The Darkening

by Stephen Irwin

  Hannah kicked and struggled, but Quill had her pinned. She tested the paring knife’s blade with her thumb, and nodded. Overhead, the moon sailed high in clearing skies. Pleased, Quill looked over at Nicholas. Her mouth creaked open in a dark smile. ‘Let’s send her on her way, then,’ she whispered, ‘so that you and I can be.’

  Hannah tried to scream, but Quill pressed her mouth deeper into the sandy ground.

  ‘Don’t, Quill. Don’t do it,’ whispered Nicholas.

  Quill looked at him, as a mother looks at a child.

  ‘She’ll not feel much. Blood is the only sacrifice that pleases the Lord.’

  Hannah’s one eye above the dirt stared at Nicholas, wide with terror.

  The moon rode high and easy overhead.

  The sharp paring knife glinted.

  And, suddenly, Nicholas knew what to do.

  The idea arrived as clear and bright as the moonlight had, casting everything sharp and lucid.

  There was a choice. He took it.

  ‘Rowena,’ he said softly.

  She didn’t hear him, and put the knife in her right hand and took a handful of Hannah’s hair.

  ‘Rowena,’ he repeated. He was surprised at how calm he felt.

  Quill looked over.

  He lifted her little knife to his wrist.

  The old woman’s face fell. ‘No. .’ she whispered.

  Nicholas plunged the blade in. The pain was as clean as glass. He dragged the blade through tendons and veins. Blood, dark like syrup, gushed out.

  He watched his blood flow between the branch bars onto the sand, soaking away. His calmness felt beautiful. Now, how do I start? he wondered. What do I say?

  But the words came of their own accord.

  ‘With my blood I call on you. I call on the Green Man.’

  ‘No,’ repeated Quill, more loudly.

  Blood pulsed out, slapping delicately into a growing puddle. Nicholas watched it, fascinated.

  ‘I give you my blood and I ask you-’

  ‘No!’ Panic.

  ‘-to remove Rowena Quill from these woods-’

  ‘NO!’ Her voice was sprung tight with terror.

  Nicholas felt his head grow hot, then cold. His vision danced.

  ‘-forever.’

  ‘Noooooo!!’ Rowena Quill’s last word became a scream.

  Her shriek brought back to Nicholas a memory two decades old. He’d been employed to lay out a brochure for an abattoir in Kent. The manager had given him a courtesy tour, and he’d been shown the killing floor. The sound Quill now made was the exact cry of animal fear the cattle screamed when they rounded the narrow chute and saw ahead the crush and, beyond it, the corpses of their cousins that had gone before. Terror in the face of certain death.

  Quill’s eyes were wide and rimmed with white. Her head swivelled as she scanned the trees. She dropped the knife. She scrambled to her feet. And ran.

  Nicholas watched the little sharp blade fall from his grasp. He put his right hand over the deep cut in his left wrist. I’m going to faint now.

  He looked at Hannah. She lay on the ground, her eyes shut. His vision seemed to blacken at the edges, like paper charring. Not yet! He strained to focus.

  He saw Hannah’s back rise and fall so slightly. She was breathing.

  He nodded, relieved.

  ‘Okay,’ he whispered, and his vision silvered. His spine seemed to turn to water and he fell inside the cage.

  The wind stopped. The trees grew still.

  The world looked far away — even the moonlit cage of bone and branches around him seemed small and distant, like viewing a room through the wrong end of a telescope.

  Take off your shirt. Bind your wrist.

  But there was so much blood. .

  He struggled to remove his jumper, but weariness crept up inside him like the pleasant, drowning waters of Lethe.

  I can’t.

  Then roll over, he told himself.

  With numb fingers, he lifted his jumper and shirt, pressed his pumping wrist against the skin of his belly, and rolled onto it.

  Enough, he thought. Sleep now.

  He was too weary even to close his eyes, so he stared out at a world far away and ringed with inviting gloom. The woods were eerily quiet. The circle of trees stood silent, their still leaves as green as frozen sea-water in the icy moonlight, black as pitch in shadow. They were hushed. Anticipating. The only movement was the gentle rising and falling of Hannah’s tiny back.

  Sleep.

  Nicholas closed his eyes, wondered what the wetness on his belly was, then nodded as he remembered. He was dying.

  Don’t worry. Sleep now.

  Cate would be waiting.

  He smiled.

  But a smell shivered him awake.

  It was a scent as old as the world. It was a hundred aromas of a thousand places. It was the tang of pine needles. It was the musk of sex. It was the muscular rot of mushrooms. It was the spice of oak. The meaty redolence of soil and bark and herb. It was bats and husks and burrows and moss. It was solid and alive — so alive! And it was close.

  The vapours invaded Nicholas’s nostrils and his hairs rose on their roots. His eyes were as heavy as manhole covers, but he opened them. Through the dying calm inside him snaked a tremble of fear.

  The trees themselves seemed tense, waiting. The moonlight was as hard as shell, sharp and ready to be struck and to ring like steel.

  A shadow moved.

  It poured like oil from between the tall trees, and flowed across the dark, sandy dirt, lengthening into the middle of the ring. The trees seemed to bend towards it, spellbound. A long, long shadow. .

  Then, a hoof. As large as a bucket and dark as stone, grey-splotched with moss; layered and peeling like ancient horn. Above the hoof: a massive leg. Feathered. Or furred. Or dense with leaves. A dark green-grey cast blue as gunmetal by the glacial moonlight. Muscular and long. Its knee bent backwards like a horse’s hind leg’s, but thrice the size and powerful. Another hoof, another enormous leg. A torso dense as an ape’s, but so much larger, as dark as the shadows between the roots of ancient trees. Arms like a man’s: knotted with ropy muscle but thick as tree trunks, their topsides shimmering with fungal grey fur or leaves or vestigial feathers, their undersides creviced as old bark. A bull neck, corded like worn rock. Shoulders, shifting with a frost of green, wide as boulders. Antlers like oak branches, webbed with vines and moss, and huge. And a face in shadow.

  Nicholas stared. I am dreaming. I am dead.

  The creature’s head turned to him. Its face was rimmed with skin like leaves, or made of leaves. The jaw was massive and oxlike, dripping with tendrils like curling roots. Great tusks the shape of oak leaves thrust from the corners of its wide, leathery lips. Huge nostrils flared. And eyes as dark as wells of deep, distant water reflected the moonlight; eyes at once human and yet so inhuman — inscrutable as winter sky, hungry as an eagle’s. And old. So old.

  It was the face he’d seen in Walpole Park. The face he’d seen carved in wood and stone in Bretherton’s church.

  The Green Man.

  Nicholas’s body was rigid with electric panic, white terror, delirium. . His flesh knew what the creature before him was; it knew at some fundamental, cellular level what it smelled and faced, and would have begun digging through the ground itself to hide were it not locked tight in bright horror.

  The Green Man stopped halfway between Nicholas and Hannah. He was taller than the trees. He lifted his head and his nostrils splayed. The air shifted. The trees shimmered with pleasure, opening their moist leaves with dark delight. Then the Green Man’s head turned in the direction that Quill had fled. . towards her cottage.

  A tiny sound. Hannah groaned softly.

  She rolled. Her eyes flickered open and found Nicholas.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but only a hiss of air escaped his lips.

  Hannah looked up.

  The Green Man loomed over her, dwarfing her small as a kitten. He shifted
his hoofs, and snorted a blast of warm air as pungent as the forest floor.

  Hannah smiled, and her eyes closed.

  The Green Man stooped and picked her up.

  ‘Hannah. .’ whispered Nicholas.

  The Green Man turned at the sound. In an instant he stamped towards the cage, three enormous steps, a colossal wave about to crash, his wide, dark face right before Nicholas’s.

  His scent was overwhelming: erotic and wildly horrible; hunger and rot and age and lust. His green leafy lips parted, showing teeth as large as bricks and hard as ivory, goatlike and sharp.

  Nicholas stared into the eyes. Eyes as large as saucers, without whites: huge dark stones that glittered with intelligence and violence.

  And the Green Man chuckled.

  The warm, foetid air from his mouth washed over Nicholas, strong and whipping as a storm wind through ripe brambles.

  Nicholas’s eyes rolled back in his head, and the night world became as black as the centre of the earth.

  44

  Hannah enjoyed this beautiful feeling. Of gently drifting above the ground. Of flying.

  She felt the cool air on her face, the warm leaves under her legs, her back. Overhead, she could see that the clouds were moving again, rolling in a steady dark wave towards the moon. More rain, she thought idly, and snuggled back into her warm cot of ferns.

  But the trip did not last long. She sailed past the roof of the old woman’s cottage, watching as the shadows of clouds raced over it, casting it into bleak shadow. Then she was being lowered. She was placed on her feet.

  ‘Oh,’ she half-complained.

  But the hands were wise. The earth was good. And — oh! — the smell. The smell was divine! A delicious brew of vanilla, of newborn puppy, of jasmine, of sweet sweat and His skin. He had put her down, and that was good. Because there was a task to do.

  Of course!

  Hannah stood beside the closed barn doors of the cellar. How long had it been since she was locked in there? An hour? A year? It was a dream lost in waking. But down there now was something that needed attention.

  Someone.

  She turned to look at the one who carried her, to ask -

  But His firm, large hands held her head gently, preventing her turn, silencing her question. And then she saw. .

  Oh! How clever!

  On the ground was Nicholas’s duffel bag.

  I shall do this right, thought Hannah, secretly thrilled, knowing that He would watch her work. To please Him, I will do it well.

  She reached into the warm, dark bag and her fingers probed gently. Ah! They found what she knew would be there.

  A cigarette lighter. And a bottle of kerosene.

  ‘The doors are heavy,’ she said. She kept her voice light and breezy, not wanting to betray how her skin tingled knowing His eyes were watching her.

  His large hand reached, and opened one of the wood doors as easily as lifting a magazine.

  Moonlight poured into the cellar. Curled in one corner was a ragged figure, barely visible in the deep shadows. Quill was sobbing.

  ‘Please. . please. .’

  Hannah smiled. She knew what to do.

  There was so much money on the floor. I put it there, she thought, pleased with herself. Some of the pile of bills had been wet by the rain that had dripped between the doors, but most was still dry. She unscrewed the lid of the kerosene bottle and poured its contents down the stairs. The oily smell was harsh, and she frowned — she didn’t want to mask so much as an atom of His charged, musky aroma.

  ‘Now?’ she asked.

  She felt the cool air swirl as His huge head swooped down through the air, down behind her, till His mouth was right next to the nape of her neck. Her skin prickled in delight and her heart pounded.

  ‘Now,’ He said with a voice as warm as sunlight on old stone or the sea-water of a summer rock pool. Delicious and old and deep.

  Hannah opened the lid of the lighter and flicked the flint wheel.

  ‘Please!’ begged the huddled old shape cowering below.

  The flame sparked brightly, and Hannah felt Him slyly retreat behind her. It made her sad. She threw the lighter down into the cellar and heard the sucking fwoompf as the kerosene caught.

  ‘MY LORD!!’ cried Quill, but her last word was smothered by a solid bang! as the cellar door shut again.

  Hannah scurried neatly to where the doors joined and slid the barrel bolt shut. Done!

  She looked up, beaming, ready for His praise.

  Beneath her, the screaming started.

  He was ten again. Tristram had been carried past him on a floating carpet of eighty-thousand legs. Now, he, too, was dead, and being borne away to be hidden clumsily, ready to be found exsanguinated and white amid broken wood and discarded things.

  The night slid past him, weeping, its tears as cold as the far sky. It’s all right, he wanted to say to the sighing trees and the lowing clouds. Don’t cry. I’m glad.

  He was going back now. Back to him, whom he’d loved as a boy, and to her, whom he’d loved as a man. This last cool passage could not end too quickly.

  Pleased with death, Nicholas opened his eyes.

  The woods moved. The trees strode by him, waving in the cold wind, shaking off their doleful rains. Nicholas was surprised. He wasn’t on his back, drifting over the forest floor on a shifting bed of scuttling spiny legs, but cradled in an arm as great as a tree bough, aphotic and smelling of soil and worm and pungent stag musk. He wearily rolled his head.

  The girl lay near him. Her name was lost just now. She slept, as he so dearly wanted to, and her lips were curled contentedly in her sleep. She could have been a dreaming sprite nestled deep between the loving roots of ancient trees.

  Sleep. A faery dream.

  Nicholas closed his eyes, and the rain fell on them, growing heavier.

  45

  That night, the river swelled. Rain hammered down as if determined to dissolve the earth.

  The police recalled the State Emergency Service volunteers searching the Carmichael Road woods for Hannah Gerlic; the forest was simply too wild and treacherous in the rain at night. . and this rain was violent. Tethered to powerful spotlight beams, the drenched men and women in orange overalls stumped back from the tree line and headed towards the parked minibus they’d arrived in. They tramped up the chequer-plate steps, stamping hard to shake off the water, switching off torches, tutting to their neighbours about how they wished they could keep looking, but all secretly glad they didn’t have to continue battling through the wild turns of blackthorn and cunjevoi and lantana while this incredible rain smashed down on their skulls.

  Veterinarian assistant Katy Rhydderch was the second last to climb the bus stairs. She just happened to glance down at a flicker of movement before she entered the vehicle. An orb weaver spider was straining across the grass on its matchstick legs, slipping as it headed for cover. Katy, notorious among her friends for hating to hurt any living thing (excluding, perhaps, the ticks she occasionally had to pull off matt-furred dogs) was afraid the spider would be crushed under the minibus tyres. She knelt to let the creature crawl onto her torch handle so she could move it out of harm’s way. As the spider tentatively stepped onto the flashlight, Katy saw there was a shadowed bundle under the bus.

  It was a little girl. She was curled like a comma under the drive shaft, fast asleep.

  Twenty minutes later, Hannah Gerlic lay dozing on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance parked just metres from where the minibus had sat. The cabin roared as if the Pacific were crashing on its roof, but Hannah’s parents didn’t seem to mind the deafening noise: each held one of Hannah’s hands. Hannah had woken long enough to yawn, ask to go home, and confess she couldn’t remember one thing that had happened after eating Vee’s enormous lunch.

  Police in raincoats paced outside the ambulance, waiting to be released from the scene. Constable Brian Wenn was counting the minutes to the end of his shift — his girlfriend, Eva, had returned from a w
eek-long conference today and was no doubt lying naked in his bed. Even more pressing, his bladder was full to bursting. Wenn checked his watch, cursed his soaking wet feet, and hurried through the tall grass towards the tree line, unzipping his fly as he went. As his waters mixed with the rain, he glanced idly to his left.

  And so the second happenstance discovery of the night was made.

  A man lay unconscious in the tall, dark grass, his head not two steps away from Wenn’s stream of warm urine.

  46

  The rain stormed down for three days, never stopping, a seemingly endless disgorgement on roofs and roads and car hoods and gardens.

  Residents who just weeks ago had complained bitterly at the council’s water restrictions turned their ire to the ceaseless rain. Elation at the filling of the distant dams that fed the city turned to apprehension as inner-city storm-water drains failed to cope with the torrents. Streets closed. Mains burst. The wide, brown river rose. . and kept rising. Landscape suppliers sold out their stocks of yard bags and sand. Schools closed. Birds too wet to feed and too weary to cling fell dead out of trees.

  Five people drowned.

  Three were in a car trying to cross a floodway from their five-acre property on the city’s western outskirts, swept away in waters that ran far faster than the driver had guessed. The fourth was a Chinese-born shop owner in Fortitude Valley, whose import warehouse had flooded. He had been working with his wife trying to raise the cardboard boxes of teapots, calendars, woks and — incongruously — vibrators off the flooding warehouse floor when a sodden carton at the bottom of one precarious stack slumped and gave way, and a whole mountain of cardboard, ceramic, steel and soft-to-the-touch silicone came down, trapping the man until the waters covered his face. The fifth death was an elderly man whose inquisitive foxhound crept too close to racing creek waters and was swept away. The pensioner, desperate to save his only companion, stepped calmly in after the tiny creature, which witnesses said, screamed like a child until it went under. Its owner drowned without a sound.

  While the river eventually broke its banks in many places, the first flood was over a lobe of land at Tallong, which the waters normally circumvented in a lazy loop. Now, the river was travelling at twenty knots and decided no longer to take the slow way round. The waters rose four, five, eight, ten metres, and then poured across the hundreds of hectares of thickly wooded land — land that had been slated for clearing and construction until the developer withdrew his plans and subsequently suicided. The fast brown waters smashed through trees, uprooted the smallest shrubs, picked up surface boulders, and strained against gums and figs and muttonwood and wild quince.