Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

She smoothed her dress to wipe the stupid thought away, then went to the living room and turned the TV on loud.

N asturtiums blazed cold orange fire on the sloping banks that led down to the train tracks. Two pairs of silver rails curved like giant calligraphy around a far bend. They’d come from the nearby 7-Eleven and let themselves under a rusted chain-link fence to sit on mossy rocks at the top of the bank. From here they could look along to Tallong railway station and its sixty-year-old wooden walkway that crossed above the tracks. Beyond, red and green tin roofs marched through the trees up the suburb’s hills. They reminded Nicholas of pieces in a Monopoly set, playthings in some larger game. He chewed fruit pastilles. Suzette ate caramel corn from a brightly colored bag. Overhead, clouds the color of pigeon wings tumbled in loose ranks. Evening was coming.

The small talk about Bryan, the kids, their school, Suzette’s work, dried up and slid into quiet. As he finished his last sweet, Nicholas braced himself for the turn of the tide. Suzette would start asking about him. She’d ask how he was holding up. She’d see if he’d visited a counselor. She’d tell him it was okay to cry.

But Suzette remained silent. She simply sat beside him, licking her fingers and retrieving the last sugary crumbs from the bottom of the popcorn bag. She seemed content to do so for another hour.

“I don’t like your hair that color,” he said to break the silence.

She licked her fingers. “Fuck you. Bryan does.”

She looked at him. Her eyes were a steely blue, her gaze as solid as granite. He could see why her financial planning business went so well-her clients would be too scared not to believe her if she said “buy now.”

“I heard a boy went missing,” she said.

“They found him in the river…” He nodded to the northeast. “Couple of clicks.”

Suzette kept her eyes on him. “Mum said he was murdered, too.”

Murdered, too. He knew what she was thinking. Murdered, like Tristram.

He nodded again.

A stainless-steel train whummed past, sighing as it slowed to stop at the platform. Men in shirts and ties and women in sensible black skirts alighted and started up the wooden stairs of the crossover, heading home.

He saw Suzette was frowning. It was the same concentrated scowl she used to wear solving fractions at the dinner table and correlating statistical charts on her bedroom desk.

“What?” he asked.

She shook her head-nothing.

He looked back at the train station. There was just one person left on the crossover now: a girl in a yellow anorak. From this distance her face was a blur, her hair a dark pistil atop a fluffed golden bloom.

“I’m waiting for you to tell me that I couldn’t have done anything to stop Cate dying.”

Suzette crumpled the empty popcorn bag and shoved it in her pocket. “That it was an accident?” she asked.

“Or some similar platitudes, yes.”

Suzette nodded. “Well. I don’t really believe in accidents.”

Nicholas looked at her again.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying it was your fault.” She met his gaze. “But… nothing happens without a reason.”

He felt a warm knot form in his gut.

“Don’t give me bullshit, Suze. I saw her-”

He bit his tongue. He’d been about to say how he’d seen Cate falling from that invisible ladder time and again, over and over, her dead eyes staring at nothing, then rolling to him, blank as slate, without a trace of the person he’d loved and married. That wasn’t heaven. That was hell.

On the pedestrian overpass, the girl in the yellow anorak pulled up her sleeve. To check her watch, Nicholas guessed. Someone was late meeting her. But then she climbed onto the crossover’s rails, balanced for just a second, then stepped into space.

“Jesus Christ!” Nicholas leapt to his feet and his breath jagged in his throat like a hook.

The girl lay motionless on the track a moment. Her arm lifted a little as she tried to sit… then her anorak seemed to fly apart. She became a small, violent storm of feathers and red as an invisible train tore over her body, dragging pink flesh and one leg and shards of yellow thirty meters up the track. Then she was gone.

“You okay?” asked Suzette. “Nicky?”

Nicholas saw his traitorous hand pointing at the track and willed it to fall by his side.

Suzette looked down at the train line, squinting. “What is it?”

Nicholas looked around. And there, a flash of daffodil two hundred meters away. The girl in yellow was slowly making her way down the steep slope of Battenberg Terrace, her body whole, her face a smudged thumbprint.

Nicholas’s heart was kicking in his chest. He put his hands in his pockets to hide his shaking fingers. Jesus. Would he ever get used to the sight of them?

“Nothing.”

Suzette frowned skeptically. “Uh-huh…”

The sun was now resting on roof ridges in the west, and here in the shadows the air had grown cold. The ground beneath the round lily leaves of the nasturtiums was black. He turned his back to the railway station. He didn’t want to see that again.

Suzette’s careful eyes slid between him and the tracks. Then she cocked her head and fixed Nicholas with a hard look.

“I saw him a couple of times,” she said, and took a breath. “Tris.”

“You saw him more than that. He was over every time his bloody parents wanted a nap.”

Suzette’s eyes were still fixed on him. “No. I saw him after he died.”

Nicholas suddenly felt the air grow tight around him. His heart thudded slow, long beats as if his blood had suddenly taken on the consistency of arctic seawater, just a degree away from becoming ice.

“Where?” he whispered.

Suzette looked him in the eye. “Running into the woods.”

She got to her feet, dusted off the back of her jeans.

“Let’s walk.”

T hey climbed back through the rusty fence and down onto the road. The sky in the west lost the last of its furnace glow and grew purple and dark. Birds hurried to find shelter before the last light was gone. A cold breeze stiffened.

A month or so after Tristram was found murdered, she’d defied their mother and walked down to Carmichael Road. There, on the gravel path through the grass verge, she’d seen Tristram kneeling, picking something up, then running away into the trees. The sight had scared her senseless.

“I reckon I felt how you just looked,” she said, smiling thinly. “Like you just saw a ghost.”

She watched her brother. His dark eyes were fixed on the cracked footpath. He was motionless. Finally, he spoke.

“Do you still see them?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I saw Tris twice more. I snuck down one afternoon when you were sick, and another time when Mum went to work or something. He did the same thing. Picked something off the path, backed away, ran into the woods.” She shrugged. “But after that, I never saw him again. Or any others.”

She watched him nod slowly. He let out a long breath. He was working up to telling her something.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Maybe I just had a… a flash. Either that, or maybe Tristram had reached his proper time.”

“Proper time? To what?”

“Die.” She could see her brother’s face tense as he digested this. “That’s what ghosts are, I think,” she continued. “Spirits of people who are killed, or take their own lives, before their time.”

Nicholas’s eyes were shadowed shells beneath a grim frown.

“Ghosts,” he said so softly it was barely a whisper. “Can I tell you about ghosts, Suze?”

A trickle like ice went up her arms and back. But she nodded.

He told her about the motorcycle crash, and borrowing the phone from the horse-faced couple he had collided with. About hurrying home to find Cate crooked like a broken exclamation mark, head bent too far backward over the tub, her open eyes unable to blink out the dust that coated them. About the Yerwood boy with the corduroy jacket and screwdriver. About all the ghosts that silently conspired to send him home. He told her that there were ghosts here, too, including the suicide in the yellow anorak. The sun had sunk below the hills, and lights glowed orange in the houses they passed. The air was faintly spiced with scents of frying meat and onions. He finished by telling her how he’d chased the Thomas boy into the woods two days ago, and lost him at the same place he’d lost Tristram-the shotgun tunnels under the tall, rusted water pipe.