The Darkening by Stephen Irwin Read Free Book Online

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.

    The police did find the child, three days later.
    During the first two days, they had searched public toilets 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 storm-water 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 theatre curtains, so they stayed indoors drinking instant coffee from Styrofoam cups and playing Trivial Pursuit. The low sea of dark cloud seemed immoveable in the bloated sky.
    The boy’s mother was named Mrs Thomas - an ineloquent woman, though by all accounts a gifted tyre-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 six kilometres downriver from Tallong. A squad of high school rowers - who trained come rain, hail or shine and would win the state championship ribbon this year, GO TERRACE! - 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. They wished to question a man of Middle Eastern appearance seen in the vicinity of a nearby bus station three nights ago.
    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.

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, avoiding carefully 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 school port 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 -