Voices in the Dark (3 page)

‘It won’t happen,’ I said, because Aldebaran had always said it. But the newspaper thought otherwise. Several pages were taken up with a discussion of the chances of war with Alcyria and the chances of civil unrest from the New Imperial Order here. They had groups in every nation on the continent. They marched about in mock uniforms, and held rallies, and stood for government at every election under the banner ‘Liberty and Justice’.

‘I think it was them,’ I said. ‘I think the Order were the ones who did it.’

‘It’s why my father got so angry,’ said Michael. ‘At least, that’s part of it. Joseph Marcus Sawyer has been linked with General Marlan. Everyone knows Sawyer was part of Lucien’s government. He’s no choice for chief adviser. What was the king thinking?’

‘I have never seen your father angry like that,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Michael. ‘He was talking tonight about getting out of the country.’

‘Does he really mean that?’

‘I don’t know. He doesn’t want to see another war.’

‘But what about you? What do you think?’

‘Maybe it isn’t so crazy to think of going, now that Aldebaran is gone. My father was in the resistance, and everyone knows it. And people are leaving Alcyria.’

‘I know,’ I said. We had seen them arrive in the city with their belongings piled up in carts and a dazed look in their eyes, as though they hoped they were about to wake up from something. ‘I know,’ I said again. ‘But where would you go if you left? Michael, you are not really serious?’

He did not answer, just sighed and changed the subject.
The wind was growling so fiercely now that I could hardly hear my own voice, and we were both shivering. ‘We should go inside,’ he said. ‘My father is in no mood to catch me leaning out of the window.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I have to know – you are not really serious about leaving?’

He sighed and I saw his shadow on the pavement shrug its shoulders.

‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow,’ I said.

‘Goodnight, Anselm.’

‘Goodnight.’

I heard him push the window down. The rain began to fall again, but I remained where I was. As I stood there, the lamp came on in the shop below. Leo must be down there. I had known he would not sleep tonight. The light threw the letters from the front window backwards onto the pavement:
L
.
NORTH
&
SON
,
DEALERS IN SECONDHAND GOODS
. I stared at those words for a while, and thought of Aldebaran in the graveyard in the dark and of his assassin, alive somewhere, awake or sleeping or drinking at some inn. Then I tried not to think about it any more. The rain was falling hard again. I ducked to go inside.

As I pushed the window down, I started. Just for a second, I thought I saw that man in the alley opposite again. But the street was deserted. I must have imagined it. A newspaper was spiralling under the streetlight; that was all. I pulled the curtains closed and turned up the lamp. The bedroom grew close and safe in the yellow glow. The narrow bed, the rickety desk piled with books, the rug worn through in the middle, and the saint’s picture that hung on the wall – all of them were so familiar that they drove out the darkness of the city. I kept my eyes on that
picture as I undressed. The saint stood at the prow of a ship in the darkness, holding forth a crucifix. We had never been able to work out who he was; even Father Dunstan, when we asked him, could not be sure. But when I was a little boy, I called the figure St Anselm and asked him to protect me from danger. Until I was ten or eleven years old, I had a hopeless fear of the dark. Perhaps it was childish, but when I whispered, ‘Defend us from all perils and dangers of this night,’ on the evening of Aldebaran’s funeral, it was still the saint I was praying to.

The clocks were sounding twelve. The largest bell, in the new cathedral, went on chiming with a steady note. The guns fired a final salute, and the city echoed. Then there was no sound at all, except the wind growling in the alleys and driving the rain hard against the windowpane. After a while, it died away too, and left the city in silence.

I suppose I should go back to the start and tell you the history of our family. I told myself the story that night as I lay in bed listening to the wind fighting in the streets and sleep seemed a thousand miles away.

It started with two families. The Andros family were the richest bankers in Malonia. The North family was famous because the Norths were Aldebaran’s descendants. After the revolution, when half the royalists in the country were exiled or missing, the last remaining members of these two families were left stranded in the city. My mother and my grandmother moved from place to place before I was born. From my earliest years, I knew the names of the streets where they had lived: Slaughterhouse Lane, Greyfriars Square, Paradise Way. And the last – the place they finally settled – Citadel Street. That was where my mother and Leo met.

Of course, I had a father. I asked about him sometimes, when I was still very young, but I had my mother and Leo, and my grandparents, and Leo’s grandmother Margaret for the first six years of my life, and to wish for anyone else seemed heartless somehow. Even Aldebaran treated me as a relative from the start. After Sunday dinner, he would stand in the light of the fire and show me magic tricks, and I wished I had powers so earnestly that I used to cry sometimes over it. Can you become part of a family by wanting to be? I don’t know. You can get so far with lying that you convince yourself that it’s true and genuinely feel a kind of outrage when anyone questions it. That is the closest thing that I can think of. And if you could measure, Leo was the one who loved me best from the start.

There is one night I remember more than anything. It was the winter when I was six years old, and all through the dark months, I had been troubled by nightmares. On this night, something woke me suddenly and drove out all hopes of sleep. It was past three o’clock and the building was silent. The last embers of the fire threw strange shadows over the walls. I lay shivering, tracing pictures in the uneven plaster of the ceiling. I imagined the largest mass was the land of England, and the smaller ones were ships sailing round its coast. Sleep seemed as far off as another world. And while I lay there, I began to be afraid that there were spirits in the room around me. I was sure that if I moved or made a sound, they would awaken and get my soul.

I stopped breathing. I thought that if I breathed too loudly, they would find me. I was scaring myself, and I knew it, but I could not help it. I counted as long as I could without taking a breath, and then breathed out carefully so as not to make a sound, and went on like that,
minute by minute. I began to pray for Leo to wake up.

The minutes passed, and the clock chimed the hour, and then the quarter. I waited and heard it chime again. ‘Leo?’ I whispered.

Then, at last, an oil lamp brightened in the next room, and I heard his footsteps. He appeared out of the dark and stood beside me. ‘Are you all right, Anselm?’ he said.

‘I can’t sleep.’

He sat down on the edge of my bed and leaned over to build up the fire. The coal caught and started to drive the chill from the room. In the sudden light of the lamp, I could make out every grey strand in his hair. Leo was twenty-two, and his hair was already greying, but at the time I did not think much about it. ‘Was it a nightmare?’ said Leo. ‘I thought I heard you call out.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Papa, don’t go away.’

He brushed the tears from my face with his jacket sleeve. ‘No. I’ll sit with you for a while until you fall back to sleep.’

Leo could always sense my thoughts without asking, and I could usually tell his. He had not spoken for the first few years of my life, and I had learned to tell what he was thinking from the very air that surrounded him.

‘Will you read to me?’ I said.

He went to the mantelpiece and took down Harold North’s second-to-last book,
The Sins of Judas
. He had read it to me twice already. But tonight he did not open it. He just sat there frowning. ‘When I was a boy, I used to dream too,’ he said after a while had passed.

‘You still do,’ I said, thinking of the way he cried out sometimes in the dark and startled us all awake.

‘Not nightmares,’ he said. ‘I used to go away from here.
Far away. They were like visions, these dreams. I used to dream about England.’

‘England?’ I said.

‘Yes. All the time.’ He said it with an air of surprise, as though he was talking of someone else.

‘Tell me about it,’ I said.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right, I could tell you what I remember.’

He began softly. His outline was very black against the fire. He told me stories of another place, where there lived a girl who wanted more than anything to dance and a boy who would become King Cassius. And Aldebaran was there, just a wanderer on a journey, a man who disguised himself as a servant to hide from the law.

‘And then what happened?’ I asked when Leo paused.

‘I don’t know.’

Sleep was dragging me down now like the waves of the ocean. The story had settled my heart. ‘Was it all true?’ I whispered.

‘There is no way of telling.’

‘But couldn’t you ask Aldebaran about it himself?’

‘He doesn’t speak about England. Not any more. Sometimes I think he doesn’t remember it. Or doesn’t even believe it exists.’

‘Then how do you know that story?’

Leo answered so calmly that I thought I had heard him wrong: ‘Because I used to have powers.’

I sat up. He turned and gave me a quick, sad smile. ‘You had powers?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘Real powers like Aldebaran? You could make things move and tell the future?’

‘Yes. A bit, anyway. I never bothered much with them.’

‘Why didn’t I ever know?’

Leo shrugged. ‘They have gone now. I gave them up the year you were born, and it didn’t seem worth telling you.’

‘Why did you give them up?’

‘All these questions …’ He shook his head and gave that same sad smile again. ‘I decided they weren’t any use. I mean, for anything that mattered.’

‘Is that true? Powers aren’t any use?’

‘It’s just what I thought at the time. Anyway, I would never have made a great one. And that’s all in the past now.’

I lay still, trying to see him as a great one, a man initiated into an ancient line of heroes. I could not do it. He was just Leo, my papa, who stood at a market stall all day and spent the evenings sweeping the floor and carrying up the water and reading me stories. ‘Papa?’ I whispered. ‘Did you ever dream about England again?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I never did.’

‘But how could you stop having powers just like that?’

‘I didn’t. They keep their hold on you, Anselm. But I never dreamed about England again.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

But there was something very final about the way he said it, something that made me remember it long after that evening, long after he had left me and turned out the light. There was always a kind of darkness about Leo, a cold side to his spirit that none of us could reach. In that, he was exactly like Aldebaran.

I never had nightmares again after that. Instead, I always dreamed about England. I saw it as a green and enchanted place, inhabited by minstrels and poets and wandering
outlaws. And after that night, Leo became a kind of hero to me. I did not think about it all the time, but sometimes I would see him waiting at the school gates in his old leather jacket or bending tiredly to dig the cold ash out of the stove, and I would think, My papa was once a man of some importance. In those days, he had a market stall in the coldest corner of the square, and his coughing every winter’s night was fierce enough to rattle the windows. But I knew secretly that it would not last. Leo was destined to be a great man. It was written in the stars somewhere, and all we had to do was wait. In my dreams, I saw a shop with our name on the sign and Leo in a new suit of clothes presiding over the counter. Years passed before it came true, but I never lost faith. It would have taken more than years to make me do that.

Our last winter in Citadel Street, the windows were leaking and the pipes were frozen and Leo was coughing worse than ever. My mother circled a shop for rent in the newspaper. The page lay on the table for several weeks, gaining dust and tea stains. Leo considered it in silence. Then I came home one day to find them packing up our things. I was not surprised by it; I had known he would say yes. It was his destiny.

The shop was a dark building full of dust and broken glass. We moved in at Christmas, in the bitterest cold you ever knew, and the landlord left before we could ask him how to turn on the lights. Only Leo’s spirits could not be darkened. ‘We will fix it up,’ he said as he carried our boxes up the stairs by lamplight. ‘It will be the best secondhand shop in the whole of Malonia City.’

‘In the whole of the continent,’ said my mother. She
carried Jasmine up the stairs and set her down on a mattress. Jasmine was two years old and would not sleep. She toddled about the floor, examining the boxes. ‘What do you think, Anselm?’ said my mother.

‘It’s all right,’ I said quietly. ‘It’s not how I thought it would be.’

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Every step forward looks like a step back at the start. It’s always a struggle to move on to something better. Did you know that? But things will be better here, for sure. You can help your papa in the shop every evening and have your own room with a desk in it.’

I nodded and followed Leo back down for the last boxes. ‘Let’s paint our name on the window,’ he said, taking hold of my arm. ‘What do you say, Anselm?’

The idea caught my imagination in spite of everything. There was an old ladder in the back room, and we had a can of black paint. I held the ladder and Leo wrote.

‘What are you two doing?’ said my mother, coming out with Jasmine in her arms and laughing up at us. ‘Leo, that ladder does not look safe, and it is past midnight.’

‘It will not take long.’

‘You two!’ she said. She hugged Jasmine to her and laughed until tears fell from her eyes. ‘It will look terrible in the light of day. You should sketch out lines and draw it properly.’