He dreamed he was a bird.
His legs were numb, because they were gone. His head was gone, too, painless and vanished. But his body — dead though it was and swelling with rot — still had feeling. It was sodden wet and cold. Ants were crawling over it, exploring for places to nest and feed. He was quite content to lie there and decay, until his body felt something poking into its side. Without eyes, he couldn’t see, but he knew it was a boy holding a stick, poking him, disturbing his death, seeking to drag him out onto a path. He was the bird, but he was also the boy. All was well, though.
Because this is the plan. This is what we need to bring him. It is the cycle.
But the prodding stick?
Flesh, not stick! Flesh and blood! Because blood is the only sacrifice that pleases the Lord. .
Nicholas’s eyes blearily opened.
A large woman stood above him, poking him with the tip of a brightly coloured umbrella. Nicholas screamed. The woman screamed, too, and skittered backwards. Despite her size, she moved surprisingly fast.
‘He’s alive!’ she called to her husband in the car on the road. She hurried into the passenger seat and the car roared past.
‘Dirty druggie! Disgrace!’ shouted the man before he swiftly wound up his window and sped away.
Nicholas was lying in the dry sword grass outside the woods. Everything hurt. His hands and feet felt like they weren’t flesh but wet dust, heavy and lifeless. His clothes were damp. His heart thudded dully, and his head felt full of acid sand. But he could move. He rolled onto his side, dragged his knees to his chest and slowly pushed himself up onto all fours. Ropy spittle fell from his slack lips. The minute it took him to sit on his haunches seemed an eternity.
He sat on the path, breathing heavily from the effort, and squinted at his watch. It was four thirty; the sun was kissing the rooftops in the west. An arm’s length away on the path lay the body of the butcher bird, its woven head re-attached to its perishing, lifeless body, its pathetic severed legs again poking out like antlers. Beside him was a clean plastic 7-Eleven bag. He reached painfully and picked it up. Within were a new torch and a bug bomb can, the latter also unused, its lid still attached.
Nicholas looked at his knees. No sign of the virulent sludge of squashed spiders — but his clothes were all wet; soaked through.
Was it all a dream?
He looked at his hand. In the flesh between his forefinger and thumb were two red-rimmed and throbbing punctures. The pain in his upper thigh told him he would find two more wounds there.
She did this, he thought. She washed my clothes. Bought new goods. She did it so no one would believe me if I blabbed. She did it so I wouldn’t believe myself.
But he could prove it! He could run now, into the woods, to the tunnels under the pipe, and the left one would be full of torn cobwebs and squashed, dead spiders. But he knew, with cold clarity, that the pipe would have been emptied of dead spiders and filled with live ones busily spinning fresh webs. The empty bug bomb container would have been spirited away.
He looked around at the woods. In the late afternoon light, they brooded, patient and dark. There was no way he wanted to go back in there, not today.
She got what she wanted.
He remembered, then, the wrinkled hand stroking him, his jerked expulsions, the horror of the catlike weight on his chest as he heaved in orgasm. He felt utterly exhausted. Raped. Emptied.
He climbed to his feet and began a slow stagger towards Bymar Street.
12
Nicholas sat on his sofa. His throat was raw and his stomach was sore from retching. The bites (spider bites, he reminded himself) throbbed, and for the hundredth time he dully considered a trip to the twenty-four-hour medical centre. And, for the hundredth time, reasoned that the resultant questions would not go well. Giant spider, you say? Oh, yes, we get those all the time. Excuse me just a moment while I phone security. Suggesting the wounds were a snake bite would only demand more tests, more questions. The punctures weren’t infected, and he was feeling incrementally better. He’d stay here.
So tired. As soon as he began drifting towards sleep, the nightmare image of the old woman stroking him while her pet sat on his chest returned with awful vividness. Shutting his mind’s door on the vision and leaning against it to keep it closed was draining. To let it open and relive those moments as a supine captive in the woods would send him crazy.
How do you know you’re not crazy?
He skipped to the next groove in the scratched record of his mind: Go to the police.
And say. . what? That the men who’d confessed to the murders of Tristram Boye and Dylan Thomas were lying? ‘Forget their confessions, their fingerprints, their car tyre tracks, Sergeant! The real killer is an old woman who lives in a strange little cottage in the woods. That’s right, just down the road from me. Her hobbies include spider farming and jerking off hostages.’
‘That’s amazing news, Mr Close! The very break we needed to re-open these already neatly closed cases. By the way, how did you find out?’
‘Oh, here’s the clever bit: a ghost led me there.’
The bitch knew.
The old woman knew there was no room in a sane world for stories about huge spiders and Brothers Grimm strawberries. Relating what happened would be the babblings of a madman. No, she knew there would be no police.
Go away. Move to Melbourne.
And when you read of another Tallong child going missing? How will you feel then?
Fuck off. I’m not the murderer.
Ah. But she has your sperm in a jar.
Nicholas was suddenly fully awake. An image appeared in his mind complete: an autopsy table, a small boy face down on the stainless steel, a lab-coated man with a syringe withdrawing milky white liquid from the dead boy’s anus and squirting it into a jar theatrically labelled ‘Evidence’.
Oh, Jesus. He definitely had to move! Create an alibi! Live a visible life and surround himself with people who could testify that he never came to this city again!
But Mum lives here.
Katharine was just a chasse away from thinking her son a killer already. Wipe her!
He paced.
No. He and his mother might not get along, but leaving her in this suburb — this haunted, killing place — would be wrong.
Move her down south, too!
You know she wouldn’t go.
He was running out of options.
You could kill yourself.
Suicide. He rolled the thought in his mind like an ice-cube on his tongue, tasting it, feeling its smooth chill. Death. He’d thought about it a lot immediately after Cate died. He’d been thinking about how he might do it (Pills? Stanley knife to the carotid artery? Sneaking up to the roof of the Leadenhall Building and taking a dive?) as he moved the last of his and Cate’s belongings the afternoon that he slipped on the front steps of their Ealing flat and rose to be stabbed by the ghost of wild-eyed Keith Yerwood. After that, his visions of the dead — in particular, his vision of Cate’s last few moments, slipping, falling, breaking, over and over — convinced him that nothing good waited after his own heart stopped. Certainly, suicide would bring a blissful end to the sightings of dead children, but would it stop live ones dying? No.
So, what then?