Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

At that very moment, a small girl appeared on the path.

She was maybe nine or ten, with dark brown hair in a ponytail and thin legs ending in shoes that looked too big. She spotted Nicholas and looked quickly away back to the path. Then her scissoring steps slowed and stopped. Her eyes had found something on the ground.

Nicholas felt the world slow to a quiet halt. The wind seemed to cease. The very sunlight seemed to freeze in the air, becoming so fragile that a single gesture would shatter it and let darkness flood the sky. The woods, a wall of black shadow, ghostly trunks and dark green waves, seemed to swell, growing taller and closer to the girl.

Bring her .

The voice in his head was low, as old as stone and as strong as night tides, a powerful rumble almost too low to hear; it vibrated through him like a whale song or thunder.

Bring her.

He shook his head as if to clear it. ‘Excuse me!’ he called out to the girl. His voice sounded impotent and exhausted.

The girl looked up at him, frowning. She was so small. It would be easy to grab her, to fold her in his arms and. .

Bring her in.

He took a step towards her, and stopped himself. No .

She was looking at the path again. Nicholas knew what lay there. A dead bird with a woven head, and if she touched it she would die.

She will die .

‘Young lady?’ he called. His feet moved again, and this time they wouldn’t stop. They were carrying him to her, across the road. It was hard to breathe. His throat was tight. His hands went to his collar and pulled it away; as he did, his fingertips touched the wood beads of the necklace. It felt heavy and tight around his neck and the sardonyx stone was uncomfortably warm.

Take it off.

Yes, he could just take it off and grab her and bring her in, she wouldn’t be heavy, cover her mouth and -

No!

The girl was looking at the path and back at him. She was going to grab it!

‘Don’t!’ he called, but his voice sounded so thin he could have been on a distant hilltop.

If I can’t stop walking , he thought, I’ll run . He jolted his legs into a sudden sprint.

She knelt and picked up the dead bird.

BRING HER IN!

Nicholas stumbled. The voice was so low it set his teeth shaking; it seemed to convulse his organs and whip his blood. The animal gravity of the woods was as primal and strong as any need to sleep or eat or fuck. His crotch bulged with a new and thumping erection. The necklace was hot, burning. He couldn’t breathe.

Then he heard them.

In the woods. A chittering. The rustle of a thousand unseen spiny legs on shadowed leaves. They were coming.

The girl stood rigid, staring at the dead bird in her hands, its head a ball of twigs and marked with blood. Thurisaz. Nicholas grabbed her by the arms.

Bring her-

‘No!’ he yelled, and picked her off her feet. He staggered — she felt as heavy as a man, as two men; too heavy. He swooped one hand under her thin legs. The tick-tick rustling was getting louder. He bent, shaking under the strain, and scooped up the dead bird talisman and shoved it into his pocket. He took a quaking step, then another, away from the woods.

The chittering of leaves gave way to a rustling in the grass behind him.

His legs were burning with effort, lactate already racing like bushfire through his thighs. He took another step, another, another. . and ran.

Just as he stepped onto the path, he cast a look behind.

The grass was turning black. It was as if flood waters had instantly risen to halfway up their stalks. Only the tide was not dark water: Nicholas knew it was a rising wave of black and grey spiders.

He turned and ran like hell.

This was the last box. Pritam pulled it down from the shelf, dropped it unceremoniously on the floor, and began emptying its contents.

Rifling through the other archive boxes had yielded a hodgepodge of curiosities: photographs of a twenty-years-younger Reverend John Hird smiling with disabled children under the World Expo monorail; a yellowing folder containing John’s papers discharging him from 3RAR; another envelope holding the location and number of his brother’s crematorium plot. Pritam set these aside.

Other finds were not personal and less interesting. Tax receipts for repairs, three notepads containing bookings for the church hall, an audit of plants in the church grounds, receipt for a mimeograph machine.

Pritam had spent the day trawling through the boxes, occasionally answering a telephoning well-wisher or a knock at the door, confirming in a cracked and tired voice that, indeed, the Reverend John Hird had passed away last night; that, yes, he went peacefully, and agreeing that, indeed, he had been unwell a long while. John certainly was a very strong spirit, an inspiration. He was, most surely, with his Lord now. Yes, there would be a service.

And so to the last box.

If the previous cartons had been pedestrian in content, this was numbingly dull. Old bus timetables. Ticket stubs for bus travel. Suggestion-box notes held together with a rusted bulldog clip. A large envelope marked ‘Fundraising’. Within this last were four smaller envelopes labelled by decade, the topmost reading ‘1970-80’. Pritam opened it.

Inside were a few copies of a flyer printed in purple ink — he was pleased the mimeograph got used. They advertised a fete: ‘Fun for the Family!’, ‘Sack races!’ and ‘Home-baked cakes!’. Handwritten lists of helpers and their duties (‘R. Burgess, set up trestle tables amp; remove rubbish’). Faded Polaroid photographs of the big day: ladies shyly holding their iced cakes and smiling. Children with long hair and flared pants were lashed together at the ankles, running and laughing. A wide-tied man wagging his finger at the camera while eating a pie. A woman staring, unsmiling, at the camera.

Pritam’s breath stopped in his throat.

The woman staring at the camera was Eleanor Bretherton.

He flipped the photograph. In pencil, written in a fine copperplate hand: ‘Mrs L. Quill. Contributed $60 to fete fund 17 May 1975’.

Pritam sat back.

He felt small again, a thin-limbed boy in his grandmother’s cottage before his parents took him from India, listening after dinner as Nani told the story of a small village in Uttar Pradesh where every child was cut open, alive and screaming, to save the village from the wrath of Kali. That tale had terrified him as a child; not just his imagining being one of those utterly helpless children not even able to turn to their parents who themselves wielded knives. . but imagining how terrible must be the face of Kali to drive loving parents to commit bloody murder.

Eleanor Bretherton. Mrs L. Quill.

Now things go bad , he thought.

At that moment, someone pounded on the rectory door.

The girl sat in one of the old club chairs, staring into space with slack eyes. She blinked occasionally and breathed slow and deep, but hadn’t shifted or spoken a word in the twenty minutes since she’d arrived at the presbytery.

‘“Hannah Gerlic, 5D”,’ read Pritam. His voice shook. He replaced the exercise book into the girl’s school bag.

He looked up to the other club chair opposite. In it sat Nicholas Close, who nodded acknowledgment. In the middle of the cleared chessboard lay the dead plover talisman. One of its claw horns had been lost, but even to look at it made Pritam’s skin prickle.

This is not hypothetical evil , he thought . Not the evil of lust, nor the evil of hate. This is fundamental evil, as old as the world itself. This is the devil’s handiwork.

The thought was electric and terrifying, as if the veneer covering the world had peeled at one corner, affording a glimpse of dark and yawning depths below.