The Dead Path (35 page)

Chapter
34
   

  T
he
Wynard
was wretched. The boat lay on her side like the mummified body of a long-dead elephant, her gray hull beginning to cave and collapse as moisture and unseen insects completed their rotting work; her timbers were faded and bleached like cow bones. Far overhead, wind roared like fire in the treetops, an invisible wave endlessly crashing.

Nicholas shifted the shotgun to one hand and checked his watch. It was nearly four. The winter sun remained hidden by a million leaves, but he could feel its distant warmth vanishing from the day with greedy speed. The air here in the deep green shadows was frigid and still. Hannah shivered beside him.

“Which way?” she asked.

He looked around the hunching curtains of green and black. At the boat, the track had petered out.

“I don’t remember.”

The last time he’d left here, he’d been carried unconscious on eight thousand spindle legs, Garnock riding on his chest like a stygian cavalier.

The ground ahead, thick with vine and root and trunk, seemed to rise. The air that way had a slightly sour tang. Nicholas reasoned that the river couldn’t be far away, its salty mud banks thick with mangroves and rancid with the droppings of flying foxes. He nodded in that direction, and he and Hannah started again uphill.

As they crawled between the ancient trees, picking their way through the dense shadows over mossy flood-felled trunks and under incestuous, noose-like vines, Nicholas told her everything else he knew about Quill. When he’d finished, Hannah was silent for a thoughtful moment.

“Wow. That’s a long time to be alive,” she said. “Rowena must be very lonely.”

Nicholas looked at her.

“Maybe that’s why she’s so mean,” she continued. “Because she’s sad. Everyone she loved is dead and left behind.”

Nicholas stopped. The trees around them now were more shadow than substance. Even Hannah’s face was a gray mask, as featureless as the sandy bottom of a deep pond.

“I think we have to turn back.”

Hannah blinked. “We can’t. If we don’t get her today …” Her voice trailed off with a shudder.

Nicholas nodded.

“Hannah?” A voice as thin as smoke wended from the dark belt of trees up ahead. Nicholas watched Hannah’s eyes widen and her face tighten like a fist. His own heart began to gallop.

“Haaaannahhh?” A girl’s voice. A pained voice.

Hannah’s eyes darted between the woods and Nicholas.

“It’s Miriam,” she whispered.

Nicholas saw goosebumps on his arm. He shook his head. “It’s not.”

“It is! She’s not dead! They were wrong!”

She started forward. Nicholas snatched her arm and wheeled her round. He grabbed her chin and made her focus her wild eyes on him.

“It’s not your sister, Hannah. Think about it.”

Hannah blinked. She nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “Stay here.”

He looked around to orient himself, then cocked the shotgun and stepped into the deeper gloom.

“Haaannnahhh? Help me, Hannaaaahhh!”

The voice was a keening tapestry of pain and sorrow. It made Nicholas’s skin crawl. What was it doing to Hannah?

He moved as quickly as he could, but the trees were wide and old and huddled tight as conspirators. The spaces between them were filled with even older stumps that rose from the rustling ground like the broken teeth of titans. It was growing so dark. Nicholas suddenly realized what a stupid thing he’d done. He’d left Hannah alone.

“Hannah?” The voice was no longer scared. A shadow shifted between the gloomy trees ahead of Nicholas.

“Miriam?” he asked, carefully swinging the gun barrel up toward the movement.

“Hannah!” replied the voice delightedly. And suddenly the shadow jolted forward.

It was a spider at least the size of Garnock, a widow with gloss black and hairless legs, each as long and thick as a broom handle. They moved a shelled body as big as a water-filled black balloon. Yet the spider jumped from tree to tree with amazing speed; one moment swaying like a ready boxer, the next leaping and landing with eerie silence, so fast that Nicholas barely had time to thumb the hammer back.

“Hhhaaaaaa!”

The voice changed from human to something utterly alien as the spider pounced. Nicholas pulled the trigger. The blast was loud but was squashed instantly by the disapproving trees. The spider jerked, but its momentum carried it right at him—he scrambled sideways and the spider hit the tree behind him with the wet crack of a giant egg smashing. It slid lifeless to the dark leaves, its long finger-bone legs quivering in death palsies.

Nicholas turned and ran.

“Hannah!”

He sprinted downhill, dodging between trunks and jumping over spiny branches, sliding and falling and rising and running. Ahead, he heard Hannah scream in terror.

“Hold on, Hannah!”

He thumbed back the shotgun’s other hammer and jumped over the last log into the clearing.

Hannah stood shaking, eyes locked on something hidden from Nicholas’s sight by a wide trunk.

“What is it?” he asked.

She pointed, and he stepped closer to see what she faced.

He felt his own legs turn light as dust.

If the last spider had been big, this one was huge. Its body was the size of a sheepdog, squat and dense, bristling with sandy brown hairs. It was reared up on six legs; its front two pawed the air, tasting it. A cluster of red eyes stared out from a nest of ugly gray hair. Its fangs shuffled noiselessly.

“Kill it, Nicholas.”

He raised the gun, and squeezed the trigger.

And as he did, he noticed the straps tucked in the folds where the spider’s tubelike legs met its thorax. Hannah’s knapsack! As the hammer fell, he jerked the gun aside. The blast shook a sudden hole in the bush beside the spider, which jerked in silent pain. As it moved, its horrible appearance melted away, becoming Hannah on her knees, her hands tied behind her back, and a tiny red circle of a single shotgun pellet hole in her calf. Her mouth was gagged with rags.

Nicholas whirled, nauseated that he’d been so stupid.

The other Hannah stood behind him, grinning. She stepped forward lightly and Nicholas felt a sting in his arm. He dropped the gun and blinked. The smiling Hannah held a syringe in her hand and, as she stepped back, her limbs lengthened and her hair grew. Rowena Quill, young and blond and beautiful, stood in front of him, smiling as only one truly pleased with herself can.

“Hello, my pretty man.”

Chapter
35
   

  T
hrough the folds and curtains of sleep, Laine heard the dry squeal of a hinge. Her eyes drifted open. The bedroom door was silently swinging open. And into the room stepped one long, bristled leg, placing its hooked foot stealthily on the floor. Then another followed it, moving with completely inhuman fluidity. The legs belonged to a squat, solid spider as large as a fox.

Laine’s heart began hammering, gulping fistfuls of blood; she felt her exhaling breath flute down to a whisper as her throat tightened with terror.

At the sound of her gasp, the spider hunched and adjusted itself with unbelievable speed to face her. Two large, black, hemispherical eyes were orbited by six smaller ones, all sitting on a gray-haired bump of a head that would feel, Laine knew, as hard and alien as a bristled watermelon. Between the spider’s two front legs was a pair of fangs, sharply pointed and hard as polished ebony. The fangs curled in, wet themselves on the glands tucked under its crablike mouth, then extended again, glistening wet with poison.

She was on the cliff edge of total panic, wanting to shriek and keep screaming, but no sound came out of her dry mouth. Her jaw spasmed.

But her left hand was farthest from the spider, and she sent it shaking out from under the bedsheets, hunting for a weapon.

The spider, low to the ground, took an incredibly slow, very careful step forward. It raised itself slightly on its legs and Laine heard a faint hiss as it drew in air. The spider let out a whisper that set the hairs on the back of her neck hard.

“Aaiiide.”

Oh God,
she thought madly.
It’s trying to say my name.

Her sneaking fingers found the alarm clock. Useless—she could grab it but every chance was that the cord plugged into the wall would stop her swinging it. She kept hunting for the other object she knew was there.

The spider steadied itself on its feet, tensing its legs and reminding Laine deliriously of how a golfer wiggled his feet and hips, positioning himself for a clean swing. Again, she heard air drawn in and released in a controlled hiss: “Maaaie maaaiee.”

She understood the bastardized words:
Bye bye.

Her fingers finally touched what she wanted: the smooth, round steel of a spray can. But as she grabbed, her sweaty fingers slipped and the can clattered across the floor and rolled impotently into the corner.

Laine’s eyes widened.

Garnock’s mandibles parted. A smile. Then it leapt.

But the spider only moved a fraction before it was slammed back down to the floor with a hard ring of steel on wood. Two tines of a pitchfork had speared through its bony shell and pinned it to the pine floorboards.

Katharine turned and spat.

The impaled creature let out a horrible hissing wail, and its horned feet scrabbled against the floor, gouging the polish. Its fangs pistoned up and down like thresher blades. It was pulling the fork out of the floor.

Katharine stepped carefully behind the skewered spider and leaned more weight on the pitchfork handle. Her stomach convulsed and she strained to keep from gagging.

“It was a dog. It looked like a dog when I stabbed it …”

Laine padded quickly across the floor and scooped up the can of insecticide. She glanced over to Garnock.

It was wheezing and straining against the tines. The hairy armor of its exoskeleton was starting to tear and a puddle of blue hemolymph spread beneath it.

“I think it’s going to pull itself free,” said Katharine quickly.

It was true. Though it would kill itself doing it, Garnock was aiming to pull its flesh right through the pinning tines. Laine popped the lid off the spray can. She stood in front of the giant spider and watched its fangs swoon up and down.

“Bye bye, indeed,” she whispered, and sprayed insecticide right into the nest of its eyes.

The spider let out a piercing whistle that bubbled in the blue liquid leaking from below it. Its legs pounded a sloshing tattoo on the boards. Laine kept the spray going, saturating the spider’s head, covering the creature in a pungent chemical fog.

“Come on,” she whispered, grabbing Katharine’s arm as she slipped past Garnock. It twisted on its impalement and Laine saw its fangs stab the air as she passed. The women hurried down the hall.

“We should leave that for a while,” suggested Laine.

“Yes,” agreed Katharine. “I’ll boil the kettle.”

  T
hey were in the kitchen, Laine helping Katharine make tea. Outside, daylight was fading from the sky.

“When did Nicholas say he’d be back?” asked Laine as lightly as she could.

Katharine frowned and checked the wall clock.

“He didn’t.”

The telephone rang. Katharine and Laine glanced at one another. Katharine picked up the phone.

“Hello?” she said. As she listened, her eyes stayed on Laine. “When?” She nodded. “Is anyone there going to … ? Okay. Thank you.” She cradled the receiver. “Reverend Pritam Anand died today. Heart failure.”

Laine set down the crockery as a shiver of understanding went through her. Pritam was dead. Garnock had come for her.

Quill would be after Nicholas.

He must know that.

“The fool,” she whispered. “He’s in the woods.”

Chapter
36
   

  S
mall, shifting gems of darkening blue winked through the high, wind-harried leaves. Evening’s fast fingers were drawing velvet across the sky.

Nicholas came awake, slowly and painfully, as if being thawed from a block of black and acidulous ice. At first, he thought he was on fire, and the flickering yellow lights at the corners of his eyes were his limbs aflame. But as he worked blood into his fingers and limbs, he realized the pain was just the agony of pins and needles.

A faint whistling. An old tune, bittersweet, mournful and thin, was barely audible above the wind troubling the eaves.

Nicholas lay on the floor. He could just see out a clear window: trees almost black with approaching night masked all but the tiniest glimpses of bruised evening sky. Everything shifted, in and out of sharpness. His stomach felt ready to let go its contents, and he swallowed back salty bile. He tried to sit, but sharp pain in his wrists and ankles stopped him. He was well tied with ropes.

He rolled a few degrees, wincing at the bright potsherds of pain in the bigger muscles of his legs and arms.

Quill sat on an old oak rocking chair before a small iron stove, staring at the flames flickering behind the black-toothed grin of the stove door, whistling through her gray prune lips. As the firelight shimmered, so did her appearance. One moment her skin was ancient and sagging, pale and deeply scored as drought-cracked earth, but when the flames rose and shadows played across her, Nicholas saw the clear skin and gold hair of young Rowena Quill. Young, ancient; haggard, beautiful. Dark brown eyes, now black, now brown, reflecting red, locked on the flames. Quill’s tune was soft and came from far away and long ago. She seemed to feel Nicholas’s eyes on her and her whistle fell to a sigh.

“Awake?” she asked.

Nicholas rolled a little more. He lay on clean wooden floorboards that smelled of pine oil. The room was a cozy mouthful of shadows: it was paneled in dark wood, but neat. A small cedar table stood on a rug with a single chair keeping company. A curtain to a toileting room was held back by an embroidered sash. A tall pine dresser as thin and stately as a butler held some painted dishes and glazed figurines. Another curtain, this one of lace that reminded him too much of spiderweb, hid all but the shyest glimpse of a trimly made brass bed with a floral counterpane. At the far end of the room he lay in, the floorboards were cut away in a circle. The ring was lined with neatly mortared stones: a fire pit in which coals glowed dully. On the far side of the pit, a folded blanket, kneaded and pressed by the weight of a pet—Garnock, he guessed—but there was no sign of the monster.

“Where is Hannah?” he asked.

Quill rocked. “Hush.”

Again, Nicholas had a vertiginous feeling of seeing her through idling water or of a hologram viewed in passing: her features swam in the fickle firelight, vacillating between old and young, hideous and beauteous. Only her expression remained fixed and cold. Behind her, through the window, the last of the day’s color bled from the sky.

He flexed an arm. The rope bit into his wrist.

“You can’t—”

“I said, hush!” she commanded, and her voice seemed to rouse the flames behind the stove grate. The room danced. She half-rose from her chair, and the young Rowena Quill, pale and blond and terrifyingly beautiful, leaned forward, rage sparkling in her dark eyes. Then she caught and reeled in her anger and sat back down, her skin rippled again into leathery furrows. She folded her hands together, watching him.

“You think you know,” she whispered, “but you can’t know.”

She looked back at the flames. As she rocked, Nicholas noticed something on the wall behind her. It was a calendar of sorts, but made of wood, with movable squared pegs plugged into holes like a board game belonging to some Victorian-era child. But the pegs were marked with strange symbols: stylized seasons, runes, phases of the moon. The board had an elaborately carved frame; at its top, staring through hooded eyes as black as wells from a face of oak leaves, was the Green Man.

“I have so much to tell. So much,” Quill whispered. “So many stories. So many years.” She spoke so quietly, her lips hardly moving, that Nicholas wondered if he was dreaming her voice in his still-swimming head. “Can you imagine my delight when I learned from your mother that you were a Samhain child?” She pronounced the word as Suzette had:
sah-wen
. A word lush and full. Quill turned her eyes again to Nicholas. “A special child. A child with the sight. And you
do
have the sight. A grave-digger’s eyes. A stomach full of sadness to match mine.”

The old woman was suddenly gone and the young Rowena Quill sat in the same dress, its collar loose enough around her pale shoulders to show the curve of her breasts below. Her lips were red as blood. Then a log cracked in the fire, and the old woman was back in the chair.

Nicholas stared. “Then why did you try to kill me?”

Quill watched him for a long moment. “I never did.”

“You set a bird for me,” he said. It was hard to talk, his own weight pressing on his ribs. “As you did for Hannah. And God knows how many other children.”

Anger flared freshly in her eyes, but was hidden away just as fast.

“But never for you. I sent Gavin Boye to you with a wee fib, to entice you here. T’weren’t hard—all his thinking was done with his little head.” She winked, a wrinkled sphincter. “The bird you found was for his brother, your plucky little blond gossip, and it found him sure as sure. He saw a lovely tin hussar. You saw it for what it was. A bird.” She fixed him with her eyes, then looked back at the warmth of the fire. “No, Nicholas Close. I wanted you full grown. That’s why I asked Him to send you back.”

Nicholas suddenly felt his heart beat harder. Its thudding pumps shook him on the floor.

“What do you mean?”

She smiled, perfect white teeth alternated with rust red, almost toothless gums.

“England was too far away. Too, too far. So I asked Him to bring you home,” she said. “And here you are.”

Nicholas felt his vision sparkle and the blood drain from his face. And memories of flashing green; the thrum of a motorcycle; the glimpse of an inhuman face among the black tangles of an oak grove; Cate’s neck bent too far back over the white porcelain edge of the bath, her open eyes dulled by a fine patina of plaster dust.

“What did you do?” he whispered.

She let free a laugh that was at once as clear and pretty as fine bells and graveled and moss-thick as a blocked drain. Her eyes watched him fondly.

“My pretty man. I did what I had to. I want us to be together.”

  T
he smell was familiar.

There wasn’t a hint of goodness about it. It was the sour scent of rot and wet shadow; the smell of bad earth and failed flesh. Hannah recalled it, or something like it, from when she had accompanied her father under the house, crawling low between stumps, over damp earth where sunlight never shone, until they found the dead possum. Its gray bones poked from beneath a pungent shroud of fur, green stuff, and wriggling white. Maggots. The smell of death had made her gag and skitter back to fresher air. Now she had no such luxury.

She was upright, but couldn’t move or see. Her legs were swaddled fast together and her arms were bound tight and crooked against her body. Her eyes were shut and she couldn’t open them: a second skin had her wrapped from head to foot, with only a little space left under her nostrils. Fine strands like baby’s hair tickled her nose when she inhaled the stale, soiled air.

But she knew what it was holding her. She was trussed up just as she imagined Miriam had been: spun tight in spiderweb, alive and waiting to be fed upon by scuttling things with sharp fangs and unblinking eyes.

A hot wave of panic swept through her, and she fought for control of her bowels.
Idiot
, she thought for the thousandth time since she’d watched Nicholas—at least, she’d thought it was Nicholas—return from chasing Miriam’s voice. He’d smiled and said, “Just the wind.” Then he pointed, “But what the hell is that?” She’d turned to follow his outstretched arm, realizing as she twisted that she had fallen for the oldest trick since smell the cheese. Something hard had come down fast on the crown of her skull, and minutes suddenly disappeared. She’d woken on the ground with her arms tied behind her back and her knees lashed together and rags shoved in her mouth. Then, like looking into a bewitched forest mirror, she saw herself standing in the darkening glade, smiling back at her. The hairs on her arms and neck turned to wire, and her twin called in her own voice: “Nicholas!”

The real Nicholas—
the one with a gun, dummy!
—had rushed back, looked at Hannah, and his eyes had widened. He’d raised the gun and, just when she thought she was dead for sure, swung the barrel away. Then,
blammo!
, and a sting ten times worse than any bee’s had rammed like a hot darning needle into her left calf muscle, which now ached like hell. Tears had rolled down her face as she watched her twin self pull out a syringe and stick it into Nicholas. He folded like a dropped doll, and then her twin came over to her. “Sleep tight,” the other Hannah had said, and stuck the needle into her arm. About ten minutes ago she’d woken from a black sleep to here, a fly in the spider’s parlor.

Hannah realized she was crying. Fat lot of good that would do.

“Help!” she called.

Her voice was muffled and sucked up by the blackness; it was like yelling from inside a wardrobe full of clothes. The dead sound and the spoiled butter smell of rancid earth confirmed she was underground. It was as if she was dead already.

Hannah expected this to make her sob even more, but instead she found her tears drying up and her tummy growing warm. How dare they? How dare they do this to little
girls
! She understood why her parents got so angry when they saw the results of bombers in the white hot streets of the Middle East, why men and women wailed in anger as well as grief when they lifted the limp bodies of children from the rubble. How
dare
they? No. She wasn’t going to die like this, wrapped up like some helpless baby.

She concentrated, trying to picture herself. There was no weight on her feet. She was vertical. Her heels, back, and shoulders were pressed against something hard and cold—the earth wall. She was hung like a side of lamb. She sent a testing kick of her twinned legs against the wall behind her and heard a small shower of earth trickle and a faint rattling like glass. She kicked again. Another small fall of soil, another rattle like glasses on a shelf. If only she could
see
. There was only one way that was going to happen.

She strained and forced open her mouth, and stuck her tongue between her teeth. It touched a fibrous skin that made her wet flesh instantly recoil and her stomach jumble.
Come on,
she told herself,
there’s no other way.
She opened her mouth again, wider. She felt the binding silk around her jaw stretch. She closed and opened again, wider, the muscles in her neck straining hard.
Come on!
She closed and opened one more time … and felt the horrible fabric tear a little.

She put her tongue out and felt the raw edges of the torn silk. She looped her tongue around them and drew them into her mouth.
Just a little bit,
she thought.
That’s all I need to free my eyelids.
She pulled the tasteless web between her teeth and ground, pulling her jaw down in a grimace—it felt as if she was eating the very skin off her face. But the silk over her eyelids shifted. She opened her mouth and gagged, her stomach heaved and finally let go, and a warm gush of acidic mush jetted out. She spat and sniffed up snot. Her eyes opened a crack.

It was impossible to judge the room’s size because it was almost completely dark. The inkiness was broken by three weak slices of light that shone down onto a set of ascending stairs made of old bricks. The far wall was swallowed by the darkness—it could be three meters away, or three hundred for all she could see. She twisted her head to the right. From the corner of her eye, she could just make out the wall she was hung from; into its earth were cut rows of horizontal shelves, and on them were jars and jars and jars. So that’s what was rattling. She twisted her head left and bit back a scream.

The skull looking back at her had its mouth open. The spiderwebs that bound the mummified child had long turned gray and now sagged morosely. The child’s skin was the black of old book leather. Curled black hair poked dully between the smoky silk around its skull. Its eye sockets had been closed over with fresher webs.

She looked away, heart cascading. How long had she been here? How long would she need to hang here until she was too weak to do anything and met the same fate? How much time did she have? A fresh wave of tears built up inside her, threatening to burst out. How much time?

Time.

T-i-m-e. T-I-M-E. T-I …

If she screamed now that she’d spat out the gag, the witch would surely hear her. She closed her eyes, focused on the letters.
T-I-M-E. T-I-M-E. Tick tock. Tick tock goes the clock. Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock
 … Her breaths came more evenly as she ran the children’s rhyme through her mind.
The bird looked at the clock. The dog barked at the clock. The bear slept by the clock
 … Her heartbeat slowed. Before she realized what she was doing, she moved her legs left, just a little, then let them drop back. As she swung down, she lifted her legs right. And drop. Tick tock. She began a rhythm, a human pendulum, swaying on the wall. She didn’t ask herself why; she knew it felt
right
. With each drop and swoop up, she strained, getting higher and higher. She felt her back, her bottom, her elbows, her heels, scrape on the dirt, grinding through the silk.
That’s it! Scrape! Tick! Scrape! Tock!
She swung herself, straining left, straining right; swing-scrape, swing-scrape. The tightness around her chest eased just slightly. Her strapped ankles grew slightly freer. She felt wet, cold earth trickle into her shirt, down her back. Left-swing-scrape … Right-swing-scrape … a little higher, a little higher … She could flex her arms, just a little, but that little bought her room to swell and contract as she swung.
A couple more!
She could hold her legs a few centimeters apart. Her shoulders could shrug. She could slide her hands across her belly.
Yes! One more!
She swung …