Stephen Irwin: The Darkening

Nicholas opened his other eye. He wasn’t in the cottage. His fingers inched to his left wrist and felt the hard sleeve of plaster there. He rolled his head one way, towards the window.

Stars trembled above the subsiding river.

He rolled the other way, and saw her.

Laine was in a cot bed beside his, her face pale and lean and grimly tight, even in sleep.

He watched her a long time. Missing Cate. Exploring Laine’s face. Wondering if he was glad he was alive.

He rolled back to stare at the ceiling. There were things to be remembered. Incredible things. The sight of something awesome and terrible. But as he mined the thought, ready to expose its shape, sleep dragged at him like insistent imps. He would sleep now, and remember tomorrow. .

But by dawn, his memory of the Green Man had vanished as completely as had the rain.

The doctors conducted cognisance tests, assayed his blood, examined his urine, and decided there was no reason for him not to be discharged.

Laine helped Nicholas pack. She told him carefully about Pritam’s death — but he simply nodded. She explained his mother had killed Garnock, and how she and Suzette and Katharine had been thwarted by the police. Again, he nodded. The silence between them wasn’t uncomfortable: it was small and warm and as sad as reading the headstone of a stranger’s child.

She took him home.

As he walked from the road to the front gate and then to the front porch, his head turned this way and that. He refused to go inside, and sat on the front steps, watching the street. Laine realised he was searching for Gavin’s ghost, so left him alone.

Nicholas waited on the porch outside 68 Lambeth Street for a full hour, watching workmen with shovels follow a truck up the road, scooping the gutters clear of debris.

Gavin’s ghost never showed.

Nicholas held his jaw tight, and went inside to have tea with the three women.

He sat for long hours looking out his childhood bedroom window at the streets of Tallong, trying to remember. His mother, his sister and Laine all asked him in their different ways what had happened the night that Hannah Gerlic had slipped away from home, and had been found under an SES minibus hours later.

He couldn’t remember.

Nicholas sent his gaze over denuded trees, over eroded streets half-closed with orange emergency barriers, over energy company crews rising in cherrypickers to repair power lines. That was not entirely true: there were two memories.

The first was a clear picture in his mind — solid and smooth as marble — of following Hannah’s pointing finger to the rippling waters of the gully creek, and seeing rafts of small, moving things struggling to escape the dark water. But the instant he recognised the shifting masses as arachnids, the tape inside his brain ran out, and his next recollection was of waking in the hospital and seeing stars over the flooded night river.

And there was another, fragmented memory. It hardly deserved to be called that: it was more a wisp, a faint scent on the fickle air of recollection. A dream.

It was of moving. Of being carried through the woods. The air had smelled wet and thick and vivid with greenery. And a voice was speaking to him, not in words, but in a vibration that carried through his body and into his mind. What it said was unclear, but it was as primal and lustful as the thunder of the ocean. . but also deathly sad and doomed. A dream.

He watched as the energy company crew lowered the boom with its cage and the truck drove away.

Nicholas asked Suzette to walk with him to the woods.

They spoke little on the way down, batting between them recollections of schoolteachers and the venial sins of childhood. They stopped at Carmichael Road, and looked across at the woods. Neither said a word for a long while.

The trees had been given new life by the recent downpours. The sun winked on their leaves, which shimmered with green lustre, and their lightly laughing tops rolling up the gentle hills to the river. They were still dark and dense, but there was no foreboding any more. No sense of things lurking. No gravity to draw you in, no ill shiver to send you hurrying. The woods were plain, and vulnerable.

‘It’s gone,’ said Suzette.

‘Yes.’

‘ She’s gone.’

‘Yes.’

Suzette nodded, took his arm, and brother and sister walked home.

Hannah waited and waited for him to come.

Eventually, the telephone rang, and she ran to the lounge room to answer — but her mother beat her to it.

Mrs Gerlic was speaking with him. Her voice was snipped and severe, warning him not to call, that Hannah was fine, thank you, but to please stay away . She hung up.

But Hannah knew he would come. He was a good man, a fine man. A brave man. A little misguided, though.

Her leg was healing nicely. She felt quite good, and told her parents so. She went to Miriam’s funeral, and cried at all the right spots.

The police asked her questions about the night that she and Nicholas went into the woods, but she said all she could remember was finding a shotgun on the path, and touching it even though she knew she shouldn’t, and dropping it and it going off with a very scary bang. Everything else was. . Well, that was all she could remember.

She said she was sorry for sneaking out, and everyone believed her.

But she did remember. She remembered everything.

Including His promise.

She was angry that Nicholas hadn’t come, but that was okay. Things would work out in time.

In weeks and months, after her parents were lulled by normalcy and their tears were done and they’d grown bored with watching out for Hannah, she would be allowed again to walk to school and back.

Then she could go back into the woods.

She could build a new place.

Replant the garden. Tend her trees.

And get back her pretty man.