Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

The shops were all shuttered and dark.

He expected a wave of pleasant nostalgia to suddenly overtake them, and they’d laugh about the lollies they’d gourmandized and the ice creams they’d loved that were no longer made. Instead, the dumb fronts of the shops were oddly hostile.

It’s because we’re being watched.

The thought shuddered through him like a shot of vodka. The streets were quiet. Nothing moved. The world was more shadow than substance and the wind made the power lines moan. They were alone. And yet, he had the unpleasant, light feeling in the pit of his gut that they were being watched.

“We should go,” he said.

“Okay,” said Suzette. But instead, she nodded at the new shop: Plow amp; Vine Health Foods. All they could see in the glass was their own ghostly reflections; the shop within was as black as the waters of a deep well.

“This was the haberdashery.” Suzette leaned closer, trying to see in. Nicholas fought an insane urge to yell “Get back!” Her eyes were fixed on the dark shop window. “Do you remember the old seamstress? Mrs. Quill. She freaked me out.”

Quill. The bent-backed old woman tucked behind a counter much too large for her, perched like some benevolent old parrot, nodding and sending a smile as he passed. Behind her had hung ranks of shirts, pants, skirts, and dresses that used to bring to mind a picture that, for a while during primary school, had haunted his dreams: from a book about the Second World War, a photograph of a dozen or so Russians-men, women, children-hanging dead and limp from a huge and leafless tree. A chill went through him and, as it did, another memory returned.

“You used to hate walking past these shops,” he said. “When you were small. You used to cry.”

She shrugged her shoulders, as if to shuck off an unpleasant memory-then she seemed to brighten. “Hey. I brought you something.” She reached into her pocket and produced a tiny parcel wrapped in tissue paper.

Not here. Not while we’re being watched.

He shook away the illogical thought. “Lovely. Can it wait till we get home?”

“Fucking hell, Nicholas,” said Suzette, cranky. “I don’t want Mum to see, okay?”

“Why not?”

“Christ! Because she doesn’t understand that kind of stuff! Jeez.”

Nicholas turned his back to the dark-eyed shop and removed the ribbon, unstuck the tape. Inside was a necklace. It was made of wooden beads and sported a polished brownish-white stone set in silver.

“The stone is sardonyx,” explained Suzette. “You said you had some headaches, so…”

“They stopped.”

“Yeah. ‘Thank you’ works, too. The wood is elder.”

Nicholas turned to face the streetlight. The stone was an inch across and cut in a square crystal, milky clear with tigerish bands of blood red. The beads were a dark timber, roughly spherical but each showing dozens of facets where they’d been cut by hand with a sharp knife. A woven silver cord held them together. It was, he had to admit, a piece both pretty and oddly masculine.

“Thank you,” he said.

Suzette didn’t answer. She was staring at the front door to Plow amp; Vine Health Foods. She leaned closer and frowned.

“Look.”

He followed her gaze and felt his stomach take a slow roll.

In the dim light it was just possible to make out an indentation in the wood doorframe. The mark had been painted over perhaps three or four times and would be invisible in daylight. But in the angled light from the streetlamp, it was fairly clear. A vertical line, and halfway down it, attached to its right, a half-diamond. The mark that had been drawn in blood on the woven head of the dead bird.

Nicholas felt a cold wave of dread rise through him.

“Let’s go home, Suze,” he said.

She was entranced, leaning closer. “This is a rune.”

“Wonderful. Come on. It’s cold.”

“Wait,” she said, and reached into her purse. She pulled out a pencil and notepad and copied the figure.

Tell her! Tell her all about the bird and its twig head and the mark… the mark, what does it mean? But another voice was stronger, calmer. No. Keep her out of it.

“Mrs. Quill,” she whispered to herself.

Nicholas put the necklace in his pocket, took his sister’s arm, and gently led her out to the street. “We’re going. I’m starved.”

The lie hurried him along.

K atharine turned the oven on low and started doling mashed potato onto three plates. How strange. She was out of practice being a mother. Nicholas had left home nearly twenty years ago. Suzette had lived in Sydney for ten. Katharine had grown used to the silence around her.

It wasn’t fair. They left you and you coped. Then they came home and you had to worry all over again. Not fair. Not fair.

And yet now they were under one roof again, the instant they stepped on the street, she was anxious.

Because of the street. Because of Tallong.

“Nonsense,” she whispered and reached for the saucepan of meatballs.

Because there’s something evil out there.

The front door rattled open.

Katharine jumped at the noise, dropping the ladle with a clatter on the tiles. Tomato sauce spattered blood red across the floor.

“We’re home!” called Suzette.

“Miss us?” asked Nicholas.

Footsteps tromped down the hall.

Katharine quickly wiped up the sauce as her children stepped into the kitchen. Both of them blinked at the red flecks, and both seemed to sag a little with relief when they figured out what it was.

“You okay?” asked Suzette.

Katharine smiled thinly and nodded. “You forgot the milk, I see.”

A fter dinner, the three members of the Close family sat on the couch and watched the news.

No one said anything as the newsreader reported that Elliot Neville Guyatt, a thirty-seven-year-old cleaner recently moved up from Coffs Harbor, had presented himself at the Torwood Police Station and confessed to the abduction and murder of eight-year-old Dylan Oscar Thomas. The overlay pictures showed a slim paperclip of a man looking thoroughly confused as police escorted him from the paddywagon into the watchhouse. Guyatt made no effort to hide his face. He walked as if he were caught in a dream.

N icholas lay on the creaking single bed in his old room. He was awake, listening to the feminine lilt of his sister and mother talking. The wood walls filtered out the detail of words but left a melody that spoke of shared blood.

His old bed. The family together. Childhood again.

The shops remained the same. The woods remained the same.

Only now, he could see they were haunted.

Tallong children were still dying.

He was suddenly wide awake.

Elliot Guyatt had confessed to killing the Thomas child, and the boy’s body was found in the river, miles from Tallong. Winston Teale had confessed to killing Tristram two suburbs distant, hiding his body at the construction site. Nicholas had always thought his memory of seeing Tristram’s drained, dead body floating past was a bad dream, a hallucination brought on by sheer terror and the thump of the tree branch.

But Suzette said she saw Tristram after he died, running from Carmichael Road into the woods. And Nicholas himself had seen the Thomas boy’s ghost dragged into the trees.

The boys didn’t die miles away. The boys had been murdered in the woods.

Nicholas rolled to look out the window.

Jesus. He wondered if Tris had been trapped down there for twenty-five years, his ghost caught in that awful loop, experiencing over and over the mind-tearing fear that had wrenched at every cell in their bodies as Teale had chased them. Twenty-five years, running in terror between those dark trees. The thought tightened Nicholas’s throat.