Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

Nicholas’s eyes blearily opened.

A large woman stood above him, poking him with the tip of a brightly colored umbrella. Nicholas screamed. The woman screamed, too, and skittered backward. Despite her size, she moved surprisingly fast.

“He’s alive!” she called to her husband in the car on the road. She hurried into the passenger seat and the car roared past.

“Dirty druggie! Disgrace!” shouted the man before he swiftly wound up his window and sped away.

Nicholas was lying in the dry sword grass outside the woods. Everything hurt. His hands and feet felt like they weren’t flesh but wet dust, heavy and lifeless. His clothes were damp. His heart thudded dully, and his head felt full of sand. But he could move. He rolled onto his side, dragged his knees to his chest, and slowly pushed himself up onto all fours. Ropy spittle fell from his slack lips. The minute it took him to sit on his haunches seemed an eternity.

He sat on the path, breathing heavily from the effort, and squinted at his watch. It was four thirty; the sun was kissing the rooftops in the west. An arm’s length away on the path lay the body of the butcher bird, its woven head reattached to its lifeless body, its pathetic severed legs again poking out like antlers. Beside him was a clean plastic 7-Eleven bag. He reached painfully and picked it up. Within were a new torch and a bug bomb can, the latter also unused, its lid still attached.

Nicholas looked at his knees. No sign of the virulent sludge of squashed spiders-but his clothes were all wet; soaked through.

He looked at his hand. In the flesh between his forefinger and thumb were two red-rimmed and throbbing punctures. The pain in his upper thigh told him he would find two more wounds there.

She did this, he thought. She washed my clothes. Bought new goods. She did it so no one would believe me if I blabbed. She did it so I wouldn’t believe myself.

But he could prove it! He could run now, into the woods, to the tunnels under the pipe, and the left one would be full of torn cobwebs and squashed, dead spiders. But he knew, with cold clarity, that the pipe would have been emptied of dead spiders and filled with live ones busily spinning fresh webs. The empty bug bomb container would have been spirited away.

He looked around at the woods. In the late afternoon light, they brooded, patient and dark. There was no way he wanted to go back in there, not today.

She got what she wanted.

The wrinkled hand stroking him, his jerked expulsions, the horror of the catlike weight on his chest as he heaved in orgasm. He felt utterly exhausted. Raped. Emptied.

He climbed to his feet and began a slow stagger toward Bymar Street.

M olten ice cream dribbled down the girl’s arm, threatening to drip off her skinny elbow. She lifted her arm high and licked the whole, sweet trail.

“Hannah Gerlic, you are too gross.”

Hannah licked the last of the sticky melted cream up to the cone, and grinned. “Takes gross to know gross.”

She watched her friend Addison wrinkle her nose and nibble at her own iceblock. Hannah knew Addison Wintour was anything but gross. Addison was one of those prissy girls who never got dirty and whose hair was always right. She and Addison weren’t good friends, but okay friends. They were in the same class, lived not far from each other, went to the same school camps, and attended the same girls’ parties.

“What time is it?” asked Addison, holding out her free hand. Hannah picked a folded bundle of junkmail flyers, catalogues, and brochures from the trolley she wheeled and handed it to Addison, who jammed it into a letterbox. They walked up Ithaca Lane to the next letterbox.

“Dunno.” Hannah checked the sky. The dove wing clouds overhead had apricot edges, and the sky behind them was turning a steely blue. She popped the last of her ice-cream cone into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Around five, I guess.”

“Good. We can finish this rubbish soon.”

As soon as Hannah had got home from school that afternoon, Mrs. Wintour had rung Hannah’s mum. Mrs. Wintour, who normally drove Addison around the suburb while she delivered her catalogues, had been delayed at her work. Could Hannah be a sweet thing and keep Addison company?

Hannah had protested, but her mother had cut her short. “It doesn’t hurt to help, Hannah Elizabeth.” Hannah had looked to her older sister Miriam for support, but got only a sweet sucked-in smile.

And so the two ten-year-olds had spent the last hour and a half trundling the streets, alternately pulling the small handcart of brochures and pushing the catalogues into mailboxes, discussing Spongebob, Miley Cyrus, and cats.

They were coming up to a block of flats at the top of Ithaca Lane, outside of which were several garbage bins. “Cool,” said Addison. She bent to the trolley and scooped up the unposted bundles.

“Wait,” said Hannah, shocked. “What are you doing?”

“They’re for Carmichael Road.”

Hannah blinked. “You have to do them. Don’t you?”

“Don’t be stupid. Mum doesn’t like me going along Carmichael Road. Open the bin, please.”

Sure enough, at the bottom of the narrow street was Carmichael Road itself, and beyond it, a shimmering sea of dark jade and emerald. The woods. Hannah frowned. Her mother had discouraged her and Miriam from going past the woods, too, all since that Thomas boy had been found dead. But they’d picked him out of the river miles away. What did that have to do with Carmichael Road? Mum had explained with gravity that the woods were too big, and it was very easy for careless girls to get themselves lost. Hannah thought it was stupid.

“That’s a bit gutless, though, isn’t it?” said Hannah.

Addison was staring at her.

“If you want to deliver them”-Addison dropped the pamphlets back into the trolley with a heavy rustle-“deliver them.”

Hannah felt a bubble of anger swell in her tummy. She stared back at Addison until the other girl looked away, down at the ground. She really was scared.

“What are you afraid of?” asked Hannah.

Addison turned and began walking down Ithaca Lane the way they’d come.

“Make sure you bring my trolley back.”

H annah stalked along Carmichael Road, carefully folding parcels of catalogues and sliding them into mailboxes. Her anger had floated away fairly quickly in the cool, late-afternoon air, and now she was just left wondering what was wrong with Addison Wintour. And her mother. And everyone! What was wrong with Carmichael Road?

The woods were like a big, green thing across the road, whispering in its sleep. They looked fine: thick and secret and old. When Dad used to read stories about enchanted princesses sleeping the years away in emerald groves, it wasn’t forests thick with European pines that Hannah had imagined, but woods like these: lush and healthy and wild and filled with hefty-trunked paperbark, glossy ash, lumbering and shadow-branched figs, and scrambling, dark-footed lantana. Trees as tall as churches, some so thick with vines they looked like green-furred dinosaurs. The woods were, really, quite beautiful.

Hannah realized she’d stopped walking and was standing, staring across the road at the trees, leaves sparkling like silent laughter in the evening air. The trolley was empty-she’d delivered the last brochure.

“I should go,” she said quietly, to no one. And she should; she should turn and go back to Wool Street and give snobby Addison Gutless Wintour back her trolley and go home.

Except…

She let go of the trolley handle, crossed Carmichael Road, and stepped into the dry blade grass that fronted the woods. The wind picked up in the trees, and a sound like a pleased sigh ran through the dark leaves. Hannah smiled as it tickled her hair.