The Dead Path (25 page)

  T
his was the last box. Pritam pulled it down from the rectory storeroom shelf, dropped it unceremoniously on the floor, and began emptying its contents.

Rifling through the other archive boxes had yielded a hodgepodge of curiosities: photographs of a twenty-years-younger Reverend John Hird smiling with disabled children under the World Expo monorail; a yellowing folder containing John’s army papers discharging him from Third Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment; another envelope holding the location and number of his brother’s crematorium plot. Pritam set these aside.

Other finds were not personal and less interesting. Tax receipts for repairs, three notepads containing bookings for the church hall, an audit of plants in the church grounds, a receipt for a mimeograph machine.

Pritam had spent the day trawling through the boxes, occasionally answering a telephoning well-wisher or a knock at the door, confirming in a cracked and tired voice that, indeed, the Reverend John Hird had passed away last night; that, yes, he went peacefully; and agreeing that, indeed, he had been unwell a long while. Pritam did not say that John Hird, a man who had seemingly been afraid of nothing, had glimpsed something in an old photograph that had literally scared him to death.

And so to the last box.

If the previous cartons had been pedestrian in content, this was numbingly dull. Old bus timetables. Ticket stubs for bus travel. Suggestion-box notes held together with a rusted bulldog clip. A large envelope marked “Fund-raising.” Within this last were four smaller envelopes labeled by decade, the topmost reading “1970–80.” Pritam opened it.

Inside were a few copies of a flyer printed in purple ink—he was pleased the mimeograph got used. They advertised a fête: “Fun for the Family!,” “Sack races!” and “Home-baked cakes!” Handwritten lists of helpers and their duties (“R. Burgess, set up trestle tables & remove rubbish”). Faded Polaroid photographs of the big day: ladies shyly holding their iced cakes and smiling. Children with long hair and flared pants were lashed together at the ankles, running and laughing. A wide-tied man wagging his finger at the camera while eating a pie. A woman staring, unsmiling, at the camera.

Pritam’s breath stopped in his throat.

The woman staring at the camera was Eleanor Bretherton.

He flipped the photograph. In pencil, written in a fine copperplate hand: “Mrs L. Quill. Contributed $60 to fête fund 17 May 1975.”

Pritam sat back.

He felt small again, a thin-limbed boy in his grandmother’s cottage before his parents took him from India, listening after dinner as Nani told the story of a small village in Uttar Pradesh where every child was cut open, alive and screaming, to save the village from the wrath of Kali. That tale had terrified him as a child; not just his imagining being one of those utterly helpless children not even able to turn to their parents who themselves wielded knives, but imagining how terrible must be the face of Kali to drive loving parents to commit bloody murder.

Eleanor Bretherton. Mrs. L. Quill.

Now things go bad,
he thought.

At that moment, someone pounded on the rectory door.

  T
he girl sat in one of the old club chairs, staring into space with slack eyes. She blinked occasionally and breathed slow and deep, but hadn’t shifted or spoken a word in the twenty minutes since she’d arrived at the presbytery.

“ ‘Hannah Gerlic, grade five,’ ” read Pritam. His voice shook. He replaced the exercise book into the girl’s school bag.

He looked up to the other club chair opposite. In it sat Nicholas Close, who nodded acknowledgment. In the middle of the cleared chessboard lay the dead plover talisman. One of its claw horns had been lost, but even to look at it made Pritam’s skin prickle.

This is not hypothetical evil,
he thought.
Not the evil of lust, nor the evil of hate. This is fundamental evil, as old as the world itself. This is the devil’s handiwork.

The thought was electric and terrifying, as if the veneer covering the world had peeled at one corner, affording a glimpse of dark and yawning depths below.

“I’m sorry,” whispered Nicholas.

He sat slumped in his chair, staring at the dead bird. For an unsettling moment, Pritam thought he was talking to the tiny corpse. Then he slid his eyes to Pritam and smiled.

He’s peered into the depths, too,
thought Pritam.
And he looks ready to fall into them.

He shook his head. After finding that photograph of Quill, he’d been shocked to open the presbytery door to stare right into the face of the man who’d brought her to his attention. Pritam had been ready to dismiss him, tell him John Hird was dead and to come back another time—better yet, don’t come back at all!—when he saw the girl standing dumbly behind Nicholas, holding his hand and staring into space. Nicholas said a word that was the second blow to finish the one-two: “Quill.”

Pritam had let them in, put the girl in the chair, listened as Nicholas briefly told him that he found her outside the woods and finished by pulling that horrible, disfigured bird from his pocket.

Now Pritam knew the girl’s name.

“Her parents. They’ll want to know why you grabbed their daughter while she was walking home.”

“I didn’t do this to her.”

“
I
believe you,” said Pritam. The words surprised him. But they were true; he did believe. Every poisonous bit. That abomination of a bird verified it all: so unnaturally dead, so
alien
. It looked like a lightning rod for evil.

“I believe you, but I don’t think her mother will,” he continued. “I don’t think the police will. Not so soon after the Thomas boy. Nicholas, I think you’re looking down the barrel of some serious questions.”

Nicholas didn’t seem to care. He was watching Hannah Gerlic, and the concern in his eyes for her was real.

She stared into space, her expression blank as glass. Pritam had seen black-and-white footage of World War I soldiers in hospital wards, automatons staring at infinity. Shell shock.

“I suppose I am,” agreed Nicholas quietly. He looked at Pritam. “They won’t believe the truth.”

The men regarded one another.

“I won’t lie for you,” said Pritam.

Nicholas frowned. “Who asked you to?”

There was a rustling from Hannah’s chair and they looked at her. She was staring, wide-eyed, at the dead bird. Suddenly, she sucked in a surprised breath, gagged, coughed up some briny yellow spittle, and started crying.

  A
ndrew and Louise Gerlic were the happiest parents in the world.

Mrs. Gerlic hugged Hannah tightly, tears running quicksilver paths down her red cheeks. “Silly girl. Silly girl. Silly girl …” She rocked her daughter in her arms. Mr. Gerlic had his arms around them both, his eyes shut, nodding to himself.

On the drive to the Gerlics’ house, Pritam and Nicholas had worked out a story set in the awkward middle ground between lies and truth. Nicholas had been reading the development sign when Hannah appeared. She was distraught and wouldn’t respond to his queries. Uncomfortable with the idea of going through a young girl’s bag unaccompanied, he drove her immediately to his friend, the local reverend, where they discovered together the girl’s identity. Why was she so traumatized? They didn’t know. Had Nicholas seen anything unusual? No.

Police arrived at the Gerlic residence. The sight of a clergyman set the room at ease. Nicholas and Pritam were thanked together and questioned separately. One female officer was questioning Hannah without success: Hannah simply screwed up her eyes and shook her head. Another female officer spoke quietly to Mrs. Gerlic, who listened a while then nodded consent. The women took Hannah to the girl’s bedroom. They emerged a few minutes later and Nicholas saw the female officer catch the eye of another uniformed officer—she shook her head. No signs of physical interference.

As the police were wrapping things up, Detective Waller arrived. Her eyes quickly found Nicholas and stayed fixed on him while a female officer brought her up to speed. Then, Waller’s eyes flicked with pendulum precision between him and Hannah. Eventually, Waller nodded thanks to the constable and came to stand beside Nicholas.

“Mr. Close.”

“Detective Fossey.”

“Should I be surprised to see you here?”

Nicholas looked at her. “I don’t think much surprises you, Detective.”

She stared at him for an unsettlingly long while.

“Don’t go too far, Mr. Close.” Then she turned away and rejoined the other officers.

Nicholas drifted to join Pritam. He could see Hannah sitting with a glass of cola, Mrs. Gerlic’s hand gripping her narrow shoulder.

“I don’t know if she’ll be safe,” Nicholas whispered to Pritam.

Pritam looked at him.

“We have a great deal to discuss.”

Nicholas brought Pritam back to the presbytery, and the men made arrangements to catch up there later that evening. Nicholas then kept driving, back to Lambeth Street.

  D
inner was awkwardly silent, considering how loud it had been to prepare.

Nicholas had sat at the kitchen bench, watching Katharine chop water chestnuts, onion, chicken. Every time he’d started to speak, she’d whacked some ingredient into submission or ground spices in her large granite mortar.

“Want a hand?” he’d yelled.

“No, no,” she’d yelled back brightly, then began throwing diced things into the wok where they shrieked loudly in the sizzling oil.

When they both sat to eat, the silence was so severe that Nicholas didn’t think he had profound enough words to break it. Katharine didn’t seem to feel compelled to; she chewed quietly, shooting the occasional cool smile to him.

“Delicious,” he said finally.

“It’s nothing,” she replied. They were quiet for a long moment, then she added, “I bought a tajine.”

“Oh? Tall, pointy thing?”

“Yes. Haven’t used it yet.”

“Wow. Exotic.”

They ate without speaking again until their plates were clean. It was only when Nicholas made to stand and clear the table that Katharine broke the silence.

“Sit. Please.”

He remained in his chair. Katharine licked her lips, lifted her chin, and tilted her head—her don’t-take-me-for-a-fool look.

“Your sister came up from Sydney,” she said, her words coming brisk and clipped hard. “You two huddle together like twitty schoolgirls. Gavin Boye shoots himself outside my front door.
You
duck away and find yourself a flat without so much as a thank you. She flies back to Sydney so fast you’d think they were giving away harborside houses. She calls up today, la-di-da, as if nothing’s happened, and then suggests I sell this house and move down to Neutral Bay.”

Nicholas shrugged and inspected the tablecloth. “Neutral Bay is nice.”

He felt her gaze on his face, drawing at his thoughts like a poultice.

“Kids are getting murdered here, Mum.”

Katharine’s hands fussed around the plates, but she said nothing.

“Not just Tris and the Thomas boy,” he continued. “A lot of kids.”

He watched for her reaction.

“I’m no spring chicken,” she said, finally. “I’m not likely to become a victim.”

“Adults, too. That Guyatt chap who killed the Thomas boy. He was from Myrtle Street.”

“He died in prison.”

“Yes. So did Winston Teale, remember? He was a local, too. Wasn’t he?”

Katharine’s fingers stopped moving. “Yes. From over the hill in Kadoomba Road.”

They looked at each other for a long moment.

“And Gavin Boye. There’s something wrong with this suburb, Mum.”

He could see her eyes narrow. But she didn’t disagree. When she spoke, her tone was even and reasonable.

“If I thought it was safe enough for you to stay here after that terrible business with Tristram Boye all those years ago, why on earth shouldn’t it be safe enough for me now?”

Nicholas wanted to say,
Because of the ghosts. Because Quill isn’t dead. She’s alive and living in the woods. She’s murdering again.
He clenched his jaw. He couldn’t say any of this to her.

“Or do you blame me for what happened to you down there?” she asked.

Nicholas blinked. “No. Why would I?”

“Because I didn’t keep you safe. Because I was—I don’t know—I was a bad mother. Because I didn’t move when your fa—”

Her eyes widened ever so slightly and she bit down the last word.

“Dad? Dad wanted you to move?”

Katharine stood noisily, picked up the plates and carried them to the sink.

“Donald wanted lots of silly things. That just happened to be one of his rare good ideas.”

Nicholas frowned. His father wanted his family to move? Why? Because Owen Liddy went missing in 1964? Or was there more he knew?

“When?”

“Nicholas! I don’t know.”

“Before he started drinking?”

“A long, long time ago. When we were happy and there was no good reason to move. Okay?” She scraped the plates off with a harsh clatter.

“But there must have been a reason!”

Before he could press the point, the telephone rang in the hallway. Katharine clip-clopped out of the room to answer it. Nicholas sighed and watched her listening as the caller spoke. Then she held the receiver out to him.

“For you.”

He took the phone. It was Laine Boye.

“Sorry to disturb your evening, Mr. Close.” Her voice was so crackly it could have been cast from Mars.

Katharine slipped into the bathroom and started the shower. There would be no more talking about Donald Close and Tallong tonight.

“That’s fine,” replied Nicholas. “Is there … Can I help you?”

“This might sound odd, Mr. Close,” said Laine. “But I need to ask you about a dead bird.”

Chapter
20
   

  T
he rain thundered down so heavily that Pritam could imagine that space itself was made of water and was now pouring through rents in the sky’s tired fabric.

The three of them sat in the presbytery’s leather club chairs, finishing coffee. The mood was odd. Three very different people, each effectively a stranger to the other two. They had next to nothing in common. A neatly dressed Christian clergyman. A reserved, elegant woman recently widowed. And that long-limbed scarecrow of a man Nicholas Close. Would they ever have gathered were it not for these unusual circumstances? He didn’t think so. Yet they were surprisingly comfortable together. None had a loved one waiting at home for them. All had lost someone close to them recently. Sad, strange events had brought them together, yet there was something warming about each other’s company. Something easy and right, but very fragile—a fine rope across a wide chasm. Each felt it; the silence while they sipped was delicate and none wanted to break it.

After returning from the Gerlics’ house, Pritam had set himself busy to fill the time until Nicholas arrived. He’d mopped out John’s room, cleaned his en suite, found a hundred small excuses not to go into the main church. When he heard a knock at the presbytery door, he had been surprised to find not Nicholas, but Laine Boye. She explained that Nicholas had invited her. Not much later, Nicholas himself arrived. Pritam made coffee, they exchanged small talk, and a silence settled that each recognized as a cue: it was time for serious talk.

“Okay,” Nicholas began. “I’ve told Pritam some of this, but not everything. Not by a long shot. Laine, you said Gavin mentioned a bird?”

Pritam felt the last word suddenly flutter in his gut like a real bird, nervous and ready to flee. He watched Nicholas walk over to the small bar fridge; he pulled out the plastic bag and untied it on the coffee table. Pritam’s heart beat faster as he saw again that violated little body, that disquieting woven ball for a head. He looked over to see Laine’s reaction to the mutilated bird, but her gray eyes were utterly inscrutable.

“I first saw a bird like this back in 1982, four days before Tristram Boye was murdered,” Nicholas said. He told them about Winston Teale chasing him and Tris into the woods, and watching Tris with his broken wrist disappear under the old water pipe through a tunnel full of spiders. How Tris’s drained body had been found miles away under tin and timber. Teale’s confession and suicide. Years later, Cate’s death. His fall on the stairs outside the flat in Ealing. The ghost of the screwdriver-wielding boy. Then more ghosts; sad, trapped ghosts. Cate’s ghost. Returning from London on a rainy night like this when Dylan Thomas disappeared. Elliot Guyatt’s confession and suicide, so eerily like Teale’s. Gavin’s dawn message punctuated by two sharp cracks of his rifle on which Thurisaz was scored: the rune that kept reappearing and seemed inextricable from death. Pursuing the Thomas boy’s ghost into the woods. The strawberries. The
Wynard
. The old woman and her dog Garnock that was no dog. The nauseating hand job. The archived flyers and news articles: so many missing children, so many dead men. Eleanor Bretherton, grim patron of this church, the spitting image of Mrs. Quill the dressmaker. Her shop, now a health food store, with a rune marked into its door. Garnock attacking Suzette and wrenching out her hair, and Nicholas’s nephew falling ill the next morning. And earlier today: a development sign erected, another bird talisman found, and a girl nearly snatched with Nicholas himself darkly urged to deliver her into the gloomy woods on Carmichael Road.

The room fell silent under the cold gaze of Eleanor Bretherton, staring belligerently out from monochromatic 1888.

Pritam was exhausted, as if he’d just finished watching a disturbing horror feature that he knew couldn’t be real, but still made him want to avoid the shadows. He looked over to Laine Boye. She was watching him intently, as if gauging his reaction.

“And, of course,” said Nicholas, “a credible witness who could have confirmed that Quill and Bretherton were, forgive the pun, birds of a feather, is dead. John Hird.”

“True,” said Pritam, and was surprised how quiet his voice was. “But there is this.”

He went to his desk drawer and returned with the photo of Mrs. Quill at the church fête thirty-two years ago. Nicholas put out his hand, but Pritam stepped past him and handed it to Laine.

When Laine saw it, her lips tightened but her face betrayed no emotion.

“You tell me, Mrs. Boye,” said Pritam. “Are they the same person?”

Laine held the photographs side by side, comparing Quill’s and Bretherton’s scowls, their chins, their frosty alarm at being photographed. After a long minute, she returned the photograph to Pritam.

“Similar,” she said.

The rain outside roared.

“So?” asked Nicholas, looking from Pritam to Laine.

“So,” said Laine, “we have two photographs a hundred years apart with two women who look alike, but that means nothing of itself. A list of deaths and murders, but they were all explained away or confessed to. As for the bird, you could have mutilated it. We only have your word, Mr. Close, that you found it. But—”

“But?”

“But you say you can see ghosts.”

Laine kept her cool gaze on Nicholas. For a long moment, he was silent. Then he spoke quietly.

“True. The only thing it doesn’t explain is why your husband was talking in his sleep about a dead bird before he left your bed and shot himself.”

Pritam saw a shiver of something behind Laine’s eyes. It was gone so quickly, he wondered if he’d seen it at all.

Nicholas turned and looked at him. “Reverend, what do you think? A coincidence with Bretherton and Quill? Secret relatives?” He smiled grimly. “And what about me? Crazy guy who thinks he sees ghosts?”

Pritam could see that Nicholas was fighting to seem contained, but was ready to snap.

“My religion,” he answered slowly, “says that one of the three aspects of my God is a ghost.”

“However?”

“However, I need to ask, are you afraid of spiders?”

Nicholas blinked, suddenly caught off guard. “Yes, I’m afraid of spiders.”

“Were you always?”

“What are you, a psychiatrist?”

Pritam took a breath. He could feel Laine’s eyes on him, appraising his line of questioning.

“Is it possible that the trauma of losing your best friend as a child, and the trauma of losing your wife as an adult, and the trauma of seeing Laine’s husband take his life in front of you just recently …” Pritam shrugged and raised his palms. “You see where I’m going?”

Nicholas looked at Laine. She watched back. Her gray eyes missed nothing.

“Sure,” agreed Nicholas, standing. “And my sister’s nuts, too, and we both like imagining that little white dogs are big nasty spiders because our daddy died and we never got enough cuddles.”

“Your father died?” asked Laine. “When?”

“Who cares?”

Pritam sighed. “You must see this from our point of—”

“I’d love to!” snapped Nicholas. “I’d love to see it from your point of view, because mine’s not that much fun! It’s insane! It’s insane that I see dead people, Pritam! It’s insane that this,” he flicked out the sardonyx necklace, “stopped me kidnapping a little girl!”

“That’s what you believe,” said Pritam carefully.

“
That’s
what I fucking believe!” Nicholas stabbed his finger through the air at the dead bird talisman lying slack on the coffee table.

Pritam’s jaw tightened. “Please don’t swear in my church.”

“It’s
her
church!” Nicholas snatched up the photo of Mrs. Quill and threw it at the photograph of Eleanor Bretherton. “She paid for it! She owns this place! And why do you think, despite all those people that
died
, all we have is this crappy pile of
speculation!
” He was spitting out the words. “Because she’s
smart!
She watches and she waits and she takes and she gets away with it because it’s insane to think otherwise!”

The air in the presbytery was as sharp and fragile as crystal. Pritam felt as incensed as the first time Nicholas Close was in here. “I think perhaps we should continue this another night when you’re a little calmer.”

Nicholas glared at him, then jerked his gaze to Laine.

She looked back evenly, her hands in her lap, expression indecipherable.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

“And don’t blaspheme, please,” Pritam said curtly.

Nicholas stood and opened the front door. The roar of rain filled the room.

“I’m sorry. I don’t expect you to put aside the real world for this stuff. I’d give my right arm to not believe it.” He looked at Pritam. “But if you’re going to be offended by a couple of words, I don’t think you’re up for what this is all about. This is murder and black magic. You don’t believe in magic? That’s fine. I didn’t until a few days ago. But if you two have any sense, don’t take the risk. Get out of here.”

He closed the door behind him, and the room again fell almost silent.

  A
nyone outside the church would have seen a tall man striding to his car, not caring that his unruly hair was slicked down by the heavy rain, throwing open his car door and angrily wrenching the engine alive. As the car drove away, its tinny burble faded, leaving only the hot skittle spatter of rain on the road. And a small, careful slide of footsteps from the pitch black eaves of the cold stone church.

Were there anyone to see, they’d have watched a small, hunched form step into the rain and look behind itself. Were they close enough, they’d have heard a dry whisper that defied the downpour.

“Go.”

A small white thing the size of a large cat stepped from the same shadows with movement too fluid, too wily, for its squat form, before hurrying silently away through the rain.

Anyone watching would have seen the dark, stooped figure stare at the presbytery for a long, long moment, before she turned and hurried away in the direction of Carmichael Road.

Only no one was there to see, and she knew that well.

  P
ritam could hear the ticking of the mantel clock. He settled in his chair with a sigh. “I shouldn’t have let him go.” Apart from rising to inspect the photograph of Eleanor Bretherton, Laine Boye had hardly moved since she first arrived. Her back was straight, her hands neatly folded in her lap. She watched Pritam.

“Do you believe in magic, Reverend?”

Pritam nodded over at his desk. It was, of course, very tidy: his laptop folded away, his pens capped and sitting in a Daylesford Singers Festival ’04 mug. Beside his day-planner were his Bibles. “In Acts Eight, Philip goes to the city of Samaria,” he said, “where a man named Simon was supposedly using sorcery and bewitching the city folk. So, my faith acknowledges magic.”

Laine shrugged. “No offense, Reverend—”

“Pritam, please.”

“No offense, Pritam, but reading something in the Bible isn’t the same as seeing it with your own eyes.”

Quite right. Gavin Boye hadn’t married a fool.

“I left India when I was nine,” he said. “So I don’t remember that much about my early years. But my most vivid memory happened, oh, about six months before we left. We’d gone to visit my uncle and aunt in their village near Kirvati. When we got there, the men of the village were holding down a screaming old man and pulling out his teeth with pliers. So much blood. He was a tantric, the old man. A mystic. He had charged five hundred rupee—about fifteen dollars—to advise a young man to kidnap a girl and sacrifice her to the Goddess Durga, who would show him where treasure was secretly buried. The girl was twelve. He cut off her hands, feet, and breasts. She bled to death. The young man never found his treasure and went back to the tantric to complain. The police caught him, thank God. But then the villagers tracked down the tantric and pulled out his teeth so he couldn’t summon the gods again.”

“That’s human violence, not magic,” said Laine. “All those deaths Nicholas mentioned—more human violence. Even that,” she nodded at the headless plover on the table. For the first time, Pritam saw a clear emotion in her eyes: revulsion. “Even that is just an act of human violence.”

She stood and held out her hand. He rose and took it. Her skin was dry and smooth.

“I know your Bible mentions ghosts and magic, Pritam. But I’m afraid I just can’t believe in either of them. If you speak with Mr. Close again, wish him luck. I think he needs it. Good night.”

She collected her umbrella from the stand beside the door, and a moment later she was gone.

  T
he rain continued through the night. Stormwater drains in the inner suburbs choked with branches and rubbish and mud, and flooding waters rose. A low-lying commercial block in Stones Corner was inundated: a carpet wholesaler and a car yard both went underwater, and Persian rugs and Mitsubishi Colts bobbed in the rising brown tide.

Birds in trees curled their heads under their wings and clung to branches for dear life. On the river, the last ferry services were canceled. In expensive houses with private docks, owners old enough to remember the flood of ’74 lay in their beds biting their lips and resisting the urge to check their insurance policies.