Guardian of the Dead

by Karen Healey

  I dragged my eyes toward his, and then away. ‘It’s been a long night. School tomorrow.’

  He handed me the bottle. ‘In your own time, then. Sorry I was a dick.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘I’m going to hug you again.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said agreeably, and let me lean into his warm solidity, my arms moving in and out with the steady rhythm of his breath. ‘You sure you’re all right? I can stay.’

  I discovered that I was trembling. ‘It’s—’ I began, then sighed, suddenly aware of how tired I was. ‘It’s been a weird week.’

  ‘When aren’t they?’ he said. ‘It’s a Mansfield tradition.’ He squeezed me and stepped back to pull up the window. ‘Good night, Ellie.’

  I watched to make sure he was gone, and then went straight to the mask. It warmed in my hands, and the humming purr travelled up my fingers, akin to but not exactly like the shock I’d got from Mark’s bracelet. For God’s sake, were these magical things lying about everywhere? Frustrated as I was, I put it down carefully, in what was nearly a caress. My dirty fingers should certainly have left marks, but the mask’s face was as smooth and clean as ever. I ignored the urge to put it on and see what happened – I’d walked into enough dangerous situations by following my impulses for one night – and resolved to ask Mark about it tomorrow.

  But the mask didn’t feel dangerous. Not to me.

  I chewed on my thumbnail, gagged on the mud, put the bottle of wine into the drawer that held the empty beer cans, and went to the bathroom.

  A shower was so normal a thing. There was nothing fanciful about the grumbling pipes or the strange pink stain up the tiled wall. I used the final squeezings of my toothpaste and scrubbed until my tongue was numb.

  Dropping off to sleep at last, I could still taste the memory of gecko in my mouth.

  Mark’s assurances aside, I had no intention of just letting Kevin wander around unsupervised while I researched in the university library. He was probably okay during school, but what about afterward? Who knew what he could get up to without someone to keep an eye on him? Unfortunately, the only solution I could come up with was personally humiliating.

  ‘Hi, Iris? It’s Ellie.’

  ‘Hi!’ Iris sounded startled. ‘How are you?’

  I’m awful, I thought. Last night I got sexually harassed – twice! – and then I was nearly turned into a tree, and now I’ve got to skip school and go to the university library in my uniform, where everyone will stare at me, and try to research something I can’t even name. I took a deep breath. ‘This is a bit weird. But can you do me a big favour I can’t tell you anything about?’

  Iris hesitated, which was a perfectly sensible reaction to being asked for a favour by a not-exactly-friend at seven in the morning.

  ‘It’s about Kevin and Reka,’ I added. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s just no one else.’

  ‘I’ll help,’ she said instantly. ‘What do you need?’

  I sagged. ‘Okay. After school, can you take him to your place to hang out? As if it’s your idea? Try and keep him there, and if Reka shows up call me right away. And if she tries to get him to go anywhere, don’t let her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Uh—’

  ‘I have a paper on Mori Urban Migration due on Monday. And exams in two weeks, and a show opening in less than a week that keeps haemorrhaging cast and crew. I’d like to help, Ellie, but I’d also like an explanation.’

  ‘It’s really important,’ I begged. ‘You know that something’s up. You said so yourself.’

  Iris was too polite to sigh wearily, but I could almost hear her struggling not to. ‘But you say you can’t tell me anything,’ she said.

  ‘Not now. I don’t know enough.’ I cracked a bitter smile at Mark’s words in my mouth. ‘I’m trying to find out now.’ I ran my fingers through my hair, getting caught in tangles before I’d gone three inches. Brushing promised to be painful. ‘Uh. And can you give me your university system username and password?’

  The pause was much longer this time, and I tore another fingernail down to the quick with my teeth, afraid to speak again in case I tipped her the wrong way. ‘Will you tell me when you do know?’ she asked.

  Really, what were my options? And it wasn’t like Mark’s love affair with secrecy had helped me any. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you.’

  When she let out her breath, it wasn’t quite a sigh. ‘Okay. I’ll do it. After school?’

  ‘After school. Thank you.’

  For once, I made it to the dining hall in plenty of time for breakfast, and ate with Samia and Gemma. Samia, who had to get up for dawn prayer, had thoroughly woken up by then and was far bubblier than anyone should have been at seven-thirty.

  ‘Ellie, did you finish the Geo assignment?’ she asked, biting into her toast.

  There hadn’t seemed much point, since I was going to skip anyway. ‘Sort of,’ I hedged. ‘You?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But it’s awful. I have no idea why I even did Geo this year.’

  Gemma rolled her eyes. ‘Because it’s handy for a journalist to know which country is where?’ she suggested. Obviously not a morning person.

  Samia rolled her eyes back. ‘Maybe I’ll do Law instead. What do you want to do, Ellie?’

  ‘Teaching,’ I said automatically, and then, ‘or maybe Classics at Canterbury.’

  Samia nodded. ‘I heard you were good at Classics. Maybe you can take out the cup this year, instead of Nolan.’ She filched Gemma’s last piece of toast as Gemma turned to wave at her boyfriend across the hall. ‘At least you’ll be there to pick it up.’

  Gemma turned back and made a strangled cry, grabbing at the crust in Samia’s hand. ‘Thieving bitch! Which reminds me, did you use my conditioner?’

  ‘Ugh, no! Why would I want to smell of fake flowers all day?’

  I smiled weakly and filled my mouth with scrambled eggs, hoping that Gemma wasn’t close enough to me to catch the scent of her hair products.

  After breakfast I checked my mail pigeonhole, and was unsurprised to find a note requesting that I meet with Mrs Chappell after school. I pocketed it, and went across the road with the girls, pretending that I wanted to do some homework in the library.

  As the corridors filled, I hid in a sciences-building bathroom, and escaped out one of the back gates when everyone else was attending morning group, feeling a little smug. There was no way to avoid being marked absent, but I had successfully evaded premature capture.

  It was one of Christchurch’s clear winter days, with not a wisp of fog. Given the circumstances, that was more than usually comforting. But the Antarctic wind numbed my nose and fingers in minutes. I joggled in place on the icy stone steps of the library, cursing whoever had invented mornings.

  The gangly boy who unlocked the doors did a double-take at my uniform and then smiled at me. ‘Bunking off school?’

  ‘At the library? No. Special study.’

  ‘Jeez, you’re eager,’ he said, but pulled the door open.

  I’d meant to wait for Mark outside, but it wasn’t worth the frostbite, nor the time wasted. I took the lift up to the fifth-floor computer lab and began.

  The search engines were not helpful.

  I hadn’t really expected a webpage or citation for the Legend of The Vampire Witch Ghost That Haunts The Riccarton Bush. Anything like that would have passed through Mansfield’s impressive gossip system, increasing in horror with each retelling. But I had hoped for some evidence of Reka’s existence, some idea of what she was, the scope of her abilities, and, most importantly, what I could do to stop her.

  There were plenty of stories about the history of the Riccarton Bush, but none of them talked about a mysterious woman living there. There were listings for Reka Gordons, but none of them referred to the woman I was seeking. It didn’t surprise me that she wasn’t in the White Pages, but she also wasn’t mentioned on the drama club’s threadbare website, nor in the university listing of enrolled stud
ents. When I thought about it, I realised I wasn’t even sure if she was a student, or what she did if she wasn’t. Iris had said that she’d just moved to Christchurch, but it was as if she’d come from nowhere, unnoticed.

  Maybe she had.

  She’d mocked me for reading fairy tales, which might mean there was something more useful in the stacks, but I was horribly aware I didn’t have time to prowl aimlessly through the shelves on the fourth floor devoted to mythology and folklore. Mark had promised me Kevin’s safety until tonight, and sunset would come, the newspaper website assured me, at 5.04 pm.

  The lab began to fill up as I browsed through tabs, and every time the door opened I craned to see. But it was never Mark. Doubt wormed at me. Maybe this ‘research’ was just another ploy to get me out of the way. Maybe he’d lied to me about everything, and was even now plotting with Reka.

  I clamped down hard on the rising paranoia and went on.

  Sometime after noon, I pushed back from the screen and pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes, my stomach gurgling. It had been a long time since breakfast, and I was beginning to have wistful visions of the vending machines in the basement.

  Desperate and bored, I tried naming dictionaries. Gordon was a traditional and very common Scottish clan name, not at all special unless you were the type of person who liked to go around claiming your ancestors were once Highland kings. Reka was listed as a few things, including the Mori word for ‘sweet’.

  I sat up so fast my wheeled chair skidded backwards, making me clutch at the heavy desk for balance.

  ‘I’m an idiot,’ I said out loud, and ignored the vicious glare from the engineering student on my left. Reka was paler than I was, and I’d assumed she was Pkeh too. But her song had been Mori, or something very like it.

  MORI VAMPIRE, I typed. Nothing. Well, that was stupid anyway. I’d seen her in daylight. MORI WITCH sent me off on a survey of tohunga, the religious guardians and special craftsmen, whose knowledge had been handed down verbally for hundreds of years. It would have been fascinating if I hadn’t been in such a hurry, and I wondered if some of the stories about curses and transformations could possibly be true. Until this last week, reading The Lord of the Rings six times in one school holiday when I was fourteen had been the closest I’d come to dealings with the supernatural.

  But if women could walk out of the night and try to turn me into a tree, why couldn’t all the rest of it be real? Including my father’s faith?

  This was no time for a religious crisis. I tried MORI IMMORTAL, and got a bewildering number of pages dealing with cosmology and the intricate, contradicting myth cycles. I scanned through a few of them anyway. There was a little bit on Tne-mahuta, God of Forests, journeying to the uppermost of the twelve heavens and bringing back the three baskets of great knowledge from the God of all creation, but it didn’t seem applicable. Anyway, if Reka was a big-G God, I was sunk. There were more pages concerning the trickster hero Mui trying to permanently secure immortality from the Goddess of Night and failing badly, but that didn’t seem right either.

  My heart thudded.

  Hidden in an asterisked hyperlink on one of the Mui stories, there was a brief note referring to the long-lived, fair-skinned, bright-haired fairy people who lived in the mists, and created great magic with their songs.

  ‘Yes!’ I crowed, and stabbed my finger at the screen.

  ‘Do you mind?’ the woman next to me snapped, the beads in her dark braids clicking against each other as she whipped her head around.

  ‘Sorry,’ I whispered, and tried to keep further yelps of triumph internal.

  ALL READY NOW

  I PRINTED OUT A LIST of texts that looked promising and took the stairs down to the fourth floor two at a time. I was terrified and excited, and incapable of waiting for anything, much less the slow library elevators.

  I slowed my mad dash to a fast walk when I pushed open the heavy fire door. The desks lining the walls and clustered in the open spaces between rows of shelves were packed with harried people finishing assignments and staring blankly at heavy books, and, at one desk, huddled up and crying quietly over her Japanese text. This would be me, in a year.

  Well, hopefully not the crying.

  Hunching with my arms at my sides, in a vain attempt to be less intrusive, I made my way between desks and bags and legs tangled uncomfortably around chairs to the right section.

  The bright red hair shone in the fluorescent lights, looking even more halo-like than usual. Mark was sitting slumped at a desk beside a window at the very end of the Folklore row, past the shelves on Mori and Polynesian Mythology. Something flared hot and glad in my stomach, even above my resentment that he wasn’t in uniform. He hadn’t lied to me this time. And he’d washed his hair.

  I tiptoed up and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Hi,’ I whispered.

  He twisted, and the anger in his face drove me back a step. His bruises had developed nicely overnight, decorating his lips and chin in shades of blue and purple, edging toward black in the middle.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he demanded tightly. ‘You said you—’ He waved at the stacks. ‘This isn’t a game!’

  ‘I’ve been researching,’ I said, confused.

  ‘No, you haven’t! I’ve been here since it opened!’

  I snapped my jaw shut and thrust the sheaf of papers in my hand into his chest, a little harder than I’d meant to. He rocked in his chair, automatically clutching at them. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘I was researching,’ I snapped. ‘With databases and search engines. It’s the twenty-first century, Mark! And you haven’t been at the library since it opened, because I was waiting outside when they opened the bloody door!’

  ‘Shut UP!’ an anguished male voice howled from the stacks.

  Mark ignored him. ‘So what did you find?’ His tone was still terse, but there was a pink stain spreading across his high cheekbones, and the paper in his hands shook like leaves in a breeze.

  This was more important than my temper. I swallowed my anger, and carefully sounded out the syllables. ‘She’s . . . pa-tu-pa-i-a-re-he.’

  Mark took a deep breath. ‘Yes!’ he said. ‘Patupaiarehe. Yes.’

  Satisfaction stretched my face into a grin.

  Mark touched his parted lips with two fingers, eyes blank and unbelieving. ‘I can say it,’ he said, and burst into tears.

  Girls crying quietly in the library before exams mightn’t be so unusual; a boy sobbing noisily was attracting a lot of attention. Mark gasped and shook, and didn’t seem to be able to stop. Worried about librarian interference, I hustled him into the elevator and headed for the eleventh floor, under the hope it would be less crowded.

  Fortunately, a clump of girls in headscarves cleared out of one of the group-study rooms just as we arrived. I shoved him in before the next group could arrive. When they did, I didn’t even have to come up with an excuse – the three boys took one look at the tears streaming down Mark’s face and backed away, looking more appalled than annoyed.

  I sat at the wide table in the middle of the tiny room. From this vantage point, I could see most of the city’s west side, and the farmland beyond, out to the hazy outline of the Southern Alps.

  Behind me, Mark hiccuped a few times and drew in some long breaths. I gave him another minute, staring at the misted mountains, before I turned to face him.

  ‘Okay?’ I asked.

  He blew his nose. ‘Yeah. Sorry.’ He didn’t look sorry. He clutched the printouts and smiled as if I were some sort of dazzling divinity – Athena giving Perseus her bright bronze shield, maybe. Or Mui beating the sun into submission so that his family could have enough light.

  ‘She really is?’ I said. ‘A Mori fairy?’

  He shook his head. ‘Fairy’s an English word. She’s patupaiarehe. Or you could say trehu or tiramka, or one of the other names. There are different stories. And they’re not Mori. They’re not human at all.’

  ‘What does she want from Kevin?’


  ‘The same thing she wanted from his great-uncle. The one who vanished.’

  ‘Robert Waldgrave?’ I gasped, feeling my way toward the answers. ‘Well, what was that?’

  ‘She had his child,’ he said, and touched his breastbone. I stared at him – the pale skin, the thick red hair, so like his mother’s – and was unable to form a single coherent question from the dozens crowding my head.

  I could feel my own face going peculiar, and very red. I tried a few responses out in my head, but settled for, ‘She wants another child.’

  ‘At least one.’

  ‘Ambitious. And what happens to Kevin?’

  He grimaced and held my eyes.

  I thought of Mark’s father – Kevin’s great-uncle – ranting on the steps of the cathedral; weeping and mad outside my dorm. My fists clenched. ‘No.’

  ‘We’re going to stop her,’ Mark said. His voice was grim, but so earnest he sounded oddly young. I suddenly realised I had no guarantee he was young. Reka looked only a few years older than me, but if she’d been around since Robert Waldgrave had disappeared . . . that was just before the Second World War.

  And Mark was her son.

  The wariness must have showed on my face, because he stiffened, then sighed. ‘Believe me, I’m not on her side.’

  ‘I don’t have much choice but to trust you,’ I said, which was entirely true, but probably not very comforting.

  Mark stared at the ceiling for a moment, then drummed his fingers against the table. ‘Okay. Some history, then. She’s of a species that made New Zealand their home centuries before humans settled here. When humans started migrating, her people withdrew almost entirely to the mists.’

  ‘First question,’ I said, raising my hand, and he nodded.

  ‘The mists are . . . sort of a real place and sort of not,’ he said. ‘They’re connected to real places, in the bush and mountains and by the sea. Patupaiarehe can go deep into the mists and move through them, but others can’t unless they’re very powerful, or have something very powerful. And . . .’ he hesitated. ‘They’re real places to patupaiarehe. They make them real out of their belief. But if you go in and you don’t know what you’ll find, you could find yourself in any kind of place. You bring your own history, your own mythology with you.’