Stephen Irwin: The Darkening

‘NO!’ she screamed.

The cage toppled, carrying Nicholas within and Quill beneath it, and hit the ground with a loud and sickly splintering crash.

Wind tugged at Hannah’s hair and slapped her face cold.

She concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other, not knowing if she was heading the right way. . yet strangely certain that she was.

She crawled blindly over roots and under branches, hurting everywhere, guided by sound. Between gusts and the timpani rush of black leaves, she heard snatches of a woman’s voice, a sad and lilting speech to someone or no one, carried away covetously by the fast air. She blundered between the dark trees, arms outstretched, falling and rising, ignoring the nauseating throb in her leg. This was right. This all was meant to be.

She was nearly there, perhaps fifty metres from the cottage. Nicholas was still alive — Hannah felt it in her heart — but things were about to turn.

Just then, the wind grew.

The clouds rolling high above the unhappy trees thinned.

The woman’s voice skipped on the air like a black pebble on silver water.

The moon peeked out of hiding and the trees seemed to spring from darkness.

Hannah stopped.

The ground around her seemed to shimmer. But not just the ground: the trunks of trees, the hanging leaves on hanging vines, the mossed fur of logs, all crept and trembled.

Hannah felt her heart gulp blood. Was it. .?

As the clouds parted further, cold silver dropped down between the leaves, lighting everything in front of her — and her breath caught in her throat.

A million spiders watched her. Small and squat, large and bristled: all took a sly, feline step towards her on their alien, skeletal legs. The moonlight winked off their eight million eyes, an evil forest sprinkled with pernicious diamonds. She felt their stare. She felt their surprise at finding her. She felt the tiny sparks flying through their tiny brains, taking her picture, tasting it, conferring.

It’s her . She watched a hungry shimmer run through them. It’s her.

The edges of her eyes prickled brightly, and her head felt like an emptying balloon. Her body seemed to know that she would be better unconscious for the horrible fate that came next. Her legs started to fold.

NO! she yelled in her head. Don’t faint! She pricked the point of the paring knife into her thigh and brilliant new pain chased away the swoon. What good would one knife do against a sea of needle-sharp fangs?

Hannah felt them watch her, see her, know her. The forest seemed to shift as the carpet of spiders, with its spiny, bristled legs and wicked little fangs and clusters of cold black pebble eyes, crouched.

She turned and ran.

And got one step before her right foot caught on a root.

She fell.

An instant later, the wave of spiders swept over her.

Hannah curled into a shrieking ball, waiting for the pain of a million stings. .

But it didn’t come.

The spiders seemed frozen. Their hooked feet grew rigid, snipping gently into her skin, her lips, her ears. All of them — large as breakfast bowls, small as match heads — were motionless. Listening.

Then they fell away.

They dropped off her and began scuttling over one another. Some wandered in confused circles. Some burrowed for cover. Some sprang away into the darkness. Some hunkered down stupidly to hide in her hair.

She sat up and brushed the few remainders away. Whatever had been guiding them was gone. The spell was broken.

And Hannah heard a splintering crash from the direction of the cottage.

She got to her feet and ran towards the sound.

Nicholas was on his back. The cage had rolled as it fell, and had struck the firm, wet ground with a sharp crack. He had instinctively tried to shield his head from the hard branch and bone and so had left his torso exposed; when the cage crunched into the ground, knurled branches and knobbled bones thudded into his exposed kidneys and ribcage. He was winded. Of all the fights he’d lost in high school, the worst was to a Scottish boy named Murray who had hammered his freckled fist deep into Nicholas’s solar plexus, not only knocking every scrap of air out of him, but seeming to switch off his lungs so they wouldn’t draw back in. Nicholas was left humiliated, gasping, desperate for air. This was worse — he was drowning in pain.

He curled on his side, mouth wide, frantically willing a scrap of air to draw into his burning lungs. His diaphragm finally jittered alive and he sucked in a throaty gasp.

His eyes rolled, hunting for Quill.

The old woman was on the ground. She had clung to the cage as it fell, but it had rolled as it collapsed; only one leg had been caught beneath it, and now she strained to pull it from the splintery grid of spiny wood.

‘Feck ya!’ she hissed, but Nicholas didn’t know if she was cursing him, herself, or someone else. Her hands patted the earth, crawling like grey crabs, hunting.

For the knife , he thought. Where is it?

‘Where is it?’ she whispered, echoing him.

Nicholas in the cage, Quill on the wet, sandy ground. Both rolled to their knees. Both scoured with eyes and fingers for the knife.

‘You fucking bitch,’ whispered Nicholas.

‘Feck you,’ she hissed again, this time surely to him.

‘You cut their throats!’ he spat, fingers crawling under the hard, gnarled branches and into the damp soil.

‘For Him!’

‘For yourself, you greedy whore!’

‘Feck you,’ she repeated quietly. ‘Where is it?!’

Nicholas painfully rocked back on his haunches. His shadow was a black smudge inside the half-collapsed sphere. The cold moonlight made the bones in the cage as white as the ribs of undersea things. A wink of silver! His eyes jerked to the shine off the keen edge of the knife. The weapon lay just outside the bars. Near to him. Far from Quill.

‘Yes,’ he whispered, and reached between the branches.

‘No!’ snapped Quill. She scrambled.

Nicholas grabbed the knife.

And a small figure shrieked from the shadows and drove its own knife down at Quill.

As Hannah crept into the ring of trees, her eyes widened. On the ground was the cage she’d dreamt of, the cage of bone and branch, the round prison where she’d dreamt that spiders had bound her ready to die. It had collapsed on the ground, and Nicholas was inside it, on his back, heaving like a landed fish. An old woman was nearby, clawing at the ground like a blind thing. Hannah didn’t hesitate. She ran.

‘Horrible!’ she yelled as she pounced on the old woman.

But Quill saw Hannah’s shadow before she heard her voice, and rolled aside. Hannah’s paring knife whisked down and through Quill’s cardigan, nicking her withered breast and driving into the sandy dirt.

‘Hannah!’ yelled Nicholas.

‘You little brasser!’ cried Quill, and her voice trembled — not with anger, but with delight.

‘Hannah, run!’ shouted Nicholas. He scrambled backwards for the hatch, but his feet fouled on the branches and his clothes snagged on the snapped bars. ‘Run!!’

Hannah scooted back, eyes locked on her paring knife driven blade-first in the ground.

Quill whirled on her, grinning brightly.

Nicholas fumbled with the cage hatch. But the frame had distorted as the cage landed and the hatch was firmly stuck.

Hannah eyed off the distance to the knife. Quill watched her, and the grey skin around her eyes wrinkled. ‘Are ya quick, girlie?’

Hannah stared. I can make it. I can get it. She’s old. She’s slow.

‘Quicker than ya sister, I hope,’ taunted Quill in a singsong.

Hannah’s jaw clenched.

‘No, Hannah! Get out of here!’ cried Nicholas. He bashed at the hatch. It didn’t move.