Mae was torn. A life ahead here, in the house full of monsters with the walking heartbreak machine of Bevan Mulholland? “I’m not so sure,” she said. “That’s a big . . . big choice to make so quickly.”
“Why? We’re away from them, away from the divorce. Rita’d benefit from having more people around. You could keep studying under her and be, like, a medium or whatever. I could work on my portfolio for an art course a few years down the line. It’d be an easy life, like.”
He still wasn’t looking at her. Still looking too hard at the drawing on the page. He wasn’t telling her something.
What Mae tried to say was, “I can’t stay here watching you and Bevan fall in love. It hurts.” What came out was, “We can’t just run away from our parents, Rossa.”
“Why not? Seems to me like they’re running away from us.”
“You know as well as I do that’s not the case at all.” Doubt flickered through Mae, though. Get the twins out of the way. Out of sight, out of mind.
Rossa shrugged, changing pencils again. “I just feel like it’d be a nicer place to be. You’re welcome to go home to those two, if you want, but I’m going to try and stay. I’ll ask Rita sooner rather than later.”
“You aren’t seriously considering sending me back26 to them on my own, are you?” Mae felt a little outside her body as she spoke. Her brother, her twin, sending her back to all that noise and rage alone. The rain of smashed crockery, the thunderclap of slammed doors. The tragedy of only ever being collateral. It’d just be her. He’d get out. She’d be trapped.
“You can’t,” she managed. “You can’t just leave me.”
“Well, Mae, what’s the alternative? One of us is going to leave the other at some stage. You could stay here with me and Rita, and I’d still leave eventually. We don’t get to stay together forever. We’re not one person. We come apart.”
Of course the pair of them wouldn’t stay together forever. She wasn’t an idiot. She just hadn’t expected it to be so soon, this way, over a girl whose name was a glaring omission: Bevan, Bevan, Bevan.
“I suppose I’m . . . well, the house is making me feel a little weird, this time. Does that make sense?” Was it so hard to say, “I saw a door, I went through the door, I touched something from another world”? She was only keeping this secret for Rita and Bobby. Still, she couldn’t seem to summon the words: they wouldn’t translate from her brain to her mouth, like something was blocking her, a thin film that wouldn’t let the truth burst through.
“I mean, yeah, there’s something a little off all right, but I reckon Rita has it under control. I’ve seen weird things up in the mountains, but they didn’t make me feel bad. Weird, sure. Weird I could get used to.” Green pencil to pink, eyes never leaving the page.
“So, you’d be happy to live in a house full of spirits with a talking cat and your great-aunt for the end of your teens? Something else must be keeping you here.” Admit it was Bevan, she willed him, but he did not.
“There’s more here for me than back there.” His steady hand slowly filled the delicate flower pink. Mae wanted to knock his elbow, leave a fat fuchsia stripe down the belly of his drawing. Snap him out of it. But she didn’t. She gathered her cards up from the grass and mixed them back into the deck with her wands and cups and pentacles and swords, the whisper scratch of her brother’s pencil in her ear.
“You’re welcome to stay, too, Mae. I’m just not going to force you.” The pink grew darker on the page, the flower becoming hot and unnatural.
Mae shuffled the heavy cards, her body roaring no but her mouth closed tightly. She pulled a single card from her deck, a knife slice of potential perspective.
The Hanged Man. Stalemate, paralysis, a problem nobody is willing to solve. Great. Mae rolled her eyes and stuffed him back into the deck. These paper things had a great sense of humor when they wanted to.
In what seemed like the distance, the kitchen patio door slid open. Rita and Bobby stood in the frame.
“Tea?” Rita’s voice echoed down the garden, and Mae accepted that as her signal to quit.
“Leave it with me,” she said to her brother, standing up and stretching. “I’ll think about it.”
He didn’t look up. “I’m all right for tea. Going to head up to my room soon.”
Mae watched him curl the letters B and E under the bouquet, in dippy hopeless affection. She turned away from him as he began the slope of the V, filling in the name missing from their conversation, silently, all for himself.
Chapter
Nine
The woman with the red hair had been the most frightened but had shown it the least. You think about her, now that you’re lying starfish sprawled on your bedroom floor, after all of them have left. It had felt good, all right. A different color to how Rossa had tasted. Maybe that was because the redhead was a stranger and Rossa was, well, in love with you or something. How funny.
Redhead had sat with three of her friends around Rita’s coffee table, held rapt by Rita’s work with the cards and bottom-of-the-teacup leaves. They’d been there for hours, receiving all manner of predictions. One of them was pregnant. He would be a Sagittarius, a heartbreaker all his life. Another, being cheated on (that, she already knew—it had been gorgeous, the budding of tears in her eyes, the cloying blotchy pink on her neck, her breathing irregular as she said, “I’m fine, girls, I’m grand”). One didn’t believe in the whole damn thing and said nothing and felt nothing other than a constant urge to take out her phone and start scrolling. Cynics are so boring.
But the redhead, she was sick and hadn’t told her friends. You read the depression off her, numb gray tones. You drank them up. Redhead didn’t want her friends to know what she was feeling, or not feeling, so when Rita took her palm and looked at it, then up into her eyes and said, “Talk to someone,” Redhead jolted, the first acute emotion she’d experienced in months. She wasn’t going to tell any of the girls in the room anything. How fortunate you’d been to watch all these ugly little betrayals unfold.
You’d sat in the corner with Bobby. Rita had expressly told the women you were her student and they’d cooed over you, shocked that a suburban medium could have an apprentice. They’d giggled. “How many points in your leaving cert did you have to get for that one?” You’d replied, “Well, I took eight subjects, failed economics, and answered a few of the exams in Irish, so the points tallied up to, I think it was, 666?” The girls had screamed with laughter. They were charmed enough not to mind that you sat, a notebook in your lap, watching this strange and intimate session, visibly taking notes, invisibly harvesting their fears. Bobby curled up at your feet. He didn’t notice a thing. Not so magical and all-knowing now, cat. Not so clever.
You’d gotten away with it and you are glowing now on the deep shag of your bedroom floor, wiggling your toes, gleeful, full of absorbed emotion. Sweet James bubbles behind the wall, letting you bask in the things you had stolen. He doesn’t quite come out, but he is there, nearby enough for you to feel his electricity.
You’d missed this. His ambience.
It isn’t even dinnertime yet. You have a whole day to enjoy it. Maybe he will even let you back into those old other rooms. What will you talk about with him? What will he tell you? Had he missed you these past three years? It is almost romantic, you think. A reunion, a rekindling. You, the girl, and he the great and terrible interdimensional beast. Tale as old as time.
The tea in the bottom of your mug has gone cold, you’ve been daydreaming so long.
“Do you mind if I head away for a hot one?” you absentmindedly ask the ivy on the wall, and the shadowy creature behind them rustles their leaves. “Thank you, darling.” You stand up, arms stretched over your head, cracking your joints. Gruesome and satisfying.
Out in the dark of the hallway, as you swan toward Rita’s side of the house, the corridor extra long today, you spot Rossa, twenty paces ahead of you. There are no windows in the hallway, and all the doors to the bedrooms and bathrooms
are closed. It could be night up here. He turns, startled by your sudden appearance. As you walk toward each other, it feels for a second like the house is deliberately keeping you apart. The cheek of it. You scowl, as each step you take seems to hold you in place, the corridor a treadmill. He doesn’t seem to notice.
“Bevan, do you want to buzz downstairs? Mae’s cooking, I think?” Rossa’s voice is far away.
You speed up a little, but that only seems to paralyze the corridor further.
“Why are you just standing there?” he says, and you speed up again, the house pushing against your momentum.
You stop abruptly, furious, and stomp your foot, fists clenched. “Stupid house! Do as I say!”
Then, with a jolt, Rossa is nose to nose with you, the corridor folding at your will. Good.
Rossa’s eyes are wide and rain-cloud gray. He smells like soap and cotton. He thinks you are going to kiss him and his heart beats in your ears, anxious, pleading, “Kiss me again like in the woods.” You smile a little. Sweet of him, that. He waits for a signal from you, but you don’t give him one, just cock your head to the side and say, “Hey. I have something really cool in my room that I think you might like.”
Rossa raises an eyebrow in a way that makes him look quite handsome. He thinks you’re talking about sex, and you are not going to correct him, even though what you are talking about is absolutely not sex.
“Oh, have you now?” His voice is confident.
Your heart stutters and you stop it, bat that away.
“Yes. Come on.” You grab his hand and lead him the few steps back to your room. He squeezes your hand tightly. Through his palm you feel a surge of emotion, a braid of excitement and infatuation and ah, yes, there it is under all that new love, fear. Fear, the color of his eyes. Fear like a cold winter day. Perfect.
He’s so wrapped around your little finger he doesn’t notice that the door you lead him to is an old door, a door that should have been swallowed and closed for good—a door that out of the corner of your eye you saw flicker back into existence. Silly, silly boy.
You kick the door open lightly and draw him into the spare landscape of your old bedroom. “This is where the magic happens.” You spin away from him playfully and throw your arms wide.
Rossa mimes snapping pictures with an invisible camera, not registering that the room hasn’t been slept in in years, not realizing it is on the wrong side of the house. He’s too in the game, too in the seduction. “Bevan, I just love what you’ve done with the place.”
“Here’s where I perform all my unlicensed dental surgeries.” You laugh, pointing towards the untouched bed, and Rossa chuckles. He can’t help himself, he has to laugh at the terrible things you’ve done to him, because in these walls he belongs to you. “And here, Rossa, is my best friend. My dear old friend. James, come and say hello to Rossa!”
The room lurches, and Sweet James rises out from the paper, those good old paper roses, beak sharp and eyes white as bone, clicking and groaning against the flutter of thousands of gray moths. You’ve never seen him so big before. It’s almost as though he’s adjusting the size of reality to accommodate his greatness.
Rossa blanches and staggers back. “Bevan, what are you doing?”
You place your hand on his shoulder. The fear ripples off him. You could almost gasp from the sheer delight of it. “Doesn’t he make you feel huge?” you whisper.
All the desire rains out of those stormy eyes of his as he stares at you, then at Sweet James.
hello, rossa.
The boy clasps his hands over his mouth, you squeeze his shoulder.
would you like to see something?
Sweet James grows bigger and bigger. He is eating. You are dining together.
say yes, rossa.
Rossa is vibrating with terror, and it brings you such bliss, you can do nothing but stand there and absorb it, feel it build under your skin and roll through your nerves. It is not like anything you have ever experienced. It is not like pleasure, it is not like satisfaction, it is new and you do not have language for it but right now, here, you do not need words.
Rossa only needs one, and he says it, breathless, “Yes.”
Sweet James roars and splits into a cyclone of roses and paper and moth and bone, rearranging himself into that old familiar door. You squeal and leap forward. “Oh, Rossa, let’s go, come on, you’ll love it in here!”
Rossa’s mouth opens and closes but he does not say a word, so you grab his wrist and lead him across the room, through the charged air. You pull open the door and the neon glow rolls out. You lean your head in and inhale the smell of fresh water. Yes, yes, this was the feeling you’d missed. The endlessness of the other worlds, right there. And this time you have a companion to take with you! You’re not alone!
But he stops, frozen to the spot. You lean in to him, summon some of the light you stole from him, and whisper, “Come on. You can be a lion, too.”
Warmth rises in his face, and he looks at you again. “Can I trust you?”
His earnestness is alarming. Of course he can’t trust you. Look at what you’ve done.
For a second, there in the space you’ve torn in reality, on the threshold of the endless other rooms, the doors upon doors of newness and exploration and sensations that defy anything you’ve ever known, something very old and very new comes over you.
Guilt, like rot, cold and damp. Guilt like, what are you doing, what have you done? You are feeding on this boy, feeding him to the monster in your house, using him as a toll to pass into the next world. Trying to get him hooked on the same damned infinity you’re hooked on. Dragging him to hell with you.
You can’t shake it off. You feel sick.
And before you say it, before you lie to Rossa again, before you tell him of course he can trust you, he can trust you with anything, he should stay with you so you can prove to him how much he can trust you, before you start to talk and ruin everything, the next door opens.
A girl stands there. The last girl in the world you wanted to see. Cropped hair and a black-and-white suit. Audrey O’Driscoll.
Chapter
Ten
Mae held a sharp, heavy grater in one hand and dragged a pale potato along it. Dinner was on her. They had a heap of leftover mashed potatoes in the fridge that wanted a second shot at the table, so boxty it was. Mae had watched her mother do this time and time again, mix last night’s potatoes with thinly shredded new ones, crack in an egg or two for hold, then palm the mix onto a hot buttery pan, frying them into dense potato cakes. The cooking was calming and repetitive. The food was hearty. The routine was just what Mae needed.
Smoked salmon was chilling in the fridge, and she’d picked fresh dill from the garden and chopped a red onion to teary-eyed confetti. Mae loved cooking, the alchemy all of it, but the kitchen at home had long been a fraught site of conflict, a no-man’s-land where the closest thing to witchcraft lately had been a frozen pizza turning crisp and golden under the grill, then scooped onto a plate and eaten in the privacy of her room.
The grid of scars on her hands seemed to ripple ever so slightly as she worked, a subtle iridescence like the scales of a fish. She held a hand up to Bobby, who was curled on the kitchen table amidst the crystals.
“Are my hands shimmering, or am I cracking up?” she asked.
Bobby opened one daffodil eye. “Yes. They’ll do that. Don’t be alarmed.”
He closed his eye again, gold slipping away into the snow white of his fur.
Mae tutted.
The extraordinary things that went on in the house were treated as mundane, humdrum. She’d barely been outside the garden and house for days. Maybe she shouldn’t keep herself so confined. She could most likely find a bus that would take her back into the city. It’d take an hour or more, but at least she’d be able to meet her friends for the day. Touch reality for a second. But something in the thought of that was sour to her. What if she left and something went wrong? What if she turned her b
ack on it for a moment and it all crashed down, a rickety illusion? What if when she returned, her brother wasn’t her brother anymore, what if he became something different too?
She gathered the shredded potato into a paper towel and wrung out the wet, then emptied it into a bowl with last night’s mash. Cracked an egg. Dashed in the onion, her eyes stinging. Garlic flakes and salt. Black pepper in a tall wooden grinder. Stir. Shape into disks. A little flour for structure, not too much. She’d keep her hands busy, keep her head busy, not think too much of her brother and Bevan and the thing in the walls.
“How was the session this morning?” she asked over her shoulder. Maybe if she did stay and study with Rita, one day she’d be allowed to host sessions of her own. Maybe she’d learn how to keep James away, and other things like him, too. She laid a huge, unwieldy pan on the hob over the furnace, the holy fire glowering in its locked gut, as always. Gas on, match struck, the pan beginning to warm, a shallow pool of olive oil glugged from a green bottle.
“Strange. Bevan did something to the energy in the room and the women were very unsettled. She was showing off—and worse, she thought she got away with it. I’m very tired, and a storm is coming.” Bobby flopped over onto his side and stretched, a small feline noise escaping him.
“What do you mean, a storm?” The oil began to hiss, and when Mae lowered a potato cake into the pan, it fizzed. Explosive, delicious sounds.
“You can feel it too, if you try. Look for it. Open your eyes.”
“What, like now?”
“Yes, now.”
The cakes sizzled in the pan. Mae held a spatula poised, ready for the flip: no magic wand here. She opened her eyes a little wider, unsure of what she was supposed to be looking for. Her hands gave a shimmer amidst the rising steam. Three thick halos edged the boxty now. She flipped them, one, two, three.
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