Little Gods

by Jenny Ackland

  ‘We needed that.’ Olive held her hand out for the lantern and Sebastian handed it to her. ‘Well, I guess we can make one from paper. Thistle said you can do it that way. For the moving thing, we’ll have to use a rock or something.’

  They went to get the food supplies. They had a tin of tomatoes, some baked beans and Heinz Beef Stockpot soup. They had a loaf of bread but nothing to go on it and some tomato sauce. Peter had a drink cooler with cordial inside and twenty-four plastic cups.

  ‘Are we having a party or something?’ said Olive. ‘Look how many cups Pete bought!’ She showed the others and Peter flushed.

  ‘I just bought them all,’ he said. ‘What’s the big deal?’

  ‘It’s “brought” you two.’ Sebastian was shaking his head.

  ‘Who cares?’ said Olive.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Archie.

  Peter had some marshmallows so they set off looking for the best toasting sticks. Then it took a long time to get the fire going because there wasn’t much paper. They found one old newspaper behind the door of the hut, tucked into a crossbeam, but it wasn’t enough. Olive suggested they burn the magazines from earlier.

  ‘I’ll get them,’ she said, standing up.

  ‘No way,’ said Archie. ‘You don’t know how hard it is to find them.’

  ‘I don’t know why you even like them—they’re so off.’

  Archie said that was where she was wrong. They were interesting. Scientific.

  ‘Who even knew it was like that?’ he said. ‘Did you?’ He was looking at Peter and Sebastian.

  Sebastian got up and went into the hut. Peter just sat there, staring at the unburning fire.

  ‘It’s like a…like a—not a hole, but a cut?’

  Olive threw her stick at her cousin and it struck him on the shoulder.

  ‘Hey, you almost got me in the eye.’ He started hitting her foot with his, then she showed them how to inhale the smoke from matches. After that it was time to open the tins, but no one had a can opener and they didn’t have a saucepan anyway, so they spread sauce on slices of bread with their fingers because they’d forgotten a knife as well. They drank cordial and discussed how scary it might get later, how quiet. Someone asked what would happen if a killer came, or an escaped prisoner wanting some food.

  ‘We’d stop him,’ said Peter.

  ‘What would happen if a raper came?’ Archie said. They all looked at Olive.

  She held her marshmallow stick and scratched her thumbnail along a bump on the surface.

  ‘No one would hurt a girl like that,’ she said.

  They agreed.

  They made bets about who would get the most scared, and what they would do when they got the most scared. Olive spent a long time doing facial expressions of how she thought everyone would show their fear. They all laughed except Sebastian.

  The main road was about a football oval’s distance away and no cars had passed by since they’d been there. At eleven o’clock they had their sleeping bags out and were lying on their lilos in front of the fire. Olive was worried the others would want to go to sleep before it was time to do the séance so she kept prodding everyone with her marshmallow stick.

  ‘I think we need more wood,’ she said. ‘Let’s go look. Nobody touch my stick.’

  Olive held the torch as she and Peter walked away from the fire, to the darkness beyond.

  ‘When you die, what do you think happens?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know, but I don’t want to be buried. I don’t want the worms eating me.’

  ‘I do. I want them to eat me until I’m bones, but also it’s because I want to have a place where people can come and see my grave.’

  ‘You can do that when you’re burned. You can have a wall like my poppa, or a tree that they plant.’

  ‘I want to be inside a tree,’ she said. ‘Standing up, where it’s hollowed out. They can put me in there and eventually I would join and mix with it. They could carve a face into the trunk at the same height as where my real one is.’

  ‘Would you be wrapped in bandages?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m saying maybe. That’s not the most important bit, though. Do you think they could carve my face into the tree?’

  They sat on a log.

  ‘Have you noticed how some people look different at night from how they do in the day?’ Olive asked. ‘Their faces?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘It’s hard to know which one is real when that happens.’

  ‘Maybe both are.’

  They gathered wood and carried it back, dumped it, and went to the trees again but this time ranged a bit further and came to the fence along Soldier’s Paddock. Olive’s torch picked out a tree with a snake looped over a branch, its head crushed open.

  ‘Over there,’ she said. ‘Another one.’ The torch picked out a second shape threaded in a tree. ‘Look.’ Dark forms with smooth folds and pale underbellies. She moved the beam away to the fence of Soldier’s.

  ‘Did they tell you never go in there?’ Olive said to Peter. He nodded. ‘Come on.’ She held one of the fence wires up so he could climb through. They cut across the paddock on the diagonal. Olive kept the torch on the ground and whenever they came to a shadowed patch they skirted it wide, knowing that even going near the edges of the mines could be dangerous.

  ‘We should go back,’ said Peter. The grain silo was outlined, black and mountainous, against the grey sky.

  As well as digging mines for gold, the soldier had made a bunker, cutting it into a small rise of land and creating an almost-horizontal duct that stretched into the ground. There was a door at one end and a stone bulwark at the other.

  ‘Don’t you want to know what it looks like? You’re always talking about the war,’ Olive said.

  ‘I suppose so, but I’m not going inside and I don’t care if you say we are. You can.’

  ‘Imagine if we looked in and saw a skeleton,’ Olive said. ‘A skeleton holding a gun.’ She leaned against the door. ‘Or a skeleton with a knife sticking out of its head!’ She moved the torch across a tattered flag that was affixed to a tree stump. It was the marker of the bunker’s entrance. The trunk of the tree was splashed with paint, the slogans and end words of a man alone in the bush. Town talk was that he’d been planning for the next war when he died and according to Peter’s father he had created ‘quite the system’, which was what Peter told Olive now.

  ‘He put things in there too. Supplies, my dad said. They had to leave everything because it was too dangerous to try and get it out because of the walls. My dad said some are rock but some are more sandy stuff? So they couldn’t be sure if someone went in there, you know, that it would be…If someone went in there to get out the things, that it would be safe. That it wouldn’t. It might collapse on them, and…and…’

  ‘Bury them alive.’ Her voice was cold and glittery.

  ‘Yeah,’ Peter breathed.

  ‘But there might be a can opener in there, we should check.’

  ‘I’m not going in—I’m serious, Ol.’

  ‘You always say that.’ Olive moved her hand to the doorhandle. ‘You know who should go in there? Luke Sands. That’s who should go in.’ She pulled and the door opened. The torch moved into the entrance and around it, on the small hillock, across the grass growing there. The old soldier must have been short, Peter said from behind, and she agreed. A tall man would have to bend over to go inside. She saw how the first part of the tunnel angled downwards so you would be going under the ground. After about twenty metres you were all the way under and that’s where the torch beam cut out. She squatted in front of the opening.

  ‘I wonder what it’s like in there. Do you think there are bats? Maybe someone lives in there—who would ever know? It looks like exactly the place a raper would go. Or there could be foxes. It could actually be a den.’

  ‘What? I can’t hear you.’

  She straightened and walked back to him.

  ‘Ghosts. Maybe the ghost of the
soldier.’

  ‘I’m going back to the others,’ Peter said and started walking to the fence. Olive followed. Back at the fire they put more wood on and sat and watched as it burned. Olive said they should start the séance. She had her notebook with her and she ripped out some pages from the back and tore them into smaller pieces of paper. On each she wrote one letter of the alphabet and the digits 0–9. She wrote YES, NO and GOODBYE on others.

  ‘What can we use for the pointer? A rock’s too heavy.’

  ‘Too heavy to push, you mean,’ said Sebastian.

  ‘Nobody’s allowed to push, everybody has to promise. We can use a plastic cup, they’re see-through. Get the cardboard from the window and bring it here,’ she said to Archie, who was almost asleep. He got up, complaining that he was tired. She sat back on her lilo after placing the letters and numbers and words in their positions on the piece of cardboard. ‘Okay. We’re ready.’

  Peter checked his watch. ‘Almost midnight.’

  ‘I’m really tired,’ Archie said.

  ‘Me too, I don’t think I’ll play.’ Sebastian had his arms around himself.

  ‘You have to, Seb,’ Olive said. ‘We need four people. And it’s not playing. It’s—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just not playing.’

  ‘Who are we going to talk to, though?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Let’s just see who’s there, I guess.’ Olive sat cross-legged and moved the cardboard so that the words faced her.

  ‘In the middle,’ shouted Archie. ‘Like that.’ He moved the board so it was on an angle but Olive reached out and righted it again. ‘Leave it.’ She put her forefinger on the inverted cup. ‘We have to treat it seriously because it’s not a game, so promise.’ She waited for Archie to draw his finger twice across his chest. ‘And the last thing is we always have to say goodbye.’

  ‘Who to?’ Archie said.

  ‘To the spirits, of course, when they come.’

  ‘Real ones?’ Archie’s bottom lip moved behind his top teeth. ‘I thought it was pretend.’

  ‘Of course it’s real. Even if the spirit doesn’t want to say goodbye we have to force it.’

  ‘Force what?’ Archie said.

  Olive pushed the plastic cup across the board to the GOODBYE piece of paper.

  ‘Like that. We make it go there.’

  ‘But you said no pushing.’ Archie pulled his finger away. ‘I thought it was just a game.’

  Olive told him to put his finger back.

  ‘Only pushing at the end, when we want to finish, if the spirit’s not cooperating. Just do it, alright? Okay, we’re going to start.’

  They all placed a single index finger on the plastic cup. Immediately it moved and Archie pulled his hand back.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ Olive said. ‘It’s working. I’ll ask the questions.’

  Archie touched it again. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘It feels weird.’

  ‘Hello. Is anyone there? Hello,’ Olive said.

  They waited but there was no movement.

  ‘Maybe we need candles or something?’ Olive said to Sebastian. The cup moved to NO. ‘That was you—you pushed it.’

  ‘It wasn’t,’ said Sebastian. ‘Who are you? Are you friendly or evil?’ The cup slid across to the YES.

  ‘You’re confusing it,’ said Olive. ‘One question at a time; I’m asking them.’ She started and her words were slow and clear. ‘What is your name?’

  The cup moved quickly across the board. It spelled out S-T-R-E-T-A-R-E-A-S and came to rest in the middle.

  ‘How old are you?’

  The cup stayed still.

  ‘When did you die?’

  The cup didn’t move.

  ‘Maybe it can’t do numbers very well. Maybe it’s still a kid.’

  ‘How did you die?’ The question came from Olive, though it didn’t feel like she had spoken aloud. It came out of her and hung in the air and the words had the colour of silverfish.

  There was a pulse as the cup spun around the board.

  M-M-A-M-A-D-D-A-D-D-M-D-M-D-M.

  Sebastian took his hand away and sat back from the group with his arms folded across his chest.

  ‘Someone’s pushing it,’ Olive said and took her finger off too. ‘I don’t want to do it anymore, it’s boring.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ Sebastian said. He had bags under his eyes that she’d never seen before.

  ‘Well, I pushed it.’ She felt sick. ‘There’s no such thing as spirits or ghosts. I’m going to bed.’ She got up and stood there, not wanting to go by herself. ‘We should all go, it’s late.’

  ‘You can say you’re scared,’ Sebastian said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Archie.

  Olive wheeled around and dropped onto her younger cousin where he sat on his lilo. She twisted his arm, saying, ‘You. Don’t. Get. It. Do. You?’ She clambered off him. ‘I don’t get scared.’

  ‘You’re mean, Ollie. That was my sore arm.’

  She sat down and gazed into the fire. After a while, Peter said it was twelve twenty. Archie was asleep so they woke him up. They put the cardboard back in the window and got into their beds. No one had pillows but no one cared because everything had grown large and still around them and all they wanted to do was go to sleep so that the morning came sooner. Olive said goodnight. She reached over and turned off the lantern. The last thing she did was feel for the matchbox, to make sure she could find it in case she needed it during the night.

  SOMEONE WAS SHAKING her.

  ‘Ol,’ said a voice. ‘Ollie.’ A harsh whisper. What was Archie doing in her room?

  ‘There’s people outside.’

  She struggled to get up and realised she was in a sleeping bag. She reached for the zip and couldn’t find it because it had twisted around underneath her. She wriggled out, making the cot springs move.

  ‘Shhhh, they don’t know we’re here.’ He was at her side, his hand on her arm.

  The two of them stepped over Seb, who was asleep on the floor. At the side of the cardboard was a crack and through it she saw figures moving around, some in front of their hut, others over near the silo ladder. There was a spotlight on top of a car and someone was up there, directing the broad white beam around the area so that it fell in turn on gatherings of people, some in twos, kissing, some in larger groupings, smoking and drinking from bottles. Light flooded the hut in a sweep, cutting in through the badly sealed window.

  Peter started moving in his sleeping bag.

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  She could see forms of people moving in a way that made her think they were being silly, playing around. One of the torchlights swung upwards and across a face.

  ‘Gary Sands,’ she whispered. Peter was beside them now. ‘What time is it?’

  He held up his wrist and the shining green hands showed almost ten past three. Archie’s face was tilted upwards, his eyes locked on hers. She was about to whisper something else when an object flew inwards, punching the cardboard out of the window. They tried to find their torches but no one could. She went over and squatted to see what the thing was. It was a face, with long eyelashes and a tongue sticking out through thinned black lips.

  ‘Come out,’ a voice yelled. A bare arm reached in the window. Olive grabbed the hand with both of hers and dragged the inside of the forearm back and forth across the edges of the broken window. Shouts from the other side but she hung on, pulling at the arm, forcing it down with her weight. She collapsed into a crouch and lifted her feet off the ground.

  ‘Stop, stop,’ the voice shrieked. ‘Jesus.’

  She let go and stood with the others at the back of the hut. Peter had found his torch and shone it through the window. Filling the space was the squinting, rage-filled face of Gary Sands, a halo of light around his head.

  ‘It’s kids,’ he shouted to someone behind him. ‘Come out or I’ll shoot you.’

  ‘You don’t even have a gun,’ said Olive.

 
; ‘Come out, I said.’ Gary stepped back from the window. The door flew inwards as he kicked it open.

  ‘Stay here,’ Olive said to the others and went outside.

  ‘Look, it’s Olive Tree,’ Gary said. He took off his t-shirt and wrapped it around his bloody arm and reached a hand out to Luke, who was standing there. Luke passed his brother a bottle of drink. Gary’s eyes were wide, sclera visible, and his chest was thin and bony. Olive saw his nipples.

  ‘We were here first,’ she said.

  Gary’s expression twisted with something she couldn’t read.

  ‘You’ve got some nerves on ya.’

  ‘I’m going to tell Mr Stonehouse about you throwing the kangaroo head. And the snakes.’

  ‘He can get stuffed. Weakest copper ever, that’s what my dad says.’ He came closer. He lifted his wrapped arm. ‘But I reckon he’d be interested in this. Maybe you’d even go to jail—juvie for sure.’

  ‘Ollie, co-come back,’ Sebastian stuttered from the doorway.

  Everything happened quickly, then. Time accelerating and slowing simultaneously. Luke and Mark Sands moved to block Sebastian and Peter while Gary Sands grabbed Olive’s shoulders and marched her around the side of the hut. Then somehow she had turned and he was walking her backwards towards the pipes, pushing her so that she lost her footing and fell over. She wrenched her head around and scrabbled away from underneath Gary Sands and got up and ran. She reached the big pipe and started to crawl in, got halfway, but he came after her, grabbed her legs and pulled. He slammed onto her and her lip hit a tooth. His breath stank of alcohol and there was a flurry of torches from outside, beams running over each other. She could hear Peter’s voice coming from far away, his voice muffled. She couldn’t move, couldn’t even think about what was happening. Her teeth were clamped shut and to keep quiet meant to stay present in the moment. Something was close and she breathed over his shoulder and her eyes looked in the darkness but saw nothing as the cement pipe encircled the two of them. Gary’s mouth was on her. Was this kissing?

  His nails were scratching her skin so she clenched her limbs, turned her head to the side, and now there was something heavy on her neck and she thought about spitting if she could just manage, but she had no liquid in her mouth, there was nothing there. She managed to wriggle and tried to spit at him and a light spray, maybe even just air, must have reached his face because he released a little and said, ‘What did you just do?’ Then he said a word that she had never heard before and it was hate-filled and violent and it shocked her.