Now I saw where this was going. ‘Including Greg?’
‘Yep. He was another outcast like me. A boy with no friends. He became her student too. Her acolyte, I guess you could call it. He loved Abigail as much as I did.’
‘Okay. But how does this connect to the murders? And to what’s happening now?’
She took a sip from her drink. ‘This is where it gets a little weird. Are you ready for this?’
‘I think my time here has prepared me for weird.’
A couple walked past us, hand in hand, giggling like they’d just been doing something naughty in the woods. They probably had. Nikki waited till they were out of earshot.
‘Much of what Abigail taught us came from this book that she’d got from some garage sale. It was called A Sacred Space: The Secret History of the Hollows. I can remember it like I can remember what I had for breakfast this morning. It was brown, with an old black-and-white photo on the cover, of a woman wearing this long white robe and standing in the woods. The pages were all stained a kind of nicotine yellow and it stank like an ashtray. But there was something so cool about it, especially the way Abigail taught it to us, like it was a holy text or something.’
She took a pack of Marlboros out of her pocket and lit up. ‘Want one?’
‘I’m good.’ I was impatient for her to tell me how this all connected. ‘What was in the book?’
Now she was into the flow of her story she seemed less nervous. ‘It was about the history of this area. Penance was founded in the early eighteen-hundreds by a pastor named George Levett. He built the church where most people here still worship. Ask anyone in Penance about George Levett and they’ll be able to tell you the official version of his biography. That he and his wife and their dozen children moved here from a logging town further south and founded the community. He used to carry out baptisms right here, by the lake.’ She pointed towards the water.
I tried not to let my impatience show.
‘According to the book, there was a hidden side to George Levett. A secret side. He had a deep love of nature. A respect for it. I guess you could call him an early environmentalist. On top of that, he had respect for the Native Americans the Europeans had stolen this land from. There were actually one or two Native Americans within the community. I guess you know that the settlers here tried their hardest to convert the indigenous people to Christianity? That included the Baptists. According to the book, Levett brought a Native American woman into his flock. They became friends. And she told him how all this was sacred ground.’
I must have looked dubious because she said, ‘I’m not talking about haunted burial grounds and all that horror-movie stuff. It’s about the Hollows being a sacred space. Hallowed ground. They believed in this essential harmony between people and nature. It’s called animism. The belief that humans, plants, animals, even mountains and lakes and trees, have a spirit. And it’s all part of the greater soul of the universe.’
‘Are you saying that Levett came to believe in that too? Animism?’
‘No. He was a Christian pastor. But he respected that belief. And he made it part of his mission to protect these woods and this lake. It’s something that was handed down through the generations. Even though there would’ve been money in it, the people of Penance resisted attempts to log the area. Later, they fought off building factories that might’ve polluted the lake.’
‘That’s . . . great. But I still don’t understand how that connects to Greg and all the stuff that’s been going on.’
‘Bear with me. I want you to understand that we were under Abigail’s spell. We lived in a shitty town. Everyone at school hated us. Our parents were mostly absent. We thought Penance was the worst place on earth, a nothing place in the woods that had just gone to hell because no one cared about it. That was our hometown. That was us, in a way. But then this book, reading about this area being sacred to the Native Americans and Levett honouring that and the townsfolk buying into it, at least for a few generations, treating the Hollows as a special place – undeveloped and unspoiled – it really got to us. It made us feel like the place where we lived wasn’t a total shithole. That it was special and, by extension, so were we. And when Abigail died—’
‘She died?’
Nikki stared at the ground like she was still deeply affected by the loss. ‘Lung cancer. It was awful . . . She was too young, and we’d only known her for, like, a year. But this is the weird part – don’t say I didn’t warn you – after she died we didn’t believe she’d gone.’