The Darkening

‘I said, HUSH!’ she commanded, and her voice seemed to rouse the flames behind the stove grate. The room danced. She half-rose from her chair, and the young Rowena Quill, pale and blonde and terrifyingly beautiful, leaned forward, rage sparkling in her dark eyes. Then she caught and reeled in her anger and sat back down — her skin rippled again into leathery furrows. She folded her hands together, watching him.

‘You think you know,’ she whispered, ‘but you can’t know.’ She looked back at the flames. As she rocked, Nicholas noticed something on the wall behind her. It was a calendar of sorts, but made of wood, with moveable squared pegs plugged into holes like a board game belonging to some Victorian-era child. But the pegs were marked with strange symbols: stylised seasons, runes, phases of the moon. The board had an elaborately carved frame; at its top, staring through hooded eyes as black as wells from a face of oak leaves, was the Green Man.

‘I have so much to tell. So much,’ Quill whispered. ‘So many stories. So many years.’ She spoke so quietly, her lips hardly moving, that Nicholas wondered if he was dreaming her voice in his still-swimming head. ‘Can you imagine my delight when I learned from your mother that you were a Samhain child?’ She pronounced the word as Suzette had: sah-wen. A word lush and full. Quill turned her eyes again to Nicholas. ‘A special child. A child with the sight. And you do have the sight. I can see it in your eyes. A gravedigger’s eyes. A stomach full of sadness to match mine.’

The old woman was suddenly gone and the young Rowena Quill sat in the same dress, its collar loose enough around her pale shoulders to show the curve of her breasts below. Her lips were red as blood. Then a log cracked in the fire, and the old woman was back in the chair.

Nicholas stared. ‘Then why did you try to kill me?’

Quill watched him for a long moment. ‘Oh. I never did.’

‘You set a bird for me,’ he said. It was hard to talk, his own weight pressing on his ribs. ‘As you did for Hannah. And God knows how many other children.’

Anger flared freshly in her eyes, but was hidden away just as fast.

‘But never for you. The one you found was for your friend, and it found him sure as sure. With your help, in fact. I had Gavin Boye tell you a wee fib, to entice you here.’ She winked — a wrinkled sphincter. ‘You saw it for what it was, not the trinket I wanted seen. You saw a dead bird. Your blond gossip saw a lovely tin hussar. But it was never for you, Nicholas Close. I wanted you full grown.’ She looked back at the warmth of the fire. ‘That’s why I asked Him to send you back.’

Nicholas suddenly felt his heart beat harder. Its thudding pumps shook him on the floor.

‘What do you mean?’

She smiled, perfect white teeth alternated with rust red, almost toothless gums.

‘England was too far away. Too, too far. So I asked Him to bring you home,’ she said. ‘And here you are.’

Nicholas felt his vision sparkle and the blood drain from his face. And memories of flashing green; the thrum of a motorcycle; the glimpse of an inhuman face among the black tangles of an oak grove; Cate’s neck bent too far back over the white porcelain edge of the bath, her open eyes dulled by a fine patina of plaster dust.

‘What did you do?’ he whispered.

She let free a laugh that was at once as clear and pretty as fine bells and gravelled and moss-thick as a blocked drain. Her eyes watched him fondly.

‘My pretty man. I did what I had to. I want us to be together.’

The smell was familiar.

There wasn’t a hint of goodness about it. It was the sour scent of rot and wet shadow; the smell of bad earth and failed flesh. Hannah recalled it, or something like it, from when she had accompanied her father under the house, crawling low between stumps, over damp earth where sunlight never shone, until they found the dead possum. Its grey bones poked from beneath a pungent shroud of fur, green stuff and wriggling white. Maggots. The smell of death had made her gag and skitter back to fresher air. Now she had no such luxury.

She was upright, but couldn’t move or see. Her legs were swaddled fast together and her arms were bound tight and crooked against her body. Her eyes were shut and she couldn’t open them: a second skin had her wrapped from head to foot, with only a little space left under her nostrils. Fine strands like baby’s hair tickled her nose when she inhaled the stale, soiled air.

But she knew what it was holding her. She was trussed up just as she imagined Miriam had been: spun tight in spider web, alive and waiting to be fed upon by scuttling things with sharp fangs and unblinking eyes.

A hot wave of panic swept through her, and she fought for control of her bowels. Idiot, she thought for the thousandth time since she’d watched Nicholas — at least, she’d thought it was Nicholas — return from chasing Miriam’s voice. He’d smiled and said, ‘Just the wind.’ Then he pointed, ‘But what the hell is that?’ She’d turned to follow his outstretched arm, realising as she twisted that she had fallen for the oldest trick since ‘smell the cheese’. Something hard had come down fast on the crown of her skull, and minutes suddenly disappeared. She’d woken on the ground with her arms tied behind her back and her knees lashed together and rags shoved in her mouth. Then, like looking into a bewitched forest mirror, she saw herself standing in the darkening glade, smiling back at her. The hairs on her arms and neck turned to wire, and her twin called in her own voice: ‘Nicholas!’

The real Nicholas — the one with a gun, dummy! — had rushed back, looked at Hannah, and his eyes had widened. He’d raised the gun and, just when she thought she was dead for sure, swung the barrel away. Then, blammo!, and a sting ten times worse than any bee’s had rammed like a hot darning needle into her left calf muscle, which now ached like hell. Tears had rolled down her face as she watched her twin self pull out a syringe and stick it into Nicholas. He folded like a dropped doll, and then her twin came over to her. ‘Sleep tight,’ the other Hannah had said, and stuck the needle into her arm. About ten minutes ago she’d woken from a black sleep to here, a fly stuck in the spider’s parlour.

Hannah realised she was crying. Fat lot of good that would do.

‘Help!’ she called.

Her voice was muffled and sucked up by the blackness; it was like yelling from inside a wardrobe full of clothes. The dead sound and the spoilt butter smell of rancid earth confirmed she was underground. It was as if she was dead already.

Hannah expected this to make her sob even more, but instead she found her tears drying up and her tummy growing warm. How dare they? How dare they do this to little girls! She understood why her parents got so angry when they saw the results of bombers in the white hot streets of the Middle East, why men and women wailed in anger as well as grief when they lifted the limp bodies of children from the rubble. How dare they? No. She wasn’t going to die like this, wrapped up like some helpless baby.

She concentrated, trying to picture herself. There was no weight on her feet. She was vertical. Her heels, back and shoulders were pressed against something hard and cold — the earth wall. She was hung like a side of lamb. She sent a testing kick of her twinned legs against the wall behind her, and heard a small shower of earth trickle and a faint rattling like glass. She kicked again. Another small fall of soil, another rattle like glasses on a shelf. If only she could see. There was only one way that was going to happen.

She strained and forced open her mouth, and stuck her tongue between her teeth. It touched a fibrous skin that made her wet flesh instantly recoil and her stomach jumble. Come on, she told herself, there’s no other way. She opened her mouth again, wider. She felt the binding silk around her jaw stretch. She closed and opened again, wider, the muscles in her neck straining hard. Come on!! She closed and opened one more time. . and felt the horrible fabric tear a little.

She put her tongue out and felt the raw edges of the torn silk. She looped her tongue around them and drew them into her mouth. Just a little bit, she thought. That’s all I need to free my eyelids. She pulled the tasteless web between her teeth and ground, pulling her jaw down in a grimace — it felt as if she was eating the very skin off her face. But the silk over her eyelids shifted. She opened her mouth and gagged, her stomach heaved and finally let go, and a warm gush of acidic mush jetted out. She spat and sniffed up snot. Her eyes opened a crack.

It was impossible to judge the room’s size because it was almost completely dark. The inkiness was broken by three weak slices of light that shone down onto a set of ascending stairs made of old bricks. The far wall was