The Dead Path (5 page)

Rain. Faces. The dead. Trees.

The doorbell, a Bakelite mechanical thing, rang out two tuneless notes.

Nicholas blinked and picked up his watch from the pink bedside table. It was nearly two in the morning.

Dang dong.

“Mum?” he called.

He swung his legs out of bed, sat up.

Dang dong.

“Coming!”

As he passed his mother’s bedroom door, he heard hefty snores befitting a circus strong man.

“Why don’t I get it?” he suggested to no one.

Down the hall. By old habit his fingers found and clicked the switch for the outside light. He swung open the front door.

There were two people waiting on the stoop. One was a dark-haired woman who might have looked quite pretty had her face not been saddled with a heavy scowl. The other was a uniformed police officer; he was fair-haired and huge as a gorilla and loitered behind the woman as if ready to bend the wrought iron handrail or uproot a tree to prevent escape.

“Good evening, sir,” said the woman. In his mind, Nicholas dubbed her “Fossey.”

“Sorry to disturb your sleep. My name is Anne Waller—” she flashed her detective’s badge “—and we’re going door-to-door seeking information about a young boy who’s gone missing.”

On cue, gorilla-man held up a laminated color photocopy of a blond seven-year-old beaming at the camera. Nicholas jolted.

It’s Tristram. But Tristram’s been dead twenty-five years.

He leaned in to look more closely.

The photograph was recent. In the background was an LCD television and the boy wore a
Spider-Man 3
T-shirt. Nevertheless, he looked eerily similar to Nicholas’s childhood friend.

His heart was pumping hard. He shook his head. “No.”

But the officers had seen the frisson of recognition. They exchanged a glance, then returned their steady gazes to Nicholas.

“Are you sure, sir?” asked Fossey. Her entrenched frown seemed to deepen.

“Yes. Really. I just got in from overseas tonight.”

“Tonight, sir? What time was that?”

“Half past ten or so.”

Nicholas licked his lips. The police weren’t moving.

“Did you come straight home, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t stop anywhere?” asked gorilla-man.

Nicholas hesitated. He’d stopped at the woods, amazed to see them still as potent and thick as ever. He’d walked halfway to their edge. Had been drawn to them. He couldn’t explain that to himself, let alone the police. Randomly scoping out dark woods in the middle of the rainy night when a boy happens to go missing. He swallowed.

“No.”

Detective Fossey reached for her notebook. Silverback’s right hand casually slipped down to hang straight beside his leg, closer to his service pistol.

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Nicholas Close. Look—”

Fossey wrote in her notebook, asked, “C-L-O-S-E?”

“What’s going on, Nicky?” Katharine arrived silently behind her son, fumbling with her dressing gown’s sash.

The police exchanged a glance.

“A young boy has been reported missing, ma’am.”

Silverback held the picture up for Katharine.

“Oh dear.” Nicholas, who knew her voice so well, could just detect a quiver. “Local boy?”

“Yes, ma’am. This gentleman told us he returned from overseas tonight?”

Nicholas saw his mother’s eyes narrow just the slightest margin.

“My son. That’s right.”

“What time did he arrive?”

“Just after eleven thirty. His flight touched down at nine fifty, which means he made excellent time getting through customs, hiring a car, and getting home here.” Her words came clipped and fast, the shake replaced by something harder. “We talked in our kitchen till quarter past twelve and both went to bed, and it certainly is tragic that a boy’s got himself lost in this rain but I’m not sure I quite understand where this is going.”

The detective and constable shifted back an almost imperceptible amount. Nicholas sagged a little. He was in his mid-thirties and still needed his mother to keep him out of trouble.

“Ma’am, we’re just asking questions,” said Fossey.

“I do understand that. Have you got any more?”

Detective Waller sent one last look at Nicholas.

“No, ma’am. Catherine with a
C
?”

“With a
K
and two As. Best of luck, Constables. I hope and pray the young lad turns up safe.”

The officers asked for a phone number—Nicholas had long discarded his cell phone when his friendships had dried up after Cate’s death, so Katharine gave the home line. Finished, Fossey led Silverback into the rain.

Katharine shut the door. She wrapped her arms around herself. “I just hate the fact that if you’re a man you’re automatically a potential sex fiend. Women do it too, you know.”

Nicholas nodded. He felt awfully tired, but sleep seemed a huge ocean away. As they started back down the hall, he saw veins like purple worms crawling on her ankles.

“What woke you up, Mum?”

Katharine looked at him, opened her mouth to lie. But she hesitated. And in that moment, Nicholas saw again the tally of years on his mother’s face.

We’re getting old.

“I had a bad dream. About you when you were small. You and your friend up the road.”

“Tristram Boye. Did you see how much that boy—”

She nodded. “Only in the dream, it was you …”

Her voice trailed off to nothing.

The rumble of the rain was as solid as the darkness outside. He kissed her cheek. It felt dry and thin as paper.

“I’m sure they’ll find him,” he said.

They returned to their beds.

  T
he police did find the child, three days later.

During the first two days, they had searched public restrooms and overgrown railway sidings and mossy culverts, but the deluge had made the hunt difficult. A team of police divers sat ready to strap themselves to cables and search the river and stormwater drains through which water thundered like rapids, but the task was deemed too dangerous. A group of State Emergency Service volunteers waited in the Tallong High School hall to start their search of the Carmichael Road woods, but the rain kept falling, heavy as theater curtains, so they stayed indoors drinking instant coffee from Styrofoam cups and playing Trivial Pursuit. The low sea of dark cloud seemed immovable in the bloated sky.

The boy’s mother was named Mrs. Thomas—an ineloquent woman, though by all accounts a gifted tire-fitter and a regular at the local Uniting Church. She appeared on the evening news, begging through a tight throat for anyone who had seen her boy to help. But in the end, the boy, whose name was Dylan (the press showed unusual good taste in making no sport of the child’s mother unwittingly naming him after that doomed alcoholic), had been beyond help for all of those three days. His body was found hooked in mangrove trees some five kilometers downriver from Tallong. A squad of high school rowers caught sight of Dylan’s red tracksuit pants bobbing in the shoreline shadows. A police spokesman said the boy’s throat had been cut. There were no clear signs of sexual assault; however, time in the water made that difficult to confirm.

Nicholas and Katharine muddled around the house, keeping out of each other’s way. When the television news reported the discovery of Dylan’s body, they watched silently from the sofa. Neither needed to remark how eerily like 1982 this was, when Tristram’s body was found three suburbs from Tallong in a cleared housing block, one pale leg poking out from under a pile of demolished timber, tree roots, and tin. His throat, like Dylan’s, had been slit wide.

Nicholas switched off the television.

Outside, the rain was finally easing.

“I’ll make some tea,” Katharine said quietly.

Chapter
3
   
   OCTOBER 1982

  I
t was the afternoon of a very bad day.

At ten years, Nicholas was slight, with a hint of the tight wiriness he’d keep as a man. His thin legs swung slow arcs through the dull, hot afternoon air, carefully avoiding the dry, severe edges of the sword grass that tissed discontentedly in the weak breeze. He walked along the narrow, gravel path that divided lengthways the long, grassy strip that sat uneasily beside Carmichael Road. The straps of his backpack ate into his shoulders, and the sun dug at his eyes from a sky that was the light, hard blue of Roman glass.

He was sweating lightly, but the sharp sunlight was okay with him. It helped bake away the memories of the day’s shame, allowed room for idle imaginings that he was a Desert Rat of Tobruk or a skulking Arab—someone brown and fearless who squinted at shimmering dunes for signs of determined but doomed Jerries.

There was no hurry to get home. Suzette was in bed with the mumps so she would be even more of a bore. Mum would be peeling vegetables with sharp strokes or attacking school uniforms with the iron and wondering how a boy could eat so many biscuits and stay so thin. His friend Tristram had remained at school for trumpet practice, so there would be no visiting his place to play Battleship or Demolition Derby. No, there was no hurry.

It was nearing four o’clock and the heat was rotten—
stinking hot,
his mum would describe it—and in this limbo between school finishing and knock-off time, it seemed no one but Nicholas was on Tallong’s streets. No cars broke the snaky heat haze wriggling above the black tar. Weatherboard and fibrous cement houses shrugged against the bashing sunlight under red or green corrugated iron. Opposite them, to his right, were the woods.

Hectares so thick with rainforest scrub and scribbly gums and trumpet vine and lantana that, from here on Carmichael Road, he couldn’t see more than ten meters into their interior. Certainly on some council map they must have a proper name, but he called them “the woods” because his mother called them that, and so did Tristram’s parents and Tristram’s older brother, Gavin, and Mrs. Ferguson the fruit lady. Nicholas knew, from looking at his father’s old street directory, that the woods stretched all the way from here on Carmichael Road back to the looping brown river—maybe a kilometer and a half, though he’d never gone in even a third of that. They were simply too scary, though he could never admit that to Tris. Even now, outside them, Nicholas felt how deep they were, as if he were walking past a bottomless lake of shadowy water rather than a forest. Last week in the school library he’d found a book called
Space
with a chapter about main sequence stars and dying supergiants and fading white dwarfs … and black holes. Things so dense and with so much gravity that they drew light even from far away and anything too close to them was trapped by their gravity and sucked into oblivion.

He found he was staring at the dark trunks, and pulled his eyes away and concentrated on the baked gravel at his feet.

He always slowed here, about halfway along his two-kilometer-long walk home from school. People dropped things on the path, and he was good at finding them. Lesser finds included a marble, tweezers, half a yo-yo, the ripcord from an SSP racer, a torn two-dollar note, and a pencil with its red paint shaved off just below the eraser and the name Hill written there in ballpoint pen. Once, he picked up a pair of rusted pliers—snubby, alligator-nosed things that he took into the garage and cleaned carefully with machine oil he found in a white can under Dad’s old bench. When the jaws opened and closed easily, he hung them on a nail next to Dad’s other tools. It made him happy and sad at the same time, so he left them there.

Nicholas knew his mother preferred that he and Suzette walk the long way home through the prim, geranium-gardened backstreets rather than past the woods. On most days, he respected her wishes. But on days like today, when Suzette wasn’t with him, he would come home along Carmichael Road. The lure of strange jetsam was too strong.

He shifted his narrow shoulders. His backpack was heavier today, weighted with a damp towel and wet swimming trunks.
I got in the pool anyway,
he told himself encouragingly. But that thought wobbled on the top edge of the slippery dip back to this morning and its awful shame. He found his bottom lip tightening and his eyes getting stingy. He grew angry with himself.
Crybaby
, he said.
Wimp
. He tried to think about something else—about the new space shuttle or the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull or why Rommel lost, but it was too late. He slid down into the memory.

Around eleven that morning, all the kids in his class had lined up under pandanus palms outside the school swimming-pool changing rooms, clasping swimming suits in plastic bags or cloth duffels over shoulders. Nicholas was near the front of the queue because it was alphabetical and his surname started with
C
. He was trying hard to shrink, to become invisible, to attract no attention. He looked hopefully around for something—anything!—to get him out of this, but saw none.

Miss Aspinall, with a voice like bells and a body like a medicine ball, called, “Okay, everyone. Sit down.”

Nicholas and his classmates sat.

“Shoes off.”

The light grunting and groaning of piglets as boys and girls reached at their feet.

The smell of chlorine bit and the chug of the filter was loud as he pulled off his left shoe, left sock, right shoe … he looked around, and slowly, carefully … right sock … and there it was.

A pale toe the size of his second smallest, only not aligned with the others, growing out the top of his foot and lying atop the other five like some showboat seal above a striated beach.

He’d become quite good at covering his foot with his bag as soon as the sock was off. He was good at hiding. Perhaps, if no one looked …

A silvery tinkle-trundle of a coin dropped and rolling.

“Oh!”

The twenty-cent piece rolled past Eric Daniels, looped in a lazy, diminishing circle, and tingled to a stop right in front of Nicholas. He looked up just as Ursula Gazelle stooped over him to pick up her dropped money. He was frozen, horrified and powerless, as Ursula’s eyes slid from her coin to his shoes to his foot … to his showboat-seal freak sixth toe.

“Oh,” said the prettiest girl in class, eyes fixed on Nicholas’s foot. “Yuck.”

She scooped up her coin and hurried back in line.

And Nicholas started crying.

He remembered pulling out his hanky, telling Steven Chan nothing was wrong, telling Miss Aspinall nothing was wrong, trying to cover his foot with his bag, hearing people whispering,
His toe. She saw his toe. What about his toe? His
extra
toe
 … Cried. Like a pooftah. Nicholas knew what pooftahs were: boys who sobbed like girls.

He’d cried then, and remembering the red-hot shame of it was making him cry like a pooftah again now. He sniffed back mucus as hot as the oven air around him.

And so it was through tears, alone in the thudding heat on a narrow gravel path beside Carmichael Road, that Nicholas saw the bird.

It could have been anything or nothing, a tiny thing at the edge of the path tucked mostly into the whispering grass. Black and white feathers. Was it a magpie? Nicholas leaned closer. No, it was smaller. A peewee.

He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, wondering what to do with it. Dead things, he knew, were dirty
(riddled with germs,
his mother would say), and so he considered simply kicking it completely into the grass and walking on. But as he peered closer, he saw something that made him stop, shuck off his backpack, and kneel.

The dead bird had no feet.

Its legs, no thicker than twigs, had been neatly snipped off below its backward-facing knees, revealing sections of brown-black marrow ringed inside white bone as fine as porcelain, wrapped in gray, leathery skin.

Nicholas closed his mouth to avoid breathing in the poachy whiff of it. Who would cut off a bird’s feet? He scoured the dirt around the bird but couldn’t see the severed claws. He did find a short stick, chewed in the middle by someone’s dog. Delicately, aware only of the iron sun baking the back of his neck and the high electric singing of insects, he poked the stick under the dead bird and pulled the limp, swollen little body out from the grass. Then his stomach lurched.

Like its feet, the bird’s head had been removed. In its place, skewered to the body with a sharpened stick, was a spherical knot of woven twigs. The bird’s severed feet were stuck into the knot by the shins and protruded from it like tiny, knurled antlers.

Nicholas felt his fingers pulsing as his heartbeats thupped harder. Carefully, he turned the bird over. Something was painted in rust red on the false head: a vertical downstroke with an arrowhead like a greater-than symbol on its right–hand side:

Nicholas felt a swoop between his navel and his testicles. His skin was suddenly cold, and the edges of his vision were tinged with silver.

He stood, heart racing, and was struck by the silence.

No car passed on the road. Not a person moved behind the dark windows of the distant houses. The breeze had died and the blade grass had lost its lizard hiss. The crickets no longer chirruped, as if even they were afraid to announce their hiding places. The sky was pale and hot as a kiln.

Nicholas suddenly felt dreadfully alive in all this stillness. Brilliantly alive with something so very dead beside him. He felt his heartbeats were as loud as drums, traveling for miles. He was alive and small and terrifyingly alone.

With the woods just a few feet away.

He knew he had to go—now. He kicked the bird and its strange woven head into the grass and grabbed his backpack. He shoved his arm into the loop, missed, shoved again, missed again. His vision was edged with glutinous, dizzy stars. Finally, he got his arm through the strap, and straightened just as the silence was broken.

The grass crunched behind him.

Deep slices through the dry grass. Heavy, deliberate footfalls. Stealthy and close. The stagnant air had suddenly thickened with the odor of sweet rot, alive as the cloying whiff around the top of an old septic tank. Tangy and ugly. Something was coming up behind him. Something from the woods.

Bright white terror filled him. His adrenal gland poured its juice into his blood and his heart galloped and his small legs tensed and sprang … 
Run!

Without turning, he flew.