The Dead Path (34 page)

“You’re some kind of a freak, are you?” he asked.

She stared at him coolly with those dark eyes. “You’re rude. I don’t think I like you.”

“Yeah, that’s going around.” Nicholas picked up the shotgun. “Go home, Hannah.”

He began climbing back up the slope. Hannah quickly stuffed the pungent wet things back into her pack and hurried after him.

Nicholas looked down at her. This kid was brave.

Like Tristram.

“This old woman. She kills children.”

“I know. It got my sister,
remember?
”

“It’s a she. And she’s …” He shrugged. “She’s been around a long time. She’s dangerous, Hannah. You really gotta go home.”

“I have to go home.”

“Yep,” he agreed, relieved to be finally getting through to her.

“Yes.”

But she kept following him. Then the penny dropped.

“Are you correcting me?” he asked.

“Yes. You don’t speak well,” Hannah replied, shouldering her backpack. “I don’t want to go home. But since I don’t have anything to
burn
her with anymore—”

“Good.”

“I’ll help you.”

She struggled to keep up with him. Trickles of blood ran down her thin legs from cuts on her knees and shins. He checked his watch. It was nearly three. If he took her back, it would be after four by the time he returned, leaving less than ninety minutes of light, if you could call this murky gloom light. He stopped and took her by the shoulders and knelt to look her straight in the eye.

“She cuts their throats, Hannah. I don’t know if I can protect you. She’s probably expecting me. I have a shot, but I don’t honestly like my chances. I can’t be responsible for you, too. You should go home and put your energy into convincing your parents to move somewhere safe and dull. Suggest Canberra.”

He rose, turned and started walking again.

A moment later, he heard her footsteps behind him.

  A
quarter of an hour later, the water pipe loomed above them like a glacial wave of rust the color of dried and crusted blood. Rainwater flowed out of the twin tunnels below the pipe; the forest floor was still weeping out the heavy rainfall. They had followed the creek up the gully to the pipe, but it had been Hannah who’d pointed at the water.

“Look.”

Small creatures floundered in the cold, tea-colored stream. Spiders. Spindly, fat-bodied orb weavers; squat jumpers; spiny, coal-black widows; platforms; broad huntsmen; chunky imperials—all scrambled to escape the cold, mumbling waters, clutching at twigs or knotted in groups to crawl over each other. Some floated with their crablike bellies in the air, curled like dead fists, drowned.

“This could be bad,” said Nicholas.

It was.

The tunnels under the water pipe were so thick with web that there were no circles of light at their far ends. The mass of silk was so dense that it overflowed the pipe and the water carried it like an obscene caul some three meters downstream. Thousands of spiders made the silk shimmer darkly.

Hannah turned away and vomited up her lunch.

Nicholas watched, not sure whether to help her or leave her. He shifted awkwardly. “You all right?”

She nodded and wiped her mouth.

“I think she knows we’re coming,” he said.

Hannah dragged her eyes to the tunnels. “You went through there?” she whispered.

“It wasn’t as … bad as this.”

She looked at him, as if appraising him afresh.

Nicholas checked his watch and a fresh ripple of fear fluttered up his spine. The day was vanishing fast. He’d planned to repeat his trick, throwing another bug bomb into the pipe and this time lighting the gas. But the web plugged the tunnels so solidly that he wouldn’t be able to get the can more than an arm’s length in.

“We need a ladder. We need two ladders,” he mumbled. He looked over at Hannah. She was frowning, deep in thought.

“What?” he asked.

“How does she get through?”

Nicholas shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“How does she get through?” asked Hannah. “If her cottage is on the other side, she must come through somehow, right? Unless she can fly.” She looked at him, clearly worried. “Can she fly?”

Nicholas shook his head. He felt a fool. Of course Quill would have another way through.

“There must be a break in the pipe.”

Hannah shrugged as if that was obvious.

If there was a break in the pipe, it could be anywhere half a kilometer in either direction. It might take hours to find, and, knowing Quill, it would be disguised. Nicholas checked his watch again. It was three thirty. The temperature was already starting to fall.

“I don’t know where to start,” he said hopelessly. “Hacking our way through this bush is going to take hours—”

“Lift me up.”

“What?”

“Lift me up,” repeated Hannah. “I can walk along the top and look from up there. And I can go fast. My balance is good, see?” She stood on one foot.

Any other time, Nicholas would have said they should turn back, that it wasn’t worth risking her neck. But he was sure that if he didn’t deal with Quill before nightfall, he would be the next to die. And if he didn’t kill Quill, she would kill again. And again, and again.

“All right. I’ll get down, you stand on my shoulders, then I’ll grab your feet and push up. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He knelt. She put her hands on the flanks of the pipe and carefully stepped up onto one shoulder, then the other. When she was ready, he slowly stood, and realized for the thousandth time that he really should exercise more—his thighs burned.

“Yeah?”

“Go!”

He grabbed both her feet and lifted. Hannah sprawled over the top of the pipe and swung her legs clear. She stood. “I’m up!” She grinned and looked around. “Which way?”

Logic wasn’t going to help here. Nicholas tried to clear his mind, to forget the ticking clock, and found himself pointing.

“That way.”

Hannah nodded down at him, and started off, arms spread wide like a tightrope walker’s. In just a few seconds, the tightly packed trees had obscured her from view. Her light footsteps echoed faintly through the metal, then they, too, faded and were gone.

Nicholas was alone.

The minutes seemed to stretch into hours. He could almost feel the hidden sun falling faster and faster into the west. A light mist began to rise from the lush undergrowth like the earth’s own disturbed ghost. Nicholas had terrible imaginings of Hannah slipping on the damp pipe, scrabbling and falling, landing headfirst with the sickening bony crack that haunted his dreams of Cate. He shouldn’t have let the kid go. What was he thinking—?

“Mr. Close?”

Light footsteps grew louder, then Hannah’s pale face appeared high on the pipe.

“Did you find it?”

She was frowning. “I don’t know. It’s weird. This way.”

She waved him on. He followed from below, straining through dense thickets of native holly and blackthorn.

“Not far,” she urged.

“Easy for you …”

He struggled to lift aside a chaotic tangle of wait-a-while vine and the spiny stem grabbed at his sleeves and the duffel bag. Then he was through. He looked up.

Hannah was pointing. “There.”

He followed her finger.

Had he not been looking for it, he’d never have seen it. But sure enough, a narrow track almost devoid of undergrowth struck out perpendicularly from the pipe. He bent to inspect it closer. It was only two hand spans wide, but the ferns and saplings were compacted by years of passage into a distinct but well-hidden path. Whoever walked it was careful to stick to the same route every time. The weird thing was, it terminated right at the pipe.

“Does it go on the other side?”

Hannah disappeared from view for a moment, then reappeared overhead. “No.”

Nicholas suddenly realized what Quill had done.

“Clever bitch,” he muttered.

He stood close to the pipe and started running his fingers over its surface. They found the neatly disguised crack. He traced it—it made a rough rectangle a meter or so high in the side of the pipe.

“It’s a door,” he said.

“A door?”

“A hatch.”

He pressed against the curved rectangle. A slight give inward. He pressed harder and a loud clack echoed within the pipe. When he released his pressure, the steel hatchway opened outward on oiled hinges.

“Wow,” she said. “Catch me.”

Before Nicholas could argue, she’d slid down the side of the pipe into his arms. She wriggled to the ground and pulled the hatch wide, poking her head inside.

“Wow,” she repeated, and the word echoed away into pitch darkness: wow-wow-wowwww … She climbed up inside the pipe. “Did you bring a torch-orch-orch?”

“No. But …” He reached into his duffel bag and pulled out one of the Zippo knock-offs. “This will do.”

“Here,” said Hannah, “you hold that and give me the gun.”

Nicholas pulled her out of the hatch.

“I’ll keep the lighter and the gun. You follow me.”

  I
t was easy to decide which way to go inside the pipe. One direction was thick with dust and littered with insect carcasses. The other was almost spotlessly clean.

By the flickering flame of the lighter, they walked through the darkness, saying nothing, listening to their footfalls dance to and fro like ripples in some subterranean lake. The barrel of the Miroku occasionally ticked off the curved metal walls, the sharp sound chased away by a long, lonely echo.

“How will we know when to get out?” whispered Hannah.

“We’ll know,” replied Nicholas.

And they did.

After what felt like hours, but was less than three minutes, two faint slits of light hovered in the darkness. As they got closer, it was clear they were the top and bottom cracks of another hatchway. When they reached it, light trickled in all four sides of the rectangle. Inside was welded a grab handle. Nicholas wondered what poor sucker Quill had seduced into doing this steelwork and what rotten fate had befallen him.

He looked around at Hannah. “Not too late to go back.”

She shook her head.

He nodded, extinguished the lighter, hefted his gun, and pushed open the hatch.

At their feet was a wider, clearer path through the trees. Nicholas recognized it as the track he’d found the day he ate those strawberries. Clearly, Quill wasn’t concerned about hiding her presence on this side of the pipe.

He turned and helped Hannah out of the hatch.

“Okay?”

She nodded.

He checked his watch. There was less than an hour and a half of daylight left.

“Then let’s go.”

Chapter
33
   

  A
chill wind blew hard as the sun inched closer to the hills in the west. It sucked away moisture, leaving her skin dry and her eyes raw.

Katharine Close’s arms were so tired that they burned, yet she kept hacking at the soil of her garden bed as if it were a beast that needed violent subduing. Her hands were blistered inside the gardening gloves. She had spent the last few hours digging, pulling weeds, clipping stems, trying not to think.

But she did think.

Maybe it was time to go. Maybe enough years had passed that she could admit she’d won. She’d laughed at Don, to his face and to his memory, waving a nasty blowtorch over the hidden things he’d believed. What room was there for bone-pointing and curses and witchery for children born in the time of rocket ships and global warming? How could lines on stone or wood have potency when real power lines crisscrossed the skies on poles, breathing useful life into computers and plasma screen televisions? What fear was there of spells when suicide bombers were killing dozens in Kandahar markets?

At nights, though, Katharine shivered. She remembered how she’d marched, fair-faced, into Mrs. Quill’s store, handed the old woman her children’s clothes, and blessed her with kind words and smiles. She’d shouted down that impotent voice inside her that agreed with Don. What else was she to do? Curl away and make the sign of the evil eye each time the old crone passed?

And yet that’s exactly what she did do. She remembered a cold winter’s night, as empty and still as the inside of a bell jar. Suzette and Nicholas tiny and asleep in their beds, and Don six years in the grave. She had been ready to go to bed herself when she heard a soft
clip clip
of footsteps on the street. She had crept in darkness to the front room and peered between the venetian blinds. Looking up at the house was the dot of the old woman, her face a black shadow. And yet Katharine had imagined her eyes, bright and sparkling, dancing and ravening, looking back. As if knowing there were two ripe young children within. In the pragmatic daylight of the next morning, Katharine had ridiculed herself for her fears—the old dressmaker was perhaps a little senile and lost, or just wanted some friendly company but hadn’t the courage to knock on the door.

But two days later, Tristram Boye was pulled dead from under a woodpile two suburbs away, his little throat cut wide to the world.

Katharine put down her trowel. Maybe it was time to admit not that she’d won, but that she’d lost. She should sell this empty house. Listen to her daughter and buy an apartment near her.

A flicker of white jigged in the corner of her eye.

She turned, wincing at the tight pain in her punished neck and shoulders. A small white terrier trotted along the path at the side of the house.

“Shoo! Go home, you naughty …”

The words died in her mouth as the dog stopped at her voice. It turned and regarded her with black pebble eyes.

Katharine had grown up on a farm and animals had been an everyday part of her childhood, but only once before had she seen a creature regard her with this cold contempt. It had been spring, and a nesting magpie had begun swooping on anyone who neared her tree beside the utility shed. It was the weekend, and Katharine had been helping her father make a new chicken house. He was working on the chicken roof and asked young Katharine to go to the toolshed and fetch the snips. She had stridden to the shed, and in her last few steps heard the dry swoop of wings on air. She put up her hands just as a flash of black-and-white feathers rocketed past her, blowing her fine hair around her ears. Fired by her suddenly tripping heart, she sprinted through the open door into the black, cavelike shed. Deep in the cool dark, she turned. Through the doorway she watched the bird land in the square of squintingly bright sunlight. The magpie hopped to the edge of the doorframe, and stopped, peering into the darkness of the shed. Its eyes were black as stones, shiny and cold. They found her. The bird watched her, calculating whether or not to attack. And young Katharine knew that if it did, it would attack without reservation, biting and spearing with every cell in its body focused on the task of hurting her. The bird held her captive in the shed until her father found her an hour later, tears rolling down her cheeks.

The little white dog watched Katharine now with the same look of icy appraisal, its round coal eyes scrutinizing her, deciding whether or not to attack.

Katharine’s skin felt frozen hard. She was terrified by a small dog that stared at her in a way no dog ever had. Then she saw: its ribcage hadn’t moved. It wasn’t breathing.

The creature turned and eased up the stairs to the back door. Katharine watched it rise with eerie fluidity to its hind legs, turn one paw, hook and swing open the screen door, and slip inside the house.

“Laine!”

She climbed to her feet, ignoring the jagged pains in her hips and back, and ran.