Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

‘You okay?’ asked Suzette.

Katharine smiled thinly and nodded. ‘You forgot the milk, I see.’

After dinner, the three members of the Close family sat on the lounge and watched the news.

No one said anything as the newsreader reported that Elliot Neville Guyatt, a thirty-seven-year-old cleaner recently moved up from Coffs Harbour, had presented himself at the Torwood Police Station and confessed to the abduction and murder of eight-year-old Dylan Oscar Thomas. The overlay pictures showed a slim paperclip of a man looking thoroughly confused as police escorted him from the paddy wagon into the watch house. Guyatt made no effort to hide his face. He walked as if he were caught in a dream.

Nicholas lay on the creaking single bed in his old room. He was awake, listening to the feminine lilt of his sister and mother talking. The wood walls filtered out the detail of words but left a melody that spoke of shared blood.

His old bed. The family together. Childhood again.

The shops remained the same. The woods remained the same.

Children were still dying.

He was suddenly wide awake.

Elliot Guyatt had confessed to killing the Thomas child, and the body was found in the river, miles from Tallong. Winston Teale had confessed to killing Tristram two suburbs distant, hiding his body at the construction site. Nicholas had always thought his memory of seeing Tristram’s drained, dead body floating past a bad dream, a hallucination brought on by sheer terror.

But Suzette said she saw Tristram after he died, running from Carmichael Road into the woods. And Nicholas himself had seen the Thomas boy’s ghost dragged into the trees. The boys didn’t die miles away. The boys died in the woods.

Nicholas rolled to look out the window.

Suzette had probably reached the same conclusion and dismissed it as irrelevant. So the men killed the children in the woods, rather than out in the streets. What did that mean? Probably nothing. Would it bring them back? No.

Yet, it was disturbing. Disturbing and unsurprising that the woods were a killing place. A small piece in a newly begun puzzle that just seemed to fit with a satisfying click.

He would pull Suzette aside in the morning.

For a long while, he stared at the stars. Without knowing when, he slipped into sleep, and dreamed that gnarled, shadowy hands were carrying him away through dark curtains of silk.

Knocking woke him. His eyes flew open, and for the first time since leaving London he woke knowing exactly where he was. Home.

KNOCK KNOCK.

The rapping of heavy knuckles on wood. Someone was at the front door.

The sea grey of pre-dawn stole between the venetian blinds. Nicholas rolled over and checked his watch. Quarter to six. He licked his dry lips and got out of bed. As he pulled on tracksuit pants, he caught sight of himself in the duchess mirror. A pale man with straw-blond hair, bleary eyes and a distracted expression. The look you saw on shoeless men in tube stations and on sparrow-fingered street-corner preachers — a face you’d give wide berth to because it seemed one ill-aimed word away from crazy. So it’s come to that , he thought: avoiding my own eyes .

He pulled on his T-shirt as he lurched like a newly docked sailor down the narrow hallway toward the insistent knocking.

His mother’s door was shut. Once again, hefty snores came from behind it. Suzette’s door was shut too; from behind it rumbled snores a half-octave higher but equally lusty.

‘How about I get it?’ asked Nicholas.

Twin snores answered.

More knocking. The patient raps of a visitor who knows that someone is home.

Nicholas passed the kitchen. The sky outside was low and pregnant with rain. Who knocks at quarter to six in the morning? Only bad news.

He unlatched the front door.

A man stood there. He was perhaps forty, but his face wore fifty years worth of miles. His suit was expensive but rumpled. His tie was neatly knotted and his hair carefully combed. He’d shaved, but small tussocks of whiskers sat out like reeds in a grey swamp. The skin under his eyes looked as thin as old chicken meat; the eyes themselves were blue and overly bright.

Drugs , thought Nicholas. Good drugs that are more than adequately compensating for sleeping pills. This guy is wired.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked carefully.

He’s lost. He’s trying to get home from a huge night and needs a phone, a cab, a twenty.

But the man said nothing. He simply stared at Nicholas, fighting a smile and winning. The look on his face was. . what? Desperate? Starved? Haunted?

Yes. Haunted.

The man finally spoke. ‘Nicholas.’

Nicholas blinked. The voice was distantly familiar. Then the little smile bobbed again on the man’s lips, a brave boat in drowning seas, and years fell away. Nicholas recognised a face he’d never seen as a man. It was a face he literally used to look up to. A Boye boy.

‘Gavin?’

Gavin grinned. It was a skull’s rictus.

‘Wow. Gavin. You look. .’ Nicholas put out his hand. Gavin looked at it as if he’d never seen an outstretched hand before. After an uncomfortable pause, Nicholas let it fall. ‘Right. Um. Listen, do. . will you come in?’

The smile sank away and the years slipped back onto Gavin’s face like the tide returning. He shook his head, and his gaze on Nicholas was unblinking. He was big, easily six-two, and Nicholas suspected he could move fast. So take it easy. .

‘How are you? How are your parents?’

Gavin didn’t answer. Instead, he looked slowly over his left shoulder and then over his right. Above pine trees in a distant park, a dozen or so crows wheeled and dipped in the grey sky like windblown black ash. Gavin’s movements sent a sudden chill flood through Nicholas’s testicles. That’s exactly what Winston Teale did before he chased Tristram and me into the-

‘Woods,’ said Gavin.

Nicholas stopped breathing. Pins and needles pricked the soles of his bare feet and his neck pimpled cold. He could see past Gavin’s shoulders that the street was empty, not another soul in sight.

‘You’re up pretty early.’ Nicholas wanted it to sound casual, but the words came out cracked, his mouth suddenly dry as sand. ‘Do you want to do this another time? Come over for dinner? Suzette’s up visiting.’

Gavin shook his head slowly, once. Nicholas noticed that he carried in one hand something wrapped in a black garbage bag.

‘I was told you were back,’ said Gavin. His voice was soft. Dreamy. He nodded, as if a subtle milestone had been met.

Nicholas found it hard to drag his gaze back up to Gavin’s face; it was like looking at the sun, painful and dangerous. Gavin was unhooked, a boat adrift in rapids and rushing for the falls — but still afloat.

‘Yeah. I’m back. What’s in the bag, Gavin?’ But Nicholas thought he already knew.

Gavin twisted his head, as if he hadn’t heard the question. He was casting back in time. Remembering. He smiled — another death’s-head grin. ‘You know, Mum had tutors for us both. Tris really didn’t need one. Mum only got him one so that I wouldn’t feel stupid.’

‘You’re a smart guy, Gavin. You were never stupid.’

‘Tris. .’ said Gavin fondly, his voice drifting far away. ‘Trissy was the smart one.’

Nicholas watched the big man stand there, his eyes decades away. Quick! whispered the voice in his head . Shut the door, now!

That instant, Gavin’s eyes flicked and locked on Nicholas’s. A task remembered. ‘I have a message,’ he said.

In a motion so fast and fluid that Nicholas could hardly register it, Gavin pulled a gun from the bag. It was a hunting rifle, sawn off so short that the ragged cut sectioned through the front of its walnut stock. The severed barrel was ugly and raw as an eye socket. What a waste of a good Sako , thought Nicholas, and was instantly dismayed by his reaction. Had it been a snake or a spider, his body’s electric impulse would have been to leap back. But he didn’t live in Baghdad or Los Angeles; fear of guns wasn’t wired into his DNA. Instead, he was offended that a fine gun had been butchered. You fucking tosser , he thought. You deserve to die. A feeling like cold jelly filled his stomach.