Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

“We’ll know,” replied Nicholas.

And they did.

After what felt like hours, but was less than three minutes, two faint slits of light hovered in the darkness. As they got closer, it was clear they were the top and bottom cracks of another hatchway. When they reached it, light trickled in all four sides of the rectangle. Inside was welded a grab handle. Nicholas wondered what poor sucker Quill had seduced into doing this steelwork and what rotten fate had befallen him.

He looked around at Hannah. “Not too late to go back.”

She shook her head.

He nodded, extinguished the lighter, hefted his gun, and pushed open the hatch.

At their feet was a wider, clearer path through the trees. Nicholas recognized it as the track he’d found the day he ate those strawberries. Clearly, Quill wasn’t concerned about hiding her presence on this side of the pipe.

He turned and helped Hannah out of the hatch.

“Okay?”

She nodded.

He checked his watch. There was less than an hour and a half of daylight left.

“Then let’s go.”

A chill wind blew hard as the sun inched closer to the hills in the west. It sucked away moisture, leaving her skin dry and her eyes raw.

Katharine Close’s arms were so tired that they burned, yet she kept hacking at the soil of her garden bed as if it were a beast that needed violent subduing. Her hands were blistered inside the gardening gloves. She had spent the last few hours digging, pulling weeds, clipping stems, trying not to think.

But she did think.

Maybe it was time to go. Maybe enough years had passed that she could admit she’d won. She’d laughed at Don, to his face and to his memory, waving a nasty blowtorch over the hidden things he’d believed. What room was there for bone-pointing and curses and witchery for children born in the time of rocket ships and global warming? How could lines on stone or wood have potency when real power lines crisscrossed the skies on poles, breathing useful life into computers and plasma screen televisions? What fear was there of spells when suicide bombers were killing dozens in Kandahar markets?

At nights, though, Katharine shivered. She remembered how she’d marched, fair-faced, into Mrs. Quill’s store, handed the old woman her children’s clothes, and blessed her with kind words and smiles. She’d shouted down that impotent voice inside her that agreed with Don. What else was she to do? Curl away and make the sign of the evil eye each time the old crone passed?

And yet that’s exactly what she did do. She remembered a cold winter’s night, as empty and still as the inside of a bell jar. Suzette and Nicholas tiny and asleep in their beds, and Don six years in the grave. She had been ready to go to bed herself when she heard a soft clip clip of footsteps on the street. She had crept in darkness to the front room and peered between the venetian blinds. Looking up at the house was the dot of the old woman, her face a black shadow. And yet Katharine had imagined her eyes, bright and sparkling, dancing and ravening, looking back. As if knowing there were two ripe young children within. In the pragmatic daylight of the next morning, Katharine had ridiculed herself for her fears-the old dressmaker was perhaps a little senile and lost, or just wanted some friendly company but hadn’t the courage to knock on the door.

But two days later, Tristram Boye was pulled dead from under a woodpile two suburbs away, his little throat cut wide to the world.

Katharine put down her trowel. Maybe it was time to admit not that she’d won, but that she’d lost. She should sell this empty house. Listen to her daughter and buy an apartment near her.

A flicker of white jigged in the corner of her eye.

She turned, wincing at the tight pain in her punished neck and shoulders. A small white terrier trotted along the path at the side of the house.

“Shoo! Go home, you naughty…”

The words died in her mouth as the dog stopped at her voice. It turned and regarded her with black pebble eyes.

Katharine had grown up on a farm and animals had been an everyday part of her childhood, but only once before had she seen a creature regard her with this cold contempt. It had been spring, and a nesting magpie had begun swooping on anyone who neared her tree beside the utility shed. It was the weekend, and Katharine had been helping her father make a new chicken house. He was working on the chicken roof and asked young Katharine to go to the toolshed and fetch the snips. She had stridden to the shed, and in her last few steps heard the dry swoop of wings on air. She put up her hands just as a flash of black-and-white feathers rocketed past her, blowing her fine hair around her ears. Fired by her suddenly tripping heart, she sprinted through the open door into the black, cavelike shed. Deep in the cool dark, she turned. Through the doorway she watched the bird land in the square of squintingly bright sunlight. The magpie hopped to the edge of the doorframe, and stopped, peering into the darkness of the shed. Its eyes were black as stones, shiny and cold. They found her. The bird watched her, calculating whether or not to attack. And young Katharine knew that if it did, it would attack without reservation, biting and spearing with every cell in its body focused on the task of hurting her. The bird held her captive in the shed until her father found her an hour later, tears rolling down her cheeks.

The little white dog watched Katharine now with the same look of icy appraisal, its round coal eyes scrutinizing her, deciding whether or not to attack.

Katharine’s skin felt frozen hard. She was terrified by a small dog that stared at her in a way no dog ever had. Then she saw: its ribcage hadn’t moved. It wasn’t breathing.

The creature turned and eased up the stairs to the back door. Katharine watched it rise with eerie fluidity to its hind legs, turn one paw, hook and swing open the screen door, and slip inside the house.

“Laine!”

She climbed to her feet, ignoring the jagged pains in her hips and back, and ran.

T he Wynard was wretched. The boat lay on her side like the mummified body of a long-dead elephant, her gray hull beginning to cave and collapse as moisture and unseen insects completed their rotting work; her timbers were faded and bleached like cow bones. Far overhead, wind roared like fire in the treetops, an invisible wave endlessly crashing.

Nicholas shifted the shotgun to one hand and checked his watch. It was nearly four. The winter sun remained hidden by a million leaves, but he could feel its distant warmth vanishing from the day with greedy speed. The air here in the deep green shadows was frigid and still. Hannah shivered beside him.

“Which way?” she asked.

He looked around the hunching curtains of green and black. At the boat, the track had petered out.

“I don’t remember.”

The last time he’d left here, he’d been carried unconscious on eight thousand spindle legs, Garnock riding on his chest like a stygian cavalier.

The ground ahead, thick with vine and root and trunk, seemed to rise. The air that way had a slightly sour tang. Nicholas reasoned that the river couldn’t be far away, its salty mud banks thick with mangroves and rancid with the droppings of flying foxes. He nodded in that direction, and he and Hannah started again uphill.

As they crawled between the ancient trees, picking their way through the dense shadows over mossy flood-felled trunks and under incestuous, noose-like vines, Nicholas told her everything else he knew about Quill. When he’d finished, Hannah was silent for a thoughtful moment.

“Wow. That’s a long time to be alive,” she said. “Rowena must be very lonely.”