by Ben Jeapes
“If there’s something real out there,” he said eventually, “something that isn’t just some shared psychological state – if it’s real then it’s evil. We were robbed. And abused. And it could still be happening to people we don’t know. So, if there’s the slightest chance we can do something …”
He was thinking of the promised website and Diana picked up on the vibe.
“What will you tell Ted?”
“Anything but the truth, I think.”
Chapter 20
“It has to be your book club!” Zoe insisted. It really was not the kind of tone Malcolm appreciated in an employee and it didn’t help that he suspected she might be right. “You said it yourself. You were targeted. Do you have another explanation for it?”
“Who needs an explanation?” Malcolm snapped, uncomfortably aware that he was sounding like Louise. “Why does there have to be one? We were attacked. We were broken. That’s all …”
And, suddenly, he was seeing it. Broken.
And Ted saw it too.
“He broke you,” the boy said thoughtfully. “That’s why you don’t feel like a guardian. That’s why you didn’t react when the Knowledge was stolen. I don’t know how it works inside you, but when he attacked you it’s like he reached inside and pulled out a handful of wires. As long as he cut the alarm he wasn’t fussed about any other damage he did.”
“Yes … yes, that makes sense,” Zoe agreed, looking from one to the other. “If he’d just killed you then the guardian spirits would move into someone else in the bloodlines and he’d have to kill them, and then the ones who came after them–”
“He wasn’t fussed, eh?” Malcolm looked at Ted with a grudging respect. The boy couldn’t know it but he had just delivered the winning argument. Ever since the thief had attacked a young Malcolm, Malcolm had put him into a category all of his own: unknown, unknowable, so leave alone. But Ted had just helped Malcolm put him alongside the kind of people he had made a career out of prosecuting: the fraudsters, the pension-grabbers, the ones who ruined lives simply because they could and thought they could get away with it. They hadn’t been fussed either. More than anything Zoe could say, that made it Malcolm’s job to stop him.
“So,” he asked Zoe, “if we’re broken, can your lady friend put us back together?”
Zoe and the witch locked eyes as the witch spoke.
“She needs to inspect the damage first,” Zoe said after a moment.
“But of course. I’d expect my car mechanic to do the same before making promises. How?”
The witch began to move towards him and suddenly Malcolm had to grip the sides of his chair to keep himself there. He was back in that field in Cambridgeshire, 1970, the thief moving across the corn towards him with the same sense of purpose, and this time he knew what was coming. This witch wasn’t the thief but she looked too similar for comfort.
“Just sit there–” Zoe said, and then the witch was on him.
It was like reopening every wound he had ever suffered – every cut, every scrape, every bruise. Every cell of his body wanted to flee but there was nowhere to go as she settled down onto and into him.
But this was different to that first time. He remembered feeling the thief rummage around in his head and he was braced against it, trying to make his mind recoil into a far-off corner where it would be safe and protected, like a dental patient trying to dig into the couch to get away from the drill. But the witch’s touch was gentle and she moved inside his head with a calm, firm grace. The best word he could think of for it was professional.
Zoe was relaying the witch’s diagnosis.
“She says ... there’s scar tissue covering a mighty void within you. Something has been torn out, and not neatly.”
“So, can she put it back?” It really was like asking a car mechanic to perform surgery on his engine. He knew he wanted something done, he had no idea how to do it and the only choice was to trust, nervously, in the experts.
A pause.
“She can make you a fighter again.”
It wasn’t quite what he had asked but he suspected this was as good as it was going to get. He forced himself to relax and sit back.
“Do what you have to do. Then I’ll call the others.”
*
The first guardians came into the shop. The woman wore a long padded coat that turned her into a featureless tube with a face at the top. She looked like she was shuffling around inside the cladding of a hot water tank. The man had an anorak zipped up to his chin and a sickly smile permanently plastered on his face. They both looked at Ted and Zoe curiously, before the woman looked quickly away as if she had committed a sin by noticing anyone at all.
“More recruits to the cause, Malcolm?” the man asked.
“Dennis, Jane, come in–” Malcolm intercepted them. “Ted, make yourself useful and put the kettle on, will you?”
Make yourself useful? Ted opened his mouth to protest. Who had been the one to work out who the guardians were? Wasn’t that being useful?
But then he remembered that his other contribution had been to allow the thief access to the Knowledge, and anyway he caught a warning glance from Malcolm that followed up the original order, so he just muttered under his breath and turned towards the back room. Malcolm glanced out of the window.
“And here comes Louise. Four cups.” Ted went on through.
Sarah stirred in her chair as Ted filled the kettle up. He heard the jingle that announced someone had come in from the street.
“I’m bored,” Sarah said.
“Tough.” He turned the kettle on and went to the door. So Malcolm didn’t want him around? He could still watch.
“I want to go home.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
He wondered what was happening at home right now. Had his mum and Barry got back? He had carefully turned his phone off, because when their mum got home and found his note – had to go out with Zoe, took Sarah, explain later – the first thing she would do would be to call him to demand his return. He wasn’t sure he would have the strength of mind not to answer.
With the door open just a crack, Ted could peer out through the gap between hinges and wall. The latest arrival was a stocky woman in a sensible quilt jacket. She sat with her back to Ted. Dennis had pulled out a notebook and Jane sat with hands clasped and knees pressed firmly together, as if she could make herself into a straight line and be invisible sideways on.
“Is Zoe your girlfriend?”
“Huh?” Ted glanced across and recognised the wind-up smirk and the taunting tone, and his heart sank. His sister had decided to have some sport with him. “No.” He turned back to the door.
“I bet she is.”
“She isn’t.”
“I bet you love her.”
“Oh, shut up.”
A pause. Thank God, Ted thought she was giving up.
“Did Barry give you condoms so you could do it with her?”
“No,” Ted said through his teeth, “he did not.”
Sarah suddenly started to giggle.
“She could squeeze your spots while you’re doing it!”
“Sarah!” Sarah collapsed into her chair and shook with hilarity. He turned away and threw his hands in the air, surrendering all responsibility for his sister’s sense of humour.
He pressed his eye to the crack again, just in time to see the woman with her back to him recoil in her chair and the couple leap to their feet. Anorak put his arms protectively around Water Tank and their faces were white as they stared at something out of Ted’s vision.
He bit his lip in a grin. The witch had done her appearing act again. They were making progress.
Another minute and the kettle was bubbling. He had the cups ready with their doses of instant coffee stirred into the milk, so he could pour the water in even before the kettle clicked off. Voices started to talk in the next room, growing louder and louder, charged with excitement. He smiled: the witch had made further repairs. He p
icked the tray up with a slight effort – it was a solid, wooden antique with a raised rim – and carried the drinks out into a room that was suddenly transformed.
It felt like they were all a team and the coach had delivered a rousing speech. The four guardians stood in a tight knot and they gazed at each other in wonder, as if each of them had suddenly found some long-buried, wonderful secret in one of the others. The witch hovered in the background like a proud mother and Zoe stood to one side, grinning widely, like the midwife who had made all this happen.
The biggest surprise was when the last woman to arrive, Louise, turned round and saw Ted. They both stopped in their tracks. She looked at him with a kind of wary sternness that he was well used to, as if she knew he was going to misbehave eventually so she would get her disapproval in now.
“Ted? What are you doing here?”
Zoe looked from one to the other. “You know each other?”
“Uh, yeah,” Ted said. He put the tray down on the counter. “You’ve met Stephen. This is his mum.”
Louise looked sideways at him.
“But you’re not a guardian ...?”
“Ted and Zoe are the ones who got in touch with me,” Malcolm said. His lean frame buzzed with energy and an expression of boyish excitement hovered behind his face. “Long story, explain later.”
Jane and Dennis were looking at each other like they were meeting for the first time. He wore a huge, soppy grin while she reached up and undid the zip of his anorak by an inch, then turned the collar down. He slowly brushed her vertical curtain of hair back over her shoulders, revealing an attractive, petite face.
“We’re back!” Dennis put an arm tight around his wife and turned to the group. “We’re back!”
“Yes, we are,” Louise agreed. Ted wasn’t accustomed to seeing her show much emotion about anything, but even she was letting the corners of her mouth twitch slightly upwards. “I feel ... how do I feel? Complete! Yes, complete, for the first time since ... since–”
“Since the thief attacked us,” said Jane. Her voice was clear and determined.
“Can you tell where he is now?” Zoe asked.
As one they turned and pointed out of the shop windows, all in the same direction.
“That way,” they chorused, and then they looked at each other and smiled or grinned or even laughed. Ted mentally ran through a list of things they could be pointing at. It was roughly south. Harnham and Henderson Close lay in that direction. Much closer was the cathedral.
“I suppose,” Dennis said, “we could all drive out around Salisbury, each get a direction, triangulate–” And then the smile vanished from his face. Each one of them perked up like a cat hearing something rustle behind the chair.
And then the guardians started to glow. Ted’s jaw dropped and there was a gasp from down by his elbow: Sarah had come to look too. A soft light filled the room and it was strongest where the four of them stood in a circle. In the corner of his eyes – never if he looked directly at them – Ted could see four others: two men, two women, dressed and coifed like the witch, superimposed over Malcolm and Jane and Dennis and Louise. The guardian spirits were making themselves known.
“He’s sensed us,” Malcolm said. “He’s coming to us.”
“He knows we’re here,” said Jane, and without any further words the guardians filed out into the street. Malcolm was the last out and he turned briefly back. He seemed to Ted to be speaking out of a great light and the shadow of his spirit’s face, ancient and stern, lay across Malcolm’s much more familiar features.
“Zoe, Ted, Sarah, get into the back room.” Then he was gone.
Zoe crossed quickly to the light switch and the shop was plunged into darkness, just the street lights outside illuminating their forms. The three of them peered out through the wide studio windows. They had a good view of everything but from outside they would have been in shadow and hard to see.
The four guardians spread out into a diagonal line across the road, from just outside the shop and across the taxi rank to the shops opposite, so that there was about twenty feet between each of them. They all had their heads craned up to look at the sky in the south. Their inner glow made them look like angelic beings superimposed on the world of cold, dark shop windows and harsh orange streetlights.
“Ted,” said Zoe, “you and Sarah stay in the back room.”
“Sarah, stay in the back room.”
“Get lost.”
The guardians glowed brighter and a human figure floated down out of the sky. He bent his knees slightly as his feet touched the road at the end of the taxi rank, just at the point where New Canal narrowed to approach the High Street. He looked like a brave defender holding the pass against four-to-one odds, and because he faced towards the shop and the guardians who stood in between, Ted got a clear look at him.
“Bloody hell!” They had been expecting the thief. They had got Stephen. The implications refused to come together in Ted’s mind. He took a step to the door. “What’s he doing here?”
Zoe’s eyes were wide, her face tragic. She put an arm out to stop him.
“No, Ted.”
“But–” The conclusion, the obvious fact, was at the centre of Ted’s mind. His thoughts whirled around it and refused to settle there. “It’s Stephen, if–”
Outside, Louise took a hesitant step forward.
“Stephen? Sweetheart–”
“Mum!” The thief’s voice was high and frightened. “Help me!”
“Oh, my baby–” She took another step and her light flickered. The thief’s face abruptly turned cold and harsh. He raised an arm towards her and Ted saw something – he couldn’t quite tell what – flash between them.
Louise shrieked – a single flare of heartbreak and agony, and then she exploded. Her skin, head, clothes erupted in a cloud of vaporised gore.
“Well,” the thief remarked, “that was easy. Who’s next?”
Chapter 21
There was no time to mourn. Malcolm felt Louise go like a light snuffed out from the world but the guardian spirit boiled within him. It would avenge the murder.
Malcolm’s own spirit raged in anger and in horror. This is just a boy! That was his mother! But a separate stream of willpower ran through him, parallel to his own and stronger. It told him Louise’s mistake: she had let her own mind do the thinking. He could not do this on his own: to live, he must settle back and let the guardian handle this. It only took a heartbeat for Malcolm to conclude, reluctantly, that it was right.
And so the being that was Malcolm Jackson withdrew. His life, his memories, his love for Diana and his children, his home, his pride in the shop, his fondness for Ted and Zoe, every case he had ever fought, every memory, every sight he had seen and every taste and every smell – all of it was bundled together and pushed down to the safety of a very deep pit within himself.
The thief was a boy no longer. The form of a teenage male faded away and in its place Malcolm saw him as the guardian did: an old man, contorted with glee and radiating power. From deep down in his pit, miles away from the action, Malcolm saw the guardian spirits link with each other and muster power of their own. They drew on the heat of the earth’s core, on the power of a thunderstorm twenty miles away, even on the starlight and the moonlight. In the time that it took to blink, they weaved a spell.
It was much more complex than the thief’s simple brute force approach. He had killed Louise with a single burst of energy that flash-boiled every molecule of water in her body. The guardians’ spell would go further. It would shred every part of him, body and soul. It would remove him from the world, erase him as if he had never been.
The guardians juggled the spell between them until it blazed with acquired power and then they flung it at the thief.
It fizzled like a short circuit from a weak battery and the thief bellowed with a man’s harsh laughter.
“Oh dear! My sister’s repairs not quite up to the job? Let me make it easier for you!”
; He raised his hands above his head, curled his fingers as if taking hold of something and abruptly pulled down.
With a crash like the end of the world, every piece of glass in New Canal shattered: every shop front, every car window, every street light. A storm cloud of razor sharp edges came hurtling towards the guardians. Malcolm shouted in the depths of his own mind, but the controlling guardian made him stand still without flinching. The air molecules surrounding the three of them gelled into an impenetrable shield. Dennis and Jane hadn’t surrendered so much control to their guardians, and they instinctively ducked down and cringed as a million shards broke against the forcefield. The roar of pulverising glass gradually settled down into the sound of every alarm in New Canal going off at once.
Jane and Dennis picked themselves up again, slow and trembling.
“I see–” The thief had gleefully identified the couple as the weakest link. He made an abrupt, businesslike gesture at a car parked further down the road. It rose up into the air as if an invisible hand had hefted it, and abruptly flung itself at the guardians. Dennis moved just in time to dive at Jane and push her aside. The flying car struck him in the shoulder and the impact knocked him to the ground. He writhed in the piles of powdered glass, his face contorted with agony.
The car swung back as if it were on the end of a pendulum. Jane’s guardian took control again and put up a shield around her just as the car hit. The air around her shimmered with the blow and she crumpled inside the shield, knocked out by the concussion. Still inside her shield she flew across the street and slammed into a building. The guardian took hold of her with molecules of air and let her gently down to the ground where she lay in a folded heap.
The car crashed to the ground with a sound of grinding metal and lay on its side, as if dropped by a bored child turning to its next plaything. The thief turned his gaze upon Malcolm and his eyes shone with the twisted love of a father for an abused child.
“I should have known you would be the strongest. You put up the most fight against me in the first place.”
He raised his arms again and Malcolm knew he was summoning energy for the final blow – a blast like the one that killed Louise. He also knew his guardian, working on its own, couldn’t cope, though it desperately, hopelessly began to gather power for a final strike. He had seconds to live. Malcolm came up out of his pit and took control of his body, breaking into a run for the first time in thirty years. His long stride ate up the space between them before the thief had time to react. The thief just had time to look surprised before Malcolm brought the boy/man down in a rugby tackle onto the hard tarmac. Malcolm felt the skin scrape and break over his knees and elbows but he held on.