by Holly Race
I laugh. I’m not going to explain it. The knights must be nearby. Maybe they’re waiting for me. I’ve got to find them.
Something catches my eye in the bedroom window and I whirl around. The street lamps are glowing impossibly bright. I push past Ollie and run back down the stairs. I fling open the door. Every imperfection in the tarmac is picked out in the punishing light. I scan the trees, the pavement, the parked cars. The road is empty. Where are they?
‘Fern!’
The panic in Ollie’s voice carries me back through the hallway. He’s standing next to the sofa. It takes a moment for what I’m seeing to sink in.
He is bathed in light. Every bulb in the room is blinding, but none of them match the unsourced blaze that sits behind him, turning him into a shadow. He looks down at his outstretched fingers, and the light plays around them like static.
I can’t breathe.
‘What is it?’ Ollie’s voice reaches me as though we are standing on opposite sides of a deep cave. He looks darkly, powerfully beautiful. ‘What’s happening to me?’
The light around him starts to pulse, as though its power source is failing. Ollie shakes his head, as though he’s dizzy.
‘It … it tickles,’ he tells me, his fear turned to sleepy curiosity.
His form shimmers, the light eroding him, as if it’s trying to drag him away.
‘No!’ I shout, closing the distance between us. Why is the light around him and not me? The bulbs shine even more brightly, as though pouring out the last of their energy.
‘Wait!’
I reach for Ollie, but I am too late. The bulbs shatter, the lights go out, and I am left in the dark surrounded by broken glass.
4
I hunch on the floor of our sitting room in darkness, flecked with scratches from where the lightbulbs have showered me with tiny shards of glass. My brother is draped like a damsel on the floor before me, seemingly fast asleep.
‘Ollie?’ I whisper, prodding him gingerly. He doesn’t stir.
‘Get up!’ I say more loudly, but again there’s no reaction. Other than the glass cuts that match my own, he seems fine. He’s breathing normally, the sound of his peaceful slumber a taunt to my own panic and confusion. I fetch my phone to call for help, but what would I tell them? My brother was inside a weird light and now he’s asleep? It sounds ridiculous.
I push Ollie a few more times and kick him once, hard, to make very sure that he’s not going to wake up. Then I burst into tears. Nothing that’s happened today has made sense, but when the lights changed I felt so sure that I was on the brink of getting answers. Now they’ve been snatched from me.
Still sniffing pathetically, I fetch a sponge from the kitchen and wash the glass fragments from Ollie’s arms and face. I wonder what he’s dreaming about, but mostly I have the strongest sense that he is being kept asleep by a force beyond any normal understanding.
Ollie still doesn’t wake when I heave him onto the sofa. There was no point leaving him on the floor. Dad would only ask questions that have no plausible answers. Ollie dealt with, I traipse upstairs to the shower and wash the glass from my own body. The skin on my left side is still a different shade from the rest of my torso, but the markings aren’t as bad as the scar on my face. My clothes protected me a little from the flames that night, but I still don’t like looking.
Brush teeth, brush hair, smother my scar in medical-grade moisturiser. The cream dulls my burn the same way my emotions feel dulled. But I can’t bring myself to climb into bed. I need answers.
I have to drag a chair from the kitchen up the stairs to reach the handle to the loft hatch. When I pull it, a considerable amount of dust follows the little ladder that drops down. Up in the attic, I clamber over wooden struts to reach a tumble of boxes tucked into one corner, behind the Christmas decorations. It’s even colder up here, so I heave the boxes down one by one into my room. I can’t have Dad knowing I’ve been poring over Mum’s stuff.
Back in my room, hot squash in hand and duvet on lap to ward off the cold, I open the first box. Inside is a sleek digital recorder. I put fresh batteries in it but the mechanics must be too old, because it doesn’t work.
The next box is full of faded photographs, most of them from Mum’s childhood. The third box has exactly what I want: a series of neatly labelled journals. ‘Your mother never liked to throw anything away,’ Dad once told us. ‘She liked to look back over them from time to time. To remind her of who she was, she said.’
It takes me a moment to work out what year Mum turned fifteen, and even longer to sift through the mountain of journals to find the one labelled 1993. I’ve read most of these entries before, of course, but there’s a difference between reading the diaries of a fifteen-year-old when you’re only eleven, and then again when you’re fifteen yourself. Snippets jump out at me: Laura was being a bitch again today. I can’t help it if we both fancy Toby … Then a few months later: Toby got me tickets to see Take That! He is the BEST boyfriend!! Going to take Laura!!!
Yeah. Mum wasn’t like me at all, was she?
I hurry on to today’s date, 31st October. Her fifteenth Samhain. She’s written nothing special, just a list of homework and a reminder to buy a birthday card for her grandfather. I almost close the diary in disappointment, when I notice it. A tiny star in the corner of the page.
I look back over the diary. Mum wasn’t a doodler. She’d scribble things out, but other than that star, there are no hearts, no stick people, no decorative borders.
I turn the page. I suppose I was expecting some sort of explosion of text: WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED LAST NIGHT? scrawled in red pen and underlined thirty times. Instead there’s … nothing. The rest of that week is entirely blank.
It’s ten days later that Mum starts writing again, but there’s a huge change in the kind of things she’s noting. Gone is the chat about boyfriends and friendship squabbles. She’s factual – more homework lists, more reminders. In December she writes, Broke up with Toby today. It was hard.
I pull out the diary for 1994. There’s more of the same – boring lists that half make me wish she’d spice it up with a bit of schoolyard gossip again. But then, on the first of February, something interesting happens. She starts writing complete gibberish.
Fall brought lost
With other lost brought
Unto for other from place unto brought lost
Be with lost is
Place unto unto place other!
Clearly my mother was not going to win any poetry competitions. Obviously it’s a code or a riddle of some sort, and I wish I wasn’t so tired or I might have a chance of cracking it. I pull a spare notebook from my desk and jot down the secret message.
As I open the diary once more, though, I register that this diary has a dust jacket – a handmade envelope of patterned paper held together with tape. I slide the jacket off and stare with bittersweet wonder at the cover beneath. On the plain grey cardboard, in my mother’s bold, spiky print, is written, Una’s Knightbook.
Out of all the mad things that have happened today, this feels the strangest. It’s the most concrete proof yet that there was some truth in what Archimago said, and it sends a shock of determination through my bones.
I keep looking.
By the time I hear Dad come in I have worked my way through to 2001, and I have a handful of further garbled poems in my notebook. Mum didn’t write in code often, which makes me think that she only did so when something really important happened. I listen to Dad half-heartedly telling Ollie to go to bed, but evidently when Ollie doesn’t stir he gives up and climbs the stairs. Too late, I realise he’ll be able to see the light beneath my door and I rush to switch off my lamp.
‘Fern?’ Dad says quietly on the other side of my bedroom door.
I want to fling it open, to hug him and ask him to tell me everything he knows about Mum. To tell him about the messages from Archimago and Mum’s diaries. To ask him to help me work this out.
I sit very sti
ll. The door between him and me may as well be concrete. Ever since he refused to punish Ollie for his part in the fire, I have known exactly how much Dad loves Ollie, and how little he loves me. Eventually, he moves on to the bathroom, and a few minutes later I hear him close his own bedroom door. I turn on the light once more.
When the sun begins to reach through my curtains and my fingers are aching with cold, I reach for the last of Mum’s journals. 2005. The year she died. The poems are more frequent here, her handwriting less contained. I flick to the last entry: 2nd August. No poem, only an appointment for Ollie and I to get our vaccinations. We would have been two months old.
‘What was happening to you?’ I wonder out loud, wishing I could reach through the pages of those diaries and probe the mind of the woman who wrote them. The woman who seemed to become more impenetrable as the years wore on.
A sound from downstairs brings me back from my reverie. Ollie must have woken up. I slip down the stairs and watch from the door as he pours himself a glass of milk.
I hesitate. If I’m wrong then I’m going to open myself up to even more ridicule. But I have nothing to lose.
‘Was it the knights?’ I ask him. He whirls round, his eyes wide, and I no longer need him to answer.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, Fern.’
‘Did you know Mum was a knight?’ I say. ‘Did you know she was murdered?’
Not even Ollie’s normal poker face can mask the shock that flits across his features.
‘Dad should know,’ I say.
Ollie strides across the room and grabs my wrist. ‘Don’t be a bitch.’
I wrestle away from him. ‘Was it them?’ I hiss. ‘Tell me the truth!’
‘Don’t upset him. For God’s sake, Fern, what makes you even think he’ll believe you?’
‘I believe it. I’ve got proof too. Messages from her murderer!’ I brandish my phone at him, and he stares, bewildered, at Archimago’s confession. When he looks back at me, his face is full of contempt. ‘So call the police then. What do you think they’ll do?’
‘Why won’t you tell me if it’s true?’ I whisper as he turns away from me.
‘Leave it alone, Fern,’ he says, equally quietly. ‘Just accept that Mum died in her sleep. She was normal. Like me, like Dad.’
He didn’t need to say it.
Not like you.
5
For the first time in years I am craving the distraction of school. I pull a hoodie over my uniform and drag my tattered satchel out into the bracing chill of early morning London. Before last year, I’d never even dreamed of going to Bosco College, a private school in Chelsea where the offspring of politicians and millionaires are sent. Usually the only way people like me would be there is because we were cleaning the toilets or serving lunch.
Given his daughter, Lottie, goes to Bosco, it seems ironic that it was one of Sebastien Medraut’s opponents who got me into the school. After the fire, Jenny was let off with something called a referral order and the rest of her gang were allowed to stay at St Stephen’s. Dad wrote an angry letter to our local MP. ‘How dare they say they can’t do anything!’ he’d hissed as he wrote. I remember that being the moment when the rage inside me had erupted.
‘You can do something!’ I’d shouted. ‘Send Ollie away!’
But Dad just promised punishments that had no meaning to me at all, shaking his head when I tried to tell him how Ollie had led me to the spot and left me there without a backwards glance. ‘Your brother was just led astray, love, that’s all. He’s not like the others, they’re bad to the core. He’s moving schools and that’s that …’
I turned away from him in every way after that. Ignored him when he told me that the MP had written back and was coming to visit. ‘She’ll be able to pull some strings,’ he’d said imploringly through my bedroom door. I didn’t believe him, but when I did meet the Right Honourable Helena Corday, MP for Newham, I had to grudgingly admit that she wasn’t bad. She’d held my hand and her smile hadn’t been dripping with pity. ‘I’m so frustrated that there’s nothing I can do to overturn the judge’s decision,’ she’d said, addressing me instead of Dad, ‘but there might be something I can do for you. My old alma mater has a scholarship scheme.’
‘My grades won’t be good enough,’ I had told her.
‘But your drawings might be.’ She had gestured at the paintings and sketches that lined the walls of our house. ‘I know something about art. I paint in my spare time. I can see that you have an extraordinary talent here, Fern. I feel sure that Bosco would consider it, especially if I put in a good word.’
So I was sent to Bosco on a full art scholarship and Ollie was moved down the road to Upton Academy. Much as I was grateful to Helena Corday, the rage of how unfair it was that my life had suffered this huge upheaval and everyone else’s had pretty much stayed the same, remained with me. I might not be bullied at Bosco, but just the fact that I have to trek across the city to get here is a constant reminder of Ollie and Dad’s betrayals.
Today, though, instead of dwelling on how different my life is to the fancy, easy lives of my fellow pupils, all I can think about is Mum and what happened to Ollie last night. I ponder Archimago’s texts. Something strange happened to my twin last night, and he all but confirmed the existence of the knights this morning. I have to find out more. The question is – how on earth am I supposed to do that?
‘You’ll work it out,’ someone says. At first I think they’re talking to me, then I realise it’s Lottie Medraut, comforting notorious drama llama Beth Goodman. ‘My dad always says that you just can’t take no for an answer,’ she tells her friend.
Someone else in the group raises an eyebrow and says, ‘I wish he wouldn’t take no for an answer with me.’ Lottie pretends to hurl, Beth smiles and the rest of their gaggle dissolves into giggles.
Don’t take no for an answer. That’s all I need to do – make Ollie tell me what he knows, whatever it takes.
After school, I sneak into Ollie’s bedroom. He’s late again – probably hanging out with his friends. I’d been counting on that. His aftershave, deep-voiced and whisky sour, lingers. Unlike my room, his is meticulous. The souvenirs on his desk are placed just so. Folders are stacked head to toe, each subject labelled in capitals. There used to be photos of him with Jenny and their gang pinned to the corkboard above the desk, but now it’s empty except for a few Post-it notes.
I open his drawers, searching for anything that might tell me what happened to him last night. It’s been years since I’ve been inside Ollie’s bedroom, and nothing is where it used to be. Back then it was covered in my artwork and his stories, and stashes of whatever conkers or leaves we’d found in the park. Now the drawers just contain stationery and the folders neatly written notes from class. It’s so strange. There’s nothing of Ollie here, as though after Dad told him to break off his friendship with Jenny he just … erased his personality from his room.
My hand brushes against something at the back of one drawer and I pull out a wrinkled photograph. My heart bloats as I recognise it. Ollie and I in the garden, covered in sand, grinning at the camera. On the back is the date: June 2012. We were seven. Those two happy children had no idea that just a few years later everything would fall apart.
It was only when we went to secondary school that the way we looked started to matter. I felt it immediately. People wanted to hang out with Ollie, but always made excuses for why I couldn’t come too – no space, no spare seats, too many girls already and so on and so on. Ollie went along with it. Then, gradually, it became more overt. At first Ollie didn’t participate. He’d make himself scarce when his new friends turned on me. Then he would snort with laughter at a well-aimed ‘joke’. Then he’d be the one making the jokes. Then …
A front-door key jiggles in the lock, wrenching me back to the present. Shit. I dart into the wardrobe just in time. It’s smaller than I remember, the space for hanging clothes too narrow for me to close the door completely.
I’m going to have to hope that he doesn’t look this way. The bedroom door squeaks open.
The gap in the cupboard only lets me see a ribbon of the room so it takes me a moment to parse the strange sound coming from Ollie’s bed. It’s so quiet it could almost be someone kicking leaves outside. Shuffle, squeak, shuffle. Is Ollie doing something I really don’t want to witness? No, I realise. He’s crying.
Edging the door open a little further, Ollie’s back slides into view. Turtle-like, it shakes. I don’t want to see or hear this at all. It complicates things.
When Ollie straightens, I worry for a moment that he’s sensed me, but no. He’s pulling something out from underneath his bed. I can’t see what it is or move to get a better view without alerting him to my presence, and I kick myself for not thinking to look there. Ollie seems to perform some kind of psyching-up ritual, breathing hard through his nose. He looks ridiculous. If only his mates could see him now. Then the bedside lamp flickers. It’s happening again.
Ollie’s holding something in his palm, staring into the sun-bright light bursting from it. It’s exactly like the light that seemed to consume him last night. I wasn’t expecting this – I thought I was going to have to blackmail him, but this is even better. A chance to get to the source of that light. I shove open the door and reach him before he’s even looked up.
‘What are you –?’ he begins as I make a grab for the object in his hand. ‘No, you can’t!’
He kicks my shin in the struggle, and my nails make crescent moons on his arm.
‘I need to understand!’ I say, prising his fist open like an oyster. In his palm is a rose gold locket, the one Dad bought Mum for their wedding. I snatch it.
‘Give it back!’ Ollie grabs my hands as I twist the locket open. We are both holding it, both acutely aware of its fragility, locked in a delicate wrestle. The light spills out of the locket like oil onto my skin.
Something’s wrong.
I am being wrenched apart, my head splitting, my heart twisting. I am being stabbed by a million needles. Ollie stares with panicked eyes, but I can tell that he’s not in pain like I am. The room melts into darkness, then light, like we’re in a train going through tunnel after tunnel. I catch glimpses of a wooden door flanked by Greek pillars, a stone dome, huge birds in the sky. The building is familiar but I can’t place it. In my hand the locket grows too hot. Pressure builds inside my chest, like a stuck bubble. It builds, and builds, and builds. It’s too much. I scream and the bubble bursts.
