Stephen Irwin - The Darkening

A faint whistling. An old tune, bittersweet, mournful and thin, was barely audible above the wind troubling the eaves.

Nicholas lay on the floor. He could just see out a clear window: trees almost black with approaching night masked all but the tiniest glimpses of bruised evening sky. Everything shifted, in and out of sharpness. His stomach felt ready to let go its contents, and he swallowed back salty bile. He tried to sit, but sharp pain in his wrists and ankles stopped him spreading. He was well tied with ropes.

He rolled a few degrees, wincing at the bright potsherds of pain in the bigger muscles of his legs and arms.

Quill sat on an old oak rocking chair before a small iron stove, staring at the flames flickering behind the black-toothed grin of the stove door, whistling through her grey prune lips. As the firelight shimmered, so did her appearance. One moment her skin was ancient and sagging, pale and deeply scored as drought-cracked earth, but when the flames rose and shadows played across her, Nicholas saw the clear skin and gold hair of young Rowena Quill. Young, ancient; haggard, beautiful. Dark brown eyes, now black, now brown, reflecting red, locked on the flames. Quill’s tune was soft and came from far away and long ago. She seemed to feel Nicholas’s eyes on her and her whistle fell to a sigh.

‘Awake?’ she asked.

Nicholas rolled a little more. He lay on clean wooden floorboards that smelled of pine oil. The room was a cosy mouthful of shadows: it was panelled in dark wood, but neat. A small cedar table stood on a rug with a single chair keeping company. A curtain to a toileting room was held back by an embroidered sash. A tall pine dresser as thin and stately as a butler held some painted dishes and glazed figurines. Another curtain, this one of lace that reminded him too much of spider web, hid all but the shyest glimpse of a trimly made brass bed with a floral counterpane. At the far end of the room he lay in, the floorboards were cut away in a circle. The ring was lined with neatly mortared stones: a fire pit in which coals glowed dully. On the far side of the pit, a folded blanket, kneaded and pressed by the weight of a pet — Garnock, he guessed — but there was no sign of the monster.

‘Yes,’ he replied, barely recognising the dry rattle of his own voice.

Quill nodded, and looked at him.

Again, Nicholas had a vertiginous feeling of seeing her through idling water, or of a hologram viewed in passing: her features swam in the fickle firelight, vacillating between old and young, hideous and beauteous. Only her expression remained fixed and cold.

He flexed an arm. The rope bit into his wrist.

‘Where is Hannah?’ he asked.

Quill rocked. ‘Hush.’

As she moved to and fro, in and out of shadows, her twin selves waxed and waned. Behind her, through the window, the last of the day’s colour bled from the sky.

‘You can’t-’

‘I said, HUSH!’ she commanded, and her voice seemed to rouse the flames behind the stove grate. The room danced. She half-rose from her chair, and the young Rowena Quill, pale and blonde and terrifyingly beautiful, leaned forward, rage sparkling in her dark eyes. Then she caught and reeled in her anger and sat back down — her skin rippled again into leathery furrows. She folded her hands together, watching him.

‘You think you know,’ she whispered, ‘but you can’t know.’ She looked back at the flames. As she rocked, Nicholas noticed something on the wall behind her. It was a calendar of sorts, but made of wood, with moveable squared pegs plugged into holes like a board game belonging to some Victorian-era child. But the pegs were marked with strange symbols: stylised seasons, runes, phases of the moon. The board had an elaborately carved frame; at its top, staring through hooded eyes as black as wells from a face of oak leaves, was the Green Man.

‘I have so much to tell. So much,’ Quill whispered. ‘So many stories. So many years.’ She spoke so quietly, her lips hardly moving, that Nicholas wondered if he was dreaming her voice in his still-swimming head. ‘Can you imagine my delight when I learned from your mother that you were a Samhain child?’ She pronounced the word as Suzette had: sah-wen . A word lush and full. Quill turned her eyes again to Nicholas. ‘A special child. A child with the sight. And you do have the sight. I can see it in your eyes. A gravedigger’s eyes. A stomach full of sadness to match mine.’

The old woman was suddenly gone and the young Rowena Quill sat in the same dress, its collar loose enough around her pale shoulders to show the curve of her breasts below. Her lips were red as blood. Then a log cracked in the fire, and the old woman was back in the chair.

Nicholas stared. ‘Then why did you try to kill me?’

Quill watched him for a long moment. ‘Oh. I never did.’

‘You set a bird for me,’ he said. It was hard to talk, his own weight pressing on his ribs. ‘As you did for Hannah. And God knows how many other children.’

Anger flared freshly in her eyes, but was hidden away just as fast.

‘But never for you. The one you found was for your friend, and it found him sure as sure. With your help, in fact. I had Gavin Boye tell you a wee fib, to entice you here.’ She winked — a wrinkled sphincter. ‘You saw it for what it was, not the trinket I wanted seen. You saw a dead bird. Your blond gossip saw a lovely tin hussar. But it was never for you, Nicholas Close. I wanted you full grown.’ She looked back at the warmth of the fire. ‘That’s why I asked Him to send you back.’

Nicholas suddenly felt his heart beat harder. Its thudding pumps shook him on the floor.

‘What do you mean?’

She smiled, perfect white teeth alternated with rust red, almost toothless gums.

‘England was too far away. Too, too far. So I asked Him to bring you home,’ she said. ‘And here you are.’

Nicholas felt his vision sparkle and the blood drain from his face. And memories of flashing green; the thrum of a motorcycle; the glimpse of an inhuman face among the black tangles of an oak grove; Cate’s neck bent too far back over the white porcelain edge of the bath, her open eyes dulled by a fine patina of plaster dust.

‘What did you do?’ he whispered.

She let free a laugh that was at once as clear and pretty as fine bells and gravelled and moss-thick as a blocked drain. Her eyes watched him fondly.

‘My pretty man. I did what I had to. I want us to be together.’

The smell was familiar.

There wasn’t a hint of goodness about it. It was the sour scent of rot and wet shadow; the smell of bad earth and failed flesh. Hannah recalled it, or something like it, from when she had accompanied her father under the house, crawling low between stumps, over damp earth where sunlight never shone, until they found the dead possum. Its grey bones poked from beneath a pungent shroud of fur, green stuff and wriggling white. Maggots. The smell of death had made her gag and skitter back to fresher air. Now she had no such luxury.

She was upright, but couldn’t move or see. Her legs were swaddled fast together and her arms were bound tight and crooked against her body. Her eyes were shut and she couldn’t open them: a second skin had her wrapped from head to foot, with only a little space left under her nostrils. Fine strands like baby’s hair tickled her nose when she inhaled the stale, soiled air.

But she knew what it was holding her. She was trussed up just as she imagined Miriam had been: spun tight in spider web, alive and waiting to be fed upon by scuttling things with sharp fangs and unblinking eyes.

A hot wave of panic swept through her, and she fought for control of her bowels. Idiot , she thought for the thousandth time since she’d watched Nicholas — at least, she’d thought it was Nicholas — return from chasing Miriam’s voice. He’d smiled and said, ‘Just the wind.’ Then he pointed, ‘But what the hell is that?’ She’d turned to follow his outstretched arm, realising as she twisted that she had fallen for the oldest trick since ‘smell the cheese’. Something hard had come down fast on the crown of her skull, and minutes suddenly disappeared. She’d woken on the ground with her arms tied behind her back and her knees lashed together and rags shoved in her mouth. Then, like looking into a bewitched forest mirror, she saw herself standing in the darkening glade, smiling back at her. The hairs on her arms and neck turned to wire, and her twin called in her own voice: ‘Nicholas!’