by John
Rémy pounded on the apartment door. ‘Mom! Tia Rosa! Let me in!’
‘Run, Rémy! Run!’ His mother screamed as a million red, compound eyes turned on him. Rémy pulled down his guitar case and wielded it like a baseball bat as the flies attacked. Frantically, he pulled his hoodie up over his head, covering his nose and mouth. But the flies were beneath the fabric, crawling into his ears and up his nose. He pulled his harmonica from his pocket, slid it beneath his hoodie and played.
The flies fell from his face and his body at the first notes, the rest swarming above his head like a thundercloud, unable to penetrate the shield that the music had created around him. Forcing his way into the apartment, Rémy slammed the door, leaving as many of the flies outside as he could.
The apartment had been destroyed in a struggle. More flies coated the ceiling, dripping like tar down the walls. The stench of sulphur and iron was overwhelming. Keeping the harmonica to his lips, Rémy scrambled over the upturned furniture, shoulder-charged his mother’s door and stumbled into a room he hadn’t seen in twelve years.
The bedroom looked like the lair of a serial killer. Photos, clippings, notes and drawings covered the wall opposite his mother’s bed. The other walls were papered in sheet music, ballads and blues riffs, lines of concertos and pages of unfinished symphonies. Every surface held towers of papers and files, books and documents. The bluebottles here were hovering like buzzards in clouds of blackness, waiting to feed.
Annie was standing on the rickety wooden balcony of her bedroom, leaning against the rusty railings, facing a sliver of Lake Michigan just visible in the distance. The hem of her sheer nightgown was blowing around her knees. The railing was not going to hold her weight for much longer. Her sobs punctuated the soft melody she was still singing.
‘I dreamt I held you in my arms…’
Rémy ran to her. He was on the balcony before he realized his mistake.
‘It’s a pleasure to see you again, Rémy.’
The French Creole pronunciation of his name, in a voice that sounded like Louis Armstrong sucking helium, sliced into him like a razor. A tall ethereal figure glided between Rémy and his escape, flicking the harmonica from his hands and out over the balcony. Rémy’s mother redoubled her song, leaning farther over the railing, as if on the prow of a sinking ship.
‘Who the hell are you?’ Rémy said.
The figure’s feet weren’t actually touching the wooden balcony, but hovering centimetres above it on a thick pillow of flies.
‘I thought perhaps you would remember me,’ he said. ‘We met when you were a child at the plantation archives.’
Rémy’s adrenalin spiked. Two men, one standing and one sitting. This one had been standing.
‘You do remember.’ The figure sounded pleased. ‘The artist caught my best side, of course.’
It had been a painting he had seen that day, Rémy realized with a sudden rush of clarity. Old too, glowing with jewel-like colours. Two men… His stomach roiled. A small blue fan whirring at his feet flashed across his memory.
The figure floated closer. Malevolence emanated from him, hitting Rémy with pulsing, painful sound waves. He backed up against the railings beside his mother. The old balcony groaned.
‘The pain in your head will subside soon, unless, of course, you decide to be uncooperative. I have been searching for you for a very long time,’ the man said.
He was wearing a red satin frock coat, its skirt brushing his knees, a white blouse with frilled cuffs and a stiff, ruffled collar open and cut low at his hairless chest. The man’s androgyny would have been seductive, had it not been for the smooth white skin stretching across his high cheekbones that suggested puberty had never quite been reached. His breeches were close-fitting and his feet bare, flies crawling in and out of flesh where toenails had once been.
‘What do you want?’ croaked Rémy. ‘Where’s my aunt?’
The man flicked a manicured finger across a diamond stud in his ear. ‘Your aunt is not your most immediate concern.’
Rémy noticed a handful of papers, covered in his mother’s writing, gripped between the tapered thumb and little finger of the man’s right hand. The hand was maimed, three stumps where there should have been fingers.
‘Yes,’ said the man, following his gaze. ‘These papers are of great interest. But they don’t contain what I need. You know what I’m talking about, I’m sure.’
Rémy didn’t.
‘You’ll never get it, Don Grigori,’ said Annie suddenly.
The flies swooped. Rémy cried out as his mother started singing again, holding the filthy creatures off with her voice.
Don Grigori fixed his eyes on her. ‘Where have you put it?’
‘Far away,’ Annie choked. ‘Where you’ll never find it.’
The balcony groaned more loudly.
‘Come inside, Mom,’ Rémy begged. ‘The balcony’s going to break…’
The legion of bluebottles increased their buzzing.
‘Your mother is being as stubborn as ever,’ said Don Grigori irritably. ‘Bring her inside, Rémy. Tell her she’ll be safe. I just need a little information from her, and then you and I will take our leave.’
He put his palm flat against Rémy’s chest, sending a frisson of electricity through his body. Rémy’s hands twitched, his knees buckled and he felt himself getting erect. He slapped Don Grigori’s hand away, horrified.
‘I’m not going anywhere with you!’
‘I hope you won’t be as stubborn as your mother, now,’ Don Grigori chided. ‘Come, Annie. Tell me what I need to know and you will be amply rewarded.’
What did his mother have that this creature wanted so badly?
‘Escort your mother inside, Rémy,’ Don Grigori whispered. ‘Let’s help her… heal.’
18.
WE ALL FALL DOWN
It was a long drop from the fourth floor to the ground below. The soundtrack of the neighbourhood – bus airbrakes exhaling at every stop, truck wheels walloping over potholes, police sirens bleating, car alarms wailing, a distant train horn – all faded to background noise. The air was still, the world holding its breath.
‘Mom, we have to go inside,’ Rémy said, pushing his mother gently in the back.
Annie kept singing, a Nina Simone song now, keeping Don Grigori at bay. The despair in her cracking voice made Rémy’s skin tingle. She was dropping notes.
How long had she been out here?
A fault line in the balcony zigzagged beneath his feet. There was an expression of such defeat and disappointment, sorrow and love in his mother’s eyes that he stepped back. He felt the balcony shift away from the railing.
‘Find it, baby,’ whispered his mother, so quietly Rémy almost missed it. ‘I love you.’
She hugged him. Rémy felt something cool and hard slither down the neck of his tucked T-shirt, coming to rest against the skin at his waist.
Stepping back into the room, Annie opened her mouth and sang a top C.
The balcony split in two. Rémy fell, slamming on to the balcony directly beneath, the hard landing punching the air from his lungs. He fought for his next few breaths. He couldn’t get air to fill his lungs. Pain pierced his shoulder, and he was covered in planks of softwood and pieces of rusty railing. He stared in disbelief up at what was left of the balcony above, the split wood like broken teeth. He could hear Don Grigori losing patience, shouting now.
‘Tell me where the journal is!’
‘Help her! She’s going to fall,’ sobbed Rémy, his ribs screaming in pain.
Don Grigori reached down with a slim, red-satin arm, lifted Annie up as easily as if she were a feather, and pulled her inside.
From beneath the broken balcony, Rémy heard his mom scream and Tia Rosa howl. A window exploded, raining shards of glass down on him.
19.
TAKE THIS AND GO
Rémy clawed at the planks and pieces of railing. His shoulder was on fire, but he scrambled to his knees fast. He
had to get back up there. He had to help.
‘What the hell happened to you, Rem? What did you do to my balcony?’
Rémy looked up at Sotto Square’s concerned face. In his late twenties, with light chocolate skin, Sotto had tats inked on most of his upper body and trouble etched in his face. On closer examination the tats were works of art, not prison ink. And every morning for as long as Rémy could remember, he would see Sotto on his balcony massaging baby oil into every one of them.
Sotto Square held sway with the gangs, the drug dealers and the pimps in this hood. Sotto was an urban entrepreneur, a thief and a scavenger, fencing stolen goods from the building’s unused underground parking garages. His grandmother was the only tenant in the building who owned a car, a 1970s sea-green Lincoln that Sotto kept in immaculate condition and rarely drove.
There were no raiding parties on kids he knew, to use them as drug runners, and no selling to anyone in the building. Guns and weapons were left at the door. Like a knight, Sotto Square had a code of honour. Anyone who lived in his castle was family and earned his protection. In return, he expected fealty and a contribution to the building’s upkeep in kind or cash. From a young age, Rémy had been responsible for mopping the hallways and mowing the lawns.
Sotto lived on the third floor of the building, his G’ma in the apartment next door on the right, and his cousin Two Square on the left. Rémy, Tia Rosa, his mom and G’ma would eat corndogs wrapped in crispy bacon and watch black-and-white horror movies on Sotto’s massive flat screen well into the night, and on summer nights, G’ma insisted Rémy step on to her balcony and play taps on her old trumpet.
When Sotto’s sister died in a drive-by outside her school, Rémy played his own arrangement of Eubie Blake’s ‘Memories of You’ on G’ma’s trumpet, bringing everyone to their feet. For one of the first times in his life, Rémy had a flash of awareness that something otherworldly permeated his playing.
*
Pulling Rémy up, Sotto glanced at the shattered balcony above. ‘Looks like a war zone up there,’ he remarked. ‘You should go to the ER. I’ll get the mess cleaned up and repaired. I can take care of the bill if you go to County.’
‘Just got the wind knocked out of me. Nothing’s broken,’ said Rémy. ‘I have to go, man, thanks…’
Sotto called out as Rémy limped towards the stairwell. ‘Hey, Rem? Want a little somethin’ take the edge off? On the house.’
The last thing Rémy needed right now was to dull his senses. The only way he was going to survive any of this was to keep his imagination alert.
*
A couple of bluebottles lay dying on the linoleum inside his apartment door. The table was still upturned and the room trashed. Tia Rosa was leaning over the sink, the water running, drinking from her cupped hand.
Rémy stared at the blood pooling at his aunt’s feet. Tia Rosa glanced at him with fading eyes, a blackened knife in her hand.
‘Stuck him like a pig,’ she whispered. ‘Shame he stuck me too. He won’t be bothering you for a while. I promised Annie I would protect you…’
She smiled and slid to the floor.
‘Shit, shit, shit…’ His hands shaking, Rémy started to dial 911 when he heard footsteps. A distorted shadow stretched to the ceiling.
He dropped the phone.
His mom was bent over, pressing her hands against a bloody wound in her lower abdomen as big as a man’s fist. Bluebottle larvae were crawling in and out of her gut.
Rémy made an inarticulate sound of horror. He couldn’t think, he had to think.
‘You still have it, baby boy?’ she whispered, as soft as a breeze.
Rémy remembered the cold thing she’d dropped down his neck on the balcony. He pulled it out: a brass key and a piece of a broken metal tablet carved with curious glyphs, on a worn leather strap.
His mother seemed to relax. ‘Mailbox at Waterloo Station… Number… is on the key.’
‘Waterloo Station? In London? Mom, hold on!’ Rémy began to sob, rocking his mother’s ruined body in his arms. ‘Mom, please don’t leave me. I don’t want to be by myself…’
Two wet, bloody bluebottles fluttered from Annie’s lips and crawled down her chin.
‘Knew this day was coming ever since I saw him in the archives. I saw him step from a painting and try to take you, my baby boy… When I went back after… after… the accident, the painting was gone, I lost it… I lost it… Oh, I wished I’d had more time…’
‘You gotta let me call 911, Mom. I can’t just let you die—’
‘You have to go, Rémy. Put… the tablet on, baby boy.’
Helplessly, Rémy slipped the segment of the etched tablet and the key around his neck. He felt the tablet vibrate against his skin, just a soft fluttering, but a vibration nonetheless.
‘Do you feel it?’
Remy nodded.
‘It’ll get warmer when you get closer.’
‘Closer to what?’
He sobbed. ‘Closer to what? What am I looking for… Oh, Mom, don’t go… please don’t leave me.’
‘Closer to…’ Her lips were blue, her breathing shallow, laboured, painful. Rémy’s tears were blinding him.
‘RD, go. To London. Get… the journal. Find the Moor. He’ll know… what to do.’
With her last breath, his mom reached across the kitchen floor and clasped Tia Rosa’s dead hand.
THIRD MOVEMENT
‘…imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.’
Ursula Le Guin
20.
TIME TRAVEL SUCKS
AUCHINMURN, WESTERN ISLES OF SCOTLAND
TWO MONTHS AGO
‘Time is running out, Matt,’ Em said, nudging her brother over to make room at the end of the wooden jetty. Muted waves rippled on to the rocky shore beneath them.
‘Go away, Em.’ Matt paused before adding with considerable emphasis, ‘I’ve not made my decision yet.’
‘Matt, how is that even possible?’ Em snapped back. ‘Every other Animare has to make up their mind when they are sixteen. But the Council gave us both a whole extra year so that you could decide. If Lizzy’s really not the one, then your final option for an official-by-the-scroll Guardian is me. And you know how everyone feels about that, including Zach.’
Matt glanced at the ridiculous expression on his twin sister’s face. He knew she was thinking of Zach Butler’s amazing body in skinny jeans. He could hear her in his mind. Dropping his sunglasses from the top of his head, he squinted in disgust at his sister.
Em grinned, punching him playfully on the shoulder. ‘You must admit Zach and I are an Animare and Guardian dream team.’
‘Can you stop talking now?’ Matt said. He turned his face up to the morning sun, and dangled his feet in the wide ribbon of Largs Bay that separated their home in Auchinmurn from its smaller sister island, Era Mina.
Matt and Em had arrived on the islands when they were 12, fleeing London after they’d animated themselves into a Georges Seurat painting in the National Gallery. Their frantic arrival at the abbey’s compound was the start of a dangerous journey that transported the twins to the island’s medieval past and revealed they were part of an ancient order of artists known as Animare – powerful men and women who could bring their art to life. And because their dad had been a Guardian, the siblings had developed Guardian powers of inspiriting and mind-control.
‘The Council of Guardians have made it clear that this union ceremony,’ said Em, ‘this joining together, is our last chance to be a legitimate part of the Animare world. Don’t you want that?’
‘Still talking,’ said Matt.
‘Mattie, our acceptance will open up opportunities I want to be part of! But you need a Guardian!’
Matt said nothing. He looked back at the house, a renovated monastery and its abbey, and at Renard, their grandfather and one of the most powerful Guardians in the world, standing at the open French doors. Matt could sense Renard�
�s attention on them even while his eyes were observing the catering circus unfolding on the Abbey compound’s expansive lawn.
Waiting staff darted in and out of a white canopy carrying champagne flutes, tea services and vases bursting with yellow blooms freshly cut from the garden. The ringmaster for the event was Jeannie Butler, the Abbey’s elderly housekeeper and an Animare with unprecedented powers in her own right. Wrapped in a starched tartan pinnie, she stood in front of Renard on the stone steps of the patio and shouted instructions to a trio of tuxedoed musicians unpacking their instruments on a small stage nearby. No one skimped on a union ceremony.
‘Do you remember when our feet couldn’t touch the water from here?’ Em asked, looking at her purple varnished toes hanging over the jetty, before splashing water on to Matt’s cuffed jeans.
‘Feels like another lifetime ago,’ Matt said curtly. He didn’t like talking about the past.
‘Kind of was. Remember the day we arrived? We drew for Grandpa and accidentally animated a T-Rex on the hillside. Almost killed Zach.’
‘Em—’
‘OK. Zipped.’ Em pinched her fingertips together, twisting them against her lips. She drew circles in the cool water with her toes.
You know that Zach’s afraid we’re all going to wake up one morning and you’ll just be gone.
Matt shoved his shades back up into his long dark hair. ‘Talking in my head is still talking.’
Apart from the scars on his arms and legs, the changes to Matt’s dazzling, damaged eyes were the most visible signs of the time-travelling trauma he had suffered three years earlier.
‘Zach’s coming in,’ Em said, sitting up and gazing out over the bay. ‘He looks so hot on his board. Doesn’t he?’
‘You want me to lust after your boyfriend too?’ Matt inquired.
Em watched Zach arch his body against his rig to catch the breeze from the Atlantic. May in Scotland was a chancy month: as much a chance of sun as of sleet, hail or high water. It was sunny now, and Zach had peeled his wetsuit off to his waist, his tanned body wet and muscular.