Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

‘Jesus Christ!’ Nicholas leapt to his feet and his breath jagged in his throat like a hook.

The girl lay motionless on the track a moment. Her arm lifted a little as she tried to sit. . then her anorak seemed to fly apart. She became a small, violent storm of feathers and red as an invisible train tore over her body, dragging pink flesh and one leg and shards of yellow thirty metres up the track. Then she was gone.

‘You okay?’ asked Suzette. ‘Nicky?’

Nicholas saw his traitorous hand pointing at the track and willed it to fall by his side.

Suzette looked down at the train line, squinting. ‘What is it?’

Nicholas looked around. And there, a flash of daffodil two hundred metres away. The girl in yellow was slowly making her way down the steep slope of Battenberg Terrace, her body whole, her face a smudged thumbprint.

Nicholas’s heart was kicking in his chest.

‘Nothing.’

Suzette frowned sceptically. ‘Uh-huh. .’

Nicholas put his hands in his pockets. He’d only been out of London a few days and he had already lost his poker face. The sun was now resting on roof ridges in the west, and here in the shadows the air had grown cold. The ground beneath the round lily leaves of the nasturtiums was black. He turned his back to the railway station. He didn’t want to see that again.

‘We should go home,’ he suggested.

Suzette’s careful eyes slid between him and the tracks. Then she cocked her head and fixed Nicholas with a hard look.

‘I was in love with him, you know.’

‘Who?’

‘Tristram.’

Nicholas blinked, disoriented by the change of subject. ‘I didn’t know.’ He thought a moment. ‘That’s ridiculous. How old were you? Nine?’

‘Eight.’ She took a breath. ‘I saw him a couple of times.’

‘You saw him more than that. He was over every time his bloody parents wanted a nap.’

Suzette’s eyes were still fixed on him. ‘No. I saw him after he died.’

Nicholas suddenly felt the air grow tight around him. His heart thudded slow, long beats as if his blood had suddenly taken on the consistency of arctic sea-water, just a degree away from becoming ice.

‘Where?’ he whispered.

Suzette looked him in the eye. ‘Running into the woods.’

She got to her feet, dusted off the back of her jeans.

‘Let’s walk.’

They climbed back through the rusty fence and down onto the road. The sky in the west lost the last of its furnace glow and grew purple and dark. Birds hurried to find shelter before the last light was gone. A cold breeze stiffened.

A month or so after Tristram was found murdered, she’d defied their mother and walked down to Carmichael Road. There, on the gravel path through the grass verge, she’d seen Tristram kneeling, picking something up, then running away into the trees. The sight had scared her senseless.

‘I reckon I felt how you just looked,’ she said, smiling thinly. ‘Like you just saw a ghost.’

She watched her brother. His dark eyes were fixed on the cracked footpath. He was motionless. Finally, he spoke.

‘Do you still see them?’ he asked. ‘Ghosts?’

She shook her head. ‘I saw him twice more. I snuck down one afternoon when you were sick, and another time when Mum went to work or something. He did the same thing. Picked something off the path, backed away, ran into the woods.’ She shrugged. ‘But after that, I never saw him again. Or any others.’

She watched him nod slowly. He let out a long breath. He was working up to telling her something.

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘Some books say that puberty either enhances or drowns clairvoyance and second sight, but it wasn’t that with me. Maybe I just had a. . a flash. Either that, or maybe Tristram had reached his proper time.’

‘Proper time? To what?’

‘Die.’ She could see her brother’s face tense as he digested this. ‘That’s what ghosts are, I think,’ she continued. ‘Spirits of people who are killed, or take their own lives, before their. . you know, appointed time to die.’

Nicholas’s eyes were shadowed shells beneath a grim frown.

‘Ghosts,’ he said so softly it was barely a whisper. ‘Can I tell you about ghosts, Suze?’

The words made her heart start to trip.

She nodded.

He took a breath, and then he spoke for a long time.

He told her about the motorcycle crash, and borrowing the phone from the horse-faced couple he hit. About hurrying home to find Cate crooked like a broken exclamation mark, head bent too far backwards over the tub, her open eyes unable to blink out the dust that coated them. About the Yerwood boy with the corduroy jacket and screwdriver. About all the ghosts that silently conspired to send him home. He told her that there were ghosts here, too, including the suicide in the yellow anorak. The sun had sunk below the hills, and lights glowed orange in the houses they passed. The air was faintly spiced with scents of frying meat and onions. He finished by telling her how he’d chased the Thomas boy into the woods two days ago, and lost him at the same place he’d lost Tristram — the shotgun tunnels under the tall, rusted water pipe.

‘Those tunnels full of spiders,’ she said.

Nicholas looked at her, shocked.

‘What?’ she asked. ‘Do you think I never went in there?’

He shook his head.

‘More fool you then,’ she said.

She stopped them outside a blue Besser-block fence, where fading graffiti demanded ‘Free East Papua’ and exclaimed that ‘Fellatio Sucks’. She pushed the back of his head. ‘Here. Let’s have a look.’

She stood behind him and lifted his hair, finding the scar on his scalp. He’d never seen it of course, but he’d felt it. The edge of the concrete step of the Ealing flat had left a lumpy scar a thumb’s length across.

‘You think that’s why I’m seeing ghosts?’ he asked. ‘A clout on the head?’

‘Something started your seeing these things. Maybe it was the shock of losing Cate. Maybe that nasty bump just cleared the plumbing.’ She rapped his head with her knuckle and grinned. ‘When’s my birthday?’

‘My memory’s fine, bloody hell-’

‘When?’

Nicholas rolled his eyes. ‘October thirty-first. Halloween girl.’

She sent him a dark smile. ‘Yes and no. Yes, correct date — and by the way you owe me a present from last year. But, no, not a Halloween girl. Halloween’s different down here. All Hallows Eve. The Celts called it Samhain.’ She pronounced it sah-wen . ‘For us in the south, the end of October is Beltane, the return of summer. Our Halloween is six months opposite.’

She watched Nicholas do a quick calculation in his head. ‘April thirtieth.’

She nodded.

‘My birthday,’ he said quietly.

She nodded again, and bumped his shoulder with her own.

‘You’re the Halloween child. And a child born on Samhain is said to have second sight.’

As they walked, Nicholas felt a lightness in his chest. What did this mean? Was his sister just telling him what he wanted to hear? That they both had some gift — or some curse — to see the dead?

Or are visual delusions wired into our faulty genes?

He felt her eyes on his face, as if she could sense his doubt.

‘You used to have inklings,’ she said. ‘I remember. Like the time you told me not to use the toaster. Mum ignored you and plugged it in, and it sparked and gave her a shock. You just knew, didn’t you?’

‘I’d forgotten about that.’

She quizzed him. That wasn’t the only time he’d had a notion, a gut feeling, scraps of information of things, places, people that really he couldn’t have known.

It was true, though Nicholas had never given it thought. Throughout his life, every few weeks or months, he had uninvited, inexplicable feelings that something wasn’t quite right or that someone was ill or this thing was broken or that thing wasn’t lost but in a mislabelled cardboard box under the house.