Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

The dark was thick, but her hours of peering in the cellar had allowed her pupils to widen to their fullest and she could make out the barest outlines of trunks and logs. She saw a fallen tree a few steps ahead, and sank, gasping, onto it, unmindful of the cold that clenched her buttocks as the wet soaked instantly through.

It felt both long hours and mere minutes since she had threaded the leather thong up the gap between the doors, watching it fold and flop over the barrel bolt. The moments she’d spent carefully pulling down on both ends of the thong-slightly more tension on one end than the other-had been the most stressful of her life. Each time the bolt slipped too far under the wet leather and clacked, her heart had hammered as she waited for the door to fling wide and something petrifying to grab her. But, finally, she’d found the balance and turned the bolt upright, then carefully pulled to the side, and the bolt arm had cleared its stay.

Nicholas would have saved her if he could have. She knew that. Which meant he was dead already. The thought made her throat tighten and her lips shake.

Run home! She yelled in her mind. You’ll be dead, too, if you don’t run home!

She got to her feet, but her wounded leg, now numb, slipped out from under her. She fell onto hands and knees, and rocks hidden under spongy rot tore at her palms.

She cried out in frustration and pulled herself to her feet. She wasn’t going to die. Not after getting out of the cellar. She wasn’t going to-

The noise froze her still. Every hair on her neck turned to a tiny icicle.

It was a sound like distant surf, only close by; a rain hiss where rain had stopped. A whisper of eight thousand thousand inhuman limbs slowing, ticking, poising…

Hannah turned.

The woods behind her were black. But not entirely black. The weak, almost-nothing light falling between the dark leaves glistened of eight thousand thousand round, unblinking eyes.

And everything fell silent. Until they leapt.

She screamed.

T he walk from the open cellar door, back past Quill’s cottage, and into the circular grove was as slow and silent as a dream.

Nicholas lifted his eyes to look at the sky. The rain had all but finished, and clouds were easing apart like rotten lace in a stiff wind; behind them, stars blinked cold, faint light. Ahead, a round wall of trees glistened and their wet leaves whispered to one another with sly drip-drips. There were two dozen or so trees in a circle sixty feet wide.

As Quill walked between two trees, she fondly touched the trunk nearest. She didn’t look back at him.

A figure slid through him, and his eyes widened with surprise, but his body allowed no other shock. Miriam Gerlic screamed without sound, wrists bound together behind her, legs kicking at air as she was carried by unseen hands between the trees. As she slipped out of sight, her ghost eyes fell on Nicholas, then were obscured by sable branches.

Nicholas felt a scream pound inside him, desperate to shriek out like a whistle from an overpressured boiler, but no sound escaped his lips except low breaths passing in, out, in, out, with easy monotony. His body- Quill’s body-carried him into the circle.

The ground underfoot was wet, sandy dirt, raked clean. In the center of the unnatural grove was a pedestal of stilted legs a meter high holding aloft a spherical cage made of woven branches and bone.

Quill hobbled to stand beside the cage. Within it Nicholas saw a shifting cloud of moving shadows. As he grew closer, he understood: inside the cage, six children half-knelt, half-hung, their ghostly skins melding with one another’s. Each was suspended by the wrists, which were lashed to the curved branch bars above them. A half-dozen children. A half-dozen ghosts. Their faces were an overlapping blur. But as each bobbed or struggled, he or she would drift apart from the others and Nicholas could see their singular, awful terror. Little Owen Liddy in his long shorts, his freckled face pale with disbelieving fright. Esther Garvie, the girl in the forties’ sundress, her bare feet torn and bleeding. Another boy, younger than the others and with red hair, had his eyes screwed tight above wet cheeks. Miriam Gerlic’s eyes were impossibly wide and without hope. Dylan Thomas, head bowed and bawling. And Tristram Boye.

Nicholas felt the rhythm of his breathing break, just a little, as a small gasp sucked in cool air.

He knew that Tristram had died here in the woods, but to see him, his friend, his hero, in the moments before his pitiful murder filled Nicholas with such a pressing sadness that he wanted simply to fall to the ground. Tristram’s jaw was tight, one wrist crooked at a strange angle. Broken. Nicholas’s willed his tongue to flick the roof of his mouth, to try to form his name- Tris! -but no name came. Only breaths. In, out…

The dead children struggled: Miriam screamed; Dylan sobbed; Owen Liddy nodded like a savant. Suddenly, Nicholas saw the boy’s hair gathered by an invisible hand, wrenched up, exposing his white throat. The dead boy’s wet eyes widened and a ghost name formed on his horrified lips- Mummy! -then his throat eased apart like a hidden mouth opening. He jolted a few moments, then sagged low, spasmed once, and winked out. Out, Nicholas knew, to appear again on the dead path outside the woods, and repeat the terror.

Nicholas felt sick. His heart felt torn to shreds.

Quill, though, could not see the ghost children. Her eyes were on the night sky. The clouds, once thick as mountains, were breaking apart, roiling to wisps as high winds began their tearing work. She nodded to herself, pleased, and cocked an ear, hearing something Nicholas could not.

“Ah,” she whispered. She smiled at Nicholas. “Ah.”

Then, out among the dark, wet trees, a girl screamed.

H annah Gerlic was wrapped in smoke. No, not wrapped, but bound, and not smoke, but fine pewter thread. Her arms were held tight to her body, one awkwardly down her side, one across her midriff. Her legs were trussed. A translucent cocoon shrouded her, leaving only her head free of sticky silk. Wispy ends blew in the light breeze, light as fluffs of snow puffed off distant mountaintops. She was carried into the circle on a spindle-legged shadow, a black magic carpet. She struggled, but it did no good; if her kicking feet crushed a hundred spiders, a hundred more poured under her from the shadows to take the ruined ones’ places. The shimmering, chittering mass deposited Hannah beside the sphere of bone and branch.

Then, she saw Nicholas-and bright hope flashed in her eyes and her yells caught in her throat, until her eyes slid down to his hand.

The hand holding Quill’s wicked little knife.

Then her eyes took in the killing cage, taking a moment to register what it was. Understanding slipped over Hannah’s pale face, an icy wave over milky sand.

Then, she shrieked. Huge tears rolled down her face.

No, Nicholas wanted to yell. I won’t, Hannah, I can’t! But his mouth said nothing, and the knife sat easy in his grip.

“Mr. Close… Not you…”

Oh, Hannah, thought Nicholas. Oh, little girl.

“Mr. Close, Mr. Close,” parroted Quill, hobbling from the shadows. “Aren’t you the little brasser?”

Hannah saw the old woman, and opened her mouth to scream again. But before the sound could come, Quill’s hand swept down fast as a crow’s beak and slapped Hannah hard across the mouth. Hannah was stunned into silence.

“Enough noise, now,” crooned Quill.

Nicholas’s heart tore inside his chest-he wanted to fight, to rage, to kill the witch. Instead, his breaths idled in, out… and he stood, waiting.

A scuttling puddle of hairy gray and black dropped something shining and silver at Quill’s feet. Quill bent and picked it up. Hannah’s paring knife.