The Blurred Lands

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  Evie and John watched the spell tighten, energy building within its myriad threads. Then it moved, flowing through the side of the dome before disappearing. When the last of the threads had gone, John and his granddaughter stepped through the wall of the dome and found themselves in the snowy landscape of the Between, alone.

  "Did it work?" said John.

  Evie looked at him. "Only one way to find out."

  John again felt the power behind those disconcertingly familiar eyes. Evie was more than she appeared to be and was no longer just a child. He felt a sadness at this realisation, and an acceptance. What was done was done, and he and Evie would have much to talk about when they returned to their own realm. If John could return at all, that is. Ashtoreth had gone, the time cage had gone, and he would only know the result of their battle when he left the Between.

  Evie took both his hands and stood facing him. "Dad and I are nearby," she said. "Back home, I mean. We're in Bristol."

  "You're where?"

  "You're quite a celebrity now, Granddad. I'll see you there."

  And with that, she was gone, skipping through the snow. He glanced behind him at the vast silver dome, then turned and scanned the whiteness, looking for any sign of his sanctum. He could see nothing familiar, but he felt the faint pull of it, through slowly falling flakes of snow. There was nothing more for him to do here.

  He thought of his room, the fire, and the Platonic Chair.

  That way.

  John trudged back through the snow and, the moment he had crossed the threshold of his sanctum, he half-closed his eyes and pictured himself in the cottage. He visualised the stone in his left hand, Ash's palm closing on his as the sky brightened behind her.

  He left the Between.

  In the cottage bedroom, John blinked in confusion. There was no stone in his hand. He dared to hope. Then he looked up, and fear, defeat, and despair replaced that first flicker of optimism.

  Forty-Nine

  Ash was holding the stone. Her clenched fist was behind her head, her arm tensed to strike. Her face was contorted with rage, but it wasn't triumph that John saw in her eyes as she threw her punch; it was fear.

  He might have dodged the blow, but by the time his muscles responded to his brain's urgent signals, it was too late. The stone in Ashtoreth's hand was inches away from smashing into his forehead.

  He closed his eyes.

  A tickling sensation as if someone had breathed on his face, then nothing. He waited. Since his skull was still intact, he re-opened his eyes.

  The bedroom was empty. Ashtoreth was gone. Not gone in the sense of stepping out, possibly to return, but gone as if she had never been. The entire atmosphere of the cottage had changed, a dark tension lifting, taking with it every last hint of Ash's presence. It was just a rundown cottage in Leigh Woods, near Clifton, a suburb of Bristol. John was convinced that if he followed the path through the gate, and along the narrow lane, he would find people walking dogs, and cars passing on the road.

  He put one shaking hand to his face and rubbed the unfamiliar beard. Then he stood up and looked through the window, watching the sunlight breathe warmth into the frosted grass through the trees.

  Downstairs, everything was different. The sofa had gone, as had his belongings. In the kitchen, there was no hum from the fridge and, when he opened it, it was empty. He flicked the light switch. Nothing. He tried the living room. No power.

  The door was locked, and the key was missing from its nail. John opened the window. A blast of cold air hit him. He half-climbed, half-fell through the gap and rolled onto the hard earth.

  He stumbled to the front gate, his legs weak.

  John looked through watering eyes at the rotting leaves on the path and the white-tipped blades of grass pushing up between them. The sun didn't warm him as it streamed through the bare branches above. He was cold, his breath coming in puffs of white smoke as he regained his composure. It had been summer when he had arrived at the cottage five days ago.

  At the first tree he came to, John stared in astonishment. His own face looked back at him from a poster taped onto the trunk. It was his passport photo from five years ago, a few months before he and Sarah went on their last holiday in the south of France. With trembling fingers, he ripped the picture away from the tree.

  Missing. John Aviemore.

  There was a phone number to call, a website for more information.

  John heard footsteps crunching through dead leaves somewhere ahead and had to hold on to the tree for support when he recognised the voices that accompanied them.

  "Harry," he whispered. The voices came closer.

  "Evie, please don't get your hopes up. Yes, I know. But maybe this time it really was just a dream. Honey, we're going home on Tuesday. You have school and I—,"

  Harry rounded the corner.

  John saw himself through his son's eyes for a moment: a wild-eyed stranger, emaciated, bearded and shaking. Harry came to a halt, glanced over his shoulder for his daughter, then looked back. His voice didn't work the first time he tried to speak, but, finally, he croaked a word out before Evie passed him and threw herself into John's arms.

  "Dad?"

  An amiable, portly police sergeant visited Harry and Evie's hotel room mid-morning and allowed himself to be plied with generous wedges of cake. He interviewed John, then talked them through the paperwork. It was rare for a missing person case to be so happily resolved, and, more than once, John and Harry had to decline the sergeant's offer of a trip to the pub to celebrate.

  A doctor had been called, and—half an hour of checkups and lots of questions later—John was pronounced underweight but, otherwise, fit and good to go.

  Harry insisted John stay a night in Bristol before they drove back to Wimbledon. The media would have to be informed and it would be easier to weather the ensuing storm from the familiar comforts of home.

  There were explanations to be made. John and Harry talked long into the evening. John had never been much of a liar, so although feigning amnesia was far-fetched, it was the only card he could play. The alternative was telling the truth, and he had no wish to pay the psychiatrist bills that would ensue were he to do that.

  It wasn't until the next morning, when Harry went to check out, that grandfather and granddaughter found time to speak alone.

  "It worked, Evie." John told her what had happened on his return to Sally Cottage. Evie listened, nodding gravely.

  "I pity her, I really do," she said. "The time cage was the kindest punishment under the circumstances, but eventually, I think she lost her grip on reality. Reversing her timeline should mean she won't be aware that she is reliving the whole thing all over again."

  "Reversing it?"

  "You asked if we could send her back when she came from."

  John stroked his chin. Rather than shave, he had borrowed Harry's trimmer, and now sported a neat white and black beard. It made him look like a different person, and that was how he felt.

  "What exactly did you do?" he said. "I thought I could follow some of it while we were in the dome, but now it seems confused. I was guided by you, and by my instincts. It was as if the spell itself was trying to help us."

  "Exactly," she said. "The best magic, the most effective magic of all, directs the flow of power where it most wants to go. We reversed Ashtoreth's progress through time. She didn't disappear in the cottage, she went backwards from that point."

  "And you don't think she'll know what's happening?"

  "It's impossible to say for sure, but I think not. She will pass back through her life to the beginning. The earliest record we have of Astarte is of her appearance in our realm, stepping out of a live volcanic crater. Her beginning is now also her end."

  Evie turned her head away and reached for another biscuit, but not before John caught a grimace of pain on her young face.

  "She hurt you," he said.

  "That she did." It was an unusual phrase for a twelve-year-old, but John's mother had used it
all the time. Evie had been brought up in America, and her accent and cultural references had reflected this. Now, however, her accent was, occasionally, British.

  Evie stood up and moved over to the window, folding her arms and looking down at passing traffic. She looked so much like a smaller version of her great-grandmother at that point, John was half-convinced he would see his mother's face when she turned around.

  "Dad and I didn't come straight to Bristol." The timbre of her voice was that of a child, but she spoke like a much older woman. "We drove out to Elstree first, to the care home. I had to stand in the place that Great-Granny died. To complete the process. To become an Adept, one of the Three."

  When she faced John, he saw what he had seen in the dome. In the striped-wallpapered room, with the two-bar electric fire, china dogs on the mantelpiece and net curtains hooked back from the bay window, it was even more striking.

  His mother stood there, as did his grandmother and great-grandmother. Other women were gathered behind those calm grey eyes so reminiscent of Sarah's. Others were present, too, shades whose existence were barely defined. Evie was still Evie, but she was more.

  "Mae wrote to me," she said. "Dad picked up the letters with the rest of her stuff when he came for the funeral. He was so caught up looking for you that he didn't find the letters addressed to me until August. She wrote about our family secret, she taught me our history, and she showed me my future. I was destined to be an Adept. Mae told me how. She would have preferred I wait a few years but, well..."

  "I went missing at the same time she died. You connected the dots."

  "I did."

  John stood up. "You did it for me? But the danger you—"

  Evie held up a finger in another gesture identical to one of her great-grandmother's. "I've already lost my nanny. I didn't want to lose my granddad too." She tilted her head. "Blaming yourself for what I've done would be self-indulgent. Mae could have left the letters in a lawyer's office until I was old enough. She didn't. She knew I would act on the information they contained if it was necessary."

  John remembered it then, the moment Ashtoreth had turned on Evie, the pain on her face. "You weren't ready, were you? Not really. What did she do to you?"

  Evie turned back to the window.

  "I'm barren," she said. The statement was so strange coming from the lips of a twelve-year-old girl, even one as unusual as Evie. "That's what Ashtoreth did. She couldn't kill me in the dome, but she thought she could prevent our line continuing. I don't know if she hoped the dome would allow it, or that it would not know what she had done. She was wrong. The dome helped us complete our spell and sent her back. Too late to undo the damage, though."

  John moved towards her, then stopped. "Oh, Evie, I'm so sorry. I don't know what to say. I can't imagine..."

  "No." Evie's voice was flat. "Neither can I, not really. I expect it will hurt more when I get to the age where I might want children of my own. I will deal with it then, I suppose. Still…" She turned towards her grandfather. The power in her was as present as if he were standing in front of a massive, humming generator. "... Astarte failed in one regard."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Grandmother's line will continue. I see our future Adepts."

  John thought through the ramifications of that statement. "Your dad had you very young. No reason he couldn't have other children. How do you feel about that?"

  "I'd love to have a sister," she said. "But you're forgetting something. Another possibility."

  "I don't think so, Evie."

  "You may be my grandad, but you're not that old. Who says you won't have any more children?"

  Fifty

  Six weeks later

  Augustus was already standing in front of the grave when John arrived at the cemetery. It was a twenty-five-minute walk from his house in Wimbledon, and the route took him past many of the places he associated with Sarah. He could pass those bookshops, art galleries, cafés and parks with as much happiness as pain these days. John found grief to be unpredictable and had resigned himself to its surprises. Progress was made, certainly, but John knew he would never be entirely free of those crippling moments of agony - the knowledge that she had gone hitting him once again, as fresh as it had been the first time.

  Now, two rows away from Sarah's grave, a new headstone, simple and small, marked his mother's final resting place. He walked up and stood beside Augustus, who acknowledged his arrival with a smile and a nod.

  There were no flowers on the grave. Mae had never wanted cut flowers in the house, always preferring to see them in situ.

  "She'll have flowers in the spring," said Augustus. "I planted snowdrops, primroses, and daffodils. There will be sunflowers behind the headstone."

  "Sunflowers?"

  "I'm not a tall person." His old friend said this as if he suspected John had never noticed. "It will give me an easy way to find her when I visit."

  John and Augustus were still feeling their way around the new parameters of their relationship. Augustus had not answered to the name Gai for centuries. His full name was Gaius Augustus, but he had dropped the Gaius after his illness and recuperation. He had been found in the Blurred Lands by his father, badly injured. His arm had been beyond any medicine or magic, and his leg could only be partially healed. Augustus's recovery had been slow, and he could not remember how he had sustained his injuries. John's revelations had filled in those gaps for him. The fact that Augustus had chosen life as a Warden, and ended up protecting John's ancestors, had a pleasing symmetry to it.

  "It won't be easy," said Augustus. "Not being able to tell anyone what you really are, I mean."

  John remembered the moment he agreed to take Ash's place in the time cage. "I'll leave the real magic to Evie. I don't think I have the temperament for it."

  "Not tempted to visit the Between at all, then?"

  Augustus knew him too well. "Tempted? Yes. Every day."

  "You're a good man, John. The realms are safer now Ashtoreth is gone. But Pan is a dangerous enemy, and that's another reason to lie low. She must have her suspicions. A god has been defeated, and you're still here."

  "She won't catch me out so easily again." It had been Pan, Glamoured to appear as Helen, who had convinced John to go to the cottage. When Augustus had told him, John had been reluctant to believe it. It was only after he had spoken to Helen that he accepted the truth. She was adamant she would never recommend cognitive behavioural therapy, or do anything so unprofessional as to give John mental health treatment.

  "I should think not," said Augustus. "I would expect you to recognise Glamour from now on."

  John looked at the headstone which showed his mother's name and nothing else. Mae Frances Aviemore. "All these generations," he said. "My mother, my grandmother, all the way back. You knew them all. How old are you exactly?"

  Augustus smiled. "Isn't that supposed to be a rude question? I stopped counting after three hundred."

  "You help keep the biggest secret in world history. And how do you conceal this secret? You open a magic shop."

  "Hiding in plain sight is often the best way, John. And, besides, I love magic. The fake kind, I mean. From what you've said, you started me on that path."

  "Yes, I probably did. You were completely fooled by a simple French drop."

  Augustus put a hand on his arm. "No one can ever know."

  "I didn't even do it very well. You were convinced I'd made a stone disappear."

  "We must never speak of this again."

  They both chuckled.

  "Come on," said John, "let's visit Sarah before we go."

  Sarah's grave had her date of birth and date of death as well as her name, but was otherwise as plain as John's mother's. John reached the grave first. When Augustus joined him, they stood in silence for a few minutes before John spoke.

  "Ashtoreth nearly won, you know."

  "Would you have done it? If Evie hadn't appeared? Would you have willingly imprisoned yourself for the rest of
your life?"

  John put his hands in his coat pockets. "Honestly? I don't know."

  It was dark by the time the two of them made their way along the path that crossed the cemetery, and out to the street beyond. Augustus raised his hand, and a taxi came to a halt in front of him. John realised in all the time he had known Augustus, a taxi had always been there whenever he needed one. If you could use magic, may as well use it for something practical, he supposed.

  "Come to the shop John," said Augustus as he slid into the back seat, his eyes twinkling. "There's something I want to show you." The twinkling eyes should have been another hint about Augustus Bonneville's true identity, along with the fact that that he looked like a pixie. He hadn't aged - he had already been ancient forty years earlier when John first met him. John wondered why he had never questioned any of this before. Then the taxi pulled away and headed into the centre of London.

  John and Augustus were sitting in the back room at Bonneville's.

  It would be Christmas soon, and the magic shop had been busy for weeks with parents buying magic sets. The majority of children receiving them would discover that making magic look real wasn't easy, and give up. But there were always a few who would find their imaginations fired by the effects in the brightly coloured box. Of those few, there would be one or two who wondered if the magic they loved might be a poor imitation of something real. Somewhere, might there be men and women like them who could summon genuine power, and make possible the impossible?

  John thought of those few children now. He had been one of their number once, before accepting that magic was only a form of entertainment. He wondered what his younger self would have made of this scene in the tiny back room of the oldest magic shop in London, where a real magician and a mythical creature were drinking gunpowder tea and discussing fate.