The Book of Beasts

by John Barrowman

  Without Matt, there was only one other person who could help her.

  Zach Butler’s Guardian abilities, his mad computer skills and his age had made him close to Matt, but his connection to Em was much deeper. Deaf since birth, Zach communicated through signing and lip-reading. He also connected with Em telepathically. He looked like a younger version of his dad, Simon – tall and fit with a footballer’s athleticism.

  Zach! Em shouted in her head. Get in here. Quick.

  She stared at the robed figure, who stared back. I’m cracking up, she thought.

  Em fished frantically under her pillows for her comic. She had been working on the piece about a warrior princess for several days, drawing and shading as a way of keeping her mind off things. She had fallen asleep last night revising several panels. Had she drawn this guy as some kind of secondary character? She didn’t recognize him. He wasn’t in her comic book.

  Rolling up the pages, Em hurled them at the figure. Instead of exploding into slivers of light and fragments of colour as Em’s lucid dreams usually did, the figure shifted slightly to his left. The comic fluttered to the floor.

  Em scrambled back against her headboard. ‘Seriously! Who are you?’

  The figure wore a long white wool robe with a wide collar that was stitched in golden threads like a tapestry. At the centre of the heavy robes was a swirling silver helix. The more Em stared, the more the helix appeared to pulse.

  Behind the figure, Em noticed an impression in the rock-face that shimmered and stretched up into her bedroom ceiling. It was as if the figure had stepped out of the rock itself. The rock was shot through with silver veins, and looked to Em a lot like the cliffs of Era Mina, the small island that faced the Abbey across a short strip of water.

  A fur cloak hung from iron clasps in the shape of a peryton at his shoulders, and in his right hand he gripped a sceptre with a similar beast on its hilt. His limbs were long and lithe, and with his chiselled jawline and his wavy dark hair curling on to his shoulders, he reminded Em of a younger version of her ancestor, Duncan Fox. Or an older version of Matt.

  The figure opened its mouth, releasing a rush of putrid air. Gagging, Em covered her nose with her pillow. It wasn’t just his breath that reeked. His entire body smelled of filth, sweat and wet fur. He smelled feral. Like a wild animal.

  Zach! Wake up!

  The figure cocked his head, startling Em. Had he heard her?

  He had dodged the comic book. He was aware of her presence.

  This was no lucid dream. This was something else entirely.

  FIVE

  Auchinmurn Isle

  The Middle Ages

  Matt scrambled through the tangled briar beneath the hanging wave. He had to reach the shore before the monstrous wall of water crashed down and obliterated the island. If his father had created this wave, he had to know.

  He thought about drawing, animating something to help him get to the shore more quickly. But as he dodged and ducked and darted through the drenching spray from the wave and the muddy ground under him, all he could picture were his mother and his sister. Dead, because of him. Killed by his own father, because of him.

  He wiped his tears with his sleeve and charged on through the woods. He would stop this wave, somehow. Stop his father from inflicting any more damage on the monks, the monastery and the future.

  Matt barrelled out of the trees and hit a streaming surge of mud flowing down the hillside. He fell, landing awkwardly on his bottom, slewing from side to side in the wet brown cascade, letting his momentum carry him under one lashing branch, then another, until he got his footing again. Thunder crashed, sending the white tips of the great wave smashing into the tree tops like a thousand angry ghosts and drenching Matt with their spray.

  In the past days, Matt had been beaten and betrayed, abandoned and humiliated. He was so angry with himself and his world that he thought he might breathe fire. He ploughed on through the thick brush. A crooked tree branch whipped in front of his face. He didn’t duck in time and it slashed across his cheek, drawing blood. Matt cursed, slowing his clumsy descent enough to wipe the cut with his other sleeve. Glancing up, he saw the white peryton lift Solon and Carik up into the scudding clouds.

  ‘Stop this madness, Matt! You can’t control the sea!’ Solon yelled down at him.

  Wanna bet?

  The gale force of the winds whipped through the trees, assaulting Matt from all sides. A branch cuffed the back of his head; another swatted his back. His chest ached from sprinting down the hill. He swerved to avoid a falling pine and, light-headed, grabbed another tree root to steady himself. At once the ground began to tremble beneath him, sending shock waves up his arm and across his shoulder. Shouting in pain, he let go, tumbling backwards into a spindly bush.

  Was his father controlling the sea? How? Malcolm Calder was a Guardian, not an Animare. Guardians couldn’t bring drawings to life. A Guardian’s expertize lay in empathy and communication with the Animare they were sworn to protect. Calming them when their fears exploded, stopping their imaginations from creating terrible things. There was nothing calming or empathetic about Malcolm Calder. Matt had already seen how his father had used his powers of mind control for evil, inspiriting the monks of Auchinmurn to do his will, turning them into his zombie-like minions, forcing them to murder two of their own – all in order to steal a sacred bone quill that would help unleash the fantastical, dangerous beasts locked away in Hollow Earth.

  Matt understood now that a malicious hunger for the dual abilities that his children shared had driven Malcolm to this madness. Surely Malcolm was behind the wave. Because if it wasn’t his father’s doing, whose was it?

  Losing his footing again, Matt landed flat on his back in the hard sand. The fall punched the air from his lungs. Gulping frantically, he stared up at the scorched swathe of hillside where Solon and Carik had last seen Em and his mum alive, before they had burned to death among the trees.

  What he saw there made him forget about the wave, the water, his grief, his dad and his own desperation.

  Dressed in an orange safety vest with her apron underneath, Jeannie, the Abbey’s housekeeper, stood ankle-deep in the muddy earth above the beach, her palms raised to the thundering heavens.

  Matt’s Guardian senses smashed into his brain like a speeding truck.

  The wave had been in Jeannie’s control from the start. She had not initially realized he was on the island. Having created the wave, and having sensed his presence, she was now holding back the sea to give him a chance to survive. But the effort was destroying her. Matt felt her power weakening, her hold over the water fragmenting, her mind closing in on itself.

  A balloon of icy salt water dropped from the wave. When it hit the ground near Matt’s head, it exploded. A fist-sized blue crab appeared, a gaping mouth snapping angrily where its eyes should have been.

  ‘Jeannie! Let the wave go,’ Matt shouted in desperation.

  He could sense her control collapsing like sand. He struggled to his feet. The creatures were swarming the beach now. Matt ran towards Jeannie, dodging them when they lunged for his ankles, but there were too many. He tripped, falling flat on his face. The creatures skittered up his legs, along his arms, hundreds of them smothering him beneath their slimy shells, their mouths snapping and sucking at his exposed flesh. They pressed him deeper into the sand. Their pinchers tore at his neck and his face. Everything Matt had been trying to keep at bay jabbed at him. Every living thing on these islands, on this coastline, in this time, might die. And it would be his fault.

  A crab chewed a chunk of flesh from his ear, and Matt shouted with grief and pain. He tore it away, his blood trickling down his neck. ‘Enough!’ he screamed into the sky.

  With a massive effort, he wrenched himself free, tossing the creatures from his shoulders, shaking them from his back, brushing them from his arms and legs. The crabs crunched under his boots, leaving puddles of blue in his wake.

  He took the opera glasses from his p
ocket and looked up at the hillside. He saw immediately that Jeannie’s eyes were sliding in and out of focus and he gasped at the weight of the old housekeeper’s love for him. He read her barely moving lips.

  ‘Draw something, son. Or yer gonna drown.’

  SIX

  The Abbey

  Auchinmurn Isle

  Present Day

  The Druid’s piercing black eyes followed Em the way a portrait in a gallery sometimes does, but he never moved a limb, never shifted from his place on the rocky ledge. A strange pulsing energy was coming from him, a line of concentration so intense it was as if he held only one emotion, one significant thought, one focus. Em wondered if this was why he wasn’t moving. It was taking all his energy to put himself here in her room.

  Zach! Wake up!

  What was it about teenage boys that they slept through anything? Obviously Zach didn’t hear the normal things that woke people – hooting owls, car alarms. But an Animare, screaming in his head?

  Matt was just as bad. Their mother put it down to hormones. But Em could hear her grandfather Renard’s calm tones in her mind. ‘Some Guardians can settle their minds so that they can sleep without hearing or feeling an Animare’s presence all the time.’

  Whatever the reason, Zach was not responding.

  Shivering from the increasing chill in her bedroom, Em flipped through her last sketches again. She couldn’t find anything even resembling this guy.

  Hugging her pillow to her chest, she stifled a sob. She’d been missing Matt so intensely that she hadn’t eaten or slept much in days. Maybe her mind was cracking after all. And once it cracked, then there would be nothing anyone could do to save her. Like other Animare throughout history – da Vinci, Gauguin, van Gogh and so many more – the Council of Guardians would be forced to bind her. She would never be able to draw again.

  Suddenly Em felt an overwhelming desire to sketch.

  She turned to a clean page on her pad and began to draw the apparition, smudging the charcoal with the heel of her hand, darkening the helix shape on her picture, trying to ignore the rancid smell of him. The more she focused on the drawing, the clearer the figure became, as if her rendering him on paper was giving him more strength. When she finished capturing him, she drew the landscape behind him as quickly and skilfully as she could. As she worked, the glow around him became stronger while the room was getting darker. Em lined and looped and shaded frantically across the paper.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ she asked, looking up from her drawing for a beat. ‘Who are you?’

  Em dropped her charcoal. A dark hole had burst open on the rock face behind the figure in a swirling storm of yellows, blacks and greys. For a fleeting moment, she felt that she had seen all this before.

  Now he was inside her head, projecting a deep resolve for something. A task? A quest? No: a warning!

  His thoughts were coming to her not as words but as lines of colour, strings of yellows, reds and cobalt blue floating behind her eyes. Em tried desperately to grasp them, to give them shape, but she couldn’t. She felt light-headed, her eyes gritty as though they were full of sand.

  Then the figure lifted his sceptre towards Em. Without hesitation, she touched it.

  She was plunged into a sink-hole that had opened at the side of her bed. The force of it pulled Em knee-deep before she had enough sense to grab the leg of her bed and hang on for dear life. A stack of books, an empty cereal bowl, a tennis racket and a wet towel smacked against her as they disappeared into the swirling vortex. The figure stood over her, the end of the sceptre spinning above her head.

  As the bed lurched towards the hole, Em had a sudden flash of the Abbey itself being sucked into the widening gyre and disappearing forever, leaving nothing but the footprint of its foundations. She tried to scream, but the sound came out a choking cough.

  Her easel lifted off its stilts and flew at her. Instinctively, she lifted her hand to cover her head, and lost her grip on the leg of the bed.

  Flapping her arms did nothing to halt Em’s momentum. She plummeted into the abyss. The deeper she fell, the faster she appeared to drop. Yet when Em looked up, she could still see the edge of her bed, the purple duvet, her sketchpad open on the pillow, the moonlight streaming in through her curtains.

  Her ears began to pop; her body felt like someone or something was pressing down on her. Instead of darkness now, Em could see Matt lying on the ground, his eyes open, pleading with her to help him. Pink bubbles floated past her eyes. She thought at first that her nose was bleeding, but as she looked at her brother again, she knew the blood was his.

  Oh, Matt!

  And then, just as quickly, she was back on her bed, her chin pressed to her chest, drooling on her pyjamas.

  And the figure was gone.

  Em! Em! Are you OK?

  Zach charged into Em’s room, his blond hair wild, his cricket bat poised above his head.

  My hero, Em said to herself, rolling her eyes. She felt weak. The man’s presence had taken a lot out of her. ‘You’re too late, he’s gone.’

  Zach looked around in confusion. Em showed him the picture she had drawn. She had caught the man’s intense, pleading expression, the colours exploding behind him. He resembled Matt so strongly that it pained her to look at him.

  Zach stared at the picture. A dream?

  It wasn’t a dream, Zach. Someone is trying to send me a message.

  Zach set the bat next to the bedroom door. Who?

  Em sat down shakily on the bed. ‘I don’t know,’ she signed, ‘yet.’

  SEVEN

  Auchinmurn Isle

  The Middle Ages

  Water began to drop in slices, as if the wave was a loaf of bread on the Abbey’s kitchen table. Matt realized Jeannie was doing her best to break the wave up, limit its power, before the wall of water collapsed in its fatal entirety.

  Draw something.

  Digging frantically in his pocket for paper, his eyes stinging from the salt, Matt cursed. His pencil was stuck in the lining and he couldn’t grasp it. His fingers were frozen and felt like thumbs. He finally managed to get a grip on the pencil and began to draw – a rubber raft, the kind that he’d seen helicopters dropping into a stormy ocean to rescue stranded tourists or fishermen in trouble.

  As soon as he’d drawn the basic outline of the dinghy, Matt felt himself rising off the sand. In an explosion of yellow and orange light, he dropped snugly into the centre of a raft.

  It wasn’t enough. He kept drawing, shading, sketching, until an inflated dome settled over the raft, sealing itself round the edges with a soft hiss.

  Matt was completely cocooned inside his own animation.

  He licked the tip of his finger and erased a section of the shaded area on the side of the dome. As he worked, a porthole cut into the real dome and sealed itself with a fizzing zipper of light.

  Outside, Matt heard an unearthly roar. The wave was falling.

  He drew handles and gripped them tightly. The surging water lifted the dinghy, tossing it far from the beach to land on the hillside. It bounced, tumbling back on itself, out over the lip of the shore to slam into the sea.

  Matt’s stomach was somersaulting. Scrambling towards the little porthole as the water tipped beneath his feet, pressing his hands to the clear plastic, he hunted frantically for Jeannie.

  She was still on the hillside, slumped against a pine tree, tied to the trunk by the strings of her safety vest. She looked to be unconscious and battered, and when he checked through Duncan Fox’s opera glasses, still breathing.

  Matt fell back on the yellow rubber and closed his eyes. Minutes passed as he steadied his breathing. You’re still alive. Jeannie too. His relief was acute.

  He was beginning to feel a bit seasick when rocks and pebbles began slapping the side of the raft with increasing fury. Wiping the condensation from the small porthole, Matt spotted Carik crouched on the battered shoreline, pulling an arrow from her quiver and taking aim at the raft. Solon was with her, pointin
g straight at the porthole.

  ‘Aim for its eye, Carik!’ Matt heard him shout.

  Carik’s arrow sliced through the porthole, just missing Matt’s shoulder. He shifted as far from the tiny window as he could, rummaging in his pocket for his drawing.

  ‘No!’ he yelled. ‘Stop!’

  Matt’s flailing caused the raft to bounce and roll on the water like a struggling mammal. He had a nasty feeling that his yells sounded like an animal’s muffled growls.

  ‘Don’t shoot! It’s me!’

  The drawing must have fallen out when he was being tossed around by the wave, but he needed to destroy it, show Solon and Carik that he was no sea monster. Matt scrambled on to his knees, frantically searching. There it was, caught in the seal between the raft and the dome.

  Swoosh. Another arrow flew through the hole, this time tearing Matt’s jeans and grazing his thigh.

  ‘OW! Stop!’

  Matt lunged flat on the bottom of the raft – and dropped the drawing again.

  Outside, Matt could see Solon wading into the water, his eyes fierce and flashing; his sword ready to stab the strange yellow beast through its heart. Matt knew he wouldn’t be able to avoid Solon’s sword. He rolled until the raft flipped over.

  Surprised by the sudden movement, Solon jumped back. Carik ducked behind an outcropping of rocks. As Solon reared back to plunge his sword with all his might into the middle of the raft, it burst before his eyes in a blaze of yellow light.

  Matt lay gasping on his back on the shoreline, shards of yellow and clumps of sand raining down on him.

  Looking stricken, Solon raced over to help him up. Carik slung her quiver over her shoulder and splashed out into the water as well. She seized Matt’s arm and shook him.