by Amy Wilson
In the darkness it’s hard to make out the details. Silhouettes of shapes. Of sinew and muscle, wing and outstretched arm. Slowly Bavar moves away, pulling himself on his elbows out of the tangle of limbs. He keeps his head low as he rises to a crawl, retching, making for the shadows at the edge of the garden.
‘Bavar . . .’
He sits against the wall and tips his head back, stretching his legs out. I walk unsteadily, suddenly freezing, crouch by him. Watch tears roll down his cheeks. He doesn’t move, doesn’t speak.
I find his hand on the ground, put mine on top of it. It fits in his cold palm.
‘I’m sorry.’
Did I?
Did I have to? Was there another way? If she’d stayed behind the wall.
If I’d stayed in the house. Never gone to school.
My hands, around its neck. Hairless skin, like crumpled leather.
Crack.
It’s so quiet now. The sky is so clear; a thousand stars bright above my shame. And it’s cold, and I can’t feel anything except her hand in my palm. So small. How can she put it there? How can she touch me now? Touch those hands, my hands, when they just did that? The raksasa lies stiff, a massive shadow over everything else.
It took an instant, that’s all.
One moment, to make me the monster they’ve been asking for all this time.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how long we’ve been just sitting here while frost gathers around us. I can’t move. There’s this weird feeling, like if I take my hand away now, he’ll be gone. I know it doesn’t make sense; there’s just something so unnaturally still about him, like he let go. I try not to look at the monster in the middle of the garden. For a second, in the heat of it all, it was hard to tell them apart. His roar, his rage was just as powerful as that of the creature he fought. Is that what he’s been so afraid of? After a while I realize I’m just counting breaths; mine and his. They plume in the air, regular and soothing.
‘Should we go in?’ I ask, when the cold is biting deeper, and our breath is slower. ‘It’s too cold, Bavar . . .’
‘What happened to you?’ he asks in a whisper.
I look at him; his eyes are still on the sky. I get it – he doesn’t want to look down, to see what he did.
‘That happened,’ I whisper, gesturing at the monster. ‘One of those. It came for us.’
He whips away from me, rises to a crouch.
‘What?’
I back away. I’m not sure he even heard me – his eyes are glazed, sick-looking. ‘Bavar, we should go in; you need help.’
He looks down at himself, his clothes torn, skin scratched by the creature’s claws. He looks at the monster. And then he looks at me, and starts to laugh.
I saved an angel. I killed the monster and saved the angel.
She said something that made my blood run cold, but now I can’t . . . I can’t remember why. My jaw aches, my hands are throbbing, my stomach hurts, and there are a million little darts of pain over my skin where the raksasa’s claws scored into me.
Aoife is running towards us and her mouth is moving, but I can’t hear what she’s saying. The girl stands, and they both stare down at me.
‘Bavar, come!’ Aoife demands. ‘Who knows when the next will strike. You’re in no condition to be sitting here just waiting for trouble.’
‘What’re we going to do with it, Aoife?’ I ask, my eyes on the creature, a wave of nausea rolling in my stomach.
‘Don’t worry about that, just get in the house!’
I notice the girl, Angel, is coming too. Will she even be able to walk through the door of the monster house? How is all of this happening? How did the world change so fast? It spins around me as I head up the steps, as I watch her disappear into the light ahead of me. I feel myself falling, catch myself on hands and knees, head for the light, the clamour of the house.
They’re howling.
All the ancestors in all their heavy frames. Howling, hooting, crowing, as I crawl into the house. They think I’m the victor; they think I’ve come into my own. And here I am on my knees, while the world spins, and the angel comes at me as I kick the front door shut, and so I lower my head because I’ve seen enough. Enough, enough, enough.
I know how to cry. I know how to be small. I know how to curl myself up on the inside so none of me shows, and nothing can hurt. Being in this house is like the opposite of that. It’s dark, and the air sparks, like danger might be just around the corner. But it’s so alive, it’s like sunshine in my veins, like magic spinning through the air, fine as dust, and I’m breathing it in and there’s something growing from the inside, something I didn’t know I had any more.
I can see from the look in Bavar’s eyes that he wishes I wasn’t here. I guess maybe I’d feel like that too, if I was him. The woman walks ahead of us, her feet quick and light, and I linger at the doorway next to him. The hallway is vast, tiled in black and white, and a grand staircase sweeps up into the gloom. Chandeliers swing at regular intervals, but they seem to create shade as much as light, and then there are the portraits. Dozens, hundreds of them – all different sizes and shapes, and all of them, all of them looking at me.
They were shouting, a moment ago – I’m sure I didn’t imagine it. They were shouting, cheering, as we came in.
Did I imagine it?
The woman stops and turns.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, her voice bright and a little breathless as she rushes back to me. Her hands are warm on mine, her smile lights up her narrow, pale face. ‘We haven’t met. I’ve heard of you, but perhaps Bavar hasn’t told you of me, or of the house . . .’ She gives a couple of the portraits a stern glance. There’s a weird, stretched silence in the air, as if something’s about to explode. ‘I’m Aoife, Bavar’s aunt. I’m sure you know, of course you’ve seen . . . this is a rather unusual place. The ancestors are all rather keen to meet you . . .’
I smile back at her, but I think I may have broken Bavar and I didn’t think, I didn’t realize it would be so hard for him. Aoife frowns, going to him as he feels his way along the wall, and I don’t know what to do. I want to tell him it’s OK, but I don’t think it is OK – not for him. I pushed him to fight, and now his face is all shadows.
‘Your first fight,’ Aoife says, putting her thin arm around him. ‘You did so well. You’ll be fine, my love; it’s just a shock to the system . . . Come, both of you. Hot tea, and a bit of toast. You’ll be fine. This is good. It is a good day –’ she looks back at me, her eyes shining – ‘and we are very pleased to have you here, Angel.’
‘ANGEL!’
The silence breaks, the house shudders around us and they call my name, from every wall, and every darkened crevice.
‘ANGEL IS HERE!!’
Aoife cajoles me along, one arm still around Bavar, through wood-panelled corridors lit with little tasselled wall-lamps. The carpet is a maze of green and gold beneath my feet, and the portraits sing loudly of brave heroes and angels and monsters in the sky. It’s kind of a relief when Aoife leads us into an enormous kitchen, bright and warm and silent – completely devoid of portraits. She notices me looking.
‘I can’t be having the ancestors in here,’ she says. ‘This is where I come to have a break from it all!’ Bavar slides on to one of the chairs, looking exhausted, and Aoife indicates for me to sit next to him. The chairs were clearly made for giants like Bavar, and so is the table. I feel like a little kid again, my feet swinging above the floor.
‘Are you OK?’ I whisper to Bavar, watching Aoife fill the vast copper kettle, and saw great slices of bread from a loaf on the side. His eyes follow her as she moves about.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Bavar . . .’
He looks at me. His eyes are bloodshot.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and my voice wobbles. ‘I really, honestly meant to help you. I was picturing you here, all alone, hiding from them, and I know how that feels and I didn’t want you to feel like . . . like y
ou didn’t have help . . .’
‘So you helped.’
I bite my lip. ‘Yeah. I didn’t realize what it would be like for you. I didn’t mean to make it worse.’
He told me, didn’t he? He told me there was a better way; he didn’t want to fight. He didn’t want to be a monster, past caring. Is that what he thinks he is now?
The toaster pops, making us both jump. Aoife reaches into a rack for plates, and starts clattering things down on the table. I wince for him, as he puts his head in his hands.
‘What do we do now?’ I ask.
‘Now?’ He lifts his head, stares at me. ‘I don’t know what happens now. I’ve never killed before. What does happen, after you kill a thing?’
‘You’re still you!’ I protest. ‘You still care, don’t you? You did all that because you cared, and you haven’t suddenly grown horns, or anything! You were just . . .’
‘Just what?’ he demands. ‘Just fighting? Just killing?’
‘You didn’t kill the raksasa,’ says Aoife, coming back to the table with a steaming brown teapot. ‘You merely sent it back to its own world; their bodies are only loosely connected with their spirits. It would take a lot more than that to kill one on the spot. You’re not there yet, Bavar!’ Her face softens as she sees the impact of her words on him. ‘All you have done is send it back, where it can do no harm to anybody. One day, in your mastery, you will be able to deliver the world of them entirely, but that will only be when you are at your full strength.’
He melts back into the chair, hands falling to his sides, and I’m so relieved that I can’t think of anything to say.
‘They’re called raksasa?’ I ask eventually.
‘It means monster in Indonesian,’ Aoife says. ‘Now, enough. Here is toast.’ She passes me a plate and a knife. There’s a dish of pale butter, and the toast is hot and truly about the size of a regular doorstep, so I dig in, but Bavar ignores it all.
‘I need to close the rift,’ he says, after a while.
‘You can’t,’ Aoife says, shaking her head as she pours the tea.
‘I don’t want to do this every day. I need to close it. Grandfather says there’s a way—’
‘No,’ she cuts him off. ‘You’re not making sense. You are what you are; this place is what it is. Not all things can be changed – some of them we must just adapt to.’
‘But I’m not my mother, or my father. And you said if I went to school, I could be different.’
‘Be different, yes!’ she says, sitting across from him and looking him in the eye. ‘Be centred, be wise. Be as human as you can be, for it is your humanity that can withstand the call of the magic that corrupted your parents. Go to school, have friends, learn to laugh a little, even, but there is no doubt about this one thing. You were born to fight them, Bavar. It is your duty, and you’ve only just begun.’
He lays his head on the table, and I wish she hadn’t said that. It doesn’t feel right, to make him do what he doesn’t want to. Even if part of me still wants him to. Even if I think he’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. I wish I could fight like that. I wonder if he ever saw the way it changes him. The way his whole body seems to come alive, shining bright. I wonder if he knows that it isn’t all dark and evil; that when he’s fighting, he’s living harder than I ever saw anybody live, and it shows in his eyes.
‘But—’
‘Bavar, that’s enough. We have company,’ Aoife says. ‘Let me get out that cake. I made a lovely chocolate cherry one; the sugar will do you good. And it’s Uncle Sal’s favourite, so he’ll come and join us, and you can meet him, Angel.’
Bavar groans, his head still on the table, and she shakes her head as she pulls a great glass dome towards us, a mountain of dark something inside. She lifts her head and calls out, ‘SAL! CAKE!’ and Bavar sinks even lower in his seat, and I feel sorry for him, but also I can’t help it – I LOVE THIS. She’s so weird, the cake is so gruesome, and Uncle Sal, when he comes in, is such a contrast to it all. He’s small and round and balding, with thick black-framed glasses, and the expression on his face isn’t exactly kindly, but he’s about as scary as pudding, and somehow, even after everything that just happened, and even though I’m worried about Bavar, somehow these three people make me smile on the inside.
Dreams that stay when I’m awake, of the raksasa, and darker demons treading on their tails. Screeches that ring in the air, and heat, and a girl in the middle of it all, cool as water, bright as the sun.
Why does a human girl want to wade into a storm like that? Did she say? She said something, but it won’t come to me now. It dances in tatters and won’t come clear.
She didn’t run.
She came into the monster house and she smiled. She looked around as if she’d never close her eyes again, and she smiled when her name echoed around the house, and I don’t know what’s going on any more.
It was simple, before. I was going to hide, and the raksasa were going to get bored and go home, and I was going to just be here, just quietly, and sometimes that seemed like a terribly lonely thing, but it was safe, and I wouldn’t make mistakes with the barrier – I’d keep it strong, always – and after a while the raksasa would leave us alone, and now we’ve ruined everything. Now I’ll be just like my parents were, before they left me here. I’ll be a monster of a different kind; a monster who will lose his humanity and live for the fight and the glory of the win, past caring for anything else.
The ancestors sang a racket about an angel who they don’t understand is actually just a girl with bright hair, and I never saw a smile like that before. So I don’t think she’s about to go anywhere. She never retreated and she never would have. I saw from the look on her face. That expression, I’ve seen it before. On my mother’s face, as she went into battle.
That’s how this place changes you. Over time, little by little, so you don’t even really notice. Skin harder, brighter; blood stronger. And then more, more – I don’t know when it happened, not exactly, but one day I looked at her and she was barely there at all. Her blue eyes glinted with silver, her teeth were sharper, in some lights they looked just like jagged points. They fought their monsters, held their parties, and when we did go into town, there was a feral, wild look in my father’s eyes that frightened me, like he just saw animals. He stopped hunching, rose to his eight-foot height and the air around him rang like a bell, deafening, and nobody saw us. The magic was too powerful; it was a mirror that they held between us and the real world. But I always wanted to be seen. That’s why I agreed to go to school. To be part of it all. I just never expected it to actually happen. For anybody to really truly see me, just as I am.
‘They see me now,’ I say out loud. ‘Now that Angel is there. She muddles it all up . . .’
There’s no answer. I’m talking to myself. Aoife comes, and goes, and then she tells me the raksasa is gone. They crumble to dust in the light of dawn, like they never were. But the scratches are real, burning on my skin. I tell her they suit me, and Aoife gives me a despairing look.
‘You saved her, Bavar! You saved her, stopped that creature from doing harm, and still you hide here? Still you hide from what you are?’
‘Yes,’ I tell her. ‘Thank you, yes.’
She shakes her head and I know that however hard she tries to reassure me, deep down she’s afraid I’ll be just like them. Despite school, Angel, everything else, she’s afraid that eventually I’ll be a fighter, before anything else, and long after everything else is gone.
‘Where were you hurt?’ she demands.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Bavar, stop it. If you were scratched, we have to deal with it.’
‘Deal with it. Yes.’
She mutters about poison and medicine, and how my body will get used to it in time, as I grow in power and strength, as I fight more of them.
‘No,’ I say. ‘No thank you.’ I sit up, visions of brightness dancing in front of my eyes. ‘Did you see the angel? Where did it go?’
>
She leans in, touches my face. And then she huffs and goes to see Grandfather. She never goes to see Grandfather. She spent a lot of the time he was alive avoiding him and she always says she’s not going to go courting a bronze statue, thank you very much.
But off she goes, muttering. Like, to be a fly on that wall.
The stuff in the cup is bog-green and it smells awful. Aoife is urging me to drink it, but there’s no way.
‘There is a way,’ I tell her. Her eyes are bright, and light sparkles all around her in little swimming points. ‘Grandfather said there is. There’s a door to the rift . . . the door, and they opened it . . . and so it can be closed.’
I’m sure I remember him saying something about a door. I can’t get it straight in my mind though; everything else is in the way. I bat the cup away and the green stuff splatters on the carpet.
‘Bavar, you’re not making any sense at all,’ she says, and her voice is tired and it sounds like it cares but it wants me to fight, so I lie down because it’s confusing and hot and I don’t understand.
‘The raksasa are interlopers,’ says the face in the curls of the flocked wallpaper. ‘A long time ago, before we knew better, we used our magic recklessly, and we opened the rift between our world and theirs. The raksasa had never smelt humanity before, and they craved it, terribly. We have been defending the world against that rift ever since; we use our magic to keep a barrier between our land and the rest of humanity. And when they come, we fight, because we must, and we have evolved to be so good at it! Aren’t you pleased, Bavar, to have such a legacy?’
‘No,’ I say. I pull the pillows over my head, but the words keep ringing in my ears: they were Grandfather’s words, a long time ago, when my parents were still here, and lessons were just lessons, and didn’t mean me.
I see it, that night. Over and over again, the way he fought the monster. In the moonlight, how his skin gleamed.
