The Dead Path

by Stephen M Irwin

  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 seawater 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.

  H e 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, lightless 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.

  Chapter 43

  T hat 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 toward the parked minibus they’d arrived in. They tramped up the checkered steps, stamping hard to shake off the water, switching off torches, tutting to their neighbors 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 tires. 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.

  T wenty minutes later, Hannah Gerlic lay dozing on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance parked just meters 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 weeklong 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 toward 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.

  Chapter 44

  T he 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 reservoirs that fed the city turned to apprehension as inner-city stormwater 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 traveling at twenty knots and decided no longer to take the slow way round. The waters rose four, five, eight, ten meters, 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 s
mashed through trees, uprooted the smallest shrubs, picked up surface boulders, and strained against gums and figs and muttonwood and wild quince.

  No one but the spiders perched high in rain-lashed branches were there to see a wave of brown water gush between the bristling trunks to drown a garden of fragrant herbs and smash against a tiny cottage. An hour later, the insistent, powerful tide sent a floating trunk like a battering ram into the cottage: the collision swept one wall clean away. With the structure breached, the waters soon took the other three walls, and the cottage was gone. A cellar beside the cottage filled first with water and then with mud, burying forever a steel box surrounded by wet ash, the mummified remains of an Aboriginal boy named Billy Fry who went missing from the Our Lady of the Rosary Orphanage in 1916, and the charred body of an impossibly old woman. One door to the cellar was carried off by the swirling waters and ended up punching a hole in the hull of a catamaran moored fifteen kilometers downstream. The other door, like the cellar itself, was drowned in black mud.

  A sagging cage of wood and bone within a ring of trees floated away and broke up gradually, tossed among the living branches of yellow wood and spotted gum. Two small knives were lost forever.

  One early morning revelation to the residents of the city was the reappearance of the ferry Wynard. A dizzy Lazarus, the ferry floated with her hull upturned to the thundery skies, like a turtle emerging from long hibernation. Her gray timbers threatened at every moment to sink forever, yet she bobbed downstream with the grace of a retired soprano convinced to make one final curtain call.

  She passed the rain-washed glass towers of the city proper, and finally was caught by enterprising young men from the Kangaroo Point Abseiling Club, who appropriated one unpopular member’s old ropes, attached a makeshift grapple, and snagged the Wynard from the shore. They sold her carcass on eBay for almost three thousand dollars.

  A s the flood waters plowed through the woods, Nicholas Close slept in his hospital bed.

  He was tended in shifts by three women: firstly by Laine Boye, then by his mother, then by his sister. Suzette would wait for the nurses to leave the ward and then trace strange symbols with fragrant water on Nicholas’s forehead and over his heart. Neither Katharine nor Laine protested, just nodded and watched.

  The doctors informed all three women that there was nothing gravely wrong with Nicholas’s body: it had recovered surprisingly well, although the reattached tendons of his left hand would never again close a full fist. He had, however, lost a lot of blood and the lasting risk was to his brain, which had been starved of good blood flow for a long while. Unfortunately, any damage to his brain would only be apparent if and when he woke again.

  The three women watched and waited.

  D etective Anne Waller visited twice.

  The first time, she came alone, spoke with Nicholas’s doctor, then stood beside Katharine at his bedside. Katharine noted the way the detective’s eyes scrutinized every detail of Nicholas’s unconscious face, his hands, his heavily plastered wrist.

  Finally, Waller said quietly, “I never pegged him as a suicide attempt.”

  Katharine wasn’t sure if there was a question buried in the words. If there was, an answer arose by itself.

  “He loved his wife very much.”

  Waller kept her stern gaze on Katharine’s son for several more long seconds, then left without a word.

  The next time Waller came back to the hospital, she was accompanied by a male detective. She marched straight up to Katharine and informed her that the Department of Public Prosecutions would not be pursuing any charges against her son for firearm offenses, including the shooting of Hannah Gerlic.

  Katharine followed the detectives all the way to their unmarked car, quizzing them relentlessly, until Waller finally admitted that the Gerlic child insisted that Nicholas did not shoot her and she had only fuzzy recollections of how the lead pellet had gotten into her calf.

  “And where’s the gun?” asked Katharine.

  Waller levelled a long, discontented stare at Katharine, then nodded for the other detective to drive them away.

  Katharine guessed the answer. There was no gun. The floods had taken it.

  Nicholas slept.

  Chapter 45

  H e opened one eye at 2:13 a.m., just as the last of the flooding rain fell on the city and the clouds pulled close their coats to scurry out to sea.

  He was certain he was dead. He was certain that he was lying in Quill’s cottage, waiting to enact again and again the trudge to the cellar, the walk to the ring of trees, the horror of placing Hannah in the cage of bone, and the cutting of her throat. So much blood. So wearying. But then he remembered… it was not Hannah’s throat that had been cut.

  Nicholas opened his other eye. He wasn’t in the cottage. His fingers inched to his left wrist and felt the hard sleeve of plaster there. He rolled his head one way, toward the window.

  Stars trembled above the subsiding river.

  He rolled the other way, and saw her.

  Laine was in a cot bed beside his, her face pale and lean and grimly tight, even in sleep.

  He watched her a long time. Missing Cate. Exploring Laine’s face. Wondering if he was glad he was alive.

  He rolled back to stare at the ceiling. There were things to be remembered. Incredible things. The sight of something awesome and terrible. But as he mined the thought, ready to expose its shape, sleep dragged at him like insistent imps. He would sleep now, and remember tomorrow.

  But by dawn, his memory of the Green Man had vanished as completely as had the rain.

  T he doctors conducted cognizance tests, assayed his blood, examined his urine, and decided there was no reason for him not to be discharged.

  Laine helped Nicholas pack. The silence between them wasn’t uncomfortable: it was small and warm and as sad as reading the headstone of a stranger’s child.

  She took him home.

  As he walked from the road to the front gate and then to the front porch, his head turned this way and that. He refused to go inside and sat on the front steps, watching the street. Laine realized he was searching for Gavin’s ghost, so she left him alone.

  N icholas waited on the porch outside 68 Lambeth Street for a full hour, watching workmen with shovels follow a truck up the road, scooping the gutters clear of debris.

  Gavin’s ghost never showed.

  Nicholas held his jaw tight and went inside to have tea with the three women.

  H e sat for long hours looking out his childhood bedroom window at the streets of Tallong, trying to remember. His mother, his sister, and Laine all asked him in their different ways what had happened the night that Hannah Gerlic had slipped away from home and had been found under an SES minibus hours later.

  He couldn’t remember.

  Nicholas sent his gaze over denuded trees, over eroded streets half-closed with orange emergency barriers, over energy company crews rising in cherry pickers to repair power lines. That was not entirely true: there were two memories.

  The first was a clear picture in his mind-solid and smooth as marble-of following Hannah’s pointing finger to the rippling waters of the gully creek and seeing rafts of small, moving things struggling to escape the dark water. But the instant he recognized the shifting masses as arachnids, the tape inside his brain ran out, and his next recollection was of waking in the hospital and seeing stars over the flooded night river.

  And there was another, fragmented memory. It hardly deserved to be called that: it was more a wisp, a faint scent on the fickle air of recollection. A dream.

  It was of moving. Of being carried through the woods. The air had smelled wet and thick and vivid with greenery. And a voice was speaking to him, not in words, but in a vibration that carried through his body and into his mind. What it said was unclear, but it was as primal and lustful as the thunder of the ocean, and also deathly sad and doomed. A dream.

  He watched as the energy company crew lowered the boom with its cage and the truck
drove away.

  N icholas asked Suzette to walk with him to the woods.

  They spoke little on the way down, batting between them recollections of schoolteachers and the venial offenses of childhood. They stopped at Carmichael Road, and looked across at the woods. Neither said a word for a long while.

  The trees had been given new life by the recent downpours. The sun winked on their leaves, which shimmered with green luster, and their lightly laughing tops rolling up the gentle hills to the river. They were still dark and dense, but there was no foreboding anymore. No sense of things lurking. No gravity to draw you in, no ill shiver to send you hurrying. The woods were plain, and vulnerable.

  “It’s gone,” said Suzette.

  “Yes.”

  “ She’s gone.”

  “Yes.”

  Suzette nodded, took his arm, and brother and sister walked home.

  Epilogue

  H annah waited and waited for him to come.

  Eventually, the telephone rang, and she ran to the living room to answer-but her mother beat her to it.

  Mrs. Gerlic was speaking with him. Her voice was snipped and severe, warning him not to call, that Hannah was fine, thank you, but to please stay away. She hung up.

  But Hannah knew he would come. He was a good man, a fine man. A brave man. A little misguided, though.

  Her leg was healing nicely. She felt quite good and told her parents so. She went to Miriam’s funeral and cried at all the right spots.

  The police asked her questions about the night that she and Nicholas went into the woods, but she said all she could remember was finding a shotgun on the path and touching it even though she knew she shouldn’t, and dropping it and it going off with a very scary bang. Everything else was… Well, that was all she could remember.

  She said she was sorry for sneaking out, and everyone believed her.

  But she did remember. She remembered everything.