Harry awoke to find both his emergency cake and his emergency emergency cake had been eaten. He had been wrapped in his emergency blanket and was sleeping on his emergency pillow. On top of that, he was wearing his standard issue non-emergency pyjamas. He rubbed his eyes and hoped for no more emergencies.
When he’d chased the sleep from his eyes and blinked a few times to adjust them to the mid-morning sun, he was greeted by the tired and bruised face of Sarah. She sat on the edge of the non-emergency bed that his mother had carried him to after he fell asleep in the early hours of the morning. She was on her second slice of cake of the day, if you don't count the emergency cake, which she didn't. Mr. Rasmus had said the more calories the better, and she wasn't one to argue with his sizeable wisdom and a near infinite supply of cake.
Harry surged out from under his possibly-emergency duvet – he wasn't keeping track at this point – and wrapped his arms around Sarah. “How is Erica?” he asked.
“She's awake, but she's very weak. She's putting all of her energy into getting better, and being angry at me. She's putting most of her energy into angry, I think. After what I did, I don't blame her.” Harry leaned in closer and tightened his hug. While he was there, he reasoned, it would be a shame to let the moment go to waste, and slowly moved his hand towards the plate of half-eaten cake.
***
Harry danced into the kitchen while Sarah limped closely behind. Erica looked up from her breakfast and managed a meek smile. She was still pale and very weak, but her breathing had returned to normal and her temperature stabilised. Harry hugged both of his parents in turn, then danced over to the breakfast table and seated himself opposite Erica. She gave him a little nudge under the table with her foot, which brought him out of his revelry just in time to see her slide a piece of cake towards him. They’d all been so very kind, she just wished the main currency of that kindness wasn’t always cake.
Rasmus entered from the lobby and sat at the table opposite the sisters and took a long sip from the cup of tea that had been awaiting his arrival. He shuddered, then casually moved the cup to the middle of the table with the back of his fingers. “I think we should have a little chat,” he said.
“About the lights, I imagine. We’re fine, by the way,” Erica replied.
“And I’m all the happier for it, Ms. Erica.”
“But you need to know.”
“How many were there?” he asked.
“Maybe a dozen, can’t say I remember much. You don’t seem surprised. What do you know? Is it about father?”
“I’m not sure it is,” he replied. “You still look exhausted. It might be best if you forget about it for now at least.”
Erica went to push her chair from the table, but the shooting pain that ran through her right shoulder decided otherwise. “Bloody hell,” she growled through gritted teeth.
“It's not broken,” Mr. Tirren said, turning from his task of washing the dishes.
“Indeed it is not, young lady. I suspect, however, you came very close to it. If you like, we can put that arm in a sling once you're taken care of your ablutions. But certainly no more manual labour for a few days” Rasmus added.
“Oh dear,” said Erica. “How will I ever cope?” Rasmus smiled and took another sip of disgusting tea. Erica took the path of least resistance and slid from the chair, forming a vague girl-like muddle of limbs below the breakfast table. Oh yes, this is much better, she thought. “Firstly,” she said from her puddle. “I'm going to go home and make myself presentable and, secondly, and this is the important part, Mr. Rasmus; I'm going to need you to not lie to me again. I’m also going to need help getting off the floor because this was a terrible idea.”
***
Sarah pushed open the door of their house and gently tried to nudge Erica down the small flight of stairs to the living room. “Not there, upstairs. Help me upstairs. If I take another rest, you're going to start feeding me cake again. I just know it.”
“I can’t move you as it is,” Sarah said. “Why would I feed you more cake?”
“The cheek of this one. Just get me to the stairs and I’ll crawl the rest of the way.” Erica entered the bedroom and shuffled over to her bed, her eyes drawn to the rug.
“Sarah? Why is the floor all wet?”
“Um,” said Sarah.
Erica opened her bedside draw and produced an ornate brass key. “I'll need you to help me back down in about half-an-hour, but first I really need to get changed out of this tent I appear to be wearing,” she said gesturing to the nightshirt. “Also, bring a mop for the floor. It's really wet.”
“Um,” said Sarah.
Erica looked down at her heavily-padded legs and put the pair of work trousers she’d picked out back in the draw. She looked as if she was going to bat an innings and didn't much fancy her chances of getting anything over them, let alone back off again if she'd succeeded. Instead, she picked out a very sensible and boring dress and painfully kicked off her boots. They were still sodden from the night before, so she decided the best place for them was out the window. She hoped they wouldn't hit anyone, but she neither had the strength to check nor apologise if they did. She just slung them underarm and hoped for the best. She'd get around to cleaning them later, or it'd rain, and if on the off-chance she did hit someone, they might be kind enough to take them home and clean them. After last night, the possibility of all these small victories overwhelmed her and she turned to go sit on the bed that wouldn’t try to kill her.
In the meantime, her sister had slunk into the room behind her with a mop and a large stack of paper towels. “But why ever is the floor wet?” she mumbled as she picked her way through the minefield of paper towels. Sarah hunched her shoulders to appear smaller than she already was and started mopping more quickly. Erica set the equally sensible and boring canvas shoes she’d picked out down on the bed and unceremoniously dropped herself down beside them. “I'm sleeping in this one tonight,” she said. She slipped on the shoes and stood up and immediately experienced the disequilibrium that comes from wearing flats after years of nothing but heels. She wavered over to the stairs and waved for Sarah to help her back down.
***
“Right,” Erica said. “We have some reading to do,” and slid the key into the workshop lock. Sarah groaned. The workshop spanned the entire height of the house, extending so far as the roof, and took up the entire back half. A single large chain hung down the centre of the workshop, down it were arrays of electric lights pointing in various directions and illuminating the numerous mezzanines and alcoves. The main floor was littered, in almost a maze-like fashion, with wooden crates of all sizes and row after row of filing cabinets filled with documentation relating to every one of their father's inventions. Their father was many things, but organised wasn't one of them, and his indexing system stood as testament to that. The bibliographical maelstrom wasn't limited to the workshop floor and extended far up onto the first floor and even parts of the second and third.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Sarah clambered atop the nearest crate and hopped her way across, shouting out directions to her sister below as she manoeuvred her way through the maze. In the corner of the workshop lay an area that Erica had reclaimed from the wilderness of storage mediums and half-finished inventions and that lay relatively clean and tidy at least by workshop standards. A desk had been cleared, and laid out upon it was a selection of tools and spare parts that she reasoned she would find herself needing sooner rather than later, but this almost always consisted of replacement parts for Mr. Tirren's oven. Erica pulled out a chair and gingerly sat down while Sarah sat on the edge of the desk beside her.
“This is going to take forever,” Sarah protested. She scuffed her boots on the side of the desk and watched as a satisfyingly large chunk of mud fell to the floor. Erica opened the desk draw and took out a small, old and tattered red leather-bound notebook. She slapped it on the table and unbound the mess of loose pages, some of which drifted to the floor like a flurry of snow This was the point where something was supposed to finally jump out and make sense, but it didn’t. The pages were still littered with a strange language she didn't understand. There were annotations here and there that she could understand perfectly, but they always descended into pictograms and symbology that bore no meaning no matter how hard she tried.
“We have two choices,” she said. “We either suddenly work out what any of this bloody means.” She pointed at the book in an almost accusatory fashion. “Or,” she let the word hang in the air long enough for Sarah to have a terrible thought. “We search as best as we can and see what we can find. I’m not sure how much help Mr. Rasmus is going to want to be, and I think it sensible to have some kind of back up. Even a terrible one.” Sarah slid off the desk and stepped in a chunk of mud.
“Goody. I'll go get some help.”
***
“I'm glad you brought the children,” Erica said. She tried to push her chair out from the desk and failed. Mr. Tirren chased Harry around one of the smaller crates. He wore a pair of black-rimmed glasses, each lens replaced by a spring with a plastic eyeball on the end. As he stepped from side-to-side around the crate, they wobbled and danced in all manner of directions. They made it very hard to see, but he was clearly having a very fun time of it. Erica rolled her own eyes to not quite the same degree and turned back to Mr. Rasmus.
“It seems very much to me that we are never going to find what it is we're looking for within a reasonable time frame. Not with my legs and their brains,” said Rasmus. He hunched over the desk and studiously examined the notebook.
“And we should give up right now? Is that it, Mr. Rasmus? Not on your life. Something is going on and you need to tell us. And if you don’t, I guess we just won’t leave. We’ll stay here forever and you’ll have to bring us food so we don’t starve.” Rasmus turned his head towards the Tirrens and smiled. Harry chased after his father with a small wooden gun that seemed to exist for no reason other than to fire brightly-coloured rubber balls at things, whether they liked it or not. Mr. Tirren evidently liked it a lot, his low rumbling laugh echoed through the maze of crates and sounded like a localised thunderstorm.
“I'm going back there, Mr. Rasmus.”
“We,” Sarah corrected.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Erica said. This was her code for we will absolutely not talk about it at all, so don’t you even try it. Rasmus sighed and pulled over a chair to join Erica at the desk.
“When I said I wasn’t sure, I meant it.” Rasmus took his spectacles off and set them down on the table next to him. He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger and without looking up, asked, “Do you remember the day you first came to the village?”
“I was three, Sarah wasn't born yet,” Erica said. “There's very little to remember. You were all so strange and so different, and oh so very kind. I don't remember much, but I remember the kindness. We’re not being ungrateful, we’re not. But we need to know. If it has anything to do with father, we have to know.”
“It was a different time back then. I'm not going to say it was a dark time, but in a way.” He pointed to the electric lights strung from the ceiling. “It was.” Rasmus put his spectacles back on and turned to Sarah. “A lifetime of reading by candlelight is, as I found, not very good for you.”
“Tell us about mother, Mr. Rasmus,” said Sarah. “Please.”
“Your mother was a beautiful soul and we all loved her dearly. She was, sadly, only with us for a short space of time, yet she lingers in our hearts as if it were a lifetime. Just look at her grave. It takes pride of place in the main square. We come out of our houses every morning, and there she is smiling at us. The fountain may not work now, but it's beautiful all the same, and a symbol of our everlasting affection. You know who made it, don't you?”
“Well, it must have been father,” replied Erica.
“Heavens no. You've seen his sketches, not an artistic bone in his body. No, it was Tobias. He's a much better craftsman than he is an artist, I will say, but poor Tobias took your mother's death harder than most. And believe me, we all took it exceptionally hard. Tobias poured everything he had into that fountain and never crafted again. We try to humour his change in artistic direction as best we can, but there is only so much to be said about brightly coloured squares.”
“Why didn’t anyone say?”
“He was happy not talking about it and we were happy not asking. There’s a lot to not feel proud about as far as how we handled things, but I digress. The first time we saw you, you were just there, stood in the middle of the square. All three of you, unusual in appearance but polite as any animal ever were. Sebastian asked for shelter in exchange for his imagineering skills. Of course, we’d never even heard of the word or dreamt of the things he could do. After your mother- Well, after your mother, Sebastian drowned himself in his work. He toiled almost day and night to build Mayflight into what you grew up in. Four years passed and, one moonless night, we saw the lights just as you did. They danced and enticed, but they whined and shrieked and pushed us back when we approached. Sebastian told us they were dangerous but he could make them go away, but it meant he, too, would have to go away. It's been five years since the lights vanished.”
A bright flash rose up from inside the crate maze. Mr. Tirren wobbled out, and without saying a word, took a small crate and brought it over to the table to use in absence of a chair. Harry staggered out after him, the wibbly-wobbly eyeballs on springs going in a hundred different directions as he chased the patches of light that moved across his vision. He was still having a great time and seemed almost oblivious to the conversation going on around him. He clambered up his papa’s back and perched himself on his shoulders.
“Short of tying your legs together,” Mr. Tirren mused. “You're going to do whatever you want anyway.”
“Even if, Mr. Tirren,” Erica said. She tried very hard to resist a smile. It hadn't been at all long since their trip to the woods, but she started to think her face had quite forgotten how to do anything other than hurt.
“The lights have come back, and we have to do something. If Sebastian said they’re dangerous, then they’re dangerous. It's just us now, no Sebastian. If they mean us harm,” Mr. Tirren said as he absent-mindedly squeezed Harry's leg. “We'll make them go away again. If you're going, I'm going. All family together.”
“All family together, Mr. Tirren,” Sarah repeated. At this point, she was almost as excited as she was terrified. Maybe they would find her father. With everyone working together, she deemed being able to do anything not an entirely unreasonable expectation.
“There's a prototype lantern here in the workshop,” Erica said. “It's heavy and rather cumbersome, and at full charge it'll only give us an hour or so of light, but we'll be able to see far better than if we rely on torchlight, though we'll need to at some point. I never could work out how to make the battery smaller, I'm afraid. The quality of my father's things tend to vary by a large amount.” She looked at the wibbly-wobbly glasses.
“We'll need weapons,” Rasmus said. “For defence of course,” he hastily clarified. “Bosco, I assume you can help with that?”
“I'll help, but I won't arm you. I won't make soldiers of children, I won't make one of the elderly.” Rasmus lightened the tone somewhat when he mock scoffed at the very notion of being called elderly. An overly-exaggerated ‘piffle’ would do the trick, he thought. Of course, he was elderly and he knew it. He didn't, however, have to admit it. “Weapons make you a danger, and danger makes you a target. I’m sorry, I hope you understand.”
“We understand, Mr. Tirren,” Sarah said. She didn't much like the idea of being armed herself and was absolutely in no hurry to have so much as a pointy stick placed in her hand.
“Well, then,” Rasmus said as he forced himself up from his chair. “I will work on getting us some provisions. We need warm clothes for a start, we can't have a repeat of last time.” He looked at Sarah. “Then, I guess we'll have to set to it.”
“Yes, I guess we will,” said Erica, finally having managed to push her chair out from the table with an accompanying ugly grunt. “But definitely tomorrow.”