Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

A dangerous rune, Suzette had called it. Too fucking right. So dangerous that he hoped he’d confused her enough, or pissed her off enough, that she’d book a flight home to Sydney tomorrow.

His tired eyes slid shut, and straightaway more dark images played like a silent newsreel: Tristram dropping to his knees and crawling into the spidery tunnel; Laine Boye’s eyes, inscrutable; Rowena’s eyes, shining with youth; Cate’s eyes, open and dusted with white powder; carved stone; the Green Man; dark woods dense with sentient trees; the oak grove at Walpole Park…

Nicholas’s eyes flew open. He felt suddenly ill.

The face that he’d seen as he sped past overgrown Walpole Park at Ealing on his motorbike, the face that made him crash-a face glimpsed just for an instant, a half-memory, a ghostly dream from the other side of his life-had been shrouded in leaves, just as the ceiling boss at the church was.

The Green Man.

There would be no sleep tonight. He stood and went to the window.

The night air was thick with fog, and all he could see was the streetlamp floating like a spectral eye. And though he couldn’t see them, he could sense the woods. He could feel the weight of the trees, huge and drawing as the moon to the tides.

He yanked on a sweater, snatched his keys, and strode out into the predawn chill.

N icholas walked through the thick mist to the 7-Eleven near the railway station. He agonized outside long enough for his light sweat to turn icy, then stepped inside and purchased two items, cursing himself for a fool every moment of the transaction.

Then he walked to Carmichael Road.

The fog swallowed all sound. No dogs barked. No cars passed. He could only see a few feet in front of him. As he crossed Carmichael Road, his footsteps on the bitumen were jealously hushed by the moist air. He stepped into the knee-high grass and felt the chill of it eat through his jeans to his calves. He plowed a wet path to what he guessed was roughly the middle of the gravel track, and stood silent, waiting.

For twenty minutes, nothing happened. The wet, frigid air seeped into his collar, up his sleeves, into his shoes. He had to bite his lip to convince himself he wasn’t still asleep on the couch, dreaming that he was here in this pearly gray world of cold. An elderly woman in a pink cardigan walked past on the other side of Carmichael Road with a tiny white dog-two faint specters in the mist. She didn’t see Nicholas and was dissolved again by the cloudy gray. He waited another five minutes. The cold burrowed into his skin, his eyes, his bones.

Then a flicker of movement ahead on the path.

Nicholas hurried. As he grew closer, the figure grew sharper through the fog like a diver rising from obscure depths. A young girl crouched on the path. She was shoeless and wore a plain sundress. His first thought was that she must be freezing. Then he saw that tall blades of damp grass speared painlessly through her legs and arms. She was as insubstantial as the mist.

My God. Tristram. The Thomas Boy. This young girl. Maybe Owen Liddy. How many children have died in those woods?

Nearer, he could see the shift the girl wore was a pattern from the 1940s. Her face beamed in delight: she’d found something wonderful on the path. She looked around cautiously, hopefully, checking that its rightful owner wasn’t around and she could claim the treasure for herself.

The girl bent again to pick up the invisible object she’d found. The moment she did, her translucent eyes widened in sudden disgust and she jerked away. Nicholas couldn’t bear what would come next. The ghost girl’s head whipped up toward the woods and white terror slammed across her face. She jittered back to run, but got not a step before her arm shot out like a signal post’s and she jetted away through the mist toward the woods, mouth wide in terror, dragged by something unseen, powerful, and fast.

A cold worm of fear shifted in Nicholas’s stomach. But he didn’t follow.

Instead, he started searching the path. It took less than a minute for him to find what he was looking for. He bent and parted the wet sword grass. There. A butcher bird. Gray wings, white belly, loose feathers over a swollen body. Legs snipped neatly off. Head gone, replaced with a sphere of woven twigs that was greening with mold encouraged by the recent rains. Hints of rust red peeked from under the ill green. The small bird’s death-curled claws were stuck in like horns.

He knew without doubt that just a few days ago, Dylan Thomas had seen this same bird on the path.

Nicholas picked up the talisman. He plucked out the feet, pulled off the woven head, and angrily tossed the legs, false head, and body in three directions.

There. Now I’ve touched the bird. Why don’t you come and get me?

He turned and strode through the sword grass toward the woods he knew were waiting.

A s he pushed through the tightly packed scrub, tendrils of fog curled in his wake. With mist obscuring everything but the few steps in front of him, there was less of an overwhelming palette of green to assault his eyes and he was drawn to details he would otherwise have overlooked: how close the trunks were to one another; how one tree was armored in bark as dark and thick as a crocodile’s hide, while its neighbor was pale gray and smooth as a girl’s calf; how the carpet of leaves underfoot bled tea-colored water as he squashed it, and how it sucked lightly when he stepped off; how the exposed rocks in gully walls bore spots of pale-green moss rounded like spray can spatters on their tops and black shadows like beards below; how vines curled up trunks like possessive serpents, rose straight like zippers, or clung with their own green claws like headless jade dragons. Some trunks were meters wide-striated tendons in the wrists of straining giants. Some massive beeches had tumbled with time and lay prone like beached whales, barnacled with funguses that reminded him of human ears. Some had fallen and exposed clumps of roots twice a man’s height-colossal, arthritic fingers probing the mist.

As he moved deeper, the fog drew even closer about him and moisture beaded on the fabric of his jumper and jeans. The half-light of misty dawn dimmed further as the dark canopy overhead closed tighter. He walked cocooned in a silent dusk and had to stretch out his arms so he wouldn’t collide with tree trunks that loomed suddenly, their limbs so madly twisted that they reminded him of Mexican catacombs where the dried dead were stacked standing, their leather-and-bone limbs crooked at angry angles.

He was unsure if he’d been walking ten minutes or fifty when he reached the steep embankment that led down to the creek bed and the water pipe. The low cliff where Tris broke his arm. The gully below was thick with fog, and the dark green tops of shrubs poked through it like the moldering heads of drowned people.

He slung the plastic 7-Eleven bag over one shoulder and carefully descended the gully face. At the bottom, he walked cautious steps away from the steep bank until his feet clacked on the stones of the wash bed. Then he turned and followed the dry creek until a dark shape coalesced from the thick fog. The pipe. Its flanks loomed like the hull of some ghost ship. Below the red metal, the twin skull eyes of the tunnels watched him.

He felt his body vibrate with the hard thudding of his heart. He took a breath, feeling the biting harshness of cold air lick his throat, and knelt. From the plastic bag he pulled out a new flashlight and a squat spray can with a plastic lid.

You could just go back, he thought. Just go back, never come down here again, never see another terrified ghost, just go back and leave town and get a job in a new office and buy a new flat and ignore the dead and-

“Shh,” he told himself. He couldn’t go back. Something was in there, beyond the pipe. Something that took children. Something that had taken Tristram.