by Amy Wilson
She was so quiet, as we walked through the city streets. She moved quickly, darting down alleyways, crossing roads between stationary cars. Never seen so much traffic. So many people, all rushing along the pavements, umbrellas up, heads down. She moved between them like magic, and it was difficult to keep up. Some of the people saw me. They stared, as I tried not to collide with them, and then she turned a corner and the streets were quieter, older, the buildings golden stone rising high above us.
‘Did you live here, before?’
‘On the outskirts.’
‘It’s busy.’
‘Saturday.’ She shrugged. ‘Shoppers, tourists . . .’
I wanted to ask if she has friends here, if she still sees them, but she was holding herself so tight that it felt like if I asked the wrong thing she might break. And I don’t want her to break. I don’t know how I’d fix her.
‘How does the hiding thing work?’ she asks now.
‘Concentration,’ I say. ‘And other people, a bit. If they want to see me, they’ll see me, no matter what I do. But most people don’t really want to see things they can’t explain, so it’s usually easy. I just concentrate on being small.’
‘Mary saw you, and Pete didn’t, not really, not to start with.’
‘Sometimes people want to; sometimes they don’t. Mary’s more curious than he is. That’s all.’
‘And you weren’t concentrating?’
‘Thought it’d be a bit strange if I turned up invisible, so I was concentrating on not concentrating . . .’
The library is enormous. A dull yellow light comes in through the windows as the sun sets, and shadows stretch between the green-shaded lights. It’s quiet, only a handful of people sitting at the little dark wood desks, lamps lit over clusters of books.
The woman sitting at the curved front desk doesn’t look particularly happy to be here. Angel is flitting around next to me, her fingers playing with the toggles on her coat. I think she’s too nervous to go in, but she’s not about to tell me that.
‘I’ll go in,’ I whisper eventually.
‘No. You won’t know what you’re looking for.’
‘I’m guessing it’ll be book shaped?’
She gestures at the millions of books lining the walls, from floor to ceiling and then up a spiral staircase to another floor. ‘Go on then!’
‘Well, you’ll have to give me a clue, obviously.’
‘I want to go in there and get it.’
‘OK, so how are you going to do that?’
‘Well, you’ll have to create a diversion,’ she says. I’d laugh, but her eyes are pretty sharp right now. ‘Do you think you can do that?’
‘What kind of diversion?’
‘I don’t know! Do a bit of roaring out here, or creep in and start moving books about – anything!’
‘I’m not doing that. I’ll just come in with you.’
‘How’s that going to help?’
‘Maybe I can hide you too.’
She stares at me for a moment. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That makes sense. Can you though? How long for?’
‘I don’t know. Did it before, at school.’
‘But I wasn’t really hiding then. This is different.’
‘Well, do you want to try it, or do you want to stand out here all day looking like you’re talking to yourself?’ I ask, folding my arms.
She scowls. ‘Let’s just do it.’
I reach down inside myself for that feeling – that feeling of being small and insignificant. It’s harder to find than usual; it’s been a busy day, and my mind is distracted by all the things going on around us. I feel bigger when I’m around her. When we’re out doing things.
‘Any time you like.’ She sighs.
I move up closer to her, extending the feeling.
‘You’ll have to stay close,’ I say. My voice sounds like it’s coming from somewhere else – everything’s muffled, dark around the edges.
She moves in close to my left side. ‘Come on then,’ she says, and we move forward, a bit awkwardly, past the woman on the desk, who frowns and looks up. Her eyes search the air around us for a moment, then she turns her attention back to the main entrance. A couple of students arrive, diverting her, and then we’re in and it’s dark and kind of musty and Angel is close and warm and I get a weird, slipping feeling, but I hold on to the feeling of small and stick to the shadows, and slowly we make our way.
‘Where do you think it’ll be?’ I ask.
‘Mr Duke said something about occult history,’ she says. ‘I guess it’ll be in the reference section . . .’
‘You have to get in closer,’ Bavar hisses, as we walk past a row of desks and lowered heads.
‘This is stupid,’ I mutter, squishing myself into his side. ‘I mean, they probably won’t even care if we’re here. They probably wouldn’t even notice.’
‘Do you reckon?’ He shifts next to me. His feet are enormous. I wonder where he buys his shoes. I feel like a squirrel in a tree. ‘I think they’d notice you. Where’s the occult section then?’
‘Over here.’ I pull him to the left, and we hobble down a carpeted aisle that gets darker as we go, away from the windows and barely lit by the pale globe lanterns hanging from the ceiling.
The shelves stretch in front of us, thousands, millions of books, their spines gleaming with golden words and names of people I’ve never heard of, and – somewhere – my father’s words are here.
‘Alphabetical first,’ Bavar says. ‘We’ll find it.’ He moves away, and it’s suddenly colder and darker. ‘Falstaff . . . Falstaff . . .’
There’s a low rumble and I stare at him, as he flits about the shelves, eyes bright, fingers reaching out, touching the shelves, the books, and I realize he’s humming.
‘Here – F . . . Falk . . . Falstaff. Medieval mythology . . . ?’
‘No.’ I move closer, look up at where he’s pointing. ‘We’re looking for Marcel – M. Falstaff. He’s not here.’
‘So –’ he peers down the aisle – ‘hang on. This is medieval history; you said we needed occult.’
He moves down, running his fingers along the shelves, and I follow him. There’s a roaring in my ears. I don’t know how I’m going to feel if we find it. I remember how he held it, when I saw him in the mirror; as though it would all be better, if only they’d just let him show them. Do I really want to know what darkness he had found, while me and Mum just got on with our normal lives? Part of me just wants to run away right now and stop it all before it gets any harder. But I don’t. I just keep following Bavar as the shelves get narrower, and the library darkens around us.
‘Aha!’ he bursts out, making me jump. ‘History of the Occult. Falstaff . . . Marcel Falstaff . . .’
My heart thuds, and suddenly there’s movement behind us.
‘May I help you?’ breaks in the voice of the librarian, coming down the aisle towards us. She’s got a kind face, I think, but her eyes are guarded as she looks me up and down.
‘Uh, we’re just looking,’ I say.
‘I’m afraid this isn’t a public library,’ she says, almost regretfully. ‘You look a little young . . .’
‘Bavar, find it,’ I hiss, digging him in the side while I smile at the woman. ‘My father worked here; I just wanted to see his books.’
‘Your father?’
‘Um, yes. Professor Falstaff.’
‘Are you with him now?’
I stare at her. How can she not know?
‘Um, no . . .’
And then Bavar charges past me like a spooked elephant, a heavy book in his hands.
‘Run!’ he shouts.
‘Young man!’ Her voice rings out as I join him and we scarper through the aisles. He lengthens his stride. The lights wink out one by one as we pass through the library, heads raising, eyes wide as he runs, making the floor shudder. I’m running full pelt just to keep up with him, the librarian’s voice still ringing in my ears, and I really hope he got the right book,
because now we’re running down the library steps, and when Bavar looks back at me his whole face is alight with excitement, a stupid great big grin, cheeks flushed.
‘Come on!’ he calls, as shouts break the silence behind us. They really care about their books here. Bavar reaches back, grabs my hand and we fly through the courtyard, past the great golden dome, and the cold air stings and the ground is slick with icy rainwater but his feet are firm and his hand is warm and it’s pretty exhilarating in all.
He’d better have the right flipping book.
I’ve never run like this.
There’s never been enough space, enough air to fill my lungs before. This city is as big and as scary as I feel, most of the time. It makes me small. Nothing ever makes me small.
I feel like even if I wasn’t who I am, people wouldn’t see me, just because there are so many of them, all of them different, all of them crowded together in this one city. Tall, golden houses rise up around us, little wrought-iron balconies beneath the windows. I try to imagine what it would be like to sit out on one of them, watching people go by. There’s so much to look at.
‘Bavar!’
I stop and turn, and she collides with me, breathing hard.
‘The book!’
I take it out of my pocket and hold it out to her. She takes it with two hands. I hadn’t realized how big it was.
‘Is it the right one?’
She stares at me. ‘You weren’t sure?’
‘I was mostly sure.’
Her fingers turn white around the battered leather cover.
‘OK.’
‘So, is it?’
‘I think so,’ she says, holding it to her chest.
It’s getting dark around us, the streetlights glowing pink as they come on. We sit in a darkened doorway and she opens the book. The pages are heavy and warped, though they can’t be that old.
Images of monsters, some of them familiar. Woodland crouched beneath angry skies. Creatures laying waste to hillside villages, smoke belching from farmlands.
Raksasa.
They’re everywhere.
‘It’s legends,’ she whispers, tracing her fingers over the small ink drawing of a hooded figure, watching from the shadows as creatures fight in the sky. ‘What did Mr Duke say? My dad collected them from around the world. I knew he travelled, looked into stuff – I just never knew he got this far. I never believed him when he told us all those old myths . . . they must have thought he was crazy.’
‘There are raksasa all over the world?’
Did my family do that? How can I fight them all over the world?
‘No,’ she says, her voice sharp. ‘Look.’ She flicks through pages of intricate drawings, diagrams. ‘There are all sorts of legends, old tales of creatures going back centuries, how different places saw them, and what they did to stop them.’
‘It’s happened all over the world?’
‘It’s happened a million times over,’ she whispers, leafing through the pages.
We huddle close as it gets colder, as ice begins to form on the iron railings, and there are dark things in those pages, things I never even imagined, and then we find a new thing. Different writing, like a page from something else entirely.
‘What is it?’ she asks in frustration.
‘It’s in Latin,’ I say. ‘It’s a spell.’
‘To close the rift?’
‘I think so, sort of.’
‘What do you mean, Bavar?’ She stares at me. ‘Don’t keep things from me now. We’re in this together.’
‘We need an angel.’ I try to smile, to make it a joke. ‘And other things I don’t really understand. Some kind of truth, and also salt.’
An angel’s tears, it says. And then something about sacrifice, and blood.
But it can’t mean her.
She’s already sacrificed too much, thanks to my family.
‘It’s just a name,’ she says. ‘I mean, you’re the one with all the magic. Not me.’
I nod, as she closes the book with a sigh. ‘We’ll figure it out. Grandfather will know some of it.’
‘I thought it might be easy,’ she says.
‘Did you really?’
‘Well, I thought it might.’ She brightens. ‘We can definitely do the salt, anyway.’
‘We’ll work it out,’ I say. ‘We have the book. The spell. That’s what we came for.’
‘Yeah.’ She fingers the battered leather cover. ‘We did it.’
We don’t speak, as we head to the train station, and the journey home is subdued, because we did it. We got the book. We have it, right here, and we still don’t have the answers we needed – the spell is just too dangerous. Angel is silent now, lost in her own world, and I’m heading back to mine. I put my head down and whisper the words of not being seen, and I concentrate on that and nothing else because I have to go back. Back, back, back, to where none of this is possible. They all said it wasn’t possible, and I put my hope into a small girl, holding a big book, and now I feel like I’ve been kidding myself. What was I doing, in universities and libraries, running through wide streets, telling myself that I could make it work? Could find another way to make it all end? It is endless. The sky is amber over the house as I head up the hill and I can already hear shrieking and that’s mine. That’s my shriek, my business.
Fight, Bavar, they say, as I let myself in through the creaking door. You need to fight.
I growl as I head up the stairs to the library. I get out on to the balcony and the raksasa spirals from the sky towards me, talons stretched like blackened daggers aimed at my heart. I jump out, roaring, and land on its back, its wings beating by my ears. We fall to the ground, and half-stunned I stand and I raise my arms and I don’t know whether I’m fighting the monster or myself by the end, but the strike is true and the sun rises and it’s all just shadows and I’m starting to think that maybe I can do this.
I can fight.
If the alternative is to hurt her, I can just fight.
School. Home. School. Not thinking, not doing.
I didn’t give up. It’s just a little break. People stare harder when Bavar isn’t around, so I lower my head, and wish that he were here.
He was so horrified by what was in the book. As soon as I turned the page, he shrank in on himself, the light in his eyes snuffed out. And I don’t know. He muttered about angels and blood, and humanity, and something about sacrifice, but he wasn’t looking at me then. He was looking at something I couldn’t see.
I meant to go back to the house with him, there and then. Get his grandfather to look at the book, and work out what we were going to do. But the warp in the air around Bavar got stronger and stronger, and by the time we got off the train I could hardly see him myself. He was just an idea, a rush of energy beside me. I held on to the book, and looked at the space where he was until my eyes watered.
‘It’s OK,’ his voice said, from a million miles away. ‘We did our best. We found the book. We did everything we could.’
‘We haven’t!’
But he’d already gone. He’d gone, and left me standing there alone with my father’s book in my arms. Maybe I should have tried harder, but I just couldn’t, not right then. I was tired, and I missed my dad, and my mum, and all I had was this stupid book, which didn’t have the answers I was looking for, and I’d just had enough of it all. I stood outside the little vanilla house, and the crying came, because really all I wanted was home, and no matter what we did I would never have that back.
And it was Dad who lead them straight to our door.
They say I’m a fool.
They want her back.
But they want Bavar the fighter too, and they can’t have both.
‘Here I am,’ I say in the mirror, teeth sharp against my tongue. ‘Just the way you wanted me. Doesn’t that make you happy?’
But they don’t look happy. Nobody looks happy at all.
The book is haunting me. Doesn’t matter where I put it in my room, I
can feel it, full of secrets and answers. I’ve looked at it a few times, and it makes no sense to me. I even ran it all through a translator thing on Google. Whatever it is, it’s pretty heavy stuff. Heavy enough to make Bavar run away from it all.
I’ve read the rest of the book. Well, most of it. Some of it is very difficult to read, and some of it’s just a bit gruesome. Obviously I knew that Dad had travelled a lot. He was away half the year, most years, and we’d talk on Skype, and I guess I never really thought that much about where he was, or what he was doing. History stuff, I thought. Talking to people about myths and cultural heritage.
Turns out history stuff meant searching the world for monster-lore. Peru, Brazil, Thailand, Norway and Indonesia, where the pages get darker, the handwritten scribbles more frantic, and there’s a lot of mention of something called the Orang-Bati, which translates as ‘men with wings’, and in his sketches it looks a lot like the creatures Bavar’s family has been fighting for so long.
He knew they were real. He saw them for himself, in the ‘boiling clouds’ over the depths of the rainforest, where dark things fluttered and men whispered, in fear of the night itself. That must have been how he recognized what was happening here. And I guess that’s why he thought he could help. He’d found the spell, in among the writings of those ancient Indonesian tribes. The spell that closes rifts – that could have stopped it all.
But it didn’t. Bavar’s parents didn’t use it, and all Dad did was lead the monsters to us. And now he’s gone, and so is Mum, and I could just howl with it all. I’m so angry with him. Why couldn’t he be an accountant? Or a historian who specialized in pots? Why did he have to get himself all caught up in this? He should have just left it alone. He had a family.
I had a family.
I pound my fists into my pillow and it all spills out in great big heaving, choking sobs, and I wish – I wish I could change it. If there’s going to be magic in the world, that’s the kind of magic there should be. Why monsters? Why this?
Bavar is fighting. I can see it from the window; orange skies over the hill, shifting clouds, and the black silhouettes of the creatures he’s been hiding from all his life.
