Angel and Bavar by Amy Wilson

Author:Amy Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

Bavar

I used to play hide-and-seek in these halls. My father would chase me, roaring, until I darted off, and then I’d scrabble for the right place, and he’d stalk the carpeted floors, hollering at every doorway. It was our favorite game, though I’m not sure it was really a fair one. The winner was usually whoever managed to get the ancestors on their side, and because I was smaller and less forbidding, it was usually me. They’d all start shouting, sending echoes through the house to confuse him, giving him false starts and misinformation until he headed off in the wrong direction, while I pressed myself in tight behind a curtain, or crouched behind a chest. It would always take him ages to find me. When I was looking, though, that was different. They’d spy on him for me and show me the way, whispering me along to wherever he was hiding. He always acted like he was angry about it, crying out at them, calling them traitors and threatening to hold a bonfire with their portraits. But I knew he wasn’t angry really—it was all just part of the game.

Now that I think about it, I wonder how I never knew there was a door with a rift behind it. Surely I’d have noticed. Or at least he’d have stopped me getting anywhere near it. But the house is funny like that; it stretches and contracts, and even familiar passageways seem to take on new twists and turns, depending on the time of day, or the mood you’re in. And I haven’t been up here for a long time. The corridors are dark and ghostly with white sheets. Eva has shut off entire parts of the house because we don’t need them. We used to need them, when my parents held their parties. There were always people here. And then the mistake happened: they had neglected the barrier, one of the raksasa escaped, and then they fled, leaving me with Eva and Sal, and overnight everything changed.

“It’s so creepy,” breathes Angel now, as we step into another dark, empty room, the windows obscured by wooden shutters, cobwebs trailing from the door frame. Has there ever, in the history of this house, been anyone like this here? She’s so determined. She can’t possibly understand what all this means, and yet she seems so sure. She darts ahead of me like a small, bright moth, examining every dark corner, fingering every wall hanging as though she might find the answers there, while I just flounder along behind her, fighting with all my doubts.

It could be the biggest mistake of all time, letting her in on it all like this. The figures in the portraits are very dubious about the whole thing, up here. They’ve been in the shadows for so long, they’re startled, their eyes blinking, as if someone just opened the curtains and they’re being blinded by the sun.

Or by a girl, whose name just happens to be Angel.

She stops

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