Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

He berated himself. Nicholas Close had undergone trauma. I should have been more sympathetic , he thought. Tomorrow, clear of this awful headache, he’d call the man and apologise. But as for child murders. . there was no way he would upset the Right Reverend with talk of cult killings.

He switched off the outside light.

Suzette sat in a silent simmer the entire drive back from the church to Lambeth Street. Nicholas pulled up the hire car. Rain pattered on the roof.

‘You are your own worst enemy, you do know that,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘Cate used to say that.’

Suzette blinked. He hadn’t said it for sympathy; it was true. Cate had often chastised him for acting before he thought things through. But the mention of Cate turned down Suzette’s thermostat just a little.

‘She was right. What did she ever see in a twit like you?’

He shrugged. It was a mystery he’d never be able to clarify.

Suzette opened her door. ‘Coming in to see Mum?’ she asked.

He begged off; his mother’s forced pleasantness so soon after the defensive hostility of Pritam Anand would give him the bends. He agreed to meet Suzette the next morning for a decent breakfast at the cafe near the railway station, and make a plan for visiting Plough amp; Vine Health Foods. He waved, watched her hurry across the front yard and through the form of Gavin Boye. The sight made his stomach tighten. He looked quickly away and drove off.

By the time he’d parked outside his flat on Bymar Street, the rain had dropped to a steady drizzle. He was halfway up the concrete stairs when he stopped. What was inside? Frozen pizza and television channels overladen with half-baked reality or over-cooked comedy, all broadcast with mephitic monotony. A sane and solid bedrock where north was north and home was safe and marriages lasted. . the frippery of evening television made a mockery of the unpleasant things he’d learned today.

What was out here? Night. Shadows. Questions.

Garnock?

Nicholas shuddered. But he’d been bitten twice by the spider and he was still fine.

Fine? My dear boy, this is hardly fine.

He thought the best thing he could do was go inside, find as much alcohol as he could and get roaringly, disgustingly, forgetfully drunk.

Yet he didn’t want to go inside. His feet were anxious to move. He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and walked back down the stairs and onto the street.

The rain finally petered out and a wind had invited itself to shift the air, turning it cold and nudging the black tops of trees. Nicholas was angry with himself. It could have gone so much better with Pritam. Suzette was right. And now he’d alienated a person who felt like a man who could be trusted. Nicholas couldn’t blame the reverend. Spoken aloud, his theory on the murders was a fabulist’s: the stuff of nineteenth-century fairy tales where endings weren’t happy and evil was as powerful as good. A woman a hundred and fifty years old killing little boys and girls to stave off her own death and, for some reason, to keep her dark woods whole.

Woods. Floods. Spiders. Church.

How had everything gone so wrong so fast? Four months ago, he and Cate had had a life to be envied. Was that the problem? That they’d had the gall to be truly happy? Had they offended the gods by flaunting their pleasure with their simple plans and simple love? One motorcycle trip. One ladder. One phone call. Halloween child. Samhain child.

Church. Green Man. Walpole Park. A face wreathed in leaves.

One fall down cement stairs and a day world becomes a night world. The dead walk unmollified, doomed to mark time while some cosmic starter gun fires, reloads, and fires again and again. . Cruel. Cruel.

They saw him, the dead. And they knew he could see them; they watched him. As some respite from their own morbid television re-run performances, perhaps they looked to Nicholas for help. But he couldn’t help them. Nor could they teach him. This isn’t like some TV show where the gold-hearted clairvoyant heals the departeds’ suffering and sends them on their way. No; this is excruciating impotence. This is jumping all the way to the end of the book and finding the last chapter has been torn out and lost. Cruel.

Why hadn’t he died in the bike crash?

Why had Cate died instead?

Why hadn’t Gavin shot him?

Nicholas stopped. He was at the corner of Lambeth Street. If he turned up it, in two minutes he’d be with his mother and Suzette. But he could feel no answers waiting there.

He walked on.

Another block and he reached the corner of Airlie Crescent.

Without thinking, he let his feet change direction — just as he used to let his hands turn the wheel of his van when he trundled through narrow-laned English villages hunting for knick-knacks. He strode up a shadowy footpath he hadn’t walked in two decades, in and out of tiny pools of streetlight, to stop outside number seven.

The Boyes’ house.

It lay watching from within a nest of tall laurel trees, which hissed disapproval at his arrival. Though the house was, to his adult eyes, smaller than he remembered, it was still huge — a looming colonial with deep verandas draped with filigreed ironwork that had greyed with neglect and hung between posts like cobwebs. The hedges had rambled and shrubs were creeping out to reclaim the yard. Dim lights shone within; a brooding Halloween pumpkin.

Nicholas entered the yard and mounted the wide wooden steps to stand outside the lattice doors. He rang the doorbell.

Here was the landing that he and Tristram had dared each other to jump off, commandoes from a C-47. And Nicholas, to his credit, had jumped, albeit pale and terrified. Tristram had jumped whooping. Tristram had been the brave one.

Across the shadowed veranda, the dark, glossy front door opened a crack and Mrs Boye squinted at him through the gap. Her white hair spilled like a judge’s wig around her dressing-gowned shoulders — she could have stepped from a scene of Shakespearean mania. Her eyes narrowed.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s Nicholas, Mrs Boye. Nicholas Close.’

Mrs Boye set her lips. ‘Oh, Nicholas. I’ll tell Tristram you’re here. But I don’t want you two yelling about the yard! Mr Boye has had a very full week.’

Nicholas thought the better of arguing with her.

‘Thanks, Mrs Boye.’

‘Tristram!’ she called. ‘Tristram Hamilton Boye? Gavin, where is that brother of yours?’

The old woman walked back into the house, shutting the door behind her. Again, Nicholas was alone on the steps. Why am I here? Avoiding my own mother. Avoiding my sister. Avoiding sleep. A minute passed, and no one returned to the door. Nicholas gave up, and was halfway down the stairs when he heard the front door open again.

‘Hello?’ A younger woman’s voice. He turned.

Laine Boye’s hair was dripping wet and she held a bathrobe closed with one hand.

‘It’s Nicholas Close, Mrs Boye.’

‘I can see that,’ said Laine. Her face was in shadow. ‘Can I help you?’

He walked slowly back up the stairs. ‘Yes. Well. . I just was walking, and happened to be. .’

He watched her watching him. She was barefoot, drenched, even thinner than when he saw her last. She held her chin up and out, her head cocked.

‘I’m sorry to come unannounced, Mrs Boye, but. .’

He felt his hand close around something in his pocket. He pulled it out. Something silver and small rested on his palm.

‘I found Gavin’s cigarette lighter. At home. I thought. .’

He held out the Zippo.

Laine took a half-step back, as if the sight of the lighter offended her. Again, Nicholas noticed the colour of her eyes. A seashell grey; an equivocal colour that could be contented or angry, serene or melancholy.