The House Next Door Trilogy (Books 1-3)

by Jule Owen

  In reality, the documents are digital artefacts concerning his father, kept in a place as secret as he knows how to make it. He could not explain why he feels the need to hide these things, but ever since his father died, he has wanted to protect them, as if a sixth sense tells him they are not entirely safe in the open.

  Mostly they are photos and videos. But there is the order of service from his father’s funeral, condolence letters from family friends and relatives. Mathew also has a collection of news articles on the solar island in the North Sea which his father was visiting when the cyclone hit and scattered the solar energy station, and the 131 men and women working on it, like match wood.

  No one survived.

  He has letters from Helios Energy, his father’s company, documents easily pilfered from his mother’s not especially secure personal drive: one regretfully confirming his father’s death, another informing them that his life insurance was unfortunately limited by a clause in the policy, and then a further letter disclaiming any further responsibility for Mathew and his mother. There had been a court case in which the disaster victims’ families sued for compensation, but the judge ruled the storm was an act of God, for which the company was not responsible.

  Mathew scrolls through these documents and finds a video of Elgol, two summers ago, the last summer holiday before his father was killed. The video is of Mathew and his grandmother. She hasn’t changed at all. He himself is so much younger, happy and carefree. He feels a pang of jealousy and resentment towards the boy in the video, who doesn’t know what’s coming, how his life is going to be changed forever. They are in his grandmother’s garden, making a trellis. The frame is flat on the floor, half constructed. He’s holding the wood while his grandmother hammers.

  His father asks from behind the camera in his Lenz, “What are you doing?”

  Ju Chen says, “What does it look like? Switch that off and come and do something useful. You’re letting your son do all the work!”

  The camera in his father’s eye pans around. Hoshi is sitting on a bench under the kitchen window reading in the shade of the flowering honeysuckle, which casts shadows across her eyes.

  Mathew hears his own idiotic laughter off-screen. His father is pulling faces at his mother. She grabs her Paper and walks away. She doesn’t smile. Before the video ends, his father’s pleading voice says, “Hoshi. Hoshi, come on . . .” and the video terminates.

  That last summer before his father died, his parents did nothing but row.

  It’s four o’clock. Back in his bedroom, Mathew goes to his window.

  A car comes smoothly to a stop outside Gen Lacey’s house. The girl, Clara, is on the pavement. She wears a calm, impassive expression, but her eyes scan the road. Like most people these days, she’s on her guard. Mathew knows she can’t see his face, but she glances in his direction, perhaps scanning his broadcast data. Her hair is around her shoulders. She brushes a strand of it from her eyes with one large, long-fingered hand, tucking it behind an ear. She pauses only a moment. It’s too hot to linger. Then she disappears from sight.

  Mathew looks across to the bay window of the house next door and for a second time sees the man with the deep-set eyes, staring at the space Clara Barculo occupied a moment before. Again Lestrange’s head snaps to the side, and those dark, dead eyes bore into Mathew like they are drilling for oil. In the next heartbeat, he steps back into the shadows of the room.

  Mr Lestrange is watching the pianist, Mathew is sure of it now. But why? And should he tell her? What would he say?

  He goes downstairs, realising with surprise that he’s shaking.

  With O’Malley butting against him and the dragons dive-bombing him as he kneels on the floor, he installs his tiny amplifier in the front room, in a gap behind the skirting boards, under a loose flap of wallpaper. It’s a place his mother is unlikely to discover and Leibniz is unlikely to disturb while cleaning.

  It’s rigged so the audio stream comes through to his e-Pin. He switches on the feed now, setting it to record, so he’ll be able to listen to the music again afterwards. The amplifier is so sensitive it detects footsteps in Gen’s house. The hinge of an inner door squeaks, and he imagines Gen Lacey and her student entering the front room, where he knows she keeps her grand piano.

  “Was your journey okay?” Gen asks.

  “Yes, fine. The car cuts across town. We take a bit of a detour, but there are fewer cars on the road than normal, so it takes the same time as the direct route nearer the river. I didn’t notice anything too unusual, except no one’s about, there’s no people walking around. It’s like Sunday morning all day, every day.”

  “How are your parents coping?”

  “Oh, they’re fine. Since they’re teachers, they’re stuck at home, doing their supervision and lesson authoring from there. I think they’re enjoying it, actually.”

  “I have to say, it doesn’t make a huge amount of difference to me, either. Now what do you want to work on today?”

  “I’m struggling with the opening piece.”

  “Honestly, Clara, I think you’re worrying over nothing. You still have plenty of time to prepare, and the way you’re playing, there’s very little work to do.”

  “The expression isn’t right,” the girl says. “Technically, it’s fine, but it’s not what I want to say.”

  “Why don’t you start? I’ll listen, and then we’ll discuss.”

  Mathew sits on the floor with his back to the wall, the sound coming from the amplifier. His head resting against the wallpaper, he closes his eyes. O’Malley climbs into his lap and falls asleep.

  Memories of his father flood back, in particular his love of classical piano music. For the past two years it has felt dangerous to listen to any kind of music, to do anything to rouse emotion. He has avoided films and games with stories of fathers and tales of storms and disasters. It shouldn’t surprise him that he hasn’t been able to listen to music he closely associates with his father. But now, as his memory of his father recedes, he wants to pull him back. The fear of losing him forever is greater than the fear of feeling.

  When he was five or six years old, his father sat him down and made him listen to Chopin’s Nocturnes and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Afterwards he listened to these pieces over and over, until they wore into him. Searching for the melodies, straining to find whatever meaning his father found in them. Soren loved a wide range of composers, but most of all, he loved Bach. Bach, he told Mathew, is the mathematician’s music. It’s the music of logic, of science. “This music feeds your brain, Mathew.”

  The music is all Mathew lets in for the next hour, broken only by discussions between Clara and her teacher. Clara’s anxious search for her own version of perfection is at odds with the sublime emotions the music generates.

  Listening, absorbed in her playing, he is calm.

  He’s so lost in the place in his head where the music has sent him, it takes him a moment to realise Clara has stopped playing and is saying goodbye to Gen.

  He scrambles up and gets to the window in time to watch her disappear into her car, the Aegis guard shutting the door.

  The guard scans around the road and then suddenly glares directly at Mathew.

  He receives an incoming message from the guard, not encrypted. Open. The equivalent of shouting, it says:

  Haven’t you got something better to do, weirdo?

  The guard grins or snarls, it’s hard to tell which, and then gets into the front seat.

  Mathew steps back as if slapped.

  The autonomous vehicle does a mathematically precise three-point turn and drives away. The passenger window winds down and Mathew watches Clara, who must have also received the message, craning her neck to search for the “weirdo” the guard yelled at. She does not catch sight of him, but she will have seen his name and broadcast data again.

  He is angry, embarrassed, flustered, and, because of this, he has forgotten about Mr Lestrange, but as he turns away from the window, he catch
es a glimpse of a shadowy figure retreating from the light in the semi-darkness of the house next door.

  Mr Lestrange is far weirder than I am. It’s much creepier for a grown man to be staring at a fifteen-year-old from his bedroom window than it is for me to do it. So why did the guard confront me and not him?

  Then he realises. The guard didn’t confront Lestrange because his surveillance gear didn’t detect him.

  Later, as he sits with his mother while she eats her late-night supper, she notices his faraway look. “Penny for them,” she says.

  “Mr Lestrange.”

  “Him again. What has prompted this?”

  “We know nothing about him. Don’t you think it’s odd?”

  His mother raises an eyebrow. “No. I don’t think it’s odd at all that you don’t know him.”

  “Before the curfew, did he leave the house?”

  “I don’t know, Mathew. I leave early in the morning and come back late at night. You’re more likely to have run into him than I am.”

  “I don’t remember ever seeing him.”

  “Do you remember noticing Gen walking down the street?”

  Mathew frowns. “I’m sure I do.”

  “Gen’s a bad example. You’ve known her since you were a baby. Do you know Mary in the house opposite?”

  Mathew shakes his head. “I didn’t even know there was a Mary opposite.”

  “Well, then.”

  “But you notice people. You must have spoken to Mr Lestrange at some point, over the garden fence or in the porch. Do you remember what he’s like?”

  She searches her memory, “D’you know? I couldn’t tell you.”

  “But you met him, didn’t you?”

  “I think that was your father.”

  “You’ve never met him?”

  “Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever have.”

  7 Eva Aslanova’s Virtual World

  “Don’t let O’Malley out,” Hoshi says, shutting the door behind her.

  “I won’t!” he shouts after her.

  Mathew shoves off his bedclothes, goes to the window, and watches his mother’s car pull away and disappear around the end of the road.

  The sun is already beating down, melting the tarmac. The doors of the houses on Pickervance Road are all shut, and the street is deserted and still, as it has been each day of the All-Day Curfew. The silence is interrupted only by the black Aegis cars coming to take the few people who have city passes to and from work and the Hydroponic City and Techno Food delivery trucks bringing supplies to the housebound residents.

  In the kitchen, Mathew allows Leibniz to make him breakfast, while he watches a report on the Canvas on the multinational Vulcan Energy and Power Services – VEPS, for short – mining Helium 3 on the moon for use in the still experimental nuclear fusion power stations on earth.

  The newsreader says, “VEPS has bought a 15 per cent stake in the part-privately financed NATO Battlestar Space Security System, or B3S, earth’s first line of defence against asteroid bombardment. VEPS’s board justified the investment to shareholders, saying the Battlestar would be used to displace incoming moon-bound asteroids, on course to hit the VEPS Moonbase, now permanently manned. A spokesperson representing both companies said the additional investment would partly fund the development of a further Battlestar.”

  Mathew laughs, remembering what Cadmus Silverwood had said in the Psychopomp report about rumours of a new Battlestar. He and everyone else on the face of the planet knows the main purpose of the Battlestars is to control satellite-based rocket launchers that are targeted at strategic locations on earth.

  They are there to keep everyone in his or her place.

  Mathew vaguely thinks about what Silverwood said about the war.

  Leibniz clears the dishes.

  Mathew has an appointment in the Darkroom. Nan Absolem has arranged a meeting with the Russian girl who builds virtual worlds.

  Eva Aslanova is slightly younger than Mathew. She is so blonde her fine hair is almost white, as white as her skin. In the Darkroom she sits in an armchair made to seem enormous by her tiny frame. She frowns constantly, and doing so over many years has actually made creases in her forehead. He is unable to raise a smile from her, but he thinks he catches something sparkling in her eyes as she watches the dragons fly around the room.

  “Why did you make dragons?” she asks him. There’s only a tiny delay when speaking via simultaneous translation. Eva doesn’t speak a word of English, and Mathew certainly isn’t confident speaking Russian. “It strikes me as . . .” she begins.

  “Frivolous?”

  “I was going to say childish.”

  Shame the auto-translate function doesn’t work on manners and cultural differences, Mathew thinks. Eva is mercilessly direct.

  “I wanted to make them real. Dragons have a different meaning in my father and grandmother’s cultures. My mother is Japanese, my grandmother is Chinese. My father was Danish.”

  “Was?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Eva doesn’t say “I’m sorry” or react in any way to this news. Mathew feels relieved and grateful because it means he doesn’t have to reply, “It’s okay,” as he normally does. Because it isn’t. It isn’t okay at all.

  “In my father’s culture dragons are evil creatures that kill and terrify people. They have to be defeated by a brave warrior. In my grandmother’s culture they are mystical and lucky: They protect us and save us. My grandmother is always trying to teach me Chinese culture because she thinks I will never learn to appreciate it living here. She thinks I’ll forget my roots.”

  “You are a foreigner in the country you live in.”

  “No.”

  “You said your grandmother thinks you are forgetting who you are.”

  “It may be what my grandmother thinks, but it’s not what I think. I’m British.”

  Eva accepts this, or is too bored to pursue it. “I understand why you wanted to make the dragons now,” she says, and Mathew considers it strange she thinks he’d appreciate her approval, but in a way he does. She asks, “Why is your mother Japanese and your grandmother Chinese?”

  “My grandfather, my mother’s father, was a Japanese businessman. He moved to China for a job and never left.”

  “And how did your mother and grandmother come to England?”

  “My mother came here on an internship. She works for Panacea’s biotechnology division. They have offices in China and in most major cities worldwide. She wanted to visit England, because her secondary subject at college was English. She only intended to come for a year, but she met my father, and they fell in love and got married. Her company helped with the visa arrangements, and so she stayed.”

  “And why is your grandmother living in England?”

  “She lives in Scotland now, but she came a few years after my mother, when my grandfather died, to get away from the trouble in China caused by drought and flooding. My mother invited her for a long holiday, and they managed to get her indefinite leave to remain on compassionate grounds.”

  “Do you miss your father?”

  “Of course I do! What kind of question is that?”

  “It’s a valid question. Just because he was your father it doesn’t mean you liked him. I loathe mine. I wouldn’t care if he wasn’t here anymore. My brothers are all he cares about. They are all stupid and are still struggling to pass their foundation exams even though they are older than me. He’s a Neanderthal and thinks women don’t need to be educated and they’re only fit to be wives.”

  “So how come you are able to program and study?”

  “I have a good teacher, and my mother isn’t as docile as my father thinks she is.”

  “Why are you building a virtual world?”

  “Because I can, because it has all kinds of practical uses. It’s officially an environmental project. I’m building worlds and running climate models in them to test the impact of pollution on the world’s ecological systems. But I orig
inally just wanted to build a world with no people in it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. Haven’t you ever wished you could have the world to yourself for a while? Haven’t you ever wished there were vast expanses of an unpopulated world for you to explore alone?”

  “Now you come to mention it, it is appealing.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But then, you won’t want my dragons wandering around in your world.”

  “It’s not an issue, is it? The whole point of my project is that I replicate my worlds for scenario testing. We’ll mirror my world, and you can have two or more, as many as you like, parallel versions of it. Versions to split off and do different things with. Whatever you imagine. I don’t mind if we clone one of my worlds for you to use. I think it might be interesting.”

  “What happens when you add new territories? Would they synch to my version?”

  “Yes. Your dragons will have an ever-expanding world to live in, rather than being confined to your house. And you’ll be able to meet your dragons there – and me as well, if you like.”

  “I’d like it very much, Eva Aslanova.”