The Gathering

by Isobelle Carmody

  It was a grim joke considering why I had come, but she didn’t know that so I smiled wanly. She hummed to herself as she emptied the blackberries into a double boiler. ‘You have to get the moisture out before you put the sugar in.’ She peered under the lid then looked up at me. ‘I daresay you’re thinking what a gossipy old woman I am.’

  I felt the blood rise into my face and she burst out laughing.

  ‘It’s true. I am. I talk the ear off the few visitors I have.’ She sighed and there was a flash of sadness in her faded green eyes as she looked from me to Indian.

  ‘My husband died three years back, and since we didn’t have children, there are no grandchildren to fill the space he left. I never thought of that when I decided against having my own children.’

  ‘You… you probably had enough of kids, what with teaching …’ I said, trying to steer her towards her former career. She gave me a bright, curious, intelligent look that told me she knew exactly what I was about.

  ‘I loved teaching,’ she said simply. ‘I felt that if I had my own children I wouldn’t give as much of myself to it. You see, for me, it wasn’t just a job. It seemed to me the most important thing a person could do was to help shape the minds that would some day direct the future.’

  I nodded, trying to imagine what it would be like to be taught by someone who thought kids were important. Then with a chill, I realised Mr Karle understood the importance of kids. Whatever he was planning, started with kids.

  ‘My mum had eight kids and she says she wonders if she didn’t miss out on another life because of that,’ Indian said surprisingly.

  ‘Eight!’ Mrs Heathcote said admiringly, scooping a pile of sugar into the blackberry soup, a delicious rich, sweet smell curling into the air. She sniffed appreciatively as she turned down the flame under the boiler, then plugged in the kettle.

  ‘Time for a cup of tea. Would you boys like a milo?’

  Indian nodded for us both and looked pleased when she began to slice some bread and cover it with blackberry jam. She set the steaming mugs and the platter of bread and jam on the table and beamed at the expression on our faces.

  The bread was still warm and the jam, from a previous batch, she murmured, was sweet and tangy and a long way from the jam you buy at the supermarket. Mr Karle and the Chain seemed to belong to another world.

  ‘Did you bring the book?’ she asked suddenly.

  The bread stuck in my throat. ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t been to school since I talked to you.’

  ‘But you rang me on Thursday. Didn’t you go to school Friday?’

  ‘I… I was …’ I stopped before her knowing look.

  ‘You skipped school, didn’t you?’ Her voice was stern and I couldn’t help myself. I nodded and I felt Indian tense up beside me.

  She relaxed. ‘Thought so. I could always tell. And something tells me lies don’t come easily to you, Nathanial.’ She looked at Indian. ‘You too?’

  I expected him to shake his head, but he nodded.

  She looked from one of us to the other. ‘I assume that the reason you took a day away from school was a very important one.’

  ‘It was,’ I said, trying to understand how we had come to tell so much to a stranger. ‘I don’t usually wag. My mother’d kill me if she found out.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Mrs Heathcote said drily. She sipped her tea and stared at me over the rim. ‘So, why did you call me?’

  ‘I’m trying to find out the name of a student who went to Three North when you were a teacher there,’ I told her.

  She frowned. ‘A student’s name? From my first year out? It was a long time ago. Why this particular student?’

  ‘Do you remember any of the kids on this list?’ I asked, handing it to her. ‘They were under that photo I told you about in the library.’

  She smoothed the note carefully, staring at me as she did so. ‘Mmm, the names do bring back faces …’ she murmured. ‘Why this one boy?’

  I hesitated and she rapped the table imperiously. ‘Come, Nathanial. How can I name him unless you tell me something about him?’

  ‘It’s just… well, you might not approve of what I’m trying to find out.’ She waited patiently. ‘I’m looking for the boy who was supposed to have murdered the caretaker.’

  ‘Ahhh.’

  ‘You remember him?’

  ‘I remember. Of course I remember. You said “supposed to have murdered”. He was convicted, you know. He actually pleaded guilty.’

  ‘I know, but he didn’t do it.’

  Her eyes glittered. ‘How do you know that? He did plead guilty to the charge.’

  I ignored that. ‘Which one was he?’ She looked down at the list, pointing to one of the names and a sick dizziness came over me.

  ‘My goodness, Nathanial. Are you all right?’ She came round to stand beside the chair. Indian had stood up too, and was staring at me worriedly.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I’m all right,’ I said, but my voice felt far away. I looked up at them both, feeling a terrible rush of sorrow. ‘Zebediah Sikorsky is dead.’

  ‘Dead …’ she murmured. She sat again.

  ‘Anna told me he didn’t do it and I wanted to… help him,’ I said. I had not meant to tell her that. It was the shock.

  ‘Anna?’

  There was no point in holding back when she knew so much. I told her everything Anna had told me about the caretaker’s death. ‘She said a group of kids witnessed what happened and that he, Zebediah, agreed to take the blame.’

  ‘A group?’ Mrs Heathcote echoed, but it was her own memory she questioned. Finally she nodded. ‘Yes. They were all seen near the school that day, the group of them. Gang you’d say now. They were friends, though they were an odd lot. Anna was one of them. She was a pretty, dark-haired girl with a quick temper …’ A distant bell rang in my mind, but I was too rattled to pursue it. ‘I remember how strange I thought it that Anna spoke out against Zeb.’ She smiled. ‘That’s what everyone called him. Not Zebediah. Zeb.’

  ‘Why strange?’ Indian asked curiously.

  Irma Heathcote gave him a long look. ‘Because she was in love with Zeb. She was from a wealthy family. The only reason she came to Three North was because her father thought pampering children made them weak. Anna was pampered all right, but she was anything but weak. She had a streak of iron in her underneath all the frills and fluttering eyelashes. The first time she set eyes on Zeb, she decided he belonged to her. He was a handsome boy. He liked her, but I don’t think he was in love with her. He was the son of a Polish immigrant who couldn’t speak a word of English, and as far as I know he had two shirts to his name. But he was a clever boy and he knew his mind.’

  She examined the list again, then shook her head. ‘So, they decided between them that Zeb would take the blame. How dreadful that they did not feel they could simply tell the truth.’

  ‘Do you… can you think of any reason why the caretaker would have killed himself like that?’

  There was a long silence, and Irma Heathcote’s eyes were shadows in the dimness of the kitchen, for it was close to dusk.

  She sighed deeply. ‘You know, I was only at that school for a month or so, but it has remained one of my clearest memories, and not just because one of my ex-students was arraigned for murder. I was not a superstitious girl, nor was I then, I fear, a very religious one. That came after, perhaps because of Three North. Yet I felt, the first day I came there, that it was a place which harboured evil. Things could happen there, that would happen nowhere else.’

  She sipped at the dregs of her cold tea. ‘There was a dance instructor who had come to the school shortly before I did. He was charming and very handsome but after he came there was a lot of trouble and his name would always be at the centre of it. Hysterical girls throwing themselves at him, claiming he had encouraged them, boys fighting and half killing each other over something he had let slip.’ She frowned. I saw him talking to the caretaker, Sam, a few times. He w
as a good talker and you often found yourself confiding things you did not mean to say to him. Sam had been in the war and I recall someone once telling me he did not like to speak of it; that he felt a great deal of guilt because he had once been ordered to burn down a building that turned out to have women and children in it. They all died. I could imagine someone working on his guilt, inflaming it until …’

  ‘But… why would this dance instructor want to make the old man kill himself?’ Indian asked.

  She sighed heavily. ‘It sounds insane even as I say it, but I think he liked to cause trouble. He enjoyed strife. He even had some of the town councillors at one another’s throats.’

  ‘What… what happened to him?’ Indian asked.

  Irma Heathcote blinked. ‘He became headmaster eventually, but I had left by then.’ She shook her head. ‘Poor Anna and Zeb. I wish… I wish I had known. Perhaps if I had stayed …’

  ‘Mrs Heathcote …’ I began, but she rose.

  ‘I don’t think there is anything more I can tell you, Nathanial,’ she said with sad finality. ‘I can’t help either Anna or Zeb now, and neither can you. I don’t live in Cheshunt and I want to forget I ever lived there because it was like living in a shadow.’ She switched on the light, and only then did I realise how long we had been there. It was verging on dark. Indian stirred too and stood up, saying he had a bus to catch.

  I stood up and pulled on the jacket I had discarded. ‘I’d better go too. My mother’s expecting me for tea.’

  Mrs Heathcote nodded. ‘It is getting late.’

  At the front door, I thanked her as if the whole strange afternoon had been no more than tea and blackberry jam. As I reached the gate, she called out my name. I turned slowly to look at her, but she was little more than a pastel shadow in the deepening twilight.

  ‘Nathanial, be careful,’ she said softly.

  THREE

  THE FORGING

  21

  On the bus ride to Elderew and during my meal with my mother, I felt as if someone had switched the vacuum cleaner on blow and put it inside my head. Everything was flying around. My head was full of voices. I kept hearing Irma Heathcote saying that Cheshunt was a place that harboured evil. And then Lallie telling us we were supposed to heal the sorrowing earth.

  And then I’d think about what Indian had told me, and Danny. They had experienced such terrible things. Nissa too, and Seth. The worst that had happened to me was that my mother and father had separated, and then my father died in a car crash. I had always felt sorry for myself over that, but the things that had happened to the others made my life seem like paradise.

  Just before Indian’s bus came, we had talked about Irma’s story of the dancemaster and how many strange, unrelated things had happened in Cheshunt over the years.

  ‘Except I don’t think they’re unrelated,’ Indian said. ‘I think that dancemaster was drawn here, same as a lot of other bad people. I think everything that has happened in Cheshunt is related to everything else because it comes from a sort of core.’

  ‘The earth that sorrows,’ I murmured now. The place where the evil had bruised the earth.

  It was such a strange concept to think of the earth being bruised, as if it were alive and could be hurt. Well, you could poison water with chemicals, and a nuclear bomb could poison the ground for thousands of years. Why shouldn’t it be possible for the earth to be poisoned with evil?

  But where was the place we had to heal; the sorrowing earth?

  Over at Elderew my mother was too busy to stop for more than a quick bite to eat, though she did ask how I was feeling. For a minute I had no idea what she meant. Getting knocked unconscious at school seemed to have happened weeks ago. In fact, it was hard to believe we had been in Cheshunt less than a month.

  My mother had seemed distracted too, as if the trip to the zoo the day before had used up her weekly ration of words. She ate and went back to work leaving me to finish alone.

  When Lilly came to drive me to the bus stop, she had some news that drove everything that had happened that day out of my mind.

  ‘Anna Galway is dead,’ she told me. ‘I’m sorry, Nathanial.’

  I felt winded, somehow empty. ‘H… how?’ Wildly, I wondered if Patrick the ex-hit man had murdered her. ‘Was it… I mean, how did she die?’

  Lilly tilted her head. ‘She was old.’

  I thought of Irma Heathcote in her gumboots picking blackberries. ‘Not as old as all that.’

  She gave me a funny look. ‘No, I suppose not in years, but in her heart she was old. Your asking made me remember some things I couldn’t have said before, but now she’s dead I don’t suppose it matters. She tried to commit suicide three times since she came here. She never married and in all the time she’s been with us, no one visited her. She was a very unhappy person.’

  ‘Did she… die in her sleep?’ I said, but I was thinking: did she finally succeed and kill herself?

  ‘She was sitting in a chair in the sun when they found her. The only thing she liked was the garden. Once …’ Lilly smiled at the memory. ‘Once I saw her dancing round and round by herself. She was singing… I suppose she was remembering something that made her happy.’

  I tried to imagine Anna as a young girl who loved dancing, but instead I thought of the photograph I had seen in Irma Heathcote’s scrapbook, and her story about the dancemaster. Then a dizziness came over me. A blurring of focus, as if I were seeing two things at once.

  A picture came into my mind of a dark-haired girl dancing around in a tangled hillside garden. The dream in which I had ended up falling off the side of a mountain.

  The hair on my neck stirred.

  Was it possible I had actually been dreaming of Anna as a girl? Maybe being in the Chain made it happen. Lallie had told me to seek the past. Maybe that somehow gave me the power to see back in time?

  If that had been Anna in my dream, it struck me forcibly that the dark-haired youth must be Zeb Sikorsky.

  I shook my head, suddenly convinced I was letting my imagination run away with me.

  But then Indian’s words at the bus stop came back to me: ‘I think everything that has happened in Cheshunt is related to everything else.’

  If the dreams were coming for a reason, then what might that reason be? Were the dreams meant to show me how destructive the darkness infesting Cheshunt was? Or how long it had been here. Or was it something more than that? Lallie had told me to look beyond the shadows of the past. Was I meant to see something in this old tragedy between Anna and Zeb and their friends? Was it a warning?

  I shook my head, suddenly exhausted. It had been such a long day and I felt so drained. I was beyond thinking.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Lilly asked, pulling up at the bus stop.

  I nodded and as I opened the car door, an icy gust of wind blew into the car and fluttered a pile of papers on the floor. ‘I had better go.’

  I was the only one on the bus. I stared out the windows at the empty streets, thinking I would write up everything that I had discovered for my assignment including what I could recall of my conversations with Anna. I would just leave it without answers. It would be like the Bermuda Triangle. Mr Dodds had said himself that there were no easy final answers in history, just questions and more questions.

  My mind was a weary blank as we came into the outskirts of Cheshunt and the heavy darkness of the place fell over me like a shroud. I pressed my face against the window. There were huge trees growing densely on all sides. I must have got on the wrong bus somehow.

  I blinked wearily and it was just Cheshunt, neat and tidy and silent. I was so tired I was starting to see things. Or maybe it was Cheshunt. Irma Heathcote called it a place that harboured evil. Only it was worse than that because it didn’t only harbour evil. Cheshunt Called it.

  That night, the phone didn’t ring once, and that seemed more ominous than the crank calls. I went to bed thinking it would be hard to go to sleep. I had let The Tod out for a walk, but now he was cur
led on the bed beside me. He had known something was wrong, the way dogs do. He had stood up on my knees and looked in my eyes as if he were searching for something there. I stroked his silky ears thinking of all the things I had learned and before I realised it, I had fallen into a dream.

  Just like that, I was back in the overgrown mountainside garden in the red moonlight. I could hear the singing. Anna Galway’s voice, I thought dreamily.

  Once again I moved towards the voice, but this time I came out of trees to find myself beside a broad, swift stream. There was a river punt floating by, carrying the two girls I had seen in the field picnicking. The dark-haired girl was singing, her voice melodious and strong.

  ‘You have a lovely voice,’ the blonde girl said.

  I could hear her clearly, though they were some distance off. The dark girl stopped singing with a haughty toss of her curls.

  ‘He doesn’t think so. He only sees you, and what am I to that?’

  ‘There is no competition,’ the blonde girl said.

  ‘Tell him that,’ Anna said, her eyes slitted with jealous anger. I shivered at the flash of savagery in her expression.

  ‘If you don’t care for him, tell him.’ She paused. ‘Or do you care for him?’

  ‘I care for all of you,’ the blonde girl answered, but I could see, as Anna could, that she was avoiding the question. Anna Galway, I whispered the name to myself. Anna who loved Zeb Sikorsky. But he had not cared for her.

  I thought of the handsome young man, preferring to sit with the blonde girl rather than dance with Anna. That had been Zeb, I was sure of it. I stepped forward on to the bank in my eagerness to hear more and the blonde girl turned to stare at me.

  ‘What is it?’ Anna asked, turning too.

  ‘That boy.’

  ‘What boy?’ Anna demanded, staring straight at me, but even as she moved towards me, her face changed and thickened and she was the monster, its eyes full of insane rage.

  ‘Children should be seen and not heard,’ it snarled in a gutteral voice, and its great fetid paws closed around my neck with lethal strength, yet I didn’t struggle or try to pull the paws away so that I could breathe.