Just Watch

"Empty houses are rarely as empty as they seem."

For a fraction of a second my brain ran through the options — Mum, Dad, burglar, Mum again, Dad again — and came up with none of them, because none of the people my brain knew would come into the living room from behind me and laugh at me like that, and it took the brain another fraction of a second to pull the file on the one person who would.

"Luke."

He was standing just behind me, one hand still slightly raised from where it had been on my shoulder, his face doing the particular grin that I had not seen in a while and had forgotten the specific wattage of. He was in a t-shirt and jeans. He looked, inappropriately for the situation he had just created, completely delighted with himself.

"Hey, mate," he said, and the grin widened as he took in whatever my face was doing. "Sorry. I couldn't resist. That was the best reaction I've had in weeks."

I put my hand down from my chest and tried to make the chair stop creaking underneath me, because my legs were still doing a version of the startle-response that had not yet caught up with the fact that I was not being murdered. The breath I had been holding came out as something close to a laugh and closer to a swear word.

"Luke, what the heck —"

"Sorry. Sorry. I'm sorry." He was not sorry. He held both hands up as if that counted for something, and looked me up and down with the slow, honest appraisal of a person taking stock of someone he hadn't seen in a while. The grin settled into something warmer and more brotherly than the one he'd opened with. "Look at you. You got tall."

"I've been tall for a while." My voice sounded thin to me. The adrenaline had nowhere to go and was coming out as volume I hadn't asked for.

"Not like this. Last time I saw you, you were — what, Lisa's wedding, maybe — you were —" he held a hand up in the air at about my chest height, "— about this tall, or thereabouts. And you had a skinnier face."

"I have the same face." I shrugged, and I had nowhere to put my hands, and the shrug seemed to amuse him more than a real answer would have.

His eyes went past my shoulder and landed on the computer screen behind me, and his whole face did the thing a face does when it has just realised it has walked in on something much funnier than it had expected to walk in on.

"Oh, mate."

I had forgotten about the computer. I had, in the compressed eight seconds since the hand had come down on my shoulder, entirely forgotten about the computer, and now the League of Legends match was still running in the background, and the Anzac crumbs were scattered across the keyboard in a formation that was closer to a confession than a scatter, and Luke's eyes had gone from the screen to the crumbs to the headphones hanging off my neck and back to my face.

"I —"

"I'm guessing you're not supposed to be on there." He was laughing now, under his breath, not a scolding laugh — the laugh of a brother who had just worked out exactly what kind of unsupervised afternoon he had interrupted and was enjoying the discovery. "Classic. How long have you been playing."

"A bit." My hand was already at the mouse. "Twenty minutes."

"Twenty minutes of Mum's forbidden hours."

"Luke —"

"I'm not going to tell her." He held both hands up again. "Relax. I've got bigger things to talk to her about than you illegally playing —" he squinted at the screen as the window came up for closing, "— whatever this is."

"League of Legends."

"League of Legends. Sure." He had clearly never heard of it and was never going to remember the name, and I watched him file the name in the part of his brain specifically reserved for things he was not going to file. "Shut it down, mate."

My hands were already working. The match window closed. The browser tabs closed in the order I had opened them, because I was tidy about these things even under duress, and the screen went back to the desktop, which had a picture of Nibbles on it. I pushed the chair in. Luke watched the whole operation with the amused patience of a man enjoying a piece of theatre, and when I was done he clapped me on the shoulder with a lighter touch than the first one.

"Come on. Kitchen. I can smell those biscuits from here."

I followed him out of the living room.

The hallway felt slightly different with Luke in it. Not because the hallway had changed. Because Luke in this hallway was a variable my mental model of the house had not accounted for in years, and my brain was still rendering.

The hallway felt slightly different with Luke in it. Not because the hallway had changed. Because Luke in this hallway was a variable my mental model of the house had not accounted for in years, and my brain was still rendering. Luke did not turn up in Craigmore on a random afternoon. Luke turned up at Christmas, sometimes, when Christmas had the specific gravity to pull him off the island, and otherwise he stayed in Hobart with Jamie and the dogs and the version of his life he had built there. And yet here he was, with his back to me, walking into our kitchen as if he had been doing it that morning.

He already had the biscuit tin open and was chewing when I came in, leaning against the bench in the way he had leaned against things when he was younger, which was with slightly more of his weight on the bench than a bench would usually reward. He pushed the tin across the bench towards me.

"These are ridiculous. Mum made them?"

"Yesterday."

"Fresh Anzacs. The best kind." He took another one and bit it in half. "Go on."

I took one, because the tin was open and the offer was in the spirit of the afternoon he was trying to build between us, and because I was, I realised, still hungry despite the four I had already had, because biscuits were not, categorically, food. The Anzac was good. Mum had done something with golden syrup this time that she had not done last time, and Luke made a small satisfied noise through his nose that suggested he had noticed the same thing.

"So." I leaned against the bench opposite his, the tin between us. "Where is everyone."

He did the pause.

He did not do it for long. He did it for about one and a half beats, the kind of pause a person puts in when they have been rehearsing the line in their head and are not quite sure how it is going to land when it actually comes out of their mouth, and I registered the pause even as I was still chewing.

"Yeah." He put the biscuit tin down on the bench without looking at it. "About that."

Something about the way he said it made the room smaller.

My hand, which had been reaching for another biscuit, stopped.

"Where are they, Luke." I was watching his face now. He looked up, and the grin was gone, and what had replaced it was something closer to the look he had worn occasionally when we were kids — the look of a brother who was about to do a thing he was not sure our parents were going to handle, and who had decided to do it anyway.

"I need to show you something." His voice was quieter than it had been a minute ago, more even, and he was looking at me properly for the first time since the living room. "It's easier than trying to tell you. Come with me."

"Come where. Luke, are they —"

"They're fine." He said it quickly, with his palms slightly raised, the way a person says a thing they want you to believe before you have had the chance to decide not to. "Nobody's hurt. I need you to come to the study."

I pushed off the bench and followed him, because there was no version of the afternoon in which I did not follow him — he was my brother, he had just told me nobody was hurt, and my body was walking before I had decided it was. Luke picked up the biscuit tin on his way out of the kitchen.

Luke reached the study door and put his hand on the handle. He paused, looking at the wood of the door for a second before he turned his head back over his shoulder.

"Ready?"

I did not have a useful answer to that. Ready presupposed that I knew what I was being made ready for, and I did not, and Luke in the hallway with one hand on the study door handle did not look like a man who was about to show me something I was going to enjoy. I managed a nod. The nod was the best I had.

Luke opened the door.

The first thing my brain registered was wrong. The second thing was wrong. The third thing was also wrong, and my brain gave up trying to process them in sequence and just took the whole room in at once — the desk pushed out of its usual alignment against the wall, the lamp that normally sat on the desk now on the floor next to it, the bookshelves along the back wall with their lower shelves half-emptied, the cardboard box that had been in the corner for as long as I could remember moved into the middle of the carpet with its flaps open. Papers on the carpet. Books on the carpet. A jumper of Dad's over the back of the reading chair, which was fine except Dad's jumpers did not usually leave Dad's wardrobe.

I stopped in the doorway.

"What —" I said, and then didn't know how to finish the sentence, because there were too many wrong things to pick one to finish it with. My hand was still on the door jamb. "What happened in here."

Luke had gone on a step ahead of me and was standing in the middle of the room now, the biscuit tin tucked under one arm, his back half to me. He did not answer straight away. He was looking at the wall opposite the window — a bit of wall which, by the standards of the rest of the room, was unhelpfully blank. A family photo usually hung there. The photo was now on the desk, propped against the edge of the lamp, face-out.

"Mum made a mess," I said, because the joke was there, and because my brain was reaching for the lightest available reading of the scene.

Luke did not laugh, and the fact that he did not laugh was the next thing that landed.

My hand came off the door jamb.

"Luke."

He turned. The grin was gone — had been gone, I realised, since the kitchen, and had not come back, and I had not fully clocked it because I had been too busy following him. His face had the specific set of a person who had been rehearsing a conversation for a long time and had just arrived at the part of it he had not worked out how to do, and his free hand — the one not holding the biscuit tin — went into his front pocket.

"Just — watch."

"Watch what —"

"Just watch, Charles."

His hand came out of his pocket.

The thing in his hand was small. Small enough to hold between his thumb and the side of his forefinger, the way you'd hold a lighter. It did not look like a lighter. It did not look like any specific object I could have named. It had a matte-dark surface with some kind of etching cut into it — intricate, tight, lines that caught what little light the study had and threw it back oddly. My brain ran through its catalogue of small-objects-a-person-pulls-out-of-their-pocket and came back with nothing useful.

Luke raised the device towards the wall. His thumb moved on the side of it.

The wall lit up.

Not lit — lit up, the way a match lit up when you struck it, except across the whole blank face of the wall at once. Colour came out of the surface in moving swirls. Bright rainbow colours. They turned over each other, caught, uncaught, and where two colours met there was a small quick spark that flicked out of the wall and was gone before I'd registered it. Then another spark somewhere else. The whole wall was moving. The whole wall was alive.

I took a step back. My forearms had gone goose-bumped.

"Whoa." The word came out louder than I'd meant it and higher than I'd meant it. "Whoa. What — what the heck is that."

"It's a Portal."

Luke said it flat. The word landed between us and sat there. I stared at the wall, which was not a wall any more, which was the single most dazzling thing I had ever seen standing in a room I had been in a thousand times, and I could not look away from it.

Portal.

The word had a specific register. It belonged to games. It belonged to the Marvel movies Eli had dragged me through when I was twelve. It belonged to novels I had read and novels I had not read and a specific type of TV show I did not watch. It belonged, in particular, to the part of the brain that held fiction. It did not belong to our study. It did not belong to Luke's hand. It did not belong to an afternoon in Craigmore when I was supposed to be playing League of Legends at the family computer and waiting for Mum to come home.

And yet.

The portal was swirling against the wall.

"Luke."

"Yeah."

"You —"

"Yeah."

"That's —"

"Yeah."

He was not going to help me finish the sentences. I did not blame him, because I could not finish them myself. The wall was still alive with its moving colours, still throwing the occasional small spark, still the brightest thing in the room, and Luke was standing in the middle of the carpet with the biscuit tin under his arm and the device in his other hand and the specific face of a man who had opened a door to somewhere impossible and was now waiting for his little brother to catch up.