by Guy Jones
‘Too cold,’ she explained.
He nodded and the two of them peered at the cut.
‘You’re red inside! That’s disgusting.’ Owen pronounced at last.
‘Why would it do that?’
‘It’s a wild animal, what do you expect?’
‘No, there was something else . . . I don’t know. It changed. Its eyes.’ The bleeding was already coming to a stop.
‘So this is your excuse, then?’
‘For what?’
‘I dared you, remember?’
‘Owen, I was bitten by a Flying Elephant Mouse! It might be poisonous.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Have you been bitten by one?’
‘I’ve never tried to pick one up.’
‘I was just stroking it.’
‘You’re just trying to get out of it.’
Of course I am, she thought. The very thought of the bridge made her skin crawl. ‘Bet me something else,’ she said.
‘Oh, come on,’ he moaned, ‘don’t be so boring!’
‘You do it, then, if you’re so keen.’
‘But I dared you first.’
Jess turned on the Stare but Owen met it with an equally powerful smirk.
She turned and stalked away. ‘Well?’ she called. ‘Are you coming or not?’
The two of them stood side by side at the edge of the chasm – that dark, gaping mouth, twisted into an enormous grimace.
‘Well?’ said Owen.
Jess had a thick coil of wet rope inside her stomach. Bile washed up into her mouth. Her legs felt unsteady – the measureless darkness throwing her off balance. But a dare was a dare . . .
She stepped on to the bridge and heard the ice crack beneath. Every creak and groan made her wince. She didn’t dare lean her weight on the handrail, which in any case stretched only half the distance across.
As she got closer the forest seemed to shudder. Leaves trembled on their branches in excitement at her approach.
‘I don’t know if I can,’ she whispered.
‘What did you say?’ shouted Owen from behind her.
One foot in front of the other, Jess. Get to the other side, win the bet, and then run back as fast as you can.
But her feet wouldn’t move. Her skin crawled as if thousands of insects were swarming over it. Her shoulders were locked and tight. ‘I don’t think I can,’ she said, louder.
‘So, you lose?’
‘Think of another bet.’
‘I’m actually happy with this one.’
‘Owen.’ Her voice was like a whip. Almost at once, she heard him step on to the bridge behind her. He took her hand and again she felt that jolt of impossible cold. But now it was somehow comforting, as reassuring as a warm fire. She gripped his thin fingers and followed him back to the garden side of the bridge.
‘You’re shaking,’ he told her.
She nodded her head, feeling sick. ‘What’s in there?’ she said at last. ‘What’s in the forest?’
‘I’ve never been in,’ he replied, his eyes flicking up then quickly back to her, as if he couldn’t even bear to look at it for long.
‘Never at all?’
‘No.’
‘Not even to the edge?’
‘The garden’s my home.’ He said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
‘You’ve never been curious?’ she asked, not quite believing it.
As he shook his head a stronger gust of wind blew and the trees sung a brief lullaby in response. Swirls of powdered snow became dancers, moving around their feet and across the orchard floor.
‘Then why dare me to go in?’ asked Jess.
Owen looked down. ‘I never really thought you would. It was just a bet. If you’d actually gone in there . . .’ A shudder passed through his body.
‘Owen?’ she said. It was time to ask the question that had been running through her mind for days now. ‘Who made the garden?’
‘What do you mean?’ he said, looking baffled.
‘It’s a garden. Someone must have made it. And if it wasn’t you, then there must have been someone before.’
Owen shook his head.
‘A mother or father?’ she pressed.
‘Nothing like that,’ he said.
‘There must have been!’
‘There wasn’t!’ he snapped. The silence watched them. ‘There wasn’t,’ he said more quietly.
‘Owen,’ she asked again, quietly, ‘how long have you been here?’
‘I’m not sure,’ he said at last. ‘I think maybe a very long time. Or maybe not long at all. Until you came, time wasn’t all that important. All I know is I belong here.’ He shrugged his shoulders in frustration. ‘You think I’m strange, I know you do.’
Jess took a step closer to her friend and hesitantly ran her gloved fingers over his shining silver skin. Then, slowly, barely daring to breath, she drew back her sleeve to reveal the bandage on her arm. She loosened the tape around it and peeled it back to reveal the weeping wound underneath.
‘You’re hurt?’ he said.
She took a deep breath. ‘Have you . . . have you heard of vampires?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think I have those here.’
‘They’re things that look like people but aren’t. Instead of food and water they live on blood. People are scared of them and think they’re monsters.’
‘Have you ever met one?’
‘They’re not real, Owen,’ she scolded. ‘But what makes them scary is that they only come out at night. People are frightened of anything that can only live in the dark. And that . . . that’s me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I can’t go outside in the sun. You see, where I come from, there’s a sun in the sky. That’s like a huge ball of fire and it burns me. My skin. It means I have to stay indoors or covered up all day so I always . . .’ She swallowed a lump in her throat and went on, ‘I’m always different . . . I always look different. Always feel different. I am different.’ The words were pouring out of her now. ‘I have a friend. Sort of a friend, I mean. He’s in hospital and can’t wake up. I read him one of my stories and so he feels like a friend but the truth is we’ve never even spoken. That’s what it’s like for me. My only friend might not even know I’m there. So there. That’s it. I don’t think you’re strange at all, because I’m stranger than anyone.’
She waited for his response, chin raised in defiance while inside she broke into a thousand pieces. She waited for him to laugh or to tell her to go, but Owen merely dropped to his haunches and started scrabbling on the ground. Jess thought, not for the first time, that she didn’t understand other people. Even frost-people it seemed. As she opened her mouth to speak he stood back up, holding out some kind of silver plant bulb. ‘You haven’t tried one of these,’ he said, ‘but they’re really good. Better than the fruit even. Just don’t eat too many at once.’ He smiled at her and in that frozen place Jess felt warmer than she ever had in her life.
When Jess came through the hedge the next night Owen was sitting cross-legged on a boulder, drumming his fingers on the ice in a frantic, jagged rhythm. Arnold the Flying Elephant Mouse sniffed and scampered around on the ground by his feet. At the sight of her, Owen sprang up, sending the little creature scurrying away, and snatched something from the rock beside him. Before she could open her mouth to say hello, he’d jogged over and offered it to her, held lightly in his palm.
‘I hope you like it,’ he blurted out. ‘I made it for you.’
Jess turned it over in her hands. It was a single purple ice crystal of a kind she hadn’t noticed before. But, she was stunned to see, it was sculpted to resemble the seashell her father had given her that she’d showed him.
‘Did I get it right?’ he asked.
The shell was no larger than her thumb but Owen had carved it in intricate detail. ‘How did you do this?’ she gasped.
A scarlet wave rippled through the fissures of his body and the
ice grass at his feet swayed back and forth. ‘It just took time.’
It must have done, she thought. The ice itself was like nothing in Jess’s own world: an impossibly rich purple, like the sky itself. The proportions of the shell were perfect, and the surface had been polished to a fine, flawless finish. She glanced up at him. He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, clasping and unclasping his hands.
‘Do you like it?’ His eyes never left her, searching for reaction, his forehead ploughed with creases of concern.
‘Are you joking?’ she replied. ‘Of course I like it! It’s beautiful. Thank you!’
He gave a single, solid nod and was finally still. ‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘I thought it might help.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You should take it home with you.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better off here?’
‘Take it,’ he said. ‘I want you to.’
‘But it would melt.’
‘Jess, please.’
She searched his face for some clue as to why he was insisting, but he looked so earnest that she couldn’t help but relent. ‘I could . . . I could put it in the freezer, I suppose,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘That’s what you should do.’
‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’
‘No, nothing. I mean, maybe nothing. Just take it back with you. Please.’
Jess sprinted home, the world blurring around her like a painting in the rain. Her feet pounded the tarmac until she was dripping with sweat and could taste blood in her mouth. She came to a halt at her front door and sucked in a few draughts of air to try and calm her breathing.
She tiptoed into the kitchen and took the shell from her pocket. The surface was already beginning to melt; some of the intricate detail washing away and smoothing out to nothing. She wrapped it in a piece of foil and tucked it away in a corner of the freezer under a bag of peas that never seemed to get eaten.
That night she dreamt strange dreams – dreams that felt as real as her waking hours. She was standing in a frozen cavern. The ice was the same deep purple as the carved shell she held in her hand. She was afraid because she knew the sun was beating down on the top of the cave, melting it. She could see it getting thinner and thinner above her. Knife-like icicles scythed down, shattering on the ground all about. The sun did its terrible work, burning a hole in the roof until eventually a beam of light lanced into the chamber. There was nowhere to hide, no blinds she could draw. She was exposed. She braced herself for the burning pain she knew would come, but there was nothing. Nothing. Nothing to be afraid of. The sun was gentle and mild, and her skin welcomed its warmth. She stared around in wonder.
‘I’m afraid Doctor Stannard’s running behind time,’ said the nurse.
Jess watched her mother’s lips tighten in irritation. ‘Do you know how long?’ she asked.
‘Only half an hour or so,’ said the woman, wisely choosing that moment to vanish around the corner.
‘Only half an hour,’ said her mother. ‘Only, she says.’
‘I told you we shouldn’t have come.’
‘We had to.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘Doctor wanted to check you again.’
‘We could have changed the bandage at home.’
‘If you hadn’t been so careless in the first place . . . ’
‘It was an accident. Haven’t you ever had an accident?’
‘Don’t be cheeky, Jess.’
A man across the room glanced up at them. Jess and her mother both fixed him with the Stare, not realizing the other was doing it.
‘If we’ve got half an hour . . .’ said Jess.
‘Go on, then,’ her mother replied, wafting a hand. ‘Full Hat, though.’
Jess made her way to Davey’s room and squeezed inside. It was much the same, like a time capsule preserving everything just as it is for the future. His chest rose and fell but his face, if anything, was even more washed out than before. Almost as pale as Jess herself.
She pulled off her gloves and took a pen and pad from her coat pocket. ‘I’m so sorry, Davey,’ she said. ‘I haven’t had time to write you another story. But I tell you what, I’ll write you one now.’ She began. The Pod was the greatest of human inventions, for it could perfectly preserve a person for the two hundred years it took to travel to the human colony of New Earth. She stopped, cocked her head to the side, crossed out the words ‘New Earth’ and replaced them with ‘Avalon’.
‘There’s been no time to write anything new,’ she explained. ‘Wasn’t meant to come until next week, but there’s this thing on my wrist and they say it might turn nasty. Do you like stories about space? Not my usual thing. But maybe that’s not bad. What if you’re so stuck on what your “usual thing” is that you never find the thing you’re really great at? Like, I wrote a story once about a girl living in the depths of the Amazon rainforest in a tribe that had never discovered the modern world. And this girl had it in her to be the greatest electric guitar player the planet had ever seen. Only, because of who she was, she’d never heard of either electricity or guitars, so that talent just stayed inside her and she never knew. It was a bit of a sad one, really. Do you like stories about space? I think I might try and write this one for you. I’ll bring it next time if it turns out OK.’
Jess caught herself in the act of scratching at her bandage. Her mother and the doctors were right, of course. The nest of blisters was weeping and infected. It needed to be properly cleaned and re-dressed. Plus it was as itchy as anything. Or at least it had been. She realized that at that very moment the itching had stopped. In fact, there was no sensation at all. It felt normal. That was strange. She peeled away the bandage and peered underneath.
That can’t be right, she thought. That can’t be right at all . . . Her skin was perfectly smooth. The red, open sores that had been there just the night before had completely vanished, leaving nothing but a few dark freckles.
Impossible, thought Jess. It was there. It hurt. It was hurting when I fell asleep. It can’t just have vanished overnight . . .
She stared and stared but there was no denying it. The burn, the wound, every last bit of damage had simply gone away.
Now that she thought of it, she felt somehow different all over. It wasn’t a feeling so much as the absence of one – a lack of something that to her was normal and natural. It was her skin, she thought. Her skin felt different.
She remembered her dream. That’s impossible, she told herself, but crossed to the window and put her hand on the blinds. Her heartbeat was loud in her ears. She took a deep breath, pushed her fingers through the metal slats and pressed them against the window. She could feel the warmth of the sun and braced herself for the awful, scorching feeling that would inevitably follow. But there was nothing. Her skin tingled slightly but other than that, nothing.
With a lump rising in her throat, she raised her hand to the string and pulled open the blinds.
‘Remission?’ said her mother.
‘We can’t say that,’ replied Doctor Stannard.
‘But that’s what you call it, isn’t it? When something like this gets better. What else could it be?’
‘I’m afraid at this stage, we just don’t know.’
‘I didn’t get burnt,’ said Jess. ‘I was standing right there in front of the window in Davey’s room, right in the sun, and I didn’t get burnt.’
‘I realize that, but—’
‘I always get burnt. With the thing on my arm I was in the sun for, like, three minutes and you saw what happened.’
‘Which is what we’d expect with a condition like yours.’
‘So what just happened?’
‘It’s not possible,’ said her mother. ‘I asked. Don’t you think I asked, time after time? We went to so many doctors in so many places and every single one said this isn’t the kind of thing that . . . that she wouldn’t get better. You said it yourself, Doctor. You told me that.’
>
She sounds upset, thought Jess, with a dawning sense of horror. She sounds almost disappointed.
‘I haven’t . . . that is to say, I don’t know of any cases in which a condition like hers has spontaneously . . .’ The doctor looked huge and lost. ‘I’m not aware of any cases like this,’ he repeated.
‘Except,’ said Jess, ‘you are now. Aren’t you?’
‘We don’t have the facilities here. We need to get you to a bigger unit, get other opinions, do more tests . . .’ Now he was on firmer ground. ‘Yes, that’s it. We’ll do more tests. We’ll get the very best people on it, under my supervision of course, and we’ll start ruling out causes. Don’t worry, Jess, we’ll get to the bottom of this.’
He’s talking like it’s a bad thing, she thought. Like it’s as bad as my condition itself.
‘How can this happen, Doctor?’ asked her mother.
He ran fingers through his thinning hair. ‘I . . . have no idea at all. We’ll get you back in tomorrow and start to investigate then.’
‘Will I stay this way?’ Jess asked. Please. Please let me stay this way.
Please let me stay this way.
Please let this be real.
Owen was nowhere to be found. Typical, she thought. The biggest news of my entire life and he’s hidden himself away. She trotted up the main path, shouting his name, but no response came.
She found him by the Old Man, staring up into its branches. ‘I’ve been searching everywhere for you. Well, not everywhere, but quite a few places. Owen. Owen! Owen, I’ve got some news. Did you hear me? I’ve got something I have to tell you! Owen?’
A creeping dread spread through her.
‘Owen?’ she asked again, quietly, coming to his side, and when he finally looked at her she saw that his face was etched with pure despair.
One of her mother’s favourite expressions was ‘It’s not the end of the world.’ When Jess slipped and banged her head, for example, ‘It’s not the end of the world’ was a comforting whisper in her ear. But when she sulked at being forced to do extra maths, ‘It’s not the end of the world’ quite clearly meant, ‘Stop being so difficult and do what I tell you.’ Now, though, it was quite literally the end of the world and her mother knew nothing about it.
