furnished flat on Bymar Street. Nicholas had signed the lease, paid two months’ rent in advance, and been allowed to use the agency’s telephone to connect power and gas. He considered continuing up the road to the shopping mall and replacing his cell phone, but the prospect of queues and forms and sales patter about plans and discounts was too exhausting. Another day.
He carried the keys and his bag of herbal tea up the concrete stairs to the first-floor flat, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. The furniture was cheap and badly worn. The fridge had an asthmatic rattle. The carpet smelled faintly of cannabis and wet dog. The white curtains of the front room hung as listless as dressed game fowl. He pulled one aside, repulsed by the greasy feel of the fabric, and looked down the street.
At the end of Bymar Street was Carmichael Road, and beyond it, the heavy darkness of the woods.
In the sagging kitchen, Nicholas found a ceramic kettle with a wire element, and boiled water. He wondered how the woods could still be there, how they survived the housing boom of the fifties, the licentious building rackets of the seventies, the fiscal orgy of the ’03 spike.
It wasn’t a loved park. No one went in there. In fact, people hurried past them. People knew, without even entering, that they weren’t friendly woods.
Leave here, he thought. Buy a ticket south. Get a job in a design firm in a nice new building and live in a new apartment where there are no ghosts. You can live with that. This place hasn’t changed.
He went to the window and stared down the road, but the woods were a sea of shadow. Down there, in the green, secret velvet, the Thomas boy was being dragged between dark trees, his face a mask of terror, his last hours or minutes playing over and over, again and again. And down there-somewhere-was Tris, caught in his own endlessly repeating cycle, tormented and helpless, forever just minutes away from his own awful, lonely death.
You can bring no solace to the dead, he told himself. Why not let the departed stay departed?
Because they didn’t stay departed. They just stayed. Cate in London, falling and dying and falling and dying. The Thomas boy here. And Gavin. And Tris. The dead were everywhere. And if he didn’t try to find out why, didn’t do something, he’d go mad. He’d put a gun to his head like Gav, or smash his car like his father, or Christ knew what else. Only then, he feared, he’d become one of them. Caught in his own death loop, forever lifting steel to his mouth or watching a power pole race toward his windscreen.
He was going insane.
And he was sure of one other thing: he couldn’t leave town. Tristram’s body had been found kilometers away, but Suzette had seen his ghost on the gravel path on Carmichael Road. The Thomas child’s body had been found three suburbs away, but Nicholas had seen his ghost dragged by invisible hands into the woods. The boys’ bodies may have been found elsewhere, and their supposed killers had confessed to murdering them a long way from Tallong, but their ghosts didn’t lie. The boys were murdered in the woods.
And he and Suzette were the only ones who knew that.
As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t leave.
Trapped.
His cheeks were wet. He wiped them distractedly. The kettle was boiling noisily. He made the herbal tea. It was surprisingly pleasant. He drank it all, folded himself onto the thin fabric of the sofa, and fell into a dark and hollow sleep.
Chapter 10
T o Nicholas, the sky seemed the same sea gray as the wet slate of the steeply set shingles on the church roof, so it was hard to see where the holy building ended and the heavens began. The rain darkened the rough stone of the church’s buttresses, and the gloom made the green moss on the lowest course of its walls almost black. A fine day for a suicide’s funeral.
He stood under a dark umbrella among a small grove of she-oaks. He suspected that he looked exactly like the kind of rumpled weirdo one expects to see at the fringes of a funeral. He smoothed back his damp hair with one hand, and surreptitiously sniffed at his armpit. Not too bad, considering. His sleep on the sofa had been as long as it was deep. He’d been out nearly a whole day, and his eyelids had drifted open just an hour ago, all traces of his feverish flu gone. He’d jumped in the shower, patted himself dry with the few paper towels the previous tenant had left, pulled on yesterday’s clothes, ran his fingers over his teeth, and hurried to the church.
But now he was here, he didn’t want to go inside.
He listened to the rain strike a slack tattoo above his head as he watched mourners hurry inside like scolded black swans. The hearse-a long, modified Ford-was parked out front, its driver sitting upright and trying not to let passersby see that he was reading a paperback. He returned his gaze to the church’s damp granite flanks. From here, he could just read the lead lettering of the church’s cornerstone. It stated that the bishop of the Western Diocese had laid this stone to the Glory of God in 1888, the funds donated by an E. Bretherton. Stained-glass windows, narrow and high and lit from within, were the blues and greens of deep-sea gems. A quarter century ago, he’d sat inside looking at those same windows as he waited for Tristram’s funeral to begin. Tris’s casket had been a polished, garlanded box that looked terribly small on its own up at the front of the church-too small to hold Tris, who’d always seemed so electric with energy, so alive. It seemed impossible that he was lying silent inside it. The clergyman, Reverend Hird, a short but tough bulldog of a man, began the service and had fairly shaken with rage at the theft of Tristram’s young life. Not wanting to cry but unable to stop himself, Nicholas had looked away from the reverend and the small coffin to the windows. Their seaweed greens and abalone blues were so dark and cold through tears that Nicholas had imagined that he was not in a church at all, but was slipping under the sea, and drowning…
A shudder of raindrops tapped heavily on Nicholas’s umbrella, startling him back to the present. The wet footpaths were empty. There were no more mourners arriving. He had no more reason to linger out here like a cowardly thief outside a petrol station.
He went inside.
T hrough the inner swing doors, he could see the casket wreathed in flowers on the front dais. Sprays of white lilies either side of the pulpit were as shocking as ice fountains.
The elderly minister stood hunched at the side of the nave in discussion with a middle-aged mourner. Nicholas blinked, amazed. It was Reverend Hird: older, shorter, but still radiating the same dogged strength. A younger clergyman, a man of perhaps thirty with coffee-colored skin, stood patiently behind his superior.
Nicholas shook off his umbrella, signed the book, and slipped quietly into the church proper.
He had hoped to sit unnoticed in the back pews, but there were only two dozen mourners so to isolate himself in the back would draw even more attention. He joined the fourth row. As he sat, several heads turned to see who was arriving this late and whether they recognized him. Most didn’t, and returned their gazes to their orders of service, their neighbors, or the festooned casket. But three women kept their eyes on him. Katharine and Suzette were frowning. Katharine shook her head and returned to chatting to the elderly lady next to her; Suzette’s lips were as tight as a razor slash, and she mouthed, “Where the fuck have you been?” Nicholas gave a dismissive wave and mouthed back, “Later.” Suzette sent him one last furious glare, then turned back to the pulpit. The third woman held her stare at Nicholas longer, puzzled, trying to place him. At other times or in other lights, she would be striking, but the gloom of the church, the ubiquitous black, her shadowing half-veil made her seem carved severely from some cold and unyielding stone. He guessed this was Gavin’s widow. Her eyes narrowed, unhappy that she hadn’t identified this latecomer, and she turned her long neck again to the front. Beside her was a hooked old woman with a shock of white hair, visible under her small black hat.
Jesus, thought Nicholas. That must be Mrs. Boye.
From where he sat, he could just see the corner of her face. Her eyes were fixed on the figure of Christ crucified. Nicholas followed her gaze. The image was carved wood, a century or more old. The raw chisel marks made his limbs seem more wounded, his suffering more pronounced. Something beyond the raw agony of the figure disturbed Nicholas. The setting carved behind him was not Golgotha, but an incongruous forest of Arcadian trees and lush vines. Old Mrs. Boye’s expression vacillated between a frown of confusion and a bluff of undisguised boredom; her head bobbed to its own unheard tune, and from time to time she’d look to her daughter-in-law to ask a question that Nicholas could guess: Where are we? Senile dementia. Her mildly confused eyes kept returning to
