Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

‘Shoo! Go home, you naughty. .’

The words died in her mouth.

The dog stopped at her call. It turned and regarded her with black pebble eyes.

Katharine had grown up on a property and animals had been an everyday part of her childhood, but only once before had she seen a creature regard her with this cold contempt. It had been spring, and a nesting magpie had begun swooping on anyone who neared her tree beside the utility shed. It was the weekend, and Katharine had been helping her father make a new chook house. He was working on the coop roof, and asked young Katharine to go to the tool shed and fetch tinsnips. She had stridden to the shed, and in her last few steps heard the dry swoop of wings on air. She put up her hands just as a flash of black and white feathers rocketed past her, blowing her fine hair around her ears. Fired by her suddenly tripping heart, she sprinted through the open door into the black, cave-like shed. Deep in the cool dark, she turned. Through the doorway she watched the bird land in the square of squintingly bright sunlight. The magpie hopped to the edge of the doorframe, and stopped, peering into the darkness of the shed. Its eyes were black as stones, shiny and cold. They found her. The bird watched her, calculating whether or not to attack. And young Katharine knew that if it did, it would attack without reservation, biting and spearing with every cell in its body focused on the task of hurting her. The bird held her captive in the shed until her father found her an hour later, tears rolling down her cheeks.

The little white dog watched Katharine now with the same look of icy appraisal, its round coal eyes scrutinising her, deciding whether or not to attack.

Katharine realised her skin felt frozen hard. She was terrified. Terrified by a small dog that stared at her in a way no dog had. Then a realisation struck her: its ribcage hadn’t moved. It wasn’t breathing.

Because it’s not a dog , said a voice in her head.

Then the creature turned and trotted up the stairs to the back door. Katharine watched it rise with eerie fluidity to its hind legs, turn one paw, hook and swing open the screen door, and slip inside the house.

‘Laine!’

She climbed to her feet, ignoring the jagged pains in her hips and back, and ran.

The Wynard was wretched. The boat lay on her side like the mummified body of a long-dead elephant, her grey hull beginning to cave and collapse as moisture and unseen insects completed their rotting work; her timbers were faded and bleached like cow bones. Far overhead, wind roared like fire in the treetops, an invisible wave endlessly crashing.

Nicholas shifted the shotgun to one hand and checked his watch. It was nearly four. The winter sun remained hidden by a million leaves, but he could feel its distant warmth vanishing from the day with greedy speed. The air here in the deep green shadows was frigid and still. Hannah shivered beside him.

‘Which way?’ she asked.

He looked around the hunching curtains of green and black. At the boat, the track had petered out.

‘I don’t remember.’

The last time he’d left here, he’d been carried unconscious on eight thousand spindle legs, Garnock riding on his chest like a stygian cavalier.

The ground ahead, thick with vine and root and trunk, seemed to rise. The air that way had a slightly sour tang. Nicholas reasoned that the river couldn’t be far away, its salty mud banks thick with mangroves and rancid with the droppings of flying foxes. He nodded that direction, and he and Hannah started again uphill.

As they crawled between the ancient trees, picking their way through the dense shadows over mossy flood-felled trunks and under incestuous, noose-like vines, Nicholas told Hannah everything he knew about Rowena Quill. About the woman’s arrival a century and a half ago. Her pseudonyms. Her faces, hiding carefully behind spinster smiles in the cool dark shops on Myrtle Street. Her killings. Her spiders.

When he’d finished, Hannah was silent for a moment.

‘She must be very lonely,’ she said.

Nicholas looked at her. She shrugged.

‘Maybe that’s why she’s so mean,’ she continued. ‘Because she’s sad. Everyone she loved is dead and left behind.’

Nicholas stopped. The trees around them now were more shadow than substance. Even Hannah’s face was a grey mask, as featureless as the sandy bottom of a deep pond.

‘I think we have to turn back.’

Hannah blinked. ‘We can’t. If we don’t get her today. .’ Her voice trailed off with a shudder.

Nicholas nodded.

‘Hannah. .?’ A voice as thin as smoke wended from the dark belt of trees up ahead. Nicholas watched Hannah’s eyes widen and her face tighten like a fist. His own heart began to gallop.

‘Haaaannahhh?’ A girl’s voice. A pained voice.

Hannah’s eyes darted between the woods and Nicholas.

‘It’s Miriam,’ she whispered.

Nicholas saw goose bumps on his arm. He shook his head. ‘It’s not.’

‘It is! She’s not dead! They were wrong!’

She started forward. Nicholas snatched her arm and wheeled her round. He grabbed her chin and made her focus her wild eyes on him.

‘It’s not your sister, Hannah. Think about it.’

Hannah blinked. She nodded.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Stay here.’

He looked around to orientate himself, then cocked the shotgun and stepped into the deeper gloom.

‘Haaannnahhh? Help me, Hannaaaahhh!’

The voice was a keening tapestry of pain and sorrow. It made Nicholas’s skin crawl. What was it doing to Hannah?

He moved as quickly as he could, but the trees were wide and old and huddled tight as conspirators. The spaces between them were filled with even older stumps that rose from the rustling ground like the broken teeth of titans. It was growing so dark. Nicholas suddenly realised what a stupid thing he’d done. He’d left Hannah alone.

‘Hannah?’ The voice was no longer scared; it was relieved and cheerful. A shadow shifted between the gloomy trees ahead of Nicholas.

‘Miriam?’ he asked, carefully swinging the gun barrel up towards the movement.

‘Hannah!’ replied the voice delightedly. And suddenly the shadow jolted forward.

It was a spider at least the size of Garnock, a widow with gloss black and hairless legs, each as long and thick as a cricket stump. They moved a shelled body as big as a water-filled black balloon. Yet the spider jumped from tree to tree with amazing speed; one moment swaying like a ready boxer, the next leaping and landing with eerie silence, so fast that Nicholas barely had time to thumb the hammer back.

‘HHHaaaaaa!’

The voice changed from human to something utterly alien as the spider’s fangs lifted and it pounced. Nicholas pulled the trigger. The blast was loud but was squashed instantly by the disapproving trees. The spider jerked, but its momentum carried it right at him — he scrambled sideways and the spider hit the tree behind him with the wet crack of a giant egg smashing. It slid lifeless to the dark leaves, its long finger-bone legs quivering in death palsies.

Nicholas turned and ran.

‘Hannah!’

He sprinted downhill, dodging between trunks and jumping over spiny branches, sliding and falling and rising and running. Ahead, he heard Hannah scream in terror.

‘Hold on, Hannah!’

He thumbed back the shotgun’s other hammer and jumped over the last log into the clearing.

Hannah stood shaking, eyes locked on something hidden from Nicholas’s sight by a wide trunk.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

She pointed, and he stepped closer to see what she faced.

He felt his own legs turn light as dust.

If the last spider had been big, this one was huge. Its body was the size of a sheepdog, squat and dense, bristling with sandy brown hairs. It was reared up on six legs; its front two pawed the air, tasting it. A cluster of red eyes stared out from a nest of ugly grey hair. Its fangs shuffled noiselessly.