T hey moved like shadows, quiet and slow, hunched to stay below the grass line. The dry fronds chattered around them in the warm air, hissing a constant warning to beware. They gripped the stocks of their submachine guns. Tristram led; there was never a question about that-he was bigger and tougher, and if he had to go down to a Jap bullet, goddammit, he would. Nicholas saw him raise his left hand and they both dropped like stones. Nicholas crawled up.
“What is it?”
“Got any grenades?” hissed Tristram.
Nicholas looked around him. His fingers fell on a lumpy rock peppered with pink quartz. “Only one.”
“Well, hell,” whispered Tristram, and he looked at Nicholas with narrowed eyes. He cocked his head and grinned crookedly. “You better make it count then.” He pointed.
Nicholas carefully raised his eyes above the grass line. About four meters ahead was the pillbox (disguised cleverly as a council garbage bin). He lowered again and pulled an imaginary pin from the rock.
“Cover me,” he said, then counted silently: three, two, one…
They both leaped to their feet. Tristram aimed his tommy gun (a wooden chair leg with a nail for a trigger and a crosspiece screwed below for a magazine) and fired: “Ach-ach-ach-ach-ach!!,” while Nicholas drew back the rock and hurled it in an overarm cricket bowl. Then they both hit the ground.
Clang-rattle-rattle-clunk. The sound of rock falling inside the metal drum.
Tristram grinned. “Good throw!”
Nicholas beamed. The sun was high and hot, they were dusty and dirty and totally happy. Life was grand. “We got ’em that time,” he agreed.
“That, my friend, calls for a Lucky,” said Tristram, and he pulled out a packet of white candy cigarettes. He shucked the box at Nicholas, who drew one and put it in the corner of his mouth. Tristram drew another. Nicholas thumbed an invisible Zippo and lit them. They puffed and sucked, stood and walked.
They were on the gravel path, wood guns slung around their thin shoulders. To their right, Carmichael Road ran like a lazy, bitumen canal. To their left was the crowding mass of the woods. You can just feel them, thought Nicholas. Even with your eyes shut, you’d know they were there. Alive. Shadowed and watching. Waiting to breathe you in and in, to draw you deep inside, warm and moist and dark and smelling of secrets, where strange hands would lift you and take you
…
“… around here?” asked Tristram.
Nicholas shook his head, clearing it. “What?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Tristram.
“Fuck off,” said Nicholas.
Tristram looked at him, shocked for a moment-then he burst out laughing at the bold use of the King of Swear Words. “You fuck off!”
Nicholas joined in giggling, and Tristram’s laughter redoubled.
Tears rolled down their faces, an innocent baptismal to mark the last time the F-word would offend either of them. Nicholas stood and wiped his face. He saw a car pull up on the far side of Carmichael Road: an unremarkable olive green sedan.
“So, guttersnipe,” said Tristram, pointing, “here’s about where I found the dead cat.” The last two words stole the humor from the air. “Where’d you find the bird?”
Nicholas looked around, getting his bearings, and pointed. They moved up the path twenty paces or so.
“Here somewhere…” He stopped on the track. “Jeez.”
It was still there. Tucked into the grass, invisible to a casual glance, the bird’s little body had swollen in the heat, its feathered skin now a round balloon. Legs snipped off clean exposed matchstick sections of bone. The death-tightened claws for horns. The sharply dangerous lines painted in rust-brown blood. There was nothing accidental or joking about it. The bird was murdered, and its corpse twisted and changed into a thing that felt… evil.
Tristram was staring at the dead bird. His jaw was slack and his eyes were wide. A smile curled his lips. “It’s beautiful,” he whispered. Without hesitation, he knelt and gingerly took hold of the woven head. It was still securely spiked to the body and he lifted the tiny carcass out. As he did, white fluid began to drip from the bird. No, not fluid, but pale, wriggling pupae. Maggots.
“Wow…” The delighted smile grew wider on Tristram’s face.
Nicholas felt his stomach roll sickly, the way it did when he had the runs, weak and afraid. “You shouldn’t touch it, Tris. Tris!”
He bumped Tristram’s arm and Tristram dropped the desecrated creature on the path. The swollen body popped open with a bright whiff of rot and maggots started worming out from their nest.
Tristram stared at the infested thing, suddenly horrified. “Oh, yuck.”
Despite the drop, the round woven head was still attached to the tiny corpse, as if determined to see a job through.
“I can’t believe you picked it up,” said Nicholas.
As he rocked back on his feet, movement across Carmichael Road caught his eye. The driver’s door of the green car opened. A man was alighting: a large man in a dark suit. In the harsh overhead sun, his face was cast into binary tones of sharp light and dense shadow, yet it seemed he was looking at the boys.
He is looking at us, thought Nicholas. I can feel it.
“Tris. We should go home.”
Tristram was wiping his hands on his shorts, staring at the dead bird. “I thought it was-”
“Let’s go,” hissed Nicholas. Tristram looked up.
The man strode across the road toward them, straight at them through the grass. He was even bigger than Nicholas had thought: solid as a rugby player, but older, in his forties. Somehow, middle age made him even scarier. The man turned his head left then right with deliberate slowness, calibrating the surrounds. He wasn’t looking for other adults to join him in chastising these boys for throwing stones and carrying toy guns.
He’s checking for witnesses.
There were none, and the man hastened his pace.
Nicholas and Tristram looked at each other. They couldn’t run to the road. If they tried to dart left or right up the path, the stranger could cut them off without even trying. There was only one way to flee.
They ran into the woods.
I n his ten years, Nicholas had been afraid many times. But this was his first taste of terror. Adrenaline on his tongue was bitter. Low branches and tough shrubs tore at his face and bare legs. Beside him, Tristram’s eyes were wide and his fair hair flew out behind. They ran like men in snow, having to take exhausting, high-kneed steps to clear the thick, ancient knots of vine and undergrowth. From behind them came the steady crach-crunch crach- crunch of heavier footsteps. Nicholas dared a look back. The suited man was a rhino between the trees, his heavy strides smashing through the stems that would trip the boys.
He was gaining.
Nicholas could see the fear on his friend’s face. Neither of them needed to ask why a strange man was chasing them. They both knew- everyone knew-that there were men who took children.
“Which way?” he whispered. His cheeks were wet; he realized he was crying.
“We should…” gasped Tristram, “… split up.”
The thought of being alone with the man after him sent a shock of new terror through Nicholas. “No way!”
“That way… he can’t… get us both.”
The woods were becoming denser and darker as all but the tiniest chips of sky remained visible overhead. Wide trunks and buttressed roots grew closer together, forming a shadowed and slippery maze. Flinty rocks peeked sharply from under wet brows of rotten leaves.
The boys scrambled up a steep slope, grazing knees and palms on spiny vines and hidden shale. The man was just a dozen steps behind them. Nicholas’s ears were ringing as his blood thudded, but over that he could hear the man’s breath pistoning in and out with horrid monotony. He could keep this pace up all day! But it wouldn’t take all day to catch them. Just minutes. Moments.
The prospect of seeing Tristram disappear between the trees and being alone with that huge, unstoppable
