by Ben J Henry
At seven, I’d been too pleased that “Daddy” was paying me any attention to wonder why he wanted me to find an old mirror in a locked room.
‘When you’ve a question on your mind, ask the mirror,’ he had said, twirling the key like it was magic. ‘The Ryan in the mirror will know what to do.’
The problem is, Peter, that Ryan is not a little kid any more. And the questions on his mind are about you.
The best thing about living in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere is that you get to explore every inch of it when playing hide and seek. You find all sorts of things: love letters that Mum received in college, books that are not for children and lots of keys. Keys to cupboards that were thrown away, keys to padlocks that are rusted shut and spare keys that were made and then forgotten.
When Peter drove off down the driveway, I knew he would be gone all day as it takes forever to get anywhere from here. But I wasn’t going to dawdle. I raced to the kitchen, took the set of keys from behind the cutlery tray and ran back out. I stopped running when I passed Amira’s bedroom, since running would be too suspicious. Amira had either seen another spider or a shadow and Mum was rubbing her back while Sam searched around the bed for something to eat.
Amira didn’t look up at me. I told her that I didn’t put the spiders on her bed, but I think she doesn’t trust me now my voice has gone all deep. Mum looked at me and smiled, but luckily she did not ask me where I was going in such a hurry. Sometimes it can be useful that she doesn’t talk to me any more.
The lock on Peter’s study door was ancient so I knew exactly what key to use: the one that looks just about right for a treasure chest. I unlocked the door.
It’s no wonder Mum wants to clean it so bad—the room was a total mess. Books and paper everywhere and so much dust. Two bookcases, a desk and a swivel chair with a peeling leather seat: that was it. I guess the bubbling beakers and brains in jars were probably in the Pagoda, but the lock on that was new and I wasn’t getting in there any time soon.
The books on the shelves had funny titles like Disorders of the Brain and Living with Phobia. I might have thought how nice it was that he had read all these books to help him with Sam’s epilepsy and Amira’s synaesthesia until I found the papers in the desk drawer. The papers had been printed off his computer (also in his new office) and lots of words had been highlighted in a green pen. Down the side, Peter had written in his spidery handwriting:
Fear removal vs fear creation? Fear controls us control fear.
The jack was out of the box now. Peter had created Amira’s fear of spiders. This fact left me with two questions: how and why?
I needed to get into his office in the Pagoda. There was nothing else useful in that dusty room, and it was just as I pocketed the key that I heard the front door: he was back.
When I looked down the stairs, I saw the most beautiful girl in the world, I reckon. Her hair was so straight and black it looked like Mum had ironed it. And her eyes were like two sapphires.
Rainn is fifteen years old and she is very troubled. Mum was obviously not pleased that Peter had brought home an orphan who was older than me, but Amira was so happy to have someone to share her room with.
Rainn settled into Sam’s old bed and I wondered what fear Peter had in store for her.
PART TWO: THE WILL OF OTHERS
Fear will express itself in a number of curious ways. Given the same stimulus, some minds will soften, pliable as heated wax; others will harden, brittle as flint. In reflective surfaces I catch the anger on my face and find myself asking: what do you fear?
— Peter Lawson —
CHAPTER FIVE
Mother
The grave is empty.
In her mind’s eye, Alicia watched her headmistress hack at the soil with a shovel, the sweat on her brow glistening in the moonlight. Numb fingers prise open the decaying panels of a bare coffin. Brushing a hand across her forehead, she stares into the empty cavity with a smudge of dirt above her silver eyes. A shallow breath fogs the air as belief transmutes to truth: her son is alive.
Ryan was not a simulacrum. His flawless features had not been generated by Aldous and Morna Crow to tempt victims through a series of tests. Ryan had been created here, in the waking world—the real world—a world in which he had a history that could not be undone. And where, presently, he was held in a farmhouse in the Lake District with Alicia’s brother.
Take me to him.
Alicia had kissed her sleeping father’s forehead and left a note on the kitchen counter telling him not to worry, she would be back in the morning. She had considered waking him, but it would have taken as long to explain where she was going as the four-hour journey to the Lake District. She was keen to travel overnight, while the roads were quiet. She was keen to travel now.
The police car was not in the neighbouring driveway and Gus did not answer the door, so she had jumped into Melissa’s Jeep and told her to drive. Melissa had needed no coercion, her hands like talons on the steering wheel as she floored the pedal and accelerated down Gardner Road as if fearful that Alicia might come to her senses and change her mind.
Standing on the bed, paintbrush in hand, Alicia had asked Melissa exactly what happened when her mother had visited. Drops of blue paint struck Melissa’s pillowcase as the woman crept across the carpet, her face drawn with intense longing as she stared at the image of her son. Finding her voice, she explained that Rainn must have left the door ajar; Anna had let herself in. From her bedroom, Melissa had heard Alicia’s mother call her name, and reached the top of the stairs as Anna reached the bottom. Anna wanted to know why David was held in the house where Melissa used to live. She had asked Melissa to take her to him.
I think I’ve found someone who can help us.
Anna had made it to the third step before she collapsed.
The tyres burned along the dual carriageway and Alicia studied Melissa’s reflection in the windscreen, searching those barren eyes for fragments of what they had witnessed. She longed to walk through Melissa’s memories, to see her mother’s final moments: a hand clutching the banister, muscles flexing in the forearm as she prepares to ascend; her face contorting as she demands to be taken to her son. And then the muscles relax. For half a second, certainty is replaced with disorientation before her eyes glaze over and Anna Harrington folds onto the steps like a rag doll.
Alicia rested her head against the window and closed her eyes. The vibration of the engine travelled through her skull and into her chest. The cool glass reminded her of a headstone and the vibration intensified. She opened her eyes and sought distraction in two white lines running in parallel down the side of the dual carriageway. If she relaxed her eyes, the painted lines appeared to detach from the road and hover like static bands above the tarmac. Lazily, her gaze drifted to the right and sent the bands accelerating up the road. She would like to explain this curious sensation to David, as she had strived to describe so many of the details that others overlooked. Some curiosities seemed impossible to explain, but she enjoyed the challenge. There was so much of the world she was yet to share with him.
If he is in the Lake District—
She clenched her teeth, letting the hum of the engine rattle her molars, allaying the rise of that treacherous optimism. Until she laid eyes on her brother, she would not allow herself to believe that the wait could be over, and that the interminable might end.
‘Do Aldous and Morna run this farmhouse?’
Melissa took her eyes from the road and stared at Alicia for a full second, her skin bleached in the glare of a passing van. Alicia knew more than Melissa had thought. The headmistress accelerated through an amber light and took a hand from the steering wheel to adjust her chignon bun. Her face was composed as she adopted a businesslike tone.
‘No. Burnflower is run by a man named Peter. A psychologist, of sorts—’
‘Burnflower? As in Rainn Burnflower?’
‘Yes. Rainn was one of three orphans that Peter…’ She paused. A
flash of pain crossed her face, but she controlled it. ‘Peter had an interest in phobia and fear. He believed fear—’
‘Gus told me that Rainn’s lesson, at school—the art lesson—it was about fear.’
‘It is rude to interrupt people while they are talking.’
Alicia sat back in her seat, biting down a retort.
Melissa continued, ‘Peter believed fear to be the primary motivator, reasoning that all action could be traced back to this primitive emotion: every decision made in its shadow. The creation and manipulation of fear became his life’s work.’
‘With orphans?’ Alicia asked, her throat dry. A gentle acceleration built in her heart.
‘The creation of an irrational fear is relatively easy: generate a sensory overload and expose the individual to a chosen stimulus and they will be unable to process it, developing a phobia. It’s the reversal of this process that was the real challenge. The mind loves fear—we would not ride rollercoasters and watch horror movies if not for the thrill of it. And once we have latched on to a particular fear, we construct an identity around it. He experimented with hypnosis, and enjoyed some success; a fear could be lessened if not removed entirely. You see, a child will not avoid fire because they are told not to touch it. Fear supersedes reason. Control fear and you control the individual.’
Her manner was detached, lacking any emotion, primitive or otherwise, as she described experiments designed to terrorise orphaned children. Alicia watched her shift the gear stick from fourth to fifth in a movement both automatic and controlled.
‘What did he want with David?’
‘Peter was interested in how different minds respond to the same stimulus, to determine which areas of the brain were responsible for the psychological and physiological effects of fear. Would an aversion to certain flavours be as pronounced in a child with synaesthesia? Might—’
‘Could a blind child be afraid of the dark?’
Melissa caught Alicia’s eyes in the glass.
‘David isn’t simply blind, is he?’
A truck blasted its horn as Melissa cut across the lane to exit the dual carriageway, but Alicia’s heart was already beating at full throttle. David had a rare condition known as ‘blindsight’. While his mind was unable to create a mental picture of the world, he would occasionally respond to his environment as if his brain received the visual information without his knowledge. Though David had no conscious image of the table in front of him, Alicia had watched him grab the spoon as if he knew where it was. His condition had fascinated her friends, who set up tasks in which David was challenged to place a coin in the slot of the piggybank or to stamp a marker in the centre of a circle. His accuracy was inconsistent and his teenage examiners soon lost interest, speculating that it was little more than blind luck.
‘Did you work for him?’ asked Alicia. ‘At Burnflower?’
‘Peter is my husband.’
The separate fragments of an incomplete truth assembled themselves like the shattered pieces of a stained-glass window.
There was a tiny shake of Melissa’s head, almost imperceptible, like she was reluctant to remember. She spoke as though addressing the road ahead.
‘We adopted Sam when Ryan was young. We couldn’t have another child. We wanted him to have someone to play with. And then—Amira, she came after. Taken from the same children’s home. Amira with her synaesthesia, he was forever testing her.’ The ghost of a nostalgic smile vanished when she swallowed. She adjusted the bun and took a sharp left at the roundabout. ‘But it was Ryan that suffered the most. Through years of hypnosis, Peter ensured that his son grew up in isolation, unattached. He took my enthusiastic boy and made a monster of him. A…’ She caught Alicia’s eye, a flash of wariness. ‘And then Rainn. She was more troubled than any child I’ve known. She suffers from REM sleep behaviour disorder: acting out her dreams without the sleep atonia that keeps us in our beds at night. He couldn’t control her, not as he had with Ryan. He told her everything. Her disorder, her dreams—she fascinated him. And then, Ryan tried to kill her. He must—it must have been jealousy, or…’ She fiddled with a hidden pin at the back of her head. ‘Peter told me that he could fix him. That he could make my boy forget what he had done, to Rainn, and to…So they put him in a coma.’
I am a simulacrum. Ryan’s eyes had held no sense of self. Whatever Peter had done to fix him, his memories had been obliterated, good and bad. Alicia pictured Ryan and Rainn beneath the glass archway, Ryan with no notion of what he had done to her.
‘What did Ryan do?’
‘It wasn’t a coma,’ said Melissa, ignoring the question. ‘Peter had given Ryan to Aldous. They said, Peter and Rainn, they said they needed him, and I—I needed him!’—a flash of anger—‘Peter told me that they needed other minds to work with. All I wanted was my Ryan back. So I did as I was told. I took the position at Valmont. If they needed other children…But two months later, Peter told me he had died.’
Melissa paused and Alicia did not fill the silence.
‘It was Rainn’s idea, I’ve no doubt. She was running my home at Peter’s side and wanted me as far away as possible. But I didn’t believe it, I couldn’t—a mother knows if her child is still alive. Some connections exist beyond the waking world.’
Alicia had seen that look in Anna’s eyes, beyond doubt and reason; beyond brittle hope lay an unshakeable certainty.
‘I unearthed that empty coffin and confronted them. Rainn told me that if I wanted to see him again, I must do as instructed. I was forced to discover what a mother would do to get her child back.’
Alicia’s nails were white against the door handle.
‘How did they find David?’
‘There is nothing that a mother wouldn’t do, Alicia.’
Captive
The first sensation was a stinging around his nostrils as the remnants of the chloroform continued to corrode his skin. The second was a dull thudding behind his eyes. And the third, immediately more concerning, was that the seat of his pants was wet. Through a thick lethargy that sealed his eyes, Gus determined that he was sitting upright with his hands bound behind his back. At his wrists, he felt the cool metal of the pole against which he was propped. A gentle rocking, as if he were in the back of a truck on uneven ground. His chapped lips stung in the salty breeze of sea air. One by one, his dislocated senses converged to present him with his surroundings. The boat’s engine hummed to his left and his heavy head rolled to the side as the vessel rose and fell over the waves.
There followed a sharper, less subtle, sensation as a finger prodded him in the back.
‘Wake up, you thumbsucking—’
Winter fell silent as Gus groaned and leaned forward, straining against the pole. He lifted his eyelids to find a murky gloom, and his eyes captured what light they could to draw his environment into focus.
He and Winter sat back-to-back, bound by cable ties to a steel pole. This pole ran from the roof of their small cabin to the rotting planks on which they sat. He felt a modicum of relief as water sloshed past him, through his jeans, and towards the tapered end of their cabin at the front of the boat. He may have been kidnapped by the school counsellor and was bound in the shadows with one of the most self-obsessed girls he had ever met, but at least he had not wet himself.
‘Where is she taking us?’ Winter hissed, leaning her head against the pole. ‘What the hell is going on?’
Gus ignored her as his eyes adjusted to the light and swept the small cabin. To his left was a simple counter with a sink and stove, a flight of wooden steps leading to the upper deck and a door that swung open with each wave they crested to reveal a narrow bathroom. Beyond the mournful hum of the engine, the silence was punctuated by a steady dripping of petrol that leaked from the low roof of the cabin to stain the sodden planks.
‘Where is she?’ Gus asked, his hoarse voice barely audible above the engine. ‘Are there others?’
Metal sheets creaked overhead as somebody crossed the deck.
‘She’s brought that dog,’ said Winter. ‘And there’s some creep driving the boat, but he doesn’t talk. He just stares. She came down a while ago—hours ago—after we set off, but I may as well have been dead. She put that thing around your neck and walked back up the stairs without even looking at me.’
Gus’s hands yanked instinctively against the pole as he became aware of something around his throat. Night was falling, and opaque clouds had made a mirror of the window running along the side of the boat, just above sea level. In the reflection he was able to discern the thin black collar that his numb senses had failed to detect. He pulled again at the cable ties binding his wrists as a claustrophobic desperation shot through him to grab at whatever had been strapped around his neck. He was particularly disturbed by the green LED light blinking intermittently on the dark band.
Pouncing on the consciousness of her fellow captive, Winter launched a barrage of questions: Who is that woman? What does she want with us? Did she kill Jack? What was that book?
Gus let them drift by with the passing waves as he mulled over questions of his own, occasionally snatching one of Winter’s to contemplate in silence. But amid all the questions, one truth lay evident, and all else paled against it: Rainn was taking them to his family.
There was no need for Anna’s letters; he was being taken exactly where he wanted to go. Aldous and Morna had not sent Rainn to retrieve the Murder Book, but to destroy the evidence. It was Gus and Alicia they wanted—the remaining Crows yet to prove their loyalty to the family. He would be offered a choice: join the Order of Chaos, or die. He had already surrendered the book. He would continue to earn their trust. He would be welcomed into the arms of the elder Crows and the murder of his parents would be avenged.