She glanced back at Joe, who was still sleeping soundly, and sat on the edge of the bed, listening to his faint snoring. He looks peaceful, she thought. I wonder what he’s dreaming about.
Amber wondered if now that that woman had gone she might be able to get some sleep for the rest of the night- she had a strange feeling that that was the reason for her restlessness, as if she had somehow known that that creature would make an appearance.
But she couldn’t sleep- at least, not properly. That miserable feeling of being utterly lost and scared kept her from sleeping for longer than maybe a quarter of an hour at a time, and she would lie awake again for ages each time she woke up. She lay down and stared up at the ceiling, listening to the pounding of her heart as she wondered for the hundredth time or more what had happened to her dad and Emma, and if they were able to look for her and Joe. She knew they would be trying if they could, but surely it was hard to look for two people who had just disappeared unless they had somehow left some sort of invisible trace, a clue of some kind.
The people who rule the Order know about this world, she thought. Does that mean everyone in the Order knows about it? Could they somehow figure out that this is where we went? Will Dad have told them about what happened and been able to get them to help? But then, Stephen said that the Emptiness is beyond the reach of the Order... so how did Joe manage to pull us both through? And how can they banish people to this place if they can’t get through?
Then a dark thought occurred to her. When my parents had me and Joe’s had his, they were going against the rules of the Order, so maybe the people who rule the Order don’t want to help rescue me. Maybe they think it would be better if I never came back from here. But then again, Joe is important to them even if I’m not, so wouldn’t they be trying to rescue him if they can?
All these possibilities chased each other around in Amber’s mind, over and over. She felt so tired, and wished she could stop thinking and just sleep until the morning without waking.
Hours passed by, not that she could measure them properly as her watch still didn’t work. Eventually the first light of the morning shone through the window. Amber couldn’t bear waiting any longer, so she got up and stretched, then happened to glance across the room at the small mirror on the wall, dismayed to see how untidy and grubby she looked. There isn’t even a hairbrush here, and I hope he has a spare toothbrush I can use, she thought, and then wondered how she could even think such ordinary, everyday things.
She tried to sort and straighten her hair out with her fingers, gave up after a moment and made her way downstairs. She saw Stephen sitting on the sofa, staring at nothing in particular. He was moving something that looked like a small glass cube from one hand to the other. Every now and then it caught the light from the window and Amber saw all the colours of a rainbow appear for a moment.
Stephen put the cube down on the table when he saw her. “Did you sleep well?” he asked.
Amber shook her head. “I couldn’t. Joe got to sleep without any problems though.” She looked around the room, and a question suddenly occurred to her. “When you were sent to live here, did you just find this place? I bet you didn’t bring all this stuff from the other world, did you?”
“No, in fact I brought nothing with me,” he said. “They didn’t give me a chance. I wandered for a day or so, and I was lucky enough to find this house. Everything you see around you was already here.”
“So it must have belonged to someone?” Amber reasoned.
“Maybe it did at one point. But there was no one else here when I arrived, and no one has returned since. And I needed somewhere to live. It gets cold outside at night, and there are other dangers. And I don’t just mean the Lost.”
Amber sat down in one of the chairs. “I don’t understand this world,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense. I just...” She could feel tears beginning to well up. “I just want to go home!” she sobbed.
Stephen looked at her in dismay. For a moment he looked as if he might decide to come over and try to comfort her, but he didn’t. He didn’t seem to know what to do.
“I will do whatever I can to help you both get back,” he said eventually. “I promise you that. But I think the only way you can get back is if we figure out why you’re both here. There has to be a reason. I know you think it was an accident, but I believe there’s a lot more to it than that. This place is difficult to understand- even I don’t understand it really- but it has some sort of plan. It has rules.”
Amber turned and looked when she heard a noise behind her. Joe had made his way downstairs without her even noticing. His hair had that slanted look from being slept on most of the night, and Amber remembered a few occasions when he had even turned up at school with his hair like that because he’d forgotten to brush it. I remember I spent all day making fun of him, she thought. Now that feels like a memory from someone else’s life.
“So how are we going to find out?” Joe asked Stephen.
“I think it must be tied in to the memories of the Guardian that were passed on to you.” Stephen frowned thoughtfully. “There’s a place called the Light Cavern, in the mountains on the other side of the forest. The magic that powers this world seems to be especially strong there for some reason. It might be that that place could awaken something in you, Joe. A memory of something to do with the Emptiness, perhaps.”
Joe and Amber looked doubtfully at each other. Stephen shrugged tiredly. “Well, I’m afraid that’s the only idea I have.”
“Won’t the Lost follow and find us if we go there?” Amber asked.
“There are ways of hiding our trail from them- and paths that they don’t seem to know about. This world has some secrets that it’s given up to me- but not to them, apparently. I don’t know why, but I’m grateful for it.”
“You couldn’t stop one of them finding its way here last night,” Amber pointed out. “I was looking out of the window upstairs and I saw it.” She glanced apologetically at Joe when he looked at her in alarm.
“They’re desperate,” Stephen said. “For some reason they want you both. They want you to become like them. I suspect the two of you are even more important than anyone knew.”
“Exactly how much have you been told about the Lost, Amber?” Stephen asked in a low voice, almost as if he thought a few of them might even be eavesdropping nearby. But we would know if they were, she reasoned. And so would he.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, about why they do what they do.”
Amber didn’t know what to say to that. “We were told that their purpose is to just create chaos. To ruin everything, I guess.”
“To ruin everything.” Stephen shrugged. “Well, they do. They spread fear and hatred. They feed on people’s paranoia. I would say their purpose is to cut the invisible strings that hold us all together. Because then chaos will just happen anyway. They won’t need to do a whole lot more. But I always thought it was strange that this vast group of people and creatures work together to create chaos. It doesn’t seem right, somehow.”
“Why not?” Joe asked.
“Why not? Because order and chaos don’t go together. That’s why I think that there’s more to the Lost than we know.”
Chapter 11
Stephen had more food in his kitchen cupboards than Amber had expected. When she asked him where it had come from, he said, “I pay a visit to the village occasionally.”
“The same village that Joe and I found?”
“The very same, Amber. The Lost lurk there occasionally- well, you met one of them, didn’t you?- but they’ve never yet had the courage to attack me.” He busied himself stuffing a backpack with bottles of water and snack bars amongst other things. “Everyone has to eat.”
Amber thought for a moment. “How does the food and everything else get there though? I mean, there are no people there, well apart from that woman...”
“She wasn’t human. You need to remember that,” Stephen told her.
“Who manufactures all the food?” Amber continued, barely hearing him. She couldn’t understand how things just appeared or existed here. “It can’t just appear, can it?”
“Can’t it?” Stephen seemed amused by something. “The truth is, I don’t have the answers to those questions. Maybe it does just wink into existence. Maybe every time someone eats something, it gets replenished somehow. Maybe something else appears in its place, to balance things up.”
“That’s impossible!”
“Of course it is. But all of this is impossible, isn’t it? I’ll bet that sometimes you still almost manage to convince yourself that it’s all a crazy dream. Even I do every now and then, after all this time- and I can’t even be sure how many years I’ve been here.”
“You must remember what year it was when you were sent here,” Amber said, “so if I tell you what year it is now...”
“No!” Stephen actually sounded frightened for a moment. Finally he took a deep breath and said in a quieter voice, “When I was sent here I had to leave my family behind, Amber. My wife and my two girls. I had no choice. I can never be with them again, so the last thing I want to know is how many years have passed.”
Oh my God, Amber thought. It’s even worse than I thought. They made him leave his family behind! “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I didn’t know. I mean, I should have guessed that you had a family, but...”
“It was my fault,” he said quietly. “All of it was my fault.”
Amber wondered to herself if the Order knew how much misery they had caused, and if they even cared. Why do they even have silly rules about their people not being allowed to have children? she wondered.
Once the packing had been done they left the cottage. Stephen briefly pressed his hand to the surface of the door after turning the key in the lock. “Something to keep the Lost from getting in. I do it every time I leave, just in case,” he said when he saw their curious looks, but he didn’t explain what it was that he had done.
It was a bright and clear morning. Slices of sunlight cut through the canopy of trees above as the three of them headed off along a path through the forest. They could hear the sounds of birds and woodland creatures sometimes, and Amber wondered briefly how they had got here. Then she started trying to work out how the Emptiness had been made in the first place. Had it existed for as long as the world that she and Joe knew? Might it be a kin d of twin of Earth? Every time she tried to think about it, dozens of questions took root in her mind.
At one point they saw something fast and bright moving through the trees, like a glimmer of light passing by, silent and beautiful. “What is it?” Joe whispered as they stopped to stare before the creature disappeared.
“I don’t know,” Stephen said quietly. “I haven’t the faintest idea. A secret of this world. I’ve seen things like them before, but not often.”
They reached the edge of the forest during the early afternoon. Before them, open land stretched away, rising into hills and then mountains in the distance.
“The Light Cavern is in those mountains,” he said. “Don’t worry, they’re not as far away as they look. It very much depends on which path you follow.” When they just stared in puzzlement at him, he added, “Directions and distances don’t always work the same way here. That’s one thing I noticed early on. One time it took me a day to get back to the cottage from a place in the forest, even though I took the same route back as I’d used to get there.” When their confusion only grew he added, “Sometimes I think this world isn’t round but instead takes on random shapes.”
“That’s can’t be possible,” Amber said immediately.
Stephen just laughed.
The three of them rested and had a little to eat and drink before setting off again. Amber tried not to think about how far away the mountains looked, and instead concentrated on things in front of them that were much nearer- stone walls, fences, small groups of trees or bushes. She felt tired and itchy- she had just realised how long it had been since she’d had a chance to wash- but she also felt deeply uncomfortable, as if she could somehow sense the Lost out there somewhere searching for her and Joe, desperate and determined to find them.
To try and keep herself from thinking these thoughts, she tried a number of things in her head- sums to begin with, and then songs that she had memorised the music and lyrics to. But although her mental arithmetic wasn’t a problem, she found that she couldn’t properly remember parts of the songs that she tried to play in her mind. She found herself troubled by the idea that because those songs didn’t actually exist here, her memory of them was starting to fade away.
The afternoon wore on, and their shadows grew longer as the sun began to sink ever closer to the skyline behind them. “Where will we sleep tonight?” Amber asked Stephen at one point.
“Somewhere that’s not out in the open,” Stephen said. “We might even reach the caves by the time it gets dark.” He stopped just then, and peered up into the sky where a bird was wheeling far above. The bird circled and came closer, swooping gradually in their direction and Joe asked in alarm, “Is that...”
“It’s a friend of mine,” Stephen said, as the bird, a big black crow, finally reached them and perched on his shoulder. “Or at least, it’s no enemy.”
“You have a pet crow?” Amber said, taking a step back as the bird tilted its head and peered curiously at her.
“A friend, not a pet,” Stephen corrected her. He stroked the bird’s head gently and it glanced briefly at him. To Amber it looked as if some unspoken words passed between the two of them, and her feeling that something like that had happened only grew when Stephen nodded thoughtfully- as if the bird had somehow passed on important information to him.
“What’s its name?” Joe asked.
“Name? I don’t know. Do crows have names for one another? I suppose they might.”
They stared at him, and then at each other, not sure whether or not he was making fun of them or being serious.
“I certainly haven’t given him a name,” Stephen added. “I prefer not to give names to animals. It would be as if I owned the animal I named. And believe me, I own nothing in this world. Not even the house where I spend my days. Even now I sometimes think the mysterious owner might return- and then what will happen to me?”
He turned back to the crow, which Amber could have sworn was listening intently to their every word. Perhaps it could even understand what they were saying. I’ve already seen so many things I thought impossible, she reminded herself. One more wouldn’t make that much difference.
Finally the bird spread its wings and took off, cawing noisily. “He’ll look out for the Lost from far above,” Stephen said as the children watched the crow became a smaller and smaller piece of darkness in the sky. “And he’ll return swiftly to warn us if we’re headed towards any of them. That’s one thing I’ve noticed in the time I’ve been here- many of the animals don’t seem to like the Lost being here. A few times they’ve even warned me in various ways about them, especially if I wander outside the forest.”
They reached a valley bordered by steep cliffs as the sun finally set behind them. A small river ran slowly through the middle of the valley, and they followed a path that led them alongside it. A short while later, Stephen pointed to a large cave entrance. “There,” he said. “That’s a way through to the Light Cavern. A place I like. I should have visited it more often.”
“Why do you like it?” Joe asked.
“It’s a place where the Lost fear to tread,” he explained. “And there aren’t many places like that here in the Emptiness.”
He led them to the cave, and stopped at the entrance to take three torches from his backpack. He handed one to them both, and switched his own one on before walking on towards the rear of the cave. Amber and Joe switched their torches on and followed carefully. They soon saw that a tunnel led away through the rock face at the back of the cave.
The air became cold and damp, and Amber found herself shiveri
ng before long. The way ahead led slightly downwards, and the ground was littered with bits of rock that crunched under her feet. A few were so sharp they almost dug through her trainers. Up ahead, Stephen had to stoop every now and then as the ceiling suddenly became lower in places.
“How much further?” she asked at one point, and almost jumped at how loud her voice sounded in the confined space.
“Not long now,” Stephen said without turning round.
Amber didn’t know whether to believe him or not. She remembered times when she had gone walking with her dad when she was younger and had asked him the same question whenever she felt tired- almost every time she felt tired, now she thought about it. He had almost always replied with a not long now, no matter how much further they really had to walk.
But soon she saw a faint glow up ahead, clear and white almost like daylight. A short while later, as they came near to the end of the tunnel, Stephen switched off his torch. Amber and Joe did the same and walked on after him towards an opening. Beyond it they could already see part of a huge cavern flooded with the strange light.
When they emerged from out of the tunnel, neither of them could speak at first. The Light Cavern- Amber knew that this was it without Stephen having to tell them, although he did so anyway- was even bigger than she had imagined it would be. The jagged, rocky walls shone as if bright daylight poured down on them, and when she looked up she had to shield her eyes because the roof of the cavern glowed with an almost white light. It almost looked as if the cavern was open to the sky and the sun hovered just above. What is that light? Amber wondered.
In the middle of the cavern the ground sloped downwards on all sides into a pool of water maybe twenty yards across. Compared to the almost painful brightness elsewhere in the cavern the water looked oddly dark, almost as if it was ink rather than water.
I don’t even know if it is water, Amber told herself as she stared at it, thinking how still it looked. Not even the faintest ripple could be seen on the surface.
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