The Darkening Page 21

  As he walked home from the Boyes’ house, the sight of the plastic bag from Rowena’s health food store kept popping into his mind. Gavin took a liking to pumpkin seeds; for the zinc, Laine had said.

  He’d shopped in Quill’s old store. The mark on her door, on the rifle, on the bird. He touched the bird. It should have been you.

  It wasn’t coincidence. He knew it wasn’t. The links were growing too strong.

  He flicked quickly through the directory’s residential listings for ‘G’. He had an inkling.

  I’m right, he thought. I know I’m right.

  His finger ran down the surnames. Gull. Gunston. Gurber. Guyatt. There were a dozen Guyatts.

  Guyatt, A., Guyatt, A. amp; F., Guyatt, C., Guyatt, E., Linning St, Toorbul. Guyatt E., Paschendale Ct, Mt Pleasant.

  Then he found it, just as he knew he would. Guyatt, E., 93 Myrtle St, Tallong.

  Nicholas sat back.

  Elliot Guyatt, the unprepossessing cleaner who had confessed to the murder of Dylan Thomas and died of a stroke just days later, had lived on the same street as Plough amp; Vine Health Foods.

  Rowena’s shop. Sedgely’s shop. Quill’s shop.

  Gavin Boye — deliverer of a cryptic message with a self-destruct ending — had shopped at Plough amp; Vine Health Foods. Nicholas was certain that Winston Teale, the huge man with the small voice who had chased Tristram and him into the woods, would have had the frayed linings of his work suits repaired at Jay Jay’s haberdashery.

  He reached into his satchel and pulled out Gavin’s rapidly emptying packet of John Player Specials, and realised he no longer had a lighter. He turned on the coil of the electric stove and waited for it to glow. Ridiculous. Rowena was young; Quill and Bretherton were old. Rowena was unthreatening and guileless; Quill had stared from her shop and Bretherton from her photograph through the same cunning eyes. Rowena was pretty and without any air of perfidiousness; Quill/Bretherton/Sedgely was malevolent.

  And yet. And yet. .

  Someone lumbered into the front door with a crash and Nicholas jumped.

  ‘Nicholas!!’ came the voice on the other side.

  ‘Suzette?’

  ‘Open it!’ she yelled.

  Nicholas felt his stomach swirl — something bad had happened. He ran for the door, undid the latch and threw the door open. Suzette sagged inside. Her face was pale and her eyes were wet. She was on the edge of hysteria.

  ‘Jesus, Suze. .?’

  ‘I finished dinner with Mum and heard something scratching at the front door,’ she whispered. ‘I opened it. . idiot. . and a white dog bit me.’

  Suzette staggered to the toilet, smacked up the lid and vomited. The air thickened with tangy brine.

  Nicholas felt the world suddenly grind into slow motion. ‘We have to take you to a doctor,’ he said quietly.

  She held on to the porcelain pedestal with both hands. Her right had twin puncture marks just above her thumb, as if two sharp pencils had been driven into the flesh.

  Oh, God, he thought. My fault. My fault. .

  ‘I didn’t even think,’ Suzette mumbled, wiping her mouth. ‘I opened the door and didn’t even think about insect spray.’ She rolled onto the floor, ripped off toilet paper and blew her nose. ‘Jumped out of nowhere. .’ Her hand slipped out from under her and she slid to the tiles. Her eyes struggled to focus.

  ‘Jesus, Suze! I’m taking you.’

  She shook her head. ‘Bed.’

  He lifted her and carried her to the spare room.

  ‘I don’ thing I really believe joo. .’ Her words were slurred.

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘Do now. ’S not a dog. .’

  ‘It’s okay.’ He placed her down.

  She nodded at the bite marks on her hand. ‘Necklace,’ she whispered.

  Nicholas shook his head — I don’t understand.

  ‘Necklace. I gave you. .’

  She was sliding from consciousness.

  Nicholas ran to his room and pulled the elder-wood necklace from his bedside table. The beads felt good in his hands, the polished stone warm and substantial. He returned and put it around Suzette’s neck.

  ‘You should ha’ be wear. . this. .’ she said.

  As Nicholas rested her head on the pillow, he saw a spot of blood appear on the white pillowslip.

  ‘Suze?’

  No answer. She had passed out. Her breaths came slow and deep. He gently parted the hair of her scalp and found a patch of blood. A clump of her hair had been torn out by the roots.

  He sat back, jaw tight. Suzette was breathing evenly. He fetched antiseptic and cotton balls, cleaned her scalp and then the punctures in her hand. He’d been bitten twice by Garnock, so wasn’t worried that the bites were fatal. But why Suzette?

  She has kids, came the voice in his head. You knew that, fool. And you let her stay.

  He felt anger heating inside him: anger at Suzette for not being careful; anger at himself for letting her come up here; angriest of all with the little white shitlicker that had bitten them both.

  And Quill?

  The thought of her didn’t make him angry. He ran his mind over the feeling like hands over a hidden gift. This was something colder and more solid; a heavy stone to bind with rope and drop into the water, to drag her down and down into the still, brown deeps.

  He would make a plan to kill her.

  17

  Pritam moved his knight to threaten the Right Reverend’s bishop. ‘You dirty black bastard,’ muttered Reverend Hird, wiping his spectacles on a handkerchief. The old man was swaddled in a padded robe, his striped pyjama pants just poking from beneath it. Pritam could see that his flesh between the pant cuffs and brown slippers was swollen as tight as a sausage and marbled with veins. Hird moved his bishop.

  ‘Is that why you never let me play white?’ asked Pritam. ‘So you can slag off at me?’ He saw that the white bishop was now stalking his one rook; Hird was the superior player. ‘You degenerate old chiseller.’

  Hird shrugged. ‘Now you’re blackening my good name.’

  Pritam advanced a pawn. He looked at the mantel clock; it was nearly midnight. They often played till one or later, discussing the foibles of the congregation, the vagaries of the synod: serious matters couched in trivialities as the old man groomed the younger to take his job.

  ‘And I feel compelled to point out, yet again, that I’m not black. Of course, if I were black, I’d be proudly black. But I’m Indian. Sub-continental. Hindustani. Whereas you are the ill-favoured offspring of deported criminals.’

  ‘Touche,’ replied Hird. ‘And, in response to your brassy defence of your low-slung heritage, let me just say this: check.’

  Pritam sighed and took a sip of sherry. He could now save his king and lose his bishop, or resign. Just once he would love to see the old man’s face in defeat. He scoured the board for alternatives that he knew would not be there.

  ‘Who were your visitors earlier?’ asked Hird.

  After Nicholas Close and his sister left, Pritam had made himself some green tea, taken another two codeine tablets, and within a half-hour his headache was gone. Which was responsible for the respite? The pills, or the departure of Close and his ridiculous questions?

  ‘Never mind,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I do mind. What if they were more Hindustanis? Unwashed half-breed cousins you’re trying to slip in under the radar? You breed like frogs. Or worse: what if they were Liberal voters? Soliciting your venal, oily hide for your curry-fingered vote?’

  Pritam looked up at the old man. His eyes were sparkling with delight.

  ‘You met one of them at Gavin Boye’s funeral,’ he said.

  Hird’s white eyebrows knitted together. ‘In the church?’

  Pritam nodded. ‘And his sister.’

  Hird thought for a moment. ‘Here to discuss the suicide?’

  ‘I resign,’ said Pritam.

  ‘At last!’ crowed Hird, then sobered slyly. ‘Oh, you mean the chess
game. No, I won’t let you. Always to the death.’ He looked at the younger man. ‘Well?’

  ‘They were talking about the murder of the young Thomas boy.’

  The older reverend nodded. ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing.’

  ‘My friend Bill Chalmers baptised Nicholas Close. The boy’s agnostic, like his mother and, I presume, his sister. Their father was a dodgy bastard: turned to drink, left his wife in the lurch with the kids, wrapped himself round a power pole.’ Hird carefully cleared one nostril with a thumbnail. ‘I might be old and foolish in my choice of housemates, but I still have capacity to wonder why two agnostics would come to see an Anglican reverend on a rainy winter’s night. Unless Nicholas wanted to show his sister how ridiculous you Indians look in a white man’s clothes.’

  Pritam waited. There was no getting around this. Hird would harass and hassle him into answering as inevitably as he would extract a victory on the chessboard. He sighed.

  ‘They mentioned a Mrs Quill. A dressmaker, I think.’

  The older reverend nodded, very slightly. ‘And?’

  ‘And, nothing. I didn’t want to worry you with this sort of nonsense, John.’

  Pritam fell silent, and Hird watched him over his spectacles.

  ‘I know English isn’t your first language, so take your time.’

  Pritam threw up his hands. ‘Fine! He wanted you to look at the photograph of Eleanor Bretherton and then for me to ask you about this Quill woman.’

  Hird looked over his shoulder at the old photograph of the church’s construction, and wearily got to his feet.

  ‘And now you’re going to do it?’ asked Pritam, incredulous. ‘Is this your way to draw out my misery?’

  Hird waved cheerily and hobbled over to the picture. He adjusted his glasses.

  ‘I remember Mrs Quill,’ he mumbled.

  Pritam returned to the board. If he couldn’t find a graceful way out of this game, he could at least backtrack and see the mistakes that had led him to lose.

  ‘Did you learn to play in Korea? John?’

  Pritam looked up at the old man. Hird was staring at the photograph. His face was white and his hand shook with a palsy.

  ‘John?’

  Hird looked at Pritam and shook his head slowly.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ he said quietly.

  Then he dropped to one knee, and slumped onto the floor like a shot beast.

  ‘John!’

  Pritam ran to the old man. His breaths were shallow and fast, and his mouth formed silent, unknowable words. Pritam scrambled for the telephone.

  The rain had finished, and the clouds were leaving like concertgoers after the final curtain. A beautiful night: chill and clear, moonless; the sky was a dark glass scrubbed clean and waiting.

  The suburb of Tallong eased itself to sleep. House lights switched off one by one, two by two, by the dozen, until it seemed only the bright pearls of streetlamps strung their beads around the dark folds of the slumbering suburb. The narrow roads were glossed with the rain, and tiny streams chuckled in the gutters and fell with dark gurgles into storm-water drains to rush underground towards the nearby river. No cars disturbed the stillness. Only the trees sang softly their night-breeze song, whispering.

  The woods were all shadow and moist as private flesh.

  At their heart, a fire flickered. In a cottage that had been long built even before the suburb’s old Anglican church had been started, flames licked fallen twigs in a stone-lined fire pit. The fire cast tall, thin shadows that jerked and clawed up the timber walls as if desperate for escape.

  Over the flames hunched an old woman. Her withered lips moved, but her words were soft; intended, perhaps, for the flames, or for something unseen already listening for her offer. Her hands, more like bone than flesh, moved quickly. In the uncomforting flicker of the hungry flames: a flash of silver, a splash of dark liquid, the ash of something crumbled through deft fingers. Then a final item, and the old woman’s hands slowed and moved with care. Tweezered in her skeletal fingers, a few long hairs joined by a small patch of blood-crusted skin. In went the hair and skin.

  Her lips moved again.

  The fire rose.

  Outside, a chill wind grew, as if to carry across the dark, sighing treetops, along the empty streets and into the slumbering suburb something urgent and baleful.

  18

  Instead of being welcomingly warm, the sunlight felt harsh and brittle. Nicholas squinted against it as he watched Suzette speak on her telephone. He was exhausted. Even thinking about the simple choice — whether to stand and close the greasy curtains, or sit here squinting — was debilitating; the distance across the room could have been a thousand kilometres. Just too far.

  Suzette finished her call and looked at her brother. There were bags the colour of soot under her eyes. She’d aged ten years in a night.

  ‘Nelson has a fever,’ she said.

  They had talked about this possibility for a half-hour over tea this morning. She’d risen from her deep, unnatural sleep and her hand went to her raw patch of scalp. Nicholas had argued that she must have lost the clump of hair scrambling away from Garnock. She disagreed, and stated plainly that the dog — and she said the word ‘dog’ the way most people said ‘cancer’ — had wrenched it out right after it surprised her with the bite.

  ‘It wasn’t sent to hurt me,’ she explained with a smile. ‘It was sent for my hair. She’s going to hex me.’

  And not a minute after she’d said those words, her mobile phone rang. Bryan was calling with news that their son was suddenly ill.

  Nicholas and Suzette sat silent for a while.

  ‘Bryan’s taking him to the twenty-four-hour clinic in Glebe,’ said Suzette, finally. She licked her lips. There was more she wanted to say, but wouldn’t.

  ‘You have to go home,’ said Nicholas.

  For a long while she stared at her hands, saying nothing.

  ‘How sick is Nelson?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is she. .’ Nicholas hesitated, but there was no easy way to phrase it. ‘Is she trying to kill him?’

  Suzette thought about this, then shook her head. ‘I don’t think that’s her plan,’ she said, and looked up at Nicholas. ‘She’s dividing us.’

  He nodded.

  ‘But you can look after him? Nelson?’

  ‘If it came out of the blue, maybe not. But since I know this sickness is. . an attack. . yes. I think so.’ She couldn’t meet his eyes. ‘But I have to be there.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘She’s afraid of us,’ she said.

  Nicholas snorted. ‘She has no need to be.’

  He produced the telephone book and hunted for the airline’s listing.

  ‘We know more about her than anyone else in a century and a half,’ said Suzette, turning one hand over. The puncture marks were healing remarkably fast and already looked days old. She touched them uneasily.

  Nicholas imagined little Nelson a thousand kilometres away, face slick with sweat and turning fitfully as he dreamed of Christ-knew-what. Nothing pleasant, he was sure of that.

  ‘She’s halved us in one easy move, Suze. If you think she’s afraid, you’re an idiot. She’s just playing.’ He slid the open phone book towards her.

  Suzette stared at it a moment, then picked up her phone.

  Nicholas shut the cab door. His sister wound down the window.

  ‘Show me,’ she said.

  He unzipped the front of his hoodie, revealing the burnished brown of wood beads. Suzette nodded approvingly. She looked into his eyes.

  ‘I don’t know, Nicky.’

  He drove his hands into his pockets. ‘I’ll keep you posted.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She spoke to the driver and the cab pulled away into the bright street and soon became a winking spot of yellow too bright to watch.

  Katharine nodded while Suzette rushed around the house collecting her suitcase, her make-up bag, her toiletries ba
g, her spare shoes. Outside, the cab horn tooted again. Katharine had swallowed not a word of the tripe Suzette had dished up about her and Nicholas having a few too many Jagermeisters last night and forgetting to tell Katharine she was crashing there at the flat.

  I may be getting long in the tooth, she thought, but I can still tell the difference between panic and hangover. The way Suzette was rushing around like a dervish, the only drug in her veins was adrenaline. All that rang true was that Nelson had come down with something.

  ‘Okay. That’s everything,’ said Suzette, pulling her hair back behind her ear.

  ‘Great,’ said Katharine. It was ridiculous. Nicholas was like his father — strange and handsome and flighty — but Suzette was supposed to be like her. Grounded. Sensible. Why were those two still keeping secrets like children? Why had Suzette flown out of the house like a bolt from a crossbow yesterday as soon as talk turned again to Mrs Quill? She was tempted to march to the porch, throw the cabbie twenty bucks and dismiss him, sit her daughter down and demand an explanation.

  And do you think she’d tell you? Would you tell her? Have you told her everything?

  No. No. And no.

  The cab horn beeped again, longer and more insistent. Suzette wheeled her suitcase out of the room and kissed Katharine on the cheek.

  ‘Gotta go.’

  Katharine nodded.

  It seemed to take just a moment, and then an engine rumbled, an arm waved, and the house was quiet again.

  Katharine went to the kitchen and filled the kettle.

  You brought this on yourself.

  She sat, determined not to think as she waited for the water to boil.

  For the last three-quarters of an hour, the young man had shuttled between his dirty brick-veneer house and a lopsided back shed.

  Nicholas was standing behind an unkempt stand of lasiandra a few doors up from and opposite the Myrtle Street shops. He stood with his hands in his pockets, shifting from foot to foot as the sun crept low to the horizon and the lengthening shadows grew cold. He was turning and stamping his feet for warmth when he noticed movement in the backyard of the house behind him. At first, he gave no mind to the portly young bloke, but within minutes could hardly take his eyes off him. The lad would stride purposefully from the house with a small cardboard box of who-knew-what, across the unmown and weedy back lawn to a small old shed. A few minutes later, he’d emerge again, cross to the house, then return carrying some plastic bottles and rags. Then he’d wait in the shed about ten minutes, before returning empty-handed to the house and emerging with. . a small cardboard box.