“Oh Lord, are you all right?” said one of the men. “Can we help at all?”
The men were standing at the edge of the pathway, looking down at him. The one who had spoken was closest. He had an educated voice, what Jackson would call posh, the vowels round and lugubrious as in a play by Shakespeare. He sounded nothing like Jackson or Pullen, which ought to have been reassuring but for some reason was not. With Jackson you knew the worst you would get was a good kicking. This man seemed more dangerous than that, though how and why that should be remained unclear.
“I’m fine,” Michael said. He pulled himself to his feet, meaning to get away immediately and as quickly as possible. The other man grabbed him by the arm.
“Oh look, it’s the little chess boy,” he said, peering at Michael down his elongated nose. “We were looking for you.” He moved to one side slightly, drenching himself in light from a nearby streetlamp. He wore a long dark coat, knee-high lace-up boots with diamanté buckles. His face was thin and pale, and his voice was terrifying, with the same knife-edge of sarcasm teachers used when they were about to give you detention. Only it was worse somehow even than that, because it was a voice he knew.
The man was Aeneas Lascombe, from The Puppeteer.
“Eh, niño,” said Lascombe’s companion. “You hurt?”
He had a thick Spanish accent and Michael felt outraged, imagining that the man was making fun of Michael’s own father. Then he got a proper look at him and realised he had been mistaken. The man, smaller and wirier than Lascombe but no less awful, was Gara Brion, the Guanche restaurant owner in American Star. He was wearing his spider-god costume, the same yellow cloak and papier-mâché mask he had worn for the island fiesta scene. As Michael watched he performed an extravagant cartwheel across the grass, the yellow cloak billowing in the twilight like an amber sail.
Aeneas Lascombe still had Michael by the arm. His grip was not painful exactly but it was firm enough to make Michael feel he could not escape it. He took a step backwards, hoping Lascombe would let go and after a moment he did, the pale fingers gliding off him, cutting the silken twilight like nacreous knives. They left trails of whitish light behind them, a phosphorescent glimmer that was gone almost before Michael realised it was there.
“I need to get home,” Michael said. His lips felt numb. He listened to his own words with a kind of distant interest, as if they were part of a programme on the radio.
“That’s perfectly all right,” said Lascombe. “We weren’t intending to detain you. Only we have something of yours, I believe? We thought you might need it.”
He reached inside his coat and drew out a small package. It was the brown paper bag he had left behind at the flat, the bag that contained the chess set and the books. In spite of his terror Michael found himself reaching for it. The paper crackled, and Michael could feel the hard wooden edge of the box that held the chess pieces. The box was beautifully carved, and opened flat to make a chessboard.
“You should take better care of your things. Especially presents. Presents are beneficence in physical form. They should be treated with respect.”
“Yes, I know.” Michael found he could no longer think straight – he was simply reacting to each new and terrible moment as it arrived. Reason told him these men must be actors, that this was some sort of masquerade, but at the same time Michael knew that this was not so. These people were the characters, the people Angel Garcia and Ludo Henry who played them in the movies had represented. Knowing that Aeneas Lascombe and Gara Brion were imaginary made no difference – Michael knew it was the truth. The inside of his head felt weightless, as if he might float up from the ground at any minute, drift away across the heath and into the night.
“If our business is concluded, we really must fly,” Lascombe said. “It’s a shame we can’t stay and chat.” He folded his arms across his chest and inclined his head. “Think about where you’re headed, won’t you? You might not realise it yet, but success – fame – brings in its wake its own cruel and special form of captivity.” He turned his eyes away from Michael then spread his arms, seeming to take in the whole heath, the coloured lights burning from the bars and restaurants at its fringes, the tall spire of All Saints’ Church that was Blackheath’s main landmark. “I’ll wager there’s not one player or scholar or prodigy that does not at some hour of the day or night wish for the harlequin life of the varmint, the abject failure, the vagabond.” Lascombe grinned, showing the gold-capped tooth Michael remembered so well from the film. “Of course, travelling with the circus I can have both.”
Gara Brion laughed like a loon, gathering his spider cloak closely around him then unfurling it like a bat’s wings. He gave a deep bow, an illusionist accepting his applause, then threw something on the grass. Michael saw it was a pair of shoes, Colin Wilkes’s tatty Adidas trainers. The lace of the left shoe was missing. Michael bent down to pick them up, then realised he already had his hands full with the chess set and the books.
“I wouldn’t bother if I were you,” Lascombe said. “He doesn’t need them. Not any more.” His voice had grown fainter, Michael realised. By the time he turned back towards them, they were already gone.
Michael ran. He didn’t stop until he reached the edge of the heath, the bright arcs of car headlamps moving slowly along Shooter’s Hill Road. He crossed at the lights then turned, looking back the way he had come. Beyond the immediate glare of the lights the heath was dark and inscrutable, a hole in the luminous fabric of the world.
A bus was just stopping. Michael leaped on to it, swiped his Oyster card and collapsed into a seat towards the rear. The back of his throat was burning and tasted of iron. He was still breathing hard, as if his body had not yet caught up with the fact that it was now at rest. He pressed his face to the window, shielding his eyes against the reflection. He saw the road, and more cars, the lights of Greenwich. Already the details of his encounter with Lascombe were beginning to become confused inside his mind. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. He stayed that way until he arrived at his stop. He got off the bus, looked both ways along Trafalgar Road. There were plenty of people about. It was Saturday, Michael remembered. Greenwich on a Saturday night.
I won’t see them now, Michael thought. That kind of stuff only happens when you’re by yourself. That’s horror movie rules.
He realised he hadn’t thought about the chess tournament in almost an hour. He walked the short distance to his home. His mother opened the door as he came up the path.
“Where on earth have you been? The headmaster phoned. We’ve been worried.”
“I’m not a kid, Mum.”
“You’re thirteen years old, Michael. That means you’re not an adult yet either. You might at least have switched on your phone.”
“You have to switch it off. It’s a chess tournament.”
“I meant afterwards.”
Michael felt bad. He had forgotten that the phone was off. It had never occurred to him to switch it back on again.
His mother was wearing skinny jeans and one of his father’s plaid shirts. Michael thought she looked good whatever she wore. Her name was Micaela. Michael had been named after her.