City of Time. Eoin McNamee
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last year had gone. His brown eyes were still wary, but that wasn’t surprising, given the danger he’d gone through.
Quickly, he opened the small box he had left on the old wooden table. He reached into his pocket and took out what looked like a small jagged stone, one that glowed bright blue. It was the piece of magno that Cati had left as a keepsake, the stone filled with a power that the Resisters harnessed like electricity. He had taken it home with him the evening before, but he wasn’t comfortable leaving it in his bedroom. It belonged in the Den, close to the Workhouse. He shut the magno in the box, took a last glance round, then left.
Once outside, he climbed up the side of the bridge on to the road. His mother had forgotten to give him lunch again so he ran towards Mary White’s shop. He had to stoop down to get into the tiny dark shop with the whitewashed front. As always, Mary was standing in the gloom behind the counter wearing an apron and pinafore, her hair in a bun.
“Have you been down at the Workhouse recently?” Mary asked. Owen remembered that the Resisters spoke of her and seemed to have a great deal of respect for her. How much did she know about them and their battles with the Harsh?
“Be careful down there,” she said. “Be very careful.” For a moment the shop seemed to grow even darker and Mary’s face looked stern and ancient. Then she smiled and things went back to normal.
Owen bought a roll and some ham. He put the money on the counter and Mary looked at his hands, which were unusually long and slender for a boy. Just like his father’s, Mary thought. Hands that were made for something special.
Things had been easier at school since Owen had fought alongside the Resisters. No one knew about his adventure with them, or that if they hadn’t defeated the Harsh, everyone would have vanished from the face of the earth, but he had grown up a lot during that time and his classmates sensed it. He was still a loner, but he was respected. It also had something to do with the fact that his mother was not as depressed and forgetful as she had been, so no longer sent him out in clothes he had outgrown or cut his hair with the kitchen scissors. Now he had the quiet air of a boy who could solve problems, and the younger children in particular often came to him for help.
At lunch he sat in the shelter outside. He had forgotten to buy a drink so when Freya Revell sat down beside him and offered him a sip of her smoothie, he gratefully accepted.
“Look at the moon,” she said. “It’s so clear today.”
“So it is,” Owen said.
“You can see the man in the moon,” she said.
Owen looked up and saw she was right. He turned back to Freya and felt his blood run cold. Instead of Freya’s pleasant features, he saw the face of an old woman, more than old, ancient beyond counting. He felt himself recoil.
“What is it?” she said. “Is there something wrong?”
Owen rubbed his eyes. When he opened them again, Freya’s face was back to normal. “I just… I just felt a bit dizzy,” he said, knowing that didn’t sound very convincing. “I have to go now.”
He backed away, feeling Freya’s eyes following him, her expression puzzled and a little hurt. He looked up again and for a moment the man in the moon did not seem like the kindly face from the nursery rhyme, but hard and cold instead.
Owen walked slowly home, trying to rid himself of the image of Freya’s face, how it had changed. Was there something wrong with him, or had it been a kind of waking dream?
No. It had happened and there was no one he could tell. If only Cati were here.
When he got back home, his mother was in the kitchen. She looked careworn, but she smiled to herself from time to time as though she remembered something funny. It was an improvement on the way she had been. She had put out tea for him. Well, Owen thought, she has tried. There was a rubbery fried egg, which looked as if his fork would bounce off it, a bowl of porridge which had set like cement, and the tea came out as hot water because she had forgotten the teabag.
Owen didn’t mind though. After his father had been lost when his car crashed into the sea, his mother had been sunk in terrible depression, barely recognising even Owen. But when he had broken the hold that the Harsh had on time, his mother had recovered a little, although Owen didn’t understand how. She was vague and sometimes hardly seemed to be there, but she was happier.
He put the egg between two slices of toast and gulped it down, then grabbed his schoolbag from the corner, kissed his mother gently on the cheek and went upstairs.
Owen spread his homework out on the bed, but he couldn’t concentrate. When it got dark he climbed up on to the chest underneath his window and stared out at black trees whipped by the wind. Then he examined the chest, as he did almost every night. It was a plain black chest with brass corners and what looked like an ordinary brass lock, and yet he dared not open it. The terrifying whirlwind which had turned time backwards and had threatened to destroy the world was trapped inside. The tarnished brass lock, the Mortmain, could look dull and ordinary as it did now, but Owen knew it was ornate and complicated. Not made just to be a lock on a chest, he thought. No matter how important the chest is.
He pulled off his trainers and lay on the bed. He shut his eyes, but Freya’s old-woman face was the first image that came into his head. Then he saw the moon, with Freya’s wizened face on it. He drifted into a troubled sleep in which images of the chest and the Mortmain drifted and merged into each other.
Owen wasn’t the only one thinking about the chest. At the far side of the garden there was an ash tree and in its branches a heavy figure was perched, holding a brass telescope in one hand. The man had a broad, red face, large sideburns and a sly look. His name was Johnston and he was a sworn enemy of the Resisters. He was a scrap dealer, but the previous year he had stood shoulder to shoulder with the Harsh, the cold enemy who had tried to crush Owen and his friends.
He peered through the telescope into Owen’s room. Reflected in the dressing-table mirror he could see the chest and the dull gleam of the Mortmain. It had taken Johnston all year to work out that the chest contained the Puissance. The Harsh were eager to get it back. He lowered the telescope. This time Owen would not stand in his way.
Cati also lay awake. For a long year she had been the Watcher. There was always a Watcher – one member of the Resisters who stayed awake while the others slept.
She lived in the Workhouse on the river below Owen’s house, taking food from the cavernous storerooms and cooking it in the vast empty kitchens. Every day she walked the crumbling battlements of the Workhouse, the Resister headquarters, which just looked like an old ruin to human eyes. She could see traffic moving up and down the road, but the drivers could not see her. She wondered what they would think if they knew that there was an army sleeping in the old building.
Watching other people going up and down the road was lonely enough, but worst of all was seeing Owen going to and from school or walking to his Den, his brown hair blowing in the wind from the harbour. She loved it when he waved and said hello even though he couldn’t see her. She longed to call to him and walk along the river, to laugh and talk the way they had before.
Cati sighed. Her father had been the Watcher before her, but he hadn’t said much about what it was like to be awake when everyone else slept. He had never mentioned the loneliness. He’d merely told her that it was a bit like being a nightwatchman. She sat up in bed. She knew that she’d never sleep that night so, pulling on her clothes and boots, she made her way towards the stone staircase that led to the top of the Workhouse. If I’m the Watcher, she thought, then I might as well go and watch.
It was a crisp, clear night, with a full moon that seemed to fill the sky over the harbour. Cati shivered and pulled her collar tight around her neck. She listened to the gentle murmur of the river far below. Then she heard the sound of wings. A vast