The Darkening

Mrs Ferguson shook her head. ‘I’ve given it up for Lent. Sudoku, that’s my thing now.’

Katharine nodded, then recounted how Nicholas had returned from London, how the Thomas boy went missing, and later was found with his throat cut. The man who confessed to his murder died in prison within days of the crime. Katharine looked carefully at Mrs Ferguson. The older woman drew a deep breath through her nostrils.

‘Anyway, all this got me thinking of when Nicky’s friend Tristram died,’ said Katharine.

‘Of course,’ said Mrs Ferguson. ‘All a bit similar, isn’t it?’

Katharine nodded. ‘Suzette asked me if I remembered Mrs Quill.’

She watched the older woman. Mrs Ferguson said nothing. She nodded to Katharine, go on.

‘Mrs Quill,’ repeated Katharine. ‘She used to scare Suzie, remember? Do you know. .’ She hunted for the right words. ‘Why do you think she worried her?’

Mrs Ferguson drew in another of those long breaths. It was a sad, finite sound. ‘I worked next to Mrs Quill from the day I took the lease on my fruit shop to the day I dropped the shutter for good. And not one second in between did I like that woman.’

‘Why not?’

Mrs Ferguson fixed Katharine with a firm stare. ‘Baobhan sith.’ Then she laughed and shook her head. ‘Fiddlesticks. That’s my nanna talking, superstitious Scot she was. I just never took to Quill. She was always polite. Always said hello. She always paid her rent, never a day in arrears, though who knows how she turned a quid in that haberdashery. There were days went by when I never saw a soul enter her shop.’ Mrs Ferguson shrugged and looked again at Katharine. ‘But nights when I worked back, making fruit salad from the bruised stock or cleaning up the grapes where such-and-suches went picking at them, and I knew Quill was still in her store two doors up. .’ She shivered. ‘I didn’t want to go up there. I thought if I did, I wouldn’t come back. I have to say it was a happy day when I heard her sister won the lottery and bought her a house in Hobart.’

Katharine frowned. ‘I heard she moved to Ballina and died.’

Mrs Ferguson’s eyebrows rose. ‘Oh? Well. That’s funny, because I also heard. .’

She looked out the window at the gently swaying callistemon. Bees hummed on the red fluffy flowers. Clouds had crept over the sun and the day had gone dull and cool. She fell silent.

‘Pam?’ said Katharine. ‘Pamela?’

Mrs Ferguson jerked at Katharine’s voice and turned. Her eyes widened in surprise.

‘Katharine! What are you doing here? How lovely. Here. .’ The older woman stood and shuffled to the kettle, switched it on. ‘I should be at the shop, but I’m not a hundred per cent today. How’s your Donald? Where’s little Suzette?’

Mrs Ferguson peered around the room. Katharine realised Pamela’s placement in AR was no temporary measure.

‘She’s at home, Pam. So’s Nicky.’

‘Oh.’ Mrs Ferguson was disappointed. ‘You don’t look well, Katharine.’

‘I’m fine. Pam, can I ask you something?’

‘Don’t ask me for limes. The markets want eighty cents a pound for them and that’s robbery, I won’t pay it.’

‘No. What’s a. .’ She hoped she had the pronunciation right. ‘What’s a baobhan sith?’

Mrs Ferguson’s eyes brightened. ‘Baobhan sith? I haven’t heard that since my nan passed on. Funny old cow. She was sure there was a woman in her street when she was a lass who was one.’ Mrs Ferguson looked at Katharine slyly. ‘The white women of the Highlands. They sometimes appear in a green dress. They prefer the night. They seduce young men, charm them with their dancing. . then drink their blood.’ She chuckled at the foolishness of it.

Katharine stayed just a little longer, waiting until Mrs Ferguson was again staring out the window before she quietly stood and crept from the room.

She was glad to get to her car.

Singing.

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 realised 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 labouring under a weight.

The singing grew clearer: ‘. . his face so soft and wondrous fair. .’

The woman’s voice was lovely and high. Where was he?

Open your eyes.

He couldn’t. He tried another deep breath, but his lungs ignored him and kept their own shallow rhythm. A memory surfaced: I was poisoned.

‘. . 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. .

Open your eyes.

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.

But another voice in Nicholas’s head spoke just as loudly: Are you sure you want to see? He remembered the dog’s flesh falling away, and the huge spider crouched there, dull spiny hairs on its long, multi-jointed legs, its black eyes sparkling. Then another flash returned. The name on the boat: Cate’s Surprise.

Was that a memory? Or a vision infected by. .

How did you like my strawberries?

A dark thing bloomed inside him. Anger.

Whatever, it was mean, he thought.

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. .’

Okay. Open your eyes.

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. Ready? Open!

One eyelid cracked open a sliver.

In the gloom, he could see the weight on his chest was no poisoned 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. The spider’s forelegs shifted, readying to pounce.

Oh, Christ, thought Nicholas. This is going to send me insane.

The spider’s two curved fangs were as dark as ebony, rooted in hairs in its head and underslung with two swollen, grey-pink sacs. The points of the fangs were wickedly sharp and glistening. They tack-tack-tacked