notepad, flipped to a new page and started writing. He stood, his chair scraping on the floor. “That’s the address of my flat. I’m going to get my stuff and go home. You should go home, too. Get home to Bryan and the kids.” He kissed her on the forehead.
Suzette was so surprised that she said nothing, simply watched Nicholas as he walked to the hall doorway, where he hesitated. “So, it’s an old rune. Anyone could have put it there. But thank you for looking.”
He smiled again at her, and in a moment was just the sound of footsteps echoing in the hall.
K atharine could feel the stillness in the air of her house as Nicholas let himself out the squeaking front gate. She went to her bedroom window and watched him walking down the street carrying his suitcase. Afternoon sunlight cast a long, thin shadow behind him, and she watched it till he was around the corner and gone.
She cursed herself for her foolishness, locking herself in her room like some jilted debutante. But when Nicholas had handed her flowers and said he’d moved out, thirty-odd years cracked like some fragile ice bridge and fell away, and she found herself stranded back in time, staring at a man who looked so much like Don, hearing him say almost exactly what Don had said the night he finally listened to his wife and moved himself out. Katharine felt her eyes clouding with tears again, and she angrily wiped them away. Christ, she’d told Don to move out. Screamed at him to go. He’d begun drinking and she had every reason to see him out of her and the kids’ lives. But when he actually did it… She didn’t run out into the street and call him back. And now her son had gone, again, and she let him. She dried her eyes and shoved the damp tissue in her pocket.
She went to the door and carefully opened it a crack. The kettle was starting to sing. Suzette was still in the kitchen. Katharine had heard Suzette’s voice as she spoke with Nicholas; although she couldn’t make out the words, she’d heard the urgent tone. The thought of having her children back here in Tallong knotted her stomach into a tight ball of worry.
Because of her. Because of Quill.
Quill. A woman she hadn’t thought of in twenty years. But was that true? Weren’t there nights when she dreamed of that dark little shop where dresses and suits hung like the capes of villainous creatures in some bad old Christopher Lee film? Quill was long dead, long gone. Why had Suzette brought her name up the other night? Was it coincidence?
Katharine wiped under her nose, ran fingertips through her hair, straightened her dress. Yes. Of course it was coincidence.
She opened her bedroom door wide and went to sit with her daughter.
N icholas had no idea of the time, but it was closer to dawn than to midnight. He couldn’t sleep. Every time he shut his eyes, images appeared, haunting his skull as surely as ghosts haunted his life: Gavin’s scalp lifting, popping up like a magician’s trick bouquet; Mrs. Boye spitting at an impassive Christ; Teale, arms like Frankenstein’s undead creation, chasing him through dense forest; a dead bird with a head of woven twigs; a strange arrowhead mark carved into the walnut stock of Gavin’s gun.
A dangerous rune, Suzette had called it. Too fucking right. So dangerous that he hoped he’d confused her enough, or pissed her off enough, that she’d book a flight home to Sydney tomorrow.
His tired eyes slid shut, and straightaway more dark images played like a silent newsreel: Tristram dropping to his knees and crawling into the spidery tunnel; Laine Boye’s eyes, inscrutable; Rowena’s eyes, shining with youth; Cate’s eyes, open and dusted with white powder; carved stone; the Green Man; dark woods dense with sentient trees; the oak grove at Walpole Park…
Nicholas’s eyes flew open. He felt suddenly ill.
The face that he’d seen as he sped past overgrown Walpole Park at Ealing on his motorbike, the face that made him crash-a face glimpsed just for an instant, a half-memory, a ghostly dream from the other side of his life- had been shrouded in leaves, just as the ceiling boss at the church was.
The Green Man.
There would be no sleep tonight. He stood and went to the window.
The night air was thick with fog, and all he could see was the streetlamp floating like a spectral eye. And though he couldn’t see them, he could sense the woods. He could feel the weight of the trees, huge and drawing as the moon to the tides.
He yanked on a sweater, snatched his keys, and strode out into the predawn chill.
N icholas walked through the thick mist to the 7-Eleven near the railway station. He agonized outside long enough for his light sweat to turn icy, then stepped inside and purchased two items, cursing himself for a fool every moment of the transaction.
Then he walked to Carmichael Road.
The fog swallowed all sound. No dogs barked. No cars passed. He could only see a few feet in front of him. As he crossed Carmichael Road, his footsteps on the bitumen were jealously hushed by the moist air. He stepped into the knee-high grass and felt the chill of it eat through his jeans to his calves. He plowed a wet path to what he guessed was roughly the middle of the gravel track, and stood silent, waiting.
For twenty minutes, nothing happened. The wet, frigid air seeped into his collar, up his sleeves, into his shoes. He had to bite his lip to convince himself he wasn’t still asleep on the couch, dreaming that he was here in this pearly gray world of cold. An elderly woman in a pink cardigan walked past on the other side of Carmichael Road with a tiny white dog-two faint specters in the mist. She didn’t see Nicholas and was dissolved again by the cloudy gray. He waited another five minutes. The cold burrowed into his skin, his eyes, his bones.
Then a flicker of movement ahead on the path.
Nicholas hurried. As he grew closer, the figure grew sharper through the fog like a diver rising from obscure depths. A young girl crouched on the path. She was shoeless and wore a plain sundress. His first thought was that she must be freezing. Then he saw that tall blades of damp grass speared painlessly through her legs and arms. She was as insubstantial as the mist.
My God. Tristram. The Thomas Boy. This young girl. Maybe Owen Liddy. How many children have died in those woods?
Nearer, he could see the shift the girl wore was a pattern from the 1940s. Her face beamed in delight: she’d found something wonderful on the path. She looked around cautiously, hopefully, checking that its rightful owner wasn’t around and she could claim the treasure for herself.
The girl bent again to pick up the invisible object she’d found. The moment she did, her translucent eyes widened in sudden disgust and she jerked away. Nicholas couldn’t bear what would come next. The ghost girl’s head whipped up toward the woods and white terror slammed across her face. She jittered back to run, but got not a step before her arm shot out like a signal post’s and she jetted away through the mist toward the woods, mouth wide in terror, dragged by something unseen, powerful, and fast.
A cold worm of fear shifted in Nicholas’s stomach. But he didn’t follow.
Instead, he started searching the path. It took less than a minute for him to find what he was looking for. He bent and parted the wet sword grass. There. A butcher bird. Gray wings, white belly, loose feathers over a swollen body. Legs snipped neatly off. Head gone, replaced with a sphere of woven twigs that was greening with mold encouraged by the recent rains. Hints of rust red peeked from under the ill green. The small bird’s death-curled claws were stuck in like horns.
He knew without doubt that just a few days ago, Dylan Thomas had seen this same bird on the path.
Nicholas picked up the talisman. He plucked out the feet, pulled off the woven head, and angrily tossed the legs, false head, and body in three directions.
There. Now I’ve touched the bird. Why don’t you come and get me?
He turned and strode through the sword grass toward the woods he knew were waiting.
A s he pushed through the tightly packed scrub, tendrils of fog curled in his wake. With mist obscuring everything but the few steps in front of him, there was less of an overwhelming palette of green to assault his eyes and he was drawn to details he would otherwise have overlooked: how close the trunks were to one another; how one tree was armored in bark as dark and thick as a crocodile’s hide, while its neighbor was pale gray and smooth as a girl’s calf; how the carpet of leaves underfoot bled tea-colored water as he squashed it, and how it sucked lightly when he stepped off; how the exposed rocks in gully walls bore spots of pale-green moss rounded like spray can spatters on their tops and black shadows like beards below; how vines curled up trunks like possessive serpents, rose straight like zippers, or clung with their own green claws like headless jade dragons. Some trunks were meters wide-striated tendons in the wrists of straining giants. Some massive beeches had tumbled with time and lay prone like beached whales, barnacled with funguses that reminded him of human ears. Some had fallen and
