The Darkening

of water could vaguely make out the silhouette of Katharine’s and Suzette’s heads flanking a large male officer’s in the vehicle’s back seat.

Laine turned back to the two officers in the car with her. Both men sat in the front on the other side of a Perspex screen, one drinking tea from a thermos, the other staring glumly into the rain.

‘I think you have to arrest me or let me go,’ she said.

‘Well,’ replied the one with the tea, but then fell silent.

‘We’re just keeping you out of the rain,’ said the other. ‘We’ll know soon.’

To Laine it felt like hours since the officers had summoned her, Suzette and Katharine over as they hurried towards the woods, shovels and forks in hand. Laine had been amazed by Katharine’s quick lie that the three of them were part of a woodlands conservation group. She and Suzette had picked up the mistruth, explaining that a rare dwarf syzygium needed its mulch turned over or it would get root rot. The police had all but let them go when Katharine spoiled it all by answering truthfully when asked for her name. Clearly, ‘Close’ was on record as associated with the Gerlic children. And so the women had been divested of their makeshift weapons and split into separate cars, where streams of questions kept flowing until the rains drowned them out.

Laine had the temerity to ask several times why the police weren’t out looking for Hannah Gerlic instead of harassing her, to which the thundering rain gave its own answer.

‘I think I need to talk with my solicitor,’ she said finally.

The police officers looked at one another. A car door opened and closed behind them. ‘Wait here.’ The officers opened their own doors and went out into the drizzle.

Laine watched them meet another four officers in a huddle. Arms pointed at the car in which Katharine sat, and fingers gestured towards Laine, towards the sky, towards the woods. Heads nodded. Torches flicked on. Men walked towards the dark tree line.

A minibus pulled up on the verge and a file of shadowed men and women in orange State Emergency Service overalls disembarked.

The front door of Laine’s car opened and a police officer slid back in. He turned to her.

‘Fancy a cup of tea?’

42

The walk from the open cellar door, back past Quill’s cottage, and into the circular grove was as slow and silent as a dream.

Nicholas lifted his eyes to look at the sky. The rain had all but finished, and clouds were easing apart like rotten lace in a stiff wind; behind them, stars blinked cold, faint light. Ahead, a round wall of trees glistened and their wet leaves whispered to one another with sly drip-drips. There were two dozen or so trees in a circle twenty metres wide.

As Quill walked between two trees, she touched fondly the trunk nearest. She didn’t look back at him.

Nicholas knew what was happening. Hannah was gone. Quill needed a miracle. To summon one, she had to have blood. She would use his.

A figure slid through him, and his eyes widened with surprise, but his body allowed no other shock. Miriam Gerlic screamed without sound, wrists bound together behind her, legs kicking at air as she was carried by unseen hands between the trees. As she slipped out of sight, her ghost eyes fell on Nicholas. . then were obscured by sable branches.

Nicholas let out his own silent scream as his body carried him into the circle.

The ground underfoot was wet, sandy dirt, raked clean. In the centre of the unnatural grove was a pedestal of stilted legs a metre high holding aloft a spherical cage made of woven branches and bone.

Quill hobbled to stand beside the cage. Within it was a shifting cloud of moving shadows. As Nicholas grew closer, he understood: inside the cage, five or six children half-knelt, half-hung, their ghostly skins melding with one another’s. Each was suspended by the wrists, which were lashed to the curved branch bars above them. A half- dozen children. A half-dozen ghosts. Their faces were an overlapping blur. But as each bobbed or struggled, he or she would drift apart from the others and Nicholas could see their singular terror. Little Owen Liddy in his long shorts, his face pale with disbelieving fright. The girl in the forties’ sundress, her bare feet torn and bleeding. Another boy, younger than the others and with red hair, had his eyes screwed tight above wet cheeks. Miriam Gerlic’s eyes were impossibly wide and without hope. Dylan Thomas, head bowed and bawling. And Tristram Boye.

Nicholas felt the rhythm of his breathing break, and he sucked in cool air.

He knew that Tristram had died here in the woods, but to see him, his friend, his hero, at the edge of his pitiful murder filled Nicholas with such an awful sadness that he wanted simply to fall to the ground. Tristram’s jaw was tight, one wrist crooked at a strange angle. Broken. Nicholas’s tongue flicked the roof of his mouth as he tried to form his name — Tris. . — but no noise came out.

The dead children struggled: Miriam screamed; Dylan sobbed; Owen Liddy nodded like a savant. Suddenly, the red-haired boy’s head jerked upwards. His face grew brighter, and his throat opened up as if an invisible zipper dragged wide. The little boy’s eyes flashed open and went dull. His small body spasmed and stiffened. . then he vanished.

Nicholas felt sick.

‘Hurry, hurry,’ whispered Quill, gesturing to Nicholas and glancing to the sky. She climbed the short stick ladder that rose to the sphere behind the ghostly children. Feet on the highest rung, she unlatched a hatch made of the same grisly bone and twisted wood, and swung it wide before scuttling down to the ground.

Nicholas saw her for what she was. A spider. A spider herself: bloated and old and thirsty, scuttling to do dark work at the centre of her ancient web of dark trees. .

‘Up,’ she whispered. ‘In.’

A wind was born, and it tickled the ring of trees, setting them awhisper like excited spectators at a night coliseum. Nicholas’s hands grasped bone and branch, and his feet climbed the makeshift ladder. The dead children squirmed in desperate terror before him. God, no, he thought. Don’t make me go in there. . But his legs stepped into the hatchway, and his body slid in after, slipping him into the ghosts of the stunned, wailing, weeping, lost children.

Cold, he thought. This is how death feels.

‘Kneel,’ she said.

He knelt. He was aware of the pain as the hard wood dug into his kneecaps, but could not so much as flinch against it.

‘Reach.’

His hands rose willingly; where the dead children strained against invisible bonds, his agreeable hands grasped the cold stick and bone lightly. As he took hold, the hair of the girl in the forties’ sundress stood on end and her neck jerked long. She tried to twist her head from side to side, knowing she was going to die and fighting. Her skin grew suddenly silvery and pale, as if a spectral spotlight were turned on it, and the skin of her neck opened up, revealing darker, wet flesh in the deep cut. Her small body arched, then slowly slackened. . and she vanished.

‘Wait,’ said Quill. She was behind him, out of sight, a lurking presence.

Nicholas was larger than the ghosts of the children. His arms were longer. Where they half-crouched, he squatted on his heels and so sat behind the four-folded children and could see the backs of their entwined heads. Their faces interwove and became as hard to discern as ripples in a stream’s crosscurrent.

He willed himself to scream and fight and flee. . but he sat immobile as a monk. He heard Quill’s careful footsteps on the ladder behind him. She sniffed back mucus.

Then Miriam’s hair grew brighter and the skin of her arms glowed. Nicholas realised what this ghostly light was: the echo of moonlight from several nights ago. Suddenly, her hair jerked straight, wrenched upward by an invisible hand. Her eyes threw wide. Nicholas saw the edge of her throat split open in a new, deep wound, severed by a keen, invisible blade. Her tiny body strained in a last animal panic; her muscles wrenched tight. . then she swooned. The hair fell down like a final curtain. Her body sagged, then winked out, leaving the ghosts of three boys struggling in front of him.