The Dead Path

by Stephen M Irwin

  Ah.

  Katharine sipped her tea. Cate was dead, and Nicky was home.

  She’d almost wanted to see him burst into tears at the sight of his mother. It would have meant he wasn’t coping. She’d coped, when Donald left, and later when he died. She’d had to. She had two kids to raise. If Nicky had cried tonight, well, that would have proved something, wouldn’t it?

  He looked so ill. Had she been drawn that thin when she made Donald leave? No: she’d known it was a war then, a war against time and the world, a war to be fought and won; and in war one ate what and when one could. She’d kept her strength. It was Donald who’d faded. Donald who’d grown thin and haunted…

  She shrugged off the thought. Past. All in the past.

  She took one more sip then poured the rest down the sink. Her boy was home, and he needed looking after. It had been a long time, but she’d at least try to be a mother again.

  I don’t see why he can’t come here.”

  Suzette ignored Bryan. She was up to her arse in the spare-room closet looking for her second hairdryer, the small one.

  “I mean, honestly, it’s just him, right? Couple of days with your mum, then he can fly down here-”

  “Bryan,” called Suzette in a sweet voice. “Come here a minute, darling.”

  There was a moment’s silence-long enough for Suzette to imagine Bryan realizing he’d really pissed off his wife. Then she heard reluctant footsteps in the room behind her. Aha! There was the dryer, in the Country Road bag. She wiggled out of the closet and turned to face Bryan.

  “What?” he asked in a quiet tone that suggested he knew very well what.

  “Are you going to keep harping on about this?”

  She realized she was holding the hairdryer like a pistol, and so started rewinding the cord. She wasn’t really angry with Bryan; he was a good bloke. A funny bloke. A fabulous father. And it was always his business that played second fiddle when things needed to be done. He was a hydrology consultant and a reasonably successful one, but it was Suzette’s business that brought in the big bucks that allowed them to live in this beautifully renovated stable so close to the center of Sydney. Once again, she would fly out of town, and Bryan would have to put his appointments on hold to look after the kids. Normally, he was so easygoing she wondered if he’d taken up smoking pot. But he had a real bee in his bonnet about this trip.

  “I’m not harping. I just don’t see why your brother can’t spend a couple of days with your mum, then fly down here. I mean, it’s not like he has any ties or anything-”

  “Now his wife’s dead?” asked Suzette.

  “You know that’s not what I mean,” said Bryan. “Forget it. Forget it…”

  “No. What do you mean?” She could hear the curtness in her voice, and it reminded her of her mother. Now that was depressing.

  Bryan sighed and put his big hands in his pockets.

  “Why have you got to go straightaway? He’s hardly back in the country. And I really don’t see why he can’t come here. I mean, we flew all the way to bloody England for his wedding-”

  “He did pay for our hotel.”

  “-and he’s back for… I don’t know, for good, I guess. So…” Bryan shrugged. “Why have you got to leave us?”

  Suzette looked at him. He was like a panda bear, and she felt a sudden wave of love for him. She put her hands around his waist and kissed the spot on his chest just below his neck.

  “I’m going because he’s come back,” she explained. “Mum’s not going to be much of a comfort, they’re like dogs and cats those two.”

  “I like your mum.”

  “Well, you’re a member of an elite minority. Nicholas…”

  Suzette pulled away from her husband and looked up into his glum, handsome face.

  “I just think Nicholas is going to need a bit of an eye on him. Just for a couple of days.”

  Bryan took in a long, slow breath, then nodded.

  “Quincy’s going to miss you. You were going to make apple pancakes Sunday.”

  “You can make them.”

  “I really can’t.”

  They smiled at each other.

  “You’ll be fine,” said Suzette. She paddled his bum with the dryer. “Now, go get me the blue suitcase.”

  T he rain on the roof grew louder until it was as steady and manic as applause at a rock concert.

  Nicholas lay staring at the ceiling boards. This had been Suzette’s bedroom-lying in his own old room would have made the image of a failed artist too complete.

  His mother was wrong. No one had regarded Cate’s death as an accident. Certainly, Cate’s brother, her parents, her friends, their mutual friends, even his own London friends, had all said the word “accident” aloud, but the silences that followed debased its currency. An undertow of quiet blame dragged the time along whenever he met his in-laws. They knew he could have taken the car, if only he’d bothered to speak with the neighbor. They knew he’d already come off his bike once in the rain, on a roundabout in Wembley. They knew that he knew Cate would be up the ladder when he telephoned. Their daughter’s death may have been an accident, but it had been an avoidable one. Cate’s had been a cruelly swift ending, and the blame for it would roost forever darkly on Nicholas’s shoulders.

  The Nicholas Close “Welcome to Widowerhood” freeze-out had been choreographed with a subtlety that was a credit to London society. It began with a dwindling of phone calls, ratcheted to a sharp decline in dinner invitations, and climaxed complete as a solid, glacial wall of quiet.

  Nicholas had tried to keep working. But it was hard to be productive and persuasive when one kept seeing things that, logically, shouldn’t be there.

  The motorcycle accident had left him almost unscratched but not without injury. After the crash, headaches came as unbidden and unwelcome as evening crows. After hitting the car and sailing through brisk London air, the bolt-of-pain landing had rammed his teeth together (slicing out a nice chunk of inside cheek) and jarred his brain like stewed tomatoes in a can thrown against a brick wall. His growing panic about Cate not answering the phone shoved the bright headache to the wings, and later the hollow business of the funeral preparations kept the nagging pain in the background. But as sad days spun out to sad weeks, the headaches made permanent nests in the dark eaves of his skull.

  The decision to sell the Ealing flat was the only easy one he took. He listed it with a tall and jolly estate agent, found a room to rent in nearby Greenford, and began excising his life from the rooms he’d planned to share for years with Cate.

  The one mercy was that Cate’s brother and his girlfriend had volunteered to box up Cate’s and Nicholas’s belongings. Nicholas knew this wasn’t to spare him more grief, but rather so that almost everything of Cate’s could be taken back to the family home in Winchmore Hill without the need for a scene. He didn’t argue. The idea of packing makeup brushes that would never again touch Cate’s skin and dresses he would never again pull from her shoulders had been filling his chest with a cold and stultifying mud, so he was grateful to find the small hillock of boxes marked “N” packed in the front hallway.

  He’d been carrying a last and cumbersome pile of boxes, topped with a framed photograph of him and Cate on their honeymoon in the Orkneys, down the front outside stairs when he stepped on a discarded plastic grocery bag. His feet snapped out from under him. He felt a brief and quite lovely sensation of weightlessness before the concrete steps hit him brutally hard in the small of his back and the rear of his skull. The world skipped forward a few seconds-moments lost in an inverted lightning flash of darkness.

  When his eyes fluttered open, his headache was gone.

  True, it had been supplanted by a severe slug of hurt between his hipbones and a burning gravel-rash throb on his scalp, but the black worms inside his skull had suddenly been exorcised. He lay motionless staring at the slate sky, enjoying the sensation of feeling-at least for a moment-that pain for once was all on the outside. The sky was a
s gray as an old headstone, and a small flock of starlings hurried across it.

  Then a young man in a stained corduroy jacket stepped into his vision.

  Nicholas realized he must look like a drunkard, and hoped this might grant him license to remain lying there awhile longer. “I’m fine,” he said.

  The boy looked down at him, unblinking. He had heavy bags under his eyes, and his skin was as pale as herring scales. His hands fidgeted like spring moles in his pockets.

  Shit, Nicholas thought. Maybe I’m not making sense. He reluctantly rose to his feet, wincing in anticipation of the flurry of black claws into his brain. But the headache stayed away.

  “I slipped,” he said.

  The boy pulled his hand from his jacket pocket. It held a screwdriver. Nicholas’s brain just had time to register it was a Phillips head when the boy shoved the chromed shaft hard into Nicholas’s chest. Nicholas jerked reflexively, waiting for the spike of agony that was sure to come. The boy withdrew the screwdriver, then shoved it in a sweeping underhand into Nicholas’s stomach.

  Nicholas braced himself. But no pain came.

  The boy watched him, jaw tight, red eyes glistening with tears. Then he took one step back, another…

  Nicholas looked down at his chest and stomach. His T-shirt was unmarked. No punctures. No blood. No pain.

  The boy took a step backward off the gutter onto the road. A blue Vauxhall was racing toward him, only twenty, fifteen, ten meters away.

  “You’re going to-”

  The car sped right into the boy, sending him flying. It kept going, accelerating.

  “Jesus, Jesus!”

  Nicholas took one, two, three jerky strides down the stairs and across the footpath. The boy lay prone on the road, a twisted swastika. Christ, he thought. The car didn’t even slow.

  He stared.

  In fact, you didn’t even hear it hit him…

  Then the boy was up. He was back on the weedy footpath, walking toward the flats. As he passed, he rolled his gloomy eyes to Nicholas. Hands in pockets, he climbed the flat’s front stairs to the buzzer panel, pressed it, waited, pulled the screwdriver from his pocket and stabbed an invisible victim twice, then retreated back, back, back and onto the road again before being struck by an invisible car and flying through the air, landing once more in a crippled heap. Then he vanished from the road, was walking on the footpath, and did it all again.

  Nicholas was rooted to the spot, transfixed by the macabre loop. A woman with a blue anodized aluminium walker trundled right through the boy as he backed across the footpath. She didn’t see him.

  Nicholas waited till the boy had backed off the stairs, then scurried up, grabbed the boxes and shattered photograph, and ran to his car, shaking hard, not looking back.

  A CAT scan-booked on the pretext of treating the now-vanished headaches-revealed his brain to be perhaps two percent smaller than average, but otherwise normal.

  But nothing was normal.

  He was seeing the dead.

  After his vision of the boy with the screwdriver, Nicholas drove home to his new and humbly tiny Greenford flat, took three Nytols, and slid into a thick and dreamless sleep. The next day, he’d been able to dismiss the boy as a fata morgana brought on by the bash to the back of the skull, but the CAT scan results were a mixed blessing.

  “Seeing things?” the radiologist asked. “What kind of things?”

  The look on the woman’s face made Nicholas whip out the first lie he could think of, like an underrehearsed magician pulling out a badly hidden bouquet. “Freckles. All over people. Dark, join-the-dot kinds of freckles…”

  She’d explained that there was no physical reason she could see for him to be having hallucinations.

  Not ten minutes later, waiting for a bus on New Cavendish Street, he saw a portly middle-aged woman gag on a sandwich and fall to her knees. “You all right?” he called, leaping to help her up. His hands passed through her and he landed painfully on all fours on the gum-sticky concrete, shaving skin off his palms. He scrambled up, aware that a small crowd of commuters had taken careful steps backward, trying not to look at him. The choking woman rolled on her back, sausage fingers to her throat, heaving and turning blue until she fell still… and vanished.

  Nicholas found himself apologizing to the crowd, and stalked away on shaking knees to find another bus stop.

  He saw them every day after that. Curled broken in space, the invisible wrecks of crashed cars around their suspended bodies. Falling from buildings. Screaming silently as long gone flames turned their splitting skin red and black.

  He was sure he was going mad.

  And that feeling grew worse when he went back to work.

  The “you-all-right?” winks and “lovely service, mate” pats on the back lasted a day or two but felt an eternity, so he was glad to get in a van and leave London. But the gladness was short-lived.

  His canny hunts led him into wet-throated cellars, dust-cauled attics, lean-boned garages, weed-choked caravans. Gray places, rich and still. Places that were disturbing to stand alone in when the light was fading from the damp sky outside. These gloomy rooms where he found his booty left such a harrowed feeling in him that he was never tempted to keep any of his finds for himself. Not one old Smithwick’s sign, not one dented Royal typewriter, Hignett cigarette card, Ekco Bakelite wireless, or meerschaum pipe. Nothing. They were all strangely tainted. It was only after his fall down the steps and thump on the back of the head that Nicholas understood at last why those grim, quiet places where he found his dusty curios gave him the willies.

  They were haunted.

  Now, in those silent attics, garages, basements, and back rooms, behind boarded windows or under musty eaves or paused on damp cellar stairs, he watched empty-eyed men throw ropes over rafters, thin farmers ease their yellow teeth over phantom shotgun barrels, tight-jawed mothers stir rat poison into tea, young men slip hosing over invisible exhaust pipes… over and over and over. To make the horrors worse, he was invariably accompanied by the home’s new owner or oblivious executor, who chattered about the charming virtues of the world’s love affair with all things old, about the latest foot-and-mouth scare, about the weather, unaware that lonely death was being silently repeated right before their florid faces. And the ghosts, in return, took no notice of their living landlords, spouses, children, enemies… yet their dead eyes rolled to stare at Nicholas. They knew he could see them.

  Nicholas stuck with his job for three weeks. Then, shaking and sleepless, he quit.

  H e had felt perpetually like crying. The dead were everywhere. He had to tell someone. In the end, he confided in just three people.

  The first was his workmate Toby, a full-faced cabinet-maker who headed the team that prefabricated the stalls and bars of the Irish pubs that Nicholas would later line with books, rods, copper kettles, and Box Brownie cameras. Toby was a bit of a tree-hugger, often talking about how the wood under his hands felt alive, always reading his horoscope in the Daily Star. He seemed the sort of chap who might listen to a story about hauntings. Nicholas was most of the way through explaining his fall on the stairs, the attack by the dead boy with the screwdriver, his consequent calls to police, and hunts through newspaper microfiche files to discover that in 1988 a Keith Yerwood had stabbed his girlfriend, Veronica Roy, nearly to death on the stairs of her flat- my flat! -when he noticed the expression on Toby’s face. It had been hard for Nicholas to place; he’d never seen anyone regard him that way before: it looked a little like confusion, a bit like skepticism, somewhat like anxiety… and yet it was something completely different, something solid and primal. Then he placed it. It was fear. Toby was afraid of him. The chat ended there. Very soon after, Toby began avoiding him on the shop floor and stopped returning his calls.

  Nicholas finally found the courage to make an appointment to see a psychologist. He told the bird-fingered, beak-nosed doctor about Cate’s death, about the headaches, the fall on the stairs, and the haunted places. She n
odded, took notes. He told her that he wasn’t crazy: the ghosts he saw correlated with records of deaths he’d found in newspaper records. They were real.

  She nodded some more, and looked up from her notes. “Do you think you’re unwell?”

  The question irritated him.

  “I’m seeing the dead. It certainly doesn’t feel fucking healthy.”

  She nodded again and propped her head on an avian fist.

  “Do you miss your wife?”

  Nicholas hesitated. Was that a trick question? “Yes.”

  She pursed her thin lips. “And do you think you could be inventing these ‘ghosts’ in the hope that you might, at least for yourself, bring your wife back?”

  The question struck like a cricket bat.

  He’d been seeing strangers’ ghosts for nearly a month, but had never thought about the possibility of seeing Cate again.

  He hurried home to Greenford, heart racing, and grabbed the spare key for the as-yet-unsold Ealing flat.

  The sun had dropped below the city’s gray skyline when he hurried past the For Sale sign around to the back of the complex (he studiously avoided the front stairs) and up the rear stairwell to their little place. The flat was clean and empty as a robbed tomb. His heart was throbbing in his chest so hard that his fingers shook. He strode through the echoing kitchen, past the still living room, to the bathroom. It was clean now-the long line through the dust where Cate’s heel had slid as her neck swung down on its fatal parabola to the bath edge was long gone, the plaster dust all swept away. The shower curtain that had popped from the rail as she’d fruitlessly grabbed it to save herself had been replaced. The ceiling remained unpainted.

  And she was there.

  Straining high on an invisible ladder.

  “Cate?”

  She turned at the sound of his voice. Put one foot down to a step in the air, another… then one foot slipped and kicked out from under her. One plaster-dusted hand struck out, grabbing at empty space. The other closed around a shower curtain that wouldn’t hold her. She fell. Her mouth opened in a small “O” of surprise. One heel hit the floor, and slid out-much as his own must have done finding the plastic grocery bag-and she arced backward. Nicholas dove to catch her, and his fingers smacked painfully into the tiles. Right under his face, her neck struck the hard, tooth-white edge of the bath and her hair tossed backward. The goggles wrenched off. And her eyes stared up at nothing, dusting white under a phantom mist of powder. Her chest deflated slowly and didn’t rise again.