Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

Were there anyone to see, they’d have watched a small, hunched form step into the rain and look behind itself. Were they close enough, they’d have heard a dry whisper that defied the downpour.

“Go.”

A small white thing the size of a large cat stepped from the same shadows with movement too fluid, too wily, for its squat form, before hurrying silently away through the rain.

Anyone watching would have seen the dark, stooped figure stare at the presbytery for a long, long moment, before she turned and hurried away in the direction of Carmichael Road.

Only no one was there to see, and she knew that well.

P ritam could hear the ticking of the mantel clock. He settled in his chair with a sigh. “I shouldn’t have let him go.” Apart from rising to inspect the photograph of Eleanor Bretherton, Laine Boye had hardly moved since she first arrived. Her back was straight, her hands neatly folded in her lap. She watched Pritam.

“Do you believe in magic, Reverend?”

Pritam nodded over at his desk. It was, of course, very tidy: his laptop folded away, his pens capped and sitting in a Daylesford Singers Festival ’04 mug. Beside his day-planner were his Bibles. “In Acts Eight, Philip goes to the city of Samaria,” he said, “where a man named Simon was supposedly using sorcery and bewitching the city folk. So, my faith acknowledges magic.”

Laine shrugged. “No offense, Reverend-”

“Pritam, please.”

“No offense, Pritam, but reading something in the Bible isn’t the same as seeing it with your own eyes.”

Quite right. Gavin Boye hadn’t married a fool.

“I left India when I was nine,” he said. “So I don’t remember that much about my early years. But my most vivid memory happened, oh, about six months before we left. We’d gone to visit my uncle and aunt in their village near Kirvati. When we got there, the men of the village were holding down a screaming old man and pulling out his teeth with pliers. So much blood. He was a tantric, the old man. A mystic. He had charged five hundred rupee-about fifteen dollars-to advise a young man to kidnap a girl and sacrifice her to the Goddess Durga, who would show him where treasure was secretly buried. The girl was twelve. He cut off her hands, feet, and breasts. She bled to death. The young man never found his treasure and went back to the tantric to complain. The police caught him, thank God. But then the villagers tracked down the tantric and pulled out his teeth so he couldn’t summon the gods again.”

“That’s human violence, not magic,” said Laine. “All those deaths Nicholas mentioned-more human violence. Even that,” she nodded at the headless plover on the table. For the first time, Pritam saw a clear emotion in her eyes: revulsion. “Even that is just an act of human violence.”

She stood and held out her hand. He rose and took it. Her skin was dry and smooth.

“I know your Bible mentions ghosts and magic, Pritam. But I’m afraid I just can’t believe in either of them. If you speak with Mr. Close again, wish him luck. I think he needs it. Good night.”

She collected her umbrella from the stand beside the door, and a moment later she was gone.

T he rain continued through the night. Stormwater drains in the inner suburbs choked with branches and rubbish and mud, and flooding waters rose. A low-lying commercial block in Stones Corner was inundated: a carpet wholesaler and a car yard both went underwater, and Persian rugs and Mitsubishi Colts bobbed in the rising brown tide.

Birds in trees curled their heads under their wings and clung to branches for dear life. On the river, the last ferry services were canceled. In expensive houses with private docks, owners old enough to remember the flood of ’74 lay in their beds biting their lips and resisting the urge to check their insurance policies.

Pritam set his jaw and unlocked the internal door that led into the church proper. He flicked a switch and the long, vaulting room flickered unhappily into half-light. He fought the need to glance overhead and check that the Green Man wasn’t staring back at him through dark, unblinking eyes. Instead, he kept his gaze level and sat in the foremost pew in front of the image of Christ crucified before a strangely lush, tree-studded backdrop, bowed his head, and prayed for the souls of lost children. Without knowing when, he slipped from prayer into fitful dreaming.

He was on Calvary, but the hill was devoid of crosses and peppered instead with incongruous trees. One was cleaved through the trunk. He was caught in the crush of it, broken and dying. Eleanor Bretherton was directing a regretful John Hird to saw off Pritam’s feet, hands, head. “It’s for Mother Kali, you loafing black tit,” said Hird cheerfully. No one heard Pritam cry out in his sleep, his whimpers echoing down the nave to be quashed by the dispassionate rumble of rain.

I n his tiny flat, Nicholas sat on his bed staring out the rain-smeared window down Bymar Street at the yawning darkness at the end that was the woods, imagining a million spiders marching silently through the deluge.

H annah Gerlic was dreaming of wings.

In the dream, she was trapped in a cage-a strange, spherical cage made of hard twisted wood, or maybe of bone. She was screaming, but no human noise came out of her mouth. Instead, the sound from her throat was the panicked batting of wings, of terrified birds flapping madly to escape. But the wap-wap cry was drowned by the wretched scratchings of a hundred real birds scrambling around her, all squawking and beating, trying to escape the cage. Their claws scratched her neck and face and hands; their beaks drove into the soft flesh of her ears, her thighs, her eyelids; their wings beat her. She screamed and cowered and tugged fruitlessly at the wood-or-bone cage. Suddenly, the beating and scratching and spearing ceased. The birds fell still, electric and listening, claws hooked onto the cage or into Hannah’s flesh or hair. Another noise. A tick-tick. A crackling. What was it? It sounded like heating metal, or rain on tin, or…

Suddenly, she screamed and the birds took wild wing.

Hannah’s eyes flew open.

She was instantly wide awake, and the dream of wings and bones disappeared like a stone dropped in deep water… all except the noise. The tick-tick sound. A gentle tapping. Testing.

She was in her bed, and her room was dark. Her Hannah Montana alarm clock said it was 2:13 a.m. (the letters stood for ante meridiem). It was raining outside; raining hard. And yet, over the rain, she heard the tick-tick noise. The scratching, tapping, testing sound. She rolled over and looked at the window.

Her stomach did a roller-coaster lurch.

There were spiders on the sill. Hundreds of spiders. Their stiff, black bristles glistening with rain. Each was at least the size of Hannah’s hand. They were piled on one another, five or six deep, and they were scratching at the glass and poking their legs into the thin gaps around the frame. Hundreds of bristled black legs were poking, prodding, scratching, trying to get in.

Hannah’s window was what Mum called double-hung sashes and what Dad called a pain in the arse to paint: two wooden-framed windows, one inside and below the other; the top was fixed, but the bottom one could lift vertically and be held open by hinged supports in the frame. The windows locked with a swiveling brass catch.

The catch was almost undone.

The swivel was barely caught on its stay plate. Just a tap would loosen it and the window would be free to rise. As Hannah watched, a spider pressed against the glass and slipped one long, spiny and graceful leg up between the window frames and patted the catch with its hooked foot.

Without thinking, she leapt from the bed and slammed the catch hard shut, slicing off the spider’s leg. Her stomach threatened to gush itself empty over the carpet as she stumbled back to her bed. She opened her mouth to shriek.