The Dead Path

by Stephen M Irwin

  Like your image of Christ? Let’s not forget how offended you were when that old nari spat on Him.

  Pritam reprimanded himself. That was different. Christ was his Lord and savior, but the Green Man is… what?

  He’d asked John Hird about why such an un-Christian image was in such a holy place. “Christ knows,” Hird had grumbled. “What am I? An interior designer?” Then he’d lumbered into the presbytery to make tea.

  And now, alone in the church, Pritam couldn’t shake the feeling that the Green Man was watching him from his headdress of hewn leaves. Suddenly, the words of the old Boye woman came back with sharp clarity. Blood is the only sacrifice that pleases the Lord.

  And he can smell my blood, thought Pritam.

  The thought came from nowhere and was irrational, childish, stupid. His heart was racing. His feet in his leather dress shoes were tingling and ready for flight. But he bent with deliberate slowness to pick up the vacuum cleaner. This was his church. He would not run from it.

  “This is a house of God,” he said, loudly. The words rang against the cold, shadowed stone and among the dark old timbers.

  He turned and walked to the apse door, all the while feeling the hairs on the back of his neck prickling like live wires.

  N icholas sat on his sofa. His throat was raw and his stomach was sore from retching. The bites (spider bites, he reminded himself) throbbed, and for the hundredth time he dully considered a trip to the twenty-four-hour medical center. And, for the hundredth time, reasoned that the resultant questions would not go well. Giant spider, you say? Oh, yes, we get those all the time. Pardon me just a moment while I phone security. Suggesting the wounds were a snakebite would only demand more tests, more questions. The punctures weren’t infected, and he was feeling incrementally better. He’d stay here.

  So tired. As soon as he began drifting toward sleep, the nightmare image of the old woman stroking him while her pet sat on his chest returned with awful vividness. Shutting his mind’s door on the vision and leaning against it to keep it closed was draining. To let it open and relive those moments as a supine captive in the woods would send him crazy.

  How do you know you’re not crazy?

  He skipped to the next groove in the scratched record of his mind: Go to the police.

  And say what? That the men who’d confessed to the murders of Tristram Boye and Dylan Thomas were lying? “Forget their confessions, their fingerprints, their car tire tracks, Sergeant! The real killer is an old woman who lives in a strange little cottage in the woods. That’s right, just down the road from me. Her hobbies include spider farming and jerking off hostages.”

  “That’s amazing news, Mr. Close! The very break we needed to reopen these already neatly closed cases. By the way, how did you find out?”

  “Oh, here’s the clever bit: a ghost led me there.”

  The bitch knew.

  The old woman knew there was no room in a sane world for stories about huge spiders and Brothers Grimm strawberries. A retelling of what happened would sound like the babblings of a madman. No, she knew there would be no police.

  Go away. Move to Melbourne.

  And how would he feel when he read of another Tallong child going missing?

  I’m no murderer, Nicholas thought.

  Ah. But she has your sperm in a jar.

  Nicholas was suddenly fully awake. An image appeared in his mind complete: an autopsy table, a small boy facedown on the stainless steel, a lab-coated man with a syringe withdrawing milky white liquid from the dead boy’s anus and squirting it into a jar theatrically labeled “Evidence.”

  Oh, Jesus.

  Tristram touched the bird. But it should have been you.

  She’d found out he was back, and she taunted him with Gavin, and drew him down to the woods like the gullible fool he was.

  Suddenly, a small noise. The front door’s knob was turning.

  With a start, Nicholas realized he hadn’t locked it.

  W hen Suzette swung open the door of Nicholas’s flat, the first thing she saw was her brother’s pallid face, eyes wide in fright. His expression, quite frankly, scared the shit out of her. “Who did you expect?” she’d asked.

  He’d simply shaken his head, and replied, “I don’t know if you’d believe me.”

  And now she’d heard it, she wasn’t sure she did.

  Nicholas had made them both coffee, sat her down, and told her how he’d followed the Thomas boy’s ghost into the woods. How he’d gone under the water pipe through the cobweb-choked drain. Wandering lost. Finding the boat. Seeing an old lady and her white dog; a dog whose bite marks he showed Suzette. They were two small red circles that already looked days old. “They were much bigger earlier,” he’d explained sheepishly. Falling unconscious. Waking to find himself unable to move, lying outside the old woman’s cottage. Bitten again by the dog-and the way he said “dog” made Suzette feel there was a lot her brother wasn’t telling her. Waking wet, clean, and nauseated in the tall grass on Carmichael Road, and staggering home.

  “What do you think?” he said. “You think I’ve gone bonkers?”

  “I think you’re a fucking idiot eating berries without knowing what they were.”

  “I told you. They were strawberries.”

  “Oh, you’re the Bush Tucker Man now?”

  Her expression must have been cynical; she saw her brother’s face harden.

  “Look at it from my point of view, Nicky. You were starving. You ate some berries-”

  “Strawberries.”

  “Would you bet your life on that?” she snapped, suddenly angry. “Would you bet your sanity on that? ’Cause that’s what you’re doing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everything weird you saw, everything weird that happened to you, happened after you ate those berries.”

  She watched him as this sank in. She could see the wheels in his mind turning behind his eyes, see him realize that everything could have been a hallucination brought on by the berries. A seed of doubt had germinated. She pressed the opportunity.

  “Trust me, I know how potent some herbs and berries can be. Datura, peyote, morning glory seeds…”

  She watched Nicholas frown, and his eyes turned to the wound on his hand.

  “And that isn’t a dog bite.”

  “No,” he agreed, but he didn’t say anything else.

  Suzette changed tack. “The old woman…” She waited until Nicholas was looking at her. “Was she Mrs. Quill?”

  He seemed to take his time thinking about this. Then he shook his head slowly. “She didn’t look like Quill. Like I remember Quill.”

  Suzette nodded. For some reason, that answer was a relief.

  Brother and sister drank their coffees in silence for a long while. Nicholas shifted on his seat, as if uncomfortable and wanting to speak. But he kept his silence.

  “I don’t think you’re crazy,” said Suzette quietly.

  “I think you do,” whispered Nicholas. He looked up at her. His eyes were grave. “You were the one who said the rune was dangerous. You were the one who wanted to know more. And now that I tell you more, you think…” He shook his head. “You think I was tripping on ’shrooms.”

  Suzette met his gaze. She couldn’t lie. Her next words she spoke carefully.

  “I believe you ate something. Maybe they were strawberries. Maybe they just looked like them. Maybe it doesn’t matter. ’Cause these things you say you saw, well… it’s only three days since a man shot himself to death in front of you.”

  She watched these last sentences sink into Nicholas’s mind. He sat rock still in his chair for a long moment, staring at the mud-colored, threadbare carpet. Finally, he took a long breath.

  “You’re probably right,” he said. He nodded, stood and collected their coffee mugs, and repeated, “You’re probably right. Yep. How do you think I got these bites?”

  Suzette felt a warm glow of relief in her stomach. Her brother was odd, sometimes lazy, a fucking i
diot for eating any old shit he found on the forest floor, but she loved him. The idea of his gift driving him mad was scary.

  “I dunno. Maybe a tree snake bit you in the woods? They’re not venomous, you wouldn’t even realize it till later.” She shrugged.

  He nodded again as he washed the mugs-that sounded reasonable. He checked his watch, and Suzette looked at her own. It was nearly 9 p.m.

  “I’d better get home. Mum will think we’ve both bailed on her.”

  Nicholas smiled. “Thanks for coming over. Sorry I… you know. Worried you. Et cetera, et cetera.”

  Suzette gave him a quick hug. “Fine. Glad you’re feeling better.”

  He saw her to the door.

  “Just the same,” she said as she stepped into the cold night, “I don’t think you should go into the woods.”

  He nodded again. “Good advice.”

  He closed the door on her.

  N icholas carefully pulled aside the limp, once-white curtains and watched his sister walking up Bymar Street, until the darkness between the tiny footprints of streetlight consumed her. Then he sagged.

  She thinks I’ve lost it. Well, when ninety-nine people say the sky is blue and one guy with bad hair says it’s green, who do you side with?

  Suzette thought he had a wee touch of post-traumatic stress syndrome after seeing Gavin off himself; that was fine. But she was still here-she hadn’t flown home to Sydney. That wasn’t so good. He wondered if he’d told her too much. She’d scared him when she came through the front door; he couldn’t help himself. When that knob had turned, he wouldn’t have been surprised to see the old woman with her blue, unsmiling eyes opening the door wide to let some eight-legged thing step silently in. When he saw it was Suzette, his relief was so great he just blabbed. Thank God he’d had the good sense not to tell her about what the small terrier Garnock really was. Or about the raping hand job.

  He hadn’t imagined it. Certainly, the old witch’s strawberries had made him see things: the beautiful vale, the glistening pond, the pretty boat, Cate’s Surprise -that was the most sadistic of them. But he’d also seen things as they truly were: that the boat was a collapsed hull, the witch’s secretive cottage, the nightmarish, fox-sized spider Garnock… He’d told Suzette a lot, but not too much. If he could keep his new, horrible knowledge inside for a few more days, he was sure he could get her to leave and go back to her family. Then there was only Mum to worry about.

  The old woman doesn’t want your mother. She wants you.

  Overhead, in the winter sky, the moon was high and small, just a slivered narrow eye in a yawning ebony sky.

  Was that the last thing Tris saw? The moon? The old woman? A knife? Eight unblinking eyes?

  Nicholas felt his eyes drawn to the end of Bymar Street, where it intersected with Carmichael Road. He could feel the wall of dark trees there, as solid and hostile as an army camped outside a city under siege.

  He was about to let the greasy curtain fall when something closer to his flat caught his eye.

  Across the road, under a moth-flickering cone of light cast by a streetlamp, a small white terrier sat on the footpath. As soon as Nicholas’s eyes fell on the creature, its tail wagged slowly. It was looking directly at his window. It was watching him.

  Now that Nicholas had recognized it, Garnock lazily got to its haunches and trotted down Bymar Street in the direction of Carmichael Road.

  Nicholas watched it go. He couldn’t stop shaking.

  Chapter 13

  H e sat shivering on wide, cement steps. Behind him rose the blocky sides of the State Library, wide slabs of raw concrete and dark glass, looking for all the world like a colossal stack of unwanted telephone directories. Across the wide, cold river, the glass spires of Brisbane’s skyscrapers winked in the morning light. The sun itself seemed a tiny, fustian token in cloudless brittle blue. Nicholas was curled tight around himself in the cool shadows-the sun’s rays were still creeping down the monolithic sides of the library building, their small warmth teasingly close yet out of reach. Around him waited other library patrons: bearded men in anoraks, precise women with tight hair and string bags, university students with deadline faces, old men straight as their canes. Nicholas reluctantly pulled his hand from a warm pocket and checked his watch.

  It was nearly nine. The drive in had been slow and dejecting. Caught in peak-hour traffic, he had been forced to crawl past a man lying at the side of the road. The man’s lips had been white, his eyes wide with confused terror, chest caved in and ribs protruding, head held off the ground by invisible hands. It took minutes for him to expire, and appear again a split second later, falling from a car that had crashed weeks, months, years ago. Why are you still here? Nicholas had wanted to ask. Why can’t you move on? You weren’t evil, were you? The Thomas boy wasn’t evil. Cate wasn’t evil. Why are you doomed to this horrible, endless rerun? As if hearing Nicholas’s thoughts, the dead man rolled his eyes toward him as his crushed body jerked. Fear and confusion. That was all Nicholas ever saw in their eyes. Terror, bafflement, a glum desire to be done with. Never enlightenment. Never hope. Never portents of heaven or signs of the divine. And they were everywhere. There was no escape, no refuge, no place without ghosts.

  He needed answers.

  There was a twitter of excitement among the people waiting outside the library. They all started moving, like cows at milking time, as the tall glass doors opened. From their hurried rush, they might have been racing to read the last books on a doomed earth. Nicholas rose wearily. I fit in here, he thought. An unkempt man with strange fires burning behind his eyes. He shuffled into the library.

  He watched the last of the small crowd of patrons disperse like swallows to nests: some scurried to the information desk, some to the reference books, some to the microfiche catalogues, most to carrels where they proprietarily placed bags beside the LCD terminals. Nicholas wandered to a far stall and staked his own claim with a pencil, notepad, and a bottle of water. He furtively checked that no one was watching, then reached into his satchel and produced a spray can of insecticide that he sat close by his chair. Then he settled to work.

  Half an hour later, he’d mastered the online photograph library. On the screen was a box labeled “Search terms.” Into it he typed “Carmichael Road.” An icon bar gradually filled as the computer searched.

  “Search results: 15 hits.”

  The first photographs were of different Carmichael Roads in other towns and many suburbs. Then he found Carmichael Road, Tallong. He clicked the link. The black-and-white photograph was from 1925; the caption read “R. Mullins’s delivery truck.” Behind the fragile-looking old vehicle was a nondescript house, naked without connected power lines or a crowning television aerial. He clicked another link. This revealed a posed photographic portrait of “Clement Burkin, meteorologist.” Another link: “C. Burkin’s home, Carmichael Road.” Yet another: a plan of the suburb of Tallong, Parish of Todd, 1891. The fold lines of the old document were as dark as the faded streets with their handwritten names: Madeglass Street, Ithaca Lane, Myrtle Street. The thirty-two lot house blocks hung like ribs from the spines of roads. To the east of them sat a large rhomboid flanked by Carmichael Road on one side and cradled by a loop of river: “Arnold Estate.”

  It took only a glance to recognize what the proposed Arnold Estate was. The woods. He leaned closer to the screen.

  Dotted lines ran through the rhomboid: “Proposed subdivision. Raff amp; Patterson, Surveyors.”

  He wrote down the names.

  Another link-a flyer for a land auction from twenty years later, in 1901: “Fifty-eight magnificent new sites! High-set views!” Again, the area of the woods was divided into dotted lines of proposed streets; another development that never happened. “?5 deposit. Thorneton amp; Shailer, Auctioneers.”

  He wrote down their names, too.

  “Flood damage to jetties and boat houses, 1893.” A jetty on leaning piers seemed to slide down into still, sepia waters. Nicholas blinked.
Of course, the ’93 flood. The river would have broken its banks in lots of suburbs, including Tallong. He flicked back to the auction flyer, its map showing the loop of river around the woods. The river waters would have torn right through them. A memory rushed back of leaning trees festooned with bent iron, and the heaved, rotting boat, her nom de guerre, Cate’s Surprise, flaking away to show her real name.

  He typed “Wynard,” then “Boat.” Search.

  “Search results: 1 hit.”

  He clicked the link.

  There she was. The caption read: “Former ferry boat Wynard docked at private jetty, Sherwood, 1891.” The sepia photograph was of the same boat he’d seen resplendent in fresh paint on a mirage pond, then decrepit and collapsed in a choked gully.

  I’m not crazy.

  Nicholas sipped his water as his heart thudded. He closed his eyes and concentrated, trying to get all the images he’d seen into some order in his mind.

  The woods. Many planned subdivisions. Many scheduled auctions. Yet none had transpired; the woods had remained undeveloped and untouched.

  He opened his eyes and flicked back through his notes, then typed a search for “Auctioneer, Thorneton.”

  Three thumbnails: that same flyer for the Arnold Estate subdivision; a photo of a rakish, smiling man in a boater hat accompanied by a heavyset woman in a bustle that was an explosion of tulle; an old photo of the stone Anglican church where both Tristram’s and Gavin’s funeral services had been held.

  Nicholas felt a flutter of fear. But why should that be surprising? The church had been the center of Tallong for more than a century. He clicked to enlarge the image.

  The caption read: “Funeral service for P. Thorneton, Auctioneer. 1901.” The photograph showed undertakers in top hats with black ribbons sitting atop a horse-drawn hearse. Mourners grim as crows were grouped around the dark stone church. Pritam’s and Hird’s Anglican church. The church of the Green Man. The building, only a decade or so old then, already looked centuries old, as grim and severe as something that had forced its way bitterly up through hard earth.