I just stood there letting it kill me. A black cloud blotted out the garden then, and somewhere miles away, I heard a woman scream. Then a little girl asked, ‘Why doesn’t he run away?’
‘Because he’s too frightened,’ my mother murmured.
I woke up gasping and choking, thrusting the nightmare out of my mind.
Riding to school, my eyes felt heavy and my throat sore. I was still terribly tired but I had come up with a simpler explanation for the dreams. Maybe they had simply been sparked off by a combination of my research and what had been happening in the attic. The simplest way to find out if I had been dreaming of the actual past was to see if Anna and Zeb’s faces in my dreams matched up with the faces in the library photograph.
I decided the first chance I got, I would go and examine the photograph.
I was late so I had to go straight to class. The morning passed in a blur. English was with Mrs Bunbury, who was one of the few teachers who really loved what she taught. Normally I liked her classes, but there was too much on my mind for me to concentrate.
‘To sleep, perchance to dream …’ Bunny read, in a voice that belonged to someone taller, younger and more beautiful.
My mind went off on a tangent at the mention of dreaming. I dragged myself back at the sound of my own name, and stood to read out my paraphrasing of Shakespearean speech. It got a lot of laughs. Even Bunny smiled at my dithering version of Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ speech. Asked what had inspired me, I told them I thought Hamlet was a guy who just thought too much, the way I did.
‘You think and think and you’re too busy thinking of everything, to do anything or to see the things right in front of you?’
At the end of the class Bunny announced that it was not too late for anyone who wanted to see a performance of Macbeth that night with the year twelves.
Science was just before lunch and it might just as well have been Sanskrit for all I heard.
At lunchtime I went straight to the library to look at the photograph.
I had half convinced myself I was not dreaming of the real past, so when Anna and Zeb looked out of the photograph at me, my heart jerked violently against my chest bones.
I felt dizzy with shock. It was one thing to suspect you were dreaming of the past, and another to know it for sure. I spent lunchtime in the library pretending to read to stay out of Buddha’s way.
Lallie had told us the library, or at least the spot the library was built on, was sacred, so I figured it was by far the safest place in the school.
At the end of lunchtime, just before the bell, my name was called over the school PA system. ‘Nathanial Delaney report to the office please …’ I packed up my books with a feeling of doom.
It turned out to be the weekend-duty teacher who hauled me over the coals for skipping detention, penalising me with an additional detention on top of the one I still had to work off. I explained about getting knocked out in sport on Thursday and staying home sick Friday. I gave her a truckload of words. It was like feeding bones to a savage dog, until it’s too bloated to be bothered biting you. She warned me to make sure I didn’t fall ill next weekend. To be there. It didn’t make any difference to her that my mother had rung in.
After lunch, I had history which meant I could legitimately think about Anna Galway and Zeb Sikorsky. Mr Dodds told us to work on our assignments and gave anyone who wanted it, a pass to study in the library.
‘And what about you, Nathanial? Have you decided on a topic?’ He was working his way round the room asking everyone the same question. I told him about the photograph in the library and the phone calls trying to locate the old students. I told him I had found out one of the students died in gaol on a murder charge, while another had died in an old people’s home in Ercildoune.
He was impressed. ‘Even so, you’ll still have to find someone who’s alive to interview, in order to complete the demands of the assignment.’
I told him about visiting Mrs Heathcote and the old book in the library. ‘That’s better,’ he said, looking really interested. ‘So what is your next move?’
I had a flash of inspiration. ‘I thought I’d go to the Examiner offices after school to see if the paper has any stories about the fire.’
‘Very good work, Nathanial. Very thorough. But you know, I don’t think the Examiner opens after four.’
We looked at one another for a minute.
‘If I gave you a study pass, you’d go straight there, right. And not fool around?’
That told me he genuinely liked the work I had done and, in spite of everything, it made me feel good. I nodded eagerly. ‘That would be great, sir, but I’d have to get the next bus and that leaves in fifteen minutes.’
He hesitated fractionally. ‘All right. No time for a study pass. Off you go then. If anyone questions you, refer them to me. Don’t let me down.’
The bus was filled with mothers with shopping baskets who stared at me as suspiciously as if I had walked in the wrong toilets. I got out of the bus right in the shopping area of Willington, and went down the pink-painted stairwell into the reception office of the Examiner. This was pink too, and a receptionist in a pink uniform looked at me expectantly.
‘Yeers?’ she said.
I told her what I was after, half expecting she would say it was impossible.
‘We do have a morgue. But it’s not really open to the public.’ I stared at her incredulously and she burst out laughing. ‘I’m sorry, I forgot. The morgue is just what the journalists call it.’
I grinned sheepishly and loosened up, thinking I might as well take a look at the papers. Maybe they would offer some information that would explain why I was dreaming of Anna and Zeb.
‘Is there someone I could ask?’ I gave her my best, earnest schoolboy look.
‘Well, as a matter of fact …’ Her eyes went over my shoulder and I turned to see a big man with a pot belly and a mop of hair that made him look like a cartoon composer, slouched in the doorway.
‘You after a job, kid? We’ve got one cadetship coming up next year and that’s it. We get twenty applications for every opening but you’ve got as good a chance as the next. Better, if you can use that talent for getting information and belly laughs out of hardened newspaper office receptionists.’
‘Mr Sharone,’ the receptionist giggled. ‘You should eavesdrop properly. He’s not after a job. He’s after information.’
‘Then he should be after a job,’ Mr Sharone declared. He looked me up and down with a measuring glance, then beckoned for me to follow. I went, feeling as if I were being swept along by a tidal wave.
His office turned out to be a dingy, smoke-stained room piled with back copies of newspapers and stacks of ringbinder notepads. Old clippings were stuck up on the wall along with a picture of a cricketer bending over to catch a ball, his pants split right along the seam to show he was wearing no underpants.
Mr Sharone roared laughing, when he saw me staring at the black and white blow up. ‘That’s to remind us that sometimes getting the story is a matter of being in the right place at the right time.’ He chuckled hugely to himself. ‘Now, what did you want?’
‘Uh… I wanted to know if I could have a look through your old papers. The morgue,’ I added.
He grinned. ‘Learning the jargon already, eh? You’re quick. Ever thought of being a journalist?’
‘Journalist …’ I echoed uncertainly.
‘Yeah. Like Clark Kent, only you don’t get to wear blue tights, but sometimes you fly all right.’ He grinned to himself.
I was startled at the way things were heading. I had just used the Examiner research as a way of getting away from school early. I seemed to have wound up in a weird sort of job interview.
‘What are you after anyhow?’ he asked.
I plunged in, explaining as concisely as I could about the photographs, about the assignment. I told him about the fire, but not the murder. ‘So, what I want to do is see if I can find any of the stories about
the fire. It wasn’t the Examiner,’ I added, remembering. ‘It was the paper this used to be. The Tribune.’
‘Hmmph. Three North secondary school, you say?’ He gave me a quick searching look. ‘We do have back files from the old rag.’ He hauled his bulk out of the chair and I was left to follow him down another corridor and down some stairs into a room piled with huge stacks of red-bound volumes.
‘They’re the back copies of the Examiner. Look for green covers.’
We found them in a cupboard and lifted a pile out onto a low table. Mr Sharone pulled up a chair and waved me to another, already flipping pages. A thick musty paper smell floated out from the volume.
‘Date?’
I told him about Irma Heathcote’s book and the two clippings pressed inside, along with their dates. He looked at the spines of the volumes, sorted four out and returned the rest to the cupboard. ‘You look through those and I’ll take these,’ he said, dividing the pile in two.
It took us about an hour. He found the first story which turned out to be a straight announcement about a fire which had gutted the school building. He read the article out loud then looked up at me with a frown that reminded me of Mrs Heathcote. ‘This says someone died in the fire, and that it was lit deliberately. You know about that?’
I tried to look innocent but his cynical questioning eyes made me give up the struggle. I told him how Zeb had pleaded guilty to the murder of the caretaker and Anna’s conflicting story of what had happened.
The journalist’s nose practically twitched with excitement. ‘What a story it would make if we could print the true story and get him out. Would this Anna talk to us?’
‘She’s dead and so is he,’ I said flatly. I told him how Anna died before I could talk to her again.
‘Tough luck,’ he grunted. I wasn’t sure if he meant for the paper, for Anna and Zeb, or me. Maybe for all of us.
To my relief, the receptionist stuck her head round the stairwell. ‘Mr Sharone, someone to see you.’
He grunted and got up. ‘Back to the fray. Listen, good luck. Lemme know how it comes out? You got me curious.’
I nodded noncommittally.
‘Kid?’ I looked up again. ‘Maybe you should think about that cadetship.’
He went before I could frame a reply. I went back to the papers.
The story he had found was brief. It said a body had been found and that there were suspicious circumstances. An article the next day expanded the story with an eyewitness who claimed to have seen kids messing around in the school grounds early on the day of the fire. Then there was a short sensational article saying police had identified the body as Samuel McLainie, the school caretaker. The story said he had been a soldier decorated in the first world war. The picture that went with the article was taken off an older photograph, and showed Samuel in uniform, smiling.
At the very end, the article said the old man had left everything in his will to a teacher at the school, a man called Koster Laine.
Only two days later, there was a story about Zeb being taken into custody by police. The article pointed out he had been one of the students spotted at the school the day of the fire. It reported that Zeb had refused to speak except to say it was his fault.
There was no mention of Anna but another article said a schoolgirl had been helping police with their enquiries. In summing up after the brief hearing, the judge presiding called it a hideous crime in the light of the previous friendship between the pair, sentencing Zeb to life imprisonment.
There were a couple of re-hashed versions of the story after that, and the final articles about the school being rebuilt and re-opened which I had already seen in Irma Heathcote’s book.
Skimming the papers following the whole affair, I was struck by the amount of violent crimes that had happened in and around Cheshunt after the fire and court case. Especially after the court case. It was as if that death had triggered off a wave of violence that swept through the following years.
Until about a year back, when, or so everyone said, things had changed. Mr Karle came to town and suddenly there was no delinquency, no crime, no hooliganism.
There was just the Gathering.
22
It was a dark, foul-smelling dusk and the streets were empty, the grey sky swollen looking and purple tinged when I got back to Cheshunt.
I turned the corner into the park street and suddenly my heart started to pound because in the dark opening of a garage, I heard breathing and saw the flare of yellow eyes. A big cat or a dog.
Whatever it was growled and it didn’t sound like a cat or a dog. Maybe it was one of those feral dogs that had chased Seth. Obviously they had been drawn to Cheshunt too, answering some dark Call.
I heard running footsteps and whirled, half expecting to see the monster of my dreams come to strangle me. But my mouth fell open.
It was Nissa, and her face was white with horror. She ran straight into me, and I realised she hadn’t even seen me. I held onto her or she would have run on.
‘Nissa?’
She struggled violently, panting and trembling from head to toe and her bare arms felt clammy.
‘Nissa!’
At last her eyes focused. ‘Nathanial,’ she shuddered, her fingers digging into my arms.
‘What is it? What’s happened?’
We were right alongside the park, so I took her to sit down on the bench. She leaned heavily on me and I thought she would have just fallen down if I wasn’t there.
‘Are you okay?’
She laughed and there was a definite edge of hysteria in her voice. ‘I’m fine, I’m great.’
My arm was resting along the back of her seat against her shoulders and I felt self-conscious. I wanted to leave it there and I wanted to take it away. I didn’t know what had scared her. What I did know was that I was on my own with Nissa and her defences were down. She wasn’t giving me that sarcastic half smile, or that cool smart look of hers. Then I was ashamed of having those thoughts while she was so scared.
‘What happened?’ I asked again.
She gave me a ghostly, hollow-eyed look. ‘It was a man. At least, I think it was a man.’
I took my hand away. ‘What? Some kind of pervert or something?’
‘I was just sitting at the bus stop killing time. Waiting to go to the library. This man came up to me and I… I knew him.’
I was confused. ‘What do you mean? A teacher?’
‘A man I knew from before my mother left.’ Her lips were pale and trembling. She bit down on her bottom lip and then took a deep breath.
‘I was in my first year at high school. My mother was still around then, and that meant there were always men calling in. There was this one guy she liked a lot. A singer, or at least that’s what he told us. He was probably a travelling vacuum-cleaner salesman,’ she added with a flash of cynicism. ‘He didn’t seem as affected by her moods as the others. That made him more appealing to her and she took a lot of trouble fixing herself up when he was coming around.
‘One night he came, and my mother had gone out. He said he knew she was with another man, but he wasn’t angry. He just thought it was funny. He asked where Mrs Kennett was and I told him she was at her flower club.’
Nissa pulled her knees up and folded her arms around them, resting her chin on one bare kneecap.
‘He told me he hadn’t been coming to see my mother. That he loved me.’ She ran one hand through her ragged hair. ‘My mother was always the centre of the universe to everybody. People treated me the way they did because of her. I was just this smart, ugly kid they had to put up with. His saying it was me he came to see… well, I… it felt good. He started putting his arms around me.’ She stopped abruptly, and looked right into my eyes with a kind of nakedness. ‘I would have done anything for him just then,’ she said in a hard voice. ‘Mrs Kennett came home and put an end to what might have happened. She called me a dirty little slut and… I… I told her we were in love.’ She laughed harshly.
‘He couldn’t get out fast enough. He told her he had just been having a bit of fun, that I had been more than willing. He said, “Like mother like daughter…”’
She looked angry at herself and hurt too. I wanted to protect her from her own contempt. I wanted to tell her I loved her and that I didn’t care about her mother or Mrs Kennett.
And then my heart jerked around like bongo drums because I realised where my thoughts had brought me.
But Nissa was oblivious to my reactions.
Awkwardly, I put my arm around her. It was uncomfortable because she was taller, but I could feel myself shaking because I was so close to her.
She stiffened and I thought she was going to shove me back. I was prepared for that, but then she just relaxed and leaned into me.
My blood felt like it was rushing backwards in my veins. I patted her back and stared over her shoulders at the street, not knowing what to say.
‘Ah hell,’ Nissa said at last. She sat up. ‘Life’s shit sometimes.’
I don’t know how I looked but she burst out laughing. Then I was laughing too, I don’t even know why. I laughed so hard it hurt my stomach. In a weird way I was also laughing because of putting my arms around Nissa.
‘You know, it changed me. Not the thing with him,’ she said, when we’d stopped laughing. ‘It was realising I wanted so badly for someone to see me for myself that I would do anything. I made a vow to myself then, that I’d never love anyone again. Not like that. From then on, I relied on nobody and took care of myself.’ She shook her head and took another deep breath.
‘Anyway, it was that man.’
I blinked, then remembered her running towards me. ‘He chased you?’
She shook her head and the fear came back into her eyes. ‘He came up to me. I thought he was going to ask directions, then I recognised him. He said hello and how had I been. I pretended I didn’t know who he was. I was half way through saying he must have made a mistake when he said there was no mistake. He said he had been thinking of me a lot. Dreaming of me. In the end, he decided to come back to Cheshunt and see if he could find me. He said I had called him.’ She shuddered with loathing. ‘I just got scared then and ran. Like he was the bogey man.’ There was disgust in her voice, but I thought of the monster in my nightmares and shivered.
The Gathering Page 17