Cellars in the northern and southern hemisphere - part 2

A Cloak of Feathers

‘Ka mate te kāinga tahi, ka ora te kāinga rua.’ – Maori proverb

Layla was awake.  A sound, which she could not quite identify, had crept into her dream and was so persistent that it woke her.

It sounded like scratching, far off, beneath her bedroom.  Mice?  Rats, perhaps.  Surely she would have seen some evidence if there was an infestation?  Layla held her breath to hear better, but the sound had stopped.

She watched the shapes around her as her night vision adjusted to the darkness and looked up at the ceiling.  Something light on the air floated down towards her face.  She put her hand out and caught it, then shuffled herself into a sitting position.  She carefully cradled the object in the palm of one hand and flicked the switch of the lamp with the fingers of the other.

The soft, orange light illuminated what she was holding, a feather, brownish and speckled.  She placed it on the bedside table beneath the lamp and looked at it. It seemed to grow more substantial under inspection.  Layla listened out for more night sounds, something was gently batting against the window; no doubt a moth longing to reach the light of her lamp, but that was all.  The scratching had not started again.

Layla would not cower beneath her covers; she refused to be victim to her imagination, so she kicked the quilt away, swung her feet to the floor and stood on the cold, wooden floorboards.  The night was nothing to be frightened of, she told herself as she strode to the window, unhooked its latch, and pushed it open.

The air was fragrant, full of messages she could not read. Something flew past her face and into the room, the moth, she supposed, and other tiny creatures of the night with it, no doubt, oh well.

Layla leaned out and breathed in clean air purified by the trees.  Trees stood a short distance from her window, graceful silver arms reached out towards her and upwards to the stars and moon.  She heard the soft, ‘morepork’, call of an owl. It comforted her.  The dawn would not be far behind and the owls were watching over her.

She closed the window and shivered.  Climbing back into bed she noticed a small gathering of winged things around her lamp. They were speaking of something in a hum. Layla shrugged and with a click of the switch all became darkness and quiet again.

The following day, Layla came across more feathers.  Some were on the floor of her bedroom, perhaps a bird had got into the space above the ceiling.  She found another feather in the butter, interrupting her morning enjoyment of toast.  How odd.  She looked with suspicion at Polly, her cat, who sat on a cushion, staring back at Layla with blank inscrutability. She was a killer, no doubt about that.

Layla continued to gather the odd feather here and there during the course of the morning, until she had a small collection.  She fanned them across the table top and observed that lying against each other they had taken on the appearance of a morepork wing.  Not an owl, she thought with a shudder, surely Polly would not have taken something so big?  She scowled at Polly darkly, who, unperturbed, leapt silently to the floor, lifted her tail into the air and stalked off towards the cellar door.  Ah well, thought Layla, if she must kill the cellar’s the place for her, perhaps she’ll chase off whatever’s scuttling done there.

Layla spent the mid part of the day working in her garden. She grew most of her own vegetables and took pleasure in digging about in the ground.  The soil was rich and black, she liked to see it against her pale skin.  Butterflies and flying beetles with pearlescent wings wafted from plant to plant around her.  She knew that their offspring, tiny eggs and blind, glutinous larvae, were making themselves at home in the hearts and leaves of her tenderly nurtured produce; but that was fine, she had learnt to share over the years, there was more than enough for all of them.

She sometimes found intriguing objects as she turned over the earth, bits of pottery, pieces of bone, sharpened stones, shaped like spearheads.  Today she found two coins; large, old-fashioned coins from another time.  She held one in her hand and scrapped away the soil from its surface with a fingernail.  It appeared to be an old British penny, 18-something, pretty old.  She felt small lives flicker around her as she touched these objects of the dead.

Layla stood, stretched, pushed the coins into a pocket of her jeans and looked around.  Polly appeared, cobwebs on her whiskers and a small, twig-like leg hanging from her mouth.  She gave Layla a golden-eyed glare then disappeared into the undergrowth.  The leg looked like it might have belonged to some enormous insect.

A faint put-put sound interrupted Layla’s musing, and she looked beyond the hedge to the sliver of road visible at the crest of a hill a mile or so away.  The put-put became more of a rumble as a beat up van struggled closer and closer until it finally arrived with a juddering halt on Layla’s driveway.

A large dishevelled woman clambered out, slamming the van door behind her.

‘Jeez, Layla, why the hell you stay all the way out here? You think I’ve got nothing better to do but trek all the way out here with your fancy tomato sauce and yoghurt?’

Gloria’s voice was deep and loud and all of a sudden Layla felt back in the world of humans.

Gloria hardly paused for breath as she lugged the cardboard box of supplies from the back of the van to Layla’s kitchen table.  Life seemed busy in the grocery shop; at least it did the way Gloria told it.

‘You gonna get me cuppa now I’m here?  Come on, I’ve got more deliveries and old Moira’s a misery if she doesn’t get her stuff on time.’

Gloria was the line joining the dots of their lonely existences together.  With Gloria’s arrival and chatter Layla felt connected to a community, it was an illusory but pleasant sensation.

‘You know, girly,’ Gloria was always big on advice, ‘you too young to be living alone like this. You oughta get yourself a man. You know that Greg Te Huia is out now?  He’s a good bloke.’

Gloria didn’t need to look at Layla to know she would be shaking her head.  Most weeks Gloria would suggest a potential partner to Layla and none of them had sparked any interest, this was simply their routine conversation.

‘Hey Gloria, look what I found in the garden.’  Layla pulled the coins out of her pocket and passed them to Gloria.  Gloria held the coins up to the light and put on the expression of an expert.

‘Oh, yeah, she said, I’ve seen lots of these.  They come from way back.  You know there was a big battle here?  A great battle they say, well, the last one anyway.  That was when we all gave up the ghost and went, yeah take the lot, you buggers; have the land and anything else you want.  That’s why I drive up and down the road delivering boxes, instead of living on the land…’

Layla squirmed, she knew the history of how she had come to live in this place was problematic, but she couldn’t help the past.  Gloria looked her in the eyes and laughed her big laugh, pushed her in the arm and said, ‘Come on girl.’  But something had risen between them, and Layla felt Gloria’s good humour came from a well-practiced force.

‘Yeah, loads of people came here to fight.’  Layla sort of knew the history, there was a monument down in the town, but she was pretty sure there hadn’t been any fighting on this land.

Eventually Gloria left, muttering about how she was going to be late for Moira, and with a slam of a car door and a splutter of engine, Layla was left in a cloud of exhaust fumes and a sense of disequilibrium.

Layla went to bed early that night, her room was still light.  She lay with the covers up to her chin and was startled to see a large moth, the size of her hand and some kind of insect, not much smaller than the moth, flat against the white of the wall. There was nothing she could do about them, she thought, and closed her eyes to avoid them, taking comfort in the soft, ‘morepork, morepork,’ of the owls, drifting on the air.

Deep into the night a small breeze interrupted her dream, it was close to her cheek.  A moth wing fanning me, she thought.  It seemed to be whispering something to her, if only she could understand.  She could hear the scratching sound again, and was sure it was coming from the cellar.  Layla slipped back into deep sleep, the scratching and soft flapping of wings providing a soundtrack to the strange images that flickered past her mind’s eye.

A tattooed man, his eyes wide, was slapping his arms and legs, chanting the opening to a haka: ‘Kamate, kamate…’  Layla felt a deep shiver of terror but looked closely at his face, it was full of bravado, strength and nobility, but so young; too young to die.

Something brushed against her, it felt like hair.  She now saw a beautiful Maori woman, her hair long and thick,  brushed against Layla’s face as she stood above her.  Her gaze was straight but Layla could not read her eyes.  Her chin was tattooed and she wore a cloak of feathers.  She sang, a high trilling note that faded to nothing, and she was gone.

Layla sat up with a jerk.  There was no one there.  But there was scratching, both the old sound and also a feeling, on her arm.  She flicked the switch of the lamp and saw an enormous insect had attached itself to her arm.  It did not appear to be threatening, but the tiny claws in its feet were catching against her skin. Layla moved gingerly out of her bed, she felt feathers beneath her feet as she stood, and the insect simply detached itself from her and flew off, to some wall, perhaps.

Layla was now properly awake and could hear scratching clearly; it did seem to be coming from the cellar. She followed a trail of feathers which led her through the half-light to the cellar door.  She grabbed a torch and steadied herself, then pushed the cellar door open and descended into darkness.

The scratching was much louder here.  Layla cast the beam of the torch around the space.  Light caught a bright gleam; golden eyes glittered in the dark.  A morepork?  How would it be in here?  Her sight adjusted and she saw that the eyes belonged to Polly, not an owl.   Of course, it would have been her scratching all along.

Layla balanced the torch on a step so that it cast a steady light without her holding it, and clambered further down to see what Polly had been up to.

There were feathers all over the dirt floor.  A massacre of birds, Layla thought.  But there were no bodies, just feathers.  She saw that Polly had cleared an area and was digging at the ground.  She seemed to have found something.  Layla pushed Polly aside; the cat gave a resentful growl, but let Layla investigate.  There were hard lumps in the ground, not stones or rocks, too smooth for that.  Layla used her fingers to dig around a hard shape and managed to pull the object free.  It was a bone.  A large human sized bone.  Layla used her hands to brush more feathers into a small heap; and saw that the whole surface of the cellar floor was made uneven by the jutting out of bones.

Bones, this is what her house had been built upon.  The cellar felt like a charnel house, thick with the memories of lives these bones had lived.

A movement in the air seemed to lift feathers from the ground.  They blew about Layla’s face as she knelt on the earth, stroking the bone of a long ago person.  Polly stared at Layla, her golden eyes telling her; this happened.

http://www.abctales.com/story/philipsidneynoo/cellars-northern-and-southern-hemisphere-part-1

Domestic Detail in the House of Dreams