by Ben J Henry
He lost his balance and fell onto his backside, landing on the stone monkey. He shifted into a kneeling position and blurted out: ‘Alicia I’m so sorry about your mother—I know it’s not what you want to hear—I know you just want to be alone, but…’
She looked at her neighbour, clutching the monkey in his lap. In his eyes, she saw sympathy, and deeper still: empathy. Both had lost their mothers to unknown forces. Two strangers, connected by tragedy. Pity left an acrimonious taste in her mouth, but this was not pity; unlike Ryan, Gus understood her pain.
‘I wanted to be alone, too,’ he continued, unable to stop. ‘I wanted to lock myself away from their charitable faces. I know what it feels like to be so…so belittled by their words. Mirroring their wooden smiles. But you can’t…here…’
He looked around, from the broken plant pot by the door to Winter’s sleeping bag beside the stained mattress, as if this was how Alicia had chosen to decorate her hideaway.
She rose, standing rigid. The bulb was too bright. The sky through the window continued to lighten as the night ended. Her vision blurred as pressure built behind her eyes, pushing against the walls of a dam, threatening to break. In Gus’s hands, she saw a monkey with its palms to its eyes, not shutting the world out, but keeping tears within.
To cry was to submit to reality. This was not her reality.
‘Why are you here?’ she asked.
Gus stood on Winter’s sleeping bag. He had given Joe an ultimatum: tell him everything he knew about the Order of Chaos, or the book would go back to Alicia. Joe had added a condition of his own, that, in exchange for the details he had seen fit to hide from his nephew, Gus would hand the book to Rainn. She would not leave without it, Joe insisted; until she left Godalming, a guillotine hung above their heads.
He had taken a moment to consider the offer. To return the hit list to Rainn was to betray Alicia, but what might be gained from the old book? If his parents had passed the book to Anna Harrington so that she might protect those yet to be targeted, then this had been in vain. Melody Wilson and Melissa Lawson were the only names yet to be struck off the list. Melody was dead and Melissa was presumably only alive because she had promised to help Rainn retrieve the evidence.
It was not the book that Alicia needed. It was all the truth that he could spare.
‘My grandfather, Augustus, before he met my grandmother, he had a child with another woman. That woman’s name was Eloise Grett.’
Alicia ran her eyes around the walls of the bedroom, searching the pale rectangles where photographs had hung. She had known so little about her mother’s mother, and nothing of her mother’s father. How much did anyone know about the grandparents they had never met? Was it in this bedroom that Eloise had died on the day she and Gus were born? Gus’s lips parted as he studied her response, waiting a moment before adding: ‘You’re my second cousin. Or something like that. Do you want to sit down?’
‘No.’
‘Okay. That book was written by our great-grandparents. Aldous and Morna. They—’
‘I need some water.’
Alicia stepped past the boy who was no longer just a neighbour and pressed a hand to the wall as she descended the stairs. She took each step with care, holding back the torrent of questions that threatened to trip her. Filling a glass at the kitchen sink, she stared into the pink glow beyond the trees and counted down from ten to one.
She turned to face her second cousin, who was now leaning against the work surface and asked: ‘Aldous and Morna?’
‘They live in Portugal—’
‘They’re still alive?’
‘Yes. And they’re lucid dreamers too. When they were young, our age, they found…’ his brow wrinkled, ‘a realm. A space—I don’t think there’s a name for it. Something beyond waking reality.’
A place where you can create dreams together. Joe’s sarcasm had been impeccable as the whiskey took effect.
Gus paused, recalling the name that Winter had circled on her brainstorm for alternatives to ‘Earth’. A name that Jack must have suggested following his journey down the well.
‘Vivador,’ said Alicia.
Green eyes locked. What had she seen in a realm so dangerous that it lined his uncle’s eyes with fear?
‘I would like to sit down,’ said Gus.
The living room was dark, but neither hit the lights. Alicia took the statuette from Gus’s hands and returned it to the mantelpiece. Gus sat cross-legged on the sofa and Alicia joined him, her back straight and her hands on her knees.
‘Go on,’ she said.
‘Aldous and Morna, they thought they’d somehow managed to merge their consciousness. But it was bigger than that. This space could be found by any lucky lucid dreamer who looked in the right places.’
Lucky, Joe had snorted, drumming his fingers against the oak.
‘They knew that if it became public knowledge, everybody would descend on their paradise. Ruin it. So, they started to track people down—people who had reached Vivador, and ask them how they got there. What “portals” they had used.’
‘Like the well?’ asked Alicia, hands to her elbows in the cold room. Gus nodded, though his uncle had been sketchy on the details here.
‘They hid that well in the shed, blocked old pipes, destroyed arches—anywhere a lucid dreamer had found a connection to Vivador. But it wasn’t enough. They couldn’t destroy all of them, not the bigger ones, like Stonehenge—’
‘So they wrote that list?’
A moan slipped through the boarded windows as the gate caught in the wind.
‘All they had to do was ask people for their names,’ Gus uttered, his throat dry. ‘Apparently, people aren’t too cautious with the information they share with characters in a dream.’
Alicia thought of Ryan. She would have told him anything.
‘So their name goes in the book,’ she said, ‘and Aldous and Morna hunt them down. Is that what she’s here for—Rainn? She’s one of my—one of our cousins, too?’
‘I don’t think so. I don’t think she’s related, I mean, but she is working for them. That symbol, on the book, it’s the Order of Chaos. That’s what they call themselves, our great-grandparents, and anyone who supports their claim to Vivador.’
‘That tattoo,’ said Alicia, her eyes widening. ‘It’s a reality check. That’s what she’s doing when she rubs it. She’s checking to see if she’s awake.’
‘Yes!’ Gus grinned, despite the nature of their conversation; Alicia was proving to be a model student. She met his smile with narrowed eyes.
‘They have my brother,’ said Alicia. ‘In Vivador.’ It’s real. ‘He’s there. I met a man—Ryan—he knows where David is. Ryan will take me to David.’
Ryan—she delivered the name like he was a dear friend. Somebody she could rely on when nobody else was there to help her.
‘Alicia, you mustn’t return to Vivador. This man, he’ll lead you right to Aldous and Morna. You cannot trust him.’
His hands were on her shoulders now. Alicia leaned forward, her green eyes searching his.
‘And I can trust you? Where’s the book?’
Both heads turned to the corridor as a distant blast shattered the silence of the early morning. The pair leaped to their feet, exchanged a glance, and headed for the well.
Embers
Whorls of black smoke drifted across the railway tracks to where Alicia had paused, leaving Gus to continue alone. Joe did not look up when his nephew reached him. Arms folded across his uniform, the police officer was lost in reverie as he stood over smouldering fragments of wood and stone. The well had been blown to pieces. All that remained was a pile of blackened bricks and a shallow hole, partly collapsed. The walls of the shed had exploded outward, the splintered panels aflame, singeing the long grass. Gus detected a smell of bleach in the air, the tell-tale sign of triacetone triperoxide: a popular explosive among the amateur and ill-equipped. He had first encountered TATP when solitary parkour adventures had landed him
in the wrong crowd, who had taken to enjoying the playground at his local park by blowing bits of it up.
‘Official police business?’ Gus asked.
Joe watched the burning panels of the door begin to dwindle as a light rain set in. Alicia’s arrival pulled his focus from the flames. She nudged a plank aside with the toe of her shoe and stepped up beside the police officer.
‘Did you toss the book in there while you were at it?’
The last time their eyes had met, Sergeant Crow had stood in Alicia’s front doorway, talking with Rory. Head dipped and heavy-browed, his profound sadness had made his lies no easier to swallow.
From the top step, Mr Harrington, yes. It was a clean break, painless.
A sob had escaped Rory’s lips and, perhaps out of discomfort, Joe had raised his eyes over the man’s shoulder and spotted Alicia on the stairs.
You’re as good at lying as your nephew, she had thought before slinking up the steps.
Alicia’s stance was hostile. Confident. How much did she already know?
‘What book?’ he asked.
She shook her head and turned to walk away, kicking a charred brick into the trees.
‘I took it,’ said Gus. The wood hissed as the rain intensified. A burning ember floated between the pair, reflected in the young man’s feline eyes. ‘I needed to know how they died.’
‘My mother.’ She balled her fists, swallowed, raised a finger. ‘You took that book and she went straight to Melissa Lawson. And when these—our—this Order came to kill Melissa, they found my mum instead.’
Joe stepped in front of Gus, hands spread as if approaching a wild dog. He opened his mouth to speak but Gus pushed past him.
‘My parents were in Portugal when they died. They took the Murder Book—that’s what my father called it. Your mother—she was in Portugal, too. She was looking for David. They gave her the book and died at her feet.’
He raised his hands to take hers, but buried them in the front pocket of his hooded jacket. Rain plastered dark hair to his brow as he continued.
‘Joe asked her to give it back. But she wouldn’t. Your mother was no murderer, Alicia, and she was no coward either. She didn’t kill those people. Jack, Melody—she tried to warn them.’
Embers landed in the long grass and sizzled out of existence, their heat extinguished instantly. Something Alicia had been resisting began to cool. Like a salve on scorched skin, imagined memories were rewritten: murderous images of her mother replaced with Anna Harrington’s struggle to protect the innocent.
Heavy droplets pounded Joe’s scalp as Alicia addressed him.
‘Rainn. Was it her? Did she kill her?’
Joe remained statuesque and Gus answered: ‘No. Aldous and Morna killed your mother.’
‘They’re here?’
‘No. They’re still in Portugal, Joe reckons.’
Gus attempted to engage his uncle, who had either taken a vow of silence or was attempting to wake from a nightmare.
‘So how…’ Alicia trailed off, her thoughts on Jack drowning in the pool. Nobody had attacked him. Nobody was there but her mother.
‘At first,’ said Gus. ‘Aldous and Morna hunted people here, in the waking world. Once they had a name, they weren’t difficult to find. People started falling off balconies and…’ he studied his uncle’s pained expression, recalling his words, ‘drowning in riptides. But each murder put the family at risk. Each death was traceable. But now—now there’s nothing to prepare. Nothing to hide. They’ve found a way of targeting their victims from Vivador. You could be going about your daily business and Aldous and Morna can kill you from their beds.’
In her mind’s eye, Alicia watched Jack Henson sink beneath the water. Melody Wilson slid to the kitchen floor as the stove continued to burn. Anna Harrington ascended the stairs as two figures watched from another realm. She opened her mouth to challenge Melissa, but no words came out. A final breath slipped through her lips as she collapsed on the steps.
‘That’s how they killed my parents,’ said Gus, wiping rain from his eyes. ‘That’s how they killed your mother. And that’s how they’ll kill us unless we get to them first.’
Joe finally nudged his nephew aside, a statue stirring to life.
‘Alicia…’ he paused, breathed, his chest heaving under the sodden uniform. When he continued his tone was deep and his teeth bared, his urgency expressed as anger. ‘I did everything I could to stop her. I tried to reason with her. And when she wouldn’t listen, I took the house next door.’
She searched his eyes but found no trace of deception.
‘I begged her to return that book. My brother and his wife should never have taken it. Anna should never have kept it. And now Gus is going to return it before we all suffer the same fate.’
Joe faced his nephew with a depth in those blue eyes that Gus had not seen in a year. That unguarded pain reminded him of the nights his uncle had spent staring at the knotted oak of an empty table, daring it to blink. Since then, any vulnerability had been concealed beneath layers of anger.
‘Losing my brother was more painful than you could ever…I will not let them take you too.’
Rain coursed his cheeks in lieu of tears. Gus’s throat burned as he turned to Alicia.
‘Melissa is still alive because she convinced Rainn that she can get the book from you. If I return it, maybe they’ll leave her alone.’
‘And what, that’s it?’ Alicia asked. ‘We just let them get away with it?’
‘No,’ Gus said with a grim smile. ‘Your birthday present—’
‘Augustus—’ Joe warned.
‘—Your Mum was writing you letters. Letters that lead to Aldous and Morna. Rainn can take their precious book, it’s no good to us now. But she’s not leaving town with those letters.’
Undone
Some nights Alicia lay on her back and imagined that she did not understand a word of English. Her sleep-deprived mind struggled to harass her with unwanted thoughts when she failed to recognise the words. She closed her eyes and listened, daring the thoughts to make themselves known. Sinking beneath her eyelids into the vast cavity of her skull, she waited. In these silent moments, she slipped into sleep.
Gus had warned her against Vivador, but she saw no threat in the lucid dream she was experiencing. She devoured the details of her bedroom: the carpet layered with Post-It Notes, snatches of dreams she had managed to recall, images dragged from one state of consciousness to another. The drawer of her desk would not shut, full to bursting with half-finished paintings that were not ready for the honest opinion of her mother or the unsolicited praise of her delightfully maddening father. She lifted a framed photograph from the desk. With eyes tight and mouths open, Alicia and two friends screamed on a rollercoaster. Her best friends had tried to console her. They had encouraged her with patient smiles and silent pleas to forget David and move on. She had not spoken with them all summer.
Down the stairs, she ran her fingertips along the wooden banister and watched the muscles in her forearm flex when she gripped it. In the living room, each surface leaped for her attention. She traced her consciousness along the neural pathways in her brain, testing them as a safecracker might listen for that click as the wheels of the lock slide into place. Passing kitchen cupboards, she wondered if any led to Vivador. Which of these intangible structures represented a link between the material world and what lay beyond? Were she to climb inside, would she find one of these conscious pathways, through which her soul could escape her biological mind?
She reached the patio. In the middle of the garden, where the pond should have been, a well disappeared into a hillock. Her bare feet flattened wet grass. If the well was not in the clearing beyond her grandmother’s cottage, would it still function as a portal? Was it the location of the well that mattered, or simply the idea of it?
Don’t be an idiot, she thought, brushing a hand across the circle of weathered stone. The bricks were charred and soot settled in her fingerprints.
Lucid in her dream, she considered the ride home in Joe’s police car before she had crept back into bed. As the sun rose over Godalming, he had watched his nephew in the rear-view mirror, wincing visibly as Gus recounted Rainn’s visit. She described her journey to Vivador and Ryan’s offer to lead her to David. Joe’s wet knuckles were white as he gripped the steering wheel, yet his tone remained firm:
He doesn’t have your brother. He’ll lead you straight to Aldous and Morna.
The most sensible decision would be to wake up and wait until they had retrieved her mother’s letters. If Ryan’s claim that he was taking her to David was a trap, she should not walk into it blindly.
But Ryan did not know what Gus had told her. The Order of Chaos, Aldous and Morna—she was not as blind as her guide believed. He had led her to a door and challenged her to destroy it. What lay beyond this Unbreakable Door? She leaned over the stones and gazed into the well, seduced by curiosity.
Wake up, Alicia thought before falling into darkness.
Blinking to the cliff’s edge, she saw a set of stone steps leading to the ground below. She could not remember seeing the steps before. It was the first of many instances in which she would wonder if such a detail existed only because she expected it to. Ryan stood with his back to the door, waiting to lead her to her brother, or perhaps her death.
With a hand against the cliff face, she descended the steps and crossed the stretch of grass to the wooden door. Arched at the top and bearing thick panels of a knotted wood, the formidable structure appeared to be missing an iron portcullis. Though both halves of the door met flush in the middle, there was no handle on either side. She made to step around the wide frame but stopped abruptly when she caught the ghost of her reflection. She raised her hand and realised that the door was embedded within a thick wall of glass, so transparent it was barely visible. The glass was cool to the touch and misty fingerprints faded when she removed her hand.
‘It’s a dome,’ said Ryan. ‘Covering the forest and the well.’
Of course, thought Alicia, the voice in her head so loud she feared he might hear it. Aldous and Morna would ask lucid dreamers for their names and then hunt them down in the waking world. If they were to return to Vivador before they had been eliminated, the avid explorers had only the forest in which to lose themselves.
