I realised my knees were shaking, and tried to tell myself not to get carried away by the atmosphere.
‘Each symbol shows the strength and weakness of the chosen,’ Lallie said, and her voice sounded eerily older. I was afraid to turn round in case more than her voice had aged.
‘Heed the warnings:
‘Danny, extinguish the dark flame of the past lest it consume you.
‘Nissa, strength without compassion is soulless and cruel. Weakness, too, has its place, for it brings understanding.
‘Seth, see the sorrowing earth. Seek your own vision. Trust it.
‘Indian, only a wound brought into the light can be healed. That which is hidden will in darkness fester.
‘Nathanial, time is a circle, without beginning or end. Seek beyond the shadows of the past to know the truth of the future.’
The bizarre warning sank into me like an echo going on and on forever as I understood that what was happening was real; was not a dream or hypnosis but some kind of magic. I felt a blast of pure joy because if this was real, what else might be real?
Then Lallie spoke again and her voice chilled my blood because she sounded older still; a withered crone whose voice trembled with unspeakable grief.
‘Long ago, terrible wrongs were done in this place: sacrifice and torture and betrayal. These deeds bruised the earth and a cycle of darkness has grown here.’
Her voice trembled and Nissa tightened her grip fiercely, arresting my instinctive movement, forcing me to remain in the circle.
‘At the beginning of the cycle, the darkness calls, drawing like to like until one comes who is empty: a vessel who will gather the darkness to it, and enable the infection to grow and extend like a cancer. The vessel has come, the darkness now gathers.’
She gave a high-pitched moan of distress, but again Nissa’s grip strengthened, forcing me to be still.
‘But the light waits too. Long ago, five gave their lives in this place, that a light would shine secretly, a sentinel in the heart of the shadow calling like to like at need. Here stand five who have chosen to answer the call.
‘Each has brought an ancient symbol to the secret place. Now shall the symbols be forged into a Chain that will enable the five to drive the darkness from the sorrowing earth. Yet once exorcised the dark will seek a new home. Then must the greater Chain be forged and as long as it is not sundered, it will bind the dark until the memory of the Chain is as dust in the wind.’
Her voice changed again and abruptly she sounded very young. ‘But if the Chain is broken, then shall the darkness infect the earth anew, its strength increased a thousandfold.’
She took a deep, shuddering breath.
‘Do each of you swear to keep faith with the others linked here, to heal the sorrowing earth, to cleave to the Chain that will bind the dark?’
The flame in the lantern shook violently, though the air was quite still.
‘I will,’ Danny whispered.
‘Say it then. Speak the words.’
‘I… I swear to keep faith with the others,’ Danny said. ‘I swear to heal the sorrowing earth. I swear to cleave to the Chain that will bind the dark.’
When my turn came to speak, I said the words too, and a wave of static electricity crackled through me, lifting my hair.
‘Now and forever are you of the Chain,’ Lallie said. ‘Let the Chain be forged.’
The lamp light went out.
There was an intense, soundless explosion of light, and in the split second before I was blinded, it seemed to me the objects on the table altered.
Then it was dark.
‘May the Chain prevail long …’ Lallie gasped. Then there was the sound of someone falling.
TWO
THE GATHERING
13
I ran home with The Tod close at my heels. It was still pitch dark and raining, but that wasn’t why I was running.
I ran because of what had happened in the attic and everything that had been happening since we arrived in Cheshunt. Coming out of the library into the last dark hours of the night, I had thought again, but with more fear than joy this time, that if what had happened was real, then what else might be real?
What nightmares might walk?
I wished I had suggested going home at least part of the way with Indian but he and Danny had their bikes and they had ridden off together. Seth had gone the other way. Lallie was still in the attic. She had not wakened since the forging. Hanging limp in Seth’s arms when he lifted her onto Nissa’s bed, she had looked more dead than alive.
By the time I reached the park, my imagination was working overtime. I kept hearing Lallie say Cheshunt had been bruised by evil, and that now an infection had grown which somehow we were supposed to heal using the symbols.
What did that mean?
And what did it have to do with Mr Karle?
I kept thinking of the yellow eyes I had seen staring out from the park and worrying about what I would do if something jumped out at me. I walked on the other side of the street but that didn’t help. I was still too close to the shadowy trees. I started thinking about the feral dogs; wondering if they had come to answer a Call too.
A dog barked in the park and I stifled a yell of fright.
My heart was galloping by the time I got to the door. I fumbled the key in the lock, then dropped it. When I bent over to pick it up, my neck crawled at the thought of Buddha creeping up behind me.
I was sweating hard before I got inside the front door.
I didn’t want to be on my own so I brought The Tod in with me. I fed him and then made myself a milo. Doing those everyday things made me feel calmer, even so the house seemed to crouch around me, filled with shadows and unexplained creaks.
I got into my pyjamas, switched the late news on loud and sat in the armchair, The Tod curled in my lap.
Nissa had warned us to forget about everything that had happened until she contacted us. She would do this as soon as Lallie was well enough to explain how we could use the symbols for the healing. Until then we were to wait patiently and stay out of trouble.
Which was easier said than done. Since coming to Cheshunt, I had been in more trouble than I had been in my whole life before that. And after everything that had happened, we still had no idea why Mr Karle was trying to figure out who we were. The one clue was the fact that Lallie had spoken of a gathering of the dark. Surely it was no coincidence that Mr Karle’s youth club was called the Gathering. That must be why Lallie was so frightened of him. I swallowed, wondering if Mr Karle could be the one who would come to be filled up with darkness. And if he was, what did that mean exactly?
I fingered the metal disc in my pocket. It had been Danny’s suggestion that if the objects could offer some sort of shielding power, we should keep them with us.
I forced my wandering attention back to the television where the announcer was talking about an escaped murderer in another state. Mr Big, he called him. It sounded as if he was talking about a new kind of kids’ toy. The Mr Big doll.
The phone rang and I jumped. I had drifted off to sleep. The announcer had been replaced by a black and white cowboy movie and a green Indian was trying to scalp a cowboy. Rain was playing havoc with the reception.
‘Mum?’ I croaked into the phone.
No one responded.
‘Mum?’ I asked again, hearing the note of unease creep into my voice.
There was a faint crackle on the line. I listened a moment longer, then hung up. Suddenly the house seemed alien. I picked up The Tod, who immediately dropped back to sleep.
My grandmother had given him to me as a tiny puppy saying I needed something of my own and overruling my mother’s protests. I felt suddenly like howling my eyes out. With a stabbing ache of loneliness, I thought of ringing her up. At least the line would be busy. But what would I say? Hi, Gran. I’m about to fight the champion of the dark. Just thought I’d call.
I wished my mother would come home, but there was little likeliho
od of that. Determinedly, I dragged out the list of names I had taken from the library photograph. There was no way I could sleep yet and doing homework was better than sitting thinking about Mr Karle. The phone book listed all of the numbers for the three adjoining suburbs of Cheshunt, Willington and Ercildoune. The first name was Wilson. There were about a million Wilsons in the book. I decided to start by concentrating on the most unusual names on my list. There were five and I wrote them down on the message pad beside the phone: Jon Briody, Marta Tron, Zebediah Sikorsky, Afron Myalls and David Belfrage. Then I pulled out the phone book and hunted them up one at a time, writing down all the numbers under those surnames. I ended up with four Briodys, three Trons, two Sikorskys, five Myallses and two Belfrages.
The phone rang again.
My heart thumped for a few beats as I waited a bit before picking up the receiver.
‘Hello?’ I said, faking a sleepy voice. I was determined not to let whoever was on the other end know I was rattled.
No answer.
‘I’m sorry, if you can hear me, you’re not getting through. Better ring through the operator.’ I hung up and stared at the phone uneasily. Folding the list of names and phone numbers, I shoved them in my pocket.
The phone rang again and The Tod growled.
This time, I backed away and stood there, listening to it ring and ring. The sound seemed to echo for a long time after it stopped, and I had to force myself to go over to the phone and take the receiver off the hook.
I felt cold and frightened, and wished we had stayed in the attic together until daylight. At least when we were together we could talk about things. And what did the phone calls mean anyway? The chances were it was just Buddha and he had got our number from the operator under new listings.
But what really scared me was the thought that maybe it wasn’t Buddha.
I shuddered, turned off the television and went into the bedroom, switching on the radio to drown out the silence. Then I climbed into bed. I thought of Nissa in her draughty roof. It must be ten times as creepy to be there. On the other hand, hadn’t Lallie called the attic a secret place for the light? Maybe we should have stayed there.
I wondered sleepily what Nissa would have said if I offered to stay. I imagined myself being up there with her alone. Maybe she would be scared and I could put my arm around her. Then I pictured her face and wondered what it would be like to kiss her. She might laugh. I had never actually kissed a girl before. She might be able to tell. Or maybe she hadn’t kissed anyone before either.
Sourly I thought of the way Seth’s eyes had softened when he looked at Nissa. He probably kissed perfectly too.
The rain on the roof seemed hypnotically soothing and I drifted into sleep.
Dreaming is a funny business. It’s the one thing you don’t have any control over. When you want to dream, you can’t, and when it’s a really good dream, you can’t make it happen again. If it’s a nightmare, you can’t wake up fast enough and if it’s an exciting dream, you always wake up at the worst possible moment. Murphy’s law of dreaming.
So I dreamed. I was walking in a dense leafy arbour. Pinhole shafts of light slanted in from odd angles and the only sound was the crackling of dead leaves underfoot.
At the end of the arbour, I could see a garden bathed in reddish light. I heard a snatch of a song and a burst of laughter.
It turned out the red light wasn’t dawn or dusk as I had expected. It was night and a bloody moon rode full and high in a starless sky, just like in the old monster nightmare.
Pushing through the tangled bushes and heading down a slope, I moved towards the singing.
‘Dance with me …’ sang a girl in the distance.
I came out of the tangles into a clearing where there were three people in old-fashioned clothes having a picnic. There was a dark-haired girl dancing around on her own and singing, and a girl with a long blonde plait sitting on a tartan rug with a guy of eighteen or nineteen.
Somehow I knew they were no more seeing the bloody moon than they were seeing me. The blonde girl had a frilly parasol as if to shade herself from the sun. For them it was daylight.
They were seeing one reality and I, another.
‘Dance with me,’ sang the dark-haired girl to the guy. He had untidy blue-black hair and vivid blue eyes that reminded me of Nissa’s. He shook his head and she danced off, eyes sparkling with anger.
‘Dance with her,’ the blonde girl said softly to him.
He shook his head. ‘I’d rather stay with you.’
‘Dance, dance, I dance with the wind …’ sang the other girl, a bitterness under the words. The bloody light seemed to deepen.
Suddenly I heard a growling in the bushes behind me and I knew the monster had followed me there. I swung around but the hill was much steeper than I had realised and I overbalanced and fell. Brambles clawed at me and I closed my eyes to protect them.
‘Dance, dance …’ sang the dark-haired girl.
I jerked awake with a gasp and it was morning, pallid autumn sunlight streaming through my bedroom window.
Immediately I thought of what had happened in the attic. The forging. It seemed even more unreal in the daylight than it had last night, and that reminded me of the dream, where I had seen one thing, while the picnicking trio had seen something else entirely.
The Tod whined at me expectantly so I got up to put him outside. It was too early to get ready for school so I made myself some porridge trying to forget about the events of the night. My mother’s bedroom door was closed which meant she had come in late and didn’t want to be woken. I noticed the phone was back on the hook and wondered what she had thought finding it off.
That reminded me of the phone numbers I had copied down the night before. I decided to try a couple.
I tried the numbers next to Briody to start with. The first was a grumpy shift worker who said he didn’t know any Briody and that he rented through an agency so how the hell would he know who lived there before him. He hung up when I asked if he had the number of the agency.
The second Briody was a younger sounding woman who called me a lunatic halfway through my explanation. The third was an Ercildoune number and it was engaged both times I tried.
Disheartened with Briody, I tried Sikorsky. No one answered.
I decided to try one of the Tron numbers. An elderly woman answered and I explained what I was after.
‘What?’ she asked when I’d finished.
I went through it again, raising the decibels.
‘What?’ she yelled.
I sighed and hung up. I’d have to scream before she would hear and my mother would wake up.
I decided to try the rest of the numbers later. I fed The Tod and got my bike out of the shed. It had a flat, which was why I hadn’t been riding it. I fixed the puncture with The Tod hanging over my shoulder, like a consulting expert.
It was still early when I had finished so I decided to ride to the public library and see if they kept back issues of newspapers. It had occurred to me that a murder case was sure to have got in the papers. If I could find it, I would be able to date what had happened.
I knew the librarian and he smiled through the window at me as I chained the bike.
‘You’re out early,’ he said. He was very fat, with a crewcut and a lisp.
‘Early bird catches the worm,’ I quipped back.
He grinned. ‘Got in a new book by David Gemmell. Knights of Dark Renown. It’s about knights who go on a quest against the dark.’
I pushed away a chilly feeling of déjà vu and put a reserve on the book. While he was filling out the form, I asked him if the library kept old newspapers. I told him I wanted to go back about sixty years.
‘We do have back copies, but not that far back. You’d want to try the Examiner office in Willington.’ The Examiner was a free paper that circulated throughout the three suburbs.
‘Would they have been around sixty or so years ago?’
‘Not as the Examin
er. It used to be called the Tribune. But it’s the same paper. They might still have copies from those days for the journalists to refer to.’
‘Do you know if it’s open to the public?’
He tapped his fingers, thinking. ‘If you tell them it’s for a school project you’ll be right. We were all students once.’
I found it hard to imagine the fat librarian as a student, but I nodded. ‘Thanks.’
It was too late to go over to Willington before school, so I put that on hold. It would be better to go on my way to Elderew for dinner one night. If I went straight after school, I could go to the Examiner and then bus across to Elderew afterwards.
I cycled doublespeed to the school, and chained my bike alongside those already in the stand.
‘What’s a matter? Don’t you trust us?’
I froze, recognising Buddha’s voice.
I turned slowly. He and two other big school patrol guys were slouching against the side of the bike shed nearest the door. The tall skinny kid with buck teeth looked like Brer Rabbit gone wrong. The other was a bullethead with a high-pitched voice.
‘So, how’s it doin’?’ Buddha asked with exaggerated politeness.
‘Fine,’ I said, wondering how far they would go in broad daylight.
‘When are we gonna see you in the Gathering?’ Buddha went on conversationally. He took one step nearer. His eyes were glassy and bloodshot as if he had stayed up all night.
‘I don’t know if I’m going to join,’ I said, hoisting my backpack out of the bike basket. ‘Those clubs take up a lot of time.’
‘You’d enjoy the meetings,’ Buddha said. He stepped forward again and carefully put his heel down on my foot. Hard.
My eyes started to water.
‘You should reconsider, Nathanial,’ he said. There was a sleepy smile on his face as if hurting me really made him feel good.
Bullethead giggled.
‘Cut it out,’ I gritted, trying to get my foot out.
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