The Dead Path (16 page)

He knew without doubt that just a few days ago, Dylan Thomas had seen this same bird on the path.

Nicholas picked up the talisman. He plucked out the feet, pulled off the woven head, and angrily tossed the legs, false head, and body in three directions.

There. Now I’ve touched the bird. Why don’t you come and get me?

He turned and strode through the sword grass toward the woods he knew were waiting.

  A
s he pushed through the tightly packed scrub, tendrils of fog curled in his wake. With mist obscuring everything but the few steps in front of him, there was less of an overwhelming palette of green to assault his eyes and he was drawn to details he would otherwise have overlooked: how close the trunks were to one another; how one tree was armored in bark as dark and thick as a crocodile’s hide, while its neighbor was pale gray and smooth as a girl’s calf; how the carpet of leaves underfoot bled tea-colored water as he squashed it, and how it sucked lightly when he stepped off; how the exposed rocks in gully walls bore spots of pale-green moss rounded like spray can spatters on their tops and black shadows like beards below; how vines curled up trunks like possessive serpents, rose straight like zippers, or clung with their own green claws like headless jade dragons. Some trunks were meters wide—striated tendons in the wrists of straining giants. Some massive beeches had tumbled with time and lay prone like beached whales, barnacled with funguses that reminded him of human ears. Some had fallen and exposed clumps of roots twice a man’s height—colossal, arthritic fingers probing the mist.

As he moved deeper, the fog drew even closer about him and moisture beaded on the fabric of his jumper and jeans. The half-light of misty dawn dimmed further as the dark canopy overhead closed tighter. He walked cocooned in a silent dusk and had to stretch out his arms so he wouldn’t collide with tree trunks that loomed suddenly, their limbs so madly twisted that they reminded him of Mexican catacombs where the dried dead were stacked standing, their leather-and-bone limbs crooked at angry angles.

He was unsure if he’d been walking ten minutes or fifty when he reached the steep embankment that led down to the creek bed and the water pipe. The low cliff where Tris broke his arm. The gully below was thick with fog, and the dark green tops of shrubs poked through it like the moldering heads of drowned people.

He slung the plastic 7-Eleven bag over one shoulder and carefully descended the gully face. At the bottom, he walked cautious steps away from the steep bank until his feet clacked on the stones of the wash bed. Then he turned and followed the dry creek until a dark shape coalesced from the thick fog. The pipe. Its flanks loomed like the hull of some ghost ship. Below the red metal, the twin skull eyes of the tunnels watched him.

He felt his body vibrate with the hard thudding of his heart. He took a breath, feeling the biting harshness of cold air lick his throat, and knelt. From the plastic bag he pulled out a new flashlight and a squat spray can with a plastic lid.

You could just go back,
he thought.
Just go back, never come down here again, never see another terrified ghost, just go back and leave town and get a job in a new office and buy a new flat and ignore the dead and—

“Shh,” he told himself. He couldn’t go back. Something was in there, beyond the pipe. Something that took children. Something that had taken Tristram.

Tristram touched the bird. But it should have been you.

Something that wanted him to come in.

Fine
, he thought grimly.
I touched the bird. Here I come.

He flicked on the flashlight. In the crepuscular gloom of the fog-bound woods, the white-yellow beam did little to calm him. He clenched his jaws and shone the light into the nearest of the twin pipes. What he saw made him reel.

The tunnel’s length, all four or so meters of it, was thick with spiderwebs: some were fresh and shining like silver wire; some were loose and dusky as old shrouds. Among the webs, dotted like black stars in a diseased firmament, were spiders. Thousands of spiders. The shaking torchlight scanned them: some had round, shining bodies with black osseous legs that stroked the air; others had abdomens orange as spoiled juice, swollen thick and looking full enough to pop; some were small and busy, tending webs with legs that moved as delicately as human fingers; others were as big as tea saucers, hairy and fleshy. Some fussed with spindle limbs over the silk-wrapped corpses of their prey or silk-wrapped bundles of their eggs. The torchlight winked off thousands of black, unblinking eyes.

Nicholas felt gorge rise from his stomach.
How did Tristram force himself through there? How did he not go instantly mad being dragged through that?

Then another thought struck him:
Maybe he did go mad. And maybe he was lucky to, considering his bloody fate.

Nicholas swallowed back the peppery bile and took the plastic lid off the can. It was a bug bomb. The illustration on its side showed a variety of cartoon insects clasping their hearts in theatrical death. The can rattled as he shook it. Satisfied, he aimed its nozzle at the pipe mouth, put his thumb on the tab and pressed it down with a plasticky click. Insecticide hissed out as the tab locked on, and he threw the erupting spray can hard into the curtains of web in the pipe. He guessed it traveled nearly halfway into the pipe until the webs snagged it.

He backed away till he could barely see the pipe’s black mouth through the fog. The echoing hiss of the spray in the tunnel sounded low and mean, like the sighing exhalation of some entombed dark god, unhappily woken. The hissing slowed and thinned and died down to a stop.

For a few moments, nothing happened. Then spiders came crawling from the pipe—first in ones and twos, then by the dozen. They rushed out on panicked legs, or staggered out to perform mad pirouettes, or crawled out weakly, stunned. Some curled and perished on the spot. Some scuttered left and right into the woods. Some scrabbled weakly toward Nicholas; he crushed them with his shoe, nauseated by the dark liquids and small, glossy organs that shot from them.

It took fifteen minutes for the exodus of dying spiders to cease. Nicholas checked his watch. It was just after nine thirty. He waited a few more minutes for the poison to finish its killing work, then looked around for a stick with which to clear the cobwebs. He found one as thick as a pool cue and returned to the pipe’s mouth.
They’ll all be lying on the bottom of the pipe. Oh, Jesus.
He hadn’t thought of that. If he’d planned this at all, he’d have bought a disposable pair of plastic coveralls, thick gloves, goggles, and a mask. Moreover, he realized he couldn’t hold the torch, crawl, and clear cobwebs at the same time. He’d have to go in the dark.

He tucked the torch in the back of his jeans, slipped the one plastic bag he had over his left hand, gripped the stick with his right, sucked in a mighty breath, and crept in.

As his body blocked the already thin light, the tunnel ahead fell into instant, sepulchral dark. He whisked the stick in front of him, left and right like a blind man’s cane. It tick-ticked off the sides, echoing like chattering teeth.
Move fast. Don’t breathe.
The first few feet weren’t so bad, but he felt the give of spiny things crushing under his hand and under his knees. And as he went deeper, so became the bed of fallen spiders. His flicking stick grew heavy with web, coated thickly as if with hellish spun sugar from some demented circus sideshow. His knees grew sodden with the juices of squashed arachnids. But what was underhand was worst. The thin bag felt woefully insubstantial as he placed it again and again on the ragged, sometimes shifting bed of spider bodies. He felt the twiggy legs and rounded bulges of the large ones. As his weight shifted onto his arm, it pushed his hand down through a centimeter, then two, then three of inhuman flesh. He vomited. Tears welled and flowed. He sucked in lungfuls of acrid air and filaments of web invaded his mouth. The fumes made him retch again. He scurried forward. The stick, heavier and heavier, failed to clear the curtains of web and they shrouded his face and hair. Dead spiders knocked against his cheeks and eyelids. Those not quite dead clambered up his arms and in his ears. His bagged hand slipped forward and he fell like a horse on ice, his face burying in the hard-soft, dead-alive carpet of spider flesh. He screamed and let go of the stick, propelling himself forward as fast as he could. The circle of light at the other end grew larger and larger. His wet shoes slipped as he scrabbled for purchase, his hands squelched and his sleeves grew soaked. He hurled himself out of the tunnel.

He leapt to his feet and jumped in circles like a mad dog, wiping his hands furiously on his jean legs and clawing at the gray caul over his face and head. His lungs roared and his head swam. His stomach heaved again, vomiting nothing but salty spit. His heart raced and tears poured from his eyes.

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!”

He pulled spiders from his hair and wiped them from his jacket. Some had gone down the front of his sweater and T-shirt, so he jerked his shirt out violently, shaking the spiny cadavers onto the ground. He stopped his rabid dance. His panicked panting slowed to shuddering breaths.

He was through.

  C
lear of the pipe, Nicholas realized he had no plan beyond getting through the spidery tunnels. Without any other clear choice, he began following the rock wash bed of the gully floor.

The woods here were even denser than on the other side of the pipe. Ancient trees conspired together, dark limbs intertwining so closely that it was almost impossible to tell where one ended and another began. Vines with ribbed stalks thick as shins curled up trunks and over one another. The forest floor was an unsteady sea with tall waves of damp roots and deep troughs filled with decaying leaves that smelled as cloying and vital as human sweat. The fog was lifting, yet here it remained as dark as evening, and Nicholas couldn’t see more than five meters ahead before the trunks and curling vines merged to become a thick drapery. No breeze stirred the dark ceiling of leaves overhead.

The streambed underfoot was narrowing. He sensed that he was heading slightly uphill, but the hunched trunks, the fallen trees leaning against each other like drunken titans, and the clutching undergrowth made it impossible to judge. Roots arched over the rolling ground like stealthy fingers. If he could travel straight, he would eventually meet the river. He couldn’t be sure whether the dry watercourse was running straight, twisting left or right, or meandering wildly—it hunted under dark schist and round knobbed elbows of roots.

He was lost.

Worse, he was thirsty and, now that his empty stomach had recovered from the crawl through the tunnel, hungry as hell. As he climbed, the rocks grew sparser and the undergrowth wilder. Leaning trees had been covered in thick curtains of vines so they took the form of elephantine beasts, hulking antediluvian monsters with shimmering hides of shadowy jade. Soon, Nicholas was scrambling, climbing hand and foot over saplings and fallen, rotting trunks hoary with moss. He seemed to reach a low crest, and stopped.

Below, visible through a narrow gap between the tight-packed trees, was a path.

He carefully edged his way down to it, pushing aside thorny shrubs and crawling between close trunks. After much panting and straining, he slid out onto a narrow stony track that wended between the trees. To his left, the path seemed to go uphill; to his right, it seemed to fall slightly. Any sense of direction was long gone, and without a glimpse of the sun, he couldn’t pick north from south. He was trying to decide when a flicker of red caught his eye.

Tucked nearly out of sight behind a tree root off the path was a small patch of strawberries. The plants’ serrated leaves were peppered with tiny fruit each as small as Nicholas’s thumbnail. Seeming to sense that food was near, his stomach growled. He pinched one of the berries off—it was firm but ripe, and deliciously sweet. He knelt and plucked and ate, only stopping when he recalled standing on St. James’s Street eating a large container of strawberries while Cate had a job interview; the runs they gave him an hour later were a loud and painful reminder of the paucity of public toilets in central London.

His belly no longer grumbling, Nicholas regarded the path again. The trees lining the downward slope seemed less tightly packed and sinister, so he headed that way.

Yes, but why is there a
path?

Nicholas grew annoyed with his own arguing voice. This was the easiest going he’d had all morning. He could walk without being scratched, there was a mild breeze, glimpses of sunlit sky winked between the leaves overhead. The woods on either side were actually quite pretty. Elkhorn ferns grew from the trunks of some, their green fronds hanging pleasantly like peacetime pennants. The air was crisp and smelled clean and lively. Was he going mad? He reassured himself by remembering the old adage that only the truly insane never question their sanity. But then, he was in the haunted woods of his youth, following the ghosts of murdered children. So, maybe he was crazy. But whether he was or not, he couldn’t deny that this was a lovely little track.

The path curved as it circumvented first one wide, friendly trunk of a fig tree, and then another, and then straightened again.

As Nicholas stepped around the last trunk, he stopped and stared.

The path kept straight ahead, widening slightly. The woods on each side retreated to allow a clearing. Its gently sloping ground was a carpet of low ferns and guinea flowers; at the bottom of the grade was a fast-running creek that burbled over glistening rocks before its clear waters broke into a wide pool a stone’s throw across. An almost perfect circle of blue sky rode overhead.

But what made Nicholas blink in wonder was the boat.

Moored at one edge of the pond was a wooden sloop. It was, he thought, the loveliest ship he’d ever seen. She wore white lapped timbers, a fresh blue canopy, and waxed hardwood rails. Her style was old, from the century before last, but her proportions were neat and spry, and she sat very prettily parallel to the shoreline. Sunlight winking off the glass portholes of her wheelhouse made her seem to smile and sparkle.