Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

Nicholas turned and bolted.

D usk settled like a darkening fog over Tallong. The pleasant, narrow streets emptied of playing children; the evening was too brisk for games. Streetlights winked on, happy baubles along avenues that huddled down in comfortable, lazy nests of old trees and old houses. A jogger in shorts and a hoodie pounded up the undulating streets, his breath pistoning in and out in small, steamy puffs that were tugged from his billowing cheeks by a stiffening breeze. Men and women in warm jackets walked smiling dogs.

The sight of the old woman walking along Ithaca Lane was unremarkable except for two things. She kept her chin high despite the chilly evening air, walking proudly, aware that she’d once been a lovely thing and perhaps willing that prettiness to linger through her poise. The other was that, where others walked their dogs on leashes, she carried her tiny white terrier in her arms.

“Excuse me?” the driver said loudly out the open window of his slowing car. His name was Miles Kindste.

The old woman looked over, feigning with great skill a little flutter of alarm at being spoken to by a strange gentleman.

“It’s okay,” said Miles Kindste. “Your dog. Did it get hit or something?”

The old lady blinked.

“Yes,” she replied. “I didn’t see it, but I heard the car drive off, and…”

Miles Kindste was certain she was crying, but the evening was now becoming dark and it was hard to tell. He suspected the dog was this lady’s sole companion, and he was right to an extent.

“Well, can I give you a lift? To the vet? Or home?”

“Oh, dear man,” said the old lady. “That would be wonderful.”

Miles Kindste smiled, perhaps feeling a small wave of warmth at the goodness of the deed he was about to do. He opened his car door on his last evening on earth.

N ight.

Spiders were busy spinning webs between pepper trees and devil’s apples.

Overhead, rain was brewing. A few scout drops fell on the shingled roof of the old cottage and rolled down to the edge to perch precariously above a rambling herb garden: rich thickets of hops, chickweed, lovage, tonka beans, high john, marigold, and coltsfoot.

Inside the cottage, a naked man lay on his back near a flickering fire. Miles Kindste’s eyes were open and daft, staring at nothing. His breath eased in and out in a slow, opiated rhythm. His erection was thick. Blood oozed from a neat, deep cut in the webbed flesh between the big toe of his right foot and its neighbor. His eyes couldn’t see nor could his mind register that a spider the size of a possum sat on a blanket in the corner of the dark room.

A figure stepped out of the cottage, stooped but spry. She wrapped a scarf around her head against the cold rain and started along the flagstone path through the herb garden. Though the clouds were snuffing the last light from the night sky, were anyone close enough they’d see that her expression was as hard as flint.

The path she took meandered through stands of hawthorn and blackberry toward a ring of trees: twenty-four weeping lilly pilly planted in a wide circle, tall and beautiful. Carved low in the trunk of each was a different arcane symbol. The old woman stepped off the flagstones and around the outside of the circular grove till she found the tree she sought. She stroked its trunk with tenderness. Then she reached to her belt and, with a whisper, unsheathed a sharp stiletto. She cut a finger-thick branch off the tree, then stepped into the circle.

The ring was some ten meters wide. Its surface was sandy dirt kept meticulously clear of weeds. Within the ring were many things, but four were significant: three were posts forming a triangle; the fourth was in the triangle’s center. It was a low column, thigh high and the same wide, made of vertically set branches held fast by woven twigs. On this basketlike pillar sat a sphere, or a globe, or a cage. It, too, was made of woven branches and twigs, but also of bone. It was bound tightly with vines and tough stems and hair.

In the cage was a thin girl. Even Mr. and Mrs. Gerlic would have had trouble recognizing their elder daughter; Miriam’s eyes were red and puffed from terrified crying. Her naked skin was alive with welts: a thousand spider bites. Her arms and legs were tied fast to the ribs of the globe, strung by wrist and ankle. When she saw the old woman approach, a pitiful stream of urine trickled from between her legs. Her throat was raw from hours of fruitless screaming, and only a ragged sigh came out.

“Time to go,” the old woman said.

She caressed the little ladder rising to the odd cage with the branch, then ascended, softly speaking old, old words. She held her sparkling knife to the blind eyes of the trees, and reached down to the girl.

G etting Laine out proved disturbingly easy.

Nicholas gave the cabbie a fifty and asked him to wait in front of the hospital, then he hurried inside. He took of one of several wheelchairs sitting idle in the corridors and loitered until the duty nurse stepped from sight, then wheeled the chair to Laine’s bedside.

Her face, normally light olive, was pale. Her eyes were closed and her breaths were shallow and slow. Nicholas went to the trolley at the far wall and hunted through its plastic drawers for adhesive tape, then withdrew the drip in Laine’s arm. He was about to bandage over the pinhole the needle left, but was arrested by the large, ruby red drop that swelled out of the wound. A sphere: round and perfect and thick. A certainty appeared in his mind, whole and clear. He knew what to do.

He lifted Laine gently and slid her gown over her shoulders and down her chest, exposing her breastbone, stopping just above her small breasts. He dipped his fingertip into the large drop of blood on her arm and drew on the skin of her sternum a vertical line with a half-diamond attached. He looked at it critically, then used the little bit of blood remaining to tidy up the lines, making them equally thick. Satisfied, he closed her gown and put the tape over the puncture on her bruised forearm.

She was surprisingly light. He placed her in the chair, put her feet on the rests, wrapped a blanket around her torso, and wheeled her out. The cab was still waiting. It had taken less than ten minutes to kidnap an unconscious woman from a busy ward of a public hospital. Something for the resume, he thought glumly, and asked the cabbie to take them to Lambeth Street, Tallong.

N icholas watched his mother.

Katharine Close sat in a chair beside the bed Laine was laying in, watching the younger woman breathe. Laine’s jaw twitched, and a light frown danced on her forehead. The scratch mark on her face was healing fast. Katharine held the back of her hand to Laine’s forehead and cheeks, and nodded to herself.

“It’s an improvement,” she said and looked up at her son. “If ever I’m in hospital, please don’t kidnap me. Leave me there.”

“Done deal,” said Nicholas softly.

He’d watched his mother carefully as he’d carried Laine from the cab into the Lambeth Street house, expecting a reaction from her when she saw the symbol on Laine’s chest. But Katharine had said nothing, and merely straightened the slumbering woman’s hospital gown.

Now, Katharine stood, smoothed Laine’s sheets and nodded, indicating that they should leave her to sleep in peace a while.

They walked softly down the hall toward the kitchen.

“I rang your sister,” Katharine said. “Nelson’s ill.”

“Yeah.”

“Nothing serious. She wanted you to know that she’s ‘keeping it up.’ That you’d understand. Do you know what that means?”

Katharine went to the sink and filled the kettle.