The Darkening Page 16

  ‘No. What’s a. .’ She hoped she had the pronunciation right. ‘What’s a baobhan sith?’

  Mrs Ferguson’s eyes brightened. ‘Baobhan sith? I haven’t heard that since my nan passed on. Funny old cow. She was sure there was a woman in her street when she was a lass who was one.’ Mrs Ferguson looked at Katharine slyly. ‘The white women of the Highlands. They sometimes appear in a green dress. They prefer the night. They seduce young men, charm them with their dancing. . then drink their blood.’ She chuckled at the foolishness of it.

  Katharine stayed just a little longer, waiting until Mrs Ferguson was again staring out the window before she quietly stood and crept from the room.

  She was glad to get to her car.

  Singing.

  A woman’s voice from across dark air, a siren song; faint, tugged at jealously by the wind.

  Awareness swam up out of nothingness, like a slow bubble rising through the night sea. Nicholas realised he was moving. His feet and hands felt a million miles distant, ice cold and unreachable. He could not command his legs, arms, lips, eyelids. But he could sense the subtle rise and fall of his chest, although there was a heaviness there. He could hear the rustle of leaves, a surf-like whisper. He was supine and yet he was moving. Under his back, his buttocks, the underside of his thighs and calves, under his forearms and head, were thousands of tiny shifting knuckles. He willed himself to breathe deeper, but his lungs kept at their shallow work, tight and pained as if labouring under a weight.

  The singing grew clearer: ‘. . his face so soft and wondrous fair. .’

  The woman’s voice was lovely and high. Where was he?

  Open your eyes.

  He couldn’t. He tried another deep breath, but his lungs ignored him and kept their own shallow rhythm. A memory surfaced: I was poisoned.

  ‘. . the purest eyes and the strongest hands. .’

  He was being carried up a grade. Slowly, recollections of his last few lucid moments came back in pieces: the boat, the sky, the old woman, the wild strawberries, the juice, the bleeding holes in his hand. .

  Open your eyes.

  He tried again. Nothing. He was deep inside himself; only his ears were unfettered, letting in the chittering of tiny legs underfoot and the lilting song.

  ‘. . I love the ground on where he stands. .’

  Open your eyes. You can’t fight what you can’t see.

  But another voice in Nicholas’s head spoke just as loudly: Are you sure you want to see? He remembered the dog’s flesh falling away, and the huge spider crouched there, dull spiny hairs on its long, multi-jointed legs, its black eyes sparkling. Then another flash returned. The name on the boat: Cate’s Surprise.

  Was that a memory? Or a vision infected by. .

  How did you like my strawberries?

  A dark thing bloomed inside him. Anger.

  Whatever, it was mean, he thought.

  He focused on his ire, blowing on its embers, brightening it. How dare she? How dare she use Cate’s name? His heart thudded. He told his lungs to breathe deeper. The air sucked in.

  ‘. . I love the ground on where he stands. .’

  Okay. Open your eyes.

  With a mental fist, Nicholas gripped the bright coal of outrage in his belly, letting it burn and hurt. Good. Now, move it up. He lifted the bright pain to the spot behind his eyes. Forget what you saw before. You don’t know what was real and what was not. What matters is what you see now. He grimly tightened his imagined hand around the coal, letting the pain and the anger grow brighter and sharper, focusing it like the pinpoint of light from a magnifying glass behind his eyes. Ready? Open!

  One eyelid cracked open a sliver.

  In the gloom, he could see the weight on his chest was no poisoned hallucination. Perched there like a spiny, deformed cat was the spider Garnock. All eight orbs of its stygian, unblinking eyes seemed to be trained on Nicholas’s face — and they noted the movement of his eyelid. The spider’s forelegs shifted, readying to pounce.

  Oh, Christ, thought Nicholas. This is going to send me insane.

  The spider’s two curved fangs were as dark as ebony, rooted in hairs in its head and underslung with two swollen, grey-pink sacs. The points of the fangs were wickedly sharp and glistening. They tack-tack-tacked together, a bony clicking like knitting needles that was surprisingly loud.

  ‘Really?’ came the old woman’s voice. ‘Well. We’re here, anyway. Put him down.’

  Nicholas felt the wave beneath retreat as the knuckle lumps supporting him slipped away first from his head — depositing it on moist-smelling earth — then his shoulders, arms, back, buttocks, legs. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed hundreds of spiders, dark grey and hunched and large as sparrows, streaming away. A jolt of new terror went through him like a spasm and his stomach heaved.

  Maybe I’m insane already.

  Above him were small gaps in the dark treetops; smoke-coloured cloud drifted overhead. Then the view was obscured by the old woman’s face.

  She wasn’t that old, Nicholas could see now, maybe in her mid-sixties. Her eyes crinkled as she smiled, but there wasn’t a speck of warmth there.

  ‘Hello, Nicholas.’

  He opened his mouth to speak, but only a shuddering breath escaped his throat.

  She took her eyes off his and ran her gaze over his forehead, his hair, his cheeks, his neck. She clucked to herself, then resumed singing in the softest voice: ‘. . and where he goes, yes. .’

  Nicholas closed his eyes and concentrated. His limbs felt carved from frozen meat. But he willed his head to turn. It did, just a few degrees. The new angle afforded him a little more view of his surrounds. He could just glimpse the tip of a stone chimney, topped with rusty iron baffles to dissipate the smoke and send it out widely. The top of a wooden trellis, lush with leaves — maybe beans or pea stalks. And the tops of a circular grove of trees.

  ‘. . I love the ground on where he goes, and still I hope. .’

  He flicked his eyes down. The old woman knelt over him, her eyes taking in his arms, his chest. He was wrong: her hair wasn’t white, it was grey, and she would have been sixty at the most, closer to fifty. A smile teased her lips. ‘. . that the time will come. .’ The tip of her tongue darted out, slick with saliva. Her hands were trembling.

  ‘Who. .?’ whispered Nicholas.

  Her eyes rolled back to his and her smile broadened.

  ‘Who, indeed. Who, indeed. .’

  She stroked his face, and her eyes returned to his belly. But her hands stayed on him, drifting down his cheeks to his neck, across his chest.

  ‘And how is your little toe? Still there, eleven of ten? Or have you tried to hide your little deformity?’

  Nicholas felt his blood thud in his ears. How did she know?

  ‘Garnock,’ she whispered.

  Nicholas’s heart tripped as the huge spider appeared in his periphery, then stepped, one delicate leg at a time, onto his chest to stare down at his face. He groaned and shut his eyes. Her hands were down at his groin. He felt her unzip his fly. Oh, God, no.

  ‘. . When he and I will be as one. .’ sang the old woman. Her hand slipped inside and softly curled around and cupped his penis. No, no, no, no. . He screwed his eyes shut. ‘. . when he and I will be as one. .’

  As she stroked him, he grew harder. No! he screamed, but again only a whisper came out, and his body — untouched since Cate died — didn’t listen and stiffened more. Her stroking grew faster.

  ‘. . When he and I will be as one. .’

  The weight of the spider on his chest was horrible, stifling. He couldn’t move. The old woman’s hand was eating him as hungrily as her eyes had.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she whispered.

  Nicholas wanted to leap out of his skin and run. His brain screamed. This, said the cheerful voice in his head, is what it’s like to lose your mind.

  ‘Yes!’ said the old woman, and he came. The warm spasms rolled up through his guts and his body jerked involuntar
ily.

  ‘Yessss,’ she whispered. Nicholas heard the scraping sound of tin on glass — a lid going on a jar. ‘Garnock. Off.’

  The weight stepped from Nicholas’s chest. Then he felt a damp, cold hand pat his cheek. He opened his eyes. The old woman was regarding him. She would have been ninety or more; her face was grey and wrinkled as a kicked blanket. Yet her dark eyes shone with the same delight.

  ‘We’ll see you again soon, pretty man.’ Her ancient voice was now as dry as ash. ‘Garnock-lob?’

  Two hot skewers drove into the flesh of Nicholas’s exposed thigh, and fire swept up to his skull. The world shrank and fell away into oblivion.

  He dreamed he was a bird.

  His legs were numb, because they were gone. His head was gone, too, painless and vanished. But his body — dead though it was and swelling with rot — still had feeling. It was sodden wet and cold. Ants were crawling over it, exploring for places to nest and feed. He was quite content to lie there and decay, until his body felt something poking into its side. Without eyes, he couldn’t see, but he knew it was a boy holding a stick, poking him, disturbing his death, seeking to drag him out onto a path. He was the bird, but he was also the boy. All was well, though.

  Because this is the plan. This is what we need to bring him. It is the cycle.

  But the prodding stick?

  Flesh, not stick! Flesh and blood! Because blood is the only sacrifice that pleases the Lord. .

  Nicholas’s eyes blearily opened.

  A large woman stood above him, poking him with the tip of a brightly coloured umbrella. Nicholas screamed. The woman screamed, too, and skittered backwards. Despite her size, she moved surprisingly fast.

  ‘He’s alive!’ she called to her husband in the car on the road. She hurried into the passenger seat and the car roared past.

  ‘Dirty druggie! Disgrace!’ shouted the man before he swiftly wound up his window and sped away.

  Nicholas was lying in the dry sword grass outside the woods. Everything hurt. His hands and feet felt like they weren’t flesh but wet dust, heavy and lifeless. His clothes were damp. His heart thudded dully, and his head felt full of acid sand. But he could move. He rolled onto his side, dragged his knees to his chest and slowly pushed himself up onto all fours. Ropy spittle fell from his slack lips. The minute it took him to sit on his haunches seemed an eternity.

  He sat on the path, breathing heavily from the effort, and squinted at his watch. It was four thirty; the sun was kissing the rooftops in the west. An arm’s length away on the path lay the body of the butcher bird, its woven head re-attached to its perishing, lifeless body, its pathetic severed legs again poking out like antlers. Beside him was a clean plastic 7-Eleven bag. He reached painfully and picked it up. Within were a new torch and a bug bomb can, the latter also unused, its lid still attached.

  Nicholas looked at his knees. No sign of the virulent sludge of squashed spiders — but his clothes were all wet; soaked through.

  Was it all a dream?

  He looked at his hand. In the flesh between his forefinger and thumb were two red-rimmed and throbbing punctures. The pain in his upper thigh told him he would find two more wounds there.

  She did this, he thought. She washed my clothes. Bought new goods. She did it so no one would believe me if I blabbed. She did it so I wouldn’t believe myself.

  But he could prove it! He could run now, into the woods, to the tunnels under the pipe, and the left one would be full of torn cobwebs and squashed, dead spiders. But he knew, with cold clarity, that the pipe would have been emptied of dead spiders and filled with live ones busily spinning fresh webs. The empty bug bomb container would have been spirited away.

  He looked around at the woods. In the late afternoon light, they brooded, patient and dark. There was no way he wanted to go back in there, not today.

  She got what she wanted.

  He remembered, then, the wrinkled hand stroking him, his jerked expulsions, the horror of the catlike weight on his chest as he heaved in orgasm. He felt utterly exhausted. Raped. Emptied.

  He climbed to his feet and began a slow stagger towards Bymar Street.

  12

  Nicholas 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 centre. 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. Excuse me just a moment while I phone security. Suggesting the wounds were a snake bite 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 towards 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 tyre 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 re-open 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. Relating what happened would be the babblings of a madman. No, she knew there would be no police.

  Go away. Move to Melbourne.

  And when you read of another Tallong child going missing? How will you feel then?

  Fuck off. I’m not the murderer.

  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 face down 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 labelled ‘Evidence’.

  Oh, Jesus. He definitely had to move! Create an alibi! Live a visible life and surround himself with people who could testify that he never came to this city again!

  But Mum lives here.

  Katharine was just a chasse away from thinking her son a killer already. Wipe her!

  He paced.

  No. He and his mother might not get along, but leaving her in this suburb — this haunted, killing place — would be wrong.

  Move her down south, too!

  You know she wouldn’t go.

  He was running out of options.

  You could kill yourself.

  Suicide. He rolled the thought in his mind like an ice-cube on his tongue, tasting it, feeling its smooth chill. Death. He’d thought about it a lot immediately after Cate died. He’d been thinking about how he might do it (Pills? Stanley knife to the carotid artery? Sneaking up to the roof of the Leadenhall Building and taking a dive?) as he moved the last of his and Cate’s belongings the afternoon that he slipped on the front steps of their Ealing flat and rose to be stabbed by the ghost of wild-eyed Keith Yerwood. After that, his visions of the dead — in particular, his vision of Cate’s last few moments, slipping, falling, breaking, over and over — convinced him that nothing good waited after his own heart stopped. Certainly, suicide would bring a blissful end to the sightings of dead children, but would it stop live ones dying? No.

  So, what then?

  Kill the old lady. Kill the witch.

  Ni
cholas stopped, stock-still.

  Witch.

  Suzette’s words came back to him: If I knew then what I know now, I’d say she was a witch.

  Very good. He had something to label the old woman now. The witch.

  The witch killed Tristram. But she wanted you. She found out you were back, and she taunted you with Gavin and drew you down there like the idiot you are.

  But then the realisation clarified slowly, like steadily clearing liquids of a science experiment.

  She can’t know I see the ghosts.

  Nicholas set his jaw.

  What does that mean? How does that help?

  ‘Why me?’ he asked aloud.

  The room was silent.

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

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

  Pritam reached with one shoe and switched off the vacuum cleaner. For a long moment, the baby-cry whine of the electric motor echoed down the nave and in the transepts, and seemed to keep the tall brass pipes of the organ humming disconsolately. The stained-glass windows were dark; it was night outside, and the occasional car headlights set the tiny panes sparkling like a handful of scattered diamonds. The candelabra overhead held electric bulbs, but their light wasn’t strong and the church seemed to Pritam yawningly huge, more dark than light. He would talk with John Hird about gradually increasing the wattage of the bulbs.

  As he followed the electric lead to the wall socket, he stepped off the burgundy carpet onto marble and his footfalls rang emptily in the choir stalls and up to the high, dark rafters. He preferred to dress well when he was working in the church, even when doing everyday chores. He regarded dressing well as a sign of respect, for the institution and the office, and he wore his leather dress shoes and ironed trousers despite the countless occasions when Hird, sidling past in thongs and shorts, snorted amusement at his understudy’s formality. But now, alone in the church at night, the clack-clack of his heels on the cool stone floor sounded stiff and distant even to Pritam. He unplugged the cord, walked back to the vacuum and pressed the retractor — the cord reeled in so fast that the plug overshot the machine and whipped past, the tiny fist of a thing striking Pritam sharply on the shin and sending a flurry of pain scampering up his leg.