‘Grace, he’s got a hold of her…Do something…I tried…He’s too strong…’
‘Marta?’
She clutched her own neck. I could sense her tightened windpipe. People were getting staff to come over. One member of staff, still at the blackjack table, was phoning for an ambulance. But then, suddenly, she wasn’t. The phone appeared to become piping hot in her hands and she instinctively let it go with a sudden jerk of her arm. The device then smashed and burned and incinerated.
It was him. He was there, still sitting at the poker table and using his mental abilities to do whatever he wanted. It was terrifying. To face that kind of murderous power. Smiling nonchalance. To see how freely evil could roam, if the usual fences of law and reality didn’t exist.
I knelt down.
‘Marta, it’s okay, it’s okay…’ An absolutely ridiculous thing to say, given the circumstances. But if my mind could make grown men stick forks in their legs and burst lobster tanks wide open, I was pretty sure it could do something on a smaller and closer scale, such as expand the airway of a restricted trachea literally centimetres away. I knew I had to act fast. I knew that if she was taken away in an ambulance she may never return.
I had a choice. I either went back into the poker room, to deal with Art and nullify him, or stay with Marta. Push or pull. The fire or the burn. I stayed with Marta.
I know what I told you earlier. About how my mind now was equivalent to a body, and just as bodies can move around in physical space my mind suddenly seemed able to actively roam into other places and ignore barriers and how I felt like the energy of a wish now came with power. Well, that was still true.
But it was tough. It was tougher than anything. I was wishing as hard as anyone could wish for Marta to breathe freely, but it was like mentally pushing against a wall. No. Wrong analogy. It was more like a tug-of-war. Little bits of progress – gasps of breath – followed by feeling too weak to help her.
Because of course there was a counterforce pressing against every wish, pushing in the opposite direction.
It was at this point that the whole room went quiet. There were no more voices and no more thoughts crowding the air. Because everyone in the room was now collapsed on the floor. They weren’t struggling to breathe like Marta. They had just had their consciousness temporarily disabled. You know, like a hypnotist putting someone to sleep. Only, en masse, and without the talk. The only exception was Alberto, who – with the talents inside him – was a little harder to control. But he was still being pushed back away from Marta as if being pressed by a hurricane, until he was pinned against a slot machine.
‘He’s got me,’ Marta managed to say, her hand clutching mine, then weakening again. Her voice no more than a rasp. Her fingers falling open like petals. His plan was clear. He was going to kill Marta and he was going to get away with it. I could not let it happen.
I changed tactic. Instead of focusing on expanding her airways, I stared over to the poker room and focused on pushing Art away. But he wasn’t in the poker room.
He was standing right there, above the crowd of collapsed bodies. He was cradling his tumbler of whisky as his smile curled like a cat’s tail.
‘Hello, Grace,’ he said. ‘How are you doing?’
The Miniature Bottle
Marta’s breath was fading beside me. Alberto was still pinned against the fruit machine, his expression pained as he tried to wrestle with the force of Art’s power.
‘You made a big mistake,’ Art said, with a voice of almost sincere concern as he stared at me. ‘You should never have come to Ibiza. You should have just stayed where you were, old lady. On your sofa.’
I stayed fixed on him. I was burrowing into him now. Seeing the truth. The politicians and protesters he had threatened and harmed and killed. His obliviousness to life every time he chose a new plot of land. But also, I was seeing pain. A jagged, open wound. A gleaming invisibility. A memory that wouldn’t leave him. His dead father, as he found him in the garage.
I remembered what Alberto had said.
The only time La Presencia has been made visible in broad daylight. And it wasn’t an adult. It was a boy. An English boy. He was on holiday here. He nearly drowned. He swam too far out from the beach, and no one could get to him. His father saw him but too late. He went under. He was under for seven minutes. He was dead, effectively…
I pictured Art as a child on the beach. He was Arthur, then. Artie. The beach was Cala d’Hort. His mother was reading a novel and his father was reading The Times and he was bored of digging holes to catch the waves. So he went out to swim.
I saw him as he swam further and further out, imagining he could make it to Es Vedrà. I saw him as he looked around and realised he was way out of his depth, the currents too strong to swim back. I felt the weight in his young arms that could hardly make another stroke. I felt him wrestle in panic, as his chin slipped below the waterline, calling for his parents…His father eventually saw him. His head sprung up and he pressed his palm into the sand and ran into the water. A desperate front crawl to him but he never got there. Artie never forgave his father for not looking sooner. ‘I would be dead if it was up to you.’ And his father couldn’t cope with what nearly happened, and what had happened. He felt he had gone mad. He turned to drink and eventually hanged himself, and Artie had felt a pain so deep that he used to carry a box of matches with him so he could light a flame under his palm to distract himself.
As I observed Art sipping his whisky, I thought this couldn’t be so. La Presencia would not bestow gifts on someone who would so drastically use them for harm.
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ Art said, still leaning over me in that casino as Marta slipped into unconsciousness. He said it with his mouth but I could feel him in my mind. ‘You see, I know you think you were the special one, Grace. I know what they told you. That your talents are the best there have been since at least Joan Bonanova. But it’s a fabrication. It isn’t true. You see, next to mine, your talents are sadly rather mediocre. La Presencia came to me as a child. I was with it for seven whole minutes while my parents thought I was dead. The whole ocean glowed with the effort. I have it in me. It chose me. My parents didn’t protect me, but La Presencia did. It saved me because it saw my potential. It saw what I could be. I make money for this place. I give back. I give beautiful experiences…’
‘No,’ I said, seeing everything in his mind as I was saying it. Seeing it all light up like a dark sea. ‘You take life. That is what you do. You want to kill Marta because you know tomorrow she is going to stop the Es Vedrà resort at the protest. Just like you knew Christina would have stopped it. You killed Ricardo Martínez after he blocked the application for one of your resorts. You use this power that the ocean gave you and you do terrible things with it. You choose the most controversial locations and the most sensitive habitats because it makes you feel in control. It makes you feel what you didn’t feel when your parents weren’t there to save you.’
‘And you would know all about neglectful parenting, Grace…’
Marta had stopped breathing. She was still. That terrifying stillness I knew too well.
‘Don’t cry for her. She was nothing special. Even La Presencia knew that. Poor, unchosen Marta…’
He wanted me to say something. He wanted me to communicate with him. Hate wants hate. But I realised I didn’t need to. I didn’t need to talk with hate. Because I understood what Alberto had in his hand. The rum bottle. I remembered that first encounter with Alberto, when he had shown me his miniature rum bottle. I remembered him explaining how it helped him become sober after his wife died. He had it now. He had been reaching for it. He couldn’t move his hand for me to see it, because Art had him rigidly held in place. But that was okay. Because I could see the glowing light coming through his fingers. I knew what it was. Extract of La Presencia.
So I didn’t focus on Art, and I didn’t focus on Marta, I focused on the thick, aged, sun-weathered fingers of Alberto. And I opened them. And the bottle dropped, and it didn’t smash on the carpet, but Art had heard or noticed, and his attention was gone for a second. So I smashed the glass with my mind and then it was free. La Presencia was there, a small glowing puddle that refused to be absorbed, and it was moving now, towards Marta.
‘Stop,’ commanded Art. ‘Stop!’
But it wasn’t stopping. It was crawling like a legless and luminescent watery creature, gleaming brighter and brighter, and then when it reached Marta it rose through her hair and across her skin and into her mouth, and, a moment later, she coughed and her eyes opened. She was very much alive.
And those eyes stared at Art, just as I stared at Art, and just as Alberto over by the fruit machine stared at Art. And there we were. All now gifted with whatever talents La Presencia had chosen to give us.
And then something even more incredible. Marta’s body glowed. Not massively, but undoubtedly, and not for a long time but for long enough. Flickering, and blue, with little specks of light moving through her veins like headlights in a city. Or like a thousand lanternfish in the deep ocean, as Alberto later put it.
And then I felt something strange inside me. A feeling of total calm. Which was ridiculous, given that I was surrounded by a load of collapsed bodies in the middle of a casino facing off against a murderous psychopath with inhuman powers. And the calm came with a feeling of internal warmth and togetherness. I felt like something had been missing and now it wasn’t. And I looked at my hand and saw tiny lights shoot through the veins there too. The same with Alberto. He was staring at his hands in disbelief and laughing.
‘It’s working together…it’s connecting us!’
Marta remembered the words on her placard and stood up, La Presencia’s light still travelling like fireflies through her body. ‘Nos alzamos como el océano.’
Art was a mix of confusion and consternation. Then he stared down at his own hands and was relieved to see the moving lights there too. ‘You can’t touch me!’
But still, he was worried. He sensed this was not the time to strike. And the worry was strong enough for him to retreat. He walked away, as La Presencia faded in all of us.
