‘How do you know that’s what happened?’ I ask.
‘I told you, on the day you fought the raksasa. They were killed by one of them. I was in the cupboard . . .’ She closes her eyes, takes a breath. ‘And everybody said it was a burglary, but I knew. I heard it screech, I saw it. Just like I saw you on that first day of school.’
‘That’s why you saw me.’ I can hardly breathe. The house gets dark around me, and all I can see is her, and all her torment just flooding the air around us.
‘I spent a really long time pretending I didn’t believe it all,’ she says. ‘I’m not going back now, not for anybody. Dad was here, and your parents just sent him away, they let this happen. Is that what you’re going to do too?’
‘No!’ I say, reaching out for her, stopping myself. ‘No. I’ll close it. Whatever it takes . . .’
She looks up at me, and that look in her eyes. Like something’s wounding her, right now, right here. I take a step towards her, but she turns and runs for the door.
I feel sick.
Aoife stares as I rush away from her up the stairs and there are questions in her eyes, but I don’t want to see them. I don’t want to have to answer it all out loud.
It was the thing. The thing that hid in my mind, when I was poisoned by the monster. She told me, how could I have forgotten? Her parents were killed because mine got distracted. She was the girl who survived it; she was the one who saw it all happen.
Aoife said there was a child left behind.
And the child was Angel.
How did this happen? How did she end up at my school? In this house? How could she bear to be so close to it all, after everything that happened? I lurch through corridors, lights flickering all around me, until I’m in the peace and darkness of my bedroom. I can’t sit still, I can’t rest. I don’t know what to do with myself. Everything is rushing around my head.
The raksasa killed her parents. I knew it, didn’t I? Deep down, somewhere, I knew that was the thing. That was why there were shadows in her eyes; that was the thing that made her different. The thing that howled at the raksasa that night, when I thought she’d lost her mind. My parents let the barrier slip, and the raksasa escaped, and destroyed a family, and then they both fled, because they knew they couldn’t come back from that. They’d gone too far into the darkness, hidden too hard from it in the parties they held every night. I remember those times so well, the lights and the heat, the smoke, the music that spiralled up the stairs and seemed to carry with it a magic that made everything dreamlike. I remember I’d fall asleep halfway down the stairs, or on the landing, my eyes heavy with the sense of it. They wove it into the air, that stillness. They used it to drown everything else out.
And then one day it was all gone. I woke in the morning and it was cold and dark, and Aoife was red-eyed, and they said goodbye, and then they were gone. They’d caught the rogue raksasa, and they’d fought with all they had, using their magic first to kill it and then to repair the barrier, and then they went, because they could no longer be trusted. It worked for a while; there was peace here for a while. But the barrier gradually weakened without their magic, and the rift kept growing, and the raksasa started to attack long before they thought they would, and they’re still not here, and I am.
I have to end this, I tell myself, while the raksasa screeches and pounds against the barrier. I have to end it while I can, before the fight takes over, before I lose myself like they did. If there’s a book that can help me to close the rift, I have to find it. Before it’s too late.
He thinks it’s all his fault. He stood there, watching me, and I could tell he had a whole heap of guilt just sitting on top of him, drowning him, and I didn’t tell him it wasn’t his fault, because I couldn’t. I was too angry. And then I made it worse. I told him everything, and I watched as it hit him, and then I ran, past all those ancestors, a million eyes watching me, seeing my heart break all over the place. Aoife’s voice shouted out behind me, but I didn’t turn. I wrenched open the massive front door and I ran down the hill, my breath steaming, wet cheeks stinging in the bitter night air.
Dad was there, in that house. He was there; I saw him. His tired blue eyes, the old hooded coat he’d had forever, that way he had of rubbing his nose when he was worried. I never thought I’d see those things again, and now I wish I’d opened my eyes wider, to see it all better. I wish I’d listened harder to his voice.
I replay the scene over and over in my mind, holding on tight until the edges begin to blur and all I am left with is the sense of his fear, and my own small self, breathing hard as I sit on the narrow bed in the little vanilla house, Mika in my lap.
‘I will find that book,’ I tell him eventually, burrowing into the duvet. ‘I will find that book and I will close that rift.’
Mika purrs, and he doesn’t move all night. He curls into the space under my chin, and stays right there.
Mary’s taking me shopping. She’s pretty adamant about it. I want to go to the university and find Dad’s book, and save the world and all that, and she wants to buy me a new winter coat.
I mean, it’s not totally unreasonable. I’ve grown, as you do, and so the cuffs on the khaki one Mum got me a couple of years ago are a little bit on the short side. I’ve told Mary they’re just three-quarter length, surely, and if I wear gloves it’ll be fine, but no, she’s insistent. She pours her cereal very firmly, and says it again: ‘We’re going shopping.’
‘Can we do it this morning then?’ I ask, fingering my spoon, looking at my upside-down self. ‘And then maybe I could go out this afternoon? I wanted to go to the library . . .’
‘Oh, we can do that together!’ she says. ‘I could do with a good book; it’s been ages since I lost myself in a book.’
‘Uh, well. I kind of wanted to go with a friend,’ I blurt, trying to put her off.
Pretty sure she doesn’t want to lose herself in this book.
‘You mean Bavar?’ Her forehead wrinkles. ‘I thought you’d had a falling out. You were pretty upset last night . . .’
‘Well yes . . . but we’re still friends,’ I say, wondering whether it’s really true right now. ‘And it’s a really important book for, uh, history – but it’s the kind you can’t take out of the library; you have to read it there, with special gloves on and everything.’
‘Really? That sounds interesting.’
Wow. This is tough.
‘And it’s the city library, not just the local one, so I need to get a train.’
The wrinkles deepen. Why did I say that?
‘You seem very keen on your homework, all of a sudden.’