by Amy Wilson
‘What is a monster?’ My mother’s sibilant voice right next to my ear, her breath making my shoulders flinch. ‘Something different? Something out of place? Many monsters in the world wearing their differences on the inside, dangerous people. You are the gatekeeper. You will protect these ordinary people from evils they have not dared to dream of.’
‘Evils like you . . .’
‘Sometimes it corrupts.’ She shrugs. ‘Sometimes in order to fight the worst, we have to understand them.’
‘I don’t want that.’
I don’t want Angel to see me like that.
‘Then don’t do it. Stay true to yourself. Be better than me. Look at me, Bavar.’
I look up, and in the mirror it’s just me and her. She barely reaches my shoulder. When did that happen? When did she get so small? She smiles, revealing her own pointed teeth.
‘You are my boy. My Bavar. You can do this. Do it your way, but do it. There are worse things in the world than anything you can ever become. And if you do not become what you should, then those things will win . . .’
I don’t tell her about our plan. I’m pretty sure she’d just tell me it’s impossible to close it, and I don’t want her doubt to join my own. I need to believe in it, like Angel does. My mother hisses as I turn away, and I close my mind to her.
There was a time she wasn’t like that. A time when she was softer, warmer, when she laughed, and held me. It’s hard to hold on to those memories when I’m surrounded by the evidence of what they have all become, in this house. After a time, it does corrupt. That part that was human becomes something else. Something hard and bitter. Something dark. Features shift, bodies stretch, and hearts harden.
Now something else has changed. Angel has been here, and she’s changed everything. The raksasa strikes its claws against the barrier that night, howling to be released into the world, and my ancestors roar. They want me to fight like I did last night, but I don’t. I won’t. I pull the curtains around my bed, and hold on tight for tomorrow.
Home. Not home. Mary is still up. She’s doing some sort of knitting with her fingers beneath a single lit lamp. Like a scene’s been set: Angel’s Comeuppance.
‘You don’t want to be here,’ she says.
I look around, my stomach tight. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to this house, the sounds and the smells so different from what I had before. I know it’s not a bad place. I know they’re kind, and I should be grateful.
‘Not really.’
A twist of her mouth; a nimble dance of fingers.
‘What shall we do?’
She’s asking me. She’s serious. Her brown eyes flicker, and she sets the knitting aside.
‘We wanted to help, Angel.’
My name rings and doesn’t sound right in this vanilla house, with the tribal masks that they probably got from a cheap furniture shop. We had stuff from real places – Morocco, Italy, places we’d been. It’s in storage now. I flinch away but she stares at me, determined.
‘We don’t want to make it worse for you. Is it worse, being here?’ Her voice falters. She clears her throat. ‘If you’d like us to contact them, make other arrangements . . .’
‘No!’
I need to stay. I need Bavar. Much as I need oxygen. Much as I need water.
I need to stop the monsters.
‘So,’ she says with a deep breath. ‘So stay.’ She smiles. ‘Stay. Go to school. Come home to us. Can you do that, every day?’
I perch on the arm of the settee.
‘I have a friend. Sometimes I’ll go there. To see him.’
‘Him?’
‘He helps.’ I shrug.
‘How do you know him? From before?’
‘No. He’s at school. He’s . . . He doesn’t fit.’
‘Like you.’
She sees me. I nod. I can’t speak right now.
‘So. You have to tell me before you go out. And where you’re going. And what time you’ll be home. You’re thirteen, Angel. It’s young, even with everything you’ve been through. You are still young. And I can’t . . .’ She shakes her head. ‘It isn’t the same, I know. But I do care.’
‘I didn’t ask you to.’
She smiles. ‘I know. That bit wasn’t up to you.’
I don’t know how that makes me feel, so I just sit there for a while, watching the gold clock on the mantelpiece. It has little balls underneath that move constantly, rotating first one way then the other.
‘Go on, it’s bedtime,’ Mary says eventually, patting my knee before picking up the knitting again. ‘Try to get some sleep.’
‘OK.’
Mika winds his tail around my ankles as I go up the stairs, and I pick him up – mainly to stop him from tripping me, but also because I suddenly have a desperate need to hold on to something alive and warm.
‘Hey,’ I whisper, gathering him close. ‘How’re you doing?’
He makes a funny little chirruping noise and puts his chin on my shoulder, his whiskers prickling at my ear. When we get to the top of the stairs I put him down, and he stalks into my bedroom, curling up on the end of the bed.
‘Huh – and Pete says you’re feral.’ I smile, pulling the curtains and turning on the lamp. ‘I guess he got that wrong. Or maybe –’ I reach out and stroke him – ‘you were just waiting for the right person . . .’
She twinkles at me, all the way through school. Every classroom, every corner I turn, there she is, restless, almost humming with it.
‘Why are you so into this?’ I ask, while she steals all the extra little things Aoife put in my lunch, in case I wanted to share it with my new friend. There are cheese straws, weird prawn things, chocolate mints, and some kind of fruit that looks like a tiny yellow plum. ‘Why does it matter so much to you?’
‘Reasons,’ she says around a mouth full of chocolate, avoiding my eye. ‘I told you the other night. I’m not about to get into it all again now.’ She pulls a bag of crisps from her lunch and opens it out so that the silver foil is like a tray. ‘Help yourself. Salt and vinegar.’
‘They’re terrible!’ I gasp a second later, reaching for a cup of water. The table has six chairs around it, but we’re the only two here. The rest of the dining room buzzes with noise and activity, and there’s a little quiet space around us. ‘Are they really food?’
‘They’re an acquired taste.’ She sniffs, grabbing a handful. ‘Anyway, enough about food. You’re OK for me to come over later so we can look for the rift?’
‘Do you think it’s possible?’
‘All things are possible,’ she says, taking a cheese straw and waving it at me. ‘How can you of all people doubt that?’
‘Some things can’t be changed.’
She gives me a look, and for a second her eyes are full of shadows, but she forces them away with a breath and a toss of her hair. ‘And some things do change. Look. Grace is staring at you.’
‘So?’
‘So a week ago she wouldn’t even have known you were here. Stuff changes, Bavar. All the time. It has to.’ She breaks the cheese straw in two, hands me half. Her eyes are shining. ‘It just has to.’
Aoife is suspicious. She’s had us trapped in the kitchen for the last twenty minutes trying out her latest fudge brownies, making us talk about school and homework. To start with, Angel looked happy enough about it, trying to answer all the questions with her mouth full, but now she’s looking a bit shifty. Her eyes keep darting to the door, and her feet tap against the wooden rung of the chair like a drumbeat that won’t stop until it has all the answers. And Aoife doesn’t want to let us go. I don’t know how much she heard last night, whether she suspects what we’re up to, but I know she won’t like it. She says it isn’t possible to close the rift. I think she’s afraid that it might just make things worse.
Is that possible?
I try to imagine what a rift to another world could possibly look like. The sky glows amber when they attack, and I’ve always imagined it as a fiery abyss, but it could be anyt
hing. What kind of door could hide that sort of thing? I’ve racked my brain for clues, but I can’t find any, and thinking about it just makes me nervous. Sitting by fidgety Angel is making me nervous too.
‘Talking of homework,’ I say loudly, interrupting them and pushing my chair back with a screech. ‘We should make a start.’
Angel nods, grabbing another wedge of brownie as she stands up.
‘Why don’t you do it here?’ Aoife asks.
‘Oh. Because . . . we’re going to use the Computer.’
‘Ah, the Computer.’ She nods, and takes a copper pot from one of the hooks over the window. ‘Very well. I’ll call you when dinner is ready.’
‘What’s the Computer?’ Angel hisses as we head for the stairs.
‘It’s in my mother’s room,’ I say, ignoring the whisper of the ancestors as we get to the first landing. ‘She used it to invite people to the parties. It’s probably one of the first computers ever made, but it does have the Internet on it, so it’s a good excuse. Also, her room is in the old part of the house, and that’s a good place to start looking . . .’
Looking looking looking, echoes through the house. Uncle Sal pops out of his study. ‘Looking? What for?’ He lifts his glasses and rubs at his eyes. ‘Ah, Angel – I thought they were excited about something . . .’ He glowers up at the nearest portrait, of a thin girl with reddish hair and a wicked smile. She arches her curved brows at him, and he turns his back on her with a huff. ‘What’s going on, Bavar? What are you two looking for?’
‘Madness!’ bursts Angel. We both stare at her. ‘Madness, in Lord of the Flies. For English. We’re going to use the Computer!’
They have a Computer! With the Internet on it! They all say the words like they’re talking about aliens. Sal looks a bit dubious about our homework mission, but I’m not sure he really likes people very much, so after an awkward moment he lifts a hand and darts back into wherever he came from, closing the door firmly.
‘So,’ I say, turning to Bavar. ‘Where shall we start?’
My blood is pumping because we’re really doing this. I feel light as a bird, full of possibility, and then I look up and he’s all shadowy, looming over me like some sort of spectre.
‘What’s bugging you?’ I whisper, trying to hide a shudder.
‘Nothing.’
I fold my arms, tapping my foot. He beetles his eyebrows at me. He has amazing eyebrows, thick and curved.
‘Come on, just tell me.’
He sighs, and wanders across the landing to a narrow window that looks across the frost-covered fields. The sun is low in the sky, and shadows stretch across glittering grass.
‘I just don’t think it’s going to be as easy as you think,’ he says, his breath huffing out at the glass.
‘How hard can it be to find a door? There are, like . . . ten in Pete and Mary’s house, if you don’t count the cupboards!’
‘You’ve seen this place, right?’ He spreads his arms.
‘Yes, but even so! I mean, what, maybe a hundred doors?’
‘But then there are the hidden ones. And what’s a door, anyway?’
‘What do you mean, “what’s a door?” Surely a door is a door? So high –’ I reach up – ‘so wide . . . Look, there’s one right there.’ I march over and pat the solid wood of the nearest door. ‘For example . . .’
‘That’s just an ordinary door,’ he huffs. ‘We’re not looking for an ordinary door, are we? Who knows what a door to a rift looks like. It might be like . . . a tree, or a chimney. Anything!’
‘So what,’ I demand. ‘You’re not just going to give up already, are you? We haven’t even started yet!’
‘I’m not going to give up,’ he says. ‘I’m just warning you, it might take a while. You don’t seem like the most patient person in the world, so I thought I’d say.’
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘I am warned, thank you very much. Now, where shall we start?’
‘Let’s get away from here, anyway,’ he mutters. ‘Sal will be even worse than Aoife if he realizes what we’re up to.’
‘Why?’ I ask. ‘I mean, surely they don’t like being plagued by monsters every evening?’
‘Raksasa,’ he says absently, starting down the corridor. ‘And no, they don’t like it. But it’s all we’ve done for a long time, so I think they probably just want me to get over it and start fighting them off properly.’
‘Killing them?’
He winces. ‘Ultimately, yes.’
‘I thought I wanted that,’ I say. ‘When I saw you fighting before, I was kind of egging you on. And then you did kill it.’
‘I didn’t . . .’
‘Well, you know, we thought you had. And I realized what it cost you.’
‘So you don’t want me to kill them?’
‘No, not if it hurts you. I want to stop them coming.’
‘Well, that’s why we’re doing this,’ he says, gesturing up a narrow wooden staircase.
‘Yes. I just . . . I wanted you to know. In case you have any doubts. I don’t know what it’ll be like, when we find this thing.’ I clatter up the steps, his slow footsteps heavier behind me. ‘But it’ll be fine. It’ll be the right thing to do.’ I look back at him. ‘Whatever happens, Bavar, we’ll do it.’
As I say it, I don’t know whether I’m trying to reassure myself or him, and either way it sounds a bit hollow. He doesn’t reply, and for a split second I am caught in a moment of total unreality, scarpering up narrow steps in a strange house, with an even stranger boy, looking for a window to a monster world. I take a breath and keep going anyway.
One step at a time.
This whole place is so incredible. The further we walk, the more we see, the more I feel in tune with it. Every part of it just gets better, darker, weirder, and there’s so much of it. There are little sunrooms with balconies, cupboards bigger than my bedroom, sitting rooms full of covered furniture. Cobwebs drape from the ceilings of little box rooms, dust thick on patterned carpets. I go into each one, poke around, open things, prod wood panels and crumbling lintels, and Bavar follows me like a cloud. He watches sceptically as I carry out my checks, and then we’re back out into the corridors to face yet more of those portraits with their waxy faces and large, dark eyes watching our every move.
‘Who are all these people?’ I ask eventually.
‘Relatives, ancestors,’ Bavar says, keeping his head bent. ‘Better if you just ignore them, really.’
‘Why, what are they going to do?’ I ask, stopping. I turn to the nearest, of a young woman, dark hair knotted on top of her head, brown eyes wide and knowing. There’s a bit of a sneer on her face. ‘I mean, I know they can be a bit loud . . . Ooh, look, this one’s called Bloodwyn Victorious. She looks . . . nice . . .’
The constant whispering gets louder, and indistinct words roar around me, like the sea getting rough. Bloodwyn looks me up and down and hisses, revealing pointed grey teeth. I jump back, all the little hairs on my skin standing on end.
‘Is that why you put the plants on the graves? So they won’t shout at you?’
Bavar pulls me away, pushes me down the corridor. ‘You’ll get them all going – I told you to ignore them!’ His shadow looms over mine, and a shudder rolls down my back
But it’s OK. What’s the worst that could happen? The worst already happened, I remind myself. This is just a sideshow.
‘Where shall we look, then?’ I’ve lost count of the rooms we’ve checked. It must be dozens, surely, and yet it feels like we’ve hardly begun. I’m beginning to see Bavar’s earlier point. Not that I’m going to tell him that. ‘Do you think these guys will help us?’ I peer up at the next portrait, a jowly man in a frilly collar called Lionel. ‘Hey,’ I whisper.
He blinks.
‘Do you know where the secret door is? The one that leads to the . . .’
Bavar pushes me on before I can finish.
‘They might know!’ I protest.
‘And then what? They’ll tell Aoife
. . . and then it’ll all be over.’
I look up at him. ‘Do you really think she can stop you if you want to do this?’
He blows his cheeks out. ‘I don’t know. I’d rather not find out. Let’s check up here.’
‘Why is it all closed up?’ I ask, as he mutters a curse and pulls hard on a heavy wooden door that leads to yet more corridors, all the same wood panelling, and dark maze carpet. We’ve been up and down and around, and now I’ve no idea where we are – it wouldn’t be a surprise if the next stop was back at the kitchen, to be honest.
‘There are only three of us here now,’ he says. ‘We don’t need all these rooms.’
‘It feels weird. Like the house doesn’t like it.’
‘It got used to being busier. Parties, that kind of thing, when my parents were here.’ He mooches forward, and lights wink on as he approaches, throwing shadows up on to the patterned wallpaper.
‘How do you do that?’
‘What?’ He turns to me.
‘The lights – they come on when you’re near!’
‘Oh –’ he looks up – ‘I’m the master of the house.’
I look at him. ‘The Master of the House?’ I intone with a grin.
‘I didn’t say it like that!’
‘Well, still. What does that mean, really?’
‘It means I’m connected to it,’ he says. ‘The magic that opened the rift and brought the raksasa affects everything. Me, the paintings, the lights . . .’
‘So your parents were like you, then. And they fought the monsters –’ I look up at the portraits – ‘and so did all these guys?’
He nods, as a woman lying on a couch bares her teeth at me from the nearest painting.
‘So where did they go then, your parents?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says shortly, turning to a new corridor on the right. ‘Let’s try through here.’
‘Why did they go?’
‘They made a mistake.’
‘And so what, they just ran away, left you here? How could they do that?’
He looks like I slapped him and I curse myself. Mouth before mind – Dad used to tell me that sometimes. ‘Think first,’ he’d say. ‘And if you think you might regret it, perhaps you shouldn’t say it.’
