Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

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 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.

Nicholas beamed back, delighted.

Why is there a boat here?

‘Shh,’ he hushed himself again. He stepped off the path over the soft, fragrant blanket of green down to the water’s edge, and ran his hands along the boat’s timber flanks. Her white paint was almost blinding after the gloom of the forest. What a beautiful surprise!

Footsteps. Nicholas turned.

Coming down the path was the old woman in the pink cardigan, walking her tiny white terrier — the pair he had seen outside the woods on Carmichael Road so many hours ago. The old woman was speaking quietly to her dog, whose tail wagged contentedly at the praise. She held herself tall, reminding Nicholas of the proud elderly women of Paris, always dressed beautifully, walking with grace. Suddenly, the woman noticed him and stopped in her tracks; she was so startled that she dropped the dog’s lead.

‘Garnock,’ she called to the terrier.

Garnock took a few brave steps towards Nicholas.

This isn’t right. .

‘Shh,’ he reprimanded himself again — he didn’t want this good mood to pass, and here was someone to share it with.

‘Hello!’ he called.

The woman looked anxiously behind her to see if there was anyone coming up the path who she might summon help from.

‘It’s all right,’ called Nicholas.

It’s not all right.

‘I don’t usually see others here,’ said the woman. Her voice was clear and strong. Nicholas could see that she would have been a pretty thing in her youth. Garnock took a few more steps towards him, and his tail wagged cautiously.

Now you have to go , said the voice in Nicholas’s head. It’s not too late if you go now .

He patted the hull of the boat. ‘I just found it myself. She’s a beaut, isn’t she?’

The old lady smiled and nodded agreement, some small relief in her eyes. Still, she watched Nicholas cautiously. ‘She is indeed.’

Garnock was just a couple of feet away now. His eyes were brown and shining, his tail started wagging faster.

Go! For God’s sake, go NOW!

‘What’s her name?’ he asked.

The old lady nodded at the bow. Nicholas followed her eyes. The boat’s name was printed in black on the white timbers: Cate’s Surprise.

Nicholas blinked, and looked back at the woman, a question on his lips.

Garnock jumped, and his teeth sank deeply into Nicholas’s hand.

It was as if a black shroud fell over the world. The trees rushed in, gnarled branches and green-black leaves closing over the sky. The pond drained into itself, drying in an instant to become a choked bowl of wild and vital thorn bushes. The largest and oldest of the trees all leaned in the same direction, as if away from a mighty gale, and the lush elkhorns that nodded from the tree trunks became hanging shards of rotting cloth or harshly bent rusted iron. The boat heaved over on its side, sucking into itself like a collapsing lung, its white paint stripping away to reveal a skeletal wreck of grey, warped boards. The painted name flaked away to different letters: Wynard.

Nicholas tried to turn his head, but it whirled vertiginously and his eyes struggled to focus. He looked down at Garnock the terrier.

The dog’s white coat dissolved away as if by invisible acid, revealing a dark brown shagginess beneath. Its legs cracked and grew, and from its flanks sprouted another four long, cadaverous shanks. Its snout and face split and peeled away, revealing another one, two, four, six unblinking eyes, and its white teeth cohered to become two curved fangs as big as bear claws; wet and sharp as needles.

Nicholas looked at his hand — two ugly, red-circle punctures were bleeding slowly. The world of the dark woods spun. With huge effort, he lifted his gaze to the old woman.

Of all the things, she alone had remained unchanged.

‘How did you enjoy my strawberries?’ she asked pleasantly.

Nicholas’s eyes rolled back in his head and the world went black.

Suzette knocked on the cheap front door of the flat. ‘Nicholas?’ she called loudly, and knocked again.

No sounds behind the door. Crickets chirped in the hibiscus bushes below. From the flat two doors up came the perky jabber of a daytime chat show. Nicholas wasn’t home.

Suzette let out a long breath and sat on the concrete steps. It afforded a view of the monolithic slab side of the building: pale bricks and pale mortar, its only feature being the flat’s street number in pressed metal, the numerals attached to a motif of a Mexican in a sombrero sleeping under a lolling palm tree.

The anger that had been leaking out of her like lava all morning was finally spent, and she was weary. Nicholas had stunned her yesterday afternoon; his dismissal of the rune in Quill’s old door as happenstance left her momentarily unsure what to do. He was out of the house and gone by the time she’d rallied her thoughts, and her confusion had begun to heat into a boiling fury. It was so typical of Nicholas to turn his back on a gift of knowledge and walk away. He’d been like that as long as she could remember, and it made her sick with fury. Everything came so effortlessly to him: he’d never studied and had sailed through school, while she’d had to study with monkish devotion; he’d pick up a pencil and draw with easy flair, while the few times she’d secretly tried to sketch a face or vase, the monstrous results had needed swift abortion; he was born with this blessing of second sight, something she had spent thousands of her free hours reading up on, working on her craft with herbs and charms and signs of earth and water. . and now he was simply walking away from an opening truth, and expected her to do the same, to just pack her bags and go home. She was so furious, so red-eye-blind with anger at him, that she did pack her bags, stumping past Katharine as she huffed from bedroom to bathroom to the telephone where she checked for the next flight to Sydney. .

But she didn’t go.

Her conscience wouldn’t let her. The rune on the health food store door was just what she’d told Nicholas: a blood rune; a dangerous rune. Yes, maybe it was coincidence that they’d found it on the door of an old woman who used to give her the willies, but as her life went on, Suzette believed less and less in coincidence. Was it coincidence that two boys, almost the same age and from the same suburb, were murdered in the same way by different men a quarter of a century apart? She didn’t think so. Quill was certainly long in the ground, but a rune did not die, and Suzette was sure it had something to do with the deaths of Tristram and the Thomas boy. The fact that Nicholas wasn’t in his flat, lolling on the sofa, made her feel that he believed that, too. What was he hiding from her?