The Lighthouse between the Worlds

by Melanie Crowder

  Philip shook out his sleeve and buttoned it closed once more. He knelt down, holding the journal out to Griffin. “Will you hang on to this for me? Don’t show it to anyone, no matter what they say.”

  Griffin’s fingers curled around the thin book. Questions crowded into his mind, each new one shoving the last out of the way to make room. The uneasy feeling he hadn’t been able to shake since that helicopter touched down turned over into something that felt a lot more like dread. “Dad? I’m scared.”

  Philip drew Griffin close. The alarm blared. Rain pummeled Philip’s shoulders and splattered against Griffin’s face. Philip pulled back, took a long look at his son, and then wrenched himself away.

  Griffin stepped into the open doorway, leaning into the wind and watching as his father disappeared up the path leading to the lighthouse. He didn’t notice the rain soaking through his flannel and weighing the thick fabric down until goose bumps rose on his skin and his whole body began to shake.

  “It’s just the cold,” he said to the air, as if speaking the words aloud would make them true. He shut the door on the wind and the rain and the knowledge that he didn’t believe that, not for a second.

  4

  SOLID GLASS

  GRIFFIN FLICKED THE toggle on the strange box in the cupboard, stopping the alarm mid-screech. The house went quiet. Too quiet after everything that had happened, as if it, too, was stunned into silence. Griffin glanced anxiously around the empty sitting room. His dad was going to be right back. Any minute. Wasn’t he?

  It wasn’t like Philip to leave his son behind. That wasn’t how the Fenn family did things. Griffin pulled a crocheted blanket over his shoulders and crossed to the window, peering north to where the lighthouse stood, braced for impact, on a bluff overlooking ocean waves that crashed into the rocks below. On winter days like this one, jealous storms flooded the beach to the south, ripping up the sand, churning it far away from shore, and leaving shredded jellyfish and long ropes of kelp in its place.

  Griffin turned the journal over in his hands. It was too big to fit in the pockets of his jeans. He drew in a shallow breath. The way those strangers had stormed into the cottage like they owned the place, he didn’t think it would stay hidden under his pillow or even in the secret pocket in the lining of his backpack. He needed to keep it on him, somewhere no one could see it, at least until his dad got back. Then they could make a better plan, together.

  He drifted upstairs and dug through the first aid kit in the hall closet. A mountain of Ace bandages toppled off the shelf and rolled down the hallway, bumping down the stairs with muted thuds. He found what he was looking for way at the back, under an electric heating pad. It was a pouch with an elastic strap that his dad used to ice his back sometimes. Griffin slid the journal into the pouch and cinched it around his waist, lowering his flannel shirt over the top. He ducked into his bedroom and stood in front of the full-length mirror, twisting to the right and then the left. He nodded, satisfied. You couldn’t tell anything was under there.

  Griffin checked the clock above his mirror. He bit his lip. He should have made his dad take him along. Griffin glanced at the clock a second time. They’d only been gone a few minutes. But what if his dad needed Griffin’s help?

  And who were those people anyway? Griffin’s eyes caught on the reflection in the mirror of his messy bedroom—his rumpled sheets, the uneven stack of library books, and the wall opposite where he stood. Griffin turned slowly, the hairs on the back of his neck rising until they stood on end. The wall was covered with papers—a patchwork of his mother’s drawings. There were all sorts: atmospheric pastels, detailed pen-and-ink drawings, silly sketches, and sweeping imagined landscapes that didn’t look like anything you’d find on Earth.

  Sometimes Griffin’s mom had told him bedtime stories to go with the drawings, like the one with the singing ocean, or the one about the world with a city in the sky. Griffin didn’t care if it was all nonsense he should have grown out of years ago. They were hers. Each drawing had lived in his mother’s mind and found its way onto paper through her fingers.

  Griffin crept closer. In the center of the wall hung a portrait his eyes must have glossed over a hundred times. It was a moody charcoal sketch of a middle-aged woman with a loose braid snaking over her shoulder. The eyes seemed to glitter, and the lips were drawn into a thin, disapproving line.

  He knew that face.

  Griffin stumbled backward as the realization seared into him, like when you step on a half-buried sea urchin. The spines stab through your skin and set their barbs—you don’t even see it until the pain starts ripping through you.

  A long-forgotten memory rose up, playing over his vision as if it were happening right there, in front of his eyes. That same alarm had sounded once before, three years ago. Griffin’s mother and father had rushed to shut it off, their bodies stiff with panic and their eyes wide with fear. Though Katherine had just returned from a work trip the day before (and she usually stayed put for a few months after anything that took her away from her family), she’d left again in a hurry that very evening. A week later, Griffin and his father had stood hand in hand at her funeral.

  Griffin sputtered, his lungs forcing a breath before the rest of him was ready to be jolted back to the present. The last time that awful alarm had sounded, Griffin had lost his mother. And now the woman in the sketch—Dr. Hibbert—showed up, and his dad rushed off in a panic, just like his mom had done all those years ago.

  Griffin tore out of his room. He was not going to lose his dad, too. He leaped downstairs and grabbed the walkie-talkie off the sideboard. “Dad, can you hear me? Pick up!” He checked the channel. He banged the battery pack against his palm and adjusted the volume. “Dad?” But no answer came from the lighthouse, only static. Griffin slammed the walkie-talkie back onto the charger.

  It was one thing to be nervous around those strangers. But now he was scared. Griffin yanked his raincoat off its hook and pulled it over his shoulders as he bounded down the front-porch steps.

  Griffin sprinted up the path that wove through a stand of wind-beaten Sitka spruce. In the gaps between trees, the ocean roared. Branches slapped at his knees as he raced by, the fading light glinting off damp leaves and waterlogged soil. A bird with slick black feathers shot out of the bushes lining the path, flapping its wings and twisting frantically to get out of Griffin’s way.

  When he reached the lighthouse, Griffin pushed through the workroom door and darted up the spiral stairs. He panted for breath, hauling himself up the steps two at a time. A hum vibrated through the curved brick walls and rattled his teeth. Around and around and up and up he ran. The crowd of strangers huddled together on the watch room landing, staring at the lens rotating in the lantern room above. Griffin shoved past them, reaching for the railing.

  Dr. Hibbert peered down at the boy as he passed. “Sykes—” She barely bothered to raise her voice.

  Griffin was halfway up the stairs when someone grabbed him from behind and yanked him back down. “Dad!” Griffin struggled to break free, but the hands only gripped tighter.

  “Let me go!” Griffin kicked Sykes in the shins, and when that didn’t do any good, he tried the knees.

  The floor above them was made up of thick steel with clusters of holes in each segment, letting light down into the watch room and giving anyone standing below a dappled view of the lantern room. Griffin could just make out his father kneeling in front of the center panel in the lens and struggling to remove the line of rivets holding the glass in place.

  All day, every day, the floor-to-ceiling lens rotated, sending its powerful beams out to sea. Except, at that moment nothing moved, not the gears in the watch room, not the lens above, and not Griffin’s dad. Everything was eerily still. And then the bull’s-eye right in front of Philip shifted. What should have been a thick pane of solid glass began to swirl like liquid.

  “Dad!” Griffin screamed. He struggled to wrest free of Sykes’s grip.

  Philip jerked a
t the sound of his son’s voice. He pulled back, turning away from the lens, his eyes searching the floor below for Griffin. He was almost to the stairs when the bull’s-eye seemed to reach out for him, the green glass circles stretching like saltwater taffy until they thrust through Philip’s chest in a ring of light.

  Philip’s eyes bulged wide. His movements slowed even as he strained toward his son. The tips of his hair and edges of his clothes thinned until they were translucent, and the humming intensified to a rattle.

  “Griffin!” he cried. “Griffin, I’m so sorry!”

  And suddenly the liquid glass snapped back, yanking Philip with it, his arms and legs flung forward as he was sucked through. The next instant, the bull’s-eye was once again a static ripple of solid glass.

  The tower went silent except for the wind wailing outside and beating against the gallery windows. And then the gears groaned as the lens began to swivel once more, the beams of light sweeping out to sea as if everything were perfectly normal.

  Griffin tried to scream, but all that came out was a whine of trapped air. His muscles weren’t working right. His knees collapsed, and he slumped forward. Sykes released him, deadweight, and Griffin slid to the ground. He crawled up the stairs, hoisting himself upright when he reached the top. He stumbled around the lens, banging his fists against the glass, but nothing gave.

  “Dad!” he shrieked.

  But Philip was gone. He was just—gone.

  Griffin tripped and crashed to the ground. Rain splattered against the newly washed windows, tracing down the glass and scarring the sky. Griffin curled into himself, shaking off the hands that tried to lift him away. He pressed his face into the cold steel floor and wailed right along with the wind.

  TIME FOR BED, SWEET BOY. What’s that—you want a story first?

  All right, then. Under the covers you go.

  Listen while I tell you about the world of dreams. At least, that’s what it used to be.

  I want you to close your eyes and imagine a world with a lighthouse just like this one, but everything else is different. Take away the ocean and the beach and all the spruce and ferns covering the headland behind us. Instead, the ground on this world stretches out from the lighthouse all the way to the horizon, broken only by clusters of homes and stands of wide-leaved trees.

  High in the canopy the trees collect clouds—so many they block out the sun and the moon. They cover the whole sky, merry and plump, filled to bursting with dreams.

  For generations, while the people of Somni slept at night, the stuff of dreams left their bodies with each exhale, rising up to fill the clouds. The clouds in turn fed the trees, cooling their leaves and shading their branches. And the trees produced air to breathe, as all trees do—but with one big difference. Breathing this air was like inhaling magic. Magic!

  The trees and their people lived happily together until one day when the trees began to die. The clouds thinned without the canopy to tend them, and the air grew stagnant and ordinary. The people of Somni tried to save their beloved trees, but it was too late. Without the clouds, and without the magic, their minds grew foggy. Their steps became listless, and they forgot the very thing that might have saved them.

  They forgot to dream.

  But you haven’t forgotten, have you?

  Clever boy. So close your eyes, sweet one, and dream.

  5

  HEADQUARTERS

  THE COLD STEEL of the lantern room floor began to seep into Griffin’s skin and shiver through his bones. Every inch of him ached, but when his mind tried to crawl back toward the memory—to the reason for the hurt, the chill would take over again, slowing his breath, his blinking eyes, and his mind.

  Through the damp curtain of his eyelashes, Griffin watched the storm keen and thrash outside. He was all alone in the tower. The others had left at some point, given up on the boy who had collapsed in grief. Eventually, there was nothing for Griffin to do but stumble blearily down to the workroom and into the building storm. He hardly noticed when one of the Keepers stepped out from beneath the spiral staircase, following him at a distance. Griffin wove through the forest, raindrops stinging his nose and cheeks and forehead. Wake up! Wake up! they seemed to say. You’ll need your wits about you for what’s ahead.

  When Griffin entered the cottage, Dr. Hibbert stood in the dining room like a sea captain on the bridge, surveying her crew. A tall man with hunched shoulders combed through the pantry, peering behind cereal boxes and upending the basket of Pop-Tarts. Another one with huge muscles tossed the cushions off the sitting room sofa and shook out the pages of each book on the shelf, the spines creaking in protest.

  “Don’t forget to search Philip’s room. The book is small—it could have fallen behind the bedside table or beneath the mattress.” Dr. Hibbert turned to consider Griffin. “I suppose we’ll have to take you with us. Go pack an overnight bag. We’re leaving for headquarters in five minutes.”

  Griffin lumbered upstairs, still reeling. He tossed his Tevas, a hoodie, pajamas, and a toothbrush into his backpack and slumped onto his bed. “He’s gone.” The words spilled out of Griffin’s mouth, but he couldn’t seem to grasp what they meant.

  On the wall opposite the bed, his mother’s drawings stared back at him. The sketch of Dr. Hibbert. The pen-and-ink diagram of the Fresnel lens. The pastel landscape of the sun setting on the water, with the three Fenns huddled together in the sand, watching for the last flicker of light.

  Griffin swallowed a sob. He crossed the room and carefully removed every one of his mother’s drawings. He wasn’t going anywhere without them. He shuffled the papers together and wrapped them around the journal, tucking them safely inside the pouch at his waist.

  You know more than you think you do.

  That’s what his father had said. But Griffin could barely make one thought connect to the next. It hurt too much to remember what had happened back there, in the tower. And what did he know, anyway? When it came to people being sucked into what was supposed to be solid glass? Nothing. He didn’t know a single thing.

  “We’re leaving,” Dr. Hibbert called up the stairs.

  Griffin backed out of his bedroom. He took one last look at the blank wall, at the stack of books due back at the library any day, at the door to his father’s empty room. None of this was how it was supposed to be. He kept casting around himself as if he were forgetting something. But of course, it was no thing he was missing, and no amount of rummaging through drawers or checking under furniture would bring back what he had lost. Griffin trudged downstairs.

  Under any other circumstances, a ride in that big orange helicopter would have made his week. But as it was, Griffin barely registered being hefted inside and strapped to his seat. If his stomach lurched when the helicopter lifted off the ground, he hardly noticed. And he didn’t glance once at the angry clouds to the west, the silver-tipped waves, or the coastline that swayed in hollows and peaks below.

  Instead, his mind played over and over again the terrible moment when his father had disappeared. He was right there, and then he was gone. Griffin squeezed his eyes shut. He barely breathed. His heart thudded slowly, too slowly, inside his chest.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  The inside of the helicopter was freezing, even though it was crammed with people. Now that there was nothing left to do but sit and wait until they reached headquarters (whatever that meant), the shock of it all hit Griffin like a broadside wave slapping across his cheek. He began to shiver, his teeth rattling and his knees knocking together.

  Since his mother’s funeral, Griffin had rarely been away from his father’s side. There had been people, of course, who had declared that the boy should have returned to school. But Griffin, terrified of being away from the only parent he had left, had clung to his dad, refusing to leave. Lost in his own grief, Philip had relented and homeschooled his son. Over the years, the two had settled into their little routines, and eventually, never being farther apart than the reach of a walkie-talkie ca
me to seem almost normal. They had been happy—as much as people living lives two-thirds full could be.

  But one-third full? How could a person even make it through a single day?

  The pitch of the rotors beating the air dropped, and the helicopter swung inland, hovering over a tall concrete building hidden in a stand of even taller evergreens. Half of the roof was a glass dome, and the other half was flat, with a broad H painted in the center. When the helicopter landed, the engine stalled, the blades slowed, and the doors slid open. Fat raindrops pinged shin high off the roof as one by one the grown-ups jumped out and hurried over to the door jutting out of the roof.

  Griffin followed them inside and down three flights of stairs that descended snug against the broad exterior walls, leaving the center of the lofty entryway open. Windows cut into stone alcoves at each landing let in a muted light. On the ground floor, an atrium like you’d find in a science museum burst with life, a trio of skinny trees reaching almost to the domed glass ceiling. Ferns and lichens sprouted from the moist branches, and a songbird alighted between fronds. The air was thicker, somehow, in the canopy, almost like a trapped cloud.

  Griffin moved to the banister and reached out his hand, brushing the tips of the cone-and-needle branches. He frowned as a memory flitted by so quickly he nearly missed it. It tugged at him—the trees and their companion cloud—but he couldn’t quite catch it.

  “Don’t dawdle,” Dr. Hibbert called over her shoulder.

  When Griffin reached the ground floor, everyone else had already disappeared through the big wooden doors across the atrium. He took a moment to breathe in the smell of the rich soil, and he tilted his chin up for a dizzying view of the canopy. The room was a little like being in the woods behind the lighthouse. If he closed his eyes, he could almost convince himself that he could hear the waves crashing onto the beach below, his dad right there beside him.