OCTOBER 1982 OCTOBER 1982It 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.