Wake (26 page)

‘If she goes first then I'm around for longer, and can see what happens,' Sam said, calmly explanatory. ‘But enough about me. So—there's no sign of him so far?'

‘Who?'

‘The man in black.'

‘He's gone to ground. First he wouldn't talk to us—though he helped Bub and William and Jacob bury the kids at the daycare centre. Then Belle took Bub to look at the rock drawings and they put two and two together.'

‘Theresa and company are carrying guns to coerce
him once they catch him?'

Oscar nodded. ‘Bub wants to shoot him. But Theresa says there's no point doing that since he's probably got some kind of machine generating the No-Go, and he has to tell us where it is so we can turn it off. Dan said that when he saw the man—on the day everyone died—he thought the guy was carrying something small, heavy, and metallic, some kind of device. And Belle says she thinks the man has a personal force field. That when he dived off Bub's boat he made a hole in the sea.'

Sam used both hands to push back her heavy hair. She looked galvanised. ‘What about the other thing?'

‘What other thing?'

‘Oh,' she breathed. She seemed about to burst into tears of joy. ‘Could you really not feel it?' she said. And Oscar was shocked to see the sudden bright streak of a tear on one of her cheeks. She said, ‘It's the first thing in my life that's made sense in the terms of my life.'

‘What?'

‘The monster,' she said.

‘Huh?' Oscar didn't know how to articulate his confusion, but his whole body must be showing it.

‘The monster,' she said again, then frowned in consternation. ‘Could you really not feel it?'

‘I don't know what you're talking about!' Oscar shouted, desperate. ‘And you're scaring me!'

All the other adults got a certain look whenever Oscar was scared, a look that told him they were hurrying their own emotions away out of sight. Sam wasn't wearing that look, and Oscar found himself feeling kind of grateful that she was prepared to scare him—to include him.

She said, ‘The monster—the thing that came when Jacob was trying to revive Warren.' She was attempting to be patient, but sounded rushed and mad. ‘It must have woken you.'

‘I was awake, but I was in my room. I didn't see anything.'

‘It was bigger than the room, and invisible. But it was there.'

Oscar thought of the green arrow in
Halo
. ‘What was there?'

Sam's eyes grew wide, she raised her hands and held them up and open, just above her head, like one of those old pictures of a saint in rapture. She grew radiant and still—then seemed to explode. Her words flooded out. ‘It was like a whirlwind,' she said. ‘Or a biblical column of fire—flaming, noiseless, spectral, sullen, and terrible. But it didn't have a self. It was just made up of everything it had destroyed—deaths—moments of miserable dying—' She paused, shivered, and lit up another notch, till it seemed to Oscar that she couldn't be breathing air, the same air he was, but something that went into her lungs and came alive in her blood. ‘It was like a tower,' she said. ‘A tower touching heaven, but every one of its building blocks a death. A tower built of deaths—and a whirlwind.'

Oscar lost his grip on his cup. It tipped and spilled warm tea into his lap, soaking the duvet and splashing Lucy's head. Lucy launched herself off him again, and this time bolted into the kitchen and out the cat door.

Oscar surged off the couch and blundered across the room, his feet tangled in the duvet. Then he was fumbling with the chain on the door. Sam was behind him. She grabbed his arms. ‘Don't run away,' she said, sounding properly appalled.

Oscar couldn't look at her. She sounded normal again. His fear abated some, but he was still determined to get away, before—and then it was too late, he was sobbing hard, really howling, like a frightened little kid. He shook her hands off and yanked the door open. It bashed his toes. He plunged out through the mobile lacework of circling moths in the sheer curtain of light cast by the porch lamp. Sam came after him and, because she was less clumsy than he was, she caught him before he got up to speed. He was only three paces from the porch. But he was too big for someone Sam's size to easily stop, or hold. He shook her off again, and she was still coming after him, trying to take his arm, when they both collided with another body—the black man in black clothes—who was standing on the path beyond the reach of the light, perhaps attracted by the eruption of voices—Sam's rapture, Oscar's sobbing.

The man in black put his arms out and caught them, and they rotated, as if they were balls simultaneously tossed into a greased catcher's mitt. Sam slid out of the man's grip and sprawled at his feet, whereas Oscar, who was too tall to simply slither free, only continued to rotate. He was in the man's arms, against the man's chest and neck and face, but touching nothing and sliding around on resistant nothing like the puck on an air hockey table.

Then the man opened his arms and stepped back. Sam shouted at Oscar to run. ‘Get help!' she yelled.

Oscar darted past the man and fled. He looked back once he was at the corner of the road, but the neighbour's magnolia tree hid his view of the front yard. He ran on, shouting for help.

Oscar was gone. Sam lunged at the man. She wrapped her hands around his ankle. Her fingers made a loose shackle three centimetres from his skin. Sam stared in wonder and disbelief. She fought her urge to let go and, while he was still within reach, to simply appreciate the slick skin of insistent impenetrable air that surrounded him. She held on—hopelessly—for his foot was slipping free. Though filled with a kind of lust of curiosity, Sam was still thinking, and, because she was
clever
Sam, she was thinking fast. She thought that if he had to turn his force field on to stop a bullet it would never stop a bullet. And she thought that if, however, it was on all the time, then how would he feed himself? There was only one way in which this could work. She considered all of this, then, while she still had him, her grip around his arch and instep, compressing the slippery nothingness so that he slipped faster, she used this last possible traction to yank his foot so that he toppled. He sprawled onto his cushion of air, and she shifted her grip back to his ankle—or the air around it. Then she hauled on him, and he slid towards her so smoothly it was as if he was moving on a bed of ball bearings. She clambered up over him, straddling him—or his frictionless casing—as best she could. She balanced, and once again made a shackle of her hands, this time around his right wrist. She found the limits of the resistance, rested there a moment, then very gradually and gently closed her grip. It never would have worked had he not been staring at her, through her hair, which had pooled on the air before his face. She saw his white teeth and the white lights in his black eyes. She read his expression—which was puzzled and speculative—and knew he looked like that because he was looking at her, and saw that she was calm, completely calm.

The circle of Sam's grip got smaller—slowly. It was like a gesture in Tai Chi. And then the skin of her fingers touched the skin of the man's wrist, and his eyes went wide with astonishment. He raised his arm and rolled, but she had him, skin to skin, her hands inside his force field.

He clambered to his feet and began to pull away, dragging her. She tried to get her feet under her, but he was a big strong man and he kept jerking her about so that she was down on one knee, then up on her feet, then hauled against him, and then hurled back so that she crashed into Oscar's letterbox. And while he shook her, she kept shouting at him, ‘Stop! Stay!'

She knew that all he had to do to be rid of her was to push her forcibly into something unyielding—like the low wall around Oscar's neighbour's yard. Once, he raised his arm so that her feet left the ground and they were face to face, and she could see him considering it—considering hurting her—but he didn't. He fought hard, but with restraint, as if she were a robust child, and this a play fight.

Then light began to grow in the street and shadows lunged out at an angle from every bush and fence as they were backlit by the headlights of more than one vehicle, coming in fast.

Sam shouted, ‘Over here!'

The man drew her towards him once more, and spun her into his arms. He clamped his free hand across her mouth and nose and crushed her into the invisible resistance that surrounded him. The skin of his palm didn't connect with the skin of Sam's face, and she could still breathe—there were still a few centimetres of compressed air between them. Then he closed his hand and that air went as dense as foam rubber. Sam's lips were pushed against her teeth. The force field slipped into her open mouth and was abruptly as unbreathable as a vacuum. Her nostrils were pinched closed. She struggled. Her heels slid along the grass. The man was hauling her away somewhere. Her field of vision snapped closed, as first the world vanished, then the green bristle of its afterimage. All sounds faded into a ringing silence.

The room was warm. Its floor was polished wood. The lights were low, the curtains drawn—glistening gold curtains, so long that they pooled on the floor.

Sam heard the flinty ‘chop-chop' of a match struck twice before igniting.

The man in black was crouching by a firebox. There was a neat fire laid in the grate, split kindling heaped over a pile of fire starters. The man held a long match to the white cube of a fire starter until it caught. He watched till the kindling was burning, then he laid two dry manuka rounds on the flames. He closed the woodburner's door, opened its damper, and turned to Sam.

She had discovered that her hands were tied before her with what seemed to be a silk curtain cord. While the man's back was turned she'd been surreptitiously struggling to free herself. She stopped and recoiled as he came over. He scooped her up and put her down in a white leather recliner, then tilted the chair and leaned over her, peering into her eyes. He smelled of wood smoke, a friendly open-air smell. His gaze moved from one eye to the other as if he were trying to judge a difference between each. ‘Which one are you?' he asked.

Sam gaped. How could he know that about her?

‘What's your name?'

‘Oh,' said Sam. ‘Sam.' The muscles of her arms and shoulders were twitching with tiredness and strain. One of her knees was smarting.

The man said, ‘You have my attention, Sam.'

Sam stalled. She asked, ‘Do you have a name?'

He said something that sounded like the name of the space station.

‘M-I-R?'

‘I haven't ever had occasion to write it in your alphabet,' he said.

‘Or is it like the gifts of the Magi—gold, frankincense,
myrrh
?'

‘How can it possibly matter?'

‘It doesn't.' Sam privately decided that she'd think of him as Myr—the ‘million years' of cosmologists.

Myr sat cross-legged on the floor by her chair and pressed its footstool until it tilted upright again. He fixed his eyes on Sam's face and said, ‘I need to understand how you know that the monster is there. You were telling the boy about the monster.' He took Sam's bound hands and held them gently, so gently that his force field didn't activate. ‘Tell me,' he said.

‘It's your monster, so you tell me.'

‘You shouldn't be able to feel it. Or rather, you shouldn't feel it as an entity, only as a disturbance—restlessness, misery, suspicion, a dark compulsion, or evil urge. Feelings you would suppose were your own.'

Sam moved her hands, trying to extract them from his grip, or perhaps trying to draw him closer—she wasn't sure which she wanted.

He didn't let go and he did lean closer.

Sam bent over their clasped hands, closed her eyes, and settled into her own darkness. She could feel her breath warming the air between her mouth and his knuckles. Myr was real and bodily, and appeared to be human. But he was unlike everyone else in the world—the multitude of mavericks whose lives had been allowed to grow freely, unlike hers, which had been trained into an inscrutable shape. In his unlikeness, Myr was the only one like her. The only one she'd ever met. Her heart went out to him. But Sam hated her own secrets, and she didn't want to tell them. She said, ‘So I should feel the monster's influence, but not sense it as a presence?'

‘No one knows it's there until, perhaps, their very last moments, when they sense that something is salting them with other people's agonies before eating them whole.'

Sam put that aside for now. ‘Do you feel it?' she said.

‘I only know it's there because I have it quarantined.'

‘Because that's what you do.' Sam opened her eyes and stared at him, thinking. Then she asked him to please tell her about the monster.

He remained silent. His patience was of a quality Sam hadn't encountered before. She dropped her gaze and began to worry at the cord around her hands.

He said, ‘If I explain, you'll be required to give up certain things.'

‘What do I have to give up?' Sam would offer whatever guarantee he wanted. She was confident that she couldn't be held to any promise she made.

But, as it turned out, it was
hope
she couldn't keep.

Part Five

S
hortly before the sun came up, after three hours of fruitless searching, Bub spotted a smudge of smoke rising from the chimney of a house east of the settlement. He and Theresa went up its driveway, while William and Dan came at it through the gardens of an adjacent property. Theresa tackled the front door, while Bub went in the back. Dan and William burst through a set of French doors into a room coloured by the faint orange glow of a dying fire.

They searched the house, but it was deserted. And when they gathered in the living room, they saw the silk ropes lying in the seat of a white leather recliner.

Later that morning Belle went, as usual, up to the reserve to feed her kakapo. Theresa insisted on delivering her right to the gate. As they made their way through the arboretum, Belle riding pillion on her own quad bike, Theresa kept turning her head to shout instructions over her shoulder. ‘It should take me twenty minutes to check the fence in both directions. Then I'll come back to the gate and wait for you.'

They arrived at the reserve, and Theresa issued her final instruction. ‘Lock yourself in. We can't have anyone else taken hostage.' She gunned the bike's engine and set off along the fence line.

Belle watched her friend go, and turned back to the gate.

There was something wrong. The padlock was closed but the chain looked looser than she'd left it, as if someone had removed the lock from the links and fastened it again, leaving the chain a little slack. Belle hauled on the gate and found it had more than its usual give. She stayed still for a long time, clasping the lock and listening to the sturdy putter of the bike receding up the firebreak. She pressed her face to the mesh. Its weave was so tight that up close every hole served as pinhole magnifier. What Belle could see through each tiny hole was super sharp. Fragments of the view jumped into life, rounded, jewel-like, and as inclusive as a reflection in a convex traffic mirror.

Suddenly, there was Sam, looking back at Belle, vivid and magnified, as if seen through a drop of dew.

Belle jumped away from the fence, backed right off so that the mesh became a semi-transparent smoke. She could still see Sam—Sam's glossy hair rippling as she bolted away into the forest. Belle called out, then rushed to the gate, spun the tumblers on the combination lock, and twisted the padlock off the chain. She pulled the gate open so fast that the chain sang through the bars and came loose, bashing her knee.

Belle limped up the track into the forest. She shouted Sam's name. Then she stood still and listened. She sensed that Sam was standing too, perhaps not very far off, her back pressed to the trunk of a tree.

Two adolescent kaka arrived, screeching and fluting by turns. Fat, forward, and nimble, they landed on a branch directly above Belle, snatched at the same perch, lost their balance, and swung upside down, eyeing her hopefully all the while. Only last week one of this pair had picked a hole in Belle's backpack to steal a muesli bar.

‘Shhh! I'm trying to listen,' Belle told the birds—to no effect.

She went on into the forest, calling. She skirted the clearing where the hopper was and walked all the way up to the limestone overhang. The shallow cave was empty. The rock drawings looked sinister, revised by what Belle now knew about them.

She stood on the ridge and called for a time, then limped back down. As she was passing through the clearing on her way to get feed from the storage shed, she saw that the hopper was full already, and that several kakapo were perched on the trough, grazing. Boomer turned his mild, whiskered face to her, spread his wings, plonked down, ambled over, and picked playfully at one of her bootlaces. She submitted for a time to his attentions, then made her way back to the gate. She went through it and locked it behind her.

Theresa was waiting. She looked concerned. ‘You never leave the gate open.'

‘Sam's in there. She ran away from me.'

‘She knew the combination to the lock?'

‘She's been up here a few times, and she wrote it down. She writes things down to remember them. The desk in her room is covered with notes to herself.'

‘Yes, I know,' Theresa said, and looked a little guilty. ‘How did she seem?'

‘She ran away from me, Tre! What do you suppose he did to her?'

They stood in silence gazing at one another, then at the dark bush beyond the fence. The kaka could be heard screeching and fluting, as happy and unperturbed as ever.

‘Let's just wait for a time,' Theresa said. ‘If she doesn't show, we'll come back later and call some more.'

‘Oscar said that when he ran to get help he thought she was trying to talk to the man in black—to
engage
with him,' Belle said. She peered at the forest. ‘Maybe he's in there too.' Her heart gave a lurch and her skin went cold. She hated to think of the stranger anywhere near her kakapo. ‘Maybe she ran from me because she's protecting him.'

‘You mean like Stockholm Syndrome?' Theresa said, and at Belle's frown of incomprehension, ‘You know—when hostages become emotionally attached to the people holding them captive.'

‘That sounds a bit dodgy.'

‘Well, yes. But let's face it, Sam is already dodgy about William. He hits her and she camps by his door and pleads.'

‘Maybe she is crazy, like William says.'

‘He doesn't think she's crazy, he thinks she's pretending to be crazy.' Theresa leaned on the bike, crossed her ankles and folded her arms. She looked like someone settling in for a long wait.

Belle said, ‘She fed my birds.'

‘But that's her, isn't it? The dishonest, or disturbed, but ever helpful Sam.'

At noon Holly stood at the head of the long table she'd set for lunch and carefully counted the place settings. For several weeks now she had sometimes found herself laying fourteen places. Before Bub and Belle had uncovered the meaning of the reserve's petroglyphs she'd been able to tell herself that she was only anticipating a time when Bub's firefighter would join them. And Curtis would choose to come back. Then it turned out that the man in black was an enemy. Holly had tried to be more mindful. But she kept getting her head count wrong. She'd set about the task, and this would waylay her—this invitation
.

Now the Man was revealed, and Sam was missing, and Curtis was still shunning them—so there were eleven for lunch. And yet when Holly took the cutlery from the drawer, despite her vigilance, she'd gone into a fugue and had, this time, set the table for
fifteen
. She'd wished Curtis and Sam back, had issued her usual forgetful invitation to Sam's captor, and then one more, to some other ghostly
guest.

Holly looked around the dining room. No one had arrived yet. She gathered up the extra knives and forks, swiftly and discreetly, and returned them to the kitchen.

*

In the late afternoon, when Theresa and Belle had gone back to the reserve to call for Sam, William said to Bub that he wondered why no one had thought to look for her where she'd most likely hole up if she meant to avoid them, but still be out of the weather.

‘Her bach?'

‘Yes, her cottage.'

They went along Matarau Point and stopped just out of the view of anyone standing at the bach's front windows. They had a quick consultation about how to tackle Sam if they found her. Then William went in by the ranchsliders, while Bub went in the back. They converged in the living room. The rug Lily had slept under that first night—a homemade rug of brightly coloured peggy-squares—was neatly folded and draped on the arm of the couch, perhaps by Lily herself all those weeks ago. William looked into the bedroom. The bed was made. ‘She's been back at some point,' he said.

‘If it was your house, wouldn't you?' Bub asked. He drifted off in the direction of the bathroom.

William checked the wardrobe, then, for good measure, got down on his knees and looked under the bed. There was a file box there. It was labelled
Sams
.

William slid the box out, removed its dusty lid, and began to leaf through the papers. He found an insurance policy for house and contents. He found the last will and testament of one John Waite, whose beneficiary was his only niece, Samantha Pehipehi Waite. He found an employment contract for Samantha Waite, from Mary Whitaker Rest Home, and a certificate to state that Samantha Waite had attended a food hygiene course. He found tax certificates and tax returns for Samantha Pehipehi Waite. He found a student ID, for Waikato University, the year 2000, for a
Samara
Pehipehi Waite, whose date of birth was 1967. There were forms from the Department of Work and Income for Samantha Waite, whose date of birth was also 1967.

William upended the box and spread its contents on the floor—no longer simply browsing, but looking for something. Bub leaned in the doorway. ‘What have you got there?'

‘What does it look like? How about you? You were gone a while.'

‘It's a nice place,' Bub said.

‘Huh,' said William, casual and surprised. He'd found two birth certificates. And a notice of a change of name by deed poll.

Bub said, ‘Belle and I have been thinking of finding someplace where we can have bit more privacy, and cook for ourselves—all that.'

‘So you and Belle want to play house,' William said, and held out the two certificates and the notice of deed poll.

Bub took the papers, but didn't look at them. ‘You have a knack for making everything sound trivial.'

‘Trivial or insincere, dishonest or mad—I can make things sound all sorts of ways. I'm a lawyer.'

‘But why are you on
our
case?'

‘I'm not. Bub, please look at what you have in your hand.'

The birth certificates were pinned together with a rusting paperclip. They were for two infant girls, born the same day—the second of October, 1967. Their mother's name was Ngaire Catherine Waiti. Their father's name was not given. The notice of change of name by deed poll was also dated 1967, and was for a John Waiti, who had changed his surname to Waite.

Bub said, ‘I didn't know that sad bastards were still anglicising their names back in sixty-seven. Not that that happened much anyway.' He looked at the birth certificates, flipping back and forth from one paper to the other. ‘Okay. So this is the root of Sam's nutty shit. She's a twin.'

‘Bub, who the hell names twins Samantha and Samara, and gives them the same middle name?'

‘Giving your kids the same middle name isn't unheard of. I bet Pehipehi is their dad's family. And a fanciful teenaged mum in sixty-seven might have called her twins Samantha and Samara.
Bewitched
was on TV.'

‘That was Samantha and
Sabrina
. And Bub, do the math.
1967
. Sam isn't in her forties.'

Bub frowned and scratched his head.

‘But this
is
her.' William handed Bub the student ID card.

Bub studied Sam's beautiful face, her baleful expression. ‘2000,' he said. ‘Samara Pehipehi Waite. It sure looks like her.'

‘Check out the date of birth.'

Bub steadied the card with his other hand and peered at it. There was a short silence, then. ‘Some people hold their age well.'

‘Right,' said William, with no discernible expression.

‘What else can it be?'

‘Is Pehipehi just a name, or does it mean something?'

Bub screwed up his face. ‘It might be, but it isn't one I've heard before. Waiti is a local name. There was a Waiti shearing gang who worked Stanislaw's Station right up to the time the Stanislaws gave the land to the crown. “Pehipehi” means something like “ambush”.' Bub scratched his head. ‘Yeah. You're right—this is very weird.'

On their way back Bub and William spotted Curtis sitting on the veranda of the bed and breakfast, wrapped in a blanket and sunning himself.

Bub said, ‘We didn't notice you there when we went past before.'

‘You were so busy searching for the man in black that I was invisible to you.'

William said, ‘News flash—we're now looking for Sam, who is hiding from us since being captured and detained by the man in black. So that's progress of a sort. We've swapped one hopeless task for another.'

Bub thought that Curtis looked pale. ‘Are you okay, mate?'

‘You people always manage to miss the man in black, sometimes by just minutes. He was here a short time ago. He's often here. Whenever I come out to enjoy a bit of afternoon sun, he appears on the path and stands so that his shadow falls over my feet. He knows what trouble I'm having keeping them warm.'

Bub met William's gaze. William frowned, then said to Curtis, ‘Are you feeling all right? Is there anything we can do?'

Curtis curved his lips at them. It was more a smirk than a smile. ‘I'd be perfectly fine if I wasn't being bothered by people putting their shadows on me.' He looked down at William and Bub's shadows, which had combined with the stripes of the paling fence in a way that reminded William of his own reflection in Sam's bathroom mirror.

‘Have you seen Sam?' William asked. ‘Is she one of the people who has been bothering you?'

‘She was over there, on the beach near the backpackers.' Curtis pointed across the bay.

The beach below the backpackers was empty.

‘What was she doing?'

‘Just standing there on her two good legs.'

William turned his back on Curtis and whispered, ‘I think we should get Jacob to give Curtis a visit.'

Bub nodded. He gave Curtis a friendly wave. ‘Do let us know if you see her again.'

‘I don't know that I will tell you anything. I think people should be allowed to avoid others if that's what they want.'

‘This is Sam we're talking about,' William said.

‘Do you suppose that, because she's not very bright, Sam has no rights?'