The Dead Path

by Stephen M Irwin

  “Shh,” he told himself. He couldn’t go back. Something was in there, beyond the pipe. Something that took children. Something that had taken Tristram.

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

  Something that wanted him to come in.

  Fine, he thought grimly. I touched the bird. Here I come.

  He flicked on the flashlight. In the crepuscular gloom of the fog-bound woods, the white-yellow beam did little to calm him. He clenched his jaws and shone the light into the nearest of the twin pipes. What he saw made him reel.

  The tunnel’s length, all four or so meters of it, was thick with spiderwebs: some were fresh and shining like silver wire; some were loose and dusky as old shrouds. Among the webs, dotted like black stars in a diseased firmament, were spiders. Thousands of spiders. The shaking torchlight scanned them: some had round, shining bodies with black osseous legs that stroked the air; others had abdomens orange as spoiled juice, swollen thick and looking full enough to pop; some were small and busy, tending webs with legs that moved as delicately as human fingers; others were as big as tea saucers, hairy and fleshy. Some fussed with spindle limbs over the silk-wrapped corpses of their prey or silk-wrapped bundles of their eggs. The torchlight winked off thousands of black, unblinking eyes.

  Nicholas felt gorge rise from his stomach. How did Tristram force himself through there? How did he not go instantly mad being dragged through that?

  Then another thought struck him: Maybe he did go mad. And maybe he was lucky to, considering his bloody fate.

  Nicholas swallowed back the peppery bile and took the plastic lid off the can. It was a bug bomb. The illustration on its side showed a variety of cartoon insects clasping their hearts in theatrical death. The can rattled as he shook it. Satisfied, he aimed its nozzle at the pipe mouth, put his thumb on the tab and pressed it down with a plasticky click. Insecticide hissed out as the tab locked on, and he threw the erupting spray can hard into the curtains of web in the pipe. He guessed it traveled nearly halfway into the pipe until the webs snagged it.

  He backed away till he could barely see the pipe’s black mouth through the fog. The echoing hiss of the spray in the tunnel sounded low and mean, like the sighing exhalation of some entombed dark god, unhappily woken. The hissing slowed and thinned and died down to a stop.

  For a few moments, nothing happened. Then spiders came crawling from the pipe-first in ones and twos, then by the dozen. They rushed out on panicked legs, or staggered out to perform mad pirouettes, or crawled out weakly, stunned. Some curled and perished on the spot. Some scuttered left and right into the woods. Some scrabbled weakly toward Nicholas; he crushed them with his shoe, nauseated by the dark liquids and small, glossy organs that shot from them.

  It took fifteen minutes for the exodus of dying spiders to cease. Nicholas checked his watch. It was just after nine thirty. He waited a few more minutes for the poison to finish its killing work, then looked around for a stick with which to clear the cobwebs. He found one as thick as a pool cue and returned to the pipe’s mouth. They’ll all be lying on the bottom of the pipe. Oh, Jesus. He hadn’t thought of that. If he’d planned this at all, he’d have bought a disposable pair of plastic coveralls, thick gloves, goggles, and a mask. Moreover, he realized he couldn’t hold the torch, crawl, and clear cobwebs at the same time. He’d have to go in the dark.

  He tucked the torch in the back of his jeans, slipped the one plastic bag he had over his left hand, gripped the stick with his right, sucked in a mighty breath, and crept in.

  As his body blocked the already thin light, the tunnel ahead fell into instant, sepulchral dark. He whisked the stick in front of him, left and right like a blind man’s cane. It tick-ticked off the sides, echoing like chattering teeth. Move fast. Don’t breathe. The first few feet weren’t so bad, but he felt the give of spiny things crushing under his hand and under his knees. And as he went deeper, so became the bed of fallen spiders. His flicking stick grew heavy with web, coated thickly as if with hellish spun sugar from some demented circus sideshow. His knees grew sodden with the juices of squashed arachnids. But what was underhand was worst. The thin bag felt woefully insubstantial as he placed it again and again on the ragged, sometimes shifting bed of spider bodies. He felt the twiggy legs and rounded bulges of the large ones. As his weight shifted onto his arm, it pushed his hand down through a centimeter, then two, then three of inhuman flesh. He vomited. Tears welled and flowed. He sucked in lungfuls of acrid air and filaments of web invaded his mouth. The fumes made him retch again. He scurried forward. The stick, heavier and heavier, failed to clear the curtains of web and they shrouded his face and hair. Dead spiders knocked against his cheeks and eyelids. Those not quite dead clambered up his arms and in his ears. His bagged hand slipped forward and he fell like a horse on ice, his face burying in the hard-soft, dead-alive carpet of spider flesh. He screamed and let go of the stick, propelling himself forward as fast as he could. The circle of light at the other end grew larger and larger. His wet shoes slipped as he scrabbled for purchase, his hands squelched and his sleeves grew soaked. He hurled himself out of the tunnel.

  He leapt to his feet and jumped in circles like a mad dog, wiping his hands furiously on his jean legs and clawing at the gray caul over his face and head. His lungs roared and his head swam. His stomach heaved again, vomiting nothing but salty spit. His heart raced and tears poured from his eyes.

  “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!”

  He pulled spiders from his hair and wiped them from his jacket. Some had gone down the front of his sweater and T-shirt, so he jerked his shirt out violently, shaking the spiny cadavers onto the ground. He stopped his rabid dance. His panicked panting slowed to shuddering breaths.

  He was through.

  C lear of the pipe, Nicholas realized he had no plan beyond getting through the spidery tunnels. Without any other clear choice, he began following the rock wash bed of the gully floor.

  The woods here were even denser than on the other side of the pipe. Ancient trees conspired together, dark limbs intertwining so closely that it was almost impossible to tell where one ended and another began. Vines with ribbed stalks thick as shins curled up trunks and over one another. The forest floor was an unsteady sea with tall waves of damp roots and deep troughs filled with decaying leaves that smelled as cloying and vital as human sweat. The fog was lifting, yet here it remained as dark as evening, and Nicholas couldn’t see more than five meters ahead before the trunks and curling vines merged to become a thick drapery. No breeze stirred the dark ceiling of leaves overhead.

  The streambed underfoot was narrowing. He sensed that he was heading slightly uphill, but the hunched trunks, the fallen trees leaning against each other like drunken titans, and the clutching undergrowth made it impossible to judge. Roots arched over the rolling ground like stealthy fingers. If he could travel straight, he would eventually meet the river. He couldn’t be sure whether the dry watercourse was running straight, twisting left or right, or meandering wildly-it hunted under dark schist and round knobbed elbows of roots.

  He was lost.

  Worse, he was thirsty and, now that his empty stomach had recovered from the crawl through the tunnel, hungry as hell. As he climbed, the rocks grew sparser and the undergrowth wilder. Leaning trees had been covered in thick curtains of vines so they took the form of elephantine beasts, hulking antediluvian monsters with shimmering hides of shadowy jade. Soon, Nicholas was scrambling, climbing hand and foot over saplings and fallen, rotting trunks hoary with moss. He seemed to reach a low crest, and stopped.

  Below, visible through a narrow gap between the tight-packed trees, was a path.

  He carefully edged his way down to it, pushing aside thorny shrubs and crawling between close trunks. After much panting and straining, he slid out onto a narrow stony track that wended between the trees. To his left, the path seemed to go uphill; to his right, it seemed to fall slightly. Any sense of direction was long gone, and without a glimpse of the sun
, he couldn’t pick north from south. He was trying to decide when a flicker of red caught his eye.

  Tucked nearly out of sight behind a tree root off the path was a small patch of strawberries. The plants’ serrated leaves were peppered with tiny fruit each as small as Nicholas’s thumbnail. Seeming to sense that food was near, his stomach growled. He pinched one of the berries off-it was firm but ripe, and deliciously sweet. He knelt and plucked and ate, only stopping when he recalled standing on St. James’s Street eating a large container of strawberries while Cate had a job interview; the runs they gave him an hour later were a loud and painful reminder of the paucity of public toilets in central London.

  His belly no longer grumbling, Nicholas regarded the path again. The trees lining the downward slope seemed less tightly packed and sinister, so he headed that way.

  Yes, but why is there a path?

  Nicholas grew annoyed with his own arguing voice. This was the easiest going he’d had all morning. He could walk without being scratched, there was a mild breeze, glimpses of sunlit sky winked between the leaves overhead. The woods on either side were actually quite pretty. Elkhorn ferns grew from the trunks of some, their green fronds hanging pleasantly like peacetime pennants. The air was crisp and smelled clean and lively. Was he going mad? He reassured himself by remembering the old adage that only the truly insane never question their sanity. But then, he was in the haunted woods of his youth, following the ghosts of murdered children. So, maybe he was crazy. But whether he was or not, he couldn’t deny that this was a lovely little track.

  The path curved as it circumvented first one wide, friendly trunk of a fig tree, and then another, and then straightened again.

  As Nicholas stepped around the last trunk, he stopped and stared.

  The path kept straight ahead, widening slightly. The woods on each side retreated to allow a clearing. Its gently sloping ground was a carpet of low ferns and guinea flowers; at the bottom of the grade was a fast-running creek that burbled over glistening rocks before its clear waters broke into a wide pool a stone’s throw across. An almost perfect circle of blue sky rode overhead.

  But what made Nicholas blink in wonder was the boat.

  Moored at one edge of the pond was a wooden sloop. It was, he thought, the loveliest ship he’d ever seen. She wore white lapped timbers, a fresh blue canopy, and waxed hardwood rails. Her style was old, from the century before last, but her proportions were neat and spry, and she sat very prettily parallel to the shoreline. Sunlight winking off the glass portholes of her wheelhouse made her seem to smile and sparkle.

  Nicholas beamed back, delighted.

  Why is there a boat here?

  “Shh,” he hushed himself again. He stepped off the path over the soft, fragrant blanket of green down to the water’s edge, and ran his hands along the boat’s timber flanks. Her white paint was almost blinding after the gloom of the forest.

  Footsteps. Nicholas turned.

  Coming down the path was the old woman in the pink cardigan, walking her tiny white terrier-the pair he had seen outside the woods on Carmichael Road so many hours ago. The old woman was speaking quietly to her dog, whose tail wagged contentedly at the praise. She held herself tall, reminding Nicholas of the proud elderly women of Paris, always dressed beautifully, walking with grace. Suddenly, the woman noticed him and stopped in her tracks; she was so startled that she dropped the dog’s lead.

  “Garnock,” she called to the terrier.

  Garnock took a few brave steps toward Nicholas.

  This isn’t right…

  “Shh,” he reprimanded himself again-he didn’t want this good mood to pass, and here was someone to share it with.

  “Garnock. Unusual name. Welsh, is it?” he asked.

  The woman looked anxiously behind her to see if there was anyone coming up the path who she might summon help from.

  “I don’t usually see others here,” said the woman. Her voice was clear and strong. Nicholas could see that she would have been a pretty thing in her youth. Garnock took a few more steps toward him and his tail wagged cautiously.

  Now you have to go, said the voice in Nicholas’s head. It’s not too late if you go now.

  He patted the hull of the boat. “I just found it myself. She’s a beaut, isn’t she?”

  The old lady smiled and nodded in agreement, some small relief in her eyes. Still, she watched Nicholas cautiously. “She is indeed.”

  Garnock was just a couple of feet away now. His eyes were brown and shining, his tail started wagging faster.

  Go! For God’s sake, go now!

  “What’s her name?” he asked.

  The old lady nodded at the bow. Nicholas followed her eyes. The boat’s name was printed in black on the white timbers: Cate’s Surprise.

  Nicholas blinked, and looked back at the woman, a question on his lips.

  Garnock jumped, and his teeth sank deeply into Nicholas’s hand.

  It was as if a black shroud fell over the world. The trees rushed in, gnarled branches and green-black leaves closing over the sky. The pond drained into itself, drying in an instant to become a choked bowl of wild and vital thorn bushes. The largest and oldest of the trees all leaned in the same direction, as if away from a mighty gale, and the lush elkhorns that nodded from the tree trunks became hanging shards of rotting cloth or harshly bent rusted iron. The boat heaved over on its side, sucking into itself like a collapsing lung, its white paint stripping away to reveal a skeletal wreck of gray, warped boards. The painted name flaked away to different letters: Wynard.

  Nicholas tried to turn his head, but it whirled vertiginously and his eyes struggled to focus.

  The dog’s white coat dissolved away as if by invisible acid, revealing a dark brown shagginess beneath. Its legs cracked and grew, and from its flanks sprouted another four long, cadaverous shanks. Its snout and face split and peeled away, revealing another one, two, four, six unblinking eyes, and its white teeth cohered to become two curved fangs as big as bear claws, wet and sharp as needles.

  Nicholas looked at his hand-two ugly, red-circle punctures were bleeding slowly. The world of the dark woods spun. With huge effort, he lifted his gaze to the old woman.

  Of all the things, she alone had remained unchanged.

  “How did you enjoy my strawberries?” she asked pleasantly.

  Nicholas’s eyes rolled back in his head and the world went black.

  S inging.

  A woman’s voice from across dark air, a siren song; faint, tugged at jealously by the wind.

  Awareness swam up out of nothingness, like a slow bubble rising through the night sea. Nicholas realized he was moving. His feet and hands felt a million miles distant, ice cold and unreachable. He could not command his legs, arms, lips, eyelids. But he could sense the subtle rise and fall of his chest, although there was a heaviness there. He could hear the rustle of leaves, a surf-like whisper. He was supine and yet he was moving. Under his back, his buttocks, the underside of his thighs and calves, under his forearms and head, were thousands of tiny shifting knuckles. He willed himself to breathe deeper, but his lungs kept at their shallow work, tight and pained as if laboring under a weight.

  The singing grew clearer: “… his face so soft and wondrous fair…”

  He couldn’t open his eyes. He tried another deep breath, but his lungs ignored him and kept their own shallow rhythm. A near but hazy memory surfaced: the things of nightmares.

  “… the purest eyes and the strongest hands…”

  He was being carried up a grade. Slowly, recollections of his last few lucid moments came back in pieces: the boat, the sky, the old woman, the wild strawberries, the juice, the bleeding holes in his hand.

  He tried again. Nothing. He was deep inside himself; only his ears were unfettered, letting in the chittering of tiny legs underfoot and the lilting song.

  “… I love the ground on where he stands…”

  Open your eyes. You can’t fight what you can’t see.

&nb
sp; But he remembered the dog’s flesh falling away, and the huge spider crouched there, dull spiny hairs on its long, multijointed legs, its black eyes sparkling. He was afraid to see. The name on the boat: Cate’s Surprise.

  Was that a memory? Or an infected vision? Whichever, it was mean.

  A new heat bloomed inside him. Anger.

  He focused on his ire, blowing on its embers, brightening it. How dare she? How dare she use Cate’s name? His heart thudded. He told his lungs to breathe deeper. The air sucked in.

  “… I love the ground on where he stands…”

  With a mental fist, Nicholas gripped the bright coal of outrage in his belly, letting it burn and hurt. Good. Now, move it up. He lifted the bright pain to the spot behind his eyes. Forget what you saw before. You don’t know what was real and what was not. What matters is what you see now. He grimly tightened his imagined hand around the coal, letting the pain and the anger grow brighter and sharper, focusing it like the pinpoint of light from a magnifying glass behind his eyes.

  One eyelid cracked open a sliver.

  In the gloom, he could see the weight on his chest was no hallucination. Perched there like a spiny, deformed cat was the spider Garnock. All eight orbs of its stygian, unblinking eyes seemed to be trained on Nicholas’s face-and they noted the movement of his eyelid.

  Oh, Christ, thought Nicholas. I am insane.

  The spider’s two curved fangs were as dark as ebony, rooted in hairs in its head and underslung with two swollen, gray-pink sacs. The points of the fangs were sharp and glistening. They tack-tack-tacked together, a bony clicking like knitting needles that was surprisingly loud.

  “It’s fine,” came the old woman’s voice. “We’re here, anyway. Put him down.”

  Nicholas felt the wave beneath retreat as the knuckle lumps supporting him slipped away first from his head-depositing it on moist-smelling earth-then his shoulders, arms, back, buttocks, legs. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed hundreds of spiders, dark gray and hunched and large as sparrows, streaming away. A jolt of new terror went through him and his stomach heaved.