The Gathering Read online

  Puffin Books

  THE GATHERING

  Isobelle Carmody began the first of her highly acclaimed Obernewtyn Chronicles while she was still at high school, working on it while completing a Bachelor of Arts, and then a journalism cadetship. The series, and her short stories, established her at the forefront of fantasy writing in Australia.

  She is now the award-winning author of several novels and many short stories for children and adults.

  Isobelle divides her time between her home on the Great Ocean Road in Australia and her travels abroad with her partner and daughter.

  SERIES BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Obernewtyn Chronicles:

  Obernewtyn

  The Farseekers

  Ashling

  The Keeping Place

  The Stone Key

  The Legendsong:

  Darkfall

  Darksong

  The Gateway Trilogy

  Billy Thunder and the Night Gate

  The Winter Door

  The Legend of Little Fur

  Little Fur

  A Fox Called Sorrow

  A Mystery of Wolves

  A Riddle of Green

  OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Scatterlings

  Green Monkey Dreams

  Greylands

  This Way Out (with Steve Taylor)

  Alyzon Whitestarr

  THE GATHERING

  ISOBELLE CARMODY

  Puffin Books

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Australia)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Group (Canada)

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  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd

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  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

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  Penguin Group (NZ)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Penguin Books Australia, 1993

  Copyright © Isobelle Carmody, 1993

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  ISBN: 978-1-74-228399-9

  puffin.com.au

  Evil comes in many shades: fire-red, uniform-blue but love comes in white, and transcends the dark

  For Danny

  and the Regulators

  In memory of Bruss

  This work was assisted by a writers’ fellowship from the Australia Council, the Federal Government’s arts funding and advisory body.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to Erica Irving, for demanding the best I could give, and then some; to Kay Ronai, for stepping into the breech; to Anne Spudvilas for the perfect Nathanial and to Ann Wojczuk for the perfect cover. And especially to John Marsden whose 11th hour conversation saved the manuscript from the flame and me from despair.

  CONTENTS

  PRELUDE

  ONE

  THE CHOOSING

  TWO

  THE GATHERING

  THREE

  THE FORGING

  FOUR

  THE BINDING

  EPILOGUE

  PRELUDE

  Sometimes you get a feeling about a thing that you can’t explain; a premonition of wrongness. Mostly you ignore it the way you would a little kid tugging at your sleeve. You think: what do kids know anyhow?

  We drove into the outskirts of Cheshunt at the tail end of an early autumn day, cold and crisp and fading to gold. Sunshine slanting through the car window rested in my lap, warm and heavy as a cat.

  I was sleepy and a bit woozy from reading my way through a stack of Phantom comics. As a rule I am not the kind of guy who goes in for stories about superheroes from Krypton or talking ducks and dogs. I like National Geographic, but I was reading these comics because the solicitor had sent them in a box along with a lot of my father’s things that had not sold at auction.

  My mother thought comics were rubbishy. She only read factual books and medical journals. I had just been a little kid when my parents were divorced, and they had not kept contact but I always had a clear picture of him in my mind as a big serious man. The comics were a surprise and made me wonder what there was about him that I did not know. Naturally I had tried asking my mother but as usual she said she couldn’t remember what he used to read, and that it was A Long Time Ago. She drives me crazy the way she acts so secretive about him, especially now.

  Suddenly she coughed in the dry fussy way she has of getting my attention before she says something. I waited for her to go on again with her usual speech of us making a new start, but she just nodded sideways.

  ‘That’s your new school, Nathanial.’

  Your school, I thought, because she chose it, just like she chose all the others. Her face had a closed look and she was staring straight ahead, concentrating on the road.

  So I looked.

  The school was a square, slab-grey complex set on an asphalt island in the middle of a common, running away to dry, bare-looking flatlands. She had told me Cheshunt was close to the sea. ‘You can go to the beach on weekends,’ she had said, as if it were across the road from our new house. Except there was no sign of the sea and the skyline bristled with pipes belching smoke into the sky.

  Closer to the school, I noticed there were no trees or shrubs around the buildings. In fact, Three North looked a lot like a concentration camp. The few bushes along the roadside were stunted and shrivelled, with empty branches on the side that bore the brunt of the gritty wind flowing across the low hills and over the school. Cold air blew through the window, a bitter blast straight from the arctic.

  I lifted my hand to close the window, but it was shut. I looked around but all of the windows were wound up. Even the vents were closed. There was no way that wind could get into the car, yet I could see the fine downy hairs on my arm flatten under its force.

  I looked at my mother, who wore only a light, sleeveless shirt. She did not notice the wind, though her hair was whipping into her face and eyes.

  Fear crept through skin and bone and folded itself in my chest as I looked back at the school and felt that wind; the same kind of shapeless terror I felt when she took me to look at my father in his coffin before they closed it and put him in the ground.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ she had said nervously, after doing a song and dance to get me there. It bothered her that I asked her so many questions about him. Her wanting me to see the body was so bizarre that I guessed she had this stupid idea that I would forget about him once I saw that he was really dead and gone. But when it came to it, she seemed jittery and uneasy. Maybe she was a bit scared herself, of what we would see. I went forward, drawn by dre
ad and morbid curiosity.

  He had been much thinner than I remembered. It seemed as if death had shrunken him, sucked the bigness out of him. His hair had gone straight and his limbs were stiff as a dried-flower arrangement.

  ‘He’s so small,’ my mother had said in a shocked whisper, as if he was sick instead of dead; as if loud voices would disturb him.

  Looking down at that strange, still face, I had barely been able to control the watery horror in my gut. I was suddenly terrified of being so close to a dead body; terrified that by staying there I might somehow catch death.

  That’s how I felt, staring out of the car window at Three North; like I was looking at something wrong and unnatural; something dead; something bad that might be catching. Might get up and come after me.

  And the old nightmare seemed to hover about me, almost real, one stage from visible; the nightmare of running through a dark, wild forest with a monster after me. A shambling, leering thing with a shark’s smile, whose reeking breath filled the air around me; the monster that was, since the funeral, sometimes my father, and above, a bloody, full moon riding high in the black night.

  But I just sat, still as a bone, tongue glued to the roof of my mouth, eyes watering from the force of the wind.

  The car glided around the corner and I let the memory of what had happened slip through the fingers of my mind like fine sand.

  Because a feeling like that has no more business being in my life than a dead father.

  ONE

  THE CHOOSING

  1

  ‘Why can’t I just board and go back to Nelson Grammar?’ I said, trying to keep my voice even in the lounge-room quiet. She stops listening the minute you raise your voice.

  ‘You know why. There isn’t enough money.’

  ‘But I could board with Gran. She said I could.’

  Her expression froze up. ‘You wrote and discussed this with your grandmother?’

  I realised I had made a tactical mistake. She had a real chip on her shoulder about taking charity, especially from her mother. ‘She suggested it,’ I lied.

  ‘I won’t have you going to her behind my back.’

  ‘I didn’t go behind your back. She asked me. She’s my grandmother.’

  ‘She’s my mother and she doesn’t need the worry of a teenager at her age. You’ll make new friends at Three North. You haven’t given it a chance.’

  New friends? I never had any old ones. We never stayed anywhere long enough. In fact, my grandmother was the closest thing I had to a best friend. Besides, I couldn’t relate to kids my own age.

  ‘Why bother?’ I asked bitterly. ‘You’ll just up and move us in another year like you always do. Why should I keep having to move just because you do?’

  ‘Don’t take that tone with me, Nathanial,’ she said coldly. ‘You think I enjoy moving so often? I do what’s best for us both.’

  I could feel my temper rising because yes, I did think she enjoyed moving. Otherwise why would she do it? Another second and I would start yelling and that would mean the silent treatment. She is good at silence, a real grand master. I have tried the same tactic but I always end up talking before she notices I’m being silent, so why bother?

  I stared past her at the photographs huddled on the end of the bookshelf. Right at the back was the only one we have of my father. He is holding me, a bald baby in a lemon bunny-rug. My mother is beside him in a pale dress, her hands folded in front of her like a praying mantis.

  I noticed something I had not noticed before. The baby me had its tiny bone-white fingers wrapped around my father’s thumb. Maybe he looks so troubled because of the strength of that baby grip; as if in that second, it struck him that I would not be a baby for ever, that I would grow up, stretch out into a man, die.

  The photograph came in the box with the comics. My mother had none of my father and had seemed shocked to see this one. She had kept all the wedding photos except the ones showing him, and the lack of a groom makes it look as if she married a ghost. I don’t know what she did with the others. She might have burned them or, more likely, she’d put them in a neat pile in the rubbish. I guess she must have hated him for leaving her. Maybe she wished he was dead.

  Sometimes wishes come true.

  ‘This is a good safe neighbourhood.’

  ‘I don’t know anyone,’ I said. I hate it, I thought.

  ‘You’ve only been here two weeks. Why don’t you join the school youth club? Or the football team?’

  ‘I don’t want to join any groups. I want to go to Nelson. I liked the teachers and I got good marks.’

  She frowned slightly, studying me as if I were one of her patients. ‘What are you trying to prove?’

  I just looked at her.

  ‘Nathanial, exactly what is it that you don’t like about Three North?’ Now she has her reasonable judge face on. Give me some evidence, her eyes say.

  ‘It stinks,’ I said defiantly. I meant that literally. It did stink. There was an abattoir up in the low hills behind the school and when the wind blew the wrong way it smelled as if the whole place was rotting. I couldn’t believe that sick, smoky stench came from killing cows. She said I would get used to it but it’s not the kind of thing you get used to. Even when the wind doesn’t blow at all you can smell it because the canteen pasties taste of it.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she snapped.

  I shook my head, knowing I did not have the kind of proof it would take to change her mind about staying in Cheshunt. I hardly knew myself why I disliked the place so much.

  I turned away. ‘I’m going out,’ I said dully. For a split second I had the old longing for my father to come bursting through the door telling me that he wanted me to come live with him, that he was taking me.

  ‘Dinner will be ready in half an hour so don’t go far.’ She sounded satisfied, as if something had been resolved.

  I closed the door quietly behind me and went round the back, whistling up The Tod. He is a chihuahua crossed with some other small dog, but he looks more like a tiny fox. He came up to me, wagging his feathery tail and tilting his head quizzically.

  ‘Walk?’ I said.

  He responded with a flip of excitement, jumping up and down on his hind legs and generally telling me in dog body language what a great idea he thought this would be.

  ‘Good Tod,’ I murmured, closing the gate behind us.

  I looked both ways along the street. It was just on twilight and everything had an unfocused look. In one direction was the milk bar and a video shop. The other way was the park.

  The old lady who ran the milk bar down the road told me a boy disappeared from the park a few years back. Some nut took him away, dressed him in pyjamas, shaved his head, then left him in the mall. They never got the man. Somehow it didn’t surprise me that this sort of thing had happened in Cheshunt. I decided to tell my mother that story the next time she started telling me how law abiding it was. She really flipped out over stories about abducted or murdered kids.

  Without really deciding where to walk, I started to head that way, still thinking about the park. It was so bland, I found it hard to believe the old woman’s story. The park was just a neat, mown block with a couple of swings, a monkey bar, and a public toilet. There were only about ten trees in the whole place. It was like a thousand parks you’d find in any small suburb anywhere in the country.

  Nothing ever happened there, though the two neighbouring suburbs were always in the paper because this gang beat up a man or that kid robbed a 7 Eleven store.

  But what could I say to my mother? Cheshunt is too perfect? She would say I was being ridiculous and she would be right.

  I sighed.

  The Tod was sniffing his way industriously along the fence-line, stopping every few minutes to pee, marking the way home like Hänsel and Gretel. I had taught the dog to be a homing dog and I guess he used his own scent to guide him. It had been part of a school project on conditioning.

  The Nelson Grammar teacher
had told us about these experiments based on research by this guy called Pavlov. They had trained dogs by putting them in boxes with food dispensers and levers. If the dogs ate or drank from the wrong dispenser, they would get an electric shock. Aversion therapy is what it was called. It means that after a while, if you hurt a dog every time it does a thing, it soon stops doing that thing. And if you ring a bell every time you hurt the dog, after a while it will react to the bell as if it was the pain.

  That Pavlov was clever but he was cruel too. An animal would never think of hurting you just to see what happens. Rather than using aversion therapy, I had shown that you could train a dog just as well with pats and dog biscuits.

  The Grammar teacher said I should try to keep more detached in an experiment.

  By the time we reached the park it was dark and the street lights had flicked on. Two women were walking a fat dachshund on the other side of the street. They walked close together, taking quick careful steps, as if they thought the ground might open up and swallow them.

  The Tod noticed them and barked a challenge. The women looked over in startled fright and the dachshund gave a hoarse cough as the woman holding its lead tugged on it so hard that she nearly throttled the poor thing.

  That was Cheshunt for you. Everybody acted like they were afraid they were being watched. You would see people look behind themselves as if they feared they were being followed.

  The Tod dragged at the lead and we crossed the street to the park. He stopped suddenly and bent to sniff the grass then whined urgently, as if he wanted me to get down there and have a smell too.

  Dogs have a very acute sense of smell, like bears. But they can only see in black and white. I guess as far as The Tod was concerned, humans smell in black and white.