Aroha barked a short, mirthless laugh. “Oh, that’s the easy part. We’ll find her in the place where we know not to go.”
Aroha cleared a space for her in a spare bedroom. “Sleep, you’re going to need it,” she commanded, but that proved impossible. Renee lay awake through the night torturing herself, her mind filled with thoughts of what might be happening to Marika. Dawn saw her jittery with nerves and sleeplessness. Aroha, on the other hand, seemed unnaturally calm, cooking breakfast with little conversation and pushing a plate laden with bacon, fried eggs, baked beans and butter-soaked toast in front of Renee. She supervised Renee while she ate as if she were a child, ensuring she cleaned her plate, then left her to do god-knows-what while Renee paced and fidgeted and stared out the lounge window at the sea.
Aroha returned close to dusk in a battered ute, the bed of which was laden with assorted dive gear. “I had to ask around and borrow some extra stuff,” she explained. “I don’t normally go out on night dives.”
They drove a short distance to a large storage shed where Aroha’s own dive equipment was kept. Under Aroha’s instruction, Renee loaded up wetsuits, tanks, fins and the like, while Aroha attached a small dinghy with an outboard motor to the ute’s towbar. They drove in the direction Renee had come from the night before, only to veer off and follow a path alongside the trees until they reached the far end of the bush. A short, steep descent took them straight onto a large stretch of beach.
“You guys were just around there,” Aroha pointed to the left.
They suited up in silence. The spare wetsuit belonged to Aroha’s younger brother, and was a touch too big for Renee, but the belt adjusted snugly enough. With weights, torch, dive knife and spear gun attached, it felt heavier than she was accustomed to. They launched the dinghy and set off diagonally from the beach, angling towards the little bay where Marika was last seen, the boat’s motor intrusively loud. After several minutes, Aroha shut it off.
“Best not advertise that we’re coming,” she whispered as she took up a set of oars.
Even the soft splash of the oars seemed too noisy for Renee. After perhaps half an hour, Aroha stopped and dropped an anchor.
“Just stick close behind me,” she instructed. Then she was tipping backwards out of the dinghy. Renee did as she was told and followed hot on her heels.
Under normal circumstances, Renee would feel at home and at ease underwater; her love of diving was a partial influence on her decision to study marine biology. Tonight, though, the weight of the water made her claustrophobic, the darkness beyond her torch beam was ominous, and the muted sound of her own breath was panic-inducing. To calm her racing nerves she narrowed her focus, concentrating only on keeping Aroha’s fins an arm’s distance from her mask.
They followed a steady downward trajectory until they swam parallel to and a few metres above the seabed. Even to her experienced eye, the submarine terrain looked largely featureless, and she wondered what criteria Aroha was navigating by. Eventually Aroha stopped and turned to face her. She pointed down at what looked like a slab of rock flush with the sand, and gestured to Renee to follow her. Puzzled, Renee did so. As they drew closer, she saw through the optical illusion; there was a gap between the rock and the sea bottom, just high enough to admit the pair. They slowed their pace as they entered the gap and travelled along a narrow, rocky tunnel. Renee’s anxiety mounted with every second.
The roof of the tunnel abruptly gave way to open water, and they finned up to find themselves in a large, air-filled cavern, the walls of which were daubed in an unidentifiable phosphorescence that gave off a dim, almost welcoming glow. They hauled themselves out of the water and shrugged off their tanks, masks, regulators and fins.
“God, it stinks in here!” Aroha held her hand over her mouth and nose and spoke in a whisper, yet her voice echoed off the walls. Renee shushed her, and pointed at the closer of two corridors that led from the cavern; it was as good a place as any to begin their search.
They tiptoed along the passageway, briefly inspecting the half dozen large rooms that opened off it. At a guess, Renee would have called them living quarters, furnished as they were with objects made of unrecognisable substances and not configured for human bodies. Thankfully, the rooms were devoid of life.
They retraced their steps and moved to the entrance of the second corridor. The stench was even stronger here, and Renee was almost overwhelmed by the instinct to turn tail and swim for her life away from the uncanny place, but a faint, distinctly human and distinctly feminine whimper overrode that impulse. She pushed past Aroha and ran down the corridor, her only conscious thought to follow the sound.
She found Marika at the end of the passageway in a cavern larger than the others. Her wife lay curled up on her side on top of a great stone slab positioned in the centre of the room. Except for the slab (there was something vaguely altar-like about it, which would make Marika the offering, a thought that Renee shunned from her mind the moment it arose), the room was empty. Here, the phosphorescent walls were overlaid with decoration, alien artworks that were at once exquisite and repellent. She didn’t dare examine them too closely; just glimpsing them out of the corner of her eye made her head swim and her gorge rise.
Gingerly, as if she might disintegrate at any moment, Renee ran her hands over Marika’s body. Her face was partially obscured by her hair, and she made no move to register Renee’s presence, only continued her soft, plaintive whimpering. Her skin was slick with some clear, viscous substance. Renee sniffed at her fingers and recoiled, gagging; it reeked of the Ponaturi.
Aroha had caught up with her, and stood warily at the entrance to the cavern. “Is she okay?”
“She’s alive,” Renee replied. “No bleeding or broken bones that I can tell. But no, she’s far from okay.” She manoeuvred Marika to a sitting position, then onto her feet. When prompted, Marika moved willingly enough, but seemed completely without volition. Her eyes were wide and unfocused. It was if her mind and spirit had been drained from her, leaving only a beautiful shell.
They half-steered, half-carried Marika down the corridor, and were mere metres from the exit, when three Ponaturi stepped from another room to block their path. The two groups stared at each other for a couple of tense seconds, neither party expecting company. Then the Ponaturi charged.
Aroha, dive knife in hand and face twisted in fury, ran to meet them. All four tumbled back into the room from which the fish men had come.
Renee didn’t wait to see the outcome. She dragged Marika past the melee, hauled on her dive gear faster than she would have thought possible, and jumped into the water with Marika in her arms, the cries of battle instantly muted as the brine closed over their heads. For one heart-stopping moment she thought that Marika’s mind might be too damaged for her to know to hold her breath underwater, but that much of an instinct at least remained. Renee held her close and swam slowly, buddy-breathing all the way out through the underwater tunnel and back to the surface.
Mercifully, the dinghy had held on its anchor. Towing Marika’s limp form through the water was one thing, getting her into the boat without capsizing was another much more difficult undertaking, and all the while Renee remained hyper-alert for signs of pursuit. After much dragging and cajoling, however, she had Marika stowed in a foetal ball in the bottom of the dinghy. With no further need for stealth, she powered the boat full throttle back to shore.
She did not speak of the events of that night. At first she felt guilty for abandoning Aroha, but soon she convinced herself that there had been no other way; Aroha knew better than she had what they were in for, had even warned her of the danger, and if she’d stopped to help, it would have only resulted in three women held captive in the Ponaturi’s lair. Besides (the dark thought lurked), the way Marika had been flirting with Aroha, Renee felt ready to hand her over to the Ponaturi anyway.
For weeks afterwards she anticipated a knock on
the door, a visit from authorities: we’re investigating the disappearance of this woman, what can you tell us about that? But the visit never eventuated, and why would it? Most likely, someone in the family found the dinghy she’d abandoned on the beach, noticed the missing dive gear, and put some of the pieces of the puzzle together. They would have closed ranks and kept quiet.
They know. They all know…
Marika never emerged from her near-catatonic state, not even when she went into labour nine months later, so her baby boy was delivered by caesarean. Casual acquaintances assumed that Renee was the biological mother with the child conceived through fertility treatments, or that he was adopted, and that Marika’s mysterious mind wipe was a tragic coincidence. Those closer, if they suspected the truth, did not pry.
The boy—Renee named him Matiu, the irony of which she did not discover until months later—was robustly healthy from birth, and hit all the right developmental milestones slightly ahead of schedule. Still, Renee could not help but wonder what might be developing in his half-alien mind. She hired a nanny to care for both mother and son while she worked, but none of them ever stayed for more than a month or two, and none could meet her eyes when they tendered their resignation. Perhaps it was the nauseating odour of rotting fish that clung to everything in the apartment no matter how thoroughly it was cleaned or what manner of perfumes were used to disguise it. Or perhaps it was Matiu’s odd appearance that drove them away. He had none of his mother’s good looks; his head was abnormally narrow, his eyes bulged unnaturally, his nose was so flat as to be almost non-existent, and his skin was peculiarly rough for such a young infant..
His strange looks certainly made her think equally strange and decidedly un-maternal thoughts. The thoughts were most intense when she was bathing him (and even bath time was weird, as he would only tolerate cold water with a full cup of salt added). With his spindly limbs giving off that smell, his unnerving, bug-eyed gaze fixed on hers, and with his mother sitting slack-jawed and staring at nothing, she often had the urge to put the pair of them in the car, drive them to the coast, and abandon them to the care of the creatures who had made them so.
Other times, the impulse was simpler, clearer, and more primal: maybe I should push his head under the water and hold him there. Just to see what will happen.
MEMORIES TO ASHES
Paul Mannering
I was three months shy of my sixteenth birthday on the night of 2nd April 1920, when the sky turned the colour of a deep bruise.
Late that afternoon the warm wind felt thick against my skin as I closed the front gate and walked to the house. Looking southward down the coast, into the teeth of the coming storm, I felt a chill sense of awe. Grey sheets of rain hung between the mountainous clouds and the slate dark sea. Now, more than ever, the air felt alive and the fading light pulsed with a strange energy. I inhaled and felt my skin tingle. With my hair blowing in all directions I went inside, leaving the rising storm howling like a dog.
“Half,” Mother called from the kitchen. “Get the children bathed before tea.”
Though I was christened Hannah, my family calls me Half, perhaps because I am the fifth child of ten and the eldest to survive past infancy. I came into this world the same way as my brothers and sisters, both living and dead, each of us born squalling and bloody on the bare wood of our kitchen table.
Home was a narrow strip of land between the sea and the mountains on the coast, north of the fishing village of Kaikoura. The mountains might one day be tamed for farmland, but not in my father’s time. He survived by fishing in a small boat with my brothers, where they dragged nets and hauled lines. They fished only a hundred yards from shore, where the ocean turned black because the mountains did not end at the beach. The rocky peaks tumbled down to the true floor of the world miles below, and we lived on a ledge like limpets clinging in a tidal pool.
In summer, we swam the surface of the abyss; I remember feeling the beach drop away under my feet and the swirling cold tendrils of dark water twisting up from the ocean depths. We had childhood’s innocence and our ignorance gave us courage.
I shared a room with my younger sister, Ruth, and our youngest brother, James. The older boys, Luke and Peter, had the other room. Aged eleven and thirteen they were decreed old enough to work with father on his fishing boat, or any other paid labour he could find in the Kaikoura district. The natural differences between boys and girls were no mystery to children growing up on a farm, yet I was glad to be away from the boys at night, to have a place where I could brush my hair, read and re-read the books I had managed to gather, all while dreaming the fanciful reveries of a young lady. This was my singular escape from the daily cycle of chores and housekeeping. As a girl of six, Ruth talked incessantly about nothing of consequence. James, at four, kept silent for the most part. He saved his voice for strident demands against his older brothers to wait for him to catch up when scrambling after them on their treks along the shore. As always, I brushed my hair and drifted in my reveries until Mother came in to remind me to go to bed.
The rain started close to midnight, when James was asleep and Ruth had crawled into my bed whimpering at the roar of the wind. I stroked her hair and shushed her gently until, in this warm and safe embrace, little Ruth slept like the freshly dead; warm and still. I lay in the still, close dark, feeling the house creak and groan under the tempest’s onslaught.
In darkness memory’s whispers come unbidden and insistent. Like Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ fabulous tale, I am visited by ghosts in the night. Mine are the shades of regret and shame and they bring no visions of the future, just an endless parade of historical guilt. They arrive astride the sharp-hoofed steeds of headaches, with which I am plagued without warning or mercy. I lie awake, the accused in a court of my own curation, where I sit in judgement and beg for execution. I know there are those with worse stories than mine, who suffer greater nightmares of despair, their minds and bodies warped by torment and abuse. I would pray for them, if I believed in a merciful God.
On other nights, my defence against the torment of night’s solitude was to work hard during the day, driving myself to exhaustion so that sleep would come as inexorably as dawn. That night, long ago, under the cowl of the storm, the wind howling in discordant harmony reflected my own inner turmoil, and the pounding of pain’s nails in my temples.
When James screamed, I sat up, my heart pounding and eyes wide, while Ruth merely whined and burrowed deeper into the warm mattress. James sat up with hair plastered across his face, his eyes glowing white in the darkness.
“Jamie?” I whispered.
My little brother stared at the opposite wall. I waited for him to fall back into sleep.
“Run…” The voice that rattled from Jamie’s throat sounded rough and foreign.
“Jamie?” I swallowed and tried to breathe.
“Donovan! For God’s sake run!” James screamed so loud that Ruth half-woke with a wail. From their bedroom I heard father curse and mother speak quickly to soothe him.
I clambered over Ruth as I rushed to James’ cot.
“Jamie, wake up!”
Mother came hurrying into the room as I shook her youngest child.
“Half, what in God’s name are you doing? Leave the child be!”
“Jamie’s having a nightmare, mother.”
“Jamie, love,” Mother settled on the edge of the cot and cradled James against her breast. She pressed a dry hand against his forehead and tsked at the signs of fever.
“It is cast adrift…” Jamie whispered in a voice closer to his own. “It will rise again…and the stars will fall.”
“Hush now Jamie.” Mother rocked him gently until he subsided into quiet slumber again.
I didn’t sleep again that night and was slow to rise at dawn. Now the storm had passed, leaving only grey, cold rain. Ruth slid out of my bed, her cotton nightdress—a hand-me-down that I wo
re when I was her age—sweeping the floor as she bustled to the distant bathroom.
“I had a bad dream.” James mumbled from his cot.
“Did you now?” I spoke gently as it seemed clear that Jamie had only limited memory of his outburst.
“There was a monster and it killed everyone,” Jamie intoned. I could see the memory of the nightmare fading in the morning light. It was the way of dreams; so vivid and real in the mind’s eye at night, but slipping away like mist come dawn.
“Just a dream, Jamie,” I reminded him.
“Nyah,” he said and slipped out of bed to follow his sister to queue for the lavatory.
My first chore was to help mother make breakfast for the family. Growing boys ate their weight in porridge every morning, and would be begging for lunch before noon. After breakfast, father and his two young men departed with the horse and buggy for a farm further up the coast, where a day’s paid labour was waiting for those with the strength for it. The atmosphere of the house was, as always, lighter once they had departed.
I set to cleaning and then mother tasked me with minding the children, which meant going to the beach to gather driftwood for the kitchen stove. The morning after a storm there are always new things to see and collect among the sea smoothed stones.
I dragged the wood-sled—easy enough when it was empty, a Herculean task when it was loaded with plunder—across the dirt track that, in later years, would be a tarsealed highway, and climbed the tussock-topped dunes. Our beach was a ridge of smooth stones, some as small as marbles, others as big as a fist. In the stories, beaches always had golden sand, but we had much younger earth. Close to shore we started picking up wood; storm-tossed branches, bleached and mummified by salt water. They would dry in the lean-to against the house and the larger pieces would be broken by father’s axe. The kitchen stove had an endless appetite and I imagined it was a dragon, sleeping under the mountain with only its mouth showing and our hearth built around it.
Cthulhu Land of the Long White Cloud AU Page 15