Page 94 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
Her arms trembled with the exertion. She was too weak against this man. How did she ever think she could best him physically?
A hissing and a screech filled her ears, and she saw a black cat darting quickly across the flowers, chasing rats, and then another cat, white and brown, and Magda wondered what other dead things would appear in the arbour.
The resistance from Lukas changed, and she saw him turn his head towards the bag a few feet away. He started pulling in that direction, pulling away from Magda rather than upwards from the box.
If he gets to the bag, he’ll get the chess piece and then it’s over!
There was movement next to Magda, a darting seen from the corner of her eye, and she flinched, thinking something bigger than a rat was coming for her. When she turned her head she saw it was Will, suddenly by her side and grabbing hold of Lukas’s arm, his hands next to Magda’s,his teeth bared in a grimace and hair flopping over his eyes. As he added his weight and his strength, Lukas’s hand dipped back into the box.
A wave of relief and hope washed over Magda. She looked past Will and saw Frank and Henry writhing against their restraints, thorns tightening and cutting their skin and spilling blood. Henry was stretching out, reaching for her ring on the ground just beyond her. And James was on his knees, released from the control of the chess piece, his eyes wild at the sight of the wave of rats and cats, the insects in the air.
“Henry—help!” Magda shouted, but she didn’t know if she or James could hear her through the buzz of insects.
Magda looked at Lukas and saw his teeth bared, his eyes wide and awful, his smell filling her nose. His eyes slid sideways again, and he tried to stretch out with his free hand towards the bag.
Put him in the box before he gets the chess piece or it’s game over.
Flies and buzzing things darkened the air around Magda’s head, as if the creatures had been sent to attack her. She could hear Will grunting beside her as he too pushed on Lukas’s arm, and rats tickled her back and her legs and scurried over her, squeaking and squealing next to her ears as they crawled through her hair. And Lukas’s fingertips inched towards the bag.
“No!” Magda screamed, her vocal cords raw.
She opened the fingers of one hand, releasing Lukas’s forearm and receiving a sharp, questioning glance from Will. She grabbed for the pendant around her neck, the gift from her mother, and as she saw James snatch up Henry’s ring from the ground, she concentrated on the bubbles of gravity around Lukas, ignoring all the noise and the bedlam and the activity, focussing her mind. She felt them, those familiar bubbles, and she moved them. She lifted Lukas off the ground, carrying a handful of rats with him. Suddenly, without any ground to push against, Lukas had no leverage, and Magda and Will forced his hand deeper into the box.
Something solid struck Magda on the shoulder, trying to knock her away, and she glanced up to see tall orange sunflowers bobbing violently towards her on their thin stems. From the canopy above she saw vines of ivy swarming in the air like ribbons, stretching down to reach forher, knocking flies and wasps out of the air. The roses of Bell Street, on all sides and in the roof above her head, swelled and throbbed in sickly neon colours and the whole arbour shook and writhed, trying to come to Lukas’s aid or singing of his anger and fear.
Then Lukas screamed and all the flowers and branches and trees screeched and stretched and tried to save him.
Another pair of hands joined the struggle, long, elegant fingers clasping over Magda’s own hand and pushing down, and Magda saw Henrietta, now freed from her bindings, mouth a tight line and hair plastered to her brow with sweat and blood as she pushed, the three of them together forcing Lukas into the Impossible Box.
Magda felt it then: the sudden grip as the Impossible Box took hold, as the artefact that was Lukas was put away.
She relaxed her fingers experimentally, and Lukas’s arm did not withdraw. The box had him.
Magda faced Lukas in those last seconds, as the Impossible Box seized him, and she saw terror in his eyes. She would live with that image of his expression forever, she knew; it would haunt her. As Will and Henry released Lukas and fell backwards, she thought about apologising again, or shaking her head to convey some sort of regret, but she did neither. She just stared, backing away on aching knees.
Lukas fell downwards, impossibly, into the box. First his arm, up to the elbow, and then the shoulder, and Magda saw the man’s horrified expression as he stared downwards towards his destination. Light and reality seemed to flex; it was like observing an optical illusion in the real world. As Lukas’s shoulder disappeared into the box, he seemed to fold and collapse in on himself, as if space and time bent like an elbow, his face stretching and elongating awfully into an exaggerated scream. Then Lukas’s head was gone, and with it his scream, and then his torso, and then, finally, there was nothing, just a wooden box sitting on the ground with its lid open, surrounded by scampering rats and buzzing insects.
“That’s what you do with artefacts,” Frank croaked from behind Magda. He was slumped on the ground, James cradling him. There were bloody scratches around his neck and the skin on his face was thecolour of newspaper, the light in his eyes fading. He met Magda’s gaze. “You put them away.”
“He’s in there for good?” Will asked, his voice shrill as he kicked at a rat that dared to come near.
“He can’t come out,” Frank murmured, a smile on his face as his eyes closed. “Not unless someone pulls him out.”
Magda exhaled heavily, breathing out terror and dread, but finding herself empty. There was no joy nor relief nor delight; the cupboard of her emotions was bare.
She thought of Lukas’s expression in the moment she had betrayed him, his face, and she flinched as if struck.
You put the genie in the lamp and now he’s stuck there, alone. Is he suffering? Is he scared? Is he wailing and beating against the walls? What did he do to deserve that, Magda? What did he really do?
She closed her eyes briefly, shaking her head, wishing for the first time in her life that her imagination was not quite so powerful.
Was he evil, really, Magda? Was it the only way?
She opened her eyes again, trying to focus on anything but the images and questions in her mind.
Around them the lights of the flowers dimmed, and the branches and boughs began to sag, the arbour collapsing now that it was deprived of the magic that fed and sustained it, revealing the dark night sky and the cold kiss of rain, and the familiar row of terraced townhouses along the length of Bell Street.
Things That Come to an End
