Chapter IV 

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The Crack on the Wall 

Victor 

His mother bit her lower lip after his father left the room. She pressed the cross around her neck. Something was wrong. His father had lied to him again. Victor clenched his fist and shared a defiant gaze towards the door. Victor breathed an unnoticeable sigh of relief. He looked back at his mother with a smile on his face as if nothing had happened. 

“I’m fine. Father worries a lot,” Victor said, and she hugged him. 

“And for good reason.” She took a deep breath, and continued, “Sweetheart, your father, and I. We...” 

The doorknob to the room turned and the factotum—a person in charge of all things in the manor house—and a friend of the family, stepped in. 

“Pardon my intrusion, Madam Waltz. The young master will be late for his lessons,” alerted the well-groomed, grey-haired man. Not as tall as his father, but he could hold his own in robustness. 

“No. Pardon me, Edward. I won’t waste my son’s time more than I already have.” 

Victor eyed his mother’s smile. “What were you going to tell me?” he asked as she rose and walked to the door. 

“We will discuss it together as a family after school. You’ll be late. You should go,” she told him with a gentle nod. His mother left the room soon after, heading towards the staircase to the second floor. 

“Let me get my cloak, Edward.” 

“No need, sir. I will do that,” said the man before disappearing. 

In the moment of silence that followed, Victor’s attention turned to his father’s newspaper sitting on the dining room table. Out of curiosity and boredom, he glanced at it, but something was amiss. He noticed the date, March 24th, 1907. It was the incorrect date. 

Had his father been reading a newspaper from a week ago? He picked up the paper and looked on in thought.

MURDER ON BAKER STREET read the headline. 

The ceiling and stairs creaked. Victor, eager to learn more, scanned the page of the newspaper for any information he could find and memorised the location. Given his father spending too much time locked up in his office room. He should have known his father was up to some kind of investigation these days. He put the newspaper down in haste as Edward returned. 

“I found your cloak,” neared his voice as he emerged at the doorway. “We had better leave now, young man.” 

It took little under an hour to get to Calne County Secondary School. It was on the other side of the town and the Waltz manor-house was some way out into the countryside. Edward drove the Waltz family's Babcock roadster model 5 in serenity through the town. Alongside the road, folk of the peasantry were opening the windows to their homes for the dawn air, whilst the women began the laundry routine in the gardens. Mostly, the morning streets were empty. Studying outside the manor house was cheap and did not raise suspicions of guarded secrets. After all, his mother wanted him to make friends, but his father completely resisted such a thing. In his own words, It was not useful or productive. 

“How are things at school?” Edward broke the silence. 

“Boring,” Victor muttered, and took something out of his shoulder backpack. 

“I was going to ask Mother about this.” Edward looked to his right where Victor was holding a black book with a silver number “0” on the cover. Edward’s eyes flashed to it. 

“Where did you get that Grimoire?” 

“You know what this is?” Victor said. 

“Where did you get it?” Edward repeated as he kept his eyes on the road, and a firm grip on the wide steering wheel. Victor’s shoulders shrunk. Victor was sure that his mother brought it to his room. 

“Did Mother put you up to this? Another one of her jokes?” Victor asked, but Edward didn’t answer. “I found it in my room this morning.” 

“How odd.” Edward raised an eyebrow. “Maybe, the Tooth Fairy put it there.” 

“Of course,” Victor replied in a sneer. 

“Look at the windows in that shop,” Edward told him. Victor looked and saw the small panes of glass transform before his eyes. The glass pulsated black, twisted, and contorted its image into many alien patterns. 

His heart skipped. His breathing sped up; he couldn’t quite believe what he had witnessed. A shocking occurrence that he refused to believe. It had to be another trick, a ruse, a farce. What was this? Victor remembered the bedtime stories his mother always used to tell him when he was a child. 

No. This was ridiculous. Magic wasn’t real. 

His mind overflowed with panicked thoughts, fighting the idea, and his hands shook. 

“Magic exists in all things in this world,” Edward replied. “It’s a shame that your mother wasn’t so gifted like yourself, sir.” 

“Edward Hellström, I forbid you to speak of my mother that way,” Victor accused, his resolve serious and austere. 

“Pardon me, sir. You’re right. This is a delicate subject that your parents should explain.” This type of humour and eccentricity had always been present in the household. During his childhood it was fine, but now it was irritating.

“You went too far,” he told the factotum. 

Edward found himself, teeth clenched, and the grip of his hand over the steering wheel tightened. His eyes seemed to narrow. Victor had never seen him like this, and it concerned him deeply. 

Edward dropped Victor at the school and left in silence. 

At the entrance to the school, the thoughts of pulsing black glass came back. It happened in front of his eyes, as if in a dream, the glass twisted and turned. 

This wasn’t real! It was not happening! It couldn’t be real! Victor thought as he ambled down the street. 

A group of students stood by the gates. “If it isn’t Vicky,” a boy gibed. The blonde student smirked at Victor and then burst into laughter with his two friends. They were all wearing the same school uniform—dark tailcoats and long pants. 

Victor walked around the crowd, shoulders shrunken. Another fool to add to the list, Victor thought with scorn.

“Oi, where are you going?” said the one in the middle. Victor kept walking and reached the classroom quickly after. Safe at last. 

Hours went by in science class, which subjected Victor to the careful study of natural rocks and ore. The section on clay fascinated him as he learned people used it for almost anything in the past. He loved the omnipresent desire of building something from what seemed to be nothing. Victor noted down everything the teacher said—clay particularly combined materials that when joined with moisture is a wonderfully plastic and malleable material. 

A piece of art. 

Lunchtime soon came, and he considered a brief nap now that he was alone in the classroom. Not really having any friends in the school, he had got used to spending his lunch hours on his own and would take it as an opportunity to rest in solitude. But as he rested his forehead on his bag, his head was abuzz with the same question. 

Could magic be real? 

He tried to empty his mind. But his mind became weary. 

The nightmare he had last night persisted all night and prevented him from sleeping properly and yet his mind was like fire, ever persisting and burning without cause to cease as the nightmare returned to him. Two massive silver eyes circled Victor at a bewildering speed. They had a fathomless absence of light, absorbing him into themselves. He felt a chilling cold that cut at his bones and caused his exhalations to appear as short shots of silver mist. 

“What’s happening?” came his shrieked voice from outside of himself. 

“Leave me alone! Please!” he begged, and it only reflected immediately back at him like a cold, black wall of absolute despair and endless void. He shivered, unable to find a warmth inside himself, as it seemed like though his tears would turn to ice, and the bottomless black which struggled and groaned above him was pushing him into further isolation. A terrible noise that Victor could not truly comprehend rang deep in his eardrums, threatening to burst them, as he, utterly helpless, covered his head and his face with his hands in total surrender.

“This isn’t real. It isn’t real,” he chanted almost in mantra to himself, again and again, praying for some kind of relief.

None came, and in those moments, he felt a hand that reached out to touch his shoulder, and a long sigh echoed through the dark. In the writing desk, where he had sat lay the notebook where he had been scrawling shattered into a thousand tiny pieces that ominously danced madly around him. 

He objected profusely to his abject fear. Magic wasn’t real. Monsters weren’t real. His voice broke as he screamed out, much more lucid in his surroundings again, “This is just a dream!” But his notebook shattered, and the classroom smothered in torn paper that floated idly around. Collecting all that he could, he stuffed the remnants of his work into his bag as his mind raced to collect and organise what had just happened. He knew there was a simple and logical explanation for what had happened to him and attempted to sober himself as he tried to reach for the paper that continued moving farther out of his grasp. 

“Please stop,” he whimpered helplessly. 

The paper collectively slumped, all falling toward the ground as though suddenly made of stone. 

“Look at this mess you made,” claimed a voice from the classroom door. No matter where he tried to hide in school, people always meddled in his affairs or took advantage of him. “Talking to yourself?” asked the plump one who was a little older than the rest. He took out a pocketknife and brandished it carefully. 

“You haven’t paid the protection fee this week, Vicky.” 

“Go away!” objected Victor, frustrated and fearful all at once, yet utterly consumed with the adrenaline to fight back. He tried to fight, but they outnumbered him, and as one boy held him down, the other punched him in the face. After what felt like a horrendous pummelling, the boys backed off and the eldest nicked his cheek with the knife before they released him. He fell to the floor, numb from pain. 

“What did you do that for?” one follower questioned, clearly taken aback by the leader’s choice. 

“Shut up! Take his money!” Earth-brown fingers rummaged through Victor’s pockets, pulling out his coin purse. Almost immediately he threw the empty bag on the floor with a hearty laugh. 

“Is that all you have?” roared the tubby one with a sinister grin. “I want at least ten times that much tomorrow or your belly will be next!” He waved the blade in Victor’s face menacingly. “Balesky, check this out.” The thinner blonde boy had pulled out his well-sewn cloak and passed it to the chubby lad. 

“Where did you get this lovely cloak from, freak? Such high quality!” The boys all laughed together as Balesky let his knife slowly cut through the fabric until it was two pieces. 

“That was my father’s,” Victor muttered. 

“Are you going to cry?” Balesky replied with malice. Victor didn’t bother to reply. 

Slumped, near-unconscious, Victor lay still on the classroom floor, yet something stirred deep inside of him. Balesky pulled his head up and a chilling pressure fell on him as he saw that Victor’s eyes were now a deep red and misted with a pulsing black. Horrified, Balesky shrieked and stepped back, stumbling over his feet, and falling backside first onto the ground, where he crawled away. 

Then the boys noticed heavy black fumes coming off Victor’s person as if they were seeping through his skin. He was screaming, crying, roaring like a beast of the darkest of depths. The classroom shook as if it was ready to fall in on itself, and the roof engulfed in a pulsating blackness that was utterly beyond the human mind’s capacity to imagine or believe. 

“Help!” Balesky croaked out to his friends, but they had already abandoned him. He looked at Victor on the floor, whose muscles and bones involuntarily pulsated and contracted in and out of places in the most horrific of ways. Getting himself up, Balesky fled toward the exit, but as he sprinted his foot slipped on a page of Victor’s notebook face-first into a wall, hitting himself firmly into unconsciousness. Victor became overwhelmed. His heart raced and his chest compressed and yet still felt hollow. The floor sank by an invisible pressure that was pulling him down, and all awareness of time melted away. In his few moments of lucidity, he could make out Balesky through misty, half-shut eyes. He tried to call out for help but was voiceless and silent. His eyes commanded themselves shut, and he could hear nagging noises in his head that sounded like the slow clinks of glass on stone. 

Then all turned black and silent.