Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

She checked left and right, then crossed Carmichael Road to the strip of tall sword grass. The tall tree line loomed in front of her, waving at her, the wind shaking the leaves in delighted applause at her arrival. Or hissing a warning.

An adult would have hesitated. An adult would have wondered if she were about to undertake an errand of dangerous foolhardiness. She’d second-guess herself; after all, didn’t the police have a confessed killer in custody? She’d wonder how she could possibly have seen a black wave of spiders at her window, working the locks with intelligence that arachnid entomology had never witnessed. She’d curse herself as a coward for doing nothing while her sister was stolen. But Hannah was young and her doubts were not adult but of adults. She knew what she’d seen was true. She knew that she hadn’t imagined the crystal unicorn set to trap her. She was angry for being deceived. She knew things that no one else did, and there was no choice: she had to do something. She stepped between the trees, and light fell away.

Walking into the woods gave Hannah the feeling she was sinking underwater; the fiery crackle of wind in high leaves became more and more distant, as if she were dropping into the depths. Shadows became thick and liquid. Spears of sunlight as thin as fishing rods probed down from the high canopy. The only sounds that were sharp were the wet crushing steps of her slip-on shoes on damp leaves and soggy twigs, and her panting breaths that were coming faster and faster. This was hard work, climbing over moss-furred logs and under looping vines. To go ten metres forward, she had to wend and wind another ten around twisted, scoliotic trunks, over hunched roots, under needy, thorny branches. This was going to take a while.

After twenty minutes, she was slick with sweat and exhausted. She brushed wet leaves off a nearby log and sat. From her backpack she pulled a water bottle. As she sipped, she took inventory of her other goods: insect spray, a paring knife with its blade wrapped in Alfoil (so it wouldn’t stab through the sides of the pack), the half-empty bottle of metho, newspaper, matches. Satisfied, she capped her water and slid the pack over her shoulders and pressed on.

She’d lain awake most of the previous night wondering how to kill the giant spider that had taken Miriam. Clearly, it was smart — or at least knew enough about little girls to set a beautiful, sparkling unicorn as bait. It was magical: it had put some sort of charm on the dead bird, and it commanded the smaller spiders. But there was the possibility that the big spider at the window wasn’t in charge, that it was just another lieutenant in the spider army. There could be an even bigger spider — a giant spider like the one that Sam Gamgee fought in The Lord of the Rings — and that thought made her tummy tighten. Of course, whatever was in charge might be something else entirely; it might be a witch or a warlock or some sort of vampire that drank the blood of children. Considering these limitless possibilities, Hannah dismissed a dozen weapons, from arrows dipped in insect spray to crucifixes. The only weapon she knew of that killed everything was fire. A bomb would have been better, but she didn’t know how to make a bomb. Fire would have to do.

She was tired.

From the outside, the woods appeared to gently roll towards the river, but within, the forest floor rose and fell sharply, and the going was hard. Small but sharply cut gullies wound between massive trunks. Rises were steep, made slippery by the dense carpet of wet leaves. Hannah’s footfalls disturbed beetles, uncovered swollen white grubs, and sent crawling things to scatter for new, damp dark.

Her legs were too short to step easily over the big roots of old, old trees that hooked like enormous sly eyebrows out of the spongy dark ground. Her eyes probed ahead of each step to avoid rocks that lurked under thick caps of sodden leaves. And so she was most way up a steepish slope before she realised that a huge Moreton Bay fig was directly in her path. It was easily four metres wide, and each of its buttressed roots spanned out another six or seven from the trunk and was half a metre thick. The nearest rose high above her head. To move forward, she had either to scramble over one of these tall roots or backtrack. She checked her watch and a sharp twinge of panic raced through her tummy. It was already well after two — she didn’t want to be caught in the woods after dark.

She followed one root away from the tree until it had diminished enough in size for her to get her arms over it. She crooked one elbow over the root. It was as cold and damp as a fish. She hoisted one leg up till she’d straddled it like a hobby horse. She rocked her weight from one hip to the other, and began her slide down the other side when she realised just in time that the ground below fell away sharply. She balanced awkwardly, wondering what to do next.

‘Hannah?’

Her head jerked up at the voice. She caught a glimpse of the man from Carmichael Road, the man who had been there when she woke up in the church, then she overbalanced and fell.

One foot hit the steep, slick ground and slid instantly away. She tried to hold on to the root, but it was so slimy and broad that her fingers found no purchase; her shoulder wrenched sharply and she careened down the slope. Shrubs lashed at her as she tumbled, and her knees and elbows struck evil-edged schist hiding under the mulch. She turned twice before she hit a fallen beech trunk. Her head struck it with a thud. Were the log not decades fallen and soggy with rot, she’d have split her skull open. Even so, the pain was sharp and her elbows and knees were badly grazed.

The throbbing in her head and the hurt in her limbs hit her all at once. . and she started to cry. She tried not to, but the sobbing wouldn’t stop. She heard the man crunching through the leaves, and a moment later saw him through a fog of tears leaning over her.

‘Huh. . huh,’ she stuttered, snuffling wetly.

‘Let me have a look.’ He placed the shotgun down beside him and gently took her head in his hands and examined her scalp. A gun! The sight of it arced across Hannah’s flash flood of tears and a thrill of excitement raced through her. He’s hunting, too!

The man seemed hugely relieved that she was whole and largely unhurt. Then he sniffed the air. ‘What’s that smell? Is it. .’

Hannah realised that her knapsack was underneath her. Her back felt wet and cold and she smelled the antiseptic tang.

‘Oh no !’

She wrenched around and shrugged off the pack, zipped it open. The bottle of methylated spirits had split. Her backpack smelled like the doctor’s surgery.

‘Bum!’ she swore, and started pulling out the other items. The newspaper was soggy, which wasn’t a bad thing, but the matchbox fell apart in her fingers.

‘Yeah, bum,’ muttered the man, frowning as he watched her produce the knife and the can of insect spray. She gave it a test squirt — it still worked.

‘Well, that’s something,’ she said quietly. She looked up at the man. ‘Are you here for the spiders, too?’

He blinked.

‘Spiders?’

Nicholas’s first instinct was to lie. ‘What spiders?’

Hannah pursed her lips, annoyed.

‘Okay, for whatever sends the spiders then?’

Nicholas felt another gust of unreality. Of all the people he could use beside him, the fates had sent him a ten-year-old girl.

‘You should go home, Hannah. You don’t know-’

She stared at him. He hadn’t seen much of her eyes two days ago: she’d been unconscious for most of the time in the car and at the church, and she’d been puking and sobbing for the rest. This was a different girl. Her tears over the fall had dried suddenly, and she was shaking her head, watching him through eyes that were a strange, dark blue as hard as sapphire.