by Ben J Henry
I know you’re at Burnflower. I’m looking for—
Ryan? Amira shuddered. The dread thickened as she recalled Rainn’s warning.
This girl has come to kill us. For once, Amira, prove your value.
On the wicker chair, the cord of her dressing gown twisted in a breeze that nipped at her exposed ankles. Since the bedroom window was shut, the front or back door must have been left open. The knife trembled in Amira’s hand as she stepped around the sleeping stranger to see muddy shoes discarded by the lower half of a champagne bottle. The end of a shoelace had fallen into a broken corner, drawing liquid from a small pool. Her bedroom smelled of alcohol and dirt. Folding her arms across her undersized pyjamas, she peered into the hallway. The front door was open.
‘Peter?’ she called up the stairs, loud enough to fill the house but not beyond it. He was presumably in the Pagoda, where he spent his waking hours. Had he forgotten to shut the door or had this intruder forced it open? The breeze was cold and she stole back into her bedroom and crept past the stranger, avoiding wet patches that darkened the teal carpet. She threaded the knife through the arm of her dressing gown and sunlight caught an overturned brass bowl at the foot of her bed: Peter’s Tibetan singing bowl. Had this girl tried to wake her?
She shot a glance through the open front doorway, beyond the patio to the thicket of bulrushes by the nearest pond and then turned for the stairs. She carried the mallet and bowl because Peter would want her to return them. She would ask him what they were—she had not heard him on the phone to Rainn while she pretended to sleep.
After a peek in Ryan’s bedroom to check it was empty, swift steps led her down the corridor—Peter would want her to return his items quickly. Her dressing gown flowed behind her as she marched up to the master bedroom and knocked firmly on the door.
‘Peter?’
No answer. Down the corridor she tried his study and, when there was no response, she stood with her back to it. Facing the door to the attic, she could no longer pretend why she held the bowl and mallet. She swallowed her heartbeat, bent to lift the edge of the carpet by the doorframe and took the key. She forced the reluctant key into the lock and turned it and opened the door and stepped inside and closed it behind her. And breathed.
Cobwebs wavered, thrilled by movement in the stale air. She tightened her gown, pinching her waist, fearful that the hem might catch on cobwebs on either side of the wooden staircase. Her body tensed as she ascended the narrow steps, assaulted with eight-legged memories. Promising to desensitise Amira, Rainn had lined the volcanic shelves with species known and imagined. Amira was not to wake until she had touched them all.
‘It worked!’ Amira had lied, forcing the corners of her mouth into her cheeks.
At the top of the stairs, she placed a tentative foot on the wooden floorboards. Ryan lay on a mattress in the middle of the attic, a grey-white sheet covering his grey-blue skin, pale as a cadaver.
Out of habit, her eyes searched the wooden rafters for spiders alive or dead.
Stop it, she scolded, her voice as firm as Rainn’s. Prove your value, Amira, for once.
Every inch of the rafters as high as she could reach bore repeated carvings of the same number. She had carved them secretly at first, when she believed that Peter ventured into the attic. On the back of beams and on the inner drawers of old cabinets, she had scratched Ryan’s favourite number with an iron nail. She would show him, secretly, when he woke.
Every day, he had set 29 as the volume on his cassette player and rolled dice until he totalled it.
Do you ever get numbers stuck in your head? he had asked her as the dice tumbled through the classroom door and into the kitchen. And wonder where they come from?
For three years, Vivador had sustained him. He had lain on that mattress while his soul inhabited another realm, somehow managing to replenish his physical body. Wherever he was in Vivador, he needed no food or water. No comfort. When Amira started to suspect she was the only one who visited him, she left the key under the carpet at a certain angle, so she would know if Peter had used it. But Peter never visited his son, and she had taken the long nail to the bricks and beams, so that Ryan would see the number when he woke.
She didn’t know if Peter was in the Pagoda, or what that stranger was doing in her bedroom, and she had no time to waste. She carried the mallet and bowl to Ryan’s side. Her eyes flitted to the sheet at the end of the room, covering the mirror, and her knees stopped wobbling when she sat cross-legged by Ryan’s waxwork head.
The thoughts that made her weak returned—louder now.
What if he pushed her?
What if he killed Sam?
The questions were carved into her mind like the numbers on the beams, tattooed through repetition. The sheet stretched across Ryan’s chest as he filled his lungs, reminding her that he was still living. Alive and alone.
Rainn had cried and Melissa had cried and Peter had shaken his head. And she had believed them. Ryan was safer here, and there: his body locked in the attic, his soul trapped in the immaterial realm.
When she had left the bathroom late one night, she saw Peter fiddling with the carpet and she had decided to test herself. She wanted to be brave, to prove her value—just once—to nobody but herself. She had dared herself to look, just once. And then she had returned. She would desensitise herself, in her own time, to the boy they called a murderer. She watched him sleeping in the dark, bloodless skin on his handsome cheeks, and wondered if he really led his brother here one night. Did he really push Rainn from the Pagoda? And if he did, was his punishment to lie alone under the cobwebs, forever?
She looked at the thick wooden mallet. It resembled the truncated end of a broom handle.
Just be confident, Amira!
She lifted the mallet to the bowl and circled the rim until a low hum reached her ears. The sound haunted the room and she dropped the mallet, which landed in the bowl with a dull clang.
Cursing her clumsiness, she picked it up and set her teeth together. She sat up on her knees and promised herself that she would not fail again.
At first, the sound was orange. Timid and warm. But as she continued to run the mallet around the rim of the bowl, the colour changed from orange to blue. Not any blue, but the bright, glacial blue she had seen in happy, unpredictable eyes across the breakfast table. The eyes of a boy with a smile at odds with the acts he had committed.
The hum grew louder and she raised her eyes to the skylight above, certain that the glass was trembling. The blue intensified until it had embodied the air around her, from the carved beams to the marrow of her bones. Willing his eyes to open, Amira studied the scar on his face: the jagged white line that ran from the corner of his left eye halfway to his ear. After he murdered Sam, Ryan had fallen and hit the corner of the mirror.
The scar twitched and Amira dropped the mallet. This time, it landed on Ryan’s chest. It did not roll onto the floor but settled on his sternum.
The scar had not twitched: she had imagined it. She sat back, defeated and afraid. The Tibetan bowl had not worked when Peter tried it before, though that was when Amira had pretended to sleep. He had phoned Rainn and Amira held her breath to hear fragments of an explanation: it would work on Ryan, but not Amira.
She’s not between the mirrors.
Amira looked from the mirror covered with the sheet to the stairs at the end of the attic. If Ryan was between mirrors, where was the other one?
She placed the bowl beside his head and stood. If she rushed to the Playground while the stranger slept and Peter worked in the Pagoda, she might trick Rainn. She could say that Peter had asked her to wake Ryan, and Rainn might tell her where the other mirror was hidden.
Satisfied with an excuse to leave the attic (or at least to defer her failure) Amira scampered down the stairs. While the sound of her footsteps was audible, the thrumming of the bowl continued to resonate, too low for her to hear.
She closed the door and Ryan opened his eyes.
Rewrite
There had been complications with Ryan’s birth; Melissa and Peter would be unable to have a second child. Both were keen for their son to grow up with other children, and Sam’s adoption had seemed a fine solution. But as the boys grew, Melissa started to question her husband’s interest in the epileptic child.
At university, she had been drawn to Peter’s passion. It was not a passion for her—it was never a passion for her—but for his postdoctoral work. While her friends lost interest in his fanciful ideas on how to cheat the subconscious and conquer fear, she found herself enrapt. Quiet, but never shy, he was often frustrated by people’s indifference to the nature of their lives. He shook his head dismissively when the topic of conversation drifted back to sports, celebrities or the weather. In bed at night, he would tell her how sheep were selectively bred to lack curiosity, and that her friends were no different, daydreaming through their lives.
‘He’s very intense,’ said her elderly mother. That’s what Melissa had liked about him.
Now, she followed her estranged husband down the gravel path that branched from the patio to fork between the seven ponds, and she wondered how she had ever loved him. Patches of weed spread through the gravel like mould, and the pond borders were wild. Peter’s pace was unhurried as he led her towards the Pagoda. The morning sky was cloudless, a brilliant blue paling at the edges. The central pond was the largest and deepest; her father had once convinced her that his old car lay at the bottom, though the circular pool would struggle to conceal more than a motorbike. She recalled Ryan and Sam on the edge of this pond, standing in their underpants as they fished with sticks and string tied around Haribo rings until the backs of their necks were red. Ryan had raced inside, declaring in a high-pitched voice that Sam had eaten his sweet straight out of the pond.
Peter had talked at length of his concerns that Ryan was jealous of Sam, and the effect this might have on their son’s development. If the boy feared that his biological parents loved the adopted child more, would Ryan be able to form a healthy relationship with him?
Melissa started to wonder whether Peter was not simply observing the boys’ behaviour patterns but creating them. Did he pay such attention to Sam to further his research into epilepsy, or was he deliberately trying to make Ryan envy his brother?
Sam had a fatal epileptic attack in the attic and Melissa tried to convince herself it was an accident. Ryan had only been playing with the torch; he had meant no harm. Whispers in the bathroom mirror became a daily mantra, and Melissa grew adept at lying to herself. She wrote the narrative that absolved her of guilt.
Amira was chosen for her synaesthesia. Driving from Sunny Climes children’s home, Melissa had watched the six-year-old in her rear-view mirror. A little rat sleeping on its way to the lab. The girl would giggle when Peter presented her with cuddly snakes, dyed different colours, and asked her what they tasted of. The experiments were amusing, and Melissa smiled at the spring in her husband’s step as he set off between the ponds to devise another set of harmless tests.
As a growing pressure will transform carbon to diamond, her suspicion hardened to belief. When Amira’s bed was filled with spiders, she questioned Ryan, but not Peter. The patterns fitted the theory, but they were not proof. She might have asked him whether he had taken to experimenting on the girl while she slept; but there was no need when she had the spare key to his study. Why confront him when she could unlock the door and read his files first-hand?
When the opportunity arose and Peter left for a weekend, Melissa did not seize it. She convinced herself that she was scared of her husband. She convinced herself that to challenge him was a threat to Ryan’s safety. But it was not Peter that she feared; she left that key at the back of the kitchen drawer because her theory remained unproven. If she knew the truth—if she raided his files and learned the extent of her husband’s experiments—then she would have no choice but to act on it.
Enter Rainn. The fifteen-year-old who had set fire to her grandparents’ house while sleepwalking. The orphan that Peter had ostensibly found because she shared the name he had given their home. The orphan who was not an orphan, but a girl who had fled her British father and moved to England to find out what had happened to her Singaporean mother.
The seventh pond curled around the uneven ground like one of Dali’s clocks. Melissa raised her gaze to the Pagoda, up the hexagonal walls that rose twenty feet to the bamboo roof supported by floor-to-ceiling arches.
‘A place to think,’ Peter had said, in one of the rare moments he spent with her in the first year of their marriage. She had plenty of time to think, since he spent every waking hour building the tower by hand, making his mark on her parents’ land. And when it was finished, he renamed their home.
‘Burnflower? Isn’t that the name of the girl in your year at university? The one who died?’ she had not asked him. When he had completed the tower, a heaviness in his shoulders had lifted, and she chose to enjoy his buoyant mood rather than dwell on the reasons behind it.
In the glare of the morning light, her fatigued mind played tricks on her: the ghost of Rainn, legs dangling beneath the arch, risking her life so Melissa would believe that Ryan had tried to kill her. Leaking from the eyes and nose, the young woman had sobbed on Melissa’s shoulder, asking why Ryan had done it. Why had he pushed her off and then jumped?
There, there, Melissa had soothed, saying no more as Ryan lay comatose in his bed. She knew why her son had done it. First Sam, and now Rainn: the victims of his envy.
Shaped like a kidney bean, the outer pond was bordered by chrysanthemum, peony and a thicket of weeds. Brushing past, Melissa caught her reflection in the water. ‘Stoneface,’ the students called her, but she had not always been this hard. She had comforted Amira when she trembled at the shadows of fish in the water, or pushed the slices of cucumber from her plate with the butt of her knife. Tears wet her neck as the girl pressed her head to Melissa’s shoulder, craving a mother’s protection.
But she had known why the tears had fallen. What was overwritten was never lost. Denied, repressed, her guilt had festered, hollowing her from within to leave nothing but a hardened shell—nothing but a woman capable of luring a blind child into her car.
Rewrite, she thought savagely, clenching her teeth at the magnitude of her self-deception.
The path extended beyond the seventh pond to the Pagoda, ran in a straight line through uncut grass and down a gentle slope that fell to the trees. Checking the buttons on her jacket, Melissa stared at the back of Peter’s head. She did not need to see his face to read his expression. After twenty years of marriage, she knew it like her own: cool and purposeful. A wolf stalking its prey. She had provided him with the land he needed to conduct his experiments and the children on which to conduct them; he had wanted no more from her. She had long given up yearning for affection, vying for his attention or demanding his respect. And while she did not respect her husband, she envied what he had: an unshakeable peace of mind. How much easier it must be to write your chosen narrative without that querulous voice of reason in your mind.
The path ended in the flagstones beside a patch of long grass where she had found her fallen son. The glass of the broken bottle was warm in her hands, a heartbeat in her thumb, as she remembered the folded paper that had poked from his pockets. She took a breath and followed Peter under the archway.
To the right, spiralling steps led to his office and the uppermost floor. To the left stood the wooden door to the cellar. A curt glance over his shoulder, and Peter blocked Melissa with his back as he entered a code into the padlock on the door.
Peter opened the door and light spilled on the steps that wound along the wall to the ground below. The cellar beneath the tower was hewn from a light stone, so rough and bare it resembled a large well. The circular space was wide enough to accommodate a single mattress at the foot of the steps, three wine barrels that had once been filled with her father’s vintage,
crates of foreign lager and an array of rusted garden tools perched against the wall. Peter stepped aside and Melissa took the first two steps, just enough to see that the boy on the mattress was David Harrington.
The throes of agony
Winter winced when Alicia screamed. As the droplets seared her skin, Alicia sent her will strong and metallic along the outline of her body, rendering herself invulnerable to the acid rain. Winter stood unharmed beneath the downpour. With her focus on the attack, she withdrew her influence on the frozen volcano. Were it Aldous or Morna, Peter or Rainn, who had set the platform rotating on a bed of lava, their will persisted and the ice began to crack.
Holding her body together like a piñata, Alicia was consumed by her defence. In this state, it would take just one strike to defeat her. Leaving enough strength in her body to resist the burning rain, she felt for the melting platform. In great tendrils, she buried her will in the volcanic glass beneath her feet.
The platform trembled, lava seeped through the cracks and Winter waited for the revolutions to resume. Alicia held the platform in her mind and let her body go. As the acid burned, she ripped through the frozen obsidian, tearing it to pieces. The ground detonated and Winter was launched into the air. Through conscious or unconscious design, both of them landed on a chunk of black ice that bobbed in the molten rock.
Alicia steadied herself on the block, shifting her heels against grooves in the ice. Winter rose skyward on a frozen pillar and Alicia joined her rival, extending the block from the surface of the lake. The pair stood tall on top of their pillars, facing one another from opposing sides of the crater. The dark storm cloud stretched across the sky, rippling with lightning. Thunder reverberated through the air and Psarnox trembled.