“I’LL TAKE YOU UP,” said Grayson after he had managed, as if by magic, to maneuver Ernest’s wide Mercedes into a tiny little parking space. “So you won’t be in trouble for staying out so late.”
“Are you crazy?” I slammed the passenger door much harder than necessary. “It’s ten past eleven, and we’re here only because you made up that fairy tale about my strict mother and I didn’t want to show you up in front of your friends.” And I’d have liked so much to stay there. In the time I had left to me, I hadn’t been able to ask even a fraction of the questions whirring around in my head. On the short drive back Grayson had said nothing to help in clarifying the situation; he had just told me off, saying “damn it all” and “downright stupid” with above-average frequency.
Even so, however, I’d been given a few answers that I needed to think over thoroughly. To be honest, I couldn’t wait to open my notebook and write it all down—this time maybe with the help of clearly organized graphs.
Grayson had climbed out of the car too. “We’re in London. Do you know how high the crime rate in this city is?”
“Yes, sure, it’s hardly safe to walk a step in this run-down area.” I pointed to the nostalgically old-fashioned streetlights ahead of us in the sleeping street, which looked like an advertising brochure for idyllic town living. “Street gangs indulging in shoot-outs the whole time, sex fiends lurking in front gardens, and isn’t that Jack the Ripper just coming around the corner—oh, shit!”
It wasn’t Jack the Ripper, it was Mom, who’d been taking Buttercup for her evening walk, just coming around the corner. But that was about as bad.
“If I were you, I’d get right back in that car and drive away, Grayson!” I hissed.
“Don’t make such a damn fuss. I only want to take you to the damn door, because that’s damn well the right thing to do!” Grayson wasted his last chance of flight by shooting furious glances at me from his caramel-colored eyes.
And by then Mom had seen us. “Yoo-hoo,” she called, letting Buttercup off the leash so that she could run on ahead and jump up at us.
I was able to relish the surprised expression on Grayson’s face for two seconds. “Your own fault, if you ask me,” I said sweetly. “Now you can explain why we’re back at only just after eleven.”
“Because her daughter always says yes when she ought to say no?” Grayson bent down to pat Buttercup and imitated my voice. “What? You’re doing something forbidden and dangerous that I don’t understand, and in addition I’ve been expressly warned against it? Yes, sure, I’d just love to join in!”
“You are such a…” As I was searching for the right word, Mom reached us.
“Hello, you two! Back already? Wasn’t it a good party?”
“Yes, it was great.” I smiled as maliciously as possible. “But Grayson wanted to get rid of me.”
“I only wanted to keep you from having to go to Accident and Emergency with alcohol poisoning after your first party in London,” Grayson retorted. “One of Jasper’s drinks would have been quite enough for that.”
I wasn’t smiling anymore, certainly not maliciously. “I beg your pardon? I didn’t even have a sip.”
“No, because I brought you home in good time. If they’d offered you one, you’d have been unable to say no, because it’s such a difficult word for you to understand.”
“Oh, my dears!” Mom looked positively moved. “You’re behaving just like a real brother and sister! I must call Ernest and tell him.”
I rolled my eyes. Typical! She saw only what she wanted to see. I climbed the steps to the front door of the apartment block, shaking my head. Buttercup followed me. “See you sometime,” I said as haughtily as possible.
But Grayson wasn’t through with me yet. “I’d like to come in with you,” I heard him saying. “If I may.”
“Of course you may, dear,” said Mom before I could spin around and strike Grayson dead with a look. She fished the front door key out of her pocket and unlocked the door. “Lottie’s been baking blueberry muffins. Baking soothes her nerves, so she had to bake three trays of muffins today.… I’m afraid meeting Charles has turned her ideas upside down.”
My own ideas were turned upside down as well.
“What are you looking like that for?” Grayson pushed his way past me at the door and ran upstairs ahead of me. Buttercup followed him, flapping her ears happily. I didn’t catch up with the two of them until just before the door of our apartment.
“What’s the idea?” I hissed at Grayson. My hair had fallen over my face, and when I pushed it back I realized that my butterfly barrette had gone missing. I must have lost it somewhere.
“What do you mean?” Grayson crouched down to tickle Buttercup’s tummy. The treacherous dog had rolled over on her back in front of him. “I suppose I’m allowed to eat a few blueberry muffins with my new family.”
“Of course you are,” said Mom, who had made it to the fourth floor too, without ruining her hairstyle and almost without getting breathless. “We’re very glad to see you.”
That was not entirely true. Only Mom was glad to see him. Lottie and Mia didn’t look glad so much as embarrassed to see Grayson when they set eyes on him. They were in their bathrobes and had covered their faces with greenish-gray face masks, which made them look a little like zombies.
“Nice apartment,” said Grayson politely while Lottie and Mia took refuge in the bathroom.
I laughed out loud. “You’re such a hypocrite!”
Mom looked sternly at me. “I have no idea why you two have quarreled, but I hope you’ll make up again soon.” She put her head to one side. “Muffins?”
“Yes, please,” said Grayson. “Can Liv and I maybe eat them in her room? So that we can make up the quarrel at our leisure?”
What in the world did he mean?
“Of course.” Deeply moved, Mom put a hand to her breast. “You know, Liv has always wanted a big brother. Oh, this is all so … I really must call Ernest.” And with one last, emotional sigh, she disappeared into her bedroom. I stared after her, left speechless.
Grayson was strolling down the corridor. “Which is your room?” he asked. “This one?”
“Yes, but … can you please tell me what all this is in aid of? Isn’t Emily waiting for you back at the party?”
“Presumably.” He was getting his iPhone out of his jeans with one hand and already opening the door of my room with the other. “Are you going to get us those muffins?”
I was taken by surprise, and I almost switched on too late. But then I felt boiling hot as I thought of my dream reports. They were lying on the chest of drawers in my room, and I definitely didn’t want Grayson seeing them. So I pushed them aside and put the notebook and any loose sheets of paper together before he could get a look. However, that wasn’t his idea at all. He was making purposefully for my bed—or, to be exact, the foot of my bed. I had put his hooded sweater there, carefully folded, so that Lottie wouldn’t think of washing it until I’d finished my empirical investigations. He picked it up with a satisfied smile.
I saw it all at once. “Oh, so that’s why you’re carrying on like this!” I said. “You want your silly sweater back.”
Bloody hell. I really had underestimated him. I’d never have expected him to be so cunning.
Grayson was checking his iPhone. “That’s right,” he said casually, looking at the display. “I kind of had an idea you weren’t going to give it back of your own accord.… Hey, there’s a lot going on at the party. Looks like Jasper is just trying to drown poor Nathan in the pool. I’d better get straight back. Don’t want to miss this! Sweet dreams, Liv.”
The self-satisfied grin on his face was more than I could stand. Ditto the feeling that I’d been hoodwinked.
“Not so fast!” I threw myself against the door, barring his way out. “We haven’t made up yet!”
He obviously hadn’t expected that. He stared at me in surprise, looking more like his usual self already.
I gave him one of my sugary-sweet smiles. “Want me to fetch Mom to help us do it? She’s really good at that kind of thing.”
“Very funny. I really do have to get back there now,” said Grayson, and I was pleased to see that he didn’t seem so casual anymore.
I didn’t move from the spot. “You ought to have thought of that before. I mean, before you started on about the crime rate in London. Does Emily know you meet your friends in cemeteries at night to conjure up demons?”
“We don’t meet to—no. No, she doesn’t know.” He began pacing restlessly up and down the room. He clearly realized that he wasn’t going to get past me without the use of violence. “And she must never know. Emily is the most rational person I’ve ever met. She wouldn’t understand how anyone can get mixed up with something like this. She’d simply say I was out of my mind. Emily doesn’t even believe her horoscope.”
“Nor do I, to be honest. Any more than I believe in demons.”
“I suppose you think I believed in that sort of thing, do you?” he asked, heatedly. “Even now I don’t really believe in it. It’s just that … well, a few odd and really bad things happened, and I simply don’t have a logical explanation for all that.”
I was still feeling pretty cross, but unfortunately I understood exactly what he meant. “If you eliminate all the logical solutions to a problem, then the illogical solution—even though it’s impossible—has to be the right one,” I said, and he smiled.
“Sherlock Holmes, right?”
Surprised, I nodded.
For a moment there was silence between us. Grayson sat down on the edge of my bed and looked at me as if he were expecting something.
I hesitated for a moment. Then I asked, “Will you tell me about it? I mean, so that I have a chance of understanding it all?”
“I don’t know.…” Doubtfully, Grayson pushed his hair back from his forehead. “I’m still angry with you for not listening to me.”
“But don’t you think it would be better to explain than go on bawling me out? After all, I’ve promised to help you and your friends.”
“You could still change your mind.” A glimmer of hope came into his face.
I just shook my head and dropped onto the bed beside him. “Start with the dreams,” I said.
He didn’t start with the dreams—he went even farther back. But at least he started. He told me about Jasper, Arthur, Henry, and himself, how they’d been friends ever since elementary school; he told me about the heights and depths of their friendship, and all the silly things they’d seen and done together over the years. Finally he came to that strange night at Halloween last year. The way he told the story, it sounded just as ridiculous as Jasper’s version, and I made a great effort to keep as straight a face as I could, in case he jumped up again and ran for it. I have to admit, that was a real challenge (keeping a straight face, I mean), especially when Grayson finally and reluctantly went into detail.
Anabel had shown them a dusty old book with sealed pages that had apparently been in her family’s possession for generations. If you followed the rituals in this book, Anabel claimed, you could conjure up an ancient demon from the underworld—a demon that could help you to gain immeasurable power and grant your dearest wishes.
I only just managed to bite back the words, “Yup, and I expect immortality was on offer too?” Extraordinary. Surely they couldn’t have been as drunk as that. Although they obviously had been, because after they’d performed the gruesome ritual of initiation, if I was to believe what Grayson said, they’d really gone all out for the rest of it. After breaking the first seal, they drew magic symbols on the floor in chalk, scribbled mysterious words on each other’s skin, and recited the spells and oaths that Anabel read out to them—half of them in Latin. They promised, in high-flown terms, to keep the rules laid down in the book all the way to the end and free the demon from the underworld if he, in return, granted their secret wishes, which they wrote down on paper and then solemnly burned. They sealed the whole agreement in their blood, letting drops of it fall into a chalice, mixing it with red wine, and drank from the chalice in turn. In short, they behaved like kids in nursery school. Well, like kids in vampire nursery school.
I wasn’t in the least surprised when, at this point in his story, Grayson gave vent to an ashamed kind of sound, like a mixture of a groan and a howl.
“So did your demon appear?” I could finally forget about keeping a straight face. “Or did you just wake with frightful hangovers the next day?”
Grayson glowered at me. “Okay, I know how ridiculous it sounds. And I’d have forgotten the whole thing again right away—so would the others. But those dreams began the very next night.…” He shuddered. “In my dream, the demon reminded me of the promise we’d given him in exchange for granting our wishes.”
“That’s only logical. Your unconscious mind had to process that idiotic stuff somehow or other,” I said.
“Could be.” Grayson rubbed his forehead. Suddenly his expression was just like Mom’s when she’s desperately searching for something she put down somewhere. “But then how would you explain the fact that we all dreamed exactly the same thing that night? All of us without exception. The demon insisted that we must break the second seal and go on to the next ritual—”
There was a beep somewhere in Grayson’s jeans pocket, clearly his cell phone announcing a text message coming in. He didn’t take the phone out, but I was glad of the short diversion, because for a moment I really had felt rather queasy in the pit of my stomach.
“So you all dreamed of a demon?” I wanted to know more of the details. “What did he look like?”
Grayson made a vague gesture. “I think he took visible shape only in Jasper’s dreams—he swears to this day that the demon looked like Saruman the White, except with horns and a black cloak. For the rest of us he was only a shadow, a whispering voice, a bodiless presence, although that wasn’t as frightening as it sounds, it was more—I don’t know how to put it—more seductive.” He sighed. “An extraordinary coincidence? We weren’t sure. We opened the second seal in Anabel’s book.”
I’d probably have done exactly the same.
“This time I was stone-cold sober, so the ritual seemed to me a bit more ridiculous than before, if anything, but we went through with it.”
“Then what?” I realized that by now I was listening to Grayson intently. Maybe rather too intently.
“Nothing much at first. Except that our dreams got more and more lifelike and vivid. We dreamed of the demon and each other, of doors and corridors, and the next day we could remember exactly what we’d said to one another in those dreams.” He bit his lower lip. “As if we really had met. That was … was frightening. Well, to me and Anabel, anyway. Henry thought it was interesting, Arthur thought it was exhilarating, and Jasper—oh, I think Jasper just thought it was funny.”
I sensed that we were coming to the point of the story, and I had that queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach again. “So you could dream together,” I summed it up. “And not having any logical explanation for that, you started believing in the demon’s existence.”
He managed to shake his head and nod at the same time. “Let’s say we were getting more and more inclined to believe that he did exist outside our imagination. So we went on and broke the next seals, one after another. Several rituals from the book were carried out only in our dreams, on a night of the new moon, and the fascinating thing was that we could do it anywhere we liked. In places where you wouldn’t normally go at night.”
Like Highgate Cemetery, I almost said. But I still wasn’t sure whether Grayson really knew that I’d been with them during the cemetery dream, or whether he was only considering the possibility because of his sweater.
“Arthur, Henry, and Anabel were fascinated by the dreams and the possibilities they opened up—they got positively addicted to trying out all sorts of things, and visiting other people’s dreams.”
I could understand that. “How about you and Jasper?”
He shrugged. “Jasper thought it was all too confusing and too much of a strain, I guess, and in time I somehow … I came to feel it wasn’t right. Apart from the fact that I’m not particularly interested in what other people dream.”
“You really aren’t? You’re not interested in anyone else’s dreams?” That had just slipped out before I could stop myself.
“The exception proves the rule.” A fleeting smile passed over Grayson’s face. “One way or another, it doesn’t seem fair to spy on people in their dreams,” he said, and I couldn’t help feeling a little bit ashamed of myself. His voice turned serious again. “But that way, the demon had already fulfilled part of our pact. Because if you can get into other people’s dreams, knowing their most secret fears and longings means nothing less than—”
“Immeasurable power,” I whispered, trying to ignore the goose bumps crawling up my arms. To take my mind off them, I went over to the window and stared at the outline of a maple tree growing in the backyard of the building. I had to concentrate. “Right. So far we don’t have any logical explanation for those dreams,” I said in a firm voice. “But then again, if we’re going to be objective about it, there’s no well-founded evidence that a demon of any kind really exists. Yours appeared, if at all, only in your dreams.”
“Right,” Grayson admitted. “And I was clinging to that idea myself. Until…” And here he paused for a moment. “Until our wishes began coming true. First Jasper’s, then mine, then Arthur’s.…”
I turned around and looked at him incredulously. “The most secret wishes of your hearts?”
He nodded. “Yes. What we’d written on those pieces of paper at Halloween actually happened.”
“And you simply told each other those wishes? I mean, they were secret, weren’t they?”
“That’s right, but when you’ve known each other as well and as long as we have, you also know what your friends really want, what they long for.…” For a moment he couldn’t go on; then he seemed to pull himself together. “Well, and you know Jasper a bit by now yourself. He’s not the type to keep his own secrets very long. He lasted exactly a day before telling us his wish. Sure enough, the Frognal Flames did win the schools’ basketball championship, even though we were still way down in the rankings on Halloween, so that when we won, it really did seem like a miracle.”
I felt a liberating urge to laugh rise in me, and it simply couldn’t be stopped. Admittedly, I’d let myself be carried away a little too far by the story over the last few minutes, especially all that about the dreams, but now my mind was perfectly clear again. The schools’ basketball championship? Hello? “I guess it couldn’t get much more demonic than that,” I said, still laughing. “Couldn’t it be just that your team played well?”
Grayson didn’t join in my laughter. “It wasn’t just that one wish that came true,” he said quietly when at last I was in control of myself again.
The sound of his voice sobered me up at once. “What did you wish for, then?” I asked, sitting back down beside Grayson.
Grayson’s hands were stroking the hooded sweater. “That’s not important. What matters is that it came true.”
There was a knock on the door, and Mom looked around it. She beamed radiantly when she saw us sitting side by side on my bed. “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve made up,” she said. “But, Grayson, didn’t you want to get back to the party? I’m sure your girlfriend is expecting you!”
“Er … yes, that’s right,” said Grayson, getting to his feet. “I ought to have been back ages ago.”
I wondered whether to snatch the hooded sweater away from him again and lock myself in the bathroom with it, or to shout something like, “Hey, wait, that wasn’t all!” But in front of Mom’s watchful eyes that wasn’t really going to work. So I had no option but to follow Grayson out into the corridor. Losing the sweater was a nuisance, but in a few days’ time we’d be living under the same roof and I was too tired this evening anyway to continue my empirical investigations. I was going to brush my teeth quickly and then go to sleep, all at once. Everything else could wait until tomorrow.
Mom kissed Grayson good-bye on both cheeks and gave him a box of blueberry muffins. “For the party—after midnight is when parties usually get going,” she said.
“I’ll go down to the front door of the building with you.” I made my way past Mom. “It’s supposed to be locked on the inside after ten in the evening. Can’t be too careful in this part of London. Positively teeming with criminals…”
Grayson grinned, but he didn’t protest. We went downstairs together, and I cast him surreptitious glances. It was a pity he had to go, now that he’d been so free with his information.
“Did your wish have anything to do with Emily?” I couldn’t help asking.
“No. Why?”
I thought it over and decided to try again from another angle. “How high was the probability of your wish coming true anyway?”
“Less than thirty percent,” he replied promptly.
Thirty percent. The chances of a white Christmas in these latitudes were even less. But if it snowed on December 24, did we always assume it was the work of a demon? I wondered whether to put my graphic comparison to Grayson, but we’d already reached the front door. Feeling the cold night air on my bare forearms, I shivered.
Grayson took the car key out of his jeans pocket. “I wouldn’t have thought it, but somehow it did me good to talk to you about all this.” He leaned forward and dropped a light kiss on my cheek. “Thanks for not laughing at me all the time.”
Embarrassed, I cleared my throat. “This is a difficult case, Dr. Watson,” I said in my best Sherlock Holmes voice. “With an exceptionally mysterious component. But I’m sure that there’ll turn out to be a logical explanation for everything in the end.”
“I’d have liked to keep you out of it.” Grayson smiled faintly. “But somehow or other it looks like we’re both involved now.”
Yes, and to be honest I didn’t really mind that too much.
“See you.” Grayson turned to go, and I watched him thoughtfully as he walked away. He wasn’t so bad after all, really.
Halfway to Ernest’s Mercedes he stopped and turned around again. “It was Huntington’s disease,” he said suddenly.
“What?”
“My wish.” His fingers were playing nervously with the car key.
I missed a breath.
“My mother died of Huntington’s. And my grandfather and one of my uncles before her.” His voice had changed. It sounded perfectly flat, and he wasn’t looking at me, but kept his head bent. “There was a probability factor of over seventy percent that Florence and I had inherited the Huntington’s mutation as well.”
I could only look at him, shocked.
“For years, Dad refused to let us take the gene test,” he went on hastily. “But Florence and I couldn’t live with the uncertainty, and finally we applied to be tested for it.” He paused for a moment. “That was my wish. That Florence and I wouldn’t die of the disease.”
“So you’re both healthy?” When he nodded, I let out a deep breath. I’d have liked to say something nice, something comforting, but I felt terribly helpless. I’d known that his mother died when he and Florence were still very small, but the reason was news to me. “And now you’re wondering whether the result of the test would have been the same if you hadn’t entered into a pact with a demon?”
“Yes” was all he said. “In weak moments I think our health could be the work of the demon. That’s sick, isn’t it?” At last he raised his head and looked me in the eyes. “And then—then I wonder what he’ll take away from me if I break his rules.”