I take my time walking back to the nice house after school. My head’s still spinning. I breathe slow, and the world is quiet around me, winter-slow, the sky bleak, trees unmoving. A normal November day, in a normal town. Except it isn’t. The yellow house perches above it all, and as I turn to look up at it, dozens of large black birds take flight from the frozen ground next to me, wheeling up into the sky like shards of night, swooping low over the rooftops.
Is that normal? I feel like it’s hard to tell now. Before, I would have told myself it was just a strange bird thing, but now it feels like it means something. It means monsters, and magic. Or maybe I’m going crazy – it’s hard to know. It’s like I’ve learned to hide from myself. I can be alive on the outside, and doing all the normal stuff, and on the inside . . . well, it’s a bit of a wasteland, really. Think of blackened trees and yellow, dusty earth. That’s what happens when you shut down. When bad stuff happens, and you have no control over it. And you hid in the cupboard, because your dad told you to, and you were a good girl so you did what you were told, but now you wish, wish, you hadn’t been so good, because hiding in the cupboard meant that they died.
And you didn’t.
I remember the sound of great flapping wings. Like a giant moth, battering at the bedroom window until it smashed, and there was glass all over the floor. I sat up and Mum and Dad rushed in, and there was a screech like a thousand nails being dragged over a board that made my spine turn to ice. A stench of metal, and darker things, and a warp in the air that made it hard to see. And Dad hustled me into the cupboard and I was too numb to argue, too dumb to do anything else.
I put my hands over my ears, when Mum screamed. And I didn’t hear anything else, and I didn’t even open my eyes until someone grabbed me, and I started screaming then, fighting and biting, but the voice was calming, and I realized after a while that it was a woman in uniform, a police woman, and she pulled me out of there, and she held me tight to her side, and she wouldn’t let me look. We walked over broken glass and around spools of darkness shining wet in the moonlight. Her black boots, my bare feet.
I never saw them.
They said it was a violent burglary, a burglary gone wrong. But I knew. I knew it was something unnatural.
I wish I’d stayed with them. I wish I’d fought with them. And I’m not delusional. I know I wouldn’t have made any difference – no human could have fought that creature. But I would have tried. And whatever happened, I could have held on to that.
‘Angel!’
I start. Mary is waiting for me at the door. All my senses fire up at the look of worry on her face.
‘What? What happened?’
‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘You looked like you were sleepwalking. I wondered if you were going to walk right into the pond!’
I look down at the pond in front of my feet. It’s about the size of a pound coin. Well. Maybe a bit bigger, but still. I probably would have survived it.
‘Come on, come in,’ she says. ‘I got crumpets . . . do you like them?’
I look at her; my heart is in my throat. I like crumpets. Who doesn’t like crumpets?
But what if she does them wrong?
‘Can I do them?’ I ask.
She grins. She has a kind face. Brown eyes, round cheeks, curly hair.
‘Yes!’
Up in my room, crumpet disaster neatly averted by yours truly, who knows how to wield a butter knife. Dinner was OK too. Pete was out, and somehow it was easier, just Mary and me, the TV on in the background. It was OK. I even saw the cat, Mika, for a moment or two before he showed me his bottom and left for better things. I didn’t blame him.
I took his lead and told Mary I needed to do homework, and she made me help with the dishes, which was criminally boring, but after that I managed to escape to my room, and I’ve lit the candle in the skull and got my maths book out and I’d sort of planned on ignoring everything that happened today, but I can’t stop thinking about Bavar, and that warp in the air when he got me away from Grace today.
‘Something’s going on,’ I murmur.
Something . . . Dad’s voice, all intrigued, like when he was in the middle of researching a new legend and all passionate about it, flinging his arms out with descriptions of things I thought only lived in his imagination.
Bavar must be connected, somehow, with what happened that night to my parents.
I spent so much time being told it was all in my head. After it happened, when every night was a nightmare and every day was just the grey in-between. Dad always talked about what we didn’t know; all the things we told ourselves weren’t really out there, because we were too afraid to see the truth. Mum and I would listen and nod, and wink at each other, because it lit a fire in his eyes and we loved him for it, but we knew it was all just a myth, really. Like chasing ghost stories.
And then it happened, and they were gone, and I couldn’t just laugh it off. I felt so bad for not believing him, and I didn’t want the rest of the world to do that any more, I had to wake everybody up. I was full of it, couldn’t stop talking about it. What I’d seen, what they were all too stupid to realize. Of course nobody believed me, they thought it was grief making me sick. Even when I’d given up on them and stopped talking, still it wouldn’t leave me alone. Not in my dreams.
I’ve tried being normal, I really have. But it’s awful, because sometimes, when I miss them with an ache that might swallow me up, when my throat is howling with no sound because it’s so tight with all the want of it, sometimes there is nothing that makes sense. Nothing for tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that. It’s just silent. And nothing gets through that – not school, not Mary, or Pete. Not the other kids, or the teachers, they’ve got no chance.
But now there’s Bavar, and he just shouts questions in my face with all his own silence and his hiding. And so I don’t care about normal any more. I care about this. I need to know, what it is with him and the monsters. I need to know more than I need anything else right now.
I sit on my hands. I should sit here and do my homework, steer well clear of Bavar, and whatever is going on. I’ve seen enough. Been through enough. Mary and Pete won’t like it if I go out wandering in the dark alone. Bavar won’t like it. And I’m not even sure what it is I want to find. I mean, monsters, and boys who can move like lightning? It’s films and books and TV shows, not actual feet-on-the-ground truth. Right?
I stare at the skull. Its eyes flicker.
‘Right?’
WRONG.
I close the maths book with a sigh. I’m going to have to do it, even if it’s not the right thing. I need to.