by Amy Wilson
‘I don’t know,’ he says, looming up behind me, his face distorted in the glass. ‘It throws things up; I’ve never been able to control it . . .’
‘I need to see him. Make it come back!’
‘I can’t!’
‘It’s important, Bavar. He had a book. He wanted to tell them . . . I think he wanted to tell them how to close the rift!’
‘How would he have known anything about it? The mirror plays tricks, Angel. Sometimes I think it just shows you what you want to see!’
‘I didn’t want to see him like that, all scared. It happened, Bavar, and your parents just fobbed him off with a drink! They were worried about their guests; they didn’t want to know!’ His face tightens and I can see it’s hit a nerve. ‘Is that what they were like? Did they care at all about the world they were supposed to be protecting?’
‘They spent their lives fighting them back,’ he says. ‘They fought until it was all they were; the fight, and the glory. And you walk in here, and in five minutes you think you’ve got it all worked out.’ He shakes his head, his shoulders tight. ‘You should go.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
We stare at each other for a long time; truthfully I don’t know what I’m doing now. Do I really want to stay here, in this place that turned my father away?
You were going to find the rift, and close it.
But if nobody else has, for all this time . . . if they didn’t even have the courage to look, then how can we make it work? Maybe it would be a disaster. Maybe we’d just let more of those monsters loose on the world.
‘I saw him. He was here,’ I say. Bavar looks from me to the mirror, and back again. Dust swirls in the air around us, and it feels like we’re trapped in a moment neither one of us ever wanted. What do we do now?
‘OK,’ he says in a low rumble, eventually.
‘You believe me?’
He nods. ‘I don’t know what it means, though. I never knew . . .’ He swallows hard, looks at the floor. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘What shall we do?’ I ask, hoping against hope that he might just have the answer, this one time, because my head hurts and my heart hurts even more.
‘We should do it,’ he says, squaring his shoulders. A flicker of doubt in his eyes. ‘Let’s just do it. We can’t change what already happened . . .’
‘. . . but we can do this?’ I say, when he runs out of steam.
‘We can try.’
He smiles. It’s not a particularly happy sort of smile, but there it is, on his face, and I’ll take it. It’s good enough, for now. I make my own to join it.
Her father was here.
She’s all pale and quiet, and right now I’d do just about anything to bring her back to life again, so I charge forward, up the stairs, past all the silent, watching ancestors, and she trails after me. My heart is hammering as I get closer to the strange door we found earlier. The little trail she left is like bits of her happiness, all cast aside as if it didn’t matter at all.
It matters. It all matters, and it all fits together, and it’s like an answer to a question I never knew I had. It’s like a chance to end all this and start again.
I’ve never been so afraid.
A wave of revulsion goes through me as I step up to the door, and I’m sure there’s movement between the wood panels, shadows and light flickering past. I jerk back, a cold sweat running between my shoulder blades.
‘Just do it,’ says Angel, brushing up next to me and leaning hard against the door. ‘Come on, before Aoife comes back . . .’
I can hardly breathe though. Deep inside me something just knows this is where it is, this is where all our troubles come from, and I shouldn’t disturb it, and I definitely shouldn’t do it with Angel standing right next to me like this. But she’s so desperate, her face is set with so much pent-up rage, that I can’t tell her no. I shove up against the rough wood with my shoulder as she pounds on it with her fists, and there’s a wrenching sound as the catch finally surrenders. I hear my mother’s voice shouting from the portrait on the wall as the door bursts open, and another world opens up before our eyes, a screaming vortex that reaches out and clutches at us, threatening to pull us in.
The woman’s voice gets louder, more shrill, but it’s hard to hear over the roar of the world before us. We should be doing something, this isn’t safe. We should step back, get away, because it’s going to devour us, it’s going to take us and never let us go, but it’s mesmerizing, far too beautiful to look away from. A red sky that you could reach out and touch, bursts of orange and yellow spiralling and flaring out towards us. Black figures wheel high above and down below, rivers of gold curl around dark mountains.
‘BAVAR!’
The voice is a roar, it makes me start, and suddenly some part of me is howling and desperate to get away from this before it’s too late. I grab Bavar’s arm and pull at him, but he’s watching like he’ll never stop, his whole body turned to the burning sky.
‘Bavar, come away!’
‘Look at it,’ he breathes. ‘Can you feel it, Angel?’ His eyes gleam as he pulls away from my grip. ‘I never knew it could feel like that . . .’
‘BAVAR!’
That same woman’s voice, darker now, stronger, it reaches out and curls around us, makes him flinch. His mother’s voice – I recognize it from the scene in the mirror – though it sounds darker now, amplified by the power in the air.
‘COME AWAY FROM THE RIFT, BAVAR.’
‘It’s not like I thought,’ he whispers, stepping closer. His face glows with the light, and the sense of magic around him that normally feels like static is rolling off him, full and easy, like sunlight.
‘CLOSE THE DOOR,’ the voice says. ‘MY BOY, YOU AREN’T READY FOR THIS!’
‘What do you care?’ he shouts, still fixated on the rift. The swooping creatures in the flare-lit sky are getting closer now, and the air around Bavar warps, hot and heavy. Somehow he’s pulling power from the rift. What if he stumbles and falls in? I reach out, wincing, and it stings but I pull at him anyway, and he resists me, takes another step towards the world of the raksasa.
‘BAVAR! I ALWAYS CARED . . . EVEN WHEN YOU COULD NOT SEE IT!’ The woman’s voice rises in desperation. ‘PLEASE, COME AWAY NOW.’
He doesn’t even hear her. Trails of gold sparkle in the orange sky before us as the raksasa rise and fall on a hot wind, twisting and calling to each other. Beneath the wings, their bodies are almost human in shape, and there’s a joy in their movements that even I can see. They call to each other, and their voices make the air ring. He’s dazzled by it. What would happen if he went in? Is that what he’s thinking? That he’d just grow wings and fly, free of care?
‘Bavar!’ I pull again, harder. What if I lost him here? If I lost him, and I just had to go home, to the little house and Mary and Pete, and the jumpers, and all the not fitting, and missing the people I’ll never see again.
‘NO! I need you here!’ I haul at him, closing my eyes and gritting my teeth, absolutely never, never letting go, no matter what, even if he pulls me in there with him, I’m not giving up. ‘BAVAR!’ Something lends me strength in that moment, and as I pull he falters, stumbling back, away from the call of the raksasa.
‘Close the door,’ I say, breathing hard.
He stares down at my hand, still clutching his sleeve.
‘You have to close it.’
‘But we found it,’ he says, turning back to it. ‘The rift! It’s right here!’
‘Yes, but . . .’
I’m so tired. The air burns, my eyes are streaming, and he wants this so desperately. The sense of it all seems to wither as the world before us darkens to nightfall, a scatter of stars and a strange blue moon appearing in the sky. I can’t make him do anything. He takes another step back towards the rift.
‘YOU NEED THE SPELL!’ the woman’s voice says. ‘YOU CANNOT WIN THIS BATTLE WITHOUT WEAPONS!’
He’s standing there, just gazing into the rift.
‘CATALYST,’ comes the voice now, like cool water against my mind, so sure of itself. ‘BRING HIM BACK. YOU CAN DO THIS. DO IT, OR WE ARE ALL LOST . . .’
A great roar goes through the house, and it throws me into action. I brace myself, stretching out, pulling him back and hauling on the door until it bangs shut, the sound echoing all around us.
‘What on earth is going on?’ shouts Aoife, running at us as we slide down the wall opposite the door, both of us exhausted and battered with heat and smoke. ‘What was that?’ She looks from us up to the little portrait high up on the wall. ‘What did you do?’ she demands.
The dark-haired woman in the portrait says nothing, her eyes are on Bavar, who stares back at her.
‘Come!’ Aoife snaps. ‘Away from here, both of you! I don’t know what this is, but you look like you barely survived it!’
I didn’t think.
I wasn’t thinking. I was just looking, feeling the power in the rift as it glowed before me, a living, breathing thing that wanted me, that craved me and soothed me and called to me in a million bright voices. I could feel it in my blood, in my heartbeat. I could have dived in, I wanted to, and then my mother’s voice was there. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to leave, to stop feeling that power. And then it was Angel, and I couldn’t hide it from her. I couldn’t leave her.
‘How did you close the door?’ I ask, as we traipse after Aoife. She’s absolutely furious, striding along, the lights flickering in her wake, the ancestors all struck dumb before her.
‘It was the house,’ she whispers. ‘There was a woman shouting, and then, I don’t know, Bavar. I don’t think it was me.’ She looks up at me and I see how close we came to really hurting ourselves. Her eyes are streaming, and there are dark smudges on her flushed skin. ‘It was the house.’
‘What were you thinking?’ Aoife demands, hustling us into the kitchen. ‘Look at the state of you, Bavar! Explain!’
‘I told you I wanted to close it,’ I say.
‘But did you think it through? How are you going to close it?’
‘I don’t know! Grandfather said the first thing was to find it!’
Her mouth tightens. ‘And now you have found it, and nearly lost yourself to it, and you take Angel with you! Angel, who has no place in this! You find a friend and you lead her into danger and you hadn’t even thought about how you were going to deal with that. I thought you were better than that, Bavar! If it hadn’t been for the ancestors, you’d both be lost!’
‘What did the ancestors do?’ Angel asks, her voice small.
Aoife takes a breath, fills the kettle with water from the tap. She’s wearing a plain dark dress that my mother would never have worn, but the way she moves is so like her. Sometimes it’s like living with her shadow. The same, but so different too. It’s not a bad thing, but it hurts anyway. Like being constantly reminded of the thing you lost, that you still crave so badly. ‘They saw the danger and lent you their strength,’ she says. ‘The rift, the house, it is all connected; it is all the same magic. It is why this place is as it is. It is how Bavar fights. It is how they saved you.’
She’s so angry, I can tell from the way she swishes around the kitchen, opening drawers harder than she has to. Angel stands there with wide eyes, listening, pale now with shock, her hands trembling as she rubs at her face.
She was the one who saved me.
What was I thinking?
You were thinking you wanted an end to it all, a little voice that was hope reminds me. You were thinking you could rid the world of the raksasa forever.
‘I have to go,’ Angel says, refusing Aoife’s attempts to feed her.
‘You’ll come back?’ I ask, following her out into the hallway, loitering by the stairs.
‘I’m not leaving it alone, Bavar,’ she says. ‘We found the rift, and Dad had a way to close it. I’m going to find that book he had; I know where it’ll be. I’m going to find it, and I’m going to use it, like your parents should have done before the monster came down and killed mine.’
And now she’s said it, and it rings in the air, and it needed to be said, because we both already knew it, but it hurts anyway. It hurts more than raksasa venom.
‘How do you know that’s what happened?’ I ask.
‘I told you, on the day you fought the raksasa. They were killed by one of them. I was in the cupboard . . .’ She closes her eyes, takes a breath. ‘And everybody said it was a burglary, but I knew. I heard it screech, I saw it. Just like I saw you on that first day of school.’
‘That’s why you saw me.’ I can hardly breathe. The house gets dark around me, and all I can see is her, and all her torment just flooding the air around us.
‘I spent a really long time pretending I didn’t believe it all,’ she says. ‘I’m not going back now, not for anybody. Dad was here, and your parents just sent him away, they let this happen. Is that what you’re going to do too?’
‘No!’ I say, reaching out for her, stopping myself. ‘No. I’ll close it. Whatever it takes . . .’
She looks up at me, and that look in her eyes. Like something’s wounding her, right now, right here. I take a step towards her, but she turns and runs for the door.
I feel sick.
Aoife stares as I rush away from her up the stairs and there are questions in her eyes, but I don’t want to see them. I don’t want to have to answer it all out loud.
It was the thing. The thing that hid in my mind, when I was poisoned by the monster. She told me, how could I have forgotten? Her parents were killed because mine got distracted. She was the girl who survived it; she was the one who saw it all happen.
Aoife said there was a child left behind.
And the child was Angel.
How did this happen? How did she end up at my school? In this house? How could she bear to be so close to it all, after everything that happened? I lurch through corridors, lights flickering all around me, until I’m in the peace and darkness of my bedroom. I can’t sit still, I can’t rest. I don’t know what to do with myself. Everything is rushing around my head.
The raksasa killed her parents. I knew it, didn’t I? Deep down, somewhere, I knew that was the thing. That was why there were shadows in her eyes; that was the thing that made her different. The thing that howled at the raksasa that night, when I thought she’d lost her mind. My parents let the barrier slip, and the raksasa escaped, and destroyed a family, and then they both fled, because they knew they couldn’t come back from that. They’d gone too far into the darkness, hidden too hard from it in the parties they held every night. I remember those times so well, the lights and the heat, the smoke, the music that spiralled up the stairs and seemed to carry with it a magic that made everything dreamlike. I remember I’d fall asleep halfway down the stairs, or on the landing, my eyes heavy with the sense of it. They wove it into the air, that stillness. They used it to drown everything else out.
And then one day it was all gone. I woke in the morning and it was cold and dark, and Aoife was red-eyed, and they said goodbye, and then they were gone. They’d caught the rogue raksasa, and they’d fought with all they had, using their magic first to kill it and then to repair the barrier, and then they went, because they could no longer be trusted. It worked for a while; there was peace here for a while. But the barrier gradually weakened without their magic, and the rift kept growing, and the raksasa started to attack long before they thought they would, and they’re still not here, and I am.
I have to end this, I tell myself, while the raksasa screeches and pounds against the barrier. I have to end it while I can, before the fight takes over, before I lose myself like they did. If there’s a book that can help me to close the rift, I have to find it. Before it’s too late.
He thinks it’s all his fault. He stood there, watching me, and I could tell he had a whole heap of guilt just sitting on top of him, drowning him, and I didn’t tell him it wasn’t his fault, because I couldn’t. I was too angry. And then I m
ade it worse. I told him everything, and I watched as it hit him, and then I ran, past all those ancestors, a million eyes watching me, seeing my heart break all over the place. Aoife’s voice shouted out behind me, but I didn’t turn. I wrenched open the massive front door and I ran down the hill, my breath steaming, wet cheeks stinging in the bitter night air.
Dad was there, in that house. He was there; I saw him. His tired blue eyes, the old hooded coat he’d had forever, that way he had of rubbing his nose when he was worried. I never thought I’d see those things again, and now I wish I’d opened my eyes wider, to see it all better. I wish I’d listened harder to his voice.
I replay the scene over and over in my mind, holding on tight until the edges begin to blur and all I am left with is the sense of his fear, and my own small self, breathing hard as I sit on the narrow bed in the little vanilla house, Mika in my lap.
‘I will find that book,’ I tell him eventually, burrowing into the duvet. ‘I will find that book and I will close that rift.’
Mika purrs, and he doesn’t move all night. He curls into the space under my chin, and stays right there.
Mary’s taking me shopping. She’s pretty adamant about it. I want to go to the university and find Dad’s book, and save the world and all that, and she wants to buy me a new winter coat.
I mean, it’s not totally unreasonable. I’ve grown, as you do, and so the cuffs on the khaki one Mum got me a couple of years ago are a little bit on the short side. I’ve told Mary they’re just three-quarter length, surely, and if I wear gloves it’ll be fine, but no, she’s insistent. She pours her cereal very firmly, and says it again: ‘We’re going shopping.’
‘Can we do it this morning then?’ I ask, fingering my spoon, looking at my upside-down self. ‘And then maybe I could go out this afternoon? I wanted to go to the library . . .’
‘Oh, we can do that together!’ she says. ‘I could do with a good book; it’s been ages since I lost myself in a book.’
