The Darkening

He remembered, then, the wrinkled hand stroking him, his jerked expulsions, the horror of the catlike weight on his chest as he heaved in orgasm. He felt utterly exhausted. Raped. Emptied.

He climbed to his feet and began a slow stagger towards Bymar Street.

12

Nicholas sat on his sofa. His throat was raw and his stomach was sore from retching. The bites (spider bites, he reminded himself) throbbed, and for the hundredth time he dully considered a trip to the twenty-four-hour medical centre. And, for the hundredth time, reasoned that the resultant questions would not go well. Giant spider, you say? Oh, yes, we get those all the time. Excuse me just a moment while I phone security. Suggesting the wounds were a snake bite would only demand more tests, more questions. The punctures weren’t infected, and he was feeling incrementally better. He’d stay here.

So tired. As soon as he began drifting towards sleep, the nightmare image of the old woman stroking him while her pet sat on his chest returned with awful vividness. Shutting his mind’s door on the vision and leaning against it to keep it closed was draining. To let it open and relive those moments as a supine captive in the woods would send him crazy.

How do you know you’re not crazy?

He skipped to the next groove in the scratched record of his mind: Go to the police.

And say. . what? That the men who’d confessed to the murders of Tristram Boye and Dylan Thomas were lying? ‘Forget their confessions, their fingerprints, their car tyre tracks, Sergeant! The real killer is an old woman who lives in a strange little cottage in the woods. That’s right, just down the road from me. Her hobbies include spider farming and jerking off hostages.’

‘That’s amazing news, Mr Close! The very break we needed to re-open these already neatly closed cases. By the way, how did you find out?’

‘Oh, here’s the clever bit: a ghost led me there.’

The bitch knew.

The old woman knew there was no room in a sane world for stories about huge spiders and Brothers Grimm strawberries. Relating what happened would be the babblings of a madman. No, she knew there would be no police.

Go away. Move to Melbourne.

And when you read of another Tallong child going missing? How will you feel then?

Fuck off. I’m not the murderer.

Ah. But she has your sperm in a jar.

Nicholas was suddenly fully awake. An image appeared in his mind complete: an autopsy table, a small boy face down on the stainless steel, a lab-coated man with a syringe withdrawing milky white liquid from the dead boy’s anus and squirting it into a jar theatrically labelled ‘Evidence’.

Oh, Jesus. He definitely had to move! Create an alibi! Live a visible life and surround himself with people who could testify that he never came to this city again!

But Mum lives here.

Katharine was just a chasse away from thinking her son a killer already. Wipe her!

He paced.

No. He and his mother might not get along, but leaving her in this suburb — this haunted, killing place — would be wrong.

Move her down south, too!

You know she wouldn’t go.

He was running out of options.

You could kill yourself.

Suicide. He rolled the thought in his mind like an ice-cube on his tongue, tasting it, feeling its smooth chill. Death. He’d thought about it a lot immediately after Cate died. He’d been thinking about how he might do it (Pills? Stanley knife to the carotid artery? Sneaking up to the roof of the Leadenhall Building and taking a dive?) as he moved the last of his and Cate’s belongings the afternoon that he slipped on the front steps of their Ealing flat and rose to be stabbed by the ghost of wild-eyed Keith Yerwood. After that, his visions of the dead — in particular, his vision of Cate’s last few moments, slipping, falling, breaking, over and over — convinced him that nothing good waited after his own heart stopped. Certainly, suicide would bring a blissful end to the sightings of dead children, but would it stop live ones dying? No.

So, what then?

Kill the old lady. Kill the witch.

Nicholas stopped, stock-still.

Witch.

Suzette’s words came back to him: If I knew then what I know now, I’d say she was a witch.

Very good. He had something to label the old woman now. The witch.

The witch killed Tristram. But she wanted you. She found out you were back, and she taunted you with Gavin and drew you down there like the idiot you are.

But then the realisation clarified slowly, like steadily clearing liquids of a science experiment.

She can’t know I see the ghosts.

Nicholas set his jaw.

What does that mean? How does that help?

‘Why me?’ he asked aloud.

The room was silent.

Then, a small noise. The front door’s knob was turning.

With a start, Nicholas realised he hadn’t locked it.

Pritam reached with one shoe and switched off the vacuum cleaner. For a long moment, the baby-cry whine of the electric motor echoed down the nave and in the transepts, and seemed to keep the tall brass pipes of the organ humming disconsolately. The stained-glass windows were dark; it was night outside, and the occasional car headlights set the tiny panes sparkling like a handful of scattered diamonds. The candelabra overhead held electric bulbs, but their light wasn’t strong and the church seemed to Pritam yawningly huge, more dark than light. He would talk with John Hird about gradually increasing the wattage of the bulbs.

As he followed the electric lead to the wall socket, he stepped off the burgundy carpet onto marble and his footfalls rang emptily in the choir stalls and up to the high, dark rafters. He preferred to dress well when he was working in the church, even when doing everyday chores. He regarded dressing well as a sign of respect, for the institution and the office, and he wore his leather dress shoes and ironed trousers despite the countless occasions when Hird, sidling past in thongs and shorts, snorted amusement at his understudy’s formality. But now, alone in the church at night, the clack-clack of his heels on the cool stone floor sounded stiff and distant even to Pritam. He unplugged the cord, walked back to the vacuum and pressed the retractor — the cord reeled in so fast that the plug overshot the machine and whipped past, the tiny fist of a thing striking Pritam sharply on the shin and sending a flurry of pain scampering up his leg.

He let out a short hiss and bent to lift his trouser leg. One of the metal prongs had taken a scrape out of the tight skin on the front of his shinbone, and a ball of claret-coloured blood had already seeped to the surface and was running down to his dark sock.

The sight of the thick, descending droplet suddenly reminded him of that shocking moment during the funeral earlier this week, when the deceased’s elderly mother had risen to her feet and spat at the image of Our Lord.