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@n o s t r a d a m u s location_city
You can read my first chapter here if you wish:
Looking for advice on my second chapter. Namely, is it too dark or is it too vague? The story is aimed at 9-14 year olds so I want to strike a balance of accurately depicting parental abuse/neglect (a lived experience of mine) without traumatizing a younger reader by being too graphic. Also, before you ask, yes it is meant to be a little bit gay and also it has not been fully proofread.
Any thoughts are welcome, good or bad.
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CHAPTER 2 - MADAME DUBOIS AND HER INEFFABLE BARGAIN
At night sometimes, Angus would wake to a horrible screeching sound coming from the roof. Claws would scrape across the corrugated tin and loud banging would follow. He would always get up to investigate, grabbing the headlamp from his bedside table and shaking out his boots by the front door before putting them onto bare feet in case a spider had crawled into them. He would creep outside around the veranda and into the back of the yard on the other side of his bedroom wall, being careful to close the front door lightly so he wouldn’t wake up his mother - who would surely yell at him for being awake so late. And sure enough, when he turned on his headlamp and stood back so he could see the roof, two pairs of shiny possum eyes would stare back at him. They would pause their fighting to look straight through him.
During the day, Angus thought possums were cute. All soft brown fur and little button noses. They would gladly reach out their little paws to accept the browned cut up bananas from his school lunch that he didn’t want to eat. But at night, he understood why people used to make coats out of them. They could be real pests.
And something about staring into the glowing eyes of a noisy brushtail possum in the dead of night instead of dreaming sweet dreams in his bed reminded Angus of this very situation for some reason. The comparison floated around his head bumping into the edges of his skull like a DVD player screen saver as he desperately tried to focus on what the fortune teller was saying, but instead he stared into her painted-on eyes. Frozen.
She was going on and on about something that she seemed to think he would be thrilled about but that in reality he was having a hard time conceptualising.
It had started like a fairytale. “Once upon a time there was a land of stories, myth and magic. Where birds soared, and deer frolicked, and trees swayed in the breeze. And the people of this land lived in harmony with it all until a blue scourge tore through the enthral…
Man turned their backs on the land. Eaten up by purblind delights and asinine slights and an imaginary twinkle in the eye. They left the birds to drop, and the deer to stop, and the trees to be felled for the fire. But hope remains for harmony. A boy, a king, a sage. Called to the land and to the skies, to sweep through blue’s dismay.”
The fortune teller had paused then and said: “And that boy is you.”
She had kept going but that was right around the time that Angus had begun to tune her out. His thoughts instead turning to possums. What she was saying was too impossible for him to believe, and so he simply ignored her.
What credence could this talking box’s words hold? There was no real magic or other dimensions. She was about five years too late if she wanted him to believe that. He was twelve, not a little kid. His belief in dragons and fairies and wizards had long since departed him.
And besides, the pieces of information he did manage to grasp at seemed utterly ridiculous. That he would be some kind of king, that people would love him and look after him and admire him, and that he would be some kind of bastion of hope. It was too good to be true.
By the time he had managed to banish the possum scraping across the tin roof that was his brain, she had finished speaking and been silent for about five minutes.
Angus gathered that she had ended on a question and was waiting for him to answer. So he did.
“…No?”
“No? Don’t you want glory? Or magic? Or power? To be a god among men?”
Angus shrugged, “Not particularly, no. Especially if it’s offered by a talking box”
The fortune teller considered this in her stilted mechanical way, wringing her robotic hands with a whir and a click. She stayed very quiet for a few moments, Angus could hear the feet of one of his classmates shuffling along on the ugly carpet not too far off.
She seemed to come to a decision as she spoke once again, “I didn’t want it to be this way deary. I really didn’t. But there’s a bit I left out.”
“You must give me the token and you must leave, or great peril will befall this land. Your very presence is a sinkhole of doom and destruction and the longer you stay here the more will be sucked in. Just think of those in your life now, how many have been worse off for knowing you. Burdened by your presence.”
That made Angus pause. He didn’t care so much about the magic and the fantasy, they would be nice to have that was sure. Nor did he really believe he was capable of dooming an entire planet by simply existing. But she was right about something, he thought. There were people who were worse off for knowing him.
His mother for one. Who did nothing but fret and pull her own hair out over his antics. Caspar for another, who had glared and sulked the entire bus ride simply because Angus avoided and ignored him. Even his dad had gotten fed up with him and left, from what he could remember of him. If Angus hadn’t been the reason, he would have taken him with him when he had run off.
The more he thought about it the more examples he found. His teachers, his classmates, his grandparents, that one boy he had met when he and his mum had gone on holidays to the beach, the man who worked behind the counter at the general store whose lollies Angus was always stealing, possibly even the sheep who roamed about in the paddocks he mucked around in.
What if he got worse? It was possible. “What happens if I stay?”
She clicked, when he said that. “If you stay, you will become a captain of industry. A businessman, rich and powerful. You will start at the bottom, a junior clerk but eventually you will rise. Lifted by those blinded by power and money, who see a glimmer of the good you could do elsewhere. You will build a business ever present in the hearts and homes of those who do not know better than to be wary. But the business you deal in will destroy everything it touches, eating away at those who stand beneath it. The work you do will cause disasters. Floods, fires, hurricanes. The world will crumble in on itself trying to fill up your pockets with the thing that matters least. And it will hurt those you love most in the world worst of all”
She paused.
“And you cannot outrun your fate. It is known in this world and the Otherworld. The harder you push against it, the harder it will shove you in retaliation. It will catch up to you if you decide to stay or go. It is your choice whether you would like to choose a world where your fate will do good or do harm.”
Angus did want to do good. He didn’t want to become this evil monster she was telling him he would be.
“But choose you must. Forever. Once you choose one path you must stay on it and you can never look back. If you choose this world, then you may never enter the magical realm again. If you choose the Otherworld, the door will seal behind you never to reopen.”
He knew he was smart enough to accomplish what she said, or at least, some of his teachers told him so. It was their go to every time he got in trouble for something, ‘You’re a smart boy Angus but…’. That sentence never ended well. But you can’t interrupt the class to talk about whatever you want. But you can’t spray paint the sheep blue. But you can’t be starting fights like this.
Angus mostly managed to get out of those ‘buts’ though. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“I tell fortunes. Ask me something, and I will tell you,”
Angus considered this, trying to figure out what he wanted to know. But only one question came to mind, one ‘but’ he knew he may never get out of, “Will I even be friends with Caspar again?”
She answered swiftly and matter-of-factly, “You were never friends with Caspar to begin with. He will come to you and you will make amends. However, if you choose to stay, there will be consequences that will separate you forever.”
They were never friends to begin with.
That buried itself like a knife in his chest and raked down his torso, tearing out his innards and leaving them bare for the world to see. Because it was true. He didn’t want to admit it but it was. He knew deep down that they were closer, that’s why it had hurt so much to ignore him all summer holidays. Could they really be separated forever?
Belief had begun to spark in him, and in his mind he furiously tried to dampen the embers it created.
It wouldn’t cost him anything in theory. She could be lying. But she was a robot moving on its own, how could she not know something he didn’t?
It was a knot, this problem, and he could unravel it if he thought through it hard enough. If he tugged on the cords of the logic to see where they looped under one another.
He tugged and tugged and tugged. What if he could prevent anything bad happening now that he knew the truth? No, it was predetermined she had said. What if he could come back here after he had done all that good somewhere else? No, there was no way back she had said. What if?
What if he just sliced the knot open like Alexander the Great. He tried to figure it out, but his mind wandered as it had a tendency to do and he couldn’t focus on what string of the knot of the problem he was even supposed to tug at.
“Exchange your life in this world for a life in another. If you remain you will become the greatest threat humanity will ever know, destruction will take form at your very fingertips. Cities will burn, great floods will descend upon the earth, mothers will grieve their children, and fathers will cry themselves to sleep in what is left of their beds….
…You will destroy this place. You will gather immense power and it will be misused here. I know of a place where this power is needed. You will be safe and you will be happy, as will everyone you have ever known and ever loved. For they will no longer know you.”
The fortune teller smiled, “All you must do is give me the token.”
Angus stood stiffly, dread seeping into his bones. He couldn’t move. The fortune teller had stopped moving too, and the light in her box had gone out. It seemed she had said her piece and now it was up to him to decide. He had to ask more questions. Or, at the very least, get his 20c back.
Angus began to bang on the glass to try and get the animatronic to start up again.
“Hey lady!”
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Hey lady!”
“What’re you doing?” Said a voice. Angus turned.
Caspar glared at him, hands on hips. The bookshelf door behind him lay wide open. It was just the two of them, there was no hiding from Caspar this time.
“I-um,”
“You’re gonna get in trouble being back here,”
“So are you,” Angus said.
Caspar screwed up his face, “Nah. I never get in trouble. You do though,”
Angus stood. Whenever he saw Caspar everything in his chest felt tight. He couldn’t swallow, he couldn’t breathe.
Angus’ mother said that what he felt was remorse or guilt or regret. But it didn’t feel that way to him. When he felt remorse or guilt or regret, he felt it in his bones. His whole body felt like it had been filled up with cement. This was different. And he couldn’t figure out what it was.
Looking at Caspar made him want to tear his insides open so he could show him he wasn’t bad. Angus had an inkling that Caspar knew this. That it wasn’t his fault, the way things had turned out. He wasn’t bad.
But instead Caspar continued along with the charade that Angus knew he didn’t believe.
“Why the hell do you keep ignoring me?”
“I, um… ah,” Angus stalled, looking for some kind of escape route to the conversation he had been avoiding for months now. But there was no way out, Capsar had him cornered and was blocking the only physical way out by leaning up against the doorway where he couldn’t see the fortune teller.
But Angus wasn’t worried about him seeing her at all. Both because it may prompt Caspar to talk about anything other than the thing he was dreading and because he had almost completely forgotten it was there at all. He was too preoccupied by his old friend and what on earth he was supposed to say.
Angus didn’t want to tell him the truth. He knew it would get him into a world of trouble. It was embarrassing and lame and his mother said there would be consequences.
His brain was overheating like a computer with too many tabs open. There were so many avenues of different excuses he could take. Some would let Caspar down gently, some would string him along to buy Angus another month or two, some were so cruel that he feared if he said them aloud nobody would ever want to be his friend again for as long as he was alive.
But the pressure of Caspar’s expectant gaze was so overwhelming and intense that he blurted the only excuse that he thought wouldn’t require any kind of follow up.
“I just don’t want to be friends with you anymore! Get over it!”
It was harsh and mean but it would do the trick, he hoped.
“Why?” said Caspar.
Angus stared up into his clear blue eyes. Capsar wouldn’t let up that easy. It was stupid to think that he would.
“I just don’t want to.”
“Really?”
“No.”
“No, you want to be friends?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Do I?”
“Yes!”
“Yes, you want to be friends?”
“No! I mean, yes. I mean! No I don’t want to be friends, and yes I really mean it. Stop making it harder than it has to be!”
“Why should it be hard for you to stop being friends with me if you don’t want to be in the first place?”
Ugh! Angus thought, he could be so frustrating when he wanted to be. He knew it would be hard but this was brutal. Caspar couldn’t know, his mother said so and she said so because she knew just as well as Angus how persistent Caspar could be about things.
The sounds of her yelling and chastising fueled his scramble to find a reason other than the real one.
Angus tried desperately to find another way to shut him down. But his thoughts were paddling in Caspar’s blue eyes. Or well drowning, more accurately. He couldn’t tell the truth, his mother would kill him. He couldn’t. He couldn’t. He couldn’t.
He had to keep his mouth shut. Everything would be okay if he kept his mouth shut.
His mother said it would get him into so much trouble if he said anything. That he might be sent away. He didn’t understand why but the fortune teller's warning seemed related somehow. There was something that was his fault. Even if he didn’t know what it was he knew it was there. Some debt, some cosmic karmic payment.
It was the reason why he did stupid things sometimes and why he was always in trouble for something and why everyone always seemed to have it out for him. And if he told Caspar why they couldn’t be friends, he was also telling him about the debt.
But the other boy just stared through him. Unblinking and unknowing. Caspar could see the gears turning in Angus’ head. They were friends after all. He knew there was something unsaid. Some truth.
Caspar knelt, and sat cross legged in the doorway of the room. He stared at Angus amongst the odd jars and cobwebs.
“Tell me the truth. I’m your friend. Why won’t you be mine?”
The gears turning in Angus’ head slowed and then stopped. He didn’t want to lie.
“It’s less of a won’t and more of a can’t.” He sighed, “It’s embarrassing but, my mum says I’m not allowed to be friends with you anymore.”
He felt awful. He hated himself. He would be in so much trouble when he got home.
“Why not? What did I ever do to her!?” Caspar exclaimed.
But Angus shushed him, with a hand. He didn’t want to do it, to say it. But he physically couldn’t hold it in anymore. He had all summer long. He had barely gone outside, barely left his room. In fear that he would say something wrong or something stupid.
Especially to somebody who could do something about it.
Shame bubbled through him, like acid devouring his flesh and his bones. “It’s not cause of you. It’s cause of your mum. Mine’s worried she’ll say something to somebody that’ll get me in serious trouble. Like sent away in trouble.”
“My mum? What have you done in front of my mum that would get you sent away?”
“You just-, my mum says you talk too much. That you’ll say the wrong thing to her about me one day and it’ll get me sent away. I don’t know what.”
“Like what?”
Angus didn’t want to look at him. He sounded so hurt.
Angus used the example his mum had given him. “Like how you told her about the time my mum locked me out of the house overnight for stealing lollies from the milkbar and I had to sleep in the toolshed with all of the spiders in. Or the time she made me wash my mouth out with soap after I said something nasty to her about dad leaving. Or the time I had to weed all four acres of the property in the rain over Easter break because I got a detention for starting a fight with one of the older boys,”
He paused, “Mum’s just worried that maybe one day you’ll tell your mum about something I’ve gotten in trouble for that’s really bad.”
The other looked so sad then. Angus knew he could see something Angus couldn’t. He hated that about him. That Caspar wasn’t necessarily smarter than him per say, but wiser. More in tune with his environment. Everything was connected somehow, in Caspar’s head. Some web Angus couldn’t comprehend. Unlike his friend, he bumped into the corners and aimlessly drifted from point to point of this web of the world, unable to see the threads that connected each to the other.
“What else is she worried I’ll say?”
He was being careful now, in his tone. Angus could feel him cajoling him, trying to pull one of those elusive threads of existence. Trying to get him to say more than he cared to.
“It doesn’t matter. I just can’t be friends with you for a while,”
Caspar looked disappointed, it broke Angus’s heart to see him so. To see the clear skies of his eyes cloud over with contemplation.
“Maybe, when I stop getting in so much trouble, then we can be friends,” He offered. “Just not right now. My mum is mad enough at me. Please don’t say anything, to your’s or mine. Please just pretend like we’re not friends for a little bit?”
“Angus, I can’t.”
Caspar stood. “I can’t pretend like you didn’t just say that.”
Angus felt like he’d been stabbed. His chest seized. His hands grew clammy. Oh god, his mother would kill him. He would have to weed the property, or wash his own mouth out with soap, or clean all of the spiders out of the toolshed. He would be sent away.
“My mum has been worried about you. She was right to be.”
“No!” Angus panicked, “It’s fine. I just have to be good. Please don’t say anything. All I have to do is be good, and then I won’t be sent away and we can be friends again. I thought you wanted to be friends again?”
“We never stopped being friends. That doesn’t stop now,”
Angus felt so awful then. There was something in him clawing up his insides. His eyes stung, his throat bobbed, his skin crawled with the feet of a thousand bugs. He wanted to scrape himself clean of them. Till he was red and raw.
“If you’re my friend, you won’t say anything. Or I’ll never tell you anything ever again.” The words can out of him wrong and strained. He was crying, he realised.
Sobbing, he realised.
He wiped at his face frantically to make himself stop. Caspar was making a horrible face, like pity, like heartbreak. He would be in so much trouble if he said anything to anyone.
“Go away.”
“I-”
“Go away!”
Caspar held up his hands. “I’ll give you a minute,” he said and backed away. Angus didn’t want him to go. He was his only friend. But he didn’t want him to stay either.
The second Angus was alone and Caspar far enough away he could no longer see him through the shelves and shelves of oddities, a new wave crashed over him. Dread.
What if Caspar said something to his mum, or Angus’ mum, or worse what if he said something to a teacher? Oh god. Oh god. He was screwed. He was screwed. Why couldn’t he just keep his mouth shut like he was supposed to? All he had needed to do was just tell Caspar they couldn’t be friends anymore, but he just couldn’t.
He had ruined everything.
How could he go home? He would have to tell his mum the truth. There was no way he could keep this secret from her. She, just like Caspar, could see things he couldn’t. And she would definitely be able to see the guilt wafting off him when he walked through the door. She would send him away. His mother would have no other choice.
Sure this wasn’t as outwardly bad as stealing lollies or starting fights. But it was still bad. Angus’ mother had given him a chance to be better, all he had to do was keep his mouth shut. A simple task.
A simple task he had failed at. Everything was screwed!
What was he going to do? What could he say to her? How could he get out of this hole he had just dug himself?
Then, all of a sudden he remembered he had something up his sleeve. Or rather. In his pocket.
It struck him then. He didn’t have to go home, to his mother. He had an escape route. He wouldn’t be in trouble. He couldn’t be sent away. If he was no longer here. If he was somewhere else in another world.
A world where he could start over. A world where he could be good.
No more arguments or teachers or Caspar. A world where nobody knew who he was or the trouble he had just caused. A world where he was free.
“I’ve made a choice!” He announced, wiping at dried tears.
Angus crouched down on the velvety cloth and stared up at the machine.
“Go on then, dear,” said Madame Dubois. She had been frozen this whole time, but the promise of the token exchanged seemed to have awakened her. Mechanical blinking and dead eyed gaze resumed. She was as real now as she had been dead a moment ago.
Angus pushed the token through the slot and a key came out the bottom.
It was little and gold and old fashioned. And it looked like it would fit right in to a golden door at the back of the machine, behind the mass of gears and cogs.
He stuck his head in, trying to gauge if his shoulders would even fit through the small opening. He shifted, stuck his arm in and tried to reach the door at the back. Straining and trying to avoid getting caught on anything, Angus fumbled to reach the keyhole. He gripped the edge of the opening and reached as far as he could. The key caught in something. Angus turned it, then toppled over backwards as the door to the other world opened.
The Otherworld. There was a passage, he could see, that ebbed and glowed red and blue. It seemed to move and flow like the intestines of some massive beast.
“Make haste.” Said the fortune teller.
And indeed he would have to. Angus could hear Caspar coming back. His muffled footsteps rung out as ticks from a watch. Thock, thock, thock.
It was his only option, Angus thought, the only way everybody else could be free of the troubles he caused them. His mum, his teachers, his only friend.
He tucked his elbows in and crawled through the gears.
The metal nipped and scraped at his skin, caught on his t-shirt and his sneaker laces. He narrowly missed smashing the top of his head into some kind of propellor blade and crawled to the other door. Both the door to the outside world and the door to the Otherworld closed behind him as he reached the tunnel. Portal.
He was alone now. In the ebbing stretch.
The walls warped and made strange synth-like noises. Angus crawled forward on his hands and knees as the tunnel shifted red then blue then red then blue. Buzz, buzz, buzz.
This was good. He was doing good. This would be a new beginning.
He would be good this time. Virtuous. He wouldn’t steal or fight or hurt anybody. And nobody would know that he had.
The tunnel stretched longer and longer as he crawled. Angus closed his eyes. He would be good. He would be good. He would be good.
He could feel the colours change around him even with his eyes closed. The ground underneath him pulsed and pulsed and pulsed. Red, blue, red, blue.
Until suddenly he put a hand down into nothingness. And then, he was falling.