Voices in the Dark by Catherine Banner

been at the Barones’ shop or that Michael had not told me. We walked on in silence, along the alley beside the Five Stars Inn. The wind cut sharply, as though it was already winter. I pulled my jacket tighter around my shoulders. It was an old leather jacket of Leo’s, with his cigarette burns in the sleeves.
    ‘I don’t want to leave,’ said Michael. ‘But I don’t want to stay if things get as bad as they are supposed to.’
    ‘Where would you go?’ I said.
    ‘South.’
    ‘Where south?’
    ‘I don’t know, Anselm.’ The exasperation was creeping back into his voice. I kept quiet and waited for him to continue of his own accord. ‘The fact is,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to live in a country ruled by the Imperial Order. And they wouldn’t want me. So maybe it would be best just to get the hell out of here.’
    ‘But, Michael—’
    He shook his head then. ‘Let’s not talk about it,’ he said. ‘It might not even happen.’
    He had a way of dismissing a matter just when you reached the heart of it, and it exasperated me, but I knew from experience that I could do nothing about it. We ran the last few streets to the Royal Gardens. They were almostdeserted tonight. A few boys our age were throwing stones into the empty fountain. A couple of children were dodging in and out of the old maze. Hardly anything remained of it now except a few overgrown hedges. The government had never been able to afford to restore the gardens. We took the least weed-choked path to the far fence, behind which an old house stood. It was where we always came to get away from Trader’s Row.
    The house had been boarded ever since I could remember, and red signs warned trespassers away. Michael and I knew how to get under the barbed wire, and when we were younger, we made a den in the broken carriage that stood in front of the doors and spent every waking hour of one summer there. But we did not go inside tonight. I watched the starlings settling in the pine trees on the other side of the fence, and through the branches, I saw the lights of the castle, appearing then vanishing again as the wind moved the trees.
    ‘Look,’ said Michael suddenly, making me start.
    ‘What?’ I said.
    ‘I thought I saw a light. Look … there.’
    ‘What, in the castle?’
    ‘No. In the house. The first floor.’
    We both stared at the house, but no light came again. ‘Where?’ I said. ‘Tell me which window.’
    ‘It was somewhere near the middle.’
    The darkness around us was suddenly charged with energy. When we were children, we had firmly believed the house was haunted; that was part of the attraction of the shut-away world on the other side of the fence. And now those old fears stirred in my mind and made me stop breathing as I stared at it. But no light shone from thewindows, though we watched in silence for several minutes.
    ‘Maybe I imagined it,’ said Michael eventually. ‘Come on, let’s go home.’
    By the time I got in, the argument had burned itself out, and my grandmother was leaving. My mother was sweeping up the broken glass from the floor.
    ‘Let me do that,’ said Leo. As he took the dustpan and brush from her, I saw his fingers rest against hers for a moment.
    ‘I see
you’ve
decided to grace us with your presence,’ my grandmother remarked as she crossly swept past me at the door. ‘I will see you all next week.’
    We listened to her heeled shoes vanishing along the street. ‘Jasmine wanted to speak to you,’ my mother said as I took off my jacket.
    ‘What about?’
    ‘I don’t know. She told me to send you upstairs. I think she wants some help with her newspaper cuttings.’ My mother smiled tiredly and touched my arm as I went past her up the stairs. I knew it was a kind of apology for my grandmother.
    Jasmine was sitting up in bed, cutting up a newspaper with my mother’s dressmaking scissors. ‘Anselm, help me cut along the edges,’ she said. ‘I can never do it right.’
    ‘Is that what you