Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

‘Oh, God!’ he whispered. Papa was right. So right. He wasn’t fit to live.

Not fit to live.

The thought struck into him with the brightness of steel on steel.

He sat up. Of course. The realisation glowed like a spotlight in an auditorium: Gabrielle was beneficiary.

He walked stiffly to the bathroom and climbed up onto the vanity. The bottom hopper was easy to swing wide. Cold wind flooded through the room. Cold and sharp and cleansing.

‘Yes,’ he whispered.

He slid his legs out the window, then pushed himself out.

The thought in his head just before his skull split open like a dropped melon was of kissing his father’s craggy dead cheek.

Just as passers-by were running to the shattered body of Tony Barisi, Sergeant Peter Lam was returning to the station’s front desk, ripping off the top of a sugar sachet with his teeth and pouring it into his coffee mug that read ‘ de’caf[dee-kaf] — noun useless brown warm water’. It was a quiet night. Two calls about some V8 thumping around the side streets doing donuts: he’d sent Erica and Mick to have a look. One call from Crazy Joan, who rang every night; this time she was complaining about an ad on TV she said was clearly made by the Mormons and must come off the air. Other than that, a lovely, quiet night. Then, movement in the CCTV monitor above the desk. A sedan was pulling into the front car park. It was commonplace for people to come in at all hours with queries about licence renewals, barking dogs, cars broken into.

Sergeant Lam sipped his coffee. A bit hot. He watched a man get out of the driver’s side. He moved slow and easy, no signs of drunkenness. Lam relaxed just a little. Then he stiffened, suddenly alert.

The man went to the boot of his car, opened it.

Lam placed down his coffee. The guy could have anything in there: a cat he’d hit on the road, a box of God-knows-what that someone dumped on his footpath. . The big worry was the folk who’d received speeding tickets that day and decided to try for some payback with a tyre iron. Lam’s hand inched closer to the desk radio; Erica and Mick might need to come back in a hurry.

Then the guy in the car park straightened his back and turned towards the surveillance camera. In his arms was the limp body of a naked child.

‘Oh, fuck,’ whispered Lam. One hand grabbed the radio handset; his other slipped down to release the clip holding in his Glock.

The man outside — who would later be identified as a Miles Kindste from the neighbouring suburb of Tallong — placed the dead girl at his feet, reached into his pocket and produced a Stanley knife. Without a pause, he flicked out the blade and drew it across his own throat. He sat himself down to die.

The phosphorescent hands of Nicholas’s watch glowed eldritch green. Nearly two thirty in the morning.

He sat in an armchair that had seemed huge when he was a boy, but now was small and uncomfortable. After the first few hours, he’d realised that moving didn’t help, and so stayed as still as he could, trying to will himself to numbness.

Through the window over the bed where Laine slept, he’d watched the rain grow softer as hours passed, until it finally ceased an hour ago. The clouds were lit faintly from below by the orange tungsten glow of the sprawling city. Gradually, those clouds parted and dissipated like smoke. Stars winked faintly. Just ten minutes ago, the fingernail crescent of the moon had begun falling with aching slowness beyond the silhouetted leaves of the camphor laurel tree outside the window to light the figure on the bed a ghostly silver.

Laine shifted again. Around midnight, her finger had twitched. By one, she was moving her feet in her sleep. Now she was rolling over, pulling the blanket up around her chin. She opened her eyes. Nicholas was again struck by their colour: a slate that was almost black in this half-light. He’d never seen eyes that colour — smoky and sombre as storm clouds.

‘We’re at my house,’ he said. ‘We’re okay.’

She nodded, closed her eyes, and fell instantly back to sleep.

He watched her for a long while. He reluctantly turned his eyes back to the moon.

He couldn’t remember the colour of Cate’s eyes. He was sure they were blue. Or were they hazel? Now he imagined them grey.

The room was so bright that Swizzle’s eyes were matchstick slits. Hannah squinted.

She sat at the breakfast table, chair pushed out, with Swizzle on her lap. Her mother made coffee. Her father poured juice into glasses. The room was as silent as a classroom after a student has been sent to the principal. Eerily still.

The police had come late last night, and for hours afterwards Hannah had lain awake listening to her mother sob and her father speak quietly, his voice a bowling ball rumble of words she couldn’t make out.

She had slept on and off, with a can of Mortein hidden under her pillow. She’d been awake to see the night turn from black to purple-blue to green and yellow. She’d heard her parents rise, voices low, reaching agreement that they ‘had to tell Hannah’.

Like she didn’t know. How stupid did they think she was?

They’d come in around seven and sat quietly on her bed, neither seeming to know what to say. So Hannah had said it for them.

‘Miriam’s dead.’

Her mother had jerked back as if slapped.

Her parents had looked at one another, and nodded. A man, they explained, had stolen Miriam from her room. He’d killed her. But the police had him now. There was no need to be scared. He’d be locked up. They dragged the words reluctantly from deep within themselves, like heavy hauls from a dismal sea.

Hannah watched while her father spoke. It was obvious he loved Miriam as much as Mum did — much more than Hannah had herself. She wondered if they’d be this upset if the spiders had got in here instead of Miriam’s room? It seemed doubtful. Her father finished by explaining that the next few days and weeks would be very, very hard. They both hugged Hannah tight and told her they loved her, and made her promise that if she needed to talk about how she felt to come straight to them.

That’s a joke , thought Hannah; she remembered all too well how much that slap on her buttocks had hurt. Maybe a man had killed Miriam; Hannah didn’t think her parents were lying. But they sure didn’t know everything.

They didn’t believe her about the spiders? Fine. She’d watch the news stories about the guy who said he’d killed Miriam. She’d see if he said anything about spiders.

If he didn’t, Hannah knew where she had to start looking.

The woods weren’t far away.

Pritam watched ephemeral diamonds crawl across the ceiling of his ward: scintillating colander holes of morning sunlight reflecting off the river and darting like fireflies above his head. The light winked between the wires and rods that held him in his web, peeking here and there between the chromium and the tubing, delighting him, making him smile. He felt sure the relucent sparks were about to divulge the definitive answer to Thomas Aquinas’s dilemma about how many angels could dance on a pin head. . but whenever the answer was on the tip of his tongue, a dazzling flicker would steal it from his mind.

When he’d woken just before dawn, the pain had been extraordinary. His pelvis and the bones of his right leg felt filled with molten metal, and their white heat was pulsing from within, cooking his flesh. He was shaking so badly that he could hardly press the call button with his left hand — his right remained immobile, strapped across his chest. The nurse had arrived and showed him how to use the morphine demand button next to the call remote. Since that lesson, the morning had passed in a delightful fog, punctuated by occasional moments of brilliant clarity and modulated by a chorus of skittering ceiling fireworks.