by Ben J Henry
Rainn leaned against the wooden railing, appearing to contemplate the chaotic pattern of glass. She did not turn when Alicia approached. A beam of light that fell through a tiny, clear window in the front wall widened across the church and lit the stained glass. The rays caught the back of Rainn’s head like a corona, generating a soft, golden glow.
You must attack what lies before you.
Alicia launched herself at Rainn, splintering the wooden railing. The pair flew through the air to strike the stained glass with a hideous crack. In a kaleidoscope of colour, they disappeared through the window.
Shards of green, orange, red and blue littered the rough rock as Alicia rose to her knees. She was on the lip of the volcanic crater, alone. Staggering to her feet, she watched the obsidian platform revolving undisturbed on its magma bed. She was unable to track her thoughts, unable to determine whether she or Rainn had chosen this change in scene. She chastised herself as she scanned the empty shelves of rock: Rainn had altered the name on the grave, cast her shadow upon it and stood awaiting Alicia’s attack—this was her game.
In the exact spot where Amira’s abject terror had confirmed Alicia’s crime, Rainn waited for her pawn. A wink, and she turned down the tunnel, disappearing into Psarnox.
You’re not in control. Anxious thoughts urged Alicia to count down from one hundred, to give herself time to think. Time to reason. If she noticed it, why couldn’t she stop it? In her chest, a coiled spring. Before her eyes, the spot where Winter had flickered. The coil tightened.
One hundred—
She shut her eyes, gritted her teeth, blinked to the shelf and marched after Rainn.
Alicia’s fingers brushed the warm rock, tracing crystals that glistened in the darkness. The tunnel curved to the right and continued downwards at an increasing decline before opening out into a subterranean expanse. Shafts of light permeated the ceiling to illuminate the chamber. Given the curve of this passage, she must be beneath the crater, and she tried to understand how the light reached her through the lake of lava. But this was Vivador, where the laws of nature did not apply.
The chamber stretched twice the distance she could throw and then the floor fell away at the edge of an abyss. Halfway to this abyss, Rainn waited with a hand on her hip and a smile in her eyes. Alicia did not question why Rainn had led her here. She did not think or reason. She listened only to the darkness in her chest.
A heartbeat later, she stood before Rainn with her hands like talons. A gust of wind blasted the woman across the cavern and she struck the rock with a thunderous crack that echoed between the distant walls. Alicia reappeared before her, palms outstretched and fingers trembling. Rainn rose higher up the rock, which splintered under the force of Alicia’s wrath. Weak, blunt phrases tumbled through her mind as she stared at the face of the woman who had handed her a gun without telling her it was loaded. Words poured from her open mouth like a gale.
‘You let me kill her.’
Crushed against the rock, Rainn twisted beneath the strength of Alicia’s will. Each strand of her black hair fanned against the crystalline surface. With her head to the side, her arms spread and one knee raised, she lay against the stone as if in crucifixion. Numerous shafts of light cast Alicia’s shadows on the wall and in these shadows her thoughts lay bare, shifting before her eyes as they made themselves known. The dark forms moved independently of her projected body, rippling like the black stallion and growing into the third dimension. A dozen arms reached from the wall and in their hands were knives and spears, axes and swords, poised and ready to destroy the enemy.
But Alicia did not need weapons, for she was one. She drew the shadows from the wall and let them coalesce within her, surrendering to their fury. Closing the distance, she lifted her head so that Rainn might look down the barrel of the gun.
Alicia saw no fear in those cerulean eyes. Instead, they radiated victory and malice.
‘You are ready.’
Alicia screamed and flung her hands to the right, hurling Rainn in the direction of the abyss. The woman landed on her feet and Alicia was before her, hands raised, using the force of her will to drive the woman closer to the edge. The rock slid beneath Rainn’s feet and Alicia felt the strain in that confident sneer.
‘Push me into the Active Nothing and I will simply return to the lighthouse with your cousin,’ said Rainn, though her voice was noticeably weaker. ‘You cannot bring yourself to kill me because I am not the target of your hatred.’ And within Alicia’s mind, she added: ‘Right now, the only person you hate more than yourself lies across this chasm.’
Rainn slowed to a halt with her heels at the edge of the abyss. One more push and she would be swallowed by the impenetrable gloom. Alicia narrowed her eyes and then her lips parted as the darkness beyond Rainn was illuminated. Where only emptiness had existed, a bridge of light now stretched across the chasm. Like sunbeams glancing the surface of a pond, a wide pathway cut through the shadow beyond Rainn’s heels. Rainn placed the sole of her foot upon the white rays and raised an eyebrow at Alicia.
‘And he waits for you.’
Over Rainn’s shoulder, Alicia saw a figure at the far end of the bridge, striding towards them. Alerted by the panic in Alicia’s eyes, Rainn shrank from the bridge and, for the first time, Alicia watched terror twist the corners of her mouth.
The figure neared their end of the bridge and the white rays lit the contours of Gus’s face. Alicia took tentative steps to meet her cousin, a frown of disbelief creasing her brow as if he had emerged from the underworld. He did not rush to greet her. His eyes were unsmiling, haunted by secrets, reminding Alicia of her mother’s absent gaze on the morning of her final day.
In Alicia’s eyes, something had hardened. Crystallised. The pair faced one another with questions on their lips, unable to recount the events that had ruptured their former selves and changed them irrevocably.
‘I found him,’ said Gus, seizing her forearms. ‘David is in that tower at the bottom of the garden—the one with the arches. He’s in the cellar.’
Alicia’s spine stiffened but she managed to step out of his arms.
‘The Pagoda? Are you—’
‘Yes,’ Gus nodded profusely. ‘He’s there, Alicia. Wake up.’
A frigid energy radiated from Rainn.
‘They won’t be the last,’ she breathed, her eyes flitting between the pair. ‘Winter…Melissa…Who will be next?’
Gus and Alicia hardened at the names. They exchanged a fearful glance, wondering what the other knew.
‘Cross that bridge now,’ Rainn ordered aloud, taking a step closer to Alicia, ‘and put an end to this.’
Gus stepped between them, his stance protective.
‘There’s nothing but death across that chasm.’
Alicia sidestepped Gus and studied the insistence in Rainn’s expression: the desperation that aged her heart-shaped face, stretching porcelain skin over high cheekbones in a severe manner reminiscent of Melissa. Through that beautiful mirage, Rainn’s motives were exposed as she urged the pawn to do her bidding. Peter had trained her to kill Aldous, but Rainn lacked the willpower to destroy their enemy. So, she had taken an apprentice of her own. Training Alicia as Peter had trained her, Rainn had nurtured a shadow violent enough for Alicia to succeed where she had failed.
Alicia trod small steps across the rock and craned her head to whisper into Rainn’s elfin ear.
‘I have no more hate to give you.’
She dived into the abyss.
Another door
On the patio lay a kitchen knife and a metal tin that Alicia had not noticed when she woke. She had hurtled down the gravel paths without a backward glance. She had seen nobody since returning from Vivador. No living body; only Peter’s corpse in his office chair. Her hands throbbed from beating the cellar door, her voice was hoarse from calling David’s name, and the joints in her fingers ached from tearing at the padlock.
The blade of the knife was thin. If she took it to the lock,
it would only bend. With no sign of Ryan or Amira through the open doorway, she bent to pick up the tin. The clasp was open and she pulled at the lid and then leaped upright, alerted by a distant crack. A police car ploughed through the wooden gate at the bottom of the field and tore up the grass as it veered around the ponds. She shielded her brow to see Joe’s determined scowl through the windshield and the shape of her father in the passenger seat. Reaching the corner of the patio, Joe slammed the brakes and Rory lurched forward, caught by his seatbelt. He fell back and his head rolled to the side in sleep.
The empty tin clattered on the flagstones and Alicia ran to the vehicle as Joe stepped out. It had been little over three hours since she had called her father, and the police officer huffed as if he had powered the vehicle from Godalming through willpower alone. The midday sun lit his bald scalp as he tucked his thumbs into his belt and surveyed Burnflower.
‘Please,’ said Alicia, drawing his attention from the farmhouse windows. ‘He’s over there—my brother, he’s in that tower.’
‘Calm down.’
Joe rounded the bonnet, disturbing crickets in the long grass, and Alicia took a step back when he raised his arms to her shoulders. She frowned at the accusation that she was anything but calm.
‘Breathe,’ he said.
In breathless fragments, she told him about the padlock on the cellar door; her hunt for the combination in the office; Melissa’s husband dead at his desk; and the silver chain on the floor.
‘There was a key on the chain. It’s a combination, the lock, but he might keep it in the desk—the code. He said David was in Portugal, but that’s—he wanted me here while he took Melissa to the Pagoda. He wanted her out of the way.’
‘Who’s up there?’ Joe nodded at the house. A shadow shifted in the window, obscured by the glare of the sun. A fist clenched around Alicia’s heart as she remembered the names that Rainn had uttered.
‘Melissa’s son, Ryan. And a girl, Amira. And…’ she raked fingers through her hair. Had Melissa found her son? ‘Melissa was here, she drove me here. She was in the Pagoda, but she’s not there. I don’t know.’
Joe entered the farmhouse with his hand hovering near the illegal firearm in his belt. Alicia crossed the flagstones, ready to charge after him, to search the house for anything with which to break the lock. Then she saw her father’s cheek pressed into the seatbelt. She opened the passenger door and manoeuvred Rory’s head into a more comfortable position.
‘Wake up,’ she said, shaking his shoulders. She wrapped her arms around him and whispered urgently in his ear: ‘He’s here, Dad.’
Finding no comfort in his limp arms, Alicia straightened up and shut the door. Joe exited the farmhouse, offered her a nod and started down the path between the ponds. Brushing against the bulrushes, Alicia hurried beside him and Joe recounted what he had found upstairs.
‘Melissa’s dead.’
In the master bedroom, he had found the headmistress on the covers of a four-poster bed. In quiet, disjointed phrases, her nineteen-year-old son had explained how his mother had fallen face-down at Alicia’s side. Amira had offered more: indicating two snakebites on Melissa’s left arm, and telling him how she had slurred before collapsing. The girl still wore the gardening gloves she had used to return the black mamba to its terrarium.
Ryan had ducked beneath the draped swags and lifted a key from Melissa’s jacket pocket. Given the expression on the young man’s face, Joe doubted he held the snake responsible for his mother’s death.
‘Where is it?’ Alicia eyed his empty hands. ‘The key?’
‘That key is for another door,’ said Joe. In his mind, an axe struck an iron sheet, quaking through his arms, showering sparks into the darkness. Ryan had not surrendered the key and Joe had not pressed him on it.
‘Did they know the code?’ Alicia asked, leading him under the archway at the foot of the Pagoda.
‘No.’
She frowned, unable to comprehend why he had left the house without an axe, a chainsaw or a medieval cannon. She stepped aside, gesturing at the cellar door.
‘You’re going to kick it down?’
Joe ran his fingers down the edges of the lintel, knocking at the heavy wood to determine its thickness. He weighed the padlock in his hand and gave it a perfunctory tug.
‘This is no garden shed,’ he said, chin in hand. ‘I’ve as much chance of breaking my leg as I have of kicking this door off its hinges.’
‘But you’ll try?’
Alicia drove the full force of her insistence into those bullet-hole eyes. Her long gaze broke at the sound of crunching gravel.
‘Oh, Alicia,’ Rory murmured as she flung her arms around his neck. She buried her chin in his shoulder and closed her eyes. In her chest, a coil loosened enough to let her breathe. Her father’s hands were tight against her shoulder blades—how satisfying to embrace him while he was conscious! She allowed herself another breath before drawing back to see his face. With shrunken eyes, he resembled a gopher, moments from hibernation.
‘He’s in there,’ she said. ‘David’s in there. And Joe—’ she fixed the police officer a commanding look, ‘—he’s about to shoot the lock.’
Joe buried his hands in his trouser pockets, attempting to neutralise her urgency with patience. He spoke to Rory as if outlining the rules to a puzzle he had just devised.
‘It’s a combination padlock. Four digits. I know a number of common entries, but it could take a while. In the house, there might be a crowbar, or something we could use to prise it off.’
Rory did not appear to be listening. Unable to take cautious eyes off his daughter, he gripped her shoulder and spun her attention to him. ‘Alicia, are you—what happened?’ He lifted a hand to her cheek and she turned into it involuntarily. ‘On the phone, you sounded so—’
‘Can you find something, Dad?’ She stepped back, her heart wild with adrenaline. In her chest, what had loosened now tightened, and if she started to explain—or even think—about what had happened in the crater, something was going to snap.
Rory nodded warily, peering up the spiral steps. He headed up to the office and Alicia might have protested had she the energy—the last thing she needed was him tumbling down the stairs. But she reserved the remainder of her resolve for Joe as he twisted the padlock back and forth, inspecting it from different angles.
‘Shoot it.’
‘I’ll try some combinations. People aren’t as inventive as you’d think. You head back to the house, see if you can get your hands on a—No.’ He caught her wrist as she lunged for his gun.
‘Just shoot the lock,’ she ordered, her impatience growing. Her breath held underwater.
‘There’s more chance of the bullet ricocheting—stop that.’
She tried to seize the weapon with her other wrist and he held them firm in his calloused hands. Her breath was shallow and her eyes wild: striving to force her urgency into his skull.
‘2001,’ called a voice from above. Rory descended with an identical padlock in his hand. ‘Try 2001.’
With slow, methodical fingers, Joe twisted the numbered dials. Click. Blink. Alicia could not breathe. Her throat had closed. She kicked towards the water’s surface, fearing that she might not make it. Hands at her face, she opened her mouth to scream for him to finish it. Click, and the lock fell open.
Alicia leaped forward as Joe leaped back to catch Rory, who appeared to have lost consciousness through sheer exhilaration. As Joe supported her sleeping father, Alicia bolted down the steps.
Sunlight flooded the vents and fell upon all that lay within the cellar: barrels of wine, gardening tools, crates of lager and a lost boy on a threadbare mattress.
Alicia seized her brother like oxygen into suffocating lungs. With his head in both hands, she brushed her thumbs across the freckles on his cheeks and they did not shift beneath her gaze. His face had thinned and his closed eyes were more sunken than she remembered; but he was otherwise unchanged. When those features sof
tened through her tears, she brushed the back of her hand against her streaming eyes and his definition returned. She drew him into her arms, laid his heavy head on her shoulder and squeezed his body as Ryan had squeezed hers, so tight that his heart beat against her chest. In deep, shuddering breaths, she breathed him in, surrendering to all the hope she had denied and all the pain she had endured. This was not memory or fantasy; it was not a simulacrum she held. Her brother was real and solid, here and now.
Through a blurred world, she watched Joe carry her father’s sleeping body down the stairs. She sat on the thin mattress, lifted David’s head into her lap and brushed a hand through his hair.
‘I’ve found your body, little brother. Now to find your soul,’ she said quietly. Joe lowered Rory to the ground, positioning him so that his head was on the mattress by Alicia’s knee. Feeling as if his presence was an intrusion, Joe cast narrowed eyes around the cellar and bent to lift a rubber collar from the floor.
‘Gus is in a lighthouse in Portugal,’ said Alicia, catching Joe’s eye. He dropped the collar on the top of a barrel.
‘He phoned me, from the lighthouse,’ said Joe. ‘I’ve contacted the station in Carvoeiro and they’re on their way to arrest Rainn. But I’m going there myself—to get Gus. And when we’re back…’ he trailed off and Alicia understood why he could not say any more out loud. There was only one way that Gus could have been certain that David was in this cellar. Beyond that chasm, he had found a means of travelling here, in the same form that Aldous and Morna had taken when they had killed Alicia’s mother and Gus’s parents. Joe’s eyes were fixed on the vents, wondering who might be listening.
‘We’ll talk,’ said Alicia.
Talking could wait. Thinking could wait. The name that Gus must have shared with his uncle—that could wait. A storm raged in her past and future, but this—her brother’s heartbeat against her knee; his freckled face unchanging—this was her moment. With nothing left to count down to, she anchored herself in the eye of the storm.
