Cthulhu Land of the Long White Cloud AU Read online

  The flying boat shudders with the impact of touchdown, the pontoons beneath the wings throwing up rooster tails of spray as it settles in the lagoon. Acres of brackish water ringed by swampy reeds and rugged, desolate hill country surround the Sunderland. The massive propellers roar and whine as the pilot guides the flying boat towards the floating dock. By the time the plane is moored and Augustus and his bags have been offloaded, he’s still thanking his lucky stars they didn’t run aground. Who knows what may lurk beneath these waters, waiting for a chance to slice open the belly of such a lumbering goose? So ungainly a thing, so cumbersome up close, yet out over the endless waters of the Pacific it felt tiny. Despite the evidence of decades, Augustus still finds it unnatural that a thing so unwieldy as an aeroplane can achieve and sustain flight. Surely the laws of physics should defy this aberration, if only because of the insult to the grace and beauty of those creatures with wings, which make the sky their home. What right have we to claim their domain for our own, there to joyride and make our wars and fancies? Must we, with our human arrogance, challenge the very heavens?

  The driver from town throws his bags onto the back of a small, smoky truck. He’s Māori, yet he has the red-tinged hair that suggests traces of Moriori in his blood, those people who claim to be the rightful inhabitants of this place they called Rēkohu, Misty Sun, before they were all but wiped out by another grand human invention: genocide. Augustus climbs into the cab.

  “Welcome to the Chathams,” the driver says as he gets behind the wheel. “First time, eh?”

  “Hmmmph,” Augustus says, hoping to derail this pointless chatter that other people so insist upon, filling all the nooks and crannies of day and night with a constant drivel of meaningless inanity. Why could people not just appreciate the silences for what they are? Why always with the talking?

  “I’m Will,” says the driver over the motor’s growl as he throws the truck into gear, and it bounces off down the rutted trail alongside the lagoon. “We don’t get a lot of visitors out our way. Not really a holiday destination, though if you ask me there’s no better place in the world. You like mutton-bird? You’re gonna love the mutton-bird. What you here for anyway?”

  Augustus grits his teeth. His mother taught him to be polite. “I’m here to do research. Anthropological. I shouldn’t be long.”

  “Scientist, eh? Yeah, we get a few through. Taking an interest in our little scrap of nothing out here. You studying the whales? They migrate up through here. My cousin Hemi’s got a boat, he can take you out if you need a charter.”

  “I’m sure,” Augustus mutters. Clearly, this far from civilisation people don’t even know the meaning of the word anthropology. “No, not whales. Nothing nearly so extravagant. I have arranged use of a vehicle for my work.”

  “No worries, bro. That’ll be me.”

  “No, not a driver, a vehicle. My work is highly confidential. I must go about it alone.”

  Will laughs, a throaty sound like a pig choking. “Not a lot of spare cars out here, eh. Don’t stress, I’ll sort you out, getcha where you need to be. My lips are sealed, eh.”

  Augustus glowers.

  The truck rises and falls along the narrow road between the low hills and the swell of the ocean. Is there nowhere on this godforsaken island where the watery horizon does not dominate the view? Is there nowhere one might hide?

  The truck pulls up outside the tavern in Waitangi, the Chathams’ largest town and still barely more than spit in the wind on a winter’s day. Augustus has never been more pleased to reach a bar, until he gets inside. The stink of stale beer and old cigarette smoke is enough to put him off wanting to eat for a week. Will lugs his suitcases to the upstairs guest room while Augustus signs in with the elder gentleman at the bar, who looks as dilapidated as the building.

  “Kitchen opens at five,” the publican tells him, “closes at seven. Menu’s on the blackboard.” He fixes Augustus with rheumy eyes through a mask of weathered, leathery skin, dark and scarred like a man who has lived most his years under the salt-harsh sun of the rolling sea.

  Augustus nods and glances at the blackboard: fish, fish, more fish, mutton-bird and steak, all generously served with potatoes and vegetables, as if potatoes were not already a vegetable.

  “Just give Arty a yell when you need a lift, bro,” Will says, waving as he heads out the front door. “I’m never far away. Can’t really be far away out here, eh?” He laughs again, that twisted sound.

  Augustus shudders, and climbs the staircase to his room, which, of course, overlooks the sea. He yanks the curtains closed and sinks onto the hard bed, relishing the confines of the four walls, yet through the window rumble the waves as they roll against the waterline just outside. It’s there, always there.

  Taking a deep breath, Augustus busies himself with checking his things, arranging his books and equipment. He fills his leather knapsack with a journal, sketchbook, reference notebooks, pens and pencils, maps of the island, charts of the surrounding ocean. Trenches and canyons plunge into unknown depths just a few miles from the shallows of the Chatham Rise, eternally cold and unknown, deeper than comprehension. Yet something drew the Moriori here, so long ago. Something kept them here, right up until their final days.

  It is late afternoon when Augustus leaves his room and dares to walk the streets of Waitangi, treading the wharf, the wind brisk in his face. This place ought to be desolate, forgotten, abandoned. Yet it persists. The hulking freighters trimmed in rusty streaks return to dock for the evening, offloading crates of fish layered in ice and salt. The sea sustains these people, just as it did when the Moriori chose this inhospitable archipelago in the middle of the unrelenting ocean as their home. Some say they arrived here fleeing the Māori, some say the Māori followed them here, one people hunted nearly to extinction by another. Whatever the truth of it is, the Moriori are gone now, glimpsed only in bloodlines, a curve of the nose, a shade of hair. Yet Augustus is not interested in their end, however brutal or bloody. He is interested only in what drew them here to begin with.

  Augustus returns to the bar and orders the steak and a cold beer as night finally settles in. Will appears and pulls up a bar stool beside him. “Take you out in the morning, eh. Where you headed?”

  Augustus lets the beer cool his throat before replying. “Hapupu.”

  Will is very still for a long moment. “Can’t take you there, bro.”

  “I merely wish to study your dendroglyphs, the carvings left in the trees by your ancestors. If you can’t take me there yourself then take me to the property owners and I will ask permission of them instead.”

  “Can’t. It’s tapu. Only family can go there. I hope that’s not all you came to do, mister, because if it is you wasted a trip.”

  Augustus sips more beer. He’d rather not but in a place like this it helps him fit in with the locals, at least a little. “Then perhaps I might start at Point Munning.”

  “Shit, bro, you trying to fall off the map or what?”

  Point Munning lies at the extreme north-eastern tip of Chatham Island, a low, flat, desolate scrap of windswept rock and sand populated by hardy grasses and a few determined trees bent permanently to the shape of the constant sea breeze. Beyond it are thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean. Standing on this point, Augustus is surrounded on three sides by the pulsing rise and fall of the sea, as if somewhere beyond the horizon in those sudden vast depths something breathes, its sleeping motions stirring the water to fright. He imagines himself an intrepid explorer, some several hundred years earlier, having successfully crossed the harrowing stretches of the South Pacific in a fragile waka built of wood and flax, thinking he had found a new world to call their own, only to have those hopes dashed by crossing the island and finding here, barely a day’s walk from where they made landfall, that the world once again ended in an infinity of waves. This land was no new Aotearoa, no land of the long white cloud and promise of
bounty, but one of misty sun and eternal sea.

  Augustus draws his journal from his knapsack and starts to sketch and take notes, while Will sits in the truck atop the hill where the track ends. His driver is keeping out of the wind, eager to be gone again. Augustus hopes his presence will be required elsewhere, and soon enough, his wishes are granted. The radio in the cab crackles, and Will replies. After a brief conversation, Will opens his door. “Hey, I gotta go do a couple things. You right for a bit?”

  Augustus waves dismissively, and continues to scrawl until the sound of tyres on gravel dies away. Then he packs his things and sets off south along the coast. Nothing is far away, at least, and this is why he got such an early start this morning. Will may think they’re too far from Hapupu to walk, but Augustus Shandon marched across northern Africa in service to Queen and country. This little tramp is but a breath of air, a stretching of the legs.

  In this flat part of the islands, the tumbled farmland soon gives way to the wide, graceful curve of Hanson Bay, and the landscape sinks into a valley of low bush and tall, slim trees. The walk has taken him three hours, and no doubt by now his absence will have been noted. Maybe the locals will presume him drowned and give him up for dead before they suspect him of defying their wishes and entering the sacred grove without permission, but he doubts it. Time is short.

  He stands alone on the sands of the bay, the ocean before him and two lakes at his back, and he imagines how it must have felt to be the first man standing here, seeing what he sees, hearing what he hears: the long, drawn hush of the ocean breathing. The insignificance of blood and skin and hair in the face of that great emptiness, stretched out before the constant wind.

  “I am here,” he shouts, challenging the massive breathing silence. “You called, and I came.”

  The sea doesn’t answer back, not in words. Only in its touch, wrapping the wide crescent of sand like a lover running her finger up the curve of his throat. He shudders, and turns to the bush behind him. Just as someone long before him turned from that hush, that touch, and knew he must capture what he saw, what he felt. Augustus walks up the sand into the shadow of the sacred trees they call Hapupu.

  Augustus walked up the sand into the shadows of the sacred halls they called Tut-Hasputet. Stepping from beneath the anvil of Egypt’s punishing sun was a relief, even though his heart pounded in his mouth with the knowledge that, officially, this place was off-limits to enlisted men. But since this war had dragged him so far from home, and his only reward had been to bear witness to a lifetime’s worth of suffering and death, why would he not take this opportunity to see something curious, some­thing that mattered, a glimpse of a past more ancient than anything he might ever see back home in quaint, rural New Zea­land.

  It had cost him all his cigarettes to buy his way past the guards stationed before the ruins, but luckily the army kept the boys in nicotine sticks and he didn’t smoke, so it was a price easily paid. From his knapsack he pulled his clunky standard-issue torch and descended the tunnel in its wan light, clambering over fallen rocks and the smoke-charred debris left in the wake of the shelling. The silence beneath the earth, broken only by his footsteps and shallow breathing, stretched out dark and deep, drawing him down.

  The silence beneath the trees, broken only by his scuffing foot­steps and laboured breathing, stretches out dark and deep, drawing him in. The kōpī trees arch and loom, swaying in the sea breeze, and the symbols glare at him from where they were carved into the bark, long ago. The glyphs may be birds, some scholars say, since birds were such an important factor in the Moriori’s survival. Others suggest the glyphs are the faces of ancestors, or heroes. But Augustus Shandon had seen something completely different when first he had read the works published by D.R. Simmons on the meanings of the rakau momori, and seen the accompanying sketches and photographs. Contorted, maybe, by time and the nature of trees to grow and change and heal, but there in the pages of the Journal of Ethnographic Sciences he had seen the same faces he had first chanced upon in the dust-dark tunnels of Tut-Hasputet, outside Cairo.

  He had come home from the war with only one thing on his mind: to return one day to Egypt, to see those places again, to touch once more the faces of the gods he had found. Yet despite securing his university education, work opportunities for anyone passionate about archaeology or ethnography were few and far between in post-war New Zealand, unless you were already part of the social elite. Augustus was not so privileged, merely a working class lad conscripted to service who had survived the war mostly unscathed, in body at least. Instead he had worked menial research and administrative jobs at Auckland’s tin-pot university and libraries, reading of others’ far-off discoveries in the periodicals and hating them all for their successes; until Simmons’ discovery, on an island just a few hours distant from his home, had led him here.

  Augustus draws a fountain pen from his pocket as he moves from one kōpī to the next, craning his neck to view the shapes carved in the bark. It is so much more beautiful than he could have anticipated. Not ancient, like the drawings in Tut-Hasputet, but undeniably of the same dream-state origins. These are living trees, and so they will grow and mend and wither and die, like people, and Augustus cannot help but grieve for all the rakau momori already lost, fallen to wind and rot and age. He is surrounded by the kōpī and their vulgar yellow fruits when he sees it. The one he came here to find, that which had called to him. He leans against another tree and sucks in breath at the sight of the carving, a cold sweat on his brow as the image takes him back fifteen years, to those forbidden graves in the Egyptian desert. With shaking hands, he opens his palm and starts to draw.

  With shaking hands, he opened his palm and started to draw. In the torch’s dim light, Augustus could just see his sweating palm, and the shape peering back at him from the crypt wall. The fountain pen moved in shaky lines, copying that face, a smile as wide as an ocean, the thread of ribs and long curving limbs, eyes like hollow pits. Would that the army had given them all journals so he might have sketched this discovery. Ink, they had aplenty, but paper was hard to come by. So he drew the face, the suggestion of a body, on the soft flesh of his hand, cursing as sweat marred the ink, distorting the clarity of the miracle before him. This image on the wall was a crude rendition, the attempts of a benighted barbarian to capture this essence in the trappings of art to represent something so much greater, yet constricted by the hard edges of stone and chisel. There was more to this carving, buried in the inadequacies of human comprehension and expression, so limited at the best of times.

  At once, Augustus understood his error. Like the artist who had stood here long before him, straining and sweating, Augustus was trying to capture what he saw with human tools, inert, fallible brushes on a fixed pallet, when he sought to capture something that pulsed and breathed. As he slipped his pen away and drew his knife, he heard a deep rumble, like an artillery shell falling somewhere far away, or a sigh rising up from within the very earth itself.

  As he slips his pen away and draws his knife, he hears a deep rumble, like an echo of distant artillery, or a sigh rolling up between the trees, from their very roots. The scars stand proud on his palm and wrist, highlighted by ink, the face grinning up at him just at it did so long ago. It writhes and stretches as he flexes his fingers. He touches the tip of the knife to the ink, and begins to cut.

  He touched the tip of the knife to the ink, and began to cut. Shallow at first, a thin tracery of blood suggesting the shape, a silhouette within an outline. There was no pain, just a rushing in his ears.

  There is no pain, just a rushing in his ears, like all the winds of all the seas are rushing past him, dashing into oblivion against the vast nothing of the ocean. The trees bend and shake, their graven images snapping back and forth as if they seek at last to take wing from these mortal prisons.

  Blood runs in thick rivulets down Augustus’ fingers, the knife trembling as he opens up the old scars, remembering
how they found him there, dragged him out, ignoring his pleas that he wasn’t yet finished, he still had to do the eyes. He remembers how they took his knife and his gun and wrapped him up to heal. When he tried to rip the bandages off, tried to take a scalpel from a passing tray in the hospital and finish the necessary cuts, they put him in a special jacket and shipped him home. Those people had no idea what they had ruined, what they had taken from him. By the time he was cleared to leave the hospital, he could no longer visualise the face, the eyes. The memory was blurred.

  Until now. This time, there is no one to stop him.

  The eyes do not form a part of the tableau of puckered scar tissue covering his hand and wrist, but it’s clear what he thought were ribs may in truth be tentacles, that these long narrow eyes through which he can see a deep sinking eternity may indeed be those of wheke, the octopus, who would also have been an essential part of Moriori life in these parts, just as they were to the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean.

  He sets the knife to the unmarked skin near the centre of his palm and cuts one short, sharp gash where an eye should be. Such a neat little slice, yet it says so much. Looking into the trickle of blood that leaks from the cleanly separated skin, Augustus can see the tears of the universe, and the depths within.

  “Mister Shandon.”

  Augustus whips his head up. No, not again. Through the trees, men with rifles. Just like they came the first time—traitorous curs—when they found him before he had completed the drawing, the cutting. He takes a step back. There’s Will, and two others he can see, perhaps more through the trees. The eyes of the dendroglyph look back at him, and he can see their completeness, their immensity. He stands on the verge of something huge, the greatest of human discoveries. The edge of a pit within which swirl the leviathan colours of the infinite. He will not have it taken from him again. He sets the knife to his palm, to the last open patch, where the final eye belongs.