The Dead Path

by Stephen M Irwin

  He felt the cold wind of night grab at his hair. He turned and walked slowly home to Bymar Street.

  “… A nd then the princess realized he was the kindest, gentlest and best of the animals, and she loved him most of all…”

  Bryan’s voice flowed down the hall like warm water, soothing and calm. Suzette could picture Quincy’s eyes rolling and straining to focus as she fought to stay awake and hear the rest of her favorite story. Bryan had been so good, keeping Quincy occupied all day and well away from her sick brother.

  Suzette was in Nelson’s room. It was dark. He lay on the bed, his chest barely rising and falling. The doctor had suggested it was some kind of chest infection and, after conducting all manner of tests for meningitis, pneumonia, and bird flu, had let him go home. Bryan had argued that he needed to be in the hospital, and Suzette loved him for it. “Trust me,” she said. He did, and she loved him for that too.

  She finished writing Nelson’s full name on a candle that was so purple it was almost black. Already waiting on a tray was a small puppet, a roughly human-shaped thing of white cotton and smelling strongly of sage, garlic, and lavender. She’d sewn the puppet closed with Nelson’s hair.

  How dare she? thought Suzette. How dare she attack my child? But a part of her cautioned to be quiet, to be grateful. Quill’s done so much worse.

  She listened. Silence from the far end of the house. Story time was done; Quincy was asleep.

  Time to start.

  She lit the candle.

  Chapter 19

  H annah was so angry she could spew. Miriam, who was two years older and in seventh grade and supposed to be more adult about things, had thrown the most dangerous kind of fit when she caught Hannah using her lip gloss. Jeez, come on! Miriam knew Mum wouldn’t let Hannah buy her own lip gloss! But catching her, Miriam hadn’t yelled and spacked out; she’d gone silent. This meant one of two things: either she’d march straight to Mum and reveal some secret she’d crossed her heart not to tell, or she’d Get Even Later.

  As Hannah shuffled along alone, she understood very clearly that Miriam had chosen the latter.

  They’d walked off toward school together, Miriam all sweetness and light and miss-you-Mum. But out of sight of home, she had turned on Hannah, fast and harsh as those peregrine falcons you see on TV documentaries, diving like lightning on field mice and ripping their guts out. “Just wait, you little bitch,” she’d hissed, and then had given Hannah eighteen-carat, diamond-studded, first-class silent treatment the whole two kilometers to school.

  Once there, Hannah quickly forgot her older sister’s fury and the day ambled along nicely to its final (and Hannah’s favorite) lesson: Arts and Crafts. Hannah loved spooning thick acrylic paint onto a brush and sliding it over pristine white paper, making something out of nothing. Mrs. Tho said Hannah’s paintings were magnificent and told her to keep in mind that the school fete was coming up, where she might be able to exhibit some of her work. The idea plucked pleasant shivers inside Hannah, and the thought of other people seeing-and maybe buying -her artwork was, well, just awesome.

  Afire with the possiblities, she attacked this afternoon’s blank paper with excitement and came up with something vibrant and pretty and deliciously weird. It was a horse in a man suit in a supermarket aisle shopping for seahorses. It made her classmates laugh and Mrs. Tho smile. Hannah couldn’t wait to show Miriam, who was usually her biggest fan.

  Not this afternoon, though.

  A glacial freeze surrounded Miriam as they started to walk home. Hannah tried to engage her older sister by telling her about the fete. She started to unroll the new painting, but at the top of the hill past the school Miriam stopped in her tracks.

  “I don’t want to talk to you, you thieving little dog. I’m going along Silky Oak Street. You walk the other way.”

  Hannah felt a small thump of fear in her tummy. The “other way” was along Carmichael Road. Past the woods.

  The little cuts on Hannah’s legs had almost healed, but her memory of the whispering grass, the cutting grass, the blood, the leaning trees with dark teeth trunks, the way the wind and the trees and grass had tasted her… that was still sharp.

  And now Miriam was forcing Hannah to go past them.

  “Miriam?”

  Miriam walked a few steps and whirled again, eyes brightly ferocious. “I mean it, shithead!” she spat. “You follow me and I’ll kick you to death!”

  Hannah stood frozen. She’d never seen her sister this angry. She remembered a half-heard warning from Mum: Miriam’s going through a phase right now. She’s growing up fast and lots of changes are happening to her. She’s liable to be a bit testy.

  Wow, you reckon? thought Hannah.

  She watched Miriam stalk off on her long, thin legs. She fought the sudden urge to bawl, slowly rolled up her painting, and walked to the terminus of the school’s avenue, which turned down Carmichael Road.

  I’ll tell, Hannah thought hatefully. I’ll tell Mum that Miriam used the F-word. And I’ll make it stick worse because I’ll fess up to using her lip gloss first, and second I’ll cry.

  The afternoon was warm and she opened up her school cardigan. The woods grew closer on her right, and as they did, Hannah realized she was being an idiot. The trees were just trees, pretty and green and normal. The grass was dry and sharp, but that’s why they call it blade grass, Einstein! She smiled at her own foolishness. She’d accused Addison of being gutless, and here she was, acting just as chicken. So, without a thought, she skipped over the road, stepped (carefully!) through the blade grass, and onto the gravel track that cut through the grass strip that fringed the tree line.

  Besides, it wasn’t woods that hurt people. Sure, you could get lost and freeze to death, or you could break your leg or your neck, but if you were careful, the woods were safe as anything. It was people who hurt people.

  With this thought in mind, it seemed to Hannah that she saw three things at once.

  The first was unimportant: someone had driven black star stakes into the ground near the footpath and wired between them a sign made of white plastic.

  Second, a man stood on the other side of Carmichael Road. He had been staring at the sign, but now was watching Hannah.

  The third was so exciting her heart began to race. The sight of it made her forget the other two things instantly. It lay smack in the middle of the path, glinting like a huge gem in the sunlight.

  It was a unicorn.

  It looked like it was made of glass, but as Hannah stepped closer, she wasn’t so sure. Glass was usually smooth and bulgy; this had fine, chiseled legs, rippling and strong. She could see the striations in the horn, the fine detail of the creature’s course mane hairs, its beautiful wise eyes. Its flanks were scalloped and muscular. It looked alive and frozen at the same time, more made of ice than glass, or perhaps carved from some magical, transparent wood. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

  “Excuse me!”

  Hannah reluctantly looked up-she didn’t want to take her eyes off the unicorn. The man had crossed the road and was coming toward her. He wants the unicorn, she thought wildly. It’s his unicorn, but I want it!

  “Young lady?” he called.

  Hannah calculated. She had time. She could grab the exquisite figurine, put it in her bag, and run.

  “Don’t!”

  She reached down and snatched the unicorn.

  And as she did, it felt as if the earth jumped a step to the side. She lurched. The sky seemed to dim. The sun sank lower. The woods, so benign and inviting, suddenly loomed dark and dreadful. She looked at her hands.

  Instead of the lustrous unicorn, she held a dead plover. The bird sagged limply. Its head was gone, cut off and replaced with a ball made of twigs and painted with a funny mark. It was hideous. So horrible. So dead.

  She was staring at it, about to scream, when the man grabbed her arms.

  N icholas was staring at the ceiling of his flat and deciding that it was indeed stucco. Thi
s was the sole conclusion that he had reached in two hours. He had bumbled around the flat, circumnavigating the dining room table and the open notebook lying there. He had rung Suzette to find that Nelson’s fever had diminished but not gone, so she had moved him onto a cot in her and Bryan’s room.

  Nicholas had forced himself to sit, intending to make a list of names and places-Quill, Bretherton, Sedgely; shop, woods, church-to see if their placement together might catalyze some epiphany he felt was ripe and ready. But the instant his buttocks hit the chair, he was up again. He couldn’t stay inside any longer. He had to go out.

  He willed his feet to take him to Lambeth Street. Suzette had said that their mother had sounded short on the phone and some placating might not be a bad idea. But the instant Nicholas’s feet touched the Bymar Street footpath, they started toward Carmichael Road.

  The wind had risen through the night; it tugged urgently at treetops and made the power lines sway and moan. High overhead, clouds were hounded fast across the sky, and the sun, though impoverished of warmth, was so bright it hurt the eye.

  Nicholas walked onto Carmichael Road. He stayed on the footpath opposite the woods and walked toward the point where Winston Teale had once stopped his olive green sedan. Movement flickered in the grass verge and Nicholas squinted.

  Dylan Thomas took a few frightened steps back, then his arm spasmed out straight as a mast’s boom and he jerked as he was rushed toward the woods and into the dark trees. Then, in an orchestration that was unsettling, high clouds passed over the sun just as Nicholas saw something else that made him flinch. A sign had been hammered into the hard strip of grass bordering the woods.

  Stiff-legged, he walked along the footpath till he was opposite the new notice. Application for Subdivision, it said; Barisi Group, Developers. A small logo of a black Romanesque stallion flanked the large print.

  Nicholas’s mind flew back through the old papers he’d found at the library-auction flyers, auctioneers’ names, surveyors’ names. Funerals of men. Murders of children.

  He blinked as a terrible realization dawned on him. Every time the woods were threatened, a child went missing and died. Here was another application to invade the woods. Quill was going to kill another child. And every time Quill killed a child, she chose a man-a Teale or a Guyatt-to take the fall.

  He knew, right then, that Quill had chosen him.

  And at that very moment, a small girl appeared on the path.

  She was maybe nine or ten, with dark brown hair in a ponytail and thin legs ending in shoes that looked too big. She spotted Nicholas and looked quickly away back to the path. Then her scissoring steps slowed and stopped. Her eyes had found something on the ground.

  Nicholas felt the world slow to a quiet halt. The sunlight froze in the air, so fragile that a single gesture would shatter it and let darkness flood the sky. The woods, a wall of black shadow, ghostly trunks, and dark green waves, seemed to swell, growing taller and closer to the girl.

  Bring her.

  The voice was as old as stone and as strong as night tides, a vibrating rumble almost too low to hear.

  Bring her.

  He shook his head as if to clear it. “Excuse me!” he called out to the girl. His voice sounded impotent and exhausted.

  The girl looked up at him, frowning. She was so small. It would be easy to grab her, to fold her in his arms and…

  He took a step toward her, and stopped himself. No.

  She was looking at the path again. Nicholas knew what lay there. A dead bird with a woven head, and if she touched it she would die.

  She will die.

  “Young lady?” he called. His feet moved again, and this time they wouldn’t stop. They were carrying him to her, across the road. It was hard to breathe. His throat was tight. His hands went to his collar and pulled it away; as he did, his fingertips touched the wood beads of the necklace. It felt heavy and tight around his neck and the sardonyx stone was uncomfortably warm.

  Take it off.

  Yes, he could just take it off and grab her and bring her in, she wouldn’t be heavy, cover her mouth and-

  No!

  The girl was looking at the path and back at him. She was going to grab it!

  “Don’t!” he called, his voice so thin he could have been on a distant hilltop.

  If I can’t stop walking, he thought, I’ll run. He jolted his legs into a sudden sprint.

  She knelt and picked up the dead bird.

  BRING HER IN!

  Nicholas stumbled. The voice was so low it set his teeth shaking; it convulsed his organs and whipped his blood. The animal gravity of the woods was as primal and strong as any need to sleep or eat or fuck. His crotch bulged with a new and thumping erection. He couldn’t breathe.

  Then he heard them.

  In the woods. A chittering. The rustle of a thousand unseen spiny legs on shadowed leaves. They were coming.

  The girl stood rigid, staring at the dead bird in her hands, its head a ball of twigs and marked with blood. Thurisaz. Nicholas grabbed her by the arms.

  Bring her-

  “No!” he yelled, and picked her off her feet. He staggered-she felt as heavy as a man, as two men; too heavy. He swooped one hand under her thin legs. The tick-tick rustling was getting louder. He bent, shaking under the strain, and scooped up the dead bird talisman and shoved it into his pocket. He took a quaking step, then another, away from the woods.

  The chittering of leaves gave way to a rustling in the grass behind him.

  His legs were burning with effort, lactate already racing like bushfire through his thighs. He took another step, another, another… and ran.

  Just as he stepped onto the bitumen, he cast a look behind.

  The grass was turning black as if flood waters had instantly risen to halfway up their stalks. Only the tide was not dark water: Nicholas knew it was a rising wave of black and gray spiders.

  He turned and ran like hell.

  T his was the last box. Pritam pulled it down from the rectory storeroom shelf, dropped it unceremoniously on the floor, and began emptying its contents.

  Rifling through the other archive boxes had yielded a hodgepodge of curiosities: photographs of a twenty-years-younger Reverend John Hird smiling with disabled children under the World Expo monorail; a yellowing folder containing John’s army papers discharging him from Third Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment; another envelope holding the location and number of his brother’s crematorium plot. Pritam set these aside.

  Other finds were not personal and less interesting. Tax receipts for repairs, three notepads containing bookings for the church hall, an audit of plants in the church grounds, a receipt for a mimeograph machine.

  Pritam had spent the day trawling through the boxes, occasionally answering a telephoning well-wisher or a knock at the door, confirming in a cracked and tired voice that, indeed, the Reverend John Hird had passed away last night; that, yes, he went peacefully; and agreeing that, indeed, he had been unwell a long while. Pritam did not say that John Hird, a man who had seemingly been afraid of nothing, had glimpsed something in an old photograph that had literally scared him to death.

  And so to the last box.

  If the previous cartons had been pedestrian in content, this was numbingly dull. Old bus timetables. Ticket stubs for bus travel. Suggestion-box notes held together with a rusted bulldog clip. A large envelope marked “Fund-raising.” Within this last were four smaller envelopes labeled by decade, the topmost reading “1970-80.” Pritam opened it.

  Inside were a few copies of a flyer printed in purple ink-he was pleased the mimeograph got used. They advertised a fete: “Fun for the Family!,” “Sack races!” and “Home-baked cakes!” Handwritten lists of helpers and their duties (“R. Burgess, set up trestle tables amp; remove rubbish”). Faded Polaroid photographs of the big day: ladies shyly holding their iced cakes and smiling. Children with long hair and flared pants were lashed together at the ankles, running and laughing. A wide-tied man wagg
ing his finger at the camera while eating a pie. A woman staring, unsmiling, at the camera.

  Pritam’s breath stopped in his throat.

  The woman staring at the camera was Eleanor Bretherton.

  He flipped the photograph. In pencil, written in a fine copperplate hand: “Mrs L. Quill. Contributed $60 to fete fund 17 May

  1975.”

  Pritam sat back.

  He felt small again, a thin-limbed boy in his grandmother’s cottage before his parents took him from India, listening after dinner as Nani told the story of a small village in Uttar Pradesh where every child was cut open, alive and screaming, to save the village from the wrath of Kali. That tale had terrified him as a child; not just his imagining being one of those utterly helpless children not even able to turn to their parents who themselves wielded knives, but imagining how terrible must be the face of Kali to drive loving parents to commit bloody murder.

  Eleanor Bretherton. Mrs. L. Quill.

  Now things go bad, he thought.

  At that moment, someone pounded on the rectory door.

  T he girl sat in one of the old club chairs, staring into space with slack eyes. She blinked occasionally and breathed slow and deep, but hadn’t shifted or spoken a word in the twenty minutes since she’d arrived at the presbytery.

  “ ‘Hannah Gerlic, grade five,’ ” read Pritam. His voice shook. He replaced the exercise book into the girl’s school bag.

  He looked up to the other club chair opposite. In it sat Nicholas Close, who nodded acknowledgment. In the middle of the cleared chessboard lay the dead plover talisman. One of its claw horns had been lost, but even to look at it made Pritam’s skin prickle.

  This is not hypothetical evil, he thought. Not the evil of lust, nor the evil of hate. This is fundamental evil, as old as the world itself. This is the devil’s handiwork.

  The thought was electric and terrifying, as if the veneer covering the world had peeled at one corner, affording a glimpse of dark and yawning depths below.