Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

The rain continued through the night. Storm-water drains in the inner suburbs choked with branches and rubbish and mud, and flooding waters rose. A low-lying commercial block in Stones Corner was inundated: a carpet wholesaler and a car yard both went underwater, and Persian rugs and Mitsubishi Colts bobbed in the rising brown tide.

Birds in trees curled their heads under their wings and clung to branches for dear life. On the river, the last ferry services were cancelled. In expensive houses with private docks, owners old enough to remember the flood of ’74 lay in their beds biting their lips and resisting the urge to check their insurance policies.

Pritam set his jaw and unlocked the internal door that led into the church proper. He flicked a switch and the long, vaulting room flickered unhappily into half-light. He fought the need to glance overhead and check that the Green Man wasn’t staring back at him through dark, unblinking eyes. Instead, he kept his gaze level and sat in the foremost pew in front of the image of Christ crucified before a strangely lush, tree-studded backdrop, bowed his head and prayed for the souls of lost children. Without knowing when, he slipped from prayer into fitful dreaming.

He was on Calvary, but the hill was devoid of crosses and peppered instead with incongrous trees. One was cleaved through the trunk. He was caught in the crush of it, broken and dying. Eleanor Bretherton was directing a regretful John Hird to saw off Pritam’s feet, hands, head. ‘It’s for Mother Kali, you loafing black tit,’ said Hird cheerfully. No one heard Pritam cry out in his sleep, his whimpers echoing down the nave to be quashed by the dispassionate rumble of rain.

Laine lay awake, staring at the ceiling, a pillow over her head to block the sound of Mrs Boye berating her dead husband. Although the screech-glass words filtered through, Laine found her mind drifting away from Airlie Crescent, flying on stiffly animated wings to the cold stone church and that dead bird on the coffee table. When she’d received the call from the police that her husband was dead and she was required to confirm it was his body, she’d refused to identify him by simply looking at the CCTV image of his wedding ring on his cheating fingers. No; she’d insisted on going into that cold room and seeing his face. They’d cleaned him up, removed the blood. But his face was broken and split. Bat-like. Horrible; all trace of his handsomeness sucked away by those bullets. It occurred to her now, as his mother ranted against the rain, that Gavin and the bird he’d muttered about had both lost their heads. Both looked pathetic and hideous in death. Both looked somehow used . She fought a surge of bile and rolled over.

In his tiny flat, Nicholas sat on his bed staring out the rain-smeared window down Bymar Street at the yawning darkness at the end that was the woods, imagining a million spiders marching silently through the deluge.

Hannah Gerlic was dreaming of wings. In the dream, she was trapped in a cage — a strange, spherical cage made of hard twisted wood, or maybe of bone. She was screaming, but no human noise came out of her mouth. Instead, the sound from her throat was the panicked batting of wings, of terrified birds flapping madly to escape. But the wap-wap cry was drowned by the wretched scratchings of a hundred real birds scrambling around her, all squawking and beating, trying to escape the cage. Their claws scratched her neck and face and hands; their beaks drove into the soft flesh of her ears, her thighs, her eyelids; their wings beat her. She screamed and cowered and tugged fruitlessly at the wood-or-bone cage. Suddenly, the beating and scratching and spearing ceased. The birds fell still, electric and listening, claws hooked onto the cage or into Hannah’s flesh or hair. Another noise. A tick-tick. A crackling. What was it? It sounded like heating metal, or rain on tin, or. .

Suddenly, she screamed and the birds took wild wing.

Hannah’s eyes flew open.

She was instantly wide awake, and the dream of wings and bones disappeared like a stone dropped in deep water. . all except the noise. The tick-tick sound. A gentle tapping. Testing.

Hannah was in her bed, and her room was dark. Her Emily the Strange alarm clock said it was 2.13 a.m. (the letters stood for ante meridiem ). It was raining outside; raining hard. And yet, over the rain, she heard the tick-tick noise. The scratching, tapping, testing sound. She rolled over and looked at the window.

Her stomach did a roller-coaster lurch.

There were spiders on the sill. Hundreds of spiders. Their stiff, black bristles glistening with rain. Each was at least the size of Hannah’s hand. They were piled on one another, five or six deep, and they were scratching at the glass and poking their legs into the thin gaps around the frame. Hundreds of bristled black legs were poking, prodding, scratching. . trying to get in.

Hannah’s window was what Mum called double-hung sashes and what Dad called a pain in the arse to paint: two wooden-framed windows, one inside and below the other; the top was fixed, but the bottom one could lift vertically and be held open by hinged supports in the frame. The windows locked with a swivelling brass catch.

The catch was almost undone.

The swivel was barely caught on its stay plate. Just a tap would loosen it and the window would be free to rise. As Hannah watched, a spider pressed against the glass and slipped one long, spiny and graceful leg up between the window frames and patted the catch with its hooked foot.

Without thinking, she leapt from the bed and slammed the catch hard shut, slicing off the spider’s leg. Her stomach threatened to gush itself empty over the carpet as she stumbled back to her bed. Get them! Get Mum and Dad!! She opened her mouth to shriek.

But before she could, her eyes widened and the scream died in her dry throat.

Something was crawling over the scuttling mass of spiders, shoving them out of its way. It was itself a spider, but a size Hannah thought impossible. It was large as a cat. It shuffled aside its tiny cousins to crouch on the sill. Its ugly nest of unblinking eyes — like enormous drops of glistening black oil sitting in a dense carpet of bristles — seemed to fix on Hannah. The creature’s legs were as thick as carrots.

Hannah stared, shaking. It’s huge it’s huge it’s huge! It was big enough to simply smash the window in.

As she watched, frozen solid, the huge spider brought one leg before its head and raised its horny foot vertically in front of its curved fangs. The breathing holes beneath its abdomen let out an audible hiss .

Oh my God , thought Hannah. It’s shushing me to stay quiet.

The large spider began scooping the smaller spiders away. The hundreds of legs withdrew from probing the gaps around her window and the spiders fell away. As they did, the giant, feline spider gracefully and silently stepped back and down and out of sight. In just a few seconds, all the spiders were gone. It was as if they’d never been there; as if they’d been a wakeful extension to her nightmare in the cage. Except she could see on the inside sill the hairy section of leg she’d sliced with the catch, lying like a bit of black pipe cleaner. Her bed was shaking. She realised it was her heart pounding.

They were coming to get her. She knew it. Just as she knew that the horrible thing she’d picked up that afternoon — the dead bird that someone had cut up and changed — had been left for her and no one else. Her urge was to throw the covers over her head and crawl into a ball.

That won’t help! she told herself. This was like those movies on the TV where the idiots did nothing instead of doing something , like locking the door or driving away or calling the cops.