Nicholas beamed back, delighted.
Why is there a boat here?
“Shh,” he hushed himself again. He stepped off the path over the soft, fragrant blanket of green down to the water’s edge, and ran his hands along the boat’s timber flanks. Her white paint was almost blinding after the gloom of the forest.
Footsteps. Nicholas turned.
Coming down the path was the old woman in the pink cardigan, walking her tiny white terrier—the pair he had seen outside the woods on Carmichael Road so many hours ago. The old woman was speaking quietly to her dog, whose tail wagged contentedly at the praise. She held herself tall, reminding Nicholas of the proud elderly women of Paris, always dressed beautifully, walking with grace. Suddenly, the woman noticed him and stopped in her tracks; she was so startled that she dropped the dog’s lead.
“Garnock,” she called to the terrier.
Garnock took a few brave steps toward Nicholas.
This isn’t right
…
“Shh,” he reprimanded himself again—he didn’t want this good mood to pass, and here was someone to share it with.
“Garnock. Unusual name. Welsh, is it?” he asked.
The woman looked anxiously behind her to see if there was anyone coming up the path who she might summon help from.
“I don’t usually see others here,” said the woman. Her voice was clear and strong. Nicholas could see that she would have been a pretty thing in her youth. Garnock took a few more steps toward him and his tail wagged cautiously.
Now you have to go,
said the voice in Nicholas’s head.
It’s not too late if you go now.
He patted the hull of the boat. “I just found it myself. She’s a beaut, isn’t she?”
The old lady smiled and nodded in agreement, some small relief in her eyes. Still, she watched Nicholas cautiously. “She is indeed.”
Garnock was just a couple of feet away now. His eyes were brown and shining, his tail started wagging faster.
Go! For God’s sake, go now!
“What’s her name?” he asked.
The old lady nodded at the bow. Nicholas followed her eyes. The boat’s name was printed in black on the white timbers:
Cate’s Surprise.
Nicholas blinked, and looked back at the woman, a question on his lips.
Garnock jumped, and his teeth sank deeply into Nicholas’s hand.
It was as if a black shroud fell over the world. The trees rushed in, gnarled branches and green-black leaves closing over the sky. The pond drained into itself, drying in an instant to become a choked bowl of wild and vital thorn bushes. The largest and oldest of the trees all leaned in the same direction, as if away from a mighty gale, and the lush elkhorns that nodded from the tree trunks became hanging shards of rotting cloth or harshly bent rusted iron. The boat heaved over on its side, sucking into itself like a collapsing lung, its white paint stripping away to reveal a skeletal wreck of gray, warped boards. The painted name flaked away to different letters:
Wynard
.
Nicholas tried to turn his head, but it whirled vertiginously and his eyes struggled to focus.
The dog’s white coat dissolved away as if by invisible acid, revealing a dark brown shagginess beneath. Its legs cracked and grew, and from its flanks sprouted another four long, cadaverous shanks. Its snout and face split and peeled away, revealing another one, two, four, six unblinking eyes, and its white teeth cohered to become two curved fangs as big as bear claws, wet and sharp as needles.
Nicholas looked at his hand—two ugly, red-circle punctures were bleeding slowly. The world of the dark woods spun. With huge effort, he lifted his gaze to the old woman.
Of all the things, she alone had remained unchanged.
“How did you enjoy my strawberries?” she asked pleasantly.
Nicholas’s eyes rolled back in his head and the world went black.
S
inging.
A woman’s voice from across dark air, a siren song; faint, tugged at jealously by the wind.
Awareness swam up out of nothingness, like a slow bubble rising through the night sea. Nicholas realized he was moving. His feet and hands felt a million miles distant, ice cold and unreachable. He could not command his legs, arms, lips, eyelids. But he could sense the subtle rise and fall of his chest, although there was a heaviness there. He could hear the rustle of leaves, a surf-like whisper. He was supine and yet he was moving. Under his back, his buttocks, the underside of his thighs and calves, under his forearms and head, were thousands of tiny shifting knuckles. He willed himself to breathe deeper, but his lungs kept at their shallow work, tight and pained as if laboring under a weight.
The singing grew clearer: “… his face so soft and wondrous fair …”
He couldn’t open his eyes. He tried another deep breath, but his lungs ignored him and kept their own shallow rhythm. A near but hazy memory surfaced: the things of nightmares.
“… the purest eyes and the strongest hands …”
He was being carried up a grade. Slowly, recollections of his last few lucid moments came back in pieces: the boat, the sky, the old woman, the wild strawberries, the juice, the bleeding holes in his hand.
He tried again. Nothing. He was deep inside himself; only his ears were unfettered, letting in the chittering of tiny legs underfoot and the lilting song.
“… I love the ground on where he stands …”
Open your eyes. You can’t fight what you can’t see.
But he remembered the dog’s flesh falling away, and the huge spider crouched there, dull spiny hairs on its long, multijointed legs, its black eyes sparkling. He was afraid to see. The name on the boat:
Cate’s Surprise.
Was that a memory? Or an infected vision? Whichever, it was mean.
A new heat bloomed inside him. Anger.
He focused on his ire, blowing on its embers, brightening it.
How dare she? How dare she use Cate’s name?
His heart thudded. He told his lungs to breathe deeper. The air sucked in.
“… I love the ground on where he stands …”
With a mental fist, Nicholas gripped the bright coal of outrage in his belly, letting it burn and hurt.
Good. Now, move it up.
He lifted the bright pain to the spot behind his eyes.
Forget what you saw before. You don’t know what was real and what was not. What matters is what you see now.
He grimly tightened his imagined hand around the coal, letting the pain and the anger grow brighter and sharper, focusing it like the pinpoint of light from a magnifying glass behind his eyes.
One eyelid cracked open a sliver.
In the gloom, he could see the weight on his chest was no hallucination. Perched there like a spiny, deformed cat was the spider Garnock. All eight orbs of its stygian, unblinking eyes seemed to be trained on Nicholas’s face—and they noted the movement of his eyelid.
Oh, Christ,
thought Nicholas.
I am insane.
The spider’s two curved fangs were as dark as ebony, rooted in hairs in its head and underslung with two swollen, gray-pink sacs. The points of the fangs were sharp and glistening. They tack-tack-tacked together, a bony clicking like knitting needles that was surprisingly loud.
“It’s fine,” came the old woman’s voice. “We’re here, anyway. Put him down.”
Nicholas felt the wave beneath retreat as the knuckle lumps supporting him slipped away first from his head—depositing it on moist-smelling earth—then his shoulders, arms, back, buttocks, legs. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed hundreds of spiders, dark gray and hunched and large as sparrows, streaming away. A jolt of new terror went through him and his stomach heaved.
The memory of Tris’s tiny, lifeless body carried on a shifting bed of spiny legs flooded his mind, and his heart sank.
Above him were small gaps in the dark treetops; smoke-colored clouds drifted overhead. Then the view was obscured by the old woman’s face.
She wasn’t that old, Nicholas could see now, maybe in her mid-sixties. Her eyes crinkled as she smiled, but there wasn’t a speck of warmth there.
“Hello, Nicholas.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but only a shuddering breath escaped his throat.
She took her eyes off his and ran her gaze over his forehead, his hair, his cheeks, his neck. She clucked to herself, then resumed singing in the softest voice: “… and where he goes, yes …”
Nicholas closed his eyes and concentrated. His limbs felt carved from frozen meat. But he willed his head to turn. It did, just a few degrees. The new angle afforded him a little more view. He could just glimpse the tip of a stone chimney, topped with rusty iron baffles to dissipate the smoke and send it out widely. The top of a wooden trellis, lush with leaves—maybe beans or pea stalks. And the tops of a circular grove of trees.
“… I love the ground on where he goes, and still I hope …”
He flicked his eyes down. The old woman knelt over him, her eyes taking in his arms, his chest. He was wrong: her hair wasn’t white, it was gray, and she would have been sixty at the most, closer to fifty. A smile teased her lips. “… that the time will come …” The tip of her tongue darted out, slick with saliva. Her hands were trembling.
“Who … ?” whispered Nicholas.
Her eyes rolled back to his and her smile broadened.
“Who, indeed. Who, indeed …”
She stroked his face, and her eyes returned to his belly. But her hands stayed on him, drifting down his cheeks to his neck, across his chest.
“And how is your little toe? Still there, eleven of ten? Or have you tried to hide your little deformity?”
Nicholas felt his blood thud in his ears.
“Garnock,” she whispered.
Nicholas’s heart tripped as the huge spider appeared in his periphery, then stepped, one delicate leg at a time, onto his chest to stare down at his face. He groaned and shut his eyes. Her hands were down at his groin. He felt her unzip his fly.
Oh, God, no.
“… when he and I will be as one …” sang the old woman. Her hand slipped inside and softly curled around and cupped his penis.
No, no, no, no
… He screwed his eyes shut. “… when he and I will be as one …”
As she stroked him, he grew harder.
No!
he screamed, but again only a whisper came out, and his body—untouched since Cate died—didn’t listen and stiffened more. Her stroking grew faster.
“… when he and I will be as one …”
The weight of the spider on his chest was horrible, stifling. He couldn’t move. The old woman’s hand was eating him as hungrily as her eyes had.
“Yes, yes, yes,” she whispered.
Nicholas wanted to leap out of his skin and run. His brain was on fire.
“Yes!” said the old woman, and he came. The warm spasms rolled up through his guts and his body jerked involuntarily.
“Yessss,” she whispered. Nicholas heard the scraping sound of tin on glass—a lid going on a jar. “Garnock. Off.”
The weight stepped from Nicholas’s chest. Then he felt a damp, cold hand pat his cheek. He opened his eyes. The old woman was regarding him. She would have been ninety or more; her face was gray and wrinkled as a kicked blanket. Yet her dark eyes shone with the same delight.
“We’ll see you again soon, pretty man.” Her ancient voice was now as dry as ash. “Garnock-lob?”
Two hot skewers drove into the flesh of Nicholas’s exposed thigh, and fire swept up to his skull. The world shrank and fell away into oblivion.
H
e dreamed he was a bird.
His legs were numb, because they were gone. His head was gone, too, painless and vanished. In its place, stuck into his open throat by a stick that would gag him were he alive, was a woven ball of twigs: his new head, staring dumb at the sky. His severed shinbones were stuck into it, making lifeless, raw horns of his curled, dead feet. But his body—dead, too, and swelling with rot—still had feeling. It was sodden wet and awfully cold. Ants were crawling over it, exploring for places to nest and feed. He was quite content to lie there and decay, until his body felt something poking into its side. Without eyes, he couldn’t see, but he knew it was a boy holding a stick, poking him, disturbing his death, seeking to drag him out onto a path. He was the bird, but he was also the boy. All was well, though.
Because this is the plan. This is what we need to bring him. It is the cycle.
But the prodding stick?
Flesh, not stick! Flesh and blood! Because blood is the only sacrifice that pleases the Lord.
Nicholas’s eyes blearily opened.
A large woman stood above him, poking him with the tip of a brightly colored umbrella. Nicholas screamed. The woman screamed, too, and skittered backward. Despite her size, she moved surprisingly fast.
“He’s alive!” she called to her husband in the car on the road. She hurried into the passenger seat and the car roared past.
“Dirty druggie! Disgrace!” shouted the man before he swiftly wound up his window and sped away.
Nicholas was lying in the dry sword grass outside the woods. Everything hurt. His hands and feet felt like they weren’t flesh but wet dust, heavy and lifeless. His clothes were damp. His heart thudded dully, and his head felt full of sand. But he could move. He rolled onto his side, dragged his knees to his chest, and slowly pushed himself up onto all fours. Ropy spittle fell from his slack lips. The minute it took him to sit on his haunches seemed an eternity.
He sat on the path, breathing heavily from the effort, and squinted at his watch. It was four thirty; the sun was kissing the rooftops in the west. An arm’s length away on the path lay the body of the butcher bird, its woven head reattached to its lifeless body, its pathetic severed legs again poking out like antlers. Beside him was a clean plastic 7-Eleven bag. He reached painfully and picked it up. Within were a new torch and a bug bomb can, the latter also unused, its lid still attached.
Nicholas looked at his knees. No sign of the virulent sludge of squashed spiders—but his clothes were all wet; soaked through.
He looked at his hand. In the flesh between his forefinger and thumb were two red-rimmed and throbbing punctures. The pain in his upper thigh told him he would find two more wounds there.