Stephen Irwin: The Darkening

Then her fingers closed on a roll of larger sheets. She followed the dry cylinder along its length. The roll’s held together, but with what?

Then a smile appeared on her face.

The roll was tied with a leather thong.

Nicholas’s head ached sharply. He’d spat in Quill’s face, and she had slapped him — slapped him hard.

Then she had risen, passing the fire pit and muttering to herself. She bent to the dresser and he heard through the ringing in his ear the clinking of glass and the tick of tin and the shush of things unscrewing. Rain mumbled heavily all the while.

His hatred for her was now as solid as the boards he lay on, as the stones ringing the fire pit. But despite it, he hadn’t come up with anything approximating a half-baked plan, let alone anything that promised a whiff of success. He was her prisoner, and Hannah was shortly to die.

‘I’ll stay if you let Hannah go.’

She kept her back to him. Her silence was terrifying.

‘I said-’

‘You will stay,’ said Quill, cutting him short. ‘And the cuttie will surely go.’

She turned her body and Nicholas saw what she held. A jar. It was open and in its bottom ran a small amount of greyish, once-white fluid. In her other hand, she held a silver cone on a rod. It looked like a candle snuffer; God knows he’d found plenty of those over his years of scrounging. But this metal cone was larger and curved like a horn, writhing with symbols and darkly stained with soot. Quill reached for her belt and, with a motion as swift and practised as a torero with a banderilla, produced the small, wickedly sharp knife. She drew the blade over her thumb and a red ruby of blood sprouted there. She let a thimbleful of thick crimson liquid drop into the silver cone. Her wrinkled oyster of a mouth mumbled words Nicholas couldn’t make out. Then she closed the wound, licked it, and poured the semen from the jar into the crucible. Without hesitating, she set the empty jar aside and held the cone by its stained silver handle over the flames.

Nicholas felt his limbs instantly blaze with pain, as if she were holding not the silver horn but him over the flames. Then, just as suddenly, fall slack and dumb. His heart stopped beating. He felt his breath sigh out of his lungs.

Oh God, she’s killed me!

Then his chest began thumping again, a deliberate, slow-paced tattoo that was dislocated and inhuman. As the blood swept from his heart through his veins, he seemed able to feel its passage. It’s not mine , he thought. It doesn’t feel like my blood any more! It feels like. .

‘Stiff, now,’ said Quill.

Nicholas felt his throat tighten and his arms, legs, chest, harden, every muscle closing like a thousand fists, till his body was straight and rigid as wood. His eyes watered with the pain of exertion, yet his sight remained his. He rolled his eyes.

Quill was watching him from a face that was all shadow bar two bright orbs that shone orange and owlish in the firelight. And she was smiling.

She got to her feet and scuttled over to him. With her neat knife, she sliced the ropes around his wrists and ankles and knees. Again, she was kneeling over his face, but instead of ripe young breasts and a long white throat, poised above him now was wattled grey flesh and rags. Her wet gums shone like the insides of dying clams.

‘Not for long, my pretty man.’

She let a string of spittle fall from her mouth into his, and giggled.

‘Stand.’

His legs swept under him and his arms gracefully pushed. He was on his feet. She watched him for a moment. Her eyes slid down his chest to his groin, and he could see the corner of her mouth grin upwards as she debated if she had time to play. Instead, she put the little knife in his fingers.

‘Take it,’ she said.

As his fingers closed around the bone handle, Nicholas suddenly understood what he would be forced to do. No! he yelled, but his mouth would not work a word of protest.

‘Follow me,’ said Quill. She pulled a scarf from a peg beside the window and tied it over her white hair, then opened the grey wood door and stepped into the rain.

Nicholas found himself following her, fluid as smoke.

He glided after her on legs that moved of another’s accord, as if transported in a body borrowed.

He followed as she hobbled along the neat, rain-soaked flagstones beside the cottage. He could feel his feet step carefully on the wet path, his breaths ease wet air in and out, his fingers on the cool bone of the knife. . but had no control of any of them. He ordered his feet to stop, but they kept walking; he tried to scream, but his breath continued in and out in a steady rhythm; he tried to throw the knife, but his fingers held it fast. He was going to cut Hannah Gerlic’s throat.

As if hearing the thought, Quill turned to him and stopped. The rain pulled her ashen hair down over her limp skin, and her clothes lumped with sodden heaviness. She lifted her chin. For the first time, he could see without her sortilege past the old flesh and shrinking bone to the woman she had been. She nodded around at the tall, ancient trees.

‘It’s easy. You’ll see.’

A flash of white and pink flickered at the edge of the clearing, and streaked towards them. When it grew closer, Nicholas felt the regular rhythm of his breaths catch. The figure was a child, arm outstretched, heels bouncing on the ground as she was hauled by invisible hands. The girl in the forties’ sundress. As she passed, her wide eyes swung to Nicholas, pleading and resigned. He felt his stomach lurch. The girl screamed silently and flew backwards into the circular grove of trees behind them.

Quill continued her rocking hobble towards the rear of the cottage. She hadn’t seen the ghost.

How does that help me? wondered Nicholas.

She rounded the corner, and he followed close behind. They saw the same sight at once. The flat cellar door lay open on the sodden ground, rain spattering the descending steps.

Quill stared for a long moment, her eyes wide and her jaw tight — then whipped her eyes around to Nicholas. She trembled from head to foot. Anger poured off her in waves. Nicholas felt a thrill of excitement rise through him. Hannah must have escaped! As Quill glared, her mouth opened wide and she let out a screech that was alien and shrill, neither animal nor birdlike, but a sound much older and deeply unsettling.

The ground itself seemed to shimmer darkly. It rippled like the surface of a dark pond disturbed by something great and unseen below. And an insect-like ticking crisped the air under the rain. Nicholas strained, and rolled his eyes to the surrounding forest. The dark wave grew closer and closer until he could see what it was: the ground was alive with spiders. Thousands and thousands of spiders. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Some were as small as rice grains, some as large as plates; smooth and hard; bristled and grey. A million round, black eyes collected around the old woman on a sea of shifting, spiny legs and round, swollen abdomens.

Nicholas felt a cold wave of primal terror swirl through his gut and fountain up his back.

The spiders watched Quill, waiting.

She was shaking. Angry. Pale.

And scared , he realised.

Quill looked over the mass of spiders. They coated bushes and her neat hedges. They piled on one another. Poised and listening. Her mouth worked. She glanced at Nicholas, unsure. Her fingers vibrated. Her jowls trembled. Then she spoke.

‘Find the girl,’ she whispered in a voice that sounded more suited to a beak than to human lips. ‘Find her. Kill her. And take her far, far, far!’

The spiders moved. Like a wave receding from the sand back into the sea, the mass drew away off the gardens and the path and the ground and shrank back into the trees.