The Teen, the Witch and the Thief

by Ben Jeapes

  All it had taken was that simple command, ‘Show me Ted’. The full length mirror had cleared without fuss or fanfare, which was why it had taken him a moment to realise. And there was Ted, walking along a road with – what’s her name from the other night, woman from the shop that Ted fancied – Chloe? Zoe.

  But they were both almost invisible, just shapes moving in the dark, because wherever they were it was night time, and obviously outdoors. Stephen was watching from a lit room, which made it almost impossible to see, until he thought to experiment further.

  “Some light?”

  No response.

  “Make this scene appear as if it had the same light level as, um, this room.”

  Ta-dah! The scene lit up and he could see perfectly. And then, “Huh?”

  Three people were walking down a road in what looked like daylight. Ted and Zoe were two of them. It was like watching blind people. Their eyes were wide open but the slightly cautious way they moved, and occasionally stumbled, showed that to their eyes they walked through darkness.

  The third was an old woman. She was dressed in flowing robes similar to what he wore, white hair in the same V-cut style, and an expression which suggested she botoxed with lemon juice. She walked next to Zoe, poised and erect, looking straight ahead, hands clasped in front of her but hidden by her sleeves.

  Stephen gaped.

  “Who’s that?”

  Her robes were pristine and immaculate, unlike Zoe and Ted, who both looked like they had been in the wars. Hair dishevelled, faces shiny with sweat and grime. What had they been getting up to since Stephen last saw Ted? Zoe was talking animatedly, mouth never stopping, making abrupt gestures with her hands that Ted could barely see. His hands were alternately in his pockets or rubbing the bare, goose pimpled skin of his forearms. He only wore a t-shirt and the night could not have been that warm.

  Stephen couldn’t help noticing that Zoe occasionally glanced towards the woman, as if seeking approval for something she was about to say; the woman would nod, or shake her head, very slightly. Ted walked on entirely oblivious to her presence. He shot Zoe several sideways glances, with a very strange and unTedlike expression that Stephen couldn’t immediately put his finger on, but he never once looked a little bit further over at their companion. In fact, Stephen soon came to the conclusion that Ted had no idea she was there.

  And he couldn’t hear a word of it, not even with every carefully phrased command he could think of.

  “Let me hear this. Let me hear what they’re saying.” There were no speakers in the room, nor anything that might serve as such. “Uh – make … the surface of the mirror … vibrate in time with … uh …”

  It didn’t work. But at least he recognised the road, now. He assumed they were walking back to Henderson Close, in which case he had plenty of time to experiment before seeing what happened next. How good was this mirror?

  “Show me Ted … at noon … on his last birthday.”

  The image in the mirror vanished. Stephen held his breath – was this thing the ultimate spying machine? – and then let it out again in disappointment as an old man reappeared in the glass, gazing hopefully back at him. No, apparently the mirror didn’t do time travel, or have a record setting. Or if it did, he didn’t know how to get it. It could be he was only using a fraction of its capabilities, and he didn’t have the manual.

  But even so. Stephen glanced at the chair that had been in front of the mirror, and shuddered. The leather cushion was bowed and worn with the imprint of a human backside. How long had the old guy sat here and … spied?

  “Show me … what the President of America is doing right now!”

  Zilch. His reflection didn’t waver. Okay. Maybe the mirror had to be tuned in to its subjects first. Who else might the old guy have watched?

  Well, duh …

  “Show me … me.”

  The reflection still didn’t change. Stephen glared at himself in annoyance. What was wrong with the–

  Of course, to the mirror he was ‘me’.

  “Show me … Stephen …” The mirror went black, and he quickly added, “Same light levels as before.”

  And there was himself, a teenage boy, standing still, eyes closed, face turned up, arms held out to either side as if pretending to be crucified. There was the brief disconnect he always got when he saw photos or videos of himself – do I really look like that? Is my hair really that dork?

  He barely realised he was chewing on a knuckle. It was like watching a burglar making himself at home in his house. But what was he doing? Just … standing?

  More important, Stephen recognised immediately where he was. He stared in fascination at the body that was his, and not his.

  “I’ll get you, you bastard,” he whispered.

  He tugged at his hair as thoughts raced through his mind. Talk was cheap. How would he get him? No idea. But he had to start somewhere. He would go back to Ted and Zoe–

  No, there was one final element. The last time he had seen Ted had been in the hospice, with Robert. Was Ted’s brother all right?

  “Show me Robert …”

  It was only for reassurance. He so wanted to see Robert asleep in bed and know that there was at least one thing not to have to worry about.

  Well, Robert was asleep, but apparently in the passenger seat of a stationary car. Stephen’s shoulders slumped. Oh, great. One more mystery.

  He couldn’t get the mirror to pan or zoom, but he could see out of the car’s windows. Again, he immediately recognised the place. Robert and Himself weren’t far apart. It was reasonable to assume one had brought the other to this place. But neither of them were doing much and he wasn’t going to learn anything just by looking.

  “Show me Ted,” he muttered in resignation.

  Ted and Zoe were still walking, but they had reached Harnham. Another couple of minutes and they would be back at Ted’s place. And they were still talking, and Stephen still had no idea what they were saying. He struck the frame of the mirror with a frustrated fist.

  “How do I get sound on this thing?”

  Chapter 18

  Ted lurked in the porch of the cinema, across New Canal from the Agora Bookshop.

  At half past three in the morning the street was deserted. The taxi rank outside the shop was empty and New Canal was an open expanse, lined with wide shop windows that were dark and blank. Ted presumed some of the shops had flats above them and people probably lived there, but no lights were on. A homeless guy slumbered in one corner of the cinema porch but Ted hadn’t disturbed him.

  “I’m going to do it,” he said. Zoe nodded and Ted pulled up his hood. It was time to live up to some stereotypes.

  There was a tug on his elbow.

  “What are you going to do, Ted?”

  He scowled down at Sarah. Why couldn’t she have just stayed in bed? But she had been wide awake and he couldn’t leave her at home alone. So, she had to come with them. Well, he was going to get a mega-bollocking from Barry anyway; might as well make it a multi-mega one. It was just a question of scale.

  “Just stay with Zoe,” he said and walked quickly across the road.

  “What are you going to do?” Her voice piped from about two feet behind him.

  Ted spun round to face her. He glared across the street at Zoe, who shrugged: your sister, you control her.

  “Right,” he said. “See this bin?” There was a litter bin on the pavement next to the shop. Ted reached in and heaved out the wire basket. He staggered a little; it was heavier than it looked. “I’m going to chuck it through the window.”

  Sarah gasped, horror mingling with hope at seeing Ted do something so naughty.

  “Why?”

  “Because then the alarm inside will go off, and the police will come ’cos it’s linked to the police station, and they’ll call Malcolm, and we need to talk to Malcolm.” He hefted the basket experimentally. “Better stand back.”

  “Ted! No! You mustn’t!” Sarah hung onto his elbow.
It was impossible to hold the basket in the air with her hanging onto his arm as well, so Ted put it down.

  “I said, we need to talk to Malcolm. We really, really need to.”

  “But–” She sounded almost in tears. “You really mustn’t, Ted. You’ll get into such trouble!”

  He looked at her sideways.

  “You reckon?”

  She nodded eagerly, her eyes imploring. He shrugged.

  “Okay. I guess I’ll have to do it this way instead.” He dug his keyring out of his pocket and selected his copy of the shop key. Malcolm had got it made for him on his very first day.

  It took Sarah a moment to twig, and then her eyes went wide and she kicked him.

  “You had it all the time! That’s so mean! I hate you!”

  Ted grinned and swaggered a little as he put the key into the lock. A slight nudge to the door started the alarm’s preliminary beeping. He had thirty seconds to get in there and enter the code before it went off altogether.

  Or not. He pulled the door shut and took Sarah’s hand.

  “Come on. Now we just have to wait.”

  The alarm went off just as they got back to the cinema: a high pitched whistle that echoed up and down the street. The homeless guy stirred in his sleeping bag.

  “Oh, Christ. Every night–” He blinked up at the three of them. “Hey! This is my spot.”

  “We won’t be long. Our lift’s coming.” Ted sank down into a crouch, his back against the wall. Sarah crouched next to him, clutching his hand and not taking her eyes off the man. Zoe leaned against the wall with her arms folded.

  “So what’s your story?” the man muttered. Ted shrugged.

  “Long one.”

  The man looked sympathetic.

  “Little girl shouldn’t be out. You know where the drop-in is?”

  “Yeah, thanks. It’s okay. Our lift will be here soon.”

  Ted already felt guilty at letting the man think they were in the same boat. For all his problems with Barry, he lived in a four bedroom house with central heating and hot and cold running water, and he had never missed a meal in his life. This guy’s problems were of a different order.

  And then he thought of all the power in the head of a man who had been prepared to burn a building full of children to the ground. He looked again at the homeless guy. Power like that could help people like this. Power like that should. Power like that probably wouldn’t.

  Soon a police car pulled up outside the shop. A single constable got out and shone his torch over the shop front. He looked up and down the street, then got back into his car and waited.

  Ten minutes after that, a Jaguar pulled up next to it and Ted grinned at the sight of the lanky figure who climbed out. Malcolm wore a jacket and tie even when it was pushing four in the morning. He strained his ears to follow the conversation.

  “Sorry to bother you, Mr Jackson.”

  “Well, I was getting up in three hours anyway.”

  “As you can see, there’s no sign of forced entry–”

  Malcolm disappeared into the shop followed by the policeman, and the alarm cut off.

  “Come on,” Ted murmured. He took Sarah by the hand and the three of them hurried over to the shop.

  Zoe pushed the door open just as Malcolm and the policeman were coming out of the back room.

  “I’m sorry for the bother,” Malcolm was saying, and then he stopped short at the sight of his two shop assistants. Ted could never have imagined Malcolm being struck dumb but apparently it could happen. At least they had washed their faces back at Henderson Close, and Ted had changed his shirt and Zoe had brushed her hair, so they didn’t look like refugees any more. But they were still the last people Malcolm had expected to see.

  The policeman looked at them askance.

  “Do you know these individuals, Mr Jackson?”

  Zoe stepped forward.

  “Of course our grandfather knows us. We came with him in the car. Didn’t we, granddad?”

  She stepped forward and hugged Malcolm, who was still in a state of shock. She whispered something in his ear and Malcolm went rigid.

  “Um. Yes. That’s right. My grandson and my granddaughter,” he said.

  Sarah moved out from behind Ted.

  “And me,” she piped. Malcolm flinched.

  “And, also, my other granddaughter. It appears. No one else?” He glanced at Ted and managed to turn it into a question. Ted gave his head the tiniest shake.

  The policeman looked dubious, and made a show of looking at his watch as if asking whether girls Sarah’s age should be up at this time.

  “Right you are, sir. Well, goodnight. I’ll leave you to lock up, if I may?”

  The policeman withdrew and no one said anything until Malcolm had closed the shop door. He stood for a moment with his back to them, then turned slowly round.

  “So.” He let the word out with an explosion of held breath. “You staged this just to get in touch with me?” For some reason he was looking at Ted.

  “Uh ... yeah–”

  “You could have just phoned me.”

  “You’re not in the book. Not under M. Jackson.”

  Malcolm frowned, puzzled, then rolled his eyes.

  “Malcolm is my middle name. I’m A.M. Jackson. And it couldn’t wait until morning?”

  “No,” Zoe said firmly, “it couldn’t ... oh, hell.” She looked at a patch of empty air and Ted had to grin to himself, knowing what was coming. “Just show him?”

  Malcolm’s self-control was back in full operation. He didn’t even flinch when the witch appeared from nowhere. He stared at her coldly for a couple of beats, then looked away.

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” he said, “and as it will take me about five minutes to draft an advert for the two vacancies that will shortly be appearing in this shop, that’s how long you have to tell me what this is all about.”

  *

  Malcolm checked his notes.

  • Knowledge of the ancients. V. powerful, dangerous in wrong hands. So:

  • Knowledge taken out of world. Hidden in “meta-Salisbury” (Zoe), contained in “great big glowy ball of thing” (Ted).

  • 1st level security: ‘mind forcefield’. Human minds can’t bear to approach it.

  • Exception. Key. Special. Mind carefully tuned. Mental barriers don’t work.

  • Key = Ted. Carefully groomed / programmed by thief. Kleptomania = side effect spill over.

  • 2nd level security. Guardians. Activated when k’ledge enters our world.

  • Thief now here with k’ledge. Guardians not working.

  • I’m a Guardian ha ha ha.

  “So, these guardians.” He was slouched in his favourite chair in the back room, one leg crossed over the other at the knee. Zoe, he noted, was still standing, leaning against the wall, showing maybe a bit more attitude than was appropriate from employee to employer. Ted was sitting forward as if he was at his first job interview, painfully eager to please. He was glad to see that the little girl, Sarah, was curled up asleep in a chair. Bringing a child out at this time! he fumed. He could understand why Ted hadn’t wanted to leave her alone, and he supposed the boy had been as responsible as a big brother could under the circumstances, but honestly ... He finished his question. “Who exactly chooses them?”

  “No one chooses them,” said Zoe. “They just are. The originals were a group of colleagues. Their spirits pass down their bloodlines.”

  “What, father to son?”

  “It’s not always so direct, or gender-specific either. Sometimes there’ll be several generations within a bloodline and no one will be a guardian. Then several guardians might suddenly appear in a cluster of siblings, or cousins. Think of the guardian spirit like a very recessive gene.”

  “The bloodlines must be very diverse by now. Half the country could be their descendants.”

  “Well, quite. Even if you just concentrate on the Salisbury area, there’s thousands of them. That’s what made it so har
d for her to track any of us down.”

  “Us?”

  “Me. You. Ted. Whoever’s body the thief is using. We’ll all be descendants of the same original group of magicians. There’s a huge range of potential candidates, but there were only four or five original guardians so there are only four or five guardian spirits, always in a small group living in this area.”

  “Well–” Malcolm gave a thin smile. “That may have worked a few thousand years ago. Nowadays people move. They go to university. They get jobs. They go on holiday.”

  “They would stay,” Zoe said confidently. “The bloodlines were bound to the land. They might leave but they would always return. Why did you decide to retire to Salisbury?”

  Malcolm allowed himself to pause half a beat before choosing not to answer that question. Not yet.

  “So,” Malcolm said. “A group of people, all from this area, all apparently targeted by our mystery man–” He half-chuckled. “Ted was right. If you think the book club are anything like what you’re after … You’re in for a disappointment, young lady.”

  Chapter 19

  Two weeks earlier …

  Far away down the line the phone rang once, twice. Then a buzz and a click and–

  “Hel-lo?”

  It was a man’s voice, cheerful, with a slightly grating emphasis on the first syllable.

  “Hello.” Malcolm had trained himself never to show the slightest hesitation on the phone: the conversation should be as natural as two friends passing the time of day. “My name is Malcolm Jackson and I saw your advertisement.”

  He glanced over at Diana. She was sitting in the other chair in his study, one eyebrow raised.

  “And which advertisement is that?” The voice was still cheerful but maybe a little guarded.

  “The one on page 31 of this week’s Journal.”

  “Ah.” Suddenly the voice was less guarded. “So you recognised the individual concerned?”

  “Yes.” Malcolm looked down again with a shudder at the picture that Diana had been the first to notice. Next to it, a simple caption: ‘Look familiar? Call or email us ...’ “From a long time ago.”

  “And what did the individual take, if I may be so bold as to ask?”