The Dead Path

by Stephen M Irwin

  Rowena frowned as she pulled away the tissue. A flecked line of blood on the white gauze.

  “One second.” Laine covered the phone with her hand. “I’m sorry, I have to go outside and…”

  Rowena nodded. “Sure. But come back in and I’ll put some pawpaw ointment on that. I’m so sorry.”

  Laine stepped outside. The door shut behind her. Rain tattled on the awning overhead.

  “Sorry. Go ahead.”

  “Ms. Boye, can I ask you about your movements last night?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “If you could please tell me what you did last night, and the times.”

  Laine’s heart started thudding again. She turned around.

  In the back of the store, Rowena was frowning, hands busily tidying.

  “Ms. Boye?”

  “I went to the Anglican-what do you call it? Parsonage?-here in Tallong about eight or so and was there with Reverend Anand till, I guess, ten?”

  The detective asked a few questions to confirm the times, to confirm she drove straight there and back, to confirm what make of car she owned.

  “And I have a Nicholas Close here,” said Detective Waller. “He wants to talk to you.”

  Laine looked into the shop. Rowena was out of sight.

  “Sure.”

  She took the opportunity to slip away into the rain.

  N icholas leaned against the cold black granite of the Police Headquarters building, wanting desperately to sit.

  Rain was hitting Roma Street so heavily that he wouldn’t have been surprised to see the bitumen pit and dissolve. Only by pressing himself against the building could he get any cover from the high, clipped-wing awnings. The metal bench seats out front were all exposed to the rain and rang dully as the heavy drops struck them. Nicholas shut his eyes, figuring anyone passing would take him for a swaying vagrant too pitiful to charge.

  For the last half-hour, he’d been trying not to watch a middle-aged man on the footpath in front of him reel under a barrage of invisible punches, fall to the ground, heave and jerk as he was struck by unseen kicks to his kidneys, his groin, his head. The man’s face was white and wide with terror and, under the steady bombardment of ethereal steel-tipped toes, caved in and bloodied. His eyes came out. His jaw snapped. His fingers bent and their bones broke through skin. Gradually, he stopped his voiceless wailing, spasmed briefly, and was still. Then there was a silent edit in the spool of his death and he was suddenly swaying whole and seemingly drunk beside the steel bench in front of Nicholas, his ghostly clothes dry despite the downpour… and the grisly replay of his murder began again.

  Nicholas was too exhausted to lift his feet and find another spot to wait. It was now well after eleven. His hour and a half in the police building had been almost solid questioning, punctuated with short breaks when the detectives left him alone. He supposed the pauses were designed to allow him to panic and consider confessing. Instead, they gave him time to divine from the questions what might have happened to Hannah Gerlic’s sister, Miriam.

  Detective Waller and that slim male detective had tag-teamed the interview. Each asked slow, deliberate sets of questions: some were repeated over and over; some were rephrased or amalgamated with others; some came out of the blue to catch him off guard. Nicholas’s favorite had been: “Why did Miriam take your cigarettes?” He’d chewed over the cleverness of that while he leaned against the ice-cold wall, recalling how carefully Waller had watched his response. “I never saw her,” he’d replied truthfully. He supposed Waller had been hoping for “I don’t smoke” or better yet, “I don’t know, but the little bitch has still got ’em.”

  “When you picked up Hannah Gerlic, was she alone?” Waller had asked.

  “Yes.”

  Nicholas guessed that this was unusual and Hannah habitually walked home with Miriam.

  “What were the two girls arguing about?” asked Waller.

  “Hannah never spoke to me.”

  The girls were having a fight. That explained their separation.

  “Was Miriam still in her school uniform when you dropped Hannah home?”

  “I never saw Miriam.”

  Miriam had made it home after school, but she’d gone missing afterward-sometime in the night.

  “You say you were at the presbytery with Reverend Anand and Laine Boye. Till when?”

  “I don’t know. Ten or so.”

  “Did you drive straight home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you stop at any shops? Gas station? Parks?”

  “No.”

  He was left alone in the room then for a quarter of an hour, before Waller came in again. Her voice was even, but her frown was heavy as lead.

  “You’re free to go, sir. There’s a taxi stand at the Transit Center across the road.”

  Without realizing why, he’d asked her to phone Laine Boye.

  And so now he was hugging the police building’s front wall, trying to stay dry. He lifted his fingers to his neck. The wooden beads felt warm. His back against the stone felt frozen.

  Eventually, to his surprise, Laine arrived.

  T he car’s tires hissed on the road. Nicholas slumped in the passenger seat. They drove in silence for a long while. He looked at Laine. Her eyes were as gray as the sky.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  Laine glanced at him. Was that a flash of self-consciousness?

  “What do you mean?” she replied.

  “I mean, how do you feel?”

  The rainy-day traffic was stop-start and the cars inched ahead like cattle toward a crush. She didn’t answer, so he spoke again.

  “There are nights I still dream that Cate is lying beside me. And then I wake up. And at that moment when I… remember, I feel like I feel now. Heavy.” He watched the rainy world sliding idly by. “Like if you laid me on the ground I’d just sink into the earth.”

  Laine drove, grim-faced.

  “I used to feel like that,” she said. “Then Gavin killed himself.”

  He looked back at her. Her profile was strong and fine. Hers was a face out of antiquity, anachronistic. She should have been born in a city of Renaissance sculptors, or the daughter of some Pharaoh, not today when culture was a thousand hits on YouTube. No wonder she was always angry.

  As if feeling his gaze, she turned suddenly to face him. “Did you love her?” she asked. “Cate?”

  Nicholas nodded. “Very much.”

  Laine lifted her chin. “You said last night that you can see…” She hesitated. “That you see ghosts. Did you ever see her? Cate? After she died?”

  Nicholas was quiet. For some reason, this seemed deeply personal, like a new lover’s questions about past partners. He didn’t want to answer. But his tongue betrayed him. “Yes.”

  Laine drew a long breath through her nostrils. “You must be so sad.”

  He thought about that. “I’m not sad. I’m angry.”

  Laine smiled. “I was angry. Now I’m sad.” She flicked on the turn signal. “Aren’t we a pair?”

  The car turned onto Coronation Drive, and their speed picked up.

  “Where am I taking you?” she asked.

  Before he could think why, he answered, “The church.”

  She nodded, checked her mirrors, and changed lanes. As she turned, Nicholas saw a small cut on her cheek.

  “What happened to your face?” he asked, and guessed: “Mrs. Boye?”

  “Yes.”

  Her tone said the talking, for now, was over.

  O utside the church, a group of middle-aged and elderly men and women huddled under umbrellas, hardly moving, heads turning this way and that. To Nicholas they looked like a team of mallard ducks-dignified and vulnerable. Their heads all followed Laine’s car as it slowed and stopped. He would have been unsurprised if they’d sprouted wings and fled, honking forlornly. He wound down his window. “Hi. The rectory’s around the side.”

  An old man with a long face and wide, hairy nostrils l
ooked down at him. “We do know.”

  Nicholas shook his head. Then why…?

  “The reverend is dead, and his replacement is in hospital.”

  “Who?” asked Nicholas. “Pritam? Reverend Anand’s in hospital?”

  An old woman with sagging wattles looked at him as if he were a fool. “Do you know any other replacement? We’re discussing what to do.”

  Nicholas looked at Laine.

  At that moment, Laine’s lips lifted in a sudden, pained snarl and her head threw back hard against the headrest. For a moment, her long fingers snatched at the air and then at the fresh wound on her face…

  “Laine!”

  Her gray eyes rolled back in her head and she sank limp into her seat.

  Chapter 24

  H annah sat in her beanbag stroking Swizzle. The cat’s girth was growing in direct proportion to his unwillingness to go outside. Hannah liked his warmth on her lap. If she thought about nothing but the immediate task of scratching behind Swizzle’s ears and keeping the rumbly motor inside him purring, things were okay.

  Her bottom hurt where her father had hit her for lying. Just thinking of how his face had been a twisted fist at once so angry and terrified made her want to start crying all over again.

  She had been dragged up from the depths of ugly sleep by motion, sliding. She’d opened her eyes and looked right up into the pale, angry, scared face of her father. This morning her father took a moment to process the empty bed, the picture frame on the floor, his youngest daughter blinking sleepily on it, before whispering, “Where’s your sister?” The memory of the spiders tumbled back as heavily and hard as stones off a dump truck, and Hannah started to bawl. Her father asked her again and again until Hannah finally stuttered through sobs, “The spiders took her.”

  Before she could explain that she’d had no choice, that if she’d let them in she’d be dead too, or if she’d screamed he and Mum would be, her father spanked her. Hard. And stalked out of the room.

  Hannah hung around in a distant orbit as her parents set fire to the morning with raging phone calls, storming to the car and screeching away, storming back, standing at the door and yelling for Miriam. The fire died and became something quiet and tight-lipped. When Hannah heard her name mentioned, it was quickly snapped up by her father hissing about “ridiculous dreams.”

  It was ridiculous that a black, silent army of spiders would come in the dead of night to steal one girl and, bested, would take her older sister. But it was true. So Hannah sat in the beanbag, petting Swizzle and nursing her still-stinging bum, trying not to think about what had happened to Miriam after the spiders got her. She was still in her beanbag when the police came. When the lady police officer came over and asked Hannah if she’d heard any funny noises in the night, Hannah knew she would be a fool to say anything but “No.”

  Miriam was down in the woods. Hannah searched inside herself for the smallest feeling that disagreed, but found none. But if it hadn’t been Miriam, it would have been her. The fact that she was so relieved not to have been taken by the spiders and cocooned up alive and screaming, to be bitten and poisoned and sucked dry or whatever else spiders did made her feel guilty and even glummer. Something had tried to get her yesterday, leaving the horrible dead bird disguised as a crystal unicorn. It had failed, and instead had taken Miriam to the woods, taken her because Hannah had chosen to hide silently in her room instead of doing something.

  As Hannah sat, her lap warmed by Swizzle and her buttocks by the hot sting of a hard slap, surrounded by a buzz of men and women in blue and her parents clenching each other’s hands, she realized what she had to do.

  She’d do something now. She go down to the woods and try to save her sister.

  Chapter 25

  N icholas sat on the toilet. He thought if he could sit there long enough, he could muster sufficient composure to find his way out. Then his stomach heaved again. He rolled onto his knees just in time and a thin stream of amber bile gushed into the bowl. He gripped the stainless-steel rail beside the pedestal as he vomited.

  He didn’t want to go. It was horrible. But he knew he had to.

  He got to his feet, wiped his mouth with some paper towel, and unlocked the toilet door.

  The dead floated by like bodies on the sea after a tsunami. They rolled by on invisible gurneys, some thrashing wildly, some almost motionless; some choked silently, arched like fragile bridges, some sobbed with pain. They rolled to and fro between the curtained bed bays of the emergency ward.

  Nicholas felt his knees threaten to give way.

  “Help you, mate?” asked a harried male nurse. Nicholas shook his head.

  An old woman suddenly lurched in front of him, tugging on IV lines in her arm that had no doubt been decomposing for who knew how many years. She fell to the floor, looking up at Nicholas, before unseen hands scooped under her thin shoulders and dragged her into a nearby cubicle, depositing her on a small, shifting sea of overlapping ghosts. In their midst, an unshaved patient chewed thoughtfully as he read a newspaper. Feeling Nicholas’s eyes on him, he peered over the paper’s edge.

  “You all right?”

  Nicholas nodded stiffly and hurried away.

  Laine lay on the trolley bed in bay twelve. A saline drip line snaked into her arm. Monitor leads were attached like lampreys to her upper chest. A red-glowing plastic clip was attached to one long-fingered hand like some electrified leech. About her drifted a fog of overlapping ghostly bodies.

  Nicholas fought the tightly-sprung urge in his legs to flee.

  “Yes, sir?”

  A round, black African nurse bowled into the bay, not looking at Nicholas as she quickly grabbed Laine’s chart, scanned it, then went to check the rate on the drip.

  “I brought her in,” he replied.

  “You her husband?”

  Laine’s face was placid, unmindful of the misty sea of death floating around her. Again, Nicholas was struck by the classical lines of her cheeks, her eyes. This is how Orpheus must have found Eurydice, asleep at the bottom of a shifting veil of spirits… but perhaps without the blurts of rough laughter from the doctors’ fishbowl office in the middle of the ward. Again, he noticed the fingernail-fine scratch on her cheek.

  What happened to your face? Mrs. Boye?

  Yes.

  She’d lied. Quill had done this. But how? When?

  “No,” he answered.

  “Relative?”

  Nicholas shook his head.

  “Uh-huh,” said the nurse, suspicious.

  An idea occurred to Nicholas. He reached to his neck and unclasped the elderwood and sardonyx necklace.

  “She wanted this. Can I put it on her?”

  “No.”

  “It means a lot to her,” he said.

  “Then why in’ she wearing it already?” The nurse glanced at the rough necklace, then fixed Nicholas with a humorless, don’t-waste-my-time look.

  “Fine. Can you give it to her for me?” he asked.

  The nurse watched him for a moment, sighed far too loudly, then held out her hand.

  He dropped the necklace onto her light brown palm. As its touch left his skin, the world suddenly lurched and he staggered. He heard a rustling in his ear, a high-pitched squeal like a million cicadas trying to burrow into his skull. The bay and the nurse swam out of focus.

  “Sir?”

  “Feeling…”

  The nurse pressed the necklace back into Nicholas’s palm and shut his fingers over the wood and stone. The world steadied, leaving only the aching weariness.

  The nurse was watching him anxiously with careful eyes. “I think you need it much as her.”

  She looked away and wouldn’t meet his eyes again.

  “Nurse?”

  She hesitated beside the bay’s front curtain, anxious to be gone.

  “Can you tell me where Intensive Care is?” he asked.

  “Take the elevator to five,” she said, and lifted her meaty arms to wave him out of the ward as if
he were an evil smell.

  P ritam was in a closed ward sealed with glass. An oxygen tube fed his nostrils. A neck brace held his face rigid, and a web of stainless-steel frames hovered over his body. To Nicholas, he was a rock in a squally sea, lying motionless as men and women surged around him silently: jerking, vomiting, dying, lapping into one another like morbid smoke. There were so many that they were a blur, but through the thrashing haze Nicholas saw their eyes-dozens of eyes-watching him.

  His heart beat fast and his neck grew hot.

  I’m going to faint, he thought.

  Just go. Pritam won’t know.

  The duty nurse walked past and Nicholas asked her in a voice that, he hoped, sounded more upset than selfishly miserable how Reverend Anand was doing. She explained that the operation to repair a split renal artery had been successful, and he would be in surgery again tomorrow morning to set his pelvis, left leg, and two breaks in his clavicle. A CT scan had revealed a minor swelling of the brain that was being monitored.

  The nurse left, and Nicholas fixed his gaze on a spot in the corner where no dead seemed to accrete.

  Quill. She’s done this without raising a sweat. As Suzette said, she’s divided us. And divided, and divided. What a joke. What a fool I was to think we could do anything.

  And Miriam Gerlic was dead; he was grimly certain of it.

  Pritam opened his eyes and blearily looked around.

  Nicholas called a nurse. Through the glass, he watched her enter Pritam’s small room and speak with him, asking basic questions. Can you tell me your name? Do you know where you are? Do you know what day of the week this is? Do you remember what happened? Pritam’s eyes wandered across the trelliswork of steel supporting him, over the ceiling, down to the glass and finally found Nicholas. His mouth moved, and the nurse pursed her lips. She reluctantly waved Nicholas inside.

  He didn’t want to go, but his legs shuffled him in.

  “You can stay for a minute,” said the nurse, stumping out. “The doctor’s on his way.”

  Nicholas looked down at Pritam. The young reverend’s normally brown face was as pale as milk. He raised his eyebrows.