‘The night she was taken was like this,’ Ryan says almost ruefully, propping himself up against Lauren’s dresser. ‘Almost blowing a gale by 10 pm; fifty knots —at least — out on the water. No one would have heard a thing. When it gets like this now, Mum insists on lighting up the entire place. Dad and I do it automatically these days. We used to try to talk her out of it, but she’s almost got us believing it, too.’ Understanding dawns on me. ‘It’s so that Lauren will be able to find her way home in the dark,’ I say softly.
‘Something like that.’ Ryan shrugs. ‘Like that makes any kind of sense. Hit any dead ends today? I sure did.’ I listen impatiently as he tells me about his fruitless search of the Port Marie Evangelical Church, before I lay out eagerly what I learnt from Spencer. When nothing in Ryan’s face changes, I know he knows it all already, and I’m hit by a wave of disappointment so hard I have to sit down on the edge of Lauren’s bed.
That’s what you get for trying to impress the boy, I think bitterly.
‘I remember checking Masson out,’ Ryan says with a frown. ‘He’s got a wife and two small boys, one with some kind of learning disorder. They live out by the burnt-down old cannery near the waterfront, and their place is tiny. It’s not a church either. Like I told you, I checked out the Paradise High choir crowd and they came up clean. We could look at Masson again,’ he finishes doubtfully, ‘but it’d probably be a waste of time.’
‘Oh,’ I say, because there’s nothing else to say.
There’s a sharp tap on the door and Ryan and I shift away from each other guiltily, even though we aren’t actually touching each other, or even close enough to touch.
‘Dinner, children,’ Mrs Daley says tiredly before moving away.
‘After you,’ Ryan mutters, holding the door open a minute later, frustration in his voice.
Chapter 17
Ryan, Louisa Daley and I make polite, but limited, conversation at dinner before Louisa insists that we run along now, refusing to let either of us help with the dishes. As I leave the room behind Ryan, she furiously scrapes leftover food into the waste bin while she tries not to let us see her cry. Just business as usual, then.
Disappointment has turned Ryan in on himself again, and we part company outside Lauren’s bathroom door without a word said, without a new plan for tomorrow, which leaves me feeling strangely restless, dissatisfied.
Inside her bedroom, I switch off all the lights and pace the pristine carpet for a while, so wired I can’t possibly sleep. I go over all of the angles, the dead ends, and it’s none for none every time.
Lauren’s eyes in her photos seem to follow me around the room. Even in the absolute dark, I can make out every image that contains her — photos of sleepovers, choir friends, pen friends, endless parties forever frozen in time. Her ash-blonde hair seems to glow, much as my own reflection does when I pace past the mirrored dresser for the umpteenth time. I have just over a week left to make a difference in Ryan’s life before I’m bussed back to whatever dismal place Carmen comes from, or vanish out of this life altogether, into another. And I can’t see how either is possible. To resolve things; to leave him.
Maybe Carmen herself is just filler. Some kind of corporeal way station. I don’t want to believe that. I’d like to think that I’m supposed to take something out of this life, or, rather, put something back — for somebody, if not for me.
I throw myself down on the bed, finally, thinking that sleep will evade me this night, and wake suddenly, hours later, paralysed and choking.
There’s a tall figure standing at the foot of the bed, and I can’t move a muscle to speak, lift a finger, run.
Is he doing it to me? Or is it her fear that’s holding me down?
I discover that the only things I am able to move are Carmen’s eyes. I watch the man drift in place, as if his feet do not touch the ground. So tall, the ceiling almost cannot contain him.
Very little scares me, and yet the shining one — who is so like me he could be my brother, my twin — stands over me with judgment in his eyes, a living flame cupped in his left hand, and I am very afraid.
‘I don’t believe him,’ he says, as if refuting something I have just said aloud.
Light shines out of every pore of his body as if he’s made of it. His voice is at once so terrible, so beautiful, like thunder advancing from a great distance, a bright bugle call, that I cannot believe Ryan can be sleeping mere metres away and not hear him.
‘ You can’t have changed.’ The stranger’s tone is incredulous. ‘It isn’t in you; you were always so adamantine, so … inflexible.’ I want to scream at him to stop speaking in riddles, but it’s as if I’m fixed to the bed by a force-field of energy so powerful I cannot make my corded neck work. It is almost worse than my fear of heights, this feeling of utter entombment, Carmen’s skin and bones a living shroud in which I am tightly bound. The sensation of being buried alive is at once so powerful and so terrifying that I feel tears spring to her eyes, roll down her frozen features.
Don’t do this to me! I wail inside her head as sweat breaks out upon her skin, drenching the pristine white sheets on which we lie. Carmen’s eyes wheel in fear as we, together, struggle to focus on the being at the foot of the bed.
The burning man moves so swiftly, so imperceptibly, that he’s suddenly beside me, on Carmen’s left, close enough to touch, if touch were permitted me. Light seems to leak from him in wisps, in errant curls that blur, then fade, into the cool air of Lauren’s bedroom.
His is raiment of such a bright white that I am blinded as to detail, can only perceive him in outline. Yet I know I have seen him before — even before the other night, when I glimpsed him poised silently beside the roadway.
And I realise that once I knew him when I was truly alive and inhabiting my own skin. How I know this, I cannot be sure.
Bending low, he whispers in a voice to rend steel, to rend stone, ‘I wanted to see for myself how you have “changed”. It seems that he has overreached himself, as usual, in his description of you. I see no indication of a shift.’ He turns away from me, as if aggrieved, or disappointed. Prepared to vanish back into the vortex he stepped out of.
There is a slight lessening of the strange pressure that binds me to Lauren’s bed and I gasp, despite myself, ‘Uri?’ Something subterranean and unheralded in me, recognising something in him.
The tall figure stiffens, turns back quickly. Bends again to inspect me, as if I am a curio, an oddity, from another age.
His voice is like a muted roar, like waves breaking across all the world’s oceans in tandem, a thunderclap to split the skies. ‘What — did — you — say?’ I know I should feel fear; I have been cautioned — by Luc, more than once — to be fearful. But that does not even begin to describe what is in my heart.
The being, Uri, raises his left hand, the living flame cupped in it, the better to see her, the better to see me within. Plays it across Carmen’s unremarkable features, her slight figure stretched out beneath the covers of Lauren’s bed.
His lip curls. So puny, so mortal. I can almost read his thoughts.
I could always read his thoughts.
‘ Uri,’ I cry again, as if I am drowning. ‘I know you.’ And for a moment, it is as if an invisible hand is at my throat, crushing Carmen’s windpipe until the room turns black at the edges, purple in my sight, the outline of the physical world wavering.
I am suddenly fearful that it may be possible to die in another’s body and I choke out, ‘You — don’t — scare — me. You — never — did.’
‘Liar,’ says the figure of power. ‘I can smell your human fear. The intervening years have made you weak.
Perhaps he was right. You have changed, if only to become even less than you were.’ There are those strange emphases again, and I struggle to draw breath into the girl’s livid body and at the same time comprehend his meaning.
He laughs harshly. ‘How would we have been able to keep you from him at every turn, if that were not the case?’ He laughs again at that. And, subtly, the energy in the room, the strange, sapping power, increases, until
