The Gathering

by Isobelle Carmody

  Mr Sharone’s byline was under the story.

  ‘Catatonic defeat, I’d call it,’ Danny said when we met at the edge of the still smoking field to finish what the fire had interrupted. It was a cold windy afternoon, but the sky was clear and the sun shining. Danny and I had arrived first.

  ‘It doesn’t seem enough,’ he added, leaning on the fence. ‘Seth’s father disappears and the Kraken goes to an asylum.’

  ‘I don’t think it matters now,’ I said. ‘The Kraken was a vessel, and now he’s empty. He can’t do anything else now that the dark has gone.’

  ‘Let’s go across. I want to see if I can find the torch,’ Danny said.

  We picked our way across the field, charred underbrush crackling beneath our feet. We had just reached the blackened ruin of the abattoir when Nissa came running across the field. Like Danny, she wanted to find her symbol and began sifting through the mess. A moment later Indian arrived carrying his bowl.

  He said he had finally told his mother the truth about the day his little sister had fallen from the slide.

  ‘She said she knew.’ His voice was subdued. ‘Someone who had been there told her, but she had never blamed me. All these years, she knew.’ He blinked hard and was silent for a while.

  Danny yelped in delight and pounced on the torch fused into a blackened club by the heat of the fire. He held it up and looked around triumphantly.

  ‘You think that hurricane was part of it? It was pretty odd the way it just turned around in the nick of time.’

  ‘Hurricanes can do that,’ Nissa said, still poking through the debris. ‘You can’t predict them.’ She grunted in satisfaction and withdrew the sword from a heap of rubble, blackened but unharmed. She spat on the blade and began to polish it with her jumper.

  ‘Where’s Seth?’

  ‘He rang my place,’ Indian said. ‘His father hadn’t come home and the police are after him. They reckon he won’t be back. Seth rang his mother and she’s driving over to pick him up tonight. He’s going to live with her.’

  ‘But where is he now?’

  Indian shrugged. ‘He said he had something to do but he’s going to meet us at the school.’ He knelt and scraped some of the powdery earth into the bowl.

  ‘I take this healed earth to the sacred place to complete the healing,’ he said softly.

  Seth was waiting for us out in front of the library.

  ‘Lallie’s gone,’ he said without preamble.

  ‘Gone!’ Danny cried. ‘You mean she died?’

  Seth shook his head. ‘I mean gone. I went to the hospital because I thought maybe she would have woken. I wanted to tell her we’d won but the nurse said she had disappeared. The police have her registered as a missing person.’

  We stared at one another wonderingly but, strangely, no one said anything. Maybe we were all thinking the same thing. Whatever Lallie was, she was not like us. She had come to heal an old wrong, and now that was done, she was gone.

  ‘Let’s finish it,’ Indian said. ‘For Lallie.’

  And so, we climbed into the attic, all of us for the last time together, not even worrying about whether anyone would see us. Nissa lit the lanterns and we sat all of the things on the packing-case table together around the bowl containing the dirt. Without a word, we linked hands.

  ‘You do it,’ Indian said.

  I took a deep breath. ‘We have healed the sorrowing earth. We have bound the dark. Let the Chain Prevail Long.’

  And a faint breeze blew from nowhere, lifting the ash from the bowl and whirling it away.

  ‘It’s over,’ Nissa whispered.

  But she was wrong.

  That night, my mother told me the whole story of my father.

  ‘He was insanely jealous. Unstable. Violent. I learned it was better not to speak to anyone or smile… for their sake as well as mine. Silence was safest.’

  Then she had discovered herself pregnant.

  ‘More than anything else I was scared. I thought he would kill me. He liked to have complete control of everything that happened to me. But he was happy. Ecstatic. Those nine months were the happiest days of my marriage.’ Her eyes shone with tears. ‘I really thought things might be all right.’

  She had sat silently a long time, holding my hand tightly. ‘But as soon as you were born, I realised what I had done. He was jealous of you too. Jealous of the time I spent with you. He hated it when you were dirty or fretful. I had to sometimes hold your mouth to stop you crying.’

  Her eyes met mine, dark with pain. ‘Then one day when you were about seven, we went to the zoo.’

  I shivered.

  ‘The three of us were together. It was a lovely autumn day and we had a picnic lunch. He seemed in a good mood. But when we got there things started going wrong. Little things but it never took much. The lady at the ticket box was rude to him and a woman jostled him in the crowd.’

  I seemed to see the words as she spoke them. The sun pricking through the leaves as I looked up into the trees. People crowding past laughing and joking. The quiet murmur of my mother’s voice above. The exotic croaks of a peacock.

  ‘We were sitting on a blanket and you were eating a sandwich. I was pouring a drink and you spilled some on the blanket. He reached out and slapped you. He had never hit you before. You shouted at him. Bad Daddy. I was terrified when he lunged at you, and I grabbed him and screamed for you to run. Then he punched me and knocked me unconscious …’

  ‘He tried to strangle me,’ I whispered hoarsely. ‘He tried to kill me.’

  She hugged me and told me the zoo authorities had managed to knock my father out and pull him off me. Finally she had given into my grandmother’s urgings and divorced him. She had also charged him with assault, but this had only put him in gaol for a few years. After that, she had moved often so that he would not be able to find us.

  ‘So that’s why we moved so much,’ I murmured.

  I wanted to ask why she hadn’t left him sooner, but I knew the answer to that. Like the little monkey in the zoo, she had simply been too frightened. I even knew why she had taken me to see his body. Not for me to get over him, as I had imagined, but so that she could be sure he was dead; that the nightmare was really over.

  She hadn’t told me because I had wakened with no memory of what had happened. She had thought it better to let the memories stay buried. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.

  ‘I was wrong.’ She hesitated. ‘Nathanial, I’m sorry I believed you… hurt The Tod.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I had murmured, hugging her, because I knew it hadn’t been her. It had been Cheshunt, working on the darkness in her.

  ‘It’s over now,’ she whispered into my neck.

  But she was wrong too.

  EPILOGUE

  I buried the circle where The Tod was buried in the garden.

  Nissa left the sword in the attic when she moved in with Indian’s family and Seth returned his telescope before he left Cheshunt with his mother.

  Indian took the bowl back to the Maritime Museum, but he goes back to look at it sometimes. He told me he thought he would be a doctor or maybe a nurse when he left school. Something to do with healing.

  Danny still has the torch suspended above his bedhead on wire. I keep telling him to take it down before it falls on his head and brains him. To which Nissa says that he hasn’t got a brain so why worry.

  He punches her affectionately and calls her maggot.

  And me? I still dream about kissing Nissa, and one day soon, I will, because I think this time she might not push me away.

  Lallie said the dark would be bound until the Chain was gone and forgotten. And we are the Chain, each of us a link in it. We’ll die one day, a long way off I hope, but the dark won’t be free until our names are forgotten.

  That’s why I decided to write this whole thing down. Because books can live for ever and as long as this book lives with my name on it, the dark will sleep.

  May the Chain Prevail Long!

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