Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

“Okay,” Nicholas began. “I’ve told Pritam some of this, but not everything. Not by a long shot. Laine, you said Gavin mentioned a bird?”

Pritam felt the last word suddenly flutter in his gut like a real bird, nervous and ready to flee. He watched Nicholas walk over to the small bar fridge; he pulled out the plastic bag and untied it on the coffee table. Pritam’s heart beat faster as he saw again that violated little body, that disquieting woven ball for a head. He looked over to see Laine’s reaction to the mutilated bird, but her gray eyes were utterly inscrutable.

“I first saw a bird like this back in 1982, four days before Tristram Boye was murdered,” Nicholas said. He told them about Winston Teale chasing him and Tris into the woods, and watching Tris with his broken wrist disappear under the old water pipe through a tunnel full of spiders. How Tris’s drained body had been found miles away under tin and timber. Teale’s confession and suicide. Years later, Cate’s death. His fall on the stairs outside the flat in Ealing. The ghost of the screwdriver-wielding boy. Then more ghosts; sad, trapped ghosts. Cate’s ghost. Returning from London on a rainy night like this when Dylan Thomas disappeared. Elliot Guyatt’s confession and suicide, so eerily like Teale’s. Gavin’s dawn message punctuated by two sharp cracks of his rifle on which Thurisaz was scored: the rune that kept reappearing and seemed inextricable from death. Pursuing the Thomas boy’s ghost into the woods. The strawberries. The Wynard. The old woman and her dog Garnock that was no dog. The nauseating hand job. The archived flyers and news articles: so many missing children, so many dead men. Eleanor Bretherton, grim patron of this church, the spitting image of Mrs. Quill the dressmaker. Her shop, now a health food store, with a rune marked into its door. Garnock attacking Suzette and wrenching out her hair, and Nicholas’s nephew falling ill the next morning. And earlier today: a development sign erected, another bird talisman found, and a girl nearly snatched with Nicholas himself darkly urged to deliver her into the gloomy woods on Carmichael Road.

The room fell silent under the cold gaze of Eleanor Bretherton, staring belligerently out from monochromatic 1888.

Pritam was exhausted, as if he’d just finished watching a disturbing horror feature that he knew couldn’t be real, but still made him want to avoid the shadows. He looked over to Laine Boye. She was watching him intently, as if gauging his reaction.

“And, of course,” said Nicholas, “a credible witness who could have confirmed that Quill and Bretherton were, forgive the pun, birds of a feather, is dead. John Hird.”

“True,” said Pritam, and was surprised how quiet his voice was. “But there is this.”

He went to his desk drawer and returned with the photo of Mrs. Quill at the church fete thirty-two years ago. Nicholas put out his hand, but Pritam stepped past him and handed it to Laine.

When Laine saw it, her lips tightened but her face betrayed no emotion.

“You tell me, Mrs. Boye,” said Pritam. “Are they the same person?”

Laine held the photographs side by side, comparing Quill’s and Bretherton’s scowls, their chins, their frosty alarm at being photographed. After a long minute, she returned the photograph to Pritam.

“Similar,” she said.

The rain outside roared.

“So?” asked Nicholas, looking from Pritam to Laine.

“So,” said Laine, “we have two photographs a hundred years apart with two women who look alike, but that means nothing of itself. A list of deaths and murders, but they were all explained away or confessed to. As for the bird, you could have mutilated it. We only have your word, Mr. Close, that you found it. But-”

“But?”

“But you say you can see ghosts.”

Laine kept her cool gaze on Nicholas. For a long moment, he was silent. Then he spoke quietly.

“True. The only thing it doesn’t explain is why your husband was talking in his sleep about a dead bird before he left your bed and shot himself.”

Pritam saw a shiver of something behind Laine’s eyes. It was gone so quickly, he wondered if he’d seen it at all.

Nicholas turned and looked at him. “Reverend, what do you think? A coincidence with Bretherton and Quill? Secret relatives?” He smiled grimly. “And what about me? Crazy guy who thinks he sees ghosts?”

Pritam could see that Nicholas was fighting to seem contained, but was ready to snap.

“My religion,” he answered slowly, “says that one of the three aspects of my God is a ghost.”

“However?”

“However, I need to ask, are you afraid of spiders?”

Nicholas blinked, suddenly caught off guard. “Yes, I’m afraid of spiders.”

“Were you always?”

“What are you, a psychiatrist?”

Pritam took a breath. He could feel Laine’s eyes on him, appraising his line of questioning.

“Is it possible that the trauma of losing your best friend as a child, and the trauma of losing your wife as an adult, and the trauma of seeing Laine’s husband take his life in front of you just recently…” Pritam shrugged and raised his palms. “You see where I’m going?”

Nicholas looked at Laine. She watched back. Her gray eyes missed nothing.

“Sure,” agreed Nicholas, standing. “And my sister’s nuts, too, and we both like imagining that little white dogs are big nasty spiders because our daddy died and we never got enough cuddles.”

“Your father died?” asked Laine. “When?”

“Who cares?”

Pritam sighed. “You must see this from our point of-”

“I’d love to!” snapped Nicholas. “I’d love to see it from your point of view, because mine’s not that much fun! It’s insane! It’s insane that I see dead people, Pritam! It’s insane that this,” he flicked out the sardonyx necklace, “stopped me kidnapping a little girl!”

“That’s what you believe,” said Pritam carefully.

“ That’s what I fucking believe!” Nicholas stabbed his finger through the air at the dead bird talisman lying slack on the coffee table.

Pritam’s jaw tightened. “Please don’t swear in my church.”

“It’s her church!” Nicholas snatched up the photo of Mrs. Quill and threw it at the photograph of Eleanor Bretherton. “She paid for it! She owns this place! And why do you think, despite all those people that died, all we have is this crappy pile of speculation! ” He was spitting out the words. “Because she’s smart! She watches and she waits and she takes and she gets away with it because it’s insane to think otherwise!”

The air in the presbytery was as sharp and fragile as crystal. Pritam felt as incensed as the first time Nicholas Close was in here. “I think perhaps we should continue this another night when you’re a little calmer.”

Nicholas glared at him, then jerked his gaze to Laine.

She looked back evenly, her hands in her lap, expression indecipherable.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

“And don’t blaspheme, please,” Pritam said curtly.

Nicholas stood and opened the front door. The roar of rain filled the room.

“I’m sorry. I don’t expect you to put aside the real world for this stuff. I’d give my right arm to not believe it.” He looked at Pritam. “But if you’re going to be offended by a couple of words, I don’t think you’re up for what this is all about. This is murder and black magic. You don’t believe in magic? That’s fine. I didn’t until a few days ago. But if you two have any sense, don’t take the risk. Get out of here.”

He closed the door behind him, and the room again fell almost silent.

A nyone outside the church would have seen a tall man striding to his car, not caring that his unruly hair was slicked down by the heavy rain, throwing open his car door and angrily wrenching the engine alive. As the car drove away, its tinny burble faded, leaving only the hot skittle spatter of rain on the road. And a small, careful slide of footsteps from the pitch black eaves of the cold stone church.