The Dead Path (12 page)

He followed them to the front door, where Detective Waller hesitated. “Do you recognize the mark on the gun stock?” she asked.

Nicholas met her eyes. “What mark?” Lying, he realized, was easy when you just didn’t care.

Waller watched him for a long moment, then nodded, and the pair left.

Nicholas helped mop the blood off the front steps before he finally took his shower, then he went to bed and fell into a sleep as deep and empty as the night sky.

  S
uzette popped another two ibuprofen from their foil card, put them in her mouth, and concentrated on swallowing them. She had the unpleasant sensation of the hard pills ticking at her molars like loose teeth, and into her mind jumped the horrible flash of Gavin Boye folded on the front stoop, his eyes partly open and seeming to stare at the potted philadelphus, his own shattered teeth grinning from his red and ruined slash of a mouth. Her head throbbed. For the hundredth time she wished she were at home and could grab some mugwort from her herb garden. Finally, the pills went down.

  W
hen he woke, his room was dark. Thunder rolled grimly outside, stabbed by flashes of lightning. He was shaking and so cold that his muscles had spasmed tight, making it difficult to sit up. As soon as he did, a swell of nausea rode up to the back of his throat. He put his feet over the side of the bed and reached with jittering fingers for his watch. It was nearly two in the morning.

Tristram touched the bird. But it should have been you
.

Something had wanted him dead a long time ago. And now that something knew he was back. It had sent Gavin.
And it wants me to
know
that it knows.

Why didn’t Gavin shoot him?

Because he wasn’t supposed to.

Nicholas kept his eyes open, because whenever he closed them he saw the top of Gavin’s scalp rising on its little font of red and gray.
You’re one small step from the loony bin, my friend. Not content with seeing reruns of suicides—you need premieres now?

He felt hungover, foggy.

Either Suzette or his mother—it had to be Suze—had left a glass of water on the bedside table. Nicholas reached for it. His hand quaked with every beat of his heart, making tiny, circular ripples.

What had possessed Gavin to shoot himself?

Possessed
.

He rolled the word around in his mind.

The same thing that had possessed Elliot Guyatt to march into Torwood cop shop and admit he killed the Thomas boy. The same thing that had possessed the monstrous Winston Teale to confess to Tristram’s murder.

Nicholas sat upright, suddenly wide awake.

Teale
.

Teale had been built like a bull. He couldn’t have fit through the tunnels under the water pipe.

Nicholas cursed himself. Twenty-five years he’d had to figure that out. Maybe Teale didn’t kill Tristram. Maybe Teale was just the sheepdog.

“Then who did?” he whispered.

The same person that told Gavin to kill himself. The same person that made a talisman from a dead bird.

Someone in the woods.

Nicholas put his feet over the bed edge. He had to talk about this, lance it before it swelled in his head like a sac of spoiled blood and poisoned him. He had to tell Suzette. He stood and struggled into his hoodie with shaking arms.

The hall was dark. Suzette’s door was open. Her bed was unmade.

Nicholas frowned and padded to his mother’s door. No snores came from inside.

“Mum?”

He put his hand on the doorknob, but let it rest there. He could feel her wakefulness and rejection on the other side of the door. A dull slosh of anger rolled inside him, which he swallowed down.

Nicholas realized he was still shaking. His legs were weak and vibrated like cello strings. He shuffled to the kitchen and made tea, then stumped to the living room.

Suzette was curled asleep on the sofa, her face a deathly gray in the television’s glow. The set’s volume was so low it was no wonder he hadn’t heard it.

He sat beside her and watched TV as he sipped his tea. After two infomercials (one for a company that implied it would loan him cash even if he’d just broken out of prison and were holding schoolchildren hostage and another showing pretty women with loose morals who could not possibly make it through the night without
his
phone call), a news update. Elliot Guyatt, remanded in custody and due to face court next week charged with the murder of local seven-year-old Dylan Thomas, had been found dead in his remand cell, having apparently suffered a brain aneurysm. A coroner’s report was pending. Today, the funeral service for Dylan Thomas had been held at St. John’s Anglican Cathedral, with his schoolmates forming a guard of honor …

Nicholas dropped the remote three times before he could switch off the set.

  I
t took over an hour to fall asleep.

But once asleep, he dreamed.

He was Tristram. Sweat poured down his temples, his armpits, his crotch. He was on his good hand and knees, pushing through a dark, cobwebbed tunnel. With every inch forward, spiderwebs cloaked his face, clogged his nostrils, coated his lips. Tiny legs spindled on his arms, his neck, his lips and eyelids. He wanted to scream but couldn’t, because spiders would get in his mouth. The tunnel seemed never to end, and the webs got thicker, and the numbers of spiders on his legs, his arms, crawling down his shirt, burrowing into his ears, became so great they weighed him down. Soon, the webs over his eyes as were thick as a shroud; they shut out the light and cloyed his limbs so he could not move. He screamed now, but the spider silk was wrapped tight about his jaw and he couldn’t open his mouth. He struggled, but the sticky silk held him tight. And the spiders—thousands of spiders—stopped crawling and started to feed.

Chapter
8
   

  H
e woke to the distant clinking of metal spoons in ceramic bowls. He rose and wiped the corners of his eyes. It was just after seven.

Shuffling down the hall, he heard an elephantine rumble coming from behind Suzette’s bedroom door. As he approached the kitchen, the sound of thick bubbling made him wonder whether he’d round the corner and see his mother in a hooded cloak, sprinkling dried dead things into a soot-stained cauldron. The imagining didn’t amuse him; it made him slightly ill. He shook off the thought and entered the kitchen.

Katharine was in her pink nightgown, stirring a pot of porridge. “Good morning,” she said. She didn’t turn around.

He’d intended to tell her what he’d seen on last night’s news: that Elliot Guyatt had died in his cell. But Katharine was stirring the bubbling oatmeal with such stiff briskness, her shoulders set so hard, that he remained silent. She was tense. Or angry. Or … 
afraid
.

No. There’d be no talk about killers of children this morning.

She finally turned, wearing a bright, forced smile. “Tea’s made, and the porridge is nearly done. You look pale.”

“I call it PTSD-chic.” He sat.

“You could have a flu.”

Christ, he
thought.
If only all I had was a flu.
“Paper?”

She shook her head and nodded to the front door.

He stood again, shuffled back up the hall, and opened the door. He yelped in surprise. Gavin stood there, the gun under his chin. A moment later, the gun silently kicked and Gavin’s jaw split open. The ghost smiled at Nicholas, repositioned the gun under his ruined chin, and it jerked again. Gavin’s scalp jumped and he fell to the steps without a sound.

Nicholas stood frozen.

A moment later, Gavin was gone.

“For fuck’s sake,” whispered Nicholas. His voice shook.

“What’s that?” called Katharine.

Gavin was now fifty meters up Lambeth Street, walking toward the front gate. The day was harshly bright.

“Nicholas?”

“Nothing.”

He clenched his teeth and hurried down to the footpath where the rolled newspaper lay in dew. He sidestepped Gavin on the way back in.

Katharine had the porridge dished out. Nicholas stared wearily at his bowl.

“I think you’re sick,” she said.

He shook his head. His stomach felt ready to disgorge, as if he’d swallowed a mugful of old blood. He was cold.

Katharine touched the back of her hand to his forehead. He could feel her thin skin vibrating. She was shaking.

“Bit hot,” she said.

He took a mouthful of tea and left his porridge untouched.

“I’ll be in the garage.”

He felt her eyes on the back of his head as he walked to the back door.

  K
atharine sat watching a skin harden over the porridge in her bowl. It was, she decided, the exact color of the poo that had come out of her children when they were breastfeeding—a wheaty shit with the sweet smell of just-turning milk. She dropped her spoon with a deliberate clatter.

You bring these creatures into the world. You guide their little, darting dumb heads onto your swollen-then-aching-then-numb nipples, you change ten thousand nappies … but what does that guarantee? That they will love you? That they will talk with you? That they will be good?

No. No. No.

Her anger stayed on a slow simmer and fed itself. Everything had been so normal a few weeks ago. Deliciously boring. A warm, smooth-sided routine. She could step from the shower and loll into every day: breakfast, tidying, check the last firing, discard the breakages, peel the thick plastic off the clay, boil the kettle, wet the wheel … and then it was dinnertime and the possibility of a phone call from Sydney or London. But now … now things had changed very fast. Old things had reappeared; feelings and fears that she’d thought were long disposed of. It was like coming suddenly across the image of the man who’d dumped you in a stack of fading, happy photographs.

But it’s so much more than that. He’d brought death to her doorstep.

She set her jaw and stared at her tea. She didn’t want to think about it and busied herself sprinkling sugar over the gelatinous surface of her cooling porridge.

Things are hot and dangerous for a while, then they cool, and you form a skin that keeps things nice and separate. Like keeping the practicalities of gas bills and leaking toilet cisterns—real-life stuff—from the dreaminess, the otherworldliness, that used to hover around Don like the scents of Arabia around a plodding climbing jasmine. That dreaminess was what had charmed her so many years ago, then alarmed her, then infuriated her. And now she saw it in her children and it infuriated her still.

She was finishing the sweet, milky dregs when Suzette shuffled into the kitchen. Katharine nodded at the saucepan on the stove. Suzette nodded, too, and pulled back her hair. Katharine felt the twin forks of pride and jealousy: pride that she had brought such a confident, good-looking person into the world, and an instinctive, primordial antagonism to another female in her space. A younger one at that.

“Your brother’s sick.”

Suzette yawned and poured tea. “I’m not surprised.”

To take the bait and ask, “What do you mean?” was to give weight to this foolishness, and she would not be party to that. Instead, Katharine pushed her cup towards Suzette’s, and her daughter refreshed it. “Ta,” she said.

For a while, they sat in silence. It was Suzette who broke it.

“Do you remember Mrs. Quill down the road, Mum?”

“Beg pardon?”

“The seamstress at Jay Jay’s? Nicky and I walked by it yesterday.”

Katharine felt her bladder go as loose as a hung bedsheet in the wind. It took all her concentration to clench and hold. Her expression didn’t change.

“Quill? Not really. She must be dead years now. Do you need something mended?”

She saw Suzette’s eyes rise and lock onto hers.

She knows I’m lying.

But still the iron spike inside her refused to bend, and she met her daughter’s stare.

“No,” replied Suzette. “Never mind.”

  T
he painted clapboard sides of the garage were once white but decades of grinding sun and mindless rain had grubbied them to a weary gray that was flaking off dispiritedly, revealing tiny continents of bilious green undercoat. Its single window of four dusty panes stared darkly out at the lush garden that flanked the building. Lush monstera bushes with their broad, perforated leaves squatted around the outside, and Rangoon creeper snaked up the jagged timbers. The unused driveway, twin rails of concrete veined with cracks from which emerged tiny lava flows of moss, ran up to two wooden bifold doors that sagged, their tops meeting in the middle like the leaning foreheads of exhausted, clinching boxers. Nicholas slipped an old nickel-plated key into the lock of the right-hand bifold. It gave a desiccated groan as he drew it open.

He stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

Inside was dark and cold. There was no electric bulb. Thin, milky light trickled through the grime-fogged window.

Something was rattling. No wind shook the gray glass; the dust motes hardly stirred. He realized the sound was his teeth. He bit down hard to stop them.

He inhaled. The taste of the still air was tinted with engine oil, with the scent of earth as fine and barren as desert sand, with dry rot … and underneath it all, as faint as a whisper, the sickly aroma of rum. Katharine had cleaned out the bottles after she kicked her husband out, but the smell of the booze lingered like a slow cancer. He walked across to the bench and pulled open the drawer. It wouldn’t have surprised him to find half a dozen of the two hundred milliliter bottles his father preferred—but the drawer was empty except for dust and cockroach shells. He closed it.

It had been decades since he’d stood in here; yet the sight and smell of it had not changed. Time meant nothing. The thought sank like a slow blade into his gut. Those intervening years had been worthless. Twenty years of heartbeats, of travel, of conversations and work and sleep and wishes and laughter were dust. Cate had lived and died, and now existed only in his mind and in some cruel lantern show in the bathroom of a small flat in Ealing. This building was as much a crypt as any stone chamber in Newham Cemetery. Time was interred here.

He was tempted to step back out, return to bed and pray that his chill was something grave like pneumonia or dengue fever. Yet he knew he had to stay. He had an inkling. Something in here was waiting to be found.

His eyes were adjusting to the gloom. He craned his head back.

Between the trusses overhead were strung side by side two old wood painter’s planks, each thick as his wrist and gray with age, spattered with a muted rainbow of paints that had dried before Nixon resigned. Stacked on the planks were his father’s suitcases.

Suzette had looked through them, but he’d never so much as touched them. To open them would have meant that Donald Close truly was dead, truly was never coming home.

Leaning against the rear wall was a timber stepladder, also speckled with paint. Loops of gritty cobweb hung between the treads like hammocks in a sunken ship. Nicholas drew in a deep breath—the effort set him shaking harder—and blew what dust he could off the ladder and pulled it from the wall. He set it below the planks, and climbed.

His head drew level with the first suitcase; inches from his face, a spider the size of a coaster hung from the plastic handle. He instinctively jumped back, and only stopped himself falling by grabbing the red hardwood truss. A splinter drove deep into the soft web of flesh between his finger and thumb. He steadied himself. The spider bobbed in the disturbed air, light as tissue. It was a carapace, hanging empty by a silk thread. Nicholas felt his heart fluttering like a trapped sparrow; he flicked the spider shell away and started carrying the suitcases down to the earth floor.

On the ground, they seemed smaller. Coated in dust and warped by seasons of damp and dry, they looked lost and vulnerable. Two were a matching herringbone, in beige and black; the third was once a cadaverous green.

He pulled that one toward him. Its plastic corners had cracked with age; its catches were brown and rusted. He pressed hard and something inside the lock snapped and the freed lid rose a fraction. He swung it open; the rusted hinges let out the sigh of a poorly sleeping man.

The clothes inside were badly eaten by moth larvae. When he lifted what he guessed was a cardigan, it fell apart in his fingers. But his eyes lit on something untouched by the vermin: the synthetic label inside the collar. He read the cream rectangle: Size 38.
A size smaller than mine,
he thought. Before he knew what he was doing, he lifted the rotting fabric to his nostrils and inhaled. An unhappy blend of lanolin and wet soil. Nothing of the man. He dropped the rags.

Inside the upper lid was a sleeve for shoes; its elastic had long lost its pull and it sagged like a slack, dead mouth. Inside were some cardboard train tickets, each punched with a tiny hole, and a few copper coins. Beneath the rotten chaff of eaten wool and grub pellets were some rusted tobacco tins; these last rat-tatted when shaken, and Nicholas guessed they contained fishing hooks, sinkers, spinners. He pushed the suitcase aside, and pulled another toward him.

It, too, resisted opening. He went to the workbench and found a screwdriver—its shaft grainy with rust—and popped open the stubborn latch. Within were books. These, too, had been exposed to insects, but clearly were less palatable fare and were only mildly damaged. They smelled potent: mealy and ripe. Nicholas pulled them out one by one. Some were cheap things, the spines of which lifted away the moment he touched them; others were weighty with dark, glossy covers. Handling them carefully, he read their titles.
Master Book of Candle Burning. The Sixth Book of Moses. Beowulf. Coptic Grimoires.
A thick book with black-and-white plates showing nineteenth-century spiritualists pulling ectoplasm from noses and ears of men and women who reclined as if dead. Books on clairvoyance, on gods of the pagan world, Irish mythology … an even dozen in all. He pushed them aside and pulled the last suitcase toward him.

This was the smallest and heaviest. It opened without protest and Nicholas felt his stomach tighten. More books: herbs and magic. Druidism. Voodoo. The Apocrypha. His mother, his pragmatic, no-nonsense mother, couldn’t have cohabited with a man who read books like this. But of course, she didn’t. Not for long. Their marriage had lasted just four years.

Nicholas stacked the books to one side as he pulled them out. There were three books left. He lifted aside
The Curse of Machu Picchu,
and stopped. Beneath was a book unlike all the others. It was a slight staple-bound thing with a thick paper cover in jaundice yellow; in the center of the cover was an etching of the
Tallong State School
main building. The title read: Tallong State School—
75 Years—1889–1964
.