Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

T o Nicholas, the sky seemed the same sea gray as the wet slate of the steeply set shingles on the church roof, so it was hard to see where the holy building ended and the heavens began. The rain darkened the rough stone of the church’s buttresses, and the gloom made the green moss on the lowest course of its walls almost black. A fine day for a suicide’s funeral.

He stood under a dark umbrella among a small grove of she-oaks. He suspected that he looked exactly like the kind of rumpled weirdo one expects to see at the fringes of a funeral. He smoothed back his damp hair with one hand, and surreptitiously sniffed at his armpit. Not too bad, considering. His sleep on the sofa had been as long as it was deep. He’d been out nearly a whole day, and his eyelids had drifted open just an hour ago, all traces of his feverish flu gone. He’d jumped in the shower, patted himself dry with the few paper towels the previous tenant had left, pulled on yesterday’s clothes, ran his fingers over his teeth, and hurried to the church.

But now he was here, he didn’t want to go inside.

He listened to the rain strike a slack tattoo above his head as he watched mourners hurry inside like scolded black swans. The hearse-a long, modified Ford-was parked out front, its driver sitting upright and trying not to let passersby see that he was reading a paperback. He returned his gaze to the church’s damp granite flanks. From here, he could just read the lead lettering of the church’s cornerstone. It stated that the bishop of the Western Diocese had laid this stone to the Glory of God in 1888, the funds donated by an E. Bretherton. Stained-glass windows, narrow and high and lit from within, were the blues and greens of deep-sea gems. A quarter century ago, he’d sat inside looking at those same windows as he waited for Tristram’s funeral to begin. Tris’s casket had been a polished, garlanded box that looked terribly small on its own up at the front of the church-too small to hold Tris, who’d always seemed so electric with energy, so alive. It seemed impossible that he was lying silent inside it. The clergyman, Reverend Hird, a short but tough bulldog of a man, began the service and had fairly shaken with rage at the theft of Tristram’s young life. Not wanting to cry but unable to stop himself, Nicholas had looked away from the reverend and the small coffin to the windows. Their seaweed greens and abalone blues were so dark and cold through tears that Nicholas had imagined that he was not in a church at all, but was slipping under the sea, and drowning…

A shudder of raindrops tapped heavily on Nicholas’s umbrella, startling him back to the present. The wet footpaths were empty. There were no more mourners arriving. He had no more reason to linger out here like a cowardly thief outside a petrol station.

He went inside.

T hrough the inner swing doors, he could see the casket wreathed in flowers on the front dais. Sprays of white lilies either side of the pulpit were as shocking as ice fountains.

The elderly minister stood hunched at the side of the nave in discussion with a middle-aged mourner. Nicholas blinked, amazed. It was Reverend Hird: older, shorter, but still radiating the same dogged strength. A younger clergyman, a man of perhaps thirty with coffee-colored skin, stood patiently behind his superior.

Nicholas shook off his umbrella, signed the book, and slipped quietly into the church proper.

He had hoped to sit unnoticed in the back pews, but there were only two dozen mourners so to isolate himself in the back would draw even more attention. He joined the fourth row. As he sat, several heads turned to see who was arriving this late and whether they recognized him. Most didn’t, and returned their gazes to their orders of service, their neighbors, or the festooned casket. But three women kept their eyes on him. Katharine and Suzette were frowning. Katharine shook her head and returned to chatting to the elderly lady next to her; Suzette’s lips were as tight as a razor slash, and she mouthed, “Where the fuck have you been?” Nicholas gave a dismissive wave and mouthed back, “Later.” Suzette sent him one last furious glare, then turned back to the pulpit. The third woman held her stare at Nicholas longer, puzzled, trying to place him. At other times or in other lights, she would be striking, but the gloom of the church, the ubiquitous black, her shadowing half-veil made her seem carved severely from some cold and unyielding stone. He guessed this was Gavin’s widow. Her eyes narrowed, unhappy that she hadn’t identified this latecomer, and she turned her long neck again to the front. Beside her was a hooked old woman with a shock of white hair, visible under her small black hat.

Jesus, thought Nicholas. That must be Mrs. Boye.

From where he sat, he could just see the corner of her face. Her eyes were fixed on the figure of Christ crucified. Nicholas followed her gaze. The image was carved wood, a century or more old. The raw chisel marks made his limbs seem more wounded, his suffering more pronounced. Something beyond the raw agony of the figure disturbed Nicholas. The setting carved behind him was not Golgotha, but an incongruous forest of Arcadian trees and lush vines. Old Mrs. Boye’s expression vacillated between a frown of confusion and a bluff of undisguised boredom; her head bobbed to its own unheard tune, and from time to time she’d look to her daughter-in-law to ask a question that Nicholas could guess: Where are we? Senile dementia. Her mildly confused eyes kept returning to the dying son of God. There seemed no trace in the old body of the sharp-eyed, sharp-minded woman who had shushed him and Tris to silence a hundred times.

Reverend Hird limped to the pulpit. Age might have bent his body, but his voice was still as strong as a Welsh tenor’s. “Please rise for hymn seventy-nine: ‘Saviour Again to Thy Dear Name We Raise.’ ”

The congregation rumbled as it stood. And so the funeral commenced.

S peakers rose, praised Gavin, lamented the loss to his wife and his mother, opened spectacles, read poems, folded papers, dabbed tears, returned to their seats. The air was warm and still, the voices monotonous. Nicholas fought to stay awake. He did calf raises. Cleaned his nails. Took deep breaths. His eyelids sank, heavy as stones. He sat back in the hard pew and let his gaze trace up those cyan windows, across the curved timbers overhead, to linger on the carved timber ceiling boss some six meters above him.

Suddenly, his weariness vanished like gunpowder in a flash pan. His heartbeat broke into a brisk trot and the hairs on his arms and neck rose into goosebumps.

The ceiling boss was carved as a face. A face with oak leaves sprouting from its sides and mouth. A face that was chillingly familiar. Nicholas dragged his eyes away, but they kept returning to the inhuman visage: a mouth drawn wide and thick, with vital leaves springing from its corners like fleshy tusks. It was a face he’d seen before, though he couldn’t place where. It scared him.

“And now,” Reverend Hird rumbled, “I’d like to call on Gavin’s wife, Mrs. Laine Boye.”

Nicholas dragged his startled eyes down from the ceiling.

Laine Boye held herself straight and took neat steps. Her black suit and skirt were well-fitted and expensive. She reached the pulpit, glanced at the casket, and then looked over the small congregation.

“Thank you for coming today.” Her voice was high-pitched but clear, a neutral accent that spoke of private schooling and careful grooming. “Gavin left no children,” she continued. “And he left too soon.”

Her gaze sought and found Nicholas, and rested on him. There was no puzzlement there any more; she’d figured out who he was. He was close enough to see that her eyes, like the dark day outside, were gray and unyielding as stone.