by Amy Wilson
‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper, as the creature crumples to the ground. ‘Forgive us.’
Silence. All around me, silence.
The raksasa dissolves to dust before my eyes, and it occurs to me that the school is in total darkness now. That somehow an entire evening has passed while I’ve been fighting this thing. The night grows thicker, shadows stretch. I look up at the moon, and over towards the house, and Angel is fighting, while I stand here just breathing. She is reading a spell that calls for sacrifice, and the barrier at the house is broken; any number of them could make their way through the rift.
So I run.
The corridors are dark, and floorboards creak under the patterned carpet as I try to find my way to the bare little room where we found the rift. The pale faces in the portraits loom out at me like moons, and they watch every move, and there’s a bustle in the air of their awareness, but they do not speak. I’m fairly glad of it, since I’m trying to do all this without disturbing Aoife and Sal, but it is a bit unnerving.
Also, after a while I have to admit to myself that I’m lost. I’m lost, and time is precious. I turn to the nearest picture, of a man sitting behind the desk in the library. His dark eyes are pensive as he looks out at me.
‘Which way?’ I ask.
‘Which way to which?’ he asks in a sing-song voice.
‘The room we found with the rift. You remember. You all shouted about it. I need to find it now.’
‘For humanity?’
‘Yes. And for Bavar.’
He leans forward, propping his elbows on the desk.
‘You will care for our boy when others see him, and he is not as they are? You will be there, when all this is over, and he is alone with shadows?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We cannot speak, we cannot live without the magic that is connected to the rift,’ he says. ‘We will miss it, but that is not the concern. Our time is past, long ago. Bavar will lose us all, and that will be hard for him.’
‘You won’t speak any more?’ I look around me at all the faces, all the ancestors who have called my name, who have surrounded Bavar with their love for so long. ‘Even his grandfather?’
My voice is a husk, tearing through my chest as I realize the full extent of it. How can I do that to him, cut him off from all of his family, when he’s already lost his parents?
‘His grandfather died twenty years ago,’ the man says, shaking his head. ‘He is as tired as the rest of us. What is more important, Angel? You must decide!’
‘Tell me the way,’ I say in a low voice, steeling myself.
I’m not sure I can do it.
But I’m at least going to find the right room before I make that decision.
Run. Run. Staggering, stumbling, slipping on ice, jumping fences, crossing frozen fields, just to get there quicker. The gate is a twist of black metal, the warped ends curving wickedly into the night. The clouds begin to boil overhead as I run up the drive, and the moon is quickly lost in fire. I keep my head low and steel myself, racing up the steps as darkness creeps in the corners of my eyes and my heart trips in my chest. My back is on fire, every move like a new strike of its claws.
‘Angel,’ I mutter.
‘ANGEL!’ shouts the house around me as the front door opens.
I can see the magic in the air now, glowing through the darkness like a thin silver cobweb that threads through every ancestor and catches at me, and sends me on with power in my veins.
They guide me with gentle voices, and as I pass each one I feel them more clearly than ever. The essence of them is warm; it reaches out and pushes me onward when I would falter. Down steep wooden steps, over landings and hallways, across vast ballrooms until I am there, before the door of the bare room where worlds collide.
And then I stop.
Bavar will have fought the monster. He’ll have sent it back to its own world; our world is safe for now. I tell myself there’s no rush. I should wait for him. I can’t do this alone.
‘YOU AREN’T DOING IT ALONE,’ says his mother from the frame next to the door.
‘How could you leave him like that?’
Her shoulders raise and fall in a shrug I know so well.
‘IT ISN’T FOREVER.’
‘Will you come back, if I do this?’
‘I DON’T KNOW,’ she says. ‘WE ARE NOT WHAT WE USED TO BE; WE ARE NOT THE PARENTS HE NEEDS.’
‘So if I do this, he’ll be alone. All the others will be gone as well.’
‘THEIR LIKENESSES WILL REMAIN, IN THE PORTRAITS. THE MEMORIES OF THEIR VOICES. HE WILL UNDERSTAND.’ She leans forward in the chaise longue, her eyes glittering. ‘DO IT, ANGEL. DO IT FOR ALL OF US.’ Her sharp teeth catch on the words, and I see then the desolation that flirts at Bavar. She was like him, once. ‘DO IT NOW, BECAUSE YES, WE LEFT HIM. AND WE SHOULDN’T HAVE, BUT WE DID, AND WE CAN’T GET TO YOU FAST ENOUGH NOW. THERE’S NOTHING WE CAN DO; IT’S UP TO YOU.’
I take the book out, wrench open the door. The world blazes around me. I take the little knife and cut into my palm, and my tears are already falling as I start to speak the words, and I don’t know whether I want this to work or not, but I’m doing it, and whatever happens, at least I was here. I wasn’t hiding in a cupboard, too afraid to meet the demons who tore my life apart. I was here, doing everything I could to stop it from ever happening again.
The house has dwindled to silence around me and I seem to have become lost in its maze. I tread softly, as walls melt around me, and the carpet leads me forward. I tread, and cling to walls and banisters and nooks and crannies, and I make my way through the forest that swims in my head and makes all things nonsense.
‘Nonsense,’ I whisper. ‘It’s all nonsense.’
And nobody corrects me. The portraits are quiet; the eyes of my ancestors are dark and hollow. What has happened here?
Am I too late?
The door to the room is open. The rift is wide, belching rage and flames. Angel is curled in a corner, the book open on the floor beside her.
‘No,’ I whisper, noticing the knife by her side.
She looks up.
‘Didn’t work,’ she says, exhausted. Her hair stands out around her head in a wiry, static mess; her skin is glistening with sweat. ‘I couldn’t get close enough. It was too much . . .’
‘We’ll make it work together,’ I manage, the words clumsy on my tongue as I move towards her. ‘Here . . .’ I use the knife, watch numbly as blood wells up, and hold my arm out to the violent, swirling rift. ‘Blood, and salt, and . . .’ I shake my head, frustrated. ‘What was the other thing?’
‘Tears of the fallen, heart’s truth, or heart’s pain, something,’ she says.
Too much, I think numbly. I tear at the lining of my coat; wrap a strand of silk around her hand.
‘Read the spell,’ she whispers. ‘I already did it once, but I don’t know Latin – I don’t know if I did it right.’
She pushes the book towards me, and the words swim before my eyes. I know it all by heart already, but there’s a piece missing – I can see that now. The piece that puts it all to rest.
I am the fallen. This whole family, we are the fallen. We are the ones who opened the rift and let the creatures see a world they never would have seen. We are the ones who let them smell the blood of humanity until it was all they craved. I watch my blood spill, and Angel is silent beside me, and I hold her hand and hope my warmth is enough for both of us, just while I read this, just until I get to the end, because she looks so cold and small, and I don’t know . . . I don’t know how she’s survived this long, with all she has seen. But there’s one thing I do know. If she can, then so can I. I can do this.
The words are like fire; they hurt as they flow. I go faster, speak louder, and Angel is trying to tell me something, but her voice is a whisper, and the words I’m saying have a life of their own. Dark shapes form within the rift, screaming as they dart towards us. I raise my voice, shouting, and Angel’s voice gets more
insistent, and I realize she’s crying, her hand pulling at mine as if to tell me something that’s desperately important, but it’s too late. Too late for listening, or for questions. Too late for doubts. Too late even for words. I finish the spell and it isn’t enough, so I roar into the abyss, and the raksasa halt in their tracks because that is a language they understand, and it is friendship and regret and sorrow and – more than that – it is hope. It is the hope that comes out of fighting for something, knowing that you aren’t fighting alone. It is Angel’s hand in mine, her voice roaring alongside mine. The raksasa understand that. They hesitate. The magic, the house, the rift itself and the creatures who live beyond it – for an instant we are all together in this. We are connected.
And then something deep inside me snaps, and we are not. I stumble forward with a sharp cry, and everything gets darker. The world of the raksasa begins to fade, the temperature of the room plummets . . .
‘Bavar!’
Angel’s voice, bright beside me.
‘Is it done?’ I whisper, my head throbbing.
‘You did it!’
‘We did it,’ he says with a ghost of a smile, looking from me to the wall where the rift used to be.
I follow his gaze, I can’t quite believe it’s gone. A moment ago there was a whole world there.
‘How did you do it?’ I ask. I don’t know what he said towards the end of the spell, what he put into the words that he shouted. I don’t know how he roared like that for so long, till the lights flickered and the world all went to black and white. Whatever it was, I think it might have broken him a bit. He tries to stand and ends up stumbling into me.
‘Uh, sorry,’ he mutters. ‘M’head’s spinny . . .’
‘You got clawed by the raksasa.’ I remember. ‘Did you send it back, Bavar? Did you see it disappear?’
‘Yup,’ he says, leaning his head against the wall and closing his eyes.
It’s so quiet now. My ears are ringing with it; I’ve never heard this place so silent.
Bavar opens his eyes. ‘What’s happened?’
I stare at him. ‘What do you mean? You closed the rift . . .’
‘Yes, I remember that,’ he says. He frowns. ‘But the silence. Why did everything stop? Why did it hurt like that?’
‘I was trying to tell you,’ I say, sitting next to him against the wall. My head is thumping; my hand aches where I cut it. It seemed like forever since I was in here without him, saying words I didn’t understand, staring into that red-gold sky and just willing it to go away, before any more harm was done. ‘You cut the magic. I think that’s why it had to be you, to say the words like that. Your connection with the house, and the magic that opened the rift in the first place. That’s what you got rid of.’
‘I got rid of the magic? All of the magic? What does that even mean?’
He looks so confused, so lost. And I don’t want to be the one to tell him. I don’t want to be the one who pushed and pushed until this happened, but I was, and now he’s lost so much.
‘It means it’s over,’ I say. ‘The rift is gone. No more raksasa. No more fighting.’
‘But there’s more,’ he says, his eyes never leaving mine.
‘I think it was the same magic that was in the house. In the portraits, and the way you could stay unseen. The way you fought . . .’
I can’t say it. He stares at me until I have to look away, and I’m not going to cry, not now. So I bite my lip instead.
‘The ancestors are gone,’ he says.
There’s a long silence.
‘Grandfather?’
‘I think so,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry, Bavar. I was trying to tell you. I wanted to warn you, before it was too late.’
‘But it was too late.’ He sighs. ‘There wasn’t really a choice.’
‘There was,’ I say, turning back to him. ‘You could have kept on being as you were. You could have fought them, just like your parents did, until it was easy, or until you lost. It would have been easier, wouldn’t it? Just to ignore all this and carry on like that? But you didn’t. You chose to stop it. You did the harder thing. And your mum . . .’
‘My mother?’
‘She spoke to me, from the portrait by the door. She wanted us to close the rift, Bavar, before you got like they did. I could see what it had done to her; she didn’t want that for you.’
‘They weren’t always like that,’ he says. ‘It was the fighting. It got to them. I get it now. There was a moment in that fight earlier, when I was in the thick of it . . . well, you know. You saw it before, when you threw that stone at me.’
‘Do you ever wonder where they are now?’ I ask, ignoring the catapult reference.
‘Sometimes,’ he says. ‘I try not to think about them too much. They left so they could fight the raksasa without distraction.’ He shakes his head. ‘Without me. And it was better when they’d gone, for a while, so maybe it was the right thing, but they still left me alone, with all this . . .’ He tips his head back, looks up at the ceiling. ‘I guess . . . I thought maybe they’d come back one day, and they’d be different. Like they were before. They never did though.’
‘Maybe they will now,’ I say. ‘I don’t know. It’s going to feel so quiet here without all the ancestors, isn’t it? They’ve been here so long.’
‘I’ll live with it,’ he says, his voice getting drowsy.
I wonder how much he’s taking in. His skin has gone a greenish colour; I guess the raksasa venom didn’t leave when we closed the rift.
‘We should find Aoife—’ I begin, and then as if she heard me the door bangs open and she strides in.
‘What on earth are you two doing?’ she demands, staring at us in our huddle on the floor. ‘What is going on in this house?’ She stops, and turns pale. Looks at the blank wall next to us. ‘What did you do?’ She gasps, holding a shaking hand out to the space where the rift gaped. ‘Bavar, what did you do?’
‘We closed it.’ He smiles, giggling a bit.
‘You closed it,’ she murmurs. Her hand glides over the wall. Blue patterned paper, a few cracks near the ceiling, but otherwise intact. ‘Well.’ She stands there for a moment, looking down at us, her grey eyes lost. Suddenly she marches back to the door.
‘SAL!’ she shouts. ‘SAL, come HERE!’
Her voice echoes through the corridors, in an ordinary sound-carrying way. No cackles or protests, no carping from the portraits.
‘It feels odd,’ she says, looking back at the wall.
‘We cut the magic,’ Bavar says.
‘All of the magic?’
‘Mm-hmm, think so . . .’
‘Gosh,’ she says, reaching up, smoothing her hair, looking from the wall to us and back again. ‘Oh, my.’
‘Aren’t you pleased?’ I ask, a bit crossly, making myself stand. ‘I mean, did you want the raksasa here every night?’
‘No, no!’ she says. ‘Of course I’m pleased. I’m . . . I’m astounded! I didn’t think it could be done. I know Father rumbled on about it sometimes; I thought it was some sort of malformation of the bronze . . . I never considered it would be possible. What a thing!’
She looks completely frazzled.
‘Well, we did it,’ I say. ‘It took a lot of effort, and also Bavar got clawed in the back by one of the raksasa earlier so . . .’
‘All of the magic, you say – all gone?’
‘That’s what they said,’ I say. ‘But about Bavar . . .’
‘Oh, yes – oh dear, yes,’ she says, turning to him, putting her hand on his forehead. He bats her away. ‘He’ll be fine,’ she says absently. ‘We’ll get him some of that potion. I suppose we’ll still have potions, won’t we?’ She stares at the wall again and frowns, and then starts pacing, her hands on her cheeks, paler than ever. ‘Oh dear. Oh dear me. Oh, Sal!’ she wails, as he marches into the room, pushing his glasses up, looking very put out about all the fuss.
‘What happened?’ he asks, peering around.
‘The rift!
The rift is gone,’ she says. He stares at her, and the sight of him seems to calm her a bit. She takes a deep breath and shakes her head. ‘It’s gone, Sal. All of it. It’ll be fine. It’s a bit of a shock . . . We need to get Bavar some of that potion, and then . . . and then, Angel, you must tell me exactly what happened. We’ll work it out. It will all be fine. Are you all right? You’re rather pale!’
They both stare at me.
‘It was a tricky spell,’ I say with a shrug.
‘The spell, of course!’ she says. ‘Of course it was a spell – no wonder you both look so peaky . . .’
‘A spell to close the rift,’ Sal says. ‘Well, and we thought it couldn’t be done! Well done, both of you!’ His chest swells as he takes a deep, luxuriant breath. ‘I thought it was rather peaceful.’ He darts back out into the corridor. ‘This is permanent, is it?’ he asks, peering back round at us.
‘Pretty sure it will be,’ I say.
‘Well, it’ll be nice to have a bit of peace and quiet about the place,’ he says, sliding his glasses back on to his nose. ‘This family was very loud, sometimes. Distracting.’
‘Oh, to your very important work, I suppose,’ Aoife says with a sniff. ‘I don’t even know what it is you do in that study of yours.’
‘General world domination,’ he says, with a wicked little smile. I think he’s joking, but honestly, I’m not sure you can ever tell with Sal. ‘But for now we need to fix up these two. Where is that noxious healing potion?’
Aoife glares at him, and he sighs.
‘I’ll get it,’ he says. He walks off, humming, as Aoife stoops to Bavar.
‘All right,’ she murmurs, stroking his hair back from his face with a sigh. ‘You’ll be all right now.’
‘Will we?’ he asks, his eyes dazed.
‘Yes, we will,’ she says. ‘Once I’ve patched you both up. I supposed it called for blood, and sweat . . . all sorts of things . . . Very crude – these spells always are.’
‘It took a lot,’ I say, looking at Bavar. ‘I’m sorry about the magic . . .’
