‘Look, it’s all very well,’ Bavar’s mother says in a soothing voice, gesturing the musicians to start up again with one hand, smiling brightly as her guests begin to talk once more. ‘And we’re so pleased to have you drop by, but dear man, this is a party! Let go of these worries of yours, and have a drink.’ She grabs a tall, fizzing glass from a waiter’s gleaming tray and passes it to him. ‘Have some of this.’
‘But the monsters, the raksasa . . .’
‘Hush now,’ she says, putting out one elegant hand to fend it all away. ‘What do you know of monsters? It isn’t Halloween, is it?’ She laughs, but it’s a brittle thing and the sound does not carry. ‘Come. Faolan, the poor man is half-dead with the cold and the rain, give him something to eat!’
‘No, you must listen! They’ll come, thicker and faster, the longer the way is open. I’ve seen it, in other places, and so I knew, when I saw that amber sky . . .’ He holds up an old book. ‘I found a way – please, I have brought this . . .’
She flinches away from him, and Faolan steps forward and puts his arm around my father, leading him towards a table filled with silver dishes of every kind of food: pastries and tarts, quiches and salads and cheeses and biscuits, jellies and figs and chocolates, Turkish delight and roasted chestnuts. Dad shakes his head, and Faolan passes him a plate, and then the mirror darkens, and the world spins.
‘Angel!’ Bavar bursts in. ‘Why are you in here?’
‘Bring him back.’ I turn to him. ‘Bring him back! Make them listen!’
‘What did you see?’
‘My father – and your parents, turning him away! Make it come back, Bavar. Make them come back!’ I stamp my foot. I have never needed anything more. I feel like someone just took all the oxygen out of the air.
He comes towards me, his dark eyes glittering. ‘It’s just a memory. The mirror holds them. I can’t bring them back. It doesn’t work like that.’
‘How does it work?’ I look back, reach up and touch the glass. My face looks back at me, all shadow and light. ‘Bavar, how do I make it work?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says, looming up behind me, his face distorted in the glass. ‘It throws things up; I’ve never been able to control it . . .’
‘I need to see him. Make it come back!’
‘I can’t!’
‘It’s important, Bavar. He had a book. He wanted to tell them . . . I think he wanted to tell them how to close the rift!’
‘How would he have known anything about it? The mirror plays tricks, Angel. Sometimes I think it just shows you what you want to see!’
‘I didn’t want to see him like that, all scared. It happened, Bavar, and your parents just fobbed him off with a drink! They were worried about their guests; they didn’t want to know!’ His face tightens and I can see it’s hit a nerve. ‘Is that what they were like? Did they care at all about the world they were supposed to be protecting?’
‘They spent their lives fighting them back,’ he says. ‘They fought until it was all they were; the fight, and the glory. And you walk in here, and in five minutes you think you’ve got it all worked out.’ He shakes his head, his shoulders tight. ‘You should go.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
We stare at each other for a long time; truthfully I don’t know what I’m doing now. Do I really want to stay here, in this place that turned my father away?
You were going to find the rift, and close it.
But if nobody else has, for all this time . . . if they didn’t even have the courage to look, then how can we make it work? Maybe it would be a disaster. Maybe we’d just let more of those monsters loose on the world.
‘I saw him. He was here,’ I say. Bavar looks from me to the mirror, and back again. Dust swirls in the air around us, and it feels like we’re trapped in a moment neither one of us ever wanted. What do we do now?
‘OK,’ he says in a low rumble, eventually.
‘You believe me?’
He nods. ‘I don’t know what it means, though. I never knew . . .’ He swallows hard, looks at the floor. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘What shall we do?’ I ask, hoping against hope that he might just have the answer, this one time, because my head hurts and my heart hurts even more.
‘We should do it,’ he says, squaring his shoulders. A flicker of doubt in his eyes. ‘Let’s just do it. We can’t change what already happened . . .’
‘. . . but we can do this?’ I say, when he runs out of steam.
‘We can try.’
He smiles. It’s not a particularly happy sort of smile, but there it is, on his face, and I’ll take it. It’s good enough, for now. I make my own to join it.
Her father was here.
She’s all pale and quiet, and right now I’d do just about anything to bring her back to life again, so I charge forward, up the stairs, past all the silent, watching ancestors, and she trails after me. My heart is hammering as I get closer to the strange door we found earlier. The little trail she left is like bits of her happiness, all cast aside as if it didn’t matter at all.
It matters. It all matters, and it all fits together, and it’s like an answer to a question I never knew I had. It’s like a chance to end all this and start again.
I’ve never been so afraid.
A wave of revulsion goes through me as I step up to the door, and I’m sure there’s movement between the wood panels, shadows and light flickering past. I jerk back, a cold sweat running between my shoulder blades.
‘Just do it,’ says Angel, brushing up next to me and leaning hard against the door. ‘Come on, before Aoife comes back . . .’
I can hardly breathe though. Deep inside me something just knows this is where it is, this is where all our troubles come from, and I shouldn’t disturb it, and I definitely shouldn’t do it with Angel standing right next to me like this. But she’s so desperate, her face is set with so much pent-up rage, that I can’t tell her no. I shove up against the rough wood with my shoulder as she pounds on it with her fists, and there’s a wrenching sound as the catch finally surrenders. I hear my mother’s voice shouting from the portrait on the wall as the door bursts open, and another world opens up before our eyes, a screaming vortex that reaches out and clutches at us, threatening to pull us in.
The woman’s voice gets louder, more shrill, but it’s hard to hear over the roar of the world before us. We should be doing something, this isn’t safe. We should step back, get away, because it’s going to devour us, it’s going to take us and never let us go, but it’s mesmerizing, far too beautiful to look away from. A red sky that you could reach out and touch, bursts of orange and yellow spiralling and flaring out towards us. Black figures wheel high above and down below, rivers of gold curl around dark mountains.
‘BAVAR!’
The voice is a roar, it makes me start, and suddenly some part of me is howling and desperate to get away from this before it’s too late. I grab Bavar’s arm and pull at him, but he’s watching like he’ll never stop, his whole body turned to the burning sky.
‘Bavar, come away!’
‘Look at it,’ he breathes. ‘Can you feel it, Angel?’ His eyes gleam as he pulls away from my grip. ‘I never knew it could feel like that . . .’
‘BAVAR!’