Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

‘That way.’

Hannah nodded down at him, and started off, arms spread wide like a tightrope walker. In just a few seconds, the tightly packed trees had obscured her from view. Her light footsteps echoed faintly through the metal, then they, too, faded and were gone.

Nicholas was alone.

The minutes seemed to stretch into hours. He could almost feel the hidden sun falling faster and faster into the west. A light mist began to rise from the lush undergrowth like the earth’s own disturbed ghost. Where was she? Nicholas had terrible imaginings of her slipping on the damp pipe, scrabbling and falling, landing headfirst with the sickening bony crack that haunted his dreams of Cate. He shouldn’t have let the kid go. What was he thinking -

‘Mr Close?’

Light footsteps grew louder, then Hannah’s pale face appeared high on the pipe.

‘Did you find it?’

She was frowning. ‘I don’t know. It’s weird. This way.’

She waved him on. He followed from below, straining through dense thickets of native holly and blackthorn.

‘Not far,’ she urged.

‘Easy for you. .’

He struggled to lift aside a chaotic tangle of wait-a-while vine and the spiny stem grabbed at his sleeves and the duffel bag. Then he was through. He looked up.

Hannah was pointing. ‘There.’

He followed her finger.

Had he not been looking for it, he’d never have seen it. But sure enough, a narrow track almost devoid of undergrowth struck out perpendicularly from the pipe. He bent to inspect it closer. It was only two hand spans wide, but the ferns and saplings were compacted by years of passage into a distinct but well-hidden path. Whoever walked it was careful to stick to the same route every time. The weird thing was, it terminated right at the pipe.

‘Does it go on the other side?’

Hannah disappeared from view for a moment, then reappeared overhead. ‘No.’

Nicholas suddenly realised what Quill had done.

‘Clever bitch. .’ he muttered.

He stood close to the pipe and started running his fingers over its surface. They found the neatly disguised crack. He traced it — it made a rough rectangle a metre or so high in the side of the pipe.

‘It’s a door,’ he said.

‘A door?’

‘A hatch.’

He pressed against the curved rectangle. A slight give inward. He pressed harder and a loud ‘clack’ echoed within the pipe. When he released his pressure, the steel hatchway opened outward on oiled hinges.

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Catch me.’

Before Nicholas could argue, she’d slid down the side of the pipe into his arms. She wriggled to the ground and pulled the hatch wide, poking her head inside.

‘Wow,’ she repeated, and the word echoed away into pitch darkness: wow-wow-wowwww. . She climbed up inside the pipe. ‘Did you bring a torch-orch-orch. .?’

‘No. But. .’ He reached into his duffel bag and pulled out one of the Zippo knock-offs. ‘This will do.’

‘Here,’ said Hannah, ‘you hold that and give me the gun.’

Nicholas pulled her out of the hatch.

‘I’ll keep the lighter and the gun. You follow me.’

It was easy to decide which way to go inside the pipe. One direction was thick with dust and littered with insect carcasses. The other was almost spotlessly clean.

By the flickering flame of the lighter, they walked through the darkness, saying nothing, listening to their footfalls dance to and fro like ripples in some subterranean lake. The barrel of the Miroku occasionally ticked off the curved metal walls, the sharp sound chased away by a long, lonely echo.

‘How will we know when to get out?’ whispered Hannah.

‘We’ll know,’ replied Nicholas.

And they did.

After what felt like hours, but was less than three minutes, two faint slits of light hovered in the darkness. As they got closer, it was clear they were the top and bottom cracks of another hatchway. When they reached it, light trickled in all four sides of the rectangle. Inside was welded a grab handle. Nicholas wondered what poor sucker Quill had seduced into doing this steelwork and what rotten fate had befallen him.

He looked around at Hannah. ‘Not too late to go back.’

She shook her head.

He nodded, extinguished the lighter, hefted his gun and pushed open the hatch.

At their feet was a wider, clearer path through the trees. Nicholas recognised it as the track he’d found the day he ate those strawberries. Clearly, Quill wasn’t concerned about hiding her presence on this side of the pipe.

He turned and helped Hannah out of the hatch.

‘Okay?’

She nodded.

He checked his watch. It was nearly four. There was less than an hour and a half of daylight left.

‘Then let’s go.’

A chill wind blew hard as the sun inched closer to the hills in the west. It sucked away moisture, leaving her skin dry and her eyes raw.

Katharine Close’s arms were so tired that they burned, yet she kept hacking at the soil of her garden bed as if it were a beast that needed violent subduing. What else was there to do? Her hands were blistered inside the gardening gloves. She had spent the last few hours digging, pulling weeds, clipping stems, trying not to think.

But she did think.

Maybe it was time to go. Maybe enough years had passed that she could admit she’d won. She’d laughed at Don, to his face and to his memory, waving a nasty blowtorch over the hidden things he’d believed. What room was there for bone-pointing and curses and witchery for children born in the time of rocket ships and global warming? How could lines on stone or wood have potency when real power lines crisscrossed the skies on poles, breathing useful life into computers and LCD televisions? What fear was there of spells when corpses, hands bound and heads shot, were being pulled daily from the Tigris?

At nights, though, Katharine shivered. She remembered how she’d marched, fair-faced, into Mrs Quill’s store, handed the old woman her children’s clothes and blessed her with kind words and smiles. She’d shouted down that impotent voice inside her that agreed with Don. What else was a modern, single mother to do? Curl away and make the sign of the evil eye each time the old crone passed?

And yet that’s exactly what she did do. She remembered a cold winter’s night, as empty and still as the inside of a bell jar. Suzette and Nicholas tiny and asleep in their beds, and Don six years in the grave. She had been ready to go to bed herself when she heard a soft clip clip of footsteps on the street. She had crept in darkness to the front room and peered between the venetian blinds. Looking up at the house was the dot of the old woman, her face a black shadow. And yet Katharine had imagined her eyes, bright and sparkling, dancing and ravening, looking back. Hungrily. As if knowing there were two ripe young children within. In the pragmatic daylight of the next morning, Katharine had ridiculed herself for her fears — the old dressmaker was perhaps a little senile and lost, or just wanted some friendly company but hadn’t the courage to knock on the door.

But two days later, Tristram Boye was pulled dead from under a woodpile two suburbs away, his little throat cut wide to the world.

Katharine put down her trowel. Maybe it was time to admit not that she’d won, but that she’d lost. She should sell this empty house. Listen to her daughter and buy an apartment near her.

A flicker of white jigged in the corner of her eye.

She turned, wincing at the tight pain in her punished neck and shoulders. A small white terrier trotted cheerily along the path at the side of the house. It sparked a memory, something she and Suzette had discussed just a few days ago. Hadn’t Quill owned a little white dog?