The Gathering Read online

  I decided to stick to the streets and jogged past the park to the end of the block and around the corner to Ende Crescent. From there, I could see the school in the distance and I slowed to a walk again. The security lights were on, showing disjointed angles and corners of buildings and asphalt in pools of grainy light.

  The Tod gave over sniffing the fence and sampled the air blowing from the school in an interested sort of way. I stopped beside a big, ornate fence post to tip some grit from my runner, wrestling with a temptation to go over to the school.

  ‘Hello,’ said a voice right next to my ear.

  ‘Eya!’ I yelped, jumping sideways. Then I realised the ornate fence post was just an ordinary post with a little kid sitting cross-legged on top.

  ‘Is that a dog?’ the kid asked softly.

  This was not as stupid a question as it seems. A lot of people think The Tod is a strange-looking cat or a pet fox. One kid even asked me if he was a dingo runt.

  ‘Did you get a stone in your shoe?’

  I realised I was standing there like an idiot with my shoe in my hand. I put it back on and laced it up.

  ‘I’m keeping watch,’ the kid went on in a confiding voice.

  ‘What for?’ I asked curiously.

  ‘For the monsters,’ he whispered. ‘They come out at night.’

  I grinned. ‘Out of where?’

  He pointed wordlessly to the school and I felt the hair on my neck stand up.

  ‘It’s late,’ he said, a warning note in his voice.

  ‘So?’ I demanded aggressively, because I felt stupid letting him spook me. I pushed myself off and jogged back along the street, whistling The Tod after me.

  ‘What about the curfew?’ the kid called, his voice swallowed up by the night.

  2

  That night in bed, I remembered something else.

  A girl in my science class had told me Cheshunt Park used to be a meeting place for a group of witches years back. A coven, she called it. At first, I thought she said an ‘oven’; an oven of witches. These witches were supposed to have stolen people’s pets and sacrificed them to the devil.

  Somehow in my mind, I must have got the park and the school muddled up with the abattoir because when I went to sleep I dreamed the abattoir was actually at the school, and was a front for witches; a makeshift coven where they sacrificed people’s pets, and the awful smell was not the smell of burning waste, but the smell of death. I had gone to investigate and found them sacrificing The Tod. It was one of those terrible nightmares where no matter what happens you can’t move or speak. I had woken the next morning aching all over with tension, the death smell of the dream lingering in the bedclothes.

  Walking to the school later, I was relieved to find the wind was blowing away from the school.

  Coming into Ende Crescent I noticed a couple of girls going into one of the houses carrying clipboards. All the signs of a survey. Houses around schools must get so sick of surveys and walkathons and sponsorships and raffles.

  There was a line up at the school gate with two form-five boys from the school patrol checking kids had their level badges on. There was a different colour for each year.

  As I went towards the gate queue, a girl from one of the lower forms came up to me, her hair as white blonde and fine as dandelion fluff. There was a vacant look in her face that told me there was something wrong with her, and pity stopped me shying away when she reached out to touch me.

  Her hand was icy cold and the contact gave me a tiny static shock.

  The air-raid siren went off and I started. Actually it was the school bell but it sounded exactly like the sirens out of the film of The Time Machine with Rod Taylor.

  The sirens were the signals for the cannibal Morlocks to come out and feed.

  A police car glided up to the kerb and a policeman got out of the driver’s seat. All the kids in the line stopped talking at the sight of the uniform. Maybe they thought they were going to be arrested.

  The passenger door opened and the school head prefect, Seth Paul, climbed out.

  ‘What did he do?’ asked a girl behind me in a stage whisper. I wondered too. Seth Paul was one of those golden boys who could do no wrong. He was a brain, he looked like one of those perfect guys off Coke ads and both kids and teachers liked him.

  ‘Dumbo,’ sneered a wild-haired kid called Danny Odin. ‘That’s his father: The Pig Man.’ He made an oinking noise loud enough for both Seth Paul and his policeman father to hear.

  I stifled the urge to groan aloud and tried to make myself invisible.

  Danny Odin was the school’s pet mad dog. He was one of those legendary bad kids you know about from the first day in a new school. His name was forever being called over the PA system. He was like some sort of wild kid that had lived with the wolves all his life and was not sure how humans were supposed to act.

  Every now and then he reverted to wolf. I had actually seen him bare his teeth at a teacher.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ he snarled now, pushing his face at me. His eyes were so pale they looked transparent.

  Fortunately, he was distracted as the policeman swept through the gate with his son. He was dark and handsome like Seth, but older and harder. His eyes looked like bits of stone and he passed us as if we were a clump of toadstools.

  ‘Come on,’ said one of the boys at the gate, and the line started moving again. Danny Odin pushed through the pair and ran off laughing.

  When it was my turn to be inspected, the biggest of the boys, a beefy kid with flat green eyes, looked me up and down. His name was Buddha and like all of the school patrol kids, he was aggressive and bossy.

  I tried to go through the gate, but he put his hand up to stop me.

  ‘Did I give you permission to go through yet?’

  The line behind me fell silent and my heart started to speed up.

  ‘What do you think, Jacko? Do we pass this kid?’ Buddha asked his gap-toothed comrade.

  I made to push past him, but Buddha shoved me back in the chest so that I trod on the toe of the kid behind me. ‘You wait until I’m ready,’ he hissed.

  ‘Let him through,’ said someone behind me. I looked over my shoulder to see a big guy with long dark hair drawn back into a pony tail.

  ‘You his protector, Indian? I guess that makes him your squaw.’ Buddha’s mouth twisted up into a sneering smirk.

  There was no answer and his smile faded. After a long minute, he took his hand away and I went through, half expecting him to grab me from behind. I felt churned up inside, thinking to myself I should have said this or that.

  ‘You okay?’ Pony Tail asked gently, falling into step beside me.

  I nodded, wondering why he had bothered standing up for me.

  ‘I’m Indian Mahoney. You’re new, aren’t you?’

  I nodded. ‘I’m Nathanial Delaney.’

  ‘You have to bluff people like Buddha. That’s all it is. Bluff.’ He seemed to be talking to himself as much as to me, but I looked at him and thought it was a lot easier to bluff when you were six foot tall and built like the Terminator.

  ‘Hey. Where are you going?’ he called.

  I looked back at him. ‘Class.’

  He shook his head. ‘First up every second Monday is general assembly in the hall.’

  The hall was the newest part of the school, built with money raised by the local community committee. It was a big utilitarian rectangle, with pine floors painted in the overlapping circles and lines needed for different sports, and a stage up one end. The walls were white and clean and there were windows all along both sides of the building. One side looked out on the oval, the other onto the parking area behind the school canteen, which was out of bounds to students.

  Kids were jostling and milling around, arranging themselves into form groups facing the stage.

  Indian took his place beside me and I realised that he must be in my year level. He was wearing a jumper, instead of his blazer with the colour badge. He was big enou
gh to be a year twelve student. Probably he had failed a couple of years.

  There was a low hum of talk as we waited for the teachers to take their place along the sides, and I thought how different it was to the ear-splitting racket at the Grammar. Here no one yelled. They all murmured in low polite voices so it sounded like the wind rustling through the leaves, rather than seven hundred or so school kids.

  ‘Where did you live before?’ Indian asked in a low voice.

  The hall settled down as the vice principal, Mr Karle, came to stand behind the microphone. I had met him the first day my mother brought me up to enrol. I had been surprised to learn he was also the sportsmaster. He had impressed my mother with his talk of the school policy of non-competitiveness and community spirit.

  He had said the purpose of sport was to help people be better co-ordinated, fitter and to teach them to work together. Without a competitive element, no one was ever left out or humiliated, and he never let the class go beyond the capability of the least able in the group.

  I guess he said that because I was kind of compact for my age.

  Mr Karle was quite a small man himself. He was bald too, and his head was brown and shiny like polished wood, but there was an aura of physical strength about him.

  He tapped on the microphone and raised his hand. I was close enough to see the flash of green as the hall lights caught the tiny greenish metal ring he wore on his little finger.

  He smiled down at us and instructed us to sit.

  ‘Welcome to Assembly …’

  I sensed Indian stir alongside me, and looked at him out of the corner of my eye. His face was impassive, but he seemed tense.

  Mr Karle started out reminding year twelve students to see him after assembly if they had not yet paid their money for some excursion. Then he flicked over a page of his notes and read out some timetable changes. He told students to tell their parents a special meeting of the Community Committee had been called for Wednesday night, and that the youth club would meet the following week.

  ‘That concludes school messages.’ His voice became serious. ‘Now Senior-Constable Paul wishes to speak to you. Give him your full attention.’

  He stepped back from the microphone and Seth Paul’s father strode up the steps onto the stage and positioned himself behind the microphone, his legs planted one each side as if he meant to frisk it.

  ‘Good morning, students.’

  There was a mumbled response, and I saw Mr Karle frown. I knew from sport classes that he liked answers to be snappy; the whole group speaking with a single, clear voice.

  ‘You may have heard on the radio or read in the Examiner that someone broke into the Willington Maritime Museum last Friday,’ the policeman said. ‘There were two witnesses whose statements suggest the person may have been a student from this school.’

  His eyes ran back and forward along the rows as if he were reading a giant book. I guessed he was searching for a spasm of guilt in someone’s face.

  ‘The description of clothing worn by the intruder indicates the person wore a yellow Three North jumper.’

  I felt immediately guilty the way you do.

  ‘We have reason to believe this break-in may be connected to the recent vandalism at Cheshunt cemetery.’ Senior-Constable Paul glanced around at Mr Karle, then back at us.

  ‘Now, we are sure someone here knows who broke into the museum, and we are asking that person or persons to come forward. I am sure you are proud of the reputation young people have in this area and will want to protect it as much as I do. Cheshunt is a model neighbourhood and we want to keep it that way. Thank you.’

  He stomped back off the stage and Mr Karle came back to the microphone. ‘I expect the person who broke into the Museum to own up to his deed.’ He stopped and I realised he actually expected whoever it was to get up and announce himself. Fat chance, even at a weird school like Cheshunt where kids were polite to teachers.

  No one spoke and Mr Karle frowned. ‘Very well. I am very disappointed. Assembly is over.’

  No one moved for a minute; it was such an abrupt dismissal.

  ‘I wonder what went missing,’ I said to Indian as we filed out.

  ‘Who knows.’ He seemed bored by the thought of the robbery.

  ‘It must have been something pretty valuable if the police came to the school about it.’

  He gave me a peculiar look. ‘You don’t know this school. If a thimble went missing there would be an enquiry.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Forget it,’ he said, and moved away into the crowd.

  I stared after him for a minute, puzzled, then I looked over my shoulder. Mr Karle had come down from the stage and was talking to a girl with buck teeth. I thought she might be confessing to the break-in from the look on her face, but she just handed a sheaf of pink pages to him.

  ‘Watch it!’

  I had walked onto the heels of the girl in front of me. She scowled and turned back to her friend.

  ‘I say we should take it to the Gathering. Find out who did it ourselves.’

  ‘Yeah.’ The friend nodded fervently and they wriggled their way through the bottleneck at the door to the hall.

  That was the name of the school youth club, I remembered. The Gathering.

  3

  First period of the day was science, which was a disaster.

  Second period was maths. Three North was about five steps ahead of Nelson which meant I had some catching up to do. Miss Santini gave me extra stuff to fill in the blanks. Indian was in the class, but he sat at the side of the room on his own. Maybe he was regretting starting up a conversation with me.

  ‘I don’t care vat de dog did to it,’ Miss Santini told another kid who failed to hand up his homework.

  Last two periods were free so I retreated to the library. You looked like less of a loser if you sat in the library alone, rather than outside. I hated new schools, but changing them so often had taught me how to blend in fast. But I had never managed to figure out how you made friends with total strangers. Maybe that was why I did well academically. I had no social life to distract me.

  The library was the only part of the school that wasn’t ugly. It was a big bluestone building with stained-glass windows and a barrel-vaulted ceiling that birds nested in. According to the school librarian it was once all there was of Three North when Cheshunt was just a one-horse town in the middle of nowhere. There was even an old sepia photograph of students about sixty years back, the names written underneath in neat lettering. A bronze plaque on the wall beside the photograph said the whole building was listed by the National Trust, which was probably why whoever designed the rest of the school had not managed to ruin it too. Portables had been built on all sides of the library, as if to hide it.

  I plugged away at the maths until the bell rang, then sat back and stretched, glad the day was over. The other kids in private study must have sneaked out early, because the library was empty except for me and a girl up the far side with odd spiky red hair sticking up in all directions.

  She looked like she was doing homework too, bent over a notebook writing furiously. She was wearing a jumper about ten sizes too big for her, and a green badge which said she must be in my year level.

  The library door swung open and a teacher came in. She looked across at me, then went over to the girl.

  ‘That will do, Nissa. You can go now.’

  The red-haired girl gave the teacher a cool look. She handed over the notes she had been writing, gathered her blazer and bag and walked out without saying a word. The teacher shook her head and stalked across to the librarian.

  ‘Problem?’ the librarian asked softly.

  ‘That girl is the bane of my life.’

  The librarian looked surprised. ‘I thought she was a bright student.’

  The teacher scowled. ‘Students like Nissa Jerome should not be in ordinary schools. I don’t have the time to keep setting special assignments for her because she finishes other work to
o quickly. She should be made to work at the pace of other students.’ She glared down at the pages the girl had given her. ‘And now I am supposed to go home and spend my time reading through this. I can’t even make sense of half of it.’

  The librarian’s eyes flickered to where I was sitting and they dropped their voices so I couldn’t hear any more.

  Later that night, walking The Tod after my mother had gone off to work, I found myself thinking how it must feel to have teachers mad at you because you were smarter than they were. Not that it was something I was ever likely to experience.

  I had decided to jog and I did a circuit of the whole neighbourhood to get in shape for track training. Despite his short legs, The Tod ran circles around me. But by the time I reached the outer perimeter of the school, it was dark again and we were both panting hard.

  I stopped to catch my breath and stared across at the school buildings with a strong sense of déjà vu because of the previous night.

  The Tod whined and twitched his nose and I wondered what he could smell. He took a step towards the fence, then looked back at me.

  I was thinking about jumping the fence when a security car came round the corner and pulled up under the street light.

  I sighed and straightened up, expecting a lecture about trespassing. The Tod started barking frantically as the security guard got out. His face was shadowed by the brim of his hat and for one second I wondered if he actually had a face. Then he tipped his head back and the light fell on a thin, lined face folded around sharp brown eyes. He looked about sixty.

  ‘Shut up!! Shh!’ I told The Tod, but he went on yapping hysterically.

  The old security guard grinned. ‘Game little critter, isn’t he?’ He looked up at me. ‘Sister’s got one of those yappy dogs. Heart of a lion. Good as an alarm.’ He rattled his keys and looked around in that characteristic Cheshunt way. I realised it was probably a nervous mannerism, but I couldn’t figure out why he would be nervous with a heavy-looking gun hung visibly in a holster attached to his belt.