by Amy Wilson
‘Can you play?’ Angel asks, rolling back the dark wood cover to reveal the keys. She fingers them gently, and the notes are a mellow whisper that make my chest ache.
‘Used to, a bit,’ I say.
‘Show me?’
I look around. It’s a quiet room; it always was. No portraits in here, just small paintings of landscapes: moonlight on a lake; the house under the amber glow of what a stranger might think was only the sunset; tiny songbirds on silver branches.
‘I don’t know what to play.’ The piano seems so small; the stool is like a perch. I sit there, and she beams at me, and so I feel like I should try. But my mind is blank.
Sometimes, when you’re not thinking, your body seems to know just what it’s doing all by itself. My fingers are clumsy at first, about four times too big for the keys, all knuckles and far too heavy. How did Father do it? I close my eyes, flinching on the inside, remembering what it was like in those rare moments when they were both here and we pretended that was all that ever existed.
‘Softer, Bavar – let it come out of you. You don’t have to push so hard . . .’ My father’s voice, almost a whisper.
I don’t know what the piece of music is called, but I remember how it filled the room, rose up to the peak of the dome and seemed to settle there, ringing long after the last note was played. How we’d sit, and my mother would tell stories while the stars came out.
There were good times here. I’d almost forgotten.
Wow.
I never saw anyone play the piano like that.
I don’t know whether it’s the magic in the house, or the memories of this room, or just Bavar, but the whole place comes alive with it, and outside it gets darker, but in here there’s a hazy golden glow, as candlelight plays with dust motes that dance in the music. The leaves in the dome glitter, the glass rose blooms, and the birds in the pictures shuffle their wings, turning their bright eyes to watch him.
He’s so lost to it. His fingers move faster and faster, his whole body seems just an extension of the piano, and he’s not scrunching himself up, or trying to hide, he’s not moping or glowering or waiting for bad things to happen – he’s just there, playing like it’s the only thing in the world . . . and so it is, for a while.
The last note rings out for a long time after he finishes. I watch as all the things come back in to bother him, as his eyes flick to the sky outside, watching for danger, and then to the door, and finally to me.
‘The rift!’ he says. ‘We keep getting distracted.’
‘Yeah,’ I say, giving myself a little shake. ‘Let’s find the rift.’ I trace a pattern on the dusty wooden floor with my toe as he goes around blowing out candles, and a fine line appears beneath my feet, crossing the floorboards.
‘Hey, look!’ I whisper, bending and uncovering more of the line. ‘It’s a trapdoor!’
‘It’s not a trapdoor.’ He kneels next to me. ‘I never noticed a trapdoor in here!’
‘Maybe there was a rug over it before,’ I say.
‘It’s probably just a fault in the wood.’
‘How do we open it?’ I ask.
‘It can’t be a trapdoor,’ he protests, poking around anyway, looking for an opening.
I shove the table back to get more space, and as I shove it, the floor he’s inspecting begins to rise. He jumps back with a shout, and I can’t help but grin.
‘Behold the trapdoor,’ I say grandly, with a bit of a bow.
‘Well, but it’s not the rift,’ he says, bending and looking into the darkness. ‘It looks like the pantry to me!’
‘What?’ I dart forward, and peer into a small, dark room, a chink of light along one side revealing shelf after shelf of bottles and tins and jars, industrial-sized bags of tea and sugar, and great sacks of potatoes on a rough stone floor. ‘Why would anyone have a trapdoor to a food cupboard?’
I look up at him, outraged.
‘I guess it’s as good a place as any to hide, if there was an emergency,’ he says, his eyes sparkling. ‘Plenty of food and nobody’d know you were there.’
‘Who needs that many potatoes, anyway? There’s only three of you.’
We peer down for a while. My stomach rumbles treacherously; it’s been a long time since lunch.
‘Come on,’ he says, finally, sounding a bit reluctant. ‘We’d better just close it, before Aoife finds us.’
‘But I’m hungry – let’s do some foraging!’ I scramble over the edge, dropping down into the pantry. It’s a longer drop than I thought it’d be, to be honest, and the stone floor is a hard landing. ‘Oof!’
‘Angel!’ he hisses, reaching down. ‘Get out of there!’
‘It’s incredible!’ I whisper. Like being in a treasure cave, only instead of gold and jewels, it’s full, ram-packed with every kind of food. Shiny foil packages, paper bags with tiny labels, bottles that wink in the light. I realize I don’t actually recognize most of it. I’ve no clue what semolina is, and desiccated coconut sounds pretty awful. There are various sorts of mouldy-looking sausage stacked in one corner, and right in front of me the most enormous tin of black treacle, oozing darkness – I guess that’s a favourite in Aoife’s cooking.
Bavar is still hissing at me overhead. I tune him out and keep scanning; surely there’ll be biscuits here somewhere. But before I can find them, there’s a mumbling noise from the other side of the pantry door. The latch starts to lift. I grab it, stopping it getting any further and hushing up at Bavar, who looks like he’s about to explode.
‘Onions, onions,’ comes Aoife’s voice. ‘Oh, this blessed door!’ There’s a thump against the wood, as if she’s kicking at it. I realize I’m trapped; I can’t let go of the latch or she’ll catch me here.
I look up at Bavar with a grimace. He disappears.
Well.
That’s less than helpful.
What am I going to do now?
‘AOIFE!’ comes a great roar through the house.
The latch stops wiggling.
‘What’s he roaring about?’ comes her muffled voice, footsteps heading away from the pantry.
‘Come on,’ pants Bavar, appearing again at the trapdoor. ‘Quickly! She’s on her way now – nobody else is allowed in her pantry!’
‘Well, you roared at her,’ I say, grabbing at a bag of something as I climb up the shelves and let him pull me out. ‘So of course she’s coming.’
‘What did you want me to do?’
‘I don’t know. I think I’d have thought of something better than that.’
He pulls a face as I scramble up, and shoves the table back, watching closely as the trapdoor closes. ‘Well, I wanted to make sure. I don’t want her to know about this; it might be useful, for midnight snacking purposes . . .’ He looks down at the bag I grabbed on my way up. ‘I mean, who doesn’t need instant access to dried mushrooms?’
Now he’s laughing.
We’re back in the old, central part of the house, up towards the eaves, when Aoife finally catches up with us. We’ve been hurrying away from her footsteps for the last few minutes, and I don’t even really know why, but somehow the idea of her trying to find us is a lot more funny than it should be. Especially when Angel does an impression of her rushing around like a chicken.
‘Bavar! There you are!’ she clucks, when she finally runs into us, wiping her hands on a floral apron, looking for all the world like a flustered hen. ‘What was all that shouting about?’
‘Oh, we were just having a look around, and I wanted to show her how the sound travels . . .’ My voice trails off and I look at Angel desperately, trying to keep my face serious.
‘How sound travels?’ Aoife demands, looking between us with bright eyes. ‘I thought there was an emergency!’
‘It was my fault,’ says Angel, clearing her throat and refusing to look at me. ‘I challenged him. Didn’t think anyone would hear us from so far away! He was just giving me a tour, really – being polite . . . And anyway, he says this is the old bit, the ori
ginal house, and everything else came after . . . It’s all so fascinating.’
Aoife narrows her eyes. ‘I’m making dinner,’ she says, looking us both up and down. ‘Ten minutes.’
‘OK,’ I say, shifting back up against the wall.
‘Way to look suspicious, Bavar!’ Angel whispers as Aoife makes her way down the stairs with a backward glance.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did you never have to lie before?’
‘Uh . . . no.’
‘Well, it shows. You should practise.’
‘It was all your “fascinating” rubbish that got her suspicious!’ I protest.
‘Ah, whatever,’ she says. ‘Quick, let’s try in here first, before dinner.’ She gestures at the next door and marches to it, shooting me a look. ‘What’s dinner going to be exactly?’
‘I don’t know. Probably some kind of meat.’ I sigh and follow her, ignoring a little portrait of my mother up high on the wall between a couple of mirrors and an old sketch of the town, hoping it’s going to stay silent. I couldn’t bear to hear her voice right now. Couldn’t bear the look on Angel’s face if she realized who it was. I don’t know what she’d make of her, but I know she’d be curious, and there would be questions, and I’ve had about enough of all that today. ‘Aoife likes meat.’
‘Bet it’ll have onions,’ Angel says. ‘Onion gravy, maybe . . .’ She looks up at me, all bright-eyed, but I don’t reply, because she’s standing right in front of a door that shouldn’t be here. There are hundreds of doors in this house, and dozens I’ve seen today that I can’t say I really remembered very clearly. But this one . . . this one rings with wrongness. It’s taller, narrower than the rest, the wood is a reddish-brown, and it looks brittle and dry, like an old dying tree.
‘Well anyway, it’ll probably be better than Mary’s fish pie,’ Angel says, pulling on the pitted, tarnished handle. She wiggles it and pushes, and then shoves at the wood with her shoulder, but it won’t budge.
‘Who’s Mary?’ I ask, a bit distracted, reaching out to the door, my mother’s eyes following me.
‘My foster mother,’ she says, still straining at the wood. Her tone is neutral, careless. But when I look down, her shoulders are high, tensed up around her neck, and I know that feeling.
‘Why do you have a foster mother?’
‘My parents died,’ she says. ‘I told you the other night; you were a bit out of it. Come on, let’s do this.’ She gestures at the door, moving away to let me get closer. ‘Open it already!’
‘But . . .’
This is a bad idea.
‘Bavar, just do it! We can talk about stuff later; I want to know what’s here!’
‘BAVAR!’ comes Aoife’s voice. And Angel glowers at me and I could just keep going with this door but I already know it’s going to change everything, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that.
Her parents died.
I wish I could remember what she told me. I want to know if it’s connected. I want to ask how they died. But I can’t because there’s an ache at the base of my stomach when she looks at me, and I don’t want to go there.
Not yet.
‘Come on,’ I say, turning my back on it all. ‘We’ll come back to it.’
‘No!’
‘Uh – yes!’ I charge out on to the main landing. After a moment she catches up with me, her arms folded. ‘I promise, we’ll find it straight after dinner.’
‘Yes, Master,’ she says eventually in a little voice. ‘I know we will.’
I look back at her.
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously, Master,’ she says with a cunning smile. ‘Look, I’ve left some clues – just in case you forget which way it was.’
I look back, and see that she really has. Not exactly breadcrumbs, but bits of her stuff, in a trail. A pen, some keys, a few books. They look like little islands in a vast sea, just pulling us back to that door. I shudder, and start down the stairs at a run.
There was a kind of pie, with various colours of mash, and we ate off platters with long, thin knives and forks that weighed a tonne. And Aoife and Sal talked about how the potatoes weren’t doing so well this year, their eyes constantly flicking from me to Bavar. And he just lowered his head and ate a mountain of food, and then there was tea, and cake. I swear, I wouldn’t at this point be surprised if the whole house was actually made of cake.
I look at one of the walls and narrow my eyes, and then laugh at myself. If it was made of cake, it’d be a lot prettier, anyway. It’s all so dark. Dark paint, only broken by darker wallpaper. The floors are polished black wood, and the rugs are like pathways through bewitched forests, vines and flowers leading you onward, onward, to where I hope at some point I might find a loo.
The ancestors are quiet up on the walls, but their eyes follow me, and Aoife said something about straight on and to the left, or the right, I don’t know, I wasn’t really listening. I stand there for a moment, a little bit lost, and in the silence something calls to me. A whisper – not in the air but in my blood. Something deep inside, like an itch I can’t reach. I step forward, to where the feeling is louder, and it peaks when I get to the ornate door on the right of the great hallway. It’s closed, it’s always been closed, and I shouldn’t go in, I know I shouldn’t, but something in there is calling like a heartbeat, like a storm on the inside. I open the door and dart in, pulling it closed behind me.
It’s bleak and bare in here, tattered velvet curtains parted at the vast bay window, and an old chaise longue along one wall, faded blue and gold. Over the fireplace is an enormous mirror with a gilded, blackened frame and that . . . that is the thing that calls to me.
I can hear my dad.
I tread lightly over the dusty rug and I keep my head down, and I can barely breathe because I don’t want to make a sound. I don’t know how, but I can hear his voice and I have this hope, this wild hope that somehow he’s going to be here. That when I look up there he’ll be, in the mirror, in the room, breathing, talking, living.
I look up. Me, but not me. My hair glows, my eyes are the blue of a bright winter sky, and there, just over my shoulders, sweeping up to the ceiling, a pair of gleaming cloud-pale wings. I blink, and the image is gone.
Hah!
I scowl at my reflection. Pale, scrawny old me, just kidding herself. And then the mirror clouds over. For a moment I can’t see anything at all, and then slowly, as I watch, a new scene unfolds behind me. The room isn’t a cold, silent place. It’s ringing with noise and light, and laughter. Men and women gather in clusters, and in the middle of it all is a couple who shine even brighter than all the rest. They’re both tall, and the man has Bavar’s hair, though he’s tried to tame it and it shines beneath the swinging crystal chandelier. The woman has magic in every movement: when she laughs the whole room brightens, and when she stops there’s a sigh, as if the world is trying to hold on to the sound. She looks up at him and those eyes . . . it’s Bavar’s parents, it must be. I turn to the room, ice down my spine, but there’s nothing there, and when I turn back the scene has faded. I look harder, desperate to see more, and another scene appears before me, like the first, except the air is darker, thicker, the room hums with tension. Bavar’s parents stand together, their heads bent.
‘What does he want, Faolan?’ she whispers. Her face is pale, though she still smiles.
Faolan bends to her. ‘He says he’s found a way . . . I don’t know! The man’s raving. They’ve let him in and now he won’t go away, and he won’t stop speaking of the raksasa!’
‘I must speak to you!’
A man breaks through the crowd and stands before them. He looks so small, so pale and scared. The whole room stops to watch.
My dad.
His hair is plastered to his head, his coat dripping with rain. His eyes are haunted. I never saw him like this. I never knew he could look like this.
‘Look, it’s all very well,’ Bavar’s mother says in a soothing voice, gesturing the m
usicians to start up again with one hand, smiling brightly as her guests begin to talk once more. ‘And we’re so pleased to have you drop by, but dear man, this is a party! Let go of these worries of yours, and have a drink.’ She grabs a tall, fizzing glass from a waiter’s gleaming tray and passes it to him. ‘Have some of this.’
‘But the monsters, the raksasa . . .’
‘Hush now,’ she says, putting out one elegant hand to fend it all away. ‘What do you know of monsters? It isn’t Halloween, is it?’ She laughs, but it’s a brittle thing and the sound does not carry. ‘Come. Faolan, the poor man is half-dead with the cold and the rain, give him something to eat!’
‘No, you must listen! They’ll come, thicker and faster, the longer the way is open. I’ve seen it, in other places, and so I knew, when I saw that amber sky . . .’ He holds up an old book. ‘I found a way – please, I have brought this . . .’
She flinches away from him, and Faolan steps forward and puts his arm around my father, leading him towards a table filled with silver dishes of every kind of food: pastries and tarts, quiches and salads and cheeses and biscuits, jellies and figs and chocolates, Turkish delight and roasted chestnuts. Dad shakes his head, and Faolan passes him a plate, and then the mirror darkens, and the world spins.
‘Angel!’ Bavar bursts in. ‘Why are you in here?’
‘Bring him back.’ I turn to him. ‘Bring him back! Make them listen!’
‘What did you see?’
‘My father – and your parents, turning him away! Make it come back, Bavar. Make them come back!’ I stamp my foot. I have never needed anything more. I feel like someone just took all the oxygen out of the air.
He comes towards me, his dark eyes glittering. ‘It’s just a memory. The mirror holds them. I can’t bring them back. It doesn’t work like that.’
‘How does it work?’ I look back, reach up and touch the glass. My face looks back at me, all shadow and light. ‘Bavar, how do I make it work?’
