1.

You want to know how I disappeared?

Here I am, surrounded by things bearing my name, brass things under bell jars, instruments glinting like silver starlight. Dust-that-is-not-dust still drifts down to us from the rafters. Your hair is white. Feel it, dry like chalk. This is my ash. Sticking to things freshly cut. Things burst.

It’s a lot to take in. I thought it’d all be blue. Light, airy blue, like the sky you scribble when you’re little, when the sky is always that same pastel shade. Fresh cotton in the lungs. But the walls, watching me with jade irises, they’re just like his special room. And that’s – that’s strange, isn’t it? That it’s so similar. The velvet curtains. The arms of red leather. I’m squeezing them in case I float away, but this is real now, isn’t it? It’s all real?

What do you want from me? How would I even begin to explain… I know where I was, and what happened, but the last three days – they’re a blank. I don't know. I don't know. I’m tired. Blood still trickles down my chest, avoiding the part where my heart flits. Too fast. Moth-fast. Why is there so much broken glass on the floor? It crunches beneath my feet.

Start at the beginning? All right. I see it differently now. I have new eyes.

Some stories start with running. And some end with it. But my legs never were up to much – spindly, all knee-lumps and no muscle. I run like a spider. When I was very young, every summer Mum would present me with a pair of shorts like it was a special treat. After pulling them on, I’d crawl down the stairs like a beetle, searing my knees across the carpet. Emily would lean down over the arm of the sofa, her face peering at me like a bright, wide moon, before shaking her head and turning back to the beautiful people between her magazine pages. Mum and Dad would just ignore me, occasionally muttering under their breath, “Bloody hell, David, you’re a hazard.” But if Grandad was there, he’d bend down to my level, his face wrinkled like an old apple, and whisper, “What are you today, Bumblebee? Take me with you.” I was the only one who saw the way his eyes glittered behind his glasses, like they were made of hundreds of jet fragments, all flicking around independently. With one finger, he’d loop my curly fringe around and around into two spirals, dangling like a pair of pale gold antennae. Then, I’d whisper whatever creature I was and he’d click like a cricket, or twitch, or fold his arms across his chest like a praying mantis. Sometimes he’d pull me to him first, just so I got the full itchy experience of his favourite orange knitted jumper – the one with the brass sparrow button on the collar – before releasing me back to the floor, my cheek scorched.

Grandad smelled like iron. Like something unearthed and laid in the light.

I used to think it strange that one place can be home to one person, but not to another. Grandad’s office at the university was my cave. Lamp-lit bell jars, apparatuses with round pieces of glass that distorted the light, and yellowing certificates that couldn’t have been as old as they looked framed in bronze. Being there was being inside Grandad’s head. Every day after primary school, I’d sprawl on the sofa and watch loose spider threads drifting in the draft from the old windows, while Emily went to theatre practice. But if it was cancelled and she came to the office with me, she’d choose the awkward wooden stool in the corner, eyes on whatever book or magazine she’d brought with her. She carried her home in her pockets, whereas mine was the smell of old leather, dust, and the tapping of Grandad’s computer keys.

Most often it was just the two of us.

Grandad’s office was where wonders happened. Everything had a story, a place. Everything was important. Most of it I couldn’t ever have appreciated for what it was because I was so young. It was beyond me. A sculpture that reminded me of a fortune cookie but made of silver mesh, framed certificates the colour of spilled tea, a row of plastic models mounted on a wooden plank that reminded me of twisted letter ‘H’s, and a huge glass model that sat on a little plinth so that it was the first thing you’d see when you walked in. Panes of glass in different thicknesses, separated by air and suspended like the layers of a cake. And piercing all of them were two glass straws, all bending in their own unique way. Blue and orange. Grandad did explain to me once in his own way what it meant, as he weaved a shoelace between the straws. “You’re blue, and I’m orange, of course.” He smiled and traced a finger up the blue straw. “And this is you travelling through time, each glass is a heartbeat. And this,” he threaded the shoelace through the gap, “is an alien travelling at the speed of light. Look how much wiggling and weaving he can do in the time it takes for your heart to go ‘thump’!”

But my favourite things in the room were the mirrors. There were mirrors everywhere – on shelves, on his desk, between books, and mounted on the walls. If you sat in his desk chair and looked to the left or right into the mirrors mounted there, there’d be thousands of you, falling away into the tiniest speck. If one of Grandad’s meetings overran, I’d wait for him on that chair, spinning as thousands of Davids dangled their skinny legs, their pale and wispy hair blowing in the breeze from the window. One time, Grandad caught me doing it and stood between the mirrors with me, staring into the depths of our reflections. He didn’t speak a word, just gazed into my eyes through the glass as his cheeks ran with tears.

Grandad seemed to think a lot of things that made him feel things. He mostly worked in silence, but would repeatedly look over at me as if about to speak but then change his mind. I’d catch him watching me out of the corner of my eye, as I pretended to read one of his books. Normally we’d be left alone in his office, but down in the courtyard, men and women in white coats bustled from place to place, their heads down, eyes on the prize. I couldn’t even imagine what they talked about, but I liked that. I liked the mystery. Grandad’s office was the heart of a creature that moved of its own will. Why would anyone want to be anywhere else?

But now, when I go back there in my head, it’s always the last visit I see.

One Friday, when I was ten years old, the telescope was set up at the small, blacked out window in the corner. It reminded me of a long black cannon from one of the war films Dad sometimes watched, apart from the white label on the side, printed with ‘Property of the Institute of Dark Matter.’ It was late afternoon and the November sky was already turning indigo. I pressed my eye to the lens but formless black oozed back at me. I gestured to the telescope then up at the sky.

“What is it, David? You want to see?”

Grandad heaved himself up from his desk and took three trembling breaths before joining me on the wooden bench. As he fiddled with the silver knobs, I watched the papery skin stretch around his jaw. The hollows where his little half-moon glasses sat beneath his eyes were as purple as new bruises. Dad had said we shouldn’t point them out to Grandad or ask about these things, just to accept them as part of Grandad now. I didn’t like it. It was as if he was starting to rot, the inside being eaten by something I couldn’t see. But I was sure Grandad would’ve talked to me if it was something he wanted to share, so over the last year or so I watched him transform silently, from my soft and round-faced friend to something new. A wrinkled and gnarled creature, emerging from an egg.

Grandad sighed and leaned back. “I don’t think there’s much to see, Bumblebee. It’s too cloudy. The skies are clearer where I’m going; I’ll take some good pictures for you, OK?”

On the floor beside his desk was a stuffed yellow rucksack, almost as tall as I was. Once, Grandad had sat me down on the floor and told me what each pocket was for. The chest support. The load lifters. A strap for a water bottle. A lock and key. We’d take a tour of the world through the bag; each corner contained a memory from his research trips. He never left without it. He called it his ‘trusty companion.’ When it was bursting at the seams, that meant Grandad would be going away, and no one knew how long it’d be before he returned. Days, weeks, months. And when he did, he always looked smaller. When I’d mentioned this to Emily she just scoffed. “Don’t be stupid. He’s the same as he’s always been.” But I knew he wasn’t, even if no one else saw it.

“Can you take me with you?” I whispered.

Grandad smiled, his teeth yellow, and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “If I could, I would. I promise. Maybe one day, when you’re bigger. I’ll show you what I’ve found.”

“You always say that. I’m bigger now.”

Grandad squeezed me closer and whispered in my ear. “You want to know a secret, Bumblebee?”

I wanted to show him that I was still annoyed that he wouldn’t take me with him so I turned away, but I couldn’t help but smile. He did that to me.

“I’ve found something.”

My breath sounded almost as loud as his whisper. My heart began to race. “What?”

“A secret, David. But it’ll change life as we know it. Especially for me. And especially for you. People like us. But I need to explore it before I break it to the world.”

I looked right into his eyes, then. Black and twinkling. They were more alive than I’d ever seen them. It was incredible. It was terrifying.

“And you will be the first person I tell when I’m back. I promise.”

“But why now? Will you miss Christmas?”

Grandad sighed and rubbed my shoulder. “I might. I don’t know.”

“Can’t you wait?”

“I have to do it now,” he said. And then his voice dropped to a low whisper, “Because Midwinter is coming.”

“Why?”

“It’s very special, David. It’s like a curtain.” His eyes glittered. “Between endings and new beginnings. Death and life. But keep this to yourself. Don’t tell your father. He’d just get upset.” And then he shook his head and chuckled.

He’d said death and life. It didn’t make sense to me. Grandma was dead, I knew that. It was permanent. She wasn’t coming back. But he’d made it sound like a door that could open and shut. For the only time in my life, I couldn’t meet his eye. I wanted to know more, but I was afraid to ask. It made me feel odd.

A knock at the door and our magic broke. Grandad whipped around, his mouth pinched. A small man, with thick black glasses and a shiny bald head, strode into the office. He looked about my Dad’s age. A wedge of paper folders was pressed against his side. “Frank, you need to go. Their patience has run out.” He didn’t seem to care that I was there, but I could tell that Grandad did. He stood up and approached the man, whispering in response, “I’m going. My bag’s packed.”

“And what about the rest?” The bald man’s voice reached every corner of the room. It was rough and musical at the same time. He raised his eyebrows at the rucksack. “I can’t guarantee that everything will still be here when you come back. If you want any of this,” he gestured to the room, “saved, this is your last chance to pack it up.”

“Don’t you worry about that. It won’t be a problem.”

The man scoffed. “It IS a problem. Already. It’s all meant to be gone.” His eyes locked onto the rucksack, leaning against Grandad’s desk. “You know I’m going to tell them what you’re doing. I have to. You can’t use University resources for this. It’s not right.”

“OK. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

This seemed to leave the small man at a loss for words. He shook his head and looked at me, still as a shadow in the corner. “Frank, he shouldn’t be here either.”

“Get out, John.”

They stood face to face for a few seconds while neither moved, like in the Westerns my Mum watched on Sunday afternoons. It seemed an impossibly long time before the bald man shook his head, shrugged, muttered, “You’re lost,” and stormed from the room. I was just about to congratulate Grandad on winning the duel but something stopped me. The space between us hung strangely, as thick as water. Grandad was motionless, even his usual slight sway on his knees was gone.

“Grandad?”

He didn’t move. His breath rasped. I slid from my stool and fought my way through the fog to reach him, to give him my hand. By the time I reached him, he’d started to hum under his breath. A tuneless burst of notes that sounded more like language than song. Bumps and clicks. I knew what to do. By the time I touched his fingers, I was humming too, mirroring the soft sounds as best I could. Grandad looked down at me then, his mouth hanging open as if he’d just remembered I was there. Or that he’d just discovered me, like a prospector discovering gold.

“I’m here,” I whispered. Even though his face was silhouetted by the brass lamp behind him, his eyes glittered like the moon in a puddle. His cheeks were wet.

“Don’t worry, David. It’s all right.” His hand on my arm was shaking. “We’ve got each other, haven’t we, Bumblebee?”

“What did he want?” I whispered.

Grandad leaned his face into my hair and sighed. “He isn’t ready to see my discovery He’s stuck in old ways, David. Not like us.”

Shortly after this, Dad arrived to take me home. By then, Grandad was back at his desk, making notes in a red hardback book while I lay on the old leather sofa, bumping my finger along the leather spines on a shelf above. Dad burst into the office, setting up a swirl of dust that caught in the lamplight. My chest tightened as I took in his sweating brow, his downturned mouth. He didn’t even look at Grandad, just eyed the yellow rucksack and then gestured to me with his good arm.

“Time to go, David.”

I quickly swung my legs down from the sofa and pulled my trainers on, leaving the laces loose.

“You said you were staying in the house today. Aren’t you meant to be out of here by now?” Just like the bald man, Dad’s voice was too loud for the room. He didn’t fit.

“Just finishing up, William.”

Dad sighed. “And this,” his voice was softer as he pointed to the rucksack. “How long will you be gone for this time? It’s the dead of winter. You shouldn’t be going, given the news–”

Grandad cut him off. “Of course I’m going. Don’t be so ridiculous–”

“You’re not fit.”

Grandad froze. Dad’s face softened in a way I wasn’t used to. I didn’t like it. “I wish for once you’d listen–”

“You’re not telling me how to live my life. This is MY life. How dare you?”

Dad’s keys jingled in his pocket as I pulled on my coat. He beckoned me over and guided me out of the office by my shoulder, allowing me one last look over my shoulder at Grandad, who gave me three of his alien little clicks. His chin was tilted aloft, the corner of his lip creased in a smile. He was asking for something, gesturing in our special language, but before I could click my reply, Dad closed the door and marched me down the dark and silent university corridor.

Dad buckled himself into the front and I slid into the back seat beside Emily. Her eyes were painted purple, and she was slouched low, her black hair wrapping around her face like seaweed. Clutching her flute case close across her chest like a shield, she glared out of the window at the darkness. The streets were empty, other than a lone walker or person at a bus stop. Lampposts flashed past the window as we headed out of town and back to the village. Many of them were plastered with overlapping posters bearing faces, but we moved too fast to see them properly. Mum never let me look at the faces. If she saw me trying to, she’d yank my sleeve and bark, “Don’t, David. Look at the pavement.” Face to the ground, I’d imagine the cracks were widening into chasms, ready to swallow me whole.

The car radio crackled with static, and Dad twiddled the knob until the newsreader’s monotone voice became clear. “Twelve bodies have been discovered on the slopes of Bidean nam Bian in Glencoe this afternoon, most likely belonging to the ‘Leeds Twelve’ who were reported missing by their families three weeks ago. Early reports coming in suggest that the bodies were found in two locations, on either side of the mountain, and like all the others were carrying unidentifiable scientific apparatus…” Suddenly, her voice cut off and was replaced by music. Dad coughed into his fist and caught my eye in the rear-view mirror for a second before focusing his attention on the road again.

I’d seen photos of the Leeds Twelve on the news at home. All smiling. I only got to hear these things when Mum and Dad weren’t around, because they always switched off the TV when these reports came on, or when the scheduled shows were replaced by a special report on the disappearances. In lots of ways, the Leeds Twelve weren’t any different to the other missing people reports. But one man, who had had a round face, curly hair, and little glasses reminded me of a young Grandad. His name always stuck in my head: Martin Bowness. I wondered if he still looked like Grandad, or whether – like the others I’d heard kids talking about at school – he’d been found floating down a stream, as stiff as a log, his eyes masked by the last autumn leaves. Or perhaps he’d been discovered spread-eagled on a grassy fell, scorched black by the sun. Or, like I’d heard through the fence between my school and the senior school, perhaps what they’d found no longer looked human at all. Transformed into a thing that was neither here, nor there. An unnameable thing. Maybe they’d never know if it was the nice man with the round face and curly hair. Maybe all they’d find were his glasses in a puddle of something… Black, dripping.

I shuddered. Squeezed together in the back of the car, I could feel Emily’s heat through my coat, so I edged closer. I knew she was long gone, away from the car. Even if I’d said her name, she wouldn’t hear me. She was still enough to be a portrait, but her face twitched with thinking. It’s like when you stare at the soil long enough so that it comes to life, and suddenly you become aware of all the wriggling things, the crawling legs. They’re everywhere, and how could you not have seen them before?

You see, Emily was always there, even when she wasn’t. As far back as I remember, I was trying to say ‘Emily.’ She’d been in the world five years before me, and though she could’ve been jealous when I appeared, she never was. She wasn’t someone you could displace like that. She was the nucleus. The spine that holds the cat together. And I was her shadow. I imagine she sang and danced around my cradle before I even learned to see, just so I would love her most. Summoning me to her, determined to be my solace, my captain, and my tormenter. She was everything. Grandad understood – and when we were visiting somewhere and it all got too much he’d whisper in my ear, “Watch how Emily does it, take note. Copy her.” I was never really sure what he wanted me to do, so I’d just let my eyes rest on her, trying to envelop myself in the control she so effortlessly held on to. Even now at fifteen, clad in black and slumping low in her chair, she held the room. If we stood outside, the wind carried her voice so it sounded like it was everywhere. When we walked through the village to the bus stop, all the green things rustled with her steps and her hair shone like it’d rained, even when it hadn’t.

In the village, she stuck out like a crow. We didn’t have lots of neighbours, but everyone knew everyone’s face, even if they didn’t know your name. And they watched Emily. They wanted to know what was happening inside her head. I would see them, their wrinkled faces pressed to their windows as we stepped off the school bus and she absentmindedly half-ran, half-walked down the middle of the road. Most of our neighbours were bent double and balanced on sticks, their eyes squinting and lips pursed as if it hurt to stand. But stand there they did, with nothing else to do until life arrived. Some had their armchairs pushed up behind the window, like prisoners ready for visiting time.

Is this right? Is this the sort of thing you want to know?

My first memory? My first memory. It’s of Emily. Of course it was Emily. Seeing something shining in her that made me feel dark in comparison. You see, Emily had another gift. She lived and breathed a secret that she didn’t know she had. She was a master decoder, a code-breaker. A chameleon. A natural.

She was also Dad’s favourite.

I used to watch as they played these little games together without speaking. She’d sit on his knee and he’d touch the end of her nose. She’d touch his nose and make a little noise, and then he’d flick her chin and make a different noise, and on it’d continue. I had no idea what they were doing or how each of them knew what to do next, but it normally ended with Emily curling in a fit of giggles and Dad pulling her into his broad and balanced chest.

I tried to make him play with me like that once, but he pulled my hand from his ear and boomed down at me, “Don’t do that, David. That hurts.” Looking up into his face gave me no clues as to what to do next. Something had happened to him when he was younger that’d left him with a permanent look of concern, a one-sided frown. I sometimes caught a spark in his eye when he raised his voice, a bolt that lashed across my face like a black whip. Dad never moved his face much, choosing to keep his thoughts hidden beneath his furrowed forehead and stubble. I’d watch Emily stroking his beard this way and that, as if petting a cat, and I wondered if I’d have a beard one day. If one morning I’d wake up and it’d just be there, like my hairline had shifted overnight, and whether I’d have to go to the hairdressers every day to tame it. The ones booming with loud men, laughing, moving, commanding their spaces like kings. I wanted to know what Dad's face felt like. Were the bristles sharp like hedgehog spines or soft like fur? I’d stare at his beard as it caught the light through the window, to try and understand the truth.

I watched everyone. I still do. Mum said it was why my eyes were so big and “goosey.” Like grey glass, letting everything through. Emily said they were so pale that they made me look like a ghost.

I watched Emily on the way back from my last visit to Grandad’s office, when I was ten. I watched to learn how to move without thinking. I watched to learn how to make your home the space inside your skin. I watched to decode why she slumped so low in her seat, and I watched to understand what she could see in the dead of winter that was so inviting.

It was around that time when we started seeing homeless people in our village. “Vagrants,” Mum called them, her nose wrinkled. But I thought of their flapping layers the colour of earth, and the way they stooped and walked like boulders come alive, and I called them mudmen. Our neighbours watched them warily through the glass as they trudged up the street like armoured beetles, laden with stuffed plastic carriers and sleeping rolls. More than once, I’d seen them pull out a wrinkled map with faded black lines on it, about the size of a sheet of printer paper. They’d never keep the map out for long, as if exposing it to the air degraded it somehow. Sometimes, after folding up their map and tucking it away into a deep inside pocket, they’d stop at the side of the street to inspect the abandoned bouquets and belongings that bordered our road like offerings. Big blue bunches, stitched-back-together teddy bears, framed photos of families, always smiling. But all of them abandoned and left to rot until all that was left was the bones of stems, the rain-sodden fur. These things didn’t appear on Poplar Avenue around the corner, or Church Gardens down in the valley. In fact, it was only our street, leading down to the broken fence at the end. Mum never looked at them directly. Even when she tended the flower beds at the front, she’d work as if her hands weren’t plunged into layers of withered gifts. I did ask Mum once what they were, but she just waved her hand and gave me this strange tight-lipped grin that made her look like a scarecrow. “Just people trying to make the place look nice, that’s all.”

Sometimes men and women wearing bright lanyards around their necks came to take photos of the mounds, their huge cameras flashing like lightning. About once a month there’d even be smartly-dressed men and women talking into microphones, gesturing towards the rows of rotting gifts like they were holy relics.

And when evening came, the ones who brought the offerings came. Always dressed in black, they’d stand for hours, staring at what they’d laid down. Their faces were always grey beneath the streetlamps. Withered and waxy. I imagined that their hands were cold to the touch. Villagers never approached them, and simply drifted by them as if the black figures were as formless as shadows. One evening, I watched as a tall woman in a long black coat laid down a ring of blue roses. Beside her, a little girl in a navy dress pressed something white to her chest. It looked like one of the shirts Dad wore when he went to work. I went downstairs and described them to Mum, pointing out of the living room window to the curb where they still stood, but she shook her head and scrunched up her face. “Don’t be silly David,” she said, “I haven’t seen anyone like that at all.”

But the mudmen were different. I kept them to myself. I watched them from my bedroom window after school, always heading down the slope towards the broken fence and away towards the cow fields. They never came back, either. They only ever travelled one way. Always in the deep grey light at the end of the day. Always alone.

Ours was a village where the curtains never closed, but no one touched.