Shadow Waters Page 5

  ‘You won’t catch me in a boat,’ Bill said. He took his Rambo knife and the .308 he’d shaped into a handgun and vanished into the bush at the head of the estuary, reappearing a couple of hours later with a pig carcass across his shoulders.

  ‘What are you going to do with the tusks?’ Kevin asked.

  Bill finished hacksawing the second one out of the boar’s jaw. ‘Present for Debbie,’ he said, holding the bloodied trophies, bits of bone and flesh hanging off them. He caught Kevin’s look of horror.

  ‘After I’ve cleaned them up,’ he added. ‘You want one, catch your own pig.’

  Halfway through the following week, new people arriving every day, they saw their first kēhua. Unfortunately it was Lydia who made the discovery. She ran screaming inside and hid behind Alex, who was in the kitchen making rewena bread.

  ‘It’s horrible,’ she sobbed and gulped. ‘Make it go away!’

  ‘You stay close to me,’ Alex said to Lydia, who clearly wasn’t going anywhere, clinging tight to the woman’s skirt. ‘We’ll find Sean. He’ll know what to do.’ What had the girl seen? Surely it wasn’t one of Paki’s kēhua.

  They found the kēhua two streets away, where Sean and Kevin were digging a grave in the back yard of an elderly cottage, the white paint peeling and a rose garden running wild. The kēhua was wearing a check shirt and corduroy trousers and looked ragged, patchy, as if it wasn’t really there.

  ‘Sean!’ Alex tried to call, but the cry came out as a strangled squeak. Not even the kēhua noticed. Then a loud yell of ‘Fuck off!’ echoed up and down the street and, while they watched, the kēhua disintegrated, fading and dissolving till the space at the gate was clear. Alex and Lydia turned to see Hoheria approaching.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked. She was breathing heavily, like she’d run all the way. She squatted and took Lydia’s hands in hers. ‘It can’t hurt you,’ she said. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘It’s scary though,’ said Lydia. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a kēhua,’ Hoheria said. ‘If you see one just swear at it.’

  Lydia looked shocked. ‘I’m not allowed to say those words.’

  ‘Yes you are, when you’re chasing kēhua away. That’s what swear words are for.’

  Sean and Kevin came round the side of the house carrying shovels.

  ‘We heard a yell,’ Sean said. ‘You guys okay?’

  Alex finally found her voice. ‘We are now,’ she said. ‘But we’ll have to do something about this.’ Both men looked puzzled.

  ‘Kēhua,’ said Hoheria. ‘We’d better have a proper service for all the people you bury.’

  That night everyone got together over fish chowder and chunks of bread.

  ‘I’ve been in this movie before,’ whispered Kevin.

  Hoheria gave him an elbow in the ribs. ‘Shut up!’ she hissed. ‘You might learn something.’ She was hoping to learn something herself, but in the end she did most of the talking, dredging up long-forgotten advice from her grandfather.

  ‘Swearing at them works,’ she said. ‘But not for long. If you see one it usually means its dead body wasn’t buried properly.’ She explained how important it was to lay spirits to rest. Christian prayers worked, she said, and so did prayers from other religions. ‘As long as they know they’re dead.’

  ‘I’d know if I was dead,’ said Pita.

  Hoheria gave him a pitying look. ‘You probably wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘My understanding is that dead people need to be told they’re dead, in several different ways. They’re not very bright and they certainly don’t want to be dead. Imagine feeling everything you felt while you were alive except you didn’t have a body to do anything about it.’

  When Hoheria and Kevin were lying in bed together that night Kevin suddenly propped himself on an elbow. ‘How come they never told me any of this stuff?’ he said.

  Hoheria shook her head. ‘It isn’t in the Bible,’ she said. ‘Can you see the Reverend Wilks believing in kēhua?’

  Kevin laughed. ‘All he believes in is the second coming.’ He reached for Hoheria and pulled her against him. ‘How about the third coming?’ he said.

  ♦

  They had three more streets to go, digging graves in the morning and holding burial services in the afternoon, when the Ponaturi came.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Kevin asked, when Derek showed up one morning badly cut and scratched, and smelling like a pile of dead fish.

  ‘Pam came last night,’ he told Kevin and Sean. He looked embarrassed. He’d been lying in bed half asleep when he’d heard a scrabbling at the window.

  ‘Pam was my wife. I buried her in Rangiora.’ He gulped and tears started. ‘I got up and opened the window, and next thing I’m fighting for my life.’

  Derek described how a possum had once dropped on his head in an old barn.

  ‘It clawed the shit out of me before I could get it off. This thing hung on like a possum. It latched onto my face and bit and clawed.’ He shuddered. ‘It was worse than that, though. It was like it was drinking me, sucking me up. Real creepy. I never felt anything like that before. And there’s me thinking it was Pam come back to me, but it wasn’t. It was a horrible little monster.’

  Derek had managed to pull it free and throw it on the floor where he’d tried to stomp it, but it swarmed up his leg and inflicted some painful bites in the groin.

  ‘Lucky it missed the family jewels,’ he said. He wrinkled his nose. ‘Man, it stunk though. My house smells like a fish-factory back yard. I think I stink too.’

  ‘No doubt about that,’ Kevin said. ‘You do, too. Like a dog that’s rolled in something.’

  Some of Derek’s cuts needed stitches and Debbie obliged, with an ordinary needle and thread and half a bottle of whisky salvaged from the pub. Bill often needed stitching, she said. He was always getting in fights with pigs and dogs, and she was becoming as expert as any Old Time doctor in repairing wounds.

  ‘A pair of pliers, a needle and thread, some strong liquor and no more worries,’ she said. ‘I did a nice blanket stitch on Bill’s calf where a pig got him in the Herbert Forest.’

  Great, thought Sean. The ‘here, bite on this,’ school of medicine.

  ‘How did he heal?’ asked Kevin.

  ‘Fine,’ said Debbie as she packed her gear away in a Trade Aid shoulder bag sporting a sequinned elephant. ‘He’s a big, tough country boy.’

  Sean was laughing to himself two nights later at the thought of Bill’s tats embellished with embroidery stitches when he was interrupted by a frenzy of barking from Hamu. It wasn’t a possum bark and not a cat bark either. It was a frantic, bad-trouble bark, and Sean grabbed his sawnoff from among the hats and raincoats as he went out the back door and into the darkness.

  Under the light of a quarter moon and a black velvet sky full of stars he could see Hamu outside his kennel barking furiously at a tall figure standing by the garden. He stepped closer and peered. It was a Māori woman, her long hair hanging free. She wore a feather cloak and the moko on her chin showed up gleaming white teeth. Te Rina. It couldn’t be. She was long gone, her body burned with her children when Sean had torched their house.

  ‘It’s okay, Hamu,’ he called. Hamu took a quick look at him and cranked his barking up a couple of notches. Sean moved closer and right when the thought struck him that Te Rina hadn’t worn a moko, he caught the stench of rotten fish.

  ‘Piss off!’ he yelled. ‘Get the fuck outta here!’ He fired the sawnoff, right at the woman. She was only ten metres away. He couldn’t miss. He didn’t. He saw the blast catch her in the upper body, blowing her cloak apart, ripping into her flesh. But instead of being thrown to the ground, she changed. Her face twisted and melted into a hāpuku head. Her arms lengthened into lobster limbs ending in many-fingered claws. She shrank, but only a few centimetres. With a chittering shriek she leapt at Sean.

  He just had time to fire another shot that had no effect at all before the creature was on him, biting and clawing. He felt
his eyepatch torn off, claws scoring his face and teeth biting his neck. This thing would kill him if he couldn’t fight it off. He tripped it and managed to twist as they both fell, head-butting for all he was worth, but that didn’t work either – he ended up flat on his back, holding the creature’s claws while it sat on his chest. Bulbous eyes gleamed. Teeth glinted as fish lips drew back.

  It’s going to tear my throat out, Sean thought. I’m going to die. Horribly. But the creature didn’t move. It fixed Sean’s eyes with its own gaze and held him, immobile. Maybe I’m not going to die, he thought. Maybe I’m strong enough to hold it off. He thrust upwards with all his strength, feeling a faint glimmer of hope. The creature still didn’t move, just held Sean with its eyes locked onto his, boring into him, and that’s when he felt it. He was being drained. His essence was being sucked out of him. He felt something in his head, gobbling up all the hatred and fear, and all his strength along with it. Suddenly he was aware of the pain of his wounds, and the creature was sucking that up too. To his horror he realised it was feeding on him, making him afraid and feasting on the fear. He felt himself growing weaker, starting to black out.

  Then whack! The creature was sprawling. Alex was thumping it with a softball bat, yelling ‘Shoot it again!’ and Hoheria was helping him to his feet.

  Kevin seized Sean’s sawnoff from the ground, reloaded, and shot the creature twice in the head as it was getting to its feet. It staggered and fell into a low hedge that Alex had planted on one side of the garden. The effect was electrifying. It lay for a second, its fish eyes shocked wide in the moonlight. Then it screamed, leapt to its feet and ran. Kevin and Alex chased the creature around the corner of the house just in time to see it running in great leaps down the road towards the estuary, swatting at itself.

  Back behind the house, Sean shook his head, dazed, confused, his muscles like jelly, his head light and empty as a ping-pong ball. What had happened? Had that creature nearly killed him? It wasn’t a dream, was it? He stood there, slack-jawed and knock-kneed, trying to gather his wits. Gradually he became aware of the overpowering rotten fish stink, and cutting through it something clean and delicate, pleasantly astringent.

  He turned to Alex, leaning on the bat, flanked by Kevin and Hoheria.

  ‘Thanks, you guys were just in time.’

  Alex’s face was wrinkled with disgust. ‘Is this a bad dream or what?’

  Sean struggled to get back in the moment. He wanted to lie down on the grass and sleep. ‘I was about to ask you guys the same thing.’

  ‘What’s that smell?’

  ‘The fish?’

  ‘No, the nice smell.’ They found it when they moved across to Hamu and passed the crushed hedge.

  ‘It’s lavender,’ said Alex. ‘That creature hated it.’ They looked at each other, the four of them pale and shocked in the moonlight. Kevin bent down and picked a bunch, raised it to his face and breathed deeply.

  ‘Maybe we should keep some inside,’ he said. ‘Smells better than the rotten fish anyway.’

  ‘That thing really scratched you,’ Lydia said to Sean in the morning. ‘It was a Ponaturi, wasn’t it?’

  He’d been wondering what to tell her, not realising the shotgun blasts had woken her instantly and she’d watched the whole business through the kitchen window.

  ‘It was really yucky,’ she said. ‘Much worse than the kēhua. Even swear words didn’t work.’

  Alex came to the rescue. ‘We’ve got something that does work, though.’ She held up a bunch of lavender. ‘They hate it. So we’ll plant it everywhere.’

  6

  A Little Village by the Sea

  The late-morning fog lay thick as the Kokopu Waters people rode alongside the river on their way into Kahuika. Everything was damp and beaded with moisture. They couldn’t see more than a few metres. The horses’ hooves sounded muffled and the jangle of their harness was barely audible. They peered warily about as they turned left and started ascending the hill away from the river and towards the markets. Their clothes were soaked in lavender water, their saddles and bridles anointed with oil.

  Everyone was jumpy, alert to every little noise and keeping close to each other. As Sean put it, they’d had one of their more rugged weeks. All of a sudden their days were full of kēhua, and every night the Ponaturi in the guise of their loved ones had been scrabbling at their windows. They’d been working their way through the town, digging backyard graves and interring the local residents. And every day they’d been watched by kēhua.

  ‘Those guys really give me the creeps,’ Manu said. ‘I walked right through one yesterday. It was just like somebody opened the freezer, except it was scary as well as cold. Fuck that. I think I’d rather have the Ponaturi.’

  ‘No way,’ said Kevin. ‘Those guys are bad news. At least the kēhua can’t kill you.’

  Kevin and Hoheria had been hanging lavender sprays everywhere in their house, and around their doors and windows, and splashing everything with lavender water. But it hadn’t stopped the creatures coming, and a clumsy caricature of Kevin’s mother had been outside the window two nights ago. The sight had really upset him. He’d wanted to open the window and deal to the creature, but Hoheria had stopped him.

  ‘Don’t,’ she warned. ‘It can’t hurt you while it’s out there, and there’s no telling what’ll happen if you let it in.’

  Kevin heeded Hoheria’s warning. He hadn’t let the creature in. But he’d tried to go out to meet it. Hoheria had tackled him outside the front door, wrestling with her inclination to swear at him and slap his face.

  ‘This won’t do any good,’ she’d said to him. ‘It’s not really your mother, and you know that too.’

  ‘Yes, I do know,’ he’d said. ‘But I can’t stand it using my memories like that. It’s just not right.’ He’d turned to carry on around the house and just as Hoheria grabbed his arm to pull him back, the Ponaturi, alerted by the disturbance, had surrounded the pair.

  Kevin and Hoheria fought for their lives. They’d managed to get back to back before six of the monsters were on them. Most of the Ponaturi were only a metre high but between their high-pitched shrieks and their rotten-fish stench they felt to the pair like an army. Kevin seized a spade from where it was stuck in the ground beside the front path and swung it edge-on with all his strength at the neck of the largest monster just as two of the smaller ones started swarming up his legs. The spade bounced off, twisting, jarring, and dropping from his numb hands. But the blow knocked the monster to the ground and before it rose again he switched his attention to the others. He seized one, plucked it free, hurled it out towards the road, and grabbed the second one. It sank its teeth in his thigh as he pulled it free with a sharp pain as his flesh tore. Then out of the corner of his eye he saw one of the Ponaturi whistle through the air and strike the concrete path with its head. He half-turned to see that Hoheria had grasped the creature by the ankles and was beginning a second swing, to an accompanying shriek of alarm. Again the creature’s head cracked on the concrete and this time it split open.

  With their way clear Hoheria and Kevin dashed for the front door and slammed it behind them. They stood in their candlelit hallway, their hands on their knees, breathing deeply, trying to still their pounding hearts.

  Finally Hoheria spoke. ‘I hate to say it, but I did warn you.’

  Kevin straightened and looked at Hoheria. ‘You’re right. Sorry. I don’t know what got into me.’

  ‘That’s okay. And we did find out one important thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We can hurt the buggers.’

  Kevin thought for a minute, then he put his hands on Hoheria’s shoulders. ‘You mean you can. It’s probably one of those fairy story things, like only the pure of heart can overcome the monster.’

  Hoheria laughed. ‘My heart isn’t as pure as you might think.’

  ‘We’ve found the answer!’ Kevin cried out to Paki after they tied their horses at the rear of his tent, and fed a
nd watered them. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘What answer?’ Paki said. ‘Forty-two?’ He was standing with Cheryl at the front of the tent behind a trestle table laden with freshly germinated plants: winter lettuces, kiwi spinach, curly kale and small white turnips.

  ‘No, mate, the Ponaturi.’ Paki dropped a tray of seedlings and spun around. ‘They can’t stand lavender. And Hoheria can hurt them, even if I can’t.’

  ‘Have a cup of tea with us,’ Paki said. ‘Tell us all about it.’ Later, when they were seated with a cup of tea and a piece of fried bread and jam each, he said, ‘We’ve had a lot of trouble with them lately. It’s the weather. Cold and foggy. They like the fog. They can control it. They hide in it.’ He paused. ‘They seem to have developed a new trick, too.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ said Sean. ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘This is going to sound like some over-dramatic bullshit, but they’re eating people’s souls – I can’t think of another way to put it.’

  Sean looked at Kevin and Hoheria, at Alex too, before turning to Paki.

  ‘Bet you can’t, bro. That sounds exactly like what nearly happened to me. And tell me, how are the victims around here?’

  Paki looked grim. ‘They’re all dead, except for one guy who told us what happened. He had all his feelings sucked up, he said, like the Ponaturi was feeding on him. He managed to fight it off, but I hate to think what’d happen if they got onto one of the kids.’ He looked around the markets. They could see half-a-dozen children, not running and playing, just sitting quietly. They all looked frightened. ‘And what’s your story, anyway?’

  ‘It was a big bugger,’ Sean said. ‘It would have killed me except Alex hit it for a home run. I know what you mean about eating souls too. This one was boring into me and I was starting to fade out. But Hoheria’s story is more interesting.’ He explained how Hoheria had killed one of the monsters, cracking its head open on the concrete path.