The Dead Path

by Stephen M Irwin

  “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.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Suzette didn’t answer. She was staring at the front door to Plow amp; Vine Health Foods. She leaned closer and frowned.

  “Look.”

  He followed her gaze and felt his stomach take a slow roll.

  In the 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, Suze,” 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.

  “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.

  K atharine 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 there’s something evil out there.

  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.”

  A fter dinner, the three members of the Close family sat on the couch 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 Harbor, 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 paddywagon into the watchhouse. Guyatt made no effort to hide his face. He walked as if he were caught in a dream.

  N icholas 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.

  Only now, he could see they were haunted.

  Tallong children were still dying.

  He was suddenly wide awake.

  Elliot Guyatt had confessed to killing the Thomas child, and the boy’s 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 was a bad dream, a hallucination brought on by sheer terror and the thump of the tree branch.

  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 had been murdered in the woods.

  Nicholas rolled to look out the window.

  Jesus. He wondered if Tris had been trapped down there for twenty-five years, his ghost caught in that awful loop, experiencing over and over the mind-tearing fear that had wrenched at every cell in their bodies as Teale had chased them. Twenty-five years, running in terror between those dark trees. The thought tightened Nicholas’s throat.

  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.

  Chapter 7

  K nocking. It wrenched him up from a scuttling black dream that lost all its detail as his eyes opened.

  Heavy knuckles rapping on wood. Someone was at the front door.

  The sea gray of predawn stole between the venetian blinds. Nicholas rolled over and checked his watch. Quarter to six. Who knocked at quarter to six in the morning? 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.

  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 gray swamp. The skin under his eyes looked as thin as old chicken meat; the eyes themselves were blue and overly bright.

  “Can I help you?” Nicholas asked carefully.

  But the man said nothing. He simply stared at Nicholas, fighting a smile and winning. The look on his face was desperate, starved, and hauntingly familiar.

  The man finally spoke. “Nicholas.”

  Nicholas blinked. The voice had a timber that opened up memories. Then the little smile bobbed again on the man’s lips, a brave boat in drowning seas, and years fell away. Nicholas recognized a face hadn’t seen for twenty-five years. It was a face he literally used to look up to. A Boye boy-Tristram’s older brother.

  “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. “Is everything okay?”

  Gavin didn’t answer. Instead, he looked slowly over his left shoulder and then over his right at the empty street. Above pine trees in a distant park, a dozen or so crows wheeled and dipped in the gray sky like windblown black ash. Gavin’s movements sent a sudden chill flood through Nicholas’s gut. 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.

  “It’s kind of early, Gavin.” Nicholas wanted it to sound casual, but the words came out cracked, his mouth suddenly dry as sand. “Do you want to stop by for a visit a little later?”

  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 reached.

  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.”

  “That was a long time ago, Gavin. Listen-”

  “Tris…” interrupted Gavin, his voice drifting far away. “Trissy was the smart one.”

  Nicholas watched the big man stand there, his eyes decades away. Nicholas knew this was his chance to shut the door. He reached slyly for the edge.

  That instant, Gavin’s eyes flicked and locked on Nicholas’s. “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.

  Gavin cradled the gun easily in his hands and pointed the rough hole at Nicholas’s midriff.

  “A message,” said Nicholas, his empty cold-jelly stomach threatening to erupt. “From who?”

  Gavin watched him a long moment. Nicholas thought it was like staring into an insect’s eyes-there was nothing human there. Gavin shrugged and shook his head as if to say, I just can’t remember. With an easy, firm movement he shifted the gun so that its barrel stared at Nicholas’s face.

  And suddenly the cold jelly was gone from Nicholas’s gut. In its place was a warm, new idea. Here it is. A way out. And I don’t have to do anything. Just stand here a moment longer and it’s over.

  He looked up to Gavin’s eyes. They were brimming full, and his patchy cheeks were wet.

  “Tris loved you coming over. Saturdays. Cheese sandwiches. Watching Combat. Remember?”

  Nicholas nodded. The two men looked at each other a long moment. A calm statement formed in Nicholas’s mind. He’s going to shoot me now. And from that warmth bloomed another thought: No more ghosts.

  “It’s okay, Gavin,” he whispered.

  Gavin nodded. With a practiced hand, he drew back the gun’s bolt and chambered a round. The street was still. No one had an inkling that in a few heartbeats, a man was going to die.

  Nicholas suddenly realized his fingers in his pocket had curled around something-wood beads and stone. The necklace Suzette had given him.

  Gavin cocked his head. His eyes lost their sharp focus. His lips trembled. When he spoke, his voice was so soft that Nicholas wasn’t sure he heard right.

  “Tristram touched the bird. But it should have been you.”

  Gavin put the sawn barrel under his own jaw and pulled the trigger. The crack was sudden and as visceral as a lightning strike. Nicholas jumped.

  The crows wheeling in the sky galvanized and scattered. Gavin was still standing. His lower jaw was mostly gone. He shook his head stupidly and the flaps of skin and white bone shook like a chicken’s wattle. He shrugged, and his cheeks lifted the broken flesh-a macabre, embarrassed smile at his error. He swiftly chambered another round, put the gun deep under his chin.

  “Gavin-”

  Crack. This time, the top of his head seemed to levitate slightly. He crumpled to the ground like a dressing gown that had missed its hook. The gun clattered on the stoop.

  In the next street over, a dog began barking. To the south, the gray sky became a curtain of slate where rain was falling.

  Nicholas watched Gavin’s body for a moment, then let himself fold to sit on the front step. A packet of John Player Specials poked out of the dead man’s jacket pocket. Nicholas leaned forward and pulled it out. Then he fished in the pocket again, found a lighter.

  “Nicholas?!”

  Two pairs of bare feet rushed down the hall toward him. Nicholas lit a cigarette. “It’s okay,” he said. “I got the door.”

  “Oh my goodness…” whispered Katharine.

  “Who is it?” asked Suzette. Her face was as white as paper.

  “Gavin Boye.” He sucked in lungfuls of smoke. His hands shook. “He was a smoker.”

  “Oh my goodness.”

  Nicholas fought the urge to cough. He could feel his sister and mother standing, staring. “Maybe phone someone?” he suggested.

  “I’ll go,” whispered Suzette.

  Heads were poking out of the doors and windows of neighboring houses. Nicholas raised his hand to them. Then he felt something on his lip and wiped it off. The gobbet was hard white and soft pink. He retched dryly between his knees.

  “I’ll get a cloth,” Katharine said thinly, and walked away on unsteady legs.

  As Nicholas wiped the ropy spittle away, his eyes were drawn to the truncated rifle that lay neatly beside Gavin’s body. Something was carved into the stock. The gouges in the walnut were fresh, pale against its darker burnished surface. The figure was a rough oval. From it sprouted two jagged lines like antlers. Within the oval was a symbol: a vertical slash with a half-diamond arrowhead on one side.

  Nicholas flipped the rifle over so Suzette wouldn’t see it.

  B y ten o’clock, Nicholas had counted eleven police officers step through the front gate, and Katharine Close had made tea for all of them. Four had arrived-lights and sirens-in answer to Suzette’s telephone call, then another two who left soon after discovering the claim had already been staked, then the police photographer accompanied by the scientific officer who phoned an armory specialist.

  Finally, two plainclothes detectives arrived, a slim man and a woman. Nicholas instantly forgot the man’s name, but the woman was Waller.

  “Detective Fossey,” said Nicholas. “Out of the jungle today?”

  Waller’s ever-present scowl deepened.

  “The name is Waller, Mr. Close.”

  Nicholas felt too tired to explain his little joke, so he simply nodded.

  Waller watched him a moment longer, then stepped back to regard the flecks of gore on the very spot on the Close porch wher
e she’d stood so recently during her fruitless search for the missing Thomas boy. Nicholas saw her heavy frown lift slightly and her eyes flicker with something he couldn’t quite define-doubt? unease?-and he almost felt pity for her. Then, her gaze landed on him and her scowl returned. The moment was gone.

  “Can we talk, Mr. Close?”

  Nicholas nodded wearily, and Waller’s partner asked Nicholas to, once again, describe what happened. Nicholas sighed and, for the fifth time, recounted the story of Gavin’s unexpected arrival and even more unexpected departure. The male detective took notes. Waller watched Nicholas from under knitted brows.

  As usual, and without questioning himself, he omitted the bulk of the conversation he’d had with Gavin, restricting it to Gavin saying that he’d heard Nicholas was back, and that he felt it should have been Nicholas, not Tristram, who died in 1982.

  “Died?” asked the male detective.

  “Murdered,” answered Nicholas. “Like the Thomas boy. You guys should keep records. They’re quite handy.”

  “You were involved in a homicide when you were a child?”

  “I nearly was the homicide when I was a child,” said Nicholas.

  Tristram touched the bird. But it should have been you.

  He was awfully tired. Shock, he knew, could weary a person, but this was just fucking tedious.

  “I hadn’t seen Gavin in more than twenty years. I don’t know how he knew I was back, but it’s not exactly a state secret. I’m sure he was resentful that Teale murdered his brother instead of me. And yes, these are his smokes.”

  Nicholas lit another one, and offered the open pack to the detectives. They refused, and he saw them exchange a glance.

  Katharine arrived quietly at the living room doorway with a refreshed tray of tea and cups, placed it, and just as silently retreated. Nicholas just wanted to sleep.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “You guys…”

  “Is that it?” asked the male detective.

  “I really fucking wouldn’t mind if it was.”

  He rubbed at his stubbled chin and felt a lump come away. It was a piece of pinkish bone the size of a match head. He felt his tongue sink back in his throat. He just wanted to shower and get to bed.