Stephen Irwin: The Darkening

Dylan Thomas was being dragged by an impalpable force, his fair hair streaming over his pale face as he flew between tree trunks. Where the sun hit him, he glowed brighter, like a dust mote caught in a spotlight.

Nicholas strained to keep up. Already, the sharp brass pain of a stitch blared in his side and his breaths were raggedly insufficient. When was the last time he’d run like this? Years. He should stop, turn around, go home. . but the sight of the dead boy flickering between the trees ahead kept him running.

The woods quickly grew thicker, the moist ground between the trunks of brush box and devil’s apple crowded with saplings and lantana, lush vines, fallen branches and spider webs glistening coldly with droplets.

Ahead, the boy’s arm pointed straight as a compass, and his body whipped behind it, flailing hopelessly. Yet his dark eyes were resigned. They were locked on Nicholas.

Nicholas’s breaths came fast and hard. He was running as fast as he could. His heavy feet churned through an ankle-deep gruel of wet, rotting leaves. His shins fouled on moss-thick roots. Scrabbling branches scratched his face and slapped him with dark, prickling leaves. Parasitic vines, as thick as wrists and mottled with grey fungus, looped like fallen question marks, lurking and ready to strangle. The wide, striated trunks of native elms and ancient figs were only arm spans apart, and the canopy overhead grew closer and tighter until it was almost solid and only tiny sapphires of sky winked into the thick emerald gloom below. It was as dark as dusk. The damp air was cold enough to burn the back of Nicholas’s throat.

The distance between him and the boy was growing. Nicholas ran harder.

The Thomas boy’s face was a bobbing flurry. His small free arm scrabbled at trees, reaching silently at damp, green-flecked trunks. He flew up a steep, shaly slope.

Nicholas’s lungs burned as he strained to follow. What would he see when the boy finally stopped? Him struggling? Pleading? Crying for his mother as his invisible killer made him kneel and his white throat opened up? Would he find Tristram, his face set hard as a knife came from behind?

Would he find the murderer himself?

Nicholas suddenly felt sick. He had no plan. What if he ran into some makeshift camp in the middle of the woods, straight into a cold-eyed man with a knife on his belt and a gun in his hands?

You’ll end up as dead as the Thomas boy. Dead as Tristram.

That thought in mind, Nicholas crested the rise — and the ground beneath fell away into space.

He barely stopped himself going over into a sharp gully. His arms pinwheeled a moment, then he found his balance and took a careful step back from the brink. Beyond, the ground fell sharply several metres to a narrow, stony creek bed. He caught his breath and looked around.

The Thomas boy had vanished.

He felt disappointment riding a wave of guilty relief that he wouldn’t need to see the boy die. He could leave, able to tell himself he did try. And at home, with time and distance between him and these sunless trees, he could convince himself never to come here again.

Traitor. Coward.

‘Shut up,’ he whispered.

He turned to go.

But as he did, his foot hit a sly rock wet with moss and shot from under him, out over space. His body followed an instant later. . and he fell. He tumbled down the steep gully face, arms flailing, trying to stay upright. Angry branched saplings slapped him for his clumsiness. He hit the gully floor with a sodden crunch, his impact blunted by a wet and tangy clump of native ginger.

His panting breaths were loud in the silence. He awkwardly got to his feet. Both his palms were scratched and bleeding. His upper lip was wet — his fingers came away red. A little blood, but nothing broken.

The air down here seemed even colder, and even denser with trees. The narrow creek bed was the only place where no plants grew. In the half-light, the rocks and stones of the dry stream stood out like bones protruding through flesh. The gully was suddenly familiar. Nicholas nodded. It had been a quarter-century, but he knew where he was. He knew what lay ahead if he followed the uneven creek bed.

The pale, rounded stones clacked nervously underfoot. The larger ones looked like skullcaps, as if this were a road of the dead.

And that’s just what it is .

The shadows behind the trees here seemed deeper, more solid, as if something lurked there, something waiting and patient. Hungry.

We were running. Tristram and I were running for our lives. This is where we parted. This is. .

Then Nicholas saw it.

Almost masked by the mossy trunks of booyong and red ash was the huge water pipe. It was almost three metres in diameter; its steel flanks were rusted to a dark red and it sat on a green patinated concrete footing half a metre thick. It ran perpendicular to the creek bed, maybe seven or eight metres in each direction, before it was swallowed by blood vine and silver-furred star nightshade. If he were to tap its dark, rusty curve, it would ring hollow and mournful as an oubliette.

This is where we left each other , he thought. Tristram and I. His mouth was dry. The remembered taste of terror was as strong as alum.

Where the hulking pipe crossed the rocky stream bed, its ancient concrete foundation was deeper. Two parallel tunnels, each almost a metre wide, pierced the concrete foundation like dark nostrils.

Nicholas stopped, lungs still working hard to reclaim the oxygen he’d spent in the frantic chase. His panting was the only sound. No wind shifted leaves. No bird called. No insect chirped.

The pipe, he could see, was too high to climb. It ran who-knew-how-far into the woods in each direction. The only way to pass beyond it was to go under, through the narrow tunnels.

He walked up the creek bed closer to the pipe, and his footsteps castaneted stones together; the sound echoed in the shotgun tunnels like the cavernous clicking of some dead giant’s teeth.

He knelt.

The twin tunnels ran right through the concrete base of the pipe, four metres or more. They were as dark as night, but he could just make out circles of light at their far ends. But those circles were dimly shrouded and imperfect. Black shapes moved across them, roughening their edges and peppering them with little shifting silhouettes.

Spiders.

Both tunnels were thick with webs and spiders. And whatever happened to the dead boys happened on the other side.

Nicholas got to his feet, turned around, and started back down the creek towards the gully cliff, heading back to Carmichael Road.

For the second time in his life, the spiders had beaten him.

NOVEMBER 1982

It was Sunday morning, and Nicholas and Tristram were deep in concentration, hunkered in patches of sunlight on the hardwood boards of the Boyes’ front veranda. They had set up two enormous opposing ramps made from Tristram’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of orange Hot Wheels racetrack. Every so often, the boys would look up from their labours and grin at one another. They were getting ready for one hell of a car crash.

Tristram and his family lived in the street behind the Closes, in (if you asked Katharine Close) a palace of a house. Nicholas would jump the Closes’ back fence (a rickety line of perennially damp hardwood palings held together by a thick crest of trumpet vine), run through Mrs Giles’s yard, then up Airlie Crescent to the enormous house at number seven.

The Boyes had moved in two and a half years ago.

Nicholas and Tristram became friends. Tristram would short-cut through Mrs Giles’s at a quarter to eight every school morning, and he and Nicholas would begrudgingly escort Suzette to school. Imagining that he and Tristram were her bodyguards, ready to pounce on would-be attackers or leap in front of assassins’ bullets, compensated for her girlish chatter about love spells and how smart bees were and bar graphs.