Arcane Inc.: Books 1-4 (Arcane Inc. Box Set), page 38
Behind the tapestry was a small library. The walls were covered with shelves of books from floor to ceiling. There was another door at the back, almost hidden among the books, but I wouldn’t be needing to go any farther than this room today. In the centre of the room, behind an old antique desk, sat a young man with short light hair. People always expect library-types to be old and I find it refreshing when I visit young Clarke. I wasn’t sure how young he actually was. He looked younger than me but that meant nothing in the supernatural world.
“Eddie, how nice it is to see you,” he said politely. Clarke was always pleasant.
“Likewise, Clarke. How’s it going?” I said.
“Now, now, let’s not waste each other’s time with pleasantries. What do you need?” That was one of the things I loved about Clarke. No bullshit, straight to business. He valued time as much as I did.
“I need to know how to kill a gnome,” I said.
“Gnomes?” he repeated ponderously. “Never had much interest in gnomes.”
“Do you have anything?”
“Let me see.” He opened the ginormous book that sat atop his desk and began flicking through the aged pages. “Let me see, let me see,” he said over and over as he scrolled through. “Ah, here we go.” He stood up and approached the shelves to his right. He pulled out the step ladders and set them up noisily. I waited patiently for him to retrieve the book I needed. He returned to his desk with it and began turning each page carefully. Clarke never let anybody else handle his books. He treated them better than he treated people and he treated people really well.
“Here we go. There isn’t much. It just says that gnomes envy and hate the fairy races. The gnomes have always wanted to be in the fairy circle but were spurned due to their ugliness.”
“Really?” I was surprised. I’d seen a fairy sub-species and it looked pretty much like a hairy lump of snot. Panomie was ugly but he was a princess compared to that thing.
“Really. Apparently they hate imps in particular. It says, when the fairies were deciding which races would be included in the classification the last space was to be given to either the imps or the gnomes and the imps tricked their way in.”
“That is… ridiculous. I’ve heard a lot of strange things in my time but that is without a doubt the worst. It was just a really shit fairy tale,” I said with disdain.
“I didn’t write it.” Clarke shrugged and then closed the book.
“Wait, is that it?” I asked.
“It is.”
“That didn’t help at all!”
“Sorry,” he shrugged again. “You could always find an imp and see if they know how to kill a gnome.”
“I think I’ll give that a miss,” I said. “Thanks anyway.” I turned and departed through the curtain. What I saw on the other side took me completely by surprise. “Ashley,” I said in shock. The woman looking at the gem stones looked around and her eyes widened when she saw me.
“Eddie,” Ashley said quietly. Her voice was as sweet as I remembered. As was her face. She was a fine specimen. I know it’s offensive to refer to women as specimens and I don’t care.
I went to ask how she’d been but was stopped by the shocking sight of a small child who stepped out from behind her legs. My jaw dropped instead.
12
Logic kicked in pretty fast. The kid obviously wasn’t hers for a few reasons. One, she’d never mentioned having a kid before. Two, I’d last seen her three months ago and she hadn’t been pregnant. Three, the kid was at least five. Four, it looked nothing like her.
“This is my cousin’s daughter, Leah. She’s staying with me for a while,” Ashley explained when she noticed me staring at the kid.
“Mum travels around a lot,” Leah said.
“I see. So you stay with relatives a lot?” I said. I don’t know why I asked that, it wan’t even like I cared but sometimes the questions just come naturally.
“No, usually she takes me with her,” said Leah.
“Must be nice?”
Leah shook her head. “They only travel around England really,” Ashley said.
“Why?”
“She lives in newly built houses. Testing them out and stuff,” said Ashley. I could tell by the way she was standing that she wanted to finish the conversation and get away. I wasn’t going to let her.
“That’s a job?”
“Apparently so.” Ashley looked about awkwardly. “Well, we should be going. Stuff to do.”
I nodded. “Of course.” I won’t lie, I was disappointed. I was hoping she’d ask me to grab a coffee or something. Maybe we could try being friends again but apparently not. “Wait, Ash,” I said as a thought occurred to me.
“Yeah?” she said, turning back to me.
“I need to ask a favour.”
The worry on her face was unmistakable. “What is it?”
“Nothing that will put you in danger. Or your little one.”
“What do you need?” she asked again.
“I just need to look through your books.” Ashley’s mum, Margie, had owned a massive collection of supernatural books and I was sure that there’d be something about gnomes in one of them. Something more than what I’d got from Clarke. I could see that Ashley was having a hard time coming to a decision. Was it because she didn’t want to be around me or because she didn’t want me near her mum’s belongings. Despite Ashley telling me the contrary, I know she blamed me for her mum’s death. Rachel had forced Margie to kill herself to teach me a lesson. Clearly I’d need to tell Ashley the whole story to convince her to help me. “It’s the missing children. A gnome’s been taking them. I need to stop it.”
Ashley bit her bottom lip and then nodded. “Come on,” she said reluctantly.
Thankfully, her dad was away on business, as usual. He hated me with a passion; he too blamed me for Margie’s death only he did not deny it. Ashley sent Leah upstairs to play and then led me through to the living room where Margie kept her books.
“I haven’t touched them since…” Ashley said. She stood in front of the light wooden bookcase. I stood next to her and thought about giving her some kind of comfort. Holding her hand, or a pat on the head or something. I don’t really know how to comfort people.
“I know how it feels to lose someone,” I said softly. My own mother had been murdered in almost the same way as Margie. A razor blade across the throat. The order had even come from the same woman. So I was familiar with what Ashley was feeling. The difference was, I blamed Rachel rather than someone who had only ever been a friend to me.
“Let’s…” She gestured for me to start. I grabbed the first book my hand fell on and went to the sofa to start looking. She followed my lead and we got to work together in silence.
“It’s funny isn’t it? We first met because you came to me for help and now I’ve come to you,” I said in a lame attempt to strike a conversation. I figured I should at least try to rekindle our friendship. It seemed silly not to use the time we had together.
“You didn’t come to me, you bumped into me,” she said distantly. She continued flicking through the book. She treated the pages with none of the care Clarke did.
“I guess.” I let some time pass before attempting a conversation again. “This reminds me of when we went through all these books trying to figure what was killing people in Mote Park.”
“Turned out my mum had the answer. Shame she isn’t here to help us this time.” I was shocked at how callous she was being. I’d never seen this side of Ashley. I didn’t bother speaking again. I trudged through book after book in absolute silence save for the turning of pages. Ashley made no attempt to talk to me. A long time passed, or at least it seemed like a long time, before we found something.
“Here we go,” Ashley said. She sounded a bit chirpier, proud of her find. “Gnomes are creatures just outside the fairy spectrum and that has always invoked bitterness in them.”
“Yep, Clarke told me that,” I said. I supposed the fairy tale was true then, or at least partly.
“They have a bitter rivalry with imps. They don’t live in our world.”
“What? Where do they live?” I wasn’t aware of other worlds. Except the place where the dead go.
“The lower realm, also known as the fairy realm,” she read.
“So they live in the fairy world but aren’t fairies. I can see why they’re so bitter,” I said. “That must be where Panomie takes the children. How do we get there?”
“Uh… Doesn’t say. No wait… We can’t. Only those from the fairy world can come and go.”
“So, they can enter our world willy-nilly but we can’t enter theirs? Seems unfair,” I said.
“Put in a complaint,” she shot and then grinned at me. I grinned back. We were getting somewhere. I decided to be smart and not point it out to Ashley.
“Does it say what he wants the children for?”
“Yes. Well, no. There are some theories.” She didn’t sound very eager to read them out.
“Go on.”
“Well, it says that gnomes have been known to kidnap young girls but nobody has ever figured out why.”
“What are the theories?”
“The first is that the gnomes have no females in their species and use human children to breed.”
“That’s…”
“Disgusting,” Ashley finished for me.
“Yes, but also not possible. They can’t reproduce at that age.” All of the victims had been about five years old.
“Maybe they groom them until they’re old enough. Or maybe the age doesn’t matter,” Ashley suggested.
“It can’t be that. He takes a new kid every week. When he’s not on a break anyway.” He seemed to take breaks of varying amounts of time before he moved to a new area. “He can’t possibly be breeding that much. He alone would have populated a small country by now. What are the other theories?”
“There’s only one more.” Her eyes skimmed the page. “Children are a rare delicacy.”
“That’s certainly less disturbing than the other one,” I said.
“Not by much.” Ashley closed the book and put it down.
“Is that all there was?” I asked.
She nodded. Well that was that. I was still not better off and now my time with Ashley was over.
“D’you want to get a drink or something?” I offered. Maybe we could brain storm a bit more and try to come up with an action plan like the old days.
She gave me a pitying smile. “Eddie… Nothing’s changed. We still can’t…” She inhaled deeply and stood up. “You’ve got what you needed and now you need to go.” I could tell this was hard for her but I didn’t care. It wasn’t exactly easy for me.
“Really, Ashley? Really?” I stood up too. “Are you really doing this?”
“I am.” She avoided making eye contact with me and folded her arms.
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“Yeah,” I laughed bitterly. “Yeah I do. Because you blame me for something that was out of my control. You blame me for Margie’s death. What is it going to take for you to realise that that was not my fault. It was Rachel’s!” By the time I was finished I was shouting.
“I don’t blame you, Eddie!” she shouted back. “I can’t be around you because of that… thing that lives inside you. That evil entity. It makes you dangerous, it puts me and my family in danger.”
“The darkness did not kill your mum.”
“No. Rachel did. And that darkness makes you like her.”
“No it doesn’t! I’m nothing like her!”
“You killed three-hundred people!” Ashley screamed at the top of her voice. Her face was red and her eyes were bulging at me. When Rachel had killed Margie I’d lost control and incinerated an auditorium full of people. It wasn’t my finest hour. “Every time you give in to that curse you become a bit more like Rachel. How can I have that around me? Around Leah?”
“I have it under control!” I yelled back and several china ornaments exploded.
Ashley took a deep breath to reign her temper in and then raised a single eyebrow. “Really?” she said quietly. I noticed that the sound of playing upstairs had ceased.
I turned away and tried to bring my temper under control. “It wasn’t my fault, Ashley. I know you won’t admit it but I know you blame me. I tried…” Tears rose up and I couldn’t speak. Margie’s death hadn’t exactly been easy on me. I’d been quite fond of her. “I know why you blame me. Even I blamed me at first. But I tried to save her. I did everything I could. Everything. If I’d known Rachel would… I never would have challenged her.”
Ashley’s hand touched my shoulder for just a moment before she pulled it back again. “Eddie, I don’t blame you. I’m just… I’m just angry. I never got to say goodbye to my mum and I can’t help associating that with you because you were a part of that. I just wanted to say goodbye. You know that feeling. Don’t you?”
I did know that feeling. All too well. And I knew that Ashley would never be able to move on and forgive me if she couldn’t close the door on that part of her life. As it happened, I thought I had the solution.
“Get your coat, Ashley. There’s something we need to do.”
13
I was surprised when Ashley did what I said without question. She got Leah, obviously, she couldn’t leave the kid alone in the house; especially not when there was an evil gnome kidnapping children, all of whom were girls around the same age as Leah. We didn’t want to tempt fate.
Ashley drove us into town, I don’t drive. I can drive, I just don’t like to. I prefer to daydream and you can’t really do that in the driver’s seat. Not if you want to live anyway. I had a few lessons but that was it. The instructor wasn’t particularly fond of me.
I didn’t tell Ashley where I was taking her because I knew she wouldn’t come, but once we were there she’d hopefully go though with it. She parked up in the Fremlin Walk car park. I had to pay for parking. I was surprised that she didn’t realise where we were going until we were right outside the building. The Hazlitt theatre. The place her mum had died.
“Eddie, no,” she said in a whisper.
“Come on, Ash. You need to.”
“I need to what? Go and have a look at where my mum died? Do you really think this is going to help?” she said angrily.
“You need to say goodbye.”
“Then take me to her grave. I’ll do it there,” she said in almost pleading voice.
“You don’t understand. Ashley, she died here. I can bring her spirit back and you can actually say goodbye,” I said.
“You can?” she looked at me dubiously.
I nodded. “I know how to summon spirits from the realm of the dead. I don’t know how long it will last but it should give you enough time to say goodbye.”
“I can’t.” She was shaking her head profusely.
“You’re scared. I understand why. You think if you see her then you’ll have to start grieving all over again after. You’re scared you’ll lose her all over again. You won’t. I promise you you will feel better.” It was a bold promise to make considering I’d never gone through it myself. There’d been no second chance for me.
“Did you do this when your mum died?” she asked tentatively.
“No. I didn’t know how when my mum died and by the time I learned it was too late. There is a time limit on this sort of thing. After a certain amount of time you can’t summon the spirit so easily. Not safely anyway.” After too long the connection between the two realms becomes unstable and any old spirit can hijack it. Very dangerous stuff. “Will you do it?”
She looked at me with wide eyes. Eyes that were pleading me to offer her a way out but at the same time wanting more than anything to see their mum again. “Yes.” She nodded.
“Come on then. Let’s do it.” She held out her hand instinctively and I took it in my own. Then with Leah’s palm in her other hand she let me lead her into the theatre in which her life had changed so drastically.
As we passed each member of staff I clicked my fingers and put them to sleep. Ashley said nothing but I could tell she disapproved by the way she pursed her lips. She kept hold of my hand until we were right outside the auditorium, then she tensed up and withdrew.
“Are you sure you can really do this?” she asked. She knew that I could but a part of her wanted out. She was scared. Of what I didn’t know. Maybe she thought her mum would be angry, or maybe she thought it would bring back all the emotions she’d managed to suppress.
“I can. I know you’re worried but this needs to happen. You need to move on,” I said gently.
She nodded. I put my hand on the door to open it and she stopped me. “Wait. We can’t take Leah in,” she said and nodded her head at the child who was engrossed in a leaflet advertising Sleeping Beauty the pantomime. The sight of the poster made me want to burn down the auditorium again. I hate panto.
“Okay, so we leave her out here?” I suggested. She seemed occupied enough with the wall display.
“Really, Eddie? With all the kids going missing you want to leave one unattended?” she said.
“Fair point. But we both need to be in there. I need to cast the spell and you need to talk to your mum.”
“So I’ll wait here whilst you do the spell and once you’ve done it, come and swap with me.”
“Alright,” I said and then walked into the auditorium alone. Whoever owned the theatre had decided to refurbish it exactly as it had been before. It looked like I’d never set fire to it at all. Red velvet seats were arranged in exactly the same rows as before. The walls had been repainted red, the same red as the curtains on the stage. Even the carpet was red. Somebody really liked red. Maybe it was a theatre thing. I hadn’t been in many theatres so I wasn’t sure.
I took a quick walk down the aisle, trying not to think too much about what had happened here a few months before. I’d tried to get the better of Rachel and she’d forced Margie to kill herself as a punishment. I walked past the point behind the stalls where I’d attempted to take Rachel’s magic. The place she had given the order from. I walked around the seats and climbed up onto the stage where Margie had pulled the razor blade across her own throat and then died in silence as her husband and daughter were forced to watch. I looked out over the auditorium at the empty seats only I could still see the charred remains of the people I’d burned to death. Not thinking about it was proving to be more difficult than I’d preferred.
