Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

He nodded, relieved.

“Okay,” he whispered, and his vision silvered. His spine seemed to turn to water and he fell down onto the cold sand.

The wind stopped. The trees grew still.

Mr. Close! Nicholas! He could hear Hannah’s shriek, but it sounded dreamlike, a thousand miles distant.

The world looked far away, even the moonlit cage of bone and branches before him seemed small and distant, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

Take off your shirt. Bind your wrist.

But there was so much blood…

He struggled to remove his sweater, but weariness crept up inside him like the pleasant, drowning waters of Lethe.

I can’t.

Then roll over, he told himself.

With numb fingers, he lifted his sweater and shirt, pressed his pumping wrist against the skin of his belly, and rolled onto it.

Enough, he thought. Sleep now.

He was too weary even to close his eyes, so he stared out at a world far away and ringed with inviting gloom. The woods were eerily quiet. The circle of trees stood silent, their still leaves as green as frozen seawater in the icy moonlight, black as pitch in shadow. They were hushed. Anticipating. The only movement was the opening and closing of Hannah’s tearstained jaw as she silently cried his name.

Sleep.

Nicholas closed his eyes, wondered what the wetness on his belly was, then nodded as he remembered. He was dying.

Don’t worry. Sleep now.

Cate would be waiting.

He smiled.

But a smell shivered him awake.

It was a scent as old as the world. It was a hundred aromas of a thousand places. It was the tang of pine needles. It was the musk of sex. It was the muscular rot of mushrooms. It was the spice of oak. Meaty and redolent of soil and bark and herb. It was bats and husks and burrows and moss. It was solid and alive-so alive! And it was close.

The vapors invaded Nicholas’s nostrils and his hairs rose on their roots. His eyes were as heavy as manhole covers, but he opened them. Through the dying calm inside him snaked a tremble of fear.

The trees themselves seemed tense, waiting. The moonlight was a hard shell, sharp and ready to be struck and to ring like steel.

A shadow moved.

It poured like oil from between the tall trees, and flowed across the dark, sandy dirt, lengthening into the middle of the ring. The trees seemed to bend toward it, spellbound. A long, long shadow…

Then, a hoof. As large as a bucket and dark as stone, gray-splotched with moss; layered and peeling like ancient horn. Above the hoof: a massive leg. Feathered. Or furred. Or dense with leaves. A dark green-gray cast blue as gunmetal by the glacial moonlight. Muscular and long. Its knee bent backward like a horse’s hind leg’s, but thrice the size, and powerful. Another hoof, another enormous leg. A torso dense as an ape’s, but so much larger, as dark as the shadows between the roots of ancient trees. Arms like a man’s: knotted with ropy muscle but thick as tree trunks, their topsides shimmering with fungal gray fur or leaves or vestigial feathers, their undersides creviced as old bark. A bull neck, corded like worn rock. Shoulders, shifting with a frost of green, wide as boulders. Antlers like oak branches, webbed with vines and moss, and huge. And a face in shadow.

Nicholas stared. I am dreaming. I am dead.

The creature’s head turned to him. Its face was rimmed with skin like leaves, or made of leaves. The jaw was massive and ox-like, dripping with tendrils like curling roots. Great tusks the shape of oak leaves thrust from the corners of its wide, leathery lips. Huge nostrils flared. And eyes as dark as wells of deep, distant water reflected the moonlight; eyes at once human and yet so inhuman-inscrutable as winter sky, hungry as an eagle’s. And old. So old.

It was the face he’d seen in Walpole Park. The face he’d seen carved in wood and stone in Bretherton’s church.

The Green Man.

Nicholas’s body was rigid with electric panic, white terror, delirium. His flesh knew what the creature before him was; it knew at some fundamental, cellular level what it smelled and faced, and would have begun digging through the ground itself to hide were it not locked tight in bright horror.

The Green Man stopped halfway between Nicholas and Hannah. He was taller than the trees. He lifted his head and his nostrils splayed. The air shifted. The trees shimmered with pleasure, opening their moist leaves with dark delight. Then the Green Man’s head turned in the direction that Quill had fled, toward her cottage.

A tiny sound. Hannah moaned softly.

She was staring at the creature.

Nicholas opened his mouth to speak, to try to comfort her, but only a hiss of air escaped his lips.

The Green Man loomed over Hannah, dwarfing her small as a kitten. He shifted his hoofs and snorted a blast of warm air as pungent as the forest floor.

Hannah’s eyes rolled back in her head.

The Green Man stooped and, with no more trouble than a man parting tissue paper, flicked open the bone and branch cage, reached inside, and picked her up.

“Hannah,” whispered Nicholas.

The Green Man turned at the sound. In an instant he loomed over Nicholas, a colossal wave about to crash, bringing his wide, dark face right before Nicholas’s.

Nicholas stared into eyes as large as saucers, without whites: huge dark stones that glittered with intelligence and violence. His scent was overwhelming: erotic and wildly horrible; hunger and rot and age and lust. His green leafy lips parted, showing teeth as large as bricks and hard as ivory, goatish and sharp.

And the Green Man chuckled.

The warm, fetid air from his mouth washed over Nicholas, strong and whipping as a storm wind through ripe autumn brambles.

Nicholas’s eyes lost their focus, and the night world became as black as the center of the earth.

H annah enjoyed this beautiful feeling. Of gently drifting above the ground. Of flying.

She felt the cool air on her face, the warm leaves under her legs, her back. The spiderwebs had been plucked off her. Overhead, she could see that the clouds were moving again, rolling in a steady dark wave toward the moon. More rain, she thought idly, and snuggled back into her warm cot of ferns.

But the trip did not last long. She sailed past the roof of the old woman’s cottage, watching as the shadows of clouds raced over it, casting it into bleak shadow. Then she was being lowered. She was placed on her feet.

“Oh,” she half-complained.

But the hands were wise. The earth was good. And, oh!, the smell. The smell was divine! A delicious brew of vanilla, of newborn puppy, of jasmine, of sweet sweat and His skin. He had put her down, and that was good. Because there was a task to do.

Of course!

Hannah stood beside the closed barn doors of the cellar. How long had it been since she was locked in there? An hour? A year? It was a dream lost in waking. But down there now was something that needed attention.

Some one.

She turned to look at the one who carried her, to ask-

But His firm, large hands held her head gently, preventing her turn, silencing her question. And then she saw…

Oh! How clever!

On the ground was Nicholas’s duffel bag.

I shall do this right, thought Hannah, secretly thrilled, knowing that He would watch her work. To please Him, I will do it well.

She reached into the warm, dark bag and her fingers probed gently. Ah! They found what she knew would be there.

A cigarette lighter. And a bottle of kerosene.

“The doors are heavy,” she said. She kept her voice light and breezy, not wanting to betray how her skin tingled knowing His eyes were watching her.

His large hand reached and opened one of the wood doors as easily as lifting a magazine.