The Dead Path

by Stephen M Irwin

  Only Hannah and Tristram were left.

  “Knife…” breathed Quill.

  Nicholas’s traitorous right hand reached up and pulled it from between his teeth… and lowered it down in front of Hannah’s face.

  “ Nicholas! ” screamed Hannah.

  “Ready!” hissed Quill.

  He lifted Hannah higher; her throat was a white curve. She was trembling.

  He could feel the moon’s cold glare on his neck, ready to open like a great and hungry eye.

  “Ready,” hushed Quill.

  His fingers lazily gripped the knife a little tighter and touched its razor blade to Hannah’s throat.

  “Oh please… I w-want my Mummy…” she whispered, a sob.

  And through her, around her, he could see Tristram was turning. His lips moved, grim, cursing his murderer. Shaking with fear, but not crying. Fighting to the end. Oh Tris… Tristram’s skin grew bright as moonlight touched it.

  No! thought Nicholas. I can’t watch my best friend die!

  And Nicholas closed his eyes.

  The ladder underfoot creaked. Just a peep. His weight had shifted, just a fraction.

  “What?” said Quill, as if she’d sensed the spell shudder. The treetops in the distance turned mirror silver. The clouds were breaking. Soon-twenty seconds, fifteen-it would be here.

  Nicholas’s heart skipped faster, shaking off its metronome beat. I did it, he thought. I closed my eyes!

  Tristram was gone. Only Hannah remained in the cage.

  The mercury tide of bright moonlight was racing across the treetops, closer and closer as the clouds overhead skidded away. Closer, closer…

  “And,” hissed Quill.

  “No!” begged Hannah.

  “Here!”

  The moonlight kissed his skin. His heart thudded hard as a storm, the blood crushed inside him like a swollen dam, ready to burst. His mind became a sharpening funnel, focusing every ounce of strength, every joule of hot hatred, every hurt he wanted to bring down on Quill into his shoulder.

  “Now!” crowed Quill. “Cut, my pretty man!”

  “ Up! ” he yelled. And he let the dam inside him break.

  The little knife sliced…

  Air.

  It wasn’t dramatic, just a tiny twist of the shoulder. But the blade missed skin by millimeters.

  “What?” hissed Quill. She was marble in the moonlight, a white thing. A wrinkled maggot. “Cut the whelp!”

  He opened his left hand. Hannah’s hair fell about her face, and she slumped in a faint to the bottom of the bone and twisted-branch sphere. The cage rocked back a fraction.

  “No,” said Quill. “No, no, no…”

  He shifted a foot and let go of the knife-its blade clattered against wood and bone. The spell was breaking. With both hands, he gripped a cold cross-member of the cage.

  “No,” growled Quill. “No!”

  “ Back! ” Nicholas hurled his weight backward and his arms wrenched straight, pulling against the top of the cage. It rocked violently on its low tower.

  Quill scrambled to grab the cage.

  “Fool!” she hissed. “What’re ye doing!”

  The cage teetered. Quill finally grabbed hold of the opposite side of the woven sphere with both gnarled hands, pulling her weight down against Nicholas’s counterpull.

  And as he felt her hang her weight off it, he released his own grip. He fell backward through cold air.

  Quill realized her mistake too late. The low tower leaned, and the ugly cage began to roll over onto her.

  “Oh no!” she screamed.

  The cage toppled, carrying unconscious Hannah within and Quill beneath it, and hit the ground with a loud and sickly splintering crash.

  Nicholas was on his back, winded, drowning in pain and unable to breathe.

  He curled onto his side, mouth wide, frantically willing a scrap of air to draw into his burning lungs. His diaphragm finally jittered alive and he sucked in a throaty gasp.

  His eyes rolled, hunting for Quill.

  The old woman was on the ground. She had clung to the cage as it fell, but it had rolled as it collapsed; only one leg had been caught beneath it, and now she strained to pull it from the splintery grip of spiny wood.

  “Feck ya!” she hissed, but Nicholas didn’t know if she was cursing him, herself, or someone else. Her hands patted the earth, crawling like gray crabs, hunting.

  For the knife, he thought. Where is it?

  “Where is it?” she whispered, a dry pipe rasp, echoing him. She strained, with an effort that amazed him, pushed up against the ruined cage, and pulled her leg free.

  On opposite sides of the cage, Nicholas and Quill both rolled to their knees. Both scoured the sandy ground with eyes and fingers for the knife.

  “You fucking bitch,” whispered Nicholas.

  “Feck you,” she hissed again, this time surely to him.

  Inside the deflated gridwork, Hannah moaned, coming awake.

  “You cut their throats!” he spat, fingers crawling under the hard, gnarled branches and into the damp soil.

  “For Him!”

  “For yourself, you greedy whore!”

  “Feck you,” she repeated quietly. “Where is it?”

  Nicholas painfully rocked back on his haunches. The cold moonlight made the bones in the cage as white as the ribs of undersea things. A wink of silver! His eyes jerked to the shine off the keen edge of the knife. The weapon lay just outside the bars. Near to him. Far from Quill.

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  But Quill was grinning.

  She’d remembered Hannah’s paring knife, and pulled it from the corpse folds of her clothes-a sharp triangle of bright metal.

  “Hannah,” whispered Nicholas.

  The girl, still bound in gray-white silk, lay on the bottom of the collapsed cage, halfway between him and Quill.

  The spoiled oyster skin around Quill’s eyes wrinkled. “Are ya quick, boy? Quicker than yer little dead blond friend?”

  Nicholas blinked, wondering which to dive for-Quill? The hatch? The knife?

  Quill didn’t hesitate. She scuttled around the side of the cage like a crab.

  Nicholas leapt for the hatch, determined to pull Hannah out. He grabbed the cold, twisted timber, and pulled, but the hatch didn’t budge. Its frame had distorted when the cage had crashed down.

  Fast as forked lightning, Quill’s free hand struck between the bone and branch bars and roughly snatched a ragged handful of Hannah’s hair. Hannah gasped, her eyes fluttering open.

  “Get off her!” yelled Nicholas.

  Quill ignored him and pulled Hannah toward her by her hair. Hannah shrieked in new pain, conscious now. Her eyes flew open, unfocused, hunting. They found Nicholas.

  “Mr. Clo-”

  His name died in the girl’s mouth as Quill slowly slid her other hand between the bars. In it was the glittering blade.

  In the corner of his eye, Nicholas saw a twin sparkle-Quill’s wicked little knife-jutting from the dark sand under a snapped cage branch. His fingers closed around it. It was as useless as a burned match with him so far from Quill.

  “He is cruel and kind, isn’t He?” twittered the old woman. “Eh, pretty man? I lose my fine old knife but He provides me wi’ another!” She laughed. Wind tickled the trees, and their leaves whispered approvingly.

  Hannah kicked and struggled, but Quill wrenched her hair tight. She tested the paring knife’s blade with her thumb, and nodded. A shadow passed over the sandy circle of trees. Quill looked up. Overhead, the moon slipped momentarily behind a ragged cloud.

  “Let me g-” cried Hannah, but her words were cut short as Quill cruelly twisted her hair even tighter. The girl screamed in fresh pain.

  Quill looked over at Nicholas. Her mouth creaked open in an ugly, raw-gummed smile. “Let’s send her on her way, then,” she whispered, “so that you and I can be.”

  “Don’t, Rowena,” whispered Nicholas. “Don’t do it.”

 
Quill looked at the sky as a patient mother regards a wayward child. “Blood is the only sacrifice that pleases the Lord.”

  Hannah stared pleadingly at Nicholas, eyes wet with pain and wide with terror.

  The clouds rode over the moon-over… over… nearly…

  And, suddenly, an idea arrived. As clear and bright as the pending moonlight, casting everything in Nicholas’s mind sharp and lucid. He knew what to do.

  “Rowena,” he said softly. He was surprised at how calm he felt. “Rowena?”

  Quill looked over at him.

  He lifted her little, sharp knife to his own wrist.

  The old woman blinked. “No,” she whispered.

  The moon broke clear of the clouds.

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

  “No!” cried Quill.

  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! No! ” Her voice was sprung tight with terror.

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

  “Forever.”

  “Noooooo!” Rowena Quill’s words 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 swiveled as she scanned the trees. She dropped Hannah’s paring knife, let go the girl’s hair. 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. His vision seemed to blacken at the edges, like paper charring. But he could see she lay slumped within the broken cage, her eyes wide and locked on the stream of crimson pulsing from Nicholas’s open wrist. On her throat, a tiny nick, no deeper than a paper cut.

  He nodded, relieved.

  “Okay,” he whispered, and his vision silvered. His spine seemed to turn to water and he fell down onto the cold sand.

  The wind stopped. The trees grew still.

  Mr. Close! Nicholas! He could hear Hannah’s shriek, but it sounded dreamlike, a thousand miles distant.

  The world looked far away, even the moonlit cage of bone and branches before him seemed small and distant, as if seen 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 sweater, 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 sweater 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 seawater in the icy moonlight, black as pitch in shadow. They were hushed. Anticipating. The only movement was the opening and closing of Hannah’s tearstained jaw as she silently cried his name.

  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. Meaty and redolent 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 vapors 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 a hard 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 toward it, spellbound. A long, long shadow…

  Then, a hoof. As large as a bucket and dark as stone, gray-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-gray cast blue as gunmetal by the glacial moonlight. Muscular and long. Its knee bent backward 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 gray 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 ox-like, 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, toward her cottage.

  A tiny sound. Hannah moaned softly.

  She was staring at the creature.

  Nicholas opened his mouth to speak, to try to comfort her, but only a hiss of air escaped his lips.

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

  Hannah’s eyes rolled back in her head.

  The Green Man stooped and, with no more trouble than a man parting tissue paper, flicked open the bone and branch cage, reached inside, and picked her up.

  “Hannah,” whispered Nicholas.

  The Green Man turned at the sound. In an instant he loomed over Nicholas, a colossal wave about to crash, bringing his wide,
dark face right before Nicholas’s.

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

  And the Green Man chuckled.

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

  Nicholas’s eyes lost their focus, and the night world became as black as the center of the earth.

  Chapter 42

  H annah 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. The spiderwebs had been plucked off her. Overhead, she could see that the clouds were moving again, rolling in a steady dark wave toward 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.

  Some one.

  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.