Mythos (The Descendants, #1)
Page 4
* * *
That night, Itzy dreamt of her father. She was in her room and she saw him standing at the window. He held his hands together behind his back and he gazed out at the night sky. Her curtains billowed for no discernible reason. They ballooned around him like a cape, and his face filled with moonlight.
‘Dad?’ she whispered to his phantom.
He didn’t reply. He just kept standing there, staring outside. She knew what he was looking at: the stars. He had always loved the stars. One of his favourite subjects had been the pyramids of Egypt, because of their apparent connection to the constellations.
She stepped out of her bed, gaining a grace she didn’t possess while awake. She glided more than walked toward him, and met him at the window. When she arrived at his side, he raised one of his arms and pointed to the sea of black that lay above and all around them.
‘They’re out there,’ he said. ‘They’re searching for it.’
Trembling with fear, she asked, ‘Who?’
But all he said was, ‘They’re coming.’ His eyes were steadily fixed on the sky, refusing to look at his daughter. ‘They’re so close to knowing the truth. And when they do….’
Then he looked at her. His head twisted around unnaturally, while his body remained forward, like an owl. His eyes were gone and the skin of his face had shrunk around what she knew was his missing brain. It had been pulled out like one of the mummies he’d always been so fascinated with.
‘Itzy,’ the thing that used to be her father whispered. He stepped forward and reached for his daughter, all the time repeating:
They’re coming.
They’re coming.
They’re coming.
Her body had gone numb; she could no longer feel her legs. They were stuck to the floor and she couldn’t move away from the creature as he stroked her head with what she now saw was his rotting hand. One of his fingers came away easily in her hair, and a scream rose up in her throat but would not come out.
‘Don’t let them get my children,’ her not-father whispered in her ear. ‘Don’t let them get you, Itzy - don’t let them -’
The scream escaped her mouth. It was long and loud and she woke to find she was screaming for real. She covered her mouth with one of her hands to stop herself, the other hand on her chest, trying to calm her breathing.
Everything in the room looked alive, like it might move at any second. Faces grinned down at her from the posters on the walls. She had the insane notion that hands might fly out from under the bed and grab her ankles, dragging her down into some underworld she found too easy to visualise.
Myra didn’t come for her. She was too inebriated to notice her daughter screaming down the hall. This fact had an ironically sobering effect on Itzy.
At once, she shook off her nightmarish paranoia. This wasn’t a dream; this was reality. And reality didn’t contain living furniture and monsters under the bed. Reality was her dead father and her absent mother.
She scrambled out from under the covers and knelt at the window that sat above her bed. She folded her arms on the sill and looked out. The sky looked just as it had in her dream. She found herself drawn to a corner of space that seemed to bend before her eyes, as if it housed something invisible but vast.
‘They’re coming,’ she whispered, without knowing what it meant.
FOUR
The funeral was a bigger affair than either of the girls expected. It was held in an old crumbling church in a historical village Itzy’s father had apparently loved, near his home in Ashford. As it was in Kent, the journey had taken the girls over two hours from where they lived in Ealing, in West London.
The village was so small, it didn’t show up on most maps. It consisted of about twenty houses, a large green and the church, surrounded by an unsettling graveyard filled with moss-covered tombstones, most of which had been installed in the eighteenth century. Weeds grew over the stone rectangles embedded in the soil, obscuring the names of those who lay beneath.
Despite the modest setting, there must have been a hundred people at the funeral. The doors had to be left open so people could throng around outside and listen from the graveyard. Itzy had no idea who most of the people might be. She only recognised a handful as her father’s colleagues, those strange antisocial types who had accompanied him on his archaeological digs, or worked with him at the university where he lectured, but weren’t exactly his friends.
She remembered some of them had awkwardly tousled her hair when she was a little girl, as if they thought that was what you were meant to do with children, but then promptly ignored her because they only knew how to speak about things that had been dead for millennia; they didn’t understand this strange thing called life. A bit like her father.
The crowd reminded her how well-liked Stephen had always been. People had regarded him as a genius of a different order, which gave him licence to be eccentric. No one had ever taken Myra seriously when she finally came out with her secrets. Stephen? Stephen Loveguard? No. You must be making things up. Any friends Myra had once shared with Stephen had taken his side in the divorce, and any friends Myra had before Stephen had taken their leave long ago because he hadn’t approved of them.
At the front of the church, near the altar, was Gwen. She had the same black hair that ran in that side of the family. It was pulled into a bun that was pierced with a glossy black chopstick. She wore a sombre mourning suit, the skirt stopping below her knees.
Beside her was a woman Itzy only vaguely remembered from broken childhood memories: her father’s first love, but second wife, Evelyn Loveguard.
And beside her was Itzy’s brother.
Osiris.
Just like in the story Itzy had written, Stephen Loveguard had known about Osiris. But he had chosen to walk out on him before Osiris was old enough to walk himself. Otherwise, perhaps her brother would have escaped their father’s ridiculous names. Osiris and Itzel: surely that was some form of child abuse. But Stephen’s fixation with mythology had been a third member of his romantic relationships and somehow the women in his life had bent to his will on the point of naming their children.
Itzy had once made the mistake of asking her father what her name meant. He’d been in an excitable mood at the time, frantically scribbling ideas in a notebook he kept, the cover of which was decorated in black and white splotches. She’d been nine then, going on ten. It was after he told her he no longer loved her mother. After she had decided he was a liar.
‘You were sent to me,’ he had answered, ‘from the stars. You’re here to teach me things - to teach me the mysteries of the universe, of life. That’s all that matters, Itzy. That’s who you are.’
Then he’d held her gaze meaningfully, as if attempting to send some coded message into her head without speaking. But more than that, he looked at her with awe and reverence, as though she might have been his redeemer.
Later, she’d looked up her name in one of her father’s books. As it turned out, Itzel was an old Mayan name. It meant ‘rainbow girl’, or something like that, though she never managed to identify with it. Rainbows were bright and colourful, a flash of optimism in the midst of a storm, while Itzy was dark and sullen.
Osiris was the name of the Egyptian god of the dead. Itzy wondered if her half-brother used it in full, or if he shortened it to avoid getting beaten up. Not that he looked like he needed protecting, now that she could see what he had grown up to become.
She felt a chill run through her at the memory of when she’d last seen him. She had been ten, and he twelve. He hadn’t been much taller than her. Boys tended to develop later, Myra had told her, back when she still had some of her wits about her. But even though Itzy might have been big enough to knock him down, something in his expression had stopped her. There was a haughtiness, like he didn’t just think but knew he was better than her - than anyone.
Stephen had once made a go at trying to bri
ng his two families together. He said he wanted the children to know each other, so he picked Itzy up from the house they had once shared together, with Osiris in the passenger seat of the car, already replacing Itzy.
They were taken to see a film neither of them paid any attention to and Osiris later declared was boring. Then they went out to eat together at Nando’s, as if a brother and sister relationship could somehow be formed by sharing a bowl of chips. Later, Itzy learned Osiris had told their father he never wanted to see his supposed sister again.
Then Myra had lost the plot, which got Itzy out of having to see her father.
Sometimes Gwen would tell Itzy what a good boy Osiris was; it was such a shame they couldn’t have known each other all along. She remembered him as a baby. She remembered when her brother left him behind.
Finally, Itzy had told her aunt she just couldn’t deal with hearing about her brother anymore. To know she might have shared something with him in another life, had things played out differently, felt like being handed an enormous bar of chocolate only to be told that the second you took a bite, it would disappear.