Despite all the weird alchemy happening to Matt’s vision, the most surreal transformation occurred a month later. The twins and Zach were at the end of a day trip to Edinburgh. With an hour to spare before their return train to Largs, Em insisted the three of them check out a stained-glass window at the High Kirk, recently restored and glowing with colour.
After five minutes, Matt and Zach went to perch on the bollards outside.
‘Pretty much what I expected,’ signed Zach. ‘Coloured glass. Lots of it.’
Matt shrugged. ‘Em operates on a different universe of enthusiasm from most people.’
Two girls slowed to a stroll and stopped at the foot of the statue of Adam Smith, glancing at Matt and Zach with obvious interest. Matt rubbed his eyes. A headache had been taunting him all day. The overcast Edinburgh sky wasn’t helping.
He suddenly felt as if an opaque screen had slipped over his eyes, filtering out colour and light. Like a drunk, he wobbled off the bollard and fell on to the cobbles. For a horrible second he was in complete darkness.
Then a shrieking woman with no front teeth began smacking him repeatedly across the side of the head with a scuffed leather book. Instinctively covering his head with his arms, Matt scrambled to his feet and stared in shock at the mob of women surrounding him on the steps of the kirk. Every one of them looked as if they were cosplaying Downton Abbey kitchen maids. And they were all locked in what appeared to be hand-to-hand combat with a battalion of tin solders come to life.
‘Get aff me, ye bastard! Fore I beat the devil out of ye,’ screamed one of the women as a soldier grabbed her shoulders and threw her to the ground.
More than a little confused, Matt ducked, only to be thumped in the chest by a stool flying from the hands of a young woman with a filthy apron and spiky hair.
‘I’ll no be told by anyone what to say to my God!’
The women charged at the soldiers. Matt pivoted in a split second to avoid the clash. ‘What the—’.
‘In the name of God, ladies, stop this affront! Yer no animals! Put down your stools!’ yelled a man in a black frock coat with a white collar, loose at his neck.
The minister tried to speak again, but before the words escaped his lips, the woman with the spiky hair threw a heavy punch to his jaw, knocking him to the ground at the bottom of the church steps. Three other women whaled on him with stools. Matt found he couldn’t just stand there and watch. Diving into the fray, he grabbed the minister by the collar to drag him loose. At once he was rounded on by one of the attackers.
‘Get off me, you crazy woman!’
A rotten cabbage flew towards Matt’s head and he rolled on to the street… into the path of an oncoming cyclist.
The cyclist swerved and swore. ‘Take yer drinking inside, ya stupit bastard!’
Matt was dimly aware of Zach and Em rushing towards him.
‘Matt, what are you doing? Do you have some kind of death wish?’
Matt was having trouble focusing on the peaceful square. Where had the fight gone?
‘The women were attacking me,’ he managed.
Em zoned in on the two girls by the statue goggling at Matt. ‘Them?’ she said. ‘Why would they attack you?’
Matt let Zach help him to his feet. ‘Not them,’ he said helplessly. ‘The other women… The ones with…’ He tried to gesture ‘stools’ and ‘aprons’ but it wasn’t coming out right.
Em stared at him.
‘We need to go home,’ she said. ‘And talk.’
*
Twenty minutes after Matt’s skirmish, his eyes still hadn’t stopped watering, the sparking lights around the edges of his vision more insistent than ever. He had a headache sharp enough to crack an egg and the caffeine in the two Red Bulls he’d gulped wasn’t helping dull the pain.
‘Tell,’ Em commanded as the train pulled out of Waverley Station.
‘Don’t laugh,’ said Matt finally, ‘but I just experienced some kind of flashback outside St Giles.’
Minutes into Matt’s description of the fight scene, Em was Googling his description. With a snort of triumph, she passed her phone to Matt. Matt stared at a picture of a mob of women throwing stools and prayer books at soldiers in front of St Giles.
‘But… that’s it,’ he said in astonishment.
Em read the caption. ‘It’s a woodcut depicting a riot during the Bishops’ Wars that resulted in the signing of the National Covenant in 1638.’
Zach and Matt both looked blank.
‘The National Covenant,’ said Em, ‘was one of the first political documents proclaiming people had a right to worship what and how they wanted.’ She looked at her brother with awe. ‘You just witnessed a major historical event. Do you know how crazy that is?’
‘Whatever I witnessed,’ Matt said with feeling, ‘I’d be OK with not witnessing it again.’
‘We should tell Mum,’ said Em.
Matt fixed his sister with his best death stare. ‘Don’t you dare.’
‘I think it’s cool.’ Zach’s signing was more animated than it had been for a while. ‘A new angle on your abilities.’
‘Easy for you to say.’ Matt winced at the bruise flowering on his spine. ‘You don’t have a three-legged stool imprinted on your back.’
*
Although Em had never experienced a visual flashback like Matt, her abilities were developing in their own way.
A few months earlier, she had been in Edinburgh with her mum, shopping. As they wandered in the Grassmarket and turned into a vaulted passageway to an antique store, Em had been violently sick without warning. No time for cupping her hands to her mouth, or grabbing a tissue, or even rushing to the gutter – just a sudden wave of revulsion and then a projectile of vomit on to the stone steps. A couple of tourists travelling in the opposite direction stopped, eyes wide in horror, then backed away.
Em’s pulse was racing. Her stomach felt like jelly, but the nausea had gone by the time she and her mother had sat themselves at a nearby café, where Sandie bought two bottles of water and a Mars bar.
‘Whoa,’ said Em, sipping the water. ‘I don’t know what just happened.’
‘Em,’ Sandie began, ‘I know that you and Zach are close. Really close.’ She cleared her throat. ‘And I… well… do you think…’
Em almost spat the water out. ‘Mum! Awkward. I’m not pregnant!’
Sandie leaned back on the chair, exhaling audibly. ‘OK, OK. But you know if you are, you know, having sex, I hope you’re—’
‘Mum, stop,’ said Em, wincing. ‘I know. Birth control. Protection. Got it. It’s Lecture Number Four.’
Sandie looked horrified. ‘You’ve numbered my… my advice? What’s Number One?’
‘Depends. My Number One, or Matt and Zach’s?’
‘Good God, you’ve even categorized them.’ Sandie bit off a chunk of the chocolate bar. ‘OK. Give me your Number One.’
‘Boys always want to touch what they don’t have,’ Em said, mimicking Sandie’s serious voice. The one she usually heard before going out in Seaport on a Saturday night.
Sandie burst into laughter.
‘Well, it’s true. You can thank my mother for that. That was her only contribution to my sex education. So, if you’re not pregnant—’
‘Muuum!’
‘—then maybe it has something to do with your abilities? No one is sick like that for no reason.’
Later that evening, they had done a little research in the Guardian archives, delving into Edinburgh’s general history. They learned that many of the passageways, or pends, in Old Town had been restored using cobbles from where the Old Tollbooth had once stood: a place where witches and sorcerers were tortured and killed in the eighteenth century.
It looked like Em and Matt’s burgeoning talents were continuing to complement each other. While Matt might see events in situ, Em sensed them, as if the places themselves spoke to her. She and her brother were still a team.
The thought comforted her more than she could say.