by Ben J Henry
With a soft click, he flicked a switch on the wall. A bulb stuttered on for a second, revealing the steps ahead, and then flickered off. Treading lightly, Gus continued down into shadow. The old bulb flickered sporadically, shedding enough light for him to spot a washing machine, a toy horse and a tartan sofa that he was not surprised Melissa had relegated to the basement. There followed a spell of darkness as he reached the concrete floor and shuffled ahead. Somewhere distant, a grandfather clock struck a hard monotone, out of sync with the chaotic patter in his chest. Light through the doorway above illuminated something on the floor: a pair of blue eyes.
A heavy chain clinked and time stopped as Gus realised that a large animal lay beside the steps he had descended. He leaped back as the sudden light of the bulb revealed what appeared to be a wolf chained to the bottom of the banister. With eyes blazing, the beast reared to its feet and drew back its lips, baring a formidable set of teeth.
Gus’s eyes strayed from those jaws and eyes just long enough to determine that it was not a wolf, but a husky. The dog issued a deep growl, its head low and hackles bristling. Gus stepped back, pushing against the corner of the sofa, and the dog moved between him and the stairs. As a pair of icy blue eyes bore into his, the throaty growl became a harsh barking. The dog reared its head and strained on its chain, less than an arm’s length away.
Sharp barks bounced between the four walls and carried through the house. Fangs snapped as spittle flicked upon the concrete floor. The banister moaned as the dog tugged ever more aggressively, determined to break the narrow distance to which Gus now owed his life.
‘Shhh,’ a voice floated down the stairs. Gus’s eyes oscillated between the turquoise dress, shimmering in the light from the open doorway, and the banister post, straining visibly. It would not last for long.
Rainn bent to lift the horse from the floor. The toy consisted of a long wooden pole with a wheel at one end and the blue velvet head of a horse on the other: a hobby horse. Holding it by the pole, she drew the lighter from her bag.
At the click of the lighter, the dog barked sharply, its violent eyes on Gus. An unseen part of the banister cracked. In that moment, the intensity of the dog’s bark was so fierce that Gus was certain it would kill him.
‘Shhh, Sam,’ Rainn soothed as the velvet head of the horse began to flame. The dog tore its eyes from Gus and faced its master.
In the blaze, Rainn’s skin was golden as she crouched beside the animal, waving the toy from side to side in a hypnotic fashion.
‘What are you doing here?’ asked an accusatory voice. Gus tore his eyes from where Rainn appeared to be both threatening and placating the beast. Winter stood on the stairs, leaning on the banisters and glaring at Gus as if he had crashed her party.
‘Announcing a pregnancy?’ asked Rainn when Gus made no reply. She eyed the bump beneath his jacket. Winter descended the stairs, high heels clicking on the concrete. Rainn extended a hand and stroked the dog’s silver-grey coat while holding the fire so close to the animal’s face that it wrinkled its nose under the heat. She rose from her crouch, leaving the toy to burn on the floor with the dog fixated upon it.
That animal is trained to kill, thought Gus.
‘I have something that belongs to you,’ he said, unzipping his jacket. ‘I’m here to return it.’
Eyeing the bag, Rainn stepped over the burning toy and settled on the sofa beside him, sending a cloud of dust into the air. Winter watched the fire dwindle, curious as to what the dog would do when it had burned out. She maintained her position with one foot on the bottom step.
Opening her bag, Rainn withdrew the packet of cigarettes and offered one to Gus. He wrinkled his nose.
‘Kids these days.’ Rainn shrugged, tipping the remainder of the cigarettes into her hand and scattering them onto the fire, followed by the empty packet. Renewed, the flames burned with a vigour reflected in the dog’s eyes. Winter was as spellbound as the dog, her eyes on Rainn, drawn to the bigger personality. Gus’s stomach churned as black smoke reached for the ceiling, unable to escape.
‘My grandfather was a smoker,’ said Rainn in a conversational tone as she returned to her seat. She lowered her eyes to where Gus was toying with the clasp of his backpack. ‘Always fiddling, always agitated. Never still. I would watch him draw nicotine into his lungs and wonder: what are you so afraid of?’
Her gaze was penetrating.
‘Fear,’ breathed Rainn. ‘That great motor that drives us from one irrational decision to the next. What drives your motor, Augustus? What are you so afraid of? Other than tattoos.’
‘Questions,’ said Gus as Rainn rubbed the symbol on her wrist. He undid the clasp and opened his bag. ‘Not big dogs, not creepy messages written on the walls in glow-in-the-dark paint. It’s the questions that keep me up at night.’ He withdrew the Murder Book. ‘And I’m done asking them.’
With tentative hands, Rainn lifted the book from Gus’s grasp. She stood, cradling the book to her chest and tilting her head to the blackening ceiling.
‘Finally, the book is mine!’
And then she cast it onto the fire.
‘I’m not here for that mouldy old list, silly,’ she said, reaching into her bag. ‘I’m here for you.’
She tossed a handkerchief into Gus’s lap with one hand and gripped a handgun in the other, letting her bag drop to the floor. Winter backed against the wall as the weapon was trained in her direction. Down the side of the gun’s barrel, the words were caught in the firelight: Glock 19 Austria.
‘That’s it,’ said Rainn as Gus picked up the handkerchief. ‘Over your mouth.’
Gus saw fear in Winter’s eyes and willed her not to charge up the stairs. He had no doubt that Rainn would pull the trigger if she attempted to escape. He lifted the handkerchief to his mouth and chloroform stung his nostrils.
Black leather twisted in the flames, a golden eye folding shut. Rainn nodded, her smile triumphant, while the grandfather clock pounded between his ears.
‘Breathe.’
Headstones
Alicia lurched forward in bed, clutching a hand to her chest where the bullet had entered her ribcage. She drew her fingers away, expecting blood. But this was not Vivador and the expectation died in her mind. The gunshot had woken her instantly, forcing the retreat of her soul within its material cradle. So intense was the shock of adrenaline, the portal had not been necessary.
She’s not ready.
He had protected her. This simulacrum, a creation of the enemy designed to do their bidding, had ensured her return to the waking world. Rainn’s eyes remained like the afterimage that follows a flash of light. What might have happened had Ryan not put a bullet in her chest?
Alicia Crow.
She trod Post-it Notes into the floor, pacing her bedroom while discordant thoughts refused to form an orderly queue.
A coiled spring. A shallow breath.
Ten, nine—
No. She fought the urge to distract herself with pointless tasks. Like counting down. Or searching for those who could not be found. Or waiting for those who would never return. She had been too busy playing with fire and cannonballs to consider her place in this murderous family. Craving something concrete, her mind wandered to a marked tree in another realm.
Don’t be an idiot, thought Alicia as she climbed under the covers.
Again, it was not necessary to visit the clearing behind her grandmother’s cottage. In her lucid dream, Alicia raised a well through her bedroom floorboards and threw herself down it. It was the idea of this well that served as a portal, and she landed on the hilltop in Vivador.
She returned to the outermost tree of the pine forest. Ryan and Rainn were surely beneath the glass archway, discussing whatever test he believed she would fail. Should either of them materialise before her, she could return to the well in the blink of an eye.
Or shoot herself in the chest? If it was not necessary to use that portal, how else might she return? The line between Vivador and th
e waking world had thinned. Alicia knelt at the foot of the pine and needles pricked her skin. She knew in which realm she felt more alive.
A + E Forever. The A did not stand for Anna after all. Had her grandmother, Eloise, sat beneath this tree with Augustus Crow? Had she held his hand while he conjured a blade of glass, sharp enough to pierce the bark and mark a world where everything could be undone? Since time immemorial, the human race has strived to create something permanent in a transient world, building pyramids like sandcastles before the rising tide. Perhaps Augustus had believed that if he cut deep enough, his love for Eloise would exist beyond their shared experience.
Had he led his lover down the well and shown her the world that his parents discovered? If so, this message was all that remained of them. Anna had been eighteen when her mother died. As had Alicia.
An aching spread like poison through her projected self and pine trees bent under the wind. More than answers, more than the feel of her brother’s hand in hers, Alicia had an overwhelming need to see her mother.
She was alone. Ryan and Rainn may have been on the far side of the forest, picking over the finer details of her demise, but this was the first time she had been by herself in the immaterial realm. Scanning endless hills, she was a speck of paint on a large sheet of paper. With nobody to share it, Vivador felt as private as the landscape of her dreams. She could generate anything she desired.
‘You’re exposed as an artist,’ her mother had said while sharing her latest creation. On the kitchen table lay a wooden sculpture of an eye, the iris filled with acrylic-sprayed petals in varying states of decay. ‘You assume that people will judge you on your talent, but it’s what you’ve chosen to create that they will question.’
Settling her focus on a flat section of grass between two hills, Alicia sent a series of walls rising from the ground. Stacking brick by brick, the walls grew higher, outlining the familiar structure of her local church. Wooden doors filled the doorways and glass filled the windows. A large tree sprouted beside the far corner of the building, leaving a narrow patch of sky between the two, so blue that it appeared to be in the foreground. The soil trembled as rows of headstones lined the ground between her and the back door of the building. She marvelled at the intricate design on the stained-glass window. How similar was her recreation to the original? How accurately had she recalled each piece of glass? Sunlight streamed inexplicably through the window from the church’s interior, illuminating the headstone at her feet.
Rays of green, orange, red and blue fell in bands across Anna Harrington’s name. Standing before her mother’s grave, Alicia’s heart thumped as turbulently as when the bullet had entered it. With each shuddering beat, a thought in her mind expanded—intoxicating, terrifying—so large that it was all she understood.
I could bring her to life.
When deciding whether to quit her teaching role and work at the art gallery on Godalming High Street, Anna had debated with Rory. Each had taken one side and then switched, to argue from both perspectives. This was proving to be an effective means of reaching a difficult decision, until Rory had fallen asleep. Alicia had stepped in to reason that her mother would be happier out of the classroom and would benefit from the extra time to paint. It had surprised them both how passionately Anna had argued that she enjoyed her teaching, inspired by the creativity of her students. Through this debate, she had realised how much she loved her job, as impractical as it may have been given the heavy demands on her time. Alicia did wonder whether Rory falling asleep had swayed her mother’s view, since they relied on her stable salary.
Facing the far corner of the church, Alicia watched her own image step through that blue rectangle between the wall and the tree. This debate would be between Alicia and herself.
‘I could bring her to life,’ Alicia voiced the thought aloud. Her conjured self stopped behind the headstone at her feet, facing her with hard eyes as counter-arguments formed.
‘It would be a simulacrum. Like Ryan. Like me. It would not be Mum.’
Hearing her own voice argue against her was as thrilling as it was unnerving.
‘It would look like Mum…sound like Mum—’
‘It would not be real.’
But the image before her appeared unfathomably real. Strands of dark hair played against her face in the anxious breeze that she unconsciously created. Knowledge of her green eyes with subtle flecks of brown had been drawn from every photograph of herself she had seen and every mirror she had looked in. Her lips were pursed in that serious pout her father mocked her for when she was cross. Surveying the detail in her face, Alicia did not doubt that she could look upon the animated image of her mother with equal clarity.
‘I need to speak to her. I have questions, I need to know—’
‘You would be asking yourself.’
Irritated by her own reasoning, Alicia’s voice rose in pitch and force.
‘If I can summon her here…if I can hear her voice…feel her—’ She reached out across the headstone and took the simulacrum’s forearm, running the pad of her thumb against the warm skin. ‘How could I not?’
She stared into her own eyes, trying to convince herself. Seeking permission. A desperate heart pleaded with a logical mind. But the simulacrum could not tell her what she wanted to hear, only what she already knew.
‘Because you would feel no more than an immaculate agony.’
Her hands trembled as the simulacrum leaned across the grave, closing the distance between them.
‘If you killed those people,’—animosity blazed in that pale face as she delivered the final words she had called to her mother—‘don’t come back.’
Green eyes filled her vision.
‘She’s dead,’ said the simulacrum. And there it was. That which had been lodged between the grey matter and the roof of her skull made itself known. Alicia took a step back and her mirror image lurched through the headstone.
‘You haven’t shed a single tear since your mother died.’
Faced with the truth, Alicia was frightened by the intensity of her self-loathing.
‘I have to be strong,’ she uttered, weakly. ‘I have to find David. I cannot—’
‘She’s dead.’
‘Stop it.’
‘She’s dead.’
‘Stop it!’ Alicia screamed and the simulacrum vanished. She closed her eyes and opened them on top of the hillock before throwing herself down the well.
She was shaking when she woke. She blinked her eyes at the alarm clock: 14:07. The numbers shifted as if beneath the skin of a pond, but only because the walls of her dam had started to splinter. Brisk, unconscious steps carried her down the corridor, down the stairs and through the front door.
A light drizzle fell as she stood before her mother’s grave. The petals of flowers she had not envisaged in Vivador quivered in the rain, echoing the tremble of her folded arms. A light in the church was on, but the coloured rays through the stained-glass window did not fall upon Anna Harrington’s headstone. Alicia stumbled forward and placed her hand on the light grey stone, brushing raindrops from its surface.
As the tremor in her fingertips grew, the drizzle became a downpour, the clouds breaking with the walls of her dam. Tears streamed down her face as she fell to her knees and lowered her forehead to rest against the cold stone. With every shuddering sob, Alicia submitted to a reality that she could no longer deny.
She did not know how many hours passed as she wept at the grave, her knees sinking deeper into the waterlogged soil. The sky had started to darken when she took a slow breath and lifted her head from her mother’s headstone. Like magnets, her eyes were drawn to the incomprehensible beauty of the circular window. Rays of light through the glass fragments landed on a grave a short distance away. With a sniff, she hoisted herself to her feet and followed the coloured beams to where they fell.
This grave was three years older, though the marble from which the headstone had been hewn shone as though recently polished. Alici
a stepped closer and read the name that lay beneath the rays. Her heart stuttered to a halt.
Immobilised, she stood before the grave of Ryan Lawson.
Melissa stepped through her front door to see a track of muddy footprints leading up the stairs. Broken glass littered the plush carpet, surrounding an ornamental stone squirrel. Without pause, she stole into the kitchen and snatched a large knife from the rack. She ascended the stairs with the knife in both hands before her chest, her breathing silent and controlled. The footprints led to the room at the end of the corridor: her bedroom. The doors on either side were closed, leaving the corridor dark. Light spilled from the room ahead through a crack in the doorway.
Shifting the knife into her right hand, Melissa raised her left to the door and gave it a firm push.
‘Alicia?’
The young woman stood on Melissa’s bed, muddy footprints on the pillows. With her back to the room, Alicia painted the white wall above the bed. Finishing a careful stroke, she turned and stepped aside.
The knife slipped from Melissa’s hand and struck the carpet with a thud. Alicia watched her headmistress stagger back and collapse against the doorframe as she stared at the face that was painted on her wall. The hair ranged in colour from a cinnamon-brown to a tawny-gold. The eyes burned a glacial blue.
‘Where is my brother?’
Ryan, age 12
On the night of Amira’s 9th birthday I was stuffed with cake, just looking at how fat I was in the mirror. That’s when I heard her screaming. I pulled down my jumper and ran downstairs and her bed was covered in spiders. There must have been about 29 of them. Of course, everybody thought it was me that put them there.
‘Were you jealous that it was Amira’s birthday?’ Mum asked while Peter brushed the spiders into a cereal box.
The next morning, I watched Peter leave the Pagoda with the P.S. Lawson briefcase and the S reminded me of Sam and that made me cross. It was Peter who gave me the key to the attic and Peter who found me unconscious by the mirror. It was Peter who told Mum that I must have found the key in his study—another excuse for him to start working in the Pagoda.