Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

“Scaredy cats,” she said.

As if in agreement, the chittering leaves whispered louder.

What was in the woods? She’d never gone in, not really. It would be warm in there, out of the wind, among the old trees. Lovely and close. And secrets! Yes, there’d be secrets in there. Not dull stuff like TV and haircuts and boys, but secrets. She could just go in. Just for a minute. Just for a second.

She took a step forward and felt a sudden bright pain.

An edge of dried grass had sliced into her calf, and a red line of blood appeared on her pale skin. “Ow…”

Wind hissed now, in the trees, and ran like a large invisible hand through the grass, coming toward her.

“Oh!”

The grass shimmered around her legs, the blades of grass snapping at her skin, drawing new blood and slapping at the red that was coming out. Sticking. Tasting.

“No,” she whispered.

Hannah backtracked a step, another.

The trees seemed taller, darker. They leaned closer as the grass snapped about her legs like reptiles.

“No!”

She danced out of the grass and onto the road. A car, approaching, blared its horn and flashed its lights. Dazzled, Hannah let out a shriek and ran across, missed by mere feet.

Panting, tears stinging her eyes, she grasped the handle of the trolley hard, as if it were a life preserver. She looked back across the road.

The trees were normal. Not big, not small. Quiet. No: almost quiet. Whispering, softly. But the dark trunks looked like black teeth in a black smile.

Hannah snatched the trolley and hurried back to Ithaca Lane.

P ritam reached with one shoe and switched off the vacuum cleaner. For a long moment, the baby-cry whine of the electric motor echoed down the nave and in the transepts and seemed to keep the tall brass pipes of the organ humming disconsolately. The stained-glass windows were dark; it was night outside, and the occasional car headlights set the tiny panes sparkling like a handful of scattered diamonds. The candelabra overhead held electric bulbs, but their light wasn’t strong and the church seemed to Pritam yawningly huge, more dark than light. He would talk with John Hird about gradually increasing the wattage of the bulbs.

As he followed the electric lead to the wall socket, he stepped off the burgundy carpet onto marble and his footfalls rang emptily in the choir stalls and up to the high, dark rafters. He preferred to dress well when he was working in the church, even when doing everyday chores. He regarded dressing well as a sign of respect, for the institution and the office, and he wore his leather dress shoes and ironed trousers despite the countless occasions when Hird, sidling past in flip-flops and shorts, snorted amusement at his understudy’s formality. But now, alone in the church at night, the clack-clack of his heels on the cool stone floor sounded stiff and distant even to Pritam. He unplugged the cord, walked back to the vacuum and pressed the retractor-the cord reeled in so fast that the plug overshot the machine and whipped past, the tiny fist of a thing striking Pritam sharply on the shin and sending a flurry of pain scampering up his leg.

He let out a short hiss and bent to lift his trouser leg. One of the metal prongs had taken a scrape out of the tight skin on the front of his shinbone, and a ball of claret-colored blood had already seeped to the surface and was running down to his dark sock.

The sight of the thick, descending droplet suddenly reminded him of that shocking moment during the funeral earlier this week, when the deceased’s elderly mother had risen to her feet and spat at the image of Our Lord. Pritam had been unable to stop himself from watching her creamy-colored spittle run down His wooden shin, down His pinned foot, to collect in an offensive egg-like sac before gravity drew it down to the carpet he’d only now just vacuumed. After the service, Hird had laughed, saying the “old bird was a bloody good shot,” but Pritam had been stunned by the action. Or was it the words… Something about the Lord only being pleased by the letting of blood.

He knelt and gingerly touched the flap of raw skin on his shin-it hurt like a bugger. He reached into his trouser pocket and removed a neatly ironed handkerchief, which he looped around his shin. Pritam tied the handkerchief tight, rolled his trouser cuff down. Someone was behind him.

“Yes, John?”

He got to his feet and turned.

The church was empty. The windows were unrelieved black. The shadows in the apse behind the figure of Christ seemed as solid as the dark timber. Yet still Pritam had the feeling someone was watching him.

“Hello?” he called. His voice, carrying only the slightest hint of his Indian childhood, echoed among the polished pews and fell away to still silence.

He found his gaze settling on the spot where the strange man had sat during that same funeral service. Close, that was his name. Nicholas Close. That was the second unsettling thing about that day: the expression Pritam had seen on Close’s face as he stared up at the ceiling. Close looked as if he’d seen the hooded skull of the reaper staring back at him.

Pritam looked up through the chill air to the carved boss six meters overhead. Even in the dim, ineffective light cast by the fake candle globes, he could make out the timber face wreathed in oak leaves. Suddenly, a chill went through him.

He’s looking at me.

He blinked. The Green Man’s face was mostly shadow, its eyes dark sockets. What nonsense. It wasn’t alive. It couldn’t see. It was inanimate; a decoration made from a tree felled by human hands; nothing more than wood shaped by iron.

Like your image of Christ? Let’s not forget how offended you were when that old nari spat on Him.

Pritam reprimanded himself. That was different. Christ was his Lord and savior, but the Green Man is… what?

He’d asked John Hird about why such an un-Christian image was in such a holy place. “Christ knows,” Hird had grumbled. “What am I? An interior designer?” Then he’d lumbered into the presbytery to make tea.

And now, alone in the church, Pritam couldn’t shake the feeling that the Green Man was watching him from his headdress of hewn leaves. Suddenly, the words of the old Boye woman came back with sharp clarity. Blood is the only sacrifice that pleases the Lord.

And he can smell my blood, thought Pritam.

The thought came from nowhere and was irrational, childish, stupid. His heart was racing. His feet in his leather dress shoes were tingling and ready for flight. But he bent with deliberate slowness to pick up the vacuum cleaner. This was his church. He would not run from it.

“This is a house of God,” he said, loudly. The words rang against the cold, shadowed stone and among the dark old timbers.

He turned and walked to the apse door, all the while feeling the hairs on the back of his neck prickling like live wires.

N icholas sat on his sofa. His throat was raw and his stomach was sore from retching. The bites (spider bites, he reminded himself) throbbed, and for the hundredth time he dully considered a trip to the twenty-four-hour medical center. And, for the hundredth time, reasoned that the resultant questions would not go well. Giant spider, you say? Oh, yes, we get those all the time. Pardon me just a moment while I phone security. Suggesting the wounds were a snakebite would only demand more tests, more questions. The punctures weren’t infected, and he was feeling incrementally better. He’d stay here.

So tired. As soon as he began drifting toward sleep, the nightmare image of the old woman stroking him while her pet sat on his chest returned with awful vividness. Shutting his mind’s door on the vision and leaning against it to keep it closed was draining. To let it open and relive those moments as a supine captive in the woods would send him crazy.