by David Hair
The young Alice-alike tilted her head, staring. ‘This was our home,’ she said. ‘We want it back.’ Her words were taken up by all those about them: the nurses, the soldiers, the stablehands and gardeners. ‘We want it back.’
They saw me and stayed with me. They followed me through the rabbit hole. Mat kept his eyes on William Larnach. ‘Mister Bryce is inside your house, sir?’
The younger man broke in, brows knitted in anger. ‘That he is.’ He looked like he’d like to spit, but was too much the gentleman. ‘He’s locked us out.’
‘We were all drawn here again after we died,’ Larnach told him. ‘We found a new peace,’ he added dourly, glancing at the young man and woman beside him, as if there were some matter between them that had taken a lot of forgiveness. ‘But Bryce’s men came and took it. We have all died twice now; we are the ghosts of ghosts. We cannot move on, nor can we stay in the place that is ours.’
Mat blinked, took it in. More people left in Bryce’s wake. These people were like those of Parihaka, linked to another cycle of sorrow that Bryce perpetuated. Perhaps I can help them all. ‘I need to get inside without being seen or heard.’
The circle of people looked at him and at each other, murmuring like wind through leaves. Then the young girl stepped forward, looking up at Larnach. ‘Daddy, I know a secret way,’ she said with a pleased smile. ‘I used to creep out on summer evenings.’
‘Did you just, my dove?’ Larnach said, the native coldness in his voice softening when he spoke to his daughter. ‘Did you indeed?’
‘Will you show me?’ Mat asked her.
The girl looked from Mat to her father. ‘Please, Daddy, may I? They won’t see us.’ She giggled cheekily. ‘You never did.’
Larnach grunted, love for his daughter conquering the annoyance that flashed across his face. ‘Of course, my sweet.’
The girl stepped forward and took Mat’s hand — her touch was ephemeral, barely felt — but she pulled him along with her into the gloom, as the other ghosts faded from view. She took him right around the house, and as they walked the skies changed and the light too, and suddenly he knew that wherever he had been, he was now back in present-time Aotearoa. Bryce’s guards were everywhere, stamping through the snow with their guns and heavy coats.
The girl touched his arm and pointed. ‘See, there?’ she breathed in his ear. ‘There’s a tree that overhangs the ballroom roof, where you can climb up and then creep along the roof to the drawing room window and around to the lower roof at the rear. The window to the bedroom never closes properly.’
‘Where will Bryce be?’
She shrugged, pressed a finger to her lips, and began to fade from sight.
‘Wait, what’s your name?’
‘I’m Kate.’ Her teeth were the last thing to vanish, as if she were the Cheshire Cat.
Alone again, he glanced left and right, then took a deep breath and began to move while his energy remained. He found a dark place in the shadows to climb onto the roof, then slithered along the roof line silently, while the guards below marched to and fro obliviously. From there it was far from easy, with ice making the way treacherous, but he had skills ordinary people didn’t have: he’d recovered just enough energy to call heat to his fingers and the soles of his shoes, melting the ice from wherever he had to grip. The window was indeed partly open, stiff but movable, a heavy sash window that slid on well-made grooves. Within a few seconds, he was inside the castle, the window closed behind him.
He drew the pistol from within his jacket, primed and cocked it, then slipped out of the tiny child’s bedroom. He found himself on an upstairs landing, above stairs that descended in an anticlockwise spiral into the house. Minimal lighting illuminated wooden walls, old paintings and faded Eastern carpets. A wall clock ticktocked loudly through the otherwise silent house. No, not quite silent: he heard the sound of music wafting up from below, scratchy and archaic, something old and forgotten being played on a gramophone. He followed the music down the stairs in the dark. On the ground floor he found the source of the sound — a closed door with light dimly gleaming from behind it. He tried the handle, his every sense alert.
The door was unlocked. It opened onto a short passage, lit only by a square of flickering light from a doorway a few feet ahead and to the left. The same room that had been visibly illuminated from outside. He crept to the edge of that patch of light and inhaled softly, poised to move, a thin stasis shield wrapped about him in case he was, even now, in the sights of some marksman.
From inside the room came a scratching sound — a pen on paper, faintly audible beneath the music. Some long-dead singer crooned a lament to love lost, the soundtrack to a Victorian romance. When it ended a man sighed from somewhere inside, and the scratching stopped.
‘Who’s there?’ John Bryce called.
Mat took a deep breath, raised the pistol and opened the door.
The room was a drawing room or some such, wide and long. A piano sat in one corner, a gramophone perched atop it. There were stag- and pig-head trophies on the walls, between the long heavy curtains. Light came from small lamps on the walls and a central chandelier. Bryce was seated at a big desk at the far end of the room, which faced the door Mat had used to enter. It was the only door. The former Native Minister was seated and had been writing, but now he held a gun. He didn’t seem surprised. ‘You again. I swear, boy, you are the devil incarnate.’
Mat barely heard him. There was a fireplace, and in it a piece of parchment lay burning. He stared at it, then darted forward, tried to wrench it out. It fell to ashes in his fingers. ‘The Treaty … You bastard.’
They stared at each other over the barrels of their guns, their stasis shields flickering, distorting vision subtly. ‘Yes, boy. I’ve burned your precious Treaty. Misbegotten document that it was.’ The former Native Minister looked broken, a cracked eggshell of a man, empty and brittle. His eyes were downcast and circled in darkness. Haunted. But there was a glimmer of defiance in his manner as he glowered back. ‘So, you’ve come to bring me to justice, have you?’ he asked bitterly.
Justice? I suppose. Mat swallowed and found his voice. ‘If you surrender, I’ll take you back to Dunedin for trial.’
Bryce shook his head. ‘That won’t happen, boy,’ he replied brusquely. He bunched a fist. ‘I’ve been too high to fall so low. They won’t put me on trial. I’ll stay the course.’ He lifted his chin proudly.
Mat tightened his grip on the pistol and readied himself. Twenty feet — one shot to block, and then he’d be on him. He slid the patu out, into his left hand.
‘How do you like my castle?’ Bryce asked him.
‘You stole it, like you stole everything else.’ He took an experimental step forward, to see if Bryce reacted with violence. The tension in the air bit deeper than the cold.
‘Will Larnach built it,’ Bryce replied. ‘He called it “The Camp”. Thought he could be happy here, with his pretty third wife, so much younger than he. But then the banks collapsed and with them his fortune. Then he found out that his young wife was having an affair with his son. The scandal and shame were too much. He shot himself in the Parliament Buildings in Wellington.’ He glanced about him. ‘I see him, some nights. He haunts this place. They all do.’ There was a shudder in his voice.
‘They’re outside right now.’
‘And they can stay there,’ Bryce sneered. ‘Remember when we met before in Waikaremoana, boy? I told you that I was the insane ghost of a sane man?’
Mat nodded, measuring the distances, readying himself for action.
‘You have to understand how it was for us, back then. The Maori Wars were fresh memories. At that time, there were more British troops stationed in New Zealand than in any other country, even India. We were frightened. The Maori had been defeated, but never totally. More and more settlers were flooding in, demanding land. Land was the lifeblood of the colony. Any backing down would be a show of weakness our government could not afford. And the passive resistan
ce of Parihaka was in its way worse: if they had fought openly, the settlers would have felt threatened and rallied to our cause. But Te Whiti’s passive resistance made our actions look like tyranny.’
‘It was tyranny. I’ve got no sympathy for you,’ Mat said. ‘You were the government’s fist.’
‘I was,’ Bryce agreed. ‘Hall and the others made the decisions; I carried them out, and carried the blame for them too, in posterity.’
Mat stabbed a finger at Bryce. ‘Don’t you try and escape the blame for what you did.’ He stepped forward another couple of paces, on the balls of his feet, quivering with suppressed tension, ready to act. He was almost beneath the chandelier.
‘It was the age of colonialism, boy. Do you think the French or the Americans or any of the rest acted any differently? They were harder on their colonies. Did anyone die at Parihaka?’
‘Not that day. But for years afterwards. Families were split apart, lives ruined. And that’s not even counting what you’ve been doing here in Aotearoa ever since.’
Bryce sighed and cocked his gun. ‘You don’t understand what it was like, boy. I woke from death with a new power that came as easily as breathing: I could kill with a word. You have no idea what it is like to wield such a power. From a hated and shunned man, I became a figure of fear.’
‘You allied yourself with Puarata.’
Bryce shrugged. ‘A new life and new circumstances dictated new rules. Only Puarata could withstand my death-wish. He needed someone to be his hand in the south, and my connections and my new skills made me the logical choice. We both benefited from the alliance. I was loyal, when many of his cabal were not.’ Bryce stuck out his chin. ‘I’ve always been loyal to my masters. I have done wrong, Master Douglas, but in life I was not an altogether evil man. Death changed me.’
Mat eyed Bryce’s gun. He was going to have to risk a bullet, and there was the worry that Bryce knew some way to defeat a stasis shield. He waited watchfully.
‘When I heard your words this afternoon,’ Bryce said, ‘I knew that the end was coming. I’d felt it coming for years. Each new year, men I knew pass onwards into the night, and I am left with fewer and fewer who think as I do. The liberals grow in number, year by year,’ he noted bitterly. ‘That is why your words resonated with the crowd, and mine did not. When your friend overcame my spell, my power was broken.’ Bryce lifted the gun. ‘The time has come to leave this place and find a new path. Had you waited until tomorrow, I would have been gone.’
‘You’re not going anywhere, Bryce.’
‘We’ll see,’ Bryce snarled, and made a brutal hand gesture towards the ceiling above Mat’s head.
Something cracked. Mat knew instinctively what it was and threw himself sideways as the chandelier fell. He rolled clear a split second before the mass of glass and metal crashed down, breaking floorboards and pulling the carpet with it. Dust billowed and wood splinters flew. A few were caught in his stasis shield, which Mat held before him even as he rolled sideways.
Another spell crackled from Bryce’s mouth and the stasis shields between them vanished. They lifted their guns simultaneously and fired as the former minister rose to his feet, his face contorted in frustrated fury.
Bryce’s shot punched through Mat’s jacket, gouged a furrow in the skin of his left side, a bare few inches from his heart, and imbedded itself in the wall behind. Mat clutched at his side and looked up, momentarily helpless.
Bryce stood swaying, his left hand clawing at the air. Then his smoking pistol dropped from nerveless fingers. A bloody hole in his forehead bloomed as he swayed, then slumped back into his chair. His head pitched forward to strike the desk. Blood began to pump across his papers.
Mat looked away, fighting an urge to be sick. But he made himself look again, so he would not forget this. He went to the desk and tugged the bloodied parchment from beneath Bryce’s head. It seemed to be some sort of confession, addressed to the people of New Zealand. An admission of guilt. A request for understanding, but not forgiveness. Mat pocketed it. Cargill can have it, if he wants.
His legs abruptly felt weak, and he went and sat in an armchair, staring at Bryce’s corpse. The wound in his side burned and he could feel blood pouring into the fabric he pressed to his ribs.
If this is the afterlife, what comes after?
No-one came. Throughout the house, silence reigned. But from outside, Mat could hear distant shouts of fear, and more than one frightened cry from the guards. Then silence, a watchful waiting silence, descended again. When he pulled open the drapes over a window, he saw Larnach and his family outside. Waiting to come back in. Their boots now left prints in the snow, and their breath steamed in the frigid air.
He left the drawing room and went into the main body of the house again. He walked through old rooms filled with quaint antique pieces of china, and walls with oil paintings of hunts and foreign places. His breath frosted in the cool stillness. At the front was a gallery with beautiful timber flooring and thick glass panes overlooking the front lawn. Below, on the snow-covered grass, the Larnach family waited. Larnach held his young daughter’s hand as she waved shyly up at Mat. The two sisters walked in Larnach’s wake towards the steps, the younger couple holding back, looking at each other warily. Then William Larnach looked up at him with diamond-eyes, and led them between the two stone lions and up the steps.
Mat went to the front door and opened it. The newcomers flowed up the steps and into the house, like air inhaled into empty lungs. All about him, lights came on, and the shadows were washed away by golden light. From the drawing room the piano tinkled into life. Mat wondered, if he went back there, would Bryce’s body even be there, and the chandelier fallen? Or would the room be restored, to just how it had been?
Larnach appeared at his shoulder. ‘Thank you, lad. You have done what we could not. We will always be grateful.’ He eyed Mat’s torn side. ‘Let me have someone see to your wound.’
‘It’s nothing, really,’ Mat said, though the near miss was only now making him tremble. Hell, that was close … ‘I should go.’
‘Not in this weather, lad. You need rest and hot food. Stay.’
Mat knew he was intruding, that the man and his fractured family really just wanted to be alone. He remembered what Bryce had told him about Larnach and his family, and his death. But he was feeling increasingly dizzy with some kind of post-shock lethargy. ‘I … perhaps for a while.’
‘We are grateful. You’ve given us back a chance to find happiness, when in life we never could.’
‘I hope you can, sir,’ Mat replied.
‘Aye, perhaps we will. But you know, son, there is no pain like that a family brings.’
Mat thought of his own parents and their painful ongoing battle with separation. He felt he knew what Larnach meant.
The man inclined his head and extended a hand. ‘We settlers were not gentle to your people when we came. Reparations are never enough. Sometimes only time heals.’ This last thought seemed addressed as much to himself as to Mat.
Little Kate appeared at Larnach’s side and grinned up at Mat. ‘Can he stay, Daddy?’ she asked eagerly. ‘Please. It’s been so long since someone nice was here.’ She seized Mat’s hand, her grip now warm and solid, not the cold barely-there thing he’d held earlier. ‘Please stay.’
William Larnach chuckled. ‘Who can refuse her, hmm?’
Mat smiled. ‘Who indeed?’
Epilogue
How do you like your coffee?’ Mat asked Cassandra, as he took the orders.
‘Strong and black,’ she giggled, stroking Riki’s shoulder. ‘Like my man.’
Mat rolled his eyes and looked at Evie. ‘Dare I ask?’
‘Um, with a bit of milk.’
Cassandra smirked. ‘Like her man.’ Evie punched her on the arm. ‘Hey! Peace!’ Cass made an ‘I surrender’ gesture. ‘Come on, Mat is kinda milky for a Maori.’
They were in a café overlooking the Octagon, full of everyday people with everyday concer
ns. Friends laughed and children shrilled, and the staff weaved among them with trays of drinks and food. A pair of office workers was huddled over notepads discussing recruitment policy amidst the cacophony. Just another Wednesday morning.
Mat had slept in one of the guest bedrooms at Larnach Castle, returning to modern Dunedin the next morning. Riki and Cass had been mildly furious with him for ditching them so abruptly and leaving them stranded in Aotearoa. But Dunedin-Aotearoa was in a celebratory mood from the events earlier, and the news Mat brought of Bryce’s demise had really set things off. Cargill and the town councillors had requisitioned barrels of beer, and the women and children had come out too, to dance jigs and reels in the Octagon to the sound of the pipe and the drums. Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead. Riki, Cassandra and Mat joined the celebrations, dancing and drinking and laughing at each other’s inability to do the local dances. Mat was in a muted mood after what he’d seen, and his bandaged ribcage throbbed, but his spirits lifted to see the celebrations.
As soon as he’d returned from Aotearoa, Mat had made a couple of phone calls. The first was to home, but he’d got no reply. Nor had his dad answered his cellphone. A little worried, Mat had called his mother’s house in Taupo.
‘Hello?’ said a male voice.
Mat blinked. ‘Dad?’
‘Mat?’ Tama Douglas’s voice rose. ‘Mat? Are you alright?’
‘Uh, yeah.’ Mat swallowed a sudden lump in his throat as he leapt to about a dozen conclusions at once. ‘What’re you doing at Mum’s place?’
‘Waiting to hear from you,’ Tama growled, though the relief in his voice was palpable. ‘Keeping Colleen company. Where the hell are you? You promised to call!’
‘Uh, yeah … sorry, but we were mostly … you know, on the other side.’
‘Hmm,’ Tama rumbled. ‘We’ve been worried, boy.’