Kill Baxter (9 page)

I take out my phone. I have three bars so I give it a try and dial the number.

‘Esmé?’ I say.

‘Hey, magic boy,’ she says. ‘Are you there yet?’ It’s so damn good to hear her voice.

‘Nah.’ I try to sound nonchalant. ‘Still on the train.’ I hear a voice in the background and Esmé laughs.

‘Who you with?’ I say.

‘Oh, just my friend Troy.’

‘Who is this Troy?’ I ask coolly. ‘Have I ever met him?’

‘I thought you said you weren’t jealous?’

‘I’m not,’ I say. ‘Pssht. Me, jealous? Come on. I just like to know what you’re doing.’

‘Troy and I are hanging out, that’s all.’

The voice says something again in the background and Esmé laughs.

‘Jesus,’ I say. ‘Do you think you could focus on me for a second?’ I instantly regret it.

‘Bax, if you’re going to be a dick, I’m going to hang up. Call me again if you want to apologise.’

The line goes dead. Shit. I instantly redial the number and then realise that the signal has disappeared.

‘Fuck!’ I scream and kick the toilet wall repeatedly until I force myself to calm down. Just relax. Wait until you’ve got signal and then call her back. At least you’ve got a phone and there is an intermittent signal. It’s all going to be OK.

I open the toilet door feeling a Zen-like calm. Which is instantly dispelled by a pair of hands grabbing me and slamming me against the corridor wall.

Hekka’s face is right in mine and his forearm is against my throat. ‘Well look. It’s the boy who wants to be king,’ he says, spitting into my eye.

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I choke out, struggling against the tattooed forearm that is slowly closing off my airway. ‘I don’t want to be anything.’

‘Well you shouldn’t have saved the world then,’ he says. His face is angry and red and the crescent scar is throbbing with his pulse. ‘That’s my job. I want you to say it. Say “You’re the Chosen One”.’

‘You’re the Chosen One,’ I gurgle. ‘You’re the Chosen One.’

‘Don’t fucking forget it.’ He pushes harder on my throat, then pulls my phone from my hand. ‘I’ll take this.’

I struggle against his arm and grab at the phone. It’s my lifeline to the outside world.

‘Give it to me,’ I hiss.

‘Consider it your donation to the cause,’ he says with a smile. He raises a fist. ‘I’m going to leave you with a little souvenir of your brush with greatness.’

‘Leave him alone,’ two voices say in unison.

I strain my neck to look over Hekka’s shoulder and see the two girls from the threesome. Except they have the same torso. The shirt is white and starched, but one shoulder is ripped, revealing an arm full of tattoos. One leg is wearing a torn fishnet stocking. In one hand is a cheerleading pompom; the other is holding a switchblade delicately between purple nails.

‘Siamese monster alert,’ Hekka says, taking his forearm off my throat. ‘Freaks defending freaks. Perfect.’

‘Just get the fuck out of here,’ the goth says. ‘Go jerk off to your diagram of the Hero’s Journey or something.’

Hekka clenches his fists. ‘I’m the Chosen One. You and this freak are nothing.’

‘You know why men become big heroes?’ the goth says.

‘Please tell me,’ Hekka says.

The twins walk over until they’re standing right in front of him. ‘Because they have tiny penises,’ the goth says with a smile.

Hekka punches the wall next to her and then stalks off down the corridor.

‘You OK?’ the cheerleader asks.

‘Yeah, thanks for that,’ I say, rubbing my neck.

‘Stop staring, dildo,’ the goth says.

‘I’m really sorry, it’s just …’

‘Yeah, we’re conjoined twins. Thanks for pointing that out. We wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.’

‘Technically we’re dicephalus twins,’ the cheerleader says. ‘Which means two heads and one body.’

‘Thanks for that, brainiac. I think he may have noticed,’ the goth says. ‘Anyways, saving your ass has been real but I’ve really got to go and smoke a joint.’

‘Bye!’ calls the cheerleader as they saunter off down the corridor.

I stare after them. I haven’t even got to Hexpoort yet and already my phone has been jacked by the Chosen One and I’ve been saved by a knife-wielding set of conjoined twins. Fucking great.

We disembark at a small station that’s not marked on the map that I have. It looks like it could be any part of small-town South Africa, a confluence of churches, petrol stations and well-aged shopping centres.

I shield my eyes against the unpleasantly bright sun. A fleet of rusty buses wait for us in the dirt. Nom and Stevo help me carry my cases to an old maroon clunker driven by an equally old grey-haired woman. She’s built a small shrine to Elvis on her dashboard, paying tribute to the plastic figurine of the King she has stuck above the speedometer with shells, beads, feathers and hair.

The bus is crammed with teenagers in various stages of inebriation.

‘Everyone’s just getting it out before we hit the Poort,’ Nom says as we find a seat at the back. ‘The school term can be a bit brutal.’

‘What’s it like?’ I ask. ‘Hexpoort?’

‘Oh,’ he says with a grin. ‘I don’t want to spoil it for you.’

We drive for about an hour through a wasteland of dirt and dust. The driver puts on an old Miriam Makeba album; the tape is stretched, giving the recording a warped, hallucinatory quality that does not play nice with my depression. I stare listlessly at the desolate landscape outside. Even the few farm kids that we pass look menacing. The bus judders and shakes as we hit an orange dirt road that leads up into a series of stark hills.

‘Beautiful,’ I say with a sigh. I lose track of the time as the brown landscape streaks by.

Eventually we grind to a halt. ‘Welcome to the Poort,’ Nom says with a grand gesture.

I crane my neck to see through the windscreen. Hexpoort squats against brown canyon walls, an old Dutch granite fort in the shape of a pentacle, surrounded by a perimeter of electric fencing and razor wire.

‘The points of the star are Malpit, Donkergees, Bokveld, Wintergat and Skaduwee,’ Nom says. ‘You’ll end up living in either Malpit, Donkergees or Wintergat depending on what clan you’re in. I’m in Broken Teeth, so I stay in Malpit.’

‘How do they decide what clan you’re in?’ I ask. ‘Some kind of magical choosing thing?’

He shrugs. ‘Nah, dude, I think it’s more a logistical thing: space, beds available, et cetera.’

I stare at the high granite walls and the razor wire.

‘Looks like a prison,’ I say.

‘You can, and should, judge a book by its cover.’ Stevo smiles. ‘But don’t look so glum, Bax. It’s not all bad.’

‘Yeah,’ I say, but I don’t believe that for a second.

Hexpoort smells of woodsmoke and herbs. I breathe it in and try to imagine myself staying here. It’s difficult.

We’re let through the perimeter fence by a couple of grim-faced guards and make our way to the entrance of the fort. Huge steel doors carved with scenes of Zulu warriors fighting strange lizard-like creatures bar our way.

‘That’s the story of the Battle of Blood River; it doesn’t often get told,’ Stevo says, nodding to the carvings. ‘Crazy shit.’

The doors swing open to admit us to the courtyard. My suitcases clack on the cobbled stones as we enter and I can’t stop myself from putting my hand against a granite wall. I feel a deep, shuddering cold, like the fort has roots that sink down into the earth and suck up dark secrets.

We pass an old gallows made of black wood. A frayed noose hangs from the wooden arm and sways in the breeze.

‘Apparently the Dutch Hexenmeisters, their mages, used to have sangomas hanged there,’ Stevo says. ‘They didn’t like the competition.’

‘Stevo is our little historian,’ Nom says. ‘Get him stoned and he’ll talk about this shit for hours.’

I smile and can’t help but think I should introduce him to Rafe.

‘Come on,’ Nom says. ‘We’ve got opening assembly.’

The crowd of kids gather at the foot of an old stone staircase that winds its way up the side of the fort like a snake. There’s no jostling or fighting now. Everyone stands quietly, their eyes flicking nervously up towards the top of the stairs. I’m so prepared for anything – animal, mineral or vegetable – to come sauntering down that when a woman with a painted face and a man in khaki appear, it’s a bit of an anticlimax.

The woman is sturdy and muscular, with high cheekbones. Her steel-grey hair is pulled back into a bun pierced by porcupine quills. She’s wearing a red leather breastplate, and riding pants with heavy soldier’s boots. Her wrists and elbows are bound with white beads and her dark skin is caked with red clay. She carries a cow-tail whisk in one hand and a long, wicked whip in the other. A squat handgun is strapped like a gunslinger’s to her upper thigh. ‘Newbies assemble next to the gallows,’ she says in a cold, commanding voice.

‘The rest of you into your dorms and get some rest. You’re going to need it; this term’s going to be fun,’ the guy adds. He’s large and beefy, with an epic handlebar moustache, and dark hair held off his face by a black headband with a bright red rising-sun logo. He’s wearing all khaki: a two-tone, short-sleeved shirt, very short shorts and long socks. Huge aviator sunglasses perch on his bulbous nose and he has silver rings fashioned into skulls and dragons on every finger.

There are groans and murmurs as the returning students troop off into the fort.

‘See you later,’ Nom says, and Stevo pats me reassuringly on the back.

A group of fifteen new kids stay behind and look nervously at each other. The woman stands in front of us with her hands on her hips. ‘I’m the Red Witch and I’m the head of this little institution. According to traditional law you are all trainee sangomas, my
twasas.
Which is a euphemism for bitches.’

She walks up and down in front of us, looking less than impressed with her new bunch of recruits.

‘There is one simple rule that will make our relationship run smoothly and it’s this: you do what I say, when I say it, without questioning, or you’ll feel pain like you’ve never felt before. If you’re thinking you can handle it, if there’s a little voice in your head that’s saying that you can fuck with me and then deal with the consequences, I urge you to silence that little voice forcefully. You
can’t
handle it.’

She turns to her khaki companion. ‘This is the Shadow Boer. He is my second-in-command and is also to be obeyed without question.’

She spreads her hands and smiles. ‘Now that we have got the formalities out of the way, let me tell you about the place where you find yourselves.’ She gestures to the surrounding structure. ‘Dutch Hexenmeisters built these walls and held them against English warlocks and magic-shielded Zulu impi. The English took the fort and used it for their own purposes. Then the Zulu took it. Then the English again.’

She raises a finger. ‘Whether you’re Xhosa, Zulu, Dutch, English, Irish, Scottish, Chinese, French, Indian or whatever the fuck fruity combination your ancestors conferred on you, make no mistake: blood has been spilled on these stones. Our ancestors threatened, killed and fucked one another here.’ She smiles a dangerous smile. Her teeth are brilliantly white against the red clay. ‘And here we stand fucked into one big crucible.’

She pauses for a moment, and during the silence I can feel the roots of the fort threading together, the blood in my veins pulsing, the group of us for one moment a single living organism, a human hivemind, ancient, flawed and bloody.

‘Yes,’ the Red Witch says with a grin that tells me I’ve experienced the effect that was intended. ‘We’re not here to teach you how to impress your little girlfriends and boyfriends with charms or magic potions. No, no. And we’re not here to be glamorous secret agents either.’

She stands in front of one of the newbies and swats him across the face with her whisk. ‘Oh, we might call ourselves agents, but we’re really just cops, policing the borders of reality. And make no mistake: out there we’re the worst kind of cops, the kind that everyone wants to kill. Other cops like to see us die because they don’t understand who we are. The Hidden like to see us die for daring to enter their worlds.

‘The only thing that gives us the edge, that little bit extra that stops us from being splattered all over the streets, is what you’ll learn here. This is dirty magic, gutter magic, street-fighting magic. We don’t rest on ceremony. Find out what works and use it. I don’t care if you pray to Darth Vader and masturbate to torture porn to charge your sigils. If you cut yourself and smoke crystal meth to get into the mood for rituals. We’re understaffed, underpaid and unimpressed by your fledgling abilities. In parts of this country people are stoned to death and necklaced for witchcraft. Nobody cares if you use magic outside of the confines of these walls. If you fuck up, you’re dead. So don’t fuck up.’

She turns to the Shadow Boer. ‘Break them up into their clans.’

The Shadow Boer begins calling out names and clans in a booming voice. The crowd starts to dissipate as the newbies are assigned. I feel like I’m the last kid being picked for dodgeball. ‘Zevcenko. Broken Teeth,’ the Boer says after a long pause.