Conjuror

by John

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘His picture was in the paper this morning, didn’t you see? Black. Tall. Kinda looked like a young Lenny Kravitz. Even had a guitar case on his back.’

  ‘Jennifer?’ came a shout from inside the office. ‘How long does a fag break take? The phone’s ringing off the hook in here! If I have to take one more call about the audition times for Disney’s Twelve Knights, I won’t be responsible for my actions!’

  ‘That’s my da,’ said Jen. She seemed reluctant to end the conversation. ‘I ought to go.’

  ‘One more question,’ said Matt. ‘Was the shop open when the break-in happened?’

  ‘I know they’re saying no one was in,’ said Jen, ‘but it was definitely open. Right before I saw the black guy jump across the roof, I heard someone inside playing the harmonica. They were really good, and I remember looking out of the window to see if someone was cadging for money. We try to discourage that. Street’s too narrow, and we get famous people coming in here a lot to make audition tapes. It’s bad for business.’

  ‘Jennifer! Get your bloody arse back to your desk now!’

  ‘I’m coming, Da!’ Jen shouted. She pulled an apologetic face at Matt, then fluttered her eyelashes. ‘Sorry. Feel free to come by and interrogate me again any time.’

  She slammed the gate behind her.

  ‘Thank God for you, Sherlock,’ said Em. ‘I was as good as invisible.’

  ‘Why thank you, Ms Watson,’ Matt said with a wink. ‘If the shop was open, that means the police report about not getting into the building because the owner was out of the country was bullshit. They lied to the police, or the police lied on the report.’ He glanced at Old Worm’s ancient back door again. ‘Were there that many flies before?’

  ‘Oh my God, no,’ said Em, staring at the mound of fat flies on the stoop. She looked a little sick. ‘What happened?’

  ‘We need to get inside that shop,’ said Matt, pulling out his sketchpad.

  Em sighed. ‘I was afraid you were going to say that.’

  39.

  OPEN FOR VISITORS

  Finding a toilet stall he could hide in was more difficult than Rémy thought it would be. Eventually, he found a staff bathroom on the lower level of the museum and broke the lock. Once inside, he sat up on the cistern, his feet on the seat and his guitar case balanced between his legs. He drank three bottles of the yoghurt he’d pinched.

  Nothing like hiding in a toilet again, Rémy Dupree Rush. Like you didn’t do enough of that in grade school.

  He squelched back the threatening tears. He’d grieve for all that he’d lost when he figured out all that he’d lost.

  ‘The Victoria and Albert Museum is now open for visitors,’ announced a polite recording.

  Rémy climbed off the cistern, flipped his guitar case over his shoulder, rinsed the three empty yoghurt bottles in hot water and used a paper towel to pick them up and toss them in the bin. He didn’t think the police had his fingerprints yet, but there was no point in being stupid.

  Spotting a rambunctious school group filing up the stairs from the main entrance and gathering near the gift shop, Rémy slid among them, taking advantage of an ambivalent chaperone and a flustered teacher with too many tickets to give out.

  ‘Sir! Young man!’

  Rémy instinctively shoved his hand into his pocket and fingered his harmonica. Another busload of visitors was swarming the entrance. Too many people to control.

  ‘Sir!’ said the guard, jogging a little to catch up. ‘I’m afraid you’ll need to leave your guitar case in the cloakroom. We don’t allow backpacks or any bulky bags in the museum.’

  Relief flooded Rémy. He didn’t want to be separated from his possessions, but at least he hadn’t been rumbled.

  His stomach growled as he deposited his guitar case at the cloakroom, the words on the museum map in his hands swimming across the page. It was difficult to concentrate with sleep and hunger and sorrow all competing for attention. The yoghurts he’d pilfered had only teased his appetite into thinking something more substantial was on its way. He was almost down to his last few coins, but if he didn’t get some food soon, he’d let his guard down and his search would be over.

  The Moor would have to wait.

  40.

  A CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

  The bluebottles swarming in and out of the cracks and crevices in the door began to slow in their frenzy, dropping one by one on to the stoop.

  ‘They’re dying,’ said Matt, poking a finger into their fat carcasses. ‘But not of starvation, that’s for sure.’

  Em had no desire to get any closer than she already was. She took out her sketchpad and a pencil and quickly drew a way into the shop.

  A knife of light, like a laser, cut a hole around the lock. Matt reached his hand inside and unlatched the rear door. They stepped over the dying bluebottles and paused for a moment, listening.

  ‘No alarm,’ said Em.

  Matt closed the door behind them.

  ‘Maybe there’s something inside this place that means they don’t need one.’

  ‘And thank you for that. You always know how to make a girl feel safe.’

  Em tore up her sketch. In a snap of a second, the door restored itself to its original form.

  Matt took off his shades and let his eyes adjust. ‘Stay close.’

  ‘Oh, I am,’ said Em, grabbing the hem of his canvas jacket.

  They made their way through what looked once to have been a kitchen and scullery area but now served as storage. Crates lay toppled to one side, some with the straw and the packing materials oozing out of their sides, others torn open and emptied completely. Everything was covered in dead or dying flies.

  Someone was looking for something.

  I hope it was a can of Raid.

  The low buzzing sound they’d both heard from outside was louder in the shop itself.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Matt blurted.

  Em dropped her grip from Matt’s jacket and covered her mouth with her hands. They both stood with their backs to the wall and stared at the remains of a man in a navy pea coat stuck to the floor with a thick, greenish-yellow substance like putrid honey. Thousands of bluebottles were swarming out of the wet mass that had been his abdomen.

  Averting their eyes, the twins stepped quickly and carefully round the corpse. It was impossible not to gag. To take her mind off the horror, Em busied herself clicking pictures of the strange, fly-ridden interior with her flip-phone. What was this place? Maybe Vaughn would know more when she showed him the images.

  Matt was in the darkest corner of the shop, examining an old cabinet with brass handles and a hundred tiny drawers.

  There’s something behind this cabinet, Em.

  Like what?

  I don’t know, but I can see air coming through the back.

  ‘Of course you can, Superman,’ Em mumbled to herself.

  It took the twins ten minutes to find the trick access to the cabinet. All the drawers in the cabinet itself were empty, so they switched their attention to the heavily laden bookcase beside it. They emptied the shelves from the bottom up, feeling, pressing, twisting all the while. On the top shelf, Matt reached for a scroll fastened with a buckled leather strap. He pulled the buckle.

  Click.

  The back of the cabinet slid open smoothly, revealing what looked like a steel-lined panic room about as big as a walk-in closet. A red, velvet-cushioned throne chair sat against the far wall. The carcasses of three fleshy flies were pressed into the seat cushion.

  ‘I saw a movie like this once,’ said Matt, walking into the room and running his hands over the gleaming steel walls. ‘A thief hides in a panic room so as not to get caught. There’s a two-way mirror and he witnesses a murder.’

  ‘Is it murder by flies?’ said Em, swatting two bluebottles flying feebly at her neck.

  Matt pushed his hands against the ceiling, feeling the steel flex under his palms.

  ‘These walls are
too thin for a panic room. I think there’s something behind them. Come in here and help me.’

  ‘You’re not getting me in there,’ said Em at once. ‘Even without that dead body, this place is freaking me out. The air feels different. Not musty, but… tragic. Like it’s left over from some really bad stuff in the past.’

  Matt suddenly slid a panel open in the ceiling, revealing a plate with two silver buttons on it. Em’s eyes widened.

  ‘Don’t touch those buttons!’

  The words left her lips at the same time Matt hit one of the buttons.

  The entire room dropped through the floor and disappeared.

  41.

  INSIDE THE V&A

  With the cafeteria wall behind him, and a broad, studious-looking guy with an Afro sipping an espresso in front of him for cover, Rémy wolfed down two egg sandwiches and two glasses of milk. The combination of carbs and protein would tide him over for a while. This was something else he’d learned from his homelessness: the all-consuming nature of hunger.

  The espresso-drinking guy in front of Rémy got up to leave. Rémy noticed the lanyard dangling around his neck. The name on the lanyard read ‘Mingus Franklin’.

  ‘Your parents were jazz lovers, sir,’ Rémy said, unable to help himself. ‘Right?’

  A wide smile split the man’s brown face. ‘It was a big name for a child, but thankfully I have grown into it,’ he said in a deep bass voice. ‘Are you a musician?’

  Rémy nodded. ‘Guitar. Horn too, and some harmonica.’

  Mingus Franklin whistled. ‘That’s a whole lot of music.’

  ‘Do you work here?’ Rémy asked.

  ‘I’m one of the curators on the new exhibition of Renaissance portraits we have running. It’s well worth a visit. Some of the portraits have never been seen in the UK before.’

  Rémy’s heart leaped. Finally, a break.

  ‘You wouldn’t by any chance know anything about the Moor of Cadiz?’ he blurted.

  42.

  INTO THE WARDROBE

  Em gazed into the black hole where the lift had been. The ceiling of the steel room was camouflaged to match the base of the cabinet.

  Matt! Matt! Can you hear me?

  The base of the cabinet shot upwards and Matt reappeared, legs crossed, sitting on the throne chair.

  ‘Get in, Em,’ he said. ‘You need to see what’s underneath this shop.’

  ‘I’m not getting in there.’

  ‘Don’t argue,’ said Matt.

  He pulled her into the lift and hit the button again. The lift plummeted like a ride at a carnival. Em’s stomach somersaulted. She slammed onto her knees as it came to a sudden pinpoint stop.

  Another set of doors slid open, revealing what looked like a nineteenth-century drawing room. An uncomfortable-looking loveseat with a curved back embedded with lots of pearl buttons stood against a wall covered with blue and yellow flocked wallpaper in a tulip and willow pattern. The loveseat was facing a freestanding, triptych mirror and a double portrait of two men, one sitting and one standing. An open wardrobe stuffed with clothes stood to the left of the mirror with a wooden tailor’s block in front. A table next to a small sink was neatly laid out with bricks of soap, a set of ivory brushes, bottles of creams and lotions, two vials of perfume, cotton pads, and a straight razor.

  Em ran her hands across the delicate wall covering. ‘This is original William Morris paper,’ she said. ‘This room’s been here for a long time.’

  ‘Big-time neat freak or what?’ said Matt. ‘Look how perfectly lined up and evenly spaced the items on that table are. All the pots and vials are in descending order of size.’

  Em rifled through the wardrobe. She lifted out a red coat with gold brocade and a black frock coat with tails.

  ‘A redcoat’s uniform from the American Revolutionary War,’ she said. ‘And a nineteenth-century opera coat. There are other costumes in here too, dating back years by the looks of them.’

  ‘Creepy portrait,’ Matt said. ‘Don’t you think?’

  Em looked back at the double portrait. A surge of sheer terror charged through her bones.

  ‘Do you feel that, Matt?’

  Matt’s vision blurred and his eyes began to tear uncontrollably. He nodded and took a step back from the painting. Em looked more closely.

  The wave of terror she felt was emanating from both figures in the double portrait, but it was stronger and more malevolent from the older man seated on a throne-like chair in the centre of the image. An open roll-top desk stood between the two figures. The desk was cluttered with items that Em knew from her art history studies represented the passions and characteristics of the sitters: pages of fluttering sheet music caught beneath a violin for their love of music, a cornucopia bursting with ripe fruit and a dripping flagon of wine for their appreciation of life’s pleasures. There was also an upside-down wooden globe and a shepherd’s compass lying on its side, these last two puzzled Em. When the items were placed the right way round in a painting, they represented the adoration of Christ and the spread of Christianity.

  She’d never seen them inverted before. Two scrolls tied with shimmering twine sat next to a strange-looking owl with lidless eyes, which seemed to be staring out at Em. A golden tablet the size of a small book, with strange glyphs etched on it, rested on the seated man’s thigh. Em had no clue what that stood for.

  ‘It looks like a Holbein,’ Matt said. ‘It’s an almost identical composition to his painting in the National Gallery, The Ambassadors.’

  ‘I can feel its malevolence,’ said Em.

  The image of the second figure was unfinished, a tall, slim, slightly blurred silhouette of soft colours and hazy lines filling the space. The telltale pale blue light of an animation pulsed like a soft strobe around the border of the canvas.

  ‘I don’t think Caravaggio is the only person loose from his art,’ said Em.

  She glanced at her brother. Matt had pushed his shades up into his hair and was wiping his face with his untucked T-shirt. His eyes were snapping through every colour in the spectrum as if someone was pointing a remote at them.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ she said sharply. ‘Turn away from that painting!’

  Keeping a safe distance, she took a quick video of the double portrait, making sure the images captured the pale blue light of its animation and the details of all the objects on the desk.

  ‘It’s like every horror movie we’ve ever watched,’ said Matt, fumbling to get his shades out of his hair. ‘All we need now is for the lift to shoot back up to the shop and trap us down here.’

  It did.

  ‘I knew I shouldn’t have said that,’ said Matt as he and Em stared in dismay at the closed lift doors. ‘We need to get out of here. Draw something!’

  ‘No time,’ said Em helplessly. ‘The lift is going to come down at any second.’

  ‘I guess we have to do this the old-fashioned way,’ said Matt. He yanked open the wardrobe doors. ‘Get inside, quick.’

  The twins threw themselves as far back into the wardrobe as possible, pushing through the clothes. Matt backed in on top of Em, scrambling to pull the wardrobe door closed behind him.

  Where are you now, Mr Tumnus?

  That would be funny if it wasn’t so terrifying, Matt. Move your leg, will you? It’s stabbing my kidney.

  They both heard the lift start its descent.

  Feel free to draw us out of here, Em!

  Em started drawing as fast as she’d ever done in her life. Matt used his body to shield her sketchpad, to hide any giveaway explosion of light, as the lift door opened with a hiss. Two sets of footsteps exited the lift. One set headed across the stone floor towards the loveseat, but the other walked directly towards the wardrobe.

  Any time now, Em!

  A hand grasped the wardrobe’s handle, turning it slowly. Em sensed a terrible bloodlust coming from the wardrobe door as she shaded the last part of her drawing.

  The twins tumbled out of the back of the wardrobe, l
anding in three feet of soft snow.

  ‘You have got to be kidding,’ Matt said, clocking the wintry forest scene and a lamp post in the clearing up ahead.

  ‘If you go on about Mr Tumnus moments before I start drawing,’ said Em a little grumpily, ‘what do you expect me to come up with?’

  ‘Somewhere warmer than Narnia,’ Matt growled. ‘My feet are freezing.’

  They waited ten minutes with the snow swirling around them. Then, cautiously, they climbed back inside the rear of the wardrobe, where Em tore up her drawing. Matt pressed his eye to the crack in the wardrobe door.

  ‘He’s gone into the painting,’ he said. ‘I think the coast is clear.’

  Climbing out of the wardrobe, the twins stared warily at what was now a large, square painting of two men, one sitting and one standing. Just like his hazy silhouette, the standing figure was tall and slim, legs spread, head tilted back, eyes forward, a facial expression suggesting curiosity, intelligence and something else. Cunning.

  A bluebottle fly buzzed lazily on the top of the gilt frame. Matt lifted a scattering of torn paper from the floor, and pieced it together.

  ‘If this painting does have something to do with Conjurors and the Camarilla,’ he said, ‘they have Animare helping them. Someone drew that guy back into the portrait.’

  It was clear from the way the figures were positioned that the seated man, soft and rounded and dressed in richly embroidered blue robes with pointed satin slippers, was the more powerful of the two. He was in stark contrast to the slim grace of the freshly returned figure who was wearing a red velvet frock coat and gold slippers. Three fingers were missing from his right hand.

  Em shivered. ‘I don’t like the look of either of them,’ she said. ‘We really need to get out of here.’

  The lift had never felt so loud. The twins left the emptied bookshelves as they were, horribly aware that the scattered books had already broadcast their break-in.

  ‘Close your eyes if you want,’ Matt said. ‘We’re leaving the same way we came in.’