I cried again in fury and misery, because it was too late. Hating Lallie for failing to warn me. Hating my mother for bringing us to Cheshunt. Hurting. Hating.
At last I got up, shivering, and wrapped The Tod in my coat. I couldn’t bury him. Not yet, so I carried him into my bedroom and laid him on the bed.
Looking down at him, Lallie’s similarity to the girl in the photograph and Mr Sharone’s words came together and showed me what I had been too stupid to see before.
Zeb and Anna weren’t just connected to what was happening now. They were what was happening now. They had been a Chain, as we were. But their Chain had failed. The simplicity of it took my breath away. I didn’t understand how it could be, but I knew I was right.
And I didn’t care.
I wanted to kill Buddha. I wanted to set him on fire, and Mr Karle. I wanted them to feel pain and scream. My hands throbbed in dull pain.
I went out in the street, heading for the school. It was dark and I realised hours must have passed as I sat on the ground. I walked the way a man shot will go on, not realising half his guts are on the street behind him.
Indian, Danny and Seth were outside the library when I arrived, greenish shapes in the neon light. As I drew nearer, I noticed Seth was swaying and his breath reeked of alcohol.
Before I could tell them what had happened, Danny clutched at my arm. ‘Nathanial, Nissa’s disappeared.’
‘Seth said she came to his place to remind him to come tonight, and then she left. That’s the last anyone has seen of her,’ Indian explained.
I struggled to understand what they were telling me.
‘She could’ve gone to the hospital again,’ Danny suggested.
The fact of Nissa’s absence and The Tod’s death came together and suddenly I was more than scared, remembering what Buddha had said.
‘Next time it won’t be a dog.’
I saw the caretaker in my dreams in flames, and superimposed over him, Nissa. For a minute I thought I was going to vomit. Fear for her almost suffocated me, and panicky thoughts skittered through me like leaves before a hurricane. I told them everything then. It all just spilled out in a tangle; Lallie in the school photograph, what Mr Sharone had told me and, finally, in stark, dreadful words, I told them what had happened to The Tod.
All three looked aghast.
‘He’ll be sorry,’ Danny swore.
Indian came over and put his arm awkwardly around my shoulders. But I shoved him away. ‘Don’t you understand? He said next time it wouldn’t be a dog. What if he meant next time it would be Nissa!’
Indian paled with shock.
I swung to face Seth. ‘You were the last to see her. There must be something she said about where she was going.’
‘I… I was drunk,’ Seth whispered, his face chalk-pale.
I grabbed him and shook him. ‘You know! You must know!’
‘Nathanial!’ Indian pulled me away from him.
I slapped his hand away feeling as if the old thinking Nathanial had gone up in flames with The Tod. ‘What did you see last night when you looked through the telescope?’ I asked Seth.
He backed away. ‘Nothing. It was too …’
‘In your mind, Seth. What did you see in your mind? What did you tell Nissa?’
Now he was shaking visibly. ‘I couldn’t see anything but… I remembered my father saying he was going there once. She said I must have seen something and I just… I told her but …’
‘Where?’ Danny snarled, grabbing him by the front of his shirt. ‘Where did you tell Nissa?’
‘The abattoir,’ Seth whispered. ‘I saw the abattoir.’
28
‘I can’t come with you,’ Seth whispered. ‘I’ve had too much to drink. I’d hold you back.’
Danny grabbed him by the front of his shirt again and shook him. If it had not been such a grim matter, the difference in their sizes would have made the gesture ridiculous.
‘You’re always drunk, you weak bastard. And you probably will hold us back, but you’re coming with us. It’s all for one and one for all, and we might need all.’
‘My father …’ Seth began, but Danny shook him. The wolf boy had hold of a grizzly, but the grizzly was tranquillised. ‘You’re part of this too and it’s your fault Nissa went there alone instead of all of us together.’
Seth nodded and Danny let him go.
We ran to start with, hugging the shadows and staying out of street lights, Seth stumbling at our heels. But the abattoir was on the other side of town and Indian reminded us a group of kids running would attract too much attention, so we slowed to a walk. I felt a blind fury at myself for not having realised sooner where the place that sorrows was. Lallie had even told me the evidence of it was all around me, and so it had been. Cheshunt was saturated with the death smell.
I was glad when Indian started filling us in on the abattoir, because when we were silent my mind started replaying The Tod’s death and I felt I might truly go mad if I thought of that too much.
I listened to Danny and Indian, moving like a sleepwalker.
Indian said he knew a lot about its history because his class had done an assignment on the abattoir.
‘It’s old and it was built years ago from the ruins of an older rammed-earth building. Somebody said it used to be a church but the book I read said it had been some kind of meeting place. There’s a disused railway line that runs along behind it that used to transport carcasses to town in freezer cars. The whole place is practically derelict, but it’s still used as a local abattoir. It’s got one solid, bolted door, as well as the shute doors for the cows, and high windows with bits of glass stuck cemented along the tops of the sills to stop anyone climbing in.’
‘Why would they bother making it so hard to get into unless there was something there to hide?’ Danny wondered.
‘The books said it was because of cattle thieves in the Depression.’
Danny turned to Seth who was as silent as I was. ‘Why did your father go there?’
‘Dogs,’ he said. ‘Someone called the police and said that’s where the feral dog pack had been hanging around. They were attracted …’ He paled further. ‘They were attracted by the smell of the blood.’
Indian and Danny exchanged a look and I read my fear for Nissa in their eyes.
The moon and stars were veiled in cloud or smog, reducing the night world to a dim place of blurred shadow against deeper shadow. There were more and more overgrown vacant lots in this part of Cheshunt, gradually giving way to paddocks and the hills.
The abattoir was on its own, sitting like a stone fortress on a low hill, others rising up behind it. As I stared at it, the black tentacles of despair gave way to a superstitious shudder of fear. The paddock we crossed to reach it was choked with blackberry and onionweed, but Indian said we would be fools to approach it along the well-lit road in case someone was keeping watch.
We stopped under a clump of diseased-looking wattle bushes a few metres from the abattoir.
‘We have to figure out what Nissa would have done,’ Indian said.
Danny nodded. ‘Going on what Seth said, she probably came here to see if he was right. To look for proof or a clue. She must have gone inside.’
‘Maybe she didn’t come here,’ Seth whispered.
‘Shut up,’ Danny snarled at him. He pointed to the holding yards which led into the abattoir. There were a series of hinged timber doors.
‘Locked from the inside,’ Indian said. He looked at me. ‘What do you think?’
I blinked at him stupidly, but my mind was blank.
Indian frowned. ‘Nathanial, you have to forget about The Tod.’
I felt a blind violent urge to strike out at him. Seeing it, Indian backed away.
Danny stepped between us and looked into my eyes. ‘Indian’s right. You have to forget about The Tod. For Nissa’s sake.’
I took a deep breath, and bit down hard on the inside of my mouth. Pain brought tears to my eyes and a moment of clarity.
‘I know,’ I said. Even to my own ears, my voice sounded strange. Flattened out and empty.
‘Nat, the best way to get revenge for The Tod is to beat the Kraken,’ Danny said.
A hard ball of hate and anger settled over my chest. ‘You’re right. Let’s get on with it.’
He looked at me a moment longer, then nodded. ‘All right, now let’s go through it again. Maybe we’ve got the wrong idea. She might not have sneaked in. Maybe she just marched up and asked to look around for some school assignment.’
I nodded. It was just the sort of blunt, fearless thing she would do.
But Indian shook his head. ‘She could ask until she was blue in the face but no one would answer. No one stays up there at night. The abattoir only operates every couple of days during the daylight.’
‘There’s no one there then?’ Seth sounded relieved.
Indian shook his head. ‘I said the abattoir was closed, I didn’t say no one was there. I meant no one official would be there.’
‘Well, let’s get closer and see if we can find some sign that she’s been here at all,’ Danny said with sudden authority.
We crept around the whole building until we came to one of the windows where the rammed earth walls were badly eroded. Here, there were fresh scuff marks.
‘Bingo,’ Danny said grimly. ‘I’ll take a look.’
He scaled the wall using cracks as toeholds. Then he reached up and hoisted himself onto the sill.
He cried out in pain and fell backwards, slithering to the ground, his palms covered in blood.
‘I forgot about the glass,’ he grimaced. Then his face changed. ‘But I saw her. At least I think it was her. She’s lying on the floor under the window.’
Seth gave a strangled groan and launched himself at the wall. He scaled it faster than I would have believed possible, until I remembered he was a champion athlete, vaulting over the windowsill and disappearing inside.
Indian was wrapping tissues around Danny’s fingers, so I went up after Seth, ignoring the pain in my own hands. I used my jacket to pad the top and climbed over the sill onto a wooden shelf set in the wall at window level. Kneeling on it, I leaned forward.
At first I couldn’t see anything; it was so dark but gradually my eyes became accustomed to the dark. In the reflected glow of street lights out the front, I saw Nissa lying directly below the sill. Seth was leaning over her, shaking her gently and trying to wake her. When she didn’t move, he stared down at her. Perhaps he spoke, but it was too soft for me to hear. I felt a vicious stab of anger as he leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth. She stirred and groaned, wakened like a princess, by a kiss.
Indian had climbed up beside me. ‘Don’t move her yet,’ he called down sharply. ‘Something might be broken.’
He climbed down into the shadowy darkness, squatted beside Nissa and ran his hands down over her body, checking for broken bones. ‘I don’t think anything’s broken. Let’s get her out of this place.’
Danny climbed onto the ledge so fast he almost head-butted me off.
‘We’ve got company,’ he said in a low voice, glancing back.
I looked outside to see an enormous dog slinking through the long grass towards the abattoir.
We climbed down onto the floor of the abattoir just as Nissa sat up and shook her head with a groan.
‘Are you… what happened?’ Indian asked her.
‘I… I came to see if this was the… the place where the earth sorrows.’ She glanced at Seth. ‘I guess you told them. I just got up on the sill when I heard a growling noise. A dog I think. It startled me and I over-balanced and fell.’
Danny and I looked at one another but before we could speak, Nissa jumped to her feet and started hunting around anxiously. ‘The sword! I had it with me.’
It had fallen under a low bench. Nissa took it into her hands and examined it.
I let my eyes wander around, taking in the shadowy partitions and benches, and a faint gleam from suspended hooks. The whole place had a dry, dusty bone smell, rather than the terrible reek I had come to associate with it.
‘You realise this is it, don’t you,’ Nissa said eagerly. ‘I don’t know why we didn’t think of it straight away. It’s so obvious. The place that sorrows. We can do the healing right now.’
‘I haven’t got the bowl,’ Indian protested.
As it turned out, only Nissa and I had our symbols with us.
‘All right, we’ll go back and get them,’ she decided.
‘We saw a dog slinking around out there,’ Danny said uneasily.
Nissa snorted derisively. ‘I’m not afraid of any mongrel dog. It surprised me, that’s all.’ She held the sword up, removing the guard plug at the end of the blade. ‘I don’t think we’ll have too much trouble fending it off.’
Outside, it had grown darker, but there was no sign of the animal. The overgrown paddocks and shadowy holding yards were empty.
‘It must’ve got sick of waiting,’ Danny said, relief in his tone.
‘Look at the moon,’ Indian murmured.
It was one of those rare, low, bloated, orange moons and because we were all looking up, none of us saw the dark shaggy shape break away from the shadows near the wall.
A dog the size of a small bear exploded out of the night, growling savagely.
Nissa sprang forward to meet it, brandishing her sword. The creature snarled and focused its attention on her. She was so quick and fearless I realised she must have been practising using the sword.
The dog stopped and gave an eerie undulating cry and there were answering howls in the distance.
‘It’s calling them!’ Danny hissed. There was another howl, fractionally closer. Nissa might be able to hold one off, but not a herd of feral dogs. If she could just get in a stab, the dog might be incapacitated long enough for us to get away. If we didn’t get away we were in deep trouble. I gritted my teeth thinking there was no way I would give the Kraken the satisfaction of finding us penned like a lot of frightened sheep.
The dog lurched forward at Nissa, but the sword hissed as she swung it, forcing the dog to retreat, snapping and snarling in frustration. She couldn’t get in a proper stab because it seemed uncannily able to anticipate her moves almost before she knew them herself. What she needed was a distraction.
I tensed in readiness and when the dog began to move in the next time, I lurched forward shouting wildly. The dog twisted to face me with the same lethal swiftness but immediately seemed to realise what I was about and swung back to Nissa. It raked talons down her arm, opening up deep gashes even as the point of her sword slashed along its side.
It yelped and fell back, but Nissa staggered after it, driving her blade deep into its mottled haunches.
It let out a bellow of agony and fell with a wet-sounding thump. Nissa reeled and stumbled to her knees.
‘Catch her!’ Danny cried.
I moved instinctively, wincing as she fell against my hands.
‘She’s probably got concussion,’ Indian said.
‘We better get away from here.’
But it was already too late. We could see a pack of dogs of varying sizes pelting up the road leading to the abattoir. It would be a matter of minutes before they discovered us.
‘We’ll have to climb back inside,’ Danny cried, panic lighting his eyes.
‘No,’ Indian said firmly. ‘I’ll run and they’ll follow me. Then the rest of you get Nissa home.’
The fear drained away from Danny’s eyes slowly, leaving a queer, rigid calmness in its wake. ‘We’ll lead them off. Nat and Seth can get Nissa home. Okay?’ He was looking at me.
Even numbed with grief, I felt a rush of admiration for his courage. ‘Be careful!’
Danny nodded. ‘You be careful. And tell Nissa what happened.’
Then, incredibly, he laughed and he and Indian ran, cutting across the field towards the old railway lines. Almost at once, the dog pack spotted them and gave chase. They passed us snar
ling and panting, their eyes gleaming redly in the moonlight. Crouched in the shadows, I held my breath, certain they would scent the dead dog and circle back.
They flew past without so much as glancing at the abattoir.
We waited until their barking had faded into the distance, then made our way back across the fields and through the streets to the school. Nissa was conscious but unsteady on her feet.
As soon as we were in the attic, I made her lie down and bandaged her arm, glad of something to occupy my mind. She was asleep almost at once.
It was an hour before Indian and Danny turned up and I let them in with a surge of relief. They climbed into the roof, their faces flushed with exertion and triumph.
‘We lost them,’ Danny said, his eyes glowing.
‘We could have come a while back, but we thought we should lie low just in case,’ Indian put in. ‘No sense in leading them here.’
The racket woke Nissa, and she insisted on getting up. She was still pale but her eyes were clear. She made us explain all over again exactly how we had found her and what had happened. Incredibly, she only had a hazy recollection of fighting the dog.
‘It’s too late to go back tonight,’ she said at last. ‘But we’ll go and do the healing tomorrow night. We’ll get in before the Kraken knows what’s happening.’
Danny and Indian looked at me, the excitement dying from their faces as they remembered the earlier part of the night. A leaden ache settled into my stomach at the thought of home and The Tod. As if the pain were linked to the event, I became aware of the burns on my hands.
Nissa followed my eyes and exclaimed as she took up one of my hands and examined the blistered palm. I winced involuntarily and took my hands firmly away.
‘What happened to them?’
There was a long silence and the wind muttered at the eaves. Seth met my eyes with a skittish look, like a horse about to bolt. His eyes skated away as he stood up. ‘I have to go home.’
There was an awkward silence as he left.
‘What I’d like to know is why he didn’t tell us sooner about the abattoir,’ Danny said tightly, as soon as he had gone.
The Gathering Page 21