‘We should have brought ice-cream!’ she shouted at Frieda.
*****
They’d left the forest and were stopping at the various pools; Big John explaining their purpose, if any. There was the “Gem Pool”. Thomas could see the actual stones strewn over its bottom, glittering blue and red and green - just as they did against the cave walls. The “Golden Pool” - the water had a golden tint due to the thousands of nuggets on its sandy bottom; some just flakes, others as large as Big John’s fist. ‘Both pools fund Rainbow’s End’s day to day existence,’ John explained as they continued up the silver chain of the river, passing the “Fishing-Pool” (where the children fished - what else?).
The next pool was very still, and Thomas thought, very deep. Several weeping willows stood on both its banks; under one, a wooden bench. Big John sat down and patted the space next to him.
‘I call this “John’s Pool”,’ he said, after Thomas had sat down. His eyes were serious. ‘I come here when I need to be by myself: When I need time out… time to think.’ He picked up a small stone and skimmed it over the deep green water: quiet then, and at peace with himself.
After a while: ‘There were gods once… I think there still are. Or superior beings - call them what you will.’ John shrugged. ‘Powerful beings capable of feats and things, and thoughts and concepts, impossible to us mortals; things… actions…we cannot begin to grasp…’ He looked at Thomas for understanding, then back at the pool.
‘A long time ago - many hundreds of years, maybe thousands - in a different planetary system, one such god lived on a planet very much like the Earth. He ruled with wisdom and love, and his people were happy and prospered. For many centuries. Then he fell in love. With a mortal; a normal flesh and blood woman.
‘Like Annie, or Frieda,’ John interrupted himself, smiling at Thomas; then continued. ‘He asked to be allowed to marry her, and knowing he would do so in anyway, the council of gods eventually gave the union their go-ahead. But not their blessing. And put a price on it.
‘Karan - that was the god’s name - would stay a god, but he would lose his immortality. He would still rule his world, but he would age, albeit slowly, and eventually die. This was done to discourage others… other gods, from attempting the same folly. Karan agreed - such was his love for Kyrstyn, the mortal woman, and they married.
‘Their love was a wonderful thing and no two beings were ever happier. Everywhere they went, they went together; and everything they did, they did together. The world they were in prospered further and two children were born to them. Twins: a boy and a girl. They called them Kraylle and Ariana.
‘But…’ Big John looked at Thomas again. ‘There’s always a “but”, isn’t there?’ His smile was sad. ‘Anyway… As always, there were the malcontents. People who deem themselves superior to others: more on par with gods than mortals - some imagine themselves capable of achieving even more than gods…’
Big John paused and when he continued again, his voice had become softer, sombre. ‘There is a way to kill a god… They found it - the malcontents - and one day, after leading Karan and his wife into an ambush, they killed him. And her. They were going for the children as well, but to some of the rebels, the… malcontents, two killings were enough. They prevented the same fate from befalling Ariana and her brother - at least temporarily. The children’s nanny was informed of the danger to them, and she helped them escape. The boy and girl, only five or six years old; demi-gods, and not wanted by either of their own ilk - gods or mortals - roamed the universe for many, many years, searching for a place to inhabit, and hopefully, to be content - if not happy in.
‘Gods are almost always associated with an element. It is called their god-sign. The twins shared the same sign - water: its presence - preferably its abundance, would be paramount when it came to choosing a place in which to settle.
‘Ariana preferred its basic form and was called. She chose Rainbow’s End.
‘Kraylle chose ice and was passed over. He took Desolation.’
They were quiet again, for a few long minutes, while Thomas digested what Big John had said.
Then, ‘Is Ariana the person Orson was screaming and swearing at when we got here?’
‘She is.’ John nodded.
‘And she’s a …’ Frowning.
‘God,’ John nodded again, then, ‘Goddess… Demi-goddess…’ Correcting himself.
Thomas nodded, pushed his hands under the tops of his legs and leaned forward, looking at something far away; confused and disbelieving and wanting to ask a million more questions.
John saw them in his eyes, and said, ‘Keep your questions for Ariana, Thomas. She’ll answer them much better than I can,’ adding, ‘You’re seeing her tomorrow night.’
Another quiet minute, and then Thomas asked, ‘Can I ask a question about something else?’
‘Of course.’ A nod. ‘But just one,’ John said, ‘for now.’
Thomas’ mind ran in a hundred directions at once. He had so many questions.
He asked the most burning. ‘What happened to my room?’ justifying it - ‘Annie said I should ask you.’
‘Ask me what?’ John threw another stone in the water.
‘About my room,’ Thomas said. ‘What happened to my room?’
John - innocently, ‘What happened to it?’
‘It changed,’ said Thomas, exasperated. ‘It changed to… to…’
‘To what you dreamed.’ John shrugged, matter of fact. Thomas nodded, big-eyed, astounded.
‘Remember what I told you yesterday, Thomas,’ Big John said. ‘Rainbow’s End is a place where dreams come true. Everything you dream, everything you want badly enough - they happen. They come true.’ His eyes crinkled and he reached out a huge hand with which he squeezed Thomas’ shoulder. ‘Lucky for us - only the good. There are no bad here - in Rainbow’s End. You can have bad dreams, but that’s what they’ll stay. Dreams. You don’t want them - so they don’t happen. They don’t come true.’
‘I wasn’t dreaming when my bathroom became bigger,’ Thomas said, and John answered, simply, ‘neither were any of us when the dining-room kept getting bigger, Thomas. We just willed it, wanted it to, subconsciously.’ He paused. ‘The same thing happened to your bathroom - it got bigger because you wanted it to.’
He looked at the sun shining through the low-hanging branches, then stood and said, ‘It’s almost time. Come, I have a surprise for you.’ He strode off with his long flowing steps and Thomas jogged after him, doing his best to keep up.
*****
The water level in the pool was higher than the previous day, and Annie and Frieda were amongst the children and other adults lining its bank. They both smiled when they saw Thomas, and Frieda gave him a wink. She had a red rose in her blonde hair and Thomas thought she looked very pretty.
There were between thirty and fifty children. It was difficult to be more exact for they were standing or sitting in groups of two and more; very few by themselves. They all looked to be between about six and twelve years old; their numbers more or less equally divided between boys and girls.
One boy was noticeably older than the rest, and different. Seventeen or eighteen, he stood off to one side - by himself, with a happy grin on his face and clapping his hands in childish glee. He wasn’t still for a moment and when he hopped up and down, Thomas noticed his limp.
Big John saw him watching and said, ‘That’s Jason. I’ll tell you about him later.’
The rainbow’s colours were very bright and the young man’s eyes, like everybody else’s, were staring up, to where its multi-coloured curve disappeared over the cliff - as if expecting something to fall from it. He was. They were…
It sounded like a very old airliner coming in to land… It thundered and screamed and creaked and groaned, and the air suddenly smelt of ozone.
It sounded like an ancient steam locomotive in the act of derailing… It whistled and screeched and boomed and roared, and…
It was
huge and red and hit the pool with a reverberating “Whump!!”; the resulting wave of displaced water crashing into and sweeping everybody off his or her feet. It was part of what they had been waiting for, what they were expecting: the whole of the pool’s shore was suddenly transformed into a wet mess of tangled arms and legs, and laughter and screams. Thomas was flat on his back and dazed and when he looked at Big John, the giant was staring back at his comically surprised face, and laughing so hard that Thomas felt sure he was going to rupture something. His normally neat beard was dribbling mud, and his pony-tail a loosely put-together mess, running yellow-brown.
In the middle of the pool stood a streaming-with-water, cherry red lorry. Or what had once been a lorry. Its nose had been flattened and its engine lay on the long steel bed behind the grotesquely elongated cab. Its steering wheel stuck out of one of its large, punctured rubber tires; the door facing Thomas had a starred-glass broken window, and a big headlight growing out of the centre of its panel. Hundreds of packages in different shapes and sizes were floating in the water surrounding the wreck.
A man’s voice called out from the inside of the out of shape, stretched and twisted cab, and Big John got to his feet, wading out to it. He reached up, and with enormous strength wrenched and twisted the passenger door open. It came off completely, and he tossed it to one side as if it weighed nothing at all. The man was sitting on a seat inside, and after saying something to John, carefully handed him a small something, wrapped in what looked to be a jacket. John took it, almost reverently, and Thomas saw his massive body hunch over whatever it was protectively. He turned around carefully, and very slowly - as if afraid of falling, waded back to the bank.
Frieda was waiting and when she saw what his big arms held, went right to the water’s edge and gave a little cry and fell to her knees so he could pass it to her without leaving the water. She wrapped the small thing in her mud-smeared apron and her arms, and when she stood and turned towards Annie, Thomas could see the soft love in her eyes. He also saw what she held. It was a little girl with a bush of copper-red curls; sleeping and sucking her thumb.
And suddenly everybody was inside the water - laughing and shouting and scrambling for plastic-wrapped parcels; floating and pushing and dragging them to the side. They heaped them on the pool’s bank: a small mountain of them; and when there were none left in the water, everybody stood back and watched the whole stack, simply disappear.
7
It was chilly and the curtains drawn. Thomas wore winter pyjamas and just the reading lamp was on. He’d just had a long, hot bath and was lying in the middle of his bed, on his stomach with his arms crossed on his pillow and his head resting on them; relishing the feel of the thick duvet under him, postponing the pleasure of crawling under it and giving himself to sleep. A small three-bar heater was glowing red in the half-dark and a favourite song of Grammy and his was playing on the portable radio. Thomas was thinking of her - how much she would have enjoyed Rainbow’s End! The very fact that it existed would have delighted her no end: its nature, its beauty, its people, the children, the sunshine… Rose had loved sunshine almost as much as she had loved snow.
There was a soft knock on his bedroom door and Thomas rolled over, sat up, and called ‘Come in!’ Nothing happened for several seconds and then the knock was repeated. He swung his feet to the floor and wriggled them into his slippers, and going to the door, opened it to find Annie with her hand raised, just in time to stop her knocking again. She wore her robe and slippers, and said, ‘I thought you were sleeping,’ then stooped and lifted a silver tray off the floor.
She beamed at Thomas. ‘Hot chocolate,’ she said, and when he stood to one side, bustled into the room and set the tray down on his desk. She turned to him and asked, ‘Were you busy? Am I interrupting?’ Thomas shook his head, and pointing at the rumpled bed, said shyly, ‘No, not busy at all. Just lying there, thinking…’ He looked at the steaming mugs. ‘And chocolate would be very nice. Thank you, Annie.’
She smiled at him. ‘Tell you what,’ she lifted one of the mugs, ‘you get into bed and I’ll hand you yours. And if it’s all right with you - if you’re not too tired, can I sit and talk for a while?’
Thomas, still confused and unsure of so many things, was only too glad to have someone to talk to, and going back to bed, lifted and then got under the covers; sitting up with his back against the headboard. Annie handed him his mug before returning to the desk for her own, stopping before the curtain covered window. She used one finger to move the fabric slightly to the side, and then shivered and said, ‘It’s snowing again… wherever we are.’ She looked at Thomas questioningly.
He was suddenly embarrassed and said, ‘Northumberland, Rockham - at least, that’s what I think. It’s where I stay. Stayed’ - he added lamely. Thomas’ voice was suddenly soft, and Annie thought, scared. He asked, in a whisper, ‘What is this place, Annie? What am I doing here?’
‘Oh, Thomas.’ Annie took her mug off the tray and came to the bed, obviously intent on sitting next to the boy. Thomas wished the bed was bigger, and it was, instantly.
Annie stopped and beamed at him. ‘That was good. That was very good.’
‘I didn’t mean to…’ Thomas stared at the suddenly larger mattress.
Annie said, ‘I know Thomas.’ She sat down next to him. ‘It just happens. To all of us.’ She smiled at him. ‘You’ll get used to it, and it is awful nice, isn’t it?’ She kicked off her slippers, then swung her legs onto the bed and after arranging her robe around her stretched-out legs settled back against the headboard. She said, ‘All settled in. And now,’ Annie took a sip of her hot chocolate, ‘now we can talk. But first - two things.’ Thomas waited.
‘Your question first - “What are you doing here?”’ Annie said, then answered as best she could. ‘Rainbow’s End is a place for children, Thomas. A place where children can really be children. Lonely children, unhappy children, destitute children, orphans, runaways, castaways…’ Annie’s look turned sombre for a second or two.
‘Ariana picks up signals from some, and Orson finds more - mostly in old houses and buildings, even alleys; he brings them all back here.’ Her blue eyes turned pensive. ‘I think there might be one more reason in your case, but I will leave it up to Ariana to tell you. Big John said you’re seeing her tomorrow night.’
She saw the trepidation in Thomas’ eyes and asked - surprised, ‘Are you worried about seeing Ariana?’
Thomas looked away and Annie gave a soft little laugh. ‘You are!’ she said, and then, ‘Thomas, Ariana is the gentlest, most wonderful person I have ever met. Ever! You will love her!’ She used one hand to turn his face towards her, and looked into Thomas’ distressed eyes. ‘I promise,’ she said, and the boy suddenly felt a whole lot better about the next night.
They sipped their hot chocolate in companionable silence for a minute, and then Annie spoke again. She said, ‘The second thing. Just now, when I knocked, did you call for me to come in?’
Thomas nodded.
‘I thought so,’ Annie said. She waved her hand at the chilly room. ‘Remember Thomas, when you are someplace else - Northumberland…?’ He nodded again and she continued, ‘When you are somewhere else and someone knocks on your door - or calls out to you - you can hear them, but they can’t hear you.’ She pointed at the bedroom door. ‘On the other side of that door is Rainbow’s End. On this side is wherever, whatever… you want. We - the rest of us, are in Rainbow’s End and you can hear us; but you are in Northumberland and we can’t hear you.
‘So I can knock and you will hear me, but you can shout until you are blue in your face, and I won’t hear you.’ Annie saw his confusion and laughed. ‘I know, it is terribly confusing, isn’t it? I have been at Rainbow’s End for more almost seventy-five Earth years and I still don’t understand some of the things here.’
This incredible statement caused Thomas to gape at Annie and stammer, ‘But you’re not - you can’t… ’
The look on his
face caused Annie to laugh out loud with delight, and she gasped, ‘Oh, Thomas, you are as easy to read as an open book.’ She laughed some more, and then said, ‘Unlike men, Thomas - men like Orson and John - woman keep track of their age. Very carefully.’
Annie looked no more than sixty years old and her smile was mischievous when she said, ‘On earth, I would have been a hundred years old last month. Exactly. And if I have to say so myself - a very well-preserved hundred year old.’
They were quiet for a minute; Thomas had both hands wrapped around his mug and was taking small sips when Annie put her drink down on the bedside table, and picked up the photo album lying next to it.
‘May I?’ she asked, and when Thomas nodded, opened its soft leather cover.
The first photo was an enlargement of an older woman, Annie’s own age; it filled a whole page. Still very beautiful: raven-black hair streaked with swathes of silver-grey; jaw square and strong; dark eyes alive and flashing, and Annie felt them reach out to her. Three tiny moles on one high cheekbone stirred ancient memories, and gave Annie goose-bumps.
‘Who is this?’ she asked softly.
‘That’s Grammy. Grammy Rose. It was taken just before I was born. She’s dead now,’ Thomas said, softly.
Annie turned the page. Another woman, this one much younger - in her late teens, maybe twenty. Sandy, light-brown hair, the same colour as Thomas’. She was smiling, her grey eyes alive and full of dreams. The photo below, the same girl; a year or two older and holding a baby. Still smiling, but not with her eyes: they were lacklustre - the dreams had flown.
Rainbow's End - Wizard Page 7
