by Amy Wilson
‘I am Clementine. I am Callisto’s daughter!’
A sudden rage swells through me, because this is my aunt, and she should know who I am. Green leaves break out on the silver trees in the distance, and birds start to sing; the flowers open their mouths, and their scent is powerful. Io stares at me, and I stare back, drawing myself up so I’m nearly as tall as she is. Nearly as fierce.
‘Callisto?’ She turns as if searching for something. Someone. ‘What is this?’ she demands of me. ‘Callisto has no daughter – I would know!’
Butterflies cascade from her, swirling in the air like bright copper pennies, and her fists clench by her sides. The sky ripens to a vibrant blue, my magic fades and petals begin to rain down on us.
‘How did you get in here? I do not know what magic this is, but I will not have it here! Ganymede did not put you here; you are not bound. How did you get IN?’
In! In! Like a bell chiming, it rings, and that is it, I realize. The magicians have been giving us hints all along, and it was on the book in the library too; the word we need is in. The trick is to get back into Ganymede’s house. It isn’t out at all. This is not a world, not a real place – this is a snowglobe. The house is reality, and we need to get back into it.
I grab Dylan’s hand and pull him away while Io raises her hands to the sky and begins to screech, turning in a whirl of gold. The ground shakes beneath us, great chasms opening as we flee to the glass boundary. Io starts after us, her words catching, making Dylan flinch, but I don’t let go of him. I just keep running until I see the darkness on the other side, the darkness of Ganymede’s house.
‘Let us IN!’ I scream, pounding one desperate hand upon the glass, as my feet start to flounder on a tide of ripped-up earth.
There’s a ringing sound, a pull on my heart and we are through.
We are back in the house.
Our feet, our knees, our hands. A hard, pale marble floor that ends the journey with a sharp smack, a breathless whirl of snowglobes all shaken up, and my magic curling away, exhausted, broken. We push ourselves to stand with our backs against a wall, and Ganymede flies down the staircase towards us, skirts rustling, moths scattering as light bulbs ping, and the globes begin to flicker.
‘What happened?’ she demands.
‘We got out of there,’ I whisper.
Everything hurts; I can barely breathe through the tightness in my chest. I gather myself together, reach out for Dylan and we stagger to the front door, turning our backs on her.
‘What are you doing? Where do you think you’re going?’ She rushes with a bustle of feathered grey skirts to stand before us.
‘Home!’ I shout.
The globes dim, and Ganymede’s hair is like wire standing on end in the gloom.
‘You’re not leaving until you explain yourself,’ she says, swishing closer.
‘I have explaining to do?’ I demand, too tired and heartsore to be afraid of her. ‘You’re the one with all the secrets, locked away here in your old tomb! You’re the one who should be explaining. But it’s late, and we’re tired from fighting our way through all the stupid worlds you made, and we’re going home!’
We edge past her, leaving her speechless in a whirl of storming snowglobes, and I reach out with a shaking hand to open the vast front door. We totter down the steps past all the reaching thorns and brambles, and if I turn round, I know I’ll see the silhouette of my aunt, standing all alone in that ivory tower. But we don’t turn round, and she doesn’t stop us, so we just keep going down the path and through the gate until we’re back in our town where the streetlights glow golden, and the cars swish past in a blur of headlights.
‘We made it,’ I say, my voice a torn whisper.
‘No,’ says Dylan, his voice slurring. ‘Helios. We have to go back for Helios.’
He strains against me, fighting to get back into that nightmare house so that we can find his dog, who came through so much and never complained, but we can’t. Tears spring to my eyes – I’d brought us back even though it meant leaving him there. I didn’t even think; there was no time. And there is no more magic left in us now. No more energy. There is barely enough to keep us on our feet.
‘He’ll be OK,’ I whisper.
Dylan just stares at me.
‘We’ll go back, Dylan, I promise.’
‘We shouldn’t have just left him there,’ he says in a broken, hollow voice.
‘We had no choice,’ I say, trying to keep my own voice level. ‘Io took him. She said he’d be safe . . .’
‘And you trusted her?’
‘There was no time; she would have trapped us all if we’d stayed! And I don’t think we can make it back there like this, past Ganymede, into Io’s chaos. We might never find him. We have to sleep, and eat, and then we can go back for him.’ It sounds so weak, pleading. My skin tightens as I say it – how can we even think of food and warm beds, of home, when our friend has been left behind?
‘He was all I had in there.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I whisper. ‘He’ll be OK. I’m sure he will – just until we go back.’
Dylan seems to fold, and I remember the way Helios was always there, keeping him up on his feet, keeping him going, keeping us both going.
‘Tomorrow?’ He looks at me.
I swallow hard.
‘Tomorrow,’ I say, putting my hand on the small of his back and propelling him homeward. ‘I promise.’
‘Is this really our town?’ he asks blearily as we start walking.
It’s night, and the streetlamps are spotlights that take us in from the darkness, just for an instant, before spitting us out again. I’m telling myself that it’s good to be back, but right now this place feels just as harsh as any of the worlds we fought our way through.
‘Clem? Is this really home?’
‘I think so,’ I say as a car swooshes past us, throwing up water from a vast puddle. ‘It doesn’t feel like a snowglobe. I’m not sure Io can do traffic . . .’
‘I s’pose not,’ he says as we edge around the old common. He bumbles along, sometimes nudging into me, sometimes into the railings by the side of the pavement, like ping-pong with a broken human instead of a ball.
‘Which way now?’ I ask, when we come out on to the main road. ‘Up here? What road is it, Dylan?’
‘You can just leave me here,’ he says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I want to make sure you get there.’
‘How long do you think I’ve been gone in real time?’ He looks up at the sky, as if the answer might be there, in the shifting clouds.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘It can’t be as long as we think; not if you thought you were there for months and it was only a day.’ I’m hoping Pa won’t have been worried out of his mind for a week. I made him a promise, and I broke it. I’m just hoping he never needs to know. ‘Come on – which way?’
Dylan grunts, gesturing to the right, and we start off, a little unsteadily, making our way through winding narrow streets until finally he stops at a little terraced house. It’s tucked in tight between its neighbours, the curtains drawn against the night.
‘Here?’
‘Yep. You can go now.’ He smiles at me, but I know that smile: it’s lying.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ he says. He squares his shoulders and heads through the gate, finds his keys in his pocket and drops them, stoops to pick them up and wobbles, looking back at me.
‘What is it?’
‘I’m just tired.’ He gives me a wan smile.
‘And you haven’t eaten real food for a long time . . .’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s going to be OK,’ I say. ‘We got out of there, Dylan. We got away from Io . . . They’ll be happy to see you, won’t they?’
‘Probably.’ He stares at the keys. ‘But we left Helios there. And everything feels different now, and they won’t know any of it. They’ll expect me to be just the same, and I’m not! What about Helios, Clem? Wha
t are we going to do?’ His eyes are full of tears.
‘Nothing more today,’ I say firmly as his knees buckle. I shove my hand under his elbow and pull him to the front door, knocking hard against the wall while he messes with the keys.
The door flings open and a woman rushes out, throwing her arms around him.
‘Dylan! Where have you been? We were so worried!’
‘Were you?’ he mumbles, raising his head and looking past her at the man standing in the hallway with a baby against his shoulder.
‘Of course we were! Where were you?’ She pulls back and looks between us, still worried. ‘What happened? Come in, both of you. You look half frozen.’
The woman drags him in, and I follow, too dazed to argue with her. It’s bright in here, and warm. It smells of dinner, and normal things that make my eyes sting. I can’t believe we’re really here. Io’s fiery eyes still flash at me every time I close mine; the ground still rolls beneath my feet.
My mother was there. I know it. And I left.
‘I went to Jago’s,’ Dylan says as the woman hustles us into a sitting room at the front of the house, where a real fire flickers, and lamps make pools of light that shine on bookshelves and an old piano crammed in under the stairs. ‘I meant to call you, but I couldn’t find my phone, and I fell asleep . . . This is Clem.’
‘I found him on his way home,’ I say. ‘I wanted to make sure he got here in one piece. I think he’s got the flu or something; he hasn’t been making much sense . . .’
‘I’ll make some tea,’ the man says, dawdling in the doorway with the baby. ‘Come on, Bea – let’s find something to cheer up your brother.’
Dylan scowls in his direction, flopping on to a settee heaped with bright cushions.
‘Oh don’t.’ His mum frowns, sitting next to him. ‘Honestly, you’re a mess, Dyl. What happened to you? Why didn’t Jago’s parents call me?’
‘They’re away,’ he says, closing his eyes and leaning his head back against the wall behind the settee.
I perch on the edge of a small green armchair, watching how she looks at him, touches his hand, his brow, checking, checking all the time that he’s OK.
He waves her away. ‘I’m fine.’
She huffs and turns to me. ‘Thanks for seeing him home, Clem. Are your parents expecting you back? I’ll drive you.’
I smile. I can’t speak right now.
She pats my hand and gets up, saying something about Bea’s bedtime. I look around at all the stuff in the room. There’s a basket of toys in one corner, a little pile of blankets and cushions on the pale carpet. Pictures line the shelves: a knock-kneed Dylan on the beach with a man who has the same kind brown eyes beneath a thatch of brown-grey hair; a newborn Bea; and a wedding photo of Dylan’s mum and the man in the hallway.
‘He’s your stepdad?’
‘Yep.’
‘He seems OK . . .’
‘He is OK.’
‘Bea’s sweet.’
‘Yep.’
I push myself up. I don’t belong here. ‘I should go.’
‘Better let Mum take you; she’ll worry.’
What does that feel like? I wonder.
Dylan looks at me. ‘You think she was in there? Your mum, I mean?’
‘I think she is,’ I whisper. And we left.
‘We’ll go back,’ he says, and he sounds far more sure about it than I am, because I can’t help wondering why she’s been in there for so long. Why she’s never fought her way home to me.
If I managed it, why couldn’t she?
Dylan’s mum’s car is a mess of kids’ toys and old wrappers, and the footwells are muddy. She catches me noticing.
‘Football,’ she says. ‘Gets boggy, watching in the winter. Where to, then?’
I give her the road name, and she winds the car through streets that get more and more narrow.
‘Oosh.’ She winces, rounding her shoulders as she manoeuvres past all the parked cars. ‘You’re right in the heart of it here, aren’t you! Which one is yours?’
I point up at the redbrick terrace, the wrought-iron balcony that marks our flat.
‘Pretty!’ she says. ‘I always liked these old houses. Go on, your parents will be waiting.’
‘My pa,’ I say.
‘Your pa,’ she repeats.
There’s a little silence. I concentrate on the whirr of the engine and the warm air flooding through the vents.
‘I’ll watch you in. Thank you for getting Dyl back. He wanders. Perhaps you have that in common?’
She stares at me, and I wonder if it shows: that magic that she ran away from, the magic that lost her a husband – that grows even now in her son.
‘A bit, maybe,’ I say. ‘Thanks for the lift.’
She nods, and watches me all the way to the red front door, waving once I’m inside. I wave back and close the door slowly, leaning against it for a moment before heading up to our flat. Every step is harder than the last; every movement drags with tiredness. I run a hand over the internal door when I finally get there, feeling the places where the blue paint dripped, remembering the day we did it, the mess we got into.
I take a breath, shove my key into the lock and tip myself into the flat, my eyes smarting at the sudden heat and all the sense of it: the wood polish from my little cleaning spree earlier; the framed prints on the ochre walls. The leafy plant that sits on the little table bursts into tiny pink flowers as my eyes fall on it, and I step closer, but then Pa comes out of his study.
His glasses are wedged into his firebrush hair, his feet scuff over the old floorboards and his eyes have that tired, worried look that means I’m in trouble. I swallow hard, and something breaks, deep inside me. The thing that kept me going, and never let me stop. The thing that buried how scared I was – that I’d never see him again, never be here again.
‘Pa!’ I choke, rushing at him.
He staggers back, puts his arms around me and when he asks me what’s wrong his voice rumbles in his chest and it feels like home. We really made it, Dylan and I; we really made it home.
‘Clem? What happened?’
‘Quite a lot,’ I whisper into his shirt, after a while.
He draws me away from him, peering at me, his brow furrowed.
‘Tell me. Come into the study and tell me.’
The study is a bit of a posh term for the room where Pa works, translating ancient texts. It’s the smallest room in the flat, and his desk is an old kitchen table tucked under the eaves. There’s a settee slumped against the opposite wall, an old wooden filing cabinet in one corner and a globe on a stand in front of the tiny window.
Pa sits on his desk chair and points the Anglepoise lamp at me.
‘No.’ I wince, flumping into the settee. ‘Too bright.’
He swings it up at the ceiling. ‘Where were you?’
‘I did leave you a note . . .’
‘You said you were at Lizzie’s house. But I phoned to make sure – I was a bit worried after everything that happened – and you weren’t there. They haven’t seen you for a long time.’
‘Oh.’ I shove myself deeper into the settee and wish the Anglepoise would stop flickering. Where do I start?
‘So where were you?’
The light bulb breaks with a tiny pinging sound, and we’re plunged into darkness. Pa curses and turns on the main light, which floods the room in a cold glare.
‘I went back to the house.’
‘You made a promise, Clem.’
He looks about a year older already, and I haven’t even started.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Is that it?’
‘I had to go back; there was somebody trapped in there.’
‘Who? Who was trapped in there?’ He scuttles forward on his chair.
‘Someone from school. A boy . . . I saw him there the first time, but I ran away from Ganymede before I could get him out, so I had to go back, Pa – I had to!’
Hot tears flood down my cheeks,
and Pa abandons his chair, dropping down on to the settee and holding me tight.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t think it would be so difficult.’
‘What happened in there?’ he asks, pulling away and staring at me.
‘I saw Ganymede again, and I got away from her and I found Dylan, but then Io was there, and she’s even worse than Ganymede, and so we had to run. We ran away. Neither of them even knew who I was, Pa! They didn’t know me at all . . .’
‘Your mother didn’t want them to know,’ he says. ‘She didn’t want you to get caught up in it all.’ He sighs and shakes his head, and even the air around us feels heavy.
‘But I am caught up in it all,’ I say fiercely. ‘And I can’t promise I won’t go back, because it’s part of me.’
‘Part of you?’
‘The magic that’s in the house – Ma’s magic . . .’ I take a deep breath. ‘I think she’s there, Pa.’
‘What?’ He bolts forward.
‘I think she’s in the house. It’s not a normal house – there are thousands of places she could be. So I need to go back and find her.’
‘You think she’s been trapped there all this time?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I knew it wasn’t a normal house,’ he says. ‘But I always thought that if she was in there it would be because she wanted to be.’
‘Maybe.’ I shrug. ‘I don’t know for sure that she’s even in there. But if there’s a chance . . .’
He stares at me, and there’s a full-on battle happening inside him; I can see it there in his face.
‘You shouldn’t go back,’ he says, but he doesn’t mean it. I’ve never seen his eyes gleam like that before.
‘It’ll be OK,’ I say. ‘I can’t pretend it isn’t happening, and I don’t want to go around zapping people in class either, so I have a plan.’
‘A plan?’ He shakes his head, incredulous. ‘What on earth are you going to do next?’
‘I’m going to go back, and ask Ganymede to teach me.’
‘What?’ He bounces up, hits his head on the light, sending shadows spiralling into the corners. ‘No you’re not!’
‘It’ll be OK,’ I say, too tired to argue properly. ‘She’s not going to hurt me, and while I’m there I can look for Ma.’