Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

Pritam looked up at the old man. Hird was staring at the photograph. His face was white and his hand shook with a palsy.

‘John?’

Hird looked at Pritam and shook his head slowly.

‘Oh, dear,’ he said quietly.

Then he dropped to one knee, and slumped onto the floor like a shot beast.

‘John!’

Pritam ran to the old man. His breaths were shallow and fast, and his mouth formed silent, unknowable words. Pritam scrambled for the telephone.

The rain had finished, and the clouds were leaving like concertgoers after the final curtain. A beautiful night: chill and clear, moonless; the sky was a dark glass scrubbed clean and waiting.

The suburb of Tallong eased itself to sleep. House lights switched off one by one, two by two, by the dozen, until it seemed only the bright pearls of streetlamps strung their beads around the dark folds of the slumbering suburb. The narrow roads were glossed with the rain, and tiny streams chuckled in the gutters and fell with dark gurgles into storm-water drains to rush underground towards the nearby river. No cars disturbed the stillness. Only the trees sang softly their night-breeze song, whispering.

The woods were all shadow and moist as private flesh.

At their heart, a fire flickered. In a cottage that had been long built even before the suburb’s old Anglican church had been started, flames licked fallen twigs in a stone-lined fire pit. The fire cast tall, thin shadows that jerked and clawed up the timber walls as if desperate for escape.

Over the flames hunched an old woman. Her withered lips moved, but her words were soft; intended, perhaps, for the flames, or for something unseen already listening for her offer. Her hands, more like bone than flesh, moved quickly. In the uncomforting flicker of the hungry flames: a flash of silver, a splash of dark liquid, the ash of something crumbled through deft fingers. Then a final item, and the old woman’s hands slowed and moved with care. Tweezered in her skeletal fingers, a few long hairs joined by a small patch of blood-crusted skin. In went the hair and skin.

Her lips moved again.

The fire rose.

Outside, a chill wind grew, as if to carry across the dark, sighing treetops, along the empty streets and into the slumbering suburb something urgent and baleful.

Instead of being welcomingly warm, the sunlight felt harsh and brittle. Nicholas squinted against it as he watched Suzette speak on her telephone. He was exhausted. Even thinking about the simple choice — whether to stand and close the greasy curtains, or sit here squinting — was debilitating; the distance across the room could have been a thousand kilometres. Just too far.

Suzette finished her call and looked at her brother. There were bags the colour of soot under her eyes. She’d aged ten years in a night.

‘Nelson has a fever,’ she said.

They had talked about this possibility for a half-hour over tea this morning. She’d risen from her deep, unnatural sleep and her hand went to her raw patch of scalp. Nicholas had argued that she must have lost the clump of hair scrambling away from Garnock. She disagreed, and stated plainly that the dog — and she said the word ‘dog’ the way most people said ‘cancer’ — had wrenched it out right after it surprised her with the bite.

‘It wasn’t sent to hurt me,’ she explained with a smile. ‘It was sent for my hair. She’s going to hex me.’

And not a minute after she’d said those words, her mobile phone rang. Bryan was calling with news that their son was suddenly ill.

Nicholas and Suzette sat silent for a while.

‘Bryan’s taking him to the twenty-four-hour clinic in Glebe,’ said Suzette, finally. She licked her lips. There was more she wanted to say, but wouldn’t.

‘You have to go home,’ said Nicholas.

For a long while she stared at her hands, saying nothing.

‘How sick is Nelson?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is she. .’ Nicholas hesitated, but there was no easy way to phrase it. ‘Is she trying to kill him?’

Suzette thought about this, then shook her head. ‘I don’t think that’s her plan,’ she said, and looked up at Nicholas. ‘She’s dividing us.’

He nodded.

‘But you can look after him? Nelson?’

‘If it came out of the blue, maybe not. But since I know this sickness is. . an attack. . yes. I think so.’ She couldn’t meet his eyes. ‘But I have to be there.’

‘I know.’

‘She’s afraid of us,’ she said.

Nicholas snorted. ‘She has no need to be.’

He produced the telephone book and hunted for the airline’s listing.

‘We know more about her than anyone else in a century and a half,’ said Suzette, turning one hand over. The puncture marks were healing remarkably fast and already looked days old. She touched them uneasily.

Nicholas imagined little Nelson a thousand kilometres away, face slick with sweat and turning fitfully as he dreamed of Christ-knew-what. Nothing pleasant, he was sure of that.

‘She’s halved us in one easy move, Suze. If you think she’s afraid, you’re an idiot. She’s just playing.’ He slid the open phone book towards her.

Suzette stared at it a moment, then picked up her phone.

Nicholas shut the cab door. His sister wound down the window.

‘Show me,’ she said.

He unzipped the front of his hoodie, revealing the burnished brown of wood beads. Suzette nodded approvingly. She looked into his eyes.

‘I don’t know, Nicky.’

He drove his hands into his pockets. ‘I’ll keep you posted.’

‘Okay.’

She spoke to the driver and the cab pulled away into the bright street and soon became a winking spot of yellow too bright to watch.

Katharine nodded while Suzette rushed around the house collecting her suitcase, her make-up bag, her toiletries bag, her spare shoes. Outside, the cab horn tooted again. Katharine had swallowed not a word of the tripe Suzette had dished up about her and Nicholas having a few too many Jagermeisters last night and forgetting to tell Katharine she was crashing there at the flat.

I may be getting long in the tooth , she thought, but I can still tell the difference between panic and hangover . The way Suzette was rushing around like a dervish, the only drug in her veins was adrenaline. All that rang true was that Nelson had come down with something.

‘Okay. That’s everything,’ said Suzette, pulling her hair back behind her ear.

‘Great,’ said Katharine. It was ridiculous. Nicholas was like his father — strange and handsome and flighty — but Suzette was supposed to be like her . Grounded. Sensible. Why were those two still keeping secrets like children? Why had Suzette flown out of the house like a bolt from a crossbow yesterday as soon as talk turned again to Mrs Quill? She was tempted to march to the porch, throw the cabbie twenty bucks and dismiss him, sit her daughter down and demand an explanation.

And do you think she’d tell you? Would you tell her? Have you told her everything?

No. No. And no.

The cab horn beeped again, longer and more insistent. Suzette wheeled her suitcase out of the room and kissed Katharine on the cheek.

‘Gotta go.’

Katharine nodded.

It seemed to take just a moment, and then an engine rumbled, an arm waved, and the house was quiet again.

Katharine went to the kitchen and filled the kettle.

You brought this on yourself.

She sat, determined not to think as she waited for the water to boil.

For the last three-quarters of an hour, the young man had shuttled between his dirty brick-veneer house and a lopsided back shed.

Nicholas was standing behind an unkempt stand of lasiandra a few doors up from and opposite the Myrtle Street shops. He stood with his hands in his pockets, shifting from foot to foot as the sun crept low to the horizon and the lengthening shadows grew cold. He was turning and stamping his feet for warmth when he noticed movement in the backyard of the house behind him. At first, he gave no mind to the portly young bloke, but within minutes could hardly take his eyes off him. The lad would stride purposefully from the house with a small cardboard box of who-knew-what, across the unmown and weedy back lawn to a small old shed. A few minutes later, he’d emerge again, cross to the house, then return carrying some plastic bottles and rags. Then he’d wait in the shed about ten minutes, before returning empty-handed to the house and emerging with. . a small cardboard box.