Green Monkey Dreams

  Her heart pounded against her chest, the mended crack aching with the force of it, as she opened the precious gift.

  The hair on her neck stiffened because the first story was called ‘The Red Shoes’.

  Shivering with excitement, Amerie began to read.

  It was the story of a girl who longed for a pair of red dancing shoes so desperately, she forgot to care for her dying grandmother. She dreamed of nothing but the red shoes and eventually stole money to buy them. But when she put them on, they danced her until she was exhausted.

  They would not be removed for they had grown to her feet. They danced her into a ragged urchin, and finally a woodcutter offered to chop them off her. ‘So that you may be still and quiet at last.’ The girl was frightened because it meant he must chop off her feet as well, and she would not ever dance again. ‘I will carve wooden feet and strap them to your legs so that you can hobble around. You will never dance again, it is true, but look where dancing has brought you. Let me chop off your feet and you will be safe.’

  And the girl had bowed her head and wept as she agreed.

  Amerie closed the book, frightened by what she had read. Her mother had once told her she would fly when she wore the red shoes, but here was a story of magical shoes that would not be removed unless your feet were chopped off as well. Her mother’s message must be riddled into the story, and she would have to fathom it.

  That night, she slept with the book under her pillow. She lay awake for a long time, thinking of all the magical shoes she had encountered in stories. Puss-in-boots had boots that carried him seven leagues at a single step, and that was a kind of flying. And Cinderella had been given glass slippers by her Fairy Godmother, and in them she had flown to the heart of her prince. Then there were the red shoes Dorothy had got from the Wicked Witch of the West, which took her anywhere she wanted if she clicked the heels together . . .

  When Amerie slept, it was to dream that she was the girl wearing the red dancing shoes, whirling and dancing and leaping herself to exhaustion, and yet, though she was half dead, her heart laughed and danced inside her and freedom flowed through her soul like a river.

  The woodcutter came to her big as a bear in the moonlight. He had a black beard and a red mouth, and he carried a silver axe with two cruelly sharpened edges.

  ‘I will make sure you don’t fly away. I love you and I will tame you.’

  Amerie was frightened, but the delight in her blood ate up the fear and she danced in a circle around the great heavy woodcutter. ‘I will not let you cage me.’

  The woodcutter made a lunge for her, but she danced out of his grasp and ran until she came to her own house in the middle of the dark woods. Somewhere a wolf howled as she threw open the door and ran up the stairs. She could hear her father’s feet on the veranda. The front door slammed open.

  ‘Come to me,’ his voice boomed. ‘Let me cut off the red shoes and you will be safe.’

  Higher, the shoes whispered.

  But there was no higher. Except . . .

  Amerie turned to look at the attic stairs. Her father had forbidden her to climb them. The roof is dangerous and unstable and you will fall through it, he had said.

  Higher, the shoes whispered urgently.

  She ran up the wooden steps, light as a bird on the snow. Up and up and into the roof. It was dark and the roof slanted deeply. Moonlight streaming in through the dormer window lit up boxes and cases and heaps of clothing; it silvered a lace of tulle and a dressmaker’s dummy festooned with spider webs.

  ‘I know you are up there. I will kill you before I will let you leave me again . . .’ cried her father, and now his feet were thunder on the stairs. ‘If I cannot have you, no one will have you.’

  Higher, whispered the red shoes.

  There is no higher, Amerie thought.

  Then you will be tamed and you will die . . . the red shoes whispered.

  ‘I love you!’ roared her father, his boots clumping on the wooden attic steps, shaking the house.

  Amerie woke up.

  Her face and hands were slick with sweat as she reached under the pillow and took out the book. The cover was cool and velvety as a puppy’s belly under her hot hands, and she lay there until the sun rose, holding the book tightly to her, trying to think what to do. She must get up into the attic and find the red shoes that would show her how to fly. But her father would not leave her alone until Sunday and that would be her eighth birthday and it would be too late. She would be trapped forever.

  She must get into the attic, but her father had forbidden it. She must get him to leave her alone. But how?

  ‘Are you all right?’ her father rumbled that evening. She had sat very quietly all day, not even reading.

  ‘I feel sick,’ Amerie said in her palest voice.

  Her father’s black brows pulled together over his dark eyes and he took her chin in his big hand and lifted it so that he could look into her eyes. Amerie prayed he would not smell the talc on her cheeks.

  ‘You look sickly, my little one. Perhaps I should bring you to the doctor tomorrow.’

  Amerie’s heart thumped. ‘Maybe if you give me some of the tonic you gave me last time, I will be better by morning.’

  He frowned again, then shrugged. ‘We will try it.’

  He went to the bathroom, but the bottle was empty.

  ‘That is strange. The bottle is finished. I will go and buy some more. You had better get into your bed.’

  She gave him a docile nod, and went up to her bedroom. A moment later, she heard the front door close. She ran to the attic steps and hurried up them, and just as in the dream, there were boxes and a dressmaker’s dummy with her mother’s slender shape, and in the corner near the dormer window, a froth of gauzy tulle.

  But no red shoes.

  Her father would only be away a little while and she must find them and return to her bed before he came back. Frantically, she began to search. Under clothes and dresses and a suitcase of silky women’s clothing. There were lots of shoes but none were red. She opened the top of one of the boxes and found letters.

  One began, ‘My dearest Winter, Jonathon must understand that you need to dance, surely. Did he not first see you soaring on the stage? Does he think you can just stop as if you were a secretary typing letters?’

  Winter was her mother’s name, Amerie knew, setting the letter aside. She had obviously left all of her letters and clothing behind because in her bird form she had no need for them. Her father had told people she had gone away because he wanted no one to know he had married a shapechanger.

  But where were the red shoes? Surely that was what the dream had meant. She opened another box and another. She had no idea how much time had passed, but she had not heard her father’s tread on the steps yet, and so she decided to take a few more moments to search.

  Help me, Mother . . . she whispered.

  Her eyes fell on the silvery tulle, and she noticed a black feather caught in it. Her heart leapt.

  Then she heard her father’s boots on the wooden veranda.

  She pulled at the tulle; there was masses of it. It was a kind of dress, and though white and silver, the bottom of the hem was thick with darkness, and there were black and white feathers stuck there. And there, under the tulle, were dark slender dancing shoes with long silky tapes. They looked black, but the moon made red look black, she reminded herself. Without thinking, she pushed her feet into them. There was a crackle and a roughness inside, as if someone had put red paint in the shoes as well as on the outside, but they fit her perfectly in the heel. They are too long, but I will grow into them, she thought dreamily.

  ‘Amerie?’

  Her father was on the second floor and it was too late now to go down and get into her bed because he would see her. She listened to him going into her bedroom as she tied the tapes round and round, making a neat bow at the rear.

  ‘Amerie. Are you up there?’ her father growled. He was at the bottom of the attic steps.

>   She stood up, thinking she must hide. Perhaps, then, he would think she had gone out and go looking for her. And she would come down and pretend she had . . .

  His boots clumped purposefully on the steps.

  ‘Amerie, I know you’re up there. I told you never to go up there. I warned you and you would not listen. You are just like your mother . . .’

  Amerie heard an axe in his voice and was frightened, but the red shoes filled her with joy. I must hide, she thought.

  He will find you, whispered the shoes.

  Amerie thought of the dream and whirled to the dormer window. It was open and she could fit through. Outside the moon shone like a bowl of silver water.

  Higher or you will die . . .

  Amerie understood then, and she hesitated and looked down at the shoes. They looked black, but surely they were the red shoes. In this darkness she could not tell. But she felt them growing onto her, filling her with feathers and the urge to fly. She looked down at the book her mother had sent as a message. The gold lettering was silver now and winked at her as if to say she must choose now and forever.

  And she laughed. I cannot choose, for I must fly, it is in me . . .

  And she flew.

  THE KEYSTONE

  for Jochen

  ‘Speak, daughter. Unburden your heart and mind.’

  The ritual words ought to have been comforting, and yet there was a coldness in Signe. Her eyes went beyond the older man to the violet sky, reflected in green hill pools.

  I have lived my life for this moment when I will stand as Keystone of the Riftgate, she thought. Can any life have been so shaped and wrapped in purpose? I tell myself I am lucky to have a purpose. Yet we know nothing of the world into which the Valoria has fallen, other than that the rift between our world and this one is nearly wide enough to permit an adult. We few will soon pass into that other world: I, the Keystone, Savid the Watcher, and the Searchers who will locate the lost Valoria so that we may bring it home at last.

  But the Dakini will follow, and they will bend all their efforts to prevent the Valoria being returned to its own world, for that will mean the loss of their savage domination. for that will mean the loss of their savage domination.

  It will be up to me to hold the Riftgate open long enough, but even if I give myself entirely to this purpose, it might not be enough. If I fail, my people will never be free.

  ‘I am afraid,’ she said at last. ‘It is almost time.’

  ‘It is past time and yet a thousand aeons before the moment of your passing, daughter. Do not fear time, for it is eternal and loops back on itself. What has been will be again. What is past is yet to come. A moment is the same as a million years. We swim in the river of time, driven by our perceptions, limited only by our vision.’

  Mystic words. Beautiful and incomprehensible; in a way, irrelevant to her fear. And yet it was true that time was fluid and bendable. She was young, and yet she felt ancient sometimes. Fear drained her as the Riftgate would.

  ‘Sing with me, and become one with the rift, for it is time and you must not fight it. You must let it flow through you.’

  ‘Who was that?’ Ricky asked.

  Old Mrs Robbins squinted through the shop window. ‘Said his name was Jurgens. Foreigner of some sort.’

  ‘German,’ her husband said out of the side of his mouth. ‘He’s . . .’

  ‘No, I mean I’ve seen him somewhere!’ Ricky’s eyes widened. ‘I remember. I saw him on television. He goes all over the world exposing fake stuff. Gerhardt Jurgens, his name is.’

  ‘Magic,’ Mr Robbins said. ‘The television said he exposes fake magic. He’s after them lights in the desert east of here. Witchlights, the papers call them. Harry up the weather station said he’d been asking if there’d been any earth tremors.’

  ‘What’ve earthquakes got to do with magic?’ Ricky asked, absently popping the top off his Coke.

  All three gazed out to where the man was climbing into his four-wheel drive. An errant breeze whipped the fine desert dust into a red spiral. When it cleared, the car was receding in a rusty cloud spewed up by the knobbly tyres.

  ‘Man like that don’t believe in nothing and can’t bear no one else believin’ either,’ Mrs Robbins said softly.

  Her husband did not dispute her. The man’s eyes had pressed against his face like questing fingers. He wondered what would drive a man to spend his life looking so hard for nothing, because that’s what it amounted to, didn’t it?

  In the car, Gerhardt was not thinking of the witchlights rumoured to shine in this godforsaken place, but of a drive across another shimmering red desert almost two decades past and half a world away.

  He could summon up the exact moment his long search began. He had been sitting in the foyer of the Las Vegas Hilton, having picked up his older brother’s interpreter from the airport. They were waiting for their rooms to be made up, and he had challenged her to live up to his brother’s claim that she could read nationality from body language alone.

  Raven Campbell did not smile, though she was amused. That was partly the job. Interpreters were not supposed to react to the words they translated. You learned to suppress your responses. But an interpreter was not simply a cipher, translating word for word. A language was the vehicle for the culture that spawned it. You had to be able to interpret not just words, but also the nuances of gesture and tone, the body language that enhanced and amplified, and which sometimes concealed, meaning. She was very good at her job.

  ‘Try them,’ Gerhardt prompted, nodding towards the entrance to the foyer.

  Raven turned to see a tall man with dark, grey-flecked hair pulled into a ponytail usher a slight blonde girl to the reception desk.

  Their clothes were elegant and expensive, but subtly foreign. No doubt this was why Gerhardt had fastened on them. Raven did not recognise the cut of the clothes, but in any case such things were deceptive. She turned her attention to their body language, seeking the subtle clues to nationality revealed by manner and mannerism. The man was solicitous of the girl. No. More than that, protective. She was not famous – Raven would have recognised her, but perhaps she was some sort of obscure royalty. She was beautiful and poised enough to be a princess.

  As the pair crossed to the lift, Raven became aware of tension in their movements – a precision that made her suddenly certain they had come to Las Vegas for something more than gambling in the casinos. Or perhaps they had come to gamble everything they owned on one roll of the dice. One might look that way then.

  ‘Well, what nationality?’ Gerhardt asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Raven murmured, intrigued.

  The lift bell chimed and the couple entered. The door closed and Raven watched the little arrow move and then stop at the sixth floor. The lift came back down.

  ‘Well, I guess even my brother’s interpreting angel can’t be entirely perfect,’ Gerhardt was saying in his oddly accented but very good English. His brother sounded much less German, but there was something rather innocent and forthright about this young man that his brother lacked. ‘You know, I was actually a little afraid of meeting you. Kurt sang your praises so highly that I felt you must disapprove of a drop-out physics student.’

  Raven looked at him with her own direct gaze. ‘Not a drop-out surely. Kurt said you were taking a year off to travel. That sounds very wise to me. I wish I had done it. ‘What is it?’ she asked, as he frowned.

  ‘I am trying to imagine what you were like as a student. You don’t look much more than that now. I was surprised at how young you looked.’

  Now she did smile. ‘For an ancient thirty-two-year-old, you mean?’

  He flushed and she was reminded again of his own age. Twenty-two, Kurt had told her, and very serious about the world. That was young in a woman, but younger in a man. She should not tease him.

  ‘I did not mean that you were old, only that you look younger than your years,’ he said earnestly.

  An attendant finally brought their key
s over. ‘Your bags will be brought up. Your rooms are on the sixth floor, overlooking the strip.’

  In the lift, Gerhardt asked her about dinner. ‘Las Vegas is not a place for eating alone.’

  ‘It’s awful,’ Raven said.

  But she was thinking of the way the town had looked as they’d approached it in the hire car. Through the golden haze of sunset, it had been like some mythical city. Of course, it had been some trick of the light or mind. Or perhaps only a mirage, for as they came closer, there were the endless rows of fast-food outlets clustered along the highway, and the heavy cement buildings with their garish facades, and endless neon exhortations to gamble and win.

  It was said there were no clocks in Las Vegas; when you were inside the casinos, there were no windows to let in outside light, so you would never know the time. The whole town was designed to disorientate. Everything but gambling was streamlined. They had even passed a powder-pink chapel offering five-minute weddings.

  Hideous. A gangster’s Disneyland.

  ‘It is truly ugly,’ Gerhardt agreed. ‘But Kurt has a meeting here and that is all he cares about. You and I are here at his behest, but perhaps there is a reason for it that has nothing to do with my dynamic brother.’

  Raven lifted her brows at him, genuinely surprised. ‘A fatalistic physicist? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?’

  ‘Maybe that is why I am taking a break.’ He smiled crookedly as the lift hissed to a halt. ‘What about dinner?’

  ‘I suppose I have to eat,’ Raven said distractedly, then bit her lip at her ungraciousness.

  ‘Have I managed to make myself so disagreeable already that dinner with me will be such a punishment?’

  ‘Of course not. It is Las Vegas that I find disagreeable.’

  In her room, Raven sat on her bed with a sigh, wondering how every hotel in the world managed to look and smell the same. Expensive sterility. The thought startled her because usually she found the anonymity of hotel rooms soothing.