Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

Afire with this, she had attacked this afternoon’s blank paper with excitement, and come up with something vibrant and pretty and deliciously weird. It was a horse in a man suit in a supermarket aisle shopping for seahorses. Where the image had come from, who knew? But it made her classmates laugh and Mrs Tho smile. Hannah couldn’t wait to show Miriam, who was usually the biggest fan of her creative talents.

Not this afternoon, though.

A glacial freeze surrounded Miriam as they started to walk home. Hannah tried to engage her older sister by telling her about the fete. She started to unroll the new painting, but at the top of the hill past the school Miriam stopped in her tracks.

‘I don’t want to talk to you, you thieving little dog. I’m going along Silky Oak Street. You walk the other way.’

Hannah felt a small thump of fear in her tummy. The ‘other way’ was along Carmichael Road.

Since Dylan Thomas went missing, she and Miriam weren’t allowed to walk along Carmichael Road. ‘How come?’ they’d both asked in a singsong complaint — although both of them preferred the Silky Oak Street route because it took them past the Myrtle Street shops, where they could buy a Cornetto if funds were plentiful or (if times were tight) share a Bounty bar. Mum had explained with gravity that the woods off Carmichael Road were too big and it was very easy for careless girls to get themselves lost. And now Miriam was forcing Hannah to go past them.

‘Miriam. .?’

Miriam walked a few steps and whirled again, eyes brightly ferocious. ‘I mean it, shithead!’ she spat. ‘You follow me and I’ll kick you to death!’

Hannah stood frozen. She’d never seen her sister this angry. She remembered a half-heard warning from Mum: Miriam’s going through a phase right now. She’s growing up fast and lots of changes are happening to her. She’s liable to be a bit testy.

Wow, you reckon? thought Hannah.

She watched Miriam stalk off on her long, thin legs. She fought the sudden urge to bawl, slowly rolled up her painting and walked to the terminus of the school’s avenue, which turned down Carmichael Road.

I’ll tell , Hannah thought hatefully. I’ll tell Mum that Miriam used the F-word. And I’ll make it stick worse because I’ll fess up to using her lip gloss first, and second I’ll cry.

Cheered a little by this plan, she walked easier. The afternoon was warm and she opened up her school cardigan. The woods grew closer on her right. They looked fine: thick and secret and old. When Dad used to read stories about enchanted princesses sleeping the years away in emerald groves, it wasn’t forests thick with European pines that Hannah had imagined, but woods like these: lush and healthy and wild and filled with hefty-trunked paperbark, glossy ash, lumbering and shadow-branched figs and scrambling, dark-footed lantana. Trees as tall as churches, some so thick with vines they looked like green-furred dinosaurs. The woods were beautiful. As she passed them, she left the footpath and took the gravel track that cut through the dried grass strip that fringed the tree line.

Besides, it wasn’t woods that hurt people. Sure, you could get lost and freeze to death, or you could break your leg or your neck, but if you were careful, the woods were safe as anything. It was people who hurt people.

With this thought in mind, it seemed to Hannah that she saw three things at once.

The first was unimportant: someone had driven black star pickets into the ground near the footpath and wired between them a sign made of white plastic.

Secondly, a man stood on the other side of Carmichael Road. He had been staring at the sign, but now was watching Hannah.

The third was so exciting her heart began to race. The sight of it made her forget the other two things instantly. It lay smack in the middle of the path, glinting like a huge gem in the sunlight.

It was a unicorn.

It looked like it was made of glass, but as Hannah stepped closer, she wasn’t so sure. Glass was usually smooth and bulgy; this had fine, chiselled legs, rippling and strong. She could see the striations in the horn, the fine detail of the creature’s course mane hairs, its beautiful wise eyes. Its flanks were scalloped and muscular. It looked alive and frozen at the same time, more made of ice than glass, or perhaps carved from some magical, transparent wood. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

‘Excuse me!’

Hannah reluctantly looked up — she didn’t want to take her eyes off the unicorn. The man had crossed the road and was coming towards her. He wants the unicorn , she thought wildly. It’s his unicorn, but I want it!

‘Young lady?’ he called.

Hannah calculated. She had time. She could grab the exquisite figurine, put it in her bag, and run.

‘Don’t!’

She reached down and snatched the unicorn.

And as she did, it felt as if the earth jumped a step to the side. She lurched. The sky seemed to dim. The sun sank lower. The woods, so benign and inviting, suddenly loomed dark and dreadful. She looked at her hands.

Instead of the lustrous unicorn, she held a dead plover. The bird sagged limply. Its head was gone, cut off and replaced with a ball made of twigs and painted with a funny mark. It was hideous. So horrible. So dead .

She was staring at it, about to scream, when the man grabbed her arms.

Nicholas was staring at the ceiling of his flat and deciding that it was indeed stucco. This was the sole conclusion that he had reached in two hours. He had bumbled around the flat, circumnavigating the dining room table and the open notebook lying there. He had rung Suzette to find that Nelson’s fever had diminished but not gone, so she had moved him onto a cot in her and Bryan’s room.

Nicholas had forced himself to sit, intending to make a list of names and places — Quill, Bretherton, Sedgely; shop, woods, church — to see if their placement together might catalyse some epiphany he felt was ripe and ready. But the instant his buttocks hit the chair, he was up again. He couldn’t stay inside any longer. He had to go out.

He willed his feet to take him to Lambeth Street. Suzette had said that their mother had sounded short on the phone, and some placating might not be a bad idea. But the instant Nicholas’s feet touched the Bymar Street footpath, they started towards Carmichael Road.

The wind had risen through the night; it tugged urgently at treetops and made the power lines sway and moan. High overhead, clouds were hounded fast across the sky, and the sun, though impoverished of warmth, was so bright it hurt the eye.

Nicholas walked onto Carmichael Road. He stayed on the footpath opposite the woods and walked towards the point where Winston Teale had once stopped his olive green sedan. Movement flickered in the grass verge and Nicholas squinted.

Dylan Thomas took a few frightened steps back, then his arm spasmed out straight as a mast’s boom and he jerked as he was rushed towards the woods and into the dark trees. Then, in an orchestration that was unsettling, high clouds passed over the sun just as Nicholas saw something else that made him flinch. A sign had been hammered into the hard strip of grass bordering the woods.

Stiff-legged, he walked along the footpath till he was opposite the new notice. ‘Application for Subdivision’ it said; ‘Barisi Group, Developers’. A small logo of a black Romanesque stallion flanked the large print.

Nicholas’s mind flew back through the old papers he’d found at the library — auction flyers, auctioneers’ names, surveyors’ names. Funerals of men. Murders of children.

He blinked as a terrible realisation dawned on him. Every time the woods were threatened, a child went missing and died. Here was another application to invade the woods. Quill was going to kill another child.