The Rusted Gate

In 2008, the town of Fenwick was a modest collection of houses and farms, its history buried beneath layers of swamp reclamation and river silt. Long before the first European settlers carved out their homesteads, the land was a network of tidal islands and boggy channels, known to the Maori as Te Repo, the place of murky waters. By the time I was nineteen, the old stories were mostly forgotten, reduced to a few street names and a plaque in the town square that no one read.

My mate, Jake, lived in the coastal settlement of Pākaraka, a scatter of baches and permanent homes about four kilometers from the main strip. One winter evening, with the sky a bruised purple and the southerly wind cutting through our jackets, we decided to walk the long, straight stretch of Pākaraka Road. It was a lonely road, bordered by gorse and pine windbreaks, with the occasional break in the hedges revealing dark paddocks and the glint of a creek. There were no streetlights out there, just the occasional porch light from a distant farmhouse.

We’d brought our phones, the old Nokia and Sony Ericsson models with basic video recording. It had become a habit of ours to try and capture EVP, electronic voice phenomena, claiming we were just mucking about, but there was a nervous excitement in our steps. We’d tried it before on these roads, getting a few garbled sounds we’d put down to cross-talk on the overhead power lines. The poles ran alongside the road, their cables humming with a low thrum, and we’d convinced ourselves that any whispers were just electricity bleeding into the phone’s mic.

That night, we decided to try a different approach. Instead of walking and murmuring into our handsets, we stopped at a gate that led into a paddock that sloped down to the river. The gate was old, rusted, with a loop of wire holding it shut. Beyond it, the land was still and dark, and the river was a black ribbon reflecting the faint glow of the town’s lights. Jake suggested we stay there for a while, record the silence, and see what might come to us.

We leaned against the gate, shoulders hunched against the cold, phones raised like talismans. The only sounds were the wind in the wires and the distant bark of a dog. After a few minutes of nothing, Jake spoke into his phone, ‘Is anyone here? We just want to talk.’ The recording would later capture the wind, the hum, and then a faint, almost imperceptible whisper that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. It said, ‘The gate is shut. Keep it that way.’

We looked at each other, a chill running down our spines that had nothing to do with the temperature. I replayed it, and there it was, unmistakable in its soft sibilance. But we were quick to rationalize. ‘It’s just the power lines,’ Jake said, but his voice was shaky. We tried again, asking for a name, and the phone picked up a longer, more complex phrase that we could barely make out under the static: ‘You should not have come here, for the land remembers the old ways.’

We should have left, but we were young and stupid. We thought we were just being spooked by our own minds. So we pressed on, walking further along the road, past the farms and the sleeping animals, until we reached the bridge over the Kaikōra Creek. The bridge was a concrete span from the 1950s, and underneath it, the water moved with a slow, oily current. The power lines followed us, their buzzing a constant companion.

It was then that we noticed the lights. A soft, lilac glow emanating from a grove of trees across the creek. It was a place we’d never noticed before, though we’d passed it dozens of times. The trees were mostly manuka and cabbage trees, but in the heart of them, there was a structure, the ruins of a stone building, half-swallowed by the undergrowth. There was an old sign, weathered to illegibility, but we could make out the word ‘Mission’.

We crossed the bridge, our footsteps echoing, and pushed through the soggy grass to the ruins. The lilac light seemed to come from the ground itself, seeping out of the earth like a slow leak. We pulled out our phones again, and I pressed record. The air felt thick, charged, like before a storm. We spoke hushed, nervous, asking who had been here, what this place was.

A voice responded, not from our phones, but from the air around us, so clear it was as if someone stood right between us. It was an old man’s voice, rough and weary, speaking in a language we didn’t understand, but the intent was undeniable. Then it switched to English, its accent thick and strange, ‘You bring your little machines to catch the dead, but you do not listen to the living. This was a place of tears, of taken children, of promises broken. The water here heard the cries. Go now, or join them.’

We were frozen, the recordings on our phones capturing the entire monologue, the raw audio layered with a deep humming that hadn’t been present. The lilac light flared, and we saw things in the periphery, maybe shapes, maybe just shadows, but we didn’t wait to find out. We turned and ran all the way back to Jake’s place, our hearts pounding, our phones clutched in our hands like sacred relics.

That night, we listened to the recordings in his bedroom with the door locked and the lights on. The initial whisper was there, the longer phrase, but the final voice we heard with our own ears was not on the recording. Instead, there was a long stretch of static, and then a child’s voice, singing a nursery rhyme we’d never heard before, in a language that might have been Māori, but the tune was wrong, too slow, too sweet.

We never experimented with EVP again. We stopped walking that road. But the recordings haunted us. I eventually lost the phone, a drop in the harbor, and I sometimes wonder if that was a relief. Jake moved away a few years later, and we lost touch. But I’ve never forgotten that lilac light, that warning, and the feeling that we had brushed against something ancient and unforgiving.

Years later, I looked up the history of the area. I found that the site we visited was once a mission station, established in the 1830s to ‘civilize’ the local Maori. The missionaries had taken children from their families, forcing them into boarding schools, and many of those children had died, victims of disease and neglect. The creek had been where the bodies were thrown. The sign I’d seen was a remnant, almost entirely faded, but it bore the name ‘Te Puna o te Aroha’ – the Spring of Love. But the love had turned to sorrow, and the sorrow had seeped into the water.

Now, whenever I hear a phone click or a signal crackle, I remember that voice and what it said. And I look at the rusted gate in my mind’s eye, the one on Pākaraka Road, and I wonder if it’s really shut, or if it’s waiting for someone else to open it.

I decided to write this down, not to scare, but to warn. If you ever walk that road, if you ever see a gate rusted shut, leave it be. And if your phone picks up a whisper, do not listen. The land remembers, and no amount of technology can protect you from that.