The Darkening

together, a bony clicking like knitting needles that was surprisingly loud.

‘Really?’ came the old woman’s voice. ‘Well. We’re here, anyway. Put him down.’

Nicholas felt the wave beneath retreat as the knuckle lumps supporting him slipped away first from his head — depositing it on moist-smelling earth — then his shoulders, arms, back, buttocks, legs. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed hundreds of spiders, dark grey and hunched and large as sparrows, streaming away. A jolt of new terror went through him like a spasm and his stomach heaved.

Maybe I’m insane already.

Above him were small gaps in the dark treetops; smoke-coloured cloud drifted overhead. Then the view was obscured by the old woman’s face.

She wasn’t that old, Nicholas could see now, maybe in her mid-sixties. Her eyes crinkled as she smiled, but there wasn’t a speck of warmth there.

‘Hello, Nicholas.’

He opened his mouth to speak, but only a shuddering breath escaped his throat.

She took her eyes off his and ran her gaze over his forehead, his hair, his cheeks, his neck. She clucked to herself, then resumed singing in the softest voice: ‘. . and where he goes, yes. .’

Nicholas closed his eyes and concentrated. His limbs felt carved from frozen meat. But he willed his head to turn. It did, just a few degrees. The new angle afforded him a little more view of his surrounds. He could just glimpse the tip of a stone chimney, topped with rusty iron baffles to dissipate the smoke and send it out widely. The top of a wooden trellis, lush with leaves — maybe beans or pea stalks. And the tops of a circular grove of trees.

‘. . I love the ground on where he goes, and still I hope. .’

He flicked his eyes down. The old woman knelt over him, her eyes taking in his arms, his chest. He was wrong: her hair wasn’t white, it was grey, and she would have been sixty at the most, closer to fifty. A smile teased her lips. ‘. . that the time will come. .’ The tip of her tongue darted out, slick with saliva. Her hands were trembling.

‘Who. .?’ whispered Nicholas.

Her eyes rolled back to his and her smile broadened.

‘Who, indeed. Who, indeed. .’

She stroked his face, and her eyes returned to his belly. But her hands stayed on him, drifting down his cheeks to his neck, across his chest.

‘And how is your little toe? Still there, eleven of ten? Or have you tried to hide your little deformity?’

Nicholas felt his blood thud in his ears. How did she know?

‘Garnock,’ she whispered.

Nicholas’s heart tripped as the huge spider appeared in his periphery, then stepped, one delicate leg at a time, onto his chest to stare down at his face. He groaned and shut his eyes. Her hands were down at his groin. He felt her unzip his fly. Oh, God, no.

‘. . When he and I will be as one. .’ sang the old woman. Her hand slipped inside and softly curled around and cupped his penis. No, no, no, no. . He screwed his eyes shut. ‘. . when he and I will be as one. .’

As she stroked him, he grew harder. No! he screamed, but again only a whisper came out, and his body — untouched since Cate died — didn’t listen and stiffened more. Her stroking grew faster.

‘. . When he and I will be as one. .’

The weight of the spider on his chest was horrible, stifling. He couldn’t move. The old woman’s hand was eating him as hungrily as her eyes had.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she whispered.

Nicholas wanted to leap out of his skin and run. His brain screamed. This, said the cheerful voice in his head, is what it’s like to lose your mind.

‘Yes!’ said the old woman, and he came. The warm spasms rolled up through his guts and his body jerked involuntarily.

‘Yessss,’ she whispered. Nicholas heard the scraping sound of tin on glass — a lid going on a jar. ‘Garnock. Off.’

The weight stepped from Nicholas’s chest. Then he felt a damp, cold hand pat his cheek. He opened his eyes. The old woman was regarding him. She would have been ninety or more; her face was grey and wrinkled as a kicked blanket. Yet her dark eyes shone with the same delight.

‘We’ll see you again soon, pretty man.’ Her ancient voice was now as dry as ash. ‘Garnock-lob?’

Two hot skewers drove into the flesh of Nicholas’s exposed thigh, and fire swept up to his skull. The world shrank and fell away into oblivion.

He dreamed he was a bird.

His legs were numb, because they were gone. His head was gone, too, painless and vanished. But his body — dead though it was and swelling with rot — still had feeling. It was sodden wet and cold. Ants were crawling over it, exploring for places to nest and feed. He was quite content to lie there and decay, until his body felt something poking into its side. Without eyes, he couldn’t see, but he knew it was a boy holding a stick, poking him, disturbing his death, seeking to drag him out onto a path. He was the bird, but he was also the boy. All was well, though.

Because this is the plan. This is what we need to bring him. It is the cycle.

But the prodding stick?

Flesh, not stick! Flesh and blood! Because blood is the only sacrifice that pleases the Lord. .

Nicholas’s eyes blearily opened.

A large woman stood above him, poking him with the tip of a brightly coloured umbrella. Nicholas screamed. The woman screamed, too, and skittered backwards. Despite her size, she moved surprisingly fast.

‘He’s alive!’ she called to her husband in the car on the road. She hurried into the passenger seat and the car roared past.

‘Dirty druggie! Disgrace!’ shouted the man before he swiftly wound up his window and sped away.

Nicholas was lying in the dry sword grass outside the woods. Everything hurt. His hands and feet felt like they weren’t flesh but wet dust, heavy and lifeless. His clothes were damp. His heart thudded dully, and his head felt full of acid sand. But he could move. He rolled onto his side, dragged his knees to his chest and slowly pushed himself up onto all fours. Ropy spittle fell from his slack lips. The minute it took him to sit on his haunches seemed an eternity.

He sat on the path, breathing heavily from the effort, and squinted at his watch. It was four thirty; the sun was kissing the rooftops in the west. An arm’s length away on the path lay the body of the butcher bird, its woven head re-attached to its perishing, lifeless body, its pathetic severed legs again poking out like antlers. Beside him was a clean plastic 7-Eleven bag. He reached painfully and picked it up. Within were a new torch and a bug bomb can, the latter also unused, its lid still attached.

Nicholas looked at his knees. No sign of the virulent sludge of squashed spiders — but his clothes were all wet; soaked through.

Was it all a dream?

He looked at his hand. In the flesh between his forefinger and thumb were two red-rimmed and throbbing punctures. The pain in his upper thigh told him he would find two more wounds there.

She did this, he thought. She washed my clothes. Bought new goods. She did it so no one would believe me if I blabbed. She did it so I wouldn’t believe myself.

But he could prove it! He could run now, into the woods, to the tunnels under the pipe, and the left one would be full of torn cobwebs and squashed, dead spiders. But he knew, with cold clarity, that the pipe would have been emptied of dead spiders and filled with live ones busily spinning fresh webs. The empty bug bomb container would have been spirited away.

He looked around at the woods. In the late afternoon light, they brooded, patient and dark. There was no way he wanted to go back in there, not today.

She got what she wanted.