The Darkening Read online

  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.

  Cheered a little by this plan, she walked easier. The afternoon was warm and she opened up her school cardigan. The woods grew closer on her right. They looked fine: thick and secret and old. When Dad used to read stories about enchanted princesses sleeping the years away in emerald groves, it wasn’t forests thick with European pines that Hannah had imagined, but woods like these: lush and healthy and wild and filled with hefty-trunked paperbark, glossy ash, lumbering and shadow-branched figs and scrambling, dark-footed lantana. Trees as tall as churches, some so thick with vines they looked like green-furred dinosaurs. The woods were beautiful. As she passed them, she left the footpath and took the gravel track that cut through the dried 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 pickets into the ground near the footpath and wired between them a sign made of white plastic.

  Secondly, 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, chiselled 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 towards 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.

  Nicholas was staring at the ceiling of his flat and deciding that it was indeed stucco. This 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 catalyse 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 towards 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 towards 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 towards 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 realisation 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.

  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 wind seemed to cease. The very sunlight seemed to freeze in the air, becoming 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 in his head was low, as old as stone and as strong as night tides, a powerful rumble almost too low to hear; it vibrated through him like a whale song or thunder.

  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. .

  Bring her in.

  He took a step towards 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, but his voice sounded 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 seemed to convulse his organs and whip 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. The necklace was hot, burning. 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 path, he cast a look behind.

  The grass was turning black. It was 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 grey spiders.

  He turned and ran like hell.

  This was the last box. Pritam pulled it down from the 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 papers discharging him from 3RAR; 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, 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. John certainly was a very strong spirit, an inspiration. He was, most surely, with his Lord now. Yes, there would be a service.

  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 ‘Fundraising’. Within this last were four smaller envelopes labelled 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 wagging 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.

  The 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, 5D”,’ 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.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ whispered Nicholas.

  He sat slumped in his chair, staring at the dead bird. For an unsettling moment, Pritam thought he was talking to the tiny corpse. Then he slid his eyes to Pritam and smiled.

  He’s peered into the depths, too, thought Pritam. And he looks ready to fall into them.

  He shook his head. After finding that photograph of Quill, he’d been shocked to open the presbytery door to stare right into the face of the man who’d brought her to his attention. Pritam had been ready to dismiss him, tell him John Hird was dead and to come back another time — better yet, don’t come back at all! — when he saw the girl standing dumbly behind Nicholas, holding his hand and staring into space. His first impression struck him like a fist: she’s been raped. Then Nicholas said a word that was the second blow to finish the one-two: ‘Quill.’

  Pritam had let them in, put the girl in the chair, listened as Nicholas briefly recounted the story about finding her outside the woods, finishing by pulling that horrible, disfigured bird from his pocket.

  Now Pritam knew the girl’s name.

  ‘They’ll want to know,’ he said.

  Nicholas cocked his head — who?

  ‘Her parents. They’ll want to know why you grabbed their daughter while she was walking home.’

  ‘I told you-’

  ‘I believe you,’ said Pritam. The words surprised him. But they were true; he did believe. Every poisonous bit. That abomination of a bird verified it all: so unnaturally dead, so alien. It looked like a lightning rod for evil.

  ‘I believe you, but I don’t think her mother will,’ he continued. ‘I don’t think the police will. Not so soon after the Thomas boy. Nicholas, I think you’re looking down the barrel of some serious questions.’

  Nicholas didn’t seem to care. He was watching Hannah Gerlic, and the concern in his eyes for her was real.

  She stared into space, her expression blank as glass. Pritam had seen black and white footage of World War I soldiers in hospital wards, automatons staring at infinity. Shell shock.

  ‘I suppose I am,’ agreed Nicholas quietly. He looked at Pritam. ‘They won’t believe the truth.’

  The men regarded one another.

  ‘I won’t lie for you,’ said Pritam.

  Nicholas frowned. ‘Who asked you to?’

  There was a rustling from Hannah’s chair and they looked at her. She was staring, wide-eyed, at the dead bird. Suddenly, she sucked in a surprised breath, gagged, coughed up some briny yellow spittle, and started crying.

  Andrew and Louise Gerlic were the happiest parents in the world.

  Mrs Gerlic hugged Hannah tightly, tears running quicksilver paths down her red cheeks. ‘Silly girl. Silly girl. Silly girl. .’ She rocked her daughter in her ar
ms. Mr Gerlic had his arms around them both, his eyes shut, nodding to himself.

  On the drive to the Gerlics’ house, Pritam and Nicholas had worked out a story set in the awkward middle ground between lies and truth. Nicholas had been reading the development sign when Hannah appeared. She was distraught and wouldn’t respond to his queries. Uncomfortable with the idea of going through a young girl’s bag unaccompanied, he drove her immediately to his friend, the local reverend, where they discovered together the girl’s identity. Why was she so traumatised? They didn’t know. Had Nicholas seen anything unusual? No.

  Police arrived at the Gerlic residence. The sight of a clergyman set the room at ease. Nicholas and Pritam were thanked together and questioned separately. One female officer was questioning Hannah without success: Hannah simply screwed up her eyes and shook her head. Another female officer spoke quietly to Mrs Gerlic, who listened a while then nodded consent. The women took Hannah to the girl’s bedroom. They emerged a few minutes later and Nicholas saw the female officer catch the eye of another uniformed officer — she shook her head. No signs of physical interference. The police began to wrap things up.

  Nicholas drifted to join Pritam. ‘I don’t know if she’ll be safe,’ he whispered.

  Pritam looked at him.

  ‘We have a great deal to discuss.’

  Nicholas dropped Pritam back to the presbytery, and the men made arrangements to catch up there later that evening. Nicholas then kept driving, back to Lambeth Street.

  Dinner was awkwardly silent, considering how loud it had been to prepare.

  Nicholas had sat at the kitchen bench, watching Katharine chop vegetables, water chestnuts, onion, chicken. Every time he’d started to speak, she’d whacked some ingredient into submission or ground spices in her large granite mortar.

  ‘Want a hand?’ he’d yelled.

  ‘No, no,’ she’d yelled back brightly, then began throwing diced things into the wok where they shrieked loudly in the sizzling oil.