Stephen Irwin: The Darkening

Quill turned to Nicholas. Her eyes were wet, and not with rain. She stepped up to him. A smile crept onto her face, but it crumbled away. With one hand she wiped the briny spill off his chin. With the other, she gently took the knife from his fingers.

‘My poor man,’ she whispered. ‘Come.’

She started towards the circular grove, and he followed.

He knew what would happen. She was going to kill him instead.

Branches tore at Hannah’s face, and the sharp hooks of thick vines raked her wrists and tangled her feet. She was exhausted. Her frantic scramble slowed from a run to a walk. Her leg throbbed where the shotgun pellet had lodged in her calf, and the limb felt like a load she had to carry. The rain had eased, but heavy drops fell like cold pebbles from high, hidden leaves onto her neck and scalp. The paring knife was wet and threatened to slip from her grasp. Her breath came in hurting, inadequate blasts — deep, greedy sucks of air. She knew she had to stop before she stumbled and hurt herself even worse, but the memory of the dead black child in his ancient grey cocoon spurred her on.

The dark was thick, but her hours of peering in the cellar had allowed her pupils to widen to their fullest and she could at least make out the barest outlines of trunks and logs. She saw a fallen tree a few steps ahead, and sank, gasping, onto it, unmindful of the cold that clenched her buttocks as the wet soaked instantly through.

It felt both long hours and mere minutes since she had threaded the leather thong up the gap between the doors, watching it fold and flop over the barrel bolt. The moments she’d spent carefully pulling down on both ends of the thong — slightly more tension on one end than the other — had been the most stressful of her life. Each time the bolt slipped too far under the wet leather and clacked, her heart had hammered as she waited for the door to fling wide and something petrifying to grab her. But, finally, she’d found the balance, and turned the bolt upright, then carefully pulled to the side. . and the bolt arm had cleared its stay.

The burning in her legs was fading at last and her breaths were coming easier. What now? she asked herself. Run home? Tell her parents, tell the police that were surely there? And then what? Lead them back in here? No, they wouldn’t let her out of their sight. Her story was unbelievable. They’d see the pellet wound in her leg, hear that Nicholas shot her. .

They’d come in hunting not Quill, but Nicholas.

And he’ll be dead by then, if he isn’t already .

But he wasn’t. Hannah was sure of it. She could feel it: Nicholas was alive. But for how long?

She wiped the black plastic handle of the paring knife. Miriam was dead. Nicholas was going to die soon. And the old witch was going to get away with it. The spark of dull anger inside her flared.

Unless. .

She took a deep breath, wiped the knife handle, and started back towards the cottage.

Laine sat in the back of the police car listening to the rain on the roof subside from a roar to a light drumming to a sporadic whisper. She glanced back to the other police sedan parked behind, and through the distorting swirls of water could vaguely make out the silhouette of Katharine’s and Suzette’s heads flanking a large male officer’s in the vehicle’s back seat.

Laine turned back to the two officers in the car with her. Both men sat in the front on the other side of a Perspex screen, one drinking tea from a thermos, the other staring glumly into the rain.

‘I think you have to arrest me or let me go,’ she said.

‘Well,’ replied the one with the tea, but then fell silent.

‘We’re just keeping you out of the rain,’ said the other. ‘We’ll know soon.’

To Laine it felt like hours since the officers had summoned her, Suzette and Katharine over as they hurried towards the woods, shovels and forks in hand. Laine had been amazed by Katharine’s quick lie that the three of them were part of a woodlands conservation group. She and Suzette had picked up the mistruth, explaining that a rare dwarf syzygium needed its mulch turned over or it would get root rot. The police had all but let them go when Katharine spoiled it all by answering truthfully when asked for her name. Clearly, ‘Close’ was on record as associated with the Gerlic children. And so the women had been divested of their makeshift weapons and split into separate cars, where streams of questions kept flowing until the rains drowned them out.

Laine had the temerity to ask several times why the police weren’t out looking for Hannah Gerlic instead of harassing her, to which the thundering rain gave its own answer.

‘I think I need to talk with my solicitor,’ she said finally.

The police officers looked at one another. A car door opened and closed behind them. ‘Wait here.’ The officers opened their own doors and went out into the drizzle.

Laine watched them meet another four officers in a huddle. Arms pointed at the car in which Katharine sat, and fingers gestured towards Laine, towards the sky, towards the woods. Heads nodded. Torches flicked on. Men walked towards the dark tree line.

A minibus pulled up on the verge and a file of shadowed men and women in orange State Emergency Service overalls disembarked.

The front door of Laine’s car opened and a police officer slid back in. He turned to her.

‘Fancy a cup of tea?’

The walk from the open cellar door, back past Quill’s cottage, and into the circular grove was as slow and silent as a dream.

Nicholas lifted his eyes to look at the sky. The rain had all but finished, and clouds were easing apart like rotten lace in a stiff wind; behind them, stars blinked cold, faint light. Ahead, a round wall of trees glistened and their wet leaves whispered to one another with sly drip-drips. There were two dozen or so trees in a circle twenty metres wide.

As Quill walked between two trees, she touched fondly the trunk nearest. She didn’t look back at him.

Nicholas knew what was happening. Hannah was gone. Quill needed a miracle. To summon one, she had to have blood. She would use his.

A figure slid through him, and his eyes widened with surprise, but his body allowed no other shock. Miriam Gerlic screamed without sound, wrists bound together behind her, legs kicking at air as she was carried by unseen hands between the trees. As she slipped out of sight, her ghost eyes fell on Nicholas. . then were obscured by sable branches.

Nicholas let out his own silent scream as his body carried him into the circle.

The ground underfoot was wet, sandy dirt, raked clean. In the centre of the unnatural grove was a pedestal of stilted legs a metre high holding aloft a spherical cage made of woven branches and bone.

Quill hobbled to stand beside the cage. Within it was a shifting cloud of moving shadows. As Nicholas grew closer, he understood: inside the cage, five or six children half-knelt, half-hung, their ghostly skins melding with one another’s. Each was suspended by the wrists, which were lashed to the curved branch bars above them. A half-dozen children. A half-dozen ghosts. Their faces were an overlapping blur. But as each bobbed or struggled, he or she would drift apart from the others and Nicholas could see their singular terror. Little Owen Liddy in his long shorts, his face pale with disbelieving fright. The girl in the forties’ sundress, her bare feet torn and bleeding. Another boy, younger than the others and with red hair, had his eyes screwed tight above wet cheeks. Miriam Gerlic’s eyes were impossibly wide and without hope. Dylan Thomas, head bowed and bawling. And Tristram Boye.

Nicholas felt the rhythm of his breathing break, and he sucked in cool air.