The Darkening

‘Dad’s suitcase.’

She blinked at him. ‘Dad. . Dad knew?’

Nicholas shook his head as if to say, your guess is as good as mine.

Outside, the rain grew heavier. They were silent a long while. Suzette finally spoke.

‘A lot of children,’ she whispered.

Nicholas nodded. ‘Have you ever heard of this. . Have you ever, in your readings about witchy shit, ever come across this kind of thing?’

She sent him a quick glare, then took in a long breath, composing her thoughts.

‘Blood is an ingredient for some of the most powerful magics,’ she explained. ‘Blood is the only element that satisfies some spells. Some quite. . extreme spells.’

Blood is the only sacrifice that pleases the Lord.

The flesh on Nicholas’s arm raised in goose bumps. Suzette’s words were frighteningly similar to Mrs Boye’s outburst in the church.

‘Like staying alive for a hundred and fifty years?’ he asked. He’d meant it to come out jokingly, but the words hung in the air.

Suzette wrapped her arms tighter around herself. ‘Yes,’ she said, and looked up at Nicholas. ‘Quill put herself in a quiet shop at the centre of a quiet, working-class neighbourhood so she could sit and watch. See for herself which families had children. Learn who lived where, who was happy, who was alone. Tiny, patient questions. Hatching plans.’

‘Like a spider in her web,’ he said.

The analogy had slipped easily off his tongue, but struck both of them keenly. That’s exactly what she had been. A hungry, perched thing, ever observant, watching and spinning thread while she waited, and. .

‘And. .’ Suzette seemed unwilling to take the next logical step.

‘And killing children,’ said Nicholas.

‘Yes,’ she agreed softly.

Night had fallen outside. Streetlamps turned droplets sliding down the windows into slowly descending diamonds.

‘I don’t understand the connections. The church? The woods?’

Suzette shook her head. Neither did she.

‘And the men,’ she said. ‘The men who confessed? Teale. Guyatt. Maybe others. She found ways to influence them.’

Nicholas remembered jetting into the old woman’s hungry palm, and the memory sent his stomach into a nauseating roll.

‘There’s something else I haven’t told you,’ he said. He slowly, carefully, recounted coming across the old woman in the woods, her dog Garnock biting him, the pleasant veil of the world dissolving to reveal the woods darker than ever and Garnock the terrier as the largest spider Nicholas had ever seen. Then, waking in the grounds of her cottage, and the way the old woman had reached into his pants, milked him, and saved his spurtings in a jar. He’d never spoken about things sexual in front of his sister, and by the end of it felt a fool for blushing like an adolescent. He looked up at Suzette.

She was as pale as the stack of paper in front of her.

‘Spider?’ she whispered.

He nodded, watching her stare down at the floor, expecting any second for her to laugh aloud and call what he’d just said drivel. But instead she leaned forward and again shuffled the photographs and picked out the image of a blurred Victoria Sedgely outside her confectionery shop cradling a small, white dog. She stared at the picture for a long moment.

‘What does she want?’ she whispered to herself. She looked up at Nicholas. ‘Have you been in the health food store?’

Nicholas recalled the pretty girl with the brown eyes and easy smile. Rowena. There was no similarity between her and the flint-faced Bretherton or the watchful crone Quill. So the lie came easily.

‘No.’

Suzette watched him for a few seconds, then nodded again. ‘We should go in sometime,’ she said. ‘Together.’

‘Sure,’ he agreed. He was already regretting the lie, but decided to deal with it later.

‘The rune makes some sense,’ Suzette went on. ‘The mark on Quill’s door — the blood rune, Thurisaz. I don’t quite get it, but it makes sense she’d use it.’

Nicholas stared at the floor. He felt Suzette looking at him.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Quill’s door isn’t the only place I’ve seen that mark.’

‘Where else?’ she asked. ‘Nicky?’

He told her about the dead bird talismans with their macabre faux heads made of twigs. He told her about the same mark on Gavin’s rifle.

‘Fucking tosser,’ she whispered, and looked up at him. ‘But I’m glad you told me. Better late than never.’

Neither spoke for a long while. The rain grew more insistent on the roof. The refrigerator compressor suddenly chugged nearby, and Suzette jerked.

‘Suze? Are you okay?’

She shook her head slowly. ‘I think I’m pretty scared.’

Nicholas nodded. ‘That’s why I didn’t want to tell you.’

He checked his watch. It was nearly seven.

Suzette pulled out her mobile phone. ‘Where’s your phone book? I’m cancelling my flight.’ Her expression dared him to argue. He went to the linen press and produced a grubby phone book.

‘Okay,’ he said, placing it in front of her. ‘Then there’s someone I think we should see.’

The Anglican church squatted darkly on the street corner like some colossal, ancient hound: spiny and carved and solemn as dolman stones. Opposite was parked Nicholas’s Hyundai. The windows were fogged; Nicholas and Suzette had been arguing inside for nearly ten minutes.

‘How? Easy!’ said Nicholas. ‘We just tell him we want to see the records.’

‘Genius, he’s a minister!’ snapped Suzette. ‘He’s going to think we’re insane.’›

‘Reverend,’ corrected Nicholas.

‘He doesn’t believe what we believe.’

‘He will when he sees the pictures.’

‘Nicholas,’ she said, ‘he may never have met Mrs Quill. It’s only our say-so that she looks like this Bretherton woman, who, I must point out, paid for his church! For all we know she’s a fucking saint!’

Nicholas shrugged — so?

‘And while I know that I saw Tristram’s ghost when I was a kid,’ continued Suzette, ‘ten out of ten people would suggest that I had a crush on Tristram and so I made myself imagine that I saw his ghost out of wishful thinking.’

Nicholas snorted. ‘I see ghosts all the time. That’s not wishful thinking.’

Suzette watched him impatiently.

‘Your wife died, Nicholas. Think about it.’

He opened his mouth to retort, but her words had caught him. My wife died. People forgave a lot when they heard that. But they also expected a lot. They expected you to be a little irrational. A bit unhinged. And irrational, unhinged people didn’t make credible witnesses.

When Suzette saw that he was getting her point, she spoke quietly. ‘We have a string of coincidences that simply fall apart unless you believe in ghosts.’

He shifted. Across the street, the church was a silhouette, solid as rock. And inside were Quill’s Green Men, the strange, half-human faces with shadowed, carved eyes. It was her church.

‘She murders children,’ he whispered.