‘You need to bury all these people,’ Paki said to Cheryl at the end of his second day in Kokopu Waters. ‘It’s a lot of work. Too much for just you guys.’
She gave him a sharp look. ‘I hear “you” and not “we”. Aren’t you going to stay out here?’
Paki sighed. ‘I really want to, but I can’t,’ he said. ‘And this isn’t some love ’em and leave ’em line either.’
‘Not even with me here?’
Paki looked stricken. ‘This is much harder than I thought it would be.’
‘I wondered what was on your mind,’ she said. ‘Why not?’
‘I’ve got work to do in Kahuika.’
‘We need you.’
‘I know you do, and I need you too. But you guys can look after yourselves. Those people in Kahuika can’t.’
‘What do you mean, look after ourselves?’
Paki sat up straight in the long grass and looked out at the estuary. ‘Creepy crawlies,’ he said.
An hour later they found Sean down on the foreshore, untangling a net strung on a frame. His green cocky’s pōtae was tilted over his patched eye. Alex had repaired his swanny, once torn and stained. She’d sewn purple bias binding around the neck and in the front and back. Already the decoration looked like it was on its last legs.
‘Paki’s been putting the wind up me,’ Cheryl began. She pulled some strands of seaweed from the net and a couple of metres fell free.
Sean turned and faced Paki. ‘Is that right?’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Kēhua,’ said Paki. ‘Kēhua and Ponaturi.’
‘Ghosts and sea demons? You’re joking, aren’t you?’
‘I wish I was,’ Paki said. ‘The kēhua aren’t so bad. They just scare the crap out of people. They’re easy enough to deal with. But the Ponaturi…’ He gnashed his teeth and made clawing motions with his hands. ‘Most of them are only little buggers, but they’re shape-shifters and they’ve got some very nasty ways.’
Sean felt a sick feeling growing. As if they didn’t have enough to deal with. Paki gave him a few moments to think.
‘We’ve got people in Kahuika who can’t hack it there,’ he finally said, placing a hand on Sean’s shoulder. ‘They wouldn’t have been able to in the Old Times and they can’t now. If you like I can send them out here.’
‘Lowlife,’ Sean said. ‘Bottom feeders. Losers.’
‘That’s them. Some really good people among them too. They’re just not too straight.’
Sean laughed. ‘Who else was going to survive the shit we’ve all been through.’ He turned to Cheryl. ‘What about you, girl?’
‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I had the idea of staying here, Paki with me.’ She gave a bitter laugh. ‘Silly me. Nothing works in my life.’
Sean watched Paki wrestling with himself for a moment before taking Cheryl’s hand.
‘Come with me,’ Paki said. He went silent and his mouth worked as more words struggled to come out.
Cheryl watched. ‘That’s an easy choice,’ she said. ‘I accept.’ Paki blinked with embarrassment when she stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek.
When Lydia was in Alex and Sean’s bed that evening and they’d made sure she was asleep, Paki talked about their supernatural problems.
‘It doesn’t really matter what you believe about kēhua,’ he said. ‘Tortured spirits or emotional energy. All they want is another body so they can feel things again.’
Paki was amazed at how undisturbed Kokopu Waters had been. ‘Something’s looking after you,’ he said. Tinirau, thought Sean. The taniwha. Of course. He took the manaia from around his neck and handed it to Paki, who held it only briefly before passing it back.
‘Wondered what it was about you,’ he said. ‘I guess that’s a taniwha?’
Sean nodded.
‘He’ll keep you safe from Ponaturi.’ He grew thoughtful as Sean hung the manaia back around his neck. ‘Watch out if he takes a smoko break, though.’
Manu was the first to arrive, riding down the hill a week later and taking the house next door to Kevin and Hoheria.
‘You’re welcome to stay with us,’ Alex said.
Manu thanked her for the hospitality and said he was preparing the way for more people. ‘I’d like to stay with you till they get here,’ he said. ‘I don’t like being by myself.’
Bet you don’t, thought Sean. He hadn’t been able to get the kēhua and Ponaturi out of his head. The burial of all the dead villagers was suddenly urgent and he was relieved at the arrival on the following day of Derek and Pita.
‘I’m a plumber,’ said Derek. ‘I’ve done a fair bit of digging.’ He punched Pita on the arm. ‘Put your nail-bag down mate, and pick up that shovel. You might think you’re a chippie, but these days you’re an undertaker.’
Debbie and Bill turned up too, after walking most of the way from near Blenheim, a thousand kilometres away. Sean asked Bill why they hadn’t ridden horses.
‘My Harley blew up,’ he said. ‘I’m a biker, not a fucking cowboy.’ His belt-length beard waggled with indignation.
‘Why didn’t you find another bike?’ Sean said.
Bill looked irritated. Debbie examined the horizon and whistled an old pop song.
‘Too many bloody questions,’ Bill growled. The tats on the back of his hands twitched as his knuckles cracked.
Food was their first consideration. How on earth would they cope with everyone? But by the end of the second day, Sean had stopped worrying.
‘I’m going fishing,’ Manu announced. ‘I’ve got my own gear. Mind if I borrow the dinghy?’ He returned late that afternoon with a load of cod and greenbone that he cleaned and filleted while Lydia watched, wide-eyed.
‘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.’