by Mark Cassell
Victor’s voice floated over to us. “This is not looking good.”
Lucas leapt to his feet and faced him. I was relieved the sofa and coffee table separated them. “Did you think that when you knew I was taken by the tribe?”
“Lucas.” Victor shook his head, his eyes pleading. “We have more important things to deal with now.”
Lucas held another piece of paper. Circles and lines covered it.
“A map?” I laughed. “You’re kidding me.”
“X marks the spot?” Lucas grinned. There he was, rummaging through the pockets of his dead friend, and making jokes. Looking at his scar, I wondered if he’d deserved it. The way it twisted his face made him look cruel. I imagined he could be very cruel, given the chance.
Victor ran a gloved hand over the bookshelves, his eyes glazed. I doubted he even read the titles. “What does it show us?” he asked.
Careful not to kick the corpse, Lucas collapsed into a sofa and held his find beneath the lamplight. “He found the graves. He knew where The Book of Leaves is.”
Victor’s eyes widened. “Where?”
I couldn’t believe their coolness. What was going on? Here they both were, talking casually about graves and a book which apparently contains sins or something, all with a dead body—drained of life force and spiked with glass—laying at their feet.
“This is mad.” I closed my eyes and breathed out. The air whistled as it escaped me. I no longer wanted to be sick.
“The graves are on this farm,” Lucas mumbled. “On the grounds.”
“What?” I said. “What sort of family bury their dead in their own back garden?”
Victor said, “When you have as many acres as a farm, you can do just about anything.”
“Isn’t there a law for burying the dead?” The skull, choking on glass, looked back at me. I’m dead, it queried, What about what’s happened to me? Isn’t there a law about this?
“Let’s get out of here.” Lucas headed for a door.
“Hey,” I called after him. “Where is the family who lives here?”
Victor’s glance told me he’d been thinking the same thing.
Lucas paused on the threshold, the crowbar gripped in both hands. He remained silent.
“Let’s find the graves first,” Victor said. “We can’t wait too long.”
“Why the hurry?” I said, and believed I already knew the answer. I stole a peek at the corpse. The lamplight reflected from the mirror shards.
Victor tugged at his gloves. “Because the shadows may return.”
I looked at my watch, and for a moment, I thought the shadows coiled around my arm, but it was only the poor light. When I looked away, the first thing I saw was the shattered glass of another mirror. This one was small, its silver frame broken, nested in reflecting splinters.
“All these broken mirrors…” I said.
Victor’s eyebrows twitched, and so did his lips.
“In your books,” I added, “you ever read anything involving mirrors?”
“Reflections,” he mumbled. “Reflections of haunt.”
I wanted to laugh, yet couldn’t. There was something in the way he’d said it.
“What?” Lucas’s voice disrupted the momentary silence. “What do you mean, haunt?”
“Haunt,” Victor said, “is a term used when referring to an entity’s means to break onto this plane of existence.”
I recalled a conversation the day before about haunting.
“I didn’t know that,” Lucas said, then disappeared into the other room. His voice came back to us. “There are more broken mirrors here.”
With the back of a hand, I wiped sweat from my forehead. The sound of my ticking watch reminded me of more time spent with the corpse. I had to get out of there.
“Come on you two, we’re going.” Lucas returned to the room. He was pale. “Let’s leave Thomas.”
I looked down at the body and hoped he’d died before the shard entered his mouth.
“Vic—” I began, wanting to say more, yet I didn’t know what. This was all complete bullshit, and I wondered just what the hell I was doing with these guys. Why did I still play Victor’s game? I should’ve run the moment he killed his brother. Then I remembered. It wasn’t Victor who killed Stanley, it was the shadows. And was Stanley dead? Apparently, he was walking around like nothing had happened. Crazy.
As we walked into the adjacent room, glass crunched underfoot. In the corner, an upright piano sat with its sheet music open on Boccherini’s Minuet. Lucas stood at the back door, beyond which a pathway wound through an immaculate garden. He unlocked it and stepped outside. The wind rushed in.
“I think this map makes sense,” he said as we joined him. “I reckon all we have to do is head out past the barns and find a pond. Or a lake, depending on the scale of this thing, and get to a tree line. Not sure how accurate this is.”
Victor tugged at his gloves. “Then we’ll follow you.”
We left the house, and I couldn’t help thinking of the corpse laying there, its head detached, the mirror shard cleaving the face in two.
CHAPTER 20
We followed Lucas, passing tractors and other machinery, and came to a row of barns. The last was set away from the others and looked derelict. Its doors swung in the wind. One rattled against the corrugated panels like it laughed at us. It was all I could hear.
I left Victor’s side and peeked in. A strong animal smell hit me, and the semi-darkness revealed a circle of hay bales. The centre contained what could have been a pile of rubbish, possibly even clothes. I thought of the family in the house.
“Victor, I’m uneasy about this,” I said as I caught up with him. He was a few paces behind Lucas. The crowbar swayed in the man’s grip.
Victor’s mouth turned down. “Me too, my friend. A lot is riding on us finding The Book of Leaves.”
“Yeah,” I said. “About that…”
“What?”
“Sins?”
“Just don’t think about it.”
That was difficult, given everything I’d so far witnessed. Things had gotten messy way too fast. And what the hell was Goodwin’s role in all this? I’d lost all trust in that man, and I had no idea where any of this was going.
We came to the edge of stretching fields, the barns and machinery now behind us. Lucas was already through the gate and into a field with sheep. They stared at him, bleating their disapproval, and then began to amble away. Lambs bounded between their legs. I was certain I’d never seen so many lambs in one field before, yet as always, I doubted my memory. The noise was incredible.
“Lambing season,” Victor explained. “And by the sounds of it, they’re hungry.”
Still no farmer in sight, and again I thought of the family…and the dead body we’d left in the lounge; Thomas.
Lucas headed for the woodland in the distance without looking over his shoulder. The wind bit my neck and I yanked my collar high. I glanced to the sky, suspecting rain.
When we reached the graves, I wasn’t sure they were that at all; simply five mounds, covered with years of woodland growth, each peaked with a rock and moss that almost glowed.
“You serious?” I said. “You think these are the graves.”
Lucas turned, his eyes piercing. “That’s what the map says.”
I held up my hands. “Okay.”
Set back from the graves, closer to the tree line, and beside a possible path, was a weathered fence. In places, barbed-wire cut into the trunks, and rotted posts dangled like hanged criminals. Or witches.
“Graves,” I said. The more I thought about it, the more they could be graves. I’d been expecting something more obvious, like those found in a church graveyard. Wooden crosses and statues, or something similar.
“I know they could be anything,” Lucas continued, “but given our location it has to be here.”
A few splashes of rain fell, and in moments it smashed through the branches. “Great,” I said.
&nb
sp; Lucas yanked up his hood, his face now in darkness. “Of course it would rain just as we find the creepy graves.” He rammed the crowbar into the ground and scrutinised the map.
“The trail ends here?” Victor stood beside him and peered over Lucas’s shoulder. Standing on a muddy bank, it was the first time Victor could be taller than the other man. “This is where your Thomas believed the book to be?”
Without a word, Lucas screwed up the paper and shoved it in his pocket. He grunted, which was all I’d expected from him. I wished these two would settle their differences.
“So there are five graves, and we’re going to dig them up?” I couldn’t believe this. We weren’t just breaking into houses, we were now robbing graves. “We haven’t even got shovels.”
Lucas pulled from his pocket a collapsible shovel, the type metal-detecting enthusiasts use. It was ridiculous to think he intended to dig up a grave with that little thing. “The book is buried to the north of the smallest grave.”
“Nice,” I said, eyeing the small mound and thought of a child buried beneath it. The sadness to lose a child must be unbearable.
In his other hand, Lucas held a compass. He flicked it open. The needle pointed at a rock a few paces away, and he strolled to it and kicked it.
“Have some respect!” I shouted. “That could be another grave.”
“Here. Maybe,” he said.
The rock was large and flat as a suitcase, and covered in grime and leaves and moss. I wondered how much we couldn’t see.
“It’s a good enough marker as any.” Victor held the crowbar in both hands. I hadn’t seen him pull it from the ground. Mud caked its pointy end. He dragged it over the rock and removed some filth. Something red showed through, faded paint perhaps. Dropping the crowbar, he wiped the surface clear—as clear as he could given the years the rock must’ve been there.
Victor picked up the crowbar and stood back. “Recognise it?”
Both Lucas and I said, “Yes.”
It was a symbol. I’d recognised it immediately; from the book in Victor’s flat, the one titled Necromeleons. Two triangles with facing apexes, one solid and the other hollow, separated by a curved X…making it resemble an hourglass, in fact. It was almost insect-like, too.
Rain flattened my hair and trickled down my face. I mopped it with my sleeve, which was already wet, and failed to dry my skin.
Victor wedged the crowbar between the rock and ground, and leaned on it. It moved a fraction, and settled when he let go. “Heavy.”
“Looks like it,” Lucas said. “Leo, over here.”
I circled Victor and stood beside Lucas. I wasn’t happy about this, though knew it had to be done. There was something important about The Book of Leaves.
“When Victor moves it,” Lucas said, “we pull. Got it?”
The moss was cold and soft, tricky to hold onto given the pelting rain. My fingers clamped a jutting edge. I bent my legs and braced my back, shoulder to shoulder with Lucas, and could smell his breath: coffee. Victor gripped the crowbar with both hands and leaned into it. The rock lifted and we pulled. It moved up and sideways, sliding. My foot slipped in the mud, Lucas’s too. We regained our footing and heaved with renewed strength. The rock shifted and Victor almost sprawled over the crowbar as it went all the way under.
“Yes!” Lucas’s bellow was lost in the sound of crashing rain. Straightening, Victor pushed the rock with both hands as Lucas and I continued to pull. It slid away further from its earthy housing, and as one, we leapt back from the rock as it settled again. My back screamed and I wondered how the older men felt. I didn’t voice my ache, seeing that neither one even grunted when handling it.
Lucas passed the small shovel to Victor, who began scraping the mud with it. He dug into the ground and hacked gouges in the earth. Deeper he went. Mud chipped away and revealed nothing. The rain pooled in the hole and Victor got filthier.
“It might not even be here,” I said. “Could be further up there.”
Lucas followed my gaze, saying nothing, while Victor continued to dig. He now hunched over the hole. In one hand, he held the crowbar like a walking stick, supporting himself as he dug with the other.
“It’s here.” Victor threw the shovel aside and held up the crowbar. “The symbol proved that.”
Lucas sat on the rock, eyeing the hole as I peered over Victor’s shoulder. There was something metallic there, rusted and muddy. The rain made it difficult to see. Victor dragged the crowbar along its edge and teased away some earth. Eventually, after more scraping and poking, he stabbed the crowbar into the ground beside it.
High above, the branches creaked. It felt like the trees warned us of our desecration, telling us we should leave it buried.
With a slurping sound, a metal box, big as a briefcase, erupted in a burst of clumpy earth. Victor pulled it out and stood up. His gloves were slick with mud. Nudging Lucas from the rock, he placed the box down and stood back.
The three of us stared at it. The sound of the rain attacked the woods with renewed force. It was like we were three modern-day pirates who’d dug up buried treasure. I thought of the antique shop where Victor and I collected Polly’s chests. The owner of that place had been reading Treasure Island. This rusted box, however, sitting atop that moss-covered rock, was nothing like those chests. This was smaller, flatter and a huge lock hung on one side.
Victor grabbed the crowbar and swung it down on the lock. The rusty clasp broke and shot across the ground. It came to rest beside the middle grave.
“That was easy,” he said.
Lucas reached for the box, and stopped. His hand almost touched it. “Victor, you should open it.”
“Thanks,” he replied. This was the first time I’d witnessed anything other than hostility from Lucas. There was a lot said during that moment.
Victor pulled up the lid. It creaked and didn’t move any more than a thumb’s width. He wedged his fingers beneath the edge. I imagined something biting his fingertips off, and thought it absurd. There was just a book in there, nothing more—maybe. A book of sin, apparently. Worms perhaps, but nothing with teeth. When he yanked harder, the metal disintegrated in rusted strips, tearing his glove across the palm. It didn’t cut through.
Inside was a book wrapped in cloth.
Victor inhaled sharply. His face said everything.
“Amazing,” Lucas said.
“Well done, men.” Victor held it to his chest.
“Don’t you want to check it’s in there?” Lucas took the crowbar from him.
“I’m not opening it here.”
“Why?” I asked, eyeing the bundle.
“Because the Fabric could be somewhere around us right now.” Victor glanced at Lucas. “Look what it did to Thomas.”
“Yeah, Vic, good point.” Lucas calling him Vic didn’t go unnoticed, and Victor raised an eyebrow at me.
I stepped towards the nearest grave, the littlest one, making certain not to tread anywhere near the other mounds. I wondered what stories lay beneath my feet. “Who were these people? And why would your book be buried with them?”
Victor came up beside me. “I’ve no idea.”
Lucas stabbed the crowbar into the ground. “We should get out of here before the Fabric comes.”
Victor’s voice was barely above a whisper. “It’s already here, there’s no doubt about it.”
“Of course it’s here,” Lucas spat. The hate surfaced again and I pictured him swinging the crowbar at Victor’s head. “What else could drain the life force of the poor bastard who’d found that damn book for you?”
“Let’s go,” Victor said, and walked away.
“What about the family?” I said, thinking about the rack of Wellington boots, particularly the little pairs. “We should find out what happened to them.”
“We’re returning to the house anyway,” Victor said. “We may as well search while we’re there.”
* * *
Back at the farmhouse, habit made me wipe my fee
t and scrape off the mud as best I could. Victor and Lucas waited patiently behind me. When I finished, neither one bothered to clean their shoes. They left muddy prints behind them. Did these men have any faith in finding the family alive?
Water dripped from all of us.
We found the family in the kitchen-dining room, and the stink slapped me across the face. I gagged. The four still sat at the table, meals untouched. Flies buzzed around them and the food. Lucas coughed and Victor grimaced.
“Disgusting,” I mumbled into my hand.
All four were seated as though nothing was wrong, only they were dried husks wearing ill-fitting clothes, drained of life force. Unlike Thomas, there was no sign of mirror fragments. Each had their head bowed, hands clasped together as if in prayer, about to enjoy their meal together. I thought of the Wellington boots, wondering which of the little ones had worn the tiara. I thought of the graves out in the field, then looked at the book under Victor’s arm.
“This is mad.” My stomach twisted, and my mouth went dry. Somehow, I managed to say, “I’ll be in the car.”
I only made it as far as the next room. The shadows moved. All of them. It was as though the grey light of the wet afternoon had forced the gloom indoors. Shadows folded on my periphery. They snaked around furniture and drooped from the ceiling. Darkness closed in.
“Guys!” I shouted, backing up.
Thundering feet rushed behind me and the pair stood on either side of me. One of them inhaled sharply.
“Run!” Victor cried out.
They charged towards the kitchen and I followed, squeezing past the dead family. Lucas knocked a chair and one of the corpses fell sideways. It sprawled across the floor in a plume of dust. I leapt over it just as something crashed behind me. I glanced back and the gloom pushed through the doorframe. Wood split and the wall crumbled.
Darkness rushed through the house after us.
My knee ached and I wondered how the hell we would outrun this thing. I didn’t believe it was the Fabric, the shadows were too clean. I knew that was a strange thing to recognise. Fresh, clean shadows, not cloying at all. Unlike I’d sensed when the Fabric had absorbed the light at Stanley’s house.