The Dead Path

by Stephen M Irwin

  She scooped up her coin and hurried back in line.

  And Nicholas started crying.

  He remembered pulling out his hanky, telling Steven Chan nothing was wrong, telling Miss Aspinall nothing was wrong, trying to cover his foot with his bag, hearing people whispering, His toe. She saw his toe. What about his toe? His extra toe… Cried. Like a pooftah. Nicholas knew what pooftahs were: boys who sobbed like girls.

  He’d cried then, and remembering the red-hot shame of it was making him cry like a pooftah again now. He sniffed back mucus as hot as the oven air around him.

  And so it was through tears, alone in the thudding heat on a narrow gravel path beside Carmichael Road, that Nicholas saw the bird.

  It could have been anything or nothing, a tiny thing at the edge of the path tucked mostly into the whispering grass. Black and white feathers. Was it a magpie? Nicholas leaned closer. No, it was smaller. A peewee.

  He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, wondering what to do with it. Dead things, he knew, were dirty (riddled with germs, his mother would say), and so he considered simply kicking it completely into the grass and walking on. But as he peered closer, he saw something that made him stop, shuck off his backpack, and kneel.

  The dead bird had no feet.

  Its legs, no thicker than twigs, had been neatly snipped off below its backward-facing knees, revealing sections of brown-black marrow ringed inside white bone as fine as porcelain, wrapped in gray, leathery skin.

  Nicholas closed his mouth to avoid breathing in the poachy whiff of it. Who would cut off a bird’s feet? He scoured the dirt around the bird but couldn’t see the severed claws. He did find a short stick, chewed in the middle by someone’s dog. Delicately, aware only of the iron sun baking the back of his neck and the high electric singing of insects, he poked the stick under the dead bird and pulled the limp, swollen little body out from the grass. Then his stomach lurched.

  Like its feet, the bird’s head had been removed. In its place, skewered to the body with a sharpened stick, was a spherical knot of woven twigs. The bird’s severed feet were stuck into the knot by the shins and protruded from it like tiny, knurled antlers.

  Nicholas felt his fingers pulsing as his heartbeats thupped harder. Carefully, he turned the bird over. Something was painted in rust red on the false head: a vertical downstroke with an arrowhead like a greater-than symbol on its right-hand side:

  Nicholas felt a swoop between his navel and his testicles. His skin was suddenly cold, and the edges of his vision were tinged with silver.

  He stood, heart racing, and was struck by the silence.

  No car passed on the road. Not a person moved behind the dark windows of the distant houses. The breeze had died and the blade grass had lost its lizard hiss. The crickets no longer chirruped, as if even they were afraid to announce their hiding places. The sky was pale and hot as a kiln.

  Nicholas suddenly felt dreadfully alive in all this stillness. Brilliantly alive with something so very dead beside him. He felt his heartbeats were as loud as drums, traveling for miles. He was alive and small and terrifyingly alone.

  With the woods just a few feet away.

  He knew he had to go-now. He kicked the bird and its strange woven head into the grass and grabbed his backpack. He shoved his arm into the loop, missed, shoved again, missed again. His vision was edged with glutinous, dizzy stars. Finally, he got his arm through the strap, and straightened just as the silence was broken.

  The grass crunched behind him.

  Deep slices through the dry grass. Heavy, deliberate footfalls. Stealthy and close. The stagnant air had suddenly thickened with the odor of sweet rot, alive as the cloying whiff around the top of an old septic tank. Tangy and ugly. Something was coming up behind him. Something from the woods.

  Bright white terror filled him. His adrenal gland poured its juice into his blood and his heart galloped and his small legs tensed and sprang… Run!

  Without turning, he flew.

  Chapter 4

  2007

  O n the fourth morning after Nicholas returned home from London, the rain had gone. The cloudless morning sky was the brittle blue of arctic ice, and aberrant winds dragged the temperature down to just above freezing. The chill whispered its way between the wall boards and the loose casement windows of Suzette’s bedroom.

  Nicholas woke feeling more buoyant than he had for a long time. The slope-shouldered weariness that always arrived a moment after waking-when he confirmed that he was alive and Cate was dead and London was muddling gray and busy regardless-didn’t come. He sat up. The sun was still below the horizon, but he could see how the cold winds had scrubbed the sky clean and the day would be beautiful and bright. He felt the best he had since Cate died.

  Knowing this delicate feeling of warm neutrality could easily slip away, he decided to do something to prolong the pleasantness as long as he could. He pulled on his jeans, hooded cardigan, and yesterday’s socks. He would walk the streets of his childhood suburb and drum up a breakfast appetite.

  The Closes’ house at 68 Lambeth Street was a bulldog of a building with beige weatherboard flanks hunched on stumps and scowling down the hill at its neighbors. The wrought-iron gate opened silently, its hinge spikes still damp from last night’s rain.

  Nicholas set out into the brisk wind. The walking felt good and easy. He was tall and lean; striding down the hill and forcing his enervated blood to move seemed to improve his already fair mood. He’d been away and, yes, terrible things had happened, but now he was home. New choices were possible. He could get fit. He could get a job. He could start again.

  As he walked, he saw that his impression last night that his childhood suburb had been locked in time was wrong. Some things had changed during his absence. Sentences of clapboard Queenslanders were punctuated by malapropos Tuscan-styled villas. The Sheehans’ house was gone, replaced by a two-story block of flats. A tiny roundabout, its axis a bright fountain of yellow verbena, had been installed where Lambeth and Crittendon Streets crossed. But most of the original houses remained, refreshed dames under new paint seated coyly behind neat gardens.

  The sun crested the horizon, and treetops were lit a mild gold. Nicholas breathed deeply. The stiff breeze brought fragrant snatches of wisteria. This was good. Life had gone on without him. Things did change. People survived.

  He turned the corner onto Myrtle Street. Halfway along, a small row of shops sat huddled under the long fingers of a massive poinciana.

  Nicholas felt a tripwire in his gut twang, and he slowed his pace. Something about the sight of the shops disturbed him, though he couldn’t say what. Determined not to let anything spoil his walk, he picked up his pace and strode toward them.

  One building housed four shops in a row that faced Myrtle Street from under a wide, bull-nosed awning. The area under the awning was raised half a meter off the ground; it was tiled and its front was separated from the footpath by a galvanized steel rail and a row of potted topiary trees. In his childhood, the shops had been a convenience store, Mrs. Ferguson’s greengrocery, the Magill Fruitbowl, a butcher, and a haberdashery.

  He stopped at the two steps leading up to the shop porch. Again, the taut, sly wire inside hummed uncomfortably. And again, he shook off the ill feeling. It was not yet six thirty and the shops were closed. The convenience store was still there, but under a new name and with window stickers proclaiming Phone Cards: 9 cents/min, Anywhere in the World!; the fruit shop’s most recent incarnation had been as a Tibetan takeaway restaurant, the owners of which had clearly overestimated the willingness of locals to enjoy good Kongpo Shaptak, and it was now out of business; the butcher’s had become a computer repairer; the haberdashery, run by an old woman with an odd name, was now a health food shop.

  Nicholas’s footsteps echoed on the cold tiles. The dark shop windows sourly reflected the brightness of the new day. Quill, he remembered. The old woman’s name was Quill. And with the name, into his mind’s eye flashed a recollection of
being eight or nine, holding Suzette’s tiny hand in his, and walking home from school past the shop and looking inside… and dark eyes set in a pale, wrinkled face looking back. Then Suzette started crying.

  Nicholas stepped out into the early sunlight and felt a small flutter of relief. A long time ago, he thought. Childhood would prove to hold much nastier things than a dour-faced old woman in a dark shop. He picked up his pace again.

  Laidlaw Street. Madeglass Street. Roads that to his younger eyes had been so long and languorous now seemed cramped and quaint. Jacarandas and liquidambars poked bare fingers into the crisp air. The leaves of callistemons and grevillea whispered benignly. A Labrador watched him from a porch, its tail lethargically thumping the hardwood boards.

  Nicholas put cold hands in his cardigan pockets and stepped into the narrow, pleasantly shadowed throat of Ithaca Lane. He realized he was looking not at his feet, or a few steps ahead, but to the crest of the steep lane fifty meters up. He was scanning horizons, looking for ghosts. But there were none. No stooped businessmen stepping in front of lorries, no hollow-eyed street girls crouched in the shadows injecting just a bit too much heroin. He was a long way from London and its ghosts-as far as one could get, really. His memory caught scent of Cate, but he quashed the familiar urge to run and sit by her gravestone and turned his thoughts to what he might do for work. Buying props for TV commercials? Building sets for the state theater company? He could volunteer at the arts college until he found his feet and made some contacts. Shit, he could go back to university and get his master’s. There was money in the bank, so why not take the year and start something new? Learn animation? Write and illustrate a children’s book? The possibilities pleased him, driving the uneasiness about the Myrtle Street shops from his mind.

  Winter sunlight winked in the crystal dew on the ridge caps of houses and rippled silver in gutter puddles. The air was raw and clean and things felt… good. Nicholas nodded to himself: yes, things felt quite good. He topped the crest of Ithaca Lane and glanced downhill.

  He stopped, rock still. His good mood blew away in an instant, as if stolen like smoke by the wind.

  At the bottom of the lane was Carmichael Road and, beyond it, the woods and their dark, countless trees.

  Just turn around, he thought. But he didn’t move. The woods held his eye, a broad and gently rippling lure. From here, even on this low rise, he could sense their size. A huge lopsided square of silver green, emerald green, olive green, and chalcedony treetops, each side more than a kilometer, rising and falling back to the distant glimpses of brown river. Why were they still so disturbing? Gazing upon their inscrutable surface, Nicholas had the feeling that the trees were merely a veneer; a cloak over some dark creature, the shape of which remained hidden and the heart of which was as cold as deep earth.

  I’m not going past them. Not today. He shifted to return home the way he’d come. But as he turned, movement caught his eye.

  On the path through the grass strip that hemmed the woods, a boy was kneeling.

  Nicholas’s blood seemed to slow to a syrupy stop. He felt as if twenty-five years of life had suddenly fallen away and he was ten again.

  The boy was bending to peer at the spot where, so many years ago, young Nicholas had found the dead bird with the woven head.

  Nicholas felt ill. It’s Tristram.

  Then the boy looked up and around, and Nicholas could see it wasn’t his childhood friend. Yet he recognized the boy’s face. The huge policeman had held up a photo of him four nights ago. It was the dead Thomas boy.

  The child leaned closer to touch something on the path.

  Nicholas felt his stomach fill with cold. Turn around, he thought. Go home. Forget it. He’s dead. He’s a dream. Like Cate, he’s not really there, he can’t be there. He’s gone…

  But he couldn’t turn. A wave of disgust rolled through him. He wanted to see what happened next.

  The dead child rose on milkstraw legs, dropped with horror something offensive and spoiled, wiped his hands on his pants. Then he stiffened and turned his face to the woods. His mouth opened in a silent scream, and suddenly one arm jerked straight, as if grabbed by someone invisible and strong, and Dylan Thomas flew backward into the trees.

  Nicholas’s heart suddenly remembered to pump. Without thinking, he ran down the hill, across Carmichael Road, through the tall, damp grass, and into the woods.

  D ylan Thomas was being dragged by an impalpable force, his fair hair streaming over his pale face as he flew between tree trunks. Where the sun hit him, he glowed brighter, like a dust mote caught in a spotlight.

  Nicholas strained to keep up. Already, the sharp brass pain of a stitch blared in his side and his breaths were raggedly insufficient. When was the last time he’d run like this? Years. He should stop, turn around, go home… but the sight of the dead boy flickering between the trees ahead kept him running.

  The woods quickly grew thicker, the moist ground between the trunks of brush box and devil’s apple crowded with saplings and lantana, lush vines, fallen branches, and spiderwebs glistening coldly with droplets.

  Ahead, the boy’s arm pointed straight as a compass, and his body whipped behind it, flailing hopelessly. Yet his dark eyes were resigned. They were locked on Nicholas.

  Nicholas’s breaths came fast and hard. He was running as fast as he could. His heavy feet churned through an ankle-deep gruel of wet, rotting leaves. His shins fouled on moss-thick roots. Scrabbling branches scratched his face and slapped him with dark, prickling leaves. Parasitic vines, as thick as wrists and mottled with gray fungus, looped like fallen question marks, lurking and ready to strangle. The wide, striated trunks of native elms and ancient figs were only arm spans apart, and the canopy overhead grew closer and tighter until it was almost solid and only tiny sapphires of sky winked into the thick emerald gloom below. It was as dark as dusk. The damp air was cold enough to burn the back of Nicholas’s throat.

  The distance between him and the boy was growing. Nicholas ran harder.

  The Thomas boy’s face was a bobbing flurry. His small free arm scrabbled at trees, reaching silently at damp, green-flecked trunks. He flew up a steep, shaly slope.

  Nicholas’s lungs burned as he strained to follow. What would he see when the boy finally stopped? Him struggling? Pleading? Crying for his mother as his invisible killer made him kneel and his white throat opened up? Would he find Tristram, his face set hard as a knife came from behind?

  Would he find the murderer himself?

  Nicholas suddenly felt sick. He had no plan. What if he ran into some makeshift camp in the middle of the woods, straight into a cold-eyed man with a knife on his belt and a gun in his hands?

  You’ll end up as dead as the Thomas boy. Dead as Tristram.

  That thought in mind, Nicholas crested the rise-and the ground beneath fell away into space.

  He barely stopped himself going over into a sharp gully. His arms pinwheeled a moment, then he found his balance and took a careful step back from the brink. Beyond, the ground fell sharply several meters to a narrow, stony creek bed. He caught his breath and looked around.

  The Thomas boy had vanished.

  He felt disappointment riding a wave of guilty relief that he wouldn’t need to see the boy die. He could leave, able to tell himself he did try. And at home, with time and distance between him and these sunless trees, he could convince himself never to come here again.

  Traitor. Coward.

  “Shut up,” he whispered.

  He turned to go.

  But as he did, his foot hit a sly rock wet with moss and shot from under him, out over space. His body followed an instant later… and he fell. He tumbled down the steep gully face, arms flailing, trying to stay upright. Angry branched saplings slapped him for his clumsiness. He hit the gully floor with a sodden crunch, his impact blunted by a wet and tangy clump of native ginger.

  His panting breaths were loud in the silence. He awkwardly got to his feet. Both his palms were scratche
d and bleeding. His upper lip was wet-his fingers came away red. A little blood, but nothing broken.

  The air down here seemed even colder, and even denser with trees. The narrow creek bed was the only place where no plants grew. In the half-light, the rocks and stones of the dry stream stood out like bones protruding through flesh. The gully was suddenly familiar. Nicholas nodded. It had been a quarter-century, but he knew where he was. He knew what lay ahead if he followed the uneven creek bed.

  The pale, rounded stones looked like skullcaps and clacked loudly underfoot.

  The shadows behind the trees here grew deeper, more solid, as if something lurked there, something waiting and patient. Hungry.

  We were running. Tristram and I were running for our lives. This is where we parted. This is…

  Then Nicholas saw it.

  Almost masked by the mossy trunks of booyong and red ash was the huge water pipe. It was almost three meters in diameter; its steel flanks were rusted to a dark red, and it sat on a green patinated concrete footing half a meter thick. It ran perpendicular to the creek bed, maybe seven or eight meters in each direction, before it was swallowed by blood vine and silver-furred star nightshade. If he were to tap its dark, rusty curve, it would ring hollow and mournful as an oubliette.

  This is where we left each other, he thought. Tristram and I. His mouth was dry. The remembered taste of terror was as strong as alum.

  Where the hulking pipe crossed the rocky streambed, its ancient concrete foundation was deeper. Two parallel tunnels, each almost a meter wide, pierced the concrete foundation like dark nostrils.

  Nicholas stopped, lungs still working hard to reclaim the oxygen he’d spent in the frantic chase. His panting was the only sound. No wind shifted leaves. No bird called. No insect chirped.

  The pipe, he could see, was too high to climb. It ran who-knew-how-far into the woods in each direction. The only way to pass beyond it was to go under, through the narrow tunnels.

  He walked up the creek bed closer to the pipe, and his footsteps castaneted stones together; the sound echoed in the shotgun tunnels like the cavernous clicking of some dead giant’s teeth.