The rain thundered down so heavily that Pritam could imagine that space itself was made of water and was now pouring through rents in the sky’s tired fabric.
The three of them sat in the presbytery’s leather club chairs, finishing coffee. The mood was odd. Three very different people, each effectively a stranger to the other two. They had next to nothing in common. A neatly dressed Christian clergyman. A reserved, elegant woman recently widowed. And that long-limbed scarecrow of a man Nicholas Close. Would they ever have gathered were it not for these unusual circumstances? He didn’t think so. Yet they were surprisingly comfortable together. None had a loved one waiting at home for them. All had lost someone close to them recently. Sad, strange events had brought them together, yet there was something warming about each other’s company. Something easy and right, but very fragile—a fine rope across a wide chasm. Each felt it; the silence while they sipped was delicate and none wanted to break it.
After returning from the Gerlics’ house, Pritam had set himself busy to fill the time until Nicholas arrived. He’d mopped out John’s room, cleaned his en suite, found a hundred small excuses not to go into the main church. When he heard a knock at the presbytery door, he had been surprised to find not Nicholas, but Laine Boye. She explained that Nicholas had invited her. Not much later, Nicholas himself arrived. Pritam made coffee, they exchanged small talk, and a silence settled that each recognized as a cue: it was time for serious talk.
“Okay,” Nicholas began. “I’ve told Pritam some of this, but not everything. Not by a long shot. Laine, you said Gavin mentioned a bird?”
Pritam felt the last word suddenly flutter in his gut like a real bird, nervous and ready to flee. He watched Nicholas walk over to the small bar fridge; he pulled out the plastic bag and untied it on the coffee table. Pritam’s heart beat faster as he saw again that violated little body, that disquieting woven ball for a head. He looked over to see Laine’s reaction to the mutilated bird, but her gray eyes were utterly inscrutable.
“I first saw a bird like this back in 1982, four days before Tristram Boye was murdered,” Nicholas said. He told them about Winston Teale chasing him and Tris into the woods, and watching Tris with his broken wrist disappear under the old water pipe through a tunnel full of spiders. How Tris’s drained body had been found miles away under tin and timber. Teale’s confession and suicide. Years later, Cate’s death. His fall on the stairs outside the flat in Ealing. The ghost of the screwdriver-wielding boy. Then more ghosts; sad, trapped ghosts. Cate’s ghost. Returning from London on a rainy night like this when Dylan Thomas disappeared. Elliot Guyatt’s confession and suicide, so eerily like Teale’s. Gavin’s dawn message punctuated by two sharp cracks of his rifle on which Thurisaz was scored: the rune that kept reappearing and seemed inextricable from death. Pursuing the Thomas boy’s ghost into the woods. The strawberries. The Wynard. The old woman and her dog Garnock that was no dog. The nauseating hand job. The archived flyers and news articles: so many missing children, so many dead men. Eleanor Bretherton, grim patron of this church, the spitting image of Mrs. Quill the dressmaker. Her shop, now a health food store, with a rune marked into its door. Garnock attacking Suzette and wrenching out her hair, and Nicholas’s nephew falling ill the next morning. And earlier today: a development sign erected, another bird talisman found, and a girl nearly snatched with Nicholas himself darkly urged to deliver her into the gloomy woods on Carmichael Road.
The room fell silent under the cold gaze of Eleanor Bretherton, staring belligerently out from monochromatic 1888.
Pritam was exhausted, as if he’d just finished watching a disturbing horror feature that he knew couldn’t be real, but still made him want to avoid the shadows. He looked over to Laine Boye. She was watching him intently, as if gauging his reaction.
“And, of course,” said Nicholas, “a credible witness who could have confirmed that Quill and Bretherton were, forgive the pun, birds of a feather, is dead. John Hird.”
“True,” said Pritam, and was surprised how quiet his voice was. “But there is this.”
He went to his desk drawer and returned with the photo of Mrs. Quill at the church fête thirty-two years ago. Nicholas put out his hand, but Pritam stepped past him and handed it to Laine.
When Laine saw it, her lips tightened but her face betrayed no emotion.
“You tell me, Mrs. Boye,” said Pritam. “Are they the same person?”
Laine held the photographs side by side, comparing Quill’s and Bretherton’s scowls, their chins, their frosty alarm at being photographed. After a long minute, she returned the photograph to Pritam.
“Similar,” she said.
The rain outside roared.
“So?” asked Nicholas, looking from Pritam to Laine.
“So,” said Laine, “we have two photographs a hundred years apart with two women who look alike, but that means nothing of itself. A list of deaths and murders, but they were all explained away or confessed to. As for the bird, you could have mutilated it. We only have your word, Mr. Close, that you found it. But—”
“But?”
“But you say you can see ghosts.”
Laine kept her cool gaze on Nicholas. For a long moment, he was silent. Then he spoke quietly.
“True. The only thing it doesn’t explain is why your husband was talking in his sleep about a dead bird before he left your bed and shot himself.”
Pritam saw a shiver of something behind Laine’s eyes. It was gone so quickly, he wondered if he’d seen it at all.
Nicholas turned and looked at him. “Reverend, what do you think? A coincidence with Bretherton and Quill? Secret relatives?” He smiled grimly. “And what about me? Crazy guy who thinks he sees ghosts?”
Pritam could see that Nicholas was fighting to seem contained, but was ready to snap.
“My religion,” he answered slowly, “says that one of the three aspects of my God is a ghost.”
“However?”
“However, I need to ask, are you afraid of spiders?”
Nicholas blinked, suddenly caught off guard. “Yes, I’m afraid of spiders.”
“Were you always?”
“What are you, a psychiatrist?”
Pritam took a breath. He could feel Laine’s eyes on him, appraising his line of questioning.
“Is it possible that the trauma of losing your best friend as a child, and the trauma of losing your wife as an adult, and the trauma of seeing Laine’s husband take his life in front of you just recently …” Pritam shrugged and raised his palms. “You see where I’m going?”
Nicholas looked at Laine. She watched back. Her gray eyes missed nothing.
“Sure,” agreed Nicholas, standing. “And my sister’s nuts, too, and we both like imagining that little white dogs are big nasty spiders because our daddy died and we never got enough cuddles.”
“Your father died?” asked Laine. “When?”
“Who cares?”
Pritam sighed. “You must see this from our point of—”
“I’d love to!” snapped Nicholas. “I’d love to see it from your point of view, because mine’s not that much fun! It’s insane! It’s insane that I see dead people, Pritam! It’s insane that this,” he flicked out the sardonyx necklace, “stopped me kidnapping a little girl!”
“That’s what you believe,” said Pritam carefully.
“That’s what I fucking believe!” Nicholas stabbed his finger through the air at the dead bird talisman lying slack on the coffee table.
Pritam’s jaw tightened. “Please don’t swear in my church.”
“It’s her church!” Nicholas snatched up the photo of Mrs. Quill and threw it at the photograph of Eleanor Bretherton. “She paid for it! She owns this place! And why do you think, despite all those people that died, all we have is this crappy pile of speculation!” He was spitting out the words. “Because she’s smart! She watches and she waits and she takes and she gets away with it because it’s insane to think otherwise!”
The air in the presbytery was as sharp and fragile as crystal. Pritam felt as incensed as the first time Nicholas Close was in here. “I think perhaps we should continue this another night when you’re a little calmer.”
Nicholas glared at him, then jerked his gaze to Laine.
She looked back evenly, her hands in her lap, expression indecipherable.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.
“And don’t blaspheme, please,” Pritam said curtly.
Nicholas stood and opened the front door. The roar of rain filled the room.
“I’m sorry. I don’t expect you to put aside the real world for this stuff. I’d give my right arm to not believe it.” He looked at Pritam. “But if you’re going to be offended by a couple of words, I don’t think you’re up for what this is all about. This is murder and black magic. You don’t believe in magic? That’s fine. I didn’t until a few days ago. But if you two have any sense, don’t take the risk. Get out of here.”
He closed the door behind him, and the room again fell almost silent.
Anyone outside the church would have seen a tall man striding to his car, not caring that his unruly hair was slicked down by the heavy rain, throwing open his car door and angrily wrenching the engine alive. As the car drove away, its tinny burble faded, leaving only the hot skittle spatter of rain on the road. And a small, careful slide of footsteps from the pitch black eaves of the cold stone church.
Were there anyone to see, they’d have watched a small, hunched form step into the rain and look behind itself. Were they close enough, they’d have heard a dry whisper that defied the downpour.
“Go.”
A small white thing the size of a large cat stepped from the same shadows with movement too fluid, too wily, for its squat form, before hurrying silently away through the rain.
Anyone watching would have seen the dark, stooped figure stare at the presbytery for a long, long moment, before she turned and hurried away in the direction of Carmichael Road.
Only no one was there to see, and she knew that well.
Pritam could hear the ticking of the mantel clock. He settled in his chair with a sigh. “I shouldn’t have let him go.” Apart from rising to inspect the photograph of Eleanor Bretherton, Laine Boye had hardly moved since she first arrived. Her back was straight, her hands neatly folded in her lap. She watched Pritam.
“Do you believe in magic, Reverend?”
Pritam nodded over at his desk. It was, of course, very tidy: his laptop folded away, his pens capped and sitting in a Daylesford Singers Festival ’04 mug. Beside his day-planner were his Bibles. “In Acts Eight, Philip goes to the city of Samaria,” he said, “where a man named Simon was supposedly using sorcery and bewitching the city folk. So, my faith acknowledges magic.”
Laine shrugged. “No offense, Reverend—”
“Pritam, please.”
“No offense, Pritam, but reading something in the Bible isn’t the same as seeing it with your own eyes.”
Quite right. Gavin Boye hadn’t married a fool.
“I left India when I was nine,” he said. “So I don’t remember that much about my early years. But my most vivid memory happened, oh, about six months before we left. We’d gone to visit my uncle and aunt in their village near Kirvati. When we got there, the men of the village were holding down a screaming old man and pulling out his teeth with pliers. So much blood. He was a tantric, the old man. A mystic. He had charged five hundred rupee—about fifteen dollars—to advise a young man to kidnap a girl and sacrifice her to the Goddess Durga, who would show him where treasure was secretly buried. The girl was twelve. He cut off her hands, feet, and breasts. She bled to death. The young man never found his treasure and went back to the tantric to complain. The police caught him, thank God. But then the villagers tracked down the tantric and pulled out his teeth so he couldn’t summon the gods again.”
“That’s human violence, not magic,” said Laine. “All those deaths Nicholas mentioned—more human violence. Even that,” she nodded at the headless plover on the table. For the first time, Pritam saw a clear emotion in her eyes: revulsion. “Even that is just an act of human violence.”
She stood and held out her hand. He rose and took it. Her skin was dry and smooth.
“I know your Bible mentions ghosts and magic, Pritam. But I’m afraid I just can’t believe in either of them. If you speak with Mr. Close again, wish him luck. I think he needs it. Good night.”
She collected her umbrella from the stand beside the door, and a moment later she was gone.
The rain continued through the night. Stormwater drains in the inner suburbs choked with branches and rubbish and mud, and flooding waters rose. A low-lying commercial block in Stones Corner was inundated: a carpet wholesaler and a car yard both went underwater, and Persian rugs and Mitsubishi Colts bobbed in the rising brown tide.
Birds in trees curled their heads under their wings and clung to branches for dear life. On the river, the last ferry services were canceled. In expensive houses with private docks, owners old enough to remember the flood of ’74 lay in their beds biting their lips and resisting the urge to check their insurance policies.
Pritam set his jaw and unlocked the internal door that led into the church proper. He flicked a switch and the long, vaulting room flickered unhappily into half-light. He fought the need to glance overhead and check that the Green Man wasn’t staring back at him through dark, unblinking eyes. Instead, he kept his gaze level and sat in the foremost pew in front of the image of Christ crucified before a strangely lush, tree-studded backdrop, bowed his head, and prayed for the souls of lost children. Without knowing when, he slipped from prayer into fitful dreaming.
He was on Calvary, but the hill was devoid of crosses and peppered instead with incongruous trees. One was cleaved through the trunk. He was caught in the crush of it, broken and dying. Eleanor Bretherton was directing a regretful John Hird to saw off Pritam’s feet, hands, head. “It’s for Mother Kali, you loafing black tit,” said Hird cheerfully. No one heard Pritam cry out in his sleep, his whimpers echoing down the nave to be quashed by the dispassionate rumble of rain.
In his tiny flat, Nicholas sat on his bed staring out the rain-smeared window down Bymar Street at the yawning darkness at the end that was the woods, imagining a million spiders marching silently through the deluge.