The Prince Of Mist

3

The following day, shortly before sunrise, Max heard a figure wrapped in the nocturnal haze whispering in his ear. He jumped up, gasping, his heart racing. He was alone in his room. The image he had dreamed of, that dark shape murmuring in the shadows, had vanished. He stretched out a hand towards the bedside table and turned on the lamp his father had repaired the day before.

Through the window, he saw dawn breaking over the forest. A thick mist was moving slowly across the field of wild grass but now and then the breeze opened up gaps through which he could just about make out the silhouettes of the statues in the walled garden. Max took his pocket watch from the bedside table and opened it. The smiling moons shone like plates of gold. It was six minutes to six.

Max dressed quietly and crept down the stairs, hoping he wouldn’t wake the rest of the family. He went into the kitchen, where the remains of last night’s dinner still lay on the wooden table, then opened the door to the backyard and stepped outside. The cold, damp air of early morning nipped at his skin. Making no sound, Max crossed the yard, went through the gate in the fence, closing it behind him, then made his way through the mist towards the walled garden.

*

The path turned out to be longer than he’d expected. From his bedroom window he’d estimated that the walled garden was about a hundred metres from the house, but as he walked through the wild grass Max felt as if he’d covered at least three times that distance when, suddenly, the gate with the spearheads emerged out of the mist.

A rusty chain was fastened around the blackened metal bars, with a corroded old padlock which time had stained a deathly hue. Max pressed his face against the bars and looked inside. The weeds had been gaining ground for years, so that the enclosure now looked like a neglected greenhouse. Nobody had set foot in that place for ages, thought Max, and whoever the guardian once was, he had long since disappeared.

He looked around and found a stone the size of his hand next to the garden wall. He picked it up and pounded at the padlock that linked the two ends of the chain, until at last the old lock snapped open. The chain broke loose, swaying across the bars like a braid of metal hair. Max pushed hard until gradually the two sides of the gate began to give way. When the gap was wide enough for him to get through, Max rested for a moment, then went inside.

The garden was larger than he’d thought. At a glance, he could have sworn there were almost twenty statues half-hidden among the vegetation. He took a few steps forward. The figures seemed to be arranged in concentric circles and Max realised that they were all facing west. They appeared to form part of something resembling a circus troupe. As he walked among the statues, Max recognised the figure of a lion tamer, a turbaned fakir with a hooked nose, a female contortionist, a strongman and a whole gallery of other ghostly characters.

In the middle of the garden, resting on a pedestal, stood the imposing figure of a clown. He had one arm outstretched, as if attempting to punch something with his fist, and he wore a glove that was disproportionately large. By the clown’s feet, Max noticed a paving stone that seemed to have some kind of design etched on it. He knelt down and pulled back the weeds covering the surface to reveal the outline of a six-pointed star within a circle. Max recognised the symbol: it was identical to the one above the spearheads on the gate.

As he examined the star, Max realised that while at first he had thought the statues were spaced out in concentric rings, they were in fact positioned in a way that mirrored the design of the star, each of the figures standing at an intersection of the lines that formed the shape. Max stood up and gazed at the eerie landscape around him. He looked at the statues in turn, each one swathed in greenery that trembled in the wind, until his eyes rested again on the clown. A shudder ran through his body and he took a step back: the hand of the figure, which seconds earlier had appeared to be clenched in a fist, now lay open, its palm stretched out invitingly. For a moment the cold morning air burned Max’s throat and he could feel a throbbing in his temples.

Slowly, almost fearing he might wake the statues from their eternal sleep, he made his way back to the gate of the enclosure, looking behind him at every step. Once he’d slipped through the gate, he began to run and this time he didn’t look back until he reached the fence guarding the backyard. When he did look, the garden of statues was once again buried in mist.

*

The smell of buttered toast filled the kitchen. Alicia was staring at her breakfast unenthusiastically and Irina was pouring milk into a saucer for her cat, which it was refusing to touch. Max observed the scene, suspecting that the cat’s eating habits were somewhat unusual and more exotic, as he had discovered the day before. Maximilian Carver held a cup of steaming coffee in his hands and gazed euphorically at his family.

‘This morning, I’ve been conducting some exploratory research in the garden shed,’ he began, adopting the ‘here comes the mystery’ tone he used when he desperately wanted someone to ask him what he’d discovered.

Max was so familiar with the watchmaker’s ways that he sometimes wondered which one of them was the father and which one the son.

‘And what have you found?’ Max conceded.

‘You’re not going to believe this,’ replied his father – although Max thought, ‘I bet I will’ – ‘A couple of bicycles.’

Max raised his eyebrows.

‘They’re quite old, but with a bit of grease on the chains they’ll go like a bat out of hell,’ Mr Carver explained. ‘And there was something else. I bet you don’t know what else I found in the shed?’

‘An aardvark,’ mumbled Irina, still petting her feline friend. Though she was only eight, the youngest of the Carvers had developed a crushing ability at undermining her father’s morale.

‘No,’ replied the watchmaker, visibly annoyed. ‘Is nobody else going to have a guess?’

Max noticed that his mother had been watching the scene and, realising that nobody seemed interested in her husband’s detective skills, she now came to the rescue.

‘A photograph album?’ Andrea Carver suggested in her sweetest tone.

‘You’re getting warmer,’ replied the watchmaker, feeling encouraged once more. ‘Max?’

His mother cast him a sidelong glance. Max nodded.

‘I don’t know. A diary?’

‘No. Alicia?’

‘I give up,’ replied Alicia.

‘All right, prepare yourselves,’ said Mr Carver. ‘What I’ve found is a projector. A film projector. And a box full of films.’

‘What sort of films?’ Irina butted in, turning her eyes away from her cat for the first time.

Maximilian Carver shrugged.

‘I don’t know. Just films. Isn’t it fascinating? We can have our own private cinema.’

‘That’s if the projector works,’ said Alicia.

‘Thanks for those words of encouragement, dearest, but let me remind you that your father earns his living mending broken things. The machines and I, we share a secret language.’

Andrea Carver placed her hands on her husband’s shoulders. ‘I’m glad to hear that, Mr Carver,’ she said, ‘because someone should be having a serious conversation with the boiler in the basement.’

‘I’ll see to it,’ replied the watchmaker, standing up and leaving the table.

Alicia followed suit.

‘Sit down, miss,’ said Mrs Carver quickly. ‘Breakfast first. You haven’t touched it.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘I’ll eat it,’ volunteered Irina.

Andrea Carver disallowed this proposal.

‘She doesn’t want to get fat,’ Irina hissed at her cat, pointing at Alicia.

‘I can’t eat with that thing waving its tail around the place and shedding hair everywhere,’ snapped Alicia.

Irina and the creature looked at her with disdain.

‘What a princess,’ Irina grumbled, as she went out to the backyard taking the animal with her.

Alicia turned to her mother, red-faced.

‘Why do you always let her do what she wants? When I was her age you didn’t let me get away with half the things she does,’ Alicia protested.

‘Are we going to go over that again?’ said Andrea Carver in a calm voice.

‘I wasn’t the one who started it,’ replied her elder daughter.

‘All right. I’m sorry.’ Andrea Carver gently stroked Alicia’s long hair; Alicia tilted her head, avoiding the conciliatory gesture. ‘But finish your breakfast. Please. Or at least try to start it.’

At that moment a metallic bang sounded beneath their feet. They looked at one another.

‘Your father in action,’ their mother commented ironically, as she downed her coffee. Then she glanced at her son, intrigued.

‘You’re unusually quiet this morning, Max. Something the matter?’

‘Uh?’

Alicia smiled to herself slyly as she pretended to munch on a piece of toast, while Max tried not to think about the extended hand and the bulging eyes of the clown, as it grinned through the mist of the walled garden.