“Christ, Suze, I thought you’d come up here to tell me I need to see someone who can dope me up with Thorazine, and here you are saying… Fuck, what are you saying?”
Suzette fought the urge to snap at him. “I’m just saying there’s more to the world than the periodic table.”
“No shit,” snorted Nicholas. “And the kids?”
“Quincy, nothing. All she wants to do is look for Saturn’s rings and bring home every creature from the pound. Nelson, though, he’s…” She looked at Nicholas. “He’s like you. Gifted. But ignorant.”
Nicholas bristled. “I’m not ignorant.”
“You are about magic.”
“That’s because I don’t believe in magic.”
“Nicholas.” She stopped, hands on hips, waiting till he turned around. “You’re haunted. You see the dead. How can you not believe in magic?”
He turned and kept walking. “I’m happy you have a hobby. Are you a good witch?”
She caught up with him. “I own three Sydney houses outright and have five negatively geared investment properties. I’m good at everything I do.”
“I meant ‘good versus evil’ good.”
“ People are good or evil. Magic is magic. Some is performed with good intentions. Some isn’t. Some is easy. Some is hard. It’s like physics. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Nothing comes free. You need to put in effort. You need to make sacrifices.”
She saw Nicholas stiffen at the last word.
Then she glanced up. They were at an intersection. To the right, beyond hopscotch puddles of streetlight and shadowed picket fences, was the squat, heavy-browed building. Suzette felt a familiar old worm of fear turn in her belly.
They’d reached the Myrtle Street shops.
T hey stepped under the awning and their footsteps echoed on the tiles. This had turned out to be a very weird evening. Suzette-sensible, nose-buried-in-financial-theory-textbooks Suzette-was into magic. And his dead father, too. Nicholas brushed hair from his face. It felt unpleasantly like spiderweb and he shivered.
The shops were all shuttered and dark.
He expected a wave of pleasant nostalgia to suddenly overtake them, and they’d laugh about the lollies they’d gourmandized and the ice creams they’d loved that were no longer made. Instead, the dumb fronts of the shops were oddly hostile.
It’s because we’re being watched.
The thought shuddered through him like a shot of vodka. The streets were quiet. Nothing moved. The world was more shadow than substance and the wind made the power lines moan. They were alone. And yet, he had the unpleasant, light feeling in the pit of his gut that they were being watched.
“We should go,” he said.
“Okay,” said Suzette. But instead, she nodded at the new shop: Plow amp; Vine Health Foods. All they could see in the glass was their own ghostly reflections; the shop within was as black as the waters of a deep well.
“This was the haberdashery.” Suzette leaned closer, trying to see in. Nicholas fought an insane urge to yell “Get back!” Her eyes were fixed on the dark shop window. “Do you remember the old seamstress? Mrs. Quill. She freaked me out.”
Quill. The bent-backed old woman tucked behind a counter much too large for her, perched like some benevolent old parrot, nodding and sending a smile as he passed. Behind her had hung ranks of shirts, pants, skirts, and dresses that used to bring to mind a picture that, for a while during primary school, had haunted his dreams: from a book about the Second World War, a photograph of a dozen or so Russians-men, women, children-hanging dead and limp from a huge and leafless tree. A chill went through him and, as it did, another memory returned.
“You used to hate walking past these shops,” he said. “When you were small. You used to cry.”
She shrugged her shoulders, as if to shuck off an unpleasant memory-then she seemed to brighten. “Hey. I brought you something.” She reached into her pocket and produced a tiny parcel wrapped in tissue paper.
Not here. Not while we’re being watched.
He shook away the illogical thought. “Lovely. Can it wait till we get home?”
“Fucking hell, Nicholas,” said Suzette, cranky. “I don’t want Mum to see, okay?”
“Why not?”
“Christ! Because she doesn’t understand that kind of stuff! Jeez.”
Nicholas turned his back to the dark-eyed shop and removed the ribbon, unstuck the tape. Inside was a necklace. It was made of wooden beads and sported a polished brownish-white stone set in silver.
“The stone is sardonyx,” explained Suzette. “You said you had some headaches, so…”
“They stopped.”
“Yeah. ‘Thank you’ works, too. The wood is elder.”
Nicholas turned to face the streetlight. The stone was an inch across and cut in a square crystal, milky clear with tigerish bands of blood red. The beads were a dark timber, roughly spherical but each showing dozens of facets where they’d been cut by hand with a sharp knife. A woven silver cord held them together. It was, he had to admit, a piece both pretty and oddly masculine.
“Thank you,” he said.
Suzette didn’t answer. She was staring at the front door to Plow amp; Vine Health Foods. She leaned closer and frowned.
“Look.”
He followed her gaze and felt his stomach take a slow roll.
In the dim light it was just possible to make out an indentation in the wood doorframe. The mark had been painted over perhaps three or four times and would be invisible in daylight. But in the angled light from the streetlamp, it was fairly clear. A vertical line, and halfway down it, attached to its right, a half-diamond. The mark that had been drawn in blood on the woven head of the dead bird.
Nicholas felt a cold wave of dread rise through him.
“Let’s go home, Suze,” he said.
She was entranced, leaning closer. “This is a rune.”
“Wonderful. Come on. It’s cold.”
“Wait,” she said, and reached into her purse. She pulled out a pencil and notepad and copied the figure.
Tell her! Tell her all about the bird and its twig head and the mark… the mark, what does it mean? But another voice was stronger, calmer. No. Keep her out of it.
“Mrs. Quill,” she whispered to herself.
Nicholas put the necklace in his pocket, took his sister’s arm, and gently led her out to the street. “We’re going. I’m starved.”
The lie hurried him along.
K atharine turned the oven on low and started doling mashed potato onto three plates. How strange. She was out of practice being a mother. Nicholas had left home nearly twenty years ago. Suzette had lived in Sydney for ten. Katharine had grown used to the silence around her.
It wasn’t fair. They left you and you coped. Then they came home and you had to worry all over again. Not fair. Not fair.
And yet now they were under one roof again, the instant they stepped on the street, she was anxious.
Because of the street. Because of Tallong.
“Nonsense,” she whispered and reached for the saucepan of meatballs.
Because there’s something evil out there.
The front door rattled open.
Katharine jumped at the noise, dropping the ladle with a clatter on the tiles. Tomato sauce spattered blood red across the floor.
“We’re home!” called Suzette.
“Miss us?” asked Nicholas.
Footsteps tromped down the hall.
