City of the Falling Sky

by Joseph Evans

  Seckry woke up with an intense feeling of dread and wiped the sweat from his forehead. His thoughts immediately returned to the watch. Somewhere deep inside him that watch meant something. Some long forgotten memory had just resurfaced, something important. Something powerful.

  After he got up, he sat at the kitchen table stirring some cereal his mum had made him.

  “Are you still feeling ill?” Coralle asked him.

  “I just . . . can’t seem to eat anything at the moment,” Seckry said, continuing to stir.

  “Mum . . . did dad . . . did dad always wear a watch?”

  Coralle stopped what she was doing and put down the dishes.

  “You know I don’t like to talk about him, my love,” she said apologetically.

  “I know, I’m sorry,” Seckry said. “I just keep having these dreams, that’s all.”

  Coralle joined him at the table. After a while she said, “You deserve to be able to talk about your father. Yes, he did have a watch that he used to wear all the time. Every day in fact. Every single day that I knew him he wore that watch, and he used to get really funny about it. He’d even begrudge taking it off to get in the shower.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, hun. Why’s that?”

  “Why was it so important to him?”

  Coralle shook her head lethargically. “Who knows? The man was a mystery. He’d never talk about it.”

  “What was he like, mum?”

  Coralle sighed. “He was a good man. I used to think he was the perfect man. He was a great father to you both . . . and then, well . . . you know what happened. He disappeared.”

  Seckry continued to stir his cereal, knowing that he wasn’t going to be able to eat a single mouthful.

  “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to go through,” Coralle continued. “I denied it for a while. I thought that it couldn’t be real, that there would be some strange explanation of why he had vanished and taken all traces of him with him. But no answers came. He had gone and that was it.”

  “How did I take it?” Seckry asked. “How old was I, five?”

  “You were six. Six years and eight months, actually. You kept asking me if it was the end of the world.”

  “The end of the world . . .” Seckry said, lost in his own memories.

  “I don’t think you fully understood what had happened at the time. But your sister was old enough. I really think it was at that point that she started to become so hardened.”

  After school that day, Eiya decided she wanted to spend some time on her astronomy coursework in the library, so Seckry returned to Kerik Square with just Tenk.

  As he was about to use his key in the door, he heard his mum’s voice through the woodwork speaking his name and he paused for a moment.

  “Seckry was asking me about your father again today,” she said.

  “Again?” Leena said exasperatedly. “Why is he so obsessed? The guy dumped us. He left without looking back.”

  “Leena, love, it’s only understandable. Seckry’s not as strong as you are, he’s more sensitive to things.”

  “Thanks, mum. So I’m just a cold hearted cow am I?”

  “Leena, you know I don’t mean that. You’ve got a thick skin, probably because you had to deal with your father leaving. But Seckry doesn’t remember any of that. He was really young. He’s yearning for a father.”

  “Did you tell him about the phone call you got a year after he left?”

  “No I didn’t,” Coralle said sadly. “It’d break his heart. I think Seckry’s got this image in his head of this heroic man who looked after us all, before disappearing to do some noble thing that couldn’t be avoided.”

  “He’s gonna have to know the truth sooner or later, mum. Dad was a fake, wasn’t he? He probably had another family somewhere. That’s why he told you a fake name when he met you, and that’s why he left.”

  “The day I got that phone call was the worst day,” Coralle said, upset. “Before that there must have still been some glimmer of hope that he’d turn up on the doorstep again, as foolish as it was.”

  “What was the real name that the guy asked for?” Leena said.

  “It was Ringold. He said it was very important and that he was looking for Pawl Ringold.”

  “Ringold,” Leena repeated. “Pawl Ringold. I wonder if the Ringolds knew we existed.”

  “I don’t think we’ll ever find out, my love,” Coralle said sadly.

  Seckry stayed outside the door, leaning against it for a little while, even though his mum and Leena had finished their conversation. He didn’t know if he could take any more secrets, any more heartache. He eventually turned his key in the lock and let himself in before heading straight to bed.

  The next morning at Estergate, Vance spotted him in the corridor.

  “Morning Seckry, what lessons have . . . Seckry? What’s wrong?”

  “What?” Seckry said.

  “You look . . . terrible. Is everything okay?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Seckry said unconvincingly.

  “Why don’t you come to my office for a moment,” Vance said, looking at his watch. “There’s a little while before lessons start.”

  Seckry nodded and followed Vance to the second floor.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” Vance asked.

  No,” Seckry said. “No thanks.” He glanced up at Vance’s board, which was strewn with equations and labelled Hindglubber’s theory of Illusional Time.

  Vance followed his line of sight.

  “Something I’m teaching the sixth formers,” he said. “Dr Hindglubber argued that time is just an illusion. It is something that sentient beings are given to make sense of the universe around them, and that past, present and future actually occur simultaneously.”

  “That’s . . . quite hard to get your head around, isn’t it,” Seckry said, glad to think about something other than his dad or Eiya for a moment.

  “Indeed,” Vance said, smiling. “The example I use is that if Mrs Cutson, in her alternate universe of 7am this morning, were to walk in here and place a large bunch of flowers on my desk, those flowers will appear in front of us right now. But to us they will have always been there, because our past was changed and everything in between. Similarly the future is interchangeable.”

  Seckry scratched his head.

  “Don’t worry, I barely understand it myself. And it’s just a theory.”

  Seckry was about to say something else, but the lump in his throat was stopping him from doing so.

  “Something is hurting you very deeply, isn’t it?” Vance said.

  Seckry swallowed for a moment and let himself breathe.

  “Things are just getting on top of me, I think. But . . . I overheard my mum talking to my sister last night about my dad. He disappeared when I was six years old and we haven’t seen him since. We’ve never known what happened or why he left, but . . . they think he had another life, with another family, and that’s where he disappeared to. It turns out this name, Sevenstars, it was fake. It means nothing, it wasn’t even his real name. I guess for all these years, even though I knew he left us, somewhere at the back of my mind there was always something telling me he’d done it for a reason, that he had really loved us.”

  Suddenly Seckry couldn’t hold it in any longer, and weeks’ worth of tears began flooding from his eyes.

  “Hey, hey,” Vance said affectionately. He put his arms around Seckry and patted him on the back.

  “Aren’t you supposed to refrain from close contact with pupils,” Seckry said through sobs.

  “Well, Seckry,” Vance said. “Sometimes common sense should come before rules.”

  Seckry closed his eyes. Having Vance’s strong arms around him should have felt strange, but he didn’t want him to let go. As he breathed in Vance’s aftershave and the leather from his jacket, he imagined that it was his dad who was hugging him, and was telling him that he had come back.

  As Seckry’s tears dried up, V
ance gave him a firm grip of the shoulder and sat down at his desk.

  “Sometimes I think I see him looking right at me,” Seckry said. “Like amidst a crowd or something. It’s like my heart suddenly starts racing and I try to locate him again but I can’t find him. And then I realise it was just my mind playing tricks on me. I don’t really remember what he looks like. I’ve got this vague idea that must be from my subconscious but it’s probably completely wrong. He took every photo of him with him when he left. Including ones with the rest of us in.”

  “Do they know what your father’s real name was?” Vance said, sipping a cup of tea.

  “They said someone phoned up looking for Ringold.”

  Vance paused for a moment before placing his tea down very slowly on his desk.

  “Seckry . . . what was your father’s first name?”

  “It was Pawl.”

  Vance’s face slowly changed. His eyes began darting from one side to the other, as if he were reading an invisible passage of text in the air.

  “What’s the matter?” Seckry asked.

  “Seckry . . . this is unbelievable.”

  “Unbelievable? What do you mean?”

  “Seckry, have you ever heard of Adelbert Endoman and Rikard Ringold?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “They were two scientists on the brink of brilliance back in the forties. They studied together at the university and began their own company here in Skyfall. It was known as the Endoman-Ringold Corporation.”

  “I haven’t heard of that either,” Seckry said.

  “Oh, I think you have,” Vance said gravely. “Shortly after its creation, they decided to abbreviate their surnames into a catchier company logo.”

  Vance was looking at Seckry intensely.

  “I thought you would have worked it out by now,” he said.

  “They changed it to The End and Ring Corporation?”

  Vance said nothing.

  Seckry slowly began to fill with horror and realisation. End and Ring.

  “Endrin?” he said.

  Chapter Twenty Three

  A Chamber Unlocked