Stephen Irwin: The Darkening

The Green Man.

Nicholas’s body was rigid with electric panic, white terror, delirium. . His flesh knew what the creature before him was; it knew at some fundamental, cellular level what it smelled and faced, and would have begun digging through the ground itself to hide were it not locked tight in bright horror.

The Green Man stopped halfway between Nicholas and Hannah. He was taller than the trees. He lifted his head and his nostrils splayed. The air shifted. The trees shimmered with pleasure, opening their moist leaves with dark delight. Then the Green Man’s head turned in the direction that Quill had fled. . towards her cottage.

A tiny sound. Hannah groaned softly.

She rolled. Her eyes flickered open and found Nicholas.

He opened his mouth to speak, but only a hiss of air escaped his lips.

Hannah looked up.

The Green Man loomed over her, dwarfing her small as a kitten. He shifted his hoofs, and snorted a blast of warm air as pungent as the forest floor.

Hannah smiled, and her eyes closed.

The Green Man stooped and picked her up.

‘Hannah. .’ whispered Nicholas.

The Green Man turned at the sound. In an instant he stamped towards the cage, three enormous steps, a colossal wave about to crash, his wide, dark face right before Nicholas’s.

His scent was overwhelming: erotic and wildly horrible; hunger and rot and age and lust. His green leafy lips parted, showing teeth as large as bricks and hard as ivory, goatlike and sharp.

Nicholas stared into the eyes. Eyes as large as saucers, without whites: huge dark stones that glittered with intelligence and violence.

And the Green Man chuckled.

The warm, foetid air from his mouth washed over Nicholas, strong and whipping as a storm wind through ripe brambles.

Nicholas’s eyes rolled back in his head, and the night world became as black as the centre of the earth.

Hannah enjoyed this beautiful feeling. Of gently drifting above the ground. Of flying.

She felt the cool air on her face, the warm leaves under her legs, her back. Overhead, she could see that the clouds were moving again, rolling in a steady dark wave towards the moon. More rain , she thought idly, and snuggled back into her warm cot of ferns.

But the trip did not last long. She sailed past the roof of the old woman’s cottage, watching as the shadows of clouds raced over it, casting it into bleak shadow. Then she was being lowered. She was placed on her feet.

‘Oh,’ she half-complained.

But the hands were wise. The earth was good. And — oh! — the smell. The smell was divine! A delicious brew of vanilla, of newborn puppy, of jasmine, of sweet sweat and His skin. He had put her down, and that was good. Because there was a task to do.

Of course!

Hannah stood beside the closed barn doors of the cellar. How long had it been since she was locked in there? An hour? A year? It was a dream lost in waking. But down there now was something that needed attention.

Some one .

She turned to look at the one who carried her, to ask -

But His firm, large hands held her head gently, preventing her turn, silencing her question. And then she saw. .

Oh! How clever!

On the ground was Nicholas’s duffel bag.

I shall do this right , thought Hannah, secretly thrilled, knowing that He would watch her work. To please Him, I will do it well .

She reached into the warm, dark bag and her fingers probed gently. Ah! They found what she knew would be there.

A cigarette lighter. And a bottle of kerosene.

‘The doors are heavy,’ she said. She kept her voice light and breezy, not wanting to betray how her skin tingled knowing His eyes were watching her.

His large hand reached, and opened one of the wood doors as easily as lifting a magazine.

Moonlight poured into the cellar. Curled in one corner was a ragged figure, barely visible in the deep shadows. Quill was sobbing.

‘Please. . please. .’

Hannah smiled. She knew what to do.

There was so much money on the floor. I put it there , she thought, pleased with herself. Some of the pile of bills had been wet by the rain that had dripped between the doors, but most was still dry. She unscrewed the lid of the kerosene bottle and poured its contents down the stairs. The oily smell was harsh, and she frowned — she didn’t want to mask so much as an atom of His charged, musky aroma.

‘Now?’ she asked.

She felt the cool air swirl as His huge head swooped down through the air, down behind her, till His mouth was right next to the nape of her neck. Her skin prickled in delight and her heart pounded.

‘Now,’ He said with a voice as warm as sunlight on old stone or the sea-water of a summer rock pool. Delicious and old and deep.

Hannah opened the lid of the lighter and flicked the flint wheel.

‘Please!’ begged the huddled old shape cowering below.

The flame sparked brightly, and Hannah felt Him slyly retreat behind her. It made her sad. She threw the lighter down into the cellar and heard the sucking fwoompf as the kerosene caught.

‘MY LORD!!’ cried Quill, but her last word was smothered by a solid bang! as the cellar door shut again.

Hannah scurried neatly to where the doors joined and slid the barrel bolt shut. Done!

She looked up, beaming, ready for His praise.

Beneath her, the screaming started.

He was ten again. Tristram had been carried past him on a floating carpet of eighty-thousand legs. Now, he, too, was dead, and being borne away to be hidden clumsily, ready to be found exsanguinated and white amid broken wood and discarded things.

The night slid past him, weeping, its tears as cold as the far sky. It’s all right , he wanted to say to the sighing trees and the lowing clouds. Don’t cry. I’m glad .

He was going back now. Back to him, whom he’d loved as a boy, and to her, whom he’d loved as a man. This last cool passage could not end too quickly.

Pleased with death, Nicholas opened his eyes.

The woods moved. The trees strode by him, waving in the cold wind, shaking off their doleful rains. Nicholas was surprised. He wasn’t on his back, drifting over the forest floor on a shifting bed of scuttling spiny legs, but cradled in an arm as great as a tree bough, aphotic and smelling of soil and worm and pungent stag musk. He wearily rolled his head.

The girl lay near him. Her name was lost just now. She slept, as he so dearly wanted to, and her lips were curled contentedly in her sleep. She could have been a dreaming sprite nestled deep between the loving roots of ancient trees.

Sleep. A faery dream.

Nicholas closed his eyes, and the rain fell on them, growing heavier.

That night, the river swelled. Rain hammered down as if determined to dissolve the earth.

The police recalled the State Emergency Service volunteers searching the Carmichael Road woods for Hannah Gerlic; the forest was simply too wild and treacherous in the rain at night. . and this rain was violent. Tethered to powerful spotlight beams, the drenched men and women in orange overalls stumped back from the tree line and headed towards the parked minibus they’d arrived in. They tramped up the chequer-plate steps, stamping hard to shake off the water, switching off torches, tutting to their neighbours about how they wished they could keep looking, but all secretly glad they didn’t have to continue battling through the wild turns of blackthorn and cunjevoi and lantana while this incredible rain smashed down on their skulls.

Veterinarian assistant Katy Rhydderch was the second last to climb the bus stairs. She just happened to glance down at a flicker of movement before she entered the vehicle. An orb weaver spider was straining across the grass on its matchstick legs, slipping as it headed for cover. Katy, notorious among her friends for hating to hurt any living thing (excluding, perhaps, the ticks she occasionally had to pull off matt-furred dogs) was afraid the spider would be crushed under the minibus tyres. She knelt to let the creature crawl onto her torch handle so she could move it out of harm’s way. As the spider tentatively stepped onto the flashlight, Katy saw there was a shadowed bundle under the bus.