The Darkening

With the woods just a few feet away.

He knew he had to go — now. He kicked the bird and its strange woven head into the grass, and grabbed his port. He shoved his arm into the loop, missed, shoved again, missed again. His vision was edged with glutinous, dizzy stars. Finally, he got his arm through the strap, and straightened just as the silence was broken.

The grass crunched behind him.

Deep slices through the dry grass. Heavy, deliberate footfalls. Stealthy and close. The stagnant air had suddenly thickened with the odour of sweet rot, alive as the cloying whiff around the top of an old septic tank. Tangy and ugly. Something was coming up behind him. Something from the woods.

Bright white terror filled him. His adrenal gland poured its juice into his blood and his heart galloped and his small legs tensed and sprang. . Run!

Without turning, he flew.

4

2007

On the fourth morning after Nicholas returned home from London, the rain had gone. The cloudless morning sky was the brittle blue of artic ice, and abberant winds dragged the temperature down to three degrees. The chill whispered its way between the VJ boards and the loose casement windows of Suzette’s bedroom.

Nicholas woke feeling more buoyant than he had for a long time. The slope-shouldered weariness that always arrived a moment after waking — when he confirmed that he was alive and Cate was dead and London was muddling grey and busy regardless — didn’t come. He sat up. The sun was still below the horizon, but he could see how the cold winds had scrubbed the sky clean and the day would be beautiful and bright. He felt, he realised, the best he had since Cate died.

Knowing this delicate feeling of warm neutrality could easily slip away like a wriggling, diamond-scaled fish into abysmal waters, he decided to prolong the pleasantness as long as he could. He quickly pulled on his jeans, hooded cardigan and yesterday’s socks. He would walk the streets of his childhood suburb and drum up a breakfast appetite.

The Closes’ house at 68 Lambeth Street was a bulldog of a building with beige weatherboard flanks hunched on stumps and scowling down the hill at its neighbours. The wrought-iron gate opened silently, its hinge spikes still damp from last night’s rain.

Nicholas set out into the brisk wind. The walking felt good and easy. He was tall and lean; striding down the hill and forcing his enervated blood to move seemed to improve his already fair mood. He’d been away and, yes, terrible things had happened, but now he was home. New choices were possible. He could get fit. He could get a job. He could start again.

As he walked, he saw that his impression last night that his childhood suburb had been locked in time was wrong. Some things had changed during his absence. Sentences of chamferboard Queenslanders were punctuated by malapropos Tuscan-styled villas. The Sheehans’ house was gone, replaced by a two-storey block of flats. A tiny roundabout, its axis a bright fountain of yellow verbena, had been installed where Lambeth and Crittendon Streets crossed. But most of the original houses remained, refreshed dames under new paint seated coyly behind neat gardens.

The sun crested the horizon, and treetops were lit a mild gold. Nicholas breathed deeply. The stiff breeze brought fragrant snatches of wisteria. This was good. Life had gone on without him. Things did change. People survived.

He turned the corner into Myrtle Street. Halfway along, a small row of shops sat huddled under the long fingers of a massive poinciana.

Nicholas felt a tripwire in his gut twang, and he slowed his pace. Something about the sight of the shops disturbed him, though he couldn’t say what. Determined not to let anything spoil his walk, he picked up his pace and strode towards them.

One building housed four shops in a row that faced Myrtle Street from under a wide, bull-nosed awning. The area under the awning was raised half a metre off the ground; it was tiled and its front was separated from the footpath by a galvanised steel rail and a row of potted topiary trees. In his childhood, the shops had been a convenience store, Mrs Ferguson’s greengrocery, The Magill Fruitbowl, a butcher and a haberdashery.

He stopped at the two steps leading up to the shop porch. Jay Jay’s, he remembered the haberdashery had been called. Again, the taut, sly wire inside hummed uncomfortably. And again, he shook off the ill feeling. It was not yet six thirty and the shops were closed. The convenience store was still there, but under a new name and with window stickers proclaiming ‘Phone Cards: 9 cents/min, Anywhere in the World!’; the fruit shop’s most recent incarnation was as a Tibetan takeaway restaurant, the owners of which had clearly overestimated the willingness of locals to enjoy some good Kongpo Shaptak (it was now ‘For Lease’); the butcher’s had become the storefront for a computer repairer; the haberdashery (an old woman ran it; what was her name? He couldn’t recall) was now a health food shop.

Nicholas’s footsteps echoed on the cold tiles. The shop windows were dark eyes reflecting sourly the brightness of the new day outside their heavy lid. Quill, he remembered. The old woman’s name was Quill. And with the remembering, into his mind’s eye flashed an image of being eight or nine, holding Suzette’s tiny hand in his, and walking home from school past the shop and looking inside. . and dark eyes set in a pale, wrinkled face looking back. Then Suzette started crying.

Nicholas stepped out into the early sunlight and felt a small flutter of relief. A long time ago, he thought. Childhood would prove to hold much nastier things than a dour-faced old woman in a dark shop. He picked up his pace again.

Laidlaw Street. Madeglass Street. Roads that to his younger eyes had been so long and languorous now seemed cramped and quaint. Jacarandas and liquidambars poked bare fingers into the crisp air. The leaves of callistemons and grevilleas whispered benignly. A Labrador watched him from a porch, its tail lethargically thumping the hardwood boards.

Nicholas put cold hands in his cardigan pockets and stepped into the narrow, pleasantly shadowed throat of Ithaca Lane. He realised he was looking not at his feet, or a few steps ahead, but to the crest of the steep lane fifty metres up. He was scanning horizons, looking for ghosts. But there were none. No fractured businessmen stepping in front of lorries, no sad-eyed women swallowing eleven, twelve, thirteen pills. He was a long way from London and its ghosts — as far as one could get, really. His memory caught scent of Cate, but he quashed the familiar urge to run and sit by her gravestone, and turned his thoughts to what he might do for work. Buying props for TV commercials? Building sets for the state theatre company? He could volunteer at the arts college until he found his feet and made some contacts. Shit, he could go back to university and get his Master’s. There was money in the bank, so why not take the year and start something new? Study illustration? Write and illustrate a children’s book? The possibilities pleased him, driving the uneasiness about the Myrtle Street shops from his mind.

Winter sunlight winked in the crystal dew on the ridge caps of houses and rippled silver in gutter puddles. The air was raw and clean and things felt. . good. Nicholas nodded to himself: yes, things felt quite good. He topped the crest of Ithaca Lane and glanced downhill.

He stopped, rock still. His good mood blew away in an instant, as if stolen like smoke by the wind.

At the bottom of the lane was Carmichael Road and, beyond it, the woods and their dark, countless trees.

Just turn around, he thought. But he didn’t move. The woods held his eye, a broad and gently rippling lure. From here, even on this low rise, he could sense their size. A huge lopsided square of silver green, emerald green, olive green and chalcedony treetops, each side more than a kilometre, rising and falling back to the distant glimpses of brown river. Why were they still so disturbing? Gazing upon their inscrutable surface, Nicholas had the feeling that the trees were merely a veneer; a cloak over some dark creature, the shape of which remained hidden and the heart of which was as cold as deep earth.

I’m not going past them. Not today. He shifted to return home the way he’d come. But as he turned, movement caught his eye.

On the path through the grass strip that hemmed the woods, a boy was kneeling.