Em tilted her head, revealing the injuries to her scalp. Matt turned white.
‘One minute, my scalp was tingling,’ Em said. ‘And the next, snakes were tearing through my brain. I don’t remember much after that.’
‘Probably good that you don’t,’ said Two, his beefy hands gripping the arms of the wheelchair.
‘Jesus,’ said Matt. ‘Snakes?’
Sotto hit the button for the cafeteria at the elevators. No one spoke until they reached the counter, where they ordered Coke and lattes.
‘Where’s Rémy?’ asked Sotto as they sat at a table by the window.
Two shrugged and picked at the small puncture wound at his neck. ‘He was gone before I came to. Don’t know what happened to him.’
‘He left this note.’ Em pulled out the torn page and handed it to Matt.
‘He left me one too,’ said Two.
Em read hers first.
My family died protecting me. I never had friends before you two. But I can't let you fight my battles. I will use myself as bait and stop the Camarilla when I get close. I will end this on my own. Go back to Scotland. Be safe.
Love Rémy
Two unfolded his note.
Em's in the roof. She's hurt. Get her to the Art Institute fast. Love you both. I may not see you again. Thanks for being my brothers.
River City
‘Damn fool,’ said Sotto, slapping the table.
‘Em,’ said Matt. ‘Can you remember what paintings here other than the Seurat have exits?’
Em leaned back in the wheelchair and closed her eyes. ‘None of the European works here have one. We need to find something by an American Animare.’
‘What about Jacob Lawrence?’ Sotto suggested. ‘Two of my favourites are on loan here.’
They left the cafeteria the same way they came in. With Sotto in the lead, they breezed through a series of galleries until they reached the gallery of modern American art.
The Jacob Lawrence was glorious. It had energy and brilliant colours, and a crowd of African-American men and women in chunky cubist design marching across a bridge towards a rabid angry wolf.
‘It’s about standing up,’ said Sotto. ‘The wolf was slavery, but it could be anythin’.’
‘It’s stunning,’ said Matt, gazing at the painting. ‘But it isn’t going to work. We need a painting with another painting inside it. That’s how we can travel, you see.’
‘What about The Visitors?’ Sotto nodded at a second Lawrence painting.
As soon as Matt looked at The Visitors, he knew it would work. But where it would take them, he had no idea. The painting was of a parlour filled with guests, family members of the sick person in the bed visible through the bedroom door in the background. In the bedroom below a window depicted the skyline of Harlem. Matt could see the telltale glow of an exit painting resting behind the bed.
‘Help me with Em,’ said Matt, pulling his pad from his jacket pocket.
Two scooped Em from the chair. Matt enveloped his sister in his arms.
‘Em, I need you to put your legs round my waist,’ he instructed.
Em’s head flopped against his shoulder. Matt felt her pain wash over him, and something else was wrapped inside it. Terror. A long aluminium tube pressed against his neck.
‘Is that Caravaggio’s canvas?’ he asked.
Em was too exhausted to speak aloud. It’s safe for now, she whispered in Matt’s mind.
The suspicious guards were back.
‘You better get moving,’ said Two.
‘Do what you got to. And then find our boy,’ said Sotto, resting his hand on Matt’s shoulder.
Matt nodded at Two. ‘Thanks for getting her back here. And I’m sorry, but we need to ask you one more thing.’
*
There was a terrible commotion in the gallery minutes later. Two heaved a gasp and collapsed on the floor blocking the entrance to the gallery, his body twitching, drool running to his chin.
‘Call 911!’ yelled Sotto, skidding across the floor to his brother’s side and ripping open Two’s jacket and shirt as if about to start CPR. ‘He’s having a heart attack.’
The guards swarmed from the closest galleries, walkie-talkies squawking, kneeling next to Sotto. A crowd gathered, standing off at a polite distance, phones out. Two rolled his eyes back in his head, but not before noting how Matt and Em’s bodies paled and shrank, or how two thick black arms were stretching out from the painting, wrapping themselves round the siblings and drawing them into the green-and-purple parlour.
FOURTH MOVEMENT
‘Come forth … so the chosen
shall inherit the earth.’
Book of Songs
53.
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
The arms belonged to an elderly black man in a white shirt, black tie and a grey waistcoat. A black woman in a red apron, eating cake at a yellow table, smiled warmly at Matt and Em as they surged past her in a frisson of light.
An immaculately coiffed woman stood up from a couch. ‘Oh, my,’ she said, her pearl earrings like tiny strobe lights winking every time she moved her head. ‘Put that poor child on the sofa. Jefferson, move.’
Jefferson moved. Matt carried a dazed Em to the couch, where the woman pulled a yellow-and-red tasselled blanket over her. Matt inhaled deeply, his hands trembling. It had been a while since he’d faded without Em’s help. His eyelids were fluttering like a wasp’s wings, distorting his vision so that he was seeing this world through a shattered lens set on a green filter.
‘You’d better sit too, boy,’ said the older man in the waistcoat, offering his wooden chair next to the kitchen door. ‘You look bushed. The name’s August.’ He nodded towards the woman in the pearl earrings. ‘My daughter, Evie. Her husband, Jefferson. That’s Brother Paul on the chair. My youngest, Ella, with baby Franklin. My sister, Flo, is in the kitchen and Reverend Gaines is with Ambuya, our mother.’ He looked into Matt’s kaleidoscope eyes. ‘You’re welcome here.’
‘The Calder twins,’ said Brother Paul, crossing his legs, his accent a lilting southern drawl. ‘Heard ’bout y’all.’
‘Good things, I hope,’ said Matt nervously.
‘Depends,’ he said, his stare focused and penetrating. ‘What y’all gonna do ’bout Rémy?’
Matt’s eyes finally stilled. ‘You know about Rémy?’
‘You think y’all the only ones with secrets and ways to share them?’ said Brother Paul, looking down his long nose at Matt.
Matt wasn’t sure if he meant Animare, white people or people outside this painted space. ‘I need a safe place to let my sister rest while I get help for her and for Rémy. He appears to have gone off on his own.’
‘To do what?’ asked August, the man in the waistcoat.
‘He thinks he can stop the Camarilla by himself,’ said Matt.
‘Stop the rise of the Second Kingdom, you mean,’ said Brother Paul.
So they knew about the Second Kingdom too. Matt nodded.
‘Can he?’ said Evie, straightening her red shawl over her thin shoulders. ‘Stop the rising evil by himself?’
‘Honestly?’ said Matt, tugging his shades from his hair and slipping them on. ‘I doubt it. Not on his own.’
‘Come to me,’ said a quiet voice from the brass bed in the background of the painted space.
Matt stood at the side of the bed. He was facing a skinny minister who was comforting its elderly occupant. A slash of white paint marked the minister’s collar, in stark contrast to his featureless face, where his expression was simply a series of thick strokes of black paint.
The old woman in the bed had eyes like black marbles and her face was scarred at the hinges of her chapped lips. She was horrible and beautiful at the same time. Matt perched cautiously on the edge of the bed. She crooked her finger. He leaned closer. She smelled of eucalyptus and warm bread.
‘The first Conjuror came to us in a slave ship,’ Ambuya whispered. Her words were slurred, but they dripped
with defiance. ‘He made the ultimate sacrifice so that your world could remain in balance.’
Her hand shot out from under her red blanket and grabbed Matt’s. Her fingers were skeletal, her skin like tissue paper over her bones, but her grip was strong. She squeezed his hand and hope shot up his arm. His scalp tingled, and his eyes fluttered furiously for a second until his vision corrected so that it was close to normal sight, or as close as it ever was. He felt more awake than he had all day.
‘Leave your sister with us,’ said the old woman. ‘She’ll be safe till your return. Use the mirror. It’ll take you where you imagine you need to be.’
‘The mirror?’ Matt had never heard of using anything other than a painting as a way to fade.
‘Y’all don’t get to have everything,’ she said, accepting a sip of iced water from the faceless minister.
Set in an elegant green frame, the mirror was as purple as the thick carpet and the high-backed velvet chair from which Brother Paul continued to watch Matt suspiciously. It hung between two candelabra shaped like tree branches, and for the first time Matt noticed the way that it matched a mirror on the old woman’s nightstand.
He looked down at his sister on the couch. I’ll be back with help, Em.
What about the painting?
It’s safer with you than with me. I’m not sure where I’m going to end up.
Be careful. I love you, Mattie.
Ella shifted baby Franklin to one side and moved away from the mirror. Matt stared into its swirling purple and began to sketch with frenzied, focused strokes.
54.
A DISTURBING DARKNESS
Rémy heard the music first. Someone near him was playing a violin off-key, the chords dissonant and despairing. Disoriented, groggy and with dread weighing heavy on his chest, he opened his eyes.
The darkness around him was beyond anything he’d experienced before. It had mass. It had a smell. Like syrup on his eyelids. Like wet dog and blood and shit and ripe fruit and turpentine.
Where the hell was he?
His body felt pummelled, but inside his head was light and airy, disconnected from reality. Like the way he’d felt after getting his tonsils removed, or when he’d smoked weed with Sotto on his balcony in Chicago. Warily, he forced himself to sit still for a minute, breathing through his mouth until his eyes adjusted to the gloom. His hands were numb, pinned under him as if he’d been unceremoniously dumped beneath…
Beneath a tree.
His eyes were adjusting. A gust of decay blew through the foliage. Bile churned in his gut. Rémy tried to shake his hands to get the circulation back, but he could hardly move them. With great difficulty, he pulled himself upright. Like he was wearing a lead apron, the pressure on his chest worsening. He could hear music.
Taking shallow breaths to settle his stomach, he followed the music to a spot in the thick foliage where a beautiful young woman in a pale pink shift stood playing. She smiled at Rémy, before her expression turned sorrowful and she stared away into the trees. Her playing became more agitated and her music more alarming. Rémy followed her gaze.
Three unclothed creatures with thick animal haunches were skinning a satyr, part-man, part-beast. The hind legs of the satyr were those of a hairy black goat, and his upper body was covered in similar thick black fur. He was alive, hanging upside down by his hooves from the canopy of trees, his human mouth gaping in a silent scream. The violin’s high-pitched chords gave the horror its voice. His naked veins pulsed his blood into a bucket set beneath him, where a wild dog lapped it up.
Rémy was moving in slow motion. Like invisible weights were attached to his arms and his legs. Like he was fighting gravity. Like he was bound in a painting.
His mouth opened in a scream to match the satyr’s. No sound came out.
55.
TOO FAR OUT
Inside painted space, time is either ephemeral or eternal. To know which, one must fade in and out of the art, as Caravaggio had over the centuries. But Em had never been in this kind of stasis for more than an hour or two, and she was worried. What if Matt didn’t find his way back to Orion and the church? What if she was bound here for ever? She stressed about the painting hidden in her sleeve. She fretted that whatever Rémy had done to save them couldn’t be undone.
Oh, get a grip, girl!
She settled deeper into the cushions of Jacob Lawrence’s sofa, tugging the tasselled blanket over her head, forcing herself to concentrate on those physical aspects that she could at least control: her thumping headache and her stinging scalp. She closed her eyes and focused on her breathing. She sensed Lawrence’s family of figures stealing glances, but in general they ignored her.
Em drifted to sleep. She dreamed again of swimming. This time she dived off the dock at the Abbey into Auchinmurn Bay, where the chill of the sea took her breath away, just the way she liked it when she swam laps round the island and back most summer mornings. The waves buoyed her and her imagination soared, connecting only to the real world in brief glimpses.
Halfway across the bay and there was Zach again. His jeans were rolled up and he was standing in the shallows, waving with the same odd expression on his face that had been there in her previous dream.
56.
NOT ON AN EMPTY STOMACH
‘Where’s the canvas?’ said Caravaggio as he helped Matt to his feet in front of a Monet inside the Orion HQ.
‘I left it with Em in a Lawrence painting. It seemed the safest place.’
‘Thomas Lawrence?’ said Caravaggio. ‘The portrait painter?’
‘Jacob Lawrence. Twentieth century. African-American. You may not have found him yet, but you’re going to love him.’
Matt headed into the kitchen. He opened the fridge, grabbed a hunk of cheese and a bottle of orange juice. He gulped the juice and began buttering slices of bread.
‘What are you doing?’ Caravaggio took a slice of the buttered bread, rolled it, dunked it in the open chutney jar and devoured it. ‘We don’t have time to cook.’
‘I need to eat and so does Em,’ said Matt. ‘Did you hear anything from your sources while we were gone?’
Caravaggio improvised another sandwich. ‘I had other things to do.’
‘God, don’t tell me,’ said Matt. ‘Sex?’
Caravaggio smirked. ‘Like you, I had needs that had to be met.’
‘So you’ve done nothing since we left?’
‘I am well-rested and ready to join the cause.’ Caravaggio poured himself a cup of the orange juice and sat at the table. ‘And what’s happened to our Conjuror? I trust you haven’t lost him.’
‘Not exactly,’ said Matt, layering cheese on to the five slices of untoasted bread and pushing them under the grill. ‘He decided to give himself up to the Camarilla.’
Caravaggio sprayed his orange juice across the table. ‘He did what?’
‘Read the note.’
Matt watched the slices of cheese bubbling under the grill while Caravaggio read Rémy’s plan.
‘So what do you think?’ Caravaggio said, laying Rémy’s note on the table. ‘Is he strong enough to pull this off?’
For the first time in their brief relationship, Matt sensed concern and compassion from the artist. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘But it’s a big risk and if he fails – if any of us fail – then it’s the end of the world as we know it.’
‘Such peasant food,’ observed Caravaggio, helping himself to one of the toasted cheese sandwiches, as Matt slathered them in chutney and HP Sauce and folded them in half.
Matt wrapped two of the sandwiches for Em in wax paper. ‘This is Dunlop Cheddar. It’s a delicacy.’ He wolfed down his two sandwiches and finished the orange juice. ‘Let’s go.’
*
Ella and baby Franklin jumped out of the way just in time as Matt faded in through the purple mirror and collided with the wooden chair. Seconds later, Caravaggio joined him.
Em was on her feet, bouncing anxiously on her heels. Colour had returned to her
pale skin and she felt herself break into a broad smile.
‘Thank God,’ she said, pulling Matt into a fierce hug and grabbing the sandwiches. ‘And I’m pleased to see you too, Caravaggio, you bastard.’
‘Cara mia,’ the artist said, ‘I am here to help. My quest has always been about redeeming myself and paying for my sins with my own flesh and blood.’
‘Up to a point,’ said Matt.
Caravaggio pouted. ‘It is true that I have kept one or two facts from you all along the way…’
‘One or two?’
‘… and I am aware that I have not yet proved worthy of your trust, but I will.’
As the artist kissed Em’s forehead, she sensed both truths and lies in what he was saying. She wolfed down her toasted cheese sandwiches, deciding to think about that later.
‘May I see the canvas?’ Caravaggio asked.
Em loosened the tube from her coat sleeve and slid the canvas from the tube. Caravaggio unrolled it carefully. Suddenly Ella was handing baby Franklin to Toby and excitedly taking one side of the canvas, while Jefferson jumped up to hold the other side.
The faceless Reverend Gaines turned towards them, his voice emanating from his chest. ‘Ambuya insists that you hang the canvas over the mirror,’ he said.
‘We have no time for that,’ said Caravaggio, keeping a grip on the canvas.
‘She insists,’ repeated the minister.
Em exchanged glances with her brother. ‘Why is the mirror important?’
‘It is not,’ Caravaggio said. ‘Unless you want its extra light to view my masterpiece in more detail.’
Matt and Em spread the canvas on the kitchen table instead, setting aside china plates filled with chocolate cake. Flo pushed her chair out of their way.
‘When I became aware of Luca’s plans to fulfil the prophecy,’ Caravaggio began, ‘I took the only measures I could to fight him. I stole this canvas from his bedchamber.’
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