Conjuror

by John

  ‘Damn! It’s hot,’ said Rémy, fanning himself.

  Matt looked at his phone. ‘It’s thirty-five degrees. High nineties Fahrenheit. Hot as hell, basically, and the valley is going to be worse.’

  ‘I knew we should have changed before we left Scotland,’ said Em.

  ‘We didn’t have time,’ said Matt, ponytailing his hair. ‘If we hadn’t faded straightaway, Vaughn would have locked us all up until his other agents arrived. We were lucky we got out when we did.’

  ‘I’ve got a little cash left from my busking,’ said Rémy. ‘I can help pay for some supplies at least.’

  Em patted Rémy’s arm. ‘Keep your money. Matt and I still have most of our Orion cash. It’s not as if fading cost us anything to get here.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ said Matt, rolling his neck muscles and flexing his fingers.

  After a quick shopping spree at a tourist market on the other side of the square where they bought water, a box of granola bars, a map and a splashy-coloured summer dress for Em, one that went with her black boots, they rented a locker at the train station where they locked up their phones. If they were going to investigate this without Orion’s help, they couldn’t allow their phones to be tracked.

  Em spread the map of the area out on a nearby bench.

  ‘The village of Olivera is about 140 kilometres from here. No way are we hiking that in this heat. It’ll take us days, and we don’t have days. We need to find the painting before Vaughn or the Camarilla find us.’

  ‘You’re sure Olivera is the village in your mother’s journal?’ Matt checked.

  ‘Positive,’ said Rémy. ‘The Grand Inquisitor’s family owned all the land surrounding the village. My mom tracked the painting’s provenance to a wealthy family living near the village.’

  ‘A car?’ suggested Em.

  ‘We’re not old enough to rent one,’ Rémy pointed out.

  Em pulled a sketchpad from her messenger bag and vanished round the corner. Five minutes later, she returned, waving a set of car keys in front of the two boys.

  ‘Our carriage awaits,’ she said.

  Round the corner, in the station’s loading zone, Em popped the boot on a shiny red Volkswagen Eos convertible. The twins tossed their backpacks inside. Rémy set his guitar case next to them.

  ‘I’ve always wanted one of these,’ said Em, patting the car as she slammed the boot and pulled open the driver’s door.

  Matt moved in front of her. ‘No way. I’m driving. You’re a maniac behind the wheel.’

  ‘My animation,’ said Em as she shoved him straight back. ‘I’m driving.’

  ‘Shotgun,’ said Rémy, quickly jumping into the passenger’s seat.

  Matt had no choice but to fold himself, grumbling, into the narrow back seats.

  *

  If it hadn’t been for the dark reasons behind this road trip, they might have actually enjoyed the journey. They decided to avoid the motorway, so their route took them deeper into the Spanish countryside. The landscape here was stunning, the red mountains dotted with castles, churches and rugged villages tucked into the side of the hills.

  Rémy kept his eyes glued to his mother’s journal, reading out bits he thought were relevant.

  ‘According to this,’ he said, ‘the village we want is beyond this range of mountains.’

  As she drove, Em’s attention wandered away from Rémy’s voice to other parts of his body. He was wearing a pair of Matt’s Ray-Bans, and had rolled his T-shirt up to his shoulders. He was in fine shape. Em wondered if he worked out.

  If you wanted to look at him instead of the road, you should have sat back here. I’ve a fine view.

  All you can see are his legs and his… Get out of my head, Mattie!

  ‘Did you hear anything I said?’ asked Rémy.

  Em blinked at Rémy. ‘Sorry, what?’

  Rémy looked at her. ‘Are you guys telepathic? You both zoned out on me.’

  ‘Bad twin habit,’ said Matt, sitting up. ‘Sorry.’

  Rémy grinned. ‘I noticed you doing it in Scotland. It must be cool.’

  Em wants to ki-iss you, Em wants to lo-ove you…

  ‘Sometimes it’s a pain in the arse,’ said Em, a little more loudly than normal. ‘What were you saying?’

  ‘I was saying, there’s more about the Grand Inquisitor in Mom’s journal than I thought. Mom used a musical cipher to code chunks of what she had written.’ Rémy took off his shades and rubbed his eyes. ‘The Professor helped me break it. In the late fifteenth century Cardinal Rafael Oscuro, Grand Inquisitor to the King and Queen of Spain, bought the village of Olivera and the remains of a Moorish castle on an outcrop of the mountain. He built his palace around the ruins of that castle to give himself extra protection from his growing number of enemies. Then, around 1510, the village, the land, castle and palace, everything was all suddenly deeded to the Trastámara family for very little money.’

  ‘The Trastámara must be part of the Camarilla,’ said Matt.

  ‘1510 is around the time the portrait was painted,’ Em commented, kicking the car into a lower gear as they climbed higher.

  ‘Exactly. The Grand Inquisitor must have sold up and climbed into the painting to hide for a couple of hundred years.’

  ‘But why?’ asked Matt.

  ‘Something big must have happened,’ said Rémy.

  Up ahead the road narrowed and got steeper. They all felt their ears pop. Suddenly the road opened up to a hairpin bend. Em braked hard, skidding the rear tyres.

  ‘Let’s try to get there in one piece, Em!’ Matt shouted from the back.

  ‘All right, that’s enough!’

  After two more tight curves and a hill that forced Em to keep her fingers on the handbrake for backup, they reached Olivera.

  Every building and structure in the village was white, including a small church with tiled steps leading to a massive arched door. The church functioned as the tourist centre for the area. A café, a car-repair garage, a gallery and a taverna stood in a horseshoe in front of the church.

  Em pulled the car over and parked next to a row of houses, indistinguishable from each other except for the bold colour of their doors. As she opened the car door, she blenched.

  ‘God, what is that horrible smell?’

  ‘What smell?’ Matt jumped from the back of the car and stretched his arms and legs. ‘I don’t smell much of anything. Maybe the clay? Or something from the café?’

  Em got out of the car and looked up at the church directly ahead. ‘It’s this place. It’s foul. It smells like death and… I’m going to be sick.’

  Em gagged and threw up in the gutter.

  ‘Is she OK?’ Rémy asked Matt in alarm.

  ‘It’s a thing. She’ll be fine. She senses intense emotions from a place. Sometimes they can make her sick.’

  After a few minutes, a bottle of water and a stick of gum, Em stood with the boys staring at a postcard-perfect place that was screaming in pain.

  52.

  DRIVING WHILE INVISIBLE

  The ruins of the castle and palace were visible on an outcrop of the hillside above the village. Shading his eyes, Matt could see the thin dirt trail they’d climbed, winding a path through the scrub.

  ‘Probably take us around an hour to hike that path and get to that highest point,’ he said, indicating a crag above the palace’s broken walls.

  Rémy laid a hand on Em’s back. ‘You OK to climb?’

  Matt noticed how the touch of Rémy’s hand brought a little colour back into Em’s cheeks. ‘Right now,’ she said, ‘I can’t leave this place fast enough.’

  They left the car parked in front of the café under the watchful eyes of a handful of locals, eating tapas and drinking red wine. Shouldering their backpacks, the three of them headed for the path.

  It was a stiff climb. At what remained of the arched front entrance to the palace, they stopped for breath and looked back down along the dusty path towards the village. Two men from t
he taverna were standing out in the middle of the road, observing their progress.

  ‘We’re being watched,’ said Rémy.

  ‘We’re probably the most interesting thing that’s happened to this place in five centuries,’ said Matt.

  ‘Keep going. I want to get an overview from that crag,’ said Rémy. ‘We can climb round from the back.’

  They hiked until it was clear they could no longer be seen from the village. They were soaked with sweat. The climb had taken them longer than they’d hoped. On the crag, they had a clear view of what remained of the palace and its gardens, with its broken statuary and its round reflecting pools long run dry. It was a dust bowl of yellow scrub brush, clusters of fat cacti, bulging agave plants popping with pink flowers and a few miniature palm trees.

  The palace itself was an empty shell, though its former magnificence was clear from its outline. Pieces of inlaid decorative tiles remained in the sandstone walls, and beneath the foundation were the remains of a long narrow rectangular bath with one side still tiled in a red scarab design.

  Everything was still. Too still.

  ‘Have you noticed?’ said Matt as they headed down towards the palace entrance. ‘We’ve not seen a single creature since we left the village. No birds. No insects. Only a few shrubs and cacti.’

  He felt his eyes twitching and watering. Trails of light were shooting past his vision and he was finding it difficult to keep his balance.

  ‘You need to do it soon,’ Em said, noticing. ‘Before it gets dark.’

  Matt grimaced. ‘I’ve never done it deliberately before. What if it doesn’t work?’

  ‘It’ll work,’ said Em with confidence.

  ‘My sister,’ said Matt, glancing at Rémy. ‘Ever the optimist.’

  ‘All we need are sketches of what you see. And whatever happens, don’t get involved in the scene,’ said Em. ‘Promise. No matter what. Stay out of it.’

  ‘Promise.’

  Mean it.

  I mean it.

  They moved beneath the crumbling archway and walked quickly across the dried-up gardens, heading for what was left of the palace itself.

  ‘I smell lilies,’ said Em, jogging to catch up with the long strides of the two boys.

  ‘I smell danger.’ Rémy pointed to the distant dust trail of a vehicle heading up the road from the village. ‘Something tells me they aren’t driving this way for a chat.’

  ‘I’ve an idea,’ said Matt, ducking under a crumbled arched gateway in the wall. ‘It might buy me some time so that I can concentrate on the past without the present interrupting.’

  He swiftly outlined his plan.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Em.

  ‘I hate to leave you.’ Rémy glanced unhappily at the dust trail again. ‘This is my fight after all.’

  ‘It’s our fight now,’ said Matt. ‘Go.’

  Em gave a swift nod. Taking Rémy’s hand, she dragged him back towards the archway and the dusty, curving road. To meet whoever was coming head on.

  *

  An old yellow Ford pick-up truck charged along the dusty road towards them. It was impossible to see who was behind the wheel, or how many were packed into its cab.

  Em and Rémy stepped out into the road, waving at the truck to stop.

  The truck skidded to the kerb in a cloud of dust. The engine idled for a second, then sputtered and died. No one jumped out.

  ‘Can you see who’s inside?’ asked Rémy quietly as they approached the vehicle.

  Em cupped her hands to her eyes. The glare from the setting sun was blinding. ‘Something’s wrong,’ she said. ‘I can’t sense anything. I… it’s like the truck’s empty.’

  Rémy slid his harmonica from his pocket, rolling it nervously in his hand.

  ‘That’s impossible. Someone has to be driving, right?’ He squinted at the truck. ‘Maybe it’s an animation from someone like you.’

  The cloud swirled around the cab. The silence stretched.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ said Em. ‘We should go back and get Matt.’

  ‘Em, we can’t. We have to let him finish what he’s doing, or this whole trip is pointless. Let me try something.’

  Watching the truck carefully, Rémy pulled Em off the dusty road and over to a scrub-filled ditch.

  ‘I’m going to play. See if I can draw them out. Block your ears.’

  Em inhaled and exhaled, closing her eyes and shoving her fingers in her ears.

  ‘Go!’

  Rémy put his harmonica to his lips. He began with a blues riff and then moved to a jaunty march, letting the music build. The music thickened into mist. With a flick of the wrist so fast that Em almost missed it, he blasted the truck with a fast screaming chord. The music swirled away into the trees, the notes caught in the branches for a beat, shaking the leaves before dispersing into the sky like embers from a dying fire.

  The truck doors flew open and a man in jeans and a filthy white T-shirt rolled from the cab to the ground.

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him,’ said Rémy breathlessly as Em ran to the man and kneeled to check his pulse.

  ‘You didn’t. He’s been drugged. Something was controlling him as he drove—’

  Em sensed the swarm before she saw it.

  ‘It’s trap, Rémy,’ she shouted. ‘Run!’

  ‘I’m not leaving you here!’

  A legion of fat flies rose from the bed of the truck. A tall man with curling blond hair and a tailored black suit floated in the midst of the thick, swarming mass, his thin fingers holding a pitch pipe at his lips.

  Before Em could reach for her sketchpad or Rémy for his harmonica, Don Grigori began to play.

  The wild, keening sound brought Em to her knees. The flies were on her immediately, filling her mouth and her mind. Her last thoughts were of Rémy watching her as if from behind a leaded-glass window, unable to reach her.

  53.

  TURN ROUND

  Matt had tucked himself into a cleft in the crumbling wall, his sketchpad resting on his knees. He was in the best position he could find. With the palace’s cracked foundations, tiled remains of the baths and the stone pillars that had once held up the whole structure squarely in his sight, he began to draw.

  He sketched the Grand Inquisitor’s palace as he imagined it had once looked, filling in with smudges and shadows the weight of its walls and the grandeur of its balconies. He imagined the tiles in their full glory, the baths with their swirling pattern of red scarab beetles, yellows and blues bursting from the grey of his drawing, flashes of light and colour sparking from his charcoal as he drew.

  He began to blink uncontrollably, the extra, thin shimmering membrane altering his vision. He blinked again, this time controlling how quickly it flicked across his vision. Blood, thick and red, was seeping through the cracks between the tiles like treacle. Matt saw a vast bath, filled with scarlet water that matched the scarab tiling, the naked limbs of a boy struggling against a man with the knife of a butcher, his apron spattered with blood…

  Matt gagged and blinked, hard and fast.

  He flipped to another sheet.

  Don’t think about what you just saw. Don’t think… Vomit later.

  His fingers danced across the paper as his imagination took full control. The palace began to emerge in its full Renaissance glory, as if he was watching a stop-motion film. And then the images all slowed to a shimmering halt, and sound, like that of a soprano’s voice exploding with nails, fractured his consciousness.

  Tears of blood fell from his eyes on to the paper. He blindly wiped them with the back of his hand, drawing, still drawing…

  The ground shook with a deafening boom and the palace collapsed before Matt, a mass of rubble and rocks, its entire apron covered in red beetles twitching to their deaths.

  A man in a brown skullcap, a tan tunic and green breeches with an artist’s pouch over his shoulder appeared at the bottom of the rubble. Matt strained to see his face.

  Turn round! Turn round! />
  The artist began to draw something on a piece of parchment. Steps burst into life, stretching up the palace wall to the first floor. Quickly, the artist began to climb, taking the steps two at a time, staying close to the wall, clearly afraid of being seen. Midway, he turned, as if he’d heard the sound of Matt’s charcoal scratching across the paper.

  Got you!

  The image shimmered, changed. Matt blinked once, twice. The artist was now climbing back down the stairs clutching something beneath his arm, an expression of horror on his face. Matt felt fear and regret and resolve, then lost the connection as the artist erased his drawing and the stairs vanished into the dust.

  A small black boy, dressed in a filthy sackcloth tunic, crawled out from a gap between two slabs of marble. Matt flipped to another page frantically and sketched him, capturing the outline of his face before the child, too, vanished.

  A tall, black man covered in chalky dust now stood at the maw of the palace balcony. He stood erect, in spite of his shredded robes and what looked like a deep wound in his thigh, bound in a bloody yellow scarf. The man had knives tucked in bands of leather across his broad chest and a sword sheathed at his hip. The child that had crawled from between the marble slabs was in his arms. Keeping hold of his charge, the man leaped from the balcony and slid down the rubble, disappearing towards the edge of Matt’s vision.

  Matt sketched furiously, his fingers on fire, his imagination beginning to tear at the edges as a second, shadowy figure appeared on the shattered balcony. An icy hand gripped Matt’s heart.

  One second more. Just one second more…

  The shadowy figure had seen him. Now it was standing directly in front of him, trying to get into his mind…

  Matt backed up against the wall, but he had nowhere to go. His fingers were still moving, but slower now, his imagination losing its grip on the past. He sketched on, desperately, his blood dripping freely on to the paper. He fought the figure off with every part of his mind, using his blood as ink to capture its eyes. The figure reached towards him, trying to grab his sketchpad, the ghastly stumps of three fingers touching Matt’s skin.