The Lighthouse between the Worlds

by Melanie Crowder

  Griffin scrambled down the steps to the watch room and raced down the spiraling stairs. When he reached the base of the tower, a horn sounded from somewhere outside. He rushed through the door where the workroom should have been, only to stop short, stunned. A massive nave with a ribbed arch down the spine stretched in front of him. Griffin’s rapid breaths echoed in the cavernous temple. He scooted to the side and clung to the wall—at least that way if someone came in, he could hide in one of the alcoves. He slid along the wall, eyes darting around the room and his hands grasping for purchase on the rough stone.

  His fingers slid onto something warm and fleshy. Griffin yelped and glanced over his shoulder. Directly behind him, tucked into an alcove, was a living, breathing person. Straps held her upright at the shoulders, waist, and thighs, and her feet dangled in the air like a puppet hanging from its strings. A clear mask covered her mouth and nose, and every few seconds it clouded with moisture from her breath. The mask led to a series of tubes that disappeared into a hole in the wall behind her. Above the alcove, a single word had been chiseled into the stone.

  EARTH.

  Griffin screamed, stumbling backward into a pew, the sound ringing like a bell through the empty nave. He jerked like a wind-up toy, his eyes roving around the dozens of alcoves. Was his dad there—hanging limp and helpless, hooked up to those awful tubes? Griffin dashed around the nave, peering into each pained face. When he’d circled back to where he’d started, Griffin leaned against the cold stone as relief rattled through him. He sank onto one of the pews. His dad wasn’t one of them.

  Except for the eight alcoves with STELLA chiseled above, each one was filled with a person—somebody’s mom or dad. Griffin couldn’t just leave those people here, could he? He should do something. At the very least he could unhook them, and maybe they would be able to find their own way home.

  The alcove closest to Griffin held a man with a thin white beard. The stone above his head read MARIS. The man’s shoulders and rib cage were enormous, but his limbs hung limp, the muscles atrophied from disuse. Griffin gulped. He stepped up into the alcove, hugging the wall so the man’s arms didn’t brush against him. Griffin rose onto his tiptoes and reached a shaking hand up to where the mask settled over the man’s nose and mouth.

  Footsteps rattled down the tower stairs. Griffin jerked his hand back. He had to get out of there. He jumped down and sprinted for the door. He pushed into the yellow evening air and clattered down the temple steps just as thousands of people in the adjacent amphitheater rose to their feet. Griffin dropped to the ground and crawled behind a low wall dividing the temple entrance from the sprawling brick floor of the amphitheater, cursing himself for dashing out into the open like that. Anyone could have seen him. Slowly, carefully, Griffin peeked over the top of the wall. But no one even noticed him.

  Everyone in the crowd stood perfectly still, facing the stage where a hundred men in red robes with purple sashes around their waists stared back. Their hands were clasped beneath their chins. One of the men stood a step in front of the rest, his arms outstretched. He spoke in a soothing voice, and the crowd seemed to sway, almost imperceptibly, to the cadence of his speech. Unease crept over Griffin’s skin like a ruptured nest of spiders.

  Those people in the crowd weren’t just listening closely. They hadn’t moved, not one of them, not even an inch. It was like they couldn’t. Whatever that man was saying—whatever the others were up to with their closed fists and implacable stares—it was doing something to all those people in the crowd.

  Griffin slunk down behind the wall again. He glanced back toward the temple doors. He couldn’t move, not when everyone else was standing perfectly still, and definitely not with those soldiers in black stolas stationed at intervals along the perimeter of the amphitheater. He was trapped. And Fergus and Sykes might bust through the temple doors any second.

  Just then, the priests opened their fists. The crowd seemed to shake themselves and, in perfect synchrony, turned away from the stage. They funneled out of the amphitheater, their shoulders hunched and their heads down, flinching away from the priests who watched their retreat with hooded eyes.

  After the eerie silence, the sudden rush of footsteps was as loud as rainwater flooding a dry canyon. The crowd was dressed in blue stolas just like Griffin, with simple sandals on their feet. Their skin was pale and waxy, and they were tall, even the children, their limbs slender almost to the point of frailty. Each adult held a stoppered jug clutched to his or her chest.

  Griffin rose to his feet. Maybe they wouldn’t notice anything different about him. His skin was pretty pale—they didn’t get much sun on the Oregon coast, either. And he was tall enough, for his age. He kept his eyes on the ground as he veered into the crowd and let it carry him steadily away from the temple.

  Griffin couldn’t get away from those priests fast enough. He’d seen that crowd entranced—what was the term the Keepers had used? Mind control. Those priests back there had ensnared all those people, made them prisoners inside their own heads. No matter how many stories his mom had told him before bed, how many coded warnings she’d tried to give him, Griffin never would have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

  The day was warm, but he couldn’t stop shivering.

  11

  SOLDIERS, SOLDIERS, EVERYWHERE

  WITH EVERY STEP Griffin took away from the temple, his panic ebbed a little. He risked a glance over one shoulder. No one was watching. No one followed him. He peered over the other shoulder, and there, at the elegant temple entrance, three figures emerged. Their stolas looked the same as everyone else’s, and their features weren’t so different that they stood out from the people of Somni. But Fergus was quite a bit more muscled than everyone except the soldiers, and though Sykes’s height was about right, the scowl that never left his face wasn’t. And even from such a distance, Dr. Hibbert’s eyes seemed to bore into Griffin.

  He ducked his head and hurried forward. The families to either side were talking about how they would share the daily provisions in the jug they carried, and the boy on the right and the girl on the left were in serious negotiations with their parents about how late they could stay outside and play that evening. But then the crowd in front of Griffin began to part, like a wave breaking on a jetty. All joking stopped. Parents tucked their children between them, and the crowd marched forward in steady rows.

  Griffin couldn’t see over the adults in front of him. He rose onto his tiptoes and craned his neck, trying to get a better look at what had everyone so unnerved. He glanced at the yellow sky above, his eyes skittering from one edge of the horizon to the other. When his gaze dropped back to the path, a large man in a black stola stood directly in front of him, letting the crowd part around him. The soldier’s feet were planted wide, his muscled arms crossed over his chest. Instead of a sash at the waist, he wore a broad belt with half a dozen weapons jammed into the loops and clips.

  Griffin darted to the side, falling in behind the boy and his parents. He dropped his head and watched the bricks pass beneath his feet. Sweat dripped down his forehead and ran into his eyes. He wasn’t imagining things—it wasn’t just his own panic that made the air suddenly seem harder to draw in. A palpable fear filled the gaps between every body in that moving sea of people.

  When you’re swimming in turbulent water, silt, debris, and bubbles of air churn in the water beneath you until you can’t even see your own feet. Anything could be down there. A tiger shark could be inches below your toes, and you’d never know it.

  Even after Griffin had moved far beyond the soldier, that feeling of being prey hung all around him. Griffin shuddered, and he looked up into the faces of the adults beside him. They were afraid of the soldiers.

  He wasn’t sure if that made him feel better or much, much worse.

  Griffin wove to the edge of the crowd and darted behind a brick wall. He climbed to the top and lay flat so he wouldn’t be seen. In the distance, he watched as Fergus and Sykes blended
into the crowd, their eyes roving back and forth, no doubt looking for him. Dr. Hibbert didn’t follow after them, though. She strode past the amphitheater, directly toward the main entrance of the rectory.

  Griffin scanned the city, trying to get his bearings before he got lost in the maze of smaller roads peeling away from the main one. The tower—what he couldn’t stop thinking of as his lighthouse—stood high above everything else. The temple branched off below, with the amphitheater wedged between it, the rectory opposite, and the barracks behind it. Eight main paths divided the houses as the neighborhoods (separated again into clusters of eight homes) spread out from the temple. The walls were brick, the benches were stone, and the homes were a combination of the two.

  Griffin dropped off the wall and doubled back toward the temple, looking for a place to wait out the night. There was no sun to set and no moon to rise, but the sky darkened, bit by bit, and the crowds thinned as people returned to their homes. Griffin peered into each cluster of houses that curved away from the main path. There were no yards or driveways, but in the middle of all that mud and brick, a thatch of green (the only plants he’d seen) thrived in the center of each neighborhood. Beside the path and between the houses, a series of dry rivers channeled rainwater toward each garden.

  Griffin turned into a neighborhood where all the lights in all the houses were out, the windows shuttered, and the doors closed for the night. He crept toward the garden and waded between hip-high plants. Around the edges, mud sculptures rose from the soil, waiting for the rains that would send them back to the ground again.

  His feet ached from all the running, and his stomach growled. He dusted off a handful of strangely colored berries and uprooted broad leaves that almost looked like lettuce. He paused, the berries halfway to his mouth. They could be poisonous. He might end up sick or worse, unable to help his dad at all.

  Griffin rolled the berries in his palm. He could breathe the Somni air. Gravity pinned him to the ground, just like on Earth. So he could probably eat the food, too. He’d need to keep his energy up if he was going to find his dad. Griffin shoved the berries into his mouth, crunching on the unfamiliar seeds and letting the juice trickle down his throat. He ate as much as his stomach would hold, and then he lay back in the dirt. There were no stars in the sky, only a silver edge to the thin layer of atmosphere.

  In the distance, the tower rose, a dark shadow against the clouds. As Griffin watched, the light in the lantern room switched on. The lens spun, sending its eight beams roving over the segmented city like searchlights. But then the lens slowed to a stop, and bulky shadows stepped in front of the beam. Soldiers. One by one they winked out, until only a single shadow was left alone in the tower. Where had they gone? Were there more worlds out there—more than Griffin’s mom had even known about? And was Somni taking over all of them? Sending their soldiers and their fear and destroying families just like his? The lens resumed its spinning, illuminating the silhouette of a robed Somni priest stepping into the darkness below, his dreadful work complete.

  How many nights had Griffin drifted off to sleep with that same tower silhouetted against a different sky? Much as it looked the same, though, that wasn’t his lighthouse. A wave of homesickness broke over Griffin, and he turned away from it all. His stomach ached and his head pounded. He curled into a ball, and his eyelids sagged closed.

  “I’m coming, Dad,” Griffin whispered. “Hold on a little longer. I’m coming.”

  CUDDLE UP, SWEET BOY. DO you need another blanket?

  Remember that time we visited the aquarium, you and your dad and me? We stopped for chowder on the way there and saltwater taffy on the trip home?

  Ha! I thought you’d remember that part. . . .

  Think back to the aquarium. Can you picture that huge room with the bones of a gray whale suspended from the ceiling? And if you pressed your ear to one of the cones set into the wall, you’d hear a recording of a whale singing in the deep. Ah—so you do remember!

  What would you think if I said there is a world out there where the oceans themselves sing to the creatures swimming beneath? And what if I told you there’s nothing else on that entire world—just one unending sea, waves unbroken by land or wind or contrary currents?

  Not many humans live on that world. It’s not meant for us, not really. It’s meant for the swimming things below. The people who live in the floating cities of Maris have developed lungs twice as large as we have on Earth. They have thick, lustrous brown skin that drinks in the sunlight glancing off the waves, and a layer of blubber beneath. But those aren’t their only adaptations. As the generations passed, they learned to listen to the ocean’s song. And after a time, they began to sing back.

  You think I’m teasing? Try it. While your eyes soften and your mind stills, listen with everything you have. Listen for the song of the sea.

  12

  THE RECTORY

  Griffin woke in the garden, the smell of dirt in his nostrils, a feathery leaf tickling his cheek, and the last remnants of a dream playing at the edges of his mind.

  A shiver rippled through him. That wasn’t a dream, though. It was a memory.

  Griffin raked his hand through the soil, the words of his mother’s bedtime story playing over again. He looked around him, at the thin layer of low clouds, the skyline without a single tree jutting above the horizon, and the houses full of people lost in the priests’ thrall.

  It was true—everything she’d said, all those stories. It was all true. And suddenly the dry air that scraped past Griffin’s throat didn’t feel so harsh. Maybe someday he would hear the singing oceans of Maris. But more wonderful, even, than that, his mother had been here. Maybe she had walked through this very neighborhood.

  Longing called up the familiar ache in his chest, making his breath hitch and stutter. But it stung, too. Why hadn’t she just told him? Why was it all hidden in riddles and stories? And why hadn’t his dad taught him about the portal? Didn’t they trust him?

  Griffin sat up. He couldn’t afford to get lost in memory and regret. His dad was still alive. Griffin had to believe that. And his dad needed him. He brushed the dirt from his stola, grabbed another fistful of greens to eat along the way, and wound back to the temple. He skirted the amphitheater and walked along the high outer wall of the rectory. The day before, when she had left the temple, Dr. Hibbert went straight there. Maybe that was where the priests were keeping his dad.

  When Griffin found the servants’ door set under an arch in the side, he ducked behind a low bench and watched the people come and go. Horns blasted at the top of every hour, telling the guards to rotate stations, and some of the servants, too. The guards were tall and pale skinned, like everyone else in the crowd from the night before, their hair black as ice or white as ice, with nothing in between. But the servants were smaller, with hair the colors of a sugar maple in the fall: yellow and orange and fiery red.

  Griffin watched one girl about his age with a broom propped against her shoulder (and a scowl that looked permanent) waltz up to the entrance like she owned the place. He watched a woman who looked older than his grandma, her spine rounded and her head hung low, carry a bundle twice her size on her back. And then he noticed a scrawny boy with a mess of orange curls balancing a basket full of purple sashes on his head. Each time the boy stopped for a rest, setting the basket on his knee and rolling his neck, the curls bounced right back up, as if nothing had ever tried to keep them down.

  Griffin jumped up and followed him. The servants’ quarters weren’t like the eight segmented neighborhoods where the people of Somni lived. The homes looked similar enough, but the paths in and around them wound like clutches of ivy. So instead of worrying about staying far enough back so the boy wouldn’t notice him, Griffin had to hurry to keep up so the boy wouldn’t round a corner out of sight.

  It’s a strange thing to walk through a world where the sky is yellow instead of blue. It changes everything. On Earth, the blue sky would make the dusty tan ground feel almost wa
rm and the bleached-out bricks quaint as a Grecian sea town. But here, the yellow and the tan and the brown all blended together, and Griffin couldn’t shake the feeling that he was stuck in a painting where the artist only had tints and shades of a single color to use.

  Griffin licked his lips and picked up his pace. He wasn’t used to heat like this. He missed the rain on his cheeks and the constant roar of the ocean. It unnerved him to be someplace so quiet; it seemed like at any moment the ground itself might rumble and groan, just to break the silence.

  Finally the boy stopped at what must have been his home, dropped the basket on the windowsill, and called inside. A woman leaned out of the window, planted a kiss on his forehead, and took the basket from his hands. Griffin ducked behind the house next door and peered around the corner just in time to see the boy run across the road to where a swing and set of rings hung in the gap between roofs. He swung from the rings, his legs flapping and scraping the dirt.

  Griffin darted across the road and crouched behind the wall that ran behind the boy’s house. Ten minutes later, the woman placed a basket of folded and pressed sashes on the windowsill and called for him to retrieve it. The boy, pretending not to hear, dangled from the crook of his knees, his curls bouncing toward the ground and the blood rushing to his head. The woman called a second time, her tone sharper, and the boy vaulted off the swing and ran to the windowsill. But the woman was already busy inside, so she called out after him to hurry back with the next load.

  The boy scurried past, no more than a step away from where Griffin hid. Pale green veins traversed his forehead, curving across his neck and spreading out over the underside of his arms and the backs of his hands. Griffin gasped, gripping the rough edges of the brick wall. He searched through his mother’s stories, and it all clicked into place.