by Ben J Henry
There was no sound of gunfire. They kicked through the waves, the jagged rocks of the shore just metres away, yet the distance seemed interminable beneath the sight of a gun. Gus disappeared under the waves and Winter followed his lead, urging her savaged leg to kick through the freezing water.
Nearing the shore, Gus raised his head to glance back at the boat. The fire was no longer contained below, but crept up the mast, feeding on the exposed flaps of the sail. Pain stabbed his knee as he struck something sharp and proceeded to haul himself out of the water. A wave crashed overhead, knocking the pair against the rocks. With fingers numb and bleeding, they struggled to their feet and dragged themselves from the unrelenting waves.
Winter steadied herself against Gus’s shoulder, ready to haul her body from the rocks to the bank, when she saw the scarecrow silhouetted against the flames of his blazing vessel. Fingernails dug into Gus’s collar as the rifle was levelled in their direction.
‘No!’
A desperate scream sounded from the rocks to their left. Soaked, with her bare navel showing through a blackened dress, Rainn cried out to the captain as Gus and Winter gripped the rock and awaited the gunshot. The man’s face was impassive as he lowered his eyes to the sight of the gun and fingered the trigger.
With a resounding blast, the boat exploded. Flaming debris was jettisoned into the sky before landing in the waves. Rainn stared in horror as the decimated vessel teetered and sank beneath the dark water. Gus tugged at Winter’s arm and the pair scrambled up the bank to where it flattened. They had reached a pinnacle of rock, with nothing but woodland ahead and a lighthouse standing defiant at the end of the world. Gus cast one final glance at the shoreline to watch a husky dog pull itself from the water and onto the rocks. Rainn had slipped from view.
The beam of the lighthouse swept overhead as Gus and Winter plunged into the strip of woodland that truncated this peninsula. Conscious of the sheer cliff on either side, Winter dragged her leg through the underbrush and the pair navigated the shadows until a flat expanse lay before them. The barren peninsula widened over hundreds of metres before joining the distant mainland. From over the trees, the beam of the lighthouse swept the rock like the flash of a prison guard’s torch. Winter yelped in pain as she tripped over a root and Gus hooked her arm around his shoulders, taking her weight as he led her out into the open. Under an overcast sky, they could see little ahead; the passing beam illuminated no more than a series of craggy cliffs and crude paths leading to higher ground. They crossed the unsheltered stretch, exposed, wondering if eyes followed their hobbled progress.
The beam delivered a half-second of light and Winter shrieked, pulling Gus to a halt. They were a step away from the edge of a large hole in the rock. The water below sloshed and gurgled, and Gus peered into the blowhole. Tireless waves had bored a tunnel into the cliff face and broken through to the surface. He steered Winter around its edge and they raced to the left, wary of other pitfalls.
Thunder rippled overhead and the clouds broke, casting sheets of rain on them. As the beam swept his back, Gus peered over the cliff to spot a ledge below. He helped Winter down to the narrow path and they made their way along stony ground, steadying themselves against the rock face until they reached a stretch where the sheer cliff fell away under a rocky overhang. Gus ducked inside the recess and out of the rain. He twisted in the shallow space and sat with his back against the wall. Winter kicked sharply at his protruding feet with her good leg.
‘Get up! I’m not dying in some hole on this miserable rock. Not with you.’
‘If they’re expecting us, we’ll not go limping into their arms.’ Gus thumbed to the right, where the peninsula joined the mainland. ‘At least let them think we might have made it—let them widen the net. Give me that knife.’
Winter tugged the blade from her belt and kneeled beside him, flicking sodden hair over her shoulders and wincing through the pain. Gus caught her eye as she slid the serrated blade between his neck and the collar.
‘Alicia isn’t there,’ said Winter as the collar fell to the floor.
Gus snatched it and cast it over the cliff. ‘I’m going to talk to that man—’ He recalled Rainn’s conversation with Aldous. ‘—Peter. Find out what he wants. He doesn’t know where we are. If Aldous and Morna want to speak to me that badly, it will be on my terms.’
Winter slumped against the wall of their cave, her dark skin ashen and her wet hair violescent.
‘You’d better come back,’ she said, ‘or I’m rolling you into the sea.’
Finally removing her high heels, she stared out across the grey ocean with no expression in her eyes. Gus wondered if she was thinking about the scarecrow that had just been blown to oblivion.
But Gus had no time to think. He closed his eyes. For a year, he had resisted; each night, natural sleep had been forbidden. Resting his head against the rock, he released his consciousness like a feather in a gale-force wind. As rain lashed the cliffs, Gus left a soaked and battered body in the waking world.
The Playground
A fine black smoke rose like a veil against the eggshell blue of Vivador’s sky. Through this veil, Alicia trained her telescopic vision and studied the battle that raged below. On the obsidian platform, Amira seemed intent on spending what was left of the night in ceaseless combat with her simulacrum. Rainn had excused herself with a sly smile, disappearing to ‘attend to something’ in the waking world. Or was this a test? Alicia scanned the rock shelves lining the crater’s inner wall to see if Rainn was watching from one of the many tunnels. She resisted the urge to interrupt the fight and question Amira before she woke.
Alicia’s eyes flitted from one furious face to the other, unable to determine which was the original. The mirror image on the left cast her hands forward, palms open and joined at the wrists, to send a torrent of laser beams at her opponent. The girl on the right stepped effortlessly to the side and the beams passed under her arm, crossing the lake of lava to strike the wall of the crater.
Having argued with her mirror image, Alicia understood that it could teach you nothing that you did not already know. In dreams, the subconscious could devise unexpected characters and objects; but, unlike that bullet in Alicia’s heart, Amira’s simulacrum was unable to provoke a shot of adrenaline powerful enough to wake her. So, she experimented, testing out weapons and ferocious animals, and Alicia wondered what she was preparing for.
The scream of a chainsaw and the crack of an electric whip were silenced as two identical faces raised their eyes to the rock shelves. Previously empty, these shelves now teemed with thousands of translucent figures: the onion-skin image of a jubilant crowd. In dresses that glistened with rubies and amethysts, the ghostly simulacrums were made in Rainn’s image. Cries of delight filled the volcano and Alicia followed the gaze of ten thousand faces to a distant figure travelling along the rim of the crater. Projecting her vision across the expanse, Alicia watched Rainn back-flipping along the rocky precipice to the gasps and whistles of her onion-skin audience.
The whistles became screams, and the screams chants, as Rainn deftly navigated the uneven rock, travelling at a remarkable speed. When she was below the higher of Psarnox’s two peaks, a section of the cliff fell away and a waterfall of lava surged into the volcanic depths. Rainn sprang from a backflip and launched herself down the waterfall, landing on a board that materialised above the cascading lava. To screams of adoration, Rainn rode her board down the waterfall, plummeting towards the lake of molten rock.
The cries were tumultuous as she struck the lava to surf upon a great viscous wave. Brighter than the gem-studded gowns of the translucent crowd, the sapphires in her leotard reflected the light of the bubbling lava. She manipulated not only the board but the wave itself, drawn to a great height and then lowered to a modest crest as she approached the platform. She hopped from the board to the obsidian disc and Amira’s simulacrum vanished.
With a pair of flaming scimitars, Rainn twisted towards Amira, who shield
ed herself with an icy broadsword. Such was Rainn’s ferocity and speed, she appeared not only to be demonstrating prowess, but venting fury.
The fight was brutal. There were moments when the crater trembled and the pair were knocked back against the edges of the disc, skidding to a halt before the lava. They paused to stare at one another and Alicia watched emotion play across Amira’s face. The girl’s lip trembled, she blinked thick lashes and inclined her head at the threat or criticism driven between her ears.
Once a new attack had been introduced, it surfaced in the repertoire of the attacked. But ideas were not cloned, they were amended. Improved. And, so, the battle evolved, with each imitation more devastating than the last. Alicia watched the seamless transmission of ideas, progressing at a tremendous rate, unparalleled in the waking world. This battle would end only through the deployment of an attack so novel and unpredictable that the opponent was unable to stop it.
The platform tipped gently as Rainn landed on its edge and cast a stream of missiles into the sky to shower down upon her younger opponent. Amira vanished beneath the explosion, but when the smoke dissipated, she remained.
There were boos and hisses from the onion-skin audience, and then a playful gasp as the tunnels behind them whooped and howled. Amira spun on the spot, casting wide eyes across the walls of the crater as a troupe of macaques hurled themselves over the burning lake. Her brows furrowed in determination and she raised her palms defensively. The first three monkeys to land on the platform petrified instantly, lining the edge of the obsidian as grotesque statues. But the monkeys continued to pour from the ledges, more numerous now. The girl tried to cast each to stone, but within moments she was overpowered and disappeared beneath an amorphous mass of grey-brown fur. The attack was swift and savage—tooth and claw—and then the whooping ceased as Amira returned to the waking world.
Rainn’s crowd disappeared and the Playground was empty.
‘What are you waiting for?’ growled a voice in Alicia’s head. She withdrew her vision from the bare platform and turned to find Rainn beside her. The woman’s sapphire leotard glistened like the crystal-encrusted rock beneath their feet. Her eyes glowered. ‘A push?’
It seemed unnecessarily intrusive for Rainn to force her words into Alicia’s mind when she could have said them aloud. From the timbre of her voice, Alicia knew she was struggling to maintain her cool composure. Whatever havoc Rainn was wreaking elsewhere, something was troubling her.
‘Nice show,’ said Alicia.
‘Oh, please.’ Rainn waved a hand. ‘I could have ended it in a heartbeat. I thought you could use some inspiration.’
‘If I win—if I wake this girl up, what will that prove?’
Rainn’s words entered Alicia’s head as a cool whisper.
‘When Aldous and Morna look into your eyes, there won’t be anyone to put a bullet in your chest. Show me what you’re made of, and I will take you to them.’
Amira appeared in the centre of the platform, scanning the shelves.
Alicia asked, ‘How do I get down?’
Rainn raised her eyebrows and Alicia nodded with a thin smile. Gripping the rock and bowing her head like a bird of prey, she launched herself from the edge and into the crater.
Sol
Gus stood in his dormitory at school, aware that his environment was fictional. He brushed the back of a finger against loose threads hanging from the corner of his mattress, permitting himself a moment to marvel at the fraying cotton, before turning to the window. The outdoor swimming pool—an adequate form of punishment in an Irish boarding school—was vacant, and the placid water glimmered in the sunlight. It was more than the uncommon weather that prompted Gus to register his surroundings as false; he was conscious that his body lay on the cliffs in Portugal. He swept his eyes around the contents of his mind. What had lain forgotten on the ghostly shelves of his mental library now stood before him in arresting detail.
He ran hands down his thighs, over his black jeans—how good it felt to be dry!—and took two paces back. He crossed his arms before his face and sprinted at the window. In a blur of broken glass, the landscape shifted under his intention and he lowered his fists to see the plains before Stonehenge. Quick steps carried him over the shallow ditch, his bare feet flattening the long grass at the bottom. He approached the low-lying stones, collapsed and sunken, where the outer circle was broken. As Winter had described, the stones within this sarsen ring were missing.
While the great sandstone blocks, with pale-green lichen fused to a pockmarked surface, were testament to the depths of his memory, Gus could not begin to fathom the arrangement replaced by the pool. Had the stones within been smaller? Bigger? Rounder? He had not paid attention to the summer-camp teacher, wheezing her facts; he had busied himself proving to another boy that it was possible to slip on a banana peel.
Chuckling inwardly at the memory, he raced between the stones. He dived into the water and hijacked the conscious pathway of the unknown lucid dreamer who had established this portal between the realms. Landing on his backside on a stone dais in the middle of a pool, Gus Crow entered Vivador.
No teenage girl waited between the stones. The sky above, as the water below, was an innocent blue. Turning bare feet on the dais, he scanned the sarsen blocks and set the focus of his attention on the horizontal stones that lay precariously on top of the others. Under his direction, six lintels rose into the air. The blocks drifted higher until Gus allowed their weight—all thirty-five tonnes—to return and sent them crashing down. With a rumble that disturbed the surface of the water, the structure collapsed around him.
He crossed the pool in a leap and landed on a fallen stone to gaze at the distant mountain, where tendrils of smoke rose between two peaks. Had Alicia’s mother seen the volcano here in Vivador and painted it on waking, or had she painted it first in the material world and then conjured it in Vivador? Which was the original and which the reconstruction?
Beyond the fallen monument, a tower stood in the centre of a great lake. In comparison, the pool between the broken blocks was little more than a garden pond. Catlike in speed and agility, Gus leaped across the length of the pool, landed in a crouch on a sunken stone and sprang forward to reach the end of the bridge. He paused for a second, stared across the wooden planks that led to Rainn’s accomplice, and broke into a run. He ran because Winter lay beside him, biting down the pain as she bled to death. He ran because he had no time to think. No time to consider the holes in his plan.
Stone steps blurred beneath his feet and narrow windows passed like the slits along a zoetrope. He slowed only when the room opened up to reveal two empty thrones rotating at its centre. Standing in an archway, having doubtlessly watched that desperate sprint across the bridge, a man waited with his back to the room.
‘Hello, Peter,’ said Gus, his voice level.
The man ran his eyes from Gus’s bare feet to his unkempt hair, dark as his monochrome jeans and T-shirt. Peter’s hands were in the pockets of his trousers, his white shirt carefully tucked under a leather belt that matched his open jacket. The sleeves of the jacket were long, no tattoos visible. His waxwork face revealed nothing; this man had no intention of confirming or denying his identity. Gus took a step closer.
‘Rainn lost us. We got away, me and the girl. Winter.’ He slowed down, controlling his breathing. ‘And if you don’t do exactly as I say, you’ll have to tell Aldous we’re gone, and I’ve a feeling he won’t be too happy about that. Not after everything he’s done to get me to Portugal. Winter is bleeding to death. I’ll send her back to the lighthouse, alone, and Rainn will take her to a hospital. And when Winter is safe, she’ll meet me here in Vivador, at a location we’ve discussed, and she’ll tell me that you’ve done as you were told. And then—and only then—will I return to meet my family.’
Peter inclined his head, pinched his hooked nose between his thumb and forefinger, and folded his arms.
‘I met your father once,’ he said, in a voice as rough a
s stone. ‘He was not like you. There was a certain charm about him. A confidence he acquired having mastered his emotions. How disappointing, when sons fall short of expectations.’
Gus held his body rigid as his chest tightened.
‘I didn’t ask about my father. Do we have a deal?’
With his head down, Peter trod the hexagonal tiles to the revolving dais. He unfolded his arms and brushed a finger against the stone arm of a passing throne.
‘Take a seat.’
Gus did not move. He could read nothing in those pale eyes. At first, they reminded him of the captain: empty as the lens of a camera; yet while that scarecrow had moved as if hypnotised, Peter’s eyes were empty through his own design. He had willed them clear of emotion, his deception absolute.
‘I don’t know how Benedict found me at Burnflower last summer. He told me he planned to surprise Aldous and Morna. That, on your seventeenth birthday, you would meet them for the first time. He was convincing—more so than you—and I gave him the key to their home. I warned Aldous, of course; he was expecting them.’
Peter paused and Gus strove to mirror that unfathomable expression. He had unwittingly displayed his anger about Winter; he would not let this man know his agony. He would bury his need to understand how they died. He would change the subject.
‘Who are you? Why did you have a key to their home?’
‘Aldous told me what happened when your parents reached their bedside,’ Peter cocked his head and continued as if Gus had not spoken. ‘How he and Morna watched them deliberating. They saw no reason to return to their bodies when Benedict pulled the knife from his bag. The hesitation on his face—no intervention was necessary. He was not going to kill them. There was a weakness about him, not visible in the waking world. His energy, how did Aldous describe it?’ He drew a thumbnail through his short grey beard. ‘A dying bulb. Sylvie grabbed the book at the bedside and, mirroring his cowardice, she ran.’