I tuned back into the conversation to find Danny telling them about the business on the bus. The way he told it I came out like some kind of hero.
‘You think the Kraken told the Gathering kids to behave themselves in Cheshunt?’ Nissa asked me.
‘I think it’s more that that. I think he sent them out to cause trouble in the other neighbourhoods.’
‘Why?’
‘To make Cheshunt look good, so the other suburbs will listen to him, so he can spread the darkness.’
‘Maybe it’s time we took a look at what goes on in those meetings they have,’ Indian said. ‘There’s one on this weekend.’
A chill ran down my spine.
Nissa bit her lip. ‘I don’t know, Indian. Lallie said the darkness would gather to give him strength. It would be too dangerous for any of us to join.’
‘Who said anything about joining?’ Indian asked, with Danny’s recklessness in his eyes.
Nissa looked worried. ‘I don’t know. If he catches you spying, I don’t know what he’d do.’
Danny grinned. ‘I’ll come with you.’ He looked at Seth and his expression grew cold. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Nothing,’ Nissa said coolly. ‘He’s going to invite me over to his house so I can snoop around and see if I can find out where his father fits into all this.’
‘What if his father realises what you’re up to?’ Danny asked.
‘You just worry about your part of it,’ Nissa snapped. She glanced at me. ‘You’re a thinker, so you can try to figure out what all that stuff about the healing means. Okay?’
I nodded, wondering if she thought I would be too frightened to do anything because I was quiet.
The sun had come out of the cloud about fifteen minutes earlier and it was getting hot.
‘What about a swim?’ Indian suggested.
We all went in, even Seth. He, Nissa and Danny dived right in and Indian and I walked in slowly. I watched Nissa swim strongly, parallel to the shore.
‘She’s pretty good, isn’t she?’ Indian asked. ‘I’m hopeless.’
‘I’m not much better,’ I admitted. But I was thinking about how Nissa had looked without the jumper and jeans. She wore bather bottoms and a T-shirt and she was not the least bit skinny or shapeless.
We had got as far as the armpits and I was trying to get up the nerve for the rest. Indian took a deep breath and ducked down, and I eased myself under, gritting my teeth.
‘It’s harder that way,’ Indian said. Then without warning, he lurched sideways with a look of horror on his face.
Danny surfaced beside him grinning like a maniac. ‘Da-da da-da da-da …’ He sang the theme from Jaws.
Indian howled in fury and splashed a great gout of water at him. Danny ducked and the water got Nissa square in the face. In a second we were all at it, splashing and screeching like a bunch of ten year olds. When we got out we were shivering and grinning with blue-tinged lips.
But near-hypothermia didn’t stop me noticing you could see right through Nissa’s T-shirt when it was wet. Then I was hot as well as cold. I wondered suddenly what it would be like if we were alone at the beach, if there was no T-shirt.
I looked up and she was watching me, a strange expression on her face.
I started drying myself furiously, waiting for her to say something nasty about me staring at her breasts like that. When I was game to look again, she had her jumper back on and was pouring hot tea out of one of the thermoses.
I slid my hand into my jeans to get a tissue and something burned me. I yelped and whipped my hand away.
‘What is it?’ Indian asked.
I didn’t have to put my hand in again to know what had burned me. Somehow the sun had made the circle in my pocket boiling hot. Then I remembered how hot the circle had felt in Mr Karle’s office that day.
Maybe it hadn’t been the sun after all.
I jumped to my feet and looked around. The others looked up at me as if I had gone mad. I ran my eyes frantically along the beach, and up the rocky cliff.
Then, swinging around, I noticed something a long way out in the water. I frowned and squinted.
The others stood and followed my gaze, then Nissa gave a cry.
‘It’s Seth!’
He must have been swimming out ever since we got into the water. Nissa didn’t hesitate. She threw off the jumper, dived in and started to swim out after him. Danny was close behind her, his arms churning. Indian and I swam too, but we were nowhere as strong or fast.
After we had gone a little way, Nissa yelled something back to Danny and he turned and yelled to us.
‘Spread out,’ Indian panted.
‘You stop here,’ I puffed, seeing he was probably the worst swimmer among us.
His eyes were dark with fear, but he nodded and started to tread water. I swam out until I started to feel tired, then I floated, conserving my strength for when it was needed. Danny and Nissa were still swimming strongly. Beyond them, seemingly kilometres out, was Seth’s dark head.
Moments later Danny had stopped and I could see his stomach. He was floating too. Now it was up to Nissa, and she showed no sign of slowing down, though it was hard to tell at such a distance. A piece of seaweed brushed against my leg and I gasped in momentary fright at the thought of sharks circling in for the kill.
There was a distant shout and I looked to see that Nissa had reached Seth. They seemed to be struggling. My heart began to pound. What if he ended up drowning them both? There was no doubt in my mind that Seth was trying to kill himself.
But then they were beginning to come back. I watched with bated breath as they crept towards the shore. Nissa was slowing then, obviously tiring. Danny swam out the last couple of metres and they began to come in again, dragging Seth between them.
When they finally reached me, I could see Nissa and Danny were at the end of their strength. Seth lay on his back between them, his face dead white. My heart thudded as I swam forward to meet them and I fought a surge of panic when both Nissa and Danny grabbed me and I went under.
I sucked in a mouthful of salty water in shock, kicked my way to the surface and yelled to Indian to help us.
In seconds he was beside me and we were swimming together, Indian and I swimming awkwardly between the rest of them, all of us gasping. By the time we hit the sand, none of us had the strength to walk and we dragged ourselves out on to the sand panting and coughing.
Then someone was crying.
I struggled to sit and realised it was Seth. He was lying on his back racked by great gasping sobs. Gradually the others sat up and we were all staring at him helplessly. Then to my astonishment, Nissa gathered the sobbing Seth into her arms and hugged him.
‘It’s all right, Seth,’ she croaked. ‘It’s going to be all right.’
Her eyes met mine, and I noticed the pupils were so wide her eyes looked black. Without thinking, I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around them both, my eyes burning. Then I felt arms around me as the others hugged us too.
All I could think about was how close Seth had come to swimming out and dying without any of us even noticing. I felt so sad for him that my chest and throat ached because no matter how bad things had got, I had never been so without hope that I wanted to die.
Nissa was the first to speak, and I realised she was the only one of us whose eyes were dry. ‘Seth, why?’
He shook his head minutely as if even that were almost beyond him. She opened her mouth to say something else, but Indian shook his head at her.
‘I think we all need a hot drink,’ he rasped.
She nodded and went meekly over to the blankets. The rest of us rose, half supporting Seth. Indian wrapped a blanket around him and Nissa poured some hot drink from the second thermos. The first one had drained away during our dash to save Seth.
She drank from it first, then offered the steaming cup solemnly to Indian.
He drank then gave it back to her. She gave it to each of us like that, silen
tly, with the air of a priestess at some ancient ritual. And last, she offered it to Seth.
He looked in her eyes, his face haggard with despair, then his head slumped.
‘Drink,’ she urged him softly.
An hour later, we were all on our way home, Indian dinking Seth and Nissa with me, her salt-stiff hair brushing against my face as we rode back into Cheshunt. As we rode, I felt the heavy wrongness that lay over Cheshunt in my bones and blood.
I felt a surge of fear, but at the same time, the nearness of the others made me feel as if I could bear going back. Something had happened that afternoon, a queer sort of meshing, and when we stopped at a stand, to let Seth catch a taxi home, there was a closeness between us that had not been there before.
After the taxi had taken Seth away, the rest of us stopped a minute before going in our separate directions.
‘You think he’ll be okay?’ Nissa murmured.
‘I don’t know,’ Indian admitted.
‘It was my fault,’ she said grimly. ‘It was the way I talked to him. The way I treated him. I put too much pressure on him.’
‘So what happens now?’ Danny asked.
‘We go on with it,’ Nissa said in a hard voice. ‘You and Indian find out what you can about the Gathering, Nat figures out the healing.’
She walked away without looking back, her shoulders slumped, and as she did so, I felt afraid for her and for all of us and what we planned to do. I shivered and zipped up my jacket but the cold had got inside my skin.
Indian and Danny stirred and climbed back on their bikes, pushing off.
‘Be careful,’ I called.
‘Daniel into the lion’s den,’ Danny yelled blithely.
I watched them go, feeling bone tired and wrung out. Before today, everything, even me getting pushed around, had seemed like some kind of black game. But the afternoon and Seth’s almost successful attempt to kill himself, brought it home to me that it was no game. Seth had come close to dying that afternoon and while I didn’t think the Kraken knew Seth was one of us, maybe the bit of weakness in Seth that Lallie had warned us about, was already working against him.
We had to find out what was eating away at Seth before it destroyed him.
A couple of girls carrying clipboards came out of the corner house and gazed at me. I climbed on my own bike, wondering if everything that had happened that day had left its mark on me. I pushed off from the kerb and pedalled away fast. I was nearly home before I remembered I was supposed to be in bed sick. I would be in serious trouble if my mother realised I had been out all day.
As I reached the park, a patrol car coasted by, going in the opposite direction. I felt the policemen inside look out at me, their eyes filled with dark magic.
19
I slept badly that night, despite The Tod’s comforting presence curled into the back of my knees, my dreams full of dogs barking in the darkness, and policemen with faces hidden in shadow.
I woke in the morning to the sound of my mother talking on the phone and I listened to the tone, trying to gauge her mood.
‘… I know but I just feel it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie,’ she was saying as I came out.
When she saw me, she mouthed that it was her mother. There was a deep furrow between her brows as she listened. For some reason, talking to my grandmother always made her tense and upset.
‘Yes, well I’ll do it in my own way and time,’ she said tightly. ‘Look, mother, Nathanial’s here now. Do you want to say hello to him?’
There was another long burst of talk and her frown deepened. ‘I know what you think, but it’s my decision. Here’s Nathanial. I’ll talk to you soon.’ She handed the phone over and I wondered what they had been arguing over.
‘Hi,’ I said into the receiver.
‘Hello darling. How are you liking your new school?’ my grandmother asked.
The sound of her voice brought me astonishingly close to the edge of tears and I might even have told her the whole thing if I hadn’t sensed my mother listening. ‘It’s okay,’ I said guardedly.
A sigh came through the phone. ‘Nathanial, I know you’re a long way away, but remember I’m always here. Call me whenever you want someone to talk to.’ She paused. ‘Try to talk with your mother. She needs you.’
‘I will,’ I said.
We talked for a little about The Tod, then she rang off.
Over breakfast my mother said a day in bed didn’t seem to have done me much good because I looked washed out. It turned out she had rung during the day, but had assumed I was sleeping too soundly to hear the phone. She stared at me for a long moment and I resisted the urge to squirm with guilt, but she wasn’t wondering what I had been up to because out of the blue she said I shouldn’t go to detention while I was still recovering, and then she rang the school to say so.
Even more surprising, she said I needed a day out in the fresh air, and suggested we go to the zoo in the next shire. I was only too happy to go, but I couldn’t help wondering what was going on. My mother rarely did anything for no reason and generally I got the feeling she preferred work to spending time with me. The only thing I could think of was that her mother had been at her to spend more time with me.
The zoo was about an hour’s drive away and we didn’t talk much on the way there but, for once, it was a peaceful silence. It was a cool day, though the sun was shining and a slight breeze stirred the sodden banks of autumn leaves under great shady trees flanking either side of the entrance to the carpark as we pulled up.
Looking up at the sky through the canopy of rusty foliage, I had that peculiar feeling you sometimes get of coming somewhere for the first time and feeling you’ve been there before.
Standing behind my mother at the ticket box covered in a peeling jungle-book mural, the sense of familiarity increased.
We had not been to the zoo for years, but we automatically headed for the monkey enclosure, the way we had always done. My mother liked the panthers and tigers, while I preferred the bears. The monkeys were a compromise because we both liked watching them. It was their similarity to humans that made monkeys so fascinating. As usual, they were clustered in family groups, baby monkeys chattering and swinging from dead branches, while the older monkeys busily groomed one another. Nearest the enclosure wire was a huge, dark gorilla. Two smaller monkeys were industriously picking fleas off the backs of his hands.
‘It’s the monkey manicure,’ a young woman told her boyfriend. He laughed and so did the other people standing around him.
‘They’re his slaves,’ said a little girl of about three, standing with her mother and father.
‘They’re his friends,’ her mother corrected. ‘That’s Magilla Gorilla.’
‘Magilla’s Manicure,’ the boyfriend said.
I glanced around at the enclosure and again, it seemed to me that I had seen it before, right down to the gnarled tree growing at the centre. I looked up at my mother but she was laughing at the antics of two small monkeys playing hide and seek. It struck me that she almost never laughed aloud.
‘Mum, did we ever come here before?’ I asked.
She gave me a startled look and hesitated before answering. ‘We did but I’m surprised you remember. It was a long time ago.’ She paused again, as if weighing her words. ‘We lived over in Pendleton for a while.’
Pendleton was the district beyond Ercildoune. Less than twenty kilometres away from Cheshunt.
‘You never told me we lived near here before.’
‘I didn’t think it was important,’ my mother said, walking ahead. ‘We only stayed a little while.’ She closed her mouth with a snap, as if to keep something inside.
I had a fleeting image of fear, and then of running, but it was too vague to put into words. ‘Is that why you took the job at Elderew?’
‘No. Well, perhaps partly to lay some old ghosts to rest. Nathanial …’
The big black gorilla in the enclosure suddenly grabbed one of the monkeys and threw it to the grou
nd baring long yellow fangs in a savage grimace.
‘Mafia Magilla,’ the boyfriend quipped, laughing.
‘The hairy godfather,’ said his girlfriend.
The black gorilla got up and started pounding its great fists into the other monkey who just cringed and whimpered, making no attempt to escape. A few people cried out in shocked surprise.
The toddler shrank against her parents’ legs. ‘The bad monkey is hurting the baby monkey. Why doesn’t it run away?’
‘It’s too frightened,’ my mother murmured.
I gave her a startled look, but she didn’t see me. Like everyone else, her eyes were riveted on the gorilla. It had now begun to kick the other monkey which rolled onto its back and was no longer even shielding its head.
‘It’ll kill it,’ someone murmured worriedly.
‘It’s an evil monkey,’ the little girl said, and started to cry.
‘They’re probably just playing,’ her father said, and led her firmly away. But the girl didn’t look convinced and kept craning her neck to look back.
At last the gorilla spat on the smaller monkey to cries of disgust from the watchers and went back to his rock. The second monkey that had just stood and watched the whole thing, came scurrying over to go on with searching for fleas. The small monkey just lay blinking and panting not daring to move. Every now and then the gorilla would give it a look of pure malice and I thought the girl had been right about it being evil.
‘Do you believe in good and evil, Mum?’ I asked, when we were looking at the seals.
She had seemed preoccupied after we left the monkey enclosure. ‘That’s a pretty heavy subject for a Saturday morning.’
I was silent and she smiled wryly. ‘Well, let me see. I don’t think a monkey can be evil. I just think they do things for territorial reasons. Out of instinct.’
‘I don’t mean the monkey.’
Her smile disappeared so suddenly I thought she was mad at me, but instead a serious look came into her eyes. ‘You mean people? I believe people can do evil things and I guess that would make them evil.’
The Gathering Page 14