Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

Moonlight poured into the cellar. Curled in one corner was a ragged figure, barely visible in the deep shadows. Quill was sobbing.

“Please… please…”

Hannah smiled. She knew what to do.

There was so much money on the floor. I put it there, she thought, pleased with herself. Some of the pile of bills had been wet by the rain that had dripped between the doors, but most was still dry. She unscrewed the lid of the kerosene bottle and poured its contents down the stairs. The oily smell was harsh, and she frowned-she didn’t want to mask so much as an atom of His charged, musky aroma.

“Now?” she asked.

She felt the cool air swirl as His huge head swooped down through the air, down behind her, till His mouth was right next to the nape of her neck. Her skin prickled in delight and her heart pounded.

“Now,” He said with a voice as warm as sunlight on old stone or the seawater of a summer rock pool. Delicious and old and deep.

Hannah opened the lid of the lighter and flicked the flint wheel.

“Please!” begged the huddled old shape cowering below.

The flame sparked brightly, and Hannah felt Him slyly retreat behind her. It made her sad. She threw the lighter down into the cellar and heard the sucking fwoompf as the kerosene caught.

“ My lord! ” cried Quill, but her last word was smothered by a solid bang! as the cellar door shut again.

Hannah scurried neatly to where the doors joined and slid the barrel bolt shut. Done!

She looked up, beaming, ready for His praise.

Beneath her, the screaming started.

H e was ten again. Tristram had been carried past him on a floating carpet of eighty-thousand legs. Now, he, too, was dead and being borne away to be hidden clumsily, ready to be found exsanguinated and white amid broken wood and discarded things.

The night slid past him, weeping, its tears as cold as the far sky. It’s all right, he wanted to say to the sighing trees and the lowing clouds. Don’t cry. I’m glad.

He was going back now. Back to him, whom he’d loved as a boy, and to her, whom he’d loved as a man. This last cool passage could not end too quickly.

Pleased with death, Nicholas opened his eyes.

The woods moved. The trees strode by him, waving in the cold wind, shaking off their doleful rains. Nicholas was surprised. He wasn’t on his back, drifting over the forest floor on a shifting bed of scuttling spiny legs, but cradled in an arm as great as a tree bough, lightless and smelling of soil and worm and pungent stag musk. He wearily rolled his head.

The girl lay near him. Her name was lost just now. She slept, as he so dearly wanted to, and her lips were curled contentedly in her sleep. She could have been a dreaming sprite nestled deep between the loving roots of ancient trees.

Sleep. A faery dream.

Nicholas closed his eyes, and the rain fell on them, growing heavier.

T hat night, the river swelled. Rain hammered down as if determined to dissolve the earth.

The police recalled the State Emergency Service volunteers searching the Carmichael Road woods for Hannah Gerlic; the forest was simply too wild and treacherous in the rain at night, and this rain was violent. Tethered to powerful spotlight beams, the drenched men and women in orange overalls stumped back from the tree line and headed toward the parked minibus they’d arrived in. They tramped up the checkered steps, stamping hard to shake off the water, switching off torches, tutting to their neighbors about how they wished they could keep looking, but all secretly glad they didn’t have to continue battling through the wild turns of blackthorn and cunjevoi and lantana while this incredible rain smashed down on their skulls.

Veterinarian assistant Katy Rhydderch was the second last to climb the bus stairs. She just happened to glance down at a flicker of movement before she entered the vehicle. An orb weaver spider was straining across the grass on its matchstick legs, slipping as it headed for cover. Katy, notorious among her friends for hating to hurt any living thing (excluding, perhaps, the ticks she occasionally had to pull off matt-furred dogs) was afraid the spider would be crushed under the minibus tires. She knelt to let the creature crawl onto her torch handle so she could move it out of harm’s way. As the spider tentatively stepped onto the flashlight, Katy saw there was a shadowed bundle under the bus.

It was a little girl. She was curled like a comma under the drive shaft, fast asleep.

T wenty minutes later, Hannah Gerlic lay dozing on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance parked just meters from where the minibus had sat. The cabin roared as if the Pacific were crashing on its roof, but Hannah’s parents didn’t seem to mind the deafening noise: each held one of Hannah’s hands. Hannah had woken long enough to yawn, ask to go home, and confess she couldn’t remember one thing that had happened after eating Vee’s enormous lunch.

Police in raincoats paced outside the ambulance, waiting to be released from the scene. Constable Brian Wenn was counting the minutes to the end of his shift-his girlfriend, Eva, had returned from a weeklong conference today and was no doubt lying naked in his bed. Even more pressing, his bladder was full to bursting. Wenn checked his watch, cursed his soaking wet feet, and hurried through the tall grass toward the tree line, unzipping his fly as he went. As his waters mixed with the rain, he glanced idly to his left.

And so the second happenstance discovery of the night was made.

A man lay unconscious in the tall, dark grass, his head not two steps away from Wenn’s stream of warm urine.

T he rain stormed down for three days, never stopping, a seemingly endless disgorgement on roofs and roads and car hoods and gardens.

Residents who just weeks ago had complained bitterly at the council’s water restrictions turned their ire to the ceaseless rain. Elation at the filling of the distant reservoirs that fed the city turned to apprehension as inner-city stormwater drains failed to cope with the torrents. Streets closed. Mains burst. The wide, brown river rose and kept rising. Landscape suppliers sold out their stocks of yard bags and sand. Schools closed. Birds too wet to feed and too weary to cling fell dead out of trees.

Five people drowned.

Three were in a car trying to cross a floodway from their five-acre property on the city’s western outskirts, swept away in waters that ran far faster than the driver had guessed. The fourth was a Chinese-born shop owner in Fortitude Valley, whose import warehouse had flooded. He had been working with his wife trying to raise the cardboard boxes of teapots, calendars, woks, and-incongruously-vibrators off the flooding warehouse floor when a sodden carton at the bottom of one precarious stack slumped and gave way, and a whole mountain of cardboard, ceramic, steel, and soft-to-the-touch silicone came down, trapping the man until the waters covered his face. The fifth death was an elderly man whose inquisitive foxhound crept too close to racing creek waters and was swept away. The pensioner, desperate to save his only companion, stepped calmly in after the tiny creature, which witnesses said, screamed like a child until it went under. Its owner drowned without a sound.

While the river eventually broke its banks in many places, the first flood was over a lobe of land at Tallong, which the waters normally circumvented in a lazy loop. Now, the river was traveling at twenty knots and decided no longer to take the slow way round. The waters rose four, five, eight, ten meters, and then poured across the hundreds of hectares of thickly wooded land-land that had been slated for clearing and construction until the developer withdrew his plans and subsequently suicided. The fast brown waters smashed through trees, uprooted the smallest shrubs, picked up surface boulders, and strained against gums and figs and muttonwood and wild quince.