to . . . ? Okay. Thank you.’ She cradled the receiver. ‘Reverend Pritam Anand died today. Heart failure.’

Laine set down the crockery as a shiver of understanding went through her. Pritam was dead. Garnock had come for her.

Quill would be after Nicholas.

He must know that.

‘The fool,’ she whispered. ‘He’s in the woods.’

37

S
mall, shifting gems of woad winked through the high, wind-harried leaves. Evening’s fast fingers were drawing velvet across the sky.

Nicholas came awake, slowly and painfully, as if being thawed from a block of black and acidulous ice. At first, he thought he was on fire, and the flickering yellow lights at the corners of his eyes were his limbs aflame. But as he worked blood into his fingers and limbs, he realised the pain was just the agony of pins and needles.

A faint whistling. An old tune, bittersweet, mournful and thin, was barely audible above the wind troubling the eaves.

Nicholas lay on the floor. He could just see out a clear window: trees almost black with approaching night masked all but the tiniest glimpses of bruised evening sky. Everything shifted, in and out of sharpness. His stomach felt ready to let go its contents, and he swallowed back salty bile. He tried to sit, but sharp pain in his wrists and ankles stopped him spreading. He was well tied with ropes.

He rolled a few degrees, wincing at the bright potsherds of pain in the bigger muscles of his legs and arms.

Quill sat on an old oak rocking chair before a small iron stove, staring at the flames flickering behind the black-toothed grin of the stove door, whistling through her grey prune lips. As the firelight shimmered, so did her appearance. One moment her skin was ancient and sagging, pale and deeply scored as drought-cracked earth, but when the flames rose and shadows played across her, Nicholas saw the clear skin and gold hair of young Rowena Quill. Young, ancient; haggard, beautiful. Dark brown eyes, now black, now brown, reflecting red, locked on the flames. Quill’s tune was soft and came from far away and long ago. She seemed to feel Nicholas’s eyes on her and her whistle fell to a sigh.

‘Awake?’ she asked.

Nicholas rolled a little more. He lay on clean wooden floorboards that smelled of pine oil. The room was a cosy mouthful of shadows: it was panelled in dark wood, but neat. A small cedar table stood on a rug with a single chair keeping company. A curtain to a toileting room was held back by an embroidered sash. A tall pine dresser as thin and stately as a butler held some painted dishes and glazed figurines. Another curtain, this one of lace that reminded him too much of spider web, hid all but the shyest glimpse of a trimly made brass bed with a floral counterpane. At the far end of the room he lay in, the floorboards were cut away in a circle. The ring was lined with neatly mortared stones: a fire pit in which coals glowed dully. On the far side of the pit, a folded blanket, kneaded and pressed by the weight of a pet - Garnock, he guessed - but there was no sign of the monster.

‘Yes,’ he replied, barely recognising the dry rattle of his own voice.

Quill nodded, and looked at him.

Again, Nicholas had a vertiginous feeling of seeing her through idling water, or of a hologram viewed in passing: her features swam in the fickle firelight, vacillating between old and young, hideous and beauteous. Only her expression remained fixed and cold.

He flexed an arm. The rope bit into his wrist.

‘Where is Hannah?’ he asked.

Quill rocked. ‘Hush.’

As she moved to and fro, in and out of shadows, her twin selves waxed and waned. Behind her, through the window, the last of the day’s colour bled from the sky.

‘You can’t—’

‘I said, HUSH!’ she commanded, and her voice seemed to rouse the flames behind the stove grate. The room danced. She half-rose from her chair, and the young Rowena Quill, pale and blonde and terrifyingly beautiful, leaned forward, rage sparkling in her dark eyes. Then she caught and reeled in her anger and sat back down - her skin rippled again into leathery furrows. She folded her hands together, watching him.

‘You think you know,’ she whispered, ‘but you can’t know.’ She looked back at the flames. As she rocked, Nicholas noticed something on the wall behind her. It was a calendar of sorts, but made of wood, with moveable squared pegs plugged into holes like a board game belonging to some Victorian-era child. But the pegs were marked with strange symbols: stylised seasons, runes, phases of the moon. The board had an elaborately carved frame; at its top, staring through hooded eyes as black as wells from a face of oak leaves, was the Green Man.

‘I have so much to tell. So much,’ Quill whispered. ‘So many stories. So many years.’ She spoke so quietly, her lips hardly moving, that Nicholas wondered if he was dreaming her voice in his still-swimming head. ‘Can you imagine my delight when I learned from your mother that you were a Samhain child?’ She pronounced the word as Suzette had:
sah-wen
. A word lush and full. Quill turned her eyes again to Nicholas. ‘A special child. A child with the sight. And you
do
have the sight. I can see it in your eyes. A gravedigger’s eyes. A stomach full of sadness to match mine.’

The old woman was suddenly gone and the young Rowena Quill sat in the same dress, its collar loose enough around her pale shoulders to show the curve of her breasts below. Her lips were red as blood. Then a log cracked in the fire, and the old woman was back in the chair.

Nicholas stared. ‘Then why did you try to kill me?’

Quill watched him for a long moment. ‘Oh. I never did.’

‘You set a bird for me,’ he said. It was hard to talk, his own weight pressing on his ribs. ‘As you did for Hannah. And God knows how many other children.’

Anger flared freshly in her eyes, but was hidden away just as fast.

‘But never for you. The one you found was for your friend, and it found him sure as sure. With your help, in fact. I had Gavin Boye tell you a wee fib, to entice you here.’ She winked - a wrinkled sphincter. ‘You saw it for what it was, not the trinket I wanted seen. You saw a dead bird. Your blond gossip saw a lovely tin hussar. But it was never for you, Nicholas Close. I wanted you full grown.’ She looked back at the warmth of the fire. ‘That’s why I asked Him to send you back.’