The Darkening Page 30

  Waiting for me.

  Tony took a reluctant step forward, his eyes locked on the spider. And another, until he was standing at the vanity, staring up at it.

  The creature leaned forward and dropped its hard little parcel.

  Tony caught the stone, and watched the spider throw itself backwards, slide down the glass and fall away into darkness.

  No others came to take its place.

  He was about to call out to Dan, but glanced down at the pebble in his palm. There were two others like it in the basin. The stones were the size of large ball bearings, smooth and white and slightly ovoid, like tiny eyeballs. The one in his palm was translucent, like quartz, and cold. On its flattest part a mark was scratched. It was a line with two angled hooks, one each end:

  The mark had been stained with something rusty red.

  Tony looked into the basin. The other two stones bore the same symbol. There was something about it. Something sad. Something depressing. Something familiar.

  Papa’s cheek. The mark looks just like the deep lines in my father’s cheek. The lines that grew deep as chasms as he got sicker and sicker. .

  A wave of unhappy nostalgia flowed over Tony like a noxious wind. He recalled his father lying in the hospital bed, his cheeks bristled white and deeply furrowed, panting like a dog. And his eyes, Papa’s blue eyes. Papa’s body was thin and dying, lungs wasted with emphysema, but his eyes were blue as flames. His glands were swollen and his voice was reed thin, but not so thin as to hide the hate as he whispered to Tony in a voice dry as cane stubble, ‘Finocchio.’

  Tony leaned on the vanity and looked into the mirror. That’s me, he thought. That’s me. A big, fat-bellied faggot.

  He ran his fingers over his scalp. The hair was thin. When had it been thick? Before the divorce. ‘You’re going to look after Gabrielle,’ Karan had said. Gabrielle. Oh, the poor kid. Did her classmates know she had a big fat wog faggot for a father? His face grew warm. Of course they knew. Kids found out everything. Did Gab ask for that? For a father who liked the feel of cock in his arse? And what was her reward for the schoolyard taunts? He’d nearly lost it all — a hair’s breadth from bankruptcy.

  Tony’s heart started thumping. I could lose it all again! He was one signature away from committing everything to the Tallong block development. What a fool!

  He hurried to the bedroom, picked up the phone and dialled.

  ‘Hello?’ The woman’s voice on the other end was sleep-fuddled.

  ‘Ellen, it’s Tony.’

  ‘Mr Barisi? It’s. . is there something-’

  ‘Stop the Tallong development. First thing in the morning. Ring Koopers and tell them it’s off. I’m not ratifying.’

  ‘Mr Barisi, are you-’

  ‘It’s off.’

  Tony disconnected. He dropped the phone. What a waste. He could hear Ellen’s disgust, having to talk to such a filthy, pathetic finocchio. Tears welled in his eyes. What did he really own? A mountain of debt, a fag brothel of an apartment with a filthy little fuck monkey faggot asleep on his couch dribbling cum out of his dirty faggot arse.

  ‘Oh, God!’ he whispered. Papa was right. So right. He wasn’t fit to live.

  Not fit to live.

  The thought struck into him with the brightness of steel on steel.

  He sat up. Of course. The realisation glowed like a spotlight in an auditorium: Gabrielle was beneficiary.

  He walked stiffly to the bathroom and climbed up onto the vanity. The bottom hopper was easy to swing wide. Cold wind flooded through the room. Cold and sharp and cleansing.

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered.

  He slid his legs out the window, then pushed himself out.

  The thought in his head just before his skull split open like a dropped melon was of kissing his father’s craggy dead cheek.

  Just as passers-by were running to the shattered body of Tony Barisi, Sergeant Peter Lam was returning to the station’s front desk, ripping off the top of a sugar sachet with his teeth and pouring it into his coffee mug that read ‘de’caf [dee-kaf] — noun useless brown warm water’. It was a quiet night. Two calls about some V8 thumping around the side streets doing donuts: he’d sent Erica and Mick to have a look. One call from Crazy Joan, who rang every night; this time she was complaining about an ad on TV she said was clearly made by the Mormons and must come off the air. Other than that, a lovely, quiet night. Then, movement in the CCTV monitor above the desk. A sedan was pulling into the front car park. It was commonplace for people to come in at all hours with queries about licence renewals, barking dogs, cars broken into.

  Sergeant Lam sipped his coffee. A bit hot. He watched a man get out of the driver’s side. He moved slow and easy, no signs of drunkenness. Lam relaxed just a little. Then he stiffened, suddenly alert.

  The man went to the boot of his car, opened it.

  Lam placed down his coffee. The guy could have anything in there: a cat he’d hit on the road, a box of God-knows-what that someone dumped on his footpath. . The big worry was the folk who’d received speeding tickets that day and decided to try for some payback with a tyre iron. Lam’s hand inched closer to the desk radio; Erica and Mick might need to come back in a hurry.

  Then the guy in the car park straightened his back and turned towards the surveillance camera. In his arms was the limp body of a naked child.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ whispered Lam. One hand grabbed the radio handset; his other slipped down to release the clip holding in his Glock.

  The man outside — who would later be identified as a Miles Kindste from the neighbouring suburb of Tallong — placed the dead girl at his feet, reached into his pocket and produced a Stanley knife. Without a pause, he flicked out the blade and drew it across his own throat. He sat himself down to die.

  The phosphorescent hands of Nicholas’s watch glowed eldritch green. Nearly two thirty in the morning.

  He sat in an armchair that had seemed huge when he was a boy, but now was small and uncomfortable. After the first few hours, he’d realised that moving didn’t help, and so stayed as still as he could, trying to will himself to numbness.

  Through the window over the bed where Laine slept, he’d watched the rain grow softer as hours passed, until it finally ceased an hour ago. The clouds were lit faintly from below by the orange tungsten glow of the sprawling city. Gradually, those clouds parted and dissipated like smoke. Stars winked faintly. Just ten minutes ago, the fingernail crescent of the moon had begun falling with aching slowness beyond the silhouetted leaves of the camphor laurel tree outside the window to light the figure on the bed a ghostly silver.

  Laine shifted again. Around midnight, her finger had twitched. By one, she was moving her feet in her sleep. Now she was rolling over, pulling the blanket up around her chin. She opened her eyes. Nicholas was again struck by their colour: a slate that was almost black in this half-light. He’d never seen eyes that colour — smoky and sombre as storm clouds.

  ‘We’re at my house,’ he said. ‘We’re okay.’

  She nodded, closed her eyes, and fell instantly back to sleep.

  He watched her for a long while. He reluctantly turned his eyes back to the moon.

  He couldn’t remember the colour of Cate’s eyes. He was sure they were blue. Or were they hazel? Now he imagined them grey.

  31

  The room was so bright that Swizzle’s eyes were matchstick slits. Hannah squinted.

  She sat at the breakfast table, chair pushed out, with Swizzle on her lap. Her mother made coffee. Her father poured juice into glasses. The room was as silent as a classroom after a student has been sent to the principal. Eerily still.

  The police had come late last night, and for hours afterwards Hannah had lain awake listening to her mother sob and her father speak quietly, his voice a bowling ball rumble of words she couldn’t make out.

  She had slept on and off, with a can of Mortein hidden under her pillow. She’d been awake to see the night turn from black to purple-blue to green and yell
ow. She’d heard her parents rise, voices low, reaching agreement that they ‘had to tell Hannah’.

  Like she didn’t know. How stupid did they think she was?

  They’d come in around seven and sat quietly on her bed, neither seeming to know what to say. So Hannah had said it for them.

  ‘Miriam’s dead.’

  Her mother had jerked back as if slapped.

  Her parents had looked at one another, and nodded. A man, they explained, had stolen Miriam from her room. He’d killed her. But the police had him now. There was no need to be scared. He’d be locked up. They dragged the words reluctantly from deep within themselves, like heavy hauls from a dismal sea.

  Hannah watched while her father spoke. It was obvious he loved Miriam as much as Mum did — much more than Hannah had herself. She wondered if they’d be this upset if the spiders had got in here instead of Miriam’s room? It seemed doubtful. Her father finished by explaining that the next few days and weeks would be very, very hard. They both hugged Hannah tight and told her they loved her, and made her promise that if she needed to talk about how she felt to come straight to them.

  That’s a joke, thought Hannah; she remembered all too well how much that slap on her buttocks had hurt. Maybe a man had killed Miriam; Hannah didn’t think her parents were lying. But they sure didn’t know everything.

  They didn’t believe her about the spiders? Fine. She’d watch the news stories about the guy who said he’d killed Miriam. She’d see if he said anything about spiders.

  If he didn’t, Hannah knew where she had to start looking.

  The woods weren’t far away.

  Pritam watched ephemeral diamonds crawl across the ceiling of his ward: scintillating colander holes of morning sunlight reflecting off the river and darting like fireflies above his head. The light winked between the wires and rods that held him in his web, peeking here and there between the chromium and the tubing, delighting him, making him smile. He felt sure the relucent sparks were about to divulge the definitive answer to Thomas Aquinas’s dilemma about how many angels could dance on a pin head. . but whenever the answer was on the tip of his tongue, a dazzling flicker would steal it from his mind.

  When he’d woken just before dawn, the pain had been extraordinary. His pelvis and the bones of his right leg felt filled with molten metal, and their white heat was pulsing from within, cooking his flesh. He was shaking so badly that he could hardly press the call button with his left hand — his right remained immobile, strapped across his chest. The nurse had arrived and showed him how to use the morphine demand button next to the call remote. Since that lesson, the morning had passed in a delightful fog, punctuated by occasional moments of brilliant clarity and modulated by a chorus of skittering ceiling fireworks.

  Best of all, Pritam now knew what to do with Rowena Quill.

  She was, most surely, a sinner, a murderer, a dancer with demons. But Pritam had felt the pain of martyrs now. He had tasted, at last, the physical agony of the saints who had died in the service of the Lord; perhaps even a sense of the pain that the Son Himself felt as His body was broken. And he had passed through. He was closer to the divine. And he was humbled. And what could be a greater display of his gratitude than to guide the most egregious of sinners to seek forgiveness?

  He would find Rowena Quill and, filled with the power of the Holy Ghost, convince her to admit her sins, to accept Christ and receive His mercy.

  Pritam smiled and pressed the morphine button again. Yes. This was so right.

  A pretty nurse entered the room, carrying something. She was young and lovely: a delightful work by the Father in this morning brightness.

  ‘Mr Anand?’

  ‘Will you marry me?’ He peered to read her name tag. ‘Joanna?’

  The nurse smiled. ‘No, Mr Anand. But I will hold the phone up to your ear. You have a call.’

  She held the mobile handset against Pritam’s left ear.

  ‘God be with you this Heaven-sent morning!’ said Pritam brightly, pleased that his words slurred hardly at all.

  ‘Cheers,’ replied Nicholas.

  ‘Nicholas!’

  Nicholas was sitting on the back steps of his mother’s house, looking out over her vegetable garden. It was ludicrously green after the rains: an impossibly emerald world of vigorous growth. To counteract the salubrious sight, he lit the last of Gavin Boye’s cigarettes and inhaled deeply.

  ‘Hole in one. How are you?’

  ‘Blessed. How am I, Joanna?’

  ‘You’re doing well, Mr Anand.’

  ‘Joanna’s going to marry me,’ explained Pritam.

  ‘Are you. . Are you high, Pritam?’

  ‘No! Well, I have a morphine button.’

  ‘Okay.’ Nicholas got to his feet. ‘I’ll call you back-’

  ‘No! I have been thinking about Rowena Quill.’

  ‘So have we. Laine’s here with me.’

  ‘Good. Now, listen. Have you read Luke?’ asked Pritam excitedly. ‘Read Luke!’

  Nicholas screwed the cigarette butt into the doorframe. ‘Pritam, you’re fucking high. I’m going to call back.’

  ‘Shh, listen! Luke fifteen something. Woman loses a coin. She has ten but loses one. And she finds it and she’s so happy!’

  ‘Goodbye, Pritam-’

  ‘Wait! That’s how the angels feel when a sinner repents!’

  Nicholas squinted against the sunlight. The cigarette had made him feel nauseated.

  ‘Like they just found twenty cents?’

  ‘No! You’re not listening!’ Pritam rolled his eyes in mock exasperation. The nurse smiled and took the telephone with her other hand so she could check his catheter bag.

  ‘I don’t feel like repenting right now,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘Not you; her! Quill! I’m going to help Quill!’

  Nicholas watched a butcher bird land on the Hills Hoist. It had a grasshopper in its beak, and the insect kicked, kicked, kicked. It occurred to him that he’d never seen the ghost of a bird or a dog or a grasshopper. Did they not have souls? Or did they never die before their time? Or did only haunted birds and dogs and insects see the ghosts of their own kind? Despite the nausea, he wished for another smoke.

  ‘Pritam? Hannah Gerlic’s sister was murdered. The guy who killed her — supposedly killed her — killed himself at the cop shop.’

  Pritam’s bright mood faded slightly. ‘Oh.’

  ‘And remember I told you a developer put a sign up at the Carmichael Road woods? Barisi Developments. A Tony Barisi committed suicide last night.’

  ‘Oh,’ repeated Pritam. He pressed the morphine button, but nothing happened; he’d reached his limit for the moment. A last facet of sunlight on the ceiling flickered and vanished. Another nurse, older with short brown hair, appeared in the doorway. Joanna waved at her — can you do this? The brown-haired nurse shrugged and took hold of the phone. Joanna whispered in her ear, smiled at Pritam, and hurried from the room. Pritam glanced down at the new nurse’s badge: Helen Muir.

  ‘I think Quill killed my father,’ said Nicholas simply. The words left his mouth without fanfare or footprints.

  Pritam felt the pain start twisting again in his broken hip, his shattered leg: some sharp-mawed worm stirring in its uneasy sleep.

  ‘Nothing’s changed, has it?’

  ‘No,’ replied Nicholas. ‘But at least we know. We’re going to go into the woods.’

  ‘You and Laine?’

  ‘Yeah. Listen, just be careful, okay?’

  ‘I can’t run too fast right now.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘Watch out for white dogs?’

  ‘That kind of thing, yeah.’

  ‘Okay.’ Pritam was feeling tired. Maybe a nap now. ‘Nicholas?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I did mean that, even though I didn’t know it was you. God be with you, this Heaven-sent morning.’

  Nicholas watched the butcher bird swallow the still-kicking grass
hopper. ‘And also with you.’

  They said their goodbyes, and Pritam nodded at the brown-haired nurse. She pressed the ‘end call’ button on the handset and reached behind him to adjust his pillow.

  ‘Thank you, Helen,’ Pritam said.

  ‘You’re welcome, Mr Anand. But it’s not Helen,’ she added, smiling at his mistake. She tapped her name badge.

  Pritam blinked, and a wave of ice water rolled up through him. The badge read ‘Rowena Quill’.

  He grabbed for the call button — but his fingers were as slow as old creek water. She easily pulled the button away, and smiled again. Pritam could see that she had Eleanor Bretherton’s eyes: hard and shining.

  ‘Are you going to call out?’ she asked pleasantly.

  A lilt, he thought. Her accent. After all these years. .

  ‘No,’ he replied. His throat was tight. Fear.

  She nodded, as if pleased with an obedient child.

  ‘You know who I am?’

  ‘Show me,’ he said.

  She raised her eyebrows and smiled, and looked to the door. No one was there. She looked back at Pritam and winked. And suddenly, right in front of him was John Hird.

  ‘Will this make it easier, you useless black fucker?’ the older reverend asked brightly.

  Pritam reeled. Here she was. Just a few minutes ago he’d been ablaze with the idea of bringing her to her knees with the Glory of the Host, penitent and humbled. But now he was cold inside, doused ash.

  John’s friendly, wrinkled face vanished in a blink, replaced by the young nurse, Joanna. ‘Or her?’

  Joanna’s face was gone, seamlessly replaced with Pritam’s mother’s. ‘Or her, my little chinnanna?’

  ‘Stop,’ he whispered. His mouth was as dry as cardboard.

  ‘Or me?’ His mother’s loving face vanished, replaced by a woman who looked older than time. Withered and wrinkled and hard as wood, with eyes that were bright blue sparks in folds of nut-brown flesh. ‘I heard you at the door,’ she whispered. Her breath was foul and smelled of decayed flesh and the mouldy misshapen things that grew in damp shadows. ‘You want to save my soul, boy?’