Buddha leaned his full weight on his heel, grinding it into my foot. The pain was excruciating.
‘What’s going on?’
It was Nissa. She wore baggy tracksuit pants and a pilled brown jumper. Her red hair sticking up in all directions and lit from behind looked like a crown of flame.
‘What’s it to you?’ Buddha sneered.
‘Nothing, so long as you get your fat bum out of my way, Lardo,’ she said savagely, staring right in his eyes.
I held my breath but after a long tense minute, Buddha backed down, stepping aside as Nissa pushed between us. She flashed me a disgusted, impatient look. ‘Go on. Get out of here.’
Feeling gutless and ashamed, I limped away, wishing she hadn’t seen me act so scared and cowardly. Why couldn’t I have stood up to Buddha the way she had? First Indian had rescued me and now Nissa.
‘You can’t run for ever …’ Buddha shouted after me.
My foot was bruised badly but I crossed the oval as quickly as I could. The air stank. It seemed incredible to me that a school had been built so close to an abattoir. Worst of all, first period was sport which meant being out in the stink and breathing it in.
It also meant facing Mr Karle. The only good thing was that Indian was in the class as well and though we dared not talk to one another, it made me feel less alone.
We were supposed to play basketball, and Mr Karle split us arbitrarily into two groups, ignoring muffled moans. He seemed preoccupied which was fine by me. I kept seeing flashes of him walking through the night with the dogs, and then there was the way his room had iced up when I was in there.
Three North had no indoor courts except the assembly hall which doubled for drama classes, and took precedence over sport for the space. So we had to play outside. It was sunny despite the cold, and might not have been so bad except for the smell.
‘Ugh,’ I grunted, getting a blast.
‘What’s up?’ a boy asked me.
I stared at him incredulously. ‘The smell.’
He looked at me as if I was mad. ‘I can’t smell anything.’
‘Begin,’ Mr Karle said.
I looked around and my heart started to race as I noticed his eyes on me. The circle in my pocket felt warm and I wondered if the heat might be some kind of warning. After all, it had felt hot when Mr Karle turned up while I was in his office.
The ball came my way and I automatically jumped for it, gasping as someone elbowed me hard in the chest. I landed hard on my sore foot and went down.
‘Foul!’ someone else shouted.
‘It’s not a foul you idiot. That’s his own team.’ An argument broke out and was quashed.
‘Are you all right, Mr Delaney?’ Mr Karle asked. He always called everybody Mr or Miss on the field.
I nodded, still gagging. Mr Karle’s eyes bored into mine. Are you one of them? his eyes seemed to ask.
He turned on his heel. ‘Play on.’
The boy who had elbowed me gave me a flat empty stare that made my blood run cold.
Indian gave me a warning look too, but there was nothing he could do. I started to feel scared of what Mr Karle might let happen.
Before the match was out, the same boy had trodden on my ankle, elbowed me in the eye and punched me in the back.
‘You’re out of step, buddy,’ he said, helping me off my face.
And all the while Mr Karle watched unblinkingly, his bald head gleaming in the sunlight.
‘You better do what they want,’ a girl whispered when we all took a breather.
I stared at her.
‘Everyone knows they’re out to get you. You’re not the first kid who tried to say no. If you go once they’ll leave you alone. You don’t have to do what they do.’
I felt my mouth hanging open and closed it. ‘Mr Karle can’t make me join.’ A gust of icy wind swallowed up my words, and I turned with a chilling sense of fear at the realisation that I had said his name aloud.
He was looking at me, his eyes as cold as something that had been dead for years. And then he smiled and I felt lightheaded with terror, because for a second his teeth looked sharp and pointed as a vampire’s.
Then he blinked and looked away.
The second half of the lesson was in the gym and I was relieved to get inside, out of the stench. It seemed to be getting worse rather than better, and I wondered if I would ever get used to it, like everyone else seemed to have done. I was set up for medicine-ball situps with a burly blond guy.
Mr Karle seemed to have lost interest in me and the kid that had knocked me around on the court was on the horse.
‘Ready?’ the blond guy asked, poised. Like Buddha, his eyes were glassy and red-rimmed. The similarity bothered me.
‘Hang on,’ I said.
He threw the ball as hard as he could at my head. When it connected, I actually saw stars. The last thing I heard as I passed out was someone giggling, and then I was down for the count.
I was somewhere, I was nowhere. I was conscious, but I couldn’t feel anything or see anything. I was floating in blackness. It took me a minute to realise I was drifting, or being drifted, towards a speck of whitish light. Somehow, I went from floating to walking, and I was heading for what looked like a stone wishing well. I leaned forward to see if there were any coins. Not only was the well empty of money, it was empty of water. In fact, it didn’t seem to have an inside. There was just a paleness, sort of like mist, but with more substance. It was like cloudy jello. As I watched, the jello grew darker and darker, and it began to smell like something rotten. The death smell.
Then a face looked out at me, dark and bestial with long yellowed teeth. Are you one of them? Are you one of those baaad kids? it whispered. Its eyes were dark and hugely pupiled. It looked exactly like the thing I had imagined would come out of the wardrobe and get me when I was a kid; the monster that chased me through the forest. And maybe that was real too. Maybe all the nightmares were real.
Then there was nothing and I was back in the blackness.
‘… get some water …’ A voice faded in like a station being tuned properly on the radio.
The darkness faded into light, into blobs of pink, into faces.
‘Are you all right, Mr Delaney?’ Mr Karle asked, his lips curved into a smile. His breath smelled terrible, like he had swallowed the abattoir, or maybe the whole of Cheshunt. The death smell came out of his mouth on a hot tide at me.
I was too frightened to speak. I just stared up at him. Then he smiled his happy murderer smile and straightened up.
I sat up slowly, surprised to find I could move.
Mr Karle assigned a kid to help me to sick bay, where a brisk and bored home economics teacher gave me a couple of pills and told me to lie on the narrow sick bay cot. ‘Observation,’ she said. ‘Concussion.’
‘Great,’ I muttered.
14
At lunchtime the home economics teacher told me to go to lunch and come back after, if I still felt sick. My head ached and I wouldn’t have minded some fresh air, but after what had happened in gym class, it seemed safer to go to the library.
I couldn’t stop my eyes going up to the roof in the foyer.
‘Hi, how’s the search going?’ the librarian’s assistant asked, then her eyes went to my forehead and the smile disappeared. ‘What happened?’
I reached up and felt the egg-sized bump on my head. ‘Gym accident.’
I went over to sit in the home-study section, grabbed a book and closed my eyes. They throw you out of the library if you sleep too obviously.
I jumped when someone sat down beside me, but it was only Danny.
‘Indian told me some kid creamed you good.’
I fingered the bump on my head ruefully.
‘You think the Kraken set it up?’ he asked.
I nodded, then wished I hadn’t. ‘He knew what was going to happen. So did half the other kids there.’ I thought of something else. ‘Lallie said the symbols would hide us once they were forged into
a Chain.’
Danny leaned closer. ‘Unless he already guessed about you.’
I shook my head gingerly. ‘He can’t know for sure or he wouldn’t still be trying to get me into the Gathering. But he’s suspicious so he’ll be watching and he won’t be the only one. Maybe you’d better not talk to me in the open like this. Remember what Nissa said about staying low.’
He ignored that. ‘You know what I think? I think we’re supposed to fight the Kraken.’
I had a mad vision of Danny going up with his papier mâché torch to duke it out with Mr Karle. ‘Lallie didn’t say anything about us fighting. She said we’re supposed to fix whatever’s wrong with Cheshunt. Heal it,’ I said doubtfully.
‘She said laughter was a weapon. Why would you need weapons if there wasn’t going to be a fight? I think the symbols are weapons too.’
I frowned. ‘She said the symbols were meant to show our weaknesses and once they were forged, we’re supposed to drive the dark out with them.’
Danny nodded eagerly. ‘He’s the dark. The Kraken. And he’ll try to stop us from this healing business for sure so we’ll have to fight him.’
He had remembered Lallie’s words far more clearly than I had, but still I felt he was taking the words too literally.
‘Well, what about this second forging? When is that going to happen?’
‘After the healing,’ Danny said triumphantly. ‘That’s when the Kraken’ll make his move.’
I sighed. He had his mind made up there was going to be a confrontation, but I didn’t know what to think.
‘One thing that bothers me is why us? Why not five adults?’
Danny shrugged. ‘Maybe they didn’t hear the Call. Or maybe they didn’t answer it. We did.’
‘But why did we?’
He shrugged, his eyes disinterested. The choosing was over so he couldn’t see the point in thinking about it. ‘You seen Nissa or precious Seth today?’ He sneered.
‘You don’t like him, do you?’
‘He’s a pretty boy. All show. Underneath he’s weak. I don’t trust him. And then there’s his father.’
I was startled at the venom in his tone. ‘You can’t blame him for his father.’
Danny pretended to read a book as the library assistant came over.
‘I forgot to mention it but I found an old scrapbook someone made about the school. Maybe you could use it for your assignment. It was in a box of books donated to us.’ She handed me a mouldy-smelling folder.
‘Bring it straight back to me before you leave.’ She hesitated a moment as if she was already regretting giving it to me. It was the bump on my head that was making her nervous. She thought it meant I was violent and might start ripping out the pages and eating them. I nodded and smiled and tried to look as sane as I could to reassure her and finally she went away and left me with it.
‘What’s this?’ Danny asked, peering over my shoulder.
I told him about the oral history assignment.
‘Let’s have a look then.’
I opened the folder. The edges of the paper were mouse chewed and yellowing.
‘Smells like something pissed on it,’ Danny murmured in disgust.
The front page said ‘Three North Cheshunt Secondary School’ in flowery handwriting. Underneath was written ‘Irma Heathcote’.
Inside were a collection of dark brownish photographs that looked as if they had been processed by an amateur using old developing fluid. Some had captions written in the same fancy handwriting. ‘Ellis Bell wins the long jump’ was written underneath the picture of a boy caught mid-jump above the pit, straining forward, his face screwed up with the effort. There were a lot of pictures of people dancing in couples. One showed two kids dressed in ball gown and suit laughing as they whirled around. I studied their faces and after a minute it began to look as if they were screaming rather than laughing.
I shuddered, thinking I was beginning to see something distorted and horrible about everything.
On the next page were two newspaper cuttings, yellowed and curling at the edges. One announced a fundraising fête, the other was little more than a picture and a brief caption.
‘Hey, that’s the library,’ Danny said.
He was right. It was the library building. The caption said: ‘The new Three North Cheshunt Secondary School building, constructed on the site of the old school, will be opened today by the Honorable Member for Calvin, Mr David Shropshire. Funds for the project were raised by the local community. It is hoped the refurbished school building and the return to school of local students will end the recent wave of youth-related crime sweeping the district.’ That surprised me because I had imagined the library dated from before it had become a school. Especially the way Lallie talked about it being a secret, sacred place.
But maybe she meant the site and not the building.
The other clipping was dated almost exactly two years before the first. ‘A fête will be held to help finance the rebuilding of Three North Cheshunt secondary school, destroyed in the tragic fire last month that took an elderly caretaker’s life.’
I sat back, feeling oddly uneasy. The fire and the caretaker again. And it had not happened just anywhere. It had happened in the library. I told Danny about the old murder.
‘I guess the building must have caught on fire when he fell,’ he said, sounding subdued.
I flicked through the remainder of the folder. More clippings from the Examiner and further in, pressed flowers from a nature walk and a snatch of a poem. Interestingly the poem was attributed to one of the people on my phone list, Zebediah Sikorsky. I wrote it down in my notepad. It was a soppy love poem comparing a girl to a flower with golden hair ‘that floats like buttery petals open to the sun’.
I wrote the teacher’s name down in my notes.
‘Why’d you do that?’
‘I’m going to see if I can hunt her down. She could be my interview.’
‘I thought you were going to talk to the old lady from the home?’ I had told him about Anna too.
‘Apparently she’s pretty cranky. Maybe she won’t talk to me.’
Danny shook his head. ‘I dunno how you can worry about this after last night.’
‘Takes my mind off it. Nissa said to forget about the Chain until Lallie can tell us more about what we’re supposed to do.’ That was true, but even as I said it, I knew it was more than that. There was something compelling about that old mystery.
The bell rang and Danny left the library to go to class. I went back to sick bay. Instead of the brisk home economics teacher, the school counsellor was on sick-bay duty, beaming maternally. I groaned inwardly wishing I had gone to class instead.
‘So, Nathanial, you’ve hurt your head.’ She had a slight accent.
‘I didn’t hurt it,’ I said indignantly. ‘Someone threw a medicine ball at it when I wasn’t looking.’
‘You weren’t paying attention then?’ She dabbed the lump with disinfectant. ‘Was there something on your mind?’
Rain began to fall against the sick-bay window, and in a moment the oval was blurred. Absently I thought how rain always seemed grey in autumn.
‘Sorry,’ Mrs Vellan said when I winced again. ‘You were saying you were distracted in the gym …’
‘I was fixing my cushion. The other kid thought I was ready, so he threw the ball.’
‘You’re angry about that?’ She was quick. I hadn’t been able to keep resentment out of my voice.
‘It hurt,’ I said.
‘Do you think he did it on purpose?’
My heartbeat quickened. ‘He said it was an accident.’
I closed my eyes. Maybe if she thought I was sleepy she’d leave me alone.
‘It has been hard for you to move around so much, hasn’t it, Nathanial? Settling in is difficult enough, and there is the matter of your father …’ she trailed off, expecting me to react to her knowledge, but I knew my mother had spoken to them about the car crash.
‘
Do you ever think about your father, Nathanial? Do you ever wonder why you never saw him after the divorce?’
I looked at her incredulously.
‘People do not see clearly when they are young, Nathanial. There is too much they do not know. Too much hidden from them. That is why children must learn to trust and respect their elders. The problem is that often young people think they know more than adults. Even, that they can live without them,’ she droned on. ‘This can lead them into error and grief. Into disobeying rules.’
She blinked, then smiled at me. I noticed the whites of her eyes were a dirty yellow. ‘Tell me, Nathanial, that night, when you broke the curfew, where did you go?’
‘I walked,’ I said. My heart beat too fast and loud. It sounded like one of the poison pygmies out of the Deep Woods where the Phantom lives sending out a drum message. Be-ware, be-ware.
‘We had a fight and I was mad, so I walked.’ I watched her warily as she put the disinfectant away and washed the bowl.
‘You walked, but where did you go? Did you visit someone? A friend?’ She shot a glance at me. ‘That is not the only night that you have broken the curfew, is it?’
My heart thumped because there was only one way she could know that. Buddha must have told Mr Karle I had not come home the previous night, and if Mrs Vellan knew, Mr Karle must have told her.
That meant Mrs Vellan was working with Mr Karle.
‘A couple of times I stayed with my mother at the home where she works, and came home late with her,’ I said innocently.
Frustration flared in her eyes. ‘Did you ever see anyone out when you were coming home late at night?’
I started to say no, then I had a flash of inspiration. ‘I did see someone once.’
She sat forward eagerly, unable to contain her excitement. ‘Who?’
‘I saw that school patrol kid, Buddha.’
There was a long silence.
‘Well,’ Mrs Vellan said at last. She rose and pushed the chair she had been sitting on back to the wall and left without another word.
I lay back thinking Mr Karle was using all of his resources to find out what I was up to. He was even prepared to let Buddha rough me up to make me join the Gathering.
The Gathering Page 10
