Annie Dupree Rush’s bulging journal resembled the walls Rémy had seen when he had burst into her room the day she died. Pulling it carefully from its padded bag as he stood alone at a London post-office box opened by the small key she’d slipped over his neck. Photos, articles torn from magazines and scribbled sketches had fallen from the journal’s pages when he opened it up for the very first time. Sheet music, riffs and choruses from songs, family trees and timelines, phrases from concertos and song cycles – everything was stuffed between its word-packed pages. And everywhere, the scrawled phrase musica vivificat mortuos, with furious underlines.
Music gives life to the dead.
Rémy took the journal from its hiding place inside the lining of his guitar case and placed it on the table at the church for Vaughn, Matt and Em to see.
‘The man… the thing that murdered my mom and my Tia Rosa called himself Don Grigori. This is what he was looking for.’
Vaughn whistled. ‘This is a lot of research,’ he said. ‘You say you’d never seen it before you took it from that locker?’
‘I saw her writing in it sometimes when I’d come home from school, but she’d hide it as soon as I walked in the door,’ Rémy said. ‘I thought it was just a diary, a way for her to make sense of the voices, the melodies and the strange noises in her head. Every Christmas I’d buy her a new one, and every Christmas she’d thank me and then put it in a drawer and never use it. I think she was afraid that if she began anew, she’d lose track of what she’d already discovered. It was as if her journal was holding her thoughts in place.’
Vaughn pulled a colour printout from among the pages. It showed a double portrait of two wealthy men, one sitting and one standing. The man on the left was tall and long-limbed, his arm and what remained of his fingers draped gracefully over the back of a mahogany throne chair. The seated man was red-faced and well fed, clothed in rich robes.
Rémy saw Em and Matt exchange a glance.
Vaughn noticed too. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’ he said.
Em looked uncomfortable. ‘We saw that painting,’ she said. ‘At Old Worm’s yesterday.’
Rémy rose to his feet. ‘It was there? I searched for it everywhere!’
Matt explained about finding the lift and the secret room. About the portrait, how it had only contained one man when they had hidden in the wardrobe, and two when they had re-emerged.
Pulling the golden tablet from around his neck, Rémy slammed it on the table beside the journal.
‘Mom gave me this before she died,’ he said, running his fingertip over the strange glyphs etched on its surface. ‘It took me to the shop. It told me where to look. I just didn’t look hard enough.’
‘What did your mother want you to do with the painting?’ Vaughn asked.
‘Destroy it,’ said Rémy bitterly. ‘And find the Moor, whoever the hell he is.’
‘I’m guessing you haven’t found him yet,’ said Em.
‘Not unless you count the portrait of the Moor of Cadiz, hanging in the Victoria and Albert Museum. But how could it be him? How’s it possible that a 500-year-old guy in a painting could be of any help to me?’
Em and Matt exchanged glances again. This time Vaughn joined them.
‘Enough with the all-knowing looks,’ said Rémy in frustration. ‘What is going on?’
‘Sit,’ said Matt, pushing a desk chair over to Rémy. ‘It’s possible, because he may not exactly be 500 years old.’
‘When Animare fade in and out of art, time, as we measure it, freezes,’ Vaughn explained. ‘Inside a painting, it can feel as if hours have passed, days even, but when we emerge it may only have been seconds.’
‘So what you’re saying,’ said Rémy, doing his best to understand, ‘is that an Animare could go into a painting and stay there for centuries before he or she emerges again?’
‘An Animare, yes,’ said Matt. ‘And maybe someone or something with an Animare’s help.’
Em suddenly jumped up from the table. Rémy watched, startled, as a red balloon floated out of the Banksy mural in the Plexiglas box behind them and up to the rafters.
‘Excitement, Em. Down a notch,’ warned Matt.
‘Sorry.’ Em sat back down. ‘If an Animare helped the guy at Old Worm’s get back into the painting, maybe an Animare is helping the Moor too.’
‘It’s possible,’ said Vaughn, shaking his head. ‘Orion has been spread pretty thin in recent years trying to monitor groups like the Hollow Earth Society and their continued attempts to undermine the authority of the Councils.’
‘Whoever is helping this Grigori creature,’ said Rémy, flipping the pages back in his mother’s journal, ‘I think my mom may have gotten in his way once before, and…’
The words caught in his throat because saying them aloud made it real.
‘And… I think they killed my dad to try to stop her.’