by Lucy Banks
“It’s absolutely 100% urgent that you help me now!” he said, in as authoritative tone as he could muster. Pamela looked at him with surprise, looked back at the fire, then shrugged.
“You guys have got this one, right?” she said to Mike and Dr Ribero, who were desperately trying to stamp the fire out with some particularly large velvet cushions.
“Yeah, got it covered,” Mike said, looking completely unconvinced. He ducked as a section of frame collapsed, spraying him with sparks. “No problems here.”
Pamela scuttled after Kester, rolling up her sleeves. “What’s happening here then?” she asked, then faltered at the sight of Serena, who had now passed out, and was leaning crazily against the mirror, suspended only by her hands, which were still stuck tight to the frame. “Jesus,” she whispered. “What has that horror done to her?”
“I don’t know,” Kester said, scooping Serena up to ease the pressure on her arms. “But you’ve got to help her, Pamela. I don’t know how.”
Pamela peered into the mirror, examining the fretful swirling shadows. Then she nodded grimly. “Only one thing to stop this cow doing any more damage,” she declared, placing her hands on her ample hips. “Bloody Mary! Listen to me now! Your painting is on fire, and you’ve nowhere else to go. Better get out of this mirror now, whilst you still can!”
A low, sickly thrum began to emanate from somewhere deep within the mirror’s surface, spilling out like poisoned treacle. It grew louder, rising in volume until it started to rattle the ornamental vase on the hallway table, sending it teetering from side to side. Kester brought his hands to his ears, taking the weight of Serena’s frail frame against his chest.
“What’s happening?” he shouted above the noise. “What’s she doing?”
“She’s getting royally hacked off, that’s what’s happening,” Pamela announced, with grim pleasure. “Go on, you old devil, you! Out of the mirror before we trap you!”
The humming noise rose, turning into a shrill, eardrum-bursting whistle. Then suddenly, it stopped. The darkness seeped out of the mirror like smoke pouring out of a window, leaving the surface clear once more. Serena’s hands fell from the frame, and she slumped to the floor like a broken puppet.
Kester crouched down, lifting her head. Her eyes rolled back, showing nothing but the whites of her eyes. He swallowed hard. God, what have I done? he thought, searching her face for signs of life. Is she okay? What happened to her?
A noise from the living room caused him to look up, startled. Pamela shook her head, gesturing to the door.
“It’s kicking off in there now,” she announced with an ominous nod. “I can feel her anger. She’s realised what’s happened.” Without warning, she reached over to the mirror, pulled it off the wall, and smashed it against the door frame. It shattered with a piercing crash, spraying shards across the hallway.
“What did you do that for?” Kester squawked, surveying the mess. He brushed some stray glass off Serena’s lap.
“She’ll be looking for another place to hide in a moment,” Pamela said grimly, as she strode into the living room, wading through the puddle of broken glass at her feet. As she entered, a wild breeze tore out through the door, whipping around Kester’s head with such power that it nearly knocked his glasses off.
“Oh boy,” he heard Pamela mutter, before the door slammed behind her with a deafening bang, leaving Kester alone in the hallway, with Serena still unconscious on his lap.
“Serena, please wake up!” he murmured, prodding her as hard as he dared on the stomach. Taking her chin firmly between his finger and thumb, he moved her head from side to side, searching her eyes for signs of wakefulness. However, her eyes remained white, rolled back as far as they would go. It was a hideous sight, and were it not for her chest, rising and falling in shallow, rasping breaths, he would have thought she was dead.
Now what are we going to do? he wondered, looking up at the lounge door, which hulked over them both like an impenetrable fortress. Serena’s a vital part of this plan. I didn’t imagine she’d end up being knocked out cold!
Gently, he moved her on to the floor, then rose to his feet.
“Everything alright in there?” he asked in a quavering voice, rapping at the door politely.
“No it bloody isn’t!”
Kester grimaced at the declaration, grasping the doorknob in an agony of indecision. He didn’t want to go into the room. Every cell in his body was rebelling against the idea. But he knew he had to. Even the excuse of being the world’s worst coward wouldn’t cut it now. He owed it to the others to at least try to do something. After all, he was the one who had come up with this awful plan in the first place.
Slowly, he poked his head around the door, trying very hard to not see the pandemonium inside.
“Need my help at all?” he asked quietly, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the floor. Even there, he could see feet leaping anxiously from place to place, not to mention charred pieces of canvas littering the carpet.
“Yes, that might be nice, dear!” Pamela replied, straining to be heard above the noise. The room oozed diabolical sounds, quite unlike anything Kester had ever heard before—low, throbbing, moaning that needled right into his eardrums.
“Where is Serena?” Miss Wellbeloved asked, staggering across the room. Her normally immaculate hair was a wilderness of steel fuzz, and her hollow cheeks were flushed.
“She’s still unconscious!” Kester shouted. A wind buffeted against him with hurricane force, sending him reeling towards the sofa. He tottered, fighting to steady himself against the side-table.
“She keeps doing that,” Mike mentioned, still trying to stamp out the flames on the wallpaper. “It’s a right pain in the backside. Any ideas what to do now then, mate?”
“No!” Kester whimpered. “In the original plan, Serena wasn’t unconscious at this point!”
“At least we’ve got her out of the painting,” Pamela said, as brightly as possible, before being thrown across the room like a hot air balloon in a storm. She landed on the armchair in the window, bouncing like a beach ball and looking rather dazed.
“Kester, we need to come up with something,” Ribero shouted, reaching across to him. “This is bad. This is very bad indeed. This spirit, she is so powerful, we need to get her locked up in a water bottle quickly. Can Serena be woken up?”
Kester thought back to the shallow breathing and the whites of her eyes. Not a chance. He shook his head. “I wish she could,” he answered, clasping the edge of the sofa as another whirlwind crashed into him, “but she’s out cold. The Bloody Mary did something terrible to her, I think.”
“That evil cow,” Mike spat. He glared up at the ceiling, searching for the spirit amongst the wind and chaos. “Yeah, I’m talking to you, you nasty piece of work. I don’t care how powerful you are, you’ve been a nightmare from the start, and I, for one, am sick to death of you.”
“That probably won’t achieve much, Mike,” Miss Wellbeloved suggested, before being lifted off her feet and tossed like a wayward twig on to the sofa next to Pamela.
“What are we going to do then?” Mike shouted, running a hand through his hair. “Seriously. Are we totally screwed here? Have we just unleashed a complete monster into the world, without any means of bringing her under control? Is that what we’ve done?”
Kester thought it was very kind of him to use the expression we, when, in fact, it had been all his idea. His shoulders slumped, and he clasped his forehead, wishing that he had never come tonight. He’d thought that the worst outcome would be that he’d been wrong, and that the spirit hadn’t been a Bloody Mary after all. He now realised that the ridicule and disappointment of the others would have been a lot easier to deal with than this.
“Kester?”
He looked up to see Ribero’s face, only a few inches from his own.
“What?” he murmered. “
Don’t ask me, I’ve got no idea. I’ve messed up again, haven’t I?”
Ribero seized him by the shoulders. To Kester’s great surprise, he smiled at him. It was an incongruous gesture, given the madness of the moment, but for the briefest moment, he felt as though everything would be alright.
“I don’t think you have messed up,” Ribero whispered, pulling him closer. “I think you have achieved something marvellous. Something that none of us managed, and we’ve been doing this for years, yes? And I think you can solve this. I believe you can do it.”
Kester looked up at the old man, blinking with confusion. The wind continued to hurtle around them, smashing against them from all angles, but for a moment, he hardly noticed.
“But I don’t know how to,” he replied, rubbing his eyes. He felt like a child again—confused, bewildered and scared. “I don’t know what to do. I wish I did.”
“Think what your mother would have done.”
“But what would she have done?” Kester fretted, clutching Ribero. “That’s just the problem! I don’t know what she would have done. It turns out I didn’t really know her at all, did I? She had this whole life with you, and I knew nothing about it!”
“She would have been brave,” Ribero replied, lowering his arms. “She would have been brave, and nothing else.”
Kester bit his lip. Is that true, Mother? he thought, fighting back a sob. Would you have known what to do, in this situation? An image of Gretchen came to him, not as she had been as she was dying, but before that, when she had been strong, full of energy and purpose.
Yes, she would have been, he realised. I understand now. You would have been scared, but you would have solved the problem. Because that’s what you did, your whole life. You solved all my problems. And that’s what I’ve got to do now. His eye widened, as he looked around him. It was as though everything had slowed down, as though he was watching a scene that he’d seen before. He took it all in: the ashes blowing in crazy circles, Mike desperately beating at the flaming wall, the two women clutching one another on the sofa, and his father calmly watching him. It didn’t seem real. I’m not afraid, he thought. I’m not afraid at all.
And just like that, the door appeared.
Initially just a tiny hole in the air, Kester watched with detached fascination as it tore itself wider, becoming a thick line of darkness that stretched downwards, until it formed a ragged doorway. The air around his head screeched even more loudly, in protest.
“I can see it!” he shouted, pointing. “The door! The spirit door! It’s appeared!”
He heard Ribero laugh with delight, and felt a hand clapping him on the back, but his attention was centred on the hypnotic sight of the doorway, shifting and slithering in the air like a living thing.
“Hang on, hang on, let me get my phone out!” Mike announced for some inexplicable reason, but Kester was too focused to give it much thought. The screeching rose into a deafening crescendo, sending a monsoon of wind tearing around the room, until it began to be sucked away, through the spirit door.
Kester continued to fix his gaze upon it, terrified that if he looked away, it would disappear. The winds gathered in front of him, rippling and rolling in the air like two fighting dogs, before shaping into a shadowy, bony form. He gasped, horrified by the sight of it—the ugly, jutting limbs; the dome-like head; and the mouth, open in a maw of rage.
“You are doing it!” Ribero bellowed behind him. “I see her! I see her now!”
Kester winced, then focused all his energy on driving the spirit backwards through the door. She howled, an inhuman sound of fury, scratching at the air by his face, trying to stop him. Then, as he felt he was about to collapse, the door sucked her through, and closed completely.
The wind dropped. The howl ceased, giving way to silence. The swirling ashes dropped to the floor like pieces of parchment. Kester fell to his knees, rested his head in his hands, and promptly passed out.
Chapter 16: Celebrity Status and Wedding Bells
It took Kester several days to recover from the events at Coleton Crescent. He remained cocooned in the sunny confines of Pamela’s back garden, cossetted away from the rest of the world, where he promptly made himself at home amongst her considerable book collection. He ignored Ribero’s agency—at least, for a little while.
Serena, after a brief but panicked trip to A&E, was declared in perfectly good health, and after a lot of grumbling, agreed to take some time off too. Quite what she was getting up to in her flat, Kester had no idea, but he suspected she might have taken down a mirror or two, just to be on the safe side.
On the fifth day, he finally dared to venture out, at the special request of his father, to a dinner party at Ribero’s home. Kester’s curiosity was naturally piqued. So far, he hadn’t seen his father’s house, and hadn’t even the whiff of an idea what it might look like. Did Ribero live in an elegant manor house, to match his own smooth Argentinian style? Or did he live like an impoverished artist, in a cramped little basement apartment in town? He wasn’t sure what to expect at all.
At half past seven, Pamela drove them through the centre of the city, then out the other side, past the river, and down through the terraced houses and cluttered local shops. She kept on driving, up another hill and along a narrow, winding road, which seemed to lead to nowhere. The road narrowed, until it wasn’t really a road anymore, but more of a dried out mud-track, and the car began to bounce about, as though it was being repeatedly electrocuted.
“Where on earth does he live, a farm?” Kester said, peering out of the window and bracing himself against the car door.
Pamela chortled, swerving to avoid a huge pothole. “You’ll see,” she tittered, as the car kept bobbling along. Kester surveyed their surroundings with great interest, as the thin line of firs flanking the road thickened into impenetrable woodland. Finally, Pamela pulled on the handbrake, bringing the car to a jittery halt.
Kester looked up at the house, then started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Pamela asked, opening the car door. A tang of pine and dry earth drifted in on the breeze.
He shook his head, still chuckling. “Well,” he said, taking his glasses off and giving them a polish, “of all the places I expected him to live, I didn’t predict it would be like this. But of course, this makes perfect sense!”
A sprawling, rickety wooden house stood at the end of the driveway, which would have looked perfectly at ease amongst the pampas plains of Argentina. The worn-out porch leaned a little to the left, and there was a rocking chair positioned by the front door. Kester half-expected to see a gaucho’s hat, slung over the fence, or a horse tethered to one of the posts.
“Let me guess, he had this house built specially,” Kester said, taking in the entirety of the building.
Pamela smiled. “You’re half right,” she said. “Actually, he and Jennifer’s father had it built many years ago.”
“Miss Wellbeloved’s father?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “Why?”
“It’s probably best if your dad explains that one.”
“You mean, when Miss Wellbeloved and he were engaged to be married?” Kester guessed.
“Oh, so you knew about it already?” Pamela looked surprised.
Kester nodded, “Yes, don’t worry. It’s not news to me. I found some letters in my mother’s bedroom a while back.”
Pamela nodded, squeezing herself out of the car like a large schooner pulling out of a particularly narrow harbour. “Come on then,” she called, gesturing toward the house, which in fairness, could only really be referred to as the world’s most incongruous ranch. “In we go!”
Kester pressed the doorbell, which released a plodding, melodious tune that continued for about a minute longer than it should have.
“Please don’t say that was the Argentinian national anthem,” he said, looking at Pamela.
She gig
gled, then rapped at the door. “Kester, you need to be a little bit more patriotic,” she said with mock severity. “After all, you’re half Argentinian yourself, remember?”
I hadn’t actually really thought about that, he thought. Gosh. I suppose I am. Half German and half Argentinian. Well, there’s a mix. Why I look 100% like a plump English academic makes even less sense now.
The door swung open, revealing Dr Ribero, who greeted them like the lord of a manor, gesturing inside with a sweep of his arm.
“Aha, you are finally here!” He ushered them in, giving them no time to respond. Kester struggled to fight back a giggle. His father was wearing what could only be described as a smoking jacket in brushed burgundy velvet, and had even taken the trouble to add a pristine white handkerchief to the breast pocket. Kester couldn’t decide whether or not he looked like the world’s most debonair old gentleman, or a rather overdressed idiot.
He was instantly entranced by the pictures that surrounded him. A sea of black and white photos lined both sides of the hallway—the pictures full of serious-looking people, wearing all sorts of fascinatingly dated outfits.
“That one is your grandmother,” Ribero said, pointing. “Mia madre. My mother.”
“She’s very beautiful,” Kester commented, struck with the woman’s strong jaw and fierce, dark eyes, so like Ribero’s own.
“Yes, yes she was,” Ribero agreed. He looked momentarily confused, then suddenly remembered himself. “Come on, come on! Serena, Mike and Jennifer are already here, and we have some big news.”
“Big news?” Kester repeated, following Ribero through the house. It was every bit as wood-dominated inside as it was out, with polished floorboards and wood-panelled walls. It must feel like living in a tree, he thought, but he rather liked it, nonetheless. The wood exuded a natural warmth that made him feel at ease.
They stepped into an open-plan room, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the woodland beyond. Serena, Mike, and Miss Wellbeloved waved, lost in the huge leather sofas by the fireplace. Mike raised his glass in salute. “Good to see you again,” he said with a wink. “Thought you’d sodded off back to Cambridge, it had been so long.”
