Bookbound

By Aonghus Fallon

Who really wrote the weird, oriental fantasy ‘The Emperor of the Crimson Planet’? Why do some aspects of that story remind Odran of his own life? And why, after falling asleep one evening, filled with dreams of revenge, does he wake up to find the story has suddenly got longer?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aonghus Fallon
• Release date: Oct 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301533145

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BOOKBOUND

Aonghus Fallon

Copyright 2013 Aonghus Fallon

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedicated to

Susan, for her input, her kindness and her patience

&

Piers, for pointing me in the right direction.

CHAPTER ONE

I’d just turned fourteen when I found out what I could do.

Back then home was a dusty cul-de-sac that echoed all day long to the sounds of kids shouting, dogs barking, the thwack of a football on brick. My bedroom window overlooked the railway line. Trains were always rumbling up and down between those grassy banks. At night their muted clatter wove itself into my dreams. Beyond the railway line I could see the War Memorial Gardens. Further still, the meadows and woods of Phoenix Park, shrouded in a permanent haze.

What can I tell you? I was an only child. My dad had died before I was born and my mum had the kind, distracted air of a woman doing her best to make ends meet – she worked as a receptionist in Inchicore village. I didn’t have any friends, thanks mainly to my grandmother, who’d paid to have me sent to one of Dublin’s better schools. Every morning I took a bus into the city centre, a journey that made me an outsider in our little neighbourhood just as my address made me a laughing stock in class.

I didn’t really fit in anywhere. So I read a lot. Reading was my one escape from my crappy life. There was a library down in the village and I went there two or three times a week. I mostly read short stories. I liked horror stories as long as they were old-school horror. I loved fantasy short stories: stories set on distant, baroque worlds populated by feuding sorcerers, where ancient seas lapped equally ancient shores, where dark and mysterious citadels presided over crowded ports, caravans trekked across vast deserts and ruined cities were common-place – in other words, settings that were a thousand times removed from the drab and rainy reality that was Dublin.

There weren’t any heroes in those stories. The only morality was that the wicked and the stupid got their comeuppance, and I was at a stage in my life when this version of things suited my worldview exactly.

I did try writing a few stories in a similar vein myself. It was hopeless. I was just a kid. The best I could manage was a sort of pastiche. It’s strange that I did try though – given what happened afterwards.

Who knows? Maybe even then my weird talent was trying to express itself.

It all started one wet grey day, early in the new year. I was outside our house, waiting for my mum – a fourteen-year-old kid with big ears and intense brown eyes, his sallow, spotty face set in a scowl and half hidden by his dark, floppy hair. Not a nice kid, or a good-looking one: a hobgoblin in a duffle coat, but – I like to think – with a certain something about him.

Mum was ‘Getting Ready’. I’d gone outside to hurry her up.

My grandmother had promised me the elephant a few months earlier. It took pride of place on her mantelpiece. Now I remember a cheap oriental figurine carved out of some dark wood with little metal chips for eyes, but at the time I wanted it more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life.

Every detail was still crystal clear in my mind. My grandmother, tiny and hump-backed, her crimped grey curls, her worn blue cardigan, her laddered brown stockings. The creak of her armchair as she’d leant forward, pressing the elephant into my small, sweaty palm, closing my fingers over it, letting me savour the smooth, hard weight of it. How she’d said – ‘You can have this after I'm gone,’ – before putting it back on the mantelpiece, an ironic glint in her faded grey eyes!

The old cow!

My mum finally emerged, boots click-clacking noisily off the pavement. She was wearing an orange polo neck and a white denim jacket with flares to match. Her dark hair was loose, and she was humming softly to herself as she jingled her car-keys.

The car was a Hillman Minx, a present from my grandmother. It was dark and bulky, with red leather seats and a walnut dashboard.

It came to life with a roar that made the windows rattle. A good omen. It was an idiosyncratic vehicle at the best of times, especially so in wet weather.

I sat back in my seat with a sigh of satisfaction.

You can have this – after I’m gone.

And now she was gone: buried in her little wooden box, deep in the cold, cold ground. Soon her hair would be a wild, white nest, and long yellow maggots would slither out from her empty eye sockets –

‘What are you thinking about, Odran?’ my mum asked, turning on the radio. ‘You look like you’re planning to murder someone.’

I grinned, snuggling down into my seat as I did so. ‘For God’s sake, Mum!’

A few minutes later Sandie Jones was echoing about the car’s confines and my mum was smoking one of her rare cigarettes as she sang along, suddenly miles away.

Looking back on it, I realise she was probably thinking about Dad. My mum had ‘hung out with the wrong crowd’ at university. My father had run with the same set. When she’d got pregnant with me, there’d been a hasty marriage – both my parents being innately middle-class – and then my father had died.

My mum’s life had changed irrevocably in the space of a few years. I know now she changed along with it. I remember her as always immaculately turned out, and the house as always pristine.

Her old life had been very different. Only one habit survived the new regime. She still smoked. Cigarettes would always be a reminder of happier, more irresponsible times.

Our journey only took about twenty minutes. My grandmother’s house was near Sandymount: another village like our own, swallowed up by the city years before. Shops and churches gathered around a tiny green, the sea lurking just beyond those rooftops and spires like some great, restless beast. Any time I visited my grandmother, I thought I could smell it on the breeze wafting inland, weaving its way through mews and culs-de-sac, and ancient, overgrown back gardens. I even convinced myself I could hear the boom and murmur of the waves.

Back then Sandymount was haunted by the elderly. They were everywhere. Couples in the final stages of decay shuffled along the pavement, arm in arm. Solitary old men and women walked their dogs. Nothing ever seemed to happen – but there was always the sea. It brought a hint of the sinister, the unexpected, the untameable, into those sleepy suburbs. I kept expecting something horrible and wonderful to happen.

I’d loved those visits when I was smaller. The second my mum brought the car to a shuddering halt, I’d jump out, run up that narrow gravel path – counting the giant pieces of black and white glass along one side of it as I did so – up to that door, with the house number printed in gilt on the fanlight, then bang that knocker as hard as I could before pressing my nose against the stained glass. I could just make out the hallway, eerily distorted and sunk in a crimson gloom.

I’d hold my breath, waiting for my grandmother to shuffle out of the shadows like some old witch coming out of her lair.

This time was different. This time we didn’t have to wait for my grandmother’s blurred silhouette to lurch into view. Instead my mum fumbled about then produced an unfamiliar bunch of keys and opened the door herself.

You can have this – after I’m gone.

The second we stepped into that hallway I could smell her. The mingled aroma of age, peppermints and cheap sherry permeated that house like dry rot.

The hallway was empty. The old dresser with the cracked mirror. The hat stand. The barometer that hung by the door into the living room.

All gone.

I ran into the living room. The mantelpiece was completely bare. So was the whole room. Every stick of furniture. Every single ornament. Even the holy picture facing the door. Gone. Everything except for the roller blinds, banging and rattling against the window, a sound like a faint, ghostly cackle.

I stood and stared at that empty space for I don’t know how long. I was furious. Then I turned and stumped after my mother – down the dark, narrow corridor leading to the back of the house.

‘Mum?’

My mum was peering around the kitchen, her nose crinkling in distaste. It was a tiny room with one slanted corner (where the stairs passed above) and cupboards built up against its low ceiling. They were painted an incongruously cheerful primrose. Blue and white tiles covered the floor. Above the sink was a window, its paint flaking, its sill covered in dead flies, its panes so dirty you could barely see the corrugated lean-to built against the high brick wall outside.

My mum ran one finger along the sill and sighed. ‘What is it, Sweetie?’

‘Remember the elephant? The one on the mantelpiece? Granny said I could have it.’

My mum was opening the cupboards one after the other now. ‘Really? I’m so sorry, Odran. Your Uncle Declan got everything.’

Tears pricked my eyes. ‘But she promised –’

My mum straightened up and studied me sympathetically before coming over and giving me a hug.

‘People don’t always keep their promises, Odran,’ she whispered into my ear.

I only found out the truth much, much later. All my grandmother had left her only daughter was a collection of chipped crockery. She’d also specified my school fees be paid until I graduated. These two concessions aside, my mum hadn’t got a penny. My grandmother had never forgiven my dad for dying in that crash, or for nearly killing my mum and me in the process. Any more than she’d forgiven my mum for her lousy choice in men. She’d only paid my school fees because she was a snob, through and through. I’d have ended up going to school in Inchicore otherwise. Me – her only grandson!

I was a bit old to be hugged but I hugged my mum back anyway, staring out the kitchen window, my cheeks wet, out at those ancient bricks, bricks pitted and scarred with age and festooned with patches of bright green moss, at that rusty roof and the tattered bags of coal squatting beneath it.

My mum let me go. ‘Right then,’ she said briskly. She took a cardboard box out from under the sink and put it on the table while I started to wander back towards the front hall.

‘Odran? Where do you think you’re going?’

‘Upstairs.’

My mum thought my uncle had got the elephant, but what if she was wrong? What if my grandmother had hidden it away for me to find? It was just the sort of the thing the malicious old bag might do.

Finding it would be tricky. That old house was full of nooks and crannies. There were cracks in the walls and gaps in the floorboards. Even the fireplaces weren’t securely attached. And the elephant had been small enough for me to close my fingers round it.

I was still determined to try.

‘Don’t be silly.’

A sudden, unexpected wave of irritation surged up inside me. I turned and scowled at her. ‘Why not?’

She was taken aback. ‘Because.’

‘Because….?’

She stood stock-still for a second, then heaved a deep breath and flicked back her long hair, her brown eyes studying me curiously. ‘Because I’m only going to be a minute. I don’t want you wandering off in the meantime.’

She was treating me like a kid again, but long habit meant I slouched back anyway, hands in pockets.

‘Here.’ She handed me the cardboard box. ‘I’m going to take down all these mugs and saucers. Wrap them up in that newspaper and put them in this, OK?’

‘OK.’

I took that box. Only watching her drag a chair over to those cupboards, then gingerly climb up onto it – her flares and her boots didn’t help – I suddenly thought: to hell with this.

I dropped the box, turned and ran back towards the hall.

‘Odran!’

She sounded more astonished than annoyed.

I was wheezing for breath before I even reached the bottom of the staircase – the dust and exertion were provoking one of my rare asthma attacks. I wasn’t giving up, though. No way. Instead I grabbed the banisters with one hand, and started to climb those steps with all the determination I could muster.

Upstairs. Upstairs was off-bounds. How many times had I peered up into that mysterious gloom and wondered what it concealed? The banisters were shiny with use. The middle of that purple carpet had been worn thin by my grandmother’s slippers. That smell – that smell I’ll always associate with her – that smell was everywhere.

I was barely halfway up when I had to stop to catch my breath. Great.

‘Odran!’

My mother’s voice was more peremptory now. I heard the chair creak, then a curse. I knew I was safe then – climbing down off that bloody chair was proving more trouble than it was worth.

I was too angry to care either way.

I was pissed off: pissed off with my grandmother for hiding the elephant, with how my mum was always bossing me around, but most of all by my own puny body, a body so weak and sickly climbing a staircase was too much for it. Enough to wish my life had been totally different.

And for a second reality seemed to shift and waver around me, as if in answer to this wish. I could still smell dust and decay and I was still on that staircase, but it was much, much bigger now, leading up to huge and cavernous chambers above. And I hadn’t been struck down by some asthma attack. I was running up those steps as fast as I could, moonlight with a peculiar, reddish tint pouring in through one tall window.

I had to reach the top of that staircase. Everything depended on it. On what was waiting for me there –

Then I blinked and everything returned to normal.

Or had it? I exhaled slowly. Something had happened. I just didn’t know what yet.

I had begun my journey up those stairs in a state of excitement. I reached their top filled with a vague dread. My mum hadn’t called out my name again. The only sounds in that sudden, vast silence were my own shallow, uneven breaths and the steady thudding of my heart.

I’d never find the elephant. I knew that now. It had been taken away along with everything else in that house, just like my mum had said. But I had a strong sense something was waiting for me up here.

I glanced around. A blank wall faced the staircase but there was a room to my left, its door ajar. It was empty – empty except for a school copybook lying on the bare wooden floor, its pages flapping forlornly in the breeze from the open window.

I crossed the floor – the boards creaking under me – and stooped down to pick it up. I’d expected to feel cool, smooth paper, but the copybook was warm to my touch. In the section marked ‘subject’ had been written: ‘THE EMPEROR OF THE CRIMSON PLANET’.

All the little hairs on my neck prickled upright. The copybook wasn’t mine, but I had half a dozen just like it in my schoolbag. That title meant nothing to me, but the lower portion of that ‘C’ was elongated like a whip or a serpent’s tail while the bar on that capital ‘T’ was tilted at an angle, so that the whole letter looked like a gibbet –

Impossible.

That title seemed to writhe and flicker slyly beneath my gaze. And when I flipped the copybook open, I thought for a second those neatly lined pages were teeming with countless tiny crimson maggots. Only when I ignored my thumping heart and fixed my eyes on the first sentence those words instantly froze beneath my gaze: red ink on white paper, nothing more.

Nardo ran…

Nardo ran up flight after flight of marble steps, each staircase leading up into yet another chamber, equally huge and equally empty: great, airy rooms in which mighty pillars of dark red obsidian loomed up into shadowy, vaulted ceilings and shafts of rubescent moonlight shone down through tall windows onto floors patterned in jasper and porphyry of deepest incarnadine.

It was just as he had suspected. The Empress was no more. And with her death, the contract between her and the malign object which had been the source of her power had come to an end. The guards conjured up with the Talisman’s help were all gone. Only once, across a vast expanse of floor, did he glimpse another waiting for him – some warrior, standing in the shadow of a staircase so that only the steely glint of his raised scimitar and the gleam of his pointed helmet were visible. Nardo’s heart had leapt in sudden terror before he cursed himself for a fool. Only empty suits of armour protected the palace of the Empress now!

Another imprecation crossed his lips not a moment later when he heard