“Good evening, Alastair,” Samuel said, and the familiarity in Samuel’s voice was like a dagger in Peter’s back.
Someone called from across the room. A group of kids were leaning against the wall. Samuel walked over to join them.
“Could I offer you a drink?”
“Thank you, yes.” God, yes.
A table near the door was covered with plates of canapés and bottles of wine. Bridwell poured two glasses, handed one to Peter and raised his own in a toast. “To new beginnings.”
The wine was really very good, and strong. Peter’s head began to spin after a couple of sips.
Fullerton pulled himself away from the wall and wrapped his arms around Samuel’s shoulders. Peter expected Samuel to flinch, but he leaned in to the hug and pounded Fullerton on the back as if they’d been best friends for years.
Fullerton said something and all the boys, including Samuel, burst out laughing. Peter wondered if he’d been wrong about the older boy. And if he’d been wrong about Fullerton, perhaps he’d been wrong about everything. The image of Samuel’s torn and bloodied shirt rose again in his mind, but it suddenly seemed far away and unimportant.
Peter raised his glass again. “To St. Enoch’s.”
The wine was really very good.
Bridwell walked him around the room and made introductions. Peter smiled but wasn’t capable of much more. It might have been the hum of conversation, but Peter struggled to make out the names and professions Bridwell rattled off. This one was a newscaster. That one had just retired from a twenty-year political career. There were lawyers, doctors, and members of the boards of the largest companies on the New Zealand Stock Exchange. Bridwell just kept moving him from one handshake to another. The smiles didn’t reach their eyes. There was an excess of teeth. And suddenly Peter’s head felt far too heavy. He took a step back, stumbled, fell against the wall.
“Are you okay?”
Peter blinked. Bridwell was leaning over him, a concerned expression on his face.
“I’m… Yeah. Fine. Just tired. Good wine.” He looked at his glass and was surprised to see it was already empty.
Bridwell nodded. “I haven’t given you the grand tour yet, have I?”
Peter shook his head.
“Come on then,” Bridwell said. “A walk might clear your head a little.”
He looked back as they left the gym. Samuel was still laughing with his friends.
The cold air hit him as soon as they were out the door.
Bridwell set out towards the playing fields at a brisk pace. Peter walked faster, struggling to keep up. When he reached the middle of the field Bridwell stopped. “Beautiful, aren’t they? There’s so much light pollution in Auckland, but out here you can still see a few. I’m sure you’re used to a far less polluted sky out in the country.”
Peter looked up. There was a halo of light from houses on the other side of the fields, but if he looked straight up he could see a few stars: the Southern Cross, Orion’s belt.
“It’s funny” Peter said. “I never really thought to look up.”
Bridwell nodded. “We get so tied up in the minutiae of life. I’m the same. Whenever I’m working late I come out here before I head home. To remind me what’s really important.”
“The stars?”
Bridwell smiled. “What about you, Mister Wilson? What’s the most important thing in your life?”
Peter didn’t have to think about it. “Samuel. There’s nothing else now. I’d do anything for him.” Peter was surprised to hear the words tumble out of him, even though they were true. The fog might have faded from his head, but he was obviously still feeling the effects of the wine.
“I understand. I feel the same way about the students.”
The school chapel was on the other side of the playing fields. “The chapel is older than the school,” Bridwell said. “In fact, it’s even older than the monastery that was here before the school. It was built in 1865. Back then it would have been the only stone building for miles. The stars must have been spectacular.”
Bridwell produced a key from his pocket and placed it in an ancient lock. The door opened with a creak. “Sorry,” he said. “I keep meaning to ask one of the caretakers to oil that. A five-minute job, but I never seem to remember. Something more important always crops up.”
They stepped through the door into darkness.
Bridwell flicked on a torch. Peter couldn’t see much of the interior, just the backs of wooden pews and the shadow of an altar at the front. Bridwell waved the torch towards the wall. Hidden in a small alcove were steps leading down. “Be careful here,” Bridwell said. “Bit of a Health and Safety nightmare, I’m afraid.”
Bridwell started down and Peter followed. He couldn’t see anything apart from Bridwell’s back and the tiniest of lights from the torch. The air grew colder. There was a damp smell that reminded him of iron.
“Ah. Here we are.”
Peter felt the last stair. He stepped down onto rough, uneven rock. They seemed to be in a cave.
Bridwell turned off the torch.
“Good one,” Peter said. “Could you turn the light on again before I trip and break my neck?”
He couldn’t hear Bridwell at all. He waited, concentrating on the dark, but the only sound was his own breathing.
“Fine,” Peter said. “If you’re going to be a dick, I’ll see you outside.” He turned around, stretching out his foot for the step, but he stumbled against the wall.
He had to be close to the stairs. He reached into his pocket for his phone. The screen was so bright it nearly blinded him. He winced and waved the phone across the wall, but it only showed what some deep part of him already knew. There was no staircase.
He followed the line of the wall, looking for an explanation. His fingers found the answer before the light did: a metal door, flush with the surrounding rock. So Bridwell had lead him down here, then silently backed away and closed the door. “Missed your calling,” Peter muttered. “You should have been a comedian.”
He refused to panic. He wasn’t going to give Bridwell the satisfaction of a freak out. “You private school people are all the same,” he muttered. “Just a bunch of wankers.”
He took a few steps away from the wall. It was a big space. The light from his phone screen didn’t reach the ceiling.
He was surprised to find his phone still had a signal. There weren’t many numbers on it. He selected Lisa and hit dial. His phone beeped and connected. Something buzzed on the other side of the room and Peter saw a light. Bridwell pulled a phone from his pocket, stared at the screen for a moment, then hit a button. Peter’s phone disconnected.
“You would have been proud of her,” Bridwell said. “She put up a good fight. She screamed when Luther dragged her to the car. If there had been anyone else around, or if the bus hadn’t been late, she might have made things complicated for us.”
“Where is she?” Peter couldn’t hide the tremor in his voice.
Bridwell dropped Lisa’s phone on the floor. The screen went black as it crunched under his heel. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
A hand grabbed Peter’s wrist and his phone slipped from his grip. The screen flashed once as it clattered across the floor, and in that instant he saw the others surrounding him.
“You can scream too, if you want.” The voice in his ear was barely a whisper, but Peter recognised it. Fullerton. He struggled uselessly. The boy was stronger than he looked.
“The chosen see visions sometimes,” Bridwell said. “Tell me, Mister Wilson, have you experienced any strange dreams lately?”
There was light now, just a little. Two students stepped towards him, each holding a small candle. They looked like altar boys, except they weren’t in white vestments. They wore heavy robes, deep red, except where age had faded them to a pallid grey.
&nb
sp; “I know we seem like—what did you call us? A bunch of wankers, but we’re proud of our ways. They burn in us, just as they did in our Founder.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Saint Enoch was the mother of Saint Kentigern, the daughter of a Scottish king.”
“I didn’t know you were a student of religion.”
“I Googled it.”
“Ah. Well. It’s a common misapprehension. Our school is named for Enoch Bowen, the greatest of all saints, though not a Catholic one. A great man, and an endless source of wisdom. He gives us so much and asks for so little in return.”
He heard shuffling. Something brushed against the back of his legs. People were on their hands and knees behind him. Fullerton and another boy pushed him gently backwards until he was lying across the backs of children.
“Don’t feel too bad, Mister Wilson. It’s not your fault. What with your wife’s unfortunate situation, no close friends, no family except a sister who won’t be missed, there was nothing you could do. You were a sparrow in a hurricane from the moment we delivered the letter.”
Another robed figure emerged from the darkness.
It was Samuel.
“You don’t need to worry. I will look after your son,” Bridwell said. “I’ve never seen a child adapt so quickly. There’s no telling what he’ll accomplish when he leaves school armed with everything he’ll learn from us. From them.”
Something moved just beyond the circle of light. At first Peter thought it was Bridwell, but the shape was too tall and thin, a shadow without a man to cast it, darker than its surroundings. He turned his head and even in the absence of light he could see several more shadows. They loomed over the children like expectant parents.
Samuel held a long dagger with a curved blade. Peter searched Samuel’s face and found no trace of the boy he’d been a week ago. He thought again of the shirt he’d found in Samuel’s room. It had been Samuel’s shirt. Had it been Lisa’s blood?
Samuel climbed on top of Peter, the boy’s knees digging into Peter’s chest. He struggled to breathe.
Samuel raised the dagger above his head.
When the blade caught the candlelight, it shone like a star.
THE SHADOW OVER
TAREHU COVE
Tracie McBride
Renee’s stomach turned as her wife Marika threw their little hatchback into the turns on the narrow country road. They were halfway to Marika’s family marae to attend a tangi, and it had just occurred to Renee that she’d never attended a funeral. Of course, she had known grief and loss, from losing childhood pets to a handful of heartbreaks from failed relationships prior to meeting Marika, but her friends had always enjoyed robust good health and fortune, and, incredibly, there had been no deaths in her family since she was a baby. Accompanying Marika to farewell her grandmother, not only did she have to contend with the unfamiliar protocol of a three day tangi in the company of mostly strangers, but in supporting her wife in her grief, she would be navigating treacherous waters. Not one for extravagant displays of emotion at the best of times, Marika tended to retreat inside herself when enduring great stress or turmoil, like a wounded animal hiding in a cave, and it was Renee’s job to venture in after her and coax her back out—preferably without getting bitten in the process. If she were to be honest with herself, Marika’s guardedness was partly what drew Renee to her; she had been both challenged by her reserve and rewarded when she became one of the elite few to break through it.
Renee glanced at her wife in profile, Marika’s expression inscrutable, and her queasiness intensified. For better or for worse, that’s what she had signed up for, hadn’t she? She looked back to the road and braced herself for another blind corner.
Renee barely knew Marika’s grandmother, and found the tangi emotionally exhausting. She could only imagine how hard it was for Marika. She’d been uncomfortable at the thought of sleeping in the same room as a dead body, but that apprehension was put to rest with more practical concerns of sharing her sleeping space with dozens of snoring, farting strangers. She slept lightly, waking often, while the songs and speeches carried on through the night.
Occasionally during the day she wandered into the kitchen, picked up a tea towel or a potato peeler and made vague efforts to help out, but mostly she made an effort to stay away from the others. Marika’s family wasn’t openly hostile or deliberately rude, but they had a way of flowing around and away from her, making space for her only temporarily, and grudgingly, as if she were a foreign body cast into the stream of their busy lives.
The morning of the interment dawned misty and unseasonably cool. Renee prepared herself as best she could in the shower block, peering into the mirror above the hand basins to apply makeup. They changed shoes for the walk up the paddock to the cemetery. Marika took Renee’s hand, the first prolonged touch they’d shared in a couple of days, and they took up a position near the head of the funeral procession. By the time they reached the graveside, Renee’s palm was sweaty in Marika’s grip.
Somebody began to keen, a mournful sound that made Renee uncomfortable. Marika rested her head on Renee’s shoulder and relaxed enough to share her bottled emotions. She sobbed, her tears soaking into Renee’s suit jacket. The bush-shrouded hills, the swirling mist, the moist air carrying a hint of salt from the coast, so alien from the diesel and dust and concrete of the city she was used to, threatened to drown her. As the wailing intensified with more women taking up the call, and the priest intoned his final words, Renee swayed on her feet. Marika’s arm tensed to keep her upright, and for a moment it was Marika having to prop her up, not the other way around.
With the formalities over, there was still some business to which Marika needed to attend. Renee managed to persuade her to book into a motel rather than prevail on the further hospitality of family. There was only one choice within a fifty-kilometre radius, a little sixteen-room affair adjacent to the local pub. Both establishments looked like they were stuck in a 1970s time warp. While Marika did her thing—she could not be persuaded to let Renee tag along—Renee read, napped, grazed on stale packaged snacks from the service station nearby, and made a desultory attempt at exercise by assuming a few yoga poses, before abandoning the endeavour for want of a yoga mat. The prospect of a pub dinner that night had never seemed more enticing.
Carrying her third mixed drink back from the bar, Renee approached the table and found Marika talking with another woman. Renee saw the newcomer brush a fingertip across the back of her wife’s hand. Renee was drunk and in no mood to behave civilly. Rather than risk making an arse of herself, she retreated to a corner of the bar to nurse her pride.
A thin old woman nearby was staring at her. Renee was surprised when the woman spoke.
“You studied at Miskatonic University.” It was a statement, not a question, delivered in a slurred yet surprisingly authoritative voice.
Renee blinked, wondering how this stranger would know that. The old woman held out her hand and Renee felt obliged to hold it.
“They call me Kitty, Aunty Kitty to my face, Crazy Kitty behind my back.” Her grin spread further, her eyes sinking into folds of skin, her body shaking with soundless laughter. “I was visited by bigwigs from Miskatonic once, ya know. When I was a kid. Want to know why?” Her demeanour shifted, no longer jovial. She leaned close to Renee and fixed her with an almost desperate stare. Renee smelled alcohol, unwashed flesh, and a hint of cow shit.
“Umm…” Renee leaned away and cast her gaze over to Marika, hoping that she might come to her rescue, but Marika was still talking to the other woman, oblivious to Renee’s absence. Kitty waved a near-empty glass under Renee’s nose, and she was grateful for the comparatively wholesome scent of yeast and hops.
“Buy me a drink, and I’ll tell ya.”
Her wife’s companion whispered in Marika’s ear, eliciting a laugh and a playful shoulder bump. It looked like nobody was
going to save her from Crazy Kitty any time soon. With a resigned nod, Renee took the proffered vessel and headed for the bar.
Renee had found the term: “non-US ethnic minorities only” somewhat patronizing for a Kiwi teenager with limited life experience and modest family means. Nevertheless, she convinced herself that a scholarship to an overseas university was too great an opportunity to disregard. She had been delighted to learn her application was successful, and she spent the months between acceptance and arrival in Arkham fantasizing about how amazing her stay was going to be.
Even before she’d arrived at Arkham she made a new friend, a young Indigenous Australian woman named Jida whom she met at the bus terminal, and who was attending Miskatonic on the same scholarship. Alongside this new companion, her arrival in the university town built beside the Miskatonic River, with its Gothic architecture, was just as she’d pictured it, but that was about where fantasy and reality parted ways. They’d barely stepped off the bus when they were set upon by rich white boys (that being the dominant demographic of the student body) to join this club or that, most of which were esoteric in nature. One tall, earnest young man with an abnormally high forehead strode up to Jida.
“Are you the Māori girl taking marine biology?” He pronounced it ‘may-OR-rye’, and Renee suppressed a wince; no doubt he wouldn’t be the only one to mangle the word. Jida pointed over her shoulder at Renee.
“You’ve got to join the cryptozoology club,” he said to Renee, looming over her. “You simply must.” Then, to Jida. “You too, I suppose, maybe, if you want.”
“Why not?” Jida had said with a shrug and a smile. “It could be good for a laugh.”
At first the two brown-skinned women from the Antipodes were the subjects of intense scrutiny. The other members grilled them on various aspects of their culture, in particular their knowledge of the creatures of their myths and legends. Jida strung them along for months, spinning fanciful tales that bore little resemblance to real Dreamtime stories, and weaving in hints of extra-terrestrial encounters and alien abductions that seemed to greatly excite the group. Renee lacked the imagination to play the same game, all her answers being variations on: “That’s just a story—it’s not meant to be taken literally,” and, “I don’t know anything about that.” If the truth be known, she found the earnestness of the other members, and their deep longing to believe, a childish and unnerving trait in young adults who were meant to be aspiring scientists and scholars. Yet she lingered in the club long after the others lost interest in her, for reasons she was never fully able to articulate.
Cthulhu Land of the Long White Cloud AU Page 13
