“You mustn’t keep on blaming yourself, Nephew,” Hoki whispered to him as he drifted off to sleep. “If anybody failed her, it was me. You two were just the messengers. I was the one who really should have delivered the message.”
When darkness fell, Arnie was still sleeping. Hoki prepared dinner for Bella, Mitch and Francis — corned beef and mashed potatoes, Mitch’s favourite. After dinner the men went to the bach. The women began to do the dishes. Bella could tell that Hoki had something on her mind. “Okay, Sister, spit it out. What’s eating you now.”
Hoki was in between washing and rinsing. “Cora is being brought out of her coma tomorrow. Somebody has to tell her about Skylark. Somebody has to tell her that Skylark is dead.”
“You sure pick your moment,” Bella said. “Well, don’t ask me to do it. That’s your job.”
Hoki was holding the remaining plate from the last lot they had bought at The Warehouse. “I can’t,” Hoki answered. “I loved her —”
“What about me? I loved Skylark too, you know. Just because the chips are down and the going is getting rough, don’t you start piking out on me now.”
Hoki was too busy blubbering to be able to answer.
“All right, then,” Bella said angrily. “I’ll do it.”
Just to make herself feel better, she grabbed the plate that Hoki was rinsing and threw it on the floor. After all, why should her sister always be the one to send plates to the great heaven for broken crockery in the sky?
The next morning, Bella dressed in her formal black dress and tied a black scarf around her head. Mitch and Francis were up at the ripped sky. Hoki was seeing to Arnie, giving him some soup.
“Everybody’s got somebody to get them through this,” Bella grumbled to herself, “and I’ve got nobody. Great.” She drove fast down Manu Valley and into Tuapa. “Ah well, better get it over with.” She had never felt so lonely in all her life.
Cora was lying in the bed, attached to monitoring equipment. Dr Goodwin and his team were there. So was Lucas, face wan with concern.
“Hello, Bella,” Dr Goodwin said. “We’re just about to bring Cora back to us, so you’re just in time. Isn’t Skylark with you?”
“No,” Bella said. She didn’t know what else to add. In silence she stood next to Lucas and waited.
“I’ve been coming to see Cora every day,” Lucas said. “I’ve been watching her while she’s sleeping. She’s so … beautiful.”
Bella looked at him. This was the time when Cora would spit out the poisoned apple. When Sleeping Beauty would awake. As for the rest — Lucas’s dreams and the restoration of happiness to the kingdom, well, life wasn’t that simple, was it?
Dr Goodwin began the induction procedure. He kept checking the monitoring equipment and Cora’s vital life signs. A few suspenseful moments passed, before he gave a grunt of satisfaction. “It shouldn’t take too long,” he said to Bella. “Will you be here when she recovers?”
“Yes,” Bella answered.
Dr Goodwin and his team left the room. After a few minutes, Lucas, too, left to go back to work at the garage. “Will you tell Cora I’ve been here? Tell her I’ll be back.” Twenty minutes later, Cora gave a deep indrawn breath. Her eyelids began to flicker. Bella took Cora’s right hand in hers, not for Cora’s comfort but for her own.
“Is that you, Hoki?” Cora murmured.
Cora’s forehead was beaded in sweat. Her eyes opened. She was trying to focus, looking around the room, and Bella thought she was looking for Skylark.
“Oh, hello Bella,” Cora said.
The moment Bella had been dreading had arrived. “You must be wondering why Skylark isn’t here with me,” Bella began. “Well —”
“Skylark? Skylark?” Cora was sighing. She started to form the words. “I know about Skylark. Of course she’s not here. She’s in that other place.”
Bella’s heart stood still. “That other place? What do you know?”
“I have a message.” Cora began coughing. “From Skylark.”
“A message?”
Cora’s voice was soft and calm. “She’s trapped in that other place. You know, that place where she and Arnie went. It’s big, dark and horrible. And a huge bird, it kind of looks like Godzilla, a giant ogre bird, has taken her to its nest. There are eggs there. Skylark’s all wet and shivering.”
“But she’s alive?”
“Yes. Her message is ‘Mum? Will you tell Hoki and Bella to send somebody to get me?’”
Bella gave a hoarse cry.
“I haven’t got a bloody clue what’s going on,” Cora said. “But when you see her will you tell her that —”
“That?”
“I know what she did for me. Tell her thank you and that —” Cora began to drift away into unconsciousness — “I love her.”
The pouakai clamped its jaws around Skylark. She kicked and screamed, trying to wriggle loose. “Let me go, you big bully —”
The pouakai was amused at first but then became irritated. It gave a sudden flick, not quite enough to break Skylark’s neck but enough to render her senseless, and she fainted.
Skylark had no idea how long she was unconscious. When she revived she was so disoriented she didn’t know whether she was dreaming or awake. Had she really become a bird and flown through the gateway all the way back through Time to help the manu whenua? Nah, get real. Surely, she was still dreaming.
“In which case,” Skylark said, “it’s time to wake up. On the count of three I’ll awake in Tuapa and I’ll make Mum a cup of coffee and —”
Skylark counted, one, two, three, but nothing happened. She went to pinch herself. Oh no, where were her hands and fingers? What was she doing with a beak, feathers and claws?
It was dark. It was raining. Lightning crackled overhead. At every flash her memory came back to her. The pouakai had captured her. It had brought her back to its nest on an island orbiting deep space. The nest was conical, as big as the Auckland Skytower, and attached to the inside of a volcanic rim. The pouakai had woven the nest out of thorny branches and plastered it over with mud.
“I’m not dreaming after all.” Skylark squinted her eyes and wiped the rain away. Where was the pouakai? Flying somewhere looking for other food? The lightning flashed even whiter and Skylark saw, far on the other side of the nest, three giant eggs.
The horror began to sink in. I’ve seen a movie like this, she thought. The pouakai is like the Mother Alien. Soon her eggs will hatch, crack apart, and horrible things with great big razor teeth, snapping jaws and dripping in goo will come out — and I’m their first meal.
Whimpering, Skylark scrabbled around looking for a way out. The sides of the nest were high and impenetrable and, when she tried to climb over them or even fly, she found that she had been tethered to the ground with a piece of twisted rope. After repeated attempts she fell back. She tried to climb again, grabbing at the mud plaster. The mud came away, revealing that skulls and bones of previous victims had been used to seal the nest. Screaming, Skylark scrambled away. Lightning forked overhead and she saw that the entire nest was latticed with bird bones. For a while she went completely berserk, pecking desperately at the rope, yanking at it with her beak and trying vainly to unpick the knot. She realised she was losing her head.
“Skylark O’Shea,” she said sternly to herself. “Calm down, get over yourself, and think this through. The worst case scenario is that you’ll die. Actually, you should be dead by now, but you’re not.” That thought made her feel better. “Where there’s hope there’s life,” she continued, echoing the kind of optimism she’d always scoffed at in her mother. “So although your situation is desperate, it’s not entirely hopeless … is it? Do you really intend being anyone’s dinner? No you don’t —”