by Ben Jeapes
And then the witch fell out of the sky and enveloped her. The barrier was knocked away and the guardian spirit burst out into Sarah. White flame consumed her and with a flick of the wrist she hurled it at the thief. The thief vanished, consumed at the heart of the fireball.
Ted gave an exultant: “Yes!”
The thief spoke from above them. “Oh, very well–”
Ted craned his neck up. The thief stood on an invisible surface, at right angles to them, parallel to the ground about twenty feet up. Someone tapped Ted on the shoulder and his head jerked round. The thief stood right behind him.
“By the way, you’re strangely alive,” said the thief, with a quizzical look on his face. Ted yelled and jumped away and the thief on the ground vanished.
Sarah was a small, girl-shaped source of radiance as she lifted up towards the thief in the air, who grinned and then also disappeared. Beams of energy shot out from her in all directions, as if she were a character in a shoot-’em-up game and the player was jabbing at the fire button. She receded into the distance towards the cathedral. The thief became visible again, a dark figure silhouetted against the floodlit building. Sarah was a small spot of light against the backdrop of stone and flashes of energy darted between the duelling pair.
Ted watched it in agony. That was his sister, there, risking her life. He wanted to do something, anything.
“That’s my sister–” he moaned, but the words conjured up a strange new feeling inside. It took a moment to work out what it was. “That’s my sister,” he said again, with pride and surprise. His little kid sister taking on the bad guy!
“For what it’s worth,” the thief agreed from behind, and Ted clutched his chest as he felt a fist of ice seize hold inside him. “My hand is around your heart, Ted. You may turn – slowly.”
Ted did, though shivers racked him and his eyes streamed. The thief stood with his hands behind his back, watching the distant battle as if they were both onlookers at the same race. Ted squinted at him, but even with the witch’s vision he couldn’t be quite sure if he was real.
“You’re an illusion,” he said. He glanced back at the battle between Sarah and ... whoever. The thief smiled.
“Well, one of us certainly is. I wonder which? Whichever it is, it’s pretty good, though I say so myself.”
Ted’s fingers twitched and the thief raised an eyebrow.
“You’re wondering if you could kill me, aren’t you?”
Ted bit his lip.
“I’m flesh and blood, Ted. The answer is, yes you could, in principle. Why do you think I’m holding you like this?”
Flesh and blood, Ted thought. For all the laser blasts and funky special effects used by the guardians, there were much more traditional ways of hurting someone. He had always preferred to despise bullies quietly behind their backs rather than get into a fight, but there could be a first time for anything.
The thief smiled knowingly and gave a half nod, as if he had read Ted’s thoughts and wanted to confirm them.
“You have a better body mass index than Stephen, over all, but I would guess he has more upper body strength. You would be well matched.” Then he glanced over towards the cathedral. “Oh, look. It seems I’m the real one after all.”
In the distance the illusion-thief, the one Sarah was fighting, had vanished. For a moment the glowing Sarah cast about in the distance as she vainly searched for him. Then her light began to grow, holding steady against the cathedral backdrop. She was flying towards them like an avenging ten-year-old valkyrie.
Too easy, Ted realised. The thief was letting this happen. He had been playing with her all along, and now ...
“Sarah!” he shouted, ignoring the clutch around his heart. “Go away!”
A crystal sphere appeared all around her and she plummeted out of the sky. Her guardian light vanished as the sphere hit the grass with a thud and it was just Sarah, terrified and alone, trapped in a glass ball just large enough to hold her.
Ted started to run forward with a wordless cry, and the grip of ice contracted around his heart. He bellowed with the pain and fell to his knees, clutching at his chest, just feet away from his sister. Her hands slapped against the inner surface of the ball and her mouth moved silently. He couldn’t hear her but he could lip read: Ted! and Help me!
He crawled forward and put his hands on it. It wasn’t glass. He could barely feel anything. No change of temperature, no friction, just resistance.
“It’s a very thin layer of atoms,” said the thief. He strolled up with his hands in his pockets. “Slightly shifted out of their normal dimension. Impenetrable. I might shrink it to half its size.”
Ted roared and flung himself at the thing that had once been Stephen. He didn’t care if it tore his heart out as long as he hurt the creature. The thief held out an imperious hand to command him, stop. The fist of ice clenched twice as hard inside him, and Ted collapsed in agony on the cool, damp grass.
“Don’t try that again,” the thief snapped.
Sheer helpless impotence spurred a cry out of Ted that was full of rage and self-pity and complete bafflement.
“Why are you doing this?” he blurted.
The thief shrugged. “Because you are without doubt the most pathetic, smugly complacent individual it has ever been my misfortune to have to deal with; because I am sick and tired of you; because making you was so embarrassingly easy and before I purge creation of your miserable little life I want to get something back for the eternities I was forced to spend in the putrid cesspool that you call a mind.”
Ted just gaped.
“You and Stephen together should have been my works of art. My masterpieces.” The thief hunkered down next to Ted and gazed into his eyes. “You have no idea how much time and effort I put into each of you. I had to mould your minds so precisely.” He held up thumb and forefinger, a hair’s breadth apart. “Him to be my vessel, you to be my key.”
“You did something to Stephen?” Ted wheezed. Until then, Ted had vaguely assumed Stephen had just been an innocent bystander. The thief could have taken anyone: it happened to be his friend.
The thief tapped his head.
“Oh, yes! It takes iron self-control to do what I do, Ted. I couldn’t just walk into any old head. You’ve no idea what I had to do to the poor boy to make him suitable. And without realising it, he fought me, every step of the way. It was like bending a bar of iron. I could do it, I enjoyed doing it, but did it ever take it out of me!” He snorted. “But you, Ted? When was self-control ever one of your strengths? Concepts like right and wrong to you are just guidelines, and what is right ultimately is just what suits you best.” He leaned closer. “When was the last time you actually kept a promise that was inconvenient to you, Ted?” He squatted back on his heels. “And, oh dear, how much time have you frittered away on private fantasies alone in your room when you could have been working like Stephen was? Did you ever wonder why he was the one who developed STOOPID and you’re the one who just makes it look pretty? Why, Ted, just a little self-awareness and your life could have been so different. I’d never have been able to mould you if you hadn’t been so mouldable. When you started shoplifting, exactly how much effort did you make to get any help? But that just makes me prouder – the fact that I fashioned something so ornate from someone so wretched.”
Ted chest heaved.
“You can kill me,” he grated, “but there’s still the guardians, and even if you kill them there’ll be more, and–”
From the thief’s proud smile, he couldn’t believe the point had been overlooked.
“Master Edward, please. You don’t think I’m just going to kill you, do you? Well, we still have a minute or two–”The thief stood up and held out his hands. “Please, join me!”
The icy grip vanished ...
Chapter 23
Stephen screamed, long and drawn out, tearing his throat raw, robbing his lungs of breath.
“Mu-u-m!”
He had followed Ted and
Zoe and Sarah in real time from Ted’s house to the shop. The older guy who turned up in the Jag was presumably the owner, Ted’s employer. More talking, the bald crone doing stuff, some hanging around – and then more people turned up, one of whom was his mother.
For an occasion like that, “huh?” just didn’t cover it.
And finally, after much apparently sitting round and doing not much, the newcomers and the manager all stood up and walked out into New Canal, and Himself dropped out of the sky, and–
He barely registered the rest of the battle, arms braced against the side of the mirror, face resting on the cool glass and staring at the spot where he had just seen his mother murdered.
She had just disappeared. Gone, not even a pair of shoes left to mark the spot. Extinguished, snuffed out of existence.
“Mum,” he whispered as the sobs welled out of him. He didn’t feel that his throat could handle any more volume than that after his scream. “Mum …”
He became aware that, against a background of carnage, his body in the mirror was lying flat on its back in the road and the shop owner was sitting astride him, hands locked around his throat.
“Yeah, kill him!” he breathed. “Kill the murdering fucker!”
But he saw the man hesitate, and then he was on the ground, and Himself was poised to strike the final blow, and Zoe was there with the tray and then – bloody hell, what was that? An angel? And the building came down and the angel flew off and Ted ran after it.
The mirror was still tuned to Ted in the absence of any other instructions, so it smoothly followed him as he pelted down the Old George Mall, leaving the carnage and the destruction and the place where his mum had been murdered behind. But Stephen could see it still, imprinted on the back of his eyelids whenever he closed them. He suspected he would see it without trying for a long, long time. To his surprise he was dry eyed now – drained of emotion, drained of sobs, drained of tears. All he had was a dull, smouldering fury, deep inside him, biding its time, waiting keenly for the moment he could watch the angel catch up with his stolen body and exterminate!
Ted bolted out into the High Street, looked helplessly from right to left, and the old woman appeared to point the way. Her sudden appearance was like a needle bursting a bubble; the fury erupted without warning, aimed at the wrong target.
“You!” he screeched. “You could have stopped him! You can have saved my mum! You stupid, ugly bitch!” He pounded his fists on the mirror and for good measure gave the frame a solid kick. “Why didn’t you–”
Her head jerked around and she was looking directly at him, her eyes round with surprise. Abruptly the anger vanished, evaporated, and he was a guilty little boy being stared down by a fierce and well feared teacher.
But she was gone, snatched from view as Ted ran off towards the Close.
“She heard …” Stephen whispered. “She heard me?”
In the mirror, Ted was still running towards the gates. Suddenly she appeared again, her back to his friend, apparently flying backwards through the air a couple of feet above the ground. Her head was cocked to one side as she gazed quizzically at Stephen. Her eyes were no longer round – he suspected she was not the kind of woman who wasted time being surprised – but they blazed, and her mouth was clamped tight enough to press diamonds.
“You can hear me!” he breathed. Her head straightened up and bobbed slightly in acknowledgement. “So … Okay. You’re helping Ted. What do we do now?”
Her total lack of reaction for a moment made him wonder if he had imagined it. Maybe the sound wasn’t working; maybe it was just a fluke.
No, she had definitely reacted. Why else the flying backwards thing? But then, with a shake of her head that was just as infinitesimal as the nod, she began to turn away to follow Ted.
“Hey!”
She paused, but only for a fraction of a microsecond. “Hey! Don’t just turn your back! I want to help! He’s my friend … Shit!”
How had the mirror suddenly started transmitting sound? What had he done different? Apart from hit the glass and kick the frame, which probably wasn’t the activation mechanism? Think. Voice activation …
He had spoken to her. Shouted, rather. But he had aimed his attention at her. Would it work on others?
He filled his lungs.
“Hey, Ted!” he shouted. “Ted! It’s me! Stephen! Ted …”
But the mirror clearly didn’t transmit sound to the real world. Maybe the woman had a mirror of her own; maybe they were on the same circuit in this place. Ted just kept going, running through the gates of the Close, slowing as he walked through the shattered remains, followed unseen by his floating companion.
Stephen stared fixedly at the back of her head.
“I’m going to keep doing it!” he shouted. “I’m going to keep going until you help me out here! I’ll shout, and I’ll swear, and … and I’ll sing! I will! I can sing a song that’ll get on your nerves! D’you want to hear it? It goes: I know a song–”
The woman swung round. Stephen almost recoiled, but not quite. He had faced up to enough disapproval from his mum during his sixteen years. He could handle this one.
The woman started to advance back at him – and then, to his surprise, held out her hand.
“You what?”
She beckoned with a sharp, impatient gesture.
“You want me to come?”
An abrupt, tight lipped nod.
“But I don’t know how. This thing only does vision and limited sound …”
Or did it? He hadn’t really tested it any further than that. She began to recede, still facing him, now making ‘come on’ gestures with both hands. It reminded him of his dad, years ago, unsuccessfully teaching him to swim at the pool. Come on, just let go of the ladder, come towards me …
He swallowed, and gulped, and took a step forward. The glass was cold against his face, and then the dark air of the Close enveloped him.
Chapter 24
“Please, join me!”
Ted felt himself falling, upwards. The lights of the Close and the ground beneath his feet dropped away.
He screamed and tumbled like an astronaut in orbit. He wriggled to try and stay upright and only succeeded in making himself tumble some more. Now they were up at the height of the cathedral tower, and Salisbury’s streetlights were an orange grid spread out on a dark cloth below. The very first light of the new dawn was a pale blur on the horizon.
Ted kept screaming.
Something dark and solid loomed at him and he had a bare moment to brace before he thumped into it. His legs and arms wrapped themselves firmly around it without any input from his brain and he clung on with all his strength, eyes firmly shut, savouring the fact that he was no longer flying.
A few feet away, the thief was chuckling.
“What do you know? Saved by the cross. Are you religious, Ted?”
Ted opened one eye.
He was clinging onto the cross at the very top of the cathedral spire. The cross was much taller than it looked from the ground, taller than he was, embedded in the capstone where the spire’s eight faces met. He had one leg slung over the horizontal bar while the other dangled free, and his arms were wrapped tight around the vertical pole. He looked down, then squeezed his eye shut again and clung on with twice his strength.
Somewhere nearby, the thief was still chatting.
“No, of course you’re not, I made sure of that. I wasn’t going to give you a potential weapon.”
Ted carefully opened both eyes, keeping his line of sight level. The thief stood on thin air, ten, twenty feet away. Stephen’s face was sharply accentuated by the red glow of the aircraft warning lights that bracketed the base of the cross.
“Your father was quite involved, your mother was quietly C of E but she gave up really caring about faith when your father died, and I think we can both agree Barry wasn’t going to be making any converts, was he? The perfect environment for my key to grow up in.”
A cold slug of
anger stirred inside Ted and broke the grip of fear. He shifted his weight a little, to clamber into a more comfortable position. Every muscle clenched as he thought he felt the cross move. How much weight was it built to take? So many times he had studied himself in the mirror, wishing some meat would actually stick to his spindly bones: now he was grateful for every extra kilo that he didn’t weigh.
But the anger gave him fuel, so he kept moving.
“You killed my father,” Ted said in slow disbelief as he worked his other leg over the horizontal bar, “and made my mum marry Barry, just to make me?”
The thief smiled broadly and shrugged, in a way that said, it worked, didn’t it?
“Now you’ve made yourself comfortable,” he said, “look around. Have eyes to see. My treat.”
The horizontal bar was under his thighs now and the vertical pole was between his knees. His perch was cold and it dug into him but at least it seemed steady. Even though it only served to remind him that he was four hundred feet in the air, Ted looked down.
To his bloodline eyes, the cathedral pulsed with power and thrummed with pent-up energy like a giant plasma globe. A network of glowing energy lines, tentacles tenuous as drifting cobwebs, radiated out of the building in all directions. One of the lines waved its gentle way up towards him, and he saw with a sense of foreboding that it went into his chest. He unpeeled a hand from the cross to wave experimentally through it. He couldn’t feel it.
Down below the cathedral throbbed even more brightly with power, though the Close was still dark and slumbering. Like pearls and rubies, the lights of the early morning traffic moved along the sodium-lit lattice of the streets. A fine mesh of thin, glowing lines was laid over the scene and it took him a moment to work out what it was. He was seeing the power cables that fed the city: the street lights, the traffic lights, every shop and house.
Entranced, Ted looked up and around. The eastern horizon quivered with an energy he barely dared to look at: that would be the sun, soon to rise. To the north was Salisbury Plain, stretched tight over a source of power deep beneath the earth like skin over a boil about to burst. Even the air that moved past the top of spire appeared in his eyes to be mists of kinetic energy drifting by.
