Suzette looked at him patiently. ‘You might have noticed that our parents didn’t have the jolliest marriage.’
‘What do you mean, though? Dad was. . what? A druid?’
‘I didn’t know him, Nicholas. All I know is what I found in his suitcases.’
Nicholas turned his sparkling gaze to her, as if finally realising a hidden truth. ‘And you. . Jesus! All those herbs and rubbish you grew in the garden when you were a kid. I thought you just liked gardening! That was. . what? Hemlock and mandrake and double-double-toil-and-trouble shit?’
Suzette pursed her lips. ‘You never asked.’
‘So, what do you do? Sacrifice piglets while baring your buttocks to the harvest moon? Christ, you’re a fucking economist. I thought you’d come up here to talk sense into me and tell me I need to see someone who can dope me up with Thorazine, and here you are telling me. . Fuck, what are you telling me?’
Suzette fought the urge to snap at him. ‘I’m just saying there’s more to the world than the periodic table.’
‘And what does Bryan think about you being into. .’ He fumbled for the word.
‘Witchcraft?’ she offered.
Nicholas laughed, but the sound blew away in the night wind.
‘Bryan’s fine with it. Weekends he helps me weed my herbs. He buys books that he thinks will interest me. And speaking of the moon, he loves it when my animal side comes out-’
‘Fine, whatever.’ Nicholas cut her short. ‘And the kids?’
‘Quincy, nothing. All she wants to do is look for Saturn’s rings and bring home every creature from the pound. Nelson, though, he’s. .’ She looked at Nicholas. ‘He’s like you. Gifted. But ignorant.’
Nicholas bristled. ‘I’m not ignorant.’
‘You are about magic.’
‘That’s because I don’t believe in magic.’
‘Christ, Nicholas.’ She stopped, hands on hips, waiting till he turned around. ‘You’re haunted. You see the dead. How can you not believe in magic?’
‘Magic is just stuff that scientists can’t make any money out of explaining.’ He turned and kept walking. ‘Though I’m happy you have a hobby. Are you a good witch?’
She caught up with him. ‘I own three Sydney houses outright and have five negatively geared investment properties. I’m good at everything I do.’
‘I meant “good versus evil” good.’
‘People are good or evil. Magic is magic. Some is performed with good intentions. Some isn’t. Some is easy. Some is hard. It’s like physics. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Nothing comes free. You need to put in effort. You need to make sacrifices.’
She saw Nicholas stiffen at the last word.
Then she glanced up. They were at an intersection. To the right, beyond hopscotch puddles of streetlight and shadowed picket fences, was the squat, heavy-browed building. The shops. Suzette felt a familiar old worm of fear turn in her belly.
They’d reached Myrtle Street.
They stepped under the awning and their footsteps echoed on the tiles. This had turned out to be a very weird evening. Suzette — sensible, nose-buried-in-financial-theory-textbooks Suzette — into magic? And his dead father, too? Nicholas brushed hair from his face. It felt unpleasantly like spider web and he shivered.
The shops were all shuttered and dark.
He’d expected a wave of pleasant nostalgia to suddenly overtake them, and they’d laugh about the lollies they’d gourmandised and the ice creams they’d loved that were no longer made. Instead, the dumb fronts of the shops were oddly hostile. This was their home suburb; it shouldn’t feel so grim, so unsettling.
It’s because we’re being watched.
The thought shuddered through him like a shot of vodka. The streets were quiet. Nothing moved. They were alone.
‘Mrs Ferguson’s fruit shop,’ said Suzette.
He turned. Suzette was peering in the window of the failed Tibetan restaurant, angled light from a distant streetlamp weakly picking out the empty bains-marie and bare shelves. ‘She had an old set of imperial scales. Remember? She converted weights to metric and did all the maths in her head.’
Mrs Ferguson. A pleasantly plump lady with a gold tooth who wore a pencil perpetually tucked behind one ear. He remembered.
‘Yep. And that old Texas Instruments calculator the size of a brick next to them? Only to prove to customers that her totals were right. They always were. Hey, we should go.’
But Suzette was staring, deep in memory. ‘Did you know she tutored me?’
Nicholas was surprised. ‘Mrs Ferguson? When? Where?’
‘Nights you had soccer. At the back of her shop. I used to hate it.’
‘Hated maths? But you’re such a fucking nerd-’
‘Not the maths, not Mrs Ferguson. But being back there. . I hated that.’ She shuddered.
Here, now, with the world more shadow than substance and the wind making the power lines moan, he could understand. And again the feeling struck him: something’s watching us.
‘We should go,’ he repeated.
‘Okay,’ said Suzette. But instead, she nodded at the new shop: Plough amp; Vine Health Foods. All they could see in the glass was their own ghostly reflections; the shop within was as black as the waters of a deep well.
‘This was Jay Jay’s.’ Suzette leaned closer, trying to see in. Nicholas fought an insane urge to yell ‘Get back!’ Her eyes were fixed on the dark shop window. ‘Do you remember the old seamstress? Mrs Quill. She freaked me out. She was why I hated coming here at night.’
Nicholas had vague memories of a bent-backed old woman tucked behind a counter much too large for her, perched like some benevolent old parrot, nodding and sending a smile as he passed. Behind her hung ranks of shirts, pants, skirts and dresses that used to bring to mind a picture that, for a while during primary school, had haunted his dreams: from a book about the Second World War, a photograph of a dozen or so Russians — men, women, children — hanging dead and limp from a huge and leafless tree. A chill went through him and, as it did, another memory returned.
‘You used to hate walking past these shops,’ he said. ‘When you were small. You used to cry.’
Suzette frowned. The line between her brows was just like their mother’s. She nodded to herself. ‘I think if I knew then what I know now. . I’d say Mrs Quill was a witch, too.’
She shrugged her shoulders, as if to shuck off an ill thought, and reached into her pocket. She pulled out a tiny parcel wrapped in tissue paper. ‘Hey. I brought you something.’
Not here. Not while we’re being watched.
‘Lovely. Can it wait till we get home?’
‘Fucking hell, Nicholas,’ said Suzette, cranky. ‘I don’t want Mum to see, okay?’
‘Why not?’
‘Christ! Because she doesn’t understand that kind of stuff! We talked about this.’
Nicholas turned his back to the dark-eyed shop and removed the ribbon, unstuck the tape. Inside was a necklace. It was made of wooden beads and sported a polished brownish-white stone set in silver.
‘The stone is sardonyx,’ explained Suzette. ‘You said you had some headaches, so. .’
‘They stopped.’
‘Yeah. “Thank you” works, too. The wood is elder.’
Nicholas turned to face the streetlight. The stone was an inch across and cut in a square crystal, milky clear with tigerish bands of blood red. The beads were a dark timber, roughly spherical but each showing dozens of facets where they’d been cut by hand with a sharp knife. A woven silver cord held them together. It was, he had to admit, a piece both pretty and oddly masculine.
The feeling of being watched had gone.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
Suzette didn’t answer. She was staring at the front door to Plough amp; Vine Health Foods. She leaned closer and frowned.
‘Look.’
He followed her gaze and felt his stomach take a slow roll.
In th
e dim light it was just possible to make out an indentation in the wood doorframe. The mark had been painted over perhaps three or four times, and would be invisible in daylight. But in the angled light from the streetlamp, it was fairly clear. A vertical line, and halfway down it, attached to its right, a half-diamond. The mark that had been drawn in blood on the woven head of the dead bird.
Nicholas felt a cold wave of dread rise through him.
‘Let’s go home, Suzie,’ he said.
She was entranced, leaning closer. ‘This is a rune.’
‘Wonderful. Come on. It’s cold.’
‘Wait,’ she said, and reached into her purse. She pulled out a pencil and notepad and copied the figure.
Tell her! Tell her all about the bird and its twig head and the mark. . the mark, what does it mean? But another voice was stronger, calmer. No. Keep her out of it. She has children of her own to watch.
‘Mrs Quill,’ she whispered to herself.
Nicholas put the necklace in his pocket, took his sister’s arm and gently led her out to the street. ‘We’re going. I’m starved.’
The lie hurried him along.
Katharine turned the oven on low and started doling mashed potato onto three plates. How strange. She was out of practice being a mother. Nicholas had left home nearly twenty years ago. Suzette had lived in Sydney for ten. Katharine had grown used to the silence around her.
It wasn’t fair. They left you and you coped. Then they came home and you had to worry all over again. Not fair. Not fair.
And yet now they were under one roof again, the instant they stepped on the street, she was anxious.
Because of the street. Because of Tallong.
‘Nonsense,’ she whispered and reached for the saucepan of meatballs.
Because you opened the door to something evil.
The front door rattled open.
Katharine jumped at the noise, dropping the ladle with a clatter on the tiles. Tomato sauce spattered blood red across the floor.
‘We’re home!’ called Suzette.
‘Miss us?’ asked Nicholas.
Footsteps tromped down the hall.
Katharine quickly wiped up the sauce as her children stepped into the kitchen. Both of them blinked at the red flecks, and both seemed to sag a little with relief when they figured out what it was.
‘You okay?’ asked Suzette.
Katharine smiled thinly and nodded. ‘You forgot the milk, I see.’
After dinner, the three members of the Close family sat on the lounge and watched the news.
No one said anything as the newsreader reported that Elliot Neville Guyatt, a thirty-seven-year-old cleaner recently moved up from Coffs Harbour, had presented himself at the Torwood Police Station and confessed to the abduction and murder of eight-year-old Dylan Oscar Thomas. The overlay pictures showed a slim paperclip of a man looking thoroughly confused as police escorted him from the paddy wagon into the watch house. Guyatt made no effort to hide his face. He walked as if he were caught in a dream.
Nicholas lay on the creaking single bed in his old room. He was awake, listening to the feminine lilt of his sister and mother talking. The wood walls filtered out the detail of words but left a melody that spoke of shared blood.
His old bed. The family together. Childhood again.
The shops remained the same. The woods remained the same.
Children were still dying.
He was suddenly wide awake.
Elliot Guyatt had confessed to killing the Thomas child, and the body was found in the river, miles from Tallong. Winston Teale had confessed to killing Tristram two suburbs distant, hiding his body at the construction site. Nicholas had always thought his memory of seeing Tristram’s drained, dead body floating past a bad dream, a hallucination brought on by sheer terror.
But Suzette said she saw Tristram after he died, running from Carmichael Road into the woods. And Nicholas himself had seen the Thomas boy’s ghost dragged into the trees. The boys didn’t die miles away. The boys died in the woods.
Nicholas rolled to look out the window.
Suzette had probably reached the same conclusion and dismissed it as irrelevant. So the men killed the children in the woods, rather than out in the streets. What did that mean? Probably nothing. Would it bring them back? No.
Yet, it was disturbing. Disturbing and unsurprising that the woods were a killing place. A small piece in a newly begun puzzle that just seemed to fit with a satisfying click.
He would pull Suzette aside in the morning.
For a long while, he stared at the stars. Without knowing when, he slipped into sleep, and dreamed that gnarled, shadowy hands were carrying him away through dark curtains of silk.
7
Knocking woke him. His eyes flew open, and for the first time since leaving London he woke knowing exactly where he was. Home.
KNOCK KNOCK.
The rapping of heavy knuckles on wood. Someone was at the front door.
The sea grey of pre-dawn stole between the venetian blinds. Nicholas rolled over and checked his watch. Quarter to six. He licked his dry lips and got out of bed. As he pulled on tracksuit pants, he caught sight of himself in the duchess mirror. A pale man with straw-blond hair, bleary eyes and a distracted expression. The look you saw on shoeless men in tube stations and on sparrow-fingered street-corner preachers — a face you’d give wide berth to because it seemed one ill-aimed word away from crazy. So it’s come to that, he thought: avoiding my own eyes.
He pulled on his T-shirt as he lurched like a newly docked sailor down the narrow hallway toward the insistent knocking.
His mother’s door was shut. Once again, hefty snores came from behind it. Suzette’s door was shut too; from behind it rumbled snores a half-octave higher but equally lusty.
‘How about I get it?’ asked Nicholas.
Twin snores answered.
More knocking. The patient raps of a visitor who knows that someone is home.
Nicholas passed the kitchen. The sky outside was low and pregnant with rain. Who knocks at quarter to six in the morning? Only bad news.
He unlatched the front door.
A man stood there. He was perhaps forty, but his face wore fifty years worth of miles. His suit was expensive but rumpled. His tie was neatly knotted and his hair carefully combed. He’d shaved, but small tussocks of whiskers sat out like reeds in a grey swamp. The skin under his eyes looked as thin as old chicken meat; the eyes themselves were blue and overly bright.
Drugs, thought Nicholas. Good drugs that are more than adequately compensating for sleeping pills. This guy is wired.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked carefully.
He’s lost. He’s trying to get home from a huge night and needs a phone, a cab, a twenty.
But the man said nothing. He simply stared at Nicholas, fighting a smile and winning. The look on his face was. . what? Desperate? Starved? Haunted?
Yes. Haunted.
The man finally spoke. ‘Nicholas.’
Nicholas blinked. The voice was distantly familiar. Then the little smile bobbed again on the man’s lips, a brave boat in drowning seas, and years fell away. Nicholas recognised a face he’d never seen as a man. It was a face he literally used to look up to. A Boye boy.
‘Gavin?’
Gavin grinned. It was a skull’s rictus.
‘Wow. Gavin. You look. .’ Nicholas put out his hand. Gavin looked at it as if he’d never seen an outstretched hand before. After an uncomfortable pause, Nicholas let it fall. ‘Right. Um. Listen, do. . will you come in?’
The smile sank away and the years slipped back onto Gavin’s face like the tide returning. He shook his head, and his gaze on Nicholas was unblinking. He was big, easily six-two, and Nicholas suspected he could move fast. So take it easy. .
‘How are you? How are your parents?’
Gavin didn’t answer. Instead, he looked slowly over his left shoulder and then over his right. Above pine trees in a distant park, a dozen or so c
rows wheeled and dipped in the grey sky like windblown black ash. Gavin’s movements sent a sudden chill flood through Nicholas’s testicles. That’s exactly what Winston Teale did before he chased Tristram and me into the-
‘Woods,’ said Gavin.
Nicholas stopped breathing. Pins and needles pricked the soles of his bare feet and his neck pimpled cold. He could see past Gavin’s shoulders that the street was empty, not another soul in sight.
‘You’re up pretty early.’ Nicholas wanted it to sound casual, but the words came out cracked, his mouth suddenly dry as sand. ‘Do you want to do this another time? Come over for dinner? Suzette’s up visiting.’
Gavin shook his head slowly, once. Nicholas noticed that he carried in one hand something wrapped in a black garbage bag.
‘I was told you were back,’ said Gavin. His voice was soft. Dreamy. He nodded, as if a subtle milestone had been met.
Nicholas found it hard to drag his gaze back up to Gavin’s face; it was like looking at the sun, painful and dangerous. Gavin was unhooked, a boat adrift in rapids and rushing for the falls — but still afloat.
‘Yeah. I’m back. What’s in the bag, Gavin?’ But Nicholas thought he already knew.
Gavin twisted his head, as if he hadn’t heard the question. He was casting back in time. Remembering. He smiled — another death’s-head grin. ‘You know, Mum had tutors for us both. Tris really didn’t need one. Mum only got him one so that I wouldn’t feel stupid.’
‘You’re a smart guy, Gavin. You were never stupid.’
‘Tris. .’ said Gavin fondly, his voice drifting far away. ‘Trissy was the smart one.’
Nicholas watched the big man stand there, his eyes decades away. Quick! whispered the voice in his head. Shut the door, now!
That instant, Gavin’s eyes flicked and locked on Nicholas’s. A task remembered. ‘I have a message,’ he said.
In a motion so fast and fluid that Nicholas could hardly register it, Gavin pulled a gun from the bag. It was a hunting rifle, sawn off so short that the ragged cut sectioned through the front of its walnut stock. The severed barrel was ugly and raw as an eye socket. What a waste of a good Sako, thought Nicholas, and was instantly dismayed by his reaction. Had it been a snake or a spider, his body’s electric impulse would have been to leap back. But he didn’t live in Baghdad or Los Angeles; fear of guns wasn’t wired into his DNA. Instead, he was offended that a fine gun had been butchered. You fucking tosser, he thought. You deserve to die. A feeling like cold jelly filled his stomach.
The Darkening Page 9