Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

For a long while, he stared at the stars. Without knowing when, he slipped into sleep and dreamed that gnarled, shadowy hands were carrying him away through dark curtains of silk.

K nocking. It wrenched him up from a scuttling black dream that lost all its detail as his eyes opened.

Heavy knuckles rapping on wood. Someone was at the front door.

The sea gray of predawn stole between the venetian blinds. Nicholas rolled over and checked his watch. Quarter to six. Who knocked at quarter to six in the morning? He licked his dry lips and got out of bed. As he pulled on tracksuit pants, he caught sight of himself in the duchess mirror. A pale man with straw-blond hair, bleary eyes, and a distracted expression. The look you saw on shoeless men in tube stations and on sparrow-fingered street-corner preachers-a face you’d give wide berth to because it seemed one ill-aimed word away from crazy. So it’s come to that, he thought: avoiding my own eyes.

He pulled on his T-shirt as he lurched like a newly docked sailor down the narrow hallway toward the insistent knocking.

His mother’s door was shut. Once again, hefty snores came from behind it. Suzette’s door was shut too; from behind it rumbled snores a half-octave higher but equally lusty.

“How about I get it?” asked Nicholas.

Twin snores answered.

More knocking. The patient raps of a visitor who knows that someone is home.

Nicholas passed the kitchen. The sky outside was low and pregnant with rain.

He unlatched the front door.

A man stood there. He was perhaps forty, but his face wore fifty years’ worth of miles. His suit was expensive but rumpled. His tie was neatly knotted and his hair carefully combed. He’d shaved, but small tussocks of whiskers sat out like reeds in a gray swamp. The skin under his eyes looked as thin as old chicken meat; the eyes themselves were blue and overly bright.

“Can I help you?” Nicholas asked carefully.

But the man said nothing. He simply stared at Nicholas, fighting a smile and winning. The look on his face was desperate, starved, and hauntingly familiar.

The man finally spoke. “Nicholas.”

Nicholas blinked. The voice had a timber that opened up memories. Then the little smile bobbed again on the man’s lips, a brave boat in drowning seas, and years fell away. Nicholas recognized a face hadn’t seen for twenty-five years. It was a face he literally used to look up to. A Boye boy-Tristram’s older brother.

“Gavin?”

Gavin grinned. It was a skull’s rictus.

“Wow. Gavin. You look…” Nicholas put out his hand. Gavin looked at it as if he’d never seen an outstretched hand before. After an uncomfortable pause, Nicholas let it fall. “Right. Um. Listen, do… will you come in?”

The smile sank away and the years slipped back onto Gavin’s face like the tide returning. He shook his head, and his gaze on Nicholas was unblinking. He was big, easily six-two, and Nicholas suspected he could move fast. “Is everything okay?”

Gavin didn’t answer. Instead, he looked slowly over his left shoulder and then over his right at the empty street. Above pine trees in a distant park, a dozen or so crows wheeled and dipped in the gray sky like windblown black ash. Gavin’s movements sent a sudden chill flood through Nicholas’s gut. That’s exactly what Winston Teale did before he chased Tristram and me into the-

“Woods,” said Gavin.

Nicholas stopped breathing. Pins and needles pricked the soles of his bare feet and his neck pimpled cold. He could see past Gavin’s shoulders that the street was empty, not another soul in sight.

“It’s kind of early, Gavin.” Nicholas wanted it to sound casual, but the words came out cracked, his mouth suddenly dry as sand. “Do you want to stop by for a visit a little later?”

Gavin shook his head slowly, once. Nicholas noticed that he carried in one hand something wrapped in a black garbage bag.

“I was told you were back,” said Gavin. His voice was soft. Dreamy. He nodded, as if a subtle milestone had been reached.

Nicholas found it hard to drag his gaze back up to Gavin’s face; it was like looking at the sun, painful and dangerous. Gavin was unhooked, a boat adrift in rapids and rushing for the falls-but still afloat.

“Yeah. I’m back. What’s in the bag, Gavin?” But Nicholas thought he already knew.

Gavin twisted his head, as if he hadn’t heard the question. He was casting back in time. Remembering. He smiled-another death’s-head grin. “You know, Mum had tutors for us both. Tris really didn’t need one. Mum only got him one so that I wouldn’t feel stupid.”

“That was a long time ago, Gavin. Listen-”

“Tris…” interrupted Gavin, his voice drifting far away. “Trissy was the smart one.”

Nicholas watched the big man stand there, his eyes decades away. Nicholas knew this was his chance to shut the door. He reached slyly for the edge.

That instant, Gavin’s eyes flicked and locked on Nicholas’s. “I have a message,” he said.

In a motion so fast and fluid that Nicholas could hardly register it, Gavin pulled a gun from the bag. It was a hunting rifle, sawn off so short that the ragged cut sectioned through the front of its walnut stock. The severed barrel was ugly and raw as an eye socket. What a waste of a good Sako, thought Nicholas, and was instantly dismayed by his reaction. Had it been a snake or a spider, his body’s electric impulse would have been to leap back. But he didn’t live in Baghdad or Los Angeles; fear of guns wasn’t wired into his DNA. Instead, he was offended that a fine gun had been butchered. You fucking tosser, he thought. You deserve to die.

Gavin cradled the gun easily in his hands and pointed the rough hole at Nicholas’s midriff.

“A message,” said Nicholas, his empty cold-jelly stomach threatening to erupt. “From who?”

Gavin watched him a long moment. Nicholas thought it was like staring into an insect’s eyes-there was nothing human there. Gavin shrugged and shook his head as if to say, I just can’t remember. With an easy, firm movement he shifted the gun so that its barrel stared at Nicholas’s face.

And suddenly the cold jelly was gone from Nicholas’s gut. In its place was a warm, new idea. Here it is. A way out. And I don’t have to do anything. Just stand here a moment longer and it’s over.

He looked up to Gavin’s eyes. They were brimming full, and his patchy cheeks were wet.

“Tris loved you coming over. Saturdays. Cheese sandwiches. Watching Combat. Remember?”

Nicholas nodded. The two men looked at each other a long moment. A calm statement formed in Nicholas’s mind. He’s going to shoot me now. And from that warmth bloomed another thought: No more ghosts.

“It’s okay, Gavin,” he whispered.

Gavin nodded. With a practiced hand, he drew back the gun’s bolt and chambered a round. The street was still. No one had an inkling that in a few heartbeats, a man was going to die.

Nicholas suddenly realized his fingers in his pocket had curled around something-wood beads and stone. The necklace Suzette had given him.

Gavin cocked his head. His eyes lost their sharp focus. His lips trembled. When he spoke, his voice was so soft that Nicholas wasn’t sure he heard right.

“Tristram touched the bird. But it should have been you.”

Gavin put the sawn barrel under his own jaw and pulled the trigger. The crack was sudden and as visceral as a lightning strike. Nicholas jumped.

The crows wheeling in the sky galvanized and scattered. Gavin was still standing. His lower jaw was mostly gone. He shook his head stupidly and the flaps of skin and white bone shook like a chicken’s wattle. He shrugged, and his cheeks lifted the broken flesh-a macabre, embarrassed smile at his error. He swiftly chambered another round, put the gun deep under his chin.