by Ben J Henry
‘Let’s take five minutes,’ said Rory, still hovering in the bedroom doorway. ‘I’ll make us a nice brew and we can have a proper chat.’
He strolled off down the corridor.
‘I found the book,’ said Alicia. ‘I found the well. I—’ She hesitated. I found a man who said he’ll take me to David—
‘Your father said Winter broke into the house. Do you think she might have taken it?’
‘Have you found him?’
Anna looked through the open window, her eyes on the police car in the driveway next door. Her haunted eyes narrowed.
‘No,’ she replied, stepping past Alicia and to the bed. She lifted the gift and stared at it for a moment, before turning to meet her daughter’s eyes. ‘But I think I’ve found someone who can help us.’
As the gravity of the statement plunged through Alicia, her mother slipped past, kissed her on the cheek and dropped the present into her hands.
‘Happy Birthday,’ she whispered. ‘We’ll open this when I’m back.’
The shape of the present was unnervingly similar to the missing book, but whatever the white wrapping paper concealed was almost weightless. Alicia followed her mother’s hurried steps down the stairs. When the front door opened, her throat tightened. Her mother was leaving, again. Alicia’s eyes burned as words spilled from her open mouth: ‘I’m still here.’
Anna watched a tear slide down the side of her daughter’s nose. On her eighteenth birthday, Alicia was an adult; but she remained the child that Anna repeatedly left behind. Anna swallowed, slung her bag over her shoulder and raised a finger.
‘One hour. And I will tell you everything.’
She turned down the drive and Alicia wiped the tear from her chin. She stepped into the open doorway, creasing the paper in her hands as a fraying rope in the back of her mind twisted. Tightened. Taut.
And then it snapped. As Anna opened the car door, Alicia heard her thoughts as clearly as in Vivador. She knew she would regret what she was about to say, yet it did not stop her from calling across the driveway: ‘If you killed those people,’—their eyes locked—‘don’t come back.’
Anna blanched. She closed the car door and started the engine. Alicia crossed to the kitchen doorway and asked her father: ‘What did she tell you?’
There was a thump as the kettle hit the floor and Rory slid to the ground. Alicia dropped her birthday present on the table by the door and dashed over to protect her sleeping father from the growing puddle of boiling water.
It’s not down my pants
Joe shrugged into a jacket and opened the front door as Anna’s car pulled out of the driveway. He closed the door behind him, but it opened again a second later.
‘Get back inside,’ Joe ordered as he unlocked the car.
‘Nope,’ said Gus, opening the passenger door and crawling inside. Joe lowered himself into the driver’s seat and gripped the wheel.
‘Get out.’
‘Drive.’
Gus blinked until the three images of his uncle coalesced into one: a pair of beetroot cheeks hot with the desire to lean across, open the door and kick him through it. The pill coursed through his bloodstream, leaking into his organs, powering him down.
‘Where’s the book?’
‘Well,’ Gus clicked his seatbelt into place with clumsy fingers, ‘it’s not down my pants.’
Joe hissed through clenched teeth: ‘Is it safe?’
‘Are we going after her, or not?’
With no time to argue, Joe closed his door and started the engine. He shot a glance at the Harrington property as they slipped past, and did not turn on the headlights until they had reached the end of Gardner Road.
‘We’re off to Melissa Lawson’s, right?’ Gus asked as they took a left onto the main road and the shadowy shapes of houses blurred past the window. The policeman took a deep breath through his nostrils and exhaled slowly. Gus folded his arms and tried to put his feet on the dashboard, but lacked the space to do so.
‘I’m not giving them the book,’ he said. ‘Not until I’ve talked to Alicia.’
At eleven on a Wednesday night, the roads were empty. Joe did not stop at red lights, but continued towards the centre of Godalming, accelerating past cars parked along the roadside. Gus’s head rattled against the window as they turned down the cobbled high street. A white building with a clocktower was bleached in moonlight. He raised his eyes to the large moon in the cloudless sky and his breath spilled on the window.
‘It’s odd, don’t you think?’ he said, his tongue heavy. ‘The moon can pull tides—gallons and gallons right up the shore…but it can’t lift a grain of sand? If it can move oceans, it must have an effect on us. Don’t you think?’
Joe took his eyes from the road to study his nephew’s face.
‘I think you should close your eyes and let that pill do its job.’
‘Is that so?’ Gus grinned. ‘Then you can go rifling around, searching for the Murder Book and handing it back to your grandparents and doing the total opposite of what my parents died for?’
The hard look on Joe’s face made Gus uncomfortable and he looked away. They were on residential streets again: lights off in the windows; mice dashing between bins. Joe took a sharp turn and Gus’s head thunked against the back of his seat. At the sight of Anna’s car at the end of the lane, the policeman floored the pedal.
‘That’s it, Uncle,’ said Gus, sitting up to grip the dashboard. ‘Hit the siren, quick—’
‘Sit back.’ Joe pushed him roughly into his seat. Gus shot him an injured look, rubbing his ribs, and Joe glanced down at the young man’s lap. ‘Is it down your pants?’
‘No!’ Gus replied, more indignantly than was warranted, given that the book had been down his shorts ten minutes before, while he stared through his bedroom window.
If you killed those people, Alicia’s voice had carried through the glass, don’t come back.
‘She didn’t kill anyone,’ Gus muttered aloud.
Anna accelerated: she had seen the police car. Gus gripped the armrest as Joe flooded the screaming engine. Alicia’s mother pulled the wheel to make a left turn, but Joe undercut her. He hit the brakes and Gus was flung forward and caught by his seatbelt. Joe cut the engine, his car blocking the entrance of a long driveway.
Through his window, Gus saw a white house flanked with tall bushes. A blink, and the bushes became fir trees. A Jeep was parked in the shade of the trees, where the moonlight did not fall. In the daylight, this Jeep was a juniper green; Gus had been struck by the juxtaposition of the offroad vehicle and Melissa Lawson’s business suit as she parked it at school that morning. He panned his gaze to the right and caught frustration on Anna’s face as she abandoned her car in the middle of the empty road.
Joe had already positioned himself between the bonnet of his car and the manicured bushes at the front of the property, blocking Anna’s route. Gus hauled his leaden legs onto the gravel and used the roof of the car to steady himself, his eyes on Joe, who glanced at Melissa’s house with unveiled apprehension. Anna tightened the cord on her jacket.
‘We have the book,’ said Joe.
Gus looked down at his crotch, frowned, and realised that his uncle meant possession of the book, back at the house.
‘Come back to mine,’ Joe added, ‘and we can talk.’
‘Move aside, Joe.’ Anna’s voice was calm, but her lip trembled: an expression Gus had seen on her daughter’s face, sick with impatience.
Joe spoke so quietly that Gus leaned against the bonnet to catch his words.
‘Rainn is here—she’s staying with Melissa. They will be expecting you. They will be watching. Come back with us. If you hand her the book—if it comes from you—they will leave you alone. You never asked for it!’ he hissed. ‘And they will spare Alicia.’
Rainn is here: Gus’s eyes roved the dark panes of the stately building, blurring between blinks. In the top-left window, the moon winked back.
‘Honestly.’
Anna shook her head, thrusting her hands into her jacket pockets. ‘You know that’s not true. What good is that book to them now? They’re all dead. What good is it to anyone? If they wanted to finish me off, they’d have done it by now. It’s Alicia they want. Her and Gus. And they won’t stop until they’ve found them.’
She was looking at him—her huge black eyes glossy in the moonlight. Gus resisted the urge to wave, swallowed painfully, and dry words tumbled from his mouth.
‘You saw them die.’
Anna shot a glance at the house and Joe took a step closer to Gus, who realised that he had not spoken quietly. He attempted a whisper: ‘Why did they give it to you?’
Joe put a firm hand on Gus’s shoulder, to steady or warn him. Anna shook her head and sniffed.
‘Because I was there,’ she said.
In her equine eyes, Gus saw his parents’ faces. His legs began to wobble. He steadied himself on the roof of the car, closed his eyes and forced them open. It was like hauling a boulder up a hill, straining under the mental exertion and trying not to lose his grip.
Anna turned to Joe. ‘You keep on hiding, Joe. Keep drinking. But this won’t go away. They have my son. They have hers,’ she nodded at the house. ‘You won’t help me, but she will.’
She did not wait for a response. In supporting Gus, Joe had left the way open and Anna shouldered past. Small stones crunched loudly underfoot as she marched down the driveway. Joe took half a step and stopped as if a forcefield stretched between the bushes.
Gus was shoved into the passenger seat, and heard his uncle growl: ‘We’re getting the book.’
The engine purred into action and Gus leaned his right cheek against the headrest, watching his uncle drift in and out of focus.
‘Alicia,’ said Gus. ‘We’ll wake her up. She won’t be sleeping. We’ll tell her what’s happening.’
Bullet-hole eyes darted back and forth between Gus’s face and the road ahead. Gus’s eyelids were so heavy he considered propping them open with his fingers.
Joe’s voice was gruff: ‘You’re into her, aren’t you?’
Gus turned his head away and laughed silently. Mirthlessly. And then frowned. Behind his eyelids, Alicia lifted a portrait from the wall.
‘I stole her book.’
A churn in his empty stomach. A rush of memories: Alicia on her grandmother’s sofa, confiding in him, trusting him; the pair of them outside her house as she refused to let him see the book. Him thinking: What if Anna returned and found a new hiding place? Why hadn’t they learned to lock the back door?
His teeth rattled in his skull as Joe accelerated over cobbles.
‘Augustus,’ warned a voice to his right. ‘You can’t…Alicia—’
‘I’m into guys.’
It might have been the pill. Gus kept his eyes ahead, watching the approach of the clocktower at the end of the street, the minute hand ticking closer to the end of his first day as an adult. His statement hung in silence. Joe’s mouth opened and closed in the reflection of the windscreen.
‘Oh,’ Joe shot his nephew a sidelong glance. He adjusted his grip on the steering wheel and ran a red light. ‘I just—you don’t seem very…’
‘It doesn’t really work like that.’
‘Right, yes. Okay. Good.’
‘Good?’
Joe cleared his throat. ‘When my father married my mother, he had a child from a previous marriage. A daughter—Anna. Alicia is your second cousin.’
Seconds trickled by. Gus watched a petrol station blur past, the world brushing against the windows like the bristles of a car wash. He waited for the blurring to stop, for it all to slow down and make sense. Chemicals melted in his bloodstream, dissolving fear, dissolving time. He waited to feel something.
‘Well,’ said Gus. ‘Good thing I’m not into her.’
Blood rushed along his temples, feeding his brain with the remnants of the pill. He slid back into his seat, waiting for Joe to remark on his admission. To ask him if his parents had known, or to tell him they had suspected. To say something.
They approached a roundabout before the Refectory Inn and Joe cleared his throat to speak. Gus sat up and the police officer’s phone rang in his pocket. He pulled it out and Gus caught a blur of letters on the screen: Lawson. Joe pulled into the middle of the Refectory car park and jumped out to answer Melissa’s call. Gus lifted a hand to open the door but fatigue overwhelmed him; a battery straining on one percent; a blink, and Joe was back in the car.
What? asked Gus, in his head.
Joe’s square shoulders rose and fell, a cloud of breath spilling through his nostrils as he stared at the windscreen.
‘Anna’s dead,’ he said.
Gus blinked once more and slipped from consciousness.
Ryan, age 9
When Amira moved into Sam’s bedroom, Mum said I should leave her to settle in while she’s processing. But I don’t like to go into Sam’s bedroom anyway, so Amira draws with me in my room. Sometimes I write numbers and she copies them, like Mum used to teach me in Maths when I was as little as Amira. She is only six and lost her parents in an earthquake in Egypt. I asked her about the pharaohs and the curses in the pyramids, but she’s not much of a talker.
Mum laughed again for the first time when we were playing Bingo in the classroom. She asked why Amira always picks the same numbers in the same order and Amira said they were the colours of the rainbow. Amira’s special, like Sam. Peter says she has synaesthesia, which means numbers have colours and colours have smells. We sang the rainbow song but with Amira’s numbers and Mum was laughing the way she used to when something so silly happens that she never wants to forget it. She holds onto the wall like she’s falling over and laughs so hard that she will always remember.
Amira is quiet but she’s brave. She’s not even scared of my scar, and doesn’t stare at it like Mum does. I stared at the scar in the mirror. It looks like someone tried to draw a line from my eye to my ear, but got bored halfway. There must have been about 29 stitches but they’re gone now. On the corner of the mirror I could see my blood on the sharp metal leaf growing out of the frame. Or maybe it was rusted.
I was thinking about how Mum used to say that my eyes were the bluest in the whole world when I heard Peter calling my name from downstairs. I thought I was in trouble because he told me not to go in the attic in the daytime now that Mum knows I was in there. But Mum was planting cucumbers in the garden and Amira was playing with the dollhouse in Sam’s bedroom so I thought it would be okay.
I hid the key and went downstairs and Peter was standing in the doorway with a puppy. It was this tiny husky, so soft it was unreal. Amira came out of Sam’s bedroom and the puppy licked all over her face. She said the eyes tasted like lemon—they were blue just like mine. It made me wonder if Mum had picked the dog as she used to talk about my eyes all the time.
‘Your first pet,’ Peter said to me. I looked at Amira and she was so excited, like this was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
‘It can be both of ours!’ I said.
Peter didn’t look too happy about that and said I was being ungrateful. The dog was for me and he wanted to know what I would call it. It turns out it’s a boy, so I named him Sam.
Me and Amira played with Sam all afternoon. When Amira went to sleep in Sam’s bedroom, I took Sam up to sleep in mine. I almost fell asleep when he stopped wriggling next to my leg like a bag of rats, but that’s because he had run out of the room. I panicked and started shouting his name all over the house. And then I saw that the front door was open.
I’m not supposed to go in the attic in the day and I’m definitely not supposed to go outside at night. But I could see Sam running around in the grass by the Pagoda. The Pagoda is a tower at the end of our garden, near the lake. Peter says that Buddhists used to keep human bones in them. He built one when him and Mum moved to Burnflower, but Sam’s bones are kept on the other side of the garden, behind the vegetables.
After Sam died,
Peter stopped working in his study. He started calling the room in the Pagoda his office, because it’s really quiet over there. I left the door wide open and ran across the grass to get Sam. He jumped around like it was his idea to play outside and he just didn’t know what time it was.
That’s when I heard Mum shouting in Peter’s office in the Pagoda.
‘Why did you give him the damn dog?’—She was so cross with him.
I did not hear what Peter said, but I held Sam tight in the trees when Mum went back to the house. She shut the door behind her and I knew I would have to ask Peter to let me back inside. I went up the steps and I pushed open the wooden door and I was so angry that I didn’t even knock.
‘What’s wrong with Mum? Why doesn’t she want me to be happy?’
I was shouting so loud, but you can’t hear shouts from the house. Peter closed his computer and told me that Mum finds it hard to love me after what I did to Sam. It wasn’t actually very cold that night, but it felt really cold when he said that.
Peter let me back into the house and I took Sam up to my bedroom. With the lights off, Sam looked like a baby wolf. Peter looks like a wolf too, with his black hair and the teeth that you can see because of the bit missing in his top lip. I think that’s why he got me the dog. I think he wants me to be a wolf like him.
CHAPTER FOUR
Am I dreaming?
She could not look at the coffin. She saw it when she scanned the crowd, avoiding each pair of eyes that sought her own. She saw it behind each detail that her mind feasted upon, from the sleek pipes of the organ nestled at the end of a wooden mezzanine to the white stone aisle worn smooth by a thousand blushing brides and as many grieving widows—a time lapse of white and black eroding the stone like warm water over ice. She could see her mother’s coffin when she blinked her eyes, but she could not watch them carry it through the heavy doors and across the grounds. In the waking world, what you see is what you get. Alicia did not ‘get’ it, and—with every fibre of her being—she refused to.