by Ben J Henry
A green glow lit the gloom: capital letters tattooed across the walls of the crater. From the surface of the bubbling lake to the jagged rim, a thousand copies of a single word.
MURDERER.
With a hand to her chest, Alicia’s gaze raced between the slanted messages, broken by tunnels and fissures, warped by translucent forms with hands to their mouths, stifling giggles. Around her ribcage, a coil tightened, braced to snap. Then, there was an anomaly in the identical crowd: Amira emerging from the tunnel where Rainn had stood, her eyes transfixed by the writing on the wall. On Winter’s face, a hateful grin—
A lie. These blazing letters were not a taunt, but an apology.
‘I didn’t know—I never would have…I’m so sorry.’ The words hummed between Alicia’s ears like the mournful note of a violin. Not pity, but authenticity. She met those chestnut eyes and knew that in another realm, tears slid down a sleeping face.
‘I need to see my brother,’ Alicia stated. ‘Don’t hold back.’
Winter mimicked the surfer’s stance, raising one hand to the sky and the other before her, fingers splayed. Alicia marvelled at the intensity of the storm above, so thick with thunderbolts that the light was a strobe upon them. Lightning left the cloud at multiple locations to land on Winter’s waiting hand. Channelling the great energy through her body, she sent the lightning along her outstretched arm, through her nails, and blasting across the crater.
In the throes of agony, people speak of a white-hot pain. A flame will burn red, orange and blue before transitioning to white. Alicia had seen nothing as bright, felt nothing as hot and experienced nothing as painful as the energy that coursed through her, tearing at every unreal atom of her projected body. She was gripping an electric fence. Blinded. To let go was to wake.
And then it ended. In the shadow of the storm cloud, ten thousand pairs of eyes glinted from the shelves, awaiting Alicia’s move. But what to do when the options are endless? She could stab and slash, blast and burn; she could send an infinite number of horrors to maim and maul Winter’s body. Wracking her mind for an original assault, Alicia spotted a familiar face on the rim of the crater. Lightning played across the cloud beyond her.
‘Winter fears no attack on her body because her body does not exist,’ hissed Rainn. ‘You must attack what lies before you.’
Whether Aldous and Morna watched from the shelves, or whether that was another lie, Alicia knew that Rainn was right about Winter. Those projected words had been tainted with guilt, but not fear. Winter understood this for the game it was. Alicia needed to prove to Rainn that she was ready to face her family.
‘I need to wake you up now,’ said Alicia to Winter. ‘Don’t worry about the phone—tell Gus I’ll send Joe.’
A flicker of protest might have crossed Winter’s face. It might have been the lightning.
‘I hope you find him,’ Winter replied, her scowl unbroken.
A chanting rose as the simulacrum army called Winter’s name, urging her to finish this battle and drive Alicia from the Playground. Winter relaxed into the role, raising her chin in a supercilious manner.
‘Can you see it?’ Rainn asked Alicia. ‘Now seize it.’
Alicia reached across the crater with her mind’s eye. When she reached Winter’s projected body, she sought what lay within. Looking beyond her eyes, she fastened on that which Ryan had lacked: the ego. Winter’s perfect smile faltered.
Lightning struck the crater’s rim and rock cascaded into the lake as Alicia held Winter in her grasp. It was not Winter’s body that she strove to drive from Vivador, but her soul. The young woman began to flicker, passing through each colour of the spectrum as she lost her definition. For a split second, she was no more than a glassy outline and then the pillar was empty.
It might have felt like victory had every simulacrum not dropped to their knees and screamed.
Matricide
Melissa dropped the broken bottle at Peter’s feet and raised her hands to her face. She hurried down the steps to the mattress at the bottom. David lay on his back, his head on a pillow with no case. His blue lips and pale cheeks matched the stripes on his pyjamas, and she might have thought him dead had his chest not risen and fallen beneath the cotton. The light shifted as Peter crouched to retrieve the broken bottle. Wearing a mask of surprise, Melissa turned to face him.
‘Another lie,’ she whispered. ‘You told me that you needed other minds to fix Ryan, and I did not question it. I took that position at Valmont and I would have done anything you asked of me. Anything. This—’ she spread her arms, gesturing at the cellar, ‘—tell her he’s here, lock the door, problem solved! This I understand. But why tell me that he died?’
Peter descended the stairs. Light strained through the grass outside, through brick vents near the ceiling and caught the jagged glass in his hands, curling green shadows along the wall. On the farthest of the three barrels lay a black tin, slightly larger than a lunchbox. A finger of green light caressed the tin and Melissa steered her eyes to Peter’s face.
‘In Psarnox, Aldous has a pair of mirrors,’ Peter growled. ‘Suspended between these mirrors, a person is unable to separate their true self from the infinite reflections. In this state, the self will erode, deteriorating in its search for identity amid illusion. Between these mirrors, Ryan lost himself. He was a clean slate.’
‘That’s what I asked for. That’s what you promised me. You should have returned him to me. You didn’t send me to Valmont for other minds, Peter. You sent me for the Harrington family—and I would have given them to you. What sense was there in telling me that he had died?’
Peter drew the glass against the wall as he reached the bottom step, scraping a chalky line into the brick. He put down the broken bottle and stood by the barrel. Melissa did not permit herself to look at the tin.
‘Only in Vivador is the memory wiped. In the waking world, history returns. Here, he would know nothing other than his ruinous past. What he did to Sam,’ he said, scratching the cleft in his upper lip, ‘such things cannot be undone. We could not give you what you wanted, Aldous and I. So, he cleared the mirrors for David and took Ryan as a simulacrum.’
‘You couldn’t fix him, so you used him as bait,’ she said bitterly, tightening the knot at the back of her head. ‘When I found that grave empty, did I rush to the police? No. I took David for you. And if it was Anna or Alicia you were after, I would have taken them too.’
‘I read her letters.’
Melissa swallowed.
‘You sent her to Portugal,’ Peter continued. ‘You sent her to Aldous and Morna. If it weren’t for you, that book would never have ended up in her—’
‘And I would have got it back! I said I would get it back. There was no need to send Rainn to my house!’
‘It is rude to interrupt people while they are talking.’ Peter closed his eyes and pinched his nose, his expression weary. ‘Do you have any idea how much easier it would have been to let them kill you? I set you up in that school. Played the long game. Just to give you purpose. I gave you value in their eyes. You are alive because of me.’
‘You killed me when you broke our son,’ said Melissa. Blinking back tears, she let her eyeline hover on the screw in the wall where the gardening gloves had hung. She sniffed, straightened up and adopted a forceful tone.
‘Lock me in, go on. Go ahead. You shut that door, and I’ll enter Vivador. I’ll wait in that tower.’ She pointed a finger to the ceiling, as if twin thrones revolved between the arches on the upper floor. ‘And when Alicia returns, I will tell her where her brother is.’
She held her breath. She need only endure that arrogant smile for as long as it took him to open the tin. He picked it up. Fingered the clasp. Ready to brandish a collar before her eyes and let her know that he had beaten her. Again.
Peter opened the clasp, lifted the lid and Melissa absorbed the change in his face. He did not scream when he dropped it. Two rubber collars bounced across the concrete floor and a snake s
lithered between the barrels.
He held his right hand in his left, pinching the bite mark. Their eyes locked just long enough for Melissa to witness her husband’s fear: his weapon of choice used against him.
Peter darted through the door. Melissa followed. She reached his office to find him struggling with the padlock. Nudging him aside, she entered the four digits that she had used on both locks earlier that morning. Peter knew what he would find when his wife let him into the office: an empty space on the shelf where the box of anti-venom had been kept.
‘Where is it?’ he asked, eyes flicking along the shelf to the tub of rubber snakes.
‘Far enough,’ she replied.
Peter walked around the desk and settled in his chair. With his bitten hand raised near his chin, he opened the drawer and withdrew a mobile phone, surprised that Melissa had not removed it.
‘You should probably call an ambulance,’ said Melissa in a monotone. ‘But what was it that you said to Amira when you presented her with that tank, and placed it by her bedside? Twenty minutes?’
In the theatre of Peter’s imagination, his wife replaced the snake in the terrarium with a rubber toy and hid the reptile in the box of collars.
Melissa opened the filing cabinet and pulled out the file she had read three hours before. The chair creaked as Peter leaned back, watching her read his notes on Ryan. She sifted through the pages, conscious of her husband watching her skim material she had already absorbed; letting him know what she knew. When climbing into bed late at night, having returned from a day in the Pagoda, had he watched her sleeping as he dreamed these plans?
‘Matricide,’ he uttered, as if his eyes were in her head. As if he knew what page she had settled on. ‘Do you know how difficult it is to break the bond between mother and son?’
She returned the file and tugged Rainn’s from the drawer. Rainn: the final playing piece in his twisted game. Ryan was to fall in love with her, and Melissa would send her away. Ryan would hate her for it. But her son had not fallen for Rainn; he had pushed her. Ryan was unable to love.
‘Is that what my murder would prove?’ she asked curiously, her eyes unable to focus on the page. ‘That love could be destroyed? Like your love for Hazel?’
Melissa withdrew the family tree she had found in Ryan’s pocket. Her husband’s motorbike had roared in her ears as she scanned its contents, and quickly put it back. The bike had dropped to the floor as he ran to his son’s side. A moment later, she was lifting Ryan into her arms and Peter was locking the door to his office.
Her eyes now lingered on the name on the paper: Hazel Burnflower. Rainn’s mother. The dead woman after whom he had renamed her parents’ home. Peter watched his wife, her face taut with conflict, and imagined her keying a date into his padlocks.
‘2001,’ he breathed.
Melissa rested the file on top of the cabinet. Words slipped from her unsmiling mouth: ‘The year we met.’
‘The year she died. You cracked it.’
She shook her head. Before taking the bear from Ryan’s bedroom last night, she had tried the door to the attic and found it locked. Had she tried to force it open, Peter might have woken. She would have to wait for him to unlock it for her. Or take the key from around his neck—the key that he claimed was to a door in Portugal.
The Pagoda did not require a key; after Ryan broke into his office, Peter had replaced the keyholes with padlocks.
‘There are ten thousand possible combinations to a four-digit padlock,’ said Melissa, arms hanging at her sides, lacking the energy to fold them. ‘Lucky the first digit was a two. It took me under an hour.’
‘You were always lucky,’ said Peter.
She laughed and he smiled, surprising them both. Sweat had broken on his brow and his breathing was laboured. He would die in that chair. Her eyes drifted from the silver chain along his clavicle to the phone clasped in his unbitten hand.
‘What did she do? Rainn?’
Peter’s thoughts flickered: a torn label stamped into the floor.
‘Nothing that I didn’t expect of her.’
‘It didn’t look like you expected it.’
‘It can be disappointing to learn that you were right.’
She nodded. ‘That’s something we can agree on.’ She stepped up to the desk and leaned on it, as he had leaned on the kitchen counter, all the weight in her hands and frustration in her eyes. ‘I wanted to give you the chance to tell me he was in the attic. One last chance to tell me something true. But I knew that you would lead me here.’
Peter swallowed and a bead of sweat slipped down his forehead, along the crease between his brows and into his eye. He blinked.
‘Fear and hatred will always triumph over love.’
‘I don’t know love,’ said Melissa, turning from the room. She heard him key a number into his phone as she went down to the cellar, her steps quickening. Where might she find the snake?
Active Nothing
Unable to dissuade her, Gus had resigned himself to Winter’s plan. He had left her in their shallow cave and dashed along the ledge towards the lighthouse. Cautious as a cat, he stalked from the bushes to the empty doorframe. A staircase to his right wound up the inner wall to the upper level, where the light was housed. The staircase was accessible only via a perforated metal door, which itself was blocked by a figure sleeping on her feet. Gus braced himself for the flutter of Rainn’s eyelids, but she did not stir when he prised the rifle from her grasp. Her attention was elsewhere, her mind engaged in Vivador. His finger found the trigger and he trained the weapon at her chest, ready to shoot the woman while she slept. He hesitated. Were it Aldous or Morna in front of him, he might have been able to convince himself: taking vengeance for the murder of his parents. But Rainn was not his target.
He brushed the deadly thoughts aside and slung the strap of the rifle over his shoulder. There was no phone on the walls. He eyed the padlock on the steel door and considered searching Rainn for the key, but chose to investigate the door to his left. He found what might have been a storage room, now bare, with an open hatch in the centre of the concrete floor. With one last glance at Rainn, he stepped on the rusting ladder and descended into the dark.
Like mole rats, Aldous and Morna’s hired hands had dug out a crude tunnel under the lighthouse which twisted beneath the crop of woodland and deeper into the peninsula. Gus ran his hands along rotting timber supports, his fingers slick with a slime that lined the rock. He had no time to waste. The ruse might end at any moment, as Peter and Rainn realised that an imposter stood before them. His walk became a jog, the rifle bouncing against his back. If he could reach his great-grandparents before Rainn woke, he would finish what his parents had set out to do on his seventeenth birthday.
Gus ran into a door. The rifle clattered to the floor and his hands searched the surface before him. Finding a keyhole, he stooped to peer through it, but saw nothing. The door would have fitted an old prison cell and the tunnel was barely broad enough to accommodate it. He slammed his shoulder against it with all the strength he could muster, but the iron did not give. In almost total darkness, he tripped over something on the ground, heavier than the rifle. Fingers grazed the rusting blade of a large axe. He pulled it upright, lifting the weapon over his shoulder and bringing it down upon the door. A loud clang issued back along the tunnel, but this axe was on the floor for a reason: whoever had last attempted to break this door had failed.
Seized by blind panic, Gus struck the door repeatedly. Each impotent strike reverberated down his arms, chipping away at nothing but his own resolve. They would know by now that Winter had deceived them. If he returned to the lighthouse to search for the key to unlock the door to find the phone, Rainn would be ready for him. Cursing in frustration, he slammed the axe against the door a final time and let the weapon drop from his hands.
Exhausted by his efforts, Gus took a couple of steps back and aimed the head of the rifle in the direction of the lock. He was standing in the pitch b
lack, wondering how stupid a move this might be, when an agonised wail issued from the lighthouse. Taking this as a sign to abandon his efforts, he raced back along the tunnel. He climbed the ladder, through the hatch. Rainn’s post was empty. A second scream spilled down the stairs and through the metal doorway. An image of Winter flooded his mind as he shouldered the rifle and charged up the steps.
The light spun in a sad and futile manner, straining against the daylight to cast its beam across the rocks. Rainn was sitting on the metal walkway with her back to the curved glass window, gazing at the rotating bulb. The spiral cord of a telephone stretched from her lap to a bracket on the wall behind her. Rainn’s face was lined with tears and the passing beam lit her pupils. She did not raise her head when Gus approached.
‘This is not how it was meant to be.’ Her voice was flat, staring into the beam each time it struck her face. Gus gripped the rifle in both hands.
‘What happened?’
Rainn looked up as the beam swept past and her face was contorted with emotion.
‘She killed her.’
‘Who?’
‘Melissa killed Winter.’
Gus ran. Tripping down the spiralling steps, he burst from the building and into the woodland. Along the barren rock he raced, with the beam of the lighthouse against his back. He stumbled along the ledge, balancing himself with the rifle until he saw Sam’s tail poking from the underhang. He slowed to a halt as the dog sniffed Winter’s body.
He threw the rifle to the floor, shook her shoulders, shouted her name; but that beautiful face resisted his attention as defiantly as she had in life. Barks and growls punctuated desperate pleas. Sam paced the ledge, padding either side of Winter’s legs, his tail shaking in agitation.
