Snowflake

by Heide Goody

  I turned and thanked the minotaur but he was already heading off, running towards the life-like (and indeed alive) fields of corn in a large impressionist painting.

  “If only we could get everyone back into their paintings,” I said.

  The sea water was still rising. When it lapped the lower edge of a painting of wolves the whole pack came to life and bounded up the stairs. Magic touching magic. The paintings were bringing each other to life.

  “Wolves,” said Theo. “They can be dangerous.”

  “Said the boy who brought a dragon to life to fight some lions,” I replied, and we wisely moved in the opposite direction. But the roaring and shrieking of tigers and elephants and whatever else remained downstairs seemed to excite the wolves and they turned toward us.

  “In there! Quick!” said James and pointed at a door.

  We dashed inside and closed the door. It was only then that I recognised Rex’s office. There was a violent thump on the door as a wolf hurled itself against the wood.

  “Hold the door!” said James and hauled a filing cabinet over to wedge against it.

  Another thump. These were persistent wolves. We dragged dusty furniture across the room to strengthen our barricade. The wolves battered the door, we worked to keep them out and the frankly alarming electrical cabinet on the wall fizzed in time to our efforts. James and Theo pulled a tall cupboard away from the wall, dislodging a large painting that had been standing on the floor behind it.

  It was a rubbish picture, just some grey rocks on a hillside.

  James shoved the cupboard against the office door. I grabbed the painting to drag it over and saw the title plaque on the frame.

  “That picture that went missing…” I said.

  “Zeus wakes on Mount Ida?” said James.

  “Can you show me a picture of it?”

  “Now?”

  Theo was tapping on his tablet and showed me the image. In a day of surprises, this one hit me like a slap round the chops.

  “Is it important?” said James.

  I looked at the sparking electrical cabinet on the wall. If a real electrical cabinet did that, someone would have fixed it by now. I rummaged through the top drawer of Rex’s desk, found a set of keys and, prepared to have my socks blown off by an electric shock at any moment, opened the cabinet.

  “What the –” gasped James.

  “Is that?” said Theo.

  “Zeus’s thunderbolt?” I said. “Reckon so.”

  Inside was something that you might have thought was a wavy stick to support a houseplant if it wasn’t for the fact that it glowed white hot like the business end of a sparkler. I reached out for it.

  “Are you sure you should do that?” said James.

  “If there’s a mad choice or a normal choice” I said, and grasped it.

  It vibrated violently in my hand like a, like a... well, like a vibrator. But, importantly, it didn’t burn or zap me.

  “So, Zeus appears and magics everything back to normal with his thunderbolt, huh?” I said.

  “That’s the general idea,” said Theo.

  I looked at it for a moment, wondering how it worked, but then the door exploded inwards. Surely the wolves hadn’t done that? No. The foot that trampled through the remains of the wood was that of an elephant.

  “What the hell?”

  It was a tight fit to get a full-grown elephant through a doorway, but it was having a go.

  “Do something!” yelled Theo.

  “Bear with me,” I said and I held the thunderbolt out on front of me. “Elephantus transformius!” I yelled. The elephant squidged, folded and then expanded and there was a fanged grizzly bear standing before us. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

  “Forget the Harry Potter stuff!” said James, edging away from the enormous predator. “Just say you want it back in the painting.”

  “Bear, into the painting!” I commanded.

  The bear was sucked from the room with a dull pop. Zeus wakes on Mount Ida by Ravioli or whatever his name was now featured a bear prowling around the empty hillside.

  I led the way out through the remains of our barricade and into the gallery again, blasting wolves and other random artistic oddities as we went.

  “Back to your painting!”

  “Back to art world, wolfy boy!”

  “Begone, foul creature!”

  By the time we were out on the upper level proper, I had cleared all creatures and ne’er-do-wells from the immediate area.

  “We have the tools and we have the talent,” I said triumphantly.

  “Enough tomfoolery!” snapped Rex, storming along the corridor towards us. “Give that back!”

  “Careful, Mr McCloud,” said James. “You don’t know what that is.”

  “Oh, he does,” I said. “Theo, look at that picture on your tablet again.”

  Theo looked from the grey-bearded museum manager to his tablet and back again.

  “Zeus?”

  “Zeus?” said James.

  “Brought to life from the painting,” I said. “It didn’t go missing. It was here all along. And, not long after, this weirdy-beardy turns up at the museum. Seriously, Rex, why would the king of the gods want a job in a museum?”

  “I came here for some peace and quiet. A well-run museum and art gallery, a touchstone for my world without all the annoyances that come with it. I can balance the books and manage the staff. It’s the closest I’m likely to come to a satisfying retirement. And then you came along with your crazed magic to unsettle it all. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the other Olympians sent that pendant to create merry hell for me.”

  “I bet it was Hera,” said Theo.

  Rex chuckled humourlessly. “Have you met my bloody wife?”

  “But can you fix all this?” I said. “Can’t you use your thunderbolt to do one of your Daily sex Macarenas and put it all back to normal and restore your peace and quiet?”

  Rex crossed his arms and smirked. “As we might have expected, we have here a poorly worded question. The question is not whether I can. Of course, I can. It’s whether I will.”

  This was classic Rex. Wait until you have an enormous emergency on your hands and then argue about sentence construction. My first, childish, instinct was to kick his shins for being so annoying, but I pushed the temptation aside. What would an adult do?

  “Thank you for helping me to improve, Rex,” I said with a smile so wide it made my face ache. “Will you make everything better with your god powers?”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t expect you to understand the world I came from. Gods, goddesses, heroes and mortals. All so very... needy. None of them were interested in peace and stability. They’d just expect constant rescuing from their –”

  “Tomfoolery?” I suggested.

  “Yes!” he snapped. “Never-ending tomfoolery. I’ve had enough of helping them and I’m certainly not going to help you. If I make this mess better you will just go and create another one. I refuse to become part of that cycle. I’ll make sure that the police know it was all your fault, and they can lock you up out of the way. The museum can rebuild from the insurance. That’s my idea of a happy ending.”

  “I see,” I said. “Then you leave me no alternative. I’ll have to sort it out myself.”

  Rex scoffed.

  “You? You’re not a god. You barely qualify as human.”

  “Zeus’s power is all locked up in his magic thunderbolt,” said Theo.

  “Pah!” said Rex. “A classic over-simplification. It is the nature of puny mortals to try and understand things that they are simply incapable of grasping. You are young, so it is perhaps to be expected. Children are so much more bearable when –”

  A lightning blast caught him in the stomach and sent him sprawling across the floor.

  “Seems easy enough,” I said and pumped the thunderbolt like it was a shotgun, not because I needed to but because I wanted to.

  “Is it wrong of me to say that was really sex
y?” James whispered to me.

  “Dad!” said Theo.

  “Now’s not the time,” I said, giving James a cheeky grin. “We have work to do.”

  “But you can’t!” bleated Rex from his position on the floor.

  “I can. Handcuffs, begone!” The thunderbolt sputtered and my handcuffs exploded into fairy dust.

  “But this is magic!” Rex squeaked. “The realm of the gods! You don’t understand it!”

  “Rex, I barely understand the real world.”

  “You’re an idiot!”

  I shrugged. “But I’m always willing to learn. Did you know that cows eat grass?”

  “What?”

  “I know!”

  Chapter 42

  “Perseus, come here please!” I shouted.

  The wing-footed hunk arrived in less than a second.

  “Can you please take Rex for a little fly around the city for half an hour while I decide what to do with him?” I asked.

  “But, my lady, it is Zeus, first among the gods.”

  “I don’t have a problem with that if you don’t,” I said.

  Perseus used the hilt of his sword to smash the window, grabbed Rex around the waist and took off above the campus. We all heard a brief fading wail from Rex as he hurtled skywards.

  “If he’d said, we could have just opened it,” I said and pointed the thunderbolt. “Window, fix yourself, good as new.”

  It was reassembled in an instant. I grinned at James and Theo. “Let’s go and fix everything else!”

  Things got a whole lot easier when we found a catalogue of all the artwork. We made a good team. James and Theo would tell me which paintings things were supposed to be in, and I would command them back there. Getting rid of the flood water made our work a lot easier. Once I’d put the French warships back in their painting I decided to put the horrible serpent in there with them, as a thank you present to Perseus. I rather liked the end result. A pair of Napoleonic warships, cannons firing, with a huge sea monster writhing in the storm-tossed sea between them.

  The satyrs had come from a painting where some sort of enormous party was going on. When I looked a little more closely at the picture in the catalogue entry, it looked like some ladies out for a nice naked swim who were being ogled by these frisky goat men. I decided to put the flying baby in there with them. He might take their minds off sex with his volleys of arrows. What was I saying? That flying baby was Eros. It looked as though it was going to be a hell of a party.

  I found the minotaur still gambolling through the fields of impressionist corn. I don’t know if the impressionists went in for minotaurs but I decided to leave him there. He deserved a bit of happiness.

  Perseus returned with Rex when we’d nearly finished. I’d already chosen a spot for Rex. The elephant had originally come from a painting of a Victorian menagerie. By modern standards, I’m not sure that the animals were getting the best possible care. They needed organising, and Rex was just the man for the job.

  Perseus set him down, and he staggered queasily to a nearby chair.

  “Travel sick from your aerial tour of the city, Rex?” I asked.

  Before he could answer, I zapped him into the menagerie painting. He didn’t look all that thrilled, but he did look like a man who would make sure the monkey’s cage got mucked out.

  Perseus was very happy to get back to the naked redhead in his painting. I couldn’t blame him for that. Perhaps they stood a chance of getting to know each other better now there wasn’t a giant sea serpent spoiling their fun.

  “She’s called Andromeda,” said James. “They’re destined to get married.”

  “I do like a happy ending,” I said.

  We stepped outside into the campus. Some of the art chaos had spilled outside. A few satyrs and miscellaneous mythical mites were on the loose but a couple of thunderbolt spells sent them packing. There were, of course, dozens of sea-soggy, bedraggled and befuddled open day visitors staggering about.

  “You think that thing can do a magical mindwipe?” said James.

  I considered the thunderbolt, still fizzing in my hand. It was probably up to the job.

  “No,” I said.

  “No?”

  “I think everyone deserves a little wonder in their life.”

  James laughed at that and it almost veered away into hysteria but he managed to bring it under control.

  “You are mad, Lori Belkin.”

  I didn’t reply. Such a statement didn’t need a reply but, also, my attention was caught by a trio of figures in the shade of a nearby tree. It was my parents with Cookie.

  “I’ve got to talk to them,” I said and headed over.

  All the times I’d fantasised about tracking down my parents, I’d imagined that I’d easily spot them from afar and run to them in slow motion and they’d run to me and there’d be kisses and apologies all round. But, I was tired, it had been a long day and, I guess, we were going to do this thing like adults.

  “Hey, guys,” I said.

  Dad – my lovely dad in his outdoorsy gear that actually looked like it had had some use recently – mouthed something and pointed in confusion at the museum building.

  “CGI interactive presentations,” I said. “Quite intense, huh?”

  “But I got my boots wet,” he said.

  “4-D cinema: wind, waves, the lot.” I put my hands on my hips and did my best to phrase an angry rebuke at them running off and leaving me homeless – sort of homeless – but I had neither the energy nor the anger. I grabbed the pair of them and hugged them until it hurt. “I’ve missed you,” I said.

  “And we you, sunbeam,” said Dad.

  “You’ve been so busy sweetheart,” said Mom. “Melissa’s been telling us about all of the interesting things you’ve been doing.”

  It would have been really handy to know what they’d talked about. My parents would have received a highly edited version of recent events, but Cookie’s edits wouldn’t necessarily match mine.

  “Interesting, yes. That’s one way of putting it,” I said carefully. “And where have you two been hiding?”

  “We’ve been volunteering on farms around Devon, Cornwall and Wales. Building stone walls and so on.”

  I tried to imagine the scene, but for some reason the picture in my head was of them both wearing slippers and sitting inside, watching television. Now I looked properly and saw that they were toned and brown. They looked incredibly healthy. Mom had stopped dyeing her hair and she looked happier than I ever recalled.

  “You’ve been travelling round then?” I said. “Cookie, how on earth did you find them?”

  “‘Living with Druids in 21st Century Cornwall’.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The YouTube video. Among all those crusties, new agers and other wonderful folk, I saw two faces I recognised. Hopped in the car and drove down to find them. Been driving all night. I only stayed long enough to make a stirring speech about how parents need to listen to the subtle vibrations of the universe when it tells them to get in touch with their kids.”

  “The subtle vibrations of the universe being a madwoman who’s driven hundreds of miles to make the point?” I ventured.

  “Yes. I think Elena might have picked up on the hint as well. I made a few suggestions about the wonders of technology for keeping in contact, even when you’re hell-bent on seeing the world.”

  “That’s…” I shook my head and remembered who was with me. I gestured to James and Theo who were standing behind me. “Mom, Dad, this is my friend James and his son, Theo. They’ve been a great help to me while I’ve, you know, been sorting things out.”

  There was a lot of polite handshaking. One minute we’d been wrangling monsters from beyond the dawn of history and the next we were making dinner table small talk.

  “Miss Belkin!”

  “And this,” I said to my parents, “is Sergeant Fenton. She thinks I murdered Adam.”

  Sergeant Fenton looked as though she’d had a pretty
rough day as well. She was soaked with sea water and her hair was plastered wetly against her head.

  “Adam’s not dead, he’s just abroad,” said Mom. “We only spoke to him this morning on the satellite phone.”

  “Well obviously, I’d be delighted to clear this up, if we could prove that he is unharmed,” said Sergeant Fenton but Mom was already hitting the buttons on the phone.

  “Adam,” said Mom. “Adam, dear. Yes. Yes, I know. I’ve got a police lady here who’d like to talk to you. Yes. No, don’t be such a diva darling, we’re just trying to sort this out.”

  Mom passed the phone to Sergeant Fenton with a ‘don’t mess with my children’ glint in her eye. Sergeant Fenton took it politely.

  “Mr Belkin? Mr Adam Belkin?”

  Sergeant Fenton walked away a distance to take the call.

  “So, are you staying long?” I said.

  Mom and Dad looked at each other.

  “You could stay at Adam’s flat,” I said. “I could find somewhere else to crash for a few nights,” I added with a look at James.

  “We wouldn’t want to impose,” said Dad.

  “We could just park the camper van outside,” said Mom.

  “Camper van?” I said. “You live in a camper van?”

  “We love it,” said Dad.

  “Every day a new vista,” said Mom.

  “But all that money you’d sunk into the house,” I said. “All those things you said about investing in bricks and mortar.”

  “Ah,” said Dad, wistfully, “you see, the thing about the property ladder…”

  “Yes?”

  “Vastly overrated. We only thought it was important because our parents told us it was.”

  Chapter 43

  We dined at Adam’s flat. My parents, Cookie, James and me.

  Mom inspected the flat while I tidied away the main course I had cooked: sausages with onion gravy. It was clear the someone had given her a litany of concerns and accusations but she could find no evidence of any damage or wrongdoing. She narrowed her eyes at the new artwork on the chimney breast but that apparently passed muster.