“Promise, Alexandra,” Josh said quietly, “promise me you’ll keep all of this a secret.”
I nodded. “Sure, Josh,” I replied.
He gazed at me a moment longer before nodding slightly to himself, as if satisfied that he believed me.
He examined his toes, wriggling them into the mud and clouding the water.
“This story goes far beyond Talita’s disappearance. Although that is the most recent interaction this town has had with the magic within Injisuthi, these mountains have been shrouded in mystery for decades,” he said, looking at me intently. “The first record we have of them is from my grandfather’s tribal stories which were passed down from his grandfather. Our tribe lived a good one hundred kilometres from the Injisuthi, where the town is situated now.”
I nodded my encouragement.
“They were very friendly with another tribe that lived much closer to Injisuthi, in her skirt folds, over there.”
He pointed to a sweep of mountains that rose aggressively into rock-capped peaks. I imagined for a moment living in their shadow, Josh’s story taking shape in my mind’s eye.
“Because of their knowledge of the forests and mountains, the mountain tribes that inhabited the foothills of Injisuthi had managed to accumulate much wealth helping various groups of travellers to cross the mountain range. In those days, this area was wild bush veld, lions and especially leopard were everywhere.”
He paused, his eyes drifting to the same plains I’d been looking at.
“One day they were betrayed by their own chief to slavers who had heard of their women’s extraordinary beauty. After many weeks of killing, the slavers cornered the mountain tribe in a deep valley, where they found themselves trapped between their enemies and a cliff face with a mighty waterfall and a deep pool. A great battle began, as the men of the mountain tribe and the other tribes they’d managed to get to help them fought off the slavers. Days and nights passed and still the fighting continued, but with no food and inferior weapons the mountain tribe began to fall. One night when almost all of their warriors had been killed and with their enemies prepared to strike, the mountain people disappeared.”
I was staring at Josh, holding my breath, completely enthralled.
“What happened to them?”
Josh’s expression was intensely serious.
“Some people say their ancestors rescued them by taking them into the stars. Others say they committed suicide by drowning themselves. Some say there was a secret way out of the valley only they knew of.”
He paused dramatically.
“And some say that ‘fish-people’ came to them through the waterfall pool and took them away to safety.”
“Fish-people?”
Luke and Josh both examined my expression carefully, as Josh nodded seriously.
“Like in swimming underwater without oxygen?” I whispered.
Josh nodded.
A chill raced up my spine in spite of the warm afternoon sunshine. I fought to fix the mask of normality on my face, staring at my fishing line intently, because inside I was screaming in terror as snapshots of my nightmare forced an unwelcome entry into daylight.
I’d been underwater for five minutes, and hadn’t drowned.
The memory of that capsule of time had, until now, eluded me in my waking hours. I’d spent countless hours in my therapist’s office trying to remember the sequence of events that’d led up to Brent’s drowning, the theory being that once I faced the horror, I’d be able to move on. None of the techniques she’d applied had worked, the memory remaining vague and wavey, just out of my reach.
Now, cocooned in sunshine and the smell of summer, I was having tiny, fragmented memories of that time.
I remembered the throb of the creepy crawly, the taste of chlorine in my mouth. There’d been a silky sensation on my exposed skin, as if the water were more than just liquid. For a moment I remembered the pain. It wasn’t like my nightmare though, I didn’t feel the pain as I did in the nightmare, but I remembered it, as one remembers a toothache.
It was what I didn’t remember that was the most significant. In all that time, I’d never once worried or even thought about the need for oxygen…
“What does this have to do with our parents’ trip into the Injisuthi?” Luke’s question jolted me back to reality
“Your parents went camping in Injisuthi twenty years ago,” Josh replied.
“Allan and Maryka –” he pointed at Luke, “and Tom and Talita –” he pointed at me “were meant to spend two weeks hiking through the Injisuthi. They were our age, and from everything I’ve heard, very happy, normal teenagers.” He paused, his eyes glinting with the excitement of the tale. “Four days into the trip, Tom came running into town in the early morning shouting for help at the top of his voice. He claimed Talita had disappeared and was worried that she’d been swept downriver. There’d been a massive storm the night before, and they had been camping near the river. Tom woke at about midnight, to find Talita gone.”
“So she was washed downstream?” Luke asked.
Josh shook his head. “That’s what everyone thought initially, but there were issues with that story. The others had been less than a metre away from her, so unless she’d got out of her sleeping bag and wandered towards the river, the others should have been washed away too.”
“So what happened?” I asked, still feeling shaken by the intense response I’d had to the story of the fish-people.
“Our people say she was taken… by them,” he replied, his voice laden with intrigue.
“Why would they take her?” I asked.
“How should I know?” he replied, shrugging his shoulders.
“It came out later that she was being abused by her father, and others thought she’d committed suicide instead, you know, thrown herself into the rushing river.” Luke filled me in on the little he knew before turning back to Josh. “So your grandfather really believed they took her?” There was huge scepticism in his voice.
“Stranger things have happened, Luke,” Josh replied defensively.
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Like Mokele-mbembe.”
Luke burst out laughing, shaking his head and muttering about stupid superstitions.
“The what?” I asked Josh.
“Mokele-mbembe is supposedly Africa’s version of Nessie, the Loch Ness monster,” Luke butted in still giggling.
“There are dozens of cave paintings proving its existence, Luke,” Josh replied angrily.
Luke laughed again. “Well, at least you have that with Mokele-mbembe, what do you have on the fish-people? Nothing.”
“So what you’re saying is that you won’t believe it unless you see it?” I asked him, not liking the way he was treating Josh at all.
“Yeah something like that,” Luke replied.
“So then, the wind doesn’t exist?” I shot back, my voice laden with sarcasm.
He laughed, some of the tension easing. “What does the wind have to do with anything?”
“Well, you can’t see the wind,” I replied, smiling to take the bite out of my words.
“Of course you can,” he replied, still smugly assured of his argument.
“No she’s right,” Josh interrupted him, “you can only see the