Spoiler! :
~Prologue~
Night had arrived, gently closing in on the city. It had enshrouded it in its feathery black wings, until the sky was a midnight black and the streets were lit up only by the dim orange glow of the streetlamps. A light rain spilled down onto the deserted pavements, and landed, with a rhythmic pitter-patter, against the glass panes of the bedroom windows.
In the very topmost bedroom lay a young boy of barely three years of age. His eyes were a mossy green, and his hair a messy, sandy brown. A beam on light fell down upon where he lay, wide awake but perfectly silent. The tapping of the rain against the window panes soothed him. The boy, lying on his back in his cot, his mouth slightly agape, barely noticed it, yet he found himself shivering when it stopped; the gentle noise of the rain washing down the window panes was replaced by the sound of thunder, rumbling in the distance.
Above the boy, visible only to his eyes, was a glimmering, vivid yellow sphere, hovering gently in the air like a buoy on the surface of the water. All he knew was that the sphere was there, in front of him, as he had expected it to be. It was always there. He smiled up at it. It bobbed a little more enthusiastically; teasing him, calling him…Half-unaware of what he was doing, the little boy stretched out his tiny hands and wrapped them tentatively around the sphere. It stayed firmly hovering in the air. And then, the most exhilarating, beautiful warmth he had ever felt filled his entire body, spreading from the tips of his fingers to his toes. He closed his eyes and let out a small laugh as it surged through him.
When the young boy opened his eyes again, he was no longer there.
~Chapter One~
The Iridescent Waterfall
The Iridescent Waterfall
It was New Year’s Eve. Charlie remembered so many days like this, so many beginnings of the New Year. He remembered his father, Marc Trueheart, holding him up on his shoulders as they joined a local celebration and calling out with him the colours of the fireworks. He remembered the wonderful, vivid colours of them … Blue. Green. Red. Yellow.
He also remembered looking around him, and seeing the glowing crystal spheres, such strange and wonderful presences in the air around him. That had been back at a time when he thought that it was normal. He had thought, back then, that everybody could see them. That was the end of his last full year he has spent in such blissful ignorance. Near the beginning of the following year, he started to wonder whether it was all a dream.
But it wasn’t a dream. It was no more a dream than the vivid, sparkling colours of those fireworks had been … Purple. Green. Pink. Orange.
That had also been just before Anastasia had been born. She was nine years old now. She argued and squabbled with her only sibling – her older, brother, Charlie – as was only to be expected. She was gradually growing older now, finding her own voice and her own style. Her eyes were a mossy green like Charlie’s, like Charlie’s father’s, but her hair was a lovely auburn to match her mother’s, Courtney Trueheart’s, whilst Charlie and his father both shared the same light, sandy brown hair.
There was no local celebration this year. That had been back when they had lived in a tiny village in Northern Ireland. In fact, the one he remembered so clearly with the colourful fireworks and his father holding him up on his shoulders had been the last year they had lived there. The next year, they had packed up and moved here to their little town in mid-England, where the rain was plentiful and there were no local celebrations.
They were having their own celebration, though, with plenty of hot chocolate and treats. Their living room was brightly lit up with scented candles and festive music issued from the television at the fore of the room. There were party popper streamers strewn with artful imprecision around the room, and a selection of drinks and snacks laid out on the coffee table. Chocolate, hot chocolate, red wine, garlic bread, biscuits …
“Charlie, the countdown’s about to start!”
He looked up, startled, and when his mother gestured him forward went to sit on the floor on the worn, midnight blue carpet along with the rest of them. Anastasia sat at the front, her legs stretched out in front of her and the family cat, Murphy, sitting on them and turning in circles, pushing at her skin with gentle paws. Marc Trueheart crouched next to her, watching the television with as much intent as the rest of them. Courtney Trueheart’s auburn hair glimmered a scarlet colour in the flickering light of the candles all around them.
It passed as quickly as it had come. The New Year was here … they had counted down the final few seconds along with the automatic animation of the clock which had lit up the television. Then they had pulled themselves to their feet and hugged and kissed each other, before bidding each other goodnight. Courtney offered her son a glass of wine, which he took and sipped cautiously. At first, a wonderful warm sensation spread through his mouth and down his throat, warming his stomach, but afterwards, the bitter taste was all that was left.
They went to get ready for bed. The multi-coloured ribbons of paper which had exploded from the party poppers stayed spread around the room. Without the television on, it became suddenly peaceful and silent. Charlie sat on the sofa and let his thoughts drift off, simply sitting there in this room in the dim light of the candles, that bittersweet taste of wine still in his mouth and the thoughts of that year they had gone to the local new year’s celebration still on his mind.
The curtains were drawn; he had drawn them himself, so that he couldn’t see outside into the darkness. But he knew that the crystal spheres would await him there as they did every night if he pulled back the curtains – in their own range of glimmering colours. Scarlet. Violet. Burgundy. Peach.
He sat there and lost himself in his own thoughts. He immersed himself in them, knowing that the only way to make them go away was to think them through.
“Charlie?”
He turned around. She stood there, with her flushed face, her mossy green eyes and her auburn hair, looking at him expectantly – his little sister, Anastasia. He felt a rush of brotherly love for her – although they fought, although they had their bad times, the fact remained that she was his sister and he loved her. Now she stood there in her pyjamas,
her face flushed and her eyes bright, ready to bide him goodnight.
He went over to her and reached down to hug her. Then he kissed her on top of the head and she squealed and laughed. “Yuck!” she said. “Don’t do that!”
He just smiled at her. “Goodnight, little sis. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
“Night, Charlie,” she said, and she ran out of the room and up the stairs to her bedroom, where Charlie knew she would sleep, peaceful and happy, her dreams un-riddled by the troubles his always brought him.
He sat for a while longer, just relishing the fact that there was a new year ahead of him, letting the thoughts drift around the whirlpool of his mind. He didn’t let any of them sink in too deeply.
Eventually, when he was sure that everybody was asleep, he got to his feet and blew out the last of the candles still flickering in the living room. He was left in the shadowy darkness. He left the living room and walked quietly through the corridor, so as not to make any noise and disturb his sleeping family. He hadn’t been afraid of the dark for many, many years. He had become used to it.
He finally reached the back door, and reached for the cold, rusty key which always hung by its side. With it he unlocked the door, and breathed in the cool, fresh air on the other side. Outside, the sky had faded to a midnight black, but those hovering, glowing spheres still lit up the sky like miniature lanterns. They shone many different colours. Scarlet. Green. Amber. Peach.
The grass gently tickled the soles of his bare feet as he stepped outside. A gentle breeze swept through the leaves of the apple tree. They had planted it when they had first moved in, and since it had grown tall and proud, bearing succulent red apples every year.
The first ball he had touched, the ball which always seemed to find its way before him, above his bed or right outside in
his garden, was the sunny yellow one. It was no larger than a golf ball, hovering gently on the wind, teasing him as he walked towards it.
When he pressed his open, outstretched palms to it like a blind man, he felt a wonderful, joyful heat spreading through him like wildfire. This was the heat he always felt when he entered the Entrance. He called it the Entrance, at least, and it was what he had always heard Tiffani call it. It seemed suitable, after all, because it was the Entrance to every world he had ever visited, every world he could have ever imagined.
He opened his eyes again as he felt his feet touch something more solid. He opened them slowly, almost leisurely. It was as if he had entered space, lit up by a myriad of glowing, miniscule planets, all of different glowing colours, all bobbing playfully in their own positions in the sky, which, as before, was an enticing midnight black. And below him, drifting in what seemed to be thin air, was a pathway, made of smooth cobbled stones. It was illuminated by the purest white light he had ever seen, purer than the light cast by the drifting crystal spheres around him. There were ocean blue spheres, violet spheres, spheres of a fiery scarlet. There were spheres of the sunny yellow colour he had touched before, numbered with the mysterious number seven. As he gazed around at what he could only name as constellations of the glowing spheres, standing on the grey pathway, he saw the different numbers marked on each one. They seemed to move more freely than the ones he had seen in his garden; orbiting, it seemed, around the very grey pathway he was standing on.
He knew that, as always, the pathway he was standing on came to an end not too far from here. It stretched only a few short metres, a pier leading to a pitch black, silent sea. At the end of it, where the path became wider, was a girl, swinging gently on a seat suspended in mid-air.
At the sight of her face, Charlie gave a small shiver of recognition. He had seen her on that first night, the first time he had visited this place. Every night, he came here hoping that she was awaiting him, hoping that she would be there.
Her hazel eyes were warm and curious as they looked at him. She was now just a little shorter than him, but still fairly tall. She was not large or unnaturally thin: instead she was a lovely medium, with curves and a soft hourglass figure. Her hair was a rich, ruffled brown and it reached down in long waves just past her shoulders. She gave him a small, distant smile as he approached her.
“Charlie,” she said, and his heart gave a little skip of joy when he realised that there was a real, genuine gladness in her voice. She was glad to see him; her smile, distant but warm, was enough to tell him that much. He returned her smile, coming to a stop not too far from where she was sitting.
“Hi, Tiffani,” he said, and she gestured for him to sit down beside her. He did so, and they swung very gently on the suspended seat, backwards and forwards as if in a dream.
“How are you doing, Charlie?” she asked him.
“Not too bad,” he admitted. “It was New Year’s Eve today – you know about New Year’s Eve, right?”
She nodded, a small smile playing across her lips again. “Of course I do.”
“Well, anyway, it’s the new year now,” he said with a sigh. “I don’t really know how I feel about that. It’s nice for another year to be here, but at the same time, it’s … daunting. I guess it doesn’t really make much difference, though.”
“I don’t think it does, really,” she agreed. “It’s the same world. The start of the new year could have been on any day, at any time.”
They sat in silence for a while. Charlie wondered whether he dared to ask her the question which had been nagging at his mind for so long. Eventually he surrendered to it.
“Where have you been, Tiff?” he asked her. She blinked and her eyes seemed to stay closed for an unnaturally long time. Then she opened them and looked straight at him, biting her lip.
“Places,” she said vaguely. “I can’t tell you everything, Charlie – there would never be enough time. But I’ve been going to different worlds, seeing new things. I’ve been checking that everything’s alright,” she said.
“Are you doing anything like that tonight?”
She didn’t reply for a moment. Then, eventually, she gave him a small, sad nod. ”Yes.”
His heart dropped. He didn’t know quite what he had been expecting. Every night since Charlie had been just a toddler, Tiffani had travelled with him to the other worlds. But as he grew older, she came with him less and less frequently, and though he supposed it was just a part of growing up, it filled him with some deep, unreasonable sadness. Before, Tiff had been more of a babysitter than a friend, a motherly figure who looked after him when he travelled to other worlds, who made sure he never got into trouble. Now, she was more like a friend, and he felt that he needed as many of those as he could get.
Besides, she was the only friend he had ever been able to share all of this with – the Entrance, the other worlds.
But she had better things to do, so instead of spilling his heart out to her and telling her all of this, he got to his feet awkwardly. “I suppose I’ll be going, then,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to keep you for too long.” He tried to say it in a light tone, but it ended up sounding sad and a little put off. Pathetic, he thought.
She got to her feet and gave him a brief, hesitant hug. He returned it and then they parted, and he looked into her eyes. For a moment, he again considered telling her how he felt. He considered asking her to come with him, so he wouldn’t be so alone.
But perhaps it would be better if he travelled alone. That would at least give him time alone to think, he thought. Over the years he had made so many rash decisions and now he was determined to at least try and think the things he said and did out before going ahead with them. Still, sometimes unreasonable things would escape his lips.
It was only human.
He saw a familiar, scarlet glowing ball near the end of the pathway, and biding goodbye to Lilith, he made his way towards it. He tried not to think of her rich chocolaty curls, of her liquidly brown eyes. His fingers reached for the fiery red sphere. It was quite a lot smaller than the yellow one had been, around the size of a fig. His eyes, then, turned to Tiffani one last time before the rush of nothingness once again took him away.
He was in a meadow, breathing in the wonderfully fresh air. He realised that his feet were still bare; underneath him was a surface of fine, silvery sand. An overwhelmingly sweet scent drifted up his nostrils; the scent of fresh sea air, of pine trees, and of lavender.
The air was thicker here, but the sensation wasn’t unpleasant. Its resistance caused him to move much more slowly than usual; the air was soft; that was the only way to describe it. He moved forward as if in a dream. This is was the place he came, when he needed to lose himself. It was a small world, no bigger than the size of a large beach, the world of the Iridescent Waterfall.
And sure enough, in front of him, he could see several large, hilly mounds, covered in moss, from which powerful, silvery sheets of water fell, and, it seemed, sank almost immediately into the sand. There were several of these waterfalls; some smaller than the others; the one in the middle, the largest one of them all, was the one that truly captivated him.
It was the Iridescent Waterfall. It fell through the sky in beautiful sheets of different glistening colours. From where he stood now, the waterfall was of beautiful shades of fiery red and fuchsia pink. If he looked at it from a different angle, the colours would gradually change. Forest green, opal blue.
He could see the edges of the world, for it was as flat as a disk, floating in space. All around it was blackness, absence of anything, looming in on him, but he did not feel as if he would fall. This place, lighted by a million pale, shining spheres, and the majestic waterfalls, was where he came when he needed to think. He would return, at the end of the night, to his own home, where morning would eventually dawn and life would continue. The New Year would finally truly start, but for now, he wanted to cling on to this year for as long as the night would allow him to.
He crept closer to the waterfall, watching it spill down the mounds and soak rapidly into the wet sand beneath it. Beside it, as close as he could get to it without being swept away, was a small placard, a sign that somebody had already been here. He had read it so many times, ran his fingers over it, until he had it memorised. This wasn’t, after all, a difficult feat, for on the placard was only one carefully engraved, foreboding line.
The Iridescent Waterfall; beware when the water turns black.
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