Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

How do you know you’re not crazy?

He skipped to the next groove in the scratched record of his mind: Go to the police.

And say what? That the men who’d confessed to the murders of Tristram Boye and Dylan Thomas were lying? “Forget their confessions, their fingerprints, their car tire tracks, Sergeant! The real killer is an old woman who lives in a strange little cottage in the woods. That’s right, just down the road from me. Her hobbies include spider farming and jerking off hostages.”

“That’s amazing news, Mr. Close! The very break we needed to reopen these already neatly closed cases. By the way, how did you find out?”

“Oh, here’s the clever bit: a ghost led me there.”

The bitch knew.

The old woman knew there was no room in a sane world for stories about huge spiders and Brothers Grimm strawberries. A retelling of what happened would sound like the babblings of a madman. No, she knew there would be no police.

Go away. Move to Melbourne.

And how would he feel when he read of another Tallong child going missing?

I’m no murderer, Nicholas thought.

Ah. But she has your sperm in a jar.

Nicholas was suddenly fully awake. An image appeared in his mind complete: an autopsy table, a small boy facedown on the stainless steel, a lab-coated man with a syringe withdrawing milky white liquid from the dead boy’s anus and squirting it into a jar theatrically labeled “Evidence.”

Oh, Jesus.

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

She’d found out he was back, and she taunted him with Gavin, and drew him down to the woods like the gullible fool he was.

Suddenly, a small noise. The front door’s knob was turning.

With a start, Nicholas realized he hadn’t locked it.

W hen Suzette swung open the door of Nicholas’s flat, the first thing she saw was her brother’s pallid face, eyes wide in fright. His expression, quite frankly, scared the shit out of her. “Who did you expect?” she’d asked.

He’d simply shaken his head, and replied, “I don’t know if you’d believe me.”

And now she’d heard it, she wasn’t sure she did.

Nicholas had made them both coffee, sat her down, and told her how he’d followed the Thomas boy’s ghost into the woods. How he’d gone under the water pipe through the cobweb-choked drain. Wandering lost. Finding the boat. Seeing an old lady and her white dog; a dog whose bite marks he showed Suzette. They were two small red circles that already looked days old. “They were much bigger earlier,” he’d explained sheepishly. Falling unconscious. Waking to find himself unable to move, lying outside the old woman’s cottage. Bitten again by the dog-and the way he said “dog” made Suzette feel there was a lot her brother wasn’t telling her. Waking wet, clean, and nauseated in the tall grass on Carmichael Road, and staggering home.

“What do you think?” he said. “You think I’ve gone bonkers?”

“I think you’re a fucking idiot eating berries without knowing what they were.”

“I told you. They were strawberries.”

“Oh, you’re the Bush Tucker Man now?”

Her expression must have been cynical; she saw her brother’s face harden.

“Look at it from my point of view, Nicky. You were starving. You ate some berries-”

“Strawberries.”

“Would you bet your life on that?” she snapped, suddenly angry. “Would you bet your sanity on that? ’Cause that’s what you’re doing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everything weird you saw, everything weird that happened to you, happened after you ate those berries.”

She watched him as this sank in. She could see the wheels in his mind turning behind his eyes, see him realize that everything could have been a hallucination brought on by the berries. A seed of doubt had germinated. She pressed the opportunity.

“Trust me, I know how potent some herbs and berries can be. Datura, peyote, morning glory seeds…”

She watched Nicholas frown, and his eyes turned to the wound on his hand.

“And that isn’t a dog bite.”

“No,” he agreed, but he didn’t say anything else.

Suzette changed tack. “The old woman…” She waited until Nicholas was looking at her. “Was she Mrs. Quill?”

He seemed to take his time thinking about this. Then he shook his head slowly. “She didn’t look like Quill. Like I remember Quill.”

Suzette nodded. For some reason, that answer was a relief.

Brother and sister drank their coffees in silence for a long while. Nicholas shifted on his seat, as if uncomfortable and wanting to speak. But he kept his silence.

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” said Suzette quietly.

“I think you do,” whispered Nicholas. He looked up at her. His eyes were grave. “You were the one who said the rune was dangerous. You were the one who wanted to know more. And now that I tell you more, you think…” He shook his head. “You think I was tripping on ’shrooms.”

Suzette met his gaze. She couldn’t lie. Her next words she spoke carefully.

“I believe you ate something. Maybe they were strawberries. Maybe they just looked like them. Maybe it doesn’t matter. ’Cause these things you say you saw, well… it’s only three days since a man shot himself to death in front of you.”

She watched these last sentences sink into Nicholas’s mind. He sat rock still in his chair for a long moment, staring at the mud-colored, threadbare carpet. Finally, he took a long breath.

“You’re probably right,” he said. He nodded, stood and collected their coffee mugs, and repeated, “You’re probably right. Yep. How do you think I got these bites?”

Suzette felt a warm glow of relief in her stomach. Her brother was odd, sometimes lazy, a fucking idiot for eating any old shit he found on the forest floor, but she loved him. The idea of his gift driving him mad was scary.

“I dunno. Maybe a tree snake bit you in the woods? They’re not venomous, you wouldn’t even realize it till later.” She shrugged.

He nodded again as he washed the mugs-that sounded reasonable. He checked his watch, and Suzette looked at her own. It was nearly 9 p.m.

“I’d better get home. Mum will think we’ve both bailed on her.”

Nicholas smiled. “Thanks for coming over. Sorry I… you know. Worried you. Et cetera, et cetera.”

Suzette gave him a quick hug. “Fine. Glad you’re feeling better.”

He saw her to the door.

“Just the same,” she said as she stepped into the cold night, “I don’t think you should go into the woods.”

He nodded again. “Good advice.”

He closed the door on her.

N icholas carefully pulled aside the limp, once-white curtains and watched his sister walking up Bymar Street, until the darkness between the tiny footprints of streetlight consumed her. Then he sagged.

She thinks I’ve lost it. Well, when ninety-nine people say the sky is blue and one guy with bad hair says it’s green, who do you side with?

Suzette thought he had a wee touch of post-traumatic stress syndrome after seeing Gavin off himself; that was fine. But she was still here-she hadn’t flown home to Sydney. That wasn’t so good. He wondered if he’d told her too much. She’d scared him when she came through the front door; he couldn’t help himself. When that knob had turned, he wouldn’t have been surprised to see the old woman with her blue, unsmiling eyes opening the door wide to let some eight-legged thing step silently in. When he saw it was Suzette, his relief was so great he just blabbed. Thank God he’d had the good sense not to tell her about what the small terrier Garnock really was. Or about the raping hand job.

He hadn’t imagined it. Certainly, the old witch’s strawberries had made him see things: the beautiful vale, the glistening pond, the pretty boat, Cate’s Surprise -that was the most sadistic of them. But he’d also seen things as they truly were: that the boat was a collapsed hull, the witch’s secretive cottage, the nightmarish, fox-sized spider Garnock… He’d told Suzette a lot, but not too much. If he could keep his new, horrible knowledge inside for a few more days, he was sure he could get her to leave and go back to her family. Then there was only Mum to worry about.