by Ben J Henry
‘You must never become attached to anyone or anything. It makes you weak.’
Peter is attached to nobody. He is a nasty island that exists for no reason other than to wreck ships.
The next day I snuck right back up the Pagoda, even though I knew Peter was working in his office below me. I wanted to be by myself, so I watched Amira feed the fish in the pond. Obviously, she wasn’t scared of them any more. She’s terrified of one thing one minute and something else the next. Snakes, spiders, cucumbers!
And me. She’ll play with Sam happily enough, but when I throw the ball and join in she backs away like I’m about to do whatever Peter told her I did to Sam.
Rainn walked out with Sam on the lead, but when he saw Amira he got so excited that Rainn lost the lead and fell over on the gravel. Sam jumped up at Amira and she almost snapped in half—she’s so skinny these days, I think she’s scared of her food. He licked all over her face and I could hear her laughing.
‘Bad dog!’ Rainn hit him like he had done something wrong. And then she looked right up at me.
When I looked in the mirror that night I could see my hatred. And it made me angry. Peter thinks I’m stupid, but I know exactly why he gave my dog to Rainn. He wants Amira to be scared and he wants me to be angry. He wants me to hate Rainn. He wants me to kill her, like I killed Sam.
CHAPTER SIX
Fairy tale
Alicia struggled to keep Rainn in sight as she directed her horse between the pines. Riding bareback through the forest, she felt the power of the animal between her thighs, each muscular leg an extension of herself, rising and falling under her command, pounding the needles to dust. Rainn’s sapphire dress was a flicker of blue, disappearing amid distant trunks while Alicia ducked low branches and leaped fallen logs. She could not recall stray branches and logs breaking the uniformity of this forest when Ryan had led her through it. Had Rainn left these obstacles in her wake? Looking four, five, six trees ahead, she willed her horse between the trunks as fast as she dared, its speed entirely dependent on her confidence. Clenching her teeth, she urged the hooves into a gallop along a straight between the rows of trunks until Rainn turned sharply to the left, forcing Alicia to slow to a more cautious canter as she rode along the sides of banks and over exposed roots.
Crystal shards scattered like glitter as Rainn ploughed through the stretch of broken glass. Alicia cleared Ryan’s trial in a single leap—a thousand rainbows shimmering beneath her—and crashed through the undergrowth in pursuit of the white steed. Steeling herself at the low branch in her path, she did not duck. Accelerating through the doubt, she let the branch break against her chest, splintering into fragments and leaving her unharmed. She lowered her head until the black mane tickled her chin, looked between the horse’s ears and charged onward, not around the trees, but through them. Locking on to her distant quarry, she denied the reality of the trees between them. Trunks split and needles scattered as she cleaved the forest in two, a streak of black riven through sawdust.
Approaching the spray of needles behind Rainn’s horse, Alicia maintained her speed. She leaped, four hooves kicking from the forest floor, and careered over her guide, rising above the treetops at the forest’s edge. She struck the lip of the cliff and kicked off with powerful hind legs, sending a sheet of rock crumbling to the steps below. The ground quaked when she landed before the glass dome and galloped through the archway to the plains beyond. Slowing into a wide arc, she turned to face the white horse trotting out to meet her. Rainn sat with her legs to one side, her chin high and hands clapping against her chest.
‘Oh bravo, bravo,’ she said, affecting a pompous air. ‘Our Ryan taught you rather well.’
She’s not ready.
Ryan believed himself to be a simulacrum, yet he had tried to protect her. He had defied Rainn, returning Alicia to the waking world before she was tested in a manner for which he considered her unprepared. The emotion in his eyes had not been a projection; he had feared for her safety. He was alive and, because of her, he was their captive.
‘Where is he?’
Rainn trotted a circle around the black stallion.
‘Here, he is held by Aldous and Morna, in Psarnox. In the material realm, he’s with his father, Peter.’
So, he is at Burnflower, Alicia thought, glancing down to avoid projecting her words into Rainn’s mind. The Crow family had used Ryan as bait, and now he was no longer needed.
‘Is he safe?’ she asked.
Rainn grinned and Alicia blushed.
‘If you care whether Ryan lives or dies, then the Order will find a use for him.’
The thunder of hooves echoed across the undulating plains as Rainn and Alicia left the archway behind. With the wind whipping at their hair, the pair accelerated between one hilltop and the next.
‘There she is.’
Alicia’s thoughts were interrupted by Rainn’s low, silky tones. Were it possible to travel at this speed in the waking world, Rainn would have had to shout across the short distance between them to be heard over the roaring passage of air; but the words projected between Alicia’s ears were as clear as thought. Rainn nodded ahead, where the tip of a mountain jutted from the horizon like a shark’s tooth.
‘Mount Psarnox.’
Despite the ferocious speed of their approach, the dark rock sat obstinate, refusing to grow. The distance between the well and the mountain was in itself a deterrent to any who might stumble across Vivador; to cover this blank canvas required a speed that was a direct corollary of Alicia’s willpower. When later she was asked how fast she had travelled across the plains, she replied simply and truthfully that it was as fast as she could imagine.
Like bullets, a streak of white and black crossed the sea of green. As the mountain expanded into the cloudless sky, Alicia’s thoughts penetrated the rock, searching what lay within. Had her grandmother and Augustus made this journey across Vivador to where Aldous and Morna had taken up residence in the immaterial realm?
‘Tell me about the Order of Chaos.’
With black hair flowing behind elfin ears, Rainn adopted the manner of a storyteller. It was in the guise of a fairy tale that Alicia traced her bloodline through a history of avarice and murder.
‘Aldous and Morna were teenagers in love, sharing an interest in dreams. It was their belief that through lucid dreaming they might merge their consciousnesses. Separated one summer following a holiday in the Algarve, they planned to meet in their dreams, at a lighthouse on the cliffs. Every night, they entered a lucid dream and walked the rugged cliffs, searching for their beloved. And it was through the exploration of this Portuguese peninsula that they found an escape: slipping through the cracks in their biological shells and into Vivador.
The pair eloped. They had discovered a world of their own beneath those cliffs, and they did not intend to share it. Without a word to their families, they stole what money they could and fled to Carvoiero, where they were married. In the years that followed, Morna gave birth to two sons. Raised between two worlds, the obedient boys became independent teenagers, and Aldous and Morna set clear boundaries: to tell another soul about Vivador was to betray the family.
But boys will be boys, am I right? Of course I am. Their eldest, Augustus, fell for your grandmother, Eloise. And how better to impress the lady than to show her a world where all her wildest dreams can come true. He defied his parents and led her down that well. The boundaries were broken and the secret was out. And it was not only Eloise who slipped down the well—other lucid dreamers were breaching their walls. And, so they founded the Order of Chaos. The choice was simple: honour the Crow’s claim to Vivador, or be hunted on Earth.’
Something stirred in Alicia’s chest.
‘My grandmother joined this Order?’
Rainn shook her head bitterly. The timbre of a sullen disappointment tainted her words.
‘No. She refused. She took her baby and she tried to hide. When Aldous and Morna found her, they would have killed her had A
ugustus not intervened. He gave his parents the one thing that might spare her: he gave her value. He believed that Eloise had a willpower that surpassed each of theirs, fitting a legend that Aldous had recently uncovered. So they let your grandmother live, waiting to see whether her children might inherit this strength of will. While Eloise had refused to join the Order of Chaos, young Anna might be persuaded.’
Alicia felt the beat of the stallion’s heart as it pounded blood through every muscle, every imaginary artery of its projected form.
‘That’s why they took David. To lure my mother to Vivador and test her on the door. And when she failed, they sent Ryan after me. What sick minds would murder innocent people to defend a world that doesn’t exist?’
Alicia’s anger was met with frigid shock: a block of ice between her ears. The emotion was solid, distorting Rainn’s words as if she spoke through a wall. Ask somebody to name a favourite book or film and then criticise it, and you will be met with hostility; to offend a treasured opinion is to offend their sense of self. Rainn’s identity was so grounded in Vivador that to question its existence was to challenge hers.
‘Remind me of the difference between reality and a dream?’
‘The real world—it’s permanent,’ said Alicia, having considered this a great deal over the past few days. ‘It has a past. Present. Future—everything’s connected by time. There are rules, like gravity. And consequences. A dream has none of these things.’
Rainn’s confidence returned and her words rang clear as crystal bells.
‘And Vivador? All that exists here can be undone, that is true. But all that exists on Earth will one day be destroyed. Everything in existence fades to nothing in the end. Whether it is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or that Unbreakable Door, every mark made on these worlds can live on only in memory. And what are we, Alicia, other than a collection of memories, real and false? If you believe that Vivador is unreal, perhaps you need a new definition of reality.’
In the silence that followed, Rainn’s umbrage lingered in Alicia’s mind. Hooves beat the ground like gunfire. Time passed until the mountain was no longer on the horizon, but embodied it. Alicia raised her head to see smoke issuing from its peak; it was not in the image of a mountain that Psarnox had been made, but a volcano.
The bare rock had all but filled the sky ahead and they were yet to reach its base. Alicia was dwarfed by the magnitude of this creation. Her mother had once said, through a cluster of anecdotes and metaphors, that the inability to comprehend the size of a mountain, ocean or night sky renders the mind speechless, creating a deep silence.
‘There is great power in this silence,’ Anna had whispered with her face to the heavens and a paintbrush in her hand as starlight struck the canvas. ‘Primal. Thoughtless.’
Alicia understood this silence as they reached the foot of the volcano. When faced with great swathes of time and space, we are in awe of that which makes us feel insignificant. This is what her mother had strived to capture in her painting. And this is what she felt in that moment: in comparison, she was nothing.
The volcano was so vast that it was surely visible for hundreds of miles in all directions. If Aldous and Morna had generated this structure, then they had wished to make their presence known. Staring up at the bare rock face, straining to see the distant peak, she imagined ghostly figures watching her approach, like a fly before the spider’s web.
‘Where now?’ asked Alicia, slowing her horse and casting her eyes across the steep cliffs, searching for the outline of paths or tunnels. The mountain looked impregnable.
‘Straight to the—’
‘—Rainn—’
Both horses reared as another voice entered Rainn’s mind, projected to Alicia with the passage of her thoughts. The colourless voice was not confined to Alicia’s skull, but resonated within every fibre of her projected being, as if she were nothing but a conduit for its deliverance.
Rainn locked eyes with Alicia and then vanished abruptly, leaving the white stallion to canter aimlessly in a circle before trotting to a halt. It lowered its head to graze at the shoots poking from beneath a large igneous boulder. Alicia held a hand to her chest to quiet the eruption within. That voice echoed between the walls of her skull, lingering as an afterthought. She sat on her horse at the foot of the mountain, trying to determine whether she was alone in her head.
Scarecrow
Pursing her lips to suppress the escape of another sob, Winter stared at the tattered hem of her dress. Bloodied threads draped across her savaged thigh. The boat lurched over a wave and she stifled a moan as pain throbbed through the open wound. In the stained water sloshing across the planks, she glared at her pathetic reflection before closing her eyes.
Absent-mindedly, Gus brushed his thumb up and down the small of Winter’s back, feeling as powerless now as when the captain of the boat had come down to find her sleeping. The skeletal man had shaken her shoulders wordlessly and then struck her across the cheek. When she did not stir, he had scurried up the steps and returned with the dog.
Metal sheets creaked as Rainn paced the deck. Gus had heard her receive a call, and the short, ill-tempered bursts of an argument breached their cabin. Between breaths drawn through clenched teeth, Winter explained how a teenage girl had attempted to wake her up.
‘Did she have a tattoo on her wrist?’ asked Gus. ‘Like Rainn’s?’
‘I don’t know, I didn’t inspect her. It was dark—she had made it dark, around the pool. And I was distracted by the hundreds of dead bodies, with my dead face, staring up—stop poking me.’
Winter told Gus about the tower in the lake, where she had not found Alicia. She provided a brief autopsy of his plan, which had cost her a leg and possibly her life. Gus asked about the man in the tower.
‘Just some weirdo. He was waiting for someone else to arrive—you, probably. Just staring at Stonehenge. He got as far as asking my name before I was mauled to death.’
‘Aldous?’
Winter sighed. ‘I don’t know, he didn’t introduce himself. He looked about forty-something. I know Alicia’s mother was, like, twelve when she had her, so I don’t know how things are done in your family, but he didn’t look old enough to be anyone’s great-grandfather.’
‘Did he have a tattoo?’
‘Would you shut up about tattoos? Next time, I’ll ask them to strip, shall I? Excuse me, tower weirdo, would you mind taking your top off and giving me a twirl?’
Gus listened to the plop of petrol on the sodden planks as blood-stained water sloshed through his jeans. His chapped nostrils stung with the salty, petrol-laced, iron-tinged air.
‘How’s your leg?’
‘He did have one of those—those cleft lips. You know, where there’s a bit of the top lip missing. You could see some of his teeth. I would recognise him, if I saw him here.’ She shuddered at the memory of those pale eyes, his voice penetrating her mind. ‘If by my leg you mean the gaping hole where my leg used to be, then it’s great. It’s like someone stuffed a hive of fire ants—can you just stop wriggling? Please. Do you need the toilet?’
‘No.’
This was a lie. He sat as still as he could and tried not to think about how much he needed to relieve himself. He hitched his attention to Rainn’s argument, presumably with the man in the tower, but failed to make out any words. Day was yet to break, the windows were black, and the waves rose and fell in his mind’s eye.
At Salthill Beach, he and his father had taken it in turns burying one another in the sand while his mother watched the waves. Clutching her knees to her chest and pressing her feet to the corners of a towel determined to blow away, she had described the journey of these waves as if each had its own character. Gus had visited the beach alone last December, on a night as dark as this. He had listened to the ocean and tried to imagine a time before people had learned how to think.
‘He was right,’ said Winter, always first to break the silence. ‘Vivador looks exactly like here. You wouldn’t k
now you were dreaming, you wouldn’t know the difference, if someone wasn’t pulling animals out of thin air. That spider she threw at me, it was a tarantula. I could feel every hairy leg on my skin.’
‘Did it have a tattoo?’
‘Oh, shut up.’
He caught her smile in the glass as she gazed into the middle distance. The smile faded and she chewed her lip in pain.
‘We’ll ask her for some bandages, or something,’ Gus suggested quietly, knowing how absurd it sounded.
‘Maybe a bow, as well? So she can gift wrap me for the serial killers. Nice one, Augustus.’ She winced. ‘He was right though, Jack. It’s like you’ve woken up. Except that…except it’s like you’re wearing noise-cancelling headphones. No sound in the background, just you and your thoughts.’
And your fears. Her internal monologue was not as clear as in Vivador, but it was louder than before. Words danced between her ears, subtle as neon, refusing to settle down into the murk of her subconscious.
Rainn had finished on the phone and Winter’s whisper was low when she spoke:
‘Do you ever think about the things you should have told them?’
‘Who?’
‘Don’t play dumb.’
‘I’m not. You mean my parents?’
‘Yes, your mum and dad. Doesn’t it drive you crazy, thinking of all the things you never said?’
Bending her uninjured leg, she scraped at the wood with a high heel and waited for Gus to respond. He fixed his eyes to the sheen of light on the tap. It was not a big deal, his sexuality. What did it matter if he had told them? Would they have cared?
You don’t seem very—
Would his parents have been as dismissive as Joe? Perhaps he should have made it more obvious, though he wasn’t sure how. There were a lot of things that his parents had not known about him. They never knew he had eaten half of his eleventh birthday cake in the middle of the night and hidden the evidence in the wheelie bin; Sylvie assumed she had left it at the store. There were so many secrets that the pair of them had never known. Why did some secrets feel like lies?