The Gathering

by Isobelle Carmody

‘He didn’t believe in what he saw,’ Nissa said sharply. ‘He thought he had imagined it. He can’t help the way he is.’

  She got out some ointment and began to stroke it with gentle efficiency onto my palms.

  ‘I’m going too,’ Indian said.

  Danny rose as well, looking over at me. ‘Tell her.’

  Nissa stared at him. ‘Tell me what?’

  Neither Danny nor Indian answered her. They left in silence and Nissa went with them to lock the front door. Returning to the attic she looked at me squarely. ‘As soon as I saw your face in the abattoir, I knew something had happened.’

  So I told her about the photograph of Lallie, and Mr Sharone’s revelations. And lastly, as concisely and unemotionally as I could, in empty words, I told Nissa about The Tod.

  I felt as if a ball of ice had formed around my heart and the cold bit into my bones. As I talked, I saw with renewed despair how easy I had made it for them.

  ‘Oh God,’ Nissa breathed. ‘Oh Nat. That poor little thing.’

  And that was all it took to re-open the floodgates.

  There was a bitter sweetness in the tears that came, because Nissa put her arms around me and held me tight. Her heart beat strongly against my cheek and hurting for The Tod was somehow muddled up with how I felt for her.

  I cried until the ice in me had melted, washing away the black killing fury and leaving only a desolate emptiness.

  At last the tears stopped and I sat quietly, oddly calm. Nissa sat back, her eyes searching my face. Her own eyes were dry and I thought bleakly that I had never seen her cry, and maybe her way was better. Never loving so that nothing could hurt you.

  But as I looked at her in the glowing lantern flame, I understood that maybe love wasn’t something tame that could be controlled. It was a wild thing which might kill you with its claws as easily as its beauty.

  And it came when it chose, so that sometimes, you could as soon choose not to love as not to breathe.

  Nissa’s eyes were so blue; as deep and beautiful as the sky on the most perfect summer day as she leaned forward slowly and pressed her lips on mine.

  They felt soft and cool and my heart stopped beating altogether.

  Then the kettle started bubbling and bubbling, spilling into the jet. Nissa jerked away from me as if she had been burned and sprang up to switch it off. She made us a drink each without turning to look at me once. When she brought the mugs back, her face was cool, her eyes shuttered.

  ‘Nissa …’ I began, but she cut me off deliberately in a hard voice.

  ‘I’m sorry about The Tod, Nat.’

  ‘Nissa …’

  She shook her head with a finality that stung me. ‘You better go home when you finish that.’

  When she locked the library door between us, we stared at one another for a moment through the glass. It was freezing cold outside, and my breath came out in tiny frost puffs of air.

  It was dark. The wind was blowing hard and smelled of the sea as I walked home, but I was numb to the cold. There were rubbish bins out in front of some of the houses even though the rubbish truck didn’t come until Friday. I remembered a notice had come in the mail saying the rubbish would be picked up a day early that week. Then I thought how stupid it was to be thinking about the rubbish.

  As I opened the gate, I opened my mouth automatically to call The Tod, half imagining him barking in the laundry to be let out.

  Then I remembered, with a dull little shock, that he was dead.

  I had never felt so sad as when I came into the empty house.

  Except it wasn’t empty. The light was on and my mother was sitting on the couch with a face like stone, staring accusingly at me.

  29

  I stared at my mother, stunned. Her car must have been in the driveway but I had been too overwrought to notice.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asked. There were black rings around her eyes as if she hadn’t slept for days.

  ‘I… I was walking.’

  ‘Walking where?’

  ‘Just walking,’ I said, striving for normality.

  ‘I’ve been into your bedroom.’

  The Tod, I thought bleakly. I had no words to give her.

  ‘I had a call from the school at work yesterday. They said you were missing in the afternoon. So I come home and I find that.’ She pointed towards my bedroom door. ‘But no Nathanial. What have you been doing since yesterday lunchtime?’

  I shook my head. What could I say? That some of my school mates had torched my dog; that I had been to the abattoir fighting the hound of the Baskervilles; that I had been kissed by Nissa Jerome?

  Sure.

  ‘I suppose it was the same place you went last Friday, when you were supposed to be home in bed, ill. The school said you were seen by police wandering the streets when, as far as I knew, you were home in bed!’

  Her voice was like a wall pressing down on me.

  ‘I wasn’t doing anything wrong,’ I said at last. Then something she had said struck me. ‘Who told you all this?’

  ‘Mr Karle. He said the school was worried about you and they were afraid you had got mixed up with a gang of …’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know why I brought us here. I thought it might lay some ghosts to rest. You see, it was when we lived in this district that we… your father and I, separated. I should never have come back, but there was something about this area that… drew me. Even all those years back with your father – he felt the same way.’ She laughed, a broken sound with tears in it. ‘You know he actually wanted to live in Cheshunt.’

  I felt a cold finger down my spine at the thought that the Calling power of Cheshunt had reached even my father and mother.

  She gave me a hard, weary look. ‘Mr Karle rang me because he was concerned about you.’

  I bit back the fierce desire to tell her Mr Karle had organised to have my dog killed, knowing she would not believe me.

  Again I saw Buddha smile and strike the match.

  I swallowed drily. ‘He was lying to you. There’s no gang.’ Somehow we had come the full circle and the end was the beginning. Like Lallie had said.

  My mother laughed harshly. ‘And you haven’t been lying to me?’

  I bit my lip. ‘I haven’t told you a lot of things, but I swear I haven’t been doing anything bad. Not the things he told you.’

  ‘Nathanial, it’s not just Mr Karle. I had a call from the police not half an hour ago looking for you. A house was burned down in Willington. There were witnesses and one of them described you.’

  ‘I wasn’t even in Willington!’ I told her, dazed. ‘The police are lying.’

  She groaned. ‘Nathanial, listen to yourself. Listen to how crazy that sounds.’ She pointed to my hands. ‘I can see your hands are burned. Are you trying to tell me that happened while you were walking?’

  ‘I wasn’t in Willington. I swear it.’

  ‘Then where were you?’

  I couldn’t tell her. I knew that. If she thought I was crazy now, what would she think if I told her the truth? ‘If you could just …’

  She cut me off and now there was a flatness to her voice. ‘Nathanial, I also received a report on you from the school counsellor in today’s mail. She recommends psychiatric counselling.’

  I resisted the urge to say the school counsellor was in on the conspiracy. ‘What does she say is supposed to be wrong with me?’

  She shook her head tiredly. ‘It doesn’t matter what she said. I know what the matter is.’

  The conversation had turned into unknown waters. I felt confused, out of my depth.

  ‘It’s my fault for not dealing with it sooner; my fault for coming to this district and raking up the past.’

  ‘The past?’ An abyss seemed to be opening at my feet and I started to shake.

  She came closer. ‘Nathanial, I’m not blaming you for what you did. I understand that you couldn’t fight what was born in you. But why did you take The Tod with you? How could you let that happen to him?�
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  I recoiled in disgust and incredulity. She thought I had burned a house down and let The Tod die in the fire!

  ‘I should have told you sooner, like your grandmother said. Maybe this wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘You think I killed my own dog?’ I whispered. I felt on the verge of overload. Too much had happened too fast.

  ‘We’re going to get through this together. I promise you. Mr Karle is going to help. He said there is a place you can be sent …’

  My head snapped up. ‘What sort of place?’

  ‘Not an institution. A private place where there are people to help you.’

  I felt like I was on a roller coaster. She wanted to send me to Mr Karle to be cured? I started to laugh.

  She held her hand up as if she was trying to ward off the evil eye.

  I was laughing and then I was crying. I opened my mouth to say what happened to The Tod wasn’t my fault, but then I saw him pushing himself against the gate and howling mournfully. And I heard Lallie telling me there would be payment exacted for saving me.

  A tidal wave of exhaustion rolled over me, and with it a terrible lonely longing for The Tod. The tears spilled, blinding me, blurring my mother’s expression.

  ‘I can’t talk about this,’ she said, rising suddenly, her own voice thick with tears. ‘I’m… I’m going to work. We’ll talk when I come home, but I don’t want you to leave the house. Not for anything.’

  ‘Mum …’ I called.

  She turned slowly to look at me.

  ‘Mum… I’m not crazy. However it looks. If you loved me, you’d believe that.’

  She stared for a moment longer, and I couldn’t tell what was going through her mind. Then she left without saying anything.

  The Tod was no longer on my bed, and I felt a fresh surge of grief because there had been no chance to say goodbye. I didn’t even know where she had buried him. If she had buried him. I couldn’t bear to go down to the yard and look.

  I felt as if I had been beaten up. I just lay on the bed curled up, staring at the wall, my hands throbbing. I felt as empty as a dead tree. I couldn’t imagine getting up ever again. Even the thought of Nissa didn’t help.

  I slept.

  And I dreamed.

  I was back in the overgrown hillside garden, the bloated red moon hovering like a malevolent eye.

  Anna was alone, sitting on a swing suspended from a thick tree branch. The rope creaked, though she was still.

  ‘Anna?’

  It was Zeb and he pushed through the bushes. His face was haggard; blue-black hair hanging lankly over his forehead, eyes filled with bewildered sorrow.

  ‘Anna, you’re smarter than I am. I know that. I guess you’re smarter than all of us,’ he said humbly. ‘I don’t understand any of it. How he could make Sam do that to himself just by talking to him?’

  ‘They want a scapegoat,’ Anna said in a hard voice. ‘He’s made them want that. It’s all of us, or one. You’re the eldest.’

  ‘He was my friend,’ Zeb said dully.

  ‘What else can we do?’ Anna demanded angrily. ‘Some of us have to stay to stand against him.’

  He nodded again. ‘All right, Annie.’ I was astounded to see the mute adoration in Zeb’s eyes as he looked at her. But she would not look up; would not see that Mrs Heathcote had been wrong about him not loving her.

  After a long minute, Zeb nodded twice, as if it were a required countersign. When he turned to make his way slowly back up the hill, his shoulders were bowed low as if under a terrific weight.

  Only then did Anna Galway look up at him, and her face was wet with tears.

  And then I was alone, the swing empty. I heard something running through the trees towards me. Terror filled me and I started to run too, crashing through the tangled undergrowth.

  ‘You can’t run away from me!’ the monster howled.

  FOUR

  THE BINDING

  30

  I woke to a dark, still day, filled with fleeting images of the previous day, as clear and disconnected as snapshots.

  Lallie’s still body in the hospital bed and then her face, older in the library photo.

  The Tod writhing in flames.

  Seth leaning over Nissa in the abattoir.

  The feral dog charging at me.

  Nissa kissing me in the attic.

  I thought with fresh incredulity of my mother believing I had killed The Tod. My mind replayed fragments of her words, but they made no more sense to me than they had the night before.

  I had been perilously close to a total shutdown, I realised now.

  The whole day, from The Tod’s murder to my arrival home, seemed like some dark, nightmarish roller coaster ride. Even now, I felt battered by what had happened and strangely lethargic. It seemed to me I had somehow compressed my lifetime into a day and though I had slept more than twelve hours, I still felt exhausted, emptied out. But under all of that burned a slow hate.

  My heart began to beat faster thinking about what they had done to The Tod.

  ‘The way to get revenge is to beat him,’ Danny said in my memory.

  I sat up abruptly, thinking about my idea that Anna and Zeb had been part of a previous Chain. That had been superseded by The Tod’s death and Nissa’s rescue, but now I thought of it again and wondered if I could possibly be right.

  And if I was, then how had the previous Chain failed? I thought of Anna’s diary and sat up, certain the answer would be there.

  My hands were painful and swollen, but using wrists, elbows and teeth, I managed to extract the notebooks from my backpack.

  Clumsily, I turned the pages, skim reading and searching for proof that I was right about Anna being part of an earlier Chain.

  In minutes, I had what I needed.

  ‘I brought Lallindra the token she desired,’ Anna wrote. ‘It was a perfectly round stone from my father’s collection. She told me it meant I was the circle bearer.’

  I felt the blood drain out of my face.

  Anna Galway had been the circle bearer of the last Chain! I thought of the bitter raving old woman in the garden with a shiver of fear, wondering if that was what lay in my own future.

  I read on, piecing it together like a jigsaw.

  Anna had been drawn to the school after hours, as we had been, meeting Zeb and three others. Lallie – Lallindra – had told them how to get their symbols.

  I couldn’t find anything about the forging, but the next thing she wrote about was trying to figure out the healing ritual, just as we had done. Apparently they had worked it out because she then wrote that they were unable to complete the ritual because Sam McLainie had killed himself. According to Anna’s diaries he had died outside the library, but had set it alight when he stumbled against it.

  Anna wrote after this: ‘We know we shall not be believed if we speak the truth about what happened to Sam. That is his power of course: distorting the truth. Lies and illusion to distract us from seeing the true battle. Yet we must remain to complete the healing and to stand against Koster Laine. Zeb will take the blame and I will be a witness so that he alone is charged. One must be sacrificed so the rest of the Chain may remain.’

  She wrote then of Zeb being taken away, and the rest of them waiting to fight their Kraken while Cheshunt darkened around them, the whole place drawn into a dark waltz by the school dancemaster, promoted soon after the fire to headmaster.

  There was no way of telling at what point they had failed. It could not have been their failure to complete the healing, since Anna wrote that they had completed the healing after Zeb had gone. Somehow, without knowing why or how or when, they had lost their battle to the dark. I felt a cold fist tighten around my heart at the realisation that we could fail as easily and unknowingly.

  I jumped as the phone rang.

  It was Nissa calling from a phone box a few streets from the school. My heart started to pound as I pictured her leaning towards me last night and kissing me on the lips.

 
‘Nissa …’

  She cut me off sharply. ‘Nathanial, have you looked outside yet?’

  ‘I just woke up. I’ll have a look now.’

  ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Just listen. There were a whole lot of kids at school early this morning. Dozens of them. Now they’ve disappeared and no one’s turned up for school. The whole place is deserted.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know what’s happening, but I have the feeling time is running out for us. I think we should do the healing now. Can you come?’

  ‘I’ll be right there.’

  ‘I’ll call the others. I’ll wait here for you.’ She rang off.

  I hung up, raced into my bedroom and dragged on my clothes and shoes. It felt cold so I jerked on a parker and pulled a beanie over my ears. I scrawled a note to my mother saying I was sorry but I had to go out, then I rang out to the back door to get my bike.

  I stopped.

  The whole sky was blotted out by dark congested clouds in fantastic shapes. The air seemed as thick as syrup, and smelled like some kind of fetid animal’s den.

  I decided against the bike after all, realising it would probably hamper me. I hiked around the side of the house and out the front gate. Then I ran. Not jogged, but ran.

  Almost at once I had a stitch, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t even slow down when the stitch turned into a jagged spike twisting in my side. The pain barrier rose up in front of me, insurmountable. I ran harder and after a long minute of pain, the suffocating feeling disappeared.

  I ran around the corner to the street where the phone was. The dark, yellowish light made it oddly hard to see and I didn’t see the phone booth until I was practically on top of it. My heart plummeted because it was empty.

  Nissa was gone.

  I froze as two sleek black dogs emerged from a house and slunk along the street towards the school.

  Then a hand touched my arm lightly.

  ‘Ahhh!’ I gasped, spinning round.

  It was Danny. ‘Hell, you scared me,’ I breathed.

  ‘Come on, we’re in the bus shelter back there.’