by Rebecca Lim
‘Actually, I’m not angry anymore,’ Jordan replied cheerfully, as if we were having an entirely different conversation. ‘Now? I’m kind of enjoying myself.’
Nonplussed, I watched as he banged on the steel fire door with the flat of his free hand like that lie he’d told security was true and he had every right to see me inside.
‘You’re a funny girl, Soph,’ he said. ‘Now that you’ve got my full and undivided attention, shut your mouth and try to look happy. Do you know how many girls would kill to be in your position?’
He gave me a sideways shove with one elbow. And then he grinned, just to show he was joking. A wide, sustained, toothy grin that changed all the lines of his angular face completely and crinkled up the skin around his grey eyes.
Something inside me flipped over, pancake-style, even though he was a lost cause. No guy forms lascivious intentions about a girl who screams like, well, a girl and wipes her nose on the back of her hand because she forgot to pack tissues.
So I said, gruffly, to shield myself from the sudden rush of hurt, ‘And your opinion means so much. Now get off me.’
I shoved Jordan back so hard he fell off the step we were standing on, almost dropping Monica’s plastic bag. He started laughing.
There was a muffled clank from the other side, then the heavy steel door creaked open. Eric the dreadlocked dish pig stuck his head out cautiously, doing a triple-take when he saw it was me standing out there. With a guy who appeared to be enjoying my company.
‘You look like shit, Soph!’ Eric exclaimed when he’d gotten his face back under control. ‘And you’re supposed to be inside the, uh’—he made exaggerated talking marks with his fingers—‘security cordon. Is that the boyfriend everyone’s talking about?’
I glared at Eric so fiercely that he darted aside to let us pass. Still grinning, Jordan guided me down the back hallway past Gran’s empty office.
‘Walk faster,’ I murmured. ‘Don’t want to be seen. No mood for questions.’
But Gran caught the edge of Jordan’s lean denim-clad hip heading up the staircase to my bedroom because Gran never misses a trick.
‘Soph?’ she called out, peering around the open double doors to the Public Bar. ‘Jordan? Is that you?’
Through the doorway behind us, I caught the stares of at least a half-dozen interested parties looking on from behind their beers, their eyes and ears almost hanging out on stalks.
At the mention of Jordan’s name, Dirty Neil actually levered his permanent leer and visible span of bum crack off his usual stool and shambled to the door with a half-finished beer in his hand, the better to eyeball us. He took a huge pull of his drink, giving Jordan the evil eye—which was hard, because Jordan had at least ten centimetres on him.
Dirty Neil’s voice was surly. ‘Where d’you think you’re off to, sport? Only bedrooms upstairs.’
‘To do some research,’ Jordan replied coolly, letting go of me and standing taller.
‘I’ll bet,’ Dirty Neil shot back, his eyes sliding down the length of my shivering, feverish body like a greased spit ball.
I heard Jordan’s angry intake of breath and his profile went hard, the tension in the air almost crystallising.
‘Gran?’ I pleaded, unused to the feeling of being contested territory. The fact that it had happened twice in one day was seriously spinning me out and something in my red-raw face made Gran turn on Dirty Neil immediately and drive him back into the Public Bar with the back of the vinyl-covered menu she was holding in her hand.
‘Last time I looked,’ I heard her scoff, ‘she already had a grandmother and her name’s not Neil Douglas, Neil Douglas. So get your nose out of Sophie’s business and back into the business of drinking your beer. Pour you another?’
Still bristling, Jordan pushed the sleeves of his battered leather jacket right up past his elbows, giving me a full view of the serious work he’d had done to his skin.
Up close, none of the symbols made any kind of sense. They were densely layered and formed patterns that seemed to flow and shift into each other. Here and there I recognised something familiar, like a flower, or a skull, or a boat in full sail, but the rest of it was probably in a language no one alive spoke any more, or maybe ever had; Jordan appeared to have whole phrases written on his skin in a spidery, Gothic script. I’d never been close enough to him to see the stuff he’d had done, but some of it looked pretty insane: fully Death Metal, I’m-a-closest-Satan-worshipper-for-real insane.
He shot me a dark look. ‘He always treat you like that? Like you’re his personal property?’
I turned, furious at the casual judgment in Jordan’s tone. ‘He’s an amoebic life form compared to that Roman guy, and I can handle it. Have been handling it—for a long time. I’m tougher than I look, hotshot.’
But then a wave of pain overcame me and, for a second, I had to look down. ‘If Dad were here,’ I murmured, ‘Neil wouldn’t dare. And he knows it.’
‘Your dad walk out on you, too?’ Jordan asked, a wealth of leashed anger in his voice.
‘No, he died,’ I mumbled, putting a hand up defensively before Jordan could get a word out. ‘And it’s okay, now. It’s fine.’
Which was the lie it sounded like. Not trusting myself to meet Jordan’s eyes, I poked instead at his heavily inked left arm as we mounted the stairs side-by-side. ‘So,’ I said, taking a deep breath to push down the pain, ‘what do all these mean then, really?’
Jordan held up the inside of his left forearm to my scrutiny, the light from the jukebox on the landing casting strange shadows that seemed to bring some of the tattoos to life before he lowered his arm.
His reply was matter-of-fact. ‘They’re extracts from certain grimoires.’
‘Grim-what?’ I muttered as we reached the upper floor. To get to my bedroom and Gran’s, which were right at the end of the upstairs corridor, you had to pass a number of suites we maintained for those pub patrons too blotto to make it home at closing time. No one was currently residing Chez Teague, so every door was open, each ‘suite’ looking more wincingly lurid than the last.
We’d passed a couple of rooms when Jordan jammed the plastic bag under one arm and started pressing his fingers into the exposed flesh of his forearms like he was cold.
‘Grimoires,’ he said again distractedly. ‘So-called ancient textbooks of magic that have been widely circulating for centuries, some in Old French, some in Latin.’
‘Magic?’ I exclaimed.
‘Just protective magic,’ he muttered, ‘nothing black. We made sure. At least, Daughtry did.’
‘Daughtry?’ I said, confused. As far as I knew, no one at Ivy Street answered to that name.
‘He’s a friend,’ Jordan replied carefully. ‘Well, of Mum’s. Big French guy. Looks like a Viking—wears his hair in a blond plait, with this wooden stick pushed through it, I kid you not. And silver.’ Jordan shook his wrists so they jangled. ‘He got me onto the silver. Actually,’ he added, ‘Daughtry kind of scares me.’
‘Because he’s, like, a magician?’ I laughed nervously. ‘Seriously?’
‘To tell you the truth,’ Jordan mused, ‘I don’t know what he is. He’s gone for months at a time, then suddenly rin
gs Mum up for a chat over a cuppa. They get on like a house on fire. It’s weird. Met at one of those New Age fairs at the Convention Centre where everyone does aura readings and unblocks your chakras for a fee and stuff. He just walked up to her and got talking and they’ve been friends ever since. When I told Daughtry how much I hated them all coming through, well, he suggested I get these.’ Jordan looked down at his forearms and his voice grew hesitant. ‘The tatts and stone and silver have kind of…helped.’
‘Maybe Daughtry’s sweet on your mum?’ I said.
Jordan shot me an admonishing look. ‘That’s sick, Soph. He’s not much older than we are. But, anyway, he knows things. Wacko stuff that’s off-the-map. That sharpened stick he wears in his hair? He says it’s some kind of weapon or key. Yeah, right, mate, I always tell him. It’s a stick. But I don’t think he’s ever been to school…’
Jordan stopped dead without warning at the doorway of an empty room we were passing and I almost ran into the back of him.
‘We call it the Orange Room,’ I said apologetically, as he surveyed the room, ‘for reasons that should be blindingly obvious.’
Everything in the room just was—even the balding, dip-dyed flokati rug. The centrepiece of the whole visual nightmare was a sagging double bed with a fluffy, razor-cut orange chenille bedspread. The bed was flanked on one side by an orange, vinyl-covered 70s armchair and on the other by a Formica-topped bedside table that had begun life as a hallway telephone stand. The late afternoon sunlight flooding the room made even the dust devils seem orange.
‘We like to match,’ I muttered faintly, wondering what my life must seem like to him. ‘Now hurry up and walk me to my bedroom and get the hell out of here, Jordan, so that my reputation as a dork who can’t get a date remains intact. You can’t be seen with me. This is “Storkie” Teague you’re messing with. The person who’s so freakishly tall, thin and all-round stupid, it defies logic. And I’m quoting here.’
Jordan shot me a quick, closed look that could have meant anything.
‘Old head on a stick?’ I continued, on a real roll now. ‘Butt of all jokes? The boobless wonder who moonlights as a reserve player on the boys’ senior basketball team? I’m “the human firelighter”, remember? Everyone’s mate, nobody’s bestie. Storkie, the undateable life form.’
I tried not to sound bitter, but I must have, because Jordan now gave me a sharp, sideways glance before ducking into the orange room.
‘If you believe a word of what you just said, then you really are stupid,’ he muttered, approaching the warped impression in the floorboards at the foot of the bed that had been there for as long as we’d owned the pub. ‘This is how it begins,’ he then mumbled, and I wasn’t sure if he was talking to himself, or to me.
‘What begins? Lessons in bad taste?’ I replied with a sigh, reluctantly trailing Jordan into the room. I’d never liked this one, and it wasn’t just that I clashed horribly with everything in it. Entering it always seemed to make my head hurt. If it ever needed cleaning or tweaking, I’d put it off until Gran rolled her eyes and did it, or got someone else to.
I hadn’t been in the room for months, but it struck me suddenly that the warping in the floorboards had gotten a lot worse; it had the profile of a small hillock now, as if the floor was somehow elastic and something pointed was pressing up sharply from underneath. As far as I knew, there was nothing but empty air under that floor. The Sports Bar, with its bank of TV screens fixed 24/7 on the races or the match of the day, ran beneath it.
‘Weird, huh?’ I said, looking down at the small mound at our feet. I could feel my heartbeat pounding in my temples the way it always did in here.
Jordan poked at it with his creeper-shod foot then sucked in a deep breath as if he’d cut himself.
Something about the repetitive way he kept pressing at the flesh of each arm reminded me of someone playing the keys of a piano.
With a chill flash of insight, I wondered why it had taken me so long to actually see what he was doing. Blinking, I remembered the lockers erupting at school; the hail of physical objects that had defied the laws of gravity and barely seemed to touch him as he’d pressed and pressed on his arms.
‘You’re hitting them in some kind of order,’ I whispered, backing away from him at the realisation. ‘Those words and pictures. Aren’t you?’
Jordan raised his gaze to mine in misery, then his grey eyes flicked past me, locking onto something—something in the room with us—and he snarled, ‘Sunto!’
12
‘Stay away!’ Jordan snapped. ‘Je suis un mastin.’
The language he was speaking had a guttural accent, and I can’t properly describe what happened next.
It’s like…something attached itself to the skin of my face.
I brushed it off with a shriek, this thing I couldn’t see. It had the feel of cobwebs, but worse. Sentient cobwebs? Spider silk, but with purpose.
Then there was a momentary pressure on my chest, as if someone had laid a heavy stone on me, or maybe the spider silk was somehow burrowing under my skin and heading for my lungs, because for a second I couldn’t breathe.
‘Jor-dan,’ I choked out, clawing at the air in his direction. ‘Help.’
‘Tradiment!’ Jordan roared, extending his right arm in a sweeping motion that ended at the empty armchair across the room. The plastic bag we’d retrieved from the Maximus Lounge fell to the floor with a rustle.
The pressure just worsened. I shook my head, tears pouring down my face as I struggled for air and Jordan thundered again, still indicating the chair, ‘Sunto!’
The pressure abruptly lifted. But the room now seemed shrouded in shadow, as if the late afternoon sun was fighting its way through some sort of otherworldly filter, or something filmy yet dense was passing before my eyes.
Then I could breathe again, and the lurid brightness of the room was as it always was. Maybe I’d imagined everything.
Jordan glared at the empty chair for a moment, arms crossed over his chest. Then he calmly turned his back on the empty, vinyl-covered seat and pulled me close, resting his chin on my hair as I gulped and shuddered on his shoulder, hands covering my tear-stained face.
‘You’re safe now,’ he rumbled, a hand at the base of my spine, I felt it burning there. ‘I’m here.’
‘What does it mean? You know, all that mass-tan stuff?’ I stumbled over the word, still gasping.
Jordan’s mouth twisted. ‘It’s one of Daughtry’s sayings. It’s a declaration that’s supposed to contain and compel. “Mastin” is what he calls people like us. It’s Norman French. It means gate keepers, guardians, the ones who stand between them and the great unwary—as he likes to call most people. Mastin, he says, have the ability to move between this world and Sheol.’
He laughed, and I could hear the scepticism in it.
‘Sheol?’ I croaked, looking up at him.
‘The underworld,’ Jordan replied in a sepulchral whisper. ‘The place things like Eve come from and go to. Though I consider myself more of a low-level watch dog,’ he added in a more normal voice, ‘prepared to turn a blind eye. Knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I want to sleep at night. Daughtry wants to train me up, teach me what he knows, but I al
ways turn him down.’
Jordan’s chuckle was now rueful, like it was some kind of longstanding bone of contention between him and this Daughtry guy.
‘One world with these things in it?’ He indicated the chair in the corner with a tilt of his head. ‘Is more than I can stand. I don’t need another one. I hope I never see Sheol. If it even exists.’
I ground the heels of my hands into my eyes. ‘That wasn’t Eve, was it?’
It had felt different, and I couldn’t explain, how I’d known immediately.
Jordan ruffled the ends of my ponytail, trying to keep his voice light. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘It wasn’t.’
‘Then let’s get out of here,’ I begged, pulling him out of the room I vowed to never willingly enter again.
Behind me, I heard Jordan hook up the fallen plastic bag before saying, almost apologetically, ‘For us, the extracts act as a kind of protective amulet or armour when worn on the skin. If I touch certain symbols, read them in a certain order, I can keep most of it—them—out. It has something to do with channelling the memory of intense pain. Daughtry said you weave it about you like a net they can’t reach through. Set them from you, set them back, he always says, with natural magic and pain and they will have to abide by your decision not to act on their behalf. Your pain will always more than equal theirs because yours exists in the realm of living memory. That is, unless your guard is down—the way mine was, with you.’
‘Hey, hey,’ I said, glancing sharply at him as we stopped short outside my closed bedroom door. ‘You can’t be blaming me for Eve? She’s a freaking force of nature. And that “net” of yours didn’t keep that thing from trying for me.’
My hands rose to the base of my throat involuntarily at the memory of fleshless, weightless fingers.
Jordan dropped the plastic bag and grasped my hands, reeling me in closer to his body. ‘What can I say?’ His smile was crooked. ‘They’re opportunistic.’