Kehua! Read Online Free

servants’ sitting and dining room. The old bell rack is still here, and the rusty mechanism quivers when anyone
     rings the front-door bell, though I cannot find any wire that connects them.
    The house above is safely bright, cheerful and light, and children love to open the door to the basement and look down the
     worn stairs to the dark space below where I lurk. Some venture down to explore, some don’t. My little grandchild Tahuri came
     yesterday, shuddering with delighted fear. She’s four, and half Maori, of a warrior tribe, and brave.
    ‘Do I have to go down?’ she asked first. I heard her.
    ‘Of course not.’
    ‘I want to, but suppose there are kehua?’
    ‘Kehua live in New Zealand,’ said her mother, ‘on the other side of the world. They don’t have them here in England.’
    ‘They could come in an aeroplane’. She pronounces the wordcarefully, aer-o-plane. She is proud of it. ‘They could have come with us, in the luggage rack.’
    ‘The kehua are just spirits who come to take you home after you’re dead. They’re perfectly friendly unless you’ve done something
     really, really bad.’
    ‘Are they making that rattling sound I can hear down there?’
    ‘No, that’s just your granny typing on the keyboard.’
    ‘I’m a bit scared.’
    ‘Don’t be,’ says Aroha. ‘Kehua live in trees, not houses.’
    ‘Do they hang from the branches upside down like fruit bats?’ Tahuri asks.
    ‘I expect so,’ says her mother.
    Tahuri decides it’s safe enough to come down. She is very brave. Aroha follows.
    I ask Aroha to tell me more about kehua and she says they’re the Maori spirits of the wandering dead, adrift from their ancestral
     home. They’re not dangerous, just lost souls making themselves useful, though people can get really frightened. Transfer them
     to another culture and they’d be ghostly sheepdogs, snapping at your ankles to make you do what you should while scaring you
     out of your wits. Kehua see their task as herding stray members of the whanau back home, so the living and dead can be back
     together in their spiritual habitation. Kehua are the ones who come to collect your soul after the proper death rituals have
     been performed: the ones who make you homesick if you’re away too long from the urupa, the graveyard, a beautiful place special
     to the tribe. Kehua put thoughts into your head to get you there, and not necessarily sensible ones. They’re not very bright,
     just obsessive in their need to get the whole hapu back together in one way or another.
    ‘The hapu?’
    ‘The Maori are very family-conscious,’ says Aroha. ‘Hapu is what they call their kinship group, which is a subgroup of the
     iwi, or tribe. The taniwha, river monsters, who guard the iwi, are a very different matter. You don’t want to meet them in
     a place you don’t belong on a dark night. They have teeth and talons and can do you physical harm. Kehua just use mental and
     emotional pressure.’
    I ask her what kehua look like and she says nobody quite knows, you hear them rather than see them, they’re thought to have
     wings, which they rub together to make a clattering chattering sound. It registers with you as good advice but you’re not
     wise to listen. They’re like the grateful dead of Central European mythology, or the Jewish dybbuks, or the hungry ghosts
     in Japan. They try to return you a favour but they understand only what the dead want, not what the living need, so they get
     it wrong. Poor things. They haven’t much brain. Why should they have? They’re dead.
    Aroha has a Master’s in Anthropology from King’s College London. She’s a lovely, warm, rounded, vibrant creature and I am
     pleased to have her in my basement, and little graceful Tahuri too, who says she has just found the ghost of a daddy-long-legs
     on my unswept windowsill and holds it up by one fragile leg to examine it.
    ‘Does this have a kehua?’ she asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer, just