Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

Katharine stepped carefully behind the skewered spider and leaned more weight on the pitchfork handle. Her stomach convulsed and she strained to keep from gagging.

“It was a dog. It looked like a dog when I stabbed it…”

Laine padded quickly across the floor and scooped up the can of insecticide. She glanced over to Garnock.

It was wheezing and straining against the tines. The hairy armor of its exoskeleton was starting to tear and a puddle of blue hemolymph spread beneath it.

“I think it’s going to pull itself free,” said Katharine quickly.

It was true. Though it would kill itself doing it, Garnock was aiming to pull its flesh right through the pinning tines. Laine popped the lid off the spray can. She stood in front of the giant spider and watched its fangs swoon up and down.

“Bye bye, indeed,” she whispered, and sprayed insecticide right into the nest of its eyes.

The spider let out a piercing whistle that bubbled in the blue liquid leaking from below it. Its legs pounded a sloshing tattoo on the boards. Laine kept the spray going, saturating the spider’s head, covering the creature in a pungent chemical fog.

“Come on,” she whispered, grabbing Katharine’s arm as she slipped past Garnock. It twisted on its impalement and Laine saw its fangs stab the air as she passed. The women hurried down the hall.

“We should leave that for a while,” suggested Laine.

“Yes,” agreed Katharine. “I’ll boil the kettle.”

T hey were in the kitchen, Laine helping Katharine make tea. Outside, daylight was fading from the sky.

“When did Nicholas say he’d be back?” asked Laine as lightly as she could.

Katharine frowned and checked the wall clock.

“He didn’t.”

The telephone rang. Katharine and Laine glanced at one another. Katharine picked up the phone.

“Hello?” she said. As she listened, her eyes stayed on Laine. “When?” She nodded. “Is anyone there going to…? Okay. Thank you.” She cradled the receiver. “Reverend Pritam Anand died today. Heart failure.”

Laine set down the crockery as a shiver of understanding went through her. Pritam was dead. Garnock had come for her.

Quill would be after Nicholas.

He must know that.

“The fool,” she whispered. “He’s in the woods.”

S mall, shifting gems of darkening blue winked through the high, wind-harried leaves. Evening’s fast fingers were drawing velvet across the sky.

Nicholas came awake, slowly and painfully, as if being thawed from a block of black and acidulous ice. At first, he thought he was on fire, and the flickering yellow lights at the corners of his eyes were his limbs aflame. But as he worked blood into his fingers and limbs, he realized the pain was just the agony of pins and needles.

A faint whistling. An old tune, bittersweet, mournful and thin, was barely audible above the wind troubling the eaves.

Nicholas lay on the floor. He could just see out a clear window: trees almost black with approaching night masked all but the tiniest glimpses of bruised evening sky. Everything shifted, in and out of sharpness. His stomach felt ready to let go its contents, and he swallowed back salty bile. He tried to sit, but sharp pain in his wrists and ankles stopped him. He was well tied with ropes.

He rolled a few degrees, wincing at the bright potsherds of pain in the bigger muscles of his legs and arms.

Quill sat on an old oak rocking chair before a small iron stove, staring at the flames flickering behind the black-toothed grin of the stove door, whistling through her gray prune lips. As the firelight shimmered, so did her appearance. One moment her skin was ancient and sagging, pale and deeply scored as drought-cracked earth, but when the flames rose and shadows played across her, Nicholas saw the clear skin and gold hair of young Rowena Quill. Young, ancient; haggard, beautiful. Dark brown eyes, now black, now brown, reflecting red, locked on the flames. Quill’s tune was soft and came from far away and long ago. She seemed to feel Nicholas’s eyes on her and her whistle fell to a sigh.

“Awake?” she asked.

Nicholas rolled a little more. He lay on clean wooden floorboards that smelled of pine oil. The room was a cozy mouthful of shadows: it was paneled in dark wood, but neat. A small cedar table stood on a rug with a single chair keeping company. A curtain to a toileting room was held back by an embroidered sash. A tall pine dresser as thin and stately as a butler held some painted dishes and glazed figurines. Another curtain, this one of lace that reminded him too much of spiderweb, hid all but the shyest glimpse of a trimly made brass bed with a floral counterpane. At the far end of the room he lay in, the floorboards were cut away in a circle. The ring was lined with neatly mortared stones: a fire pit in which coals glowed dully. On the far side of the pit, a folded blanket, kneaded and pressed by the weight of a pet-Garnock, he guessed-but there was no sign of the monster.

“Where is Hannah?” he asked.

Quill rocked. “Hush.”

Again, Nicholas had a vertiginous feeling of seeing her through idling water or of a hologram viewed in passing: her features swam in the fickle firelight, vacillating between old and young, hideous and beauteous. Only her expression remained fixed and cold. Behind her, through the window, the last of the day’s color bled from the sky.

He flexed an arm. The rope bit into his wrist.

“You can’t-”

“I said, hush!” she commanded, and her voice seemed to rouse the flames behind the stove grate. The room danced. She half-rose from her chair, and the young Rowena Quill, pale and blond and terrifyingly beautiful, leaned forward, rage sparkling in her dark eyes. Then she caught and reeled in her anger and sat back down, her skin rippled again into leathery furrows. She folded her hands together, watching him.

“You think you know,” she whispered, “but you can’t know.”

She looked back at the flames. As she rocked, Nicholas noticed something on the wall behind her. It was a calendar of sorts, but made of wood, with movable squared pegs plugged into holes like a board game belonging to some Victorian-era child. But the pegs were marked with strange symbols: stylized seasons, runes, phases of the moon. The board had an elaborately carved frame; at its top, staring through hooded eyes as black as wells from a face of oak leaves, was the Green Man.

“I have so much to tell. So much,” Quill whispered. “So many stories. So many years.” She spoke so quietly, her lips hardly moving, that Nicholas wondered if he was dreaming her voice in his still-swimming head. “Can you imagine my delight when I learned from your mother that you were a Samhain child?” She pronounced the word as Suzette had: sah-wen. A word lush and full. Quill turned her eyes again to Nicholas. “A special child. A child with the sight. And you do have the sight. A grave-digger’s eyes. A stomach full of sadness to match mine.”

The old woman was suddenly gone and the young Rowena Quill sat in the same dress, its collar loose enough around her pale shoulders to show the curve of her breasts below. Her lips were red as blood. Then a log cracked in the fire, and the old woman was back in the chair.

Nicholas stared. “Then why did you try to kill me?”

Quill watched him for a long moment. “I never did.”

“You set a bird for me,” he said. It was hard to talk, his own weight pressing on his ribs. “As you did for Hannah. And God knows how many other children.”

Anger flared freshly in her eyes, but was hidden away just as fast.

“But never for you. I sent Gavin Boye to you with a wee fib, to entice you here. T’weren’t hard-all his thinking was done with his little head.” She winked, a wrinkled sphincter. “The bird you found was for his brother, your plucky little blond gossip, and it found him sure as sure. He saw a lovely tin hussar. You saw it for what it was. A bird.” She fixed him with her eyes, then looked back at the warmth of the fire. “No, Nicholas Close. I wanted you full grown. That’s why I asked Him to send you back.”