Kevin
rubbed his dark-circled eyes and yawned widely. “A pox on the filthy pirate,” he muttered softly, referring to Father’s act of destruction.
He was going crazy.
That pernicious epistle! What could it possibly mean; the incredible assertion that he had ‘inherited the Gift’? What ruddy gift? He had to be the least gifted person on Earth! He had no gifts, and received none at Christmas either. Father had long since banned the practice of religious festivals at Pitterdown Manor. The last gift he remembered receiving was a green hardback journal from his mother, containing his grandfather’s memoirs. Father had confiscated it after a shouting match with Mother that ended with his fist smashing her nose.
Put that mystery to one side, and there was this talk of ‘other worlds’ and the ‘spirit of a person’.
Kevin believed that there was something more than merely physical that separated human from animal, if one were prepared to substitute consciousness for quasi-religious talk about spirits. But other worlds–that was a nonsense for writers of fantastic tales and nursery stories, and he was surprised and aggrieved that Great-Grandmother, whom he had always regarded as a paragon of old-fashioned British common sense, should spout such drivel in the course of an otherwise serious and important letter.
“
Hogwash,” he grumbled, growing agitated. “Fiddlesticks! Codswallop and dollops of horse manure!” His lungs creaked and wheezed. He took a puff of his pump and leaned back upon his pillow, trying as always to defeat his throat’s closing.
Ah, and the nub of it–that he was the keeper of some ancient tradition passed down the family line, from generation to generation, only to be dropped by
… “Good old Kevin.” He sighed. “Pathetic little weasel. Trust
him
to make a dog’s breakfast of it.”
But what
was
this tradition? The wording implied some special meaning to which he was not party, the knowledge of which Father had apparently denied him all these years. He had no doubt Father knew its exact meaning. The vein on his forehead only swelled and pulsed like that–Kevin’s palms grew sweaty and his bowels clenched–when Father was in a blind fury, in contrast to his routine fits of anger or petulance where he was wont to shout and swear at the servants but no worse. That kick into the fireplace–clearly, broaching the subject would be tantamount to signing his own death warrant. Yet how could he not wonder?
How could
Great-Grandmother reach him as it were from beyond the grave? A cold shiver played down Kevin’s spine. He touched his ruined ear. How could he become keeper of a tradition about which he knew not the first thing? Whom worse could she have chosen? The least capable person imaginable? A person of courage–a hero, not some asthmatic pipsqueak–was called for to stand up to Father, to take that decisive step. He hardly dared acknowledge it. The letter had spoken of the Blue Room. Something hidden beneath the mantelpiece. Proof positive. Proof that might burden him with the necessity of being ‘called to serve’.
“Oh, God!” he cried, throwing himself toward the bathroom.
He only just reached it in time.
* * * *
“The joys of the porcelain throne,” Kevin lamented, a little later, holding his feverish head in both hands. Lunch had been wholly expurgated. “At least it happened in private this time. Repulsive. Why me?”
It was a bitter question he was much in the habit of asking.
Kevin looked up, studying his face in the dark mirror opposite. The leaded glass made his skin look healthy, but it exaggerated the bags under his eyes into a racoon-like mask. Just reflected in the mirror for a moment he thought he saw–his head jerked around–no, it was nothing. “You belong in an asylum,” he told the face in the mirror, “if you’re going to start seeing things now. Hearing odd noises in the night, jumping at the slightest sound–you are turning into a complete crackpot, my dear fellow. Why, you are even thinking …”
Did he dare?
Instead, he recalled a curious dream he had dreamed the previous night. He had woken to hear the grandfather clock on the landing striking eleven dolorous notes, with such a gripping sense of portent and urgency that he feared his heart would burst right out of his chest. At first, he thought there must have been some noise to rouse him, but long minutes of trembling, listening and staring across the bedroom at the unmoving drapes convinced him that nothing was amiss. Just a silly start, he decided at length, and plumped up his hypo-allergenic pillow preparatory to settling down again. Sometimes the medications gave him insomnia. But his head had no sooner touched the pillow than his eyelids flickered open, and he remembered the dream.
He was in an indeterminable place. All around him was soft, milky illumination upon a formless and perfectly uniform haze. There was neither sense of movement nor sense of time’s passage. Some distance apart from him, far enough that details were indefinite
, but near enough to fuel the conclusions that he had since drawn, was the figure of a ghostly little girl. She was barefoot, somewhat plump, and garbed in an otherworldly dress of what appeared to be leaves or some unfamiliar textile, he could not tell which. She was crying.
No more did he remember, yet he found himself moved with unaccustomed emotion. Pitying another’s plight was foreign to
Kevin’s experience, a notion for which he had neither explanation nor solution–yet he found himself reaching out to her, as if he were somehow responsible for her distress. Impossible, he knew, but the feeling lingered. Most of his dreams were about Father and Brian–he wrestled them out of his mind with an effort, and concentrated instead on the little girl. He sensed an inchoate urgency accompanied the dream, but why? Who was she? He did not generally read about girls, and had only once to his recollection met a girl his own age. This girl was different.
It was
… disturbing.
Kevin
felt as if he were a leaf fallen into a fast-running stream, snatched away by events, helplessly carried by the current until he should be washed up on some bank or caught in an eddy. All the carefully constructed edifices of his sheltered existence were collapsing around him like so much damp origami. Nothing was certain any more. Even sleep, that final surcease from his daily misery, was being disturbed with flashes of dreams that he could barely recall in the morning–save for this dream of the little girl, and even there he was powerless.
W
retched letter! He wanted to deny the relentless march of facts. He was the addressee. It was found in a forgotten corner, tucked into an obscure book. The chance of anyone finding the letter by accident was so fantastically small … but he refused the alternative, that Great-Grandmother must somehow have foreknown that
he
would be its discoverer, twenty years later. And something within those fragile pages had triggered the most violent reaction he had ever seen in Father. Kevin shambled out of the bathroom and cast himself like a limp dishrag upon the bed. He fumbled for his pills. No, there were no simple conclusions to be drawn.
There was, he surmised, but one way forward through
the morass. He breathed in and out harshly, stilling the asthma by sheer willpower–but he lacked the same willpower to conquer his panic.
He
had to check the mantelpiece in the Blue Room.
H
e could afford no
assumptions, so Kevin set about his scheme with the enthusiasm of a budding Sherlock Holmes. A certain slyness was integral to Father’s character, and he suspected that the servants had been instructed not to let him wander around unsupervised. Thus, taking advantage of the fact that Pitterdown Manor was a virtual maze, having been added to, remodelled and gutted in part numerous times over the years to satisfy the vicissitudes of its various owners, Kevin attempted on successive mornings four different routes to the Library and was each time met by an unwelcome escort. The servants took the opportunity to inquire solicitously about his wellbeing and needs, where before they had let him be. To cap it all, they began to invent little tasks that should be done in the Library, such as dusting and tidying, where before they had never bothered.
“A tad obvious,” he muttered behind the back of a particularly industrious book-sorter, that fourth afternoon when his suspicions had solidified into fact.
“Sir?”
“Nothing, carry on.”
“Would Sir care for a drink? A light snack?”
Kevin
sighed. “No, sir would not, thank you.”
Thankfully, the Library had more exits
and nooks and crannies than could reasonably be guarded by the most zealous corps of servants. He resolved to employ such an exit, just as soon as he figured out how to gain access to the Blue Room undetected. The only Blue Room he knew of was an old study in the unused East Wing of the house, a study that belonged to Great-Grandmother and had been locked, well, forever. Father probably had the key. The second problem was that in order to reach the East Wing, he would have to pass through the main hallway or cross the courtyard–assuming he could make it that far without collapsing. Discovery was assured. But was there an alternative?
When he was younger, he had heard two servants passing in the corridor outside his room. His door had bee
n left ajar, which was unusual. The hour was late, and they were returning from a night on the town.
“I’m
tellin’ you, ‘e’s no good!” said the first.
“
Wharr–seein’ th’ scullery-maid?” slurred the second.
“Nay,
th’
how
is th’ stranger thing!”
“
Wharr? Wharr yer on about, yer ol’ lecher?”
“Blimey, that’s
th’ last time you drinkin’ six pints! You can’t stan’ straight up. ‘Ere, ‘old me arm.” There was a crashing noise and some muffled swearing. “’Old me arm, ah say! Better. Ah’ll ‘ave yer know, sonny, ‘e’s usin’ th’ secret passage behind them rooms.”
“
Gerroff, yer big buffoon!”
“Shh! You’ll wake
th’ house.”
“
Wharr, ‘e’s getting’ it an’ yer jealous?”
“Nay, but that’s how ‘e’s
seein’ ‘er, I reckon, sneakin’ back there.”
Kevin
gnawed at a fingernail. Just two old servants, stumbling back to their rooms, chuckling over another’s affair with one of the maids. But to his knowledge, the matter of the secret passageway had never come to light.
“Not impossible,” he sighed.
Several weeks had passed since he had requested a worktable in the Library. Professing an interest in architecture, Kevin began to cover the pitted work surface with various diagrams and books on the subject. He intended to examine Pitterdown Manor’s building plans, which had taken him almost two months to find, hidden in a mildewed box in the lowest level of the Library. Some of the pages fell apart at his touch. But Kevin liked to think he had the patience of a monk. Quietly and secretively, he pursued his detective work. He was so fearful of discovery, that he did not even record his observations on paper, but trusted all to his powers of recall and deduction. He hid the plans and drawings within books and read them on his favourite armchair, or stuffed them down his shirt and read them by moonlight in his bedroom with the door locked and bolted. Overnight, he began to dream plans and room dimensions, but the business of mentally comparing the different extensions and renovations that he had unearthed took weeks of intensive mental gymnastics.
“Thank heavens for a first-rate brain,”
he told himself, rather immodestly.
Immersed in his studies late one afternoon,
Kevin was aghast to hear a familiar tread in the downstairs hallway. No, it couldn’t be! His hands gathered and sorted through the papers in panicky haste. Dread speared into his bowels, causing his nerveless fingers to fumble and shake with maddening debility. The low voice, inquiring of the servants what had transpired in his absence … a demand for whiskey … Kevin’s paranoia escalated to mountainous proportions.
He swore weakly as he dropped
a book on the floor. He scrabbled under the desk like a vagrant mining a trash-heap. All the tiny freedoms he had allowed himself, all the careful and secretive planning, all was lost in an instant.
Father had returned.
* * * *
He was in an indeterminable place. All around was a soft, milky illumination upon formless and perfectly uniform haze. There was neither sense of movement nor sense of time’s passage. Though his legs
moved, they were so disconnected from his perception that they might have belonged to a different person, for there was no sensation of solid contact with the ground, just an ethereal drifting of the kind usually associated with summer’s slow clouds. All colour had been leached from the haze until it resembled ghoulish shrouds upon the sweep of an endless plain. He peered forward intently, trying to make out the outlines of … trees? Mountains?
Without warning, the scene changed.
Damp-slick, gnarled trunks rose all around him, a circle of trees ancient beyond knowing, and from the prickling, cloying chill along his spine he knew himself to be in a special, powerful, place–yet all remained insubstantial, as though the merest breath might send these visions back to the mists. The irruption between reality and unreality confused him. He knew he was not a physical presence in the dreamscape–this was a delusion, a sliver of the subconscious magnified by his imagination–but he recognised a defiant counter-current that coolly insisted upon the vision’s reality, that he was being drawn by a force external to himself to an unknown destination. Subtly, the dream enticed him in. Apprehension grew in his breast.
Some distance apart from him, far enough that details were indistinct, was the figure of a ghostly little girl. She was barefoot, and garbed in an otherworldly dress of what appeared to be leaves or some unfamiliar textile, he could not tell which. She was crying.
She was the same every time. Never smiling nor merry, always fixing him with such beseeching glances from her soulful dark eyes that he squirmed and blushed in reaction. He was unable to speak to her, though he yearned to understand the cause of her tears. Kevin sensed she waited for him. Her arm lifted to beckon, to invite him to follow her, as with an impetuous step she turned to lead him on. But he was incapable–his feet were carved of stone. She looked back over her shoulder. Her despair only seemed to deepen when Kevin made a helpless gesture grounded in frustration and misery almost equal to hers.
There was a danger of losing himself here, he realised, an insinuating thread of fear that coiled silkily about his heart and
ensnared him in weakness and self-loathing. Perhaps it had to do with the dreamscape. An inkling of mystical significance suggested itself to his senses, a thread too tiny and delicate to readily identify, but nevertheless he felt that there was woven into the dream’s fabric a magnitude of composition or importance that transcended ordinary physical substance–which gave his fears voice. They crowded in suddenly, like a flock of vultures descending to feast upon carrion, tearing into him with such visceral abhorrence that he staggered and nearly retched, even in his dream. They pushed him over the edge. The dream, never comfortable, had become a nightmare.
He took a backward step.
The little girl’s mouth flew open, a soundless, desperate cry. Perhaps the impact on him was the more acute because the cry was inaudible; his imagination supplied from her stricken expression what was lacking in sound. His retreat instantly transformed into statue-like immobility. They stared at each other across the intervening space, unable to break the terrible connection. Kevin’s heart skipped a beat, two, and then burst into a frenetic catch-up. What now? Had she captured him? Why was he unable to leave the dream? He could not even tear his eyes away from that tearful gaze, nor could he deny her hope–an unutterable expectation united him to her, a knowledge she possessed but was somehow unable to share, as if he held the key to her world and did not know it. He could not articulate what he meant to this strange girl, but her behaviour wordlessly screamed his significance.
Kevin
had never considered his possible importance to another person. Everything Father and Brian had taught him, everything beaten and pounded into him over the years, pointed to the utter
in
significance of the desires and opinions–indeed, the very existence–of one Kevin Albert Jenkins. He counted for nothing. Less than nothing, for his sickliness was a burden to his family and required the services of a small army of carers to ameliorate. To Father he was just a useless mouth to feed.
And the target of his rage.
He ought to do something. The ‘ought’ snared and held him, for having never before been required to serve another in any capacity whatsoever, he now became paralysed with indecision. To be switched from weakness to a position of strength was more than disconcerting. It was chilling, unthinkable, anathema.
But his immobility
gave the little girl heart. First her features began to relax, then her fists unclenched, then suddenly she tottered a dozen or so steps toward him before pulling up short. It was enough that Kevin’s eyes grew round in astonishment.
Because the haze rendered all colours a uniform grey, he could not have told if her eyes were blue or brown, or discern if the trees were green or puce, for that matter. But he could distinguish patterning, and his initial impression was that she was
intricately tattooed on her hands and forearms, feet and calves, similarly to Celtic or Gaelic designs and motifs that he had encountered during his extensive researches in the Library. Or henna hand-painting! He had seen a picture of that once, but these were different, more organic–leafy. That was the right word. Leafy. Either the toil of an artistic genius had been worked upon her flesh, or the patterns were natural. They were boldest on the extremities of her limbs and faded toward her torso.
S
he essayed now a welcoming smile, albeit a weak one, and made an encouraging gesture with her tiny hand. She was
afraid!
This startling new insight flashed into Kevin’s mind, instantly dismissed as laughable. Why, she was but a slip of a creature, just a girl, but even so a thousand times more able than he. What reason could she have to fear him?
Movement in the mists caught
Kevin’s attention. Seeing the direction of his gaze, the little girl turned, too. At once her hands flew to her mouth. This must be some happy surprise, for she eagerly waved several times and jumped up and down, before turning to him with a ‘now-you’ll-see’ gesture.
Kevin
did, and for a timeless age nearly forgot to breathe.
A unicorn! Ridiculous.
Now he knew he was dreaming. Momentarily, he had feared his dream had been subverted by an unknown force. What had appeared from the haze beyond the little girl was unmistakeably a Unicorn. The creature was as white as freshly starched sheets, with a long mane and gentle dark eyes. Though it dwarfed the little girl, and its double-spiralled horn must make a wicked weapon indeed, the Unicorn approached her with the fluttering steps of a ballet dancer and paused to nuzzle her arm briefly. She trembled.
Kevin
had never seen a creature nobler or more splendid, nor could he find words adequate to describe how sculpted was its musculature, or how effortlessly it filled the space between the twisted old trees with light and beauty. If all the goodness and rightness in the world were to be reduced to living flesh, then the Unicorn would be the embodiment of these.
He felt
compelled to speak, to respond. But he remained helpless.
T
he Unicorn tossed its silken mane and pranced toward him. But it, too, was unable to approach Kevin, and he could see the puzzlement in its mien as it mapped out the boundaries of the invisible space between them. There was no explanation. The separation was physical and apparently inviolable. At length, the Unicorn turned to the little girl as if to say, ‘What do you think, then?’ She stomped her little foot in a fit of pique.
This too was astonishing, for her reaction was completely at odds with the subdued and imploring behaviour he had come to expect–it jolted him from his previous indecision into a state approaching real alarm. From costly experience it stood to reason that if he had caused someone to be angry with him
, then he should expect further violence, and now indeed, as if to complete this unhappy train of thought, the Unicorn turned purposefully toward him and lowered its horn to point its needle-like tip directly at his heart. Kevin curled within himself, victim of a thousand ill-conceived fears, which were never far removed from the surface of his consciousness.