Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

Nicholas felt his throat twist and tighten. His wide eyes stung.

She looked so small. This was how he had found her the afternoon of the crash: sprawled as if exhausted, painfully arched, eyes open to nothing.

Then her eyes rolled toward his. Just for a moment. It was a look that could mean a million things or nothing. A look as empty as a dusty glass found forgotten on a windowsill. Then she was back up the invisible ladder, floating, sanding, about to die again, and again, and again.

Nicholas stayed until midnight, watching her fall and die, until his eyes were so red and his throat so wretched he could hardly see or breathe. He willed his heart to burst and fail, but it kept squeezing, disconnected from his grief. Then he closed the bathroom door, locked the flat, and drove very slowly away.

He stayed in bed for three days.

The third and last person he told about his visions worked out of a small shop off High Street in between a discount luggage store and a bakery. A hinged shingle proclaimed “Madame Sydel-Readings, Seeings.”

She was a wizened lady, brown and twisted as the trunk of some hardy Mediterranean tree, her wildly dyed hair sown with glazed beads. When she reached under her scalp and scratched purposefully, Nicholas realized it was a wig. Still scratching, she led him into a parlor lined with tasseled silks and smelling of incense and burned hair. She sat him down and took his hand.

He jumped straight into business: “I see ghosts.”

“Oh? How much do you charge?”

Nicholas went home, picked up the phone, and bought his airline ticket out of Britain.

T he day before he stepped in the cab for Heathrow, he had woken to a rain as light as steam drifting from the sky. By midmorning, when he reached the cemetery in Newham, the sun was having a tug of war with the clouds and was creating small dew diamonds on the roses and willows.

Nicholas sat heavily beside Cate’s grave.

He looked at her headstone and a felt a swirl of guilt. It was black and angular and Cate would have hated it. “Like something by Albert Speer,” she’d have said. Her parents had done the choosing. Nicholas remembered the typed, formally worded letter asking him for nine thousand pounds for the funeral, grave lease, and a “lovely package where the council plants spring and summer flowers on the grave.” He read the gold-lettered epitaph for the hundredth time.

In God’s loving arms.

Was it true? There was no sense of her here. No feeling that she lay below him. No feeling that she watched from above. The air was cool for summer, and, with the rain drying, felt empty and fleeting. Was she trapped in the silent playback going on and on in the echoing little bathroom in Ealing? Was she gone completely, the spark in her brain extinguished and her with it?

He waited. For a sign. For a whisper of wind. For anything that said she heard him and wanted him to stay.

The willows held themselves silent. A car with a sports muffler rutted past on the North Boundary Road. Nothing.

Nicholas got to his feet and left.

T hree days later, a hemisphere away, he lay on his little sister’s childhood bed, listening to rain crash down in an endless, dark wave.

And now he was home.

A ring wedding him to a dead woman. A few thousand pounds. A couple of nice-ish Ben Sherman shirts.

Seventeen years. Nothing.

And his mother? No new man. Same house. Twenty new teapots… otherwise, nothing had changed.

Rain. Faces. The dead. Trees.

The doorbell, a Bakelite mechanical thing, rang out two tuneless notes.

Nicholas blinked and picked up his watch from the pink bedside table. It was nearly two in the morning.

Dang dong.

“Mum?” he called.

He swung his legs out of bed, sat up.

Dang dong.

“Coming!”

As he passed his mother’s bedroom door, he heard hefty snores befitting a circus strong man.

“Why don’t I get it?” he suggested to no one.

Down the hall. By old habit his fingers found and clicked the switch for the outside light. He swung open the front door.

There were two people waiting on the stoop. One was a dark-haired woman who might have looked quite pretty had her face not been saddled with a heavy scowl. The other was a uniformed police officer; he was fair-haired and huge as a gorilla and loitered behind the woman as if ready to bend the wrought iron handrail or uproot a tree to prevent escape.

“Good evening, sir,” said the woman. In his mind, Nicholas dubbed her “Fossey.”

“Sorry to disturb your sleep. My name is Anne Waller-” she flashed her detective’s badge “-and we’re going door-to-door seeking information about a young boy who’s gone missing.”

On cue, gorilla-man held up a laminated color photocopy of a blond seven-year-old beaming at the camera. Nicholas jolted.

It’s Tristram. But Tristram’s been dead twenty-five years.

He leaned in to look more closely.

The photograph was recent. In the background was an LCD television and the boy wore a Spider-Man 3 T-shirt. Nevertheless, he looked eerily similar to Nicholas’s childhood friend.

His heart was pumping hard. He shook his head. “No.”

But the officers had seen the frisson of recognition. They exchanged a glance, then returned their steady gazes to Nicholas.

“Are you sure, sir?” asked Fossey. Her entrenched frown seemed to deepen.

“Yes. Really. I just got in from overseas tonight.”

“Tonight, sir? What time was that?”

“Half past ten or so.”

Nicholas licked his lips. The police weren’t moving.

“Did you come straight home, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t stop anywhere?” asked gorilla-man.

Nicholas hesitated. He’d stopped at the woods, amazed to see them still as potent and thick as ever. He’d walked halfway to their edge. Had been drawn to them. He couldn’t explain that to himself, let alone the police. Randomly scoping out dark woods in the middle of the rainy night when a boy happens to go missing. He swallowed.

“No.”

Detective Fossey reached for her notebook. Silverback’s right hand casually slipped down to hang straight beside his leg, closer to his service pistol.

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Nicholas Close. Look-”

Fossey wrote in her notebook, asked, “C-L-O-S-E?”

“What’s going on, Nicky?” Katharine arrived silently behind her son, fumbling with her dressing gown’s sash.

The police exchanged a glance.

“A young boy has been reported missing, ma’am.”

Silverback held the picture up for Katharine.

“Oh dear.” Nicholas, who knew her voice so well, could just detect a quiver. “Local boy?”

“Yes, ma’am. This gentleman told us he returned from overseas tonight?”

Nicholas saw his mother’s eyes narrow just the slightest margin.

“My son. That’s right.”

“What time did he arrive?”

“Just after eleven thirty. His flight touched down at nine fifty, which means he made excellent time getting through customs, hiring a car, and getting home here.” Her words came clipped and fast, the shake replaced by something harder. “We talked in our kitchen till quarter past twelve and both went to bed, and it certainly is tragic that a boy’s got himself lost in this rain but I’m not sure I quite understand where this is going.”

The detective and constable shifted back an almost imperceptible amount. Nicholas sagged a little. He was in his mid-thirties and still needed his mother to keep him out of trouble.

“Ma’am, we’re just asking questions,” said Fossey.

“I do understand that. Have you got any more?”

Detective Waller sent one last look at Nicholas.

“No, ma’am. Catherine with a C?”