The Dead Path (6 page)

Chapter
4
   
   2007

  O
n the fourth morning after Nicholas returned home from London, the rain had gone. The cloudless morning sky was the brittle blue of arctic ice, and aberrant winds dragged the temperature down to just above freezing. The chill whispered its way between the wall boards and the loose casement windows of Suzette’s bedroom.

Nicholas woke feeling more buoyant than he had for a long time. The slope-shouldered weariness that always arrived a moment after waking—when he confirmed that he was alive and Cate was dead and London was muddling gray and busy regardless—didn’t come. He sat up. The sun was still below the horizon, but he could see how the cold winds had scrubbed the sky clean and the day would be beautiful and bright. He felt the best he had since Cate died.

Knowing this delicate feeling of warm neutrality could easily slip away, he decided to do something to prolong the pleasantness as long as he could. He pulled on his jeans, hooded cardigan, and yesterday’s socks. He would walk the streets of his childhood suburb and drum up a breakfast appetite.

The Closes’ house at 68 Lambeth Street was a bulldog of a building with beige weatherboard flanks hunched on stumps and scowling down the hill at its neighbors. The wrought-iron gate opened silently, its hinge spikes still damp from last night’s rain.

Nicholas set out into the brisk wind. The walking felt good and easy. He was tall and lean; striding down the hill and forcing his enervated blood to move seemed to improve his already fair mood. He’d been away and, yes, terrible things had happened, but now he was home. New choices were possible. He could get fit. He could get a job. He could start again.

As he walked, he saw that his impression last night that his childhood suburb had been locked in time was wrong. Some things
had
changed during his absence. Sentences of clapboard Queenslanders were punctuated by malapropos Tuscan-styled villas. The Sheehans’ house was gone, replaced by a two-story block of flats. A tiny roundabout, its axis a bright fountain of yellow verbena, had been installed where Lambeth and Crittendon Streets crossed. But most of the original houses remained, refreshed dames under new paint seated coyly behind neat gardens.

The sun crested the horizon, and treetops were lit a mild gold. Nicholas breathed deeply. The stiff breeze brought fragrant snatches of wisteria. This was good. Life had gone on without him. Things did change. People survived.

He turned the corner onto Myrtle Street. Halfway along, a small row of shops sat huddled under the long fingers of a massive poinciana.

Nicholas felt a tripwire in his gut twang, and he slowed his pace. Something about the sight of the shops disturbed him, though he couldn’t say what. Determined not to let anything spoil his walk, he picked up his pace and strode toward them.

One building housed four shops in a row that faced Myrtle Street from under a wide, bull-nosed awning. The area under the awning was raised half a meter off the ground; it was tiled and its front was separated from the footpath by a galvanized steel rail and a row of potted topiary trees. In his childhood, the shops had been a convenience store, Mrs. Ferguson’s greengrocery, the Magill Fruitbowl, a butcher, and a haberdashery.

He stopped at the two steps leading up to the shop porch. Again, the taut, sly wire inside hummed uncomfortably. And again, he shook off the ill feeling. It was not yet six thirty and the shops were closed. The convenience store was still there, but under a new name and with window stickers proclaiming Phone Cards: 9 cents/min, Anywhere in the World!; the fruit shop’s most recent incarnation had been as a Tibetan takeaway restaurant, the owners of which had clearly overestimated the willingness of locals to enjoy good Kongpo Shaptak, and it was now out of business; the butcher’s had become a computer repairer; the haberdashery, run by an old woman with an odd name, was now a health food shop.

Nicholas’s footsteps echoed on the cold tiles. The dark shop windows sourly reflected the brightness of the new day. Quill, he remembered. The old woman’s name was Quill. And with the name, into his mind’s eye flashed a recollection of being eight or nine, holding Suzette’s tiny hand in his, and walking home from school past the shop and looking inside … and dark eyes set in a pale, wrinkled face looking back. Then Suzette started crying.

Nicholas stepped out into the early sunlight and felt a small flutter of relief. A long time ago, he thought. Childhood would prove to hold much nastier things than a dour-faced old woman in a dark shop. He picked up his pace again.

Laidlaw Street. Madeglass Street. Roads that to his younger eyes had been so long and languorous now seemed cramped and quaint. Jacarandas and liquidambars poked bare fingers into the crisp air. The leaves of callistemons and grevillea whispered benignly. A Labrador watched him from a porch, its tail lethargically thumping the hardwood boards.

Nicholas put cold hands in his cardigan pockets and stepped into the narrow, pleasantly shadowed throat of Ithaca Lane. He realized he was looking not at his feet, or a few steps ahead, but to the crest of the steep lane fifty meters up. He was scanning horizons, looking for ghosts. But there were none. No stooped businessmen stepping in front of lorries, no hollow-eyed street girls crouched in the shadows injecting just a bit too much heroin. He was a long way from London and its ghosts—as far as one could get, really. His memory caught scent of Cate, but he quashed the familiar urge to run and sit by her gravestone and turned his thoughts to what he might do for work. Buying props for TV commercials? Building sets for the state theater company? He could volunteer at the arts college until he found his feet and made some contacts. Shit, he could go back to university and get his master’s. There was money in the bank, so why not take the year and start something new? Learn animation? Write and illustrate a children’s book? The possibilities pleased him, driving the uneasiness about the Myrtle Street shops from his mind.

Winter sunlight winked in the crystal dew on the ridge caps of houses and rippled silver in gutter puddles. The air was raw and clean and things felt … good. Nicholas nodded to himself: yes, things felt
quite
good. He topped the crest of Ithaca Lane and glanced downhill.

He stopped, rock still. His good mood blew away in an instant, as if stolen like smoke by the wind.

At the bottom of the lane was Carmichael Road and, beyond it, the woods and their dark, countless trees.

Just turn around,
he thought. But he didn’t move. The woods held his eye, a broad and gently rippling lure. From here, even on this low rise, he could sense their size. A huge lopsided square of silver green, emerald green, olive green, and chalcedony treetops, each side more than a kilometer, rising and falling back to the distant glimpses of brown river. Why were they still so disturbing? Gazing upon their inscrutable surface, Nicholas had the feeling that the trees were merely a veneer; a cloak over some dark creature, the shape of which remained hidden and the heart of which was as cold as deep earth.

I’m not going past them. Not today.
He shifted to return home the way he’d come. But as he turned, movement caught his eye.

On the path through the grass strip that hemmed the woods, a boy was kneeling.

Nicholas’s blood seemed to slow to a syrupy stop. He felt as if twenty-five years of life had suddenly fallen away and he was ten again.

The boy was bending to peer at the spot where, so many years ago, young Nicholas had found the dead bird with the woven head.

Nicholas felt ill.
It’s Tristram.

Then the boy looked up and around, and Nicholas could see it wasn’t his childhood friend. Yet he recognized the boy’s face. The huge policeman had held up a photo of him four nights ago. It was the dead Thomas boy.

The child leaned closer to touch something on the path.

Nicholas felt his stomach fill with cold.
Turn around,
he thought.
Go home. Forget it. He’s dead. He’s a dream. Like Cate, he’s not really there, he can’t be there. He’s gone
 …

But he couldn’t turn. A wave of disgust rolled through him. He wanted to see what happened next.

The dead child rose on milkstraw legs, dropped with horror something offensive and spoiled, wiped his hands on his pants. Then he stiffened and turned his face to the woods. His mouth opened in a silent scream, and suddenly one arm jerked straight, as if grabbed by someone invisible and strong, and Dylan Thomas flew backward into the trees.

Nicholas’s heart suddenly remembered to pump. Without thinking, he ran down the hill, across Carmichael Road, through the tall, damp grass, and into the woods.

  D
ylan Thomas was being dragged by an impalpable force, his fair hair streaming over his pale face as he flew between tree trunks. Where the sun hit him, he glowed brighter, like a dust mote caught in a spotlight.

Nicholas strained to keep up. Already, the sharp brass pain of a stitch blared in his side and his breaths were raggedly insufficient. When was the last time he’d run like this? Years. He should stop, turn around, go home … but the sight of the dead boy flickering between the trees ahead kept him running.

The woods quickly grew thicker, the moist ground between the trunks of brush box and devil’s apple crowded with saplings and lantana, lush vines, fallen branches, and spiderwebs glistening coldly with droplets.

Ahead, the boy’s arm pointed straight as a compass, and his body whipped behind it, flailing hopelessly. Yet his dark eyes were resigned. They were locked on Nicholas.

Nicholas’s breaths came fast and hard. He was running as fast as he could. His heavy feet churned through an ankle-deep gruel of wet, rotting leaves. His shins fouled on moss-thick roots. Scrabbling branches scratched his face and slapped him with dark, prickling leaves. Parasitic vines, as thick as wrists and mottled with gray fungus, looped like fallen question marks, lurking and ready to strangle. The wide, striated trunks of native elms and ancient figs were only arm spans apart, and the canopy overhead grew closer and tighter until it was almost solid and only tiny sapphires of sky winked into the thick emerald gloom below. It was as dark as dusk. The damp air was cold enough to burn the back of Nicholas’s throat.

The distance between him and the boy was growing. Nicholas ran harder.

The Thomas boy’s face was a bobbing flurry. His small free arm scrabbled at trees, reaching silently at damp, green-flecked trunks. He flew up a steep, shaly slope.

Nicholas’s lungs burned as he strained to follow. What would he see when the boy finally stopped? Him struggling? Pleading? Crying for his mother as his invisible killer made him kneel and his white throat opened up? Would he find Tristram, his face set hard as a knife came from behind?

Would he find the murderer himself?

Nicholas suddenly felt sick. He had no plan. What if he ran into some makeshift camp in the middle of the woods, straight into a cold-eyed man with a knife on his belt and a gun in his hands?

You’ll end up as dead as the Thomas boy. Dead as Tristram.

That thought in mind, Nicholas crested the rise—and the ground beneath fell away into space.

He barely stopped himself going over into a sharp gully. His arms pinwheeled a moment, then he found his balance and took a careful step back from the brink. Beyond, the ground fell sharply several meters to a narrow, stony creek bed. He caught his breath and looked around.

The Thomas boy had vanished.

He felt disappointment riding a wave of guilty relief that he wouldn’t need to see the boy die. He could leave, able to tell himself he
did
try. And at home, with time and distance between him and these sunless trees, he could convince himself never to come here again.

Traitor. Coward.

“Shut up,” he whispered.

He turned to go.

But as he did, his foot hit a sly rock wet with moss and shot from under him, out over space. His body followed an instant later … and he fell. He tumbled down the steep gully face, arms flailing, trying to stay upright. Angry branched saplings slapped him for his clumsiness. He hit the gully floor with a sodden crunch, his impact blunted by a wet and tangy clump of native ginger.

His panting breaths were loud in the silence. He awkwardly got to his feet. Both his palms were scratched and bleeding. His upper lip was wet—his fingers came away red. A little blood, but nothing broken.

The air down here seemed even colder, and even denser with trees. The narrow creek bed was the only place where no plants grew. In the half-light, the rocks and stones of the dry stream stood out like bones protruding through flesh. The gully was suddenly familiar. Nicholas nodded. It had been a quarter-century, but he knew where he was. He knew what lay ahead if he followed the uneven creek bed.

The pale, rounded stones looked like skullcaps and clacked loudly underfoot.

The shadows behind the trees here grew deeper, more solid, as if something lurked there, something waiting and patient. Hungry.