The Dead Path

by Stephen M Irwin

  “Not for long, my pretty man.”

  She let a string of spittle fall from her mouth into his and giggled.

  “Stand.”

  His legs swept under him and his arms gracefully pushed. He was on his feet. She watched him for a moment. Her eyes slid down his chest to his groin, and he could see the corner of her mouth grin upward as she debated if she had time to play. Instead, she put the little knife in his fingers.

  “Take it,” she said.

  As his fingers closed around the bone handle, Nicholas suddenly understood what he would be forced to do. No! he yelled, but his mouth would not work a word of protest.

  “Follow me,” said Quill. She pulled a scarf from a peg beside the window and tied it over her white hair, then opened the gray wood door and stepped into the rain.

  Nicholas found himself following her, fluid as smoke.

  H e glided after her on legs that moved of another’s accord, as if transported in a borrowed body.

  He followed as she hobbled along the neat, rain-soaked flagstones beside the cottage. He could feel his feet step carefully on the wet path, his breaths ease wet air in and out, his fingers on the cool bone of the knife, but he had no control of any of them. He ordered his feet to stop, but they kept walking; he tried to scream, but his breath continued in and out in a steady rhythm; he tried to throw the knife, but his fingers held it fast. He was going to cut Hannah Gerlic’s throat.

  As if hearing the thought, Quill turned to him and stopped. The rain pulled her ashen hair down over her limp skin and her clothes lumped with sodden heaviness. She lifted her chin. For the first time, he could see, without her sorcery, past the old flesh and shrinking bone to the woman she had been. She nodded around at the tall, ancient trees.

  “It’s easy. You’ll see.”

  A flash of white and pink flickered at the edge of the clearing and streaked toward them. When it grew closer, Nicholas felt the regular rhythm of his breaths catch. The figure was a child, arm outstretched, heels bouncing on the ground as she was hauled by invisible hands. The girl in the forties’ sundress. As she passed, her wide eyes swung to Nicholas, pleading and resigned. He felt his stomach lurch. The girl screamed silently and flew backward into the circular grove of trees behind them.

  Quill continued her rocking hobble toward the rear of the cottage. She hadn’t seen the ghost.

  How does that help me? wondered Nicholas.

  She rounded the corner, and he followed close behind.

  The flat cellar door lay open on the sodden ground, rain spattering the descending steps.

  Quill stared for a long moment, her eyes wide and her jaw tight-then whipped her eyes around to Nicholas. She trembled from head to foot. Anger poured off her in waves. Nicholas felt a thrill of excitement rise through him. Hannah must have escaped! As Quill glared, her mouth opened wide and she let out a screech that was alien and shrill, neither animal nor birdlike, but a sound much older and deeply unsettling.

  The ground itself seemed to shimmer darkly. It rippled like the surface of a dark pond disturbed by something great and unseen below. And an insectlike ticking crisped the air under the rain. Nicholas strained, and rolled his eyes to the surrounding forest. The dark wave grew closer and closer until he could see what it was: the ground was alive with spiders. Thousands and thousands of spiders. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Some were as small as rice grains, some as large as plates, smooth and hard, bristled and gray. A million round, black eyes collected around the old woman on a sea of shifting, spiny legs and round, swollen abdomens.

  Nicholas felt a cold wave of primal terror swirl through his gut and fountain up his back.

  The spiders watched Quill, waiting.

  She was shaking. Angry. Pale.

  And scared, he realized.

  Quill looked over the mass of spiders. They coated bushes and her neat hedges. They piled on one another. Poised and listening. Her mouth worked. She glanced at Nicholas, unsure. Her fingers vibrated. Her jowls trembled. Then she whispered in a voice that sounded more suited to a beak than to human lips.

  “Bring her back.”

  Chapter 40

  B ranches tore at Hannah’s face, and the sharp hooks of thick vines raked her wrists and tangled her feet. She was exhausted. Her frantic scramble slowed from a run to a walk. Her leg throbbed where the shotgun pellet had lodged in her calf, and the limb felt like a load she had to carry. The rain had eased, but heavy drops fell like cold pebbles from high, hidden leaves onto her neck and scalp. The paring knife was wet and threatened to slip from her grasp. Her breaths came in hurting, inadequate blasts-deep, greedy sucks of air. But she had no idea which direction she was running-to the pipe, to the river, in circles. She let out a sob. She knew she had to stop before she stumbled and hurt herself even worse, but the memory of the dead child in his ancient gray cocoon spurred her on. Her leg felt like it was on fire, and tears poured from her eyes.

  Then, a thought bloomed in her head like a black flower: What about Mr. Close?

  The dark was thick, but her hours of peering in the cellar had allowed her pupils to widen to their fullest and she could make out the barest outlines of trunks and logs. She saw a fallen tree a few steps ahead, and sank, gasping, onto it, unmindful of the cold that clenched her buttocks as the wet soaked instantly through.

  It felt both long hours and mere minutes since she had threaded the leather thong up the gap between the doors, watching it fold and flop over the barrel bolt. The moments she’d spent carefully pulling down on both ends of the thong-slightly more tension on one end than the other-had been the most stressful of her life. Each time the bolt slipped too far under the wet leather and clacked, her heart had hammered as she waited for the door to fling wide and something petrifying to grab her. But, finally, she’d found the balance and turned the bolt upright, then carefully pulled to the side, and the bolt arm had cleared its stay.

  Nicholas would have saved her if he could have. She knew that. Which meant he was dead already. The thought made her throat tighten and her lips shake.

  Run home! She yelled in her mind. You’ll be dead, too, if you don’t run home!

  She got to her feet, but her wounded leg, now numb, slipped out from under her. She fell onto hands and knees, and rocks hidden under spongy rot tore at her palms.

  She cried out in frustration and pulled herself to her feet. She wasn’t going to die. Not after getting out of the cellar. She wasn’t going to-

  The noise froze her still. Every hair on her neck turned to a tiny icicle.

  It was a sound like distant surf, only close by; a rain hiss where rain had stopped. A whisper of eight thousand thousand inhuman limbs slowing, ticking, poising…

  Hannah turned.

  The woods behind her were black. But not entirely black. The weak, almost-nothing light falling between the dark leaves glistened of eight thousand thousand round, unblinking eyes.

  And everything fell silent. Until they leapt.

  She screamed.

  Chapter 41

  T he walk from the open cellar door, back past Quill’s cottage, and into the circular grove was as slow and silent as a dream.

  Nicholas lifted his eyes to look at the sky. The rain had all but finished, and clouds were easing apart like rotten lace in a stiff wind; behind them, stars blinked cold, faint light. Ahead, a round wall of trees glistened and their wet leaves whispered to one another with sly drip-drips. There were two dozen or so trees in a circle sixty feet wide.

  As Quill walked between two trees, she fondly touched the trunk nearest. She didn’t look back at him.

  A figure slid through him, and his eyes widened with surprise, but his body allowed no other shock. Miriam Gerlic screamed without sound, wrists bound together behind her, legs kicking at air as she was carried by unseen hands between the trees. As she slipped out of sight, her ghost eyes fell on Nicholas, then were obscured by sable branches.

  Nicholas felt a scream pound inside him, desperate t
o shriek out like a whistle from an overpressured boiler, but no sound escaped his lips except low breaths passing in, out, in, out, with easy monotony. His body- Quill’s body-carried him into the circle.

  The ground underfoot was wet, sandy dirt, raked clean. In the center of the unnatural grove was a pedestal of stilted legs a meter high holding aloft a spherical cage made of woven branches and bone.

  Quill hobbled to stand beside the cage. Within it Nicholas saw a shifting cloud of moving shadows. As he grew closer, he understood: inside the cage, six children half-knelt, half-hung, their ghostly skins melding with one another’s. Each was suspended by the wrists, which were lashed to the curved branch bars above them. A half-dozen children. A half-dozen ghosts. Their faces were an overlapping blur. But as each bobbed or struggled, he or she would drift apart from the others and Nicholas could see their singular, awful terror. Little Owen Liddy in his long shorts, his freckled face pale with disbelieving fright. Esther Garvie, the girl in the forties’ sundress, her bare feet torn and bleeding. Another boy, younger than the others and with red hair, had his eyes screwed tight above wet cheeks. Miriam Gerlic’s eyes were impossibly wide and without hope. Dylan Thomas, head bowed and bawling. And Tristram Boye.

  Nicholas felt the rhythm of his breathing break, just a little, as a small gasp sucked in cool air.

  He knew that Tristram had died here in the woods, but to see him, his friend, his hero, in the moments before his pitiful murder filled Nicholas with such a pressing sadness that he wanted simply to fall to the ground. Tristram’s jaw was tight, one wrist crooked at a strange angle. Broken. Nicholas’s willed his tongue to flick the roof of his mouth, to try to form his name- Tris! -but no name came. Only breaths. In, out…

  The dead children struggled: Miriam screamed; Dylan sobbed; Owen Liddy nodded like a savant. Suddenly, Nicholas saw the boy’s hair gathered by an invisible hand, wrenched up, exposing his white throat. The dead boy’s wet eyes widened and a ghost name formed on his horrified lips- Mummy! -then his throat eased apart like a hidden mouth opening. He jolted a few moments, then sagged low, spasmed once, and winked out. Out, Nicholas knew, to appear again on the dead path outside the woods, and repeat the terror.

  Nicholas felt sick. His heart felt torn to shreds.

  Quill, though, could not see the ghost children. Her eyes were on the night sky. The clouds, once thick as mountains, were breaking apart, roiling to wisps as high winds began their tearing work. She nodded to herself, pleased, and cocked an ear, hearing something Nicholas could not.

  “Ah,” she whispered. She smiled at Nicholas. “Ah.”

  Then, out among the dark, wet trees, a girl screamed.

  H annah Gerlic was wrapped in smoke. No, not wrapped, but bound, and not smoke, but fine pewter thread. Her arms were held tight to her body, one awkwardly down her side, one across her midriff. Her legs were trussed. A translucent cocoon shrouded her, leaving only her head free of sticky silk. Wispy ends blew in the light breeze, light as fluffs of snow puffed off distant mountaintops. She was carried into the circle on a spindle-legged shadow, a black magic carpet. She struggled, but it did no good; if her kicking feet crushed a hundred spiders, a hundred more poured under her from the shadows to take the ruined ones’ places. The shimmering, chittering mass deposited Hannah beside the sphere of bone and branch.

  Then, she saw Nicholas-and bright hope flashed in her eyes and her yells caught in her throat, until her eyes slid down to his hand.

  The hand holding Quill’s wicked little knife.

  Then her eyes took in the killing cage, taking a moment to register what it was. Understanding slipped over Hannah’s pale face, an icy wave over milky sand.

  Then, she shrieked. Huge tears rolled down her face.

  No, Nicholas wanted to yell. I won’t, Hannah, I can’t! But his mouth said nothing, and the knife sat easy in his grip.

  “Mr. Close… Not you…”

  Oh, Hannah, thought Nicholas. Oh, little girl.

  “Mr. Close, Mr. Close,” parroted Quill, hobbling from the shadows. “Aren’t you the little brasser?”

  Hannah saw the old woman, and opened her mouth to scream again. But before the sound could come, Quill’s hand swept down fast as a crow’s beak and slapped Hannah hard across the mouth. Hannah was stunned into silence.

  “Enough noise, now,” crooned Quill.

  Nicholas’s heart tore inside his chest-he wanted to fight, to rage, to kill the witch. Instead, his breaths idled in, out… and he stood, waiting.

  A scuttling puddle of hairy gray and black dropped something shining and silver at Quill’s feet. Quill bent and picked it up. Hannah’s paring knife.

  “Well.”

  She tucked the knife into her belt. Humming to herself, she approached the short stick ladder that rose to the sphere behind the ghostly children. Within, Nicholas saw Esther Garvie’s neck jerk long and her hair stand up on end, lifted by an invisible, clenching fist. He knew that fist had been Quill’s. The ghost girl tried to twist her head from side to side, desperate to avoid the killing blade. Suddenly, Esther’s skin grew silvery and pale, as if a spectral spotlight were turned on it, and the skin of her neck opened up, revealing darker, wet flesh in the deep cut. Her small body arched, then slowly slackened. She jerked once, twice… and she vanished. Quill climbed onto the highest rung and unlatched a hatch made of the same grisly bone and twisted wood, and swung it wide before scuttling down to the ground.

  Nicholas saw her now for what she was. A spider. A spider herself: bloated and old and thirsty, weaving dark deadly work in her ancient web of dark trees.

  “Mr. Close,” whispered Hannah.

  Nicholas forced himself to look at her.

  Her eyes were wet and desperate, and her lips trembled. “Please, Mr. Close. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but please help me?”

  “Help me, help me,” mocked Quill, brightly.

  Nicholas felt a flare of hatred rise in his throat, and rolled his eyes-the only part of him he could command-to glare at the evil old woman.

  Quill’s eyes were on the sky, on the shifting clouds. Satisfied, she looked down at Nicholas. “You heard her, pretty man. Help her.” A worm rotten grin split her wrinkled face. “ Put her in. ”

  No! thought Nicholas. No! he yelled at his arms, his hands, his legs. No!

  But his body obeyed her. One hand lifted the knife to his mouth, his teeth clenched around the cold blade, and he strode, easily and without hurry, to Hannah.

  Hannah shook her head. And new, huge tears rolled down her face. She began to sob. “Mr. Close, please… d-don’t do this…”

  And as he lifted her, he felt warm tears roll down his own face.

  He carried her easily up the creaking ladder. So light, he thought. So small.

  “Please, Nicholas, d-don’t listen to her!” sobbed Hannah. “You don’t have to l-listen to her!” She wriggled and kicked, but it was futile. His grip was strong. She began bawling.

  Strung dead children squirmed in desperate terror beneath him. God, no, he thought. Don’t make me put her in there… but he slid her easily into the hatch, in among the ghosts of the stunned, wailing, weeping, lost children. As he dropped her in the bottom of the dry killing cage, his dumb arms tingled.

  Cold. This is how cold death feels.

  Hannah curled into a ball at the bottom of the cage, trying to shrink away from him.

  “No, no. Don’t drop her,” commanded Quill. “Lift her.”

  His hands rearched down willingly and lifted Hannah into a slump against the side of the cage-she sobbed, trembling with terror, trying to pull away. His dispassionate fingers twined her dark hair.

  “N-Nicholas…” she stammered. Despair filled him like cold lake water.

  As Hannah’s tiny shoulders shook, the faces of the ghost children interwove and became as hard to discern as ripples in a stream’s crosscurrent. As Nicholas straightened Hannah, a slightly older version of Hannah glowed among the fog of ghost children. It was
Miriam’s face that was yanked, unwilling and blind with horror, up to face the night sky. Miriam’s spectral skin glistered bright pearl and her dark hair was streaked with mercury as invisible fingers hauled it up.

  And Nicholas realized what this ghostly light was: the echo of moonlight from several nights ago.

  Suddenly, Miriam’s eyes threw wide and Nicholas saw the edge of her throat split open in a new, deep wound, severed by a keen, invisible blade. Her tiny body strained in a last animal panic; her muscles wrenched tight, then she swooned. The hair fell down like a final curtain. Her body sagged, then winked out, leaving the ghosts of two boys struggling in front of him-Dylan Thomas, Tristram Boye.

  Oh, God! thought Nicholas. Let me die. Let me die now rather than do this to Hannah.

  “Nearly,” said Quill, her voice tight with excitement. She stood just in sight, a poisonous presence in the corner of his eye. She was watching the sky, rocking from foot to foot beside him. “Wait.”

  For the moon, realized Nicholas. The moon comes out just before she cuts their throats.

  He needed to do something. He needed to break the spell before the moon winked out from behind the clouds, because the moment its chromium light fell on Hannah… he would cut her narrow throat.

  He rolled his eyes upward, but could not see the moon. Move! he commanded his head. Back!

  But his muscles refused him.

  “Up,” whispered Quill, crag face tilted up to the clearing sky. “Up and ready.”

  “Nicholas, n-no!” sobbed Hannah. “Please d-don’t h-hurt me…”

  His left hand gently tightened on the soft rope of Hannah’s hair. He pulled her up, up into the twin swirls of the two ghost boys.

  The hair of one of the boys grew bright. Dylan Thomas’s. His scalp and skin glowed silver as the forgotten light of a ghost moon fell on him. A moment later, his short hair twisted cruelly upward, yanking his head high and his neck straight. Then the skin of his neck slid apart in a neat cut, deep, exposing arteries and tendons.