Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

Neither of them spoke for a long moment. The pile of papers sat between them, and Nicholas could almost feel their presence, as if something alive and poisonous was lying on the table. The rain drummed on the road, on the tiled roof of the flat, the window.

“Mostly boys. Some girls. Average fourteen years, three months apart,” said Suzette.

Nicholas raised his eyebrows, impressed.

“Economist,” she explained. “Statistics are my thing.” She lined up the papers, moving them around quickly like cups on the table of a sideshow swindler. She frowned. “Three of the child murders occurred in the same years as other events.”

Nicholas nodded in grudging admiration. It had taken him over an hour to make that connection. One child was murdered in the same year the auctioneer Thorneton died; another child had been found dead the year the pipeline was abandoned; another was killed the year Eleanor Bretherton funded construction of the Anglican church in 1888.

“How far back does it go?” she asked.

“I checked back as far as I could, right back to the first year of the Courier in 1846. There were lots of gaps, sometimes weeks without entries, so any articles about child murders or missing children could have been in papers that weren’t archived. But I did find this.” He placed down the last printout. “It’s an excerpt from the captain’s log of a ketch named the Aurora.” Nicholas read aloud: “ ‘Monday, 24 April 1853. Posted notice to positively sail for Wide Bay from Kangaroo Point on 6 May. Discussed with First and agent an increase of charges to 30s per ton, agreed same. Commenced taking cargo this afternoon. Received news that William Tundall (cabin boy) missing. Raised volunteers from crew to search nearby bushland tomorrow.’ ”

He looked at Suzette. She lifted her chin and gazed out the window. No light was left in the day outside, and the rain fell steadily. He felt a sudden pang of fear. He wanted Suze as far away from this mess as possible.

“You can see why I wanted you to just go home-”

She cut him off with a glare.

“I’d never have forgiven you,” she said. “Where’s the last one?”

“What?”

“Before, you said ‘third-last.’ There’s one more clipping.”

Nicholas nodded. From his pocket he withdrew the folded sheet of paper that had slipped out of the Tallong High School yearbook he’d found in their father’s suitcase. He opened it up and let her read about how young Owen Liddy never made it to his model railway exhibition in 1964. Suzette delicately picked up the old clipping, turned it in her fingers.

“Where did this one come from?”

“Dad’s suitcase.”

She blinked at him. “Dad knew?”

Nicholas shook his head as if to say, your guess is as good as mine.

Outside, the rain grew heavier. They were silent a long while. Suzette finally spoke.

“A lot of children,” she whispered.

Nicholas nodded. “Have you ever heard of this. Have you ever, in your readings about witchy shit, ever come across this kind of thing?”

She sent him a quick glare, then took in a long breath, composing her thoughts.

“Blood is an ingredient for some of the most powerful magics,” she explained. “Blood is the only element that satisfies some spells. Some quite… extreme spells.”

Blood is the only sacrifice that pleases the Lord.

The flesh on Nicholas’s arm raised in goosebumps. Suzette’s words were frighteningly similar to Mrs. Boye’s outburst in the church.

“Like staying alive for a hundred and fifty years?” he asked. He’d meant it to come out jokingly, but the words hung in the air.

Suzette wrapped her arms tighter around herself. “Yes,” she said, and looked up at Nicholas. “Quill put herself in a quiet shop at the center of a quiet, working-class neighborhood so she could sit and watch. See for herself which families had children. Learn who lived where, who was happy, who was alone. Tiny, patient questions. Hatching plans.”

“Like a spider in her web,” he said.

The simile had slipped easily off his tongue, but struck both of them keenly. That’s exactly what she had been. A hungry, perched thing, ever observant, watching and spinning thread while she waited.

“And…” Suzette seemed unwilling to take the next logical step.

“And killing children,” said Nicholas.

“Yes,” she agreed softly.

Night had fallen outside. Streetlamps turned droplets sliding down the windows into slowly descending diamonds.

“I don’t understand the connections. The church? The woods?”

Suzette shook her head. Neither did she.

“And the men,” she said. “The men who confessed? Teale. Guyatt. Maybe others. She found ways to influence them.”

Nicholas remembered jetting into the old woman’s hungry palm, and the memory sent his stomach into a nauseating roll.

“There’s something else I haven’t told you,” he said. He slowly, carefully, recounted coming across the old woman in the woods, her dog Garnock biting him, the pleasant veil of the world dissolving to reveal the woods darker than ever and Garnock the terrier as the largest spider Nicholas had ever seen. Then, waking in the grounds of her cottage, and the way the old woman had reached into his pants, milked him, and saved his spurtings in a jar. He’d never spoken about things sexual in front of his sister, and by the end of it felt a fool for blushing like an adolescent. He looked up at Suzette.

She was as pale as the stack of paper in front of her.

“Spider?” she whispered.

He nodded, watching her stare down at the floor, expecting any second for her to laugh aloud and call what he’d just said drivel. But instead she leaned forward and again shuffled the photographs and picked out the image of a blurred Victoria Sedgely outside her confectionery shop cradling a small, white dog. She stared at the picture for a long moment.

“What does she want?” she whispered to herself. She looked up at Nicholas. “Have you been in the health food store?”

Nicholas recalled the pretty girl with the brown eyes and easy smile. Rowena. There was no similarity between her and the flint-faced Bretherton or the watchful crone Quill. So the lie came easily.

“No.”

Suzette watched him for a few seconds, then nodded again. “We should go in sometime,” she said. “Together.”

“Sure,” he agreed. He was already regretting the lie, but decided to deal with it later.

“The rune makes some sense,” Suzette went on. “The mark on Quill’s door-the blood rune, Thurisaz. I don’t quite get it, but it makes sense she’d use it.”

Nicholas stared at the floor. He felt Suzette looking at him.

“What?” she said.

“Quill’s door isn’t the only place I’ve seen that mark.”

“Where else?” she asked. “Nicky?”

He told her about the dead bird talismans with their macabre faux heads made of twigs. He told her about the same mark on Gavin’s rifle.

“Fucking tosser,” she whispered, and looked up at him. “But I’m glad you told me. Better late than never.”

Neither spoke for a long while. The rain grew more insistent on the roof. The refrigerator compressor suddenly chugged nearby, and Suzette jerked.

“Suze? Are you okay?”

She shook her head slowly. “I think I’m pretty scared.”

Nicholas nodded. “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you.”

He checked his watch. It was nearly seven.

Suzette pulled out her mobile phone. “Where’s your phone book? I’m canceling my flight.” Her expression dared him to argue. He went to the linen press and produced a grubby White Pages directory.

“Okay,” he said, placing it in front of her. “Then there’s someone I think we should see.”