The Dead Path by Stephen M. Irwin Page B

For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Nothing comes free. You need to put in effort. You need to make sacrifices.”
    She saw Nicholas stiffen at the last word.
    Then she glanced up. They were at an intersection. To the right, beyond hopscotch puddles of streetlight and shadowed picket fences, was the squat, heavy-browed building. Suzette felt a familiar old worm of fear turn in her belly.
    They’d reached the Myrtle Street shops.
      T hey stepped under the awning and their footsteps echoed on the tiles. This had turned out to be a very weird evening. Suzette—sensible, nose-buried-in-financial-theory-textbooks Suzette—was into magic. And his dead father, too. Nicholas brushed hair from his face. It felt unpleasantly like spiderweb and he shivered.
    The shops were all shuttered and dark.
    He expected a wave of pleasant nostalgia to suddenly overtake them, and they’d laugh about the lollies they’d gourmandized and the ice creams they’d loved that were no longer made. Instead, the dumb fronts of the shops were oddly hostile.
    It’s because we’re being watched.
    The thought shuddered through him like a shot of vodka. The streets were quiet. Nothing moved. The world was more shadow than substance and the wind made the power lines moan. They were alone. And yet, he had the unpleasant, light feeling in the pit of his gut that they were being watched.
    “We should go,” he said.
    “Okay,” said Suzette. But instead, she nodded at the new shop: Plow & Vine Health Foods. All they could see in the glass was their own ghostly reflections; the shop within was as black as the waters of a deep well.
    “This was the haberdashery.” Suzette leaned closer, trying to see in. Nicholas fought an insane urge to yell “Get back!” Her eyes were fixed on the dark shop window. “Do you remember the old seamstress? Mrs. Quill. She freaked me out.”
    Quill. The bent-backed old woman tucked behind a counter much too large for her, perched like some benevolent old parrot, nodding and sending a smile as he passed. Behind her had hung ranks of shirts, pants, skirts, and dresses that used to bring to mind a picture that, for a while during primary school, had haunted his dreams: from a book about the Second World War, a photograph of a dozen or so Russians—men, women, children—hanging dead and limp from a huge and leafless tree. A chill went through him and, as it did, another memory returned.
    “You used to hate walking past these shops,” he said. “When you were small. You used to cry.”
    She shrugged her shoulders, as if to shuck off an unpleasant memory—then she seemed to brighten. “Hey. I brought you something.” She reached into her pocket and produced a tiny parcel wrapped in tissue paper.
    Not here. Not while we’re being watched.
    He shook away the illogical thought. “Lovely. Can it wait till we get home?”
    “Fucking hell, Nicholas,” said Suzette, cranky. “I don’t want Mum to see, okay?”
    “Why not?”
    “Christ! Because she doesn’t understand that kind of stuff! Jeez.”
    Nicholas turned his back to the dark-eyed shop and removed the ribbon, unstuck the tape. Inside was a necklace. It was made of wooden beads and sported a polished brownish-white stone set in silver.
    “The stone is sardonyx,” explained Suzette. “You said you had some headaches, so …”
    “They stopped.”
    “Yeah. ‘Thank you’ works, too. The wood is elder.”
    Nicholas turned to face the streetlight. The stone was an inch across and cut in a square crystal, milky clear with tigerish bands of blood red. The beads were a dark timber, roughly spherical but each showing dozens of facets where they’d been cut by hand with a sharp knife. A woven silver cord held them together. It was, he had to admit, a piece both pretty and oddly masculine.
    “Thank you,” he said.
    Suzette didn’t answer. She was staring at the front door to Plow & Vine Health Foods. She leaned closer and