The Dead Path by Stephen M. Irwin

ice went up her arms and back. But she nodded.
    He told her about the motorcycle crash, and borrowing the phone from the horse-faced couple he had collided with. About hurrying home to find Cate crooked like a broken exclamation mark, head bent too far backward over the tub, her open eyes unable to blink out the dust that coated them. About the Yerwood boy with the corduroy jacket and screwdriver. About all the ghosts that silently conspired to send him home. He told her that there were ghosts here, too, including the suicide in the yellow anorak. The sun had sunk below the hills, and lights glowed orange in the houses they passed. The air was faintly spiced with scents of frying meat and onions. He finished by telling her how he’d chased the Thomas boy into the woods two days ago, and lost him at the same place he’d lost Tristram—the shotgun tunnels under the tall, rusted water pipe.
    “Those tunnels full of spiders,” she said.
    Nicholas looked at her, shocked.
    “What?” she asked. “Do you think I never went in the woods?”
    He shook his head.
    “More fool you then,” she said.
    She stopped them outside a blue concrete barrier, where fading graffiti demanded “Free East Papua” and exclaimed that “Fellatio Sucks.” She pushed the back of his head. “Here. Let’s have a look.”
    She stood behind him and lifted his hair, finding the scar on his scalp. He’d never seen it of course, but he’d felt it. The edge of the concrete step of the Ealing flat had left a lumpy scar a thumb’s length across.
    “You think that’s why I’m seeing ghosts?” he asked. “A bump on the head?”
    “Maybe it was the shock of losing Cate. Maybe that nasty bump just cleared the plumbing.” She rapped his head with her knuckle and grinned. “When’s my birthday?”
    “My memory’s fine, bloody hell—”
    “When?”
    Nicholas rolled his eyes. “October thirty-first. Halloween girl.”
    She sent him a dark smile. “Yes and no. Yes, correct date—and by the way you owe me a present from last year. But, no, not a Halloween girl. Halloween’s different down here. All Hallow’s Eve. The Celts called it Samhain.” She pronounced it sah-wen . “For us in the south, the end of October is Beltane, the return of summer. Our Halloween is six months opposite.”
    She watched Nicholas do a quick calculation in his head. “April thirtieth.”
    She nodded.
    “My birthday,” he said quietly.
    She nodded again, and bumped his shoulder with her own.
    “You’re the Halloween child. And a child born on Samhain is said to have second sight.”
      A s they walked, Nicholas felt a lightness in his chest. He wondered what this all meant—was his sister just telling him what he wanted to hear? That they both had some gift—or curse—of seeing the dead?
    He felt her eyes on his face, as if she could sense his doubt.
    “You used to have inklings,” she said. “I remember. Like the time you told me not to use the toaster. Mum ignored you and plugged it in, and it sparked and gave her a shock. You just knew, didn’t you?”
    “I’d forgotten about that.”
    That wasn’t the only time he’d had a notion, a gut feeling, scraps of information of things, places, people that really he couldn’t have known. Throughout his life he’d had uninvited, inexplicable feelings that something wasn’t quite right or that someone was ill or this thing was broken or that thing wasn’t lost but in a mislabeled cardboard box under the house.
    During a high school field trip to the state art gallery, he and four classmates had been about to cross the street to the footpath opposite when Nicholas convinced his classmates to remain where they were. Not a minute later, a speeding taxi mounted the opposite curb and came to a shatter-glass stop against a power pole. The cab driver had suffered a mild stroke and lost control. Had Nicholas and his fellow students crossed the road, they’d all be in hospital—in a ward or in a steel