by Ben J Henry
Barks and cries gave way to whining, and then to silence.
A grey sea undulated beneath the bleak, lifeless sky. Each wave gave the false impression of a journey to the shore as the sea rose and fell, creating the illusion of the water’s progress. With his toes flush to the edge of the cliff, Gus followed the futile journey of a wave from its birth on the horizon to a certain death upon the jagged rocks of an unforgiving shore. When the white spray had bled away, the wave disappeared with no trace that it had ever been.
No furnace burned in Gus’s chest. In the void of his anger lay a profound emptiness. That burning vengeance had led him to a locked door; Winter had sacrificed herself for nothing. The grey waves swelled hypnotically, waiting to swallow him. Distantly, he heard the clatter of pebbles dropping down the cliff face and heard the approach of footsteps. He blinked and ducked beneath the overhang, feeling a surge in his chest as the vacuum filled. He reached for the knife as Rainn walked around the corner.
Morning light caught the serrated edge of the blade as Gus held the knife to Rainn’s throat. Rainn’s heels shifted against the jagged lip of the cliff and loose stones fell silently into the ocean. A growl issued between Sam’s teeth, but he remained by Winter’s side, blue eyes moving between the pair.
‘Lies,’ Gus uttered with a tremble that ran from his lips to the knifepoint, ‘your words. Your tears. You brought her here to die. You’re done.’
‘The man in the tower, Peter.’ Rainn’s voice was calm and certain, her cheeks dry. ‘He is Melissa’s husband. Melissa has struck a deal with Aldous in return for her son, Ryan. She has killed Winter. She will kill Alicia. Aldous believes that Alicia has the Sol, and she will die for it. Unless you stop Melissa.’
Ryan will take me to David.
Gus choked back a breath, his thoughts jumping between shelves in his mental library. Alicia’s guide: Melissa’s son.
‘You told Peter that Alicia has the Sol—that he was wasting his time with me. If Melissa is after her, that’s your doing. If Alicia dies, you’ve killed the pair of them.’
‘I told Peter that Alicia has the Sol because I did not want you on that throne. I did not want them to take what you have.’ Her throat shifted as she swallowed. ‘Alicia destroyed the Unbreakable Door—that is why they think she inherited Eloise’s willpower. But I don’t. Why would I kidnap you, why would I come here, unarmed, if I did not believe that you had what they were after? Your parents knew. That’s why they flew to Portugal. That’s why they died here, up there…’ She nodded beyond the overhang, in the direction of the woodland. Gus fought the urge to follow her gaze. ‘They did not want the Order taking what you have. The Sol lies with you, Augustus. And I can show you how to use it against them.’
Gus searched those eyes for fragments of truth amid layers of deception. He could end her now, and who would know? Who would mourn her?
‘Anna’s letters lead to Psarnox,’ Rainn continued. ‘To their home in Vivador. But she could not reach them. They hide beyond a chasm, and that is where Alicia’s mother failed. I have read the letters—I can take you to this chasm. If you have the Sol, you will cross it, and on the far side you will find their greatest weapon. That is the only way you can reach Melissa before she kills Alicia.’
Gus inched closer, moving the knife just millimetres. Rainn’s foot slipped and she lurched forward to grip his shoulder with one hand and his wrist with the other.
‘I am a liar and a murderer,’ she said. ‘One push and you will rid this world of me. One push, and you lose your only chance of saving your cousin.’
Rainn felt the knife falter. Holding Gus’s gaze, she eased his wrist aside and stepped from the cliff’s edge. He watched her duck beneath the overhang and lie on the ground. On her back, resting on her elbows, she patted the ground twice in invitation.
He ignored the growls of the husky, settled beside Winter and closed his eyes. Through the rush of the wind, Rainn whispered in his ear and Gus drifted into an uneasy sleep. Lucid footsteps under a starry sky carried him to the blowhole in the centre of the peninsula. As Rainn had described, a green vapour rose from the depths of the weathered hole as if it were a cauldron in the rock. It was through this portal that his great-grandparents had discovered the immaterial realm over sixty years before. With tendrils of green mist snaking around his ankles, Gus stepped over the edge and fell into Vivador.
He lay on the floor in a large, dark cavern lit by shafts of light that permeated the rock high above. He ran his eyes across the ceiling in search of the blowhole, but saw only the cracks through which the light fell. The underground chamber stretched to walls on his left and right so distant that he struggled to see them. Apart from the crystals glistening underfoot, the environment was unremarkable. He might have believed he was still on Earth, were it not for the luminescent green dress that Rainn wore.
She stood with her back to him on the edge of a wide chasm. Gus walked over, narrowing his eyes as he strained to see the far edge. It looked as if the cavern had been cleaved in two and set fifty metres apart. When Gus reached her side, Rainn swept a hand from behind her and drew a branch into view. The branch ignited, casting a shuddering light on their surroundings, though the light had no effect on the abyss before them. Slowly, Rainn extended her arm. As the burning torch crossed the cliff’s edge, it disappeared as if it had passed through a curtain, leaving Rainn with nothing but a blunt stick in her hand. She drew her hand towards her and the branch reappeared to cast the pair in firelight.
Gus stepped cautiously to the edge of the abyss. He held his hand before him and turned to Rainn, who nodded. He inched his fingers over the edge and watched them vanish, passing into a perfect darkness. Gently, he withdrew his hand and flexed his fingers.
‘What is it?’
‘Active Nothing. Aldous and Morna decreed that nothing can exist here. Anna could not cross it. Neither can I.’
She turned from the chasm and observed him. As Gus stared into the void, he felt the weight of her expectation. All that remained was to determine whether he, and not Alicia, had inherited the Sol.
‘If you can cross this chasm,’ Rainn projected within his skull. ‘You will find the portal that Aldous used to kill your parents. Through this portal, you can reach Melissa before she finds Alicia.’
‘And then what?’ Gus asked aloud.
Rainn whispered into the void.
‘You cannot let her live.’
Who is Ryan?
Ryan ran a finger through the dust, tracing the number on the low beam. The 2 and 9 had been scored in straight lines along and against the grain of the wood, resembling figures on a digital clock. He lifted an iron nail from the floor beside the mattress and swept his eyes across dozens of 29s engraved into the beams and the floorboards, the exposed brick between the attic floor and the raftered roof, and the discarded, cobwebbed furniture.
Amira’s tongue poked between her teeth as she drew the number 2, boxy and right-angled on the paper, dragging the blue crayon with uncertain, infant strokes.
The nail slipped through Ryan’s fingers as the memory ghosted into focus like fragments of a dream: the six-year-old girl lying on her tummy on his bedroom floor; the deconstructed cereal box covered in numbers. He turned his face to the shaft of morning light that fell through the window in the slanted roof. Wearing only boxer shorts, he felt the sunlight warm his clammy skin and burn the retinas through his closed lids, scattering the ghosts.
He lowered his eyes to the blunt wooden mallet that had rolled off his chest when he woke. Beside this was an empty brass bowl. Like the needle of a record player, his eyes circled the rim of the bowl and a hum rang between his ears. The haunting sound brought forth a second memory, more recent yet more distant than the last. A pair of black eyes observed him distastefully as he hung suspended between two opposing panes of glass. He attempted to reconstruct the face that held those eyes, but the humming between his ears continued to grow, drawing him from the memory as it had pulled him from between the mirr
ors. Melting into that liquid sound, his soul had been lured from the immaterial realm and returned to his body.
Ryan tore his eyes from the bowl. For how many months, or years, had he lain upon that mattress? Trying to fathom how he had ended up in the attic was like trying to recall his own birth. Staring at the aged sheet, he searched for memories. It was like fishing for a plug in cloudy water, reaching deeper but finding nothing.
An innate urge pulled his gaze to the back of the room, where a bedsheet covered the mirror. Crossing the floorboards, he looked beyond the material to what lay beneath: brown-spotted glass and rusted leaves bordering an iron frame. With each step he took, his heartbeat increased, the pounding of blood in his ears grew as deafening as the ethereal hum that had woken him. He lifted a hand to the grey-white cotton and watched his fingers tremble.
A torch flickered on and off in the dollhouse windows—
—‘Melissa!’
Each memory bubbling through the murky waters harboured a passenger: an emotion heavier than anxiety but less defined than regret. His fingertips brushed the edge of the bedsheet.
‘Stop it!’
Stop what? His chest tightened and a weight pressed him from all sides as a tyranny of emotion coursed through his veins. To uncover the mirror would be to look into his eyes and see what they had seen. One tug of the sheet and he would face his past. He wrung his hands together against his chest, took a deep breath and turned from the mirror, rejecting the memories that sang for his attention.
At the foot of the attic stairs, Ryan faced his father’s study. Staring at the Leave-It door, he recalled a flash of spidery handwriting: Fear removal vs fear creation—
—a briefcase: P.S. Lawson.
He steadied himself against the door, hands on the frame, forehead against the wood. The letter S lingered in his mind, significant and painful. On the back of his eyelids, a sheen on black leather glinted like obsidian eyes. Watching him. Waiting for him to be undone.
You are a simulacrum.
Retreating down the corridor, Ryan considered the burden of thought. As a simulacrum, he had been free from the shackles of consequence and time, his actions dictated by Aldous and Morna, his purpose to do their bidding. He had to contend with neither the regrets of past decisions nor the anxieties over future choices. He had lived without guilt or fear.
She’s not ready.
Had he not intervened, Rainn would have extinguished Alicia’s soul. The test was unfair: regardless of whether Alicia was as powerful as Aldous and Morna believed, she would not have known how to prevent the attack. So, the simulacrum had taken action, firing a bullet into Alicia’s heart.
And the simulacrum was punished, placed between the mirrors that no longer held David. Ryan had waited for those obsidian eyes to latch upon his body, like Alicia had held the Unbreakable Door.
But he was not a simulacrum, and could not be undone. He was a person, with a history, and to have history was to have all the mistakes of your past rolled out before you like a stained rug. He followed this rug to his bedroom, where the door was ajar.
On his bed lay Amira. She was thinner than when he had last seen her; the duvet barely creased under her waifish frame. She was older too, by a couple of years at least. Her face appeared troubled, even in sleep, and he wondered why she slept in his bed and where her soul lay. Drawn to that fragile form, he wanted to lie on the floor and join her in Vivador, to meet her eyes and ask for her help to navigate his memories. But now he had escaped the immaterial realm, could he willingly return to it?
He opened the wardrobe in the corner of the room and dressed slowly, pulling on a pair of black jeans and sliding his arms into a cream jumper, enjoying the sensation of the wool against his cold skin.
You’re distracting yourself.
He did not want to fish for memories. They no longer lurked at the bottom of murky waters, but darted like sharks beneath the surface. Moments ago, he had believed himself to be a simulacrum: a mental projection born from the imagination of Aldous Crow. As an isolated fragment, he had questioned nothing; now he was connected to a history so vast it overwhelmed him.
In Vivador, a rock might be conjured in an instant, originating in the mind of its creator. Through will or expectation, the rock would be obliterated, leaving no trace behind but the memories of those who had seen it. In his bedroom, everything that Ryan saw existed in a sliver of time between an infinite past and an infinite future. To trace the origin of an object, he would have to look beyond its construction to the creation of the materials from which it was made.
Near the foot of the bed, a table lay beneath the window. On four short legs sat a disc of pine an inch thick. Though the surface was bare, he recalled a dollhouse that had once sat in its centre. Blue wooden panels, cracked. Tinged with guilt. He pushed the memory aside, reaching deeper into obscurity. Before the dollhouse, a Turkish lamp had scattered multicoloured rays against the white wall. Bathed in these rays, he had read in bed, his eyes on the pages of the book in his lap while his father’s voice carried up the stairs as he read to Amira in her bedroom below.
Amira? Or someone else?
Jealousy coloured the memory and Ryan tried to picture what had lain on the table before the lamp. He pondered the contents of a past that existed outside his memory. In how many rooms—in how many houses—had this table served its stoic purpose in the corner? And before this, on what sunlit hill or sunken valley had grown the pine from which it had been hewn?
—not her bedroom—
Ryan ignored the memories that thrashed beneath the surface. He focused on the table: this inanimate object driving deep roots into a history that dwarfed his own. Twenty years ago, when the molecules in his body inhabited other organisms, had this table existed as he saw it now? In decades to come, when his body returned to the soil and his atoms found new homes, would this table remain standing, defiant against the other uses this world might find for its parts? He kneeled to study the marks on the table legs and recalled a husky puppy gnawing on the wood, wagging its tail.
Sam. The dog’s name was Sam. Guilt and jealousy twisted into pain, and he reeled from the name that resounded through his mind. Again, he latched his attention to something safe: the blank patch of wall above his bed where coloured rays had fallen. Heightened by emotion, a succession of memories overrode his perception of the bedroom, more real than his surroundings.
‘You’re my special boy,’ his mother whispered, a proud, protective glint in her silver eyes as she squeezed his hand, lying in bed beside him with a picture book on her chest.
The image shifted and the memory stung.
His mother caught his eye as he passed the bedroom doorway. Her face was blank, her eyes wide and untrusting.
He blinked fiercely, beating down the memories and grounding himself in the waking world. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans. If his eyes unlocked evocative moments from such innocuous surfaces, he dared not lay his hands on anything.
Yet, as a child might lift a finger to a static surface, knowing they will suffer a shock, his curiosity wrestled his fear, and his eyes found Amira’s face. From her coy smile rose the colours of the rainbow: a string of numbers sang tunelessly as she folded her arms across the wooden desk. He smiled at the bedside, enjoying the memory of his mother’s laughter, while keeping Amira’s face in focus, not allowing the images to consume him—
A bed filled with spiders. A mess of twitching legs on the sheets, the pillows. There must have been 29 of them—
—‘Were you jealous that it was Amira’s birthday?’
Fear on Amira’s face, and he was the source. She blamed him for the spiders. Not just the spiders. There was more. He staggered backwards until his heel met the wardrobe, and he raised his hands in front of him. What forgotten crimes had they committed?
Who is Ryan?
In Vivador, hours had passed as he followed the chaotic tumble of a waterfall or the gentle passage of a cloud. He had waited for Alici
a without impatience, allowing time to flow with his surroundings, passing through him effortlessly. Now the weight of history pressed upon him as he studied the face on the pillow. Mirrored in Amira’s angelic innocence, Ryan saw himself reversed. He was a demon, guilty. A shoal of thoughts jostled for his attention, fins breaching the surface. And these thoughts carried different weights. Like a great white shark, his father’s voice weaved through his attention, scattering all else in its wake.
Ryan is a murderer.
‘Dad?’—a female voice, outside his mind. Downstairs. Ryan fled his bedroom and looked over the banister to the hallway below. Alicia Harrington stood by the front door with a phone pressed to her ear and a look of abject desolation on her face.
29
‘Dad?’
‘Alicia?’
Pain pricked her dry throat at the sound of her father’s voice.
‘I need you—’ Winter’s face flickered, translucent as stained glass. ‘—I need you to come and get me.’
She cut through Rory’s urgent questions, describing the location of Burnflower as best as she could and assuring him that she was physically unharmed.
‘Have you…’ his voice was a tentative whisper. ‘Is David…?’
‘No. Bring Joe Crow.’
Alicia returned the phone to the bracket on the wall and stared at it for a moment before her peripheral vision alerted her to the figure at the top of the stairs. It was not a simulacrum that stood in black jeans and a woollen jumper. It was the young man who had pressed a gun to her chest and pulled the trigger. The living, breathing Ryan walked down the stairs. He appeared bigger in the real world, taller and broader, perhaps because she had, until now, only seen him against a backdrop of rolling hills and innumerable pines. She had, until now, only known him in another realm.
‘What happened?’ he asked, his voice husky and lethargic. And when she did not answer: ‘Alicia?’
She pictured the headstone near her mother’s grave on which his name was etched. Her lips quivered and she swallowed.
