Keepers of the Lost City

4 Padlocked Gates and Dead Roads

When Cecil Harding arrived at the gateposts of his father’s farm, his stomach churned a little. His father did not approve of his choice of vocation and he was preparing himself mentally for another verbal bout about not casting his lot with the family to continue in the livestock business — like being a veterinarian was not close enough. At just before 8pm, he pulled his rental up to where his GPS told him the farm was. Even though his father knew he would be arriving sometime between 6pm and 9pm, as discussed during their last phone call, a chain was locked around the frame.

“Typical,” he scoffed, stretching his fingers in two fans of tension on the wheel. “Jesus, I don’t believe this!” Infuriated after his long journey, he was not in the mood for any more hold-ups. He had been awake since he came by ferry over the Cook Strait, and with driving the rental from Picton on the north shore of the South Island all the way down here was five hours of hell.

Roadworks along Highway 7 had delayed him considerably, not to mention ate a lot of extra fuel. By the time he reached Ahaura, he could not stand the hunger anymore. However, upon arriving at a local bar, Cecil found that the kitchen closes at 5pm, a mere eight minutes before he arrived. Bearing onwards to hopefully make it to a hot meal at his destination, he pushed on through the meandering roads of Arnold Valley with a little less enthusiasm than before.

And now this. His cell phone delivered only a weak signal. Only the third attempt to get in touch with his father yielded a ring tone at all, but even that was left unanswered. Cecil had his father’s temper, not a man of great virtue in patience, and like his brother, he had a healthy appetite. Between his rumbling stomach and his refusal at the gates, he was stewing by 10pm, when he was still not able to gain entry to the gate of Nekenhalle Farm.

Against his better judgement, Cecil drove to the nearest gate on the small bush road, hoping that he could find out what was going on from a neighbor. It was unlike his father to have relinquished control to anyone else, but anything unforeseen could have happened while he was en route. The horizon seemed to be divided between the black tree line of the hills and the growing dark blue of the clear sky that was falling to night. Upon the road in front of him, the illumination of his car’s headlights did little to break the darkness. He could barely see more than a few meters ahead, having to go at a slow speed for the sake of wild life. The last thing he needed was to hit an animal and lose his deposit.

Dust danced in the lights, drifting eerily through the beams of his rental car. Cecil was driving in the opposite direction from where he had come, so the road was completely unfamiliar. Although he grew up on the western part of South Island, Cecil found that a lot had changed since he left to pursue his veterinary studies.

Now he was 34 years old, physically chubby, and still single. His brother was afforded pardon for the latter, for now, while he was young. But Cecil had to hear it every time he saw his family and he still had not the heart to tell them that he was gay. While he was already steaming for the inconvenience of being locked out, thinking of the inevitable conversations with his father about his future only put a worse taste in his mouth.

As he travelled along the godforsaken road, he had to really strain his eyes to find concealed entrances, often taking his eyes off the immediately road to read signs. Twice, Cecil thought he had found a neighboring farm, but realized that the signs read as distance markers and served as local demarcation beacons.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” he exclaimed aloud in the dark car. The green lights of the dashboard accentuated his deep frown as he searched the sides of the road. Listening to the radio served no point, even where there was sufficient reception. Right now, just about everything irritated him.

At once, a man appeared in his headlights, crouched over something big and white that almost stretched the width of the road. The rented Hyundai SUV Cecil drove, screamed to a halt as his feet slammed on the brakes.

“Jesus Christ!” he shouted as his heart thundered in his ears. The seatbelt cut into his chest as his neck whipped forward, clobbering the back of his skull against the headrest in recoil. “What the fuck is this?” Cecil shrieked. In his blood a mixed cocktail of rage and fright jolted him up a notch, but just as he was about to hook his fingers around the door handle, he realized that the man had disappeared. As angry as Cecil was, a rush of unknown terror seized him, and instead, he locked the doors.

In the road he could see a torn sheep, its entrails traversing the entire span of the backroad. “Fresh kill,” he murmured as he surveyed the situation. The innards of the animal were still steaming; evidence of a recent slaughter, but there was more. Behind the animal, in the shadow made my Cecil’s high beams, another sheep was lying dead and stiff.

All around the SUV the darkness closed in, and Cecil felt like a stranger in the alien landscape of his home island. A plethora of synopses from various horror films darted through his mind, unwelcome as they were at the worst times. The silence of the night terrified him most. Such absence of movement in the grasses somehow implied a lack of breath that made his lungs feel thick just considering it. It was an uncomfortable peace that he was suddenly jerked from by a loud thump against his window that made him jump.

“Oi! You!” the man from the road exclaimed angrily. “What do you know about this?”

Cecil frowned in befuddlement. “What do you mean?”

The old man, scrawny and wide-eyed, just stared at him, waiting for an answer.

“What do you mean?” Cecil repeated.

The old man shook his head under his narrow-brim leather hat. “I can’t hear a bloody word you are saying. Get out of your goddamn car, boy!”

“No fucking way!” Cecil retorted, adamant that the old man meant him harm.

“Did you do this?” the old man shouted, hammering on his doorframe with the side of his fisted hand. “Did you kill my sheep? You fucking city people. What are you? A tourist?”

“Hey, piss off, you grumpy old bastard!” Cecil growled at his window. His breath blossomed out on the glass. When it faded, he noticed the old man’s twelve gauge yawning at him. “Christ! Are you crazy?” he screeched, throwing up his hands in surrender and falling back toward the passenger seat.

“Get out!” the old man ordered.

“Why?” Cecil wailed.

“If you don’t get out, I will blow out your tires, boy!” came the answer with a series of sharp taps of iron on glass from the barrel. “You can’t go any further anyway, until my animals are out of the road.”

Cecil was not about to push his luck with the frenzied old man. “Alright, okay!” he shouted, still holding his hands in full view when he could. The door opened and Cecil dreaded the cold air that came with its liberation, but he had to deal with this now. He did not want to die hungry.

“I did not run your animals over,” he promptly told his accuser. Pointing to his grill, “Don’t you think my car would have been full of blood and shit if I had killed your sheep?”

The tiny old man, no taller than five feet and weighing less than a wet poodle, leered at the fancy stranger through sunken eyes. For a moment he was pondering on the theory, studying the front bumper and plates with his eyes.

From where Cecil stood, the old man’s face looked like a skull. His gaunt features of deep ocular cavities and protruding cheekbones aged him considerably, but in the slight light of the beams, the shadows only emphasized how underweight he was. His neck, especially, was stringy, covered in stretched skin.

‘He looks like a living mummy,’ Cecil reckoned in thought. ‘Doubt he ever eats his own sheep.’

“I suppose you are right,” he told Cecil reluctantly, lowering his gun. “Like I don’t already have just enough livestock to make the year. My God, I am losing so much money here.”

Cecil knew he was not going to get anywhere with his father’s gate and he was not going any further up the road. He figured it best to stick with the old man for now and at least get some information; maybe even something to eat.

“I tell you what,” he offered, “I can help you ate least get them out of the road.”

The old man shrugged. “What is the use? It will just clear the road for you to leave. And I’ll never know who killed my animals. I keep them inside the fence, you know, penned up. I do my best, but I am just one man tending to all my livestock and sometimes,” he sighed, “they just wander off.”

By the old man’s pitiful tone and body language, it was hard even for Cecil not to feel sorry for him. “Listen… uh, sir… I am a veterinarian by trade. Let me help you get them off the road and then I’ll have a look for you, you know, see what killed them.”

“I don’t have money, son,” the old man sighed. “Do you think I could afford a bloody vet?”

“Do you have dinner and a brandy?” Cecil asked.

Lighting up, the old man replied, “I have shepherd’s pie and beer, son.”

“Good, then you have a vet,” Cecil smiled. It was clearly great news to the old farmer, as he almost skipped forward to put his gun down before gesturing to the stranger to roll up his sleeves.

“Nigel Cockran,” the old farmer smiled as he held out his hand to introduce himself properly.

“Cecil Harding,” Cecil replied. “How do you do?”

Happy to at least get some chow from the deal, Cecil quickly got his coat off and tossed it in his rental.

“Back up your truck, Mr. Cockran,” Cecil suggested. “Then we can try to get them on the bed with as little possible interference to their injuries.”

For over 40 minutes, the two men struggled to get the dead animals on Nigel Cockran’s truck, and when they finally completed their task, Cecil was surprised to find that he had, in fact, passed the Cockran farm an hour before. Following the old roughshod Ford, Cecil realized that Cockran’s farm had no signage or visible gateposts, as he had been looking for. It was just a double-track dirt lane off the bush road that ran between their farms. With rather high growing grasses running a green stripe down the middle of it, Cecil could not help but assume that the road was not used much. Either that, or Nigel was just not bothered with landscaping to ease the overgrowth of his driveway. He relished the thought of filling his belly soon, especially after his hard work that now left the whole rental reeking of animal guts.

At the end of the road, after enduring potholes and dangerously overreaching thorn branches, Cecil was a nervous wreck. He feared for his deposit again, as the hardened stems of foliage and bristles grazed the sheeny surface of the paint job on the SUV, threatening to engrave their names in the car’s body.

As the two vehicles pulled into the gaping door of the small barn to the left of an old farmhouse, Cecil felt an overwhelming sense of fear grip him. All that kept him going was the promise of food and drink. Much as his body would enjoy nourishment, such would his heart be deprived of peace, because he could not shake the feeling that something terrible had befallen his family on the farm while he was helping to clean up a mess in the road.