Darkly, Deeply, Beautifully

by Megan Tayte

  ‘He was watching her,’ said Luke. ‘All those blurs on the DVD. That was Michael, watching her.’

  ‘It is forbidden,’ said Jude. ‘It is forbidden to use the power in that way!’

  Gone was his disbelief, replaced with disgust. I should have been relieved that he was on the same page at last. I had no time for relief; the cogs were whirring.

  ‘He’s been watching!’ I said.

  The sculpture right here in this room. Minutes ago. Out of focus and then, suddenly, crystal clear. I lurched to the corner. Reached out, grasping. But my hands collided with nothing but cold metal.

  Voices behind, questioning, but I couldn’t answer. Already my mind was racing ahead:

  Michael was gone. But he had been here.

  Watching from the corner.

  He must know he was exposed.

  So he had run.

  To where?

  Ignoring the clamour of questions, I pulled out my phone. Rang the hospital. Repeated my message of minutes before: no visitors for Mum; don’t leave her alone.

  ‘Scarlett?’ said Luke, hand on my arm, as I hung up. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘He’s out there,’ I said, shaking him off so I could dial again. ‘And he’s got nothing to lose.’

  Sienna answered after a single ring. ‘Hey, sis. What’s up?’

  ‘Michael…’ I began.

  ‘Ah, so he told you?’

  ‘What?’

  A rustling; then, in a quieter voice: ‘Look, what’s this Big Thing he needs to explain? Is it Evangeline? I know already she’s all set to pop her clogs; Jude told me.’

  ‘Sienna, what are you –’

  ‘If that’s what Michael’s all het up about, I might just head to bed. Just because Evangeline’s technically related, doesn’t mean –’

  ‘Shut up! Listen! Michael’s coming to talk to you?’

  ‘Well, yes. And to Gabe.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When what?’

  ‘When is this talk?’

  ‘When Gabe gets back.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Well, here. Honestly, Scarlett, you –’

  ‘WHERE IS HERE?’

  ‘Gabe’s…’

  I dropped the phone. I dived past Luke. I lunged for Jude. Grabbed him. Travelled.

  We arrived on the dining table. (Not by it. On it. I don’t Travel well upset.) I twisted around, searching the room. Empty, but for my sister standing in the kitchen, phone in hand, open mouthed.

  ‘Where’s Gabe?’ I demanded, climbing down off the table.

  ‘Huh?’ said Sienna, as if the last two minutes had passed her by. She was staring over my shoulder at Jude, who was kneeling on a pile of dinner mats and looking thoroughly confused.

  ‘Gabe,’ I said. ‘We need him here. Now! And Daniel.’

  Jude’s head snapped from Sienna to me.

  ‘You think – here?’ he hissed.

  I didn’t look at him but I nodded as I barked at my sister, ‘When exactly is Michael due?’

  Jude had launched himself to his feet, and now he jumped off the table and strode towards Sienna.

  She threw her hands up, as if to defend herself, and said stupidly, ‘Due?’

  ‘Scarlett!’ said a warm voice from the hallway. Gabriel emerged. His smile lasted no more than a second before the atmosphere in the room registered. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said at once.

  I moved towards him quickly. ‘Michael,’ I said urgently. ‘He’s coming here. You have to stop him. It’s him.’

  Gabe had matched my every move so that we met in the middle of the room. He grabbed my shoulders now, fingers digging into me. ‘You’re sure?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will someone please tell me what the hell’s going on?’ snapped Sienna from behind me. ‘First Michael turns up all wild-eyed, and now the rest of you –’

  I was turning, mouth open, but Jude beat me to it.

  ‘He’s here already?’ he rasped.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Sienna hesitantly, eyes flicking from Jude to me. ‘I explained, didn’t I? He turned up needing to talk. Said it was important. That he’d wait for Gabe.’

  ‘Where is he?’ I couldn’t get the words out fast enough.

  ‘Toilet,’ said Sienna, and she pointed behind us.

  Gabe, nearest the door, made it into the hallway while I was still hurtling across the room, my sock-clad feet slipping on the wood floor. Jude caught up with me at the doorway and shoved past. Somewhere behind I heard the rapid tap-tap-tap of my sister’s heels over her shout, but I focused only on the hunt – as Gabe flung himself into the bathroom and Jude exploded through the door to the master suite, I plunged past them and through the entrance to the guest room at the end of the hall. Only then did my sister’s shout permeate the cloud of rage carrying me, the rampant need to find him, find him, hurt him:

  ‘Hey, you’ll wake the baby!’

  It was too late to stop. I slithered across the floor and crashed into the first solid item in my path: a travel cot.

  Steadying myself on the rim, I took in a sheet speckled with stars and planets and space rockets, and a fluffy blue blanket, and a lonely stuffed elephant.

  My sister was tap-tapping up behind me, and I turned and thrust my hands out and said, ‘No, don’t…’, and I tried to push her away, back.

  But even though she paused, bewildered, and let me hold her, she was taller than me, and she looked past me, over me, and she saw.

  The city air is routinely rent by noises that millions of Londoners block out in order to go about their business: the crack of a gun, the scream of a siren, the jeer of a racist, the sob of a homeless ‘crazy’. But that night, even the hardest of hearts must have struggled to dismiss the wrenching cry erupting from the top of a tower on the Thames, so raw that the word was lost and only fear and fury came through. But we in the tower, we crammed into that room around an empty cot, we had every letter of that cry on our white lips, in our fisted hands, in our thrumming, unified pulse:

  J. A. C. K.

  What do you do when you discover that someone you thought was your friend has been working to destroy you and those you love? What do you do when confronted with a list so long of lies and deception and manipulation and violence? What do you do when your mother is lost someplace between life and death, and your sister is consumed by terror and rage, and your friend is losing himself to a newly unfurled darkness within, and your baby nephew is gone, lost, alone out there somewhere with a madman?

  I know what you do not do. You do not sit calmly on a sofa in a pseudo art gallery, sipping tea and nibbling cookies and chit-chatting.

  I told Luke as much. Vehemently. He sighed and topped up my teacup from the china pot on the table.

  ‘Luke!’ I snapped.

  ‘Scarlett,’ he countered. ‘I know, okay? I know it’s killing you to just sit here for five minutes. Since Michael took Jack, you’ve been steaming about like a woman possessed. Si’s. Your dad’s. The hospital. Your dad’s again. Sienna’s. The hospital. The cottage. Hollythwaite. The island. And now this school.’

  ‘Can you blame me?’

  ‘No. Of course not.’ Luke reached over and smoothed back a stray tendril of crazy-hair. ‘But it’s my job to look out for you, Scarlett. And that means sometimes I make you stop, and drink something, and eat something, and talk to me.’

  I squeezed my eyes shut tight enough that white spots danced in the darkness.

  ‘Talk to me,’ Luke said again, only this time it was an instruction.

  I sighed. Kept my eyes closed to block out the surroundings, both the order and the chaos.

  ‘I’m sorry I went without you,’ I said. ‘To London. I didn’t meant to shut you out. I thought if we were quick…’

  ‘You tried.’

  ‘But I was too slow.’

  ‘Not your fault.’

  My eyes flew open, and only the cup of steaming-hot tea in my hand kept me from leaping up.

&nb
sp; ‘It is my fault, Luke,’ I said.

  He was silent; he seemed to know that no response would placate me. He just held my gaze and waited. And out it came:

  ‘I should have known! It’s been so obvious. Last night, the council of war we had around Gabe’s dining table – Jude and Gabe and Sienna and I comparing notes. So much makes sense now. But it was me, it was me who knew the most by far. Me Michael confided in; me he got close to. I was the one who should have known! But I’ve been so caught up in everything else: you and me, being Cerulean, my father, my sister; nothing Michael did or said was ever significant. When I look back, though, it’s like he was telling me all along.

  ‘Like the night of that dinner party I threw. He Travelled to the cottage garden, bold as brass. And it didn’t even occur to me that he shouldn’t have been there – shouldn’t have been able to Travel there, because he’d never been to the cottage before. But he had! He had been there! He was taunting me – Work it out, Scarlett. Catch me if you can.

  ‘The clues were there. He didn’t even bother to hide them well. Turning up at the hospital looking like that, a total mess, awkward, unable to even look at my mother but getting right into my business – it was like he wanted to be found out. And I was too stupid to do it.’

  I ignored Luke’s head shake; there was no stopping the torrent pouring out of me.

  ‘Now I’m left doubting everything, this past year and more. Did he try to hurt me, before I was Claimed? All those accidents I had – were they him? The fire in the cottage – did he start that? Did he start the fire at your grannie’s home, to draw me and Jude and Gabe out? Did he deliberately stir me up against Evangeline, Cerulea? Did he deliberately lead me to Gabe in Newquay? His recent alliance with Gabe, secretly pledging to turn Vindico – what was that, some kind of warped scheme? His visit to Mum in the hospital, everything he said there – what was he trying to achieve?’

  I slammed my cup of tea down on the coffee table, relishing the messy splash it produced.

  ‘And worse, every blur I’ve seen but dismissed, and every blur I haven’t even noticed – was that him? Has he been there, all the time, watching? Has he watched Sienna and the baby? Has he watched Jude? How often did he watch Mum? How often has he watched me, you? What is he looking for? Is he some kind of stalker, or just obsessed with gathering information for his messed-up plans?’

  I stood and began pacing up and down the stripped floorboards, kicking aside the many obstacles.

  ‘Why? Why Mum and Sienna and me and that tiny, innocent child? What’s his fixation with us? Why try to kill me when I was human – if that’s what he did? Why hurt Mum? Why leave her like that, not dead, not alive? Why take Jack – to hurt us? To hurt Jack?’

  I stopped in front of a painting on the wall. Grimaced at the pretty little rendering of boys playing cricket on a summer’s afternoon.

  ‘What is he? Is he totally off the planet – a sociopath or psychopath or whatever-path? Is everything he’s done to plan? Is he just crazed, impulsive? Is everything he ever said a lie? Is every instinct I ever had about him wrong?’

  Finally, I met Luke’s eyes.

  ‘How on earth did we end up here?’ I finished bleakly.

  He stood then and crushed me to him so hard I could feel the solid thrum of his heart resonating through his chest.

  ‘I have no answers,’ he said. ‘But I’m here. And I love you.’

  It wasn’t enough; we both knew that. But it was all he could offer. That and another cherry oatmeal cookie, which I took.

  ‘So,’ said Luke, looking around at the paintings up high and the paintings laid low, ‘are we done here?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Get me the hell out of this place.’

  ‘Home?’

  I longed to say yes, but it wasn’t an option. Not yet.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s someplace else we need to go first.’

  *

  We left the art space that was meant to be a studio but was too sterile, too white, to be anything but a gallery, and we walked down the long corridor leading back into the main body of the school.

  Kikorangi. The private estate on Dartmoor that was home to the Cerulean boys and their teachers. I was about as comfortable here as I was on the island. But this was Michael’s home, and someone had to search here. Gabe was still on Cerulea, waiting in agitation for Evangeline to break out of her latest stupor. Sienna was banned from the school by the anxious headteacher for her Vindico affiliation. Jude was in no fit state to be unleashed in a building full of impressionable boys. Which left me… and Luke, who’d been attached to my side since we arrived here with the tenacity of a limpet clinging to a rock.

  We’d begun in the school hall, standing before an assembly of staff whose horror mounted with each fact I laid down about their colleague Michael.

  We worked through denial, for which I had no patience.

  We worked through blame, for which I had even less patience. (‘No,’ I told the spluttering headteacher Barnabas, ‘Michael has not been corrupted by the Vindicos. He has hurt the Vindicos as much as the Ceruleans in this. The woman Gabriel loved. His children. His grandchild. Michael is alone. He is rogue.’)

  Finally, we reached a point of stunned acceptance. Then we probed for some idea of why Michael would do this and – most importantly – where he may be now. Silence, nothing but infernal silence. ‘He kept himself to himself,’ was the best the teachers could offer.

  I’d rushed out of that hall barely in control of my anger at their passivity. As I’d led Luke down the corridor I’d searched among the many pupil portraits there for his, ready to tear it from the wall and grind his mocking eyes and his knowing smile under my heels. But I couldn’t even find an image of him – he was gone, gone.

  Were it not for a sudden surge of little boys surrounding us as they charged from class to grounds, I might have lost control there and then. As it was, I had to settle for marching Luke to Michael’s work space – the classroom where he taught, and his private ‘studio’ – and searching it, all of it. But there was nothing there, nothing to say, Here’s what I’ve done, here’s why, and here’s what I plan to do next.

  And then I did lose control. My reaching hand found a canvas, tore it off the wall, hurled it to the floor. Then another. Then another. Until I found myself sitting on a white sofa in a sea of adrift artworks, with a cup of tea in one hand and a cookie in the other and a guy determined to make me talk.

  I squeezed Luke’s hand now, as we walked through the deserted central hallway of the school.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘About the mess back there.’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said, returning the squeeze. ‘Bet my mum was smiling down.’

  It took me a moment to follow his meaning. Luke’s mum had taught him to ‘Cereal it out’ when he was in the grip of difficult feelings: throw dry cereal all over the kitchen floor and pulverise it underfoot until the anger or fear or sadness dimmed.

  I would have replied, but we’d reached the foot of the wide staircase that led to the bedrooms. I’d never been beyond the ground floor before, and I hesitated now, one foot on the first step.

  ‘This is the right staircase?’ said Luke.

  I nodded. Barnabas had given us directions to follow to Michael’s bedroom. I’d never been there before, and I was suddenly afraid of what I might find in that most private of places.

  ‘He’s not up there,’ Luke reminded me.

  Barnabas had been called before our arrival and he’d checked the entire school for Michael, including his bedroom – which, apparently, Michael had long ago designated as out of bounds to all (‘Don’t all artists closely guard their privacy?’ had been the headteacher’s defensive comment).

  ‘I know Michael’s not here,’ I said. ‘It’s not him that frightens me.’

  ‘So what does frighten you?’ said Luke.

  But already I was talking over him, saying, ‘Come on,’ and tugging his hand to lead him up the staircase.
/>   On the first-floor landing, we turned and ascended another flight of steps. They terminated on the second floor, and we strode down the corridor to the west, passing door after door opening into children’s bedrooms. We didn’t linger to look – we pressed on to the very end of the hall, to a wooden door on which was engraved the image of a lion.

  The door was unlocked, as Barnabas had promised – he held the master keys for the entire building and had been here already. Beyond was a steep staircase climbing up to an attic. It was narrow, so we were forced to go up in single file, me in front, Luke at my rear.

  Finally, after what seemed an age but was probably no longer than half a minute, we reached the top of the staircase. Another wooden door stood in our path, this one engraved with a griffin. It was stiff to open, and Luke had to move alongside to help me shove it. The hinges creaked in protest with every inch we gained, until finally they gave and we spilled over the threshold.

  And suddenly Barnabas’s parting words to me made sense:

  ‘Michael’s bedroom – what he left behind – brace yourself, Scarlett.’

  The room was a mess.

  Not because its usual occupant was slovenly – far from it. The bed was neatly made. The books on the shelves were organised by colour and then size. The blotter on the writing desk was angled perfectly to line up with a sheaf of paper alongside. Even the beanbag on the floor was perfectly rounded, without a bump or hump as evidence that a person had slumped on it.

  It was the walls that were disturbing. To be precise, the canvases hanging on them that had once been paintings but were now tattered ribbons of fabric slashed horizontally, vertically, diagonally.

  ‘Jeez,’ said Luke, staring around the walls. ‘Anyone would think you’d already been here.’ He saw my expression, and added at once, ‘No. I didn’t mean… what you did downstairs was totally different.’

  It wasn’t true, though. Not entirely. I’d lost control in the studio, and vented my rage through tearing paintings off the wall and throwing them down. Clearly, in this space, Michael had also recently lost control, but rather than tearing paintings from the wall, he’d torn them up.