The Monsters of Rookhaven

by Padraig Kenny

  ‘Can’t catch me, can’t catch me,’ Daisy chanted.

  Mirabelle dived and just passed through Daisy again.

  ‘Can’t catch me, can’t catch me.’

  Mirabelle saw Daisy’s pendant dangling from her neck. Uncle Enoch had used a special combination of spells to ensure that the twins’ pendants would always stay in place whether they were corporeal or not. Mirabelle grabbed at it. Daisy snarled, swerving out of the way, then recommenced chanting ‘Can’t catch me’ as Mirabelle swiped at her again and again.

  At last Mirabelle managed to grab the stone pendant with both hands and started to twist Daisy around by the leather band. This only made Daisy shriek with delight as she continued her chant.

  There was a full-length mirror at the rear of the hall that Aunt Eliza liked to use when she was prettifying herself for a night walk. Mirabelle kept whirling Daisy around, keeping in mind the exact position of the mirror, moving closer to it with each arc.

  She felt her rage swelling to bursting point now, paired with a delicious joy at the sudden look of terror on Daisy’s face. Daisy’s mouth formed an O shape. Mirabelle could see her trying to concentrate, but she was moving too fast, and Mirabelle had already made her decision when Dotty shouted, ‘Mirabelle! No!’

  She swung Daisy round with all her might, Daisy flailing as she tried to stop her momentum, but it was too late for her to materialize now. She hurtled towards the mirror and fell right into it. The pendant hit the surface of the mirror, fell down the length of it, and clattered onto the floorboards.

  Mirabelle could see Daisy floating on the other side of the mirror, pounding her fists against it and shouting, but she couldn’t make out the words.

  And, just as quickly as it had come, Mirabelle’s anger was gone.

  Daisy howled silently beneath the mirror surface.

  Suddenly she was jerked left, then right by some unseen force. She scrabbled at thin air with her hands, like a swimmer fighting a riptide, and then she was whipped away backwards, dragged into the depths, until very soon she was little more than a dot in the distance.

  There was stunned silence in the hall.

  Until Dotty screamed.

  Jem

  Jem had been rooted to the spot in terror when she saw the girl get trapped in the mirror. The running in and out of walls was terrifying, as was the thought that someone could be incinerated by sunlight, but this was somehow worse. The screaming from Dotty shook her out of her paralysis, as did the sudden entrance of Enoch bursting through the door with Mr Fletcher following close behind.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Enoch demanded.

  Dotty pointed at Mirabelle. All she could manage was ‘She . . . she . . .’ and then she burst into tears.

  Enoch towered over Mirabelle. Jem could see the defiant set of her jaw as she looked up at her uncle, and some small part of her almost cheered.

  ‘What happened?’ said Enoch.

  Mirabelle pointed at the mirror. ‘Daisy’s in there.’

  Enoch looked bemused for a moment, then he strode over to the mirror and picked Daisy’s pendant up off the floor. He looked at the mirror surface and squinted.

  ‘How did she get in there?’ asked Enoch.

  ‘Muh . . . muh . . . Mirabelle threw her in when she wasn’t solid,’ Dotty wailed.

  Enoch turned and looked fiercely at Mirabelle, but Mirabelle didn’t seem fazed.

  ‘Is this true?’ said Enoch.

  Mirabelle nodded.

  Enoch looked at a loss for a moment as he considered this piece of information. He turned to Mr Fletcher, who, along with Freddie, had been regarding the account of the whole episode as if it were nothing out of the ordinary. Jem was amazed by their lack of surprise. For her own part she was almost dizzy with a strange mixture of terror and confusion. These people were talking about this as if it was an incident involving children bickering over toys.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Fletcher. We may have to continue our discussion at a later date.’

  Mr Fletcher simply nodded. Again Jem was struck by how unfazed both he and his son seemed to be. He grunted something to Freddie, and Freddie followed him out of the door, casting a quick glance at Jem as he left. Jem noticed the way they both walked, plodding, slightly hunched, as if they both carried the same heavy weight on their shoulders.

  Aunt Eliza dashed into the hallway, clutching an ornate silver hand mirror.

  ‘How did Daisy get into my mirror?’ she asked.

  Enoch sighed and gestured for her to give it to him. He looked at it and curled a corner of his mouth up in exasperation, then turned the mirror round so that Mirabelle could see.

  Daisy was shrieking silently inside the mirror as she battered at the surface of her prison with her fists.

  ‘She’ll be travelling through all the mirrors in the house now.’ He turned to look accusingly at Mirabelle. ‘You know how dangerous it is for her to pass through the surface of a mirror. She could be trapped for who knows how long.’

  Dotty couldn’t take it any more, and she ran sobbing towards the back of the house.

  ‘How terrible for poor Daisy,’ said Aunt Eliza drily.

  ‘This is serious, Eliza. It’s unconscionable behaviour.’

  ‘Sorry, Uncle,’ said Mirabelle, bowing her head.

  ‘We’ll have to get her out of there,’ said Enoch, looking into the mirror.

  ‘How, pray tell?’ asked Eliza.

  ‘Odd will help,’ said Enoch.

  ‘He may be busy. We might not want to disturb him,’ said Eliza.

  ‘That’s right. He has a lot to do,’ said Mirabelle.

  Enoch held the mirror at arm’s length as if appraising himself in the same way Eliza so often liked to. He seemed to consider what they were saying.

  ‘You know, it might not be that urgent,’ he said, looking a little distracted. Daisy was mouthing the words ‘Help me’ at him. Enoch cleared his throat and then tugged at his collar with one hand as if remembering his place. ‘But this is very serious, Mirabelle.’

  Mirabelle clasped her hands in front of her and nodded. She looked penitent, but Jem had spent enough time with Tom to know when somebody was pretending to be sorry.

  ‘This cannot go unpunished. And Odd will be found and will correct this.’ Enoch looked again at the mirror. ‘Soon,’ he said, a little too hesitantly.

  Jem saw Mirabelle and Eliza share a look of amusement. Enoch turned a withering glance on her.

  ‘This is family business. Perhaps you’d like to retire outside for a little while.’

  Jem knew an order when she heard one, but found she couldn’t leave, not like this, not when Mirabelle needed someone to stand up for her. She had sympathy for her in her dealings with the twins, despite the rather unnerving end result. She felt the overpowering need to say something. She turned to look at Enoch.

  ‘She was only sticking up for me and Freddie.’

  Enoch looked momentarily taken aback, as if he were offended that she’d had the temerity to speak to him. Eliza looked impressed with her intervention.

  ‘That’s all she was doing,’ she said, holding his gaze for as long as she could. When she finally turned to leave she saw Mirabelle smile at her in gratitude.

  She stepped out into the sunlight and was surprised to find Freddie coming up the steps.

  ‘I was coming back in,’ he said.

  Jem nodded, unsure of what to make of his anxious demeanour.

  ‘Just to say . . . to say thank you,’ he said.

  Jem nodded again, feeling a little stupid and lost for words.

  ‘For standing up for me,’ he said. He didn’t seem to know where to look, and he gave a nervous nod before heading back down the steps. At the bottom he stopped and looked back up at her.

  ‘Who was it for you? Who did you . . .’

  He couldn’t seem to look directly at her, and Jem, knowing what he meant, felt a sudden tautness in her chest.

  Who did you lose?

  ‘My d
ad,’ she said. She tried to add and my mum, but it seemed too much to say, as if the words might be so heavy that they would drag her right through the earth, so that she would end up falling, falling forever.

  Freddie nodded in understanding. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  He headed back to the van where his father waited, eyes fixed front, unblinking, unseeing.

  Jem sat on a step and watched the van drive away. She felt suddenly cold despite the shining sun, and she tried to look straight ahead and not think of anything.

  ‘He took my pendant.’

  Jem jumped at the sound of the voice coming from behind her. Mirabelle was standing just inside the door.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jem.

  Mirabelle shrugged. ‘What do you have to be sorry for?’

  ‘I annoyed Daisy in the first place.’

  Mirabelle sniffed. ‘She annoys everybody else. She deserves everything she gets.’

  ‘Do you want to come outside?’

  Mirabelle shook her head. ‘I can’t. I need my pendant to protect me out there.’

  Jem looked at the dark patch on the ground where

  Great-uncle Cornelius had allegedly once stood. She tried to imagine what it meant to go unprotected in sunlight for someone like Mirabelle. She found it difficult to imagine, but that didn’t stop her shivering.

  ‘What will happen to Daisy?’ she asked.

  ‘She’ll float around in the mirror realm until someone is sent to get her out. She and Dotty are usually very careful around mirrors.’

  ‘Mirror realm?’

  ‘It’s the place behind all mirrors apparently. Nothing much there, or so people say. Odd has been, I think. He says it’s very boring.’

  ‘I see,’ said Jem, although she didn’t really. This was just another very strange piece of information that she was finding difficult to digest.

  ‘Uncle Enoch says that he doesn’t want you wandering around the house on your own,’ Mirabelle said, then winked at her and waved her inside. ‘But he didn’t say anything about a guided tour.’

  Jem went inside, and Mirabelle took her hand.

  ‘Come on. Let’s show you around, Jem Griffin.’

  Freddie

  If there was one thing Freddie Fletcher was used to it was silence.

  Silence was the great suffocating thing that had squeezed itself in between the cracks of his family since his brother had died, and it had grown, like a great fungal mass filled with poison. Freddie knew that to ask the wrong question was to risk bursting it, and release all of that poison, so he hardly ever spoke to his father, least of all on delivery day.

  But today felt different. They’d collected the key from Dr Ellenby, who’d told them that he didn’t think they’d be needing it, but that he would give it to them anyway ‘in case Enoch has done his work and fixed the problem’. They didn’t question this curious statement.

  Freddie’s father had allowed him to hold the key as they drove away from Dr Ellenby’s. It wasn’t a conventional key. It was a palm-sized gold disc made up of bands of concentric circles. Freddie had seen his father place it on the appropriate spot on the tor in the forest dozens of times before. Just holding it made him instantly feel more grown up. He was hoping that this would finally be the day his father might ask him to fix it in place and turn it, thereby opening the way to the Path of Flowers. But any illusions he’d had about doing so were dashed when they arrived at the stone.

  Now they understood what Dr Ellenby meant by ‘the problem’. This strange tear in the Glamour was not something they’d ever seen before. Both Freddie and his father were slightly stunned by it, but they drove up the path to the house anyway. The flowers were bobbing their heads as usual, as if in greeting.

  Freddie couldn’t get the colours around the fringes of the tear out of his head – beautiful shimmering rainbow colours that danced in the air – yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that the rip was an omen of sorts.

  ‘I can take the key back to Dr Ellenby if you like, Dad?’

  Freddie was as surprised as his father at his own offer. His father looked at him, then nodded.

  ‘Just be quick about it.’

  He parked the van outside their butcher shop and handed the gold disc to Freddie.

  ‘Be careful now,’ he said. ‘Don’t lose it.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Freddie replied.

  His dad grunted and clambered out of the van, heading towards his shop.

  Freddie got out and walked away from the butcher’s and up through the main street. He enjoyed walking. It allowed him time to think. It made him feel lighter.

  The street was bathed in sunlight, and he could see Constable Griggs across the road talking to Mrs Smith the greengrocer. Both of them waved at him and he waved back.

  Alfie Parkin was on the path ahead of him standing outside Nicholson’s Bakery. Alfie was about a year older than James would have been . . .

  Freddie winced inwardly, forcing himself to stop thinking about it.

  Alfie leaned heavily on the walking stick he’d had ever since he’d come back from the war. Freddie had never got used to seeing him with it. He remembered Alfie being at least two stone heavier before the war, fit and active, messing about with James, not this wan, sickly figure.

  There was always a moment when Freddie’s eyes met Alfie’s and Freddie would have to steel himself to say hello, hoping and praying that Alfie didn’t see the pity in his eyes.

  Now, as Freddie watched, Alfie hovered outside the baker’s, seemingly considering whether to go in or not.

  Freddie felt as if he had to do something. He readied himself, keeping his voice light and friendly.

  ‘All right, Alfie? You going in?’

  Alfie turned and looked at him, looking slightly mortified.

  ‘All right, Freddie. Yeah, just thinking about what I might buy.’

  There was an awkward pause, and Alfie gave an embarrassed smile. Through the glass of the door Freddie could see Amy Nicholson behind the counter. She was serving his neighbour, Mrs Arkwright. There was no mistaking her vivid white hair and faded pink coat. She was chatting away. Freddie could see her hands flapping in the air and her rapid nodding. ‘Mrs Arkwright could talk for England,’ his dad always said.

  ‘A sticky bun maybe?’ said Freddie.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Alfie, biting his lower lip as he watched Amy serve the old lady.

  ‘Right.’ Freddie smiled.

  Alfie limped towards the door, and Freddie fought the urge to open it for him. He heard Amy’s voice as she greeted him, and the shy hesitancy of Alfie’s response.

  Freddie walked on.

  He was at Dr Ellenby’s front door minutes later. He knocked and was surprised when the doctor answered in rolled-up shirtsleeves, puffing on his pipe.

  ‘The key, Dr Ellenby.’

  Dr Ellenby nodded in gratitude, his eyes twinkling. ‘Good lad, Freddie. Thank you,’ he said as he pocketed the disc.

  Freddie blushed a little.

  The doctor narrowed his eyes and looked at Freddie.

  ‘You all right, young man?’

  Freddie swallowed and nodded. Dr Ellenby had this effect on you. Freddie was familiar with it. He was kind and disarming, and you always wanted to confess everything to him. Freddie didn’t want to say anything, though. He decided the best way forward was to distract him.

  ‘There’s something wrong with the Glamour,’ he said.

  Dr Ellenby frowned. ‘So you saw it, did you? I thought Enoch might have fixed it by now.’

  Freddie nodded.

  The doctor sighed. ‘I suppose there’ll have to be a council meeting.’ He shook his head and muttered to himself. Freddie knew the doctor wasn’t too fond of the council, even though he himself was a senior member. It consisted of the few townsfolk people considered best suited to the task of liaising with Mirabelle’s family and ensuring the Covenant was observed. ‘Self-important stuff and nonsense for self-important men,’ he’d once said in Freddie’
s presence, and then immediately apologized because Freddie’s father was also on the council.

  ‘I should get home,’ said Freddie.

  ‘Thank you for bringing the key back.’ With that, Dr Ellenby went back inside and closed the door. For a moment Freddie just stood there, feeling a sudden urge to knock on it again and tell him everything.

  About Dad. About Mum. About how sad the world feels now. How sad it’s felt since . . .

  Freddie shook the thoughts from his head, and headed towards the green. He stood on the corner for a moment and noticed something blue and red in the mud where the grass had become scarce.

  He nudged it with the toe of his shoe and realized it was a small Union Jack that had been trampled into the mud. No doubt a remnant from VE Day when the whole village had gathered on the green to celebrate.

  The whole village.

  That wasn’t strictly true. He and his mum and dad had stayed at home. To Freddie it had felt as if they were separated from the world that day as the sound of celebrations carried on the wind, ghostly and faint, like something from a dream. Adults singing, children laughing as they ran around the green. He’d looked out of his bedroom window as people made their way home, smiling and laughing. He’d spotted Kevin Bennett walking with his parents. Kevin had only been five years old then. He’d waved up at Freddie and Freddie had waved back, smiling at Kevin’s shiny red cheeks and how breathless he looked.

  Then Freddie had spotted Mr and Mrs Smith, stooped and tottering along almost aimlessly, their flags by their sides, both looking lost, returning to a house that would never see their sons walk through the front door again, and he felt that familiar sensation of something heavy weighing him down.

  Later that same evening, Freddie had gone for one of his walks as dusk settled over the village. The streets had been eerily empty and, as he’d walked by the Smiths’ house, he’d heard sobbing coming from one of the front rooms.