sing.
Again, I feel a twinge of discomfort. Carmen, trying to tell me something?
I am back at the door, my eye to the gap, when I see the woman hang up the telephone at the front of the house. I glance down the other way, down the hall back towards the kitchen, and see the back door begin to open, the leading edge of the Reverend’s receding hair line framed there. Things are about to get tricky. I forget to breathe.
My heart starts up a crazy tattoo, blood in my ears, in my eyes. There’s that twinge again, like I’ve pulled a muscle along my ribcage, like Carmen is trying to warn me things are going bad, bad, bad. What am I going to do?
The woman is closer to me but her back is still turned.
I have maybe five minutes before one of them returns to find me frozen here at the foot of their bed, like a person turned to stone, or salt. I have to move. But where to?
And how? Will I make it past the wife if I run? Or will she intercept me at the door, hold Carmen’s slight frame easily until her husband gets there, the police arrive?
I can’t be seen here. I can’t be seen here. Carmen is in enough trouble.
Then something strange happens.
‘Esther!’ I hear the man shout loudly. ‘I need your help. In the kitchen, hurry.’ The woman swings around wide-eyed, runs past my hiding place, down the passageway, responding blindly to the terrible fear in her husband’s voice.
Before I know I am moving, I have sprinted up the hall in the opposite direction, towards the front door, have flung it wide open. For a moment, I look back and see the woman stop and turn in confusion, the man turn in surprise from the act of shutting and locking the kitchen door beyond her, holding a steel bat in one hand.
And I see it. He can’t have spoken. He hasn’t even seen me until now.
‘What are you doing? Get her!’ he roars, pointing beyond his disconcerted wife at me.
She blusters, ‘But you just said for me to —?’ And I slam the front door behind me in their shocked faces, dodging falling pieces of flaming pine as I run like I have never run before. Everything finally working together, as if Carmen and I have become a single organism at last.
I did that.
I did that.
Three blocks away, the knowledge takes the air out of my lungs and I sit down hard on the edge of someone’s driveway, legs trembling.
Behind me, a red glow lights up the distant skyline.
The whole tree, as tall as a small apartment block, must be in flames now, and in the distance I can hear fire engines drawing closer. I need to make it back to Ryan’s place before someone spots Carmen Zappacosta wandering the streets of Paradise with ashes in her curling hair. But I can’t seem to move.
What else am I able to do? What else have I forgotten about myself?
It is only when I finally get to my feet that I see him.
Standing across the road like a silent reproach, looking directly at me. He doesn’t make a move in my direction.
Nothing about him indicates anger, or sorrow, or even interest. He just wants me to see him, to know he is there. Or maybe he has been there all along and only now have I begun to perceive him. His right hand rests upon the hilt of a sword, the blade of which is lost in his raiment of white. In his left palm is cupped a living flame.
And he could be brother to my true self, he could be my twin. I recognise the same features that greet me in the mirror. The same thick, straight, perfectly even brown hair, worn a little too long for fashion, the brown eyes. He is very tall. Pale. Classical looking. Broad-shouldered. Quite beautiful, taken all together. Like a living statue. Not Luc, but yet so like Luc in the way he holds himself, his bearing, his essential nature, that Luc, too, could be his brother.
What are they?
The thought rocks me suddenly with an impact like a small bomb.
What are we?
Ryan got it right when he tried to explain it earlier.
Light seems to seep from the stranger’s skin, as if he is made of it. As if he’s some kind of being of pure fire. In robes so luminously white, I can’t make out the detail.
I look down at myself, and the illumination I shed into the chill night air is like a poor imitation, a mere shadow of the light cast by the burning man standing on the opposite verge.
I take a step towards him, pass a hand across my eyes — in apology? Supplication?
And, like that, he is gone.
Chapter 10
Ryan steps out of the shadows outside the Charltons’ place. For a moment, I don’t know who he is, because grief has made me punch-drunk.
I don’t recall the walk back. I have raked the faulty show reel that is my memory for any recollection of the gleaming youth who is like my male double. There is nothing there but darkness, and no one to ask, and the thought fills me with despair. I have never felt more alone. Suddenly I realise the value of what I might have lost, and it is legion.
Who am I? What am I capable of?
‘What took you so long?’ Ryan says worriedly, lifting one hand towards me.
I bat him away. No more touching. That’s just asking for confusion and pain when what I need is clarity.
‘You’ll never get over that on your own,’ he warns as I weave towards the boundary fence that separates the Charltons’ property from his home.
‘Watch me,’ I reply thickly, and I catch the top of the paling on the first leap and vault it easily. Grief has given me wings, the strength of Titans. I feel Ryan’s astonishment behind me, more than see it.
He lets us silently into his parents’ house, darting me sidelong glances. He trails me up the stairs into Lauren’s room, wanting answers. Too numb to care, I watch him close the door gently behind us, drop his heavy rucksack and switch on the desk lamp. He turns to face me, arms crossed against his broad chest.
‘What happened back there?’ he asks. ‘You’re like a different person, like something’s … gone out.’ That brings a hollow laugh to my lips. ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,’ I reply, groping for the edge of Lauren’s bed, dropping down on it. ‘Where would I begin?’ Ryan frowns in confusion. ‘From where I left you, from when we were separated. Where else would you need to start?’
‘Indeed,’ I say dully. ‘Where else?’ So I tell him what happened, except the part I don’t understand myself. How, in my need, I was able to speak in that man’s voice so convincingly, his wife unhesitatingly went to his aid, giving me space and time enough to flee.
Neither do I tell him of my silent visitor, the shining one, the man of fire; Ryan and I, more similar than I first imagined. Someone missing all this time, someone lost.
Like a phantom limb, the ache only now re-establishing itself. He wouldn’t believe me. I don’t believe me. It’s as if some long-dormant part of me has begun to stir; so long imprisoned, it has forgotten the rudiments of language, history, feeling.
‘So I did the right thing then,’ Ryan says, relieved. ‘I wasn’t sure. I didn’t have time to think it through.’ I look at him blankly.
‘The tree,’ he reminds me. ‘I bought you enough time to search the bedroom then get out of there, remember?’ His version of events, so different from mine.
Hope in his voice. ‘Find anything?’ I shake my head and his eyes go flat. He fumbles with his pack, brings out a … gun, waves it around.
‘Don’t you want to know how I did it?’ There’s that twinge again. Carmen. Can she see this?
Understand what she’s seeing? Is she frightened?
