Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

Tristram was being carried past, cradled in large, dark hands. The boy’s naked limbs were starkly white in the stygian gloom, swaying loosely. His head lolled back too far, his fulvous hair streaked with something darker. A wedge of darkness divided the white of his throat. Then Nicholas caught a glimpse of bone.

He tilted his head to see who carried Tristram, but the world slipped off its axis, heeled and fell. . He retched again, and his eyes rolled back in his head.

He woke a second time to feel tears on his cheeks.

No. Not tears. Rain. Drops clattered on the canopy of leaves overhead, coalesced, and fell in heavy, cold dollops.

Nicholas rose to unsteady feet, and, arms outstretched in a pose that, had he been able to see himself, would have reminded him horribly of the man who had pursued them and, hours later, had carried Tristram dead from the woods, began shuffling his way home.

Four hours later, he was wrapped in his mother’s arms. After seeing her brother was home safe, Suzette had curled on the sofa and fallen asleep. Police cars were parked out front, their blue lights coruscating sapphires in the downpour. A bath, and a policewoman with his mother inspecting his head, his neck, his penis, his bottom. Questions, questions, questions. Did he know the man who chased them? What colour was his car? Did he say anything while he chased them? Was he bearded or clean-shaven? Tris’s parents sat with Gavin in the next room. Mrs Boye sent hollow glances through the doorway at Nicholas, as if by the intensity of her concentration he might suddenly transform into her youngest son.

The Boyes left. The police left. The kettle boiled. Sweet tea. Bed.

And, through it all, rain.

The search of the woods for Tristram Hamilton Boye was postponed due to the unseasonably heavy rain. As it turned out, a search was unnecessary: the Frankenstein’s monster man told police where to find the child.

Nicholas sat rigid beside his mother watching the news. A television reporter described how Winston Teale, second-generation owner of furniture retailer Teale amp; Nephew, had presented himself at Milton Police Station and told the desk sergeant where they could find the body of the missing Tallong child, Tristram Boye. The television flashed images of a small lump covered in a sheet being wheeled away from a demolition site not a kilometre from the police station, two suburbs from Tallong.

A week later, Katharine Close made Nicholas wear a tie for his court appearance. All through the hearing — including when the prosecutor asked Nicholas to point out the man who had chased him and Tristram on 1 November — Nicholas watched Winston Teale. The man no longer looked terrifying. He seemed smaller. His eyes shifted like caught mice in a cage, as if he couldn’t quite believe that he was in the docks of the Magistrates’ Court. And when Teale looked at Nicholas, there wasn’t a gram of recognition. He seemed even more confused by his own words during questioning.

‘You killed Tristram Boye?’

‘Yes.’ Teale’s voice was that of a smaller man.

‘How?’

‘I. . I believe I cut his throat.’ He explained that he had used a carpet knife from his warehouse.

‘Why did you kill him?’

Teale blinked, frowning. The courtroom was so silent that Nicholas heard a train horn sound at the distant railway station.

‘Mr Teale?’ urged the magistrate.

‘I don’t remember.’

‘And transported him to the lot on the corner of Myner Road and Currawong Street?’

‘Yes.’ Teale’s voice was unconvincing.

‘How?’

Again, Teale shook his head. ‘My car. The boot of my car, I think. Yes. .’ Teale shrugged and gave an apologetic smile.

Nicholas felt eyes on his neck, and looked behind.

His mother was watching him, a frown line dividing the brow between her eyes. Her lips smiled, but her eyes kept watching.

Winston Teale was convicted of murder and deprivation of liberty, but hanged himself with his shirt the night before he was due to be sentenced.

Nicholas had no more cause to jump the back fence and run past Mrs Giles on his way to visit the Boyes.

Cyclone season came and its hail-teeth winds blew away newspapers carrying the photo of his murdered friend.

One school year finished. The river flowed brown. The city sighed a mournful puff of car fumes and stale perfume and electric train ozone, then shrugged her steel shoulders and braced for her footpaths to be stamped upon by New Year’s drunks and her spiry hair stained bright by fireworks.

Time ticked on.

Katharine Close forbade her two children from ever again walking past the Carmichael Road woods.

2007

Nicholas watched his younger sister alight from the taxi, her chatty, white smile winking at the cabbie unloading her bags. He let the blinds fall and sank on the bed. Suzette hadn’t brought her husband on this trip to see her sad widower brother, nor her children. I’ll be nice , he decided. Answer her questions. Accept her sympathy. Send her home tomorrow.

‘Your sister’s here!’ called Katharine brightly.

‘I know!’ called Nicholas in matching tone.

Rattling of the latch, the birdsong of greetings and compliments, rustling of plastic bags, the friendly thump of footsteps. Then Suzette was in the doorway, arms folded.

‘Get out of my room.’

The last time he’d seen her was at his wedding in Osterley Park. Her hair was longer, but she was still tall and pale and pretty, with a stance like a bouncer.

‘No.’

‘It’s my room.’

‘Not any more.’

‘I’ll tell Mum.’

‘Then you’d be a dirty little dob artist.’

‘MUUUM!’ she yelled, as brutally as a cheated fishwife. ‘Tell Nicholas to get out of my room!’

‘Nicholas, let your sister have her room back,’ called Katharine. The smile in her voice suggested she enjoyed this old game.

Nicholas sighed and got to his feet. He walked up to his sister. She grinned. He kissed her cheek. She grabbed him and squeezed him. He found himself sinking into the hug. She rubbed his back.

‘Dear, oh dear,’ she said.

Suzette felt him gently release himself from her hug, watched him turn his face away and suggest that while she unpacked he might ‘make some fucking tea or some shit?’, then he was down the hall. The room felt hardly emptier without him. She hadn’t expected him to look so. . gone.

She stood in her old bedroom a moment, trying to reconcile the thin, insubstantial man with the voice she’d heard on the phone just a week ago. He had sounded so fine, so balanced and normal, that no alarm bells had rung. Suzette chastised herself. She prided herself on being sensitive to people, to being good at reading faces, decrypting moods and deciphering subtle expressions — yet this huge lapse had occurred and she’d missed her own brother slipping over that twilit border into a dark and alien place. How? He’d sounded so reasonable on the phone from London. No, don’t come to the funeral. She’s gone. Thanks, but Nelson and Quincy need you there. Cate’s folks are looking after me. I’ll be fine. Was he that good a liar? Or did he just say what she wanted to hear, absolving her of the need for that exhausting flight and the eviscerating drain of a funeral?

She lifted her suitcases onto the single bed. The springs let out a familiar squawk, recognising their old sleeping mate. She unzipped the larger case and pulled out her toiletry bag and make-up purse.

She’d failed. She and her mother both. Even before Cate’s accident, he’d had enough death for one lifetime. Now he looked like death himself.

‘Tea’s made!’ called Katharine from the kitchen, amid the staccato ticking of cutlery on china.