by Ben J Henry
Kill the bad guy
Melissa staggered down the gravel path with a tin under her left arm and a key in her right fist. She had searched the cellar for the snake, pulling at the wine barrels, shifting the dusty crates of lager from the wall and peering in the musty bag of the broken lawnmower. Thrumming with anxiety, she had cast a thousandth glance at David and seen movement in the creases of his pyjama top. For a terrible moment, she thought the snake had slid beneath his clothes and across his chest. But then: a flicker of brown scales. The animal slithered down the side of the mattress behind David’s head.
Overwriting rational thought, Melissa had seized the snake, wrestled it back into the tin and clipped the clasp shut; but not before sustaining bites on her thumb and forearm. She held her arm up, hissed between clenched teeth, and stared at the deadly puncture wounds, wondering how long it would take her to reach the Jeep. The creases in David’s pyjamas thickened and thinned, blue folding over white as he slept on unawares.
Passing the nearest pond, she pressed her injured arm against her chest to better grip the tin, squeezing tight, as if to prevent the writhing reptile from breaking free. A passionate agony in her left arm migrated through her body. Each crunch of her feet on the uneven stones sent bright splinters along her nerves. Maintaining her balance with a forward gaze, she saw two figures on the patio. On the flagstones by the birdbath, Alicia slept in Amira’s shadow. Amira passed a kitchen knife from one hand to the other, wiping a palm on her dressing gown. At the sight of that severe expression, Melissa urged her legs into a sprint.
‘Amira,’ she called. The girl looked up and the colour drained from her face. Tattered and bleeding, hair straggling wild down her cheeks, Melissa came at her like a banshee.
‘Amira?’ she repeated as a pulse of agony shot from her heels to her skull. ‘What are you doing?’
The girl’s lips quivered and her brown eyes glowered. In her hand, the knife trembled.
‘She killed…’ Amira coughed and returned her gaze to Alicia, who lay with her arms by her sides and one leg tucked beneath the other like a discarded puppet. ‘She murdered a girl. In Vivador.’
Melissa crossed from the gravel to the patio flagstones, firing questions—Killed who? How?—but Amira stared at Alicia’s face, reliving what she had witnessed. The girl’s olive skin was taut with determination, her lips pursed and her brow furrowed, and Melissa remembered the night before Ryan’s tenth birthday. Young Amira had trembled with the need to make it right, biting her lip when she poured too many sprinkles on the cake. Though Amira had not uttered a sound, Melissa had read the curses on her face, berating herself for making a mistake. Now she watched the girl wrestle with what she believed to be weakness: her reluctance to stab a sleeping stranger.
What has he done to you? Her thought was white-hot as Melissa viewed the outcome of her husband’s experiments. Then, the heat cooled: what did you let him do to her?
This thought was not rewritten. David was the second child she had stolen; Amira was the first. After Sam, they could not return to Sunny Climes children’s home. They would not be able to adopt again. But Peter had convinced Melissa that Ryan must not grow up alone. While the children played in the fields beyond the children’s home, Melissa approached the six-year-old with a fistful of daisies. The little girl with synaesthesia, who Peter insisted was not getting the treatment she required in that underfunded place. The little girl had not said no to the kindly woman offering to help her make a daisy chain. She had not said no when the kindly woman offered to adopt her.
With Peter dead, Melissa was the last living parent that Amira should never have had. She pocketed the key and crossed the flagstones, holding out her hand.
‘Give it to me,’ she demanded in the authoritative tone she had used when the puppy ran off with her hairbrush. Amira looked from the knife to the tear that slipped down Alicia’s cheek. The droplet fell and hung on a blade of grass that poked between the paving slabs.
‘She’s dangerous,’ Amira muttered, arms deflating to her sides as she struggled to maintain her fragile resolve. ‘A killer. I can’t…in Vivador, I can’t stop her. I have to stop her.’
Amira raised the weapon.
‘I killed Peter,’ Melissa whispered.
Amira’s eyes snapped to hers. Melissa saw a dead body slumped in a desk chair, head back and eyes wide. She had pulled the key from beneath her husband’s collar and tossed the chain to the floor. His hand rested on the desk, fingers gripping the phone, and she had wondered whether it was Rainn he had called, or Aldous. Or both. Wherever Rainn might be, Melissa knew she would head for Burnflower. Before leaving the Pagoda, she had locked the cellar door.
‘He’s dead?’ Amira’s gaze drifted to the Pagoda, as if Peter’s ghost might hover in the arches.
‘I was too afraid to do anything,’ Melissa stated. ‘To stop him. I should have stopped him. But he’s gone now, Amira. He’s gone. And you…’ She clenched her teeth, unable to speak to this girl as a mother should. Her voice hardened. ‘I lost everything to that man. My son, my home. My hope. And I got my revenge.’
Amira saw the swollen skin around Melissa’s left hand and forearm. Redness spread around two puncture wounds as the blood panicked.
‘Mambo?’
Melissa nodded, and her stomach lurched at hearing Ryan’s name for the black mamba. It was her son’s attempt to humanise the present that Amira would not look at. She softened her tone.
‘That anger inside—the one screaming that it isn’t fair. The one that makes you want to seize something valuable and crush it in your hands. I thought it would help. I thought that getting my revenge would make the anger go away.’
Beneath the black hair that curled against her forehead, Amira’s dark eyes lingered on the teardrop hanging from the blade of grass, splitting the light of the morning sun. She could not look at Alicia’s face any longer, though the knife was steady in her hand. She opened her mouth to speak and a bead of perspiration dropped from her lower lip.
‘It’s not revenge. She hasn’t killed a friend—I don’t have…I didn’t know that girl. I tried to wake Ryan, but I can’t. She’s going to kill him.’
Melissa’s mouth hung open, but she shook her head, which swam as if filled with liquid.
‘No. She wouldn’t. Not everyone kills to get what they want. That’s not…’ The tin was too heavy to hold, and she placed it by Alicia’s feet. A wistful look came upon her. ‘Remember those superhero comics we gave Ryan one Christmas?’
Amira nodded. She and Ryan had taken it in turns reading the speech bubbles. He had been eleven, she had been eight. He had used different voices for the villains and she had tried to copy him. It was the Christmas before the spiders.
‘Kill the bad guy,’ Melissa continued. ‘That’s what they teach us. That’s what they want us to believe. The books, the films. The news. But the bad guy never really dies, he just changes. He changes into you.’
Melissa held out her palm again as her husband’s voice swam through her liquid mind: Fear and hatred will always triumph over love. It was the final thought that she rewrote.
‘Alicia is good, Amira. And so are you. You’ve always been good.’
Amira passed the knife to Melissa, who received it as if it were a great weight and fell to her knees, her adrenaline exhausted. Fifteen minutes must have passed since the snake had bitten her, and she would not make it to the Jeep before losing consciousness.
She tapped the tin and blinked heavily, trying to keep Amira in focus.
‘The snake is in this box. There are gloves in my car, in the—over—’ she gestured to the back of the house. ‘Put Mambo back. Her brother is in the cellar. And the attic—I have the key. He says it’s for Portugal. But he lied.’
In her jacket pocket, her fingers slipped around the key. Might she make it up the stairs, just to see his face? She tilted her head to the windows above and saw—a hallucination? She lifted the knife, raising a hand to shield her gaze, an
d met Ryan’s eyes through his bedroom window.
Ghost
As Rainn had instructed, Gus held an image in his mind: a wakeboard cleaving the surface of Lake Windermere. The deafening howl of the tornado ceased and an expanse of water lay below him. His surroundings shifted in and out of focus, flickering between different shades of green as if viewed through the facets of an emerald. Suspended in the air, he tried to comprehend the immensity of this experience. Through his great-grandparents’ portal, the conscious element of his self had left Vivador without returning to his body on the cliff in Portugal. He had entered the material world as spirit alone. He was a ghost.
Reaching out a spectral hand, he urged this curious form across the water. A fine golden energy threaded through his fingers, making not a ripple when he passed his hand beneath the surface. He lifted from the lake and shot across the width of a slender isle to twist between the boats of Bowness Bay. He commanded his soul across the lead-covered roof of a church and through quiet roads empty of residents this early in the day. He had been on holiday in Windermere with his parents and uncle in the spring before Blithe died. Through chance or memory, he veered left, gliding over slate tiles, not knowing what he was looking for, until he saw the cottage at the end of the lane.
Returning from the lake, he and his father had parked the car, turned that corner and found Joe and Sylvie playing cards on the terrace. Gus set his attention on the empty chairs as he had focused on the animated frieze, willing memories to stir. He heard his mother’s boisterous laugh. He smelled the acrid fumes from Joe’s pipe. His mother tossed a winning card onto the pile; Joe toyed with his fashionable moustache and accused her of cheating. The wry grin on his uncle’s face was as alien as his surroundings. The seats below were empty, but this was not fantasy: the memory was true.
Haunted by his uncle’s grin, Gus lost himself in thought. Had he never been born, Joe would not have been left alone to care for Blithe. Had he never been born, Joe would not have received a call from the Portuguese authorities informing him that his twin brother was dead.
And I was left with the child that they were never supposed to have.
The terrace trembled and Gus remembered himself. He shot into the sky with a sudden urgency until Windermere was visible in its entirety. Still rising, he scanned the Lake District, latching his attention to tiny details—a falling leaf; the swish of a horse’s tail—anchoring himself to the landscape. At this height, the great lakes were garden ponds, with Windermere a narrow crack through the south-east of the National Park. Recalling instructions that had seemed so unnecessary while he struggled to cross the Active Nothing, Gus searched emerald ridges until he spotted the lake matching Rainn’s description.
He soared through the air with a sea of trees beneath him, as inert as the landscape of a model train set. Lowering himself, hungry to connect, he glided first through the treetops and then along the surface of a dirt track before rising again, his gaze searching the farthest shore of the lake for a farmhouse visible only from the sky. From his vantage point high above the lake, he saw a bamboo roof poking through the leaves.
Gus fixed his attention to the tower in the trees and reeled himself towards it. A fish on the line, he did not slow when he passed through leaves, branches, trunks—stopping only when faced with stone arches. Though the tower in Vivador reached seven storeys high, and this Pagoda only three; while the roof in Vivador was made of stone rather than bamboo, there was no doubt that one of these structures had inspired the other.
No thrones rotated on the bamboo matting. No figure awaited his approach. If this was where Melissa hid, where was she? He willed his body through the floor and there followed a moment of darkness before the room below stuttered into focus. Silver light fell through two narrow windows, converging on the upturned face of a man seated at his desk. Peter was still, gazing at the ceiling with eyes that were not the pale blue he had seen in Vivador, but an olive green. Death had set a permanent sneer on his cleft lip. In his hand, he clutched a phone.
This is not how it was meant to be—lifeless eyes as Rainn cradled the phone in her lap. Gus surveyed the room: the open filing cabinet, the files on the desk, the tub of rubber snakes on the shelf; but no blood, no weapons, no sign of a fight. How had Melissa killed her husband?
He left the second corpse he had found that morning and drifted through the door. Had Alicia even left Godalming, or had Rainn sent him to avenge the death of her only ally? In search of other clues, he followed spiral steps to a padlocked door and urged his ghostly form through green panels.
The steps continued along the wall and down into a cellar, lit by weak shafts of light that breached vents in the ground-level bricks. The light fell through him; he cast no shadow on the mattress by the wine barrels. On this mattress lay a boy, his eyes closed in sleep or death. Gus drifted down the steps and recognised the freckled face of David Harrington. He studied Alicia’s brother just long enough to watch his chest rise and fall, and then he gazed around the cellar. There were no empty trays, no flask of water, not even a bucket. Had Vivador sustained him for two years?
An urge to find Alicia drove him through the ceiling, through the office, through the roof, and he might have launched into space had he not hooked his attention to the farmhouse. A path ran in a straight line towards seven ponds that glinted in the light of a silver sun cresting the trees to his right. Like capillaries, the paths diverged to link the ponds and then converged again, drawing his attention to two silver lights on the patio.
He soared through wild grass along the inclining slope, darted over path and pond and slowed when he reached the patio. A thin-faced girl he did not recognise leaned over Alicia’s body to hand a knife to Melissa. While their bodies glowed, Alicia’s was devoid of light—like Peter’s. He scanned her fallen form for signs of trauma; but she was breathing. Perhaps, like her brother, Alicia’s physical body was empty because her soul was in Vivador.
Melissa dropped to her knees and Gus veered to her side, mesmerised by the light that emanated from her. Tendrils of silver energy weaved through her limbs, so bright her skin was translucent. Brighter still was the light in her skull. The spectral outline of his hand appeared in his vision, rising subconsciously, riding a visceral desire to reach out and connect with that brilliant energy burning in the woman’s mind. Melissa’s lips moved as she spoke to the girl, her words inaudible.
A jade blade glistened in the sunlight. He drifted in front of her, through a birdbath by Alicia’s head, but Melissa saw nothing. She heard nothing when he called her name. Was she responsible for Winter’s death? If he did not strike, would she drive that knife into Alicia’s chest? Rainn had given no further instructions, yet it was a primal urge that commanded him now. Golden sparks flooded his fingertips, and he hesitated. Just like his father.
When faced with difficult choices, weaker minds will fail to do what is in their best interests.
Melissa raised the knife and a frenzied emotion lit her face. Gus stretched out his hand, forced his golden fingers into that burning light and closed his fist within the woman’s mind. A violent flash of colour and Melissa collapsed on the flagstones.
Light and shadow
With her back against her mother’s headstone, Alicia followed the streams of coloured light to their source. High in the church wall, the circular window held each diaphanous shard of glass in place. Each fragment was a piece of a puzzle. If she were able to reassemble it, to lay the disordered pieces down side by side, she might unlock their secrets and order the chaos.
Her thoughts were frenetic. Again, she considered conjuring her mother’s image, if only to scream at that hopeful face for leaving her to deal with this insufferable mess. A cold wind drew gooseflesh on her bare arms and she found comfort in the lie, absorbing every inch of the fiction that surrounded her. She turned to kneel before the grave and glared at the palindromic ANNA as if it were her mother’s face.
‘You never believed in chaos,’ she said out loud
. ‘Everything happens for a reason, doesn’t it, Mum? It’s all part of a grand design. So, tell me, was this my fate?’
Dark and violent, the shadow stirred within her. What had lain dormant now rose, tightening her throat and clenching her jaw. She glared upon the lettering, indulging in the knowledge that this environment was as false as the eyes that beheld it. All that was real was the current of fury accelerating through her self.
‘What am I supposed to do now?’ she hissed, gripping each side of the headstone until cracks appeared beneath her thumbs. Fragments of unsolicited advice cycled through her mind.
Look at all those challenges, Anna had said as Alicia chewed her lip, thumbing buttons on the gaming controller. It’s just a game, Mum. But that’s what her mother had wanted her to see: win or lose, it did not matter. It was all just a game that we chose to play each day. Alicia had lost against the boss, tossed the controller to the floor and accused her mother of distracting her—of trying to make a lesson out of everything.
She had shielded herself from her mother’s suggestions, each tailored to infuriate her. She had shut her ears and rolled her eyes. Now, with ears open, she kneeled on the grave and listened to the silence, squeezing the granite and longing for words of wisdom.
The letters rippled as though beneath water and then hardened into new forms, and Anna Harrington became Winter Hazelby. Gingerly, Alicia pressed her palms either side of the name, and then harder, straining against the polished stone as she had the panels of the Unbreakable Door. But Winter’s death was no fiction, and Alicia’s actions could not be undone.
Before she might question this cruel trick of a troubled mind, the coloured rays were disturbed and she turned to see a silhouette in the window. A figure stood behind the glass.
Alicia stepped through the back door of the church and scanned the empty pews. A mezzanine ran overhead: a walkway linking the organ with a row of vestibules on the far side. For someone’s shadow to fall on the stained glass, they must have been standing in the centre of this mezzanine, directly overhead. Bare feet padded across cold stone as Alicia ascended the steps.