Stephen Irwin: The Darkening

Hannah dived.

Fast as a crow beak, Quill swung out. Her arm struck Hannah mid-flight, knocking the girl face first into the dirt. Hannah’s outstretched hand grabbed nothing but wet, dark sand. Quill rolled, snatched up the knife, and drove her free hand down on the back of Hannah’s neck.

Hannah yelped, but the cry was cut short as Quill pushed her face hard into the cold, wet dirt.

‘Get off her!’ yelled Nicholas.

‘He is cruel and kind, isn’t He?’ twittered Quill. ‘Eh, pretty man? Sends her back, whole and ready, out of His woods to me!’ She laughed. Wind tickled the trees, and their leaves whispered approvingly. She straddled Hannah’s back.

Nicholas stopped beating at the hatch. In his left hand was Quill’s wicked little knife, but it was as useless as a burnt match with him trapped inside.

Hannah kicked and struggled, but Quill had her pinned. She tested the paring knife’s blade with her thumb, and nodded. Overhead, the moon sailed high in clearing skies. Pleased, Quill looked over at Nicholas. Her mouth creaked open in a dark smile. ‘Let’s send her on her way, then,’ she whispered, ‘so that you and I can be.’

Hannah tried to scream, but Quill pressed her mouth deeper into the sandy ground.

‘Don’t, Quill. Don’t do it,’ whispered Nicholas.

Quill looked at him, as a mother looks at a child.

‘She’ll not feel much. Blood is the only sacrifice that pleases the Lord.’

Hannah’s one eye above the dirt stared at Nicholas, wide with terror.

The moon rode high and easy overhead.

The sharp paring knife glinted.

And, suddenly, Nicholas knew what to do.

The idea arrived as clear and bright as the moonlight had, casting everything sharp and lucid.

There was a choice. He took it.

‘Rowena,’ he said softly.

She didn’t hear him, and put the knife in her right hand and took a handful of Hannah’s hair.

‘Rowena,’ he repeated. He was surprised at how calm he felt.

Quill looked over.

He lifted her little knife to his wrist.

The old woman’s face fell. ‘No. .’ she whispered.

Nicholas plunged the blade in. The pain was as clean as glass. He dragged the blade through tendons and veins. Blood, dark like syrup, gushed out.

He watched his blood flow between the branch bars onto the sand, soaking away. His calmness felt beautiful. Now, how do I start? he wondered. What do I say?

But the words came of their own accord.

‘With my blood I call on you. I call on the Green Man.’

‘No,’ repeated Quill, more loudly.

Blood pulsed out, slapping delicately into a growing puddle. Nicholas watched it, fascinated.

‘I give you my blood and I ask you-’

‘No!’ Panic.

‘-to remove Rowena Quill from these woods-’

‘NO!’ Her voice was sprung tight with terror.

Nicholas felt his head grow hot, then cold. His vision danced.

‘-forever.’

‘Noooooo!!’ Rowena Quill’s last word became a scream.

Her shriek brought back to Nicholas a memory two decades old. He’d been employed to lay out a brochure for an abattoir in Kent. The manager had given him a courtesy tour, and he’d been shown the killing floor. The sound Quill now made was the exact cry of animal fear the cattle screamed when they rounded the narrow chute and saw ahead the crush and, beyond it, the corpses of their cousins that had gone before. Terror in the face of certain death.

Quill’s eyes were wide and rimmed with white. Her head swivelled as she scanned the trees. She dropped the knife. She scrambled to her feet. And ran.

Nicholas watched the little sharp blade fall from his grasp. He put his right hand over the deep cut in his left wrist. I’m going to faint now.

He looked at Hannah. She lay on the ground, her eyes shut. His vision seemed to blacken at the edges, like paper charring. Not yet! He strained to focus.

He saw Hannah’s back rise and fall so slightly. She was breathing.

He nodded, relieved.

‘Okay,’ he whispered, and his vision silvered. His spine seemed to turn to water and he fell inside the cage.

The wind stopped. The trees grew still.

The world looked far away — even the moonlit cage of bone and branches around him seemed small and distant, like viewing a room through the wrong end of a telescope.

Take off your shirt. Bind your wrist.

But there was so much blood. .

He struggled to remove his jumper, but weariness crept up inside him like the pleasant, drowning waters of Lethe.

I can’t.

Then roll over , he told himself.

With numb fingers, he lifted his jumper and shirt, pressed his pumping wrist against the skin of his belly, and rolled onto it.

Enough , he thought. Sleep now.

He was too weary even to close his eyes, so he stared out at a world far away and ringed with inviting gloom. The woods were eerily quiet. The circle of trees stood silent, their still leaves as green as frozen sea-water in the icy moonlight, black as pitch in shadow. They were hushed. Anticipating. The only movement was the gentle rising and falling of Hannah’s tiny back.

Sleep.

Nicholas closed his eyes, wondered what the wetness on his belly was, then nodded as he remembered. He was dying.

Don’t worry. Sleep now.

Cate would be waiting.

He smiled.

But a smell shivered him awake.

It was a scent as old as the world. It was a hundred aromas of a thousand places. It was the tang of pine needles. It was the musk of sex. It was the muscular rot of mushrooms. It was the spice of oak. The meaty redolence of soil and bark and herb. It was bats and husks and burrows and moss. It was solid and alive — so alive! And it was close.

The vapours invaded Nicholas’s nostrils and his hairs rose on their roots. His eyes were as heavy as manhole covers, but he opened them. Through the dying calm inside him snaked a tremble of fear.

The trees themselves seemed tense, waiting. The moonlight was as hard as shell, sharp and ready to be struck and to ring like steel.

A shadow moved.

It poured like oil from between the tall trees, and flowed across the dark, sandy dirt, lengthening into the middle of the ring. The trees seemed to bend towards it, spellbound. A long, long shadow. .

Then, a hoof. As large as a bucket and dark as stone, grey-splotched with moss; layered and peeling like ancient horn. Above the hoof: a massive leg. Feathered. Or furred. Or dense with leaves. A dark green-grey cast blue as gunmetal by the glacial moonlight. Muscular and long. Its knee bent backwards like a horse’s hind leg’s, but thrice the size and powerful. Another hoof, another enormous leg. A torso dense as an ape’s, but so much larger, as dark as the shadows between the roots of ancient trees. Arms like a man’s: knotted with ropy muscle but thick as tree trunks, their topsides shimmering with fungal grey fur or leaves or vestigial feathers, their undersides creviced as old bark. A bull neck, corded like worn rock. Shoulders, shifting with a frost of green, wide as boulders. Antlers like oak branches, webbed with vines and moss, and huge. And a face in shadow.

Nicholas stared. I am dreaming. I am dead.

The creature’s head turned to him. Its face was rimmed with skin like leaves, or made of leaves. The jaw was massive and oxlike, dripping with tendrils like curling roots. Great tusks the shape of oak leaves thrust from the corners of its wide, leathery lips. Huge nostrils flared. And eyes as dark as wells of deep, distant water reflected the moonlight; eyes at once human and yet so inhuman — inscrutable as winter sky, hungry as an eagle’s. And old. So old.

It was the face he’d seen in Walpole Park. The face he’d seen carved in wood and stone in Bretherton’s church.