The Book of Beasts (3 page)

Em had always been a vivid dreamer, often waking in the middle of the night with her dreams coming to life around her. Her bedroom would fill with the wispy trails of storybook characters darting to and fro – grinning cats, young knights and wizards. But some nights she'd wake to horrible things. Swooping dragons with snakes' eyes hovering above her. Demons lurking in the shadows; monsters and madmen. When they crowded her room, their presence was so strong, so fully animated, that they would bring her mother, Sandie, rushing in, waving madly, exploding them into a million points of white light.

She had learned to quiet many of her fears and dreams since coming to the Abbey. But when she and her mother had returned from the Middle Ages without Matt, all the control she had gained – asleep and awake – had been crushed under the weight of her longing for her brother.

Em didn't think things could get any worse, especially after learning from her grandfather Renard that the terrible monk in the purple cloak on that burning hillside in the Middle Ages had been her own father, unbound from his painted prison by Matt himself.

In the week following these revelations, Em had moped around the Abbey compound, restless and disconnected. She and Matt had never been separated from each other for any significant length of time, and Em kept imagining she could hear him sneaking up behind her or sitting next to her at meals. But he was never there. He was a phantom presence, a lost limb, haunting her.

During those first dark days, the other adults at the Abbey had insisted Em stay inside to avoid any serious manifestations of her fears. One day, when she had wandered down to the beach from the kitchen, Jeannie's rose bushes had burst from the soil one after the other, sprouted feet and trotted behind Em like ducklings, their buds opening and closing in unison. It had taken Simon hours to catch them all, and even yesterday Em was convinced she'd spotted one of the animated roses grinning at her from behind a tree.

Without Matt, there was only one other person who could help her.

Zach Butler's Guardian abilities, his mad computer skills and his age had made him close to Matt, but his connection to Em was much deeper. Deaf since birth, Zach communicated through signing and lip-reading. He also connected with Em telepathically. He looked like a younger version of his dad, Simon – tall and fit with a footballer's athleticism.

Zach!
Em shouted in her head.
Get in here. Quick.

She stared at the robed figure, who stared back.
I'm cracking up
, she thought.

Em fished frantically under her pillows for her comic. She had been working on the piece about a warrior princess for several days, drawing and shading as a way of keeping her mind off things. She had fallen asleep last night revising several panels. Had she drawn this guy as some kind of secondary character? She didn't recognize him. He wasn't in her comic book.

Rolling up the pages, Em hurled them at the figure. Instead of exploding into slivers of light and fragments of colour as Em's lucid dreams usually did, the figure shifted slightly to his left. The comic fluttered to the floor.

Em scrambled back against her headboard. ‘Seriously! Who are you?'

The figure wore a long white wool robe with a wide collar that was stitched in golden threads like a tapestry. At the centre of the heavy robes was a swirling silver helix. The more Em stared, the more the helix appeared to pulse.

Behind the figure, Em noticed an impression in the rock-face that shimmered and stretched up into her bedroom ceiling. It was as if the figure had stepped out of the rock itself. The rock was shot through with silver veins, and looked to Em a lot like the cliffs of Era Mina, the small island that faced the Abbey across a short strip of water.

A fur cloak hung from iron clasps in the shape of a peryton at his shoulders, and in his right hand he gripped a sceptre with a similar beast on its hilt. His limbs were long and lithe, and with his chiselled jawline and his wavy dark hair curling on to his shoulders, he reminded Em of a younger version of her ancestor, Duncan Fox. Or an older version of Matt.

The figure opened its mouth, releasing a rush of putrid air. Gagging, Em covered her nose with her pillow. It wasn't just his breath that reeked. His entire body smelled of filth, sweat and wet fur. He smelled feral. Like a wild animal.

Zach! Wake up!

The figure cocked his head, startling Em. Had he heard her?

He had dodged the comic book. He was aware of her presence.

This was no lucid dream. This was something else entirely.

Auchinmurn Isle
The Middle Ages

Matt scrambled through the tangled briar beneath the hanging wave. He had to reach the shore before the monstrous wall of water crashed down and obliterated the island. If his father had created this wave, he had to know.

He thought about drawing, animating something to help him get to the shore more quickly. But as he dodged and ducked and darted through the drenching spray from the wave and the muddy ground under him, all he could picture were his mother and his sister. Dead, because of him. Killed by his own father, because of him.

He wiped his tears with his sleeve and charged on through the woods. He would stop this wave, somehow. Stop his father from inflicting any more damage on the monks, the monastery and the future.

Matt barrelled out of the trees and hit a streaming surge of mud flowing down the hillside. He fell, landing awkwardly on his bottom, slewing from side to side in the wet brown cascade, letting his momentum carry him under one lashing branch, then another, until he got his footing again. Thunder crashed, sending the white tips of the great wave smashing into the tree tops like a thousand angry ghosts and drenching Matt with their spray.

In the past days, Matt had been beaten and betrayed, abandoned and humiliated. He was so angry with himself and his world that he thought he might breathe fire. He ploughed on through the thick brush. A crooked tree branch whipped in front of his face. He didn't duck in time and it slashed across his cheek, drawing blood. Matt cursed, slowing his clumsy descent enough to wipe the cut with his other sleeve. Glancing up, he saw the white peryton lift Solon and Carik up into the scudding clouds.

‘Stop this madness, Matt! You can't control the sea!' Solon yelled down at him.

Wanna bet?

The gale force of the winds whipped through the trees, assaulting Matt from all sides. A branch cuffed the back of his head; another swatted his back. His chest ached from sprinting down the hill. He swerved to avoid a falling pine and, light-headed, grabbed another tree root to steady himself. At once the ground began to tremble beneath him, sending shock waves up his arm and across his shoulder. Shouting in pain, he let go, tumbling backwards into a spindly bush.

Was
his father controlling the sea? How? Malcolm Calder was a Guardian, not an Animare. Guardians couldn't bring drawings to life. A Guardian's expertize lay in empathy and communication with the Animare they were sworn to protect. Calming them when their fears exploded, stopping their imaginations from creating terrible things. There was nothing calming or empathetic about Malcolm Calder. Matt had already seen how his father had used his powers of mind control for evil, inspiriting the monks of Auchinmurn to do his will, turning them into his zombie-like minions, forcing them to murder two of their own – all in order to steal a sacred bone quill that would help unleash the fantastical, dangerous beasts locked away in Hollow Earth.

Matt understood now that a malicious hunger for the dual abilities that his children shared had driven Malcolm to this madness. Surely Malcolm was behind the wave. Because if it wasn't his father's doing, whose was it?

Losing his footing again, Matt landed flat on his back in the hard sand. The fall punched the air from his lungs. Gulping frantically, he stared up at the scorched swathe of hillside where Solon and Carik had last seen Em and his mum alive, before they had burned to death among the trees.

What he saw there made him forget about the wave, the water, his grief, his dad and his own desperation.

Dressed in an orange safety vest with her apron underneath, Jeannie, the Abbey's housekeeper, stood ankle-deep in the muddy earth above the beach, her palms raised to the thundering heavens.

Matt's Guardian senses smashed into his brain like a speeding truck.

The wave had been in Jeannie's control from the start. She had not initially realized he was on the island. Having created the wave, and having sensed his presence, she was now holding back the sea to give him a chance to survive. But the effort was destroying her. Matt felt her power weakening, her hold over the water fragmenting, her mind closing in on itself.

A balloon of icy salt water dropped from the wave. When it hit the ground near Matt's head, it exploded. A fist-sized blue crab appeared, a gaping mouth snapping angrily where its eyes should have been.

‘Jeannie! Let the wave go,' Matt shouted in desperation.

He could sense her control collapsing like sand. He struggled to his feet. The creatures were swarming the beach now. Matt ran towards Jeannie, dodging them when they lunged for his ankles, but there were too many. He tripped, falling flat on his face. The creatures skittered up his legs, along his arms, hundreds of them smothering him beneath their slimy shells, their mouths snapping and sucking at his exposed flesh. They pressed him deeper into the sand. Their pinchers tore at his neck and his face. Everything Matt had been trying to keep at bay jabbed at him. Every living thing on these islands, on this coastline, in this time, might die.
And it would be his fault.

A crab chewed a chunk of flesh from his ear, and Matt shouted with grief and pain. He tore it away, his blood trickling down his neck. ‘Enough!' he screamed into the sky.

With a massive effort, he wrenched himself free, tossing the creatures from his shoulders, shaking them from his back, brushing them from his arms and legs. The crabs crunched under his boots, leaving puddles of blue in his wake.

He took the opera glasses from his pocket and looked up at the hillside. He saw immediately that Jeannie's eyes were sliding in and out of focus and he gasped at the weight of the old housekeeper's love for him. He read her barely moving lips.

‘Draw something, son. Or yer gonna drown.'

The Abbey
Auchinmurn Isle
Present Day

The Druid's piercing black eyes followed Em the way a portrait in a gallery sometimes does, but he never moved a limb, never shifted from his place on the rocky ledge. A strange pulsing energy was coming from him, a line of concentration so intense it was as if he held only one emotion, one significant thought, one focus. Em wondered if this was why he wasn't moving. It was taking all his energy to put himself here in her room.

Zach! Wake up!

What was it about teenage boys that they slept through anything? Obviously Zach didn't hear the normal things that woke people – hooting owls, car alarms. But an Animare, screaming in his head?

Matt was just as bad. Their mother put it down to hormones. But Em could hear her grandfather Renard's calm tones in her mind. ‘Some Guardians can settle their minds so that they can sleep without hearing or feeling an Animare's presence all the time.'

Whatever the reason, Zach was not responding.

Shivering from the increasing chill in her bedroom, Em flipped through her last sketches again. She couldn't find anything even
resembling
this guy.

Hugging her pillow to her chest, she stifled a sob. She'd been missing Matt so intensely that she hadn't eaten or slept much in days. Maybe her mind was cracking after all. And once it cracked, then there would be nothing anyone could do to save her. Like other Animare throughout history – da Vinci, Gauguin, van Gogh and so many more – the Council of Guardians would be forced to bind her. She would never be able to draw again.